Sunak faces a grilling over his key targets

Does Rishi Sunak think he’s going to hit his key targets? The Prime Minister had to answer this question repeatedly today after being asked by members of the powerful Liaison Committee. His basic answer was that he was still very committed to the targets – but couldn’t say that he definitely would meet them.

A particularly difficult set of questions came from Home Affairs Select Committee chair Diana Johnson, who grilled him on the details of how his Rwanda deportation policy would stop the boats, as Sunak has promised. The Prime Minister was very keen instead to talk about the agreement the government had struck with Albania, but said he was confident that the government would succeed in its appeal against the Court of Appeal ruling on Rwanda. ‘Our belief remains that the plan that we have is legal, it’s compliant with all our obligations, and we’ll be appealing it vigorously.’

Johnson pointed out that the Rwandan government had said the capacity of the scheme was 500, while more than 8,000 people had come to Britain on small boats. She asked, ‘if we assume your Rwanda policy is upheld in the Supreme Court, Rwanda has said they can take a capacity of 500 people, so that leaves 7,628 who have come across since the bill was introduced, what do you intend will happen to those people?’ The PM replied that he wouldn’t go into the details of a commercial contract, but that the Rwanda scheme was uncapped. He didn’t say this, but ministers are also trying to find other governments who might be interested in similar schemes in their countries – so far without any success.

Sunak then refused to offer a percentage probability on meeting his target to halve inflation. That question came from a member of his own party, Treasury Select Committee chair Harriett Baldwin, who kept asking him how likely it was that he was going to do this by the end of the year. Sunak said he was ‘working 100 per cent to achieve that’, and ‘all I can do is keep throwing everything at it’. He did insist that ‘of course I support the Bank of England’, adding ‘I don’t think anyone thinks we should return to a world where the government is setting interest rates.’

Despite frustration within Conservative circles about the way the Bank has handled the current economic situation, Sunak is very cautious about appearing to criticise it, given the turmoil of the Liz Truss weeks was in part down to her threats to the independence of the central bank.

The Liaison Committee is a cross-party group of select committee chairs and as such it generally has a non-partisan culture, but its tone does tend to shift as an election looms. As the session went on, the committee chairs reverted more to their party lines.

Under more partisan questioning from Catherine McKinnell, who chairs the Petitions Committee, the Prime Minister said he took responsibility for the fact the UK has the highest inflation rate in the G7 and the lowest growth projections. He had a scrap with Chris Bryant over his absence from the next two Prime Minister’s Questions – though Bryant tends to be rather pedantic about this with members of any party.

Sunak grumbled back that he didn’t think Bryant was really suggesting he should miss representing Britain on the world stage at next week’s Nato summit, and argued that it was important for him to attend a Westminster Abbey service for the NHS tomorrow. But Bryant tied it in with the government announcing the NHS workforce plan on Friday to the press and not in parliament first. Sunak’s response was that he did pay proper regard to parliament and made a point of bringing things to the House as soon as he could. He has been better at this than his two predecessors, in fairness, but that’s a pretty low bar. It’s not a bar Sunak will be particularly worried about either way, when the targets he has set for himself now look too high to reach.

Drone strikes Russian military base near Moscow

Just as Moscow was beginning to recover from the shock of Evgeniy Prigozhin’s march on the capital, the city has, once again, been targeted by drones. 

In the early hours of this morning, according to the Russian ministry of defence, five drones were intercepted before they reached the capital. Eyewitnesses reported seeing two of the drones flying in the direction of Moscow at a low altitude of approximately 200 metres. They came within touching distance of the city, getting as far as the New Moscow suburb to the south west.

According to Russia, four of the drones were shot down. Footage circulating on Russian social media allegedly filmed at the time the drones were taken out has caught the sound of a huge boom echoing around the tall apartment blocks of outer Moscow. The footage has not been independently verified. 

The independent bilingual newspaper the Moscow Times reports that two of the drones landed in an open field 2.5 miles from Moscow’s Vnukovo airport. As a result, the airport was closed for several hours and flights diverted to the city’s other airports.

The fifth drone, Russia said, was ‘suppressed by means of electronic warfare’ – jammed, perhaps – and downed in the neighbouring Odintsovo district. What Russia’s MoD failed to mention was where exactly this fifth drone landed and the damage it had caused.

Citing a source in the emergency services, the Kremlin news agency TASS reported that this fifth drone had in fact fallen at about 4 a.m. in the town of Kubinka. It had landed, they said, on the territory of a local military base. 

More specific information was not given as to the military base’s location, but it is worth noting that Kubinka is home to the Kubinka aerodrome, where some of the Russian air force’s best performing squadrons are known to be stationed. A military garrison is also based there.

According to the anti-Kremlin Telegram channel Baza, the drone hit an ‘administrative building’ on the base without any casualties. Whether the airbase or military garrison were the drone’s intended target or coincidence is unclear – either way, whoever is responsible for the attack will chalk it up as a small win.

Predictably, the Russian authorities have pinned responsibility for the attack on Ukraine. Moscow’s mayor Sergei Sobyanin called it ‘an attempted attack by Ukrainian drones’; the Russian MoD branded the incident ‘an attempt by the Kyiv regime to carry out a terrorist attack’. As with the drone attacks that have shaken Russia, and Moscow in particular, over the past few months, whether this attack was carried out on Kyiv’s orders or by someone sympathetic to their cause is something we will be unlikely to know for certain until the war is over.

Nevertheless, loudly blaming Ukraine at every opportunity is not without risk for Putin’s regime. Less than two weeks after Prigozhin’s Wagner forces got to within 200 miles of the capital, Muscovites will be feeling jumpy. In the three drone incidents aimed at Moscow since the end of May, the New Moscow region has been consistently caught up in the crossfire – that the flight paths of these drones expand as more attacks take place would not be unlikely. 

For Russians, it seems likely that the Kremlin’s rhetoric of victimhood will eventually begin to wear thin in the face of increasingly regular attacks. Putin has a fine line to tread.

Espionage dominates the best recent crime fiction

The best espionage novels cater to our fantasies while still persuading us of the authenticity of their worlds. Of the titles published this year, two stand out in the field, and each author understands that, in fiction, veracity is not the same as authenticity. In Hemingway’s words: ‘All good novels have one thing in common. They are truer than if they had really happened.’

White Fox (Bantam, £18.99) is the concluding volume of a trilogy of thrillers by Owen Matthews, one of the best of many western writers on Russia. It can happily be read on its own, though it is sufficiently gripping to send readers back to the earlier two books. It begins in 1963, shortly after the assassination of President Kennedy. Matthews’s protagonist, Alexander Vasin, a KGB officer, is now the director of a labour camp deep in Siberia, having effectively been exiled by his enemy and superior, General Orlov. After a prisoner arrives with armed escorts, Vasin is mystified when Orlov orders the escorts to be killed. It soon emerges that the new arrival has a secret which Orlov’s distant superiors are desperate to keep from getting out: Lee Harvey Oswald shot the American president on the orders of the KGB.

When the inmates of the camp revolt, Vasin and the mysterious prisoner are forced to flee. What follows is an extended chase in which the hunted are themselves also hunting – for the truth: it is a kind of Russian version of The Thirty-Nine Steps. A lot of groundis covered, literally: the action moves from the frozen tundra of the camp to a village west of Kirov, where Vasin is stranded for three days, then to Leningrad and the magnificent Catherine Palace.

Throughout, we are deeply immersed in a Soviet Russia vacillating between persisting pride at defeating the Nazis and misery at the failure of victory to make Russia a happier place to live in. The book is steeped in Russian history and mores; Matthews even knows the difference between the window blinds in the three classes of a 1960s Russian train. But his learning is unostentatiously conveyed, and the narrative is never swamped, as is so often the case, by tell-all use of an author’s research.

The plot’s premise – that the KGB were responsible for Kennedy’s assassination – is not one held by Matthews or anyone credible today. He acknowledges in an afterword that this central conceit is fantastic, but hopes it is nonetheless a plausible one; and such is the impact of the story as it progresses that we willingly suspend disbelief for the sake of an engrossing read.

In David McCloskey’s Damascus Station (Swift Press, £9.99), Sam Joseph, a CIA officer, feels responsible for the abduction and murder of a colleague by the Syrian authorities. He volunteers to avenge the agent’s death, and to persuade Mariam Haddad, a Syrian official, to work secretly for the Americans while she pursues her duties coercing exiled Syrians. Joseph’s recruitment of Mariam succeeds, and then some: quite unexpectedly, the two find themselves in love. Since knowledge of their affair would result in Joseph’s immediate dismissal, the secrecy in which the couple have to operate now doubles, which cranks up the tension in what is already a tautly told story.

Unusually, the novel features points of view from both ‘sides’ of the mission underway, including those of two Syrian government officials who are brothers, one of them the head of the secret police. There is little fraternal love between them; they spend as much time intriguing against each other as they do rooting out the traitor in their ranks. The corrupt brutality of President Assad’s immediate circle is chillingly portrayed, and includes an appearance by Assad himself.

Since McCloskey is a former CIA analyst specialising in the Middle East, much has been made of the book’s ‘realism’. The novel comes festooned with praise from members of the intelligence world, including David Petraeus, once director of the CIA. He declares it ‘the best spy novel I have ever read’, a commendation roughly akin to that of a wheat farmer praising a baker – which is to say, related but irrelevant. The real strengths here are the traditional ones of superior thrillers: clear and powerful writing, subtle characterisation that never slows the story down and action scenes that are brutal and immediate. I can’t assess McCloskey’s credentials as a spy, but he shows the confidence of a talented writer. This is a book by someone who understands that, paradoxically, when ‘real life’ is transplanted unaltered into fiction it rarely seems credible. Damascus Station excels precisely because it relies on imaginative power.

Simon Mason’s A Killing in November, published last year, was a remarkable entry into crime writing by a veteran author. Its successor, The Broken Afternoon (riverrun, £16.99), features writing just as good, but it involves a balancing act that Mason will need to resolve if he carries the series forward.

The first novel introduced as its protagonist the awkward, self-destructive and utterly compelling detective Ryan Wilkins. He has a senior colleague sidekick named, in a truly lifelike coincidence, Ray Wilkins – a black detective whose establishment credentials (Balliol, boxing blue and rapid climb up the constabulary ladder) mean he serves as a foil to Ryan, his near-namesake. 

In the latest novel, Ryan has been booted out of the force after one misdemeanour too many and is now working as a security guard in the outskirts of Oxford. When a little girl is abducted from her nursery, Ray is given both the case and a new prominence in the narrative. For all his accomplishments, he is a troubled character, with a marriage that is faltering, despite his wife’s much yearned for pregnancy. He makes heavy weather of the case, driving his impatient boss to make overtures to the recently cashiered Ryan, who, for all his foibles, gets results.

Atypically for an Oxford-based thriller, the university plays no part in the story – a refreshing recognition that Mason’s imaginative take on college clichés in the earlier book would, if repeated, threaten to become a cliché itself. Mason (who lives in Oxford) writes well about this unacademic version of the city, moving easily from the nouveau villas of Boars Hill to the greyer streets of Blackbird Leys. He also contrives a truly startling surprise at one point, based on a misidentification. The prose is singularly good and the sentences sing.

The problem remains, however, that in trying to devote equal attention to his co-protagonists, the author ducks the fact that Ray, the black Balliol grad, is by far the less interesting of the two. The focus on him in this sequel seems obligatory rather than natural or earned; throughout the many scenes told from his point of view we find ourselves waiting impatiently for Ryan to reappear. It’s like watching an understudy perform when you know a more riveting actor is backstage, waiting to come on. Ryan is almost irredeemably gauche and self-destructive (sometimes frustratingly so), but he is still the obvious star of any show he’s part of. As the series proceeds, Mason should drop his efforts to balance the attention given the two detectives and put Ryan firmly back centre stage.

What should we make of the esoteric philosophy Traditionalism?

Last August a bomb tore through a Toyota Land Cruiser outside Moscow killing its 29-year-old driver. Darya Dugina, a pro-war TV pundit, had been returning from a conservative literary festival where her father, an ultra-nationalist ideologue, had been giving a talk on tradition and history. Quite possibly he was the intended target. Alexander Dugin was called ‘Putin’s Brain’ by Foreign Affairs magazine and ‘Putin’s Rasputin’ by Breitbart. He had advocated conflict with the West and told Russians they should ‘kill, kill, kill’ Ukrainians. Ukraine denied responsibility for the attack.

One way of thinking about the conflict in Ukraine is that it is a proxy war between the forces of modernity and tradition, and that Putin’s invasion is realising ideas set out in Dugin’s 2009 bestseller The Foundations of Geopolitics. For Dugin, the fundamental geopolitical conflict is the West against the rest, with Eurasia leading the rest. In this he is following an old perspective called ‘Eurasianism’, which emphasises the differences between the Slav peoples and the West, the former being orthodox Christians, the latter conceived of as colonialists forcing consumerist barbarism on a world that deserves better.

In this book Mark Sedgwick explains how Dugin’s thinking draws on the little known philosophy called ‘Traditionalism’. It’s a body of ideas that has inspired Steve Bannon, Jordan Peterson, more or less racist groups such as Germany’s AfD party, tree-hugging environmentalists such as E.F. Schumacher, some of the barmier far- right corners of the dark web and John Tavener’s music. Most improbably of all, Sedgwick cites it as underpinning King Charles III’s thoughts about how the modern world has gone so terribly wrong, particularly with architects who refuse to build according to the sacred geometry found in nature and instead ‘seem deliberately to summon up chaos rather than conjure up harmony’.

Traditionalism asserts that there is a sacred, primordial tradition that western modernity destroys, leaving us godless, rootless and lost. While everyone in the West, from Hegel to Brian Cox, believes things can only get better as humanity progresses towards greater self-knowledge and material comfort, Traditionalism claims – and not just because of our current cost of living crisis – that things are getting worse. John Ruskin argued that the division of labour destroyed the human spirit, making us ‘small fragments and crumbs of life’. Søren Kierkegaard – writing long before Elon Musk bought Twitter – argued that communication is becoming more meaningless as it grows speedier. The word of God, he contended, cannot be heard through ‘empty communication that is designed merely to jolt the senses and stir up the masses’. Traditionalism agrees with these jeremiads and goes further.

Until his death in 1998, one of its leading theorists, the Swiss thinker Frithjof Schuon, lived in unspoiled woodland outside Bloomington, Indiana in the primordial simplicity he appropriated from Native Americans, eschewing jeans and modern vulgarities in ways of speaking, to focus on the spiritual and the beautiful. His retreat was an antidote to the rubbish of modern life, like King Charles’s Highgrove or Roger Scruton’s Scrutopia, with a dash of Thoreau’s Walden.

Another leading Traditionalist thinker, the Italian philosopher Julius Evola, was an avowed fascist supporter whose ideas proved popular with Bannon when he worked to make Donald Trump president. Evola’s book Riding the Tiger argued that Traditionalism could not change politics, but that didn’t mean political action was pointless. As long as it was clear that ‘all that matters is the action and the impersonal perfection in acting for its own sake’, it was justified. Between 1969 and 1980, Sedgwick tells us, a neo-fascist group called Ordine Nuovo killed hundreds of Italians with terrorist bombs, inspired by  Evola’s philosophy.

If you haven’t heard of Traditionalism, that’s not surprising. It’s an esoteric philosophy hardly devised to be generally understood. Its founding father, the Frenchman René Gueron, suggested that beneath all forms of religion, from Catholicism to Buddhism, there was a single, timeless tradition. Just as Socrates argued in Plato’s Republic that a noble lie is propagated by an elite to ensure social stability (an idea since borrowed by the neo-conservative thinker Leo Strauss), so for Gueron the superficial nature of religion, its exoteric public role, conceals its esoteric nature, only decipherable by the few.

How does Jordan Peterson come into this? The Canadian psychologist and bestselling author of the unremittingly butch 12 Rules for Life applies Traditionalism to politics, but with a twist. Gueron thought that the proper source of authority was spiritual. Peterson locates it in competence. Hierarchies, from lobster to human societies, are predicated on competence, which may well be produced by biology and tradition but have come to be seen by Marxists and their allies as only oppressively based on power and self-interest. The rejection of such political correctness leads Peterson to some interesting positions, to put it mildly. He argues that there is no such thing as white privilege, that it is folly for men to be less aggressive, since ‘aggression underlies the drive to be outstanding’, and that patriarchy is a system enabling men and women to co-operate mutually beneficially. We need tradition to thrive, he suggests.

Sedgwick’s book works as an elegant primer to what, depending on your perspective, is either a dangerous idea or a truth that us mimsy, consumerist decadents would do well to attend to. But he ends with a disquieting thought. He cites Alain de Benoist, the journalistic colleague of Alexander Dugin, neo-pagan brains behind the French New Right, defender of white minority rule in Rhodesia and the sort of traditionalist who believes that Europe should be exclusively for white Europeans: ‘Modernity has given birth to the emptiest civilisation humanity has ever known and is coming to end.’

What could the end look like? The horrors of Ukraine would be negligible by comparison. Sedgwick writes: ‘What might happen if, with the help of Identitarianism, real inter-ethnic conflict between Europe’s Muslim and non-Muslim populations developed doesn’t bear imagining.’

New trials for Frank Bascombe: Be Mine, by Richard Ford, reviewed

Frank Bascombe, the narrator of Be Mine and several other novels by Richard Ford, is, as always, living a horribly tragic life. In previous books, his son dies, his wife leaves him, he can’t find love, he gets cancer and has radioactive devices implanted in his prostate. He fails as a writer, but finds success as an estate agent. There’s something vital and winning about the way he describes all this. He’s a great philosopher: he tries to accept the world as it is, and just grind on towards the grave. Now he’s 74.

In a previous novel, Independence Day, he is 43, recently divorced and trying to bond with his surviving son, Paul. But everything goes wrong. Paul has a bad head injury, and Frank finds himself in a hospital, calling his ex-wife with the news. You wonder how much worse Frank’s life can get. Well, 32 years later, he is still trying to bond with Paul, who now has ALS, an incurable neurodegenerative condition. Aged 47, he is close to death and can’t move freely. Frank plans to take him to the Mayo Clinic, and afterwards to drive him to Mount Rushmore. This all happens around Valentine’s Day.

Frank is still, only just, in the real estate business. He’s well off. He’s always got money, although money doesn’t do anything for him. He still can’t find love. He wonders obsessively whether or not he’s still in love with Catherine, someone he knew many years ago. But then again maybe he’s in love with Betty Tran, an Asian-American masseuse, who might or might not be a sex worker (he hopes and thinks not). He has excruciating, cringe-making phone conversations with these people. One of his problems is that he tries to imagine that women are in love with him, but can’t bear to engage with them.

So Frank and Paul set out on their ill-fated journey, a sort of tragic echo of the one they had more than three decades earlier. Frank has his pocket Heidegger; Paul brings along his ventriloquist’s dummy, which he can no longer use. Frank does his best, and tells us how he feels: ‘If three house moves are the psychic equivalent of a death, a son’s diagnosis of ALS is equal to crashing your car into a wall day after day, with the outcome always the same.’

At the Mayo Clinic, Frank gets stuck in a series of horribly awkward moments. He marvels at the way capitalism and medicine have converged: ‘Here, no one goes away unsatisfied, even if they leave in a box.’ Later, Paul has a fall and bangs his head; trying to manoeuvre him into the rented RV, Frank tells us: ‘I fear he might fart more or less in my face.’

Frank can’t talk to women, I thought at this point, because he’s frightened to say the wrong thing. To his reader, though, he says exactly what’s on his mind. This is a really strong episode in Frank’s life. I’m already re-reading it.

Picture study: Second Self, by Chloë Ashby, reviewed

Having established a name for herself as a talented art critic for the national press, Chloë Ashby employs her expertise with illuminating effect in her fiction. In her first novel, Wet Paint, she used the uncomfortable gaze of the barmaid in Manet’s ‘A Bar at the Folies-Bergère’ to explore how her protagonist sees and is seen. In her new novel, Second Self, the central painting is ‘View of Scheveningen Sands’ by Hendrick van Anthonissen, which again becomes an insightful parallel to the protagonist’s life.

Cathy, 35, an art conservationist, is happily married to Noah, 11 years her senior, an academic and authority on international relations. Home is a flat in the yuppified part of Hackney, where Noah lovingly cooks and where the couple enjoy steamy sex in the shower after Cathy’s morning jogs along the towpath. Cathy’s best friend from school, Anna, lives a different version of this cushioned metropolitan existence. In her smart Kentish Town house, tasteful furnishings hide beneath the happily chaotic accoutrements of her toddler; beside ‘soothing sage green’ cupboards, the kitchen table is ‘pollinated with crumbs’. There are weekend trips to Cathy’s mother in Norfolk and weekly dinners with Noah’s brother’s boisterous Jewish intellectual family. So far, so cosy; but a tension runs beneath, tripping Cathy up on her jogs. She and Noah initially agreed that they didn’t want children, but, eight years into their marriage, does she want them after all?

Starting work on ‘View of Scheveningen Sands’, Cathy soon reveals a beached whale at its heart, concealed after the artist’s death ‘to suit changing sensibilities’ – a conservationist discovery that really happened. Researching historical whale strandings, while preoccupied with her ticking biological clock, Cathy notes: ‘Nature played a cruel and irreversible trick on them. I tried not to linger on the thought that it might also be playing a trick on me.’

As she works to preserve the painting, she decides to preserve her fertility by freezing her eggs. And, just as she discovers hidden intentions buried in the painting, so she also uncovers deep psychological motivations for her reconsideration of motherhood. Perhaps her craving has come about not just because Anna is pregnant again but because her own mother’s health is beginning to deteriorate.

With the painting, it is easy to decide to honour the artist’s original intention and reveal the whale. Cathy’s far less straightforward decision is compellingly played out.

A Blakean heaven or hell: fish with coloured lanterns and teeth like primeval beasts

Sometime in the early 1940s, when he was living in exile in LA, Thomas Mann picked up a copy of the National Geographic. Leafing through it, he found an article whose strapline was a Jules Verne novel in summary: ‘Half a Mile Down: Strange Creatures, Beautiful and Grotesque as Figments of Fancy, Reveal Themselves at Windows of the Bathysphere.’ Next to dark, exotic images of what appeared to be alien life from the abyssal depths of the sea was an account of how the author, a scientist named William Beebe, had become the 20th century’s first aquanaut in exploits so sensational that live radio broadcasts were made of his dives, as though he were taking a walk on the moon.

Beebe’s descriptions of a brave new world teeming with bizarre life prompted Mann to introduce him into Doktor Faustus (1947), in which the main character, an avant-garde composer named Adrian Leverkuhn, claims to accompany a fictionalised Beebe on his dives. There, ‘in the soundless, frantic foreignness’, Leverkuhn sees ‘the unlooked-at, the not-to-be and not expecting-to-be-looked at… the monstrously extra-human…in den Ozean der Welten’.

Mann’s appropriation of the story is an analogy for the way art can deal with extremes but also be suborned by them – in his case, the fate of his homeland in the apocalypse of war. There is no mention of this in Brad Fox’s wondrous new The Bathysphere Book, but such is the poetic and often mythical reach of its writing that the episode could easily have found a place there. Its short, sharp chapters are more like separate essays. They deal with Beebe’s adventures and relationships, but entangle with his dreamlike, out-of-body experiences. Thus Beebe’s descent becomes a Blakean heaven or hell, as the giant eyeball of the bathysphere hangs in the abyss. The scientist might discover Isaac Newton down there, sitting on the sea bed, futilely employing his science to work out what it all meant. As Fox dives into Beebe’s biography, the book itself becomes the bathysphere.

Beebe had been fascinated with the sea since he was a student and had seen whales spouting and playing off the coast of New England. ‘I cannot express the peculiar sense of weirdness and freedom which it gave me,’ he wrote, ‘to see these tremendous primeval monsters absolutely masterless, rioting in this vast expanse.’ Working with Otis Barton, an engineer, former actor and deep-sea diver, Beebe designed a machine to realise his dreams.

On 11 June 1930, off the Bermudan island of Nonsuch – part of the same archipelago on which the English sailing ship, the Sea Venturer, was wrecked in 1609, providing Shakespeare with the backstory for his last great play The Tempest – Beebe and Barton descended in their steel ball with quartz portholes. They discovered something rich and strange – not a drowned duke whose eyes and bones had turned into pearls and coral, but pulsating, bioluminescent organisms that lit up the darkness of our human ignorance of their existence.

Fox creates his luminous prose out of these scenes. He shows the miracle of Beebe’s experience in that eerie light; without it, none of that life would have been visible in ‘the darkest place in the world’. Beebe relays descriptions of what he saw via a telephone line to the surface 2,000 feet above. There his lover and fellow scientist Gloria Hollister is listening, taking accurate notes from Beebe’s narration, not knowing if she will ever see him again.

Fox describes this descent, and all that spins out from it, in shards, backwards and forwards in time and space, interspersed with Beebe’s observations in a kind of blank verse:

All the sea plumes have disappeared,
it looks absolutely dead
like the surface of the moon.

Sloping down to a sandy place in the distance…
Looks like death…

something wriggling like mad.

The tension of the line between the lovers, between life and death, is only heightened by the fact that some scientists could not accept what Beebe said he saw. They believed he was high on too much oxygen, or starved of it and hallucinating. Fox nicely contrasts Beebe’s rarefied aesthetic notes with his companion Barton’s sweaty, farty and generally distracting presence as the two necessarily skinny men curl up in the cramped space like overgrown foetuses.

Many of the creatures Beebe saw have never been seen again since, such as a pair of black 6ft-long fishes with dangling lanterns of red and blue lights and teeth like primeval beasts. Then something else lurks in the darkness, 20ft long. ‘Was it a fish at all? How did it move?’ Fox frames it in a memorable phrase as being ‘like the living mirror of a blank mind’.

Other things Beebe sees more clearly he can hardly believe. Great conglomerations of siphonomores, which may be the largest organisms on the planet, but which appear as diaphanous, shape-shifting colonies of multiple creatures. Crucially, he cannot touch or smell or hear these things; his amphibious curiosity is forever at one remove. I know that feeling, having been in the ocean with great whales, in the water with them, close enough to touch, yet still separated by an entire world.

It is telling that it was in these same waters, off Prospero’s isle of strange noises, that the first recordings of the songs of humpback whales would be made in the 1960s. The scientists who taped them were listening for Soviet submarines. What they heard instead were the siren voices of those Edenic New England whales who had first drawn Beebe into the deep. He could not have known that the advances in marine science to which he was contributing would lead to the despoilation of that same watery Arcadia. As deep-sea mining is set to ravage the last wilderness of our blue planet, a scientist working in the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton told me recently that when she was guiding a remote-operated vehicle in an abyssal trench – a venture which provides her research project with new species almost daily – she watched on her monitor as, on that virgin sea bed, an empty Coke can rolled by.

Don’t condemn Israel for defending itself

Car-rammings, shootings, stabbings and bombings targeting innocent men, women and children are a constant fear for Israelis. This morning, seven people were wounded in a ramming attack in Tel Aviv. Only a fortnight ago, four Israelis were gunned down by Hamas murderers. Last year, there were 5,000 such attacks. In 2023, more than 28 Israelis have so far been killed.

How would we in Britain react to such events? The IRA years show all too clearly that, in the wake of a terror threat, the security forces fight back. Israel is adopting a similar approach – but is being roundly, and unfairly, condemned for doing so.

On Monday night, Israeli forces began a major incursion into the West Bank city of Jenin, which has long been a hotbed of terror and source of Israeli death. This was an operation on a scale not seen since the Intifadas. Beginning with airstrikes at 1 a.m. targeting a militant command-and-control centre, it was followed by an infantry incursion.

Footage showed special forces padding silently in under cover of darkness. With daybreak, armoured bulldozers cleared a path, which had been mined with improvised explosive devices. Then came the cavalry. Mobile phone videos showed Palestinian youths in sports gear and head-dresses firing wildly with automatic weapons. 

The incursion continues, but the results are starting to come in. Multiple arrests, a bomb laboratory and rocket launcher parts seized. Nine dead with at least 50 wounded, 10 critically.

The underlying problem is that the hopeless Palestinian Authority is no longer able to police Jenin, which has turned into a gangster-run enclave. It reminds me of the slums of Caracas, in Venezuela, where I have worked as a foreign reporter: the police are fearful of entering, so it is literally a case of mob rule. The place is awash with guns. Only in Caracas there aren’t terror cells intent on massacring innocents.

Given that the terrorists who target Israeli civilians are of a piece with those who target British soldiers and civilians, you’d have thought that commentators in this country would understand the need for such measures. After all, both Hamas, which kills Israelis, and Al Qaeda, which brought down the World Trade Center, are offshoots of the same ideological source, the Muslim Brotherhood. But due to a phenomenon that I have started to call ‘Israelophobia’ – I have a book by that name coming out in September – the attitude in Britain has been quite the opposite.

The World Tonight on BBC Radio 4 last night showcased soft-soap interviews with Palestinians alongside an evisceration of a Likud politician, with the presenter repeatedly seeking to lay the blame for the cycle of violence at Israel’s door. The Today Programme this morning included a noticeable paucity of Israeli voices, likewise focusing its coverage heavily on the Palestinian narrative. Even-handed sections — there were one or two —were islanded amid waves of nudge-nudge insinuations about the evil Israeli army.

Much hay was made of Israel’s rightwing government, which includes a number of deeply unpleasant hardliners. It is true, of course, that the political situation is bleak, with young men in Jenin having little aspiration or hope for the future. But none of this excuses antisemitic terrorism, which long preceded the establishment of the Jewish state.

Given the density of civilians in Jenin, it will be impossible for Israeli troops to avoid innocent casualties, however hard they try. Following its modus operandi, the Israeli Army has issued multiple warnings to Palestinian residents, advising them to evacuate areas that are earmarked for attack. But casualties are, tragically, inevitable. And when they occur, they will be weaponised as propaganda by some Palestinians and their cheerleaders in the media. Look at those bloodthirsty Israelis, the narrative will run. Things haven’t changed since medieval times, when they used the blood of Christian children in their matzos.

Like I say: Israelophobia. The newest form of antisemitism. It slumbers when the news is dry, but as soon as the Jewish state takes action to stop people killing its civilians, the old prejudice dominates our airwaves. All Israel can do is continue to keep its people safe, even if that means using its armed forces in a way that armchair critics, whose children are safe in their beds, find unpalatable.

Barbara Ker-Seymer – Bright Young Person in the shadows

English Modernism was graced by five daring and gifted women who were in many respects well in advance of their native male counterparts: Virginia Woolf and Anna Kavan in prose, Edith Sitwell in poetry, Elisabeth Lutyens in music and Barbara Hepworth in sculpture. Barbara Ker-Seymer is not remotely in this class. She took some attractive photo-portraits before the war in her studio above Asprey’s and that was it.

Not that Barbara cared. Though trained at the Chelsea School of Art, she had a deprecating attitude to her activity which was characteristic of English amateurism and is absolutely maddening when it comes to the arts at a proper level. Woolf, Kavan, Sitwell, Lutyens and Hepworth were deadly serious about their vocations. Barbara had no vocation. She’d carried on the photography business of her boss, the woman who’d taken her virginity, Olivia Wyndham, when Olivia flitted off to the USA to lay siege to Edna Thomas (who succumbed).

Barbara was born in 1905 into the gentry, but her father was penniless and he ensured, via gambling, that her mother became penniless too. She grew up in a small house near St Paul’s Girls’ School, which she attended, and was soon drinking, drugging and dancing round town. Her vital friendships were with gay men, especially Edward Burra and Frederick Ashton, and also Afro-Americans visiting London or who she met in New York.

The usual suspects (Nancy Cunard, Cyril Connolly, Evelyn Waugh, the Lehmann sisters, Elizabeth Bowen, Oliver Messel) went up her stairs to be snapped in a cool 1930s style that – despite the urgings of her friend Brian Howard and the claims of her biographer Sarah Knights – never overstepped the mark into cutting-edge. The book’s preambles make much of her links to Jean Cocteau and Man Ray. It turns out that she once photographed Cocteau in Toulon for Town & Country magazine; and Man Ray sent her a saucy postcard, though there’s no evidence they actually met. The moment that war was declared Barbara gave up photography and fled the city for the country. Later she joined a film company. She never enlisted in any defence organisation.

She wasn’t pretty. However, she was on the circuit and frolicsome. She had affairs with both sexes, not in the traditional way (marriage plus a sequence of lovers), but in the free-love parallelism associated with the 1960s. She did marry twice, on doolally impulses, but her husbands were even less satisfactory than her boyfriends and girlfriends. Knights has been assiduous in untangling these liaisons, but the impression Barbara gave to her contemporaries remains: a very messy love life.

After the war she might have gone back to photography – but no. By this time she was a single parent and needed to fund the upbringing of her son. When visiting America she’d seen things called launderettes. She opened several in London and did well. However, when her son was eight, she packed him off to boarding school and had another go at Harlem (it didn’t last long).

When Barbara’s work was reappraised towards the end of her life, she expended much energy avoiding publicity. She claimed to have lost her negatives along the way; but after her death in 1993 they were discovered in her home and given to the Tate. In his Journals, Anthony Powell, a long-time friend, described her as having ‘colossal egotism’. I’m sure Barbara would agree that Powell was fond of accusing others of his own characteristics (in the same volume he described me as being ‘greatly pleased with himself’). She strikes one as a free and generous spirit.

We have had many accounts of the lives of the Bright Young People at the Ritzy end of society. Barbara’s antics were more Lyons Corner House. The book is unusual in that it conveys what it was like to hang out in that era with no particular privileges. It is replete with colourful near-unknowns who were as much a part of the zeitgeist as the bigger names, and perhaps even more determined to bring chrome, zigzags and jazz rhapsody into their lives. This is underpinned by the author’s chatty style of short sentences (what joy to bump into a semicolon on page 42) and simple vocabulary, e.g. ‘Billy always kept a tin of salmon in the cupboard in case Fred turned up for a fish-cake supper.’ Knights refers to her subject as ‘Bar’ throughout, a misjudgment in my view. This faux cosiness buckles wonderfully on page 238 as a true monstre sacré enters the story – Patricia Highsmith – and destroys everything in sight. It says much for Barbara’s big-heartedness that she and Highsmith remained friends.

The immigrant’s experience of Europe

Meet Ibrahim, from Syria. He fled Aleppo just before the bombs began to fall. A clean $4,000 in cash to a smuggler got him a fake passport and, voilà, a ticket to Europe – briefly in Greece, then in Germany (‘the people, they looked different’), now in Spain. Immigrant life was tough at first: the strange language, the alien norms, the overt racism. ‘He was not on their level. Just a refugee.’ Then a lucky break. He starred in a homemade porn video that went viral: ‘100 per cent real Arab bull.’ Next, he’s earning close to a seven-figure salary, owns a flash car and has women dripping off his arm.

In Ben Judah’s illuminating depiction of modern-day Europe, almost everyone has a dream. Of the 23 personal narratives around which This Is Europe is built (each character gets his or her own chapter), almost half belong to refugees. The remainder herald from the peripheries, either geographic (Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Russia’s frozen north) or socio-economic (poor, low-skilled, rural). As a collective, longing defines them: a wish for a better future, an aspiration for a happier present.

So, does Europe deliver? Does this continent of nearly 750 million people have the space and solidarity for all its residents, whatever their background, to flourish? It’s the question Szilvia asks herself as she works a dead-end supermarket job in a backwater Hungarian town (only the occasional store invasion by wild dogs shakes her from the sense that ‘she could be anywhere’). Then there’s Aboud, living constantly by the clock, stealing an hour or two with his chronically depressed wife before it’s back to his Amazon delivery van and Berlin’s unfriendly suburbs. And Ionut, the Romanian trucker who longs to swap his life of gruelling motorways and grubby lorry parks for a career as a singer.

Ibrahim’s success story, it turns out, is the exception. As the testimonies of Judah’s carefully selected informants reveal, barriers to personal progress abound. Europe is often cast as bureaucratically sclerotic, all advancement thwarted by the primacy of protecting social rights, but such measures rarely reach the margins, it would seem. Consider the fate of Nazneen, the Afghan-Iranian refugee left stranded by her Greek bosses on an island olive farm as a forest fire raged. Or Natasha and German, the Belarusian couple forced into exile simply for attending a peaceful protest. Forget solidarity: it’s social isolation that defines them. 

The dividing line between Europe’s haves and the have-nots is seismic. That is Judah’s central conceit, and one that his characters (all skilfully described) step up one after the other to endorse. Simone, a well-meaning soul, volunteers for mountain rescue in the Italian Alps. Week after week he watches African migrants traipsing up to the high passes of ‘Fortress Europe’, equipped with nothing but Google Maps and battered sneakers. Only in the spring, when melting snow gives up the corpses, can they count the dead. ‘It was almost like there were two categories of human being,’ Simone says: ‘Those who could and those who couldn’t.’

For readers looking for a clear analysis of the whys and wherefores of such bifurcation of opportunity, This Is Europe will disappoint. As with Judah’s previous book, the critically acclaimed This Is London, the focus is on detailing the stark realities of ‘lived Europe’, not on theorising about them. In the case of London, Judah slummed it with tramps and misfits. This time he takes a step back, still travelling and interviewing (although by Zoom when Covid constraints required), but then writing himself out of the story.

The result – a mix of verbatim reporting and journalistic re-enactment – is designed to deliver intimacy with the protagonists. Judah’s direct, at times staccato, prose accentuates this desire to evoke the closest feeling to ‘being inside their heads’. The following is from the story of David, a shepherd in Portugal, on seeing his house consumed by flames:

The hillside, the farm, it was scrubbed with ash. He got closer, closer to the house.
You should never see this.
A skeleton of black beams.
David didn’t cry.
The winds had gone…
‘OK, it’s done. It’s done.
There’s nothing I can do about it.’

This Is Europe is a bold literary and journalistic experiment. Judah knows how to tell a story and does so with panache. The chapter on Haidar, a gay Syrian who found liberation among the drag queens of Berlin (‘It was gone… the conflict in my mind’), is a 24-page masterclass in pace and place. No less memorable is the tale of the Latvian teenager who spends a summer as a sex-chat worker (‘Just one more payday’) to realise her dream of studying abroad.

But try as Judah might to extricate himself from the page, he is there in every line. These are his characters and these are the stories he has sought out. That, of course, is valid: choosing one’s subjects is every writer’s prerogative. Judah pushes the point further. For him, such selection is his analysis. Other Europes exist – those of cultural history, of Brussels politics, of Eurovision optimism. Judah simply turns his gaze on another. And he does it well – for his is a Europe that many experience but which still operates largely in the shadows.

Remembering Dido – and the fate of Carthage

It is a curious fact that between the foundation of Tunis by the Arabs in the 7th century and the foundation of Tel Aviv in the early 20th century no major cities were created on the shores of the Mediterranean. Even those cities were not quite new: Tunis, as Katherine Pangonis points out, was partly constructed out of rubble from Roman Carthage, situated nearby; and Tel Aviv originated as a Jewish suburb of Jaffa. Nor were ancient Mediterranean cities as sizeable as we imagine. Only Rome, Alexandria and Constantinople can be called megalopolises, and Constantinople lies much closer to the Black Sea than the Mediterranean. Pangonis’s lively new book therefore looks at five places whose significance was far greater than their relatively small size might suggest, places that were in some sense capitals, whether because they were centres of government (like Ravenna) or trade (like Tyre) or indeed culture (like Syracuse).

Although the emphasis is on ancient and medieval cities, an important dimension to the book is what happened to these places once their glory days were over. This does not simply mean recounting their history in more recent times, even when they became backwaters, but taking the reader through the modern streets, meeting today’s residents and even diving underwater to find the submerged remains of large parts of ancient Tyre. It means asking the inhabitants of Ravenna whether they are proud of their city’s mosaics, to which the perhaps predictable answer is yes, we are very proud of them but we never actually take a peek at them. In Antioch, it means scrambling over the ruins of modern Antakya in the immediate aftermath of the massive earthquake which levelled the city earlier this year. Following its abandonment in the 7th century, Carthage too has vanished, though its often forgotten revival as a major Roman city is well represented by the remains of massive baths, villas and spectacular floor mosaics.

Pangonis has an acute eye for literary traditions as well as archaeological remains. In her account of Carthage she details the various versions of the dramatic story of Dido, or Elissa, the queen who is said to have brought the first settlers to what would be the greatest city in the pan-Mediterranean trading network of the Phoenicians, and also became Rome’s mortal rival. But she also describes a more disturbing reality than the funeral pyre on which Dido supposedly immolated herself. The tophet, or children’s burial ground, appears to confirm the horrified insistence of Greek and Roman writers that the Carthaginians practised child sacrifice, apparently on a much larger scale than their ancestors in the Levant. These writers, along with Flaubert in his novel Salammbô, invented details of the rituals, which seem to have taken place especially at times of national emergency.

A feature of all these cities is that they were home to a variety of religious and ethnic groups. As Pangonis shows, intolerance existed alongside forbearance. The Roman inhabitants of the reconstructed city of Carthage were relaxed about which gods people worshipped, with the exception of that mysterious group of supposed trouble-makers, the Christians. Pangonis offers a haunting account of the martyrdom of Perpetua, who at the start of the 3rd century heroically faced not just a wild bull but a circus crowd baying for her blood.

Another century was to pass before the practice of Christianity became legal, so there were plenty more victims of the lions and tigers, even if, once again, the tales were sometimes enhanced for dramatic effect. But elsewhere a story of generally peaceful co-existence emerges, as in modern Antakya, where Jews, Christians and Muslims lived in harmony before the earthquake. Ravenna had its moment of toleration when its Gothic rulers fostered the Arian version of Christianity but did not suppress the Catholic church. On the other hand, the conquest of the city by Justinian’s general Belisarius in the 6th century saw the takeover of the mosaic-encrusted Arian churches, and a portrait of the Arian king Theoderic the Great was mischievously transformed into one of St Martin of Tours.

Pangonis’s combination of familiar and unfamiliar places is one of the great attractions of the book. Getting to Tyre – now a stronghold of Hizbollah – or ruined Antakya is a challenge for any traveller. But she eloquently evokes Carthage, Syracuse and Ravenna, all easily accessible, and manages to weave their stories together in a way that gives Twilight Cities coherence. This is a vividly written book to savour and enjoy, whether criss-crossing the Mediterranean or lounging in an armchair dreaming of it.

The wonder of the marine world is in serious danger

Streamlined, musclebound, warm-blooded and with fins that retract into body slots like a switchblade so it can attain swimming speeds of more than 40 mph, the Atlantic Bluefin Tuna is a wonder of the marine world – the Clan Chief of the Scombridae, that can weigh up to 1,500 lb. It has long been prized by sport fishermen, from Charlie Chaplin to the dentist-turned-bestseller Zane Grey, and there is nothing tentative about a tunny strike. In 1927, after a four-hour battle with one eight-foot giant, Grey wrote: ‘If it were possible for a man to fall in love with a fish, that was what happened to me. I hung over him, spellbound and incredulous.’

Alas for the ABT (as they are known in the trade), they taste so good that they have been hunted for millennia. Their flesh contains a chemical which, on death, is converted into a monophosphate closely associated with umami. Their numbers are now in decline and some think the global population is endangered.

As the Canadian journalist Karen Pinchin describes in her thoughtful, well-intentioned book, it is simplistic to ascribe this crisis solely to the Japanese obsession with sushi and its attendant near-fetishistic rituals. That is a relatively modern vogue which has gone global. In 2019, one Tokyo restaurateur bid US$3 million for a single flash-frozen bluefin carcass. But within living memory this rich, meaty flesh (‘red gold’) was regarded as no better than cat food. In Kings of Their Ocean Pinchin traces the scientific developments that suggest how stocks of this magnificent fish may be managed for the future.

Her basic structure might be called a ‘Convergence of the Twain’. One central figure is Al Anderson, a temperamental Rhode Island charter skipper who was a pioneer of tagging tuna and releasing them – a method which today, with microchip technology (‘fish and chips’) can yield much valuable information about their previously mysterious migratory movements. Captain Al is a maverick, and ornery even by the standards of his profession, though it transpires he is suffering from alcoholism and a brain tumour. In 2004 his boat catches and tags a juvenile ABT, subsequently nicknamed Amelia (after the aviator Amelia Earhart, who happened to have been a tuna aficionado). A scientist captures Amelia again three years later, retags her and finally – spoiler alert – she is netted and killed off Portugal in 2018 and her lifeway is recorded for posterity. In death she even merits her own scientific website.

It was once thought tuna had two distinct Atlantic populations (east and west), but recent research confirms that these remarkable fish often cross the ocean and commingle. This makes international regulation very complex, and Pinchin’s book is partly a chronicle of quotas, bureaucratic infighting, vested interests and the lucrative black market. It’s quite a tale, though much of it has been told before – for instance by the ecologist Carl Safina, whose Song for the Blue Ocean offers a crisper narrative, or by Mark Kurlansky, in whose tradition Pinchin appears to be writing, though her prose is sometimes lacklustre by comparison. Still, you have to applaud an author who is so dedicated that she home-makes garum (that noisome decoction of fish essence, once beloved by the Romans) and who describes how the notorious Korean preacher Sun Myung Moon ran a fleet of tuna boats in the 1970s. ‘You just keep trying until you catch one. That’s the way it goes,’ was apparently his incontrovertible mantra.

To be fair, there are some eye-catching set pieces along the way. One concerns the brief history of Outer Baldonia. Beginning in the 1930s, trophy anglers (including Babe Ruth and FDR) were seasonally attracted to the sleepy settlement of Wedgeport, Nova Scotia to fish for the then prodigious runs of huge tuna and to compete in tournaments. In 1948 one enthusiast, Russell Arundel, purchased a small island there and playfully declared it an independent microstate (Baldonia), dedicated to big-game fishermen and with its own currency, the tunar. The Soviet authorities took a dim view. Eventually, though, the concentration of fish dissipated and Wedgeport slipped back out of the limelight.

Pinchin makes a colourful visit to Spain, where bluefin is still big business. Since Phoenician times, tuna on their spawning run have swum through the Straits of Gibraltar and been intercepted with elaborate netting systems. In Andalusian Arabic, this is the almadraba (or ‘place to hit and fight’), and even now the ritual harvest maintains its own family traditions and is occasionally a tourist attraction. To preserve the quality of fish flesh, today’s fastidious Japanese dealers have replaced with more surgical practices the historic bloodbath of clubbing – once described as ‘like watching a thoroughbred racehorse being hacked to death with an axe’.

Strangely, Pinchin makes no mention of our own history of angling for ABT (a British Tunny Club was founded in Scarborough in 1933) and pays scant attention to ‘ranching’ (the fattening up of juvenile tuna kept in pens). But until someone finds a way of breeding Thunnus thynnus in captivity, I think we are just going to have to eat far fewer of these spellbinding creatures.

A visit from the devil: Russian Gothic, by Aleksandr Skorobogatov, reviewed

Like light from faraway stars, fiction from outside the Anglosphere may take decades to reach English-language readers. This sinister, indeed sulphurous, novella by a Belarus-born author was first published in Russian in 1991, and won major awards. Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse’s English translation, as creepily compelling as the book deserves, appears long after the contemporary hook that Aleksandr Skorobogatov embeds in his tale has lost its topicality. Recent events, however, make this fable of obsession, madness and violence timelier than ever. It almost vindicates a belief in Russian history and literature as an epic recycling of eternal themes.

In a dismal Russian town lives Nikolai, a drifter and drinker on a meagre government pension. His wife, Vera, is a fêted actress at the local theatre. Five years earlier, the couple lost their small son. In his drunken, grief-stricken despair, broken-down Nikolai begins to receive visits from the handsome, confident ‘Sergeant Bertrand’. This fine fellow, ‘radiant, gleaming with health’, seems determined to seduce the willing Vera, or so Nikolai assumes. The flirtatious gentleman caller uses fragrant colognes: ‘The stench made Nikolai’s stomach heave.’ But Bertrand also brings an acrid, burning smell along with him. We have been warned.

Bertrand’s debonair virility drives ‘talentless, dull, insignificant’ Nikolai into paroxysms of jealous, paranoiac rage. He terrorises the blameless Vera, driving her from her ‘shameless job’ at the theatre, first by emotional blackmail, then vicious physical attacks perpetrated during his alcoholic rages. Meanwhile, the super-misogynist Bertrand – a sort of Russian Andrew Tate, with fancier touches of Nietzsche – pops round to insist that every man is ‘born with power. You’ve got to use that power, you’ve got to rule!’ ‘People gravitate towards strength,’ he preaches, and will ‘forgive the strong for using their teeth to show dominance and superiority’. Thus ‘a strong and healthy person should never feel pity’. Nikolai learns the Bertrand doctrine all too well. Accused and abused, the angelic Vera nonetheless stays loyal to her increasingly sick and delirious spouse – even when his vengeful fury lands him in the asylum’s alcoholism ward.

With its non-specific setting, fantasy-prone protagonist, saintly heroine and satanic interloper, Russian Gothic can resemble a brief, accomplished reprise of key motifs from classic Russian fiction. (Incidentally, the translation’s over-explicit title is not Skorobogatov’s: he just called the story Sergeant Bertrand.) Admirers of Gogol, Dostoevsky and other literary conjurers of infernal powers, both psychological and social, will find plenty to recognise. Scenes of horror and panic blend with near-farce in the ‘provincial, mediocre, grey town’. Its squalid office-holders embody the smug, stupid corruption that Russian writers like to dub poshlost. They almost provide an excuse for Nikolai’s frenzied paranoia as it builds towards a foregone, but still hideous, conclusion.

At one point, this undated backdrop acquires some fixed coordinates. Nikolai’s pension derives from his military service: ‘The government is paying us damages for injuries we sustained.’ Specifically, it compensates veterans ‘for the blood we poured like fertiliser on to the Afghan soil’. The anti-hero’s demonic possession, and the heroine’s long-suffering virtue, may unfold against a broad canvas of Russian writing, with its recurrent spiritual dramas, yet Nikolai also suffers alcohol-enhanced PTSD, bequeathed by the imperial dabacles of the moribund Soviet state. His hallucinations have a history. And this English version arrives just as Putin’s war on Ukraine creates thousands more traumatised Nikolais. In his sermon from hell, Bertrand refers to life as ‘a never-ending battle in a never-ending war’. If so, then the Kremlin now hosts the most faithful devil’s disciple of them all.

Frederic Raphael settles old scores with a vengeance

Last Post is a collection of reminiscences, anecdotes and a settling of old scores by Frederic Raphael in the form of imaginary letters to many of the people who have been part of his long life. You might expect a nonagenarian’s critical faculties to have ‘mellowed by the stealing hours of time’, but far from it. Raphael’s intelligence and acerbic wit are undiminished. 

Those who have crossed his path will be aware of his ability to ‘verbalise easily’ and, as he himself confesses: ‘It is one of my failings that I know how to hurt people.’ Jonathan Miller is criticised for being insufficiently conscious of his Jewish heritage. Miller in turn described Raphael as displaying an unattractive ‘piranha-like savagery’ in his disapprovals. Kenneth Tynan comes under fire for his ‘smart-assery’ and ‘clenched fist and limp wrist’. But Raphael’s final assessment of him could be taken as a sort of tribute: ‘You were a one-off all the way, merely unforgettable, you bastard.’ George Steiner suffers a sustained attack for being gauche, malicious and too obviously ambitious, blessed with ‘a moist and spatulate tongue’ of ‘garrulous versatility’. Raphael subscribes to Isaiah Berlin’s view of Steiner as a ‘genuine phoney’.

After reading this book it becomes easier to understand why Raphael may have thought it fortunate that he somehow failed to gain a First in Moral Sciences at Cambridge. If he had, he could have been ‘lost in the rooms and corridors of academe’, as he writes to the Bedales classicist Kenneth McLeish. The truth is that Raphael possessed many gifts – those of a novelist and screenwriter as well as a classicist who translated Catullus and Petronius – and perhaps it was difficult for some of those addressed in these letters to keep up with him.

There are sideswipes at Kingsley Amis, who, like all alcoholics, ended up ‘living in pickle jars’; and his son Martin also comes under attack. About poor Doris Lessing: ‘I trudged through several volumes; sieved no treasures.’ Even the Royal Society of Literature earns displeasure. When Raphael was elected a Fellow more than 60 years ago it meant something. Now he refers to the institution with contempt.

He does, however, write with compassion about Dorothy Nimmo, his accomplished contemporary at Cambridge who was full of promise and received a starred First. Her undergraduate career, which she combined with being an actress and a poet, was unequalled. But she ended up in obscurity, the caretaker of a Friends’ Meeting House, after a disastrous marriage to an unfaithful husband. Raphael laments with sympathy her lack of renown. And he describes movingly his artist daughter Sarah, who died at the age of 40 – a blow difficult for any parent to bear.

The name-dropping continues, often with reference to the film industry. Stanley Kubrick, an aspirant classicist but Raphael’s intellectual inferior, is seen as the main beneficiary of their collaborations: ‘The friction between us freshened the sparks necessary for your forge.’ Kubrick is considered guilty of a kind of cancellation of Raphael’s contributions to some of his films – a non-recognition of work rendered. This is often the curse of screenwriters, as Raphael indicates to John Schlesinger and Jo Janni, who both showed a ‘presumption of authorship’, with no acknowledgment – or publicity – of Raphael’s input. Tom Cruise and Wolf Mankowitz receive the same acid treatment, as does Ken Loach. When Janni, immobilisd in old age, lacked visitors, Loach was ‘too busy hoping for the revolution to have any bourgeois manners’.

Raphael reveals himself as a networker – if an accidental one – and finishes with ‘the glittering prizes’ described in his 1976 television drama. Whether you’ve lived through most of the years covered in Last Post or notyou’ll be bound to find these letters to the dead who cannot answer back immensely entertaining.

Ireland’s most notorious murderer still casts a disturbing spell

Mark O’Connell was three years old when Malcolm Macarthur – a silken-tongued toff in a bow tie – went on his killing rampage in 1982, and 33 when he was released from prison in 2012. Eight years later, when he began this book, O’Connell describes stalking Macarthur around Dublin in the hope of securing the kind of interview that would cause Ireland’s most famous murderer to ‘tremble in terror and awe at the moral magnitude of his iniquity. I wanted to witness the breaking down of his ego defences, the revelation of some terrible emotional truth within’. His ambition recalls that of the Romantic essayist Thomas De Quincey, in relation to another dandy killer: ‘There must be raging some great storm of passion – jealousy, ambition, vengeance, hatred – which will create a hell within him; and into this hell we are to look.’

O’Connell got both more and less than he bargained for. Despite many hours of startling interviews, it is the mind of the writer and not the murderer we are invited to explore.

Macarthur has been written about before of course, in mile upon mile of reportage and also by John Banville in The Book of Evidence, where he is cast as the unreliable narrator, Freddie Montgomery. It was through Banville’s novel that O’Connell came to be interested in Macarthur as a subject, and A Thread of Violence, in which he plays another unreliable narrator, is concerned with the whole business of turning murderers into colourful ‘characters’ – particularly in the genre of true crime – while their featureless victims fade into obscurity.

The Macarthur case, as O’Connell makes plain, is threaded through with so many fictions that it is important to establish the unbelievable facts. Malcolm Macarthur, the only son of a violent father and a stone-cold mother, was born in 1945 and brought up in a big house in County Meath. Unusually for landowners in Ireland, the Macarthurs were not English Protestant settlers but Scottish Catholics who had come over from Lanarkshire in 1907. Macarthur was nonetheless raised with a colossal sense of entitlement. The purpose of his life, he explained to O’Connell, was to pursue his many interests, which meant tolerating no interruption to his leisure time. This was the logic behind his decision, when his inheritance ran dry, to commit armed robbery rather than find a job.

Pulling off the heist required the use of a car and a gun, neither of which he owned, so he stole the car of a 27-year-old nurse called Bridie Gargan who was sunbathing in Phoenix Park, and in doing so bludgeoned her skull with hammer blows. Bleeding to death in the back seat while Macarthur made his getaway, Bridie desperately tried to attract the attention of passing vehicles, which is how an ambulance, assuming that Macarthur was racing to Accident and Emergency, came to escort the murderer through the city, lights flashing and sirens blaring.

Dumping the car and the dying Bridie, Macarthur went to County Offaly to buy a gun from a young farmer, Donal Dunne, whose face he then blew off. Next he parlayed his way into a swanky house called ‘Camelot’, overlooking Dublin Bay, whose owner, Harry Bieling, he held at gunpoint. Bieling escaped, reporting the incident to the gardaí. Macarthur then telephoned Bieling to explain that it had all been a joke and told the gardaí, giving his real name, to drop any charges against him, before going into hiding in the Dalkey apartment of his old friend, Patrick Connolly, who happened to be the attorney general. It was here that he was arrested on 13 August 1982, the day Connolly’s career also ended and the downfall of the Taoiseach, Charles Haughey, began.

Notes found after his arrest suggested that Macarthur was also planning to electrocute his mother, added to which he may have killed his father, who died in the 1970s in ‘suspicious circumstances’ and was buried without an autopsy (it was after his father’s death that Macarthur received the £70,000 inheritance he had squandered by 1982).

The trial, in which he pleaded guilty, was over before it had begun. He served time only for the murder of Bridie Gargan; it was deemed unnecessary to charge him for the additional murder of Donal Dunne. His 30 years in a low-security prison provided Macarthur with the leisure time he had wanted in the first place; he was at last able to live the life of the mind without worrying about money.

After his release, he returned to Dublin where he pursued the cultural attractions of the city. On one occasion he turned up for a talk that John Banville was giving. Seeing the murderer in the audience, Banville made a swift exit; but Macarthur stayed on for the drinks reception, where he was mistaken for Banville himself.

The problem with this material, O’Connell concedes, is that it reads like black comedy rather than the ‘story about class and Irish history… cruelty and repression’ that he wanted to write. Plus the central character doesn’t make any sense; he is a motiveless malignity, a hellkite confounding human understanding. All attempts to unravel the reasons behind his ‘criminal episode’, as Macarthur quaintly refers to the murders, are like nailing jelly to the wall.

Dismissing O’Connell’s suggestion that he had an unhappy childhood, Macarthur insists that his upbringing was impeccable, that he was not a ‘natural criminal’ but a murderer of a ‘particular class’. Common criminals kill for pleasure, but Macarthur – not unlike O’Connell himself – was a gentleman, an intellectual, a man of parts. He tells O’Connell:

You must remember that this was a financial situation. It wasn’t what you might call irrationality or lack of control. There was a problem to be solved. And you might well ask, well, why solve it using this particular technique? And that’s a legitimate question. But it wasn’t an act of madness. 

So the months roll by and the conversations, in which Macarthur endlessly contradicts himself, draw to an end. But instead of falling to his knees before God like Raskolnikov in the final pages of Crime and Punishment, Macarthur remains, O’Connell notes, like Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, who ‘detested murder unless it was absolutely necessary’. Meanwhile, Macarthur’s self-image chimes more and more with what De Quincey called, in his essay ‘On Murder as a Fine Art’, the ‘dilettante in murder’. He does not express remorse, he explains, as ‘a matter of style’, having been raised to see ‘excessive emotionality’ as being in poor taste. ‘If there is such a thing as a criminal dilettante,’ O’Connell concludes, ‘that is what Macarthur is.’ 

The similarities between the author and the murderer are striking, as O’Connell notes with increasing discomfort. Both come from comfortable backgrounds, both want quiet lives devoted to study, both are dispassionate about the art of murder, both struggle to humanise the victims. O’Connell writes:

My tendency to think of Macarthur as a character, and of his crimes as constituting a bizarre and compelling story of human perversity… was itself a kind of heartlessness. Because if Macarthur was a character, and his crimes were a story, then his victims were necessarily characters too, and secondary ones at that. My work, in this way, was permeated with a cold and methodical violence.

When it comes to himself as a character, O’Connell paints a murky picture of a shady figure, the sort who tucks his three-year-old into bed before pursuing a man who is ‘the very worst thing that could possibly happen to me and to the people I hold close’. While his self-portrait is well executed, O’Connell is another unreliable narrator. A Thread of Violence is shot through with silences: there is no mention in these pages of the classic texts that O’Connell builds on and against which his own work will be evaluated. It is as if Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood or Janet Malcolm’s The Journalist and the Murderer had never existed, despite the fact that Malcolm’s famous opening paragraph about the ethics of journalism is O’Connell’s entire premise.

As for Malcolm Macarthur, the Irish Humbert Humbert with the fancy prose style, he will go down as one of the great literary copycats.

Why are high street banks teaming up with Stonewall?

Pride month is over but my local bank still has its rainbow-striped window display firmly in place. The LGBTQ+ theme continues inside with rainbow bunting galore. If you’re lucky enough to spot a member of staff, they’ll be wearing a rainbow lanyard and possibly a pronoun badge to boot.

Today’s revelation that most high street banks are signed up to Stonewall diversity schemes will shock no one. Long after organisations such as the BBC, the Department of Health and even some universities, cut ties with the LGBTQ+ advocacy group over impartiality concerns, banks are still there, dutifully doling out money to Stonewall for the privilege of following its dubious guidance.

Stonewall recommends the use of gender neutral language and spaces. This might mean describing mothers as ‘birthing parents’ or allowing men who self-identify as women to use female toilets and changing rooms. Institutions keen to climb up the rankings of Stonewall’s Workplace Equality Index, or join its Diversity Champions Programme, strive to put these recommendations into practice.

According to a report in the Daily Telegraph, HSBC – which allows customers to register as gender-neutral – Barclays – which offers private medical cover for employees transitioning, and Nationwide – which encourages staff to use pronouns in email signatures – all feature in Stonewall’s top 100 employers. HSBC’s decision to permit accounts without the ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’ appellation shows that these policies can extend beyond rules for staff and impact upon customers, too.

One person who knows this already is the Reverend Richard Fothergill, who had his 17-year-old Yorkshire Building Society account shut down just days after he complained about the company’s messaging during Pride month. Since the Reverend’s story broke, news has come to light of numerous people who suspect their bank accounts have been closed down because of their political views. Among those who claim to have been affected are high profile Brexiteers and people who are gender critical.

The impact of having your bank account shut down suddenly, when so many businesses now operate on a cashless basis, cannot be overstated. Victims become non-persons, effectively unable to function in a society that runs off direct debits, bank transfers and tap to pay. That this can happen because of someone’s sincerely held opinions is truly shocking.

The government now plans to warn banks that they must protect free speech. They might have to give customers a longer notice period before closing their accounts and be more transparent about the reasons for their decision. This is a small step in the right direction.

But the power banks have to close the accounts of customers they deem to hold the ‘wrong’ political views is about more than just free speech. It gets to the heart of what it means to be a citizen in a democratic society. Surveys show that the public are not in favour of making it easier for people to change their legal gender. Britons oppose transgender athletes being allowed to compete in sporting events for the opposite sex and transgender women being permitted to use female changing rooms.

For banks to attempt to impose such views on staff and customers alike, not least through the prevalence of rainbow bunting and pronoun badges, is troubling.

It is too easy to blame Stonewall for this sorry state of affairs. Stonewall is influential but it is not all-powerful. No institution is compelled to join its Diversity Champions programme.

It seems that banks, along with numerous other British institutions, have lost sight of their primary justification. No longer content with merely storing, investing and loaning us money, bankers seek an apparently more virtuous purpose in progressive causes. Why sit around calculating interest rates when there is rainbow bunting to be pinned up? Why get bogged down with mortgages when there are diversity workshops to attend?

Stonewall’s success is down to the fact that no one wants to be seen getting their hands dirty making money or, indeed, engaging in any kind of economic function or public service. The drive to substitute progressive politics for the actual business of producing, buying, selling and banking, not to mention education, health care and policing, comes from the very top. We learnt this week that in an application to Stonewall, the Bank of England itself uses the phrase ‘birthing parent’ and expresses its commitment to providing staff with gender neutral toilets. Claims that the British public might be better served by more focus on tackling inflation are purely speculative.

Government ministers issuing polite reminders about the importance of free speech will do little to stem the politicisation of our institutions. The message from Westminster is, at best, misleading. Free speech might be important but Natwest, which is still one-third taxpayer owned, partners with Stonewall to ‘deliver best practice’. Any government serious about running a country that enacts the views of the electorate urgently needs to work out how to depoliticise businesses and institutions or encourage the emergence of viable alternatives.

Rishi’s Tory rating turns negative

As the average mortgage rate for a five-year fixed deal rises to 6 per cent, Rishi Sunak can find little relief in his personal approval ratings. ConservativeHome has published its monthly cabinet league table in which the Prime Minister’s support among Tory members has hit its lowest level since he entered 10 Downing Street. Sunak at least has plenty of company in the red – he is one of a record nine cabinet ministers to find themselves with sub-zero approval ratings. These ministers include his deputy Oliver Dowden, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, Levelling Up secretary Michael Gove and Therese Coffey.

Sunak is now on -2.7, compared to a positive rating of 21.6 in June, but is still doing better than some of his predecessors. Boris Johnson previously hit -33.8 as prime minister and Theresa May went lower still. Yet the ratings will just add to a sense in government and across the party that things are not going the Prime Minister’s way at present. National polling suggests the Tories are losing ground and there is a feeling that recovery has stalled since the local elections and that the party’s prospects are getting worse.

The problem for Sunak is that it is currently hard to see what will change in his favour. The economy remains in a tricky state and mortgage misery will likely get worse before it gets better. Ministers had hoped a flight to Rwanda could improve their fortunes – but the Court of Appeal verdict last week that the scheme is unlawful means that a flight this year is unlikely. The case will now be heard in the Supreme Court, likely in October.

There are still some levers Sunak can pull. There is hope in government, too, that inflation will fall steeply in the second half of the year. One such lever is a reshuffle – currently a matter of debate in government as to whether to do it at the end of July or when MPs return after the summer recess. Those who could find themselves on the way out or moved include Health Secretary Steve Barclay, Defence Secretary Ben Wallace and the Home Secretary Suella Braverman. But all three currently enjoy a much more positive reception from Tory members than Sunak. It means even picking his pre-election team, as I write about here, will prove difficult.

Why did a police officer tell me I was ‘hot’?

Poundbury in Dorset looked beautiful as it prepared for the King’s arrival. Gardeners were sprucing up flowers; painters were hurrying their ladders into vans; security officers and policemen were positioned on every street corner. But my encounter with the men tasked with keeping us safe left me feeling deeply uncomfortable.

I was there with my 12-year-old daughter and mother and we took up a prime position outside the Monart Spa, where the King was to unveil a plaque. My daughter clutched a bunch of flowers so tightly that it lost most of its petals. 

As His Majesty greeted the crowds, police officers made their way along the queues of people, straight-faced and eagle-eyed. I felt someone standing directly behind me. I turned. It was a dark-haired, casually-dressed man who clearly wasn’t there to greet the King. He was standing back, scanning the crowd. I noticed that he was wearing an earpiece and realised that he must have been part of the security detail. He caught my eye and I felt uncomfortable. I turned away.

As I pushed forward to greet His Majesty, I felt the man’s presence come closer. But soon my mind was on other things. My daughter was one of the only children present and King Charles picked us out for a chat, even granting royal permission for her to take the rest of the day off school.

After the conversation, His Majesty walked off to open a garden in memory of his late father, the Duke of Edinburgh. We followed, along with the rest of the crowd, and came to a stop beside the garden. My daughter began doing cartwheels on a patch of grass behind me, so I kept an eye on her, turning frequently away from the King. That was when I saw that the man with the earpiece was still behind me.

As I turned back towards His Majesty again, I noticed another three men in plainclothes and earpieces in front. At least one of them seemed to be armed. They were talking amongst themselves and glancing regularly in my direction.

Behind me, the man was still watching me closely and he had been joined by a comrade. I was starting to feel unnerved. Worried that I was appearing suspicious, I said to them: ‘I promise you, I’m not dodgy. I’m just keeping an eye on my daughter who’s decided that doing cartwheels is more exciting at this point.’ They laughed and one replied, ‘it’s not because you look dodgy. It’s because you’re hot.’

Taken off-guard, I felt myself flush. Nervously, I said: ‘I’d rather I was on Dorset’s most wanted list, as I am spoken for,’ and flashed my engagement ring. He didn’t move. My mother touched my arm and said, ‘are you OK?’ By this time, I was sandwiched by the security men, with two officers behind and their three comrades in front.

One of them tried to strike up a conversation. ‘Are you local?’ he asked. I said that I wasn’t, and tried to close down the exchange. Then I called my daughter and suggested to my mother that we leave the King to it and find some lunch. The men didn’t try to follow me as I walked away. But their eyes did.

Wayne Couzens, who murdered Sarah Everard in 2021, and the serial rapist David Carrick, were both members of the same Metropolitan Police armed unit. Carrick used his gun as a symbol of sexual power and intimidation. During his criminal trial, the Old Bailey heard that Carrick held his police firearm to the head of a woman as he violently raped her. 

Couzens was a member of a WhatsApp group with police colleagues, where misogynist, sexist and degrading messages were shared. One post used the term ‘struggle snuggles’ to describe pinning a 15-year-old girl to the floor during an incident.

In another post, a policemen joked about performing a sex act on a victim of domestic violence. ‘That’s alright, DV (domestic violence) victims love it… that’s why they are repeat victims more often than not,’ the officer wrote. Hundreds of serving officers are under investigation for domestic and sexual violence.

Having been a victim of abuse in the past, I am aware that I carry with me a sense of wariness around men. But I have also developed finely-tuned instincts for danger. The way these plainclothed officers behaved was not normal.

Those officers had not broken the law, of course, and I would have felt silly lodging an official complaint. But there had been something unsettling and predatory about them. It worried me.

What would have happened if I had been local, and had told them where I lived? What would have happened if it was not a Royal visit but some other event, taking place after dark? What would have happened if I had been alone? Or drunk?

It is now common knowledge that the police, which is supposed to protect us, has squandered public trust by failing to root out the letches, misogynists and criminals in its own ranks. But now I know this in my gut. My experience in Poundbury left me with the disturbing knowledge that in 2023, women in Britain are less protected than preyed upon by the police.

A Met Police spokesman said: ‘We take allegations of this nature seriously and we would welcome the opportunity to speak to the woman involved in this incident, should she wish to. It is clear that this kind of behaviour is inappropriate and unprofessional.’

No soldier should have been above the law in Afghanistan 

The public inquiry into alleged SAS war crimes in Afghanistan hears fresh evidence this week. Lawyers representing Afghan families argue that up to 80 civilians may have been victims of ‘summary killings’ by UK special forces between 2010 and 2013 in night raids in search of Taliban fighters. 

The inquiry has led to some debate about how possible it is to uphold the rules of war in a messy, overseas conflict. These quandaries are nothing new. When Lance Corporal George MacDonald Fraser’s Border Regiment were fighting through central Burma in April 1945, Fraser admitted that when they got into the swing of fighting, killing the Japanese was fun. ‘It was exciting; no other word for it, and no explanation needed, for honest folk,’ he wrote in 1992. ‘We all have kindly impulses’ he observed, ‘fostered by 2,000 years of Christian teaching, gentle Jesus, and love thy neighbour, but we have a killer instinct too…’  

As a young soldier he recognised this killer impulse in himself, and saw it in others. A thoughtful man, he knew that crossing the Rubicon of violence was a dangerous business. And that the rules of war, formalised in the nineteenth century, were designed to protect soldiers from having to make moral choices while channelling that violence for legal purposes. 

I have experience of this myself. In May 1983 I was shot at by terrorists in an ambush in Northern Ireland. They missed. It was dusk. After the sudden rush of bullets I couldn’t see who had fired at me, all I could identify was the location they had fired from. By the rules of the Yellow Card (a summary of the soldiers’ legal use of force) I was not allowed to fire back. I could only do so if I was sure that in a subsequent court of law I could prove to a jury that I had spotted my attackers, with the evidence (a recovered weapon, or expended bullet cases, for example) to prove it. 

Equally, as a trained soldier, I had no desire simply to fire in the direction of the shots. We were trained to shoot only when we knew we had a high chance of hitting the enemy. There was always a chance innocent civilians could be hit in a return of fire, and this would not have assisted the cause I served. At the time no one I knew griped about the Yellow Card. It was there to protect us, the people who were forced to live with this violence every day, and the cause we were fighting for in Northern Ireland. When these laws were egregiously broken, this was to the great detriment of the path to peace. 

British soldiers are authorised by His Majesty’s Government to use violence for the purpose of national policy. A careful framework of law shapes that violence. It makes no sense – legally, logically or morally – for soldiers deliberately to break the very law they are sworn to uphold.  

This equally applies to all soldiers, including the SAS. Members of the SAS are simply soldiers who have received the benefit of selection and training to undertake more onerous and specialised tasks than their comrades in, for example, an infantry battalion. Soldiers who have received levels of training above and beyond that of an ordinary soldier should also have higher levels of accountability.  

All thinking soldiers believe that a civilised nation should abide by the rules of war. Any army that breaks this sacred bond opens the door to moral mayhem and legal chaos. We saw this with the Wehrmacht in the second world war and we’ve seen it recently, and horrifically, in Ukraine.  

Killing in the heat of battle is what soldiers are tasked to do. But those who glory in it are few and to be pitied. Once the fighting is over the killing must, should and always stop. In my time as soldier I can’t think I came across anyone who did not hold to the maxim that killing outside of combat was murder, pure and simple. 

Experienced soldiers know that killing outside of combat is morally repugnant not merely because it is outside of the rules, but because the act of killing diminishes the humanity of the killer. The rules exist to protect the soldier from moral harm. In the British Army this is a belief based on centuries of Christian indoctrination. Human life is precious, and it is protected by both moral and civil law. Killing in combat is the judicial exception to this rule, but even then it is recognised that the very act of killing another human – even in battle – should be something for regret. There is quite obviously a problem when a soldier wants to kill outside of combat. 

It is for these reasons that the British Army, including the SAS, should welcome any scrutiny now of its actions in Afghanistan.

The mortgage pain is going to get worse

When the average two-year fixed mortgage hit 6 per cent last month, panic started to set in. For the 1.3 million homeowners set to renew before Christmas, many would now be facing interest payments three times higher than what they had originally paid. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt immediately called a meeting with lenders and customer representatives to formalise safety nets, including repayment holidays and moving people over to interest-only payments. 

But this was always set to be the start – not the end – of mortgage pain. Today we learn from Moneyfacts that the average five-year fixed-rate mortgage has also now passed 6 per cent. 

The last time five-year fixed rates reached this level was right after last autumn’s mini-Budget (which, once rolled back, promptly fell back down to 5 per cent by the end of the year). When mortgage rates jumped last year, it was due to the expectation that the Bank of England would have to hike interest rates rapidly to deal with Liz Truss’s fiscal loosening. Now, it’s actually happening, mainly in a desperate attempt to get inflation more under control – which is failing to fall as quickly as the Bank predicted.

Last month’s base rate hike – another 0.5 percentage points, taking the base rate to 5 per cent – will have pushed five-year fixed rates up further. It’s not the most surprising update: when the news broke about two-year mortgages last month, five-year fixes weren’t far behind: already at 5.7 per cent in late June and rising. It seemed an inevitability, then, that five-year fixes would suffer the same fate as two-year fixes. 

But that inevitably won’t provide any comfort to those set to renew their mortgages anytime soon. One of the biggest concerns remains the great unknown of where interest rates will peak: only a few months ago, markets expected a peak of 4.5 per cent. Now it’s closer to 6.25 per cent. When the Bank stress-tested mortgages last year, 6 per cent was their nightmare scenario, an eventuality ‘not expected or likely to materialise’. We are now living in that worst-case scenario.

Still, don’t expect the Treasury to change its tune on support. Any kind of mortgage tax relief or subsidy has been ruled out by the chancellor as inflationary, and also deeply unfair to renters, who have seen their costs skyrocket too.

Expect, instead, for more pressure to be put on the banks to make good on the benefits of rising rates – not just the costs. Banks are meeting with the Financial Conduct Authority later this week to be questioned over why there remains a 4 percentage point gap between mortgage rates and savings rates. As Ross Clark says on Coffee House, this is yet another examples of failure in the banking sector – in this case, an unfair and costly one for their consumers.