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China wants robots to look after the elderly
An AI data centre – imagine a factory of buzzing wires and computing equipment cooled by industrial fans – can consume as much power as a city. It has been estimated that, not too long from now, we’ll require 92 cities’ worth of extra power just to meet the demands of artificial intelligence. Ergo, the heat is on – but so, it is said, is a new cold war.
On Radio 4 last week, Misha Glenny was exploring how the rapid evolution of technology is shaping the rivalry between the US and China. It turns out that the race for pre-eminence – in AI, at least – is as close as the 1973 Grand National. Red Rum (China) has the current lead, but that lead is ‘razor-thin’ and is thought to owe something to the nature of American tactics.
An astonishing 90 per cent of 14-year-olds in China are short-sighted
California-based AI giant NVIDIA is, at more than $4 trillion, the most valuable company in the world. But the Americans’ decision to block the export of their high-end chips to China is said to have propelled the creation of Chinese rival DeepSeek. The latter, made at a fraction of the price, can apparently do the same number of things using a far smaller number of chips, and looks set to have the longer-term economic advantage.
If you are wondering where we come into this, it is worth listening back to the third episode, ‘Europe’s AI Challenge’. Glenny informed us that, while US investments in AI start-ups over the past decade exceeded $471 billion, and China put in $119 billion, the UK was third with $28 billion – which is still a lot more than Germany, Europe’s lead investor. The main cause of the discrepancy? A relative lack of spending here by pension-fund assets.
A question that was never explicitly asked but hovered over the series is whether all this money is well spent. Glenny and his interviewees offered much for the AI-sceptic to chew on; there was a particularly good discussion about the frankly terrifying use of AI chatbots on political websites to influence voting choices. There was also an acknowledgment of the ugliness of a superpower flexing its digital muscle over poorer countries. Although the focus of the series was on the economic and geopolitical consequences of the tech race, it would have been good to hear a little about its cultural impact. There was an allusion to the literal chopping-up and scanning of authors’ books by Anthropic, but not to the successful lawsuit against that company, from which many authors, including me, are due a small pay-out.
AI aside, the series was brilliant on the rivalry over robotics, particularly humanoid. You would assume that China is light years ahead here, and it is, but according to a professor at UCL, the Chinese companies are excellent at building the bodies, less so the brains, for which the US has the more profitable lead. This must bother the Chinese because they are eager to corner the market on humanoids that can be trained to care for the elderly. The number of over-sixties in China is expected to exceed the total population of the US within the decade. It is surely only a matter of time before robots are manning homes for OAPs from Chongqing to Carshalton.
For the elderly and the short-sighted – which includes an astonishing 90 per cent of 14-year-olds in China and many other countries in the east – AI may also come up trumps. In Radio 4’s Sliced Bread slot last week, we were served ‘Dough’ – a sub-series on products of the future, which really ought to have been called ‘Toast’. Anyway, one of the topics up for discussion with host Greg Foot was smart glasses, which have largely made headlines for adorning the faces of creeps.
The VP of ‘Wearables’ at Meta was eager to defend their specs from all such associations. There is, he said, an LED that flashes to warn people when the glasses are recording video. But as Foot pointed out, there are forums all over the internet with details of how to disable that feature. It’s obviously in Meta’s interest to correct the bug and allay people’s concerns about finding unauthorised footage of themselves online.
I was actually more persuaded of the value of this technology by the optometrists interviewed for the programme. Recording video, scrolling the internet and taking calls through your glasses is all very well, but having your glasses read the ingredients on a label or the contents of a letter might be a lifeline for the visually impaired. The next question may well be, what do you trust more, your glasses, or your humanoid carer?
Goodwill will not save Claudia Winkleman’s new chat show
Claudia Winkleman has a chat show on the BBC. I’m struggling to understand why this is a story but I listened to an entertainment-industry podcast recently which tried to explain. Apparently, chat shows are ratings death; hardly anyone watches them, so TV execs are very reluctant to launch new ones. But because of Traitors, Winkleman is now huge, bigger even than Ant and Dec, so against their better judgment they decided to give her a shot.
If Winkleman’s chat show flops and doesn’t get recommissioned she shouldn’t blame herself, just the genre
They’re probably regretting it, though. Everyone wants Claudia to do well because she seems nice. But goodwill and niceness aren’t enough to carry a new chat show, as we could have gleaned right from the beginning of her second show, when Claudia engaged in some completely unarranged-in-advance, ad-libbed audience bonhomie with a gay couple near the front who were there on their first date.
Imagine! An actual gay couple on their first date! Was there EVER a rarer and more wonderful thing in the world? Well, the audience couldn’t immediately think of one and whooped and clapped for all they were worth, as Claudia teased out the gorgeous details. It had started on a run for gay men and despite the one chap being all red-faced and sweaty, the other one still found him attractive enough to ask out, and well, here they both were. Amazing!
But even greater excitement was to come. Not only was there a gay couple on a first date in their midst but on stage, in front of them, sitting on the curved sofa right next to kohl-eyed Claudia and her allegedly-not-a-wig Cleopatra haircut, was an actual member of the pop band One Direction. No, not Harry Styles – then everyone’s heads really would literally have exploded and that would have been the end of the show. But still, a bona fide 1D member: Niall Horan, no less.
Boringly – though not for the audience, nor for the fellow guests who all feigned enthusiasm – nice Niall had an incredibly dull song to promote about meeting his girlfriend at a dinner party. Once everyone had enthused dutifully about the song, nice Claudia followed up with some tough questions about how her guests felt about dinner parties. Some of them quite enjoyed them; some of them didn’t.
It’s probably a sign of my age but I didn’t know who any of these people were. Joanne McNally? Guz Khan? Rachel Zegler? Somebody must know who Rachel Zegler is because when she was in Evita in London recently she got the longest standing ovation there has ever been in England (though not in Russia, I’m guessing), a whopping 12 minutes, most of which she spent mouthing at her co-stars ‘Help! What am I supposed to do?’ and bursting for a pee. Anyway, she seemed nice. They all did. But isn’t that the point when you’re in showbiz and on a chat show: you reveal to the pond life on whose worship your income depends what a lovely, modest but deserving person you are?
To remind myself how it should be done I checked out a recent-ish episode of The Jonathan Ross Show, which I’d recorded at the time of his stupid handcuff series. The guest list was marginally starrier (a bona fide Hollywood star, Neve Campbell, from the Scream franchise), but what really gives Wossy his enduring edge is his nearly 40 years’ worth of honed impishness.
Ross isn’t so grand or as naive as to imagine that chat shows are anything other than product promo for mostly shallow, soulless system creatures. But he doesn’t fawn, as poor Claudia feels she has to fawn because she’s new to the game and doesn’t want to ruffle feathers.
So, for example, when his guest Alan Carr announces that he wants to introduce wolves to this Scottish estate he’s buying for his next TV series, Ross doesn’t applaud him for rewilding as all the chattering classes have been trained to do because that is the wearisome on dit. No. He tells Carr it is a silly idea, and how would the locals feel about having their livestock eaten? And Carr swiftly retreats. Ross makes it look easy. But it’s really not. If Winkleman’s chat show flops and doesn’t get recommissioned she shouldn’t blame herself, just the genre.
The Madison is the latest spin-off from Taylor Sheridan’s ever-expanding Yellowstone franchise. This one is about a recently widowed, rich New York socialite Stacy Clyburn (Michelle Pfeiffer) who only discovers just how magnificent the great outdoors of southwest Montana are when her husband Preston (Kurt Russell) is no longer there to enjoy them with her.
Critics have panned it for being slow and schematic, which it is rather. But I think there’s also an element, here, of Caliban’s rage on seeing himself reflected in the glass. Sheridan loves to wind up metropolitan liberal types by contrasting their meretricious, impeccably woke, iPhone-addicted urban existence with the rugged honesty of plain-talking country folk. I love the scene when a friendly cowboy local spies the grieving Clyburns struggling somewhat at the late Preston’s remote fishing lodge – and trucks over a hamper of food prepared by his wife. The snooty Clyburns recoil at the cowboy’s overfamiliarity, sneer at the unhealthy ingredients and pick him up on his outmoded and offensive use of the term ‘Indian’ to describe Native Americans. Outrageous caricature, the critics are complaining. Rings true to me, though.
For those of a nervous disposition, is Sinners worth it?
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners won four Oscars and was nominated for 16 and I’d yet to see it. Sometimes the labels associated with a film can be off-putting and, for me, ‘horror’ and ‘vampires’ have the same effect as, say, ‘experimental’ or ‘like a poem’ or ‘directed by Michael Bay’. It’s now landed on the streamers and it seemed like an omission that needed correcting, so I spent around ten hours with it. It’s only 135 minutes but should you hit pause every time it gets scary that’s how it might roll.
Please don’t sell me a vampire film when it’s a zombie one, even if I don’t like either
The film is a genre-mashing beast, told with gusto from the off – and you get nearly an hour of pause-free time, even if you know what’s coming down the track. We’re in 1932, following identical twins Smoke and Stack (both played magnificently by Michael B. Jordan), who are returning home to Clarksdale, Mississippi, after working for gangsters in Chicago. They are quick to violence yet charismatic, relying on presence rather than dialogue, and stroll back into town as if this were a Spaghetti Western.
The twins have returned to set up a ‘juke joint’ (blues club) in an old sawmill. They are joined by their young cousin Sammie (Miles Caton), a masterful blues singer and guitarist caught between the church (he’s the son of a preacher) and his ‘sinful’ passion for music. They each have a romantic interest. For Sammie it’s the sexy singer Pearline (Jayme Lawson); for Stack it’s Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) – who is of black heritage but can pass as white; and for Smoke it’s his magnificent wife Annie (Wunmi Mosaku), a hoodoo practitioner and herbalist who will know what to do with garlic when the time comes.
It’s a movie that was made to be slathered in music, and the blues seeps from its every pore. There is one scene in particular, which charts the past, present and future of black music through some mind-blowing choreography, that is extraordinary. But we’ve also had glimpses of a trio of Irish folk singers (led by Jack O’Connell) who will turn up at the venue and sing ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ beautifully before… lunging for a carotid artery.
It’s only 135 minutes but I spent ten hours with it
These aren’t your classy Ann Rice-type vampires. These stomp around in dungarees with arms outstretched and bloodied mouths, drooling – so much drooling. My longest pause was for a sex scene that climaxes in a bit of necking, the like of which I never wish to think about again. These vampires can’t be killed. Shoot them, and up they get. They also turn those they gouge. Doesn’t this make them zombies? The living dead? I am not well versed in any of this lore, but I don’t appreciate sloppiness. Please don’t sell me a vampire film when it’s a zombie one, even if I don’t like either.
Coogler takes no hostages, escalating the action into all-out mayhem. But he also delivers riffs on religion, Jim Crow, the power of music as a spiritual force. It’s impressive but if you are of a nervous disposition, is it worth it? That will depend on how much time you have. If it’s around ten hours, then probably yes.
Don’t miss it: Summerfolk, at the Olivier, reviewed
Dachniki meaning ‘dacha people’ is the Russian title of the National Theatre’s new production of Gorky’s sprawling 1905 drama. Nina and Moses Raine, who adapted the play, chose the flavourless title Summerfolk which doesn’t quite capture the play’s distinctive Russian atmosphere of ennui, intellectual rumination and despair. However, their perky, supple and idiomatic dialogue works very well.
Gorky appears to have written the script as a feverish homage to Chekhov, who died in 1904, and he pinched numerous characters and plot twists from his mentor. The beautiful, vain and sexually inert Varvara is a copy of Yelena in Uncle Vanya. Kaleria, the nervous actress who performs amateur verse for her friends, is inspired by Nina in The Seagull. And the cynical lawyer’s clerk, Vlass, is a version of Trofimov in The Cherry Orchard.
The setting and the personalities could become a Netflix series that never ends
Gorky’s personalities chat about love, money and the meaning of life but they seem far more pompous and pretentious than Chekhov’s characters. Are we supposed to admire these people, to laugh at them or to despise them? Hard to say. And it’s unclear who the main character is until the beautiful widow Maria Lvovna (Justine Mitchell) receives a romantic proposition from the angry rebel Vlass. He seems sincere, if a little desperate, and his declaration turns Maria into a skittish, giggling novice as she considers his offer. She yearns for romance but she fears that her heart will break if Vlass becomes dissatisfied and moves on. Justine Mitchell and Alex Lawther (Vlass) make an adorably weird couple but their fling doesn’t receive as much narrative attention as it deserves.
As the play develops, the characters become sharper and nastier. Varvara (Sophie Rundle) makes it clear that she hates her hard-working husband, Sergei, who seeks emotional comfort in fishing and boozing instead. Paul Ready (Sergei) gives a masterclass in replicating the mannerisms and vocal cadences of Simon Russell Beale on stage. (Perhaps this impersonation is an in-joke among the cast.) An unhappy couple, Yulia and Pyotr, squabble bitterly when Yulia produces a pistol and takes aim at Pyotr’s head for fun. This lazy and ill-motivated spat would have dissatisfied Chekhov whose characters are always warm, humane and endowed with limitless charm.
You may find yourself tiring of Gorky’s superficial and narcissistic personalities but you can still relish the play’s atmosphere of wasteful ease and its languidly beautiful aesthetic. Peter McKintosh’s luxurious wooden summerhouse is an ideal backdrop for the beautiful white costumes of linen and cotton. All are immaculately cut. At the edges of the stage lurk a few surly peasants dressed in ratty grey smocks who mutter angrily about vengeance and the coming revolution. These soiled bumpkins create a wonderful contrast that makes the wealthy characters seem all the more angelic and adorable.
In Act Two, the set opens up to reveal a shallow blue lake where the actors paddle and swim half-naked. It’s no criticism to say that this play might have continued until midnight or beyond, with the actors improvising more dialogue as they went along. The setting and the personalities could become a Netflix series that never ends. Don’t miss it, by the way. Everyone will be talking about this for months.
Welcome to Pemfort opens as a gentle sitcom set in a failing gift shop. Pemfort Castle is a neglected landmark near Warwick and the staff are determined to put the place on the map. A local geek, Glenn, is organising a family day out and he asks his boss, Uma, and his colleague, Ria, to create a timeline of the castle and to prepare a re-enactment of a duel between two bishops that took place in the grounds.
The nerdy atmosphere is brilliantly and subtly evoked in Ed Madden’s wonderful production, and the script by Sarah Power is full of deft, realistic touches.
It’s rare to find writing of this calibre on the fringe
The gift shop’s most loyal customer is a solitary villager, Pete, who owns a hound of prodigious size. Hence his nickname, ‘Big Dog Pete’. The characters are harmless, amiable types with low ambitions but the actors never stray into self-parody. Then the excitement begins. Uma hires a new assistant, Kurtis, without asking Glenn and Ria in advance. This feels like a violation of the informal rules of the gift shop. And Kurtis is hiding a secret which becomes the focus of the story as it develops into a fascinating drama about ethics and forgiveness. Is it a sign of strength or weakness to show mercy? Power’s script soars to unexpected levels. Kurtis and Ria bond over a distressed stag whose antlers have become entangled in a clump of fishing line and the fate of the animal becomes a symbol of their troubled romance. It’s rare to find writing of this calibre on the fringe. Could the show transfer? It doesn’t quite have enough oomph for a West End run. But the writer and the director are destined to hit the heights.
The mystery of Morgan McSweeney’s missing phone
Morgan McSweeney may be out of office – but he is certainly not out of the headlines. A mystery concerns the ex-No. 10 chief of staff’s phone, amid ongoing Tory pressure to release the so-called ‘Mandelson files’: all the messages relating to the appointment of the (now former) US ambassador. The Sun reported on Saturday that McSweeney’s phone was nicked on 20 October – days after Labour officials began to worry that a motion would be put to parliament demanding the release of McSweeney’s messages to Mandelson. As one put it to Steerpike’s colleague Tim Shipman: ‘If the Tories pass a humble address motion, Morgan is fucked.’
It seems quite extraordinary that the Downing Street chief of staff – the second most powerful man in the country – had his phone stolen with so little hullabaloo. Journalists have now been putting in phone calls to the Metropolitan Police, asking what investigations they undertook about this matter back in October. Given the security sensitivities of this matter, you might have thought Plod would be all over it. Far from it, with the Met officially concluding ‘Nothing to see ‘ere guv’. But, under pressure, London’s finest have today been forced to U-turn, issuing the following statement:
On Monday, 20 October police received a report from a man in his 40s alleging that his phone had been snatched. The incident was recorded as having taken place in Belgrave Street, E1. A review of the allegation, including a consideration of whether there was available CCTV, did not identify any realistic lines of enquiry. The investigation was subsequently closed. In the course of responding to a recent media enquiry, we became aware that the address was entered incorrectly at the time of the initial call and should instead have been recorded as Belgrave Road, Pimlico. Having identified this error, the report will be amended and the assessment of whether there is available evidence revisited.
So, er, the address was entered incorrectly and registered in a completely different part of town? Jolly good. It all smacks of that most ignoble of Whitehall traditions: a classic SW1 cover-up, designed to stop the McSweeney-Mandelson messages from ever being published. Don’t expect the Met to get to the bottom of it any time soon…
Anthemic angst from The Twilight Sad
The only thing misery loves more than company is a backbeat. While capturing pure happiness surely remains the Holy Grail of any artistic endeavour, the blues is the bedrock of popular music for a reason. Sure enough, as we ready for the clocks to go forward, two albums arrive which could hardly be said to be full of the joys of spring, although they approach personal crisis – and catharsis – in very different ways.
It’s The Long Goodbye, the sixth album by Scottish indie-rock band the Twilight Sad, is their first in seven years. During that hiatus lead singer and lyricist James Graham was dealing with his mother’s decline and eventual demise from early onset dementia, while also becoming a father. Eventually, the toll on his health caused him to cancel the band’s tour supporting the Cure in South America and seek medical help.
Dazzling sonic details and ingenious shifts in mood and texture make Girlfriend almost indecently enjoyable
The songs on the album document this time, though it must be said that the joys of new parenthood are significantly outpunched by wave upon wave of documented trauma. ‘We’re dealing with the dark again, and this time we’ll lose,’ Graham sings on ‘Attempt A Crash Landing – Theme’. The Twilight Sad have always been an intense band, but here Graham and his partner in music Andy MacFarlane, peer hard into the void.
The Cure is a useful reference point, and not just because Robert Smith plays guitar and keys on three tracks. Smith offered the band advice on demos, song arrangements and production – and it shows. ‘Get Away From It All’ and ‘Dead Flowers’ recall the Cure at their most punishingly bleak, on albums such as Pornography and the recent Songs Of A Lost World. The rhythms are martial, while the bass – played by auxiliary member Alex Mackay from Mogwai, another useful musical marker – often recalls the distinctive style of Smith’s bandmate, Simon Gallup.
The sound that emerges is a tightly wound thrum, epically melancholic, meditative yet muscular. This is anthemic angst with a strong Celtic undertow. Occasionally, as on ‘Waiting For The Phone Call’, a glitchy, broken rhythm breaks through. The songs are less songs and more like mantras, repeated phrases weaving in and out of the music. Graham’s voice has a folkish purity, by turns urgently conversational and red-raw. ‘Back To Fourteen’ is a terribly sad depiction of a man retreating into his teenage self, keening for his mother. ‘Is it OK to feel this way?’ he asks repeatedly during the final song, ‘TV People Still Throwing TVs At People’. It is, of course – I doubt he had much choice – but this is a brutal and unrelenting unburdening. You hope Graham feels better for it.
Grace Ives, a 30-year-old New Yorker whose primary mode of musical expression comes via the Roland MC-505 synth, chooses another route to relief on her third album, Girlfriend. Ives’s 2022 breakout album Janky Star was followed by three years of ‘true rock bottom’, before a necessary switch to sobriety. Some of that story is told on Girlfriend – one song is called ‘Drink Up’ – but it is possible to be blissfully unaware of the context and still appreciate its considerable pleasures.
Consisting of 40 minutes of sharp, smart, drama-filled synth-pop, scored with dazzling sonic details and ingenious shifts in mood and texture, Girlfriend is almost indecently enjoyable. The music draws from a full palette of beats and sounds, from the thick Cubano groove of ‘Neither You Nor I’ to the big growling guitars on ‘What If’, while retaining an appealingly home-made quality. On the folksy, waltz-time ‘Garden’, Ives sounds as though she is singing in the room next door and someone recorded the results through the wall on their phone. Her voice is characterful and appealingly muzzy, old-school country-soul flourishes rubbing against something a little more experimental; the languorous ‘mmm’ at the beginning of ‘Avalanche’ echoes ‘The Sensual World’ by Kate Bush.
In a pop culture dogged by self-consciousness, Ives’s playful, fuzzy, artfully offhand approach to making music is refreshing. Throughout, the sticky business of hearing someone confronting and attempting to overcome their struggles most often plays out as a kind of bubbling euphoria, the sound of an artist vaulting over her misery with such elan her feet barely touch the ground.
Royal Opera’s Siegfried is magnificent
Covent Garden’s new Ring cycle has reached Siegfried, and once again, you can only marvel at Wagner’s Shakespeare-like ability to anticipate modern preoccupations. Want to talk about the manosphere? Well, here’s opera’s most profound study of the playful, disruptive, world-making energy of the adolescent male psyche. The least interesting thing that you can say about Siegfried is that he’s an impulsive oaf. Well, duh. Have you never met (or if you’re really unfortunate, been) a teenage boy?
Wagner could hardly make it more clear. Siegfried’s upbringing has been toxic. He has been isolated from humanity, and his only inkling of love has been brutally transactional. He’s the eternal disposable male; valued only for his future ability to fight and die for people more cynical than himself. Wagner, true (as ever) to nature, portrays Siegfried’s blossoming, chaotic instincts as a life force that finds its natural purpose in his union with Brünnhilde – herself an anxious and vulnerable beginner at this whole impossible business of being human.
Apologies for going on like this, but the point is that the director Barrie Kosky gets it. He absolutely gets it, and coupled to Andreas Schager’s magnificent, multilayered performance as the orphaned hero, the result moves Kosky’s Ring cycle up a gear. Imagery that has been present (and sometimes unclear) since Rheingold now slots into place and reveals its latent meaning. The final tragedy is not yet visible, but we can feel the ground beneath us starting to tilt.
Take the naked, passive crone who represents Erda (Illona Linthwaite), and whom I’d written off as the faintly pervy side product of Kosky spending too much time in Germany. She’s still silent, but now she’s active: turning to gaze fondly at Siegfried as he sits on a forest swing. Through Erda, Kosky shows nature reaching out to meet him: the Woodbird (sung by Sarah Dufresne) is simply a bunch of feathers in her hand. Later, when Erda is compelled to speak by the Wanderer (Christopher Maltman), a comically grotesque sequence sees her give birth to a singing (and fully clothed) avatar (Wiebke Lehmkuhl).
The bleakness of Kosky’s Ring becomes meaningful, too. The chilly monochromes and blasted tree trunks finally add up when, having passed the flames (heard but not seen), we witness Erda tending the first living flowers in the whole cycle. A Parsifal-like meadow has grown up around the sleeping Brünnhilde (Elisabet Strid), and the sense of her love story as nature-myth is unignorable.
True, Kosky’s visual imagination has had an atmosphere of eerie, distilled Germanness from the start, with designer Rufus Didwiszus filtering Grimm fairytales and Weimar noir through Anselm Kiefer and Caspar David Friedrich. Now, we get a grungy kind of black humour. Mime (Peter Hoare) and the Wanderer are a pair of bums out of Beckett by way of Steptoe and Son. The Wanderer munches from a packet of crisps as he meets Alberich (Christopher Purves) by a snow-covered road, and he’s grown careless about where he leaves his spear.
He’s not alone: Siegfried is so busy making snow-angels that he nearly mislays his newly forged Nothung. The crisis ahead will not be resolved with weapons, though we do get to see – in glorious pyrotechnic detail – the making of the sword on a delightful Heath Robinson forge. Only the Wanderer’s final meetings with Erda and Siegfried really disappoint, visually. Performing on the lip of the stage in front of a huge blank screen is doubtless a practical necessity, but it feels half-realised, especially given the majestic, wounded power of Maltman as the ailing god – a characterisation whose vocal grandeur seems to have deepened and redoubled since Die Walküre.
But in his dishevelled, resigned state this Wanderer is no match for Purves’s clenched, steel-toned Alberich, though he toys easily with Mime: a surprisingly lyrical performance from Hoare, who chops his deadly herbs with the camp theatricality of a TV chef. Soloman Howard brings out the pathos as well as the strangeness of the dragon Fafner, encrusted in crystalline fragments of the Rhinegold. Strid, we already knew, would be a radiant, girlish Brünnhilde and her awakening to life and love – dancing and running through that sunlit meadow – provides just the catharsis we need.
Pappano conducted. He’s never been an instinctive Wagnerian, but after several Covent Garden Ring cycles this was an active and searching account of the score; possibly his best yet. Still, the key to this opera is in its title, and throughout, Schager’s singing had the clarity, sheen and directness of the sword Nothung itself. That’s miracle enough in this voice-shredding role, but Schager was tender and articulate too, with an ability to convey both teenage bravado and desperate pathos in a glance or the turn of a phrase. Casts come and go; productions endure (for a while, anyway). Still, any theatre lover who gets to see Schager as Siegfried can count themself lucky indeed.
Ovid puts today’s radicals to shame
It’s a crisp afternoon, and in a darkened room in central Amsterdam a woman is being smothered in snakes. Projected on to three walls is a massive video close-up of her face. She is young and beautiful and remarkably composed: just a nose twitch here, an eyelid flutter there, as a python wriggles across her mouth or languidly caresses her cheekbone with its tail.
In the room behind me, another woman stares fiercely back. Her shoulders are bunched with muscle, arms stiff at her sides, like a nightclub brawler about to nut someone. But it’s the bull’s horns sprouting from her forehead, and the mane of matted fur marching down her back, that make it hard to meet her gaze.
As the exhibition shows, Ovid puts today’s ‘radicals’ in the shade
A few miles away, in the city’s red light district, you pay good money to see such confrontational sights. Here, they are part of a package deal, included in the admission price for the Rijksmuseum’s blockbuster spring exhibition Metamorphoses. A collaboration with the Galleria Borghese, it runs in the Dutch capital until 25 May, and reopens in June in Rome. The Rijksmuseum are good at the pyrotechnics required to get punters in through the door – its 2023 Vermeer exhibition brought together an unprecedented 28 of the artist’s 35 known paintings. And its curators have an apparently inexhaustible supply of ‘lost’ Old Masters up their sleeves. Early this month, they announced the rediscovery of a new Rembrandt, authenticating ‘Vision of Zacharias in the Temple’ as by the 17th-century artist, rather than a student of his school.
Yet Metamorphoses displays ambition, and risk, of a different sort. Alongside the Bible, the epic work by the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso – ‘Ovid’, to posterity – was once one of the twin pillars of western artistic inspiration. Now it’s seen as a specialist subject: the niche of scholars at the unfashionable end of university humanities departments, or the kind of schools it’s unwise to admit attending in civil service job interviews. In fact, the Rijksmuseum’s curators claim this is the first major exhibition dedicated to artworks inspired by the poem. It ranges across 2,000 years of art history, taking in 9th-century hunting trophies and contemporary video art, and featuring artists from Bernini and Titian to Magritte and Louise Bourgeois. (The snake installation ‘Spawn’, 2019, by Juul Kraijer, and the female minotaur statue ‘Zeus’, 2009, by the South African artist Nandipha Mntambo, are two of the more successful modern artworks.) Of the 80 pieces, more than half are loans: the result of a web of negotiations more than a decade in the making. It’s an intelligent, thoughtfully curated show, with some spectacular
individual pieces.
It’s also pretty brave. You only need a glancing acquaintance with the modern art scene to realise that getting ahead requires necking a hearty dose of ideological Kool-Aid: progressivism, in all its guises, is good; fluidity, of all kinds, is all but essential. And anything that smacks of the western tradition is suspect – or, at least, worthy of a withering eye-roll. So it’s spiriting to find a celebration of an 8 AD Latin poem in the heart of one of the most liberal cities in the world; as the exhibition shows, Ovid puts today’s ‘radicals’ in the shade.
‘The poem is one of the roots of our common culture,’ says Dr Frits Scholten, the Rijksmuseum’s head of sculpture and the exhibition’s lead curator. ‘It still speaks to us… It holds a mirror back on ourselves through these universal themes – jealousy, love, revenge. One of the surprises of this project is how much of Ovid’s work was still alive.’
Scholten’s own story demonstrates how quickly – and dramatically – we’ve lost touch with that common European culture. ‘Ovid isn’t so well known in Holland any more,’ he admits. The only reason Scholten had studied the classics at all was because he first trained as a biologist: ancient Greek was required to get into the gymnasium of his choice. Fewer than 7,000 British students started classics degrees in British universities in 2023; and only 206 candidates sat ancient Greek at A-level last year – though the subject has, admittedly, always been a somewhat boutique choice. In the space of a generation or two, literature such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses has grown remote and obscure.
Ovid’s poem – which runs to nearly 12,000 lines across 15 books, and tells the story of the history of the world from creation to the deification of Julius Caesar – had been a touchstone for artists since its composition. In 1604, the Flemish painter and critic Karel van Mander had declared Metamorphoses ‘a Bible for artists’. Its ubiquity was ensured by the invention of the printing press and the mass production of illustrated copies, the poet’s words transmuted into image: another metamorphosis. The early artists drawn to the poem are well accounted for in the Rijksmuseum’s show. Poussin’s ‘Apollo and Daphne’ (1663-64) shows the messenger god inspiring the poet; in Correggio’s gorgeous ‘Jupiter and Io’ (1532-33), meanwhile, the encounter between god and nymph is seductive and tender: Jupiter appears as a vast, cloudy hand, gently reaching down for his lover.
Still, Ovid’s work abounds in what Scholten delicately terms ‘less female-friendly stories’. Rape, abduction and bestiality are commonplace; in 2015, four Columbia University literature undergraduates petitioned to have trigger warnings in place before students embarked on reading it.
‘I wanted this exhibition to show a more nuanced side to Ovid,’ says Scholten. ‘I didn’t want to just focus on the gender-fluidity side of his work, or the sexual violence. These debates are very strong in the Netherlands too – it’s not just America or the UK. But when you actually read his work, he’s almost an objective writer. He stands aside. There’s no judgment.’
Scholten points out that Ovid regularly took on female voices in his writing, such as in his letters purporting to be from famous women: Penelope, left behind to mourn the men at Troy, for example. Sexual violence cuts across genders too: the myth of Hermaphroditus has the nymph Salmacis forcing herself on the beautiful youth until their bodies fused. In the show, this story is represented by the 2nd-century AD Roman marble sculpture ‘Sleeping Hermaphroditus’, which, as you move around it, enacts the gender switching of the original tale.
For Scholten, Ovid’s true radicalism comes in Book 15, when Pythagoras advocates for vegetarianism on the grounds of animal welfare. ‘To read that in Ovid was really a revelation – it’s an ecological flash of insight from a 2,000-year-old text,’ he says. ‘We think we’re superior, but our monotheistic culture has placed God outside the cosmos. We don’t have an animistic sense of the world – the knowledge that everything is alive and animated – and so we abuse creation.’
It’s a view echoed by Taco Dibbits, director of the Rijksmuseum. ‘So much has been published about Ovid, but in his own work he left gaps for the imagination to work,’ he tells me. Ovid, for instance, almost never directly described the moments of sexual assault. Rather, as with many of the artworks around us as we talk, ‘he showed the moment before the unimaginable encounter between the human and the divine’.
In Book 15, Pythagoras advocates for vegetarianism on the grounds of animal welfare
As a curator, Dibbits has little truck for the idea that fashionable modern pieties should shape the art on display. ‘Exhibitions are always contested spaces. You need to allow space – you cannot dictate how people should feel. Just give historical context, and let them make up their minds.’
When he first took over the museum in 2016, Dibbits programmed two exhibitions grasping some of the thorniest aspects about the Netherlands’s past – one on the Dutch slave trade, another on its colonisation of Indonesia. ‘Museums cannot react [to politics], they must act,’ he argues. ‘As soon as you start to worry, it limits your curiosity. Art is there to be borderless, to be free.’
In the exhibition’s final room hangs Luca Giordano’s extraordinary 1696 ‘Flaying of Marsyas’. It’s a depiction of Apollo skinning the satyr alive: Marsyas’s face is torn with pain, his flesh hangs in bloody strips, as the cherubic young god digs in with his knife, intent about his work. To modern eyes, it’s a gruesome depiction of torture. But to its original Renaissance viewers, it had a different meaning: that all things change, but nothing truly dies. One body withers, and the soul flits to another form; freedom comes, but always with a cost. It’s a brave, progressive idea. Radical, even.
Exiting through the gift shop, I spotted a bright, cartoonish book on display: Gender Swapped Greek Myths. Somewhere, somehow, Ovid was having a laugh.
Inflation stalls before the energy shock hits
Prices rose by 3 per cent last month – the same rate as the month before. Figures just released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) show that – ironically – falling petrol costs were one of the main things keeping the Consumer Prices Index (CPI) from climbing. This data was, of course, collected before the latest conflict in the Middle East – and we can soon expect the numbers to start heading in the wrong direction.
Elsewhere, clothing costs were the largest upward driver of inflation, while food inflation remained broadly flat. In good news for drinkers, the cost of alcohol came down thanks to increased promotional activity in February.
In a different world, the government would be cautiously welcoming today’s figures. But in the one we live in, they are, unfortunately, already outdated.
Since they were recorded, America and Israel’s war against Iran has sent global energy prices skywards, meaning increased UK inflation is unavoidable. As things stand, some economists are predicting inflation will head north of 5 per cent this year.
Worse still, we will be entering this crisis with the highest inflation of the developed G7 countries. Core inflation – which strips out more volatile prices – climbed to 3.2 per cent as well. The Chancellor bears a lot of the responsibility for that, given her employment policies and National Insurance tax raid have clearly been passed on to prices.
As for what happens next, the outlook is pretty bleak. The slowdown in oil supply, for example, has not actually spread to much of the West yet, meaning that the worst effects of the energy shock have not yet reached our shores. ‘With energy facilities severely damaged and production grinding to a halt across the Middle East, there is now a long-term, structural supply-side issue in the energy market. Even if the war was to stop today, the damage has been done and long-term implications are inevitable,’ said Joe Nellis, economic adviser at MHA.
All eyes are now on Threadneedle Street, where the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee shocked markets last week with a unanimous nine–zero vote to hold interest rates at 3.75 per cent. Usually, the MPC doesn't respond to energy price shocks, so bank watchers were surprised when every committee member turned hawkish – a vibe shift that was more extreme than in other central banks.
The MPC's move sent gilt yields soaring on Friday and saw swap markets pricing in four interest rate rises. Since then, we have had trickled-out briefings from the Bank suggesting that the market has misread its signals, with some traders critical of its communication strategy. It may be that they were signalling a year of interest rate holds rather than hikes, but that will come as little comfort for most. Certainly, if the predictions of 5 per cent-plus inflation hold true, then the Bank has made it clear it will do what is necessary – i.e. hike rates – to keep on top of it.
The net effect of all this – even higher borrowing costs for Britain – underscores why the Chancellor was right yesterday to make clear any energy bills bailout will be ‘targeted’ and ‘funded’. It was Liz Truss’s energy price guarantee that sent markets berserk and brought down her government, as Ross Clark explained to me on this week’s Reality Check. Reeves might be responsible for how unprepared we are going into this next crisis, but she is taking the right approach now.
The shocking entitlement of Huw Edwards
There are few things more savagely amusing than a disgraced member of the BBC becoming indignant. (‘Member’ seems the oddly appropriate word, considering how employees seem to conform on everything from loving transvestites to hating Israel.)
It’s hardly surprising, though still rather shocking, that Huw Edwards, a keen viewer of indecent images of children, is getting into a self-righteous stew over the Channel 5 drama ‘Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards’
It’s often said approvingly that ‘the NHS is the closest thing the English have to a religion’ (as Nigel Lawson first sarcastically noted) but though the BBC is very much in favour of the NHS, it probably regards itself as the sole national religion now. So it’s hardly surprising, though still rather shocking, that Huw Edwards, a keen viewer of indecent images of children (several of them category A, the most serious level of abuse, depicted a child around eight years old) just a couple of years after being sacked by Auntie is getting into a self-righteous stew over the Channel 5 drama Power: The Downfall of Huw Edwards which aired last night.
In a statement to the Daily Mail, this preposterous man complained that Wonderhood, the makers of the two-parter, ‘made no attempt to check with me the truth of any aspect of their narrative before going ahead with the production… they belatedly asked for a response after the drama had been made, while reserving the right to edit any such response. They also refused to disclose whether any of those making allegations had been paid for their contributions. Channel 5’s “factual drama” is hardly likely to convey the reality of what happened.’
Incredibly, he added:
‘It is difficult to see how this approach can be considered remotely responsible or fair, or be in compliance with key sections of the Ofcom code on broadcast standards.’
Why on earth would anyone expect ‘the truth’ from someone who hid their repellent and illegal behaviour for many years?
Actors are generally so pro-BBC that it makes me feel like rushing out and getting a huge Martin Clunes tattoo, after he dared to take on this role portraying Edwards, a former member of this most hallowed of clubs. He really is magnificent in this role, and it was a daring move by the makers to cast a – hiss! – National Treasure in what is a very grim watch indeed.
Clunes deserves a Bafta; it will be interesting to see if the showbusiness establishment who have the final say will vote for something which shows their beloved Beeb in such a bad light. (It’s immeasurably better than the BBC’s own belated Jimmy Savile bio The Reckoning.) The excellent writer, Mark Burt, talked at length to the young man who was allegedly groomed by Edwards. Played by Osian Morgan, the portrayal of the alternating arrogance and insecurity of youth is spot-on (also excellent is Sian Rees-Williams, who plays the boy’s mother – Baftas all round!).
In a Guardian interview to promote the show, Clunes reveals himself to be a rather down-to-earth, cheery sort, especially considering the po-faced aspect of those who hawk their wares in the bazaars of Thespis. Clunes jokes that they probably asked Michael Sheen first. When the newspaper can’t help reverting to type at the end – ‘Could he ever allow himself to reflect on what Edwards might think about the drama or did he have to close his mind to that?’ – the actor answered with admirable bluntness:
‘Well, I don’t think he’d like it. But I mean he shouldn’t watch it, should he? And he would have happily reported on other people committing similar crimes so that aspect doesn’t worry me. There’s no way back for him. People get forgiven for cheating on their wives and bit of tax evasion. But, this one, I don’t think you do come back.’
Edwards certainly doesn’t need the money. Last year Steerpike revealed that ‘not only had one of the Beeb’s highest paid stars received a £40,000 pay rise in the 12 months between March 2023-April 2024, he was paid a further £200,000 after his arrest – with BBC boss Tim Davie confirming last year that the corporation had been aware Edwards had been arrested over the most serious category of indecent images of children.’
He’s also had the freedom to spend it, having received only a six-month sentence suspended for two years. You’d think that he’d consider himself fortunate in getting off so lightly, but in a surreally ill-judged demonstration of the Barbra Streisand Effect, Edwards says he plans to produce his own account of ‘these terrible events.’
He says:
‘Mental illness is misunderstood by many but can never be an excuse for criminality. It can, however, at least help explain why people sometimes behave in shocking and reprehensible ways.’
If he is serious about this (although I am generally sceptical of those who blame ‘mental health’ for their vile behaviour) he really has lost his marbles. That said, given licence fee payers are involuntary funding this paedophile’s handsome pension – as we once funded his child pornography habit – we’re not quite all there ourselves.
Tim Davie may have gone, and a new Director General been appointed (or rather, anointed) but the profound stupidity of the BBC will still be with us. Inexplicably, the nation’s broadcaster has both prized and protected paedophiles before: Jimmy Savile, for decades, and half a million pounds spent last year on reinstalling the sculpture by the daughter-abusing artist Eric Gill after it was attacked by a man with a hammer in 2022.
It’s entirely likely that they will learn nothing from this terrible episode – and we, the suckers, will keep on funding their disastrous lack of a moral compass. Indeed, the BBC is so irrevocably corrupt that it even makes the Church of England appear fit for purpose as a national religion – and that’s really saying something.
Can Europe help fix Britain’s defence muddle?
Could an agreement for Britain to join Europe’s defence fund ‘Security Action for Europe’ (Safe) be back on the cards? Speaking in Paris yesterday, European Council president Antonio Costa suggested as much. ‘It could take some weeks, months, but for sure, we will achieve an agreement with the UK on the Safe issue,’ he said.
Nato officials last month warned Starmer that uncertainty over Britain’s defence spending and the speed of rearmament risked undermining the country’s status in the alliance
Talks between Britain and the EU on joining the £130 billion scheme broke down last November when Brussels demanded the government hand over a £5 billion joining fee. France, reportedly, was the most hardline proponent of this ‘pay to play’ model at the time.
Since then, Keir Starmer and his government – most notably minister for EU relations Nick Thomas-Symonds – have been working hard to ‘reset’ relations with Brussels. That endeavour appears to be heading in the right direction: in his speech, Costa said, ‘the new Labour government has started the reset, and the reset is going well.’
This is sure to have been music to Starmer’s ears. During his grilling at the House of Commons liaison committee session on Monday, the Prime Minister confirmed Safe would be on the agenda with EU commission chief Ursula von der Leyen when the two next meet. ‘We are having intensive discussions about how we can be involved,’ he added. The next UK-EU summit is expected in May.
Starmer’s appearance at the liaison committee came as pressure continues to mount on his government to publish its defence investment plan (DIP), setting out how the Ministry of Defence intends to spend its budget on the armed forces and finance the recommendations of last year’s strategic defence review. The DIP was originally due to be published in the autumn; one reported reason for the hold-up is a row with Chancellor Rachel Reeves over plans to slash the international aid budget to increase defence spending. Pressed again on when the DIP could be expected, Starmer replied: ‘I cannot give you a date, but I can tell you that we are finalising it.’
Defence industry representatives, meanwhile, warned MPs at a hearing of the defence select committee yesterday that manufacturers in the industry had been left in ‘paralysis’ and ‘bleeding cash’, with others are going bust waiting for the DIP to be published.
Last year, Starmer committed the UK to raising defence spending to 5 per cent of GDP by 2035 in line with other members of the Nato alliance. While countries such as Germany, France and Poland have begun to lay out roadmaps for when and how they plan to reach this new defence spending target, Britain’s has been conspicuously lacking.
Beyond a commitment to raise defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by next year, there is little indication of how or if the defence budget will be raised in time by 2035. On Monday, Starmer promised he would set out how to go ‘further and faster’ on defence spending ‘in due course’ – although he refused to be drawn on what this would involve.
Successfully brokering Britain’s entry into Safe would undoubtedly be a welcome diversion for Starmer amid the growing pressure on his domestic defence spending commitments. It would also be chalked up as a win for the government’s new defence diplomacy strategy, launched by defence minister Lord Coaker at the defence tank Rusi yesterday.
While admitting that the measures set out in the defence diplomacy strategy were not ‘wholly new’, Lord Coaker described the strategy as ‘fine-tuning’ the government’s overlapping diplomatic and defence priorities. While also unable to name a date for the DIP’s publication, he stressed that ‘significant investment is going into British defence at the moment’.
It is doubtful, however, that this will be enough to assuage concerned Nato officials who last month warned Starmer that uncertainty over Britain’s defence spending and the speed of rearmament risked undermining the country’s status in the alliance. Similarly, at the beginning of the year, European members of the alliance laid out their expectation to British officials that the UK would do more of the ‘heavy lifting’ on European defence. They are also believed to have stressed the need for the country to up its defence spending quickly.
When asked by The Spectator if Europe’s anxieties over the lack of a spending roadmap for British defence were a concern for the government, Lord Coaker was unable to answer decisively. He stressed that the UK’s involvement in Nato was ‘immense’ and that the country ‘is leading in so many ways’. He also highlighted that the Nato alliance was an umbrella structure under which Britain was engaged in multiple bilateral agreements with countries such as France, Germany and Norway, as well as leading on the Joint Expeditionary Force coalition and continental nuclear deterrence.
If all discussions go smoothly over the next few months, it appears that British membership of Safe in some form seems less elusive than some in Starmer’s government may have feared. Whether the same can be said of the urgent need to raise defence spending more broadly is another question entirely.
The Foremans can’t blame the UK for their imprisonment in Iran
Lindsay and Craig Foreman, the British couple imprisoned in Iran on spying charges, have issued a desperate plea for help, saying they feel abandoned by the UK. The pair want the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, to ‘step up’, describing how they feel ‘let down, alone and completely frustrated’.
It was reckless, and simply asking for trouble, to enter a country with a longstanding reputation for randomly imprisoning westerners (Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, anyone?) on trumped-up charges
Speaking in a recorded phone message from Evin prison in Tehran, Craig described life in a war zone. ‘We have gone from a challenging situation to a life-threatening situation… There is a serious lack of commitment for our safety.’
It is heart-wrenching stuff. Evin prison is notorious for being overcrowded and unsanitary. Prisoners share cells infested with rats and sleep on concrete or metal blocks. Food and basic essentials are in short supply.
This desperately sad tale began with the couple’s arrest in January 2025. They were charged with spying for the UK after travelling to Iran on a motorcycle trip. Only the paranoid Islamic Republic could seriously argue that a couple of Instagram-obsessed bikers on the trip of a lifetime were moonlighting as James Bond and wife. They were handed a ten-year sentence in prison after a three-hour hearing at the Islamic Revolutionary Court in Tehran, during which they were not allowed to present a defence. The regime has no interest in due process, a fair trial or basic legal rights. Such matters are simply alien concepts in the fiefdom of the mullahs. Yes, this is a disgrace and worthy of condemnation in the strongest terms. Even so, the Foremans continue to display an astonishing naivety about the reasons for their plight, preferring to lash out and blame everyone but themselves for the folly of going to Iran in the first place.
For instance, Craig Foreman claims the British government is ‘fully aware’ of their innocence and says he cannot understand the lack of a public statement from officials. Well, one reason might be that official statements from the British government are unlikely to help matters and could actually make things much worse. Nor is it immediately obvious how exactly the government can ‘step up’ in this case. Communication lines (minimal at the best of times) are not exactly reliable at a time of war. With the Iranian regime fighting for its very survival, the plight of the Foremans is unlikely to be high on their list of priorities.
Yvette Cooper, the Foreign Secretary, has previously condemned the sentence passed in this case as ‘completely appalling and totally unjustifiable’ – strong words but likely to fall on deaf ears in Tehran. Cooper added that the government would ‘pursue this case relentlessly’ until the Foremans returned home safely and were reunited with their family. That too is exactly the kind of thing that ministers are duty-bound to emphasise, but the words carry no real force when dealing with the brutal and lawless Iranian regime. The reality is that the UK government – even more so at a time of war – has limited sway and few meaningful ways to bring pressure to bear.
The larger questions that have haunted this affair remain unresolved. The standard Foreign Office advice to all British nationals is not to travel to Iran because of a ‘significant risk of arrest, questioning or detention’. The Foremans chose to ignore this advice and pressed ahead with their travel plans. It was reckless, and simply asking for trouble, to enter a country with a longstanding reputation for randomly imprisoning westerners (Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe, anyone?) on trumped-up charges. The pair are authors of their own misfortune, however harsh that might sound. Yes, ministers must do everything they can to secure their eventual release and safe passage home. But it really isn’t a good or sensible strategy for the Foremans, and their family back home, to criticise the very people – ministers and officials – whose help they most need. A little humility and patience would be welcome.
Italy is now stuck in the legal dark ages
Giorgia Meloni has suffered the first significant defeat of her three-and-a-half-year premiership.
The Italians have roundly rejected her plans to reform Italy’s sclerotic judicial system – even though those plans were in the election manifesto that persuaded so many of them to vote for her. It is unlikely now that any Italian government will attempt such a reform for another generation. Italy is condemned to remain a country where the motto in every court in the peninsula – ‘La legge è uguale per tutti’ (the law is equal for all) – is but a sick joke.
Defeat is a big blow not just to Meloni but to all who dreamed of change
Still, Italy’s first female prime minister – the third longest surviving of Italy’s 69 governments since the fall of fascism – has no intention of resigning. Her right-wing Fratelli d’Italia party is as popular in the polls as when it won the 2022 election – a virtually unheard of state of affairs in a western democracy. Her coalition remains rock solid despite the odd bit of posturing by Matteo Salvini, leader of the Lega, whereas the opposition parties remain unable even to form a coalition. But undoubtedly Giorgia Meloni’s halo of invincibility shines far less brightly.
The ‘popolo’ voted by 54 per cent to 46 per cent against the Meloni reform in a referendum held on Sunday and Monday with a high-ish turnout of just under 60 per cent. Parliament had approved the reform but not by the required two thirds majority as it would have meant changing the constitution. So the matter had to go to a referendum.
It was bad luck that Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu, both very unpopular in Italy, launched their war on Iran during the referendum campaign. The war itself is unpopular enough but it also sent the price of petrol and diesel through the roof to above €2 a litre.
Meloni has been the EU leader closest to the US President and inevitably Italians also used the referendum as a vote on her premiership. In recent days, she has tried to position herself, not very convincingly, as neither condemning nor supporting the war. The danger is that this comes across as weak fence-sitting rather than astute realpolitik.
Defeat is a big blow not just to Meloni but to all who dreamed of change.
Opponents of the reform ranted and raved successfully that it would deprive the judiciary of its liberty and place it under government control. In fact, the reform would have meant the exact opposite: it would have prevented judges who impose their political agenda on the judiciary – they are mainly left-wing and nicknamed ‘Toghe Rosse’ (Red Togas) – from doing so.
But it was not to be and so now it is back to business as usual.
Italy’s judicial system is agonisingly slow, incompetent, and politicised. This means, for instance, that it is all too often quite impossible to know whether the accused is guilty or not when a court case at last ends, which after countless appeals and counter appeals can be many years. This is especially so if it is a gruesome criminal case, or involves someone famous, and so becomes a trial by media. For instance, who murdered Meredith Kercher on that Halloween night in 2007 in Perugia? No one has the faintest idea. Judges themselves leak the juiciest bits of evidence and salacious gossip during the investigation phase before a trial takes place. This makes a mockery of the concept of a fair trial.
I personally am involved in a labyrinthine legal odyssey that is now in its 21st year involving various types of judge in various cities. I have no money to pay a lawyer but earn just too much to be able to get one free. Thank God, then, for Stefano who smokes cheroots and has a gunmetal Porsche Targa and defends me gratis out of pity. At least when every now and again he wins a case for me and a judge orders my assailant to cough up costs, he does get those – even if it does nothing to stop the never-ending conveyor belt from grinding out new cases.
Some years ago, then US ambassador to Rome John Philips in a speech to Italian businessmen said that the main reason American companies invested more in tiny countries like Belgium than in Italy – the world’s eighth largest economy – was the inability of Italy’s justice system to guarantee the enforceability of contracts.
Italy’s judiciary is undoubtedly short of manpower but aside from that a key reason for its sclerotic state is that both prosecuting judges and presiding judges are part of the same professional body called La Magistratura. So the Italian equivalent of the Crown Prosecution Service and the judiciary in England and Wales are one and the same thing. The Meloni reforms planned to change this.
Such a system inevitably causes collusion between prosecuting judges – the equivalent of players in a game of football – and presiding judges, the equivalent of the referee.
The Magistratura is self-governed by a ruling council whose 33 members are mostly judges elected by Italy’s 10,000 judges but include ten lay members elected by parliament. The Consiglio Superiore, as it is called, is highly politicised, and can and does use its powers to destroy the careers of those judges who cross swords with it. Meloni’s justice minister, Carlo Nordio, called the system for electing its governing body ‘a para-mafioso mechanism’. The left shouted for days: ‘How dare he!’
I live in Ravenna in Emilia-Romagna which along with adjacent Tuscany was the stronghold of the Italian Communist party – the largest in Europe outside the Soviet Union – that ran, and still does run via its heirs, though less easily and universally, both regional and local government. Emilia-Romagna registered the highest number of ‘No’ voters – 67 per cent.
‘Every day I see collusion between the [prosecuting judges] and the presiding judges on anything from ordering the phone of X to be intercepted without proper justification, to deciding to hold someone in custody with no justification,’ Stefano tells me.
To stop such collusion Meloni proposed to split these two types of judge into two separate bodies with separate ruling councils as happens in most modern democracies. She also proposed that the method of choosing the members of the ruling councils be changed from an election to a lottery. The aim was to stop control of the ruling councils being in the hands of political factions as at present and to create a working environment in which judges would feel both obliged to work swiftly, competently and impartially – but also be liberated from political pressure applied on them by those in command of their profession.
‘Sadly the people, especially young people, believed the propaganda of the left and voted No,’ Stefano says. ‘But how on earth can a lottery to choose the governing body of the judges possibly place them under the control of the government?’
The Italian justice system reminds me of Bleak House by Charles Dickens and the case of Jarndyce and Jarndyce where there is fog everywhere and ‘at the very heart of the fog sits the Lord High Chancellor in his High Court of Chancery’:
‘Jarndyce and Jarndyce drones on. This scarecrow of a suit has, in course of time, become so complicated that no man alive knows what it means. The parties to it understand it least, but it has been observed that no two Chancery lawyers can talk about it for five minutes without coming to a total disagreement as to all the premises. Innumerable children have been born into the cause; innumerable young people have married into it; innumerable old people have died out of it. Scores of persons have deliriously found themselves made parties in Jarndyce and Jarndyce without knowing how or why; whole families have inherited legendary hatreds with the suit … there are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless.’
‘If Yes had won you would have seen for the first time a tsunami of prosecutions for illegal bribes by the Coop Rosse in Emilia-Romagna and Tuscany to local politicians,’ Stefano added. ‘Not because a right-wing government would’ve ordered the pubblici ministeri [prosecuting judges] to do so – though that’s inevitably how it would be treated by left-wing politicians and journalists – but simply because judges would have been freed from control by the Toghe Rosse in the Consiglio Superiore.’
The ‘Coop Rosse’ (Red Co-ops) are the network of cooperatives through which the left has run large swathes of the economy, especially in Emilia Romagna and Tuscany, since the second world war.
Meloni has said on social media that the result was ‘a lost opportunity to modernise Italy’. But she added: ‘Sovereignty belongs to the people and the Italians have today expressed themselves clearly.’ Indeed they have.
The truth about England’s ‘New Towns’
At the end of last week, the government suggested there should be resonant names – that evoked the grandeur of past heroes – for seven magnificent New Towns to be built across England. Just as Clement Attlee had envisioned a new Jerusalem after years of Tory neglect, so Labour would once again build the wholly new settlements of the future.
If Leeds South Bank is a New Town then Stonehenge is a cutting edge aesthetic installation reflecting the vibrancy of Young British Artists
The ambition of post-war years, which gave us Milton Keynes, Harlow, Bracknell, Crawley and other visionary developments, was to be re-kindled. The names suggested for these New Towns – Attleeton, Elizabethtown, Seacole, Athelstan, Pankhurst – provoked debate. They were meant to.
Because the entire exercise was a masterful piece of misdirection. The government isn’t marking a break with the poverty of Tory ambition on housing by building seven New Towns. The main thing it’s building on are plans inherited from the last government. From me, in fact.
On Monday we discovered that the seven New Towns are, for the most part, decidedly old hat. There are three urban regeneration schemes in the heart of London, Manchester and Leeds, which have been in development for years now. There are urban extensions in Bristol, Enfield and Milton Keynes (a genuine new town eight years ago) which are again already under way. The only thing close to a genuine virgin development is the expansion of the Bedfordshire village of Tempsford to become a significant commuter town for Cambridge. But as virgins go it’s hardly fresh, the project having been vigorously advanced when I was in office, well over two years ago.
The developments the government announced are many things. Welcome investment in brownfield sites. A recognition that building more in our cities rather than always placing new homes on green fields is environmentally enlightened. A vote of confidence in the agglomeration effect, clustering talent closer to where it can find jobs. What they are not is New Towns. Certainly not as anyone might understand the term. Which is a Town that hadn’t been thought of, and didn’t exist, before.
The post-war New Towns were just that. On virgin land, or where only villages stood before, whole new communities were built. You might consider Bracknell, or Cumbernauld, Harlow or Cwmbran, realisations of a noble vision or architectural dead zones. But they were undeniably new. The Leeds South Bank development is not. Leeds has been a thriving settlement since the time of the Beaker People. A river runs through it. One of the city’s many handsome features is the Crown Point Bridge linking the north of the city with its, well its south bank. Built in the 1840s. Modernised in the 1990s.
Of course, Leeds South Bank will certainly benefit from regeneration money. I should know. I authorised it years ago. I’m delighted this government is following where I led. But if Leeds South Bank is a New Town then Stonehenge is a cutting edge aesthetic installation reflecting the vibrancy of Young British Artists. Maybe the government should re-name Leeds South Bank ‘Athelstan’ – they’re about the same vintage.
To be fair, we were warned. In the introduction to the report from the New Towns task force, published last September, it was acknowledged that inner city regeneration and urban extensions were as much the way to go in providing new housing as any other route. But even then there were indications that genuine New Towns – including one in Cheshire – might still be established. When Monday’s announcement was made, any hint of anything genuinely ground-breaking had gone. It was Tory plans and Tory policy with a bit of additional debt-fuelled finance. Something old, nothing new, all of it borrowed, pretty much blue.
Now, it doesn’t, of course, suit the government to admit that its flagship housing scheme is pretty much just the same as the Conservatives’. They want to portray the last administration as a radioactive dead zone, a housing Chernobyl. And for the new Tory leadership, there is an understandable desire not to revisit or re-litigate the recent past. The voters delivered their damning verdict in 2024. Far better to repudiate, apologise and move on.
And my pointing out the continuity here will, of course, only be more ammunition for those who want to denounce the existence of a ‘uniparty’ which needs to be swept aside by the New Force which is Reform or the Insurgent Outsiders who are the Greens.
They will of course overlook the fact that Reform’s ‘shadow chancellor’ is the former (really rather good) Tory housing secretary Rob Jenrick. Or the point that the Greens are led by a man who wanted us to celebrate the achievements of the Lib Dem-Tory coalition government which introduced tuition fees, austerity and the King James Bible into all schools.
Might it be the case that disaffection with our politics is fuelled not by the pragmatic adaptation of administrations to reality but the exaggerated claims made by those who promise to build a wholly New Jerusalem but end up with improving a bit of familiar old Leeds?
Long live the bottomless brunch
Bottomless brunch: it sounds disreputable, to start with. There’s the suggestion of indecency; that lower garments are optional, perhaps on the part of the poor waiting staff, like those ‘Butlers in the Buff’. And ‘brunch’ is surely the louchest of meals, invented purely so that people could roll into a restaurant after a long lie-in and commence drinking before noon. There is none of the briskness of ‘lunch’ or the cosiness of ‘dinner’. No one’s going to go for a ‘constitutional’ after brunch. No, they’re going to have ‘just one more’…
I’ve had some lovely brunches in my time. A glass of champagne, a brace of Bloody Marys (or, even better, Bloody Marias, with tequila) and all the newspapers an outside table on Brighton seafront can hold was for decades a lovely way to spend a Saturday morning. But even I, as a big fan of excess, remember thinking ‘that won’t end well!’ when I first heard of the bottomless brunch: basically, one meal per person and all the – selected – booze you can get down you in two hours, tops.
Hogarth himself could not have come up with a better illustration of how the most respectable of women lose their inhibitions than a ‘BB’ at the Cocktail Club in Shaftesbury Avenue in 2022 which recently ended up in court. On one table, five off-duty policewomen. On the other, a mother and her three daughters. It started wholesomely enough, with the rozzers singing High School Musical songs and the family group presumably chatting about family matters. Lubricated, both parties got up to dance – and the trouble started.
Rose Webb, the matriarch of the smaller group, took exception to the way PC Tanisha Whitlock strutted her stuff, Wood Green Crown Court was told, to the extent that she yelled ‘Fucking lezza!’ at her and a stand-off ensued. PC Whitlock’s colleagues Daniella Andrean, Binal Valji, Megan Pearson and Bethan Thomas went to Tanisha’s aid – and it all kicked off. The CCTV shows amazing footage, like a grown-up Girls Gone Wild, the massive brawl lasting nearly five minutes. Two men who tried to break up the barney were helpless in the face of female aggro.
Webb and her daughters Casey, Emma Dee and Billie Jo Jackson were cleared of affray after claiming they had been acting in self-defence. Defending them, Dominic Thomas opined disapprovingly that the Territorial Support Group girls were ‘strutting around’ as if they ‘owned the place’. What was a public room has become the TSG dance room’. He blamed Whitlock’s ‘manic aggressive’ dancing for the fight, adding: ‘The best way to describe it was an angry chicken.’ On the other side, prosecutor Alex Balancy told the jury: ‘The whole thing erupted into an almighty melee… these defendants, under the influence of alcohol, went over the top.’
Like the Asbo Granny, ‘BBs’ reveal there is still a – sometimes scrappy – schoolgirl inside many a matronly figure
If you met any of these women in the street, I have no doubt they would prove delightful. But the demon drink can distort a personality beyond all recognition, as I know regrettably from my own behaviour. I wasn’t surprised to hear that the ‘bottomless’ bit referred to prosecco. It seems so harmless – like a fruity pop! – but, when drunk competitively in a short window, is just alcohol like any other. Yet people, particularly women, believe somehow that it ‘doesn’t count’ – like food eaten while standing up in front of an open refrigerator. Lots of men believe prosecco doesn’t count as wine for other more snobbish reasons. It’s true that you don’t generally see imbibers of the fruity treat sniffing at it suspiciously and rolling it around their mouths like mad things, but so much the better.
The Americans, who tend not to drink like we do, make brunch a far more elegant affair. I doubt the Sex and the City broads would have put away as much prosecco as they could before getting into a brawl with some off-duty femmes from the NYPD. Far more refined than Brit broads, they’d be sipping mimosas and discussing the pros and cons of sodomy.
Crude though it may be, I prefer the British way. Like the Asbo Granny or the female half of a SKI (Spending Kids’ Inheritance) couple, BBs reveal there is still a – sometimes scrappy – schoolgirl inside many a matronly figure. From a wider perspective, our high streets will be miserable places when the watering holes are gone. Pubs are now closing at a rate of one a day, having been forced to raise their prices to a point increasing numbers of punters can’t afford to pay – part of the reason why the BB is in the ascendent. Let’s rage against the plan to keep us all at home, drinking supermarket booze and eating food from Deliveroo. Men have football and as long as we have the bottomless brunch, female friendship – and occasional fisticuffs – will continue.
Wind power is far from ‘woke’
Energy policy is, ultimately, a judgement call on the future. It is a suite of decisions tied to predictions about demand, supply, geopolitics, and public consent. Some decisions pay off for decades. Others unravel as the world shifts. Even ‘letting the market decide’ requires a strategy. Markets sit within infrastructure, taxation, and regulation. These, too, are political choices.
Renewable energy has become associated with one specific vision of the future: the need to transition to net zero. Because that case is sometimes made in moral rather than practical terms, some on the Right have viewed the sector as an example of the ‘madness of net zero stupidity’, evidence of the current government’s ‘eco zealotry’ and based not on science or economics but ‘a literal ideology’.
But technologies aren’t ideologies. The real question is whether – given what we can best predict today – wind should be a pragmatic part of Britain’s power mix. When we look through that lens, it is hard to decry wind as ‘woke’.
Let’s start from a clear-eyed view of the world we live in, not the world in which we wish we did
Let’s start with demand. AI, data centres and electric vehicles will see electricity use rise sharply. In such a world, a nation cannot simply ‘hope’ the global gas market behaves or pray that long-build technologies arrive exactly when needed.
Then let’s look at energy security. 17 per cent of Qatari LNG export capacity has been knocked out by Iranian strikes. Full exports could take five years to restore. No surprise, then, that interest in the North Sea has risen. The North Sea will remain important – for jobs, expertise (a third of the same supply chain is shared with wind) and resilience – but it is a declining basin. Even under industry’s most optimistic assumptions, it will only meet half of net zero gas demand by 2050.
More importantly, greater UK production won’t change prices. Gas was once regional – supplied by pipeline and priced locally. But Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) has turned gas into a global commodity. Britain now pays the global price for it whether it comes from Aberdeen or Algeria. That’s why the last decade has been one of volatility, driven by shocks beyond our borders.
Fracking seems unlikely to solve this. I say that as someone tasked with investigating it relentlessly in government. The geology is uncertain, the scale is unclear, and the public consent isn’t there. Even if it succeeded, it would not insulate us from global prices like in the United States. The UK is not a continent-sized energy island with vast reserves of gas and limited export capacity.
Nor are other alternatives immediately obvious. Small modular reactors have promise but are at least a decade away. Costs are also uncertain.
So, what can we build now? The answer starts with price. On normal – not crisis – gas prices, new onshore wind costs around £72/MWh and offshore just over £90/MWh. A new gas plant, once you include construction, financing, fuel and carbon, comes in closer to £150/MWh.
Even without carbon pricing, new gas generation still sits above offshore wind, while onshore remains considerably cheaper. And when gas spikes – as it repeatedly does – the gap widens sharply.
During the 2022 energy crisis, £44 billion was spent subsiding energy bills. By contrast, the fixed-price ‘contracts for difference’ (CfD) system – a Conservative-led innovation copied worldwide, whereby developers are paid a stable long-term price for the power they generate in return for paying back the difference when market prices rise – gave the nation a fixed-rate mortgage on its energy. When gas prices surged four years ago, homegrown renewables didn’t cost the taxpayer; providers paid millions back to consumers instead.
Of course, none of this is to suggest the system today is perfect. Electricity carries historic levies that make it disproportionately more expensive than gas. Government has already begun some rebalancing to make this fairer to consumers. Reforms to planning and supply chain policy could help reduce costs.
Constraint costs also remain an issue – but a transitional one. As the network is reinforced, those costs fall sharply. Even ‘free market’ Texas recognised this, proactively building transmission from windy regions to demand centres. And when analysts such as Aurora, Baringa and others model the full system – including balancing, capacity and networks – they consistently find a renewables-led mix the best value.
Indeed, we do not claim that wind is a silver bullet. The lowest-cost system sees wind and solar doing the heavy lifting; nuclear providing firm power; gas at the margins for backup; storage, hydrogen, hydro and interconnectors for smoothing variability; and a grid built for the 2030s, not the 1930s.
But if anyone doubts the impacts of a renewable-led system, look to Spain. A few years ago, gas dictated Spanish electricity prices three-quarters of the time. Today it is just a fifth, and Spain enjoys some of the lowest power prices in Europe.
So, strip away the noise and the choice is clear. We can keep leaning on globally traded fuels and accept the volatility that comes with them. We can place massive bets on technologies that won’t arrive until the 2040s. Or we can back a solution that works today, reduces exposure to foreign shocks, and is a growing industrial success story: 112,000 jobs by 2030 across 70 constituencies, from blades in Hull to cables in Hartlepool.
Let’s start from a clear-eyed view of the world we live in, not the world we wish we did. In that context, wind isn’t ‘woke’. It’s the most sensible move on the board.
Don’t let AI read philosophy for you
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) once wrote: ‘[T]he man who feels himself drawn to philosophy must himself seek out its immortal teachers in the quiet sanctuary of their works.’ That’s easier said than done: philosophical classics have a terrible reputation outside ivory towers – as big, boring, difficult books, filled with obtuse theorising about irrelevant problems, their covers featuring ghastly old men staring miserably out at the reader. Books about philosophy are hugely popular today, most of which repackage the thoughts of past thinkers for time-pressed readers – but I suspect not many people transition from these guides to the great works themselves, especially when AI can do all the hard reading for you.
But Schopenhauer was right: to really get to know a philosopher, there’s no substitute for reading their books yourself. The rewards repay the effort several times over, as I have recently rediscovered. Last month, I finished reading Schopenhauer’s masterpiece The World as Will and Representation, in the classic 1958 English translation by E. F. J. Payne. With notebook and pen in hand, it took around 60 hours, spread over several months and 20 sessions. There were tough moments, of course, but overall it was one of the most exhilarating reading experiences of my life.
I understand why people are put off by Schopenhauer. He’s usually referred to as a pessimist, an accurate but by no means exhaustive description. Again, the image used on almost all his own works hardly invites the reader in: a daguerreotype taken in 1859, when the philosopher was 71, it shows an unsmiling, thin-lipped man with tufts of white hair sprouting on each side of an otherwise bald head. You can just imagine this cranky old misanthrope shouting at the women who stood gossiping in the corridor outside his Berlin apartment, as apparently, he used to. He also tends to be lumped together with the other major German philosophers of the period, most of whom deserve their reputation for soul-destroying difficulty and dullness (Hegel is the chief offender).
Readers who enter Schopenhauer’s world, then, are in for a big surprise. Unlike many philosophers, who couldn’t care less what they put their readers through, Schopenhauer is great company – witty, irreverent and fascinated by the human and natural worlds. The first edition of The World as Will and Representation was published in 1818, when its author was 30 years old. It is very much a young man’s book, full of passion and urgency. Schopenhauer claimed that it was the elaboration of a single thought, presented in the first sentence: ‘The world is my representation.’ This is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness.’ While working on the book, Schopenhauer discovered, to his amazement, that this basic idea (as well as several others in his system) also appeared in the ancient Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism; as a result, his work is unique in the western canon for its frequent references to Indian thought.
I understand why people are put off by Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer was also one of philosophy’s rare stylists. An Anglophile who read the Times every day, he modelled his prose on that of the Scottish thinker David Hume. He sought to emulate Hume’s precision and clarity, with great success. On every page, even in the most difficult passages, it is evident that Schopenhauer cared about his readers’ experience. He loathed obscurity in philosophical prose, claiming that it was a fig-leaf for intellectual vacuity. This was his chief complaint against the philosophers he despised the most – Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.
Schopenhauer deserves his reputation as a pessimist: he described the world as a living hell and considered optimism ‘a really wicked way of thinking, a bitter mockery of the unspeakable sufferings of mankind’. But this element of his thought is balanced out by its more uplifting aspects. A devoted lover of the arts, especially music, he presents a fascinating account of their power to lift us above the chaos of life. He defends an ethics of compassion, premised on the idea that ultimately everything is One (a key similarity with Hindu thought). The sheer unity of his system is awe-inspiring. Whether or not you agree with his premises, he uses them to explain (or try to) literally everything: why we shouldn’t fear death; why music is the deepest art; why boredom and desire are opposite but equal torments; and, perhaps most importantly, why fruit is ‘admissible’ in still-life painting but lavish feasts absolutely aren’t.
When you see a crap film or read a crap book, you regret the hours you wasted on it – hours you’ll never get back. I feel the opposite after this epic reading journey. I don’t regret a single moment that I spent in this ‘quiet sanctuary’ of genius, not even those when I thought my head was going to explode. Or rather, especially not those.
Len Deighton taught British bachelors to cook
Men who cook Spanish omelettes look a bit gay. Or at least that is how American film executives reacted to Harry Palmer cooking in The Ipcress File. The cable said: ‘Dump Michael Caine’s spectacles and make the girl cook the meal. He is coming across as a homosexual.’ This was 1964, when London was the cultural centre of the Swinging Sixties. In the final cut, Palmer asks what she will report back about him. She replies simply: ‘That you like girls … you also like books, music, cooking.’ The Americans had misread the moment. This was a modern heterosexual man, self-sufficient, urban, and quietly competent, but one whose lifestyle still had to be explained.
I’ve rewatched this film following the recent passing of Len Deighton, author of the book of the same name, which shot him to fame in 1962. He is remembered for his espionage novels including SS-GB and Funeral in Berlin but that wasn’t where he started. He said: ‘I was earning enough money as an artist to write anything I chose. I chose a spy novel.’ He began as an illustrator, advertiser and, more curiously, as a cooking cartoonist.
The format came from not wanting to dirty his cookbooks, so he copied them into diagrammatic notes, later spotted by a journalist. The Express tried him first but thought his cookstrips ‘too fancy’ and they were instead taken up by the Observer, where they found their audience. They were targeted at bachelors, who hoped that a gâteau St-Honoré would open up sexual opportunities. What they did instead was demystify cooking for a new generation living on their own, far from whoever used to cook their meals.
Seventeen years after the war, British food still had a poor reputation. Bernard Levin described it on the BBC as dirty, complacent, exorbitant and disgusting. Hotelier Charles Forte defended our national reputation by saying that one day people would come to Britain for cooks – the studio audience simply laughed. Yet change was underway as Elizabeth David was telling people to melt tomatoes in olive oil in her 1960 book French Provincial Cooking. She made food cosmopolitan; Deighton made it accessible. They were throwing off Edwardian habits and moving beyond suet and Spam. Deighton was easy to understand and gave confidence where others were intimidating.
Deighton wasn’t the only one to facilitate this change. Terence Conran, with his twin empire of furniture and food, led the way. Habitat opened in 1964 on Fulham Road, with staff in Mary Quant uniforms and Vidal Sassoon haircuts. The items on offer were a mix of rustic French copper pans, Bauhaus metal chairs and flat-pack furniture. Press coverage had to explain this novel shop: ‘You pick your wire basket and take what you like off the shelves.’ With its aspirational yet affordable products, it appealed to a post-war generation seeking independence from their parents, a generation who suddenly had to furnish and feed themselves in the absence of domestic servants.
Deighton was easy to understand and gave confidence where others were intimidating
Conran’s dream was to bring beautiful, useful, and affordable objects into everyone’s homes, that everyone should ‘have the best of everything… and it should be affordable.’ But the old guard didn’t like it; Conran famously said that ‘Cecil Beaton would regularly stalk all around the outside with a look of enormous disdain.’ But Conran wasn’t the man to show you how to use these new tools, Deighton was. The bridge between the two men is captured in the cover of Deighton’s Action Cook Book: a handsome man stares out as a woman caresses his hair. His competence is clearly seductive. Cooking is not domestic drudgery but the mark of a quality man.
Male and female stereotypes were shifting – with more young people living alone and marrying later, they needed to cook for themselves. This is where Deighton’s cookstrips enter: graphic, practical, unpretentious. Words like RINSE, SHAPE, SERVE appear in all caps, with none of David’s ‘voluptuous aubergines’ here. Male competence may have seemed suspect at first, but self-sufficiency quickly trumped convention. Even if reassurance was occasionally required that our male icons did indeed ‘like girls’.
Deighton did not invent the metropolitan man any more than Conran invented the modern flat. But both grasped how the world was changing. British life was being reorganised around a new ideal of private competence. What Deighton offered was not cartoons for bumbling bachelors, but a way of making good food part of a masculine life, and faintly glamorous to boot. Harry Palmer’s omelette belongs to the same Britain as Habitat’s chopping boards. Conran furnished that world; Deighton taught it how to feed itself.
Welcome to All Kings Day
King Charles III is planning a state visit to Washington DC next month. He is rumored to be staying at the White House, attending a state dinner and possibly addressing a joint meeting of Congress.
The last royal to address Congress was Charles’s mother, the late Queen Elizabeth II speaking to a full chamber in May 1991, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, around three months after the end of Operation Desert Storm. Britain contributed more than 50,000 troops to Iraq during the Gulf War which was – and remains to this day – the largest deployment of British military personnel since World War Two.
(Pay no heed to Punchbowl’s Jake Sherman, who this morning tweeted that “King Charles II” was coming: the previous Charles has been dead for 341 years.)
Quite a few royals are expected in Washington this year for the 250th anniversary of the United States. The king and queen of the Netherlands are also set for an April visit – while Charles’s heir Prince William and his wife Kate are rumored to be coming in for the Independence Day celebrations. With so many royals in town on July 4, the holiday marking the birth of our republic might look more like an All Kings Day.
Will Charles praise Congress for defying his ancestor, King George III, and forming this new government? Should we expect No Kings protesters taking things a bit too literally? Perhaps tone-deaf jokes about giving ourselves back to England?
Trump’s ego might prove helpful in this regard. Given his track record with foreign leaders who come to visit, Trump always finds a way to show a monarch, prime minister or supreme leader who’s President. This is how the world works two and a half centuries after the Revolutionary War: led by an American empire, for better or worse. Having a few sheepish royals in town might be the perfect set-up for the most realistic Fourth of July reenactment in 250 years. Someone call Lin-Manuel.
On our radar
STRETCH ARMSTRONG Governor Kevin Stitt of Oklahoma has selected energy executive Alan Armstrong to fill Markwayne Mullin’s seat in the US Senate.
NEVER MIND THE BALLOTS President Trump voted by mail in today’s Palm Beach special election, while threatening to hold up all legislation until the SAVE Act – which bans mail-in voting – is passed.
NICK OF TIME Self-described “alpha male” Nick Adams has been appointed “Special Presidential Envoy for American Tourism, Exceptionalism, and Values.” Adams was previously nominated as US ambassador to Malaysia but was quietly dropped last month.
Life’s a beach
In dark times, it’s good to fall back on the rites of passage that unite us. So thank you Jesse Watters, in this period of war and economic turmoil, for reminding a nation on edge what it truly means to be American, through the ritual of the Fox News spring-break vox pop.
Johnny Belisario, a correspondent for Jesse Watters Primetime, was dispatched to the beaches of America to interview sauced-up, swimwear-clad college students. The kids give predictably dumb answers, and their boomer parents watching back home lament the thousands of dollars they’re shelling out on higher education.
A peroxide-blonde young woman clad in a white bikini and a cross shares her plans to “black out with my rack out.” A gentleman wearing what appears to be a St. Christopher pledges to “get with as many girls as we can… and not come back with a STD [sic].”
“What issue facing America is the most important to you?” asks Belisario. “What bikini I’m gonna wear next,” the peroxide blonde replies.
“We’re going to war with Iraq,” a different blonde girl says, “that’s been crazy.” Almost. Later, the same young lady says, “Venezuela… isn’t that in Spain?” Not for a while.
Then and now
February 2025 – Reacher star Alan Ritchson in a GQ interview, when asked about his high-school classmate Matt Gaetz:
“That motherfucker. We are adversaries… It’s shocking to me that the panhandle of Florida continues to vote for somebody – knowing everything we know about him and the promises that he’s made behind closed doors about pardoning certain criminals – he’s just not a good dude!”
March 2026 – Gaetz on X following a TMZ report about Ritchson getting into a fight with his neighbor:
“Don’t do steroids.”
Till Trump do us part
Donald Trump – whose first marriage ended only after his affair with Marla Maples was exposed, and has been married twice more since – has opinions about the correct timetable for widower remarriage. Joe Kent remarried “fairly quickly” Trump said, four years after his wife was killed by a suicide bomber in Syria in January 2016 while serving as a Navy intelligence officer.
These comments follow Kent’s resignation as director of the United States National Counterterrorism Center. “As a veteran who deployed to combat 11 times and as a Gold Star husband who lost my beloved wife Shannon in a war manufactured by Israel, I cannot support sending the next generation off to fight and die in a war that serves no benefit to the American people,” he wrote.
Re-marriage shaming seems to be a go-to for the President when dealing with defiant subordinates. “Did Thomas Massie… get married already??? Boy, that was quick!” he wrote when Massie remarried after his wife died of an autoimmune disease.
It’s almost as if it’s an inside joke with himself. Cockburn sure hopes the comments about giving Kent the job out of pity were also a private joke, and not an honest assessment of the man he installed atop the nation’s counterterrorism apparatus.
The tragicomedy of Rachel Reeves talking about the Middle East
Rachel Reeves was in the House today, responding to the war in the Middle East. That as a statement alone has an air of innate tragicomic potential to it: like Igglepiggle responding to Spanish Flu.
Despite the gravity of the situation, it was more of what we’ve come to expect from Reeves. She did her standard park and bark in the Commons, delivering everything by means of a permanent earnest glottal stop. Like a monoglot tourist in a foreign bar, she makes the mistake of thinking that saying things loudly and slowly will somehow make them effective.
Like a monoglot tourist in a foreign bar, Reeves makes the mistake of thinking that saying things loudly and slowly will somehow make them effective
Of course, what she was saying was even worse than the way that she was saying it. She claimed to be ‘agile in responding appropriately at each moment’, which she probably thinks makes her sound like an economic Catwoman when she actually gives off the vibe of Catweazle. ‘We will be responsive and responsible’, she boasted.
Of course, for Reeves – as reality-phobic a cabinet minister as we have – the war was evidence that she had been right all along: ‘It makes our economic plan even more important’ she crowed. Yet despite graphs showing oil prices now resembling the north face of the Eiger and the atmosphere of blind panic obvious across western economies, Reeves still claimed to be the voice of prudence; all these efforts would be ‘delivered through our ironclad fiscal rules’. Given the state of defence spending that’s the closest we’re going to get to an actual ironclad I suspect.
Listening to Reeves is like playing an exceptionally disheartening game of bingo. All the old canards which the government uses to deflect discussion about their efforts were there: breakfast clubs, benefits, Liz Truss. She genuinely mentioned the phrase ‘under the last government’ than she did ‘strait of Hormuz’.
Everything adds up to Reeves being a pitiable figure, yet she always manages to snatch contempt from the jaws of empathy. Partly that’s because she is driving Britain into a miserable penury and partly because she does so whilst acting as if we’re lucky to have her as Chancellor. In a classic display of Reevesian arrogance she accused Mel Stride of being ‘out of his depth’. She fumbled over figures, she mispronounced things she’s bellowed a thousand times before. The self-appointed voice of prudence has never been so grating.