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Why is Starmer not fighting the EU’s new carbon tariff?
Why do so many people rail against the trade barriers erected by Donald Trump and yet have so little to say about similar barriers erected by the EU? Where is the liberal outrage against the EU’s carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) which from next January will add tariffs to imports of ferrous metals, aluminium, cement and fertiliser, and which in future is intended to be expanded to other goods with significant carbon footprints? While remainer opinion has condemned Keir Starmer and his government for ‘appeasing’ Trump by considering lowering the Digital Services Tax and easing online safety laws in order to please US tech giants, there is a remarkable lack of objection to Keir Starmer’s proposal to bend to the EU by aligning Britain with the CBAM.
The UK is being forced to choose between greater alignment with the EU and the US
The CBAM is a mechanism which is supposed to deal with the perverse incentive to offshore Europe’s carbon emissions created by net zero targets. Carbon levies are imposed on carbon-intensive industries at home, but at present they do not affect imported goods. Hence, industry has a perverse incentive to offshore its emissions by transferring production outside Europe. The CBAM would attempt to put this right by imposing extra levies on imported goods, calculated on the basis of the carbon emissions created in their manufacture.
Logically, it makes some kind of sense. Yet it is, all the same, an extra tariff – and one which involves an extra layer of bureaucratic burden. It creates friction in trade which did not exist before. It is not officially a tariff, but in practice it is very much a trade barrier – albeit a more subtle one than Trump’s quite brazen tariffs.
The other difference is that while Trump’s tariffs appear to have been imposed with the purpose that they can be negotiated downwards, there is no such intention with the CBAM. On the contrary, we are warned that next year’s introduction is just the beginning. It will become a permanent part of the EU’s protectionism infrastructure, requiring importers to leap through hoops in order to comply.
The UK is proposing to levy its own version of the CBAM from 1 January 2027. Nevertheless, the government has decided to align itself with the EU’s CBAM in order to reduce the regulatory burden on UK exporters. One of the big problems for the government is that the CBAM includes the trade in electricity via subsea cables connecting Britain with neighbouring countries.
Britain is becoming increasingly reliant on electricity imports due to the growing role of intermittent wind and solar in our electricity mix. The government also has designs on becoming a major electricity exporter, selling surplus electricity when it is sunny and windy in Britain but less so in neighbouring Europe. This is not going well – last year 13 per cent of our electricity was imported. The CBAM, however, threatens to undermine the UK’s power exports further because, in its typically weaselly fashion, the EU proposes to work on the assumption that UK electricity is much more carbon intensive than it actually is. This would make our electricity exports liable to higher tariffs than should really be the case.
Aligning with the EU on the CBAM might help to alleviate that problem, but it is unlikely to impress the Trump administration. The American President has imposed a lower tariff rate on Britain than on the EU on the basis that Britain’s trade policy is better aligned with the US. Moreover, J.D. Vance claimed on Tuesday that Donald Trump is willing to speed through a trade deal with the UK. But if Britain is going to allow itself to be sucked back into the regulatory orbit of the EU that may well change.
Like it or not, the UK government is being forced to choose between greater alignment with the EU and the US – and at present, in spite of Starmer’s reconciliatory language towards Trump, the EU seems to be winning the battle for Britain’s affections. Those who remember Starmer as an ardent remainer, who sought to re-run the Brexit referendum, may not be surprised.
Britain and France are too scared to tackle the migrant crisis
France has overtaken Germany as Europe’s top destination for asylum seekers. During the first quarter of 2025, France registered more than 40,000 applications, just above Spain (39,318) and Germany (37,387). This is a 41 per cent drop in German applications for the same period in 2024; Interior Minister Nancy Faeser attributed the fall to a ‘strong package of measures, Germany’s own actions and close European cooperation’.
Germany has been Europe’s destination of choice for asylum seekers since 2011. The country was considered the most welcoming, in part because of the impression cultivated by the former chancellor Angela Merkel, who issued an open invitation to migrants and refugees in 2015.
Successive British governments have claimed there is no ‘silver bullet’ for cracking the migrant crisis
Her successor, Olaf Scholz, continued this policy until the numbers became unmanageable; in 2023, a record 334,000 people claimed asylum in Germany. Last year there were a series of atrocities committed on German soil by asylum seekers – including the fatal stabbing of three festival-goers at Solingen – which prompted Scholz’s government to act. Among the measures introduced were tighter border controls and the restriction of financial aid to immigrants entering from another EU country.
In contrast, France has continued to welcome unprecedented numbers of legal and illegal immigrants under Emmanuel Macron. In 2023, 323,260 first residence permits were granted to non-European immigrants, a record, and 40 per cent more than the number of permits issued in 2016, the year before Macron came to power. The bulk of asylum seekers in France hail from Afghanistan, Turkey, Bangladesh, Guinea and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Fondapol, a liberal French think tank, reported recently that each asylum seeker in France who can’t be housed in an accommodation centre receives €426 (£366) each month; in Germany it is €367 (£315), in Finland it is €348 (£299) and in Sweden it is €201 (£173). Furthermore, France is the only EU country where migrants are entitled to free medical care because of Aide Médicale d’Etat (AMS), a scheme that cost the cash-strapped French state €1.2 billion (£1 billion) last year. As Fondapol concluded: ‘France can now be considered the most permissive country in the European Union when it comes to asylum and immigration’
Britain would give France a run for its money were it still in the EU. For years, politicians and journalists in France have blamed Britain for the Channel migrant crisis, accusing their neighbour of being a soft touch. When five migrants drowned in the Channel last year, Jean-Luc Dubaële, the mayor of Wimereux (not far from Calais) said he held Britain responsible for the deaths. ‘If migrants want to go to England, it’s for a good reason: they’re well received, they can work without a work contract.’
The truth is that Britain and France are both seen as soft touches by the migrants and the gangs who smuggle them into their countries. Germany, Sweden, Denmark and Italy have all shown that with determination and a coherent plan it is possible to reduce illegal immigration and asylum applications.
In February this year, Denmark’s government announced that in 2024 it had granted asylum to 864 people, the lowest number in forty years (barring the Covid year of 2020). Denmark’s government is left-wing, but it has unashamedly pursued a tough line on asylum and immigration since it came to power in 2019. As Kaare Dybvad, Denmark’s immigration minister, put it:
If you’re from the left then you must have a strict immigration policy because it’s always the working class which pays the price of immigration…never the rich or bourgeois.
Instead of following the example of Denmark, the governments of Britain and France cobble together agreements that are rarely worth the paper they’re written on. In March 2023, Rishi Sunak and Macron met in Paris and, amid much fanfare, announced an ‘entente’ that would put an end to the scourge of small boats crossing the Channel. The scheme involved Britain handing France £480 million. Nearly 9,000 migrants have crossed the Channel in small boats this year, a 42 per cent increase on the same period in 2024. Perhaps Britain should ask Macron for its money back.
Instead, the government is in talks with France about another great idea. This one would entail Britain returning small boat arrivals to France. In exchange the French would send to Britain ‘legal migrants seeking family reunion in the UK’. A spokesperson for France’s Interior Ministry told the BBC that:
[The scheme] is based on a one-for-one principle: for each legal admission under family reunification, there would be a corresponding readmission of undocumented migrants who managed to cross [the Channel].
There is an obvious flaw in the scheme: people coming to Britain for family reunions want to cross the Channel, whereas the illegal immigrants being sent back to France from Britain do not. It would therefore be a surprise if there weren’t lengthy legal challenges, similar to those launched when the Tories introduced their Rwanda scheme in 2022.
Successive British governments have claimed there is no ‘silver bullet’ for cracking the migrant crisis. There is, as Denmark has shown. It’s called the ‘Zero Refugee’ policy, and all it requires is a little determination.
Wes Streeting and Kemi Badenoch’s Game of Thrones’ connection
Labour’s Health Secretary Wes Streeting and Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch have clashed on many things – from Chagos to the NHS. But it transpires that they do have at least one thing in common: a love for Game of Thrones’ House Targaryen.
When The Spectator’s Katy Balls interviewed the Leader of the Opposition at Christmas, the newly elected Tory leader was quick to state her admiration for the series. ‘I’m also a Game of Thrones fan. The White Walkers are out there!’ she warned – referring to the zombie army threatening mankind in the George R.R. Martin books. On her favourite character, Badenoch didn’t hesitate. ‘I strongly associated with Daenerys, yes,’ the no-nonsense Tory leader replied – citing the programme’s self-confessed ‘Mother of Dragons’.
Just a few months on, in conversation with Katy for the Easter edition of The Spectator, Streeting has unwittingly let slip that he too harboured a deep-seated fascination with the fantasy TV programme. In fact, not only is the Health Secretary currently rewatching the eight-season show, Wes is also reading George R. R. Martin’s Fire and Blood – a history of the House of Targaryen. Perhaps the Health Secretary’s immersion in the politics of fantastical warring nations gives some sign of the challenges he’s come up against with NHS chiefs…
But not even enjoying a shared interest can relieve tensions between the pair. On finding out that Kemi said she sees herself as Daenerys, mother of dragons, Streeting was quick to scoff: ‘Did she? You see I love Daenerys Targaryen and I don’t feel the same about Kemi!’ Ouch.
Can Giorgia Meloni sweet-talk Trump on EU tariffs?
We are about to see how significant a politician Giorgia Meloni really is after she arrived in Washington yesterday evening for bilateral talks today with Donald Trump. Tariffs will be top of the agenda but they are also expected to talk about Ukraine. She then flies immediately back to Rome to meet Vice President J.D. Vance – a Catholic – on Friday, who is in Rome for Easter hoping to meet the Pope as well.
Certainly, Meloni is the one leader of a major EU country Trump enjoys seeing
Italy’s first female prime minister travels to Washington bearing the cross of the EU on her small but sturdy shoulders. For she is going not on behalf of Italy but on behalf, albeit unofficially, of the EU. This is ironic considering her past record as a Eurosceptic in common with so many on the so-called ‘far right’. But she is Trump’s favourite EU leader. She has a great sense of humour and is full of charm. She speaks good English. And above all, she is a pragmatist.
A passionate reader of Tolkien, her hero is Sam Gamgee because, as she told me, ‘Without Sam, Frodo is nothing.’ Her trip to Washington, she may be feeling, is not unlike that of the Fellowship of the Ring to Mordor. Many in the Italian media are calling it ‘Mission Impossible’.
Trump has repeatedly made plain his contempt for the European Union. This week he rejected the EU Commission’s offer of a zero-for-zero tariff deal. So hostile is he to the EU that it is doubtful whether he would even agree to meet EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.
Earlier this week, talks between the EU negotiator, Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic, and Howard Lutnik, US Commerce Secretary, are said to have run into the sand. But von der Leyen has given Meloni her support as an unofficial mediator between Europe and America and they have had several preparatory telephone conversations.
How times change. When Meloni became prime minister two and a half years ago, and the world was still calling her the heir to Mussolini, von der Leyen said that the EU had the tools to stop her if need be. But the two have since become allies, in particular over the Mediterranean migrant crisis. EU Commission press spokeswoman, Arianna Podestà, said that ‘naturally’ only the Commission could negotiate, but the Meloni-Trump meeting is ‘much appreciated and strictly coordinated’.
The task confronting Meloni, however, is daunting. As the US President told a White House press conference earlier this month:
For decades, our country has been looted, pillaged, raped and plundered by nations near and far, both friend and foe alike (…)You know, you think of the European Union, very friendly. They rip us off. It’s so sad to see. It’s so pathetic.
This week, as he rejected the EU’s zero tariff offer, he told a White House press conference:
The European Union has been very, very bad to us, they don’t take our cars … they don’t take our agricultural product. They don’t take anything practically.
Elsewhere, he has called Europeans ‘parasites’.
Meloni is often talked about as the most important leader in the European Union, given the weakness and deep unpopularity of Emmanuel Macron in France and (until recently when he lost the election) Olaf Scholz in Germany. Meanwhile, she goes from strength to strength. Popular support for her Brothers of Italy party has increased significantly since she came to power in October 2022 at the head of a right-wing coalition. For a party in power to increase support is almost unheard of in a European democracy.
Certainly, she is the one leader of a major EU country Trump enjoys seeing. She was the only EU leader he invited to his inauguration on 20 January. Earlier that month, she was his guest at Mar-a-Lago when he called her a ‘fantastic woman’. In addition, she is a friend of Elon Musk, who last September presented her in New York with a Global Citizen Award from the influential Atlantic Council think tank. ‘She is even more beautiful on the inside than the outside,’ he said. She and Trump are both right-wing national conservatives but are able to appeal to what in Britain is called the Red Wall working class. Both are very seductive public speakers.
What Trump wants even more is for the EU to turn its back on China in favour of America
We shall soon find out how much all this counts when it comes to the nitty-gritty. Before setting off for Washington, Meloni conceded: ‘We are in a difficult moment (…) We will do our best as always.’ She also joked: ‘I don’t feel any pressure at all, as you can imagine, regarding the next two days.’
The Italian left has been taunting her relentlessly about this trip to the White House by asking rhetorically, ‘Why is she going?’ and ‘Is she the EU’s ambassador to Trump, or Trump’s ambassador to the EU?’
She has said Trump’s tariffs are ‘mistaken’ and that it would be counter-productive for the EU to react with equally huge tariffs on American imports. She has declined to say what she will be offering Trump when she meets him today.
But it is thought that in an attempt to get him to think again and do an acceptable tariff deal with the EU, she will offer a number of things. Firstly, an increase in defence expenditure across the EU to 2 per cent of GDP immediately with the possibility of increasing to 3.5 per cent in the longer term (Italy spends 1.6 per cent of GDP on defence). Secondly, that EU countries buy arms from America to achieve this. Thirdly, that the EU waters down its ‘Green Deal’ which aims to cut by 2030 greenhouse gas emissions by 55 per cent and by 2050 by 100 per cent. And lastly, that the EU buys significantly more natural gas from America.
All this will please Trump, but what he wants even more is for the EU to turn its back on China in favour of America. Indeed, it emerged this week that in return for lower tariffs he now plans to force the EU to block Chinese imports, stop Chinese firms setting up shop in Europe, and stop them shipping goods through the bloc.
Ukraine, too, is an issue that potentially puts Trump and Meloni, despite their shared political beliefs, in serious conflict. Meloni was one of the most devout supporters in Europe of Joe Biden’s programme of military support for Ukraine. In March 2024, he invited her to the White House, where he kissed her on the head and called her ‘a close friend’.
Since Trump’s election victory, however, she has been conspicuously quiet about Ukraine. But I think she now genuinely believes that President Volodymyr Zelensky cannot regain the parts of Ukraine captured by Vladimir Putin, especially as Trump has suspended military aid, and that it is pointless shedding any more blood.
Giorgia Meloni, as I said, is above all a pragmatist.
Who should have Elon’s next child?
The Wall Street Journal has published an eye-opening exposé on Elon Musk’s “harem drama,” diving into the relationships the world’s richest man has with his baby mamas – and the labyrinthine system by which he allegedly manages them.
Musk is on a mission to help “seed the earth with more human beings of high intelligence,” per the Journal’s Dana Mattioli. The White House senior advisor has at least 14 children by four different mothers – though this number is thought to be higher. Conservative influencer Ashley St. Clair, one such mother, reveals how after being impregnated by Musk, he offered her “$15 million and $100,000 a month in support,” while encouraging them a “legion-level” of children “before the apocalypse.”
The quest to repopulate America and save civilization is a noble one — even if Elon’s vision of supplanting the nuclear family with “a compound in Austin where Musk imagined the women and his growing number of babies would all live among multiple residences” might scandalize the Republican party he joined last year.
That got Cockburn thinking: who’s next?
Natalie Winters
Surely “Washington’s most eligible bachelorette” is Elon’s most obvious next target? The Journal describes how Musk uses X to boost certain users: “He replies to them and sometimes interacts through direct messages, some of whom he eventually solicits to have his babies.” Winters, the bright 24-year-old executive editor for Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast, has posed for pictures at the White House in a DoGE cap. Elon regularly pops up in her replies.
When asked about this prospect, Winters told Cockburn: “Maybe he just shares my stories because they’re good?” She added, “No H-1Bs,” seemingly taking her boss’s side in the feud that saw Bannon and Musk hash it out on X.
That’s another reason Winters may not be a viable candidate for Musk. Bannon has branded Musk a “parasitic illegal immigrant.” It’s unlikely he’d want a mini-Elon bawling in the back of the War Room studio.
Bridget Phetasy
The Spectator’s very own columnist and Dumpster Fire host Bridget Phetasy has declared Elon her “nemesis.” Yet Cockburn thinks the lady doth protest too much. She may be married, but that allegedly hasn’t stopped him before. Phetasy is already an Austin resident, so relocating to his compound would be no issue.
“I’d only have his baby if it ensured my current daughter a spot on the rocket off earth or in his bunker,” Phetasy told Cockburn, alluding to Musk’s predicted apocalypse. A strong maybe.
A new X-ecutive
Shivon Zilis is mother to four of Elon’s kids and serves on the board of Neuralink, one of his many companies. What’s to stop him from making a similar proposal to the high-flying girlbosses of Tesla, SpaceX, X and the rest? Musk is said to consider intelligence a crucial trait, both to run the boardroom and to have his children. No wonder he has such an unorthodox approach to “company benefits” – most people just want healthcare and a 401k…
Giorgia Meloni
Will they, won’t they? Furious speculation has surrounded Elon’s relationship with the Italian PM, whose pronatalist views are, astoundingly, even more robust than Musk’s. The X CEO felt compelled to declare last year that he had “no romantic relationship whatsoever with PM Meloni” – because every time the pair are pictured together, the sprezzatura is conspicuous. She’s in DC tomorrow…
Grok
Women, who needs them? Elon is enough of a technofuturist to think outside the box on this issue. A hundred samples, a hundred artificial wombs, a hundred Musks. Let the X AI rear the whelps until adulthood, educating them until they are ready to take up their engineering jobs on Mars.
Eye contact is overrated anyway. If any human support is required for maintenance, Elon can deploy his small army of staunch fan boys, like the infamous reply guy who claimed to have “made the clutch move of ordering [Elon] pizza at 1am.” Cockburn suspects this man would bear Elon an heir if he could. Might as well make use of that loyalty.
How well are Wes Streeting’s health reforms going?
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has made a lot of promises about the NHS. Before he got into power, he talked about slashing bureaucracy, introducing AI and improving patient autonomy. While he claims to have made progress in the last nine months, is it enough?
As Katy Balls and Michael Gove say in their interview with the Health Secretary for this week’s issue, Streeting is keen for more ‘responsive and entrepreneurial’ healthcare. He wants a devolved approach that means healthcare services across the country could better deal with local problems in a personalised way. In many ways, this aligns with the ‘personalised medicine’ approach that most healthcare services look towards, incorporating what medicine at the moment is capable of – using modern science to target particular types of disease while filtering patients to the right system.
Slashing bureaucracy is a priority for medics and, luckily, it’s also a priority for the Health Secretary. He has already scrapped NHS England, and Streeting is straightforward about how he isn’t keen on the way things in the health service are being run at the moment. His move to shut down NHS England – which will see the body taken back under the control of the Department of Health in a re-politicising of the health service – is another step forward in Labour’s war on NHS management and the decision is welcomed by doctors across the UK.
‘Patient power’, the Health Secretary says, is a key consideration. He wants patients to understand that no matter where they stand on a socioeconomic level, they are able to access good care – and potentially even choose what type of care they receive. That is a luxury in the NHS – but as welcome as Streeting’s dreams are, they possibly overlook the fact there are hundreds of thousands on NHS wait lists and that currently the way the system works doesn’t help those most in need.
While medics are in favour of Streeting’s plans, there remain issues with staffing across the UK that only help to drive doctors out. Medical students are faced with a lottery system on graduation that sends many halfway across the country against any will of their own. At the same time qualified doctors aren’t able to access specialities they’ve trained and passed exams for – pushing qualified professionals to take reluctant career breaks.
The Health Secretary is keen to see ‘devolution at the heart’ of a new NHS. But while most doctors would agree with Streeting that the health service needs reformed, they also want to see him take decisions to improve retention. The Health Secretary’s vision is only possible if he can ensure the right people are in place to carry it forward.
Putin’s cronies are enjoying needling the West
Sergei Naryshkin, director of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), is in many ways an uncomfortable and ephemeral spy chief, but an enthusiastic information warrior. In recent talks with the Belarusian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, he accused Nato of threatening Moscow and Minsk by increasing the size and activity of its forces on the border – or rather, certain nations within the alliance:
We feel and see that European countries, especially France, Britain and Germany, are increasing the level of escalation around the Ukrainian conflict, so we need to act pre-emptively. We are ready for this.
Playing up a supposed ‘threat’ to Belarus is a way of threatening Poland and the Baltic States
It is certainly true that, concerned about the potential threat from Russia, Nato has stepped up its presence and the tempo of its exercises in north-eastern Europe. June’s BALTOPS 25 exercise may be the largest such training exercise yet, while next month’s HEDGEHOG 25 will specifically wargame the defence of Estonia. Meanwhile, along Belarus’s border, countries are arming: Poland is in the middle of a programme to fully buy a thousand new tanks.
That is hardly surprising, though. Lukashenko is still maintaining his autonomy, unwilling for his country to be annexed and for him to become nothing more than a glorified governor of a new Belarusian region of the Russian Federation. In March, addressing the Russian Senate, he pointedly said that while Minsk would ‘always side with Moscow… It can’t be otherwise. Belarus will never leave Russia alone, just as Russia will never leave Belarus,’ the two countries were not going to merge.
‘Siding with Moscow’, however, has included letting Belarusian territory be used as a base for the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, allowing the Russians to help themselves from its arsenals when stocks of ammunition and spare parts were running low, and signing a military pact at the end of last year. Although it is not clear whether or not the tactical nuclear weapons Putin said he was willing to deploy on Belarusian territory are really there, the very fact of this move was enough to alarm even China. The regular Zapad (‘West’) military exercises in autumn see substantial Russian forces deployed to Belarus, with the perennial concern that this could be used as a springboard for some new military adventure.
Technically there for a meeting with his counterpart, Ivan Tertel of the Belarusian KGB – and what does it say that Minsk never even thought to change the name of its security agency from Soviet times? – Naryshkin was essentially doing what he does so often: needling the West. Playing up a supposed ‘threat’ to Belarus as a pretext for unspecified ‘responses’ is a way of threatening neighbouring Poland and the Baltic States (who, he warned, would be ‘the first to suffer’ in case of any conflict). In the unlikely event they are cowed, then that benefits Russia. If, as is more likely, they become all the more belligerent, the Kremlin also plays that up to try and present the notion that a hostile West is a threat to the nation.
After all, by saying what he said, Naryshkin was not just disingenuous, even though it is hard to see how he concludes that Poland’s decision to plant two million land mines along its border is ‘aggressive’. He was also pushing an emerging theme in Russian propaganda: that at a time when the United States is talking peace, it is Europe that is trying to derail the process, arming Ukraine and pushing Volodymyr Zelensky into greater intransigence.
The fiery rhetoric of European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas obviously gives Moscow ample material for this line. It is also intended to flatter Washington, playing to Donald Trump’s evident hostility to the European Union as an institution.
Trump’s hostility has been an increasingly important element of the Russian narrative ever since the first phone call between Putin and the American President this year. Russian senator Alexei Pushkov then said he was ‘sure that in Kyiv, Brussels, Paris and London they are now reading Trump’s lengthy commentary about his conversation with Putin with horror and cannot believe their eyes’.
Since then, the Russian press has periodically run stories trying to amplify this divide, such as the article last month in the popular tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda under the headline ‘The West is belligerently spreading its feathers and tearing the ground under its claws: Russia’s enemies are trying to disrupt the conversation between Putin and Trump.’
Russia has many kinds of official propagandists. Former president Dmiri Medvedev is known for his toxic social media rants against the West. Presidential aide Nikolai Patrushev spins grand civilisational conspiracy theories. Naryshkin, a keen amateur historian who has an eye on a senatorial seat, aims for the more statesmanlike. Nonetheless, his words should be taken not simply as a mark of the paranoia now reigning in the Kremlin, but a sign of the evolving official line. For now, at least, America good (kinda, at least for now), but Europe definitely bad.
The case for chlorinated chicken
As a UK-US trade deal moves closer, an age-old fear is rearing its head once more: that Britain will be forced to accept imports of American chlorinated chicken. Ever since Brexit, politicians of all parties have decried the prospect. The Labour manifesto ruled it out and even Rishi Sunak promised farmers in 2023 that there would ‘be no chlorine-washed chicken… on the UK market. Not now, not ever.’ But here’s the thing: isn’t chlorinated chicken a small price to pay for a deal with our biggest trading partner?
I have never understood the scaremongering that surrounds chlorinated chicken. First of all, washing poultry in chlorine-based solutions poses no harm to humans. Don’t just take my word for it: it’s a fact that’s been recognised by the World Health Organisation, the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation and the European Food Safety Authority. The chlorine wash kills off bacteria such as salmonella and campylobacter, and the levels are typically no more than 50 parts per million – much lower than what would pose a health risk.
Secondly, chlorinated chicken is becoming increasingly rare even in the United States. The National Chicken Council estimates that chlorine rinses and sprays are used in less than 5 per cent of American processing plants. Indeed, most of the chlorine used is for cleaning and sanitizing equipment. Instead, the industry often uses organic acids to reduce cross contamination, primarily peracetic acid, which is essentially a mixture of vinegar and hydrogen peroxide. So even if chlorinated chicken imports are allowed, it is hardly going to flood our supermarket shelves in significant quantities.
And then there’s the hypocrisy. Chlorine-washed bags of salad are already common in the UK and other European countries. Our drinking water is also chlorinated. The only difference is that we simply don’t think of them as such. If and when chlorinated chicken is allowed into Britain, no one will treat it any differently to the chlorine-rinsed radicchio we’ve been eating all our lives. Of course I understand why the mental image of a chicken breast dripping in chemicals is off-putting, but that simply isn’t what we’re talking about here.
So why has chlorinated chicken become such a straw man? Partly it’s a result of the very thing a UK-US trade deal would alleviate: protectionism. British farmers have long worried the market will be flooded by cheap American imports, driving down prices and harming their livelihoods. But our farmers already have to compete with producers from around the world. More to the point: why shouldn’t consumers see the benefits of the free market through lower prices? We cannot on the one hand decry Trump for the madness of his trade tariffs yet on the other respond with protectionism of our own.
Then there’s the hangover from the Brexit debates. Chlorinated chicken was a bogeyman of choice for Remainers, who delighted in warning voters – baselessly – of the impending danger of unsafe US meat imports. But most of all, the hysteria over chlorinated chicken reeks of anti-American snobbery. Both in Britain and across Europe, we comfort ourselves with the notion that, even if we’re not as wealthy as our transatlantic friends, we are morally superior. We view their food standards in much the same way as their obsession with religion, guns and Nascar-racing: as the curious customs of a less civilised people.
The truth is Britain desperately needs a trade deal with the US. Ever since the financial crash of 2008, our levels of GDP growth have been pitifully low. Domestic policies, including reforms to planning laws and an expansion of house building, will help but striking a deal with our largest trading partner would be an enormous fillip for the economy and put the UK in a hugely advantageous position at a time when America is putting up trade barriers elsewhere.
If allowing imports of chlorinated chicken is the price we need to pay, it is a small one. The scaremongers should swallow their pride – along with a healthy serving of coq au chlorine.
Joe Biden recalls ‘colored kids’ to be hero of their struggle
In his first public remarks since leaving office, Joe Biden recalled – without a hint of self-awareness – the moment from his childhood he first saw “colored kids” on a bus going by.” It was, in his telling, a pivotal experience, one that sparked his youthful sense of outrage growing up in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
Let’s stop right there.
At best, the speech – billed as his first major intervention since Donald Trump took office – reveals how deeply stuck in the past Biden’s racial worldview really is. At worst, it’s an embarrassing reminder that the Democratic Party continues to view black voters, especially black men, not as equals or thinkers, but as props in white liberal moral storytelling.
As a black conservative, I’ve heard this record before. And frankly, it’s scratched beyond repair.
Biden’s entire political brand on race is based on a tired script: tell a nostalgic story about discovering racism, describe a personal evolution, then promise vague notions of justice and equity. It’s the same formula we’ve been fed for decades. But here’s the problem – it’s not resonating anymore.
Black men aren’t buying it.
Recent polling shows black male support for the Democratic Party is slipping. It’s not because black men have suddenly become conservative ideologues. It’s because the Democratic message hasn’t evolved past 1965 – and worse, it still centers white liberal guilt over black agency.
I’m one of many who are tired of watching Democratic leaders dust off the same worn-out tropes about race, pretending it’s progress while ignoring the real challenges black men face today. I’m not offended – I’m exhausted. Exhausted by politicians who still speak as if our value lies in how shocked white America feels when it finally notices we exist.
When Biden invokes “colored kids,” he’s not just showing his age, he’s showing his framework. In his mind, racial progress is something that begins with white recognition, white outrage and white-led reform. Everyone else is there to serve as narrative color – pun intended – for his moral journey.
This is exactly the kind of condescension that turns voters off. It’s not just the language. It’s the mindset that says: I’m the hero of your struggle.
What Biden and the Democrats haven’t realized is that a growing number of black Americans – particularly men – are tired of being reduced to background characters in someone else’s morality play. They don’t want symbolism. They want results.
Tell a black father in Detroit that his son is going to be safer because Joe Biden had a moral awakening in 1955. Tell a small business owner in Atlanta that rising crime and falling opportunity will be fixed because Biden once “felt outrage” watching a segregated bus roll by. Better yet, try that with a straight face.
This isn’t civil rights. It’s performance art.
And what’s worse? The media gives him a pass. If Donald Trump had referred to “colored kids,” there would be wall-to-wall coverage and think pieces accusing him of white supremacy. But when Biden does it? Silence. The same pundits who scream about “racial sensitivity” suddenly rediscover their capacity for grace. Or maybe just hypocrisy.
That’s the real insult – not just to black voters, but to anyone who values consistency and accountability. It’s a double standard that insults our intelligence. It says the same words can be racist or noble depending on the speaker’s party affiliation.
Let’s be clear: this isn’t about language policing. It’s about recognizing how hollow and performative this brand of racial politics has become. Biden’s rhetoric may have resonated in a post-Civil Rights America, but it lands differently today. Black men are increasingly skeptical of being talked at instead of talked to.
And Democrats are noticing – if only in the polls. You can’t talk about “equity” on one hand while ignoring the real-world failures of urban education, crumbling infrastructure, rising crime, and economic stagnation in black communities on the other. You can’t appeal to working-class black men with throwback stories while pushing policies that prioritize activists over actual outcomes.
At some point, voters ask: What have you done for me lately? And no amount of Scranton anecdotes can answer that.
The truth is, Joe Biden still sees race through a black-and-white television lens. But the rest of America – especially younger black men – live in high-definition. They don’t need a savior. They need a government that works, leaders who deliver, and respect that isn’t laced with nostalgia and pity.
So no, Joe, we’re not moved by your stories about “colored kids.” We’re not inspired by your selective outrage. We’re not props for your redemption arc.
We’re Americans. And we’re paying attention.
China bans Boeing in targeted trade war shot
“If it ain’t Boeing, I ain’t going,” goes the old adage, championing the supposed superiority of the company’s planes on safety issues. If you are traveling in China in future that probably means that you won’t be going very far at all. The US aviation giant is emerging as one of the biggest losers of Donald Trump’s trade war.
China has not merely applied punitive tariffs on the company’s planes; it has banned imports altogether. Even existing orders of planes appear to be affected by the ban. What’s more, the ban applies to Boeing itself rather than to general imports of US aircraft – it is personal.
Boeing, already reeling from the crash of two 737 MAXs in Indonesia in 2018 and Egypt in 2019, lost $11.8 billion last year, and is certain to suffer a further big hit, given that China is the company’s biggest export market. Boeing’s Commercial Market Outlook for 2022-2041 reveals that the company is, or had been, expecting to deliver 8,485 planes to China over the next two decades, as well as to build up a market servicing the planes worth $545 billion.
Boeing’s shares are already down more than 50 percent since their 2018 peak (which seems actually quite modest for a company which has just lost nearly $12 billion in a year). The share price seems bizarrely calm in the face of this week’s news, although that may change when the implications sink in.
Trump’s problem is that the public tend to notice large prestigious products like airliners in the way they wouldn’t, say, notice if China had banned the import of some obscure parts for machine tools. While the latter might impact workers, and the town where the goods are made, a ban on imports of Boeing planes is likely to impact on national pride.
Trump of late has appeared to be no great fan of Boeing’s – in February he lambasted the company for being late in delivering to replacements for the fleet of 747 Jumbos used for Air Force One. He even threatened to buy a second hand Airbus (although not a new one) and convert it for his own purpose. Nevertheless, the American public is unlikely to be impressed that the President has managed to undermine one of the country’s most iconic companies.
On the other hand, it is far from clear that Chinese airlines can do without Boeing. While China does manufacture airliners, and now builds a competitor to the Boeing 737, its aviation industry is a long way behind its rampant electric car industry. To take China Southern Airlines, the country’s biggest airline, 273 of its 862 planes are Boeing and 389 Airbus.
Airbus is likely a big winner from the ban on Boeing imports. The European consortium has two assembly lines in China, and has been steadily pushing aside its longer-established American rival. But even so, it would have to step up production rapidly to make up for the loss of Boeing planes. It will be a struggle for China’s airlines to cope with the forced cancellation of their orders.
That rather emphasizes the negative fallout from trade wars. There are several big losers in the shape of Boeing and Chinese airlines, and while there is one obvious winner in the middle – Airbus – it is unlikely to be able to take full advantage of the situation, at least in the short term, due to constraints in manufacturing capacity.
Boeing’s situation will add to the sense that this trade war is not going to bring many people much good – and that the worst of the fallout could be yet to come.
The making of Van Gogh as an artist came at a terrible cost
Six months before Vincent van Gogh’s death, the critic Albert Aurier, waxing poetical, wrote an article entitled Les Isolés on the then unknown painter. It raised to sainthood the solitary genius driven to insanity by an uncomprehending world. ‘Is he not one of the noble and immortal race which the common people call madmen but which men among us consider sort of saints?’ The man had already become myth. His life would be a sacrament and his suicide a reproach. It has remained that way ever since.
Miles J. Unger thinks otherwise. He recasts our hero as the very opposite of isolé, a painter whose stylistic development was totally dependent on the artists and influences surrounding him in Paris. As for sainthood, what emerges is a Donald Trump or an Elon Musk, a thin-skinned master of coercive control disrupting those around him by the judicious use of rages, sulks, religious high-horsery and entitlement.
Vincent would talk non-stop, day and night, even shaking Theo awake if he fell asleep
After the pastor Theodorus van Gogh was attacked by his oldest son with a knife, he sensibly wanted him committed; but Vincent refused. Responsibility for the Great Disruptor was assumed by his hero-worshipping younger brother Theo, who supported Vincent both financially and emotionally for the rest of his life. Vincent, who never earned a penny, abused and belittled Theo for kowtowing to Mammon while (Unger tritely repeats several times – who edited this book?) biting the hand that fed him.
Fire in the Soul focuses on the years 1886-88 when the brothers lived together in Paris, during which time Vincent transformed from the plodding painter of social protest into the towering genius of universal vision, and Theo came close to breakdown.
First we run through the early life. The religious mania; Vincent taking a cudgel to bed to belabour his back; his evangelising among the poorest of the poor in Borinage, the Belgian coal-mining district. There his oddity was so frightening that people pelted him and he was ejected from the church for excessive missionary zeal.
His art of this period reflected his sado-masochism. Penitential pictures of grinding poverty culminated in ‘The Potato Eaters’, made from the dusty colours of unwashed potatoes. Simultaneously, his untrammelled sex drive led to exploitative relationships, dominating women washed up on the shore of desperation. Following a particular pregnancy, the priest forbade his parishioners to model for Van Gogh. Local life had reached a dead end. The painter fled to Antwerp, flung off his peasant smock and reinvented himself as a flâneur, a sinister pavement-lingerer hunting out models in brothels and dance halls and borrowing the ghastly lecherous leers of Frans Hals to immortalise them. He was treated for syphilis.
When dead-end 33-year-old Vincent flopped on his brother’s Paris doorstep in 1886, the hardworking Theo had spent six years establishing himself as an important art dealer at Goupil’s gallery, supporting his mother and siblings on his salary of 300 francs a month. Vincent got 150 francs. It was never enough. When Theo implored him to stick to a budget, Vincent guilt-tripped him by asking: ‘Am I less than your creditors?’ Employing Vincent in the gallery was disastrous. Spittle-flecked sermons explaining to browsers that art was holy, not just something colourful to hang on a wall, did not go down well.
Vincent persisted in mocking Theo for pimping commercial art while failing to sell his own potato-coloured pictures. But they were unsaleable. Social conscience à la Millet was old hat. Impressionist light-play was the new kid on the block. Theo was selling Monet’s pictures for thousands.
He suggested to Vincent that to increase saleability, colour and light had to enter his canvases. Theo’s wide network of artists provided the material that forged the eventual style. Adolphe Monticelli brought vibrant colour and Seurat’s pointillism inspired study of optical effects and deconstruction, though his disciplined dots were impossible for one inclined towards chaotic chromatic explosions. Perspective was vital to Impressionism, but Vincent found it awfully difficult. He called it ‘witchcraft’ and relied on a patent contraption – a wooden frame with wires arranged like a Union Jack designed to impose mathematical rules upon views. Thankfully, he never got the hang of it. Fantastically subjective multiple-point perspective is part of his magic.
His figures also were hopeless. To improve them, Theo suggested that he study anatomy at Fernand Cormon’s studio. Once again, social awkwardness got him thrown out. And so, while Vincent is able to enthral us with cartwheeling landscapes and close-up portraits that are speeded up studies of psychological states seething with nervous energy, his clumsy unlifelike figures, allied with his wonky perspective, intensify the skewed reality that draws us into his somehow totally convincing irrational world.
Both brothers were suffering from the syphilis that would drive them insane. Both would be dead within three years. These two frantic years that were the making of Van Gogh’s art came at terrible cost. In exalted mood, Vincent would talk non-stop, day and night, following Theo into his bedroom and, if he fell asleep, shaking him awake to continue the monologue. Theo’s dilemma was that while he was barely hanging on to his salaried position that was imperilled by his unhinged brother, he fully understood the emerging artistic significance of that same man.
Vincent’s ‘Self-portrait with Straw Hat’ (1887) is rough and unsubtle, but all the elements are there. The brushstrokes are no longer ad hoc but dynamically directional, as if there’s a gravitational pull behind the whole composition obeying an invisible law, like iron filings responding to a magnetic field. He is also starting what he called ‘colour gymnastics’, based on his belief that complementary colours corresponded to the highest ideal form of earthly love, each fulfilling its potential through action with its opposite.
Event
The Book Club Live: An evening with Max Hastings
Towards the end of two years living hugger-mugger, Theo nearly went under. Giving in, he inhabited the dangerous margins alongside his brother, ‘their vices no longer out of step but synchronised’. They drank too much and whored too much, but the upside was that Vincent drew Theo into the new art of the emerging artists that would take over from established stars such as Monet and Degas. Now Theo bought Toulouse-Lautrec and Gauguin. And it was through Gauguin that Theo was released from this unbearable personal and professional tension. Vincent became obsessed with the idea of painting with Gauguin, and Theo got Vincent out of his hair by bankrolling him to go to Arles and paying Gauguin 150 francs a month to live with him.
Inheriting from Theo the psychological switchback of living à deux with Vincent, Gauguin soon found a way of halting the machine-gun monologues simply by saying: ‘Corporal, you’re right.’ Their nine weeks together in the Yellow House comprise one of the most famous episodes in art history, culminating in Vincent cutting off his ear and spending the rest of his life in asylums before shooting himself. This book ignores Arles, ears, asylums and suicide altogether. Sticking to the word ‘Paris’ in the title, it pointlessly includes two brief and totally inconsequential post-ear journeys to the capital, the first en route from one asylum to another, the second lasting less than a day, with Vincent visiting Theo, his wife Jo and their baby.
Unger, who has also written on Picasso, Machiavelli, Michelangelo and Winslow Homer, ably proves his thesis that Vincent might never have made his artistic breakthrough without those two years in Paris during that highly charged period when the battle of the -isms saw Impressionists fighting like cats in a bag while also warring with the Cloisonists, Divisionists, Synthesists and Symbolists. Their clashing theories formed his style at manic speed, giving him the means to express on canvas art that could not have been forged without the stimulation of that combativeness.
In casting our hero as a bullying Trump/Musk jerking everyone around on a rope braided from rage, religious righteousness, victimhood and utter selfishness, the book lacks humanity and understanding. Read the 600-odd letters between the brothers and you feel gut-wrenching compassion for both. Gauguin’s account of his time in the Yellow House refers to ‘my gentle friend Vincent’. It’s a kinder understanding of an impossible man.
Why we never tire of tales of pointless polar hardship
Benedict Allen has narrated this article for you to listen to.
I’m not altogether a fan of what the writer Sara Wheeler has called the Big Willie school of expeditions. ‘To me,’ I once intoned loftily, ‘exploration is not about conquering nature or planting flags or going where no one’s gone before in order to make a mark. Rather the opposite.’ It’s more about a spirit of inquiry, I went on. If anything, the place should make its mark on you.
How then, do we want our explorers to be? The sort with steely eyes and frosted brow who silently trudges their way poleward despite the odds – though it’s never quite clear any more what they’re usefully discovering? Or would we rather have the boffin – a bespectacled specialist, say, in puffer jacket who genuinely advances humanity’s knowledge while overwintering in a prefab cabin, but frankly risks being a bit, well, dull?
If it’s not an explorer hacking off his frostbitten toes, it’s Nansen or Amundsen haunted by fear of failure
Erling Kagge is the former sort. Known for being the first person to bag not only the South and North Pole but Everest too, there’s no questioning his stamina and intent. Neil Shubin, who we learn is the ‘Robert R. Bensley Professor of Organismal Biology and Anatomy’ at the University of Chicago, is the latter. Neither is a slouch.
Take Shubin. In careful, unimpassioned prose he presents an overview of those at the ice face, as it were, of polar research. There’s the break up of the Larsen B ice shelf, as documented by Nasa’s Terra satellite. Then there’s Willi Dansgaard, the Danish physicist whose diligent analysis of ice cores revealed to us the alarming rise through the centuries of our planet’s temperatures. Next along, a Japanese team questing for meteorites; others tracking the prints of bulky dinosaurs; still others investigating the use by various organisms of antifreeze compounds. We hear of worms that get through hard times by transforming into brittle strands of sugary glass, reanimating maybe decades later when temperatures are more favourable. And, should you want more, there are 20 pages of dense notes and references. All to the good, then. Fascinating. Important, too. Yet, out there in the stark, cold ends of our planet as portrayed by the good professor, there’s something missing. Drama, is it? Or ego? Folly, certainly.
Kagge, by contrast, is absorbing from the start. We are a crazy, messed-up species – that much is known already. But where better to display our workings – the best and worst of us – than on a wide open, icy stage, where the sun at times emits no warmth? You might not think that the continual questing by a few obsessive individuals for a northerly point on the drifting pack ice would make for good reading – we should surely be tiring now of these blinkered and largely irrelevant polar athletes – yet it seems there’s nothing better than a fairly pointless journey into the middle of nowhere to tell us about ourselves.
Out there, our heroes and anti-heroes are stripped down to essentials, like King Lear exposed on the heath. The quest for knowledge turns inward and becomes a quest for self-knowledge – and human improvement. Success lies in being a better tactician, a finer operator in the face of adversity, as he – and it nearly always is ‘he’ – achieves ever higher levels of diligence, preparation and also (you fondly hope) humility.
Of course, when it comes to striding through uniform whiteness it is the inner, psychological journey – or at least our protagonists’ colourful antics – that must deliver. Tales of polar trekkers become character-driven. It helps that the art of dicing with death is quite intriguing in itself, as are great feats of self-delusion. And here they are, a tally of stubborn, maddened strivers who from the time of the Vikings – they called the Arctic hinterlands ‘home of the fog’ – have sallied forth and, to a greater or lesser extent, suffered.
If it’s not an explorer hacking off his frostbitten toes – the act was hard but, we gather, not as hard to bear as the reeking smell of gangrene that had preceded it – then it’s the great Fridtjof Nansen and his protégé Roald Amundsen haunted by ‘a perpetual fear of failure’. The ice floes become a telling backdrop to national rivalry, false pride and hubris – deftly illustrated by the Italian aviator Umberto Nobile’s second (1928) endeavour with an airship, much trumpeted by the fascist Mussolini. It crashed on to the ice, lost its gondola and the now buoyant superstructure rapidly ascended, along with six crew members, never to be seen again.
Looming large in a crowded field of egotists is the ghastly Admiral Peary, a foremost claimant to the North Pole who also claimed quite a few Inuit ladies en route. Over the course of four years in the vicinity of one perceived rival, the Arctic navigator Otto Sverdrup, the American felt unable to take off his mittens to shake the Norwegian’s hand.
Helpfully, all these boreal goings-on are interlaced with Kagge’s own hard-won experience:
When it is between -40˚ and -50˚C outside the tent it is all too tempting to stay in your sleeping bag for just another ten minutes rather than crawl out shivering and freeze like hell. That has been – and remains – the greatest challenge since polar exploration began.
And so to the present day, when our greatest pioneers are the sort brought to us by Shubin; from here, the ‘path of wonder and adventure’, as Kagge puts it, leads elsewhere, ‘past the North Pole to the moon and on into space’.
These books of very different persuasions each have their merits. They also share a schoolboy error, dubbing the august Royal Geographical Society ‘the Royal Geographic Society’. In Kagge’s case, it may be the fault of the translator. But you get the feeling that it is he, the one schooled not by academic rigour but the polar blizzard, who is the explorer who’ll be most niggled to have this pointed out.
Event
The Book Club Live: An evening with Max Hastings
Is there ever a good time to discuss the care of the elderly?
Not far into The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Didier Eribon quotes from this balladesque 1980 track by the French singer-songwriter Jean Ferrat:
We have to be reasonable
You can’t go on living like this
Alone if you fell sick
We would be so worried
You’ll see, you’ll be happy there
We’ll sort through your affairs
Find the photos you love
It’s strange that a whole life
Can be held in one hand
With the other residents
You’ll find lots to talk about
There’s a TV in your room
A pretty garden downstairs
With roses that bloom
In December as in June
You’ll see, you’ll be happy there
‘You’ll see, you’ll be happy there’ presents us with an adult gently addressing a parent about the latter’s imminent entry into a nursing home. For all that the speaker seeks to conjure pleasant scenes, and for all that his future tense verbs point confidently to new horizons, one can’t but feel that this move marks the onset of an ending.
The words, put to music by Ferrat, were ‘more or less the same words I said when it was my turn’, Eribon observes ruefully of his mother’s admission to one of France’s 7,500-odd ÉHPADs (or residential facilities for dependent elderly people):
It was as if I was reciting a text I had learned, the lines of a liturgy that so many others had chanted before and that so many others would repeat after me: a prayer book for sons and daughters with a parent whose life will be entirely changed from this decisive moment on.
The social scripts that we lean on, depart from and rewrite throughout our lives have long interested Eribon. Now 71 and a professor of sociology at the University of Amiens, he burst to the fore in 1989, after some years as a literary critic, with an acclaimed biography of the philosopher Michel Foucault. Later works theorised homosexuality and how the ‘gay self’ is made, arguing that ‘social verdicts’ mark our identities and shape our trajectories. But in the Anglosphere he is best known for Returning to Reims, a memoir about his vexed relationship with his father and his entry into the Parisian intellectual elite after he spurned his working-class roots.
In his new book, which appeared in French in 2023 as Vie, vieillesse et mort d’une femme du peuple, the focus is on his other parent. She goes unnamed, but her long, hard life in a factory and quite rapid death after moving into the residential home tells us much about the personal and political stakes of care for the elderly, family ties and social systems.
As literature helped the young Eribon come to terms with his sexuality and class transgression, so he turns to other writers in later life to better understand his mother’s situation. The breadth of cultural references – we encounter Foucault, Norbert Elias, Annie Ernaux, Albert Cohen and Simone de Beauvoir via German and Japanese fiction – is stunning, and the readings of them are nuanced. Some passages are overly dense, but Eribon is clearly more comfortable writing at one remove, not least because he dis-agreed with his mother about so much.
His diagnosis of how old age, to nobody’s benefit, is neglected in public discourse is spot on, especially in view of the decades-old debate about a sustainable British social care model. Young people are understandably too busy making a life and enjoying themselves to have the conversation; in middle age we tend not to want to initiate it; and the elderly can’t always take part in it.
Yet Eribon evidently misses his mother – ‘I must now speak of her so that she may live again,’ he asserts loyally – and it is in those more intimate moments that the book’s politics acquire real force. Towards the end, Eribon notes how heated rows between mother and teenage son about his disdain for helping her on badly paid leafleting rounds captured how ‘she was a prisoner for life in a reality no one could wish for, whereas I was dreaming of other things, of leaving, of making an escape’.
The Berkeley professor Michael Lucey, who translated Returning to Reims, has again delivered a stylish version that reflects the spare, analytical bent of Eribon’s prose, although some terms (‘grade school’, for instance) won’t immediately resonate with British readers. Moreover, while ‘working-class woman’ is not a bad approximation of femme du peuple, it lacks some of the phrase’s sociological and philosophical breadth, since it is possible to be both comfortably off and a ‘woman of the people’. In that sense, the title in English could be said unwittingly to impose a ‘verdict’ on the book itself. For this uniquely moving memoir, ‘ordinary woman’ would have worked just fine.
Event
The Book Club Live: An evening with Max Hastings
Only Hitler could have brought the disparate Allies together
‘Allies,’ declared Stalin on 8 February 1945, the fifth day of the Yalta Conference, ‘should not deceive one another.’ In order to defeat Hitler, Mussolini and the Japanese, the British, Americans, Soviets, French and Chinese had indeed all worked closely together. But in his meticulous, scholarly and highly enjoyable history of the second world war, Tim Bouverie makes plain just what this entailed: a collaboration that was both deep and rivalrous, riven by secret deals, prejudice, changing loyalties and betrayals, conducted by people who at different times admired, feared and despised one another, while in public most often remaining models of civility.
All the great set pieces are here – Dunkirk, Pearl Harbor, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Normandy landings – as Bouverie traces the twists and turns of a war that lasted five years and nine months, moving from theatre to theatre, dying down in one place only to ignite in another, turning friends into enemies and enemies into friends. But no less interesting are the many sideshows: the disastrous attempt to take Trondheim in April 1940, when Allied soldiers ‘looking like paralysed bears’ floundered in snow drifts; the lengths to which the British went to keep Spain neutral; or the Iraqi revolt of May 1941.
Bouverie was unable to consult the Russian archives, but he has delved deep into the collections available to him throughout the rest of the world, along with the diaries, notes, memoirs and dispatches of an enormous cast of characters, many of whom were shrewd observers, excellent writers and very witty. He is particularly good at bringing them to life with well chosen quotations and pen portraits. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s friend and emissary, whose chronic ill health had made him very thin, was described by one British diplomat as looking like ‘an animated piece of shredded wheat’. Paul Reynaud, the French prime minister, with his narrow eyes and natural smirk, was said to have the ‘countenance of a Samurai educated at Cambridge’, while the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov had ‘small, deep-set eyes’ and the ‘smile of a Siberian winter’. Anthony Eden was ‘a sartorial symphony’.
The crucial importance of personal relations, not just between Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin but between individual ministers and diplomats, and the way that friendships and animosities shaped events, is the central theme of the book. ‘It is fun,’ wrote Roosevelt to Churchill, at a moment of closeness, ‘to be in the same decade as you.’ The Allies, separated by differences of ideology, disagreements over strategy and the sort of peace they sought, entered the war carrying ancestral grudges and profound suspicion of one another. The Americans deplored British colonialism while conveniently forgetting their own racial segregation. There was endless friction over the ‘ruthlessly determined’ Charles de Gaulle, one British officer suggesting that he should be locked up in a lunatic asylum and Churchill wondering whether he had ‘created a monster’. As General Sir Leslie Hollis put it: ‘Roosevelt was suspicious of Churchill, and Stalin was suspicious of everybody. But outwardly they were great buddies.’ As Bouverie writes: ‘Only Hitler could have brought them together.’
The meetings between the Big Three – in Teheran, Casablanca and Yalta – are portrayed as times of great emotional intensity, the leaders playing with words, the diplomats jostling with misconceptions and perceived slights, all sides trying to avoid possibly catastrophic consequences of misunderstandings while accepting deals doomed to disaster even as they were being made. In retrospect, Yalta, the last of the meetings, when Roosevelt was dying, came to be seen as a synonym for gullibility, duplicity and betrayal, though both Roosevelt and Stalin went home saying that never in history had there been so close an alliance. ‘Yalta,’ noted the British historian Chester Wilmot, was ‘Stalin’s greatest victory.’ It took just four weeks before the long betrayal of Poland, over which the Allies had gone to war, was completed by Stalin’s annexation of great swathes of territory and the despatch of thousands of members of the Home Army, along with Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians and Cossacks, to gulags in the far north.
Bouverie’s account of the last year of the war makes for bitter reading today. Much thinking went into what would happen after the fighting ended and Germany was dismembered, with Europe ‘peaceful and happy’ in a United Nations and Roosevelt convinced that world peace would depend on the closest possible co-operation between the US and USSR. Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with America was indeed special then, described by one official as ‘the largest, most integrated, most collegiate military alliance in history’. It is impossible not to read Allies at War without constantly reflecting on the days when diplomats were highly trained, extremely knowledgeable and intelligent, and generals and national leaders had vision and resolve; or on Churchill’s wistful words, written long after the war, about the years in which ‘we seemed to be friends’.
For all the strategic errors and many dis-agreements, for all the 75 million dead and countless numbers displaced, the Allies did indeed defeat the Axis powers, and the foundations of a new world order were laid in the shape of the United Nations, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. But the cooperation did not last. Fresh rivalry, suspicion, the Cold War and the arms race quickly followed. In the end, no one nation had really understood another. It had been, as Adolf Berle, assistant secretary of state, put it, simply a ‘temporary confluence of interests’.
Event
The Book Club Live: An evening with Max Hastings
Christianity in England is dying – and our national identity with it
‘Christianity,’ writes Bijan Omrani in his opening sentence, ‘is dying in England.’ Does it matter? His next sentence makes it clear that, for him at least, it does. ‘In this generation, the religion that has defined the spiritual life, identity and culture of the country since its origins as a unified state in the 10th century has come into its death agony.’ This, he adds, is ‘far more profound than anything like Brexit.’
The implication is either that we are nothing without our religion or we are becoming something unrecognisable and untested by history, a people without a story, with no tale to tell themselves. This book is a history of what we are losing. It is compendious, well written and alarming because we are evidently in danger of losing everything. Omrani’s writing is passionate – his Iranian name comes from his father but he is English born and bred.
The story begins with the arrival of a boat laden with treasure and 40 seamen on the Isle of Thanet in 597. It had been sent by Pope Gregory I who had noticed some boys in a market place with fair skin and hair and beautiful faces. He was told they were Angles – meaning English – but he insisted they were not Angles but Angels. English religious history thus began with a bad pun.
Then, in the 7th century, comes the Venerable Bede, a monk and scholar, who redefines kingship as a matter of Christian morality and sanctity rather than the brute force preferred by the Germanic tribes. From this point on Omrani’s title – God is an Englishman – is thoroughly justified.
The injection of the idea of virtue into the ruler is, of course, unstable. Merely saying the ruler is good and sacred will not always work. Bad kings and queens litter our history. So along comes the law. This provides one of the highlights of the book when, in 1928 in Glasgow, May Donoghue finds there is a dead snail in her bottle of ginger beer. In seeking who was responsible for her injury and distress, lawyers tied themselves in knots. Then four years after the event, Lord Atkin rose in the Lords to deliver a speech which clearly evoked Bedean morality, a superbly nuanced expansion of the injunction to ‘love thy neighbour’ which made the makers of the beer responsible. It was a Christian triumph but, as Omrani cuttingly notes, the case is taught in law schools but ‘few tutors allude to the influence of Christianity in the ruling’. Twentieth-century judges – Denning, Devlin – continued to defer to Christianity in English common law but by the 21st century other judges – Munby, Beatson – rejected this idea as mere rhetoric.
Such stories abound in the book, all providing evidence that we are a country built from religion. Other nations find this hard to believe. Americans, in particular, seem obsessed with the idea that we are peculiarly racist and the most guilty party in the slave trade. In fact we outlawed the Atlantic slave trade and sent the Royal Navy to enforce this in the early 19th century. The Americans slaved on until a civil war put an end to it in 1865.
Anti-slavery feelings were driven by Christian preachers who took seriously the idea that all people should be treated equally well. ‘The idea of human dignity before anything drove the evangelical campaign against the slave trade,’ Omrani writes. Indeed, he sees the 1800s as a golden age of Christian morality. We stopped mistreating children; women and girls were protected from sexual exploitation; and we made serious efforts to suppress working-class poverty.
Of course, there were plenty of doubters. They were driven by the spectacle of scientific and technological progress. They embraced the secularisation thesis –
the idea that with the rise of a modern society characterised by a scientific world view, industrialisation and urbanisation, the role of faith in that society would inevitably recede and eventually disappear.
Omrani does not buy this. He takes a more subtle view that changes in society are the cause of the decline of Christian observance. The self, not society, has begun to matter more to people. Quoting Durkheim, he insists that we need ‘a sufficient degree of homogeneity’ to ensure the sustenance of collective life.
This is edgy stuff and will convince few doubters. As Omrani well knows, the ‘collective life’ is rapidly being dispersed by the ragged bands of individualists lacking in history and burdened by the mere present. Nevertheless, he remains hopeful. ‘We need not think that England is brutish, or deficient in that which might feed and satisfy the spirit.’
This is a tremendous book, whatever you happen to believe. The storytelling and characterisation are gripping in themselves and the arguments are truly profound. They undermine the glib scorn that has emptied our churches and depleted our souls. Read it and weep or, perhaps better, think.
Event
The Book Club Live: An evening with Max Hastings
The boy who would be king: The Pretender, by Jo Harkin, reviewed
Cock’s bones! This is a most wonderly historical novel, the very reverse of a wind-egg. It tells the story of Lambert Simnel, the youthful figurehead of a Plantagenet uprising against Henry VII in 1487. The historical Simnel is an elusive figure, and most of what little we know comes through Tudor propagandists. Jo Harkin fills the gap in the record with enormous brio, channelling this bloody epilogue to the Wars of the Roses through a hapless adolescent who usually has his mind on other things.
Simnel is a pretender in more ways than one. Even he doesn’t know who he really is. The son of an Oxfordshire farmer? A Yorkist bastard, retained by the sinister Lord Lovell as a form of dynastic insurance? The 17th Earl of Warwick and the rightful Edward VI? In the final section of the book, however, when he has been captured by Henry VII, he becomes a different sort of pretender, pursuing a dark strategy of revenge.
When we first encounter him, he’s ten years old and on the losing side of a long-drawn out war with a goat. Soon he’s whisked off to Oxford where, in a house off Gropecunt Lane, a priest force-feeds him literature suitable for a boy of noble birth. Then it’s off to the magnificent court of Burgundy, where his putative aunt, the formidable dowager duchess, primes him for his royal destiny. Next stop Ireland, where he falls for the ruthless but sexy daughter of the Earl of Kildare and is crowned king in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin.
The invasion of England ends in tears at the battle of Stoke Field. Henry VII puts the pretender to work first as a turnspit in the palace kitchens and then as a falconer. But Simnel, now adult and capable of creating his own destiny, has other plans.
There is an extraordinary energy about this novel, due partly to its language – a supercharged blend of Chaucerian and modern demotic English – and partly to Harkin’s almost supernatural ability to channel the chaotic mind of a teenage boy. Simnel is a glorious creation, whether wanking in a garderobe and fearing God might see him or worrying that his new crown will fall off his head in public. (The grown-up Simnel isn’t quite so much fun. To be fair, though, that’s true of everyone.)
All in all, this is the most enjoyable historical novel I’ve read in years. Harkin’s previous book was science fiction. I don’t know what her next one will be but I do know that I shall want to read it.
Event
The Book Club Live: An evening with Max Hastings
The pain of being a Bangle – despite sunshine through the rain
I must say that my feelings about the 1980s American rock band the Bangles were – unusually for me – moderate. I loved some of their hits while being left cold by others. They were pleasant. But after reading this book’s press release, I realised how sorely lacking in appreciation of their impact I’d been:
It’s a story of the challenges faced by women attempting to follow their artistic dreams in a media and music industry ecosystem which seemed set up for their failure from the start… It is a long overdue corrective that restores the Bangles to their rightful place in music history as feminist trailblazers… As Debbi Peterson herself notes: ‘It’s about time that our true story was told. People only see certain aspects of the Bangles, especially as the media has twisted the past, and we have been misrepresented for a long time.
The saying ‘Writing about music is like dancing about architecture’ might generally be true; but skilful writers can at least make their words prance and spin in imitation of music. Jennifer Otter Bickerdike’s book is like number-crunching about alchemy. Though never intentionally amusing, the Pooteresque tenor of the writing can be so. Imagine the Bangles’ shimmery, dreamscape sound. Now imagine the opposite. No banal supposition, no tiny detail of their lives is missed in the early chapters. We are even asked to imagine that a band member’s enjoyment of long car rides with her immediate family to visit relatives in different states was ‘possibly training her for future life as a touring musician’.
A biography without bitching is like a Bloody Mary without Tabasco, and luckily Susanna Hoffs soon joins the Peterson sisters’ combo. She couldn’t help being beautiful, whereas the original group were just ordinary attractive girls. If you don’t want the attention and hassle that good looks bring, as well as the added success and publicity, it’s probably best not to ask a beauty to join your group.
Something that soon becomes obvious is that although the backing Bangles (as I can’t help but think of them) look like stoic worker bees, they are in fact downer divas. A manager of the Runaways referred to a Bangle who was briefly in his band as ‘always having a migraine’. Another Bangle boasted that, unlike her school mates, she didn’t fritter her time away ‘going to parties, getting drunk and throwing up’. Yet another suffered ‘a pretty serious depression’ while trying to decide between college and a music career. A laugh a minute they were not.
But soon the group really had something to moan about. It wasn’t the press who stirred up some imaginary bitch fights between loving mates. Here it is in their own words. Mind you, Hoffs can be pretty annoying as she gloats: ‘I don’t think that the rebel streak of “I’m going start a band” would have happened had I not been raised by my artsy mom and free-thinking dad’ – ignoring all the offspring of labourers and wage slaves who basically invented rock’n’roll. Still, she certainly fits in with the moneyed brats who’ve colonised it these days.
The revamped Bangles quickly made it big time. But by album two, Debbi felt ‘suicidal’ about the choice of producer, and the producer himself was ‘depressed… my life was totally screwed up’. There’s something quite comical about hearing the cute little Bangles tracks of the time – ‘Walk Like an Egyptian’ was one – and discovering that there was all this misery going on in the course of their creation. Apparently the way Hoffs moved her eyes from side to side for about ten seconds at the 2.47 mark during the Egyptian video made the others particularly angry.
The more successful the Bangles became (the album in question goes multi-platinum and gets rave reviews), the unhappier they seemed. Generally this was due to the old saw ‘Be careful what you wish for lest you get it’ , but specifically because none other than Prince in his pomp happened by with his limp little ditty ‘Manic Monday’ and his fancy for Hoffs.
As the gossip columns and pop press increasingly saw Hoffs as top girl, the gloves were really off. A devoted advocate of therapy, Hoffs starred in a film directed by her mother for a laugh. Her bandmates reacted like Horrified of Hollywood. Vicki Peterson harrumphed: ‘I read the script and I couldn’t believe it was getting made… it’s cringeworthy when a woman directs her daughter to dance in her underwear.’ The critics didn’t approve either: ‘Grotesque in the Aids era… borders on child abuse… a teen flesh spectacle.’
Then in 1989 Hoffs had the outright cheek to write the Bangles’s best song ever, ‘Eternal Flame’. It reached number one in nine countries, far outselling their previous hits. But no good deed goes unpunished, and for the other three band members this was the last straw. Even the fan club president became sick with ‘stress’, while Hoffs herself walked around with ‘a knot in my stomach and a bottle of Pepto-Bismol in my pocket’.
It’s a relief when they break up shortly after their greatest hit and best song – and very amusing that, after all that blather about not being taken seriously, they reunited in 1998 to contribute a song called ‘Get the Girl’ (sample lyric: ‘When I saw you/Every single part of me said/Yeah, yeah, yeah/My lips wanted to, you know/Lose control’) to the soundtrack of the gloriously unserious film The Spy Who Shagged Me.
Hoffs and the two Peterson sisters are still together, but not troubling the charts overmuch. Having had only pleasant feelings about them at the beginning, I finished the book thinking what a load of misery-buckets they were, and I can’t imagine it will gain them any new fans, let alone cheer their dwindling followers. If you do a thing you love for a living, don’t moan about it. It’s a lousy attitude, and makes for an even lousier read.
Event
The Book Club Live: An evening with Max Hastings
Magnetic and manipulative – the enigma of Gala Dali
Salvador Dali’s wife Gala was born Elena Ivanova Diakonova in 1894 in Kazan, on the banks of the Volga. Her father was an abusive alcoholic who vanished when she was ten. Her mother, a midwife, moved the family to Moscow where Elena attended an exclusive school. But in 1913 she started coughing, so was sent to a Swiss sanatorium, Clavadel. There she fell in love with a fellow patient, Paul Éluard, who had just published his Premiers poèmes. They got engaged but had to wait until he turned 21 (she was 22) to marry – by which time she had adopted the name Gala. They had a daughter, Cécile, but they left her with his parents.
Éluard was one of the Dadaist circle around André Breton. The big event in spring 1921 was the debut show of a German artist, Max Ernst. Paul and Gala missed it because they were away, so they went to visit Ernst in Cologne and bought his ‘The Elephant Celebes’, the first painting he ever sold. Unfortunately, Ernst’s wife Louise took a strong dislike to Gala – ‘this floating, glowing creature with dark curls, crooked sparkling eyes and limbs like a panther’ – who, she rightly surmised, was trying to steal her husband. Ernst told Louise: ‘I wish I could be happy just married to you, but it does not work.’ Instead, he moved in with Paul and Gala in a very open ménage à trois. Paul told a journalist ‘I love Max more than I love Gala’ and referred to Max as his ‘brother’.
The threesome shared a pavilion outside Paris and attracted local rumours of orgies and witchcraft. But Paul became increasingly depressed. He handed his poetry manuscript Mourir de ne pas mourir to his publisher and disappeared the next day. He telegraphed his father: ‘I’ve had enough. I’m going travelling.’ Most of their friends believed he was dead. In fact he was on a ship to Guadeloupe, then Panama, whence he wrote to Gala: ‘You alone are precious. I have never loved anyone but you.’ Then he sailed on to Tahiti, and finally Saigon. Max and Gala went out to persuade him to come home, but Max stayed in Indochina. Their ménage à trois was formally over.
Gala and Paul reappeared in Paris as if they had never been away. Then they met the new art star, Salvador Dali, who invited them to stay in Cadaques. Dali, at 25, was still a virgin and Gala, ten years older, found his youth and neediness very appealing. She became his ‘life coach’ and, according to Dali, taught him ‘how to dress; how to go downstairs (without falling six times); how to eat (without throwing chicken bones at the ceiling); how to recognise enemies and how to stop losing their money’.
Louis Aragon called Dali ‘Avida Dollars’, but actually it was Gala who ran their finances and was very shrewd about it. At first they relied on a single wealthy patron, Edward James, but once they were known in New York (after MOMA gave Dali a one-man retrospective when he was only 38), they got greedy. Dali started doing society portraits at $25,000 a pop and even designed clothes, furniture and accessories. Air India was so pleased with an ashtray he created that they gave him a baby elephant.
Gala complained that she was being ‘turned into a businessman’, so she hired an Irishman, Captain Moore, to help her. They agreed that she would continue to sell Dali’s original paintings and drawings, but Moore could take 10 per cent of all deals he generated. (He said that he made $500,000 in his first weekend.) He got Dali doing editions of lithographs, but from 1965 he had Dali signing blank sheets of paper to which he could then add a doodle or a forgery. When this practice was exposed in 1974, it left Dali’s reputation in tatters. But Moore said it was all Gala’s fault: ‘Gala is a mean, stingy old woman who refused to pay me what I am worth. So I paid myself.’ When he died in 2005 he was found to possess 10,000 fake Dali lithographs
By the late 1960s, Dali and Gala were rarely together. His usual escort was an English model called Amanda Lear and Gala retreated to a castle he bought her called Pubol. Her last great project was to create the Dali Theatre-Museum in Figueras, which opened in 1974 shortly after her 80th birthday. She attended the opening but then had a serious fall and was scarcely seen again. She died in June 1982. Dali moved into Pubol but was severely injured in a fire. He died in 1989.
There were times when I wondered whether this book was produced by AI because it is so weirdly written. For instance, right at the beginning Michèle Gerber Klein tells us that Gala was born in Russia, officially in 1894 but possibly 1890. The disputed birth date sounds interesting but Klein never discusses it: instead she informs us that Russia is ‘an 8,800,800-square mile landlocked empire that stretched contiguously eastward from Sweden and the Baltic Sea to the Bering Strait in the Pacific Ocean’. This is followed by two pages of Russian history before Gala is mentioned again, and then we get a history of Kazan.
This eagerness to whizz off into Wikipedia crops up again and again. Whenever Gala and Dali go to a dinner party, Klein gives us details of every guest, even though they never recur. She just cannot keep her eye on the ball. Which is perhaps why Gala herself seems so elusive. We are told that countless people found her ‘fascinating’ but it is a bit hard to see why. Everyone agrees she was shrewd, scary, intelligent and very beady about money, but her fascination remains a mystery.
I met her once in 1969 when I went to interview Dali at the Hotel Meurice in Paris. Dali’s entourage melted away when Gala entered the room and conversation died. She patted the sofa, indicating that I should sit next to her, but her first (and only) words were: ‘I never speak to journalists.’ I didn’t find her fascinating.
Event
The Book Club Live: An evening with Max Hastings
Dangerous games of cat and mouse: a choice of crime fiction
Psychosis and thriller writing are never friends. Even when told from the psychotic’s point of view, madness is always hard to portray since it involves a form of chaos irreconcilable with the resolutions we find in any thriller worth its salt. Havoc (The Borough Press, £16.99), by the American writer Christopher Bollen, is a remarkable exception, with the added bonus of being brilliantly written.
Maggie Burkhardt is an 81-year-old widow who has spent the six years since her husband’s death living in a succession of resort hotels. We now find her installed in the grandly named but slightly shabby Royal Karnak Hotel in Luxor. There she has ample opportunity to indulge her favourite pastime of intruding into people’s business – the result, she assures us, of her ‘insatiable need to help others’. Identifying a couple whose marriage she decides is unsustainable, Maggie embarks on a disruptive campaign, facilitated by pilfering a maid’s pass-key that allows her to place an incriminating scarf in a bedroom where it doesn’t belong.
This chicanery coincides with the arrival of new guests – a smart young woman with her eight-year-old son in tow. The boy, Otto, is savvy well beyond his years and almost majestically malign. He soon cottons on to Maggie’s sadistic contrivances, and blackmails her into paying for an upgrade at the hotel for himself and his mother. When he increases his demands to include an XT Megabox games system, Maggie decides to turn the tables on him, but soon finds herself in a dangerous contest, as each of them works to discredit the other.
The battle manages to be both gripping and hilarious as other characters, including a gay couple Maggie befriends by the hotel swimming pool, prove unwitting accomplices in the struggle. Maggie is a wonderful creation, and the malevolent Otto is equally appealing – and appalling. I have not enjoyed the prose of any book as much in a very long time.
Charlotte Philby’s strength as a writer of spy novels lies in the novelty and depth of her characters, and this has carried over to her recent foray into more conventional detective fiction. Dirty Money (Baskerville, £16.99) features an odd but compelling duo. Ramona Chang (her adopted name, we eventually learn) is a young, London-based woman with a drug habit she is intent on kicking with the help of AA-like daily meetings. A former journalist, now in some danger from her exposé of a powerful crook, Ramona is trying to establish herself as a private investigator. The going is tough. In no position to be choosy, she finds her services engaged by a young woman who has been abused after trying to join what purports to be an upmarket escort agency supplying hard-up female students to ‘sugar daddies’.
Madeleine Farrow could not be more different. Aged 50, the daughter of a diplomat and the inheritor of a pricey flat in Marylebone, she works as a detective sergeant in the Serious Crime Investigation Department, located near Charing Cross in what is colloquially known as SCID Row. Just back from investigating a paedophile ring in Vietnam, Madeleine is assigned to tracing the money of an imprisoned Kazakhstan official as it gets laundered in London by his free-spending family. She soon finds there is more than tax-dodging to uncover, and a link emerges to Ramona and her pursuit of the dating scamster.
The connection is predictable but also credible, and smoothly made. The many London settings are vividly portrayed, ranging easily between the East and West End, from tawdry bedsits to gaudy displays in Harrods, and even an academic’s office at the LSE. The dialogue is sharp but resonant, and Philby is particularly good at portraying the complementary mindsets of her protagonists. It’s not a flawless book – sometimes the descriptive prose can seem formulaic, even laboured – but the characters and narrative pace offset the occasional stylistic hiccup. Philby has made the transition from espionage to detection with aplomb, and laid the ground for what should be an excellent series.
Crime fiction now attracts many ostensibly literary writers, and the most successful examples of this change of genre see the author bringing high calibre prose to a strong, tense plot. But in Death Takes Me (Bloomsbury, £16.99), by the acclaimed Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza, the balance seems out of kilter, and the result is a frustrating, gnomic kind of read.
We begin with a brutally castrated male corpse that has been discovered by the ‘Informant’ who is then questioned by the ‘Detective’. Lines of poetry have been sprayed on the wall of the alley where the body lies. The poet, Alejandra Pizarnik, is a real writer, while the Informant is named Cristina, and is a professor, like the author.
The effect of this blurring of real identities with fictive ones is at best playful, at worst confusing, and ultimately exhausting. Identities shift between gender, names are provisional and often changed or dropped altogether, and the savagery of the serial killer is lost in a melange of poetry and descriptive prose, including a rambling rumination on prose poems. The give and take needed when a literary writer steps into thriller terrain is all take here.
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The Book Club Live: An evening with Max Hastings
Holy City by Henry Wise (No Exit Press, £9.99) has a hero in search of a ghost-filled past. Will Seems works as a deputy sheriff in the small town where he grew up. He has been away for ten years, but unfinished business and some persisting guilt have brought him back.
When a childhood acquaintance is found stabbed to death, the father of Will’s best childhood friend is arrested for the murder. Will is certain the man is innocent, but since his boss, the town’s long-serving sheriff, is content with an easy solution to the case, Will has to work on his own to clear the accused. His efforts stir more than mere memories, and we learn why he left town and why he feels the shame that triggered his hasty departure.
This is classic Southern Gothic terrain – a land of chiffarobes and wrecked cars, of faded grandeur and present-day squalor. It is not a skein of American literature much in fashion now. But Holy City injects it with considerable new life, and there is a freshness to the prose that lifts the novel above the time-worn environs of William Faulkner and Harper Lee. Race is an issue, but a subordinate one, and never the most important feature of any character. There are many scenes of great power – and comedy: a coffin at a funeral turns out to be empty; a colleague at the factory where Will once worked is so famously lazy that it comes as a shock when he is finally fired for idleness. This is a debut that manages to use old tropes in a new way, and one looks forward to more from Henry Wise.
The mystical masterpiece from Stalag VIII-A
Olivier Messiaen was a French composer steeped in the solitude and ecstasy of Catholic mysticism: everything he wrote was dedicated to the greater glory of God. He was in thrall to the liturgical works of Stravinsky, but also to the percussive cling-clang of Javanese gamelan music and other eastern sonorities. His thirst for ‘un-French’ music sometimes put him at loggerheads with the Paris old guard who found him as fandangled and foreign as a pagoda.
His ability to create new possibilities in sound was of course what made him modern. Messiaen was scarcely 20 when he wrote his hauntingly strange Préludes for piano in 1929 and the no less mysterious orchestral suite Les offrandes oubliées (Forgotten Offerings). These are among the most lovely works of devotional music to have come out of interwar Europe. The hushed intensity of the music, which has scarce metre or pulse, later left its mark on Miles Davis, for one, who saw in the French composer a pre-jazz master of the sonic impressionist sketch. There was a stillness in early Messiaen that suggested new horizons.
His most famous composition by a long chalk is Quatuor pour la fin du temps (Quartet for the End of Time). Written for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, it was first performed in the winter of early 1941 at Stalag VIII-A, a German POW camp in Görlitz, Silesia, where Messiaen was a prisoner. The ‘end’ in the title refers to the abolition of time as proclaimed by the Angel of the Apocalypse in the Book of Revelation. The Quartet’s wild and whirling passages reflect the drama of St John’s prophecy, but overall the impression is of a quiet, melancholy contemplation of the divine. The piece was a signpost in the development of contemporary classical music; its third movement, ‘Abyss of the Birds’, evokes a blackbird’s song and is utterly beautiful or, as the poet and librettist Michael Symmons Roberts puts it, ‘heartsore in its longing’. The Quartet combined the abstract pianistic moods of Debussy with a gamelan-like sense of ‘movement through stasis’. It has been a staple of Symmons Roberts’s adult life.
His meditation on Messiaen and the legacy of the prison camp masterwork looks at a religious avant-gardist who was often misunderstood and vilified in his day. (Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie was likened to ‘bordello’ music when it premiered in 1949: its electronic whoop sounds and giddy-making colouristic alchemy exasperated many critics.) Messiaen persisted with his musical vision. In his lifelong fascination with bird song Symmons Roberts detects a St Francis-like reverence for living creation. Messiaen believed that birds had managed to fly free of the suffering attendant on the Fall and somehow survived ‘intact in our wounded world’.
He had experimented with transcription of bird song since his teens and by the end of his long career in the early 1990s he had built up an archive of more than 200 notebooks of birdcall notation with audio recordings made by his wife as backup. The notebooks became the basis for his extraordinary 1950s cycle for piano known as the Catalogue d’oiseaux, in which dawn chorus trills and answering calls metamorphose musically into a new avian idiom. Debussy’s translation of the sea into orchestra in La Mer undoubtedly provided a model for Messiaen, who took non-western harmonic developments a step further into Stock-hausen territory.
Messiaen’s elevation of bird song into a state of holiness became a touchstone for Symmons Roberts during Covid lockdown when, he writes, ‘the world contracted to the size of a house and a small garden’. He tape-recorded blackbirds in full-throated chirp in his back garden outside Manchester and became quite an obsessive ornithologist. Like Messiaen, Symmons Roberts is a Roman Catholic who believes in the symbolic real presence during the Eucharist. (He is currently poetry editor of the indispensable Catholic weekly the Tablet).
In a beguiling chapter, ‘Tangle of Rainbows’, he visits the site of Görlitz camp on the German-Polish border, which is now a pilgrimage destination for Messiaen enthusiasts. According to popular myth, the Quartet was performed with Messiaen at the piano to an audience of 5,000 fellow POWs (or was it 400? – the record is uncertain). Reportedly the piano was a saloon-bar upright with sticky keys and the cello was missing a string. Symmons Roberts wonders about that. His guide says the instruments were most likely brought in brand new from Görlitz town and that the cello had its full complement of strings. Probably we shall never know the truth, which has got muddied by afterthought.
Along the way, Symmons Roberts connects the devotional poetry of John Donne and the agonised spiritual musings of Simone Weil to Messiaen, whose music amounts to one of the most profound spiritual contemplations of our age. This wonderful book should help to win the strange, bird-fixated composer new admirers.