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THE WEEK

1 FEBRUARY 2020 | ISSUE 1264 | £3.80

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Britain goes it alone Page 5

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4 NEWS

The main stories…

The coronavirus: how scared should we be? shared its full genetic code with Britain and many other nations were colleagues worldwide – a process scrambling to evacuate their citizens that in the case of Sars took months. from the Chinese city of Wuhan this Beijing has closed tourist sites, week as fears grew that the outbreak deployed temperature-checking of coronavirus there would lead to a equipment at ports and stations, and global pandemic. Until 20 years ago, imposed a “near lock-down” on a coronavirus would give humans no Wuhan, a city of 11 million people more than a common cold, said known as the “thoroughfare of Annie Sparrow in Foreign Policy. But China”, along with a dozen other three times so far in the 21st century, nearby cities – restricting travel at a novel – and far more deadly – forms time when tens of millions of Chinese of coronavirus have emerged. First normally head home to celebrate the came Sars (severe acute respiratory Lunar New Year break. Whether syndrome) in 2003, then in 2013, these drastic measures work remains the Mers (Middle East respiratory to be seen, said Thomas Abraham in syndrome) epidemic, both causing The Guardian. The Sars outbreak around 800 deaths. And now the “mysteriously disappeared” after strain emanating from Wuhan. As checks stations ports Temperature at and nine months, and this one may do of Wednesday, the virus has infected the same. “On the other hand, if the more than 5,000 people in China, number of cases and deaths increase, China’s rulers could face causing at least 132 deaths – and these numbers keep rising something they fear more than the disease itself: anger at a despite the imposition by Beijing of the largest quarantine botched response and social discontent.” operation in history. Confirmed cases have been found in 19 other countries. Hong Kong, Russia and other neighbouring Beijing has acted with impressive despatch so far, said The territories have imposed border restrictions.

Independent. It has sent an army of medical workers into Wuhan and, amazingly, has almost finished building a new Could “Wuhan flu” be the “oft-predicted ‘Big One’”? It’s 1,000-bed hospital in the city in the space of just ten days. But too early to tell at this point, said Mark Honigsbaum in if its response has been quicker The Sunday Telegraph. One than it was in the case of Sars, disease modeller caused alarm “China’s wildlife markets provide the perfect the threat it is dealing with is last week by speculating that conditions for creating human pandemics” that much bigger. China is a the virus would have a similar far more mobile and globally mortality rate – around 3% – connected country than it was back in 2003: “more than to Spanish flu, the virus that encircled the world in 1918-19, 200,000 people take flights in and out of China every day, infecting a third of the world’s population and killing more six times as many as at the time of Sars”. than 50 million people. But it’s a “misleading” comparison.

It was based on confirmed coronavirus cases among hospital “When you’re done worrying about this outbreak, worry patients. There may be many thousands more asymptomatic about the next one,” said David Quammen in The New York patients doctors don’t know about. Besides, most of those Times. For make no mistake: there will be more. Combine the who died from Spanish flu were young adults in the prime of life, while most of the victims of this outbreak have been older rise in air travel with China’s crowded wildlife markets, with their mix of live and dead animals (the Wuhan virus is thought people with pre-existing conditions. It’s also too early to tell to have come from bats or snakes in the city’s food market) how contagious the Wuhan virus is, said Julia Belluz on Vox. and you have the perfect conditions for creating pandemics.

Preliminary evidence suggests that it’s less so than Sars, but These “wet markets”, where meat is sold alongside piled cages more so than seasonal flu, a virus that, lest we forget, still of live snakes, porcupines, foxes and other exotic species, are a “kills between 250,000 and 650,000 people annually”. clear menace to public health, said Dr Jonathan Quick in The Daily Telegraph. Beijing tried banning them in 2013, but that The one thing we can say for sure, said Tom Hancock in the just drove the trade underground, potentially raising the FT, is that China has responded with greater urgency to this contamination risks. The best option may be to concentrate on outbreak than it did to the Sars epidemic. Within a fortnight making these markets safer while, over time, shifting consumer of the Wuhan virus coming to the authorities’ attention on 29 preferences to more hygienic sources of food.

December, Chinese scientists had identified the pathogen and

It wasn’t all bad Tesco is to stop selling plasticwrapped multipacks of tins, to cut its use of single-use plastic.

Instead of using plastic to bind store-cupboard staples such as baked beans together, the supermarket will offer permanent multi-buy deals on individual tins. Packaging is being removed from Tesco’s own-brand products, as well as those made by major brands such as Heinz, Green Giant, John West and Princes. It says the change will save 350 tonnes of plastic a year.

A British adventurer has become the first Briton to scale the world’s most remote peak unaided.

At 2,020 metres, Spectre is not especially high, but the mountain is so isolated, 450km south of the South Pole on Antarctica, that only ten people have seen it, and only one other team has climbed it. Those climbers used a vehicle to get part of the way, but Leo Houlding (above), along with Jean Burgun and Mark Sedon, kite-skied the 2000km to and from the mountain, pulling 2,00kg of kit on sledges behind them. A film of their adventure will be shown at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.

Archaeologists have retrieved around 100 objects dating from the 14th and 15th centuries from a four-metre medieval cesspit discovered beneath Somerset House in central London. The haul, which includes drinking vessels, tablewear, a rare Penn floor tile and a ring, are believed to be the only surviving artefacts from the opulent medieval mansions that once stood on the Strand. The cesspit was found when archaeologists were given access to Somerset House during the refurbishment of the Courtauld Gallery.

COVER CARTOON: HOWARD MCWILLIAM THE WEEK 1 February 2020

…and how they were covered

NEWS 5

Brexit day

Enough of this “defeatism”, said Leo McKinstry in the Daily Express. Since the Brexit vote, the pro-EU diehards have A “long and bruising chapter in Britain’s wallowed in gloom. But, contrary to their political history” has drawn to a close, forecasts, unemployment is at its lowest said The Times. Last week, the Queen rate since 1974 and sterling is buoyant. gave assent to the European Union And now Brexit looks set to spark “a withdrawal bill, enshrining in law British renaissance”. Last week, the CBI Britain’s departure from the bloc, and reported the greatest surge in confidence Boris Johnson called for the “rancour and among manufacturers on record, and the division” of the past three years to be left IMF has predicted that over the next two behind. This week, “Britain becomes a years our economy will grow faster than fully independent nation for the first time that of any other major European in almost half a century,” said The Mail economy. Indeed, as a German I’d say on Sunday, and we should rejoice. To Sign here: less than a year to negotiate a deal Europe could learn a lot from the British, commemorate the event, a 50p coin with said Alexander von Schoenburg in the the inscription “Peace, Prosperity and Friendship with all Daily Mail. Germany’s economy is “on the brink of nations” was due to come into circulation on Friday. At 11pm recession”; President Macron of France is locked in a losing that day, the end of the UK’s 47-year membership of the EU war to reform the “vast and creaking” French state; and Italy was set to be marked by a light display in Downing Street, is in permanent decline. Free from Europe’s shackles, Britain with a countdown clock projected onto No. 10. can “look forward to the future with confidence, while the EU and its member states remain trapped in bureaucratic sclerosis, Brexit day is being cast “as a moment of national liberation”, obsessed with regulation and welfare”. said Fintan O’Toole in The Observer. But who is really being liberated? Not Scotland, and not Northern Ireland – which Britain’s withdrawal is “a good thing for the EU”, said Luuk both rejected it emphatically. Not even London. Brexit marks Molthof on EUObserver. Until the Tory victory in December, the liberation of a nation that doesn’t exist: “England without many in Brussels had hoped for a change of heart. But the UK London” and parts of Wales. The public mood is now one of was always a “difficult partner”, and the wrangles over Brexit “listless acceptance”, said Nick Cohen in the same paper, but have dominated European politics in recent years. The EU has that’s just because we’re sick of the whole debate. The coming other “important challenges” to tackle, such as how to beef years will see Britain isolated and in decline. We’re leaving the up its common foreign policy and promote closer integration. most successful free trade zone on Earth, in favour of an That’s the point, said Quentin Letts in The Sun: the British uncertain new relationship with the EU. “Businesses that rely don’t want to be part of the EU’s ever more ambitious federal on the frictionless movement of goods will suffer.” The future project. Britain is leaving “the annoyingly intrusive legal and of industries from pharmaceuticals and car-making to fishing political entity known as the European Union”. We are not, is at risk, threatening “hundreds of thousands of jobs”. When though, leaving Europe: we will always remain a proud part historians look back on 31 January 2020 they will conclude of it. Our flag may no longer stand outside the European that “the pain was yet to come”.

Parliament, “but people of Europe, we still love you!”

After Brexit: what happens now?

Britain will enter a “twilight period” from 1 February, said Jim Brunsden in the FT. It will continue contributing to the EU budget and will still be bound by EU laws for 11 months – but it will lose its seat at the decision-making table. By Monday, the UK’s 73 MEPs will have lost their jobs, Union Jacks will have been taken down all over Brussels, and Britain will be marked as a foreign country on EU maps. Yet the European Commission will still have the power to investigate breaches of EU law in the UK, and the European Court of Justice will be able to impose fines.

For citizens, life will carry on as normal until the transition period ends on 31 December this year. Free movement for both British and EU citizens will continue: travel arrangements and holidays won’t be affected. British subjects will still be able to use the EU channel at airport passport control gates, and use UK driving

licences in Europe. Britain has already started introducing blue passports in place of the EU burgundy version, but there is no need to change them until they expire. For businesses, very little will change in the short term; UK-EU trade will continue without extra checks or charges during the transition period.

What follows after 31 December depends on the outcome of “unprecedented” negotiations, said Jon Henley in The Guardian.

The talks – covering a “vast sweep” of areas including trade, security, fisheries, data and foreign affairs – will begin after 25 February, with a tariff- and quota-free trade deal the priority. By 1 July, the UK must decide whether to request an extension to the transition period, which Boris Johnson has ruled out. EU officials say a deal, if there is one, must be in place by 26 November for the European Parliament to approve. If no agreement is signed by 31 December, Britain will fall back on World Trade Organisation terms – effectively the same outcome as a no-deal Brexit.

THE WEEK

When Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced that they were leaving the UK, the novelist Philip Pullman was quick to sympathise.

Britain, he said in a tweet, is a “foul country”. Pullman is entitled to his view. But even if Britain is foul, is it really more foul than other nations? Comparisons are tricky, but consider some of our neighbours. Italy is corrupt and unstable, and until recently, was in the grip of the far-right. In France, police brutality, especially against minorities, is on a scale unimaginable in Britain. Germany may have a liberal reputation, yet it only passed same-sex marriage laws in 2017, and the far-right AfD is the largest opposition party in the Bundestag. The supposedly progressive Danes have some of the most hostile anti-immigrant policies in Europe; Islamophobia is a serious and growing problem in tolerant Sweden; and every year, visitors to the Netherlands are shocked anew by “blackface” celebrations at Christmas. Foul as we may be, international surveys show that Britons have some of the most welcoming attitudes to immigrants in Europe. We’re unusually kind and generous: we were rated the sixth most charitable country in the world in the 2018 World Giving Index. And Britain gives more in international aid than any country except the US. Of course, the UK is far from a utopia, and people should continue to speak out against injustice, discrimination and prejudice. To do so is a positive act: it reflects a belief that even if we’ll never be perfect, we are perfectable; but simply to dismiss the country as “foul” is a counsel of despair.

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1 February 2020 THE WEEK

Politics

6 NEWS Controversy of the week

The Huawei dilemma Boris Johnson has made a “generation-defining error”, said Nick Timothy in The Daily Telegraph. This week, the National Security Council, which the PM heads, decided to allow Huawei a crucial role in the development of Britain’s 5G network. This technology is not, as some seem to think, “simply the next generation for mobile phones”. Its wireless networks will be “at the heart of everything we do for years to come”. 5G will transform “homes, hospitals, farms, factories, cities and utility grids” – supporting everything from smart household devices and virtual-reality entertainment to autonomous cars and remote surgery. It will turn personal data into the “world’s most important commodity”. That’s why Tuesday’s decision, announced after months of debate, presents such a “very serious threat”. By permitting a Chinese firm with Huawei: a crucial role in 5G close links to the People’s Liberation Army to build large parts of our 5G network, we are inviting a “Chinese fox into the henhouse”. The move risks “exposing British companies to the theft of intellectual property, British governments to geopolitical blackmail”.

Many Tories opposed the move, said Dan Sabbagh in The Guardian – including Johnson’s Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace. But it was a “sensible compromise” between security concerns and “the need for a fast and affordable roll-out of 5G”. Huawei has been providing telecoms technology to Britain for 15 years, and UK spy agencies firmly believe that any risks can be mitigated. It has been excluded from supplying “core” parts of 5G infrastructure – the servers and software that actually handle data – and restricted to antennae and base stations, in which it is the world leader. But giving the green light to Huawei will “come at a cost”, said Francis Elliott in The Times. The US vocally opposed the decision, arguing that China could use it as a back door for cyberattacks. White House officials have suggested it could jeopardise both US-UK trade talks and Britain’s membership of the “five eyes” intelligence-sharing group of countries (also including Australia, Canada and New Zealand).

Johnson has shown that he is not Donald Trump’s poodle – but there may be “consequences”.

This was a “pragmatic” decision, but not a very satisfactory one, said The Daily Telegraph. The country has been forced to rely on Chinese infrastructure because “home-grown alternatives” are simply unavailable. Only three companies in the world make the kit needed to roll out 5G and none are British (the other two being Ericsson of Sweden and Nokia of Finland). It is deeply regrettable that we have lost the expertise we once had in telecoms but, on the upside, this episode forces us finally to confront that reality. The National Security Council has limited Huawei’s share of the 5G market to 35% and the plan is to reduce this over time as domestic suppliers spring up to fill the gap.

Britain and its closest allies must build up their know-how in this crucial area. “As Dominic Raab, the Foreign Secretary, told MPs, we must never be placed in this position again.”

Spirit of the age Arts Council England has said that instead of referring to “artists”, it will use the term “creative practitioners”, as it believes this will make its work more inclusive. Announcing the move as part of its ten-year plan to champion culture for “every person in every town, village and city”, the funding body said some people were uncomfortable with the term “the arts” and assume it only refers to visual arts of “high art”, such as ballet or opera.

Fifty super-rich but timepoor tourists boarded a privately chartered Boeing 757 last week for a 24-day around-the-world tour.

Costing from £108,000 a head, the trip includes ten flights, 23 five-star hotels, and visits to Luang Prabang, Kyoto, Rio de Janeiro and the Galápagos Islands.

THE WEEK 1 February 2020

Good week for:

Billie Eilish, who swept the board at the Grammys. She won five awards including best new artist, album of the year, record of the year and song of the year. Eilish also broke two records: at 18, she is the youngest person to win all four main awards, and she is also the first female artist to do so.

Giovanni Ferrero, chairman of the Italian firm behind Nutella and Ferrero Rocher, who paid himself and his family a £542m dividend – one of the largest in European corporate history.

Bad week for:

The Church of England, which was criticised for warning heterosexual couples who opt for civil partnerships that they should not have sex. Christian teaching is that sex outside heterosexual marriage is sinful and the House of Bishops decided that civil partnerships, though legally binding, are not marriages.

Anxious flyers, who may be about to lose their right to bring “emotional support animals” on to flights in the US. Following a surge in complaints about support animals, US officials have said they might change the rules so that only trained service dogs are allowed on board. In recent years, passengers have tried to board aircraft with a range of animals, including spiders, possums, iguanas, peacocks, ducks, pigs and even a squirrel.

Victoria Derbyshire, with the sudden cancellation of her BBC2 daytime series. She said she was “devastated” that the Bafta Award-winning show was being axed; a petition to save it has attracted more than 37,000 signatures. The BBC said it was having to cut 450 jobs in news to make £80m savings.

Smart motorway deaths

The Government is urgently reviewing Britain’s network of “smart“ motorways after a BBC Panorama investigation found that 38 people had been killed on them in five years, and that the number of near-misses had soared.

During busy periods, smart motorway hard shoulders can be used as extra vehicle lanes, but this can leave drivers whose cars break down trapped in speeding traffic. All smart stretches are to be fitted with radar technology to quickly trace any cars that stop in a live lane. The number of emergency areas – currently spaced up to 1.5 miles apart – is to be increased.

Facial recognition

The Metropolitan Police is to begin using facial recognition cameras to catch serious and violent offenders, and to help it find missing people. The cameras are being deployed following a High Court ruling, which is subject to an appeal, that their use in specific circumstances in Wales was lawful. In the Met’s trials, the software has led to a high incidence of “false positives”. The cameras will be set up in places likely to be used by specific suspects, such as outside railway stations and pubs.

Poll watch 82% of Britons are in favour of species that are extinct in Britain being reintroduced.

36% would like to see the return of wolves and lynxes and 24% want brown bears to be brought back.

YouGov 53% of people in Britain think that capitalism “does more harm than good in the world”. In the US, the figure is 47%, but it rises to 63% in China, 69% in France and 74% in India.

Edelman Trust Barometer/ The Independent 63% of Britons feel they have received a better school education than their parents. However, only 45% say they have a better standard of living and just 29% believe they have better job security.

YouGov/The Guardian

Europe at a glance Oswiecim, Poland Auschwitz remembered: More than 200 Auschwitz survivors gathered at the site of the Nazi extermination camp on Monday to mark the 75th anniversary of its liberation (see page 13). Former prisoners spoke of their experiences and urged their audience to be mindful of the evil of which mankind is capable. “Young people should understand that nothing is for sure, that some terrible things can happen and they have to be very careful. And that, God forbid, what happened to the Jewish people should never be repeated,” said Jeanette Spiegel, 96. Many of the survivors (including Igor Malickij of Ukraine, pictured) were dressed in blue and white hats or uniforms, similar to those they were forced to wear at the camp, where an estimated 1.1 million people – mostly Jews but also Roma, gay people and Jehovah’s Witnesses – were murdered.

They spoke in a purpose-built tent which enveloped the “Gate of Death”, where prisoners were brought into the camp in cattle wagons. Last week, world leaders – including Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron, and the Prince of Wales – gathered to commemorate the occasion at Yad Vashem remembrance centre in Jerusalem.

NEWS 7

Moscow “Fake” parties: The Kremlin is reported to be planning the launch of at least three “fake” political parties, in a bid to create the illusion of democracy and give a boost to President Putin’s United Russia party, says The Times. The groupings are expected to act as “spoilers”, inhibiting the rise of genuine small parties. If, as anticipated, they fail to attract 5% of the votes, their tally will be redistributed to larger parties. United Russia, which has slumped in popularity, would be the main beneficiary: the extra votes could enable it to maintain a majority in the Duma. Putin recently unveiled sweeping constitutional changes seemingly designed to let him keep control of the reins of power after his current presidential term ends in 2024.

The Hague, Netherlands Myanmar genocide ruling: In a historic, unanimous judgment delivered last week, the International Court of Justice in The Hague has ordered the government of Myanmar to protect its 600,000 Muslim Rohingya people from genocide, to preserve evidence of past crimes and to report regularly to the tribunal about its progress. The court – the principal judicial body of the UN – stopped short of ruling that the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya in Rakhine state, which began in August 2017, amounts to a genocide: a verdict on that issue could be years away. But it did unanimously find that there was prima facie evidence that such a genocide had occurred, and issued a ruling akin to a “restraining order” on Myanmar while the court considers the case. It is a humiliating blow for Aung San Suu Kyi, the civilian leader of Myanmar, who travelled to The Hague so that she could defend her country’s armed forces in the case in person.

Lisbon Whistleblower: Two weeks ago, the world’s press began publishing stories revealing the allegedly corrupt methods by which Isabel dos Santos, Africa’s richest woman, amassed her fortune (see page 16). The source of these leaks has now been revealed: 31-year-old Portuguese hacker Rui Pinto (pictured). A football fanatic and founder of Football Leaks, he is currently in jail for exposing – allegedly by illegal means – extensive tax evasion by some of Europe’s top football players. His lawyer says he did not set out to expose corruption in Angola: it just turned out that Portugal’s football clubs and Angola’s political and business elite used the same banks – whose computers he had hacked.

Catch up with daily news at theweek.co.uk

Emilia-Romagna, Italy Populists suffer setback: The far-right leader Matteo Salvini suffered a blow to his political ambitions last weekend when his anti-immigrant League party failed to wrest control of the wealthy northern Italian region of Emilia-Romagna from the centre-left Democrats (PD). Salvini, who was forced out as interior minister when his party’s coalition with the Five Star Movement collapsed last year, had hoped victory in the regional election would bring about the fall of the national government – a coalition between PD and Five Star. Even though his party failed to unseat the PD (the region has been leftwing for 70 years), the coalition government may still fall, thanks to Five Star’s disastrous showing in the election: it won just 4.74% of the vote in Emilia-Romagna.

To make matters worse, its leader, Luigi Di Maio, has resigned after a mutiny by his own MPs. The coalition currently has only a slim majority in the senate.

Berlin Far-right soldiers probed: Germany’s military intelligence agency – the Militärischen Abschirmdienst, or MAD – has revealed that it is investigating 550 serving soldiers on suspicion of having links with far-right extremist groups.

Christof Gramm, the head of MAD, told the Welt am Sonntag newspaper that last year 14 soldiers were sacked for having links with far-right organisations: eight had been found to be neo-Nazis. A further 40 had been sacked for a “lack of constitutional loyalty”. Twenty of the cases being investigated concern members of the Kommando Spezialkräfte (the KSK, Germany’s equivalent of the SAS), which has acquired a reputation as a hotbed of far-right activity. The number of KSK cases being investigated is proportionately five times higher than for the rest of the armed forces. Gramm said the surge in the number of soldiers under suspicion was on account of increased scrutiny by MAD. 1 February 2020 THE WEEK

8 NEWS

The world at a glance

Washington DC “Peace plan”: Donald Trump unveiled his long-awaited peace plan for the Middle East on Tuesday – describing it as a “realistic two-state solution”.

Speaking next to his close ally, the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump described Israel as a “light unto the world”, and said “they want peace badly”. However, the plan was dismissed as a “conspiracy” by the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and it sparked protests in the Gaza Strip.

Although the plan includes a path to some form of Palestinian state (albeit one with no army), it sets many conditions for this, including the “complete dismantling of Hamas”. It also leaves Jerusalem as Israel’s “undivided capital” and grants the strategically important Jordan Valley, which makes up about a third of the occupied West Bank, to Israel.

After the press conference, Netanyahu – who is seeking re-election on 2 March – said he would take steps to begin annexing West Bank settlements within days.

New York Rape testimony: Two of Harvey Weinstein’s accusers have given harrowing testimony at his trial in New York. Miriam Haley, a former production assistant on one of his TV shows, broke down in tears as she described being assaulted by Weinstein at his New York apartment in 2006. Having behaved “normally” at first, Weinstein, she alleges, suddenly lunged at her, pushed her into a bedroom and forcibly performed oral sex on her. “Every time I tried to get off the bed he would push me down,” she told the court. “I was mortified. I was just crying, ‘No’.” Earlier, the actress Annabella Sciorra had testified that Weinstein had violently raped her in 1993 or 1994 after knocking on the door of her Manhattan apartment and forcing his way in. The statute of limitations for that alleged crime has expired, but prosecutors hope Sciorra’s testimony will convince the court that Weinstein is a repeat “sexual predator” – a charge that could see him jailed for life.

Washington DC Bolton book complicates Trump trial: Republicans in the US Senate were under renewed pressure this week to call John Bolton as a late witness in the president’s impeachment trial, following the leak of the manuscript of The Room Where It Happened, his forthcoming memoir. Bolton – who served as Trump’s national security adviser from 2018 to 2019 – apparently alleges in the memoir that Trump personally demanded a freeze on military assistance to Ukraine until it agreed to investigate his Democratic rivals, including Joe Biden. “There can be no doubt now that Mr Bolton directly contradicts the heart of the president’s defence and therefore must be called as a witness,” said the Democrats prosecuting the impeachment case. However, unless four Republican senators vote with the Democrats to allow witnesses in the Senate trial, Trump could be acquitted within days.

Ciudad Hidalgo, Mexico Tough line on migrants: Mexican security forces dressed in riot gear massed on the border with Guatemala this week to confront a caravan of 4,000 people trying to make their way north to the United States. Police used tear gas to disperse the group as they waded across the Suchiate River; about 800 people who did get into Mexico were rounded up and put on buses. Mexico’s left-wing president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador (known as Amlo), took office just over a year ago vowing to give free passage to the many migrants fleeing poverty and violence in Central America. But under intense pressure from the Trump administration, which threatened to close its border and impose tariffs on Mexican goods, the government has reversed course.

Critics have accused it of effectively building Trump’s promised wall for him – on Mexico’s southern border.

New York Prince “not cooperating”: Prosecutors who are investigating multiple sex abuse allegations against the late Jeffrey Epstein have complained that they have had “zero cooperation” from Prince Andrew, despite him promising last year that he would be willing to help US law enforcement. The FBI reportedly contacted the Prince’s lawyers but received no response.

Financier Epstein hanged himself in jail in August while awaiting trial on trafficking charges. Andrew has insisted he did not know Epstein well and saw no evidence of his crimes. Prosecutors may, however, wish to talk to him about his friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell, who is accused of having acted as Epstein’s procurer. This week, a source said the Prince had not heard from prosecutors and would be “happy” to talk to the FBI. THE WEEK 1 February 2020

Belo Horizonte, Brazil Deadly landslides: At least 53 people died in flooding and landslides in southeastern Brazil last weekend after 48 hours of torrential rain. At least 44 people were killed in the state of Minas Gerais, where the capital, Belo Horizonte, suffered its heaviest rainfall for 110 years, according to the National Institute of Meteorology. Another nine people died in neighbouring Espírito Santo. Thousands were forced to flee their homes and the death toll in both states is expected to rise. The deluge coincided with the first anniversary of the mining dam collapse in the Minas Gerais town of Brumadinho, which killed some 270 people; 11 others were unaccounted for and are now presumed dead.

The world at a glance Sivrice, Turkey Deadly quake: At least 41 people were killed, and more than 1,600 injured, in a powerful earthquake of 6.8-magnitude that struck southeast Turkey last Friday evening. The epicentre was close to the town of Sivrice, in the sparsely-populated province of Elazig, where people rushed onto the streets to escape collapsing buildings. Sivrice, a town of about 4,000 people, is a tourist spot on the shore of Lake Hazar, the source of the Tigris.

Tremors were also felt in neighbouring Syria, Lebanon and Iran, and more than 950 aftershocks were recorded over the weekend. Turkey’s government is now opening a criminal investigation into “provocative” social media posts attacking the official response to the quake: President Erdogan has fiercely denied criticism that the country was ill-prepared to deal with it.

Baghdad Anti-US rally: Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis took to Baghdad’s streets last Friday to protest the killing of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani by a US drone and to demand an end to the US military presence in Iraq. It follows a parliamentary vote last month calling for the expulsion of foreign forces. On Sunday, three rockets hit the US embassy in Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone – the first direct strike after months of near misses. Three people were reported injured. Washington blames Iran-backed Iraqi militias for the attacks.

Alongside the anti-American protests, there has also been a resurgence in the anti-government protests – over corruption and the lack of jobs – that have shaken southern Iraq since October. More than 500 people have been killed in the brutal response of the security forces.

NEWS 9

Peshawar, Pakistan Sedition charges: The leader of a protest movement that campaigns against human rights abuses and kidnappings carried out

by Pakistan’s powerful military and police force, has been arrested on charges of criminal conspiracy and sedition. Ever since the extra-judicial killing of a Pashtun man

by Karachi police two years ago, Manzoor Pashteen, leader of the non-violent Pashtun Tahafuz (Protection) Movement (PTM), has drawn tens of thousands of supporters to join peaceful protests across Pakistan.

Pyongyang Here’s auntie: Kim Jong Un’s aunt, the only sister of the late North Korean leader Kim Jong Il, has appeared in public for the first time in six years – puncturing the widespread belief that she had been purged along with her powerful husband, Jang Song Thaek, back in 2013, when he was executed on charges of plotting a coup against Kim Jong Un. The aunt, Kim Kyong Hui, appeared with Kim and his wife at a concert in Pyongyang; her sudden re-appearance is seen as a notable display of the unity of the Kim dynasty.

Harare Generous émigré: The four-month long doctors’ strike that has crippled Zimbabwe’s health service is now at an end. Strive Masiyiwa, a Zimbabwe-born telecoms billionaire, has stepped in and offered personally to pay them a guaranteed subsistence allowance for the next six months – and the doctors have accepted his offer. It means that 2,000 hospital doctors will now receive a minimum of around $300 a month, from a fund of about $6.25m: some of those who have been on strike currently receive less than $100. Masiyiwa, the London-based founder of the telecomms group Econet Wireless, has an estimated fortune of $1.1bn. Zimbabwe is currently plagued by triple-digit inflation which is eroding salaries and savings.

Nairobi Locust plague: A vast area of east Africa is experiencing its worst infestation of locusts for decades. Huge swarms are destroying crops and fodder and threatening an already vulnerable region with famine.

The locust “mega-swarms” emerged in Yemen last summer, and in recent months have wiped out farms in Ethiopia and Somalia. They have now spread south to Kenya: last week a swarm measuring 60km by 40km was seen in the northeast of the country. In the last major locust crisis of 2003-5, it cost some $570m to bring the infestation under control.

Sydney, Australia “Invasion Day”: Tens of thousands of people in cities across Australia marked its national day last Sunday by holding “Invasion Day” protests, drawing attention to injustices suffered by Aboriginal Australians. Campaigners for indigenous rights have long objected to holding Australia Day on 26 January, the date when the first British colonists landed at Sydney Cove in 1788. It has become a divisive issue. The conservative PM Scott Morrison is a strong supporter of the status quo: new rules require municipalities to hold citizenship ceremonies on that day.

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

People

10 NEWS Walliams’ famous friends Having had huge success as a comedian and writer, with 37 million book sales to his name, David Walliams moves in glamorous circles, says Cole Moreton in The Mail on Sunday. But that doesn’t mean he is always at ease around celebrities. Simon Cowell (his fellow judge on Britain’s Got Talent) is a friend – but he still feels star-struck in his company. “I have to tell myself to stop and just relax,” he says, “but then Simon creates an aura of fame around him.”

And on set, Cowell can be tricky. Walliams’ role on BGT is to make teasing jokes, but if Cowell is in the wrong mood, they don’t go down well.

“Sometimes he’ll say: ‘That’s not funny. Shut up.’” Walliams frowns. “I say: ‘I’m just trying to make your show better. I can sit here and say nothing if you want.’” But not all A-listers are like that. Elton John, with whom he has been on holiday, may have once had a diva-ish reputation, but he is “a lot more normal than Simon Cowell. He’s very blokeish in a lot of ways. I’m not into football, but if you are you’ll never be short of something to talk to him about.”

Britain’s youngest MP On 12 December, 23-year-old Nadia Whittome’s life changed overnight, when she went from living at home with her mother in Nottingham to being Britain’s youngest MP. It has been a whirlwind, she told Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian.

“It does feel really odd that,

not very long ago, I was looking for Christmas temp work and now I’m a Member of Parliament.” Having dropped out of university, she was working as a carer when she decided to run as a Labour candidate. “When are you going to get a proper job?” she recalls being asked. “I’d say: ‘I’ve got a proper job; I’m a care worker.’” And though she is young, she reckons it has left her with more “life experience” than many older MPs. “Jacob Rees-Mogg is in his 50s and he’s never changed a nappy.”

Larry David on Larry David Larry David co-created the hit TV sitcom Seinfeld, but now he is better known for playing an exaggerated version of himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm. The fictional Larry is so tactless, he offends people wherever he goes – yet David was shocked when people said the show made them cringe. “It never occurred to me,” he told GQ. Far from finding his on-screen persona mortifying, he rather admires him as a truth-teller.

“When you think of the way we conduct ourselves in life, how much bullshit we have to endure, and how much bullshit comes out of us just to avoid hurting someone’s feelings... I don’t think I’m a bad guy. I’m honest.” In one famous scene on the show, Larry interrupts a young girl as she sings (badly) at a friend’s party. “Would I ever stop a girl from singing in my life? No. Would I stand there thinking, ‘Boy, I wish I could stop her’? Yes! That’s why there’s a show.”

Castaway of the week This week’s edition of Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs featured the Booker Prize-winning writer Anne Enright 1 Intermezzos: Op. 117, No.1 by Brahms, performed by Glenn Gould 2 Jersey Girl, written and performed by Tom Waits 3 A Case Of You, written and performed by Joni Mitchell 4 Then You’ll Remember Me by Michael William Balfe, performed

by De Dannan 5 The Man Comes Around, written and performed by Johnny Cash 6 Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Laurie Anderson, performed by Laurie Anderson 7 Tower of Song, written and performed by Leonard Cohen 8* Soave sia il vento from Così fan tutte by Mozart, conducted by Karl Böhm, performed by Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, Walter Berry, Christa Ludwig and the Philharmonia Orchestra

Book: In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust Luxury: high-thread-count cotton sheets

* Choice if allowed only one record

THE WEEK 1 February 2020

When Siya Kolisi lifted the Rugby World Cup in November, it was hailed as a defining moment in his country’s history. The first black player to captain South Africa’s rugby team – a symbol of white supremacy during apartheid – had now led his side to victory over England. “Since I’ve been alive I have never seen South Africa like this,” he said on the pitch afterwards. Born in 1991, Kolisi grew up in Zwide, a township outside Port Elizabeth, and slept on the floor of the two-bedroom house he shared with five other relatives. “It was difficult, in the sense that we couldn’t eat and didn’t have a lot of resources,” he told David Walsh in The Sunday Times.

“Sometimes there would be no food in our house and, though it was embarrassing, I would hang out at neighbours and ask for food. Every time they would give something.” His life changed when he won a full scholarship to Grey High School – a prestigious boys’ school where his talent blossomed. “At first I was just OK at rugby. I was very small. Missing a lot of meals over the years hadn’t helped. At Grey, they had to stop me from eating too much. I was on my third plate while the other boys were still eating their first plate.” Only at 16 did he grow into his frame; he now stands at 6ft 2in and is over 16 stone. “I don’t think I would have grown unless my nutrition had improved. No kid should be in that situation.”

Viewpoint:

Praise the imperfect body “Five years ago, an American psychology student coined the phrase ‘dad bod’. The dad bod, she wrote in a blogpost in praise that went viral, is ‘a nice balance between a beer gut and working out’. It says, ‘I go to the gym occasionally but also enjoy eating eight slices of pizza at a time.’ With the fifth anniversary of this coinage coming up, I have a question. Men! Why have you not returned the favour? In 2020, there is still no term for women who are fairly fit but still have a bit of jiggle in the middle, and have never knowingly passed up a cheese sandwich. I look in vain for blogs by young male students affectionately and lustfully hymning the mum bod. Chivalry has failed.”

Caitlin Moran in The Times

Farewell Kobe Bryant, basketball star and winner of two Olympic golds (see page 22), died 26 January, aged 41.

Seamus Mallon, advocate for peace and former deputy first minister of Northern Ireland, died 24 January, aged 83.

Viscount Montgomery of Alamein, gregarious son of war hero Monty, died 8 January, aged 91.

Nicholas Parsons, broadcasting legend, actor, radio and TV presenter, died 28 January, aged 96.

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NEWS 13

The liberation of Auschwitz

This week the world commemorated the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the most notorious of the Nazi camps How was Auschwitz liberated? to imprison (and execute) Polish political prisoners. They were supervised by The Red Army launched a major offensive in January 1945; in just over internees: criminals from Germany, two weeks, Soviet forces advanced from who established a reputation for sadism. central Poland to near the current border Gassing, using Zyklon B cyanide pellets, was pioneered there on Soviet POWs in with Germany. On 27 January, they 1941. As the War went on, the first stage liberated Auschwitz, in the town of of the genocide, the mass killings carried Oswiecim, and its 40 or so satellite camps; 230 Soviet troops were lost in out by the Einsatzgruppen – death squads combat that day. By then, Auschwitz following Axis forces across Eastern Europe – gave way to a more systematic had largely been evacuated: Heinrich Himmler, one of the architects of the “final solution to the Jewish question”.

Holocaust, had ordered that no evidence It was agreed by Nazi officials at the Wannsee Conference in January 1942 should fall into Allied hands. The Soviets found only 7,500 prisoners, mostly sick that Jews from all over Europe would and close to starvation, many confined to be transported to camps in Poland, bunks covered with filth and excrement which had the continent’s largest Jewish – and more than 600 corpses. Most of population, and annihilated through the inmates – about 58,000 – had been The Soviets found just 7,500 prisoners left at the camp forced labour and mass murder. The evacuated earlier in the month, on “death first mass transport came in early 1942. marches” taking them deeper into German-held territory.

How did the death camp work?

How did witnesses remember the episode?

People were crammed into livestock wagons from all across Many in the Nazi camps “experienced their liberation as a sudden Europe. Upon arrival, they were subjected to a “selection”: those absence of guards rather than as an arrival of Allied liberators”, deemed useful were sent right to be registered, and set to work on writes the historian Dan Stone. One of the great memoirists of starvation rations; the rest were sent left to the showers for Auschwitz, Primo Levi, described ten days of chaos in the wake “delousing” – i.e. to Birkenau’s gas chambers. The average number of the Germans’ departure. On 27 January, four young Soviet of bodies disposed of between 1942 and 1944 was 1,000 per day, soldiers arrived on horseback: he wrote that they seemed though between April and July 1944, when 430,000 Hungarian ashamed, “throwing strangely embarrassed glances at the Jews were deported to Auschwitz, it was around 6,000 per day. sprawling bodies, at the battered huts and at us few still alive”.

The disposal was done by Sonderkommando, “special squads” of One Soviet officer, Georgii Elisavetskii, remembers the survivors mostly Jewish prisoners, who were wiped out at regular intervals. trying to hide from him before he spoke in Yiddish: “Do not be afraid, I am a colonel of Soviet Army and a Jew. We have come to What impact did the liberation of Auschwitz have? liberate you,” he said. “Finally, as if the barrier collapsed ... they At the time, not much, certainly in the West. The New York rushed towards us shouting, fell on their knees, kissed the flaps of Times devoted only two paragraphs to the discovery of a “murder our overcoats, and threw their arms around our legs.” Despite the factory” at Oswiecim. The Allies had been aware of the genocide Soviets’ determined efforts, about half of those inmates died. since at least 1942 (see box); the Russians had discovered other major camps in 1944. But in the West, there was suspicion of Why is Auschwitz particularly notorious? what was seen as Soviet propaganda about Nazi crimes, and only It was the Holocaust’s most deadly site. The numbers are over time did the scope and machinery of the final solution come estimates – the SS destroyed their records – but about 1.1 million into clear focus. In Auschwitz, the SS guards had blown up the people were killed at Auschwitz: 960,000 Jews, 75,000 Polish main crematoria and gas chambers, but surprised by the speed civilians, 25,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet of the advance, they left abundant prisoners of war, and 15,000 others. evidence. As well as the survivors, Uncovering the Holocaust It was also unusual. There were The extermination of the European Jewry began when the Russians found 837,000 women’s various types of camps in the Nazi the German army invaded Russia in July 1941. Reports garments, 370,000 men’s suits, and system: concentration camps, such as 7.7 tonnes of human hair. of massacres in the USSR leaked rapidly out of Nazioccupied Europe.

By the end of the following year, the Dachau, for keeping enemies of the free world knew, in outline, that a genocide was under regime; extermination camps, such Why is this anniversary way. The Polish government-in-exile had compiled a as Treblinka; industrial labour particularly significant? report from its underground resistance networks, and camps; and prisoner of war camps.

In 2005, the UN designated 27 in late 1942 it issued a document to the embryonic The 15-square-mile Auschwitz zone January as International Holocaust United Nations entitled The Mass Extermination of contained all of these: Auschwitz I, Remembrance Day, urging every Jews in German Occupied Poland, which Anthony a concentration camp; Auschwitz IImember nation to commemorate Eden referenced in the House of Commons.

Birkenau, a death camp; Auschwitz its victims and to help prevent future In 1943, a report by Witold Pilecki, a Polish officer who III-Monowitz, built by IG Farben to acts of genocide. The date was chosen had volunteered to be sent to Auschwitz, and had later make synthetic rubber; and dozens escaped, was the first comprehensive account to reach because of Auschwitz’s centrality to of sub-camps. Some 200,000 inmates the killing of around six million the Allies. It included details about the gas chambers, the selections and medical experiments conducted by survived Auschwitz, so it is relatively Jews under Hitler’s regime. “After Josef Mengele and other doctors.

Further eyewitness well remembered. By contrast, more Auschwitz, the human condition accounts by Auschwitz escapees – 196 prisoners than 800,000 died at Treblinka in is no longer the same,” declared successfully escaped in total – circulated in early 1944. eastern Poland, but there were just another survivor, Elie Wiesel. But But in Britain, it was the liberation of Bergen-Belsen 67 Jewish survivors to bear witness. the ceremonies this week are likely concentration camp in April 1945 that was the moment to be the last major events at which of real revelation. There, British forces found some of Why was Auschwitz chosen? survivors will be present. They mark the evacuees of the camp system in Poland: 60,000 Originally a Polish army barracks, starving, mortally ill people, and thousands of corpses. the moment at which the Holocaust Auschwitz I was adapted in mid-1940 is passing out of living memory.

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

Young adults need a home of their own Liam Halligan The Sunday Telegraph

The dirty secret of Britain’s rivers Editorial The Guardian

Green policies that make people see red Philip Stephens Financial Times

Bash London and you hurt the nation Clare Foges The Times

THE WEEK 1 February 2020

Best articles: Britain Home ownership is in steep decline, but don’t let it bother you, declared The Economist last week: the British need to get over their property “fetish”. I beg to disagree, says Liam Halligan. The fact that well over half of 25- to 34-year-olds today are locked out of the property market should concern us deeply. Only 41% of those in this “crucial family-forming age” are property owners, compared to 67% in 1991. Even many professional couples in that age group, people who as children grew up in leafy suburbs, now find it impossible to get on the property ladder. And almost a third of 20- to 34-year-old men are still, amazingly, sleeping in their childhood bedrooms. “Such a sudden reversal in generational fortunes, on such a large scale, tears at the social fabric.” It’s not just that owning your own home is cheaper and more secure than renting it. It’s that it roots people in their local community; it gives them a stake in the economy through their ownership of capital.

A society loses its cohesion when these benefits are concentrated in the hands of an ever more exclusive class of property owners.

It’s great to see wild swimming making a comeback in Britain, says The Guardian. But you have to live near the coast to enjoy it. For while many beaches are formally designated as bathing areas – the sea around them having been regularly tested for cleanliness – no such system exists for our rivers. However, if outdoor swimmers in Ilkley, Yorkshire, win their campaign to get designated status for part of the River Wharfe, it may soon do so. Just 14% of our rivers met the EU standard of “good” cleanliness. Indeed, there are 17,600 sites in England where untreated effluent can flow into rivers; and though companies can be penalised – Southern Water was recently fined £126m for failing to work a sewage plant properly – they seldom are. Environment Agency prosecutions for polluting rivers have actually fallen – from 30 in 2014 to just three in 2018. It’s folly. As other nations recognise, clean inland bathing areas benefit both tourism and the environment. Germany has 1,900 inland bathing waters rated sufficient or above; Italy 660; France 1,300. “The UK should paddle fast to catch up.”

“We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get reelected once we’ve done it.” Jean-Claude Juncker’s warning about the electoral price to be paid for introducing austerity policies after the global crash proved “painfully prescient”, says Philip Stephens.

The voters felt the “left behinds” had been made to pay for the sins of the financial elite and voted accordingly. And a similar populist backlash is brewing today over the issue of climate change. Many political and business leaders accept major changes are needed if we are to reach the targets of a carbon neutral world by 2050. No more cheap flights. No more gas boilers. No more driving around in old bangers. So officials are busy devising ambitious “green deals” to reorient the economy. But what they’ve not given any thought to is how to offset the cost of these changes on lowincome voters – the people who will feel them most keenly and who are in no mood to be cheated again by “wealthy globalists”; the people who drive to work, don’t have the cash to replace the boiler and take a cheap flight for their annual holiday. Politicians beware: the rage of France’s gilets jaunes, whose protests began over an increase in fuel taxes, is a sign of things to come.

London-bashing is all the rage these days, says Clare Foges.

There’s a sense the capital has grown too rich and dominant, and must be “brought down a peg or two”. The Government, mindful of this mood and the need to keep new Tory voters in the North and the Midlands happy, is directing far more spending to the regions and has floated the idea of moving the Lords to York.

Labour leadership contenders are falling over themselves to stress their provincial roots. The BBC has declared that two-thirds of its staff will eventually be working outside London. And, yes, there’s much to be said for the idea of “levelling up” the regions – but we mustn’t undermine the capital in the process. London generates a quarter of Britain’s GDP. It’s the magnet that attracts the “entrepreneurs and tech geniuses” who spark the economy. They’re drawn to its arty districts, its cosmopolitan food scene, the buzz of being a centre of power – the “panoply of experiences” that only a megacity like London, Shanghai or New York can provide.

To hobble London would be “an act of national self-harm”.

IT MUST BE TRUE…

I read it in the tabloids Two men who were filmed showering while riding a motorbike together in Vietnam have been fined by police. Footage shows the pair riding topless, their torsos lathered in soap, with a bucket of water between them. The passenger gleefully pours the water over the driver, who grins after washing his hair and face.

After the footage was posted on social media, the duo were tracked down and fined 1.8 million Vietnamese dong (£60) for traffic violations.

A pensioner was taken aback after discovering his own grave in a cemetery. “I’m still alive,” protested Alan Hattel as he stood beside his tombstone in Forfar, Scotland. “My phone hasn’t rung for three or four months. I’ve been confused, but now I know why nobody has been calling.” The retired welder, 75, said his wife – from whom he has been separated for 26 years – was responsible. Although still alive, she had bought a joint headstone and plot to save their children money. But Hattel only found out after the grave was spotted by friends. “I’m struggling to take it in,” he said. “I don’t even want to be buried.

I plan to be cremated.”

A Kansas man has asked an Iowa judge to let him engage in a sword duel with his former wife and her attorney, so they can resolve their disputes “on the field of battle”. David Ostrom, 40, said that his former wife Bridgette and her attorney, Matthew Hudson, had “destroyed him legally”, and he was entitled to meet them in combat, where he would “REND THEIR SOULS from their … bodies”.

© PAUL REID

14 NEWS

Best of the American columnists

NEWS 15

The Virginia gun rally: “terrorism” on US soil?

So much for the hysterical predictions, out of fear of what might happen. said Dan Gainor on FoxNews.com.

The event took place on Martin Luther King Day, a holiday that From the media coverage ahead of last Virginia has in recent years declared week’s protest by gun rights activists in the Virginian capital of Richmond, a “Lobby Day”, when citizens can air you’d have thought we were facing their grievances to legislators; yet no “the start of the second civil war”. other demonstrators dared turn up.

The protest may not have been lethal, There were all sorts of blood-curdling warnings about “white nationalists” but to the extent that it intimidated armed to the teeth and threatening lawmakers and scared other citizens insurrection. In the event, we got “a out of exercising their own right to rally so peaceful that the protesters free speech, it was “arguably the most even picked up their own trash”. The successful use of terrorism on US soil crowd was demonstrating against a in nearly a generation”. package of new gun restrictions under “The irony is that these gun-toting people are scared” consideration by the new Democratic You can just imagine the response if majority in the state’s legislature. And quite right, too, said the this rally had been organised by left-wing protesters or black Washington Examiner. The measures would “make a mockery nationalists, said Jamelle Bouie in The New York Times. But of due process and create more barriers for law-abiding citizens white men still have the power to get away with it. The irony is to exercise” their Second Amendment right to bear arms. that these gun-toting people are scared, said Petula Dvorak in The Washington Post. Many fear that a “red flag” law allowing Yes, this protest was not as bad as some feared, said Will weapons to be temporarily removed from troubled individuals Bunch in The Philadelphia Inquirer. But don’t you dare call is part of a plot to disarm them. But two-thirds of all gun deaths it “peaceful”. There were 22,000 people – many dressed in in Virginia are suicides, and most of those who kill themselves camouflage and masks, bearing assault rifles and even grenade are rural white males over the age of 45 – almost exactly the launchers – gathered outside the seat of the state government. demographic at the rally. “Think about it, guys. The biggest Local businesses shuttered their doors, and many residents left thing you have to fear, when it comes to guns, is yourselves.”

A nation overrun with bathrooms Derek Thompson The Atlantic

Clinton’s clumsy swipe at Sanders Katherine Timpf National Review

Why America supported Prohibition Mark Lawrence Schrad The New York Times

Why does America have “so many damn bathrooms”? It’s a question many foreign visitors ask themselves, says Derek Thompson, and with good reason. Over the past half century, the number of bathrooms per person in the US has doubled, to a 1:1 ratio, and these rooms are continuing to multiply. They’re getting bigger, too: the typical size of a bathroom in a new family home in the US has doubled since the 1970s, from 35sq ft to 70sq ft. The obsession with what used to be the smallest room in the house has reached particularly insane levels among the super-rich. Last year, it was reported that a $49.9m mansion in Bel Air, California had eight bedrooms – and 20 bathrooms.

Across the nation, the share of houses with ten or more bathrooms has almost doubled in the past decade. This is partly down to America’s abundant space, but it’s also a matter of fashion. With their Jacuzzis, steam showers, rainfall heads and other “gizmos”, bathrooms have become status symbols, but they’ve also acquired a new role as sanctuaries where people, in today’s constantly connected world, can luxuriate in seclusion. The bath, originally conceived by the Romans as a space to “convene with the world, has become one of the last places where we can truly disappear from it”.

Hillary Clinton is making headlines again, says Katherine Timpf – this time with a blistering character assassination on Bernie Sanders. “He was in Congress for years,” she says of the Democratic presidential candidate in a new documentary. “Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” Asked whether she would support Sanders if he were to become the Democratic nominee, Clinton demurred. So what effect has this “brutal attack” had on the man she beat to that role in 2016? Have his backers deserted him? Of course not. Twitter has instead been abuzz with messages of support for the Vermont senator, who trades on his image of being a thorn in the side of the establishment. Such has been the backlash that Clinton had to take to Twitter to clarify that she would back any Democratic nominee. It’s the second time in this primary that Clinton has given a boost to a candidate she intended to bring down, following her “absurd” allegation in October that the Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard was being “groomed” by the Russians. It’s further proof, as if it were needed, that Clinton is just not very good at politics.

A century ago last month, the 18th Amendment came into effect, banning the sale of alcoholic drinks across the US. It’s popularly assumed that Prohibition was forced on an unwilling public by “Biblethumping” crackpots, says Mark Lawrence Schrad, but that’s a gross misunderstanding. There were in fact no outraged street protests against the reform; no frantic, last-minute dashes for booze.

The US had already been “dry” for the previous six months thanks to the 1918 Wartime Prohibition Act. And even before that, 32 of the 48 states had already enacted their own alcohol bans. Far from representing a radical fringe, the temperance movement had enjoyed long-standing popular support.

Among those who backed Prohibition were Frederick Douglass and Theodore Roosevelt. What bothered reformers was not just the social ills caused by alcohol, but the thought of people making money from this. Saloon-keepers were seen as “parasites”, enriching themselves off the back of the feckless poor. Alcohol was the early 20th century’s opioid crisis. If today you object to the “predatory capitalism” of “big pharma”, then it’s more than likely that you would, 100 years ago, have been among the “vast majority of Americans calling for the prohibition of liquor traffic”.

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

16 NEWS

Best articles: International

The fraud claims facing Africa’s richest woman Isabel dos Santos “spun a story the half-brother is on trial for corruption. world wanted to believe”, said the Both of them deny wrongdoing, as does Isabel dos Santos herself; she says International Consortium of the claims against her are “completely Investigative Journalists (Washington).

She was Africa’s richest woman, who unfounded” – part of an “orchestrated had amassed an estimated $2bn attack” coordinated by the Angolan fortune in Angola’s male-dominated government and “foreign media”. business world. Dos Santos was feted Few will shed tears for her: the case is a warning to African rulers who treat in Europe, where she wooed audiences with tales of her hard work and public money as their own, while their acumen. What she tended not to talk people “languish in misery”. about was that her father, Angola’s Portugal, Angola’s former colonial former president José Eduardo dos Santos, had installed her as chair of power, benefited greatly from Dos Angola’s state oil company, Sonangol Santos, said Manuel Carvalho in Dos Santos: feted in Europe Público (Lisbon). She bought chunks Group. And last month, a report by this consortium exposed the extent of her corruption: two of the country’s banking and media sectors during the eurozone decades of unscrupulous deals had spread hundreds of millions crisis. We knew her fortune was suspect, but turned a blind eye; of dollars in government contracts, licences and loans across her our “indignation” now rings hollow. Angola’s inequality is impossible to miss, said Bernd Dörries in Süddeutsche Zeitung companies in 41 nations. It was a fortune made “at the expense (Munich). Luanda Bay, in the capital, is Africa’s equivalent of the Angolan people” – and secured by a cadre of Western business advisers, who helped her to stash her ill-gotten wealth. of the French Riviera: a playground for the elite built on oil money while, nearby, people die of cholera in filthy slums. To us Angolans, none of this is news, said Cláudio Silva in The Her troubles can be traced back to her father’s retirement in Guardian (London). Local reporters have been “exposing the 2017, said Boubacar Sanso Barry in Le Djely (Conakry). His rot” for years. Sadly, foreign governments – and even our own successor, João Lourenço, is under pressure to clean up Angola – and is going after the Dos Santos family in response. Isabel’s government – only sit up when US and European journalists get half-sister has been ousted as a member of parliament, and her involved. “Who’s going to listen to an African journalist?”

FRANCE

Macron’s theatrical church rant Le Huffington Post (Paris)

INDIA

How the prime minister lost his mojo The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

ITALY

The Mafia: bribing its way to the top La Repubblica (Rome)

THE WEEK 1 February 2020

What was Emmanuel Macron really up to when he let fly at Israeli security guards last week, asks Anthony Berthelier. France’s president – in Jerusalem for a Holocaust memorial event – paid a visit to the Old City, including the Church of Saint Anne. Gifted to France in 1856, the church is still considered French territory; so Macron was furious when Israeli security guards thrust past him and went inside. “Go out – outside please!” he shouted at them. He said the church had been French “for centuries”, and that that would “not change with me, okay? Respect the rules.” The scene echoed a similar exchange when one of Macron’s predecessors, Jacques Chirac, harangued Israeli bodyguards during a visit to the city in 1996. “What do you want, me to get back on my plane and go back to France?”, Chirac said angrily, refusing to enter Saint Anne before Israeli security left. That outburst won applause across the Arab world; and there are suspicions that Macron staged an altercation to win similar praise. He even seems to have copied Chirac’s heavy French accent, though his own English is perfect. Has the president been using the Middle East as a “playground for bad acting”?

Narendra Modi is “losing his mojo”, says Amrit Dhillon. Just eight months ago, India’s PM seemed invincible after leading the BJP to a “historic” landslide election win. His Hindu nationalist government was pushing through one controversial measure after another, most notably stripping Kashmir, the largest of India’s Muslim-majority territories, of its autonomy. Now, though, he is “on the defensive”. A controversial law offering citizenship to non-Muslim migrants from Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan has sparked claims of discrimination. Worse, critics say new laws could lead to Muslims without the right papers being deemed illegal immigrants, even if they have lived in India for generations, while the rules are less harsh for those of other religions. The reforms are being seen as a “devious” ploy to strip India’s 195 million Muslims of their citizenship, resulting in deadly protests across the country of 1.3 billion. Unfortunately for Modi, the protests have erupted as the country teeters on the brink of recession. “He has misread the election verdict”; his mandate was for jobs and better living standards, not pitting Hindus against Muslims. This miscalculation will cost him dear. The protests may subside, but his aura of invincibility is gone for good.

Organised crime is operating in every sector of Italy’s society – including our government, says Dario Del Porto. That’s the grim take-away from the most recent report by the police’s anti-Mafia investigation division, the DIA. The dreaded Calabrian ’Ndrangheta has spread “everywhere” in the north and is now being emulated by other clans. A gang in the southeastern province of Foggia tried to bomb a key witness in a criminal trial twice in the past month, drawing thousands of people onto the streets there in protest. In Sicily, the Cosa Nostra is reasserting its control in the western province of Trapani, and the Palermo Mafia “has intensified its relations” with its US counterparts. The Neapolitan Camorra, meanwhile, is so well structured that it sponsors gangs of youths that “constitute a sort of Camorra Academy”. These crime syndicates have grown far beyond the traditional mob rackets of loan sharking and waste management. Public contracts are compromised at all levels, from city councils to parliament, allowing gangs “to drain resources and launder money”. This infiltration of our politics and economy, the DIA says, is “more insidious than violence”. If the Mafia can bribe their way to the top, there’s not much hope for Italy’s democracy.

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Health & Science

NEWS 19

What the scientists are saying…

Sepsis is world’s “biggest killer”

Sepsis is the most deadly condition in the world, killing more people than cancer, scientists have found. According to the new estimate, there were 48.9 million cases in 2017, and it was a factor in 11 million deaths – or 19.7% of the global total.

(Cancer is responsible for some ten million deaths per year.) Also known as blood poisoning, sepsis occurs when the immune system overreacts to an infection, leading to severe inflammation and, in some cases, organ failure. But as the symptoms of the primary infection can mask those of the sepsis, it often goes undiagnosed – making it notoriously difficult to assess the number of sepsis deaths. Previous studies have tended only to look at middle- and highincome countries – which generally keep better records – and have concentrated on hospital admissions. But the team at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation based their conclusions on data extracted from millions of medical records in 195 countries. According to their figures, more than half of the cases in 2017 involved children. “We need renewed focus on sepsis prevention among newborns and on tackling antimicrobial resistance, an important driver of the condition,” said Prof Mohsen Naghavi, an author of the Lancet-published study.

Human bodies are getting colder

In 1851, the German physician Carl Reinhold August Wunderlich set the temperature for a healthy human body at 37°C. In fact, most people have a temperature slightly below this – a discrepancy that has usually been put down to faulty 19th century temperature-reading techniques. A new study, however, has suggested a different explanation: the

increasingly controlled indoor climates – have caused our bodies to cool down.

Foreign languages “protect” brain

Cows: gregarious

human body has got colder over the years.

A team at Stanford University looked at three data sets: one involving veterans from the American Civil War, whose temperatures were measured between 1860 and 1940; a second from the early 1970s; and a third from 2007 to 2017. These suggested that men born in the early 19th century typically had body temperatures 0.59°C higher than men today. (Since the earlier data set only featured men, a full comparison between women wasn’t possible.) The team are confident that the fall is real, because younger people were found to have lower temperatures than older people; and because the decline was evident between the two late 20th century data sets. “I don’t think there’s much difference in the thermometers between the 1960s and today,” said senior author Dr Julie Parsonnet. She and her colleagues suspect that a variety of factors – including a decline in infectious diseases and

© CHRISTINA HANSEN WHEAT

Wolf pups like to play fetch

Some wolf pups will spontaneously fetch a ball thrown by a human, researchers in Sweden have discovered. This quintessentially canine trait was thought to have been acquired by dogs through training and selective breeding. The finding that it in fact comes naturally to some wolves raises the possibility that the trait helped determine which animals were “adopted” by humans during the early stages of domestication.

Between 2014 and 2016, the team at Stockholm University hand-reared three wolf litters. At eight weeks old, the pups Three out of six hand-reared pups chased a ball underwent several tests, one involving an unfamiliar human tossing a tennis ball across the room. While no pups from the first two litters showed much interest in the ball, three out of six from the 2016 litter chased it – and, when coaxed, returned it to the human. “I literally got goosebumps,” said researcher Dr Christina Hansen Wheat, who was watching from the next room.

She added that natural genetic variation is the probable explanation for why the litters differed: all three were raised in identical conditions, but each had different parents.

The theory that learning a foreign language has a protective effect on the brain has been boosted by a new study showing that people with multiple sclerosis (MS) experience less cognitive decline if they are bilingual. When a team at the University of Reading compared the mental abilities of bilingual and monolingual MS patients, they found that the former performed markedly better, and particularly in an area known as “monitoring”, which is connected with people’s ability to think laterally. That bilingualism provides some protection against neurodegenerative decline was first suggested by studies that found evidence that the symptoms of dementia develop later in bilingual people.

Bilingual people have also been found to be better at remembering shopping lists and at distinguishing quickly between important and irrelevant information.

What a cow’s moo reveals

Their moos may all sound the same to us, but according to a new study, cows use the sounds to communicate a range of emotions to each other. By recording the sounds made by a herd of Holstein Friesian heifers in different contexts, a PhD student at the University of Sydney found that they use their moos to express everything from excitement and arousal to distress. Alexandra Green also found that each heifer’s moo was distinguishable, and that their tone varied, depending on the topic that appeared to be under discussion within the herd: for example, in a positive situation, such as when they were eating, their moos were far more sonorous. “Cows are gregarious, social animals,” Green said.

2019 second hottest year Last year was the second hottest year on record, only narrowly pipped by 2016, says The Guardian. The finding confirms that the past decade was the warmest on record, and that the five hottest years on record have all occurred since 2015.

The analysis is the work of several government agencies, including Nasa in the US and the Met Office in the UK, and is based on surface air temperature readings from tens of thousands of observation stations across the globe.

It found that the average temperature in 2019 was about 1.1°C above the preindustrial average; many scientists have warned that if global warming rises above 1.5°C, extreme weather will worsen, with devastating consequences for millions of people. “These announcements might sound like a broken record, but what is being heard is the drumbeat of the Anthropocene,” said Nasa scientist Dr Gavin A. Schmidt.

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

20 NEWS Pick of the week’s

Gossip

Penny Mordaunt and Philip Hammond often clashed during their time together in government. And at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year Awards, Mordaunt seemed in no mood to bury the hatchet.

“I have it on good authority that he is in line for a very important job,” she said of her former Cabinet colleague. “Given his reputation for being able to rain on any parade, suck the oxygen out of the room, and put a dampener on things, civil contingencies are about to deploy him to Australia.”

Brian Blessed was taken by surprise when he was invited to audition for the Cats musical ahead of its first stage run in 1981.

“Cats?” he exclaimed.

“F***ing gorillas maybe!

Bears!” But on a later trip to the North Pole, the sheer scale of the show’s popularity became clear to him. “I came across an igloo and there was an Inuit inside, playing Memory on a banjo. Now that is success!”

When David Baddiel arrived at the BBC’s Salford studio to be interviewed about Holocaust denial last week, he found he’d been the victim of a rather regrettable mix-up. On announcing himself at reception, the comic – whose Twitter bio reads simply “Jew” – discovered that he had been named on the BBC’s visitor list as David Irving. “Do you know who that is?”

Baddiel asked the puzzled receptionist. He found a photo of the Holocaust denier on Google, and showed her his phone. “If he turns up claiming to be David Baddiel,” he told her, “don’t let him in.”

THE WEEK 1 February 2020

Talking points Jeff Bezos: the hacking of a billionaire For 25 years after he founded reporting in The Washington Post, which he owns. It was Amazon, Jeff Bezos managed to keep a remarkably low eight months after The Post started employing the Saudi profile, said The Washington Post. That changed in January dissident Jamal Khashoggi as 2019 when, days after the a columnist that bin Salman is alleged to have targeted Bezos; billionaire revealed that he was divorcing his wife, the and weeks after Khashoggi National Enquirer ran an was murdered at the Saudi 11-page spread about his embassy in Istanbul, that MbS secret affair with a former sent him the message hinting TV presenter, Lauren Sánchez. at knowledge of his affair.

There followed a feverish hunt to find out the source of the On the face of it, the idea that tabloid’s scoop. Its publisher, MbS would personally deliver AMI, insists it got the story spyware to Bezos’s phone is from Sánchez’s Trumpoutlandish. The risk of supporting brother. But at Bezos with Sánchez: targeted by MbS? exposure, for a man posing as a liberal reformer, was surely the time, Bezos suggested Saudi Arabia might be involved; and last week, too great. But MbS is not a rational actor, said his investigators pointed the finger at Crown Stephen M. Walt in Foreign Policy. He is a Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MbS) himself. “loose cannon: reckless, paranoid and a bit According to their report, Bezos’s phone started of a fool”. He allegedly ordered the murder to “leak” vast amounts of data in May 2018, of Khashoggi – though the journalist posed no threat to his rule. “He launched a war in Yemen after he’d opened a WhatsApp message from MbS (the pair having exchanged numbers in that has been a humanitarian disaster and a April, when they met at a party in Los Angeles). military failure.” He endures because Saudi has In November that year, MbS sent Bezos a photo lots of oil, and Donald Trump has proved an of a woman loosely resembling his lover, with a unswerving ally. But his “enablers” in the West must be wondering who else’s phone he may cryptic message hinting at divorce negotiations. have infiltrated – and whether he’d be reckless The Saudis have dismissed as “absurd” the idea enough to turn on them, said David Wearing that MbS hacked Bezos’s phone – but the report in The Guardian. Meanwhile, “wiser heads in has been given credence by the UN, said The Washington and London” will be growing ever Times. Its investigators have suggested that MbS more dismayed at the prospect of having to deal targeted Bezos in an effort to influence critical with this “dangerous” figure for years to come.

The BBC: in peril yet again “If you find yourself afflicted by a sudden urge to destroy the BBC, I have the ideal remedy,” said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian: spend some time in the US. It shows what happens when there is no major news broadcaster that is objective, impartial, and insulated from commercial pressures. In the US, people of differing political views watch different networks, and get different facts: Fox News facts, or MSNBC facts. The result is a partisan “cacophony”, with “two sides shouting at each other”. The need to think about this has arisen because the BBC is “in peril” – yet again. Its director-general, Tony Hall, is stepping down.

Boris Johnson’s government is openly hostile to the corporation, and has suggested that the licence fee has had its day. This week, 450 jobs were cut at BBC News. So it’s time to point out, once again, that “the country’s collective life would be undeniably impoverished without it”.

The BBC brings the nation together, with its sports and royal wedding broadcasts, its news and landmark documentaries, its comedies and dramas, and crucial services such as local radio.

The problem, though, is that the BBC isn’t impartial, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. It has its own “impermeable, uniform right-on culture”, which “treats Greta Thunberg as Joan of Arc and the wider

population as prejudiced idiots”. This failure to represent great swathes of Britain has actually helped to exacerbate splits in our society. Of this, Brexit – which the BBC clearly opposed – “is the final proof”. Yet anyone who wants to watch TV must pay a poll tax of £154.50 per year to the BBC, on pain of being dragged to the magistrates’ court. Moving to a subscription model is the BBC’s only hope, said Rod Liddle in The Spectator. If it had to fight for viewers, the BBC might suddenly “comprehend the need to understand its audience a little better”.

Moving to subscription would be the death of the BBC as we know it, said Camilla Cavendish in the FT. It would turn it into something like the US Public Broadcasting Service – “dignified, but with little reach”. Yet the BBC is facing some fundamental questions. Can a monopoly licence fee be justified when it is reaching fewer people, particularly young people, every day? If it is to continue in its current form, it must make more effort to represent a genuine range of opinion: not just Euroscepticism, but radical socialism too. And it needs to get leaner. “It currently runs five orchestras, and two 24-hour news operations.” In short, it should strive to look less as it is portrayed in the BBC’s own satire W1A: like a complacent metropolitan behemoth, entirely “removed from reality”.

Talking points HS2: hanging in the balance It was a “torrid” week for desecration” of rural HS2, said Michael Savage areas – along with HS2’s in The Observer. An official admission that the line “will not reduce carbon review, leaked in draft form to the FT, found that the emissions” – means the final cost of the 345-mile environmental case does not “hold up either”. But high-speed rail link between London, Birmingham, pulling out now would Manchester and Leeds incur costs of £12bn – and the PM’s decision is made could amount to as much as £106bn – almost double more difficult by the fact that his recent election the current budget of £56bn, and more than three victory was based on a A decade late and three times the cost times the original estimate surge in support for the Tories in areas of the of £32.7bn. At the same time, a National Audit Office report suggested Midlands and the North that would most benefit that the line’s first phase, from London to from a high-speed line. Having promised not to Birmingham, might not open until 2036, more take his new-found voters for granted, can he than a decade later than planned. It criticised the really afford now simply to “ditch HS2 and Department for Transport and the governmentcover his tracks with some piffle about supportowned HS2 Ltd for underestimating the ing our friends in the North” in other ways? project’s complexity – prompting ever-louder calls from critics, including dozens of Tory MPs, It’s true that the case for HS2 has “never been to scrap the idea and invest in upgrading other properly made”, said Chris Blackhurst in The Independent. But as someone who travels often services instead. from London to the North, it’s clear to me that Boris Johnson is expected to make a decision on “it has to happen”. With demand for rail HS2’s future in the coming weeks. Either way, doubling in the past 20 years alone, an efficient he faces a “dilemma”, said Christian Wolmar in service capable of transporting 85 million people The Guardian. Various arguments have been put a year between the country’s four largest urban forward in support of the project, since it was areas is a “no-brainer”. It would join up initiated by a Labour government more than communities, free up capacity on other routes, a decade ago. But none has provided a “clear and consign “at least the physical North-South divide” to the past. Yes, it would come at a cost. rationale” for spending such huge sums. Over the years, the business case has been “wrecked” But if we want to “bring the country into the by “out of control” spending, while “widespread 21st century”, it is a price we will have to pay.

Labour hopefuls: still in Corbyn’s shadow To win the next election, Labour increasingly out of step with the must secure 60% more MPs, or times, while the Left’s focus on another 124 seats, said Polly identity politics too often comes Toynbee in The Guardian. No across as pious and hectoring. A party has ever achieved such a fundamental rethink is required. swing, but that doesn’t mean it’s The party must suppress its impossible. To stand any chance, “top-down”, centralising instincts, and find “cleverer means of though, Labour will need to pick fighting the supposed culture war the right leader. The contest to replace Jeremy Corbyn has come than repeatedly telling half the down to a three-horse race, said population they are bigots”.

John Rentoul in The Independent.

Jess Phillips dropped out last week, There’s little evidence so far of and Emily Thornberry is unlikely any rethinking, said The Daily to secure a place on the ballot Telegraph. Corbyn’s continued paper when nominations close on appearances at the despatch box Nandy: a tricky task Valentine’s Day. That leaves the are “object lessons in denial: it’s as two front-runners, Rebecca Long-Bailey and though the election never happened”. As for the Keir Starmer, and Lisa Nandy, who faces the leadership candidates, they keep talking about tricky task of persuading the former’s backers the need for complete honesty about the defeat that she’s a “better salesperson for the Corbynite while at the same time furiously dissembling dream of socialism”, and the latter’s backers about the reasons for it. Because Corbyn retains that she is “not too Corbynite”. Polls suggest “an almost messiah-like status” among the Starmer will be declared the victor on 4 April.

Labour members who will decide the final vote (in a recent YouGov poll, they rated him above Whoever wins will inherit a party in deep crisis, any previous Labour leader), the candidates said John Harris in The Guardian. Labour is daren’t criticise him. When asked to mark his “all but extinct” in Scotland, and has become leadership, Long-Bailey gave him ten out of ten. estranged from its former heartlands elsewhere.

“The unwillingness to see what everyone else The party’s “old-fashioned statism” looks can see has paralysed the leadership contest.”

NEWS 21

Wit & Wisdom “Ambition and suspicion always go together.”

Georg C. Lichtenberg, quoted in Forbes “Lies are like children. If you don’t nurture them, they’ll never be useful later.”

US webcomic author R.K. Milholland, quoted in the I newspaper “Young person worry: What if nothing I do matters? Old person worry: What if everything I do does?”

Novelist Jenny Offill, quoted on NYMag.com “Some people are cold.

Others are oily. His peculiar distinction was to combine coldness and oiliness.”

John Bercow on Michael Howard, quoted in The Sunday Times “Never write if you can speak; never speak if you can nod; never nod if you can wink.”

US politician Martin Lomasney, quoted on OpenLettersReview.com “There are no such things as bad plants or bad men. There are only bad cultivators.”

Victor Hugo, quoted in The Wall Street Journal “We have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.”

John Maynard Keynes, quoted in The Guardian “There are few nudities so objectionable as the naked truth.”

US essayist Agnes Repplier, quoted in the I newspaper

Statistics of the week

On average, British Cabinet ministers spend just under two years in post before being reshuffled – slightly more than managers in the top four English football leagues, who get 1.5 years.

Institute for Government One in 14 crimes recorded by police in England and Wales leads to a prosecution.

Home Office

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

Sport

22 NEWS

Kobe Bryant: a basketball great

“Of all sport’s icons, it is a vanishing few who ever grasp the distinction of being known by their first name alone,” said Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. Kobe Bryant was one of them. It is “impossible to overstate” the impact that his death on Sunday, in a helicopter crash which also killed his 13-year-old daughter Gianna, will have on basketball. In his 20 years at the Los Angeles Lakers, the club at which he spent his entire career, he electrified the game, winning five national titles. He was, without question, one of the greatest players in the sport’s history: at his best, he was “a giddying force of nature on court”.

6,000 career assists; the only player to be picked for the All-Star Game, featuring the league’s 24 best players, in 18 consecutive seasons. In 2006, he scored 81 points against the Toronto Raptors, the second highest total in a game in NBA history.

And a decade later, in the very last match of his career, he scored a remarkable 60 points.

Bryant leaves a “glittering” but complicated legacy, said Marc Stein in The New York Times.

He clashed with Shaquille O’Neal, another Lakers legend. A “relentless competitor”, he would shoot whenever he had the chance, often at the expense of his side, missing more shots in his career than Even as a teenager, Bryant was “a basketball any other player in NBA history. And a sexual assault allegation in 2003 “would change how phenomenon”, said Ian Whittell in The Times.

At a time when the traditional route to going many people saw Bryant”: the case was dropped Bryant: “a force of nature” professional included a stint in college basketball, because the accuser was unwilling to testify, and he took the bold decision to skip that step – making him only the Bryant later settled a civil case out of court. A “genius on the court”, and a sometimes flawed character off it, Bryant seemed to sixth player in NBA history to do so. Bryant modelled his style on Michael Jordan, said Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail. Like be solving the problem of “life after sport”, said Tom Fordyce on Jordan, he was a master of the fade-away, a shot taken while BBC Sport. Jordan, for instance, has struggled to “find anything that satisfies him as much as the first act”. But Bryant was jumping backwards, away from the basket. And he had an dedicated to Gianna’s promising basketball career, and he even incredible knack for scoring in the dying moments of a game, “surrounded by opponents aware of his audacity but unable to wrote an Oscar-winning short film, Dear Basketball. He was prevent it”. His record speaks for itself: he was the first player in “navigating the second act, becoming something that all around NBA history to score 30,000 career points, and the first to have him hoped would last”.

Cricket: England’s uplifting South Africa tour England’s tour of South Africa could hardly have ended on a more straightforward note, said Valkerie Baynes on ESPNcricinfo. On Monday, they wrapped up the fourth Test within four days, beating the hosts by an “emphatic” 191 runs to win the series 3-1. It was only their second overseas series victory in four years, and it gives the side “huge cause for optimism”: this was the moment when Dom Sibley, Zak Crawley and Dom Bess announced themselves.

England’s struggles at the start of the series, when they lost the first Test as player after player was hit by a virus, “seem so long ago”.

and he has suffered a long run of injuries. In Johannesburg, however, playing back-to-back Tests for the first time since 2017, he took nine wickets in a “hostile, accurate and threatening” performance. It wasn’t just Wood who impressed, said Simon Wilde in the same paper. As a dry run for the Ashes tour in two years’ time, this series “could hardly have gone better for England’s bowlers”: they “operated superbly as a unit, disciplined and patient”. Before the series began, England appeared incapable of taking 20 wickets in an overseas match. Yet here, they took 20 in each of the four Tests. The only real worry in this side is Jos Buttler, said Chris Stocks in Observer. His batting numbers in this series The real pleasure of this Test was seeing Mark The Wood: “threatening” Wood bowl “as well as he has ever done in England were “pitiful”: he averaged just 17.83 runs per colours”, said Mike Atherton in The Times. He is a genuinely fast innings. In white-ball formats, Buttler remains perhaps the finest bowler – he dismissed Pieter Malan on Saturday with a ball batsman in the world – so it’s time he focused on his strengths. moving at 94mph – but the sport takes a real toll on his body, “He has a lot still to offer his country, just not in Test cricket.”

Shrewsbury prove Liverpool’s match

Sporting headlines

Liverpool are “the champions of wasn’t quite the upset it looks the world”, said Matt Barlow in on paper, said Henry Winter in the Daily Mail. Since the start of The Times. Few of Liverpool’s the season, they have been on first-team players were on the “a near flawless procession pitch. But the side’s “lax towards the Premier League attitude” and complacency title”. But on Sunday evening, were “unforgiveable”. Their in the fourth round of the FA opponents, meanwhile, put in Cup, they were held 2-2 by some fantastic performances: Shrewsbury Town – a team in midfield, Josh Laurent was languishing in the lower reaches superb; Shaun Whalley “kept Shrewsbury’s Laurent: superb of League One. It wasn’t a result running at Liverpool’s anyone would have predicted with an hour defence”. If anything, they were unlucky. But gone, when the Reds were two goals up. But they might be luckier next time, said James when Jason Cummings came off the bench, he Pearce on The Athletic. The replay falls in the led Shrewsbury’s fightback, scoring twice in ten middle of English football’s first ever winter minutes. With an already packed schedule, it break, so Klopp has decided to field a team was the last thing Jürgen Klopp, the Liverpool made up entirely of youth players. It shows manager, wanted: the two teams will meet at how little he cares about the FA Cup – and it Anfield next Tuesday for a replay. However, this makes a mockery of the competition.

FA Cup Manchester United beat Tranmere 6-0.

Manchester City beat Fulham 4-0. Newcastle drew 0-0 with League One side Oxford United.

Tennis Serena Williams was knocked out of the Australian Open in the third round by China’s Wang Qiang, the 27th seed.

Rugby union In the Premiership, Harlequins beat Saracens 41-14. Sale beat the league leaders Exeter 22-19.

Bristol beat Gloucester 34-16.

Bristol also agreed a deal to sign England prop Kyle Sinckler from Harlequins in the summer.

THE WEEK 1 February 2020

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LETTERS Pick of the week’s correspondence Power of Remembrance To The Guardian

My mother, Esther Brunstein, was a survivor of the Łódz ghetto, Auschwitz and BergenBelsen. She spoke at the opening of the Holocaust galleries in the Imperial War Museum, and at the first Holocaust Memorial Day in the UK in Westminster Hall.

She died three years ago.

As she lay in her bed in Barnet Hospital, in London, her life very nearly over, a young junior doctor was attempting to put in a cannula in her concealed veins. My sister was at her bedside. My mother winced and cried with the pain of the needle repeatedly failing to hit its target, but eventually the doctor managed.

My mum said something like: “Not bad for an 88-yearold survivor of Auschwitz and Belsen!” The doctor was dumbfounded, and asked my sister if this was indeed true.

She confirmed it. He looked again deeply into my mother’s face and then asked her if she’d ever spoken at a certain school in Dorset. She thought about it – she had spoken to so many students and children in so many schools about her experiences – and she then said: “Yes, I did.”

He told her and my sister that he went there, he was in the sixth form and heard her speak. He said you could have heard a pin drop, she spoke so engagingly and expressively.

He told her and my sister that her presence and her words had such a deep impact on him and influenced him in his decision to study medicine.

And there he was, years later, helping her in what turned out to be her last few days on this Earth. We were all blown away by this story – me, my sister, my mother and the doctor.

Denise Fluskey, London

What about the West?

The Daily Telegraph

Those of us in the southwest cast weary and slightly envious eyes to the north and east whenever the HS2 project is debated. We grow weary of seeing the constant “urban regenerations”, infrastructure projects and communication initiatives that are poured into the North. It takes 2.5 hours to get from London to

Letter of the week

Europe will bid a sad farewell To The Economist

So, three-and-a-half years after the Brexit referendum, Britain is leaving the European Union on 31 January. For millions of people, particularly in eastern Europe, the country we tend to call “Anglia” has been a benchmark of nobility, of spirit and excellence. Britain is deeply embedded in our cultural makeup. During the War, our grandparents listened to Winston Churchill on the wireless, grateful to know that there was a place in this world where the bad guys’ writ did not run. For our generation, literature from an early age consisted mostly of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Winniethe-Pooh and The Wind in the Willows. Later, the explosion of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, the Kinks, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and the rest blew the cobwebs of communist propaganda out of our souls. The Beatles made us, as New Wave, New Metal and the New Romantics were to make our children.

When the propagandists railed against the “Iron Lady of imperialism”, we would say to each other, “Iron Lady? Sounds promising”. As Margaret Thatcher defeated tin-pot dictators on the other side of the world, we were wishing she would do something about our lot over here. As she later did.

In the 1990s, we were fully aware that France and Germany wanted no truck with us east Europeans, and it was Britain that ultimately engineered our entry into the EU. It is our EU membership that has kept us away both from the clutches of Russian imperialism and from the temptation to revive the ideology of provincial fascism we experienced before the War. Tens of millions of us are grateful that Britain has always been there for us. Which is why we watch Brexit with great sadness, feeling a wrenching sense of loss. Originally, we thought that the results of that wretched referendum were some kind of cosmic joke. Now we have become reconciled to the fact that the British are, indeed, leaving us, much as we would wish it otherwise.

Evgenii Dainov, professor of politics, New Bulgarian University, Sofia Manchester by train, whereas a journey to Plymouth takes three hours 30 minutes.

Penzance is five hours and more. The West has no significant concert or entertainment centre, and the last shopping centre of any size is in Bristol.

The political map in the southwest is almost totally blue, which may be a factor, but this is a long-term issue: it needs to be addressed in the interest of equality and fairness.

Nik Perfitt, Bristol

Turning a profit on HS2 To The Daily Telegraph

If the objection to cancelling HS2 is the £8bn already spent, principally on buying up properties and land along the route, surely selling the land and properties will solve the problem. It might even show a profit.

Dr Max Gammon, London

The case for Manchester To The Guardian

If the PM is thinking of moving the House of Lords to the North – partly to get it out of his hair, and partly to suck up to the region of England most decimated by Thatcherism – York is the least suitable city to plonk it in. In reality, York is a bit of the South that just happens to be in the North: a chocolate-box-lid tourist town with medieval architecture to remind their lordships, perhaps, of their feudal roots; an archbishop to partner the one living in Lambeth; no industry left; and a gleaming university. York is lovely, but it’s no longer “the North”.

Manchester. Now that would be my ideal venue for the upper house today. It has a fine Victorian Gothic city hall, which in my view is architecturally superior to Westminster, and which surely could house their lordships comfortably.

25

It also has two leading football teams. (You can’t get much more northern than that.)

Beyond this, Manchester and its environs have a claim to be the capital of a vital English “identity” quite distinct from, but just as important as, the one that London represents: its industrial, nonconformist, creative, democratic and radical spirit. Boris Johnson might not feel comfortable there, but putting half of Parliament in Manchester could help to bring the North and South together in the way he claims to want. And I write as an (adopted) Yorkist.

Bernard Porter, Hull, East Yorkshire

Selective principles To The Sunday Times

You report that John Humphrys has given up flying to “save the world from climate change” – except perhaps when he wishes to visit his grandchildren in Greece.

This is inspiring. Like him, I have now also given up flying – except when I want to go somewhere and flying is the most convenient option.

Peter Bloomfield, Petworth, West Sussex

Bucolic body count To The Spectator

James Forsyth’s assertion that next month’s Cabinet reshuffle will be “more Midsomer Murders than Valentine’s Day Massacre” will do little to calm frightened ministers.

Since 1997, there have been 369 murders in the county of Midsomer, whereas only seven Chicagoans were gunned down in the Valentine’s Day Massacre.

Deirdre Wyllie, Dull, Perth and Kinross

“I’ve built this painstakingly accurate scale model of the HS2 railway line” © MATT/THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

● Letters have been edited

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

BEDS, SOFAS AND FURNITURE FOR LOAFERS

ARTS Review of reviews: Books Book of the week Motherwell

by Deborah Orr W&N 304pp £16.99 The Week Bookshop £14.99

When the journalist Deborah Orr died from breast cancer last year aged 57, it “provoked an outpouring of grief of the most genuine kind”, said Sarah Hughes in The Observer. Friends praised her outspokenness and humour, her “sandpaper-rough tongue” and “wild and cussed streak”. Her memoir Motherwell, completed just before her death, “showcases all those qualities and more”. Named after the town near Glasgow where she grew up, it is a powerful depiction of a now vanished way of life – one built on factory employment, regular churchgoing and the dream of a “house with a back and front door”. It also tells the story of Orr’s fraught relationship with her mother, Win, a woman who was entirely unable to “mother well”. Although talented and charismatic, Win was a controlling, unpredictable character who was pathologically jealous of her adventurous, high-achieving daughter. “She wanted to keep me with her,” Orr writes, “in the same way as she wanted to keep her arm with her.” Motherwell is a fitting legacy for Orr’s “blazing talent”.

27

There is “great accuracy in the book’s sociological depictions”, said Andrew O’Hagan in The Guardian. Orr summons up the texture of life in Motherwell, a town dominated by the Ravenscraig steelworks, where her dad, John, worked as a labourer. The town was blighted by Margaret Thatcher’s policies during the 1980s, and Orr suggests a parallel with the love-starved atmosphere of her own family: “Over the years, Win’s power came to seem entirely oppressive to her daughter, like the forces excoriating the town itself.”

The tying together of these narrative strands – one public, the other private – is what elevates Motherwell above the common run of non-fiction books. It is, I believe, “the best memoir to appear out of Scotland since 1935, the year of Edwin Muir’s Scottish Journey”.

I found Motherwell to be a “frustrating book that raises as many questions as it answers”, said Janice Turner in the New Statesman. And that is perhaps because of the “radioactive” presence of Orr’s ex-husband, the novelist Will Self, who is “seldom mentioned but always there”. Their “absolutely bloody divorce” (which Orr tweeted about with “eye-popping frankness”) spills into the text in the form of frequent, unexplained asides about narcissism, which sometimes “make Orr sound quite deranged”. It’s a pity, because when Orr isn’t “banging on about narcissism”, she writes “beautifully” about her “quintessentially 1970s working-class childhood”.

Why Women Read Fiction

Novel of the week

by Helen Taylor OUP 304pp £14.99

Low

The Week Bookshop £12.99

by Jeet Thayil Faber 240pp £14.99

“When women stop reading, the novel will be dead,” Ian McEwan declared a few years ago. And he’s right, said Susannah Butter in the London Evening Standard: “it is women who keep fiction in business”. Women represent twothirds of the fiction-buying market; they discuss novels more avidly on social media; and all-male book clubs (unlike female ones) are rare. In her “thought-provoking” book, based on interviews with female readers and writers, the academic Helen Taylor explores some of the causes behind this imbalance. A variety of factors impel women to read fiction, she suggests, ranging from escapism and excitement to a desire to better themselves. Taylor’s wish to include as many voices as possible – including a few male ones – makes this “more of a sweeping account than an in-depth analysis”, but it is nonetheless a “heartfelt and worthwhile” study.

Taylor’s “fascinating” survey suggests that for many women, novel-reading is tinged with guilt, said Daisy Goodwin in The Sunday Times. One interviewee says that she only allows herself to read “when I have done everything else” – a sentence “said by no man, ever”. Another claims that reading offers the excitement of an affair, without any of the accompanying danger. This book makes a “real start” to explaining fiction’s appeal to women, said Erica Wagner in the New Statesman. However, I was “disturbed” by Taylor’s unquestioning acceptance of gender stereotypes. Accounting for the proliferation of women’s book groups, she describes women as “list-makers and social secretaries par excellence”. Is that true, or is it just that they’ve “only been allowed to be these things”? Clearly, when it comes to women and fiction, there are “deeper, bolder questions still to be asked”.

The Week Bookshop £12.99

Jeet Thayil’s first novel, the Booker-shortlisted Narcopolis, was set in a Mumbai opium den in the 1970s, said Rob Doyle in The Guardian. His third novel sifts the same “subsoil”. Following his wife’s suicide, poet Dominic Ullis travels to Mumbai and, over one weekend, “gorges on every substance he can lay his hands on”: cocaine, heroin, sleeping pills, opium and, “in a rare appearance in literary fiction, the synthetic upper mephedrone, or ‘meow meow’”.

Reading like an “Indian cover version” of Edward St Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose novels, Low is “surprisingly colourful and enjoyable”.

While carrying his wife’s ashes, Ullis visits old hands and reconnects with dealers, said Max Liu in the FT. Thayil writes about Mumbai (nostalgically referred to as “Bombay”) with “deep affinity and close attention”. This is a novel of our times, said Suzi Feay in The Spectator: Ullis is “fascinated by Trump”, and balefully observes the damage done to the environment. The result is a “beautifully written” and “gripping” work that “elicits compassion for a character who is pitifully adrift”.

To order these titles or any other book in print, visit theweekbookshop.co.uk or speak to a bookseller on 020-3176 3835 Opening times: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm and Sunday 10am-4pm

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

28 ARTS

Drama Theatre: Uncle Vanya

Harold Pinter Theatre, London SW1 (0844-871 7622). Until 2 May

Running time: 2hrs 30mins

★★★★★

This ravishing revival of “one of the Times. Aimee Lou Wood is quite greatest plays” in the world canon is brilliant as Vanya’s self-doubting niece, Sonya – all “doleful gawping” a must-see, said Dominic Maxwell in at the dashing Astrov. However, The Times. It is superbly directed by Ian Rickson; the dilapidated countrythe very “best thing” about this production is the “ravishingly bored, house set devised by Rae Smith is as “beautiful and as stifling as an Old passionate and tender” performance Master”; the fresh adaptation of from Rosalind Eleazar as Yelena, Chekhov’s script by Conor said Patrick Marmion in the Daily McPherson is “almost impossibly Mail. Last year, Eleazar stole the contemporary in the way it packs so show from Matthew Broderick much lust, wit, rage and regret” into in The Starry Messenger. Here, its brisk but unhurried running time; she lights up the stage as the young and every performance is first-rate, wife of an elderly professor. It’s a “every character fully realised”. career-defining performance, said Demetrios Matheou in The Vanya is the quintessential Chekhovian anti-hero – a perennial Hollywood Reporter, and just underachiever facing up to the one of the delights of a “brilliantly, buoyantly accessible production” disappointments of middle age, said Jones and Eleazar: first-rate Dominic Cavendish in The Daily that perfectly captures the essence of Chekhov: the funnier it gets, the “sadder and more painful it Telegraph. And it’s hard to think of better casting for the part than Toby Jones, who gives a bravura performance – and a becomes”. It’s exhilarating theatre. profoundly moving one. I have seen angrier Vanyas – Roger Allam, for example; and more melancholy ones (notably, Simon The week’s other opening Russell Beale). But I don’t think I’ve seen any actor better catch The Welkin Lyttelton, National Theatre, London SE1 Vanya’s “tragicomic mixture of fury and futility”. Nor is Jones (020-7452 3000). Until 23 May the only one to make his mark on this production. The cast is Lucy Kirkwood’s play, set in rural Suffolk in 1759, is about a a “store-house of talent”. Richard Armitage, for example, is young woman convicted of killing a child, who claims she’s outstanding in the role as the “tree-hugging” doctor, Astrov. pregnant – a claim that could save her from hanging. It’s full of Yet for all the undoubted class of Jones and Armitage, it is the interesting colour, but ultimately is a “bit of a slog” (Telegraph). women who “steal the show”, said Quentin Letts in The Sunday

Leeds Grand Theatre from 12 February, then touring (operanorth.co.uk)

Running time: 2hrs 45mins

★★★

This notoriously tricky work by the Robert Hayward, Paul Gibson and German composer Kurt Weill is the Alex Banfield also excel in key roles; and several members of the Opera most ambitious and arguably the finest of his American period (1935North chorus seize their moments in 50), said Tim Ashley in The the limelight, giving fine individual Guardian. A sprawling work with performances in a “focused staging” more than 30 named roles, and that makes “the best possible case based on an earlier play by Elmer for the piece”.

Rice, Street Scene depicts 24 hours I agree that Opera North has done this difficult work proud, said in the lives of a largely immigrant community in a tenement block in Rupert Christiansen in The Daily Manhattan’s Lower East Side. PlotTelegraph, but that does not mean wise, the focus is the murder of an it has overcome the core problems unfaithful wife by a violent alcoholic of the piece. The score veers husband. Musically, the piece is hard awkwardly between the idioms of to classify and “at times uneven”.

“Berlin cabaret, Viennese operetta, Big operatic arias are juxtaposed Broadway musical and Hollywood with Broadway numbers, and B-picture” – and there’s no dramatic “jazz collides with Rossini”: at Opera North delivers a compelling and energetic production drive or psychological insight. times you can’t help feeling Weill has There’s no denying that some overreached himself. Yet for all Street Scene’s limitations, Opera passages are laboured and preachy, said Richard Morrison North have “done it proud”. Stick with it, and director Matthew in The Times. Yet overall I found Street Scene a compelling, Eberhardt’s production emerges as “fine, engaging music theatre, energetic, and fascinating piece. “I’d pay to see it again.” beautifully done”.

Eberhardt has indeed done a great job, agreed Fiona Maddocks Album of the week in The Observer. The staging is clear; the “dramatic hierarchy of Wire: Mind Hive Pink Flag £9.99 characters laid out deftly”. And the versatile Opera North If Mind Hive were the debut from a hot new band, one suspects orchestra, persuasively conducted by Kurt Weill specialist James that “what’s left of the music press would be doing their nut over Holmes, sounds just at home in Weill’s “bluesy, operative it”. This latest collection from the London rockers, pioneers of art sonorities” as it does in Wagner or Mozart. The singing, too, punk in the 1970s, feels “sinewy, stripped bank, precise and popis first-rate, said George Hall in The Stage. Giselle Allen is facing”, even on its roomiest, Eno-esque tracks (Guardian). “luminous” as the desperate, caring Anna Maurrant; Stars reflect the overall quality of reviews and our own independent assessment (5 stars=don’t miss; 1 star=don’t bother) Book your tickets now by calling 020-7492 9948 or visiting TheWeekTickets.co.uk THE WEEK 1 February 2020

© JOHAN PERSSON; CLIVE BARDA

Opera: Street Scene

Film

ARTS 29

The Personal History of David Copperfield What the Dickens?

Dir: Armando Iannucci

★★★★

1hr 59mins (PG)

Armando Iannucci is best known for dark Fox a fit of the vapours”, and though Iannucci doesn’t use the colour-blind political satire – from The Thick of It to casting to explore the novel’s themes The Death of Stalin. But his “terrifically in a fresh way, it brings welcome “new likeable, genial adaptation of David Copperfield” taps into Dickens’s humanity vibrancy to the period drama palette”. and optimism, at the expense, perhaps, of some of the book’s bleaker aspects, said As in Greta Gerwig’s recent adaptation of Little Women, the process of writing has Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. The been made part of the action, said Ryan basic story remains unchanged: Dev Patel is our “open-hearted” hero, who Gilbey in the New Statesman. Gerwig had is cast out of his home when his mother her film ending with Jo March presenting a publisher with the manuscript for Little remarries, and sent away to an “episodic series of places, some less welcoming than Women. This movie is “bookended by others”, before ending up at the rural scenes of Copperfield” standing in front Dev Patel (right): our “open-hearted hero” home of his formidable aunt Betsey (Tilda of an audience, as though he is reading Swinton, in a “thermonuclear star turn”). his own story during a promotional tour.

Iannucci drives the story forward at a gallop, imbuing the film As he begins to speak, he steps into a film being projected across with a “hopeful tail-wag energy”, relishing “the drama and the the back of the stage – and runs across the fields to be in time for his own birth. At other points, Iannucci keeps up his film’s brisk absurdity, the larger than life characters, and the sheer dreampace by simply removing pieces of the set, to reveal the next like craziness of everything that’s going on”. scene lurking behind. In a Monty Python-esque touch, there Characters bustle in and out “like guests in the Fawlty Towers is even a moment when a giant hand descends, to move Copperfield from one place to another. Ultimately, it all moves lobby”, said Robbie Collin in The Daily Telegraph, and you’d too fast, said Deborah Ross in The Spectator. “Incidents and be hard-pressed to come up with a better guest list. As well as Patel and Swinton, we have Ben Whishaw as the cringing Uriah characters come and go so furiously fast it is hard to care. Or Heep, Peter Capaldi as the optimistic, debt-ridden Mr Micawber, feel involved.” And anything the book has to say about class and Hugh Laurie as the child-like Mr Dick, to name just a few. and injustice is “wholly lost” in this “breezy soap”. It is very The film “has enough multicultural credentials to give Laurence likeable but, ultimately, not that memorable.

The Turning Disappointing horror flick

★

Dir: Floria Sigismondi

This updated version of The Turn of the Screw takes the psychological ambiguity of Henry James’s novella and whittles it down into a flat and fairly basic horror flick, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. Set in the 1990s, the action takes places in a sprawling manor house where a young teacher (Mackenzie Davis) has arrived to take up a job as a governess to orphaned eight-year-old Flora (Brooklynn Prince), whose last nanny has done a runner. Then her older brother Miles (Finn Wolfhard) unexpectedly turns up.

The children are the film’s “main asset”: Flora flits between “mercurial mischief and malice”, and Miles exudes “the charm and careless cruelty of extreme privilege”. But alas for Davis, there is very little in the screenplay for her to cling to.

1hr 34mins (15)

There’s a “wonderful simplicity” to James’s story, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent, but the film is muddled.

Floria Sigismondi’s “video game visuals” sit oddly with the Gothic source material, and it doesn’t help that the film has been “saddled with the conventional scares” of a cheap and cheerful horror movie. It’s hard to build a “sense of creeping dread” when ghosts keep popping up “like a bunch of broken fairground animatronics”.

Shadowy figures appearing in mirrors; a mannequin that moves on its own; it’s-only-a-dream moments... The Turning has them all, said Ben Kenigsberg in The New York Times. It’s a shame to see a skilled actress like Davis reduced to “miming ashen poses” in this unoriginal, scare-free film.

The Man Who Killed Don Quixote A troubled passion project

Dir: Terry Gilliam

Terry Gilliam started work on this film 25 years ago, and its tortured production history (its funding drying up, its stars dying) long ago eclipsed the film itself, said Tom Shone in The Sunday Times.

Now, though, it is finally here. In a role first slated for Johnny Depp, Adam Driver stars as a hack director who stumbles upon a student film he made about Don Quixote and returns to the Spanish village where he shot it. There he finds the cobbler he cast as Quixote (Jonathan Pryce) charging tourists to see “the living Quixote”. The pair then embark on a series of misadventures that – in true Gilliam fashion – blur the line between fantasy and reality The result is a meandering shaggy dog story that could

★★★ 2hr 13mins (15)

serve as a warning about the need to keep directors away from their passion projects.

The cast do their best, said David Sims in The Atlantic. Pryce finds the right balance of “dignity and ludicrousness”, while Driver is a source of energy in a film that feels longer than its running time – and a “human figure” for viewers to identify with, “lest they drown in Gilliam’s overflowing imagination”. Let’s face it, the film is a mess, said David Fear in Rolling Stone, but it’s a magnificent mess. A riff on artists haunted by their earlier works, and old men pursuing impossible dreams, it’s a very personal film – and Gilliam’s best for 20 years. Admittedly, that bar is not set high, but his fans should celebrate all the same.

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

Art

30 ARTS

Exhibition of the week Picasso and Paper Royal Academy, London W1 (020-7300 8090, royalacademy.org.uk). Until 13 April Pablo Picasso was a Rose Period, and his first, revolutionary experiments compulsive draughtsman, said Rachel Campbellin the cubist style, “the work is a whirlwind of Johnston in The Times.

“I draw, like other people innovation”. Indeed, even a set of “animal cut-outs” bite their nails,” he once explained, claiming that created when he was just nine years old is remarkably paper itself “could seduce him”. He wasn’t accomplished. Yet for all of exaggerating: Picasso simply its “jaw-dropping moments of beauty”, the exhibition could not stop himself from devotes far too much collaging, reshaping or doodling on whatever attention to technical materials came to hand: details and feels too big “invitation cards, book by half, making for an “endless sprawl” of Picasso pages, letters and envelopes, wrapping paper, metro ephemera that could have been “at least three tickets and blotting pads” – all were canvases for his rooms smaller”. “fabulously creative” mind.

This extraordinary new Many exhibits here may exhibition at the Royal seem less than spectacular, Academy is the first to focus said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. A napkin on the artist’s astonishingly torn into the shape of a inventive works on paper, “Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe”, after Manet I (1962): “a whirlwind of innovation” tracing a chronological arc skull, for instance, will be of interest to only “the most ardent Picasso-worshipper”. that takes us from the drawings of Picasso’s childhood to sketches made well into his 90s. Incorporating some 300 works – including Nevertheless, even “seemingly throwaway” items – notes scrawled on hotel stationery, political cartoons drawn over newspapers, a rarely seen drawings, prints and collages, as well as sculptures, “macabre” display of paper animals that Picasso created to cheer costume designs and photographs – the show casts an intimate up his lover Dora Maar following the death of her pet dog – add light on Picasso’s “fantastically fertile career”, and “captures the to our knowledge of Picasso’s creative processes, demonstrating vitality” of one of the 20th century’s greatest minds. how even an ostensibly inane doodle could serve as a conduit to a radical new artistic idea. Throw in a number of studies for The best of these off-the-cuff sketches and experiments on paper are “stunning”, said Eddy Frankel in Time Out. From the “heartmasterpieces including 1907’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and wrenching” etching The Frugal Meal, executed when Picasso was you have a genuine blockbuster. This is a “beautifully curated” in his late teens, to the “stony faces” and muted palette of his show that is “full of surprises and delightful moments”.

The Week reviews an exhibition in a private gallery

THEM at the Redfern Gallery This intriguing exhibition focuses on an eccentric group of artists active on London’s bohemian fringes in the 1970s and 1980s.

Too disparate to be classed as a “movement”, these figures Kevin Whitney’s Chelita (1969), oil on canvas nonetheless shared an anarchic disregard for convention and embrace of what is sometimes – the highlights are tremendous. dismissed as “camp” or “kitsch”. While Luciana Martinez’s 1982 painting some – notably film-director Derek Pru Pru is a berserk stylistic collision Jarman and “Alternative Miss World” between Klimt, Alma-Tadema and organiser Andrew Logan – achieved Hockney, while Duggie Fields’ recognition through other cultural illustrative, pop-informed depictions of exploits, others faded into often pin-ups in modernist interiors offset his undeserved obscurity. This show encyclopaedic art-historical knowledge presents a welcome opportunity to with an infectious irreverence. Prices rediscover them, and though not range from £400 to £40,000. everything is great – a selection of Jarman’s drawings and paintings 20 Cork Street, London W1 suggests cinema really was his medium (020-7734 1732). Until 15 February.

THE WEEK 1 February 2020

Jarman’s seaside “shrine” On one level, it is just a “pretty Victorian former fisherman’s house” in the shadow of Dungeness nuclear power station, said Mark Brown in The Guardian. But to its admirers, Prospect Cottage is “a work of art in its own right with an internationally recognised garden” – and a “shrine” to the late Derek Jarman, one of the greatest film-makers of his generation. Jarman bought the property on a remote shingle beach in Kent in 1986, and created an unusual garden which has attracted thousands of visitors and greatly influenced British garden design. After his death in 1994, the cottage was looked after by his companion, Keith Collins – but following Collins’ own death, a campaign has been launched by high-profile figures, including the actress Tilda Swinton and Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund, to raise £3.5m to buy the house and fund an endowment to preserve it. “Prospect Cottage is a living, breathing work of art, filled with the creative impulse of Derek Jarman at every turn,” said Deuchar at last week’s launch. “[It] is imperative... to save” it.

© SUCCESSION PICASSO/DACS 2019

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32

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THE WEEK 1 February 2020

To advertise here please email classified@theweek.co.uk or call Nicholas Fisher on 020 3890 3932 or Rebecca Seetanah 020 3890 3770

The List

33

Best books… Elizabeth Day

The bestselling author and creator of the hit podcast How to Fail With Elizabeth Day chooses her favourite books. Her latest, How to Fail (Fourth Estate £9.99) – part memoir, part manifesto – is out now in paperback The Neapolitan Novels by Elena Ferrante, 2012-2015 (Europa Editions £12.99 each, or £49.15 for the boxset). I realise that this is four books rather than one, but I’m cheating because Ferrante needs to be swallowed up whole. I adore the forensic passion with which she writes about female friendship, rage and love, and the way in which she adopts the style of a classic 19th century novel in order to turn the male gaze in on itself.

The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe, 1987 (Vintage £10.99). I read this novel on my first trip to America and was blown away by the fizzing energy of Wolfe’s prose style.

I was a young journalist, and

I loved the way he was able to blend the best bits of narrative reportage with the best bits of fiction to create a propulsive plot, full of colour and verve.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2013 (Fourth Estate £8.99). Epic in scale and deeply human in resonance, Americanah is a brilliant dissection of race, class, immigration and kinship.

It’s also a wonderful read.

Roget’s Thesaurus by Peter Mark Roget, 1852 (Penguin £10.99). I’ve had my copy of Roget’s since I was 17, and it has helped and fascinated me in equal measure since then. I adore the richness of words and the cleverness of synonyms

and I don’t think Peter Mark Roget is honoured enough for this remarkable achievement.

Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain, 1933 (Virago £14.99).

I read this astonishing memoir when researching my second novel, Home Fires, part of which dealt with the female experience of the First World War. There was, I soon discovered, vanishingly little written about it other than this book, which is a profoundly compelling account of the personal cost of war. (I also liked how much attention Vera Brittain paid to her clothes – some of her most enthusiastic sentences concern the particular power of a polka dot.)

Titles in print are available from The Week Bookshop on 020-3176 3835. For out-of-print books visit biblio.co.uk

The Week’s guide to what’s worth seeing and reading Showing now

Faustus: That Damned Woman Playwright Chris Bush reimagines the Faust myth in this radical new production, in which the eponymous character is a woman. Until 22 February, Lyric Hammersmith, London W6; then Birmingham and on (headlong.co.uk).

“the bad boy of fin-de-siècle London”, who died aged just 25 (Guardian). 4 March-25 May, Tate Britain, London SW1 (tate. org.uk).

Northern Ballet’s 50th anniversary celebrations continue with Geisha, a new work by composer Alexandra Harwood and choreographed

by Kenneth Tindall, about two geisha drawn into a collision between East and West.

Premieres at Leeds Grand Theatre on 14 March, then touring until 16 May (northernballet.com).

Portraying Pregnancy Spanning five centuries – from a Holbein sketch of Thomas More’s daughter to Awol Erizku’s 2017 photograph of a pregnant Beyoncé – this exhibition charts the artistic representation of an experience Beardsley’s The Black Cape (1893) Just out in paperback that “unites women across Around the World in 80 Trains by Monisha history” (FT). The Foundling Museum, London Rajesh (Bloomsbury £9.99). Rajesh’s first book WC1 (foundlingmuseum.org.uk), until 26 April. recounted “a 25,000-mile odyssey” around India; this time, she details an “enthralling swirl Book now of cultures and landscapes” across Europe, Asia Aubrey Beardsley, at Tate Britain, is the and North America (Guardian). largest exhibition in 50 years of drawings by

© TATE

The Archers: what happened last week

In protest at The Bull’s name change, Eddie and Lynda make plans for an alternative Burns Night event. On an evening out together, an exhausted Natasha snaps at Tom. She later apologises and says she wants to move her business to Ambridge to cut down on commuting – they could share work space. When Kirsty confesses to Philip that the wedding plans are stressing her out, he says they can call it all off. Later, Helen asks Kirsty if this is what she really wants. Ian and Lee have an awkward meeting. Jim, Jazzer and Alistair head to Harold Jayston’s funeral but, in the end, Jim can’t face it. As Rex brings his pigs to the abattoir, a farmer accuses him of stealing his trailer; later, when Rex and Toby check the chassis number, they find it has been removed. Jim visits Jayston’s grave and encounters Michael, another of his victims; they talk. Rejoining Alistair and Jazzer, Jim says it’s time to go home. The Bull’s Burns Bop is a flop, so Tracy and Roman slink off to the Grundy’s party. Kirsty says she does want to marry Philip after all, but with just the two of them.

Television Programmes

Australia on Fire: Climate Emergency Dramatic

account of the wildfires as told by firefighters, wildlife experts and people who lost their homes. With drone footage of the devastated landscape, the film also explores the wider concerns of climate change.

Mon 3 Feb, C4 20:00 (60mins).

Mary Beard’s Shock of the Nude The classicist’s witty, personal take on the nude in art through the ages, covering everything from classical sculpture to contemporary photography. Mon 3 Feb, BBC2 21:00 (60mins).

Baghdad Central Set in

2003 after the fall of Saddam Hussein, this tense six-part drama opens with an Iraqi former police inspector trying to find his estranged daughter.

Mon 3 Feb, C4 22:00 (60mins).

Home Season two of the

gentle sitcom about a Syrian refugee living with a family in Dorking. Sami is still waiting for his right to remain, but his patience is wearing thin. Wed 5 Feb, C4 22:00 (30mins).

Secrets Of The Museum A

look behind the scenes at the V&A, exploring the treasures in its collections. Part one takes us inside Kylie Minogue’s 2007 tour dressing room. Thur 6 Feb, BBC2 20:00 (60mins).

Films

Hidden Figures (2016)

Oscar-nominated drama about three female mathematicians, dealing with sexism and racism while working for Nasa in the 1960s. Sat 1 Feb, C4 21:00 (145mins).

Wind River (2017) Thriller

set on a frozen reservation in Wyoming, with Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen. Wed 5 Feb, Film4 21:00 (130mins).

Coming up for auction

Nell Gifford, the creative powerhouse behind Giffords Circus, died in December, but her passion for circus life is celebrated in an exhibition and auction of her paintings, Into a Land of Pure Magic.

Her exuberant depictions of horses and acrobats start from £250. Exhibition 20-27 February, online auction 10-28 February; Olympia Auctions, 25 Blythe Road, London W14 (olympiaauctions.com).

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

Best properties

34 Colourful properties

▲

Suffolk: Hill House, Polstead. A detached Grade II, 18th century timberframed property in the heart of the village, opposite The Cock Inn and overlooking the village green.

Polstead sits on the Essex/Suffolk borders, on the north side of the Stour Valley and is surrounded by the gently sloping countryside of the Dedham Vale Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. Master bed, 1/2 further beds, family bath, kitchen, dining room, sitting room, bed 3/office with en-suite shower, hall, double garage, west facing gardens. £425,000; David Burr (01206-263007).

▲ London: St Lukes Mews, Westbourne Park, W11. A charming two-bed mews house, set over three floors, just moments from Portobello Road. Master suite, 1 further bed with en-suite shower, ground floor kitchen/dining room, WC, open plan first floor double recep. £2m; Foxtons (020-7616 7000). ▲

Hertfordshire: Walnut Tree House, Hunsdon, Ware. A pretty house with extensive equestrian facilities, directly adjoining open countryside, with lovely views. Master suite with vaulted ceiling and exposed beams, 4 further beds, family bath, kitchen/breakfast room, utility, playroom/study, dining room, drawing room, entrance hall, WC, driveway, hardstanding, triple cart lodge/garage with room above, gardens, paddock, stable block, ménage, 4.46 acres.

OIRO £1.3m; Savills (01279-756800).

THE WEEK 1 February 2020

on the market

35 ▲

Suffolk: Elms Farm, All Saints South Elmham, Halesworth. On the market for the first time in almost 40 years, this traditional Suffolk pink Grade II* farm house is one of only six aisled halls in Suffolk. Parts of the building date back to 1290, with 15th and 16th century additions, and the house retains a wealth of period features, including the original minstrels’ gallery. Elms Farm is set in a rural location in large gardens with ponds, a kitchen garden and views over the fields beyond. Master bed, 2 further beds, family bath, WC, study area, kitchen, 2 receps, brickbuilt stables with tiled roof and electricity, large driveway with parking for several cars. £500,000; Exquisite Home via OnTheMarket (01473679801).

London: Salford Road, Balham SW2.

A ground-floor flat, with its own front door and a private garden, in this Victorian conversion in the Telford Park Conservation Area.

Balham mainline and Underground station is close by, as are the shops, bars and restaurants of the area. Master bed, 1 further bed, family bath, kitchen, sitting room, garden. £570,000 share of freehold; Jacksons (020-8675 6565).

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London: Arlington Street, St James’s SW1.

An impressive, spacious duplex penthouse in a quiet enclave in the heart of St James’s. Set on the third and fourth floors, this elegant apartment has direct views over The Ritz and Piccadilly, and onto Dover Street.

Master suite, guest suite, 1 further bed, shower, spacious double recep with separate kitchen area, hall, lift access. £3.95m leasehold, with approximately 64 years remaining; Knight Frank (020-7647 6615). ▲

Norfolk: 36 Elm Hill, Norwich. A 16th century period town house on one of Norwich’s most historic streets, just 500 feet from Norwich Cathedral.

This Grade II* timberframed house has 18th century additions and a wealth of period features, from sash windows and shutters to exposed beams, fireplaces and a brick cellar. Master suite with walk-in wardrobe, 3 further beds, family bath, kitchen, 3 receps, garden room, hall, courtyard garden. £725,000; Strutt & Parker (01603-883602).

▲ Worcestershire: Little Acton Cottage, Acton, near Ombersley. A characterful cottage dating from 1750, with lovely private gardens, fields and woodland extending to 2.78 acres. Master suite, 3 further beds, family bath, kitchen, breakfast room, utility, conservatory, hall, 2 receps, cloakroom, garage/workshop, barn. £630,000; Knight Frank (01905-723438).

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

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Not to blo our own Alphorn, bu ...did you know that our herba sweets are multi award-winnin

Available from the confectionery aisle of selected Waitrose, Sainsbury’s, Holland & Barrett and WHSmith stores and online at ocado and Ricola.com

THE WEEK 1 February 2020

Wish you well.

To advertise here please email classiďŹ ed@theweek.co.uk or call Nicholas Fisher on 020 3890 3932 or Rebecca Seetanah 020 3890 3770

LEISURE Food & Drink

37

Three vegan porridge recipes Porridge makes for a perfect breakfast – quick, healthy and 100% satisfying, says Bettina Campolucci Bordi. These dishes can all be topped with “boosters” (see options below) and can be made the evening before if you prefer.

Mostly apples and oat porridge Makes 2 portions 2 dessert apples ½ tsp coconut oil ½ tsp ground cinnamon ½ tsp ground cardamom 1 pinch of ground cloves 125g oats (or quinoa, rice, millet or buckwheat flakes) 500ml oat milk or other plant milk nut butter, plant milk, jam or plant yoghurt, to serve boosters: hemp hearts chopped nuts • Grate the apples, including the core and peel, and set aside. Gently heat up the coconut oil in a small pan, then add the spices and give them a stir. Add the oats and plant milk and bring to a simmer for 5 minutes until thickened and the oats are soft, stirring occasionally.

• Take the pan off the heat and ladle in the grated apple. Enjoy with milk and a dollop of nut butter, jam or plant yoghurt.

Banoffee oats Makes 2 portions 2 bananas ½ tsp coconut oil 1 tsp vanilla paste 2 medjool dates, pitted and torn 125g oats (or quinoa, rice, millet or buckwheat flakes) 500ml oat

salt and bring to a simmer for 5 minutes until thickened and the oats are soft, stirring occasionally.

• Take the pan off the heat and ladle in the mashed bananas. Enjoy with a dollop of coconut yoghurt.

Spicy carrot oats Makes 2 portions ½ tsp coconut oil ½ tsp ground cinnamon 125g oats (or quinoa, rice, millet or buckwheat flakes) 500ml oat milk or other plant milk 2 carrots, grated 1 tbsp currants nut butter, or chopped nuts or seeds, to serve (optional) boosters: hemp hearts cacao nibs • Gently heat the coconut oil in a small saucepan, then add the cinnamon and give it a stir. Add the oats and plant milk and bring to a simmer for 5 minutes until thickened and the oats are soft, stirring occasionally. milk or other plant milk a pinch of salt coconut yoghurt, to serve boosters: grated dark dairy-free chocolate (with at least 70% cocoa solids) cacao nibs hemp hearts chopped nuts • Peel and mash the bananas and set aside. Gently heat up the coconut oil in a small pan, add the vanilla paste, then stir in the dates. Add the oats, plant milk and

• Take the pan off the

heat and ladle in both the carrots and the currants. Enjoy with a dollop of nut butter, or a handful of chopped nuts or seeds.

Taken from 7 Day Vegan Challenge by Bettina Campolucci Bordi, published by Hardie Grant at £15.

To buy from The Week Bookshop for £12.99, call 020-3176 3835 or visit theweekbookshop.co.uk.

© CLARE WINFIELD

What the experts recommend

Sugo Pasta 70 Mitchell Street, Glasgow (sugopasta.co.uk) This 200-seat pasta joint has only just opened, and is already “Glasgow’s most oversubscribed restaurant”, says Marina O’Loughlin in The Sunday Times. It is from the team behind Paesano, a pizzeria that was also a “smash hit”. It’s no secret that pasta – like pizza – is a “banker” for restaurateurs, but Sugo has entirely resisted the temptation to cut corners.

From its glorious setting in the old Glasgow Herald building, to the careful pairing of pastas and sauces, everything has been meticulously thought through.

The short menu is split up by region: there’s agnolotti stuffed with veal and cavolo nero (a nod to EmiliaRomagna), and tagliolini with green beans, pesto and – in “a typically Ligurian touch” – potato. One of my dining companions declares his pappardelle with slow-cooked beef ragu (Tuscany) “the best pasta he’s eaten in a restaurant, ever”. That they can do all this and still produce a “gentle” bill at the end is “little short of remarkable”.

Dinner for three, including drinks, £69.

Bistro Forty Six 46 Brentwood Avenue, Newcastle (0191-281 8081) From the outside, this restaurant in the trendy Newcastle neighbourhood of Jesmond looks as though it’s going to be “knocking out beetroot and goat’s cheese salads”, says Jay Rayner in The Observer. But it turns out that its speciality is game, much of it personally shot by chef Max Gott in the hills of Northumberland. We start with “pheasant bonbons”: seasoned balls of “minced loveliness” served with burnt leeks and finely shredded puffball.

That “Gott has a way with pheasant” is equally clear from another starter, pheasant scotch egg, its yolk “at that perfect place between set and running”.

The stand-out main is “deep rosy slices” of venison served with impeccable mash. To drink, we are served cloudy cider, made from “apples scrumped from the streets of Jesmond”.

But more important than the “field to fork thing” is the “completely delightful” mood. Run by a team of enthusiasts, Bistro Forty Six is a “small restaurant with heart”. Starters £6.95-£8.95; mains £15.95-£24.95.

English pinot noir Although “English whites have been up there with the best” for some time, our reds – generally made from pinot noir – have tended to be “thin, weedy, acidic affairs”, says Jane MacQuitty in The Times. In 2018, however, a combination of ideal weather conditions and “better equipment, knowledge and finance” resulted in the “vintage of the century”.

Don’t expect English pinot to taste like Burgundy or New World editions; it has a “light, floral, fruity quality – part cranberry, part raspberry – of its own”. See what I mean with the “red cherry-spiked” 2018 Bolney Estate Pinot Noir (£16.99; Waitrose). Also bursting with “ripe yet tangy red fruit” is the same winemaker’s Dark Harvest from the previous year (£11.49; Waitrose) – made this time primarily from rondo.

Worcestershire’s 2017 Sixteen Ridges Pinot Noir Early (£19.50; Hawkins Bros), produced from an early ripening clone, is tangy and smoky. And when judiciously oaked, English reds acquire a “classy dimension” – as with Sharpham Estates’s soft, velvety 2018 Pinot Noir (£19.95; Noel Young).

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

Great Escapes

38

Local knowledge means never more than one set of footprints

Puerto Viejo, Costa Rica

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THE WEEK 1 February 2020

To advertise here please email classiďŹ ed@theweek.co.uk or call Nicholas Fisher on 020 3890 3932 or Rebecca Seetanah 020 3890 3770

Consumer New cars: what the critics say

Ford Puma

from £20,545

What Car? Back in the 1990s, the Ford Puma was a small, sporty coupé.

So it’s a little odd that it has “morphed” into a small SUV – but it’s certainly a good one.

It uses the kind of mild hybrid engine technology that you’d usually expect to find in a much more expensive car, “allowing it to combine nippy acceleration with remarkably thrifty fuel economy”.

LEISURE 39

Auto Express So far, there’s only a onelitre turbocharged petrol engine on offer, with either 123bhp or 153bhp.

It’s an excellent engine, with a clever EcoBoost mechanism to shut down one of its three cylinders when it’s not needed. The Puma is “a real pleasure” to drive, and though it can be loud, it has a “fluid, sure-footed feel that only Ford seems to be able to manage in the mainstream family-car class”.

The best… non-pod coffee machines

The Daily Telegraph The Puma has a distinctive “tough toy car” look, and an “airy”, comfortable interior. There are a few cheap materials inside, but there is also a “wealth” of innovation – from zip-off seat covers to a height-adjustable floor for the impressive 456-litre boot. Generous entry-level spec includes pre-collision breaking and massaging seats. The Puma might just be “good enough to be crowned Car of the Year”.

▲

Sage Bambino Plus s assle-free and compact, Ha th s machine has a sim mple three-button intterface for making on ne or two cups, an nd for operating the steam wa ust and. It heats up in ju th ee seconds (from £ £199; joh hnlewis.com).

Tips of the week… how to go vegan, and stick to it ● Decide why you’re going vegan, whether it’s for your health, the environment or animal welfare, and then read up on it.

You’re more likely to stick to your decision if you know why your convictions matter. ● Re-stock your cupboards full of vegan cooking basics: a dairy-free spread (Flora is now fully vegan), veggie mince (handy for bolognese and chilli), oat milk (try Oatly Barista Edition), and vegan mayonnaise (try the Hellmann’s one, or Follow Your Heart). ● Learn to check the labels – eggs and milk are often hidden ingredients. ● Most wines, barring French ones, are vegan, even if they don’t carry an official label. If in doubt, buy new world wines.

Most spirits and champagnes are vegan. ● Most toiletries are tested on animals, as are many cleaning products. Look for vegan/cruelty-free labels, or use brands like Ecover, Method, Lush and The Body Shop. ● Don’t throw away your non-vegan clothes – phase them out gradually.

SOURCE: THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

Melitta Ba arista TS Smart This model lets you choose from 21 different varieties of coffee, as well as five different strengths. It can n also save up to eig ght preferences so members of the fam mily don’t have to start from scrratch with each cup p (from £680; am mazon.co.uk).

Sa Oracle Touch It ▲ Sage may look fiddly, but this bean-to-cup machine does the complicated bits for you and makes outstanding coffee. You pour in whole beans, select your coffee on the colour touchscreen and it does the rest (£1,799; johnlewis.com).

And for those who have everything…

If you sometimes find yourself out and about, desperately craving a home-made smoothie, the Smoovii is what you need.

The portable blender (about the size of a water bottle) can mix about 20 drinks on a single USB charge. £40; smoovii.com SOURCE: LONDON EVENING STANDARD

Where to find… winter gardens to visit One of the first places to lay out a special winter garden, the 40-acre Cambridge University Botanic Garden is filled with glowing orange and red dogwoods and willows (£6; botanic.cam.ac.uk).

Endsleigh, in Devon, exhibits the “genius” of the 18th century landscaper Humphry Repton, with water charging under paths and down rock faces (£5, or free with lunch or afternoon tea; hotelendsleigh.com).

Stourhead, the National Trust’s landscape garden in Wiltshire, has a beautiful lake, temples and “magnificent” conifers (from £17.40; nationaltrust.org.uk/stourhead).

Formerly home of the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, Plas Brondanw, in Gwynedd, has fascinating topiary, alleys and stairways, as well as views of the peaks of Snowdonia (donations welcomed; brondanw.org).

Kew’s Garden in Sussex, Wakehurst, suffered greatly in the Great Storm of 1987, but was subsequently rethought in new and interesting ways (£14; kew.org/wakehurst).

SOURCE: THE SUNDAY TIMES

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

SOURCES: T3/THE INDEPENDENT/ THE DAILY TELEGRAPH

▲

e Breville One-Touch VCF108 slick, Particularly slic thanks to its rose-gold accents, this one is a bit unusual in that it can use both pods as well as coffee grounds. It’s also excellent value for money (from £217; amazon.co.uk).

▲

▲

Smeg ECF01 Available in lots of colours, S Smeg’s coffee machine is as compe etent and well made as it is stylish. Perfectly simple to use, it makes great espressos and also has a milk fro other and a cup warmer (from £278; amazon.co.uk).

Bestsellers and new releases

Save up to 20% and enjoy FREE UK delivery on orders over £20 Agency

One Million Minutes

Verity is called “the app-whisperer” and her latest research project in San Francisco sees her test an astonishing new AI device.

Meanwhile, in a post-apocalyptic London a century from now, Wilf is tasked with interfering in the alternative

Wolf’s four-year-old daughter has physical disabilities, and as he begins to understand the magnitude of her condition, he starts to reconsider what is most important in life. He decides to prioritise time with his family - a million minutes. Over two years they travel the world, but the real journey is one of personal discovery.

William Gibson

£18.99 £16.99

Wolf Kuper

New release

The Other Bennet Sister

£12.99 £10.99

The Boundless Sea

Janice Hadlow

David Abulafia

For fans of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Hadlow’s The Other Bennet Sister tells Mary’s story.

Simultaneously a wonderfully warm homage to Austen and a delightful new story in its own right, it’s a tale of a young woman finding her place in the world. £16.99 £14.99

BEST SELLER

Abulafia’s book is “nothing less than a history of humanity written from the perspective of the sea”, said Jerry Brotton in the FT. Throughout, his interest is above all in how seafaring opened up connections between cultures. A work of “phenomenal” richness and detail, The Boundless Sea is an “epic achievement”. £35 £29.99

Paul Lay

Dr Guy Leschziner

Under Oliver Cromwell, “Christmas was banned, theatres were closed”, and Puritan “godliness” was thrust upon the nation. But as Paul Lay shows in his elegant history of Cromwell’s Protectorate, such “timehallowed assumptions” are mostly false. Far from being a “historical dead end”, the republic was a place of “astonishing energy and ambition”.

With compassionate stories of his patients’ conditions, Leschziner illustrates the neuroscience behind our sleeping minds, revealing the biological and psychological factors necessary in getting the rest that will maintain our health, as well as improve our cognitive abilities and overall happiness.

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Paul Merton

£25 £21.99

£8.99 £7.99

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A Short Philosophy of Birds

Funny Ha, Ha 80 of the funniest stories ever written, selected and introduced by comedian and broadcaster Paul Merton. From Anton Chekhov to Ali Smith, from P.G. Wodehouse to Nora Ephron, the greatest writers are those who know how to laugh. Silly, surreal, slap-stick or satirical - there’s a story here to tickle every funny bone.

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The Secret World of Sleep

Providence Lost

£30 £25.99

New release

Philippe J. Dubois, Elise Rousseauv

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Having spent a lifetime watching birds, Dubois and Rousseau - a French ornithologist and a philosopher - draw out the secret lessons that birds can teach us about how to live, and the brilliance of the natural word. This charming book gives you twenty-two little lessons of wisdom. £9.99 £7.99

BEST SELLER

Order online at TheWeekBookshop.co.uk/bestsellers or call us on 020 3176 3835

Terms & Conditions: Prices quoted do not include delivery. UK standard delivery is FREE on orders over £20, otherwise costs £2.99. All stock is subject to availability. Our phone lines are open: Monday to Saturday 9am-5.30pm Sunday 10am-4pm.

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Travel

LEISURE 41

This week’s dream: Algeria’s ancient treasures

For some years, a visit to Algeria was Forth. At that time, a third of Roman a “tricky prospect” owing to anxieties senators were north African, and their about Islamist militants. But it is now “sybaritic” lives at home are easy to imagine as you wander the ruins of safe for travellers, and well worth a visit for its empty beaches and its Timgad and Djémila, with their “olive-dotted” landscape, but also for “palatial” bathhouses, theatres, its architectural and artistic heritage, houses of pleasure and houses of says William Dalrymple in the FT. The Bacchus. Equally evocative are the mosaics, depicting a world of lioncountry’s colonisation by France and hunting and horse racing in summer, its 20th century war of independence, in which 25,000 French and at least and winter afternoons of pig-sticking 400,000 Algerians lost their lives, and gladiatorial combat. figure large in its image abroad.

Equally sophisticated were the medieval Muslim empires – the But for much of the last 2,000 years, North Africa carried far more weight Almoravids and Almohads, in the global balance of power – and whose palaces in Tlemcen are The “palatial” ruins of Timgad as “extraordinary” as those in in Algeria’s Moorish palaces and Roman towns, such past glories shine forth. southern Spain. And in Algiers, the wealth of the Barbary pirates Near the Roman hilltown of Tiddis, for example, lies the tomb (the terror of western Europe in the early modern age, capturing of a Berber cavalry commander, Quintus Lollius Urbicus, who 100,000 white Christian slaves to serve Algiers) can be seen in the was the first African governor of Britain. Appointed in 139AD, he “gorgeously painted” palace apartments of the Dey and – more led the reconquest of lowland Scotland, and oversaw the building luxurious still – of the corsair Admiral Barbarossa. Wild Frontiers of the Antonine Wall, from the Firth of Clyde to the Firth of (wildfrontierstravel.com) organises group trips.

Hotel of the week

Getting the flavour of…

Diving with humpbacks

Mezzatorre Hotel Ischia, Italy Perched on the north coast of the island of Ischia, near Naples, this beach hotel reopened last year after a makeover by “visionary hotel maven” Marie-Louise Sciò, says Tatler. Like her other creations – Il Pellicano and La Posta Vecchia – it mixes “tradition” and “fantasy” with “impeccable taste and style”.

There’s a Santa Maria Novella spa (where the treatments focus on Ischia’s natural thermal waters), a swimming pool scene “straight out of a Slim Aarons shot”, and a thatched beachside restaurant that combines an “intimate clubby vibe” with such a “heady” atmosphere that “you truly feel like the world outside can wait”.

Doubles from £310. pellicanohotels.com.

Humpback whales mate and calve in the tropical Gulf of Guinea each year, and there’s no better place to swim with them than around the tiny archipelagic nation of São Tomé and Príncipe. Go with the operator I Am Water Ocean Travel, says Ian Belcher in The Times, and you’ll also enjoy daily tuition in freediving (diving with no equipment) from Hanli Prinsloo, a record-breaker in the sport, and Peter Marshall, a champion swimmer.

The sight of the whales leaping near your boat is both astonishing and intimidating.

They’re so active that guests can’t always get close to one in the water, but there are other “mesmerising” creatures to dive with (including dolphins). The islands are beautiful, with fabulous beach hotels, verdant jungle punctuated by volcanic “fangs” of rock, and as many endemic species as the Galapágos in an eighth of the space. Visit iamwateroceantravel.com to request prices for bespoke tours.

France’s wildest western isle

Twelve miles off the coast of Brittany, the Île d’Ouessant is the westernmost landmass in metropolitan France, and one of the country’s “most stimulating spots”, says Anthony Peregrine in The Sunday Times.

Around its rocky edges and treeless heaths swirl high winds, frequent mists and fog, and currents of “devilish treachery” (it has

five lighthouses, including Europe’s most powerful, the Creac’h, whose beam reaches 32 nautical miles and from where a notional line drawn to the Lizard in Cornwall divides the Channel from the Atlantic). There are pretty white-sand beaches hidden among the cliffs on the island’s south coast, and lovely paths for hiking, biking and birdwatching all over its six square miles. Visit pennarbed.fr for information on ferries, and ot-ouessant.fr for general information.

The RHS’s first urban garden

Due to open this summer on the edge of Salford in Greater Manchester, the RHS Garden Bridgewater is the biggest gardening project in Europe, and the RHS’s first ever urban garden, says Rachel Dixon in The Guardian. Occupying the former grounds of Worsley New Hall, a 19th century mansion demolished in the 1940s, it includes a café and kitchen garden, a Chinese garden, a wild woodland play area, and a “well-being garden” for use by community groups.

There’s also a “social prescribing” scheme, allowing GPs to refer patients struggling with isolation, restricted mobility and other conditions for activities organised by a “therapeutic gardener”. For those keen to see the garden before its official summer opening, there are two-hour guided tours until April, and volunteering opportunities.

Visit rhs.org.uk for information.

© STEPHEN RINGER

Last-minute offers from top travel companies Heart of English Riviera Set on the seafront in the beautiful town of Torquay, the Torbay Hotel offers a 3-night stay from £104pp half-board, including drinks vouchers.

01942-415419, shearings.com.

Arrive 20 March.

Croatia’s Lopud island With views across the water to the mainland, the four-star Hotel Lafodia offers a sevennight stay from £706pp b&b, including Glasgow flights. 0203451 2720, firstchoice.co.uk.

Depart 4 June.

Five-star Portugal The five-star Pestana Casino Park in Funchal, Madeira, offers a 4-night stay from £392pp half-board, including Manchester flights. 020-3474 0372, blueseaholidays.co.uk.

Depart 9 March.

Sharm El Sheikh retreat Stay 7 nights at the Jaz Club Fanara & Residence, which boasts breathtaking views of the Red Sea. From £780pp allinclusive, including Bristol flights. 020-3636 1931, tui.co. uk. Depart 6 May. 1 February 2020 THE WEEK

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Marketplace

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THE WEEK 1 February 2020

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Obituaries

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Acclaimed writer, director, historian and Python Terry Jones, who has died Terry Jones aged 77, shot to fame in the 1942-2020 early 1970s as a member of Monty Python’s Flying Circus – the six-strong troupe whose anarchic, iconoclastic TV sketch show captivated audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, and changed the face of comedy. As well as appearing on screen in a variety of bizarre guises, he co-wrote some of the Pythons’ most memorable sketches, and directed three of their feature films. Such was their impact, he was forever after referred to as the “ex Python”, said The Times, yet he had many other strings to his bow. He wrote screenplays and children’s books, and was a keen amateur historian of the medieval period. Gregarious, effusive and affable, he once said that he was glad he had gone to the University of Oxford, because he met two men there who changed his life: Michael Palin and Geoffrey Chaucer.

brother’s verdict. They then had to decide the show’s format – which was trickier, said The Daily Telegraph. Jones and Palin – the “Oxford men” – had a more “visual, anarchic” humour, a freewheeling, stream of consciousness approach that did not depend on punchlines; the “Cambridge men” favoured more structured sketches, with puns and sharp, clearly-signalled jokes.

This tension proved creative: the Flying Circus was a massive hit, leading to records, books and (later) “concert” tours. But behind the scenes, there was considerable disharmony.

The Pythons disbanded in 1973, before reuniting in 1975 for the film Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Jones co-directed it with Gilliam before taking the reins solo on Life of Brian (1979), a satire about a young Jewish man who is mistaken for Jesus. He also starred in the film and, as Brian’s mother, Mandy, he Jones: Chaucer changed his life delivered its most famous line: “He’s not the Terry Jones was born in Colwyn Bay in 1942, and brought up in Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy!” Although the film is not about Christ, Life of Brian was banned as blasphemous in Ireland and Surrey, where his father worked in a bank. As a boy, he listened by several councils in the UK. Jones also directed The Meaning of to the Goons on the radio, and was entranced. “It was the surreality of the imagery and the speed of the comedy that I Life (1983), in which he played Mr Creosote, the obese diner who explodes in a smart restaurant after eating a “wafer-thin” mint. loved,” he wrote. He was a star pupil at the Royal Grammar School in Guildford, and from there won a place to read English at St Edmund Hall, Oxford. Joining the Experimental Theatre Jones’s later films as a director included Personal Services (1987), Club, he started writing and performing material with Palin, a about the British “madam” Cynthia Payne. He wrote the fellow undergraduate, who would become a lifelong friend. On screenplay for the David Bowie film Labyrinth (1986), and several graduating, they found work at the BBC, and in the late 1960s, highly regarded popular histories. In the 2000s, he had a column collaborated with Eric Idle and the American animator Terry in The Guardian, which he used to rail against the US invasion of Gilliam on the surreal children’s sketch show Do Not Adjust Iraq. Jones was married first to Alison Telfer, with whom he had two children. He left her in 2009, to marry his lover Anna Your Set. Soon after, John Cleese and his writing partner Graham Chapman (who had met at Cambridge) contacted them, Söderström, whom he had met at a book signing when she was suggesting they produce some material for a new show together.

23. They had one daughter, in 2009, and married in 2012. He Conveniently, the BBC offered them a 13-episode series. Their was diagnosed with a form of dementia in 2016. Asked once what first choice of a name for the troupe was Bun, Wackett, Buzzard, he’d like written on his gravestone, Jones said he didn’t want to Stubble and Boot, but the BBC rejected it, so they settled on be remembered as a Python, but for his children’s books, and the Monty Python’s Flying Circus. “It’ll never catch on,” was Jones’s “academic stuff”. Those, he said, “are my best bits”.

Italian artist who was a pioneer of British cinema Lorenza Mazzetti, who has died aged 91, earned a place in British cinema history in the 1950s when she co-founded the Free Cinema documentary movement, a precursor to the British New Wave. Its films were typically shot in black and white, using hand-held cameras, and focused on everyday, mainly working-class British subjects that their makers felt were overlooked by the mainstream industry. Mazzetti’s best known film, Together, won a prize at Cannes in 1956, but while her three collaborators in the movement – Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson – went on to make some of the seminal films of the 1960s, Mazzetti moved back to Italy, where she became better known as a writer and painter.

Lorenza Mazzetti 1928-2020

War, she studied at the University of Florence, then moved to London, where she worked as a waitress. Finding that she enjoyed drawing, she applied to the Slade School. “You must let me in, because I am a genius,” she told its director, William Coldstream.

At the Slade she “liberated” some film-making equipment to make a film based on Kafka’s Metamorphosis. On discovering the theft, Coldstream threatened to call the police, but was interested to see what she had produced: the result was so impressive that Denis Forman, the director of the British Film Institute, gave her a grant to make Together. Filmed on location, it stars the artists Edouardo Paolozzi and Michael Andrews as profoundly deaf brothers who work Mazzetti: “Because I am a genius” as dockers in the bomb-ravaged East End. It was Lorenza Mazzetti was born in Rome in 1928. After her mother a sensation when it was screened as part of the Free Cinema died, she and her twin sister were sent to Tuscany, where they programme in 1956, but soon after, Mazzetti returned to Italy to were raised by an aunt who was married to Robert Einstein, a visit her sister, and fell into a depression. She never worked in the cousin of Albert. She remembered her childhood as a happy one UK again, but she remained on good terms with her friends from until the summer of 1944, when the SS slaughtered her aunt and the British film world. She wrote several books, including the her two cousins. Robert was not at home at the time, but killed bestselling Il cielo cade (The Sky Falls); exhibited her paintings; himself a year later. Mazzetti was deeply traumatised. After the and for many years ran a popular puppet theatre in Rome.

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

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CITY Companies in the news ...and how they were assessed

CITY 45

Tesla: racing to $100bn

As expected, Tesla’s market value broke through a key barrier last week, said The Economist. The California-based electric carmaker “accelerated past $100bn” – making it the world’s second-most valuable carmaker after Toyota, even though “it still accounts for only a tiny fraction of global car sales”. Last year, Tesla delivered 367,500 vehicles “compared with 11 million from VW alone”. The milestone caps “a dramatic rally that has seen the carmaker’s share price rise 125% in three months”, said the FT. It also marks “a moment of vindication” for founder Elon Musk, “after a controversial period in which the Tesla chief has at times been almost at war with Wall Street”. But is Tesla a carmaker or a “platform” tech company, asked Jasper Jolly in The Observer. Its soaring share price suggests that investors think it can achieve the same “unassailable scale” as the likes of Amazon and Apple. The latter’s shares have more than doubled in the past year, boosting its market capitalisation by $692bn. Google parent Alphabet, meanwhile, has just become the latest member of the $1trn valuation club. Analyst Alex DeGroote reckons this cohort of tech giants is now “basically unstoppable”. Investors are certainly betting on “the platform capitalists continuing to add zeroes to their bank balances – at least until politicians come good with their threats of serious regulation”.

Amigo: adios to an “unlovely company”?

Two months ago, the colourful financial entrepreneur James Benamor returned to Amigo – the subprime lender he founded and in which his family retains a 61% stake, said Kate Burgess in the FT. It seems that “the more you see, the less there is to like”: seven weeks in the boardroom have persuaded Benamor that “he cannot get shot of Amigo fast enough”. This week, he effectively put the firm up for sale; a de-listing from the stock exchange may follow. Amigo’s already battered shares dived 29% on the news. Will Benamor find a buyer for his “unlovely company”, asked Nils Pratley in The Guardian.

The venture – which makes its money lending to troubled borrowers (at an annual rate of 49.9%), provided they find a wealthier “friend or relation” to guarantee interest and principal – is certainly under pressure. “As you’d expect, regulators have taken a sceptical look at this business model”, questioning whether “guarantors truly understand they could be on the hook”. Unsurprisingly, there have been complaints aplenty. Amigo somehow got itself floated at a £1.3bn valuation in 2018, but it’s been downhill ever since: shares listed at 275p are now worth just 48p. “The bitter 2018 vintage” of London flotations “is souring with age”, said Chris Hughes on Bloomberg. After Aston Martin and Funding Circle, “London’s Worst IPO Award” now has a new contender – Amigo.

UK banks: overdraft overkill

Are high-street lenders colluding over overdraft rates? The Financial Conduct Authority suspects so, said Harry Robertson in City AM. The City watchdog has demanded banks explain why they appear to have “aligned their new overdraft rates at around 40%”. The new rates follow a controversial “rule change”: from April, the FCA “will ban banks charging more for unarranged overdrafts” in response to complaints that fees can be “ten times as much as a payday loan”. It appears the banks have decided to impose uniformly higher charges on arranged overdrafts to compensate. No wonder customers are furious.

Seven days in the Square Mile Global markets continued to be rattled by the coronavirus outbreak in China, with exchanges in Korea and Singapore taking heavy hits amid fears that regional companies could be the first to suffer. The value of traditional safe haven assets such as the dollar, the yen and gold all rose. Bond yields fell, as did oil, and the prices of commodities such as copper and iron ore all dipped on concern over Chinese growth. The price of crude fell more than 2% to below $60/ barrel – its lowest level in three months.

JPMorgan analysts predicted a further hit of up to $5 a barrel if the outbreak developed into a full-blown epidemic.

Both the US Federal Reserve and the Bank of England were set to make key calls on interest rates. The Fed was expected to hold rates steady after three cuts last year; the Bank’s decision was more finely balanced. Many economists, citing falling inflation, expected the first UK base-rate cut since 2016, from 0.75% to 0.5%. Others pointed to a more positive outlook for the economy and forecast the Bank would stay its hand.

Shares in Finablr, the foreign exchange group behind Travelex, slumped to their lowest level since listing after its founder pledged more than half the company as security for a loan. Boeing posted its first annual loss in two decades; it expects the bill for the grounding of the 737 Max jet to reach $18.6bn. The Government said it would strip the troubled Northern rail franchise from Arriva five years early. The line will be renationalised.

Just Eat/Takeaway.com: another serving of trouble “Just when you thought the most tortuous meal in history was finally over”, along comes the Competition and Markets Authority with “an extra course”, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. The UK watchdog has intervened to postpone the £6bn merger between Just Eat and its Dutch-listed counterpart Takeaway.com just a day before the deal was due to be completed. The “CMA foodies” – who are already investigating a $500m investment by Amazon in Just Eat’s rival, Deliveroo – want to gauge whether the tie-up would prevent a new entrant breaking into Britain’s increasingly lucrative food-delivery market.

combo would create “a titan” processing 360 million orders a year. Central to the CMA’s investigation is whether Takeaway.com, which exited the UK market in 2016 “after racking up big losses”, would have re-entered off its own bat were it not for the Just Eat deal – the Dutch firm having since grown into “one of Europe’s largest names”. The CMA has hitherto “been all too happy to wave through deals that have gone on to be detrimental to the consumer landscape”. Quite right to examine this one.

Still, what a saga, said Jennifer Marston on The Spoon. It all underscores how fiercely competitive the food-delivery market is, “with Just delayed?

The CMA’s intervention “has prompted demand for off-premises orders set to drive predictable outrage” from interested parties, restaurant sales for the next decade”. said Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. But come on – the Takeaway.com remains confident that clearance on the merger watchdog “couldn’t simply wave through a deal of this size”. “will be obtained”. We’ll have to wait and see if there’s “a longer, Just Eat is already Britain’s No. 1 food-delivery service and this more complicated battle on the horizon”.

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

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Talking points

CITY 47

Issue of the week: corona contagion Could the rapid spread of China’s deadly virus derail stock markets around the world?

Charles Li, chairman of the Hong Kong said “the outbreak could affect its stock exchange, performed a traditional financial forecasts”. Plenty more global duty on Wednesday – handing out cashcompanies are already “exposed”, with stuffed red envelopes to celebrate the first carmakers, auto-part suppliers and trading day of the Year of the Rat. It was luxury goods groups “among the most hardly the most auspicious of starts, said vulnerable”, said the Financial Times.

Wuhan, the city at the centre of the Louis Ashworth in The Daily Telegraph. outbreak, “is a major automotive hub”: “Almost half a trillion pounds was wiped off global stocks” this week as China’s Nissan, PSA, Honda and GM all have plants there. Japanese carmaker deadly coronavirus rattled markets.

Some traders fear the epidemic may have Toyota has already postponed the reopening of 12 Chinese plants until a major effect on global equity markets, “many of which ended last week at allwell into February. time highs”. Shares in mainland China Will the virus derail the bull market remained “isolated from the fall-out”: the country’s stock markets were closed in stocks? History suggests not, said during the new year holiday and will The coronavirus sent Hong Kong stocks tumbling Dominic Frisby on MoneyWeek.com. probably remain “in stasis” until next The most easily comparable epidemic – the Sars outbreak of 2003 – had little long-term impact on global week, according to Bloomberg. But Hong Kong’s benchmark Hang Seng index, which tracks the performance of large Chinese markets. “Unless this coronavirus morphs into something much companies, fell by 3.5% on Wednesday. bigger ... I don’t see it having a big effect on Western markets, beyond causing some choppy action in the days – and maybe weeks – ahead.” Economists at Goldman Sachs say “the negative The main worry for investors, said DealBook in The New York Times, is that this outbreak “could undo months of economic impact on growth and asset prices from viral outbreaks typically fades within a few months”, said Peter Wells in the FT. “But any gains around the world”. The biggest stock market hits were hit to the economy is unlikely to be well received by investors at taken by miners, luxury groups and airlines, including IAG, a time when they are positioned for growth to accelerate.” In the owner of British Airways, which has suspended flights to China.

Among big US losers were Starbucks, which closed more than half run-up to this epidemic, markets have been preternaturally serene.

“Anything really piercing the calm could prove a rude shock.” its stores in China, its second biggest market, and Apple, which

agent Purplebricks, finance firm Burford When the former star and the doorstep lender fund-manager Neil Provident Financial.

Woodford crashed last “We have no desire to year, his flagship fund engage in... an unseemly was frozen. This week, exercise in schadenpension funds and freude”, noted rival some 300,000 private fund superstar Terry investors in the £2.9bn Smith of Fundsmith – Woodford Equity before putting the boot Income fund learnt Woodford’s model: “lethal combination” into the “lethal combinhow much of their ation” of Woodford’s money they are getting model: “a daily dealing open-ended fund back, said Patrick Collinson in The with significant holdings in unquoted Guardian. In a nutshell: about half. After companies and large stakes in small quoted selling a first tranche of the fund’s assets, companies [with] very limited liquidity”. administrator Link Asset Services confirmed it would make “an initial payout of just 48p-58p a share – compared with ● Getting your own back the 100p price at launch five years ago.

The scale of losses felt by investors The money comes mainly from the sale depends on when they bought into the of “liquid” easier-to-sell assets: mostly fund and “which investment platform they shares in quoted companies. A second used”, said Sam Benstead in The Daily distribution will follow the disposal of Telegraph. If you bought through a “unquoted investments”. Don’t hold your “fund supermarket” – such as AJ Bell breath. “The administrators have already or Hargreaves Lansdown – and want warned that these assets are proving more to complain, your first port of call is to difficult to sell than expected.” contact them; they may direct you to the (free) Financial Ombudsman Service. If ● Lethal combo you invested directly in Woodford, contact The drastic fall in the value of Woodford Link, the administrator. “Legal action is shares contrasts sharply with the typical also an option.” Some 3,500 investors 31% gain in average equity income funds have signed up with law firm Slater and over the past five years, underlining “the Gordon to launch a case against the failed calamitous failure of Woodford’s stockfund manager. According to the firm “it is picking”. Duff investments included estate too early to say” what may be achieved. ● Glass half-empty

Mark-isms At his worst, he was “an unreliable boyfriend” whose Bank of England tenure was “bedevilled” by “policy hints and U-turns”, says The Sunday Telegraph. Yet he saw Britain safely through one of the worst political crises in a century. As the governor prepares to leave Threadneedle Street, here is the world according to Mark Carney: On limits to central bank policy “The BoE has long stressed that bank policies are not the cause of low rates but responses to them. We are actors in a play written by others.”

On the perils of a cliff-edge Brexit “This is a trade deal in reverse, which in many respects is harder... It is clearly undesirable to have that adjustment overnight.”

On the dangers of climate change for the economy “Companies that don’t adapt, including companies in the financial system, will go bankrupt without question.”

On facing future economic challenges “There is an old saying that there is no such thing as bad weather, just inappropriate clothing... Let us ensure that the Bank remains well suited to deliver its mission.”

On life as BoE governor “This role is just much more public than the same role in Canada… You’re not always performing but you’re always in public.”

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

© THE TIMES/NEWS LICENSING

Woodford payouts: what the experts think

Reasons to be cheerful post-Brexit Alex Brummer Daily Mail

Great news: green is the new greed Philip Aldrick The Times

Stop throwing money at mindfulness Miranda Wolpert Financial Times

Making lots of money out of Flying Fairies Schumpeter The Economist

THE WEEK 1 February 2020

Commentators The Brexit bill became law last week, says Alex Brummer, bringing to an end three-and-a-half years of political turmoil that has “held back economic confidence and investment”. The big surprise, however, “is the speed of the rebound”. A couple of weeks ago “the conventional wisdom was that the economy was in a bad place and that Mark Carney’s last duty as governor of the Bank of England would be to cut interest rates”. But, as he rightly argues, “monetary policy has largely run its course” and it’s “time for fiscal policy to take up the slack”. And the economy looks in pretty good shape. CBI data shows “manufacturing optimism surging and a rise in investment intentions”; the housing market is recovering; record levels of employment bode well for the public finances. All this may be a blip, not least because the global economy is struggling. But “with an expansionary budget on the way and corporate Britain sitting on a cash-pile, there’s no reason to think that an interest rate cut is required”.

Environmental sustainability. That was the “purpose” of Davos this year. Or, as the Prince of Wales put it: realigning “our economy to mimic nature’s economy and work in harmony with it”. The Prince has been “beating this drum since 1968”, says Philip Aldrick. But if business has finally caught up with him, it’s because “purpose is serving profit”. Cynical as it sounds, “green is the new greed” – and there’s “no better reason to be optimistic” about the battle to halt climate change. Homilies are nice, but money matters. Away from the main stages at Davos last week, private discussions “were less about ticking social responsibility checklists to greenwash brands for millennial consumers”, and more about “making profit”. Encouragingly, the other “base capitalist emotion”, fear (“the yin to greed’s yang”), is also pulling its weight. Despite strong profitability, energy has been the worst-performing sector in S&P 500 for three years running. That underperformance “can be linked directly to the policy risk that the 2016 Paris accord baked into the industry’s business model”.

Incentives are being realigned. “Money is doing the talking now.”

The global cost of mental illness through lost productivity and income, absence and staff turnover is put at around $2.5trn annually, says Miranda Wolpert. But in their efforts to help tackle the problem, companies may simply be throwing their money away. In-house yoga, happy hours, bi-weekly chair massages, plants and puppies, mindfulness seminars, bans on out-of-hours emails: all these “unconventional tactics” and more have been tried. And some may indeed have a positive effect. Trouble is, we can’t tell because most are completely untested. We even lack evidence on whether “employee assistance programmes”, common in many big organisations, really help. Companies should take a more encompassing view: “a workplace meditation room or wellbeing app is of little use if employees are overwhelmed with work pressures or poorly managed”. Nor will “the odd staff talk on resilience” work “if job cuts are looming”. Rather than simply trumpet their mental health initiatives, corporate leaders should seek “hard evidence on what works for who, and why”. Investing without understanding is both poor science and poor business.

One of the perils of doing business in China, says Schumpeter, is their liquor, known as baijiu. “Foreigners are told to avoid the worst pitfalls of baijiu binges by tipping unwanted toasts discreetly into their rice bowls.” The dominant notes of China’s national drink are “fermented beans and soy sauce”, and no one makes it better than its most renowned and successful producer, Kweichow Moutai. Its shares have soared by almost 600% in the past five years, “outpacing the likes of Amazon”. And the secret of its “intoxicating success”? For a start, it profits from Chinese nationalism: its Moutai was famously used “to raise spirits and disinfect wounds” on Mao’s Long March. But its great achievement has been its marketing strategy: it serves China’s super-rich rather than competing “in the cut-throat battle for middle-class wallets”. (A bottle of its high-end brand, Flying Fairy, which sold in the 1980s for the equivalent of a dollar now retails for $400.) And, it looks beyond affluent millennials” to the equally lucrative “elderly and middle-aged” market. No wonder Kweichow is now “the world’s biggest booze business”.

City profiles Philip Hammond “Small and medium-sized businesses are the lifeblood of the British economy.”

Thus spake Britain’s former chancellor, says Katherine Griffiths in The Times. And today his latest job is all about funding them.

Hammond, 64, has joined the board of OakNorth – a digital lender, founded in 2015, which aims to go where mainstream banks fear to tread. OakNorth is the second company Hammond has joined since leaving politics last month: he’s also a director of Ardagh Group, an Irish producer of glass and metal containers, which is listed in New York.

Fortunately, when it comes to balancing the books, OakNorth seems a winning proposition – it is “one of the only” UK fintech companies “to have broken into profitability”, and is backed by the might of SoftBank’s Vision Fund.

Lord (Paul) Drayson

When the former Labour science minister floated his newest start-up, Sensyne Health, two years ago, he vowed to realise the potential of artificial intelligence in health care “in an ethical way”, says The Sunday Times. That vow is now ringing rather hollow. Shares in the outfit have lost nearly three-quarters of their value, the company is on its fourth chairman and Drayson, who has declined to answer questions, is fighting for his reputation. A former amateur racing driver, Drayson, 59, started out in biotech before moving into politics. His first start-up, Powderject, was sold to a US rival for $800m in 2003. Those close to him don’t expect him to be down for long. “Paul is a force to be reckoned with – he’s used to getting his own way.”

© TIMES/NEWS LICENSING

48 CITY

50

Great Escapes & Marketplace

THE WEEK 1 February 2020

To advertise here please email classiďŹ ed@theweek.co.uk or call Nicholas Fisher on 020 3890 3932 or Rebecca Seetanah 020 3890 3770

Shares

CITY 51

Who’s tipping what The week’s best shares Learning Technologies Group Investors Chronicle The digital learning group’s figures are “comfortably ahead” of expectations, with revenues up 38%, profits by 58%. With an “active” pipeline of international acquisition opportunities. Buy. 158p.

Gamma Communications The Times Gamma uses the cloud to provide internet-based phone and broadband services to businesses. A “quiet phenomenon”, with profits up 40% and stellar growth figures. “Lots of overseas potential.” Buy. £13.80.

Royal Dutch Shell The Sunday Times Shares have been punished by the “pushback against fossil fuels”, a “sagging” gas price and a well-supplied oil market.

Still, there’s high potential for returns through buybacks and dividends – “if you dare”.

Buy. £22.00.

Safestore The Times In a “hot sector” with plenty of growth potential, Safestore operates 150 warehouses in London and the southeast, Paris and Barcelona. Not cheap, but a cautious approach adds to its “safe” appeal, and the storage market is a long way off “peak”. Buy. 768p.

Sage Group The Share Centre Sage software helps firms with their management, accounting and payroll services. The drive to increase revenues from subscriptions and cloud services is “beginning to bear fruit”. Buy. 751.4p.

Fever-Tree Drinks 2,600 2,400 2,200 2,000 1,800

Director buys 21,579

1,600 1,400

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

Jan

Shares in the tonic drink-maker slumped 20% following “subdued” Christmas trading.

Peak G&T? Not according to non-executive Kevin Havelock, who has spent £320,000 topping up his holding in anticipation of more fizz.

…and some to hold, avoid or sell

Form guide

BHP Group The Daily Telegraph The Anglo-Australian miner benefits from the “profitability of its world-class iron ore operations” and generates “significant” cash. Demand from China is slowing, which is a risk, but it yields 6%.

Hold. £18.16.

Derwent London The Times Rental income is up and vacancies are low at this high-quality commercial property developer focused on the West End, Shoreditch and Paddington. But after a strong post-election run, shares are richly valued. Avoid. £41.86.

Smiths Group The Sunday Telegraph Smiths’ products include airport x-ray machines, mechanical pipeline seals and hoses – all markets with high barriers to entry. It’s spinning off its medical division to boost “slowly” improving performance. Hold. £17.42.

Card Factory Investors Chronicle Faced with rising costs, declining footfall, persistent sales decline and rising cost inflation, the greetings card retailer has delivered a profit warning, suspended the special dividend and is reviewing the basic pay-out. Sell. 96.3p.

SIG Investors Chronicle The roofing and insulation specialist’s sales decline is accelerating and margins are wafer-thin. Brokers have slashed forecasts following a second profit warning and recovery hopes look overoptimistic. Sell. 97.6p.

Whitbread The Times The Premier Inn operator is planning 3,000 new UK rooms, and 2,000 more in Germany. But a frail economy means that positive food and drink sales haven’t offset falling hotel bookings .

Avoid. £44.29.

Shares tipped 12 weeks ago Best tip AK Medical The Daily Telegraph up 64.99% to HK $12.16 Worst tip Hargreaves Lansdown The Daily Telegraph up 1.93% to £18.51

Market view

“The market sell-off we were waiting for is here. The US stock market rally was overextended, and investors will use the coronavirus epidemic as the trigger needed to deliver a pullback.”

Edward Moya of Oanda. Quoted in The Daily Telegraph

Market summary Best and worst performing shares

Key numbers for investors FTSE 100 FTSE All-share UK Dow Jones NASDAQ Nikkei 225 Hang Seng Gold Brent Crude Oil DIVIDEND YIELD (FTSE 100) UK 10-year gilts yield US 10-year Treasuries UK ECONOMIC DATA Latest CPI (yoy) Latest RPI (yoy) Halifax house price (yoy) £1 STERLING

28 Jan 2020 7480.69 4154.90 28779.62 9267.89 23215.71 27949.64 1580.10 59.81 4.39% 0.57 1.65

Week before 7610.70 4223.35 29331.41 9390.94 23864.56 27985.33 1560.15 64.71 4.32% 0.66 1.78

1.3% (Dec) 2.2% (Dec) +4.0% (Dec)

$1.302 E1.183 ¥141.943

1.5% (Nov) 2.2% (Nov) +2.1% (Nov)

Change (%) –1.71% –1.62% –1.88% –1.31% –2.72% –0.13% 1.28% –7.57%

WEEK’S CHANGE, FTSE 100 STOCKS RISES Price % change 2705.00 +3.60 Experian 1018.80 +3.19 National Grid 5346.00 +3.09 Berkeley Group +3.09 Hargreaves Lansdown 1851.50 760.80 +2.94 Phoenix Group FALLS Burberry Group Antofagasta Carnival Evraz Tui

2010.00 859.20 3312.00 366.70 815.80

–11.18 –9.56 –8.89 –8.78 –7.92

BEST AND WORST UK STOCKS OVERALL 13.50 +125.00 Petrel Resources 1.75 –58.82 LightwaveRF

Source: Datastream (not adjusted for dividends). Prices on 28 Jan (pm)

Following the Footsie 7,700 7,600 7,500 7,400 7,300 7,200 7,100 7,000

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

Jan

6-month movement in the FTSE 100 index

1 February 2020 THE WEEK

SOURCE: THE MAIL ON SUNDAY

AFH Financial Group Investors Chronicle Shares in the wealth manager have rebounded as it milks the under-supplied market for independent financial advice.

Funds under management are up 40%, and there’s a pipeline of potential acquisition targets.

Buy. 385p.

Directors’ dealings

The last word

52

Man on a mission: a portrait of Dominic Cummings The Prime Minister’s controversial chief adviser is admired and loathed in equal measure – but having got Brexit “done”, he is now hell-bent on shaking up the Whitehall machine. George Parker reports When Boris Johnson walked through the front door of No. 10 on 26 July 2019, the British political system was in a state of Brexit-induced paralysis. But in a small room upstairs, arguably the second most powerful man in Britain was already issuing new instructions to demoralised staffers: “Don’t be shit,” he told them.

and unscrupulous – an intellectual showboater riding for a fall. For all his election success, the pressure is now on to deliver his ambitious agenda. One government insider says: “He’s allpowerful and he’s running the country. But nobody ever dies in a ditch for an adviser. Of course he’s expendable.”

For his part, Cummings tells people he will quit before he A dishevelled figure with a soft voice and the appearance is fired – that he could walk of an eccentric scientist, away at any time and return to his “bunker” at his parents’ Dominic Cummings explained to his political team – largely farm in County Durham. On inherited from a broken this, he has form. When he joined Vote Leave in 2015, he Theresa May – that from now insisted he would only be the on, No. 10 would be run like Nasa, with him at Mission “acting” campaign director, Control. There was one but went on to lead it to single objective: delivering victory. Similarly, he Brexit. It was an “astonishing predicted in November 2019 meeting”, noted the adviser that he would soon quit No. 10: “As you know, I Jason Stein, who was there.

Cummings: immersed in the art of campaigning strongly dislike Westminster,” “He says the last government made a total mess of this and we won’t mess it up again. He says he told colleagues. But Cummings did come back after Johnson’s unlike in the last government, decisions are going to be rapid and victory in December, and soon announced plans to create his final. It’s absolute Darwinism in there. Titles don’t matter.” At dream Downing Street operation – inhabited by data scientists, times, in what one person called a 90-minute diatribe, Cummings policy experts, project managers and people with “odd skills”. waved his pen around so Even Cummings’ appearance is frantically, some feared he would “Cummings is all-powerful and he’s running seen by some as an outward sign deface the oil painting behind him. “The overriding sense was the country. But nobody ever dies in a ditch of his contempt for Whitehall that we had wasted the last three tradition. Although he insists for an adviser.

Of course he’s expendable” years,” recalls another witness. he has “always been a scruffy “He said bad performance bastard”, his style has wouldn’t be tolerated. Then he invited everyone for drinks – it grown more idiosyncratic over the years. His “low-riding”, was so different to the old regime. It was quite inspiring.” loose-fitting trousers are usually accompanied by threadbare shirts, often open to the chest, covered in biro marks and set off with a bulldog clip attached to the front. Freddy Gray, deputy Six months later, Cummings is still in Downing Street, presiding editor of The Spectator and a friend of Cummings and his wife over the new political landscape that he helped shape. The man Mary Wakefield, another senior journalist on the magazine, says: who directed the 2016 campaign to take Britain out of the EU is “On occasions, Dom has come into the office with two pairs of chief adviser to Johnson, a PM whose promise to “Get Brexit Done” secured an 80-strong majority. This week, Britain formally tracksuit bottoms on, and Mary’s looked up and thought that he was one of the homeless people she helps to look after.” left the EU – but the challenge of agreeing a trade deal with the bloc is just beginning. Cummings, the man who gave us Brexit, is Cummings was born in Durham in 1971. His father was a leaving the tricky details of delivery to others. The 48-year-old is construction manager on oil rigs and his mother a special moving on to a new agenda – hoping to remake the civil service, needs teacher. Although he grew up far from the gilded world of invest in “left-behind” regions, and put the country at the cutting Eton-educated Johnson and David Cameron, Cummings attended edge of artificial intelligence, robotics and climate science. Last month, he published a blog post that went viral, inviting “weirdos Durham School, a prestigious private school, and Exeter College, Oxford. In spite of railing in this month’s unorthodox Downing and misfits” to join him at the heart of government.

Street job ad against “Oxbridge humanities graduates”, he studied ancient and modern history. Robin Lane Fox, his ancient history Those who see him in No. 10 meetings with Johnson detect no tutor, says: “He got a very good First in both parts in three years,” deference towards the Prime Minister. “He sits there, leaning adding that he was “a whole class better” than Johnson, who had back in his chair – as though they are equals,” says one insider. earlier studied classics at Oxford. Critics argue that Cummings is For now, Johnson embraces Cummings, who friends call a a poseur, name-dropping Thucydides to claim intellectual “Renaissance man” with skills spanning campaigning, policy, communications and project delivery. To his enemies, he is vicious superiority. But Lane Fox disagrees: “Dominic is not a pseud.”

THE WEEK 1 February 2020

The last word

53

At the encouragement of the late Norman Stone, his Oxford modern history tutor, Cummings travelled to Moscow in 1994 to witness the new world being created behind the old iron curtain. “He was intense, very clever, socially a little bit awkward,” recalls the journalist Liam Halligan, who offered him somewhere to stay. Initially jobless, Cummings later helped set up an airline flying from Samara, on the Volga, to Vienna. It was unsuccessful. “It once took off forgetting its only passenger,” he later recalled.

he’s genuinely interested in serious policy issues,” he says – but “he can be unnecessarily rude, hectoring and create a climate of fear.” By 2014, Cameron was tiring of the fact that his education reforms had become “toxic” with voters, partly thanks to Cummings’ war with the teaching profession. Cummings jumped first in 2014 – Cameron later labelled him a “career psychopath” – and returned to his bunker, while Gove was shuffled out of Education. Two years later, Cummings would return as the PM’s nemesis, working with Johnson and Gove to Back in the UK in the late 1990s, deliver Brexit in the 2016 referendum Cummings entered the world of rightby campaigning on EU “waste”, and wing pressure groups, becoming campaign exploiting immigration fears with a false claim that Turkey was about to join the director for Business for Sterling, which Mary Wakefield and Cummings: not sweet?

EU. “What he is brilliant at doing is argued against joining the euro. Cummings believed the EU was a lumbering behemoth, but he has never been creating a kind of guerrilla warfare against the establishment,” a member of the Conservative Party. In 2004, his instinctive view says Craig Oliver, who helped run the Remain campaign. “He that politicians are squanderers of public cash and his dislike of found the weak spots and probed them relentlessly.” bureaucracies were fused in the referendum campaign that made his name – on Tony Blair’s plan to create a regional assembly for Cummings and Johnson have now carried their partnership into northeast England. Blair had reckoned without Cummings, who No. 10. Nominally Johnson’s “assistant”, Cummings acts as his helped the “No” campaign to a 78:22 victory with a giant inflatchief adviser and enforcer. He hires and fires staff and sets the able white elephant and the slogan: “Politicians talk, we pay”. tone, focusing on delivering Brexit and the three things he says people actually care about: the NHS, crime and ending austerity.

Later, he retreated to the ramshackle outhouse at his parents’ To some, he can be ruthless (critics cite his sacking of a young Treasury adviser, Sonia Khan, who was marched off the premises farm near Durham, where he spent two years reading about history and science, which he regarded as the keys to solving by police) – but to others, he inspires loyalty. Sir Mark Sedwill, Britain’s top civil servant, has put off a plan to become Britain’s public policy problems. He also immersed himself in the art ambassador to Washington to help deliver his reforms. of campaigning: among his heroes are Blair’s polling guru, the late Philip Gould; and Bill Cummings’ strategy of closing Clinton’s adviser James Carville “He isn’t a soothsayer. He spent ages telling down Parliament last October (whose three-word campaign slogan, “The economy, stupid”, us we’d be toast if we didn’t deliver Brexit on to force through a no-deal Brexit was echoed by Cummings’ later was blocked by the Supreme 31 October. He was completely wrong” Court, and could have calls to “Take Back Control” been disastrous for Johnson and “Get Brexit Done”). had the Lib Dems and the SNP not obliged by agreeing to a snap In 2007, Cummings caught the eye of Tory shadow minister election. “He’s not a soothsayer,” says one insider. “He spent Michael Gove, who made him his special adviser and later ages telling us we’d be toast if we didn’t deliver Brexit on 31 brought him into Cameron’s new coalition government to October. In fact, he was completely wrong: the Get Brexit Done overhaul England’s education system and take on “the blob” – message won the election.” Although he advises Johnson across the teaching establishment, which he blamed for low standards. all aspects of government, insiders say it is important to strip By now, Cummings had started writing down his thoughts, away the “myth” and recognise that in some areas, he is less influential than others. After losing a recent battle with Chancellor expounding in sprawling online tracts how a more rigorous education system could help to save the country’s ills. “We need Sajid Javid, Cummings has taken a lower profile on the economy, what Murray Gell-Mann, the discoverer of the quark, calls ‘an and he is increasingly letting others sort out the details of Brexit.

Odyssean education’ that integrates knowledge from maths and science, the humanities and social sciences,” he wrote in 2014.

His new focus is on putting science at the heart of government and ensuring politicians deliver what they promise. His inspiration is the US government’s Manhattan Project, which In 2011, he married Mary Wakefield. They have one son; created the first atomic bomb. He wants to set up a civilian friends say Cummings is a doting father. Wakefield’s father owns version of the US Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency Chillingham castle in Northumberland but the couple, who own (formerly known as Arpa), pursuing “high-risk, high-return a house in Islington, do not enjoy a lavish lifestyle. “Typically projects that markets won’t fund”. His WhatsApp account English – asset rich, cash poor,” says one friend. Cummings, who profile says: “Get Brexit done, then Arpa.” has railed against officials earning six-figure salaries, earns just under £100,000, less than other senior No. 10 staff. The couple’s Cummings recognises that his relentless style has a time limit. relationship was depicted in a Channel 4 film on the Brexit He suffers from a much-discussed mystery ailment that causes referendum, starring Benedict Cumberbatch. “Because of the abdominal pain; he has suggested he might quit after a year. film, people see Mary as the sweet one,” says Gray. “She hates Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff, wishes Cummings that. If either of them is Machiavellian, it’s her.” well in his efforts to overhaul the state but fears he is on course for a crash. “On the basis of my experience, the sensible thing for Cameron blocked Cummings from entering government for fear an unelected official in No. 10 to do is keep a low profile,” he that he was too confrontational – and though he later relented, says. “I give him 12 months max. If you try to be in the papers allowing Cummings to join Gove, that snub cemented the every day, your political life expectancy is short – and like couple’s “deep dislike of Dave and the gang”, Gray recalls. “I Rasputin, you end up on the bottom of the River Neva in chains.” remember thinking the day after the referendum, ‘Well, that’s what happens if you f*** with Mary and Dom.’” David Laws, A longer version of this article appeared in the Financial Times. a former Lib Dem minister who worked with Cummings at the © Financial Times Ltd 2020.

Department for Education, witnessed his abrasive style. “I think 1 February 2020 THE WEEK

Marketplace

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Crossword

55

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1194

This week k’s winner will receive an ettinger.co.uk) Bridle hide Ettinger (e travel pass case in black, which retails att £105, an nd two Connell Guides (c connellgu uides.com).

An Ettinger travel pass case and two Connell Guides will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 10 February. Send it to: The Week Crossword 1194, 2nd floor, 32 Queensway, London W2 3RX, or email the answers to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Tim Moorey (timmoorey.info) 1

ACROSS

DOWN

1 Mum and Dad, for example do plead with minors (11) 9 Fabulous beast with singular problem on foot? (7) 10 Port built in granite (7) 11 Is without handles, being disorganised (2,1,4) 12 Love helping to produce speech (7) 13 African country’s hell in one area (9) 15 Big bird and small hound slipping lead (5) 16 Plants involved in drastic action (5) 19 Youngsters eat greens? Rarely (9) 22 Kenyan perhaps, like Violet (7) 23 Dog biting middle of leg? Apply iodine (4,3) 24 Collide accidentally on Turin ground (3,4) 25 Busy with Japanese board game? (2,3,2) 26 Rum may have inspired this overture? (3,8)

1 Fast swallows edge first place (7) 2 She’s game, this lady of pride (7) 3 Relatives crazy to ignore British airline (5) 4 What some alcohol reformers might do in explanation (9) 5 Order fruit on island (7) 6 Son’s sick from activity at sea (7) 7 In which all but one in party stand to lose their seats (7,6) 8 Choirs don’t know what to do with one high rating (7,6) 14 Angler’s bottom line? (3,6) 17 Queen has one in bed?

Unlikely! (7) 18 Pleasant fragrance to anger greatly (7) 20 Dead silly about a point being modified (7) 21 Old iron, say (7) 23 River journey, south first (5)

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Name Address Clue of the week: Why climb Everest? Ice sheet’s a brute to struggle with (7,3,5) The Guardian, Vulcan

Solution to Crossword 1192 ACROSS: 8 Tokays 9 Evesham 10 Brentwood 11 Orate 12 Admiral 15 Mail-out 16 Higher education 20 Retsina 23 Pattern 25 Kirks 26 Marseille 29 Tendons 30 Odds-on DOWN: 1 Looe 2 Martyr 3 Asbo 4 Seldom 5 Veronica 6 Cheapo 7 Impertinence 10 Blatherskite 13 Mug 14 LNE 17 Emission 18 Ump 19 Ice 21 Turing 22 At most 24 Trendy 27 Rood 28 Loop Clue of the week: Nub? (6-4,4) Solution: UPSIDE-DOWN CAKE (nub reversed)

Tel no Clue of the week answer:

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TITLE - MR/MRS/MS/OTHER

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Fill in all the squares so that each row, column and each of the 3x3 squares contains all the digits from 1 to 9

Solution to Sudoku 737

4

5 4

Sudoku 738 (medium)

1 4

2 9 1 4 3 6 5 8 7

8 6 5 7 9 2 1 3 4

4 3 7 1 5 8 9 6 2

5 4 9 8 6 7 3 2 1

3 2 6 5 1 4 8 7 9

1 7 8 3 2 9 6 4 5

6 5 4 9 7 3 2 1 8

9 8 3 2 4 1 7 5 6

7 1 2 6 8 5 4 9 3

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