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22 MAY 2021 | ISSUE 1332 | £3.99

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2 NEWS What happened

Covid resurgent

The country’s reopening plans hung in the balance this week, as officials considered whether to delay the schedule in response to the spread of the new Indian variant. On Monday, residents of England, Wales and most of Scotland were able to enjoy new freedoms, such as hugging people who are not members of their household, drinking inside pubs, and travelling abroad for leisure (at least to the destinations on a “green” list). But Boris Johnson urged people to be cautious with their new freedoms, warning that the Government may yet have to postpone the plan to lift virtually all remaining lockdown restrictions in England on 21 June.

What the editorials said A sense of foreboding hung over this week’s partial lifting of Covid restrictions, said The Independent. If ministers had been confident about the timing, they’d have been posing for pictures in the pub, but they know Johnson is taking a gamble. It would have been wiser to have delayed this week’s relaxations until scientists work out just how dangerous the Indian variant is. Not for the first time, the PM has “rolled the dice and hoped for the best”.

There’s no urgent need yet to deviate from the roadmap, said the FT. It’s true that the variant properly known as B.1.617.2 does pose a potential risk. Government advisers say there’s a “realistic possibility” it is 50% more transmissible than the Kent variant, which is itself 40-80% more transmissible than the original coronavirus. If that’s the case, Cases of the Indian variant have spread to 86 local authority areas in England, and have Queuing for vaccines in Bolton then lifting all restrictions next month could trigger a lethal wave of infections among the surged in hotspots such as Blackburn and Bolton unvaccinated. If, on the other hand, it’s only slightly more – where some health officials fast-tracked younger people for transmissible, we needn’t worry too much. The figure to watch vaccines, to try to avoid a local lockdown. Ministers voiced is hospitalisations with Covid-19, said The Economist. As long concern about vaccine hesitancy, pointing out that most of as that number – currently about 100 a day in the UK – stays those hospitalised in Bolton with the Indian variant had not flat or declines, we’ve little to fear from the Indian variant. been jabbed despite being eligible.

What happened

What the editorials said

The worst fighting between Israeli and Palestinian forces since 2014 entered its tenth day this week, with little sign of an imminent let up in the conflict. Israel continued to launch air strikes on Gaza, which Palestinian authorities say have killed 219 people, including more than 60 children. Hamas and other Palestinian militant groups have in turn fired some 3,400 rockets into Israel, where at least 12 people, including two children, have been killed.

There has also been intercommunal violence between Jews and Arabs within Israel, triggering warnings of “civil war”.

The roots of this tragic conflict may be decades old, said The Independent; but this latest “eruption of violence” was remarkably sudden. Its trigger was Israeli police officers’ use of rubber bullets on protesters demonstrating against a threat to evict Palestinian families from their homes in East Jerusalem. The clashes took place in the compound of Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa mosque – Islam’s third holiest site – adding to the tension, said the FT. Known to Jews as Temple Mount, the compound has long been “one of the conflict’s most emotive flashpoints”. When images circulated of Israeli police using force there against Palestinians, Hamas responded by firing rockets at Tel Aviv and other Israeli towns and cities.

The Israel-Gaza conflict

Both sides must accept a share of the blame for Despite mounting international pressure, this escalation, said The Economist. Turning Israel vowed to continue its bombing of Bombing of Gaza City Israeli cities “into hell”, as Hamas threatens, Gaza. The US publicly supported Israel’s won’t help Palestinians “who suffer grievously in Gaza”. But “right to defend itself”, and blocked three UN Security Israel, too, must “reconsider its strategy”. For too long, its Council statements calling for a cessation of violence. But leaders have viewed the broader conflict as “something to be there were signs this week that its stance was changing: managed, not solved”. Yet solve it they must; and for that to under pressure from his own party, on Tuesday President happen, both sides must “come to the table” and talk.

Biden joined calls for a ceasefire.

It wasn’t all bad The Government has announced plans to ban the sale of peat-based compost by 2024, and restore 35,000 hectares of degraded peatland.

The UK’s 2.6 million hectares of peatland store three times as much carbon as its forests; they provide a habitat for wildlife; and play an important role in water management.

Campaigners have been calling for a ban on peat compost for years. The Government tried to phase out its sale voluntarily, by 2020, but this failed.

Canadian researchers are asking for help in authenticating a message in a bottle that appears to have been sent from the Titanic. Dated 13 April 1912, it reads: “I am throwing this bottle into the sea in the middle of the Atlantic. We are due to arrive in New York in a few days. If anyone finds it, tell the Lefebvre family in Lievin.” Found on a New Brunswick beach in 2017, it is signed Mathilde Lefebvre, a 12-year-old passenger in 3rd class who died the next day. While many fakes have been found in the past, the researchers say that in this case, the paper and the bottle are consistent with the period; they hope now to find other examples of Mathilde’s handwriting.

Twenty-nine students from one of London’s most deprived local authority areas have won places at medical school since 2017, thanks to a pioneering scheme aimed at widening access to the profession. Organised by the Mossbourne Federation, which runs schools in Hackney, it tries to give aspiring medics the kinds of advantages they would have if they were at a fee-paying school, or had a parent who was a doctor. These include access to talks, visits to university laboratories, handson experience, and expert training in entrance exams.

COVER CARTOON: HOWARD MCWILLIAM THE WEEK 22 May 2021

…and how they were covered

NEWS 3

What the commentators said

What next?

A small taste of liberty and already they’re threatening to take it away, said Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph. It seems as if before every loosening of lockdown restrictions, a new story about a Covid mutation, or “scariant”, emerges to frighten us back into our homes. To listen to the media, you’d think there was “a tsunami of Covid patients” in Bolton and Blackburn, yet when I checked the latest NHS England figures for Bolton Hospital, the actual total was 25.

If Johnson tries to “withhold precious freedoms after 21 June from 66 million people on the strength of a coachload of Lancashire vax-refusers”, he’ll be “courting civil disobedience”. The Government isn’t trying to withhold freedoms, said Polly Toynbee in The Guardian. On the contrary, it is, like last summer, opening up hospitality venues and foreign travel too fast.

“Watch ministers now blaming any resurgence on vaccine refusers, nudging blame onto poor people and ethnic minorities.” In fact, Britain is fortunate in having very few vaccine refusers, said Tom Whipple in The Times. In Bolton, around 95% of over-50s have had the jab.

In the Commons on Wednesday, the PM said a review of fresh data had led to “increasing confidence” that Covid vaccines are effective against all variants.

Public Health England expects to conclude its tests by the end of next week.

Experts believe that by early next month, it will be evident how much more transmissible the Indian variant is than the Kent one. Johnson had been expected to lay out plans next week for the ending of social distancing rules, but this may now be delayed.

If the Indian variant does scupper the scheduled reopening, the Government will only have itself to blame, said Ian Dunt on Politics.co.uk. India announced that it was concerned about the variant on 24 March. Yet it wasn’t until 23 April that the Government, which was keen to secure a trade deal with India, finally got around to closing the UK’s borders to travellers from that country. During that critical month, thousands of people arrived in the UK on flights from India. Again and again in this pandemic, the Government has done “the necessary thing between two and four weeks too late, thereby creating a situation where more people die”. Its other big failing has been “confused public messaging”, said Jessica Elgot in The Guardian, and that has certainly been on show in the past week. We can hug, but only cautiously and ideally outside – and it’s probably best if we don’t. We can holiday abroad, but we shouldn’t. We can eat in a restaurant, but Sage scientists have queued up to say they wouldn’t yet risk it. Faced with such contradictory messages, the public could be forgiven for feeling bemused.

The Government has opened the vaccination programme to those aged 36 and 37 as it seeks to accelerate the present rate of 500,000 jabs a day to 800,000 within a fortnight.

What the commentators said

What next?

“If Groundhog Day were a horror movie, it would look like this,” said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. Each element of the deadly violence shaking the Middle East is familiar. The photos of “flattened buildings” and bereaved mothers crying for children buried beneath rubble in Gaza; families being wiped out as bombs rain down on their homes; explosions at Gazan schools and hospitals, and at Israeli synagogues; and the uneven death toll as Israel’s “iron dome” defence system protects its citizens from the worst horrors. This time, though, there’s a “terrifying” new dimension to proceedings, said Dimi Reider in the New Statesman: the violence that has erupted between Arabs and Jews who usually live harmoniously in towns and cities across Israel. Such intercommunal strife means this long-running conflict could morph into something “unlike anything seen in Israel-Palestine in living memory”.

There were tentative signs this week that a ceasefire may be within sight, said The Guardian, with a plan for a truce brokered by Egypt said to be gaining momentum. Both Israel and Hamas denied the existence of a deal, but Israeli media reported that Netanyahu had told officials that fighting could end within days.

It’s a tragic situation, agreed Roland Oliphant in The Daily Telegraph. Yet for Benjamin Netanyahu, there’s an “undeniable silver lining”. Two weeks ago, after a fourth inconclusive election in a row, his opponents looked set to form a coalition to end his 12 years as Israeli PM. Now, their coalition talks have stalled – and his position looks secure. Hamas, now closely linked to Iran, also stands to gain from the hostilities, said Anshel Pfeffer in The Times. With Mahmoud Abbas, president of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, looking politically fragile, Hamas felt that in reacting violently to the clashes on Temple Mount it could portray itself as “the true leader of the Palestinian struggle”. As the violence shows little sign of abating, said Walter Ellis on Reaction.life, the US must intervene. Biden is so wary of being dragged into this he hasn’t even appointed an Israeli ambassador. Yet he alone can pressure Netanyahu into de-escalating the violence on the Israeli side. He can also “wipe the slate clean” with the Palestinian leadership, still smarting from Donald Trump’s unstinting support for Israel. Biden may not relish it, but he has a vital role to play in the drive to end the bloodshed.

THE WEEK

We all want to reduce our carbon footprint, but it’s a slog. You can switch to an electric car, but since it takes six times as many mineral inputs to manufacture as a petrol car, it’ll take years of driving it before your footprint starts to shrink. There is a fundamental switch we can make, however, that has almost no downside. It involves an item whose sales shot up during lockdown, driven by panic buying and, as one industry analyst coyly put it, “by increased occasions in home”. I refer, of course, to the humble loo roll. Even in non-Covid times the average Brit gets through about 127 rolls a year – twice the European average: a national total of some 8.5 billion. Writing in The Independent this week, Donnachadh McCarthy calculates that it requires one tree to be felled for every 800-1,500 rolls produced; that means felling seven million trees simply to meet the UK’s yearly toilet-tissue needs.

Just think how many tonnes of CO2 are released in doing so. So following McCarthy’s lead, I’d like to tender a modest proposal to put this error behind us. Let us ditch loo rolls and clean ourselves using water (from a jug, hose or bidet) instead. If this strikes many Westerners with horror, it’s nothing to the disgust people across Asia feel at the far less hygienic practice of cleaning up with paper sheets, which only took off in 1857 anyway, when Joseph Gayetty marketed a “Medicated Paper for the Water-Closet” in New York. We’ve quickly adapted to pooper scooping for dogs; surely it’s worth taking the next small step... for mankind. Bottom line? It’ll help save the planet. Jeremy O’Grady Subscriptions: 0330-333 9494; subscriptions@theweek.co.uk © Dennis Publishing Limited 2021. All rights reserved.

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The UN General Assembly was due to discuss the conflict on Thursday, with France leading a push to present a draft resolution that would safeguard urgent humanitarian relief.

The US would have to use its veto power to block the resolution, a move Biden would be reluctant to make.

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22 May 2021 THE WEEK

Politics

4 NEWS Controversy of the week

Can Labour recover?

Is it time to write a eulogy for the Labour Party? The local and by-election results earlier this month were certainly a “crushing rejection by the voters”, said Trevor Phillips in The Times.

One poll suggested that if a general election were held now, the Conservative majority would rise from 81 to 122. But Labour can come back from this – if it listens to its “latter-day prophet”, Tony Blair, who led it to three successive election victories. He has given a “blistering analysis” of Labour’s eclipse, arguing in the New Statesman that the party needs “total deconstruction and reconstruction”. It is failing to modernise its economic position, he said: sticking to the old message of tax and spend, while failing to engage with the effects of the technological revolution – robots, AI – on voters’ jobs. At the same time, Labour has repelled the wider electorStarmer: “a torrid time” ate by “uncritically” siding with identity-based movements, Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion. In Blair’s view, a party which shuns the likes of J.K. Rowling – over her comments about transgender activists – will never win back power.

Keir Starmer clearly isn’t listening, said Madeline Grant in The Daily Telegraph. As violence escalated in the Middle East, for example, he issued a “one-sided denunciation of Israel”. A fairer approach would have also mentioned the attacks on Israel, but that would anger the party’s combative hard-left. These “skewed priorities” and “internecine squabbles” are making Labour irrelevant to voters. Starmer is having a “torrid time”, said James Forsyth in The Spectator. His approval ratings have plummeted to near-Corbyn-like lows (to appear less remote, he has now agreed to be interviewed on Piers Morgan’s Life Stories on ITV ). “The vultures are circling”: Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester and one of the few Labour figures to come out of these elections with an enhanced reputation, is talking about his leadership ambitions. However, Starmer is nowhere near the biggest problem for his party, which is trying to please two opposing sets of supporters: “metropolitan voters” and “Brexity provincials” in the North and the Black Country.

It’s a myth that Labour has lost the working classes, though, said Jonn Elledge in the New Statesman. It still has plenty of voters among the under-55s. Age is the real story: the Conservatives have the “overwhelming support of older voters”; and thanks to the “baby boomers”, there are a lot of them right now. But Labour’s supporters come from groups which are “demographically ascendant”, said Ed West on UnHerd: “the young, unmarried, renters and ethnic minorities”.

“Britain under 30” is very different to “Britain over 50”. And the former, resentful at being priced out of the property market, is strongly anti-Tory: parts of the Southeast are already turning red.

Unless housing costs plummet, time will be on Labour’s side. Even if – for now – the voters aren’t.

Spirit of the age They have been referred to as “residents”, “service users”, and even as “clients”, but now the Prisons Minister has decreed that prison inmates should be called what they really are: prisoners. Alex Chalk said that the use of other terms created a misleading impression. One former prison officer told The Times that he approved of the edict. “I have locked some people up in the worst accommodation you can imagine, and if you called them a resident... you’d be taking the mick.”

Estate agents have reported a surge in the number of “hobby” buyers investing in small plots of woodland since the start of the pandemic. Specialist agent Woodlands.co.uk says prices have risen by 25% a year in some areas.

THE WEEK 22 May 2021

Good week for:

Naomi Campbell, who announced that she had become a mother. “A little blessing has chosen me to be her mother,” wrote the supermodel, 50, on Twitter, under a photograph of her hand cradling a tiny pair of feet.

The West End, after its longest-running play became the first to reopen. Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap – which first opened in 1952 – is playing to reduced audiences at St Martin’s Theatre, with two casts lined up in case of any Covid-related emergency.

Bad week for:

Bill Gates, after Microsoft confirmed it had launched a probe into its billionaire founder’s conduct in 2019, shortly before he stepped down from the company’s board. The investigation was into a complaint that Gates – who recently announced that he and Melinda, his wife of 27 years, are divorcing – had “sought to initiate an intimate relationship” with a female employee in 2000.

Rail enthusiasts, with the retirement of the last Intercity 125s.

Icons of the British Rail era, the diesel locomotives came into service in 1976, promising unheard of speeds and shorter journey times. In the past ten years, however, they have been gradually phased out. The last were on the East Midlands Railway.

McVitie’s, after its Turkish owner announced that it may have to close its factory in Glasgow, because the British biscuit market is “mature”. Although biscuits bounced back a bit in lockdown, sales have been in slow decline for years. Experts say that today’s consumers opt either for more nutritious snacks, or more indulgent ones, leaving the likes of Custard Creams on the shelf.

Covid inquiry announced

The Prime Minister announced last week that a much-anticipated independent, public inquiry into his Government’s handling of Covid-19 would begin in the spring of 2022.

Boris Johnson told MPs the inquiry would examine decisions “in the cold light of day” and “identify the key issues that will make a difference for the future”.

Asked why it was not starting sooner, the PM said it was to avoid the risk of it “distracting” those who were dealing with the threat of new variants. His critics, however, noted that the timing meant its key findings were unlikely to be published until after the next election.

Pfizer jab for children

The UK has acquired enough doses of the Pfizer Covid-19 vaccine to immunise all children aged 12 and above, Matt Hancock said this week.

The Health Secretary said he was monitoring the positive data on the use of the Pfizer jab on children very closely, and that a decision on whether to vaccinate them could be taken within two months. The Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies previously found that vaccinating all adults might not be enough to prevent a resurgence in cases, but that vaccinating over-12s probably would be.

Poll watch Andy Burnham is seen by voters as the most plausible person to become the next Labour party leader. 47% of Britons think he would be a good leader while 19% think he’d be a bad one. Next on the list is Sadiq Khan: 35% say he’d be a good leader; 35% say he’d be bad.

Opinium/Observer 6% of Americans think they could beat a grizzly bear in a fight. 72% think they would win against a rat, 61% against a goose, and 49% against a medium-size dog.

YouGov/Daily Telegraph 58% of Scots feel they don’t know enough about what an independent Scotland would look like to make an informed decision in a referendum. 30% feel they are sufficiently informed.

Stack Data Strategy/Daily Telegraph

The UK at a glance Glasgow Arrests stopped: Hundreds of people converged on a residential street in the south of Glasgow last week to prevent the detention of two Indian nationals suspected of immigration offences. Home Office officials detained the men following an early-morning raid on an address in Pollokshields on Thursday – but were unable to drive away when protesters, including MSPs and councillors as well as activists and local people, surrounded their van, shouting “these are our neighbours, let them go”. After an eight-hour stand-off, Police Scotland freed the men on bail, “in order to protect the safety, public health and well-being of all people involved”. One of the two, Lakhvir Singh, 34, said through a translator: “I’ve been astonished and overwhelmed by the support I’ve received from the people of Glasgow.” Three protesters were later charged with public-order offences.

NEWS 5

Glasgow Easing postponed: As Covid restrictions eased in most of Scotland this week, Nicola Sturgeon said Glasgow and Moray would have to remain under strict Level 3 rules, owing to evidence that the Indian variant was driving a rise in cases there.

However, the First Minister said all adults aged over 18 in those areas would be offered the vaccine within weeks, in an effort to combat the surge. Separately, police and politicians condemned thousands of Glasgow Rangers fans who flouted restrictions last weekend by gathering in the city centre (pictured) to celebrate their Scottish Premiership title win.

Batley and Spen, West Yorkshire Sister joins the race: The sister of Jo Cox – the MP murdered by a far-right terrorist in 2016 – is hoping to stand as Labour’s candidate in the forthcoming by-election in Cox’s former seat of Batley and Spen.

Labour faces a tough battle to hold onto the seat, which was held by Tracy Brabin until she was elected mayor of West Yorkshire earlier this month. Kim Leadbeater (pictured), 44, who works for the foundation set up in Cox’s name, lives in the local area and says she “cares deeply” about it.

Hinckley, Leicestershire Amazon expansion: Amazon announced last week that it will create more than 10,000 jobs in the UK by the end of the year, by opening a new parcel centre and four new warehouses. The expansion, which will take the e-commerce giant’s total UK workforce to 55,000, will start with a new “fulfilment centre” in Hinckley, in the East Midlands, this summer. A parcel centre in Doncaster and three more warehouses – in Dartford, Gateshead and Swindon – will open later in the year. Jobs will also be created in corporate offices, web services and operations networks in London, Manchester, Edinburgh and Cambridge, Amazon said.

Kwasi Kwarteng, the Business Secretary, called the move “a huge vote of confidence in the British economy”.

Cardiff Universal basic income: A universal basic income (UBI) scheme, in which the government makes regular payments to all citizens, regardless of their means, is to be trialled in Wales, the First Minister Mark Drakeford confirmed last week. The pilot will be designed to explore “whether the claims that are made for a basic income approach are actually delivered”, he said. Proponents of UBI schemes argue that they stop people falling through the safety net, give security to those in insecure employment, and alleviate poverty. In the run-up to the 6 May elections, 25 candidates who went on to win seats in the 60-strong Senedd publicly backed a UBI trial. However, Drakeford said Wales would need “an active commitment from the UK Government” to implement UBI fully, as the welfare system is not devolved.

Glastonbury, Somerset Bungled protest: Homes in Glastonbury were left without access to the internet last week, after vandals mistook a 5GHz broadband box for a 5G transmitter. Voneus, which provides the connection, said the attack at Paddington Farm was almost certainly the work of conspiracy theorists who believe unfounded claims that 5G causes cancer and Covid-19. The vandalism “was not only criminal but also completely pointless”, it said. 5G will allow much quicker download speeds than 4G. The scientific consensus is that it is not harmful; however, 5G infrastructure has been attacked all over the country, and last year the council in Glastonbury published a report calling for a government inquiry into the safety of 5G, and opposing its roll-out in the town.

London Surge in anti-Semitism: Four people have been arrested in connection with video footage that appears to show anti-Semitic abuse being shouted from cars that were being driven in convoy through North London. In clips that appeared on social media, the cars, which were draped in Palestinian flags, can be seen driving through Golders Green and Finchley Road, areas known for their large Jewish populations. In a separate incident, a rabbi required hospital treatment after being attacked outside his synagogue in Chigwell, Essex, leading to two further arrests; in Salford, Greater Manchester police are investigating the vandalism of Jewish-owned cars. Jewish groups have warned the attacks will continue until the current violence in the Middle East subsides.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

Europe at a glance Dublin Cyberattack disrupts health service: Ireland’s health service was hit by a major cyberattack last week that forced the closure of its IT systems, causing extensive disruption. Paul Reid, head of the Health Service Executive (the Irish equivalent to the NHS), said the “very sophisticated” attack had affected national and local systems and “all of our core services”, and that its networks had been shut down to protect them from further attacks. Officials confirmed that a ransom had been demanded, payable in the cryptocurrency bitcoin, but said the government would not be paying it. Operations to restore systems were still ongoing this week, amid reports that patient data stolen by the hackers was being published online.

According to state broadcaster RTÉ, Ireland’s National Cyber Security Centre has identified the hackers responsible as members of the Wizard Spider group, which is based in Eastern Europe.

NEWS 7

Berlin Short-haul flights: The Green party’s candidate for German chancellor has said that short-haul air travel is inconsistent with climate-change goals, and that a Green government would impose new taxes on airline fuel. Annalena Baerbock said her party wanted to encourage people to travel by train wherever possible, and that if it came to power, it would expand the rail network to that end. The plans were seized on by her political rivals and by sections of the press, which accused her of wanting to make holidays in Mallorca unaffordable to ordinary Germans.

Baerbock, 40, has emerged as a serious contender for the chancellorship, with most polls showing her party narrowly ahead of the centre-right bloc. Lately, she has come under attack from trolls believed to be in Russia – a possible indication that her vow to scrap the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline is now regarded by the Kremlin as a matter of concern.

Zagreb Football manager flees: The former manager of Croatia’s top football club has gone on the run to avoid a four-year, eight-month prison term for defrauding the club of £13m in transfer fees. Zoran Mamic, 49, was convicted of the fraud in 2018, but was released on bail pending an appeal. In March, Croatia’s supreme court upheld the guilty verdict and his sentence, and ordered Mamic to report to custody last week. However, he did not turn up.

He fled to Bosnia, where he also has citizenship, but has since been detained.

Mamic’s brother Zdravko Mamic, 61, the club’s former executive director, was also convicted of the fraud. He fled to Bosnia shortly before being sentenced to six-anda-half years in prison.

Bari, Italy Judge “was arms dealer”: An Italian judge who is already accused of taking bribes from convicted mobsters has now been charged with arms trafficking.

Police have linked Giuseppe De Benedictis to a massive arsenal of weapons found at a farmhouse north of Bari. The weapons – including machine guns, pump-action shotguns, semi-automatic pistols, hand grenades, 100,000 rounds of ammunition, and an anti-tank mine – were found in a cellar, the door of which had been soldered shut. De Benedictis says he is a collector, and the guns were just his hobby. The farm belongs to an Italian army officer.

Athens Welcome back: Greece has lifted most of its remaining Covid restrictions and launched its tourist season, declaring that “we are putting the lockdown behind us”.

However, an overnight curfew (00:30 to 05:00) remains in place, and all travellers must present on arrival a certificate of vaccination, proof of recovery from Covid, or a negative PCR test. Greece is on the UK’s “amber list”, meaning that Britons can legally go there, but they are advised not to and would have to quarantine on their return. Italy (which is also on the amber list) has scrapped all quarantine requirements for visitors from the EU, UK and Israel. And Portugal this week began welcoming British travellers, though other non-EU citizens are still barred. It is the only major short-haul holiday destination on the UK’s “green list” for travel. The other European territories on the green list are Gibraltar and Iceland.

Montpellier, France Hijab row: Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche party threatened to withdraw its support for a Muslim candidate in a local election, after she was pictured on campaign flyers wearing a hijab. Sara Zemmahi, a lab engineer, appeared in a line-up with three other candidates in Montpellier, under the slogan: “Different but united for you.” In response, a member of the far-right National Rally posted a copy of the flyer on Twitter, with the words: “Is this how you fight separatism?” En Marche leaders then stated that its candidates should not wear religious insignia on campaign literature.

Ceuta, Spain Migrant influx: At least 6,000 migrants, including 1,500 children and teenagers, crossed into Ceuta – a Spanish territory on the Moroccan coast – in a single day on Monday. Many of them swam in; one reportedly drowned in the attempt.

In response to the sudden influx, Spain deployed troops to the border. They used batons to disperse crowds on the beach, and smoke bombs to deter further crossings. The incident has exacerbated existing tensions between Spain and Morocco stemming from Madrid’s decision to allow the leader of a Western Sahara independence movement, who was seriously ill with Covid, to receive treatment in Spain.

Thousands of migrants have since been sent back to Morocco, under a pre-existing deal.

Catch up with daily news at theweek.co.uk

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

8 NEWS

The world at a glance

Washington DC Rising star: Republican legislators have elected a high-profile Trump loyalist as their chairwoman in the House of Representatives, signalling that four months after Donald Trump left office, his grip on the party remains strong. New York congresswoman Elise Stefanik (pictured), 36, was elected as the House Republican Conference chair by 134 votes to 46. She replaces Liz Cheney, one of only ten Republicans who’d voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Capitol riot, who was ousted last week (see page 16).

However, pressure was mounting this week on Trump himself, after the New York state attorney general’s office announced that an inquiry into his business affairs had acquired a “criminal capacity”. The investigation, in progress since 2019, had previously been a civil matter. According to CNN, investigators have, among other things, been looking into allegations that the Trump Organisation improperly inflated the value of its assets in order to obtain loans; the Manhattan DA, which is acting in concert with the state attorney general, has stated in court filings that the “possibly extensive and protracted criminal conduct” now being investigated includes the falsification of tax records.

Washington DC Cancel culture: President Biden has cancelled a series of executive orders made by Donald Trump, including the one establishing his plan for a “National Garden of American Heroes”. The former president issued the order last summer, while controversy was raging about the toppling of statues in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. He personally curated a list of 31 individuals deemed worthy of commemoration, ranging from the abolitionist Harriet Tubman to the evangelical leader Billy Graham. Other cancelled orders include one that sought to restrict immigration to the US to people who had health insurance or could prove they could pay their medical bills, and another that condemned the “rioters, arsonists, and left-wing extremists” who have “sought to advance a fringe ideology that paints the USA as fundamentally unjust” – and ordered that anyone found vandalising monuments be prosecuted to the fullest extent possible under law.

Washington DC Roe v. Wade challenge: The US supreme court has agreed to hear a case that represents the biggest challenge in a generation to Roe v. Wade – the landmark 1973 ruling that established a woman’s right to an abortion. The case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organisation, concerns a 2018 Mississippi state law that banned abortions after the 15th week of pregnancy. The Dobbs in the case is Thomas Dobbs, Mississippi’s state health officer. The other party is the only abortion clinic in Mississippi, which went to court to block the law, and won in two lower courts. Mississippi’s appeal will be the first abortion case heard by the supreme court since its conservative majority was cemented by the appointment of Amy Coney Barrett.

Manaus, Brazil Towns inundated: Weeks of heavy rain have caused flooding in towns and cities across Brazil’s Amazonas region. Some 25 towns and cities, including the capital Manaus, have declared a state of emergency owing to floods that have affected 400,000 people across the state. In Manaus, 4,200 homes are underwater, and the Rio Negro is at its third-highest level (29.72 metres) since records began in 1920. The heavy rains are associated with the La Niña phenomenon, by which cooler-than-normal sea-surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean affect global weather patterns.

In Brazil as a whole, there is no sign of an end to the Covid outbreak. Daily new cases have been on an upward trend since late April, and the daily death toll is around 1,900.

Santiago Centrists vanquished: In a shock result that could have long-term ramifications for Chile’s future, left-wing and independent candidates have won almost two-thirds of the seats in the new assembly that will rewrite the country’s constitution. Chile’s centre-right president, Sebastián Piñera, drew up plans for the Pinochet-era constitution to be redrawn in an attempt to calm weeks of violent unrest in 2019. Chileans had long complained that it was geared towards the interests of business, and entrenched inequality. However, his coalition had been expected to secure more than a third of the seats in the body, enough to block radical changes. In the event, it won 37 of the 155 seats, while the main centre-left bloc got just 25. Blocs of more radical leftists, including communists, took 52.

THE WEEK 22 May 2021

Asunción Vaccine delays: Some of the world’s poorest countries will not have vaccinated even a fifth of their populations against Covid-19 before 2022, unless current vaccination rates can be sped up, according to new research. Countries on that list include Paraguay, the Philippines, Iran, Myanmar, Namibia, Guinea, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Gabon and North Macedonia, according to a survey by science analysis firm Airfinity. Concerns about global vaccination rates have been heightened by the emergence of more transmissible variants – and the impact of the crisis in India on vaccine distribution. Until its exports were suspended in March, India’s Serum Institute was the biggest supplier of doses to the Covax vaccine-sharing scheme.

The world at a glance Zarzis, Tunisia A fatal attempt to cross into Europe: Fifty-seven migrants, almost all believed to be Bangladeshis, drowned off the coast of north Africa on Sunday, when their boat sank while attempting the crossing to Europe. The inflatable boat was packed with more than 90 people when it left the Libyan port of Zuwara, a key migration gateway. Thirty-three people survived the sinking, reportedly by clinging to an oil rig off the southern coast of Tunisia. They were rescued by the country’s authorities and taken to the port of Zarzis in Tunisia.

The International Organisation for Migration, a UN agency, calculates that more than 500 people have died trying to cross from north Africa to Italy or Malta since the beginning of 2021. Almost 9,000 have been intercepted at sea and returned to Libya.

Kazungula Bridge, Zambia New bridge: A major boost to north-south trade in central and southern Africa was heralded last week with the opening of a road and rail bridge spanning the Zambezi River. The 923-metre Kazungula Bridge sits at the “quasi-quadripoint” on the Zambezi, where four countries (almost) meet: Zimbabwe, Namibia, Zambia and Botswana. The key trade route had earlier been served by a ferry: hauliers often faced miles-long queues and days-long delays.

First agreed in 2007, construction of the bridge began in 2014. The new crossing is gently curved, because Zimbabwe’s former president, Robert Mugabe, had refused to let any of the structure be built on Zimbabwean territory. But after his ousting, Zimbabwe did join the consortium building the £185m project.

Ürümqi, China Suppressing Uighur fertility: Birth rates have been falling across China (see page 19), but nowhere has the fall been as dramatic as in Xinjiang in northwestern China. In this region, home to the Uighur Muslims, the birth rate has collapsed by half in just two years between 2017 and 2019. An in-depth study of county-level data by the Strategic Policy Institute, an Australian think tank, notes that such an extreme, sudden decline is unprecedented in the 71 years that the UN has collected fertility data. It’s larger even than the falls brought on by the Syrian civil war or the genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia. The analysis adds weight to the charge that Beijing is using forced sterilisations and abortions, mass internment camps and other coercive controls on fertility, as part of its policy to pacify the restive province.

NEWS 9

Mindat, Myanmar Sanctions on the regime: The UK and the US have imposed new sanctions on Myanmar’s military regime, which is led by coup chief Min Aung Hlaing (pictured), and have demanded he put a halt to the killing of civilians. The latest such incident occurred in the town of Mindat in the western state of Chin, where the newly formed “People’s Defence Force” had seized control. Using civilians as human shields, the army last week retook the town. Around 800 people have been killed since the army coup in February.

Osaka, Japan Olympics in jeopardy: A surge in Covid cases in the city of Osaka and its environs has pushed local healthcare services to breaking point, and renewed concerns over Japan’s ability to safely host the Olympics in two months’ time. The outbreak is far bigger than those experienced by neighbouring countries, though smaller than similar outbreaks in the West. And a mere 4% of Japan’s population has been vaccinated. A recent poll shows that 80% of Japanese want the Games to be cancelled.

Mumbai, India Cyclone strikes: Some 77 people were missing at sea this week, after Cyclone Tauktae battered shipping and oil rigs all along India’s west coast. Many more people have been killed in Gujarat, where the storm – the worst in the region for 20 years – made landfall. The evacuation of hundreds of thousands of people from low-lying areas to crowded evacuation centres has increased the risk of the spread of Covid, just as India’s infection rate was starting to trend at lower levels. The official daily death toll is still above 4,100 and climbing; most analysts think the true death toll is many times higher.

Taipei First wave: Taiwan has announced its first significant Covid restrictions, following a dramatic surge in infections, with hundreds of new cases a day being recorded. The island has hitherto been held up as a model of how to tackle the disease: its prompt closing of borders and enforcement of quarantines last spring has given it one of the world’s lowest per capita case rates: it has had only 14 Covid-related deaths in a population of 24 million. The government has now closed leisure and entertainment venues, limited gatherings, and made outdoor mask-wearing mandatory.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

People

10 NEWS

an accident, your family are going to die’”. Eventually, in 2018, he was signed off work for three months suffering from anxiety-related insomnia – which gave him the space in which to recover. Three years on, he sums up what happened to him concisely. “I was jogging along in life,” he says, “and I fell off a cliff.”

A knock-back on Notting Hill Although both his parents were actors, Toby Jones didn’t have an easy start in the film business. He was nearly 40 by the time he got his breakthrough role, playing Truman Capote in Infamous (2006).

But before it was released, Philip Seymour Hoffman had a crack at the same role in Capote – and won an Oscar.

Still, if he felt overshadowed then, it was nothing compared to some of the knocks he’d had earlier, says Eva Wiseman in The Observer. In the late 1990s, he was offered a day’s work on Notting Hill: they needed someone to play Julia Roberts’s stalker fan. “Hugh Grant was personable and welcoming,” he recalls, “but Julia Roberts seemed to be mistaking me for a real… fan.

And when we did the scene, she kept forgetting to give me the cue I needed. It was awful, humiliating stuff. And there was just that feeling, of almost having disappeared.”

Which proved prescient, because the scene was cut, and the character deleted from the record. “I was the only witness,” he says. “There was nothing. He didn’t exist.”

Castaway of the week This week’s edition of Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs featured physicist and writer Brian Greene 1 An extract from Icarus at the Edge of Time by Philip Glass, performed by the Orchestra of St Lukes, conducted by Brad Lubman 2 A harmonica tune from Rockin’ in the Rockies, written and performed by The Cappy Barra Boys Harmonica Quartet 3* Turn Around by Malvina Reynolds, Alan Greene, and Harry Belafonte, performed by Harry Belafonte 4 An excerpt from Light Falls by Brian Greene, composed by Jeff Beal, performed by the Hollywood Chamber Orchestra 5 Rhapsody in G minor, Op. 79 No. 2 by Brahms, performed by Martha Argerich 6 Over the Rainbow by Harold Arlen and Yip Harburg, performed

by Judy Garland and the Victor Young Orchestra 7 A Million Dreams by Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, performed by Hugh Jackman, Michelle Williams and Zif Zaiman 8 The Sound of Silence by Paul Simon, performed by Disturbed Book: Philosophical Explanations by Robert Nozick Luxury: the world’s largest particle collider

THE WEEK 22 May 2021

* Choice if allowed only one record

By the time Christine Keeler was 22, in 1964, her name was already a byword for scandal. Her affairs with Tory minister for war John Profumo and the Soviet military attaché Yevgeny Ivanov, in 1961, had seen her cast as a femme fatale; and she’d been jailed for perjury. Yet according to her son, Seymour Platt, Keeler was a victim of the Profumo affair. It wasn’t just that she had been used by powerful men. She’d also been terrorised by Lucky Gordon, a jazz musician who’d become besotted with her. He frequently beat her; once, he raped her at knifepoint. When she went to the police, they didn’t take her seriously at first. “This is typical of the treatment women get – even today – if they have been earmarked a certain way,” says Platt. In 1963, Gordon was finally prosecuted for assaulting her, but soon after his trial it emerged that there had been two witnesses to the attack, whose presence she’d denied. As a result, she was jailed for perjury – which cemented her reputation as one of history’s bad girls, said Margarette Driscoll in The Daily Telegraph. But Platt says she’d only pleaded guilty to escape her abuser – and the relentless press attention. Now, he’s seeking a posthumous pardon for his mother, who died in 2017. “I need to fix this for my mum,” he says, “and I need to fix it for history, because people still blame the women and call them liars and that’s wrong.”

Viewpoint:

Moving with the times “Does it matter that schools are changing their titles or the names of buildings to reflect changing values?

Not in the slightest. Recognising that slavery, for instance, isn’t something to be proud of isn’t pandering to ‘oversensitive snowflakes’. But slavery aside, we don’t need to hark back to the same old names of Drake, Raleigh, Nelson when there are plenty of other people since then who have accomplished magnificent things: Rosalind Franklin, Noor Inayat Khan, Alan Turing, Paul Stephenson. History expands as time moves on. Changing names doesn’t have to be labelled as inflammatory and political. We could instead choose to see it for what it is: natural progression.”

Sara Tor in The Times

Farewell Helen Murray Free, chemist who helped develop the dip-andread diagnostic test for diabetes, died 1 May, aged 98.

Richard Parry-Jones, executive who revived the fortunes of Ford, died 16 April, aged 69.

Michael Parsons, civil engineer who revolutionised suspension bridge design, died 20 April, aged 92.

Spencer Silver, chemist and co-inventor of the Post-it Note, died 8 May, aged 80.

© SEYMOUR PLATT

Bradby’s breakdown With his just-off-the-rugbypitch complexion, Tom Bradby exudes calm confidence, says Charlotte Edwardes in The Sunday Times. But in 2018, the ITV newsreader experienced a serious mental health crisis.

“I’d had a relatively easy, slightly gilded life in which nothing really bad had happened,” he says. “It seemed to come absolutely from nowhere.” Except that it hadn’t. His mother had died of cancer in 2012, and his father’s health had started to deteriorate in 2015, when Bradby was asked to host a revamped News at Ten. Then, while on holiday in Greece that summer, he watched a car drive off a quay in front of him – and dived in after it. He swam up to the sinking vehicle, and saw an old man behind the wheel. He banged on the window, and pulled the door handle. “It was locked.” His eyes met the man’s. “And then the car went down fast. I just let go. I tried to swim down but I couldn’t. Days later I said to [my wife] I just feel this overwhelming sense of dread.’

And she said, ‘Well, I wonder why? Massive stress. Your father’s really ill. And an old man just died by suicide.’”

A few months later, he started at News at Ten in a blaze of publicity. Then his father died of a heart attack. Soon, his anxiety levels had got so high, it felt as though “an angry man [was] following me around, shouting in my face, ‘Something bad is going to happen, you’re going to have

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Briefing

NEWS 13

The rise of the influencer

© INSTAGRAM

Who exactly are social media influencers? And why are they always going to Dubai?

Where did influencers come from? selfies may sound cushy – but the reality Ever since the creation of the World can be hard. There are the endless hours Wide Web in 1991, like-minded users spent preparing for photo shoots, have gathered together, first on web arranging photographers, changing outfits in cramped “pop-up tents”, forums and bulletin boards, then on blogging sites, and more recently on editing photos and thinking up social media. In the early 2000s, canny envy-inducing captions and hashtags. marketers started approaching influential Demanding clients often force them to endlessly re-shoot photos or videos until bloggers and forum moderators, asking them to promote products in return for they come out just right. There’s the freebies, and later for cash. This process pressure of always seeking to increase became supercharged with the founding your follower count to drive up revenues. of YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006, But arguably the toughest part, says and in 2010, Instagram – which is now Amy Hart (1.1 million followers), is most influencers’ platform of choice. negotiating payment in a crowded Today, there is an army of influencers: market. After all, she says, “there are social media users – mostly women – a lot of me. If I turn around and say, ‘No, I want this’, they’ll say, ‘Okay, cool, with a large, devoted following, who give their followers access to a carefully “Instagram face”: Bella Hadid (42 million followers) we’ll go to one of the other 1,500 people curated version of their lives. In this who’d be happy to do this’.” “authentic” context, sponsored content, known as “sponcon”, has proved a potent tool for selling products.

How do businesses judge an influencer’s worth?

In theory, everything online is quantifiable: “engagement” can Who are these people? be recorded, in the form of follower counts, “likes” and views.

There’s a bewildering range, from fashion, lifestyle and “mommy However, nowadays “engagement fraud” is a big problem: bogus influencers” on Instagram to gamers, beauty vloggers and “toy followers can be purchased online, from people who operate fake influencers” on YouTube, to teenagers lip-synching to songs on accounts and bots. An arms race has begun between fraudsters TikTok. Some of the biggest are famous from another field: last with fake followers and the software developed to detect them. week, the rapper Nicki Minaj wore a pair of bejewelled pink A whole industry has emerged to negotiate it: agencies such as Croc shoes on Instagram, where she has 136 million followers; BrandConnect, owned by YouTube, connect influencers with large followings to companies who want to buy “sponcon”. demand for pink Crocs spiked by 4,900% in hours. Many of the most famous influencers, such as Kim Kardashian (who has 221 million Instagram followers) graduated from reality TV – another Do the followers not mind “sponcon”? carefully crafted version of “real life”. Then there are people who Apparently not. “A decade ago, shilling products to your fans made themselves famous entirely by posting content on social may have been seen as selling out. Now it’s a sign of success,” media: the likes of Logan Paul, PewDiePie or Zoë Sugg, who noted Taylor Lorenz, who writes about internet culture for The each speak to tens of millions of people. Marketers now divide New York Times. Some fledgling influencers even put out fake sponcon, on the grounds that the more sponsors you have, the them up into nano influencers (1,000-10,000 followers), micro influencers (10,000-100,000), macro influencers (100,000more credibility it gives. An influencer culture has developed – 1 million) and mega or celebrity influencers (more than 1 million). or more accurately a series of cultures. The prevailing Instagram culture mixes rampant consumerism with inspirational bromides about self-worth, personal growth and “wellness”. It has also How big is the industry?

Very. By the end of 2019, the influencer marketing industry was been accused of propagating an unrealistic version of beauty. worth some $8bn a year. One recent report by Insider Intelligence What version of beauty?

Dubai: the planet’s influencer capital predicted that it would grow to Dubai is now “a global hub of influencer culture”, says The New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino $15bn globally by the end of 2022.

Ruth Michaelson in The Guardian, “a magnet for social noted the gradual emergence, among The tech consultant SignalFire thinks media stars desperate to tweak their image in what has “professionally beautiful women” become the ideal Instagram city”. With its reliable that “the creator economy” – built today, of a look known as sunshine, crystal-clear seas, and a series of signature by those who post and monetise “Instagram face”. It’s “a young face, constructions – the sail-shaped Burj Al Arab hotel, the content online – employs more than of course, with poreless skin and Palm, and the world’s tallest building, the Burj Khalifa 50 million people, and is the fastestplump, high cheekbones”, long lashes – Dubai is perfect as a backdrop for influencers’ growing sector for small businesses in and full lips – generally white but idealised lifestyles. The city’s authorities have actively the world. There is now a UK union with a hint of “rootless exoticism”: encouraged this: there is “The Frame”, a 150-metre for influencers, The Creator Union; you see it among the Kardashian gold rectangle through which, at the right angle, the and a US trade association, the family, and the models Bella Hadid Burj Khalifa can be framed; free helicopter tours are American Influencer Council. Mega (42 million followers), and Emily available for those with enough followers. Instagram’s Middle East headquarters are, of course, based there. influencers such as Kylie Jenner (233 Ratajkowski (27 million followers). million followers on Instagram) can Dubai has also benefited because it didn’t impose strict It is thought to owe its existence lockdowns during the pandemic. Dubbed the “Covid earn as much as $1m per post. Even partly to the growth of cosmetic Casablanca”, it largely kept its bars, cinemas, malls and the Government uses them: last year it procedures, but also to the popularity paid influencers including Love Island clubs open. Many UK influencers bypassed travel bans of Instagram filters such as Facetune, on the basis that they were making “essential work stars to promote the NHS Test and which tweaks images to give a trips”. James Lock, star of The Only Way Is Essex, told Trace service. thinner face, bigger lips, smoother his followers he was “still grafting” in Dubai. His thenskin, larger eyes, and slimmer legs. girlfriend, Yazmin Oukhellou, added: “We are here for What is life like for influencers?

Professional photos have long been work purposes, for business... Obviously, we’ll make The idea of making thousands of airbrushed; now aspiring influencers the most of it while we’re here as well.” pounds a month by sharing a few can do it at home too.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

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Best articles: Britain The messy task of policing the internet Gaby Hinsliff The Guardian

Why should the poor pay for the rich’s care?

Leo McKinstry The Spectator

Starmer’s only route to Downing Street Andrew Grice The Independent

No, the doctor will not see you now Harry de Quetteville The Daily Telegraph

Conspiracy theories; videos promoting self-harm; hate speech.

The aim of the Government’s Online Safety bill, outlined in the Queen’s Speech last week, is one we can all applaud, says Gaby Hinsliff. We’d all like to see social media rid of “the bile and the threats”, as Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden puts it. But how to achieve this? Giving Ofcom powers to impose sanctions on tech firms hosting illegal material on their platforms is all very well; sadly much of the harmful content isn’t clearly illegal. For this reason, the bill imposes a “duty of care” on big tech firms, making them responsible for eliminating stuff that carries a “physical or psychological impact”, but still enjoining them to respect freedom of expression. How on earth will that work? To refer to gay men, as Boris Johnson once did in an article, as “tank-topped bum boys”, or to argue that biological sex is real and immutable, would indeed have a “psychological impact” in some circles. So would tech firms be obliged to outlaw such remarks? Setting “hard-and-fast rules on this is like nailing jelly to a moving wall”.

“The sound of the well-off grumbling about their finances” is never attractive, says Leo McKinstry. And it’s especially noisome on the issue of social care. It’s a scandal, the grumblers moan, that those with capital of more than £23,250 have to pay for all their care, often having to sell the family home to do so: care should be free or at least massively subsidised. What they’re really saying is that “hard-pressed wage earners” should shoulder the huge rise in taxation that would involve just so that they can keep their wealth intact. In reply, such people often counter that their parents “worked hard” to pass their money on: but the reality is that this wealth mainly derives from the explosion in property values. So it is eminently justifiable that some of this unearned value is tapped for social care. The whole system is in desperate need of reform, and reformers have advanced various sensible ways of funding it, only for each plan to be shot down as a “death tax”. Face it: we’re only going to be able to fix this problem if the relatively well-off “drop the obsession with maximising their inheritances”.

How can Labour ever win power again? That’s the big question exercising the party after the recent elections, says Andrew Grice.

With the prospect of more red wall seats going the way of Hartlepool, and with looming changes to constituency boundaries, Labour may have to gain 160 seats to win a majority next time round. So what to do? Electoral reform is one idea. Adopting proportional representation in place of first-past-the-post (which has given the Tories an 80-seat majority with just 44% of the vote) would indeed be a game changer: but to make that change, Labour would first have to win under the present system – a distant prospect as things stand. No, Labour’s best hope is to form an alliance with the Lib Dems – who in the last election came second in 80 seats won by the Tories – and the Greens. With the right-of-centre vote united behind them, the Tories currently get a free ride against the split progressive vote. But an informal agreement between the progressive parties, allowing whichever one is strongest in any given constituency to field their candidate, would level the playing field – and strike fear into their opponents.

Seen your doctor recently? I doubt it, says Harry de Quetteville.

Today, it’s a battle just to get an appointment with an unknown locum. Yet in 1948, the year the NHS was founded, my mother – then a child with rheumatic fever – was visited every day for six months by her GP. Why the decline in service? It’s a numbers issue. The key factor isn’t population growth per se – in the past 50 years the number of GPs per capita has risen substantially – it’s the huge growth in the number of older people. Seventy years ago, men could expect to live to 66, women to 71: today, those figures are 79 and 83. And those extra years tend to bring complex health problems. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculates that a man in his 80s costs the NHS about ten times as much as a man in his 30s; almost a third of all hospital spending is accounted for by 1% of the general population. And not only is our population older, it’s fatter and prone to many more mental health disorders.

If we don’t tackle these underlying health issues – many of them rooted in poverty and inadequate social care – arranging a face-toface consultation with your local GP isn’t going to get any easier.

NEWS 15 IT MUST BE TRUE…

I read it in the tabloids A 19-year-old from Arkansas drawn in by an ad for a reasonably priced flat unwittingly moved into a retirement village. Madison Kohout signed the $350 per month lease without viewing her new home – and only noticed something unusual a week after moving in. “I thought it was a bit weird that all of my neighbours were significantly older than me,” she said. However, she soon found that living with elderly people has its advantages: her friendly neighbours have offered her home-cooked meals, and she’s found she can “play music whenever I want to, because some of them can’t hear”.

A Wisconsin bakery resorted to an unusual method to track down the thief who raided the premises at night: printing his face onto a batch of cookies. The owners of Canfora Bakery in Milwaukee – known for its “bigger than your face” doughnuts – invited locals to “take a bite out of crime” after putting the black and white image on edible paper and applying it to 96 cookies.

Tips about the man’s identity started coming in after 20 minutes, the bakery said, and the alleged culprit was quickly identified.

Australia’s oldest-ever man has revealed the secret of his longevity: eating chicken brains. Retired cattle rancher Dexter Kruger this week marked 124 days since he turned 111, making him a day older than Great War veteran Jack Lockett when he died in 2002. “Chicken brains,” said Kruger, by way of explanation. “You know, chickens have a head. And in there, there’s a brain. And they are delicious little things. There’s only one little bite.”

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

16 NEWS

Best of the American columnists

Liz Cheney’s ousting: a turning point for the Republicans?

“This is a big moment in American the party’s message to members. It can’t be done by someone who is history,” said Thomas L. Friedman in The New York Times. One of the constantly undermining the party line. country’s two major political parties The GOP has made its choice, said has decided that it will grant senior Kurt Bardella in the Los Angeles roles only to those willing to embrace a lie. How else to interpret the ousting Times. It has embraced Trump’s claims of electoral fraud and is using last week of the third-most senior them to justify voter-suppression laws Republican leader, Liz Cheney, from her post as Conference chair? The in Republican-controlled states. We’re daughter of a former vice-president, not talking about a Republican civil Cheney is a distinguished conservative war any more, but “a battle for the future of democracy”. The stakes who has consistently backed her party’s agenda. But the representative could not be higher, agreed Mona of Wyoming has one unforgivable Charen on TheBulwark.com. What flaw: she refuses to have any truck will happen if the GOP wins control of Congress in next year’s midterm with Donald Trump’s claim that he Cheney: unwilling to embrace a lie was the rightful winner of the 2020 elections? If Trump then runs in 2024, election. It seems such honesty is now incompatible with GOP disputes the result, and asks Congress to override the Electoral leadership, so her colleagues have voted to replace her. “It’s hard College, will Republicans defer to the rule of law – or to Trump? to accept that this is happening in today’s America, but it is.”

By purging truth tellers like Cheney, the GOP has aligned itself with the Capitol rioters. Beware: “The real steal is coming.”

Don’t feel too sorry for Cheney, said Byron York in the Washington Examiner. She brought this on herself. One of ten There are still plenty of dissenters within Republican ranks, said House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump on the charge Greg Sargent in The Washington Post. Following Cheney’s of inciting the 6 January Capitol riot, she comfortably survived ousting last week, a group of more than 100 Republicans – a leadership vote later that month. But she “couldn’t seem to including members of Congress, former governors and state stop talking about Trump”, and her endless media appearances officials – threatened to launch a breakaway party if the GOP started to grate on colleagues. She became “a distraction from didn’t change direction. Such a party would surely be doomed the GOP’s mission to oppose the Biden agenda and win back the at the polls, but a challenge from this quarter might have a House in 2022”. In purely practical terms, the Republicans had chastening effect on the GOP. Whatever happens, the US can a “legitimate case for removing her”, said Russell Berman in The only benefit from more “centre-right voices who are willing to Atlantic. The job of Conference chair is to preside over meetings flatly articulate the principle that accepting democratic electoral between Republican members of Congress, and to communicate outcomes is a precondition for a functioning liberal democracy”.

Cybercriminals: hacking into the heart of the US economy

For years, experts have warned that names of informants – stolen and, in some cases, published online. state-sponsored hackers could launch a cyberwar against the US, shutting down swathes of its infrastructure, said Andy Russian gangs dominate this new criminal trade, but they aren’t the only Greenberg on Wired. But we now know ones involved in it, said Ed Caesar in that hackers can, and will, do it just for the money. A Russia-based The New Yorker. One state that barely cybercrime group known as DarkSide bothers to conceal its cybercrime has claimed responsibility for the recent ambitions is North Korea. In a country attack on the computer systems of where “few families own computers”, Colonial Pipeline, which supplies the Pyongyang regime has trained nearly half the fuel consumed on the cybercriminal talent “the way East Coast. The attack obliged Colonial Olympians were once cultivated in the to shut down parts of its operation, former Soviet bloc”, placing the most causing fuel shortages that in turn led The Colonial attack caused chaos on the East Coast promising pupils in specialised schools. to panic buying. Seventeen states and the It’s estimated that 7,000 North Koreans District of Columbia declared states of emergency; 12,000 now work in the country’s “hacker army”. petrol stations ran dry. It was “one of the largest disruptions of American critical infrastructure by hackers in history”.

America must bolster its defences against this threat, said Timothy L. O’Brien on Bloomberg. The vulnerability of its Ransomware attacks – in which hackers lock up computer energy infrastructure, in particular, is “one of the top-drawer networks and/or threaten to leak stolen data – have become issues of the 21st century”. Companies and the government a global epidemic, said A.J. Vicens in Mother Jones. The have to start insulating their networks. Part of that is “being cybersecurity group Emsisoft estimates that more than $18.6bn transparent” after attacks, rather than holding on to was paid in ransoms in 2020, and that at least 2,354 US-based information out of embarrassment or competitiveness. government, healthcare and education institutions faced some That only makes it “harder to prepare for and surmount the level of ransomware attack last year. The real number is no next one”. Designating ransomware a national security threat doubt higher, as some companies prefer not to reveal they’ve would also help, said The Washington Post. It would free up been targeted. Among the recent victims are several US police intelligence resources and make it easier for authorities to departments, who have had large quantities of classified impose harsher punishments, such as asset forfeiture and data – including surveillance videos, crime-scene photos, sanctions. We can’t afford to pull our punches in this fight.

THE WEEK 22 May 2021

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Best articles: International

NEWS 19

Too few children? China’s “population crisis” Will China grow old before it grows our economy depends. Beijing only has itself to blame, said Fabian Kretschmer rich? That’s the question plaguing officials in Beijing following the alarmon RND (Hanover). Its one-child policy, ing results of the country’s seventh introduced in 1979 and lifted only six census, said Amanda Lee and Orange years ago, led to some 400 million Wang in the South China Morning fewer births, while countless abortions Post (Hong Kong). Released last week, contributed to a male surplus of 35 the once-a-decade data showed that million. And high house prices and the “immense” costs of raising a family are China’s population hit 1.41 billion last year, up by 5.4% on ten years earlier. putting a new generation off marriage That may sound pretty reasonable; but and children. Yet instead of opening the door to immigration, Beijing has it actually marked the slowest rate of resorted to propaganda promoting expansion since records began in 1953. “traditional Confucian family values” Fertility has plunged: there were just 12 million births last year (down from The one-child policy led to 400 million fewer births in a desperate drive to raise birth rates.

14.65 million in 2019); the fertility rate For all the dire predictions, talk of a crisis is premature, said fell to 1.3 children – well below the 2.1 needed to maintain a stable population. The country is ageing rapidly: it has added 80 Frank Chen in Asia Times (Hong Kong). China’s labour force still exceeds that of the “key Western powers combined”. What’s million old people in a decade. The census suggests that China is heading for a “population crisis”, with a shrinking, ageing more, other Asian countries such as Japan, Singapore and South populace which could slow the pace of its relentless economic Korea are also wrestling with population retreat, said Daniel growth, and add greatly to spending on health and care.

Moss on Bloomberg (New York). Yet all boast high living standards and strong economies. Rising education levels (China’s 218 million graduates in 2020 was nearly double the number ten The trend risks jeopardising China’s status as “the workshop of years earlier) almost always lead to falling birth rates and a shift the world”, agreed Xu Jingjing in Sanlian Shenghuo Zhoukan (Beijing). Our working-age population peaked at 925 million from rural to urban areas. If China is to continue on its journey from “impoverished backwater” to the world’s largest back in 2011, and has decreased every year since – raising questions about who will do the manufacturing jobs on which economy, “sluggish demographics are part of the deal”.

FRANCE

Europe needs to reach to the stars Le Figaro (Paris)

INDIA

How Covid has destroyed our self-respect The Quint (Mumbai)

BRAZIL

The barbarism of Bolsonaro’s government Istoé (São Paulo)

When the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet helped Coldplay launch their new single from space on 6 May, the band enjoyed a blaze of publicity, say Louis d’Hendecourt and Olivier Mousis. Pesquet chatted to the group via video link before the song was beamed up to the International Space Station, which he joined in April as the European Space Agency’s contribution to a six-month mission. But are music promotions and photos of Paris from space really the limits of Europe’s cosmic ambitions?

Sure, they get some social media “likes”. But they have zero scientific merit. And, according to Patrick Baudry, the first French astronaut on Nasa’s Discovery space shuttle, Pesquet’s experiments on the ISS are largely redundant, such is their similarity to those Baudry carried out 30 years ago. In truth, Europe’s role in space is a source of embarrassment. The US has plans for a permanent lunar base; Russia and China have Moon programmes; smaller players like India and the UAE are in space to showcase their technological know-how. Europe, meanwhile, appears destined to keep sending astronauts to space in roles which amount to little more than that of “goodwill ambassador”.

The Indian government’s “floundering” response to the latest wave of Covid-19 has destroyed the “national self-respect” painstakingly built up over three generations, says Shashi Tharoor. Indian leaders have been obsessed with the need for self-reliance ever since we escaped the humiliations of colonialism in 1947. When regional disasters struck, like the 2004 tsunami, ministers rejected offers of help and boasted about their ability to aid neighbouring countries. And in the pandemic, Prime Minister Narendra Modi proclaimed India’s status as the “pharmacy to the world”, citing its huge vaccine manufacturing capacity. Yet now his government’s “transcendent” failures during this “horrifying” wave of infections have led to the collapse of the health system. We’re keeping vaccines promised to other nations for ourselves. Medical supplies are so scarce that, far from being selfreliant, we’re “approaching the world on our knees with a begging bowl”. Even our tiny neighbour Bhutan has offered oxygen generators. In a “final indignity”, bodies are washing up on the shores of the Ganges as crematoriums run out of space. Amid the darkness, ministers exhort citizens to stay positive. “But when you have lost self-respect, can positivity be anything more than self-deception?”

The erosion of women’s rights by Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right government in Brazil has taken a sinister new turn, say Antonio Carlos Prado and Mariana Ferrari. Damares Alves, the minister for women, family and human rights – an evangelical pastor, who had a vision of Jesus in a guava tree – is an opponent of abortion, even in the very limited cases where it is permitted in Brazil: she was accused last year of trying to prevent an abortion being carried out on a ten-year-old rape victim.

Now, the government seems to be going in a new and shocking direction: it recently proposed giving prisoners, sex workers, homeless women and those infected with HIV or tuberculosis a new contraceptive implant which would prevent them giving birth. The policy has drawn comparisons with The Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood’s dystopian novel in which the state decides who can have children. Women’s rights groups have likened it to an “act of eugenics”; those affected say it’s a violation of their rights. While the government has yet to firm up its proposals, it insists that the measure is needed – citing the fact that some 50% of pregnancies in Brazil are unplanned. It appears to be yet another example of the “barbarism” of Bolsonaro’s regime.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

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Health & Science

NEWS 21

What the scientists are saying…

Sugary drinks linked to cancer

Drinking two or more sugar-sweetened drinks per day has been associated with a significantly increased risk of bowel cancer.

Researchers analysed data gathered on 95,000 American women under 50, who were tracked from 1991 to 2015 for the Nurses’ Health Study II. They found that women who consumed more than a pint of sugary drinks a day were twice as likely to be diagnosed with early onset bowel cancer during the period of the study than those who drank less than half a pint a week. The results suggest that sugar consumption could be a factor in the rising rates of bowel cancer. In the US, adults born around 1990 run twice the risk of colon cancer and four times the risk of rectal cancer of adults born in 1950.

However, as only 109 women in the study, at Washington University in St Louis, were diagnosed with early onset bowel cancer, other experts stressed that more research would be needed to confirm the findings.

The Cerne Abbas giant is Saxon

The origins of the Cerne Abbas giant are shrouded in mystery: many historians and archaeologists have argued that the huge figure of a naked man, carved onto a chalk hillside in Dorset, is prehistoric. But as there is no written record of it until 1694, others have argued that it was created in the 17th century – perhaps to mock Oliver Cromwell. But now, scientists have analysed soil samples to determine its origins, and found that the giant most likely dates to the late Saxon period, around the 10th century. “Everyone was wrong, and that makes these results even more exciting,” said geoarchaeologist Mike Allen. The researchers used Optically Stimulated Luminescence, which can determine when grains of sand were last

The stratosphere is shrinking

The Cerne Abbas giant: a 10th century man

exposed to sunlight, to work out when the chalk-filled trenches that form the giant’s outline were dug. This produced a time frame of AD700 to AD1000 at the earliest.

They speculate that the giant was created by local people when the area was pagan, but became overgrown and was forgotten after it was converted to Christianity by the monks at Cerne Abbey, founded in AD987. Then, sometime in the mid-17th century, someone spotted the faint lines of the giant, cut the grass and re-filled the trenches. This would explain why the figure is not mentioned in the abbey’s medieval records, nor in an extensive 1617 survey of the area. Intriguingly, it may only have been in the 17th century that it acquired its penis – courtesy, perhaps, of a local prankster. Topographical mapping reveals that a “belt” line that goes across the figure’s middle originally cut across where the penis is now, suggesting the giant once wore trousers.

The hedgehog cull in New Zealand

In Britain, we love hedgehogs, and worry about how many are squashed on roads or eaten by badgers. So it may come as a shock to learn that in New Zealand, the prickly creatures are regarded as pests – and there are plans to eradicate them, along with all other non-native predators, such as rats. Hedgehogs were introduced in the 19th century by British colonisers, who wanted to be reminded of home. But whereas in Europe they have several predators, in New Zealand they have very few. As a result, their population has thrived, and they are now wreaking havoc, by feasting on native beetles, lizards, bird eggs and weta – a type of giant flightless cricket. Researchers have found 283 weta legs in a single hedgehog stomach. “That means in a 24-hour period this hedgehog has guzzled 60 or so animals,” Nick Foster, a researcher at the University of Otago, told The Guardian.

“It’s a banquet.” But while conservationists see the need to control hedgehogs, many Kiwis are fond of the creatures, and don’t want them to be killed. It has been proposed that instead, the creatures are rounded up and shipped back to Britain, where populations are in sharp decline, but it seems this isn’t feasible.

Greenhouse gases are causing the stratosphere to shrink, new research has found. Extending from about 12 to 40 miles above the Earth’s surface, the stratosphere is the layer of the atmosphere that sits on top of the troposphere – where humans live and weather exists. According to the study, the stratosphere has become 400 metres thinner since the 1980s, and it was probably shrinking before that too. If greenhouse emissions are not cut, it will shrink by a further 1,000 metres by 2080, they say – enough, potentially, to disrupt satellite operations, radio communications, and the GPS system. The shrinkage occurs in two ways, reports The Guardian: CO2 in the troposphere heats and expands the air, pushing the stratosphere upwards. But when CO2 enters the stratosphere, it cools the air, causing it to contract. The study “proves we are messing with the atmosphere up to 60km”, said Associate Profession Juan Añel, of the University of Vigo in Spain. “It is shocking.”

Napoleon “overdosed on scent”

Could Napoleon have died from an overdose of cologne? That is the theory being put forward by biomedical scientist Parvez Haris of Leicester’s De Montfort University, who notes that whereas most people use a few drops of the stuff, Bonaparte slathered himself in two to three bottles of it a day, for many years. This, he says, is the “elephant in the room” that researchers investigating Napoleon’s death, in exile on St Helena in 1821, have overlooked. Previous studies have suggested that essential oils of the kind found in cologne can act as “endocrine disruptors” which affect hormones, potentially leading to tumours. Napoleon’s official cause of death was stomach cancer.

Alcohol deaths rise 20% Alcohol deaths in England and Wales reached a 20-year high in 2020, official figures have shown. There were 7,423 deaths from alcohol misuse last year – 20% more than in 2019, the Office for National Statistics says. Around 80% of those deaths were from alcoholic liver disease; 10% were the result of alcohol-induced mental or behavioural disorders; and 6% were accidental alcohol poisonings. As in previous years, twice as many men died of alcohol-related cases than women. Men living in the poorest parts of England were four times as likely to die of alcohol abuse than those in the richest areas. The rate of death increased from March, when the country went into lockdown. This may have been because people were drinking more, but it could also have been because people with alcohol-related illnesses became more reluctant to seek medical help.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

22 NEWS Pick of the week’s

Gossip

The Hollywood actor and producer Norman Lloyd, who died last week aged 106 (see page 39), played tennis with Charlie Chaplin four times a week – and never lost. “You could always beat Charlie because he was too vain to wear his glasses,” he explained. The trick was to draw Chaplin into the net and then smash the ball past him. Each time, Chaplin would stomp back to the base line muttering: “That, Charlie, is not the way the world’s funniest man should play tennis.”

Barbara Amiel knows what it’s like to be cast out of high society. When her husband, the media tycoon Conrad Black, was arrested on suspicion of fraud in 2007, she slid rapidly “from fame to infamy”. Her friends disappeared; her hairdresser told her she was “no longer a welcome client”; and when she telephoned her favourite shoe shop to enquire about some “moodlifting” Manolo Blahniks, its owner replied: “You’ve got quite enough”, and hung up. It was a brutal reckoning, she writes in the Daily Mail. “Even Ghislaine Maxwell snubbed me at a reception!”

As fellow members of the “Madchester” music scene of the 1980s and 1990s, Shaun Ryder and Ian Brown go way back. But that’s not to say they always see eye to eye. Ryder, for instance, is dismissive of Brown’s controversial views on masks and vaccines. “Ian’s just another of them pseudo intellectuals,” he says. “He was one of them guys who was 21 years old and didn’t look at porn because it was detrimental to women!”

THE WEEK 22 May 2021

Talking points Cameron: a “humiliating spectacle” As the Government was reported that he sold some of grappling last spring with them in 2019, netting many Britain’s worst crisis since the millions); nor will his inability end of the Second World War, to recall how many times he’d David Cameron was facing a used Greensill’s private jets to challenge of his own: how to fly to his holiday home in make sure his employer, Cornwall have done much Greensill Capital, obtained for his battered reputation.

Similarly unimpressive was his government loans to which it was not entitled under existing claim that he had no idea of rules. Undoubtedly, he worked the weakness of Greensill’s hard on Greensill’s behalf. We financial position, or of the “vulnerabilities in its business know now that he lobbied ministers and senior civil model” – though he had servants 56 times via emails, attended its board meetings. text messages and phone calls, Took private jets to Cornwall said John Rentoul in The Perhaps the real low was Independent. Giving evidence about this when he conceded that the important lobbying lobbying to the Treasury Select Committee last reforms he’d introduced as PM had not been week, Cameron was careful to appear candid. enough, said Tom Peck in The Independent. Not enough, that is, to stop him doing what he did.

Greensill was paying him a “generous” amount, conceded the former PR man; and yes, he had But it’s hard to say, because there were so many shares and share options in the firm (which went excruciating moments, from the revelation that bust this March). But his frenzied efforts had not he signed his wheedling text messages “love DC”, to his claim that it was hard for young been motivated by personal profit. Oh no. He former PMs who “wanted to get really stuck in” genuinely believed that the services Greensill to a new project, to know what they could and offered (which included a payday app for NHS couldn’t do. It was a humiliating spectacle, said workers) were of “profound social benefit”.

James Kirkup in The Spectator. But watching Cameron’s glossy performance, I wondered if Cameron has always been a “polished public performer”, and speaking on Zoom, his answers he feels humiliated. For that, you have to care to the committee were typically fluent, said The what people think; but Cameron has never been Times. But his “evasiveness did him no favours”. troubled by the views of “lesser people”. This His refusal to disclose the value of his shares in is not just the “industrial-grade self-belief” Greensill only reinforced the view that they’d required to reach No. 10. It’s a form of disdain.

And it makes him shameless. been worth a very great deal (indeed, it has been

ID for voters: a “suspicious” proposal Boris Johnson once vowed that, were he ever asked to show an identity card when he was simply exercising his rights as a “freeborn Englishman”, he’d “physically eat it in the presence of whatever emanation of the state has demanded I produce it”. The “plot twist” is that the emanation now turns out to be Johnson himself, said Marina Hyde in The Guardian. His government is going to draw up a bill that will require people to show photo ID at polling stations, to combat electoral fraud. This is a “suspiciously unnecessary” plan: in 2019, only one person in the UK was convicted of in-person voter fraud (postal fraud is a far larger problem).

It looks like the kind of “voter suppression” seen in the US: a bill designed to make it harder for young adults or those on low incomes – who are less likely to have passports and driving licences, and also less likely to support the Tories – to vote. It does look suspicious, agreed Rachel Cunliffe in the New Statesman. The precise rules on IDs are not yet clear, but “tellingly”, in a pilot scheme, the Freedom Pass for pensioners – who are more likely to vote Tory – was deemed acceptable, but student IDs were ruled out.

Like most people, I enjoy the ease of voting in Britain, but the system is worryingly “open to abuse”, said Charles Moore in The Daily Telegraph. I exposed its flaws myself when,

as a journalistic experiment, I voted twice in the Brexit referendum – once from my main home in Sussex and once from my flat in London (I deliberately spoilt the second ballot). There are actual cases of electoral fraud, too: in 2015, Lutfur Rahman was removed as mayor of Tower Hamlets in London after he was found to have used “numerous illegal methods” to secure his election, including impersonation at polling stations. In 2003, the Labour government introduced photo ID rules in Northern Ireland, and they are widely considered fair and effective.

The new system would not be onerous: anyone without photo ID could simply apply for a free voter card. This is “common sense, and should be common ground”.

The policy might look like a “blatant attempt” by the Conservatives to gain a marginal advantage, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. But a 2014 review by the Electoral Commission (generally deemed rather anti-Tory) actually supported the use of voter photo ID, to boost public confidence and security in the system. The experience in Northern Ireland reveals no significant effect on voter turnout.

The real question is whether the Prime Minister – one of the noisiest libertarian critics of Labour’s plans for ID cards back in 2005 – is able to bring his backbenchers along with him.

Talking points DUP: new leader, same bind What should we make of the says one Assembly member, triumph of Edwin Poots, elected “perhaps Poots can too.” It’s last week as the new leader of notable that, moments after the Democratic Unionist his victory, the DUP elected its Party? For some, said Andrew most liberal Assembly member, Paula Bradshaw, to be his McQuillan in The Spectator, it marks “the definitive end of the deputy. This suggests the party party’s moderate turn”. Those is not so much lurching to the unfamiliar with the intricacies right as thirsting for change. of the DUP may scoff at the suggestion of moderation, but The main change Poots is the party’s two previous leaders promising, said The Irish both “recognised that for Times, is the dismantling of unionism to succeed, a more the Northern Ireland Protocol – that part of the Brexit deal open approach was needed” – and at least tried to follow that created an effective that strategy. It seems unlikely economic border in the Irish Poots: bigoted moments that Poots, a hardliner from the Sea to avoid the need for a hard Christian evangelical wing of North-South border on the the party who believes the planet is only island of Ireland. But it’s unclear how he hopes 6,000 years old, will adopt the same approach. to achieve that. While the implementation of the Reformers within the DUP are certainly fearing Irish Sea border can “probably be tweaked to the worst, said Ben Lowry in the News Letter minimise its impact on the people of the North, (Belfast). “This is our Jeremy Corbyn moment,” the principle will remain – and it is the principle sighed one last week. which is at the heart of the DUP’s opposition”.

Poots has promised more than he can deliver Critics shouldn’t be too quick to write off Poots on the Protocol, said Freya McClements in the as “an irredeemably divisive force”, said Shawn same paper. At the same time, he faces a tough Pogatchnik on Politico.eu. Although known for challenge in revitalising a party that is shedding “moments of blunt-spoken bigotry, such as votes on one side to the Traditional Unionist blocking blood donations by gay people and Voice and on the other to the centrist Alliance claiming Catholics were much more likely to Party. He is, in short, in the same bind as his catch Covid”, he is personable and enjoys good predecessor Arlene Foster – and now he can’t relations with Sinn Féin figures in the Stormont use her as a scapegoat. “In politics, it is always Assembly. Being a hardliner doesn’t rule out easier to be in opposition; Poots may discover cooperation. “If Ian Paisley can surprise us,” this sooner rather than later.”

Prince Harry: dealing with “genetic pain” For someone who is “obsessed his father and grandparents in with protecting his privacy, the public. Personally, I think it’s Duke of Sussex spends an great that Harry can talk about his mental health, said Victoria inordinate amount of time baring his soul for a global audience”, Richards in The Independent. He has had a traumatic and difficult said the Daily Mail. His latest outburst marked a new low: not life, and hearing him discuss the content with branding the royal ways in which therapy, empathy family racist on prime time US TV and self-awareness have helped earlier in the year, Prince Harry him deal with his emotions will last week went a step further, in turn help millions of others. suggesting that both his father and the Queen had failed as parents.

Self-awareness is hardly Harry’s Interviewed by the actor Dax strong suit, said Celia Walden in Shepard for the Armchair Expert The Daily Telegraph. On last podcast, he said that Prince week’s podcast, he took time out Can he escape the zoo?

Charles had “treated me the way from publicly bashing his father to that he was treated” as a child: “There’s a lot of describe the US First Amendment – the one that genetic pain and suffering that gets passed on,” guarantees freedom of speech, religion and so on he said. But thanks to therapy, Prince Harry – as “bonkers”. Obviously, this didn’t go down declared, he is now determined to “break the well stateside. My friendly PR advice to him is: cycle” for his own children.

“Harry: stop talking. Pipe down. Quit chattering. Put a sock in it. Shush.” In the interview, I used to feel “genuine sympathy” for Harry and Harry described life in the royal family as “a Meghan, said Barbara Ellen in The Observer. mix of being in The Truman Show and being in But “it becomes increasingly difficult to defend the zoo”, said Will Lloyd on UnHerd. He’s right, them as they sink ever deeper into the bubbling of course: “the monarchy is our national zoo”.

Californian quagmire of therapy-speak”. “There But by moving to California and sharing his is no blame”, he stated in the podcast – which intimate struggles and opinions with millions, doesn’t quite square with bitterly reproaching he has only “swapped one zoo for another”.

NEWS 23

Wit & Wisdom “Remain in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.”

St Benedict, quoted in The New Yorker “Nobody who says ‘I told you so’ will ever be a hero.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, quoted on The Browser “It is good for a man to eat thistles, and to remember he is an ass.”

E.S. Dallas, quoted in Jane Grigson’s Vegetable Book “The difference between the almost right word and the right word is really a large matter. ’Tis the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

Mark Twain, quoted in The New York Times “A fool bolts pleasure, then complains of moral indigestion.”

Author Minna Thomas Antrim, quoted in Forbes “Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.”

Vladimir Putin, quoted in the FT “Never doubt the courage of the French. They were the ones who discovered that snails are edible.”

Doug Larson, quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle “Patience? A virtue for the dead.”

Iraqi poet Nazik al-Mala’ika, quoted on the Poetry Foundation “Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.”

C.S. Lewis, quoted in The Daily Telegraph

Statistic of the week

The proportion of people working from home has doubled since 2019 – but still makes up a minority of the workforce. According to the ONS, 25.9% of people had worked from home at some point in the week before its snapshot survey, up from 12.4% in 2019.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

24 NEWS

Sport

Football: Leicester’s deserved FA cup victory

Some 21,000 fans were allowed into Wembley have been “cut adrift” from Europe’s elite, for Saturday’s FA Cup final between Leicester despite having won the Premier League as recently as 2016, and despite lying fourth in this and Chelsea, said Ian Ladyman in The Mail on Sunday, but it often seemed as if many thousands year’s table. So in many ways, Saturday’s win represented a “kind of karmic retribution” more were present. After the sterility of the past against the clubs – Chelsea included – who had 14 months, it was wonderful to behold “real life” finally returning to a major sporting event. In so recently “set out to destroy them”. such circumstances, the match itself could well Yet the sense that the right team won goes have turned into something of an afterthought, said Jonathan Wilson in The Guardian; but deeper than that, said Jonathan Northcroft thanks to Leicester midfielder Youri Tielemans, in The Sunday Times. As is widely recognised who on the hour lit up a hitherto uneventful across the footballing world, Leicester are a contest with an “outrageous 28-yard strike”, it “remarkable club”, whose Thai proprietors – certainly wasn’t. In an “incredibly gripping” final the Srivaddhanaprabha family – have produced a “brand of modest, heartfelt ownership” that half hour, Chelsea threw everything they had at Leicester – only to be denied by a pair of brilliant contrasts strikingly with their rivals. The family saves by Kasper Schmeichel and an agonisingly “Top” and the celebrating throng invest generously in facilities (Leicester’s training ground is the envy of the Premier League), and close VAR review. In footballing terms, it wasn’t the greatest of matches, but it was a truly “great FA Cup final”. work tirelessly to make fans feel included. The resulting sense of togetherness was clear to see in the way the team celebrated on And for the majority of neutral observers, it ended with the right Saturday, said Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail. As the players hugged on the pitch, “Top” Srivaddhanaprabha (who became the team winning, said Oliver Brown in The Sunday Telegraph. Not club’s chairman after the helicopter crash that killed his father in only was this the Foxes’ first-ever FA Cup victory, but their triumph seemed the perfect riposte to the attempt by England’s 2018) bounded over and was soon enveloped by the “celebrating “Big Six” – along with six other European clubs – to form a throng”. Would the Glazers at Man Utd – or the Kroenkes at breakaway European Super League. Had the attempt of this “self- Arsenal – ever behave in such a way? As Alan Shearer so accurately put it afterwards: “This is how to run a football club.” serving cabal” succeeded, Leicester – for no good reason would

Tennis: Nadal’s hopes, Murray’s misery We may be living in uncertain times, said Mike tennis history. (He and Federer are tied on 20; Dickson in the Daily Mail, but one thing remains Djokovic is just behind on 18.) The closeness of the constant: Rafael Nadal’s “extraordinary ability” on contest makes this year’s Roland-Garros – at which clay. On Sunday, the 34-year-old Spaniard clinched Federer will also be playing after his latest lay-off – a more than usually mouth-watering prospect. yet another title with a 7-5, 1-6, 6-3, win over Novak Djokovic in Rome. By Nadal’s lofty standards on One former major winner who won’t be in Paris this surface (on which he has now won 62 titles), it was an unusually hard-fought victory. After playing is Andy Murray, said Simon Briggs in The Daily Telegraph. The Scot has dropped his plans to play near his best in the first set, he fell away in the second, before regaining control midway through the after experiencing a recurrence of groin pain, and decider. He was also in an uncharacteristically tetchy will instead concentrate on readying himself for mood, muttering frequently about the state of the Wimbledon. It’s the latest blow in a miserable season court and reacting angrily when he fell heavily after for Murray, who has now played in only four major tournaments since first dropping off the tour with a tripping over one of the lines. Nadal may feel under Poised to make history more pressure than usual heading into this year’s hip injury in 2017. When he had his hip “resurfaced” French Open, said Angus Oliver in The Times. Should he claim in 2019, his aim was to become the first singles player to compete his 14th victory at Roland-Garros next month, he will overtake successfully at the top level with a bionic hip. As setback follows setback, that is starting to look like “an impossible dream”.

Roger Federer as the male player with the most grand slams in

Will bureaucracy kill parkrun?

Sporting headlines

Since its launch in 2004, parkrun because the courses traverse has become one of Britain’s a mix of private and publicly “most effective public health owned land and the organisers innovations”, said Jeremy need permission from both the Wilson in The Daily Telegraph. local authorities and the private What began as a weekly jog for land owners. But concerns 13 friends in southwest London about the spread of Covid have had become, by the start of the meant that only about a third pandemic, a giant exercise in have given it. Some have volunteer-led cooperation simply ignored the requests. taking place in 589 parks across Others insist that the courses Running a 5k in Chippenham the country. The 5k runs were must first be approved by a free to enter, and in a typical week a total of Safety Advisory Group – a process that can take more than 200,000 people would run in them. months to complete. Such foot-dragging seems absurd when pubs and restaurants are throwing But will they ever do so again? The hope had open their doors – and when the “science been that parkrun would resume on 5 June, but overwhelmingly shows that the risk of it is now “mired in a bureaucratic nightmare transmission outdoors is tiny”. If the runs aren’t worthy of Kafka”, said Sean Ingle in The allowed to resume, the well-being and health of Guardian, so much so that the organisers fear hundreds of thousands of people will suffer. the scheme’s entire future is in jeopardy. That’s

Women’s football Barcelona beat Chelsea 4-0 in the final of the Women’s Champions League.

Boxing Tyson Fury and Anthony Joshua announced a heavyweight title bout in Saudi Arabia on 14 August.

However, Fury’s mandatory rematch with Deontay Wilder will likely delay the fight.

Cricket Fast bowler Jofra Archer will miss England’s Test series against New Zealand after another flare-up of his elbow injury.

Rugby union Leicester beat Harlequins 35-29 in the Premiership. Wasps beat Worcester 23-19.

THE WEEK 22 May 2021

LETTERS Pick of the week’s correspondence Keep voting simple To the Financial Times

I have spent an enjoyable few days explaining to my often bewildered friends from Europe that the UK currently has no voter ID requirement.

When I say that, if you are on the electoral register, you turn up, give your name and address and fulfil your civic duty, I am met by an array of questions about voter fraud and the like.

My answer is that the level of voter fraud is exceedingly low (one personation fraud conviction in 2019) and that a system without voter IDs reduces the barriers to voting and avoids getting into the nitty-gritty of who would be excluded were IDs to be implemented.

If I could make a further argument, not one supported by the hard facts above, but rather based on an emotional response: the current mechanism works, it’s easy and in a public system not known for this trait, it is quaintly welcoming (particularly to new voters), rather than inducing the nerves one feels upon hearing the dreaded words “papers please”.

The Government may have convincing arguments for compulsory voter IDs, but this voter has yet to hear them.

William Peck, London

Exchange of the week

Getting to see your GP To The Daily Telegraph

The near-impossibility of getting a face-to-face appointment with a GP is a scandal. How can triage be carried out by receptionists who are not medically qualified? How do they have the right to decide who can or cannot see the doctor?

Pamela Kitt, Wallington, Surrey To The Daily Telegraph

GPs have not been “missing in action”. Rather, they switched to a mandatory total triage model in March 2020, to protect patients from catching Covid in the waiting room. GPs have continued to see patients when necessary, but many issues do not require a face-to-face consultation. Taking a good history and knowing your patients helps to provide continuity of care.

We can agree that general practice is broken. This is due to chronic underfunding of a service that provides 90% of NHS contacts for about 9% of the budget. The current system allows most to access their GP within one or two days, versus waiting weeks pre-pandemic. GPs are trying their best with limited resources while dealing with more patients than ever before, as well as delivering 75% of Covid vaccinations.

Dr Rosie Shire, GP, Doctors’ Association UK To The Times

I retired as a GP in 2007 after 32 years. During our medical training, our teachers emphasised “eyes first, ears second, tongue last”. Many a symptom deemed unimportant by patients can be vital to a clinician in arriving at a correct diagnosis. Like, for example, the 17-year-old boy with a high fever who thought the purple patch on his ankle was a bruise sustained on the football ground. I had seen him six hours earlier, when he had had no such rash.

Obviously he had meningitis. After administering penicillin I summoned an ambulance. I shudder to think what the outcome would have been if a phone or Skype consultation had taken place. Without a physical consultation both the doctor and the patient are the loser.

Dr Ajay Kumar, Gorleston, Norfolk

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China has already peaked and is destined to falter long before displacing the US as the world’s leading power. The most recent census shows China’s population growth is at its slowest for decades. The question that should keep US strategic thinkers up at night is how America should deal with a China that is beginning to sense that the brass ring of global primacy is fated to recede from its grasp.

Ominously, the world’s experience with similar faltering contenders – Germany in 1914 and Japan in 1941 – suggests that when a dominant power assumes it is confronting a rising power, when actually it is confronting a faltering contender, catastrophic war can ensue.

Andrew A. Latham, professor of international relations and political theory, Macalester College, US

Scotland’s borderlands To The Economist

The possible preference of the Scottish counties that lie on the border with England not to join a Scottish separation from the UK should be considered seriously. These counties have voted against the Scottish National Party in elections for the Scottish and Westminster parliaments, and, by nearly two to one, against devolution in 1979 and independence in 2014. This is the same margin by which Scots voted to remain in the EU, prompting Nicola Sturgeon to claim that Scotland was being dragged out of the bloc “against our will”. Sauce for the goose?

Jack Ponton, Earlston, Scottish Borders

Home Office heavies

Turf war over social care

China can’t compete

I read with great interest your article about the Home Office.

Little did I know the range of its cruel activity. I am Polish, came to the UK in 1978, have been married for 42 years to an English citizen, raised a family here and had a fulfilling career as a consultant pathologist working for the NHS for 33 years. Since 1980, I’ve been the proud owner of British citizenship, and a British passport.

Last week, I received a letter from the Home Office advising me to apply for the EU settlement scheme, and, in a threatening tone, stating that I am getting benefits from the Department for Work and Pensions. Yes, this is my state pension, for which I worked for 33 years!

Dr Isabella Moore, Southampton

I began my career in social work in 1965. The hot topic at that time was how social care and healthcare could better work together. That conundrum remains, not because of resource constraints, but because of the intractable question at its heart: who controls the resulting service?

Is it to be local government, through locally elected members, or central government through Parliament?

Therein lies the rub: the control of social care is locally determined but within parameters set by central government. The control of healthcare is firmly embedded in Whitehall.

Neither entity is likely to give ground. The problem is not about resources, but power.

Robin SeQueira, former director of Social Services, Dorset County Council

China’s economic rise is stalling. Rather than being on track to displace the US as the next economic superpower, China now finds itself ensnared in a classic “middle-income trap” – a situation in which rapid growth is followed by a period of stalled growth and failure to achieve the status of a high-income country.

As a result, China is not fated to become the world’s economic middle kingdom. Indeed, it will be lucky if it escapes the fate of countries like Brazil and South Africa that have also fallen into this economic trap. The bottom line is that while China’s rise has been “If one of your ears was inside out, meteoric and strategically would you want someone to tell you?” consequential, it is not destined to continue. © ELISABETH MCNAIR/NEW YORKER/CARTOON BANK

To The Guardian

To The Daily Telegraph

To The Spectator

● Letters have been edited

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

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ARTS Review of reviews: Books

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Book of the week

to grasp the seriousness of Covid-19.

In January 2020, as he reminds us on the opening page, he predicted that it Doom would create a global pandemic, and

by Niall Ferguson “was regarded as eccentric”. His book, however, is an unconvincing blend of Allen Lane 496pp £25 “statements of the readily apparent” The Week Bookshop £19.99 and laborious theorising. Was the pandemic a black swan (an unexpected While the rest of us spent lockdown event that catches humanity unawares), a grey rhino (an obviously dangerous learning to bake sourdough, Niall event that people nonetheless do Ferguson applied his “prodigious intellect” to the task of placing the nothing about), or a dragon king pandemic in historical context, said (an event that flattens civilisation)?

Ferguson says it was a grey rhino.

Douglas Alexander in the FT. In Doom, the Scottish-born Harvard not playing with such grand When Catastrophe: Bruegel’s The Triumph of Death historian sets out to “understand why concepts, he indulges in tiresome humanity, time and again through the ages, has failed to prepare liberal-baiting – describing Black Lives Matter as a “contagion”. for catastrophe”. Ferguson’s inquiry is “dazzlingly broad”, Another problem with this book is that it is already outdated, covering a host of natural and man-made disasters – Vesuvius, said Mark Whitaker in The Washington Post. Concluding his wars, famine, Chernobyl – and takes in disciplines ranging from narrative last autumn, Ferguson predicts the Covid-19 pandemic will be remembered not in the same league as the 1918 Spanish network science to epidemiology. Insofar as the book has an “overall thesis”, it is that disasters are usually less the product of influenza, but rather the (now largely forgotten) Asian flu of poor leadership than of “vulnerabilities of the system”. America’s 1957. A lot, however, has happened since – including the second wave, the emergence of scary new variants, and the roll-out of nearly 600,000 Covid deaths, in other words, probably had less vaccines. Doom is most successful when it sticks to Ferguson’s to do with Donald Trump than with the country’s cumbersome specialist subject, said Martin Bentham in the London Evening bureaucracy. Whether you agree with this or not, Ferguson is a Standard. His accounts of history’s landmark catastrophes are superb historian, and Doom is an “immensely readable” book. always thought-provoking and well told. They make this a work Ferguson has one good reason to claim to be an authority on that many readers will “relish”, even in these “bleak times”. catastrophes, said David Aaronovitch in The Times: he was quick

One of Them

Novel of the week

© KASIA ZACHARKO/GUARDIAN/EYEVINE

by Musa Okwonga Unbound 224pp £8.99

Whereabouts

The Week Bookshop £6.99

by Jhumpa Lahiri Bloomsbury 176pp £14.99

“The literary micro-genre of Eton memoirs by black former pupils has doubled in size,” said Ludovic Hunter-Tilney in the FT. Fifty years ago, Dillibe Onyeama’s N****r at Eton caused the Nigerian writer to be banned from ever returning to the school. Now comes Musa Okwonga’s One of Them, which describes his time at Eton in the 1990s. The son of Ugandan immigrants, Okwonga grew up in a working-class suburb in west London and became obsessed with Eton aged 11, after watching a documentary about it. Two years later he won a half-scholarship, and found himself “among a small minority of black pupils”, rubbing shoulders with the likes of princes William and Harry. His “nuanced” account of the school, while not entirely uncritical, is unlikely to lead to a ban: the place, he reports, made him feel safe, and he flourished academically under “nurturing teachers”.

One of Them is “such a good advert” for Eton that at one point I paused to look up the fees, “momentarily forgetting I didn’t have a spare £14,000 to burn every term”, said Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. This is a “richly observed book, packed with elegant descriptions’’ – and written in effortlessly graceful prose. The book does not “reveal a sordid hotbed of racism and elitism”, said Maighna Nanu in The Daily Telegraph. But Okwonga recalls the “diffidence and caution” he felt obliged to display “as a black man in an institution that exudes white privilege”, as well as the occasional, painful episodes of racism.

More broadly, he criticises the school’s narrow “parameters for success”, which he still feels bad about having failed to meet: marriage (to a woman), children, “and a high-paying banking job”. Poetic and intelligent, this is a balanced and “complex” account of being an outsider in the ultimate insider’s institution.

The Week Bookshop £11.99

Jhumpa Lahiri is “one of the most interesting American writers at work today”, said Lucy Atkins in The Sunday Times. Her early work, written in English, won just about every prize going. Then in 2011, she “packed up her family and moved to Rome” – determined to learn to speak and write Italian “like a native”. Nearly ten years on, we have, in Whereabouts, her first novel written in Italian (though now translated into English by Lahiri herself). A short, spare account of a “solitary middle-aged woman wandering around an anonymous city”, it’s an “oddly compelling” study of estrangement.

The novel is composed of 46 vignettes, many not obviously about very much, said Anthony Cummins in The Observer. The narrator swims and gets her nails done; she flirts (and goes underwear shopping) with a friend’s husband.

While there’s a “peculiar magnetism” to the novel’s mix of “candour and coyness”, its “hypnotically surgical gleam can verge on bleached sterility”. Lahiri’s Italy seems to “be a blank canvas” – and it may not be a place that, as a writer, she “can profitably stay long”.

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

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

ARTS

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Podcasts... sitting down, music, and life-altering events Its ability to cater to niche or Mozart and Rossini. Sticky Notes, from conductor Joshua Weilerstein, unlikely interests has always been has been experimenting with part of podcasting’s charm, said Fiona Sturges in the FT. But an approaches to score analysis.

Beethoven fans are particularly welleight-part series about being seated? It sounds bizarre, but A served by its current season, which discusses his symphonies in depth.

Somewhat Complete History of Sitting Down, from Audible, And the Miller Theatre at Columbia is highly absorbing. It helps that University, known for its excellent we’re in the safe hands of Greg anthology podcast Composer Portraits, is breaking new ground Jenner, the historian, author and host of the BBC Sounds podcast with Mission: Commission. The You’re Dead to Me. Here he uses series follows three contemporary the “story of who gets to sit and composers as they create pieces for the final episode (released this on what and when and why” as a means of exploring different week). “Rarely are audiences societies and eras. The series takes granted this kind of insight into us from Rome’s Colosseum to a composer’s process.”

Victorian music halls, from the Grace Spence Green on the “mesmerising” Life Changing Life Changing, a Radio 4 series and Palace of Westminster to Montgomery, Alabama – yielding stories of injustice, struggle podcast from ex-Woman’s Hour presenter Jane Garvey, is simply “mesmerising”, said Charlotte Runcie in Prospect. In it, she talks and triumph. Jenner has long “perfected the art of livening up potentially dusty subjects”, and his script here is “irreverent, to ordinary people affected by dramatic, life-altering events. One illuminating and sharply funny”. It’s a clever idea, cleverly done. guest is a Welsh man, adopted as a baby, who tells of setting out to trace his birth parents and discovering that his natural father Classical music has been “slow to embrace podcasting”, though was a Malaysian prince. Another is a gambling addict who the medium is “ideally suited” to its sounds and stories, said embezzled £1m. Other episodes are more sombre, said Miranda Joshua Barone in The New York Times. But over the past year, Sawyer in The Observer – such as the story of Grace Spence Green, a young medic. She was left paralysed in 2018 when a with live performances on hold, classical and opera podcasts have flourished. Aria Code, hosted by the “cross-genre man jumped from the top floor of a shopping centre and landed luminary” Rhiannon Giddens, has found “new depths of poetry on her. “I’m not out for revenge,” she says. “If I had any anger directed at this man, I think I would just feel miserable.” and resonance”. Recent episodes cover operas by Stravinsky,

Squid: Bright Green Field Warp £10.99

Robert Schumann: Complete Piano Trios, Quartet and Quintet – Trio Wanderer Harmonia Mundi £29.99

St. Vincent: Daddy’s Home Loma Vista £9.99

The English band Squid have been “tentatively” classed as “post-punk”, but their debut album is “far weirder than that label suggests”, said Isobel Lewis in The Independent. Between songs – and even within them – they “flit from up-tempo rhythms to slow, screaming despair”, and experimental, “often-uncanny noise”. This “shape-shifting, genre-defying” music can seem challenging. “But there are real rewards” for those who put in the time to “unravel this cacophony”.

Squid are part of a guitar-band scene that has loosely coalesced around The Windmill in south London, said Ludovic HunterTilney in the FT. Shared attributes include volume, intensity, improvisation and serious musicianship. This impressive album brims “with ideas and energy”.

“Squiggly guitars criss-cross in songs like hairline fractures”, alongside “tightly channelled rhythms” and “passages of madly jittery funk”. The vocals might be “overcooked” at times – there is some demented hollering – but “they are a challenge worth meeting”.

This three-disc collection of Schumann’s chamber pieces is a “substantial feast”, said James McCarthy in Gramophone.

Running at two-and-a-half hours, Trio Wanderer’s survey includes the three numbered piano trios, plus the set of four pieces for violin, cello and piano published as the Fantasiestücke, Op 88. In addition, there are Schumann’s two best-known chamber works, the Piano Quartet and Piano Quintet, in which the trio are joined by viola player Christophe Gaugué and violinist Catherine Montier. Fans of Trio Wanderer’s work should tuck in.

Their playing combines “exuberance with refinement”, and captures Schumann’s “playfulness” in a series of works that demand contrast and balance, said Andrew Clements in The Guardian.

To my taste, they sometimes overdo the composer’s instructions regarding tempi.

The opening of the quartet takes its sostenuto assai marking too literally, while the scherzo in the quintet “threatens to trip over its own feet”. But for the most part, this ensemble’s playing is “immaculate”.

Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) is a past master of reinvention, said El Hunt on NME. On her self-titled 2014 album, her chosen persona was a dystopian cult leader; on 2017’s Masseduction she was a latex-clad dominatrix. For her sixth album, she presents as a “bourbon-swigging rock star in a power suit and Hunter S. Thompson shades”, channelling 1970s funk and “dirty New York grit”. It suits her. This is the warmest St. Vincent record yet; cold precision has been traded in for “looser rock’n’roll sounds” and “arch humour”.

Its title, Daddy’s Home, is a nod to her father’s release from prison after a ten-year stretch for stock manipulation, said Alexis Petridis in The Guardian. And its sound is apparently an homage to his early-70s record collection. “The whole album is liberally dressed with a synthesised sitar sound that cropped up on dozens of the era’s soul singles” – and there are musical references to the likes of Harry Nilsson, Randy Newman, Donny Hathaway and Pink Floyd. The results are “heady and disturbing” – and “hugely impressive”.

The Week’s own podcast, The Week Unwrapped, covers the biggest unreported stories of the week (available on Apple and Google) THE WEEK 22 May 2021

© SOPHIA EVANS/GUARDIAN/EYEVINE

Albums of the week: three new releases

Film & TV Films to stream The dreamlike nature of cinema has been recognised since its earliest days, and dream sequences in films are two-a-penny. But sometimes directors devote whole films to our mental experience during sleep – as in the following examples: Dead of Night This Ealing chiller from 1945 is a classic of British cinema, an omnibus movie consisting of five ghost stories. These are narrated by the guests at a house visited by an architect who is convinced that he has been there before in a dream.

THE FILMS ARE AVAILABLE ON GOOGLE (EXCEPT DEAD OF NIGHT AND ON BODY AND SOUL), APPLE (EXCEPT DEAD OF NIGHT) AND AMAZON

Waking Life In Richard Linklater’s animation from 2001, a nameless young man wanders through a city talking to people about the nature of reality, unsure if he is awake or dreaming. The film is sometimes pretentious but always engaging, thanks partly to its vibrant rotoscoped visuals, created by tracing over live-action video.

The Science of Sleep This 2006 comedy by Michel Gondry is as quirky as his earlier Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Gael García Bernal plays a young Parisian who, mourning his father and thwarted in love, retreats into fantasies and dreams that are realised in pleasingly lo-fi stop-motion animation.

Inception Leonardo DiCaprio stars as a corporate spy who enters dreaming minds to steal or plant ideas in Christopher Nolan’s devilishly twisty – arguably over-long – sci-fi blockbuster from 2010. Its dreamworlds are light on sex, humour, horror and the humdrum, but worth a look for their breathtaking motion effects and architectural spectacle.

On Body and Soul Hungarian director Ildikó Enyedi’s 2017 film is about two abattoir workers who discover they share the same recurring dream, a revelation that has a great effect on their lives. It’s a delicate, poignant drama, but contains some gruesome moments.

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New releases Servants

Dir: Ivan Ostrochovský (1hr 20mins) (15)

★★★★

Shot in “haunting monochrome” and permeated with the “chill of political fear”, this “deeply disturbing” film is about the covert power struggle between Church and state in communist-era Czechoslovakia, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Two “fresh-faced” teenagers, Juraj (Samuel Skyva) and Michal (Samuel Polakovic), arrive for their training at a Catholic seminary in Bratislava, only to find themselves in “an austere haunted house of shame, reeking of paranoia, exhaustion and self-reproach”. The Dean (Vladimír Strnisko) belongs to Pacem in Terris – a real-life regimesponsored organisation of Catholic clergy – but dissident young priests are secretly in touch with the Vatican. Into the ferment steps the “deeply malevolent”, blackmailing policeman Dr Ivan (Vlad Ivanov).

Scripted by Marek Lešcák and the British playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz, this drama transfixes with its “opaquely fragmented” storytelling and “dislocated” visuals, said Guy Lodge in Variety. It evokes a world that seems real but utterly alien too, and “shivers with anti-authoritarian sentiment”: both state and Church are run by “gaunt, grey men” with no “passion or mission” beyond service to power.

Director Ostrochovský “styles Servants with the flair and unease of film noir, while ramping up the tension to almost horror-movie levels”, said Sarah Ward in Screen International. From the opening shots of a body being removed from a car boot, the stakes are clear. With the “droning, needling” soundtrack and highcontrast cinematography (black cassocks against gleaming white marble), the film bristles with anxiety. Available on Curzon Home Cinema.

Monster

Dir: Anthony Mandler (1hr 38mins) (15)

★★★

It screened at the Sundance Film Festival back in 2018, but this Harlem-set courtroom drama about a black teen “swallowed up by a cruel

Servants: bristles with anxiety

legal system” feels just as “timely” in 2021, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian. Based on a novel for young adults by Walter Dean Myers, it stars the “commanding” Kelvin Harrison Jr as Steve, a film student at an elite school who is accused of having been the lookout in a robbery in which a bodega owner was shot dead. He maintains his innocence, but is imprisoned on remand, and his lawyer (Jennifer Ehle) is concerned that the cards are stacked against him owing to the prejudices of the judge and jury. The challenge Steve faces is to get others to see him as he sees himself.

The story unfolds in “an appropriately jittery non-chronological whirl”, said Kevin Maher in The Times, jumping about between the trial, the robbery, and Steve’s formerly “idyllic” life as a middle-class boy enjoying a nascent teenage romance on hot summer evenings in New York.

The cast (which includes Tenet star John David Washington) is impressive. And, daringly, the film moves into “giddy thriller territory” (while “quietly stress-testing” the viewer’s assumptions) by suggesting that Steve might not be entirely free of blame. It’s just a shame it is let down by overly tricksy direction, said Stephanie Zacharek in Time. Anthony Mandler presents the film as though it were a film Steve were making, with parts of his imaginary script in voice-over – which saps the drama of energy.

“Too much filmmaking is sometimes worse than bad filmmaking.” Available on Netflix.

The Underground Railroad: an epic vision of America Adapted from the novel by Colson when she fled years earlier.

Whitehead, The Underground The cruelty the series addresses Railroad is a magnificent makes it a “tough” watch, said “American epic”, said Katie Daniel Fienberg in The Hollywood Rosseinsky in the London Evening Reporter, but director Barry Standard. Its title is a 19th century Jenkins (Moonlight) infuses it metaphor for a network of safe with poetry too. And while the houses for slaves escaping to “overall mood” occasionally free states, reimagined here in a trumps the story, it is not short on “magical realist” twist as a literal ideas. On the railroad, each stop railway under the southern states. represents a new challenge for The passenger we follow is Cora Cora – another “insidious” form (Thuso Mbedu), who escapes of racism. It’s a “looking-glass” the “living hell” of a plantation Mbedu in a “tough” watch vision of America, said Danny with her friend Caesar (Aaron Leigh in the FT, realised in a way Pierre). Slave hunter Ridgeway (Joel that is often “profound”. Episodes vary hugely Edgerton) is obsessed with catching her, in length, but never feel wrong. And visually, having failed to catch Cora’s mother, Mabel, the series is “dynamite”. On Amazon Prime.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

Art

ARTS 31

Exhibition of the week The Making of Rodin Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8888, www.tate.org). Until 21 November In 1899, Auguste Rodin Belgian soldier”. Yet for all its strengths, the show is let mounted a “decidedly down by a needlessly unconventional” exhibition in “censorious” attitude towards Paris, said Rachel CampbellJohnston in The Times. Rodin its subject. The curators make (1840-1917) took the decision the mistake of judging the to show his works in plaster, artist by our contemporary a material hitherto considered mores. It tells Rodin off for “appropriating” classical only as a “transitional” part of the process by which a sculpture, which he collected. sculpture progressed from the A series of “frankly erotic” drawing board to its finished studies of naked women is state in bronze or marble. accompanied by a caption The artist aimed both to informing us that the “emphasise the fundamental relationship between artist role” that plaster played in and model was “starkly the development of his unequal”. Such “finger“audacious modern vision”, wagging” is pointless and irritating: “if you don’t like and to “mythologise himself as a solitary genius”; because the work, don’t show it”. unlike a bronze cast, a work in plaster would bear the Any attempt to engage with the exhibition’s arguments is imprint of his hand. The resulting show was “a muddle “futile”, said Jonathan Jones of figures and fragments and in The Guardian. The curators maquettes”, evoking the make a series of pretentious atmosphere of the artist’s and historically illiterate The Burghers of Calais (1889): unforgettable studio. It would, the curators claims about Rodin’s of a new exhibition at Tate Modern argue, set the pace for supposed “modernity”, repeatedly insisting that “the factory-like sculpture in the 20th century. In its first exhibition to open since system he employed of churning out plaster models and bronze lockdown restrictions were relaxed, the museum sets out to casts” made him a direct precursor to 20th century artists like replicate the thrill of Rodin’s groundbreaking display, bringing Andy Warhol or Jeff Koons. In fact, this was common practice for many 19th century sculptors. The show offers precious little together more than 200 works, mostly in plaster. The Making of Rodin includes many of his most famous sculptures and in the way of “biographical context” or iconographic analysis, reminds us that he was unquestionably “the most innovative and consequently risks misrepresenting Rodin’s art. Yet enjoyed sculptor” of his time. as a “purely aesthetic” experience, it is a pleasure from start to finish. Among the highlights are a full-scale plaster cast of The In many ways, this is a “serious and accomplished” exhibition, Burghers of Calais (1889), Rodin’s unforgettable monument to a said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. It features a roll-call group of 14th century volunteers who sacrificed themselves to the English to save their city. Better still is a “full-sized plaster model” of Rodin’s “greatest hits”: several plaster versions of The Thinker (1881) and a marble of his immortal The Kiss (1901-04) are for his extraordinary monument to Balzac, capturing the rotund novelist swathed in a vast dressing gown. “Intellectually present and correct, as are less-celebrated gems such as The Age of Bronze (1876-77), an “astonishingly supple likeness of a young confused” as it is, this show is undeniably “beautiful”.

News from the art world

© MUSÉE RODIN, S.00153; XAVIER MARABOUT

The nocturnal adventures of Tintin

Keith Haring’s fridge door

Xavier Marabout, a French artist who Last week, an unusual auction took was sued by the heirs of Tintin’s creator place in Manhattan, says Will Pavia in Hergé over a series of cheeky pastiches The Times. Lots included a rare 1930s featuring the image of “the boy Rolls-Royce, and a stuffed moose head adventurer”, has won his case, says once owned by Andy Warhol. Its star Alison Flood in The Guardian. The item, however, was a fridge door offending images depicted Tintin in the “covered in scribbles” that was context of works by Edward Hopper, salvaged from the apartment of the often featuring him in uncharacteristic pop artist Keith Haring 30 years ago. “romantic encounters” with scantilyHaring, who died of Aids in 1990, aged clad women. Moulinsart, the just 31, became famous for the “runic” organisation that manages the Tintin graffiti that he drew in New York’s brand, immediately sued the artist for subways over the course of the 1980s.

Tintin in Nighthawks: cheeky pastiche copyright infringement, arguing that His work made a huge impression on Marabout was “taking advantage of the reputation of a character the art world, but he also made a mark on his own fridge – to immerse him in an erotic universe”. The court, however, doodling all over it and inviting visitors to his SoHo apartment to accepted the defendant’s argument that the images – in which sign their names on its door. Among the luminaries who tagged Tintin is inserted into Hopper masterpieces such as Nighthawks – the object were the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat and Madonna, were parodies, and thus a legitimate use of the image. “In my who occasionally slept on Haring’s sofa at the beginning of her paintings, Tintin evolves in a Hopperian world populated by career. “Madonna loves Keith”, her missive reads. Even so, the pretty women,” said Marabout after the hearing. “If I parody, it lot failed to fetch its $75,000-plus estimate when it hit the block is mainly [...] because life cannot be a serious business.” last Wednesday; ultimately, it sold for $25,000.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

The List

Best books… Patrick McGrath

The award-winning author of nine novels and two short story collections chooses his five favourite books. His latest novel, Last Days in Cleaver Square (Hutchinson £16.99), is published this week Mephisto by Klaus Mann, 1977 (Penguin £9.99). This acrid novel tells the story of a left-wing theatre director in pre-war Germany who surrenders his political principles, and much else, to the seductive blandishments of his patron, a powerful Nazi official. The process of corruption is agonising to watch, and all too plausible.

Darkness Falls from the Air

by Nigel Balchin, 1942 (W&N £8.99). A witty, ultimately tragic novel of London in the Blitz, which features the rather unorthodox marriage of a senior civil servant and his restless wife. Bombs fall nightly but the city survives, as does our unflappable couple. This

novel has the best ending I know, and I discreetly stole it for one of my own books.

Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, 1900 (Penguin £8.99). All Conrad is very wonderful and very wise. I choose this over Heart of Darkness for its ironic portrait of a young Englishman in the dying days of empire, who gives his all to satisfy what he takes for a high moral code of conduct, and it’s nothing of the sort.

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall by Anne Brontë, 1848 (Wordsworth Classics £2.50).

Anne Brontë’s novel lacks the romantic grandeur of her sister Emily’s masterpiece Wuthering Heights, but it is, in its own

way, just as passionate. The eponymous tenant is a woman with a child, in flight from a cruel, dissipated and faithless husband. A bitter attack on women’s marital subservience, it is also an extraordinary account of the moral and physical decay of the husband.

Good Morning, Midnight

by Jean Rhys, 1939 (Penguin £8.99). All Jean Rhys’s novels of Paris in the 1920s involve a young Englishwoman’s experience of bad lovers, strong drink, poverty, hard luck, and an appetite for fashionable clothes she cannot possibly afford. All written in the most spare, precise, unsentimental prose. She is one of our perfect stylists.

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 Book now

The first blockbuster of the summer, Nero: the man behind the myth is “a magnificent show” bringing together 200 objects that shed light on the life of the notorious Roman emperor (Times). 27 May-24 October, British Museum, London WC1 (britishmuseum.org).

Before it reopens in July with a production of South Pacific (which will also be available to stream), Chichester Festival Theatre is hosting an Open Air Weekend of concerts in which West End performers will be singing well-loved numbers from musical theatre. 3-6 June, Oaklands Park, Chichester (cft.org.uk).

Four different pairs of actors – among them Zoë Wanamaker, Russell Tovey and Anna Maxwell Martin – perform Constellations, Nick Payne’s two-hander about a beekeeper and a quantum physicist who meet at a barbecue. 18 June-12 September, Vaudeville Theatre, Strand, London WC2 (donmarwarehouse.com).

The London outpost of Edinburgh’s Pleasance Theatre reopens with a season of comedy,

Programmes

Arena: African Apocalypse

With Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as a guide, BritishNigerian poet and activist Femi Nylander sets out to uncover the legacy of violence and colonialism in West Africa. Sat 22 May, BBC2 21:30 (90mins).

Great British Photography Challenge Six amateurs compete to impress the acclaimed photographer Rankin. Episode one includes a nature assignment with Chris Packham. Mon 24 May, BBC4 21:00 (60mins).

Are You Scared Yet, Human? Panorama

investigates widely held concerns about the proliferation of artificial intelligence, as well as the race between China and the US to become the dominant AI superpower. Wed 26 May, 19:30 BBC1 (60mins).

The Road to Partition As

Northern Ireland marks its centenary, this two-part documentary recounts the events that led to a border on the island of Ireland, and how they reverberate today. Thur 27 May, BBC2 21:00 (60mins).

Films

Loving (2016) Powerful

American drama based on the true story of Richard and Mildred Loving, a couple who were at the centre of a landmark civil rights case about interracial marriage in Virginia in the 1950s. Sat 22 May, BBC2 23:00 (115mins).

A fresco from Nero: the man behind the myth

including works in progress from Fern Brady (31 May), Rich Hall (1 June), and Rob Beckett (4-5 July). Pleasance London, Carpenters Mews, London N7 (pleasance.co.uk).

Ralph Fiennes directs and stars in an adaptation of T.S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece Four Quartets. 25 May-5 June, Theatre Royal Bath (theatreroyal.org.uk); 8-12 June, Royal & Derngate, Northampton (royalandderngate.co. uk); then touring.

The Archers: what happened last week

After the christening debacle, an exhausted Chris tells Susan and Neil that leaving Alice was the only option. They offer to help with looking after Martha. Brian warns Jennifer off calling Susan, saying that Alice is fine – she just needs space. Joy and Elizabeth open up to each other about depression and loneliness. When Jennifer visits, Chris tells her the truth about Alice’s alcoholism.

Distraught, Jennifer calls in to Alice, who has been drinking and admits she doesn’t want to see Martha – the baby is better off with Chris. At Lower Loxley, Vince helps Rex with the pigs. Fallon is angry at village gossip about Harrison and Alice. Later, Emma decides it’s time to confront Alice about all the pain she has caused, and furiously shares some home truths with Brian about his precious daughter. Ruairi wonders if Alice will open up to him, and she does, saying she’s lost without Martha. She tells Jennifer that she wants to be part of Chris and Martha’s life again but can’t face making the call – Jennifer agrees to sort it. Together they’ll help her recover.

THE WEEK 22 May 2021

Television

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) Hitchcock’s

remake of his own thriller stars James Stewart and Doris Day as the couple in a race to find their kidnapped son. It features Day’s famous rendition of Que Sera, Sera. Thur 27 May, Film4 15:45 (140mins).

Coming up online

Catch the critically acclaimed production of Touching The Void, the true story of two climbers struggling to survive in the Peruvian Andes. The live broadcast of David Greig’s adaptation uses multiple cameras and a 3D soundscape to bring the drama to life. There are also a few in-person tickets available for each performance (26-29 May; bristololdvic.org.uk).

© MINISTERO DELLA CULTURA, MUSEO ARCHEOLOGICO NAZIONALE DI NAPOLI

32

Best properties

34 Medieval homes

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Suffolk: Whiting Street, Bury St Edmunds. A beautifully presented Grade II 15th century town house, situated within the medieval grid. The house has a number of notable original features, with a fine exposed timber frame evident throughout and a Norman window.

Triple-aspect main bed with en-suite shower, 2 further beds, family bath, kitchen, recep hall, sitting/dining room, study, cellar, westfacing brick and flint walled garden, flagstone paving, permit parking. £595,000; Bedfords (01284-769999).

▲ East Sussex: Skinners Farm, Wadhurst. A farm complex including a Grade II Wealden hall house with late medieval origins, set within 62 acres on the edge of Wadhurst. Farmhouse, oast house, unconverted late-medieval granary, threshing barn, workman’s cottage, 2-bed cottage, farm buildings, 2 large ponds, an old orchard and a paddock. £2.95m; Knight Frank (01892-773942). ▲

North Yorkshire: Bolton Old Hall Bolton-on-Swale, Richmond. The principal part of this Grade II* house dates from the reign of Elizabeth I, but the oldest part is Richard le Scrope’s peel tower built in the 1380s. The house was remodelled in the late 17th century to create an elegant Georgian façade. 5 beds, 2 baths, box room, kitchen/dining room, hall, 3 receps, utility, cloakroom, WC, walled garden, outbuildings, garage, 1.97 acres. £1.35m; Blenkin & Co (01904671672).

THE WEEK 22 May 2021

on the market

35

▲ Wiltshire: Camera Principalis, Salisbury. A unique Grade II property in Cathedral Close with views over Constable’s meadows. Part of the Old Deanery, this property has been in residential use for over 800 years. 5 beds, 4 baths, kitchen/ breakfast room, 3 receps, study, WC, communal grounds. £750,000; Hamptons (01722-480142). ▲

Surrey: Taylors Farm, Capel, Dorking. This fine Grade II* medieval hall house, one of Surrey’s oldest houses, dates from the early 13th century and was originally two halls. Main suite, 4 further beds, family bath, shower, 2 kitchens, 5 receps, utility, conservatory, office, gardens, lake, parking. £1m; Hamptons (01306-580182).

Moray: North College House, Elgin. A magnificent B-listed house, dating from the 13th century, in an idyllic central location overlooking Cooper Park. 6 beds, 5 baths, kitchen, breakfast room, 6 receps, separate 4-bed wing with 3 baths, extensive ancillary accommodation, adjoining business premises, garage, mature grounds, 1.73 acres. OIEO £1m; Galbraith (01343-546362).

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East Sussex: Strand House, The Strand, Winchelsea. A substantial 15th century Grade II house nestled at the base of the Ancient Town, together with two separate holiday cottages with far reaching rural views across National Trust land.

Prior to the pandemic, the property had been trading as a guest house/bed and breakfast business for over 90 years. Main house: 4 suites, 3 attic rooms, commercial kitchen, recep hall, 2 further receps, cloakroom; 2-bed Crow’s Nest Cottage; and Rye Bay Cottage, a 2-bed converted coach house; driveway, garden. £875,000; Phillips & Stubbs (01797-227338). ▲

Cambridgeshire: Linton House, Swaffham Bulbeck, Cambridge. The Grade II Linton House is believed to date back to around 1542, and was originally an open hall house which has been added to over the centuries. Main suite with woodburner, 3 further beds, family bath, kitchen, main sitting room with fireplaces at each end and a woodburner, 2 further receps, conservatory/ breakfast room, utility, WC, cellar, spiral staircase, 1 further staircase, garage with studio above, driveway, garden, paved terrace, outbuilding. £875,000; Savills (01223-347241).

▲ Gloucestershire: Thorne, Painswick, Stroud. In need of renovation, this double-gabled Grade II town house, on the market for the first time in 35 years, is thought to date from the early 17th century, when the house was two dwellings. 3/4 beds, 5 baths (2 en suite), kitchen, 2 receps, study, WC, front and rear courtyard gardens. PoA; Hamptons (01452-595249).

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

Home & Interiors

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F O R A B R O C H U R E A N D N E A R E S T B AT H R O O M S P E C I A L I S T C A L L 01 4 5 4 3 2 8 811 | W W W. M AT K I . C O. U K | M AT K I P L C , B R I S TO L B S 3 7 5 P L

THE WEEK 22 May 2021

LEISURE Food & Drink

37

What the experts recommend Thirteen restaurants in one Last month, Deliveroo users in Reading were baffled to discover that no fewer than 13 new Indian restaurants had apparently just opened in the town, said Louise Eccles in The Sunday Times. Something odd struck the more observant among them: all 13 had the same address. They were, in fact, not separate establishments but “virtual brands” created by a single restaurant – Madras Flavours. Delivery apps allow restaurants to sell their food under more than one name, but the idea is that each “brand” offers a different menu. However, some are simply creating a string of identities selling identical (or nearly identical) food. Critics say the practice could mean restaurants with just one brand lose customer share – and enable bad ones to disguise their poor reputations. We shouldn’t be surprised by such scams, said Giles Coren in The Times. Delivery apps are highly exploitative – feeding off their workers’ cheap labour, and the public’s laziness – and are creating a culture in which people see nothing odd in eating food prepared in a restaurant they’ve never stepped into. If customers are being duped, they have only themselves to blame.

Can jazz improve your diet?

“Jazz is not a milieu traditionally associated with healthy living,” says Henry Bodkin in The Daily Telegraph: it conjures

more towards doughnuts and pizzas.

Danni Peng-Li, who led the study, said it appeared that by inducing a “relaxed and clearer mind”, the restrained sound of jazz playing in the background leads people to make better choices than if they are listening to fast-tempo music at high volume. But for those who don’t like jazz, all is not lost, he added: in most cases, “classical music meditation music”, or “nature sounds” will have the same effect.

Garlic confit: “compellingly delicious”

an image of “smoke-filled clubs with freely flowing alcohol and a menu of steak and chips”. But a new study suggests that it could, in fact, help inspire better dietary choices. For the research at Aarhus University in Denmark, 215 adult volunteers from Denmark and China were presented with various food options while music played in the background.

Half ate to a sedate jazz track. The rest listened to a rockier style of music, featuring an energetic drum beat and distorted guitar. The difference between the two groups was marked: those exposed to jazz were more likely to choose greens and fresh fruit, whereas the others leaned

A revelatory way with garlic From the New York-based chef Dan Kluger, author of the excellent Chasing Flavor, I recently picked up a real “gamechanger” of a technique, says Ellie Krieger in The Washington Post. It’s to make your own garlic confit. The process couldn’t be simpler: just take the peeled cloves from two heads of garlic, put them in a small pan with 1 cup (236ml) of extra virgin olive oil, then cook them at the lowest heat possible until the garlic is golden and soft – 45 minutes to one hour. Once cooled, transfer garlic and oil to a clean, lidded jar – and refrigerate until needed (it will keep for up to a week). Garlic cooked this way is “compellingly delicious”, and can be used in myriad ways – spread on toast, whirred into a bean dip, slathered onto meat or fish. Or you can make the most “glorious” creamy salad dressing by using it in place of crushed, raw garlic. It now has a “permanent place in my fridge”.

Recipe of the week: mango salad There’s so much brightness and freshness to this salad, says Zoe Alakija. Packed with punchy flavours and contrasting textures, it’s truly a fulfilling meal in itself – though it also pairs beautifully with most main courses.

Serves 6-8 3 mangoes, diced 2 medium avocados, peeled, stoned and diced 1 red pepper, finely diced ½ a red onion, thinly sliced 1 round lettuce, roughly chopped 100g pomegranate seeds handful of fresh coriander and mint, chopped 2½ tbsp pomegranate molasses 1 lime, to garnish for the candied peanuts: 100g unsalted peanuts 60g light brown sugar sprinkling of chilli powder pinch of fine salt for the dressing: 40ml avocado oil 2 limes, zested and juiced 2 garlic cloves, minced 1 tsp ground cumin 2 tsp light brown sugar large pinch of fine salt large pinch of chilli flakes

• Start with the candied peanuts. Roughly crush the peanuts using a rolling pin (you can do this while they are still in the bag, if you wish).

• Combine them with all the other ingredients and 25ml of water in a wide frying pan over a medium heat.

• Keep stirring until the peanuts caramelise and turn brown, thick and sticky. Remove before they burn.

• Tip the peanuts onto a lined or greased tray and spread them out as much as you can to make sure they don’t clump together. Leave to cool.

• For the dressing, put all the ingredients

in a small jug and mix well. (If you can’t find avocado oil, vegetable oil will do.)

• When ready to serve, put the mango, avocado, red pepper, onion, lettuce, pomegranate seeds and herbs in a large bowl. Toss gently to mix. Spatter the pomegranate molasses across the dish.

• Drizzle the dressing over the salad and scatter the peanuts evenly across its surface. Serve fresh, garnished with the lime, cut into wedges.

• If you like, add a scattering of chilli flakes for more heat.

Taken from Afro Vegan by Zoe Alakija, published by Hoxton Mini Press at £20. To buy from The Week Bookshop for £15.99, call 020-3176 3835 or visit theweekbookshop.co.uk.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

Consumer

38 LEISURE The best… garden tableware

▲ Toulouse Blue Stripe Napkins They’re said to look and feel like traditional French linen, but these napkins are actually made from recycled plastic bottles. Machine washable, they’re sold in sets of four (£20; weavergreen.com).

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Kilner 5 Litre Drinks Dispenser Let guests get their own drinks from this retro Kilner dispenser. It has a large five-litre capacity, a silicone seal and a simple, easy-to-use tap (£15; dunelm.com).

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Vera Poppies Bamboo Melamine Serving Platter Great for garden parties and barbecues, this serving platter with a poppy design is made from bamboo fibre and melamine, so it is light, easy to clean and shatter-resistant (£26; anthropologie.com).

Wilko Bamboo Serving Tray Made from bamboo, this good-value, minimalist tray is a generous 30cm across, and is useful for carting things from kitchen to garden, or for serving drinks (£10; wilko. com).

Tips of the week... quick and easy cleaning

And for those who have everything…

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Haohai Cutlery Set – 4 Sets Rather than rely on disposable plastic cutlery, invest in these re-usable ones made from wheat straw. They come in handy compact cases, and are dishwasher safe (£11; amazon.co.uk).

kate spade new york Citrus Celebration Melamine Picnic Tumblers Part of Kate Spade’s melamine picnicware range, this set of six citrusthemed tumblers can be matched with various plates and bowls (£15.50; johnlewis.com).

Where to find... vineyard tours

● Use shaving foam to remove carpet and mattress stains. Gently rub it into the stain using warm water and a soft brush or cloth.

Leave it for ten minutes, rinse and air dry. ● To clean dirty pans, put a teabag in the pan with some warm water and leave it to soak for at least 15 minutes. ● Use wet rubber gloves to remove pet hair from furniture or carpets. Simply run your hand across the surface then dunk it in water to clear off the hair. ● To deep clean a dishwasher, put 250ml of white vinegar in a bowl on the top rack when it’s empty, and run a long cycle. If it’s smelly, add drops of essential oils. ● Clean grubby grouting or pull cords with toothpaste, using a toothbrush. ● If your shoes smell, spray them with dry shampoo, or put an unused teabag into each one and leave them in a warm spot. ● To get rid of spilled candle wax, or wax crayon marks, cover the area with a cloth and apply heat with an iron or hair dryer.

You can get a basic Apple AirTag – a little tracking device you attach to your keys, luggage or whatever – for just £29.

But if you want someting a bit more special, there is this leather-bound version made in collaboration with Hermès. It comes in black, brown or orange. from £249; apple.com

All tours at White Castle Vineyard in lush Monmouthshire are led by one of the owners, Robb and Nicola Merchant, who live on site (£15; whitecastlevineyard.com).

Ryedale Vineyards in Yorkshire grows 16 varieties of grape. Tours are followed by a wine and cider-tasting paired with local cheeses (£15; ryedalevineyards.co.uk).

Best known for sparkling wines, Hattingley Valley in Hampshire has produced a variety of prize-winning bottles using traditional methods on its 60-acre territory (£17.50; hattingleyvalley.com).

The family-owned Rathfinny Estate on the South Downs sits on a band of chalky soil that runs from England to the Champagne region, making for great conditions (from £25; rathfinnyestate.com).

The terrace at Adgestone Vineyard on the Isle of Wight has views over fields to the sea. On its tours, followed by tastings, you’ll learn how vineyards are planted (from £10; adgestonevineyard.co.uk)

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN

SOURCE: FINANCIAL TIMES

SOURCE: THE TIMES

THE WEEK 22 May 2021

© JOAQUIN LAGUINGE

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Orange Ceramic Jug Oliver Bonas’s elegant orange jug isn’t specifically made for outdoor dining, but it will brighten up a garden lunch. Use it for drinks or as a vase. (£59.50; oliverbonas.com).

SOURCES: LONDON EVENING STANDARD/ GOODHOUSEKEEPING.COM/BBC GOOD FOOD

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Epicurean Re-usable Rio Medallion 26cm Melamine Dinner Plates Made from dishwasher-safe melamine, these plates (sold in sets of four) are designed to resemble glazed clay (£27; amazon. co.uk).

Obituaries

39

Free spirit who helped popularise the hippy trail You may not know his name, but if you have travelled extensively there is a good chance you have taken his advice, said Simon Calder in The Independent.

Geoff Crowther, who has died aged 77, was an adventurer, a free spirit and, from the mid1970s onwards, a “pioneering guidebook writer for Lonely Planet”. For a generation of young Western travellers, if you wanted to know how to get a bus across the Algerian desert, where to find a family to stay with in Timbuktu, or which shops in Bangkok sell penicillin, Crowther was your man, said The Times. In fact, “Geoff recommends” became something of a mantra on the hippy trail, as well as on “its less well trod byways” – though Crowther’s information could be sketchy, out of date, and even wrong.

After leaving Liverpool University, where he read biochemistry, he travelled overland to Asia. Back in London, he settled in Notting Hill, and started volunteering at BIT – an alternative information centre founded by that hero of the hippy counter-culture, John “Hoppy” Hopkins. It was, he said, the scruffiest office he’d ever seen, frequented by “a constantly changing collection of dropouts, misfits, visionaries, deviants, information freaks, students, runaways, travellers, electronics whizz-kids and even ‘normal’ people from all over the world”. BIT offered travel advice, and had put together an overland guide to India and Australia that consisted of a few pieces of paper stapled together. With the activist Nicholas Albery, Crowther expanded it, until it was 100 pages long. They then churned out thousands of copies, on a manually operated duplicating machine.

Geoff Crowther 1944-2021

In an article in The New York Times in 1986, Crowther: sold millions of books he was described as “the patron saint of By the mid-1970s, these guides had come to the travellers in the third world” – but he hadn’t visited all of attention of Tony and Maureen Wheeler, who’d founded Lonely the remote places covered in his books (he relied heavily on Planet in 1972. They suggested that if Crowther worked for them, information gleaned from other travellers); his maps were often he could be paid for doing what he had been doing for free. And rather than relying mainly on tips sent in, he’d research these hand-drawn and sometimes verging on fantasy; and not all his tips were well researched. In a way, it all added to the experience. books himself. His first for Lonely Planet was Africa on the Cheap. “The hardest part is making the decision to go,” read His bestselling book Southeast Asia on a Shoestring included a his introduction. “The rest is easy and will turn into one of mention of a jungle hike that a traveller in North Borneo had told him about. A couple of years after the book was published, a man the best buzzes you’ve ever experienced.” The books sold in their tens of millions, and his royalty payments enabled him to buy a walked into Lonely Planet’s office, and said: ‘You know that hike spectacular home in Sumatra. In 1982, he married Hyung Poon, that you said would take a day and a half? It took me six weeks. whom he’d met on a bus in South Korea. Their son, Ashley, Halfway through I was cursing your name, but later I realised it recalled that Crowther – who never lost his wanderlust – had was the greatest adventure I’d ever had.’” not been a perfect father. If he had given him one “bit of fatherly advice”, he said, it was that you shouldn’t “try heroin, but that a Crowther was born in Todmorden, in West Yorkshire, in 1944, little raw opium is okay, and that mushrooms were fine, and that to parents who worked in a cotton mill. He started hitch-hiking pot was all right provided you didn’t do it while working”. around Europe in his summer holidays from Calder High School.

Hollywood actor whose career spanned eight decades

© HYUNG POON CROWTHER

Norman Lloyd, who has Norman Lloyd died aged 106, was an actor, 1914-2021 director and producer, and one of the last survivors of the Golden Age of Hollywood. He was never a leading man, but he counted the likes of Orson Welles, Jean Renoir and Charlie Chaplin as friends – and had made his film debut in the title role of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1942 classic Saboteur.

As the villain, he is not on screen for very long, but he is in the film’s climactic sequence on top of the Statue of Liberty. The hero, Robert Cummings, tries to stop him slipping off it by grabbing his jacket’s sleeve, but the seam splits, and he plunges to his death. “Hitchcock told me I should have had a better tailor,” Lloyd recalled.

returned to Hollywood to make Saboteur; Hitchcock also cast him in Spellbound (1945).

In the same year, Lloyd was in Renoir’s The Southerner. Towards the end of the 1940s, he moved behind the camera. As anti-communist fervour hit Hollywood in the 1950s, his friendships with various left-wing figures, including Bertolt Brecht and Chaplin (who shared his passion for tennis, and who’d cast him in 1952’s Limelight), meant he was “greylisted” – put under suspicion – and work became scarce, said The Daily Telegraph. It was Hitchcock who came to his rescue, by employing him as an assistant producer on his TV series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Lloyd: rescued by Hitchcock

Norman Lloyd was born Norman Perlmutter in Jersey City in 1914, the son of an accountant and a bookkeeper. His mother loved the theatre, and he started performing aged nine. By the age of 18, he was working in the New York theatre, and in 1937, he joined Orson Welles’s Mercury company. When it moved to Hollywood, with a plan to film Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Lloyd went along. Although funding problems put paid to that film, Welles asked his actors to stay in LA, while he finalised another project. But on impulse, Lloyd went back to New York with his wife, Peggy. “Those who stayed did Citizen Kane,” he said. “I have always regretted it.” However, he

In the 1960s and 1970s, he worked mainly in television, producing and directing; but in 1982, he returned to acting, when he was cast in a new medical drama: St. Elsewhere.

He was supposed to appear in only four episodes, as Dr Daniel Auschlander, but ended up appearing in all six seasons of the hugely popular show. He returned to the big screen as the headmaster in Dead Poets Society (1989); he played Mr Letterblair in Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993); and at the age of 100, he appeared as the lecherous inhabitant of a care home in Judd Apatow’s film Trainwreck (2015). A good-humoured man, with a sonorous voice, he credited his longevity to a daily shot of whiskey, and his happy marriage to Peggy, who died in 2011.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

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

CITY 41

Virgin Galactic: spaced out

Some analysts think space will become a trillion-dollar market in the next 30 years. The travails of Virgin Galactic suggest “this is still science fiction”, said Jon Sindreu in The Wall Street Journal. Richard Branson’s space tourism outfit has posted a steeper-thanexpected quarterly loss as it struggles to get its operations airborne. There are doubts on whether it will meet its self-imposed May deadline for the next test flight of its spaceplane, SpaceShipTwo. “Investors enamoured with the final frontier” should be worried about the “rapidly cooling” market for Spacs (special purpose acquisition companies).

When Galactic went public in 2019, after merging with a “blank cheque” company run by the “Spac king” Chamath Palihapitiya, the deal sparked an explosion of Spacs – many space-related – on Wall Street. Clearly, “space mania and Spac mania go hand in hand”.

But after soaring last year, Galactic’s shares have sunk almost 75% since February, said Zeke Faux on Bloomberg. Both Branson and Palihapitiya have recently sold large chunks of shares. Virgin had planned to launch in 2020, charging tourists $250,000 per flight.

But it probably “won’t begin commercial operations before 2022 at the earliest”, said The Motley Fool. The fear for shareholders is that it has already ceded “first mover advantage” to rivals like Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Ryanair: leading the pack

“The pandemic has hit travel more heavily than any other sector,” said Lex in the FT. “But markets have deemed well-run, low-cost European airlines to be winners in the recovery.” And leading the pack is Ryanair. In the week foreign holidays were officially re-legalised in Britain, the Irish group filed its largest-ever annual net loss of s815m. But investors have been pushing shares higher ever since last year’s vaccine breakthroughs.

While rivals such as easyJet are scaling back, Ryanair is plotting expansion into new markets – such as Eastern Europe. Ryanair is investing in 210 new planes, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. Boss Michael O’Leary has christened these “Gamechangers”.

But they’re actually “revamped” versions of the Boeing Max jet that suffered two fatal crashes pre-pandemic. Few aircraft have been subjected to as much testing as the newfangled Max. Still, having “dodged round Matt Hancock’s traffic lights, jabbed or PCR’d the family and run the homemade algorithm on the most variant-resistant holiday hotspots”, catching one will certainly “add an extra frisson to the holiday experience”.

GFG Alliance: tightening net

Sanjeev Gupta’s attempts to rescue his business empire following Greensill’s implosion “have been dealt another blow”, said Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. News that the Serious Fraud Office is investigating suspected fraud, fraudulent trading and money laundering at GFG “will surely scupper what hope remains of a lifeline”. The SFO has “a dire record” on big cases. Still, there are “plenty of clues”, said John Collingridge in The Sunday Times. The SFO might start by asking how much Lex Greensill, who had $5bn of exposure to GFG, “knew about Gupta and his methods”, and whether reports of “circular trading” (selling goods and then buying them back) and “fictional invoices” hold any water. Finally, whether Gupta used his bank, Wyelands, “to finance himself”.

Gupta hasn’t been charged personally. Even so, he is “said to be holed up in Dubai”.

Seven days in the Square Mile The price of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies plunged after Chinese regulators banned the country’s financial institutions from using digital tokens. In chaotic trading on Wednesday, bitcoin tumbled by $12,000, or almost 30%, and some 40% was wiped off the value of ethereum and the “joke” currency Dogecoin. Digital exchanges, such as Binance and Coinbase, suffered technical problems as users tried to offload their holdings. Some analysts predicted that regulators in other countries could also impose restrictions.

Stocks on both sides of the Atlantic fell on growing inflation worries. Traders feared that the US Fed is contemplating an end to its “ultra-accommodative” policies, and may curtail its $120bn-amonth bond purchases.

In Britain, the annual CPI inflation rate more than doubled in April – to 1.5% from 0.7% in March. Consumer prices are now rising at their fastest rate since the start of the pandemic, driven by rising energy and clothing costs. UK unemployment figures unexpectedly fell to from 4.9% to 4.8% in Q1, as numbers of those in employment jumped by 84,000. UK house prices soared by 10.2% in the year to March, the highest annual growth for 14 years.

Jingye Group, the Chinese owner of British Steel, indicated it may seek to buy Sanjeev Gupta’s UK Steel plants.

Companies House threatened to strike off Gwyneth Paltrow’s wellness brand Goop over an accounts filing row.

WarnerMedia/Discovery: the streaming arms-race continues “AT&T could be accused of dabbling in the art of misdirection,” said Ben Woods in The Daily Telegraph. While the media’s gaze was focused on the reunion of the cult sitcom Friends – a trophy asset of AT&T’s content arm, WarnerMedia – the US telecoms giant “was busy plotting a break-up”. WarnerMedia is to be spun off and merged with Discovery to form a $132bn entertainment behemoth with the heft to compete with Netflix and Disney.

The move is “a tacit admission” that, just three years after buying Time Warner for $85bn, AT&T’s “huge bet” on media has failed.

the Eurosport channel. AT&T will take a controlling 71% stake in the new business, but Discovery’s boss, David Zaslav, will run it. There’ll be an estimated $20bn war chest to spend on content.

AT&T’s unsuccessful foray into entertainment saddled it with a monster $170bn debt, said DealBook in The New York Times – raising the question of whether the comms giant should have “just let Donald Trump’s Justice Department block the Time Warner deal and avoided this whole mess”. (Trump was anxious about AT&T owning his bête noire, This combo will certainly create a “content CNN.) The ongoing question, as “the industry Friends: a “trophy asset” powerhouse”, said Mark Sweney in The races for scale”, is who will merge next? Step Guardian. Warner brings a film studio, the CNN news channel forward Amazon and MGM, said the FT. Jeff Bezos’s outfit is and the hit factory HBO, maker of Game of Thrones and The reportedly preparing to pay around $9bn for the owner of the Sopranos. Discovery contributes a stable of reality TV shows James Bond franchise – “one of the few Hollywood studios not spanning nature, cooking and home improvement, plus to have been gobbled up by a larger conglomerate”.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

Talking points

42 CITY

Issue of the week: a reckoning for Elon Musk?

The mercurial Tesla founder has abandoned bitcoin. What are the likely consequences?

Back in February, when Elon Musk Pratley in The Guardian. “Bitcoin is an environmental abomination.” At the last revealed that Tesla had bought $1.5bn worth of bitcoin and would henceforth count, electronic mining of the currency accept the digital currency as payment was consuming the same quantity of energy as economies such as Argentina for its cars, fans hailed the move as a sign that bitcoin had arrived as “a tool of and the Netherlands. Moreover, “dirty corporate finance”, said Richard Waters bitcoin” hardly sits well with a carmaker in the FT. Musk appeared to embrace trading on its clean-energy credentials. the idea with gusto, adding the hashtag There were also “clear dangers” in #bitcoin to his Twitter profile and tying Tesla’s fortunes to a single cryptocurrency. This move may be a naming his CFO “Master of Coin”. His army of acolytes responded accordingly. belated admission that bitcoin was too

By April, bitcoin’s price had climbed risky, even for a “maverick genius”. above $60,000, a record high at least Musk is one of a handful of “evangelists partly attributable to the Tesla chief, said James Titcomb in The Daily Telegraph. for innovation” whose pronouncements But it turns out that “Musk’s influence drove the day-trading bonanza that Musk: “evangelist for innovation” gripped Wall Street during the pandemic, works both ways”. His announcement last week that Tesla would no longer accept bitcoin as payment, said Chris Bryant on Bloomberg. Together with “Spac king” Chamath Palihapitiya and Cathie Wood of ARK Invest, he owing to environmental concerns, whacked both the cryptocurrency and Tesla’s shares – knocking around $3bn off Musk’s encouraged an army of retail investors (so-called “Redditors”) “to net worth. Having fallen some 40% from recent highs to below pour money into extravagantly valued tech stocks and speculative cryptocurrency”. There are now multiple signs that the frenzy $40,000 (and falling) bitcoin is now firmly in a bear market. is cooling – thanks in part to inflation worries and greater The pitchforks are out for Musk, said Edward Thicknesse on City regulatory scrutiny. Tesla’s shares have declined about a third AM. And Michael Burry – whose giant bet against the US housing since this year’s peak, as has Wood’s ARK fund. The “positive feedback loop” that boosted them on the way up (the more market before the financial crisis was immortalised in the movie attention and money they attracted, the more successful they The Big Short – has taken out “a sizeable short position against Tesla”. Still, in this instance, Musk made the right call, said Nils were) could now “work against them on the way down”.

Inflation hedging: what the experts think ● Sound the alarm

“Markets are not infalliblle,” said Philip Aldrick in Thee Times. But I’d back them as a more reliable guide than economists any day – particularly on the question of inflation. “With the exception of a few monetarists, markets were pricing in inflation long before economists.”

The UK “five-year break--even inflation rate, a market measure,, is close to its highest in 20 years”. Yet just three months ago, the Bank of England was forecasting that interest rates may have to fall below zero, “to prop up prices”. Some economists are confident that the current uptick – which saw UK annual inflation more than double to 1.5% in April – is “transitory”. Yet there is “every reason to believe that inflation is back for good”. ● Hedging strategies

So how best to protect your assets? The first reaction of many investors, said Dan Moskowitz on Investopedia.com, is to head for gold. But it isn’t a “perfect hedge”. Sure, the price might rise if everyone has the same idea. But “holding onto an asset like gold that pays no yields is not as valuable as hanging on to an asset that does” – particularly when interest THE WEEK 22 May 2021

rates (and ( d therefore yields) are rising. Arguably a betteer protection is to invvest in what is acctually inflationary.

C Commodities – a broad ccategory including eeverything from grain aand metals to natural ggas – have “a unique reelationship” with infllation, and there’s a welter of exchange-traded funds (ETFs) to choose from.

Another b broad category to consider d is property in the form of Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs), because infrastructure and property investments often have contracts linked to inflation.

You can also protect yourself by buying index-linked bonds, where interest paid rises in line with inflation. ● A good niche bet

Another interesting (if niche) investment is “collectable coins”, said Merryn Somerset Webb in the FT. Prices have been rising for some time but, according to Tim Robson of Spink, there’s still value to be had. A standard collector buy is the gold fiveguinea coin, struck from Charles II’s reign – “but the one and two guinea coins have been slightly overlooked”, as have Tudor coins. These coins don’t look particularly cheap now, but if inflation returns fast “they could look cheap in retrospect”.

Game on “Video gaming was once the preserve of geeky kids and teenagers,” says David Brenchley in The Sunday Times.

No longer. The global market grew 5%-15% annually between 2012 and 2020, and was worth $191bn last year.

Here’s how to get a piece of the action: LF Blue Whale Growth Fund A key investment is Nintendo which, as well as owning games franchises including Mario and Pokémon, makes the Switch game console. Fund manager Stephen Yiu reckons the Switch will ultimately “be as game-changing for Nintendo as the iPhone was for Apple”.

Jupiter Japan Income Fund manager Dan Carter is a big fan of Sony, whose PS4 console is estimated to have outsold Microsoft’s Xbox by “at least two to one”. Sony has also recently invested in Discord, an online chat app used by more than 140 million gamers.

Majedie Global Focus This fund, run

by Tom Morris, focuses on “incredible franchises that can span decades”. Two key holdings are New York-listed TakeTwo, which owns Grand Theft Auto, and Electronic Arts, which makes the Fifa franchise games.

Rathbone UK Opportunities Fund manager Alexandra Jackson rates Team 17, which created the Worms franchise, as one of the best stocks listed on London’s Aim index. Shares have jumped fourfold since 2018.

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Commentators The fierce battle over Aussie beef Oliver Wright The Times

A new headache for hospitality Editorial The Economist

The pandemic could be the saving of GSK Nils Pratley The Guardian

A dinosaur in need of retirement Matthew Lynn The Daily Telegraph

Ministers are embroiled in a ferocious row over whether to grant tariff-free access to Australian farmers in the forthcoming trade deal, says Oliver Wright. Boris Johnson apparently agrees with Trade Secretary Liz Truss that Australian food exporters should be given the same terms as those enjoyed by the EU. But others in the Cabinet support the claims of farming groups, who argue the move could leave British farmers struggling to compete with cheap imports. Given that Australia is 9,000 miles away and its agricultural exports “will only ever form a small part of the UK’s food market”, the battle over tariff-free access, particularly for beef (currently subject to a 20% tariff) might seem like a “niche” ideological conflict; in theory, “we should be eating less meat” anyway. But as “the first bespoke trade deal” since Brexit, the agreement reached with Australia may set a template for future trade policy, and could potentially open the floodgates to “huge US and South American agrifood companies”. This is a fundamental argument about the nature of “global Britain”.

Britain’s pubs and restaurants are back in business, and reportedly enjoying a surge of happy customers. But while their “Covidrelated problems are easing”, a new one looms, says The Economist: staff shortages. The situation is “most acute” in London and the Southeast. Brexit is part of the problem – many European workers put on furlough have left, or are heading home. And the continuing upheaval of the pandemic is also a factor: “students, who would usually work a few shifts a week, are now in the wrong parts of the country”. Even so, the shortage is “hard to square with the official labour market data”, which shows an unemployment rate of 4.9% in February. Bosses believe that one reason for the shortage is that furloughed workers “have been tempted away from hospitality” into sectors such as retail and logistics, which reopened earlier. But wage rates may also be an issue. Wages don’t, as yet, “seem to be responding to the shortage of staff”. The sooner some of the cash “from all that pent-up demand” finds its way into wage packets, the better.

Is Britain’s biggest pharma “doomed to be carved up and sold to the highest bidders”, asked Nils Pratley. Apparently so, if you “believe some of the chatter” about the arrival of the aggressive US hedge fund Elliott Management on the shareholder register of GlaxoSmithKline. But a lot has changed since 2014, when America’s Pfizer made a hostile bid for AstraZeneca, and David Cameron’s government “flapped ineffectually”, leaving Astra to save itself. “In a Covid world, large healthcare companies, even those that have underperformed their shareholders for years, are viewed as national assets.” Downing Street would probably not hesitate to intervene at GSK. Even a spin-off of its vaccines unit from the rest of the pharma division might be resisted, “if it was seen to weaken control”. Elliott has so far “said nothing about its intentions”, and may simply demand that the current CEO, Emma Walmsley, be replaced. “Ministers probably don’t care about the make-up of the boardroom” – but they do care about ownership. Any unwanted bidder should “expect a very large political roadblock to be thrown in its path”.

The “newish” director general of the Confederation of British Industry, Tony Danker, is “doing everything he can to heal the bitter rift” at Britain’s biggest business lobby group caused by its “fanatical opposition to Brexit”, says Matthew Lynn. But the real trouble is that no one is listening to the “voice of business” any more. The CBI has become “an irrelevance”. Created in the 1960s, “at the high point of corporatism”, it is a throwback to a different era. Back then, “the prevailing view was that government, trade unions and industry should all sit down, preferably over beer and sandwiches, and plan where the economy should be going”. The idea that anything similar will be “tried over sushi and chai tea in 2021 is simply ridiculous”.

It’s questionable whether there was ever a single “industrial” point of view, but there certainly isn’t now: specific industries are far better represented by their own trade associations. “The CBI doesn’t represent anyone anymore apart from the consultants and apparatchiks that dominate the organisation.” The best thing it can do for business now is “to wind itself up”.

CITY 45 City profiles Dylan Jones After 22 years heading the men’s style bible GQ, Dylan Jones has become the latest casualty of the “editorial clear-out” at Condé Nast, said The Observer. He joins a growing list as the publisher streamlines operations – including the editors of Vogues China, Germany, Spain, India and Japan.

Jones, 61, made his name at Arena during the 1990s “lad mag” boom: he later distanced himself from lads’ mags, while insisting that every successful magazine needs “a libido”. Jones survived criticism in 2008 for a fawning book on David Cameron, and weathered difficult market conditions: GQ had the biggest circulation of any UK men’s magazine last year. The most recognisable departure from Condé Nast of late, Jones “is not expected to be the last”.

Ian Osborne

When the tech financier Ian Osborne invests in a company, executives must agree “not to talk about it”, says the FT. That has helped the native Londoner and his firm Hedosophia to “fly under the radar”, despite being “one of the architects” of Wall Street’s frenetic Spac boom. Osborne, 38, is now heading to Europe with plans to list a s460m Spac in Amsterdam. After starting out as an adviser to media baron Michael Bloomberg, Osborne is renowned for his “Zelig-like” qualities, as an urbane “go-between” for other titans. “He’s the sort of guy who will turn up behind you on a flight to Rio... A real man of mystery,” notes one associate. Apparently passionate about the theatre, he’s producing one of the first musicals to reopen in the West End – Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

Shares

CITY 47

Who’s tipping what The week’s best shares

Directors’ dealings

Digital 9 Infrastructure The Mail on Sunday This digital infrastructure firm specialises in subsea cabling, Wi-Fi connectivity in towns, and fibre-optic cables. It promotes sustainable, inclusive industrialisation. Prospective 5.3% yield, with ethical investment appeal. Buy. 112p.

Signify The Times The world’s largest lighting firm is strong on ESG principles, using renewable energy and making fullyrecyclable products. Demand for sensor and softwarecontrolled LED lighting is set to rise. Yields 3%. Buy. s50.4.

Diageo The Times The Johnnie Walker and Guinness-maker is restarting its share buyback programme.

Profits are expected to rise by 14% as American and European markets ease restrictions on pubs and bars.

Buy. £32.98.

Royal Mail The Sunday Times Thanks to its international parcels business GLS, Royal Mail expects to make £700m in profits this year.

Restructuring should bring £130m in annual savings, and drone deliveries are promising.

Buy. 519p.

Trinity Exploration and Production Investors Chronicle This Trinidad and Tobagofocused oil and gas explorer expects production from its newly acquired PS-4 Block to rise. The oil price should make headway too as the recovery gathers pace. Buy. 14p.

Ocado 2,750

Director buys 2m

2,500

2,250

2,000

Jan

Dec

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Non-exec Jörn Rausing, a member of the Swedish Tetra Pak dynasty, continues to build his stake in the online grocer, adding another tranche worth £38.8m. The joint venture with M&S has increased sales volume and order sizes.

…and some to hold, avoid or sell

Form guide

Barratt Developments Investors Chronicle A booming market backed by government policy has driven up the housebuilder’s reservation rates and completions. But it could face headwinds with joblessness and the end of the stamp duty holiday. Hold. 782p.

Compass Group The Times The catering giant, which works in schools, offices and industry, has handled the pandemic admirably. Margins are strengthening as it gains new business, but virus variants and lockdowns remain a risk. Hold. £15.53.

Victrex The Times Victrex makes polyether ether ketone (Peek) – a strong, lightweight, heat-resistant plastic. Exposure to the aerospace market sent revenues and profits plunging, but Peek is a key product for electric car makers. Hold. £25.36.

Carnival The Daily Telegraph Shares in the cruise liner have doubled from their pandemicinduced lows. But rising debt is worrying and social distancing restrictions could be problematic when sailing resumes. The dividend is some way off. Sell. £15.52.

Uber Technologies Investors Chronicle The UK Supreme Court’s ruling on workers’ rights has resulted in a damages bill $100m larger than expected, and Uber also faces higher costs. The ride-hailing app is now too dependent on asset sales gains. Sell. $46.65.

Volution Group The Daily Telegraph The fan and ventilation system maker has had a good run, thanks to operating in a growing market supported by environmental regulation.

Take profits on a 113% gain since October 2020.

Sell. 419.5p.

Shares tipped 12 weeks ago Best tip International Cons. Airlines The Sunday Telegraph up 16.8% to 193.88p Worst tip Wynnstay Group The Mail on Sunday up 3.72% to 466.75p

Market view “The Spac market is dead, dead, dead.”

Anonymous Spac sponsor on the abrupt collapse of the recent driving force in capital markets.

Quoted in the FT

Market summary 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

18 May 2021 7034.24 4007.57 34249.96 13427.60 28406.84 28593.81 1853.70 68.52 2.95% 0.87 1.65

Best and worst performing shares Week before 6947.99 3962.98 34296.66 13355.24 28608.59 28013.81 1840.45 68.32 2.97% 0.83 1.61

1.5% (Apr) 2.9% (Apr) 8.2% (Apr)

$1.418 E1.160 ¥154.673

0.7% (Mar) 1.5% (Mar) 6.5% (Mar)

Change (%) 1.24% 1.13% –0.14% 0.54% –0.71% 2.07% 0.72% 0.29%

WEEK’S CHANGE, FTSE 100 STOCKS RISES Price % change 238.40 +10.47 M&G 5050.00 +6.74 Ashtead Group 663.40 +6.59 Sage Group 1524.50 +6.27 SSE 1146.00 +5.62 Scottish Mortgage FALLS Antofagasta Takeaway.Com (Lon) Flutter Entertainment Vodafone Group Rio Tinto

1614.00 6265.00 12410.00 129.08 6250.00

–13.69 –8.06 –7.08 –7.07 –4.45

FTSE 250 RISER & FALLER 1023.00 UDG Healthcare 948.50 Homeserve

+21.50 –9.10

Source: Datastream & FT (not adjusted for dividends). Prices on 18 May (pm)

Following the Footsie 7,200

7,000

6,800

6,600

6,400

6,200

Dec

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Feb

Mar

Apr

May

6-month movement in the FTSE 100 index

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

SOURCE: FINANCIAL TIMES/HARGREAVES LANSDOWN

Croda International Investors Chronicle Croda may streamline – focusing on higher-level IP life sciences and personal care chemicals – to improve margins. Its lipid nanoparticles, used in the Covid-19 vaccine, have long-term gene-therapy potential. Buy. £65.42.

The last word

48

The Mitfords: the Kardashians of their day Nancy Mitford’s comic novel The Pursuit of Love, newly adapted for the BBC, mythologised her family as a group of adorable oddballs. But what was the true story behind it? Iona McLaren investigates “My dear Lady Kroesig, I have only ever read one book in my life, and that is White Fang. It’s so frightfully good I’ve never bothered to read another.”

So says Uncle Matthew in Nancy Mitford’s The Pursuit of Love, a glossy new adaptation of which aired on BBC1 this month, with Lily James as Linda Radlett (Nancy’s alter ego), and Dominic West as Uncle Matthew, the “wicked lord of fiction”, who hunts his children on horseback with bloodhounds, and takes tea under the entrenching tool, (still covered with blood and hairs), with which he “whacked to death eight Germans as they crawled out of a dug-out” in 1915.

sewer!” and “Stinks to merry hell!” Redesdale was far from offended. On the contrary, wrote Jessica, he “rather loved being General Murgatroyd… Farve became – almost overnight – more of a character of fiction than of real life, an almost legendary figure, even to us. Now that he had been classified, so to speak, his Murgatroydish aspects began to lose some of their dread, even to take on some of the qualities of raw material for fiction.”

The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate, with Murgatroyd now evolved into Uncle Matthew, were instant classics. But Redesdale, who never had a strong grip on Jessica, Nancy, Diana, Unity and Pamela Mitford in 1935: much written about As in art, so in life. The real the distinction between real Uncle Matthew was Nancy’s father, Lord Redesdale, progenitor and make-believe, treated them as straight portraits of himself, of the much-written-about Mitford brood: Diana, the fascist; offering corrections: “Never got the stock whips in Canada”; Unity, the even more fascist; Jessica, the communist; Deborah, “You can’t fuddle chub in Feb”. As the decades went by, the duchess; Tom, the forgotten-but-also-fascist son; Nancy, the Nancy “continued to perfect the process of capturing him and novelist; and Pam, the housewife. (It is worth noting that Pam imprisoning him between the covers of novels”, as Jessica put it, erasing his prior existence so completely even his obituarist called – who spent much of her childhood impersonating a horse, him “the explosive, forthright became John Betjeman’s muse, Uncle Matthew”. married a bisexual and then, late “Nancy continued to perfect the process in life, settled down as a lesbian – is still agreed to be the Captured, imprisoned: there’s of capturing [her father] and imprisoning a touch of sadism here. Diana “boring” one.) him between the covers of novels” spoke of Nancy’s “will to power”, and as a friend of In The Pursuit of Love (1945) Hitler, she presumably knew what she was talking about. The and its sequel Love in a Cold Climate (1949), they become the whole Mitford family succumbed, in various ways, to Nancy’s Radletts, a feral pack of aristocratic imps who, “had they been forceful mythology. We might now call it “structured reality” – poor children... would probably have been removed from their having to live with someone else’s narrative vision relentlessly roaring, raging, whacking papa and sent to an approved home”. imposed upon you, and offered up, Kardashian-like, for public These comic novels are nostalgic, but not fluffy: people don’t delectation. And the public were ravenous for it. “Whenever I see associate Nancy Mitford with acne, abortion, paedophilia and the words ‘peer’s daughter’ in a headline... I know it’s going to be incest, yet it’s all there. And Redesdale, as “that ogre” Uncle something about one of you,” their mother told them.

Matthew, is the novels’ star – which, since he was a committed bibliophobe, is ironic.

For better or worse, it was Nancy who had made the Mitfords, on and off the page. As Deborah said, she “saw people and situations In the early days of their marriage, the Mitfords’ mother Sydney as no one else did, and could turn the serious into the ridiculous”. had persuaded him to broaden his horizons beyond White Fang, Without their eldest sister, and her ceaseless, often unkind teases and lent him Tess of the d’Urbervilles, because she thought he (like calling Unity, Jessica and Deborah “NIT SIC AND BOR” might like the bits about farming. As Jessica recounts in her after the middle letters of their names) and her genius for memoir, Hons and Rebels, Sydney came in to find him sobbing transmuting life’s banalities into “shrieks” and “screams” – uncontrollably. “Oh, darling, don’t cry, it’s only a story,” she which is to say jokes – they might have been a more normal said. “‘WHAT,’ said my father, sorrow turning to rage, ‘do you family. “Everything sprang full-blown from Nancy,” said Jessica. mean to say that damn feller made it up?’”

His views on fiction warmed considerably when he started appearing in Nancy’s. It was in Highland Fling (1931) that he made his debut, as General Murgatroyd, “a man of violent temper” who whips dogs and roars (in Redesdale’s argot) “Damn THE WEEK 22 May 2021

Inevitably, there were winners and losers in this game. In The Pursuit of Love, Sydney, a noted eccentric, becomes “vague” Aunt Sadie (played by Dolly Wells in the new series, adapted

by Emily Mortimer, who makes a cameo as Sadie’s sister, “The

The last word Bolter”). “I don’t mind what you write about me when I am dead,” Sydney told Nancy, “but I do dislike seeing my mad portrait while I am still alive.”

49 The feckless, fey and undoubtedly gay Hamish St. Clair-Erskine strung her along for years; when he finally let her down, she attempted suicide – like Linda, who eats a basket of yewberries to rejoin a lost labrador – except Nancy put her head in the oven. Then she went “back to bed and was sick”.

Arguably, Sydney got off lightly. This is a woman who said, of the 1938 Nuremberg rally: “How sensible it is of H[itler] to put all Germans into uniforms, as they have On the rebound, at 29, she married such terrible other clothes.” Diana, who in 1932 had fallen for the British fascist Rodd, whose two unlovely sides were Sir Oswald Mosley, had persuaded the portrayed in The Pursuit of Love, as Redesdales to overcome their antipathy Selina Hastings noted, in Linda’s two to the “Hun” (“Farve is one of nature’s husbands: the bore Tony Kroesig, his head full of “a vast quantity of utterly Born Fascists,” said Diana) and tour Nazi Germany. They were impressed. Unity, of empty fact”, and the ideologue Lily James and Emily Beecham in the BBC adaptation Christian, “so detached from other course, was already there, dreaming of human beings he hardly notices whether life as “the Hon Mrs Adolf Hitler”, as her biographer put it. When war was declared, Lord Redesdale they are there”. For Linda, it takes a Frenchman, Fabrice, Duc publicly renounced the Nazis, Unity shot herself in the head, and de Sauveterre, to show her real love. For Nancy, it was Colonel Gaston Palewski, de Gaulle’s chef de cabinet in London.

Sydney, maddened with grief, or perhaps just mad, remained pro-Hitler (“he has very good manners”).

Palewski, a Frenchman of Polish extraction, was one of those But, of course, you won’t read any of this in Nancy’s novels. So charmers who, as a friend put it, “could talk away their face” in half an hour with a pretty girl, which was fortunate because he successful have they been at imposing their version of Mitford reality, that readers now take them for memoir-in-code. The truth had, in Thompson’s words, “a face like a King Edward potato”. is that they are wishful thinking on a heartbreakingly grand scale.

But it is thanks to Nancy’s intoxication with Palewski that The Pursuit of Love is suffused with a magical benevolence entirely In 1945, when Nancy wrote the book that made the world fall lacking in her cynical, forgettable earlier novels. He, however, was embarrassed by the book – the French press making hay with in love with her family, that family was in tatters: Diana under house arrest, Unity brain-damaged, Tom dead in Burma, Jessica “Hitler’s Mistress’s Sister dedicates daring book to M Palewski”. starting from scratch in America. Her parents had separated.

Nancy, after an ectopic pregnancy, had woken up on the In The Pursuit of Love, Fabrice tells Linda he loves her and wants surgeon’s table to be told she was barren. (“Ovaries – I thought to marry her. Nancy, on the other hand, would wait and wait, abasing herself, for “the Col’s” affection. She moved to the same one had 700, like caviar,” was her mother’s response.) She had street in Paris; her grey-enveloped letters were so frequent he no money; her marriage to the unfaithful Peter Rodd – whom her father called “the bore” – was over. Working in a Mayfair nicknamed them an “avalanche grise”. “I know one’s not allowed bookshop, she was asked to suggest a book for the Duke of to say it but I love you,” she wrote. After a quarter of a century, Beaufort: “He NEVER reads you know. If somebody could write in 1969, he said he was marrying another mistress: the Duchesse a book for people who never de Sagan. What a smack in the face for the nearly-not-Hon read they would make a “In 1945, when Nancy wrote the book fortune.” So she did.

Nancy Mitford.

that made the world fall in love with her

Why not, she must have thought, No more than she deserved, family, the family was in tatters” some say. Is Mitford fever – go back to that cosy mythical pre-political time when the this unhealthy obsession with a clutch of backward girls, mostly either snobs, or Nazis, or both Mitfords all ran as a pack? In fact, why not rewrite herself – the raven-haired changeling in a blonde family – as the “great – something Britain will ever grow out of? There is no question beauty” of a brunette one? And why not lend the Mitfords the over whether Nancy was a snob. Her notorious 1954 article on stable grandeur of the Radletts at Alconleigh, their “large, ugly, “U and non-U” English (“napkin or serviette?”) was, she north-facing, Georgian house... as grim and bare as a barracks”. protested, meant as “a volley of teases”, but it was not a one-off; Nancy was, offhandedly, running down something she longed her novels, too, enjoy their “delicate fingering of fraught middleclass nerves”, as Thompson calls it. to have. She had been born in a small London house, and thereafter “we lived under the shadow of two hammers: that If that cruel streak were all there was to Nancy, she’d belong in of the builder and that of the auctioneer”. Her father eventually the bin. But The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate are quartered the family in Swinbrook, a ruinously expensive really about the secret of living intensely. “The Radletts were new-build, “some lesser Nazi’s vision of a Cotswold manor always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters house”, as Nancy put it, which she nicknamed Swinebrook. of despair; their emotions were on no ordinary plane, they loved There, the children slept in whitewashed cells and found their or they loathed... they lived in a world of superlatives.” The sponges frozen over each morning. barrier to entry is low: Radletts take joy in newspaper headlines (“Man’s long agony in a lift-shaft”) or Fuller’s walnut cake.

The only warm place was an airing cupboard, known as the “Hons Cupboard”, where the children (all “Honourables” The Mitfords are mistakenly thought to embody Englishness, because their father was a lord) met to plot “war on the terrible but even though they could only have happened here, they were, Counter-Hons”. This detail makes it into The Pursuit of Love, in their carelessness of convention, quite alien. And so Nancy’s which Nancy’s left-wing friends, like Cyril Connolly, found novels, with their quivering joie de vivre, still have something particularly obnoxious. But the Mitfords were never meant important to teach the English – who “as a nation, take their to be Hons – their father only became a lord by accident, pleasures sadly”. As Deborah wrote: “Nancy made me laugh when his brother was killed in the Great War. Nancy was, as her and cry equally, but what I remember now is the laughter.” biographer Laura Thompson put it, “intrigued by the question of what constitutes an aristocrat because she was only one herself by A longer version of this article appeared in The Daily Telegraph. the skin of her pointed little teeth”. The fictional Linda does not © Iona McLaren/Telegraph Media Group Ltd have an easy time in love, but in real life Nancy had it far worse.

22 May 2021 THE WEEK

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Crossword

51

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1261

This week’s winner will receive an T Ettinger (ettinger.co.uk) travel pass E case (assorted colours), which retails c a at £105, and two Connell Guides (connellguides.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 31 May. Email the answers as a scan of a completed grid or a list, with the subject line The Week crossword 1261, to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) ACROSS 9 Parrot learned after scratching head (7) 10 Call from happy US majority? (2-5) 11 Expansion of corporation in times past, pared after restructuring (6-3,6) 12 Debate in party not considered (6,3) 14 Musician’s very short attack (5) 15 Male entertainer is rubbish at his place of work (7) 17 Assistance in call charging (7) 19 Treat bowel and another part of the body (5) 21 Skipper’s a Met character (9) 24 Scrap Israel as it involves flight that’s not direct (6,9) 26 Soldier ordering the usual? (7) 27 Practical person’s on a roll (7)

DOWN 1 King’s Head is convened for a musical (6) 2 Type of petrol that’s ordered wirelessly? (4-4) 3 Celt who’s gone north in the Middle Ages (4) 4 Small boat that’s zipped along?

Not entirely (6) 5 Predecessor found no traces (8) 6 Russian plain said to be first, team makes way (5,5) 7 Artist whose work is barely presented? (6) 8 Second fat guy starting on oil exploration? (8) 13 Crazy people turn on cobblers (5-5) 15 Contentment from appeal?

Certainly (8) 16 This could be tuberose?

Indeed (2,2,4) 18 Daring F1 races not appropriate (5,3) 20 Pontoon, say, is an indoor game (6) 22 Parts of this container could be expressed in turn! (3,3) 23 French girl sounding like a European checker (6) 25 Ferry boat’s first to drop off Irish boy? (4)

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Name Address

Clue of the week: Begging, one puts one’s cap on the floor?

(4, first letter K) The Times Solution to Crossword 1259 ACROSS: 1 Sparser 5 Erasmus 9 Itchy 10 Swingeing 11 Partridge 12 Steno 13 Trapeze 15 Tsunami 17 Mangoes 19 Tranche 21 Rosie 23 Road shows 25 Barbadian 26 Abase 27 Reamers 28 Ragweed DOWN: 1 Snippet 2 Ascertain 3 Shyer 4 Rushdie 5 Exigent 6 Angostura 7 Maine 8 Signori 14 Exonerate 16 Anchorage 17 Mars Bar 18 Sarnies 19 Trainer 20 East End 22 Syria 24 Slang Clue of the week: Newspaper taking offence (5, first letter T) Solution: THEFT (theft is a taking offence) The winner of 1259 is Mr P.D. Wakely from Bristol The Week is available from RNIB Newsagent for the benefit of blind and partially sighted readers. 0303-123 9999, rnib.org.uk/newsagent

7 2 5

6 2 8 9 3 1 7 8 4 6 4 7 6 1 2 7 5

4 8 9 8 4 7 2 9 4 5 7 2 1 9 5 3 7 6 1 8

Sudoku 803 (easy) 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 802

9 5 7 6 8 3 4 2

2 3 4 5 7 1 9 6

1 8 6 4 2 9 5 3 7

6 7 9 1 3 5 2 8

5 2 8 7 9 4 3 1

3 4 1 8 6 2 7 5 9

8 1 5 3 4 7 6 9

4 9 3 2 1 6 8 7

7 6 2 9 5 8 1 4 3

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Tel no Clue of the week answer:

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22 May 2021 THE WEEK