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‘MUMMY’S ON THE BOTTLE. AGAIN’ Fashion editor Harriet Walker: my playdate martinis

CAN JESS PHILLIPS SAVE HER PARTY?

By Janice Turner

OUR MAN IN SAGE

Jeremy Farrar on what the government got (really) wrong GEN Z TWINS OF JERUSALEM

With 2 million followers

By Charlotte Edwardes

17.07.21 5 Caitlin Moran A simple medical self-test has changed my life. 7 What I’ve learnt It’s important to forgive your parents, says singer Rufus Wainwright.

9 Spinal column: Melanie Reid A solo excursion to Edinburgh. What could go wrong? 12 ‘People don’t expect things to get better any more’ Labour’s Jess Phillips tells Janice Turner how her party can win back power. 20 Pandemic postmortem Jeremy Farrar advised the government from the beginning of the crisis. Now he reveals the chaos behind the scenes. 30 Cover story My boozy lunch habit From hen-night hangovers to craft-beer playdates: Harriet Walker on how motherhood has changed her drinking routine. 33 Eat! Six dishes for easy entertaining. 40 Dispatches from Jerusalem Meet the 23-year-old twins whose video streams have made them social media stars. 46 Fashion’s king of tech How José Neves became a billionaire. 50 Home! A furnituremaker’s Dorset retreat. 55 Interiors Scandi-style hot seats. 57 Pout!

Lesley Thomas reveals her secret beauty ritual. 59 Giles Coren reviews Pythouse Kitchen Garden, Wiltshire.

66 Beta male: Ben Machell The things I’ve learnt at Legoland.

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ON THE COVER: HARRIET WALKER PHOTOGRAPHED

BY DAN KENNEDY. DRESS, VICTORIA BECKHAM; SHOES, MALONE SOULIERS

WAYFAIR, £15.99 A tube feeder designed like a metal lantern (wayfair.co.uk)

PIDAT, £63.60 GARDEN GLORY, £167 Go kitsch with this bling feeding This “bird silo” is designed for vertical feeders such as blue ring. Birds perch along the tits (finnishdesignshop.com) bottom (amara.com)

EVA SOLO, £40 A duo of hanging glass balls with drainage holes to keep seeds dry (madeindesign.co.uk)

GREEN & BLUE, £30 A terracotta sphere that also acts as shelter for small birds (black-by-design.co.uk)

CHOSEN BY MONIQUE RIVALLAND

MATTHEW SHAVE

FIVE COOL BIRD FEEDERS

EDITOR NICOLA JEAL DEPUTY EDITOR LOUISE FRANCE ART DIRECTOR CHRIS HITCHCOCK ASSOCIATE EDITOR JANE MULKERRINS ASSISTANT EDITOR TONY TURNBULL FEATURES EDITOR MONIQUE RIVALLAND CHIEF SUB-EDITOR AMANDA LINFOOT DEPUTY ART DIRECTOR JO PLENT DEPUTY CHIEF SUB-EDITOR CHRIS RILEY PICTURE EDITOR ANNA BASSETT DEPUTY PICTURE EDITOR LUCY DALEY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR BRIDGET HARRISON EDITORIAL ASSISTANT GEORGINA ROBERTS

The Times Magazine 3

CAITLIN MORAN

I’m free of back pain. Finally

A miracle operation and I feel human again – after 20 years

ROBERT WILSON

A

ll it takes is the three middle fingers of your hand pushed gently into the centre of your torso.

Anywhere between the belly button and the breastbone. Three fingers pushed in there and you’ll know straight away. If you know what you’re looking for.

The terribleness of my posture is a longrunning joke. I make most of the jokes. I did a piece for The Times back in 2008 where I trained for a day with David Cameron’s personal trainer, Matt Roberts.

“Matt tells me to run, and I see my reflection in the shop windows we pass. I am hunched over. I look like a prawn, running away from some bigger, meaner prawns. Or, perhaps, a bear, pedalling an invisible bike.

‘You run out of your quads,’ Matt says, watching me. ‘Try to straighten up.’

“I can’t.”

To try to correct my posture – get me out of those quads! – I start doing Pilates.

I become good friends with my instructor; she gets my sense of humour. Some days to amuse me she’ll do an impression of the way I walk – stooped over, slightly waddle-y.

“Did you know the grandparent who was a penguin?” she asks.

I’m still, occasionally, trying to wear heels at posh events. I marvel at how other women walk in them: heads up, tits out, stomachs in, arses out, legs long. Elegant. Clack, clack, clack on the parquet. Like a dance.

My heels make the sound of “shuffle, stomp, stomp”. My stoop becomes even more pronounced; when I catch myself in the golden mirrors of these events, I look like a Tyrannosaurus rex in a cocktail dress.

When the backache starts, it’s just a backache. An ache is, like, 3/10 on the pain scale. Just a low, distant cello note in the music of your day. It doesn’t get in the way.

The known scale of pain is this: ache, “thing”, “problem”, “condition”. When it’s a backache, I ignore it. When it turns into a back “thing”, I add yoga to the mix. When it becomes a back “problem”, I start dutifully doing stomach crunches – 500 every morning, to make the core strong. Gotta support the back!

Despite the crunches, by March 2019 it’s escalated to a “condition”. I’ve now spent thousands of pounds on osteopaths, I live on

I walked around like Daffy Duck when Bugs fires a cannon at him and his whole centre is blown away

painkillers, and some days just getting out of bed makes me cry. I feel 1,000 years old; my lower back is like the rotten, sunken hull of the Mary Rose.

I have lunch with a friend who also has a bad back. We bonded when we met at a party and discussed which chairs are “the least agonising”.

Today, she looks different.

“Back pain’s gone!” she announces, looking ten years younger. “GONE! TOTALLY!” All you have to do, you see, is take the three middle fingers of your hand and push them gently into the centre of the torso just above the belly button. That’s what the doctor had done with her and told her that she had Diastasis recti.

During pregnancy, to make room for the baby the muscles of the belly split open and separate, like a fleshy Tower Bridge. Diastasis recti is where they do not heal back together again. You remain wide open, from belly button to sternum. You have no core. You are, essentially, broken – right down your middle.

And so you stoop over like a prawn, because there is no centre at your centre. And your back – your poor, brittle, bony back – has to try to do all the work of a wall of muscle at the front, which has now gone. If you’re doing 500 crunches a day, they’re going straight into your back, not your belly. You are grinding your nerves and vertebrae into dust.

My friend reaches over and pushes her three fingers into my belly. She looks at me.

Six months later, I have the same operation she had. They mend the hole that has, presumably, been there since I was six months pregnant in 2000. Two whole decades have gone by where I have walked around like Daffy Duck when Bugs fires a cannon at him and his whole centre is blown away. But less funny than that. More painful than that.

It is definitely a better life, I find, when you are sewn back together. I stand straight. I don’t hurt. If you did an impression of me walking now it would just look like… a normal human.

So, women. Mothers with stoops and bad backs. Just take three fingers and push them into your belly. Just to check. Check to see if, all this time – under all those loose clothes and jokes – there’s actually been a hole right in the centre of you. Because, even though that’s all it takes, no doctor ever did it to me.

I marvel, all over again, at how curable, but not cured, women’s pain so often is. n The Times Magazine 5

What I’ve learnt Rufus Wainwright

THE NEW YORK TIMES/REDUX/EYEVINE

The singer/songwriter, 47, is the son of folk singers Kate McGarrigle and Loudon Wainwright III. In 2011 he had a baby girl, Viva, with Lorca Cohen, Leonard Cohen’s daughter. The former alcoholic and drug addict lives with his husband and manager, Jörn Weisbrodt, in Los Angeles.

If you are going to go off the deep end, there’s nowhere better than New York’s Chelsea Hotel. There was a lot of drugs, going out every night, hanging out with Alexander McQueen and Courtney Love.

It was a moment when I was blissfully unaware of the cliff I was on.

You have to forgive your parents, even if they don’t deserve it.

Otherwise it just screws up your path and your relationship with your own kids. And my father has forgiven me for things he feels I did that were wrong, hopefully.

When I came out I was young, and Aids was decimating the male gay population. I was seriously under threat of dying, because I was going out a lot and was promiscuous. I went to boarding school in upstate New York, and that was a lifesaver.

With crystal meth you seriously become a bad person. Your brain does a 180 and everything you thought was bad suddenly becomes normal. Everything you thought was taboo is like just a toss-off. Insecurities that were actually protecting you from hurting yourself are just thrown into the wind.

At the beginning I was prone to indulge my daughter, Viva, and be this godlike figure who once in a while would appear in a puff of smoke with presents from the Orient, and whisk her off her feet. That wasn’t the best – I don’t think I caused any major damage, but I wasn’t an ideal parent.

I regret not spending more time with my mum. I had to tour so much when she was sick [with a soft tissue cancer], and she was very selfless and understanding.

She wanted me to go out and make my way in the world.

I wish I’d cancelled a few more tours and hung out with her as

‘If you are going to go off the deep end, there is nowhere better than New York’s Chelsea Hotel’

INTERVIEW Susan Gray PORTRAIT Vincent Tullo

much I could. Because I really didn’t accept she was going to die right until she died.

I wasn’t expecting to be in a long-term relationship. Right before I met Jörn I had gotten sober, but before that I was living it up in the Chelsea Hotel, expecting to have a Dylan Thomas existence. But we built this relationship, had a child, and have been together for 15 years.

Until my thirties I pooh-poohed physical exertion. I wanted to be bohemian, reclining in a bathrobe.

It was a good look for that time.

Now, working out, it takes months to get anywhere.

The longer the gap between when you write a song and when you record it, the better. Music has to stand the test of time.

As a child I saw my dad only two or three times a year. It was the Seventies, he was a touring musician and he had to be on the road. So for the last while, I did think, ‘Oh, I’m going to be a better dad than him. I’m going to show him a little bit.’ But now

I think it’s better to get rid of all that resentment and sadness.

Kids amaze me, how they want this and want that, and you want to give it to them. But when you’re more strict, they become more attached in the long run.

I’m a Henry James character: this American who is not comfortable in America. He is imbued with confidence, but also a naivety, that can serve him and damn him. n To book tickets for Rufus Wainwright’s October UK tour, go to rufuswainwright. veeps.com/stream/schedule

The Times Magazine 7

SPINAL COLUMN MELANIE REID

‘My first solo outing for 18 months. Cue military levels of planning’

MURDO MACLEOD

P

reparation for my first proper solo outing in 18 months was extensive. I wish I came from a military family; a dash of officer would make planning come naturally. I’d been at home for so long that I felt like a wheelchair newbie again, venturing into a perilous world.

I ran down the checklist, rusty with lack of practice. Blue badge in car. Sufficient petrol. Bottle of water. Tinfoil blanket in case I drive off the road and nobody finds me.

Arsenic pill ditto. Mobile phone lead for Google Maps, destination postcode primed.

Number of the essential helper at the other end logged and triple-checked. Also the switchboard of the venue.

For God’s sake, I told myself, you’re only driving to Edinburgh.

But it’s all about confidence. After you’re abruptly disabled and learning to live all over again, you build confidence incrementally.

Over several years I learnt to manage first one thing – getting myself somewhere – and then practised the next: finding somewhere to park in a city centre. The stuff able-bodied people do on autopilot. Lockdown had taken that away.

It’s wryly amusing that any worries about making a semi-intelligent contribution when I arrive anywhere – the whole bloody point of going – were way down the anxiety list. That had become the easy bit. Everything’s relative.

My next stage of prep was – aargh – me.

First a lateral flow test – a bit of a challenge if you’ve only three working fingers and a thumb and never done one before. Then make-up, which took a while to find, it’s been so long.

Handbag likewise, with extra anti-spasm medicine in case I’m late and my legs go rigid.

Then, double aargh, clothes. It was baking hot. Wheelchairs are antithetical to summer.

I’ve been wearing a uniform of dark blue or black woollies and padded jackets for eternity, happily invisible, and suddenly sunshine knocks on the door: hello, Mrs Slob, you need something smart and summery.

What followed was high farce. I hacked myself a fringe to soften the tortured Handmaid’s Tale face. Too short, of course, but irreversible. I struggled into a dark blue jersey.

Awful. A dressy jacket, terrible – no way I could lug myself out of a car seat in it. Dave arrived as I started wailing, “I look ghastly in everything because I’ve got no muscles,” and offered me one of his shirts, which was very sweet but not the solution. “Wear this,” he said, pulling down a red cardigan. At least it wasn’t dark blue. “And earrings,” he ordered.

“And what have you done to your hair?”

I swallowed a metaphoric brave pill, he helped me into the car and I set off. And not only did everything go smoothly, but it turned into one of those magic evenings. One of the quiet delights of my life over the past few years has been a connection with the Fruitmarket gallery in Edinburgh, a public contemporary

art venue that is basically Scotland’s Tate Modern. I love that it’s a world a million miles from mine, an exciting, challenging place full of people sparking with ideas who send me home feeling 20 years younger. I know little about contemporary art but actually that doesn’t matter, because it’s beautiful and mysterious and stimulates my brain.

Best of all, the gallery has allowed me to give something in return. During lockdown it’s been extensively rebuilt, with a new warehouse space added. Not quite on the scale of the Turbine Hall, but it’s big, raw and industrial.

It’s a fact that exciting galleries, free to enter, with great cafés, need equally impressive toilets.

Which is where I came in. My new cultural claim to fame: I helped influence the design of Fruitmarket’s disabled loos – “Bigger, make them bigger!” – and lifts that, unlike the old one, don’t get stuck with wheelchairs in them.

So imagine how thrilling it was, during a sneak preview tour of the building and its eye-popping opening exhibition, to test-run the new lifts and toilets. The glamour of high art, huh? I’m patron of an awesome disabled loo. And if I caught a bittersweet glimpse of my seated self in the mirror, a red cardigan spinning round in the roominess, and thought, “Who’s that? Oh God, that’s me,” so be it. I’ve done something properly useful. n @Mel_ReidTimes Melanie Reid is tetraplegic after breaking her neck and back in a riding accident in April 2010 The Times Magazine 9

‘THE ONLY WAY A WOMAN WILL BECOME LABOUR LEADER IS IF MEN DON’T STAND’ Why Jess Phillips is the life and soul of her party

Jess Phillips, 39, wears blouse, Roland Mouret (selfridges.com), leggings, spanx.com, shoes, gianvitorossi.com, earrings, shylajewellery.com

Fake nails! Spray-on leggings! High heels! Who else at Westminster but the MP for Birmingham Yardley would really go for it on a photoshoot?

The politician talks to Janice Turner about the future of Labour PORTRAITS Matthew Shave STYLING Hannah Rogers

W

GETTY IMAGES, PA, JEFF OVERS/REUTERS/BBC

hile most of us gained weight during lockdown, Jess Phillips lost three stone. “I’m still on a strict 1,000 calories a day in the week, but at the weekend I do drink and eat bread.” While many faltered in their fine intentions to write a book during Covid, Phillips, often banging out 6,000 words per afternoon (“I find it quite therapeutic, especially if I’m cross about something”), managed two. One is a short treatise on motherhood; the other, Everything You Really Need to Know about Politics, reflects on her six years as a Labour MP. There are few more engaging, warm and funny politicians but Phillips’ vape-smoking, trainer-wearing, happy-in-her-own-skin exterior belies serious drive. Her book, while chatty and anecdotal, also offers a route for Labour, through its dense forest of identity politics, back towards ordinary voters. She is an enthusiast, an across-the-aisle pragmatist happy to find common cause with Tories – the antithesis of the petty, chiding, cancel culture Left. “I don’t care if someone calls me ‘love’,” she shrugs. “I mean, people are being raped.”

We meet in her home in Moseley, a Birmingham suburb it’s mandatory to call “leafy”. Her back lawn, so verdant I assume it’s AstroTurf, is the work of Phillips’ husband, Tom, “who gets obsessed with doing one thing really well, like cooking fried chicken, then moves on to something else”. Lockdown kittens, Frankie and Holly, stalk the kitchen: the male one, she says, breaks into her bedroom and bites her at night. Upstairs, her elder son, 16, slumbers having finished school for good, after many Covid-disrupted months.

Although this double-fronted house, rather than the sparsely furnished London flat where we last met, is her true home, she misses her old Westminster life terribly. “I hate you have to make an appointment for a Zoom call with someone you’d bump into in the corridor. We don’t work as a team anywhere near as well.

The support of your colleagues, bouncing ideas off them, is gone. And finding cross-party allegiances is near-impossible, because I don’t know all the Tories’ phone numbers, obviously, whereas I could just happen upon them in the tea room like, ‘I’ve got this issue. Will you back it up?’ I hate zooming into the chamber. I did it to ask an urgent question but I couldn’t see the home secretary. I’m a person who needs people.”

She pauses to refill her vape with strawberry liquid. Writing the book at a 100-mile remove made her reflect on what she wished she’d known when becoming an MP. She’d no idea the job was formless: “You could literally buy a villa in France, go to it and do nothing.” She thought she’d model herself on Harriet Harman until the Labour veteran told Phillips she could only be herself. She was naive about political loyalty and “people’s unwillingness to 14 The Times Magazine

During the International Women’s Day debate in the House of Commons in March. Left: Rebecca Long Bailey, Jess Phillips, Emily Thornberry, Lisa Nandy and Keir Starmer at the leadership hustings in Liverpool in January 2020. Below: with Starmer on The Andrew Marr Show

be brave. They say one thing in the tea room, like, ‘God, isn’t he an arsehole,’ and something completely different on the TV news.”

That Phillips, 39, generally speaks her mind and has never allied herself with a particular Labour tribe accounts for her high public profile but also her relatively low ranking within Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour. Her domestic violence and safeguarding portfolio fits her feminism and earlier career in women’s refuges. But it isn’t a full shadow cabinet job.

Doesn’t she deserve a bigger post?

“The truth is I’m probably best wherever I am,” she says. “Because I still get on the telly all the time, and if there are wedge issues the government is struggling on, it’s things like crime and rape. They’re doing a terrible job.

So in some ways, I think that maybe it’s better having people who can speak passionately and fluently about the things they know about.”

She says her greatest achievement is “making women as important as bins”. Councils only had only two statutory duties: adult and children’s social services, and refuse collection.

The Domestic Abuse Act adds a third: providing women’s refuges. She recalls watching her first budget speech in 2015, when George Osborne “didn’t mention sexual violence once, despite it being the biggest crime type in the UK”. Now no government would

dare. That is in part down to Phillips, who every year reads the femicide list of women – usually around 150 – killed by men. But she is generous about support from Tory women such as Caroline Noakes, Tracey Crouch, former MP Anne Milton (“a great loss to Westminster”) and Theresa May. Although none of them voted for migrant women to have recourse to refuge, “so sometimes I feel they care up to the point there is a political cost”.

We speak days before the vicious Batley and Spen by-election, amid Momentum activists demanding Starmer resign as leader if Labour loses. (It retains the seat by a squeaky 323 votes.) Phillips believes the hard left stoked George Galloway’s campaign with its crude appeals to Muslim voters, and was

Is Labour leader Keir Starmer doing a good job?

‘Look, he needs to do better, without question’ gleeful about the prospect of Labour losing.

“But they would make the same charge about me, wouldn’t they, under the Corbyn years.” She compares activist-journalist Owen Jones and Novara Media writers to noisy, overexcited children who have had too much sugar – “Who cares what they think, frankly.”

Didn’t Labour itself fall into the gutter with a leaflet showing Boris Johnson shaking hands with the Indian PM, Narendra Modi, playing on communal tensions? Phillips claims not to have seen it. “Politics has got ugly in lots of ways, and the Labour Party will make terrible mistakes in that environment just like everybody else. You know, there are Facebook memes saying that I want rapists to come out of prison early, put around by the Tories.” She dreams of a philanthropist setting up a Twitter bot farm disseminating hopefulness rather than hate.

Should Corbyn regain the Labour whip, removed after he claimed a report into antisemitism under his leadership was politically motivated? “No,” she says emphatically. “I was about to say, ‘Until

he shows real contrition,’ but how does one prove it’s real? I don’t think that he can.”

Yet both the Labour Party and Starmer’s personal poll ratings are dire. Does Phillips think he is doing a good job? “Look, he needs to do better, without question. He needs to build a team that can go to the country.” The trouble, she says, is the public can’t name any of them. So has he chosen the wrong people?

“No, I think this is a terrible time, where you’ve no opportunity to act like a team and get around a table.”

But since the 2019 Tory landslide, it has been hard to see how Labour, with just one MP in Scotland and the Red Wall collapsed, could gain the numbers to govern. “My mum thought that, and then in 1997 they won. It’s tough, don’t get me wrong – but the Tories came back from Tony Blair, who had a massive majority. I can totally see how it would come back. And it can come back quite quickly.”

She cites the LibDem victory in the Chesham and Amersham by-election as an example of people showing they don’t want their votes taken for granted. She’s in politics

to govern, she says, not “just make marginal gains for the people of Birmingham Yardley.

I could do that working at Women’s Aid. It must always be about trying to change the country and making things better.”

When normal, post-pandemic politics resumes, she says, the government’s “levelling up” agenda will be proven hollow and meaningless. “We can’t afford hardly any of the services that we used to have. And the Labour Party has to convince people that things used to get better, because people’s expectations are now so low, they don’t expect things to get better any more.” When many Birmingham schools decided to close at 1pm on Fridays because they couldn’t afford to stay open, her constituents were so inured to cuts, many didn’t even complain.

The worst accusation against Labour is that it seems no longer to like its working-class base.

Phillips balks at this and says this complaint doesn’t come up on doorsteps. But it is a perception, I say, that Boris Johnson is upbeat, enthusiastic, while Labour is negative, judgmental, miserablist. “We’ve definitely got to be much more optimistic. We’ve got to have a laugh! We’ve got to be big and bold and bright and funny and charming. But it’s a really hard thing to do, a) in a global pandemic, and b) when you’re in opposition. If you start being too optimistic about things, people will be like, ‘You’re not scrutinising the government.’ ” Phillips, however, exudes genuine delight in her constituents. “They’re just fascinating, and really, really, really funny. Even in terrible adversity. When things are awful in Westminster, when you’re under loads of pressure, just a day here will bring you back down to earth. But also there’s nothing better than somebody needing help and you being able to offer it.” In her political mind’s eye, she has an imaginary woman she calls Brenda – middle-aged, working at Asda, with grownup kids (“We don’t agree on everything.

Brenda hates garlic”) – and Phillips asks, of Labour policy, whether it includes Brenda.

Moreover, in 2018, when a man called Michael tried to kick down her constituency office door, accusing Phillips of turning a blind eye to Asian grooming gangs, she arranged to meet him. They talked, not agreeing, but realising they were the same age, raised in the same area. Phillips showed him speeches she’d given to contradict the lies he’d read online.

“Michael is a human being,” she writes. “He is not an internet avatar and I’m not a video game baddy he must stamp on.”

On paper, Jess Phillips seems destined to be a Labour MP. Her parents were left-wing public sector workers: her dad was a teacher, her mother rose to chair an NHS trust. As the youngest of four kids, the only girl, she held The Times Magazine 15

ALAMY. HAIR: NARAD KUTOWAROO AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING UNITE. MAKE-UP: JULIA WREN AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING SISLEY. NAILS: JOANNA NEWBOLD AT ARLINGTON ARTISTS USING MORGAN TAYLOR FROM RED CARPET BEAUTY

her own in a raucous household. (The book is dedicated to her brother Luke, a former heroin addict who has just graduated with a politics degree.) A grammar school girl, she went to Leeds University and after having her two sons early – she got pregnant very soon after she started dating Tom, then a lift engineer, now a virtual reality technician – became a Birmingham city councillor. She agreed to join the MP selection list shortly after her mother died, in part to distract from her grief.

A star of the 2015 intake, she made an immediate impression, at ease with social media, frank about everything from her abortion to her taste in music. She rapidly became a rare recognisable Labour face. Yet she has always stayed apart from Westminster factions. On the plus side, in the style of Mo Mowlam, she connects. On the downside, she is accused of being a shallow egotist, with no wider political vision than what’s best for Jess.

In 2019, after Corbyn stood down, she tried “on a whim” to parlay her appeal into a leadership bid. “It wasn’t like I’d been planning it for five years and had infrastructure and teams of people… It was a nightmare.” Her sole intention, she claims, was to use her campaign to encourage more people to join the party so they could vote. Once that deadline passed, she dropped out.

“I feel like a total arse saying this, but I wanted the conversation within the Labour Party to be more focused on people who weren’t necessarily always part of it. I have an appeal to the public that is beyond party politics.” Isn’t Labour’s perennial problem that the leader that the members want is repellent to voters. “It is, yes.”

Starmer, with his “machine operation”, was always going to win, she says. Yet four of the six candidates were female and this was supposed to be the time, after 119 years, that the Labour Party had its first female leader.

Every other party, even the DUP and (briefly) Ukip, have been led by women. What is Labour’s problem? “It’s just appalling. I have no defence of it.” Could it be that while Tories will choose women if they can hold power, the left demands ideological purity, and women must pass an additional feminist test?

“The Labour Party’s problem writ large is the idea that somebody has to be perfect. They have to look good standing outside 10 Downing Street, but also be down with the people, while also being right about everything… Boris Johnson doesn’t give a shit about any of that.

You don’t have to be perfect.” Phillips points out that more than half the parliamentary party is female. “But I genuinely think the only way a woman will win is if men don’t stand – an all-woman shortlist.”

Now feminism itself is riven by the bitterest of battles: how to solve the clash of rights between women and trans people. We last

‘The Labour Party’s problem writ large is the idea that the leader has to be perfect. Boris Johnson doesn’t care about any of that’

With husband Tom at the Birmingham Yardley count, 2015

spoke during the consultation on the Gender Recognition Act. Since then, the debate has grown more arcane. During the 2019 election, candidates were asked a simple yet toxic question, which flummoxed the LibDem leader at the time, Jo Swinson, perhaps costing the MP her marginal seat: what is a woman?

How would Phillips answer that? She draws thoughtfully on her vape. “I think that biological sex exists, and we are discriminated against on the basis of our biological sex, without question,” she says. “I’ve had an abortion, had to go home from work because I had my period, borne my children and lost loads of my salary. My womb is more political than any other part of my body. But I think if somebody identifies as a woman, I should refer to them as a woman. That’s what I think.”

But now some activists blur the distinction between sex and gender, claiming a trans woman is female. “Well, of course she’s not.”

She recalls an intimate chat with a trans woman at a Labour social club in Wakefield.

“I said, ‘I suppose there’s the upside of not having periods.’ And she said to me, “The thing is, I’d really, really love to have a period.’

That woman was a woman to me, but neither of us was under any illusion that we had the same biology.”

What surprised her when sitting on the women and equalities committee, which discussed Gender Recognition Act reforms, was the requirement of two years living “in role” as the opposite sex before changing a birth certificate. “How do you live in role as a man?

Have I got to use a spanner? No one could answer that. I’ve got short hair. I’m wearing trousers. Like, it’s not an act, is it? You can’t act like a woman, because we’re all different.”

She has noticed what she calls the “de-womanising” of language. The Tories’ domestic violence bill avoided mention of

women, by far the most likely victims, largely, she says, due to Conservative men’s rights campaigner Philip Davies. But in her international development work she’s observed the term “gender-based violence”, which blurs the stark reality: “It’s male violence against women.” Trans people, she adds, “don’t want breastfeeding called ‘chestfeeding’. They don’t want you to eliminate the word ‘women’ and use ‘people with cervixes’. They’re fine with ‘women and people with cervixes’.”

She is aghast that the modern left seeks to legitimise, even idealise, prostitution, which through her long experience in the refuge movement she sees as sexual abuse. She uses the term “prostituted women” rather than the woke euphemism “sex workers”. Moreover, she’s long been concerned about long-standing women’s refuges losing funds in favour of generic services that purport to include everyone. “If you had £1 million for domestic violence services, you’d give £800,000 to a women’s refuge based on need and numbers.

Having specialist services for LGBT or male victims of domestic abuse is totally brilliant and legitimate. They’re not the same. They need different services.”

Yet Starmer has pledged a Labour government would grant gender recognition certificates (GRCs) via self-identification. This would have serious consequences given any trans woman prisoner with a GRC, even a rapist, is placed by default in a women’s jail.

“I don’t think anyone who has perpetrated any violent crime against women, children or really anyone, I suppose, should be put in a prison estate that is largely low security,” says Phillips.

At this moment, the doorbell rings: it’s the local news asking for a Phillips comment on cladding policy. When she returns, she looks thoughtful and says she wants a world where trans people have excellent healthcare and “the biological things that have been used to hold back women” are addressed. And I think life would be so much easier for Jess Phillips if she recited the expected mantras, made her activism about hashtags not infrastructure, abandoned nuance for certainty and refused to understand others’ views, even those of vicious internet trolls. That she will not is both her political weakness and her greatest strength. n Everything You Really Need to Know about Politics: My Life as an MP by Jess Phillips is published on July 22 (Simon & Schuster, £16.99).

To read an exclusive extract, go to thetimes.co.uk The Times Magazine 17

‘We need a government that can get a grip on day 1 – not day 180’

‘I was told by a head of MI5 to get a burner phone. I was frightened’

Sir Jeremy Farrar, 60, in the headquarters of the Wellcome Trust in London

Sir Jeremy Farrar was a key player in the pandemic from the beginning.

Now he’s written an explosive book about what he witnessed inside government. The scientist reveals a dysfunctional system that took far too long to take control of the crisis and didn’t learn from its mistakes.

Interview by Tom Whipple PORTRAIT Tom Jackson

GETTY IMAGES

H

as it, I ask, been worth it?

Nineteen months since he first heard of a new virus in China, 18 months since he was so worried it had been leaked from a laboratory that the former head of MI5 advised him to conduct inquiries over a burner phone, 17 months since it was clear the pandemic was global, has Sir Jeremy Farrar’s involvement in Sage – his gruelling stint at the very centre of the UK response – made a difference?

“I don’t know,” he says, sitting beneath a bust of the pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome, whose considerable trust Farrar now heads. “I think… eventually… yes, it did.”

Along the way, though, he confesses, he wondered whether he and the multibillionpound philanthropic organisation he represents should even withdraw their advice entirely.

“There were times you could see what was happening. You could see the trends and the trends looked terrifying… And yet you can’t agree with the decisions that are made on the basis of your advice. You question whether giving the advice is worth it.”

For the past eight years Farrar, 60, has been director of the Wellcome Trust, one of the world’s leading funders of health research.

Before that he spent a career in global public health, for most of which time the “global” part indicated it happened elsewhere. Then came coronavirus.

He advises our government; he advises the German government. He can’t help but notice that one has done rather better than the other.

But in his role as the head of Wellcome, hobnobbing in Davos, briefing governments, negotiating with UN agencies, he has always seemed as much a diplomat as a doctor.

Which makes the somewhat undiplomatic account he has just written of the pandemic and his role in it, Spike: The Virus v The People, all the more striking.

In the early days there was, he writes, “organisational mayhem”, “an absent prime minister”, “dysfunctional state apparatus”. It didn’t improve that much either. Matt Hancock took almost a year to “get his act together”; Boris Johnson was in thrall to contrarian scientists and journalists; Dido Harding, the “figurehead responsible for the disastrous TTI system”, was promoted rather than removed.

Procurement and planning involved “random decisions, about this app or that product, plucked from the sky that did not seem informed by any knowledge of public health”. He remembers being in procurement meetings with obvious “snake oil salesmen”.

Most of all, time and again there was a refusal to face up to the seriousness of the situation. In meetings, in that crucial fortnight at the start of March, he describes John

22 The Times Magazine

Edmunds, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, devising his own “behavioural strategy”. He would “look political advisers directly in the eye while repeating the phrase, ‘We are talking about hundreds of thousands of deaths.’ He just wanted a reaction, an acknowledgement, that those in power understood what was coming.”

Even months into the pandemic, Farrar says, many didn’t understand. Scientists were still having to explain the most basic concepts of infectious diseases – about exponential growth, about lagging indicators, about “the fact that your data today represents people being impacted two to four weeks ago”.

This is why, with Anjana Ahuja, a science journalist, he has written the book. Because this will not be the last crisis of this kind and there is, he says, a lot that needs to be changed.

“It would be dishonourable not to share your real thoughts. Everybody’s gone through a rollercoaster in the past 18 months. There were some great moments but there have been some very, very dark moments: personally, professionally, for the country and for the world.

“The British state machinery did not get a grip. The machinery of government did not click in fast enough.” It isn’t even about individuals or ideology. “The message in the book is, it has to work, whoever is in charge.”

Eight years earlier, in his first month in the job, Farrar sat beneath the same bust and talked to me about his plans and fears for the role. Zika was yet to happen, Ebola was a year away, but pandemics were on his mind.

He had cut his teeth as a doctor in the Aids epidemic and been in southeast Asia as a researcher during Sars 1. He warned that eventually there would be a true pandemic that would affect everyone – not just in the sort of foreign countries where Britons expected to see pandemics.

That he did so was not some astonishing feat of prescience. Over the preceding two decades, warning about pandemics – and being ignored – had become something of a hobby among those in global public health.

When the real thing did come, even for him it retained its power to shock.

He remembers, in particular, speaking to colleagues in Italy. “I will never forget that phone call. It was harrowing.” Northern Italy was the first part of Europe to be hit, and it became the canary for the continent.

“I had not imagined that a whole health system of a rich country would totally collapse, that doctors had to choose who to ventilate.

I was listening to people in intensive care units who face nasty things every day in tears.”

Amid this devastation he had another worry. The virus did not look quite right. He had been speaking to virologists and there

were certain features that looked odd for a supposedly natural virus.

“I remember sitting in the kitchen with my wife, Christiane, and saying, ‘This looks like an engineered virus. It could be a lab accident – or worse,’ ” he writes in his book. “Saying it out loud felt like a bombshell.”

The chair of Wellcome is Dame Eliza Manningham-Buller, former head of MI5. As Farrar emailed colleagues around the world – among them Kristian Andersen from Scripps Research Institute and Anthony Fauci, who led the US response – she advised him to get a burner phone. This had moved beyond public health into dangerous geopolitics, and they needed to be careful.

“President Trump was in office, it was being called the ‘Wuhan Virus’, there were already discussions about whether it could be bioterrorism,” says Farrar. “And I’m suddenly thrust into this space I’ve never worked in before. I was frightened, to be honest.”

Many of the features that so worried those virologists have since been identified by others and formed the basis of continued claims that the virus has been engineered. At the time, Andersen was 60-70 per cent sure it came from a laboratory, Farrar says.

By now Farrar had helped assemble leading experts – a global “dream team”, he calls them.

They were so worried that Sir Patrick Vallance, the UK chief scientific officer, relayed the concerns to the security services. Ultimately, on March 17, the dream team reached their verdict. Despite their suspicions, they had not found any evidence for human manipulation.

Farrar, at least, was satisfied. “I don’t think we’re ever going to truly dismiss the thought that it could be a lab leak, but the weight of the evidence is that this was a natural origin,” he says. He is satisfied that the RNA is entirely consistent with having evolved in nature, from where viruses arrive all the time.

But by now he had more pressing concerns.

As February became March, it became clear the virus had arrived here and was spreading.

This was the period when John Edmunds began death-staring at random civil servants.

These days, herd immunity is the policy with no parents. No one wants to admit that the idea of letting the virus pass through the country originated from them. However, neither was the policy we consider its alternative yet orthodoxy. Read the Sage minutes, or even the UK pandemic plans, and it is clear that before March there was no thought of lockdowns.

This should not, says Farrar, be a surprise.

“We talk about lockdown now as if it’s something standard that governments do.

It’s not. It’s bizarre. It’s a horrific thing to do.

Societies haven’t been locked down since the Middle Ages. But if you lose control of an epidemic, then it is your last resort.”

Boris Johnson with Chris Whitty, left, and Patrick Vallance, March 3, 2020

It was ‘organisational mayhem’ with an ‘absent prime minister’ and ‘random decision-making’ Today, in a world of political binaries, the response to a pandemic is binary too: lockdown or herd immunity. In early 2020, that was not Farrar’s understanding. It was possible, public health officials believed, to try to slow a pandemic without stopping a society – while also hoping for the arrival of vaccines.

Farrar’s thinking never involved herd immunity. He has the email receipts to show other members of Sage concurred. “Herd immunity by natural infection is a mirage,” he says. “It would take decades. I don’t know where the idea came from; it beggars belief.

“From a public health or clinician’s perspective, laying out a strategy which you knew would lead to 400,000-500,000 deaths and not trying to do something about that would just be unacceptable.” He can’t explain why it is that Patrick Vallance is on record speaking about herd immunity, except to say that everyone was very, very, tired.

Whatever the truth, by mid-March it is clear that Sage was pushing to follow Italy and go into lockdown. It is also clear that they were not being listened to. On March 18, after the famous Neil Ferguson paper but before full lockdown, I spoke to Farrar. He strongly hinted that London would be in lockdown by the next morning. It wasn’t.

The chaos and confusion is, he says, understandable. “If you’re being charitable you can say, ‘It’s a totally new pandemic;

we couldn’t have predicted the scale of the impact.’ ” What he cannot forgive is what came in the months after: in a summer of eat out to help out; of fringe scientists gaining the ear of the government with claims we had already hit herd immunity; of failing to act again.

These were the mistakes, he argues, that eventually meant that he did not need to look to Italy to see a health service pushed beyond its limits. He just needed to go to the building next to the Wellcome Trust’s headquarters: University College London Hospital.

“There’s this horrible phrase ‘military medicine’, where people are triaged. Decisions were being made: ‘This person I can save; this person I can’t.’ ” That happened, he says, in January. “Decisions were being made like that in Britain in 2021.

“Britain’s health system did not collapse, but people were having to make decisions that no nurse or doctor should have to make.”

British science has had a stunningly good pandemic. It would not, in fact, be a stretch to say that the country has outperformed every other nation in the world. There is the Oxford vaccine, of course. There is the Recovery trial, which identified the drug dexamethasone as a treatment. There is the genomics sequencing consortium COG-UK, which was convened in late March after a meeting at Wellcome, and which at one point had

done half the Covid sequencing in the world.

There are also countless other trials and initiatives, many of which feel obvious now but which most countries simply do not have.

We have two mass community surveys to gauge population prevalence of infection.

We have a fortnightly contacts survey called CoMix to judge the efficacy of lockdown. We have the Siren study of health workers to look at real-world vaccine efficacy. We have the Vivaldi study in care homes.

None of this happened by chance. It happened because extremely skilled scientists knew what was needed and moved fast to make it happen. Many of those same scientists also sit with Farrar on Sage at the interface of science and politics.

Farrar cannot avoid probing this contradiction. “I hate the phrase ‘worldbeating’,” he says. “There are things done in the UK which have been absolutely extraordinary. And yet as a country, one of the richest countries on Earth, with a public health system that is available to everybody, we’ve had one of the worst outcomes, certainly in Europe if not globally. Why the disconnect?”

He thinks it isn’t actually surprising that many far poorer countries, such as Vietnam, have done so much better. In the UK, we are simply not used to this kind of crisis.

“Certainly in my lifetime, and even in the past 100 years if you exclude war, I can’t think there’s been such a disruptive event in the world. It was very clear in the first quarter of 2020 that this was going to affect every single aspect of society, from the economy to jobs to education, everywhere.” Nowhere did he see the urgency of response that was required.

This, he thinks, is the lesson of the pandemic. It’s not that we lack talent. It’s not that we need better leaders. It’s that we need a system where the leader doesn’t matter and which responds fast in the next crisis.

“You have to be personality-independent and it has to be able to click into gear. I don’t like military analogies, but when a moment of crisis strikes, the military would not say, ‘We’ll be organised in a year. Give us a shout then.’

The military has to be able to respond within days, minutes and hours. An exponentially increasing pandemic is the same.”

Today, he thinks, the country is working as it should. Since January, Sage and Whitehall have been in unison. He backs England’s reopening on July 19. This is not like September, when he was so close to quitting.

But it has taken too long to get here.

“We need a really strong government that can take a grip and make these decisions in a structured, cross-government way. And it needs to be in place on day 1, not on day 180.”

Turn the page to read an extract from Jeremy Farrar’s new book

The Times Magazine 23

EXTRACT

‘I TOLD MY BROTHER, IF ANYTHING HAPPENS TO ME, THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW’

XINHUA/SHUTTERSTOCK

I

was in an airport lounge on New Year’s Eve 2019 when my mobile rang. I was heading back to England from Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, where I had been visiting the ebola vaccination centres in Rwanda across the politically fraught border region of North Kivu. I was absolutely knackered and looking forward to a couple of days at home in Oxford before heading back to the office.

I was scanning my phone when I saw a report of a mystery pneumonia spotted by doctors at a hospital in China. I sent a short text message to George Gao, head of the Chinese Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (China CDC) in Beijing, and an old friend.

He phoned me back. Very soon, George told me, the world would be hearing about a cluster of cases of a new pneumonia from Wuhan in China. The cases had already been reported to the World Health Organisation.

It was, essentially, a courtesy call from one scientist to another. I remember him telling me that we wouldn’t need to worry because it wasn’t severe acute respiratory syndrome (Sars), and that we must keep in touch.

The cases of unexplained and untreatable pneumonia in Wuhan kept growing, matched later by reports of crowded hospital wards and overflowing mortuaries. Social media and online chat rooms in China hummed with rumours of a strange new illness spreading in Wuhan, including among hospital workers; reports began filtering in of police crackdowns on those trying to get information out over the heavily monitored internet.

By the second week of January, I was beginning to realise the scale of what was happening. I was also getting the uncomfortable feeling that some of the information needed by scientists to detect and fight this new disease was not being disclosed as fast as it could be. I did not know it then, but a fraught few weeks lay ahead.

Covid patients are wheeled into the newly built Huoshenshan Hospital in Wuhan, February 2020

In those weeks, I became exhausted and scared. I felt as if I was living a different person’s life. During that period, I would do things I had never done before: acquire a burner phone; hold clandestine meetings; keep difficult secrets. I would have surreal conversations with my wife, Christiane, who persuaded me we should let the people closest to us know what was going on. I phoned my brother and best friend to give them my temporary number. In hushed conversations, I sketched out the possibility of a looming global health crisis that had the potential to be read as bioterrorism.

“If anything happens to me in the next few weeks,” I told them nervously, “this is what you need to know.”

The process of reporting a new disease to the wider world is quite informal and not at all glamorous. It often starts with a brief notice on ProMED-mail, an online repository collating short descriptions of outbreaks of animal and human diseases in different countries, as well as other news snippets relating to diseases, such as grant announcements. That is where I had picked up the information on the Wuhan cases that George Gao and I spoke about.

The descriptions of outbreaks are clipped from

official sources, such as health authorities, but also from social media and local newspapers.

Every outbreak that becomes a global headline begins as a local rumour.

The ProMED alert that had caught my eye was dated December 30, 2019, next to a line reading simply: “Undiagnosed pneumonia – China (HU):RFI.” HU refers to Hubei, the central province in which the city of Wuhan is located; RFI signals a Request for Further Information.

Nobody knew it then, but that single line marked the debut of a new disease, one that would come to be called Covid-19 and cause the biggest upheaval to the global order since the Second World War. The line clicks through to an imperfect machine translation of a story relating to “an urgent notice on treatment of pneumonia of unknown cause” originally posted that evening by the Medical Administration of Wuhan Municipal Health Committee, concerning four patients with an unknown form of pneumonia.

A report appended underneath that urgent notice adds worrying detail gleaned on December 31: 27 people were in various hospitals in Wuhan with viral pneumonia or pulmonary (lung) infection. Two were recovering but seven were critical. All the patients apparently had links to the Wuhan South China Seafood Market (also known as the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market). The report added, “At present, related virus typing, isolation treatment, public opinion control and terminal disinfection are under way.”

On January 3, 2020, ProMED posted an update pulled from the South China Morning Post. The unexplained disease was spreading: 44 patients in Wuhan, up from 27; 11 seriously ill with breathing difficulties and lesions, or scarring, on both lungs. There was another unwelcome development: five people had shown up in Hong Kong with unexplained fever after visiting Wuhan.

Just a week into the new year, the unknown disease was no longer wreaking havoc just

The Times Magazine 25

‘THE CHINESE KNEW MORE THAN THEY WERE LETTING ON’ in Wuhan, a city of 11 million people and a major travel hub in central China. A lot of people were becoming anxious – and for good reason. A week is an unsettlingly long time in the world of infectious diseases.

By Friday, January 10, it was clear that the Chinese authorities knew more than they were letting on.

Scientists track how viruses relate to each other by drawing family trees, in much the same way that people can trace their own origins back by following the trail of births, deaths and marriages. Instead of surnames and family records, viruses reveal their origins in their genetic sequences. Genetic overlap pinpoints the similarities between different viruses, signposting when they potentially share a common ancestor. Likenesses between human viruses and animal ones can also narrow down which animal might have transferred a virus across the species barrier to us.

Eddie Holmes is a British-born virologist and professor at the University of Sydney who does exactly this sort of viral detective work. He is, in my book, the outstanding evolutionary biologist of his generation, with an extraordinary brain when it comes to pattern recognition.

Since 2012, Eddie has worked closely with Yong-Zhen Zhang, a professor at Fudan University, Shanghai, on finding and identifying new animal viruses, and Wuhan is a familiar locale in their virus-hunting network.

They don’t normally study samples from humans but genomic sequencing, the method used to place viruses in their family trees, can also be used as a diagnostic, to help identify mystery viruses found in hospital patients.

On January 3, 2020, a sample taken from a pneumonia patient hospitalised in Wuhan on December 26, 2019, arrived at Zhang’s lab packed in dry ice in a metal box. By 2am on January 5, after a 40-hour shift in the lab, Zhang and colleagues had worked out its genetic sequence. It was a coronavirus that looked suspiciously like SARS-CoV-1, the virus responsible for the 2002-2003 outbreak.

Eddie still remembers the phone call (Sydney is two hours ahead of Shanghai).

“We agreed that he should tell the Ministry of Health in China immediately. Zhang did it the same day.

“Zhang told them it was clearly very closely related to the first Sars virus and that it was very likely to be respiratory because of its relatedness. He also told the ministry that people should take precautions.”

That phrase – people should take precautions – was a direct warning that this new virus, like its dangerous predecessor,

26 The Times Magazine

might be able to spread from one person to another. Eddie says this should have been interpreted back then as a warning of human-to-human transmission. In the end, China did not confirm this publicly until January 20, more than two weeks later.

While Zhang informed Beijing, some of the sequence was deposited on January 5, 2020, on GenBank, an online collection of publicly available gene sequences run by the National Institutes of Health in the US. But it takes a while for those deposited sequences to be checked, edited and put through the system in a way that others can use. There was an imperative to post the entire sequence more publicly. Anyone, anywhere, could then use that published information to develop a diagnostic test. The world would, at a stroke, have eyes on the virus.

There was, though, a major hitch: Zhang was told in no uncertain terms not to publish anything. The gagging order, Eddie understood, came from Beijing. The warnings to stay silent were real – medics had already been disciplined by the Chinese Communist Party for discussing hospital cases online.

Eddie and Zhang hit on a loophole to get round the gagging order: the government ban on publishing information about the outbreak did not preclude them from writing and submitting a scientific paper. Holmes contacted the journal Nature; one of its editors urged them to submit something as soon as possible. By January 7, 2020, Zhang’s paper, with Eddie as one of the co-authors, reached Nature’s offices in London.

Things began moving quickly and chaotically. On January 8, rumours began circulating that the new virus was a coronavirus, putting it in the same family as Sars. A day later, the Chinese authorities confirmed the fact. But, otherwise, and especially on the genome sequence of the virus, they were silent.

Not only had Zhang contacted China’s Ministry of Health with details of the new virus, but Eddie was sure that, in doing so, Zhang had merely confirmed information that Beijing already knew. Eddie had screenshots of messages on WeChat, a social media platform in China, suggesting two private companies had already sequenced the virus in December 2019.

Eddie, disturbed at what was looking increasingly like a decision by China to hold back information on a new disease, rang me to tell me that he’d been trying to get the sequence released, with no luck. After that call, I realised that he and I were probably the only two people in the world outside China who knew there was this sequence

in existence and what it was, with all the potential consequences.

Eddie and I had a series of frantic calls between London and Sydney on the night of Thursday, January 9, which stretched into the early hours of Friday. We hatched a plan that Eddie would go back to his collaborators in China and I would go back to George Gao at China CDC. We would threaten to go public if they refused to disclose the information by Saturday morning GMT. We decided to tell them, “If you don’t release the sequence in the next 24 hours, we will release it the next day.” By 9.18pm London time, and 8.18am in Sydney, Eddie and I had committed to the high-stakes pact to force China’s hand.

The world had to have access to that sequence because the world needed to be able to diagnose it. It was going to appear in Beijing, in Hong Kong and Singapore in the hours or days that followed. It was going to spread everywhere.

Eddie remembers the pressure-cooker atmosphere of those days too. Zhang deserved public credit for leading the consortium’s sequencing breakthrough – but Eddie also knew his colleague would be at the sharp end of Beijing’s displeasure for shattering the government’s code of silence.

“My big concern was not getting Zhang in trouble,” Eddie says now. “I called him and said, ‘There’s a lot of pressure to release the sequence. I think we have to do it.’ Zhang was on a plane going from Shanghai to Beijing, on the runway literally waiting to take off.”

Zhang asked his collaborator for a moment to think. It didn’t take long. Perhaps Zhang had already decided the world had waited long enough. Before the plane took to the skies, Zhang rang Eddie back with a simple message: “OK, let’s release it.” Eddie phoned me immediately.

By the time Zhang’s plane touched down just over two hours later, the information was out. n Extracted from Spike – The Virus v the People: The Inside Story by Jeremy Farrar with Anjana Ahuja, published on July 22 (Profile Books, £14.99)

Extract continues tomorrow in The Sunday Times

THE SHOCKING TRUTH What the government got wrong

CONFESSIONS OF A FASHION EDITOR AND MILLENNIAL MUM ‘I used to be hungover on the front row.

Now I take my baby on boozy brunches.

So shoot me’

Harriet Walker, 35, grew up knocking back pints and Jägerbombs. When she got a job in the fashion industry she graduated to wine and cocktails. Two kids have decreased her units – but her party days gave the Times writer an idea for a new novel PORTRAITS Dan Kennedy STYLING Hannah Rogers

Harriet Walker wears dress, 16Arlington (brownsfashion.com); shoes, malonesouliers.com Story continues on page 38

T OU P LL EE PU D K AN

Eat! EASY DINNER PARTY FOR FOUR

Saturday night entertaining: here’s how to do it – in case you’ve forgotten!

PRAWN STARTER

F

irst it was bubbles only, then groups of six outside, then indoors but with the windows open and 2m between guests…

The rules have been so confusing that it’s no wonder most of us gave up on entertaining. But with Monday’s lifting of remaining sanctions, we’re out of excuses.

Lost the habit after 16 months? Here is a simple three-course dinner menu from Leith’s-trained stylist and cookery writer Lizzie Kamenetzky to ease you back in gently. There’s a seafood starter, a choice of mains and a crowd-pleasing chocolate pudding. “My passion for cooking comes from my mum,” she says.

“She taught me that food should be fun; it doesn’t have to be fancy.” Tony Turnbull

GARLIC AND TOMATO PRAWNS Serves 4 Prep: 10 minutes. Cook: 20 minutes These prawns are simply delicious – try to buy raw prawns in their shell.

• 2 tbsp olive oil • 1 banana shallot, finely chopped

34 The Times Magazine

BEEF MAIN COURSE

• 3 garlic cloves, finely sliced • 125ml dry white wine • 1 rosemary sprig • 400g tin cherry tomatoes • 700g shell-on raw king prawns • Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper Heat the oil in a pan and gently fry the shallot for 5 minutes, then add the garlic and cook for 30 seconds. Add the wine, rosemary and tomatoes and bubble for 10-12 minutes, then add the prawns and cook until they are pink.

Season to taste and serve immediately.

SPICE-CRUSTED RUMP CAP WITH PUY LENTIL SALAD Serves 4 Prep: 15 minutes. Cook: 35 minutes Rump cap, or picanha as it is known in Brazil, is still little known over here. It is the meat that sits on top of the whole rump – you get a little bit of it when you buy rump steak. Instead of slicing as part of the rump, it is removed and sold as a whole piece. It is like a steak roasting joint, meaning you get the best of both worlds.

• 2 tsp black peppercorns • 2 tsp sea salt • 2 tsp cumin seeds • 1 tsp coriander seeds • A good grating of nutmeg • A pinch of dried chilli flakes • 1.5kg whole rump cap • Olive oil, to drizzle For the lentils • 300g puy lentils • 600ml chicken stock • Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper • 1 sweet onion, finely sliced • 1 tbsp cider vinegar • 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil • A handful of flat-leaf parsley, chopped 1. Preheat the oven to 180C (200C non-fan).

Mix together the peppercorns, salt and spices in a mortar and pound to a coarse mixture with a pestle. Heat a heavy-based pan over a high heat, drizzle the beef with olive oil and sear briefly on all sides until golden. Press the spice crust all over the beef and put it in a roasting tin, then roast for 30-35 minutes until cooked but still pink inside – it should read

COD MAIN COURSE

Eat! EASY DINNER PARTY

PORK MAIN COURSE

50-52C on a digital thermometer. Leave it to rest for at least 10 minutes before serving.

2. Meanwhile, put the lentils in a pan with the stock, season and bring to the boil. Simmer for 15-20 minutes until tender and the stock is absorbed. Drain any excess stock and tip the lentils into a bowl. Toss with the sweet onion.

Mix the cider vinegar with plenty of sea salt and black pepper, then whisk in the olive oil to make a glossy dressing. Pour over the lentils and toss together with the parsley.

Serve with slices of rump cap.

required except for the crackling. But it’s the crackling that seals the deal, making this a truly great roast.

with the ribs over a low heat and add the cider.

Bubble and scrape all the yummy bits from the ribs into the gravy. Serve with the pork belly.

• 3-4kg piece of outdoor-reared pork belly, ribs removed but retained and skin scored • 3 red onions, cut into thin wedges • 2 tsp juniper berries, roughly crushed • A drizzle of olive oil • 1 tbsp sea salt flakes • 1 tbsp green fennel seeds • 300ml dry cider

HERB-CRUSTED BAKED COD Serves 4

Tip If you can’t get hold of a whole rump cap you can use a whole piece of sirloin steak instead – imagine 4-5 fat steaks together in a piece and you should have the right amount.

1. Preheat the oven to 200C (220C non-fan).

Put the ribs of the pork belly into a roasting tin, scatter with the onions and juniper berries and drizzle with a little oil. Use the bones as a trivet for the belly to sit on. Mix the salt with the fennel seeds and press all over the skin.

2. Roast for 30 minutes, then reduce the temperature to 130C (150C non-fan) and cook for 4-5 hours until really tender. Increase the temperature to 200C (220C non-fan) for 5-10 minutes to crackle the skin at the end if you need to.

3. Remove from the oven and transfer to a warmed serving plate. Put the roasting tin

SLOW-ROAST JUNIPER AND FENNEL SEED PORK BELLY Serves 4 generously Prep: 15 minutes. Cook: 4-5 hours An almost magical transformation occurs when you slow-cook pork until the tender shreds of meat fall apart; hardly a tooth is

Prep: 15 minutes. Cook: 15 minutes Pressing a crust onto fish before baking is a great way to add loads of extra flavour and texture to the finished dish. It also protects the delicate fish from the heat of the oven so that the fish cooks perfectly.

• 2 sides of cod fillet, about 350g each • Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper • 150g fresh white breadcrumbs • 1 garlic clove, crushed • Zest of 1 lemon • A handful of chopped flat-leaf parsley • A handful of chopped soft herbs, such as tarragon, chives or dill • 2 tbsp mayonnaise • 1 tbsp Dijon mustard • 2 tbsp capers, chopped • Extra virgin olive oil, to drizzle

The Times Magazine 35

Eat! EASY DINNER PARTY

SALMON MAIN COURSE

CHOCOLATE DESSERT

PHOTOGRAPHS Laura Edwards

1. Preheat the oven to 180C (200C non-fan) and line a baking tray with baking paper.

2. Season the fish all over with salt and pepper and put on the lined tray. Mix together the remaining ingredients, adding enough olive oil to bind and season. Press the mixture all over the fish and bake in the top of the oven for 12-15 minutes until the fish is just cooked and the crust is golden.

BAKED SALMON WITH FENNEL Serves 4 Prep: 10 minutes. Cook: 25 minutes Cooking a whole fish or a large side is a wonderful way both to impress your friends and family and to ensure you have plenty of leftovers for the next day. In season, sea trout is a wonderful alternative to the usual salmon.

• 2 fennel bulbs, finely sliced • 2 lemons • 1 salmon side, about 750g • Sea salt and freshly ground black pepper

36 The Times Magazine

• 1 small bunch of dill • Knob of unsalted butter • 150ml white wine or vermouth 1. Preheat the oven to 160C (180C non-fan).

Line a roasting tin with foil and scatter the fennel into it. Slice 1 lemon and scatter the slices into the tin, then put the fish on top, skin-side down. Season and scatter with the dill. Dot all over with the butter.

2. Pour the wine around the outside of the fish and add the juice of the remaining lemon.

Bring the foil up and over and scrunch to form a parcel. Roast for 20-25 minutes until it is just opaque and you can flake it gently with a fork or the tip of a knife.

RICH CHOCOLATE MOUSSE Makes 8 pots (2 each!)

Prep: 25 minutes, plus chilling • 200g dark chocolate, about 70 per cent cocoa solids • 150ml double cream

• 3 large free-range eggs, separated • 45g caster sugar 1. Break the chocolate into small pieces and put in a large heatproof bowl. Heat the cream to almost boiling, then pour over the chocolate. Stir to mix, then add the egg yolks.

2. Whisk the egg whites in a clean bowl until they form soft peaks. Gradually whisk in the sugar until you have a glossy light meringue.

3. Mix a quarter of the meringue into the chocolate mixture to loosen it, then very carefully fold in the rest, being careful not to knock out too much of the air. Spoon into 8 x 150ml glasses and chill for at least 2 hours before serving. n

Extracted from Batch But Better: 3 Meals from 1 by Lizzie Kamenetzky, published by Kyle Books (£16.99)

Harriet Walker Continued from page 31

HAIR: NARAD KUTOWAROO AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING UNITE. MAKE-UP: JOE PICKERING AT CAROL HAYES MANAGEMENT USING SWEED. COCKTAIL SHAKER, GLASSES, ICE BUCKET AND BAR CART, ALL SOHOHOME.COM

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y worst hangover was on a work trip to Los Angeles. I woke up in a hotel room – alone, thank God – with no idea how I had got there, wearing nothing but my pants. My handbag was gone, my phone and bank cards with it.

My last memory was of doing shots in a gay bar with two men I’d met about 12 hours earlier. Then: nothing.

I’d like to say this was a wake-up call – along with the 50-plus missed calls I found from worried friends and colleagues on my work BlackBerry as I tried to piece together what had happened during my blackout. It terrified me enough to run up a £400 phone bill as I cried across the Atlantic to my sister, but it was just another episode in a phase of my life I now refer to as the “drunkest one in the room” era.

It was around this time that my friends nicknamed me “the female Tom” after a pal who was invariably the other drunkest person in the room. I laughed along but was secretly slightly wounded: Tom – often barely coherent by the end of the night, he once ate a cigarette and was sick into his own coat pocket – was always much drunker than me. Wasn’t he?

Pissed Me started arguments and ended friendships, made people cry and more often wince. She broke a leg and an ankle (her own), a shoulder (ditto) and several windows (other people’s). Hungover Me had panic attacks in unfamiliar bathrooms, the back row of the cinema, at my desk. For a long time, Saturday was just the day I spent hiding under the duvet trying not to spin out about details I couldn’t quite remember from the night before. My first words on waking were usually, “What did I say last night?” I didn’t always recognise the person who replied.

But everyone I knew was doing the same.

For a while we called it “getting Hannah-ed” after another girl in our group, who had a new phone every week for a year after leaving her old one in yet another cab while passed out.

Someone else came to in a stranger’s child’s bedroom one morning after she got lost and fell asleep on the nearest doorstep. One friend took a nap under a lorry when she couldn’t find her keys at 4am. Another opened her bleary eyes to see a policeman knocking on the glass of the Soho phonebox she’d bunked down in, checking whether she was alive. She went straight into work afterwards.

During this phase, I went for a check-up with my doctor and bashfully revealed a unitsper-week number that, although a considerable underestimate of what I was actually consuming, nevertheless convinced him to hand over a leaflet headed with jolly bubble letters that asked, “Are you an alcoholic?”

38 The Times Magazine

If you drink more than four times a week (tick), have five or more alcoholic drinks in one day (does five glasses of the same wine count?), feel guilty or remorseful after drinking (tick, tick, tick), the answer, technically, is yes.

“Oh gosh,” I said to the GP, scanning the list earnestly. “No, none of these.”

The thing is, I don’t think I was an alcoholic. Or, if I was, then most of my friends were too – and if they were, then most women in their twenties probably were back then as well.

“Have you ever had a drink while hungover and then immediately felt better?” the doctor asked, citing another symptom.

Er, who hasn’t?

As geriatric millennials born between 1980 and 1985 (we eat lots of avocado but can’t code), my friends and I just missed out on the second summer of love. Instead, our cheap,

that are strategically planned around enjoying cans of craft beer with pretty labels in other people’s homes. We watch dessert parlours opening on our high streets and pity the teenagers inside them who appear not to be drinking. Recently, we have been convinced of the benefit of alcohol-free lager on Mondays and Tuesdays.

Those in Generation Pisshead drink less often than their forebears but are far more likely to binge when they do, pushing the after-effects of alcohol into new territory of almost existential angst, now known as hangxiety. So intense were my own forays (I once woke up convinced I’d beaten someone up the night before), I was inspired to write a novel based around one wild night and the ensuing fallout the morning after. The Wedding Night is a mystery that turns on the decisions – and the mistakes – a group of friends make while they’re drunk.

I broke an ankle, made people cry, had panic attacks at my desk. But so did everyone I knew strong Ecstasy was a bottle of Lambrini each with an Archers chaser before we left the house. We came of age during the era of Britpop ladettes drinking pints and graduated into a world full of Jägerbombs: a caffeinated shot that warp-speeds feeling sozzled into becoming totally shitfaced within ten minutes, and which scientists have compared to cocaine for its moreish qualities. Rumour has it our hen nights caused the great prosecco boom of 2013-2015. We are Generation Pisshead.

We grew up with blurry Britney (39) and lairy Lindsay (34), mercilessly mocked in the celeb mags of the time yet emulated by scantily clad young women with no coats on around the world. Now Michaela Coel (33), Billie Piper (38), and Kaley Cuoco (35) are our pisshead poster girls for their angsty and realistically messy turns in the award-winning shows I May Destroy You, I Hate Suzie and The Flight Attendant. In April, Emerald Fennell (35) won an Oscar for turning our worst nights and shameful secrets into an unsettling triumph in Promising Young Woman, starring Carey Mulligan (36).

We laugh along with Amy Schumer (40) because we also google “Can I drink on these antibiotics?” every time we pick up a prescription. Those of us with children bristle at the label “white wine mom”, not because it’s vaguely misogynistic but because we have moved on to rosé actually. Carrie Symonds (33) might have dissed our John Lewis furniture, but I’ll bet she drinks Whispering Angel too. We take our children on playdates

Incidentally, I’m writing this while a bit pissed on maternity leave. No, really – I’ve just come back from a boozy brunch with my baby.

That’s how we roll in Generation Pisshead.

After my first child, my NCT group met up in the pub rather than the park. Today, a friend and I had three proseccos, smashed avo and an espresso martini in the knowledge that both we and the baby would come home and have a nap. Except, obviously, I’m writing this instead. I know what you’re thinking, but I’m not an alcoholic. I just – to use another millennialism – love the sesh.

And I’m not alone. Forget the football terraces; drinking culture is increasingly female. Trends for flavoured gins, hard seltzers and celebrity rosés – produced by the likes of Kylie Minogue, Sarah Jessica Parker and Angelina Jolie – are powered by women.

Female drinkers were behind the rise during lockdown of cocktail delivery kits, perfectly packaged for Insta. My mother used to remind me that a lady never drinks alone, but for many last year there was no other way to do it.

After lagging behind when it came to alcohol consumption, women of my age now drink as much as men. Some studies suggest that younger women may even be outdrinking them, with 40 per cent admitting in 2017 that they had binged in the previous week compared with 34.4 per cent of men. During lockdown and the pandemic, research suggests that more women than men drank at higher levels than usual. In Australia, a survey found 18.1 per cent of women increased their

Dress, Victoria Beckham

drinking during the Covid crisis, compared with 15.5 per cent of men. For me, too much booze now comes with too heavy a price to pay regularly: the last terrible hangover I had, in 2018, saw me hunched over the loo as my two-year-old patted my shoulder, and I spiralled into trembling dread on the sofa in front of a Disney film while she climbed on me. It was a pre-pandemic bacchanal with colleagues that did it, and I spent the rest of the weekend worrying that I might get the sack on Monday (I didn’t).

After that I gave up white wine, as have so many other women I know. It makes me

giddy, bright red, opinionated, fighty, teary, black out and itchy, in that order, and I can’t help but wonder whether I gave myself an allergy by using it as a sort of social dialysis every evening between the ages of 18 and 27.

Without white wine I no longer have fights or blackouts or terror the next day, but what else have I lost? For me, white wine was once the root of female friendship – the solidarity found in a couple of bottles, a pile of handbags on a dancefloor.

While I was writing The Wedding Night, I asked women for their drunkest stories. I asked uni friends, mum friends and work

friends. Most people over 30 had one that was mortifying; most people under 30 barely qualified. Perhaps they hadn’t reached their messiest years yet – or perhaps Generation Pisshead has scared them off the sort of booze culture we imbibed from an early age.

“Drinking in my twenties meant horrendous memory loss, lash rash, losing my phone, pissing the bed and putting myself in mortal danger on a regular basis,” said Jennifer, 35. “It was great.”

“I once fell asleep in the toilet of a bar and woke as the staff were about to lock me in,” remembered Laura, 38. “My bag was gone and I only managed to get home because a man at a bus stop gave me £2 to stop me crying.”

I’m aware that me and my friends have been “lucky” and many young women are not. Perhaps that’s part of the hangxiety: the feeling that we only just got away with it.

Why women feel so much guilt alongside the headaches and the nausea, and men seem not to. Perhaps it’s why so many younger women have become “sober-curious” in recent years, or given up alcohol altogether.

The current 16-24 cohort are the least likely group to drink yet. In the States, the number of teetotal young people has risen by a third in ten years; in the UK, 40-yearolds are now more likely to be caught drinkdriving than 18-year-olds. It’s partly to do with the rising costs of booze versus declining wages, but Gen Z’s interest in wellness is also key, both for its health benefits and the cool points and elite social status a “clean” lifestyle now confers.

More than that, as older millennial women’s messier moments ride the zeitgeist in fiction and drama, younger women are all too aware that any slip-ups they make in real life are far more likely to be captured on screens and social media and shared. Not for the first time am I grateful to have lived out my mistakes before social media really took off – something else I’ve tried to explore in The Wedding Night.

Men have been sharing drinking stories for centuries while women’s are only just becoming acceptable, but where theirs get rehashed for entertainment, ours remain cautionary tales, especially now that the traditional night-out code of omertà is under threat from our smartphones.

Still, nobody batted an eyelid at two women with buggies drinking prosecco and martinis over brunch today. In fact, we tagged ourselves – and our drinks – on Instagram of our own volition. And I even managed to write this piece. High functioning or what? n The Wedding Night by Harriet Walker is out now (Hodder & Stoughton, £14.99). To read an extract, go to thetimes.co.uk

The Times Magazine 39

THE GEN Z TWIN ACTIVISTS OF JERUSALEM (2 MILLION FOLLOWERS AND COUNTING) Muna and Mohammed el-Kurd are 23-year-old siblings who have become social media stars. They are famous worldwide for live streaming the violence they witness on their streets in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood.

Charlotte Edwardes meets them at home

Mohammed and Muna el-Kurd photographed at their home in Jerusalem by Tanya Habjouqa. Opposite: the twins following their release after being arrested on June 6

PREVIOUS SPREAD: AHMAD GHARABLI/GETTY IMAGES, MARCUS YAM/GETTY IMAGES. THIS SPREAD: EMMANUEL DUNAND/GETTY IMAGES, AHMAD GHARABLI/GETTY IMAGES, @MUNA.KURD15/INSTAGRAM

T

heirs began the way of modern movements of resistance: with Muna el-Kurd taking out her iPhone and live streaming the scenes right in front of her.

Mohammed, her brother, followed suit. Two Palestinian 23-year-olds with their Apple Inc weapons, documenting the almost daily violence they witness from armed settlers and military police. What else could they do? They didn’t know if anyone would watch. They didn’t know if anyone would care about their neighbourhood in east Jerusalem.

But the numbers began ticking up. Faster and faster. Suddenly everyone was talking about the Gen Z twins in Sheikh Jarrah. In a few short months they have amassed 2.7 million social media followers across Instagram and Twitter, among them the American politician Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Even The Jerusalem Post has called them “iconic twin activists”.

Last month their Instagram Stories drew so much attention that the authorities – perhaps unsure of how to handle the situation – arrested them.

Crowds gathered outside the police station where they were being held on June 6. Seeing the protest, the interrogating officer turned to Muna: “What do you do? Why are all these people here to see you?” Muna replied, “I just document what you do in my neighbourhood.”

Certainly, if Instagram Live is a crime, the whole of Gen Z is at risk, because this is a contemporary response to social injustice.

It’s what Darnella Frazier did when she saw a policeman with his knee on George Floyd’s neck in 2020; what Feidin Santana did when he saw unarmed Walter Scott shot in the back by a US policeman in 2015. The audience doesn’t need every twist and turn narrated; viewers want to look at their screens, see the footage and make up their own minds.

“I feel there is a new generation of people all around the world who feel that they want to be informed like this,” Mohammed says.

So powerful is the threat of viral transparency, one of his friends in Jerusalem was recently arrested on suspicion of wanting to put footage on TikTok. “They actually said the charge was ‘TikTok’,” he says. It took the friend nearly three weeks to get her device returned.

Mohammed’s day job is an adjunct professor in creative writing at the City University of New York, where he is studying for a master’s degree. He has a book, Rifqa, published by Haymarket, coming out in October. Muna was a star high-school footballer and is a trained clown therapist, a job she does in hospitals to help children afflicted by trauma. (She shows me clips on her phone of her dressed in a bright wig of primary colours, a red nose and comedy specs, handing out balloons made into swords to smiling kids in Nablus.)

42 The Times Magazine

At the beginning of July, Muna graduated from the journalism school at Birzeit University, Ramallah. She joked in her graduation speech that her family hoped the ceremony would be over quickly, “before we find settlers cooking maklouba in the middle of our home”.

But the fear that the family can’t leave their home without someone seizing it is serious.

Sheikh Jarrah is a short walk from the Old City. It’s long been targeted by right-wing American-Israeli settlers determined to overturn Palestinian ownership of houses awarded two generations ago to families in compensation for property they lost when they were displaced from their homes in Israel. These settlers aim to take the houses of Palestinian families using pre-peace agreement documents and discriminatory property laws that favour Jews over Arabs.

Under international law, the settlers’ claims are illegal because east Jerusalem is still occupied territory. But the ideological goal of the settlers is to turn Palestinian neighbourhoods Jewish, to consolidate control of the city and declare it the capital of Israel. Palestinians want east Jerusalem to be the capital of their own future state. The Israeli Supreme Court initially ruled in favour of the settlers, but the result of an appeal is due on August 2.

Many Palestinians feel the efforts to evict the 300 families from this block are in microcosm the fate faced by them all. As such, the streets were a spark in the recent flare-up of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian Authority.

In late April, tension here merged with demonstrations at the al-Aqsa mosque in the Old City. The mosque is in an area sacred to both Jews and Muslims. During Ramadan, Israeli police stormed the area injuring hundreds of Palestinians. On May 10, Hamas, the militant group that controls Gaza, issued Israel with an ultimatum to withdraw from Sheikh Jarrah and the mosque complex. When the deadline passed, it fired thousands of rockets into Israel, most of which were blocked by the “iron dome”. Israel retaliated with airstrikes.

In total, 13 Israelis, 2 of them children, were killed; 256 Palestinians – including 66 children – lost their lives. A ceasefire was agreed on May 21 (but broken temporarily on June 16).

But Sheikh Jarrah continues to be a flashpoint. During the day, the el-Kurds’ street is relatively peaceful. Elderly men sit on chairs on the pavements, kids weave up and down on bikes, teens wear Marvel T-shirts and Nike trainers.

Once the sun goes down, the atmosphere becomes charged. The main street has a police checkpoint at either end that prevents Palestinians from outside the neighbourhood entering (even taxi drivers), but is porous to settlers, mostly young men wearing T-shirts

Muna at a community breakfast in her home neighbourhood

A friend was arrested for wanting to put footage on TikTok. ‘They actually said the charge was “TikTok” ’ over tzitzit – traditional tassels – chinos and sandals. Some are armed. At all times “Border Police”, with assault rifles, grenade launchers and pistols, are present.

The evening before I first meet them, I watch Muna’s live feed. Settlers are attacking families with pepper spray. The police join in, using batons to beat the Palestinian youths and sound bombs and smoke to disorientate them. The ominous crackle of flares and bangs of grenades can be heard streets away. Mohammed posts a film of the exploded glass of their sitting room pendant light, which shattered when a grenade was lobbed in. His hand is shaking as he holds the shards to the camera.

“It’s just really overwhelming, the violence,” he tells me when I arrive at his house the next afternoon. “Two days ago, they threw tear gas inside our neighbour Qasim’s house. They target [Arab] journalists and medics who try to help us. People who are assaulted and then collapse are refused medical attention.”

We sit down on plastic chairs under a kumquat tree that shades the path. There’s a fig tree too, an olive tree and a wild rose. But the pervading smell is a putrid, gagging stench.

“Skunk water,” Mohammed explains. “The police spray it at our houses.” First used by the Israeli military in 2008, it’s ten times worse when it’s fresh, he says. Like excrement and rotting flesh.

“Police violence is not only unacceptable, it’s illegitimate, right?” says Mohammed. “But

Israeli security forces on horseback, Sheikh Jarrah, May 18

A protest by Mohammed four days before his arrest last month

A woman is detained by security services in Sheikh Jarrah in May

The twins are reunited following their release from jail, June 6

there are times when it’s absurd here. When people were playing chess on the pavement and they were beaten by batons; when children were flying balloons and an entire unit of militarised police on horseback came to confiscate the balloons. There is a video of people getting brutally beaten for flying a kite. There is a circus, a theatre, in the way the brutality operates in this neighbourhood. It feels more psychological than anything else.”

He says it’s hard to communicate this sometimes, even for him, a man whose profession is words and description. “How can you communicate the fact that the military came down on the population for a bunch of balloons? You sound ridiculous. There is just an absurdity to this oppression that makes it sound fictional – the chess, the balloons. One time in mid-May we were in our neighbours’ house playing music and the police busted through the gigantic metal gate, destroyed all the flowerpots, and took the speaker system.”

He pauses and adds, voice weighted with irony, “They arrested the speakers.”

Mohammed is 6ft 2in, pale and slight, with an otherworldly manner that might be construed as fey. He has a low-key way of speaking and an almost indiscernible lisp, which contrasts with his sister’s syncopated energy. Muna’s voice is a fierce allegretto in Arabic.

Every time they go out, Muna says, their parents panic. “They say, ‘Don’t go too close to the soldiers!’ ” Mohammed says their mother, Maysoon, phones Mohammed “every single time I leave the neighbourhood to make sure that, when I come back through the checkpoint, I pass without a problem”.

Today, he took a photograph of the checkpoint and they surrounded him and demanded his phone. “I said no. And they said, ‘Give us your phone or we will arrest you.’

And I said, ‘OK, arrest me.’ They said, ‘You can’t film us,’ and I said, ‘I can, actually.’ They yell at people for taking photos because they worry about social media.” While the police were distracted by a car, he walked away.

The el-Kurds live on the main street in Sheikh Jarrah. Their house is two flat-roofed blocks of buttery Jerusalem stone. The far block, where the twins live with their parents, brother and sister, was built in 1956, the front annexe in 2000 by the twins’ father, Nabil, now 77. Because 94 per cent of building applications submitted by Palestinians are rejected, Nabil built it without proper authorisation and a local judge immediately placed a demolition order on it and fined him 100,000 shekels, which he paid. The annexe remained empty while Nabil fought the demolition order and tried retrospectively to organise a building permit.

And then, in 2009, an American settler from Long Island was allowed by the same

authorities to squat in the property and the demolition order was replaced by a demolition ban. While I am with the twins, this man from Long Island walks up the front path, dressed in an oversized white T-shirt and sweatpants, dragging behind him a wheelie suitcase. His name is Yaacov Fauci and Nabil says he didn’t speak Hebrew when he arrived. Fauci seems to enjoy the notoriety of being the star of a viral clip made by Muna back in May. “You are stealing my house,” Muna told him across the front garden.

“And if I don’t steal it, someone else is going to steal it,” he replied.

“Yaacov,” she reasoned, “you know this is not your house.”

“Yes. But if I go, you don’t go back. So what’s the problem? Why are you yelling at me? I didn’t do this. I didn’t do this.”

What he means is that even if he moves out, the authorities will never allow the el-Kurds to live in this part of their house, which they built on their land. He means that the ultimate responsibility for the settlers are the authorities. “I didn’t do this,” he says, because the Israeli authorities did.

On the opposite side of the road from the el-Kurds is the home known as the Ghawi house, which was taken over by settlers a few months before the el-Kurds lost their annexe in 2009. It’s an extraordinary sight, like a makeshift fort, covered in Israeli flags, CCTV cameras and metal grilles, with a neon Star of David blazing from the roof. A small boy with blonde payot, or sidelocks, and a dummy in his mouth peers through the bars of the gate before a sibling not much older removes him.

A few days earlier a petrol bomb was thrown from this house into a neighbouring home. It landed in a large palm tree, fortunately, causing no injury. While I am in the street with another British journalist, settlers in the street call him over. “What are the dogs saying to you?” they ask him, referring to the el-Kurds.

Mohammed and Muna were 11 when the settlers arrived at their home. Muna remembers turning into the street and one of the neighbours running up to her, agitated, repeating, “They took your house!” She told him not to say such things. But as she walked further down the street she saw a commotion, soldiers and scores of settlers. The soldiers wouldn’t let her in, so she ran to the neighbours’ and jumped over the wall.

On the floor was her aunt, who had passed out. Someone was trying to revive her.

Mohammed remembers being called out of class by his teachers and told simply to go home, that his parents needed him. Mayhem greeted him. Later that night, settlers took the cot of his little sister, Maha, who had just turned three, and set fire to it in front of her.

“For a few years she couldn’t walk past the

The Times Magazine 43

TANYA HABJOUQA

place where it happened without wetting her pants,” he says.

Before Fauci, the people who moved in lived there on shift rotation, usually three at a time, always men. Many settlers are Kahanist, supporters of American-born Meir Kahane, who believe in the annexation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Israel and the forcible removal of non-Jews. Kahane was the inspiration behind the Ibrahimi massacre in Hebron in 1994, where 29 people were shot dead while they were praying.

Their decision to start filming their experiences was born, says Mohammed, out of sheer frustration. He was sick of seeing Palestinian deaths reported in the passive voice – “As if they just, pfff, died” – with no responsibility apportioned. He says when he was asked to do a podcast interview by The Washington Post, they censored his description of east Jerusalem as under “occupation” – something internationally recognised.

He says he wants to be able to use words like “colonialism” and “apartheid”.

The death threats he receives on social media don’t worry him any more. “It was difficult the first 100 times, but then it becomes…” He shrugs.

Muna was asleep when five plain-clothes officers, two soldiers and three uniformed officers banged on the front door at 9.30am to arrest her on June 6. They told her the charge was “disturbing public order” and a female intelligence officer accompanied her to her bedroom and told her to dress.

“She watched me, demanding to see every article of clothing that I was going to wear.

And then she told me I couldn’t wear the little plastic pin that holds your hijab in place [she shows it to me]. I said, ‘You’re scared of this small thing? What could I do with it?’ And she said, ‘Don’t wear it.’

“I was scared because of the way they entered my house. There were so many of them and they had guns and Tasers.” They refused to let her wash her face, brush her teeth or use the bathroom and led her from her house in handcuffs.

Mohammed wasn’t at home, so made his own way to the police station. He was held in a cell with his ankles cuffed. “The guard took his Taser out of its holster, put his finger on the trigger and held it next to my head for the entire time.”

While Muna was scared, she also knew she had done nothing wrong. During the interrogation, the officer accused her of inciting young men to attack the police.

“I said, ‘Show me. If you’re telling the truth, show me where I ever said that.’ She couldn’t.”

The officer asked if she had a problem with the police. And then whether she had a problem with Jews. “I told her, no, I don’t.

I said, ‘The police have a problem with me,

They long to be like average 23-year-olds.

Muna follows Bella Hadid and KFC and those Jews [the settlers] have a problem with me.’ ” After seven hours, the police told Muna they were taking her to a car downstairs and moving her. They refused to tell her where she was going, they said, because they thought she would make some signal to the waiting crowds. Mohammed was told he would be going to the maskubya – the police jail – on Jaffa Road. “We’d be there a few nights, that’s what they said. Within seconds of Muna going to the car I could hear cheering, and as soon as people started cheering, I swear to you, I counted over 40 sound bombs. The investigator was shouting to distract me from counting. He shouted for three minutes straight. I stopped at 40 but there were many more. The street is narrow – I mean, it’s the same width as this path here. And they bombed indiscriminately.”

“I saw their bombs,” Muna says. “I saw my father, standing there, bombs going off at his feet, and I was screaming, ‘Dad! Dad!’ but he couldn’t hear. For a second you can’t hear anything.”

Once they arrived at the maskubya, they unlocked her ankle and handcuffs and told her to leave. “I was like, ‘What?’ And they started laughing, really laughing at me. They said, ‘Go! What, do you want us to imprison you?’ And I said, ‘Why would you imprison me?’ I said, ‘I don’t know how to get home from here. This is a strongly Jewish Israeli neighbourhood. Can I call my lawyer please?’ They said no. I said, ‘But you have to.’ They laughed even harder. They said, ‘Take a right, left, right [she does an impression of someone giving quick and confusing directions], and then in five minutes you’ll be at Damascus Gate [in the Old City]. And then they left.

“At this point, more than any other, I was scared. I was alone and afraid I was going to get jumped. I thought maybe they’d tipped off a mob of settlers. I had no phone.

Then there was a Palestinian driving past and I flagged him down and asked to use his phone to call my lawyer, who turned up to collect me.”

Neither of them can really explain why the police arrested them. They expect it to happen again. Mohammed says a friend has told him that there is a strategy to it – the more times the el-Kurd twins are arrested for no reason, the less powerful an impact it will have. The police will make it routine, hoping to exhaust their audience’s outrage.

How does he feel about going back to university in New York in September? “It feels difficult. And like a betrayal. It feels like such a luxury – and it shouldn’t – to be able to leave here willingly and to be able to walk around streets in New York without being questioned about your ID, or going to a house without worrying about being expelled.”

He flicks the lighter in his hand; a flame ignites, then goes out. “I worry mostly about people dying. Because it happens. Palestinians die. And it’s fine. We die. Like, constantly, instantly, suddenly, in between our breaths, we die. We just die and it’s fine, like nobody seems to care. I am terrified of a loved one or a family member or a community member being that death. A few hours in the news and then that’s it. And then I have to deal with the grief of it, like many families deal with this unresolved grief for decades and decades.”

The twins long to be like any other average 23-year-old. Muna follows Bella Hadid, actress Luna Mansour, KFC, Dyson Hair and a zoo that specialises in reptiles in California. Mohammed likes being in New York, likes the fact that he has friends from all backgrounds, of all sexual persuasions and nationalities. “I’m not very religious,” he tells me at one point.

But the nightmares and flashbacks follow him there. “It’s less the violent things that really wake me up at night – I mean, it’s all violent – but some of it is implicit things. Like I walked home once and there was a settler with a rifle sitting on the couch. Just sitting on the couch. That guy haunts me.”

I ask them both what they will do if the appeal goes against them on August 2. Muna sits up in her chair and stares me straight in the eye. “What would you do, if a thief tried to take your house? A foreign organisation working with the government to steal your home? That’s what we ask everybody in the world: what would you do? They will have to drag us out of our houses. We will not accept leaving. I am more than happy to chain myself to the inside of the house. They will have to drag me out.” n The Times Magazine 45

He meditates twice a day.

Loves fashion. Hates money.

Not your average tech billionaire José Neves is a Buddhist, a trained shoemaker – and now in the top 100 on The Sunday Times Rich List, thanks to his luxury website, Farfetch. Anna Murphy meets him PORTRAIT Andrew Woffinden

José Neves, 47.

Opposite: with his wife, Daniela Cecilio

PREVIOUS SPREAD: GETTY IMAGES. THIS SPREAD: ALAMY, GETTY IMAGES

I

t is probably easier to dismiss The Sunday Times Rich List as “completely meaningless” if you have just appeared on it. In at No 82 this year for the first time – with a personal fortune calculated at £2 billion – was José Neves, 47, the Portuguese founder of Farfetch, a London-based luxury fashion website.

“The numbers they publish go up and down daily,” he insists, when we meet at his deserted offices near so-called Silicon Roundabout in Shoreditch, London. “You put in names of people, and then [there are] numbers next to them. What does that mean?”

The fact that he has just moved into a giant gaff in flashy Holland Park might be one clue, I venture. “Of course! But money has nothing to do with happiness or personal realisation. It’s completely irrelevant after a certain point. If you make £100,000, that’s very nice compared with if you make £50,000.

Then if you make £300,000 that is even nicer.

But after that it’s pretty immaterial. I was happy when I had nothing.”

He is just getting started. “Money is a social token. It doesn’t exist without society. So it is also only a token when you get a big lump sum of it. It’s not yours. You’re just a caretaker.

It will go somewhere else when you die. So the question is – the responsibility is – what you do with that token.”

Neves is not, as you have probably clocked, your typical billionaire. He meditates for an hour every morning and 45 minutes every night. (“I started when I was 13, when it wasn’t cool. It’s become like, I don’t know, cleaning my teeth.”) He is Buddhist “by philosophy, not by religion”. (“I learnt that we’re all trying to model reality, but all we build are constructs.”)

His favourite book is The Master and his Emissary: the Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World by the polymath psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist. (Full disclosure: it’s mine too.) “That book shows that when the right brain and the left brain are both working and playing pennies then we are well integrated, we are happier and we make better decisions.”

Neves, it seems to me – from reading up about him and now talking to him – is the personification of left and right brain integration. Here is the proper tech geek who is also obsessed with fashion and who hybridised both passions to create a business in which each feeds into the other – training, en route, to be a cordwainer, just for the lols.

Here is someone who forms “strategic alliances” with supposed competitors, most recently by way of a deal with the luxury conglomerate Richemont and Alibaba, the Chinese “neo-retailer”. (More on what that means anon.) What strikes me more than the left/right stuff, however, is the vastness of his cerebrum generally. The blue sky-thinking

48 The Times Magazine

At the New York stock exchange for his company’s IPO, 2018

fashion statement every day, unless you go out naked, and I would argue that is a pretty strong fashion statement as well. The people who deny that fact, they usually have a very strict dress code. To them I would say, ‘How about I pick five random things and you wear them?’ And they would say, ‘No, no, no!’ You can live a life without being engaged with art or music, but you are engaged with fashion whether you want to be or not.”

Neves is not so much a brainbox as a brain I will get back to Neves in a minute. I need without a box. to talk you through Farfetch first. You might Today he is dressed all in black, in a shop the website regularly, like me. Lots of “Dries” jacket, nameless designer jeans and people do, hence Neves’s appearance on the ever so slightly bulbous-toed Oxfords worn Rich List. In 2020 Farfetch’s revenue rose – in true fashionista style – without socks. “It’s 64 per cent year on year to $1.7 billion, and a trend from 2000 that I never shook off,” he this year, he tells me, he is “committed” laughs. So far so fashion tech entrepreneur. In to becoming profitable, still vanishingly his twenties “cyberpunk” was more his style, rare among those businesses known he says. “I was like a cross as tech unicorns. “The lawyers won’t between the singer in the allow me to say it is going to happen, Prodigy and Bill Gates.” but I believe it is.”

More laughter.

Yet it’s more likely that you Growing up he “hated won’t have heard of Farfetch. fashion. I thought it was Its profile is considerably frivolous, a waste of time.” lower than that of an It was when he started online operation such as developing software for Net-A-Porter, and Neves the shoe factories near himself flies similarly where he lived in north below the radar compared Portugal, and going to with, say, Net’s founder, shoe fairs in Milan, “that Natalie Massenet – who I fell in love. There were has long since left the all these different styles, Neves with Anna Wintour business she started and different tribes.” was, until last year, nonWhat has he to say to executive co-chairman at those who argue clothes Farfetch alongside him. don’t matter? “It’s a myth!

The company’s premise is Everyone is making a

‘Money is completely irrelevant after a certain point. I was happy when I had nothing’

Labels on Farfetch: Dolce & Gabbana…

…Halpern

an interesting one. And it has ramifications that go far beyond a high-falutin retail realm in which a handbag from the cult label OffWhite, brought to your front door by way of a boutique in Athens called Simple Caracters, will set you back a not very simple £910.

Farfetch is, in short, a marketplace that hooks up its consumers with a curated array of boutiques from around the world. It doesn’t hold its own inventory; it provides an interface.

While most in the fashion industry see “clicks” (online purchases) to be in competition with “bricks” (concrete shops), Neves believes technology can support retail operations that might otherwise face closure by bringing them consumers they otherwise wouldn’t reach. He can also furnish them with data about their customers that supports both the service they offer and their strategic decision-making around, for example, what stock to carry – a luxury iteration of the “neo-retail” model built by Alibaba.

The potential profits are epic, with online sales in luxury currently at only 23 per cent in contrast to the 30 per cent they already equate to in many other categories. The way Neves sees it, all that data can pertain to IRL shopping too. “With your consent, I can know what you want to see in my store, even before you have stepped in.”

Neves – who opened his first boutique in London, B-Store, when he was 22, and also flogged his own brand of posh trainers, Swear, long before this apparent contradiction in terms became one of the most significant revenue streams in luxury – started with his eye more on supporting retailers than serving consumers.

It was 2007. He had sorted out a showroom during Paris Fashion Week not just for B-Store and Swear but for assorted other small British shops and labels. It was becoming clear at that point, with the rise of Net and others, that the game was changing: that e-commerce was the future, possibly at the expense of all else.

“Everyone was feeling defeated. The boutiques were saying, ‘What is our place in the world?’ And the small designers were saying, ‘This is all about the big brands.’ There was this feeling, ‘This is not for us.’ Suddenly the lightbulb came on.”

Fashion had been a kind of hobby up until that point, funded by that tech business he had set up with a friend. “I sent Cipriano an email saying, ‘This shoe software we are building is so boring and it’s not going anywhere. We are going to keep paying the bills but that’s it.’”

Neves had that email printed and laminated to celebrate the ten-year anniversary of the business. And Cipriano Sousa is now Farfetch’s chief technology officer. In a recent interview he described Neves as being “as revolutionary as he was

then, but with much more wisdom, more serenity, more focus”.

Not surprisingly it was the small shops that cottoned on first to the opportunity Farfetch represented. The big brands were less convinced. “It was terrible,” recalls Neves.

“I never had panic attacks because of my meditation practice. But I was such a wreck.

I would get calls from boutiques saying, ‘Brand A is telling us either you stop Farfetch or that’s it – we are going to cancel your account.’” Why? “It was fear of the unknown.

And it was a bit of a territorial attitude also.

They were, like, ‘Who gave you permission to start putting my brand on this website?’”

These days Farfetch works with megalabels such as Chanel, and retail behemoths such as Harrods. In the process, Neves has picked up the London boutique Browns, where he can road test his more avant-garde variety of service culture.

Is he a workaholic? “It depends on who you ask. If you asked my wife she would say I am an absolute workaholic. I say, ‘No! I have breakfast with my baby every morning!’” A new baby is due soon, his second child with his second wife, a Brazilian who was one of the original team at Farfetch. He also has four children by his first marriage, the eldest of whom is 23. Does she shop at Farfetch?

“She doesn’t get that kind of allowance! She shops the sale.”

Neves’s career in tech began with a ZX Spectrum computer, a Christmas present when he was 8. It didn’t come with games, just a programming manual. “I found I could change the colour of the screen of our TV to yellow. It felt like this incredible power.”

That was what his childhood became: coding, coding and more coding. “I had asthma, so I couldn’t do any sport.” These days he is a high-intensity junkie. “It makes me feel free. Bootcamps, interval training.

Things I couldn’t do as a kid.”

Back then he was also a target for bullies.

“My mother said, ‘Your only chance is an element of surprise. When their back is turned, throw whatever you have at them.’

The message was, ‘Be a terrorist,’ basically.

I remember one day in the gym one of them hit me, then knelt down to lace his trainers.

And I hit him with my rucksack.” He nods with a wry grin in the direction of his Louis Vuitton rucksack on the floor nearby. “Of course I was badly hit after that. But that guy never touched me again.

“When I was little I wanted to be an astronaut,” he continues. “But I worked out that wasn’t going to work because Portugal didn’t have a space programme. So I decided to be a scientist. And then, when I was a bit older, I decided I would be an entrepreneur.”

It could be said Neves has come close to pulling off all three. n

…and Alessandra Rich

The Times Magazine 49

THE DESIGN KING OF DORSET A furniture-maker’s chic home is a masterclass in modern country style REPORT Dominic Bradbury PHOTOGRAPHS Rachael Smith

Clockwise from above: Ariel Childs and Wicklow the dog in the hallway, with a chair and stool by Another Country; Paul de Zwart beside his dining table and chairs, Another Country, and Moooi lampshade; the studio-cum-guest lodge; sitting room, with sofa and chairs by Søren Lund, Kasthall rug, Another Country coffee table and a 19th-century French armoire

Home!

Home!

Clockwise from left: the exterior; the kitchen, with custom-built units; the garage, with guest suite on first floor; a bedroom; the hallway, with wood carvings from the Philippines

F

or a furniture entrepreneur and his wife, a creative director, their cottage in Dorset is not just a rural escape but the place that the couple, who both grew up in other countries, can really call home. For 20 years, the hillside house near Shaftesbury has been a much loved presence in their lives and their teenage daughter’s.

“There is a magical quality to the place,” says Paul de Zwart, founder of furniture company Another Country. “It’s tucked away and extremely quiet. There’s very little light pollution so the stars are very visible at night.

It’s a house that’s not trying to be cool or hip.

We do really feel at home here.”

De Zwart spent much of his childhood in Italy with his Dutch parents, and then studied in America and London. He met Ariel Childs, who grew up in the States, when they were on the launch team for Wallpaper*, the design and interiors magazine.

Then De Zwart launched Another Country.

The company’s origins lie at the house itself, a former gamekeeper’s cottage dating back to the 17th century, which the couple had just bought and were renovating. De Zwart was after a stool, but was finding it difficult to find

anything he liked. So he designed one himself.

“I was looking for something that was fairly priced but also had some heritage to it,” says de Zwart. “So I began to design a collection, using the inspiration of that first stool, and that was the genesis of the brand.” The collection has since expanded to include homeware, rugs and lighting.

If de Zwart had not followed the path that he did, he would probably have been an architect, he says, so he has enjoyed the renovation of the house. The couple purchased the property when they were both still at Wallpaper* as a weekend retreat.

“We bought the house just before we got married,” says de Zwart. “We set out to find a place that we could make our own and, after a lot of searching, we came across this cottage. We ended up completely refurbishing.

Everything was rebuilt or built new in the original two storey-cottage and then we added a new studio and guest lodge, trying to keep it sympathetic to the place that it’s in.”

The stone cottage was stripped back to the bare walls and roof. The main living space sits within a newly built part of the house that replaced some of the older, ramshackle addons. With its exposed beams and wooden

floors, this fresh element has the feel of an open-plan barn conversion, with a seating area at one end, the kitchen at the other and a dining table and chairs from Another Country at the centre.

“There is a sense of connection between the house, the West Country point of view and Another Country,” says de Zwart. “During the last year we have spent a lot of time walking and cycling, but also talking about farming, woodland, forestry and biodiversity.

It’s all very much linked to the house and the Dorset-Wiltshire borders.”

The garden has also been a labour of love and has evolved over time. More recently, de Zwart and Childs were able to buy an acre of woodland next to the garden. “It’s nice to know that it’s now part of the grounds and that we can look after it,” de Zwart says.

“It is such a beautiful part of the world.

For us, the house has generated a lot of happiness. When we designed it we were in our late twenties and we picked every single thing in it, down to the doorknobs, so it is very personal to us. It has been our constant friend.” n anothercountry.com

The Times Magazine 53

Home!

By Monique Rivalland

23 COOL CHAIRS

3. Chairs, £705 each, Gubi (nest.co.uk).

1. £199.99, hm.com.

2. £360, Nordal (amara.com).

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

4. £69.99, hm.com. 5. £199, Business and Pleasure Company (amara.com). 6. £199.99, zara.com. 7. £432, maisonsdumonde.com.

8. £160, frenchconnection.com. 9. £256, Almost Furniture (bombinate.com). 10. £309, Ferm Living (huhstore.com).

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

11. £119, made.com. 12. £119.99, zara.com. 13. £395, frenchconnection.com. 14. £346.50, Muuto (nest.co.uk).

15. £225, frenchconnection.com. 16. £89, dunelm.com. 17. £149, cultfurniture.com.

18

19

20

21

22

18. £270, sixtheresidence.co.uk. 19. £109, westelm.co.uk. 20. £319, heals.com. 21. £189, cultfurniture.com.

22. £995, sohohome.com. 23. £179.99, zara.com.

23

Pout!

By Lesley Thomas

The secret of youthful skin? Wash your face These rich cleansing balms remove every trace of make-up remember meeting the manager at one of the world’s top spas – the kind of place Elizabeth Hurley goes for some turbo pampering – and asking what is the one thing we all get wrong when trying to look our most youthful. The answer was dull, a tiny bit gross, but gives hope to us all: “People just don’t clean their faces properly.”

If we cleansed well every day, he said, we’d be spending less on lotions that promise miracles and we’d be much happier with our skin. I’ve never forgotten these words. After that, I never slept in my slap ever again.

My cleansing routine is something lightly foaming in the morning and a splash of cold water – the nearest I will ever get to midlife women’s cold-water swimming trend.

Night-time is when I am careful to cleanse thoroughly, using a rich cleansing balm.

I remember back in the Nineties when balm cleansers were a niche, rather ritualised technique. Eve Lom’s (£40; spacenk.com) was the one to use. Now there are scores on the shelves and most of the experts I know use them to cleanse at the end of the day. If you’ve never used one, it’s like cleaning your face with something the texture of petroleum jelly. This may sound off-puttingly messy, but the majority are quick and easy to use, rinse off well and work for every skin type.

The one the beauty editors love is Emma Hardie’s Moringa Cleansing Balm (£25; marksandspencer.com). I try new ones when they come along but always return to this. It’s

TOM JACKSON

I

What Lesley loves

If we cleansed well every day, we’d be spending less on lotions that promise miracles and we’d be much happier with our skin

packed with high-grade plant oils and gets every trace of mascara off. There’s no greasy residue, yet skin does not feel remotely dry.

The technique is the same for most of these products: you wet your face after massaging in the balm and remove with a damp cloth. If I’ve been wearing a lot of make-up, I’ll do this twice. Muslin cloths are fashionable for using with balms, but I prefer an old-fashioned face cloth. Like many of these products you can leave it on for longer and use as a face mask.

Many of the good balms are pretty pricey but there are a few very decent ones at the less expensive end. I loved Holy Hydration!

Make-up Melting Cleansing Balm from the budget brand e.l.f. (£10; boots.com). As well as thoroughly cleaning the face, it contains many of the current buzzy skincare ingredients – peptides, hyaluronic acid and ceramides.

Lumene’s Nordic-C Pure Glow Cleansing Balm (£16; marksandspencer.com) is one I’ve raved about several times on these pages. It removes even the most indelible-seeming mascara marks and gives skin a vitamin C brightening boost – excellent for managing sun damage and evening out skin tone.

Elemis’s Superfood AHA Glow Cleansing Butter (£30; elemis.com) is great for a bit of ever so gentle exfoliation. I’d recommend this one to anyone who wants to try a balm but doesn’t love the extremely rich textures they usually come in. n instagram.com/lesleyjthomas

Thorough cleansers

The original deepcleaning balm

With seed oils to prevent dryness

Bargain with peptides and hyaluronic acid

Eve Lom Cleanser, £40 (spacenk.com)

Tea & Tonic The Meadow’s Secret Cleansing Balm, £28 (teaandtonic.co.uk)

e.l.f. Holy Hydration!

Cleansing Balm, £10 (boots.com)

Good for gentle exfoliation

Elemis Superfood AHA Glow Cleansing Butter, £30 (elemis.com)

Lightweight and non-greasy

Clinique Take the Day Off Cleansing Balm, £26 (clinique.co.uk)

Removes stubborn mascara

EDIT OR’S PICK

Emma Hardie Moringa Cleansing Balm, £25 (marksandspencer.com) The Times Magazine 57

Eating out Giles Coren

‘All these immaculate dishes for £28 per person!

Such value is unheard of.

Such beauty indescribable’

TOM JACKSON

Pythouse Kitchen Garden, Wiltshire

W

hat have we had now, maybe 12 restaurants in Wales and the west of England over the past 3 weeks, with lovely gardens to eat in, decent cooking and wonderful local produce? Will you indulge me for just a couple more? Please?

And then next week we’ll head back to the capital for tasting menus and sharing plates and, “Let me explain the concept,” for hipsters, wokery, no-platforming and traffic, for stinky Underground trains and squeals of, “Cultural appropriation!” every

time a white man chops a bit of chilli into a stew. We will, I promise.

So are we good? Great. In that case, it’s a train to Tisbury we’ll need, out into the wilds of Wiltshire, and then a cab from the station to the Compasses at Chicksgrove for a quick pint and a catch-up with its landlord, Ben Maschler, formerly of the Drapers Arms in Islington, son of the legendary restaurant critic Fay (and the legendary publisher, Tom, first discoverer of Heller’s Catch-22).

Well, not a pint for Ben. Something nonalcoholic. He’s off the sauce these days, as we all should be, and hurling new energy into this beautiful, mazy old pub that I reviewed a couple of years ago and won’t dwell on too long. Only to say that the garden out back, which I hadn’t seen until now, is in wonderful shape and

The Times Magazine 59

Eating out Giles Coren surrounded by fields lined with the loveliest oak trees. Columns of them, 300 or 400 years old, and in their absolute pomp at this time of year. You can gawp at them now from a big wooden terrace built by Ben himself “with my bare hands, Giles, my bare hands” (because that’s what sobriety will do to a fellow), initially, like everyone else, to make outdoor space to get back on track post-Covid, but all of a piece with this Golden Age of Pub and Restaurant Gardens that I have been documenting over the past few weeks.

So, a gawp at all that, a pint of Butcombe, a bowl of incredible crispy chilli squid and then a lift to Pythouse Kitchen Garden, just under five miles away, and the best garden yet, with probably the best garden restaurant that you will ever find.

It is the brainchild, love child, whatever, of Piers Milburn, a former graphic designer (and brother of Oz Milburn, co-founder of Kitty Fisher’s and Cora Pearl), and his wife, Sophia, who bought it five years ago and ran it successfully enough, but with a series of chefs who didn’t really get the garden, Piers says, or his passion for cooking with fire.

Didn’t understand the way that proper use of the 18th-century walled garden, and cooking over wood, could make something unique here.

The hiring of Darren Broom, just before the first lockdown, changed all that. “He’s an outdoorsman,” says Piers, “a hunter and a butcher and a forager.” And in league with gardeners Heather Price and Annie Shutt, he’s started to do something amazing.

Oz and I arrived around 1.30 (he strongarmed me into the trip; I couldn’t say no), and walked through the bright, airy, artfully distressed Wiltshire chic of the interior into the most beautiful eating space imaginable, on a terrace, under a canopy, overlooking a garden full of foxgloves, delphiniums, sweetpeas and dozens of other things that I’ve no doubt you could name, but I certainly can’t. All of them available to pick for yourself and take away.

The menu is fixed at £28 per head for what is effectively four courses, each incredibly wide-ranging and generous, and the whole thing is just insanely good value. We started with soft, comforting potato bread, warm from the wood fire, with great pucks of deep yellow, salty butter and pickled carrots, cabbage and onions, and a bowl of intensely summery broad bean whip with fresh herbs and a single, peppery radish.

Then asparagus, fermented (apparently) and chargrilled on the fire with a slow-cooked egg puree in place of a hollandaise; a young, creamy Laverstoke Park mozzarella piled high

with smoked peas (very, very lightly smoked, you possibly wouldn’t have known without the menu) and spring onions, slivers of radish and the little mauve flowers of, I guess, spring onions or chives. Also, two hefty rectangles of potato, steamed in a “herby broth” courtesy of the kitchen garden, then pressed and chilled, then sliced and fried and scattered with sea salt to make two giant, layered, endlessly fascinating “chips” (of a type I once rhapsodised about, funnily enough, at Cora Pearl), with swirls of wild garlic mayonnaise.

This stuff is not all from the garden. You’d need a garden the size of Wiltshire. But some of it is, and the point, says Piers, is for the menu to be “inspired” by the garden. And the guest too. And I was. For there is nothing to

A sweet, young haunch of venison came with a gooseberry puree, lardo, flowering thyme and celeriac compare to grazing on early summer English produce in the middle of an early summer English garden, warm breezes riffling the bee-bothered petals and sending soft scents to the table, green lawns winking at the end of iron-gated paths.

In many ways, it was Covid-19 that made all this possible. Darren came on just before it struck and at first was not able to “spread his wings”, Piers says, with the business pivoted to all the usual delivery and grocerybased endeavours that we saw countrywide in those strange days. But as things started to come back after lockdown 2 and eating out returned, but with distancing, they found a new vision: “To do one thing really well.” And that was lunch for 50, not the 100-plus of former days. And not, for the moment, dinner.

And not Mondays or Tuesdays either (in line with a lot of rural restaurants), so five sittings of 50 per day, set menu, leaving plenty of time to do those things brilliantly and, with a young family, to have a life. (This is how Piers and Sophia are rolling as I write, but he is at pains to say that this could change at any time – nothing in this industry is predictable, least of all now.)

There is a glamping site too, on the other side of the heart-stopping walled garden, which is available to groups of 12 or more

(and looks like it can take more than twice that) who can self-cater if they want, or be fed by the kitchen, or take the very attractive middle road of having all their produce delivered, pre-prepped for the barbecue, to cook over fire themselves.

Back up on the terrace, it was time for our own main courses from the wood grill: a sweet, young haunch of venison, on the bone, well seasoned, with a gooseberry puree, lardo, flowering thyme and celeriac; hogget from Beechwood Farm with a braised fennel marmalade and Dorset yoghurt; ChalkStream trout (which I cannot remember eating, I have to say, but by then I had been eating and drinking and basking in the sun for some five or six hours and was possibly growing a little, er, tired and forgetful) and a big beef tomato filled with buckwheat and chard.

And then, oh my God, the barbecued rhubarb, draped over a puffy white meringue and crowned with a quenelle of burnt honey cream, for the most original and exciting pavlova imaginable. Anna would have done her absolute nut.

And then also New Forest strawberries on fresh cream cheese, scattered with a kind of roasted white chocolate brittle and hatted with “garden filo” in which assorted herbs from the garden had been pressed between the leaves of pastry like Victorian flowers in a sketchbook. And, also, as I had come all this way, chocolate mousse with roasted hazelnuts, puffed grains and date syrup.

All of this – all of it! – for £28 per person.

Twelve immaculate dishes. Such value is unheard of. Such beauty indescribable. I don’t think there has been food this pure and lovely, in a garden this perfect, since, well, that whole thing with Man’s first disobedience and the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought death into the world, and all our woe… Oh my God, this place has got me quoting Milton. It’s time to go.

Back to London next week, then, and the resumption of normal service. *sigh* n Pythouse Kitchen Garden West Hatch, Tisbury, Wiltshire (01747 870444; pythousekitchengarden.co.uk) Cooking 10 Garden 10 Paradise found 10 Score 10 Price Absolutely sweet FA, as above. So buy good wine and tip generously.

The Compasses Lower Chicksgrove, Tisbury, Wiltshire (01722 714318; thecompassesinn.com)

The Times Magazine 61

INTERIORS

LIFESTYLE

LIFESTYLE

LIFESTYLE

Beta male Ben Machell

KATIE WILSON

‘My first trip to Legoland and I want to cry. I’ve waited over 30 years. The kids quite like it too’

My children’s primary school was shut for teacher training on Monday, so we all went to Legoland. As we approached Windsor, I found myself becoming increasingly distant and withdrawn. While my girlfriend wrestled with the traffic, did the navigation and occasionally lobbed rice cakes into the ceaselessly grinding maws of our two kids, I just gazed, unblinking, out of the passenger window while talking to myself. “Legoland,” I muttered. “I’m going… to Legoland.”

Legoland. The great white whale of my childhood. I’d always yearned to go but somehow it never happened. Perhaps it was just too far from Yorkshire. Perhaps it was too expensive. Perhaps, circa 1989, when my mania for tiny plastic bricks was at its height, my parents simply had a lot of other stuff to worry about. The IRA. Poll tax. The physical safety of Salman Rushdie. It’s possible I’m just making excuses for them. They knew how I felt. I was an official member of the Lego Club, although I’d got it into my head that this was something I had been selected for – that it was some kind of elite unit for obsessive seven-year-olds – rather than a club that literally anyone could join via postal order.

Anyway, I finally went to Legoland. It was cathartic, like regression therapy with rides.

It was also instructive. You learn a surprising amount about life – about yourself, the world, the universe – by spending eight hours navigating a theme park with two small children. For example…

Trust your instincts about people. There were thousands of other kids there. But they couldn’t all have school training days, could they? No, we decided. Impossible. So the only explanation was that any other given child was either a) Scottish (already broken up for the summer); b) went to private school (ditto); c) a skiver. As we walked through the crowds I’d mentally categorise each child I passed – “Scots, posh, Scots, Scots, skiver, posh, skiver” etc – and it was uncanny how little I even needed to think about it. You hate to generalise, but if the child was translucently pale and downing a yard glass of pop, odds-on they were from north of the border. Look like you’d encounter them in a hotel corridor in The Shining? Private school. Wild-eyed and emitting nonstop primordial bellows of joy?

Skiving. Reckon I was 98 per cent accurate.

Money talks. Once you were in, you could then pay even more money to avoid waiting hours and hours for the rides. I’m genuinely

ashamed to say that we did this. I know it was only Legoland – I wasn’t paying to jump the queue for a kidney on the NHS – but I might as well have been dressed as Marie Antoinette as I breezed to the front of the Haunted House Monster Party line. Nothing like the sullen stares of the mob to make your neck feel suddenly very slender.

Don’t underestimate five-year-old girls.

When we first arrived, my daughter was exactly 109cm tall. I know this because we measured her before leaving. When it became clear that in order to go on the Viking River Splash ride you had to be 110cm tall, we told her to “think tall thoughts” in the incredibly stupid and unhelpful way that parents do.

Anyway, she screwed up her face, balled her fists and for the next five minutes went very quiet. We tried to bluff our way past the ride attendant but he insisted on measuring her.

And guess what? She had grown! A whole centimetre! Through force of will alone! It was chilling. What else is she capable of?

Don’t overestimate six-year-old boys. My son and all his pals are really into Ninjago Lego – the sets, the comics, the associated TV shows and apparel – and so, at his insistence, we went on a ride in which the principal characters are brought to life in 3D. I hadn’t really prepared myself for how deeply profound he would find it, seeing half a dozen Lego ninja he’s known by name for half his life speaking directly to him, almost within touching distance. He looked like he was seeing the face of God. I wanted to burst into tears. I wanted, in that moment, never to get off that ride – to go round on an endless loop, to shield him for ever from porn and TikTok and everything else that’s surely to come – but then he needed a wee and wanted an ice cream. So we got off and pushed on.

I owe my parents an apology. We had a very nice time and headed for the car park as the light began to fade. Still, why had my mum and dad never taken me, I asked myself. It gnawed.

And then, while reading an information board near the exit, it became very clear: Legoland didn’t open in the UK until 1996! Prior to that, the only Legoland had been in Copenhagen… and that’s in Denmark! No way were my folks going to take us to Denmark just to go on some rides. That would have been mad. I just… hadn’t realised. On the drive back I felt a weight had been lifted. See? All’s well that ends well. n Robert Crampton is away

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