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What happened

Covid: is the end in sight?

What the editorials said “Whisper it”, said the Daily Express, but the spectre of Covid may finally be in retreat. The PM’s decision to lift England’s restrictions on 19 July triggered warnings that cases could surge to 100,000, or even 200,000, a day. Instead, they’ve fallen almost every day since – the first time such a consistent drop has ever happened without a national lockdown. It suggests the critical mass of vaccinated people needed to quell infection has finally been reached. It’s too soon to declare the pandemic over, said the London Evening Standard, but evidence that jabs are having a big impact is mounting by the day. The latest data show just 5,000 patients were in hospital with Covid on 22 July, far below January’s peak of 39,254.

There were cautiously optimistic predictions this week that the third wave of Covid infections in the UK may have peaked. The number of reported cases fell for seven days in a row and

by Tuesday was down to 23,511 – almost half the previous week’s figure. Daily deaths climbed to 131, the highest number since March, but analysts said this might be the lagged effect of high infection rates in preceding weeks. In any case, the Government was careful to dampen expectations. “People have got to remain very cautious, and that remains the approach of the Government,” warned Boris Johnson. No one should “run away with premature conclusions” that the virus has been beaten.

Revellers in London last weekend Johnson’s unlocking gamble “is, touch wood, being vindicated”, said the Daily Mail. Now, he must tackle the so-called “pingdemic”, which is still As part of its efforts to keep infections low, the Government “wreaking havoc on business and the economy” by forcing wants to make full vaccination a condition of entry to crowded indoor spaces such as nightclubs and large gatherings even fully vaccinated people – if they’ve been in close contact with someone with Covid – to isolate for ten days. The need to such as football matches. But Tory rebels have signalled that get the economy firing again could scarcely be more urgent, they may align with Labour to defeat the plan if it reaches a Commons vote. No. 10’s suggestion that students may require said The Sun on Sunday: a committee of MPs calculated this week that the pandemic has already cost taxpayers a “Covid passports” to attend lectures or live in halls at English “staggering” £372bn – or £12,000 a head. universities has also met fierce opposition.

What happened

The Games finally begin

compete. He had had two bouts of Covid; she had spent two weeks on crutches with a damaged femur before coming to Tokyo. Their travails mirrored those of the Games as a whole, which got under way a year later than planned. The elaborate opening ceremony climaxed with the lighting of the Olympic flame by Japanese tennis star Naomi Osaka, but Covid restrictions meant that fewer than 1,000 people were inside the 60,000-seat arena to watch, and protesters gathered outside to object to the staging of the Games at a time when coronavirus infection rates are climbing.

It wasn’t all bad A Spitfire enthusiast in Cumbria has built a life-size replica of the fighter plane in his back garden.

David Price, from Cotehill, sourced some original parts – including a canopy – but made most of the convincing-looking model from wood, plastic and bits and pieces of wiring and other items he had lying around. It took him 3,000 hours.

“I’ve always admired the Spitfire, and it started as a little project,” he told ITV. “I thought, ‘I’ll build a couple of wingtips and just see how it goes.’”

A fossilised dinosaur footprint found by a fouryear-old girl in south Wales has now taken pride of place in the National Museum in Cardiff. Lily Wilder was walking along Bendricks Bay with her father when he heard her scream with delight. He assumed she had found a pretty shell; instead, she pointed out the exquisitely detailed 220-million-year-old footprint, which has since been described as “the best ever found” in Britain. He photographed the print, and the museum later applied for permission to extract it for an exhibition called Lily’s Fossil Footprint.

A teenager with cystic fibrosis, who spent much of his early childhood in and out of hospital, has won a place at the elite Rambert ballet school in London. Exercise is vital for cystic fibrosis patients, as it helps dislodge the mucus that builds up in their lungs. As a small boy, Tom Oakley, from Liverpool, had no interest in sport; but aged seven, he fell in love with dancing. It often causes him considerable pain, but now he says he can’t live without it, not only because of his condition, but because of the friends he has made.

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THE WEEK 31 July 2021

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Covid had spread a cloud over the Olympic Games, but the sun was shining on Team GB, which made its greatest start in modern times. By the end of Monday, it had already collected three golds and a silver, including a long-awaited first gold medal for diving champion Tom Daley at his fourth Games.

By Tuesday night the medal tally had swelled to 13. For the first time in 110 years, British At the ceremony, Thomas Bach, the Chairman male swimmers shared an Olympic podium, of the International Olympic Committee Tom Dean having touched the wall 0.04 (IOC), described the opening as “a moment of seconds ahead of his teammate Duncan Scott hope”, but the problems didn’t end when the to pip him to the gold in the men’s 200 Games started. A heatwave forced the metre freestyle. In the women’s triathlon, Tom Dean: gold rush organisers to reschedule rugby matches and Georgia Taylor-Brown took silver, coming some track and field events, and to move marathons out of just one minute after Flora Duffy of Bermuda, which Tokyo. Several athletes, including Amber Hill, Britain’s gold became the smallest nation (population: 63,000) ever to medal prospect in the shooting events, were forced to win an Olympic gold. withdraw after testing positive for Covid. And one of the stars of the Games, the US gymnast Simone Biles, was so overcome After receiving their medals, both Dean and Taylor-Brown by the pressure of the event, she felt obliged to withdraw. revealed the difficulties they had had to go through just to

…and how they were covered

NEWS 5

What the commentators said

What next?

It’s all a bit of a mystery, said Rhys Blakely in The Times. After weeks of growth, Covid cases are plummeting faster than anyone could have dared hope, even though restrictions have been lifted. Why? One factor may be that the start of school holidays in England and Wales has reduced the virus’s spread among children. Another could be the ending of the Euros: while they were on, the clustering of football fans round the telly to watch England matches fuelled a “male-dominated ‘mini wave’”. The recent hot weather, encouraging people to open windows or gather outdoors, will also have helped. Above all, we’re seeing the combined effects of vaccines and past infection, which mean that “nine in ten adults now have Covid antibodies”.

People from the EU and US will no longer have to quarantine when arriving in England provided that they have been fully vaccinated.

And UK residents returning from “green” or “amber” list countries can, under the current rules, re-enter Britain without having to isolate as long as they’ve been double jabbed on the NHS. Those who were vaccinated outside the UK will still have to isolate for ten days.

But we’re not in the clear yet, said Graham Medley in The Guardian. The fall in cases may in part be down to people’s reluctance to take tests and risk having to self-isolate. Besides, the effects of last month’s unlocking won’t be felt until August. There’s also the issue of vaccine take-up, said Olivia Gavoyannis on Reaction.life. The PM is said to be “raging” that 40% of 18 to 25-year-olds still haven’t been jabbed, despite being eligible since 18 June, some because they know their risk of becoming seriously ill from Covid is minimal, others because “social media misinformation”, among other things, has made them unusually hesitant about vaccines.

Then why doesn’t the Government try to convince them that jabs are safe, as it did to combat hesitancy among ethnic minorities, asked Ian Dunt on Politics.co.uk. Instead, the PM is “bullying them into compliance” by threatening to introduce vaccine passports. Perhaps he has been influenced by France’s President Macron, whose announcement that “health passes” will be required to enter everything from cafés to trains led to a surge in vaccinations. Italy has a similar scheme. Germany is considering one. It’s one thing for shops and private companies to demand proof of vaccination, said Hugo Rifkind in The Times, but “the state restricting your freedom for not taking the right medicine feels like a major new Rubicon”. Even after 18 months in which our freedoms have been massively curtailed, that seems like a step too far.

The list of professions exempt from self-isolation rules has been expanded to cover the likes of vets and rubbish and tax collectors to limit disruption from the “pingdemic”. Medics, prison staff, soldiers and train drivers were among those already exempt.

What the commentators said

What next?

“Japan is back.” Those were the words of its then PM, Shinzo Abe, at the closing ceremony of the 2016 Olympics in Rio, said Taku Tamaki on The Conversation. Hosting the next Olympics, Abe believed, would allow Japan to put the tsunami and the Fukushima nuclear disaster “firmly in the past”, and follow the success of Tokyo 1964 in providing a giant boost to the economy. Alas, the reverse now looks likely. Thanks to Covid, few high-spending international tourists are making the trip, and last year’s postponement means the Games’ cost has jumped from a projected $7.5bn to at least $22bn. Worse, there are legitimate fears that the Olympics could prove a super-spreader event, said The Independent. Tokyo is in a state of emergency: only a quarter of the population is fully vaccinated. Scores of athletes have already tested positive; cancellation cannot be ruled out if cases surge in the wider population.

The Olympics will return to Australia for a third time in 2032, after the selection of Brisbane as the host city for the 35th Games was formally approved in a vote

by IOC members last week.

The result was a foregone conclusion, given that Brisbane was the only bid city still in the running.

“The Olympics have always had to overcome problems,” said John Goodbody in the London Evening Standard. Think of the boycotts in 1976, 1980 and 1984, and the controversies over drug-taking and foul play. But then elite sport is, to a large extent, about overcoming adversity.

I vividly remember the US discus thrower Al Oerter, who despite a badly damaged neck and torn cartilage, managed an Olympic record in 1964. “These are the Olympics,” he said. “You die for them.”

Even so, this might be the moment to consider the Games’ future, said Ross Clark in The Spectator. Today, the Olympics risk being “squashed beneath their own weight”. Only about a dozen countries are capable of staging them in their current extravagant form. The IOC could start by stripping out sports such as golf, tennis or men’s football, where winning gold does not represent the pinnacle of achievement. This is our opportunity to “build back smaller”.

THE WEEK

Look, I know I shouldn’t be saying this, seeing as I’m in the news business myself, but do you really think it a good idea to be doing what you’re doing right now? Reading up on the news, I mean.

Yes, it may make you a bit better informed, but that will be outweighed by a far heavier downside: it will make you unhappy. How could it not? Humans were not built for gloom. Our brains evolved to tackle problems that fall within the scope of our own experiences: we expect bad things to enter our lives and have developed ways to cope with them. But how are our minds meant to process all the ills of the world that occur beyond our ken, out there in the remote political realm? “Politics”, Bismarck observed, “is like visiting a country one doesn’t know with people whom one doesn’t know and whose reactions one can’t predict”. In short, a visit guaranteed to make you feel gloomy.

I know all this because last week I was happy. I’d just had a blissful news-free holiday on the west coast of Scotland. Then I did something rash: I cast my eyes over a newspaper. “Pingdemic chaos likely to last weeks,” ran the headline. “Omagh attack could have been stopped.” “Germany’s ruinous floods.” “US wildfires creating their own weather.” Gloom again. There’s no escaping it: news is bad for you. It should come with a government health warning: “this intellectual diet is fine taken in small doses, and preferably in weekly instalments, via a wellJeremy O’Grady balanced news magazine. But don’t overindulge. It’s bad for the soul.”

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With elections due in the autumn, Japanese PM Yoshihide Suga had been hoping that a successful Games would boost his re-election chances, said Reuters. His approval ratings have been on the slide since he took office in 2020, and they recently hit their lowest level.

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31 July 2021 THE WEEK

Politics

6 NEWS Controversy of the week

The Channel migrants “The disheartening truth is that France knows we’re a soft touch,” said the Daily Mail. Last week, the Home Secretary Priti Patel “bunged” the French £54m to crack down on illegal migration across the Channel. That’s on top of the £28m we paid them last year. But what are we getting for our money? The French navy continues to “cynically escort” migrant boats into UK waters, where “the Border Force offers a taxpayer-funded taxi service to Dover”. The numbers heading for England in small boats have surged, rising from just 299 in 2018 to 8,400 last year to more than 8,900 so far in 2021. “We welcome the Home Secretary’s plans for greater deterrents: boats turned back, asylumseekers flown abroad as claims are assessed, penalties for “Impossible to halt”? those reaching our shores via safe countries.” But Patel must also demand “concrete action” from France, rather than just throwing “good money after bad”.

In fairness, France has had “some successes”, said Charles Hymas in The Daily Telegraph. Nearly 50% of migrants who try to leave its shores are now being stopped, a total of 7,500 this year; some 300 smugglers have been arrested. The problem is that the overall numbers are increasing, and traffickers are expanding their operations across hundreds of miles of France’s northern coast. The French authorities also insist that they will not stop boats at sea, or accept back migrants from the UK – which has lost the right to return refugees to other EU nations because of Brexit. Frankly, French and British interests “are not aligned” on this question, said James Forsyth in The Times.

France, which had 92,000 asylum applications last year to the UK’s 27,000, is not particularly worried about people leaving its soil. The fact is that the Channel crossings are “almost impossible to halt”. Both traffickers and migrants know that “no civilised country can allow people to drown at sea”; this is why people get on overcrowded vessels. “And this is why Britain is about to be plunged into a similar crisis to the one Italy faced three years ago, albeit on a reduced scale.”

Perhaps we need to get it in proportion, said Sean O’Grady in The Independent. This is not an “invasion”. It’s a relatively small number of people turning up on our shores, many of whom have escaped civil war in their own lands. The situation is already looking very ugly: RNLI crews have received vile abuse for rescuing people from the Channel. It makes no sense to me at all, said Jeremy Clarkson in The Sun. We keep hearing that the post-Brexit exodus of EU citizens has left pubs, builders and farmers in dire need of staff. At the same time there are people turning up on our shores every day – just when the UK needs workers. “So why are we putting them in detention centres?

Why aren’t we sending them to Norfolk, and employing them to pick vegetables?” These are people with real drive and “gumption”. And all we ever do “is think of ways to send them away”.

Spirit of the age The heatwave in the US, and the lockdown-enforced closure of public leisure centres, has created boom times for Swimply – an app known as “Airbnb for backyard pools”. In Oregon, where summers are often wet and cold, one couple have made $111,000 in less than a year by renting out their 26-ft long heated pool for $75 an hour. Jim and Lisa Battan say they have had 2,700 guests.

Developers of luxury flats in Los Angeles and New York are listing on-site therapists, healers and “spiritual concierge” services among their amenities, to attract millennials with an interest in “self care”. One estate agent explained that it’s a buyers’ market at the moment, and gyms and yoga studios are no longer enough to set a block apart.

THE WEEK 31 July 2021

Good week for:

A-list gossip, with news that pop superstar Jennifer Lopez and actor Ben Affleck are once again an item. The pair originally dated from 2002 to 2004, giving rise to the first celebrity relationship portmanteau: Bennifer. Lopez, now 52, confirmed rumours that Bennifer had been reborn on Instagram last week.

Rumpole of the Bailey, who is returning to British TV screens, but this time as a woman. First shown in 1978, Rumpole of the Bailey starred Leo McKern as John Mortimer’s grumpy barrister.

The gender-swapping reboot, being written by Mortimer’s daughters, Emily and Rosie, is expected to be screened next year.

Northwest Wales, after its slate landscape was designated as a Unesco World Heritage Site. PM Boris Johnson had backed the UK bid, commending the area for its “remarkable uniqueness”.

The designation was announced days after Liverpool was stripped of its Unesco status (see page 23).

Bad week for:

Oxford Street, after the Marble Arch Mound – a £2m artificial hill designed to attract shoppers back to central London – was deemed such a disappointment, visitors who’d bought advance tickets to climb it had their money refunded. In The Observer, Rowan Moore said the hill looked more like “an ensemble of illmatched carpet tiles than a greensward”. But Westminster Council said the structure just needed time to “bed in and grow”.

Sajid Javid, who apologised for tweeting that people should stop “cowering” from the coronavirus. The Health Secretary said he had not meant to minimise the impact of the pandemic.

Care home cruelty

Lambeth Council presided over a “culture of cover-up” that led to the sexual abuse and mistreatment of hundreds of vulnerable children in care homes in South London, a report has found. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse found that abusers were able to infiltrate five homes from the 1960s to the 1990s, with “devastating” consequences for their victims. Many staff, it said, had a “callous disregard for the children they were paid to look after”. The Council, meanwhile, employed staff it knew posed a risk to children; ignored complaints about abuse; and turned a blind eye to the brutal regimes in its homes. The report concludes that the level of cruelty inflicted is “hard to comprehend”.

A new crime plan

Boris Johnson has unveiled a new Beating Crime Plan for England and Wales, which includes more electronic tagging for convicted thieves, and the removal of limits on the use of Section 60 stop and search powers. The PM said he also wanted criminals in “chain gangs” wearing hi-vis jackets, so that the public could easily identify them; and for every neighbourhood to have a named police officer as a contact point for residents.

Poll watch 86% of Britons say they’ve not tried to have something they disagreed with banned, withdrawn, or “cancelled” in the past year; 7% say they have. 54% of people think it is more important to protect free speech than regulate what people can say to avoid offending certain groups; 21% think the opposite. 79% think people are too easily offended.

However 71% are concerned about hate speech, and 68% are proud that the UK is embracing more diversity.

More in Common/The i Paper 40% of people say they have never downloaded the NHS Test and Trace app. 34% have downloaded it, but have abused or deleted it to avoid being contacted. 22% have downloaded it and used it correctly at all times.

YouGov.

Europe at a glance Paris Vaccine passes: Countries across Europe are making being vaccinated against Covid a requirement for entering a range of venues as part of their efforts to encourage take-up of the jab, and contain the Delta variant. This week, French MPs approved a law that will require people to have a “health pass” to gain entry to restaurants, museums and sports venues, and to board trains and aeroplanes. The law also introduces mandatory vaccinations for health workers. Italy announced a similar “green pass”scheme last week; and in Germany, Angela Merkel’s chief of staff has warned that a two-tier system, in which the vaccinated “have more freedoms”, is on its way. Vaccine passes are already required to sit inside cafés and restaurants in Greece, as well as in parts of Spain and Portugal.

In Sweden, officials are exploring a carrot more than stick approach, in which people will be paid to have the jab. As part of an initial trial, 8,200 unvaccinated people under 60 will be offered a voucher worth £17 that can be redeemed in most shops. Incentive schemes are already in place elsewhere: in California, people who come forward for jabs are offered tickets for a $1.5m lottery.

NEWS 7

Berlin Nord Stream 2: Germany and the US have agreed a deal that will allow the completion of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia to Europe. The 1,230km (764 mile) line under the Baltic Sea will allow Russia to double its gas exports to Germany, and bypass Ukraine, which currently profits from the transit of Russian gas across its territory. Opposition to the pipeline was a cornerstone of US foreign policy during the Obama and Trump administrations, and President Biden’s decision to reverse that stance (and remove the threat of sanctions on firms working on the project) has caused considerable consternation. Critics say the pipeline will undermine Europe’s security by increasing its dependency on Russia.

Paris Spying anger: Emmanuel Macron has reportedly asked Israel’s Prime Minister Naftali Bennett to investigate allegations that his mobile phone may have been targeted by highly sophisticated spyware developed in Israel. Over the past few weeks, the Israeli technology company NSO has been the subject of a major exposé coordinated by Forbidden Stories, a Paris-based media consortium. It claims that NSO’s Pegasus software – which can gain access to a device via a single missed call – has been acquired by a range of government clients, and used to monitor politicians, diplomats, rights activists, and journalists. Macron’s phone may have been selected for targeting by the security services in Morocco. In the US, four Democrats in Congress have called for sanctions to be imposed on the NSO group. In Hungary, the opposition has demanded that ministers resign over allegations that Viktor Orbán’s government selected journalists and opposition politicians for targeting with the Pegasus software.

Madrid A new urban forest: A million trees are being planted around Madrid to improve air quality in the city, fight its “heat island” effect, and mitigate its carbon emissions. The new urban forest will form a 47-mile ring around the Spanish capital and will absorb an estimated 175,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year, once the trees reach maturity. It will be made up of indigenous species, including black pine, Spanish juniper, and various oak varieties, which need little water. Officials stressed that the new forest is “not a park”; however, it will have cycle lanes running through it, to allow city-dwellers to enjoy its shade. Madrid has more premature deaths per capita linked to nitrogendioxide pollution than any other city in Europe, according to a recent study by the Barcelona Institute for Global Health. This summer, its residents have been sizzling in temperatures of over 40°C. Catch up with daily news at theweek.co.uk

Oristano, Sardinia “Unprecedented disaster”: Around 1,500 people have been forced from their homes in Sardinia by wildfires raging across the southwest of the island this week. The blazes have consumed at least 20,000 hectares (50,000 acres) of forest, ruined crops and destroyed buildings. Some 7,000 Italian firefighters and volunteers were battling to extinguish the fires, which were close to 13 towns. Christian Solinas, the president of Sardinia, called the fires an “unprecedented disaster” for the island.

The fire in Sardinia was just one of several in southern Europe, which has been experiencing a severe heatwave. In the southwest of France, a fire destroyed 850 hectares of forest last week – and cut electricity to homes in France, Spain and Morocco. Fire chiefs said it was probably caused by someone flicking a cigarette out of a car window on a motorway between Carcassonne and Narbonne.

Budapest Pride defiance: Thousands of Hungarians marched through Budapest last weekend to show their support for LGBT rights, and to protest against a new law that makes it illegal to show children under 18 books or other content that could be seen as promoting homosexuality or gender reassignment. The law also introduces tougher penalties for paedophiles. More than 40 embassies and foreign cultural institutions in Hungary issued statements backing the Budapest Pride Festival and its attendees included the British ambassador, Paul Fox, who was seen handing out rainbow flags emblazoned with the words “Love is Great”.

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

8 NEWS

The world at a glance

Silver Lake, Oregon Rampant wildfires: The flames of the massive Bootleg Fire, which broke out in the dry forests around Silver Lake last week, were still raging across southern Oregon this week: by Sunday it had already scorched 541,336 acres. Bootleg is the biggest, but by no means the only, wildfire: more than 22,000 firefighters are battling 86 other enormous fires across the western side of the US and yet more fires in Canada. Some of the blazes have been so intense they are thought to have created their own weather systems (see page 17). The Bootleg Fire and the Dixie Fire in California have produced their own lightning, and Bootleg has spawned “fire tornadoes” (see picture) – spiralling vortexes of gases, smoke and fire. Another unusual phenomenon observed by the National Weather Service, has been the emergence of pyrocumulonimbus plumes (aka “fire-breathing dragon” clouds): giant, dirty-coloured thunderheads atop huge columns of smoke from the wildfire.

The wildfires have also created a smoky haze that has spread across the country, reaching as far as New York City, 3,000 miles from where the blazes began. As a result, the city now has some of the worst air quality in the world: alerts have been issued advising residents with underlying health conditions, such as asthma, to avoid going outdoors altogether.

Washington DC Capitol Hill riot: The House select committee investigating the 6 January invasion of the Capitol began its hearings this week with testimonies from four police officers attacked during the rioting.

“I was at risk of being stripped of and killed with my own firearm as I heard chants of ‘kill him with his own gun’,” said DC Metropolitan Police Officer Michael Fanone. “I can still hear those words in my head today.” Officer Harry Dunn recounted how pro-Trump supporters had hurled racial epithets at him, calling him the N-word. The committee’s work is likely to become ever more controversial as it delves into the role President Trump may have played in inciting the rioters. In contrast to previous high-profile hearings aimed at the former president, however, no Trump supporters have so far emerged to offer support for him.

Los Angeles, California New sexual assault charges: The disgraced Hollywood mogul, Harvey Weinstein, who was sentenced last year by a New York court to 23 years in jail for rape and sexual assault, now faces fresh charges of assault relating to five women at a court in Los Angeles. The 69-year-old, who lost his bid to block extradition from New York on medical grounds, arrived at the Los Angeles Superior Court in a wheelchair. Weinstein denied four counts of rape, four counts of forcible oral copulation, two counts of sexual battery by restraint, and one count of sexual penetration by use of force. If found guilty, he faces up to 140 years in prison.

Nashville, Tennessee Statue taken down: African Americans have been calling for the removal of the bust of Nathan Bedford Forrest ever since it was installed in the Tennessee General Assembly Building in 1978. To his admirers, Forrest is one of the great Confederate generals of the Civil War, but he was also a slave trader and a Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

Several attempts in recent years to have the bust removed were voted down by Republican opposition; but in March the Tennessee Historical Commission voted 25-1 to relocate it to the state museum and, despite fierce protest from local Republicans, the state Building Commission last week voted 5-2 to confirm the decision. It’s the second time this year that Forrest has been moved: in June coffins holding his remains and those of his wife Mary Ann, were dug up from a park in Memphis and removed to a museum.

Guatemala City Prosecutor flees: The special prosecutor in charge of Guatemala’s anti-corruption unit has been fired by Guatemala’s attorney general, who has accused him of undermining her. Juan Francisco Sandoval is an internationally respected investigator who helped take down former president Otto Pérez Molina and members of his cabinet on corruption charges. The Special Prosecutor’s Office Against Impunity he headed was the offspring of a UN-backed initiative to stamp out crime and corruption in Guatemala. But the present government, much criticised for driving out judges taking a hard line on corruption, has been seeking to declare his agency unconstitutional. According to Guatemala’s ombudsman, Sandoval has now fled Guatemala in order “to safeguard his life”.

THE WEEK 31 July 2021

Minas Gerais, Brazil Iced coffee: The worst frost to strike Brazil’s coffee-growing plantations has pushed Arabica coffee prices to their highest point in nearly seven years. Severe frosts have damaged fields in Brazil’s three largest growing regions – Minas Gerais, Paraná and São Paulo – which comprise about 11% of Brazil’s Arabica crop area. The world’s largest coffee producer and exporter, Brazil had already been grappling with its worst drought in a century, which left plants across the coffee belt weakened by heat stress. Predictions by weather forecasters of another frost hitting the country next week, have driven up Arabica coffee futures, making it more than likely that major coffee brands will be raising their prices in the coming weeks.

The world at a glance Tunis President’s “coup”: Tunisia’s president has sacked the prime minister, suspended parliament and imposed a nationwide curfew, following a series of antigovernment protests sparked by a spike in Covid cases, and growing anger about the country’s economic malaise. President Saied, a former law professor who was regarded as a safe pair of hands when he was elected in 2019, said he’d acted to stop Tunisia spiralling into chaos, and denied claims by its biggest political party that he had staged a coup. Many Tunisians welcomed his radical intervention.

However, others warned that the country – considered a bright spot of the 2011 Arab Spring movement – was becoming a dictatorship. This week, US secretary of state Antony Blinken urged Saied “to adhere to the principles of democracy”.

Tehran Water protests: At least three people have been killed in protests sparked by water shortages in Iran.

Demonstrations erupted in Khuzestan, as temperatures in the southwestern region soared close to 50°C, but then spread to other areas, where they morphed into an expression of general discontent with the government. In Tehran, protesters were heard chanting “Death to the Dictator”, a reference to Ayatollah Khamenei. Human rights groups have accused the security forces of firing on demonstrators.

NEWS 9

Pyongyang Hotline restored: North and South Korea have restored a communication channel that Pyongyang cut off last June, as relations between them soured. At the time, officials in North Korea cited the failure of the government in Seoul to stop activists sending anti-regime leaflets across the border. It also followed the failure of a second nuclear summit with former US president Donald Trump. By reopening the telephone hotline, Kim Jong Un and South Korea’s President Moon Jae-in are making a “big stride” to restore mutual trust between the two countries, North Korea’s state media said. Kim has made no secret of the fact that North Korea is in a parlous state: in June, he warned that the food situation was “getting tense”, and the official media recently described this year’s rice harvest as a “matter of life and death”.

Nanjing, China City shutdown: The 9.3 million residents of the Chinese city of Nanjing have been put into a “soft” lockdown, in an effort to contain a new outbreak of Covid-19.

Seventeen positive cases were detected during a routine check of airport workers last week. Local officials have since revealed that at least some of the cases identified at the airport were of the highly transmissible Delta variant. By Tuesday, 106 cases had been reported in Nanjing, and mass testing of residents was being carried out.

Cabo Delgado, Mozambique Troops battle extremists: Around 1,000 troops and police officers from Rwanda arrived in Mozambique last week, to help local forces battle the Islamist insurgency raging in the northern Cabo Delgado region. The Rwandan forces have since been joined by troops from Botswana, who form part of a deployment agreed by the 16-member South African Development Community to fight the militants, and stop them fleeing to neighbouring countries and establishing bases there. At least 2,500 civilians have been killed and more than 700,000 displaced since the start of the insurgency in 2017. According to the World Food Programme, the security situation has put a million people in the oil-rich but long-neglected region at risk of starvation.

Kabul Taliban advance: The Afghan government has imposed a night-time curfew across most of the country, in an effort to halt the advance of the Taliban, which is now believed to control up to half of the country’s territory. Most of the areas it has gained in the past few weeks have been rural, but emboldened by the withdrawal of US troops and their Nato allies, the group is now threatening cities, including Kandahar, the country’s second-largest city. The last American troops are due to leave by 31 August; however, President Biden has promised that the US will keep supporting the Afghan army.

Sydney, Australia Lockdown extended: Thousands of people took part in anti-lockdown protests in Sydney last week, days before restrictions in the New South Wales capital were extended for another month. The city’s five million residents have been under a strict lockdown since June, as part of efforts to contain an outbreak of the Delta variant.

Officials have warned that the case rate remains stubbornly high, and restrictions might not be eased until September. Last week, some 13 million Australians (almost half the population) were under lockdown, but other cities have now reopened.

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

People

10 NEWS Out of order at PMQs Betty Boothroyd, 91, didn’t suffer fools gladly during her eight years as Speaker of the House of Commons, from 1992 to 2000 – and she doesn’t mince her words when assessing Prime Minister’s Questions today.“I’m afraid that it has deteriorated,” she says. “The Prime Minister is there to answer questions about what the Government is doing, why it is not doing it. I don’t say prime ministers have got the answer to every question. But at least they’ve got to have a stab at it.” Too often, she says, Boris Johnson doesn’t even try “to answer the questions”. Her scorn isn’t reserved for the PM alone. “I get goosepimples when a backbencher gets up and says, ‘Will the Prime Minister congratulate Bill Smith in my constituency, because he’s got the best pigeons development in the country, or he plays darts better than anybody else’,” she told Matt Chorley on Times Radio. “It really is an abuse of the system.”

A geek’s progress Having starred in the likes of Juno and Six Feet Under, Rainn Wilson has an impressive CV. But he’s best known for playing Dwight, the resident dork in the US version of The Office – the counterpart of Mackenzie Crook’s Gareth in the British original. In many ways, the goofy role came naturally to him, he told Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian.

“When you put a camera on someone, you’re seeing a lot of

what’s already there.” At the beginning of his career, agents suggested he “build loads of muscles and lose weight. But I realised early on that I was in the character-actor tradition.

Also, sensibility-wise, I’m weird! I play chess, I play the bassoon, I read science fiction.

I’m not out there hunting, driving a truck or…” he throws his hands up in exasperation. “What do leading men even do in their spare time? Gut trout?”

Marr’s brush with Covid Andrew Marr had a stroke in 2013, and kidney cancer five years later; by March he had already had two doses of the Pfizer vaccine. So when the broadcaster developed a sore throat and started sneezing in June, he put it down to hayfever. Several lateral flow tests came back negative, but he began feeling “seriously ill” – and a PCR test showed he had Covid. He developed a “vice-like headache... I felt queasy and started to get shivers and shakes with my temperature going up and down all over the place,” he told Andrew Preston in the Daily Mail. “The last time I’d felt like that was 25 years ago when I had hepatitis. I was genuinely surprised by how ill I was.” He recovered after ten days, and credits the vaccine with saving him from hospital or worse. But as cases rise, he has a warning. “Even if you’re double-vaccinated, you don’t have superpowers, you can still get ill,” he says. “It can be really, really, horrible.”

Castaway of the week This week’s edition of Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs featured the writer Robert Macfarlane 1 Nature Boy by eden ahbez, performed by Nat King Cole 2* The Ghost of O’Donahue, written and performed by Johnny Flynn 3 California Dreamin’ by John and Michelle Phillips, performed by The Mamas & The Papas 4 Birdhouse in Your Soul by John Flansburgh and John Linnell, performed by They Might Be Giants 5 Blessing by Julie Fowlis, Karine Polwart, Seckou Keita, Kris Drever, Rachel Newton, Beth Porter, Jim Molyneux and Kerry Andrew, from The Lost Words, a book of spells 6 Four Ethers by Jonathan Wise, performed by Serpentwithfeet 7 The Swimming Song, written and performed by Loudon Wainwright III 8 Messiaen: Quartet for the End of Time (third movement) by Olivier Messiaen, performed by Claude Desurmont Book: Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins Luxury: a very spicy-hot chilli plant

THE WEEK 31 July 2021

* Choice if allowed only one record

Playing Tadzio, the object of desire in Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice, made Björn Andrésen not merely a star but an instant icon – the embodiment of youthful beauty, says Ryan Gilbey in The Guardian. But it’s not an experience he recalls fondly. In fact, “it has screwed up my life quite decently”, he says. He was 15 at the time, and saw the role as “a cool summer job”. But things were odd from the off: Visconti made him strip to his trunks and evaluated his body at the audition; during filming, the director warned the crew to keep their hands off the boy – before dragging him to a gay club when shooting was over. Andrésen wasn’t even allowed to go out in the sun, play with friends or swim in the sea, for fear of spoiling his complexion. Promoting the film was even worse. At Cannes, he was mobbed, while Visconti joked to the press about him losing his looks. In Japan, he was plied with pills to deal with his punishing schedule. It was, he has said, a “living nightmare”. Even today, the movie dominates his life. “Everything I ever do will be associated with that film. I mean, we’re still sitting here talking about it 50 years later.” He knows who he blames for his treatment. “Luchino was the sort of cultural predator who would sacrifice anything or anyone for the work.” What would Andrésen say to him if he were here now? His answer is immediate: “F*** off.”

Viewpoint:

Ever-growing cars “Just as children have grown up taller in the past generation, so new cars have grown in length. Like parents, new cars have also been getting fatter.

The five top-selling cars are, on average, a foot wider than the equivalent in 1965. This means there is only six inches’ clearance on each side as the car waddles into the average garage. Parking spaces are no wider, so it’s harder to squeeze past the neighbouring Chelsea tractor to reach the driver’s door at the supermarket. It’s odd. We used to wonder at the bulk of American cars. Since then, green aspirations have made smaller cars theoretically desirable, yet they swell like prize marrows.”

The Daily Telegraph

Farewell John Cornell, maverick Australian businessman behind Crocodile Dundee, died 23 July, aged 80.

Richard Lewontin, geneticist and evolutionary biologist, died 4 July, aged 92.

Doreen Pugh, devoted secretary to Winston Churchill, died 17 July, aged 96.

Menelik Shabazz, film-maker and campaigner who chronicled the black British experience, died 28 June, aged 67.

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Briefing

NEWS 13

The battle of Stonehenge

Building a tunnel on the stretch of the A303 passing Stonehenge has been mooted for years. Now it looks set to become a reality Why build a tunnel at all? an early Bronze Age settlement. At the It’s Britain’s most picturesque traffic jam: eastern end is Blick Mead, an ancient a notorious bottleneck on the A303 in Mesolithic site, where humans gathered Wiltshire, which passes 200 yards from thousands of years before Stonehenge was erected. A treasure trove of finds England’s – and possibly the world’s – most famous prehistoric monument, have been made there: 35,000 pieces of Stonehenge. For decades, the A303, the worked flint; the perfectly preserved most direct route between the Southeast hoofprints of wild cattle, known as and the Southwest, has been heavily aurochs; as well as a 7,000-year-old overloaded. Most of this 100-mile dog’s tooth, which has been analysed to corridor between the M3 and the M5 is show that it began its life far away, dual carriageway, but 35 miles (including probably in northern England. Blick the Stonehenge section) is single Mead’s integrity could be compromised carriageway – which, says Highways by the construction of a tunnel entrance England, causes “congestion, delays and a few hundred metres away, and a an increased risk of accidents”: 24,000 flyover literally metres from the dig. vehicles use the route per day, almost twice as many as it was designed for. At Do all experts oppose the plan? weekends and in the summer, it’s more No. Both the National Trust, which Putting an end to congestion and delays? like 29,000; it routinely takes an hour or owns 800 hectares of land around more to pass the short Stonehenge section. So the idea is to build Stonehenge, and English Heritage, which runs the site itself, are in a dual carriageway in a tunnel, thus “removing traffic from much favour of the tunnel in principle. English Heritage says the scheme of this iconic setting”, says Highways England. “would transform Stonehenge, reunite the landscape and leave a lasting legacy for future generations”. At present, the World When was the plan first hatched?

Heritage Site, dotted with monuments, barrows and enclosures, is It was first considered in the 1980s, but progress has been slow bisected by the A303: two thirds of its 6,500 acres are on the and laborious. Plans for a 1.3-mile underground bypass were southern side of the A303, opposite Stonehenge. Grassing over the existing road (which would be turned into a track for walkers scrapped in 2007 on cost grounds. In 2014, the Government’s official roads strategy included £2bn in funding for improvements and riders) would allow for the restoration of the Stonehenge to the A303 – but was bogged down by funding difficulties. Then, Avenue, an ancient processional route which currently crosses the A303 en route to the monument from the River Avon. in November 2020, the Transport Secretary Grant Shapps approved a £1.7bn plan to create a dual carriageway on the eight miles between Amesbury and Berwick Down, including a twoIs there a third way? mile tunnel which would run slightly south of the existing A303.

As it stands, the planned scheme is “an unattractive British compromise: a bit of a tunnel, but one that is not long enough to Who objects to this? protect the archaeology of the World Heritage Site”, says archaeologist Professor Mike Parker Pearson, a leading expert on The plans have drawn public opposition from local politicians, Stonehenge. The Stonehenge Alliance, Unesco and others argue archaeologists, historians, green campaigners and druids alike.

The Stonehenge Alliance, a campaign group, has amassed more that the tunnel should be made longer to avoid risking damage from the construction of its portals. The Government, though, is than 137,000 objections to the tunnel, arguing that it would do “irreparable damage” to the landscape surrounding Stonehenge adamant that it only has funding for a tunnel of a certain length.

– a Unesco Word Heritage Site containing a wealth of prehistoric English Heritage has warned that a longer tunnel wouldn’t be financially viable, with the result that we would be left with the archaeological evidence. The tunnel itself would pass too deep to cause archaeological damage; it’s the unsatisfactory status quo. entry points that are the bone of An enduring mystery contention. “There would be Is it actually going ahead?

We still know remarkably little about Stonehenge, but It looks that way. Highways England extensive tunnel cuttings into the what we do know is remarkable enough. It was begun says it expects to start building the chalk for four lanes of tarmac, and around 3000BC, in the late Stone Age, when a circular earthwork was built on the site, which was by then tunnel between July and September massive highway interchanges already surrounded by long barrows (large communal 2022; the construction is expected to through sensitive archaeological graves). We can be sure about this first date because take five years to complete. But areas,” says the Stonehenge Alliance. the earthwork was built using antler picks which were campaigners aren’t giving up just yet: It wants the tunnel to be considerably carbon dated in the 1990s. Cremated remains were a judicial review challenging the longer so that the portals don’t buried there. The stones did not arrive until at least 400 lawfulness of the Government’s endanger the World Heritage Site. years after construction began: the bigger “sarsen” decision was heard from 23 to 25 Unesco itself supports this position, stones from the Marlborough Downs, and the smaller June at the High Court; judgment and has said that the site’s status may “bluestones” from the Preseli Hills, 140 miles away in be threatened by the plans.

Wales, aligned with the sunrise of the summer solstice will come later in the year. And even and the sunset of the winter solstice. Stonehenge was if that isn’t successful, some have built over some 1,500 years, or 70 generations, and vowed to take direct action to stop What damage could it do? remained in use for around two millennia. the works from going ahead. “Boris The Planning Inspectorate had Over the years, its construction has been credited to Johnson claimed he’d lie down in recommended that Grant Shapps giants, wizards, Romans, Phoenicians and even aliens. front of the bulldozers to stop the should withhold consent, warning it Druids are still widely thought to have been involved, third runway at Heathrow,” says would cause “permanent, irreversible though the dating is wrong by at least 1,000 years.

Arthur Pendragon, a druid who harm”. A string of sites could be “The desire for knowledge and the love of mystery are claims to be an incarnation of the endangered by new cuttings and two of the most powerful human impulses,” wrote the once and future king of England. “I building work; in total, ten hectares historian Rosemary Hill in her book about the really will lie in front of the will be churned up. At the western monument, “and Stonehenge satisfies both at once.” bulldozers to stop this.” end of the tunnel it could cut through 31 July 2021 THE WEEK

14 NEWS

The UK at a glance

Loch Lomond Swimmers drown: There were calls for more safety measures at Loch Lomond this week, after four people drowned in its waters over two days. The body of a teenage boy was recovered at Balloch Castle on Friday; on Saturday, a nine-year-old boy, his mother and an adult friend drowned near Ardlui. The boy, who could not swim, had fallen off a pier, and the two adults went in after him. His father said none of them had realised the water was so deep. Across the UK, around 40 people have drowned in open waters since 14 July, three times more than normal for the time of year.

Edinburgh Food waste ban: Charities have demanded new laws to prevent food waste, in response to footage of piles of unsold groceries being designated for destruction at Amazon’s plant in Dunfermline. The items, seen in clips obtained by The Times, included “in date” crisps, tinned foods and drinks.

The Scottish government has described such waste as “unacceptable”.

Amazon’s policies have been under scrutiny since it emerged that surplus electrical goods are routinely destroyed at its Dunfermline site. However, it insists it never junks “good” food and that it donates to food banks.

Belfast Omagh deaths “preventable”: There was a “real prospect” that the Omagh bombing of 15 August 1998 – the worst atrocity in the history of the Troubles – could have been prevented, according to a High Court judge in Belfast. Mr Justice Horner made his ruling in response to a judicial review brought by Michael Gallagher, whose son Aiden was one of 29 people killed by the Real IRA that day. Gallagher has long claimed that the attack could have been thwarted had the security services done more to share and act on intelligence about terrorist activity. Mr Horner ruled that such arguments were “plausible”; he stopped short of ordering a public inquiry into the issue, but urged the UK and Irish governments to launch investigations.

London Libel victory: A teenage refugee from Syria has won a libel action against Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (aka Tommy Robinson), the anti Islam activist and founder of the English Defence League. In 2018, Jamal Hijazi, now 18, was filmed being attacked in the playground of his school in Huddersfield. When the clip went viral, Yaxley-Lennon produced two Facebook videos, in which he claimed that Hijazi was “not innocent”, and had “violently attacked young English girls”. These were watched by almost a million people, and led to reprisals against Hijazi and his family that forced them to leave their home. In a London court, a judge ruled that Yaxley-Lennon’s allegations had not been proven, and that his clips had been “calculated to inflame the situation”. He was ordered to pay £100,000 in damages, and £500,000 in costs.

Cardiff Complaints soar: The number of complaints about members of the Welsh Senedd (MSs) have more than doubled in a year; however, a single politician accounted for almost half the total.

In his annual report, the parliament’s standards commissioner, Douglas Bain, said there had been 216 complaints recorded in 2020-21, up from 106 the previous year. Of these, 97 were about Neil McEvoy, a former Plaid Cymru MS who was expelled from the party in 2018 and who lost his seat in May’s election. Almost all the complaints about McEvoy related to “failing to declare or register an interest”. Bain said McEvoy had been responsible for wasting “a great deal of public money”. Other complaints were mainly about comments made by members on social media.

Exeter Admissions offer: Exeter University has written to students who have accepted offers to start degrees in medicine this autumn, offering them £10,000, and a year’s free accommodation, if they defer their start date until 2022. The university said it had been forced to act because of an “unprecedented” rise in the number of candidates who’d made Exeter their first choice. It also noted that the government cap on places for medical students means it cannot expand to accommodate them. English medical schools are only allowed to accept around 7,500 candidates a year, owing to the large public subsidies required to cover the cost of their courses, and the need for students to have NHS placements. This year, a record number of students applied for medicine, and some universities had more acceptances than they were anticipating.

THE WEEK 31 July 2021

London Flooding chaos: Torrential rain caused flash floods in parts of London on Sunday, for the second time in less than a fortnight.

Among the areas worst affected were Newham, Barking and Battersea. Homes were inundated, vehicles were stranded, and some Tube stations and major roads, including the Blackwall Tunnel, were closed. In east London, two hospitals – Newham and Whipps Cross – had to ask patients to stay away from their emergency departments, owing to flooding and electricity failures.

The London Fire Brigade said it had responded to more than 1,000 flood-related calls. This week, the Met Office warned that Scotland’s week-long heatwave was about to end in downpours that could lead to flooding in Aberdeen, Glasgow and Edinburgh.

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Best of the American columnists NEWS 17 End game in the White House: was Trump plotting a coup?

“Donald Trump’s final days in office Biden’s inauguration. “They may try to stage a coup,” the general told his were even worse than we thought,” said Chris Cillizza on CNN.com. A subordinates, “but they are not going slew of newly released books paint “a to f***ing succeed.” It’s also claimed terrifying picture” of a president that Milley stopped Trump from starting a war with Iran – which the “consumed by personal hatred” and prepared to desecrate the constitution president was contriving to keep him to stay in power. In Frankly, We Did in office after losing the election. But Win This Election by Michael C. all that happened is that Trump held Bender, we learn that, during the Black meetings to discuss military options Lives Matter protests last summer, against Iran; in the end, no action was taken. And whatever Trump’s flaws, Trump called for the army to “just shoot” demonstrators; he retreated to describing his supporters as the White House bunker in panic, and “brownshirts”, as Milley did, will add when news of that was leaked, wanted to their sense that Washington regards General Milley with Trump: “florid” claims? to charge whoever was responsible their grievances as illegitimate. with treason. “They should be executed,” he yelled. Staff were deeply worried about his authoritarian impulses, said Ben Another new Trump book, Michael Wolff’s Landslide, makes it clear Milley’s fears were overblown, said Laura Miller on Jacobs on NYMag.com. In I Alone Can Fix It, Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker report that the Pentagon’s top general, Mark Slate. Trump reacted to his defeat not by calling out the army Milley, feared Trump would invoke the Insurrection Act to hold but by ranting about voter fraud and dispatching the “ghoulish, on to power, and drew comparisons to Nazi Germany. snivelling” figure of Rudy Giuliani to mount doomed legal challenges. Wolff says most of Trump’s aides thought he was Milley is an “honourable man”, said Gerard Baker in The Wall “off his rocker” and put on a show of appeasing him while Street Journal, but it’s wrong for a general to criticise a recently ignoring his demands. Yes, Trump had tyrannical impulses, but departed US president in this way. Milley’s “florid” claim seems he was so disorganised and delusional that Wolff concludes that to be that he saved the US from disaster in the days before Joe “American democracy was never in real danger”.

How Native Americans have been betrayed Bidtah Becker and Anne Castle The Washington Post

The scary ravages of climate change David Leonhardt The New York Times

No, Joe, Big Tech is not to blame Jonah Goldberg Los Angeles Times

The president is on a mission to fix the US’s ageing infrastructure. Large, complex projects involving highways, tunnels and bridges are in his sights, say Bidtah Becker and Anne Castle, but there are much more basic problems crying out for attention. Such as: the fact that more than half a million Native Americans lack proper access to clean water and sanitation. Some households have no plumbing at all; others rely on failing pipes or have contaminated water supplies. The pandemic has highlighted the costs of this poor sanitation. It’s no coincidence that Indian Country has borne the brunt of Covid: Native Americans were 3.5 times more likely than their white neighbours to catch the virus, and have the highest death rates of any ethnic group. Federal programmes to improve sanitation facilities on reservations have all fallen short over the years, but the current infrastructure drive provides a “once-in-a-generation opportunity” to correct this shameful state of affairs. The US appropriated the lands of its Indigenous citizens in exchange for the promise that the tribes would have permanent homelands where they could prosper. “That promise has gone unfulfilled in countless ways, and it is meaningless if Native American homes do not have clean water.”

“It’s almost as if the entire East Coast has shifted south,” says David Leonhardt. If you look at average July temperatures for the decades ending in 1970 and 2020, it shows just how much hotter the US is getting. The July average up north in Portland, Maine – 78°F (28.6°C) in the 1960s – has risen to the low 80s, the old average of Boston, 100 miles further south. Summers in Boston, meanwhile, now resemble 20th century summers in New York. The temperature in the Big Apple, though, has become like that of Philadelphia, whose average of nearly 90°F (32.2°C) is in line with the old average of Washington DC. As for the capital, it’s now hotter than Tampa, Florida used to be. The same phenomenon is occurring in the Mountain West, where a rash of wildfires have broken out this summer, creating horrendous conditions. The Bootleg Fire in southern Oregon is so huge that it is generating its own lightning clouds, along with fire whorls – a vortex of air and flame that resembles a fiery tornado. “Normally the weather predicts what the fire will do,” said a forestry official. “In this case, the fire is predicting what the weather will do.” Put it all together, and it makes for a pretty scary picture. “These are the cascading effects of climate change, and they are getting worse.”

Joe Biden has a problem, says Jonah Goldberg. The US vaccination programme, which got off to a great start, is stalling just as cases of the more contagious Delta variant are rising. What to do? The president can’t blame the people not getting jabbed, as tempting as that might be, because that could further alienate them. Besides, they’re not all Trump-loving white Republicans: black Americans and Latinos are over-represented among vaccine resisters – Biden doesn’t want to insult them. Being a “typical politician”, however, he wants to blame someone. “Enter Big Tech.” The White House has gone on the attack against Facebook and other social media companies, accusing them of allowing misinformation to flourish on their platforms. Biden went so far as to declare that they were “killing people”. Facebook rebutted this: its users’ vaccine acceptance rate exceeds that of the public at large.

But his position is also constitutionally problematic. It’s not for him to tell private companies what they can and cannot publish. In practical terms, too, it’s a “terrible idea”: it will only feed the bogus right-wing notion that social media firms are “extensions of the Democratic Party, the Deep State, etc”. Rather than seeking scapegoats, Biden should stick to rebutting myths and using persuasion.

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

Best articles: International

18 NEWS

China’s floods: carnage in Henan province

The ferocity of the downpours was public scrutiny, said Pei Lin Wu and almost unimaginable, said Aw Cheng Rebecca Tan in The Washington Post.

Wei in The Straits Times (Singapore).

Bloggers complained that officials had On a single day last week, 25 inches of reacted slowly, and tried to play down the gravity of the situation at first. rain fell in Zhengzhou, China – over a year’s worth of precipitation. One There was also criticism of the “overly hour alone saw almost eight inches of positive tone” during rescue efforts – rain flood the city of 12 million: cars including a now-deleted line on the Zhengzhou government’s social media and motorbikes floated down streets; pedestrians clung to trees in the channels: “We have to keep the faith. gushing water. In the most horrifying After this historic downpour, the city will be cleaner, the grass will be episode, around 500 commuters were stuck in a flooded subway carriage, greener and more lush.” Yet this tragedy was “absolutely impossible” said Frank Chen in Asia Times (Hong Kong). As water levels rose above “After this historic downpour, the grass will be greener” to prevent, said the state-owned chest height, desperate passengers Global Times (Beijing). The scale of the rainfall exceeded any since records began; it’s not realistic to climbed onto seats and sent SOS messages to family and loved ones; 12 of them didn’t make it out alive. In all, more than 50 expect cities to build infrastructure that could cope with it. people died and three million were affected by the disaster in the Henan region of central China, where multiple tributaries of In the West, catastrophes like this are seen as timely reminders of the threat posed by global warming, said Nectar Gan and the Yellow River cross one another and flooding is common.

Jessie Yeung on CNN.com (New York). But in China, state The disaster in Zhengzhou and its surrounds led to a “massive media dismissed the link between the floods and climate relief effort”, said Xinhua (Beijing). Thousands of firefighters change. Beijing likes to see climate change as a crisis it has and soldiers were deployed as rain moved north during the “stepped up to solve”. It is less keen to highlight the threat of week, leaving cities and villages without electricity or fresh global warming to China itself, which has the dubious honour water. But the government’s early response prompted unusual of being “the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases”.

PALESTINE

No, actually Ben & Jerry’s are not Nazis Haaretz (Tel Aviv)

RUSSIA

The Kremlin leak: fake news or gospel truth?

The Moscow Times

CYPRUS

Sophia Loren’s much-loved beach resort Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

THE WEEK 31 July 2021

Ice-cream sales might seem like a trivial issue to get worked up about – but apparently not in Israel, says Joshua Shanes. Last week, Ben & Jerry’s announced plans to stop selling its ice cream in Jewish settlements in the West Bank, saying that operating there would be “inconsistent with our values”.

The decision provoked a “swift and furious” reaction. Israeli PM Naftali Bennett called the boycott “morally wrong” and labelled Ben & Jerry’s “anti-Israel ice cream”; the foreign ministry called it “economic terrorism”; with one right-wing pundit even calling Ben & Jerry’s “Nazi collaborators”.

Israel’s ambassador to the US, Gilad Erdan, said it was advancing “the de-legitimisation of the Jewish state and the de-humanisation of the Jewish people”. By this warped logic, “refusing to sell your products to settlements that the entire world considers illegal is not only an attack on Israel but actually constitutes an anti-Semitic attack on the entire Jewish people”. How strange that the ongoing dispossession and oppression of millions of Palestinians provokes so little outrage; but that making Israelis who live in the occupied West Bank “have to buy a different brand of ice cream”, or else “drive 15 minutes to buy Ben & Jerry’s in Israel proper”, is apparently an unacceptable disgrace.

“In a world awash with disinformation and misinformation, genuine whistleblowers and fake leaks, it’s often difficult to know what to believe,” says Mark Galeotti. So I’m not sure what to make of The Guardian’s publication of what it claims is a leaked Kremlin document confirming President Putin ordered Russian spies to support Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid. The document is apparently from a meeting of Russia’s national security council, and contains a psychological assessment of Trump as an “impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual” with an “inferiority complex”, whose presidency would cause a “social explosion” in the US. On the one hand, we know Russia meddled in the election, and some experts believe the document is genuine: it could have been hacked and then leaked by Western intelligence; or brought by a spy who defected from Moscow. Then again, “it could be a hoax”. We’ve only seen a pixellated version, and the damning assessment of Trump (and the mention of kompromat – compromising material – on him) appears a little too “perfect”, as if tailored to a Western liberal audience. So, “boring as it may be” I’m going to sit on the fence: for now, I’ll take the story neither as “gospel truth nor cynical fake”.

Last year, Turkey’s President Erdogan provoked a standoff with Greece over oil exploration in the Mediterranean. Now, he’s stirring trouble over Cyprus, says Rainer Hermann. He recently visited the island to promote the reopening of Varosha, in Turkish-occupied northern Cyprus. In the 1960s, it was a bustling beach resort, popular with the likes of Sophia Loren and Elizabeth Taylor. But it has been a fenced-off military zone since the 1974 Turkish invasion, when its Greek-Cypriot population fled: its streets are overgrown with weeds; its hotels abandoned. Varosha has long been seen as a bargaining chip for Ankara in any future peace deal, owing to the expectation that it would return to Greek Cypriot administration under a settlement. Now, however, Erdogan has backed plans by Northern Cypriot authorities to reopen the resort solely for the benefit of Turkish Cypriots.

It’s a “blatant provocation”, which caused fury in Brussels, Nicosia and Athens – and dashes any short-term hopes of reunifying the island. In truth, Erdogan is probably motivated by a quest to arrest his falling poll ratings at home. But he may yet come to regret his stance, which risks alienating the EU just as he wants closer ties with Brussels. Once again, Erdogan is “playing with fire”.

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Health & Science

NEWS 21

What the scientists are saying…

Wobbling Moon will cause floods

A “wobble” in the Moon’s orbit will lead to a “dramatic” increase in coastal flooding in the 2030s, Nasa scientists haved warned. As it orbits Earth, the Moon’s angle relative to the equator changes over time. This wobble – which spans an 18.6-year period – influences how tides ebb and flow. For the first half of the cycle, tidal extremes are suppressed. For the second half, they are exaggerated, meaning that high tides are much higher than average. A report published in Nature Climate Change by Nasa’s Sea Level Change Science Team says the latter effect will be felt again in the 2030s, when rising seas are already predicted to threaten many coastal areas. Nasa looked at high-tide or “nuisance” floods, rather than extreme events caused by hurricanes or heavy rain. They found that most US coastal communities can expect a three- to fourfold increase in such floods from the mid-2030s. Urban planners, businesses and homeowners need to act now to protect lives and livelihoods, they say.

A “life-saving” spider venom

The venom of an Australian funnel-web spider contains a protein that may help reduce damage from heart attacks, and preserve donor hearts for transplants. This “death disruptor” protein was extracted from the deadly Fraser Island funnel-web, named for the island where it lives, by scientists at the nearby University of Queensland. They believe the substance, known as Hi1a, could be used as a drug to stop cardiac cells from dying. After a heart attack, blood flow to the heart is reduced, resulting in a lack of oxygen to the heart muscle. This triggers a “death signal”, causing the heart cells to die; Hi1a works by disrupting that signal. “Despite decades

The Fraser Island funnel-web spider

of research, no one has been able to develop a drug that stops this death signal in heart cells, which is one of the reasons why heart disease continues to be the leading cause of death in the world,” said Nathan Palpant, one of the authors of the study in the journal Circulation. The drug candidate has been tested on live heart cells in the lab and on genetically engineered mice. After further animal testing, the researchers hope to begin trials involving human heart transplants in 2023. Funnelweb venom contains more than 3,000 different molecules. Venoms are valuable to drug researchers as they are often complex, highly potent and have specific targets and effects in the human body.

Virtual reality can reduce pain

A poster on the dentist’s ceiling can be a welcome distraction for children facing their first filling. Virtual reality headsets may be even more effective for patients

© SAMANTHA NIXON

The Amazon is no longer a carbon sink

The Amazon rainforest has passed a crucial tipping point: it now emits more carbon dioxide than it absorbs. That was the conclusion of a study in the journal Nature, for which scientists sent 590 small planes above the Amazon over eight years, to measure atmospheric carbon levels. Logging, forest fires and drought have taken a heavy toll on the world’s largest tropical forest, which is now a net producer of CO2, according to the study. Their estimates are thought to be more accurate than previous studies, A patch of rainforest burns in Brazil which were based on satellite and ground-level data. Emissions now amount to about a billion tonnes of CO2 a year.

Most of this is produced by fires, which are deliberately set by people clearing land for beef and soy production. But deforestation and fires also make conditions generally hotter and dryer, creating a vicious cycle which reduces the ability of vegetation in the region to absorb CO2. Trees and plants have absorbed about a quarter of all fossil fuel emissions since 1960; and the Amazon – which covers some 5.5 million square kilometres – had previously played a vital role in this process.

undergoing uncomfortable medical procedures. A team at Wroclaw Medical University in Poland found that headsets showing the beautiful Skógafoss waterfall in Iceland, famous for its double rainbows, drastically reduced the pain and discomfort of tests. The study involved more than 100 people undergoing a cystoscopy, an unpleasant and invasive examination of the bladder via the urethra, usually conducted under a local anaesthetic.

Subjects given the headsets showed lower pain scores than the control group, while their blood pressure and heart rates also rose less than in other patients. Immersing patients in virtual reality not only distracted the patients, but also seemed to trigger their ability to fight pain, say the researchers, who presented the results to the annual congress of the European Association of Urology.

Pigs rooting for climate change

The world’s growing population of feral pigs could be a significant threat to the climate, because their digging releases large amounts of carbon trapped in the soil. The spread of millions of feral pigs across five continents has been studied by Australian scientists, who calculate that the animals are uprooting up to 48,000 square miles of land in countries where they are not native.

This could release as much as 4.9 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide, the equivalent of 1.1 million cars. “Wild pigs are just like tractors ploughing through fields, turning over soil to find food,” said Dr Christopher O’Bryan, co-author of the study in Global Change Biology. About 2,500 wild boar roam the UK, most of them descended from escaped or released farm animals. The National Pig Association said it does not consider this small population to be a climate risk.

The symptoms of long Covid An international study of long Covid sufferers has identified more than 200 symptoms affecting ten organ systems.

About a third of these symptoms can last up to seven months or longer. The most common ones are fatigue, postexertional malaise – where a condition worsens after physical or mental exercise – and so-called “brain fog”, or cognitive dysfunction, according to the study led by University College London.

Other symptoms reported by around 3,800 patients studied include tremors, hallucinations, itchy skin, sexual dysfunction, heart palpitations, bladder control issues, memory loss, blurred vision, diarrhoea and tinnitus. Almost a million Britons are believed to be suffering from long Covid, which affects about one in ten patients who contract Covid-19. British health experts are calling for a nationwide screening programme to help identify sufferers.

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

Pick of the week’s

Gossip

Tom Cruise is embracing all things British. While based in the UK to film the next Mission Impossible movie, he has been to Wimbledon, and has watched England play in the Euro 2020’s final; he is currently holidaying on a yacht in Cornwall. Now he has also taken up darts – installing a board at his plush new home near Biggin Hill in Kent. “A dart board was probably the next natural step as he turns himself into an honorary Englishman,” a source told The Sun. “He knows darts are a staple of English pubs and he fancied a go.”

Sajid Javid was delighted to be appointed back to the Cabinet as Health Secretary.

So too was his mother, he wrote in The Spectator diary: “Like many Asian mothers she wanted at least one of her five sons to be a doctor and she was thrilled that I would be, as she put it, ‘working in healthcare’ after all these years.”

Everyone knows that J.K. Rowling wrote some of the first Harry Potter book in a café in Edinburgh, when she was a struggling single mother. Now, she has revealed that inspiration also struck her in a public toilet. “I once wrote a paragraph sitting on a public loo. Literally. You know what? It was the moment, I had no time, it’s gonna have to happen now,” she told the Radio 4 show The Poet Laureate Has Gone to His Shed. However, she refused to be drawn on the exact location of the WC: “I’m not telling anyone where that loo was, I’m too embarrassed, I can’t believe I’ve told you that.”

THE WEEK 31 July 2021

Talking points NHS pay: do nurses deserve more?

“We owe you more than their jobs had a tough words can say.” That’s time too. So why are only what Prime Minister NHS staff getting “a Boris Johnson told my costly wage increase”? colleagues on Over the past three years, International Nurses’ Day the starting salary for a last year, as he thanked newly qualified nurse has us for our work fighting gone up more than 12%.

Covid-19, said Rachel The £1.5bn cost of the Ambrose in The proposed new raise has to Guardian. But “talk is be met somehow. If the cheap”: last week the NHS’s budget is Government rewarded to pay for “cannibalised” NHS workers protesting in Parliament Square nurses and other NHS it, that will mean less staff in England with a paltry 3% pay rise money for new drugs or more medics. If the (junior doctors were excluded). Yes, it’s better cost is met by raising taxes, then the people than ministers’ “derisory” initial offer of 1%, paying for it will include waiters, construction but with the cost of living going up fast, it’s “a workers, and other private sector workers real-terms pay cut”. Do we really deserve that, whose incomes, unlike those of NHS staff, fell in the middle of a pandemic? Morale is sharply during the pandemic. “rock-bottom” among NHS staff, said Rachel Even in normal times, the issue of nurses’ pay is Clarke, a palliative care doctor, in The Sunday “politically volatile”, said Sean O’Grady in The Times. It’s no exaggeration to say that the service is quietly disintegrating. We went into Independent. In the second year of a pandemic, the pandemic with one of the lowest per capita you’d hope the Government would have rates of intensive care beds and doctors in handled it more carefully. But now nurses are Europe. Now we also have a shocking 5.3 preparing strike action – and politically, this million people on hospital waiting lists. A&E may offer “an escape route for the Prime departments are reporting their most intense Minister and his colleagues”. Even a grateful workloads on record. “A world-class health public is unlikely to back the rise of 12%-15% service cannot be sustained by claps alone.” more demanded by health unions for NHS staff.

If nurses do take action, it will allow ministers to depict the unions as “heartless” extremists.

Look, we know that NHS staff were “heroes in the pandemic”, said Tom Harwood in the Daily For now, “the court of public opinion” is on the nurses’ side. But if they ask for too much, they Mail. But so were supermarket workers and could “snatch defeat from the jaws of victory”. delivery drivers, and all the people who lost

Brexit friction: who’s to blame?

When the Brexit Minister Lord Frost announced his proposal to reform the Northern Ireland Protocol last week, he observed that most of the “current friction” between Britain and the EU stemmed from this arrangement. “It’s hard to argue with that statement,” said Peter Foster in the FT. Yet it is also hard to see Frost’s proposals as he tried to present them – as “an even-handed, mutually consensual attempt to make the Northern Ireland situation work for both sides”. Frost’s 28-page “command paper” does not offer “detailed technical solutions to difficult problems”. Rather, it effectively suggests that the Protocol – which leaves Northern Ireland effectively inside the EU single market for goods, to avoid a hard border with the Republic – should be renegotiated. “It is an attempt to wind the clock back to arguments that were lost in 2019,” but that Boris Johnson’s Government “now wants to try to win again”.

The Protocol should be renegotiated, or better still, scrapped, said Daniel Hannan in The Sunday Telegraph. “For six months, Britain has been bending over backwards to make the system work, while the EU gives every impression of relishing our discomfort.” The UK has spent more than £500m helping businesses adapt. It has given EU officials unprecedented access to its customs systems. “It has repeatedly

suggested ways to facilitate the flow of goods while ensuring that uncertified products don’t enter EU territory.” Brussels has responded to every offer “by insisting on the most intrusive checks possible”. No one seriously thinks that this is really about British sausages “sneaking into Co Donegal”. Around 20% of all the regulatory checks carried out by the EU are done on goods entering Northern Ireland from Great Britain – though the volume of trade is relatively tiny. “No, this is about squeezing the UK.” The UK has “legitimate concerns” about the Protocol, said Anand Menon and Jill Rutter in The Guardian. It has caused genuine difficulties, both for Northern Ireland’s trade and for its politics. However, the fact remains that this Government signed this treaty less than two years ago. “The problems were both foreseeable and foreseen.” Brexiters, of all people, should have been aware that “the EU is not known for its flexibility”. Brussels has duly dismissed the idea that the Protocol should be renegotiated, said The Times. And it would “be better to try to make existing arrangements work”, with both sides making “reasonable compromises”. But the clock is ticking. The latest grace period before EU regulations are fully enforced lasts until 30 September. It’s in both sides’ interest to make Brexit work for Northern Ireland.

© TWITTER

22 NEWS

Talking points Liverpool: stripped of its Unesco status For 17 years, the waterfront of and the “colossal mess” that is my home city of Liverpool has the Museum of Liverpool. But the biggest concerns were over been ranked alongside the likes of the Taj Mahal and the Great the two planned developments: Liverpool Waters project, a Wall of China as a site of “outstanding value to humanity”, £5bn “60-hectare jamboree of half-baked towers”, which put said Imogen Cooper in the Daily Mail. “But no more.” the city on Unesco’s “danger list” in 2012; and Everton’s Why? Because at a meeting new £500m stadium, a “great 4,894 miles away in China last silver slug” at Bramley-Moore week, a Unesco committee Dock. Now the “unbridled voted to strip it of its status as a World Heritage Site, citing contempt” with which Liverpool’s leaders have “irreversible” damage caused treated their city’s architectural by new developments. Never mind that the site includes the heritage has “come to its logical conclusion”.

Albert Dock, home to more A blight on the Three Graces Grade I listed buildings than anywhere else in Britain, and the monumental Actually, Unesco’s decision says more about the “Three Graces” – the Royal Liver, the Cunard “wrong-headed priorities of the cultural and the Port of Liverpool Buildings – on the cognoscenti” than anything else, said The Times.

Mersey. And never mind the 54 million tourists Sure, not all of Liverpool’s recent developments who flock here annually for our rich culture and are beautiful. But it’s hard to disagree with the history. Unesco has made up its mind – making city’s mayor, Joanne Anderson, who asked Liverpool only the third site ever to be kicked off whether Unesco would prefer the docks to its list, after Dresden’s Elbe Valley and Oman’s “remain a derelict wasteland, rather than Arabian Oryx Sanctuary. making a positive contribution to the city’s future”. Unesco’s designation – of the entire I’m shocked it took them this long, said Oliver “Maritime Mercantile City” – was always too broad anyway, said Edwin Heathcote in the FT, Wainwright in The Guardian. Liverpool council has been trampling on the city’s architectural rendering it difficult to redevelop swathes of empty land. So the Unesco decision, while “a heritage for years to make way for “atrocious” knock to its dignity”, may turn out to be good new developments. Perhaps the worst are a trio of huge black blocks built in 2013, which ruined for Liverpool, if it can focus on architectural the waterfront view of the Three Graces. They quality in future. After all, it is “a terrific city” joined a Carbuncle Cup-winning ferry terminal; and “it deserves the best new buildings”.

Billionaires in space: pointless joyrides?

“One very small step for and floods. But the critics dismissing the billionaire space mankind, one giant ego trip for Jeff Bezos.” Last week, the race as an environmentally Amazon founder became the costly vanity project are missing second billionaire in a matter of the point. Space tourism is only the start for Bezos: sending the days to launch himself into the heavens, said Gaby Hinsliff in super rich on thrill rides will The Guardian. Virgin tycoon help fund his grander plans, Richard Branson had made the which include moving heavy first suborbital tourist flight, on industries into space, to help 11 July; but Bezos’s Blue Origin preserve this planet. As for rocket flew higher, and crossed Tesla-founder Elon Musk, his the Kármán line, the widely ultimate plan is to colonise Bezos: his “Best. Day. Ever.” recognised boundary between Mars. In the meantime his firm Earth’s atmosphere and outer space. “Best. Day. SpaceX, with its cost-slashing re-usable rockets, Ever,” the 57-year-old proclaimed, as he is already “indispensable for delivering cargo touched down. “I want to thank every Amazon and crew to the International Space Station”. employee and every Amazon customer,” he said The competition between these titans will only mistily. “Because you guys paid for this.” It’s spur greater innovation. true, in a very real sense we did; and quite a few of us reckon our cash could have been better People grumble that if Bezos cared about the spent on Earth. As one critic pointed out, planet, he’d focus his efforts closer to its surface, Bezos’s ten-minute trip cost $5.5bn – enough to but he and Musk are right to gaze at the stars, stop 37.5 million people starving this year. said Andy Daga on USA Today. Resources are limited on Earth; in space, they are not. The idea A tech tycoon who dons a cowboy hat before that we could mine asteroids for minerals, or tap flying into space in a phallus-shaped rocket, is into solar energy, may seem fantastical, but so inviting trouble, said the FT. And there was did cat scans and camera phones once. Both of certainly something jarring about the timing of those are by-products of space exploration. Who these flights, as Earth was lashed by heatwaves knows what benefits this new era will bring.

NEWS 23

Wit & Wisdom “Literature is the most agreeable way of ignoring life.”

Poet Fernando Pessoa, quoted in Reader’s Digest “A divorce is like an amputation; you survive it, but there is less of you.”

Margaret Atwood, quoted in Forbes “An army without profanity couldn’t fight its way out of a piss-soaked paper bag.”

General George S. Patton, quoted in The Wall Street journal “Before you marry a person, you should first make them use a computer with slow internet to see who they really are.”

Will Ferrell, quoted in the Metro “National pride is to countries what self-respect is to individuals, a necessary condition for selfimprovement.”

Richard Rorty, quoted in the New Statesman “Autobiography is an unrivalled vehicle for telling the truth about other people.”

Philip Guedalla quoted in The Daily Telegraph “I have never been modest enough to demand less of myself.”

Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted on The Browser “No folk tale has ever begun thus: ‘Once upon a time there was a president.’”

Philosopher Nicolás Gómez Dávila, quoted in The American Conservative

Statistics of the week

Keyless cars make up nearly half of car thefts – despite accounting for only 1% on the road.

The Daily Telegraph Between 2010 and 2019, 760 youth clubs closed in England and Wales, as local authority expenditure on youth services fell 70%.

The Guardian

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

Sport

24 NEWS

The Olympics: Team GB joins the gold rush

“Magic Monday” they’re calling it, biker Tom Pidcock, who won the said Matt Dickinson in The Times: men’s cross-country event. But “on a the day when Britain’s Olympic day of vertiginous pressure”, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian, the campaign “picked up a glorious momentum”. And it was well nigh nation’s focus remained poolside, inevitable that Team GB’s gold rush, where Tom Daley and Matty Lee when it came, would begin in the produced an “utterly ruthless” diving Aquatic Centre. After all, Adam performance to see off the Chinese favourites in the 10m synchronised Peaty’s Olympic victory in the 100m breaststroke was such a dead cert platform. After “14 years, four “you could have set your alarm clock Games and all manner of twists, by it”. The three-time world turns and pikes”, Daley has finally champion hadn’t lost a race for seven added a gold medal to his years; if gold in Rio was his to win, in two bronzes.

Tokyo it was his to lose, and he knew It was a nail-biting contest, said it. Which is no doubt why in victory he seemed more relieved than happy, James Gheerbrant in The Times. The said Andy Bull in The Guardian. In Chinese duo Cao Yuan and Chen Daley and Lee: “a moment of sweet deliverance” the past year, the 26-year-old has Aisen had held the lead until a poor dive halfway through the rapid-fire six rounds gave Daley and Lee confessed to often feeling “under siege”, not least from the stresses of being a new father. I looked forward to international a slender lead. The British pair nailed their difficult last dive, but competitions, he has admitted, “just so I could get some sleep”. their rivals matched it with an almost faultless final effort, and there were agonisingly anxious moments before victory was And he hid his near-breakdowns even from his family. confirmed. For Daley, who hit rock bottom when he failed to qualify for his individual final in Rio, it was “a long-awaited Nothing, however, could stop him from fulfilling his destiny as he beat his Dutch rival Arno Kamminga by over half a second. With moment of sweet deliverance, and a glorious conclusion to one of the most tumultuous careers of any modern British Olympian”. his powerful legs and immaculate technique, Peaty has redefined Yet the British pair hadn’t been expected to win here, said Nick breaststroke and “taken his body to places it was never designed Mashiter in The Independent. Daley revealed that he’d undergone to go”, said Oliver Brown in The Daily Telegraph. He dominates his event in a manner unseen in knee surgery just a month earlier, and “there was a chance British sporting history, be it Sebastian Coe, Daley Thompson “I looked forward to international competitions, I wasn’t actually going to be able to be here in the first place”. or Steve Redgrave. “Not even just so I could get some sleep” Michael Phelps has conquered a It is amusing to hear 27-year-old single discipline so Daley now call himself the squad’s “granddad”, said Ben Bloom destructively.” Peaty’s only competition is himself, and having in The Daily Telegraph. But he certainly has been through much broken the world record five times, he has vowed to swim the in the course of his long career: bullied at school for his success 100m in under 56.5 seconds before he retires – “a benchmark (he competed in his first Olympics aged 14 and was world that will, he believes, never be beaten”. champion a year later), he has since come out, married, and become a father and an influential LGBT advocate. “I feel Peaty’s was not the first British medal of “Magic Monday”. After incredibly proud to say I am a gay man and also an Olympic a dramatic false start in the men’s triathlon – a speedboat drifting champion,” said Daley after the victory. “I hope that any young across the startline as the hooter went – 23-year-old Alex Yee had scooped Britain’s second silver of the Tokyo Olympics, while later LGBT person out there can see that no matter how alone you feel right now, you are not alone and you can achieve anything.” in the day Peaty was joined as Olympic champion by mountain

The Hundred: same old sandwich in a fancy wrapper?

After a year’s delay caused by the outbreak of Covid-19, England’s new cricket tournament, The Hundred, finally arrived last week, said Elizabeth Ammon in The Times. Eight teams representing seven different city grounds (London has two: Lord’s and the Oval) are competing in the men’s and women’s sections. And the opening women’s game, held at the Oval between the Manchester Originals and the Oval Invincibles, had its share of thrills.

spare. And they triumphed again in the men’s match the next day.

Like its limited-over predecessor, Twenty20, the Hundred format aims to attract new audiences by putting a premium on hitting and scoring. But unlike T20, it does away with the concept of “the over”, instead allocating 100 deliveries to each side, divided into blocks of five. What struck me, said Jonathan Liew in The Guardian, “was not how fresh and new it all Van Niekerk: invincible felt, but how familiar”. The music, The Originals had seemed set for victory, fireworks, spectacular fielding and batting were “blasting” the bowling to score 135 from their indistinguishable from T20: “the same sandwich 100 balls, then swiftly reducing the opposition with the same filling, only packaged in fancy to 12 for 3. But the Invincibles lived up to their coloured plastic”. There was plenty of action, name, said Tim Wigmore in The Daily said Scyld Berry in The Daily Telegraph, “but Telegraph. In “a distillation of her class and not enough drama”. I felt previous innovations nerve”, their South African captain Dané van like day-night cricket and T20 would succeed.

Niekerk built a 73-run partnership with But I suspect the Hundred won’t “be another Marizanne Kapp, winning with two balls to stage in the game’s evolution, but a cul-de-sac”.

THE WEEK 31 July 2021

Sporting headlines Rugby union South Africa lost 17-22 in the first of the threeTest series against British & Irish Lions after four penalties from Dan Biggar and a try by Luke Cowan-Dickie helped the Lions overturn a half-time deficit of 12-3.

Racing Adayar, trained by Charlie Appleby and ridden

by William Buick, became the first horse in 20 years to win both the Epsom Derby and the King George VI & Queen Elizabeth Stakes at Ascot.

Beach handball Norway’s Handball Federation was fined s150 per player after the women’s beach handball team wore shorts, rather than bikini bottoms, in their bronze medal face-off against Spain at the European Championship (which they lost).

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LETTERS Pick of the week’s correspondence France must step up...

To The Daily Telegraph

As a former director of the UK Immigration Service (Ports), I was interested to see that the Home Secretary has made a further payment of £54m to help the French stop boats leaving their coast. If stopped, those involved are simply released, and will inevitably try again. They need to be lucky just once, while the authorities have to be lucky every time.

The Home Office should be highlighting France’s failure to tackle the problem, especially when there is a tragedy. It must also ascertain how many traffickers have been caught and prosecuted by the French over the past three years. The answer is to get the French to accept the return of those who are intercepted. Migrants – and traffickers – would soon realise it is pointless to make the hazardous journey. It would also benefit the French, as the camps would disperse.

Peter Higgins, West Wickham, Kent

... and consult a map To The Daily Telegraph

Britain keeps paying France to stop migrants embarking for its shores, but France claims that this is too difficult, as it involves patrolling hundreds of miles of coastline. A quick look at the map shows that this is disingenuous. The shortest crossing is clearly from Calais, at 22 miles. Leaving from Boulogne increases this to 30 miles, while embarking from Gravelines increases it to 36 miles. The French authorities only need to concentrate on about 40 miles of coast. Boats are being obtained and made ready in and around Calais, and must be easy to spot.

Robert Duffield, Tenby, Pembrokeshire

A blundered protocol To The Times

It was reported during Brexit negotiations that the EU was at least as concerned as the UK to maintain an open border between the North and the South in Ireland. One might therefore have expected reciprocity on the issue in the Brexit agreement. If the UK agreed that goods crossing the Irish Sea to Northern Ireland from Britain should meet

Exchange of the week

Reversing climate change To the Financial Times

It may seem counterintuitive when much of western Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands have suffered catastrophic flooding and when the Pacific Northwest has recently broken heat records, but Martin Wolf (“The G20 has failed to meet its challenges”) is too gloomy about prospects for action against climate change. He writes “given this signal failure [to vaccinate in line with the global interest], it is impossible to imagine we will do much more than fiddle while the planet burns”. The danger of this mindset is that it encourages inflation of the threat-language far beyond the credible science, so that the future cannot be discussed except in terms of a choice between “disaster”, “catastrophe”, and “planetary extinction”, on the one hand, or impossibly fast reforms on the other. In the decades to mid-century, we will make rapid progress in scientific knowledge about weather and climate.

Improvements in energy, transport, buildings, materials and food are already under way, and the prospect of vast new green investments, supported and underwritten by the state, will intensify them. Images of “fiddling while the planet burns” obscure the progress being made and underestimate the likely technology improvements to come.

Robert H. Wade, Professor of Global Political Economy, London School of Economics, UK To the Financial Times

In response to Professor Robert Wade’s letter, the world has had the scientific knowledge of what it was doing to the climate for over 50 years now. So how come we are not reducing our emissions? Instead we are planning to emit even more CO2 for at least the next 30 years, thus adding to the problem. The amount of CO2 in the atmosphere is now about 420 parts per million. The level we know to be truly safe is 300 ppm. Everything else is scientific forecast, which is about as accurate as economic forecasts when dealing with a total planetary system which is much more complex than any economy. One thing is predictable though – with more CO2 and other greenhouse gases, we get warmer and warmer. Heat makes things more chaotic and unpredictable. It is about 100 years since we passed the 300 ppm level. There is no magic technological fix that will solve the problem while we continue to add to the carbon levels.

Lesley Ellis, Tarland, Aberdeenshire, UK European standards, Europe could have been required to agree that goods imported into the Irish Republic from the rest of Europe should meet UK standards. With the extra paperwork, it could have been termed an Ireland protocol, rather than a Northern Ireland protocol. Europe would now be equally unhappy and equally keen to seek a better solution. But as that wasn’t what was negotiated, we can expect to pay a price for making changes now.

Robert Procter, Thrupp, Oxon

No right time to unlock To the Financial Times

Your editorial (“UK Government is not free of its Covid duty”) appears to

27

always be able to interpret data in such a way as to demonstrate that continuing restrictions are the imperative.

In this way, lockdowns and variations thereon can continue for 20 years or more. In handing responsibility for their wellbeing to its citizens the Government is not in dereliction of its duty, as your editorial suggests. It is doing what a government ought to do in a free country.

John Murray, Guildford, Surrey

Devaluing the arts To The Guardian

Gavin Williamson stated that planned changes to education funding (“Funding cuts to go ahead for university arts courses in England despite opposition”) will be “directed towards high-cost provision that supports key industries and the delivery of vital public services”. This implies a move away from creative subjects to Stem subjects. Given that the Government’s own figures show the creative industries’ contribution to the UK economy is £111bn, closely behind financial services, what is the logic in reducing funding for educating the creative minds that will help drive technology and engineering? I wonder if the Education Secretary stopped to think of those with skills in visual communication and typography, who make data, algorithms and coding readable on our digital screens every day. Where will those skills be developed if not in our worldleading universities? The case could also be made for those with skills in architecture, filmmaking or fashion. I fear the Government has not caught up with the direction of our engineering and tech sectors.

Jim Northover, Rye, East Sussex

overlook the simple fact that there is never a right time to do anything. Whether it is getting married, starting a family, moving house or changing one’s employment. I am certain that there never was a right time for humans to abandon caves, and surely those who did faced a higher rate of mortality in consequence.

But they were the ultimate winners.

Since it is in the nature of viruses to mutate there will always be a new variant coming along “His last words were ‘if not now, when?’” behind and someone will © PRIVATE EYE

● Letters have been edited

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

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V7545

ARTS Review of reviews: Books Book of the week The Premonition

by Michael Lewis Allen Lane 320pp £25 The Week Bookshop £19.99

In October 2019, health security experts published the Global Health Security Index, a list of countries best placed to deal with a pandemic. The US was number one. So why have more than 600,000 of its citizens died from Covid-19? The answer, said Steven Poole in The Daily Telegraph, is that although the US had a plan, no one dared use it until it was too late. This is the tragedy explored by Michael Lewis, author of Liar’s Poker and The Big Short, who once again turns a complex subject into “a fluid intellectual thriller”. Packed with fascinating facts and personal angles, The Premonition follows a gang of maverick scientists who designed a detailed response to an imagined outbreak – only to find it ignored at the critical moment. Trump’s “cabal of know-nothing cronies” were partly to blame, but Lewis reserves his real fury for the obtuse scientific bureaucrats who were perpetually demanding more evidence.

It was George W. Bush who decided that the US needed a pandemic plan, said Christina Patterson in The Sunday Times.

After reading a book on Spanish flu, he funded a team which

29

came up with a revolutionary approach involving social distancing and school closures. But, fatally, those scientists had been dispersed by the time Covid19 arrived. This “gripping” book details the inertia and wilful blindness of the government, and brings those involved vividly to life. The descriptions are “punchy”, the dialogue is snappy: “Lewis is a master of his form.”

What makes the book so refreshing is that it ignores the obvious Covid narrative, said Frieda Klotz in The Irish Independent. Instead of starting in Wuhan, it burrows back into the lives of important players in the US response.

First up is 13-year-old Laura Glass, who asked her scientist father to help with her school project on the Black Death by creating a computer programme to plot a disease’s path through society; this would become key to the lockdown strategy the government finally embraced. As in his previous books, Lewis’s “propulsive” narrative pits a handful of unheralded individuals against a monolithic system, said Mark O’Connell in The Guardian. The main antagonist here is the federal Centres for Disease Control and Prevention, damningly portrayed as an organisation in which institutional caution amounts to a form of recklessness. It’s a gripping book with a powerful message – even if it does sometimes read less “like a work of narrative journalism than an exceptionally vivid script treatment” for the inevitable movie adaptation.

The Aristocracy of Talent

Novel of the week

by Adrian Wooldridge Allen Lane 496pp £25

A Shock

The Week Bookshop £19.99

by Keith Ridgway Picador 288pp £16.99

“Meritocracy has come in for some hard knocks of late,” said Darrin M. McMahon in the Literary Review. Radicals on the left and populists on the right both deride it as a mechanism for perpetuating elite privilege – so coming to its defence seems either brave or foolhardy. But Adrian Wooldridge’s book is a timely reminder that, for all its flaws, meritocracy may be better than the alternatives. For most of human history, nepotism and patronage were the norm: not until the Enlightenment were the privileges of birth and blood called into question. Even then, the argument was for a new aristocracy of talent – something that Wooldridge supports, while insisting that it needs to be cultivated more fairly and efficiently. It’s a case he makes “with a wealth of erudition, in brisk and readable prose”.

This “rich stew” of a book includes a “priceless” array of quotes, said Mark Damazer in the New Statesman – “on how to define the best people, how to seek them out, how to educate them, how to test them, how to give them power”. The Aristocracy of Talent covers all the arguments – do people with high IQs deserve success? Isn’t talent a morally neutral matter? – even if it doesn’t entirely succeed in reconciling them. Wooldridge, who is the political editor of The Economist, marshals some “astounding” facts, said Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times: he shows how for generations the liberal US establishment happily marked down Jews and Asians to keep down their numbers in the higher reaches of the educational establishment. The inescapable truth is that all groups try to promote their own interests, even while preaching a doctrine of “disinterested fairness”. The prime example of this was Napoleon – the apostle of meritocracy who handed out royal titles to his own family.

The Week Bookshop £13.99

Set during a sticky summer in south London, this “provocative” novel consists of nine interlinked stories, jostled together like “regulars in a pub”, said Susie Mesure in The Spectator. What unites the characters is their powerlessness: Harry, the landlord of The Arms, can’t choose the beers he sells, while Gary, a shift worker at B&Q, can’t earn enough to buy the camera he longs for. A master at manipulating emotions, Ridgway will have you smiling wryly at London life one moment, and wincing at police brutality the next. “There is little plot but plenty of action, and the odd dose of surrealism.”

Ridgway’s prose is “mesmerisingly” sharp, said Louie Conway in Vanity Fair, and his meticulously crafted novel is by turns bleak, hilarious, chilling and hopeful. His descriptive writing is “pinpoint”, agreed John Self in The Times, but it’s the people – a slightly messed-up but “deeply loveable” bunch – who really hold the book together. With their constant reappearances and a final story which loops back to the opening one, A Shock is “like Finnegans Wake, only readable”.

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

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

30 ARTS

Drama & Podcasts

Theatre: tragedy, comedy and summer romance Last week was a “catastrophic” space works a treat. And Phillip one for theatre, with several Breen’s staging is glorious: shows, including Andrew Lloyd “exhaustingly funny”, but also Webber’s new Cinderella touching on “deeper distresses musical, falling victim to the about identity and reality”. The “inflexible” rules on Covid fast-paced production has “more than a touch of madness, isolation, said Ben Lawrence in The Daily Telegraph. So the but its energy and inventiveness opening night of Ian McKellen’s prove just about irresistible”, “age-blind” Hamlet at Theatre agreed Clive Davis in The Royal, Windsor, felt like a Times. There’s a “winningly resourceful” cast of fine comic double “act of defiance” – actors; a splendidly over-the-top against the ravages of the pandemic, and the passing of the 1980s “Day-Glo” aesthetic; any years. At 82, McKellen proves number of funny set-pieces and sight gags; and a director “extraordinarily lithe”: as he “ran up the metal steps in Sean Ian McKellen takes the lead in a new age-blind production of Hamlet determined to wring comedy Mathias’s quasi-industrial from “every word and every production, the years seemed to fall away”. Yet his aged voice – comma” (until 26 September, then touring). “rich and oaky, sometimes pedagogic” – works against the ageblind conceit. I wasn’t troubled by that, said Arifa Akbar in The Deborah McAndrew’s “brisk and witty” adaptation of Pride Guardian. In an often brilliant performance, McKellen gives us “a and Prejudice, at the Grosvenor Park Open Air theatre in prince of all – and any – time and age”. But the production Chester, is a “playful” and “romantic” treat, said Mark Fisher in overall is “bumpy”. Elsinore lacks specificity and danger, several The Guardian. The actors, who repeatedly break into song, of the key relationships are flat and unconvincing, and the “final “respond to the outdoor setting with a breezy sense of fun”.

There’s a nice double from Perry Moore as both “buttoned-up” tragedy leaves us unmoved” (until 25 September).

Mr Darcy and “preening” Mr Collins, and a “grotesque” Lady Catherine de Bourgh from Howard Chadwick. But the glue that The RSC’s new staging of The Comedy of Errors was about to open (indoors) in March 2020 when the pandemic intervened, holds the show together is Suzanne Ahmet’s excellent said Mark Lawson in The Guardian. Sixteen months on, it is performance as Elizabeth Bennet. She brings great charm, humour finally being staged, but outdoors – launching a new Stratford and spirit to the part – and makes us truly believe that Lizzie’s season in a pop-up “Garden Theatre”. This amphitheatre-style “independence of mind is worth fighting for” (until 30 August).

In the summer of the strangest “hilarious” – that Fogo surpasses all expectations.

Olympics in history, said Emma Whatever your holiday plans, Dibdin in The New York Times, here are three podcasts that chances are you’ll need distractions during traffic jams provide interesting perspectives on the games. Blind Landing is or airport queues, said Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times. If a “compelling new investigative” series about the scandal that you’re travelling with children, plagued women’s gymnastics at check out Fun Kids, one of the UK’s only children’s radio Sydney 2000. “One by one, with stations – and a “rich, easily the whole world watching, elite navigable resource for gymnasts kept falling off the informative podcasts, shorts and vault, in ways that were tunes”. For young children, try embarrassing at best and The Old Man in the Boat, their dangerous at worst.” The series “beachside story-telling series” tells the “bizarre” true story narrated by Harry Enfield and (“no spoilers”) of what was Pangolins are victims of the lucrative illegal trade in wild animals Clarke Peters. And for children going on. Pursuit of Gold With Laura Wilkinson (a US gold-medallist diver) is about the training aged eight-plus, they produce The Week Junior Show podcast. techniques and psychological tools that equip winners for success.

Another podcast that older children (and adults) should find “Even if you’re just starting a running routine or trying to get gripping is Wild Crimes said Patricia Nicol. This new ten-part yourself back to the gym, there are plenty of insights from the series from the Natural History Museum explores the illegal mindset of Olympic athletes.” Anything but Footy is a “relaxed, $23bn global trade in wild animals and protected plants (from affable” Olympics-themed podcast covering just about every pangolins and chameleons to elephant tusks and black-market Olympic sport (except football, obviously). orchids). It’s not specifically aimed at children, but is excellent for “family listening”. The presenters are Dr Tori Herridge, an Going camping this summer? Or can’t think of anything worse? evolutionary biologist at the museum, and Dr Khalil Thirlaway, My new favourite podcast, Fogo: Fear of Going Outside, is an a science communicator – and their passion for the at-risk wildlife “immensely entertaining” look at what makes people want to go and sleep in tents, said Miranda Sawyer in The Observer. It’s a US “rings out”, said Gege Li in New Scientist. Listening to this pair “coo” over footage of a baby pangolin is a heart-warming podcast, presented by an “indoorsy Vietnamese-American” reminder of “the simple joy and beauty of nature – and why it is comedian called Ivy Le. And while the premise is simple, Le is so so important to protect it”. “charismatic, funny and clever” – and her script and asides so THE WEEK 31 July 2021

© MARC BRENNER

Podcasts... the Olympics, camping and children’s shows

Film & TV Films to stream With their inertia and sense of endless possibility, the long, hot days of summer have often played a powerful role in drama on screen. Here are five interesting films saturated in the spirit of the season: Summer with Monika Ingmar Bergman is famed for his icy psychodramas, but some of his early films are light and summery. The best of them is this sensual, bittersweet romance from 1953 – about a young couple who spend a carefree summer island-hopping around Stockholm, but cannot escape adult responsibilities forever.

The Go-Between Scripted by Harold Pinter, director Joseph Losey’s fine version of L.P. Hartley’s novel of innocence lost stars Dominic Guard as the schoolboy caught in the crossfire of a romance between an upper-class beauty (Julie Christie) and a tenant farmer (Alan Bates).

The BBC TV version from 2015 is also worth a watch.

THE FILMS ARE AVAILABLE ON GOOGLE (EXCEPT TOMBOY AND MONIKA), APPLE TV (EXCEPT MONIKA) AND AMAZON.

Do the Right Thing Spike Lee’s 1989 film traces the tensions that lead to a riot in a multiracial Brooklyn neighbourhood over the course of a single sweltering summer day. It’s both an angry polemic and a vibrant portrait of life on the streets, with its saturated colours and diverse, oddball cast.

Call Me By Your Name Released in 2018, but set in 1983, Luca Guadagnino’s acclaimed drama about a holiday romance between a 17-year-old boy (Timothée Chalamet) and a handsome doctoral student (Armie Hammer) is an exquisite coming-of-age tale and a gorgeous portrait of a languid summer in Lombardy.

Tomboy Tenderly evoking the sense of freedom and adventure of childhood summers, this drama from 2011 tells of an 11-year-old Parisian girl who decides to spend her holiday as a boy.

Its director, Céline Sciamma, recently won great acclaim for Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

31

New releases Old

Dir: M. Night Shyamalan (1hr 48mins) (15)

★★★

“M. Night Shyamalan has had a rum old career,” said Ed Potton in The Times, “lurching from creepy triumphs (The Sixth Sense) to flawed but intriguing curios (The Village) to outrageous turkeys (Lady in the Water).” Old belongs in the flawed but intriguing group. Gael García Bernal and Vicky Krieps star as Guy and Prisca, a couple on holiday in an unnamed tropical country with their children. Dropped off at a remote, supposedly secret beach, they are surprised to find other guests present, including Charles (Rufus Sewell), an arrogant British surgeon, and Mid-Sized Sedan (Aaron Pierre), a famous American rapper. But far more sinister are the events that follow: all the characters start ageing at a wildly accelerated rate, and no one seems able to leave.

With a premise worthy of early Star Trek and an ensemble cast straight out of Agatha Christie, Old is pure “hokum” – but ingenious and hugely entertaining too, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. Shyamalan keeps up the tension, piling on the horrors (from ballooning tumours to dangerous episodes of psychosis), while drawing us in with the underlying mystery. This “time-lapse nightmare” drives home to these human “mayflies” what they have always tried to avoid facing: their own mortality. It’s all “daft and not exactly dislikeable”, said Tim Robey in The Daily Telegraph, but many of the film’s events – including “the speediest onset of dementia in film history” – are more like “hysterical punchlines” than plot developments. “The movie can only advance by springing something more ridiculous and/or shocking than whatever the last bombshell was.” All in all, it adds up to a rather deranged offering. In cinemas.

The World to Come

Dir: Mona Fastvold (1hr 35mins) (15)

★★★★

A period romance set on the US frontier, The World to Come is a “gentle, slow-burning”

Gael García Bernal in Old: “hugely entertaining”

affair, said Wendy Ide in The Observer. In upstate New York in 1856, Abigail (Katherine Waterston) and her taciturn husband Dyer (Casey Affleck) eke out a tough existence from the land, their hearts hollowed out by the death of their daughter from diphtheria a year before.

But a change to Abigail’s numbing routine comes when the red-haired Tallie (Vanessa Kirby) and her threatening and abusive husband Finney (Christopher Abbott) move in nearby. The women strike up a friendship that blossoms into a love affair, but both live in fear of violent retaliation from their husbands.

This is a “flawless heartbreaker” about two women who “desperately need each other”, said Kevin Maher in The Times. The relationship “crackles with life”: between them, Waterston and Kirby “create incendiary levels of erotic voltage”. Kirby especially “brings uncommon complexity to a character who could have been all vamp and desire”, and director Mona Fastvold sustains the tension all the way to the film’s “devastating” climax. It has a “meditative” beauty too, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent, with “painterly and sharply intuitive” framing that celebrates “female desire wrestling to be free of its cage”.

Golden streaks of light break up the dour monotony of the women’s world, beautifully suggesting “the fabled world to come” in which their love might finally flourish. And the writing is “subtle and delicate” throughout. In cinemas.

Uprising: Steve McQueen on the New Cross Fire His recent drama series Small sparking similar revolts Axe addressed black history in nationwide. the UK from the 1960s to the These “moving” films paint a 1980s; and now the artist and sobering picture of an era in film-maker Steve McQueen has which “black lives did not made an “outstanding” threematter”, said Sean O’Grady in part documentary, Uprising, The Independent. There was about three events in 1981 that precious little official interest in “changed race relations”, said the New Cross fire. We see a Barbara Ellen in The Observer. police spokesman excusing the The first was the New Cross use of the N-word by officers; house fire, in which 13 young An “outstanding” documentary Mrs Thatcher says white people black people died in a suspected are worried about their culture racist arson attack on a party. In its aftermath getting “swamped”. The films’ power rests in came the Black People’s Day of Action, when their intimacy, said Rebecca Nicholson in The tens of thousands marched through London.

Guardian. They show the “real, full, human Weeks later, the black community “rose up” lives” of their subjects, making the account of against police racism in the Brixton riots, the fire, in particular, “utterly devastating”.

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

Art

32 ARTS

Exhibition of the week Sophie Taeuber-Arp Tate Modern, London SE1 (020-7887 8888, www.tate.org.uk). Until 17 October The Swiss artist Sophie as an avant-garde “jack Taeuber-Arp was “the of all trades” who great overlooked mastered multiple modernist”, said Laura disciplines with enviable Cumming in The skill. Her work in design Observer. She was a is presented just as reverentially as her bona fide pioneer who made “no distinction paintings: the show is between high and low, “chock-full of rugs and applied and fine art”, tapestries and folksy combining abstract cushion covers and painting, textile design, pillowcases”, displayed amid “satisfying” interior decoration and abstract canvases even architecture, and “resembling dominoes rendering it all in a or wiring diagrams”. joyous signature style.

Born in Davos in 1889, The best of her art, Taeuber-Arp learnt to notably a series of “inky” drawings filled sew at a young age and with “fractured forms chose to study “practical arts and and conical, searchlightcrafts” rather than like shapes”, is Six Spaces with Four Small Crosses (1932) follow a more interesting, while a prestigious education in fine art. It was a wise decision: where group of marionettes created for a Zurich theatre in 1918 is “memorable”. Yet while all this is impeccably tasteful and often other artists were restricted to painting and sculpture, TaeuberArp could “turn wood and engineer brackets, warp a loom and pleasing, there is little here “to thrill the soul”. Some of what we solder silver”. After marrying the abstract artist Hans Arp (better see is downright dull: there are far too many technical drawings, known as Jean Arp in English) in 1922, she became involved with “boring” photos Taeuber-Arp took on her travels, and numerous Dadaism and moved around Europe, but settled in Zurich in pieces of “underwhelming” furniture. It makes for a “dutiful” but never “scintillating” experience. order to avoid the Nazis. One night in 1943, she missed the last tram home and spent the night in “a snow-covered summer house”. The stove misfired, and the next morning she was found I completely disagree, said Ben Luke in the London Evening dead from carbon monoxide poisoning. Despite earning renown Standard. Taeuber-Arp’s abstract paintings are terrific: there is a in her lifetime, Taeuber-Arp was “forgotten” following her tragic “mesmerising” group of canvases depicting “rhythmic, pinging” demise – her legacy eclipsed by that of her more famous husband. circles – the artist described this style as “boulisme” in reference A new exhibition at Tate Modern comes as a long-overdue to the French game of boules or pétanque; they presage Bridget Riley by a good 30 years. Other highlights include a number of corrective, bringing together paintings, drawings, sculptures, “exquisite, loosely geometric” works from the 1910s and better textiles and furniture to assert Taeuber-Arp’s status as one of the great talents of the interwar years. To see her work here “is to be still, Relief (1936), a wooden sculptural relief that sees her immediately uplifted”. distinctive emblematic circles tapering into cones to create “a delightful, vibrant spatial flux”. Taeuber-Arp’s art is “playful” and “matter of fact”, but no less “profound” for it. Ultimately, There’s no doubting Taeuber-Arp’s talent and resourcefulness, it all adds up to a “superb” exhibition. said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. The show frames her

News from the art world Dürer’s nightlife

A cave house in Derbyshire that was A leading expert on the work of Albrecht previously thought to be a Georgian-era Dürer has identified a drawing of an folly has been identified as “one of the interior by the artist (owned by the oldest intact domestic interiors ever British Museum) as a depiction of Zum found in the UK”, says Mark Brown in Spiegel (“The Mirror”), a gambling den The Guardian. What’s more, it might in the German city of Aachen. The have been home to an exiled Anglodrawing, which is currently being Saxon king. It was long believed that exhibited in Aachen, depicts two beer Anchor Church Cave near Derby was a tankards beside “a three-footed vessel natural cave that was enlarged in the for heating liquids”, says Martin Bailey in 18th century so the local gentry could The Art Newspaper. Christof Metzger, a hold parties there. However, according to curator at the Albertina Museum in archaeologists who have studied the site, Vienna, believes that the drawing was Anchor Church: the former home of a king? it is much older, perhaps dating back originally made in a sketchbook the artist 1,200 years to the time of Eardwulf – a deposed king of filled when he visited Aachen in 1520 to attend the coronation of Northumbria who became a hermit and is thought to have spent the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. Metzger has matched it with his later years in the area. Edmund Simons, who led the study, the timeline of events described in his detailed diaries of the trip. thinks Eardwulf, who was later canonised, had the cave built for Dürer made a record of having visited Zum Spiegel several times him after his ousting in AD806. Although a hermit, he would not while in the city, even noting his losses. “I went through five have been alone. Eardwulf “would have had disciples with him”, silver pence bathing and drinking with my friends,” the artist says Simons: he may not have had his “great feasting hall any wrote. “I lost seven stuivers gambling with Hans Ebner [a more, but it is quite a nice gaff”.

Nuremberg alderman] at Zum Spiegel.”

THE WEEK 31 July 2021

© KUNSTMUSEUM BERN

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The List

35

Best books… Lucy Kellaway

The former FT journalist turned teacher chooses her favourite books by authors who came to writing late. Re-educated – How I Changed My Job, My Home, My Husband and My Hair (Ebury £16.99), is out now

The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald, 1978 (Fourth Estate £7.99). Fitzgerald based her second novel on her experience of working in a bookshop in Suffolk – one of the many jobs she did to make ends meet before she became a literary sensation in her 60s. I read it

again the other day and found it sadder and funnier than before – there is no better account of the pettiness of disputes in a small town.

Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt, 1996 (Harper Perennial £9.99). McCourt did the opposite thing to me and was a secondary school teacher first and then a writer, with this account of his impoverished childhood in Limerick. It is the original misery memoir, but the quality of the misery is so intense and the writing so lyrical that the book is oddly uplifting.

The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller, 2021 (Viking £14.99). This debut –

written by a television executive in her late 50s – is about the messed-up East Coast intelligentsia, and its Long Island setting makes it the perfect beach read. My favourite character is the waspish mother who has the immortal line, “two things in life you never regret – a baby and a swim”.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark, 1961 (Penguin £8.99). Spark was the daughter of a teacher and briefly one herself which may have informed this joyously naughty book. I set my heart on becoming a Brodie #2, but alas, I found that her teaching style doesn’t work in a Hackney comp.

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

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

For his “joyous, unexpected, and wonderfully silly” new summer exhibition at Blenheim, Tino Sehgal has cast more than 50 members of the local community – who pop up, acting out various scenarios around the park and gardens (Guardian). Until 15 August, Blenheim Palace, Oxfordshire (blenheimpalace.com).

An acclaimed 40th anniversary production of Willy Russell’s Educating Rita, starring Stephen Tompkinson, continues its nationwide tour – with upcoming dates in Kingston, Cheltenham, York, Horsham and Newcastle.

Until 18 September (educatingrita.co.uk).

Book now

Live music returns to the parkland of Euston Hall in Suffolk as it hosts the Red Rooster Festival, with Richard Hawley headlining. 27 to 29 August, Euston Hall, Suffolk (redrooster. org.uk).

When it aired in April, the National Theatre’s film production of Romeo & Juliet won fivestar reviews and praise for its two leads, Josh

Programmes

BBC Proms In a Proms first,

all three of Mozart’s final symphonies will be performed, with new principal conductor Maxim Emelyanychev leading the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. Sun 1 Aug, BBC4 20:30 (115mins).

Blind Ambition A blind

comedian and a myopic TV director meet other blind and partially sighted artists to discover how they cope and do their work. Sun 1 Aug, BBC2 22:00 (60mins).

Write Around the World With Richard E. Grant The

actor travels around southern Italy in the footsteps of writers inspired by the country and its culture, including Charles Dickens, Patricia Highsmith and Robert Harris. Tue 3 Aug, BBC4 21:00 (60mins).

I Am Victoria The first of

three one-off dramas stars Bafta-winner Suranne Jones as a woman struggling with anxiety beneath the veneer of a happy life. Thu 5 Aug, C4 21:00 (60mins).

Films

All is True (2018) Ben Elton’s

gentle fantasy imagines Shakespeare’s return to Stratford, after The Globe burns down. Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench star. Sat 31 Jul, BBC2 22:10 (95mins).

Eddie the Eagle (2016)

Josh O’Connor in Romeo & Juliet

O’Connor and Jessie Buckley. Don’t miss it when it comes to cinemas for one night only. 28 September, cinemas nationwide (ntlive.com).

Philip Pullman’s The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage, a prequel to the His Dark Materials trilogy is being adapted for the stage later this year in a gripping new production directed by Nicholas Hytner. 2 December to 19 February 2022, The Bridge Theatre, London SE1. (bridgetheatre.co.uk).

The Archers: what happened last week

Nasty neighbour Kyle taunts Helen at the farm shop. Helen tells Lee she’s annoyed she let Kyle bully her, and later tries to confront him at The Bull, but he ends up twisting her words. Brian and Adam are shocked when Alice returns home, having quit rehab. Kirsty tells Phoebe to let Roy have fun with his online date Leyla, but later does some sleuthing of her own. Furious Brian and distraught Jennifer try to convince Alice to stay at home, to no avail – she’s determined to leave Ambridge. Alan saves the day, suggesting Alice stay for a while with his daughter Amy in Nottingham – it seems like a good solution. After Lee spots Kyle receiving an illicit visitor, Helen threatens to tell his wife and he finally backs off. Fallon tips off Chris that Alice is leaving, but he gets there too late and worries she’s gone forever. Ben and Ruairi celebrate their futures with a VIP night out. After Adam lies about a phone call, Ian becomes convinced he’s having an affair. Helen reassures him otherwise, but Ian thinks it’s the only explanation for Adam’s behaviour of late.

Schmaltzy but warm comedy based on the story of Michael Edwards, the underdog British ski jumper. Tue 3 Aug, Film4 18:55 (125mins).

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012)

Family-friendly first instalment of Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy, with Martin Freeman as Bilbo Baggins. Tue 3 Aug, Film4 21:00 (200mins).

New to Netflix

Pray Away Powerful documentary about gay conversion therapy, with testimony from several former leaders who now disavow the movement. From 3 August.

Vivo Lin-Manuel Miranda writes the songs and voices the main character, a singing rainforest bear, in this much hyped (and delayed) animated musical. From 6 August.

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

© ROB YOUNGSON

Foreign Affairs by Alison Lurie, 1984 (Vintage £9.99).

Lurie burst out of obscurity as an academic at nearly 60 to win the Pulitzer Prize with this novel about the romantic liaisons of two Americans abroad in London. I’d loved Jane Austen as a teenager, but Lurie is something else altogether in her merciless savagery. I’m re-reading all of her books this summer.

Television

Best properties

36 European getaways

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France: Magagnosc, Grasse. A charming 6-bed bastide laid out over 3 floors, dating back to the 17th century, entirely renovated in 2015. The large basement with stone walls can easily be converted to a wine cellar. Main bed suite with small balcony offering wonderful sea views, 1 further suite, 1 further bed, bath, kitchen, 3 receps, independent artist’s atelier, annexe with 3 independent studios, summer kitchen, vegetable garden, Koi pond, 2 parking spaces. Ref: 8301_440988. s895,000; Fine and Country (+33 4 925 925 93).

▲ Spain: Guadalmina Alta, San Pedro de Alcántara, Malaga. A newly built town house within a gated community, with excellent panoramic views, close to shops, a golf course and the town. 3 beds, 3 baths, fully fitted kitchen, private garden, communal swimming pool, private garage and private terrace, 24hr security. Ref: ESMPDNS-MPT4435. £601,000; Hamptons International (020-7265 6571). ▲

Greece: South Rhodes. A handsome two-storey villa on a landscaped plot with majestic views of the Aegean Sea. Situated in a quiet and serene neighbourhood, the property is just 200 metres from the beach and is perfect for families with children. Main suite with direct access to an outdoor veranda, 4 further beds, 2 baths, kitchen, 2 receps, potential playroom, garden, swimming pool, BBQ area, parking for 4 vehicles. s520,000; Property Pass (+30 210 674 4660).

THE WEEK 31 July 2021

on the market

37

▲ Italy: Chiesina, Umbertide, Perugia, Umbria. This

charming cottage is set on the east-facing slope of the historic Monte Corona estate. 3 beds, 2 baths, 2 receps, rustic kitchen, walled garden, additional plot of land with a small olive grove and a delightful sitting area. s295,000; Savills (020-7016 3744). ▲

France: Manor House, Thouars, Deux-Sèvres.

An example of a grand “Hôtel Particulier” or town mansion, this property was restored in the late 1980s and is hidden behind high walls and impressive gates. 6 beds, 6 baths, lift, barns/outbuildings, indoor swimming pool complex, private grounds, garage. Ref: FRLGGTS-118704TLO79. £734,000; Hamptons International (020-7265 6571).

France: Barcelonne-duGers, Gers. A beautiful manor house, with most rooms being south facing with views of the landscaped garden. The layout and space means the property can be used as a family home and as offices at the same time. 5 beds, 3 baths, garden, heated swimming pool, greenhouse, double garage, woodshed.

Ref: 8181TS. s789,000; Groupe Mercure (+33 5 34 41 74 27).

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Montenegro: Regent Pool Club Residences, Aqua & Baia. The Aqua and Baia wings form part of a stunning residential collection of branded condominiums, located along the marina waterfront in Porto Montenegro. Properties here offer elegant contemporary living with access to a residents-only courtyard with landscaped gardens, an infinity pool, lap pool, kids splash pool and a poolside café. Each apartment comes with a landscaped terrace with unobstructed sea and mountain views. 2-bed Aqua residence for s912,000; 1-bed Baia residence for s599,000; Porto Montenegro (+38 232 660 700). ▲

Italy: Country House Fiorita, Tuscany.

An enchanting farmhouse dating back 500 years, located in the province of Florence, offering spectacular views of the Sieve Valley. The property lies in lush wild-flower meadows and has a sheltered outdoor dining area. 4 beds, 3 baths, kitchen, 2 receps, library, independent 2-bed apartment with 2 baths.

Large garden, olive grove, swimming pool, agricultural annexe, parking, private access road. s990,000; Precious Villas (+39 055 098 1940).

▲ Portugal: Budens, Vila do Bispo, Algarve. Set in a quiet elevated location on the golf resort, this south-facing villa offers the most beautiful views over the gardens, local countryside and the sea. 4 bed suites, kitchen, 2 large receps, guest WC, terrace, heated swimming pool, landscaped gardens. Ref: PTBPWAS-PDF-214. £688,000; Hamptons International (020-7265 6571).

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

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LEISURE Food & Drink

39

What the experts recommend The Table 9 York Street, Broadstairs, Kent (thetablebroadstairs.co.uk) Joe Hill has forged a successful cheffing career – “his CV bristles with names such as Ramsay and Aikens” – despite being born with one of his hands missing, says Marina O’Loughlin in The Sunday Times.

A couple of years ago, he became the latest chef to move away from the capital in search of affordability and quality of life.

Settling in Broadstairs, he opened The Table, where he started “very low key”, serving little apart from “magnificent cheese toasties and interesting wines”. But given time by the pandemic to “plot and plan”, he’s now unveiled something more ambitious: a restaurant with a “counter kitchen”, and a menu consisting of a “series of intriguing small plates”. Many of these dazzle with their unshowy brilliance: peeled cherry tomatoes come “bobbing in a clear liquid” of dashi broth; salted cod, dressed in cultured buttermilk, lemongrass and lime leaves, is “soothing and energising at the same time”. Neither swanky nor exclusive (you can sit at the bar for a glass of wine and a single dish), The Table is a “little beauty”. Lunch for two, with a bottle of wine (excluding service charge): £100.

Ombra 1 Vyner Street, London E2 (ombrabar.restaurant) Housed in a former art gallery on the Regent’s Canal in Hackney, Ombra

“pistachio-infused vegetable broth”; ‘nduja is served with egg yolk and mushroom; an Amalfi lemon tart is “a riot of fine-wrought pastry and zingy, pepperflecked curd”. It’s great to see Ombra back doing “what it does best”. Meal for two plus drinks around £130.

The Table: a “little beauty”

responded to the lockdown with a series of “hit innovations”, says Jimi Famurewa in the London Evening Standard: “fresh pasta kits, takeaway Lasagna Sundays, sell-out porchetta sandwiches”. Now, it has resumed normal service. Head chef Mitshel Ibrahim, though Milanese by birth, “ranges freely across Italy’s regions” with his cooking. Among the Venetian cicchetti (light snacks) are a “bronzed and burnished” Roman-style fried artichoke and wonderfully moreish Emilian gnocco fritto. Although many dishes are ostensibly simple, their flavours are “almost confrontationally vivid”: peas and “wrinkled morels” float in a pool of rich

Recipe of the week Guacamole is a simple dish that can be raised a level with a few extra measures, says Edson Diaz-Fuentes. I “desflemar” (neutralise) the chopped onion by adding lime juice, and pre-salt the tomatoes. Mexican grandmas leave the avocado stones in the guacamole to prevent oxidation: you can also do this.

Classic guacamole Serves 4 ¼ a red onion, finely chopped juice of 1 lime 2 ripe tomatoes, halved, deseeded and finely chopped 2 ripe avocados, peeled and stoned 15g coriander, finely chopped 1 green serrano or jalapeño chilli, deseeded and finely chopped (to taste) fine sea salt

• Place the onion in a

bowl and pour over half the lime juice. Set aside.

• Place the chopped tomatoes in a bowl and sprinkle with a generous pinch of salt. Mix well, then pour the tomatoes into a sieve placed over another bowl. The salt will enhance their flavour and also cause them to release a watery juice.

• Place the avocado flesh in a mixing bowl and add the rest of the lime juice.

Use a fork to crush the avocado until it is mashed, but still firm and chunky – you don’t want it to become puréed or watery.

Drain the onions and add them to the bowl, along with the drained, chopped tomatoes and coriander.

Use a spatula to fold the mixture gently together without mashing the avocado further.

• Add the chopped chilli to taste and adjust the seasoning. That’s it.

Taken from Ciudad de México: Recipes and stories from the heart of Mexico City

by Edson Diaz-Fuentes, published by Hardie Grant at £26. To buy from The Week Bookshop for £20.99, call 020-3176 3835 or visit theweekbookshop.co.uk.

Pho Cue 52a Faulkner Street, Manchester (phocue.co.uk) My train for Manchester had already pulled out of Euston when the restaurant I’d booked for lunch called to say that it had been forced to close by NHS Test and Trace, says Jay Rayner in The Observer.

“As my train barrels through Milton Keynes, I fire off messages to my friends in Manchester”, seeking recommendations for a short-notice alternative. That’s how I end up at Pho Cue – which proves a more than adequate replacement. This simple Vietnamese cafeteria serves “all the classics”, and offers “seriously good value”. We have summer rolls, a plate of crisp pork belly, and a huge bowl of steaming beef pho that is “lunch by itself” and only costs £9.30. So tasty is a dish of lightly battered soft-shell crab – served in a big, dry mess of onions, garlic, chilli, salt and pepper – that we end up ordering it twice. This is food that “makes you feel like you are being good to yourself”. I’m grateful for the “happenstance” that delivered me to it. Small dishes £5-£6.50; larger dishes £8-£11.80.

Beach wine What is the perfect wine to take to the beach, asks Susy Atkins in The Daily Telegraph. My choice may surprise you. It’s not rosé, or English fizz.

It’s sherry. Not just any old sherry, but the palest, most refreshing sherries of them all: fino and manzanilla.

These two “both start life in Andalucia, southern Spain, as simple white wines made from the Palomino grape”. After being fortified with spirit, they are rested in barrels, where they develop a “doughy, savoury complexity”. Super-fresh, bone-dry and immediately palate reviving, they are the “vinous equivalent of jumping in the sea” – hence why they make sense on the beach.

Added to which, they are great with seafood: if you haven’t tried fino with fish and chips, you’re missing out.

The quality of supermarket own-label sherries is, in general, surprisingly high. Try

Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference Dry Fino Sherry (£8; 50ml): it has flavours of green olives, lemons and green apple peel. For a good value manzanilla, Barbadillo Solear Manzanilla Sherry (£5.95 for 37.50cl; The Wine Society) is hard to beat: it has “lemon peel, green melon and soft, freshly baked white bread all mingling together”.

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

Consumer

40 LEISURE

New cars: what the critics say

Citroën e-C4 from £32,495

Car Magazine This family hatchback is an “impressive new addition” to the electric car market. Whereas the old C4 model was a “forgettable” version of its rival, the Ford Focus, the e-C4 is “the most individualist family car” to enter the Citroën mix since the 1970s. It looks almost identical to the petrol and diesel version, making it ideal for those who want to go electric “without shouting about it”.

The Daily Telegraph The car has the bonus of being at once “high-tech” and unintimidating. With a focus on “practicality”, it sits nicely between a fashionable coupé and a robust SUV, but isn’t so flashy that it will scare off traditional family-car buyers. With “pronounced” wheel arches, scalloped front doors and bonnet and a refined interior, this model is genuinely distinctive and stylish.

What Car? By combining an electric model with a coupé SUV, this car has certainly tapped into “the zeitgeist”.

But it’s not the best longdistance vehicle money can buy. With a 134bhp motor and 50kWh battery, it’s got a “real-world” mileage of just 139, and relatively slow acceleration (0-60mph in 9.0secs), so it lags well behind the Volkswagen ID.3. Still, it makes for a “soft, cushioning” ride.

The best… bike holders ▲

Saris Bones EX 2-Bike This is far easier to load than roof-rack rivals, because it holds bikes clear of the car at chest height; since it doesn’t require a tow bar, it’s also cheap and can be swapped between cars at will (£200; cyclesolutions.co.uk).

▲

TThule EasyFold XT 2 T This smart bu pricey rack takes the e trouble but out of lifting heavy e-bikes. It has removable and d adjustable a j arms that click loud dly at the right tension to ens sure the frames don’t get da amaged, and can be easily folded up and stored in a garage ((£675; thule. c com).

And for those who have everything…

Where to find… places to stay for garden lovers

● Follow a routine: get up at the same time each day, avoid sleeping in on weekends, and go to bed at the same time each night. ● Avoid screens and social media at night.

If you have to use your phone, then only do so while standing; as soon as you feel like lying down, get rid of it. ● One or two hours before bed each night, write down on paper anything that is bothering you, and then throw it in the bin. ● Try to cut out caffeine after 2pm and limit yourself to two alcoholic drinks. Make sure you get a daily dose of exercise, regardless of the type or intensity – though finish it at least four hours before going to bed. ● Follow the 25-minute rule: if you can’t get to sleep in that time, get up and do an activity to quieten the mind, such as reading, meditating or breathing exercises. ● Working from home has blurred the boundaries between sleep and work; make sure your mattress isn’t your office and instead make your bed into a haven.

Tune in and sunbathe wire-free with Fauna’s bluetooth-connected audio glasses.

They’re the first that don’t look like something a “geeky character in a 1960s science fiction TV puppet show” would wear. Pick from a range of styles, with the option of prescription lenses. £207; wearfauna.com

There’s a beautiful array of flowery paths at the Cambo Gardens in Fife, a walled garden and beach at the end of a woodland path (£850 for 4 nights, camboestate.com).

You have access to five hectares of meadows and lawns if you stay at Askham Hall in Penrith. There’s a Michelin-star restaurant and an outdoor heated pool (doubles from £160; askhamhall.co.uk).

The YHA hostel is a five-minute walk from Cambridge University Botanic Garden and its sea of scented roses, lavender and wild poppies (£39; yha.org.uk).

You could almost be on a tropical holiday at the Portmeirion escape in Gwynedd; wander through vibrant gardens, white beaches and Italian-style cobbled streets (from £244 a night; portmeirion.wales).

As the rhododendrons wane, the Long Walk from Tudor-style Petwood Hotel in Lincolnshire to the Temple of Atalanta shimmers with peonies, sage and loosestrife (£125 b&b; petwood.co.uk).

SOURCE: THE INDEPENDENT

SOURCE: FINANCIAL TIMES

SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN

Tips of the week… how to beat insomnia

THE WEEK 31 July 2021

SOURCE: THE INDEPENDENT

▲ Pendle Hang On Bike Rack Bikes rest easily on the extended arms of this tow bar rack: it’s durable, carries up to four bikes at a maximum load of 60kg, and comes with a light and number plate panel. The kit also includes a 3m strap and two 1.5m straps for extra protection (£250; pbr. co.uk).

▲

▲

FWE Three-Bike If you’ve got a hatchback d and need a rack for the odd family excursion, this on affordable and sturdy optio is your best bet. It rests on the back of the car using straps and cushioned pads – but it won’t work on convertibles or cars with rear spoilers (£40; evanscycles.com).

Halfords Advanced 1 It’s not the most attractive, but this roof--mounted rack is a greatt choice for those on a dget and with kids bik bud kes.

It features four mountin ng straps that latch to mo ost cars, and foam pads to c o protect from wear and p d tear (£60; halfords.com).

Obituaries

41

Borscht Belt comic who became an international star Jackie Mason, who has died Breaking onto the New York circuit proved more difficult, however. He was advised that Jackie Mason aged 93, was a hugely his accent was too broad, and that his act had 1928-2021 successful stand-up comedian, and one of the last “limited appeal” – code for “it’s too Jewish”. survivors of America’s “Borscht Belt” circuit, “You have to laugh,” he said later. “To my family I was not Jewish enough.” The early said The New York Times. A fast-talking days were a struggle. “I had to sell furniture to former rabbi, he made “comedic capital as a Jew feeling his way – sometimes nervously, make a living – my own,” he joked. But he sometimes pugnaciously – through a perplexing ignored his critics, and in 1961, he got his TV gentile world”. Jews and Jewishness were not break; he released his first LP the following year; and was soon a regular on the hugely only the themes, but also the targets of his observational humour. “It’s a fact,” he would successful Ed Sullivan Show. say, “that Gentiles make better coalminers than Jews. Did you ever see a yarmulke with a light In 1964, however, it all came tumbling down. on top?” But he “wrung laughs” from various One night, the show had to be interrupted so ethnic groups, said The Daily Telegraph: “I go that President Johnson could address the nation to Puerto Rico every year – just to visit my about Vietnam. Mason was on air, and from hubcaps,” ran one typical one-liner. As the the sidelines, Sullivan started frantically decades wore on, such defiantly un-PC gags counting down with his fingers in an effort to alert him to the new timing. Confused, Mason came to be regarded as outdated and even up a finger of his own – which Sullivan offensive. In 2002, a reviewer accused him of held Mason: an equal opportunity offender interpreted as an obscene gesture. Sullivan playing “fast and loose with the line between humour and hate speech”. But Mason vehemently denied being banned him; agents blackballed him; and the next night, he found himself addressing 100 people in an auditorium big enough to racist. He was, he liked to say, an “equal opportunity offender”. accommodate 1,000. “Good evening, tables and chairs,” he began. He reckoned it took 20 years for his career to recover from He was born Yacov Moshe Maza in Wisconsin, to immigrant parents from Belarus, and brought up on the Lower East Side of the incident. Mason made up with Sullivan, but then became New York. His father was a rabbi; his grandfather and great embroiled in a more alarming feud, with Frank Sinatra, triggered by rude remarks he had made about the singer’s marriage to the grandfather had been rabbis; and his three older brothers became rabbis. By the age of 12, he had little interest in theology, but he much younger Mia Farrow. “Frank soaks his dentures while Mia felt he had no choice but to follow suit. “It was unheard of to brushes her braces,” he’d told an audience in Vegas. He received a think of anything else,” he said. In his teens, he took a summer death threat, and shots were fired through his hotel window. job at one of the Kosher resort hotels in the Catskills that make up the Borscht Belt. During the day, he cleared tables and worked Mason’s career bounced back in the mid-1980s, when he as a lifeguard (though he could not swim). In the evenings, he produced a one-man show that was a hit on Broadway and in took part in amateur nights – and found he could make people London. In 1992, he won an Emmy for his role as Rabbi Hyman laugh. He carried on with his rabbinical studies, but after being Krustofsky – the disappointed father of Krusty the Clown – in ordained, he couldn’t resist peppering his sermons with jokes.

The Simpsons. And in 2005, he was ranked in a poll as one of the When his father died in 1959, he decided to pursue a full-time top comedy acts of all time. He described himself as a womaniser, career in comedy, and returned to the Catskills, to hone the freebut in 1991, he married his manager, Jyll Rosenfeld. She survives flowing, ad-libbing routines that became his stock in trade. him, along with a daughter, Sheba, from an earlier relationship.

Nurse who became Britain’s first black female police officer In 1967, Sislin Fay Allen was working as a nurse at a hospital in Croydon when she spotted an ad calling for new recruits to the Metropolitan Police. “I looked at it, and thought, ‘Why not?’” That year, Norwell Roberts had become Britain’s first black police officer since John Kent, the son of a slave, served as a constable in Carlisle in the 19th century, said The Times. Allen would become Britain’s first black female police officer. Her appointment, in 1968, caused quite a stir: at one point, she found herself having to run away from a pack of reporters. “I realised then that I was a history-maker,” she said, last year. “But I didn’t set out to make history. I just wanted a change of direction.”

Sislin Fay Allen 1938-2021

She persevered, but on her application, she made sure to state her ethnicity. “I didn’t want, if I had succeeded, and when they saw me, [them] to say: ‘I didn’t know she was black.’”

She trained at Peel House in Pimlico, and was then posted to Fell Road station in Croydon – two months before Enoch Powell delivered his notorious “Rivers of Blood” speech. “Many white people have congratulated me on joining the police,” she said at the time. “But for every nice letter, there have been others full of abuse.

They are all from white people and they say things like, ‘get out, black,’ and, ‘stay out of the police, n*****.’” She encountered hostility from the black community, too: “I was asked how I Allen: a “history-maker” could leave nursing and join the police force. It was like joining something degrading.” She served for four years; Sislin Fay Patterson was born in St Catherine Parish, Jamaica, in then in 1972, she and her husband moved back to Jamaica with 1938, the second of ten children. Her mother, a midwife, died their children. She joined the police force there, and was when she was 13, and after leaving school, she spent several years disappointed to find a “stigma” attached to being a police officer caring for her sick father. Following his death in 1962, she in Jamaica too. In 2020 she received a lifetime achievement award emigrated to Britain, where she qualified as a state-registered from the National Black Police Association. “I think we still have nurse. She was working at Queen’s Hospital, which specialised in a very long way to go,” she said, “but I am glad that I was able to geriatric care, when she read the Met’s ad. One of her friends told inspire so many people to take up the challenge.” her she was “silly” to think she might be accepted into the force.

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

Marketplace

42

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

CITY 43

Autonomy: rough justice

The 2003 UK-US extradition treaty was supposedly “intended for terrorists”, said Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. But Britain “has never been shy about shipping its alleged financial villains off to face justice in foreign lands”. The latest may be the Cambridge tech tycoon, Mike Lynch, who pocketed around $800m in 2011 when he sold his software house, Autonomy, to the US giant Hewlett-Packard in an $11bn deal that quickly soured. Last week, Judge Michael Snow ruled that Lynch’s extradition to face 17 charges of conspiracy and fraud could go ahead, but it will be up to Home Secretary Priti Patel to make the decision; the case could go all the way to the Supreme Court. Given the “fundamental” questions raised, “that may be the best place for it”, said Nils Pratley in The Guardian. One is whether Lynch can expect a fair trial in the US; another is the precedent set. As several former Cabinet ministers have pointed out in an open letter, “any British businessman or woman who finds themselves at odds with a powerful US company could face the same fate”. If the circumstances were reversed, it’s hard to imagine the UK being able to extradite a high-profile US executive to face criminal charges. This “sovereignty issue” matters. “Not only for Lynch, but for UK business.”

UK banks: retreat of the old guard

The Treasury has announced plans to sell another tranche of NatWest shares, at “a massive loss to the taxpayer”, said Simon English in the London Evening Standard. The former Royal Bank of Scotland is currently worth around 200p per share, compared with its 502p rescue price at the height of the 2008/09 financial crisis. Clearly the Treasury, which is aiming to dispose of its existing 55% stake by 2025, “has given up hope of ever getting its money back”. It raises the question of “why sell at all”, said The Observer.

Why not at least keep “a golden share to influence the bank in times of stress”? The simple answer is that the Chancellor badly needs the cash. But it’s also indicative of a changing of the guard in banking. Old school retailers are signalling a retreat from their foray into banking, said Joanna Partridge in The Guardian: M&S is closing all its current accounts in August, Tesco Bank by the end of November. Meanwhile, digital challengers such as Starling are rapidly expanding their offerings. The upstart banking app, Revolut, was valued at £24bn at its latest funding round – over £1bn more than NatWest.

Bridgepoint: golden hellos

The private equity firm Bridgepoint, whose assets include Hobbycraft and Burger King UK, enjoyed “a strong debut” in London last week, said Attracta Mooney in the FT. Shares jumped 29% on the first day’s trading as investors embraced “the buoyant outlook for the private equity industry”. But that triumph was marred by a row over the “golden hellos” paid to well-known City figures adorning the board as independent directors. “What price independence,” asked Lex in the same paper. “A cool £1.5m” if you are the M&S chairman Archie Norman; £500k apiece for three other non-execs, including ITV boss Carolyn McCall. It makes a mockery of the concept of independent supervision. Private equity firms have been on a roll this year, striking a record 6,298 deals worth $513bn, said Rupert Neate in The Guardian. Bridgepoint’s float gave “mere mortals” a “rare glimpse” inside the money-spinning machine. Critics weren’t converted.

Seven days in the Square Mile A sharp sell-off in Chinese stocks slowed on Wednesday after heavy losses in Shanghai, Shenzhen, Hong Kong and New York. But the turmoil – sparked by a government clampdown on tech companies – also hit shares in some of the US’s largest tech groups.

Shares in Apple and Microsoft fell because of the huge sums tied up in exchange-traded funds that track both US and Chinese tech companies.

The IMF upgraded its economic forecasts for developed economies, but said the outlook for many developing countries had weakened. Britain is now expected to have the joint fastest growth of the G7 rich countries alongside the US – growing at 7% this year. The Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, welcomed “positive signs that the economy is rebounding faster than previously expected”.

The price of bitcoin rose from $29,000 to more than $39,000 after Amazon revealed it was hiring an expert, prompting speculation that the e-commerce giant might start accepting bitcoin payments. Aon and Willis Towers Watson abandoned a $30bn tie-up to create the world’s biggest insurance broker after the US sued to block the combination. Financier George Soros and former Microsoft boss Bill Gates joined a consortium to buy the UK Covid test company Mologic, with the aim of transforming it into a social enterprise to diagnose tropical diseases.

China General Nuclear: banned from Britain?

The Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab observed last year that Britain could no longer conduct “business as usual with China”. The UK’s highest-profile action so far has been to force the Chinese telecoms supplier, Huawei, out of Britain’s 5G network, said the FT. But now ministers are seeking to “ditch” China General Nuclear from future UK power projects – ending a collaboration dating back to a 2015 agreement between David Cameron and Xi Jinping. The move reflects growing concerns about CGN’s “role in critical infrastructure” and follows a similar ban in the US, which put the Chinese state-owned company on an “export blacklist” in 2019, “alleging it had stolen US technology for military purposes”.

French group EDF Energy. CGN had hoped these would be a “springboard” to building and running a Chinese-designed reactor “within 30 miles of London” at Bradwell in Essex, said Jillian Ambrose in The Guardian.

That controversial scheme is now deemed a political non-starter, and the Government has also started talks with EDF about finding alternative investors for the other two plants.

The brief “golden era” of Sino-British relations has turned “radioactive”, said Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph – exposing great holes in UK energy policy. Ministers claim “the removal of the Chinese will encourage other partners to End of a “golden era”? come forward”, but “there is no proper contingency plan”. How very unsurprising, said Alistair Osborne CGN holds a minority stake in the Hinkley Point C nuclear power in The Times. “Given the explosive costs of large nuclear, the plant currently in Somerset and a 20% stake in the planned debate shouldn’t be over how to replace China on these projects.

Sizewell B plant on the Suffolk coast – both projects led by the It’s whether we need Sizewell and Bradwell at all.”

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

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Talking points

CITY 45

Issue of the week: food inflation Soaring inflation is hitting big companies such as Unilever and consumers alike The consumer goods market is facing its fiercest inflationary pressures in a decade. That, said Judith Evans in the FT, was the message last week from Unilever – whose brands range from Hellmann’s mayonnaise to Magnum ice cream to Domestos bleach. Chief Executive Alan Jope said “very material cost increases”, for packaging, transport and particularly raw materials, were squeezing its profit margins. The price of palm oil was up 70% from the first half of last year, he said, while soybean oil was up by 80% and crude oil by 60%.

bargaining power than in Europe and the US”. Consumer bosses thus “face a delicate balancing act” to get through this year with their margins, market share and reputations intact. “Anxiety that inflation is about to gut the economy” is all around, said Bloomberg.

“At the White House. In consumer data.

On earnings calls.” Roughly 87% of S&P 500 companies that released earnings in July mentioned inflation. The only places apparently immune to the angst are the stock and bond markets, where investors have taken Fed chairman Jerome Powell’s mantra that the current level of inflation is “transitory” to heart.

Inflation, it seems, is “becoming as much Commodity prices are squeezing profit margins a headache for CEOs of householdstaples companies as for shoppers”, said Carol Ryan in The Wall If the rising price of coffee – hit by a shortage of containers – is Street Journal. Margins are hurting. Unilever’s shares fell 5% on anything to go by, “trouble is brewing in America”, said The the announcement because, despite improved sales, “operating Economist. Yet “transport logjams and paltry harvests in producing regions” have “conspired with surging demand to margins are expected to be flat in 2021”. Bernstein analysts stoke food inflation across the smorgasbord”. The UN Food and recently estimated that Unilever and its main European peer Nestlé face roughly 14% increases in bills over the next 12 Agriculture Organisation expects the value of global food imports months. Prices of individual ingredients such as soybean oil are to reach nearly $1.9trn this year – up from $1.6trn in 2019. “In rising even faster. Should the company try and absorb these costs May, its index of main soft commodities hit its highest value since or pass them on? And to whom? It’s an ethically fraught question. 2011.” Price spikes could feed broader inflation – already rising in Consumers in emerging markets have less disposable income on many countries – which would be bad for consumers. But their average than those in mature economies, but it’s easier to hike loss is a gain for “big agriculture” and the giant companies that prices there since supermarkets in developing countries have “less source and ship foodstuffs. There’s always a winner somewhere.

Making money: what the experts think

measures and fines”. The latest rout – which began “It took a while, but an with a crackdown on three unrelenting stream of big Chinese education crackdowns finally spooked companies listed in New investors,” said Jennifer York – was a global affair, Hughes on Reuters said Hudson Lockett in the Breakingviews. After a torrid FT. The Nasdaq Golden couple of days, China’s blueDragon China index, a chip stocks were close to benchmark of Chinese tech “bear-market territory” on stocks listed in New York, Wednesday, having fallen by suffered “its worst fall since nearly 20% since their 2008”. And the sell-off left February peak. The Beijing Cathie Wood: ditching Tencent traders in Hong Kong regime “makes market tea stunned. “Have I ever seen leaves very hard to read” anything like this?

No,” said market and some sectors have been spared. But veteran Louis Tse of the Hong Kong only “the truly daring” are venturing into brokerage Wealthy Securities.

China now. Even once-bullish investors are selling up, said Business Insider. Cathie ● Contagion?

Wood’s ARK Invest has been “rapidly “Beijing is intent on showing Big Tech that shedding its positions”, ditching its last the Communist Party is boss, and is remaining shares in Tencent, the social therefore unlikely to steady panic selling media and gaming giant, on Friday, along any time soon,” said Marcus Ashworth on with positions in the property website KE Bloomberg. “Markets aren’t about to calm Holdings and the ecommerce giant JD. down with the Biden administration com. That high-profile exit looked talking about restricting US-based funds prescient by Monday, when Tencent from investing in China or Hong Kong plunged by 10% (its worst daily loss in a equities.” The big fear is a re-run of the decade) and KE by as much as 26%. rout of 2015 which saw a 45% sell-off in China – prompting a knock-on effect on ● A global affair emerging market equity, bond and China’s regulatory crackdown began late currency markets. This latest stumble last year with the abrupt cancellation of “could lead to skinned knees” around the Ant Group’s IPO. Since then, Alibaba, world. “Forget your plans for a quiet, Tencent and the ride-hailing giant Didi relaxing summer.” have all been hit with “anti-monopoly ● Chinese bear

Spacs and the City The City watchdog has just published its rules designed to encourage more Spacs (aka “blank-cheque companies”) to list in London, said Jim Armitage in the London Evening Standard. Cause for celebration?

Why now? The City has so far “lost out to the US and Europe” in the battle to attract Spacs – the hot investment craze of 2020-21 – “leaving London looking old-fashioned” and out of the money.

What does a Spac do? A Special Purpose Acquisition Company’s sole purpose is buying, or investing in, another business – usually by “raising a tonne of money” via a stock market listing. They are often “a backdoor route” for getting target companies onto the stock market, without “the paperwork” of a traditional listing.

Are they risky? The Financial Conduct Authority has imposed new safeguards ensuring that Spacs aren’t quite as dangerous as the blank-cheque companies of the 1980s, which became “a byword for defrauding investors”.

They’re still riskier than conventional listed companies. “Spacs are not, as they say, for widows and orphans.”

Will they be successful here? “That’s the trillion-dollar question.” Having raised $80bn so far in 2021, “the market has declined in recent months amid worries about a bubble”. London’s late entry could be a blessing in disguise.

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

46 CITY The damning farce of the “pingdemic” Jeremy Warner The Sunday Telegraph

Time to reform help for the unemployed Philip Aldrick The Times

Tesla is showing us the way Antony Currie Reuters Breakingviews

Time to no-platform the “platform” Jonathan Knee Financial Times

THE WEEK 31 July 2021

Commentators “It’s hard to think of any government that can genuinely be said to have had a good pandemic,” says Jeremy Warner. But the UK’s handling of the crisis seems “particularly inept” – the latest in a long list of blunders being the “wholly predictable fiasco” of the “pingdemic”. Even as the Government attempts “to open things up”, the NHS Test and Trace app is “closing down large parts of the economy, and laying waste to vital supply chains” – a farcical situation that has made us “an international laughing stock”. The charitable way of looking at this policy confusion is that the UK “has to be seen” to be doing something about the spread of infections, “or it will find itself completely cut off from the outside world”. And so we continue with the charade of the (voluntary) “isolate when pinged” regime, resulting in “a strategy that is neither fish nor fowl”. The one bright spot remains the success of the vaccine roll-out in breaking the link between infections, hospitalisations and deaths. “The light at the end of the tunnel keeps on receding, but at least it is still plainly visible.”

The pandemic has completely “reset expectations” about the state’s relationship with unemployment, says Philip Aldrick. After furlough, which paid out up to £2,500 a month, jobseeker’s allowance, worth just £3,900 a year, “will never be enough”. The end of the scheme in September is thus an opportunity for reform – all the more pressing given that “business insolvencies will rocket as zombies are taken off life support”. “For ideas, the Government should be looking across the North Sea to Denmark and Germany.” The latter’s pre-pandemic kurzarbeit scheme (whereby the state pays the wages of those who temporarily stop working) was a model for the UK furlough, and still has much to offer. The Danish model – which pays out £2,200 a month, strictly on the basis that recipients retrain or actively look for jobs – is one of the most effective at tackling unemployment in the world. The Chancellor is halfway there: he has already unveiled a raft of initiatives worth billions to help people back to work. He should now back that up with a revamped job-support scheme “that recognises nothing will ever be the same again”.

Tesla has overcome the prevailing global chip shortage to post a record $1.1bn quarterly profit: a sign, says Antony Currie, that Elon Musk’s electric carmaker has “finally joined the grown-ups”.

The company didn’t, for a change, “have to rely on one-off items” – such as flogging environmental credits to gas-guzzlers or selling Bitcoin – “to make its numbers”. Musk has not lost his “recently discovered knack” for keeping costs under control. Yet if Tesla’s processes have become a model of control, its valuation is another story. At $620bn, the carmaker is “way overvalued”, and the stock remains volatile. “Between late January and early March, the company lost some $310bn in value” – more than Toyota’s market worth. Over the next few weeks, it then added $90bn, which is more than the value of General Motors. These wild swings are likely to continue, but Tesla has at least proved that the challenges of ramping up production “on an entirely new type of car” are no longer “existential”. With the rest of the industry in upheaval, this “coming of age” couldn’t be more timely.

The growing dominance of “a small group of massive digital platforms”, such as Apple, Microsoft, Amazon and Google, has changed the way we think and talk about value – “and not for the better”, says Jonathan Knee. The notion of the “platform” has become so beguiling that it is now “a kind of trigger word”, routinely used to “separate investors from their money”.

Deploying the buzzword is the easiest way “to goose” the valuations of otherwise “pedestrian” businesses, or just to attract interest. There are, it is true, “plenty of extraordinary platform businesses that derive their core value from the connections they facilitate”. But does the fast-food salad chain Sweetgreen really qualify as a “food platform”? And was the US property business Compass really justified in mentioning its “platform” 291 times when filing to float earlier this year? Shares in the outfit have since fallen by more than a third, amid questions over how different its business model really is to that of “traditional agents”. It was a reminder that “relying on trigger words” bearing little relation to reality “is a recipe for long-term financial disappointment”.

City profiles Michael O’Leary The Ryanair CEO was quick to accuse the Belarus regime of “state-sponsored hijacking” when one of his planes was forced to land in Minsk in May, enabling the arrest of Roman Protasevich – a prominent critic of president Alexander Lukashenko. Since then, the “straight-talking” O’Leary has been unusually quiet on the issue, said Prufrock in The Sunday Times. But it turns out he’s been “busy behind the scenes”. When Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the Belarusian opposition leader, visited Ireland in midJuly, she held “a secret meeting” with O’Leary at the Ryanair HQ and came away impressed. She told her followers on the Telegram app that Ryanair was conducting its own investigation, and thanked O’Leary for his “principled stance”.

Virgil Abloh

LVMH’s “definer of cool” ruffled some feathers when he became artistic director of menswear at the luxury group in 2018, said the FT. Despite founding the hot street label Off-White, Abloh isn’t “a traditionally trained fashion designer”. Born in 1980 to Ghanaian parents in Rockford, Illinois, he trained as an engineer and architect.

It was a meeting with rapper Kanye West that changed his trajectory. After winning a Grammy for art directing on West and Jay-Z’s 2011 “Watch The Throne” tour, Abloh launched his first clothing line – and never looked back. Promoted last week to create new brands for LVMH “beyond the realm of fashion”, friends say Abloh is just the man for the job. “He’s one of the best cultural communicators since Andy Warhol,” says producer Tremaine Emory.

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Shares

CITY 49

Who’s tipping what The week’s best shares

Directors’ dealings

Frontier Developments The Mail on Sunday Shares in this hotshot videogaming publisher were whacked by news of teething problems in the sequel to Elite Dangerous and a delayed Formula 1 game. Buy the dip: long-term prospects remain compelling. Buy. £25.00.

Medica Group The Sunday Times The record numbers of patients awaiting elective surgery bodes well for Medica, whose technology allows radiologists to view images remotely. Its recent deal with Australia’s Integral Diagnostics also helps.

Buy. 163p.

CVS Group The Times The pet boom spells upselling and cross-selling opportunities aplenty for the UK’s secondlargest vet, which also provides hospital, pharmacy, insurance and crematorium services. A potential takeover target.

Buy. £23.40.

Harworth Group ShareCast A positive trading update from the land and property company has prompted Liberum analysts to up their target price to 175p.

The 12.7% total accounting return is “towards the top end” for UK real estate.

Buy. 161.95p.

The Mission Group Investors Chronicle The marketing specialist is trading briskly and winning new clients, like Porsche GB, Bottlegreen and Burts Chips.

The modestly priced shares are “well worth buying” ahead of September’s interim results.

Buy. 78p.

Caerus Mineral Resources 35

Chairman buys 240,000

30 25 20 15

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Chairman, Michael Johnson, has forked out £55,220 for shares in the exploration firm, which is focused on Cyprus.

Copper has historically been the main source of production on the island, but the presence of gold provides extra impetus.

…and some to hold, avoid or sell

Form guide

AJ Bell The Times Swelling numbers of retail investors have pushed profits higher and the platform is attracting both advisers and younger punters. But at a “pricey” 36 times forecast earnings, potential is already priced into shares. Hold. 280p.

Naked Wines The Daily Telegraph A deal to tap US investors via the OTCQX trading platform spells opportunities stateside, but poses a dilemma for UK investors. Complex rules mean the Aim-listed vintner could forgo valuable tax breaks.

Hold. 836p.

Rio Tinto The Daily Telegraph The Anglo-Australian miner enjoyed a storming 2020 – pretax profits hit £11.2bn, as a result of an 85% hike in iron ore prices fuelled by Chinese activity. Yet with returns so dependent on China, shares are a gamble. Avoid. £59.26.

Hammerson Investors Chronicle The retail landlord’s turnaround, after a punishing rights issue, remains elusive.

Appetite for large shopping centre assets is damp, making disposals difficult, and rents owed are sizeable. Options look limited. Sell. 35p.

Netflix The Times Having thrived on lockdown escapism, Netflix faces “a costly battle for eyeballs”.

Falling subscription growth has highlighted fears of customer churn. Despite the move into games, there’s room for greater losses. Avoid. $509.02.

Sumo The Mail on Sunday The Sheffield video-games group has received a generous £5.13/share offer from China’s tech giant Tencent. As shares have tripled since 2018 and the bid may face political scrutiny, investors should take profits.

Sell. £4.95.

Shares tipped 12 weeks ago Best tip Focusrite Investors Chronicle up 14.32% to £14.05 Worst tip Alstom The Times down 23.11% to s36.30

Market view “China’s policy U-turn is tectonic.”

Richard Yetsenga of ANZ on the implications of Beijing’s tech crackdown.

Quoted in the FT

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

27 July 2021 6996.08 4010.29 34991.02 14581.67 27970.22 25086.43 1800.20 74.23 3.12% 0.56 1.24

Best and worst performing shares Week before 6881.13 3932.84 34565.51 14475.99 27388.16 27259.25 1814.90 69.04 3.09% 0.56 1.21

2.5% (Jun) 3.9% (Jun) 8.8% (Jun)

$1.389 E1.176 ¥152.536

2.1% (May) 3.3% (May) 9.5% (May)

Change (%) 1.67% 1.97% 1.23% 0.73% 2.13% –7.97% –0.81% 7.52%

WEEK’S CHANGE, FTSE 100 STOCKS RISES Price % change 1280.50 +10.53 3i Group 3072.50 +9.73 Anglo American 175.32 +9.26 Intl. Cons. Airl. Grp. 98.27 +9.16 Rolls-Royce Holdings 8040.00 +8.74 Next FALLS Reckitt Benckiser Gp. Unilever (UK) Polymetal International Scottish Mortgage Avast

Following the Footsie 7,200

7,000

6,800

5700.00 4051.50 1510.00 1278.00 573.20

–10.99 –6.25 –3.70 –3.44 –2.85

BEST AND WORST UK STOCKS OVERALL 225.00 +73.08 Acceler8 Ventures 42.00 –32.80 Loopup Group

Source: Datastream (not adjusted for dividends). Prices on 27 July (pm)

6,600

6,400

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

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6-month movement in the FTSE 100 index

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

SOURCE: SHARECAST

Creightons Investors Chronicle The beauty and healthcare specialist has filed record results, buoyed by hygiene sales. Consistent prowess at generating and then recycling cash back into high-margin business makes a 100p target “realistic”. Buy. 79p.

The last word

50

“They said I don’t exist”: one woman’s battle to prove she’s alive Five years ago, Jeanne Pouchain was declared dead by a French court. It was news to her – but it was just the beginning of a Kafkaesque nightmare. By Kim Willsher

T

he trouble began in 2016. When Jeanne Pouchain’s passport application was declined, she was annoyed – but assumed she had forgotten an important piece of paperwork. Several weeks later, at a doctor’s appointment in her town of Saint-Joseph, outside Lyon in southeast France, both Pouchain, then 53, and her GP were perplexed when his computer spat out her carte vitale, the green card that gives access to the French public health system.

Pouchain put it down to a technical blip. She assumed that was also the reason her pharmacy suggested she must pay in full for her diabetes drugs.

had no idea she was signing for a document announcing her own death. The letter informed her that a lawyer in a court case relating to her cleaning business had told the court that she had died, aged 53, in February 2016. Somehow, this claim was allowed to go unchecked and unchallenged.

Pouchain was shaken. “I thought I was going to collapse. How could I be dead? Someone said I was dead – did the judge just believe them, with no death certificate?” she asks. “I felt like I’d been punched in the face. But we thought it would be quickly resolved.

I went to my doctor, who Pouchain: “administratively dead” for three and a half years gave me a certificate to It seemed like a series of annoying coincidences; the kind of red say I was still alive, then we went to the administrative offices at tape many in France find themselves tangled up in at one time or Saint-Étienne and reported there had been an irregularity. But all another in a country notorious for bureaucracy. It was irritating they said was that nobody can be declared dead who isn’t dead but would, she assumed, eventually be resolved. and it wasn’t within their competence to deal with it.”

But when the former cleaning company boss received her bank Since then, Pouchain has spent more than three and a half years statement and discovered her business account had been plunged engaged in an existential battle to prove to the French authorities into the red, even though she had paid in dozens of cheques, she what remains obvious to all – her family, friends, neighbours, the became seriously concerned. “I knew money should have been local mayor, and even visiting strangers like me: that she is very going into my account, but there much alive. was nothing. So I went to the bank; I’ve been with them for 27 “The letter informed her that a lawyer in a case As she opens the electric gates years,” she says. “The director relating to her business had told the court that of her home, surrounded by came out and told me, ‘I’m blossoming cherry trees on a she had died, aged 53, in February 2016” sorry, you don’t exist.’ I said: chilly morning earlier this year, ‘But I am here, you know me.’

Pouchain greets me briskly.

He told me: ‘I don’t have an explanation. But what can I do?’ He “If you’ve come to talk about my death… well, you can see for said there was no record of a Jeanne Pouchain and no accounts yourself, I’m not dead. If you want to know how we arrived here, in that name. “They had all been closed. He wanted me to hand then let’s talk.” back my chequebook, but I refused. As we were leaving, he gave me an envelope of cheques worth s14,000 that should have been “This has been my nightmare for three years,” Pouchain says, paid in, and said there was nothing he could do. settling into a chair and lighting a long, thin cigarette. “It’s like Groundhog Day: it’s the first thing I think about every morning, “There was no explanation. I knew something wasn’t right. All the first thing my husband and I talk about.” my life, I’ve been precise about keeping records, documents, tax receipts. I like everything to be correct. Pierre-Jean, my husband, For Pouchain, being “administratively dead” means having said there must have been some mix-up and not to worry, we’d no access to the public health system and no medicines for her sort it out.” diabetes and thyroid condition unless she pays for them privately.

Dead people don’t need cars or cash, so her driving licence has Over the next few months, Pouchain noticed odd things also been cancelled, and neither her expired passport nor her happening, but assumed it was just a computer glitch. She carried carte d’identité can be renewed, ruling out travel. During the on working and driving, and applied again for her passport, Covid lockdowns, when people could be fined for not carrying submitting more documents. But in October 2017, her passport identification papers, Pouchain was virtually housebound. Job application was returned, marked “REFUSED”. applications are also impossible as she has no proof of address and her name has been taken off the electricity bill, the item that Then on 12 November 2017, two bailiffs turned up at Pouchain’s acts as an “open sesame” to all French bureaucratic procedures. home with a recorded delivery letter addressed to Pierre-Jean. She As things stand, she will not be getting a pension.

THE WEEK 31 July 2021

The last word “People complain about Covid lockdowns, but that has been my life for three years,” says Pouchain.

“I’m better now, but I admit there were some days I couldn’t even be bothered to wash and get dressed.”

She gives a defeated shrug. “In any case, I don’t go out; I am getting bigger and bigger.” Her weight has ballooned by 30kg (4.7 stone), and the stress has led to severe depression, including three attempts to take her own life.

51 legal bill, but was glad it was all over.

Later, Pouchain’s lawyer, Sylvain Cormier, tells me the solicitor’s letter informing Pouchain the industrial tribunal case was being dropped was probably a phoney pause, while Mme H’s lawyer drew breath to relaunch the case.

Sometime afterwards, the case returned to court – where it was said that Pouchain had died and that her “heirs” would be asked to settle. “This should not have happened,” Cormier says.

She admits some days it can feel as if she is going mad, caught up in a grotesque conspiracy designed to drive her to a real grave. “I used to After several attempts to correct A bureaucratic nightmare: Jeremy Irons in Kafka (1991) be on antidepressants and antithe record failed, Pouchain says it took time to find a lawyer who would take on her case, before anxiety tablets but I cannot afford them now. I have the right to nothing and I have nothing despite having worked all my life.

Cormier agreed to act on her behalf. “When Mme Pouchain told How can they have wiped me from the face of the Earth?” me her story, I found it hard to believe,” says Cormier. “But I read the files and everything she told me was true. It appears there lthough she has now been officially “dead” for five years, was no certificate of death, it was just taken on someone’s word. the story of Pouchain’s demise began in 2000 when she Nobody checked.” was running her own business specialising in maintenance and cleaning services for homes and offices in Lyon. Pouchain Pouchain’s case is unusual, but she is not the first person estimates she employed 120 people over the two decades she ran caught in a fight to prove that rumours of her death have been the business. She was, she insists, a firm but fair employer. “Staff exaggerated. In 2013, an Ohio judge ruled that Donald E. Miller came and went, they moved, retired, but I never laid anyone Jr. would remain legally deceased, even though Miller was sitting in the courtroom to hear his fate, perfectly healthy. He had been off. I had a good reputation. Around 90% of my employees were women, often in difficult declared dead after disappearing in 1986, owing thousands of situations; if they had a problem, “I have the right to nothing despite having dollars in unpaid child support.

I was there for them. I ran my business as if it was family, and worked all my life. How can they have wiped In India, a farmer called Lal that was a mistake. I didn’t put me from the face of the Earth?” enough distance between us.”

Bihari spent two decades battling to prove he was alive In autumn 2000, Pouchain lost a contract to clean an office between 1975 and 1994, even throwing himself a funeral to draw complex for start-up firms. Under French law, when a new attention to his plight. This year, his story was turned into a company takes over a contract, existing staff are transferred as Bollywood film, Kaagaz. part of the deal. Pouchain says she carried out 35 such transfers during her 20 years in the business and had a solicitor and an Having thought she had drawn a line under the employment accountant to deal with the process. In this case, there was just wrangle in 2013, Pouchain decided to wind up her cleaning one staff worker to transfer, whom we shall call Madame H. She business and set up a small restaurant in the family’s traditional had worked for Pouchain since May 1999. stone house. “I like cooking, and it was to be a family restaurant at weekends,” she says. Pierre-Jean, 58, a graduate of the elite “We had a good relationship. She was a hard worker, serious.

French Sciences Po, continued to run his consultancy business from home.

She worked all hours to pay for her children’s studies. Once she went on holiday with her husband and sent me a postcard saying she couldn’t wait to get back to work. I made the transfer, the Pouchain slaps the nine-page document she signed for on 12 paperwork was done and it seemed to go well. She officially November 2017, the one informing her husband of her death, stopped working for me on 31 December. From 2 January 2001, onto the pile in front of me. She runs her finger along the text. she was supposed to be working for the new company.”

It reads: “Following the death of Madame Jeanne Pouchain…”

The industrial tribunal case had been reopened on 25 February Four months later, however, Pouchain says she received a 2016 without Pouchain’s knowledge, and, as she had supposedly timesheet from Mme H demanding payment for 200 hours of died before it was resolved, her “heirs”, Pierre-Jean and their cleaning in January 2001. Pouchain responded that Mme H no son Hugo, 28, were ordered to pay Mme H’s demand for almost longer worked for her, but when she failed to pay she was taken s20,000 in back pay, compensation, and redundancy, plus a to an industrial tribunal. Pouchain plucks documents from a pile further s15,000 in damages. of folders on her dining table. “I have all the records. It’s very complicated.”

“It was an ambush. She couldn’t win the proceedings while I was alive, so she had me declared dead,” Pouchain claims. Fifteen In 2004, an industrial tribunal ordered Pouchain to pay Mme days later, her husband’s and son’s bank accounts were frozen.

H s14,000, having ruled that the employment transfer had not Pierre-Jean shows me a photograph of a polished black 2002 been carried out correctly, contrary to what Pouchain claimed.

Porsche Boxster, his pride and joy. In August 2019, bailiffs took it However, because Mme H’s lawyer had brought the case against away to settle part of Mme H’s claim. “It was worth s24,000, but Pouchain’s trade name, Select Services, and not her personally, they damaged it and sold it for s7,000,” he says. “We have both the ruling was subsequently declared null and void. Five years worked hard all our lives. We were not born with silver spoons in later, Mme H made another claim, this time against Pouchain our mouths,” he adds, quietly. personally, but the industrial tribunal threw out the new case, stating that the matter was now closed. In 2013, Pouchain was Pouchain has sold all her jewellery, including her wedding and told the case had been dropped. She was looking at a s100,000 engagement rings. Fortunately, Pierre-Jean has an income from his

A

31 July 2021 THE WEEK

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The last word

consultancy, but nothing feels secure. “They have even threatened to take our home. It’s like some kind of personal vengeance. They seem out to ruin us, and nobody cares.”

The stress caused a rift between Pouchain and Hugo, a biological engineer, who on the day before my visit had flown to French Guiana to take up a new job. Hugo and his mother were reconciled shortly before he left. “He didn’t want to stay in France. He’s disgusted with his country,” Pouchain says.

Normally she would have gone to see him, but without a passport she can’t.

I pleaded with them and explained what had happened, and the gendarme said it wasn’t possible I could be declared dead, just like that. Then he looked on the central database and said, ‘I wouldn’t drive if I were you, because you don’t exist.’”

Pouchain’s lawyer, Cormier, has now filed a legal complaint for fraud and false declarations in the criminal court and a separate case in the civil court to stop Mme H seizing any more of Pierre-Jean’s property. The earliest hearing will be on 31 August, when Cormier hopes to have Pouchain administratively resurrected, but By now, I’ve been going over the fine details for several hours with Pouchain he says it could take another two years and papers are scattered all over the before an investigating judge finds out what tablecloth. Pouchain has briefly recounted happened.Cormier says Pouchain has acted in good faith throughout. “It’s a histoire de her life-death story many times to French fou [a mad story]. I’ve never come across journalists, but never in such detail. She recently started writing it down, partly as anything like this before. I think we will get there in the end, little by little, and a cathartic exercise. “I need to get it out,” Pouchain: “on the list of dead people” she says. we will establish that Mme Pouchain is perfectly alive and there have been lies told and mistakes made.”

Cormier has brought the new action on the basis that this was a ife was not kind to Pouchain even before she was pronounced dead. Born in Algeria, she never knew her parents and was deliberate error. brought to France at 14 days old and placed with a foster family in Lyon, who had seven children of their own and did not want Whether this is the case will be a matter for a judge to decide, but another mouth to feed. “It was a toxic, violent childhood that Pouchain says she finds it hard to believe Mme H, who is 70, is lasted until I ran away, aged 23, to get married,” she says. “It driving a case that feels to her like persecution. “Even when we was in infant school that I learnt that my only way out of this later ended up at the industrial tribunal, she said she had nothing nightmare was to work at school.” to say against me; she told the judge she’d worked for me and that I’d been fair,” she says.

After her baccalauréat, she did a business diploma. “The final exam was in Bourg-en-Bresse [an hour away], but I had no money Pascale Revel, Mme H’s lawyer, declined multiple requests to for transport, so I hitchhiked and slept the night under a bridge. I comment on the case, saying she was “bound by professional still passed the exam. I was going to leave for Australia, but was secrecy”. She passed on my requests for an interview with Mme introduced to Pierre-Jean at a party, and it was love at first sight.” H, adding that her client was “free to make her own choice to They married in 1988. “If Pierre-Jean threw me out, I’d be on the contact you or not”. There has been no word. At a preliminary streets,” she says. court hearing last October, Revel accused Pouchain of “My life will never be the same after this In France, deaths are confirmed playing dead to avoid paying by a doctor and must be Mme H, something that – even if I am resurrected” registered with the local mairie Pouchain vehemently denies. (town hall) within 24 hours.

The mairie issues a death certificate, and it is up to relatives Several courts, including the Cour de Cassation, the highest in or their legal representative to notify the tax, health and social the French judicial system, have examined the case and conceded security authorities as well as banks and others by sending them there appeared to be “irregularities”, but deemed it was beyond a copy. Until last year, when the French statistics agency Insee their competence to bring Pouchain back from the dead. began compiling details of deaths since 1970 from local authority records, there was no central register, and only family members So who can? Pouchain’s local MP’s office tells me they have taken could request details from the mairie where the death was up her case. The MP, Valéria Faure-Muntian, told Pouchain she recorded. Insee says its list of the past 30 years is “exhaustive”. It has spoken to the justice minister, Éric Dupond-Moretti, who is also initially says that Pouchain is on the list of dead people “but a member of the French bar and will keep a close eye on the case. has not died”.

For now, Pouchain must wait to be officially resurrected.

L

© ED ALCOCK / EYEVINE

When I question this, an Insee spokesperson replies, saying: “Sorry, we made a mistake, she’s not on the dead list.” So I ask if she is on their list of living people. “No, she is not, and sorry, alas we have no more information on this subject.” There is no record of any death certificate being issued at her local mairie. Whatever the rights or wrongs of the 20-year industrial tribunal saga, nobody seems able to explain how Pouchain came to be declared dead, or why the court that made that declaration appeared to do so without any proof. Or why, once the obvious error was made, it cannot be rectified.

Pouchain has no idea who informed her bank, social security, and other administrative offices she was dead, and has been unable to find out how they could do so without a death certificate. In fact, nobody seems to have a clue. “It sounds so ridiculous when you tell people – but that has been our reality for the last three years,” she says. “When the gendarmes came to take Pierre-Jean’s car, THE WEEK 31 July 2021

A week after we meet, Pouchain calls to thank me for listening to her story. It sounds as if she is crying; she is distraught because she can only have a Covid vaccination if she joins the waiting list as a homeless person. “My life will never be the same after this – even if I am resurrected. For 20 years, I have been harassed over this, and finally they have nailed the coffin shut by declaring my death. I will keep fighting, but I have to find a way to rebuild myself.”

When we speak again in June, there is some good news. She tells me she has finally been able to get her first Covid vaccination, although she had to pay s150 for it. She has even managed to find black humour in her situation: “I wouldn’t want to die of Covid before I’ve had the chance to be brought back to life.”

A longer version of this article appeared in The Guardian. © 2021 Guardian News & Media Ltd.

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Crossword

55

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1271

This week’s winner will receive an T Ettinger (ettinger.co.uk) travel pass E case (assorted colours), which retails c a at £105, and two Connell Guides (connellguides.com).

An Ettinger travel pass case and two Connell Guides will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 9 August.

Email the answers as a scan of a completed grid or a list, with the subject line The Week crossword 1271, to crossword@theweek.co.uk. Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) ACROSS 4 Heard someone raising a glass for racecourse (9) 8 Coin met abroad? Yes, in South America (7) 9 One’s mad to be off this vehicle (7) 10 Massage image showing point of no return (7) 11 No pilgrim could turn to begging (9) 13 Afternoon meal for the very best people? (5,3) 14 Nitwit with unfinished pasta (6) 17 Extremely bad lamb, say out to lunch (7) 19 Engineer with wide view (6) 23 Plain answer beginning to puzzle Dad? (8) 25 Acceptable friend has restaurant booking (9) 26 Have such pets and always be anxious? (7) 27 It can be reshuffled (7) 28 Sped back with speed to tell a story (7) 29 Witnessing game of cricket in giant ground (9)

DOWN 1 Guy on field injured in soccer war (9) 2 Deborah rolls around and is insulted (7) 3 Sounds like food after the war, taken bit by bit (9) 4 Individual in Bow, a City type (6) 5 If leaving California, move to a former colony (8) 6 Port of New Orleans (7) 7 A little alien has to learn about going on for ever (7) 12 High officer damages Henry (7) 15 Nearly all ancient works creating a stink (9) 16 No longer married, masses cite singular raptures! (9) 18 Gallery in topmost product trial (4,4) 20 Determined topless lady gets on top of worker (7) 21 Rock played in Tangier (7) 22 Spanish bread once placed in vegetables (7) 24 Exercises with ruler in old Eastern capital (6)

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Name Address

Clue of the week: Maybe Iago’s characteristic Richardson exemplifies?

(15, first letter H, last letters NESS) The Times Solution to Crossword 1269 ACROSS: 7 Cereus 9 Entrepot 10 Done 11 Triumphant 12 Vicars 13 Boogaloo 15 Taxi 16 Dryad 17 Sept 19 Goings-on 21 Ramp up 22 Parachuted 25 Toby 26 Contempt 27 Enough DOWN: 1 Semolina 2 Revelation 3 Deli 4 Stamford Bridge 5 Seth 6 Borneo 8 Set-aside scheme 13 Bryan 14 Assumption 18 Plumbago 20 Orator 23 Ants 24 Tote Clue of the week: Back in pub, saying when about to drink?

(7,2, first letter B) Solution: BOTTOMS UP (b + motto reversed + sup) The winner of 1269 is Estella Warwick from Longworth

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5 9 1

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Sudoku 813 (difficult) Fill in all the squares so that each row, column and each of the 3x3 squares contains all the digits from 1 to 9

Solution to Sudoku 812

5

8

8 3 7 2

8 1 9

8 9 5

7 4 3 2 8 9 5 1

8 1 5 3 4 6 7 2

9 6 2 1 5 7 8 4 3

1 8 6 4 9 2 3 7

2 3 9 7 6 5 1 8

5 7 4 8 1 3 9 6 2

4 2 7 5 3 8 6 9

3 9 8 6 2 1 4 5

Tel no Clue of the week answer:

6 5 1 9 7 4 2 3 8

Charity of the week Anxious Minds was founded in 2015, as a result of the CEO’s experiences with anxiety and depression. This gives us a detailed understanding of the reality of mental health and a passionate desire to improve the situation.

Our mission at Anxious Minds is to improve the mental well-being of the people we serve here in the Northeast. We work to a set of core values and principles that are upheld in everything we offer. We believe that individuals who suffer from mental health conditions do not receive enough support, and we started the charity to ensure that better support was easily available.

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31 July 2021 THE WEEK

Injustice won’t stop.

Abuse won’t stop.

The climate crisis won’t stop.

So neither will we.

Businesses today are keen to tell you how they’ve changed.

They’ve become more ethical. They’re doing their bit.

At The Co-operative Bank we haven’t developed an ethical approach. We’ve had one from the very start.

In 1872 that meant things like supporting local communities.

Behaving fairly and honestly. Paying workers a proper wage.

Today, we also help to tackle some of the biggest issues facing us all.

We are beyond carbon neutral and send zero waste to landfill.

We campaign alongside Amnesty International UK to fight injustice, and Refuge to challenge economic abuse. We’ve invested £1.7 million to support co-operative businesses since 2016.

And our work is having an impact. In fact, we’ve been recognised as the UK’s best ESG (Environmental, Social and Governance) rated high street bank* by independent experts Sustainalytics.

It’s an achievement we’re proud of. But the problems facing our communities aren’t going away. So this is no time to relax.

It’s time to do more.

That’s why, on August 2nd we’ll launch our sixth Values and Ethics Poll. It will ask our 3.3 million customers to help us shape our Ethical Policy. It will also provide a unique view of where the UK stands on ethical and sustainable issues in 2021 and beyond.

We know that, now more than ever, consumers want their voices to be heard. And they want a bank that listens and acts on the issues that matter to them.

So, ask yourself: does your bank do that? If the answer is no, maybe it’s time to join one that does.

The Original Ethical Bank.

* Rated by Sustainalytics in the Regional Banks subindustry with a score of 9.2 as of

June 11, 2021

The Co-operative Bank p.l.c. is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority and the Prudential Regulation Authority (No.121885).