Spectator Life Spring 2015

A R T / S T Y L E / P O L I T I C S / F I L M / T R AV E L p.44

WILLIAM B OY D

SA R A H GA D O N

SE A N T HOM A S

James Bond and the Eton connection

Playing the teenage Queen

My literary sex change

ISSUE 13

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S P E C TAT O R L I F E

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SPRING 2015

THE RETURN OF THE ANONYMOUS INTERNET

DAV I D CA M E R ON ’ S

S E C R E T A -L I S T Tory HQ has a new set of favourite candidates — but don’t tell anyone COVER_Spectator Life March 2015_Spectator Supplements 210x260_

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Seven years ago I came up with a list of Conservative wouldbe MPs to photograph and profile: the now infamous ‘Tatler Tory Totty.’ When the piece came out, David Cameron was said to have been puzzled why Andy Coulson — then his head of communications — had enlisted the help of the society bible: ‘I’ve already got the Tatler vote, if I don’t have the Tatler vote, I am screwed’ was the gist of his reaction, or so I heard.

With the rise of Ukip this time around, even the Tatler vote may be in doubt and CCHQ aren’t risking another well-dressed debacle: my request to gather ten more promising, notably diverse candidates for a shoot was politely declined. What’s going on? As Harry Cole’s cover story makes clear, the Tory party does have another ‘A-list’ of favoured parliamentary candidates, glamorous, often female, often BME, but this time the list is secret. What a strange state of affairs — but one that seems typical of the anxiety about privilege that has characterised Call Me Dave’s time in office.

Elsewhere in the issue we look at the casting call to replace Daniel Craig in the Bond franchise. Eddie Redmayne’s charm and capacity to work a room are said to have helped him edge an Oscar away from Michael Keaton, and while public school boys and girls used to be rejected by the top drama schools, today virtually all the candidates to succeed Daniel Craig went to Eton — and unlike the politicians, they don’t care. Showbiz for ugly people is now effectively a no-no if you went to Eton — but there’s always, well, showbiz. Enjoy the issue.

Spectator Life spectator.co.uk/spectator-life Twitter @Spectator_LIFE Instagram @SpectatorLife Supplied free with the 28 March 2015 issue of The Spectator 22 Old Queen Street, London, SW1H 9HP Telephone 020 7961 0200 ISSN: 2050-2192

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Chairman Andrew Neil Publisher Damian Thompson Editor Olivia Cole Deputy Editor Danielle Wall Columnists James Mumford, Harry Cole. Sam Neill is away Sub-editors Peter Robins, Victoria Lane, John Honderich Design & Art Direction Design by St www.designbyst.com Group Commercial Director Melissa McAdden melissa@spectator.co.uk Head of Luxury Advertising Emily Glazebrook: emily@spectator.co.uk

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C ON T R I B U T OR S

EAMONN MCCABE

Richard Goldstein was the first widely read rock critic in America and for many years executive editor of the Village Voice. He is a professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York.

William Boyd, who writes for us about Ian Fleming and Eton, recently wrote the James Bond novel Solo. His other novels include Any Human Heart and Restless, and his 13th, Sweet Caress, is out in September.

Victoria Lane is more usually spotted in Hackney or at The Spectator but for this issue ventured to Rwanda.

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Jamie Bartlett is the author As S.K. Tremayne, travel Nigel Milne, Arcade, 12a Piccadilly Arcade, SW1Y 6NH Nigel Milne, 12a Piccadilly London SW1YLondon 6NH of The Dark Net, published journalist Sean Thomas wrote Nigel Milne, 12a Piccadilly Arcade, London SW1Y 6NH +44 (0)20 7491 9201 Email jewels@nigelmilne.co.uk Website www.nigelmilne.co.

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CONTENTS

17 49 29 61 C U LT U R E

STYLE

LIFE

T R AV E L

14. The Index Where to go and what to see in April, May and June

36. David Cameron’s secret A-list CCHQ has found its dream batch of prospective MPs, says Harry Cole – but don’t tell anyone

17. Spy society Damian Thompson on James Bond’s Etonian side; and William Boyd on Ian Fleming’s schooldays

42. Harry Cole Male politicians get objectified, too 44. The next net Jamie Bartlett discovers the future of online privacy in an office off Fulham High Street

22. Screen princess Sarah Gadon tells Olivia Cole about working with David Cronenberg and playing the future Elizabeth II

49. The green, green glass of home Lara Prendergast on the discreet charm of the terrarium

24. My literary sex change For my novel to take off, says Sean Thomas, I had to become a woman

52. The Wish List 56. My little oligarch Clover Stroud talks to the designers who outfit children’s bedrooms for the super-rich

26. What the Sixties did for us The spirit of rebellion is not dead, says Richard Goldstein 29. How the Big Apple lost its bite It’s a shame, says Harry Mount, but maybe New York is better off being a bit boring

61. Green hills, great apes Victoria Lane is swept away by Rwanda

32. The Chinese are coming Mark Mason on London’s latest financial influx

64. Globe Trotting Escapes from Austria to Bodrum

34. James Mumford Pitching a film? Here’s the script not to follow

66. One to Watch Sean Scully on the perverse paintings of Benedikt Hipp 13

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THE INDEX

MAY

I L T U RCO I N I TA LI A Royal Opera House, 11–27 April This 1950s-set production of Rossini’s joyful, cynical romantic farce, full of veils, masks and mistaken i­ dentities, was ahead of the game when it was first put on ten years ago, and it still looks good now.

APR

A DECENT RIDE 16 April Irvine Welsh just keeps on revisiting characters: this time Glue’s Juice Terry, driving a cab and as charming as ever.

T H E VO T E Donmar Warehouse, from 24 April Having tackled 1974’s political ructions in This House, James Graham has set his latest on election night 2015 – which is also the day its run ends.

GAME OF T H RON E S Sky Atlantic, from 13 April Sex! Violence! Betrayal!

Dragons! The fifth season.

R AV I L I O U S Dulwich ­Picture Gallery, from 1 April Remarkably, this is the first major retrospective of Eric Ravilious’s watercolours. It includes many of the bestloved, among them ‘Westbury Horse’ (above) and ‘Train Landscape’.

N E W YOR K ­P H I L H A R M O N I C Barbican, from 15 April This residency has a family emphasis: two concerts with puppets, animation and Petrushka (‘All adults must be accompanied by a child’).

But there’s also a Ravel-andStrauss programme with Joyce DiDonato.

T H E M ERC H A N T OF VENICE Royal Shakespeare Theatre, from 14 May Polly Findlay, rather radically, has chosen to set her Merchant of Venice in Venice. Patsy Ferran is Portia, Makram J. Khoury Shylock.

AMERICAN B U F FA L O Wyndham’s Theatre, from 16 April Having divorced one queen and beheaded another in Wolf Hall, Damian Lewis plots to rob a coin collector, with John Goodman, in this Mamet classic. Lots of swearing.

W I L KO JOH NSON Shepherd’s Bush Empire, 26 April The ex-Dr Feelgood ­guitarist — and Spectator poet — was expecting to die of pancreatic cancer last year. He’s had an all-clear; this date concludes one hell of a comeback tour.

HOW T H E L IGH T GETS IN Various venues, 21–31 May Hay-on-Wye’s other festival, of philosophy and music. Those thinking include Roger Penrose, Terry Eagleton and Nancy Cartwright; those singing, Cara Dillon, the Noisettes and Luke Sital-Singh.

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JUN

LEE MILLER AND PICASSO Scottish National Portrait Gallery, from 23 May He painted her six times; in return, she took more than 1,000 photographs of him. This exhibition charts their friendship.

WILL IRELAND, TEAM ROCKLEE MILLER, HOTEL VASTE HORIZON, MOUGINS,1937; CHRISTOPHER POLK/WIREIMAGE; GETTY

MAY

ART15 Olympia, 21-23 May This vast ‘global art fair’, now in its third year, boasts work from more countries than any other; looking beyond Europe is a particular point of pride.

TONY BENNETT A N D L A DY GAGA Royal Albert Hall, 8–9 June Not quite as odd a pairing as it seems. They did a swing album together: didn’t you notice?

A L DEBU RGH F E S T I VA L Various venues, 12–28 June It’s well worth an excursion to Suffolk for this annual celebration of classical music in Britten’s hometown — this year’s festival features music by Beethoven, Wagner and Mahler.

BAR BAR A H EPWORT H Tate Britain, 24 June You’re not just saving trips to St Ives and Wakefield; this exhibition focuses on how Hepworth built her international reputation, progressing from small carvings to monumental bronzes.

BST Hyde Park, June 26-27 Headliners include Blur, Kylie and the Who; the final Saturday, with Taylor Swift, is already sold out.

DA N I E L BAR EN BOIM RFH, from 27 May The ambitious Barenboim Project continues with a cycle of Schubert piano sonatas.

F L E E T WO OD M AC 02 Arena, from 27 May The reformed soft rockers keep their fans and accountants happy with a long run at a ginormous venue.

DY L A N MOR A N Hammersmith Apollo, 29–30 May As you might expect if you remember Black Books, the keynotes of this bravura stand-up act are mischief, misanthropy and red wine.

THE LOOK OF SILENCE Various venues, from 12 June Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing was a brilliant and disconcerting look at the men who perpetrated massacres in Indonesia. This time he’s talking to victims.

THE RED LION National Theatre, from 3 June Patrick Marber turned poker into drama with Dealer’s Choice. Here he attempts to do the same for football.

WIMBLEDON All England Club, from 29 June Can Andy Murray become the first British man to win Wimbledon since Andy Murray? Not if he has another Australian Openstyle meltdown.

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Snobbery with violence

Putting the Etonian back into James Bond Damian Thompson 17

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CULTURE The ginger-haired man in the three-piece suit had been standing at the bar all night, ordering gin and tonics in a proprietorial voice that conveyed unvarnished delight in belonging to a gentleman’s club.

To each his own, thought Bond. He was fond of Blades, the rakish and exclusive establishment off St James’s to which M belonged. But this club was not in that league. Despite its grandiose premises in Pall Mall, the place reeked of suburban self-importance. The word ‘pardon’ hung in the air, even if most members had long since removed it from their vocabulary.

It was, as his old friend Alan Clark would have said, a club that bought its own furniture.

Bond glanced at his Rolex Submariner. He had been stood up by his contact. And, since he was only a guest, he was obliged to leave.

T h at wa s a rel ief .

He would slip out before the ginger bore noticed.

‘You seem lost,

dear fellow.’ Too late. The man had leapt from the bar stool and was pressing a clammy, ladylike hand into his. ‘But you look familiar. We were at school together, surely?’ The word ‘school’ was said with a slight emphasis: no need to name it, eh?

Bond didn’t bother searching his memory.

He could use his eyes and ears. The Windsor knot.

The chain store suit with its telltale ‘collar gap’.

The plasticky shine of his brogues. The meticulously practised ‘posh’ vowels. This was not even a good fake.

‘School? I think your memory must be playing you tricks,’ said Bond, and headed gratefully for the door.

J

ames Bond, like the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Mayor of London, is an Old Etonian. The Bond of the books, that is.

Not the Bond of the f i l m s . But t h at m ay b e ab out t o c h a n g e .

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Very few readers will have picked up that little upper-class in-joke, but they will certainly have noticed 007’s constant ridicule of middle-class people pretending to be posh. On the same journey Bond meets Captain Norman Nash of the Royal Automobile Club. That’s three black marks: sporting the lowly title of Captain in civilian life, being called Norman and belonging to the unsmart RAC. Worse, his regimental tie (Royal Artillery — not for gents) is twisted into a Windsor knot.

In the dining car, he holds his knife ‘like a fountain pen’. ‘Minor public school’, decides Bond. Later Nash is unmasked as a foreign Soviet spy, which one can’t help thinking redeems him in 007’s eyes.

Also, Bond quite often goes in for the sort of low-key intellectual showing off that some OEs deploy — subtle references to the clever side of his schooling.

At the end of Dr. No, he’s in Jamaica, his

Screen Bonds ‘all tried to hard’, says Nicky Haslam.

Could a genuine Old Etonian Bond supply that effortless poise?

arch-enemy is dead and his knockout girlfriend, Honey Rider, is about to leap into their double sleeping bag. And yet, despite being in tropical paradise, Bond longs for ‘the douce weather of England: the soft airs, the “heat” waves, the cold spells — “the only country where you can take a walk every day of the year”. Chesterfield’s letters?’

Bond is referring to Lord Chesterfield’s 18th-century Letters to his Son, which are only quite well known; i.e., it’s a classic putdown of anyone who hasn’t read them.

And the question mark implies: ‘I can’t be bothered to look it up but I’m bound to be right.’

Bond’s (and Fleming’s) contempt for ‘Captain Nash’ and everything he represents can still be encountered today: it lies at the heart of David Cameron’s strained relations with the blazer-wearing Tory faithful. As I say, most OEs aren’t like that, but it’s a chilling thing to experience.

Remember that James Bond is supposed

to be cold-hearted. Given that technology has deprived us of any sense of wonder at Q’s gadgets, is it time to shock the series back to life with an authentic dose of snobbery with violence?

But a properly snobbish 007 would require an actor who recognises the tiny nuances of upper-class manners. So far, none of the screen Bonds has come close.

‘They all tried too hard,’ says the OE designer Nicky Haslam. ‘They lacked the flippancy which goes with having been at school.’ Both Etonian charm and snobbery have a taken-for-granted quality that’s far removed from the studied nonchalance of your typical screen Bond. Roger Moore may have been suave, but to an Etonian acting suave is common, especially if you have to resort to raising an eyebrow.

Could a genuine Old Etonian Bond provide that effortless poise? Damian Lewis seems to think he could. Having previously kept quiet about ‘school’, he’s recently taken to boasting that Eton was the ideal preparation for playing Henry VIII in Wolf Hall. ‘There is no question that it helps having had the kind of schooling I’ve had to play a king. It’s not such a leap, oddly,’ he told Desert Island Discs.

One can imagine OEs all over the world wincing at those remarks and Ian Fleming turning in his grave. That is not how James Bond would have talked about school.

My colleague Mark Mason, author of The Bluffer’s Guide to Bond, is suspicious of the way Lewis ‘butters up journalists with his disarming style — and now Eddie Redmayne is up to the same trick.

Also, you can’t play Bond if you’ve won an Oscar, and certainly not if your acceptance speech was a tedious string of overly emoted giggles.’ To put it another way, very few things can erase the stamp of Eton, but turning into a luvvie is one of them.

Which leaves us with Dominic West, who specialises in playing roles as far removed from his background as possible — a Baltimore detective and a West Country serial killer — but who, in private life, moves quietly in the same circles as his fellow Old Etonians. He is affable but keeps his distance from fans and social climbers. For my money, he’s the only actor who could play James Bond as his creator envisaged him – licensed to kill, famously, but also to cut people dead at parties.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY EDWARD TUCKWELL

Spectre, to be released in October, is Daniel’s Craig’s fourth and almost certainly penultimate outing as 007. There’s already speculation about his successor. The names of Damian Lewis, Dominic West and the Oscar-winning Eddie Redmayne have been mentioned. Three more different Bonds it would be hard to imagine — but they have one thing in common: they are all themselves Old Etonians.

Ian Fleming, himself an OE, tells us that Bond was at Eton for only a year before he was expelled for ‘trouble with a housemaid’ and transferred to Fettes.

As William Boyd points out overleaf, Bond’s Scottish schooling is not mentioned until the last completed novel, You Only Live Twice, published in 1964, by which time Fleming wanted to capitalise on the success of Sean Connery in the role. But I can’t agree with Boyd that ‘deep down he really didn’t want James Bond to be an Old Etonian’.

Whether ordering a Martini or skiing off a cliff, Bond never loses the insouciant self-confidence of ‘school’, as OEs refer to their alma mater. It’s almost impossible to fake. (My own attempts to do so, as a grammar school boy from Reading during the Sloane Ranger craze, were comically inept.) He knows how to deploy good manners as a weapon. And he is a snob — a ‘tremendous snob’, in fact, to quote Sean Connery’s description of Ian Fleming, who was initially horrified that his hero was being played by a former Edinburgh milkman.

This isn’t to say that most Etonians are snobs, but those who are tend to be very good at it. One thinks of Anthony Powell, whose merciless anatomy of English society in A Dance to the Music of Time is rooted in his obsession with genealogy — Etonian Shinto at its most intense. Another OE ancestor-worshipper was James Lees-Milne, whose diaries burst with delight at his friendship with David Somerset, now Duke of Beaufort, and his ‘heavenly’ wife Lady Caroline, daughter of the Marquess of Bath.

Fleming knew the couple, too, and it’s no accident that, when escaping by train from Moscow in From Russia , With Love (1957), James Bond and his lover Tatiana use the cover names ‘David and Caroline Somerset’.

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CULTURE

F ROM FETTES WITH L OV E

for boys applying to Sandhurst. Newport Pagnell became his home for the remaining months of his secondary education.

So what did Fleming make of Eton? It wasn’t a happy time, one feels, but he did make some lasting friends. In any event, one’s life at a single-sex public school achieves its mythic personal significance in hindsight, most often. Many a miserable, persecuted boy has donned the rose-tinted spectacles of nostalgia and reinvented his schooldays from the fond perspective of secure adulthood.

Paul Gallico, the American novelist, who was a friend of Ian Fleming, wrote in an introduction to a James Bond omnibus that Fleming had an ‘implacable distaste for Eton which has lasted to this day’. Fleming corrected the manuscript, deleting ‘implacable distaste’ and substituting ‘mysterious affection’. I suspect that is close to the truth but there is some other evidence to suggest that the memories were more tarnished when one considers what Fleming provided for James Bond by way of education.

Like Fleming, Bond was sent to Eton, but only managed two terms, ‘a brief and undistinguished’ career, before being expelled, according to Bond’s obituary in You Only Live Twice, because of a dalliance with one of the school’s maids. A precocious 13-yearold, indeed. Bond then went on to Fettes College in Edinburgh, his father’s old school, where he spent the next four years or so before lying about his age and joining the Special Branch of the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1941.

It’s an intriguing choice. Why Fettes? Why Scotland? Fettes is one of Scotland’s grander public schools (alumni include Michael Tippett, Tilda Swinton, Tony Blair and a lot of Scottish rugby players). The consensus is that this late delineation of Bond’s life in You Only Live Twice — published in 1964 and the last completed Bond novel that Fleming wrote before he died — was influenced by the casting of Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr No (1962). Fleming’s Bond was now flesh and blood and indisputably Scottish. The triumphant success of Connery as Bond, it can plausibly be argued, must have begun to shape the backstory that Fleming now envisaged for his world-famous protagonist.

My feeling was that the Connery influence was more profound and was the catalyst for a new emphasis on Scotland and the Scots in Fleming’s final novels that is hard to ignore. The Flemings were, of course, of Scottish descent but had been thoroughly anglicised.

I detect in the choice of Fettes over Eton, in the nationality of Bond himself (half Scottish, half Swiss) a growing and distinct distancing from England and the values of English high society in ­F leming.

This was his world but you can see in the timeline and biography he was constructing for Bond in the late novels a return to his ­Scottish Fleming roots. It’s particularly obvious in The Man with the Golden Gun — Fleming’s final, uncompleted Bond novel.

In the novel Bond says he regards himself as ‘a Scottish peasant and will always feel at home being a Scottish peasant’. On one page alone Bond refers to himself three times as a Scot. I think it was the Connery effect that brought this about but it may also be an oblique comment on Fleming’s time at school.

Deep down he really didn’t want James Bond to be an Old E­tonian.

Ian Fleming’s school days, and how they influenced Bond’s William Boyd

I

an Fleming went to Eton in the autumn of 1921 and left, aged 17, in 1926 for a crammer in Newport Pagnell to be prepared for Sandhurst and a career in the army.

At Eton he was in the same house, the Timbralls, as his older brother, Peter. There was a new house master, E.V. ‘Sam’ Slater, described by one old boy as an ‘abrupt, red-faced bachelor with a loud voice and a liking for port’. Sam Slater had no liking for Ian Fleming, and Fleming’s few years at Eton under Slater’s tutelage did not bring out the best in him.

This unsatisfactory situation was no doubt complicated by the fact that Peter Fleming (just a year older) was turning out to be a storybook Etonian hero. A serious boy, an outstanding scholar, liked by everyone, Peter Fleming’s refulgence was bound to obscure the complex, moody character that his younger brother was already becoming. You either liked or you didn’t like Fleming minor, it seemed, and he didn’t encourage popularity, pointedly choosing to spend time each day alone, enjoying his own company — an eccentricity that, in the fervid proximity of an all-male boarding school, almost seems designed to be provocative.

Fleming did excel at one thing, however: athletics. He became the outstanding athlete — victor ludorum — of the school two years running, in 1925 and 1926. But little kudos was attached to athletics at Eton. Ian excelled — but in the wrong sport.

Because of Peter Fleming’s acclaim and influence Ian was put up for ‘Pop’, Eton’s elite boys’ society with its own arcane privileges. Even with the demigod Peter as his sponsor it took five goes to get Ian elected — he was black-balled on the first four proposals.

But it was Ian’s widowed mother, Eve, who really influenced the course of his education. Ian was the second of her four sons. Peter was destined for Oxford, ready to storm the heights of the intelligentsia; Ian, she decided, would become a soldier (like his father, Valentine, who had died in the war) so she had Ian enrolled in the Army Class at Eton, where boys were prepared for the military colleges at Sandhurst or Woolwich. This was a real fall in the Eton caste system — Army Class boys were dullards and simpletons.

Ian joined their number, but not for long. His mother removed him from the school at the age of 17 and sent him to a special crammer

William Boyd is the author of the James Bond novel Solo (2013).

His new novel, Sweet Caress, will be published in September 20

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Screen princess

CULTURE

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The Canadian actress Sarah Gadon sparkles as a young Princess Elizabeth escaping the palace on VE night. Now there’s just one huge question: will the Queen like it?

Olivia Cole

during the Venice film festival. As is the nature of these things, we rattle at top speed through her life, her filmography and whatever else comes to mind. Gadon carries maple syrup with her wherever she travels — ‘We put it in everything, we put it in our salad dressings, we glaze our chicken with it, we have it porridge in the morning, in yoghurt…’ I take Jarrold’s point. She is very Canadian indeed. However, in his film she perfects a peculiarly prickly British royal unworldliness which sits uneasily (and interestingly) with the sweetness she brings to her character.

Her father is a psychologist and she shares his fascination with what makes people tick. ‘I never consciously felt that it would have any sort of influence in terms of me becoming an actor — but now, as an adult and looking at it, I realise that it really has a lot to do with it.’ The combination of spectacular looks and this psychological subtlety makes it easy to see her joining the ranks of Canada’s star exports to Los Angeles: think Cronenberg, Jason Reitman, Christopher Plummer, the Ryans — Gosling and Reynolds — Jim Carrey, Joshua Jackson, Rachel McAdam. This list goes on. Next up is The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, the psychological thriller that Anthony Minghella was developing when he died, in which Sarah will star with Jamie Dornan.

I wondered if she worries about the inspiration for her character seeing the film: after all, Helen Mirren was invited to Buckingham Palace after winning her Oscar for The Queen. ‘I hope she sees it but it’s not an accurate retelling of history so I think… I hope she has fun watching it,’ she says diplomatically.

Being a fledgling film star is an odd thing. As a brand ambassador for Jaeger LeCoultre, sponsors of the Venice film festival, Gadon is ferried around the Lido dripping in diamonds and Armani Privé; on the other her mum and a friend have come along to look at art, and when I ask where her retro interview outfit came from, she tells me Topshop.

‘We’re a city that goes to the movies,’ she says of her home city. ‘New York and London are known for their theatre, Paris it’s opera, San Francisco is ballet but Toronto has always had the festival. I grew up going to the Toronto film festival and watching films there. Toronto influenced me as an artist but it is also my home, it’s where my family lives, it’s where my childhood friends are. I come home and I’m submerged in familiarity and familiar experiences. In order to be an actor you have to live a life.’

David Cronenberg will be relieved. His home-grown find may be the new face of Armani, but there’s nothing princessy about her. She’ll be carrying around her own maple syrup for a good while yet.

Sarah Gadon has been in no fewer than three David Cronenberg films. She was cast in A Dangerous Method, his account of the friendship between Freud and Jung, while she was still a student at the University of Toronto, and brought real pathos to the role of Carl Jung’s long-suffering wife, trying to remain dignified as he put into practice his theories of human sexuality with his mistress. Cast opposite Michael Fassbender and more recently Julianne Moore in Maps to the Stars, Gadon is capable of not only holding her own, but virtually pulling focus from two of the most scene-stealing actors around. So it’s hardly surprising that she’s now taking centre stage herself.

In A Royal Night Out she stars as Princess Elizabeth, the 19-year-old future Queen. The film is a fantasy spun from the fact that on VE Day, and for a few summer nights afterwards, ‘Lilibet’ and Margaret were allowed out of the palace to mingle with the crowds. Did their adventures go a stage further? Did they perhaps have a real night have a night on the tiles as ‘ordinary’ girls? It’s the kind of historical rumour that stays around because it’s so appealing — the idea of the teenage princesses running amok, hoping for a glimpse of Gregory Peck in the Curzon Club and looking for boys to dance with in the Chelsea Barracks.

In 1945, even the chandeliers in a very grey Buckingham Palace were literally wrapped in cotton wool, to protect them from bomb blasts. It’s hard not to sympathise with the girls’ desire to escape what Princess Margaret terms a ‘ghastly mausoleum’. Right on cue, they are barely past the footmen before Margaret (a memorably batshit turn by Bel Powley) is in danger of being slipped a Mickey Finn in Soho and Elizabeth has lost a heel after falling off the back of a bus in a attempt to capture her sister who has run — inevitably — ‘orf’.

‘The thing about our film is that it is very tongue in cheek, full of humour, full of embellishment. It’s a very heightened fantastical look back at history. I’m a huge fan of Roman Holiday and tonally the film had a lot of that to it,’ Gadon tells me. As the film’s producer Douglas Rae points out, Gadon herself has more than a touch of Audrey Hepburn about her. While she makes a wholly convincing Windsor, she has more of an emotional connection to the anonymous faces in the crowd than to the princesses. Her late British grandmother was in the WAAF and her grandparents were in Trafalgar Square dancing on that very night.

As is often the way with modern casting, Gadon’s first interactions with the film’s director Julian Jarrold (Becoming Jane, Brideshead Revisited) were a recorded video and conversations over Skype. Their first face-to-face meeting was in Soho, long after she had been cast. ‘I said “Hi, how are you, I’m so excited about this,”’ she recalls. ‘And he looked really terrified and said, “You’re so Canadian!”’

Our own interview takes place in the garden of the Cipriani

A Royal Night Out is released on 15 May 23

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woman CULTURE

TO WRITE A BESTSELLER I HAD TO BECOME A

The author of The Ice Twins explains how he joined the literary sisterhood and left his penniless blokey days behind Sean Thomas aka S.K. Tremayne

It’s remarkable the efforts some authors will make in order to achieve literary fame. Take the American writer James Frey. A few years ago he decided that his hitherto rejected novel, A Million Little Pieces, was suddenly a ‘memoir’ — and, piquantly, rather a good one. As a result he fou nd a publ isher, and a publ ic, and sold millions of copies. It was just a shame that he had to sobbingly confess, a few months later on Oprah, that he’d fabricated entire chunks of his ‘autobiography’.

By contrast, James Joyce trod the long road : spending nearly a decade writing Ulysses, and once taking a whole working day to write a single sentence, which described a man helplessly lusting after perfumed ladies. For the record, that sentence was ‘With hungered flesh obscurely, he mutely craved to adore.’

In the face of such stern competition, and in an ever more competitive market,

I took an even more drastic route to literary success. I changed sex.

It’s not the first time I’ve made an identity switch in the service of literature, and of personal greed. For much of my life I was myself, Sean Thomas, a jobbing Fleet Street journalist, writing about art, travel, politics; I also had a few published but commercially unsuccessful literary novels to my name. And I mean unsuccessful: my first novel, Absent Fathers, sold so badly I once got a royalty cheque for nought pounds, nought nought pence.

I think the publisher’s computer could not understand the idea of an author selling zero copies, so the cheque was mailed out anyway.

To be fair to myself, I did go on to slightly better things, even as Sean Thomas. My later literary novels were ‘well received’, and in my mid-thirties I wrote a very candid memoir of my love life, Millions of Women Are Waiting to Meet You, which sold nicely, got some lovely reviews and was translated into half a dozen languages, German to Russian, meaning there are people in St Petersburg who know all about the Incident with the Cleaning Lady.

Despite this modest but growing success, by the time I was 44 or so I was pretty broke. My friends owned cars and houses, I owned a chair. Just one chair. When

friends came round to my flat for tea, I had to sit on the bed.

At this point my brilliant agent Eugenie Furniss (who famously won a record-breaking £1.2 million advance for Piers Morgan’s diaries) told me it was time to get real and write a thriller, because, as she pithily put it, ‘people like stories’. Taking the hint I sat down and wrote a Da Vinci Code type thriller, The Genesis Secret, centred on the 12,000-year-old temple of Göbekli Tepe in Kurdish Turkey. Even in its first draft, this accrued my first six-figure advance from a publisher. I confess we’re talking very very low six figures. But hey, six figures!

Prior to publication there was, however, one problem. What to call myself? My own name had several complicating issues: it was associated with freelance journalism about art, sex and politics, it was also associated with The Cleaning Lady Episode, so readers might be alarmed by the leap in genre. More importantly, my own name had – to be honest – the taint of literary failure when it came to novels. And finally, my real name just wasn’t butch enough: the type of thriller that I was writing demanded a more virile, thrusting pseudonym.

Thus it was that after several editorial/authorial meetings, we came up with my new thriller-writing persona, Tom Knox. The process was disconcertingly

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technical. Did you know, for instance, that it is commercially better as a writer to have a surname beginning with a letter from the middle of the alphabet, e.g. K? That means your book will be centrally placed in the bookshop shelves, one of the first books browsers see as they glide past the neglected top left shelves (A-D) and fail to reach the bottom right units, where wretched Ws, Xs, Ys and Zs gather dust. That poor William Wordsworth, he never stood a chance.

So there I was, Tom Knox, international thriller writer. For six or seven years my thrillers sold well around the world, enough to buy me a flat on the turbulent borderlands of Primrose Hill.

And then, suddenly, the selling stopped.

The bottom dropped out of the Da Vinci Code-y market. Why? Not because of any intrinsic flaw in the genre. You may not agree with me (few do) but I believe that Dan Brown’s book, The Da Vinci Code, is a masterpiece of plotting, even if the prose is pedestrian and the characterisation trite. And plotting is no trivial thing: it is the melody of literature. Plotting — like discovering a great tune — is hard and rare, that’s why thriller writers, who have to plot, make lots of money when they get it right. Not many people can construct a plot, though plenty think they can.

So why did the Da Vinci Code ­fashion die? Probably for the same reason all fashions die. People of a certain age, who remember the 1970s, will recall how trousers got more and more flared until they were virtually mainsails: absurd and dangerous. My genre followed the pattern: by the end, Templar knights were hunting grails made of anti-matter guarded by Jesuits in rusting submarines. We’d all gone as far as we could.

Moreover, fashions constantly shift.

For a long time ‘misery lit’ — tales of childhood abuse, of impoverished families living in metal buckets — were quite the thing; then, when the genre peaked, suddenly everyone wanted those books with the pastel covers, swirly titles and stories of sweet romantic misfortune: chicklit. For a brief moment, novels about ben-wa balls and bondage were at a premium, after Fifty Shades of Grey.

Thus, for commercial reasons, Tom Knox had to die. Yet I had already been planning his demise, not least because I’d

tasted the change in the wind. Now I wanted to write taut, more literary thrillers — chillers with domestic contexts. But this would again be a massive leap in genre: a Tom Knox fan expecting to see Buddhism decoded as a mind-altering drug would be surprised to find me writing about eerie marital discord in a kitchen, or a lonely child on a beach. So I needed, again, a new ID. A new name.

And that name had to be a woman’s.

Or at least the name of someone not neces-

My agent is a woman, her co-agent is a woman, my editor is a woman, her assistants are women, my publicist is a woman… sarily a man. Why? Partly because I wanted to write this book — about a family who lose an identical twin child, and then fear, a year later, that they misidentified the surviving twin — from the perspective of the grieving mother. The shift seemed aesthetically right, and it was a salutary artistic challenge to me, as a writer, to speak in a female voice.

But I also wanted to be a ‘non-man’ simply because it helps these days not to be a man, if you write fiction.

This may sound surprising; it is however the case. Modern publishing (in stark contrast with journalism, or British TV, or Hollywood) is dominated by women. Take my own situation: my agent is a woman, her co-agent is a woman, my editor at Harper­ Collins is a woman, her assistants are women. My publicist is a woman. Over in New York my editor is a woman, her assistant is a woman, the American publicists are women. And so it goes on: most professional fiction purchasers for supermarkets (hugely important) are women.

Most fiction bloggers (unpaid reviewers, increasingly important) are women.

Moreover, most fiction readers are women. It’s long been a publishing truism that men only read military history after the age of 50, but increasingly men aren’t doing any book-reading at all. Some experts estimate 70 to 80 per cent of novel buyers are female in the UK and USA.

For a time the one genre to hold out against this sweeping, secular trend to women readers was, ironically, the thriller itself. Until a few years ago thrillers were the final redoubt of commercial male novelists, the one remaining place mainstream male authors did significantly better, and enjoyed large male readerships.

But in the last decade this Spion Kop of literary testosterone has been overrun: it is more often women, today, who will buy classic, pacy, tension-fuelled narratives, or gruesome and slashery chillers. From Gillian Flynn to Sophie Hannah, from Liane Moriarty to Paula Hawkins, female thriller writers are taking over, and reaching – it seems – a mainly female readership.

One day psychologists might tell us why.

Whatever the reason, this evolution is no fault of women. If men have decided they can’t be bothered with books and want to play computer games, so be it. Men can’t complain if the publishing industry is usurped by the gender that still cares about novels. And I am lucky to be surrounded by hugely talented women, from my editors to my agents: they are there because they are passionate and clever and committed.

Nonetheless, it does present the ‘debut’ male author with a dilemma: do you come out as a man, or do you maximise your appeal all round and be a little more, ahem, gender neutral? I confess I went for the latter option, just like S.J. Watson, the man who wrote the fiendishly inventive thriller Before I Go to Sleep, but changed his male name to something sexually unspecific for the same commercial reasons as me.

The result? As I write this my book The Ice Twins is number six on the charts.

I have my very first Sunday Times best­ seller. And some of my readers are presuming I am a woman, they’ve written reviews calling me ‘her’. I find that oddly pleasing.

Would I have had this success if I had written a book overtly admitting my real, masculine identity? I simply don’t know.

But if the shades of Emily Brontë and George Eliot are watching us from the literary Empyrean, they might be smiling with polite irony. They had to pretend to be men to get published and read. The world is turned upside down.

The Ice Twins (HarperCollins) by S.K. Tremayne aka Sean Thomas is out now

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CULTURE

Old hippies and the new economy

less generous than the one I grew up in. Their nightmare is failing to establish a career, whereas I, at their age, felt free to take a job that offered the sterling salary of $20 a week. But it allowed me to explore a new form of writing: rock criticism.

This was in 1966, when it was possible to hang out with rock stars without the intervention of press agents, and when a concert didn’t mean a perfectly digitised replica of an album. As a rock critic I interviewed the greatest musicians of the time. The awe I felt in their presence was not just a fan’s response. I regarded their songs as a kind of religious text, a design for living. ‘Don’t follow leaders, watch the parking meters,’ Bob Dylan squawked in ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’, and we all knew what he meant. The slap at authority that ends this song — ‘You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows’ — was so influential that it led a militant group to call itself the Weather Underground.

Can anyone imagine the equivalent today?

Hip-hop is the closest contemporary music gets to the prophetic feeling of Sixties rock, but a gang sign is very different from a peace sign. The hard truth about the Sixties is that only what was marketable endured. I wonder whether feminism would have taken hold if it hadn’t been useful economically. After all, women still earn less than men in many professions. Hence, this central form of human liberation is also the matrix of a cheap labour force.

As for gay marriage, I’m not sure it would exist if it hadn’t created a clientele for same-sex honeymoon cruises. Granting legal equality to women and LGBT people is important but cheap. It doesn’t

Richard Goldstein I’m what you call a Sixties person. I still believe in sex and drugs and rock ’n’ roll, and radical democracy. You may or may not share these ideas, but you have certainly been influenced by the culture that germinated when I was young. Many people have declared the spirit of the Sixties dead, yet we still live in its wake.

This was a decade when foolish notions led to wise ideas: multiculturalism; feminism and its love child, gay liberation; racial awareness and sexual freedom. I could add lava lights and veggie burgers to the list, along with the new left and the new right, both of which emerged in the Sixties and still shape liberal and conservative thought. And then there are the hippies, long consigned to the dustbin of bad hair history. Their legacy lives in every man who wears bracelets and every woman who doesn’t wear a girdle (except for erotic games).

As for the psychedelic revolution, the current culture of mood alteration by pharmaceuticals is its descendant, with one crucial distinction: the drugs we favoured in the Sixties were intended to disrupt functioning. The drugs we crave today enhance it.

As a teacher at the City University of New York, I’m intensely aware of what it’s like for my students to deal with an economy far 26

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Another Little Piece of My Heart by Richard Goldstein is published by Bloomsbury, £18.99

ILLUSTRATION BY STEVEN WILSON WWW.BREEDLONDON.COM

and rage. Of course, no performer today dares to be as emotionally unguarded as Joplin, or as overtly literary as Dylan was in his prime. The revolutionary fervour that marked classic rock is absent as well. What remains is an implicit dissatisfaction with the world as it is, and a longing for something that once existed but now is missing. I think that missing link is the sense of unbridled freedom that shaped my youth.

The need to rediscover confidence in possibility is what inspired the Occupy movement of 2011, as much as any ideological agenda. These demonstrations allowed thousands of young people to experience the thrill of protest at a time when that was supposed to be passé. They didn’t smash the order — neither did we — but they did come to understand that a Facebook page is not a life.

The essence of being young is the power to create real change, and when that is stymied, so is youth itself. This is why the Sixties remain so magical. They represent a yearning for what has been repressed. But the real world is so harsh, so hostile to the spirit of ‘all you need is love’, that at some juncture of crisis and idealism the Sixties can happen again. The tendencies that created that era are imbedded in the culture of the West. The artefacts of classic rock, the YouTube clips of kids running wild in the streets, are evidence that an alternative to the present is possible. So I’d say that the Sixties are both dead and yet to be born. Wait and see.

require social programmes that redistribute wealth, as racial redress does. That may be one reason why feminism and gay rights have advanced further than the black struggle.

I see the difference between what we fought for in the Sixties and what we achieved. I passed my youth in jeans and handmade tie-dyed T-shirts. No one would have been caught dead in a corporate-logo cap. No one spent a chunk of his assets on sunglasses.

No one wore semi-precious sneakers. It costs a lot to look hip today The scramble for status has supplanted generational solidarity.

My major emotion as a Sixties person is survivor guilt. I witnessed violence and mayhem as a young man, but at least I felt entitled to act. I never had qualms about the risks I had to take in order to grow. My students do. For them, there’s only one way to think of risk: it’s risky. This is not to say that the ideals of my youth are gone. Many young people practise social activism. The environmental movement has been inherited and expanded by the young.

Street art is an autonomous zone, albeit one that skirts respectability. And then there is music — as compelling as ever, but too firmly lodged in the grip of marketing to inspire true belief.

I cringe when I hear a Beatles song jinglised in an ad. I groan when I think about what it’s like to attend a rock festival today: the forest of targeted sponsorships, the outrageous price of a ticket to see what, for me, was practically free. Yet, there are hidden links to the Sixties in music now. Though their spirit is very different, I see connections between Adele and Janis Joplin, Eminem and Dylan, Sam Smith and Sam Cooke in their frustration 27

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When Debbie Harry, the lead singer of Blondie, moved to New York from smalltown New Jersey in the late 1960s, you could live in the city for next to nothing.

These days, Harry says, Blondie could never have got off the ground. There’s just no way a broke musician could afford to survive in Manhattan, let alone support a decent heroin habit.

One by one the old boho-cheapo quarters of town have become a mixture of hyper-expensive residential and retail. Blondie’s haunts — from the Bowery to Hell’s Kitchen — are now an achingly cool combination of high-end apartments and shops. Little Italy has lost most of its Italians. The Chelsea Hotel — where Dylan Thomas spent his last night and Sid Vicious killed Nancy Spungen — is now smart apartments. The Meatpacking District in the West Village still has a few meat trucks rumbling around, but it’s only a matter of time. There’s a Helmut Lang outlet opposite the Louis Zucker and Co Pork and Beef Products warehouse — I know which one’s going to survive.

BIG AP P L E LO ST ITS BITE Modern Manhattan is no place for a rock ’n’ roller Harry Mount

JILL FREEDMAN/GETTY

HOW T HE

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LIFE And now it’s the turn of Times Square. A combination of Leicester Square, Piccadilly Circus and Oxford Street, Times Square has long been a vision of commercialised hell — illuminated 24/7 with 50ft high H&M ads, populated by desperate chancers dressed up as Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse, shaking tourists down for a few bucks.

What chutzpah to reopen the ­K nickerbocker Hotel at the tou r ist crossroads of New York, where Times Square collides with Broadway and 42nd Street. The Knickerbocker was built in 1906

by John Jacob Astor to cater to the beau monde of Gilded Age New York. Enrico Caruso lived in a suite there for years. The hotel barman was said to have invented a mindblowing cocktail in the Knicker­b ocker one night. An Italian barman — went by the name of Martini.

A stor went dow n on t he T i t a n i c a nd t he Knicker­b ocker’s fortunes dived with the trashification of Times Square. The hotel closed in 1921, to become a series of dowdy offices for the next 94 years.

Today, the Knickerbocker retains its ­c harming, classical Edwardian facade. Inside, it has been given all the marks of the supersleek, m ­ inimalist modern hotel: a pale stone lobby; bedroom decor of smoked glass and 50 restrained shades of grey; extremely attentive staff who could moonlight as supermodels.

Gone is the two-martini lunch, the cocktail on the evening train.

Funny how as soon as the bankers stopped drinking and started working harder, the global financial system collapsed

The look is 21st-century Mad Men, and it couldn’t be further from the sound and fury just beyond the windows — which are double-glazed and fitted with blackout blinds to keep the tourist tat at bay. In the dining room the blinds are lifted, giving views onto random sections of those vast, illuminated ads. The effect — like some surrealist installation — is not

for everyone. I’m as fogeyish as they come, but I rather liked it — particularly when they played Blondie’s ‘In the Flesh’ in the restaurant: a blast of old, poor New York.

Where the tourists scarf McDonald’s on the street, the account executives in the ­K nickerbocker’s restaurant sip martinis and peck at oysters and linecaught halibut from New England. Outside, on the roof terrace, the funereally dressed fashionistas perch, Batman-like, on the edge of the parapet — protected by J.J. Astor’s twirling copper balustrade — and gaze west down 42nd Street to the sun setting over Gotham City.

Twenty-five years ago, when I first came to New York, Ti mes Squ a re wa s a f r ig hten i ng plac e to be. On my first night in the city, I saw someone being ­b eaten to a pulp by two men: one with a baseball bat, the other with an old tennis racket in a wooden press.

No more. T he c r i me c ol lapse is a moder n ­m iracle, with murders down from 2,245 in 1990 to 328 last year — the lowest since reliable records began in 1963. While I was there this February, the city went through its longest murder-free period — 12 days — in 20 years. That might have had something to do with it being the coldest spell in New

Above: Times Square, no longer such a scary place Previous page: the campaign for the wicked old Times Square, 1984

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Right: the Knickerbocker Hotel

Well, it turns out, quite a few old bohemians want precisely that. I once met a multimillionaire designer who talked wistfully of those days. On his first morning in his SoHo brownstone in the 1970s, he woke to find a drug dealer beating to death another drug dealer with a dustbin lid. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!

Nostalgie de la boue has its pitfalls.

But my nostalgic millionaire friend had a point.

New York is a lot safer, but a lot more boring. Manhattan hasn’t just gentrified. It has also got a lot more hard-working — in all classes. Gone are the leisured elite of Gilded Age New York. The grand Dutch New Yorkers of Edith Wharton and Henry James may have done a bit of mild stockbroking — but they devoted themselves to art and literature, too. The Edwardian manufacturing tycoons, like Henry Clay Frick of the Frick Collection, turned their coal and steel fortunes into Holbeins and Goyas.

Their gazillionaire equivalents today — the hedgefunders and the bankers — are working too hard to become aesthetes. Gone is the two-martini lunch; gone the cocktail on the evening train to Connecticut. Funny how the moment bankers stopped drinking and started working harder, the global financial system collapsed.

The Manhattan middle classes are also working much too hard to have fun. Rent is so high that they have no other choice. University graduates are living like the Corleones when they came to the Lower East Side from Sicily a century ago. They bunk three to a room to meet the rent on a tiny apartment in Battery Park City.

As for the poor of New York, they never stop.

That exceptional service culture — the dry-cleaning done in a few hours; the sushi delivered instantly to your doorman; the venti, triple-shot, non-fat, sugar-free, cinnamon latte, with whip — depends on a growing army of worker ants, slaving flat out at the minimum wage. Some poor New Yorkers still live in Harlem; but fewer and fewer of them.

Manhattan was always going to run out of room for anyone but the rich. As I flew out of JFK, I got a glimpse of Manhattan: a tiny speck of an island, surrounded by the spreading seas of the suburbs.

T hat isla nd is just too sma l l to ac c om mo date the growing numbers of the world’s rich and still maintain a critical mass of engaging, middle-class residents — let alone broke, aspirant pop singers.

The Knickerbocker Hotel, from £450 per night (theknickerbocker.com).

Harry Mount is a former New York correspondent for the Daily Telegraph

THE IMAGE BANK; MICHAEL OCHS ARCHIVES/GETTY

York for 20 years — murderers hate the icy winds slicing in off the Hudson, too.

The collapse in crime is the no. 1 factor behind the gentrification of New York. The retail trade has exploded in New York: from the Marc Jacobs shops in Greenwich Village to the huge Gap on Times Square. The coffee shops and tartan- shirted hipsters with silly beards now feel safe enough to spread north into Harlem and east into the old industrial areas of Brooklyn.

Last year, Spike Lee caused an almighty hoo-ha when he attacked the white middle-classes — ‘the motherf——s’, as he called them — for colonising his childhood stamping ground of Fort Greene, Brooklyn. He was particularly incensed at them telling black, long-time residents not to play their drums in Mount Morris Park in Harlem.

But then the tribes of New York have always been on the move. The Bronx used to be heavily Jewish; the Greek population of Astoria in Queens is in decline. And we really should thank our lucky stars that the whole place is getting safer. A generation ago, bankrupt, broken New York was on the edge of the precipice. In 1975, the city nearly went bust after President Ford initially refused to bail it out — thus the Daily News headline, ‘Ford to City: Drop Dead’. In 1977 a 25-hour blackout hit the city, leading to widespread looting and vandalism and more than 3,000 arrests. Who wants that?

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LIFE

It used to be just the ducks in the windows on Gerrard Street. But now Chinese investment in London is on a whole different scale. And some of it’s threatening to annoy the purists.

‘Lots of rich Chinese see London as a safe haven for their investments,’ says Anna White, property correspondent for the Telegraph. Some of these investments could really leave a mark. For instance a Chinesebacked consortium is bidding to buy the Hyde Park Barracks, its proposals including demolition of the famous tower and construction of an underground retail complex. This is only a possibility, though.

A project already under way is the conversion of the old Port of London Authority building opposite the Tower of London into luxury apartments and a hotel.

Ten Trinity Square, as it will be known, is the work of the Reignwood Group, a global Chinese concern founded in 1984 by Chanchai Ruayrungruang. Born in Shandong, Chanchai was so poor at the beginning of his career that he was forced to sell pints of his blood.

He made his fortune by, among other things, introducing China to the delights of Red Bull, and grew so rich that he rewarded someone who 20 years previously had given him a bowl of rice by buying them a house. (That’s what you call a return on investment.) Reignwood’s plans for Sir Edwin Cooper’s Beaux Arts masterpiece include a Four Seasons hotel, a private members’ club and 41 fully serviced apartments. Prices start, should you be interested, from about £5 million.

All rather different from the building’s original role as the port authority headquarters when it was opened by Lloyd George in 1922, and indeed from the day in 1946 when its ballroom hosted the reception for the inaugural meeting of the United Nations. Cue the usual traditionalist cries (do we hear some emanating from St James’s Palace?) about the desecration of a much-loved London landmark, how dare these foreigners come over here knocking our buildings about, blah blah blah. The kingdom will fail, goes the old legend, if the ravens ever leave the Tower of London. Surely the consequences can’t be that much better, some will argue, if a Corinthian-columned beauty just over the road has its heart ripped out?

London’s attractiveness to Chinese investors has been heightened by the slowdown of their domestic

C H I NA T OW N The latest wave of foreigners to reshape London are from the Far East Mark Mason

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influence of pesky foreigners, never existed in the first place. The very stone from which it’s constructed is French, shipped over by William of Normandy after his successful invasion of 1066. Throughout its history London has been built and rebuilt by foreigners, all the way from the Romans (some of whose houses and roads have been uncovered by the current excavations at Ten Trinity Square) to the current influx of Russians and Chinese. And at every turn there were complaints.

Just look at the 1970s, when the discovery of North Sea oil prompted Fletcher in Porridge to observe: ‘Now we can tell the Arabs to stuff it, and can we please buy London back?’

London has always been a city of outsiders — the Chinese are just the latest to arrive. And if they rearrange the scenery a little, that’s all to the good.

ILLUSTRATION BY JAMIE JONES

economy. Last year the number of investor visas handed to Chinese millionaires by the UK doubled. Traditionally they’ve bought sub-£1 million buy-to-let flats in Canary Wharf and Clapham, but now not only are the purchases getting more expensive, the Chinese are choosing to live in the flats themselves. ‘We recently had a Chinese banker who bought a flat in Mayfair,’ says Becky Fatemi, managing director of the upmarket estate agent Rokstone. ‘She commutes via Bond Street to the Square Mile.’

The Chinese like Mayfair, explains Fatemi, ‘because it’s their favourite place to shop in London.

They also love the hotels there, like Claridge’s and the Connaught.’ They prefer portered apartment buildings — and high ceilings are a must. ‘In Shanghai and Hong Kong they’re used to homes providing space with generous ceiling heights, so they look for the same when they come to London.’ Another trend is for rich Chinese to buy or rent a flat for their children so they can study in London. One couple completely redecorated their daughter’s City flat after a couple of years — even though she hadn’t yet lived there.

To those whose feathers are ruffled by the changes at Ten Trinity Square, the scheme’s defenders could reply: ‘No need to worry — the building is Grade II listed. Reignwood wouldn’t be allowed to bastardise it even if they wanted to. Take a look at the show apartment that has just opened: you’ll see how in keeping it is with the building’s original character. And with a hotel in there, ordinary Londoners will at last be able to see the inside of the place.’

This, however, assumes that the defenders felt like being polite. What they should actually reply is: ‘You short-sighted buffoons. Not only is it acceptable for London’s landmarks to change, it’s essential for them to change.’ The moment you handcuff a city to an unalterable blueprint of its own past is the moment that city begins to die. Lots of people have opposed the Square Mile’s new skyscrapers on the grounds that they ‘ruin’ the view from the Tower of London. They’d do well to remember that that is indeed its name: the Tower of London. There is no London of the Tower. The fortress owes its existence to the city, not the other way round.

Talking of which — the Tower is a reminder that this sacred England, mercifully free of the villainous 33

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LIFE

JAMES MUMFORD

An interview with a studio exec means someone is doing you a favour. Nothing more

I took a trip to Hollywood because I’m a budding screenwriter. ‘Budding’ in this context means ‘unsuccessful’. Here’s Tennessee Williams on being an unsuccessful writer: ‘A life of clawing and scratching along a sheer surface and holding on tight with raw fingers to every inch of rock higher than the one caught hold of before.’

The meeting I clawed along to was at Rough Draft. This is how I got there: it started with pure nepotism. My dad knows a guy who has generous instincts and loves encouraging young people in their careers. He took me to lunch at Scott’s, where we happened to sit at a table along from a famous producer who’s made most of my favourite films. When he came over to say hi to my dad’s friend, I knew I had 30 seconds to pitch my script.

‘It’s about kidnapping on the Texan border,’ I blurt out, ‘and abortion and it’s got a massive twist which no one will see coming…’ I peter out. ‘Sounds cheery,’ he replies, I suspect ironically.

(Background: I’d been working on this script for nearly a decade. I went to live on the Rio Grande for a while so I could kinda method-write. Truth be told, the script was pretty shit, but I didn’t know that yet. At that point I thought it was a shoo-in for Best Original Screenplay.)

Back to Scott’s: ‘Do we know about you?’ he asks. ‘Not yet,’ I said, flushed with excitement. And he said ‘You must come in’. So I went in. They said next time I was in LA I must visit their sister office. So I saved up and flew out to LA for a meeting. Top floor of Rough Draft’s LA office, ‘off Wilshire’, is dead-tech and faux industrial — exposed piping, no effort

to disguise the concrete, etc. Interns and creative execs alike wear the Converselumberjack combo. I’m ushered into the radically beautiful Samantha’s office (with long hair falling down to a slender waist, it is Samantha who is radically beautiful; her office is quite boxy). And in truth, she is very gracious. She’s having to deal with a GMO (ghastly moral obligation) passed down from the London boss — but betrays zero annoyance. sa m an t h a: So great to meet you. How come you’re in LA? ‘To meet you!’ Except I can’t say that, of course. That I’ve flown 5,454 miles for this. It’d be super-lame, very uncool, creepy even. So I have to dive into the deceit of… me (weakly): Oh, you know, meetings.

Meetings. Plural. Like, more than one meeting. But shit! What if she makes me list them? I’d have to reach for the studios: Fox Spotlight, Preeminent, MRI, Global, Dreampipes. Worse, what if she makes me write them down, like Richard Burton’s brilliant double-bluff in Where Eagles Dare; then checks them against the schedules of her counterparts? sa m an t h a: Tell me about yourself. me : Well, I’ve written this script. s a m a n t h a : I know. I’ve read it.

You didn’t think I wouldn’t have done my preparation?

‘It’s about a kidnapping on the Texan border, an abortion . . . and there’s a massive twist,’ I blurt out’

I suddenly decide that Samantha is being a little bit flirtatious. The red devil on my right shoulder tells me she’s only human; the angel on my left shoulder provokes me into the usual routine: whip out the iPhone; then awkwardly, abruptly thrust forward its screensaver of me-andmy-gorgeous-wife-Holly-on-holiday. me (brutish): Me married. She wife.

Samantha smiles and we get down to business: the characters in my script are indistinguishable. This is a conversationstopper. Having indistinguishable characters is a bad thing. Desperate to appear confident, I wave away that decade-long project and proceed to pitch another idea. m e (compelling): OK, so this one, it’s a cross between Gladiator and The Mission. It’s about St Teresa of Avila. s a m a n t h a (exasperated) : Teresa of Avila? Fucking hell!

And this does not seem like an epiphany ‘Eureka! You genius, why didn’t I think of this myself?’ kind of fucking hell.

It’s at this point she stops me in my tracks and tells me the truth. Samantha spells out how I got the meeting: that I wouldn’t be sitting opposite her now unless I had known someone; how we’ve done the whole show-off-pictures-of-your-wife thing; and that Rough Draft don’t really do religious movies. Though other people do. samantha (brightly): I mean, like, for example, Jesus is really big right now.

I remind myself to tell Him when we next speak — he’ll be delighted. Then she gives me a final word of advice. samantha: Oh, and next time you pitch this, don’t mention The Mission. Lost a lot of money.

illustration by david sparshott

How not to pitch in LA

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16/03/2015 14:14

LIFE

Meet Dave’s secret A-list Women and ethnic minority candidates are being selected for the safest Tory seats, just like the ‘Tatler Tories’ of 2008. But they’re keeping quiet and this time there will be no photoshoots Harry Cole

The Conservative party elected Britain’s first ethnic minority MP, Sir Mancherjee Bhownagree, as long ago as 1895. It also gave us our first Jewish and women prime ministers. Yet something went badly wrong along the way. By the dawn of the 21st century the Tories had never looked more male or more pale.

Upon taking control of the party in 2005, the Cameroon spin machine embarked on a blunt attempt to reverse this trend, the ‘A-list’ project. Safe or winnable seats were reserved for a new breed of candidate: ambitious young women, known as ‘Cameron’s cuties’, and high-profile ethnic minority poster boys. Ten would-be MPs were photographed for Tatler, looking glamorous, diverse and not a little smug.

Come the 2010 election, however, it all went pear-shaped. Every candidate in that photo feature lost, with the sole exception of Charlotte Leslie in Bristol North-

West. Scarcely a third of the original 100 A-­listers made it into Parliament. The ghost of the ‘Tatler Tories’ came to haunt No. 10: that ill-judged makeover crystallised a wider concern with the Cameron project’s dependency on PR gimmicks. The final humiliation for the project came with the departure of chicklit novelist ­L ouise Mensch. One of the few A-listers who managed to get elected, she moved to New York after two years, handing her marginal seat on a platter to the opposition.

This time round the Tories have been more careful. There is no public A-list – but a simple glance at the faces and names of those who have been selected to inherit the safest constituencies shows that something has been going on behind the scenes.

As the election nears, a small group of candidates have swum into the narrow pool of safe seats, at times fighting each other in two finals on the same day.

There is an A-list in everything but name and — as in 2010 — it’s dominated by women and ethnic minorities. The difference is that Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ), formerly known as Central Office, does not want anyone to know about it. With no expenses scandal to force out the bed-blockers, there are fewer seats up for grabs in May. Despite this, the allure of the Lords or the private sector has freed up some the loveliest, trueblue rural constituencies for lucky candidates. They will have a seat for life and Tory command a chance to reshape the image of their party — this time below the radar.

What the Tories don’t mind people knowing is that at May’s election, 33 per cent of their candidates will be women, and 14 per cent representing black or ethnic minorities. Not a single new Etonian is standing in a Tory-held constituency.

If you’re a white, middle- or upper-class

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man, you’re unlikely to have landed a safe seat. At a surface level, modernity has finally caught up with the pale, male party.

Look beyond the aesthetics, however, and has anything really changed? If you scrutinise the candidates selected for the plum seats, what jumps out are the similarities, not the diversity. They may not have gone to Eton, but several went to Cambridge. Privilege runs deep. The majority are married, able to rely on the security of alternative income streams.

They’re rich barristers and businessmen or ex-army officers and career politicians.

The Tory party has been filling its benches from these professions for centuries.

But they are extremely quiet about their ideology — there is not an original idea to be found anywhere on their identikit websites.

Most of them hide their ages. If they mention their schools, it’s only because they were state-educated. Those who went to public school don’t broadcast the fact.

Not only are details withheld, but access to these candidates is restricted. When they were invited to The Spectator for a group photograph, CCHQ refused to co-operate.

Terrified of a ‘Tatler Tories’ debacle, the party machine is keeping the cream of the crop safely cocooned. Ideology-free, rich and slaves to PR? It’s as if David Cameron has finally succeeded in building a Conservative party in his mould.

Left: Alan Mak, solicitor and ‘investor in a range of businesses’

Lucy Frazer, a Cambridge-educated QC, must have been acutely embarrassed by a selection process that would have looked iffy in a banana republic

Right: Lucy Frazer, ‘successful at eveything’

How does this process work? Grant Shapps, the Tory chairman, claims that the party has succeeded in making its candidates more representative ‘without getting blood on the carpet’. But is that really true? Gareth Fox is one of the most influential people in the country that you have never heard of. He’s not an MP, nor a civil servant, rather the head the Conservative party’s candidates department. Nobody gets selected for a seat without the approval of this opaque office. Strictly speaking, Fox’s role is purely administrative. In practice, his job carries enormous power.

Fox has his own way of micromanaging the system. Although the entrepreneurs, lawyers and bankers on the list are extremely tech-savvy, every time they put their name forward for a seat they must deliver two copies of their application form to party HQ in person. Cannier operators know what’s going on. It is much easier to ‘lose’ a piece of paper without those pesky electronic paper trails. Who needs a formal A-list when it’s so easy to bury an undesirable candidate early in the process?

Approved hopefuls, meanwhile, are ‘invited’ to apply for a seat. A sift of these candidates is then undertaken within CCHQ; association chairmen are invited in for some coffee and hard politicking with the candidates department; a longlist

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LIFE Right: Rishi Sunak, ‘cool metropolitan guy’

is drawn up. A source explains what goes on. ‘It’s all very coy: “We’ve got a name for you… there’s a few people we think you might be interested in… I’d like to introduce you to so-and-so”.’ There are stories of photographs and CVs of favoured candidates left prominently on the top of piles, with nothing so crass as a wink or a nudge.

Needless to say, the unofficial A-­listers play down the role of CCHQ. ‘I do not know what went on, but I know that it’s the Association that chooses the shortlist, not the headquarters,’ says Lucy Frazer, candidate for South-East Cambridgeshire. She has more reason than most to choose her words carefully. A Cambridge-educated QC, she must have been acutely embarrassed by a selection process that would look iffy in a banana republic. Having seen off her competitor in the ‘open primary’ by 84 votes to 48, it later transpired that 23 votes had been mistakenly awarded to Frazer from her closest rival Heidi Allen. Despite a ‘reaffirmation’ vote a few weeks later, a shadow hangs over Frazer’s fledgling political career (Allen was later adopted for the neighbouring seat, Cambridgeshire South). She has been compared to Education Secretary Nicky Morgan, and it’s not meant as a compliment. ‘She’s just one of those people that have been very

Painfully on-message, his nickname as a young Tory activist was ‘Party Line’.

Cambridge graduate Alan Mak, 30, will be Westminster’s first British Chinese MP. The son of Yorkshire Chinese restaurant owners, Mak was a solicitor at Clifford Chance, though he would like you to know he also serves ‘as a non-executive director/investor in a range of businesses’.

On paper, this comprehensive-educated son of immigrants looks like the dream candidate for the Tories. He was selected for Havant last autumn after a ‘barnstorming’ performance on the day emphasising his humble origins. Sadly, his selection prompted an outpouring of rage in the comment section of the ConservativeHome website, with the row spilling over into the local press. ‘I was the surprise winner,’ Mak tells Spectator Life. ‘I’d worked very hard in the run-up, but some people thought I hadn’t done my time in the party.’

Yet there was a vitriol not directed at other youngish candidates selected elsewhere. So successful at everything they’ve ever done,’ says a fellow wannabe MP, cryptically.

Victoria Atkins, 37, should also be joining the green benches as member for Louth and Horncastle. Yes, she’s a woman — but also another barrister and, conveniently, the daughter of former Tory MP Sir Robert Atkins. Not every incoming lady is from political aristocracy, though. Nusrat Ghani will become Britain’s first female Muslim Conservative MP when the people of Wealden, Kent, go to the polls. Born in Kashmir, Ghani has worked for the World Service and Age Concern. No doubt she won selection for the seat (majority: 17,179) purely on merit. But it won’t have harmed her chances that she is said to have the ear of the Chancellor.

Ranil Jayawardena, 28, candidate for North-East Hampshire, also ticks the BME box and holds the unglamorous title of deputy leader of Basingstoke council. But he’s also from an extremely wealthy background and describes his day job as ‘senior manager for Lloyds Banking Group’.

According to a report in the Guardian, ‘disclosures from the European parliament show that he has lobbied MEPs on European banking legislation and acted as Lloyds’ “government relations manager” during the integration of HBOS with Lloyds TSB’.

No one is quite sure where Rishi Sunak picked up his Jackie O habit of wearing sunglasses on his head.

Perhaps it was at his school, Winchester what was it about Mak? ‘Probably a generational thing,’ he says. ‘I got some distasteful comments, but I won 70 per cent of the vote and the association and local residents were behind me’. Given his ethnicity, you can’t wondering if ‘distasteful’ is a euphemism for ‘racist’.

It’s remarkable that so many unofficial A-listers went to Cambridge. But Rishi Sunak, 34, breaks the mould. He went to Oxford — followed by a Fulbright scholarship at Stanford University. No one is quite sure where he picked up his Jackie O habit of wearing sunglasses on his head; perhaps it was at his school, Winchester. He will inherit William Hague’s seat in Richmond, a rare Tory stronghold in Yorkshire which, the locals joke, has not seen immigration since 1066. A successful i­ nvestment

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320,000 additional people will be affected by noise from a new runway at Heathrow.

Compared to 18,000 at Gatwick.

Heathrow already flies its planes over central London. Choosing to build a new runway there isn’t exactly going to be music to many people’s ears.

Get the facts about the runway debate at gatwickobviously.com and @LGWobviously 039_speclife_mar15.indd 1

16/03/2015 14:24

fund entrepreneur, Sunak is married to Akshata Murthy, the daughter of ­Narayana Murthy, billionaire founder of the Indian multinational Infosys. She reportedly owns 1.4 per cent of the firm, so the Sunaks needn’t worry about struggling on an MP’s salary. ‘He’s a cool metropolitan guy,’ say supportive Tories. ‘Clearly favoured by the inside,’ adds a fellow ­candidate.

Some white men have managed to slip through CCHQ’s firewall. Simon Hoare, 45, did so at the last minute, in February this year, when Robert Walter unexpectedly vacated the plush seat of North Dorset. It can’t have harmed his chances that he serves as a councillor in Witney, Oxfordshire, and that the PM is one of his own voters. Presumably no one mentioned a story that appeared in the Daily Mail on 4 April 2012, which claimed that ‘a minister held a “private lunch” with a lobbyist to discuss a controversial rail terminal while MPs’ demands for meetings were rebuffed by the government’. The minister was Theresa Villiers from the Department of Transport.

The lobbyist was Mr Hoare, who owned an agency called Community Connect.

Still, at least one Tory candidate has a distinguished record in the public sector. Lt Col Tom Tugendhat, 41, is almost certain to be the next MP for Tonbridge in Kent. After a postgraduate degree

in Islamic studies from Cambridge, Tugendhat spent time learning Arabic in Yemen. As a member of the TA, he was called up to serve in Iraq in 2003, later touring Afghanistan and remaining in the army until last year. Unlike some ex-soldiers currently in Parliament, Tugendhat — whose father is Mr Justice Tugendhat and uncle a Conservative peer — is oddly reluctant to talk about his military service. He charmed the Tonbridge Tories with his startling answer when he was asked to name a living politician he admired. ‘Dan Jarvis, Labour MP for Barnsley,’ he replied without a blink. The two served together in Helmand, and Jarvis — one to watch on the red team — is equally complimentary about his ‘thoroughly decent’ friend. ‘I would expect him to very quickly rise through the Tory ranks,’ he says.

Described as carrying a ‘slight whiff of James Bond’, Tugendhat refuses to discuss the details of his military service.

‘I was in the Intelligence Corps — that is a matter of public record,’ he says when pressed by Spectator Life. ‘I’m not going to get into what I did after that.’ Rumour has it that ‘Thomas of Arabia’, as he’s been called, negotiated with the Taleban on behalf of the British government.

‘That’s a different matter,’ he says.

Right: ‘I was in the Intelligence Corps – I won’t get into what I did after that,’ says Tom Tugendhat

Another former public servant very keen not to talk about the last few years, but for different reasons, is Oliver Dowden. David Cameron’s Cambridge-educated deputy chief of staff has spent years trying to secure a safe seat. He got his fingers burnt in Croydon South, where opponents portrayed him as a No. 10 plant. Fortunately James Clappison, the MP for Hertsmere in Surrey, suddenly announced that he was walking away from his 17,000 majority last summer. This time Dowden’s Downing Street connections did him no harm. Jealous colleagues describe him as ‘the beneficiary of a coup’.

What can they mean?

James Cleverly, leader of the Tories in the London Assembly, is a major in the Territorial Army. In May he will become MP for Braintree in Essex following the resignation of the electronic exhibitionist Brooks Newmark. He was chosen after the selection process was quietly suspended by CCHQ — the local party had chosen someone not on the approved candidates list and was told to ‘think again’. Cleverly, a six-foot bruiser from a mixed-race background, has been described as ‘the most charming man in City Hall’. That’s not a view shared by the unions, who made him their pantomime baddie after he organised Boris Johnson’s sell-off of London fire stations. Even his critics would not bet against him being in a Boris cabinet, should the situation arise.

If the PM survives, however, he can look back with satisfaction on the Tory selection process. He has the new intake he wants.

While the Eurosceptic Tory class of 2010 spent its first years in Parliament writing policy pamphlets and forming pressure groups, there is scant evidence that this lot will stray too far from the reservation, much to Downing Street’s relief.

Whether these lucky secret A-listers are the best candidates for the country remains to be seen. Just as selection was a breeze, the coming election will be no test for them — but five years in the House of Commons will.

Although Cameron may have got the right names and faces in the safest seats, the Tories still have some way to go to represent modern Britain beyond percentages and photographs. The Conservative party may have planted the first female bottom on the green benches back in 1919 but, lest we forget, she was the multi-squillionairess Nancy Astor — Mrs Cameron’s step great-grandmother.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY LAUREN CROW

LIFE

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If we'RE talking runways: "IT's

the economy and the environment, stupid."

We all want growth in the economy, and expanding runway capacity in the South East can help achieve that. But now more than ever we’ve got to consider the environmental costs of the decisions we make.

A new runway at Gatwick can deliver the economic benefits of expansion at a fraction of the cost and environmental impact of either of the Heathrow alternatives.

So while it may be our children who will be grateful to us for that decision, we should not have to wait for them to tell us: “It’s the economy and the environment, stupid”.

Get the facts about the runway debate at gatwickobviously.com and @LGWobviously

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16/03/2015 14:25 13/03/2015 17:37

LIFE

HARRY COLE

What matters at Westminster is how fit the MPs look — men as well as women

A couple of years ago a perky female MP stood up in the Commons with a bit of boob on display. There were titters from Twitterers and raised eyebrows about her cleavage at the more downmarket end of political journalism, where I usually dwell.

Given that she was not just a Labour MP but the sort elected from an all-women shortlist, all hell broke loose. Colleagues were ‘outraged’, comment pieces were filed and puritan campaigners rushed out press releases. At one point I thought they were going to hang poor Toby Young. ‘Women who have made it into Parliament must fight an uphill battle,’ said the gorgeously named feminist Anna Bird from the Fawcett Society. A. Bird continued: ‘It’s hard to believe this is British politics in the 21st century.’ But is this obsession with looks an exclusively female problem? I think not.

There’s a joke doing the rounds in Westminster that you can tell how severe the terror threat is by how tight the PM’s suit gets. The larger his waistline, the more likely it is that the jihadis are coming, as Dave has been unable to break out of No. 10 for his early morning run around St James Park. Heaven help us if A. Bird had been in the pub when such a personal comment were made about a woman.

Things are not much better for George Osborne either. A search of Google News about the Chancellor’s hair brings up some 39,700 results. Gossip about Osborne’s tonsorial austerity, plus his new slimmeddown physique, were some of the most popular talking points of this parliament.

‘Et tu, Osborne?’ wrote the Guardian of his ‘Caesar-style makeover’. Glamour magazine has described it as ‘Lego-esque’,

while the Mirror claims ‘he looks more like a Playmobil policeman’. ‘George Osborne delivered a serious speech for serious times,’ said the Telegraph, ‘but everyone was looking at his Madchester hair.’

There are 3,310 news articles listed

by Google that describe new-Osborne as ‘svelte’, but he’s far from the only politician to drop a few pounds using a celeb craze diet, the 5:2. There were plenty of column inches regarding Alex Salmond’s pre-referendum toning, while Osborne’s shadow Ed Balls is a shadow of his former tubby self. Balls credits the two-day fasting diet and running the marathon. How do we know? Because it’s been written about in depth, again and again.

Westminster’s men have become so associated with the 5:2 that the diet’s creator, Mimi Foster, has broken her silence: ‘The regime works well with a political lifestyle.

Bon viveurs can still have large business lunches or formal dining events in the evenings, and very busy people cope well with the fast days. I imagine George Osborne is dashing from pillar to post and so he has the capacity to cope well with low-calorie days,’ she told a broadsheet.

Westminster is obsessed with looks. It’s not sexism, just how shallow our 24-hour,

There’s a joke going round that you can tell how severe the terror threat is by how tight the PM’s suit fits. The larger his waistline, the more likely the jihadis are coming

140-character politics has become. Knowing that it would be a hugely popular story, I spent the better part of a day trying to stand up a tip that Ed Miliband had had a series of ‘chemical facial peels’ and a round of Botox over the Whitsun recess last year. Miliband’s rumoured ‘nose job’ — in fact a standard adenoids removal procedure — was given forensic Sunday tabloid analysis. His transformation from dorky brother in 2010 to the dorkyish leader in 2015 has been followed with hawklike attention, not least by those who have sat opposite the Labour leader every Wednesday for half a decade.

Tory MP David Morris was a hairdresser — among other things — before entering parliament and considers himself something of an expert on the making of Mr Miliband: ‘When Axelrod came along his hairstyle changed to emulate an American senator’s,’ says Morris, crediting Obama’s campaign guru David Axelrod with the death of the Labour leader’s buzz-cut and his new heavily lacquered two-inch ‘do’. He adds: ‘A couple of my friends in the trade have remarked that, although he’s a very handsome man, the shading of his hair as all his own is questionable.’

Yes, politicos talk about women’s hair and legs and — on occasion — cleavage.

Yes, the papers write about what women politicians wear. Yes, they even put pictures of newly appointed female cabinet members in a tacky double-page Downing Street ‘catwalk’ spread, but the idea that men’s looks don’t come under intense scrutiny, both in print and by mouth, is demonstrably false. And we haven’t even got round to mentioning the baldies yet…

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LIFE

The utopia algorithm In Fulham, a gang of geeks are working on a plan to make the internet truly private, secure and decentralised. What will happen if they succeed?

TRAFFIC_ANALYZER/GETTY

Jamie Bartlett

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T

he internet has changed its character dramatically several times over its short life. It started in the late 1960s as a military project, morphed into an academic network in the 1980s and was transformed into a vehicle for commerce in the 1990s, before being invaded by social media in the 2000s. Now it’s on the verge of a change that puts all the others in the shade.

An alternative way of organising the internet is being built as we speak: an internet where no one is in control, where the government can’t find you or shut you down, where big tech companies aren’t able to learn everything about you. A decentralised net that is both private and impossible to censor.

This revolution is being plotted in snazzy offices just off Fulham High Street in south-west London — not what I was expecting, since you associate hackers with hoodies, basements and graffiti. But the Ethereum project isn’t a typical hackers’ collective: it received around $12 million of crowd-funded support when it was founded a couple of years ago, by a 20-year-old Russian-Canadian programming wizard called Vitalik Buterin. That’s been enough to hire 40 of the smartest geeks you’ll ever meet, and house them in comfort in Amsterdam, Berlin and London.

‘Welcome to Web 3.0,’ says Vinay Gupta, a hackercum-poverty-activist who’s part of the Ethereum team, as I arrive. Web 1.0 was all static websites. Web 2.0 was interactive social media platforms like Facebook. This third iteration is about encrypted peer-to-peer networks. It sounds dry, but Ethereum — which is launching part of its software this spring — has London’s tech crowd purring. Last year it won the World Technology Award for IT software. IBM has already used it to build a washing machine that orders its own soap.

But these people aren’t in it for the money. Ethereum is an open-source project which is available to everyone, and its employees will slink off when the project is complete. They’re doing it because they want to transform the internet — and, by extension, society.

In practical terms Ethereum does two things. First, it’s what Vinay calls ‘deep infrastructure’. It’s building a new web out of the spare power and hard-drive space of millions of connected computers that its owners put on the network. What they say of the brain is true of your computer — you only ever use a small amount of it.

Ethereum links all that spare power and space and allows people to build apps, websites and software that other users can access. Because it runs with strong encryption and the network is ‘distributed’ across all those individual computers, it’s more or less impossible for anyone to censor or control what’s on it.

Second, it allows people to create immutable, pub-

lic transaction records. (Bear with me on this: it’s very important.) The problem with digital records is that they can be copied and so are not really owned by anyone. Borrowing the idea from the digital currency bitcoin, Ethereum uses something called a ‘block chain’ to record information on a public database in a chronological way that prevents copying, tampering, fraud or deletion. It’s a new anonymous, decentralised, uncensored internet, and a new way of controlling and storing information. This is why the tech crowd are excited.

Ethereum is one of many initiatives trying to change the way the internet works, making it easier to prevent censorship, monitoring or control (another is called MaidSafe, based in Scotland, which works to similar principles). Many people have been stirred by Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing or by growing unease about the creeping power of Google and Facebook.

When you open a browser and surf the web it feels seamless, but there are invisible rules and systems in the background: domain name servers, company servers, routing protocols, security protocols. This is the stuff that keeps the internet going: rules that route your request for traffic, servers that host that web page you’re after, systems that certify for your computer that the site you’re trying to access isn’t bogus.

All these little stages and protocols create invisible centres of power: governments who can monitor what you do; big tech companies that collect all your data in large centralised servers and sell it; invisible US-based regulators exercising control over what happens on the net. People are getting worried. Andrew Keen, in his new book, The Internet Is Not the Answer, reveals how a tiny sliver of insanely rich Silicon Valley adolescents are capturing the world’s wealth by snaffling up all your data. Public concern about online privacy is on the up.

More people are using tools and techniques to cover their digital tracks — heading to the so called ‘dark net’ where surveillance is difficult. And then there are the people like Vinay who think the answer lies in redesigning the whole damn thing so it’s less centralised and harder to control.

Greater freedom online will have vast consequences in the real world. Take the Tor web browser — originally a US Navy research project and still funded by the State Department — which allows its users to surf the web without revealing their location. It has had a hugely beneficial effect on free expression around the world, and played a pivotal role in the Arab uprisings. In 2011 it won the Free Software Foundation Award because it has allowed millions of people to access the net while retaining control over their privacy. And it’s not just in dictatorships that privacy matters. In most democratic societies, privacy creates a sphere of freedom for the

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LIFE

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Provenance, founded by Jessi Baker, plans to use Ethereum to make supply chains transparent: helpful when you wish to buy a diamond, not of the blood variety

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individual, which allows for political, social and personal expression.

In this sense, Ethereum is artillery in the running battle between technology and governments. The Ethereum team seem like a leftish anarchic bunch, but the idea that the internet could secure a libertarian utopia by rendering man-made law redundant has always appealed to internet pioneers. Doesn’t Ethereum undermine the ability of democracies to manage their societies? Vinay sees it the other way around: ‘Democratic societies are stifling free expression. Democracies generally have constitutions to protect political rights that no law can ever cancel, and I see these technologies as a way to guarantee the rights we already have. We are maintaining the status quo of, say, reasonable expectation of privacy in letters, not creating some kind of new pirate utopia.’

Perhaps. Technology has always created naive expectations which are usually disappointed. When the internet went mainstream in the early 1990s there was a blaze of optimism about humanity’s imminent leap forward, spurred by connectivity and access to information. Harley Hahn, an influential technology expert, predicted in 1993 that we were about to evolve ‘a wonderful human culture that is really our birthright’. Nicholas Negroponte — former director of the illustrious MIT Media Lab — declared in 1997 that the internet would bring about world peace and the end of nationalism. How’s that been working out, guys?

The frustrating truth is that the baddies are often enthusiastic adopters of anything that can help them avoid getting caught. According to researchers at the University of Luxembourg, 44 per cent of websites on the dark net — which is accessed using the Tor browser — deal in illegal pornography and drugs. Serious child pornographers use encryption and anonymous browsers to stay one step ahead of the law, making it more or less impossible to rid the net of their images. Terrorists keenly follow the growth of difficult-to-censor networks: Isis now routinely shares information about the best way to dodge government surveillance using tech designed for journalists — which is one reason its propaganda is always online. It’s inevitable that Ethereum or Maidsafe or anything like them will make the job of policing the internet far more difficult than it already is.

That’s not the inventors’ fault, and it’s not scaremongering. It’s just the way of things.

But for all this talk of terrorists, whistleblowers and

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sights. With Ethereum, you could create an immutable record of your house deeds, and then simply transfer them over to a buyer using encryption verification. As someone who’s dealt with their Kafkaesque administrative costs, I find this idea hugely satisfying.

It feels like Ethereum is pushing us closer to the future: a world where technology becomes more powerful, and by extension, so do all of us who wield it.

There are great challenges ahead: 3D printing, drones, artificial intelligence, biological weapons being produced on DNA synthesisers. ‘We’re going to have to deal with a world in which there is unbelievably powerful technology on every front,’ explains Vinay, who looks far less worried than I do. The truth is that no political party has the foggiest idea what to do about any of this. Neither does Vinay, although he admits that ‘how we deal with information will have to change dramatically. Ethereum will force us to respond sooner’.

So what’s a best-case scenario, I ask before I leave. ‘By the end of the year, we’ll be responsible for 5 per cent of the world’s internet traffic.’ And the worst? ‘Someone else will have done what we’ve done, only better.

Either way, it’s going to happen.’ I’m unsure whether to be excited or terrified.

libertarian dystopias, Vinay reckons Ethereum will benefit the typical Spectator reader as much as a Syrian freedom fighter. There are lots of bad people doing bad things online: conmen trying to part you and your bank details, internet trolls trying to bully you, hackers trying to take control of your computer. Anything that helps create a secure network is a good thing.

One person who’s spotted the beneficial potential of Ethereum is Jessi Baker. She was working on her computer science PhD in supply chain data when she heard about block chains and Ethereum, back in 2013.

She took a break to found Provenance to offer what she calls ‘block chain-powered product histories’. The idea is simple: give people a way to see how the things they buy are made. Provenance, a small team based in north London armed with angel investment, plans to use Ethereum to make opaque supply chains ­transparent.

Imagine you want to buy a diamond, but not of the blood variety. With Provenance your freshly mined rock would be given a unique digital ‘tag’ (a very long number) which is put in the Ethereum block chain. Each stage of the production process would then be recorded under that tag in the block chain record — it could be a certificate, a photograph, a piece of text, a contract — in chronological order, with each new addition verified by someone at the next stage of the process.

By the time it reaches your finger mounted on a gold ring, you also get a record of the diamond’s entire life.

Far better than a flimsy certificate or a fair trade stamp — both of which could be added to this block chain anyway — this is a mathematically perfect, immutable record for the ages. Provenance is starting small with a dozen or so of what Jessi calls ‘good suppliers’ who want to demonstrate to customers how their products are made and workers are treated, including a fashion retailer whose supply chain spans the globe. But who knows where next? If the frozen food company Findus had used Provenance, we’d have known exactly where, or what, that lasagna meat had come from. Palm oil?

Supermarket produce? Perhaps even refugees?

It’s difficult to predict where this will all end up: the evolution of the net is immune to forecast. The early 2000s saw several similar efforts at peer-to-peer software which never quite took off. But the combination of new technology and public demand make this a stepchange in the internet’s endless evolution. Vinay thinks the big social media companies will feel the pressure, because someone will set up a social networking site on Ethereum that doesn’t collect your data, perfect for privacy-conscious users. Then there’s all the online marketplaces. When you buy something on eBay or Airbnb, a cut goes to the company for facilitating the transaction. A handful of programmers are planning to build an online marketplace on Ethereum where buyers and sellers can connect without a third party and their commission. Vinay also has estate agents in his

Jamie Bartlett is the author of The Dark Net

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STYLE Was it the Russians? The Saudis? Or Elton John, who once received a florist’s bill for £293,000? Someone’s to blame for having sacrificed Britain’s great floral heritage on the altar of bling. In days gone by, bunches of homegrown narcissi, gladioli and peonies would have been acceptable. But things have got out of hand, floristry has gone berserk and 90 per cent of cut flowers now come from faraway places like Kenya and Colombia. When I used to work as a florist in London, we would regularly make bouquets of 100 red roses for Arab businessmen. Occasionally they’d ask for two — one for their wife, one for their mistress.

Next time you see a photoshoot in OK! magazine, look at the backdrop and you’ll see what I’m referring to: gargantuan displays of blooms, alongside the Botox and the Bentleys. London’s florists aren’t complaining when asked to festoon some Park Lane ballroom with obscene quantities of white hydrangeas to fit the ‘white tie and tiaras’ theme. But in their hearts they know — cut flowers have become painfully naff.

The Duchess of Cambridge understood this while planning her wedding. Instead of filling Westminster Abbey with flowers, as might have been expected, she went for an avenue of English field maples. Shane Connolly, who designed this display, describes it as ‘a dream commission, not just because of who it was but

London’s florists will happily fill a Park Lane ballroom with white hydrangeas but in their heart they know: cut flowers have become painfully naff and British plants are back in vogue, roots and all

because of their desire to be environmentally thoughtful in all aspects of their wedding’. Afterwards all the trees were replanted or donated to charity.

Cut flowers are out of vogue, and plants, especially British varieties, are back in — roots and all. At the heart of this movement is Ken Marten, a designer from south London, who creates terrariums. He developed an interest in these miniature gardens after a number of years working as a florist at McQueens. He describes his frustration at working with cut flowers: ‘The whole aesthetic is that everything has to be at this perfect

moment of bloom. It’s not real in a way. I wanted to get back closer to nature.’ He felt he had ‘nothing more to say through the use of cut flowers’.

His background in gardening, prop design and floristry led him to found Hermetica London, a company that makes terrariums. Originally a Victorian concept, terrariums are experiencing a revival, as people begin to think more carefully about what plants they surround themselves with indoors. A terrarium can be either open or closed, depending on what plants are used. Ones that are sealed will create their own water cycle, meaning they barely need to be watered and can basically look after themselves. For those who are lazy, time-poor or hopelessly bad at gardening, a terrarium is ideal. ‘They thrive on neglect,’ wrote Anne Raver, the New York Times’s gardening columnist.

As well as being simple to look after, they are also lovely to look at — a micro world that you can keep anywhere, so long as it has enough light and heat. ‘I wanted to change the way we think about houseplants,’ says Marten. While houseplants were once thought the height of sophistication, particularly during the 1920s and again in the 1970s, ‘their appeal died out as people began to spend less time at home’. As a result, indoor plants began to be neglected. When convenience became king in the 1980s and 1990s, the cut flower industry boomed. You could pick up a bunch of tulips at the supermarket together with a takeaway meal. Marten believes things are begin-

Above: a custommade terrarium

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ning to change, because modern technology is allowing us to spend more time at home again. But while the tech revolution has allowed us to shop for food, enjoy movies and arrange dates from the comfort of our home, urban living has reduced the amount of space available. A garden has become a luxury which plenty can no longer afford and terrariums are a ‘way to bring green indoors’, says Marten. Social media has also played an important role in generating interest; on Instagram, the hashtag ‘terrariums’ currently has over 182,000 posts. Interior design has been democratised as individuals round the world share their ideas about style.

Hermetica terrariums are objects of great beauty.

Some of the glass containers are designed specifically, some found at car boot sales or in junk shops. Marten studies the English landscape for ideas about what to fill them with, ‘to see where the unexpected happens’. He favours local and ‘found’ plants — things that often might be considered weeds, like Herb Robert, a member of the geranium family. During a recent walk near his studio, he discovered a type of plant called navelwort growing in the cracks of the pavement and included it in a design. He buys succulents from the ‘eccentric old men who sell them round the UK’ as well as plants from the New Covent Garden MarRight: terrariums can be made in vessels of many different kinds

ket, which he then propagates so they don’t look ‘too generic’. His impressive knowledge of British specimens is the product of a childhood spent in the garden.

In many ways, Marten’s enthusiasm for terrariums and British horticulture harks back to the Victorian obsession with collecting. The botanist Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward is credited with having invented the terrarium in the 1830s, which was known then as the ‘Wardian case’. This technology was used to transport plants around the globe, which helped generate interest in botany. Marten points out one plant he has propagat-

ed called rosebay willowherb, a herbaceous plant native to volcanic regions. Morten thinks it probably reached Britain in a Wardian case and colonised woodland areas during the steam age, because it grew in ash from the trains. During the second world war, it was known as ‘bombweed’ because it was often found in craters.

In the Victorian era, collecting plants was a cheap and healthy activity, and all sectors of society took part in amateur botany. ‘Such study must exercise an ennobling and purifying effect on the human soul,’ wrote one Victorian botanist. Ferns were particularly prized: in 1855, Charles Kingsley described how ‘Pteridomania’ — fern madness — had taken hold. Ferns were thought to be an acceptable plant for women to collect because they weren’t considered overtly sexual.

In wealthy Victorian houses, Wardian cases filled with ferns would have been a common sight. But ‘even the farm labourer or miner could have a collection of British ferns,’ notes the academic Peter Boyd.

Victorian botany combined a love of collecting, a respect for nature, and an interest in preserving plants. It’s the reverse of today’s floral industry, with its addiction to quick fixes and flamboyant displays, all at great expense to the environment. But a resurgent interest in botany, encouraged once again by technological advances, means more of us are looking beyond the generic world of floristry. Leave the oligarchs to their opulent arrangements; the terrarium is the elegant — and easy — way to bring the British countryside inside.

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W I NGS OF DE SI R E

When Lewis Carroll created Alice’s wonderland, he sent his diminutive heroine down rabbit holes and through looking glasses and in doing so created an imaginative kingdom that has lived in the mind’s eye of adults as much as children for 150 years. He captured the imagination of generations, because escaping into a world of fantasy is what most children want to do.

My children’s excitement was unbridled when I bought them a secondhand set of bunk beds for the princely sum of £70. They transformed them into a den, using some cleverly draped blankets and a few butterfly stickers. Their bedroom door remained locked during this process, and I didn’t mind being shut out, letting them escape from my demands that they brush their hair, do their homework and pick up their clothes, since I know that leaving them to their own devices is the best way to encourage their creativity.

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I don’t have a fortune to spend on my children, but if I did, the ‘den’ that might have been created could have been very different. Because today’s commercially astute interior designers and construction engineers have become inspired by the idea of bringing imaginary worlds to life. There is a rapidly growing market in fantastical bedrooms, playrooms and playhouses for children. It is led, inevitably, from LA, where every other child probably sleeps in a pumpkin carriage bed.

‘If you dream it, we can create it,’ says Nino R ­ osella, of the Master Wishmaker, which creates bespoke interiors that are loved by adults as much as children. ‘We literally make dreams come true.’ Founded in 2011 by the architect Roger Mcintyre and the builder Sege Rosella, the company was born after a client asked for a luxury playhouse. ‘We can make anything now. If you want a playhouse as big as a mansion, made from real gold, we’ll do it,’ says Rosella.

Most projects start at 10k, but a 29-year-old c­ lient recently spent several million on a pirate hide­away called Challis Island, on a lake near Cambridge. The lake was drained in order to create the island, and then refilled. The result is an adult playground on the most preposterous scale.

The process of building fantasy worlds is lengthy and technically complex. Before a single splash of hot pink paint is slapped onto a princess carriage, or a pirate cutlass artfully arranged on the bespoke boatshaped bed, the clients will have been extensively interviewed about their taste and hobbies. Then 3D animated computer models and technical drawings are created, and plans drawn up for lighting, access, and so on. That’s to say nothing of planning applications.

The ‘Baron’s Bunk’ comprised a hand-carved plane hovering over a bunk bed, complete with slide and fully lit, two-storey air traffic control station. The Master Wishmaker’s playhouses are more extravagant, and they’re in the process of making a two-storey tree house with cinema, hot tub and kitchen for a family in Essex. There are also plans for a 20,000 square foot tree house with ‘river’, helipad, glass-bottomed swimming pool, jungle gym and home cinema for the US luxury magazine the Robb Report.

‘There’s an element of oneupmanship at work,’ says Rosella, describing the entire street one family commissioned, with fire station, village shop, cinema and garage, complete with real cars. ‘Clients love looking through past designs, then taking them several steps further. People like to push their imagination to the extreme, creating the most bonkers world possible.’

There’s certainly something bonkers, too, about building expensive, elaborate interiors that children will soon grow out of. After all, a princess suite designed for a three-year-old girl won’t delight the world-weary 13-year-old she later becomes. It brings new definition to the term ‘disposable income’, and

One family commissioned an entire street, with fire station, village shop, cinema and garage.

‘People like to push their imagination to the extreme’

Opposite page: Dahlia’s design for a plane bed. Right, the Little Duchess cot by Dragons of Knightsbridge

makes one wonder who, exactly, parents are buying for when they fork out £50k for a bedroom suite.

‘Children absolutely love our stuff, but I think parents are at their happiest seeing their crazy ideas come alive,’ says Rosella. ‘There’s no doubt this is as much for the parents as the kids.’

Less disposable, more heirloom, Dragons of Knightsbridge have been creating bespoke painted interiors for 30 years. Gwyneth Paltrow, Elton John and Madonna are fans, and they’ve recently shipped an entire bedroom to Moscow, complete with all furnishings, lighting and rugs, at a cost of over half a million pounds. There’s something so reassuring, after all, about buying into old-fashioned English style. ­D ragons have graced many a royal nursery. Prince George apparently has a Beatrix Potter-themed bedroom designed by them. There’s a certain melancholy 57

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play car made from real car parts, and a navy and gold nautical nursery with a crystal ship chandelier. Their woodland-themed nursery for Leah Wood featured heavily in Hello! magazine.

‘The internet has opened up a giant look-book for parents, and we’re seeing a demand for highly creative design spilling beyond bedrooms and playhouses into special events for children,’ says Ali Lovegrove of Gigi Brookes. The company created a week-long Wild West camp for a child’s birthday party, with handmade tents painted with western themes, and an old-fashioned general store where the children could spent tokens they won on toys and sweets. No detail was overlooked, from the wicker shopping baskets to the open fire where the kids cooked marshmallows every night.

‘Our designs really help stimulate creativity, and all our clients are focused on encouraging their children’s creativity,’ says Lovegrove, without a hint of irony.

I’ll never have these sort of sums to spend on my children’s bedrooms, but it’s not just sour grapes that leaves me with the sense that the world of the imagination can’t be bought. Benign neglect, and allowing children to get thoroughly bored to encourage them to dream, can work magic. If you really want to push the boat out, read them Lewis Carroll, then drape a blanket over a bunk bed and leave them to it.

in the story of the poor little rich kid who craved a real puppy of her own. The globe-trotting existence of her super-rich parents made this difficult, so instead they ordered from Dragons full sets of puppy-decorated furniture for the nursery of each of their houses around the world.

When David Cameron bought his daughter a chair painted with a rabbit outside 10 Downing Street, he and Sam may have been nostalgic for older, grander nurseries. ‘Of course people love spending money on their children, but our clients also genuinely treasure their heirlooms,’ says MD Lucinda Croft. ‘It’s not unusual for parents to bring in old pieces they owned as children to be repainted for their families. There’s a huge amount of ostentation around children’s design, but we’re really not trying to show off.’

The understatement only goes so far: one of their bestselling items is the Little Duchess upholstered cot, coming in at a cool £12,000, with French silk drapes and cut-glass diamante padding.

All this seems rather modest compared with ­A merica, where Beyoncé spent £400,000 on a solid gold Ginza Tanaka rocking horse for her baby daughter Blue Ivy. The interiors company Dahlia Designs recently created a 5,000 square foot playroom, decorated with all sorts of themes, including space, safari, aviation and princess. ‘It was wild, and we really went to town on the special effects. There was a games area with hi-tech toys that would pop up. We created something beyond most people’s wildest imaginations,’ says director Dahlia Mahmood, who runs the company from LA and Washington DC and has a (highly confidential) list of movie star clients. The playroom cost a million dollars, and took a year to complete.

‘Parents will spend everything they can to capture this moment in their child’s imagination,’ she says, only momentarily faltering when I ask her if she thinks it is good for a child to grow up in a million-dollar playroom. ‘Who am I to question how parents spend their money? And the children of very well-off clients are always very gracious, in my opinion.’

The US tendency to spare no expense when it comes to indulging children is being imported to Britain. Baby showers, if they happened here at all, used to involve a few friends getting together for tea and cake to give the expectant mum some muslin squares and a nursing bra. Today, extravagant themed parties are becoming common among the wealthy, with gifts running into tens of thousands of pounds.

Leading the field in bringing this LA trend to Britain is Gigi Brookes, whose clients are described as highnet-worth individuals. Much of their more extravagant pieces are manufactured in America, and while they can create a nursery with a budget of £5,000, many clients will be working with ten times that amount.

Recent projects include a bed inside a huge dragon, a

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The gorillas who saved Rwanda Victoria Lane

DAVID YARROW PHOTOGRAPHY

GR E E N H I L L S, GR E AT APES

Here’s my first proper view of Rwanda: an improbably blue lake, endless hills striped with different shades of green stretching into the distance, and thousands of little corrugated iron roofs winking in the afternoon sun. The topography is rolling and you could imagine yourself still in Europe, but the sun is unusually fierce, the birdsong more frenzied, and on the path you might meet a foot-long earthworm.

We are staying at Virunga Lodge, a remarkable and lovely place on a ridge above two large lakes.

To the north rises Mount Muhabura, an extinct volcano which is the most easterly of the Virungas, a range of nine mountains that divides Rwanda from Congo and Uganda. On this side they comprise the Volcanoes National Park, and somewhere in that dense forest live the mountain gorillas that are the country’s great tourist attraction. They are what I am here for.

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T RAV E L

Gorillas are essential to Rwanda’s tourism, and they have given the country an identity separate from the genocide of 1994

Creating this hotel has been a labour of love for its owner, Praveen Moman, who grew up in Uganda until his family was thrown out of the country by Idi Amin.

They had spent many holidays in this area and in early adulthood, living in London, the Virungas represented a lost paradise for him.

He returned to visit Uganda in 1995 and set up three lodges there, but it wasn’t until 1999, five years after the genocide, that he came back to Rwanda. Although the country was traumatised — it is plain to see it still is in many ways — gorilla tourism started up again in 2000, and he began to organise excursions from the Ugandan hotels. The next year, he found the hilltop where Virunga Lodge now stands: ‘one of the most perfect sites in the world’, as he says.

The main building has views all around; there is a shaded dining terrace overlooking the lake and a drinks terrace with firepit facing the mountain. The sitting room is high and spacious, held up by tall eucalyptus beams. It is airy when it’s hot and sunny, but has a large open fire for cooler days. On the first morning, rainclouds amassed and we sat around it reading

Above: View from Virunga Lodge

books and drinking coffee. In the evening, everyone eats communally in the wood-panelled dining room.

Building a hotel in this troubled region is not easy; it requires about ten companies all in one. There are guides, drivers, waiters, cooks, electricians, plumbers.

Lots of people do more than one thing — it’s a bit like Local Hero. I was invited to go for a massage and was mildly disconcerted to find Jean d’Amour, the barman, wielding the scented oils.

For such a place to work, it must benefit the locals.

Part of each guest’s bill goes to help the surrounding community: a building for the school, or some sheep for the villagers. Until recently the hills all around 62

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were dark at night. But the completion of a hydroelectric dam, funded in part by the lodge, has brought electric light to some 60 houses nearby, and this is due to be expanded. The neon starts to flicker across the ­valley at dusk.

We walked to the nearest village, Mwiko. Looking down the mountainside you see valleys tidily portioned into bananas, sorghum, plantain, coffee, eucalyptus, beans. Apart from the occasional football shirt or mobile phone, it looks pre-industrial, timeless.

The disparity between life down here and life up there is unnerving. Here are children in grubby clothes, without a pencil to their names, kicking a football made of bound leaves. Just up the hill there are guests arriving by helicopter with Chanel backpacks.

The next day is the main event. We set off at dawn towards the gathering point in the national park, bouncing along red tracks in an ancient juggernaut of a Land Rover. Gorillas are essential to Rwanda’s tourism, bringing in visitors from all over the world.

It costs $750 a pop to go gorilla trekking; there are about 480 of them in the Virungas, and it is calculated that each one is worth $1 million a year to the economy.

More than that, they have given the country an identity separate from the genocide of 1994. After the civil war and then the massacre of perhaps 800,000 people within three unbelievably brutal months, it was feared that many gorillas, already critically endangered, would have been killed. That their numbers had remained more or less stable was taken as a symbol of hope. Gorillas are everywhere on signs all over the country. Naming day, when it is decided what that year’s baby gorillas should be called, is a big deal.

There are ten gorilla families that are habituated to human visitors; each family may be visited by eight people a day, for one hour. The rest of the time they can get on with their usual activities unharassed by people in cagoules, though protected by patrolling guards.

So here are 80 or so people drinking coffee in an atmosphere of high anticipation and watching the Intore dancers, who wear long blond wigs and huge grins and are slightly scary because this is a kind of war dance. If you’ve seen King Solomon’s Mines, you know them. The tourists’ drivers and guides are sorting out whether their charges will hike for hours or just get a gentle stroll. It’s one of those mysteries you can’t hope to understand.

Anyway, we chug up another track and the guide points to the park’s boundary wall and says, the gorillas are just there. We walk across the field, climb over the wall, follow the guide through a bit of undergrowth and there, a metre away, is a large black woolly creature. It is quite a shock. She is lolling on her back with an arm outstretched, a young female of about four. She sits up, realising that visiting hour is here, scratches her head, rolls onto all fours and pushes past me.

Then there are gorillas all around. This is the Sabyinyo group, a family of about eight. The chief is the silver­back Guhonda, who at nearly 35 stone is the largest mountain gorilla ever recorded, which means he is the largest gorilla in the world. (How do they weigh them?) He is also the oldest at 43 — the n ­ atural life­span of gorillas is about 40. Perhaps he owes his longevity to his laziness, which has earned him the nickname ‘Sleeps-a-lot’.

He is an amazingly powerful presence, sitting up above us in a hammock he has made of bent b ­ ranches, eating leaves and farting loudly. The digestive n ­ oises all around us are incredible, as is the smell, which is pungent but not horrible.

Each gorilla family may be visited for one hour per day.

The rest of the time they can get on with life unharassed

One of the trackers beckons us on to where a scenario is playing out between a younger silverback, son of Guhonda, and a female. These intrigues have to be kept secret since Guhonda would go ape if he knew. Suddenly they are mating. Our group goes to photograph them, click click click. It doesn’t seem right.

But it was an extraordinary hour. As well as the tryst we saw toddlers playfighting, a mother handling a baby, a show of rage from Guhonda when our group got too invasive. He stood up, shouted something, and smashed down two small trees. It was terrifying.

Well, probably it sucks to have a group of humans following your family and manically taking ­photos.

Perhaps Beckham feels the same way. But just as Rwanda depends on the gorillas for tourists, the gorillas need tourists for their survival. Their protection is ensured by their value. In a country riddled with impossible conundrums, it’s just another.

For information on Virunga Lodge and travelling with Volcanoes Safaris, see www.volcanoessafaris.com Victoria flew with Kenya Airways.

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GLOBE T ROT T I NG

Stay in the picture On location with James Bond, sipping tea with the Middletons — our latest travel favourites

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1. Das Central, Austria It’s not a Bond film without a snow scene and Sam Mendes’s choice of location for Spectre is hard to beat. central-soelden.at/en 2. Mosaic Palais Aziza, Morocco Away from the manic energy of the Marrakech medina the Palmerie is the perfect place for a hotel. This elegant spot should be in your address book for instant relaxation. mosaicpalaisaziza.com

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3. The Goring, London Happy 150th birthday to the Goring. A favourite of Mrs T and the Middletons, it’s had a facelift but remains a classic. thegoring.com 4. Mandarin Oriental, Bodrum Bodrum in Turkey is the new St-Tropez. Not convinced? Next to the pool of the MO is the perfect spot to research this pressing issue. mandarinoriental.com/bodrum

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O N E T O WA T C H

PE RV E R SE TA LEN T

Like a lot of the most interesting work now, Benedikt Hipp’s paintings are a fusion between figuration and abstraction. There’s a lot of strange ornamentation on the figures and a kind of dark surrealist threatening space. They are also fairly perverse, so you have all the ingredients of success!

I first met Benedikt when he was my student at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich ten years ago. He was an unusually gifted tactile painter. Painting is, unfortunately, like singing and dancing, dependent on talent. That’s why it’s often under attack, because it’s not democratic. Benedikt was just very capable and clearly talented. As a painter, you’ve got to have some talent, you’ve got to have ability. You’ve only got to look at Mondrian’s early work, the windmills and so on, to see what a gifted painter he was. But you can give them a ­philosophical grounding, which is the way I teach… so that the painting gets tougher, and intellectually loaded rather than just being something about ­facility.

Like me, Benedikt has had a child so that of course slows you down. I often say to people, ‘You can forget your career,’ but we do survive these things, and so we should, and we shouldn’t give up these delights of life. I’ve noticed that he’s shown from time to time, but never broken out internationally — I believe he has the capacity to do it.

Benedikt’s not the kind of person who would put himself about enough. He has a family, he can’t just go and live in ­L ondon or go to Berlin, he has to think about his domestic situation and its needs, he has to prioritise the needs of his family. But his work has the dark, almost comic strangeness to make it quite fashionable right now, because that kind of funky figurative painting is quite in vogue.

Deformity is the order of the day, like it was in the 1920s and 1930s.

The first model was Salvador Dalí, and other artists have followed on, using what we might loosely describe as props — identity props of one kind or

courtesy: galerie kadel willborn, düsseldorf and the artist / photo: max reitmeier

Sean Scully introduces his fellow artist Benedikt Hipp

‘App for Replacement Characters III’, Benedikt Hipp, 2015

another — to put their image out there. Benedikt hasn’t done that. He’s a quiet person, and selfeffacing in some ways, so it will be a slow burn.

I think any advice I was going to give him, I’ve given to him in bucketfuls when I was teaching him. What I said to him was that you have to look after your art, but I think that it’s very difficult for serious artists, when they come through slowly. It’s not media-friendly, being a serious artist, it does take a long time, but that’s the order of things, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I think he’s got the love of his craft, and the integrity, seriousness and subject matter, to work for a lifetime, and at some point I’m sure it’s going to work out.

Benedikt Hipp’s solo show is at the Wilhelm Hack Museum, Ludwigshafen, from 14 May to 16 August, www.wilhelmhack.museum.

Sean ­S cully’s project Land Sea will be in the Palazzo Falier at the 2015 Venice Biennale

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