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The new
normal
Its Trump,
says Rod Liddle.
It cant be,
says Nick Cohen

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O
ne of the stated objectives of this
weeks brief strike by prison officers
was to publicise the dire conditions
in many of our jails. In this regard, as in
many others, it was a failure. The strike trig-
gered discussions as to whether it was legal
(it wasnt, the High Court ruled) and ques-
tions about how exactly it helped prison
safety to abandon the wings to the inmates
for the day.
But there is all too little awareness of or
concern about the increasingly desperate liv-
ing conditions of those sentenced to spend
time at Her Majestys pleasure. Order seems
to be breaking down. In the past year there
have been 625 serious assaults by prisoners
on prison staff up 30 per cent on the pre-
vious year plus six homicides and 2,197
serious assaults against fellow inmates.
When schools, hospitals and trains dete-
riorate, we notice because we can see what
is happening. All we tend to hear about pris-
ons are dry statistics. Dry, but still shocking.
Since 1993 the prison population has almost
doubled to 85,000. Given how much crime is
committed by a handful of prolific criminals,
there is a strong argument for using prison to
protect us from the worst offenders. But that
should not blind us to the conditions behind
prison walls. While the number of inmates
has risen, the number of prison officers has
plummeted down by a quarter in the past
six years. Violent incidents have more than
doubled over the same period.
You dont have to be a liberal extremist
opposed to incarceration to see how wrong
this is. If safety is so badly compromised, if
about half of adult prisoners are re-convicted
within a year of release, then prisons are not
working. And it is the poorest members of
society who have to put up with recidivist
thugs and drug-dealers prowling their neigh-
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
established 1828
Jail break
bourhoods. Those with high fences, burglar
alarms and CCTV need not worry as much.
This is a crisis which demands a debate.
First, just how many criminals should we be
incarcerating and what results should we
demand of prisons? If we do decide as a soci-
ety that we want so many people in jail, then
the costs must be met head-on. Over the past
two decades governments of all colours have
been increasing sentences to satisfy public
demands, yet they have failed to provide for
the consequences. That cannot carry on.
Much more, for instance, should be done
to educate prisoners and prepare them for
employment when they have served their time
including the temporary release to part-
If current trends continue,
the risk is of a mass
riot or a terrorist event
time jobs of those in open conditions. That
means more investment and, yes, some risk;
but the results will be quickly measurable.
Then there are challenges from tech-
nology. In April, security cameras caught a
drone delivering drugs and mobile phones
through an open window at Wandsworth
Prison. Inmates now smuggle thumb-sized
mobile phones into jail up their backsides.
These are freely for sale online under the
name Beat the Boss: Boss being the body
orifice security scanner designed to detect
concealed metal objects.
Synthetic drugs such as Black Mamba
and Spice are also on the rise; they are
far harder to test for than marijuana and
cocaine, and their use has undoubtedly con-
tributed to increased levels of violence.
If current trends continue a justice
system quick to incarcerate; new threats and
challenges; a government that wont fund
prisons properly then it is easy to see
what lies ahead. Another mass riot like that
at Strangeways in 1990, or perhaps a terrorist
event hardly unthinkable, given how many
Islamic fundamentalists are now locked up.
At the start of the year, David Camer-
on gave a speech about prisons the first
by a prime minister for more than 20 years.
He was following the lead of Michael Gove,
the former justice secretary, who was ask-
ing good questions that discomfit Conserva-
tives: does prison work? Are prisons places
of redemption and hope? Does the taxpayer
really get value from a system where it costs
as much as the school fees at Eton to lock
someone up? At the moment we warehouse
criminals, often in rundown Victorian build-
ings, rather than reform them. As the former
chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick has
said: It is hard to imagine anything less like-
ly to rehabilitate prisoners than days spent
lying on their bunks in squalid cells watch-
ing daytime TV.
In the governments recent white paper
on prisons, there is at least the recognition
that things have got out of hand and the
promise of the biggest overhaul of the sys-
tem in a generation. Liz Truss, the Justice
Secretary, has made funding available for
prison officers to use body-worn cameras.
But prison safety cannot be dealt with incre-
mentally over the next four or five years. It
is too urgent for that.
Theresa May, who was one of the long-
est serving home secretaries, knows this area
well. She is aware that prison reform is no
vote-winner; but she also knows the risks
of allowing these problems to fester. While
much of her time will be taken up with Brex-
it, she should prioritise prisons before they
deliver the first real crisis of her premiership.
5
 The view from Texas, p32

A new Russian hero, p23

The man who messed up
the Middle East, p41

THE WEEK BOOKS & ARTS

5 Leading article 14 The new normal CHRISTMAS BOOKS II
9 Portrait of the Week Trump has sensed a paradigm shift. 38 Books of the year
So did Theresa May 41 Andrew Lycett
11 Diary Nobody knows anything Rod Liddle
Gerard Baker The Man Who Created the Middle
15 Which side are you on? East, by Christopher Simon Sykes
12 Politics Hammonds dilemma A moral test for conservatives
James Forsyth 42 Marcus Berkmann
Nick Cohen on Christmas stocking fillers
13 The Spectators Notes The Brexit 16 Trumps inside man Keith Miller on first novels
memo, Trump and O-level grammar On vice-president Mike Pence
Charles Moore 43 Simon Heffer Revolution,
Patrick Allitt by Peter Ackroyd
17 Mary Wakefield 18 The Breitbart conspiracy
My husbands gay affair 44 Kate Webb Autumn, by Ali Smith
On Trump counsellor Steve Bannon
20 Barometer Walls, elections, Freddy Gray 45 William Cook Reality is Not
US immigrants and internships What It Seems, by Carlo Rovelli
20 Italys Brexit moment Sara Wheeler White Mountain,
24 From the archive German bankers The EUs next referendum trauma by Robert Twigger
27 Ancient and modern Nicholas Farrell
46 Rhian Edwards Pied Margot;
Thucydides on Trump 23 Moscow rules Three (The Reckoning); Five
28 James Delingpole We won! Trump fans and TV hucksters (Jocale): a poem in three parts
Owen Matthews
31 Letters Mob rule; the special 47 Peter Parker Thomas Hardy:
relationship; terms of address 24 London notebook Half a Londoner, by Mark Ford
Glitter and prizes
32 Any other business Oil men on Evgeny Lebedev 48 Geoffrey Wheatcroft
Trump; the 747; Leonard Cohen Remembering Eric Christiansen
Martin Vander Weyer 27 The perfect mismatch
Whats wrong with dating apps
Ariane Sherine

Cover by Morten Morland. Drawings by Michael Heath, Castro, Phil Disley, Nick Newman, Paul Wood, Adam Singleton, RGJ, Weef, Grizelda, Steve Way and Bernie.
www.spectator.co.uk To subscribe to The Spectator for 111 a year, turn to page 70 Editorial and advertising The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP,
Tel: 020 7961 0200, Fax: 020 7681 3773, Email: editor@spectator.co.uk (editorial); letters@spectator.co.uk (for publication); advertising@spectator.co.uk (advertising);
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Distributor COMAG Specialist, Tavistock Works, Tavistock Road, West Drayton, Middlesex UB7 7QX Vol 332; no 9821 The Spectator (1828) Ltd.
ISSN 0038-6952 The Spectator is published weekly by The Spectator (1828) Ltd at 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP
Editor: Fraser Nelson

6 the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk

 The delights of Ardizzone, p56

Is she really going out with him?, p27

Sticking up for stucco, p54

LIFE
ARTS SPECIAL LIFE Its a rare political leader who
50 Charles Foster 69 High life Taki isnt known to be homosexual
Where the wild things are Low life Jeremy Clarke
by someone or other
52 Drawing Is this newly discovered 70 Real life Melissa Kite Mary Wakefield, p17
Van Gogh sketchbook authentic? 71 Long life Alexander Chancellor
Martin Gayford
73 Wild life Aidan Hartley When my cancer was first
54 Architecture In defence of stucco Bridge Susanna Gross diagnosed, my brother had invited
Laura Freeman
me out for a long walk. So now
56 Exhibitions AND FINALLY . . . it was my turn to invite him out
Ardizzone: A Retrospective 64 Notes on National Hunt racing Jeremy Clarke, p69
Melanie McDonagh Camilla Swift
58 Photography 74 Chess Raymond Keene By exploiting the medias
The woman who invented the selfie Competition Lucy Vickery virtue-signalling reflex,
Bob Colacello
75 Crossword Columba Trump found the thermal exhaust
59 Opera port on the liberal Death Star
Lulu; Simplicius Simplicissimus 76 Status anxiety Toby Young
Battle for Britain Michael Heath Rory Sutherland, p77
Michael Tanner
60 Theatre Lazarus; Bits of Me 77 The Wiki Man Rory Sutherland
Are Falling Apart Your problems solved
Lloyd Evans Mary Killen

61 Cinema Indignation 78 Drink Bruce Anderson

Deborah Ross Mind your language
Dot Wordsworth
62 Television James Walton
Radio Kate Chisholm

CONTRIBUTORS
Owen Matthews is
a contributing editor to
Newsweek; he used to head its
Moscow bureau, and returns to
the city on p. 23.
Freddy Gray, who writes
about Steve Bannon and
the Breitbart phenomenon
on p. 18, is The Spectators
deputy editor and a former
literary editor of the
American Conservative.
Michela Wrong, who picks
her books of the year on p. 38,
is the author of Its Our Turn
to Eat, Borderlines and In the
Footsteps of Mr Kurtz.
Andrew Lycett has written
biographies of Rudyard
Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle
and Ian Fleming; he considers
Mark Sykes, of Sykes-Picot
fame, on p. 41.
Bob Colacello edited Andy
Warhols Interview magazine
for 12 years, despite his father
having threatened to break
his legs if he went to work for
Warhol. He remembers the
inventor of the selfie on p. 58.

the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 7

 Home
N igel Farage, the caretaker leader
of Ukip, was photographed with a
smiling Donald Trump as the two men held
a meeting at Trump Tower in New York.
Downing Street was furious at suggestions
that Mr Farage might act as a go-between.
Theresa May, the Prime Minister, said at
the Lord Mayors banquet that policies
favouring the common good should protect
everyone from the effects of globalisation.
Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary,
complained of a European collective
whingerama about Mr Trump and decided
not to attend a summit of EU foreign
ministers summoned by Germany; France
and Hungary did not attend either. The
prosecuting counsel in the trial for murder
of Thomas Mair told the court that the
accused repeatedly shouted Britain First
as he shot and stabbed Jo Cox, a Labour
MP, just before the EU referendum.
D ementia, including Alzheimers
disease, overtook heart disease as
the leading cause of death in England
and Wales, accounting for 11.6 per cent
of deaths, two thirds of them women. An
Italian man living in south London was
found guilty of murdering a policeman he
met on a gay dating site and whose body
he tried to dissolve in the bath. Police
said that a 14-year-old girl who claimed
in September to have been abducted
in Oxford was not. A memorial is to be
erected to the six men and a woman killed
when a tram overturned in Croydon.
Someone accidentally sent an email to all
840,000 employees on the NHS internet
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
list; chaos followed when hundreds of
recipients clicked on reply to all.
I ngrid Isgren, Swedens chief prosecutor,
questioned Julian Assange at the
Ecuadorean embassy in London (where
he has lived since 2012) about a rape
allegation. The government obtained a
High Court injunction ordering protesting
prison officers to return to work. Dominic
Chappell, the man who brought BHS for
1, confirmed that he had been arrested on
2 November by HM Revenue and Customs
over an unpaid tax bill of about 500,000.
Unemployment fell to an 11-year low of
4.8 per cent. The rate of inflation, measured
by the Consumer Prices Index, fell from
1 to 0.9 per cent, though a rise had been
expected; the Retail Prices Index remained
at 2 per cent. Google said it was to open a
new headquarters building in London. The
route of the HS2 rail link to Manchester
and Leeds was announced; residents of a
housing estate at Mexborough, which would
be demolished, were displeased.
Abroad
D onald Trump, the president-elect of
America, said that he wanted to expel
or jail two or three million people that
are criminal. He conceded that part of his
wall with Mexico might be fence. He said
future nominees to the Supreme Court
would be pro-life and defenders of the
constitutional right to bear arms. He would
take only $1 of the $400,000 presidential
salary. A week after the election, not all
votes had been counted but an interim
total gave 61,324,576 for Hillary Clinton
and 60,526,852 for Mr Trump. Mr Trump
appointed Reince Priebus to be his chief
of staff and Stephen Bannon, executive
chairman of the Breitbart News Network,
as his chief strategist. Leonard Cohen, the
Canadian singer-songwriter, died aged 82.
A rnaud Danjean, an ally of presidential
election frontrunner Alain Jupp, a
right-wing contender for the presidency of
France, said that France would close the
British border post in Calais. Igor Dodon,
the pro-Russian candidate, won Moldovas
presidential election. Alexei Ulyukayev,
Russias economy minister, was charged
with taking a $2 million bribe. Work began
at Chernobyl in Ukraine to move a cover
345ft tall and 900ft wide over the ruins of
the nuclear reactor there. The Argentine
province of Tierra del Fuego planned a cull
of 100,000 beavers, first introduced in 1946.
I slamic State shot 40 civilians accused of
treachery in besieged Mosul and hung
their bodies on electricity poles, the UN
human rights office reported. Islamic State
said that one of its people set off a bomb
that killed 52 worshippers at the Sufi shrine
of Shah Noorani in Balochistan, Pakistan.
Pakistan said that seven of its soldiers had
been killed by Indian shelling in Kashmir.
The pilot was saved when a Russian Mig-29
fighter jet crashed into the Mediterranean
as it tried to land on the Admiral Kuznetsov
aircraft carrier off Syria. Bombing of
Aleppo resumed. Two people were killed
by a powerful earthquake on the South
Island of New Zealand, which caused much
damage. The moon came its closest to the
Earth since 1948. CSH
9

N obody knows anything. William
Goldmans famous first law of the
movie business that no one can say
before the fact whats going to be a hit
or a flop is our new rule of political
punditry. Pollsters, experts, markets tell
us with scientific certainty whats going to
happen. Then the voters come along and
ruin everything. Brexit. Trump. Ed Balls
and Strictly Come Dancing. Who knew?
As last Tuesday dawned in New York,
the US election was deemed a formality.
Newsrooms had lovingly compiled their
historic First Woman President editions.
The final polls pointed to a clear Hillary
win. And then the actual votes rolled
in, uncannily like Brexit. Clinton was
doing worse than expected where she
needed hefty totals. Trump was doing
better. Just as the UKs big cities voted
Remain, only to be swamped by the
non-urban Leavers, the early clamour of
Clinton victories in Miami, Philadelphia
and Cleveland was drowned out by
the silent roar of smaller towns and
counties in Florida, Pennsylvania and
Ohio. President Trump. Nobody knows
anything.
L ike Brexit, the shock of Trumps
victory was greeted the next
morning with a keening that was taken
up like the call of the muezzin from the
minarets of traditional and social media.
Confirmation of the result came in the
early hours of November 9: thats 11/9
in the US convention, 9/11 in Europe,
and of course the distraught members
of the establishment quickly wrapped
themselves in the symbolism. Much of
New York City stumbled around in the
fog of mourning. The principal of the
school to which a colleague sends his
child sent a note to parents explaining
how the school would lead their children
through their grief. And now when
we most want to weep and mourn, we
must come to work and be a source of
both solace and inspiration to all our
young students, it said. Tom Friedman,
the blowhard, self-anointed intellectual
voice of proper-thinking elites (the New
York Times), went on TV to pronounce
Trumps victory a moral 9/11. The
difference, he said, was that the first 9/11
had been inflicted on us by others. This
one we had inflicted on ourselves. Thus,
60 million Americans were instantly
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Gerard Baker
denounced as moral terrorists. And Trump is
accused of extremist language!
T he media and the educational establish-
ments may have been in mourning
but the markets loved it. The Dow Jones
Industrial Average moved up and kept
moving in its biggest weekly gain since
2011. Interest rates rose sharply as investors
anticipated both rising growth and more
debt and inflation. The Trump agenda is a
curious mix of pro-growth, pro-business
measures infrastructure spending, big tax
low by a motley crowd of deplorables:
Villa Tasca gold cufflinks
Cassandra Goad, 147 Sloane Street, London SW1X 9BZ
Telephone: 020 7730 2202 cassandragoad.com
cuts and alarming anti-growth, anti-
business populism like protectionism and
punitive measures against companies that
ship jobs overseas. The markets have
chosen to bet for now that well enjoy the
former and never get the latter. Well see.
O n Friday, Im invited to Trump Tower
for the inaugural post-election
interview. The man himself lives in the
penthouse up top and descends for his
daily grind, as it were, to the 26th floor.
He sweeps in and greets us, just back
from Washington and a first meeting
with his presidential predecessor. The
helmet of hair is even more golden than
usual, having received a fresh post-
triumphal, presidential burnishing.
Someone once said that Trump is one
of those businessmen who absorbs the
ideas of the last person he spoke to, and
in our conversation, he is clearly eager
to demonstrate that his meeting with
President Obama has woken him up to
the need to be more presidential. Hes at
pains to stress hell govern pragmatically.
He declines politely to say whether he
still wants to imprison Hillary.
O n Monday Im in Washington for
the Wall Street Journals annual
CEO Council, a gathering of corporate
globalists nervously breaking bread
with leading figures from the Trump
transition. Rudy Giuliani is on fine form,
gleefully telling me hes going to be
Secretary of State. We poll a sample of
the nations top chief executives in the
room and discover that 50 per cent of
them voted for Hillary. Just a third voted
for Trump. Nobody knows anything. All
of this mayhem Brexit, Trump, a rising
populist tide shattering the stable world
of our elites reminds me of a moment
from the hit Broadway musical Hamilton
about the life and times of perhaps the
most gifted of the founding fathers,
Alexander Hamilton. As the British
troops surrender at Yorktown to General
George Washington, they play a mournful
rendition of an old drinking song that
captures the improbable enormity of it all
the worlds mightiest empire brought
The World Turned Upside Down.
Gerard Baker is editor in chief of the
Wall Street Journal
11

The economic consequences
of Philip Hammond
W
hat are now called fiscal events UK government approach on the customs
the Budget and the Autumn State-
menthave become the big-
gest dates in the Westminster calendar. The
Chancellor lights up the landscape with polit-
ical pyrotechnics. There are attempts to bribe
prospective voters through tax and spend-
ing changes, a litany of pork-barrel projects
designed to help individual MPs, and fiend-
ishly complicated schemes no one expects.
But with the Treasury under new manage-
ment, this will all change on Wednesday.
Philip Hammond is the least political
Chancellor Britain has had for quite some
time. The two longest-serving incumbents of
recent times, George Osborne and Gordon
Brown, doubled up as electoral strategists
whose fiscal policies were informed, above
all, by political aims. Hammond is different:
he does not see this job as a stepping stone to
another. Addressing Tory MPs recently about
his plans for the Autumn Statement, he men-
tioned Labour only once in more than an hour.
But the limits to his ambition, and his dis-
like of the limelight, shouldnt blind us to his
importance. He has already made it clear
privately that if the economy grinds to a halt
and he needs to introduce a fiscal stimulus,
he would rather embark on an infrastructure
splurge than cut VAT. Hammonds logic is that
with infrastructure spending you have some-
thing left to show for it afterwards whereas
with a VAT cut (Alistair Darlings policy after
the crash) you simply boost consumption.
His new approach raises the question
of how he will deal with the cost-of-living
squeeze which even some of his closest allies
think is coming down the track. If the pounds
fall in value pushes inflation up and wages fail
to follow suit, then disposable incomes will be
hit badly. The just managing classes, whom
Theresa May promised to help, might start to
ask who stole their recovery.
Might this economic pain make voters
turn against Brexit? And might this lead to
pressure for the UK to remain inside both the
single market and the customs union? These
questions are being asked by several pro-
Remain Tory MPs, including some in the gov-
ernment, but it looks unlikely. Theresa May
has promised control over EU immigration,
which is hard to square with single-market
membership. And whats the point of leav-
ing the EU but staying in the customs union?
It would stop the UK doing trade deals with
other, non-EU countries removing one of
the main reasons for quitting. The most likely
12
POLITICS|JAMES FORSYTH
lations such as the cap on bankers bonuses
union is to leave it then try to opt back into it
in various sectors, such as car manufacturing.
Many Brexiteers regard Hammond as
worryingly gloomy. They complain that he
dwells on the negatives of leaving the EU
and fear that his pessimism about the econ-
omy might become a self-fulfilling proph-
ecy. Hammond himself believes that the
most important thing is for him to maintain
his credibility. If he declared everything to
be rosy and the economy then stalled, he
argues, his credibility as Chancellor would
be shot. His friends say that if he asks dif-
ficult questions about Brexit, it doesnt
mean he is trying to block it. It just means
If he is downbeat, it risks giving
the impression that Brexit Britains
prospects are nothing to smile about
hes ensuring things are done properly.
But one thing Hammond should start
doing is talk about the governments options
if there is no exit deal with the EU. He should
make clear that the UK will not be passive
in these circumstances and will enact radical
measures to improve competitiveness if we
are driven back into reliance on World Trade
Organisation rules for our trade with the EU.
The government should, for instance,
say that it will seek a deal to ensure the
right of UK financial institutions to operate
within the single market. But if that cannot
be achieved it will take immediate steps to
make the UK a more attractive place to base
a bank. It will hack away at needless regu-
Are you one of those shy Trump supporters?
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
and scrap the corporation tax surcharge that
banks currently have to pay. And it needs to
get this message out soon, because banks will
start considering whether to relocate parts
of their operations in the new year. These
measures are exactly what the French fear we
will do, so will tend to make a UK-EU deal
on financial services more likely.
Hammond is not a natural cheerleader,
but he needs to be careful that he doesnt
come across as the governments Eeyore.
A chancellor cant create consumer and
business confidence through sheer force
of personality. But if Hammond looks and
sounds permanently downbeat, there is a risk
that he creates the impression that Brexit
Britains long-term prospects are nothing to
smile about. He needs to counter that.
One way would be to emphasise the suc-
cess of the British tech sector. Hammond
recently told Tory backbenchers that both
Bill Gates and Googles Eric Schmidt believe
the UK is ahead of Silicon Valley in develop-
ing both artificial intelligence and the internet
of things. This is an astonishing achievement
and one that Hammond should be shouting
from the rooftops. Coming from him it would
be authentic and a reminder to voters and
international investors of the UK economys
bright medium-term prospects.
Most of the attention in the run-up to next
weeks Autumn Statement will focus on hous-
ing. Hammond, a large part of whose person-
al fortune comes from property development,
is keen to get more homes built; he regards
it as one of the best ways to boost the econ-
omy in the short term and one of the most
important structural changes to be made for
the long term. He will also publish a hous-
ing white paper proposing various changes to
the planning laws. He clearly thinks that the
coalitions efforts to overhaul them in the last
parliament were inadequate.
The UK economy has performed far
better than the Treasury feared since the
Brexit vote. But Hammond will want to keep
in reserve the possibility of a fiscal stimulus
should the economy hit the rocks. So expect
him to present a new set of more flexible
fiscal rules that will let him step in if the
economy needs it. His success or failure as a
Chancellor, will, ultimately, be judged on the
effectiveness of these rules.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/EVENINGBLEND
Your essential daily email

O n a day when much fuss was being
made about false news on the net, it
was amusing to study the Times splash of
Tuesday, greedily repeated by the BBC. It
concerned a leaked memo, prepared for
the Cabinet Office and seen and aided
by senior civil servants. The memo, from a
Deloitte employee, was in fact unsolicited.
It was not a bad summary of why the
governments Brexit plans are confused,
but its status was merely that of journalism
without an outlet. By the use of the single
word leaked, a piece of analysis was
turned into news false news.
A t least two former Spectator figures
understood things about the recent
American contest which eluded most
commentators. The first is our former
proprietor, Conrad Black. Disagreeing
with the anti-Trump conservative
National Review, for which he writes,
Conrad filed a powerful piece at the
time of Trumps nomination: What
the world has witnessed, but has not
recognised it yet, has been a campaign
of genius. He enumerated virtually
every issue where Trump was nearer to
the voters than Democrats, the media
and other Republicans. The second is
Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, nowadays
the Telegraphs international business
editor. In the 1980s, Ambrose wrote
wonderful pieces from central America
for The Spectator, the only British
journalist to predict the electoral defeat
of the Sandinista regime. As editor of
the Sunday Telegraph in 1993, I sent him
as our correspondent to Washington. In
that almost pre-internet time when the
American media were still in thrall to
Washington power, Ambrose was the
first in the entire world to carry through
investigations into the Clinton scandals
in Arkansas and after Sally Perdue,
Whitewater, the death of Vince Foster,
etc. Bill and Hillary were never quite able
to extricate themselves from what he
found out.
A mid all the recent electoral upsets
caused by the global revolt against
the elites, more attention should have
been paid to the Colombian referendum
last month. The people of Colombia were
invited to vote on the peace deal made
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Charles Moore
Not so easy to depict the deplorables,
between the Colombian government and the
Farc rebels. On the ballot paper was what
Latin grammarians call a nonne question:
Do you support the final agreement to end
the conflict and build a lasting peace? Yet
despite this carefully crafted expectation
of a Yes and opinion polls all predicting
one the answer, very narrowly, was No.
The BBC was amazed by the result because
the Yes campaign was backed by a wide
array of politicians both in Colombia and
abroad, including UN Secretary-General
Ban Ki-Moon. It would be helpful in global
media organisations if top executives could
point out to their staff that, nowadays,
the backing of conventional politicians,
especially foreign politicians and of
Mr Ban for any vote in any country on
anything now virtually guarantees its defeat
(see Obamas pro-Remain intervention).
The governing establishments of the whole
western world got ready to hail the deal
with Farc as a model for peace (hence,
presumably, President Santoss recent state
visit to Britain), but the Colombian majority
decided that it let the terrorists literally get
away with murder. In a metaphorical sense,
getting away with murder is what voters no
longer permit their boss classes to do.
W hen, in September, Mrs Clinton
consigned half of Mr Trumps
supporters to what she called the basket
of deplorables, I reminded readers of
how some people grab an insult from
their opponent with pride (see Notes, 24
September). The Iron Lady is a classic
example intended by Red Star newspaper
to mock Margaret Thatcher. I mentioned
the Vermin Club. This was a response to
Aneurin Bevans claim that the Tories were
lower than vermin, and quickly attracted
a large membership among Conservatives
in the late 1940s. A kind reader, Mr Philip
Lewis, has just sent me the clubs badge.
It is a handsome metal square, depicting a
fat, recumbent rat with a long, well-curled
tail, and the single word VERMIN.
who, said Mrs Clinton, include racists,
sexists, homophobes, xenophobes, and
Islamophobes, but perhaps Trump
merchandising can produce an attractive
memorial basket.
I n Northern Ireland recently, I sought
out the Mass times of the local
Church of the Immaculate Conception.
Its website duly listed them, but I was
surprised to find roughly half its web-
page filled with a picture of a young
womans all-but-naked torso and the
invitation to click for more Diva pics
and videos. I couldnt tell whether this
was a viral invasion or an Irish parishs
highly unimmaculate conception of
how to make extra money for its good
causes. When I met the priest, I was about
to ask him, but he looked so young. I
remembered that this is still the Year of
Mercy, and stayed silent.
nofowyouitthenhedukestopped
make I said will you let me ask
what you think you will
and said by heaven
I think blucher and myself can do the
thing do you calculate on any desertions
in bonapartes army i asked not upon
a man he said from the colonel to the
private we may pick up a marshal or two
perhaps do you reckon i enquired on any
support from the french kings troops oh
he said dont mention such fellows no. A
reader sent me the document of which
the above is a part. Candidates were
asked to punctuate, supply the necessary
capitals, and paragraph the passage.
It comes from an English Language
O-level paper of 1953. Examinees are not
allowed to remove the modern GCSE
equivalent from the examination hall, so
I cannot make a direct comparison. But
the difference, between then and now, in
grammatical accomplishment expected
and depth of cultural reference assumed
does not need labouring. The exam also
contains a choice of essay questions.
One is: The application of science to
entertainment has made us lazy. Do you
agree or disagree?
13
 The new normal
Trumps victory is the latest manifestation of an enormous paradigm shift
W
hat was your favourite response
from the liberals to Donald
Trumps victory in the US pres-
idential election? Actress Emma Watson
handing out copies of a Maya Angelou book
to bewildered commuters in New York? Cher
announcing that she wasnt simply leaving the
USA, but Planet Earth too a move some
of us assumed she had made at least 40 years
ago? The hysterical protestors who set fire
to their own shoes because they thought the
said shoes were pro-Trump? The hyperbolic
hatred spewed out towards those who voted
for the Donald, or Matthew Parris suggesting
that maybe this democracy caper has gone
too far, or the teachers telling tearful children
that were all going to die?
Theres just too many to choose from, a
cornucopia of riches, of wailing and fury and
outrage. And yet they still dont quite get it,
the liberals dont get the full import of
what Trumps victory, and this tumultuous
year 2016 in general, means for us all. It pres-
ages an enormous paradigm shift to a post-
liberal future. They are weighty, cumbersome
things, paradigms, and take a lot of shifting.
This one has been at least 20 years in the
making. But once they turn, the course is set,
and you can set fire to as many shoes as you
like it will do no good. In a sense, 2016 is
1968 in reverse.
Theresa May clearly gets this. Gets the
change, the momentum behind the change.
Even before Trumps astonishing and
deserved victory she had grasped, post-
Brexit, that patriotism, long considered a bit
long in the tooth, had made a rather remark-
able comeback: If you are a citizen of the
world, then you are a citizen of nowhere, she
said, to derision from the Guardian. Patriot-
ism, a sense of historic pride in ones nation
state, persuaded a good few Americans to
vote for Trump; it persuaded most of Scot-
land to vote SNP last year. It is, you have to
say, very much alive and well in Russia, and
growing in continental Europe.
It is a corrective to globalisation, though,
not a denial of it. Much of what we are seeing
now and will come to see even more in the
future is not a denial of reality, but an adjust-
ment to it. Our Prime Minister gets this too,
I think. The post-liberal economic world will
have some time for protectionism once again
the very left-wing US film-maker and
writer Michael Moore spoke approvingly of
Trump telling Ford executives in Detroit that
14
ROD LIDDLE
safe spaces in universities where absurd lib-
he would slap a 35 per cent tariff on their cars
if they moved production to Mexico. So the
intelligent parts of the left get it, too.
The economic paradigm shift, away from
the inviolable sanctity of the free market,
long predates Trumps victory, mind. It started
after the financial crisis of 2007. For three dec-
ades, state ownership was considered de trop
not any more. The opinion polls suggest
that there is a huge appetite for nationalising
the railways and the utilities, while even that
old liberal David Cameron (remember him?)
offered to take parts of our steel industry into
public ownership. There is no great wish for a
return to 1973, when even some travel agents
were owned by the state it is, instead, an
Much of what we are seeing now
is not a denial of reality, but
an adjustment to it
adjustment, a tilting of the tiller.
The interesting thing, for me, is the degree
to which social policy will change because
change it certainly will. Those who voted for
Brexit and those who voted for Trump are
often derisively accused of wishing to turn
the clock back to the mid-1950s. But that is
not the case at all. The 1950s was the the-
sis overly authoritarian and conserva-
tive about how people lived their lives, how
children were taught in schools, how people
could express their sexuality. The antithesis
came in the 1960s and early 1970s, with leg-
islation which made divorce easier, increased
welfare, legalised homosexuality, changed for
two generations the way in which teachers
went about their work all or most of this
stuff long overdue.
But as is ever the case with these lumber-
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
ing paradigms, we went too far. The liberalism
of the 1960s has resulted in this decade with
too many broken families and failed, inar-
ticulate, unhappy children. With people who
proudly will say they will not work for a living
because they dont like working and prefer to
be on the dole. With the manifest insanity of
eral shibboleths about race and a ludicrous
multiplicity of gender options must not, under
any condition, be gainsaid. In scores of tenth-
rate universities turning out unemployable
young people with useless degrees in fatuous
subjects. Oh, and so much more. And yet the
imperative now is not to roll back that earlier
legislation. It is to achieve instead a synthesis,
an accommodation, if you like.
Take the issue of homosexual rights and
equality. There is not the remotest desire to
return to a time when gay people were con-
sidered criminal and, further, were the subject
of contempt from the man in the street. The
opinion polls show an enormous majority
favouring equality for homosexuals (a rather
larger majority here than in the States, mind).
But ask people if homosexuality should be
considered the norm, or whether it is per-
fectly OK for gay people to adopt children
then tell them that, further, people who think
it is preferable for children to be raised by a
mummy and a daddy are irredeemable bigots
who shouldnt be allowed to adopt children
themselves, and I suspect you will get a very
different response. Even now, despite the
enormous opprobrium which attends if you
express this view, and the almost impossible
task of expressing this view if you hold pub-
lic office, the electorate is split pretty much
50-50 on gay adoptions. My guess and its
only a guess is that if you put before the
electorate the statement: Children are best
raised in a traditional family, by a mum and a
dad, three quarters would agree. There is also
an aversion to gender and LGBT propaganda
being doled out to young children in school,
especially transgender propaganda. My guess
only a guess again is that people would
in general prefer a greater proportion of NHS
funds be spent on cancer care than gender re-
alignment procedures.
And what of heterosexuals? The last opin-
ion poll I saw (Ipsos-MORI) suggested that
more than 70 per cent of people thought that
marriage should be for life. We marry, or dont
marry, and have children too readily, too eas-
ily and there is plenty of evidence suggest-
ing that children from single-parent families
are prone to greater mental strife, poorer
educational ability and more future jobless-
ness than those from a traditional nuclear
family. Should people have kids if they cant
afford to bring them up without substantial
help from the taxpayer? Much like the issue
of single parents, this was an almost impossi-
ble issue for a politician to raise without being
labelled a bigot. The opinion polls suggest a
majority of voters think people should have
children only when they can afford to provide
for them. All of this stuff is likely to be back
on the agenda now.
Should people who do no work as a con-
sequence of idleness be allowed to live their
entire lives on taxpayers money? An enor-
mous issue and one which arouses fury
particularly among the hardest-working,
poorest-paid of us, for obvious reasons. The
public think they should not be able to get
away with this. If you dont give, you dont get.
And there are more obvious issues, such
as immigration. There is no animus against
the immigrants themselves, except among a
handful of untermensch knuckle-draggers.
Nor a wish to return to the almost pristinely
white 1950s. But more than 70 per cent of the
public think there is too much immigration,
and almost 50 per cent think it should be cut
substantially. And that people who come here
should learn the language pronto and fit in.
Both Donald Trumps victory and the Brexit
result demonstrated the potency of this issue
as does the rise of right-wing populist par-
ties across Europe. I would suggest that it is
an unstoppable force. It is time that the left
got to grips with it. The liberals, of course, can-
not get to grips with it.
Neither Brexit nor Donald Trump brought
about this paradigm shift. They are simply
manifestations of it. The liberal elite (it was
a conservative elite which ran us back in the
1960s, remember; elites rise and fall) may flail
against Trump and Brexit for as long as they
like. But to use a phrase which the liberals
rather like, and use a lot they are begin-
ning to look as if they are on the wrong side
of history.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Hear Rod discuss the new rules of politics.
I predict a long journey
looking for a new job.
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Which side are you on?
The new President is a moral test for the right and its failing
NICK COHEN
T rumps victory sets a test for
conservatives, a test they are failing
with embarrassing ineptitude. They are
making the oldest mistake in politics.
They are carrying on as if nothing has
changed.
In the early 21st century, it was easy
to attack the supposed liberal left.
These alleged liberals were for real
censorship. The white working class
was their enemy. Radical Islam was
the fascism of the time, yet liberals
who thought themselves anti-fascists
accepted that misogyny, prejudice
and hatred of individual rights were
fine, as long as the haters had brown
rather than white skin.
Apparently moral conservative
writers joined the democratic left in
tearing into such double standards. Yet
in the background hung questions they
should never have been allowed to duck.
What does it mean to be a conservative?
What are conservatives for?
Now we have, if not a new fascism, at
least a new nationalist authoritarianism.
But conservative politicians and the
medias claque of Tory talking heads are
unable to oppose it.
Instead they have doubled down
on liberal hypocrisy. Trump incites
his fans to attack reporters. He wants
to open up Americas libel laws to
make it easier for rich men to sue news
organisations that do not treat them
with enough deference. There is even
talk among his supporters of a Trump
presidency sending state inquisitors
into universities to root out academic
bias. Maybe I do not read as widely as
I should. But I have not seen any of
the conservatives who condemn the
Stepford students take on these threats
to free speech. Censorship, it appears, is
deplorable when it is enforced by their
opponents but unremarkable when
enacted by their friends.
The white working class, for whom
they expressed such concern, appear
to be as dispensable as the freedom to
speak and write without punishment.
Why arent our new tribunes of the
proletariat raising their indomitable
voices against Trumps tax plans? They
are nothing more than a swindle, which
will see Trumps household and all
other households in the top 0.1 per cent
receive a cut in their tax bills averaging
$1.1 million.
I am not going to go on about the
attacks on women, Latinos and blacks
lets just say that you cannot deplore
the lefts indulgence of Islamist reaction
if you dont also condemn these. Nor
will I linger on how those who make
so much of their opposition to the
establishment and the elite are falling
over themselves to excuse a nepotistic
and corrupt president-elect, who lets his
son-in-law run his transition team and
refuses to put his investments in a blind
trust. I will not even give you a lecture
Censorship, it appears,
is only deplorable when
enforced by opponents
on how a right that tells us not to get
hysterical about Trumps support for
Putin cant go on to denounce Corbyns
admiration for Russian gangsterism.
The point surely is that conservatives
are trying to have it all ways. On the
one hand, they say they support the
rule of law, freedom of speech, the
independence of the judiciary and the
sovereignty of Parliament. On the other,
they sniff the air like tomcats and sense
the growing power of the radical right.
Rather than deal with accusations of
treachery from their own side, rather
than face the discomfort of breaking
from their herd, they have decided to
become its fellow travellers.
George Orwell provided the clearest
warning against refusing to see the
darkness in your midst. He said to the
left intellectuals who went along with
Stalin: Do remember that dishonesty
and cowardice always have to be paid
for. Dont imagine that for years on end
you can make yourself the bootlicking
propagandist of the Soviet regime and
then suddenly return to mental decency.
Once a whore, always a whore.
The same applies to the bootlicking
apologists for Trump. You have to
choose. Are you radical right or
respectable right? For you surely cant
be both.
15
 Trumps inside man
Veep Mike Pence is the new presidents link to his party
PATRICK ALLITT
L
ets take stock. Donald Trump, until
last week, had never done a govern-
ment job or held an elected office. He
ran for president as a kind of anti-politician,
ignoring the conventional wisdom about how
to win. Amazingly, he won. It was, in its way,
an impressive feat, overturning much conven-
tional wisdom. Still, theres no getting around
the fact that, as president, hes got to be polit-
ical and must surround himself with politi-
cians. Mike Pence, his vice-president, may
turn out to be the most important of the lot.
The two men did not previously know one
another, but have become friends over the
past five months, and recognise each others
merits. They are a study in opposites. Trump
is larger-than-life, tempestuous, never boring;
Pence is mild, methodical, steady and a trifle
dull. Pence is a Tea Party critic of politics-as-
usual, but by comparison with the new chief
he looks like an insider. Even if Trumps team
dismantle parts of the immense federal gov-
ernment, as they intend, theyve still got to
know how to manoeuvre in the Washington
labyrinth. Pence knows his way around.
In last weeks jostling for power, he clear-
ly came out ahead of Chris Christie, the gov-
ernor of New Jersey. Trump almost selected
Christie as his running mate back in July,
before settling for Pence. He gave Christie
the consolation prize of organising the tran-
sition, at a time when hardly anyone thought
there would be a transition. Now that the
impossible has happened, Trump has taken
the suddenly significant job out of Christies
hands and given it to Pence.
Trump may well believe, along with near-
ly everyone, that Christie was to blame for
Bridgegate, the deliberate creation of para-
lysing traffic jams on one of the major bridg-
es from New Jersey to New York to punish
a Democratic town mayor who refused to
endorse Christie for governor in 2013. Two
of Christies aides took responsibility, were
recently convicted and may go to jail.
Pence, by contrast, has an untarnished
personal record and is now in a position to
shape the Trump administration by pushing
his preferred candidates into key positions.
Hes also low-key, patient, and a reconciler.
For example, Trump has had a succession of
rows with Paul Ryan, speaker of the House
of Representatives. Each insulted the other
during the campaign. Pence gets on well
with both men, is already their go-between,
16
and might become the peacemaker. He was
a member of the House of Representatives
for 12 years up to 2012, then governor of his
home state, Indiana, for another four. He has
worked with most of the leading Republicans,
and has a reputation among them for hard
work and ideological purity.
At a time when rumours abound that
Trump is planning a hands-off presidency
its said he will spend a good amount of time
in New York an intriguing question pre-
sents itself: how much else will be devolved to
Pence? Might his duties include running the
American government?
Pence was born in 1959 in the Indiana
town of Columbus, population 45,000, gradu-
ated from a small religious college, attended
law school and made his name as a conserv-
ative radio commentator, once describing
himself as Rush Limbaugh on decaf. Catho-
lic by birth, with Irish ancestors, he became
a born-again Christian in his teens, claiming
that evangelical Protestantism gave him, for
the first time, the chance to develop a per-
sonal relationship with Jesus. He has prom-
ised never to drink alcohol unless his wife
was in the room, and apparently has stuck to
the pledge. He finds the theory of evolution
unconvincing and doubts the human role in
global warming. He favours balanced budg-
ets and a strong defence posture while oppos-
ing abortion, gay rights and sex education. He
supported an Indiana law that would have let
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
business owners deny service to gay people,
but was forced to back away from it under
intense local and national pressure.
His office, the vice-presidency, has been a
mixed bag historically. Often a place where
presidents have mothballed prominent rivals,
it remains nevertheless as the clich goes
just a heartbeat from the presidency. Eight
presidents have died in office, pushing eight
vice-presidents into the Oval Office. Six other
former veeps have advanced to the top job,
sometimes in subsequent elections but once
(Gerald Ford, 1974) when a sitting president
had to resign. Even if the president survives
but is weak or inexperienced, the right vice-
president can play an influential role.
The US constitution says nothing about
the work the vice-president should do, other
than to break deadlocked votes in the Senate
and to preside over the quadrennial work of
the electoral college. In the early days of the
republic, the president was the man with the
most votes, and the vice-president the man
with the second most. George Washingtons
vice-president, John Adams, found he had
nothing to do, and complained in a letter to
his wife that he held the most insignificant
office that ever the invention of man con-
trived or his imagination conceived.
When Adams finally became president in
the election of 1796, however, he was saddled
with Thomas Jefferson, that years runner-
up, even though they belonged to opposite
parties and clashed over all the major issues.
The Twelfth Amendment to the constitution
(1804) changed the rules but further dimin-
ished the prestige of the post.
Things have looked up for vice-presidents
since then. Richard Nixon sat in on President
Eisenhowers cabinet meetings and acted as
his liaison with Congress. When Eisenhow-
er was taken ill on three separate occasions
Nixon ran the cabinet in his absence. Walter
Mondale supervised the Jimmy Carter tran-
sition team in 1976-77 and played a major
role in the Camp David negotiations that cul-
minated in the Israel-Egypt peace treaty of
March 1979. Dick Cheney was a central fig-
ure in the George W. Bush administration,
and Pence may well rival him for influence
and power. Cheney, too, was in charge of the
transition.
The unspoken, but doubtless not un-
thought, reality for Pence is that Trump has
two immense weaknesses. First is his lack of
experience. Its one thing to claim that only a
new broom can sweep clean but its another
to show up, green and credulous, in a city full
of tough janitors. The new president is going
to need a lot of help. Second, Trump is an old
man, already 70, and likely to decline in ener-
gy as the years pass. It may not be long before
Pence, 13 years his junior, comes to seem like
the dynamic half of Washingtons strange
new duo.
Patrick Allitt is a professor of history at
Emory University in Atlanta.

My husbands gay affair with Gove
A
few weeks ago I discovered that
while he should have been focused
on the fight of his life during the
referendum campaign, David Cameron was
instead obsessing over whether or not his
justice secretary, Michael Gove, had had an
affair with my husband, Dom Cummings,
campaign director of Vote Leave.
The story was in the Mail on Sunday, who
eked it out across two consecutive issues. On
week one it kept Dom and Michaels names
under wraps (for ethical reasons, it said) but
revealed the source of the thrilling bit of gos-
sip to be an aide of Camerons called Gavin
Williamson (now Chief Whip). Williamson
had, said the MoS, dashed into No. 10 in the
heat of the bitter EU campaign to deliver
news of the fling to the PM.
Even before I knew Dom was one of the
Brokeback Brexiteers this seemed a very
curious tale. What could have made William-
son so sure? Why did he rush to tell the PM,
in the heat of the campaign? The story was
written as if somehow Williamson thought
a gay romance shed light on the otherwise
inexplicable success of Vote Leave. Perhaps
he imagined they were all fuelled by homo-
erotic passion in the manner of the Spartans.
The following week the MoS, recovered
from its bout of ethics, printed the names
of the secret lovers and I felt an odd mix of
emotions. First sadness, that it wasnt a more
exciting revelation, then a glimmer of under-
standing, followed by a feeling of anxious
shame which has stayed with me ever since.
The understanding was about what might
have been Williamsons motive. Not then,
nor now, does David Cameron accept that
his pal Gove a lifelong Eurosceptic
chose to campaign for Leave for the sake of
his country. Camerons position on the mat-
ter, Ive heard it said, is simply that Gove
chose the wrong DC, Dominic C over David
C, and that for this crime he will be forever
dead to Dave. So what if Williamson, in the
manner of all successful courtiers, was simply
telling his leader what he thought he wanted
to hear: an explanation as to how the wrong
DC could ever be preferred? This all makes
Camerons No. 10 sound like teenage group
chat on WhatsApp. If the young knew what
really makes a modern Tory tick, they might
identify with them more.
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
MARY WAKEFIELD
But though he (allegedly) spread lies
about my husband, though he conjured imag-
es I will never quite recover from, I cant be
too cross with this Gavin and heres where
the shame comes in. Over the past few dec-
ades I must have heard many dozens of sto-
ries about politicians or actors being secretly
gay. Magazines, newspapers, the internet are
full of them. Gay rumours follow like vapour
trails in the wake of any star: in politics, sport,
Hollywood, and Ive never before paused for
long enough to wonder if theyre nonsense.
Ive thought: no smoke without some roman-
Camerons position on the matter,
Ive heard it said, is simply that
Gove chose the wrong DC
tic spark, and more often than not passed
them on.
But what if almost all of the endless
insider stories about secretly gay celebs are
as bogus as the Dom/Gove story?
Its a rare political leader who isnt
known to be homosexual by someone or
other excepting Cameron, for some rea-
son, who perhaps doesnt have the imagina-
tion to be gay.
Theres many wholl swear Obamas mar-
riage is a sham, and that he was a frequent
visitor to gay saunas in his Chicago days.
Hes believed, among the sorts who think
him a secret Muslim, to have had a fling with
the very straight, very married mayor of Chi-
cago, Rahm Emanuel.
I interviewed the late fat chef Clarissa
Dickson Wright a few years before she died,
Is it gender neutral?
and she told me that she believed Tony Blair
to have had gay relationships. They moved
in the same circles at the Bar in the 1970s,
she claimed, and his nickname was Miran-
da. Why? Because of The Tempest you
know, when Miranda says: How beaute-
ous mankind is! O brave new world,/ That
has such people in t. It didnt previously
occur to me, even through the Wendi Deng
affair, that this might be entirely untrue.
And what of all the whispering about
the supposedly secret sexuality of William
Hague, which eventually forced an embar-
rassing and sincere public denial? I spent
my formative years in journalism as a gossip
columnist and barely a month went by with-
out my editor including a little paragraph
on Hagues friendship with Seb Coe. Why
did they practise judo so often, we wondered
pathetically in print.
Its all just utter cobblers, isnt it? Is Tom
Cruise straight? Is George Clooneys mar-
riage for real? What about John Travolta?
Whats behind this great yearning need of
ours for famous men and women to be gay?
Theres certainly nothing moral about all
this fictitious outing. Its not that were all
intent on a healthy flinging open of all the
closet doors because what would be the
need? There was a time when homosexual
stars laid low for fear of suffering profession-
ally; perhaps some politicians still do. But in
2016, in the West, all and any sexuality is
increasingly a-OK. In the world of fashion
and music, its decidedly cooler for a young
star to be pansexual than narrow-mindedly
straight.
I suspect the answer is that though our
culture has moved on, our monkey minds
havent. Though we think of ourselves as non-
judgmental, it still seems excitingly transgres-
sive to us that someone might be gay. If this
were just about illicit sex or infidelity, thered
be rumours cooked up about settled gay cou-
ples having straight affairs, perhaps a secret
affair between Elton John and Lady Gaga for
instance, but no one has any interest in that.
The great gay rumour mill churns on. Just
this week a great friend of mine insisted to me
that Hillary Clinton is a lesbian. He knows, he
says, really knows it for a fact. Everyone does.
Thanks to Gavin Williamson, instead of pass-
ing on the news, Ive bet him 100 its rubbish.
17
 The Breitbart conspiracy
Is Steve Bannon really pulling the strings in Team Trump?
FREDDY GRAY
D
onald J. Trump always keeps every-
one guessing. Is the president-elect
ditching his crazy act in order to bring
in a conventional Republican government?
Or ditching conventional Republican govern-
ment in order to bring in his crazy act? Is he
bringing together the anti-politics outsiders
and the Washington insiders? Or is he play-
ing them against each other? Are we witness-
ing the usual scramble for power that accom-
panies every incoming administration? Or is
the Trump transition a new kind of shambles?
The answer to all these questions is yes,
probably. Take the role of Steve Bannon,
executive chairman of the right-wing website
Breitbart (aka Trump Pravda), who served
as the Donalds campaign manager in the
run-up to the election. Bannon, a former US
navy officer, has reportedly described himself
as a Leninist who wants to tear down the sys-
tem. The fear, among the anti-Trump press at
any rate, was that he would be rewarded with
the chief of staff job in the new administra-
tion. It came as something of a relief on Sun-
day, then, when the news broke that Trump
had instead appointed Reince Priebus, chair-
man of the Republican National Committee,
to be his main man in the White House.
For those craving a return to normality,
however, the press release was the opposite
of satisfying: Trump for President CEO Ste-
phen K. Bannon will serve as Chief Strategist
and Senior Counselor to the President and
Republican National Committee Chairman
Reince Priebus will serve as White House
Chief of Staff. Bannon and Priebus would
be equal partners, it said.
Nobody could fail to notice the order in
which the two posts were revealed. Again
the announcement threw up more questions
than it answered. Was Team Trump soften-
ing the blow to Bannons ego emphasising
his importance as consigliere when he had in
fact missed out? Was Bannon being pushed
aside? Or was he still pulling the strings? Had
he composed the statement himself? It cer-
tainly read like a Breitbart PR declaration.
The media, predictably enough, had a
sense of humour failure and freaked out.
Bannon is an anti-Semite and a white nation-
alist, screamed the hacks. The accusations
were based on the editorial tone of Breit-
bart, which often flirts with racial politics
in a mischievous way, as well as an allega-
tion made by one of Bannons ex-wives in a
18
divorce court. Mary Louise Piccard (hardly a
neutral source) claimed her former husband
doesnt like Jews and doesnt like the way real news operation. That is what most web
they raise their kids to be whiney brats.
Right-wingers rallied to Bannons defence.
Newt Gingrich, a Grand Old Party stalwart
and now Trump crony, countered by saying
Bannon couldnt hate Jews because he had
worked in Hollywood and for Goldman
Sachs, which prompted a lot of chortling
about what a bigot Newt must be.
Others pointed out that Bannon is a
fierce supporter of Israel. On Breitbart.com,
of all places, the Democrat Alan Dershowitz
came out to say that Bannon has very good
relationships with individual Jews.
As if all that werent silly enough, vari-
ous websites started posting articles listing
Breitbarts most offensive articles, pretend-
ing these were the direct fruits of Bannons
evil mind and therefore proof that the White
House was being taken over by a Nazi. Select-
ed headlines included such gems as Would
You Rather Your Child had Feminism or
Cancer? and Birth Control Makes Women
Crazy and Unattractive. The hundreds of
thousands of people being offended on the
internet are making fools of themselves. They
seem pathologically incapable of realising
that they have fallen for the Breitbart trick,
which is to wind them up.
Breitbart isnt anti-Semitic or white
nationalist; it isnt sincere enough for that.
Andrew Breitbart, the sites late founder, was
brought up in the Jewish faith and was a pas-
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
sionate pro-Israeli. Its true that the website
is now connected to the alt-right, a growing
web-based movement of freaks and geeks
who dabble in misogyny and racial antago-
nism, only to plead irony when called out.
Anybody who isnt with them is a libtard
liberal retard or a cuckservative a
cuckold conservative. Breitbart is at the PC
end of this politically incorrect spectrum: alt-
right lite, if you like. Most of its contributors
are harmless provocateurs, such as The Spec-
tators own James Delingpole (see his humble
insights into the age of Trump on page 28).
Breitbart surfs the waves of internet outrage
in pursuit of clicks, while pretending to be a
journalism is about: but Breitbart is on the
vice-signalling right rather than the virtue-
signalling left. In other words, its not worth
taking seriously.
Thats not to say Bannon is without real
political ambitions. He is, Im told, a true
believer although what he truly believes
is not altogether clear. Hes not a libertarian
as such. But he wants to smash international
governance, corporatism and the centralised
state wherever he finds it. He believes in a
global tea party movement against globalism
and likes to lecture people about crony cap-
italism. In interviews he identifies himself
as a working-class Catholic boy a classic
Reagan Democrat and says he is a defend-
er of Judeo-Christian values and traditional
marriage. Hes been divorced three times. He
swears a lot. Yet he doesnt want Breitbart to
publish saucy images. He wants to expose the
dark money secrets of the Clintons, but Breit-
bart never reveals where its considerable
funding comes from. Hes apparently some-
times charming as well as being a nasty thug.
Hes always trying to make a star out of new
recruits before he totally screws them over
with a shitty work life and a long debilitat-
ing contract, claims one DC-based journalist.
On the other hand, a seemingly jovial guy.
Whats certain is that long before Trump,
Bannon had been trying to hitch Breitbarts
fortunes to various anti-establishment politi-
cians on the right. He attempted to jump on
the Sarah Palin phenomenon after the 2008
election. That petered out. He set up Breit-
bart UK in London and forged an alliance
with Nigel Farage and Ukip ahead of last
years general election. That went awry. In
Trump, he has found a winner and, perhaps
the ultimate prize, a senior role in the new US
government. Breitbart France is coming soon,
presumably to help Marine Le Pen win the
presidential election next year.
But Bannon cant be that important. Not
many of the 60 million people who voted for
Donald Trump would have done so because
they read Breitbart or because they share
Bannons revolutionary worldview. They just
wanted change and better prospects. Is Ban-
non on the right side of history? A lucky jack-
al? Or a bit-part in the greater Trump farce?
The answer on all counts is yes, probably.
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 BAROMETER
Long divisions
Donald Trump reaffirmed his plan for a
border wall between the US and Mexico,
but said parts might end up as a fence. Who
has the longest, highest barriers?
India-Bangladesh India is still building
a 2,545-mile three-metre-high barrier of
barbed wire and concrete.
Morocco-Western Sahara Separated
by a 1,700-mile sand berm, typically two
metres high, reinforced with land mines.
US-Mexico 580 miles of fence already
exist along the 1,950-mile border.
Israel-Palestinian territories 440-mile
barrier: part concrete wall, part barbed wire.
Hungary-Serbia To thwart migration
there is a 110-mile, four-metre-high fence.
Catholic and Protestant Belfast
25-mile long peace lines up to 8.5 metres
high still separate some communities.
Unpopular winners
Hillary Clinton lost the US presidential
election despite winning the popular vote.
Other elections where the loser won more
individual votes than the winner:
2000 Al Gore (51 million) lost to George
W. Bush (50.5 million) by 266 votes to 271
in the electoral college.
1888 Democrat Grover Cleveland
(5.5 million) lost to Republican Benjamin
Harrison (5.4 million) by 168 to 233.
1876 Democrat Samuel J. Tilden
(4.3 million) lost to Republican Rutherford
B. Hayes (4 million) by 184 to 185, after
20 electoral college votes were disputed.
Coming to America
Where did the million people who
emigrated to the USA in 2014 come from?
Mexico...... 133,000 Cuba........... 46,500
India ............ 74,500 Dominican
China ........... 72,500 Republic .... 44,600
Philippines .. 48,600 Vietnam ..... 29,800
Source: Department of Homeland Security
Labouring in vain
Alan Milburn, head of the Social Mobility
Commission, wants a ban on unpaid work-
experience placements lasting more than
four weeks, saying only the children of
the better-off benefit. But a study of US
students suggests unpaid internships during
college dont help you to get a job anyway:
No internship: 35 per cent found a job at
graduation, average salary $37,100
Unpaid internship: 37 per cent found a
job, average salary $35,700
Paid internship: 63 per cent found a job,
average salary $51,900
Source: National Association of Colleges
and Employers
20
Italys Brexit moment
Unelected prime minister Matteo Renzi
is losing his own referendum campaign
NICHOLAS FARRELL
T
hough he is a big fan of the Europe-
an Union, Barack Obama brings bad
karma to it. So perhaps he should not
have chosen Greece and Germany, the two
countries which illustrate so poignantly why
the euro is doomed, for his last foreign tour.
His farewell visit is, if not a kiss of death,
surely a bad omen for the EU and most imme-
diately for one of those present in Berlin to
bid him goodbye: Italys prime minister, Mat-
teo Renzi, who has called an all-important
referendum on constitutional reform for
4 December. If he loses, as looks ever more
likely, it could cause a run on Italys sclerotic
banks that could engulf the eurozone.
Obama was certainly defying the gods
last month when he gave his last state dinner
at the White House a swirl of Dolce Vita
diplomacy, CNN called it in honour of the
41-year-old Renzi. The Italian prime minister,
who is the leader of Italys former communist
Instability is rising rapidly
once again and all eyes are
on the referendum result
party and the third unelected leader of this
troubled country in five years, was praised by
Obama as bold and progressive. The out-
going President was generous enough to add:
I am rooting for [his] success. Renzi might
ask David Cameron how that kind of support
tends to work out.
Ten days later, a massive earthquake
destroyed the Basilica of San Benedetto in
Norcia, near Perugia, built on the site where
St Benedict, patron saint of Europe, was born
in about AD 480.
So, as Italy gets ready to vote, the omens
are not looking good for Renzi, whose motor-
mouth oratory about tough but progressive
reform to drag Italys economy out of the
mire earned him the nickname Il Rottama-
tore (demolition man) and catapulted him
from being mayor of Florence to prime min-
ister in February 2014 without so much as a
general election.
Nor are the opinion polls the modern
equivalents of haruspicy (as practised on ani-
mal entrails in Ancient Rome) looking
much better. These show the no vote in the
referendum, which is constitutionally bind-
ing, consistently ahead by three or four points.
They also show that up to a third of Italians
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
have yet to decide. This is hardly surprising:
only one in five, according to other polls,
understands what the referendum is about.
And who can blame them? For here is the
byzantine question they are called to answer
with either a s or a no: Do you approve
the text of the Constitutional Law concern-
ing dispositions for the overcoming of equal
bicameralism, the reduction of the number
of parliamentarians, the containment of the
running costs of the institutions, the suppres-
sion of the National Economic and Labour
Council and the review of Title V of Part II
of the Constitution approved by Parliament
and published in Gazzetta ufficiale n.88 on
15 April 2016?
In essence, Renzi wants to curtail the pow-
ers of the upper house, the senate, and to cut
the number of senators who would no
longer be elected, but appointed by regional
governments from 315 to 100. If he suc-
ceeds, his economic reforms should be easier
to pass.
The two houses of parliament currently
have equal power which, according to Renzi,
causes huge delay, hobbles decisive law-mak-
ing and causes weak government. In fact,
Italy spews out more laws than the British,
American, French and German governments,
many of them bad. What it needs is fewer,
better laws, and a decent judicial system to
enforce them, not the abysmally slow, politi-
cised and inconclusive one it is cursed with.
The reason Italy has had 60-odd govern-
ments in the past 70 years all coalitions
is not thanks to its senate but to its electoral
and party systems, which make it impossible
for one party to win a majority of the seats.
The referendum proposes many other
things, including electoral reform. The idea
is a version of proportional representation
which awards bonus seats to any party that
gets 40 per cent or more of the popular vote
right away or in a run-off between the two
most popular parties. The winning party will
thus be guaranteed 340 seats in the lower
house, an impregnable majority.
Only twice since the war has a single party
got more than 40 per cent in a general elec-
tion, in 1948 and 1953.
A dmittedly, Renzis Democratic party is
ahead in polls when Italians are asked
which party they would vote for in a gener-
al election, at roughly 30 per cent, but only
slightly ahead of the populist Five Star Move-
ment that was founded by the comedian and
internet comedian Beppe Grillo and whose
slogan is Vaffa! (fuck off) to more or less
everything, including the euro but excluding
wind farms.
Grillo has dismissed the referendum ques-
tion as incomprensibile. His movement and
most of what remains of media tycoon Ber-
lusconis party, Forza Italia, will vote no in
the referendum. So too will the right-wing
populist Northern League party, which also
wants Italy out of the euro and illegal immi-
grants out of Italy. On top of that will be a sig-
nificant tranche of Renzis own party.
So this has become a referendum not just
on constitutional reform but on Renzi and
if not on Italian membership of the EU, cer-
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She wants to be an MP so she
can be on Strictly Come Dancing.
tainly on the euro. The Brexit vote, the tri-
umph of Trump and the populist spring tide
sweeping Europe are sure to convince many
Italians to vote against Renzi.
The Italian economy, meanwhile which
Renzi boasted he would sort out is a pris-
oner of the euro and remains mired in reces-
sion. Italys GDP has shrunk by 8 per cent
since 2008 while Britains, for example, has
grown by 8.2 per cent. Italys unemployment
rate remains stuck at around 12 per cent
(youth unemployment is nearly 40 per cent).
Public debt keeps growing and is now 135 per
cent of GDP the third highest in the world
by that measure. Italys banks including
Monte dei Paschi di Siena, the worlds oldest,
founded in 1472 are in deep trouble. They
are badly undercapitalised and hold 360 bil-
lion of bad loans the equivalent roughly of
a fifth of Italys GDP.
In short, things are hotting up. What fin-
ished Berlusconi was not bunga bunga but
the spread between Italian government bond
yields and German ones, which had soared
into the meltdown zone. The spread is rising
rapidly once again and all eyes are on the ref-
erendum result. The more the spread rises, the
more the interest Italy has to pay on its strato-
spheric public debt. If Renzi loses and resigns,
there will be even more political instability in
Italy than normal. Even if he does not, there
probably will be anyway.
Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel prize-winning
economist and former adviser to Bill Clinton,
recently warned that the eurozone is heading
for a cataclysmic event. Asked if the Italian
referendum could be it, he replied: That is a
big risk. He said the only solution, however,
was to cancel the referendum.
Last week, while filming a referendum
video, Renzi took down the EU flags that for
years have stood alongside the Italian flags
behind the prime ministerial desk at Palazzo
Chigi. Perhaps he too is getting a little super-
stitious. But win or lose on 4 December,
there is big trouble ahead for Italy and for
the EU.
The Spectator pocket diary is
bound in soft red goatskin leather
Set with a week to view, the
diary features a wealth of useful
information as well as contributions
by regular Spectator writers and
artists, including cartoons and a
pocket pub quiz by Mark Mason.
21.50 for subscribers.
25.50 for non-subscribers.
21
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 Moscow rules
Encounters with Trump fans and TV hucksters
in Russias increasingly glossy capital
OWEN MATTHEWS
Moscow
T
o the Union Jack pub on Potapovs-
ky Lane for a US election night party.
The jolly Muscovite Trump support-
ers who organised the event had gone to
the effort of providing girls with tight-fitting
Trump-Pence T-shirts and Make America
Great Again baseball caps. In pride of place
beside the bar hung a specially commissioned
triptych of oil paintings heroic Soviet-style
portraits of Russias new heroes: Vladimir
Putin, Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen.
Among the guests were a group of young
men from Tsargrad TV, Russias popular
new Orthodox nationalist channel. Sporting
neatly trimmed beards and sharp suits, they
were a Russian version of Republican evan-
gelicals. In one corner was a motley collec-
tion of middle-aged American right-wingers,
identifiable by their lapel buttons and red
ties. The foreigners were feted lavishly, as
communist fellow travellers once were. For
these chaps, Vladimir Putin has become a
kind of Che Guevara for the anti-establish-
ment right, the leader of a worldwide move-
ment whose time, they believe, has come.
Perhaps rashly, I had accepted a series
of invitations to appear on Russian TV
talk shows. The very first thing Putin did
on coming to power in 2000 was eliminate
independent television stations: the looking-
glass worldview projected from the nations
screens remains the cornerstone of his power
today. Russian TV is a strange world where
nothing is true and everything is possible,
in Peter Pomerantsevs memorable phrase.
Naturally, all channels were in a lather of
excitement about the triumph of Trump and,
apparently, the forthcoming disintegration of
Nato and collapse of the West.
I was told by grateful TV producers
that while pro-Putin Americans are two-a-
penny, there is a terrible dearth of foreign-
ers in Moscow willing to take a pro-western
line on their show. I quickly realised why.
My role appeared to be to act as a human
punchbag and also to answer personally
for the multitudinous sins of the West, from
the Nato bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999 to
Americas aggression in Ukraine in 2013. I
found myself momentarily stumped by this
last, but was quickly enlightened: America
apparently orchestrated the Maidan revolu-
tion in Ukraine that brought a fascist junta
to power, from which the Crimean people
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
fled to the protection of Russia. And by the
way, the US obviously wants to take over
Iraq and Syria and only Russia stands against
the march of American global hegemony.
Advancing into that barrage felt like going
over the top into raking machine-gun fire.
It got worse. By Friday, Russian TV was
joyously showing footage of anti-Trump riots
across the US, calling it an uprising. One of
the axioms of Russian TV is that no demon-
stration can be spontaneous. Every revolt,
from Tahrir Square in Cairo to the Maidan
Square in Kiev to downtown Portland this
week, must be the work of sinister secret forc-
es working for Hillary Clinton. The US tried
to stoke popular risings to destabilise Russia,
but now the Orange boomerang (named for
Ukraines Orange Revolution) has rebound-
ed on America, the Foreign Ministry spokes-
woman Maria Zaharova told us gravely.
I feel like an early Christian
facing the lions, vainly shouting
about the truth making you free
An ad from Craigslist offering $15 an hour
to people willing to Stop Trump was trium-
phantly flashed onto the screen as evidence
of a Hillary conspiracy to overturn the elec-
tion result until I pointed out that the ads
purpose had been to encourage voters to go
to the polls, three days previously. Momen-
tary confusion reigned until the host came
back with a spirited response. With what we
know about Hillarys corruption and Ameri-
cas flawed voting system, I dont think you
have anything to teach us about democracy
or thieving politicians. Cut to an ad break.
One of the hosts asked me jokingly if I
enjoyed this kind of gladiatorial combat. I
felt more like an early Christian facing the
lions, vainly shouting about the truth making
you free. But in fairness I was encouraged
to say whatever I liked and it was really
broadcast live, to Moscow, with no time-lapse.
After a few shows I got a few lines off pat.
You realise that all this stuff about Syria and
America is all cooked up to distract your
attention from the staggering thievery of
Russias leaders? and Russias economy is
the 12th largest in the world and shrinking fast
its time to get over the pain of this phan-
tom limb thats your lost empire and work
out how to pay your pensioners. And so on.
Slightly to my surprise, the producers
seemed delighted by these zingers. Perhaps
many of them are simply clever conformists
who dont wholly believe the party line. On
the day of Trumps victory, an editor came
up to me in the corridor with a concerned
expression. Embarrassed for the idiocy of
your countrymen? she asked consolingly,
taking me for a Yank because I work for
Newsweek, an American magazine. Now you
know what Russians feel like.
After all this, facing off against the veteran
Russian ultranationalist Vladimir Zhirinov-
sky felt almost refreshing. At least hes occa-
sionally honest. The only reason you like
Trump is because you wish America harm,
I ventured. I spit on America, he agreed.
Meanwhile, outside the TV studio, Mos-
cow flourishes. The city centre has been fitted
with new granite pavements complete with
cycle lanes, newly planted trees and even
swings for grown-ups. Theres city-wide Wi-Fi
and a thriving hipster foodie culture. Thanks
to Russias self-imposed ban on imported
foodstuffs, local chefs have been forced to
become locavores, with brilliant results that
have transformed Moscow into a gourmet
destination. Of course these are just the
playthings of a small metropolitan middle
class but compared with the grim, almost
post-apocalyptic Moscow I found when I
first came to work here in 1995, it feels like
progress. Nonetheless, Moscows European
makeover made me feel nostalgic for a lost
future one without Putins return to power
in 2012 or his disastrous miscalculation over
Crimea that heralded Russias plunge into
nationalism and self-delusion.
My talented Oxford friend Louise Mensch
has tweeted that Russia has nothing. Russia
is joyless. You are quite wrong, Louise. The
arts still burn bright. The brilliant Gogol the-
atre, the Garazh museum of modern art, the
upcoming Moscow Art Triennial and a slew
of small galleries and theatre workshops
ignore the official doom-mongering.
None of this makes up for the casual rac-
ism, the institutional homophobia, the scary
rising fringe of ultra-nationalists who refuse
to be co-opted by the Kremlin. Modern Rus-
sia may be deluded, aggressive and possibly
dangerous. But never joyless.
23
 LONDON NOTEBOOK
T he new government seems to
be struggling with the logistical
intricacies of removing Britain from
the European Union. I can only assume
they have never tried to put together a
theatre awards. The Evening Standard
Theatre Awards take a year to arrange,
but it can sometimes feel like the whole
thing is done in a week, which passes
in a blur of seating plans, speeches,
menus and other thespian miscellany.
It is theatre within theatre. If the Prime
Minister is reading this, I am available
to consult on how to manage conflicting
egos in a high-pressured environment.
B etween Maggie Smith, Eileen
Atkins, Kristin Scott-Thomas, Joan
Collins and Shirley Bassey, a full range
of damehood is on display. As Rob
Brydon pointed out, with the exception
of Kristin these ladies are all eligible for
the governments winter fuel allowance.
The usual complaint is that the worlds
of stage and screen are obsessed with
youth. Not here. It wasnt just the
women, either: David Attenborough and
Michael Gambon are many things, but
few would call them sprightly youths.
Diversity takes many forms.
A s usual there were several
contenders for the worst-behaved
guest, but the competition for best
behaviour had a standout star: Vladimir,
my borzoi puppy. He arrived and left
on time, sat quietly during the speeches,
and didnt once get up to go to the loo.
He even hummed along to Elton Johns
performance of The Circle of Life, from
The Lion King. The borzoi is also known
as the Russian wolfhound. They were
bred by the Tsars to hunt wolves on the
steppe. So despite Vladimirs immaculate
manners he will probably not be
introduced to Boris and Lara, my other
two pets, who are timber wolves and live
in Italy. We all have difficult cousins.
R adio 2 broadcast the event live, and
as part of the build-up I recorded
Tracks of My Years with Ken Bruce,
whose gentle Glaswegian burr was later
subject to a brilliant Brydon impression.
I could hardly leave out David Bowie,
24
Evgeny Lebedev
who died this year. And one of my other
choices was Leonard Cohens Hallelujah.
Dylan had just been awarded his Nobel
Prize and we talked about how Cohen was
the only other living singer-songwriter who
would be up to the prize. Had I known I
was cursing my choice to die immediately
afterwards, I might have picked someone
else. Cohen was a genius.
E lizabeth Debicki, the wonderful
Australian actor who starred in The
Night Manager, stole the show on the red
carpet. Elizabeth is 6ft 2in and manages to
be even more glamorous in real life than on
screen, which is saying something.
FROM THE ARCHIVE
Germany and the City
From English versus German banking,
The Spectator, 18 November 1916: At the
present moment a good many of us are
in the mood to feel that we never wish
to see any kind of German within our
country again; but it is quite certain that
this attitude of mind will not endure
for ever, and it is equally certain that
if we prevent German bankers from
establishing themselves in London after
the war they will take their business
elsewhere, and to that extent London
will lose its character as an international
banking centre. Mr Pownall well expresses
the main proposition: It is the universality
of London, its cosmopolitan composition,
that creates its character. Deprive it of
that character and its pre-eminence dies.
We cannot, in a word, retain our position
as bankers of the world unless we allow
foreign bankers to settle among us.
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Not that height makes much difference
most of the time. Some of the most
impressive people I ever met were
the Bayaka pygmies, who live in the
middle of the Central African Republic.
They are only about 4ft tall, but highly
accomplished at tug of war, as I learnt.
They also smoke a terrific amount of
weed, which has the effect of making
them very horny and liable to rub
themselves against the nearest person
or the nearest tree, if a person isnt
around. At the Old Vic we made do with
champagne and cocktails.
T he Duke of Cambridge was our
guest of honour and presented
Sir David Attenborough with his
Beyond Theatre award. The Duke and
I share a love of animals, as well as the
theatre. It is perhaps a surprise that
London is such a centre of elephant
conservation, but I suppose its harder
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of the Serengeti. Later this month is
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conservation knees-up. Id never put
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more urgent than theirs. (The jurys out
on who holds a grudge better.)
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ever that we help improve the lives
of Londons most vulnerable citizens.
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 The perfect mismatch
Dating apps encourage their users to pair off by looks.
Thats a mistake, as I learned the hard way
ARIANE SHERINE
I
s she really going out with him? asks
the old Joe Jackson song about a mixed-
attractiveness couple. They say that
looks dont count for much there goes your
proof. High society used to abound with cou-
ples in which the woman was far more beauti-
ful than the man. But while we can still point
to famous aesthetically mismatched partners
(pudgy Trump and pulchritudinous Melania
anyone?), the mating patterns of the young
now mean we are witnessing the death of the
mixed-attractiveness couple.
This is thanks to the way millennials fall
in love more often than not, online. They
flick through potential matches on sites
such as Match.com and MySingleFriend
with distressing rapidity, discounting anyone
they dont fancy straight away. This process
becomes even more savage on apps such
as Tinder, Bumble, Happn and OKCupid.
Habitually, users barely bother to write
anything about themselves, opting instead
to upload snaps of significant parts of their
anatomy. If you spot a young person furious-
ly attending to their phone, chances are they
are swiping through thousands of faces
right for yes and left for no and bypass- the more likely the partners are to differ in
ing hundreds of members of the opposite sex
with whom they might actually be compatible
in favour of those they find simply delectable.
Multiple studies have shown that the most
successful relationships are built through
assortative mating i.e. pairing up with those
who share the same background, social aspi-
rations, education and attractiveness. But
only the latter is readily apparent on dating
apps. When couples who fancied each other
rotten find the physical fascination wearing
off, those who met via dating apps may dis-
cover that they have nothing in common with
their partner besides relative good looks.
When it comes to long-term love, the
lack of mixed-attractiveness couples marks
a troubling trend. Research shows that it
takes between 18 months and three years for
a relationship to move on from the being in
love phase. But, as Louis de Bernires put
it in that passage so often read out at wed-
dings, real love is what is left over when being
in love has burned away Those that truly
love have roots that grow towards each other
underground, and when all the pretty blos-
soms have fallen from their branches, they
find that they are one tree and not two.
I discovered this to my cost seven years
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
ago, during my relationship with my daugh-
ters father. When we first met in a crowded
pub, our mutual physical attraction was so
powerful we didnt notice that, other than
sharing a profession, we had little in com-
mon. He liked art films, foreign literary novels
and playing football: I preferred Hollywood
blockbusters, comic fiction and going to
watch stand-up comedy. He drank wine and
was a seasoned traveller; I was teetotal and
had never ventured out of Europe.
We werent even similar in character: he
was adventurous, sporty, mentally stable and
private, while I was risk-averse, sedentary, had
an anxiety disorder and, as this piece would
suggest, often used truths from my personal
life to illustrate my journalism. When I had
a major nervous breakdown, fell pregnant,
put on weight, and we moved in together, our
relationship broke down. We struggled along
but split up before our third anniversary: we
simply werent compatible enough to with-
stand serious difficulties.
Fascinatingly, it turns out that the longer
two people know each other before begin-
ning to date, the less important beauty is, and
conciliation and admire resistance;
attractiveness. In one experiment at the Uni-
versity of Texas in Austin, researchers asked
students to rate their classmates for desir-
ability (including non-physical attributes)
at the start of term, and after knowing them
for three months. While students agreed who
was attractive to begin with, their ratings at
the end of term differed. Over a three-month
period, personality had a powerful effect.
When looking for love, young people
might do better to revert to the slower court-
ship rituals of past generations. After all,
mutual beauty is a flimsy basis for a relation-
ship. If, instead, a partnership is founded on
shared hobbies and genuine friendship, it is
more likely to be able to withstand the vicis-
situdes of life. Beauty always fades with time,
but relationships need not fade with it.
I dont regret my passionate but ultimate-
ly doomed romance without it, our won-
derful, sweet and hilarious five-year-old girl
would never have been created. But I cant
help but think how much better it would have
been if wed been compatible as people, and if
I were now married to the father of my child.
SPECTATOR.CO.UK/PODCAST
Ariane Sherine talks with Cosmo Landesman
ANCIENT AND MODERN
Thucydides on Donald Trump
Americas journey
into the great unknown, screamed
a headline greeting Donald Trumps
election as next President of the United
States. Most of us call it the future, which
has a long and distinguished tradition of
being unknown.
In the ancient world there was quite
an industry in attempting to foretell
the future: oracles, auguries, dream
interpreters and so on. But to rely on
the supernatural was to put ones trust
in something equally unknowable, and
the great Greek historian Thucydides
(5th century BC) proposed a better way:
as doctors evidence-based analysis of
the course of an illness enabled them
to generalise about the course of any
future example, so human history gave
clues to to anthrpinon, the human
condition, ways in which humans were
likely to respond to the situations in
which they found themselves. As a result
of his researches, Thucydides human
constants included e.g. States which
suddenly and unexpectedly become
prosperous are inclined to ideas above
their station; It is prestige, fear and
self-interest that prevent men giving up
power; It is human nature to despise
When men desire something, they are
inclined to trust in mindless hope, but
to reject what they do not care for with
ruthless logic; War is a violent teacher
and tends to assimilate mens character
to their condition.
But the spanner in the ointment, as
Thucydides was well aware, was tukh,
chance, or what Harold Macmillan
called Events, dear boy, events.
However intelligently one planned, tukh
could not by definition be prepared for
or explained; it was unaccountable to
both men and gods, and however unjust,
never reversible. Admittedly, as the
Roman Valerius Maximus pointed out,
When chance puts aside her malicious
nature, she piles up great and numerous
gifts that are also permanent. But there
were no guarantees.
The commentariat has been caught
completely on the hop by Trumps
victory, and even more by his assorted
volte-faces after it. One rather hopes he
continues the good work, if only to make
the fourth estate think a little harder
about their own journey into the great
unknown.
Peter Jones
27

The moral arc of the universe bends towards me
S
o I made 250 betting on Trump to
win the presidency. It would have
been more, except that every time I
got close to topping up my stake, this boring,
mimsy, responsible voice in my head kept
saying: Now, now James. Dont be silly. All
your sensible friends who know much, much
more than you do about politics have been
telling you that President Trump just isnt
going to happen.
One of them was mlearned colleague
Toby Young. Until recently we used to do
a podcast together. Because it was partly
aimed at a US audience, wed usually chat
about the presidential race and Id go into
my crazy spiel about why Trump was the
only sane choice; and Toby would patiently
explain how silly this was because Trump
wanted to disband Nato and wed probably
end up with the third world war.
Toby has now got himself a proper job
(working for an education charity), as have
most of my journalistic contemporaries. Of
late, Ive begun to feel like the pilled-up,
grey-haired rave casualty on the dance floor
who hasnt quite accepted that the partys
over. There I am, persuading myself that
Im the last of the breed, fearlessly relay-
ing truth to power when all the rest have
fled the field. But maybe the truth is or
so Ive sometimes wondered in my darker
moments that Im just a puerile contrar-
ian raging against reality, when what I should
really have done is embraced Remain and
rooted for Hillary, like all my more sophis-
ticated friends at places like the Economist,
the Times and the Financial Times.
Instead, look at what happened! No, I
cant believe it either it feels so weird and
unnatural I almost want a rerun. Not only
was I in the journalistic minority of being
right about Brexit, but I was in the even tinier
minority of being right about Trump. Maybe
it wasnt such a totally lunatic thing taking
that contract with Breitbart, after all.
Breitbart, as youre probably now aware,
is the right-wing US website which can more
or less claim ownership of Donald Trumps
victory. Until last week, they were derided by
the left-liberal media as being quite beyond
the pale of civilised discussion because of
their shockingly rude stories about feminists
28
JAMES DELINGPOLE
and Islamists and Black Lives Matter activ-
ists. Even one or two conservative friends
advised me that Id be tainting myself by
association with such a fringe organisation.
What I replied to these kind friends was:
One you clearly dont understand whats ago, he had it all planned out: he was going
happening to the media. Fat fees and fantas-
tical expenses have gone. To earn a living you
have to go where the money is. And increas-
ingly that aint on whats left of Fleet Street.
Two: you obviously have no idea how
well Breitbart is doing. You may not like their
punchy, attack-dog style but theyre part of a
populist revolution, representing the kind of
When Trump says he doesnt believe
in global warming its not some
wind-up stunt to troll lefties
people who are ignored and often despised
by the mainstream media.
And three: how many other outlets are
out there would be prepared to pay me a
regular income to write whatever the hell I
like, especially on my pet topic, the hateful-
ness of the environmental industry?
A lot of Breitbarts success is down to its
former executive chairman Stephen K. Ban-
non (aka the Steve Monster; aka Honey
Badger), a truly terrifying figure: ex-US Navy;
ex-Goldman Sachs; ex-movie industry, where
he made a fortune accidentally buying up the
rights to Seinfeld; infamous for his short tem-
per and epically foul-mouthed outbursts. But
though I found him petrifying to work for
hes like the eye of Sauron: he sees every-
Your fathers feeling emboldened.
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
thing and exists on Diet Coke and no sleep
hes probably the most impressive galva-
nising force and greatest political visionary I
have ever met.
When we first met a bit over three years
to destroy the corrupt, sclerotic, self-serv-
ing political establishment which he utterly
despised squishy, centrist conservatives
even more than lefties and the first stepping
stone towards achieving this would be secur-
ing Britains exit from the European Union.
Thereafter, hed capture the US presidency.
Yeah, right, I thought. But look where he
is now: newly appointed chief strategist and
senior counsellor to the next president of
the USA. Hes earned it too. It was his idea,
I suspect, to copy from his friend and hero
Nigel Farage the strategy of campaigning on
an outsider ticket, whereby Trump revelled in
the hatred and brickbats of his establishment
opponent because it just showed what a peo-
ples revolutionary he was.
Before that, Bannon did an awful lot of
groundwork on Breitbarts daily radio show
on Sirius FM, engaging with and building
Trumps voter base even before Trumps pres-
idential campaign was really a thing. These
were blue-collar workers but they definite-
ly (and this was the left-liberal medias fatal
error) werent low-information voters nor
were they dumb rednecks. Bannon would talk
to them like an impatient, irascible professor
trying to get the very best out of students he
knew were much cleverer than they realised.
More often than not he was proved right.
One of his pet peeves is the great climate-
change con. Its partly why he recruited a
notorious sceptic like myself. This is going to
be painful news to the BBC, the University
of East Anglia and Caroline Lucas, but this
thing where Trump says he doesnt believe in
global warming: its not some wind-up stunt
to troll lefties; its going to be a core part of
his administrations political programme.
This is great news for science (the sort
that cleaves to empiricism, rigour and the
scientific method), great news for the global
economy and great news for the handful of
journalists whove been saying for years that
the climate emperor has no clothes.
Basically, we won.
 tod ay!
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Wisdom of crowds
Sir: According to Matthew Parris (Can
we trust the people? 12 November), I have
become part of the mob. Nevertheless,
I have never really thought of myself in
that way. Although it may be reasonable
to criticise the antics of Farage or Trump,
surely it is wrong to characterise all those
who voted for their causes as a mob? My
motives in voting for Brexit were simple
and reasonable. Many of my generation
who lived as children through the 1940s
when our parents went to war to preserve
our sovereignty, our justice system and
control of our borders voted to leave
the EU because they saw these three vital
powers slipping away into the hands of an
unelected bunch of bureaucrats.
The mob which Parris describes in
America are people whose livelihoods
have been devastated by the globalisation
of trade, which has enriched big business.
Their votes were against the status quo
(Hillary Clinton) and in favour of change.
Sadly it appears that Parris is joining the
ranks of an elite who not only are unable
to accept the will of the people, but whose
detachment from their rationale leads him
to think them a mob that might endanger
democracy. He should think again.
Brian Thornton
Malvern, Worcestershire
Please dont fix it
Sir: Matthew Parriss view that the
procedures need to be reformed to avoid
killing our faith in democracy is both
arrogant and wrong. Brexit and the election
of Donald Trump clearly strike much of the
electorate as clear signs that, for once, their
views did count. Whether I or anyone else
agree with their views, changing the rules
so the masses cannot change how nations
are governed will lead them to conclude
that democracy no longer works for them.
Other routes to achieving their desired
outcomes involve violence and lawlessness.
The people have spoken. We ignore them
at our peril.
Jonathan Little
Penshurst, Kent
Friends over the Falklands
Sir: I normally agree with most of what
Rod Liddle says, but I must challenge his
implication that the special relationship did
nothing for Britain during the Falklands
war (Trump will be much, much better for
Britain, 12 November). In siding so openly
with Britain as he did, President Reagan
was prepared to put his entire Latin
American policy in jeopardy for the sake
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
LETTERS
of the special relationship. US assistance,
in terms of military hardware, aircraft fuel
and, above all, satellite intelligence helped
ensure our victory in a conflict whose
outcome was never a foregone conclusion.
The wholehearted commitment to our
cause by Caspar Weinberger, who even
offered us an aircraft carrier, earned the US
defence secretary an honorary knighthood
and Margaret Thatchers claim that Britain
never had a truer friend.
E. MacIntosh
Darlington, Co. Durham
Glorious ignorance
Sir: Like Claire Fox (In defence of
post-truth politics, 12 November), I am
constantly struck by the way experts get
it wrong, and how enterprising folk, along
with the masses, hit the nail on the head.
What fascinates me is the glorious
unpredictability of mankind. We can
predict the lunar orbit to within a
hairsbreadth and understand the internal
chemistry of stars. Yet try to calculate
beforehand the results of the EU
referendum or the US election, then you
might as well go and whistle. What we have
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here is not so much post-truth as a higher
truth one reflected in the patriotism and
simple common sense of the deplorables.
Renaissance monarchs had astrologers
armed with brass astrolabes to help fathom
the future. Their modern equivalents have
experts with supercomputers. The results
are often about the same.
Dr Allan Chapman
Wadham College, Oxford
Double issue
Sir: Your publication of an edition devoted
to Donald Trumps victory within 24 hours
of the result is impressive. Did you perhaps
follow the example of your former editor
(now our Foreign Secretary) and prepare
editions for either outcome?
David Hadden
Ardingly, West Sussex
Cheer up, me duck
Sir: May I suggest to Mrs Slade Crombie,
who is upset by odd forms of address
(Letters, 12 November), that it is better to
accept these endearments in the spirit in
which they are intended? In the north of
England it is an everyday occurrence to
be addressed as love, but it is always by
people who only mean to be friendly. My
son, who lives in Derby, has found himself
occasionally addressed as duck, and
although tempted to quack in response has
so far managed to refrain.
Clare Johnson
Glossop, Derbyshire
Cosy fan tutte
Sir: There seems a lot of fuss about this
Danish notion of homely cosiness (Mind
*
your language, 12 November). People the
world over have words that mean the same
as hygge. I bet the Eskimos have 50.
June McManus
Leeds
First-name terms
Sir: I recall meeting a lady who shared
Mrs Priors Christian name (Letters,
12 November). Holding out my hand, I
gave my own name by way of introduction.
A wry smile crossed her lips as she said:
Well this was bound to happen one day
before giving her name as Fanny. Since
then Ive introduced myself as Richard.
Dickie Ellis
London EC4
WRITE TO US
The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street,
London SW1H 9HP; letters@spectator.co.uk
31
 ANY OTHER BUSINESS|MARTIN VANDER WEYER
In Trumps Texas, the oil men
awaken to hope of new prosperity
Houston, Texas
I
ts hard to find anyone in polite socie-
ty here who admits to having voted for
Trump, even among the oil men. But
4.7 million Texans did so, giving him 53 per
cent of the popular vote. In redneck rural
counties the Donald carried four fifths of
the ballot, but Hillary Clinton was ahead in
urban Houston, whose citizens pride them-
selves on good relations between white,
black and Latino communities and on the
welcome they offer to newcomers includ-
ing, a decade ago, a quarter of a million ref-
ugees from hurricane-hit New Orleans. But
still this is predominantly an oil town, and
an industry that has suffered losses and
slashed capital projects under the combina-
tion of sub-$50-a-barrel prices and Barack
Obamas environmental policies, awoke last
week to the hope of new prosperity.
Curiously, Big Oil gave four times more
in campaign contributions to Hillary than
to her Republican opponent but not
much to either, having shown an earlier
preference for Jeb Bush. The industry evi-
dently didnt take Trumps candidacy seri-
ously, and the biggest players such as Exxon
Mobil were concerned that his protection-
ism would restrict their global trade more
than his deregulation policies would boost
the domestic production, which is a relative-
ly small part of their portfolio. But now he
is president-elect, theres a buzz of expecta-
tion of new drilling licences on federal land,
pipeline permissions, lighter regulation of
emissions and fracking, less call for renewa-
bles and even a resurgence of coal mining.
Key appointments are awaited, but hot
tips include climate-change sceptic Myron
Ebell to run the Environmental Protec-
tion Agency, Oklahoma shale oil billionaire
Harold Hamm for energy secretary, and oil
products tycoon Forrest Lucas as secretary
of the interior. So if youre a bold investor
but not so adventurous as to contemplate
shorting the Mexican peso, which has been
in free fall since election day you might
want to take a look at mid-sized US oil and
gas companies with prospects in west Texas
32
and elsewhere that will become viable under
the new regime, at coalminers such as West-
moreland (already up 25 per cent since the
election), at rail companies that carry coal,
and at contractors to the fracking industry
such as Halliburton. But if youre an envi-
ronmentalist concerned for the American
wilderness, hold your head and weep.
Tomorrows America
Sunday brunch at Hugos, a bustling Mexi-
can restaurant with a mariachi band and a
multi-ethnic clientele: at the next table, a big
Latino family with a happy baby in a high
chair. This is a true picture of Houston: only
a third of its citizens are white, and only
22 per cent of under-20s; the Latino popu-
lation has risen from 6 to 41 per cent in two
generations, its birth rate boosted by a cul-
ture of family support that tends to produce
healthier babies. Whats significant about
this, according to sociologists at the citys
Rice University, is that by 2050 all of the US
will look like Houston today, with a major-
ity of minorities in all age groups below 60.
Which means that what Donald Trump
has been threatening halting immigra-
tion, building a wall on the Mexican bor-
der, deporting undocumented immigrants
cannot possibly achieve his objective of
rebalancing the economy in favour of the
older, white, non-college-educated working
class who are his core supporters, because
the societal change he and they so dislike is
already irreversible. In Houston, immigra-
tion peaked in 2007: the continuing shift of
population pattern is all about birth rates.
The Trump revolution is an attempt to turn
back history, and it must surely fail.
Still up there
Talking of time travel, I was excited to find
myself flying to Houston in a Boeing 747.
The aircraft I once described as one of the
very few commercial products that has actu-
ally changed the world which it did by
making it smaller is two years short of its
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
half-century and has long been scheduled
for obsolescence. The last passenger ver-
sions left the Seattle factory in 2005, though
British Airways still has several in operation.
A bulbous workhorse with a near-perfect
safety record, the Jumbo Jet is a symbol of
the world-beating manufacturing prowess
and blue-collar self-confidence the United
States has lost: hence the rise of Trump. If
you had to name an American product with
comparable global impact today it would
almost certainly be the iPhone which is
made in Shenzen, China.
Thirty years ago, when I was a frequent
long-haul explorer of Asian markets and the
747 had no rivals, hardly anyone was correct-
ly predicting the great rise of China. Back
then, it was Japan that was widely but as
it turned out wrongly feared and court-
ed as the next superpower. And it was on a
Tokyo-bound 747 in 1984 that I watched a
fellow passenger who could have been my
identical twin and stage double, right down
to his copy of The Spectator, drink himself
to oblivion on vodka and grapefruit juice. I
wonder if hes still a reader?
Ballads of despair
Its rare for me to celebrate anyones finan-
cial misfortune, but if Leonard Cohen had
not lost $5 million of his retirement sav-
ings due to alleged fiddling by his former
manager, he might not have re-embarked
on recording and touring in his seventies,
and we would have heard much less of that
uniquely stirring voice in his last years. The
Canadian-born poet-laureate of pessimism
who I contend would have been a more
deserving and gracious Nobel winner than
Bob Dylan died in Los Angeles on the
eve of the US election, so well never hear
the ballad of despair he might have com-
posed on Trumps victory. When he sang
democracy is coming in 1992 (and Bill
Clintons campaign briefly adopted the song
as an anthem), he called America the cradle
of the best and of the worst. It still is, and it
needs poets today.
 Bulgari, an emerald and diamond
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Est. 90,000-150,000

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A DV E RT I S I N G F E AT U R E

HOW TO
SOLVE THE
ENGINEERING
SKILLS CRISIS
UK
engineering is facing an insidious threat to
its success a chronic failure to get enough
young people to become the engineers and
skilled technicians we need. Post-Brexit, the UK is likely to face
greater challenges than before in recruiting enough professional
engineers and technicians to meet industrys needs. As engineering
contributes 20 per cent of the UKs gross value added (GVA), it is
vitally important for our future prosperity and economic growth
that we address this problem as soon as possible.
So what can we do to plug the skills gap? One of the biggest
barriers to the uptake of engineering as career is how it is perceived.
If you look up engineer in Google images, you will see page after
page of pictures of men in hard hats. This completely belies the
reality of modern engineering, which includes so much more than
just construction. A graduate with an engineering degree or a skilled
engineering technician can enjoy an exciting and rewarding career in a
host of sectors developing medical technologies, advancing articial
intelligence, designing sports equipment or inventing sustainable
energy solutions, to name just a few potential opportunities.
Children girls as well as boys are natural engineers: a small
child at play uses their imagination to design, modify, innovate,
perfect and often test to destruction. Unfortunately, throughout
their years of education, we fail to capture this innate ability by
nurturing in them a range of practical, creative and problem-solving
skills. We owe it to young people to develop these talents through a
curriculum that provides opportunities to grow, skills to fall back on
throughout their lives and clear paths to future careers.
The Royal Academy of Engineering is leading a project to meet
this challenge at the front line. The Engineering Talent Project is
bringing together the entire engineering profession in a drive to
transform perceptions of engineering among young people, their
parents, teachers and peers. Founder partners Airbus, Atkins,
Babcock, BAE Systems, GKN, Jaguar Land Rover and National
Grid are working with the Academy on a major communications
campaign to bring perceptions of engineering up to date and
to encourage our young people, whatever their background, to
consider it as a career.
The group has also identied ve key policy areas, which, if
tackled, could make a real difference to efforts to solve the UKs
engineering skills problem:
 A DV E RT I S I N G F E AT U R E

Promote teaching careers in maths, science, computing and

D&T, to those engineering graduates currently around
1,000 a year in the UK who do not want a career in WHATS CAUSING
industry.
Improve careers education, guidance and transition to work in
THE CRISIS?
every school.
The crisis to date is a result of a variety of factors spanning
Improve further education provision in engineering. every stage of schooling and education, workplace
Broaden the curriculum up to age 18, to avoid the need for environments, and societal perceptions, including:
children to make decisions by the age of 16 that could be
wrong and will affect them for the rest of their lives. The arts versus science divide currently imposed on pupils
at the age of 16, before they have decided on their future
Enable universities and colleges to invest further in
career path
engineering higher education a high cost subject to
ensure that they can grow to meet increasing demand. The lack of STEM subject teachers who have enough
knowledge or experience of the engineering sector
Delivering these solutions is something that Philip Greenish, Inconsistent provision of careers advice at school
Chief Executive of the Royal Academy of Engineering, believes
Outdated perceptions of engineering as a narrow and
will rely heavily on coordination between professional bodies,
male-dominated profession
engineering employers and government:
We must all work together if we are to secure the skilled The attraction of graduate jobs in other areas, such as
people needed for the advanced, high growth businesses that will banking or management consultancy
keep us ahead of the competition and to maintain our position
as a world leader in science, research and innovation. Much of
our energy, transport and communications infrastructure needs
huge investment in future years, all of which requires people
with engineering skills. We must work harder to develop creative,
inventive and skilled people and attract them into the huge range
of roles across engineering. This is what the Engineering Talent
Project aims to do and we encourage government, industry and the
profession to support us in this.
The UK economy has, so far, been fairly resilient following the
Brexit referendum, with economic growth for 2017 reforecast up by
the IMF. But, from the perspective of the engineering profession, we
cannot be complacent. The development of new technologies such as
Photo credit: The Archway Project Ltd
driverless cars, missions to Mars, revolutionary treatments for cancer
and the worldwide drive for plentiful, clean water
for everyone demands bright young minds to meet the many
challenges ahead.
Simply put, the engineering community and indeed society as a To nd out more about
whole cannot afford not to ll the skills gap. The Engineering Talent the project please contact
Project is a critical step towards ensuring Britains prosperous future. ETP@raeng.org.uk
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 ESTATE OF EDWARD ARDIZZONE

Illustration from Little Geoffrey Wheatcroft mourns Marcus Berkmann delights Martin Gayford gives his
Tim and the Brave Sea Eric Christiansen one of in the surreal preoccupations verdict on the authenticity
Captain by Edward
Ardizzone our sharpest, funniest and of the posh Highgate mum of a newly discovered Van
Melanie McDonagh p56 most original reviewers Laura Freeman comes to Gogh sketchbook
William Cook finally finds the defence of the much- Bob Colacello remembers
a book on physics he maligned, double-cream the wayward deb who
understands streets of Stuccovia invented the selfie
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 37
BOOKS & ARTS
Books of the year
A further selection of the best and most overrated books of 2016,
chosen by some of our regular contributors
Michela Wrong
Back in 2006, David Cornwell, aka John le
Carr, hired me as guide for his first trip
to the Democratic Republic of Congo
(DRC), to research The Mission Song.
Evenings were spent on the terrace of
the Orchids Hotel in Bukavu, watching
pirogues languidly traverse Lake Kivu,
ice cubes clinking in respective glasses of
Scotch. It was easily the most entertaining
ten days of my life, despite the stonking
hangovers. Cornwell proved to be a thes-
pian manqu. The wry, extremely funny
anecdotes about his career as diplomat, spy
and writer, his charming conman father,
his peripatetic childhood and his encoun-
ters with the likes of Yasser Arafat, Rich-
ard Burton and Rupert Murdoch were all
gloriously enriched by the fact that he can
do all the voices. Not approximately its
pitch perfect. Reading The Pigeon Tunnel:
Stories from My Life (Viking, 20) felt like
being back on that terrace. I savoured the
gravelly, quietly insistent voice of a master
storyteller examining his own life.
Another highlight of the year was a
new biography of Africas most extraordi-
38
CHRISTMAS BOOKS II
nary monarch: King of Kings: The Triumph
and Tragedy of Emperor Haile Selassie I of
Ethiopia (Haus Publishing, 20). Its author,
Asfa-Wossen Asserate, was the emperors
great-nephew; his nobleman father died in
a coup defending the leader he no longer
believed in. Its an accessible, well-writ-
ten insiders account, and the depiction
of the doomed royal courts last days is
haunting.
We Are Not Such Things by Justine Van
Der Leun (Fourth Estate, 14.99) was a
book I carelessly picked up but kept return-
ing to. Its not so much the story of the
idealistic US activist Amy Biehls murder
in the South African township of Gugu-
lethu but about what happened next: the
lies and self-delusion of both perpetrators
and family and the inevitably manipulative
ends to which her death was put in a nation
still choking on apartheids legacy. Van Der
Leun has a compassionate but admirably
clear eye.
It was also good to see another chap-
ter in the DRCs tortured history probed
in Spies in the Congo: The Race for the
Ore that Built the Atomic Bomb (Hurst &
Company, 25). Susan Williams unpicked
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
the mystery of UN secretary-general
Dag Hammarskjlds death in her previ-
ous book. This time she turns to the dis-
covery in Shinkolobwe of the uranium
eventually dropped on Hiroshima by the
Enola Gay. An intriguing, beautifully
documented tale.
Claire Lowdon
Does size matter? This year my go-to stock-
ing filler will be the pocket-sized Grow a
Pair by Joanna Walsh, from Readux Books:
64 pages of unadulterated pleasure ($4.99).
Walshs collection of hilarious, nimbly inter-
linked fairy tales about sex (The Three
Big Dicks, The Princess and the Penis) is
a comic gem to set beside Nicholson Bak-
ers slim masterpiece Vox (1992), a book
about phone sex. Make like Monica Lewin-
sky and give Vox to the Bill Clinton in your
life, or treat yourself and go solo: either way,
both these books will make you laugh, blush,
and nod in delighted if risqu recogni-
tion.
Not so good on sex was Eimear McBrides
highly anticipated The Lesser Bohemians
(Faber, 16.99). Come with me, he says and
I, holding on as it rises, the high tide. There
were a few demurrals this time round, but
Im still surprised that McBrides skimpy
bouillabaisse of modernism has so many
people coming back for seconds.
Frances Wilson
Hot on the heels of his books about the
Bible and the Queen comes A.N. Wilsons
witty, learned, utterly self-possessed novel
Resolution (Atlantic, 16), about the tur-
bulent life of George Forster. He was the
Polish-born, Warrington-raised, multi-lin-
gual Enlightenment scholar-scientist who,
aged 18, was appointed botanist on board
the Resolution. His popular account of the
voyage pipped Captain Cooks own book
to the post. So Wilsons Forster is a guilty
man, a protg who murdered his master:
It now amazes me that I had the gall, the
sheer cheek, to write my Voyage book. I
wrote it fast. We finished it before Cook. It
sold well only now do I see how justifi-
ably angry the Captain must have been! Id
done more than jump the gun. Id violat-
ed him. Forsters own protg, Alexander
Humboldt, praised him for combining sci-
entific accuracy with the vivifying breath
of imagination. This is also A.N. Wilsons
achievement. Best novel of the year.
Cressida Connolly
Easily the most original novel of the year was
Charlotte Hobsons The Vanishing Futurist
(Faber, 16.99). It tells the story of an Eng-
lish governess who finds herself caught up
in the Russian Revolution; but instead of
retreating to the safety of Cornwall, she stays
on in order to join a sort of prototype com-
mune run by the charismatic Futurist Nikita
Slavkin. Entirely sui generis, it also boasts the
years best cover design. This is the book Ill
be giving people for Christmas.
World events were gloomy when Ann
Patchetts Commonwealth (Bloomsbury,
18.99) and Ali Smiths Autumn (Hamish
Hamilton, 16.99) appeared. Each of these
books describes the best in human nature:
our capacity for love and loyalty and kind-
ness; our love of storytelling. Fantastic
writing, big ideas and generosity of spirit.
If I had been in charge of the Man Booker
Prize this year, I would have given it to one
of these.
Speaking of which, how on earth did
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (Penguin, 8.99)
find its way onto the shortlist? I absolutely
hated this squalid little tale of small-town
revenge, which rejoiced in its own nastiness.
The characters are flat, the story flimsy, the
writing clichd: it leaves a bad taste in the
mouth, like last nights onion gravy. When
I heard the author being interviewed on
the radio, I was disgruntled to find that she
sounded lovely: her editor should tell her to
stop trying to shock.
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Christopher Howse
Kate Lovemans Samuel Pepys and his
Books (Oxford, 60) abounded in memora-
ble touches: Pepys buying a Mass book in
1660 and reading it aloud late into the night
with great pleasure to my wife to hear that
Portrait of Samuel Pepys Carter, Chatto, 25). The responsibility of
she long ago was so well acquainted with; or
Pepys writing handy memos to self: Consult
Sir Wm Petty about the No. of Men in the
World &c. I like the &c.
From The Making of the Oxford English
Dictionary by Peter Gilliver (Oxford, 40) I
learnt that Charles Onions, 18721965, the
OEDs fourth editor, pronounced his name
like the vegetable and, on a larger can-
vas, of the stupendous struggle to wrestle
millions of pen-and-ink quotations from
1,000 years into a history of the language.
My biggest surprise was to be swept away
by The Bird of Dawning by John Masefield,
which should be republished and made into
a Netflix series.
Thomas W. Hodgkinson
Bob Dylans Nobel Prize should have per-
suaded everyone to reassess their snobber-
ies. Can a songwriter be a literary genius?
Then how about a graphic novelist? Charles
Burnss Last Look (Cape, 16.99) is a sleazy,
slow-burning, page-turning exploration of a
midlife crisis, in which the queasy imagery of
William S. Burroughs meets the Death Hex
and sex horror of Hamlet all sketched out,
incongruously enough, in the spare ligne clair
style of Hergs Adventures of Tintin. I doubt
if Burns will be up for a Nobel any time soon,
but hes not a million miles off.
A curmudgeonly scholar, who lurks in
a little village on the north coast of Corfu,
Richard Pine has long been publishing his
monthly reflections on the state of Greece
in the Irish Times. His highly readable book,
Greece Through Irish Eyes (Liffey Press,
14.45), provides an excellent introduction
to the countrys recent troubled history.
Philip Hensher
A good year for novels. Rachel Cusks
Transit (Cape, 16.99) is a brilliant and
original enterprise, as well as a hymn to the
joys of the good story. Elizabeth Strouts
My Name is Lucy Barton (Viking, 12.99)
shouldnt work, but its frail texture was a
triumph of tenderness, and sent me back to
her excellent Olive Kitteridge. And I loved
David Szalays scabrous, intelligent and
hugely engaging All That Man Is (Cape,
14.99). My major discovery, though, was
Joy Williams, whose collected stories, The
Visiting Privilege (Tuskar Rock, 16.99),
proved an electric and dangerously human
volume. Not making sense, and making
too much sense, is Williamss alarming
territory. You will probably do what I did
afterwards, and order her old novels from
America I dont think they were ever
published here. Cheever would have liked
her Breaking and Entering in particular.
In non-fiction, Edmund Gordon did a
splendid job with the first Angela Cart-
er biography (The Invention of Angela
the research and the just sobriety of his
writing have produced a book which
will always have a special place on the
Carter shelf. Stanley Prices James Joyce
and Italo Svevo: The Story of a Friend-
ship (Somerville Press, 14) was lovely,
even joyous. Srinath Raghavans Indias
War (Allen Lane, 30) is a book that has
unearthed a lot of interesting and gener-
ally unfamiliar material. Unusually for this
subject, it had no particular axe to grind or
point to prove.
Matthew Parris
Spymaster by Martin Pearce (Bantam
Press, 20) is a study of my late constitu-
ent Sir Maurice Oldfield, once the head of
MI6. Oldfield rose high from a small Der-
byshire village, fell very hard denounced
in the press as secretly gay and died
in something close to national disgrace.
He was the authors great-uncle, but this
is a frank and clear-eyed, if affectionate,
biography of a great public servant, cruelly
traduced.
The Bible for Grown-Ups by Simon
Loveday (Icon, 12.99) persuaded your
columnist, a confirmed atheist, of the
power and beauty of the Old and New Tes-
taments, and to see them as a window into
humanitys soul.
My hopes of Tristan Gooleys best-
selling How to Read Water (Sceptre, 20)
were dashed by a book that sacrificed
depth for popularity. The most interest-
ing thing about puddles, surely, is how
splashing through them enlarges them.
And to say a rivers level is a good guide
to the local water table is dangerously
inaccurate.
39
BOOKS & ARTS
Jane Ridley
Christopher de Hamels Meetings with
Remarkable Manuscripts (Penguin, 30).
De Hamel has spent a lifetime working
with medieval manuscripts, and he pro-
vides a superb and sometimes idiosyncrat-
ic history of the manuscripts themselves.
The book sheds a penetrating light on an
extraordinary medieval world which until
now has been closed to most of us. Brilliant
and original.
Artemis Coopers Elizabeth Jane
Howard: A Dangerous Innocence (John
Murray, 25). Biography at its best, this
is the story of a novelist whose life was
in some ways stranger than the fiction
she wrote. Cooper gives a vivid, insightful
account of Howards romantic misfortunes,
and especially her doomed marriage to the
impossible Kingsley Amis. A cracking read.
Julie Burchill
I must admit that I write a beautiful essay
about my dad in My Old Man: Tales of Our
Fathers (Canongate, 14.99, edited by Ted
Kessler), but it would be nearly as good
without me.
James Bloodworth is one of the most
elegant and passionate (not an easy
combo) writers about politics in this coun-
try today, and in The Myth of Meritocracy
(Biteback, 10) is especially eloquent on
the way the diversity divas have diverted
attention from the lack of opportunities
for a whole swathe of underprivileged chil-
dren put beyond the pale of pity by their
risibly named white privilege.
We Dont Know What Were Doing
(Faber, 7.99) is the first book of short
stories by Thomas Morris, a young writ-
er whose descriptions of the mundane
magic of everyday life make one blissed
out beyond envy. And while I very much
enjoyed Richard Cohens How To Write
Like Tolstoy (One World, 16.99), I do for
the first time feel like calling down the
wrath of the Trade Descriptions Act, as
Ive seen no improvement whatsoever.
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
For sheer readerly pleasure, two books
stand out. Sebastian Barrys novel Days
Without End (Faber, 17.99) is an Ameri-
can Civil War tearjerker about the many
kinds of suffering that people inflict on
each other (and sometimes on themselves),
but is written with such swaggering charm
you end up wanting to read it at two speeds
simultaneously, turning the pages as quick-
ly as possible while lingering over every
beautifully crafted phrase.
Alan Bennetts memoir Keeping On
Keeping On (Profile/ Faber, 25) is equal-
ly quick with its one-liners, and altogether
they add up to a handsome brick of a book
40
some 700 pages long. Dont give a copy
to your neighbour unless you want the
soundtrack of Christmas Day to be dom-
inated by muffled laughter coming from
next door.
Lewis Jones
I pray I shall not find a biographer, said
Steven Runciman, eminent historian of
Byzantium and the Crusades, Grand Ora-
tor to the Patriarch of Constantinople,
Astrologer Royal to King George II of the
Hellenes, Laird of Eigg, screaming queen,
howling snob and honorary whirling der-
vish. His prayer has been denied, but he
could not have found a better biographer
than Minoo Dinshaw, whose Outlandish
Knight (Allen Lane, 30) is monumentally
impressive: scholarly, witty and gorgeously
written.
When Runciman was in charge of the
British Council in Athens after the war
he dismissed Patrick Leigh Fermor from
the only job he ever had, having tired of
Paddys little irregularities, such as drink-
ing too much and not paying his debts.
Paddy took it badly at the time but later
forgave him, as he had a generous and
sunny spirit, which irradiates Adam Sis-
mans selection of his letters, Dashing for
the Post (John Murray, 30), a feast of
adventure, gossip and flirtation.
Nicky Haslam
I dont really care as Im sure you dont
either whether Duchess Kate agrees to
a photoshoot or whether Dolce and Gab-
bana will show up at the gala centenary
dinner. But you will when you read Alex-
andra Shulmans Inside Vogue: A Diary
of My Hundredth Year (Penguin Fig Tree,
16.99). In a candid, introspective, gener-
ous and witty way, Vogues editor shows
the slog, guts and diplomacy that are need-
ed to produce the magazine often to
the detriment of family life. The eventual
results of a years long-planned coups are
page-turners.
The people of Thierry Couderts
The Beautiful People of the Caf Society:
Scrapbooks by the Baron de Cabrol (Flam-
marion, 75) are surely anything but caf
chteau and yacht more like. Beginning
in the 1930s, Fred de Cabrol painted faux-
naif watercolours of the grandest Euro-
pean houses, gardens and resorts, which
he enlivened with invitations, menus, cut-
tings and dcoup photographs of their
frequenters at balls, races, hunts, wed-
dings and on the beach. Its a lavish pano-
ply of the elegant style, decor and beauty
of a long-forgotten world. One of its most
serenely elegant beauties was Freds wife
Daisy, shown wearing a simple couture
creation franfreluch delicious word
meaning with ribbons.
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
The war didnt prevent that set from hav-
ing a gay old time, or Coco Chanel from hol-
ing up in the Ritz in Paris with her Abwehr
officer and other collaborateuses horizon-
tales. But Anne Sebba, in her meticulously
researched Les Parisiennes (Weidenfeld,
20), paints a very different picture of many
other women at the time who were trying to
preserve some vestige of dignity as they wit-
nessed and worked against the humiliation
and terror that the Nazi occupiers inflicted
on that city. Not many ribbons, then; rather
more Ribbentrop and his like.
Richard Davenport-Hines
This has been a bumper autumn for first-
time biographers making tremendous
debuts. Three of them have deployed radi-
ant empathy and keen detective instincts
to produce compelling studies of self-con-
cealing, image-conscious and teasingly
deceptive subjects. James Stourtons Ken-
neth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation (Wil-
liam Collins, 30) leads the field. It is such
a lithe, elegant, astute celebration of patri-
cian values, all-surpassing intelligence and
glorious style. I read it with joy. Edmund
Gordons The Invention of Angela Carter
(Chatto, 25) is a wise, generous and inspir-
ing book by an exciting young scholar who
writes like a prize-winning novelist. The
combination of emotional cool and pro-
tective tenderness in Gordons approach
is specially appealing. Minoo Dinshaws
Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of
Steven Runciman (Allen Lane, 30) is idi-
osyncratic in some of its digressions and
structure, but Dinshaw bubbles with nim-
ble wit, wicked gossip, curious oddities and
a walloping glee for his subject.
Martin Gayford
A study of medieval manuscripts which is
also a gripping page-turner might seem a
most improbable combination. But Meet-
ings with Remarkable Manuscripts by Chris-
topher de Hamel (Allen Lane, 30) is just
that. Like many excellent books, this is a
unique hybrid of heterogeneous ingredi-
ents. De Hamel mingles meticulous schol-
arship, enthusiasm, autobiography, wit and
gossip while pursuing each clue about dat-
ing or origin with the tenacity of a detective.
It is sometimes said of such books
that they read just like a novel. But John
Prestons account of the affair of Jeremy
Thorpe, Norman Scott, Peter Bessell and
Rinka the dog A Very English Scandal
(Viking, 16.99) is more engaging by far
than most fiction. The story it narrates is an
astonishing farrago of wickedness, insou-
ciant risk-taking and stratospheric levels
of incompetence. Prestons account is fre-
quently hilarious and especially when
dealing with the tragicomic figure of Bes-
sell poignant too.
A fateful squiggle
on the map
Andrew Lycett
The Man Who Created the Middle
East: A Story of Empire, Conflict and
the Sykes-Picot Agreement
by Christopher Simon Sykes
William Collins, 25, pp. 368
When turbaned warriors from Daesh (or
Isis) advanced on Raqqa in Syria two years
ago, they whooped wildly about having
broken the Sykes-Picot Agreement. They
were celebrating the destruction of national
frontiers which had stood for nearly a cen-
tury, since the fall of the Ottoman empire
in 1918.
They were also venting their spleen
against the two villains (as they saw it) of
the piece one British, Sir Mark Sykes,
and the other French, Franois Georges-
Picot, who, after months of diplomatic hag-
gling, had drawn metaphorical lines in the
desert sand to reach their secret 1916 agree-
ment apportioning Ottoman lands and cre-
ating the modern Middle East.
In doing so, Sykes and Picot set aside
promises of an Arab homeland made to
Sharif Hussein of Mecca. Together with the
Balfour Declaration, their pact not only
perpetuated western influence in the region
but advanced the cause of Zionism.
Christopher Simon Sykes, best known as
a photographer of country houses, had long
been curious about his reviled grandfather
Mark who died, exhausted, in the Span-
ish flu epidemic of 1919. (I dont know the
author; Christian names are the easiest way
of distinguishing the two men.)
By all accounts, Mark was remarkable,
with his fierce curiosity, sense of humour and
passion for the Arab world, which he vividly
conveyed in hundreds of letters to his beloved
wife Edith, many of them lavishly illustrated
with line drawings or cartoons.
His father Tatton Sykes, the fifth baron-
et, was a neurotic who escaped the drudg-
ery of running Sledmere, his large Yorkshire
estate, by embarking on lengthy trips to the
Middle East. Hearing of his own fathers
death while in Egypt, his only comment was:
Oh, indeed. Oh, indeed.
He often dragged along young Mark
on his travels. The boys initial education
had been among the books in the library at
Sledmere, where the grounds fostered his
love of military games and fortifications.
At his fathers side in Ottoman lands, Mark
became familiar from an early age with
Arab hospitality and culture, as well as with
musty British embassies.
Marks impulsive mother Jessie, ne
Cavendish-Bentinck, pulled in anoth-
er direction, after finding consolation in
Roman Catholicism. After a belated chris-
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Mark Sykes in Vanity Fair, June 1912
GETTY IMAGES
tening, where his godfather was the Duke of
Norfolk, he attended Beaumont, the Cath-
olic Eton, while Jessie looked to alterna-
tive panaceas gambling, affairs and
drink. When her husband absolved himself
of responsibility for her debts, she resort-
Gertrude Bell is dismissed as a
conceited gushing globetrotting
rump-wagging blethering ass
ed to money lenders, leading to a distress-
ing court case in which Lady Satin Tights
(as she was derisively known) was found to
have forged his name on promissory notes.
Jessie intended Mark to go to Trinity
College, Cambridge. Arriving there late for
an interview, she excused herself by say-
ing she had been at the Cesarewitch. When
the nervous Master replied, Oh, and where
may that be?, she concluded he was a cre-
tin, turned tail, and put her son down for
Jesus.
Despite Marks own traumas (after
he impregnated a servant girl, his father
ordered his favourite dogs to be hanged),
he continued his explorations of the Otto-
man world. While an undergraduate he
wrote his first book, Through Five Turkish
Provinces (later trumped by Dar-ul-Islam:
A Record of a Journey through Ten Asiatic
Provinces of Turkey). A common theme was
his scorn for Europeans dismissal of east-
ern customs.
During the Boer War, he excoriated dim-
witted British officers and put his enthusi-
asm for ramparts to practical use. Wiling his
time in the veldt, he also indulged his apti-
tude for drawing and storytelling, writing a
spoof book about military training under
the pseudonym Major General George
DOrdel, who featured in two further vol-
umes on official spin and the popular
press, the last of which was described in a
review as probably some of the most bril-
liant nonsense ever written.
After Cambridge, Mark followed a tra-
ditional career path for a young man of his
caste as private secretary to George Wynd-
ham, Chief Secretary to Ireland, and hon-
orary attach in the British embassy in
Constantinople, where one intelligence-
gathering expedition led to his Report on the
Petroliferous Districts of the Vilayets of Bagh-
dad, Mosul and Bitlis.
After becoming an MP, his fascination
with Arab (really Ottoman) affairs propelled
him through various committees about the
future of the region to his negotiations with
the fiercely nationalist Georges-Picot.
Turkeys entry into the war on Germa-
nys side altered Marks inclination to pre-
serve the integrity of the Ottoman empire.
He began to support Arab aspirations
for independence. But he realised a post-
war accord in the Middle East required
French involvement. As a Tory roman-
tic who had admired Disraeli (and hated
Gladstone, the scourge of Turkeys Bulgar-
ian atrocities), he succumbed to the attrac-
tions of Zionism and helped draw up the
Balfour Declaration, which promised Jews
a national home in Palestine.
Christopher tells this complex story with
gusto, though he adds little to the exist-
ing literature. Judging from his bibliogra-
phy, his material is dated: no mention of
James Barrs A Line in the Sand (2011), for
example. A decent map would have been
welcome. The reproduction of so many of
Marks wispy cartoons, while evocative,
seems a trifle haphazard, a first outing for a
personal treasure trove.
But Christopher did not set out to write
a history of the Middle East. (His editor
once suggested an alternative title The
Man Who Fucked Up the Middle East.)
He aims to put a human face on a imperial-
ist adventurer, and in this he succeeds bril-
liantly. Marks fiercely independent spirit
shines through. He meets all sorts of char-
acters from Cecil Rhodes to Gertrude Bell,
a potential rival whom he dismisses as a silly
chattering windbag of a conceited gush-
ing flat-chested man-woman globetrotting
rump-wagging blethering ass!
Looking back on Mark in Seven Pillars
of Wisdom, T.E. Lawrence took a harsh line:
His instincts lay in parody: by choice he was
a caricaturist rather than an artist, even in
statesmanship. Thats a sad reflection on a
man whose best known squiggle that fate-
ful line on the map from the e in Acre to
the last k in Kirkuk did much to shape
the modern world.
41
BOOKS & ARTS
Show cats at the National Cat Club Show, 1983, photographed by Jane Bown
Christmas stocking fillers
Marcus Berkmann
The gift books come in all shapes and sizes
this year: big, little, tiny, huge, long, short, fat
and thin, rather like their writers, I would
guess. Biggest and fattest of them all is The
Art of Aardman (Simon & Schuster, 16.99).
This is a coffee-table book, pure and sim-
ple, that celebrates 40 years of animation
at Aardman Studios, who make Wallace &
Gromit, Shaun the Sheep and others, and I
would suggest that you have known since
the beginning of this sentence whether or
not you want this book for Christmas. Its
everything you would wish for from such a
volume, featuring stills from the films, draw-
ings from the animators sketchbooks, por-
traits of sets, technical drawings for props,
manifold character studies and very, very
few words indeed. Its a book to get lost in
on Boxing Day, or any day before or after.
Slightly smaller is Jane Bowns Cats
(Guardian/Faber, 14.99). Bown was a pho-
tographer who joined the Observer in 1949,
worked almost exclusively in black and
white with natural light, and died a couple of
years ago. This is, again very simply, a book
full of photos of cats. Why would anyone
need this? said my partner, before spending
the entire afternoon leafing through it. They
are not obvious photographs of cats, but
oddly enough each one seems to tell a story,
and because the photos were mainly taken
between the 1950s and the 1980s, theres the
slightly sombre knowledge that all of these
cats are long dead. Its probably best con-
sumed with a cat on your lap, or at the very
least, one purring around your legs asking for
the food youve forgotten to give it.
42
One constantly thriving sub-genre of the
gift book category is the Book About Words,
of which there is an apparently never-ending
supply. I already have more than enough of
these on my shelves to be going on with, but
Paul Anthony Joness The Accidental Dic-
tionary (Elliott & Thompson, 12.99) is cer-
tainly worth adding. Its all about the changes
in meaning that many words have experi-
enced over the years. Hussy, for instance,
originally meant housewife: somehow, call-
ing someone a brazen housewife seems a less
effective insult than it once did. Heartache
originally meant heartburn, and heartburn
originally meant lust. If you called someone
buxom in 1867, you meant that they were
obedient. I knew very few of these, which is
a good thing, and now I know more, which is
a better one.
Alexandra Coghlans Carols from Kings
(BBC Books, 9.99) tells the stories of
everyones favourite Christmas carols, from
the grandeur of Hark! The Herald Angels
Somehow, calling someone a
brazen housewife seems a less
effective insult than it once did
Sing (originally the less catchy Hark How
All The Welkin Rings, welkin meaning
the sky or heavens), to the blatantly com-
mercial Rudolph the Red-Nosed Rein-
deer, a big hit for Gene Autry in the 1940s.
Every song has its tale, and they are carefully
collected in this bijou volume.
Smallest book of this batch is also by
far the funniest. Highgate Mums, compiled
by Dan Hall, is subtitled Overheard Wis-
dom from the Ladies Who Brunch, and you
dont have to live in Highgate (as Im afraid
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
I do) to know that these snippets of haute
bourgeoise wisdom are terrifying accurate.
Its based on a Twitter account, as everything
has to be now, but it will make you laugh out
loud on page after page. Someone heard a
very chic woman admonish her toddler with,
I just dont understand your priorities right
now. Or, overheard in a coffee shop, Arch-
ways so bloody full of posh mums now that
theres no room in any of the cafs to put the
pram. Or The social etiquette for first play-
dates has obviously changed. She turned up
without anything. Not even a shop-bought
cake. Or, possibly my all-time favourite,
Like everyone, I am appalled by the Islam-
ist attack on Charlie Hebdo. But I am also
struck by its similarity to the plot of my last
novel. Its my favourite because I was there
when it was spoken. Although not by me, Im
relieved to say.
A choice of first novels
Keith Miller
Constellation by Adrien Bosc (Serpents
Tail, 12.99) picks nimbly along the divide
between fiction and non-fiction. Its really a
speculative group biography, telling the story
of a Air France plane crash in the Azores in
1949, and the lives of the planes passengers,
mostly (except for a quintet of migrating
Basque shepherds) of an appropriately stel-
lar socio-economic stratum.
It does a fair job of knitting the known
into the unknown, hopping from seat to
seat like a solicitous flight attendant, shift-
ing pace and perspective, throwing some
metaphorical flesh on to the bare bones of
what remains an unsolved tragedy (astrolo-
gy, Bergsons theory of dure, even some-
what improbably a boxing match between
the ill-starred Flight F-BAZN and the plane
sent out by investigators to shadow its last
minutes). Bosc trips over the historic present
tense from time to time, as almost everyone
does who uses it; and his disinclination to use
invented material means that the charac-
ters arent much fleshed out (though theres
a spicy love letter from Edith Piaf to her
lover Marcel Cerdan, en route to fight Jake
LaMotta in New York). But its a book thats
defined by what its author knows to be true;
and as a result it never quite as it were
takes wing.
Private Citizens by Tony Tulathimutte
(Oneworld, 12.99) is in some ways the most
conventional of these books: the story of a
group of recent college graduates embark-
ing on careers or not in San Franciscos
tech industries. I could have done with a lot
more exposition here, not to mention a lit-
tle less sex. Its unclear what most of these
people actually do for a living and I dont
think Tulathimutte intends to leave it unclear
for the purposes of satire; he just thinks we
should know, or somehow be above caring.
 But the book is plainly offered as a polit-
ical document of a sort a sketch of the
way US millennials, and the only slightly
older men and women who employ them,
live now. And theyre just awful: needy, rude,
dishonest, crippled by self-consciousness to
the extent that they can barely use language
meaningfully, culturally inert and in general
as strong an advertisement for compulsory
military service as you could hope to find.
Admittedly, theyre awful because theyre
unhappy. They are what happens when you
take the tube-addled lost children of David
Foster Wallaces 1990s, disburse stupid
amounts of money among mediocre peo-
ple who happen to be able to code or know
one end of an SEO algorithm from another
(while consigning their contemporaries who
dont to a life hanging by their fingernails
above Skid Row), add internet porn on tap
and stir well.
Also much preoccupied with gruesome-
ness in this case the gruesomeness of
uncontrolled bowel movements, decom-
posing body parts and auto-erotic asphyxia
is Feeding Time by Adam Biles (Galley
Beggar Press, 8.99). Yet theres tenderness
and joy in there too. It is set in an old peo-
ples home thats shockingly run even by
the standards of our deregulated age. The
book treats its elderly protagonists with
imagination and respect, using repetition
and dislocation to suggest their disordered
mental state, concocting a sort of crazed
picaresque whereby the unfolding events
at Green Oaks mirror and merge with pas-
sages from the Boys Own adventure stories
beloved of Captain Ruggles, the Randle
McMurphy of this particular cuckoos nest.
The lurches of tone and lapses in taste
initially made me feel that Biles wasnt quite
in control of his material; but I think theres
a courage there, too, a reluctance to treat his
themes with deference or piety, that I found
intensely refreshing.
Infinite Ground by Martin MacInnes
(Atlantic, 12.99) is the most fully realised
of these first novels. Its classy, understated
jacket design doesnt exactly scream Rich-
ard and Judy; and sure enough, an epigraph
from Clarice Lispector heralds a novel that
follows the austere edicts of modernism:
few names, not much pack drill. It is a meta-
physical police procedural, with lashings of
made-up science and a paradoxically vivid
sense of place. The metaphysical policeman,
aka the inspector, begins to identify with
his (possibly imaginary) quarry, Carlos, with
a shamanic intensity that echoes the behav-
iours of certain microparasites found on the
disappeared (but was he ever here?) mans
computer.
This is a book thats not overly con-
cerned with detail. Its haunting, oneiric, cir-
cling warily around themes of environmental
damage and corporate excess in an exotic
setting. What marks it out is that the writer
has a clear sense of how much he wants to
tell us, and how much he wants us to figure
out for ourselves.
Full steam ahead
Simon Heffer
Revolution: A History
of England, Volume IV
by Peter Ackroyd
Macmillan, 25, pp. 352
To write, and indeed to read, a history of con-
siderable range, both in terms of chronology
and of subject matter, is a profound chal-
lenge. The fourth volume in Peter Ackroyds
History of England starts with the Glorious
Revolution of 1688 and ends with Waterloo
in 1815. It was a period that laid the founda-
tions of the modern British state and created
the basis of its prosperity, and of its status as
the worlds greatest power later in the 19th
century.
During the 130 years Ackroyd cov-
ers there were revolutions in attitudes
too: though when he writes of the coarse
humour of cartoonists such as Gillray, and

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the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 43

BOOKS & ARTS

Scotland and England, working 13- or 14-hour days in gruesome

to which the union conditions. Yet, as Ackroyd also indicates,
with Ireland was added these conditions were regarded as sufficient-
nearly a century later. ly superior to working on the land to cause
None of her numer- a mass migration to the expanding towns of
ous children survived northern England, and to end the economic
her, which brought predominance of the agricultural economy.
Sophias son, George, This is a beautifully written book, and the
the Elector of Hano- narrative is easy to follow, while packed with
ver, to the throne of information, even though nothing is covered
England: Sophia had in depth. There is a select bibliography but
died just two months no footnotes, so its use for serious students as
before Queen Anne. opposed to the general reader who wants to
Ackroyd depicts the know something about the past will be limit-
gradual detachment ed. It is also littered with literal errors, which
of the Hanoverians suggests poor editing and proof-reading (an
from the centre of the egregious error introduces the second para-
political process, and graph of the whole work). But Ackroyd has
the growing reliance constructed a fluent, intelligent and informa-
on their first ministers, tive work that will be enjoyed by those curi-
from Walpole onwards, ous about the 18th century: and he correctly
to manage the domes- conveys the idea that as well as being an age
One of the famous victory tapestries shows John Churchill, 1st Duke of tic and foreign policy of revolution, it was also an age of great sig-
Marlborough, at the battle of Blenheim of the country. It was a nificance.
century in which Brit-
the aggressive expressions of public opinion ain, partly because of the need to maintain
in incidents such as the Gordon Riots, one the balance of power in Europe, and partly Things fall apart
wonders whether the temper of the English because of its imperial interests in America
people is so very different today. Indeed, one and India, became embroiled in wars, from Kate Webb
of the pleasures of reading this history is the those of Marlborough to those of Welling-
occasional, subtle indication that Ackroyd ton and Nelson. It was the politicians and Autumn
gives, when he writes of the importance of not the king who suffered when things went by Ali Smith
coffee houses, the influence of the press, the wrong: George III may have been upset at Hamish Hamilton, 16.99, pp. 259
decline of the Anglican church and the need the loss of his American colonies, but it was
to improve the road network, that the Eng- North and Shelburne who paid for it with Ali Smith is that rare thing in Britain: a
land he writes about is not a foreign country their careers. much-beloved experimental writer. Part of
at all, however far in the past. Ackroyd deals with much more than high her attraction for readers is that she continu-
Ackroyd ensures he covers all the main politics and policy. His wide cultural know- ally connects formal innovation and the free-
political trends and events of the period, ledge allows him to flesh out his picture of dom to reinvent a story with the freedom to
though he cannot do so in any depth, given 18th-century life with descriptions of the reinvent the self. Its a beguiling proposition
the need to cram 13 decades into 370 pages. that can make liberation seem like a mat-
He is adept at pen-portraits of the main People worked 14-hour days in the ter of style. Following the success last year
players conveying the moral repellency new factories, and even children as of How To Be Both, the most dazzling and
of Harley, the geniality and guile of Walpole, accomplished of her novels, Smith planned
the ugliness (and loyalty) of North, the etio-
young as four were employed to write a long-gestated novel quartet, its
lation of Pitt the Younger and the upright- four volumes reflecting successive seasons
ness of poor old Spencer Perceval, the literature and the theatre of the time, and an idea that would allow her to pursue her
only one of our prime ministers to be references to Turner and some of the other fascination with what is perhaps the novels
assassinated. painters of the period. Given his celebrated greatest subject: time. But the times overtook
But this is also a period in which politi- novel Hawksmoor, based on the life of the her, and the events of 2016 turned Autumn,
cal power seeps from the monarch towards architect though not about him, it is surpris- the first of her intended novels, from a farce
the House of Commons even though, as ing he makes so little reference to the archi- in an antique shop into a meditation on the
Ackroyd also notes, Pitt the Younger was the tecture of the period, which is, after all, the upheavals surrounding Brexit.
only member of his own cabinet to sit in the means by which today we most register the Autumn opens by acknowledging that
lower house. After the revolution of 1688 it presence of the 18th century in our lives. it is a tale, one, which like all tales, is influ-
is monarchical power that holds the country He deals, too, with the scientific and tech- enced by others and fashioned in part from
together the dual monarchy of William of nical advances that underpinned the massive their language. It was the worst of times, it
Orange and Mary Stuart and it is a peri- social changes of the century. The invention was the worst of times, Smith begins, and
od in which important and enduring changes of the steam engine and the Spinning Jenny once again, Things. They fall apart. From
occur: such as the establishment of the Bank were the triggers of the Industrial Revolu- the imaginative place Christina Stead once
of England in 1694 and the removal of cen- tion. Together with the ideas of Adam Smith called the Ocean of Story and Salman
sorship of the press the following year. Par- notably the division of labour this pro- Rushdie, the Sea of Story, a figure emerg-
liament also passed the Act of Settlement pelled Britain to the head of the advanced es, washing up on some unknown shore.
(1701), which ensured that no Roman Cath- nations. While this created a new class of He is a literary figure trailing the memories
olic could sit on the throne, and made Sophia capitalists, and gave them enormous wealth, of Odysseus and Crusoe in his wake, who
of Hanover, a grand-daughter of James I, the it plunged their workers into appalling con- questions everything (is he dead or alive?)
heir presumptive. ditions, with children as young as four work- and keeps changing shape, morphing from
Queen Annes reign saw the union of ing in the new mills and factories, and people nakedness to leaf-dressed Green Man,
44 the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk

from old age to youth. Daniel Gluck is his
name and he recalls a life of good fortune,
of being lucky through the accidents of time.
But as he strolls along the beach to discover
what kind of world he has landed in, Gluck
finds the corpses of children lying close by
holidaymakers sunning themselves under
parasols. Something is amiss here: in more
ways than one the times are out of joint.
From these dreamlike beginnings, Smiths
novel jumps into a prosaic world where Eliz-
abeth Demand keeps vigil at Glucks bed-
side as he lies unconscious in a care home,
hovering at deaths door. A refugee from fas-
cism in Europe, Gluck was once a neighbour
who befriended her in lonely adolescence.
Watching him now, she thinks back over this
vital relationship in which he opened up the
world of art to her. The rest of her time is
spent queuing for a passport in a soon-to-be-
closed-down Post Office, battling with the
Kafkaesque bureaucracy that seems deter-
mined to stop those unhappy about Brexit
from leaving the country. She also visits her
mother, who lives in an English village where
the mood is turning sour. People glower at
strangers on the street, someone has daubed
Go Home across the front of a house, and
a faceless company erects a giant fence
around a patch of common land. Meanwhile
her mother, in the grip of nostalgia, obsesses
about an antiques TV show. This is England
2016, Smith tells us: narrow, suspicious and
backward-looking. As the three parts of her
book progress through the seasons three
months, the political climate darkens with
the weather.
Against this all too familiar gloom, Smith
offers, once again, ideas about the moral
value of art. In How To Be Both she argued
for the inherent friendliness of narrative,
here (drawing on the Odyssey) she makes a
demand for hospitable stories. And where
in the former novel she lionised the swing-
ing Sixties and the young, free and stylish
women of the French pop scene, so here the
figure of hope is another Sixties figure, the
similarly young and glamorous pop art paint-
er, Pauline Boty, discussing in particular her
portrait of Jean-Paul Belmondo with a huge
open rose on his head.
It is clear that Smith is emphasising the
delight and openness of art, its ability to
hearten and fortify us in difficult times. But
is this enough? The unease in Autumn stems
not just from troubling signs of a nation
becoming more divided and cruel, but from
a writer looking to aesthetics as a salve for
ugliness in politics. The final demand of the
book, the demand of art, is that we pay great-
er attention in this case to a wide-open
rose still blooming in the depths of Novem-
ber: Look at the colour of it. But it feels as
if Smith has failed to do precisely this, to look
hard enough at whats novel in the Brexit
situation, what might disturb well-trodden
narratives, relying instead on the consola-
tions of art.
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Secrets of the universe
William Cook
Reality is Not What it Seems:
The Journey to Quantum Gravity
by Carlo Rovelli, translated by Simon
Carnell and Erica Segre
Allen Lane, 16.99, pp. 255
A few years ago, in Berne, I visited the
apartment where Einstein wrote his theo-
ry of special relativity, which changed our
understanding of the world forever. Its a
small apartment, plain and nondescript.
The best thing about it is the view. From the
window you can see Bernes huge medieval
clock, the Zytglogge. It was this clock which
inspired Einsteins great breakthrough. At
the end of every humdrum day, in his dead-
end job at Bernes patent office, he took
the tram home, past the Zytglogge, back to
this apartment. As he gazed at that clock
through the tram window, he wondered:
what if his tram could travel at the speed
of light? Logically, the light from the Zyt-
glogge should never overtake him. Rela-
tively speaking, it should remain static, just
as two trams travelling side by side at the
same speed in the same direction remain
static in relation to each other. But that
wouldnt work, because the speed of light
never alters. Therefore time would have to
change.
Carlo Rovelli doesnt tell this story in
Reality is Not What it Seems, but he tells lots
of stories like it, and the result is a book that
brings physics alive. If youve read his previ-
ous book, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics,
youll know what to expect. If you havent,
youre in for a treat. Rovelli is the director
of the quantum gravity research group at
the Centre de Physique Thorique in Mar-
seilles (no, Id never heard of it either, but I
imagine you must have to be pretty brainy
to get a job there). Consequently, you might
expect this book to be completely impene-
trable. You couldnt be more wrong. Com-
plexity is the hallmark of second-rate minds.
Like all great thinkers, Rovelli has a talent
for simplicity. His prose is lucid and poetic. I
scoured this book for quotable phrases, and
ended up copying out entire paragraphs. Its
not a scientific treatise. Its a paean to the
wonder of the natural world.
Reality is Not What it Seems is a sort of
prequel to Seven Brief Lessons in Physics.
Rovelli wrote this book first, and then wrote
seven shorter articles based upon it. Those
articles were published as Seven Brief Les-
sons, and the huge success of that slim tome
(translated into 31 languages) prompted
this new translation of his first book. Being
unable to read it in the original Italian, I
cant assess the merits of Simon Carnell and
Erica Segres translation, save to say that
their joint effort reads far better than most
books by native English speakers.
So whats this book about? Well, in the
course of just 255 pages, Rovelli charts our
understanding of the universe, from the
astronomers of the ancient world to todays
boffins and all the key points in between.
He explains how Newton built on Galileo,
how Faraday and Maxwell built on Newton,
and how Einstein transformed their theo-
rems, by uniting space and time. I scraped
a C in my Physics O-level and havent been
near a physics textbook since. If I can under-
stand and even enjoy Rovellis book,
then anyone can. What thrilled me most
of all was his revelation that physics and
philosophy are actually twin disciplines
two sides of the same equation, if you
like. Mind you, the ancients knew that too.
Had you realised that it was Aristotle who
coined the term Physics, in his book of the
same name? I hadnt until I read Rovelli.
Reality is Not What it Seems is full of fasci-
nating nuggets like these.
Rovelli concludes with some mind-
boggling stuff about quantum physics. This
was the only part where I got brain ache, but
it seems Im in good company. Apparently,
even Einstein couldnt quite get his head
around it. Indeed, the best thing about this
beautiful, compact book is its celebration of
uncertainty. As Rovelli demonstrates, confu-
sion is the creative impetus that drives us on
to fresh discoveries. Certainty is the enemy
of science.
He begins with a tale from Platos Repub-
lic, which would work just as well as an epi-
logue. Its about some men imprisoned in
a dark cave, whose only source of light is
a hidden fire which casts strange shadows
on the wall. One of the prisoners escapes,
and ventures outside. For the first time he
sees the sun, and all the splendours that sur-
round us. He returns to the cave and tries,
and fails, to describe the amazing things hes
seen. Like Platos prisoner, Rovelli has seen
the splendours beyond the dark cave of our
imaginations. Unlike Platos prisoner, he can
tell us what hes seen.
Up where the air is clear
Sara Wheeler
White Mountain: Real and Imagined
Journeys in the Himalayas
by Robert Twigger
Weidenfeld, 20, pp. 460
Robert Twiggers father was born in a
Himalayan hill resort and carried to school
in a sedan chair. His son, born in 1965 and
long fascinated by the region, has produced
a social and cultural history of the mountains.
It is a hybrid volume and why not? Twig-
ger leaves no mountain path untouched in
his bookish reportage.
Topics covered in this long book include
crustal formation and destruction, the pre-
45
BOOKS & ARTS
Buddhist Bon religion (even today 10 per
cent of Tibetans are Bon-worshippers), sha-
mans, yeti, Colonel Francis Younghusband
(the first mountaineer), altitude sickness
(which fascinates Twigger), the 19th-centu-
ry exploration of Nain Singh, that bloody
annoying Madame Blavatsky and much else.
Chapter titles include The Mapping of
It, and Mythical Origins, in which we learn
that Himavant was the ancient ruler of Him-
alayan India. He was father of Ganga, the
river goddess, and so on. Other chapter titles
such as The Major is Drowned and to be
Auctioned off Today are less guessable.
The author, one of whose previous books
is Red Nile: A Biography of the Worlds
Greatest River, is a solid researcher, a good
writer and an amiable companion. The sub-
ject matter is dense. It turns out that even the
geographical definition of the big mountains
is more complicated than Id imagined. It is
excusable to believe that the Himalayas sim-
ply provide a north-south barrier, explains
Twigger. This is true, though less significant
than the more formidable east-west barrier
they provide.
Few of the real journeys of the subtitle
are Twiggers own. Despite scores of pages
on Tibet, he says he didnt want to go there,
as he dislikes travelling in a group (the only
way to reach the tabletop, apparently). But it
doesnt matter: White Mountain doesnt pre-
tend to be a travel book. On the few jour-
neys Twigger does make, he tends to put up
in hovels to save money; but in Kalimpong,
in West Bengal, he does stay at the legendary
Himalayan Hotel, which all the greats visit-
ed, including Alexandra David-Nel, Hillary
and Tenzing.
As for the imagined journeys, Himala-
yan peoples strong sense of the transcen-
dental is inextricably bound up with their
surroundings. Twigger does a good job with
what he calls the endless complications of
Tibetan Buddhist writing. Then, of course,
come the pundits religiously learned
Brahmin. The British invader, writes Twig-
ger, commenting not for the first or last time
on the terrible imperialist clashes in the
region, decided to become a slightly differ-
ent kind of pundit.
Each chapter opens with a proverb from
the various tribal groups of the zone, some
quotes more enlightening than others. Twig-
ger shows respect and compassion for indig-
enous peoples sufferings as the old world
vanishes and they find no place in its replace-
ment a global story. No foreign nation
emerges with credit:
The British were the last to give up on Tibet;
in 2008 the foreign secretary David Miliband
claimed that it was archaic to insist on Chi-
nese suzerainty rather than sovereignty. It was
just another deal to make money for Britain;
more importantly it meant that Chinas inva-
sion had succeeded Tibet no longer existed
as an independent or semi-independent nation.
On a lighter note, I enjoyed the brief and
46
unexpected excursions into the authors past: in 1996 when so many climbers perished, and
I spent a week in the 1990s, he announces, about which so many books have been writ-
teaching aikido to Indian soldiers at a train- ten. The movie, Twigger writes of the recent
ing camp above Dehradun. His response to major feature film on the disaster, of course
the beauty of a snowy landscape is obviously gets it wrong. He doggedly sifts through the
heartfelt. Twigger has published several vol- evidence and reaches his own conclusions.
umes of poetry, and one observes a poetic Generally the book drifts west to east,
turn in some of his lines here. ending up among the Naga on the Indian-
Many of the real journeys in this book Burmese border. White Mountain is more
are made by climbers. Twigger is excellent on quirky than most others in the field vol-
the rasp of crampon on ice and the headi- umes by Charles Allen and John Keay, for
ness of thin air. The unlikeable Reinhold example. Im not sure if these variegat-
Messner, perhaps the greatest mountaineer ed chapters make a coherent whole, but
ever to have lived, receives much attention. they are lively, interesting, unusual and
As does, of course, that May day on Everest entertaining.
Pied Margot
The term magpie comes from magot pie (Pied Margot), first found in
Shakespeares Macbeth.
One for sorrow, two for joy;
Three for a girl, four for a boy;
Five for silver, six for gold;
Seven for a secret, never to be told;
Eight for a wish, nine for a kiss;
Ten for a bird thats best to miss.
The following are the third and fifth poems in a sequence entitled
Pied Margot.
Three (The Reckoning)
My womb is gambling again,
waging its luck against the house
that took me for all I had.
***
I have been squandering the waxing
trimesters in the fields where I was sown;
a faltering scarecrow, fending off
the minstrel theatre of birds.
There is no slighting or warding you
for you parade where you hatched,
sedentary to the core, handicapped
and blunted in your nerve to migrate.
Now Your Eton Morning dress, checkerboard
gang colours, have become my ultra
sound, my skull theory, the noosed
wedding ring swaying above my belly.
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
 I keep spying your tidings in triptych,
In life divided
the figure which clinches it,
a girl in the gut, helixed behind
Peter Parker
the blanche of my own magpie paunch. Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner
by Mark Ford
Belknap Harvard, 20, pp. 305
The sonogram inches across the cold,
stretched drum of my belly. The monitor The ten pallbearers at Thomas Hardys
picks up the echo of a mermaid, funeral in Westminster Abbey on 16 Jan-
uary 1928 included Kipling, Barrie, Hous-
a flailing of legs blurring into a fin. man, Gosse, Galsworthy, Shaw and both
the prime minister and leader of the opp-
It hears the ghost of a snub nose, position. This distinguished gathering was
not strictly necessary for the job at hand,
the spit of my own mouth, the temples because Hardys coffin merely contained
of a head bridged by the arrow of a hand, his ashes all that there was room for in
the near certainty of a girl. Poets Corner. At exactly the same time
in Dorset, at a smaller funeral, a casket
containing Hardys unincinerated heart
Science christens the magpies call, was being borne to its final resting place
the coveted daughter, a second chance alongside his parents and his first wife
in the churchyard at Stinsford. As Mark
at myself; the reckoning of a wishing Ford observes, this macabre compromise
lash blown clean away from my finger.
Hardy wrote many poems set in
London, ranging in subject from
***
prostitutes to St Pauls Cathedral

Five (Jocale) between the nations and the authors wish-

The word jewel was anglicised from the Old French jouel and beyond that, to the Latin es seems appropriate for a writer whose life
word jocale, meaning plaything. and career was divided between the capital
and the countryside.
It also neatly reflected Hardys poetic
Never one for the magpies eye, obsession with the physical and imagina-
avid as the pawnbrokers magnifier, tive afterlives of the dead, a persistent and
disturbing theme inspired by graveyards in
the mesmerised quarry of the tinsel shine. Old St Pancras as well as Mellstock. The
title of Fords lively introductory chapter,
Never the gilded valentine, the decorated In Death Divided, is borrowed from a
poem containing some distinctly odd post-
lover on parade, the brandisher of a cariads mortem musings that Hardy wrote about
rapture in a trifling bauble. Florence Henniker, one of several women
who had captured his heart while it was still
securely lodged in his chest.
Never the squirreller of trinkets, As both a poet and novelist, Hardy is
the trover, the hoarder, the purser, always associated not only with English
the chary archivist of the rhinestone nest. gloom but also with the English country-
side in which he was born. It was in Lon-
don, however, that he became a writer,
Never one to grasp the whimsy of dearness, and Ford shows just how significant a role
the pretty penny dwarfed, the wild tender the capital played in both Hardys life and
imagination. Hardy first came to Lon-
vaulted in a precious metals brevity. don in 1862, shortly before his 22nd birth-
day, in order to work in an architectural
Never once starry-eyed by the dangling carat, office while at the same time attempting
to launch a career as a poet. Having failed
still I accepted your ex-fiances diamond. to interest publishers in his poems, and suf-
At that ungainly moment in the autumn fering from ill-health, he returned to Dor-
set after five years, but would frequently
live for extended periods in London, and
New York woods, I wish I had resigned when he became a fted literary figure he
myself to your secondhand proposal would spend the season there. As a map in
with the regalia of a Coke ring. this elegantly designed book shows, choos-
ing which of Hardys 34 London residences
warranted a blue plaque must have been
Rhian Edwards difficult, though the eventual choice was
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 47
BOOKS & ARTS

1 Arundel Terrace in Tooting, where he OBITUARY

and his first wife Emma lived from 1878 to
1881.
A damp, dark street in Tooting was the
setting for Beyond the Last Lamp, written
many years later, in September 1911, when
Eric Christiansen
Hardys relations with Emma had reached Geoffrey Wheatcroft remembers the idiosyncratic historian
their nadir. This is among the many poems
Hardy set in London, ranging in subject
whose funny, sharp reviews were only bettered
from prostitutes to St Pauls Cathedral; and by his exquisitely entertaining letters
Fords discussion of these urban verses, par-
ticularly in a chapter on Londons Streets

WITH THE PERMISSION OF THE WARDEN AND SCHOLARS OF NEW COLLEGE, OXFORD
and Interiors, is both engrossing and illu-
minating. He places this poetry in a liter-
ary context and relates it both to Hardys
life and to entries, often as beautiful as the
poems themselves, that Hardy made in his
notebooks and diaries.
Ford provides equally valuable insights
into the London of Hardys fiction, start-
ing with The Poor Man and the Lady. This
socialistic, not to say revolutionary book, as
Hardy characterised it, failed to find a pub-
lisher, but accurately reflected what he called
his early years of London buffeting, and it
was subsequently cannibalised for Desper-
ate Remedies, published as his first novel in
1871, and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873). Hardy
continued to explore London in later novels,
and although he is famed for his descriptions
of Wessex landscapes, such as Egdon Heath
in The Return of the Native and the turnip
field in Tess of the dUrbervilles, Ford shows
that evocations of metropolitan life in The
Hand of Ethelberta and The Well-Beloved
are equally striking.
What Ford calls the London-Dorset
axis is an important aspect of the work, Eric Christiansen at New College in 1972
and Hardy was able to shuttle between
the country and the capital because of the

arrival of the railways. He would later com-
plain that Dorchester had become almost
a London suburb, owing to the quickened
locomotion, but he was not slow to take
advantage of the railways as both a passen-
ger and a writer. Trains speed from town
to town, and to and from London, carry-
ing characters and plot, on a regular basis
in Hardys novels and short stories, Ford
observes, and he explores the often crucial
psychological function these journeys have
in the fiction. In A Pair of Blue Eyes, for
example, Stephen Smith and Elfride Swan-
courts disastrous decision to leap onto
a London-bound train initiates the first
of the ghastly episodes of disillusionment
towards which so many of Hardys novels
inexorably move.
Ford has the true measure of his sub-
ject, and his admiration for Hardy does
not blind him to occasional dud moments
and absurdities, which he treats with a light
and witty touch. His discussion of less well-
known novels and poems is particularly
welcome, and this fine book will encourage
readers to return to the work they know
with a quickened perception and explore
further what is new to them.
48
O
ver the past year, we have lost two
names cherished by Spectator read-
ers. Rodney Milnes, our opera critic
for 20 years before he moved to the Times,
as well as editing the monthly magazine
Opera, died last December, and Eric Chris-
tiansen, the Oxford medieval historian, who
was a regular book reviewer here for many
years, followed on the last day of October.
They both died at 79, both of cancer. Their
upbringing and education were similar
Rugby and Christ Church for Milnes, Char-
terhouse and New College for Christiansen.
From the last peacetime call-up generation,
both served unenthusiastically and unhero-
ically in the army. They were both old and
dear friends of mine.
Although I was sad that Rodneys death
wasnt marked in these pages, Ive written
about him at some length for Opera, and so
here I want to remember Eric. In the autumn
of 1965 he had just returned to New College
as a Fellow, and I had just gone up to the col-
lege, where Eric became a friend before he
taught me, or tried to, about the Middle Ages,
to which he had also returned, after a dis-
sertation on the politics of the 19th-century
Spanish army.
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
As soon as he began writing for The
Spectator, he proved to be a marvellous
book reviewer, clever, sharp and funny. It
seemed to go on for ever, a review of a book
on the Thirty Years War began. Leathery,
unshaven pikemen traipsing over a frosty
plain unexpected gunfire perpetual low
jabber before telling us that this was
the Coliseum in 1956, where the Berliner
Ensemble had brought Mother Courage, a
drama of NAAFI life on the battlefields of
17th-century Europe.
He had begun that sad and sticky evening
convinced that Brecht was right: if something
is worth saying, say it in German and inaudi-
bly, and as the evening wore on, it seemed
to endorse the motto we National Service
intellectuals had engraved on our metal cap
badges: War is hell, but by the end he won-
dered whether even the Thirty Years War
can have been as hellish as this. I thought
of that much later when one of Erics exqui-
sitely entertaining letters mentioned his two
years as a glorified filing clerk in the ranks
of the dear old Steel-backs (Northamptons
to you). No shots were fired in battle, but
gosh! the uniforms scratched.
Sometimes Eric could be derisive about
ill-informed amateurs I could believe
anything about the chronological system of
the Mayans, but not from a source that thinks
that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle was writ-
ten up year by year from Alfred the Great
onward but then again he asked us to
understand the plight of the don who knew
that he ought to be pursuing his scholarly
avocation rather than cutting a public fig-
ure, but was faced with the rocketing price
of leather patches for tweed jackets. And
with a gift that not many working journalists
possess, Eric could write his own headlines.
A review of a book by the tout ce quil y a
de chic French historian Emmanuel Le Roy
Ladurie appeared here under, Oh come, oh
come, Emmanuel.
In another piece more than 20 years ago,
Eric mentioned 1066 and All That, and said,
quite rightly, that its a very clever and amus-
ing book, but added that it was a joke which
had lost any point, since the kind of narra-
tive history Sellars and Yeatman satirised in
1930 simply hadnt been taught in this coun-
try for a generation. At the time, I thought
he was exaggerating; since then, my own
children have been through the educational
system and I now think that Eric was under-
stating the problem. And he sardonically
lamented the decay of the Oxford history
syllabus, and the hateful regimen of bureau-
cratic assessment.
Some of Erics wit was for private con-
sumption. Many years ago I looked for
him in his rooms in the Front Quad. On
the table was a portfolio outlining the lat-
est desecration of the Oxford townscape,
a proposed new brutally brutalist edifice
which had just been discussed at a college
meeting. As well as plan and elevation, the
architect had helpfully provided a per-
spective drawing of his work seen from the
street. For added realism, a young couple
He ew the Dannebrog above his
house to celebrate the Danish vote
against the Maastricht Treaty
were walking by, and a mother was pushing
a pram. In Erics copy, a cartoonists bub-
ble emerged from the hood of the pram,
lettered in his fine copperplate, so that the
little baby was looking up at the new build-
ing and saying, Innit fuckin orrible?
I f Eric wrote anything better than his
reviews it was his letters. He told me
about the election of a new Fellow, and of
one colleague whod read this mans books,
and announced delightedly, Hes even
more fraudulent than I am! Some letters
make me wince as well as smile. When I
sent him a chapter of book I was writing,
and apologised by way of saying that it had
been turned out fast against a deadline, he
replied that, if it had really been written
so quickly, I am astonished. Can this really
be the man whose inability to complete an
essay was once a source of such constant
relief to me?
And he snapped at any hint of affecta-
tion. Once when I incautiously wrote in the
TLS that One thinks again of Grillparzers
haunting epitaph for Schubert his next
letter began, Yes, no doubt in some cir-
cumstances one may think of the sod-
ding epitaph, in consequence of having
thought of it on a previous occasion, which
Im ashamed to say I havent. I didnt know
you used the poufs pronoun, but if that
marks a significant change in sexual orien-
tation, I wont even smile.
His loyalty to his ancestral country
went beyond his scholarly work on the
11th-century Danish chronicler Saxo
Grammaticus. An idiosyncratic Tory and
Churchman, and the most sceptical of
Eurosceptics, Eric flew the Dannebrog,
the venerable red flag with a white cross,
above his house to celebrate the Danish
vote against the Maastricht Treaty, and
lived to vote Leave, though not to see
the outcome of the American election.
How I wish I could hear Eric on President
Donald.

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the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 49

BOOKS & ARTS
Where the wild things are
Well do anything to forget we are animals. Charles Foster hails a forthcoming
exhibition that makes us face up to reality
W
hat is man, that thou art mind-
ful of him? asks the Psalmist.
Its a good question.
God Himself doesnt give a very satis-
factory answer. In one breath he insists that
humans are a little lower than the angels,
made in His own image, but also (in a for-
mulation as bleak and more terse than any
modern reductionists) that they are made
of dust, and to dust they will return.
Darwin tells us a similar story. We dont
have to flip back too many pages in our
family albums, he says, before we see furry,
feathered and scaly faces. But then he draws
an exuberantly branching tree of life, rooted
in stardust, and tells us that were perched
on the topmost bough. Its not surprising
that were confused.
This confusion is at the bottom of all our
neuroses. Our predominant feeling is the
queasiness of ontological vertigo. We know
ourselves too well, and read the newspapers
too diligently, to believe that were gods. And
yet our pride, and our love of literature and
old churches, convince us that were not mere
beasts. We see human deaths as more morally
significant than animal deaths. We hold our-
selves to different standards: we can tolerate
cannibalism in wolves, but not in ourselves.
Well do anything to reduce the queasi-
ness. Thats what our moral and religious and
cultural and scientific lives are about. We
read books, draw pictures and watch plays
to try to describe ourselves to ourselves. We
worship gods in us and gods outside us, try-
ing to find some comforting affinity with the
divine. We frenetically name animals in an
attempt to feel, like the first animal-namer,
50
ARTS SPECIAL
Adam, that we have dominion; but also so
that we can caress and relate. There are no
unnamed pet dogs.
But nothing really works. Were still
amphibians: neither properly spiritual
nor satisfactorily material. Were never at
home. We cant romp, copulate or die quite
like our dogs; nor can we thrive on light and
abstraction.
Faced with the hopeless prognosis for
our condition, a common palliative strategy
is to try to forget our connection with the
natural world; to hole up in cities; to eat plas-
tic animals blithely, denying what they are;
to have actual and metaphorical air-condi-
We are animals in the bedroom and
the boardroom; bloodless, besuited
apologies for animals everywhere else
tioning; to be animals only in the bedroom
and the boardroom, and bloodless, besuit-
ed apologies for animals everywhere else.
Yet this doesnt work either. At some level,
if only in our dreams, we know were wild
things, and that well only have functional
relationships with ourselves and each other
if we acknowledge what we are and where
weve come from. And where were going,
which is back to the wild. One day Im going
to be eaten by worms or fire, and so are you.
One way of asserting some reassuring
control over the wildness out there and
hence the wildness in us is to classify.
Pigeonholing is anxiolytic. Adam did it, Aris-
totle did it, the medieval bestiarists did it,
and then, from the 18th century (Linnaeus
Systema Naturae was published in 1735), it
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
became a popular, opioid religion, telling us
what we wanted to hear about what we are.
A few anarchic protestors (notably Swift, in
Gullivers Travels) objected to the hubristic
pedestal on which the taxonomists placed
humans, but they have still not prevailed.
There are other emollients. We can col-
lect, and tell ourselves that if wildness is
stuffed and locked in a glass case, it wont
come out and get us. We can put strange and
dangerous things in zoos, invite them elec-
tronically into our rooms, courtesy of David
Attenborough, or embody them in soft toys
with eyelashes like ours. There theyll be
safe, and so will we.
These are vast themes, normally thought
of as too big or too scary to examine. It is
hugely impressive that Making Nature,
shortly to open at the Wellcome Collection,
addresses them at all. That it does so with
such steely, elegant, iconoclastic verve and
nerve is astonishing.
Swashbuckingly curated by Honor Bed-
dard, Making Nature is an exploration of the
way that humans represent the non-human
world and hence how they see them-
selves in relation to that world. For (and to
acknowledge this is the real genius of the
exhibition) we are always self-creators: eve-
rything we paint is a self-portrait.
Beddard knows that the act of represen-
tation is political: that to juxtapose X with Y
is necessarily to make an assertion about the
nature of both, and to change both. She has a
wry awareness that to hold an exhibition to
highlight the distortions of taxonomy, con-
trol and display is to create a new set of dis-
tortions. That means that she has to subvert
 HENK SNOEK, MARCH 1965

The Elephant House at London Zoo, designed in 1964 by Casson Conder Partnership

her own event. And, splendidly, she does. For
me, the centre of the exhibition is Hiroshi
Sugimotos eloquently ironic picture of a
museum diorama. To make artifice into art
is smart and unnerving.
Its a small exhibition: there are just over
100 objects, many of which are images. But
the ground is well covered. There are ped-
igrees, drawers of bird skins, comparisons
of human and animal faces, glass-eye cata-
logues, ethereal seaweeds (like their own
Platonic forms), an interrogation of the
notion of type specimens, and theres plen-
ty of mere exuberant weirdness. Our thirst
for patterns and metanarratives is gently
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
exposed most beautifully in Werner and
Symes 1814 catalogue of colours in differ-
ent natural domains: the same buff orange
is said to recur in the Streak from the Eye
At some level, if only in our dreams,
we know were wild things
of the Kingfisher, the stamen of the large
white cistus, and the mineral natrolite.
This is a bracingly philosophical exhibi-
tion: a rigorous exposition of the phenom-
enologists axioms that context matters the Wellcome Collection from 1 December
profoundly, and that each of us creates a
universe. If you know youre a wild thing, go
along to meet some more of the family and
to see what others think of them and so
of you. If you dont know youre a wild thing,
go along to realise that you are.
The most dangerous worldview, wrote
von Humboldt, is that of those who have
never viewed the world. Or themselves,
Im tempted to add. But my addition is
unnecessary, as Making Nature so brilliantly
shows.
Making Nature: How we see animals is at
until 21 May 2017. Charles Foster is the
author of Being a Beast, Profile Books.
51
 BOOKS & ARTS
DITIONS DU SEUIL
Study of Two Blossoming Branches of Almond Trees, early February 1890, Saint-Rmy
Drawing
Will the real Van Gogh
please stand up
Martin Gayford
Vincent van Gogh spent a remarkably short
span of time in the southern French town of
Arles. The interval between him stepping off
the train from Paris on 20 February 1888 and
his departure for the asylum at Saint-Rmy
on 8 May the following year was a scant
14-and-a-half months. For some of this time
the painter was hospitalised and seriously ill,
yet in this brief period he produced not just
one, but several of the greatest pictures in
the history of art.
It might be thought that there was noth-
ing more to discover about Vincent in Arles,
a subject that has been so discussed, investi-
gated, dramatised and filmed over the years.
But this year a flurry of fresh information has
appeared. In the summer, strong evidence
emerged in Van Goghs Ear, a book by Berna-
dette Murphy, about how much of that organ
he had sliced off on the evening of 23 Decem-
52
ber 1888. It was not just a portion of lobe, as
is often believed, but the whole damn thing.
Now, in Studio of the South: Van Gogh
in Provence (Frances Lincoln, 25), Martin
Bailey, an indefatigable and much-respected
researcher into Van Goghs life and art, has
lucidly marshalled the facts of the case, and
added several fresh pieces of information.
One poignant detail he underlines is that,
Many of the recently discovered Van
Gogh drawings look positively inept
on the very day that Vincent descended into
delirium and mutilated himself, his young-
est sister Wil passed on a compliment from
Jozef Israls, a famous older Dutch artist.
On seeing Pink Peach Trees, one of the
paintings of orchards in blossom from the
previous spring, Israls exclaimed that Van
Gogh was a clever lad.
This undercuts another persistent leg-
end: that his work was neglected and derid-
ed during his lifetime. In fact, very few got a
chance to see the great paintings from Arles
and Saint-Rmy until near the end of Van
Goghs life. As Isralss remark shows, those Bernard, and the oil Sunset at Montma-
who did often liked them.
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Had this praise reached Vincent, would
it have forestalled his breakdown? There
were other factors pushing him over the
edge, one of which, as Bailey argues, was the
announcement that his brother Theo had
become engaged. Through assiduous detec-
tive work he has demonstrated that a letter,
almost certainly containing the good news,
arrived on the morning of the 23rd. This
might well have caused Vincents anxiety
levels to surge, since he depended on Theo
for money, and the latter would now have a
family to support.
This could well have triggered the catas-
trophe although there was more than one
factor undermining Van Goghs mental equi-
librium. He had been working furiously hard
for months, was probably drinking heavily,
and his house-share with Paul Gauguin, the
most fraught in art history, was about to dis-
integrate. There was also an underlying mal-
ady, probably inexorable and genetic, since
his sister Wil later also became deranged.
Baileys book reproduces a large num-
ber of works, including a recently unearthed
sketch of Van Gogh by his friend mile
jour, which was rediscovered a few years
 MESSUMS
www.messums.com

Henry Herbert La Thangue R A NEAC, 18591929 In a Cottage Garden (The Sawing Horse), 1896
oil on canvas 114 x 88 cms 45 x 34 5 8 ins

While never ceding objectivity, H. H. La Thangue knew that sentiment was a powerful tool in depicting
rural subjects: a way of life that was disappearing in the wake of modernisation.

Despite its topicality, In a Cottage Garden startled critics and audiences when it was rst exhibited. The
public thought the paintings intense focus radical, and La Thangues inclusion of blossoms and golden
light in no way softened the womans raw energy. As far as English contemporaries, La Thangues only
rival in the genre was George Clausen, and La Thangues work actually had more in common with
that of French contemporaries, like Lon Lhermitte, than any of his New English Art Club confrres.

The Studio, Lords Wood, Marlow, Buckinghamshire, SL7 2QS

by appointment please telephone 01628 486565
BOOKS & ARTS

ago. There is, however, a yet more sensa-

ADAM OFFICE
tional supposed find, which has just been
announced: a unknown sketchbook that has
apparently been preserved, unnoticed,
in Arles since 1890.
This, and the 65 drawings it contains, was
revealed to the world this week at a press
conference in Paris and in a book, Vincent
van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook, writ-
ten by a distinguished Canadian scholar,
Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, with a fore-
word by Ronald Pickvance, doyen of Van
Gogh specialists. It contains many versions
of familiar subjects the cornfields, the
cypress and olive trees plus a few novel-
ties, including an alleged portrait of Gauguin
and a strange self-portrait, quite unlike any
other image of Vincent.
It is claimed that the sketchbook was
presented to his friends and ex-landlords
Joseph and Marie Ginoux, the proprietors
of the Caf de la Gare, by Van Gogh short-
ly before he took the train north to Auvers,

The shocking revelation would

have been that Van Goghs work
could be this bad
where he killed himself a few months
later. He did not give it to them in person,
but entrusted it to Flix Rey, the doctor
who treated him immediately after the ear-
cutting episode.
Dr Rey allegedly visited him at Saint-
Rmy and carried the sketchbook back to
Arles. Neither the gift nor this visit was pre-
viously known, but are referred to in another
discovery a fragmentary notebook record-
ing various dealings at the Caf de la Gare
that was preserved with the drawings (which
are not in a conventional artists sketchbook
but a recycled commercial ledger).
There are several aspects of this prov- The white stuff: drawing showing sections of the stucco interiors at 20 Portman Square,
enance that make one feel cautious. It is c.1775, by Robert Adam
surprising, for example, though possible,
that such a valuable object should have lain
around undetected for more than a century.
However, that would not be so important if
the sketches themselves were comparable in
quality to the masterly paintings and draw-
ings that Vincent was producing at the very Almost from the moment the first stuc-
same time. But they are not.
Architecture co suburbs Belgravia, Pimlico, Bay-
I must emphasise that I have not seen Stuck on stucco swater, Paddington, Notting Hill, North
the originals, but judging from reproduc- Kensington went up in the 19th century,
tions many of them are weak and some Laura Freeman modelled more or less devotedly on John
especially the portraits look positive- Nashs Regents Park scheme, Stuccov-
ly inept, no better than amateur art-class Whenever the words stucco house appear
standard. The opinion of the Van Gogh in the newspapers, you can be certain the The Spectator, in 1875, called
Museum experts, released just after the occupiers have been up to no good. The stucco immoral
unveiling of the sketchbook, is convincing: Russian kleptocrat in his stucco palace in
that they are in fact imitations contain- Mayfair. The shamefaced prime minister ia, as it was called, was treated with sus-
ing striking topographical errors such seeking refuge in the stucco mansion of a picion and sometimes derision. Those runs
as omitting part of the asylum at Saint- party-donor chum. The disgraced wife-throt- of piano-key houses were too smooth, too
Rmy which Van Gogh did not other- tler with a stucco terrace in Eaton Square. bourgeois, too bland, too samey, too subur-
wise make. The verdict is also a relief. If the In each case, it is miscreant stucco, offshore- ban. This, when any street west of Marble
sketchbook had proved genuine it would trust stucco, stucco hiding corruption and Arch was thought to be the outer reaches
have contained a truly shocking revelation: foul play behind whiter-than-white, butter- of civilised London. People who like this
that Vincent could be this bad. wouldnt-melt faades. sort of thing will find this the sort of thing
54 the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
 Ch r i s B e e t l e s G al l e r y

THE ILLUSTRATORS
THE BRITISH ART OF ILLUSTRATION 2016

The best private gallery in London

Paul Johnson, The Spectator

Saturday 19 November 2016 Saturday 7 January 2017

Monday Saturday 10am5.30pm

H M Bateman (1887-1970) The passenger who dared to feel sick on the Queen Mary

All images can be viewed on our website www.chrisbeetles.com

Your catalogues are a

harbinger of Christmas, which
I still love with a childish glee
A A Gill

Our annual exhibition, the biggest event

worldwide for cartoon & illustration
collectors, features over 500 pictures
from the last 200 years.

The 156 page exhibition catalogue

presents a selection of illustrations
from 1900-2016
15 (free p&p for Spectator readers)

Paul Cox (born 1957) Through Twenties France by Bugatti Paul Mak (1891-1967) The Princess & The Phoenix

CHRIS BEETLES
8 & 10 Ryder Street, St Jamess, London SW1Y 6QB 020 7839 7551 gallery@chrisbeetles.com www.chrisbeetles.com
BOOKS & ARTS
they like, said the satirist G.W.E Russell
of small-minded, excruciatingly genteel
Stuccovia in 1902.
There are two sorts of stucco (which is
a type of plaster). The first is the delicate,
filigree stucco work of Italian stuccatori
craftsmen: lace-like wedding-veil patterns
applied to ceilings and drawing-room
panels and popularised in this country by
Robert Adam. Adam was the master of
intricate stucco-work ceilings, not always
white, but often coloured in his palette of
pinks and blues. Horace Walpole mocked
Adams stucco daintiness as gingerbread
and sippets, but clients adored it.
Less so Adams external stucco work.
Frances Sands, curator of a superb new exhi-
bition, Robert Adams London, at Sir John
Soanes Museum, cites Kenwood House
where Lord Mansfield complained that far
from being a cheap alternative to stone, the
stucco needed so much upkeep and redoing
that it would have been cheaper to cover it
all in Parian marble.
There were similar problems with
Adams stucco at 11 St Jamess Square and
at the Adam brothers Adelphi scheme.
This was slap-it-on stucco, stucco as the
In a country that is often grey, stucco
is a salamander: when there is sun, it
basks in it, glories in it
cake icing on so many Georgian and Regen-
cy streets and vaguely Italianate Victorian
terraces. External stucco could be grand
as it was in the hands of Nash and Adam
at their best or a cheap way of making
shoddy, rapidly built houses look like Bath
or Portland stone. The architectural histori-
an John Summerson thought stucco suggest-
ed faintly and agreeably, the artificiality of
powder and rouge. He is too kind to say that
like heavy make-up, stucco often hid build-
ings that were much pocked and wrinkled. It
is this sort of stucco, smothering street after
street Stucco Square, Upper and Lower
Stucco Place, Stucco Gardens, Stucco Mews
West from the 1820s that comes in for
such a drubbing.
Already in 1871, editorials in the Times
were weary of eternal stucco. The paper
hailed the first brick-and-terracotta buildings
of the South Kensington Museum now
the V&A as sights for stucco-sore eyes. By
1879 the Times was running special reports
on unscrupulous builders who covered jerry
dwellings, unsafe and unsanitary, with stucco,
pronounced them improved and hiked the
rents. It is cracked stucco, blistered stucco,
dreary stucco, sham stucco and the disfig-
urement of the country. The Spectator, in
1875, called stucco immoral.
In Henry Jamess The Princess Casa-
massima (1886), we know the Princess has
sunk in society when she moves from May-
fair to a stucco crescent in horrors!
Paddington. As far as the Princesss friends
56
are concerned, The descent in the scale of
the gentility was almost immeasurable.
Madeira Crescent, her new address, is not
only shabby, but mean and meagre and
fourth-rate and had in the highest degree
that petty parochial air, that absence of style
and elevation, which is the stamp of whole
districts of London.
Virginia Woolf, born in a stucco house in
Hyde Park Gate, thought stucco stood for
merchant middle-class timidity: nice man-
ners, no guts. She resented the pale pomp-
ous beauty of the Kensington of her youth.
When her time-travelling hero-heroine
Orlando arrives in the late 19th century she
looks at Londons Stuccovia and finds her
mind dizzied with the monotony.
It wasnt just London, but Bristol,
Brighton, Canterbury, Bath, Liverpool,
Manchester a whole country stuccod
from basement to cornice. In Gilbert Can-
nans novel The Stucco House (1917), set
in Thrigsby, a fictional Midlands industrial
town, stucco becomes something demon-
ic. The stucco house bought by the Law-
rie family, wanting to go up in the world
but not really able to afford the upkeep, is
blamed for all their subsequent misfortune.
Jamie Lawries descriptions of the house on
Roman Street become more and more hys-
terical: a great big sarcophagus of a house,
a prison, hideous and pretentious, an
absurdity of a house, a monstrosity in which
it was grotesque to imagine that happiness
could dwell. All because of a marzipan
layer of stucco.
Who will speak for stucco? Where are
its white knights? Here they come, trot-
ting down the ivory avenues of Regents
Park: John Betjeman and Osbert Lancaster.
To Betjeman, stucco was always creamy
stucco, while Lancaster wrote fondly of
his birthplace, the bright creamy 79 Elgin
Crescent. Lancaster later became a champi-
Exhibitions
on of sensible and attractive stucco, which Serious concerns
harmonised so well with the scenery and
atmosphere of the English seaside. Melanie McDonagh
Im with the white knights. To my eyes
there is nothing so scrumptious as a Jersey- Ardizzone: A Retrospective
cream, Eton-mess meringue of a house in House of Illustration, until 22 January 2017
Maida Vale, revelling in its own whiteness
in the Regents Canal. In a country that is Its funny, isnt it, how a dust jacket on a book
often grey, stucco is a salamander: when can draw you to it from the other end of a
there is sun, it basks in it, glories in it, is room always supposing the illustration is
white, gorgeous and gleaming against blue by Edward Ardizzone. In fact, is there any-
skies; when it is overcast, stucco is defiant, thing more suggestive of delight than a book
it takes what little light there is and shines illustrated by him? Its the Midas touch even
and smiles, where red brick, steel and con- for unprepossessing authors. The exhibition
crete frown. Yes, it is prone to falling off in of his work at the House of Illustration fin-
lumps if not maintained. But when pristine, ishes off with a wall lined with them: The
is there a nicer, nobler sight than a stucco Little Grey Men, Jim at the Corner, Italian
crescent? When the pearly gates open on Peepshow, Johnnys Bad Day, Eleanor Far-
my vision of heaven, it is on an uninter- jeons Book. . . youll recognise lots.
rupted vista, a John Nash utopia, of street And theres something utterly distinctive
after double-cream street. about every one: the boys upturned nose,
the rounded line of a motherly womans
Robert Adams London is at the Sir John bottom hes good at soft womens lines;
Soanes Museum until 11 March 2017. the tapering narrow shins of two children in
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
 tures of tarts, drunks, chipper working-class

ESTATE OF EDWARD ARDIZZONE

girls, many of them seen close by his home
in Maida Vale, were affectionate, unjudg-
mental and reflected the political pre-
occupations of the International Artists
Association to which he belonged, which
emphasised the importance of social real-
ism. Indeed, for a man of his kindliness,
its notable that his least sympathetic fig-
ures are rich men. You can see as much in
his collaborations with Graham Greene in
books such as The Little Horse Bus where
the plutocrats are baddies. (Interesting-
ly, those books arent really successful:
Greene was too arch, too knowing.)
He seems an improbable choice of offi-
cial war artist, given that others included
Graham Sutherland, John Piper and Henry
Moore, but he was recommended by Ken-
neth Clark who wanted an artist who would
show the earthy part . . . what military life
was really like. And while he of all artists
found it most difficult to show mans hate-

There are times when Ardizzone

Shelter Scenes, Tilbury by Edward Ardizzone
Edwardian dress; the curve of a dragonflys
body over a pool where a dwarf with a wood-
en leg sits fishing. Just a line, usually a curved
line, but evocative of a delicacy and human-
ity that characterised everything well,
nearly everything he ever drew. Actually,
theres a dragon in this exhibition that he did
when he was a boy, and its reminiscent of the
feisty, fierce one in what is, I stoutly maintain,
his masterwork: The Land of Green Ginger,
Noel Langleys wonderful tale of dragons
and djinns and an enchanted island that was
never in the same place twice.
And of course there are illustrations
from the books for which hes probably
best known, the Tim and Ginger series,
which he wrote as well as illustrated he
did 17 books as author and illustrator
but the exhibition isnt just about the chil-
drens books.
Thats the point.
Actually, I feel rather embarrassed now
that I only ever associated Edward Ardiz-
zone with childrens stories which Puffin,
to their infinite credit, are still producing
(check out The Little Girl and the Tiny Doll).
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Its like going on about how brilliant T.S.
Eliot is when all youve read is Old Possums
Book of Practical Cats.
He was a serious artist, much admired
by Kenneth Clark, often compared to
Daumier for his thick outlines and heavy
shadows, and as an official war artist he was
probably the most effective in capturing
the human aspect of the war. He was quite
extraordinarily prolific one of the good
things about being financially hard-pressed
quite a lot of the time and his oeuvre,
represented here in more than 100 pieces,
encompasses his advertising and commer-
cial work (theres a charming poster for
Guinness showing a cheery workman car-
rying not only a piano but also a piano play-
er), his many illustrations for adult books,
his pictures of London pub and street
scenes and his war paintings.
He was never except in his murals
for a church in Faversham overtly reli-
gious, though his own Catholic sensibility, a
warm humanity, infused everything he did.
As an artist he was a lover of mankind, a
storyteller, in the way Dickens was; his pic-
resembles no one so much as Watteau
ful aspect as with Dickens, cheerfulness
will keep breaking out his sympathetic
approach and eye for the absurd was entire-
ly apt.
One image, On the Road to Tripoli: Cup
of Tea for the Burial Party, shows squaddies
calmly drinking mugs of tea in front of three
open graves, which, you feel, was how it was.
There are uncharacteristic exceptions here,
though, including the sparse, bleak A Bat-
tery Position in an Orchard of Young Fruit
Trees in the Snow, in ink and wash.
Paring the material down to the selec-
tion here must have been a formidable
undertaking for the curators, Alan Powers
(who has written an admirable monograph
to accompany the exhibition: Edward Ard-
izzone, Artist and Illustrator, Lund Hum-
phries, 40) and Olivia Ahmad. In fact, the
exhibition, over three rooms, is probably the
right size, given that a number of the exhibits
are small-scale, to be pored over. For good
measure, theres a bookshelf that stood in
his sitting room, and a little theatre that he
made for domestic theatricals. Its a gem of
an exhibition; for fans of Ardizzone, and we
are legion, its a must.
Theres also a small, charming dis-
play of his work at Chris Beetles Gallery
in St Jamess, The Human Comedy, which
includes some lovely pub scenes (Barmaids
Old & New), pictures from one of his col-
laborations with Robert Graves, and some
enchanting illustrations for Eleanor Far-
jeons Italian Peepshow. Honestly, there are
times when he resembles no one so much as
Watteau a world in which sin and death
never enter. And from the end of the month
the show will be incorporated into the gal-
lerys ever-brilliant annual exhibition, The
Illustrators. Its a delight.
57
BOOKS & ARTS

mothers mirror image, however, she was her curiosity value. In recording life, she cap-
Photography mothers worst nightmare. Brigid was Gen- tured our times. By myopically depicting
The woman who eration Gap. Whatever her mother did, Brig- her own transgressions and self-indulgenc-
id did the opposite. Honey was thin. Brigid es, she has prophetically reflected the nar-
invented selfies was fat. Honey had tea with the Duchess of cissism and exhibitionism, the craving for
Bob Colacello Windsor and Diana Vreeland. Brigid had fame and confusing of fame and infamy
sex with John Chamberlain and Larry Riv- that have become the staples of American
ers and got them to draw their penises popular culture. I invented selfies, she says
It took a while for Brigid and I to get to know in her infamous Cock Books. Honey adored proudly. I did. Id put in a roll of film. And
each other, not to mention like each other. Bill Blass. Brigid told her he was gay. then I would suck in my cheeks to look like
But then it was total lifelong devotion. At Of course, millions of children of the a model. And then snap, snap, snap. Id use
first, when I started out at Interview, in 1970, rich and upper middle class were rebel- six of the eight pictures on the roll. I couldnt
Brigid would give me The Glare, which was ling against their boring, bourgeois parents think of what else to take, so Id just take two
the negative equivalent of Nancy Reagans in the 1960s. But Brigid took her rebellion pictures of the floor.
The Gaze. One or two seconds of that kill- to extremes: blowing her trust fund on a Brigid bought her Polaroid 360, with Dif-
ing look were enough to put fuser Portrait and Close-Up
across Brigids message: stay lenses, in 1968. It was the
away. But a few years later, BRIGID BERLIN/REEL ART PRESS
only camera I ever used,
she gave up speed, moved she says. Taking pictures
to a proper apartment on with it quickly became her
East 22nd Street, and took newest addiction. As she
a steady job as receptionist puts it, Running out of film
and transcriber of Andy War- was worse than running
hols tapes at the new Facto- out of speed. The recently
ry at 860 Broadway. That was invented camera was the
when we bonded. perfect toy for the great big
Our newfound friend- spoiled child she was and
ship was partly based on our the perfect tool for some-
shared Republican roots one enamored of disrobing
her Dad was a close friend whenever she felt like it.
of Richard Nixon and Nel- With its in-camera, 60-sec-
son Rockefeller; my Mom ond development process,
had been a Republican party this wondrous portable
precinct captain in Plainview, machine not only provid-
Long Island. We also shared ed instant gratification, but
the highly developed appre- also eliminated the threat of
ciation of absurdity that you censorship at the photo lab.
needed to survive at Andy Brigids artistic approach
Warhol Enterprises, to get was somewhere between
what was going on and go opportunistic and nihilis-
along with it. Not that Brig- tic, addict-style: No picture
id worshipped Andy or his ever mattered. There was
art quite the contrary. I never any subject that I was
think she felt because she after. It was clicking it and
had given him two of his best pulling it out that I loved.
ideas Polaroids and tape- Actually, she was quite
recording she had the right definite about her favour-
to call him ridiculous and his ite subjects: herself and
art a big nothing. She cer- Andy, in that order. Brigid
tainly was the only Factory and Andy made the perfect
worker to spurn a Christmas What you see is what you get: Self-Portrait by Brigid Berlin couple: the outcast heiress
gift of one of his paintings, and the nerd desperate to
saying shed rather have a get in; the self-destructive
washer-dryer. By then, she had given up tak- quickie marriage to a staple gun queen exhibitionist and the ambitious voyeur; the
ing Polaroids, and was stitching needlepoint (i.e., window dresser); lolling about naked high-camp nun and the Pope of Pop (never
slippers, at $1,200 a pair, for Andys dealers in underground movies; tweezing the gem- underestimate the Catholic influence on the
and clients. Shed also lost a lot of weight, and stones out of a silver box the Shah of Iran Factory mentality). I found it telling that in
once a week had her hair teased and sprayed had given her parents so she could score Brigids portraits of Andy he frequently had
into a grand bouffant, just like her mother. more speed. And she was surely the only his eyes closed, as if he couldnt be bothered
Brigids mother, Muriel Honey Ber- alumna of the Convent of the Sacred Heart to look at her. Oh, Brigid, one can hear him
lin, was a popular New York society host- to record her fights on the phone with her saying. Youre never going to do anything
ess. Her father, Richard E. Berlin, was the mother and turn over the tapes to Andy with these pictures anyway. On the other
president of the Hearst Corporation from Warhol to turn into an off-Broadway play. hand, maybe he thought he was prettier with
1943 to 1973. Hearst owned a dozen or so The key word is record. Brigids need his lids downcast and pretty was some-
magazines, including Harpers Bazaar, Town to rebel has always been matched by her thing he always wanted to be.
& Country and Cosmopolitan, several radio need to document her rebelliousness, and A remarkable aspect of this new book
and TV stations, and a chain of right-wing the overlapping of these two compulsions of Brigids Polaroids is the large number of
newspapers. Before Brigid became her is what gives her work meaning beyond its important artists who had Brigid take their
58 the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
picture. Or perhaps I should refer to paint-
ers and sculptors as other artists, whose
names she would drop to make Warhol jeal-
ous. Some had been her lovers, and they all
seemed to adore her, probably because she
was at least as crazed as they were in those
days. Its quite an assembly: from De Koon-
ing to Donald Judd, Cy Twombly, and Roy
Lichtenstein. One of the best photos is of
the poet Joe Brainard, Bill Katz, John Cage
and Jasper Johns huddled together against a
white brick wall.
One also finds Brigids fellow superstars,
the wayward debs, poets and drag queens
who appeared in Andys movies. Nico, Baby
Jane Holzer, Ultra Violet, Candy Darling
and Joe Dallesandro are all here look-
ing not glamorous but ordinary. This is the
opposite of fashion photography or studio
portraiture. Brigid was a realist. What she
saw is what you got. Moreover, she was a
master of the expressionless, the almost
empty, the deader than deadpan. In that
regard, she outdid even Andy. Yet for all
her aching to be shocking and perverse, her
work remains tinged with the innocence of
a sheltered Catholic schoolgirl.
This is an edited extract from Brigid Berlin
Polaroids, 29.95. Deluxe Limited Edition,
650, published by Reel Art Press, www.
reelartpress.com.
Opera
Another fine mess
Michael Tanner
Lulu
London Coliseum, in rep until 19
November
Simplicius Simplicissimus
Independent Opera, Lilian Baylis Studio,
until 19 November
I wonder why ENO has invested in a new
production of Bergs Lulu, when the previ-
ous one, which we first saw in 2002 and then
in 2005, was so brilliant as to be virtually
definitive. (Of course, that last word is anath-
ema to operatic creative teams, for obvious
reasons.) Not that this new one, directed by
William Kentridge, isnt good too, though it
is excessively busy, compounding the hyper-
activity of the score and action. It doesnt do
anything to clarify matters, though almost all
the questions one is left asking are ones that
the composer-librettist has set. The very full
and useful notes in the programme trace the
history of the Lulu plays and their transfor-
mation into the opera, in a way that makes
clear what a mess it was how the whole thing
slithered into being, both dramatically and,
hardly separably, conceptually. What emerg-
es with some degree of lucidity is that both
Wedekind and Berg made artistic capital out
of their highly ambivalent attitudes towards
women and womens sexuality, and hoped
that by leaving their feelings unresolved
and letting them coexist uneasily they would
engender something that counted as a mod-
ern myth, and so make confusion seem deep
and labyrinthine. Its not a particularly high-
risk strategy, since audiences are only too
content to be baffled and impressed. But it is
worth thinking about the difference between
a dramatic experience that leads you into a
problem and which enriches your life by hav-
ing you constantly returning to it and using
it as a reference point, and on the other hand
an experience that leaves you bemused and,
so to speak, standing on the outside and won-
dering what is going on within.
It seems clear to me that Lulu belongs
to the second category. It is a work of enor-
mous allure as well as repulsiveness, and
one to which I have returned regularly
over the five decades since I first saw it,
fascinated. Its sound-world is all its own,
almost always quite different from that of
Wozzeck, a far greater work. The point of
nearest contact is the supercharged orches-
tral interlude after Act One scene two,
which rubs shoulders with the notorious
D minor interlude in Wozzeck after

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the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 59

 BOOKS & ARTS
CATHERINE ASHMORE
Intimations of perplexity: Joanna Dudley in Lulu at ENO
Wozzeck drowns. The world of the earlier
opera is permeated with strong feelings,
unironically expressed, so that that inter-
lude can seem to render explicit what we
have already grasped. By contrast, Lulu is so
sharp and dry for most of the time that any
chance for emotional abandon is gratefully
taken. The relationship between the stage
and the pit is a vertiginous one: on stage,
Lulu is a work of enormous allure as
well as repulsiveness
people say and do things that are only intel-
ligible if they are intensely overwrought, yet
the reactions of other characters, especially
Lulu, are offhand and often comically bru-
tal. The same goes for the orchestra, which
seems to be enjoying itself in self-sufficient
musical ingenuities, alternating with passag-
es of typically Bergian heavy breathing and
compassion. Yet the music and the action
are only sometimes coincident, and its hard
to predict when. This allows for further inti-
mations of perplexity and the abyss.
Kentridge and his team update the action
to the 1920s, thus prolonging Jack the Rip-
pers life by several decades. Projected car-
toon images come and go at a vertiginous
60
rate, and since almost all Lulus words are
inaudible or unintelligible, the eyes are kept
dizzyingly busy. Brenda Rae is Lulu, and in
Act One on the first night at least she under-
sang, with only her top notes carrying. Lulu
may be a blank on which the other charac-
ters, and the audience, can project their own
image of womanhood, but she does at least
need to be sexy. Rae has the figure but not
the magnetism that leads to cardiac arrests,
suicides and the other fates that await those
who exploit and are exploited. The survi-
vor, apart from Jack, is the malodorous Sch-
igolch, well sung but hygienically acted by
Willard White.
The most sympathetic figure, as usual, is
the Countess Geschwitz of Sarah Connolly,
her acting and singing equally moving. The
rest of the amorous team are a distinguished
group, many of them veterans. Mark Wig-
glesworth and the orchestra are tremendous,
but even so Im heretical enough to wish
that Act Three had never been completed by
Cerha, and to return to my older recordings,
with the music from the Lulu Symphony,
much briefer and at last giving permission
for a straightforward response.
Independent Opera is giving four perfor-
mances, the first in the UK, of Karl Amade-
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
us Hartmanns Simplicius Simplicissimus at
the Lilian Baylis Studio. Hartmann was part
of the inner immigration of Germans hos-
tile to the Nazi regime, but determined to
stick it out. His idiom would not have given
even the Nazis sensitive ears offence, but
the opera, like the rambling novel on which
it is based, is an indictment of war, hence the
delay in its production. Simplicius is a young
man, brilliantly performed in this produc-
tion by Stephanie Corley, who encounters
several archetypal figures and gets roughed
up. Nearly everyone is dressed as a boy
scout, and there is lots of running around
and wrestling. It could just as well be staged
as a cantata, in fact might make a greater
impact that way.
The performance was excellent, the in-
yer-face acoustics of the theatre giving it
maximum impact, but that turned out to be
pretty small, thanks to Hartmanns general-
ised idiom, neither expressive nor illustra-
tive, uniform in its depiction of whatever
varying ordeals or consolations Simplicius
encounters. Under the convincing baton of
Timothy Redmond, and in David Pount-
neys translation, one cant imagine the
work being better served, so it has only
itself to blame.
Theatre
Space oddity
Lloyd Evans
Lazarus
Kings Cross Theatre, until 22 January 2017
Bits of Me Are Falling Apart
Soho Theatre, until 3 December
One of David Bowies last works, Lazarus, is
a musical based on Walter Teviss novel The
Man Who Fell to Earth. Enda Walsh has writ-
ten the script. The lead character, Newton, is
a derelict celebrity addicted to gin who occu-
pies a big brown apartment full of bickering
attendants. Its unclear who or what Newton
is. Human or alien? Something in between?
His ontological status is a further puzzle. He
He may be alive, dead, half-dead,
non-dead, half-undead or semi-not-
quite-half-unalive
may be alive, dead, half-dead, non-dead, half-
undead or semi-not-quite-half-unalive. This
is a problem, dramatically. A character who
exists outside the mortal realm cant make
choices or perform actions that affect himself
and others. Hes not a personality, therefore,
just a puzzle wearing some clothes. Beige
clothes in this case.
Newtons light-brown shirt and fawn
trousers match his fudge-y make-up. The
playing area, also beige, is arranged in rec-
tilinear blocks like a bookless municipal
library. A glass wall at the rear of the stage
reveals a lugubrious band of musicians who
churn out Bowies magnificent back cata-
logue without a trace of passion or involve-
ment. These visual and spatial effects are
cooling, distancing. The emotional register
is frozen reverence. The plot dodges here
and there, never settling on anything for
long, as Newtons employees pootle around
the place, whining. A black-clad helper
announces that hes gay and dies. A foxy
maid and her clingy boyfriend exchange
petulant gripes and accusations of infidelity.
A scene of bloodshed in a nightclub darkens
the mood temporarily.
Then a sexy sprite appears. She creates
a low-budget Mars probe by sticking some
tape on the floor in the form of a winged
cone. Newton climbs into this imaginary
rocket, and his trip to the red planet, perhaps
also imaginary, begins. Somebody persuades
The curved-spine community cant
hear a thing unless the amps are
cranked up to 11
Newton to stab the sprite with a penknife.
He hesitates. In a normal play this would
be tense and gripping but here the would-
be killer and his potential victim are ethe-
real spectres so the result of the knifework
is impossible to guess at. Newton wields the
blade, the sprite falls flat on her back, turns
into milk, gets up again and announces that
she has a new name. The foregoing sentence,
Im sorry to say, describes the most coherent
narrative passage in the show.
Box-office business seems healthy
enough and the Bowie fans, many now qual-
ifying for free bus travel, watched the show
in motionless silence. Was that ennui or
medical advice? Dont overdo it, dear. The 15, Key Cities
music itself outstrips everything. Michael C.
Hall (Newton) gives a vocal performance
that ascends gloriously to the level required.
As an actor hes over-demonstrative but his
voice is transfixing, like Bowies, intimate
and vast, full of weird shadings and colora-
tions, haunted by pain and need. Its always
a treat to hum along to classic tracks like
Heroes and Changes being thrashed out I wouldnt wish for you to cancel that hip
at top volume. But lets be honest about
this. In its heyday, rock music was played
over-loud as an act of defiance. Now its an
act of prudence. The curved-spine commu-
nity cant hear a thing unless the amps are
cranked up to 11.
Ade Edmondson was part of a comedy
duo that famously lacked a straight man.
Pop-eyed maniac Rik Mayall played every-
thing at breakneck speed. And Edmondson,
to match his friends inspired lunacy, assumed
the role of a ranting goblin whose zaniness
never fully convinced. Behind the braying
vocalisations and the distorted grimaces lay
something softer and more humane, a genial
intelligence, a quiet thoughtful figure embar-
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
rassed, perhaps, by the posturing caricature
hed been forced to create.
The true Edmondson emerges in Wil-
liam Leiths sad-dad memoir, Bits of Me
Are Falling Apart. Edmondson is a wry,
unshowy, presence who brings warmth and
likeability to Leiths troubled persona. He
ruminates on lifes disappointments as he
makes his weekly journey across London
to fetch his son from his estranged partner.
Self-pity is a lure he cant resist. Though a
successful writer, he regards himself as a
failure. In perfect health, hes convinced
that lethal ailments are about to budge
him into the boneyard. Securely housed, he
regrets not scrambling on to the property
ladder earlier. And he insists that his little
lad, aged two, is the only source of comfort
in his life. This is false, of course, as he prob-
ably realises. He derives far more pleasure
from the relentless contemplation of his
own shortcomings. What he forgets is that
hes exceptionally fortunate, in his mid-50s,
to be fit, intelligent, solvent, fertile, avail-
able romantically and therefore capable of
starting afresh. As his son grows into boy-
hood he will start to view his distant but
loving father as a figure of romance and
glamour. Steve Marmion has added some
colourful flourishes to the script but the
material is devoid of theatricality. It would
work better on radio. And best of all in
book form. Which is where it began.
Cinema
About a boy
Deborah Ross
Indignation
Indignation is an adaptation of Philip Roths
2008 novel and amazingly, for an adapta-
tion of a Philip Roth novel see the recent
dogs dinner that was American Pastoral,
for example it may even be worth two
hours of your time. (Depending on what you
would otherwise be doing with that time;
Semitism where hostility is never expressed
operation or similar.)
It stars Logan Lerman as Marcus Mess-
ner, a 19-year-old Jewish boy from Newark
who, in 1951, escapes the Korean war and
the over-anxious clutches of his parents by
winning a scholarship to a college in Ohio.
Marcus, at the outset, is a good Jewish boy
an exemplary Jewish boy. Marcus is the
Jewish boy you would want if you hap-
pened to be in the market for a Jewish boy.
He is super-bright, serious, a straight-A stu-
dent. Marcus and his parents (his father is a
butcher) are determined he will make it to
law school, and there is no reason to imag-
ine he wont. But Ohio is an unknown quan-
tity How will you keep kosher? asks his
mothers friend, worriedly. And its in Ohio
that his life does, indeed, go awry, as the col-
leges conservative Christian values close
in on him and hes forced to feel the emo-
tion for which the films title is absolutely
the mot juste.
This is the directorial debut of James
Schamus, who also penned the screenplay,
and is otherwise a producer (Suffragette,
Happiness, Brokeback Mountain, Sense
and Sensibility) and writer (The Ice Storm,
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Eat Drink
Man Woman) and if he doesnt take out the
rubbish or unstack the dishwasher, I put it
to you: where would he find the time? Scha-
mus conjures a compelling sense of dread
it feels ominous from the opening frame
and also captures the stifling, suffocat-
ing nature of a 1950s campus where girls are
constrained by curfews, boys are strangled
by buttoned-up shirts worn with ties, and
regular chapel-going is mandatory for all,
regardless.
Two encounters are pivotal for Marcus.
One is with a fellow student Olivia (Sarah
Gadon), with whom he becomes infatuated.
She is a blonde shiksa goddess with a his-
tory of mental instability (uh-oh, here comes
It bristles with a sexual energy and an
emotional richness as well as,
yes, indignation
trouble) and who introduces him to both
treif food and handjobs. (But not simulta-
neously, which would be super-messy; youd
need quite a clutch of napkins for that.) The
other pivotal encounter is with the head of
the college, Dean Caudwell (Tracy Letts),
who is adversarial, prying and insinuating.
It says here your father is a kosher butcher,
says the Dean, reading through Marcuss file,
in his presence. No, it does not. I remember
writing down just butcher, Marcus replies.
Im merely assuming he is a kosher butch-
er. He is, but its not what I wrote down.
I acknowledge that. But its not inaccurate
to identify him more precisely as a kosher
butcher. . . What is Caudwells game?
Caudwells game is anti-Semitism. That
is, the kind of institutionalised, systemic anti-
directly, but thrums chillingly beneath the
surface. Caudwell doesnt wake up every
morning consciously thinking of new ways
to hate on Jews. (He isnt like the RE teach-
er from my secondary comprehensive who
referred to the few Jews in the school as
the Jesus killers and would turn to you
mid-class to ask: What does the Jesus killer
think about this? Um . . . really sorry? Um
. . . wont happen again?) He thinks Christi-
anity is good for everybody, and Jews can be
accommodated so long as they attend chap-
el and toe the line. The most gripping sec-
tion of the film is an 18-minute two-hander
between Caudwell and Marcus which culmi-
nates in nice Marcus shedding his niceness.
61
BOOKS & ARTS
And also puking all over the Deans tro-
phies. Riveting. (Not the puking: the to-and-
fro between the two.)
Having never read this particular Roth,
I cant say how true this stays to the novel;
cant say whether it captures its complexi-
ties, nuances, depths, obsessions with sex and
death and so on and so forth. I can only say
that it bristles with a sexual energy and an
emotional richness as well as, yes, indigna-
tion. It is also tremendously well served by
a terrific cast. Letts is wonderful, of course,
while Lerman exactly portrays a boy who
is brilliant yet naive, morally righteous yet
flawed. Further, there is a fabulous scene
late on where Linda Emond, as Marcuss
mother, appraises Olivia (uh-oh, trouble)
and extracts a promise from Marcus that will
prove shattering. This is also riveting. And it
doesnt come with puking.
You could pick holes, so I will. For
instance, Marcus offers a sporadic first-
person narration that feels like what it is
Roths prose spoken aloud while Olivia
seems horribly underwritten. What is her
story? And I couldnt tell you what it all
adds up to. That the thrum of prejudice can
destroy you? That fate is simply the sum
of incidental happenings? Whatever, its
still worth two hours of your time, but only
depending on what else you have to do. (A
hip will always come first.)
Television
Old stamping ground
James Walton
If I tell you that on Monday there was an
hour-long documentary about the history of
stamp-collecting, then you probably dont
need this columns usual bit in brackets
saying which channel it was on. Indeed, at
times Timeshift: Penny Blacks and Twopen-
ny Blues seemed determined to be the most
BBC4-like programme in the history of
BBC4: cheerfully niche, heroically indiffer-
ent to all notions of cool and so old-school
in its production style that any mention of
France was introduced with a blast of accor-
dion music. Above all and unlike so many
other documentaries elsewhere it was
wholly confident that its viewers would be
interested in interesting things without hav-
ing to be shrilly reminded every few minutes
of how interesting they are.
Admittedly, presenter Andrew Martin
did permit himself the odd modest flourish
when offering us a particularly fascinating
fact: that the word philately comes from
the Greek for a love of the exemption from
tax, for example; or that the first-ever com-
memorative stamp was issued in 1871 to
mark the 20th anniversary of the Peruvian
railway. Otherwise, he followed the trusty
method of his previous BBC4 documenta-
62
ries by simply casting a knowledgeable
and often amused eye over a subject clearly
close to his heart.
Of course, another element of the pro-
grammes considerable appeal was nostal-
gia, even if it came at the cost of making
the target audience realise that their youth
took place in a long-vanished era. When I
was a boy, Martin began wistfully, there
was much talk of hobbies. And back when
he was, in the early Seventies, the default
hobby consisted of carefully using adhe-
sive paper hinges to stick stamps in the cor-
Was this the most BBC4-like
programme in the history of BBC4?
rect part of a special album. (We made our
own fun in those days.) By 1972, you could
increase the pleasure still further by play-
ing the board game Collect, the lid of which
promised All the excitement of the stamp
collecting world!
But, as we learned, this golden age had a
long gestation. The first stamp was collected
on the day the first stamp was issued in 1840,
when a British Museum zoologist bought a
couple of Penny Blacks to keep for himself.
After that, the practice unexpectedly went
underground, with collectors meeting in
London backstreets to avoid prosecution
for unlicensed trading. It finally became
big business when Stanley Gibbons opened
his London shop in the 1870s although,
weirdly, Gibbons chose to sell up in 1890 and
go round the world womanising, when he
could have been, say, cataloguing the stamps
of Mauritius.
When it reached the present day, the
programme struck a more melancholy note.
These days, it seems, philatelys main pur-
pose is as an investment opportunity, with
a one-cent magenta from British Guia-
na selling at auction in 2014 for $9.5 mil-
lion. Nonetheless, Martin did discover a
group of amateur collectors still meeting
in an East Croydon church hall. To his evi-
dent surprise they even included a woman.
(Fortunately, in a thoughtful concession to
maintaining gender stereotypes, she spe-
cialises in stamps with cats on them.) What
he didnt find there, though, was anybody
under about 55.
The Undiscovered Peter Cook (BBC4,
Wednesday) was, among other things, a
strong argument against the current fad for
decluttering. When Cook died in 1995, his
wife Lin locked up his Hampstead house
just as it was, with a lifetime of memorabil-
ia scattered about, and refused all requests
to look inside. Until, as the unseen pre-
senter Victor Lewis-Smith inevitably put
it, now.
In fact, this thumping clich pointed to
the one disappointment about the pro-
gramme: that the unruly talents of Lewis-
Smith and Cook himself were combined
to produce a documentary that not only
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
observed TV conventions so scrupulously,
but that also treated its subject with a most
un-Cook-like reverence.
Happily, there was no denying the quality
of the material that Lewis-Smith unearthed
from various cardboard boxes, shelves
and carpets. Home movies from the 1930s
reminded us how posh Cooks upbringing
was, by featuring garden parties and serv-
ants and by being home movies from
the 1930s. We also got any number of nev-
er-before-seen clips, including from Cooks
fabled 1971 chat show, originally planned
to last 13 episodes, but pulled after three.
(Left with a sudden gap in the schedules, the
BBC hastily replaced Cook with a journalist
called Michael Parkinson.)
Given the reverent tone which was
presumably linked to Lins involvement
Cooks last years were duly treated with
almost Jeeves-like discretion. Cook, Lewis-
Smith told us, was by no means the tor-
tured genius of popular imagining, and had
long periods off the booze, once even
giving up for seven months. Yet, despite
such efforts, the final sections of this pro-
gramme were distinctly melancholy too
not least when Lin rather gave the game
away by explaining that she once asked her
husband why he drank so much. Despair,
really, Cook replied.
Radio
Whodunnit
Kate Chisholm
Barbed wire, concrete, razor blades, pass-
ports, Bakelite and the sewage system are
all crucial to the way we live now yet what
do most of us know about who, when, how
they were invented? In an ambitious new
series for the World Service, 50 Things
That Made the Modern Economy, Tim Har-
ford intends to put us straight, taking one
thing each week over the next year and in
just nine, tight, well-ordered minutes giv-
ing us its potted history. This weekend,
for instance, Harford introduced us to the
Haber-Bosch process, which he argues is
the most significant invention of the 20th
century, allowing the worlds population
to grow exponentially from four billion
people in the 1910s when it was first intro-
duced to seven and a half billion now. What
Fritz Haber did was to work out a way to
convert the nitrogen in the atmosphere
into ammonia, used as the basis of ferti-
liser. Carl Bosch replicated the process on
an industrial scale, thereby revolutionising
farming and food production. Both won
Nobel prizes. Acquiring more land was no
longer the only way to feed more people;
all that was needed was nitrogen, which
was freely available in the atmosphere. The
process was just like alchemy, or Brot aus
Luft (bread from air) as the process came
to be known in Habers native Germany.
But as followers of Harfords programme
on Radio 4, More or Less, will know, to be
informed is not just to be told the facts.
Harford helps us to understand the back
story, the broader implications. His nine
minutes on Haber-Bosch began by telling us
about the sad life of Habers wife Clara, who
was also a scientist, the first woman to gain
a doctorate in chemistry in Germany. Once
married to Haber, she was not encouraged
to continue her research, and whenever she
did give a lecture it was assumed he must
have written it for her. Later, Clara plead-
ed with her husband to stop his pioneering
work devising chemical weapons for the
German government. In 1915, after chlorine
was used to gas allied troops at Ypres, she
took his gun and killed herself.
This was great storytelling; precise, col-
ourful, to the point. The programme was
blighted, however, by the intrusive back-
ground music and the format, which is very
much moulded for the podcast audience,
who often listen on the move, or maybe
while doing something else, who are rarely
focused on whats being said. You can tell by
the amount of aural busyness, the way the
voices are underscored by music or other
sound effects to ensure the listener (or rath-
er half-listener) stays tuned.
More facts and figures were bandied
around for those up early on Sunday morn-
ing when Caz Graham took On Your Farm
to north Lancashire. Apparently, we now
spend 8 billion a year in coffee shops. for milk designed to make coffee taste bet-
8 billion? But our newly developed and
voracious appetite for cappuccinos and
Our voracious appetite for
cappuccinos and lattes may save
our dairy farms
lattes may be a way to save our dairy farms,
which have suffered so badly recently, in
large part because of the supermarket wars
and the way the price of milk is used to
draw in customers rather than reflect the
cost of its production.
Graham talked to Joe Towers, who per-
suaded his father to let him buy a new herd
of Jersey cows so that their farm could start
producing milk specially formulated for
the coffee-shop market, blending each day
the rich yield from the Jerseys with a vary-
ing amount of milk from their existing herd
of Friesians. Those foamers and steamers
beloved of baristas need milk that is high in
solids and proteins to froth up properly and
create those perfect toppings: 3.6 per cent,
precisely, according to a Danish researcher
who spent two years analysing nothing but
steamed milk.
Towers, who has worked on coffee farms
in Kenya, was intrigued when approached
by Shaun and Rebecca Young, baristas from
London who believed there was a market
ter. His milk now sells direct to more than
100 specialist coffee bars in London and
business is booming. A back story to ponder
next time you order a latte (but dont go for
the skinny option).
Over on Radio 4 Extra on Friday there
was another chance to hear Nigel Plan-
ers gently comic play (his first for radio)
about Michelangelo and the painting of the
Sistine Chapel from 1508 to 1512 in a classy
production by Mary Peate. Lapo (Phil
Daniels), a Plato-reading plasterer, and his
apprentice Loti (Bryan Dick) are stuck up
the scaffold waiting for the great artist to
arrive. Hes late, and believed to be sulk-
ing because things are not going well. Lapo
has been working on frescoes for decades,
and reckons he can teach Michelangelo how
to do it. After all, hes not as good as Leon-
ardo.
Lapo has mixed the artists colours, pre-
pared the skimmed plaster, punched the
holes in his cartoon and transferred the lines
to the ceiling using charcoal. He even claims
parts of the paintwork. Hes not impressed
that Michelangelo gets all the credit. That
buttock, says Lapo. I did that.

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the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 63


A
more thrilling, uplifting, glorious
way of living has yet to be invented,
the jockey John Francome said of
National Hunt racing. Watching last week-
ends action from Cheltenham racecourse, it
was easy to see what he meant.
Now is when the National Hunt
or jump season really gets under way.
The summer months are about flat racing,
although these days flat racing goes on
through the winter, too. There are now six
all-weather racetracks in the UK; the lat-
est, Newcastle, opened earlier this year. Of
course, its not quite the same (floodlights
are no replacement for long summer eve-
nings), but it does enable flat horses, trainers
and jockeys to stay in business all year round.
For most racing aficionados, winter is
about the jumps. While summer racing brings
to mind ginormous hats, picnics and Pimms,
the National Hunt season tends to be far
more relaxed. Youll see plenty of tweed and
probably some fur although hats (of a
more sensible type) are a common sight too.
Essentially, its about keeping warm.
You cant really write about the jump
season without mentioning the most famous
steeplechase of them all: the Grand Nation-
al. Both famous for the sheer thrill of the
Aintree courses enormous fences and
infamous for the sad fact that horse deaths
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NOTES ON
National Hunt racing
By Camilla Swift
Ruby Walsh riding Al Ferof at Cheltenham
have historically been higher there than
average, it still attracts crowds of over 73,000,
and up to 10 million television viewers.
The other major event is the Chelten-
ham Festival in March a four-day spec-
tacular which climaxes with the Gold Cup
on the Friday. The legendary Cheltenham
roar (the noise the crowds let out as the first
race begins) has to be heard to be believed,
and with St Patricks Day coinciding with the
third day of racing its difficult to have a bad
day out even if the luck of the Irish doesnt
go your way.
There are other big races which will take
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place much sooner: on Boxing Day, Kemp-
ton Park racecourse plays host to a grade one
race, the King George VI Chase. Surely thats
more fun than drowning in a post-Christmas
hangover with a turkey sandwich?
Its not all about the big race meetings,
though. Many peoples first introduction
to jump racing is at a point-to-point, which
take place across the country from Novem-
ber until early summer. Originally designed
as a race from one steeple to another
(hence steeplechase), point-to-point racing
involved crossing everything in your way
be that a ditch, a hedge or a wall.
These days, its more structured. The
races which are for amateur jockeys rath-
er than professionals are run over a set
course of about three miles with a number
of birch fences as obstacles, though the rules
say that there must still be a couple of ditch-
es in there too. They are far more relaxed
affairs than the professional jump races; just
turn up with your picnic and pay on the gate.
(To find out where your nearest race is, con-
sult www.point-to-point.co.uk.)
Its here that youll find the real grass
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Splendid red trees, certainly,
but how many red men were lurking
among them?
Bruce Anderson, p78
High life
Taki
New York
The only thing worse than a sore loser, I
suppose, is a sore winner, but thank God
we dont run into too many of those. Thir-
ty years ago, The Spectator and I lost a libel
case that cost the then proprietor and yours
truly a small fortune. As it turned out, after
the plaintiff had gone to that sauna-like
place below, everything that I had written
was the truth and nothing but. (The hubby
of the woman who sued me came clean
after her death, but a lot of good that did the
Speccie and me.)
The sainted editor at the time was
Charles Moore, and in view of Justice Otton
having taken a great dislike to yours truly,
he ordered me to remain at home when
the decision was about to be pronounced.
Nevertheless a few hacks parked them-
selves outside my front door and demand-
ed a statement. I asked them if they could
find out the name of the German pilot who
mistakenly bombed the Temple in 1942 and
killed a hell of a lot of lawyers. I would like
to call my next son after him.
Sportsmen used to be neither sore losers
nor excuse-makers. By sportsmen I mean
the old amateur type of athlete of both sexes.
My father used to go crazy when someone
made excuses after losing a contest. Old dad
was a wonderful 800-metre runner back in
the days when track and field athletes ran
for the glory of it, and the sport had not as
yet become drug central. He told me about
a friend of his who, having lost badly when
running the marathon, said that he had only
lost because the winner had jumped the gun.
When I was on the tennis circuit back in
the late Fifties, Australians, New Zealanders
and South Africans never made excuses after
losing a match, whereas the French and Ital-
ians never failed to make one. The Greeks
are pretty good at excuses, too, and it used to
drive me crazy when I was competing. Now
that sport has become professional, excuses
are the order of the day. I guess it goes with
the territory. If a pro admits that the oppo-
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
nent was better on a given day, he or she
diminishes his or her own value dollar-wise.
American professional football and basket-
ball players are the worst. They make mil-
lions and all they do is complain and cry foul.
Female professional tennis players are great
big crybabies, much more so than the men.
And speaking of crybabies, they are all
over the streets nowadays, some of them
rioting because the election didnt go the
way they wanted it to go. I suppose that this
is a new phenomenon: you lose and so you
What really won it for Trump was
the slogan Black Lives Matter
cry, demonstrate, stamp your feet and dis-
rupt normal life, even attacking people who
voted for the monster. There is counselling
at American prep schools and classes have
been called off in American universities. The
spoilt dears are too upset to attend them.
One memory I shall never forget is my
piano teacher, during the second world war,
hiding underneath the instrument she was
teaching while an air raid was going on.
So my brother and I went into the garden
and played. British and German kids went
to school every day and the only time they
did not attend classes was when the school
had been blown up. Not to mention the poor
Japanese kids who were boiled alive daily
in their wooden schoolhouses by Curtis
LeMays B-29s. Seventy years later, Ameri-
can kids do not go to school because 60 mil-
lion of their fellow citizens did not vote the
way the little dears wanted them to, and that
upsets them greatly. Would you say the west-
ern race is improving?
The Donalds not a great apologiser. I
find that quite funny given that were liv-
ing at a time when all we do is apologise for
things that we need not apologise for. The
other trait I like is his arrogance. When a
headline screamed, Its Trump against the
world, he told his entourage that if it were
any other way it wouldnt be a fair contest.
Now everyones circling trying to land jobs
in DC. Even the vile New York Times wants
access having abandoned all fairness and
having lost its credibility hence haemor-
rhaging readers. (Like all phonies, the owner
and executive editor have pledged to try
harder and have apologised.)
Basically, this was an uprising of the
unprotected against the rich elite, a revolt
la Brexit. But what really won it for the Don-
ald was the slogan Black Lives Matter. They
do, but lots of folks, as Trumpie calls them,
saw that as a threat to law and order. Worse,
Hillary embraced it and encouraged the big
lie that cops are out to kill blacks. Racial vic-
timology works in schools but not in the rust
belt or Florida, where cops are seen as the
last line of defence against criminals.
Take it from Taki. When the worlds big-
gest unelected asshole, Jean-Claude Junck-
er, calls a meeting to examine what Europe
can do about Trumpism, its time to call the
men in the white suits and vote for Marine
Le Pen. Weve had two great victories, Brex-
it and Trump. With Marines win it will be a
perfect trifecta. Once again, yippee!
Low life
Jeremy Clarke
The day after the American people applied
a very welcome touch on the brakes to the
Enlightenment juggernaut, I went for a
walk with my brother, who the day before
had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
Which is a crying shame because three years
ago, after I had been diagnosed with pros-
tate cancer, he had conscientiously toddled
down to the doctor to have himself checked
out with a PSA (Prostate-Specific Antigen)
blood test, in case it ran in the family. But the
doctor had thought the precaution unneces-
sary for a man of his comparatively young
age (47) and vetoed it.
A fortnight ago he couldnt pee and
went again to the same doctor. This time
the doctor agreed to a PSA blood test.
When the result came back, his PSA score
was 112. For most doctors, normal is four
and below. My brothers score was off the
scale, in other words. It wasnt a question of
whether he had cancer, but how far it had
spread. The morning after Trumps victory
he had received the results of the biopsy on
his prostate gland. Wed of course hoped
that his ridiculously high PSA score was a
ghastly mistake, or that the decimal point
was in the wrong place. It was neither. His
prostate was diseased; the cancer highly
aggressive.
When my cancer was first diagnosed, my
69
LIFE
brother had invited me out for a long walk.
So now it was my turn to invite him out for
a post-prostate cancer diagnosis walk. Our
walk took us and his three Border terriers,
Roxy, Ruby and Taz, across coastal moor-
land and down to a steep and remote cove.
To give the walk a purpose, no matter how
spurious, I brought a supermarket bag for
life and scissors for collecting edible sea-
weed. Iodine kills cancer cells, reputedly.
We could dry and powder the seaweed and
sprinkle it on our cornflakes every morning,
I thought. Not for one moment do I believe
that it would cure us. It was merely a bow in
the homeopathic House of Rimmon. I rea-
soned, however, that snipping at seaweed
with kitchen scissors might make us laugh
and take our minds off things.
My brother has spent his entire working
life as a big, incorruptible Devon and Corn-
wall policeman. Nowadays he specialises in
training other police officers in the art and
science of containing public disorder. Some-
times he spends entire days throwing petrol
bombs at other policemen or having them
thrown at him. He is a judo black belt and
built like the proverbial outside lavatory. He
is one of the fittest, sanest, healthiest peo-
ple I know. He loves his job. He lives clean-
ly and decently and is dedicated to his wife
and two adolescent children. That my pros-
tate gland should turn out to be cancerous
UK/Intnl edition
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70
surprised nobody. Many, Im sure, assumed it
was an apposite kind of long overdue natu-
ral justice. But it is heartbreaking that a chap
as physically fit and morally upright as my
brother should get it, and so early on.
As we trod the saturated fields down to
the sea and talked, I was glad to know that his
fine sense of humour had remained intact, in
spite of his pessimistic assumption that he will
be dead and buried by Christmas. He showed
me how he has been practising crossing his
wrists over his chest in the mirror to see what
his laid-out corpse might look like. He did
this several times and grinned and waggled
his eyebrows at me. Also he told me how,
after announcing his diagnosis to his team of
police instructors, he came to work one day
and found Post-it notes attached to the per-
sonal effects on his desk in their shared office.
Each item bore a colleagues name, claiming
the item when he died. His West Ham mug,
his spoon, his bravery award certificate, even
the framed photograph of his pretty daughter
had a Post-it stuck to it. My brother said he
had taken this as the best possible joke. One
of his fellow instructors, however, took him
privately aside to express his sympathy. My
brother is a hilarious mimic. All those bleed-
ing scumbags out there, he said, mimicking
the guys Bristolian accent to exquisite per-
fection. None of them get cancer, do they?
Whys that then? Why?
The path down to the cove was washed
away and we had to abseil the last few yards
on a rope. At the bottom I got out the sea-
weed guidebook, positively identified one of
the several types strewn about in a stinking
heap as carrageen, and we started snipping.
Thinking we were searching for something
for them to kill, the dogs nosed up the sea-
Australian edition
weed to a frenzy of excitement. It did make
12 months (52 issues)
us laugh. It was a crying shame, though, that
that doctor hadnt given him a PSA test
when hed first asked for one.
A$279
NZ$349
Real life
Melissa Kite
The Israeli chef and I have become firm
SHA10A friends since he moved out of my flat. He has
his own place now, and is trying to find a job.
I take him horse riding at the weekends.
On the way down the A3 he asks me all sorts
of questions about his new life in Britain and
the things he is struggling to make sense of.
Like why he cant get a work visa. He is
very upset about this. You have to under-
stand, I explain, that the mistake you made
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
was to come here legally and apply to the
system honestly and openly, stating clearly
that you wanted to find work.
I glanced at him as I drove, surveying his
handsome baby face, dark skin, slightly curly
black hair.
It may be too late now, but if you could
pretend to be 12 and from Syria you would
find our country a lot more welcoming. And
I have to say, you look a lot more like a Syr-
ian child than most of the ones Ive seen
in the paper. However, if you did that you
might have to go to school on a sink estate
for a bit.
The Israeli chef knows all about sink
estates because while he was staying with
me on Airbnb, he went house-hunting on
a Brixton estate because he had heard me
boasting about spending the weekend on a
friends shooting estate.
He traipsed back looking very despond-
ent. How did it go? I asked. It was terrible.
I went to an estate but it wasnt nice, like the
one you went to, with the lovely big house.
So I had to explain that in England there
are two kinds of estate, each one being the
polar opposite of the other.
Although, the estate you went to prob-
If you could pretend to be 12 and from
Syria you would nd our country a lot
more welcoming
ably was a shooting estate, in its way. Its just
they werent shooting pheasants, they were
shooting people.
He always nods conscientiously and tries
to look like he understands these home
truths Im telling him about the country he
has come to, believing the streets are paved
in gold.
It is interesting to see it from the point of
view of the settler, to see the young people
who come here on travel visas trying to con-
vert them to work visas, and thereafter, one
supposes, into indefinite leave to remain.
While he was staying with me he got very
upset about Brexit until I explained that if it
werent for our being in a Europe of open
borders, there would be plenty of space left
for skilled people like him.
But its no use me trying to convince him
of the difficulties, because shortly before he
moved out and went to live with a couple
of hipsters with green hair, he got hit in the
eye by a tennis ball while playing at my local
tennis club.
That night he came home with a black
eye, still slightly dazed, and told me about
his day. After the accident, the coach took
him to my local GP surgery where there is a
walk-in minor injuries clinic.
Dear God, how long did you wait? I
asked, having never been seen there for any
injury myself, despite various attempts. Pre-
sumably you didnt get seen and youve no
idea what to do now?
No, he said. It was fine. They saw me
quite quickly. About an hour. And they
werent sure about my eye so they sent me
to Moorfields Eye Hospital. That was a very
nice place. And the eye surgeon checked me
over and made sure it was all right.
What now? I said, sitting bolt upright on
the sofa and putting the TV on mute. Youre
saying youve been seen, today, by my local
doctor, who I cant get an appointment with
for love nor money, and youve also been to
Moorfields? And been seen by a specialist?
What did they charge you?
Charge?
Yes, the bill.
No bill.
Of course, Im very happy for my new
Israeli friend to have gained access to free
healthcare in Britain so promptly, without
anyone asking him any bothersome ques-
tions, but there is a point of principle here.
Not least the fact that he doesnt seem to
be short of cash, and was only injured in the
first place because hes joined a tennis club
that I cant afford to play at.
So I said to him: Can I ask you what
would have happened if I had got hit in the
eye by a tennis ball in Tel Aviv and gone to
see your doctor?
He laughed. Well, youd have to pay of
course.
And the best eye clinic in Israel? Do you
think they would have seen me for free?
Oh no. They would have charged you a
lot of money.
At least we all know where we stand.
Long life
Alexander Chancellor
I started watching The Crown, the 100-mil-
lion television series on the early years of
the Queens reign, on Netflix but turned
it off during the second episode because I
couldnt bear the endless coughing by her
father, George VI, as he died of lung cancer.
The coughing, performed with eager real-
ism by the actor Jared Harris, who played
the king, was made harder to bear by the
fact that he kept on smoking at the same
time. The link between cancer and smoking
may not then have been established, but it
is well known now; and exposure to both at
the same time is not for the squeamish. For
me, however, there was another reason for
discomfort the memory of George VIs
death in 1952 when I was 12 years old, a
boarder at a prep school in Berkshire. One
day the headmaster summoned the whole
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
school to assembly to hear an important
announcement. With the utmost gravity,
he told us that there was terrible news: the
king had died. And all of us children, myself
included, promptly burst into tears. We were
sobbing away like the people of Thailand
when their king, Bhumibol Adulyadej, died
last month aged 88, ceding to our Queen the
record of being the worlds longest-reigning
monarch.
I dont think that even then we were
quite as hysterical as the Thais are in their
devotion to their inherited head of state,
but those were still nevertheless deferen-
tial times. The national anthem was played
in cinemas, where film-goers would stand
up for it, and I can remember people even
standing up in their homes when the nation-
al anthem preceded the Kings (and then the
Queens) radio broadcast on Christmas Day.
It would be like replacing the Queen
with Nigel Farage
Those days are long gone. Many people now
wont interrupt their Christmas feasting to
watch the Queen on television.
But the monarchy remains popular all
the same, and the republican cause, briefly
promoted by the Guardian, arouses little
enthusiasm. Even Jeremy Corbyn now feels
it prudent to sing the words of the national
anthem (or at least to give the impression
of doing so) as he did at the Remembrance
Sunday ceremony at the Cenotaph. And
when the Queen led the commemoration by
laying the first wreath of poppies at Edwin
Lutyenss splendid war memorial in White-
hall, a majority of us must have felt how
lucky we were to have her to do it. There is
much to be said for having a non-political,
unelected national figurehead to perform
such a duty.
In the next four years the United States
will have in that role President Donald
Trump, whose unsuitability to personify
national unity has been well illustrated by
the protests of thousands of demonstrators
all over the country shouting, Hes not my
president. Imagine: here it would be like
replacing the Queen with Nigel Farage. Was
it perhaps fear of a president as divisive as
Trump that persuaded the New York Times
to publish, three days before the presiden-
tial election, an article by Nikolai Tolstoy
in praise of the monarchical system? The
Anglo-Russian historian Tolstoy is a com-
mitted monarchist, the chancellor of the
International Monarchist League, and a
Brexiteer who has more than once stood
for Parliament as a Ukip candidate, but he
wasnt wrong when he wrote that constitu-
tional monarchy had shown itself to be per-
fectly compatible with democracy and to
be a force for stability in other countries.
As an example, he cited contented Cana-
da, Americas northern neighbour. At this
unquiet hour, he wrote, they [the Ameri-
can people] might well wonder whether
for all the wisdom of the founding fathers
their republican system of government is
actually leading them toward that promised
more perfect union.
It seems to me that the monarchy has
never been more useful to us than it is
today, when the country has been split by
the EU referendum. If we had a head of
state that had taken one or other side in
this battle we would be in a sorrier state.
But one thing wrong with the monarchy is
that we pay too much attention to members
of the royal family. Apart from the Queen
herself, most of them have become victims
of the celebrity culture, and this demeans
the institution itself. The less I hear or read
about them, the happier I feel; and the less
wobbly in my loyalty.
Listen to Jeremy Clarke read
his Spectator columns
www.spectator.co.uk/lowlife
71

Wild life
Aidan Hartley
Aero Club of East Africa
The world looked so clean and untroubled
during the flight in Bobs light aircraft to
Georges memorial at the Aero Club of
East Africa. It was a relief to get away from
the farm for a few hours. On 27 October a
mob of 300 Samburu warriors armed with
spears and knives cut down our boundary
fences and invaded with 10,000 cattle. Since
then theyve hurled javelins and rocks at
us, flattened pastures to dust, destroyed 15
kilometres of fencing, smashed windows,
demolished huts, robbed what they could,
cut water pipes, broken machinery and
threatened our staff with murder until half
of them ran for their lives. For days before
the invasion we received calls from friends
saying that politicians were urging the mob
to hit us. I hoped the warnings were not true
given that we had good relations with many
of our neighbours. Those trespassers who
would talk to us revealed that they were
attacking precisely in order to smash up
whatever plans we had to help our neigh-
bours with grazing and their cattle.
George died of burns after his air crash
and his memorial was outside the Aero
Club bar. The reading from Ecclesiastes and
speeches by the family were intermittently
drowned out by the noise of machines taxi-
ing and throttling up at take-off. George
had been a Royal Marine and Conrad, his
fellow Bootneck and a mountain of a Ken-
yan, recited Tennysons Crossing the Bar.
Giles talked about Georges Boran cattle.
Georges best friend Alastair told a funny
story from their days at Rannoch, when at
the age of 17 they managed to get an invi-
tation from a couple of young Australian
teachers who had previously been at the
school to spend half-term with them in
Paris. When it was time to return to Perth-
shire, they claimed to have food poisoning
and skived off for ten days more. All inno-
cent, you understand, said Alastair, whose
girlfriend Diane in Paris later became his
wife and there she was in the crowd,
laughing.
Afterwards scores of farmers and pilots
descended on the bar, smacking their lips
for Tusker. I saw Hugh, the vet who had
been called out to save some of Georges
cattle that people like our own invaders
have been shooting at through the farm
fences. Thieves rustled Georges prize bull,
which won junior champion at the show
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
in July. Luckily it was recovered, much to
the relief of Georges surviving family, now
doing their best to carry on ranching. Mark
had a beer in one hand and a phone in the
other, calling back to his farm where shoot-
outs can happen day or night. If you think
this is like Zimbabwe, think again. There
are all types here. An African farmer spun
past me in his wheelchair, to which hes
been confined since he was shot twice while
driving home in July. We drifted in and out
of talking about the invasions, hoping to
avoid the subject by finding a city person,
but we all seemed to be from up country.
One hopes that ways of life might change
at a pace that is manageable, but its mor-
bidly gripping to consider that ours might
be vanishing fast.
Leaning over his Tusker, John tells
a funny, sad story about how last week a
butcher called up asking to buy fat cull
cows. Two cheques were deposited in the
bank, which advised that the money had
been paid so John allowed 32 cows to
be loaded on to the buyers lorries. Hours
after they drove away, the bank called to
say the cheques had bounced. The butcher
300 Samburu warriors cut down our
boundary fences and invaded with
10,000 cattle
has vanished. Johns daughter, chatting to
friends nearby, is a picture of radiant beau-
ty and her old man says proudly, Ugly bulls
produce the finest heifers.
On the flight back up to the north we pass
over tea gardens and hillsides of coffee, well-
organised villages with schools and clinics on
red soil ridges. Then the thick, mist-swathed
forests of the Aberdares, clean waters flowing
in big rivers, with Mount Kenya in cloud to
the north-east, and we bank down across the
ochre plains of Laikipia bathed in a ghostly
evening light and descend until we see them
again: thousands of cattle advancing south.
Tens of thousands.
In the first week of the invasion the police
visited a total of nine times. They drove up,
disembarked and wandered about. Hmm,
they said, announced they could do nothing,
and drove away. I asked, What should we
do? One officer advised sagely, Resolve this
with the elders. . . Another said, Wait for
the rains. They promised to file reports. They
recorded our police statements. That was
after one of my staff had been clubbed with
knobkerries and was bleeding from the head.
Another day the cops stole a sheep from the
trespassers and later they fired three shots in
the air. After they left, the trespassers came
and threw rocks at us.
Every day now for three weeks, I have
listened to thousands of cowbells passing
the house, hour after hour. Once for me the
happy sound of remote wells in arid country,
cowbells have now become the soundtrack of
my bad dreams, clonking relentlessly.
Bridge
Susanna Gross
Have you ever felt that none of your partners
are on the same wavelength as you? Despite
regularly partnering the worlds top players,
Zia Mahmood often jokingly moans (well,
semi-jokingly) that hes made a subtle or clev-
er bid which has fallen on deaf ears. But that
shouldnt surprise anyone: whether hes bid-
ding or playing, you can always rely on Zia to
do something imaginative and unexpected.
Zia was on the winning Lavazza team at
the recent HCL International Bridge Cham-
pionship held in New Delhi last month
(Indias biggest bridge tournament, with a
$200,000 prize pot). His partner faced the fol-
lowing lead problem and Zia gave it to vari-
ous players, including me. It came with the
warning: So far no one has got it right. If I can
find the person who does, I will either propose
to them (if its a woman) or partner them!
You are South, and at favourable vulnerabil-
ity (green v. red), you pick up zAKJ10976 yJ
XK3 wA54. The bidding goes:
West North East South
Pass 1y 4z
5y Dble pass pass
pass
So what do you lead? My answer was a
top spade, which I felt must be wrong (too
obvious). But it was a trick question
very unfair! The right answer was that you
shouldnt be on lead at all. Zia, your partner,
had made a striped-tailed-ape double. This is
about my favourite term in bridge: its when
you double at the 5-level knowing the oppo-
nents can make slam the doubled over-
trick will cost you less than a slam, but if they
redouble you intend to run like a striped-
tailed-ape to your partners suit.
Zia held zQ8754 y53 X872 w632. East
held z yAKQ942 X109 wKQ1097. West
held z6 y10876 XAQJ654 wJ8. Zia was hop-
ing to be redoubled and end up in 5z doubled.
But he also felt his partner should have pulled
the double. His reasoning: How can I have
enough to double, especially when you have
the biggest 4z non-vul bid ever? Your right-
hand opponent has an opening hand, you have
16 points, your other opponent has about 10. I
have 0-2 points. I cant have a double! I knew
they had six or seven hearts on and was hoping
to bluff them. If you work that out, you need
to protect my bluff and bid 5z. 5z doubled
would have gone for -500, instead of -1050 for
5y doubled+1. That was better than -1430 for
6y, but Lavazza lost imps because in the other
room EW bid to 6y and NS sacrificed in 6z
for -800. Still, youre in good company if you
didnt think Souths pass was odd: after all,
South was Giorgio Duboin, ranked fourth in
the world ...and he could justifiably argue that
no one ever knows exactly what Zia is up to!
73
LIFE

Chess Competition
Chigorin revived I quit
Raymond Keene Lucy Vickery
The early games of the World Championship Diagram 1 In Competition No. 2974 you were invited to
in New York between Magnus Carlsen and submit a resignation letter from God.
Sergei Karjakin did little to contribute to the rDWDWDWi Despite mankinds attempts to kill Him
off, God has continued to bounce back.
gaiety of nations. In the first two games both
contestants seemed more anxious to display 0p0W1W0p The Almighty, as Terry Eagleton puts it in
their ability to avoid loss than to strive WgnDWDWD his book Culture and the Death of God, has
proved remarkably difficult to dispose of.
DWDWDrDW
heroically for a win. If the two were willing to
wound, but yet afraid to strike, their But what if He decided one day that Hed had
willingness was of a most muted variety.
Fortunately, there was no lack of
WDQDWDW) just about enough of us all (Gexit, as Ken Ste-
vens termed it)?
entertainment from the parallel Champions DW)W)NDW Now seems as likely a time as any, so its
Showdown in St Louis, which pits Veselin
Topalov, Hikaru Nakamura, Fabiano Caruana
PDWGW)PD over to you. The winners take 25 each.

and Viswanathan Anand against each other in
multifarious formats. Meanwhile, the
European Club Cup, from which this weeks
extraordinary game is taken, also showed a
plethora of exciting clashes.
Aronian-Rapport: European Club Cup, Novi
Sad 2016; Chigorin Defence
1 d4 d5 2 c4 Nc6 3 Nc3 I first encountered
this move when the Dutch grandmaster Donner
played it against me in the annual Anglo-Dutch
match at London 1971. At that time I tried to
continue in true Chigorin fashion with 3 ... dxc4 4
$WDWIWDR Over the years, the human race has been taking
part in a momentous democratic process. It is right
that we trust the people with these big decisions. As
Diagram 2 you know, I have always been absolutely clear
WDWDW4Wi about my belief that humanity is stronger, safer and
better off inside the Kingdom of Heaven. However,
0pDWDW0W the human race has made a very clear decision to
take a different path. Faced with the choice of God
WgpDWDW0 or Mammon, it has chosen the latter. This choice
DWDWhW1W must be respected. I will do everything I can, as
creator and sustainer of the universe, to steady the
WDW$WDW4
ship over the coming weeks, but it would not be
right for me to be the captain steering humanity to
DW)W)WHW its next destination. I love this universe, I feel

Nf3 (4 d5 Ne5 5 Bf4 and now 5 ... Ng6 was PDWDQ)PD honoured to have served it, and I wish it luck under
its new leadership. Thank you for your time.
satisfactory for Black in Gligoric-Smyslov,
Amsterdam 1971) 4 ... Bg4 5 d5 Bxf3 6 exf3 Ne5.
DWGWDRIW David Silverman

Sadly after 7 Bf4 Black is almost lost since 7 ...
Ng6 fails to 8 Bxc4 with the deadly threat of
Bb5+. 3 ... Nf6 4 cxd5 Nxd5 5 Nf3 e5 This
gambit revives Blacks chances in the Chigorin. 6
dxe5 Bb4 7 Bd2 Nxc3 8 bxc3 Ba5 9 e3 0-0
10 Qa4 Bb6 11 Qf4 Qe7 12 h4 New, but
eccentric. Natural and good is 12 Bc4. 12 ... f6
13 exf6 Rxf6 14 Qc4+ Kh8 15 Bd3 Bf5 16
Bxf5 Rxf5 (see diagram 1) Largely because of
Whites irrelevant 12 h4 Black enjoys sufficient
compensation for his sacrificed pawn. 17 Ng5
An overoptimistic thrust. White should simply
play 17 0-0. After Whites mistaken sortie with his
knight Black succeeds in concentrating his forces
against the white king. 17 ... Ne5 18 Qe4 Qd7
19 0-0 Re8 20 Qc2 h6 21 Ne4 Rh5 22 Ng3
Rxh4 23 Rad1 Rf8 24 Bc1 Qg4 25 Rd5 Qg5
PUZZLE NO. 435
White to play. This is a position from Topalov-
Caruana, St Louis 2016. Can you spot Whites
crushing blow? Answers to me at The Spectator
by Tuesday 22 November or via email to victoria@
spectator.co.uk. There is a prize of 20 for the first
correct answer out of a hat. Please include a post-
al address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Last weeks solution 1 Rxd8+
Last weeks winner Alan Ward, Burgess Hill,
26 Qe2 c6 27 Rd4 (see diagram 2) A clever
idea which meets with an even more
astounding riposte. If now 27 ... Bxd4 28 exd4
when Black must lose material. However,
White is in for a shock. 27 ... Rh1+ If now
28 Nxh1 Nf3+ wins the queen, so Whites hand
is forced. 28 Kxh1 Bxd4 29 f3 Or 29 exd4
Qh4+ 30 Kg1 Ng4 31 Re1 Qh2+ 32 Kf1 Qxg3
33 Be3 Rf6 when White has virtually run out of
sensible moves. 29 ... Bb6 30 Ne4 Qh5+ 31
Kg1 Bc7 32 Kf2 Qh2 33 Ke1 Rd8 34 Bd2
Nd3+ 35 Kd1 Qe5 With Whites king in the
firing line, resistance is futile. 36 g4 Qb5 37
Qg2 Nb2+ 38 Kc2 Nc4 39 Bc1 Rd5 40 g5
Na5 41 Bd2 Qd3+ White resigns
WDWDW4Wi
0p0WDW$p
WhWDW)bD
DWDWDW!p
WDW$WDWD
DW)WDWDW
WDWDW1PI
Being omniscient, I should have known: Creation is
one thing, its administration quite another. I might
apologise for my somewhat simplistic approach to
management in earlier millennia the autocratic
Commandments, the pernickety dietary laws, the
ten frankly melodramatic Plagues were it not for
the failure of my later, more people-centric
managerial approach. My sons unfortunate work-
experience placement in Palestine particularly
discouraged me nepotism was never my
intention and your reaction, even today, seems
disproportionate. I think it is to my credit that I
have remained, albeit in a privately consultative
capacity, until now. Nevertheless, I resign. Lucifer,
who has been rather literally shadowing me for
some time, and who seems to possess a surer
understanding of human motivation than I, has
already suggested himself as successor. I am off
to one of those other Universes, whose existence
convinces your physicists in a way my own
never could.
Adrian Fry
Let me admit that when I started this project it
was in a vein of hope and belief but also of sobriety.
I reasonably concluded that my power and
knowledge, being limitless, would ensure a
transcendent outcome. Even when I was obliged to
drown nearly everyone I dismissed the issue as a
glitch. Something went badly wrong, however. I
chose natural selection as the instrument of my
vision of a biodiverse world, but also to build in a
sense of advancement, from lower to higher forms,

DWDWDWDW
West Sussex rather than a static perfection. Homo sapiens would
move beyond animal instincts to refined emotions,
art and the practice of reason. The pattern would
work out. My plan would be accomplished.

74 the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk

 LIFE

Unfortunately you seem to be a rabble of blind,

mutually destructive fucking maniacs. I can accept Crossword 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

no further responsibility and hereby resign.

Basil Ransome-Davies
2287: 9 10

Quarry 11 12
To whom ... although increasingly I doubt if there
is anyone concerned at my resignation. Doubt, by Columba 13 14 15

incidentally, is something new to me. I would not 16 17 18 19

wish to accuse you of constructive dismissal: your
lack of faith in me, however, has made my position 20 21
untenable and Eden beckons. Perhaps I appointed In eight clues, cryptic indica-
the wrong departmental managers, perhaps I tions omit reference to parts 22 23 24

should have encouraged profits rather than of answers; these parts must be
highlighted, to reveal a word 25 26 27
prophets. The thought of another damp Sunday
that defines each of the unclued
with its ragbag of ill-assorted hymns and 28 29 30 31
lights. Two unclued lights con-
tambourines is too much for One accustomed to
sist of two words each.
choirs of the angelic host. While I am tempted to 32 33
enact sections of the Book of the Revelation at my
Across 34 35 36
farewell do, I realise this would be tame compared
to your recent activities and that I should leave you 1 Quiet exercises by expert
37 38
to your own devious devices: that you can outdo (5)
me gives me no pleasure. Fortunately your 9 Locusts, very large, after 39
perfunctory explorations of the glories of the jelly and syrup (10)
universe failed to locate Eden. 11 Free to return without a 40 41

D.A. Prince souvenir (5)

14 Sound during festival
13.8 billion years without a decent holiday, identified (5) 3 Cloudy regions (6) A first prize of 30 for the first
100 billion galaxies to supervise, a ridiculous 15 Varied like marks in rug 4 Hood active in opposition correct solution opened on
amount of commuting, and the last straw (5) (6) 1 December. There are two
that bastard Mephistopheles has hacked into my 16 Going out east, slow, short 5 Vocal artist in middle of runners-up prizes of 20. (UK
server again. Its been a nightmare arranging of oxygen (6) solo (4) solvers can choose to receive the
workable yet convenient laws of physics: you need 21 Pacific island with prison 6 Pasta in new bags (7) latest edition of the Chambers
gravity to stop things floating off and then blame mostly in concrete (8) 7 Take one to wander round dictionary instead of cash
me when other things fall down. (Einstein 22 Excluded, king and earl university city (5) ring the word dictionary.)
glimpsed my space-time difficulties but most of sulk (7, two words) 8 Make hygienic order about Entries to: Crossword 2287,
you have the insights of a dog chewing a remote 24 Birds utterance initially cuckoo (8) The Spectator, 22 Old Queen
control.) I dont like earthquakes, tempests and covered by music (4) 10 Costly aid from assorted Street, London SW1H 9HP.
plagues any more than you do (I watch your 25 Weight left in reserve (4) general practitioners (6,7) Please note that the closing date
painfully slow, stumbling ascent wishing I knew a 27 Resented Greek 13 Element in pony trek sadly for entries is earlier than usual.
better route) but how am I expected to fix condemned without justice lacking energy (7)
probability, meteorology, molecular biology etc so (7) 17 Intermittent appeal to stop
they permit your evolution but preclude natural 28 Worked out aim to contain lifting edge of sail (6)
disaster and disease? Trolls have been very nasty constant poison (8) 18 Master in barge injured
to me about all this. Im benevolent but Im not a 33 Uncle in charge around a part of skull (6)
bloody miracle worker. I need a break. boat (6) 23 Salad plant in cereal so out Name
Hugh King 34 Knight tucked into cheese of order (8)
and pickle? (5) 26 Runner perhaps worried
Address
Despite my secondment remaining intra-contract, 35 Sole lecturer with about hard obstruction (7)
I hereby tender my immediate resignation in order department retired (5) 29 Calm, therefore remaining
to forestall the headhunting by competitors of my 37 Hated bias about article without resistance (6)
successor. In post I have driven the brand, (7) 30 Unprincipled monk
maximised market penetration and pursued 38 Support very old villain (5) climbing to grab gold (6)
profitability. But my technological innovations, 40 Goddess to greet, dressed 31 Preserve tube in tent (6)
successful these past two millennia in cementing in silk (9) 32 Inscribe part of Bible with
consumer loyalty across diverse cultural and 41 Explain away grand defeat hesitation (5)
socioeconomic sectors, have unfortunately fostered (5) 36 Rising temperature,
Email
outbreaks of critical thought, threatening project problem for new wine (4)
Down
ethos. In battling to perpetually weave the intricate
2 Issue raised for example
web of fable vital to the role, it is now my view that
relating to me (6)
brand viability demands fresh Chief Executive
input. Only a radical overhaul, under the eternal
direction of a more virile and charismatic entity
with a proven delivery record, can bolster the SOLUTION TO 2284: SHOCKING!
projects flagging facade. I humbly commend to the
committee, with the proviso He wont come cheap,
The Lord Our Blair. In PYGMALION (21D), ELIZA (32) said NOT BLOODY
Albert Black LIKELY! (7A/9/12). Synonyms were NEGATIVE (24),
RARE (35), ODDS-ON (20). GB SHAW (in the second
NO. 2977: LETS TWIST row) had to be shaded.

You are invited to submit a Christmas carol First prize Vincent Clark, Frant, East Sussex
with a topical twist. Email entries of up to 16 Runners-up Julie Sanders, Bishops Waltham, Hants;
lines to lucy@spectator.co.uk by midday on Kenneth Robb, Linlithgow, West Lothian
25 November. The earlier than usual dead-
line is because of the Christmas production
schedule.
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 75
LIFE
Status Anxiety
A new path to the top
of the teaching tree
Toby Young
A
few months ago I joined forc-
es with Sir Anthony Seldon,
the vice-chancellor of Buck-
ingham University, to run an idea up
the flagpole. Why not make it possi-
ble for senior managers from outside
the teaching profession to retrain as
heads? Anthony, who was a successful
head himself, is in the process of set-
ting up the Buckingham Institute of
School Leadership to train the heads
of the future. He proposed creating a
mid-career and late-career entry track
into this programme so successful
managers in their thirties, forties and
fifties can retrain as school leaders.
This idea was met with some scep-
ticism by teachers and I cant say I
blame them. It rankles for the same
reason that allowing people from
outside the profession to set up free
schools rankles, as well as encourag-
ing people to teach who dont have
QTS (Qualified Teacher Status). It
implies theres nothing particularly
valuable about the training or expe-
rience that goes into the making of
a good teacher any Tom, Dick or
Harry could waltz in off the street
and do what they do. Its symptomatic
of a failure to take the profession of
teaching seriously, which is an contin-
uing source of resentment. If I were a
teacher it would certainly annoy me.
For what its worth, my experience
of helping to set up free schools left
MICHAEL HEATH
76
me with a huge respect for the pro-
fession. None of the schools would
have got off the ground without the
involvement of experienced teach-
ers as co-founders, and thats true of
most free schools more than 70 per
cent have been set up by teacher-led
groups. In addition, the eagerness of
free schools and academies to employ
non-qualified teachers has been exag-
gerated. At our schools we take on
non-QTS teaching staff only if theyre
willing to become qualified in due
course. That, too, is fairly standard.
Anthony and I are not saying busi-
ness people with no teaching experi-
ence should get jobs as school leaders,
which is how it has been interpreted
by some. For instance, Dr Bernard
Trafford, the headteacher of Newcas-
tle and Tyne Royal Grammar School,
wrote a piece for the TES last week
attacking this straw man. I take issue
with the suggestion that leaders who
have mastered the pressures and
drives of commerce can similarly seize
the reins of education and drive the
chariot to success, he said.
No, our idea is that people with a
strong record of managing organisa-
tions a bit like schools, such as publicly
funded arts organisations, should have
an opportunity to retrain as heads over
two to four years. Much of the process
would consist of shadowing school
My experience leaders, and trainees would graduate
of helping to with QTS. This would give them cred-
ibility in their staffrooms, although
set up free theyd need to prove themselves on
schools left me the job. We believe they would.
with a huge This idea has won support from
respect for two unexpected sources. One is the
Harvard Business Review, which
the teaching published an article last month enti-
profession tled The One Type of Leader Who
the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk
Can Turn Around a Failing School.
Written by four academics, it ana-
lysed the impact of 411 English heads
and concluded that the most effec-
tive ones are Architects lead-
ers who take the time to work out
how to improve a school, do it with-
out alienating the staff and then stick
around long enough to see those
changes through. Architects have
a number of interesting characteris-
tics they tend to have studied his-
tory or economics at university, for
instance but the most interesting
is that most have spent between ten
and 15 years working in another pro-
fession before retraining as teachers.
But the most unexpected endorse-
ment comes from a group of teachers.
Last weekend, a research paper called
The School Leadership Challenge:
2022 was jointly published by Future
Leaders, Teach First and Teaching
Leaders and warned that by 2022 Eng-
land may face a shortfall of between
14,000 and 19,000 school leaders. This
is due to a lack of heads and deputy
heads in the present system, the need
for more leaders as more schools open
to keep pace with a growing popula-
tion, and the fact that many existing
heads are approaching retirement age.
Of the various solutions it suggested,
one jumped out: Expand the pool of
leaders, including welcoming execu-
tives from outside the profession.
At present, Anthony is on track to
open the Seldon School of Headcraft
and Wizardry in 2017. I hope some
Spectator readers will think about
becoming mature students. Your
country needs you.
Toby Young is associate editor of
The Spectator.

The Wiki Man People left, right, and centre but
especially on the right are justi-
How the left fiably sick and tired of being called
bigots and having almost everything
wastes its energy in social politics reduced to smear
campaigns about bigotry. The over-
Rory Sutherland application of terms of bigotry as
a means of silencing disagreement
with a left-bending social orthodoxy
has become, shall we say, problem-
atic. As a result, words like racist,
costumes? Do you think no one sus-
pects that virtue signalling is mostly
an unconscious and oblique form of
status signalling? Just as tattoos and
piercings might prove the strength
of your immune system, proclaiming
your openness to all change is a way of
advertising how unthreatened is your
place in the social hierarchy.

T
here are only three infallible
rules in advertising. Be distinc-
tive. Make a lot of noise. And
try to feature a cute animal some-
where. Had Donald Trump followed
my advice and bought a springer span-
iel he would have won California.
For a man with such tiny hands
to be elected to the worlds high-
est office, I think we can all agree, is
a tragic loss to proctology. But it is
also a remarkable lesson in how to
play the media. Hillary had $2 bil-
lion to spend; what Trump mirac-
ulously found was that with each
outburst of political Tourettes, he got
more airtime than her, and for free.
So eager were the mainstream and
social media to express their horri-
fied disdain for his latest outrage that
they were effectively donating to his
campaign. By exploiting the medias
virtue-signalling reflex, Trump had
found the thermal exhaust port on
the liberal Death Star. The more he
was attacked, the stronger he grew.
As James Lindsay wrote back in June,
Liberals, want Trump to win? Keep
calling him racist:
sexist, misogynist, homophobe and
the rest have become conserva-
tive dog-whistles that mean honest
and brave, and willing to speak his
mind (without fear). Like the inap-
propriate application of an antibi-
otic, the incessant misuse of these
terms has created a superbug.
The commentariat were right in
one way: Trumps support was fuelled
by hate. But it was mostly hatred by
one class of white people for another
class of white people. A large part of
his appeal lay in the pursed-lipped
horror he aroused in some of the
worlds most annoying whites. (Yet
intriguingly the Latin vote, where
Trump fared better than Romney,
Proclaiming seemed unperturbed by his outbursts,
your openness maybe because when translated into a
to all change language where coo and puta madre
are used like punctuation marks, the
is a way of Donald didnt seem all that rude.)
showing how But honestly, lefties, how clue-
unthreatened less do you have to be not to real-
ise that people living in a rust-belt
is your place town might not empathise too much
in the social with Yale students protesting about
hierarchy the cultural sensitivity of Halloween
This reflex causes the left to waste
energy on causes with mostly symbol-
ic value; energy which could be spent
on campaigns that matter far more,
such as protesting the USs appall-
ingly high rate of especially black
incarceration. But campaigning for
the removal of flags and statues just
feels better somehow. Virtue signal-
ling, in short, is rather like wetting the
bed; in the short term you get a nice
warm feeling, but soon afterwards
everything starts to stink.
There is one thing I recommend
which we can all do to help. Its a sim-
ple rule I invented last weekend, and
it seems to work. Before you respond
to anyone online, check their last
ten posts. If eight or more are relat-
ed to the same issue, do not respond
or engage, positively or negatively.
I recently came across one person
whose last 44 posts were all rants
about Brexit. Please ignore them. It
will be better for you and its much
better for them.
Rory Sutherland is vice-chairman
of Ogilvy Group UK.

DEAR MARY YOUR PROBLEMS SOLVED

Q. Following a lavish house party
I received a flood of effusive
thank-you letters, the bulk of
which praised the impeccable
service, the luxurious treats laid
on nightly, and my attentiveness
to my guests every whim. One
letter, however, commenced in
a fairly complimentary vein but
soon devolved into a letter of
complaint about a fellow guest.
So vehemently did the author
express his antipathy that he
covered two sides of paper. I
concede that the young woman in
question is an acquired taste, but
I resent my friends being subject
to character assassinations. How
can I reprehend the scribe?
Name withheld, London W2
A. Bear in mind that this letter is
something of a compliment. The
author defies convention to put
your welfare above his own. In
speaking his mind, he risks his
own exclusion from future house
parties. If you still wish to punish,
invite him to an acquired taste
restaurant such as Quo Vadis on
Dean Street, not mentioning you
have also invited the subject of his
scathing diatribe. On arrival he
will have to appear delighted at
the surprise, as per social niceties.
This unenjoyable evening will
be made worse by your studious
failure to bring it to an end by
asking for the bill. Eventually
your guest will be forced to do so
himself and to insist on paying.
Q. A peripheral friend is under
the impression that I still hold
a grudge against him due to a
minor transgression that occurred
at an after-party I gave a year
and a half ago. (I discovered this
peripheral friend dancing in his
dirty shoes on one of my newly
upholstered sofas.) I was furious
at the time, but had forgotten
the incident. However, every
time I encounter the perpetrator
socially, he manages to corner
me and launches into earnest
and lengthy offerings of remorse,
repeating I do feel we got off to
a bad start and I would sincerely
like to make amends. How can I
politely but firmly put an end to
his gushing apologies?
F.W., London W11
A. You have misinterpreted the
gushing apologies: they are merely
a means for him to make an
overture towards you. You may
not yet have seen his point but
this reformed oaf has one thing to
recommend him consistency.
Its a quality in short supply
among young men of today. Why
not allow him to make amends by
agreeing to a dinner date where
you can consider him in a less
hectic context?
Q. Further to your recommending
the Grosvenor Hotel, may I help
avert confusion by pointing out
that the Grosvenor is often used
to refer to the larger and more
pretentious Grosvenor House off
Park Lane. The Grosvenor you
refer to was for a few years called
the Thistle Victoria but has now
reverted to its traditional name.
O.B.,London SW19
A. Thank you for clearing up this
matter.

the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk 77

LIFE

log sheds, of well-fattened pigs scoff-
Drink ing the last windfalls, heedless of their
Autumn riches doom. Slaughtering day approaches.
With the defences against winter
Bruce Anderson well-prepared, wise households can
approach the great feast of Christmas
in a complacent spirit.
There would have been little of
that in nascent New England. The
fall of man: the fall of the year. It
may be that the embattled colonists
had lost the easy English assumption
that spring would return. Across the
Atlantic, the fall meant an impend-
ing exposure to the furious winters
bruschetta. Cook the fungi in oil, rub
the toasted country bread with garlic,
pile on the riches, add a further driz-
zle of oil eat to repletion and reach
for superlatives. Yet that was only the
approach to the summit. Our next
meal was based on an early-season
white truffle. There is only one way
to describe such sensations. Imagine
what Hillary Clinton must be feeling
now, move 180 degrees opposite, dou-
ble that, redouble it and you are
within hailing distance.
Yet Hillary had her revenge. To
accompany fungi and tubers, we

A
few days ago, on the Dorset/
Somerset marches, autumn
was still in orderly retreat.
Although a pear trees leaves had
turned sere and yellow, the last fruit
was still peeping through. Across the
lawn, a horse chestnut was undressing,
festooning the lawn with bronze. Out
of a cloudless sky, a mild seasonal sun
blessed the scene with a gentle glow,
as if it were pouring Sauternes. Along
the Ladies Walk, the yellows and
greens were reinforced by bushes in
russet mantles and by the triumphant
redness of acers and liquidambar. We
could have almost been in the New
England fall, at least for a few yards.
Autumn, fall: the two have pro-
found resonances from different his-
tories. As one might expect from its
French name, autumn is full of good
eating. This does not always take
forms which the French would recog-
nise, for it includes Brussels sprouts.
Curious as it may seem, my friend
Eyzie has an elective affinity with that
vegetable. She is the Brillat-Savarin of
the sprout. More generally, autumn is
redolent of full barns, of well-stocked
rages. Splendid red trees, certainly,
but how many red men were lurking
among them? Admittedly the Puri-
tans arrived with a harsh religion, but
at least in the first era, there would
have been nothing to mitigate the
bleakness. If those early Americans
had been minded to gloss over origi-
nal sin, there would have been plenty
to remind them of it.
In Dorset, religion has a much
more Rosicrucian hue. If counties
have a patron sin, Dorsets is gluttony.
My friend Ro, a redoubtable forager,
If counties returned with a cornucopia of fungi:
pied du mouton, chanterelles, orange
have a patron birch boletus, cepes and parasols.
sin, Dorsets What followed was transcendent sim-
is gluttony plicity, as he transformed them into
Like him or loathe him, hes promised to make Germany great
again I say we give him a chance and see what happens.
decided against cabernet sauvignon.
Although left-bank claret works for
almost everything except shellfish, it
is not quite right for mushrooms. Cha-
teauneuf du Pape Clos des Papes 02
should have been ideal, but the first
two bottles we opened were pure vin-
egar: Chteau Clinton 2016. So we
fell back on a Malescot St Exupry
2000: a thoroughly acceptable line of
retreat. For the truffle, returning to
the original strategy (as opposed to
the original sin) with trepidation, we
tried a Bourgueil 76. Would it have
lasted 40 years? There was an ini-
tial and deeply unpromising musti-
ness. It then began to open out in the
glass, without achieving harmony. But
after five minutes could it have
smelt the truffle? it awakened to
deliciousness.
So it is time to make an early New
Year resolution; one I have made
before, but always broken. Drink
more Loire reds. There is lots of inter-
est including anything made by
Jacky Blot even if it will rarely
match that Bourgueil, and even if one
will rarely drink it with truffle.

MIND YOUR LANGUAGE

Cortana
At the Queens Coronation,
the Duke of Northumberland
carried the Sword of Mercy called
Cortana. I mention this for three
reasons: by way of a holiday, since
it is as far from the American
elections as we can get; because
I am worried that the sword
might not be carried at the next
Coronation; and because I was
surprised to find the word cortana
in the 20-volume Oxford English
Dictionary.
The OED does not include
proper names, so in 1893, when it
reached the letter C, it pretended
that cortana was a common
noun. It notes that the sword
has no point and that its name
comes simply from Latin curtus,
short, which in Old French was
extended to cortain and in Anglo-
Latin cortana (feminine, agreeing
with spatha, sword). It is not
easily connected with curtain,
itself of uncertain origin. Cortana
is also called the sword of King
Edward the Confessor.
The OED calls it the sword of
Roland, the hero of the French
national epic. But according to
Gaston Paris, the historian the
dictionary cites, Charlemagne
tried out three swords forged by
Wayland (Galant dAngleterre)
by thrusting each into a block of
steel. Cortain bit in, but broke at
the tip, and was given to Ogier.
The two other swords, Almace
and Durendal, were given to
Turpin and Roland. In the
Chanson de Roland, Durendal is
an important character, addressed
in a speech by Roland covering
two laisses or stanzas.
That epic swords have names is
also seen in the Spanish national
poem, the Cantar de Mio Cid,
about a more recent hero, the
11th-century Rodrigo Diaz. Like
Roland he fights the Moors or
Saracens.
Cortana is mentioned by
Matthew Paris in the 13th century,
and the present sword is a rare
bit of regalia predating the
Restoration in 1660. The English
Coronation service does not
claim that Cortana is the sword
that Charlemagne wielded. In
fact the service doesnt explain
much: neither the colobium
sindonis, nor the armills, nor the
pall held over the monarch at
the anointing. It is all the more
important that Cortana, as a
symbol not contrived for the
moment but, like any ancient
word in the language, inherited,
should not be dumped now.
Dot Wordsworth

78 the spectator | 19 november 2016 | www.spectator.co.uk

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15 PU S M
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