The Week UK July 10 2021 [PDF]

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THE WEEK

10 JULY 2021 | ISSUE 1339 | £3.99

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Taking off the masks Johnson’s Covid gamble Page 4

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The main stories…

What happened

The great reopening

What the editorials said “Our long crawl to freedom is almost over,” said The Sun. The easing of rules is being resisted by the usual band of opportunists and “hysterics”, but what do these people want? “Another year of this purgatory?” It’s true that Covid cases are rising and that this will lead to some deaths, but we “accept 40 or so daily flu deaths in an average year” without locking the country down. Now that the risk to the NHS has abated, there’s no justification for continued curbs on people’s liberties, said The Daily Telegraph. It’s high time we got rid of them.

Boris Johnson declared his intention this week to push ahead with the lifting of almost all Covid restrictions in England on 19 July. The plan – which will be signed off on Monday unless there is a dramatic worsening in the data – will end mandatory mask-wearing and limits on indoor gatherings, along with working-from-home guidelines and the school “bubble” system. Nightclubs will be able to reopen, and pubs, theatres and sporting venues will be able to operate at full capacity. The pandemic was On the contrary, the lifting of the rules Mandatory mask-wearing will end “far from over”, said the PM, but it was “feels excessive and rushed”, said The time to end “government by diktat”, and Independent. The strategy is based on the trust people to make their own informed decisions. If we don’t premise that the vaccination campaign has erected a “wall of unlock society now, in summer, he said, when will we ever? defence” against the consequences of rising infections. Yet the wall has a gaping hole in it: large numbers of younger people still haven’t received even one jab. Why not wait for a couple Sajid Javid, the Health Secretary, acknowledged that new Covid cases could double to 50,000 a day by 19 July, and of months until we finish the job? The decision to scrap the mask requirement is “particularly baffling”, said The reach 100,000 a day later on in the summer. But he said vaccinations would prevent the NHS being overwhelmed. Guardian. Face coverings are a minor inconvenience and Labour leader Keir Starmer accused the Government of being highly effective. “Israel, much better vaccinated than the UK, “reckless” and backed union calls for mask-wearing to remain was forced to restore its mask mandate only days after dropping it, as cases rose.” compulsory in enclosed spaces and on public transport.

What happened

A Labour victory

What the editorials said

It wasn’t all bad The Queen has awarded the George Cross – Britain’s highest civilian award for gallantry – to the NHS, to mark its 73rd birthday. Her Majesty said the award recognises the “courage compassion and dedication” of NHS staff “over seven decades, and especially in recent times”. It is only the third time the George Cross (which is awarded on the advice of the PM and a committee) has been given to a non-individual: Malta won it in 1942, for its wartime courage; the RUC in 1999.

An American woman who was rejected by Nasa in the 1960s on account of her gender is finally going into space, aged 82. Wally Funk trained with the Women in Space programme in 1961 – but it was cancelled before she could join Nasa. Later, she became the first female flight instructor at a US military base. Her test scores were excellent, but Nasa still wouldn’t accept her. Now, though, Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos has invited her to be his guest of honour on his first space flight, on 20 July. “No one has waited longer,” he said, on Instagram. “Welcome to the crew, Wally.”

Scientists have recruited a new partner in the war against plastic waste: mussels. The marine creatures feed by filtering seawater, digesting tiny particles of nutrients and flushing the rest through their systems. Now, a team at Plymouth Marine Laboratory has run trials to see if they can do the same for micro-plastics. Their findings suggest that 300 mussels can filter out 250,000 shards of microplastic each hour. They calculate that if deployed to estuaries, they could filter up to 25% of waterborne particles. COVER CARTOON: NEIL DAVIES

THE WEEK 10 July 2021

© INSTAGRAM BLUE ORIGIN/JEFF BEZOS

Labour’s win gives Starmer a badly needed reprieve, said The Times. His party is still reeling from its by-election defeat at Defying the polls, Labour scraped to an Hartlepool in May; a second Tory triumph unexpected by-election victory in the West would have “knocked another big hole in Yorkshire seat of Batley and Spen last week Labour’s red wall” and raised more questions – a major boost to the party’s flagging about his leadership. Not that he’s in the clear fortunes. But though it held on to the seat, yet, said The Guardian. Labour owed its win its majority was slashed to just 323, down more to the “energy” and “charisma” of its from 3,525 in 2019. The winning candidate, candidate than to Starmer. Indeed, recent Kim Leadbeater, now represents the polls suggest that 59% of voters feel he is constituency once held by her sister Jo doing a bad job as leader. Until Starmer Cox, who in 2016 was murdered by a comes up with a clear plan for the party, the white supremacist while on her way to meet idea that he can win back voters will remain Starmer and Leadbeater “wishful thinking”. constituents. Leadbeater took 35% of the vote, just one point ahead of her Conservative rival. Labour leader Keir Starmer hailed the result as “a turning point”. Starmer also needs to ditch the dubious tactics Labour used in this by-election, said The Daily Telegraph. It wasn’t just The election – triggered by the resignation of the Galloway who sought to win over Batley and Spen’s large constituency’s former MP to become the first elected mayor Muslim population by stoking “sectarian tensions”. Labour of West Yorkshire – was marred by accusations of dirty did it, too. One leaflet pictured Boris Johnson with the Hindu tricks. Most were levelled at former Labour MP George nationalist Indian PM Narendra Modi, and warned: “Don’t Galloway, standing for the Workers Party of Britain, who risk a Tory PM who is not on your side.” How does that took third place with almost 22% of the vote. square with the high moral tone Starmer adopts in Parliament?

…and how they were covered

NEWS 5

What the commentators said

What next?

It was hard to follow the logic of Johnson’s announcement this week, said Robert Hutton on TheCritic.co.uk. The PM gravely declared that the pandemic was still very much with us and that cases were increasing fast – but then confirmed that he was going to help cases increase even faster by scrapping social distancing rules. He then advised the public not to “get demob happy” and to keep wearing masks in crowded situations. His message, in short, was: “it’s not over, but you can act as if it is, but you shouldn’t”. Don’t bother looking for sense in the PM’s Covid stance, said Elliot Chappell on LabourList.org. It has little to do with public health and everything to do with appeasing those restive Tory backbenchers who cried “hallelujah” in the Commons at the news of the lifting of restrictions.

As of 16 August, fully vaccinated people in England will no longer have to selfisolate if a close contact tests positive for Covid. The same will also apply to under-18s. Some have urged the Government to bring that date forward, warning that with the number of new infections rising fast, millions of people could be obliged to self-isolate for ten days over the next few weeks.

Opening up the country as it’s riding a huge new wave of infections does seem counterintuitive, said Tom Whipple in The Times. But the PM is not alone in thinking it’s a gamble worth taking. That’s also the broad consensus of the Government’s scientific advisers. Better now, they reckon, than to delay until September when, with schools back and people spending more time indoors, it might lead to an even larger wave of cases that runs into the winter flu season. The hope in any case is that the vaccination programme will hold the line. “At the height of the pandemic, more than 1 in 10 recorded cases ended in hospital. Today it is fewer than 1 in 50.” Given all the variables, nobody really knows how things will pan out over the coming months, said Ian Sample in The Guardian. About 99% of UK deaths from Covid so far have been among those aged 40 or over. By 19 July, nearly everyone in this age group will have been offered two jabs – and we know that a double dose of either AstraZeneca or Pfizer is more than 90% effective at preventing deaths from the Delta variant of Covid. This means that even a very large number of infections shouldn’t carry too heavy a toll. On the other hand, the larger the reservoir of infected people, the greater is the risk of a new variant emerging that might have substantial vaccine resistance. “This is the gamble the Government is taking.”

The lifting of restrictions in England may put it at odds with the other home nations of the UK. Wales has yet to set a date for easing any more rules, though it is expected to announce a review of its policies on 14 July. Scotland has set a later target date on 9 August for dropping more restrictions.

What the commentators said

What next?

It wasn’t supposed to go this way, said Tim Bale on UnHerd. On the eve of the by-election, pundits had been confidently predicting a “Hartlepool-style humiliation” for Labour. Angela Rayner was even said to be mulling a leadership challenge. By contrast, the Tories had plenty of good news to sell, not least the lifting of Covid restrictions later this month. So why did they fail? The crass “shenanigans” of former health secretary Matt Hancock certainly didn’t help, but local factors were probably of more significance. Labour benefited from a down-to-earth and “hyper-local” candidate, with powerful emotional ties to the constituency. Thanks to the party’s newly-appointed National Campaign Coordinator, Shabana Mahmood, who did “a bang-up job” of getting out the vote, it also benefited from a far slicker than usual local campaign. As a result of all this, talk of a Labour leadership challenge has “fizzled out” for now, said Andrew Grice in The Independent. But Starmer knows that unless he shows “tangible progress” before Labour’s annual conference in September, his position is far from secure. The clock is still ticking.

Galloway says he plans to take legal action to overturn the by-election result, claiming that he and his team had been defamed throughout the campaign. One example he has cited is a “false statement” by Leadbeater claiming that he had been seen laughing as she was being abused by people outside a mosque.

The one real loser in this by-election was “British politics”, which has been “dragged into the gutter” once again by George Galloway, said Alys Denby on CapX. Batley and Spen has seen more than its fair share of trouble: Jo Cox was murdered on its streets; a local teacher is still in hiding after showing students a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammed. Yet instead of looking to heal divisions, Galloway chose to pursue the Muslim vote with a campaign designed to fan the flames of anti-Semitism and homophobia (Leadbeater is gay). It was indeed a truly poisonous affair, said Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian. Galloway’s explicit goal was to push Labour into third place. The comforting irony is that his “anti-wokery” and pro-Brexit stance may well have pulled in “ex-Labour votes that might otherwise have nudged the Tories across the line”.

THE WEEK

There’s no denying that gloomy reports about climate change have lost some of their impact over the years through sheer familiarity. We’ve become so inured to headlines about unusual weather and thinning sea ice in the Arctic that our eyes can glide over articles setting out the latest findings. It takes something really shocking to grab our attention now on the climate front – and the bad news is that such freak events do seem to be occurring with increased frequency. The latest is the so-called heat dome that has brought blistering conditions to America’s Pacific Northwest (see page 16). The idea of temperate Seattle and lush, forested British Columbia – places on a similar latitude to the UK – enduring temperatures that you’d normally expect to find only in the Sahara desert (Canada registered a record high of 49.6°C last month) is unsettling. Equally alarming are the recent temperature spikes in the Middle East and Asia, parts of which are facing the threat of literally unsurvivable heat. The mercury topped 50°C in several countries in June, which is manageable as dry heat but lethal when combined with humidity. The critical measure is the “wet bulb” temperature given by a thermometer covered with a wet cloth. When this hits 35°C – as it briefly did in Pakistan’s Indus Valley – the body can no longer cool itself by sweating. The Indus Valley is truly at the front line when it comes to climate change, but it’s Harry Nicolle becoming clearer that none of us can afford to be complacent. Subscriptions: 0330-333 9494; [email protected] © Dennis Publishing Limited 2021. All rights reserved. The Week is a registered trademark. Neither the whole of this publication nor any part of it may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publishers

Starmer’s allies are reported by The Times to be pushing for the dismissal of Angela Rayner for alleged disloyalty. One shadow minister has reportedly claimed that Rayner’s supporters had even worked for the party’s defeat at Batley and Spen. Editor-in-chief: Caroline Law Editor: Theo Tait Deputy editor: Harry Nicolle Consultant editor: Jenny McCartney City editor: Jane Lewis Assistant editor: Robin de Peyer Contributing editors: Simon Wilson, Rob McLuhan, Catherine Heaney, Digby Warde-Aldam, Tom Yarwood, William Skidelsky Editorial staff: Anoushka Petit, Tigger Ridgwell, Aine O’Connor, Georgia Heneage Picture editor: Xandie Nutting Art director: Nathalie Fowler Sub-editor: Monisha Rajesh Production editor: Alanna O’Connell Editorial chairman and co-founder: Jeremy O’Grady Production Manager: Maaya Mistry Production Executive: Sophie Griffin Newstrade Director: David Barker Marketing Director (Current Affairs): Lucy Davis Account Manager/Inserts: Jack Reader Account Director/ Inserts: Abdul Ahad Classified: Henry Haselock Account Directors: Jonathan Claxton, Joe Teal, Hattie White Advertising Manager: Carly Activille Group Advertising Director: Caroline Fenner Founder: Jolyon Connell Chief Executive, The Week: Kerin O’Connor Chief Executive: James Tye Dennis Publishing founder: Felix Dennis THE WEEK Ltd, a subsidiary of Dennis, 31-32 Alfred Place, London WC1E 7DP. Tel: 020-3890 3890 Editorial: 020-3890 3787 Email: [email protected]

10 July 2021 THE WEEK

Politics

6 NEWS Controversy of the week

Leaving Afghanistan “The Taliban is on the march,” said Ishaan Tharoor in The Washington Post. In recent weeks, its forces have swept through Badakhshan Province in northern Afghanistan, chasing more than 1,000 Afghan government troops across the border to Tajikistan. The area was once an anti-Taliban stronghold. But ever since President Biden confirmed in April that the last Nato troops would withdraw by 11 September, at the latest, the fundamentalists have “surged”. Twenty years ago, the US ousted the Taliban from Kabul during “Operation Enduring Freedom”. Now a shaky Afghan government, led by President Ashraf Ghani, has been left to battle an emboldened Taliban, which currently controls roughly a third of the country’s 421 districts. The Taliban forces: surging US exit, which started to accelerate last week, seems hasty and disorganised. It abandoned the vast Bagram airbase – the former hub of its operations – “in the dead of night” last Friday, reportedly without even informing Bagram’s new Afghan commander. Biden seems “eager to turn the page”. When the press quizzed him on the withdrawal before the US’s annual Fourth of July celebrations, he said, “I want to talk about happy things, man.” People in Afghanistan don’t have that luxury, said Shabnam Nasimi in The Daily Telegraph. By leaving now, the West is “betraying” millions of ordinary Afghans, particularly women to whom it promised – and briefly gave – a better life. Millions of girls are in school, and women have entered professions and politics. All such gains could vanish overnight. Recent months have seen a wave of assassinations of public servants by fundamentalists. And in districts the Taliban has retaken, it has already issued new laws ordering women not to leave home alone. The US and Nato have an even more urgent responsibility for those Afghans who risked their lives to work for them, such as its local interpreters, said Michael Wendt on The Hill. The US has pledged to evacuate them, but its sluggish “special immigrant visa” scheme has a backlog of some 18,000 people. US officials must cut through the red tape and get them out, before a vengeful Taliban reaches them first. Sadly, that day may now be closer than we imagined, said Hugh Tomlinson in The Times. General Austin S. Miller, the commander of US and Nato forces in Afghanistan, has expressed alarm at the speed of Taliban gains. “I don’t like leaving friends in need,” he said. “We should be concerned.” Biden is making a grave mistake, said Gerald F. Seib in The Wall Street Journal. An “America-first” US grew weary of a faraway war it couldn’t “win”. Yet simply by being there – at the relatively low cost of maintaining a few thousand US troops – it prevented a far more dangerous situation. A Taliban return to power would be a humanitarian disaster. But it could also open the door for Afghanistan to become, once again, a “safe haven” for Islamist extremists intent on harming the US.

Spirit of the age Parents at a secondary school in Leicestershire have been divided by its new behaviour guidelines. The e-booklet explains that in future, children will be expected to “always smile”, to thank their teachers after every class, and respond to whistled commands. Looking out of the window is banned, as is walking in groups of more than two. One parent described it as “horrendous... sort of like a prison camp”, but the head teacher at John Ferneley College said most parents welcomed the initiative. Footballer Cristiano Ronaldo has been identified as the highest paid Instagram influencer, commanding an average of $1.6m for every post. Dwayne “the Rock” Johnson is next on the Rich List ($1.52m) and Ariana Grande third ($1.51m).

THE WEEK 10 July 2021

Good week for:

The Stockwell Six, a group of black men who were falsely accused of robbing a corrupt cop 50 years ago, three of whom had their convictions overturned. Courtney Harriot, Paul Green and Cleveland Davidson were arrested after leaving Stockwell station in 1972, when aged 17 to 20, and were jailed on the basis of testimony fabricated by Derek Ridgewell. One of the six was acquitted; the whereabouts of the other two are unknown. Unilever, which won a legal battle with DC Comica, over its plan for a brand of cosmetics called Wonder Mum. The US publisher had argued that the name was too similar to that of its crime-fighting heroine Wonder Woman. However, the Intellectual Property Office ruled that the word “mum” was too British to be confused with any member of the superhero Justice League. The Ever Given, the container ship that blocked the Suez Canal in March, which was finally able to continue its journey. The 400-metre long vessel set sail for the Mediterranean, after its owners and insurers agreed a deal to compensate Egypt for the cost of the salvage operation and damage to the canal bank.

Bad week for:

Callum Saunders, a semi-professional footballer who was caught out in an insurance scam as a result of delivering a dazzling, halfway-line goal. Saunders, who plays for Haywards Heath, had told insurers that an injury he sustained in a car crash had left him unable to work, to support his claim for £55,000. Alas for him, his goal was so spectacular, it made it onto Sky Sports’ Soccer AM slot – where it was seen by investigators.

Borders bill unveiled

Knowingly arriving in the UK without “valid entry clearance” will become a criminal offence, under the government’s new Nationality and Borders Bill. Unveiled this week, the much anticipated bill also includes a maximum life sentence for anyone convicted of people smuggling; new powers for Border Patrol to divert boats carrying migrants across the Channel; and measures to allow asylum claims to be processed outside the UK. The Home Secretary Priti Patel said the reforms were “firm but fair”, and would enable the UK to control its borders. However, campaigners said they would “criminalise asylum”.

Time to sue builders

Home owners are going to be given more time in which to claim compensation for dangerous cladding and poor workmanship. Under the Building Safety Bill, owners will have 15 years in which to sue developers – up from six – and the change will be applied retrospectively, meaning that the residents of a building completed in 2010 would have until 2025 to take action. However, campaigners said the change was meaningless, as in many cases, the developers no longer exist, and the leaseholders cannot afford to instruct solicitors.

Poll watch 81% of Tory voters think the UK is a nation of “equality and freedom”, while 19% think it is “institutionally racist”. Among Labour voters, 52% agree with the former and 48% the latter. 40% of all voters agree that “cancel culture” enforces a “thought and speech police” that can ruin lives, while 25% think it is right that if you say something sexist or racist you “face the consequences”. 68% of Tories think that “for the most part economic and financial success is earned and deserved”, compared with 42% of Labour voters. The Centre for Policy Studies/The Times 88% of parents of children under 16 think they would definitely or probably allow their child to be vaccinated against Covid. Office for National Statistics

Europe at a glance Kyiv Sexism row: Ukraine’s defence ministry has been criticised for proposing that female soldiers march in high heels at a parade celebrating the country’s independence next month. Pictures of fatigue-clad female cadets marching in heels during one of their twice-daily training sessions for the parade were published on the ministry’s Facebook page, sparking furious complaints that the soldiers were being sexualised and demeaned. There are 57,000 women in the Ukrainian armed forces. The army says it is now looking into alternative footwear.

NEWS 7

Stockholm Supermarket cyberattack: Hundreds of Swedish supermarkets were forced to close last weekend owing to a “colossal” cyberattack that affected companies worldwide. Coop Sweden, which accounts for around 20% of the country’s supermarket sector, shut 500 stores after its point-of-sale tills and self-service checkouts were paralysed by the attack. However, cybersecurity experts said the hackers’ target was not Coop, but a large US software supplier that the company uses: the attack may have been intended to disrupt Fourth of July celebrations in America. Hundreds of other companies around the world were also crippled by the ransomware attack, whose perpetrators demanded $70m (£50.5m) in bitcoin to undo the damage. The US president, Joe Biden, has ordered an investigation into the incident, which some suspect was the work of the Russia-linked REvil ransomware gang.

Moscow Champagne row: Vladimir Putin has enraged French wine producers by approving a law which restricts the Russian word for champagne – shampanskoye – to Russian-made bubbly. The law requires all non-Russian producers, including those from the Champagne region, to include the words “sparkling wine” on their labels, though they can also use the word “champagne”. The French champagne producers’ committee said they were “scandalised” by the move and have called on French and EU officials to demand that “this unacceptable law be modified”. Shampanskoye is the post-Soviet successor to Soviet champagne, a cheap sparkling wine that was first produced in the Stalin era to make bubbly available to all.

Vatican City Papal surgery: Pope Francis had surgery on his colon at a hospital in Rome this week, hours after addressing thousands of people in St Peter’s Square. The 84-year-old Pontiff didn’t mention the operation during his Sunday address, though a week earlier he had asked congregants to pray for him, which may have been because he was preparing for the surgery. Francis, who suffers from diverticulitis, a condition which can inflame the colon, was described as “in good general condition” after the threehour operation, but was expected to stay in hospital for a week.

Troodos Mountains, Cyprus Forest fires: Four people have been killed and 50 homes have been destroyed by Cyprus’s worst forest fires in decades. Greece and Israel sent fire-fighting planes to help contain the blaze that swept through the foothills of the Troodos Mountains. Britain, which has military bases on the island, deployed two search and rescue helicopters. By the time the fire was declared fully under control, over 20 square miles of forest and farmland had been razed. A 67-year-old farmer has been arrested and remanded in custody on suspicion of causing the fire, which he denies. Cyprus has been grappling with a blistering heatwave: temperatures have hit 40°C, and there has been very little rain since mid-April. Various parts of Europe have experienced heatwaves this summer, including Finland. In Arctic Lapland, the mercury hit 33.6ºC – the highest temperature for more than a century.

© AFP PHOTO/UKRAINIAN DEFENCE MINISTRY PRESS-SERVICE

Madrid Rape law tightened: The Spanish government is introducing a law to define all non-consensual sex as rape, as part of a major reform of its penal code on assault. The bill comes five years after a notorious case in which five men who’d gang raped an 18-year-old woman, during Pamplona’s Running of the Bulls festival, were originally only convicted of sexual abuse, because in footage of the attack, the woman appeared silent and passive; and the court decided that there was no evidence of violence or intimidation – which was required under existing law. The verdict prompted demonstrations across Spain. Dubbed the “only yes is yes” law, the new legislation – which still requires parliamentary approval – will define rape as any sex without clear consent. It will also class stalking and catcalling as crimes, instead of misdemeanours. Bern Fighter jet purchase: The Swiss government has recommended the purchase of 36 F-35A fighter jets from the US company Lockheed Martin, angering antiarmaments groups and left-wing parties who are now calling for another plebiscite on the issue. The decision to replace the country’s ageing fleet of military planes was narrowly approved in such a vote last year, but critics of the deal maintain that neutral Switzerland, which last fought a foreign war more than 200 years ago, has no need for cutting-edge fighter jets. The decision to buy the jets from Lockheed, instead of one of the European firms in consideration, has also been seen as a rebuff to the EU at a time of strained relations between Bern and Brussels. The government says the planes are necessary to defend Swiss airspace, and for tasks such as patrolling the skies during the World Economic Forum in Davos. Catch up with daily news at theweek.co.uk

10 July 2021 THE WEEK

8 NEWS

The world at a glance

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Bill Cosby freed: The American comedian Bill Cosby was released from jail last week after a court overturned his sexual assault conviction on a technicality. In 2018, Cosby, 83, was found guilty of drugging and molesting the former basketball player Andrea Constand, and sentenced to between three and ten years. She was one of dozens of women who had made such allegations. But in a review of his case, judges at Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court found that an earlier “non prosecution” deal that he had struck with a prosecutor, in return for his deposition in a civil case, should have prevented him being tried in 2018. Cosby’s conviction was widely seen as a landmark moment in the #MeToo movement. Lawyer Gloria Allred, who represented more than 30 accusers of the man once known as “America’s dad”, described the ruling as “devastating”, but said the decision was no vindication of Cosby.

Winnipeg, Canada Statues toppled: Protesters marked Canada Day last week by toppling the statues of Queen Victoria and Queen Elizabeth II that stood outside the Manitoba State Legislature. The protest was one of a series planned for Canada Day – which marks the country’s confederation – aimed at highlighting historic abuses committed against Indigenous peoples. In recent weeks, investigators have found the unmarked graves of hundreds of Indigenous children who’d been separated from their parents and sent to residential schools, as part of a system of forced assimilation in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Wilmington, Delaware Sexual abuse settlement: The Boy Scouts of America has reached a preliminary deal to pay $850m (£617m) in compensation to some of the 60,000 people who have made claims of child abuse against the organisation. If it goes through, it will be one of the largest settlements in US history involving sexual abuse claims. Even so, Tim Kosnoff, one of the lawyers representing the victims, described it as a “rotten, chump deal”: he noted that some men who had been abused for years might end up with payouts of just a few thousand dollars. The 111-year-old organisation apologised to survivors and filed for bankruptcy in Delaware last year, saying it would set up a compensation trust for men who were molested as youngsters by scoutmasters and other “leaders”. Gulf of Mexico “Eye of fire”: An underwater gas leak caused a huge, whirling fire to burst out of the sea west of Mexico’s Yucatán peninsula last week. Footage of the strange circular blaze – which took more than five hours to bring under control – went viral on social media, where it was dubbed the “eye of fire”. According to Mexico’s state-run oil company Pemex, the subaquatic fireball was the result of a leak from a pipeline that coincided with a lightning storm.

© MANUEL LOPEZ SAN MARTIN/TWITTER

Ciénaga de Zapata, Cuba Tropical storm: More than 100,000 Cubans were evacuated from their homes this week, to avoid the impact of tropical storm Elsa. Elsa made landfall near Ciénaga de Zapata, a natural park with few inhabitants, causing mudslides and torrential rains. Before arriving in Cuba, the storm had passed over the Dominican Republic and St Lucia (killing three people) before moving on to Barbados, where more than 1,100 reported their houses had been damaged – and in 62 cases had collapsed. Prior to losing speed, Elsa had been recorded as the tropic’s fastest-moving hurricane, clocking in at 31mph. Cuba is currently battling its worst Covid-19 outbreak since the start of the pandemic, and the mass evacuation has raised fears of a further spike in infections. Tegucigalpa Assassination plot: The former head of a major Honduran construction company has been found guilty of the murder of the prize-winning indigenous environmental activist Berta Cáceres in 2016. Roberto David Castillo, a US-trained former Honduran army intelligence officer, was president of Desarrollos Energéticos (Desa) when he collaborated in Cáceres’s assassination. Days earlier, the campaigner had received threats for opposing one of Desa’s dam projects. The high court in Tegucigalpa found that Cáceres had been killed because she had been leading a campaign to stop a dam being built on the Gualcarque River, on land that is sacred to her Lenca people. In its verdict, the court also noted that Castillo had used paid informants as well as military contacts to monitor Cáceres in the years prior to her murder. THE WEEK 10 July 2021

Santiago New constitution: A woman from Chile’s indigenous Mapuche people has been chosen to lead the drafting of Chile’s new constitution, as part of efforts to ensure power is spread more equitably across the nation. Elisa Loncón, a university professor and campaigner for indigenous rights, was chosen for the role by 96 of the 155 members of Chile’s new constitutional body. Under her leadership, the delegates will draft a new text to replace Chile’s previous constitution, which was produced during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet: it was notably pro-business, and its many critics say it has done much to exacerbate inequalities in Chile. Delegates have nine months to write a new constitution that will then be put to a referendum.

The world at a glance Tbilisi Pride attacked: A planned Pride march in Tbilisi was cancelled this week, after anti-LGBT protesters (pictured) stormed its organisers’ office, smashed equipment and attacked activists. The event would have been only the second Pride march in Georgia. Organisers said they couldn’t risk it going ahead, and blamed the authorities for failing to ensure its security. The march had been bitterly opposed in the socially conservative country; even the PM, Irakli Garibashvili, had described it as “not reasonable”.

Jerusalem Coalition defeat: Israel’s new coalition government suffered a blow this week when parliament failed to extend a controversial citizenship law. The 2003 law – which bars Palestinians from the occupied West Bank or Gaza from gaining citizenship or residency rights if they marry Israeli citizens – expired on Tuesday as a result of the bill to extend it by six months ending in a tied vote, of 59 to 59. The new PM, Naftali Bennett, had declared that he regarded the compromise bill (originally the extension was for a year) as a confidence vote in his coalition – which is made up of left-wing, centrist, right-wing, and Arab parties. This was to put pressure on coalition MPs to support the bill. But in the end, a member of his own ultranationalist party voted against it, while two Arab members abstained.

NEWS 9

Jakarta Oxygen crisis: The Indonesian government has called on the gas industry to step up production of medical oxygen, to help hospitals buckling under the strain of Covid admissions. Indonesia’s Covid-19 outbreak is currently the worst in Southeast Asia. Owing in part to the spread of the more transmissible Delta variant, the number of new cases has quadrupled in a month, to more than 25,000 a day, while deaths reached 728 a day this week. Those figures are likely to be an underestimate, however, as little testing takes place outside big cities and patients who die at home are not included in the official toll. Hospitals say their oxygen supplies are either running low or exhausted. In one hospital, 63 patients have died as a result of the shortages; and many are turning away Covid patients.

Atami, Japan Deadly mudslide: More than 1,000 soldiers, police and firefighters were sent to the Japanese resort of Atami this week to search for survivors of a huge mudslide. Triggered by days of torrential rain, the deluge of muddy water, debris and rock damaged more than 130 buildings on Saturday morning. By Wednesday, four people were confirmed dead, and 24 were missing. Heavy rain was ongoing this week, and residents in other at-risk areas were urged to take precautions.

Mekelle, Ethiopia Humanitarian crisis: Senior UN officials have warned that more than 400,000 people in Ethiopia’s northern state of Tigray are now in famine, and another 1.8 million people are “on the brink” of it. The region has been the site of an eight-month conflict between the federal government and forces loyal to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF). Last week, the government issued a unilateral ceasefire, after the rebels retook the regional capital, Mekelle. But there are reports that TPLF troops are now mobilising against militias from a neighbouring province, while the central government stands accused of blocking humanitarian assistance to Tigray. A UN spokesperson has described the security situation as “extremely concerning”.

Jammu and Kashmir, India Nomadic government: For 149 years, the government of the Indian territory of Jammu and Kashmir has shifted between a winter base in Jammu, and the summer capital of Srinagar (pictured). But now, the bi-annual Darbar Move has come to an end: to the dismay of the traders that profited from the migration of civil servants and their families to Jammu, officials will now be based, permanently, in one location or the other – and will just have to put up with the weather. The regional government said the shift was not necessary, in the digital age, and was a huge waste of resources.

Canberra Border tightened: Australia is halving its cap on international arrivals, in a blow to the 34,000 Australians still stranded abroad. From mid-July, only 3,035 people will be allowed into the country per week. Australia closed its borders in March 2020 as part of its efforts to contain Covid-19. These have been successful: it has recorded just 910 Covid deaths. However, the virus continues to circulate – Sydney is currently back in lockdown – and the government has been accused of being too slow to roll out vaccines. Fewer than 8% of Australians have had two jabs. 10 July 2021 THE WEEK

People

10 NEWS

Becker’s highs and lows Having won Wimbledon for the first time aged 17, Boris Becker has won six Grand Slam tennis championships. But he is as well known for his rollercoaster personal life as for his sporting achievements, said Jane Mulkerrins in The Times. In 1999, he had a notorious tryst with a waitress in Nobu, fathering a child in the process; despite having earned an estimated £100m, he was declared bankrupt in 2017; and he is currently on bail, awaiting

trial on charges of financial malfeasance (which he denies). It must be stressful – but Becker, 53, is philosophical. “I’ve done a lot,” he says. “I’ve experienced the highs and the lows. I was never a believer in not crossing the road when the light was red. I wouldn’t have won Wimbledon otherwise. I cross frontiers to see how far I can go – I like to go to the edge. I go as fast as I can and as far as I can possibly go.” A riot at Glastonbury Emily Eavis’s childhood on Worthy Farm – home of the Glastonbury Festival – had some surprisingly ugly moments. For much of the 1980s, her father Michael was in a stand-off with new-age travellers who thought they should have a free pass to the site. Tensions reached a boiling point a day after the event in 1990, says Craig McLean in the Radio Times. “I was at the kitchen table doing homework while Mum was cooking dinner and these explosions started,” says Eavis, who was ten at the time. Spoiling for a fight, a group of travellers had come up to the house to find her father and other festival crew. “It got really nasty. They were all outside, throwing Molotov cocktails and blowing up Land Rovers.” Whisked off to her grandmother’s house nearby, Eavis saw ambulances “streaming” past. The rioters caused £50,000 worth of damage, and 235 people were arrested. It was, she has said, “one of the lowest points of the entire festival history”.

Castaway of the week This week’s edition of Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs featured fashion designer Paul Costelloe 1 Don’t Be Cruel by Otis Blackwell, performed by Elvis Presley 2 On Raglan Road by Patrick Kavanagh and Luke Kelly, performed by Luke Kelly and The Dubliners 3 Save the Last Dance for Me by Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, performed by The Drifters 4 Les Champs-Élysées by Mike Wilsh, Mike Deighan and Pierre Delanoë, performed by Joe Dassin 5 Ol’ Man River by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, performed by Paul Robeson 6 Silent Worship by Arthur Somervell and Handel, performed by Aled Jones 7 ‘O Sole mio by Giovanni Capurro, Eduardo di Capua and Alfredo Mazzucchi, performed by Luciano Pavarotti and the National Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Giancarlo Chiaramello 8* Grace by Seán and Frank O’Meara, performed by Rod Stewart Book: Reynard the Fox by Anne Louise Avery Luxury: paper and watercolour paints

THE WEEK 10 July 2021

* Choice if allowed only one record

In the 1980s, Earvin “Magic” Johnson became a legend on the basketball court; when he revealed, in 1991, that he was HIV positive, his courage – and his activism – won him legions of admirers off it too. But growing up in the 1960s and 1970s, his life was nothing like as easy as he sometimes made basketball look. Every year, his family would drive south to visit relatives in Mississippi. The trip was long, and fraught. They took their own food to avoid going into roadside diners, and if they stopped to use the toilet, his father would send the children in groups, so they could “watch each other’s backs”. The racism was less overt in the northern states, but his hometown of Lansing, Michigan, was de facto segregated. Johnson was among the first black pupils there to be “bussed” to a majority-white high school. He soon joined the basketball team where, at first, his teammates were reluctant even to pass the ball to him. It was tough – but the experience proved valuable. “It taught me how to work alongside somebody who doesn’t look like me,” he told Oliver Laughland in The Guardian. “And what I would find out later is that is the way America is. No matter where [I] turned, whether I was coached by one, whether they owned the team I played for, or the partnerships I was trying to create in business… it was somebody white in charge.”

Viewpoint:

Towels, please “Tennis is no longer a titanic battle between athletes at the top of their game. It’s hour after hour of people wiping their hands on a towel. I don’t get it. These guys and girls are at the peak of physical fitness, but after serving one ball, in England, where it’s only ever 13°C, they have somehow developed such sweaty palms that they must stroll to the back of the court and stand there for a few moments, wiping the rivers of perspiration away. Then, after several minutes of doing this, they amble to a comfy chair at the side of the court, where they chew idly on 4 grams of protein bar before taking a tiny sip of their electrolyte drink. Then it’s back to the handwiping, and so on, until one of them falls over and the other is declared the winner.” Jeremy Clarkson in The Sunday Times

Farewell Richard Donner, popular director of Superman, died 5 July, aged 91. Dick Leonard, MP, journalist and political biographer, died 24 June, aged 90. Clare Peploe, screenwriter and filmmaker, died 23 June, aged 79. Gianna Rolandi, American soprano, died 20 June, aged 68. Peter Zinovieff, composer and engineer, died 23 June, aged 88.

© PHILIP CHEUNG/GUARDIAN /EYEVINE

Belinda Carlisle on drugs The pioneering all-female band The Go-Go’s were formed in LA’s burgeoning 1970s punk scene – which singer Belinda Carlisle threw herself into with gusto. She’d moved to the city at 18, and knew she was in trouble with drugs “from the very beginning”, she told Emine Saner in The Guardian. “I always had that little voice: ‘What are you doing?’” She was “an acid head” at first. “But when I was introduced to coke, I thought: ‘Oh my God, when I get money, I’m going to buy lots of this.’ And I did.” She laughs. It was wild: The Go-Go’s partied with everyone from Ozzy Osbourne to Andy Warhol. “I had a great time,” she says. “I had a complete blast, but it does become a problem.” Drugs led the band to break up, and though she then had a massive solo career, she was also left with a 30-year cocaine addiction. “It was fun until it stopped being fun,” she says, “and then it just became a real f***ing nightmare.”

Briefing

NEWS 13

The great chip shortage

Since late last year, there has been a severe shortage of microchips, which is now affecting industries across the world How bad is the shortage? will rise; and premium electronic features “Never seen anything like it,” Tesla’s like navigation systems or extra screens Elon Musk tweeted last month. Since are being dropped in order to stretch the late 2020, the world has been facing an supply of chips further. In electronics, unexpected dearth of microchips – the trade prices for computer memory have tiny integrated circuits that are nowadays risen around 30% since the start of found in practically every manufactured 2020, pushing up costs for items such device with a battery or a plug – from as laptops and printers. HP has raised toasters to TVs to airbags to fighter consumer PC prices by 8% and printers jets. The scarcity was first seen in by more than 20% in a year. Prices for sophisticated consumer electronics: TVs, smartphones and home appliances gaming consoles like the PlayStation 5 look set to increase too. The chip and the new Xbox have had big order shortage also has governments worried. backlogs; prices for computer graphics cards have shot up. But because semiWhy are governments worried? conductor chips are so ubiquitous, a Chips are now such a crucial component large number of industries have been in many strategic technologies – from affected. The car industry has been hit defence systems to cybersecurity to hardest of all. Modern cars can easily renewable energy – that their “Chips are the new oil” contain 3,000 chips, and the shortage has manufacture has become a big slowed down vehicle assembly lines across the world: global geopolitical issue: policymakers say that “chips are the new oil”. output will drop by four million cars, nearly 5%, this year. They were invented in the US, and much of the cutting-edge design still takes place there, but around 80% of production Why is it happening? now happens in Asia because costs are lower: mostly in Taiwan, At the best of times, chip supply chains are hard to maintain: it South Korea and China. The world’s biggest producer by volume is TSMC in Taiwan. Intel, based in California, is the biggest by is an industry prone to gluts and shortages. Fabrication plants revenue. Along with South Korea’s Samsung, these companies (“fabs”) for advanced chips are among the world’s most complex manufacturing facilities, costing tens of billions of dollars to build. dominate high-end, specialised chips. But China is positioned to become the largest producer by 2030: its latest five-year plan sets Lasers print billions of transistors onto tiny areas of silicon wafers; it can take three to four months to turn a large silicon the goal of meeting 70% of its semiconductor needs by 2025. wafer into a useable batch of chips (see box). So the industry Europe accounts for less than 10% of global chip production. tends to swing between undersupply and oversupply, in what What are governments doing about it? economists call a pork cycle: as with breeding pigs, there are lags in production. Producers invest when prices are high and find they Last month, the US Senate passed the Innovation and are left with too much capacity when it finally comes on stream. Competition Act, a $250bn bill designed to boost US At present, however, the trend in the industry is of remorseless semiconductor production, along with scientific research and expansion: green tech, cloud computing, 5G, artificial intelligence, other strategic technologies. In March, the European Commission cryptocurrency, robotics – all these growth areas eat up chips. set out an ambitious plan to grow its share of the global And the pandemic has helped to create the perfect storm. semiconductor market to 20% by 2030, and committed $160bn of its Covid recovery fund to tech projects. The UK has long had a strong presence in the design side of the industry, but few What effect did the pandemic have? It closed down many fabs temporarily. At the same time, the great producers; Newport Wafer Fab, the UK’s largest chip producer, has been acquired by Nexperia, a Chinese-owned company. increase in working from home, and the increase in demand for home entertainment, created a surge in demand for electronics. PC sales How long will the shortage last? The triumph of the microchip rose by 13% last year. In New York There is no end in sight. Intel’s chief A microchip is a collection of anywhere from a few City alone, the department of executive, Pat Gelsinger, said that he hundred to tens of billions of tiny circuits on a small thinks it could be two years before education bought 350,000 iPads. wafer of silicon. Silicon is a semiconductor – it can either conduct electricity or contain it. On a chip, silicon production is able to ramp up. “The Video calling meant that data centres transistors are miniature switches that can be turned shortage will probably continue for a needed more capacity. And during the on and off by electronic signals. Computers run using few years,” said Michael Dell, chief worst of the pandemic, car purchases binary code. Transistors reflect this: the digits 1 and 0 executive of Dell Technologies, earlier plummeted. So while electronics used in binary represent the on and off states of a in the year. The likes of TSMC, companies bought up all available transistor. Essentially, the chip’s job is to shuttle Samsung and Intel are all investing production capacity, car electrons around in a way prescribed by computer heavily. But “even if chip factories manufacturers cancelled their orders. code. All the data on computers – numbers, pictures, are built all over the world, it takes But later, when the carmakers were music, images – is stored and processed in this way. time”, says Dell. Many companies are ready to gear up production again, The invention of this kind of transistor, at Bell Labs in examining their supply chains: Tesla they found themselves at the back of New Jersey in 1947, and its increasing miniaturisation is considering buying a chip plant the queue: microchip fabs can take up is the backbone of modern electronics. Moore’s Law, coined by the chip pioneer Gordon Moore, states that outright. High-tech industries will to six months to re-start production the number of transistors on a chip doubles about probably recover first, towards the of specific types of chip. every two years, making computers ever more end of this year. Cars and home powerful. Today’s advanced chips are dizzyingly appliances, which use cheaper, older How does this affect us? complex: lasers imprint circuits just 12 nanometres chips will take longer: they are not so The supply of cars for sale is set to wide, the length a fingernail grows in 12 seconds. profitable for manufacturers, so there be restricted later this year because of Transistors are thought to be the most manufactured is not the impetus for them to invest. the shortage, the leading UK motor items in world history. The number of microchips sold Product delays and parts shortages dealership Pendragon warned last globally in April reached a record of nearly 100 billion. will continue for some time. week. With fewer cars to sell, prices 10 July 2021 THE WEEK

14 NEWS

The UK at a glance

Edinburgh Flash floods: A violent thunderstorm triggered flash floods that brought chaos to parts of Edinburgh last weekend. On Sunday, nearly half the average rainfall for the whole of July fell in less than an hour, overloading drains, stranding cars and forcing shops to close. Water was knee-deep in Princes Street, the city’s main shopping street. According to Edinburgh Council, up to 37mm of rain fell during the storm. Councillor Lesley Macinnes said: “No city’s drainage systems are designed to cope with the sort of short, sharp volume of water experienced.” More rain was forecast for this week.

Sunderland Nissan boost: Nissan has set out its plans for a £1bn battery “gigafactory” at its Sunderland plant, which will lead to the creation of around 6,000 new jobs at the site and in British supply chains. The new 9GWh factory will be run by Nissan’s Chinese partner Envision AESC. The scheme also includes investment in a new all-electric crossover vehicle, in a UK battery recycling facility, and in up to ten solar farms to power the project. Nissan gave no details of government support, but ministers are thought to have promised state aid worth £100m. The announcement ends years of concern about the post-Brexit future of Britain’s largest car plant. “This project is the demonstration of the renaissance of the British car industry,” said Ashwani Gupta, Nissan’s chief operating officer, while PM Boris Johnson described the project as a “major vote of confidence in the UK”.

Belfast Prosecutions dropped: To the anger of victims’ families, two soldiers accused of Troubles-era killings have been told that they will not face trial after all. One of the men, Soldier F, had been accused of murdering James Wray and William McKinney on Bloody Sunday in 1972. The other, Soldier B, was to be prosecuted for the murder of 15-year-old Daniel Hegarty, who was shot in the head during an Army operation in the same year. But last week, Northern Ireland prosecutors announced that, in light of an earlier case in which key evidence against veterans facing similar charges was deemed inadmissible, there was no longer any “reasonable prospect of conviction”. Veterans groups welcomed the decision, but the Bloody Sunday families described it as a “damning indictment of the British justice system”. Slough, Berkshire Council cash crisis: A local authority has effectively declared itself bankrupt and suspended all non-urgent spending. Revealing a “catastrophic” £100m black hole in its finances, Slough Borough Council warned that “rigorous” measures, including job losses, cuts to services and the sale of buildings, were now needed. Otherwise, it said, the deficit could reach £150m by 2024. The town has been hard hit by the pandemic, but the Labour-run authority accepts that years of financial mismanagement and accounting errors are partly to blame for its plight. It is the third council to face insolvency in the last three years, after Northamptonshire and Croydon. Earlier this year, the National Audit Office found that at least 25 local authorities were on the brink of bankruptcy. Cardiff Farming crime-buster: The Welsh government has appointed a Wildlife and Rural Crime Coordinator, the first such post in the UK, to combat rising crime levels in the countryside. Rob Taylor will work on a range of issues, from fly-tipping and the theft of heating oil to dog attacks on sheep. A recent report by the farmers’ union, NFU Cymru, found that around one in five Welsh farmers had been the victims of crime in 2020. Theft accounted for more than half the offences; more than a third of farmers had felt the need to install CCTV. Across the UK, rural crime rose by 11% in 2019 with organised gangs targeting expensive machinery such as quad bikes and tractors, sometimes for sale overseas. Isles of Scilly Wally not wanted: The giant Arctic walrus who appeared in British waters in the spring has outstayed his welcome in his latest haunt off the Isles of Scilly. Wally, who weighs around a tonne, has damaged or sunk a dozen boats since arriving at St Mary’s around three weeks ago, and British Divers Marine Life Rescue has now drawn up an action plan to dissuade the walrus from swimming in or near the harbour. This includes the use of a range of “humane deterrents”, such as the recorded growls of polar bears. THE WEEK 10 July 2021

London Transport gloom: Transport for London has lost a record £100m in advertising revenue, owing to commuters staying away from its Tube, train and bus network during the pandemic. As passenger numbers dropped to as low as 10% of their normal levels last year, advertisers withdrew their business. As a result, TfL’s commercial revenues in the 12 months to March fell to £50m, down from £158m in 2019. Passengers are now returning – numbers on the Tube are back to 45% of their 2019 levels, while on the buses the figure is 65% – but TfL is still struggling to meet its costs. Last month, it secured another £1bn in emergency funding from the Department for Transport. In return, TfL has pledged to make savings of £900m this financial year.

Believe me: things really are looking up Emma Duncan The Times

Unmasking the line that divides a nation Matthew Lynn The Daily Telegraph

Don’t let them turn journalists into spies Patrick Cockburn The Independent

British justice can never come cheap Editorial Financial Times

Pessimism sells, says Emma Duncan. That’s why a new book, Everything is F*cked, is a bestseller. It tells us of the “paradox of progress”: the wealthier and safer the place you live, it says, “the more likely you are to die by suicide”. It’s a startling claim, but the good news is it’s baseless. Yes, poor folk living in rich neighbourhoods are more likely to kill themselves than those living in poor ones, perhaps due to the starker comparison in fortunes. Yet overall, it’s just not true that greater wealth makes people more suicidal. Quite the opposite. Since the mid-1990s, as the world has got far richer, the global suicide rate has fallen by a third. For young women in China, it has declined by an incredible 90%. Urbanisation has freed them from the constraints of village life and unhappy marriages (and made it harder to get hold of guns and poison). In many countries, the suicide rate among old people has also plummeted – a trend almost certainly due to the higher incomes and advances in medical treatment and palliative care that the elderly now enjoy. So don’t let the pessimists get away with calling this the “paradox of progress”. “This is progress.” So that’s that then, says Matthew Lynn. As of 19 July, we’ll no longer have to wear a face mask in enclosed public spaces. Some people will bin them with relief, others will opt to keep wearing them, and both sides will move on, respecting the other’s point of view. Think so? Fat chance. A glance at social media tells us that the face mask is now a cultural dividing line. “Maskers and antimaskers look set to become the new Remainers and Leavers (with almost, if not quite, the same tribes in both camps).” The former see mask-wearing as an act of good citizenship and despise those who’d put the community at risk; the latter see it as a “pointless imposition” favoured by “doom-mongers who never want to return to normal life”. The clinical utility of masks is secondary; it’s all about signalling the type of person you are. “Are you freedom-loving and rational, or socially responsible and selfless?” With luck we may succeed in beating Covid soon, but the divisions opened up by lockdown will be with us for years to come. Britain isn’t Turkey or Egypt, says Patrick Cockburn. Our Government isn’t empowered to silence critics and conceal wrongdoing. But in insidious ways, I fear we’re moving that way. Ministers and officials have started to correspond through encrypted messaging services that leave no paper trail. And they’ve taken to blocking Freedom of Information Act requests: some 50% are now rejected, up from 15% when the Act was introduced. But the most sinister development is the change to the Official Secrets Act put forward in a little-noticed Home Office consultative paper. Replete with scares about the hidden enemies we face, it offers a shockingly broad definition of espionage – “the covert process of obtaining sensitive confidential information not normally publicly available”; anyone revealing information regarded as a state secret, it says, will be liable for prosecution. Yet in my experience such “secrets” typically involve not some vital plan for defence of the realm – the stuff of spy fiction – but official blunders which politicians only want revealed, if at all, at a time of their choosing. The Government is seeking to redefine journalism as espionage. It’s increasingly hard to get justice in this country, says the FT. The criminal courts of England and Wales can’t deliver it. The backlog of cases they have to deal with is at a record 60,000. The pitifully few rape victims who get “to see their alleged attacker charged face an average 1,000-day wait between offence and end of trial”. When trials do go ahead, most are heard in “crumbling, dirty buildings where basic services don’t work and support staff have been cut to the bone”. The pandemic has exacerbated the problem, but the underlying cause is a decade of spending cuts. Some measures the Ministry of Justice has taken in order to cope – repurposing civic buildings to serve as emergency “Nightingale” courts; allowing some short technical proceedings to be heard remotely – are welcome. Other proposed remedies, notably the plan to reduce juries from 12 members to seven, are certainly not. Eroding a fundamental right to be tried “by a full complement of one’s peers” cannot be justified. No, the only way to fix our broken justice system is to fund it properly. If we don’t, the long delays will continue, “and justice delayed is justice denied”.

NEWS 15 IT MUST BE TRUE…

I read it in the tabloids A 65-year-old Austrian man was recovering in hospital this week after an escaped 5ft python slithered through the plumbing and bit him in the crotch while he used his lavatory. Police in the city of Graz said that, upon sitting down on the toilet shortly after 6am, the unnamed man felt a sudden “pinch in the genital area”. He found an albino reticulated python, which is thought to have escaped from the home of a neighbouring reptile collector. However, pythons aren’t venomous and the wound was said to be “light”. The owner may face criminal negligence charges.

An engineer from Solihull has claimed a new Guinness World Record by stacking five M&Ms on top of one another. “Five M&Ms doesn’t sound like a lot,” says Will Cutbill, “but it was nearly impossible.” While bored during lockdown, he “decided to see how many of them I could stack on top of each other”, he said, trying hundreds of times over two days before topping the previous record of four. “I was absolutely ecstatic,” he said. “I considered attempting six, but there’s no chance.” A yellow tiddlywink has been extracted from a woman’s nostril, 37 years after it got stuck up there. Mary McCarthy, a 45 year old from Christchurch, New Zealand, inhaled the tiddlywink by mistake while playing a game when she was eight. She forgot about the episode, but afterwards suffered from chronic sinus pain, which became very severe after a Covid-19 swab test last year. Doctors found and removed the offending object in June.

10 July 2021 THE WEEK

© WILL CUTBILL/GUINNESS WORLD RECORDS

Best articles: Britain

16 NEWS

Best of the American columnists

The “heat dome”: sweltering in the Pacific Northwest It’s a well-known fact in Seattle that result of the warming climate. And you can’t count on warm weather until the Pacific Northwest wasn’t remotely after the Fourth of July, said Jane C. prepared for the heat. Seattle is the Hu on Slate. While friends elsewhere least air-conditioned metro area in the in the US are enjoying barbecues, we’re US – less than half of residents have still languishing under the grey skies it – because the city has never really and drizzle of what locals like to call needed it. Community centres and “Juneuary”. Not this year. Over the libraries had to be hastily converted past fortnight, the US Pacific into mass public cooling stations Northwest has experienced an where people could take refuge from unprecedented heatwave. Before this the extreme temperatures. Both the summer, the temperature in Seattle had region and the US as a whole need to reached 100°F just three times since step up their climate contingency planning. Heat is already the deadliest 1894, but it did it for three days in a row at the end of June, hitting a peak type of weather event in the US, A cooling station in the Oregon Convention Centre of 108°F. In Portland, the temperature killing more people than hurricanes reached 116°F – higher than has ever been recorded in or floods. And the problem is only getting worse. Houston, Texas, 2,000 miles south. The stifling heat buckled This crisis will have served as a wake-up call for many roads, caused power outages, knocked out tram systems, and is Americans about the “first-hand realities of a heating planet”, thought to have caused at least 76 deaths across the region. said James Ross Gardner in The New Yorker. People are used The blistering temperatures were the result of a so-called heat to hearing of record-high temperatures in desert states such as dome, said Robinson Meyer in The Atlantic: a meteorological Nevada or Arizona, but not in verdant Washington and phenomenon that occurs when a static high-pressure system Oregon. Asked in 2014 where people might consider moving traps concentrations of hot air over a certain location. It would as global temperatures rise, a climate researcher told The New once have counted as “a one-in-1,000-year event”, but this sort York Times: “The answer is the Pacific Northwest.” The way things are going, that no longer looks such a safe bet. of freak weather seems to be growing ever more common as a

How to stop cops shooting from the hip Brian Sheppard Slate

But who will guard the guardians? Kimberly Guilfoyle Newsweek

The worst president in US history Mark K. Updegrove The New York Times

THE WEEK 10 July 2021

Here’s an awful statistic, says Brian Sheppard: in the US, about one black man in 1,000 will be killed by a police officer; and nearly one in five of the men killed will be unarmed. Clearly, something needs to change. A good place to start would be to make it harder for officers to access firearms. The reality is that they don’t need a loaded gun on them all the time, and the constant presence of their firearms often causes tension and leads to situations escalating out of control. Officers spend only an estimated 4% of their time responding to crimes of violence. Most of their tasks pose little danger to them: the death rate of farmers, garbage collectors, roofers and delivery drivers is two to three times higher than that of cops. So let’s introduce a system whereby guns are kept in smart lockboxes in police cars that can be remotely opened by staff back at the station, when officers on the ground specifically request it. As a fail-safe, officers would be able to override the lock, although that would trigger a mandatory review. Yes, this might lead to some incidents of officers being hurt or killed while their gun is still in the box, but those tragedies would “likely be outnumbered by the peaceful encounters that would otherwise have taken a dark turn had a gun been on the officer’s hip”. The recent headlines about Britney Spears have highlighted the problem of “guardianship abuse” in the US, says Kimberly Guilfoyle. Whether or not the star is being exploited by her father under a legal protection order, this is happening to many vulnerable people. There are 1.5 million, mostly elderly, individuals under some form of guardianship in the US, with total assets of around $270bn. Combine that with a system that presumes good faith and lacks adequate scrutiny, and the opportunities for malfeasance by corrupt lawyers and other bad actors are “abundant”. Some awful cases have come to light. Last year, a Florida woman escaped her guardian-imposed imprisonment in a care facility by using a phone and Facebook to signal for help. In 2019, a retired schoolteacher died alone in a hospice in Jefferson County, Alabama, after being placed there by a court-appointed guardian who reportedly banned her family from visiting her. The woman didn’t even live in the county, but had been caught up in the system after stopping at a hospital on her way home from a trip. “Guardianship abuse might just be one of the biggest criminal enterprises threatening the elderly in America”, but we won’t know for sure until officials give the crisis the attention it deserves. Who were the best and worst presidents in US history? Numerous league tables have been compiled over the years, says Mark K. Updegrove. The latest – based on a survey of 142 historians, who scored ten criteria such as “crisis leadership” and “performance within context of time” – was issued last week by C-SPAN. Top of the rankings, as usual, was Abraham Lincoln. And in last place, again, was James Buchanan. This must have come as a relief to Donald Trump, but he didn’t exactly do well: he finished 41st out of the 44 former presidents, above only Buchanan, Andrew Johnson and Franklin Pierce, the three leaders who botched the lead-up to and the aftermath of the Civil War. Some presidents rank poorly just after leaving office, but rise up the table as history takes a kinder view of their tenure. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, for example, both started in low positions, but are now ranked in the top ten. Will this happen with Trump? Unlikely. His term in office will always be remembered for two key crises: the pandemic, and the attack on the Capitol fuelled by his false claims of a stolen election. “Trump’s fecklessness in both cases, and his general failure to put the nation above himself, will almost certainly continue to doom him in future polls.”

Best articles: International

NEWS 17

South Africa: how the courts stood up to Jacob Zuma When Nelson Mandela opened South National Congress ticket, became Africa’s Constitutional Court in 1995, synonymous with “the demolition of he told the assembled judges to “stand the parts of the state meant to stop on guard not only against direct assault graft”. The inquiry that was his on the principles of the constitution, eventual undoing is focused on the but against insidious corrosion”. Some so-called “state capture” scandal, in 26 years later, they’ve done just that, which he was accused of allowing the said Juniour Khumalo on News24 Gupta brothers, Indian-born billionaire businessmen, to pick stooges to head (Johannesburg). In a landmark ruling last week, former president Jacob government ministries, said Yusuf Zuma was jailed for 15 months for Akínpèlú in Premium Times (Abuja). contempt of court, for defying an order The Guptas and Zuma deny wrongdoing, but the inquiry has heard to attend an inquiry into allegations of corruption during his nine-year damning testimony from more than presidency, which ended in 2018. The 250 witnesses, including tales of cash Zuma: no longer “untouchable” court spelt out the many ways in which stuffed into designer bags and delivered as bribes, and the theft of up to £29bn from state coffers. the former president had lied, sought to mislead the public, and had ultimately, they said, tried to “destroy the rule of law”. This is the first time in the country’s history a former president Zuma claims the allegations are part of a “conspiracy” to jail has been jailed, said Richard Calland on IOL News (Cape him, said Mcebisi Ndletyana on The Conversation (Melbourne), and has launched a series of attacks on the Constitutional Town). It shows, at last, that “no one is above the law”. Court. That left its judges with two options: “capitulate to Zuma’s megalomania, or uphold the rule of law”. To his “No one has done more to corrode the institutional pillars of post-apartheid South Africa than Zuma,” said The Economist. supporters in his native KwaZulu-Natal, who viewed him as Even before sentencing, he was facing a separate criminal trial “untouchable”, the decision came as a great shock, said Wayne Duvenage in the Daily Maverick (Cape Town). But his support this month over allegations – which he denies – that he took is “dwindling”, and for millions of South Africans this was, at hundreds of bribes from a French arms company in the decade before he was president. And his presidency, won on an African last, a chance to see “what the rule of law looks like”.

ITALY

Is it curtains for Five Star’s populists? la Repubblica (Rome)

TURKEY

A “crazy” canal that is going nowhere Karar (Istanbul)

PAKISTAN

The price we’ve paid for the US War on Terror The Nation (Lahore)

Italy’s populist Five Star Movement is in turmoil, says Sebastiano Messina. Founded in 2009 by Beppe Grillo, the comedian, it won the biggest vote share of any party in elections in 2018, and joined two subsequent coalitions. But it has been out of government since the second coalition collapsed in February, and faces sagging poll ratings after reneging on key policy pledges. So in an effort to revive his party’s fortunes, Grillo recruited Italy’s former prime minister, Giuseppe Conte, as its new leader in March. Conte, a lawyer, promised a “complete restructuring” of the party; sensibly enough, when it previously offered a mere “jumble of dreams, utopias and illusions”. That proved too much for Grillo, a lifelong anti-establishmentarian, who has turned on Conte, publicly accusing him of lacking “political vision” and talent. Yet he may find his broadside backfires: there is mounting speculation that Conte could now form a new party – and win support from many of Five Star’s current MPs. Even by the standards of Italian politics, it’s a mess. Then again, a party founded on the premise of telling politicians to “f**k off” was never likely to stay the course. Seldom has a grand infrastructure project looked less likely to succeed, says Ibrahim Kiras. Last month, a foundation stone was laid for the first of six bridges over a huge new canal that President Erdogan wants to build near Istanbul. It was the symbolic first step in what Erdogan himself has called a “crazy” plan for a 28-mile waterway that would relieve pressure on the Bosphorus strait: it would run from the Black Sea to the Sea of Marmara (which leads to the Mediterranean). The canal has “no political support” outside Erdogan’s party, and has been dismissed by experts as “objectionable and dangerous”, likely to wreck marine ecosystems and compromise the city’s water supply. In a weak economy, there’s no obvious way to pay for the scheme, for which there is no clear estimate: Erdogan said it was $15bn; the official website said $75bn. Opposition parties say they’ll repudiate the contracts if they win elections in 2023; Turkish banks are loath to finance the plan. Yet Erdogan is pressing ahead. Why? Because abandoning it would represent a serious loss of face, and enrage his wealthy supporters, many of whom have bought land along what will be the canal’s banks to build luxury homes. It’s absurd: this delusional project must be stopped, once and for all. With two words, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan has put the US in its place, says Maleeha Hashmey. As the US military withdraws from Afghanistan, it is badgering Pakistan to let CIA drones be stationed on our soil for counter-terror operations. The drones are needed, says the US, to replace the intelligence infrastructure it built during its 20-year war in Afghanistan. But Khan isn’t interested. “Absolutely not”, he replied when asked in a recent interview whether he’d allow such a deployment. The US should take him at his word. Khan campaigned on getting Americans out of Pakistan, and since his election in 2018, there have been no drone strikes here. We’ve already paid an “unbelievably high” price in the so-called War on Terror. At least 60,000 Pakistanis have died in the conflict, and our country has suffered an estimated $118bn in economic losses. In recent years, we’ve gone to great lengths to protect ourselves against militant incursions from Afghanistan – even building a chain-link fence, topped with barbed-wire, along all 1,640 miles of our border. Allowing US drone launches could jeopardise that new-found safety, along with the stability which is a “mighty win-win” for all nations in the region. The “old Pakistan” that bowed to the US is gone. 10 July 2021 THE WEEK

Health & Science

18 NEWS

What the scientists are saying…

A simple test for 50 cancers

Enter the Dragon Man

In 1933, a large and remarkably complete fossilised skull was uncovered near the Chinese city of Harbin by labourers working on a new railway bridge. The project was being overseen by the country’s Japanese occupiers, and rather than see it fall into their hands, the Chinese workers wrapped up the skull, and hid it in a disused well. There it remained until 2017, when one of those men was dying,

How mongooses “level up”

A recreation of the Dragon Man

and told his son his secret. Now, four years on, a Chinese-led team has proposed that the skull belongs to a previously unknown human species – a large-brained hunter-gatherer who lived at least 146,000 years ago, and who may turn out to be our closest evolutionary relative, supplanting the Neanderthals. They have called it Homo longi – or Dragon Man. The individual, an adult male, had a mix of primitive features, such as a broad nose and low brow, and more modern ones, including flat, delicate cheekbones. But although his skull is unusual, other experts cautioned that it might be too soon to cite him as evidence of a new human lineage. He could, however, be something similarly exciting: a Denisovan, a mysterious human ancestor from Asia mainly known from DNA. The Chinese findings were published just days before an Israeli team said they had identified a 120,000-year-old jawbone

The “last ice area” is now melting

The Arctic’s “last refuge” for polar bears and walruses may be more vulnerable to climate change than previously thought, researchers have warned. The Wandel Sea region, to the north of Greenland, is referred to as the “last ice area”, because the ice there has remained thick year on year – and because it was expected to remain so, even after other parts of the Arctic melted. As such, it was viewed as a vital refuge for mammals that use ice to rest, feed and breed. But last August, a German research vessel sailed to the area – and found alarmingly large stretches of open water where ice should have been. Researchers from the University of Washington have now looked at data and satellite images dating back to 1979, and found that climate change has contributed to long-term thinning of the ice in the Wandel Sea area. This, in turn, made it more susceptible to the main cause of last year’s melt: unusually strong summer winds, which blew the ice away. The area had been considered relatively safe from climate change, because as sea ice circulates, it piles up against Greenland and the northern Canadian coast. But climate models will now have to be reassessed, they said.

THE WEEK 10 July 2021

People talk a lot about levelling up and building a fairer society; but banded mongooses seem to have actually done it, reports The Independent. Females within groups of mongooses have evolved to all give birth on the same night. The mothers have no way of knowing which of the pups in the communal crèche are theirs – and cannot give them extra care. So instead, they focus their attention on the pups that need it the most. For the study, by researchers from the Universities of Exeter and Roehampton, half the pregnant females in a group in Uganda were given extra food during the breeding season, leading to greater than normal inequalities in birth weight among their offspring. But the researchers found that in the period after birth, the females who’d been fed extra rations gave extra care to the pups of the less well-fed females – and as a result, the inequalities between the pups disappeared. “We predicted that a ‘veil of ignorance’ would cause females to focus their care on the pups most in need – and this is what we found,” said Professor Michael Cant of Exeter University. “Those most able to help offer it to the most needy, and in doing so minimise the risk that their own offspring will face a disadvantage.”

A million long Covid cases Almost a million people in Britain were suffering long Covid in May – around 376,000 of whom had been battling symptoms for at least a year. The figures came from the Office for National Statistics (ONS), which defined long Covid as symptoms persisting for more than four weeks. Two-thirds of sufferers said their symptoms were limiting their day-to-day activities; nearly one in five said it was limiting them “a lot”. Fatigue was the most commonly reported symptom, followed by shortness of breath. But although the ONS figures suggested that 962,000 people had long Covid in May, separate research has found that between February and April, only 23,273 cases had been formally recorded by GPs in England. Experts said the discrepancy could be down to sufferers not seeing their GPs – but also the result of GPs not diagnosing cases, or not logging them.

© CHUANG ZHAO

A simple blood test that can detect more than 50 types of cancers before symptoms appear could be used as a screening tool for people over 50. The test, created by the US medtech company Grail, uses AI to examine data on the tiny fragments of cell-free DNA that are shed by tumours into the bloodstream. By looking for particular chemical patterns, it can distinguish the signs of cancer – with a false positive rate of just 0.5% – and also pinpoint the tumour’s likely location in the body. In a trial, reported in the Annals of Oncology, the Galleri test correctly identified 65.6% of cancers involving solid tumours for which no screening options currently exist, such as oesophageal, liver and pancreatic cancers. For breast, bowel, cervical and prostate cancers, for which screening does exist, the figure was 33.7%. It correctly predicted the tumour’s location about 80% of the time. The NHS will begin a pilot scheme of the test this year, with a view to making it widely available by 2025. “Early detection – particularly for hard-to-treat conditions like ovarian and pancreatic cancer – has the potential to save many lives. This promising blood test could therefore be a game-changer in cancer care,” said NHS chief executive Sir Simon Stevens.

as the remains of one of the “last survivors” of another previously unknown human group, which they have called Nesher Ramla Homo. As the fossils have Neanderthal features, they believe ancestors of this group migrated from the region, and gave rise to the Neanderthals in Europe. “It all started in Israel,” Dr Hila May told the BBC. “During interglacial periods, waves of humans migrated from the Middle East to Europe.”

20 NEWS Pick of the week’s

Gossip

In his new role as chairman of the British Museum, George Osborne will help the institution reach “ever larger” audiences. As a politician, he faced a similar challenge, recalled Rachel Cooke in The Observer. Years ago, she was sent to interview Osborne when he was an obscure backbench MP. The Tory membership, he told her, was too old. “‘What the party needs, Rachel, is people like you…’ There was a brief pause while I sat to attention. Then, full throttle, he said it: ‘Ordinary people.’”

Michael Gove and Sarah Vine made their imminent divorce public only last week, said The Sunday Times – but before that, Vine had hinted that all was not well between them. In a Daily Mail column in April, after the death of the Duke of Edinburgh, she wrote: “Too often in marriage – especially marriages where one person is richer or more powerful than the other – one ends up consuming the other.” Then last week, while discussing Matt Hancock’s affair, she let rip: “The problem with the wife who has known you since way before you were king of the world is that she sees through your façade... she knows, that deep down inside, you are not the Master of the Universe that you purport to be.” Lyndon B. Johnson was famously narcissistic – but he wasn’t without a sense of humour. A visiting German statesman once asked him if it was true he had been born in a log cabin. “No,” he replied breezily. “That was Abe Lincoln. I was born in a manger.”

THE WEEK 10 July 2021

Talking points China: bent on global domination? Don’t try to “bully” China, harmony, it has infiltrated or you’ll get a bloody nose. “hundreds of Western universities, businesses and That was the Chinese president Xi Jinping’s other institutions”. The tone warning to the world on the changes abruptly, though, centenary of the founding if anyone raises questions about its theft of intellectual of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), said William property; its treaty-breaking assault on the liberties of Yang in The Independent. Xi told a flag-waving crowd Hong Kong; or its “Belt and Road Initiative” – a that anyone who tries to “oppress” China will “have “massive imperial project” their heads bashed bloody giving it control of transport routes and natural resources against a Great Wall of steel”. The celebrations around the world. Then, “Xi Dada”: a leader in Mao’s mould? included a “dazzling” with angry threats and re-enactment of the CCP’s “early struggles” boycotts, the CCP’s true face is revealed: of a and its “recent achievements”. They glossed totalitarian regime bent on global domination. over the grim era between 1950 and 1970, when Chairman Mao Zedong’s policies killed millions The West has misread the CCP for 50 years, said and pushed China into “extreme poverty”. Yet Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. Ever since Xi seems increasingly to be a leader in Mao’s Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon first mould: in office since 2012, he has abolished the engaged with it, the “fantasy” was that if we two-term limit on the presidency and tightened traded with communist China and gave it a seat on the UN Security Council, it would “absorb ideological control, using technology to monitor our values”. It didn’t, as its rising militarism and citizens. A government unit pushes a partyapproved version of history, with contrary views “genocide” against the Muslim Uighur minority demonised as “historical nihilism”. State media show. China now feels strong enough to fosters a Mao-style personality cult around “Xi challenge the US economically, “and maybe even prevail”, said The Times. “But Party control will Dada” or “big daddy”, said Ian Williams in The always be a brake.” A society without freedom Spectator. His approach, though, owes more to of speech “cannot count on innovation”. A “strident ethnic nationalism” than communism. nation without internal criticism cannot correct mistakes or fight corruption. “China may be Under Xi, China adopts two rather different hailing the Party as the institution that has made tones abroad, said Charles Moore in The Daily it great.” But the CCP faces an uncertain future. Telegraph. Claiming to pursue “dialogue” and

EU migrants: five million and counting Shortly after the Brexit vote in 2016, a group of distraught Europeans met in a Bristol pub to set up an organisation to lobby for their rights, said The Economist. They called their outfit “the3million”, based on the official estimate of the number of EU citizens living in the UK. Now it needs “to rebrand”: at the last count, 5.3 million EU nationals living in Britain had applied for “settled status”. Three months before the final deadline for applications, on 30 June, at least half a million Italians had applied, along with 918,270 Romanians and 975,180 Poles. Britain is “much more European than anybody thought”. For comparison, the 2011 census recorded 1.2 million people of Pakistani origin, 1.5 million of Indian origin, and 1.9 million black people in the UK. We should be very pleased to have these new European migrants, who are mostly young and well-suited to the job market. This is a “resounding vote of confidence in Britain’s future”. In some respects, the EU settlement scheme has been a “triumph”, said Daniel Trilling in The Guardian. The vast majority of these applications have been processed quickly and successfully. The Home Office, unusually, has been at pains to show “an open and friendly face”. But the fact is that millions of Europeans will henceforth be enmeshed in a “dysfunctional

immigration system that, until now, they had largely been able to avoid”. The danger is that many will fall through the cracks: there’s a backlog of 400,000 settled status applications, and an unknown number (one estimate puts it at 150,000) have not yet applied. People in the latter group will be subject to the “hostile environment policies” that blight the lives of migrants from outside the EU. They will lose the right to work or rent a home, and will be charged for NHS treatment. The ramifications of this vast EU influx “will be profound”, said Harry de Quetteville in The Daily Telegraph. The total may end up at around six million, about 9% of the population. In Boston in Lincolnshire, 31% of people are EU citizens, as are about one in five Londoners. If they become UK citizens, which many will, they will redraw the political map. “We are only learning just how big a deal European migration was at the moment we are confronted by life without it,” said Sarah O’Connor in the FT. Whole industries have been reshaped by the constant flow of cheap EU labour. Without new migrants, in meat processing, for instance – where EU workers account for over 60% of staff – employers are already complaining of “acute” labour shortages. “Learning to live without them” will reshape British life once again.

Talking points Diana’s statue: “kitsch”, yet fitting? Everybody in Britain, whether the form of a playground and a fountain, in Kensington Gardens they know it or not, is familiar with the work of the sculptor and Hyde Park, “which more Ian Rank-Broadley, said Simon joyfully and eloquently honour Heffer in The Daily Telegraph. her than the statue”. His portrait of the Queen adorns our coinage (or at least the share The problem here is the medium, of it minted between 1998 and said Mark Hudson in The 2015). He has also produced Independent. Bronze statuary some impressive pieces of public “belongs to the norms and standards of another time”. art, such as his Armed Forces Memorial at the National How could a “much-loved Arboretum in Staffordshire. His figure whose charm lay in her spontaneity and naturalness” latest work, however, is less than ever really be captured in a inspired. A statue of Diana, Princess of Wales, surrounded format we “instinctively by an “entourage of waifs”, it associate with colonial generals, was unveiled last week in the Victorian politicians and fascist The Princess, plus “waifs” Sunken Garden at Kensington dictators”? Given those Palace on what would have been her 60th limitations, Rank-Broadley has done a pretty birthday. For an artist of Rank-Broadley’s ability good job. His image of “this new serious, commanding Diana” gives a sense of the to have turned out “something so banal suggests he had been given a serious briefing, presumably woman she might have become, had she lived. by the Princess’s sons, of what was expected”. Is there “a faint touch of kitsch” to the whole enterprise? Undoubtedly. “But this is, to my mind, by far the best result we could have hoped Aesthetically, it’s “horrible”, said Rachel for under the circumstances.” Some critics have Campbell-Johnston in The Times. Worse still, it presents Diana in a mawkish, quasi-messianic said it’s a poor likeness of Diana, and that it light “calculated to appeal to the lowest reminds them more of a young Theresa May or even David Bowie, said Camilla Tominey in The common denominator”. She stands protectively over the three children, her “arms outspread in Daily Telegraph, but the statue is growing on the pose of a traditional religious Madonna”. me. The opinions that really count, though, are Yet instead of flowing robes, she sports “a those of Princes William and Harry. If they’re happy that the work honours their mother’s somewhat frumpy 1980s outfit”. It’s all rather flat and lifeless, said Rowan Moore in The memory, “it doesn’t really matter” what anyone Observer. Memorials to Diana already exist in else thinks.

Farewell, Gap: a high street staple falls Yet another familiar fashion would be astonished to learn retailer is disappearing from our that the brand was once high streets, said Anthony Kent embraced by high fashion, said on The Conversation. Last Lisa Armstrong in The Daily week, the “once-mighty” Gap Telegraph. In 1992, Anna revealed that it is closing its Wintour put ten models in white Gap shirts on the cover of 81 remaining UK and Ireland Vogue. Four years later, Sharon stores, and moving to onlineonly sales. Founded by two Stone turned up to the Oscars property developers in San in a black Gap turtleneck. Well Francisco in 1969, Gap arrived into the noughties, Gap was in Britain in 1987, and in the working with top stylists and 1990s it seemed unassailable, designers. So where did it go Gap marketing from the 1990s said Anna Murphy in The wrong? In retrospect, the rot set Times. In that era, before Zara brought us fast in 20 years ago, when sales slumped and bean fashion and turned “the British everywoman counters were brought in. Instead of investing in into a trends junkie”, we flocked to Gap for creativity, their strategy was based on identifying clothes that were affordable, well-made and successful lines and recycling them. But Gap’s “styled to last”. In truth, the “basics” that were wounds were not all self-inflicted. Any brand the brand’s signature were not dissimilar to lines that defines one generation risks being rejected at Marks & Spencer – but Gap was just that bit by the next – and when the BabyGap kids grew cooler and more on point, with shops styled up, they found little in Gap that spoke to them. “like Manhattan lofts” and beguiling marketing. The cool people in its ads may have been Gap just failed to keep up with the times, said wearing dull chinos, but they looked as though Alys Key in The i Paper. The high street isn’t they might be about “to write a hip-hop song or doomed, but unless you can compete with the ride across Mongolia”. online giants on price (as at dirt-cheap Primark), you have to give people a compelling reason to Recent visitors to Gap’s stores, with their racks come through your doors. Gap offered nostalgia full of discounted clothing covered in naff logos, and dated denim, and it wasn’t enough.

NEWS 21

Wit & Wisdom “A censor is a man who knows more than he thinks you ought to.” Educator Laurence J. Peter, quoted on iNews.co.uk “Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians.” Hannah Arendt, quoted in The Press and Journal “The assumption of good faith is dead. What matters is not goodness but the appearance of goodness. We are no longer human beings. We are now angels jostling to out-angel one another.” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, quoted in The Guardian “When I first went into the movies, Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally my husband. If he had lived, I’m sure I would have played his mother. That’s the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older.” Lillian Gish, quoted in Forbes “A writer’s promise is like a tiger’s smile.” Lytton Strachey, quoted on The Browser “Fear is a reaction. Courage is a decision.” Winston Churchill, quoted in The Daily Telegraph “There has never been a single tweet that couldn’t be replaced with ‘PLEASE AUTHENTICATE MY EXISTENCE.’” Journalist and screenwriter Charlie Brooker, quoted in Vogue

Statistics of the week There are an estimated 1.5 million pet reptiles and amphibians in the UK, including lizards, snakes, tortoises and salamanders. The Times

Between 1989 and 2017, Latvia lost 27% of its population, Lithuania 22.5% and Bulgaria 21%. The Guardian

10 July 2021 THE WEEK

22 NEWS

Sport

England at the Euros: a likeable leader’s “quiet revolution”

“Le jeu prudent,” was how the French newspaper L’Équipe described the emotional victory over Germany which took England to the quarter-final of the European Championships, said Barney Ronay in The Guardian. It’s a telling phrase that encapsulates the sense “not just of caution, but of a guiding wisdom” which defines both the England team and its manager. Gareth Southgate’s conservative philosophy might be dismissed as timidity by those begging him to unleash “insideforward hell”, but in sticking to his guns and letting his natural caution prevail, the England manager is leading his own “quiet revolution”.

The bright boy who grew up in Crawley, West Sussex, didn’t seem destined for a football career, said Paul Byrne in The Mirror. His teachers thought his future lay in accountancy or journalism. Even when apprenticed at Crystal Palace, he was advised by his coach, Alan Smith, to become a travel agent. However Smith still made him first-team captain, and Southgate went on to enjoy a 57-cap international career.

The dominant memory many fans have of him as a footballer is the missed penalty against Germany that kept England out of the Euro ’96 final – plus the Pizza Hut advert it inspired. Yet that failure And those “ruthless but never reckless” instincts was “the making” of Southgate, said Matthew were thoroughly vindicated in Saturday’s 4-0 Syed in The Times: it forged in him the resilience he now inspires in others. It is Southgate’s quarter-final defeat of Ukraine, when the first that Southgate: inspiring resilience own “DNA” that has defined England’s Euro priority was once again solidity in defence, said Dave Kidd in The Sun. Indeed, the fact that England hasn’t conrun, said Mark Critchley in The Independent. And in particular ceded a single goal so far in this tournament, (it has still to play it is his unusual openness to new ideas – evident during his tenure its semi-final against Denmark as The Week goes to press), shows as manager of Middlesbrough and during his subsequent stewardship of the England Under-21s – that has informed his long-term that Southgate’s team has evolved into a stronger unit than it was when he led them to the 2018 World Cup semi-final. Ignoring overhaul of England’s national set-up. Another component of that mounting calls for them to be dropped, he has stuck by players he DNA is the “decency” and “common sense” that has proved him trusts in – Raheem Sterling, Harry Kane, Harry Maguire, Jordan right on so many things, said Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail. Henderson – while developing “myriad attacking options”. And His just reward is to be the first manager to reach consecutive now the team reflects the qualities of its patient, likeable leader. major tournament semi-finals since Sir Alf Ramsey in 1968.

Tennis: the 18-year-old who has wowed Wimbledon “A star is born,” said Alyson Rudd in The Sunday Times. Last Saturday, Emma Raducanu, the world No. 338, became the youngest British woman to reach the last 16 at Wimbledon in the open era, by defeating the Romanian Sorana Cîrstea. With her elegant running forehand and astonishing agility – she used to ballet dance – the 18-year-old outwitted her more experienced opponent, and gave “a masterclass in how to harness public adoration”.

showed extraordinary sangfroid when the Romanian made a dangerous comeback at the start of the second set. Never have I seen such a composed display by a British hopeful – not even the 18-yearold Andy Murray taking on David Nalbandian in 2005. This was “goosebump territory”.

Last week, Wimbledon’s famous “Henman Hill” was – temporarily – transformed into “Raducanu Ridge”, said Tim Lewis in The Observer. But in her match Raducanu, who sat her A-levels last month, wasn’t against Australian Ajla Tomljanovic on Monday due to play the tournament at all, said Simon Briggs evening, both expectation and physical exertion took in The Sunday Telegraph. Her parents had held her their toll. After a long day of waiting, she went on to back from competing on the tour so she could study. Raducanu: “a star is born” lose the first set and then retired – 3-0 down in the The panel that issues wild cards granted her one only second – with breathing difficulties. It’s always rash after her coach Nigel Sears protested against the oversight. Their to heap too much praise on a newcomer, said Riath Al-Samarrai change of heart has paid off. Raducanu navigated the first week in The Mail on Sunday. But after her performance on Saturday, without dropping a set. And in her victory over Cîrstea, she people are inevitably wondering just how far she might go.

The youngest chess grandmaster

Sporting headlines

He’s just 12 years, five months required string of results and old, said Leonard Barden in rankings necessary to attain GM The Guardian. But last week, status if he stayed in the US. So Abhimanyu Mishra of New Mishra’s father bought a oneJersey, who has been playing way flight to Hungary and the game since he was two and moved the family to Budapest. a half, became the youngest What this meant, said Leon chess grandmaster of all time. Watson in The Daily Telegraph, It’s been a long, hard road for was that Mishra was able to the prodigy, said Charlotte play virtually non-stop from Mitchell in the Daily Mail. Chess April in preparation for the last Mishra: a long hard road leaves “little time for hobbies”, hurdle: his third grandmaster and in his single-minded pursuit of his goal, “norm” – a favourable result against a highly he’s faced much adversity, including a 35-game rated competitor. Mishra secured it with a win winless streak last year. Still, Mishra seemed to against 15-year-old Indian grandmaster, Leon be prevailing in his “race against time” to Luke Mendonca, in the penultimate round of the overhaul the record (12 years, seven months) Vezerkepzo GM Mix. The passing of chess’s for youngest grandmaster set 20 years ago by “Holy Grail” brought praise from Karjakin, who the Russian Sergey Karjakin. Then the pandemic said he was sad but “philosophic” about losing struck. There was no way he could achieve the his long-held record.

Formula 1 Max Verstappen won the Austrian Grand Prix. The Red Bull driver is now 32 points ahead of Mercedes’ Lewis Hamilton, who finished fourth after tyre problems. Tour de France Mark Cavendish took his third stage win on stage 10, taking his career total to 33 stages – just one off Eddy Merckx’s record. Athletics Norwegian Karsten Warholm broke the 400m hurdle world record in his very first race of the outdoor season in front of a home crowd in Oslo. His 46.70sec beat the previous record, held by Kevin Young for 29 years, by 0.08sec.

THE WEEK 10 July 2021

LETTERS Pick of the week’s correspondence We must pay for justice To the Financial Times

It’s heartening that the FT is raising the alarm over the criminal justice system. Over the past decade, the Government closed half the courts in England and Wales before technology was in place to bridge the gap. News that five Nightingale courts are to close, despite a backlog, suggests lessons have not been learnt. Recruiting more police officers, stiffer sentencing and rhetoric about being tough on crime is meaningless without investment across the justice system, including for legal aid. And it’s not just the criminal courts: backlogs are engulfing the Small Claims Court and the Coroner’s Court, where a growing number of bereaved families are waiting more than a year for an inquest. People living below the poverty line are regularly denied legal aid by too stringent a means test, and many others face legal issues such as in housing, employment and family law, with no recourse because of cuts to legal aid. If the belief becomes widespread that there is little chance of people enforcing or protecting their rights, there is little incentive for less scrupulous people to comply with their legal obligations, which is highly damaging to the rule of law. I. Stephanie Boyce, president, Law Society of England and Wales, London

The blue-eyed monster To The Times

I share Richard Morrison’s frustration with the seemingly interminable intrusion of cultural identity politics into the arts, but sometimes it is useful to recall how things used to be. My first experience of Shakespeare was when, aged 17, I saw a production of Othello by the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1972. The lead was played by a man with blue eyes, blacked up and spouting a ridiculous faux West Indian accent. It is the worst thing I have ever seen in a theatre. We will not see anything like this again, and one day the culture wars will resolve. In the meantime, we should all try to be patient and engage constructively. Jon Talbot, Chester

Exchange of the week

England and the Union To The Times

When Nelson signalled to the fleet before the Battle of Trafalgar that “England expects that every man will do his duty”, he, like many before and since, confused England with the United Kingdom, and did so notwithstanding that the fleet was manned predominantly by Irish and Scots. The confusion of the two reflects the aggressive part that England played in the subjugation of Wales, Ireland and, in some respects, the Scots to forge the Union: a part that needs to be understood by those who strive to preserve the Union. Iain Milligan QC, author of Sovereign of the Isles: How the Crown won the British Isles To The Times

I suspect that Iain Milligan QC is placing more political weight on a technical issue than it will bear. When Nelson drafted his signal he used the word “confides”. His signal lieutenant told him that there was no group in the signal book for the word, and offered “expects” instead: he was still obliged to spell out D-U-T-Y with a two-flag hoist for each letter. “England” was in the vocabulary, “Britain” was probably not. Captain Richard Channon, RN, Stoke by Nayland, Suffolk

Those left behind To The Guardian

Your report (“Ministers plan to end social distancing in England on 19 July”) should be a cause for dismay for a large group of vulnerable people who, because they are immunocompromised, have failed to raise a significant antibody response despite having received two doses of a Covid-19 vaccine. This applies to patients receiving immunosuppressant treatment for autoimmune diseases and cancers, and the recipients of organ transplants. A great many of those people will not presently be aware that they may not be protected by the vaccine. All of us who have failed – knowingly or unknowingly – to respond to the vaccine will be at increased risk if the rest of the population cease social distancing and stop wearing face masks. Until such time as our predicament is more widely recognised and a solution can be found, we shall have to run that risk or revert to self-exclusion from society. Pam Dean, Flamstead, Hertfordshire

Battery overkill To The Independent

The [car] industry’s increasing obsession with gigafactories speaks to range anxiety and the broader problem of electric vehicle (EV) battery scale. The average car journey in the UK

is just 1.5 miles. Yet carmakers insist on developing huge EVs to account for larger batteries – which frankly wouldn’t be required if they just focused instead on making smaller, lighter vehicles. If car companies stopped thinking about how to make a profit and started thinking instead about what their customers actually want, they’d be able to be much more innovative when it comes to their actual design, enabling lighter, more efficient models which get people where they need to go using much smaller batteries. This would not only be more cost-effective for the manufacturer and customer, but far more environmentally sustainable, which is what it’s all about. Mark Simon, chief technical officer, Page-Roberts Automotive

23

Levelling up starts young To The Daily Telegraph

Since founding The Big Issue, I have spent nearly 30 years supporting more than 100,000 vulnerable people. I believe that prevention is the key to unpicking our social problems, so to lift people out of poverty permanently I have introduced a Wellbeing of Future Generations Bill. To take this bill through Parliament, I have joined forces with the Conservative MP Simon Fell. Despite the millions spent every year, people are not getting out of poverty. It costs taxpayers an average £1m to produce one Big Issue vendor, because 80% of them grew up in local authority care, which costs £15,000 per person per month. Prevention is the route to real social mobility. My co-sponsor knows that this Government’s ambitious levelling-up agenda will only be achieved through long-term solutions. Not only does prevention make sound economic sense, it is also at the top of voters’ concerns. Lord Bird, editor-in-chief, The Big Issue, London

A lethal cure

To The Guardian

I was in hospital having my appendix out when I got an attack of hiccups. I asked a nurse if there was any cure. “Not really,” she said, “it will eventually go away on its own. We recently had a patient who had hiccups for four days.” So what did they do to make it stop? “Nothing, really,” she assured me airily, “he just died.” My own hiccups stopped instantly. Brian Shuel, London

Creative identity To The Times

Rachel Campbell-Johnston describes the newly unveiled Diana statue as aesthetically horrible, and says it would have been much better if the sculptor had been a woman instead of a middle-aged white male. Maybe Michelangelo’s statue of David wouldn’t have been so rubbish if the sculptor had been Jewish. Paul Rubert, Cheadle, Greater Manchester

“Cheer up. Very soon it will be the end of not going to school and the start of not going on holiday.” © MATT/THE TELEGRAPH

● Letters have been edited

10 July 2021 THE WEEK

ARTS Review of reviews: Books

25

Book of the week

said Dominic Sandbrook in The Sunday Times. For example, he picks out John Sergeant’s improbably long run on All In It Together Strictly Come Dancing in 2008 – by Alwyn Turner against the wishes of the judges – as exemplifying a growing distrust of Profile 376pp £20 “experts”. Today the idea is commonThe Week Bookshop £16.99 place, but only Turner would have “thought to look for it on Strictly”. An This hugely enjoyable book is the excellent portrait of the comedian Roy fourth instalment of Alwyn Turner’s “Chubby” Brown – who was effectively blacklisted by mainstream TV, but who series looking at Britain’s recent past, said Craig Brown in The Mail on made millions from his DVDs and sellout shows – is used to explain many of Sunday. Having previously published the tendencies that led to Brexit. chronicles of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s, “he has now turned his This book is a “fluent enough trot Pippa Middleton’s big moment: “half-forgotten” over the ground”, said Quentin Letts in attention to the first 15 or so years of The Times. But it’s pretty superficial. Turner “regurgitates some the 21st century”. The events he drags us back to didn’t happen of the political and pop-cultural events” of the Blair, Brown and long ago, but many already seem “half-forgotten”. The millennium bug, Pippa Middleton’s bottom, the dodgy dossier, Cameron years. Immigration, the benefits system, child abuse – they’re all “covered in breezy prose”. “When telling quotations Cleggmania – they all “resonate like the songs of yesteryear”. Turner is “up there with the best” writers of contemporary are needed, they are lifted from television shows.” That’s unfair, said Kathryn Hughes in The Guardian: this is not just a dive into history, and here, as previously, he strikes a balance between entertaining his readers and making them think. While his the digital newspaper archives. With “great skill”, Turner pulls narrative “zings along”, he ensures it’s more than a series of out “plums from the recent past” that make sense of it all. The “unrelated events” by interweaving various themes – including general mood is familiar, but the details seem “downright Britain’s “increasingly troubled relationship with its past”, and implausible”. Did George Galloway really do a kitten impression the growing disconnect between the public and politicians. on Celebrity Big Brother? Did Robert Kilroy-Silk actually once Turner’s particular skill is to alight on an event which seems consider himself a serious politician? It’s a book that allows you “utterly trivial”, but which illustrates one of his larger arguments, to see the lineaments “of our present times”.

Cricketing Lives

Novel of the week

by Richard H. Thomas Reaktion Books 440pp £20

Animal

The Week Bookshop £16.99

by Lisa Taddeo Bloomsbury 336pp £16.99

In this absorbing book, Richard H. Thomas tells the “long and involved” history of cricket through some of its most colourful characters, said Marcus Berkmann in The Spectator. Luckily for him – and for us – the sport has always attracted eccentrics, from oddballs such as W.G. Grace (right) to Geoffrey Boycott, to the many less familiar figures in Thomas’s account. One such figure is Wilf Wooller, who captained Glamorgan to the championship in 1948 and later became the club’s president. In the latter guise, Thomas portrays him as a “terrifying figure”, prowling the boundary in his sports jackets and brown suede shoes, often commandeering the public address system to denounce the negative tactics of opposing teams. “Drinkers, adventurers and shaggers abound” in these pages, said Patrick Kidd in The Critic. A century ago, the Hon. Lionel Tennyson (grandson of the poet laureate) found himself summoned to make his Test debut for England the next day while “deep into a night at the Embassy Club on Bond Street”. He struck an extravagant bet with one of his companions that he would score a half-century – and duly made 74. And it’s not just “Boys’ Own stories”: Thomas doesn’t neglect the “great female legends of cricket”. Eileen Ash, an England player in the 1940s (who is still alive, aged 109), “flew in a Tiger Moth on her 100th birthday and kept one of Don Bradman’s bats by her bed to repel burglars”. Nancy Doyle, the “volcanic” head cook at Lord’s, once responded to Mike Brearley’s request for lighter fare than steak and kidney pudding by telling England’s then captain: “You worry about the f***ing cricket, and I’ll worry about the f***ing food.” Heavy on research but light in touch, this is a book with something for everyone – “even those who find the game dull”.

The Week Bookshop £13.99

Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women – an “intimate investigation” of female sexuality in America – was the “biggest publishing sensation of 2019”, said Madeleine Feeny in the London Evening Standard. As a result, “all eyes are trained” on Taddeo’s debut novel, Animal. And it proves to be a dark, carnal tale, “drenched in sex and blood”. It begins with Joan, the beautiful but damaged narrator, driving cross-country to Los Angeles and renting a ramshackle three-storey house up Topanga Canyon. Sex, rape and murder ensue: “men hunt women, women hunt men, and damaged women hunt one another”. Taddeo’s writing can be “exceptionally good”, said Sandra Newman in The Guardian. But the “careening outlandishness” of the plot seems at odds with the book’s “serious content”: much of the incident is “gratuitously bizarre and seedy”. It rather grew on me, said Melissa Katsoulis in The Times. Taddeo is attempting something radical, which is “flipping American Psycho for the #MeToo generation”. She hasn’t quite found her fictional stride, but she has the “guts and big ideas to become something great”.

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

10 July 2021 THE WEEK

26 ARTS

Drama & Podcasts Theatre: three musical treats

“Who would have thought that pleasure. And the production one of the highlights of the summer conveys its ecological message would be watching Les Dennis without losing any of the play’s fondle Michael Ball?” These two magic and humour. The only “offnote” comes at the end, in the “old stagers” are playing husband and wife in the gloriously revived form of a superfluous epilogue on climate and sustainability, said musical Hairspray – and they have a huge amount of fun with Arifa Akbar in The Guardian. But their vaudeville-style duet it is soon “swallowed up by a celebrating marital bliss, (You’re) rousing last song”. This is first-rate Timeless to Me, said Clive Davis summer Shakespeare, made “all in The Times. But the pair are just the more spellbinding for the one of the attractions. The whole greater stage of the natural world show – the tale of Tracy, a tubby around us” (until 24 July). girl from Baltimore who is determined to become a dancer on Stephen Sondheim’s “cruel, clever a “cringingly cute” TV dance show and delectable” 1973 musical A Little Night Music is “piercingly – is a high camp triumph. The songs “rock with genuine bluesy Dennis and Ball in Hairspray: one of the highlights of the summer well done here” in a collaboration energy”, the choreography is “slick between Leeds Playhouse and yet soulful”, and the racial theme is handled deftly. The cavernous Opera North, said Sam Marlowe in The Times. Directed by James Brining, the production brims with “rapturous romance”, without Coliseum is a tough space for a musical, but this five-star romp, with its infectious music and madcap routines, easily fills it. “You dulling the musical’s “serrated edge”. The singing is superb – really would have to be in a terminal state of humourlessness not “rich, natural and precise” – and the acting just as impressive. to enjoy” the production (until 29 September). Stephanie Corley as Desiree makes “desolate, devastating work” of the show’s most famous number, Send in the Clowns. And as Staged in The Watermill Theatre’s woodland gardens in Newbury Madam Armfeldt, former lover of kings and counts, Josephine – weeping willows, rippling streams, passing ducks – Paul Hart’s Barstow is as “arch, sharp and hilarious as anything you’ll find in production of As You Like It is a “bucolic delight”, said Judi the best Oscar Wilde production”, said Mark Brown in The Daily Herman on What’s On Stage. The cast of actor-musicians is Telegraph. This is a “true gem” of a show – an exceptional excellent, and include Katherine Jack as a “beautifully calibrated achievement, “pitched wonderfully between French sex comedy and intelligent” Rosalind. “Spine-tingling” arrangements of folk and Chekhovian existentialism”. It’s a production that could and pop songs (Taylor Swift, The Beach Boys) add to the “grace stages anywhere in the world” (until 17 July).

Any politician thinking of weighing a fictional US vice-president. And in on the question of the England Rosamund Pike is terrific as Edith – “smart, irreverent and sardonic”. football team “taking the knee” The podcast’s subtitle is The should first listen to TalkSport’s Coming in From The Cold, said Untold True-ish Story of America’s Secret First Female President. But Patricia Nicol in The Sunday Times. This “moving and informative” it is based on fact and, with no series, presented by Jessica creaking sound effects at all, it Creighton, is a remarkable slice of makes for “compulsive” listening. social and cultural history, which “I was not the first female tells the story “of modern England president,” says Edith, modestly. through the prism” of its black “I was a patriot who helped the professional footballers. “Booing country stay together while the one of your own players... are you president took a little nap.” expecting him to play better,” asks the former England striker Emile “No podcast is more interesting, Heskey, his voice “cracking with more impishly good fun, more Cole’s experiences are examined in Coming in From The Cold exasperated incredulity”. Heskey beautifully produced” than is referring to Ashley Cole. But, Malcolm Gladwell’s ideas-filled depressingly, he could probably be talking about any of the show Revisionist History, said James Marriott in The Times. players profiled here, from the Victorian goalie Arthur Wharton In fact anyone who has not listened to the episodes The King of and Walter Tull in the 1910s, to more recent stars such as Clyde Tears (on country music), The Hug Heard Round the World Best, John Barnes, Ian Wright and Raheem Sterling. Their stories (on Sammy Davis Jr. and Richard Nixon), A Good Walk Spoiled are “engaging” and “often poignant”, and this “engrossing” (on the evils of golf) and Hallelujah (on the two kinds of genius) series does them proud. is “hereby banned from reading this column” until they have gone away and “done their homework”. Gladwell’s last series I tend to find audio drama a “struggle”, with its “creaking sound was “the only duff one so far” – but the new series, the sixth, effects” and excess of exposition, said Fiona Sturges in the FT. has just begun, and he’s back on top form with an episode on But Edith!, a comedy-drama about President Woodrow Wilson’s driverless cars. Much of the fun arises from Gladwell “gleefully wife, who took over running the White House in 1919 after he experimenting” with Google’s self-driving car, Waymo: throwing suffered a stroke, is a treat. The writing is “fast and fun”, with beach balls at it, racing it, and riding around in it while abusing clear shades of Veep, Armando Iannucci’s TV comedy hit about learner drivers. “It’s good to have him back.” THE WEEK 10 July 2021

© TRISTRAM KENTON

Podcasts... from racism in football to self-driving cars

Film & TV Films to stream School and college reunions were a popular theme in films during the 1980s and 1990s, especially in the US. Here are five that have reunions as their focus: The Big Chill As in John Sayles’s similar Return of the Secaucus Seven (1979), memories of 1960s student activism haunt Lawrence Kasdan’s intimate comedydrama from 1983 about seven former college friends who gather for a comrade’s funeral. The cast includes Glenn Close, Jeff Goldblum and William Hurt. Peggy Sue Got Married Francis Ford Coppola’s comedy from 1986 is an intriguing, touching film about a woman who gets a second chance at youth. Kathleen Turner turns in a brilliant performance as a jaded 42-year-old who faints at her school reunion and wakes up a teenager again.

THE FILMS ARE AVAILABLE ON GOOGLE PLAY (EXCEPT BEAUTIFUL GIRLS), APPLE TV AND AMAZON

Beautiful Girls Directed by Ted Demme, this comedydrama from 1996 centres on a group of male friends brought together at a ten-year school reunion, at a time when they are all struggling with anxieties about romantic commitment. The starry cast includes Timothy Hutton, Uma Thurman, Matt Dillon and Natalie Portman. Grosse Pointe Blank George Armitage’s hip, noirish black comedy from 1997 stars John Cusack as a disillusioned hitman who revisits the Detroit suburb of Grosse Pointe to do one last job, and attend a high-school reunion where he hopes to win back the girl he jilted on prom night (Minnie Driver). Romy and Michele’s High School Reunion Lisa Kudrow and Mira Sorvino bring charming chemistry to this delightfully silly cult hit from 1997 about two ditzy Valley Girls who were bullied by the “A group” at school, and so invent fake CVs in an effort to impress their former classmates at a ten-year school reunion.

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New releases Another Round

Dir: Thomas Vinterberg (1hr 56mins) (12A)

★★★★

Winner of an Oscar for best international feature, this tragicomedy is director Thomas Vinterberg’s finest film since Festen (1998), said Mark Kermode in The Observer. Mads Mikkelsen plays a high-school teacher and reformed hellraiser who is in the throes of a mid-life crisis. Inspired by the notion – attributed to the real-life psychiatrist Finn Skårderud – that all humans are born a tiny bit alcohol deficient, he and three male colleagues start drinking secretly at work, hoping to “learn to live again”. They treat their drinking as a scientific experiment, with “severe and absurd” rules, and at first they amaze themselves, their pupils and their wives with their new-found lucidity, enthusiasm and spontaneity. But they struggle to limit their consumption, and are soon “spiralling towards self-destruction”. Another Round’s take on alcohol struck me as confused, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian. By the end, health has been wrecked, careers trashed, marital beds urinated in. But Vinterberg also seems to want to upend “liberal pieties about excessive drinking being bad”. He has said that the tragic death of his daughter, Ida, in a car crash four days into filming led him to emphasise the story’s life-affirming aspect. The film is certainly ambivalent, said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent – but to me that feels “honest”. Mikkelsen embodies the duality in a towering performance drawing on the inscrutability that has made him such a great Hollywood villain. Even early on, when he is enthusing to his pupils about Churchill’s boozing, you wonder if he knows his quest is doomed. And yet he is quite sublime in his final scene, when, egged on by his students’ cheers, he dances in the rain, as graceful as Gene Kelly – but extremely drunk. In cinemas.

Freaky

Dir: Christopher Landon (1hr 43mins) (15)

★★★★

Freaky Friday meets Friday the 13th in this

Kathryn Newton in the “splatter-fest” Freaky

ebullient “splatter-fest”, said James Dyer in Empire. The film’s “knowingly daft” plot involves a shy, bullied small-town teenager, Millie (Kathryn Newton), who swaps bodies with a serial killer, the Blissfield Butcher (Vince Vaughn), when he attacks her with an Aztec dagger he doesn’t know to be enchanted. Now appearing as a hulking man whose photofit is a constant presence on the news, Millie must evade the police, convince her friends of her predicament and retrieve the dagger to reverse the curse before it sticks. Meanwhile, the killer in Millie’s body takes brutal revenge on her persecutors at school, including leering jocks and a creepy male teacher. For a “crowd-pleaser” with a “gimmicky” premise, Freaky is surprisingly “substantial”, said Benjamin Lee in The Guardian – as unrestrained in its “exploration of gender and sexuality” as in its “inventively gnarly” murder scenes. Newton brilliantly conveys the killer’s outrage on learning how it feels to be a victim of everyday male aggression. And Vaughn’s turn as Millie is beautifully observed, and “moving” too – notably when she finally dares to tell a jock about her crush on him, and, despite her “masculine shell”, the pair kiss. I’m afraid I found Vaughn’s performance merely “camp”, said Kevin Maher in The Times, and the film too “schematic”. Its novelty fun soon wears off, leaving only a series of grizzly murders to keep us watching. In cinemas.

Hemingway: another brilliant series from Ken Burns Documentary-makers Ken Burns Later “readings of and Lynn Novick have taken on Hemingway’s work have many monumental American sometimes accused him of subjects, from Jefferson to jazz. misogyny and homophobia”, Their latest is Ernest Hemingway, said Rebecca Nicholson in The the most influential US writer of Guardian. The series accepts the 20th century, said Camilla those readings, while attempting Long in The Sunday Times. Their “to craft a story that may explain “signature skill” – turning still this ‘brute, and lover, and man images into “something that feels about town’”. We learn, for like a newsreel” – works well instance, that his mother liked to here, as there are many wonderful dress him and one of his sisters photos of the man and his milieu A “moreish” documentary as twins; and that he blamed her to draw on, and the six-part series for his father’s unhappiness. This is “extraordinarily moreish”. It positively packs is a gripping series, with contributions from the in high-quality information, though it only likes of Edna O’Brien, and top flight actors skims over the writer’s “rabid violence, his (including Jeff Daniels and Meryl Streep) racism, his disgusting treatment of women”. reading from his letters and books.

10 July 2021 THE WEEK

Auctions

28

A LIFETIME’S PASSION:

PROPERTY FROM THE FELL COLLECTION LIVE ONLINE AUCTION WEDNESDAY 21 JULY 2021 VIEWING BY APPOINTMENT Friday 16 July (10am-5pm) Sunday 18 July (10am-4pm) Monday 19 & Tuesday 20 July (10am-5pm) To book an appointment please email [email protected]. ENQUIRIES Joe Robinson: +44 (0) 1635 553 553 | [email protected] Dreweatts, Donnington Priory, Newbury, Berkshire RG14 2JE Catalogue and free online bidding: dreweatts.com

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THE WEEK 10 July 2021

To advertise here please email classifi[email protected] or call Henry Haselock 020 3890 3900

Art

ARTS 29

Exhibition of the week Gustave Moreau: The Fables Waddesdon Manor, near Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire (01296-820414, waddesdon.org.uk). Until 17 October The French symbolist painter is an allegory of Fable as a woman Gustave Moreau (1826-1898) has “flying across the sky on the back of a hippogriff”. Another has “an never regained the “cult status” angry dragon with more tails than that he had in his lifetime, said Maev Kennedy in The Art an octopus has legs” crashing Newspaper. His work is rarely through a fence to devour a man hiding in a tree. Elsewhere, exhibited today, and if he is remembered at all, it is as Moreau depicts a fable in which a man falls in love with his cat and a histrionic and “feverish” figure. His palette, one critic complained, somehow manages to turn her into was like that of a jeweller “drunk a woman. After some “furious on colour”’; and no scene was lovemaking”, she leaps from bed complete without a flourish of the to chase a mouse across the room. fantastical – with monsters, deities The protagonist of this “creepy” or demons. Yet in his time, he was tale is shown cowering in the considered “a visionary sage” sheets like “a child watching a who taught and greatly influenced horror movie”. Yet eccentric the likes of Henri Matisse. Now, a though they are, The Fables represent “a remarkable body of small show at Waddesdon Manor, a National Trust home formerly work”. These pictures teem with owned by the Rothschild family, “blues that throb like powdered seeks to explain why. The sapphires, reds that glow like exhibition brings together the rubies, gold that gleams like an surviving fragments of a series of Australian nugget” – exceeding watercolours Moreau created to all expectations of what can be illustrate the fables of the 17th achieved with watercolours. His depictions of animals are century poet Jean de La Fontaine. When first exhibited, this cycle “beautifully observed”: Moreau captures an elephant frightened created a sensation: George Bernard Shaw, for one, remarked by a mouse and a “screaming that it entitled Moreau “to rank monkey” riding “on the back The monkey and the dolphin (1879): “beautifully observed” with Delacroix and Burne-Jones”. of a speeding dolphin” more Created between the 1870s and the 1880s, the series of 64 believably than you might think possible. pictures was sold on the original owner’s death and then split: about half of the collection was “looted by the Nazis”, and most You don’t need to be familiar with La Fontaine’s fables to marvel of it has never been recovered. This is the first time that almost all at Moreau’s bizarre inventiveness, his breadth and his originality, said Alastair Sooke in The Daily Telegraph. Each picture is “a the remaining pictures have been shown in public together for miniature world unto itself”: Moreau paints the Senate of Ancient more than a century. Can it restore Moreau’s reputation? Rome, “quasi-Dutch and Shakespearean scenes”, and even I approached this show with some “trepidation”, said Waldemar “radiant landscapes reminiscent of Turner”. “Looking at these Januszczak in The Sunday Times. Moreau’s reputation for artistic dream-worlds is like passing through a fairy-tale forest thick with “onanism” is well deserved, and the works in this exhibition magic and flickering, supernatural lights.” What an “intoxicating make few concessions to subtlety. The first image we encounter vision” Moreau’s was. And “what an extraordinary show this is”.

News from the art world

© PRIVATE COLLECTION; CAYCE CLIFFORD/GUARDIAN/EYEVINE

The Flintstones house

An art thief’s regrets

The owner of a “controversial FlintstonesThe man who stole three paintings, including themed house” has settled a long-running masterpieces by Picasso and Mondrian, from lawsuit against her local authority, says The Greece’s National Gallery nine years ago Guardian. The media magnate Florence has confessed, says Helen Stoilas in The Fang, now retired, lives in a brightly coloured Art Newspaper. The works were recovered experimental house built by the architect last week and the culprit, it turned out, was William Nicholson in 1976 in Hillsborough, in a 49-year-old builder named George the suburbs of San Francisco. It is popularly Sarmantzopoulos. A self-confessed “art known as the “Flintstones house” after the freak”, he had no intention to sell the works, 1960s cartoon. Fang incurred the wrath of only an intense desire to own them. “These the local council when she took the theme thoughts tormented me for about two years one step further by installing statues of Fred and led me to make the biggest mistake of and Wilma Flintstone, along with various my life,” Sarmantzopoulos told police. For dinosaurs. The town took her to court, six months before the 2012 heist, he would accusing her of causing a “public nuisance”. sit in the gallery for hours, observing the Authorities in Hillsborough described guards and the security arrangements, Fang’s project as an “eyesore”, arguing before eventually carrying out the robbery Fang’s dinosaurs: a “public nuisance”? that residents are obliged to obtain a permit in seven minutes late at night. Panicked by before erecting any sort of sculpture. Fang counter-sued, citing reports that the authorities were close to solving the case earlier her property rights. Under the terms of the settlement, she will this year, he gave himself up, expressing remorse and leading drop her lawsuit and apply for the necessary building permits. police to the remote ravine where he had hidden the paintings. In return, Hillsborough will pay her $125,000. The robbery was “the biggest regret of my life”, he said.

10 July 2021 THE WEEK

The List

Best books… Sasha Swire

The journalist and author chooses her six favourite diaries, from politics to nature. Her Sunday Times bestseller, Diary of an MP’s Wife (Abacus £9.99) is out now in paperback Henry “Chips” Channon: The Diaries (Volume 1) 1918-38 edited by Simon Heffer, 2021 (Hutchinson £35). The best political diaries are witty, waspish, snobbish and gossipy. And they are often written by people not necessarily at the heart of power, but at its edge. Chips Channon is an absolute master at the form. His diaries are delicious, dangerous and utterly compulsive.

I’m as much a nature writer as a diarist, so share Nicolson’s concentrations and interests.

The Harold Nicolson Diaries, 1966 (W&N £12.99). Nicolson was an MP and a diplomat married to the poet and gardener Vita SackvilleWest. Both were gay but devoted to each other and their famous garden at Sissinghurst.

The Diary of Samuel Pepys, 1825 (Everyman £18.99). The diary of the 17th century naval administrator is perhaps the most famous of them all. Pepys’s writings reveal how life under the bubonic plague mirrors our own pandemic,

Diaries: In Power by Alan Clark, 1994 (Phoenix, out of print). Like Chips, Clark had the flaws of vanity and lechery and crashing snobbery, but he was a natural writer of people, places and politics. Penned during a time when the bad behaviour of a politician was either ignored or dismissed.

including similarities in how people responded to the crisis. Bee Journal by Sean Borodale, 2012 (Vintage £9.99). This poem-journal chronicles the life of the hive, from the collection of a small nucleus to the capture of a swarm two years later. As an amateur beekeeper, I’ve found it to be something of a bible. Notes from Walnut Tree Farm by Roger Deakin, 2009 (Penguin £9.99). A journal of sorts, but more a medley of musings, feelings and observations about the natural world of rural Suffolk. Deakin had a unique way of painting the humblest of scenes with the richest of prose.

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

The Week’s guide to what’s worth seeing

Book now

Set to be one of the summer’s most talked-about

episode of a new series, the BBC’s media editor meets the CEO of Alphabet and its subsidiary Google at his Silicon Valley headquarters. Mon 12 July, BBC2 21:00 (60mins).

This Way Up Aisling Bea’s

bittersweet comedy returns for a second season. Aine’s excitement mounts ahead of a date with her student’s father (Tobias Menzies). Wed 14 July, C4 22:00 (30mins).

Carlos Ghosn: The Last Flight Storyville charts the

rise and spectacular fall of the former Nissan CEO, and his audacious escape from Japan. Wed 14 July, BBC4 22:00 (100mins).

Our NHS: A Hidden History

Historian David Olusoga hears the stories of some of the health workers from overseas who have had a transformative effect on the NHS. Thur 15 July, BBC1 21:00 (60mins).

Oldman won an Oscar for his portrayal of Winston Churchill in this rousing historical drama. Sat 10 July, BBC1 19:35 (120mins).

Trumbo (2015) Biopic about

Uche Abuah in Notes on Grief

shows, Paradise has writer and recording artist Kae Tempest reimagining Sophocles’s Philoctetes, with an all-female cast. Ian Rickson directs. 4 August-11 September, National Theatre, London SE1 (nationaltheatre.org.uk). Book early for the world premiere of Double Murder, a double bill of new pieces by the acclaimed choreographer Hofesh Shechter and his company. 14-18 September, Sadler’s Wells, London EC1 (sadlerswells.com).

The Archers: what happened last week

When Elizabeth and Vince’s holiday booking gets cancelled, they decide on a staycation at Lower Loxley, to Freddie’s dismay. After a work party, Lily sleeps with her colleague Sol. She confides in Rex about her mixed feelings – she had fun with Sol, but feels guilty about being unfaithful to Russ and thinks she should come clean. Meanwhile, Russ receives his decree absolute and can’t wait to tell Lily that he is finally divorced. Vince’s mother Iris comes to visit Lower Loxley, making a big impression on everyone, and warns Elizabeth how soft-hearted Vince is. Lily is aghast to see Sol at the drive-in movie night, but he knows she has a partner and hopes they can be friends. Later, Russ shares his news with Lily and shows her a portrait he has made of her – overwhelmed, she decides to keep quiet about her indiscretion. She wonders if they should get married, but Russ says they don’t need to. Elizabeth and Vince talk about the week’s goings-on and she tells him she loves him, but can’t live with him; he’s happy with that.

THE WEEK 10 July 2021

Amol Rajan Interviews Sundar Pichai In the first

Darkest Hour (2017) Gary

After some delay, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s new musical Cinderella – as retold by Oscarwinning screenwriter Emerald Fennell – has opened. Expect “lavish family entertainment” with a few comic nods to issues of the day (Daily Telegraph). Until 13 February 2022, Gillian Lynne Theatre, Drury Lane, London WC2 (andrewlloydwebberscinderella.com).

Everyday objects – from crockery to hardware – are displayed alongside the paintings, reliefs, prints and drawings they inspired in Ben Nicholson: From the Studio. Until 24 October, Pallant House Gallery, Chichester (pallant.org.uk).

Programmes

Films

Showing now

Notes on Grief, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s powerful reflection on family, love and loss, is adapted for the stage as part of the Manchester International Festival. Until 17 July, Exchange Auditorium, Manchester Central (mif.co.uk); also available to watch online.

Television

the screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, who fell foul of the House Un-American Activities Committee in Cold War-era Hollywood. Bryan Cranston stars. Sat 10 July, BBC2 01:05 (124mins).

Gravity (2013) After flying

debris destroys their shuttle, an astronaut and a medical engineer find themselves alone and tethered to each other in Alfonso Cuarón’s atmospheric space drama. Tue 13 July, BBC1 20:35 (88mins).

Coming up online

Even as venues reopen, livestream events continue: Kings Place hosts The Guilty Feminist, Deborah FrancesWhite’s hit podcast; 19:30, 12 July (kingsplace.co.uk). Retail guru Mary Portas discusses How To Thrive in the New Kindness Economy, her take on how firms will or should behave in the postpandemic world; 18:30, 20 July (howtoacademy.com).

© ROCK ROSE PHOTOGRAPHY; TRISTRAM KENTON

30

Best properties

32 Houses with long drives ▲

Cumbria: Appletree Estate, Newby, Penrith. This family home and holiday letting business in the Eden Valley is accessed by a private driveway and set in generous gardens with superb views to the Pennines. The adjacent barn is converted into 2 flats: a 1-bed on the ground floor and a 3-bed upstairs, along with a 1-bed Garden Cottage on the grounds, all used as successful holiday lets. Appletree cottage: main suite, 3 further beds, family bath, kitchen, 2 receps, utility, garage, stores. £895,000; Fine & Country (01768-869007).

▲ Devon: Natson Mill, Bow. Tucked away off a private road, this former mill with traditional Devon longhouse and stone cottage is in a courtyard setting with extensive outbuildings, nestled on its own land on the banks of the River Yeo. 4-bed farmhouse, 2-bed mill cottage, arboretum, orchard, variety of outbuildings, 14.5 acres. £975,000; Fox Grant (01722-782727). ▲

Carmarthenshire: Clearbrook Hall, Llanarthney, Carmarthen. Located in 45 acres of serene and stunning countryside, this stately Georgian house and 2 semidetached, Grade II 3-bed cottages sit in an elevated position surrounded by landscaped gardens, managed woodland, meadows and pastures. Main house: 5 suites, 6 receps. Large paddocks, 1-acre stocked pond, walled garden with tennis court, large outdoor swimming pool, summer house, 2 sand schools, 3 stables, manège, plus additional outbuildings. OIEO £1.5m; Fine & Country (01834862138).

THE WEEK 10 July 2021

on the market

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▲ Cornwall: Hustyn Gate, Burlawn, Wadebridge. Sympathetically restored, this idyllic farmhouse has a 2-bed annexe. Main suite, 5 further beds, 3 further baths, kitchen/breakfast room, 3 receps, utility, shower, boot room, summerhouse, gardens, 2.8 acres. £1.15m; John Bray & Partners (01208-862601). ▲

Co Durham: The Old Vicarage, Hunstanworth. An imposing Grade II former vicarage set in beautiful grounds. Main suite, 4 further beds, family bath, kitchen/breakfast room, 4 receps, hall, pantry, scullery, garden room, boot room, store, 2 WCs, coach house with carriage room and stable, hayloft, groom’s room, formal gardens, orchard, summerhouse, wood. OIEO £1m; Finest Properties (01434-622234).

Lincolnshire: Mercia Lodge, Spalding. Set back from the road and with an in-and-out formal carriage driveway, this doublefronted Grade II Victorian town house needs full modernisation. The house retains many original features and there is the potential to create a main suite in the attic. 4 beds, 2 showers, WC, landing, balcony, kitchen/breakfast room, 3 receps, study, entrance hall, boiler, stores, WC, workshop, rear garden with lawns and mature trees. £699,500; Fine & Country (01780750200).

▲

▲

Devon: Marley House, Rattery, South Brent. Located in one of Devon’s oldest villages, on the old travellers road from Kingsbridge to Bristol, this Grade II* Georgian mansion, set in extensive grounds, is approached by way of a long tree-lined drive, with secure gated access. 4 suites, kitchen, 3 receps, billiards room, shower, kitchenette, sauna, study, utility, triple garage, stores, large garden, wood, paddock, lake, 13.9 acres. £995,000; Stags (01803-865454).

▲

Cheshire: Faulkners Farm, Wilmslow. A small country estate with a long drive, extensive outbuildings and a separate cottage. Main suite with dressing room, 3 further suites, openplan kitchen/breakfast/ family room, sitting room, utility/side hall, galleried dining hall, WC/cloakroom, office, orangery with glasstopped well, drawing room, 3-bed cottage, detached garage with storage/potential office or studio above, outbuilding, gardens, paddock, approx. 11.3 acres. £6.25m; Jackson-Stops (01625540340).

▲ Somerset: Cleeve Hill House, Midford, Bath. There are 2 gated private drives to this Grade II Georgian house in a pretty village close to Bath, with fine views of the surrounding hills. 2 suites, 5/6 further beds, family bath, shower, kitchen, 3 receps, study, utility, WC, landscaped gardens, car port, greenhouse, 1.1 acres. £2.25m; Knight Frank (01225-325994). 10 July 2021 THE WEEK

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THE WEEK 10 July 2021

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LEISURE Food & Drink

35

What the experts recommend The new crisis facing UK restaurants Britain’s restaurants reopened after the pandemic expecting to go full throttle, thanks to soaring demand from customers. But the sector now finds itself in a new crisis, said Eshe Nelson in The New York Times – caused by “a dearth of hospitality workers”. With an estimated 188,000 hospitality jobs unfilled, some restaurants have been forced to close on particular days, or suspend lunch service altogether. “It’s becoming impossible,” said Mauro Sanna, owner of Italian chain Olivo. “I thought the Covid crisis was tough, but this one is much tougher because I can’t do anything about it.” The problem is partly down to Brexit, which has made it harder for EU citizens to come to work in Britain, said Clea Skopeliti in The Independent. But it is also down to Covid-19: when the crisis started, many foreign nationals went home, and have not yet returned, while a large number of British hospitality workers took jobs in other sectors – and found they preferred it in their new field. “They get a better work-life balance and don’t want to be breaking their neck for a pittance any more,” said the head of one hotel chain. A plastic-free picnic surprise Although we can now meet indoors, it looks like picnics are going to be all the rage again this summer, says Richard Godwin in The Times. So how to make sure you are “the envy of the rug-

Finally, add salad items – rocket leaves, basil, tomatoes, etc. Once the contents are almost spilling out of the top, replace the lid and wrap the loaf tightly: Ramoutar recommends using tinfoil, then tying a tea towel around it and twisting it supertightly. Do this, she says, a couple of hours before you plan to eat it, to give the contents a chance to marinate. “When you take it to the park and slice it open, it’s a real moment. No one is expecting all those lovely layers to be there.”

Be “the envy of the rug-spreading classes”

spreading classes?” Obviously, you want your picnic to look hassle free; you might also want it to be free of the plastic waste that goes hand in hand with modern picnics. To tick both boxes, food writer Shivi Ramoutar suggests preparing a “park loaf” – inspired by the Provençal pan bagnat (“a salade Niçoise in a baguette”). Buy a round loaf (whether a fancy sourdough or a “cob from Tesco Metro”), slice off the lid, and scoop out the doughy insides. Then “pack your entire picnic inside the crust”. Start with mayonnaise and perhaps pesto too; next, add some grilled vegetables, followed by slices of mozzarella, and salami or Parma ham.

The ultimate no-churn ice cream Homemade ice cream is the ultimate summer pud, says Lucy Battersby in Waitrose & Partners Food. And you don’t need an ice-cream maker. To make an “endlessly versatile” no-churn vanilla ice cream, simply put 600ml of whipping cream in a bowl along with a 397g can of condensed milk, 2 tablespoons of vanilla bean paste (or vanilla extract if you’re not making plain vanilla), and a pinch of salt. Whisk it all with electric beaters until soft peaks form (about 5-6 minutes), and then spoon the mixture into a freezer-proof container and freeze for at least five hours. If you want to make it into a raspberry ripple, add two layers of sieved raspberries while you are putting the mix into the container, and then draw a knife through the ice cream to marble the ingredients. Alternatively, “try swirling through lemon curd or ready-made salted caramel”.

Tomato and fennel fish stew with garlic and oregano bread Just because you’re self-catering in a camper van doesn’t mean you can’t eat well, say Claire Thomson and Matt Williamson in their new book. This fish stew is simple and delicious. Look out for firm, white, locally caught fish at the fishmongers or fish counter (if you are near the sea, ask the fishmonger’s advice). Serve it with oregano garlic bread, which you can wrap in foil and either toast in the fire if you’re having one, or warm through in a dry pan over a moderate-low heat. Serves 4 3 tbsp good olive oil, plus more to serve 1 small onion, finely chopped or sliced 3 celery stalks, finely chopped or sliced 3 garlic cloves, finely sliced a pinch of dried chilli flakes (optional), plus more to taste a big pinch of salt, plus more to taste 2 tsp fennel seeds, lightly crushed 1 tsp dried oregano ½ a can of chopped tomatoes, or about 1 cupful of chopped fresh tomato 700ml fish or vegetable stock, or water 700g firm white fish, cut into bite-size pieces juice and finely grated zest of 1 lemon black pepper for the garlic and oregano bread: 3 garlic cloves, crushed to a paste 2 tsp dried oregano 100g butter, softened (about 7 tbsp) 1 large baguette, slashed at 3cm intervals

• Heat the olive oil in a wide, shallow pan over

a moderate heat. Add the onion, celery and garlic, and the chilli flakes (if using). Season well with the big pinch of salt and some black pepper and cook for 10 minutes, until soft and fragrant. • While that’s cooking, prepare the garlic bread. Mash the crushed garlic and the oregano into the butter and season with salt and pepper. Use the mixture to butter the slashed bread. Wrap it in foil and place it on a heat source (in the embers of your campfire or in a dry pan) to allow it to warm through and melt the butter. • Add the fennel seeds, oregano and chopped

tomatoes to the onion and celery in the pan and continue to cook for another couple of minutes, until rich and thick. Add the stock or water and bring to the boil. Turn the heat down to a simmer and add the fish, then cover with a lid and simmer until the fish is opaque and just cooked through – 5-7 minutes should do, depending on the size and thickness of the fish. • Add the lemon zest and check the seasoning, adjusting with lemon juice and more salt, pepper and chilli flakes accordingly. • To serve, ladle the stew into bowls with plenty of the sauce and serve with the garlic bread alongside.

Taken from Camper Van Cooking by Claire Thomson and Matt Williamson, published by Quadrille at £20. To buy from The Week Bookshop for £16.99, call 020-3176 3835 or visit theweekbookshop.co.uk.

10 July 2021 THE WEEK

Consumer

36 LEISURE

New cars: what the critics say

Toyota GR Supra 2.0

from £46,010

The Daily Telegraph Toyota’s Supras have always been “big beasts”: the last one was “defined by its big, gutsy 3.0-litre, six-cylinder engine”. Now, there is a new model, but with only four cylinders, it doesn’t exactly fit the “Supra mould”. Instead, it finds itself in “the lighter, nimbler sports car territory” already dominated by talented rivals such as the Porsche Cayman and Alpine A110. Can it compete?

Autocar It has price on its side. Sports cars in the £40,000-£50,000 bracket are rare. With its smaller engine, the Supra is slower than its predecessor. But for the price, it is “on the money”. Inside, the car is little changed: it feels snug and expensive, with a slick 8.8in touchscreen infotainment system; the seats are lighter and softer – but for comfort and support, they are still no match for the Porsche’s.

Top Gear This is objectively a better car to drive than the Supra 3.0. It is 100kg lighter than its predecessor, and enjoys all the byproducts of that; it’s sharper, and more resolved and cheaper to buy and run. But these changes make the car “a bit of an enigma”. It can do 0-62mph in an impressive 5.2 seconds, and it handles like a dream, but to achieve that, it has swapped out the muscle that was its USP.

The best… outdoor pizza ovens Gozney Roccbox This is a great dual-fuel option that benefits from superb insulation. The set-up is painless and it is simple to use (£399; gozney.com).

Tips of the week… camping for beginners ● If you like to bed down early, set up camp in the “family zone” if there is one. There’s less chance of late-night carousing. ● Buy a bigger tent than you need. If it says it “sleeps four comfortably”, it will probably only hold three at a push. ● When pitching the tent, face the opening away from the prevailing wind to avoid flapping at night. Be aware that if you are close to water, there may be mosquitoes. ● Invest in a good camping mattress (avoid blow-up beds) and a decent chair. The Trekology Yizi Go foldable camping chair (£43.99, amazon.co.uk) is a favourite among seasoned campers. ● If the prospect of squatting in the nettles is a camping deal-breaker, consider investing in a “privacy tent”. Wet wipes are always useful (biodegradable, of course). ● Make life simpler by bringing a precooked dinner for the first day. Camping cookers that can be fuelled with sticks and twigs are better than disposable barbecues. SOURCE: THE SUNDAY TIMES

THE WEEK 10 July 2021

And ffor those ho have everything…

If you can’t find room in your bag for your reusable water bottle, Fendi has the solution. They sell a bottle that comes with a logo-emblazoned woven raffia case, which has an adjustable, detachable shoulder strap. from £490; net-a-porter.com SOURCE: FINANCIAL TIMES

Firepod Pizza Oven Mk3 This portable oven runs on patio ti g gas so hea ats up p quickly. Itt should give an n even bake without you having w to o turn the pizza; and if you choose the optional griddle, it can also be used as a g gas barbecue (£449; thefirrepod.com).

Wh t find… pick-yourown farms near cities Run by the same family since 1938, Parkside Farm in Enfield has a pick-yourown area of nearly 20 hectares. There’s a good range of fruit and veg alongside a farm shop (parksidefarmpyo.co.uk). There are lots of activities to choose from at Craigie’s Farm in Edinburgh, including feeding the animals and a new farmthemed play area for kids (craigies.co.uk). Medley Manor Farm is just a short walk from central Oxford. As well as picking your own, you can enjoy fruit baked into cakes at the farm’s café (medleymanorfarm.co.uk). With lovely picnic areas and day fishing, Woore Fruit Farm, near Crewe, has an abundance of fruit to pick in the summer, and pumpkins in autumn (bigbarn.co.uk). On the outskirts of St Albans, Hawkswick Lodge Farm is a small, family-run farm specialising in soft fruit. Although the opening has been delayed until 3 July, the farm says that this year, the berries should taste extra sweet (hawkswickfruit.co.uk). SOURCE: THE GUARDIAN

SOURCES: T3/THE INDEPENDENT/WHICH?

▲ DeliV Vita Pizza Oven If you have a big budget, this wood-fired oven is the cclosest you will get to an authentic restaurant one. It looks amazin ng; you can sett it on an ny surface; and it d delivers outstanding re esults – but yo ou will have to o learn how to o use it (£1,2 295; delivita. com m).

▲

▲

Ooni Karu 12 A g greatt all-rounder in the mid range, the Karu 12 can be used with three types of fuel: untreated wood, charcoal or propane gas. It heats up quickly to the desired temperature, and at just 12kg, it is properly portable (£299; uk.ooni.com).

▲

▲

Igneus Classico Pizza Oven his Handmade in Portugal, th sleek wood-fired oven has the great advantage of a cookking surface large enough to bake b two 10in pizzas side-by-side (£730; thepizzaovenshop.com).

Obituary

37

The hawk who persuaded George Bush to invade Iraq al-Qa’eda and was developing weapons Henry Kissinger once described Donald of mass destruction. The US, he argued, Rumsfeld as the most needed to strike pre-emptively against such threats (a strategy later dubbed the ruthless man he had ever met. Rumsfeld was also one of the Bush Doctrine). “The best and in some cases the only defence is a good offence,” most consequential “foreign policy actors” of his generation, said The Times he said. – for it was he, backed by a close-knit US generals argued that half a million group of officials, who persuaded George troops would be needed for the invasion W. Bush to respond to the 9/11 attacks by of Iraq in March 2003; Rumsfeld invading Iraq and Afghanistan. Hundreds of thousands of people died or were overruled them, saying around 140,000 would suffice. He was right at first, said maimed as a result of those conflicts. And 20 years on, their aftershocks are still The Times. Owing to the success of a being felt. The war in Afghanistan became “shock and awe” bombing campaign, US-led forces reached Baghdad in only a quagmire from which US troops are three weeks – but the idea (promoted by only now withdrawing, leaving behind prominent Iraqis in exile such as Ahmed not a rebuilt nation, but one that seems ripe for renewed takeover by Islamist Chalabi) that Iraqi troops would defect to extremists. (Rumsfeld did not believe the US, and that civilians would welcome in nation-building: It’s “not our broken the invaders as liberators, proved entirely false. Instead, coalition troops found society to fix”, he said.) Iraq, meanwhile, themselves battling a fierce Sunni “has known no stability since the invasion of 2003”. It remains a breeding ground insurgency, one that was fuelled by Rumsfeld: offered no mea culpas Washington’s decision to disband for terrorism, and was the crucible of Islamic State – which has “wreaked havoc across the region”, and Saddam’s largely Sunni army. This left 300,000 men jobless, inspired countless jihadist attacks in the West. Yet unlike Robert many of whom went on to form, or fight for, Islamic State. McNamara, the defence secretary who took the US into its war Around the same time, a vicious sectarian war broke out. in Vietnam, Rumsfeld offered no mea culpas, said The New York Saddam was captured and executed, but there was no sign of any Times. On the contrary, as recently as 2018 he was still insisting that the invasion of Iraq – which cost the US $700bn and 4,400 WMDs. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” American lives – had “created a was Rumsfeld’s famous response. His take on the looting more stable and secure world”. “Rumsfeld pushed so hard for the of Baghdad had been similarly Donald Rumsfeld was born in pithy: “Stuff happens.” With Star Wars missile defence programme Illinois in 1932, the son of an no viable plan in place for the he was nicknamed Darth Rumsfeld” estate agent and a housewife. aftermath of the invasion, the conflict dragged on, and From high school, he won a scholarship to Princeton, then enlisted in the navy. He became casualties mounted; then in 2004, shocking evidence emerged of Iraqi prisoners being brutally mistreated by poorly trained US a pilot, and an All-Navy wrestling champion. His mind was set, however, on a career in politics. In 1957, he moved to staff at the Abu Ghraib detention centre. This added to growing Washington where he worked for two Republican congressmen. concern about the detention of terrorist suspects from Afghanistan Five years later, he was elected to the House himself. A handsome at “black site” centres, and at Guantánamo Bay. Rights groups man who “radiated confidence”, he served as Richard Nixon’s claimed the US’s “enhanced interrogation techniques” amounted ambassador to Nato, before becoming defence secretary under to torture. “I stand for eight to ten hours a day. Why is standing limited to four hours?” wrote Rumsfeld, in one of the terse Gerald Ford in 1975. At 43, “Rummy” was the youngest man ever to hold the post, said The Daily Telegraph. In that role, memos for which he was famous (they were known as he started to emerge as a leading warrior of the Cold War, “snowflakes”, because they arrived in such a flurry). In the wake exaggerating the Soviet military threat in order to increase the of the Abu Ghraib scandal, he offered to resign. Bush kept him US defence budget. When Jimmy Carter defeated Ford in the on, but support for the war continued to ebb away, even among presidential election in 1976, Rumsfeld went off to make a senior Republicans. fortune in the private sector – in pharmaceuticals and other industries. However, he continued to hold part-time public posts. In 2006, the Army Times declared that “Rumsfeld has lost He served as a Middle Eastern envoy for President Reagan, in credibility with the uniformed leadership, with the troops, with which role he met Saddam Hussein, and was briefed on his use Congress and with the public at large. His strategy has failed, and of chemical weapons; he also pushed so hard for the Star Wars his ability to lead is compromised.” A few days later, voters gave missile defence programme he was nicknamed Darth Rumsfeld. the Bush administration a “drubbing” in mid-term elections, said The Guardian. “Rumsfeld was immediately sacked, and largely In January 2001, he returned to politics as George W. Bush’s disappeared from public life.” In 2011, he published a memoir, in defence secretary. On the morning of 11 September, he was at the which he defended his record and castigated his critics. He called Pentagon when it was struck by American Airlines flight 77, and it Known and Unknown, after a peculiar speech he had given in was one of the first at the crash site. After briefly helping with the 2002, in response to a question about links between Saddam and rescue effort, he rushed to the Command Centre to start preparing terrorists seeking WMDs: “As we know, there are known the US’s response. The US-led offensive to oust the brutally knowns, there are things we know we know,” he said. “We also repressive Taliban regime – which had harboured Osama bin know there are known unknowns; that is to say, we know there Laden and al-Qa’eda – began within a month, but from the are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown outset, Rumsfeld, vice-president Dick Cheney and other hawks unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” In 2007, he were determined to use the attack as a pretext for removing established the Rumsfeld Foundation to help promote leadership Saddam, too. Although there was no hard evidence to support and public service, and to support veterans. He is survived by either claim, Rumsfeld insisted that Saddam had links to Joyce, his wife of 66 years, and their three children. Donald Rumsfeld 1932-2021

10 July 2020 THE WEEK

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

39

GlaxoSmithKline: Elliott versus Emma

“Aren’t activist investors meant to sound angry,” asked Nils Pratley in The Guardian. Last week, Paul Singer’s US hedge fund Elliott Management, an activist investor with designs on GlaxoSmithKline, finally emerged from the shadows after weeks of sabre-rattling. Yet “vast chunks” of its 17-page open letter to GSK’s board “comprised mild statements of the bleedin’ obvious”. The group’s shares have underperformed “shockingly”, and the business has spent too little on R&D for years. Well, yes. But it’s precisely these ailments that CEO Emma Walmsley’s strategic plan – to demerge the consumer healthcare division from pharmaceuticals – is intended to address. And it’s a plan Elliott’s letter describes as “wise”. The real meat of the letter is its attack on the current GSK leadership, said Aimee Donnellan on Reuters Breakingviews. It calls for a new boss for the “New GSK” core pharma business. “That’s effectively asking Walmsley (above) to reapply for the job she already has.” With a sub-5% stake, Elliott’s firepower is limited. Meanwhile Walmsley’s defences would be bolstered if GSK’s HIV treatments take off and its pipeline of drugs including respiratory and meningitis vaccines become blockbusters. Let battle commence.

Amazon: life after Jeff

What’s the future for Amazon after Bezos? The founder stepped back after 27 years as CEO this week – handing over the keys to Andrew Jassy (see page 41) – with his grand vision for “the everything store” fully realised, said Dealbook in The New York Times. Can the firm’s phenomenal growth continue from here? “Taking risks is harder for new leaders.” And the regulatory push to rein in Amazon will only get “more powerful”. Yet there are also good reasons to think Amazon’s dominance can continue for decades, said Matthew Lynn in The Daily Telegraph. From Apple to Microsoft and IBM, the tech giants of recent decades have all outgrown their founders many times over – and so can Amazon. There remain clear opportunities– from real estate to medical services and groceries – and that’s before it buys anything. “Netflix or Spotify would be easy acquisitions for a post-Bezos Amazon, and both would add hugely to its overall muscle.” And even if regulators break it up, each “Baby Amazon” – retailing, streaming and cloud computing – would be “a giant in its own right”. Amazon might be “scarily dominant”, but even without its founding genius at the helm, it is only just “getting started”.

Vauxhall: going electric

Keeping the Vauxhall plant at Ellesmere Port open was “no tap in”, said Alistair Osborne in The Times. First came Brexit turmoil; then the merger between Vauxhall’s French owner PSA with Fiat Chrysler to form Stellantis; then the pandemic; then Boris Johnson’s ban on new petrol and diesel cars from 2030. “So, it’s a victory all round that after a three-way deal between Stellantis, the unions and the Government, the Cheshire plant will become Britain’s first large factory dedicated to electric vehicles.” It’s certainly good news after months of threats from the Franco-Italian owners to jettison Ellesmere, said Ben Marlow in The Daily Telegraph. But there’s a big question mark over the (rumoured) £35m government contribution. Unlike at Nissan in Sunderland – where the case for a large subsidy has been well made – Stellantis has no plans to build a battery gigafactory in Cheshire. So you have to ask why the Government is spending taxpayers’ cash – and whether “this really secures the plant’s future or if it’s just a short-term fix”.

Robinhood: buyer beware

The “popular but controversial” US stock-trading app Robinhood “knows the value of striking while the iron is hot”, said Lex in the FT. A day after it agreed $70m to settle charges that it misled customers, the start-up published paperwork for its IPO – one of the year’s most eagerly anticipated. The numbers are eye-catching. Revenues more than tripled to $958m last year, and topped $522m in the first quarter of 2021. The boom in viral meme-stocks and cryptotrading has seen customers double to 18 million in a year. Even so, the $40bn target valuation looks wildly overblown, said Robert Cyran and Gina Chon on Reuters Breakingviews. Most of Robinhood’s revenues come from payment-fororder flows (earning a fee for sending retail customer trades to market-making firms). These, like cryptocurrency trading fees, are highly vulnerable to regulatory intervention and further legal turmoil. Robinhood is trying hard “to deflect any arrows that come its way” by building a legal team that includes ex-SEC bigwigs. “With so much of its valuation riding on speculation, there’s only so much fortifying it can do.”

Seven days in the Square Mile The UK Government’s fiscal watchdog published its annual report on budget risks. It noted that the fiscal impact of a one-percentage-point rise in interest rates would be six times greater than it was in 2007, at the start of the financial crisis. It also said spending on pensions will cost an extra £3bn, under the “triple lock” guarantee, due to the exceptional post-Covid bounceback in wages. There were signs the housing market may be cooling after months of price rises. The average selling prices dipped 0.5% in June according to the Halifax, taking the year-on-year rise to 8.8%. Nexperia, a Dutch business owned by Chinese electronics company Wingtech, acquired Newport Wafer Fab’s factory in South Wales, the UK’s biggest microchip factory, for £65m. Sainsbury’s revised its profits guidance upwards after better than expected sales, but boss Simon Roberts brushed off growing speculation that it will be the next big takeover target. Deloitte announced that more than a quarter of its secretarial staff would be made redundant as part of a post-pandemic shake-up. Hospitality sector shares surged on Monday as Boris Johnson announced the scrapping of almost all Covid-19 restrictions on 19 July. Money transfer service Wise said it expected to be investigated over alleged money laundering in Brazil, but this didn’t derail its successful floatation on the London Stock Exchange on Wednesday – the biggest IPO by a tech firm in London. Shares in Didi, a Chinese ride-hailing app newly listed in New York, slumped on fears of a Chinese regulatory backlash.

E-sports star “Parents of teenage gamers, look away now,” said Alistair Osborne in The Times. Europe’s top-ranked Fortnite player Tai Starcic, a 16-year-old Slovenian better known as TaySon, has just been sold to a Saudi Arabian e-sports team for a record transfer fee of $115,000. The deal follows his third triumph at the Fortnite Champion Series All-Star Showdown, where he picked up $150,000 in prize-money. The outfit selling the teen is Guild Esports, the first e-sports franchise to list on the London Stock Exchange in a £41m floatation last October. Its co-owner happens to be one David Beckham. So now you know who to blame “when the kids won’t go to bed and say they’ve got to practise”.

10 July 2021 THE WEEK

40 CITY

Talking points Issue of the week: the battle for Morrisons A vote of confidence in Britain? Or an unsavoury scramble by “private equity vultures”?

“You wait 122 years for a bidder then out to carve up the supermarket – and no doubt flog off its large property three arrive at once,” said Bryce Elder in the FT. The UK’s fourth-biggest portfolio – are unsavoury. Fortress’s supermarket chain, Wm Morrison, backer SoftBank has failed to keep the promises made when buying British stunned the City last weekend by recommending to shareholders a 254p-achip giant Arm. Koch Industries is one of the US’s most “notorious polluting share takeover – valuing the enterprise at £9.5bn – from US private equity firm companies and a backer of eccentric farFortress, backed by Koch Industries and right causes”. Apollo is tainted by links a Canadian pension fund. Apollo Global to Jeffrey Epstein. The idea that these Management, another US buyout are the right folk to take on the “rich legacy” of the socially-conscious Sir Ken specialist, immediately confirmed that it is working on a rival offer. And the Morrison is “risible”, said Ben Marlow original Yankee suitor rejected last in The Daily Telegraph. The month at 230p, Clayton Dubilier & Rice, Government must scrutinise the plan Sir Ken Morrison: spinning in his grave? carefully; shareholders should block it. has until 17 July to come back with an improved bid. This is a resounding “vote of confidence in UK plc”, said The Sunday Times. The sell-off might cause “shudders” It’s clear why Morrisons is popular, said Lex in the FT. Years of to some. But the board has had “reassurance from Fortress that Brexit worries have left UK stocks looking cheap, and the grocer this is no asset-stripping operation or land grab, and that the new offers utility-like cash generation plus significant freehold owners will be good stewards”. It should be warmly welcomed. property, logistics and manufacturing assets that should be easier to exploit under private ownership. There’s speculation a fourth What nonsense, said Alex Brummer in the Daily Mail. The “speed or fifth bidder will emerge, said James Moore in The Independent. and naivety” with which the retailer’s “feeble” board approved “And that Amazon could ultimately end up squashing the lot of Fortress’s bid – and believed their vague, unenforceable promises them.” This makes the board’s haste in accepting the Fortress – is “deeply disturbing”. Morrisons has a special place in British offer look idiotic. Sir Ken Morrison will certainly be spinning in life: its “unique ownership model” means it has long supply his grave at the prospect of “private equity vultures” gobbling up chains “stretching from farm and fishing fleet to table”. And even his business. But “goodness only knows how he would respond by the standards of private equity, the “marauding buccaneers” to the limp capitulation of the people now at the helm”.

Inflation worries: what the experts think

pandemic bottlenecks ease. Inflation is bad Markets have been news for bonds, since it abuzz with talk of erodes the value of your rising inflation for investment while also months – and the making the interest clamour is getting payments you earn less louder, said Russell valuable. InflationLynch in The Daily linked bonds are one Telegraph. Prices in the solution. But “while world’s 38 advanced they offer protection (OECD) economies on one hand, they are Gold: a haven? are now rising at the very expensive, so you fastest pace since to be have confident about where you 2008: inflation averaged 3.8% in May, up believe inflation is heading”. from 3.3% in April. In the US, consumer inflation is already 5%. Here, UK services ● Value over growth (accounting for 80% of the economy) are raising prices at the fastest rate in 25 years. Given the paltry yields on financial The Bank of England Governor Andrew securities, it makes sense to have exposure Bailey and the departing chief economist to gold and commodities, adding “genuine Andy Haldane clashed publicly last week diversification”, agreed John Plender in the over inflation risks. The former is FT. In addition, long-term investors should sanguine; the latter very worried. He check whether their pension holdings predicts 4% inflation by Christmas, up include assets that “respond robustly” to from 2.1% now. inflation, such as property or infrastructure, and should minimise their exposure to ● Going for gold fixed-income bonds. Equities are a better What can investors do to prepare for an hedge against inflation than bonds, and era of higher inflation? Diversification is an inflationary background tends to the key, said Michelle McGagh on strengthen the case for a “value investing” Citywire. Commodities – such as oil, approach (focusing on cheaply valued crops and metals – typically benefit in stocks) rather than “growth” stocks. inflationary times. But commodities are Finally, residential property is definitely already having an “incredible run” (copper not cheap, but “with inflation it tends to is at an all-time high; oil has recovered to a become even less cheap. This is not a time three-year high) and could fall back as to be out of the property market.” ● Back to the 70s?

THE WEEK 10 July 2021

Simple tax tips Tax rules are “devilishly complex,” – even the financially literate often overlook some simple ways of saving tax, says Mike Warburton in The Daily Telegraph. Here are five: If your spouse or civil partner is a basicrate taxpayer and you don’t pay tax (or vice versa), you can transfer £1,260 of your personal allowance to them, saving your household £252. What’s more, this can be backdated to any tax year from 2017-18 onwards. Everyone has an annual £12,300 capital gains tax allowance. Consider transferring shares (or other assets) to your spouse or civil partner before sale to ensure their allowance isn’t wasted. You don’t have to be earning anything to make pension contributions of up to £2,880 a year, gaining a further £720 from HMRC. This operates well for nonworking spouses. If you’ve been working from home during the pandemic, you can claim an allowance of either the actual costs, or a flat rate of £6 a week without evidence (applies to 2020-21 and the current year). If you’re concerned about inheritance tax, don’t forget you can make unlimited payments free of IHT so long as they are regular and out of surplus income. This is in addition to the £3,000 annual allowance and seven-year lifetime gift rule.

A slow train wreck is coming Nouriel Roubini Project Syndicate

Brexit: the sixmonth report card Editorial Financial Times

Older workers must not be forgotten James Moore The Independent

In praise of the suit and tie Ben Wright The Daily Telegraph

The global economy is on track for a “slow-motion train wreck”, says Nouriel Roubini. Years of ultra-loose fiscal and monetary policies have pumped up asset and credit bubbles. Warning signs are now flashing across financial markets and asset classes giddy with “irrational exuberance”. And there’s a slew of negative supply shocks that could easily precipitate the slump. However, few yet understand how grave the threat is and how powerless policymakers will be to cope with it. Put simply, we are facing the “worst of the stagflationary 1970s” (inflation and recession at the same time) combined with the multiple debt crises of the 2007-2010 period. Because debt levels are far higher than in the 1970s, central banks will be put in an “impossible” position. They can raise rates and risk a gigantic debt crisis and depression. Or they can stay loose, and risk double-digit inflation and “deep stagflation”. They’ll be damned either way, since many governments will be semi-insolvent and “unable to bail out banks, corporations and households”. This disaster is approaching. “The question is not if, but when.” Half a year into Brexit proper, the worst “prophecies of shortterm disaster” have failed to materialise, says the FT. Kent did not seize up with lorries; pharmacy shelves did not empty; bankers failed to “decamp in their tens of thousands”. But if “disruption has not been visible” – partly masked by the pandemic – it has been significant and ominous. Nearly a third of British companies trading with the EU have seen business fall or stop altogether. All the early evidence confirms that “erecting barriers with the UK’s nearest and largest market” will damage long-term growth. And although financial services have lost less than feared, the UK is no longer pushing for a crucial equivalence deal, since it’s clear the EU will not grant it. Alas, “getting Brexit done” has brought not a “cathartic reset”, but further tensions and economic decoupling that must be reversed – via further deals on facilitation and market access – if all this damage is to be limited. The current Government, “tightly lashed to the Brexit mast”, has little interest in addressing this. Let’s hope future ones will be “more willing”. The received wisdom about the pandemic is that older people have paid with their health while the young have suffered economically, says James Moore. But research from the Resolution Foundation suggests that the economic pain has increasingly been shared across age groups. Older employees, for example, are finding it much harder to get off furlough and back to work. Of all UK workers on furlough in February, 26% of those aged 55-64 were still on full furlough in May, against just 6% of those aged 35-44 and 16% of those aged 18-34. The winding down of support now leaves older workers “in the firing line” for redundancy. So far, the Government has focused on helping younger workers, with initiatives like the Kickstarter scheme. Now it should focus on older people, starting with a onemonth extension of furlough, buying time to shape a broader policy response. It won’t be cheap, but it makes sense politically. Older people tend to be conservative, but “that might change if they feel abandoned. And right now they are being abandoned.” The suit and tie are “fast becoming endangered species in the corporate world” – their disappearance accelerated by the pandemic, says Ben Wright. Over numberless Zoom calls with business folk and bankers, I can recall only a handful in traditional business attire, while many had “regressed to polo shirts and even T-shirts”. Plenty of men will say: good riddance. But they should be careful what they wish for: “we discard the tried-and-tested combo” at our peril. Sticking to suits saves male office workers daily “bewildering” debate over what to wear. It also nullifies the faintly ludicrous displays of supposedly “nonconformist” power-play dress codes, such as those adopted by hedge fund managers (chinos, button-down shirts and armless fleeces) or tech entrepreneurs (compulsory white trainers). Most importantly, the rise of casual dressing risks further blurring the necessary boundary between being on and off duty. If you’re always working from home, you “never get to leave the office. And if you’re always casual, you never get to fully relax. The best thing about a suit may be that you can take it off.”

CITY 41 City profiles Andrew Jassy Amazon’s second-ever CEO, who started his new job on Monday, made a powerful first impression on Jeff Bezos soon after joining the upstart bookseller fresh from Harvard Business School in 1997. During a game of “broomball” – a blend of lacrosse and football invented by an Amazon staffer – the newcomer Jassy whacked the boss over the head with a kayak paddle. Bezos, 57, not only forgave Jassy, 53, but “quickly and repeatedly promoted” the intensely competitive New Yorker, said Rupert Neate and Sarah Butler in The Guardian. His faith paid off. As Bezos’s “intellectual sparring partner”, Jassy first suggested expanding from books into CDs and DVDs, and later proposed the company’s crucial move into cloud storage. Amazon Web Services, Jassy’s fiefdom, is now the company’s “most reliable source of profit”. Jensen Huang

The billionaire boss of chipmaker Nvidia credits an early stint working in a diner with giving him the confidence to start a business. Jensen Huang, a TaiwaneseAmerican, was a gifted but shy child, says Jamie Nimmo in The Sunday Times. He leapfrogged two years at school, but “I only had a few friends”, he says. “We were all in the same three clubs: the maths club, the computer club and the science club.” It was a job at Denny’s, the US diner chain, that helped him become less introverted. “It was a great way to get me out,” he says. And it was at a branch of Denny’s, on his 30th birthday in 1993, that Huang and friends “cooked up” the idea of Nvidia – now an industry giant valued at $500bn.

10 July 2021 THE WEEK

© WINNI WINTERMEYER/REDUX/EYEVINE

Commentators

Marketplace

42

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Shares

CITY 43

Who’s tipping what The week’s best shares

Entain The Sunday Times The online gaming firm has rebranded and is aiming for all revenues to come from regulated markets. Given shares are up 44% since MGM’s rebuffed January bid, there’s hope for a better offer. Jefferies names a £23.35 target price. Buy. £17.97.

Herald Investment Trust The Daily Telegraph Shares in the tech-focused trust have risen 80% in two years thanks to “extraordinary” fund manager Katie Potts. Herald’s well-diversified portfolio majors on small UK firms. Undeservedly cheap. Buy. £21.80.

JP Morgan The Daily Telegraph The diversified US giant offers investment banking, asset and wealth management. Solid, growing and gaining share in a fragmented market. Profitability is “up there with the best” – 14% last year despite the pandemic. Buy. $154.14.

James Latham Investors Chronicle After early pandemic disruption, the timber products distributor has staged a strong recovery. Margins remain elevated with short supply and strong demand from the construction and housebuilding sectors. Buy. £11.31.

Speedy Hire The Times Speedy provides drills, scaffolding, picks, shovels and the like to a wide customer base. Improving ESG credentials should put it in good stead to benefit from an infrastructure-driven construction boom. Buy. 70p.

Energean 1,000 950 900 850 800

Director sells 700,000

750 700

Feb

Burberry The Sunday Telegraph The departure of CEO Marco Gobbetti has wiped £1bn off the luxury house’s value. Finding a new CEO to partner creative chief Riccardo Tisci amid Burberry’s “partially successful” turnaround could take time. Sell. £20.49.

Crest Nicholson The Daily Telegraph Demand for good quality homes outstripping supply should continue to drive the housebuilder’s sales, prices and profits. Margins currently lag behind peers’, but are expected to improve. Hold. 429.2p. Petrofac The Times The oil services group is still impacted by the SFO’s probe into suspected bribery, corruption and money laundering, and is struggling to win work. Last year’s oil price crash didn’t help, and the order backlog continues to fall. Avoid. 111.1p.

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Finance chief Panos Benos has sold £5.6m-worth of shares in the oil and gas firm. Shares have recovered to the January 2020 level, and production is building, but operating losses have increased by a third and debt is high.

…and some to hold, avoid or sell Ashtead Group The Times The equipment-rental firm provided solar-powered light towers, electric bikes and other carbon-free kit for the G7 summit in Cornwall. Shares are punchy, but it’s well set to benefit from the US infrastructure splurge. Hold. £54.04.

Mar

Form guide

Sirius Real Estate The Daily Telegraph Property firm Sirius invests in German business parks. Hammered in the first couple of months of the pandemic, it has recovered losses, and rental rates and occupancy levels are up. Yields a well-covered 2.9%. Hold. 112p. Stagecoach Investors Chronicle Passenger numbers may take a while to return to pre-Covid levels. Meanwhile, the transport group has halted capex, cut the dividend and negotiated covenant waivers on debt. A dilutive placing may be necessary. Hold. 83p.

Shares tipped 12 weeks ago Best tip Helical The Times up 7.64% to 444.03p Worst tip Hilton Food Group Investors Chronicle down 1.55% to £11.44

Market view “The property market resembles a supermarket in the early days of lockdown: the shelves are bare and only the dregs remain.” Isabelle Fraser in The Daily Telegraph

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

6 July 2021 7100.88 4060.82 34454.40 14613.27 28643.21 28072.86 1791.35 74.44 2.97% 0.63 1.37

Best and worst performing shares Week before 7087.55 4042.58 34359.47 14502.44 28812.61 28994.10 1780.30 74.37 2.97% 0.74 1.49

2.1% (May) 3.3% (May) 8.8% (Jun)

$1.380 E1.167 ¥152.634

1.5% (Apr) 2.9% (Apr) 9.5% (May)

Change (%) 0.19% 0.45% 0.28% 0.76% –0.59% –3.18% 0.62% 0.09%

WEEK’S CHANGE, FTSE 100 STOCKS RISES Price % change 186.52 +7.26 Intl. Cons. Airl. Gp. 535.60 +6.44 Informa 967.40 +5.43 JD Sports Fashion 1572.00 +5.26 Compass Group 103.66 +5.15 Rolls-Royce Holdings FALLS Ocado Group Evraz Antofagasta CRH (Lon) Prudential

Following the Footsie 7,200

7,000

6,800

1901.50 586.60 1404.50 3600.00 1385.50

–7.78 –4.18 –3.04 –2.97 –2.77

FTSE 250 RISER & FALLER 195.00 GCP Student Living 440.00 Micro Focus Intl.

+19.80 –19.00

Source: Datastream & FT (not adjusted for dividends). Prices on 6 July (pm)

6,600

6,400

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

6-month movement in the FTSE 100 index

10 July 2021 THE WEEK

SOURCE: INVESTORS CHRONICLE

Dixons Carphone The Times Online electrical equipment sales doubled in the pandemic as customers upgraded their home technology. Profits swung to £33m after last year’s £140m loss. The dividend has been restored. Buy. 130.25p.

Directors’ dealings

The last word

44

A Cold War tragedy: the execution of the Rosenbergs On 19 June 1953, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sent to the electric chair for being Soviet spies. Sixty-eight years later, their sons are still trying to clear their mother’s name. Hadley Freeman reports “It was a queer, sultry summer, the summer they electrocuted the Rosenbergs…” So begins Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar, referring to the Jewish American couple, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and sent to the electric chair on 19 June 1953. Their execution is seen by many as America’s Cold War nadir. The Rosenbergs are still the only Americans ever put to death in peacetime for espionage, and Ethel is the only American woman killed by the US government for a crime other than murder.

espionage. Ethel’s brother, David Greenglass, had earlier been arrested for the same crime. Significantly, the Korean War – seen by the US as a life-or-death struggle with communism – had just begun. Senator Joseph McCarthy was warning about “homegrown commies”, and the US entered a red panic. A month later, Ethel too was arrested. She called Michael at home and told him that she had also been arrested. “So you can’t come home?” he asked. “No,” she replied. The seven-year-old screamed.

During their trial, Ethel in Julius and Ethel, like David Greenglass and his wife, Ruth, particular was vilified for were communists. Like many prioritising communism over her children, and the prosecution Jews, they became interested in insisted she was the dominant half the movement in the 1930s when of the couple, because she was it seemed a way to fight fascism. three years older. But questions Unlike many others, they stuck about whether she was guilty at with it after the Soviet Union and all have grown louder in recent Germany signed a non-aggression “Ethel thought life without Julius would have been valueless” years, and a new biography pact, ostensibly becoming allies. presents her in a different light. “Ethel was killed for being a wife. “These were people who grew up during the Depression,” says She was guilty of supporting her husband,” Anne Sebba, author Sebba. “They thought they were making the world a better of Ethel Rosenberg: A Cold War Tragedy, tells me. And for that, place.” David worked as a machinist at the Los Alamos atomic the 37-year-old mother of two had five massive jolts of electricity weapons laboratory. He was arrested after being identified as part pumped through her body. Eyewitnesses said smoke rose from of a chain passing atomic secrets to the Soviets. David admitted her head. The killing of the Rosenbergs was so shocking it became his guilt, and his lawyer advised the best thing he could do for part of popular culture, referenced in works by Tony Kushner and himself, and to give his wife immunity, would be to turn in Woody Allen. The most moving cultural response was E.L. someone else. Then the Rosenbergs were arrested. Doctorow’s 1971 novel, The Book of Daniel, which imagines the life of the Rosenbergs’ oldest child, whom he renames Daniel. In The FBI believed Julius was a kingpin who recruited Americans as spies and used David to pass on atomic secrets to the Russians. reality, the older Rosenberg child is called Michael, and his younger brother is Robert. The initial allegations against Ethel were that she “had a discussion with Julius Rosenberg and others in November 1944”, It is a bitter, rainy spring day, the “Ethel was guilty of supporting her husband. and “had a discussion with day I interview the Rosenbergs’ sons. Three and seven when their For that, the mother of two had five massive Julius Rosenberg, David Greenglass and others in January parents were arrested, six and jolts of electricity pumped through her body” 1945” – in other words, she ten when they were killed, they talked to her husband and are now known as Michael and brother. It was feeble stuff, as the FBI knew. At first, David Robert Meeropol, having taken the surname of the couple who testified that his sister had not been involved. However, his wife eventually adopted them. When their parents were arrested, said that Ethel had typed up information that David had given Michael, a challenging child, acted up even more, whereas Robert Julius to pass to the Soviets. David changed his story before the withdrew into himself. This dynamic still holds true: “Robert is more reserved and I fly off the handle,” says Michael, 78, a retired trial to corroborate his wife’s version, probably under pressure from Roy Cohn, the ambitious chief assistant prosecutor. This economics professor. Patient, methodical Robert, 74, a former was the key evidence against Ethel – but even with that, Myles lawyer, considers every word carefully. We are talking by video: Lane, the chief assistant attorney for New York’s Southern Robert is in Massachusetts, Michael in New York state. The District, admitted privately: “The case is not strong against Mrs differences between them are obvious, but so is their closeness: Rosenberg. But [to act] as a deterrent, I think it is very important since Michael’s wife, Ann, died two years ago, his brother has that she be convicted, too.” FBI director J. Edgar Hoover agreed. called him daily. “Rob and I are unusual siblings. We have dealt with so many struggles, we are very enmeshed,” says Michael. At the trial, David testified that he gave Julius details of the atomic bomb, and that Ethel was involved in their discussions. The brothers’ struggles began on 17 July 1950, when their father, Because he gave names, David ended up serving nine years. Julius, was arrested at their New York home on suspicion of THE WEEK 10 July 2021

The last word Ruth was free to stay home with the children. The Rosenbergs, who pleaded innocent, were found guilty. Judge Irving Kaufman carefully considered their sentence. Hoover, aware of how it would look if the US executed a young mother, urged against the death sentence for Ethel, but Cohn argued for it and won.

– i.e. he hadn’t passed on details about the atomic bomb. Michael was more sceptical of the Venona papers, wondering if they were “CIA disinformation”. But in 2008 he finally accepted them when Morton Sobell – who was convicted along with the Rosenbergs – publicly confirmed that Julius had not helped the Russians build the bomb. “What he gave them was junk,” Sobell said. Of Ethel, Sobell said, “What was she guilty of? Of being Julius’s wife.” In 1996, David Greenglass finally admitted he had lied about his sister: “I told them the story and left her out of it, right? But my wife put her in it. So what am I gonna do, call my wife a liar?” He added, “I frankly think my wife did the typing, but I don’t remember.” Ruth Robert and Michael: “we are unusual siblings” died in 2008, David in 2014.

Michael and Robert never saw the Greenglasses again after the trial, and all Michael remembers of them is: “David looked like a nondescript schlub and Ruth was a cold fish. But is that true, or just a nephew who wants to expose the people who lied about my parents?” he asks. Ethel herself has long been portrayed as cold. In reality, Sebba says, she was a devoted mother who consulted a child therapist to improve her parenting skills. But when she was arrested, all the aspirations she had of giving her boys a happy childhood imploded. At first the boys lived with her mother, Tessie, who resented the situation. Worse still, they were later put in a children’s home. Eventually, Julius’s mother, Sophie, took them in, but the boys were too much for their frail grandmother. None of their aunts or uncles would take them, so they were shipped around to various families.

© WEBB CHAPPELL/GUARDIAN/EYEVINE

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Robert launched the campaign for Ethel’s exoneration in 2015. Yet her innocence raises more questions than it settles. Given she was a true believer in communism, why didn’t she join Julius in spying? “Her main identity was as a wife and a mother,” says Sebba, “and that’s what mattered to her.” So why didn’t Julius save Ethel? He could easily have given names to save her life. “Dad’s unwillingness to rat out his fellows [was] personal,” says Michael. “These were his friends!” Until the end, Julius believed they wouldn’t go to the chair. The government hoped that, too – but they wanted names. After Ethel was killed, the deputy attorney general William Rogers said, “She called our bluff.”

For the boys’ sake, Ethel always maintained a happy front. “We always had a good time on prison visits: singing, talking, enjoying ourselves,” says Michael. He even used to play hangman with his father, although he didn’t realise the irony until he was an adult. The US government said that if Julius gave them names of other spies, and he and Ethel The defining mystery about confessed, their lives would Ethel is why she chose to stay “For the boys’ sake, Ethel always maintained silent. Her letters show that be spared. The Rosenbergs issued a statement: “By a happy front on prison visits. Michael even she was deeply in love with her husband, but also full of anxiety asking us to repudiate the used to play hangman with his father” truth of our innocence, the about the boys. “Ethel thought government admits its own life without Julius would have doubts concerning our guilt… we will not be coerced, even under been valueless,” says Sebba. “Because her sons would never have pain of death, to bear false witness.” On 16 June 1953, the respected her, because she would have had to name names.” Their children were brought to New York’s Sing Sing prison to say childhoods would have been easier “if Julius had cooperated”, says Robert. “He’d have been in prison and Ethel would have goodbye to their parents. On 19 June, Ethel and Julius wrote their last letter to their children: “Always remember that we been released” – as with the Greenglasses. “But as an adult I were innocent and could not wrong our conscience. We press would much rather be the child of Ethel and Julius than the child you close and kiss you with all our strength. Lovingly, Daddy of David and Ruth Greenglass.” and Mommy.” Just after 8pm, the Rosenbergs were executed. Michael and Robert’s campaign for their mother’s exoneration was struck a blow with the election of Donald Trump, whose The boys were eventually adopted by Abel and Anne Meeropol, an older left-wing couple. They grew up in anonymity among original mentor was none other than Roy Cohn. Robert says there loving people. Abel was a songwriter, whose biggest hit was was no point in asking Trump for help. But now the campaign is starting again, and they are “optimistic” President Biden will look Strange Fruit; the boys were raised on the royalties from the most at it favourably. I ask why it matters now. Why not leave this in famous song of the civil rights era. “Living with Abel and Anne, the past? “It’s personal as well as political,” says Robert, emphasit felt like we won the lottery,” says Michael. The boys enjoyed a ising both words. “That the US government invented evidence to happy upbringing, telling almost no one their real surname – until obtain an execution is a threat to every person in this country.” they were unmasked by the local media in 1973. They used the exposure to campaign for their parents, writing a memoir and The biggest question about Ethel for me relates to her sons. suing the FBI and CIA for the release of documents which they Following our interview, I end up speaking to them several more believed proved their parents’ innocence. times, partly because they are so delightful to talk to: intelligent, interesting, admirable. How did they triumph over such trauma? In 1995, however, the Venona papers were declassified. These Sebba tells me she asked the same thing of Elizabeth Phillips, the were secret Soviet messages intercepted by US counterintelligence. child therapist consulted by Ethel before her arrest. “She told me The Rosenbergs were named. Julius, it was now clear, had it was down to three things,” Sebba says. “She said, ‘One, they definitely been spying for the Soviets, codenamed him have a high level of intelligence. Two, they had amazing adoptive “Antenna” and later “Liberal”. David and Ruth Greenglass parents. But we now know how important those early years of life were also spies. But there was little about Ethel. She didn’t are, and Ethel must have given those two boys so much in those have a codename. She was, the cables noted, “a devoted person” years that it lasted all their lives. Ethel must have been an (i.e. a communist) but “[she] does not work” (i.e. she was not extremely good mother.’” a spy). “That transcript was as close to a smoking gun as we would get,” says Robert, “because it said Julius and Ethel A longer version of this article appeared in The Guardian. didn’t do the thing they were killed for. Ethel didn’t work and © Guardian News and Media Ltd Julius wasn’t an atomic spy, he was a military-industrial spy” 10 July 2021 THE WEEK

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Crossword

47

THE WEEK CROSSWORD 1268

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

An Ettinger travel pass case and two Connell Guides will be given to the sender of the first correct solution to the crossword and the clue of the week opened on Monday 19 July. Email the answers as a scan of a completed grid or a list, with the subject line The Week crossword 1268, to [email protected]. Tim Moorey (timmoorey.com) ACROSS 1 Comedy hits given credit (9) 6 I’m a leader of Muslims (4) 10 Shock from having rear-end chopped off in aerobatics (4) 11 Town shown by film in stereo? Not all of it (9) 12 What helps it all run smoothly in musical? (6) 13 Charlie hating to remove a garment? (8) 14 A little quiet merriment is organised around 1 May once (5,8) 19 Mess up transport? Some may be fired (13) 21 Most upset about Irish county (8) 24 Where farm workers may go for a snack (6) 26 Stress on pupils could be this (9) 27 Tarmac part of unmade-up avenue (4) 28 Garden feature stood out in leaves (4) 29 Each in turn cut off needing supporter (9)

DOWN 2 Being bookish is rarely up with IT (8) 3 Sort of car that’s the making of father (5) 4 Member of a clan merits ban when out of order (9) 5 Garden perhaps has pear tree finally cropped (5) 7 Without equal and without a game (9) 8 Jolly little one in French department (6) 9 Gen’s pregnant, Al’s gone missing (4) 15 Sounds like thoroughly modern lass went for bug (9) 16 NHS founder is close reportedly (3) 17 Player on bench has position that’s material (9) 18 VAT files sent causing celebration (8) 20 Southern Africa farmers saving vote for Chinese nationalists (6) 22 Glut, say with no end of fruit? (4) 23 Incomplete puzzle in rag (5) 25 A letter opener (5)

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Clue of the week: Despotic leader installed without a break (5, first letter P) The Guardian, Brendan Solution to Crossword 1266 ACROSS: 8 Sophia 9 Toodle-oo 10 Herr 11 Anticipate 12 Cinematographer 14 Knotted 16 Doyenne 19 Leonardo da Vinci 22 Strip light 24 Ritz 25 Marchesa 26 Israel DOWN: 1 Comedian 2 Charleston 3 Malaga 4 Station 5 Concerto 6 Flop 7 Goethe 13 Premier cru 15 Enrolled 17 Niceties 18 Douglas 20 Entrap 21 Astrid 23 Inch Clue of the week: It’s not true love, just a bit of passion in the van (6, first letter P) Solution: PHONEY (p + honey) The winner of 1266 is Caroline Brown from Stroud The Week is available from RNIB Newsagent for the benefit of blind and partially sighted readers. 0303-123 9999, rnib.org.uk/newsagent

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Sudoku 810 (very difficult) Fill in all the squares so that each row, column and each of the 3x3 squares contains all the digits from 1 to 9

Solution to Sudoku 809

2 7 6 5 1 4 9 3

4 3 1 9 8 7 5 6

7

8 5 9 3 6 2 1 4 7

9 8 2 4 3 1 7 5

1 4 3 6 7 5 2 8

7 6 5 2 9 8 3 1 4

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6 9 8 7 5 3 4 2 1

Charity of the week Universities UK encompasses 140 universities in England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Our member universities’ purpose is to maximise their impact for students and the public through teaching, research and scholarship. We are led by our members and act on behalf of universities. Our universities’ priorities are: Opportunity: anyone with the will and potential has the opportunity to transform their lives through access to an outstanding learning experience. Impact: our universities are world-leading in the production of knowledge and skills. Trust: by demonstrating a positive impact on students, economic growth and public services, they benefit from public trust. Global: they’re leaders in international education and research. Autonomous: they can make autonomous decisions according to their diverse missions and the needs of their communities. Visit universitiesuk.ac.uk for more information.

Tel no Clue of the week answer:

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