Features

Wednesday

Owen Matthews

The truth about Russia’s hidden Covid deaths

The secret is out: the Russian government has been lying to its people. Officially, Russia’s coronavirus death toll for last year — as reported on state television and logged at the World Health Organisation — was an impressively low 86,498 for a population of 146 million. In his traditional December press conference Vladimir Putin proudly reeled off statistics on how quickly Russia’s economy was recovering from the pandemic, and last month he made a triumphant address to a packed public concert to celebrate the anniversary of the annexation of Crimea in 2014. ‘Today is a holiday for our entire vast country,’ Putin told an 80,000-strong, maskless crowd at Luzhniki stadium. ‘Please, take a deep breath and answer this: Do we love Russia?

Thursday

Jenny McCartney

The competitive cult of cosiness

Do you remember the first wave of hygge, in 2015? It seems a long time ago — back in the freewheeling technicolour of a pre-Covid world — but at that time hygge was the hottest thing to come out of Denmark. The country already attracted envy for its vigorous welfare state, covetable knitwear and high rating on the international happiness index, but the new export outshone them all. It roughly translated as ‘cosy’, people said, but the English word was frail and puny next to the soul-feeding, friendship-cementing, quasi-spiritual force that was hygge. The latter signified home-baked bread and cakes, hand-knitted socks and friends laughing around a wooden dinner table as a hotpot bubbled on the stove.

Alicia Munckton

Do schools really have a problem with sexual violence?

I hadn’t heard of Everyone’s Invited until a few weeks ago, despite being mother to a 15-year-old girl. I was a little surprised to learn that the forum making the front pages, on which predominantly teenaged schoolgirls share their experiences of every-day sexism, sexual harassment and worse, was actually founded in June last year. The site received no prominence until it went viral following the death of Sarah Everard. As I write, the testimonies of those Wikipedia is terming ‘survivors of rape culture’ number almost 14,000.

Dominic Green

How Prince Harry became celebrity frontman for a very questionable industry

Prince Harry is now chief impact officer for BetterUp, a Californian corporate consultancy whose ‘mission’ is to sell online life coaching with — in his words, — ‘innovation, impact and integrity’. Harry may not realise it, but he is the latest celebrity frontman for the rapidly growing, broadly unregulated and frequently dubious corporate ‘coaching’ industry. And you might not realise it, but Harry, Duke of Malibu is your future, because California’s today is America’s tomorrow and Britain’s next week. BetterUp is one of a group of Californian companies on the growing, corporate edge of life coaching.

Kate Andrews

Britain’s vaccine success was supposed to lead to freedom. What happened?

In November, when cases were surging and a second lockdown was under way, Boris Johnson made a big promise: things might look bleak, he said, but the ‘scientific cavalry’ would arrive. It duly did, with a vaccination programme that became the envy of Europe. The mood of the country lifted. Today, Britain is still on course to become the first country in Europe to vaccinate its way out of the pandemic — and lockdown. The economy can reopen in time for summer: truly a great escape. Science achieved the seemingly impossible. Produced in record time, Covid vaccines are proving more effective than most predicted. In Britain, cases and deaths have fallen by 95 per cent since the latest peak, a stunning descent.

Boris Johnson

Boris on liberty: the PM has always been against ID cards – until now

‘I loathe the idea on principle. I never want to be commanded, by any emanation of the British state, to produce evidence of my identity.’ From the ‘personal notes’ on Boris Johnson’s website, February 2005 ‘There is the loss of liberty, and the creepy reality that the state will use these cards — doubtless with the best possible intentions — to store all manner of detail about us, our habits, what benefits we may claim, and so on.’ Daily Telegraph, November 2004 ‘The government would love to put issues such as these beyond the bounds of debate by creating an air of national emergency. As far as the Prime Minister is concerned, Britain is at war: with terrorists, muggers and fraudsters.

Anshel Pfeffer

In Israel, vaccine passports are already redundant

Jerusalem The vaccination centre where I got my jabs was in the cavernous foyer of the Jerusalem Arena, Israel’s largest indoor sports venue. Through the locked glass doors, I could see the seats where my 15-year-old and I spent so many hours cheering on our basketball team. Putting my ear to the door, I could hear the players practising. Last week, we were finally back in the stands after a year’s absence. Fans were allowed in, at quarter of the arena’s capacity. After showing my season ticket, I was then asked for my ‘green pass’, which proves I have been vaccinated. My son, too young for vaccination, had to queue outside for a quick Covid test before joining me.

Alexander Pelling-Bruce

The misguided plan to ‘retain and explain’ statues

When Mao’s Red Guards first got to work in China, they defaced statues before they tore them down. It was common to find a statue of Buddha, for example, with new signs saying: ‘Destroy the old world! Establish a new world!’ Boris Johnson’s government isn’t keen on statue removal, but it is offering a compromise. Oliver Dowden, the Culture Secretary, has adopted a policy of ‘retain and explain’, whereby the statue remains but with a plaque giving more historical context. Explanation, it is assumed, can only be good. Yet you only have to look at the single case where ‘retain and explain’ has been deployed to see what we could be in for.

Thursday

David Abulafia

University challenge: conservatives are now the radicals on campus

On the letters page of the Sunday Times last month, the presidents of the Royal Historical Society and the Historical Association were among the signatories to a letter boldly headlined ‘History must not be politicised’. They were incensed by a rumour that government funding might be cut for the Colonial Countryside project, which looks at possible connections between the British Empire, the slave trade and National Trust properties. Unable to recognise their own political bias, the letter-writers accused the government of ‘politicising’ history by trying to depoliticise it. This extraordinary self-belief, this insistence that academics occupy the high moral ground, reflects what is happening in British universities, not least among my fellow historians.

Mark Palmer

Britain’s travel ban brings risks of its own

No one knows for sure how many cars are on the road without insurance. The Motor Insurers Bureau puts it as high as one million, and a good number of these won’t have a valid MOT either. Come to think of it, many such uninsured cars without MOTs are likely to be in the hands of drivers who don’t even have licences. And yet it’s never suggested that only those who have a ‘reasonable excuse’ to drive should be allowed to do so, just in case of encounters with revved-up lawbreakers. We know there’s a risk — but we don’t close down all the roads in the country. We get on with our lives. But when it comes to international travel 12 months on from the start of this grisly pandemic, we are not allowed to get on with our lives.

Katy Balls

The new opposition: an interview with Ed Davey

When Boris Johnson sought to extend the government’s emergency powers for another six months last week, he faced little opposition in the Commons. Rather than fight for parliament’s right to scrutinise the government, Keir Starmer told Labour MPs to vote with the Tories. There was only one party of opposition: the Liberal Democrats. Ed Davey, the party leader, complained in parliament about the ‘draconian’ powers taken by the government, and whipped his MPs to vote against them. The 11 Lib Dem MPs are a much-depleted force from the 57-strong party that propped up David Cameron in the coalition years. After they have spent years struggling to find ways to be heard, could a rediscovery of liberalism do the trick?

Richard Dobbs

How should we tackle vaccine hesitancy?

As Britain celebrates its vaccination success, we’re in danger of missing something important. A great many people have been offered the vaccine, but have turned it down — and we hear very little about them. No. 10 briefings trumpet the numbers vaccinated in the past 24 hours but are silent on the numbers who have refused. This matters, because if vaccine passports are on their way, granting access to pubs and so on, the unvaccinated will be excluded. More importantly, the unvaccinated will be vulnerable to the virus as we unlock. We need to know more about them. Dig deep enough and rough figures are there. Let’s look at the over-seventies in England.

Gilles Demaneuf

WHO knows? We still can’t be sure of Covid’s origins

Could Covid-19 have originated from a Chinese lab accident? When the virus was first identified, many pointed out that it was close to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. It sounded like a conspiracy theory. But it’s all too plausible. And there are questions that the long-awaited report by the World Health Organisation leaves unanswered. Only after the pandemic started did Professor Shi Zhengli, director of the Center for Emerging Infectious Diseases at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, notice that a close viral relative to Covid-19 had been found in a mineshaft years before. There was an apparent pneumonia outbreak nine years ago at a copper mine in Mojiang, around 1,000 miles from Wuhan, in an area where Zhengli’s team regularly hunted for new viruses.

James Holt

What Mormons like me really believe

As one of the 200,000 British members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, my heart doesn’t leap when I hear about a new documentary made about us. Such films tend not to be flattering. But here’s the puzzle: if our faith is really based on nonsense, why is it growing? Why would people like me convert? If you can bear with me, I’d like to say a bit about who we are — and what we are not. We’re followers of Jesus Christ (i.e. Christians). Our scripture is the Bible. We also believe that the Book of Mormon, another Testament of Jesus Christ, revealed to Joseph Smith and published in 1830, is the word of God.

Damian Thompson

The troubling history of Mormonism

The new three-part Netflix series Murder Among the Mormons is attracting big audiences, and deservedly so. Finally someone has made a major documentary about Mark Hofmann, the squeaky-voiced Mormon nerd who was both the most brilliant document-forger in history and a psychopathic murderer. In the early 1980s, the young Hofmann manufactured a series of documents that portrayed its prophet Joseph Smith — the discoverer of the ‘gold plates’ that supposedly described a great Israelite civilisation in America — as a conman up to his ears in the occult. In 1985, panicking that he was about to be discovered, he blew up two Mormons with pipe bombs, was caught by police and is serving life in jail.

James Mumford

‘Spiritual but not religious’: the rise of consumerism in church

I was raised Christian and the more I’ve thought about it, the more curious something about my upbringing seems. My church was constantly denying it was ‘religious’. By any objective social--scientific measures, the community was decidedly religious. Maybe we weren’t that organised (there was no website), but we recited historic creeds, we submitted to the authority of a sacred text and we practised ancient rituals. We identified with the worldwide institutional expression of the body of Christ, yet we still liked to say we weren’t ‘religious’. Throughout my childhood I was reminded in sermon after sermon that we were ‘-Spiritual but not Religious’.

Marcus Berkmann

Has the vaccine cured my long Covid?

Everyone has their own Covid-19 story, and here’s mine. I caught it in Marks & Spencer in late March last year, when 200 clearly deranged panic-buyers set about stripping the store of its every last ready meal. Web designers grasping the last known packet of Our Best Ever Prawn Cocktail, estate agents fighting over the gooseberry and elderflower yoghurts: it felt like the end of times, and was actually one of the scariest experiences I have ever had. My friend Russell got it at around the same point at his daughter’s PTA meeting. He spent five weeks in hospital. Another parent died. There were four of us in this small flat. We knew if one of us got it, we all would. It was my daughter Martha, aged 20, who first started showing symptoms.

Tuesday

James Forsyth

The fightback: it’s time for the West to take on China

Boris Johnson says it is a mistake to ‘call for a new Cold War on China’. Yet China is, in many ways, a more formidable foe than the Soviet Union ever was. It is more integrated into the world trading system and its economic model is less flawed. This gives it a commercial pull in the West that the USSR never had. Its purchase over businesses and institutions goes some way to explaining why there is such reluctance in the UK, and the West more broadly, to take a tougher line on Beijing. ‘It’s the money, there wasn’t that complication in the Cold War,’ laments one cabinet minister. Yet in the past year China has made a series of tactical missteps.

Thursday

Douglas Murray

We don’t need a law against ‘conversion therapy’

Earlier this month, with the citizenry still confined to their houses, borrowing at record highs and GDP in a record slump, there was a debate in Westminster Hall about ‘conversion therapy’. An internet petition has called on the government to ‘Make LGBT conversion therapy illegal in the UK’. And so for a couple of hours MPs from across the major parties competed with each other to express their horror at gay and trans people being subjected to this practice. Feelings ran high. Nobody spoke against. One Conservative MP arguing for criminalisation, Alicia Kearns, claimed that she had come into parliament with ‘one legislative change I wanted to deliver, which was to ban conversion therapy’.

Melanie McDonagh

Teenage life has never been so fraught

You’ve heard about Everyone’s Invited? It’s the controversial new website for female students, mostly schoolgirls, to unburden themselves about boys behaving badly. It has trashed the reputation of some independent schools, Dulwich being the latest. There are sections for St Paul’s, Eton and Latymer Upper — and, among the private schools, my son’s state school, which takes girls in sixth form. The first thing my daughter, 14, does in the morning is to whip out her phone and scroll through the posts. ‘More from J’s school!’ she carols. ‘Look at these! Actual abuse!’ Frankly, I am far from pleased that she can understand the language on the wretched site. I take a look and, my goodness, it’s sordid.