Features

When asked to describe in three words what it means to win Badminton, the world’s most challenging and prestigious equestrian event, Jonelle Price — this year’s victor and the first woman to take the title for a decade — knocked back a glass of champagne and answered: ‘Dreams. Come. True.’ For the past 20 years Jonelle has relied on dreams and phenomenal willpower to get to the top of the exclusive and very expensive sport of eventing. Hers has been a different route from the classic one of ‘Daddy bought me a pony’ (or in the case of her fellow competitor, Princess Anne’s daughter Zara Tindall, ‘Mummy’). The child of suburban parents, Jonelle first sat on a horse as an eight-year-old.

I meet Bernard-Henri Lévy in a colossally luxurious hotel on a tree-lined avenue just behind the Elysée Palace. The French philosopher is half-reclining on a sofa, with one ankle tucked under his thigh, beneath an ornamental bookcase bearing a bust of Voltaire. He wants to discuss his new play, Last Exit Before Brexit, which will receive its world premiere at Cadogan Hall, London, on 4 June, under the auspices of the Hexagon Society. The play takes the form of a 100-minute monologue. What’s it about? ‘A group of anti-Brexit intellectuals decide to organise a last-chance event in the symbolic city of Sarajevo. They ask me to deliver the keynote speech.

When my husband, John, was born in 1946, doctors were the chief agents of adoption. His mother was young, single, pregnant and desperate. Her doctor had another patient, a happily married but childless woman in search of a baby. The doctor, knowing the two women, solved both their problems by handing John to his new parents at birth. Thirty years later I adopted my Cambodian daughter, Li-Da, with minimal fuss. We had a visit from a social worker to check us out. Within days a legal guardian was appointed, and we were allowed to foster Li-Da at once. After three months, with the occasional visit from her guardian, we adopted her. How very different it is today.

The extermination of every single one of South Georgia’s rats, for the sake of its birds, was confirmed at a press conference in London last week. A summer of searching with dogs and bait two years after the last poison was deployed turned up no sign of a rodent. This achievement is remarkable, not least because it was deemed impossible right up until it was achieved. It was a barmy idea, way out there, crazy, bound to fail. Like lots of other ideas. Maybe there’s a lesson here. The island got infested with rats from whaling ships centuries ago, and they soon exterminated endemic pintails and pipits from the main island, driving the remnant populations of prions and petrels into the rat-free mountains. Only the penguins were rat proof.