Features

Thursday

Peter Jones

How I bonded with Tom Stoppard over the classics

Many years ago, and well retired, I was working in my study when the phone rang and a voice said: ‘This is Tom Stoppard. David West put me on to you.’ West was professor of Latin at Newcastle University and Tom called him when he had queries about Latin. But he had a question about the ancient Greeks which David could not answer, so he suggested Tom try me. I have no memory of what the question was, but my answer must at least have satisfied him because he continued to throw the odd leg-break my way. To give some idea of his range of interests, on one occasion he became interested in the Greek perfect tense. He had done Latin and some Greek at his school in Yorkshire.

Michael Simmons

Labour is now the party of welfare, not work

Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have gone into bunker mode. The pair – whose political fortunes are so tightly bound – have been forced all week to defend the Chancellor’s claims at last week’s Budget that there is a black hole in the country’s finances. Mendacity soon gave way to something closer to bewilderment. Neither can grasp why they are being called out for their omissions and dishonest briefings – always more fiction than fiscal – about the state of the economy. Their new argument is this: once you factor in the Budget’s own measures – welfare increases, the U-turn on winter fuel payments and the desire to increase headroom – a hole did indeed appear. They insist they had no choice.

Thursday

Tim Shipman

Nick Thomas-Symonds: ‘The Brexit architects essentially ran away’

With his owlish expression and affable manner, Nick Thomas-Symonds looks more like the academic that he was, rather than the political bomb disposal expert he has become. Brexit is the greatest political issue for a generation, yet Keir Starmer has chosen to put this softly spoken Welshman in charge of defusing it. The Cabinet Office minister, responsible for post-Brexit negotiations with the EU, is following in the footsteps of Olly Robbins and David Frost, but his lack of public notoriety says much about how things have changed as we approach the tenth anniversary next year of the vote to Leave.

Taki

My life as a writer

It was roughly 55 years ago, at the tail end of the 1960s, that I took the monumental decision to become a writer. It wasn’t exactly an agonising one. By then I’d been on the European tennis circuit for a decade, and was kaput. Joining the circuit at 19, I travelled non-stop seeing the world. I was never tired or hungover no matter how much I partied – and I partied relentlessly. And, needless to say, there were constant thump-thumps in the heart, as at every opportunity I pursued beautiful women. Right out of the box, I found writing easy. Well, it was not exactly writing; copying is the better word I had a great advantage in this regard. As one of the worst players on the circuit, I was usually free to pursue the fairer sex by the second day of the tournament.

Julie Burchill

The art of owning up

Though Rebecca Culley is obviously a wrong ’un – having stolen £90,000 from her dear old gramps while pretending to care for him and only spend a minimum of his cash on ‘bits and bobs’ – I couldn’t help feeling a flash of admiration for her. When she was caught bang to rights, she diagnosed herself as a ‘spoilt brat’. At last, a person with lousy personality traits – in this case acquisitiveness, laziness and dishonesty – has refused to reach for some bogus medical synonym to justify their behaviour and has used words which all of us can read and think: ‘Yep, sounds about right.

James Heale and Michael Simmons

Bring back the Budget tipple!

Of all Gordon Brown’s mistakes, perhaps the most sobering was his decision to end the tradition of drinking at the despatch box on Budget day. Commons convention holds that alcohol in the chamber is forbidden – with the sole exception of the chancellor when making his or her big speech. Rachel Reeves is known to like an Aperol spritz, though sadly not enough for her to restore this great custom. But we wanted to do our bit, so in protest at this abstemiousness we set ourselves a challenge: try every chancellor’s drink for which records are available, all in one sitting.  The tradition of the ‘Budget tipple’ seems to have been popularised in the 1850s, with Benjamin Disraeli. ‘Dizzy’ favoured a simple brandy and water – good for keeping one alert, warm and alive.

Nicholas Wade

The scientific case for marriage

‘Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.’ With this stern admonition, the Church has long been a fervent defender of marriage. But as religion has faded as a social force, so too has marriage. The annual number of marriages in the UK has halved since 1970, with a similar decline in the rate in the US. Does it much matter if people choose to shack up together instead of tying the knot? What is lost if some men are incels or if women decide a husband is a bothersome surplus to their needs? The problem is that all lifestyles alternative to marriage serve to undermine it. And like other major social institutions, marriage is not some arbitrary cultural construct like a bank holiday.

Madeline Grant

Marriage is the real rebellion

Jonathan Swift had a suitably unromantic attitude to holy matrimony. Once, when sheltering under a tree during a storm near Lichfield, he was asked to marry a heavily pregnant bride to a rather guilty-looking groom. Asked to provide evidence that he had performed the shotgun wedding, Swift found a piece of paper and wrote: Under an oak, in stormy weather,I joined this rogue and whore together;And none but he who rules the thunderCan put this rogue and whore asunder. Despite his cynicism, even Dean Swift would lament the marginalisation of one of our foundational institutions. Marriage is undergoing a seemingly inexorable decline. In the 1970s, almost three quarters of the adult population were married.

Owen Matthews

The path to peace in Ukraine will be tortuous

In order to impose peace terms, you first need to win the war. That fundamental principle seems, for the moment, to elude Ukraine’s European allies. Donald Trump, on the other hand, has taken the more pragmatic – some would say more cynical – view that Ukraine will never defeat Russia and therefore needs to make the best of a bad lot. Trump’s strategy for peace in Ukraine has been to browbeat Volodymyr Zelensky into approving a deal acceptable to Vladimir Putin. In fairness, Trump has also gone some way to putting the squeeze on the Kremlin too, by sanctioning the oil giants Rosneft and Lukoil, authorising the Ukrainians to use US--provided long-range weapons against Russian targets, and threatening to provide Kyiv with Tomahawk cruise missiles.

Lara Brown

Are you too cool for marriage?

The term ‘spinster’ doesn’t seem to scare young women like it once might have. In fact, it is rarely heard nowadays. Instead, women are declaring themselves ‘alpha singles’ and eschewing dating altogether. Influencers are keeping their relationships quiet, for fear that simply posting photos of a new amour can lead to an exodus of followers. Vogue has declared boyfriends to be unfashionable. Women, it seems, are swapping engagement rings for solo travel, matcha lattes and nights spent at home with an LED face mask. Is marriage suddenly uncool? There are certainly plenty of women pushing this idea. Elle McNamara, a beauty influencer who goes by the name ‘Bambi Does Beauty’, posts advice videos on Instagram and TikTok aimed at other women.

Thursday

Melanie McDonagh

Would you pay £65 for toothpaste?

Time was, you didn’t look forward to going to the dentist. Even for routine stuff, your highest aspiration would be to get it over as quickly as possible with as little unpleasantness as possible. Most of the procedures seem pretty mechanical, including having the most sensitive bits of your teeth scraped with a metal thing. That was what I thought before I encountered Anti-Ageing Dentistry at the Nejati clinic in Belgravia, where the founder – it seems wrong to call Brandon Nejati a mere dentist – talks about ‘pampering’. This is where a really expensive luxury spa meets dentistry and it’s the most obvious example of how oral care is changing.

Matt Ridley

Are we finally about to crack fusion energy?

Imagine dropping a pea-sized capsule through a spherical chamber and hitting it with a colossal bolt of laser energy as it falls. If the capsule contains a mixture of deuterium and tritium, two heavy versions (isotopes) of hydrogen, then the atoms may fuse, turning into helium and emitting fast neutrons as they do so. Those neutrons and their accompanying radiation can heat molten salts around the walls of the chamber and that heat can be used to power industrial processes – or to boil water and generate electricity through a steam turbine. That’s the dream of a firm called Xcimer, one of the more ingenious fusion energy startups, based in Colorado.

Andreas Roth

The catastrophic dumbing down of German education

German teachers are a privileged species. Most of us enjoy the status of a Beamter, a tenured civil servant. We can be dismissed only after a serious criminal conviction, we are exempt from social insurance contributions, and even our mortgage rates are lower. Such comfort discourages dissent. Yet, after more than 25 years as a pampered Beamter, I find myself overwhelmed, not by the teaching load or the students, but by the accelerating erosion of academic standards. Having taught English, history and Latin at four different Gymnasien, the equivalent of a grammar school, I have learned that challenging students is frowned upon by both bureaucrats and politicians. Nearly all my colleagues agree that standards have plummeted.

Owen Matthews

Ukraine is on the verge of political collapse

Defeat, political implosion and civil war – those are the jeopardies that Volodymyr Zelensky faces as Ukraine heads into the most difficult and probably the last winter of the war. Evermore effective Russian strikes against Ukraine’s energy and transport infrastructure are likely to plunge swaths of the country into cold and darkness. Russian troops continue to push forwards slowly and bloodily in Donbas and, more dangerously, on the southern flank in Zaporizhzhia. Desertions from the Ukrainian army are up four times since last year and the number of deserters now matches the number of active fighters. The US has turned off the money taps and Europe struggles to produce the cash Kyiv needs to keep its war effort going.

William Atkinson

My teenage brush with a micropenis

Like Adolf Hitler, I have been involved in a Channel 4 documentary about penises. I also share a love for watercolours and a partiality for Wagner but that, I promise, is where the similarities end. But back to penises. The Führer’s genitalia – or lack thereof – is a feature of a new documentary, Hitler’s DNA: Blueprint of a Dictator. The documentary makers have examined a scrap of the bloodied fabric from the bunker sofa upon which Hitler blew his brains out and the long – but mostly the short – of the findings are that history’s most evil man likely had underdeveloped sexual organs, including a micropenis and an undescended testicle.

Michael Simmons

The greatest threat to the economy? The Employment Rights Bill

On Monday night, former England manager Gareth Southgate joined MPs and philanthropists for an event in Westminster described as ‘the Oscars of the charity world’. Cabinet ministers Lisa Nandy and Bridget Phillipson joined the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) in handing out prizes to five charities that help those who fall through the cracks. Across the winners, a single theme stood out: the transformative power of a good job. But Britain is running out of those jobs. Vacancies are falling, unemployment has risen to 5 per cent, while a deeper crisis sits beneath both: nine million working age people are economically inactive, including more than four million on out-of-work benefits with ‘no work requirement’.

Richard Dearlove

Britain’s national security must not be sacrificed to net zero

Those who, like myself, experienced life behind the Iron Curtain understand instinctively that centrally planned economies beholden to an ideology do not bring benefit to the majority of the population on whom they are imposed. A few top-level individuals prosper, but the citizen finds himself and his aspirations crushed by the diktats of central government. The state itself is similarly confined by a set of ideas which are presented as self-evident truths which constrain its policy--making and exclude challenge. That Iron Curtain model describes pretty accurately the UK’s energy policy, driven as it is by the ideological pursuit of net zero and the diktats required to implement it.

Tim Shipman

It’s time to dispose of the Budget

Denis Healey’s ‘caretaker Budget’ on 3 April 1979 is an odd focus for Labour nostalgia. It came a week after Jim Callaghan’s government had lost a vote of no confidence, paving the way for Margaret Thatcher’s arrival in No. 10. Healey was reduced to merely introducing the finance bill to maintain normal tax collection functions, and made no other announcements at all. But as chaos surrounds Rachel Reeves’s second Budget next week, one senior figure fondly recalled that simpler time. Healey began his 27-minute ‘non-Budget’ (as Geoffrey Howe called it) speech by confessing: ‘I feel a little bit like a man who turns up to play the leading role in the opera and all they want him to do is to help them hold the scenery together.

Thursday

John Power

Britain’s cities are descending into a San Francisco-style nightmare

One morning a few months ago I was walking past St James’s Park station when a dishevelled man with his fists clenched stepped into my path without warning. He stared at me furiously and blocked my path, body almost shaking. For a few tense seconds he stood there before I crossed the road to get away from him. ‘Most rough sleepers are harmless and vulnerable, but a small minority are violent’ When I told friends who work in central London about this incident, I was shocked at how typical my experience was. For people who commute into Westminster, it is becoming commonplace to be spat at, lunged at and screamed at to ‘fuck off’ by individuals who appear to be high on illegal drugs.

Rosie Lewis

How to get Britain eating healthily again

Another week, another government offensive against childhood obesity. This time it’s a fresh round of pleas for new levies on junk food. And right on cue, out come the sympathetic pundits with a familiar lament: the poor simply can’t afford to eat well. Carrots are unaffordable and broccoli is a luxury that only the middle class can stretch to. It’s a predictable narrative. It’s also wrong, or at least, far from the whole truth. I say this having lived the messy reality of fostering, where I’ve had the privilege, and sometimes pain, of stepping into lives different from my own. For more than 20 years, I’ve cared for children pulled from homes where parenting skills are scarce and where ‘dinner’ might consist of a handful of sweets and a packet of crisps.