Features

Thursday

Harry Mount

Women are obsessed with the Romans, too

Infamy! Infamy! That was my response to the TikTok trend about ancient Rome. Women asked their partners how often they thought about the Roman Empire. Many men admitted they thought about it every day; three times a day, said one. One confessed he was obsessed with ‘aqueducts and the fact that they had concrete that could harden’. The scoundrels who came up with the idea should have asked women. Because they, too, are obsessed with ancient Rome. ‘I’ll be at a picnic when I look at my sandwich and suddenly ask: “Did you know the Romans had sandwiches?”’ Professor Mary Beard told me: ‘I must confess that I probably think about the Roman Empire about 50 times a day… but then it is what I do. But I don’t think about macho men in military kit or orating in togas.

Jenny McCartney

An ode to the BlackBerry

The demise of tech plays out first as disorientation, then entertainment. We’ve reached the latter stage with the BlackBerry, the now-defunct Canadian harbinger of global smartphone addiction. A new film out this month charts its spectacular rise and fall: young folk, look up from your iPhones, and learn how in its Noughties heyday, the BlackBerry was beloved by Obama, Beyoncé and Madonna. With its seductively clicky Qwerty keyboard, it came to control 45 per cent of the mobile phone market. Then it plummeted to today’s share, zero. BlackBerry the movie had a particular poignancy for me, because I hung on to my final BlackBerry phone, the KeyOne, until well past its cultural sell-by date. Last May, in fact.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Hell is a heat pump

‘So, as Rishi Sunak has announced that we’re now allowed to keep installing new gas boilers till 2035, and they last about 15 years, that means I’ll be able to keep a gas boiler till 2050, so I might even be allowed to die with a gas boiler still going in my house, and may never have to switch to an ugly, expensive air-source heat pump which makes an annoying fridge-like hum in the garden, vibrates through the bedroom wall and keeps the house at a weird, lukewarm temperature all day and night.’ I think many of us were making that kind of calculation last month. Were we tempted by Sunak’s raised offer of a government grant of £7,500 for switching to a heat pump, up from £5,000, to reward us for doing our bit towards net zero? I don’t think so.

Wednesday

Katy Balls

Battle begins: inside Rishi Sunak’s plan to take on Labour

When David Laws moved in as chief secretary to the Treasury in 2010, he found a note from his predecessor Liam Byrne saying: ‘I’m afraid there is no money.’ It was the most famous parting gift in British political history. What was meant as a joke (Byrne had thought his friend Philip Hammond would get the job) quickly became the coalition government’s most effective weapon against the opposition: proof that Labour could not be trusted with the public finances. Today, Labour wants to level the same accusation against the Conservatives. ‘On the first day [in power], we need to land the message very quickly that the finances are in a very bad state and it is all because of the Tories,’ says one Keir Starmer aide. ‘We would need to make them wear it.

Melissa Kite

Train wreck: HS2 destroyed the countryside I love

When I drive to see my parents in the once-peaceful farming country where I grew up, it is a strange, bittersweet experience. The car journey takes me through places I ought to recognise but I don’t any more, because the green fields of Warwickshire, the villages and the farms, are scarred by the tortuous works of HS2. The distinctive red earth is laid bare for mile upon mile as the bulldozers do their worst. Rows of cottages and entire villages lie deserted, testimony to the billions already spent. As I drive along the main Banbury to Coventry road, I see mountains of earth piled high as flyovers take shape. I stare at this curiously outdated project – old hat both in terms of the controversy and the purpose it was meant to have.

Matt Ridley

The new age of gullibility

Is the Loch Ness Monster real? Many thousands of people think so. ‘Existence “plausible” after plesiosaur discovery,’ the BBC reported. ‘Hundreds join huge search for Loch Ness Monster.’ Not only that. The Beeb had live coverage of congressional hearings about possible UFO sightings in July. It ran a series on the yeti the previous month asking: ‘Is something out there in the Himalayas?’ Last year, an Autumnwatch presenter took seriously the possibility that large cats are roaming the countryside. What’s coming back next? Poltergeists, Ouija boards, the Bermuda Triangle, crop circles? Have we been time-ported back to the 1970s?

Nigel Biggar

What really motivates the ‘new progressives’

Kemi Badenoch is right to say that Britain is not a racist country. The data simply does not support the claim that black and ethnic minority (BME) people in the UK are generally disadvantaged because of the racial prejudice of white Britons – that ‘systemic racism’ is the cause of the problem. It also suggests that some ethnic minorities tend to perform better than others because of internal cultural factors – not least, strong families and high educational aspirations. By the same token, the cause of relative disadvantage often lies in culture, not racism.

Andrew Roberts

Why are House of Lords clerics so anti-Tory?

The bishops can smell blood in the water. Sensing how badly the Conservatives are doing in the polls, the two archbishops and 24 bishops of the Church of England in the House of Lords appear to have thrown aside any pretence of political objectivity and impartiality and have pitched themselves all-out against the government. This has been building up since the advent of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition in 2010, but the way that the bishops have taken their gloves off in the present session of parliament is shocking. Anglican bishops occasionally argue that they opposed the last Labour and coalition governments just as much as they do the present Conservative one, but consider these statistics. In 1999-2000 they opposed Tony Blair in 27.

Wednesday

Jonathan Sumption

Judgment call: the case for leaving the ECHR

The debate about the European Convention on Human Rights is in danger of being diverted into irrelevant byways. Hostility to the convention has become a trademark of the right wing of the Conservative party, which invites unnecessary partisanship. This is unfortunate, because the United Kingdom’s adherence to the convention raises a major constitutional issue which ought to concern people all across the political spectrum. It is far more important than Suella Braverman’s battles with boat people and ‘lefty lawyers’. Yet so far, the debate has rarely risen above the level of empty slogans, meaningless mantras and misleading claims.

Katy Balls

‘The zealots are turning people off’: Claire Coutinho on net zero and her bond with Rishi Sunak

When Claire Coutinho picked her A-levels in 2002, she received a phone call from her grandmother in India. ‘She could see that I’d not picked medical subjects,’ Coutinho says: she’d gone for maths, history of art and English – a glitch in the matrix for a family that tends to choose medical school. ‘She told me that she may not last very long and it was her final wish that I reconsider.’ Coutinho stuck to plan A; her grandmother lived for another ten years. Last month, at 38, she became one of the youngest secretaries of state in British history. We meet in her soon-to-be-vacated office with a rooftop view of Westminster Abbey and a whole floor of advisers and aides. Not so long ago, Coutinho was one of those advisers.

Lloyd Evans

Could I find a girlfriend on a Guardian Blind Date?

Free grub, free booze and the chance to fall in love. That’s the deal offered by Blind Date, a matchmaking strand in the Guardian that brings together lonely hearts and asks them to spill the beans. When I applied for this enticing freebie I had no expectation of being chosen, but my email was answered within hours. Amazing. Randy singletons are in short supply among Guardian readers. I was asked to describe my ‘interests’, which are rather limited. I tend to avoid travel, sport, art, museums, cars, planes, movies, pubs, music, parties, dancing, eating out or holidays. I’m never invited to dinner by anyone or ‘for the weekend’, thank God. I avoid TV, and my idea of hell is ‘a walk in the countryside’.

Svitlana Morenets

Should Ukraine hold a general election next year?

In the months before Russia invaded Ukraine last year, Volodymyr Zelensky was fighting for his political life. The former comedian was elected in 2019 on a pledge to end the war in Donbas by an electorate exasperated with its political class. Zelensky initially set out to negotiate with Vladimir Putin – but achieved nothing. He appeared naive and out of his depth. However, Zelensky’s transformation into a wartime leader captured the world’s imagination and rallied his allies. Yet some of those allies are beginning to ask whether, if this war is really about the free world versus autocracy, as Zelensky claims, Ukraine should hold a general election next year.

Tom Switzer

Meet the Aboriginal politician leading the charge against Australia’s Voice referendum

Sydney Every so often, in the life of nations, there comes a moment when a new political force articulates a sense of frustration at the old orthodoxies, or a yearning for something new. Sometimes, such a force turns into a momentous presence that transforms the national landscape. Australia has reached such a moment in the person of a 42-year-old Aboriginal mother of four. A conservative legislator for little more than a year, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, the shadow chancellor for indigenous affairs, has challenged the old, failed narratives which argue that systemic racism is responsible for indigenous woes and that a policy of welfarism and separatism is the answer. As a result, she has changed the nature of our national debate surrounding our Aboriginal population.

Rory Sutherland

Why we hate surge pricing – but love happy hour

A Dominican and a Jesuit were chain smokers. Both were eager to be allowed to smoke while performing their devotions, but needed to gain permission from a higher authority. ‘I tried asking the Prior, but he was dead against it,’ said the Dominican. ‘What did you ask, precisely?’ enquired the Jesuit. ‘Well, I asked him whether it was acceptable to smoke while I was praying.’ ‘Wrong question,’ replied the Jesuit. ‘I asked my Abbot whether I could pray while I was smoking. Permission granted.’ To economists, price is a number. To everyone else, price is a feeling This is called a framing effect and is one of the best attested findings in the psychological sciences.

Thursday

Leah McLaren

The simplicity and joy of recorded conversations

Recently I stumbled across a file of conversations I’d recorded with my seven-year-old son Frank back when he was four. Topics include his travels through wormholes, why he finds planet Earth ‘boring’, the tragic story of how his ‘first family’ died and how he got his ‘laser eyes’. It was only by listening to these voice notes three years later that I understood just how precious audio recordings are, and also how under-used. The conversations I taped illustrate the nuances of Frank’s four-year-old self more vividly than any photo or video could. Anyone attempting to write fiction should take note of the power of audio – conversation and voice are how character is built. A physical description tells you relatively little.

Melanie McDonagh

Parent trap: the relentless rise of children’s speaker Yoto

If you want a handy metaphor for contemporary childrearing, it’s a colourful plastic box with big red buttons on it. Yoto is the name, and before long, you’ll be seeing it where you already see children using screens – so pretty much everywhere. One in 50 British homes with a child under 12 is said to have one. It’s like a CD player-cum-iPad with ambitions to run your child’s life. The essential bits of it are plastic cards that you or the child – the idea is that the child has agency here – slot into the player to listen to a story, but there’s a whole range of other options – radio, podcasts, night lights, sound effects.

Wednesday

Christopher Caldwell

The enormity of the migrant crisis will upend European politics

When hundreds of mostly African migrants escaped from the transfer centre in Porto Empedocle, Sicily, last weekend and began roaming the town’s bakeries and shops begging for food, the mayor took to social media to explain. There were 2,000 migrants squeezed into a facility meant for 250, he told terrified locals. The conditions were inhumane. The repeated attempts to escape were inevitable. On the island of Lampedusa, 11,000 migrants had arrived in the space of five days. There were 6,000 migrants in a facility meant for 600. The Sub-Saharan Africans were fighting with the North Africans. ‘To get food is a problem,’ one migrant told a television interviewer. ‘If you don’t fight, you don’t have food.

Cindy Yu

125,000 Hong Kongers have come to the UK. Where are they?

The Revd Dave Ho Young wasn’t interested in being Chinese when he was growing up. After his parents’ divorce, he was brought up by his British mother in Shropshire, while his Cantonese father moved back to Hong Kong. These days, the Revd’s Chinese heritage plays a bigger part in his life: his evangelical C of E church, St Barnabas in Leeds, has become a gathering place for the city’s newly arrived Hong Kong émigrés. Two years ago, Britain opened the route to residency for Hong Kong Chinese who hold British National (Overseas) passports, after the National Security Law imposed by the Chinese Communist party ended the city’s ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement with the mainland.

Dan Hitchens

Inside the fastest growing – and shrinking – churches in the UK

The Pentecostal preacher is in full flow – his voice raised to near-deafening volume, his gestures expansive but exact, the congregation murmuring back a chorus of ‘Amens’ – when he receives an unexpected interruption. ‘A woman asked me at the barbecue last week,’ he is telling us, ‘“Pastor, if I won the Lottery…”’  A voice somewhere to his right intervenes. ‘A-MEN!’ A wave of laughter from the congregation. The preacher rides it. ‘No! Don’t Amen that! We don’t believe in lotteries, we believe in work. Hard work. So, she asked me, “Pastor, if I won the Lottery, and I gave the money to the church repair fund, would you accept it?” And I said…’   The congregation is quiet again. We’re in the realm of moral theology.

Owen Matthews

The exiled activists who dream of dismantling the Russian empire

There is a dream called the Republic of Ingermanlandia. This republic’s values will be European, its borders will be open and it will prosper like its neighbour Estonia on the back of a booming digital economy. For the moment Ingermanlandia is better known as Russia’s Leningrad Region, and its capital as St Petersburg. But soon, promises Maxim Kuzakhmetov, a leader of the Ingria Without Borders independence movement, Russia will suffer ‘catastrophic defeat in Ukraine and will collapse like the USSR, or like all the empires who lost the first world war’ and disintegrate into its constituent regions. This week in London and Paris, exiled activists from more than 40 regions of Russia will gather for the Free Nations of Post-Russia Forum.