Features

Wednesday

Nicholas Farrell

Why Giorgia Meloni is key to ‘stopping the boats’

Ravenna, Italy Whatever Rishi Sunak does to ‘stop the boats’, the fight to prevent illegal immigration to Britain and Europe will not be won or lost in the English Channel. It will be decided in the sea between Italy and Africa. At a recent EU summit in Brussels, Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s new right-wing Prime Minister, warned that if the crisis-torn dictatorship of Kais Saied in Tunisia falls, then there will be ‘an invasion’ of Italy this year of ‘up to 900,000 migrants’. Tunisia has become a new major departure point for migrants coming to Europe. An Italian secret service report, meanwhile, warns that another ‘685,000 migrants’ are ready to cross to Italy from Libya.

Thursday

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Help! I’m trapped in a 15-minute city

It’s a nasty moment when you receive a letter informing you that a fortnight ago, at a specific number of minutes past an hour, your car was photographed turning into a side road which, at the time, you had no idea you weren’t allowed to turn into.   You vaguely recall the junction. There was no ‘No entry’ sign: just a torrent of words (‘except’, ‘through’, ‘motor vehicles’, ‘access’) that you didn’t have time to read. That outing will now be forever sullied in your memory by the £65 fine. Protesting ‘but the sat-nav told me to do it!’ is as ineffectual, legally speaking, as Adam bleating to God that ‘the woman gave me fruit from the tree and I did eat’. The punishment is still enforced.

Tuesday

Rishi Sunak

What I learned from Nigel Lawson

The memory of Nigel Lawson will always be a blessing. He was the embodiment of serious radicalism, a politician who changed Britain for the better – and for good. When I became chancellor, I hung a picture of Nigel behind my desk in No. 11. It was a large photograph of him holding up his red Budget box. It was an image which summed up the intellectual confidence that he brought to the job. But it was also a reminder of the sheer amount of preparation, hard work and attention to detail that he had put in to get the party and the government into a position where it could do those radical things.

Dan Hitchens

The third great crisis in Christianity

After he anoints the King next month, Justin Welby’s thoughts will perhaps turn to his own future. If Anglican gossip is to believed, Welby plans to step down to make way for a new Archbishop of Canterbury once the new Supreme Governor has been crowned. You could hardly blame him for wanting a quiet life: the divisions within the Church of England are more acute now than at any time since he was enthroned ten years ago. Ever since February, when the C of E’s parliament, the General Synod, voted to introduce blessing services for same-sex couples, conservatives have been up in arms.

Owen Matthews

‘Navalny is ready to fight and win’: meet the Russian rebel’s chief of staff

Ever since the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny was arrested and imprisoned on trumped-up charges in January 2021, Navalny’s Anti-Corruption Foundation (FBK) has fought tirelessly to keep its leader in the public eye – and to continue his work exposing the corruption of the regime. Just under 130 million people viewed the FBK’s YouTube video ‘Putin’s Palace’, which detailed the outrageous luxury of a seaside palace built for Russia’s leader and the complex web of offshore schemes that financed it. The documentary Navalny – which details the opposition leader’s investigation into his own near-fatal poisoning by a team of FSB assassins in Tomsk in August 2020 – won the best documentary award at this year’s Oscars.

Svitlana Morenets

The blurred lines between patriotism and profiteering in Ukraine

What is the right way to commemorate a war when it is still being fought? Many victories, tragedies and acts of defiance have already been depicted in Ukrainian books, films and art. Popular subjects include the liberation of Snake Island, the defence of the Azovstal plant, the horrors of the Bucha massacre, a woman offering sunflower seeds to an occupying Russian soldier so they can grow when he dies, and the sinking of the Moskva warship. However, it doesn’t take much to blur the lines between patriotism and profiteering. Anything with a military logo sells. Military--patriotic themes are being used to flog all sorts of products. War symbols have been slapped on socks, flip flops, vodka labels, designer clothes, sweets and even sex shops.

Christopher Howse

The surprising beauty of Mass in a burnt-out church

As I sat down on the folding chair at Sunday morning Parish Mass, it sank a little into the mud. We were in a tent with one side open, floored with bruised and quaggy grass, like an agricultural show on a chill bank holiday. There were 13 of us and nine in the choir, who sang a brief setting by Monteverdi. The celebrant, the Revd Kate Harrison, in alb and stole, sat behind the wooden altar on a tall office chair. A server produced clouds of incense with a thurible. A homemade board hanging from the tent-poles gave the hymn numbers: 430, 234, 408, 440. A blackbird joined in after Communion. We were in the fresh spring air because the church of St Mark, in St John’s Wood, had burnt down on 26 January, leaving nothing but empty windows, a shell of walls and a charred steeple.

Bernard Cornwell

My invitation to meet King Arthur

I am in Charleston, South Carolina, whither we fly to escape the northern winter, which so far has not been too frigid. Charleston is anything but frigid. Last week we attended a cocktail party and I overheard two elegant ladies who were discussing a gentleman glimpsed across the candlelit courtyard. One remarked on his good looks, whereupon the other replied: ‘I think I was married to him once.’ Pure Charleston. But our dog, Vicky, has been severely disappointed by the winter. The rest of the USA seems to be buried in snow, but on Cape Cod we have seen scarcely three inches, and Victoria adores the snow, believing it to be sent for her particular pleasure.

Thursday

Lucy Holden

A toast to the old man pub

I’ve always preferred ‘old man pubs’ to bars, old man pubs being the kind decked out in mahogany and offering up a gin and tonic to anyone clueless enough to ask for a cocktail. Having just moved to Glasgow, I find myself surrounded by these sorts of places, Scotland practically being the home of pubs so wooden they’d float. There’s a joy in walking into a pub and the staff knowing your name. I’m 33 and I’d like to meet someone, but I also want to make friends. My initial idea was to use dating apps to contact people in Glasgow. I recced Hinge from Bath, where I last lived, and set up dates for the first week I arrived. It was all too easy – I only had to say I was new in Scotland and I was immediately offered a dozen tours.

Wednesday

Jonathan Miller

Macron’s last adventure: the President vs the public

Montpellier Every generation or so, French politics is decided on the streets. The May 1968 unrest in Paris spread worldwide; Jacques Chirac’s welfare reform agenda was ended with the 1995 disturbances. The spirit of revolt is so alive in French society that a special police force exists for such occasions, specialising in crowd control. Now President Emmanuel Macron is facing another sustained revolt. Eight weeks into the battle over his pension reforms, it’s far from clear who – if anyone – is winning. Police cars and buildings have been set alight in Strasbourg, Lille, Saint-Étienne and Bordeaux. In Paris, bin men have just ended a three-week strike: some 10,000 tonnes of garbage is piled up on the streets and the city is infested with well-nourished rats.

Posie Parker

Fear and loathing in New Zealand

The mob lunged towards me, screeching and grabbing, and I knew that if I fell I would never get up. I’ve stopped expecting mercy from anyone whose motto is ‘Be kind’ but the event last week was terrifying. I was sure in that moment, on the New Zealand leg of my ‘Let Women Speak’ tour, that the trans activists who surrounded me would trample me to death if they could. They gather in menacing groups to intimidate us and hurt us if they can, just to prevent us speaking a simple truth: that women don’t have penises, men don’t have vaginas, there is no such thing as non-binary and transitioning children is abuse. We started these talks at Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park, London and have now taken them around the UK and across the USA.

Lisa Haseldine

David Kezerashvili: ‘Georgia is a proxy of the Russian state’

David Kezerashvili knows better than most what standing up to Russia entails. He helped to overthrow the Kremlin-aligned Georgian government during the 2003 Rose Revolution. Then he served as Georgia’s defence minister for two years including when Russia invaded in 2008. He eventually fled to London in 2012 when the Kremlin-backed Georgian Dream government accused him of embezzling $5.2 million in state funds. Seven criminal charges were levelled against him, including extortion and money laundering. None was upheld in court, until two years ago when the country’s Supreme Court overturned the embezzlement acquittal, sentencing him in absentia to ten years in prison.

Charlotte Eagar

Getting a job after 50 is easier said than done

I am fed up with the government claiming that half a million professionals aged over 50 are reluctant to get back to work. They make it sound like we’re all on cruises, gardening or watching telly. But have they actually tried getting a job after the age of 50? I’m not doing nothing, I hasten to add. Part-time, I run a successful, if tiny, NGO, producing plays with refugees. Our work is studied at universities all over the US and Europe. I write books and screenplays and I once made a film that got into Cannes. But none of this has yet translated into the security provided by cold hard cash, so I spend half my time applying for jobs. If you’re too high-powered, you’re a threat and/or too expensive.

Sean Thomas

The decline and fall of urban America

They’re calling it ‘revenge travel’: the desire to make up for the touring opportunities we all lost when we were locked down in our pandemical homes. As a keen professional traveller, I confess I’ve got a fearsome case of this bug: I’ve spent the past 20 months going just about anywhere I can, playing catch up. Here’s a brief list of the cities I have visited since mid-2021: Tbilisi, Seville, Munich, New Orleans, Lisbon, Reykjavik, Bangkok, Yerevan, Rome, Istanbul, Athens, Da Nang, Nashville, Los Angeles, Florence, Phnom Penh, Tucson. I could add a dozen more, but you get the gist. I’ve missed a terrific number of domestic social engagements; but I have recently seen quite a lot of the world and, more pertinently, seen how the urban world is coping post-pandemic.

Ross Clark

What David Attenborough’s ‘Wild Isles’ doesn’t tell you

It is not just Gary Lineker, apparently, who has fallen victim to sinister right-wing forces at the BBC. A follow-up programme to David Attenborough’s BBC1 series Wild Isles, focusing on the decline of UK wildlife, will not be shown on terrestrial television but only made available on iPlayer. ‘The decision has angered the programme-makers and some insiders at the BBC,’ reports the Guardian, ‘who fear the corporation has bowed to pressure from lobbying groups with “dinosaurian ways”.’ The BBC has claimed that the extra programme – which, like the whole of the Wild Isles series, is co-produced by the WWF and the RSPB – was never intended to be shown on BBC1.

Thursday

Dan Hitchens

The ebb and flow of life on a houseboat

In the spring of 2021 I took a man to a pub in Hackney and bought him a drink. Perhaps he should have been doing the buying, since I had just handed him a large sum in return for his narrowboat. But I was in an exultant mood. No London flat, I reasoned, could ever be as cosy as that low-ceilinged, teak-panelled interior with its coal-burning stove and narrow cabin bed. And outside it lay a pathway to adventure through the hidden districts of the capital, their parks, nature reserves, railway bridges, gasholders, locks, warehouses and waterside pubs. Such thoughts, amplified by a sub-genre of YouTube and Instagram accounts, tempt scores of idealists on to the canals each year. They quickly discover reality.

Wednesday

Harriet Sergeant

Ghost children: the pupils who never came back after lockdown

‘There was this guy in my year who never came back to school after lockdown,’ a 14-year-old girl at a comprehensive in the Midlands says. ‘Then one day my friends and I saw him by the shopping centre. He was, like, sitting on a piece of cardboard by the side of the road, looking a bit homeless. Other kids recognised him and bought him food and clothes. He’d always been popular. Then someone told a teacher and a couple of days later he came back to class. But he was so far behind, he grew frustrated and angry, and then one day he just upped and left for good.’ That boy is a ghost child – a victim of the disastrous policy of school closures during the Covid pandemic. On 8 March 2021, when schools reopened, everyone expected that it would be business as usual.

Damian Thompson

How to lose friends and ghost people

In Elizabeth Day’s new book about the fragility of friendships, annoyingly but memorably entitled Friendaholic, there’s a gripping chapter on ‘ghosting’, the process of turning a friend into an ex-friend without explaining why. It culminates in the act of cutting them dead in public. I’ve always found it a haunting experience when someone does it to me, and I hope my ex-friends feel the same way when I do it to them. It can be a difficult trick to pull off, especially at a big party. I worry that the person hasn’t noticed that he or she is dead to me, and so after my initial snub I move awkwardlyaround the room, glaring at them from multiple directions. By the end of the evening they’re sighing with relief that they’ve been dropped by a loony.

Owen Matthews

The mild-mannered economist who could end Erdogan’s rule

In modern Turkey, as in ancient Byzantium, the factions and passions of the stadium crowds are a key bellwether of the people’s true mood. Last month the terraces of Istanbul’s Sukru Saracoglu stadium – home to the Fenerbahce team of which Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been a proud member for 25 years – echoed with chants of ‘Erdogan, resign’ and ‘Lies! Lies! Lies!’. The same weekend, the home crowd of another major Istanbul club, Besiktas, had filled the pitch with a heartbreaking, minutes-long hail of soft toys thrown from the stands in memory of the thousands of children who lost their lives in the devastating earthquake of 6 February.

Ian Williams

ChatCCP: how will China cope with AI?

The Chinese Communist party faces a conundrum: it wants to lead the world in artificial intelligence and yet it is terrified of anything with a mind of its own. Chinese regulators have reportedly told domestic tech companies not to offer their users ChatGPT, the Microsoft-funded chatbot that can provide seemingly well-researched answers to pretty much any question you can think to ask it. China Daily, a CCP mouthpiece, has admitted that the technology has already gone ‘viral’ in China. The paper said that AI could give ‘a helping hand to the US government in its spread of disinformation and its manipulation of global narratives for its own geopolitical interests’.