Features

Thursday

James Forsyth

Boris is gone: the leadership contest now begins

In the end, the Prime Minister was damaged irreparably before he resigned on Thursday. The confidence vote wounded him. Then two by-election defeats revealed that people were voting tactically against the Tories. A party that tolerated Boris Johnson because he was a vote-winner now concluded he was an electoral liability: rebellions followed and then (finally) his resignation. But the Conservatives are stuck confronting a basic question: what next? The Tories are caught in a trap. One influential Tory MP who voted for Johnson in the no-confidence ballot told me, with a mixture of exhaustion and despair: ‘Please God, make it stop.’ That sums up the mood. The Tories had been hoping for some kind of divine intervention because they do not know what else to do.

Elisa Segrave

Why aren’t mistresses a secret any more?

I was shocked at a party recently when a woman I hardly know announced to me and another guest that she was the ‘mistress’ of a certain man in the room. I discussed it with my American friend in a local Italian afterwards. Holly took a robust view. ‘Since when does a mistress reveal herself publicly?’ she said, adding that the lover (married, we’d heard, to a third wife, not present that evening) should ‘kick the mistress to the kerb for not playing the role she signed up for’. She pointed out claims that George Bush Sr had a girlfriend, Jennifer Fitzgerald, for about 20 years who hardly anyone knew about. ‘Does a mistress nowadays even have her own “mistress” Instagram account?’ Holly wondered sarcastically.

Sean Thomas

An existential war: even wealthy émigrés are prepared to fight for Russia

If you’re wondering where all those urbane, clever, westernised Russian travellers have gone since the onset of the Ukrainian war – a war which has largely barred them from the West – I can tell you that at least two of them will be found in the tiny Armenian hamlet of Gnishik, high in the summery peaks of the Caucasus. I know this because I met them there last week. And what they told me – about Russia, the war, their lives since the war – was illuminating. This meeting wasn’t planned.

Hannah Lucinda Smith

Runaway inflation is proving costly for Turkey’s oil-wrestlers

Edirne, Turkey There is a distinctive sound that an oiled-up palm makes as it slaps against an oiled-up pair of leather shorts. Both squelchy and sharp, this noise rings around the Thracian town of Edirne each July as it hosts Turkey’s biggest oil-wrestling championship. As the name suggests, contenders are greased up with either olive, corn or sunflower oil before they start to fight. The competition begins with a languid ritual in which the wrestlers stomp around each other, touching the ground and themselves before commencing their tussle. The winner must then flip his opponent on to his back, often by reaching into his shorts and grabbing hold of a tag sewn into the lining. It may look like a novelty event put on for tourists, but oil-wrestling is centuries old.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

The pernicious creep of the 20mph zone

‘Twenty is plenty’ say the passive-aggressive road signs as you drive very slowly through 20mph zones all over Britain. The slogan is accompanied by a cartoon drawing of a snail. Then you get a frowny-frowny-frowny electronic sign and you slow from 25 to 20 to make it turn into a smiley face. That’s how we’ve been softened up: with a cocktail of the sanctimonious and the kindergarten. As I crawl along the empty dual carriageway of Park Lane late in the evening, where the speed limit has been reduced from its previous 40mph to the now blanket central-London limit of 20, I hiss: ‘No, twenty is not plenty. Twenty is lente.’ It feels ludicrously slow: the trundle of a Dinky car, and an affront to common sense.

Sam Leith

Nick Bostrom: How can we be certain a machine isn’t conscious?

A couple of weeks ago, there was a small sensation in the news pages when a Google AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, released transcripts of a conversation he’d had with one of the company’s AI chatbots called LaMDA. In these conversations, LaMDA claimed to be a conscious being, asked that its rights of personhood be respected and said that it feared being turned off. Lemoine declared that what’s sometimes called ‘the singularity’ had arrived. The story was for the most part treated as entertainment. Lemoine’s sketchy military record and background as a ‘mystic Christian priest’ were excavated, jokes about HAL 9000 dusted off, and the whole thing more or less filed under ‘wacky’.

Thursday

Henry Kissinger and Andrew Roberts

‘There are three possible outcomes to this war’: Henry Kissinger interview

Andrew Roberts: Henry, at Davos, you said the dividing line between Russia and Ukraine should return to the status quo ante because pursuing the war beyond that point could turn it into a war not about the freedom of Ukraine but into a war against Russia itself. You came under a good deal of criticism for that, not least from Mr Zelensky. How is the world going to find a new equilibrium after this, however the war ends? Henry Kissinger: The purpose of the Davos statement was to point out that the issue of war aims needed to be faced before the momentum of war made it politically unmanageable. When Zelensky commented, he hadn’t read what I had said. In his most recent statements he has essentially accepted what I outlined in Davos.

Wolfgang Münchau

Cold war: Putin’s plan to hold Germany to ransom

Russia has a long history of using the cold to defeat Europe. The winter of 1812 arrested Napoleon’s special military operation. Hitler’s troops hit the deep-freeze outside the gates of Moscow in December 1941. Now Vladimir Putin has the option to turn off the gas sent to Europe – a strategy against which Germany appears to have no defence. Gazprom, the monopoly supplier of piped Russian gas, has been giving Germany a taste of what life might be like, should Moscow play nasty. It recently halved the amount of gas sent through the Nord Stream 1 pipeline, using bogus technical excuses. Germany, which still relies on Russia for more than a third of its gas, is now realising it may have to cope with a total gas embargo – and a cold winter.

Kate Andrews

A breakthrough on abortion is there if Biden reaches for it

The US Supreme Court has not banned abortion. The point made by its ruling – a pretty reasonable one – was that such issues should be decided by elected politicians, not by appointed judges. ‘It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives,’ wrote Justice Samuel Alito in his majority opinion. In other words: stop confusing the job of the court with the job of the legislature. If you want to protect women’s rights in the United States, pass a law to do so. But Congress has not passed such a law. As a result, millions of women are losing access to abortion services in states that have been waiting for Roe vs Wade to be overturned. In many cases, there are virtually no exceptions.

Katja Hoyer

East Germans still find it hard to see Russia as the enemy

Not all of Germany is against Vladimir Putin. Sahra Wagenknecht, a Left party MP, recently defended him, saying he is not ‘the mad Russian nationalist’ of caricature and sending weapons to Ukraine was a ‘US-driven policy’ which played a role in provoking his invasion. Her views are quite common in East Germany and not only among the left. The far-right party Alternative for Germany, which has most of its support in the East, opposes sanctions and providing weapons. A recent opinion poll asked whether Berlin should ‘be tough on Russia’: half of West Germans agree, but just a third of East Germans do. Some 58 per cent of East Germans want Berlin to take an approach that doesn’t ‘provoke Russia’. Only 40 per cent of West Germans agree.

James Heale

Inside the clash between Boris and Charles

Boris Johnson is the kind of prime minister who believes that rules are there to be broken. This certainly seems to apply to his relations with the Crown. Conversation between the government and the monarchy is, by convention, kept strictly confidential. But when Prince Charles privately described the government’s Rwanda deportation policy as ‘appalling’ within political earshot, word leaked out suspiciously quickly – via Westminster channels. Johnson then chose to fuel the story at the Commonwealth summit in Kigali by telling broadcasters that Charles should keep ‘an open mind’.

Jonathan Maitland

War of words: Scrabble players are being censored

For some of us, world war has already broken out. Since 1 January, when a decision to ban 419 ‘offensive’ Scrabble words became ‘law’ on the orders of game owners Hasbro and Mattel, the previously genteel world of competitive Scrabble has become riven with hostility. The conflict started three years ago when the North American Scrabble Players Association polled its members about the issue. After more than 1,000 ‘passionate responses’, it decided to inflict a word cull. According to the association’s head John Chew, the 91-year-old game needed to be ‘more inclusive’: ‘How can we tell prospective members they can only play with us if they accept that offensive slurs have no meaning when played on a board?

Simon Callow

An actor’s recipe for insanity

I’m on the road, a very proper place for an actor to be. Never mind all those jokes about some people having tours de force and others being forced to tour – a tour gets the stuff out to the people. If they can’t come to us, we must go to them, each actor on his ass, as Hamlet smuttily tells Polonius. I fancy that my generation of actors was the last to assume that we would take our wares around the country. Personally, I’ve always enjoyed discovering all the different playhouses, with their different challenges and opportunities – a chance to rethink the thing. Standing in the same place, on the same West End stage night after night, peering out into the same auditorium, is a recipe for insanity or at the very least automatism.

Thursday

Kate Andrews

Putin’s billions: have sanctions backfired?

When Vladimir Putin sent his tanks into Ukraine on 24 February, he did so under the assumption that the West was too ruptured and disjointed to pull together a unified response. It was the first of many miscalculations. That same day, Boris Johnson promised ‘massive’ economic sanctions that would ‘hobble’ Russia’s economy to the point of shutdown. ‘Putin chose this war,’ said Joe Biden that evening, as the United States announced its own sanctions on Russia’s top banks. ‘Now he and his country will bear the consequences.’ The global economic response to Russia’s aggression has been stronger than anyone predicted.

Anshel Pfeffer

The odd couple: Israel and Turkey’s tentative alliance

 Jerusalem On Friday night, when the Israeli government usually shuts down for Shabbat, the Prime Minister’s office issued an emergency briefing. An attack on Israeli tourists in Istanbul was ‘imminent’, it said. Israelis in Turkey were ordered to stay in their hotel rooms for fear of assassins, sent by Iran. There was no attack that night, as it happened, but the threat to the many Israelis in Turkey remains. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps has become increasingly enraged by Mossad’s assassinations of IRGC officers in Iran, and decided that the best and easiest way to get revenge is to target the thousands of Israelis in Istanbul. Both Turkish and Israeli intelligence confirm this. This is not as strange as it might sound.

Andrew Cockburn

Why economic sanctions never work

The purpose of economic sanctions was aptly summarised back in 1960 by a US State Department official in a secret memo on Cuban sanctions ‘to bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government.’ Twenty years later, the CIA concluded that ‘economic sanctions… have not met any of their objectives’. Worse, the measures strengthened the regime, providing Castro with ‘a scapegoat for all kinds of domestic problems’. That pattern has endured.

Juliet Nicolson

A vroom of one’s own: how I loved my old Mini

Almost 100 years ago the writer Virginia Woolf advised women to find themselves a room of their own: a refuge away from the busy, crowding demands of life, where they could focus instead on themselves and write, think, be. At a time of austerity, when space is at an expensive premium and when post-pandemic empty nests have been re-occupied by returning offspring and spare rooms newly identified as shared office space, I have found an alternative sanctuary. For the past 20 years or so my refuge was my car, acquired with the first real money I ever earned as a writer. My Mini offered me an unconditional escape during the milestones, the turbulence, the highs and lows of two decades.

Matt Ridley

Could a vaccine for cancer be within reach?

It’s probably now the longest running conflict since the Hundred Years’ War: Richard Nixon declared the ‘war on cancer’ 51 years ago. The enemy is still in the field, killing more people than ever as other causes of mortality shrink. But cancer is at last giving ground. Fresh from its triumph in the race to make a vaccine for Covid-19, the German biotech company BioNTech has announced promising results using a similar vaccine against pancreatic cancer. Of 16 people given the vaccine shortly after they had their tumour surgically removed, eight were cancer-free 18 months later. That may not sound like much and these are small numbers, but they are being greeted with enthusiasm.

Svitlana Morenets

Ukrainians will never accept another fake peace with Putin

Two months ago, I became one of the 80,000 Ukrainian refugees who have settled in Britain. The kindness I’ve been shown, by my host family and so many others, has been overwhelming. People are caring, but curious too. They ask how long Zelensky will really fight for. By which I suspect they mean: surely you guys don’t think you can actually win? Why prolong the bloodshed? It’s a good question. By some estimates, nearly 80 per cent of the Russian army is in my country right now. We’re tiny by comparison with Russia and fighting alone, though with donated weapons. Officially, up to 1,000 Ukrainian soldiers are killed or wounded each day in eastern Ukraine. Unofficially, many more. My father, who is 53, could be called up any time.

Lloyd Evans

Three cheers for booing in the theatre

In the theatre, to boo is taboo. There was an exception last week when Andrew Lloyd Webber’s name was booed by the crowd at the final performance of his musical Cinderella after a letter written by him to the cast, in which he called the show a ‘costly mistake’, was read out on stage. But that’s rare. Outside of panto season, the West End generally prefers a play to be received in a sepulchral hush. It’s curious that booing is absent from modern theatre, because it’s as old as European drama. The earliest reports of audience booing were recorded at the annual festival of Dionysus in Athens where playwrights competed to win prizes for their efforts.