Features

Thursday

Bill Wyman

The moment I fell in love with music

I’ve lived in Chelsea for the past 35 years. Since 2002, I’ve photographed everything I find interesting here — churches, streets, door knockers and pub signs, plus two old Chelsea pensioners chatting on a bench with their medal ribbons and rank pinned to their scarlet coats. I’ve recently finished my project and added these 1,800 photographs to the historical research I’ve done about Chelsea, which is now sitting safely on my bookshelf. My love of photography comes from my Uncle Jack. When he returned home at the war’s end, he had a Leica camera, which he got by trading his cigarette rations with an Italian civilian. He gave me his old Brownie box camera.

Niall Ferguson

The predictive power of science fiction

The pandemic is not quite over, but we are getting used to its inconveniences. What disaster will be next? An antibiotic-resistant strain of the bubonic plague? Climate collapse? Coronal mass ejection? Will the next catastrophe be natural — perhaps a massive volcanic eruption, the likes of which we have not seen for more than two centuries, since Tambora in 1815? Or will it be a man-made calamity — nuclear war or a cyberattack? And might we inadvertently descend into a new form of AI-enabled totalitarianism in our efforts to ward off such calamities? To all these potential disasters it is impossible to attach more than made-up probabilities. So what can we do about them? The best answer would be that we should strive to imagine them.

Quentin Letts

Best of the Blob: who would be picked for its 1st XV?

Selectors for the Blob have chosen their 1st XV. Fans of The Game sometimes ask, as they do about Barbarians RFC: ‘Who are these people, do they have any supporters and who exactly pays them?’ Well, now we have the answer to at least that first question. Full back: Sir Philip Barton, head of the diplomatic service. Recovering from injuries after a sticky select committee hearing on Afghanistan. Sometimes drops the ball but popular with professionals for telling civil servants not to work weekends or more than eight hours a day owing to dangers of ‘burn-out’. Was holidaying at a family château in the Dordogne while Afghanistan was crumbling. Good to see a man lead by example. Left wing: Former Guardian editor Dame Alan Rusbridger.

James Forsyth

‘Politics exacts a very high price’: an interview with Michael Gove

What is Boris Johnson’s government for? The answer, we’re often told, is ‘levelling up’. So far this has been a slogan without much meaning. More than two years on from Johnson’s election victory, it has been left to Michael Gove, as the new Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, to define the concept. He intended to set out his plans before Christmas, but Covid stopped that. It nearly stopped this interview, too. Under the government’s rules at the time, Gove is in self-isolation because he met Barnaby Joyce, Australia’s deputy prime minister, who then tested positive for Covid, possibly the Omicron variant. It means we have to speak over a computer screen.

Sarah, Duchess of York

What’s your kindness IQ?

A few weeks ago, MailOnline carried a rather mundane story about some personnel changes at my charity, Sarah’s Trust, and another I support as patron, Humanitas. The piece reported quite fairly some of the work that we have been doing, including supplying hundreds of sleeping bags and essential supplies to homeless people. I rarely venture into readers’ comments, finding the online world rather frightening, but for some reason on this occasion I decided to scroll through what people were saying. I should have been put off by the warning that greeted me: ‘The comments below have not been moderated.’ Someone calling themselves Russell Nash, of the Highlands, had written simply: ‘Leech.

Ephraim Mirvis

Our new era of Jewish-Muslim relations

Reactions to the recent passing of F.W. de Klerk transported me back to my childhood in South Africa. The horror of apartheid was a frequent topic of conversation in our family. My uncle’s law firm, Witkin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, pioneered the employment of black people and gave Nelson Mandela his first job as a clerk, in defiance of the accepted practice at the time. My mother was the principal of the only training college for black pre-school teachers and my father, a rabbi, made pastoral visits to Robben Island. We were all-too-aware of the urgent need to dismantle the structural racism that plagued the country. When de Klerk and Mandela worked together to do exactly that, the joy was tempered by the knowledge that it had taken far too long.

Lissa Evans

Gus and his mate Mark: A short story by Lissa Evans

‘I’ve just seen a wen,’ said Gus, returning from the toilets. ‘A what?’ ‘A wen. It’s a benign thing, I can’t remember the proper name for it. It looked like a button mushroom growing out of this bloke’s head. Really hard not to stare.’ ‘A wen,’ repeated Mark, broodingly. ‘I’ve never even heard of it. How come you know about it and I don’t?’ He mentally added ‘wen’ to his personal 40-volume encyclopedia of medical ignorance. ‘I dunno, I heard it somewhere. Maybe you only know the clinical term.’ ‘Unlikely. I’m going to look it up.

Steven Pinker and Rory Sutherland

Sense and sensibility: Steven Pinker and Rory Sutherland on reason vs instinct

Steven Pinker’s latest book is called Rationality. Rory Sutherland is The Spectator’s Wiki Man. We arranged for them to meet at the Cucumber restaurant, where they discussed the logic of monarchy, gender-bending, and why academics are unreasonably obsessed with wine. Steven Pinker: Part of the reason I wrote Rationality was to ask, how there can be so much irrationality in an era that has the resources for unprecedented rationality. We invented a vaccine for Covid in less than a year. So why do people today believe in conspiracies like QAnon? Rory Sutherland: Conspiracy theories aren’t always irrational, and instinctive responses can serve you well. An instinctive person with no knowledge of virology wouldn’t go into a cave full of bats.

Joan Collins and Taki

Hollywood, fist-fights and getting cancelled: Joan Collins and Taki in conversation

Introductions Scene: a drawing room in London. When the recording starts, Taki is already mid-anecdote… Taki: … I was sent out to Monte Carlo to speak to Roger Moore. The Spectator offered to pay all my expenses. I said thank you, I’ll pay my own. I went and had a terrific drunken dinner with Roger who really spilled the beans, cos we were buddies. I came back. The tape was empty because I’d never turned the recorder on. Joan: I’d known Roger since I was 15, because my father was a big agent in London and I came back from school — oh, 14 actually, because I left school at 15 — and there’s the most gorgeous man I’ve ever seen standing there. He came over and said: ‘How do you do?

Jools Holland

What musicians like me learned from the pandemic

My mother died earlier this year aged 85. She left me her old pianola. These were popular in the 1920s and 1930s before people had records and hi-fis. You would put the rolls on the pianolas and they were cut by the great pianists of the day, from the popular players like Charlie Kunz, as well as the star jazz and rhythm pianists like Fats Waller or Jelly Roll Morton, and also the great concert pianists like Rubinstein. You would simply put the piano roll on and then pedal away. The old war-damaged pianola had been left to her by her mother — and I learnt in my grandmother’s front room — so the old piano has lasted for three generations. Without that pianola, all the extraordinary things in my life would never have been possible.

Howard Jacobson

How is humanity served by the e-scooter?

In Hatchards for the launch of Andrea Rose’s catalogue raisonné of Leon Kossoff’s oil paintings. It’s bad for the morale of writers to frequent bookshops: too many shelves without their books on them. But I’m here to talk about Kossoff, not me. Whether he shunned galleries that showed him scant respect — one of the country’s greatest painters, yet for many years one of the least-known — I have no idea. But he was a modest, principled man who put the making of art before making a name or a fortune, so I choose to believe he didn’t care. He reminds me, in his quiet refusal of flamboyance, of Wordsworth. Like Wordsworth, he found his inspiration in ‘everyday appearances’ and the fleetingness of things.

Katy Balls

Can Boris take back control of No. 10?

There’s a mutinous mood in Westminster this Christmas. In quiet corridors on the parliamentary estate the question is being asked: has Boris outlived his usefulness? Ministers are laying low. Tory WhatsApp groups are hushed. MPs are dodging calls from the whips, claiming to be sick or working from home. In conversations with Tory MPs, it isn’t long before the topic of Johnson’s long-term future comes up. ‘Everyone’s sniffing the air — you can just feel it,’ says a former adviser to the Prime Minister. Members of the cabinet, from Liz Truss to Rishi Sunak, are accused of being on manoeuvres. One former minister has taken to measuring his office to work out how many desks he can fit into it, should a contest begin sooner rather than later.

Andrew Sullivan

The PowerPoint plot against Joe Biden

If the revolution won’t be televised, the counter-revolution will at least be on PowerPoint. A series of 36 corporate-style PowerPoint slides have now been handed over to the Congressional Committee investigating the 6 January insurrection. Written and conceived by a retired colonel (who else?), the PowerPoint lays out a clear, if bonkers, strategy for keeping Donald Trump in power earlier this year. It involves the assertion that China had directly intervened in the election, skewing the electronic results to favour Joe Biden. Quite where the evidence would be procured to prove this is not so clear. But the plan barrels past that small problem to the main event: ‘1. Brief Senators and congressmen on foreign interference. 2. Declare National Security Emergency. 3.

Christopher Howse

The tiny charity that saves derelict churches from destruction

There is a plateau of neglect upon which an old church seems to sit for a while blessedly spared from ‘improvement’. But on the far side of the plateau, the land falls away steeply to closure, vandalism and ruination. St Mary’s church, Mundon, possessed of a rare tranquillity, had begun slipping off the plateau by 1975. The nave was exposed to rain by a gappy roof. Brambles lashed in the wind at the broken windows. Demolition was proposed. But in that year it was taken into the care of a small voluntary organisation, Friends of Friendless Churches. So it was that I could find myself standing in the dimness of the church on a winter afternoon (there being no electric light) talking to a volunteer, Christine McDonald, who has lived within half a mile all her life.

Caroline Moore

How chilling ghost stories became a Christmas tradition

‘A sad tale’s best for winter,’ says little Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale: ‘I have one/ Of sprites and goblins…’ (He is dead by Act III.) Ghost stories have always been best told on a midwinter night — preferably aloud, in a group drawn close together around a blazing fire. Pleasure comes from awareness of the icy cold and dark, hemming our small convivial light: there is a particular frisson in the contrast between ‘in here’ and ‘out there’, between the snug ‘us’ and a possibly malign ‘them’, the known and the unknown.

Joanna Lumley

The day I got the key to the Sistine Chapel

After being landlocked for the past 18 months, it was a particular thrill to set off to film in three European capitals: Berlin, Paris and Rome. As always, it is my duty to supply and prepare my wardrobe for each documentary, having been given a list of the things we shall be doing so that I can be suitably dressed for each occasion. Conscious of the ‘waste not, want not’ attitude which has intensified as the planet warms, I have devised a sort of dressing-up box of old clothes which can be re-worn (‘your chance to see again…’) and made slightly different by adding a scarf or rolling up the sleeves or trouser legs, or occasionally wearing the garment inside out. It is far easier to dress for Mongolia or Kyrgyzstan than for Paris.

Tuesday

Andrew Watts

My year-long battle with the parking profiteers

I had been cross enough about having to go to Sennen Cove. Aside from the fact that I don’t care for the place — what is the point of a Cornish beach if the sand is too coarse-grained for sandcastles? — I resented the fact that I would not even be able to park near the place I hated. The car park on the beach is full from nine in the morning; I would have to drive up to the town — which is so far away that some of the houses aren’t even second homes — and walk. Furiously I bought a ticket, chucked it in the car and marched down the cliff to the beach. When I returned to find a parking fine on the windscreen, I was, I admit, not in the holiday spirit. I assumed that sending a scan of the ticket to Armtrac, the parking company, would resolve matters.

Thursday

Tanjil Rashid

Common prayer: when churches become mosques

A Presbyterian minister, a Pentecostalist pastor and a Sunni imam come to worship in the same place. It’s not the start of a joke: this is literally what happens at my local church in east London which, strangely, now encompasses a mosque. It was in danger of being closed, but instead the walled church complex has been partitioned, with a chunk of it sold off to Muslims while the main church building remains the home of two different Christian denominations. The site serves as a sanctuary for followers of rival creeds, a kind of suburban Temple Mount. The shared use indicates an unlikely chapter in the life of a once-renowned institution, founded in 1642 when Protestant nonconformists met in Stepney amid civil war.

Jonathan Miller

Cutting ties: the sad decline of men’s neckwear

Of all the global trends exacerbated by Covid, the demise of the necktie is probably not the most important. It is, however, worth noting — because the way we dress tells us a lot about who we are. The tie has been on the retreat as a quintessential item of the male wardrobe for the past 30 or so years. Thanks to all that working from home, it is now at the edge of imminent extinction: soon it will be worn only by eccentrics, dictators or eccentric dictators. The worker bees have returned to their office hives, but on the whole their ties have not come with them. It cannot be chance that the decline of the tie has coincided with the erasure of everything it once meant to be a man. Masculinity is considered toxic. The tie is being cancelled.