Joyous chaos: Lucy Harwood, at Firstsite, reviewed

‘Welcome to England’s Most Misunderstood County’, reads an imitation road sign inside the entrance to Firstsite gallery. It’s part of ‘The Essex Way’ (2021), a monumental collage commissioned from local boy Michael Landy to mark the 10th anniversary of the Colchester gallery’s opening. With its discombobulating mix of illustrations of native birdlife and views of landmarks such as the Veolia landfill site at Rainham, Landy’s mural is designed, like the gallery’s current exhibition series, to challenge assumptions about the county now most commonly associated with Towie.

The series started in 2021 with a show about the legendary East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing, founded in Dedham before the war by Cedric Morris and Arthur Lett-Haines. This was followed in 2022 by a retrospective of Denis Wirth-Miller, a former student of Morris’s and a mucker of Francis Bacon’s who made Wivenhoe his home. Now it’s the turn of another former student – not a famous one like Lucian Freud or Maggi Hambling, but a local girl you may never have heard of. I confess I hadn’t.

Born into an East Anglian farming family in 1893, the gifted Lucy Harwood had hoped to become a pianist before an operation gone wrong left her partly paralysed down one side. Thrown back on her other talent, art, she enrolled at the Slade, where she taught herself to paint with her left hand. It was the making of her. Obliged ‘to swing a loaded brush at the canvas’, in the words of the show’s curator Hugh St Clair, she would earn the admiration of Matthew Smith for her ‘flamboyant impasto’. But it wasn’t until middle age that she found her form.

Harwood was 45 when the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing opened on her doorstep; she enrolled at once and became a living testament to Morris’s belief that ‘an old maid on a camp stool is as potentially capable of achievements in the Arts as a lad of 17 who crashes into the firmament of fame’. She flowered under the teaching of Lett-Haines, who flirted with her, but was more influenced by Morris. Given that they both painted the produce of his famous garden, this was perhaps inevitable: the purple-bearded irises and orange lilies in one still life will have been grown, and bred, by Morris. The rampant chaos of ‘Flowers in the Garden at Benton End‘ (1950s) brilliantly captures the ‘bewildering, mind-stretching, eye-widening canvas of colour, textures and shapes’ of the place as remembered by Beth Chatto. But whereas in a painting Morris would have organised the chaos, Harwood relished it; it was as if she couldn’t contain her enthusiasm. What her still lifes lack in clarity they make up in energy: ‘Fish and Vase’ is so crammed with stuff it’s hard to know exactly what you’re looking at, but the mess of painted marks is a joy to behold. Landscape was her forte. Students were encouraged to get out into nature and learn from its flora and fauna first-hand, which suited Harwood down to the ground. Her diary makes plein air painting sound like an escapade: ‘When I was painting in Colonel Hitchcock’s celery field, my beloved easel,’ records one entry, ‘suddenly collapsed… I felt broken-hearted and grovelled on the ground to continue painting the picture… but it was no use.’ Is this why her works feel so vivid? A fellow visitor swore she could smell hay coming off a painting of a sunlit cornfield, and I seemed to smell it too. Growing up in East Bergholt and Dedham, Harwood was a Constable country girl, but I’ve never smelt hay around Constable’s ‘Cornfield’.

When the school moved to Benton End near Hadleigh in 1939 (after the teenage Freud reputedly burnt down the previous premises with a fag end) Harwood followed it, buying a house in nearby Upper Layham and appointing herself the school’s tea lady and chauffeur, despite her notoriously bad driving. ‘People maintained a respectful distance from her paint-spattered car,’ remembers Hambling.

During the holidays Harwood travelled. ‘Landscape with Blue Mountain’, with its heavy bank of bruised-looking cloud threatening to rain on the parade of trees below, is probably the Lake District; ‘Fishermen at St Malo’ recalls the Brittany landscapes of Christopher Wood. She was comfortable with her status as a lone traveller, ignoring the comments of ‘fools… tied up with husbands or wives or too many daughters’, and philosophical about her lack of fame. ‘Perhaps it’s fair of providence not to allow painters to be known and acclaimed,’ she confided to her diary, ‘even if then they merit success, until after they are dead. The delight which artists experience is so much greater than that obtained from other pursuits.’

Without Pitchfork, bands like the Clientele would never have attracted any attention

The whole world might have been different had Alasdair MacLean, singer and guitarist of the delicate, pastoral, slightly psychedelic band the Clientele, had his way. In 2006 he told music website Pitchfork about the time he was working for a publisher and strongly recommended they turn down a children’s fantasy novel that had been submitted. They overruled him and published Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone anyway.

We all know what happened to J.K. Rowling. MacLean ended up leaving the world of books, and in due course the Clientele got a music deal that enabled them to turn full time, though I have no idea whether they still survive solely on the tiny margins a working indie band can carve out. So here they are, 26 years on from the release of their first single, playing in Kings Cross on a perishing night, being gorgeous.

It’s easy to see why the Clientele have remained little: they are little. Their music is made up of fragile curlicues and arpeggios. Mark Keen’s drum kit at Lafayette was as small as I have ever seen: a kick drum, a snare, a hi-hat and a couple of cymbals. No toms at all. And often he played with brushes. Rather than being the back beat, the percussion was a whisper of wind behind MacLean’s guitar and Sebastian Millett’s cello; what rhythmic propulsion there was came from James Hornsey, playing bass.

The music had the smell of the library of a small country house: warm, aged and papery, with the scent of fresh flowers drifting in through open French windows. It summoned scores of groups from the past – little snatches of Television and the Zombies and the Left Banke and Fairport Convention and Felt flitted past – and I swear that every second song included the word ‘blue’ somewhere in its lyrics. In the age of oversharing and singers telling you about their mental health, there’s something deliciously restrained about the concept of blue-ness.

I mentioned the Rowling anecdote not just because it’s amusing, but also because of where it appeared. Last week, the magazine publisher Condé Nast announced it was folding Pitchfork – which it bought from its founders in 2015 – into GQ where, presumably, it will become a ‘key vertical’. Lots of staff and freelancers have been bid adieu – no one thinks Pitchfork will survive in any meaningful form.

Those of us in the crowd at Lafayette probably wouldn’t have been there had it not been for Pitchfork. The Clientele are more popular in the States than here, and that’s almost certainly down to the website’s patronage of them: a stamp that carried the same power in indie music in the 2000s as John Peel’s approval did when I was a kid. Without Pitchfork, the Clientele – and scores of groups like them – would never have attracted any attention, and the world would be a poorer place for it.

When Q magazine closed in 2020, David Hepworth – one of its founders – wrote in the New Statesman: ‘To the music business I would say, you’re going to miss the music press. Why? Because it did one thing you failed to value. Through its lens it made your acts seem exciting and larger than life, even when they weren’t.’ That would never have been an issue for the Clientele, who don’t need to be exciting or larger than life, but it might well have troubled Bring Me the Horizon, playing the first of two shows at the O2.

I first wrote about them in 2013, when they had recently been signed to Sony. The company’s then managing director, Colin Barlow, told me it was ‘a landmark deal – it’s as important as when Sony signed AC/DC or when Metallica was signed to a major’. They would, he predicted, be headlining Download, the vast metal festival at Leicestershire’s Donington Park, by 2015. In fact it took them until last year – when they also headlined Reading and Leeds. Part of the reason, I suspect, is that there was little or no music press left to champion them.

I suspect BMTH might not appeal to many Spectator readers – they play a juddering version of metal, where double kick drums are as important to the sound as the guitars, albeit one tempered by a commitment to melody and skyscraping choruses, and incorporating touches of electronica and hip hop – but they deserve to be in the big rooms. Singer Oli Sykes, tattooed up to the nines and with artfully teased hair, was every inch the rock star. If anything, I wanted the gig to be a little more metal; it didn’t quite have the volume to achieve the sense of overwhelming physicality that very loud music offers.

Throughout the set, a thought kept occurring: without a music press, how long will it take the next young band to reach this point?

Visually world-class, dramatically second-rate: Don’t Destroy Me, at the Arcola, reviewed

Don’t Destroy Me is the rather breathless title of Michael Hastings’s first play which he wrote when he was just 18. The material draws on his adolescent years in a south London boarding house and the action opens with an elderly husband, Leo, and his unfaithful young wife, Shani, preparing for a visit from their handsome teenage son, Sammy. Leo knows that his marriage is being undermined by Shani’s affair with a cocky spiv who lives next door but this tawdry business fades into the background as the play starts to come alive.

The characters upstairs take over. The flat above is occupied by Mrs Pond, a pretentious fraud in her early forties who is desperate for romance and attention. She earns money by reading tea leaves and she claims to have a husband, Jack, and a white rabbit living with her. Neither have ever been seen, possibly because they don’t exist.

Mrs Pond’s only real companion is her teenage daughter, Suki, who wears a party frock and always hopes to be invited to a ball. Both these needy women conduct their business on the landing of the boarding house where they engage passers-by in conversation. Suki, who describes herself as ‘a tight little virgin’, tries to attract young Sammy but she does so clumsily by berating him for his lack of experience and sophistication. Sammy is 15. Suki is 17. Their frenetic and confused snatches of amorous dialogue are the best thing in the play.

The costumes and the furnishings are as good as you’ll find in the West End. Designer Alex Marker has done a first-rate job of solving the awkward stage requirements. The script calls for a private apartment, a public stairwell and a twisted corridor with three front doors leading off it, and his solution is an amazingly subtle ensemble that fits snugly into the Arcola’s limited playing area. Visually this is world-class. Alas, the drama doesn’t quite match it.

The charming and funny first act gives way to a second half where the plot grinds to a halt and all the characters speak in the same petulant, self-pitying and aggressive tone. For the final 30 minutes, everyone on stage yells abuse at each other while indulging in minor acts of vandalism. Never a good way to end a play.

Protest Song is a 2013 drama by Tim Price whose biographical play about Aneurin Bevan opens next month at the National Theatre. The protagonist, Danny, is an angry tramp who gets swept up in the Occupy movement that established bivouacs in Bristol and elsewhere to express outrage at the capitalist system. Danny is an intensely difficult person to like because of his ungovernable temper and his habit of howling and swearing at complete strangers. Sadly, he blames his self-inflicted ruin on other people. His wretched state is reinforced by the system that exists to raise him out of poverty.

Homelessness charities encourage him to live in dirt-cheap hostels where he shares war stories and begging tips with other vagrants. Inevitably they develop a perverse pride in their destitution and they see their survival skills as proof of manliness and virtue. This is deeply depressing but easy to fix. If Danny were shipped out to a friendly village, where beggars are seldom seen, he’d be offered food and lodging in return for work. Within a day he’d learn how to look after himself.

1979 by Canadian playwright Michael Healey looks at the inglorious career of Joe Clark, who briefly served as Canada’s prime minister. He seemed to have lucked into power by default and after nine months in office he was ousted by Pierre Trudeau whom he had succeeded in the first place. On stage, Joe describes himself as a ‘Progressive Conservative nobody’ and the programme notes confirm that his character is ‘bumbling and unsure’. The play feels like a memo from the author to himself about the perils of picking the wrong subject for a drama. Poor old Joe lurks in his office like an anxious squirrel receiving visits from activists who are sharper and more articulate than he is and who bully him endlessly. One of his visitors, a young Stephen Harper, delivers a lengthy speech outlining a complete framework for government. And in 2006, Harper duly became prime minister and carried out the programme which, according to this play, he foresaw back in 1979.

This is a strange way to teach history. Newcomers to the subject are fed key information from an overhead screen rather than by an on-stage narrator. This method works well on film and TV, where viewers are accustomed to reading as they watch, but it seems a cumbersome device for live theatre. If you want a light-hearted and informative introduction to Canadian politics between 1979 and 2015, this is well worth seeing.

Fresh as an April shower: Opera North’s Albert Herring reviewed

Opera North has launched its spring season with Giles Havergal’s 2013 production of Benjamin Britten’s Albert Herring, performed (as conceived) in the Howard Assembly Room – the company’s studio space next door to the Grand Theatre. The economics of opera are a dark and dismal science, but one of the few constants is that ticket sales are never the whole story. So if ON has revived a show that can only accommodate an audience of around 300, and which can’t tour, we should assume that’s all priced in. The problem here is that Havergal presents the opera in the round, a practice rarely seen on the unsubsidised stage but beloved by directors who don’t have to worry too much about the paying public.

With seating on three sides of the performance space, the result, as always, is that there are stretches where at least some of the audience can’t see the performers’ faces, or hear what they’re saying. The problem is made worse by operatic vibrato and a lack of surtitles – a real pity when you’ve got an artist as fine as Judith Howarth playing Lady Billows; a character who’s been described as the Lady Bracknell of opera. The ripe, upholstered grandeur of Howarth’s tone is as splendid as ever but the actual words are often a blur, and it’s not her fault. Eric Crozier’s libretto is one of the best that Britten ever had: it’d be good to hear rather more of it. If you can get past the acoustic issues, this staging is fun – in fact, thanks to revival director Elaine Tyler-Hall, it positively pings along. The venue is completely carpeted with greengrocers’ grass (Albert is the village greengrocer, after all) and the cast bustle in and out while the village brats pop up in the balcony to chant their taunts. Havergal’s production places the action in the opera’s own period, 1947, with woollen pullovers and gingham blouses. Presented like this, it’s tempting to see Albert Herring – whose henpecked hero snaps the apron strings, gets bladdered and finally dares to eat a peach – as a satire on the centrally planned priggishness of Clement Attlee’s Britain. But in truth, it’s too good-natured for that. If it wasn’t for Britten’s bracing, teeming score, it would feel as cosy as an Ealing comedy, or the Archers omnibus. 

Opera North’s music director Garry Walker was indisposed, so David Cowan conducted and it all came up as fresh as an April shower, with lairy orchestral wolf-whistles and woozy psychedelic harmonies as Albert’s spiked lemonade goes to his head. There was never any question of the orchestra overpowering the singers, who seemed to have fallen entirely in love with their roles and were doing their best to articulate clearly, despite everything. 

Alongside Howarth, Richard Mosley-Evans made a suitably warm and sonorous village bobby, while the sweethearts Sid (Dominic Sedgwick) and Nancy (Katie Bray) were lively, engaging and – in the opera’s brief moment of shadow, after Albert goes missing – heartfelt. And Dafydd Jones was an Albert anyone could root for: projecting flustered, wide-eyed decency and letting his tenor ring firm and clear as he finally asserts himself. If directors are going to persist in doing opera in the round, it needs to be done at least as well as this.

Opera della Luna, meanwhile, is touring Jeff Clarke’s production of HMS Pinafore, which has been around since the millennium and has apparently clocked up more than 500 performances (for context, Jonathan Miller’s English National Opera Mikado, which dates from 1986, is still only in the 200s). I’ve usually seen this light-footed company up close in the rackety (if atmospheric) surroundings of Wilton’s Music Hall. How would they scale-up to the proscenium stage of the Oxford Playhouse? Answer: they took the challenge and ran with it. Apart from the small onstage band, the space is bare. Then, as the overture plays, the crew of the Pinafore use bits of rope and cloth to rig the ship before our eyes: simple but effective theatrical magic. 

Clarke’s staging keeps the original Victorian setting, and also emulates Gilbert and Sullivan’s practice (derived from music hall) of casting a mixture of classically trained singers and comic actors, with a bit of cross-dressing thrown in as required. They all look the part, they bounce cheerfully off each other and, although some sequences (including the finale) have been cut or rewritten for the reduced forces, you never feel (as with the recent ENO Pinafore) that the opera is being patronised. It’s Gilbert’s humour that we’re getting, and all the saltier in this concentrated form.

Three cheers, then, and one cheer more for Matthew Siveter (a ramrod Captain Corcoran), Georgina Stalbow (bright as a bell as Josephine) and as Sir Joseph Porter, the unsinkable Paul Featherstone, whose face even looks like a Cruikshank cartoon. Seriously, you have to see it.

Original and absorbing: A Highland Song reviewed

Why don’t you go outside and get some fresh air instead of playing that stupid game? A) I’ve been outside, and I didn’t like it. And B) there’s a game for that. A Highland Song excellently simulates the experience of going outside for a walk and regretting it.

Moira sets off to meet her Uncle Hamish at the lighthouse – but like Virginia Woolf’s lot, takes her sweet time getting there. Once you’re 100 yards from her front door, she has no idea where she is. Despite her och-aye-hoots brogue, she turns out to be no less clueless than the tourists who head up Ben Nevis in flip-flops and have to be helicoptered back to civilisation by mountain rescue three days later. Think of this as a getting-lost-in-the-glens simulation.

You guide her anime avatar through a schmaltzy but atmospheric series of watercolour-style landscapes, where rocky ridges and windswept peaks are layered over blue remembered hills. Moira scrambles up slopes, teeters on cliff faces and gets stuck in trees. Is that a pathway? Nope. Stuck again. Try to sit down for a health-boosting Curly Wurly and, unless you’ve found a bothy, you’ll perk up only very slowly. Messages explain why: ‘dreich’; ‘exposed’; ‘wind chill’; ‘I’ve grazed ma knee!’

But then, jings, you’ve bagged a map fragment or another munro, the sun comes out, and the ethereal pipes on the soundtrack give way to something a bit more skirling as you chase a deer downhill, leaping in time to the music. A Highland Song puts the twee into tweedy more than it puts the art into tartan, but it’s original and absorbing. You can easily get lost in it. 

Highly effective slice of old-school storytelling: ITV’s Born from the Same Stranger reviewed

With its tales of close relatives reuniting after years of separation, ITV’s Long Lost Family has been reliably jerking tears since 2011. Now, from the same production company, comes Born from the Same Stranger: another thumping slice of highly effective old-school human-interest storytelling, this time served with a side order of ethical dilemmas.

In the 1990s when, as the programme put it, ‘sperm donation was in its heyday’, donors did their thing in return for 50 quid and a promise of anonymity. On solid practical grounds, this seemed like a good idea at the time – and perhaps still does. But it reckoned without the deep human need to know where we’re genetically from – especially now that we appear to have decided this makes us who we are. ‘When you only know half your family tree,’ said one donor-born participant, ‘it makes you feel like you’re half a person.’

The first of the programme’s two main stories featured Liam, an only child who’d grown up making Father’s Day cards in the belief that he’d be able to give them to his dad one day. Having learned from his mum that she’d used the London Sperm Bank, Liam headed there to meet the chief executive, who could pass on only ‘non-identifying details’ about the sperm donor. Even so, the news that his biological father had, like him, been 6ft tall with blue eyes and self-proclaimed ‘varying moods’ caused Liam to weep at length.

But then he uploaded his DNA to a voluntary data website – and within minutes  discovered that he had two half-brothers and two half-sisters. A few days after that, they agreed to meet in a London pub, which seemed quite high-risk to me, but which produced what Liam quite accurately called ‘a sense of instant warmth’. For all five, there was no doubt they were siblings. After saying ‘this is mad’ several times, they were soon noting their many physical similarities (which were not always obvious to the rest of us). ‘This is what I dreamt of my whole life,’ concluded Liam.

In the show’s other featured story, Sarah found no siblings after searching on DNA websites. She did, however, find the donor. After much understandable agonising, she opted to write to him ‘as delicately as possible’ saying that she didn’t wish to impose on his life, but that ‘I would love to know you’. The way she almost convincingly told it, his ‘lovely’ reply – telling her he was young at the time and didn’t want any further contact – was fine by her. (Another man who’d had the same experience was less sanguine about it all, saying: ‘That rejection cuts pretty deep.’)

Through all this, the programme did a fine job of simply presenting the material and leaving any editorialising up to us. The only possible lack of balance, I suppose, was the fact that everyone involved was astonishingly nice. Presumably, there must be some donor-born people who aren’t – but, if so, we’ve yet to meet them.

Both matters of ethics and the strange nature of families took a darker turn in Revenge: Our Father the Nazi Killer. In 1949, Boris Green emigrated with his brother Fima to Melbourne, where he became a respectable watchmaker, husband and father. But during the war, after the murder of his entire extended family except Fima, he’d led Nekoma (‘Revenge’) a unit of Jewish partisans in Belarus.

His three grown-up sons had known of this background, but the oldest, Jon, also had a vague childhood memory of overhearing his father having a conversation in Yiddish about killing a former Nazi in Sydney. His much younger brother Jack now decided he wanted to get at the truth, with the aid of some of his late father’s friends and a private detective. What emerged was, you could argue, purely circumstantial – yet by the end there were an awful lot of significant-sounding circumstances.

Post-war Australia, you see, was a haven not only for European Jews, but also for Nazis, mainly from the Baltic states. The Holocaust survivors compiled extensive dossiers on them which they handed over to the police, confident that the evidence was damning enough to result in convictions. Instead, the authorities stuck firm to a sleeping-dogs policy – at which point many of the former Nazis began to die in a wide range of mysterious and gruesome ways. According to the coroner, one had committed suicide by disembowelling himself with a razor, another by strapping explosives to his forehead. (Fima, incidentally, had been Nekoma’s explosive expert and after he died, a tin of detonators was found among his possessions.)

As the bodies piled up, so did the ethical questions – at least in theory. In practice, everybody in the programme essentially thought justice had been done. The result – definitely not a common one in TV documentaries – was a group of sons proud to discover that their father had almost certainly killed quite a few civilians.  

Mesmerising: All of Us Strangers reviewed

Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers is an aching tale of grief, loss and loneliness starring Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, so I probably don’t need to tell you the acting is off the scale but I will anyway: the acting is off the scale. Scott, in particular, infuses his character with such vulnerability that you’ll want to reach into the screen and comfort him. And while it does feature ghosts, don’t let that put you off. They’re the doable kind rather than the walking-through-walls, ‘wooOOO-wooOOO’ kind. (Huge relief all round.)

Haigh makes complex, intimate, single-protagonist films (Weekend, 45 Years, Lean on Pete) and this is no exception. Here Scott plays Adam, who lives on the 27th floor of a plush but barely populated London tower block that gives off Ballardian vibes. The opening five minutes do enough to tell us he is not in a good place. He watches daytime TV, eats biscuits, inspects the contents of his fridge (curdled takeaway leftovers), puts Frankie Goes to Hollywood’s ‘The Power of Love’ on the turntable, which becomes something of a leitmotif.

He is a screenwriter and has written the first line of a script – ‘EXT. SUBURBAN HOUSE. 1987’ – but that’s it, he can’t get any further. He is prompted to dig out a box of old family photographs which in turn prompts him to visit his childhood home near Croydon where, astonishingly, he finds it’s still 1987 and his mother (Claire Foy) and father (Jamie Bell) are somehow alive. They died in a car crash when Adam was 11 and are the age they were then, which means they are slightly younger than their adult son.

Adam is overwhelmed and elated, whereas they are welcoming but behave quite normally. He might have just returned from popping to the corner shop for a Marathon that’s yet to become a Snickers. They are amazed to discover what he does for a living. ‘A writer, our son,’ says his mother. His father puts his hand on his but quickly retracts it. ‘Enough of this poofy stuff,’ he says. Adam is gay and never had the chance to come out to them. Based (very) loosely on the novel Strangers by Taichi Yamada, the film is about the conversations with parents that were never had and the acceptance that was never received.

Adam visits his parents over and over – taking a deep pleasure in it even if it becomes more complicated and tense over time – while another story is unfolding back at the tower block. There seems to be only one other occupant, Harry (Mescal), on the sixth floor. Emboldened by whiskey, Harry comes knocking at Adam’s door one night, seeking company, but Adam won’t let him in. Not letting people in is what Adam does. (This is a subtle film that is occasionally not that subtle.) They eventually embark on an intense – and hot – romance. Can Adam, finally, succumb to ‘The Power of Love’?

The film is mesmerising and deeply affecting (I cried) with many stand-out scenes. Foy and Bell bring a strange, eerie, everydayness to their roles; Mescal remains sexy even while drunkenly desperate. As for Scott, the only other actor who is capable of conveying so much sadness and sensitivity beneath the surface is, possibly, Ben Whishaw. Not everything is spelled out, particularly the ending, which may make you sit up and say: ‘Hang on, what?’ But here’s a tip: clock what Harry is wearing the first time we meet him and what he’s wearing in the final scene. This is key.

Could you call it a ghost story? Probably, but these are the sort of ghosts we can get on board with.

Giselle is lovingly revived at the London Coliseum

Two archetypal ballet heroines have been facing each other across WC2: at the Coliseum, Giselle the blameless virgin, wronged in the first act, disembodied in the second; at Covent Garden, Manon the seductive, manipulative courtesan who can’t choose between love and money. Both in different ways are victims of a cruel world, and both must die. The men responsible for their downfall – of course – survive.

Mary Skeaping’s staging of Giselle for the English National Ballet, first seen in 1971, divides opinion among the cognoscenti. It reverts to what is known about the original 1841 Paris production, retrieving a substantial episode of expository mime – that will baffle modern audiences – as well as some musical interpolations of questionable taste (notably a flat-footed fugue assigned to the ghostly Wilis that sounds and looks weirdly out of key). Giselle’s two-faced lover, Albrecht, is also more sympathetically presented than in other iterations, which means that, with all reference to Giselle’s fragile mental and physical health removed, her sudden collapse when his deceit is revealed becomes that much less plausible.

These are negatives in the eyes of some sticklers, but even the grouchiest find it hard to deny the romantically evocative beauty of David Walker’s designs, the overall clarity of the narrative or the stylistic coherence of the choreography. ENB honours these virtues lovingly. The cast that I saw was led by Katja Khaniukova in the title-role and Francesco Gabriele Frola as Albrecht; she was too insipid in the first act to leave much of an impression, and he lacks the overtly aristocratic presence to suggest the character’s ducally entitled nature. But both of them raised their game considerably in the spectral second act – Khaniukova pure of line, Frola fleet of foot – as the corps of Wilis, ably commanded by a regal Alison McWhinney, conjured up the poetic nocturne at the heart of this ballet’s enduring appeal.

I guess I’ve seen Kenneth MacMillan’s Manon at least 20 times since its première in 1974 and although I continue to squirm at its interludes of knockabout comedy, I steadfastly rank it as a work of irresistible emotional power, offering magnificent opportunities for great dancers to chart the trajectory of a turbulent relationship through four electrifying pas de deux. MacMillan had a genius for using bodies to express psychological nuance and, in collaboration with his designer Nicholas Georgiadis, he also created a richly detailed social milieu that gives context to both Manon’s rapacious greed and her terror of ragged destitution. This is ballet that means something real.

There are many ways of interpreting Manon’s inner life: Lauren Cuthbertson makes her cool and knowing, ruthlessly playing with whatever bauble is at hand – an unsentimental approach that makes the girl’s ultimate brutal humiliation as painful as it is moving. A true ballerina and in her prime, she dances with gloriously easeful musicality. Matthew Ball is her Chevalier des Grieux, as ardent and sincere as she is foxy and scheming. What a marvellously thoughtful dancer he is – an unfailingly attentive partner, alert to the implication of every twist and bend in the choreography, but never interrupting the lyrical flow. Nothing in the way he moves ever seems routine or unconsidered.

Luca Acri is razor-sharp as Manon’s pimp of a brother and Gary Avis and Thomas Whitehead creepily characterise two seedy villains. The rest of the company has a lot of fun – perhaps too much fun at times – as assorted cheeky whores, wily beggars and upper-class twits. A terrific revival in sum, and I should toss a further bouquet into the pit, where Koen Kessels conducts Jules Massenet’s deliciously sugared score with unabashed passion.

Where are the smart investments under a Starmer government?

I worry that my Burlington Bertie life in London’s West End offers a misleading picture of the real economy. Yes, boutiques and brasseries are busy, but what’s it like in outer boroughs and distant provinces?

To take a single morning’s headlines, on the plus side there’s upbeat trading news from ABF, the grocery and Primark discount clothing retailer, which reaches consumers everywhere; and a prediction that energy prices will fall 16 per cent by April. On the negative, warnings that ‘more than 47,000 companies are on the brink of collapse’ (from insolvency specialists Begbies Traynor); and that world trade faces a second wave of Red Sea disruption even if Houthi attacks stop (from the shipping giant Hapag-Lloyd).

So here’s a balanced view: with inflation falling, interest rates at peak, wages generally up and taxes likely to come down, the consumer economy is improving, but not by much; the mildest shock could set it back. In search of confirmation I asked my cleaning lady, who lives in east London, whether she sees things getting better or worse.

‘Pluto has moved into Aquarius,’ she answered solemnly, ‘and that hasn’t happened since the French Revolution.’ I rush to Google: ‘Pluto… the planet of death and rebirth… is often associated with deep, transformative change.’ Deeper than the rise of Keir Starmer and the return of Donald Trump? Crikey. I see no signs in Piccadilly and the Strand, but we’d all be wise to brace for turbulence ahead.

Steel’s bitter end

Transformative trouble has hit Port Talbot, where 2,800 job losses could follow Tata Steel’s decision to close its last two coal-fired blast furnaces and replace them with electric arc furnaces that will reprocess scrap steel. The change will reduce the UK’s carbon footprint but leave us more dependent than ever on imports, with no capacity to make primary steel from iron ore.

‘Net-zero madness’, critics cry, but even an alternative plan from the plant’s unions would only keep one furnace operating for less than a decade, at huge expense to Tata (which says it’s already losing £1 million a day) or taxpayers.

The British steel industry has been slowly dying for 50 years, crushed by tectonic global shifts. Port Talbot is literally the bitter end. New technologies and new investors are the transformative answer, though they’ll never create equivalent numbers of industrial jobs.

A Starmer portfolio

With Starmer in mind, I asked Robin Andrews – the ‘veteran investor’ whose share suggestions served readers well over the past decade – how he might build a buy list for the new political era which, let’s face it (and to quote Philip Larkin), is coming like Christmas.

He picked three sectors bound to be affected by a change of government, starting with housebuilding: if incoming ministers address housing shortages by easing planning rules, then big names such as Persimmon and Barratt will reward the patient investor, as will Forterra in building materials.

Next, defence, and the perpetual search for more bang for Whitehall’s buck. Rolls-Royce and BAE Systems were strong performers last year but they may have further to rise; QinetiQ (the privatised defence research establishment) and Cohort (a smaller collection of defence tech ventures) could also do well.

Finally, pharma, in which any advance that might improve NHS performance or relieve its pressure points must be worth a look. A safety-first approach would involve quoted specialist investment trusts such as Polar Capital Global, Biotech Growth Trust and International Biotechnology Trust – or even safer, a holding in AstraZeneca as a pillar of the sector. But for a little more excitement our man picks three smaller companies in the process of seeking US Federal Drug Administration approval for their products and with reasonable cash runways: Scancell in immunology; Destiny Pharma in infection prevention; and Angle in liquid biopsy technology. Shield Therapeutics, with an iron deficiency drug already FDA-approved, could be a fourth. A spread across those four, plus Cohort, is a bet the veteran investor has already made for himself; but as ever, he urges you to do your own research. And we invite you to send your own Starmer portfolio picks to martin@spectator.co.uk.

City fox

To the Mansion House for tea with the City’s 695th Lord Mayor. He is Professor Michael Mainelli, and rather surprisingly he’s an Italian-American from Seattle who started out as an aerospace and computer scientist. He’s probably best known for founding a market-research firm called Z/Yen, publisher of a ‘global financial centres index’ in which London currently ranks second, below New York but above Singapore.

The theme of his mayoralty, ‘Connect to Prosper’, is less about financial clout and more about the City as an intellectual power-house and hub of ideas. That broad canvas is in contrast to the approach of his predecessor, Nick Lyons. Indeed, as I tried to keep pace with Mainelli’s polymathic tour d’horizon, I recalled the distinction first made by the ancient Greek poet Archilocus between the hedgehog who knows one big thing and the fox who knows many things.

Lyons was the former. He set himself one major objective: to persuade pension providers to contribute to collective funds for long-term, high-return, illiquid investment in UK infrastructure projects and unlisted equities. The ‘Mansion House compact’ to that effect, signed by nine UK pension firms last summer, attacked a big gap in the London capital market – and was an unusually solid achievement for a one-year term of office.

Mainelli – the fox – assures me that con-tinuity from one mayor to the next is ‘stronger than people think’. But amid all the conversations he’s keen to start in ‘the world’s coffee house’, I hope the Lyons project doesn’t get lost in a cacophony.  

Letters: Jesus was a wine connoisseur 

Benefits of abstinence

Sir: In last week’s Spectator, I turned to the cover piece ‘Dry Britain’ first because I stopped drinking alcohol last January. However, contrary to the demographic expectations of your article, I am a not-young 58-year-old. My abstinence is not based on a moral position, nor fear of an appearance on TikTok, but on the fact that three people I knew of my age and younger sadly passed away in the past year. One was directly due to the effects of alcohol, and in the other two cases alcohol was a likely factor. A year ago I was relatively fit, healthy and slim in comparison to the majority of my peers but still, as I peered at the horizon, I could make out a grim-looking gent with a scythe. Although I have also changed my eating and exercise habits, I can still identify the significant benefits, both physical and mental, that not drinking has delivered. Winston Churchill said: ‘I have taken more out of alcohol than it has taken out of me.’ For once, I have to disagree with him: alcohol will definitely take more out of you than you will take from it.

James Gardiner

Derby

Greater solace

Sir: Again Bruce Anderson bemoans his inability to believe in God, and turns to the solace of good wine (Drink, 20 January). But, despite his gloomy suggestion, Christian faith does not depend on anything so abstract as ‘a meaning to life and a fear of death’. It depends on Jesus. Jesus seems to have approved of excellent wine, as in the second chapter of John’s gospel. What’s to stop Bruce from starting there and searching for the still greater solace which the rest of that book might offer?

The Rt Revd Prof N.T. Wright
(former bishop of Durham)

Wycliffe Hall, Oxford

Plucky forbears

Sir: Professor Abulafia’s article (‘Sea worthy’, 20 January) is most welcome to every historian, especially those whose interest is in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Modern campaigners rail against those plucky forbears who underwent untold hardships and extraordinary challenges to discover more about the world we live in.

The vast majority of naval officers recognised that their own success depended on their sailors. I recall on joining the Royal Navy some 60 years ago being given a copy of The Naval Officer’s Handbook; on the title page was an outline of a uniformed sailor with the caption: ‘The single most important part of the navy.’ This was the philosophy handed down from Nelson’s day and earlier. Modern-day leaders would do well to recognise the same principle.

Tom Fremantle

East Markham, Newark

Corruption in Mongolia

Sir: I read Aidan Hartley’s article on Mongolia with great interest (‘Out of steppe’, 20 January). I would like to draw attention to efforts by the current government to combat deeply entrenched corruption. Aidan’s piece rightly highlights the recent public outcry over the coal scandal. Beyond that, corruption has hit state funds, as is shown by the misappropriation of the $100 million state education fund. The ongoing investigation reveals a convoluted network involving past and current politicians, their families, and other influential figures. The much larger involvement of a major conglomerate exploiting state resources – amounting to several hundred million dollars – to privatise a prized state mining asset suggests a Ponzi-like scheme. This shows the systemic nature of corruption in Mongolia, and potentially implicates high-ranking officials including a former Mongolian head of government.

Corruption is now a major concern for Mongolia’s 3.5 million citizens, who are fed up of the inequality. The efforts being made to put this right are a testament to Mongolia’s evolving democracy.

Batnairamdal Otgonshar

International Secretary, Mongolian People’s party (former vice minister of mining and heavy industry of Mongolia)

Strength of the force

Sir: Professor Bond is of course quite right in his elaboration (Letters, 20 January) of my remark that the army’s failure in 1940 was due in large part (but not exclusively) to ‘political purblindness and stinginess’, the generally accepted view of ‘the low, dishonest decade’ which the authors of Victory to Defeat (Books, 13 January) cover in detail. What makes the book of especial significance, however, is its examination of the army’s own failures to learn the real lessons of the first world war, and to keep up with developments in military technology; in short, to have an overarching concept of modern warfighting. His point about excessive belief in the power of the Maginot Line and the French army to ward off defeat long enough for Britain to build a continental army is well made. Belgium was always the open flank. And as in 1914, so in 1940: ‘Fall Gelb’ (the Manstein Plan) was Schlieffen for slow learners. Thank heavens for the Royal Navy and Fighter Command; and the English Channel.

Professor Bond rightly says that the army remained ‘the Cinderella Service’ in the 1930s. It has become so again. If our defence and security policy is really to be built on ‘leveraging strategic advantage’, we must make sure that all three services are strong enough to lever, for decisive action is ultimately only achieved by land forces.

Allan Mallinson

Salisbury Plain, Wiltshire

Ferreting out facts

Sir: Peter Krijgsman mistakenly refers to ferrets as ‘rodents’ (Notes on ferret racing, 13 January). I’m sure I will not be the only reader to point out that ferrets belong to the mustelid family, which also includes stoats, polecats, otters and even badgers. I don’t think Mr Krijgsman would see much result from sending a rodent down a rabbit hole.

Simon Sinclair

Llanddulas, Clwyd

Write to us letters@spectator.co.uk

The customer is never right

Penny Mordaunt, who carried her sword with such panache at the coronation, has called for 2024 to become the year we ‘make the consumer the king again’. I like Mordaunt. You should see the way she demolishes her Labour and Scots Nats counterparts in the Commons. But with her call for customers to be treated as monarchs, she may face an unwinnable battle. Businesses regard customers not as kings but as potential muggers, racists and a thoroughly dodgy lot.

‘Le client n’a jamais tort,’ said the hotelier César Ritz (d.1918), and he made a fortune. The more common attitude among today’s business owners, particularly in London, is that le client n’a jamais right. Are they correct – or is their much-paraded suspicion worsening the atmosphere?

Here are some signs seen in shops and cafés. Exhibit one: ‘Zero tolerance. Shouting, being disrespectful or abusive towards staff will not be tolerated at any time. Our hardworking, amazing staff have the right to be treated with dignity and respect at all times.’

Exhibit two: ‘Our people are people too. Please respect our Team so we can create a positive retail experience.’

Exhibit three: ‘Zero tolerance policy. We will not tolerate any forms of sexual harassment, aggression, racism, misogyny, LGBT phobia, religious bigotry.’

Exhibit four: ‘Giving money or food to people outside our store is encouraging theft, aggressive behaviour and substance abuse. There are many charities that would love your support. Please consider before handing over any money outside our store.’

Harry Gordon Selfridge (1858-1947), creator of the department store on London’s Oxford Street, helped mint the dictum ‘the customer is always right’. Selfridges is today more concerned about parading its own righteousness. On its website, alongside statements about its ‘tax vision and tax strategy objectives’, its modern slavery statement and gender pay gap report, you will find an ‘unacceptable behaviour policy’. Here, Harry Gordon Selfridge’s successors – ‘we are diverse, we are inclusive, we are Selfridges’ – wag their fingers at customers. Members of the public are told they will be reported to the police ‘or other relevant authorities’ if they use ‘derogatory language’, ‘language that is prejudiced based on a person’s sex, sexual orientation or gender identity (homophobia, transphobia or biphobia)’ or if they commit ‘cyberflashing, cat-calling or up-skirting’. Blimey. And you only stepped in to buy a packet of handkerchiefs. I don’t even know what cyberflashing is.

The Retail Trust, which campaigns for shop workers, says violence towards retail staff is worsening. It claims 90 per cent have been abused, with one unfortunate woman at a hardware store being told ‘I will slam your face through the desk’ before the customer punched her. Having done my time as a barman, I suppose I was once part of the statistics. An over-refreshed patron at the Red Lion pub in Oxford flayed a fist at me after I declined to serve him a snakebite. More recently, a minister for culture came charging up to the press gallery of the House of Commons and started screaming at me for having shown insufficient respect to her in a parliamentary sketch. The minister, since you ask, was Dame Caroline Dinenage. Perhaps I should report her to ‘the relevant authorities’. But I probably deserved it.

Attacking shop staff is surely illegal. No one can condone such scurvy conduct. But these corporate warnings seem to be about something else. Companies are parading political positions. Managers are telling customers who is boss, and it ain’t them.

My friend Janet, a nonagenarian widow, was taken to a Herefordshire pub the other day. Janet no longer has much appetite and chose something off the children’s menu because it would be smaller. ‘It’ll be on a cold plate,’ said the waiter. Janet politely asked if the plate could perhaps be warmed. ‘Nope,’ came the reply. ‘Children’s dishes come on cold plates. Safety protocols.’

One of the liberations of early Thatcherism was that companies started trying harder to please customers. Competition in previously stagnant and nationalised industries meant, for instance, that British Telecom was more helpful than the old GPO if you wanted a telephone line. Service in shops and public transport and hotels improved. Briefly, the philosophy of César Ritz flourished.

A couple of decades later, things started slipping to the old ways. Switchboards were replaced by phone trees (‘automated attendants’). Privatised utilities introduced reference numbers ‘for the convenience of the customer’ that were long and fiddlesome, plainly more for the convenience of the company computer. Holiday bookings became hellish. We now had to reserve hotels and flights ourselves. It is unlikely anyone under 45 knows what heaven it was to leave such chores to your travel agent. Now you have to input your details, print your boarding passes, faff around with your seat choices, the price rising at every click of the mouse.

The pandemic made things worse. Retail managers were finally able to impose one-way systems, queueing flows and bollards to control the duplicitous swine who wanted to spend money in their shops. My wife, at an otherwise empty Homebase store, ducked under some plastic tape to reach the till more quickly. The supervisor yelled at her as if she was a shoplifter: ‘Follow the arrows!’

Theatregoers used to arrange to meet in the foyer. You can’t do that now. You have to queue outside in the cold and dark while bouncers glare and shout at you and call you ‘guys’ or ‘people’. At our local Vauxhall dealer-ship, a sign says: ‘Due to coronavirus we will no longer be accepting cash payments. We apologise for any inconvenience.’ Apologise, my hat. They love it. Same with the catering trolley on trains. Ever since Covid it has been ‘we’re not taking cash at this time’. It’s the ‘at this time’ that maddens me. Some train companies have no intention of ever accepting cash again. They can’t be fagged.

The customer as king? Dream on. The customer is a lackey and a nuisance. Have a nice day.

Could Nikki Haley become the first female US president? 

Madame president

If Donald Trump stumbles before election day, could Nikki Haley end up becoming the first female US president? Hillary Clinton failed as the first female presidential candidate in 2016, but she wasn’t the first to stand on a presidential ticket: that honour belongs to the now-forgotten Geraldine A. Ferraro, who was picked by Walter Mondale to be his Democratic running mate in the 1984 election. Mondale had hoped to win over women voters, but his tactic appeared to backfire when a poll soon after her selection showed only 22 per cent of women voters approved of Mondale’s choice and three in five of all voters believed he had only chosen Ferraro to please feminist groups, not for her innate abilities. In the event, Mondale was soundly beaten by Ronald Reagan standing for his second term.

Steel trap

Port Talbot’s blast furnaces are to be replaced by an electric arc furnace to recycle scrap steel. How big is the UK steel industry?

– In 2022, the UK produced 6m tonnes of steel, 4.8m tonnes of which was made in an oxygen steel furnace and 1.1m tonnes of which was made in an electric arc furnace.

– The 4.8m tonnes from oxygen furnaces was made using 4.5m tonnes of iron made in blast furnaces and from 0.9m tonnes of scrap steel. All the steel made in electric
arc furnaces was made from scrap steel.

– UK production has fallen from 28m tonnes in 1970s. As recently as 2014 the
UK made 12m tonnes.

– UK output in 2022 represented 0.3 per cent of the global total of 1,885m tonnes.

– More than half the world’s steel in 2022 (1,018m tonnes) was made in China. Germany, the largest European producer, made 37m tonnes.

Source: UK Steel and the World Steel Association

Perfect storms

Storm Isha battered the UK with winds of more than 100mph. Have named storms become a debased currency? The number of named storms per season since the Met Office and its Irish equivalent began naming them in 2015 (does not include storms named by other countries):

2015/16 – 11

2016/17 – 5

2017/18 – 8

2018/19 – 8

2019/20 – 6

2020/21 – 4

2021/22 – 6

2022/23 – 2

2023/24 – 10

Source: Met Office

How to pass Harvard’s unconscious bias exam

Like Prince Harry, I never knew I had unconscious bias until it was pointed out to me, but now it has been I know I will have to do something about it. Except that in my case that ‘something’ is not to moan to Oprah Winfrey about members of my family speculating on the colour of my baby’s skin. It is to dig a little deeper and ask: do I really have an inner Ku Klux Klan that is controlling all I do and preventing me from becoming a good person?

I had heard of unconscious bias training on many occasions – not least when the then Cabinet Office minister Julia Lopez told the Commons that a government review of evidence had suggested it was ineffective and would therefore be phased out in the civil service. Actually, it seems to be taking a long time to be removed: more than a year after Lopez had made her statement, Civil Service Learning, which organises courses for civil servants, was still offering unconscious bias training. As for other organisations, it seems to be a booming industry. One company, for example, offers a one-day training course which ‘provides a non-judgmental approach aimed at understanding how unconscious bias operates in the workplace’. The cost is £795 per delegate face-to-face or £295 via Zoom.

Until last week I had never tried it myself, not least because I have never applied for a job in a public body or woke corporation. I then discovered that I could visit the Harvard University website and try for myself the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which lies at the heart of unconscious bias training. What’s more, I could do it for free, rather than having to pay £795.

This is how I got on. The IAT comes in many different flavours, promising to weed out unconscious bias on anything from disability to age, but the best-known is the one which deals with race. The test began by presenting me with a number of faces which I had to classify as either belonging to an African American (in which case I had to tap the ‘e’ key on my computer) or a European American (in which I had to press the ‘i’ key). If I got it wrong – and there was one face which befuddled me – I would be corrected. Then I was presented with a series of words like ‘friend’ and ‘disaster’ and had to identify them as ‘bad’ words (‘e’ key) or ‘good’ words (‘i’ key). Then it started to mix up the faces with the words, but asked me to do the same thing: press ‘e’ if I saw an African American face or a bad word; ‘i’ if I saw a European American face or a good word.

I paused at this point. Was it really trying to sow in my head the idea that African Americans are bad and European Americans are good? I wondered if that was what I was supposed to do; whether it was like Stanley Milgram’s experiment where volunteers were instructed by a man in a white coat to administer an apparent electric shock to a human being sitting behind a window. Was I going to be branded a racist if I went further?

But I reckoned I clearly wasn’t harming anyone, so I carried on. After I finished that section, the rules suddenly changed. I still had to press ‘e’ for a bad word and ‘i’ for a good word, but now I had to press ‘e’ for a European face and ‘i’ for an African face. Unsurprisingly, I found it a little confusing given I had got into the habit of doing it the other way round. Then it was all over and the computer delivered its verdict: I had taken much longer when black faces were on the same key as good words as I had when they were on the same key as bad words. Therefore I had a bias: I found it easier to associate black people with bad things. In fact, I had taken ‘much longer’ on the second part of the test. I really was right out there on the racist fringe.

It ought not to be hard to see the problem here. In the second half of the test I was having to counter what I had been doing in the first part. If I associated black people with bad things it was surely because that was the way my muscle memory had just been conditioned a few minutes earlier, not because of my inner bias. The objection has been raised before, indeed quite soon after the IAT was introduced in 1998. Yet the Harvard webpage rejects it. It turned out that while I had been given a version of the test with first associated black faces with bad things, some people – at random – got the test the other way around: where black faces were initially associated with good things. ‘The order in which you take the test can influence your results,’ it said, ‘but the effect is small.’

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So I took the test again, posing as someone else just in case Harvard’s mainframe spotted me as a returning customer. And this time I did indeed get the test the other way around. And guess what? This time I was taking longer when white people were associated with good things and black people bad things. In other words, I was no longer a white supremacist; rather I had a bias towards black people.

Ah, but was that because of the effect I described above – or was I subconsciously taking longer over the second part of the test because I didn’t want to be branded a racist? Either way, it undermines the test. Once you have done an IAT and you know how it works, you can game it so as to get the result you want. I then took the test a third time, this time counting to three each time before I pressed each key, to make sure I had enough time to counter any confusion and make sure I was getting it right. This time my result came back: ‘You were about equally fast at sorting “black people” with “bad” and “white people” as “good” and at sorting “white people” with “bad” and “black people” with “good”.’ Miraculously, I had suddenly lost all my prejudices. That is my advice if ever you are asked to undertake one of these tests: count to three before pressing any key and you will pass with flying colours (if I haven’t just unconsciously made an association between ‘colour’ and something good).

 In spite of these flaws, a vast industry has grown up around the IAT. It is nice business, at £795 a delegate. Some time the whole edifice of unconscious bias training will surely crumble and the IAT will be used with the same prefix as tends to be used with the Milgram experiment – ‘the now dis-credited’. But not before great fortunes have been made on the back of this junk science.  

Everyone should eat venison

Well, lucky little tiny tots at Top Days nurseries in Hampshire and Dorset. It’s Bambi on the menu for them now that the organisation running the schools has teamed up with the Eat Wild company, which promotes wild meats, to introduce venison into school lunches. They’re rolling out five dishes featuring venison, including deer mince in spaghetti bolognese and burgers. Some 3,000 children will benefit, and there will be more when the scheme is introduced in other schools.

It is the obvious and sane solution to the problem of an ever-increasing deer population, short of introducing wolves to cull the creatures, which nowadays have no natural predators. The children get to eat venison, which is low in fat and rich in nutrients like iron and zinc. The deer have a happy life until they’re shot – and if you had a choice between being a wild deer or a battery chicken, which would you prefer? The meat comes from two estates in the South Downs which are overrun with deer, so the environmental benefits of culling them are huge, specifically for trees, and for biodiversity generally.

There are, according to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, two million deer in Britain, a million more than there should be if we’re to continue to plant trees with a chance of survival at the rate the government promised. So eating deer is a win-win for children, deer (arguably) and the environment (definitely). And though no one has had the bad taste to mention it, for the sportsmen who get to stalk the noble beasts.

If venison is good enough for nurseries, what about prisons? I would argue that HM’s prisoners deserve some decent, nutritious food. My cookbooks are stuffed with inviting venison recipes: the Pipers Farm book has one for venison stew with bacon and chestnut dumplings – yum; Tom Kitchin’s Meat & Game has the excellent-sounding venison escalopes with parma ham, parsley and shallot butter; while Norman Tebbit’s The Game Cook has a lovely venison casserole with beer. (He begins his chapter encouragingly: ‘There are six species of deer in Britain – all of which make good eating.’)

And have you tried venison sausages in red wine? If I were a prisoner, that sort of menu would make me a better person. It would work for all of us.

The great mystery is how we have somehow managed to persuade ourselves that healthy food is chicken, salmon and vegan products, when in fact game is better on every count. There are some good chicken producers but they produce just a small percentage of the chicken that has become the default healthy protein for a diverse population. As for salmon, you can buy wild, either Alaskan or UK, but most is produced in environmentally problematic fish farms. Venison can be farmed, but why bother when wild deer are already overrunning whole areas? It’s local, sustainable and free from the dodgy elements of the vegan menu; avocados and soya, vegan faves, are water- and pesticide-intensive and produced on the other side of the world: edible ecocide.

Actually, it’s not just venison we should be eating more of. Next up should be wild rabbit (another pest, but good in a casserole) or grey squirrel, ditto (just pretend it’s chicken). Delicious.  

‘The perfect winter snack’: how to make flammekueche

There are times in the year that call for snacks. Rather than embracing the various diets and other forms of self-flagellation that sweep over us at the start of the year, we need every joy we can get during endless January, with its dark, short days and cold nights. Right now, we are in such territory. Open those posh crisps, order the triple-cooked chips, invite joy in.

I have strong ideas about the platonic snack for winter: something hot, ideally, to accompany a glass of something cold as you while away the dark evenings. The ideal contrast between crisp and yielding, sweet and salty – something that can be picked up one-handed and is substantial enough to satisfy, but still leave you wanting more. Flamme-kueche fits the bill pretty well.

Flammekueche is a speciality of the Alsace region: a rectangle of dough, topped with onions, bacon and crème fraîche. Outside of the main regions, it is often known as tarte flambée – which is slightly misleading, as it is neither flambéed (set alight with alcohol) nor really a tarte. It’s more of a pizza, if we’re being honest, although I wouldn’t let either the Alsacians or the Italians hear you say that. Supposedly a flammekueche would be used to test the heat of the farmers’ wood-fired ovens, as it would cook very quickly when these were hot enough.

There are a couple of variations among flammekueche aficionados: it can be made with a leavened or unleavened base; thin and crisp, or thicker and breadier. Michel Roux makes his with puff pastry, but I agree with Felicity Cloake who thinks that this turns the flammekueche into ‘just another tart’, which it definitely is not. I’d rather have a flammekueche than not, so in a pinch, shop-bought puff will do the job, but I’d urge you to give making the dough a try. It comes together quickly, doesn’t require proving, and – despite the rich toppings – really gives the dish its distinctive character.

For my money, flammekueche should have the thinnest of bases, crisp and almost flaky. Crème fraîche or (if you have access to the proper French stuff) fromage frais are spread on the raw base; if you can, splash out and use the fancy, thicker varieties of either. This is then topped with salty cured pork and tangles of onion: I like the pork in the form of little chunky lardons (rather than in rashers or slices), which have been cooked from cold until the fat renders and they turn golden. The onion also benefits from a quick softening before it is added to the base. The whole thing is cooked hot hot hot, until the base crisps and the onions just begin to char.

Rick Stein adds gruyère to his flamme-kueche  (which, if we’re getting technical, actually turns it into a flammekueche gratinée). I’m not sure I’ve ever deliberately eschewed cheese on, well, any dish, but this might be the exception. Having tried it both ways, I think that grated gruyère sprinkled on top is delicious, but it also changes the whole taste. It has the tendency to outshine the other
elements, which otherwise complement each other. And the trio of rich crème fraîche, sweet onion and salty pork truly don’t need anything else.

For all my snack evangelism, flammekueche does hold its own as a meal, with nothing really needed to accompany it apart from a green salad dressed with something sharp and mustardy, and perhaps a handful of small pickles. But for me, its speediness, its thinness, its salty sweetness, make it the perfect pre-dinner appetiser. Either way, if you’re lucky enough to have a pizza oven, these thin tarts can be cooked in under two minutes; in a domestic oven, you’re going to need to be a little more patient, but they will still be ready in under a quarter of an hour. This is fast food.

Lift the finished flammekueche out onto a breadboard, cut it into big, generous squares or slabs, plonk it down with a bottle of wine, and remind yourself that even the darkest months can be brightened in this way.

Serves 4

Takes 15 minutes

Cooks 10-12 mins   

For the dough

• 250g plain flour
• 150ml water
• 2 tbsp olive oil
• 1 tsp salt

For the filling

• 200g smoked lardons
• 1 onion, peeled and sliced
• 200g crème fraîche
• 20g butter

1. First make the dough. Place all the ingredients in the bowl of a stand mixer with a dough hook, and knead for about five minutes, until smooth. You can do this by hand, but it will take a few minutes longer. Leave the dough to rest while you prepare the other ingredients.
2. Place the lardons in a dry, cold frying pan, and cook over a medium heat until the fat has rendered and the lardons are golden. Lift from the pan with a slotted spoon and set to one side. Turn down the heat, add the butter and sliced onions, and cook until the onions are softened but not coloured.
3. Heat your oven as high as it will go.
4. Roll the dough into two rectangles, each measuring about 25x28cm, and lift onto two large, lined baking trays. Gently straighten out the dough on the tray if it has become rucked up.
5. Spread each rectangle with 100g crème fraîche, leaving a thin border on all edges. Scatter over the onions and the lardons, and then cook for 10-12 minutes, until the edges of the dough are golden brown, and the onions are just starting to catch. Remove from the oven, cut into squares and serve.

Would Jesus really be against the Rwanda Bill?

Sitting in the Chamber late on Monday afternoon for the Lords debate on the UK-Rwanda treaty, I was impressed by the standard of oratory. Most of the best speeches came from those – Lords Goldsmith (the Labour one), Kerr of Kinlochard, Anderson of Ipswich – who argued that the treaty was not, in itself, proof of the government’s contention, which the Safety of Rwanda (Asylum and Immigration) Bill seeks to turn into law, that Rwanda is now a safe country. Not for the first time, I felt an unease about how the government has got itself into this tight corner. But then up popped the Bishop of Gloucester: ‘I will just say,’ she just said, ‘that as Lord Bishops we take no party position… based on tribal loyalty and we are not whipped. Instead, and because of what our Christian faith teaches us about care for the stranger, we have spoken with one voice on these benches.’ As the late Sir John Junor used to put it: ‘Pass the sick bag, Alice.’ Does Jesus really insist that His followers must all, if given the chance, vote for Lord Goldsmith’s motion not to ratify the treaty? Cannot He rely on us to exercise our consciences? Does He not have bigger fish to fry? It is a curious thing that our now almost uniformly left-wing diocesan bishops look down on African nations and churches (with whom they disagree about things like same-sex marriages) just as much as did their missionary, colonial predecessors. Their pride reminds me of Bishop Heber’s imperial hymn ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’: ‘Can we whose souls are lighted/With wisdom from on high/ To a land benighted/ the lamp of life deny?’ Thanks to Bishop Treweek, I remembered just in time that cant is not the same as virtue and that the brilliant arguments of the Bill’s opponents have the overriding ungodly purpose of impeding Britain’s attempts to reduce illegal immigration.

One must not be drawn into any culture war by Sir Keir Starmer’s accusation that only Conservatives (which I am not) and conservatives (which I am) are spoiling for one. I would merely ask him to consider career patterns in the great British institutions he claims to defend. Here is one example. Zarin Patel was chief financial officer at the BBC from 2004-11. In her role of collecting television licence money, she allowed to be sent out 6.6 million letters threatening people (including me) that unless we had a television licence we would have to admit enforcement officers into our homes. She had to apologise for this. Ms Patel is also on the Board of Trustees of the National Trust and chairs its Audit Committee. She was appointed to this role in 2018 under the NT chairmanship of Tim Parker, who was also chairman of the Post Office during part of the painful saga of the wronged sub-postmasters. In addition, Zarin Patel was the senior independent director of the Post Office from 2019 to March last year, beginning under Mr Parker’s chairmanship. I think such interconnections are worthy of notice, perhaps even of criticism.

A recent study by the Behaviour and Health Research Unit at Cambridge University suggests that if wine is sold in smaller glasses, people drink less – ‘just under 8 per cent’ less in this case. It followed four weeks’ drinking patterns in 21 licensed premises. This finding contradicts work undertaken years ago at my own Cambridge college. Trinity (winner of more Nobel prizes than France, as our Master, the late R.A. Butler used, inaccurately, to boast) studied wine-drinking only at its own high table. When presented with smaller glasses, the dons increased their consumption by a third. Why the difference? I suspect it relates to price. The Behaviour and Health Research Unit notes ‘the higher profit margins of smaller serving sizes of wine’ for publicans but does not consider how the consumers might have become more reluctant, if they knew they were paying the same price for less wine, to order another round. The Trinity study, however, was looking at a situation in which the consumers were not billed. Like the NHS, Trinity’s wine was ‘free at the point of use’. The dons therefore feared that small glasses would give them less. So they kept refilling, increasingly merrily.

It was deplorable that a Hindu mob destroyed the Babri Mosque in Ayodhya in 1992, and controversial that the Indian Supreme Court eventually decided to give the land to Hindus for the construction of a temple. It is also deplorable that Narendra Modi, the Prime Minister of India, made himself the main consecrator of the new temple this week, timing the ceremony with an eye to the forthcoming general election. This is a prime example of the ‘communalism’ which compromises the deliberately secular state of India. There is, however, a historical irony here which wokeists should bear in mind. The Babri mosque was constructed in the 16th century by a general of Babur, the first Mughal emperor. In the eyes of many Hindus, therefore, its destruction hundreds of years later was a ‘decolonising’ act. The current mania for destroying or removing beautiful things associated with an imperial power is not confined solely to white Christian empires.

In the West, parents no sooner have children than they wish to farm them out to carers, crèches, preschools etc. Political parties compete to expand these facilities at public expense. Is a similar trend now observable in relation to dogs, probably accelerated by Covid, when hundreds of thousands wanted a dog to keep them company when stuck at home? Now the word ‘barkyard’ has entered the English language. These can be workplace areas or boarding facilities where you deposit your dog with other dogs, and minders. I have long argued that any party which promised to create a National Health Service for pets would win the election (and bankrupt the country). ‘Free’ barkyards would be an almost equally popular election promise and a smaller burden on the taxpayer.

Why won’t Europe defend its own interests?

The US and Britain have joined forces to strike Houthi rebels who have been attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea. But where is the rest of Europe when it comes to defending its own interests? The Netherlands has provided some logistic support – along with Australia, Bahrain and Canada – but European countries have otherwise opted out of the operation, just as they have so many times before.

This response to the Houthi attacks is no military adventure. It does not compare with the invasion of Iraq 21 years ago, which raised legitimate questions about the legality and wisdom of trying to invade, seize and rebuild a country. The operation in the Red Sea is a straightforward defence against illegal attacks on civilian ships. Those attacks are not just threatening the lives of sailors; they are blocking the most direct route for goods being transported to Europe from Asia and the Gulf. Europe has already suffered an energy crunch following Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine; now the supply of replacement fuel is under threat. Among the many ships which have been forced to divert from the Red Sea and Suez canal and take ten days longer going around the Cape of Good Hope are ships carrying liquefied natural gas (LNG) from Qatar to Europe. As the shipping giant Maersk has warned, a protracted blockage of the Red Sea will add substantially to the cost of shipping and thwart global economic recovery.

A blockage of the Suez canal is Europe’s problem more than it is America’s, yet the European response has been feeble. Emmanuel Macron said he decided not to join in the military strikes because he doesn’t want France to get involved in an escalation of tensions in the Middle East – the Houthis have made it clear that they are trying to retaliate against Israel’s military operation. Macron refused even to sign a declaration of support, along with Italy and Spain.

Olaf Scholz, who did sign, seems to want to get involved but only as part of an EU-backed operation, any chance of which has so far been scuppered by Macron. So much for the argument trotted out so many times during the Brexit debate: that membership of the EU allows states to punch well above their weight on international affairs. The reluctance of EU states to assert themselves militarily without unanimous agreement is becoming a serious weakness.

We do not wish to get sucked into a wider Middle Eastern conflict either, which is why the Prime Minister was right to make it clear this week that Britain is not trying to impose its will on Yemen. Regime change is not on the agenda, nor is any kind of world-policeman role within the territory of Yemen. But the attacks on shipping cannot be allowed to persist, and the operation to prevent them must continue until the Houthis voluntarily end their attacks or their ability to wage them is thoroughly degraded.

It would help if other European countries were to join in rather than try to hide behind US military might. The reluctance to become involved is reminiscent of the situation two years ago when the US and Britain quickly stepped up to supply weaponry and other tactical support to Ukraine, while other European countries initially prevaricated. Had it not been for our timely response, Ukraine could have fallen very quickly and Putin would have emerged emboldened, ready to extend his dream of a revived Russian empire.

For far too long, Europe has been trying to shelter beneath America’s defence umbrella. Donald Trump won no prizes for diplomacy when he tweeted, during the 2018 Nato summit, ‘The US pays tens of Billions of Dollars too much to subsidise Europe, and loses Big on trade’, but he was essentially correct: the US is getting a bad deal out of defending Europe because too few European countries are taking their own responsibilities seriously. Nato has set a clear target that member states should spend at least 2 per cent of GDP on defence. Yet pitifully few member states meet this obligation.

Germany has vowed to change its ways but, as Lisa Haseldine observes in her article, its efforts so far are unconvincing and Lithuania is seriously considering whether Poland might not be a better defence partner. If Germany does deploy to Lithuania, it is far from clear whether it would be able to retain the capacity to defend itself. This is a ludicrous situation and it should not take Trump to point it out. Eventually there may come a time when the US has altogether had enough of paying to defend Europe and its interests, at which point European countries will be horribly exposed.

It isn’t just that extra firepower would be welcome against the Houthis. The greater the number of countries prepared to stand up against illegal attacks on civilians and commercial interests, the more political legitimacy the operation will seem to possess.

A better way of handling the situation is needed. Shying away from defending shipping will not ease tensions in the Middle East; it will merely encourage Europe’s enemies to take advantage of its weakness.  

Could Dean Phillips be President?

Joe Biden likes to say that ‘democracy is on the ballot’ in 2024. Yet Joe Biden was not on the ballot on Tuesday in New Hampshire. In his absence, a 55-year-old former congressman called Dean Phillips, who started his campaign just ten weeks ago, won 20 per cent of the vote.

Biden still won easily as more than 65 per cent of Democratic voters wrote his name in. But the President’s ducking of New Hampshire, and Phillips’s sudden emergence, says a lot about the sorry state of Democratic politics and the gnawing fear that Biden is going to lose to Donald Trump in November.

The re-nomination of a commander-in-chief is usually little more than a formality. Lyndon B. Johnson was forced to step aside in 1968, but the last time an elected sitting first-term president was not his party’s candidate was in 1856, when president Franklin Pierce was brushed aside for James Buchanan.

There’s nothing normal about Biden’s presidency, however. Last year, at his behest, the Democratic National Committee (DNC) announced a major shake-up of its primary system, stripping New Hampshire of its ‘first-in-the-nation’ status and making South Carolina the opening primary. The official reason was that South Carolina is more racially diverse and more representative of the nation. The truth is that the Democratic leadership knows Biden is unpopular and potentially vulnerable to a challenge.

New Hampshire rejected the DNC’s change, insisting it would hold its primary before anyone else and citing a clause in its state law which compelled it to do so. The DNC responded by ruling that New Hampshire’s vote would not count and ordered presidential candidates to ‘take all steps possible not to participate’. Various long-shot candidates, such as the spiritualist TV star Marianne Williamson, ignored that and ran anyway. But it was Phillips, a centrist dad on an eccentric mission, who stood out.

Phillips is more machine politician than maverick. His hair is coiffed, his suits shine and he talks as if he’s the sweetest man in America; Ted Lasso with a Minnesota accent. ‘I love you guys,’ he tells audiences, dripping in earnestness. ‘This is so cool.’ He says he wants to repair America ‘one handshake, one high-five and one hug at a time’.

Americans aren’t necessarily allergic to that kind of schmaltz. For millennials and Gen Zers, corniness is kindness and Phillips speaks to their obsessions with mental health and anguish at the nastiness of the age of Trump. ‘I want to be your mentor,’ Dean tells them. ‘I want to be your friend.’ He also taps into a Democratic longing for the hopey-changey mood that Barack Obama once gave the party, something utterly lost under Biden.

Phillips’s back story is a political consultant’s dream. His father, Artie Pfefer, was killed in Vietnam when Dean was six months old. His mother then married the heir to the Phillips Distilling Company. He joined the family firm, eventually becoming its CEO, then set up his coffee-shop chain Penny’s.

In 2018, he won Minnesota’s third congressional district, the first Democrat to do so since 1961. He got into politics because his daughter – ‘who’s a gay woman’ – was upset by the election of Trump. He discovered his calling to lead, he suggests, on 6 January 2021, when he was locked in the Capitol as Trump supporters ran riot.

Phillips presents himself as a great uniter. He denounces the ‘angertainment’ of cable news as well as the ‘cult of personality’ around Trump and Biden. Whereas Biden condemns ‘MAGA extremists’, Dean says that the Trump supporters he encounters are ‘the most hospitable, friendly, decent people you could ever hope to meet’.

He wraps up his speeches with a saccharine story about Emily, a Democratic woman who drives a Prius, and Dave, a pick-up-truck-driving Trumper, who have dinner together and end up hugging. Again, it’s all too corny to be true. ‘I actually found him annoying,’ said one Biden voter, when asked about Dean as she left the polls. Phillips isn’t deterred: ‘We’re just getting started,’ he tweeted, as the results came in on Tuesday. ‘See y’all in South Carolina.’

One of his chief backers is Andrew Yang, a quirky former presidential candidate. Yang, whose old campaign team is running Phillips’s effort, quit the race four years ago after he got only 2.8 per cent of the vote in New Hampshire. He insists, however, that Dean is ‘the man for the moment’ in 2024. ‘He’s a steady hand but also someone who will be with us a while and you’re not worried about their mental or physical vitality.’

Yang and Phillips argue that the Democratic establishment is choking off their challenge because it can’t accept that ‘Biden is going to get creamed’ by Trump in November. Lots of New Hampshirites seem to agree, even if they didn’t vote for him.

Phillips lacks the radical edge that might help him fire up the American left. He supports ‘Medicare for all’ and has a cuddly plan to create ‘dream accounts’ for every child. At a rally in Nashua on Saturday, however, his mask slipped a little as a heckler demanded that he denounce ‘Israel’s war crimes’.

‘Just let him be obnoxious,’ said Phillips, who is Jewish. ‘This is how 21st-century politics works these days.’ On Monday night he snapped at journalists who asked if he was ‘splitting the vote’ for Biden. ‘I’m only doing this to defeat Donald Trump… You’re doing your jobs but you’re not asking the questions that Americans give a shit about.’

Short of a miracle, Phillips is not going to unseat Biden through conventional voting, but Democratic anxiety about Trump’s strength and Biden’s weakness are likely to intensify. By August, when the party holds its national convention, the President’s cognitive decline may have become too obvious for even the party establishment to ignore. Everybody knows that Kamala Harris, his Vice President, is hugely unpopular. The party might try to shoehorn in Gavin Newsom, the California governor, or the Democrats might just fall back on Phillips, the man who doesn’t terrify the establishment.

On Saturday night, Trump mischievously suggested Democrats ‘should vote for the congressman just to send a signal’. Phillips replied: ‘Careful what you wish for, Donald.’

Downing Street aide defects to the dark side

So, who is the Conservative Britain Alliance? Westminster is virtually swamped these days with an alphabet-spaghetti-esque collection of different acronyms, ranging from the CGG and CSG to the the NRG and ERG. But the CBA is both the newest and most secretive entity of them all, with little known about the Alliance, other than its name and tendency to commission polls that are unhelpful to No. 10.

But tonight a little more light has been shed on the group. First, Sir Simon Clarke did an interview with the BBC in which he admitted that even he did not know who was behind the group. And now, the Alliance has unveiled its latest recruit, straight from the heart of government himself. Will Dry, a former special adviser under Rishi Sunak, has tonight publicly defected to the CBA and is now conducting for the group.

In a statement given to the Sun, which broke the story, Dry explained his move:

Sadly, it became clear to me we weren’t providing the bold, decisive action required to overcome those challenges. You cannot dent them without internalising just how broken our political system is. I further concluded, again sorrowfully, that the Conservatives are heading for the most almighty of defeats. Be in no doubt: we are on course for at least a decade of Labour rule. And if Farage comes back, the Conservative Party essentially won’t exist by Christmas.

Dry of course previously spearheaded the controversial pro-Remain group ‘Our Future, Our Choice’ which campaigned against Brexit throughout the May years. Talk about a political journey…

Simon Clarke breaks his silence

Well, that was quick. Less than 24 hours after Simon Clarke called for Rishi Sunak to resign and tweeted ‘I have no further comment to make’ he has, er, issued a further comment. The former Levelling Up Secretary broke cover tonight after taking a battering from colleagues over his call for the Prime Minister to go. In an interview with the BBC’s Chris Mason, Clarke doubled down on his position but acknowledged that not all his colleagues would agree with him:

I totally respect the strong views that something like this evokes. No-one likes the guy who’s shouting “‘”Iceberg!” but I suspect that people will be even less happy if we hit the iceberg. And we are on course to do that. That is the point which I need to land with colleagues respectfully and calmly: We’re not responding to the situation with the seriousness that it warrants. Because I don’t want a decade of decline. I want a Conservative government that delivers for communities like mine and for the country. I really worry that we are on course for a shattering defeat.

Mason also took the chance to ask the Middlesbrough MP about the mysterious group ‘Conservative Britain Alliance’ which has commissioned a series of YouGov polls for the Telegraph that have produced some very unfavourable headlines for the beleaguered PM. Did Clarke know who they were? ‘No’ replied the former minister, adding ‘I haven’t made it my business to find out because what I’m concerned about is what’s in the poll.’ He continued ‘What matters is that the poll was conducted by YouGov, who are one of the leading pollsters in the UK’.

Mr S suspects Clarke’s interview will only lead to further questions in the days ahead…