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A prolonged love affair: The Two Roberts, by Damian Barr, reviewed
For a time, Robert Colquhoun and Robert MacBryde were at the heart of the in-crowd. Stories of Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud and their wartime circle often make reference to the two young painters from Scotland. Feted in the 1940s for their modernist styles – Colquhoun typically portraying figures, MacBryde preferring still life scenes – they later lapsed into painful, drink-sodden obscurity.
Damian Barr’s novel, The Two Roberts, is a tender and evocative act of resurrection. It portrays the men’s lives from the time of their first meeting as students at Glasgow School of Art to the moment in the mid-1950s when, penniless and out of fashion, they retreated to an ancient cottage in Suffolk. Meticulous in its verisimilitude, it is the story of a prolonged love affair – one that was tentative in the beginning, and urgent (sometimes blazingly fractious) in later years.
More than anything, The Two Roberts is a study of divergent characters: the voluble, bold Bobby MacBryde and the quieter, coiled Robert Colquhoun; the one Catholic and poor, the other Presbyterian and hailing from a more arriviste but no less stifling background. ‘Robert never forgets a word. Bobby never forgets a feeling’ – such an antithesis, typical of Barr’s compressed style, evinces their temperaments.
Barr has drawn upon a variety of historical sources, including letters, but much of the small detail of the novel (including some of the correspondence) is imagined. For instance, he ventriloquises a letter written by the Roberts’ friend John Minton – a fellow artist and third wheel for a time in their relationship – which recounts a long-delayed return to Ayrshire in the mid-1940s. Minton’s imagined account of Colquhoun’s reunion with his parents is one of the novel’s more tragic, desperate incidents.
‘It’s like they didn’t exist until they got to London,’ remarks Minton in the same letter. In fact much of the novel deals with Bobby and Robert’s prewar, pre-London life. With an attuned sense of place, down to the smallest specifics about streets and rooms, Barr dwells on the period when they lived together in a Glasgow attic – the slow ignition of their relationship, the eccentricity of their landlady, the heartbreaking separation entailed by Robert’s war service. The narrative perspective oscillates between the pair, as if to imply the nearness of one’s consciousness to the other’s. Action and thought follow each other in brisk progression.
Barr is never ponderous. Sometimes, though, one desires a break in the tempo or a more lingering depiction of interiority. There isn’t any sustained sense – at least at first – of the mutual nature of the men’s desire. Then, quite suddenly:
Robert’s mind is full of the possibility of what he knows is wrong – what he’s been imagining since he was a boy, what presented itself in Bobby’s lips that first time he sketched him, what he dreams about every night in their attic.
The two Roberts lived
in continual awareness of
prejudice and the law
This is a prime example of Barr’s ability to shift from fluent, elegantly functionary prose to something more wayward and ambiguous.
There is a drollness to the writing and a vibrancy and precision to the imagery that propel the story forward. ‘As castles go, Maybole’s has almost gone,’ we are told, during a flashback to Bobby’s childhood in the small South Ayrshire town. Much later, when the middle-aged Bobby drops a bottle of whisky he has been cradling, it slides ‘straight down between his legs like some miracle birth’, crashing to the ground.
In the middle of the novel, Barr recounts the pair’s adventures in France and Italy on the brink of the second world war, following the awarding of a joint travel scholarship. There are transient references to their sexual goings-on (‘They’ve unclothed plenty of men on their travels – collected a button from each’), but these remain largely under cover of night. Such reticence, not uncommon in contemporary novels, here befits the historical moment: the two Roberts live in continual awareness of prejudice and the law. At one point, Bobby thinks to himself that ‘pictures of sex, like stories about dreams, should never be shared’.
Bobby, who was always considered the follower in their double act, takes centre stage in Barr’s story. His ironic, irreverent personality sings through, with Colquhoun’s stiffer (probably less generous) nature acting as a counterpoint. Real historical figures – the debonair patron Peter Watson, the excitable Cyril Connolly – are brought deftly to life. Bacon is resurrected, a touch caricatured, in all his boozy loucheness.
In the main, though, Barr steers clear of the hackneyed fables and stock settings of wartime bohemia: the Colony Room club and its foul-mouthed proprietor Muriel Belcher are no more than passing details. The humour, compassion and tragedy of the story are invested in the incompatible, inseparable characters at its heart. In the space of a few pages, we find them chasing each other naked around a London garden – one brandishing a knife – and then settling down in the timeless countryside. The ‘happily ever after’ ring of the novel’s closing pages has a subtle, aching irony to it: the paradise won’t last, but it hardly seems to matter.
Glamour and intrigue: The Silver Book, by Olivia Laing, reviewed
Olivia Laing has had a productive couple of years. The Silver Book arrives hot on the heels of The Garden Against Time, a memoir-cum-environmentalist treatise published in 2024. It is a novel of stunning imaginative power that was apparently written in just three months.
Set in 1975, during the making of two great works of Italian cinema, Federico Fellini’s Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, it is suffused with the glamour and intrigue of these filmmakers’ worlds. It offers a fictional retelling of the events that led up to Pasolini’s murder – a crime that remains unsolved – on 2 November. But at heart the book is a love story that follows the relationship between Danilo Donati – the costume and production designer responsible for realising Fellini’s and Pasolini’s visions – and a young English boy called Nicholas.
This is an ambitious set-up, but Laing (who uses gender-neutral pronouns) is more than up to the task. The Silver Book exhibits her characteristic flair for responding to different art forms; a fascination with individuals who are at odds with the status quo; and her fierce political sensibility. The subject matter is indeed overtly political: Salò is a nightmarish allegory of fascism, and the themes of artifice and sexual abandonment in Casanova echo Nicholas’s plight as a homosexual in 1970s Italy. His identity comes with the ‘emotional burden of self-invention’. Wearying of the strain, Nicholas longs, through romantic connection, ‘to be gutted, to be relieved of his personality and his face, to dance on the hook like an exhausted fish’.
Laing makes us realise the effort involved in sustaining illusions both in life and art. When Nicholas asks Donati why Casanova is being filmed in Rome rather than Venice, where the action of the plot takes place, he is told: ‘Because the film is not set in Venice. It is set in Fellini’s Venice, and that has to be made from scratch.’ These are film-makers intent on fashioning a reality that fits the precise contours of their imagination. The resourceful Donati makes a ‘mosaic out of boiled sweets’; he uses chocolate to resemble excrement; he becomes ‘a magpie for materials that might transcend themselves, given the right lighting’. He and his circle are in the business, as he puts it, of creating ‘authentic illusions’. In this rigorously researched yet highly inventive novel that delights in mingling fact and fiction, Laing is, too.
The history of modern Ireland, seen through the lives of its leaders
My passion for history was ignited by political biography when I was a teenager. You read the life story of a person who – if the writer is any good – captures your attention like the protagonist of a novel; and along the way, almost by chance, you learn about the great events in which the person was a player. My strongest memory of Disraeli, from a 1951 book by Hesketh Pearson, is his maiden speech in the House of Commons in 1837, when, after being heckled and jeered at for his flamboyant dress and delivery, he said: ‘Though I sit down now, the time will come when you will hear me.’
These days I not only read biography but write it. So I seized on The Taoiseach, a collection of essays edited by Iain Dale, as a painless way to rectify my shameful ignorance of recent Irish political history and its leading figures. It consists of short biographies of each of the 16 men (they are all men so far) who have occupied the top position in Irish politics since the founding of the Irish Free State in 1922.
It did the job. I now know that Sean Lemass, when he was a 16-year-old Irish volunteer in 1916, played with his loaded revolver in the family sitting room and accidentally shot dead his 19-month-old baby brother Herbert. I also, thanks to a luminously written short essay by Professor Bryce Evans of Liverpool Hope University, understand why Lemass is often considered the greatest of the taoisigh (the plural of taoiseach). From 1959 to 1966, he made three great shifts away from the siege mentality of the early years of independence. These shifts in the long term transformed the country and its economy. Making them required him to initiate policies which he had spent a lifetime opposing.
He saw that protectionism would not work in the postwar world and emphasised the importance of attracting outside investment. He recognised the reality that was Northern Ireland. And he pointed his country towards Europe, where – whatever the UK may think of the European Union – Ireland remains happy and prosperous.
With a different writer tackling each taoiseach, the quality is naturally variable. Several chapters, like Evans’s Lemass, are very good indeed. The great Eamon de Valera is brought to magnificent life in all his glory and his contradictions in an informative, thoughtful and readable piece by the Irish journalist and De Valera biographer David McCullagh. And Professor Gary Murphy of Dublin City University lucidly and fluently garners sympathy and even admiration for Charles Haughey, who served three terms as taoiseach in the 1980s but, as Murphy writes, is associated with ‘corruption, venality and profligacy’. In reality, says Murphy, he was ‘a master compartmentaliser who, like Icarus, soared too close to the sun’.
The great Eamon de Valera is brought to magnificent life in all his glory and contradictions
Other chapters are less distinguished, though all are workmanlike. John A. Costello, the taoiseach who followed De Valera in 1948, was really a lawyer who dabbled in politics, which made him a less effective political leader (a problem that may afflict Britain’s current prime minister). It cannot be easy to make him interesting, and Charles Lysaght, an Irish lawyer and obituarist, does not succeed in doing so. For Albert Reynolds (1992-4), instead of commissioning a new piece, the publishers have decided to edit down one intended for an entirely different purpose: the entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography, written by the Fianna Fail politician Martin Mansergh. It tells the story in a pedestrian manner.
This book was a really good idea, largely well executed. Most Britons, even those who know some history, are dreadfully ignorant about the politics of the country which is our nearest neighbour, whose destiny we guided for eight centuries until 1922. Here is a way to grasp the essentials quickly and enjoyably. Having each taoiseach dealt with by a different writer allows the reader to see different takes on the same issue, and to watch the issues weave their way through Irish politics: relationship with the UK, with the EEC and now the EU, and the long stranglehold of the Catholic church over domestic policy.
It is possible to trace through these essays the extraordinary progress Ireland has made, from a poverty-stricken back-water with hardly any infrastructure, so deeply in the grip of the Catholic Church that it was almost a theocracy, to a modern, thriving liberal democracy, where the power of the Church has been broken to an extent that no one would have predicted when I first visited the country in the 1970s.
The surreal drama of Helsinki’s history
In 1920, the young Finnish architect Alvar Alto flew over Helsinki for the first time. He was aghast. ‘An aviator can see where the monkeys have been and destroyed so very much,’ he recalled. Alto’s aerial view reflected a story of fragmentation and occupation spanning some five centuries, now surveyed by the historian Henrik Meinander. The capital, explains the author, was bashed about by a series of bad actors – Swedes, Russians and Germans – until Finland stood its ground and became an independent nation in the early 20th century.
Helsinki is ‘a city shaped by the sea, a city best seen from the sea’, writes Meinander. ‘Wherever you are in Helsinki’s inner city, you will always be close to the water.’ It originated by royal order, when King Gustav I of Sweden, Finland’s ruling power in the 16th century, decided that a new town was needed on the southern coast to give Sweden a competitive edge in the Baltic trade. It received its charter in 1550.
Helsinki’s early history is a dismal cycle of building, settling, fires, rebuilding and resettling. And then there was the plague of 1710, which decimated the population. The chief progressive event of its first two centuries came in 1748, with the construction of Suomenlinna, a vast sea fortress composed of eight islands south-east of the city.
Meinander, a professor of history at the University of Helsinki, is interested in statistics, demographics and power plays between burghers, much of which is as dry as reindeer jerky. Things get juicier in the 19th century, however, when Finland was part of the Russian empire and saw huge expansion and growing tensions over the Russification of the country.
The Russian Revolution changed everything. Civil war broke out between Finns seeking Bolshevism and the anti-communist White Guard led by General Mannerheim and supported by German forces (who soon had boots on the ground in Helsinki). Two decades later, the Winter War with Russia brought further mayhem to the city. Helsinkians have long been an ‘inadvertent audience to a surrealist geopolitical drama’, Meinander observes.
A keen eye is brought to a built environment ravaged by time and conflict. The blueprints for Helsinki’s city centre, with its grid layout and grand boulevards, were drawn up by a local nobleman, Johan Albrecht Ehrenstrom, following a devastating fire in 1808: ‘It was nothing short of a proposal to completely reconstruct the city from the ground up.’
Helsinki’s early history is
a dismal cycle of building, settling, fires, rebuilding and resettling
Later, we get pungent intelligence on the refuse and drainage systems: ‘In the 1910s, the mere thought of taking a dip off the coast of Sornainen, where one of the city’s large sewers discharged its contents, must have been enough to induce nausea.’ And then there are the mid-century developments. It wasn’t just Alto’s elegant modernism; there were architectural anomalies such as Makkaratolo, a retail and office block opposite the central station characterised by a tubular bulge circling the building. Popularly known as the ‘Sausage House’, it is routinely voted the ugliest building in Helsinki.
Another curious and well covered aspect is the relationship between language and the city’s fortunes, with the population now composed of a Finnish-speaking majority and Swedish-speaking (but historically culturally dominant) minority. The one unifying linguistic characteristic is modesty. Bertolt Brecht quipped that the Finns were silent in two languages. This humility hints at the book’s chief weakness. There are too few voices from Helsinki’s avenues, squares and docks. The city is more than a piece on a diplomatic chessboard; it is home to some 690,000 people.
There are, however, glimpses of intriguing stories. While staying at the Hotel Kamp, a haven for foreign reporters, the journalist Martha Gellhorn witnessed the Russian air strike on the city in the winter of 1939. Meinander writes:
At Kamppi’s bus station, she encountered the wreckage of a number of cars and a bus in flames, beside which lay a man’s headless corpse. In her article, Gellhorn paid attention to his repaired leather shoes.
In fact the Hotel Kamp correspondents could have filled an entire chapter.
Similarly, there is frustratingly brief coverage of the fashionable postwar scene. Wiipurin Korsetti sold lacy lingerie to its racier residents, while Restaurant Lehtovaara served its bourgeoisie Finnish dishes with French flourish. Both establishments remain in situ.
Meinander would have been wise to take his lead from Nicholas Walton’s Genoa: La Superba, a study of another similarly sized maritime powerhouse. Walton delves into Genoese passions (primarily pesto, piracy and football). While there is a feast of information in Meinander’s book – and it provides a valuable record of nation-building events, such as the 1952 Summer Olympics and the Helsinki accords of 1975 – it lacks the tart and telling dishes served up on the streets.
The diminutive dictator who ruled Spain with an iron fist
General Franco died on 20 November 1975, and with the 50th anniversary just passed, this biography – the first in years – of the man who ruled Spain with an iron fist for nearly four decades is timely, incisive and authoritative. Written by a former Madrid correspondent of the Economist, it’s also an up to date and highly accessible introduction to 20th-century Spanish history.
Born in 1892 into a middle-class family, Francisco Franco shared a bedroom with his younger brother Ramon, who later won international fame as Europe’s ‘equivalent of Charles Lindbergh’. There were few signs, however, that eminence also awaited Francisco. A weedy child, who dutifully got by at school, he had a difficult relationship with his domineering Freemason father. Even when Franco had become the all-powerful head of state, his father could be found in Madrid’s bars fulminating against his son as an inept, boastful cabron (shit).
Entering the military academy in Toledo as a 14-year-old, Franco was bullied mercilessly. He graduated 251st out of 312 cadets. But once he saw action in Spain’s Moroccan protectorate, his cool head, conspicuous courage and tactical flair brought ‘meteoric ascent’. At 33, he became the youngest general in Europe. Meanwhile, he’d acquired a beautiful, wealthy, devoutly Catholic wife – ‘his first and only girlfriend’ – whom he wooed with ‘the same determination that he applied to military manoeuvres’. The couple slept with the wizened relic of Saint Teresa’s arm on top of their bedroom cupboard. Unsubstantiated rumours suggested that, because of Franco’s war wounds, their only child, a daughter, could not have been his.
The evident shortcomings of the Second Republic (1931-36) sparked Franco’s interest in politics. Before long, he was pronouncing ‘firm ideas on subjects about which he knew little’; his knowledge of economics derived from conversations with a local bank manager. He even claimed that Britain had introduced Freemasonry to Spain as part of a cunning plan to turn ‘Spaniards against Spaniards’.
Eventually, Spain’s descent into chaos and violence under the socialist Republican government outweighed his initial reluctance to join the military uprising that led to civil war (1936-39). ‘Spain needs saving, and here I am,’ he announced. Once the other generals had appointed him generalisimo, Franco swiftly welded conservatives, reactionaries and fascists into a single party that did not tolerate debate. ‘It is I who, answering only to God and history, decide,’ he declared. He exasperated his allies Hitler and Mussolini by dragging out the war so that he could exterminate more left-wingers. His unshakable faith in the efficacy of the firing squad – he didn’t even save his own cousin, once his childhood playmate – led to the execution of 130,000 Republicans during the war and a further 20,000 after it.
After their meeting in 1940, Hitler said he’d rather have teeth pulled than spend time with Franco again
During the second world war, Franco argued that supplying tungsten was of greater value to Germany than military support; after their face-to-face meeting at Hendaye, south-west France, in 1940, Hitler said he’d rather have teeth pulled than spend time with Franco again. Franco was right to be careful: these were years, Giles Tremlett notes, when ‘Britain could decide whether Franco’s regime fed its people or not’. But Franco did eventually dispatch troops to support Hitler on the Eastern Front.
Post-1945, Franco blamed Spain’s pariah status on a global conspiracy organised by a ‘Masonic superstate’. Meanwhile, after well over a century of political and social chaos, he demanded order, obedience and social conservatism. One school book showed the Virgin Mary promising Franco’s mother the birth of a son ‘with the heart of a Caesar and the wisdom of a sage’. While the 5ft 4in-dictator’s now ample hips and buttocks had turned him into ‘a deformed ball of fatty tissue’, his autarkic economic policies condemned thousands to starvation. It was only US support (in return for Cold War military bases), tourism and the opening up of the economy that finally, in the 1960s and 1970s, turbo-charged the country, creating for the first time a substantial middle class.
Power, Franco complained, had been thrust upon him, preventing him from ‘enjoying life like… other Spaniards’. But he clung to it, Tremlett observes astutely, to ensure that nobody else could wield it, keeping his promise to go straight from the job ‘to the cemetery’, by dying – unlike Hitler and Mussolini – from natural causes.
Surveying the decades of repression, corruption and cronyism, Tremlett concludes that ‘the balance is overwhelmingly of harm: to the economic welfare, personal freedoms and cultural and intellectual life of the Spanish people’. But elsewhere he records Spaniards’ displays of genuine support for Franco, suggests many believed that he’d been the best possible solution for a country that was difficult to govern and notes that they ‘were freer, and better off, than people living in the communist regimes behind the Iron Curtain’.
Margaret Atwood settles old scores
In the introduction to Book of Lives, Margaret Atwood recalls her initial response to the suggestion that she write a memoir: ‘Who wants to read about someone sitting at a desk messing up blank sheets of paper?’ Her autobiography was hardly the stuff of high adventure: ‘I wrote a book, I wrote a second book, I wrote another book, I wrote another book.’ This is not what they meant, her publishers replied: ‘We meant a memoir in, you know, a literary style.’
While Book of Lives is about a great deal more than Atwood churning out prize-winning novels, it is not written in a ‘literary style’. The style, if anything, is anti-literary. Atwood’s voice is casual, chatty, often catty. Instead of strong sentences we have hollow phrases, such as ‘here’s the thing’, ‘you never know’, ‘those were the days’, and ‘time will tell’. Atwood agreed to her publishers’ proposition, she writes, because a memoir allowed her to ‘depict myself in a flattering light… reward my friends, trash my enemies and pay off scores long forgotten by everyone but me’.
These benefits are embraced with such gusto that I wonder why she waited until she was 85 to get round to them. Added to which she has perfect recall, as though her most significant experiences had been cellared for just this purpose. Not since Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast has a novelist revealed such a well-stocked memory palace. Atwood remembers every halloween costume she ever wore, every camp song she ever sung, the unique smell of the lavatories on the Greyhound route between Toronto and Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1961, the name of her Harvard ‘roomy’ in 1966 who left the cap off the toothpaste (Susan Milmoe, Sociology, from White Plains, New York), the pastel-coloured wallpaper frieze in the narrow room which could only be reached through the main bedroom in the haunted farmhouse she bought in Ontario in 1972, and the flea bites she got on the park bench in Merida, Mexico City in January 1976.
The second of three children, Atwood was born in Ottawa in 1939. Being a Scorpio, she explains, she ‘holds grudges’. She also hoards compliments, including the note written 75 years ago by one of her teachers to another, praising her ‘feeling for words’ and ‘observing eye’. Her natal chart, reproduced in chapter one, predicted that she would have ‘esoteric interests’ and make an ‘implacable enemy’. Because her character was predestined, Atwood has little time for self-reflection and no patience with Freud: ‘I was more interested in the paper people I could create than doing deep dives into my own psyche.’ One of her theories about novelists is that ‘they don’t know more about human nature than other people: they know less, and their novels are attempts to figure it out’. Her exploratory drive as a novelist does not extend to her role as memoirist, where her insights take the form of soft Q&A sessions, such as ‘Do I carry some lingering resentment? Yes. I do’, and shallow ‘life lessons’, such as ‘You can’t tell from looking at a person how bright they are, or what they are thinking’.
Atwood’s father was an entomologist, who took his family for long vacations in the wilderness of northern Quebec, where she developed a love of the natural world. Her childhood was happy until, aged nine, she was horrifically bullied at school. The experience was returned to in her autobiographical novel Cat’s Eye, where the protagonist is made by her three best friends to dig her own grave and then lie in it. Atwood would scoff at the suggestion, but it may have been then, to defend herself from future pain, that she developed what she calls her ‘heart of stone’.
She could have been a biologist, but, aged 16, chose poetry instead. Her first book of poems appeared when she was 22, the year she began graduate studies at Harvard, where it was assumed that, being Canadian, she had been raised in an igloo. Her second collection was published in 1965: both books won prizes. Canadian writers were at this point as rare as pandas (‘Canadian writer? Isn’t that an oxymoron?’ quipped one English wit). But the decade saw the country evolve from a literary backwater in which the best known book was the Bible to a place in which it was possible for literature to flourish. Atwood was part of that progression: ‘There is nothing so motivating as a blank page,’ she writes. ‘It cries out to be scribbled on.’
The Edible Woman, the first of her 18 novels, appeared in 1969, the year she married her college boyfriend, Jim Polk, with whom she had a daughter. The marriage lasted five years, after which Atwood lived with the novelist and ornithologist Graeme Gibson, who died in 2019. During this time she changed from being ‘famous in Canada’ to being world famous, when The Handmaid’s Tale was believed, after Trump’s first inauguration, to have been prophetic.
Atwood and Gibson did not marry, initially because he already had a wife, Shirley, who refused to give him a divorce, and then because he wanted no more Mrs Gibsons. There is a moving account of his death from dementia, but running alongside Atwood’s love for Graeme is her loathing of Shirley. While Shirley was demanding and unreasonable she was also, Atwood concedes, a fragile depressive from a violent home who had been dealt a relentlessly poor hand.
Why, in that case, is Shirley denied all sympathy? Had she been one of Atwood’s ‘paper people’, she would have been drawn with depth and complexity instead of mockery and derision. When Shirley’s boyfriend kills himself on a train track in Port Hope, Atwood cracks that Shirley’s plans to move to Port Hope were now ‘obviously kaput’, because ‘you can’t relocate to a town where the lethal squashing of a lover has taken place’. When another of her boyfriends then also commits suicide, we are drily informed that ‘Shirley was once more prostrated’. When Shirley’s own dead body is found by a friend, who tells Atwood that she had ‘never seen such a terrible thing’, Atwood comments that, as an ‘Auschwitz survivor’, this distraught friend had surely ‘seen a lot of much more terrible things’. It is a low blow to measure the lonely death of an unhappy woman against a genocide.
Atwood has never pretended that women were the nicer sex, which is one reason for her power as a novelist. Her fiction is fuelled by the cruelties we inflict on one another: Cordelia, the chief bully in Cat’s Eye, and Zenia, the false friend in The Robber Bride, are nightmarishly real. What Atwood had to say about women added a much needed dimension to feminism, and for that we must all be grateful. The cruelties in Book of Lives, however, seem redundant and diminish the work.
If Atwood the memoirist seems entirely unrelated to Atwood the novelist it is because, as she puts it in her introduction, writers have a body double: ‘There’s the daily you, and then there’s the other person who does the actual writing.’ Book of Lives is the work of the daily Atwood rather than the writing self, which is what makes it such a dispiriting read. An alternative title might have been ‘Women Beware Women’.
Carlo Scarpa’s artful management of light and space
If Carlo Scarpa were as well known as Le Corbusier, modernism might not be so reviled. This architetto poeta grew up in Vicenza, whose 21 buildings by Palladio surely had a formative influence on his fast- evolving artistic intelligence.
Scarpa studied building design at university, but, instinctively disobedient, never bothered with a licence to practise as an architect. So connected was he to his native territory that when Frank Lloyd Wright first visited Venice in 1951 he insisted on Scarpa being his guide. Most of Scarpa’s working life was spent in the Veneto, but he died in 1978, aged 72, in Sendai, Japan, after falling down a flight of concrete stairs. This added his own distinctive chapter to the story of curious deaths of great architects.
Federica Goffi’s finely illustrated book is not a biography nor a formal catalogue. (There is already a comprehensive monograph by Robert McCarter.) Instead, Scarpa becomes an exemplar of very topical ‘creative re-use’. Since he was not a licensed architect, he made few standalone buildings, preferring startling interventions and ingenious adaptations. Thus it is a timely manifesto as we become increasingly aware of how environmentally reckless demolition and new build are. Chemical processes in making one ton of concrete release nearly the same weight of carbon.
Yet concrete became Scarpa’s medium, though glass came first. He began working with the Venini glassworks on the island of Murano in 1932, where he was called a disegnatore, an early example of this title. In 15 years Scarpa designed 300 sophisticated vases, bowls and flasks, reviving ancient techniques but achieving results that are distinctively modern.
Indeed, Scarpa glass is shorthand for ‘contemporary’, and because his vessels are by no means functional they can be enjoyed for what they are: original and profoundly beautiful. When the Met put on a show of the glass in 2013, it was a critical and popular sensation. ‘Art, craft and science merge,’ said the New York Times’s critic Roberta Smith – neatly defining the modernist mentality as a whole.
Then Scarpa turned to buildings. Olivetti, an office machine manufacturer, was one of the great patrons of designers during Italy’s postwar ricostruzione. In 1957, Scarpa began work on an Olivetti showroom in Venice’s Piazza San Marco. In a small but exquisitely subtle space, typewriters were presented with reverential awe. ‘I’d rather build museums than skyscrapers,’ he wrote. The Negozio Olivetti shows his fascination with joints and spaces: horizontal floor plates do not always meet vertical walls. This is not unsettling: it is a richly satisfying demonstration of spatial complexity, the designer playing with our assumptions about the laws of construction. It is preserved as a shrine.
Scarpa believed the old
truth that you don’t finish
a building, you start it
Two years later, Scarpa made his dramatic interventions in Venice’s Fondazione Querini Stampalia. In Verona’s Castelvecchio Museum, he uses blue polished plaster to set off a Tiepolo. He always questioned the notion of ‘single author buildings’ and at Venice’s architecture school in the old Tolentini convent, itself a design by the great Vincenzo Scamozzi, he built a heroic entrance in bold geometrical forms.
Verum Ipsum Factum is inscribed there – Giambattista Vico’s belief that ‘there is truth in what is made’. Pass through a dramatic sliding concrete gate to find a magnificent 16th-century door frame in Istrian marble that is laid horizontally. With water features and enfilades of concrete, this is a compact introduction to all the possibilities of architecture. Scarpa said he liked water because he was Venetian.
His most famous work is the tomb for the Brion family at San Vito d’Altivole, near Treviso, ironically completed in the year of his own death. Like Olivetti, the Brions were, through the Brion-Vega electronics business, generous and influential patrons of architecture and design. That celebrated bright red plastic folding radio? It’s Brion-Vega.
The tomb is unlike anything else you have ever seen, more miniature townscape than solemn mausoleum. Vivid Venetian glass inlays contrast with a rambling narrative of serene and sometimes disarming shapes. Only a 5mm skin of concrete covers the iron reinforcing rods, creating an immediate maintenance problem. But the resulting dynamic stains suggest something of the transitory nature of existence. Scarpa wrote: ‘The place for the dead is a garden. I wanted to show some ways in which you could approach death in a social and civic way.’
Because he was so dedicated to the Veneto, in his lifetime Scarpa never achieved the global recognition enjoyed by lesser designers. But his ideas about the layering of history, of re-use and an ‘architecture of multiple authorships’ came to happy prominence in David Chipperfield’s Neues Museum in Berlin, an inspired renovation project completed in 2009 where past and present are indivisible.
Goffi is an Italian academic who has journeyed to the United States and carries the heavy rhetorical baggage that ticket suggests. Critics are forever arguing with one another in her book. Nonetheless, it is a fine memorial to a great creative figure: only the dullest person could fail to be inspired. As Roberta Smith said of Scarpa’s work: ‘If you are open to it, it can radically reshape your ideas about form, beauty, originality and art for art’s sake.’
For Scarpa, modernism was not a style but an attitude. Great buildings are achieved by the artful managing of light and space. He deserves to be better known. He believed the old truth that you don’t finish a building, you start it. I started Goffi’s book, but finished it, too – and felt rewarded.
The march of lazy children’s books
There’s a myth that lots of us fall for/ ‘Kids’ books are so easy to write’/ And you can see why we might think so/ As so many of them are shite.
Little poem by me there. As the dad of a six-year-old and a three-year-old, I have spent perhaps 100 hours reading some wonderful books, and hearing gorgeous books read to me. But parents everywhere will know what I mean when I say: Christ there’s a lot of dross out there. Why are so many children’s books so bad?
Children learn through books. If they read lazy poetry, they’ll become lazy writers and lazy thinkers
While looking for kids’ books to name and shame for this piece, I realised that some of the very worst offenders are now in a charity shop or the bin. But plenty remain: rhyme schemes that evaporate into thin air; books with scansion that is forced to the point of agony; or passages that don’t even attempt to work, their authors hoping that plonking a rhyme at the end will suffice (I’m looking at you, Quentin Blake).
Take this example by the normally reliable Julia Donaldson. Say what you like about Donaldson’s vice-like grip on the children’s publishing industry: she knows how to write a good rhyming book. I could only find an example of bad scansion in A Squash and a Squeeze: ‘And now she’s full of frolics and fiddle-de-dees/ It isn’t a squash and it isn’t a squeeze.’ Second line great. But look at the first one. That’s insane. Anyone involved in the publishing of the book would know it was insane if they just read it aloud.
Almost anything would scan better: ‘And now she’s a happy old lady’; ‘And now she’s as happy as happy can be’; even ‘And now she is full of fiddle-de-dees’. But who lets the published line slip through, knowing that it could only possibly work if you forced yourself to say: ‘And now SHE’S full of frolics and fiddle-de-dees’?
Blake might be a wonderful illustrator but should he have been allowed to publish Angelica Sprocket’s Pockets in his seventies? I’m all for a tale about a mad old woman with weird stuff coming out of her massive coat, but rhymes like the following make it impossible to enjoy: ‘There’s a pocket for mice/ And a pocket for cheese/ And a pocket for hankies in case anyone feels that they’re going to sneeze.’ What is going on there? How about: ‘There’s a pocket for ice cream/ And all kinds of nice things to drink/ There’s a pocket for saucepans and frying pans and buckets and spoons and forks and cheesegraters and the kitchen SINK.’ Let’s skate over ‘And all kinds of nice things to drink’ – good God – and look at the final line, which is a rare example of an author having to capitalise the rhyme because the line started so long ago the reader has forgotten what was going on then. You could say this is a novel, post-modern approach to the conventions of children’s poetry. But really it’s just an octogenarian making a list of things he can see in his kitchen.
In a book like Go the Fuck to Sleep – which, I should stress, I have not read to my daughters – there’s a stanza that reads: ‘The eagles who soar through the sky are at rest/ And the creatures who run, crawl, and creep/ I know you’re not thirsty. That’s bullshit. Stop lying/ Lie the fuck down, my darling, and sleep.’ All fine until the last line. Again, you only need to read it out loud to know that. You could have ‘Lie the fuck down, darling, and sleep’; or ‘Lie the fuck down, dear, and sleep’; or ‘Lie the fuck down, darling, sleep.’ The only combination you can’t have is the one that is in the book.
I suspect the problem has got worse in recent years, mainly because the phenomenon of ‘celebrity children’s author’ is one that is still relatively new. This is not to let older children’s literature off the hook – there are plenty of dodgy, racist old kids’ books out there – but no one is lazier than a famous person trying to get richer by writing a kids’ book. And as well as talented writers being overlooked, the era of the celebrity kids’ author may be dragging down the quality across the board.
Returning to my stanza at the beginning, the problem is that authors think they can get away with rubbish rhyming and sloppy scansion because they see so many other people getting away with it. They see a book like 101 Bums – ‘Some bums are rather crazy/ Some are very lazy/ And this one’s very, very, very tall’ – and think: ‘Ah, OK, so you don’t actually need to be able to write in order to publish a children’s book.’ I shudder to think of the number of people currently writing children’s books with ChatGPT – something that, if I were prime minister, would warrant the death penalty.
It’s obviously a sad state of affairs. And it’s harder to call out kids’ books for being awful because it feels like trampling on flowers, to some extent. But I think there’s a case to be made that naming and shaming bad children’s writing is more important than doing the same for adult fiction. Perhaps bad children’s books are particularly offensive for the same reason that good ones are particularly beautiful. Children learn through the books they read. If they read lazy poetry, they’ll become lazy writers and lazy thinkers. There are so many fabulous children’s authors with an ear for poetry – I’d recommend Lynley Dodd in particular – but while reading these books I’ve been able to tell that the authors have thought: ‘Yeah, that’ll do.’ Do they ever read their writing out loud? Or do they not have time because they’re too busy plotting their next mediocre book?
Brigitte Bardot’s rejection of fame was her most radical act
In 1956, Brigitte Bardot was invited to the Royal Command Film Performance in London, where she would be presented to Queen Elizabeth II. She was thrilled – not only to meet our queen, but the other one too: Marilyn Monroe would also be present.
Bardot later recalled the evening with a mixture of awe and amusement. Monroe, she insisted, was the real star: radiant, charming, fragile. This brief encounter between the two most famous blondes in cinema history captured, in miniature, a fork in the road between two kinds of fame.
Six years later, Monroe would be dead. She was found nude in her Los Angeles home, killed by a drug overdose, aged just 36. Even in death, her body was not left alone: a photograph was released to the press, as if the spectacle required one last offering. Bardot, by contrast, would live for nearly seven decades more. Monroe was absorbed entirely by the fame machine until it destroyed her. Bardot, improbably, would walk away.
Bardot never wanted to be admirable, she just wanted to be free
Bardot belonged to the first generation of truly global celebrities – recognisable across continents, relentlessly photographed, increasingly commodified – yet she lived in a world where fame still had edges. One could, with sufficient stubbornness, step outside it. She accepted obscurity as the price of survival.
By the time of that London evening, Bardot was already an icon. In the climactic scene of her 1956 film And God Created Woman, directed by her then husband Roger Vadim, mambo music swells in a St Tropez beach bar. A young woman dances, hair loose, movements untrained, instinctive. She is provocative, shameless, mesmerising. Men from the conservative village stare, transfixed and furious, aroused and powerless.
The scene’s blatant sensuality catapulted Bardot to international fame and permanently altered what female sexuality could look like on screen. Paris Match called her ‘immoral from head to toe’. Simone de Beauvoir declared her a ‘locomotive of women’s history’. The New York Times, more primly, described her as a ‘voluptuous little French miss’.
At first, Bardot enjoyed the attention. Then she began to loathe it. At 39 – when she was arguably the most recognisable woman in the world after the Virgin Mary – with more than 50 films behind her, she quit the movie industry cold turkey. Not a strategic farewell tour, not a teasing ‘final role’ designed to leave the door ajar. When Bardot quit, she quit for good.
Her last film was Don Juan, or If Don Juan Were a Woman, directed once again by Vadim, her by then ex-husband who had launched her into stardom. Almost as suddenly as she had appeared on screens, she vanished from them.
‘When I left the world of cinema, I couldn’t stand it anymore,’ she later wrote. ‘The other side of the stardom coin was too heavy a burden to carry. Popularity is a poison. It kept me from living my life.’ She described being pursued by paparazzi, held hostage by rumour and insult, suffocated by what she called ‘this worship of celebrity – a life perpetually centred around myself’.
Artists’ self-portraits, particularly autobiographical ones, should always be taken with a pinch of salt. Bardot also wrote of devoting herself to patience, silence and kindness in her later years, but the public record is less serene: multiple convictions for hate speech, repeated fines, and a tendency to express herself with the same raw, unfiltered energy she once brought to the screen.
She escaped at the precise moment when celebrity was becoming total, but before it became permanent. Today, fame is no longer episodic or geographically bounded; it is continuous, monetised, algorithmic. It is addictive and almost impossible to quit. What Bardot refused, instinctively rather than philosophically, was this logic of perpetual access fans demanded of their stars.
From her 40s, animals became the centre of her life. ‘Animals and the choice I made to live with them and for them have been my guarantee of survival,’ she wrote. ‘My love for them gave me back my desire for life.’ Perhaps this is the secret to her longevity. She lived among a small menagerie in her St Tropez beach house, La Madrague – her escape from the world. These creatures, she noted with relief, ‘couldn’t care less about B.B.’ With them, she found relationships that were natural and untheatrical. They did not adore her image or punish her contradictions. They simply existed with her.
It is here that the later controversies intrude. Her devotion to animals hardened into ferocity; her language curdled; her politics drifted towards the French far right. These facts cannot be ignored – but neither do they negate the farsightedness of her original refusal of fame or the body of work she leaves behind. Bardot never wanted to be admirable, she just wanted to be free. To the end, she was unapologetically herself and didn’t care what the world thought.
‘So when I take stock of it all,’ she wrote toward the end of her life, ‘I can say that my earlier success did not make me happy. This constant blinding light never suited me.’ The only exposure she ever enjoyed, she said, was sunlight on the terrace at La Madrague. From there, she watched the Mediterranean change with the seasons, fed pigeons in the morning, and observed – quietly – the beauty of the world. ‘I cannot possibly doubt my decision.’
In the end, Brigitte Bardot did not fade. She vanished from film deliberately, stubbornly, and on her own terms. In a culture that treats attention as oxygen, her refusal remains the most radical thing she ever did. Her death offers a timely chance to examine what might be gained – and what it might still cost – to walk away from the crowd.
At 53, I’m training to be a priest
I have recently begun training for holy orders in the Church of England. I know, they’re getting desperate. My motivation for wanting to be a priest is selfish. I want more joy in my life. You might feel that joy is to be found in extreme sports, or pop concerts, or snorting coke from the midriffs of hookers. But I think you mean pleasure. Joy is deeper, linked to a sense of the goodness of existence.
It seems to me that joy is to be found in doing cultural things. I don’t mean going to plays or art galleries; I mean cultural things that are very participatory and democratic. Things like this: getting to know people who are different from me, through putting on a little play, making stuff for a festival and seeing some local children enjoying it, singing a rousing song. This stuff feels, sometimes, like authentic culture. In fact, as I see it, the secret to human fulfilment is participation in festivity – communal meaning-making fun.
Within the dirgey and naff music you notice that there is a spirit that holds this disparate bunch together
You may say you get this from Glastonbury or the Eton-Harrow match (or both), but to my mind these things are not sufficiently open to the wellsprings of meaning and purpose. There is a unique wideness and depth to religion, and those who have tasted it can be satisfied by nothing smaller. Other subcultures are likely to attract a certain sort of person – religion doesn’t settle for that, it seeks to be cross-class, cross-cultural. And it earnestly addresses the meaning of life.
This all sounds good, you may be thinking, but in practice my local church is an uninspiring place, with a bunch of old ladies and assorted other oddballs, and music that alternates between dirgey and naff. It doesn’t look like the pinnacle of authentic culture and true community. Fair point. I’ve wrestled with it for decades, this gap between how church ought to feel and how it does feel. All I can say is that if you stick with it, it starts to feel a bit more like it ought to feel. Within the dirgey and naff music you notice that there is a spirit that holds this disparate bunch together – when they sing the prayers, they mean it, and in a way no other bit of culture is quite as real.
For years I felt like this: I half-like church, or feel the need for it, but I can’t really be myself there, because there’s a slightly fake pious atmosphere. But it gradually grew on me: secular social life is also a bit fake, everyone’s showing how laid-back and unjudgey they are, treating everything as material for repartee, and keeping their sincerity half-hidden. I’m someone who wants a bit more earnest shared culture as a ground for ‘being myself’. Social life has never felt quite enough, much as I like some of my friends.
So church has grown on me. One way of putting it is that in every other group or public meeting, whether a book talk or a PTA, there is something I don’t like the smell of. I always sniff something cliquey or snobby or chippy or self-righteous, or ideologically dodgy. But Anglican worship (unless it’s one of the sectarian fringes) feels miraculously inoffensive. It’s just some local people trying to worship God in an open-minded way, trying to keep the rumour of Jesus alive. It feels like a miracle that in a world full of dodgy creeds, the one creed I fully approve of has a weekly meeting in my local high street. Some weeks I don’t feel that keen on turning up. Then I think: imagine if it shut down, this 150-year-old church, and became flats or a carpet shop. (Some weeks, I imagine this and still don’t turn up, to be honest.)
But why go the whole hog? Why not just be a layman? I suppose I feel the need to nail myself to the mast. Maybe it’s because I have a strong secular side and feel that my life gravitates that way unless explicitly redirected. Or that I don’t feel I have a very clear role in the world, and this might help.
It has taken a long time, my calling (I’m 53). For many years I kept my distance from church, despite being keenly Christian. One aspect of this was finding church rather dull, as I have said. But I also wondered whether organised religion was defensible – didn’t it always have a dubious authoritarian side? For some years I felt that the C of E was intolerable; it seemed to entrench this tradition in nostalgia. I have come to see that the Church’s establishment ties it, very benignly, to political and cultural liberalism.
Another reason for delaying is that priests are meant to exemplify Christian goodness. I felt that I had a good side but a prickly, proud, neurotic, angry side too. And even my good side was a bit muted compared with those energetic do-gooder types (including, annoyingly, lots of agnostics). I guess I needed a bit more time than some to trust that my good-ish side might be good enough.
In the weeks leading up to my final interviews, I tried to get it clear in my mind what a priest is. One thought was sparked by an article in the New Statesman, a dialogue between Gordon Brown and the actor David Tennant, both sons of ministers. Tennant said that his father was a talented performer who could have become an actor if certain opportunities had been open to him. This struck me as an enormous misunderstanding, to imply that being an actor is a bigger deal than being a minister. It struck me that a priest is a sort of anti-actor, a performer who understands that one role is worthy of being inhabited for real, for life.
A related thought was that a priest’s uniform is more substantial than other professional uniforms. He or she brings narrative stability to the world. So does every other type, you could say, but maybe there is an ambiguity to every other type. A politician might make moral speeches but have a dodgy personal life. A priest might have a dodgy personal life too, but it would be more jarring – he or she has signed up to a consistency of narrative function that is unique.
Does this mean a priest has to be predictable and so a bit boring? I suppose that was my assumption for a long time. But in reality no form of human life is boringly stable, free of edge and angst and creative possibility. In fact, Jesus told us to be an interesting mix of good and edgy (cunning as serpents as well as innocent as doves). For a while this thought held me back. Me, a priest? Nah, I’ll lose my edge. I fretted on, repeating the phrase ‘I’ll lose my edge’, until methought I heard one saying: ‘You’ll lose your edge? You’ll use your edge.’
Christmas with my soon-to-be-ex-wife
I didn’t force any hyacinths this Christmas. Most years I plant a dozen bulbs at the end of September and hide them in a dark corner so they’re ready for Christmas Day – they never are, of course, but they usually arrive shortly after the Wise Men on Epiphany. But last September I took out the wooden planters – oak boxes stamped with the date of our wedding, a gift for our fourth wedding anniversary (wood) – and they fell apart in my hands, the wood split and rotten.
I always thought the Christmases Yet to Come after my wife and I separated would be sad and un-Christmassy. I saw a vacant seat in the chimney-corner and all that. But even though my wife’s lawyer is pushing through the divorce – her deadline for my completing the paperwork was Advent Sunday, our 12th wedding anniversary (silk: she should have hung in there for that) – neither of us can afford to move out unless we sell the house.
I can’t help feeling it’s my fault. I spent the past few years working in the local MP’s office, campaigning for a more rational property market in Cornwall; the taxes we advocated have worked infuriatingly well, and the bottom has fallen out of the market as if it were a wooden planter rotten with metaphor. A few years ago, a Cornish cottage by the sea (on a spring tide, the sea comes up the river outside the house, which surely qualifies as a sea view) would have been snatched up by a holidaying banker before the listing was in the Cornishman; now we have to watch and wait and ‘declutter’ in case a cash buyer is disgusted by the sight of my stuff being where I can find it.
It should be easier now that my stuff is contained and limited to my sphere of influence, though. Soon after I got the email from contactdivorce@justice.gov.uk I observed, in a Winston Churchill voice, that a William Morris curtain had descended across our property. The master bedroom and her study are under the control of hostile powers; the free zone consists of the spare bedroom and the box room. The bathroom is in the middle, with two doors to east and west; the negotiations for crossing Checkpoint Khazi involve precise timings and tit-for-tat exchanges.
Sometimes marriages are like the eco-friendly crackers I mistakenly bought; they don’t end with a bang
I suppose one should be grateful that it is only a cold war: having separate sitting rooms means that we haven’t engaged in direct conflict. (In fact there are far fewer fights than before, now the nuclear button has been pressed.) Tensions did rise when I bought a pile of logs which were too big to fit in her log-burner but were the right size for mine – a needless provocation (Pravda) – but after an undiplomatic stand-off the cold war didn’t become hot, and the room with the nicer log-burner did.
We were very alert to the danger of fighting a proxy war over our son – his bedroom is in the red zone but I am allowed Berlin airlift-style visits – but he is playing us off against each other as expertly as Marshal Tito. Trips to Disneyland and extra screen time from his mother, and someone prepared to listen to a play-by-play analysis of his rugby matches from me. His first thought when we started discussing Christmas was that, like all the other boys in his class, he might get two dinners and two sets of presents. But after a summit meeting, my soon-to-be-ex-wife and I decided that we would not be buying his affection but, as usual, Stem toys to promote lifelong learning. Our son remains Non-Aligned.
The plan was to make our last family Christmas together a real family Christmas, but the boy was unimpressed. I suggested a family board games night, and cranked out one of my father’s sayings (when he died, I inherited all his sayings): ‘The family that plays together, stays together.’ The boy rolled his eyes: ‘But you’re not staying together.’ The Scrabble remained in its box.
There was, at least, a Christmas truce. The arguments don’t matter any more: we didn’t fall out over whether the Christmas meal should be beef wellington or roast lamb (none of us likes turkey, which would have saved many skirmishes in the past), and neither of us was talking darkly about coercive control on the phone to our sisters when we didn’t get our way. But equally we won’t be working on pieces together – my wife is a journalist – setting out the battle lines between us: he likes Christmas, she celebrates Hanukkah; he is a monarchist and pro-Brexit, she is a republican who hates Britain. I thought we’d be writing these articles forever – and posing for photographs back-to-back, me looking jolly and her scowling – but it turns out these differences were irreconcilable after all. (The most irritating thing about getting divorced is that all the unpleasantest commenters below the line were totally right.)
Divorce is so much less dramatic than I expected: an email from HM Courts and Tribunal Service doesn’t have the same end-of-the-Christmas-episode-of-EastEnders theatricality as a hand-delivered letter saying that the Watts marriage was over. (‘Merry Christmas, Ange.’) I did tell one of my cousins – I’m the only one who didn’t include a round-robin letter with my Christmas cards, and I couldn’t rely on her picking up on the fact that it was signed by my son and me only – and she took it as calmly as the news that we wouldn’t be able to make it to her Christmas party. More calmly, probably. The only person to be even vaguely interested by the news was interested, to be sure, but she manfully lasted five minutes before asking if I was dating again.
Sometimes marriages are like the eco-friendly crackers I mistakenly bought in 2023; they don’t end with a bang. It won’t be the stress of the Christmas season that drives us apart, like all those couples in articles about ‘divorce day’ – the first working day of January, when applications supposedly peak. Apparently it’s not true anyway: my wife’s lawyer says it’s humbug. But she would.
‘Islamist’ is a dishonest confection
Convicted last month of plotting what could have proved the worst terrorist attack in British history, Walid Saadaoui had hoped to murder at least 50 people in Prestwich, because ‘Prestwich is full of Jews’. He was caught purchasing four AK-47s, two handguns and 1,200 rounds of ammunition.
For Saadaoui’s fires of righteousness on social media had earlier drawn the eye of British law enforcement. ‘Avenge your religion Oh Muslims in Europe,’ he posted. ‘I pray to you not to catch me until I break my thirst with Jews, Christians and their proxies’ blood.’
Thus Saadaoui instructed an undercover officer: ‘Grab a Jewish person and slaughter him and remove his head, rub blood on my body, throw it away. That is the least we can do.’ Calling Jews ‘pigs and monkeys’, the Tunisian immigrant shared helpfully: ‘Hitler, may God be exalted, was burning them, the Jews. Did you know?’
Aiming to kill as many Jews ‘as possible’ and emulating Abdelhamid Abaaoud, the architect of the 2015 Bataclan attacks in Paris, Saadaoui assured the undercover officer: ‘These matters of running someone over with a car or using a knife is ineffective, what is needed is an automatic gun. We want to do the same as what Abaaoud done, God willing. We must run rivers of their impure blood.’ He relished the image: ‘The schools I showed you, their gathering. We open fire on them, young, old, women, elderly, the whole lot, killing them all. Killing them all.’
Now, we biddable journalists have been scrupulously schooled to identify our charming friend Walid as an ‘Islamist’ hatching ‘Islamist terrorism’. Considering that it would previously have passed for a mere typo, the contemporary swapping of a ‘c’ for ‘st’ packs an impressive ideological punch. The coinage decodes: ‘These disagreeable people and their disagreeable mayhem have nothing whatsoever to do with Islam. Or if these people are sort-of-kind-of connected to Islam, they distort and pervert the gentle teachings of their prophet, because Islam is a religion of peace.’
The modern confection ‘Islamist’ is meant to wall off the vast Muslim majority – nice, benevolent, friendly Muslims who love their western brothers and sisters and wouldn’t hurt a fly – from the teensy minority of theologically misguided Muslims who are actually dangerous. The intention – nay, the injunction, to journalists and readers alike – is to insulate the friendly Muslims from any stigma that might otherwise attach to innocent adherents of their faith just because so many of their co-religionists keep ploughing vehicles into Christmas markets, flying aeroplanes into tall buildings and blowing stuff up.
Yet if there’s such a hard-and-fast distinction between the friendly Muslims and the extremist sort that we must contrive an entirely different adjective for the latter, why don’t we hear more sorrow from the friendly Muslims after Bondi Beach and 7 October? Or when synagogues are attacked? Wouldn’t the friendly Muslims have an even greater vested interest than secular journalists in distancing themselves from their bad-news co-religionists? How about a bit more passionate disavowal among what we’re always told is a ‘community’? Something along the lines of Joe Biden’s favourite clarion declaration: ‘This is not who we are!’
Has Saadaoui’s naked loathing of Jews no canonical roots in Islam? I’m no expert on Islam – I’m not an ‘Islamist’ in the archaic sense of the word – and rather than read the Quran cover to cover I’d put an ice pick through my eye. (Ditto the Bible, to be fair.) But I have read excerpts, and they’re not subtle. By now, most of us have tripped across this infamous hadith: ‘The Hour will not be established until you fight with the Jews, and the stone behind which a Jew will be hiding will say: “O Muslim! There is a Jew hiding behind me, so kill him.”’ The texts are anti-Semitic, and so, if you believe the polls, is the better part of the international Muslim community. Pew Research had 78 per cent of Pakistani nationals and 95 per cent of Egyptians holding unfavourable views of Jews back in 2010. After the outcry over Gaza, those percentages will have risen further.
And is Islam really a religion of peace? Historically, it’s a religion of conquest. It’s often violent (ask Salman Rushdie); the punishment for apostasy is death. Doctrinally, Islam unabashedly aims for the whole world to become Muslim. Why, supposedly everyone is born Muslim. Eventually the scales will fall from the outsiders’ eyes and they’ll realise they’ve been Muslims all along. But before they get with the programme, the faith is overtly hostile to infidels. Live-and-let-live this ain’t. Sure, most Muslims aren’t stocking up on 1,200 rounds of ammunition, but is there no relationship between Islam and the Muslim extremists who take the creed’s contempt for unbelievers up a level?
Though American progressives disparage ‘Christian nationalism’, no one refers to ‘Christianist nationalism’, the better to distinguish friendly Christian patriots from the Jesus people who want to violate the constitution’s ban on an established church. That’s because no one is worried about Christians, who therefore don’t warrant a special cordoning-off suffix for their fringe. The odd mass murder is labelled ‘white supremacist’, but ‘Christian terrorism’, much less ‘Christianist terrorism’, is not really a thing.
That’s my problem with ‘Islamist’: it’s fearful. The prissy adjective treats Islam and its scarily touchy sensibilities with kid gloves. And it’s dishonest. It’s denying there’s any connection between Islam the faith as properly understood and terrorist acts, when 75 per cent of British terrorism investigations involving radical Islam can’t be an accident. And it lets some Muslims, who often at least passively support anti-western and anti-Semitic violence, off the hook.
By the way, British authorities continually dither over ‘hate speech’, which apparently extends to showing Donald Trump videos to a class on contemporary US politics (sorry – or is that ‘terrorism’?). But Saadaoui’s rivers-of-impure-blood rant bests Enoch Powell! This pigs-and-monkeys, go-Hitler!, slaughter-and-behead-them stuff – by golly, that’s proper hate speech! The real deal! These ‘Islamists’ put us wussy, unconsciously biased folks to shame.
How the ancients anticipated the apocalypse
What with the threat of global warming and nuclear war, the new year might start with a big bang. The Greeks were preoccupied with this possibility as well and called it the apocalypse (apokalupsis), meaning ‘uncovering’ or ‘revelation’. It has a long history behind it.
The Greek farmer-poet Hesiod (c. 700 BC) introduced the idea of a sequence of five ages – golden, silver, bronze, heroic, iron, each worse than the other – repeated five times and ending in total destruction.
In his magnificent On the Nature of the Universe, the Roman poet Lucretius (d. c. 55 BC), who was an atomist, described how a world made of atoms would slowly decay and crumble into ruin – which he thought nature was doing in his own time – but would then renew itself. The evidence? Consider the world before Homer. The Romans knew nothing whatever about it. Why not? Because it had decayed and disappeared but then been renewed in the rise of Greece and Rome. QED. Even so, he asserted, the world’s ultimate destruction was inevitable because it would run out of the food on which it survived and ‘be beaten down by the deadly bombardment of particles’ (the rediscovery of this poem in ad 1417 was to play a crucial part in the much later development of modern atomism).
The Stoic younger Seneca (d. AD 65) believed the cosmos underwent an eternal cycle of destruction and renewal and envisaged the end coming ‘suddenly, with tremendous violence’ owing to an increasing imbalance in nature, especially between land and sea. As the end drew near, winter would dominate a world where summer was no more, and even the sun and the stars would fail. Finally, flood and earthquake would bury the human race in a single day in one gigantic cataclysm.
But the wise man would look with equanimity on it all and, like Jupiter, he would retire into himself with his own thoughts. Indeed, he might even decide to hurl himself into the cataclysm, because he knew that the ‘cosmic conflagration’ would see the rebirth of the world anew.
Well, we can only wait and see. Or not see.
Keep children out of politics
In Citizens, his account of the French Revolution, Simon Schama wrote how the Jacobins recruited children into ‘relentless displays of public virtues’. These youth affiliates, the ‘Young Friends of the Constitution’, encouraged children to attend sessions at the group’s headquarters in Paris, while ‘throughout France, “Battalions of Hope”, consisting of boys between the ages of seven and 12, were uniformed and taught to drill, recite passages from the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen and parade before the -citizen-parents in miniature versions of the uniform of the National Guard’.
In Lille, a ‘children’s federation’ was formed, two of whose members, César Lachapelle, aged eight, and Narcisse Labussière, nine, were noted to declare: ‘We will live for our patrie, and our last sighs will be for her… When our parents and teachers boast endlessly of the wisdom of your decrees and when from all parts of France we hear applause for your immortal work, when all of France showers blessings upon your heads, how can our hearts remain insensible? No, Messieurs, recognition and respect know no age.’ They sounded insufferable.
You might call Youth Parliament a way to engage people in politics. You might also call it a grotesque charade
The use of children has been a feature of authoritarian and illiberal regimes down the years, most notoriously during China’s cultural revolutions when teenagers were encouraged to attack teachers, while the recruitment of adolescents has been found across many communist regimes. Last September, far-left extremists at a traditional French riot in Aurillac brought children along, showing them how to throw ‘foam cobblestones’. Sweet.
In contrast, the use of children as political human shields has historically been viewed with discomfort by the more politically moderate, creepy even. Not so much today, where numerous schools have recruited children to bunk off to attend climate protests. At the recent Labour party conference there were dozens of schoolchildren outside, ‘campaigning’ for free school meals, apparently with the blessing of their teachers. In the United States, children have been encouraged to pester politicians over the ‘Green New Deal’; in Ireland, a group of nine- to 12-year-olds from a community centre in Cork were utilised to promote asylum through the medium of rap music.
The taboo against using children to promote political ideas has largely been broken, driven not just by naked calculation but also a mawkish sentimentality about the opinions of children, their purity and goodness. It’s a form of populism that might be called totulism – politics dictated by tots.
The trend became notable in the 2010s, when politicians and journalists began repeating the profound thoughts of children on the hot-button issues of the day. In 2017 the New York Times reported that at the Advent School in Boston, ‘a teacher asked a group of students the big question: “What is gender?” The first answer came from a second–grader: “It’s a thing people invented to put you in a category.”’
There was a five-year-old girl who wrote to Pope Francis calling for looser immigration controls because ‘my dad works very hard in a factory galvanising pieces of metal’. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden produced a letter from ‘Charlotte’ asking why men get paid more, and ‘I think you should fix this since your the presitent’ [sic]. Horrible cynics such as myself suspected that most of the young children were simply repeating what they’d been told by parents and teachers or, in the case of various social media posts, recounting similar stories, simply made up. The trend subsided for a while – but hasn’t gone away.
MP Tom Hayes recently described visiting a school in Bournemouth where a little girl asked him: ‘Why is a South African-born person, who lives in the United States, has funded a presidential election there, and is now part of the US government, threatening to get involved in UK politics? I can’t even have a say in UK politics.’ The pupils are aged four to seven.
The newfound respect for the political opinions of children inspired the creation of the ‘UK Youth Parliament’, established in 1999 and comprising 400 representatives aged between 11 and 18. Footage of this parliamentary theatre shows young people repeating the prevailing moral views and clichés of their elders and betters, just as eight-year-olds in 1792 might have done. Various local councils have set up youth panels in order to send representatives. The young Jacobins of the Belper Youth Council in Derbyshire recently ‘explored their town’s links to the Transatlantic Slave Trade’.
If you think 11 is a bit early to start a life in politics, there is also the Children’s Parliament Select Committee, in which children as young as seven got to grill representatives from water companies in 2022.
You might call it a way to engage young people in politics. You might also call it a grotesque charade, embarrassing and demeaning to the institution, and it is certainly telling that, at a time when MPs have never been less powerful or prestigious, when most are merely lobby fodder whose actions are irrelevant to most decisions, we encourage children to cosplay as MPs.
Reflecting on the creation of the Youth Parliament, the former Labour politician Tom Harris recently joked: ‘I can live with most of the votes I cast as an MP, including my vote for the Iraq war. But I’ll never forgive myself for voting to allow this lot to use the chamber.’
Younger people tend to be far less knowledgeable about current affairs and far less tolerant of opposing views
It seems like bad form for middle-aged columnists to sneer at the dreams of young people, but I’d rather my daughters had OnlyFans accounts than joined the UK Youth Parliament to serve as human shields. That’s exactly what they are, and as with earlier authoritarian regimes, this mockery of a parliament allows grown-ups to use children to further their aims. At the beginning of last year, the Youth Parliament chose to debate the motion that ‘16- and 17-year-olds should be allowed to vote in all elections and referendums’ and, ominously, that this should be ‘accompanied with more political education throughout school’. Another motion declared: ‘All young people in the UK must have access to a standardised level of political literacy and democratic education.’ This is something which Labour activists have long wanted to push, both enfranchising a demographic guaranteed to vote left, but also further institutionalising the political ‘education’ of schoolchildren.
Well, they’ve got their way, and the government has said it will give 16-year-olds the vote. The move was phrased in the language of ‘hope’, of helping young people and showing a belief in them – and what kind of -monster would argue against the children, our future?
Perhaps someone who pointed out that younger people tend to be low-information voters, far less knowledgeable about current affairs, far less tolerant of opposing political views, more likely to believe in zero-sum economics and much more likely to believe in conspiracy theories. They have lower levels of what psychologists call ‘crystallised intelligence’, or what the rest of us might call ‘wisdom’. Whenever teenagers have been involved in politics, the results have been dismal; if you visit America and wonder why there are no public toilets, it’s because a group of high-schoolers started a campaign, the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America. The result of this egalitarian campaign: there are now no toilets at all. Understanding the law of unintended consequences is beyond many adults, indeed many MPs, but completely alien to most children.
While there are obvious political machinations behind the rise of totulism, it also reflects a deeper collapse in authority following the cultural revolution of the 1960s, a movement driven by youthful rebellion against parental authority. This has left adults unable to wield authority in a culture which prizes youthful innocence and rebellion. Without that authority, adults are easily manipulated by infants and adolescents.
This has informed the recent debate over gender more than any other. In 2023, Minnesota Lieutenant Governor Peggy Flanagan argued that we should support sex changes for minors because: ‘When our children tell us who they are, it is our job as grown-ups to listen and to believe them. That’s what it means to be a good parent.’ Is it though? As columnist Mary Harrington put it: ‘It’s an abdication of responsibility to allow kids to choose their own bedtime, let alone their own “gender”.’
Our job as adults is to nurture and protect children, and to love and cherish them – but it doesn’t mean that we have to listen to their opinions about politics. Recognition and respect do not, in fact, ‘know no age’.
Pubs, schools and water in crisis: my economic forecast for 2026
Forecasting is a mug’s game, as the Bank of England governor Mervyn King once said. But I’ll sketch a few trends for 2026 nevertheless, starting on a positive note in the stock market before moving on to some of the many choices on an à la carte menu of gloom. The FTSE 100 index will have ended 2025 almost 20 per cent higher than it started – slightly better than the US S&P 500 index – and the consensus of fund managers is that (having closed for Christmas at 9,870) it will carry on upwards, perhaps even towards 11,000. Why? In short because many UK blue-chips in traditional sectors such as banking, housebuilding and mining have been undervalued for too long, because interest-rate cuts will help, and because stock markets have a mind of their own. But that tells you very little about the real economy, in which…
Down the drain
First, watch out for a deepening crisis in the water industry, on which the government has failed to issue a white paper proposing an effective new regulatory structure in response to the Cunliffe report, while the largest operator, Thames Water, totters towards collapse in the absence of a ministerial decision as to whether it should be temporarily taken back into state hands, or left to find a ‘market-led’ rescue.
Labour backbenchers are breathing down the Prime Minister’s neck in favour of permanent renationalisation. The Chancellor prays for a private-sector solution for fear of having to pay up for Thames’s broken infrastructure. A majority of the company’s existing bondholders, as London & Valley Water, have tabled proposals which accept a 25 per cent write-off of debt in return for appointing a new board to manage a turnaround; theirs is the only viable option today and a temporary state takeover is highly unlikely to produce better terms down the road. Further delays will make investors wary of water companies generally – raising their borrowing costs, delaying their repair programmes and increasing the likelihood of renationalisation across the entire sector, which needs (but won’t get) more than £100 billion of capital investment. In which case, you may be sure, anger will rise as water bills soar.
Farewell St Custard’s
Stand by for a second wave of destruction in the independent schools sector. Since the imposition of VAT on fees, plus the scrapping of business rates relief on schools that are registered charities, more than 80 have failed, affecting 25,000 pupils. But that’s a relatively small hit to a wider population of 2,600 private schools and 620,000 children. Stronger institutions adjusted their budgets, picked up strays from the closures, dipped into reserves to fund more bursaries and hunted abroad for wealthy parents. Some, including Radley and Rugby, took the opportunity to absorb vulnerable prep schools, reinforcing their own new-pupil pipelines.
Meanwhile, the government abandoned any pretence that the supposed £1.8 billion per year of extra tax proceeds would fund 6,500 new teachers for state schools. The Prime Minister said in June that the funds were needed for affordable housing, while the Tories claim there are ‘400 fewer teachers than when Labour came into office’.
In the hands of union-captive Bridget Phillipson – the Secretary of State for Education who will be remembered chiefly for her attack on ‘posh blazers’ – the raid has been exposed as the ‘worthless exercise in class warfare’ I said it would be when it was enacted. But the limited damage so far to this beacon of British excellence will redouble in 2026. Would-be private parents who are themselves feeling Labour’s pinch will ask whether the expensive school of their choice can survive for the number of terms or years their child needs, or will gradually reduce the quality of its offer in order to stay in business; and that will become a self-fulfilling prophecy as application numbers fall.
In this Darwinian struggle, St Custard’s and St Trinian’s were the first to fail. Some very good and very historic schools will go next, for no measurable transfer of advantage to state school pupils anywhere.
‘Tally-ho!’
Pub closures will also continue apace, more than 2,000 having been repurposed or abandoned in response to rising wage costs and changing drinking habits since the start of this decade. In that context, I’m very much in favour of banning Labour MPs from bars in response to a Budget sting that will lead, after steep increases in rateable values, to an average 78 per cent rise in pubs’ business rate bills. The instigator of the ban, Dorset publican Andy Lennox, says ‘the vast majority’ of his peers are ‘either going bust, struggling, or on their last legs… We need an emergency VAT cut to 13 per cent now’.
I very much doubt the Chancellor will heed that plea. In which case, I suggest rural publicans join forces with their allies in the hunting fraternity, who should announce that since trail hunting is to be banned, they will meet in pub car parks and set hounds on a prey that commands no public sympathy whatsoever but will provide fine sport for a field robbed of its proper heritage. ‘Tally-ho!’ should be the cry when any Labour minister is spotted trying to sneak in for a pint.
Winning flush
My Christmas competition invited readers to name an honest business in any of the 31 Carry On films that so deftly captured the British social attitudes of their era. The first nomination to hit my inbox – from H. Percy of London EC3 – was for GlamCabs, Hattie Jacques’s proto-feminist taxi firm that outsmarts a fleet of blokes in Carry on Cabby (1963). The second was for W.C. Boggs & Son, the bathroom ceramics manufacturer plagued by union bolshies in Carry On at Your Convenience (1971), suggested by M. Gove of Old Queen Street, SW1. Chocolate bitcoins – for which I make no prediction – to both winners.
Letters: Don’t let Labour kill off trail hunting
Man with man to dwell
Sir: Your editorial (‘All ye faithful’, 13-27 December) suggests that scepticism about Stephen Yaxley-Lennon’s (Tommy Robinson’s) Christian faith tends to coincide with credulity about conversions among refugees from Muslim-majority countries, and vice versa. This does not reflect the experience of many churches.
Over the past year in our congregation, several young men have come to faith alongside a larger number of Iranian asylum seekers. One of the former was so affected by the murder of Charlie Kirk that he came to church the following Sunday. Many of the latter are sincerely seeking Christ, having become disillusioned with Islam in their homeland. These groups are not divided or suspicious of one another, but warmly united, and equally welcomed by the wider church. St Paul’s claim that ‘There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus’ is not an ideal but an observable fact.
Richard Coombs
Rector of Cheltenham
Hail Mary Magdalene
Sir: I write in protest at the description in your editorial (13-27 December) of Mary Magdalene as ‘morally compromised’. There is no biblical authority for such terminology. With the exception of J.C., she is the individual most mentioned across the four gospels; she stood close by the crucifixion in the absence of all the disciples and was among the first to see the risen Christ, and she has been an early recipient of Christian canonisation. Not many signs of ‘compromised morality’ there. In the spirit of seasonal Christian forgiveness, I will hope for a simple statement of contrition in your new year issue, failing which I may need, on behalf of the maligned lady, to consult lawyers in Florida, whose ideas on misplaced terminology seem to include claims amounting to $10 billion.
James Stewart
Sevenoaks, Kent
Smart thinking
Sir: Lionel Shriver notes how for Americans the word ‘clever’ suggests a ‘sly, calculating deviousness or cunning… Tax evasion can be “clever”’ (‘What’s wrong with discrimination?’, 13-27 December). The American equivalent of British ‘clever’ is ‘smart’, and it’s interesting that the reverse is also true: that in British English ‘smart’ has a similarly pejorative hint, as in ‘smart aleck’. In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge tries to crack a joke when he first encounters Marley’s ghost, at which Charles Dickens tells us: ‘The truth is, that he tried to be smart, as a means of distracting his own attention, and keeping down his terror.’ I tend to view all gadgets and devices claiming to be ‘smart’ with the same sense of sceptical bias.
Graham Chainey
Brighton
Campaign trail
Sir: Rachel Johnson’s ‘Best Life’ column (6 December) had me in tears. The little beagle Wanda will have much to cry about, as shall I and thousands of my fellow beaglers, should this government succeed in its desire to ban trail hunting.
I have not met Wanda personally but know many who share her bloodline and live glorious lives as working hounds in the Cotswolds. Our Boxing Day meets are not as glamorous as those of foxhound packs, but always very well attended by local families as well as visiting Americans keen for a slice of country life. Our followers are mainly, but not exclusively, elderly and this is how we keep fit and happy during the long, cold months. We walk for miles in all winds and weathers in glorious countryside and take great joy in watching and listening to our ‘girls’ following trails. Ours is a way of life which I am sure keeps many of us out of hospital and doctors’ surgeries.
I hope many Spectator readers attended their local meet of hounds on Boxing Day to help preserve this vital aspect of country life for future generations.
Julia Pickles
Cheltenham
Party favour
Sir: The letter on Your Party from Adnan Hussain (13-27 December) was insightful and accurate in equal measure. However, for those of us who do not engage in their idiocy, he overlooks the hours of entertainment and merriment they gift to us. Long may they continue to provide distraction from the uselessness of this current Labour government.
George Kelly
Buckingham
Resting in peace
Sir: One of the most remarkable of composers’ graves is that of Richard Wagner (Arts, 13-27 December). Remarkable because, unlike some of the graves mentioned in Richard Bratby’s article, it displays no grandiosity, which one might associate with an ego as large as Wagner’s. Instead, it is a plain marble slab on which nothing indicates the final resting place of Wagner and his wife, Cosima. It is simply signposted in the garden of his house in Bayreuth, Haus Wahnfried, surrounded by evergreen foliage, shaded by trees and adorned with flowers laid by admirers.
As if to emphasise the modesty of Wagner’s grave, alongside it lie those of his black Newfoundland, Russ, who has a gravestone with the words (in German) ‘Here rests and guards Wagner’s Russ’, and of Cosima’s dog.
David Woodhead
Leatherhead, Surrey
Cut and dried
Sir: As the founder and sole member of the Association for the Restoration of Washing-up, I was delighted to read Rupert Hawksley’s erudite and well-crafted ‘Notes On…’ (13-27 December). We differ on a critical point, however: the need for two clean tea towels, one strictly for glassware. Drip drying is not for aficionados.
Ian Mycroft
Leamington Spa, Warwickshire
Alaa Abd el-Fattah and our misplaced priorities
What would you like the priorities of His Majesty’s government to be? I have quite a long list. Sorting out the economy would certainly be up there, as would closing the border. But I imagine the government has had to put such things on the backburner because it turns out that one of its actual top priorities has been ensuring that Alaa Abd el-Fattah can come to the UK.
Who, I hear you ask? El-Fattah turns out to be an Egyptian ‘activist’ who has lately spent a certain amount of time in the prisons of General Sisi. In 2021 he gained British citizenship through his mother, who lives in the UK. I think that clears up any fears of the anti-integrationist movement in this country by the way. That is good enough for me – to my mind, once an Egyptian who is in prison in Egypt is given British citizenship, he becomes as British as you or me. I’m sure we can look forward to seeing him down the Dog and Duck on the first Saturday evening that he’s available.
Everything that should be a priority is not, and the last things that should be a priority are made a priority
That certainly seems to be the attitude of Keir Starmer’s government. Last week the Prime Minister announced that he is ‘delighted’ El-Fattah is back in the UK and has been ‘reunited with his loved ones, who must be feeling profound relief’. He went on to pay tribute to the dogged efforts of ‘Alaa’s family’. You’ll notice by now that Starmer is on first-name terms with the former Egyptian prisoner. ‘Alaa’ has already become one of those celebrities who need only be known by a single name, like Kylie, or Cher.
In any case, the Prime Minister wittered on that ‘Alaa’s case has been a top priority for my government since we came to office’. Which explains a lot. If you happen not to be able to find paid work in the UK, fear not, the government has been too busy on Alaa’s case to give a thought to you.
Unfortunately, the government has made such a big homecoming fandango for El-Fattah that a few people have started to look into what our latest arrival actually believes. Of foremost concern is the fact that he seems not much to like the country that has done so much to spring him from Sisi’s jails. In a set of social media posts from 2010, he called the British people ‘dogs and monkeys’. He also described British history as ‘pure BS’, claiming that we ‘enslaved a fifth of humanity’ and ‘massacred millions’. Why exactly someone would want to come to a country filled with so many infidel ‘dogs and monkeys’ is, I suppose, a question for another day. But these are El-Fattah’s views about us and once again we can all agree there is nothing wrong with that and it all just makes him another weave in the rich tapestry of our diverse and multicultural nation.
In a set of other online posts, El-Fattah said he wanted to kill ‘all police’, and – astoundingly enough – he has stern views about Jews and Zionists. The latter should, according to our latest import, all be killed. It is ‘heroic’, he has said, to kill ‘any colonialists and especially Zionists’, adding of Zionists: ‘We need to kill more of them.’
It is worth dwelling on that. After the Manchester synagogue attack in October, Starmer, David Lammy and all the rest of them stressed how we can’t let ‘hate’ into our country, and need to stop people riling up nastiness. But all the time they were making a priority of bringing a man into the UK who hates the British people, wants police officers to be killed and thinks the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.
At such moments, of course, Starmer’s political opponents realise that there might be some political capital to be made from highlighting this obscenity. Robert Jenrick and others spent the post-Christmas period rampaging across X trying to highlight El-Fattah’s historic views and point at Starmer’s evident present-day numpty-ness.
But, as I can often be found saying, there is always another level to this hell. On this occasion it comes from the following fact.
It is not merely Starmer who has made El-Fattah into the human rights case de nos jours. It turns out that each of our swiftly rotating previous Conservative governments also thought that his case should be a priority for them. Liz Truss’s government thought so, as did Rishi Sunak’s. The Home Office also made the release of this Egyptian a priority by granting him citizenship. The then foreign secretary James Cleverly boasted: ‘We will continue to work tirelessly for his release.’ Again, you and I may have thought that the Home and Foreign Offices might have tried to bring migration down several notches. Instead they ramped migration up to historic highs. And why not, when they were working so ‘tirelessly’ for El-Fattah’s release.
Which party was in power when British citizenship was given to El-Fattah while he was still in jail? Why the gloriously competent Tory government of Boris Johnson, of course.
In any case, put aside for the time being the political game which has resulted from the case and consider the following rather more important question. Does anybody anywhere in government have access to Google? Or any other search engine? Does anybody in the Home Office have the capability to press ‘Control’ and ‘F’ on their keyboard and search for past public comments by a foreign national they are so eager to bring into the UK? There was a time when we might have had some faith that a British official might phone an Egyptian counterpart and ask a few questions about a chap before awarding him citizenship, let alone making a ‘priority’ of getting him on to these shores. But all the government officials, Labour and Conservative MPs, and actresses such as Olivia Colman, who campaigned for El-Fattah’s release seem not to have taken a moment even to Google him.
That is the problem for the UK. Everything that should be a priority is not a priority, and the last things that should be a priority are made a priority by governments of all stripes. Happy new year, by the way.
Iranians are risking everything to convert to Christianity
Apostasy – specifically, conversion to Christianity from Islam – is punishable by death in Iran. Suspected Christians are routinely imprisoned and tortured. Despite this, evangelical Christianity is sweeping through Iran. A 2020 survey of 50,000 Iranians conducted by a Dutch NGO, the Group for Analysing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran, suggests that there could be more than 1.2 million Christian converts. In a country with a population of 90 million, that’s a sizeable portion – and it’s growing fast.
‘It’s probably more like two million today,’ says Father Jonathan Samadi, founder of the Persian Anglican Community of London. ‘The numbers increase every year.’ Father Jonathan converted as a young man, having found a Farsi copy of the New Testament in a Tehran library. He fled Iran for Britain in 2009 after he was arrested and questioned by the security services. Now in his forties, he was ordained into the Church of England in 2016.
At Father Jonathan’s church, St Mary and St Peter in Staines, Surrey, the congregation is swelling with Iranian Christians who have recently found refuge in the UK. Two huge karaoke screens flank the altar, broadcasting hymn lyrics in English and Farsi.
After communion, Iranians gather beneath the gargoyles for their post-service coffee morning, keen to let me know what led them to Christ – and, by extension, Staines. ‘My mum became a Christian in Iran,’ says twentysomething Mehdi (not his real name). ‘Then I got interested. There is no force in this religion. Not like Islam. That’s the big difference between Islam and Christianity.’
‘There are lots of Christians like us in Iran,’ insists a group of Iranian ladies, clustering round the pew.
I first came across Iranian Christians 18 months ago, when I started an oral heritage drama and podcast project for refugees and asylum seekers in Hounslow, a few miles from Staines. Based on our normal take-up, we’d budgeted for six months of workshops and about 35 participants. We were expecting Ukrainians, Afghans, Syrians and perhaps a few Saudi girls fleeing domestic abuse. I was amazed when around 100 Iranian Christian converts turned up.
To my shame, I originally assumed these Iranians were political activists who had ‘converted’ once they arrived in the UK to ensure they couldn’t get deported: as apostates, they would be in genuine danger if they were sent back. After working with asylum seekers for more than ten years, I thought – as most are incredibly dynamic, motivated people – this might seem like a wizard wheeze.
‘There is no force in this religion. That’s the big difference between Islam and Christianity’
But, as the Iranian Christians shared their stories, it quickly became clear that they were genuine. They were disgusted by the cruelty of their Islamic Republic, yet they felt the need for some kind of spirituality.
It is the harsh rule of Islamic theocracy that has stoked Christianity in Iran. But, as Father Jonathan explains to me, there were Christians there long before the 1979 revolution. Thomas the Apostle is said to have converted the Persians in the 1st century before he was martyred in India. Iran’s indigenous Christians are ‘mainly ethnic Armenians, Assyrians and so on – from cultures that have always been Christian’. The regime just about tolerates these minorities (recorded in a 2016 state census at around 130,000) – it’s the converts from Islam who must be crushed.
Nadia (not her real name), 60, from Tehran, converted to Christianity ten years ago. She was introduced to the faith by a neighbour who gave her the Bible. She and her fellow Christians would secretly gather to worship and read the Bible in other Christians’ houses, like the early Christian home churches in ancient Rome, albeit with the 21st-century addition of services over Zoom. ‘There are lots of churches in Iran, and they are very old,’ one Iranian Christian explains. ‘But they are locked and no one can go.’
Often, the Gasht-e Ershad (Iran’s morality police, tasked with enforcing Sharia law) then turn up at some hapless suspected Christian’s home, waving the Bible and asking the children if they’ve seen it before. If the children say ‘Yes, Mummy reads it all the time’, then one of two things happens. If Mummy is at home, she is carted off to jail, probably tortured and told to rat on her fellow Christians. But she’s not normally executed – which legally she could be – and that implies there are enough Christians to cause concern to the regime. You can execute dozens, perhaps hundreds, of people, but not 1.2 million without the world – or indeed your population – making a fuss.
If Mummy is out, Daddy rings Mummy and says: ‘Whatever you do don’t come home.’ Then they look for a people trafficker and pay tens of thousands of US dollars to be smuggled, often as a family, in a lorry to Turkey before being flown on false passports to the UK. Here, housed in asylum hotels, they enter our system. Typically, their asylum is granted fairly quickly as they are in genuine danger. Typically, too, some are horrified by the number of Muslims in Britain. ‘The British Muslims try to convert our children at school,’ says one Staines parishioner.
The low-key boom in Iran’s Christianity may even be supported informally by the UK. When I asked a British diplomat who was previously posted to Iran whether he knew anything about the growing numbers of Iranian Christian converts, he turned red and muttered: ‘I might do!’
As for whether mass Christian conversion poses a genuine threat to Iran’s Islamic Republic, it’s certainly another pressure point along with sanctions, a collapsing economy and the rage of Iran’s women and liberal classes. However, given that Iran’s converts seem keener on spirituality than revolution, their effectiveness as a political destabilisation tool is – like so much else – in God’s hands.
I ask Father Jonathan if he thinks the Iranian Christians will start an uprising. ‘No,’ he replies. ‘But there will be a lot of prayer.’
Dominic Cummings’s warning to broken Britain on migrant crime
Britain should prepare for more rape cases involving illegal migrants, Dominic Cummings has warned. Speaking on The Spectator’s Quite right! podcast, the former advisor to Boris Johnson referenced the case of two young Afghan asylum seekers who were jailed earlier this month for the rape of a 15-year-old girl in Leamington Spa. Places like Leamington ‘better get used to it’, Cummings said, ‘because there’s going to be a lot more of it.’
Criticising the lack of information Warwickshire police were initially willing to share about the identities of the Leamington perpetrators, Jan Jahanzeb and Israr Niazal, following their arrest in May, Cummings told Michael Gove and Madeline Grant:
The odd thing is, the country knows it’s all fake. The voters know it’s all fake
Dominic Cummings
It’s only after the media actually sues and goes to court that their identities are revealed. And the boys from Leamington are revealed to be two illegal Afghan asylum seekers who just got off the boat.
Citing this as just one example of how broken the British state has become, Cummings said that he believed that there is an ‘incredible parochialism inside Whitehall where they hate the idea of learning’. Branding the concept of ministerial responsibility ‘fake’, he said: ‘the odd thing is, the country knows it’s all fake. The voters know it’s all fake. The only place where anyone still pretends the fake is real is inside Westminster itself.’
Cummings described how, on joining Johnson’s team in 2019, he had plans to reform how certain aspects of Whitehall functioned, including the Ministry of Defence and the immigration system. His efforts were, however, scuppered by the onset of the Covid 19 pandemic in early 2020 – and Johnson himself:
Every single thing pretty much that I’ve just described…was either deliberately closed by Boris or more often, the system just closed it down and Boris didn’t even know or didn’t care.
Reflecting on his time working for Johnson in No. 10, Cummings denied being responsible for putting the former prime minister in power. ‘I very deliberately had nothing to do with the Conservative party leadership contest or anything to do with the Conservative party at the beginning of 2019’. Nevertheless, with ‘Corbyn waiting in the wings’, he agreed to go and work for Johnson in an effort to solve the ‘nightmare’ crisis the government found itself in thanks to its efforts to find a workable Brexit deal:
We said, okay, we’re going to try and get Brexit done, force through an election, get a democratic mandate for change and then deliver it in government. Will Boris blow up and screw it all up? There’s a very reasonable chance that he will. But what’s the alternative?
Touching on the focus the ongoing Covid inquiry has had in recent months on Cummings’s influence in No. 10, Gove asked the former political advisor if he had a response to those criticising the response of Johnson’s government to the pandemic. Cummings answered: ‘I think it is important to separate out that first initial crisis from what came later, after the first crisis.’ Had government departments taken on board the lessons of the first lockdown quicker, ‘there would never have been any need for further lockdowns and all of the huge economic and other damage that they did,’ he added.
Cummings said the first lockdown, which was put in place between March and May 2020, was ‘defensible’ because ‘there was no system, there was no testing, there was no nothing’. Accusing the cabinet office of misleading Johnson and his team in the months prior to the pandemic, Cummings said:
If we’d actually had proper pandemic planning and preparation in the first place, if we’d had the ‘world’s best pandemic preparations… as [we] were all told in January…there would definitely be no need for the first lockdown either.
You can listen to the full episode of the podcast here.
Friedrich Merz risks losing touch with the German people
What a radically changing year 2025 has been: a year in which Germany’s new chancellor, Friedrich Merz, found himself fighting not merely the parliamentary opposition, the Russian threat and the brittle promise of European unity, but also his weakest and most self-confident adversary of all – his own coalition partner, the Social Democrats (SPD).
After years of aborted ascents, Friedrich Merz has finally reached the summit. For more than seven months now, he has sat in the Kanzleramt in Berlin he once seemed destined never to occupy. His ascent, however, was ungainly. Two rounds of voting were required to crown him chancellor. A monumental volte-face on the reform of the constitutional debt brake shattered his reputation for reliability before the paint on the office door had even dried. And all the while, his party, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), can feel the AfD’s breath growing warmer, closer, more confident.
Still, to conclude that Merz has failed would be premature. There have been unmistakable hits amid the stumbles. The arrival of Alexander Dobrindt at the Interior Ministry marked a rhetorical, if not yet substantive, shift on migration. Abroad, Merz has projected something Germany had conspicuously lacked under his predecessor Olaf Scholz: presence. Where Scholz faded into communiqués and caveats, Merz shows up, speaks plainly and, crucially, is noticed. When the New York Times recently crowned him ‘the strongest remaining leader among Europe’s great powers’, it was not flattery but relief.
Merz still has time. But time in politics evaporates faster than credibility
At home, however, the knives are out – and they are aimed, predictably, at Merz’s mouth. Too blunt, too spontaneous, insufficiently ‘chancellor-like’: the familiar German media chorus. The ‘cityscape’ remark – when, in October, he linked urban problems with illegal migration – is wheeled out as exhibit A, as though the Republic might collapse under the weight of an unpolished sentence. This is a misdiagnosis bordering on wilful blindness. Merz’s impulsiveness is not a bug but a feature. It belongs to him as cinnamon belongs to a Christmas star: sometimes excessive, rarely fatal. Indeed, after years of Olaf Scholz’s linguistic shrink-wrapping – sentences sealed against any conceivable offence – and Angela Merkel’s syntactical labyrinths designed to obscure intent, Merz’s lack of teflon can feel almost invigorating.
No, Merz’s real problems lie elsewhere. And they are far less cosmetic. The chancellor governs as though Germany were an annexe of the Foreign Office. His gaze is fixed on summits, alliances and historical verdicts, while the domestic landscape blurs beneath his feet. Nothing illustrated this more starkly than his recent confusion over the pension level – a basic concept, mishandled at precisely the moment pensions became the coalition’s most explosive fault line. Merz clearly dreams of a place in the history books as the chancellor who finally made the ‘Zeitenwende’ real, who stiffened Europe’s spine against Russia and restored Germany as Washington’s equal rather than its anxious dependent.
The danger is obvious. For most Germans, geopolitics is abstract; the heating bill is not. A foreign policy legacy does not pay the rent. Governments that lose touch with the social and economic texture of everyday life do not merely stumble – they hemorrhage trust. After the pension debacle, public satisfaction with the coalition collapsed to barely 20 per cent. The old truth still holds: foreign policy may flatter statesmen, but domestic policy decides elections.
Then there is Europe – the arena in which Merz should, by rights, feel most at home. As leader of the EU’s largest net contributor, he possesses leverage few can match. Yet when it came to the European Green Deal and its most dogmatic offspring, the de facto ban on combustion engines, that leverage went largely unused. The policy was driven by Ursula von der Leyen, a former CDU minister no less. If ever there was a moment for a CDU chancellor to intervene decisively, this was it.
Instead, Merz appealed – and was ignored. Manfred Weber’s breathless declaration that ‘the combustion engine ban is history’ turned out to be political fiction. What followed was a fudge: a so-called compromise that satisfies no one, confuses industry and leaves regional candidates in Germany’s automotive heartlands politically naked. Power in Brussels is not asserted through optimistic tweets. It is asserted through confrontation and sometimes through vetoes. On this score, Merz has yet to demonstrate that he is willing to use the weight Germany pays for.
Most perilous of all, however, is the slow, quiet transformation of the CDU itself. If the party is to survive as a force rather than a memory, Merz must arrest its drift into social democracy. The SPD, drunk on moral self-assurance, treats the coalition’s ‘firewall’ against the AfD as both shield and sword – its insurance policy against ever having to compromise. The Union, meanwhile, risks becoming the junior partner in all but name.
Again and again, it is the SPD that prevails where the CDU promised change: the pension guarantee line, the cosmetic reform of the Bürgergeld benefit, the stubbornly high tax and contribution burden. The rhetoric is conservative; the outcomes are not. A CDU that administers social-democratic policy cannot expect conservative voters to remain loyal indefinitely.
Merz still has time. But time in politics evaporates faster than credibility. Without domestic ballast, without the will to throw his weight around in Brussels, and without a CDU confident enough to negotiate rather than acquiesce, his chancellorship will rest on a single, fragile pillar: foreign policy acclaim.
Germany’s chancellor may yet be remembered as a statesman abroad. The question is whether, in this radically changing year, Merz can also survive at home – against an emboldened opposition, an impatient electorate, and a coalition partner that smiles politely while tightening the noose. And so we return to where we began: a year of upheaval, a chancellor besieged on all sides, discovering that the hardest battles are rarely the ones fought beyond the border.