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Why I’m keeping my Christmas decorations up until February
It feels like the 57th day of January. Last week the coldest temperature of the winter so far (-12.5°C) was recorded about 20 miles west of my house. And according to every newspaper and social media feed I have scanned since new year, I should be purging my body of toxins by eating ‘plant-based meals’, abstaining from alcohol or otherwise giving up any semblance of comfort and joy.
But there is another way. This may be ‘the worst time of the year… the very dead of winter’, as T.S. Eliot described the season in ‘Journey of the Magi’, but we are still in Christmastide – right up until 2 February, or Candlemas.
Twelfth Night used to be about fun and misrule, incorporating elements of the Romans’ midwinter festival Saturnalia. Now, the only orgy permitted is one of dusting decorations and denuding the house of every last twinkly light. But the ‘rule’ that taking down the tree has to happen on Twelfth Night is a fairly modern one. Traditionally, decorations stayed up until February – as described in an early 17th century poem by Robert Herrick:
Down with the rosemary and bays,
Down with the mistletoe;
Instead of holly, now up-raise
The greener box for show
Today, however, this custom is really only observed by Roman Catholics. I’m a fairly idle Catholic, but it’s a tradition that I embrace – and not because I am lazy and sluttish (although I am). There’s a natural Cromwellian gloom that descends after the festivities, and there’s no need to add to it in the collective self-flagellation that begins in January.
As fellow Spectator contributor Melanie McDonagh puts it: ‘Twelfth Night concludes the festivities, but we go on in a mildly festive mode throughout January.’ What this means in our house is that I leave the crib up in the hall and the Christmas tree twinkling away in the drawing room. Thanks to the popularity of the Nordmann fir, the pine-drop and depressingly bare branches of my 1980s childhood don’t exist any more.
The paper chains and cards invariably come down when I’m short of newspaper to get the wood-burner going, but I’ll continue to bring evergreens into the house to stick behind picture frames and drape over the fireplace. There are three ceramic tea-light kings twinkling on the hearth, too. They make me happy at a time when spirits can flatline very easily.
I’m fuelled by leftover Christmas cake (if you put enough booze in, the kids don’t eat it) and continuing to have a good time with the remains of a baby stilton. If you cut my veins at this time of year, they’d ooze blue cheese. Going teetotal and adopting a vegan diet in January might well put me in a psych ward. Eliot also wrote that April was the cruellest month, but as he a) never endured an East Anglian winter and b) was a daft anti-Semite, we can ignore this. January is awful and we should do all we can to get through it.
By Candlemas, the first carpets of snowdrops will be appearing – a reminder that, though there will be several more weeks of foul weather to endure, spring is on the way. In the church calendar, Candlemas commemorates the purification of the Virgin Mary and the presentation of Jesus at the temple, 40 days after his birth, according to the Jewish law. It’s why snowdrops, a symbol of purity, are often gathered to decorate churches. Then Christmastide is officially over and the church looks ahead to Lent and Easter.
Whether you’re vaguely observant or have no faith at all, might I suggest that if you want to think about resolutions or going on the wagon, Lent is a far more forgiving time of year to do so? Last year I used it to sort out my 30-plus year unhealthy relationship with alcohol – and have successfully kept it down to a couple of drinks a week, no more than two when I go out. And yes, I will be pouring myself a small sloe gin tonight. It is January, after all.
Is this the end of the French croissant?
Occasionally, a French person reveals – without any malice or superciliousness – that they run on an alternative operating system from us Brits. Over the years, a surprising theme has emerged in my conversations with Frenchmen: butter. Take my first visit to Paris, more than 30 years ago. I innocently asked for butter with my croissant. Simple answer: ‘Non.’ Naturally, I remonstrated. The waiter retorted: ‘A croissant eeez butter!’
He had a point. Upon biting into said viennoiserie, I had to concede: it was nothing like the dry grocery store versions I was used to. Moments later, a small pot of raspberry confiture was graciously placed on my table. (To this day, it remains the best service I’ve ever received in Paris.)
Fast-forward 20 years and I’m in rural Brittany, ordering a ham and cheese baguette. This time, the young woman behind the counter asked if I’d like butter. ‘Mais bien sûr!’ Clearly irritated by my overconfidence, she spread it thinly, added the fillings, and was about to wrap when I piped up with a final request. Mayonnaise? ‘But you already ’av butter!’ Her revulsion was palpable.
After my Paris humiliation decades earlier, I dug in. After all, I knew what I wanted. Butter and mayonnaise are hardly strangers in a sandwich – and I happen to be an expert in my own taste. She resentfully slopped some on, gratis. I asked for mayo on my wife’s sandwich too, if only to normalise it.
When we moved to France permanently, we rented a tiny house in the centre of a small Catalan town. Our British landlord drew our attention to the croissantière just around the corner. Assuming this was a veritable French term for ‘croissant specialist’ (it isn’t), I investigated the next morning. The croissants did not disappoint – still warm, they transported me back to that Parisian revelation. So naturally, I returned the next day. And the next…
‘You’ll get fat,’ the croissant-maker’s wife warned, deadpan, as she handed over the bag. I looked up, expecting a smile. There was none. I tried to hide my offence, but her comment bounced around my head for days. It wasn’t just the bluntness – it was the complete lack of commercial instinct. In the UK or US, such patronage would earn you loyalty points and a branded tote bag. In France, you receive a warning.
Ashamed but still addicted, I tried to ration myself. Mercifully, a few years later, we moved to a nearby village with its own boulangerie. A fresh start. The next morning, brimming with anticipation, I bit into my new dealer’s wares. Gone was the delicate shatter of buttery lamination. Absent was the fragrant plume of warm dairy. What I tasted was more like… wax. Hydrogenated, seed-oil-infused wax. It stopped me mid-bite.
I soon learned the truth. Many bakeries, faced with high butter prices and early mornings, have outsourced croissant production to industrial suppliers. These ‘croissants in waiting’ arrive frozen and full of margarine. A croissant pur beurre can contain as much as 30 per cent real butter by weight. The industrial kind? Next to nothing. But thanks to the slippery language of au beurre versus pur beurre, no one’s technically lying. Roquefort has a charter. Camembert has a lawyer. The croissant? No such protection.
‘You’ll get fat,’ the croissant-maker’s wife warned, deadpan
I now conduct covert pastry runs to our neighbouring town. I smuggle them home in unmarked bags, slipping them past my own boulangerie like a man hiding dinner receipts from his wife – except the mistress is covered in egg wash. It’s tragic, considering the way the French deify food, to witness them quietly debase it. The croissant, that most sacred of breakfast foods, is now often a margarine-infused counterfeit.
Frédéric Roy, a Nice-based baker, has tried to sound the alarm. His campaign to label industrial pastries has gained traction, but little legal weight. Meanwhile, ‘butter blend’ croissants made with palm oil and diacetyl are increasingly sold as au beurre – just without the taste or conscience.
Healthwise, it’s a grim spectrum. On one end, the artisanal croissant – a golden coronary wrapped in charm. On the other, the industrial version: trans-fat-free, yes, but with all the digestibility of a scented candle. If you want to evaluate the prosperity of any French neighbourhood, buy the most expensive croissant you can find. It will tell you the real story.
And perhaps that’s the truest measure of where France now finds itself: a country still wrapped in the golden flake of tradition, but filled more and more with something else entirely. The croissant was once a luxury. Then it became a daily pleasure. Now it’s a performance – ersatz, over-rehearsed and mostly margarine. A rich pastry for a country that can no longer afford the substance, but insists on maintaining the form.
This article was originally published in The Spectator’s World edition.
Is the Supreme Court poised to back trans bans?
It’s been a less than stellar year for trans activists. Shortly after taking office last January, President Trump signed an executive order withholding federal funds from any school that permits biological men and boys from playing on women’s sports teams.
Then in June the US Supreme Court upheld a Tennessee law banning the use of puberty blockers and hormones for the treatment of young patients suffering from so-called gender dysphoria and seeking to change their gender identity.
And on Tuesday the Supreme Court heard arguments in two cases brought by transgender athletes seeking to overturn laws in Idaho and West Virginia barring biological boys and men from playing on female sports teams at the state and local level.
While much of the three-hour hearing, extraordinarily long for the high court, focused on arcane abstractions of class certification and the troublesome legacy of conflicting case law, the overall import was clear. The conservative majority seemed inclined, for the moment at least, to leave in place laws in 27 states that ban biological men and boys from playing on women’s sports teams.
“One of the great successes of America in the past 50 years has been the growth of women’s sports,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh remarked during a colloquy with one of the lawyers representing the transgender athletes. “There are a number of groups who believe that allowing transgender women to participate will undermine that success. If a (female) athlete doesn’t get a medal or make all league, there is a harm there. There are a lot of people who are concerned about that.”
The two cases before the court were brought by Lindsay Hecox, now a college senior in Idaho and Becky Pepper-Jackson, a high school sophomore in West Virginia. A federal district judge initially ruled against Pepper-Jackson’s complaint, but that decision was overruled by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond. Hecox won favorable rulings both at the district court level and at the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco. Both Idaho and West Virginia appealed to the Supreme Court, which agreed last year to hear the cases.
Permitting transgender girls to compete on girls’ teams would “eliminate sex separated athletics entirely,” said Michael Ray Williams, the Solicitor General of West Virginia, urging the court to uphold the state ban. “In the end, this court must recognize the physical differences between men and women. And they are enduring.”
At bottom, the dispute involves a clash of two different and entirely irreconcilable world views. On the right, sex is biological and immutable, on the left it is whatever an individual decides it is. It’s a dispute over custom and ritual, social organization and cultural identity that at times seems even more politically powerful than crime, health care and general economic conditions.
And, in the sense that where a politician stands on the question is a window on his or her baseline political views, it is a signal issue.
It even arguably decided the 2024 president election. One of the most powerful campaign ads of the 2024 presidential race took Kamala Harris to task for her support for taxpayer funded sex change operations for prison inmates and illegal aliens. “Kamala is for they, them, President Trump is for you,” the add proclaimed to devastating effect.
In her 2022 Senate confirmation hearing, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson declined a request from Senator Marsha Blackburn that she define what a woman is.
“I can’t… I am not a biologist,” she answered.
And now, in its own formalized and ritualistic way, this is the world that the federal court system and Supreme Court jurisprudence finds itself embroiled in. At least two federal circuits, the Seventh and the Ninth, have identified transgender persons as a protected class, subject to invidious discrimination by the government, in need of special protection. One circuit, the 11th, has declared that sex is a function of biology and has rejected the transgender argument that sexual identity is immutable and objectively determined.
At different points during the hearing both Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts wondered aloud whether the best course of action for the court would be to allow individual states to decide what their policies should be. That would of course let laws stand in states that have banned transgenders in girls’ sports.
The court’s three liberal jurists, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor seemed all too aware that the court’s conservative majority likely would not reverse the bans.
And so, in their back and forth with the attorneys, raised the possibility that a more tailored approach, where transgender athletes might show through use of testosterone lowering drugs that they posed no unfair competitive advantage.
Absent a ruling against the bans, which is highly unlikely, what activists on the left want is for the court to avoid providing a definition of sex based on biology that might then serve as a basis for legal challenges against the 23 states that permit biological men to compete in women’s sports.
“I urge the court not to decide the case without a definition of sex,” said Joshua Block, an ACLU lawyer representing Pepper-Jackson.
The court will likely rule in the matter sometime before the current term ends in June, just as the mid term congressional elections are heating up. Observers on the right and left will be watching closely to see just where the Supreme Court draws the line.
Claire Foy and the future of celebrity activism
When the actress Claire Foy – still best known for her deservedly award-winning performance in The Crown – was interviewed recently by Harper’s Bazaar to promote her new film H is for Hawk, an adaptation of the Helen MacDonald memoir, she must have expected an easy ride. Estimable title though Harper’s Bazaar undoubtedly is, few would confuse it with a hard-hitting investigative magazine. Yet Foy made some remarks that have blown open the whole vexed question of what the point is of actors getting involved in public discourse, and whether they should, instead, stick to reading other people’s lines.
Foy said, when asked about her public opinions, that it was not her place to sound off on social or wider issues. She commented, “What I believe and who I am and where I stand on things is constantly in flux, as much as it is for everyone else, and I have absolutely no authority to discuss or proclaim about anything other than what I do as an actor.” She concluded, “If you’re just making noise for the sake of it, then you should probably shut up – so I tend to shut up.”
These were nuanced, intelligent words from a nuanced, intelligent actor. Foy has conspicuously not parlayed the career success that she won with The Crown into boring identikit Marvel roles, but instead continues to make interesting, original films, such as Damien Chazelle’s space odyssey First Man and Andrew Haigh’s acclaimed All Of Us Strangers. She is probably someone who people would listen to if she started offering her opinions, and the fact that she has explicitly disavowed her ability to do so – without suggesting for a moment that she is some sort of limited bimbo who doesn’t hold strong views – is a refreshing and surprising shift in an industry that has usually valued blowhards, as long as they say what is perceived to be “the right thing.” How else to explain Mark Ruffalo’s hard-left views, which would have the actor cancelled if they were on the opposite end of the political spectrum?
Nobody would put Foy down as a conservative or right-winger, and indeed her refusal to discuss her political opinions publicly should not indicate for a second that they are in any way unorthodox or extreme. Yet the Overton window of what is and isn’t acceptable in Hollywood is continually shifting, and there are some unexpected characters emerging, too. Keira Knightley’s recent half-scornful, half-incredulous response to those who criticized her casting in a new audiobook version of Harry Potter – “I think we’re all living in a period of time right now where we’re all going to have to figure out how to live together, aren’t we?” – was widely and probably correctly seen as her mocking the anti-Rowling brigade. Overnight, she became a heroine for TERFs and a hate figure for the woke. It may have made her life easier if she’d taken a leaf from Foy’s book and kept quiet.
Actors have always had political views, and historically, the likes of John Wayne and Charlton Heston campaigned as hard for Republicans as most Hollywood stars do for Democrats today. The difference was, in the era of Wayne and Heston, that holding different opinions to your neighbor was unlikely to lead to the end of your career. Therefore, while we should not read too much into Foy’s statement other than it being a sensible and overdue acceptance of actors’ need to shut up and avoid wading into issues that do not concern them, the fact that someone has finally said something that obvious is a rarity in the entertainment industry. We should applaud her for it.
Trump flips off Ford worker – and boasts about revving the US economy
“This is the easiest speech to make,” President Trump was saying. “We have great people. And all I’m doing is spewing off what the hell we’ve done.”
No speech is particularly hard to make for this President. He loves speaking. He would speak to an empty room, a kindergarten class, or a blank wall. In this case, he was speaking to the Detroit Economic Club after a nice tour of a Ford F-150 plant. During the tour, a Ford worker – who almost certainly no longer has a job – yelled “pedophile protector” at Trump, who yelled back “f— you” twice and flipped the guy the bird.
After that, Trump, who, after all, is just like us, headed off to talk to the swells. “Isn’t it nice to have a President who can go off teleprompter?” he said, to rousing applause, before going off on a cruel but admittedly funny Joe Biden impression.
Trump was celebrating a booming economy, a record stock market, decent inflation and jobs numbers and tariff revenue. His, he said, is the greatest Presidency ever and America is richer than it’s been since the Gilded Age.
“Even Venezuela wasn’t too bad, was it, huh? But you have Democrats who are saying, I don’t know if we should have done Venezuela, I don’t know. Anybody who’s saying that hates our country. That was as flawless an attack as there’s ever been. And they asked us to help them. They have 50 million barrels of oil. They said take it.”
But mostly, Trump said, he was here to report on “the strongest and fastest economic turnaround in our country’s history… there’s never been anything like this. You are so lucky I even allow you into this room to be with me. I’m kidding. The fake news will say, Donald Trump thinks he’s hot stuff. Right now I’m feeling pretty good though.”
Trump said his policies are the best, and that “everybody makes money with me,” before desecrating the memory of the late Jimmy Carter, criticizing him for selling the Panama Canal for one dollar. “We lost 36,000 people to the mosquito building the canal,” he said, definitely going off the prompted speech. “And a certain snake. This was a brutal reptile. You got bit and it was over. You’d say, Bye-bye everybody.”
But seriously folks, “we have the highest growth we’ve ever had,” Trump said. “Think of what we can do for the rest of it! Do we have wood around? I want to knock on wood. Everything’s plastic now.”
Not cars, though. Well, cars do contain some plastic, but there’s also a lot of high-grade steel and aluminum. And the car business is back, baby! Ford is investing in new plants in Michigan and Kentucky. Chevy has moved production from Mexico. Stellantis, which used to be Chrysler but now is at least partly owned by European interests, has agreed to invest billions in American infrastructure. Trump announced all this before going off on a five-minute diversion about men playing women’s sports, before getting back to his actual point about opening up domestic oil and gas investment.
“I love electric cars, I think they’re great,” he said. “I like Elon a lot. I don’t think he was too happy about my policy of opening it up. And I can understand that. But I was saying it for four years. They wanted everyone to have an electric car. There was no way to build the stations, there was no way to get it done. I want you to have gasoline powered cars, I want you to have electric, I want you to have hybrids.”
Overall, the President said, the economic news is damn good.
“I want you,” he said, “to have everything.”
Compulsory digital ID is dropped
Keir Starmer has just made his 13th u-turn since taking the No. 10 keys. The government, this evening, decided that the digital ID scheme would no longer be compulsory.
The IDs were to be used to verify if job applicants had the right to work in the UK – something that is currently done using passports and National Insurance numbers. But, according to the Times, Starmer has now dropped the compulsory aspect of the scheme because of fears it was causing distrust in the principle of digital ID.
Under the changed plans there will be an entirely optional digital ID, or workers can use digital versions of existing documents – such as passports – to complete right-to-work checks. Those concerned about civil liberties and freedom from the digital state will be relieved, but the government never answered why a digital ID would stop people working here illegally when physical ID checks clearly don’t.
The original scheme was widely opposed, but not just by those you might expect.
Peter Thiel’s Palantir – a data and analytics company – in many ways makes the perfect bogeyman company that many might fear such a project could have been outsourced to. But as I revealed in my Reality Check newsletter last year, the company surprised many by announcing they were not interested in any compulsory scheme.
Louis Mosley, Palantir’s boss in Britain and Europe, later told Times Radio: ‘I want to say that we will not be participating. I have personal concerns about digital ID… On a technical level, there are other ways of addressing the challenge we have with engaging government services online… On a corporate level, Palantir have long had a policy that we will help democratic government to implement the policies they’ve been elected to deliver and that does mean that often we are involved in implementation of very controversial measures; however, digital ID was not one that was tested at the last election.’
Palantir has spent years trying to shed its caricatured reputation as an evil corporation bankrolled by a Bond-villain billionaire founder.
I wonder if that intervention was a factor in the Prime Minister’s decision this evening.
Behind the scenes, I heard there were more reasons behind Palantir’s decision than just democratic legitimacy, including straightforward PR. Palantir has spent years trying to shed its caricatured reputation as an evil corporation bankrolled by a Bond-villain billionaire founder. To take on a project that many would see as the most authoritarian step into cyberspace yet attempted by the British state would hardly help the cause.
Back in Westminster, though, I wonder if the government is also taking advantage of the appearance that immigration is dropping down the salience list in voters’ minds. As I explained on last week’s episode of Reality Check, the latest visa and migration stats seem to suggest we may even hit net zero migration this year. Voters seem to have noticed, and whilst immigration is still the top issue for half of the respondents to YouGov’s issues tracker, it seems to be tumbling down from the near 60 per cent it registered in September.
Whatever the government’s reasons for this decision, though, Starmer can’t escape the fact he’s made yet another u-turn. And with reports suggesting there may be another one on trial by jury within days, it’s hard to escape the feeling that this is a government rapidly spinning out of control.
The serious business of games: Seven, by Joanna Kavenna, reviewed
Joanna Kavenna is very serious about games. Her novels have a certain playful quality, even her debut Inglorious, where the humour and allusions are Mittel-european. More markedly ludic are her Lewis Carroll-esque fantasy about quantum physics, A Field Guide to Getting Lost and the Philip K. Dickish tech-dystopia of Zed. In Seven, however, it’s not just the style but the subject. As if to make clear that games are neither childish nor mere distractions, there is a pointed reference to Johan Huizinga’s study Homo Ludens¸ published on the eve of the second world war.
The narrator here is working for a formidable philosopher in Oslo, whose current project is entitled ‘Thinking outside the Box about Thinking outside the Box’. (‘I’m serious,’ the narrator archly notes.) Although there is a fair amount of academic satire, Kavenna sketches the actual importance. Archimedes may have said ‘Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I shall move the world’, but these Norwegian thinkers are vexed about there not being a place to stand; that one cannot think objectively about thoughts using the very mind that is doing said thinking. The opening chapter has a deliciously grotesque dinner party, fuelled by a drink aptly and worryingly called Black Death, which culminates in an incident where ‘they all looked as if they were doing impressions of “The Scream” in a game of charades, art-classics version’.
One box that especially interests the so-called Box Philosophers is that which contains a game called Seven, of which the narrator happens to be an above average player. ‘Thinking Outside the Box about Thinking Outside the Box’ work necessitates their going to Greece to meet up with a ‘great poet, mediocre dentist and terrible driver’ called Theodorus Apostolakis.
He is the creator and curator of the Society of Lost Things, and a Seven set was one of the motivations. The game seems a cross between Gō, Snakes and Ladders and backgammon; crucially no one seems to know the original rules or whether it is even a game. This cerebral picaresque takes in two Seven rivals, an AI trained to play it, gilded celebrities who will pay to find themselves by getting lost and art vandalism. Although it is witty, ingenious and says some sharp things, there is an undertow of melancholy.
Games are oases of meaning in an indifferent world – I vividly remember playing Solitaire repeatedly when my dad was in hospital for heart surgery, as if it made a difference or I could bet against the future. Kavenna captures this exquisitely. She is a writer of genuine elegance, intelligence and understated emotions. It is encouraging that there are those who still follow the pellucid postmodernism of Italo Calvino rather than the more rambunctious Angela Carter.
A young Englishwoman is caught up in the Russian Revolution
This vivid account of a young English-woman caught up in the Russian Revolution was first published in 1919 as Under Cossack and Bolshevik, but it’s possibly even more gripping today. Rhoda Power, a political science graduate, was 26 when she was hired as a tutor to a 16-year-old Russian girl, Natasha Sabaroff, living in Rostov-on-Don. Going to Russia had for years been one of her dreams, so off she sailed from Newcastle to Bergen through U-boat-infested seas; and, indeed, future sailings were cancelled after four ships were torpedoed. But she arrived safely in Bergen, where the Cook’s man put her on a train to Petrograd (St Petersburg), which she spent four happy days exploring before taking the three-day train journey on to Rostov.
Her employers, the Sabaroffs, were one of the two richest families in the city and lived in a grand mansion with many servants. They feasted and went to the theatre in their carriage wearing jewellery and furs while their servants worked all day and slept on the floor. Rhoda writes: ‘I was very sorry for the servants, they had such uncomfortable lives, and though they nearly all seemed to be thieves and liars, I could not help liking them.’ Her pupil, Natasha, treated them with contempt – ‘they are all pigs’– but Rhoda wasn’t that smitten by Natasha either. The girl had no interest in learning and paid a teacher to write her essays. Her one ambition was to get married. But she told Rhoda: ‘You will always be funny and English, so you will never be married.’ (This turned out to be true. Rhoda never married but became a pioneering children’s broadcaster and died in l957.)
She was constantly struck by the huge gulf between the Sabaroffs’ ostentatiously luxurious life and the peasants who had to wait in bread queues throughout the night: ‘I used to wonder how long it would be before they would rebel.’ She noticed one particular girl, Anna Ivanova, who worked in a factory all day and then joined the bread queue, getting weaker and thinner, until one day she didn’t appear and Rhoda heard that she had died. She also observed soldiers leaving for the Front with their boots falling apart and sometimes only one rifle between five men. ‘The country was literally worn out.’
‘And then the Revolution came.’ For three days there were no trains and thus no news from Petrograd; but rumours flew around and then a messenger came from the station: ‘In less than half an hour the whole town knew that the Tsar had abdicated and that the students and workmen were fighting against the police in the streets of Petrograd.’
Rostov remained orderly but red flags started appearing and people began to organise public meetings, which had hitherto been illegal: ‘The police, like the Snark-hunter, “softly and silently vanished away”. In any case, they had no power, for they were deprived of their firearms, and the people simply refused to recognise them.’
The Sabaroffs’ servants attended meetings at which they resolved to work only eight hours a day; and when the coachman and chauffeur failed to turn up to take the family to the theatre, the only explanation given was ‘Cvoboda’ (liberty). Anyhow, ‘the car and carriage, not to mention the horse, were missing’. Home life became completely disorganised: ‘Servants who wished to go to the cinema sauntered out of the house when they pleased; workmen, bored with what they were doing, temporarily downed tools and strolled off to meet their friends.’
The Sabaroffs decamped to their dacha near Odessa for the summer and spent their time giving tea parties for their friends. But when they returned to Rostov they found the situation had grown far more dangerous. The price of food had increased seven times, and the news from the Front was uniformly bad. More-over, all prisoners had been released and formed themselves into rival gangs – the Union of ex-Criminals, the Society of the Red Hand, the Committee of Adventurers and Apaches – who went around extorting protection money. M. Sabaroff received a note from the Apaches demanding 15,000 roubles to prevent his house from being bombed.
So the Sabaroffs decided to move to their flat in Novocherkask to the north of Rostov, leaving Rhoda and Fraulein (Natasha’s German tutor) alone in the house, saying that, being foreigners, they had nothing to fear. In fact they had plenty to fear as gangs of brigands roamed the streets but Rhoda found her way to the British consulate, where she stayed while the Bolsheviks and then the Anarchists took over the city. The Anarchists, Rhoda writes, were ‘like children playing at brigands with real firearms’.
Meanwhile, the Germans were advancing and Rhoda determined to leave Rostov on a refugee train. It had no water or food, and took 12 days to reach Moscow, where she stayed for three days before joining another refugee train to Murmansk. By now the passengers were no longer in danger from the Germans and they grew wildly hilarious and gave nightly concerts; but in Murmansk they were put in a grim barracks with bed bugs and many fell ill with smallpox or Spanish flu. Then followed 17 days by ship to Britain, where Rhoda arrived three months after she’d set out from Rostov.
The great thing about her is that she is an utterly trustworthy and sharp-eyed observer who simply reports what she sees without moralising. She is brave, resourceful, cheerful and never given to self-pity. The one time she almost breaks down is when she watches a Bolshevik funeral procession and realises that the coffins are uncovered, so she can see limbless trunks, heads severed from bodies and crushed faces: ‘All the while there was a sickening odour of putrefaction.’
The book has an excellent introduction by Rhoda’s godson Basil Postan, and a helpful glossary and chronology. I could have done with a map showing where the German front was at various times and perhaps more explanation of the different armies – Reds, Whites, Junkers, Anarchists, Cossacks, Volunteers – that passed through Rostov. But as a vivid eye-witness account of a turbulent time, In the Storm is really unsurpassed.
Bookshop blues: Service, by John Tottenham, reviewed
A friendly admonition for the thwarted or struggling writer in your life: that tempting little job at the local bookshop might not be the best way to keep the show on the road until the Muse comes through. Would-be actors who take a front-of-house gig at the National Theatre aren’t constantly buttonholed by strangers raving about how brilliant Andrew Scott’s Hamlet was. Plus, of course, their more successful contemporaries will generally be elsewhere of an evening, doing shows of their own. But imagine slinking out of your modest lodgings, your dreams of what John Tottenham calls ‘actualisation’ left simmering behind you, to spend eight hours wrangling a roomful of people who want nothing more than to chat about – and pay money for – books you know in your heart to be terrible, or fear in some darker recess might be good.
He takes long baths, with classical music on the stereo, a cocktail in one hand and a Barbara Pym in the other
Service is the story of just such a predicament, as experienced by Sean Hangland, a former music journalist born in England but long domiciled in, if not quite reconciled to, America. He is now on the cusp of 50; his creditors are closing in, and he works the evening shift at a lightly fictionalised version of Stories in Echo Park, a rapidly gentrifying district of Los Angeles. His mornings are devoted to a last-ditch attempt to actualise himself in prose, from which he recovers by taking long, rather appealing sounding baths, with classical music on the stereo, a cocktail in one hand and a damp Barbara Pym in the other. Why he feels the need to write in the first place is something that is never made particularly clear, especially considering his low opinion of most people who read.
The book alternates between passages of pithy, misanthropic observational comedy while Sean is at work and baroque interior monologues back at home as he struggles to write, assisted – perhaps less than he thinks – by a pharmacopoeia of ‘yellow’, ‘white’ and ‘brown’ pills. There are a few remembrances of things past and acute observations on LA’s accelerating present along the way – naturally, the bookshop carries a copy of City of Quartz by Mike Davis.
Just how lightly fictionalised a version of John Tottenham (also fiftyish, works at Stories, has ruined good looks, is an authority on country blues, etc) Sean might be is, arguably, moot. Certainly the book doesn’t treat the question with the passive-aggressive shrug one gets from most autofictionalists. We come to understand that the book we are reading is a version of the book Sean is working on. The guy who runs the café at one end of the bookshop even starts giving him notes: sort the tenses out, make the characters more relatable, put in a sex scene (the latter done self-sabotagingly badly: ‘I slowly pounded the shrine of her womanhood…’). The book doesn’t end so much as stop: ‘Then again, fuck it. I’m tired.’
The madness of Prince Rogers Nelson
In June 1993, the Artist Who’d Just Decided He Didn’t Want to be Called Prince Any More handed his passport to his long-suffering tour manager Skip Johnson and told him to get the name on it changed to the squiggly symbol with which he’d decided to rebrand himself. It is ironic that he felt ‘oppressed’ by a name bestowed on him by others while insisting on renaming most of his colleagues and lovers.
The passport incident is one of the more comical demands listed in the exhausting catalogue of employee grievances that make up John McKie’s sprawling biography of Minnesota’s own Prince Rogers Nelson, the virtuosic visionary who died, aged 57, of an accidental Fentanyl overdose in 2016.
A former editor of both Smash Hits and Q magazine, McKie embarked on Project Prince back in 2017. He’d been commissioned to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the pop star’s 1987 double album Sign O’ The Times for the BBC and found that ‘the more sources I approached, the less clarity there was’ about a man whose rare, awkward interviews were littered with half-truths and evasions.
Failing to nail Prince for that article turned the late star into something of a white whale for McKie. He set off on a bold voyage to make sense of the pint-sized prodigy, interviewing more than 200 musicians, office assistants, wardrobe designers, studio engineers, hairdressers, security guards and roadies about their experiences with a man whose rock-pop-funk music defied racial and genre boundaries. They’ve all got their own take on the man behind hits such as ‘Purple Rain’ and ‘When Doves Cry’. And they also take the opportunity to voice their complaints about an employer who expected staff on call 24/7, responding to one damn whim after another.
By the time he’d transcribed their testimony, McKie must have felt more like a beleaguered union rep than a biographer. You wouldn’t have wanted to work in HR at Prince’s Paisley Park compound. While staff were forbidden to drink and swear, and were regularly lectured on godly behaviour by their Jehovah’s Witness boss, they were expected to either facilitate or turn a blind eye to Mr LoveSexy’s French farce of a love life. His girlfriends (mostly employees, reduced to addressing him as ‘Hey, you’ during his squiggle phase) often overlapped. He didn’t inform staff when he married. Male employees were expected to avert their eyes from his lovers – challenging when they walked around in see-through clothing.
Prince expected staff to be on call 24/7, responding to one damn whim after another
McKie struggles to find anyone who saw Prince less than impeccably dressed and expensively perfumed. He finds a housekeeper who washed Prince’s underwear – disproving the urban myth that the star wore new silk boxer shorts every day. The dancer Bruce Scott has a delicious memory of one night chez Prince in which the host greeted his guests ‘in his whole outfit, with the suit, gold buttons, jacket with shoulder pads, the matching four inch heels and stirrups. It’s all red’. When Prince announced ‘I’m going to change into something more comfortable’, Scott wondered if they’d finally see him in jeans. ‘But he walks back in and he’s in the exact same outfit in blue.’
The video director Steve Purcell recalls more oddity. He says while they were working on edits together, Prince regularly sent out for large boxes of his favourite chocolates. Then the star would ‘break every one off and eat the one he liked and put the rest in the trash. He would never offer me any. It was very strange. We were literally a foot from each other.’
Alas, anecdotal gems like these – alongside classic tales of Prince beating Michael Jackson at ping pong and playing songs backwards, perfectly – are at risk of getting lost in a book which eschews coherent, chronological structure because its author has chosen to stick to his original brief of celebrating Sign O’ The Times, using the album’s track listing to explore themes in Prince’s life. We end up with a lot of interesting material about how Prince made other people feel without getting deeper access to his own heart.
He was, after all, the damaged child of a hedonistic woman and violent father. He left his turbulent home aged 12; was hailed as a ‘genius’ and signed by a record label in his late teens; and buried his only child when he was 38. The baby boy, Amiir – with first wife Mayte Garcia – was just a few days old when he died. Shortly afterwards, the couple appeared on Oprah Winfrey and talked about him as though he were still alive. It seems Prince never really made emotional sense of all this – his own posthumously published autobiography is sketchy – and neither does McKie.
Online fan forums show many threads by those who believe Prince was autistic (his hit ‘Starfish & Coffee’ is about an autistic girl) and although journalists are not diagnosticians that does seem likely. But who knows? Not me or John McKie. And probably not the man whose passport was – despite Skip Johnson’s best efforts – never changed to read: O)+>.
From riches to rags: The Effingers, by Gabriele Tergit, reviewed
Sometimes the term ‘lost masterpiece’ proves to be little more than a publisher’s puff. At other times, however, a long-buried book that is dug up, dusted down and branded a classic is worthy of the accolade. That applies to Gabriele Tergit’s The Effingers. Originally published – and then promptly overlooked – in the author’s native Germany in 1951 and recently rediscovered and reappraised there, the novel, a vivid chronicle of German Jewish life over the course of 70 years, now appears in English for the first time.
Opening in 1878, Tergit charts the progress of siblings Paul and Karl Effinger as they leave their provincial hometown in the south of Germany to make their fortunes in Berlin. There they receive financial backing to open a factory from the bank of Emmanuel Oppner and his brother-in-law, Ludwig Goldschmidt. The Effingers graduate from humble screw producers to prominent car manufacturers and marry Oppner’s daughters Klara and Annette. Enjoying success, wealth and higher social standing, their future looks rosy. But a new era brings conflict and instability: war breaks out; hyper-inflation takes hold and savings are rendered worthless; and then the Nazis assume power and gradually tighten their stranglehold, endangering not just livelihoods but lives as well.
Over more than 800 pages, the novel traverses decades with a teeming cast of characters, making for a multigenerational epic. If its size is off-putting then so too is its subtitle, ‘A Berlin Saga’, for sagas, in places, as a rule, sag. There are longueurs in the form of domestic trivialities and discussions about gas engines. Chapters devoted to peripheral figures also impede narrative momentum.
But the book has many strengths. It is thoroughly immersive and unfolds in precise, often stark prose, expertly translated by Sophie Duvernoy. It is packed with well-drawn scenes of individual struggles and family dramas. Tergit (born Elise Hirschmann) wrote for Berlin newspapers until the Nazis forced her into exile, and she brings her sharp journalistic eye to bear in mapping the city and highlighting the political, societal and economic upheavals of the Weimar Republic. The novel constitutes not only a sweeping panorama but also a series of captivating portraits. Standout characters range from Paul, who yearns for a simple life, to Karl’s daughter Marianne, whose life is enriched by the women’s movement, to Emmanuel’s lovelorn son Theodor, who ‘wants to escape his life, since it doesn’t suit him’. At one point, Emmanuel declares: ‘Ever since we began to plumb the depths of nature we’ve lost interest in the human.’ Tergit never loses interest in the human, and ensures we root for her compelling characters until the bitter end.
What is it about Bob Dylan that sends writers mad?
Ron Rosenbaum is a man of galactic learning. Theology, neuroscience, American history, psychology, Shakespeare, cosmology, ‘all of Dickens’, nuclear weapons, quantum theory, iron ore – nothing escapes his hungry eye. Except, perhaps, Bob Dylan. Which is unfortunate, given that he’s written a book about him.
What is it about Dylan that sends writers mad? Christopher Ricks’s usual mellifluousness succumbs to a pun-overdose; Clinton Heylin’s blindingly completist biographies are as impenetrable as their subject; Sean Wilentz lurches from the unlikely to the banal. With Things Have Changed, Ron Rosenbaum, the de facto ‘Dylan correspondent’ for the Village Voice in the early 1970s, proves that even ‘being there’ confers no immunity. As the conductor of the longest interview Dylan has ever granted (1977) – and witness to many seminal Dylan moments, including the debut of ‘Desolation Row’ – Rosenbaum has the chops to deliver a good book. Instead, he writes what feels like one long voice-note after the pub, full of bluster, conspiracy and giddy conjecture.
It is hard to say with any confidence what this book is about. Even Rosenbaum seems unsure. It is a ‘sort-of biography’, a cultural history, a history of culture, a ‘kind of follow-up’ to the recent Dylan biopic, a pitch to revive Dylan’s four-hour film flop Renaldo and Clara; ‘a biography of Dylan’s impact on the consciousness of the culture’; and an opportunity to advertise Rosenbaum’s other works (‘I’ve written a 600-page book on Shakespeare… I think you’re unlikely to find a better brief study’). We might wonder how successfully a book is doing any of these things if, more than 200 pages in, its author is still telling us what he ‘will do’ or what the book, in fact, ‘is about’.
There are some interesting ideas: on the distinction between authenticity and performed sincerity; on ‘the foundational Dylan trope, the “put-on’”; on the grouping of Dylan’s so-called ‘lynching songs’. But they are buried in the landslide.
The prose is stop-start. Jerky. Moves off in random directions like a simile that doesn’t work. The editing is non-existent. Rosenbaum’s broadside against the term ‘Dylan-ologists’ is repeated almost word for word three times in five pages. After the phrase ‘whole other level’ had cropped up ten times, I stopped counting. And there’s so much throat-clearing that you feel the need to hose yourself down after each chapter.
What of the arguments?
Two seem to predominate. The first is that Dylan, born a Jew, is obsessed with the Holocaust. How do we know this? Unhelpfully, the lyrics barely mention it, so instead Rosenbaum hangs his argument on a single quote plucked from Dylan’s aborted, and ‘otherwise gibberish-filled’, fiction Tarantula, written when he was 24: ‘Hitler didn’t change history/ Hitler was history.’
From this thin plank, Rosenbaum attempts to construct a cathedral of meaning. But it’s almost all supposition. Mights, mays and probablys litter the text. After a riff trying to connect the magnetism of the ‘iron ore-filled Mesabi Range’ near where Dylan grew up and Dylan’s going electric, Rosenbaum reflects: ‘Do I know absolutely that Dylan was moved by the northern lights? No, but I’m willing to go out on a limb. And if he wasn’t, he might as well have been.’
Some mysteries, however, are easy to clear up. ‘Things Have Changed’ was not ‘unaccountably left off 1999’s Time Out of Mind album’, because Time out of Mind was released in 1997 and ‘Things Have Changed’ hadn’t been written yet. Changing of the Guards is not a Dylan album from the late 1970s but a song off Street Legal (1978). The list continues. Pedantic? Perhaps. But since we’re asked to go along with Rosenbaum’s airy conjectures, we should at least be confident that he’s on solid ground.
The second argument concerns Dylan’s 1978 conversion to a Bible-thumping brand of Christianity, which saw him release three explicitly religious albums and deliver lengthy sermons to bewildered audiences. Rosenbaum takes Dylan’s conversion personally. He scolds those ‘stupid folkie’ fans who didn’t get Dylan going electric, but Dylan going Christian? Judas! Because the problem with the conversion, Rosenbaum argues, is that it is a ‘cultural crime’: it destroys the art, and destroys Dylan.
This is very harsh on the ‘holy trinity’ of Christian albums. The greatest religious art offers the listener the opportunity to enter into an imaginative community with the believer, to discover how faith might feel, and allows us to sympathise with intuitions that may not be our own but which have shaped mankind for millennia. It is, in short, a gift – one Dylan extends to us.
And to those who can only hear terrifying betrayal in this period, listen again to those early folk songs with their biblical morality, or the mid-1960s work that spins God round in the cultural kaleidoscope as well as man. Indeed, it is Dylan’s ability to wed the modern to the sacred order and simultaneously subvert it that gives his art such sustained resonance across the decades. It is startlingly new and yet we have been here before.
Despite his vast curiosity about other subjects, Rosenbaum is unwilling to countenance this. He is right that ‘things have changed’ – something older, however, remains.
Does running 42 Lakeland fells in less than 24 hours really bring ‘serenity’?
‘We continue to grapple as a species,’ writes Carl Morris, ‘with a knotty philosophical divide between anthropocentric and biocentric approaches to the natural world. Our bodies are both transcendent – seemingly beyond nature and capable of rationalised enhancement – but also immanent – that is within nature and therefore subject to the same frailties and limitations.’ What is he addressing? Space travel? Diving to the bottom of the Mariana Trench without oxygen? Not quite. He is talking about the process of human locomotion. He is talking about running.
Stay with me. Books about running can be as dull as a ten-mile road race in the Illinois flatlands, and I say that as a keen fell runner. This book isn’t. The stall-setting, a bad habit in academic writing, doesn’t reappear and doesn’t stand for the rest of the book, which is a deep dive not into a trench but into what Morris calls MUT. He claims this as a standard abbreviation for Mountain Ultra Trail, though I’ve never heard of it.
Humans have not always run for fun. Nor have they traversed epic distances by foot just because they wanted to. Morris takes us at a steady pace through the growth of off-road ultra running, from its beginnings in the charming phase of pedestrianism in the 19th century, when people like Weston the Walkist were famous for their walking feats. In 1866, wagered $10,000 that he could not do it, Edward Payson Weston walked 1,200 miles from Portland, Maine to Chicago in 29 days, where he was ‘escorted to the Sherman House Hotel by 50 police officers and a 30-piece marching band’.
Meanwhile, in England, George Littlewood set the six-day walking record of 531 miles, one that still stands, ending it with a foot worn down to the bone. But my favourite walkist is Grandma Gatewood. Emma Gatewood, the 66-year old survivor of a brutally violent marriage, decided to walk the entire Appalachian Trail, a route that had taken nearly 20 years of planning by various hiking clubs and finally opened in 1937. She failed on her first attempt, getting frequently lost. On her second, in 1955, she didn’t prepare much better, having only a shower curtain against the rain, sleeping on leaves at night and eating mostly berries. But she did it and became famous; and suddenly walking your cares away on epic trails became normal. Normal, but not easy. It is never easy, as Morris says: ‘In a complex world where outcome and our societal contributions can be elusive, it is an activity that combines simplicity with difficulty: move – keep moving – finish.’
Morris’s focus is definitely on ultra running and mostly on the US side of things. That’s where ultra running grew fastest. In 1972 there were only six ultra-distance events in the United States, and ten years later there were 209. The US has produced magnificent runners, such as Courtney Dauwalter and Dean Karnazes. In Britain, we have contributed Bob Graham, a ‘powerfully built, modest, kindly’ hotelier in Keswick, who set off in June 1932 to run 42 Lakeland mountains, a distance of 66 miles, in less than 24 hours. Although he and his pacer relied on fruit pastilles and water at first, they succeeded in 23 hours 39 minutes, and the Bob Graham Round is still the most famous round that fell runners aspire to complete.
Ultra running may have started as a man’s sport – early athletics and walking clubs kept women out because they were considered too delicate – but Morris gives starring roles to many magnificent women, too. There is the unnamed Tarahumura woman who won a race covering about 77 miles around ‘an oblong mountain’ in Mexico in 1867, having given birth ten days earlier. And there is my particular hero, Jasmin Paris, who won the Spine Race outright in 2019 (we have to say ‘outright’, because otherwise it’s not clear she beat all the men) while expressing milk for her 14-month-old daughter.
As for why people choose to run improbable distances up and around mountain ranges and across endless fells, you will find plenty of reasons in Dirtbag Dreams. If you are someone who responds to a person running a long distance with ‘you’re mad’, this book may change your single-track mind, since the enterprise actually increases sanity and serenity. Morris has delivered a satisfying account of how we got to where we are now, where it is almost normal to run for days, for fun. At the finish line, though, there is no better reason for why I or anyone else chooses to run 42 miles overnight, or 268 miles along the Pennine Way, or many miles around the French Alps than: ‘Why not?’
The scourge of plagiarism reaches crisis point
‘Talent borrows, genius steals.’ Do you like it? I just came up with it. No, honestly. Any resemblance to the work of anyone else is purely coincidental.
The idea that taking someone else’s words and passing them off as one’s own constitutes a form of theft goes back to antiquity. Aeschines, one of Socrates’s disciples, was said to have read out dialogues appropriated from his master, to which one philosophically informed heckler blurted out: ‘Oh! you thief; where did you get that?’
But, as I learned from Roger Kreuz’s Strikingly Similar, it was the Roman poet Martial who gave us our modern word for this crime. Plagiarius means kidnapper. So when Martial accuses the poet Fidentinus of being a plagiarist, the sense is worse than theft: it is as though one’s children have been carried away and raised by someone else.
What might it mean to think of our words as though they were our property or even our children? The Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges tells the story of Pierre Menard, a Frenchman in the late 19th century, who made it his project to rewrite Don Quixote word for word. Easy you’d say: just copy it out. But Menard’s idea was to live his life – 300 years after Cervantes – in such a way that it would be the natural expression of himself to write exactly those words as if they were his own, written for the first time. Borges gives us an example:
It is a revelation to compare Menard’s Don Quixote with Cervantes’s. The latter, for example, wrote (Part one, Chapter nine): ‘… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, the future’s counselor’.Written in the 17th century by the ‘lay genius’ Cervantes, this enumeration is a mere rhetorical praise of history.
Menard, on the other hand, writes: ‘… truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, the future’s counselor.’ History, the mother of truth: the idea is astounding. Menard, a contemporary of William James, does not define history as an inquiry into reality but as its origin.
And so on. Like all of Borges’s remarkable stories, it is short and playful, but also opens out into vast philosophical implications about what texts really are. Is it plagiarism if Menard is truly expressing himself? And isn’t every text unique to the moment in which we read it? As Roland Barthes might put it, can plagiarism really exist after the Death of the Author?
These, however, are not problems that trouble Kreuz, whose principal method, he tells us somewhat depressingly, was to type ‘plagiarism’ into the search function of the New York Times online archive and tally what he found there. What we have, then, is a series of anecdotes, each a page or so long, arranged under headings such as ‘Unconscious Plagiarism’, ‘Plagiarism and Politics’, ‘Unrepentant Plagiarists’, etc. We learn that the largest settlement ($5.4 million) ever paid out for copyright infringement in the music industry was by Michael Bolton and his record label over the similarity of ‘Love is a Wonderful Thing’ to an Isley Brothers song of the same name. And that Joe Biden’s political speeches throughout his career had a tendency to include phrases lifted from the speeches of his heroes. And that, having woken up with the tune to ‘Yesterday’ in his head, Paul McCartney spent a month humming it to anyone who would listen to make sure he hadn’t heard it somewhere before. ‘It became like handing something in to the police,’ he said. ‘I thought if no one claimed it after a few weeks, then I could have it.’
Kreuz’s style is engaging, and he has a nice way of telling a story. The trouble is that, while the stories pile up, the next part never arrives. One is constantly left wondering: where is the analysis, the complexity? Where is Kreuz’s own thinking? Strikingly Similar is exhausting in the way that a banquet of hors d’oeuvres might be. One keeps being served morsels that are in themselves interesting and tasty, but about halfway in you realise that there’s no main course on its way and despair sets in. I looked again at the publisher’s press release. It promised ‘the first in-depth history of plagiarism’. Unfortunately, depth is exactly what’s missing. If it were one of my students’ essays, the margins would be full of me scribbling: ‘So what?’
In fact let’s stick with that idea of the student essay. Why might an in-depth looking at plagiarism be an important book right now? Because for the last three years – since 30 November 2022, to be precise, when ChatGPT 3.5 went live – the whole basis of how we assess work in schools and universities has had the rug pulled from under it.
The crisis is an existential one. Unless the student is especially stupid or lazy or brazen, it’s extremely difficult to catch work that has been written with the aid of AI. Are we then wasting our time attempting to prosecute this? Or should we – and this is increasingly the preference of university managers, who are not immune to being stupid, lazy or brazen themselves – find ‘ways of working with AI’? To many, this sounds like an effort to eliminate plagiarism simply by redefining what the term means. To take my own discipline, English literature, what is it that we aim to teach if not the ability to read insightfully and to structure those insights in writing that is stylish and expressive? At what point in that process is there room for a mechanical servant?
Meanwhile, in case you weren’t aware of it, a $1.5 billion class action has been raised against the American AI company Anthropic. If you published a book at any point in history before July 2021 there’s a good chance you can join the lawsuit as a claimant.
At the end of Something Similar is a four-page breeze through the recent history of ChatGPT and its ilk. It reads as an afterthought. Kreuz – who might reasonably regard himself as a leading expert on the legal and ethical implications of all this – offers this brief opinion: ‘The training of large language models with copyrighted text may or may not be deemed problematic.’ Thanks for that, but it’s simply not enough.
Somewhere, between the enormo-scraping of Large Language Models and the writers – professionals as well as students – who use these tools to produce work which they will claim as their own, something is happening that looks very much like plagiarism. That ancient distinction between theft and kidnapping, between taking someone’s property and passing someone else’s children off as your own, feels like it might be useful. The matter might be complicated, but that’s why an academic such as Kreuz could be the careful and thorough explainer that we need. If only he would push harder at the questions he raises and not just tell us stories.
Plagiarism is big news now, and Strikingly Similar trades on that: the subtitle promises ‘Chaucer to Chatbots’. Unfortunately, Kreuz drops the ball. Imagine a travel writer perched in one of the Titanic’s lifeboats, filing their report on the deliciousness of the food and the jauntiness of the band. The incident with the iceberg may or may not be deemed problematic.
The anxious gaiety of Britain’s interwar years
However many times one absorbs the brevity of the interlude between the first catastrophic worldwide conflict of the 20th century and the next, it was the not-knowingness of that timetable that allowed society to cope. In the 20 years between world wars that shattered several generations, Britain’s full emotional recovery was never really accomplished. But with his eye for the political and the cultural, for the game-changing and the deliciously absurd, for comedy and for tragedy, Alwyn Turner demonstrates the irrepressible optimism of humanity, whatever the circumstances: ‘Highbrows and lowbrows [lived] cheek by jowl, rubbing along with politicians, priests and pressmen.’ Relentlessly twisting the kaleidoscope, Turner finds a stunned nation navigating what became an increasingly turbulent pause.
With the armistice in November 1918 and the prime minister David Lloyd George adapting H.G. Wells’s phrase that Britain had just emerged from ‘the war that will end war’, buoyancy initially felt tenuous. No bodies were returned from the battlefields, the potential scale of such an undertaking preventing it, so no funerals took place, no graves were dug and no conventional rituals guiding the process of mourning were followed. Without any evidence of death, grieving happened in a vacuum.
Even as the negotiations to bring the conflict to a halt were being conducted across Europe in the summer of 1918, more destruction was approaching. Spanish flu, a plague on a scale not seen since the Black Death, and eventually accounting for five times as many deaths as the war itself, was met with such horror that it was barely spoken about. Although the annual commemorations of the armistice were celebrated in a spirit of national unity, with a series of innovations, including the observation of a two-minute silence, the wearing of a poppy, the burial of a symbolic unknown warrior and a cenotaph at the centre of Whitehall representing the ‘Glorious Dead’, people were keen to move on from the sorrow towards long-term peace. In fact what Turner calls a ‘cultural silence’ became a placebo with which to deal with collective trauma.
But the 1920s world soon became unrecognisable. Suffrage had transformed society, so that by 1928 most women were incorporated into an electoral voting system four times its prewar size. The world seemed to contract as technological advances made remote places suddenly accessible by car and aeroplane. The ubiquity of the radio, the biggest communication development since the printing press, allowed millions to hear the voice of their monarch for the first time on Christmas Day 1932.
Unlike America, with the Ku Klux Klan, or France, with its paramilitary organisation La Cagoule, or Spain, engulfed by civil war, Britain was devoid of political extremism. Yet the economic paralysis resulting from the Depression, the ebb and flow of political power and the crisis involving Wallis Simpson all found their place. There was a dizzying change of prime ministers and a change of crowned heads, too. Throughout the two decades, the Conservative, Liberal and Labour parties all competed for leadership, while taboos concerning divorce derailed the marriage plans of a king who had no option other than to abdicate.
Spanish flu, a plague on a scale not seen since the Black Death, was met with such horror it was barely spoken of
Turner’s emphasis, however, is on the full cultural, sporting and recreational scene, with ‘a bias towards the popular’. His stories range through music hall, dance, art, Noël Coward, cinema, poetry, Mills & Boon romance, architecture, new confectionary (Crunchies, Mars Bars, Kit-Kats), the BBC and the building of football stadia and Butlin’s holiday camps. Though involving considerable social and technological progress, the interwar years were also ones of caution and vigilance. Movements for nude sunbathing and cross-dressing were roundly condemned.
By the early 1930s, the fear of conflict loomed again, although Oswald Mosley’s fascist movement never truly caught alight. But in an account bristling with tension, we see Neville Chamberlain’s 1938 Munich Agreement, and his assurance that ‘appeasement’ of Hitler had done the trick, followed by plunging disillusionment as the promises come to nothing.
I wish I’d had a history teacher like Turner, with his idiosyncratic gift for wit and tenderness, describing how things were done in the past by people who feel as knowable as if they were alive today. This is history at its most fun, immersive, human and revelatory.
The last chapter: Departure(s), by Julian Barnes, reviewed
Departure(s), whose publication co-incides with Julian Barnes’s 80th birthday, will be his last book, a thank you and goodbye to his readers. Barnes has blood cancer, but the condition is manageable and not terminal; when he dies, it will be with, and not of, the disease. Or rather, as he puts it: ‘I, in dying, shall have killed my cancer! Barnes 1, Cancer 0 – result!’ Otherwise he is in good nick and still master and commander of his narratives. He is bowing out because his body of work is complete: his 18 novels and two memoirs – or, depending on how Departure(s) is categorised, his 17 novels and three memoirs – form a perfect whole. It is a canny move to write your own final chapter, and Barnes is a canny writer who has always had the sense of an ending. The Sense of an Ending, I need not remind you, was the title of his 11th novel, which won the Booker prize in 2011.
The unreliable narrator of Departure(s) is a chilly novelist called Julian Barnes, with manageable but not terminal blood cancer. Now in his late seventies, he is preoccupied, as he has been all his life, by the horror of mortality. While the protagonist of his debut novel, Metroland (1980), was ‘scared to death of death’, Barnes himself has become, as he says, ‘a little more accepting’ of his own departure, ‘a little more philosophical’.
The book is divided into five sections. The first begins with Barnes reflecting on an article in Neurology Clinic Practice about a man who, following a stroke, found himself deluged by involuntary autobiographical memories (IAMs). Tasting an apple pie, for example, would trigger the recollections, in chronological order, of every other pie he had ever tasted. How terrifying such a ‘high speed assault’ of memory would be, he muses, and how convenient for autobiographers, especially if our many different versions of each memory could be laid out before us. But – terrifying thought – what if the pie man had missed out some pies, or got the chronology wrong?
Swerving between intellectual curiosity and blind panic, he moves on to the phenomenon known as HSAM or ‘highly superior autobiographical memory’, in which every moment of a life is filed away in the mind like a film, waiting to be replayed. This is very educational, his readers respond, but will there also be a story? ‘There will be a story,’ Barnes reassures us on page 9, ‘– or a story within the story – but not just yet.’
The story, which begins in the second section, is ‘true’, or so we are told, and has a beginning and an end but no middle. Barnes may or may not have remembered the beginning accurately because it took place when he was a student at Oxford. What he describes is therefore not ‘what actually happened’, but what he ‘wants to remember’. The story is about Jean and Stephen (not their real names, and both are now dead), who began a relationship after Barnes introduced them in a café. The ‘moth-eaten’ memories Barnes has of this time amount to
a chaplet of moments and images, worn away like rosary beads. Walking past a late-night launderette and seeing them each with a book on their lap, doing a weekly wash together (and feeling too shy to disturb them); appraising them all togged up for some formal dinner or ball… the two of them having tea in my room… Jean sitting on the floor with her back to Stephen’s legs.
Instead of ‘some noble deus ex machina’, he turned out to be ‘a seedy marriage broker’ who failed in his task
After 18 months, Jean and Stephen separate and lose touch. All we know about their middle years is that Jean does not marry, Stephen marries on the rebound and divorces because he cannot get over Jean, and Barnes becomes a famous novelist.
After a 40-year silence, Stephen then emails Barnes to ask if he might reunite him with Jean. Barnes, recently widowed, comes up with a plot: he and Jean will meet for tea in the same Oxford café and Stephen will happen to walk past. ‘You fucking novelist,’ says Jean when she sniffs out the ruse, ‘couldn’t resist, could you?’ Jean, one of Barnes’s readers, likes some but not all of his books. ‘This hybrid stuff you do,’ she tells him, ‘I think it’s a mistake. You should do one thing or the other.’ ‘I don’t mind you not liking my books,’ he replies, ‘but you are mistaken if you think I don’t know exactly what I’m up to when I write them.’
Jean and Stephen, now in their sixties, get married. The wedding is a celebration of Barnes, the man responsible for their last chance at happiness. He imagines their honeymoon in France and Italy, awkwardly returning to places they had first been to with other people:
It doesn’t always work, talking straightforwardly about previous lovers… trying to give them due weight in your life, while emphasising that of course their main function was to be innocent and heedless precursors of the glorious present.
This second attempt at a relationship lasts, again, for 18 months, during which time they each confide in Barnes. The problem with their marriage, as Barnes understands it, is that Stephen loves Jean too much, and Jean thinks too much about what love means. Happiness, she says, does not make her happy. ‘There’s a difference between showing your feelings and expressing your feelings,’ she explains, and Stephen gets it wrong. Plus she found his secret stash of hotel shampoos, mini-soaps in wrappers and different coloured shoehorns. Jean makes Barnes swear on the Bible that he will not change their names and turn them into characters in a novel, which shows how little she knows writers: ‘One atheist swore to another on a book neither of them was guided by in life that he would not do something he subsequently did.’
But nor does Barnes know Stephen and Jean, or the difference between life and fiction. He thought he was ‘some noble deus ex machina’, but he turned out to be ‘a seedy marriage broker’ who failed in his task. ‘I had treated Stephen and Jean as if they were characters in one of my novels, believing I could gently direct them towards the ends which I desired.’ Stephen and Jean were, however, characters in one of his novels: Stephen is another version of Graham Hendrick, the divorced protagonist in Before She Met Me (1982), who becomes consumed by jealousy over his second wife’s past. Jean, who asks too many questions, recalls her namesake Jean Serjeant in Barnes’s fourth novel, Staring at the Sun (1986), which begins with the sun rising twice over the English Channel.
Departure(s), a masterpiece of narrative trickery, is a tale told twice: the tragedy of Stephen and Jean was Barnes’s first undergraduate story, and also his last. As the curtain comes down on the book’s fifth section, Barnes reflects on his relationship with his readers, people like you and me and Jean, ‘invisible yet lurking, like my cancer’. He has never, he insists, told us how to live or what to think; he has not spoken down to us from an ‘assumption of greater wisdom’. Rather than leader and disciple, he prefers to think of us sitting together ‘side by side’ in a café somewhere, watching the world pass by. ‘We watch and muse. From time to time I will murmur things like: “What do you make of that couple – married, or having an affair?”’ But whatever we reply he can’t hear, because we’re sitting on his deaf side.
West Midlands Police is rotten to the core
Each new revelation that has followed the banning of Israeli football fans from Birmingham shows that West Midlands Police is rotten to the core. As more evidence emerges, the case that the force responsible for policing our second city has been captured by sectional interests becomes stronger.
The association between the police and Green Lane mosque is one which the mosque is keen to promote
The most recent information released into the public domain shows just how deeply ingrained that infiltration has become – and how it goes to the very top.
In 2022, when the force’s current chief constable, Craig Guildford, was recruited, the then chief executive of the controversial Green Lane mosque in Birmingham, Kamran Hussain, sat on one of the selection panels which interviewed prospective candidates.
This is a mosque which has subsequently become no stranger to the articulation of highly-controversial views. In December 2025, the mosque livestreamed a sermon where an imam said husbands had a right to impose ‘physical discipline [as] a last resort on the condition that it doesn’t cause pain, injury, fear or humiliation’ on their wives. In 2024, the then chief executive of the mosque, Abdul Haqq Baker appeared to cast doubt on the number of victims in the 7 October 2023 terrorist attacks. In 2023, the mosque had £2.2 million of government funding suspended after footage was uncovered of a preacher linked to the Green Lane mosque and community centre arguing that ‘homosexuality is not permissible’. None of this is a recent turn of events: as far back as 2007, a Channel 4 Dispatches investigation found that teachers and preachers were promoting extremist ideas at the mosque.
The association between the police and Green Lane mosque is one which the mosque is keen to promote. Both West Midlands Police and the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner are listed as ‘partners’ in the mosque’s 2024 annual report. In their 2021 annual report, they refer to the assistant chief constable attending their annual Gala Dinner. It has now been revealed through a Freedom of Information request that the local Police and Crime Commissioner, Labour’s Simon Foster, has documented how well the mosque is known to his office, how he has ‘attended Green Lane mosque and community centre on various occasions’ and that he has previously confirmed he is ‘happy to provide a general letter of support for the purpose of Green Lane mosque and community centre funding applications’.
Can any other faiths or community groups claim such strong partnerships with the police? Why is this faith ‘community’ – particularly those within it who have connections to those who espouse extremist views – seemingly prioritised above all others?
The recruitment of the chief constable is one of the many responsibilities of the Police and Crime Commissioner. What due diligence do he or his office undertake when it is decided which ‘community leaders’ to involve in their activities? As part of this process there were also panels representing staff members – which of the force’s so-called ‘staff networks’ were involved? Are any specific groupings regularly prioritised over others?
The recruitment exercise is just one example of how embedded sectional interests have managed to become within West Midlands Police. During the riots of 2024 a senior officer, in an interview with Sky News, defended the force’s failure to deal with an armed mob after consulting with ‘community leaders’, because the community would apparently police ‘within themselves’.
Can any other faiths or community groups claim such strong partnerships with the police?
Central to the problem here is the lack of transparency when it comes to the various policing structures and their dealings with ‘stakeholder’ groups. Involved in this case alone were: the Home Office, the National Police Chiefs Council, the UK Football Policing Unit, the National Police Coordination Centre and the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government.
This week Sir Andy Cooke, His Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Constabulary, will report to the Home Secretary on West Midlands Police’s handling of the affair. With Sir Andy’s five-year term coming come to an end in March 2026, this will be one of his final pieces of work before departing. Returning the force to the ‘special measures’ oversight regime will be the minimum requirement given everything we have seen so far.
The ball will then fall squarely to the Home Secretary, Shabana Mahmood MP. While the immediate question will be what to do with the chief constable – and for the avoidance of doubt his position is entirely untenable – the equally important question is how to rebuild a force which has been allowed to be so evidently captured by vested interests.
In this case, the government should pass emergency legislation to place powers of oversight for West Midlands Police into the hands of the Home Secretary – as was the case for London’s Metropolitan Police prior to 2000 – for a time limited period. Having decided to abolish Police and Crime Commissioners, the government’s current plan is for existing PCCs to complete their terms of office with their powers passing to the mayoralty where one exists in May 2028. Here, that cannot be allowed to happen when it is partly local politics that has permitted sectional interests to have such considerable influence.
Beyond West Midlands Police, this is an episode which has called into question how local accountability in policing can ever be effective when there is a risk that police forces and the relevant local mechanisms of oversight can so easily be influenced or captured. In the coming weeks, the government will publish its White Paper on Police Reform. Ministers’ most essential task will be to ensure that – contrary to what we have seen in Birmingham – we can once again have faith that our police forces really do act ‘without fear or favour’.
Hegseth’s vision is more Starship Troopers than Starfleet Academy
“Welcome to Starbase, Texas,” Elon Musk said from the stage Monday night, as the crowd whooped. “This is a city. It’s actually legally a city that thanks to the hard work of the SpaceX team, we built out of nothing. And it’s now a gigantic rocket manufacturing system. For people out there who are curious to see it, we’re actually on a public highway, so you can come and visit. Drive down the road and see the epic hardware. I think this is the first time that a rocket development program has actually been on a public highway.”
Musk was hosting Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and senior Pentagon leadership, currently traveling the country to defense industry manufacturing locations as part of an “Arsenal of Freedom Tour,” a tour name that I believe the War Department stole from Ted Nugent.
War wasn’t exactly on Musk’s mind as he introduced Hegseth. “We want to make Star Trek real,” he said. “We want to make Starfleet Academy real, so that it’s not always science fiction. But one day, the science fiction turns to science fact. And we have spaceships, going through space, big spaceships, with people going to other planets, going to the moon, and ultimately going beyond our star system to other star systems, where we may meet aliens. Or discover long-dead alien civilizations. I don’t know, but…we want to go. And we want to see what’s happening, and we want to have epic futuristic spaceships with lots of people in ’em, traveling to places we’ve never been before.”
This is somewhat ironic, because the new Star Trek: Starfleet Academy series has come under fire from Trek-favorable critics for being too woke even by modern Trek standards, full of overweight aliens, middle-aged female captains wearing glasses and ambisexual youth. That show stands in direct opposition to what Hegseth said he wanted from the War Department at a Monday afternoon speech at the Lockheed Martin headquarters in Fort Worth:
“No more DEI, no more dudes in dresses, no more climate change worship, social justice or political correctness,” he said. “We are done with that. We are UNLEASHING the warfighter to be ready, trained, disciplined, accountable and LETHAL.”
Hegseth didn’t repeat the same stump speech at SpaceX on Monday night. They’re calling it the “Technological Dominance at the War Department” speech, and though it sometimes got bogged down into the weeds, explaining in detail levels of bureaucratic organization of interest to only the people directly involved, it was still a remarkable performance.
Hegseth forcefully called out an “archaic” military-industrial complex as having a “risk-averse culture that prevents us from offering our warfighters the best resources.” “This ends today,” he said. He offered up a plan to accelerate “artificial intelligence, quantum, hypersonics and long range drones… space capabilities, directed energy and biotechnology.” The War Department, he said, was the exact opposite of SpaceX. He announced the abolition of committees and other bureaucratic structures that stifled innovation.
Musk’s time in Washington clearly had an effect on our WarSec. From now on, Hegseth said, his department would be an “AI-first department.” “We will win by discovering entirely new ways of fighting,” he said. Our adversaries will tremble in the face of technological innovations approved by our streamlined bureaucracy that will no longer be a bureaucracy. “No sacred cows,” he said. “No exceptions.”
This was a serious speech by a serious man, but it was seriously not Star Trek, whose entire premise is based on progressive cooperation among nations, races and interstellar species. That may be what Elon Musk wants, but it’s definitely not what Pete Hegseth wants. His vision, while fully aware of the need for the US to stay on top of the rapidly-changing technological landscape, is way more Starship Troopers than Starfleet Academy.
“The cycle never stops, always iterating,” he said. “One system, one purpose. Speed to the fight. We are preparing to win the future.”
Hegseth plans to boldly go where no man has gone before. As long as those men are American. And aren’t dudes in dresses.
Why Ed Davey is happy being boring
The Sopranos is not an obvious starting point when discussing the Liberal Democrats. But a TV programme about mafia, murder and manicotti offers a useful analogy for comparing Ed Davey’s strategy to that of Reform UK. David Chase, the Sopranos creator, recalls once meeting a TV exec who wanted LOP – ‘Least Offensive Programming’, the idea that the more palatable and likeable a character, the more they would be popular with audiences. It is a theory which Davey seems to have taken to heart, donning cricket whites and wetsuits in a bid to appeal to the perceived sensibilities of Middle England.
His party’s policy offering is carefully calibrated not to offend the tastes of such voters. Today’s offering was a classic of the genre. Standing proudly in front of a sign warning of ‘an A&E crisis’, Sir Ed unveiled his big, bold strategy: scrapping the UK-US pharmaceutical deal to put £1.5 billion into social care. Such a sum sounds big – until one remembers that it is less than 1 per cent of the annual NHS budget. Pressed as to why he was not being more ‘radical’, Davey spoke of the need to be ‘credible’. Some differentiation then from Labour and the Conservatives, yet not enough to spook wealthy southerners wary of their taxes going up. Incrementalist, yes; revolutionary, no – LOP at its finest.
Incrementalist, yes; revolutionary, no
This morning’s press conference was intended to offer a contrast to those hosted by Reform. Davey’s aides believe that he offers the perfect foil to Nigel Farage; the former is modest and sensible, the latter – in their view – bombastic and absurd. Where Reform like to go off piste, the Lib Dems prefer to be low-key and structured, with Davey’s softly spoken answers the opposite of Farage’s jousting with journalists. Pyrotechnics were eschewed, with the only self-indulgent touch being Davey’s walk-on music: the Pointer Sisters’ Jump, famously enjoyed by Hugh Grant in Love Actually.
The sober style fits with the party’s wider strategy. The Lib Dems will spend the next five months depicting Farage’s party as a bunch of Trump-loving cowboys with an unhealthy obsession for guns – something which party polling shows is Davey’s most effective attack line to date. His outfit may lack the flash and flair of Reform but that does not mean he cannot secure the headlines he wants. ‘Lib Dems set out plans to end 12-hour waits,’ reads the BBC write up. ‘You have to stand up to him’: Ed Davey on how to deal with Donald Trump,’ says Sky.
The danger for Davey is that the audience numbers for such a product will continue to shrink as new and exciting offers – like the Greens – come on our screens. As Luke Tryl of More in Common told us on today’s Coffee House Shots: ‘I can’t remember the last time someone brought up the Lib Dems in a focus group.’ Davey’s team are gambling that while their offering is not always box office, there will continue to be enough of a market for it. On 7 May, we could well get our answer.
Hear more of James Heale on Coffee House Shots:
TikToks won’t stop illegal migration
The Labour government may not like X these days but they have turned to another social media platform in their latest bid to smash the gangs and stop the boats. As of today, an official Home Office TikTok account will have the people smugglers quaking in their boots as it posts images of illegal migrants and foreign criminals being arrested, detained and deported.
What is a TikTok channel if not gesture politics?
Called ‘Secure Borders UK’, the TikTok channel’s mission statement is ‘restoring order and control to our borders’. It’s a similar refrain to the rhetoric deployed by Keir Starmer in May 2024 as he campaigned to become PM. In a speech that month he outlined how he would stop the boats. He also castigated the Tories for their attempts to curb illegal immigration. ‘We need to turn the page and move on from an unhealthy interest in gesture politics that has long defined this policy area,’ declared Starmer.
What is a TikTok channel if not gesture politics? The same goes for Starmer’s ‘One in One Out’ scheme, launched with such fanfare last summer. By the end of 2025, 193 migrants had been returned to France and 195 had arrived. You do the maths.
Last week the first scheduled return flight of 2026 was cancelled at the last minutes without explanation. Officials declined to elaborate, citing ‘operational confidentiality’.
Last year 41,472 migrants crossed the English Channel illegally in small boats, up from 36,816 in 2024. For the 12 months ending June 2025, nearly 52,000 people were granted refugee protection, which was a 24 per cent drop on the previous year. The countries most represented in refugee protection status are Iranians, Sudanese, Afghans, Eritreans and Pakistanis.
Despite the abject failure of the ‘One n One Out’ scheme, Keir Starmer boasted to his MPs in a late-night briefing on Monday that immigration is ‘firmly under control’. This, he added, would herald ‘change and renewal this year. Our country is moving in the right direction’.
The British public might need more convincing than Labour MPs that the migrant crisis has been cracked.
One country that definitely has moved in the right direction is Denmark. Yesterday they announced that the total number of asylum application granted in 2025 was 839 – a new record low, surpassing the 860 approvals in 2024. In response to the news, immigration minister Rasmus Stoklund said it is ‘absolutely critical that as few foreigners as possible come to Denmark and obtain asylum.’
This is because the priority of the left-wing Danish government is to look after its most disadvantaged, a point made in 2023 by Kaare Dybvad, Denmark’s immigration minister at the time. A French journalist asked if his country’s immigration policy wasn’t a little too hardline, to which he replied: ‘If you’re from the left then you must have a strict immigration policy because it’s always the working class which pays the price of immigration… never the rich or bourgeois.’
Reports at the end of last year suggested that Labour was seeking ‘inspiration’ from Denmark in its approach to mass immigration. The same was said of the French government in 2023. Olivier Véran, the government’s official spokesman, visited Copenhagen on a fact-finding tour to learn the secret of Denmark’s success. And the result? France experienced record numbers of legal and illegal immigration in 2024.
That’s why Britons should perhaps hold their breath when they hear their government declare that there are adopting the Danish approach. Is Starmer prepared to be as tough as his Danish counterpart, Mette Frederiksen, and her ‘hostile environment’ strategy?
In her traditional New Year’s Day speech Frederiksen used language that would appall most Labour MPs. She promised a comprehensive reform on deportation, boasting it will ‘mean even more criminal foreigners will be sent out of Denmark.’
Frederiksen talked with pride of ‘our willingness to push the boundaries of convention’, and she said she was ready to overstep the ECHR because her priority is ‘the protection of the public and the victims, not the perpetrator.’
She finished with what was interpreted as a warning to Islamic extremism, saying Denmark didn’t want their ‘culture of dominance’.
Admittedly, Starmer talked tough in May last year, during a press conference on the Immigration White Paper. It was imperative to ‘finally take back control of our borders’, thundered the PM, otherwise ‘we risk becoming an island of strangers’.
A month later Starmer said he deeply regretted his choice of words. They were, he added, too close to the rhetoric of Enoch Powell. Too close, also, perhaps, to the Danish government?
They are prepared to do what is necessary to protect their people. Is the British government?