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A chillingly seductive glimpse of assisted dying
A few weeks ago, I was present when my aunt, a Canadian citizen born in the UK, chose to die through euthanasia, or as it is euphemistically called in Canada, Medical Assistance in Dying or MAiD. Being British, I wasn’t familiar with the process. What I saw horrified me, but it was also chillingly seductive.
My aunt was 72 and in the early stages of motor neurone disease. She had lost the use of one arm but though frail, was living independently and had perfect mental acuity. She was an artist who had worked in the theatre for 40 years designing beautiful and elaborate costumes. For several decades following her divorce she had lived determinedly alone and was not prepared to become an invalid. She made the decision to die freely and against the wishes of her family. She was, by any measure, the perfect candidate.
My aunt made the decision to die freely and against the wishes of her family. She was the perfect candidate
It was frighteningly easy to organise. Having been diagnosed with a terminal condition in February, she had received instant pre-approval. She made a phone call on a Sunday afternoon (yes, you can dial-a-death at weekends but try getting a regular medical appointment) and arrangements were made for her to die on Tuesday at 7 p.m.
My aunt had wanted me with her at the end. She knew that I am a practising Christian (there is nothing like being brought up in the 1980s by self-proclaimed ‘radical vegans’ to drive you into the arms of the church) and I sensed that deep-down she was conflicted about religion – that beneath all the crystals and dream-catchers there was still a remnant of the faith that as a teenage art student in late-1960s London she had dismissed as stuffy and old-fashioned.
I was very honest with her in the days and hours before her death. I made it clear I didn’t approve of euthanasia and would be saying prayers for her as she died. She responded with her usual flippancy: ‘Oh no, it’s not going to be too Goddy is it?’ I didn’t tell her that I intended to read the Anglican prayers for the dying and was left with a conundrum: how to give her what I knew she wanted but which might nevertheless upset the rebellious part of her even in her final moments.
At lunchtime on Tuesday, a chatty, -pleasant-enough nurse turned up at her house and made conversation about local goings-on while she made repeated attempts to insert a cannula into my aunt’s skinny arm. I found myself becoming angry and had to step outside. How could someone in a supposedly compassionate role treat life so cheaply? I was worried that I would feel uncontrollable anger towards the doctor coming later. My cousin, my aunt’s son, had taken to calling him ‘The Killer’.
Job finally done, I heard the nurse leave with a cheery and oh-so-mildly–Canadian goodbye. As the afternoon bled into early evening my aunt’s two closest friends arrived and I found myself withdrawing to prepare for what had become a fait accompli. As the hour drew closer, I thankfully entered a state beyond emotion and was fixed entirely on my role as a minister of sorts.
The doctor, a tall, awkward, middle-aged man, known jokingly in the town as ‘Dr Death’, arrived at 6.45. With him was a nurse, whose job was to assist by handing him the appropriate syringes containing the lethal cocktails of drugs. In a surreal scene – a new form of rite which will doubtless be coming to the UK soon – we gathered in the living room to witness my aunt’s imminent death. There were ten of us in total: my aunt, her two friends, five family members including two young granddaughters, and the doctor and nurse.
There followed an emotional interlude involving many tears from my aunt’s teenage granddaughter which the bemused doctor and his nurse were forced to witness. He then muttered a few platitudes about it being my aunt’s decision not to suffer any more than she had to and injected her with sedative.
In her last few moments of consciousness, I read out a short prayer which I had translated into Welsh. My aunt looked up in momentary surprise and delight at the sound of the language her father had often spoken at home, although, not being a Welsh speaker herself, she didn’t know that it was definitely Goddy: ‘Into your loving arms, O Lord, we commend your servant…’
As the next syringe went in and the life drained from her, I was able to read the prayers for the dying aloud. The friends and family members in the room told me afterwards that they appreciated them, grateful that this traumatic occasion had been made into a solemn ceremony. The doctor, though, seemed unmoved. Less than a minute after declaring his patient dead, I heard him in the kitchen saying his goodbyes and chuckling at something, perhaps in relief that what had probably been an unexpected ordeal for him was over. I remained in the living room with my aunt’s body as her two friends closed her eyes and continued to hold her hand. The lovely, irreverent woman, with whom I had spent the morning going through her studio and picking out prints of her work to take home with me, was gone.
For some reason, the nurse remained in the room a little longer than she needed to. I overheard her say to my aunt’s friend that hearing the prayers had ‘got to her’. It occurred to me that those who opt to die this way must seldom be believers. The clinical process of putting someone down – and I use the phrase advisedly – to which she had become inured had been met on this occasion with a belief in the soul, in God, in consequences.
Fifteen minutes later, funeral directors turned up – they coordinate with the MAiD doctors and have a slick operation going (MAiD is now the fifth most common cause of death in Canada). My aunt’s body was zipped into a black nylon bag and trolleyed out to a van. She had bought a small wooden casket for her ashes so they wouldn’t end up in a plastic bag in her son’s kitchen cupboard like her late ex-husband’s, and arrangements were made for it to be delivered to the funeral home.
By 7.30, all was quiet. It was all so easy and clean. My aunt hadn’t had to suffer a lingering illness like her two older siblings are still suffering, she never had to have a nappy changed and she got to leave her pension fund and house to her family instead of it being eaten up in care costs. The Canadian state also had a big win – a patient dying slowly from a wasting disease would have cost its national health system a considerable sum.
There was a beguiling sense of emotional closure. Despite our protests, she had simply left
There was also a beguiling sense of emotional closure. Despite our protests, she had simply left. There were no months and years of future suffering to contend with, no guilt at not having visited enough, no wrangling with doctors and care homes, no resentment at her money being bled away when it could go towards her granddaughters’ futures. It was difficult not to feel that in some ways she had given her family a gift.
It also remains hard not to admire her bravery. Even with seconds to go, she was joking. When the doctor asked her whether she wanted to be upright in her chair or reclined, she said: ‘I don’t know, I’ve never done this before.’ Earlier that day, when we were discussing what music she would like to hear at her end, her son, still hoping to dissuade her, had suggested AC/DC’s ‘Highway to Hell’. She laughed. As the whole thing played out, there was also – and it’s horrible but necessary to admit – a macabre fascination in seeing someone alive and joking one minute, voluntarily dying the next.
Dial-a-death proved, even for someone as implacably opposed to euthanasia as I am, seductive. It offered a small glimpse into how evil works: remove the sacred boundary and it becomes commonplace. Easily digestible. The norm. A planned review of MAiD in 2027 may see it extended to the mentally ill. Already in Canada, the default answer to prolonged physical and mental suffering is becoming what remains in the UK as -murder-suicide.
‘Satan himself masquerades as a shining angel,’ wrote St Paul. From what I saw, that turns out to be an uncharacteristic understatement.
The joy of hiring an old banger
There is always much to look forward to on a holiday with friends in France (the day one supermarket sweep, boules under plane trees, foie gras on demand); but, for me, one of the greatest joys is the hire car. That’s entirely due to my indulging in the niche pastime of driving around in the worst, most clapped out vehicle possible.
You can do this quite easily in France using an Airbnb-style platform called Turo which allows you to go directly to the – usually bemused – owner and, for not very much money, drive off in whatever they have to offer you. And so it was that I found myself this summer burbling down vineyard-flanked routes départementales in a 32-year-old, one-litre Peugeot with paint flaking off and every panel dented.
Simplicity was the point: to strip transportation down to its essence and forget you’re living in 2024
Not everything worked. It turns out that a working fuel gauge is quite a useful thing. I was fine with no power steering or air conditioning, but I would have quite liked a radio. Yet that simplicity was the entire point: to strip transportation down to its essence, wind the windows down, engage with the landscape and forget you’re living in 2024.
It’s not necessarily seeing the world at a gentler pace but rather unlocking a new level of ‘pretending to be a local’ tourism. No, I’m not some red-trousered prat from London cooing over the cheeses in Carrefour – I am Pierre on the way to get a baguette or maybe some cinq à sept. A fantasy, of course, but a harmless one.
I’m not just a masochist when on holiday. In the UK, I use the same car I bought 19 years ago, and which, with a few memorable exceptions, is still going strong. Even back then, a 20-year-old Saab was an anomaly. Now, with its wraparound windows, velour interior and vertical headlights, it’s an anachronism.
Over the years, my Saab has been supplemented with various other unsuitable vehicles: a Soviet Volga with no brakes, a Jaguar you could watch rusting, a two-seater MG swapped for a bottle of champagne, a 1980s Romanian Dacia that makes a very good argument against a planned economy, and – co-bought with a friend before lockdown – another, older Dacia that I’ve not yet actually seen. The local garage must be sick of the sight of me.
So why do it? One reason must be a straightforward enjoyment of old-fashioned technology, ideally something you can fix with a hammer, WD-40 and gaffer tape. There was a sweet spot for cars in the 1980s and 1990s. People had learnt how to make vehicles that didn’t fall apart but it was prior to the arrival of unnecessary electronics. We’re all capable of winding down a window, for goodness sake. In an endless quest for gadgets and gimmickry we’ve lost the ability to keep things simple, and that applies to many things in life beyond cars.
Linked to that is that older vehicles, with all their quirks, are great fun to drive. Even when things go wrong, it’s an adventure of sorts – as I found out when driving back to London from a wedding in Suffolk. It took two days and a lot of reliance on the kindness of strangers. Special thanks are due to the chap who helped push the stricken Saab off a roundabout and the staff of the McDonald’s in Chelmsford.
Lurking in the list of reasons, too, is the slightly Greta-ish point that we should, generally speaking, be doing more to keep older things going. Of course, my old clunkers are going to pollute more. But building a car is in itself a resource-intensive activity, especially when it comes to electric vehicles – cue Volvo’s research suggesting the manufacture of an electric vehicle emits nearly 70 per cent more greenhouse gases than a petrol one.
There’s also an element of subversion about the unrespectability of a properly battered, ancient car. A banker acquaintance with a penchant for rusty Ladas would get stared at when visiting new clients. And on the school run, the late Duke of Westminster was asked by a parent whether he was ‘struggling’ when he arrived in an ageing Ford.
I remember taking the Dacia to a snooty restaurant in Romania where, seeing it clattering up the drive, the staff decided they didn’t want such downmarket customers and promptly shut the gate. Awkward, given I was there to review it.
The best reason, though, for using old cars is that I never get asked to give other people’s children a lift.
Problem solved
When I select puzzles to accompany this column, I stick to the plain vanilla. The stipulation must be short and sweet, and one move solutions must be accepted (though I like to include a few further words of explanation). Alas, a thousand such puzzles can never do justice to the wondrous ingenuity of chess composers.
Longer mating problems and ‘studies’ (where the objective is to find a winning or drawing sequence) allow considerably more artistic scope. Then there are genres which maintain the rules of movement but subvert the players’ objectives. Those include helpmates (in which both sides choreograph their moves to engineer a checkmate) and selfmates (in which one side attempts to force the other to deliver checkmate). Selfmates I find particularly mind-bending, though the aesthetic dividends can be considerable.
All these were featured at the World Team Chess Solving Championship, held in Riga in late July. Solving competitions are like a series of exams, in which competitors solve problems against the clock. The Polish team were a strong favourite, having won all but one of the team events since 2009. Two of their competitors, Piotr Murdzia and Kacper Piorun, have 14 individual world solving championships between them.
But the British team of John Nunn, David Hodge and Jonathan Mestel are all proficient solvers (Nunn and Mestel are former individual world solving champions, and Hodge is the reigning British solving champion). The race was especially tight this year, with both Britain and Poland finishing on the same number of points, but Britain took the title thanks to a better tiebreak: they had taken a bit less time.
One side event in Riga featured an even more niche theme – Retro solving. ‘Retro’ refers to the need to deduce something about the preceding moves, based on a diagram position. One classic example, below, is a mate in 2 with a twist, composed by Thomas Dawson in 1914. At first sight, both en passant captures 1 gxf6 and 1 cxd6 do the trick. But exactly 10 black units are missing, and white’s eccentric pawn structure entails at least 10 captures since the start of the game. If black’s preceding move were d7-d5, the Bc8 could never have been captured by a pawn, so the last move must have been f7-f5. Ergo 1 gxf6 is the unique solution.
The second diagram shows a ‘proof game’, presented as a problem in Riga, and composed by Markus Ott in 1983. The diagram shows the position after white’s 13th move, and the task is simply to deduce all the moves from the start position up to the diagram. This is well worth attempting, but harder than it looks, although evidently, the pawn from b7 must have promoted to a queen. The solution reveals a very neat surprise.
Solution:
1 a4 b6 2 Ra3 b5 3 Rg3 b4 4 Na3 bxa3 5 e3 a2 6 Bb5 a1=Q 7 Ne2 Qxc1 8 O-O Qxd1 9 Nc3 Qf3 10 h4 Qc6 11 Rh3 d5 12 Rh1 Bh3 13 Ra1
No. 819
Le-Sindarov, Budapest Olympiad, September 2024. White’s next move induced immediate resignation. What did he play? Answers should be emailed to chess@spectator.co.uk by Monday 23 September. There is a prize of £20 for the first correct answer out of a hat. Please include a postal address and allow six weeks for prize delivery.
Last week’s solution 1 Qf6+! Qxf6 2 Re8+ Qf8 3 Rxf8#
Last week’s winner Mark Lunt, Manchester
Spectator Competition: Our kid
In Competition 3367 you were invited to write a formal poem about the Brothers Gallagher (Noel and Liam). This comp was set before we had quite reached Oasis saturation point; possibly we’re beyond that now. There were more entries than usual and they were roughly equally split between those that expressed great joy at the reunion and those that weren’t even remotely bothered. A shout-out to Brian Murdoch, Bob Newman and Edmund Carver – and the winners below get £25.
When minstrel knyghtes forst gan maken melodye,
Two brother knyghtes, each of grete envyé,
Sire Noel, eldeste, meek, a gentil knyghte,
Sire Liam, yonge, a cur who loved a fyghte,
Abusioned lutes in every shire’s ende,
Of Engelond, where’er they wende,
To slaght hir rank ballads: yet alacke, one nighte,
Sire Noel struck his brother with grete mighte.
Upon his noggin with a lute ful brute,
And thus did breake hir bonde, and put hir noyse on mute.
For fifteen winters, bitter were hir layes,
Moping and moaning in grete drunken daze,
Till that Sire Noel took his brother by the honde,
And quoth, ‘Methinks there’s coin in our old bonde.’
And thus they played whil erst hir stryf was shorn,
For who could fighte with Wonderwall reborn?
Ralph Goldswain
‘What did you do on the day, Dad?’
The time of JFK?
Or when Apollo hit the Moon?
‘No – New Oasis Day!’
’Cause history’s been made this week:
Hotels can stay afloat.
The Gallaghers have saved the world,
Before they’ve sung a note!
They’re Jack-the-lads from Manchester;
Their hobby is to swear.
They love to strut in anoraks
And cultivate their hair.
Their fans say they’re the Beatles Plus,
While others hold their ears.
It doesn’t matter, though: they’re back –
Definitely? Maybe years!
Nicholas Lee
O scowling sourpuss lager gods, Oasis,
Thou feuding fraternal frontmen, Britpop lads,
O surly Noel and Liam of rockstar status,
Give us thy gigs at Wembley, you’ll earn scads,
Outdo fair Tay-Tay, don’t look back in anger,
Wild spirits, O Mancunian bards, bad boys,
O Morning Glory, belt us out a banger,
Give us thy Wonderwall, revive thy noise.
O Gallaghers, O brawlers reunited,
O lewd, loud bros, O effing huge commotion,
O Champagne Supernovas oft-recited,
Thou cultural monoliths of fan devotion,
Thy tickets sell, restore thy lost net worth,
Thy concerts come; O contracts freshly signed,
The trumpets of PR hath shook the earth,
If Noel says yea, can Liam be far behind?
Janine Beacham
Do not go mental over yesterday
But keep today’s oasis within sight –
Rage not in retrospect, I heard you say.
Though fans are getting fleeced to see you play,
You know those ticket prices can’t be right,
Do not go mental over yesterday.
Though City lost to Liverpool, away,
With Grealish, Foden, Haaland playing shite,
Rage not in retrospect, I heard you say.
Though trolls and critics said you’d lost your way;
Though you and Noel had yet another fight,
Do not go mental over yesterday.
Though time moved on and now you’re old and grey,
Though Britpop’s just a blur, in failing light,
Do not go mental over yesterday,
Rage not in retrospect, I heard you say.
David Silverman
The return of the fabled Oasis
Seems to rely on the basis
That vast new rewards
From fraternal discords
Are sure to put smiles on their faces.
But is their rapprochement a fake
Inspired by the fortune they’ll make,
With dynamic pricing
The undeserved icing
On already overpriced cake?
And, though both seem eager to try
To make peace, will we see by and by
That three hours on stage
Could end in a rage
And rapprochement as pie in the sky?
Martin Parker
It’s time for two fraternal millionaires
To call a ceasefire on a lengthy feud,
One of those sibling rivalry affairs
Where each of them competes to be more rude.
Yet now a reconciliation airs
A friendly, nay a loving, attitude.
What action could express agreement more
Than an expansive reunited tour?
Expensive, also. You must be well heeled
To buy a concert ticket, lucky too.
The anarchy of the consumer field
For middle-aged Britpop means quite a queue,
And drives up the all-round financial yield
From an event, promoted as a coup,
That even groupies call a money-grab.
Though if the fans enjoy the show, why crab?
Basil Ransome-Davies
No. 3370: Space to think
The two Nasa astronauts who have been stranded on the International Space Station have been talking about how they plan to make the most of their extended stay. You’re invited to write a poem about their situation (16 lines maximum). Please email entries to competition@spectator.co.uk by midday on 2 October.
2672: Seamless schemes
The eight unclued lights are of a kind.
Across
1 One slandering and misrepresenting our claimant (11)
7 Purpose of Maoism oddly forgotten (3)
11 Trees concealing old furrow (6)
13 Bitterness of soldier on the radio (7)
15 Signature is tamper-proof, to some extent (5)
17 Sturdy or, conversely, broken? (6)
18 French here about to turn more frosty (5)
20 Tension of female teacher leaving motorway (6)
21 Initially sickened by green gunk (5)
29 Delete article in Irish Gaelic (5)
30 Giving up golf, glass worker becomes less active (6)
34 Paced mostly unforested grassland (6)
36 Camp joke about university lecturer (5)
37 Rattle Kurt Waldheim? (5)
38 I phone hosts about smoothing things out (7)
39 Backing independent expert in Ukrainian city (6)
40 Ultimately they undermine society, I agree (3)
41 Silences cat, terrible pest (5,6)
Down
1 No Liberal, girl redacts naughty magazine’s contents (10)
2 British grass covered by pine bark (8)
4 Inveterate rebel I admire wildly (12)
5 One boring French city finally got visitor (7)
6 Shopkeeper and servant having left for north (8)
8 Second-class loaf (4)
9 Oscar regularly announced Conservative enlightenment (6)
10 Attack is part of periodic tussle (5)
12 Sycophantic millions following small crowd (6)
14 Serializes a novel about female permissiveness (7-5)
19 Spooner’s married girlfriend perhaps is heavy burden (4,6)
21 Small-time dons scoffing vegetable (9)
23 Wrongly interprets confusion of sad miser (8)
25 At first Eva Braun acts sophisticated (6)
26 Deposits of gold round lakes and Roman road (7)
28 Wolfish occupant of bed, character facing eviction (6)
31 Checks rules for auditor (5)
33 TV awards upset setter and setter’s son (5)
Download a printable version here.
A first prize of £30 and two runners-up prizes of £20 for the first correct solutions opened on 7 October. Please scan or photograph entries and email them (including the crossword number in the subject field) to crosswords@spectator.co.uk, or post to: Crossword 2672, The Spectator, 22 Old Queen Street, London SW1H 9HP. Please allow six weeks for prize delivery. The dictionary prize is not available at present.
2669: Partners in Crime – solution
The unclued lights are the surnames of the ‘Queens of Crime’ and of their famous detectives: 1A/16, 19/15, 29/32 and 38/42.
First prize G.R. Snailham, Windsor
Runners-up Bill Ellison, Caversham, Reading; John and Di Lee, Axminster, Devon
Are the Tories brave enough to be conservative?
The Conservative party is out of power – and that’s not easy if you’ve been in power for more than a decade. Even after a short spell in government there are certain aspects of life that you miss. The drivers and others who used to manage your life and get you around. The legions of advisers. The security detail (if you held one of the high offices of state). And the civil servants who do your bidding.
That last one is a joke, of course. I know most readers will, like me, have found it difficult to listen to Conservative ministers complaining about civil servants during their 14 years in power. There might well have been cause to moan that civil servants were all a bunch of lazy lefties for the first couple of years. But after four election victories – or three and a half depending on how you count them – complaints that the bureaucrats are thwarting your wishes come to seem like an excuse. Surely 14 years is time enough to hire new bureaucrats?
Whoever wins the leadership race will discover they have two things they can wield: words and ideas
Then you get a reminder that riding the bureaucracy put in by a previous Labour administration did have consequences. In July, an anonymous civil servant wrote a piece in the Guardian in which they said that the general mood in the civil service after Keir Starmer’s election victory was ‘a profound sense of relief’. The then incoming Chief Secretary to the Treasury had ‘purred’ that ‘the adults are back in the room’. Another long-serving official said: ‘I’ve never been so glad to see the back of a government – of any colour.’ So it is fair to say the Tories certainly had their challenges in trying to steer that ship, not only against the tides but against the will of much of the crew.
Today the Conservatives don’t even have that power. They have nothing to hand. But, as I was reminded recently when reading a couple of books about Ronald Reagan and William F. Buckley, that does not mean they are completely without arms. Whoever wins the Conservative leadership race will discover that they have two things they can wield: words and ideas. And these two things are not nothing.
When Reagan was out of power in the 1970s, these were all he had, but gosh did he wield them well. Spurred on by his friendship with Buckley and other conservative thinkers, he realised that he had the opportunity to lay out a different vision from that of his Democrat opponents. That vision was not just about nipping around the edges of Democrat policies, but about laying out a separate idea of what America was and what it could be.
Reagan’s vision was one that most conservatives have been able to rattle off for the past five decades: a smaller state, fiscal responsibility, strong defence. Today’s conservatives sometimes do a copy of this. Or a copy of a copy. They talk about free markets, but it’s not always clear that they know what to do to let them flourish. I know it’s not good form to kick someone when they’re down, but it didn’t reassure me when, after leaving office, Liz Truss gave a video interview to this magazine in which she said that conservatives must make the case for free-market economics and, in listing the intellectual foundations for this, referred to the thinker ‘Hay-ak’. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue, but one got the impression that this was not a name that she had heard said out loud before.
Now, whoever becomes Conservative leader has a choice. They could shadow the Labour government, making comments about wardrobe allowances here, complaining about a national insurance hike there, or they could lay out a different future for the country. One in which, for instance, the state is not the answer to everything, but very often the problem. A country which doesn’t think that the only thing needed to improve public services is more investment. One in which if you do well, half of everything you earn doesn’t go to the government. They could also address the social divisions in Britain that everyone can see but that politicians find almost impossible to address.
The other week one of the Conservative leadership frontrunners, Kemi Badenoch, made reference to the highly sectarian group of MPs to the left of Labour who seem to want to introduce communitarian politics to the UK, specifically by raising issues which they believe will get them ‘the Muslim vote’ (to use the name that one Muslim campaigning group actually calls itself).
What Badenoch said was entirely fair. But one of her supporters was cast in the unenviable position of being her surrogate on talk shows that week and he was asked about her comments. It was an opportunity to give a robust push-back to the expectations of this country’s boring gotcha television interviewers, but you could hear the poor man flailing. Perhaps because he had the disadvantage of being male and white, this was terrain he was especially unhappy on. You could actually hear the man’s mouth dry up as the interview went on.
And yet the Conservative party cannot have truths about the nature of our country policed by the Beth Rigbys of the world, wherever they think the Overton Window of politics should be. If the Conservatives are going to stand any chance of getting back into government they will have to be able to say things that are true – even if they are unpopular with journalists at Sky News.
To do that they will need not just a small degree of bravery but a considerable amount of intellectual and moral grounding. Fortunately they have it, here and elsewhere. I am reminded of what Buckley said at the fifth anniversary dinner for his magazine, National Review: ‘We are probably destined to live out our lives in something less than a totally harmonious relationship with our times.’ Nevertheless, he added that conservatives could take comfort in knowing ‘that for so long as it is mechanically possible, you have a journal, a continuing witness to those truths which animated the birth of our country, and continue to animate our lives’.
It’s time to let Ukraine join Nato
Kyiv
The young amputee had a question. We were sitting once again in the rehab centre in Kyiv, and I was looking at the same sort of injuries I saw last year: the missing limbs, the cranial scars, the withered hands and feet that no longer obeyed their owners’ commands.
The difference was that Vladimir Putin’s carnage had been inflicted on a new group of Ukrainians – noticeably younger than last year’s victims, and now including a woman. Once again, I shook their hands (where possible) and put my arms around them, and did my best to be reassuring to all, including the young man on the bed, who had lost his left leg up to the hip. ‘When are you going to let us use the Storm Shadow?’ he asked – amid a general murmur of agreement.
I was positive in my response, or cautiously positive, because it so happened that on that very day the UK delegation had arrived in Washington. If the briefings to the media were accurate, this was perhaps the moment of breakthrough, when the Americans and the British were about to announce that the poor Ukrainians would be able to defend themselves properly against Putin’s glide bombs. We would jointly lift our technological reserve and allow them to use the weapons they already possessed – Storm Shadow and Scalp-EG, its French equivalent, and the American ATACMS systems – in the way they were supposed to work.
I was confident that these permissions would be forthcoming because I could not imagine why else the UK would have bothered to stage the meeting. Why otherwise did Sir Keir Starmer go to the White House, togged up in his Waheed Alli-funded suit and specs? What on earth was Sue Gray doing there? Enforcing the rules on ‘propriety and ethics’? Huh.
When you look at the maimed bodies of these soldiers you are looking at a ghastly reproach to our delay
Now the US-UK talks have apparently ended in failure – at least for the present. What the hell are we supposed to tell the Ukrainians? The days are ticking by. The killing goes on. What do we say to all those who continue to suffer loss and mutilation at the hands of Putin?
What more have these people got to do to show the rest of us their fighting spirit and their ability to win? Look at what they have achieved in the Kursk region, the audacity of their lunge on to Russian land, taking more than 500 square miles and 100 villages, creating a strategic dilemma for Putin that will only intensify as the autumn rains begin and the fighting season draws to a close.
Then think what more they could have done, and faster, to turn the tables on Putin, if only we had not been dilatory with our help. Then ask yourself the corollary question: how many Ukrainian lives and limbs could have been spared if we had done the right thing, or at least done it earlier. When you look at the maimed bodies of these soldiers, you are looking at a ghastly reproach to our delay.
So why are we doing it again? What’s the hold-up with Storm Shadow and the permissions to use them against Putin’s bases within Russia? Can we please all stop babbling this tired old rubbish about ‘escalation’ and the so-called fear of provoking Putin. That argument has been mounted at every stage in the past three years, and at every stage it has been disproved by events.
I remember getting warnings from the UK system about the risk of ‘escalation’ when we sent the NLAW missiles, just before Putin invaded – though in fact the weapons were of vital assistance to the Ukrainians in immobilising Russian tanks. People made the very argument against sending western tanks, against sending planes, against sending missile systems of all kinds; and yet the outcome was always the same.
Putin’s bluster and sabre-rattling turned out to be nonsense because in reality he is the one who fears escalation. Indeed, one of the very reasons the Ukrainians have been able to mount their astonishing operation in Kursk is that after more than six months of agonising delay in Congress, the $60 billion of US ‘supplemental’ assistance is finally getting through.
If you are truly worried about ‘escalation’, then imagine what happens if Ukraine loses this war – because that is when things really would begin to escalate. Ukraine won’t lose but if it did, we would have the risk of escalation across the whole periphery of the former Soviet empire, including the border with Poland, wherever Putin thought that aggression would pay off.
We would probably see escalation in the South China seas and in the Middle East. We would see a general escalation of global tension and violence because a Ukrainian defeat, and a victory for Putin, would be not only a tragedy for a young, brave and beautiful country; it would mean the global collapse of western credibility.
It would mean the demolition of all our claims to be willing to stand up for ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’. Above all, a defeat for Ukraine would be – let us not mince our words – a catastrophic defeat for Nato, the explosion of the aura of Nato invincibility that has helped keep us – the British – safe for the past 80 years. It cannot and must not happen. So for heaven’s sake let us snap out of this trance-like state and stop muttering about ‘escalation’ as an excuse for vacillation.
We need to get serious and to get real, and the first step to sanity is to understand that there is no honourable compromise to be made with Putin. We must abandon any idea that the Ukrainians will do a deal. They won’t. They won’t trade land for peace. They have fought for too long, and they have suffered too much. Their hatred for Putin – and now, I am afraid, the Russian aggressor as a whole – burns with such an incandescence that no Ukrainian leader could do such a deal and remain in office. Yes, the Ukrainians are tired, and of course there are many who want the war to be over. But their will to fight is undiminished, and it feels to me that the country would collapse into anarchy and civil war rather than submit to partition.
We in the West would be mad to try to impose that outcome. There is only one alternative, and it happens to be the morally right course of action. That is to pursue a three-fold plan for Ukrainian victory of the kind that I believe President Volodymyr Zelensky will outline in the US in the next few days.
We need to stop the pathetic game of grandmother’s footsteps with Putin. We need to end the delays. We need to drop the mantra that we are with Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’ (which now makes Ukrainians groan). We need to get it done and get it won.
We need to show that we are serious, first by giving the Ukrainians the right to use the weapons they already possess. It is mad (and cruel) to insist that they try to protect themselves against bombardment with one hand tied behind their backs. Second, we need to produce a package of loans on the scale of Lend-Lease: half a trillion dollars, as suggested by former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, or even a trillion.
Remember, in the long term a peaceful and prosperous Ukraine will amply repay this confidence, just as Britain faithfully repaid Lend-Lease until the premiership of Tony Blair. In the short term, a giant Lend-Lease package will send the message to the Kremlin that we are going to out-gun you financially and back Ukraine on a scale you cannot hope to match.
Third and most important of all, we need to end the ambiguity that has dogged Ukraine since the end of the Cold War, and give final institutional expression to the destiny the Ukrainian people have chosen. We need to get Ukraine into Nato now, and I mean now.
We must abandon any idea that the Ukrainians will do a deal. They have fought too long
There is a way of doing this. We could invite Ukraine to join before the war is even over. That is because we could extend the Article 5 security guarantee to all the Ukrainian territory currently controlled by Ukraine (or at the end of this fighting season), while reaffirming the absolute right of the Ukrainians to the whole of their 1991 nation. We could protect most of Ukraine, while simultaneously supporting the Ukrainian right to recapture the rest. There is plenty of scope within the Nato treaty to do this. See Article 6, which specifies that countries can be members even if the security guarantee does not apply to all of their internationally recognised territories.
We should do this in the next few months because this is the single biggest step we can take to bring this hideous war to an end. By getting Ukraine into Nato, we would send the crucial message to the Kremlin, the one Russians really need to hear.
The message is: that’s it. It’s over. You don’t have an empire any more. You don’t have a ‘near abroad’ or a ‘sphere of influence’. You don’t have the right to tell the Ukrainians what to do, any more than we British have the right to tell our former colonies what to do. It is time for Putin to understand that Russia can have a happy and glorious future, but that like Rome and like Britain, the Russians have decisively joined the ranks of the post-imperial powers, and a good thing, too.
Can anything like this happen? It certainly can, but it depends on us, on Nato, and above all on America. It means that we would all have to commit to the defence of that Ukrainian territory; and of course that will mean anxiety and resistance. Pentagon strategists will point at the map, the sheer size of Ukraine, and they will dwell on the risk and the expense. Well, as I say, I believe a peaceful Ukraine will be in a position to meet the expense. As for the risk, it is all the other way. The risk is that we continue with the ambiguity and indecision over the future of Ukraine that has led to the worst war in Europe in my lifetime. To adapt St Paul, Nato membership for Ukraine will bring faith, hope and clarity, and the greatest of these is clarity. Nato membership means clarity on borders, clarity on governance, clarity for Russia and Ukraine alike; and with clarity comes peace and stability.
Would any US president do it? Would Donald Trump do it? I have argued many times that the Republican candidate has been far better on foreign policy questions than his detractors say. Trump was bolder, tougher and more decisive than his Democrat counterparts on Syria, Iran and Ukraine itself, where he was the first to ship anti-tank weapons. Yes, I do believe he has the strength to pull it off, and to end the war this way. I also believe, frankly, that there is no alternative.
If we want peace, then we must put the Ukrainians in the strongest possible position, and this is how to do it. It was that great Republican president Ronald Reagan who called the Soviet Union an ‘evil empire’, and I cannot believe there is any US president, Republican or otherwise, who will allow Putin to rebuild it.
How much do we spend on workwear?
The first nimby
Who coined the term ‘nimby’?
— The expression, from ‘Not In My Backyard’, entered the political sphere in Britain in 1989 when it was used by the then environment secretary Nicholas Ridley to describe people who were in favour of house-building in general, just not near where they lived. He was later ridiculed when it emerged that he had objected to a development next door to his own Gloucestershire home.
— But the term originated around a decade earlier in the United States, when it was applied to people who were opposed to the dumping of nuclear waste near their homes. The first mention has been traced to a piece in the Daily Press in Virginia in 1979, quoting a member of the Atomic Energy Commission saying that the ‘nimby syndrome must be eliminated’.
Suit yourself
We don’t all get our work outfits for free. How much do we spend on workwear?
Last year, the UK workwear market was worth £15.07bn – an average spend of £475 for each of the UK’s 31.7m workers. The market broke down as follows:
Corporate office wear 46%
Industrial protective clothing 37%
Uniforms 17%
Source: essentialworkwear.com
Track record
Which cities have the best-used trams?
Includes only systems which feature an element of street-running (millions of journeys in year ending March 2024):
Manchester 42
London 20
Nottingham 15.5
Edinburgh 10.1
Sheffield 8.7
West Midlands 8.3
Blackpool 4.7
Source: Department for Transport
Moving the needle
Has the Covid pandemic had any lasting effect on the vaccination rate in children?
Percentage receiving primary jab by their first birthday:
2018/19
Diphtheria/polio/tetanus/pertussis – 92.1
Rotavirus – 89.7
Meningococcal B – 92.5
2023/24
Diphtheria/polio/tetanus/pertussis – 91.2
Rotavirus – 88.5
Meningococcal B – 90.6
Percentage receiving primary jab by their fifth birthday:
2018/19
Measles/mumps/rubella – 94.5
2023/24
Measles/mumps/rubella – 91.9
Why can’t China play football?
It would be tough for any country to lose 7-0 in a World Cup qualifier, but when the losing team is China, and the thrashing is at the hands of arch-rival Japan, it is deeply humiliating. The defeat was ‘shameful’, according to an editorial last week in the Global Times, a state-controlled tabloid, while the Shanghai-based Oriental Sports Daily called it ‘disastrous’, adding: ‘When the taste of bitterness reaches its extreme, all that is left is numbness.’ Some commentators called for the men’s team to be disbanded, bemoaning that a country of 1.4 billion people could not find 11 men capable of winning a match.
While being awful on the field, it seems some Chinese players are world champions at wrongdoing
It is almost a decade since Xi Jinping, China’s supposedly football-mad President, launched a multi-billion dollar national crusade to turn the country into a footballing superpower. While China had forged ahead economically, the ultimate symbol of soft power remained a western stronghold, and that grip needed to be broken if China was to realise Xi’s ‘China Dream’ of becoming a truly great power. Ten years ago, China was ranked 81st in the world by Fifa, the sport’s governing body, just ahead of Sudan and Iraq. It now ranks 87th. Xi’s masterplan has been a colossal failure, on and off the field.
His vision was spelt out in ‘The Overall Chinese Football Reform and Development Programme’, published in 2015 with all the pizzazz of a state plan for steel, coal or pork production. The short-term goal was to create a ‘football management model with Chinese characteristics’. In the middle-term, the men’s team was to become the best in Asia before scaling ‘the highest global ranks’.
The main tools were to be party diktat and cash – lots of cash. All schools were to include football in their physical education curricula, and the number of schools with football pitches was to rise from 5,000 to 70,000 by 2020. The target was to have 50 million people, including 30 million students, playing football within ten years. Football was also to be at the centre of a broader ‘national fitness strategy’, which earmarked billions of yuan for the construction of public sports facilities.
There was even a target for ‘per capita area of sports fields’ – 1.8 square metres per person. The strategy was closely linked to the burgeoning cult around Xi, portrayed on state media as a football-mad man of the people, often kicking balls around and watching youth games. Thousands of coaches were trained and Chinese companies were urged to support the national effort to reach footballing greatness. Nominally private companies, well attuned to the needs of the party, sank billions of dollars into the country’s top teams, splashing out on players and facilities. They went on a spending spree abroad, bringing in foreign players on contracts worth up to $40 million a year. In 2016, Italy’s World Cup-winning coach Marcello Lippi was appointed head coach of China’s national men’s football team on a reported salary of $28 million a year, second only to Manchester United’s then coach José Mourinho. According to Fifa, Chinese clubs spent $1.7 billion on international transfers between 2011 and 2020. A Chinese consortium bought a £265 million stake in City Football Group, which owns Manchester City. Other Chinese investors once controlled Southampton, West Bromwich Albion, Aston Villa, Birmingham and Wolverhampton Wanderers.
Chinese buyers snapped up stakes in Italy’s AC Milan and Inter Milan, looking to tap into their marketing and coaching expertise. Evergrande, the now bankrupt property giant, announced plans to build the world’s biggest football stadium in Guangzhou – ‘a new world-class landmark comparable to the Sydney Opera House and Burj Khalifa in Dubai, and an important symbol of Chinese football to the world’, it boasted. The sheer volume of money was astonishing – as was the corruption, even by the standards of the Chinese Communist party. While being awful on the field, it seems that some Chinese football players and officials are world champions at wrongdoing. Last week, 43 of them, including three former internationals, were banned for life following an investigation by the Chinese Football Association (CFA) into match fixing and gambling. The ban followed a clear-out at the top of the CFA, including the jailing for life of its president and an 11-year sentence for his vice-president for bribery.
Why has Xi’s football scheme been such a failure when a rigid top-down approach has helped China succeed in the Olympics? China uses an intensive and disciplined bureaucratic system modelled on the Soviet Union, scouting for children at an early age and plucking them out for full-time training at elite government-run sports schools. It’s a method which relies on rigid routine and repetition, meaning it excels in individual, not team-based, sport. In essence it is a machine with the single purpose of turning out other machines to win medals. Football doesn’t work like that. As a team sport, it requires creativity and innovation; authoritarianism seems almost guaranteed to destroy it. Football is an open and free-flowing game of countless permutations, relying on the brain as much as, if not more than, physique. ‘Playing football is very simple, but playing simple football is the hardest thing there is,’ Dutch football legend Johan Cruyff once said. ‘You play football with your head, and your legs are there to help you.’
Caixin, a Chinese business magazine, has bravely pointed out that the CCP’s grand footballing plan was overseen by rapacious bureaucrats with no real interest in the game, whose plunder thrived in the absence of any independent oversight. Football is, in other words, a metaphor for CCP rule, and the stifling way Xi is micro-managing China’s economy and society. The fiasco laid bare by the defeat to Japan and the rampant corruption should contain lessons for Xi’s even grander plan to create an innovation economy by diktat and wads of cash, but there is little sign that any of them have been learned.
The science of voting for Kamala Harris
The latest issue of Scientific American, a popular science monthly published by Springer Nature, contains an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. She is the candidate that anyone who cares about science should vote for, apparently. Her positions on issues such as ‘the climate crisis’, ‘public health’ and ‘reproductive rights’ are ‘lit by rationality’ and based on ‘reality’, ‘science’ and ‘solid evidence’, while her opponent ‘rejects evidence’ in favour of ‘nonsensical conspiracy fantasies’.
There’s something a bit odd about a science magazine getting embroiled in the grubby world of politics
On the face of it, there’s something a bit odd about a storied science magazine getting embroiled in the grubby world of politics. Indeed, the editorial acknowledges how unusual this is, suggesting that’s all the more reason we should take the recommendation seriously. The editors have descended from Mount Olympus because the fate of America – nay, the world – is at stake: ‘That is why, for only the second time in our magazine’s 179-year history, the editors of Scientific American are endorsing a candidate for president.’ True, the previous occasion was only four years ago when it endorsed Joe Biden, but the editors have a point. It is rather unorthodox.
So how can science tell us how to vote? My admittedly primitive understanding of the history of science is that it only really began to transform our understanding of the world when a firm distinction emerged between fact and value – between descriptive propositions, which depict the world as it is, and prescriptive ones, which tell us how it ought to be. That is, the Scientific Revolution occurred when students of nature eschewed politics and religion and embraced reason and empiricism. In that context, the editors of Scientific American, in seeking to muddy those waters again, seem to want to return to an era in which the evidence of our senses – ‘reality’, as they put it – tells us how to behave. In defiance of the naturalistic fallacy, they are smashing the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ back together.
This seems a little unwise, to put it mildly. If believing in ‘the science’ means you have to vote Democrat, how are you going to persuade Republicans to embrace your ‘evidence-based’ policy on, say, Roe vs Wade? A paper in Nature Human Behaviour last year found that the endorsement of Joe Biden in 2020 by Nature, the prestigious science journal, caused Trump supporters to distrust the publication, lowered the demand for Covid-related information it published (i.e. downloads of articles on the efficacy of the Covid vaccines fell substantially) and reduced Trump supporters’ trust in scientists in general. I can’t quite get my head around just how stupid this is. It’s a bit like a group of evangelical Christians telling potential converts that if they vote Democrat they’ll go straight to hell. If you’re in the proselytising business, as Scientific American clearly is, it seems a bit daft to alienate roughly half the US population.
There’s also the fact that, in the event of Trump winning, he’ll be more likely to cut federal spending on scientific research and public health. In fact, this is one of the reasons given by Scientific American to vote for Kamala, but talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy! After all, why would Trump give billions of dollars to a community that’s aligned itself with his opponent? Wouldn’t it be more prudent for these panjandrums of the scientific establishment to remain above the political fray?
One explanation of why the editors of these high-profile science publications are behaving in such a bizarre way is that they’re just partisan hacks, determined to persuade people to vote Democrat. According to this theory, they don’t really believe science has anything meaningful to say about who to vote for – how could it? They’re just pretending it does to gull their less sophisticated readers into supporting Kamala.
But I don’t buy that. More likely, I fear, is that the editors of Scientific American really do believe in the snake oil they’re selling. It’s not science they’re committed to, but scientism – a weird hybrid of technocratic managerialism and radical progressive ideology. If the modern era was made possible by the separation of knowledge and morality, the worshippers at this new altar seem determined to usher in a new post-modern utopia in which science and religion are fused once again. In that light, they cannot help but endorse Harris because their consciences won’t allow them to do otherwise. It’s not a choice dictated by science, but by theology. Trump, who gleefully trespasses over their sacred values, is the devil and they must stop him. The title of their magazine should be changed to Scientistic Americans.
The Battle for Britain | 21 September 2024
Why women’s golf is better than men’s
In the exhilarating event of Somerset managing to sneak past Surrey and being on their way to claim their first county cricket championship since the Norman Conquest – or since Vic Marks was playing – they would owe one of their captains from long ago, an eccentric gentleman by the name of Jack Meyer, a big debt of gratitude. Without Meyer it is unlikely that Somerset would have snared Archie Vaughan, the 18-year-old son of Michael and the hero of Somerset’s nerve-racking win over Surrey, the defending champions, last week.
The list of Millfield’s exceptional players, past and present, is eye- watering
Meyer, a firm believer in the power of sport to make lives better, founded Millfield School in 1935 after a spell planting tea in India, and since then it has churned out some of the finest sports people in the country. Cricket is its big calling card, fielding 17 teams across all abilities, with the Meyer all-star XI playing counties and university sides. Archie himself was captain of the Millfield first XI, which puts him easily at county standard.
The school’s facilities are all top class and my sources tell me that Millfield is pulling all the best 14- to 15-year-olds out of the state system as well as club cricket. The list of its exceptional players, past and present, is eye-watering but here are just a few: Will Smeed, Rory Hamilton-Brown, Simon Jones, Tony Lewis, Lewis Goldsworthy, David Graveney and Craig Kieswetter, whom I was lucky enough to share a cricket pitch with the other day and who can still whack the ball with the velocity of a space rocket. You could also field a pretty good rugby team from Millfield Old Boys, including J.P.R. Williams, Chris Robshaw, Mako Vunipola and Gareth Edwards.
Edwards was brought up in poverty, a miner’s son from Glamorgan who won a scholarship to Millfield, and is recognised as one of the greatest rugby players of all time. Without schools like Millfield and their belief in excellence, would he have ever made it to the top? You might also meet Lando Norris, the McLaren F1 driver chasing Max Verstappen to the chequered flag, at an old boys’ reunion. Oh, and Lily Allen, though sport probably wasn’t really her priority.
It has always baffled me why there aren’t more prestige match-play golf tournaments. The four stroke-play majors can get pretty tiresome as beefy guys from Texas whack the ball 350 yards down the middle of the fairway. The only drama usually comes at the end of day four. Contrast that with the tension and excitement of the three-day women’s Solheim Cup, which ended in a nail-biting win for America in Virginia last weekend. Women’s golf is far more interesting to watch than men’s anyway: the swings are better and more complete, and their game is more precise, graceful and usually more accurate.
Where else apart from match-play could you have seen the wonderful Charley Hull thrash the world No. 1, Nelly Korda, in the opening match of the singles to set up a riveting day? The next big match-play tournament is the President’s Cup, next week in Montreal, where the US take on the rest of the world (minus Europe). No one seems to care much about it: a women’s version, however, would be watched all over the world.
If you get a moment raise a glass of superstrength lager to the extraordinary darts wizard Luke Littler, who is still only 17. He might look as if he’s wandered off the set of the latest James Graham misery drama about the plight of the working class in some Red Wall seat, but put three darts in his hand and he rules the world. At the weekend, in front of several thousand riotous and roaring Dutch fans in Amsterdam, he won £80,000 and the World Series of Darts final, swiping all his opponents effortlessly aside. How do you get to be that good?
Dear Mary: Should you flush the loo in the night when staying with friends?
Q. We live in an area with no mobile reception and trying to get hold of taxis for guests leaving late at night or early morning after a party is nerve-racking. We have only two local taxi firms, both of which stop working after 10 p.m. When taxis from outside the area try to find the house, the signal drops as they near and they can’t find us. What do you suggest?
– A.E., Pewsey
A. Put a warning on your invitations that since taxis will be unable to find the house, guests should screenshot your enclosed map, send it as an aid to the taxi firm and agree a precise time for collection. However, as seasoned party-givers will know, many guests are too air-headed to take in such useful instructions. You might take a tip from another regular host, who lives in a signal-free area of East Sussex. She now books in (pre-paid) local youths to drive disorganised guests home to locations within 30 minutes, saying that ‘the cost to the host is not a huge amount compared with the cost of a party’.
Q. We are having a big party later in the year. My problem is that I currently dread other social events as tactless friends who have been invited mention the party in front of people I haven’t asked. How should I get out of this embarrassing situation?
– Name and address withheld
A. Say to those friends: ‘You mustn’t tell me any more. It’s meant to be a surprise for me!’
Q. My friendship group has reached that time in life when they don’t want ‘things’ as birthday presents as these will clutter up their homes. I am now at a loss to know what to take to birthday parties. Any ideas?
– J.L., Suffolk
A. Bulk-buy bottles of superior olive oil to take to birthday events. Considering the recent price hike, it will be gratefully received, and as it is consumable, it will not be a dust-gatherer.
Q. I have just been a holiday guest at a Scottish lodge. There were seven of us in various bedrooms but we all shared one bathroom. Could you advise the best procedure if one has to use the loo in the night: is it better to flush and risk waking up the lighter sleepers amongst the party – or not?
– S.H., London SW6
A. If number one is involved, people would rather rest undisturbed even at the risk of being confronted during the night by a lightly used loo. In the unlikely event of your needing to expel number two, you should deal with such a bio-hazard immediately and flush and be damned.
As good as Noble Rot: Cloth reviewed
Cloth is opposite St Bartholomew the Great on Cloth Fair. People call this place Farringdon, but it isn’t really: it belongs to the teaching hospital and the meat market and William Wallace who died a famous death here and has only a little plaque in turn. Smithfield embraces the dead. Sherlock Holmes met Dr Watson here and, for BBC1, jumped off the roof of the hospital. If Cloth calls itself a ‘neighbourhood wine bar’, which sounds less threatening than ‘restaurant’, its true customers are the dead, and that is no criticism.
The chips are marvellous, and this matters. I always judge a restaurant on the chips
I am early, so I sit in St Bartholomew the Less – this is how buildings fight! – and learn that Inigo Jones was baptised here, and that the warden – a chatty man – likes to play the wireless in the church, a pleasing eccentricity. ‘That’s the Police,’ he says, helpfully, when I say good night. Then I sit in the gaudy, brightly lit pub on the corner of Cloth Fair as a storm blows in. This is where I might complain about the absence of people in the City, but it adds to its charisma at night. Anything could happen. Of course, what will happen is that I will eat at Cloth and get the 46 bus to Hampstead. But it feels like I mightn’t, and that’s the alchemy of a good restaurant.
Cloth is the ground floor of a house that used to belong to John Betjeman – another plaque, they outnumber live residents – and now belongs to the Landmark Trust, who rent it to tourists who treat it like a shrine. If you don’t know the Landmark Trust, you should. They have a thatched castle in Dorset, which is unique even for English architecture: a self-hating fortress.
Inside, Cloth is Ebenezer Scrooge’s parlour. It has dark walls; wood floors; silver candlesticks; interesting art. It is busy because, fellow critics say, the menu is small, simple and doesn’t lie about sustainability. Human breath fogs the windows, as in a fairy tale: not enough of London is like this. It is Georgian pastiche – it must be, syphilis doesn’t sell – though I wonder why, when restaurants travel in time, they always stop here. Tudor was ruined by Charles Laughton, it is true, but what did Queen Anne, and the Incas, do? It must be the familiarity: Cloth’s ideal diners live in houses like this, or they want to.
It was founded by wine importers. You can drink all day if you need to, but the kitchen closes in the afternoon, as serious kitchens do: they still provide snacks for alcoholics, and the hungry. We eat: a pretty buffalo mozzarella salad with walnut, chicory and truffle; superb Westcombe Dairy salami, dense and lovely; Dorset crab and white cabbage salad; cured seabass with tomatoes and lovage; agnolotti of ricotta, roasted onion and sausage; Cornish monkfish, mussels, leeks and manzanilla; and marvellous chips. (This matters. I always judge a restaurant on the house wine and the chips.)
This food is loved, skilled and styled like a Vermeer and so, for me, Cloth is as good a London restaurant as Noble Rot. I would advise, as with all newly-fashionable restaurants, to dine early or late: at 8.30 p.m. it is so full as to feel reckless – we had to wait in the eerie pub, which was fine considering what happened when we were finally seated – but I can’t imagine a more charming place to eat at 10 p.m., ideally in a storm.
The prix fixe at lunch is £24 for two courses (white onion soup, Longhorn bavette) and £29 for three (add peach sorbet). With a meal at Pret a Manger, a restaurant so aggrieved it has lost its circumflex, wobbling dangerously at £13 I can only say eat here: with all the ghosts.
The meaning of ‘moot’? It’s debatable
In Florence there was a stone on which Dante sat in the evenings, pondering and talking to acquaintances. One asked him: ‘Dante, what is your favourite food?’ He replied: ‘Eggs.’ The following year, the same celebrity-hunter found him in the same place and asked: ‘With what?’ Dante replied: ‘With salt.’
In the Piazza delle Pallottole in Florence skulks a lump of stone bearing a label declaring it the genuine Stone of Dante. It doesn’t look very comfortable but at least it explains the line in Browning’s ‘Old Pictures in Florence’ where he says: ‘This time we’ll shoot better game and bag ’em hot – / No mere display at the stone of Dante, / But a kind of sober Witenagemot.’
The Witenagemot was one of several kinds of meeting or moot enjoyed by the Anglo-Saxons. In the 16th century, moot was the name for an exercise in debate at the Inns of Court. The name was revived in the 19th century.
This gives us a moot point: one that is debatable. But a reader, Anthony Whitehead, has found moot in a different sense: ‘academic’ or ‘irrelevant’. He noticed the new meaning in J.K. Rowling and blames her.
He is on to something. Alex Massie in the Times used the familiar sense: ‘It is a moot point whether or not social media encourages paranoia and hatred.’ In the new sense, James Cleverly, when asked on Today whether he would vote for Donald Trump, replied: ‘I am not an American citizen so it is a moot point.’ He didn’t mean ‘debatable’, he meant ‘irrelevant’.
Miss Rowling cannot be blamed for the new sense, for it originated in 19th-century America, where it is now the usual meaning. One can see how it developed: a question suited to a moot was regarded as academic, not real. When George Washington wrote in 1779 ‘The policy of our arming slaves is in my opinion a moot point’, he meant it was debatable. He certainly didn’t mean it was academic.
Portrait of the week: Keir Starmer’s free clothes, Huw Edwards sentenced and Tupperware faces bankruptcy
Home
Sir Keir Starmer met Giorgia Meloni, the Prime Minister of Italy, in Rome and said that sending funds to Tunisia and Libya ‘appears to have had quite a profound effect’ in cutting the number of migrants arriving in Italy. In the seven days to 16 September, 1,158 migrants arrived in England in small boats; eight drowned off France. Sir Keir made a late declaration of gifts from Lord Alli, a Labour donor, including clothes for Lady Starmer. David Lammy, the Foreign Secretary, defended the practice, saying that prime ministers ‘do rely on donations, political donations, so they can look their best’. Sir Keir’s hair was observed to be greyer than before.
About 780,000 pensioners in England and Wales are expected to lose their winter fuel allowance because they will not manage to apply for benefits they are entitled to, according to an estimate by the Department for Work and Pensions. Junior doctors in England belonging to the British Medical Association union accepted a 22 per cent pay rise over two years. Lord Darzi, the former Labour health minister who had produced a report on the healthcare of London in 2007, presented a damning report on the National Health Service, finding that although hospital staff numbers had increased since the pandemic, the numbers of appointments and procedures have not; that there was a serious lack of capital investment; and that long waits in A&E were likely to be causing an additional 14,000 deaths a year. The Prime Minister responded in a speech saying, ‘It’s reform or die,’ and declaring that the NHS would receive ‘no more money without reform’. Inflation remained at 2.2 per cent. The Guardian was in talks to sell the Observer to Tortoise Media. Norman Ackroyd, the etcher, died aged 86.
Huw Edwards, the former BBC newsreader, was given a suspended six-month jail sentence after pleading guilty to three charges of ‘making indecent photographs’ by receiving 41 illegal images mostly of children aged 13-15. The magistrate remarked: ‘You did not keep them and you did not send them on to anyone else.’ One of the beneficiaries of the government’s early release scheme was charged with sexual assault after an incident on the day of his release and recalled to prison pending trial. Glasgow agreed to host a reduced version of the Commonwealth Games in 2026, with the backing of the Scottish government.
Abroad
President Vladimir Putin said that if western countries allowed Ukraine to use their long-range missiles to strike Russian territory: ‘This will mean that Nato countries, the USA and European states, are fighting with Russia.’ President Joe Biden and Sir Keir Starmer kept their counsel on the matter after a meeting in Washington. Russia revoked the accreditation of six British diplomats it accused of spying. Russia and Ukraine exchanged 206 prisoners of war. Fire affected the town of Toropets in Russia after a Ukrainian drone attack on an ammunition store.
Three thousand members of the Lebanese armed group Hezbollah were wounded and at least nine killed when their hand-held pagers exploded. The Greek tanker Sounion, carrying a million barrels of crude oil and hit by Houthi missiles on 21 August, was towed to a safe area in the Red Sea without any spill. With 12 million people displaced, the World Health Organisation said, famine was widespread in Sudan, where since April 2023 there has been civil war between the Sudanese army and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces; the United Arab Emirates denied supporting the RSF with money and guns. China decided to raise the statutory retirement age from 50 to 55 for women in blue-collar jobs, and from 55 to 58 for women in white-collar jobs; for men the increase will be from 60 to 63.
The American Secret Service spotted a rifle poking out of shrubbery at Donald Trump’s golf course while he was playing. They arrested a man, Ryan Routh, 58, who was charged federally with possession of a firearm as a convicted felon. ‘Both are against life, be it the one who kicks out migrants, or be it the one who kills babies,’ the Pope said when asked about the US elections. ‘You must choose the lesser evil.’ Tupperware filed for bankruptcy. The rapper Sean Diddy Combs, formerly Puff Daddy, aged 54, was charged with racketeering, sex trafficking and transportation to engage in prostitution. Dominique Pelicot, aged 71, admitted in an Avignon court to drugging his wife and recruiting dozens of men to abuse her for more than ten years. Bangladesh enforced its ban on the export of the fish hilsa to India. CSH
I’m engaged!
I slept only between the hours of 5 and 6 a.m, thanks to self-induced terror tactics. My son Adam stayed over, having offered to accompany me for my angiogram – or ‘the procedure’. He kindly moved my old Honda Jazz round the corner and parked his car in my space overnight. The procedure revealed that a) I am impossible to sedate – I once told a full joke under anaesthetic; b) I am neurotic; and c) I didn’t, after all, need a stent. So why was I so breathless? Could it be because, at three score and ten… er… plus eight, I find myself in love? Prescription: I must walk more, breathe more, change medication and cool it.
Adam came back to check on me and rebuked me for moving my car – which I hadn’t, because the doctor said that I shouldn’t drive for a day or two. The car had, of course, been hot-rodded and nicked. I phoned 101 and frankly the call was more harrowing than the angiogram. One hour on hold and I needed more sedation. The algorithm gave me a crime number and I gave the algorithm short shrift.
I went to the Mayfair launch of a book about cooking and the crown by Tom Parker Bowles. It was hot and I was overdressed. (Isn’t everyone wearing layers now? Yes, Maureen, but not a whole knitted sheep.) The Queen gazed fondly at her son’s delightfully ditsy speech with exactly the same ‘Aww, bless’ look on her face I sported when I realised my son might have left my stolen car’s window open. Later that night my partner David and I decided to tell our children that, with a combined age of 156, we are going to get married. In truth I had been rather against the ‘M’ word, but on a train coming back from Edinburgh he mentioned that it was the minor festival of Tu B’Av – a day when a Jewish woman can ask a man to marry her. Unable to resist the gag, I slid under the table separating us on to one knee and asked him for his hand. To my surprise and slight panic, he gave it.
My late, great husband Jack Rosenthal’s birthday would have been on 8 September. So, armed with a birthday cake, we set off in David’s car to tell first my kids, then his about our engagement. Suddenly my phone rang. ‘Hello, this is the Metropolitan Police here. We just found your car today in Chippenham Road.’ (Five minutes from my flat.) ‘Oh gosh, thank you. Is she OK? Was she… peed in? No, I mean, don’t worry I’ll be there in a minute.’ We reversed and headed off at 20 miles an hour, as you do these days in ‘no Khan-do’ London, and found two officers, one warm and twinkly, and one tall, dark and gorgeous, picking three or four damp and blurry parking tickets off the windscreen of my abused car, which was in an induced coma and required a procedure. David went home for jump leads.
Even though the car had been flashing hazard lights for three days, people came out of houses and offered us tea. It felt like the 1950s. We’d never had it so good. The road where we waited was narrow, so we decided, on David’s return, that rather than re-align all our cars, he would plug the leads straight from their police van to my engine. However, this caused the first crusty behaviour of the day from other drivers. ‘Oh, right, so that’s what the Met are offering these days is it? Servicing celebrities?’ ‘Not botherin’ catchin’ any villains today then? All right for some!’ ‘You’re blocking the effing road, you arseholes!’ The cops were impeccable – patient, smiling and interesting. And, improbably, one of the officers, whose surname was Hussein, turned out to have a Jewish mother. They’re both coming to the wedding.
As David turned the car round again, we saw a double rainbow. We drove to the four separate houses of his three grown-up children and his youngest brother to drop the bombshell. All reactions were warm, and all were individual. One child said that he needed time ‘to process it’. We broke the news to another as he slid leaves into a new dining table, transforming the scene into a Jack Rosenthal play – one with, I like to think, a happy ending. Driving home at 10.30 p.m., we realised that we were starving. Restaurants and pubs were tipping out. There was a dip in temperature, so we pulled up at the crêperie stall in Hampstead high street and bought two rubbery cheese and mushroom crêpes, which we ate too quickly in the car, with the bum-warmer heating switched on. That night, with the help of Gaviscon, I slept like a teenager.
Labour vs labour: how can the government claim to be promoting growth?
Growth, growth, growth: that was what Keir Starmer told us would be his government’s priority in his first press conference as Prime Minister. Nearly three months on, as the Labour party heads into its first conference in power for 15 years, it is becoming ever harder to reconcile Starmer’s promise with the policies that his government seems determined to deliver.
With junior doctors voting to accept a 22 per cent pay rise, yet another group of public sector workers has been lavished with financial reward without any obligation to accept or implement more productive working practices. The NHS is in the midst of a pay bonanza at a time when productivity in the health service has been declining. Since the pandemic, ever more employees are delivering significantly fewer treatments. As NHS England admitted recently, productivity in acute medicine is still down 11 per cent on pre-pandemic levels.
Labour has promised employees flexible working, but employers are offered nothing but pain
It is the same issue on the railways, where train drivers – already among the best-paid groups of workers in the country – have been awarded a 14 per cent increase over three years, again with no conditions attached. Where James Callaghan spent much of his time in office reminding workers that pay rises must be earned through productivity gains, and Tony Blair would insist that extra money had to come with reform, Starmer has shied away from the subject altogether.
Britain is supporting a sprawling government machine whose employees are no more productive than they were when Blair came to power 27 years ago, according to the Office for National Statistics. The tax burden is the heaviest in modern history and the rising cost of government is one of the biggest pressures facing households. And yet a Labour leader who does not come from a trade union background, and who has made a great show of taking on the left of his party, could turn out to be the most union-friendly Labour prime minister in history.
Business Secretary Jonathan Reynolds tells us that people who work from home are more productive. Where is the evidence? And why, if this is so, did we learn this week that Amazon, one of the world’s most successful companies, has ordered all its staff back to the office five days a week?
Labour has promised employees flexible working, the right to switch off and so on, but employers are offered nothing but pain. Chancellor Rachel Reeves appears to have stepped back from her original plan to force employers to pay higher national insurance contributions. Yet it looks as if they will be hit with the obligation to respect more stringent employees’ rights, possibly from the first day of their employment. As employers have warned, such a system would undermine the concept of probationary periods and act as a huge disincentive to create new jobs. If an inadequate employee cannot be fired easily, they are less likely to be hired in the first place.
Labour has already begun to offend some of its new-found supporters from the world of business. Three months ago, Richard Walker, executive chairman of supermarket chain Iceland, was chosen to launch the party’s manifesto after switching support from the Conservatives. Yet a fortnight ago he warned the government he helped to elect that it could drive his business to bankruptcy if it proceeded too quickly with workplace reforms or jacked up the national minimum wage too sharply.
His turn reveals that Labour’s support from the business sector is flaky at best. Business leaders switched allegiances before the election because they hoped that by supporting Labour they could mitigate against the worst of the new government’s plans. It is far from clear that they will be successful.
From an employee’s point of view, the government is damaging the incentive for hard work by threatening higher taxes on savings and investments. We have yet to hear Reeves’s first Budget, but it is expected to contain some constriction on pensions, perhaps limiting tax relief or doing away with the right to take a tax-free lump sum upon retirement. A government with a genuine desire to promote economic growth would not be acting in this way. But then again, very few of Starmer’s front bench have ever run a company or created jobs first-hand. Britain’s relatively flexible labour laws have created comparatively low unemployment in recent years. Why damage that now by emulating France, a country with high levels of job security but where it is far harder to find stable employment in the first place?
Labour’s plan to clamp down on zero-hours contracts fundamentally misunderstands the role that this form of employment plays in the economy. Not only do such contracts allow businesses to expand and contract their workforces in tune with economic conditions, they also allow opportunities for staff who want to choose their hours. That is genuinely flexible working, by mutual agreement of employee and employer – yet it is an arrangement the government wants to all but ban.
Labour, as its name suggests, has always been the party of organised labour. But on current showing, this is turning into an administration which lacks the pragmatism of previous Labour governments. If growth really is the objective, Labour needs to change tack quickly.