Michael Mosbacher

The Church of England has been displaying distinctly masochistic tendencies of late. The Church has previously tried to return its tainted Benin bronzes, even though their specimens were crafted 80 years after the Kingdom of Benin succumbed to British forces and its palaces were looted in 1897. This week the Archbishops’ Commission for Racial Justice – chaired by the Blair-era Labour minister and subsequently High Commissioner to South Africa Lord (Paul) Boateng – issued its first report; there are five more to come over the next three years, so we can anticipate much more self-abasement.

Britain’s statue wars are rumbling on. Stroud District Council wants to take down an historic Jacquemart or jack – a mechanised figure which strikes the time with a hammer on a bell – clock located on Castle Street in the centre of the Gloucestershire town. Whilst jack clocks are fairly common in France and Germany, there are only 20 in the UK, most showing knights or similar striking the bell. Stroud’s jack, however, is a thick-lipped black boy in a leaf skirt and hence offends today’s mores.

Bashing fee-paying schools is a popular sport – and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is as good an excuse as any to engage in it. Labour MP Ian Mearns has called for schools to lose their charitable status if they take fees from oligarchs linked to the Putin regime. Meanwhile, Tory MP Nickie Aiken has said oligarch kids should be sent back to Russia. Yet these claims risk painting a misleading picture of Russian children at British schools. The reality is that many Russian children educated at our top private schools have nothing to do with Putin, so it's wrong to punish them for his war. There are around 2,300 Russian children at Britain’s fee paying schools, according to the Independent Schools Council’s 2021 census.

Should a 3.5 metre high Soviet statue of Karl Marx’s collaborator and patron Friedrich Engels – brought over from Ukraine five years ago – stay up in central Manchester? The concrete likeness of communism's co-founder, dating from 1970, lorded over Mala Pereshchepina, a village a few hours drive from Kharkiv, until 2015. In the aftermath of Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the stoking of pro-Russian insurgents in Donbas, Ukraine decreed that all Soviet era symbols be removed – and Marxism’s co-founder was felled there, only to rise again in Manchester. This Engels from Ukraine was not erected to celebrate Anti-Dühring, his 1877 polemic against the wrong kind of socialist.

When is money so soiled that merely accepting it makes you tainted? It has been reported today that the National Portrait Gallery (NPG) and Scottish Ballet are ending their sponsorship deals with the oil and gas company BP following years of protests. Climate activists argue that these sponsorships launder the reputations of those responsible for despoiling the planet. BP has long been a significant arts sponsor; the NPG’s annual portrait exhibition has been supported by the company since 1989. And in 2016 BP announced renewed sponsorship deals with the British Museum, NPG, the Royal Opera House and the Royal Shakespeare Company, pledging a total of £7.5 million over five years, starting in 2018.

Tate Britain’s Rex Whistler restaurant will never reopen the gallery announced yesterday. The restaurant – once known for its excellent and well priced wine list – won’t reopen due to the apparent offensiveness of the mural on its walls. Diners used to be embraced by the mural, The Expedition in Pursuit of Rare Meats, a painting by Rex Whistler, an artist best known for his decorative murals in grand country houses. He was killed in France in 1944 fighting the Nazis, in other words engaging in anti-racist action. When the Tate restaurant first opened in 1927 it was described as ‘the most amusing room in Britain’. It was a favourite spot for BBC political editors to lunch their political contacts.

We in Britain have long been much more squeamish about fur than other Europeans. I still well remember the snide comments I would get even in the 1980s when my German mother would collect me from my London school in the fur coats she insisted on wearing. The ocelot number especially raised eyebrows. The UK’s domestic retail market for fur has always been small. Britain’s half--dozen fur farms were closed when Tony Blair’s government legislated to ban them in 2000. As it was, British manufacturing could never compete with Italy on quality, or with Hong Kong, and then China itself, on price. But the wholesale trade has been a very different matter.

Fishmongers are an endangered species in London. Thankfully, 15 minutes walk across Westminster from The Spectator’s offices there is an excellent fish stall on Tachbrook Street market in Pimlico. Jonathan Norris’s stall — much frequented by 1990s Tory politicians — does a thriving trade in live lobsters. He will happily boil the crustaceans for you in his lobster kettle, but buying them alive is more fun, especially if you have children in tow. At this time of year the lobsters are Cornish; in the winter live lobster flown in from Canada will have to do. Buying — and then boiling — live lobsters is a sure way of getting children interested in their next meal, at least it is with my two boys.