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21 July, 2023

Rishi Sunak has suffered two damaging by-election defeats in Tory safe seats. Labour overturned a previous Conservative majority of 20,000 in Selby & Ainsty, while the Lib Dems took Somerton & Frome. There was some consolation for the PM: his party narrowly kept hold of Boris Johnson’s former seat in Uxbridge & South Ruislip. Coutts boss Alison Rose has apologised to Nigel Farage for “deeply inappropriate” comments made about him in a dossier. The government has since issued new rules to clamp down on what it calls “unfair bank account closures”, outlawing any discrimination based on “political or any other opinions”. “Barbenheimer begins!” says the Daily Mail, as critics predict a record-breaking weekend at the box office. One cinephile, Mitch Corrigan, left his home in Somerset just after midnight to watch Oppenheimer followed by Barbie at the Leicester Square IMAX, finishing the double bill around 8 am. He assured reporters he has “never gone this mental before” over a film release.

Natwest CEO Alison Rose. Hollie Adams/Getty

Thomas Coutts must be spinning in his grave

When Alison Rose was appointed the first female boss of NatWest (and with it Coutts), says Allison Pearson in The Daily Telegraph, she announced that “tackling climate change would be a central pillar” of her strategy. Eh? Did she think she’d “assumed control of Extinction Rebellion” rather than a leading capitalist institution? But, true to her ideological posturing, she swiftly ended new loans for oil extraction – a “ruinous piece of virtue signalling” that means we now pay more than £40bn a year to import oil and gas from our North Sea neighbours. And this week, she’s been caught up in another ideological scandal, issuing Nigel Farage a grovelling apology over the closing of his Coutts account.

A friend who used to be high up at the exclusive private bank tells me the furore was “depressingly inevitable”, adding: “the forces of woke have wrought havoc there”. It seems he’s right. Despite bankers admitting in a 40-page dossier that the Ukip leader was a “commercially viable customer”, they decided there was “something a bit whiffy about him”, because some sensitive types perceive him as “xenophobic” and possibly a “grifter”. Of course, there’s no such reluctance over other “unsavoury clients”: Chinese tycoons who put Uyghyrs in concentration camps, say, or Iranian potentates who authorise the “mass hanging of gay people”. But the face of Brexit – “Ugh, let’s show him the door!” The bank’s founder Thomas Coutts – who went to Paris at the height of the French Revolution to help “beleaguered aristocrats” – “must be spinning in his grave”. Would he have considered Farage’s money as good as the next man’s? “You can bank on it.”

To celebrate the release of Barbie today, Time Out has collected a list of the “pinkest places in the world”, including the Don CeSar hotel in Florida; the highly salty, vibrant Lake Hillier in Western Australia; the Hawa Mahal in Jaipur, otherwise known as the Palace of Winds; the Muralla Roja apartment building in Spain’s Alicante; the Tan Dinh Catholic Church in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City; and Craigievar Castle, nestled on a picturesque hillside in Aberdeenshire. See the full list here.

Republican claims that Donald Trump’s legal cases are undemocratic don’t hold water, says Foreign Policy: charging and convicting former leaders of crimes is “quite common” across the free world. At least 78 leaders in 53 “democratic or semi-democratic countries” have been indicted since 2000, with 47 convictions. Guilty names include Nicolas Sarkozy, Silvio Berlusconi and many more. South Korea has convicted two former presidents of corruption in the last five years alone.

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Cornishware, the bold blue-and-white pottery that was last in fashion half a century ago, is once again becoming a home sensation, says the FT. Top British designer JW Anderson ordered more than 500 personalised teapots, mugs and bowls in the traditional design – handmade and painted by TG Green’s 28-person team, actually based in Somerset – using them as invitations for his recent runway show. Today, most of the company’s customers come from Instagram and are between 25 and 35-years-old. During the pandemic, the family-owned business “doubled in size”, says boss Charles Rickards. “I think everyone was at home looking at their mugs thinking, maybe I need a new one.”

A car production line in Ingolstadt, Germany. Andreas Gebert/Getty

German industry’s best days are behind it

Germany’s biggest companies are “ditching the fatherland”, says Matthew Karnitschnig in Politico. Chemical giant BASF, a pillar of German business for more than a century, has become increasingly worried about its home market. Bosses have decided to abandon the firm’s Rhine-side location for a new $10bn state-of-the-art complex in China. It’s a sign of the malaise spreading through the whole German economy – a harbinger of what could be a “fundamental reversal” in the country’s fortunes. Confronted by a “toxic cocktail” of high energy costs, worker shortages and reams of red tape, massive companies like Volkswagen and Siemens are “experiencing a rude awakening” and moving their plants and offices to rural America and Asia. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion Germany is heading, ever deeper, into economic decline.

Reports from the front line only get worse: unemployment has risen this year by around 200,000; foreign investment is at its lowest since 2013; orders at engineering companies – “long a bellwether of health” – fell 10% in May, their eighth consecutive decline. It’s largely down to the fact Germany’s most important industries, from chemicals to cars, are rooted in 19th-century technology. The country thrived for decades because of these industries but now they’re either becoming obsolete, like the combustion engine, or too expensive to produce domestically. At the same time a failure to support burgeoning industries like AI is prompting successful tech and pharmaceutical companies – like BioNtech, which helped develop the Covid vaccine – to uproot and move to more tech-friendly countries like Britain. So what will Germany’s future success be based on? “So far, there’s nothing in sight.”

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An MCC member sensibly not letting it all get to him at Lord’s. Getty

The stress of watching your team compete can be a bit much for some, says Mark Mason in The Spectator. At the 1882 Oval Test between England and Australia, which gave birth to the Ashes, things became so tense “that one spectator died of a heart attack” and another “chewed through his umbrella handle”.

Despite the UK’s well-established reputation for rainfall, says The Guardian, parts of the country are bone-dry. South-east England gets about as much rain as Lebanon or Kenya, and less than Sydney. London gets less rain on average every year than all eight of Australia’s state capitals.

It’s an original iPhone still in its unopened, plastic-wrapped box, which has just sold at auction for a “staggering” $190,000, says Gizmodo. It’s a 4GB version of the very first edition of the device, which went on sale in 2007. Because customers overwhelmingly preferred having 8GB of storage, the 4GB model was quickly discontinued and has now become much more valuable. An 8GB original iPhone sold last year for just $32,000.

“Life is a tragedy when seen in close-up, but a comedy in long-shot.”

Charlie Chaplin

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