29 July, 2023

Life

O'Connor at Glastonbury in 1991. Martyn Goodacre/Getty

The renegade singer who stuck it to the suits

Sinéad O’Connor was the ultimate nonconformist, says Suzanne Moore on Substack. When she was 21, and her manager ordered her to “wear make-up and dress in a more feminine way” to promote her first album, she went home and shaved her hair off. She fell pregnant the same year, and ignored record company bigwigs who “tried their damnedest” to get her to have an abortion. With a “hit album and a tiny baby”, she was invited to perform at the 1989 Grammys. She came on stage in ripped jeans, a black halter-neck and Dr Martens, with her son’s babygrow tied around her waist. “A middle finger to her record company, if ever there was one.”

In 1992, she “effectively nuked her career” by performing a track about child abuse in the Catholic Church, before tearing up a picture of Pope John Paul II. “The Washington Times called her ‘the pure face of hatred’; Joe Pesci said he wanted to give her a smack; Madonna took the piss out of her.” O’Connor continued aggravating the public and stars alike, in particular by refusing to have The Star-Spangled Banner played before her concerts, as per tradition. Frank Sinatra weighed in, saying he wished he could meet her so “he could kick her ass”. She later joked that her father in Dublin wouldn’t be best pleased if she had been forced “to beat the crap out of Ol’ Blue Eyes”.

Heroes and villains

Heroes

Quick-thinking British Airways cabin crew, who responded to a catering emergency by providing hungry passengers with KFC. After a fridge malfunction meant binning all the in-flight meals, staff hopped off the plane during a scheduled stop in the Bahamas and bought a couple of Bargain Buckets. Travellers shared videos of air stewards handing out chicken tenders with a pair of tongs.

Villains

The Guardian’s sub-editors, who have had a tough week at the office. On Monday, the paper had to issue a correction after printing that the number of atoms in the sun was “around 1057”. It was supposed to say “10⁵⁷” – or 10 followed by 56 zeroes. Two days later, the paper said that Irish poet Seamus Heaney had “tweeted” a tribute to the “beautiful” and “courageous” Sinéad O’Connor. Heaney died a decade ago.

Heroes

England’s cricketers, who triumphed in the Ashes – the “Grey Ashes”, at least. In this year’s over-60s series, England’s seniors have taken an insurmountable 3-1 lead, meaning they will retain the esteemed terracotta urn for the fifth consecutive time. The triumphant squad – which features retired teachers, a bus driver and a carpenter – are already anticipating their trip Down Under in 2025.

Villains

Neckties, according to the Taliban, which has denounced the garment as representative of the Christian cross. A senior representative of the murderous theocracy appeared on state TV on Wednesday declaring that the tie should be not just banned but destroyed. “It is ordered in Sharia,” he said, “that you should break it and eliminate it.”

Heroes

YouTube pranksters Josh Pieters and Archie Manners, who gave Just Stop Oil a “taste of their own medicine”, says The Daily Telegraph. The duo slipped into a vegan banquet hosted by the environmental insurgents in east London, and set off ear-piercingly loud panic alarms attached to bright-orange, helium-filled balloons.

Sponsored

The Pleasance Theatre Trust, the heart and soul of the Edinburgh Fringe, has a characteristically excellent line-up at this year’s festival. Highlights include Spirit of Ireland, a night of Celtic music, comedy and dancing set in the greatest pub in the land; A Comedy of Operas, in which five singers perform quirky takes on top arias; and riotous stand-up sets by Adam Kay, the best-selling author of This Is Going to Hurt, and Rosie Jones, star of the Bafta-nominated Trip Hazard. To book tickets, click on the links above.

Property

THE COUNTRY HOUSE The 100-year-old Trewoofe House in West Cornwall is up for sale for the first time in its history. Its 4,166 sq ft interior includes a magnificent studio with a vaulted ceiling, six large bedrooms, and a sunroom. Outside, there’s around 1.5 acres of south-facing gardens, complete with a sun-drenched terrace and “secret garden” perfect for aspiring botanists. Cornwall’s rugged coast is just a mile away, while Penzance train station, with direct trains to Paddington, is a 10-minute drive. £1.2m.

Zeitgeist

Matty Healy performing in Chile earlier this year. Marcelo Hernandez/Getty

You can’t blame everything on the British empire

According to the “idiotic credo” of today’s progressive left, says Rod Liddle in The Spectator, anyone who is not straight, white and male shares an “equal burden of oppression” and should thus “put aside footling differences” to unite against the “ghastly and brutal hegemony”. By this view, there are no greater agents of oppression than colonialism and imperialism, which are “solely responsible” for the misery of all persecuted people everywhere. The problem is not just that this is “patently untrue”. It also forces those who believe it to “put their hands over their ears, stamp their little feet, and lie through their teeth”.

Take the “eminent, and in many ways admirable” gay-rights campaigner Peter Tatchell. He was invited on Radio 4 this week to comment on the latest antics of Matty Healy, the “thick-as-mince” frontman of the indie band The 1975. On stage at a festival in Malaysia, Healy ranted about the country’s stringent anti-gay laws and kissed one of his male bandmates. Authorities stepped in and cancelled the whole festival. Commenting on these events, Tatchell failed to mention that Malaysia is an Islamic country, and instead blamed its homophobic laws on the British Empire, implying that were it not for those dastardly “straight white men of imperialism”, Malaysia today would be a “sunlit upland of untrammelled buggery”. No mention of the fact that homosexuals are banned from state TV, or that being gay can get you 20 years in prison and “several strokes of a rattan cane across the backside”. Tatchell must know all this, of course, but he can’t say it. Because to today’s progressives, the only solution to evil is a “vigorous bit of decolonising”.

Life

DiCaprio enjoying some downtime. KCS Presse/Splash News

Leonardo DiCaprio is famed for his “long, hot summers” partying with supermodels on yachts, says Simon Mills in The Times. I witnessed one myself. I was in the lonely back room of a nightclub, “nursing a negroni”, sitting beside a cold bottle of vodka on ice. And then, “… OMG, Leo DiCaprio!” He lit up a Cuban stogie and nodded at me; I nodded back. All of a sudden, six models walked in, “sat on his knee, ruffled his hair and pulled him off the banquette for a bump-and-grind dance”. The actor grinned at me from ear to ear, before getting up to leave. On the way out, he cast me a pitiful glance, before planting a fresh Cohiba cigar in my breast pocket and saying: “Enjoy it pal.”

Inside politics

Anti-Ulez stickers on a van in London. Carl Court/Getty

The Tories have a new dragon to slay

Rishi Sunak has two problems, says Robert Shrimsley in the FT. The first is that parties typically win elections by “finding dragons to slay”, but voters seem to think his government is the problem that needs solving. The second is that disillusioned supporters “simply don’t vote”. So what he needs is a “new dragon” to energise his base. With an unexpected Tory win in last week’s Uxbridge by-election – widely attributed to a backlash against the Ulez tax on polluting cars – he might have found one.

Standing firm against costly, Labour-backed green policies not only has a certain electoral appeal; it may also be the glue that holds together a political campaign against “liberal orthodoxy”. Think of it as the “battle with Big Everything”: a conservative assault on “The Blob” – including Whitehall, “lefty” lawyers and judges, the media, eco-types, universities and trans-rights campaigners. In short, the hated “woke liberal establishment”. The Tories can argue persuasively that while Brexit freed us from Brussels, its “leftist ideologies” are still embedded in the culture – and that these “dark forces”, rather than any government failures, are holding Britain back. Before Ulez, this reasoning seemed abstract. “Now Tories can put a price on it.” You don’t have to buy the argument to see its potential power. Can it save the Conservatives? Perhaps not. “But it might give them a dragon.”

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Books

The Colossus computer at Bletchley Park. Jack Taylor/Getty

Spying on Russia: how ungentlemanly

In the first half of the 20th century, says The Economist, Western governments were at times almost comically naive about espionage. In 1929, America’s secretary of state shut down his country’s codebreaking agency on the basis that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”. Seven years later, Britain’s ambassador in Moscow refused to let MI6 open a station in the embassy because it might “cause embarrassment”. When the UK joined forces with the Soviets during World War Two, the Foreign Office “went so far as to ban espionage” against its new ally.

Stalin took the reverse approach, “placing a higher priority on espionage against his allies than against Nazi Germany”. He knew about both the codebreaking successes at Bletchley Park and the top-secret Manhattan Project “years before Harry Truman”, who was told of these “momentous secrets” only on becoming president. These and other revelations in Calder Walton’s “riveting” new history of the subject seem particularly relevant today, in light of the West’s insistence that it doesn’t want a cold war with China. As he puts it: “Western powers can be in a cold war irrespective of whether they seek one and before they recognise it.”

Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West by Calder Walton is available to buy here.

Weather

Quoted

“If it is a 10-minute speech it takes me all of two weeks. If it is a half-hour speech, it takes me a week. And if I can talk for as long as I want to, it requires no preparation at all.”