18 October, 2023

In the headlines

Joe Biden met with Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel this morning, and said the hospital explosion in Gaza yesterday appears to be the responsibility of “the other team”. Palestinian officials blame Israel for the blast, which is thought to have killed at least 200 people, but the Israelis say it was caused by a misfired militant rocket. Laughing gas will become illegal in the UK next month. Serial recreational users of nitrous oxide – nicknamed “hippy crack” – will face up to two years in prison, and the maximum sentence for dealers will be doubled to 14 years. In another blow for hedonists, boozy Brits could be banned from the Balearic Islands for drunk and disorderly behaviour. Spanish officials are considering blacklisting holidaymakers who break existing regulations, which in some areas include six-drink-a-day limits at all-inclusive hotels and bans on pub crawls.

Comment

An opposition rally in Warsaw earlier this month. Wojtek Radwanski /AFP/Getty

Poland’s victory for democracy

To be in Poland on Sunday night was to experience “a rare moment of political joy”, says Timothy Garton Ash in The Guardian. Young voters queued into the early hours to turf out the “xenophobic, nationalist populists who have been dragging their country backwards”, and to prove that even a biased election can be won against the odds. Poles have pulled off this feat once before, in 1989, when they came out in force to elect the first post-communist government in eastern Europe. Last weekend’s turnout was even higher – a record 74%. It seems Poles got fed up with the “corrupt, petty, backward-looking” rule of the Law and Justice party, and decided to turn towards a “modern European future”.

It’s not just good news for Poles, says Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic. After democratic insurgents failed to oust autocrats in Hungary last year and Turkey in May, and elections in Israel brought a “coalition of extremists” to power, plenty of people feared that democracy was on the way out. The victory of the Polish opposition proves that “autocratic populism can be defeated”, even when the ruling party has “turned state television into a propaganda tube”, altered voting laws in its favour and “leaked top secret military documents” for electoral gain. It’s also an encouraging sign for neighbouring Ukraine, whose political support in Warsaw has wobbled, that voters favoured pro-Kyiv centrists over the far right. As in 1989, Poles now have their work cut out in unpicking the apparatus of autocracy. But they long ago learned the crucial lesson: “Nothing is inevitable about the rise of autocracy or the decline of democracy.”

Drinking

Getty

The “Breakfast Martini” might sound like the “classiest possible way to be a full-blown alcoholic”, says Robb Report, but in fact it’s neither a martini nor, officially, a morning drink. It was invented in 1997 by Salvatore Calabrese, a “leading light of the London cocktail scene”, after his wife forced him to try marmalade. He took the citrus spread into work and “riffed on it” until he found the right formulation: gin, orange liqueur, lemon juice, and a healthy dollop of orange marmalade, spooned into the cocktail shaker and shaken with ice. It’s delicious “at whichever time of day it most suits you”.

Inside politics

A tongue-in-cheek rumour has long floated around Canadian politics that Justin Trudeau is the secret lovechild of Fidel Castro (see the similarities above). What is true is that Trudeau’s father Pierre, also a Canadian prime minister, knew Castro quite well. At Trudeau senior’s funeral in 2000, the Cuban communist was one of his honorary pallbearers – along with Jimmy Carter, Leonard Cohen and the Aga Khan.

Life

Kevin Mazur/Safe & Sound/Getty

Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon has officially pulled the plug on his DJing side hustle. In recent years, the top banker has played dance music sets at festivals around the world, including Lollapalooza and Tomorrowland. But with Goldman’s profits plunging, colleagues haven’t looked too kindly on the hobby. “Music was not a distraction from David’s work,” a spokesman tells the FT. “The media attention became a distraction.”

Comment

Leonardo DiCaprio splashing the cash in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

The end of easy money

When the legendary investor Howard Marks asks people what they think is the most important financial event in recent decades, says Ben Wright in The Daily Telegraph, they typically go for one of the usual suspects: the 2008 global financial crisis, say, or the dotcom bubble bursting. But Marks reckons it’s something much less obvious: the 20-percentage-point decline in interest rates between 1980 and 2020. Until the past couple of years, the “vast majority” of people in finance, and indeed politics, had only ever worked in an environment with ultra-low borrowing costs. This allowed them to spend more freely, and recklessly, than ever before. British chancellors, for example, have broken 15 of the 26 “fiscal rules” imposed by the government since 1997 – and investors simply haven’t cared.

Now, finally, we’re emerging from our “zero-interest-rate-induced coma” – and things are going to be very different. Interest payments on government debt will soon be around £30bn higher than we’re used to. The Liz Truss debacle demonstrated that international investors will no longer take the British government’s word. The markets are even starting to “ask probing questions” about the sustainability of America’s finances. This is not to say that the UK, or indeed the US, is about to default. But we’ll have to work a lot harder – and offer more generous terms – to persuade investors to give us the benefit of the doubt. For Jeremy Hunt and his successors as chancellor, “the battle has only just begun”.

💸🤨 Perhaps the best illustration of how low interest rates clouded people’s judgement was “Modern Monetary Theory” – the idea, pushed by “apparently intelligent people”, that countries with control of their own currencies could effectively borrow at will, and stop worrying about deficits and national debt. “We don’t hear so much from those guys these days.”

Noted

Afterlife

Left to right: Elizabeth Debicki, Diana herself, and Naomi Watts

The forthcoming final series of The Crown will reportedly feature the ghost of Princess Diana, played by Elizabeth Debicki, appearing to Prince Charles and the late Queen. I’ve long taken an interest in the paranormal princess, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian: the actresses Naomi Watts and Kristen Stewart, for example, both said they felt her “presence” while preparing to play the royal on screen. Over the years, Diana’s ghost has also cropped up at the England’s Rose pub in Oxfordshire; communed with a Japanese psychic and an Australian anti-masker; and told her former “energy healer”, Simone Simmons, that she was a fan of Brexit.

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It’s Pepper X, the new hottest chilli in the world. Guinness World Records has certified its spiciness at “a whopping 2.69 million Scoville heat units”, says New Scientist – over a million more than the previous record holder, the Carolina Reaper. Both were bred by South Carolina’s Ed Currie. “I was feeling the heat for three-and-a-half hours,” he says of trying his latest creation. “Then the cramps came.”