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11 November, 2023

Kirsty Wigglesworth/AFP/Getty

Britain’s secret weapon

The world may be falling apart, says Adrian Wooldridge in Bloomberg, but the King’s Speech on Tuesday “proceeded like well-oiled clockwork”. The Yeomen of the Guard searched the cellars of the Palace of Westminster for gunpowder plotters. The King arrived in the Diamond Jubilee Stage Coach and proceeded to his gold throne in the House of Lords. The junior whip was dispatched to Buckingham Palace to act as a hostage until the boss was safely home. The speech itself, written by No 10, was striking for its “thinness”, but the richness of the ritual reveals something important: “the fundamental stability of the British political system”.

That system has been under “extraordinary strain” in recent years. Brexit, Covid, the “flamethrower” politics of Dominic Cummings and then Liz Truss. Even under the calmer leadership of Rishi Sunak, headbangers like Suella Braverman continue to throw “rhetorical firebombs” in a bid to polarise the electorate. And to cap it all, recent weeks have seen huge pro-Palestine marches, including some attendees “openly supporting Hamas and making anti-Semitic gestures”. Yet despite all this, Britain has seen nothing like the Jan 6 outrage in Washington, or the riots that “regularly consume Paris in flames”, or the surreal 2022 pro-monarchist coup attempt in Germany. Part of the reason is what Victorian journalist Walter Bagehot identified as the division of powers between the “dignified branch” that excites “reverence and enthusiasm”, and the “efficient part”, which delivers policies. Ceremonies like the King’s Speech remind us that political spats come and go, but something grander endures.

Party time in Amsterdam: no Brits, please. Ozan Yilmaz/Getty

Heroes

The Dutch, says Giles Coren in The Times, who are sensibly putting a brake on their tourism industry. “Fed up with overcrowding and the bad behaviour of foreign visitors”, they’ve capped flights into Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport and introduced a “digital discouragement campaign” aimed at “young British sex and drug tourists”. Maybe Suella Braverman should launch similar ads for this country: “Britain: the weather’s awful, the train stations are full of anti-Semites, the roads are blocked by hate marches, you’re going straight to Rwanda anyway and we’ve just made tents illegal.” 

Villain

Hannah Ingram-Moore, daughter of the late NHS fundraiser Captain Tom Moore, who has been ordered to demolish a home spa built in her garden after losing a planning dispute with Central Bedfordshire council. She had argued that the complex, which includes changing rooms, a sauna and showers, was a charitable endeavour that the Captain Tom Foundation could use for coffee mornings and “rehabilitation sessions” for the elderly.

Hero

Sue Gray, who is impressing folk at Labour HQ with her energetic approach, says columnist Patrick Maguire. Keir Starmer’s new chief of staff is playing a key role in shaping Labour’s Middle East policy, is generally first in the office and last out, and even takes to task “messy staffers” who “don’t accord the office cleaners due respect”.

Villain

The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse, a bestselling book which will now be inflicted on schoolchildren after being added to the national curriculum. Problem is, says Marianne Levy in the I newspaper, it began life as a series of drawings with inspirational captions on Instagram. So the book has no narrative and is filled with the kind of twee sentimentality that kids usually run a mile from. “One of our greatest freedoms is how we react to things,” runs one line. “Try saying that when you’re five and someone’s just nicked your crisps.” 

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JFK minutes before his assassination in 1963. Bettmann/Getty

The day America lost its innocence

Sixty years ago, when President Kennedy was assassinated, I was a student at a Catholic girls’ school in Chicago, says Bonnie Greer in The New European. It’s a late November day, and our class is suddenly summoned to assembly. As we walk down the hall in a “straight, anxious line”, I see one of the nuns crying through an open door. “I had never seen a nun cry before. I had never seen an adult cry before.” We’re told Kennedy has been shot and to pack our bags and go home. Out in the street, it’s raining. People are crying. “Wailing.” When I get to my house, my mother opens the door in tears.

We turn on the TV and watch Walter Cronkite, the legendary evening news presenter. “Now he is on air, in the afternoon, in his shirtsleeves.” He looks into the camera and announces that President Kennedy is dead. The following days are a blur. I remember LBJ being sworn in as president on television. “There was Jackie, the former first lady, still with JFK’s blood on her pink Chanel suit.” I remember the funeral: very slow, with the black horse, the black riderless horse, being led down the Mall in Washington. “And those drums. Those languorous, deep, rolling drums.” Everything happened on live TV – the assassination, then the assassination of the guy who did the assassination. Those were the days when America lost its innocence.

Nigella in 2005. Francesca Yorke/Getty

Farewell to the celebrity chef

In the mid 2000s, the celebrity chef reigned supreme, says Finn McRedmond in The New Statesman. Jamie Oliver, plucked out of the River Café kitchen by an enterprising TV producer, delighted viewers with phrases like “spag bol”, “lovely jubbly” and “pukka”. Gordon Ramsay lorded over a culinary empire built on “screeching and sneering at Midwestern diner owners on Fox’s Kitchen Nightmares”. It was as if Nigella Lawson was “the first woman to eat butter”, and Anthony Bourdain “the first white man to eat pho on a plastic stool”. Unshackled from the kitchen, these titans were known not for their cooking but their books, TV shows and endorsements of frozen pizzas.

That world is disappearing. There are no worthy successors to those stars, besides small-scale Instagrammers such as the “sinister French patisserie chef who sculpts dinosaurs out of chocolate”. Instead, restaurants themselves hog the limelight: London establishments like St John and Noble Rot have become brands with huge social media followings and their own lines in media and merchandise. This is for the best. Life in a restaurant is onerous and poorly remunerated; “the world of micro greens and basil foam is not a natural home for a showman”. The guiding principle of celebrity – self-interest – is “anathema to the requirements of decent hospitality”.

Tigst Assefa after winning in Berlin. Luciano Lima/Getty 

Super shoes are nothing to be scared of

Marathon running records are tumbling in this year, says The Economist. In Berlin, Ethiopia’s Tigst Assefa set a new fastest time for women (2hr 11min 53sec); in Chicago, Kenya’s Kelvin Kiptum did the same for men (2:00:35). And they’ve got their footwear to thank. Both athletes broke the records wearing so-called “super shoes” – trainers with chunky foam soles that effectively act as springs, giving runners much more oomph when they push off the ground. Nike and Adidas have persuaded World Athletics that these kinetic kicks are legitimate, but critics argue they have become “too dominant”. Eight of the 10 fastest women’s marathon times have been recorded since the start of 2022 – and some think they should be “scrubbed from the records”.

This “technophobia” is misplaced. Sometimes advances have to be reined in: javelins were made less aerodynamic to “save spectators from a spearing”; restrictions were placed on cricket bats “to prevent skewing the game in favour of batters”. But technology has always helped humans improve at sport, and banning super shoes would be regressive. Just look at swimming. When competitors wearing full-body Speedo suits smashed multiple world records at the 2008 Olympics, the authorities swiftly banned the kit. But swimmers found other ways to improve, and today, just one of the women’s world records set in a Speedo suit still stands. The likes of Assefa and Kiptum are astonishing athletes. “We should marvel at their feats, not what’s on their feet.”

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Dorries: exposing a shadowy cabal? Dan Kitwood/Getty

Voldemort, the Wolf and Dr No

“It’s all perfectly simple,” says Christopher Howse in The Daily Telegraph. According to Nadine Dorries’s new book, The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson, the former PM was brought down not by his own calamitous mistakes, but by a shadowy cabal of powerful insiders: “the Dark Lord” (Dominic Cummings), “Voldemort” (Michael Gove), “the Wolf” (Dougie Smith, whoever he is), and “Dr No” (who is never identified). And it’s not just Johnson. “The Movement” has apparently been pulling strings inside the Conservative Party for decades. Dorries, who became a bestselling fiction writer during her 18 years as an MP, says she learned the “full sordid horror” of this dastardly conspiracy from some aptly nicknamed informants: “Moneypenny, Skyfall, Thumper, Bambi, and M”.

The details are quite something, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. We are told that “Dr No” once chopped up a rabbit belonging to his ex-girlfriend’s younger brother and “nailed it to a door”. That an MP had sex with a prostitute on a billiards table “while four other MPs cheered him on”. That Boris and Carrie’s £112,549 Downing Street refurb included painting the dining room wall red to celebrate his Red Wall victories. Much of it is “hilariously mad”, of course. But there’s a good chance bits of it are “horribly true”. And the “mere existence” of this book – by someone who was a cabinet minister only a couple of years ago – is a pretty damning indictment of the “wider political culture”.

The Plot: The Political Assassination of Boris Johnson is available to buy here.

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