6 December, 2023

In the headlines

Boris Johnson has defended his failure to chair five Cobra meetings on Covid in early 2020, saying the possibility of a pandemic hadn’t yet “broken upon the political world”. Speaking at the Covid inquiry, the former PM also downplayed the importance of WhatsApp messages in which his advisers criticised him, saying if the app had been around during the Thatcher government the messages would have been “pretty fruity” too. Israel is considering plans to flood Hamas’s network of tunnels with seawater, says The Wall Street Journal. According to US officials, the Israeli military has prepared a system of large seawater pumps that could shift “thousands of cubic metres of water per hour”. A series of sculptures featuring crowd control barriers, barbed wire and tattered Union Jack bunting has won this year’s Turner Prize. Judges said Jesse Darling’s exhibition (below) conveyed a “familiar yet delirious world invoking societal breakdown”.

Comment

Israeli armoured vehicles on the Gaza border last month. Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty

Israel should offer Hamas a “clean deal”

As the Israelis push into southern Gaza, says Thomas Friedman in The New York Times, it’s becoming increasingly clear that they have no plan for what comes next. If they’re not careful, they’ll get bogged down in the strip forever. So here’s a “radical alternative” – Israel should call for a permanent ceasefire, and the immediate withdrawal of all its military forces in Gaza. The one condition? That Hamas returns the 130 hostages it has left. There would be no Palestinian prisoners freed in return, and thus no political victories for Hamas. It’d be a “clean deal”: withdrawal for hostages. In a stroke, this would place all the pressure for a ceasefire – and for sparing Gazan civilians more “death and destruction” – on Hamas, not Israel. “Let’s see Hamas reject it and declare that it wants more war.”

Some would complain that Israel wouldn’t achieve its objective of wiping out Hamas. But that goal was always “unattainable”, especially given that the right-wing Israeli government won’t work with the more moderate Palestinian Authority to create an alternative government in Gaza. With Israel out of the Palestinian territory, the humanitarian crisis there would become Hamas’s problem, “as it should be”. The Israeli military would be able to devote its “full attention” to Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. And Israel itself could begin the “important healing” it needs to do at home, starting with the ousting of Benjamin Netanyahu. No, it’s not a perfect plan. But this is the Middle East. “Perfect was never on the menu.”

Architecture

The Royal Institution of British Architects has named as its house of the year a “domestic greenhouse” in Tottenham, north London. The five-bedroom property is modelled on a riad, a type of Moroccan house arranged around a central courtyard, says Dezeen. It has a skylit atrium, sliding polycarbonate screens on the facade, and an expansive roof terrace, with greenery throughout. Materials used include cross-laminated timber walls, which hold 39 tonnes of sequestered carbon, and energy-efficient recycled cork rubber flooring. The chair of the judging panel called it a “true oasis within the city”.

Zeitgeist

The blue badge disabled parking scheme is “no longer fit for purpose”, says Melanie Reid in The Times. In 2019, the eligibility criteria were expanded to include “invisible disabilities”, such as autism, dementia and mental illness. As a result, some 70,000 extra people in England and Wales are now using a scheme that was “already heavily oversubscribed”. This isn’t to denigrate those people. But they’re not in the same category as those of us with severe physical impairments: we need the extra space to get in and out of cars; we need to be as close as possible to the entrance. Not all disabilities are the same, and pretending otherwise “simply isn’t fair”.

Inside politics

Getty

Populism, according to podcaster Rory Stewart, “is all about hair”. Just look at the follicular abundance of Javier Milei and Geert Wilders, two middle-aged men of the radical right who have scored recent election victories in Argentina and the Netherlands respectively. The pioneer was Boris Johnson, says Andrew Anthony in The Observer: his “untameable thatch became a symbol of an independent mindset, of someone who ploughs his own furrow”. Donald Trump’s “super-teased quiff-cum-comb-over” is even more distinctive. Male hair is a classic “signifier of virility and masculinity”: it’s surely no coincidence that America has not voted in a bald president since Dwight Eisenhower in 1956, and that the UK hasn’t had a bald prime minister since Winston Churchill in 1951.

Comment

Matt Smith and Claire Foy in The Crown

Thank goodness The Crown is over

“No one is happier than me that The Crown has come to an end,” says historian Hugo Vickers in Tatler. When I first began “forensically” taking apart its episodes, finding countless factual mistakes, I thought I was “catching the filmmakers out”. What I didn’t realise was that the truth seems to have been “of no interest to them at all. They were only interested in drama.” Even their historical advisor declared at one point that there is “the truth” and there is “the emotional truth” – and they refused, despite extensive criticism, to introduce a disclaimer in each episode saying that we were watching “fictional versions of real-life happenings”.

In particular, the filmmakers “had it in for Prince Philip”. They imply that he sent Charles to his old school, Gordonstoun, despite knowing he would hate it. They depict him refusing to kneel before his wife as part of her coronation. It’s nonsense. “I have studied the 1953 coronation in depth. He was perfectly happy to do his homage. He had been raised as a minor member of the Greek royal family. He knew the rules.” Matters weren’t helped by Matt Smith, who played him, saying on television: “I wouldn’t want to kneel to my wife”. But it all looked so real that people believed it. A “gnarled old tabloid editor” in New York told me that I might as well forget every well-researched royal biography and documentary: “The Crown was now ‘the narrative’”.

On the way back

Flamboyant, 1970s-style puddings are making a return to trendy dinner tables, says The New York Times. Manhattan restaurants are serving up Black Forest gateau with “tutus of Oreo-flavoured buttercream”, towering pink souffles, and Bundt cake filled with “pale chartreuse crumb”. At Gage & Tollner in Brooklyn, the “elaborate, retro” baked Alaska is the most frequently ordered dessert. Since restaurants re-opened after Covid, one pastry chef theorises, diners have been craving “solace in the form of a nostalgic sweet”.

Noted

Mental Floss has compiled a delightful list of “vintage words and phrases related to winter”. If you meggle (a Scots word meaning “to trudge laboriously through mud or snow”) make sure you’re wearing mufflements (Lancashire dialect for warm clothes). Look out for aquabobs (icicles) and snow-bones (the lines of snow left on the roadside after the rest has melted). And if there’s been a hap (an old Yorkshire word for heavy snowfall), you might be able to create a snowball that gets bigger as it rolls down a hill – a hogamadog. See the rest here.

Snapshot

Snapshot answer

It’s The French Bed, a Rembrandt etching so raunchy that Christie’s has put a content warning on it. The sexy sketch is hidden from the auction house’s online catalogue, unless you click a message marked: “This lot contains explicit material and mature subject matter.” It seems the Dutch artist himself got rather carried away when creating the piece – he gave the woman three hands. Bidding starts tomorrow, with an estimate of £250,000 to £400,000; put your offer in here.

Quoted

“I believe that if life gives you lemons, you should make lemonade, and try to find somebody whose life has given them vodka, and have a party.”