View online

23 December, 2023

Leon Neal/Getty

From teenage mum to Labour’s front bench

If Labour win the next general election, says Alastair Campbell on Leading, Angela Rayner will become the most powerful woman in Britain. It will have been a “pretty incredible journey”. Growing up in Stockport, Rayner was just six when she effectively became a carer for her bipolar mother. There were no books in the house, and she left school with no GCSEs. She became a single mum aged 16 and soon afterwards had another baby – born at just 23 weeks, weighing less than a pound – who is disabled. He’s now 15, and “worried sick” about his GCSEs, she says. “But I’ve set the bar low in the family.”

Rayner never aspired to be a politician. As a young mum she worked night shifts as a carer to provide for her children, and joined a union where she quickly rose up the ranks to become a convenor and later an MP. It was “no time at all” before she was on the Labour front benches, where she has been for the past eight years, becoming deputy leader in 2020. But there are still people who think she shouldn’t be there. “I’ve always had to prove myself,” she says. “I’ve had to survive different challenges throughout my life, but they haven’t broken me – they’ve strengthened me.”

DeAgostini/Getty 

Heroes

Chimpanzees, who don’t forget their buddies. Researchers have found that chimps and bonobos can recognise photos of apes they used to live with. “In the most extreme case,” says New Scientist, “a bonobo called Louise seemed to recognise her sister Loretta and nephew Erin after more than 26 years of separation.”

Villain

University Challenge, at least according to education professor Frank Coffield, who thinks the programme’s current format is rigged in favour of Oxbridge colleges because they compete separately rather than as the two universities. But elitism is largely why we watch University Challenge, says Gerard Gilbert in the I newspaper: it’s all about “some of our cleverest young people being posed incredibly difficult questions” that we viewers have no chance with. Two of the world’s best universities being overrepresented makes complete sense. 

Heroes

Driverless cars, which already appear to be safer than human motorists. Analysis by Waymo of its fleet of automated vehicles in Phoenix, Los Angeles and San Francisco found that they were 6.7 times less likely than human drivers to be involved in a crash resulting in an injury, and 2.3 times less likely to be in an accident reported to police. Over a total of “seven-million-plus miles” across the three cities, says The Verge, the cars were involved in only three accidents resulting in minor injuries. 

Steady on, your Royal Highness. Aaron Chown/WPA Pool/Getty

Villain

Prince William, aka “One Pint Willy”, whose abstemiousness is letting down his country (and his famously boozy family). He was given the nickname by the former rugby player Mike Tindall – husband of the prince’s cousin Zara – who revealed on a podcast that William is “not the best of drinkers”. The late Queen, by contrast, was knocking back nightly martinis until the age of 95.

Villains

Busybodies in the town of Weymouth, Dorset, who forced a cafe employing eight people to shut down after three local residents complained about the “smell of bacon” and the noise of spoons and teacups. “This absurd story is modern Britain in microcosm,” says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. “In almost every planning dispute, it seems, the moaners win.” All the discussion around why Britain’s economy won’t grow ignores a simple truth: “We don’t want it to.” 

THE ISLAND HIDEAWAY Inspired by a traditional Scottish longhouse, this modern four-bedroom home in Tokavaig on the Isle of Skye enjoys breathtaking views across the Cuillin mountain range. An open-plan layout connects the modern kitchen and cosy oak-floored living room, while full-height picture windows ensure natural light throughout. A small deck provides the perfect spot for star gazing, with regular views of the Milky Way and the Aurora Borealis. Inverness is around a two-and-a-half-hour drive, with regular rail services and flights to London. £500,000.

The D-Day landings in Saving Private Ryan (1998) 

The great wartime crossword mystery

The D-Day crossword crisis remains the “last unsolved wartime enigma”, says Ben Macintyre in The Times. In the months leading up to the Allied assault, the answers to The Daily Telegraph’s crossword included the codenames for not only all five of the Normandy landing beaches (Sword, Gold, Juno, Utah and Omaha), but also for the naval phase of the onslaught (Neptune), the floating harbours (Mulberry), and even the entire operation (Overlord). “The military establishment went into meltdown.” The codenames were changed, and the paper’s chief crossword compiler Leonard Dawe and his colleague Melville Jones, both schoolteachers, were arrested on espionage charges. But the two men protested their innocence, and MI5 decided to “believe in coincidence”. 

In 1984, one of Dawe’s former pupils claimed he and his classmates had selected the words on their teacher’s behalf, having picked them up from US and Canadian troops preparing for D-Day on a nearby base. But that was “hardly credible” – these were some of the “most closely held secrets of the war”, known to only a handful of officers in the Allied intelligence, not regular GIs. A more likely explanation is that Dawes and Melville learned the words from an “indiscreet” British spy and inserted them into the puzzles as some sort of “ultra-clever insider word joke”. That would explain why MI5 allowed the fiction of coincidence to “take root”, and indeed why the files of the affair still haven’t been declassified – to save face. Sadly, “with all the protagonists gone, the complete solution to this puzzle may never be found”.

Hidalgo: saying non to oversized cars. Chesnot/Getty

The mayor battling the scourge of SUVs

The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has come up with a brilliant new scheme, says Alexander Hurst in The Guardian. She wants to triple parking rates for SUVs in the city centre to €18 an hour, and hike them to €12 an hour everywhere else. The measure, which would affect around 10% of the capital’s cars, is being pitched as a way to tax the rich and encourage people to use public transport. But it would also help address one of the scourges of modern urban life: oversized cars. We have America to blame for these “enormous monstrosities” clogging up our roads. The average weight of a new car in the US has ballooned from 1,550kg in 1980 to 2,000kg today. And as with so much in life, where America leads, Europe follows.

Bigger vehicles are obviously terrible for the environment. If motorists hadn’t shifted to SUVs in such high numbers, “global emissions from the motor industry would have fallen by 30%” over the past 12 years, thanks to the fuel efficiency of modern motors. It’s also a “safety disaster”, both for other drivers and for pedestrians. If you’re in a Mini and get hit by a 3,175kg Dodge Ram, it’ll probably just “drive straight over you”, and many cars are so big now that the driver wouldn’t physically be able to see a child walking in front of them. It’s surely no coincidence that car crash deaths in the US rose by 33% between 2011 and 2021, while pedestrian deaths have climbed by 77% since 2010. There are lots of good trends that have crossed the Atlantic – ideas, music, culture. “This is not one of them.” 

🚚⛔️ At least it looks like Elon Musk’s Tesla Cybertruck won’t be on European roads any time soon. At 3,080kg, it’s so heavy it would require a trucking licence to drive.

British soldiers during the Crimea War: appropriately hirsute. GHI/Universal Images Group/Getty

The British Army is “pondering whether to end a century-long ban on beards for soldiers”, says The Economist. Though traditionalists are up in arms, it was the army which helped to “usher in the Victorian beard craze”. During the mid-1850s Crimean War, soldiers were permitted facial hair on account of the extreme cold weather. The conflict was “the first to be extensively photographed”, and as images of whiskered soldiers were transmitted back to Britain, full beards, out of fashion since Tudor times, “became associated with martial virtues”. This morphed into a requirement, until 1916, for soldiers to have moustaches. “Some regiments maintained a stockpile of artificial ones for those unable to grow their own.”

Enjoying The Knowledge? Click below to share

The Milky Way: a “clustered, textured, shift-shimmer arch of stars”. Dicky Bisinglasi/AFP/Getty

The fading power of darkness

True darkness “does not exist”, says Horatio Clare in The Spectator. Quantum physics has found that light particles – photons – exist “throughout the known universe and beyond it”. But the idea of darkness as an absence of light only goes back to Isaac Newton. Before him, it was generally believed to be a “force or entity, light’s opposite, a thing”. And that “thingness” clings on in our language – “pitch-black” comes from the tar used to waterproof wooden ships, a reminder that dark is “viscous, tangible, impenetrable”.

Medieval Europe worried so much about the power of dark to “conceal ill deeds and erase status” that contracts could only be signed before dusk – “darkness being the realm of the untrustworthy”. But away from the “spreading glare of artificial light” there were “richer and more sinuous relationships with dark”. Irish Gaelic has four distinct terms for the transition of afternoon to nightfall, from idirsholas, “between light”, to amhdhorchacht, meaning “raw, uncooked darkness”, referring to the sky at dusk. Today, darkness is lost to us – the Milky Way, that “clustered, textured, shift-shimmer arch of stars, dense and deep”, is invisible to 80% of the world’s population. “This is sad, if only because to gaze on a span of our galaxy’s 400 billion stars is to feel our true proportion.”

Into the Dark: What Darkness is and Why it Matters by Jacqueline Yallop is available to buy here.

“You can tell a lot about a person by the way he handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights.”

Maya Angelou

That’s it. You’re done.

To find out about advertising and commercial partnerships, click here

Been forwarded this newsletter?

Sign up for free to receive it every day

Unsubscribe from the newsletter