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Welcome to The Apprentice 2015 blog: series 11, episode 1

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It’s the 11th instalment of The Apprentice. And aside from a small reshuffle, the format remains reliably, appallingly the same.

WARNING: This blog is for people watching The Apprentice. Contains spoilers!

Bake Off’s over. Wipe away your crème pat tears and forget the concept of gracious, talented TV contestants. For the frenzied violins and coruscating Burton suits of The Apprentice are here to replace it. And it’s the same this year as it always is. Reason enough to join me on my journey of futile incredulity as I bring you this year’s Apprentice episode blog.

Like last year, I’ll provide weekly despairing recaps after each episode airs. But careful if you miss an episode – I might spoil it for you faster than a secret “fish-orientated” sous-chef will a fishcake. See.

Anyway, onwards to episode 1!

There are 18 contestants. That’s 150 per cent of how many disciples Jesus had. A good margin. But they’ll probably only be giving it 110 per cent, as always. Nothing changes in Alan Sugar’s Canary Wharf-shaped mind palace, because – in his words – the bottom line is: this process works”.

Except…

The chair to his left is empty as he welcomes the contestants into the boardroom. The ghost at the feast. Who is replacing Nick Hewer, the tired old sidekick who has been shipped off to a scrapyard in Chigwell to gather dust alongside all the Amstrad CPC 464s?

Enter stage left: an aggrieved boiled egg.

Claude Littner, the aggressive interrogator from the past few years of the interview stages of The Apprentice, will be Sugar’s latest accomplice. And Karren Brady, who Sugar was “honoured to introduce to the House a' Lawds”, is still on board. These unhappy two will be forced for the next 12 weeks to wander around stressful London locations from dawn till dusk, raising their eyebrows to camera.

For the first time ever in the opening Apprentice task, the contestants are split into MIXED teams. At bloody last, eh. The feminist struggle is finally over.

The annual abstract noun shouting game begins as they try to name their teams. But this year, we have an adjective: Versatile! Well done, guys. Even worse, the other team comes up with Connectus, which just sounds like something that would only ever be printed on a free corporate biro. Or a Latin term for a sex act.

The task is to go to Billingsgate fish market at 2am and create fishy lunch products for confused passersby. Of course. So who will navigate their teams through this first labour? Selina, an events agency owner and former podium dancer, leads team Versatile, because “I cook and I’m intolerant to loads of food.” Equally relevant is boutique owner April’s experience to lead team Connectus – she writes a food blog.

Sub-teams called team Calamari and team Fish Finger emerge during the episode, which muddy the proceedings, but at least boast more inspiring names than Connectus.

Each team has to prepare its fish products for lunchtime. Good business is all about confidence, hard work, and fingering seafood, after all. “We’re not squid purveyors . . . I don’t think it’s going to harm us,” says someone, confidently gazing at a tangle of melancholy tentacles.

April’s team misses the lunch hour when trying to flog £9 tuna niçoise salads to city workers who have already eaten. “The footfall here is going to start rapidly decreasing,” one of her team members yelps, in the direst euphemism for “where is everybody?” ever to be uttered.

“I didn’t enter this process in order to sell salad on the street,” sighs Dan, who, it is safe to say, must never have seen an episode of The Apprentice before in his life.

Everything falls apart – all to a majestic Marriage of Figaro soundtrack. The calamari curdles in the sun. There aren’t enough ingredients for the fishcakes – which former Navy man Brett makes “tower-thick”. Sales manager Mergim attempts to sell a tupperware of eight fish fingers for £6 to a vegan restaurant, calling it a “once in a lifetime opportunity”. Which, to be fair, it probably is to a vegan.

Eventually they all crawl back to the boardroom, gills aquiver. Sugar, who is evidently losing interest in this whole charade, informs them: “This was the first task, which has something to do with fish.”

It turns out team Connectus made a profit of £1.87, which, even by Apprentice standards, is terrible – so April brings Dan and Brett back into the boardroom with her to face their fishy fate.

What follows is an epic revelation. Brett – who messed up the fishcakes – had been hiding from his team that he’s actually a professional fish chef. He was a sous-chef in a Plymouth restaurant, which was – in a devastating admission – “fish-orientated”. With intense sincerity, he explains: “I’m a fully qualified, certified catering assistant . . . You have to understand, I was a young adult at the time.” Tell it to the judge, Brett.

“You’ve gone bang bang straight into fishcakes,” responds Sugar, quoting the little-known alternative Nancy Sinatra lyric.

Then the mild-mannered Dan gets fired, presumably because he doesn’t make as good telly as the other two, and our 12-week festival of incompetence is underway.

Candidates to watch:

Ruth

Let’s see how far her “slightly creepy” (according to Karren) sales technique takes her.

Gary

Is that Mark Ronson?

Sam

A posh private tutor and self-professed “wordsmith”. We’re all ears, Sam.

I'll be blogging The Apprentice each week. Click here to follow it. The next episode is tomorrow evening, so check back on Friday morning for the next instalment.

All photos: BBC

Why do players from independent schools increasingly dominate rugby in England?

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National sports teams are drawing from a narrower pool.

After years of preparation, it took just 15 days for England to be knocked out of their own World Cup. Yet the team’s defeats by Wales and Australia reflected something that runs far deeper than a handful of mistakes in the game of rugby: they showed how hard it has become, in sport as elsewhere, for those not among the 7 per cent of the population who attend private schools to reach the top.

Players from independent schools increasingly dominate elite rugby in England. When England won the Rugby World Cup in 2003, only 11 members of the squad had been educated at fee-paying schools. This year, 20 of the squad attended such a school; so did 61 per cent of the English players in the rugby union premiership.

Rugby is “missing out on a wide range of potential players from large parts of the country”, says Andy Reed OBE, the founder and director of Sports Think Tank. “Broadening the base of players and fans would be a real benefit to the game.”

But it’s not only in rugby that former private school pupils are over-represented. Last year a report by Ofsted found that a third of current England sporting internationals had attended independent schools. In both the 2008 and 2012 Olympics, 37 per cent of Team GB’s medals were won by athletes educated at private schools, compared with 26 per cent in 2004.

The England cricket team has become another preserve of the privately educated. Eight of the 11 who played the first Test against the West Indies earlier this year attended independent schools, against just three of the 12 players who won the Ashes a decade ago. In 1987 only one out of 13 players who made the squad against Pakistan hailed from a private, fee-paying school.

Growing up in north London in the 1970s, Phillip DeFreitas learned to play cricket with a tennis ball, an artificial wicket and three concrete nets at Willesden High School.

“It helped me love the game and showed me how much I enjoyed it, which encouraged me to join a club side,” he told me. DeFreitas went on to play 44 Test matches for England, but he fears that this would not have been possible were he growing up today. “I drove by the school recently,” he said. “Those facilities don’t exist any more. It’s a little bit sad, really.”

Under the Conservative governments between 1979 and 1997, more than 10,000 school playing fields were sold off across Britain. A further 200 were sold under Labour between 1997 and 2010. There has been no attempt to replace or reclaim lost fields since.

The dearth of space to play is only part of the problem. Money for physical education and sport for young people has not been ring-fenced. Although the government has set aside £150m for the Primary PE and Sport Premium to help junior schools improve the quality and quantity of sporting activity for pupils, this amounts to only £35 per child. The total is less than the annual £162m awarded to school sport partnerships, which fulfilled a role similar to the Sport Premium until both were abolished in 2010.

Few state schools today have a vibrant sporting culture. Last year, just 13 per cent of head teachers said they expected all students to take part in competitive sport, prompting the chief inspector of schools in England, Michael Wilshaw, to argue that it had become an “optional extra” for many.

The situation outside the school gates does not provide any great encouragement, either. The proportion of people on the lowest incomes taking part in sport has reached its lowest point since Sport England began keeping records a decade ago.

“Sport is becoming less and less accessible,” Andy Reed says. “Social class is now your greatest determinant of access to sports facilities. In lots of deprived communities across the country, facilities have disappeared.”

As local authorities have had their funding from central government cut – the budget for 2016 will be 37 per cent lower in real terms than that for 2010 – they have not given priority to protecting sports facilities. Hire charges are increasing as the quality of free facilities diminishes. Nor does it help that ticket prices are rising and many flagship events are available only on pay TV. Since 2005, all live England cricket matches have been shown exclusively on Sky. After 61 years on the BBC, the Open Championship golf tournament will also be moving to Sky in 2017.

Meanwhile, sport in private schools has been transformed. Coaching and facilities have improved “significantly” in the past 15 years, says David Faulkner, director of sport at the independent Millfield in Somerset. Pupils at the school today enjoy facilities that include a 50-metre pool, a nine-hole golf course and 13 tennis courts. Seventeen former professional sportsmen work as coaches. It’s little wonder that three of England’s World Cup rugby squad, including the captain, Chris Robshaw, attended Millfield. Nearly 50 of the school’s alumni play international sport every year.

Millfield and other schools do offer sports scholarships, but these cannot be expected to change much. Those who get scholarships are often relatively well off – they are “almost self-selecting”, Reed says. Such schemes do nothing for those who develop later in life.

Phillip DeFreitas predicts that the dominance of England’s sports teams by those from private schools will become even more pronounced. He is now a coach at Magdalen College School in Oxford, where parents pay £16,275 a year for children to enjoy his expertise. 

CHRIS LEE – WORLD RUGBY/WORLD RUGBY VIA GETTY IMAGES

I spent three days at a refugee camp. Here's what I learned

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Shabana Mahmood, Labour MP for Birmingham Ladywood, reflects on her recent visit to refugee camps in Greece.

What am I doing here? I asked myself that question a lot during the three days that I spent on the Greek island of Lesvos last week, working with a group of Birmingham based volunteers to provide aid and assistance to refugees as they land on the shores of Europe.

I asked myself that question as I helped pull people off dangerously overfull dinghies; as I tried to block out the screams of a small child terrified by the dangerous boat journey he had just survived; as I found myself knee deep in wet clothes discarded by refugees trying to find anything that could be salvaged; and as I tried to tell a crying mum that we had run out of milk.

It wasn’t how I was intending to spend my conference recess. But at the beginning of September I met with my constituent Tariq Jahan, a man who came to national attention when his son died during the riots of summer 2011. We were meeting to discuss our ongoing campaign for an inquiry into the handling of his son’s case.

Tariq told me he was thinking of taking a convoy of aid out to Greece to help the refugees who are reaching the shores of Europe. He had been out to Syria with a British charity previously and wanted to do something practical to help.

He has a calm zeal that has been forged by personal tragedy that is difficult to ignore or resist – so when he asked if I would consider joining him to help, I agreed without hesitation.

This is my account of what I saw and experienced whilst I was out there. 

Children sweep up in a refugee camp in Greece. Photo: STR/AFP/Getty Images

Pipka Camp

This site used to be a summer camp for children but fell into disuse and disrepair. In 2012 a group of Greek volunteers started to use this as a base for refugees arriving on the island. Recently the Mayor of Lesvos called for the camp to be used once again for the Greek people but has since been persuaded that the work done here by volunteers is too valuable and has agreed to its continuing use as a base for refugees.

The first thing that surprised me when we arrived at Pipka camp was that we could drive straight in. This may sound a bit twee but I was expecting some sort of system or checkpoint, somewhere to register maybe – but no, we parked up and there we found Efi Latsoudis who is one of the lead coordinators of the camp. She gave me a brief tour, showed me the kitchen that they have got up and running again, the huts that are being used by Syrian families and talked me through some of their hopes about building more permanent structures to support those who make it to Pipka.

It’s a smaller camp, so things feel pretty ordered, and calm. It’s clean and there is no debris lying around. The refugees here breathe a bit more easily, there is time to reflect, time to grieve.

We meet an 11-year-old boy, Osama, who is alone – his terrified parents got him out of Isil controlled Raqqa, but he made the perilous journey on his own. To say I am shocked is an understatement. What must have gone through his parents minds when they did that – what kind of desperation makes a parent send their child to trek and sail across continents alone, for his safety.

There are too many horrific stories of deaths on the waters between Greece and Turkey. And Efi and the volunteers are upset that the Greek systems for processing deaths are applied to refugees in a way that fails to recognise their unique circumstances at a time when they are too traumatised to understand what is happening.

Whilst we are there, a van arrives full of tins of food and bottled water – a British group from Oldham have paid for food aid to help people at Pipka and are dropping it off. A good natured discussion about whose accent is better - Brummie, clearly - bemuses the other volunteers, but the Aussie volunteer cook soon restores order.

A young boy grabs a razor wire topped fence as the Greek prime minister visits a refugee and migrant registration camp in Mytilene, on the Greek island of Lesbos, on October 6, 2015. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Moria Camp

If Pipka was calm, clean and ordered, Moria camp is anything but. A former military base, it has received up to 2000 refugees in a day – and Save the Children who provide food once a day at 4pm for everyone on the camp (both on the Syrian and non-Syrian side) cater for up to 8000 people. It is staggering to see the numbers of people here. Conditions are difficult but everyone keeps telling me things are much better than they were a week or so ago. Apparently there are always marked improvements whenever a dignitary visits – the UNHCR High Commissioner is reported to be visiting and by Day Two of our visit there is a new UNHCR tent facility in the camp providing shelter. (I think it’s fair to say there is a healthy amount of cynicism from volunteers on the ground about the UNHCR.)

Save the Children try to co-ordinate the food drops to make sure the different volunteer groups hand out parcels at different times to them; it doesn't always work. Our morning drop was delayed by three hours because the entrance to the camp was blocked by a police van put there to protect the “foreign dignitaries” from the camp's residents.  You have to be quite tough to ration out limited resources amongst desperately needy people – I could manage it just about on a temporary three day basis, but I take my hat off to the volunteers who do this day in day out. 

The worst thing about Moria camp is that it is split into two parts – one for Syrians and the other for non-Syrians. The Syrian side is relatively well looked after – but the non-Syrian side is appalling. A long line of mostly young men, primarily from Iraq and Afghanistan queue for registration. There is no sanitation, a few makeshift tents for families. If you lose your place in the queue you are totally screwed, so they barely move. Registration is often halted as camp authorities, such as they are, struggle to cope. The man who was at the head of the queue when I visited on day one had been there for 11 hours, when I was back there the following day 12 hours later, he was still there. No food no water in all that time. I cannot believe it is possible to have such differential treatment; even here there are two classes: Syrian and everyone else. But those who have fled Iraq and Afghanistan are no less terrified than the Syrians. Jeanne from Save the Children is practically in tears as she tells me how she is struggling to draw attention to the non-Syrian part of the camp.

I feel sick that almost no-one is very interested in that part of the camp.

I feel sick that a separate part of the camp even exists

A migrant woman finds shelter under a tarpaulin with the lettering UNHCR (the UN refugee agency) at the camp site of refugees and migrants who spend the night on the street after their arrival at the Greek island of Lesbos after crossing the Aegean sea from Turkey on October 4, 2015. Photo: AFP/Getty Images

Sikiminia

By far and away the most emotional part of my three day journey was the time spent on Skala Sikiminia. This is in the north of Lesvos, and is one of the points where many of the boats and dinghies crossing from Turkey land. Sometimes the boats arrive during the day, but often at nightfall – the patterns are difficult to predict and depend on how the smugglers are feeling more than anything else. Volunteers here have seen boats capsize, and witnessed deaths at sea. Thankfully every boat we saw landed safely – but it is a perilous journey.

You have to be resilient to volunteer here. Here the screams of the children are loudest; the exhaustion acute; the mixture of fear and hope at its most overwhelming. Here you are only ever moments away from seeing someone die.

There is no welcome here for the refugees from the “civilised” bureaucracy of the EU. But there is a welcome from the best of human civilisation exhibited by the volunteers from all over the world who are working here. When the refugees are pulled ashore, volunteer medics provide immediate medical assistance to anyone who needs it. Clothes donated from all over the world are kept near two tents – one for men and one for women and children; where refugees can take off their soaking wet clothes and change into something dry.

A man called Osama from Homs has been taken ill as he came off the boat; he needs some dry trousers – and there aren’t any to be found. I rummaged through literally every item of clothing in that tent and practically cried tears of joy when after 50 minutes of searching I found some trousers that would do the job. After that I spent most of my time cleaning up and organising this area – after a boat has come in it gets muddy and wet, and there is a shortage of clothes.

Further along the shore, there is another tent where refugees receive hot tea and food. The volunteers on this section have been on their feet all day because there has been a steady stream of arrivals – more than 30 boats have come in on one day. Lighthouse, a group who are Greek-led co-ordinate all volunteer activity on the beach from here.

Any volunteer with a car is asked to drive groups of refugees to the make shift camp/bus station about a mile up the road from the shore. Here the refuges can have a very long wait for busses to take them to Moria or one of the other camps; its either that or walk for a day or two. On my second night, there were 400 refugees waiting here, the temperature had plummeted and it was dark. A local Greek man had made some soup and was handing it out but it wasn’t enough, so a volunteer called Rayyan was making another pot, in the dark. His only source of light? Me, holding a torch.

A child stands in a temporary migrants' camp near the town of Mytilene on the island of Lesbos on June 18, 2015. Photo:AFP/Getty Images

Two things were said to me during my three day trip which go round and round in my head as I reflect on what I have seen and experienced.

Firstly; when I met the Mayor of Lesvos he told me that at the height of the crisis one of his constituents said to him “Mr Mayor, I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes right now”. The constituent was referring to the fact no doubt that this small island of population circa 85,000 has welcomed over 200,000 refugees since the beginning of the year. The Mayor pointed to a refugee and responded “And I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes”. Everything I have seen at Sikiminia, Moria and Pipka tells me I wouldn’t want to be in any of their shoes – not those of the Mayor nor the refugees.

We might not be standing directly in their shoes but we have a moral duty to act. When the refugees make it to the shores of Lesvos they are not just on Greece’s doorstep but our doorstep too.

I welcome the government’s policy proposals to help refugees directly from the camps, who have not made the dangerous journey to Europe. But we cannot simply ignore the crisis in Europe, either.

It is not an either/or situation – we must have a strategy and a willingness to help both refugees in the region and those who have made it to Europe.

When the Home Secretary says that it is only the fittest or the wealthiest that have made the journey to Europe, she is not entirely wrong, but she does entirely miss the point.

Their desperation is not lessened because they have a degree or because they had a good job before war and chaos descended.

Fear of death doesn’t diminish because of the money you used to have or the standard of the house you used to live in.

It is a false distinction and we mustn’t fall for it.

The weather is getting colder; those who move on from Greece are walking. Unless there is coordinated action across Europe it won’t be long before we see pictures of refugees who have died from the cold on our TV screens. That is why I believe the government should go beyond its current commitment and agree to resettle at least 10,000 refugees over the next year. And the number of 20,000 over five years currently agreed to by the government is clearly inadequate – we need to be willing to at least double that, if not more.

And it's not just on the total numbers that we need to go further. We have to work with our European partners and create new, safe, and legal routes for refugees to get to Europe. We cannot abandon them to their fate, left as prey for smugglers whilst risking death on the seas. Maybe we can make ourselves feel better by saying no-one is making them get on the boats. And again, the Home Secretary is not entirely wrong when she says that we have to be mindful of push and pull factors. But she does again entirely miss the point. Because the push factor is either death or the slow torture of a temporary life in a camp which amounts to no kind of life at all. If that is what they face then they are going to run. We cannot kid ourselves that they have choices; we have to act.

And secondly; I asked Hussain from Iraq who landed on the shores of Europe at Sikiminia through an interpreter why he left Iraq. It was noisy and the interpreter only caught a bit of what he said: “chaos, all over, a time of chaos”.

It does feel as though an age of chaos has descended. Crises everywhere, millions on the move, nuclear-armed world powers on different sides… and in the midst of the chaos ordinary people are running. You would run. I would run. They are running. We must do our part to help them. 

Photo: Getty Images

The Returning Officer: Winchester

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Robert Geoffrey Ellis was Tory MP for Wakefield (1922-23 and 1924-29) and Sheffield Ecclesall (1935-45). In between, he was MP for Winchester (1931-35). His Labour opponent was Dr R A Lyster, who qualified at London University in 1890 and was later appointed as medical officer for Hampshire. In 1913, Lyster noted that clogs had “been adopted in place of boots in many parts of Hampshire with satisfactory results”.

Lyster resigned his post in 1929 to fight the constituency and contested Preston in 1935; he was selected for the Isle of Wight in anticipation of the 1940 general election. In 1943, he protested that Bournemouth council was removing tram rails for the war effort when there was other metal “just lying around”.

The new air strikes on Syria will compel even more angry young men to join the jihad

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Jihadists have long operated in the Caucasus and they have been re-energised by the Syrian conflict.

When Russian warplanes began bombing in Syria, they achieved only one thing: more chaos in an already crazed conflict. For all the talk of “fighting terrorism”, the Kremlin’s efforts have so far focused on protecting and consolidating President Bashar al-Assad’s control over north-western Syria, where he has lost ground in recent months. This is the crucial subtext to Russian involvement. Earlier this year a coalition of jihadist groups came together to form Jaish al-Fatah (Army of Conquest), which secured a number of quick victories across Idlib province. This coalition united a number of disparate groups, including Jabhat al-Nusra (which is aligned to al-Qaeda), Ahrar al-Sham and Faylaq al-Sham (which is heavily influenced by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood). The capture of strategic towns such as Jisr al-Shughur threatened to weaken Assad’s control over the port cities of Lata­kia and Tartus, both of which are Alawite strongholds from where his support principally derives. Much of the Russian bombing is therefore aimed at reducing this pressure.

Herein lies the critical distinction between western and Russian bombing raids in Syria. With Putin’s decision to attack the full spectrum of oppositionists arrayed against Assad, Russia will face a broader and more sustained backlash from jihadists, which could prove difficult to contain.

Jihadists have long operated in the Caucasus and they have been re-energised by the Syrian conflict. Not only have scores of fighters migrated to Syria to fight alongside both Islamic State (aka Isis) and al-Qaeda, but those who have stayed behind now have renewed impetus for their cause.

A video released by Islamic State last week urged would-be fighters in Russia to join its Wilayat al-Qawqaz (Caucasus province) and fight there. According to a statement
attributed to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, there is no need for them to migrate to Syria.

The Russian campaign in Syria will also suffer from the romanticism of jihadi narratives about superpower weakness. After all, it was during the Afghan-Soviet war in the 1980s that the phenomenon of Sunni foreign fighter mobilisation was born.

Some of the global jihad movement’s most important figures made their names there, including Abdullah Azzam, who led the so-called Arab Afghan contingent. His works and legacy are relevant to jihadists today. Osama Bin Laden also established himself as a respected fighter in Afghanistan, rising to prominence after leading his men to an unlikely victory during the Battle of Jaji in 1987.

Whereas the west has limited itself overwhelmingly to Islamic State targets, the Russians are going after all anti-Assad groups. This risks bringing together previously disparate groups into a more unitary force. Indeed, Jabhat al-Nusra and Ahrar al-Sham have already announced that they will unify their commands in order to fight the Russians more effectively.

Other groups are being spurred into action, too. “The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria strongly condemns the ugly Russian invasion,” reads a statement from the group. “Self-defence is legitimate and obligated on all Syrians who are capable of it. The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria is ready to put all our efforts into defending the country and saving it from its enemies.”

It is not just Syrian Islamists who are riled by recent developments. A group of 55 scholars – the vast majority of them Saudi – wrote an open letter in response to the Russian air strikes. Although it is carefully worded (it makes no explicit call for jihad), the unmistakable corollary is that jihad against the Russians is now obligatory.

“Religious scholars have to be honest and emphasise that this is a war on Islam,” it reads. “People have to offer the Syrians material and moral support.”

The notion of a “war on Islam” has been a constant feature of both Islamist and jihadist interpretations of the international system for the past 15 years. Russian involvement in Syria has merely strengthened the idea that those who join jihadist groups “are defending the entire umma [world Islamic community]”. Not only are the Russians “ultra-crusaders” fighting with the blessing of the Orthodox Church, they are also allying with insidious Iranians to destroy Islam from within. This is a constant fear of Sunni millenarians in the Syrian context.

Consequently, the Iranians are pejoratively referred to as rafida, a sectarian colloquialism meaning “rejecters”, because Shias do not accept some of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions as his successors in the caliphate. The letter consequently calls on Arab states to suspend all diplomatic relations with Russia and Iran.

The “Saudi” letter shares the view of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, arguing that Russia’s entry into the conflict is a sign of Assad’s weakness. “God has defeated the security of the [Assad] regime, its ­shabiha [a militia loyal to Assad], and then its army, and then the Iraqi, Iranian, Afghan and other rafida groups, and through you he has defeated Hizb al-Shaytan [the Party of Satan – a reference to Hezbollah, whose name means Party of God],” it reads. “And God – the Exalted – is also capable of defeating Russia.” This type of rhetoric will have far-reaching consequences, not least because Saudis are already among the largest contingent of foreign fighters in Syria. Many of their scholars have broad appeal, often reaching far beyond the kingdom’s borders.

Although the Kremlin is making ostensibly responsible statements about a limited campaign in Syria, history counsels against this. Expect yet another wave of angry young men from the Gulf, North Africa and beyond to make their way to Syria soon.

Shiraz Maher is a contributing writer for the New Statesman and a senior research fellow at the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation, King’s College London

Gokhan Sahin/Getty Images

Commons Confidential: George’s Monkeys moment

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I do trust a reporter will invite Sir George to recite the lyrics of Sufjan Stevens songs such as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or “Oh God, Where Are You Now?”.

Regal airs and graces from George Osborne. The trustafarian son of a baronet and presumptive heir to Cameron’s Tory crown is irritating the media by behaving as though he was born to rule without scrutiny.

Broadcasters mutter that the Anointed One’s rapidly expanding entourage complains noisily if TV crews lie in wait to ask questions without prior permission. Sir George prefers the friendlier approach of the Mail on Sunday editor, Geordie Greig, who played Boswell to the Chancellor’s Dr Johnson on a recent trip to China and informed us that Osborne is a fan of the trendy folk musician Sufjan Stevens.

In one of those spooky coincidences, the aforementioned performer is a favourite of Osborne’s new spin doctor, James Chapman, formerly of the Daily Mail. I do trust a reporter will invite Sir George to recite the lyrics of Sufjan songs such as “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” or “Oh God, Where Are You Now?” to prove it’s true. Or it could be an embarrassing Arctic Monkeys moment.

What of the austerity charter changer John McDonnell, Osborne’s Labour shadow? National newspapers and the Tory party (a Venn diagram would reveal a disturbingly large overlap) are combing his back catalogue. McDonnell’s first wife was tracked down by a Daily Mail hack who offered a large wad of cash to entice her into rubbishing her ex-husband. Loyally, she refused to say a bad word about him. According to McDonnellites, the lady’s new hubby moaned: “But we could’ve afforded a cruise.” McDonnell must be the first shadow cabinet member not sold down the river.

The launch of the Britain Stronger In Europe campaign at the Old Truman Brewery in Brick Lane, London, was underwhelming. I’m told its frontman, the former knicker salesman Lord Sir Stuart Rose, was “terse” behind the scenes and didn’t want to answer questions. The organiser required Lord Underwear to be interviewed by the BBC, ITN and Sky News before his speech, but Channels 4 and 5 were mightily miffed to be excluded. The preciousness of Wilting Rose will irritate pro-Europeans.

Boris Johnson showed what he thought of Cameron’s all-our-tomorrows conference speech by singing “Bright Eyes”, the schmaltzy theme tune of the rabbit movie Watership Down. He has a nice voice, says a witness. His own leadership bid? “Is it a kind of dream, floating out on the tide?”

The flunkey spied holding an umbrella over Liz Truss, the Environment Secretary, when it wasn’t raining, has one of the least enviable jobs in politics. She’s very particular about her hair, apparently. Does she demand puddles be drained so her Hunters don’t get muddy on farm visits?

Kevin Maguire is the associate editor (politics) of the Daily Mirror

Getty

Why Nasa is right to give up on searching for life on Mars

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“Is there life on Mars?” seemed like an epoch-defining question.

Is finding life on Mars all that important? Nasa doesn’t seem to think so and it might have a point. We have now seen signs of flowing water on the Red Planet. The claims, first published in the journal Nature Geoscience, are based on interpretations of the light reflected on the planet’s surface. It’s a smart piece of detective work that has heightened enthusiasm for a quest to find life on Martian soil. Unfortunately for the excited, Nasa refuses to sanction such a mission.

Our obsession with the idea began in the 1970s. In the first half of the decade, space agencies launched 11 Mars missions, most of which were failures. The “curse of Mars” provided a mythology but no answers. Nasa successfully landed its two Viking probes on the planet in the mid-1970s. One of them even looked for life and found a suggestion of microbes living in the soil. The discovery was declared void, however, after an accompanying experiment failed to find carbon-based “organic” molecules. Without organics in the soil, it was thought, life couldn’t exist. The results must have been an error.

That second experiment has since been declared faulty. We have found organic matter on Mars. Some might argue that it is worth repeating the life-detection experiment but science has moved on. In the 1970s, “Is there life on Mars?” seemed like an epoch-defining question. Given that we now know that organic molecules have assembled into microbes in some of the most extreme environments on earth, it doesn’t seem unlikely that the same has happened on Mars. The planet does, after all, appear to have the materials and conditions that this needs.

It’s not even a stretch to imagine that simple, single-celled life is scattered through the galaxy. There is plausible evidence that life on earth was seeded by microbes ejected from the Martian surface as a result of a meteor shower. If this “panspermia” theory is right, we are all Martians.

Meanwhile, we would have to rule out contamination by the various spacecraft that we have sent up there if we want to claim that Mars is truly home to life. This would take a lot of effort for relatively little gain. Science has moved on.

These days, the intriguing issue is not whether there is life elsewhere but what it takes to make complex, multicellular life. In his book Lucky Planet, David Waltham, a geophysicist at Royal Holloway, University of London, argues that it requires a complex set of conditions that may have arisen only once in the observable universe – here, on earth. The biologist Nick Lane of University College London, the author of The Vital Question, has demonstrated that the transition from simple to complex life was almost certainly a fluke.

Doing geology and biological archaeology on Mars presents a fascinating technological challenge that will give us useful skills and experience – but it will tell us almost nothing about the validity of these more compelling ideas. It is a mistake to fixate on questions that are no longer pressing.

We have a new big question for the 21st century. Earth is populated by a vast array of multicellular organisms, some of which have evolved so far that they have intelligence and consciousness enough to contemplate their origins. How did this happen? Here’s a thought for governments ruminating on science budgets. Our best chance of a profound discovery is relatively cheap: well-trained, well-funded scientists working on basic science in well-equipped labs. It’s not rocket science.

ESA/Getty Images News

Reclusive novelist Dominic Cooper: what do writers do when the words no longer come?

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In 2013, a local paper reported on a strange script chiselled into a stone that had baffled not only historians but US code-breakers for decades. The mystery was solved when Cooper stepped forward and said that he was the secret poet.

Down a narrow track on the Ardnamurchan Peninsula, in the westernmost part of the British mainland, you’ll find the writer Dominic Cooper in his Norwegian-style log house. He built it himself three decades ago, 300 feet up, perched above the sea. Looking north, one can see 60 miles up the coast to the Outer Hebrides. The nearest town is a two-hour drive away. There are no neighbours visible.

“Nobody can see me, either,” Cooper says, laughing. “All I see at night are the little lights of the houses on the islands. When the sun comes out, the wood creaks and pops like a boat. For me, this place has a feeling of peace . . . apart from when I get a force-ten [gale] in February, of course.”

Now 71, Cooper published four novels between 1975 and 1987, the first of which, The Dead ofWinter, won the Somerset Maugham Award alongside Ian McEwan’s debut, First Love, Last Rites. All could be considered forgotten classics of contemporary literature.

Cooper came to writing after being thrown out of Oxford in the 1960s. He worked first for the classical music department of Decca Records and then as a teacher in Iceland. “I planned on becoming an Icelander,” he says. “I was going to change my name to Dominic Martinsson. God, the naivety.”

His second novel, Sunrise (1977), tells the story of the forest worker Murdo Munro’s escape into the wild after burning down his family home. Like The Dead ofWinter, it is a novel of pursuit but, unlike John Buchan’s Thirty-Nine Steps or Geoffrey Household’s Rogue Male, which it resembles superficially, Sunrise favours poetry and landscape over plot.

The only reason he hasn’t been hailed as a figurehead of the renaissance in nature writing over the past few years is that he exists so far below the radar (a contact at his former publisher Faber & Faber confessed that he hadn’t heard of Cooper). Perhaps this is because he simply walked away from writing. “Actually, writing walked away from me,” he says. “After my last novel, The Horn Fellow in 1987, which I wrote over two intense and wonderful years up a mountain, I ran out of words. The capacity for words is still there but I’ve lost the track.”

This raises the question: what do writers do when the words no longer come? “Early on, I realised to make a living was near-impossible,” Cooper says. “I trained as a clock- and watch-mender so that I’d always have an income. The idea that it was easier for writers back then is basic sweet bollocks. It’s always been precarious being a ‘serious’ writer. Some contemporaries, like McEwan, became extremely successful but I accepted I was to be the poor cousin. Would I want to be him? No. I’ve never done a single thing specifically for money. I’ve done precisely what I wanted in life. When I sold a film option for £25,000, I worked at giving it all away.”

But the writing didn’t stop. In 2013, a local paper reported on a strange script chiselled into a stone that had baffled not only historians but US code-breakers for decades. One theory suggested that it had been crafted by commandos during the Second World War. The mystery was solved when Cooper stepped forward and said that he was the secret poet. The five-line script, written in Icelandic in 1986, was a tribute to his recently deceased father, translated again using the Elder Futhark: the runic alphabet favoured by Vikings and ancient Saxons.

“Of course I chose bloody granite, didn’t I?” he says. “Five strikes and your chisel is blunt again. It took ages.” One way or the other, Cooper’s magnificent writing will endure. His reclusive commitment is that of a true and pure British poet.

Sunrise” will be reissued by Thirsty Books on 9 October

COURTESY OF DOMINIC COOPER

How inequality became the defining issue of the 2016 US presidential campaign

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Economic and social inequality is rising, threatening to eclipse even the levels of division seen in the “gilded age” of the 1920s.

“I’s the time of year,” the economist Robert Reich wrote on social media as he watched Goldman Sachs recruiters working at the table next to him at a hotel near Harvard Square, “when Wall Street treks to Cambridge [Massachusetts] to lure bright young things with the promise of big bucks, cachet and power.” For a university that demands so much ambition and imagination in its admissions essays – and particularly when you consider the number of applicants who write about wanting to change the world, often through public service – it is remarkable how many students succumb. There are several explanations but Bob Dylan said it best: “Money doesn’t talk. It swears.”

Reich would agree. He was in town to talk about his new book, Saving Capitalism, in which he seeks to counter the “sense of powerlessness, anger and frustration” people feel with a system that appears broken and out of control. The stream of money into US politics has become a flood, catalysed by the 2010 Citizens Unite v Federal Election Commission ruling that allowed corporations unlimited political spending in the name of free speech.

Economic and social inequality is rising, threatening to eclipse even the levels of division seen in the “gilded age” of the 1920s. And trust in the willingness of politicians and government to intervene, undermined by their apparent capture by moneyed interests, has never been lower. A woman in Reich’s audience said: “It just seems like it’s too late . . . Is there any hope?”

If there is hope, it is that the issue of economic inequality has moved to the heart of the ongoing presidential election debate. On the Democratic side, Bernie Sanders has done a lot to take it there. Coming from the very left of the party (he is registered as an independent in the Senate), his message of political revolution has gained a devout following.

As he told the Democratic convention in New Hampshire on 19 September: “What looked like a fringe campaign is now seen as a campaign that is standing up for working Americans and is prepared to take on the billionaire class.”

When Hillary Clinton spoke at the same event, she did not repeat Sanders’s claim that the system is so “corrupt . . . [that] we are not talking about democracy, we are talking about oligarchy”. Yet she did make economic inequality the cornerstone of her message, echoing her declaration in recent campaign adverts that: “The deck is stacked in favour of those at the top.”

To Reich, sidelined as labour secretary during Bill Clinton’s administration for supporting greater public investment and a focus on reducing inequality, it is a sign of changing times. “Her husband would never have said that,” he claimed.

In part, Hillary Clinton’s move is intended to close the ground on Sanders. In part, it is designed to shut the door on Joe Biden, whose blue-collar credentials will be crucial if he is to make a late entry to the race. Yet it also taps into a historical moment. Hearing her speech in New Hampshire felt like watching the defining economic lines of the next generation being drawn: a raise for middle-class families, rewards for success that don’t just go to those at the top, a share in the profits for those who produced them and overhauling a system in which “the top 25 hedge-fund managers earn more than all the kindergarten teachers in America combined”.

It is not only on the Democratic side that inequality will be a crucial issue. An important dynamic of the Republican debate will be, as Greg Sargent put it in the Washington Post, “the need to offer solutions to inequality while vowing to roll back Obama’s efforts [and particularly the Affordable Care Act] to redistribute resources downward”. So far, the dominant Republican policies remain variations on the vice-presidential candidate Paul Ryan’s 2012 platform of tax cuts in the name of reducing dependency and unleashing growth, but there is an anger growing among voters that demands deeper reforms.

With that anger comes unpredictability. In the UK, few predicted Jeremy Corbyn’s surge. In the US, nobody anticipated the rise of Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump. Perhaps nothing can or will be done about widening inequality but it feels that a change is coming. As Reich concluded at Harvard: “If you give up on politics, you give up on democracy. And if we give up on democracy, we allow the moneyed interests, the special interests, to have it all. We give up on any hope for change. So it is our obligation to fight.”

George Kynaston, an Obama 2012 campaign alumnus, is studying at the John F Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University

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Something to live for – a new fridge will be delivered today, some time between nine and six

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The fridge has become, literally, unhinged. What now?

So, last night the fridge door fell off. It was nearly bedtime and I was in my room when I heard it happen: a crash that went right through the Hovel. I thought of going downstairs to see what had happened but then decided that someone else was responsible for it, whatever it was. I have got to that stage of life when if I hear something big falling down I decide that it is because an unstable equilibrium has been resolved, and I say to myself: “It had it coming.”

So I cowered in my room and went back to my book. It was another resident of the Hovel who had set the disaster in motion by rashly opening the fridge door. To be fair to it, this door had been exhibiting mounting signs of distress over the previous few weeks, and had lately been reduced to leaning on the freezer door beneath it, in a fashion the freezer door clearly resented, for now it was being forced ajar and the ice that was building up because of this was shoving it ajar even more. And what did I do about this? Nothing: for about the only secure good that arises from living in a house you do not own yourself is that you don’t have to worry about these things.

Now, as we await the delivery of a replacement, the fridge door rests fully on the door of the freezer. The fridge has become, literally, unhinged.

I know a good metaphor when I see one, but this is almost too corny. Sometimes it is very hard indeed not to start thinking that the narrative of one’s life is reaching some kind of catastrophic conclusion, like in an early Polanski film – Repulsion, say, or The Tenant– in which the pressures of solitude drive the heroine or lead character insane. Or are they pressures? Is it perhaps the very absence of the pressures of human obligation that is the problem? Like astronauts freed from gravity, whose bones thin and whose blood doesn’t know where to go, the solitary have to perform artificial exercises so that they can function normally. And without the embrace of another’s orbit, the soul, unless it is careful, starts cartwheeling off into the void. Something must be done, it occurs to you, when you realise you have become too unsocialised, too incapable, beyond even normal inertia, of investigating an enormous crash in your own dwelling.

To this end, I have invited people to the Hovel, to arrive on two consecutive evenings, which is two more than I have managed in the past six months. And of course, as luck would dictate, the fridge decides to lose its shit the day before I do any cooking. Worse things happen at sea, I suppose, and as I keep reminding my children, we are not put into this world for pleasure alone.

But while I dodged anything to do with the initial event, I still have to address some of the consequences, and this means, basically, sorting out what is still inside the fridge. There will be people to take the old hulk away and replace it with a new one tomorrow, some time (anyone’s guess, really) between nine and six. Before then things have to be removed, and I also fancy the removers will not be happy with the extravagant, baroque formations that have accumulated in the run-up to the final crisis.

****

We now cut (cheap, shimmery visual effect, represented by the four stars above) to the next day. I have awakened, and we are understanding the word “awakened” in its loosest possible sense, to the ringing of the doorbell and the knowledge that I am not horribly hungover, but horribly ill. Well, there have been iller people, but this is basically a stinker of a cold, the kind, I realise with a sensation that sinks me, which will leave the body incapable of cooking for people that evening, and maybe the next. I wail for my housemate to answer the door, and lo, it is the fridge-bearers. I hear them clumping and cursing up the stairs with their heavy burden.

When I finally haul my carcass down to the kitchen, I see something as astonishing as the monolith the proto-hominids saw in the first bit of 2001, with the subtle difference that this is not an enigmatically chic slab of polished black stone, but a fridge very obviously still encased in its packaging, amid the wreck of a kitchen. I foresee, correctly, about an hour’s work unpacking and installing this thing, yet I am in no fit state to do anything. I would need a cup of tea at the very least, yet the kettle is out of reach. And so, like Kubrick’s ape, I feel like going berserk with a bone. 

DAMIEN MEYER/AFP/Getty Images

No renaissance for Mr Healey

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A reflection on Denis Healey (1917 - 2015) in this piece from the NS archive from 1981.

Nothing could be more brutally plain than that Denis Healey, one of the Labour movement’s principal chieftains, is an object of hostility, even of hatred, for many of that movement’s members.

By Labour standards, Healey gets a mighty affectionate press. The label of “Renaissance man” is applied without consciousness of hyperbole. The standard profile describes him as unquenchably diligent: as gifted beyond all contemporaries in the absorption of technical detail, but as capable nonetheless of strategic perception.

Who else debates so fluently with foreign statesmen in their own languages, or turns so easily from industrial minutiae to the discussion of music, painting, or literature? Who else so well combines a Balliol First with the common touch of Yorkshire? Usually, the only fault advertised is a rough, tough over-confidence: a brash assertiveness about the product of his own excellent intellect, which emerges in office as a penchant for the brow-beating of civil servants. The virtues are authentic. It is the “fault” which is phoney.

Healey’s failure as Chancellor, with which Labour remains hag-ridden, occurred because the bravura mask concealed a deadly lack of self-assurance. He could not out-face the civil servants, however compelling intellectually the evidence of their unwisdom. He may have brow-beaten them, but only as a preliminary to accepting the seductive comfort of their advice.

The great panic of 1976, when Labour abandoned a decisive part of its social programme, was as usual the climactic moment in a process of deterioration. Months beforehand, the pound was weakening, and indications were that without support it might fall to the alarming level of $1.50 . . . The Treasury claimed it was impossible to raise $10 billion for the reserves. But they also said that $3 billion for exchange-support was impossible . . . Britain stumbled onwards to the crisis when the pound “nearly died” – and Healey lined up with the Treasury – under the melodramatic and highly simplistic threat that the IMF’s Enforcers would otherwise bankrupt Britain like a High Street dress shop.

Healey’s enemies see here the skilful class-traitor. His friends see the tragedy of a man armed everywhere with gifts – except the crucial intuition which reveals itself when every scrap of political credit must be risked on a challenge to the conventional wisdom. The price of retaining office was Labour’s adoption of interests which the Tories exist to defend. The consequences for Toryism weren’t salubrious, but that’s another story. For Labour, given the existing disaffection of the “bed-sitter radicals”, and the dilapidation of the whole movement’s democratic equipment, schism became an almost inevitable process.

Neither Denis Healey, Tony Benn nor any of their colleagues will admit that the price might have been excessive (though Benn stoutly refuses to pay his share of the bill). For various reasons, they all believe office must never be surrendered.

Healey is not the simple-minded reactionary of left-wing caricature – how many of those who heckle him, for instance, realise that he is opposed to Cruise missiles in Britain? But his conception of politics scarcely extends beyond the wearing-down of opposition, tempered by the occasional touch of what his best friends call “thuggery”. Like an administrator, he believes that
there is only one correct path which is the one recommending itself to him. Sooner or later, the “silly billies” will achieve wisdom: if it looks like being too much later, they may have to be hustled.

His own firm belief is that no government can think. At its best, it can only implement a previously devised plan, and nothing could be more foreign to his thought than that planning is only the precondition for the creative improvisation that must be called forth by stress. To Healey, a government taking office and a student leaving university are alike in having acquired their essential stock of knowledge, which then requires merely to be applied, with more or less success. It would be difficult to think of a more conservative conception – in the non-political sense – or, come to that, of one further from the idea of “Renaissance man”.

Obviously, to some Labour enthusiasts, any evidence of failure by Healey is source for rejoicing. But there is little advantage in it for Labour’s overall cause, for he retains a solid position among a large number of Labour’s voters: something just as necessary to the party as the activist enthusiasm which Tony Benn commands.

Fairly or not, Healey bears the chief responsibility for Labour’s disastrous change-of-path in 1976. Indeed, some large part of his public standing probably derives from the fact that, for all his disputatious skills, he hasn’t really tried to shuffle that responsibility off. It is the kind of broad point which political enthusiasts may overlook in their concern with the intricacies of praise and blame.

Whatever the leader-writers may say, Labour will never succeed as the party of radical change so long as its leadership is dominated by Denis Healey. But a major problem for the party, and one which could yet be too much for its democratic skills, is to eliminate his claim to command without, in the process, destroying its own legitimacy.

Two days after this piece was published, Denis Healey defeated Tony Benn’s challenge for the Labour deputy leadership by 50.4 per cent of the vote to Benn’s 49.6 per cent

Joseph Conrad and the lure of solitude

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The sceptical doubt that infuses Conrad’s work – particularly his last great novel, Victory – has to do with the human world, which he believed was moved by illusions.

 

“It was the very essence of his life to be a solitary achievement, accomplished not by hermit-like withdrawal with its silence and immobility, but by a system of restless wandering, by the detachment of an impermanent dweller amongst changing scenes. In this scheme he had perceived the means of passing through life without suffering and almost without a single care in the world – invulnerable because elusive.”

This is how the unnamed narrator describes Axel Heyst, the central protagonist of Joseph Conrad’s Victory, a tantalising metaphysical fiction which is also a psychological thriller, a tragic romance and a subversive commentary on Edwardian values. Heyst lives by a philosophy taught him by his father, a Swedish aristocrat who viewed the human world as a place of pain and illusion. Under the influence of this view of things – a version of the philosophy of the 19th-century German pessimist Arthur Schopenhauer – Heyst aims to drift through life in solitude. He believes that as long as he remains without any human ties, he can avoid being defeated by the world.

Heyst’s wanderings take him to the Far East, where he meets a sea captain who has been framed by the Portuguese authorities and risks losing his boat. Heyst saves him from ruin. In an act of gratitude, the captain sets up a company on the island of Samburan with Heyst as manager; but the firm fails, and Heyst lives on in a derelict compound with only a Chinese servant for company. He strays from his life of non-involvement for a second time when he meets a frightened young Englishwoman, Lena, who is working in the orchestra at a ­Javan hotel, whose proprietor, Schomberg, is infatuated by her. Moved again by pity but also by desire, Heyst helps Lena to escape and takes her back with him to Samburan, where they live together. Neither is entirely happy – Heyst because he regrets that he has formed a human tie, Lena because she is not sure that he is fully committed to her. Yet their lives pass peacefully together.

This tranquil life is disrupted by the arrival of three armed desperados who have heard from Schomberg – now a mortal enemy of Heyst’s – that the Swedish recluse has amassed a fortune which he keeps with him on the island. Suspecting Lena is in danger, Heyst keeps her presence secret from the group; but one of the men knows she is on the island and goes to the bungalow where she is hiding. Heyst persuades the leader of the group, Gentleman Jones, that there is no treasure to be found and tells him of his accomplice’s designs on Lena.

The two men go the bungalow, where Lena, struggling with the accomplice, seizes his knife. Jones, who loathes women and thinks that his accomplice has betrayed him, fires a shot that grazes the accomplice but fatally wounds Lena. Thinking she has saved his life, Lena hands Heyst the knife. Heyst, however, thinks she has betrayed him; but then, finding her hit by the bullet, he realises she is dying. Still wedded to his philosophy of detachment, he cannot give her the declaration of love for which she asks; yet when he takes her in his arms she dies triumphant, feeling that Heyst had responded to her plea. Asking to be left alone, he sets fire to the bungalow. He is found dead next to Lena’s body.

The story ends with a friendly sea captain, who had made a practice of looking in on the island to see if Heyst was well, describing what he had found to a colonial official and concluding: “There was nothing to be done there . . . Nothing!” The last words of the novel may be a reference to the closing lines of Schopenhauer’s main philosophical treatise, The World As Will and Idea:

***

“. . . to those in whom the world has turned and denied itself, this world of ours, real as it is, with all its suns and galaxies, is – nothing.”

Like many writers of his time, Conrad read and admired Schopenhauer. He also shared something of Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Yet nothing would be more mistaken than to see this multilayered novel as the mere working out of a philosophical idea. Conrad was a sceptic of the most profound kind; but his sceptical doubts had very little to do with the distinction, made by Schopenhauer and other philosophers, between appearance and reality in the universe at large. The sceptical doubt that infuses Conrad’s work has to do with the human world, which he believed was moved by illusions. However, these illusions, this incomparably subtle and self-reflexive text suggests, may be the very source of what is most valuable in human life.

First published as a book in 1915, Victory is Conrad’s last great novel. Born in 1857 into the Polish aristocracy in what was then (and is again now) Russian-ruled Ukraine, he spent part of his childhood in the Russian province of Vologda after his father, whom he describes as having “a terrible gift for irony”, was exiled for taking part in anti-Russian activities. It seems to have been in 1872 that Conrad decided on a seafaring life, to the horror of the kindly uncle who was by then his guardian. Two years later he was in Marseilles, a seaman in the French and then the British merchant navies. After being a cabin-boy and for a time (by his own account) a gunrunner, he qualified as a master mariner in 1886. Among other commissions, he went on to command a steamer in ­the Congo, where he witnessed the genocide inflicted on its peoples under the rule of Léopold of Belgium – a traumatic experience whose impact Conrad hinted at when he said, “Before the Congo I was a mere animal.”

He took up his career as a writer in 1894 when, as if by chance, he found himself out of a job in London. His first novel, Almayer’s Folly, which he had worked on intermittently towards the end of his years as a sailor, was published a year later. All of the work for which Conrad is famous was written in English, his third language, French being the second (as it was for many educated Poles at the time). He spent the rest of his life in England, a country he loved, without ever becoming remotely English, often suffering from writer’s block and usually in debt, becoming an admired figure in the Edwardian literary establishment and yet choosing to decline the offer of a knighthood. He died in 1924.

In a letter of 1903, Conrad wrote: “Homo duplex has in my case more than one meaning.” He lived beyond the borderlines that are marked out by socially fixed identities and the familiar uses of language, a vantage point that equipped him to deploy his most distinctive literary technique – the frequent use of shifts of perspective. Ambiguity and uncertainty are integral to his work, producing a Rashomon-like effect that is particularly powerful in Victory. Critics have recognised Conrad’s use of this technique as an innovation in literary method, but it is more than that. An expression of his suspicion that human beings may lack the capacity to understand each other or themselves, this shifting view of things expresses his sense of the unreadable obscurity of human events.

Describing Axel Heyst as he considers helping Lena to escape from the hotel, the narrator writes:

“Formerly, in solitude and in silence, he had been used to think clearly, and sometimes even profoundly, seeing life outside the flattering optical illusion of everlasting hope . . . of an ever-expected happiness. But now he was troubled; a light veil seemed to hang before his mental vision; the awakening of a tenderness, indistinct and confused as yet, towards an unknown woman . . .

He paced there to and fro for a long time, a calm, meditative ghost in his white drill-suit, revolving in his head thoughts absolutely novel, disquieting, and seductive; accustoming his mind to the contemplation of his purpose, in order that by being faced steadily it should appear praiseworthy and wise. For the use of reason is to justify the obscure desires that move our conduct . . .”

If there is any theme that runs throughout Conrad’s work, this is it. Human beings seek solidarity with one another in love and work. In fact, they live alone, moved by insubstantial images of themselves and those around them. Yet it may be these very illusions that give meaning to their lives.

Many of the figures that are central in Conrad’s fiction have become isolated in the course of their lives – Almayer in Almayer’s Folly, Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, Jim in Lord Jim. Heyst is also isolated but his solitude seems to be the result of a deliberate choice: he believes he can make himself immune to the pains of the human world by cutting himself off from its passions and delusions. In Victory, Conrad questions whether such a life is possible or desirable for human beings. A life of disillusion may itself be founded on illusion, and the dream of invulnerability may be more deceptive than the passions by which ordinary human beings are driven. As Heyst exclaims towards the end: “. . . woe to the man whose heart has not learned while young to hope, to love – and to put its trust in life!”

The last word may be “Nothing!” yet it is Lena who gives the novel its title. If there is a victory here, it belongs to her. She is the pivot of the tale, invulnerable at the end because she is not moved by mistrust or doubt, and it is Heyst who is finally defeated. Whether he could have avoided this fate is left uncertain, one of many unanswerable questions posed in this inexhaustibly rich book.

“Victory” by Joseph Conrad is published in a new edition by Penguin Classics (£7.99)

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Loving the crustacean: an unstable fantasy in dating dystopia The Lobster

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The atmosphere throughout this film resembles that last, desperate, twilight hour at any nightclub.

The coastal establishment that David (Colin Farrell) checks in to at the start of The Lobster could be any cheesy hotel that time forgot. From the grandmotherly decor to the graveyard hush in the breakfast room and the out-of-tune house band with its ponytailed drummer, it’s like a theme park re-creating the mid-20th-century British and Irish holiday experience for those born too late to have sampled it. (The film was shot mainly in County Kerry.) But that doesn’t explain why the staff force a man to insert his hand into a toaster. Or why some long-term residents are being hunted at night in the surrounding forests. Perhaps the management just takes a hard line on the theft of its little shampoos and its teeny-weeny soaps.

In the world presented by the film, anyone without a life partner will end up at this hotel. David was deserted by his girlfriend, some guests were widowed – but, whatever the reason, each single person must become part of a couple within 45 days of checking in. If they don’t meet the deadline, they will be taken to the Transformation Room and turned into an animal. It’s like Bridget Jones has found herself in a Logan’s Run remake scripted by Ovid.

A film set in an alternate reality must take time to establish the rules of its particular fiction, and most of the joys of The Lobster arise from these early scenes. The enrolment process involves registering, in advance, a sexual orientation, as well as a choice of animal to be turned into should one’s stay not prove fruitful. The system is delightful in its plainness, and not unlike the pen-pushing, jobsworth view of the afterlife seen in A Matter of Life and Death.

Occasionally, the film overcomplicates its vision – the rituals involving newcomers being allowed to use only one hand, or chambermaids grinding against the crotches of single men as routinely as they replace the complementary shortbread in the rooms, feel unworkable. Questions also arise in the second half of the film when David escapes from the hotel grounds: we begin to wonder how the invisible dictatorship can possibly be sustained. The further the movie strays from the hotel, the more unstable its fantasy becomes. That’s why films such as Groundhog Day or Never Let Me Go confine themselves to a relatively limited area. Let off the leash, fantasy can become impossible to police. That is the mistake of later scenes in The Lobster, even if they do have the advantage of introducing the film’s warmest element: David’s prospective lover, played by Rachel Weisz, who has been narrating all along even those parts of the story in which she wasn’t present.

The picture would always have been a seductive allegory for the tyranny of social norms – the way we are raised to believe our choices are to pair off or die unhappy. But played utterly straight by the Greek filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, it becomes grimly funny as well as clever. His earlier films (including Dogtooth and Alps) were also set in recognisable worlds that differed in only a few significant respects from our own. His trademark is to regard warped or brutal behaviour with a credulous eye. He retains this in The Lobster and successfully coaches new performers in his impassive house style of acting. Farrell makes understatement and drabness obscurely joyful; it helps that his spectacles and slightly oversized moustache have the look of a joke-shop disguise. As the hotel manager, Olivia Colman is straightforward to the point of helpfulness in her severity. Ben Whishaw is splendidly winsome as a forlorn guest. He is excited at the arrival of a possible match who appears to have a limp like his own; when it turns out to be a twisted ankle, his disappointment is both touching and pathetic.

One need not expend any effort trying to fathom how the unforgiving world of The Lobster corresponds to our own. (It might be argued that there is nothing in the Transformation Room as frightening as Tinder.) The atmosphere throughout resembles that last, desperate, twilight hour at any nightclub – even if, coming home empty-handed from a night on the pull, one has rarely had cause to worry that one might wake up the next morning as an elk.

The Lobster (15), directed by Yorgos Lanthimos, is out 16 October

My big fat Greek tragedies: on new productions of Medea and Oresteia

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The decision to “Greek it up” for half a year has given the Almeida a bold and engrossing revisit to the creation myths of theatre.

There has been a twist in the wine list at the Almeida over the past six months, with reds and whites from Greece lined up behind a bar that also serves three different snacking plates named “the Oresteia”, “the Bacchae” and “the Medea”, in honour of the three productions that make up the venue’s exploration of Greek tragedy.

A theatregoer with knowledge of what Medea does might be queasy about a meal inspired by her, but the branded catering is a sign of how completely the Almeida has adopted a project for which it has been rewarded with long queues, cooing reviews and, in the case of the adaptation of Aeschylus’s story of Orestes, a West End transfer few would have predicted for a 2,500-year-old script. Each play has been modernised in dress and setting, with the finale, the artistic director Rupert Goold’s version of Medea (to 14 November), using a text by the novelist Rachel Cusk. She recasts the discarded wife of the king of Corinth as a novelist and Medea’s former husband, Jason, as a narcissistic film star who leaves her and their two sons after an affair with someone younger.

As a first-time playwright, Cusk proves adept at both monologue and dialogue: her text, while more physically and linguistically graphic than Euripides about why Jason favours the other woman’s body, retains poetry: “Trust is like a pane of glass/When it’s clean you hardly know it’s there/But smash it and you’re cut to shreds.” Kate Fleetwood and Justin Salinger as the unhappy couple – rawly shrunken and smugly enhanced respectively – have marital rows with such unnerving intensity that it feels like waking up in a hotel room to find that your neighbours have crashed through the communicating door during a final split-up fight. Savage imaginative touches in the production include the chorus of Corinthian women becoming north London domestic goddesses, chanting about house prices and their hubbies’ promotions.

Yet the production makes one strange, clumsy stumble. As they explore aspects of humanity that have remained universal – grief, greed, lust – these ancient plays have constantly been seen as topical: one producer of EastEnders would urge the writers, when ratings fell, to “Greek it up”, meaning storylines featuring murder, betrayal, even incest. Intriguingly, Medea was identified as the one Athenian plot that could not be retold in soap, as a character who committed matricide would destabilise mid-evening entertainment. The Almeida, which doesn’t have to worry about Ofcom, has proved as squeamish as peak-time TV when it comes to this plotline. Cusk and Goold duck out of making its protagonist the child-killer and mistress-murderer of the original, allowing her a more sympathetic revenge. The point of Medea is to get the heroine explicably to that point. The substitute feels like taking a glug of one of those Greek wines on sale in the foyer and finding it’s alcohol-free.

By contrast, the middle play in the Almeida Greeks season – James Macdonald’s staging of Bakkhai, Anne Carson’s translation of Euripides’s masterpiece – suffered from too much fidelity to the inheritance. The classically exact use of three actors to play all the central roles confused the impact of a narrative that, depicting a crackdown on a hedonistic cult, also has less contemporary resonance than the other Attic tragedies.

The gold medallist in the Almeida season is the director-writer Robert Icke for his ­rewrite of the Oresteia, which, to satisfy ­demand, has moved to the Trafalgar Studios in central London (until 7 November). The play has Agamemnon (Angus Wright) sacrificing his daughter in order to get the gods on the side of his foreign policy. Religion and politics have become so entwined in our times that it proves worryingly easy to imagine a contemporary leader could have his kid killed to win a war and then go on TV to lie about it; or that his wife, Clytemnestra (Lia Williams), might enact a revenge as bloody as the real Medea’s. Goold’s decision to “Greek it up” for half a year has given the Almeida a bold and engrossing revisit to the creation myths of theatre.

All in the emphasis: how Marlon Brando turned his scripts from good to great

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Does there exist one individual, radio-friendly, incontrovertible moment of Marlon Brando’s that perfectly transmits his genius?

To a discussion about Marlon Brando on the Today programme (BBC Radio 4, 12 October) in advance of the release of the documentary Listen to Me Marlon, which uses never-before-heard tapes of the actor talking about his life. John Humphrys spoke to the film’s co-writer and director, Stevan Riley, and the superlatives about Brando were unstoppable: “riveting . . . intriguing . . . mesmerising . . . curious . . . inquisitive . . . brave . . . an incredibly acute observer of human behaviour”.

Confessing to having rewatched Apocalypse Now only a few days earlier, Humphrys breathed: “God, it’s still an amazing film and his performance is just staggering . . .” And so on, all of it whetting the appetite – but as is often the case with movie- or book-plug discussions, only very general: the sort of small talk that goes on in the antechamber while everybody waits to file into the main room.

Does there exist one individual, radio-friendly, incontrovertible moment of Brando’s that perfectly transmits his genius? I kept thinking of something the poet Don Paterson said, about that scene in the back of the car in On the Waterfront– the “I coulda been a contender” speech, which, crucially, Brando wrote himself, or rather he rearranged the original lines, his ear impeccable. Paterson is very specific about the actor’s delivery, his “I coulda been somebody” instead of the more obvious “I coulda been somebody”. The modesty and humanity in that choice of locution – it’s impossible to hear it and not to conclude that you are in the presence of something wonderful. “It doesn’t just ‘get me every time’,” Paterson said, “it reminds me what art is. The way he hits class/contender/somebody/bum/am – all spaced so perfectly, so rhythmically, the way each one falls a little in pitch, as he drags you right down with him.”

In truth, you could listen for hours to people talking about Brando’s lost beauty and “intellect”, about how haphazard and lazy he was, more given to gestures than stamina in all aspects of his life. How much he hated himself for having sold out and was always more his own victim than victimised by others.

But all we ever really need to hear is that one line.

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Talking to Marlene, I thought: “How fat do you have to be before a plane refuses to take off with you on it?”

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It was indeed a terrible situation to lose your dream job because of excess baggage.

The pool was really dirty but since I’d just arrived, I thought I should sit by it.

It was a cheap motel. Everything was brown. The air-conditioning dripped into a puddle that I tried to stem with towels. Sirens blazed all night.

“Hey, honey, do you want me to fix you a drink?”

I looked up. She was blonde, older than me, in a matching swimsuit and sarong – the height of sophistication. Plus she was drinking a blue drink and smoking. Full house in the coolness stakes.

“I need to shift a little weight,” she said. “That’s why I’m in Florida.”

Maybe she did need to? She wasn’t thin. But not hugely fat or anything.

“So I can fly again.”

“Fly?”

“They grounded me. And I won’t be grounded.”

Marlene had been an air hostess for American Airlines. It was everything she had ever wanted.

“I told them it’s glandular but the bastards tried to put me behind a desk.”

“Bastards,” I agreed. The blue drink gave me a rush.

“Was your weight really upsetting the whole plane?” I asked, not knowing what to say. I just wondered how fat you would have to be to stop a plane taking off.

Marlene could have been annoyed with me but instead she continued to regale me with stories of the places she had been. All of them were in America but I knew not to point that out. “I’ve given them my all and they do this? I’ve been everywhere for them.”

It was indeed a terrible situation to lose your dream job because of excess baggage.

“You staying here? It’s a dump,” she said.

“Yes.”

“OK, then maybe I’ll sleep in your room. At the moment I’m living in a car and that’s making it hard to diet.”

“Um . . .”

“What number is your room, Suzie Q?”

And that was it. Marlene moved into my room. With lots of vanity cases. I went to work every night as a waitress at a diner and brought back whatever food I could steal.

She lay in bed all day eating crisps and watching TV. I don’t think she even had a car.

“The weight is coming off,” she would say, though her clothes were very tight.

“Marlene, I have to pay for this room. You could help.” “Sure, honey,” she said. “I’m just waiting for the payment from American Airlines.”

I wondered after a few weeks how I’d got myself in this situation, living with a grounded air hostess. I thought I must really have it out with her. But I never got round to it, as I’d discovered Quaaludes.

One morning I came back and she had gone. There was a note. “American came through. They need me back in the air. Bye Suzie Q.” She’d also stolen most of my clothes.

Not that she could fit into any of them.

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Allegory and humiliation on the BBC’s Secret Life of Books

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Plus Abi Morgan’s new drama River – it should be so good, and yet it is so bafflingly bad.

When Robert Harris and others insist the BBC needs a TV books programme, I always wonder what kind of thing they have in mind. I suppose they picture an all-singing, all-dancing version of Radio 4’s Open Book, a magazine show that doesn’t only review books, but interviews authors and sometimes whips up little debates around literary trends, too. But that’d be pretty tiresome on screen, wouldn’t it? Either an attempt would be made to match pictures to words (cue cheesy roaring fires, dusty spines and wobbly library ladders) or we would have to endure many pompous talking heads, as we used to do with The Review Show. In its final incarnation, this was the most unendurably flatulent programme on television.

In any case, although there might not be a books programme proper, no one can say the BBC doesn’t dish up plenty of bookish stuff. Some of us are still struggling to recover from its recent adaptation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. (If I’m lucky, I’ll have removed the cold compress from my head in time for the Downton Abbey Christmas special.) Meanwhile, on BBC4, The Secret Life of Books has returned for a second series (Tuesdays, BBC4, 8.30pm). Do books have a secret life? Hmm. I do distinctly remember my father asking the teenage me not to tell my mother he had lent me Portnoy’s Complaint. But I think it might be pushing it to talk about the secret life of Swallows and Amazons, as it will be doing in a few weeks’ time (his qualification for this job, by the way, is that he is a keen sailor).

The series opened with Dr Janina Ramirez on The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser, which she claimed to have loved ever since she first read it as a teenager (crikey, some teenager). I, for one, don’t think Dr Ramirez – the only non-celebrity to get a gig presenting an episode of this series – will have convinced too many Spenser virgins to try his allegorical epic, which is some 35,000 lines long and absolutely heaving with elves. There was something just a little unconvincing about her proclamations of its beauty, her insistence that what Spenser called its “darke conceit” had captured her imagination right from the off. (I would say, as one who struggled through it as a student, that The Faerie Queene is both beautiful and subversive, after its way, but I also think it’s bloody hard work.) But perhaps this doesn’t matter. Maybe the film’s real fascination lay in the fact that Spenser lived in an age when a proficiency for poetry like his could lead, at either end of the scale, to his exile to war-torn Ireland, and to an audience with Elizabeth I, whose then fragile rule his cantos were intended to bolster. We were a thrillingly long way from smug literary festivals and Book at Bedtime here – though the film did deliver some choice 21st-century literary humiliation in the form of Professor Simon Palfrey, a Renaissance scholar who had to read, aloud, Canto VI from Book III of the poem in a room that was illuminated only by candlelight. I suppose we should be grateful the director didn’t snuggle him inside a quilted doublet, or make him shout the words through a clanking visor.

What to say about River (Tuesdays, BBC1, 9pm), which is by Abi Morgan (The Hour, Shame, Suffragette) and stars – yes, really – Stellan Skarsgård? It should be so good, and yet it is so bafflingly bad. I don’t understand anything about it. Why is a Swedish copper, for one thing, working for the Metropolitan Police? Wouldn’t he rather be eating gravadlax in Uppsala than chewing on a greasy burger in Brixton? And why does he keep seeing ghosts? I suppose it’s just about feasible that in the throes of post-traumatic stress disorder, he might want to commune with his late colleague Stevie (Nicola Walker), who was killed on the job only a few weeks ago. But quite why Thomas Cream, aka the Lambeth Poisoner (Eddie Marsan), keeps strolling into the nick is unclear (Cream died in 1892). Oh dear. It’s so embarrassing, watching an actor as good as Skarsgård have gnomic conversations with people only he can see. His sincerity pitted against their desperate loquaciousness: it would be comical if it didn’t seem so very lumbering and stupid.

Leader: The SNP and the neverendum

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While SNP politicians obsess about independence – which they like to say is a process, not an event – the party’s record in government is far from distinguished.

A year on from the referendum on Scottish independence, the future of the United Kingdom remains uncertain. Support for the Scottish National Party, whose annual conference began in Aberdeen on 15 October, has surged since Scotland voted No on 18 September 2014: it won 56 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster seats in the general election, and is poised to increase its governing majority in the Holyrood elections next May.

Predictions that defeat in the referendum would undermine the nationalist movement were as ill-judged as the Labour MP George Robertson’s assertion two decades ago that “devolution will kill nationalism stone dead”. Today, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and her immediate predecessor, Alex Salmond, insist that a second referendum on Scottish independence is “inevitable”.

We agree that our present constitutional settlement is flawed but our preference is for a reconfigured Union and full fiscal autonomy for Scotland in a federal or neo-federal United Kingdom in a system that also recognises the need for greater devolution in England. England remains the largest nation in Europe without its own political institutions.

The Scotland Bill (which should become law by March next year) would grant the Scottish government new tax-raising powers as well as greater control over welfare, but the Conservative government should go further.

The existing devolution settlement is botched. It allows SNP politicians to claim all successes as their own while blaming failures on the nefarious government in Westminster. Both Mr Salmond and Ms Sturgeon have proved adept at exploiting the ambiguities and anomalies of devolution, allowing the SNP to cover up its internal tensions and ideological contradictions, as David Torrance reports on page 32.

While SNP politicians obsess about independence – which they like to say is a process, not an event – the party’s record in government is far from distinguished. Education, which is devolved, has been a particular weakness. In 2007 the SNP pledged to reduce average class sizes in primary schools to 18, yet the average has since risen to 23.3. Spending on Scottish schools fell by 5 per cent in real terms between 2010/11 and 2012/13, even as it rose south of the River Tweed. Between 2012 and 2014, standards of literacy fell in Scottish primary and secondary schools. The attainment gap between the poorest and the wealthiest students is higher in Scotland than in England.

The SNP’s record is little better when it comes to higher education. It has trumpeted the abolition of tuition fees (which, in effect, favour the middle classes at the expense of those who do not go to university) as evidence of its progressive credentials. The policy, however, has been funded largely by a real-terms reduction in student grants. Many poorer students have struggled to get the support they need at university: spending on income-related grants in Scotland has almost halved in real terms since 2007. Today, disadvantaged students in Scotland are significantly less likely to study at university than those in England – and the gap has widened since the SNP first won power at Holyrood eight years ago.

Moreover, the number of Scottish children living in absolute poverty rose by 30,000 between 2013 and 2014. Pockets of intergenerational deprivation remain; life expectancy in Glasgow is a year lower than in any other part of the UK.

Since 1998, the Scottish Parliament has been in control of the health service. Yet NHS Scotland is in crisis. Targets for waiting times for hospital admission have been missed repeatedly, including the Scottish government’s “guarantee” of a 12-week maximum wait for planned treatment for inpatients. Spending on health will decrease between 2013/14 and 2015/16. Scotland has grave health inequalities: the hospital admissions rate for heart attacks is three times higher in its most deprived than in its least deprived areas.

These are critical failings, and they point to the urgent need for the SNP to improve its performance rather than bring every conversation back to independence. Granting full fiscal autonomy would both recognise the wishes of the Scottish people for greater control over their own affairs and compel the SNP to take full responsibility for Scotland’s socio-economic problems. The party could then be held properly to account.

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For all the uproar among Labour MPs, Jeremy Corbyn is going nowhere

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The Labour leader’s weakness among MPs is more than counterbalanced by his strength among members.

The evening of 12 October 2015 will live long in the memory of Labour MPs. All sides still speak with shock about the venomous exchanges that took place at Jeremy Corbyn’s second meeting with the parliamentary party. Veteran backbenchers described it as the most fractious gathering in 30 years. “A total fucking shambles,” was the verdict of the former cabinet minister Ben Bradshaw as he left.

Relations between Corbyn and his MPs were destined to be lukewarm at best. As few as 14 of them voted for him in the leadership election. But after an even-tempered conference in Brighton, it was hoped that the underlying tensions could be contained. A succession of events – Corbyn’s failure to be inducted into the Privy Council, the creation of a group called Momentum, the shadow chancellor John McDonnell’s reversal of support for the Conservatives’ so-called fiscal charter – brought them into the open.

MPs are prepared to accept political differences but are less tolerant of what they regard as the leader’s failure to fulfil the basic duties of leadership. Even allies despair at the confusion that has often characterised his opening weeks. “They’re not managing the party, they’re not managing the media,” one told me.

There was anger and surprise when McDonnell, without a meeting of either MPs or the shadow cabinet, announced that Labour would no longer support George Osborne’s fiscal charter. MPs were left asking why an avowedly anti-austerity leadership had backed the measure to begin with.

Few were satisfied with McDonnell’s explanation that global economic conditions and a visit to the now-closed Redcar steel plant had persuaded him to reverse his position. Rather, they suggest that he was unaware that the charter mandated an absolute budget surplus, instead of merely a current surplus (a claim he denied). Others say he failed to realise that, as a statutory instrument, the charter could not be amended to allow borrowing for investment.

If few MPs defend Corbyn’s leadership with confidence, even fewer align themselves with his most trenchant critics. The view of most is that Ian Austin, who told Corbyn to start acting like the leader of the opposition, rather than a “student union president”, and John Mann, who raged over the lack of policy direction, overreached themselves. “Once basic civility is abandoned in an organisation it’s a free-for-all,” a shadow minister said. Corbyn’s parliamentary allies are appealing for patience. Clive Lewis, the newly elected MP for Norwich South, whom some speak of as a future left-wing leadership candidate, told me: “There are going to be teething problems. The leader’s office is still being set up; John McDonnell changed his position from conference two weeks ago. I get all of that, but I don’t think the way that some people in that room behaved was warranted or justified. The way that Jeremy and John sat there quite stoically and respectfully, and took it, says a lot about them.”

The creation of Momentum is the cause of much of the unrest among MPs. The new group describes itself as a “grass-roots movement”, set up to harness the energy of Corbyn’s leadership campaign. But MPs, who were not briefed in advance of its launch on 8 October, fear it will become a vehicle for the deselection of sceptics.

Momentum's supporters cannot fully rebut this charge. Forthcoming boundary changes will force selection contests in some seats and activists can already initiate “trigger ballots” against incumbents. But Corbynites are seeking to reassure their colleagues. Katy Clark, one of Momentum’s six directors, told me: “The reality is, if you’re a good constituency MP, constituency Labour parties recognise that. I would say to anybody who’s worried about new people coming into the Labour Party: embrace it, work with the new members, engage them.”

The individual spoken of most darkly by MPs is Jon Lansman. As a veteran of the Bennite Campaign for Labour Party Democracy, Lansman, another director of Momentum, is an unashamed advocate of mandatory reselection. “When there are selections of an MP, I would like to see MPs who reflect the values of members of the party,” he said recently. “The fact is that Liz Kendall got 4 per cent of the votes in the leadership contest.”

Even left-wingers have been disturbed by his remarks. “Jon Lansman needs to wind his neck in and get back in his box. He’s doing a lot of damage,” a pro-Corbyn MP told me.

Frank Field, the chair of the Commons work and pensions select committee, told me that any MPs “picked off” through deselection should “cause a by-election immediately and stand as independent Labour candidates”. He said they “would probably win” and that “a whole pile” of colleagues would campaign for them.

All sides have identified next May, the month of London mayoral, Scottish, Welsh and 126 English local elections, as a defining early test of Corbyn’s leadership. Should Labour fall below expectations, he will come under intense pressure. Yet his weakness among MPs is more than counterbalanced by his strength among members. The party has nearly doubled in size since the general election, with 370,658 full members. To adapt Stalin on the pope: how many divisions do the anti-Corbynites have?

Many agree with the view of Ken Livingstone, who told me: “If MPs trigger another leadership ballot, Jeremy will be elected by an even bigger margin.” He added that the rules should be changed to allow anyone to stand for the leadership if they are “nominated and seconded by two MPs”, a move that would guarantee left-wing candidates a place in future races. But as an increasing number of Corbyn’s opponents acknowledge, no one should assume that there will soon be a vacancy.

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Abi Morgan on Suffragette: “These were voiceless women. We gave them a voice”

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The screenwriter Abi Morgan explains why Suffragette spurned the story of the Pankhursts to focus on working-class activists.

When she finished her first draft of Suffragette, Abi Morgan had a sudden realisation: she had written the wrong film. “I originally started out with this idea of Romola [Garai]’s character, an upper-class, aristo­cratic woman who was bored and suppressed,” she says, when I meet her in central London a few weeks before the movie’s release. “There would be a scene at an opera . . . This young maid was going to come in and convert her in every way. And they would, you know, possibly fall in love.”

Already uneasy with the idea of a relationship causing her lead character’s feminist awakening (“Isn’t it enough just to have your activism activated on your own terms?”), Morgan started to read about the laundries in east London, where working-class women carried out hard, repetitive, dangerous labour. Then she went to see the film’s director, Sarah Gavron, and made her confession. “I went back to Sarah and said, ‘You know, I think I’ve done completely the wrong story. Can we start again?’ And so we threw that script away.”

This is typical of Morgan’s approach, which she has honed over 17 years of working across film, television and theatre. For her, writing really is rewriting. She hammers out a script, then peels back its layers, discarding version after version. If you feel that her characters have a hinterland, it is usually because they do, spelled out in draft three and discarded in draft four.

Because of this approach, she is happy to work collaboratively. She surrounds herself with people she respects and then shows her “mess” to them. Working through so many drafts also demands a lack of preciousness – darlings are not just killed but mown down without compunction – which has served Morgan well when working in film. Normally, if you gather more than two screenwriters in a room for ten minutes, one of them will start complaining about all the people who have interfered with their work. The film industry has a reputation for treating writers with a reverence lower than that reserved for the dolly grip and the person who makes sure no animals are harmed. But Morgan is not bothered. “I got dumped off The Iron Lady a month before they started shooting and then they brought two new writers on. Then I was brought back on again,” she says, with undimmed cheerfulness. “I’m just a bit of a rubber ball. I just bounce back.”

The final version of Suffragette refocused the film on a character called Maud, played by Carey Mulligan. She is a laundress, a mother, a wife and a foot soldier of the movement, rather than one of its generals. Making her the lead character foregrounds class and the material conditions of life as a woman in the early 20th century, showing how they affected the struggle for the vote. It’s an approach reminiscent of the way in which Hilary Mantel chronicles the build-up to the French Revolution through the mounting cost of bread in A Place of Greater Safety, or how Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies are shot through with an awareness of the simultaneous power and fragility of the female reproductive system.

In Suffragette, Violet (Anne-Marie Duff) wants to be an activist but is constrained by frequent beatings from her alcoholic husband and the strain of endless pregnancies. “Some of the accounts that were really heartbreaking were [of] those women who would say something like, ‘I’ll be in again tonight ’cause he’s in and I’ll be sore in the morning,’” says Morgan. “And we know those issues are relevant today. What is it, two women a week are murdered by their partner or ex-partner?”

Many histories of the suffragettes focus on middle-class activists such as the Pank­hursts, as working-class women were often illiterate and unable to record their stories. “One of the things that’s very moving when you hear the testimonials of these women is you realise that someone else has taken them down,” says Morgan. “They’re not going to write their own memoir. It’s an aside they’ve said to a journalist or a police officer, or it’s that finally somebody took down their testimony in front of Lloyd George. So, for me, there were these voiceless women and we were able to give them voice.”

The film also includes more well-to-do female characters (Helena Bonham Carter’s pharmacist Edith, whose husband supports the struggle, and Romola Garai’s lady of leisure Alice, whose husband does not) and examines the reactions of men. It has some sympathy for Maud’s husband, Sonny (Ben Whishaw), who is left to care for their child while his wife goes to prison and who has to endure the gibes of his workmates, who say that he can’t control her.

For Morgan, it was important to include men in the story, though several agents rebuffed the film-makers, saying that the parts were not big enough. She hopes that men will watch Suffragette, too. “On one level, we want to go, ‘This is for us birds, get together and watch it,’” she says. “But this is a two-sex war. We need the guys onside.”

That will also help in the quest to get more female-led films made, in an industry where 93 per cent of directors are male and 88 per cent of lead roles go to men. “If it doesn’t prove itself at the box office, then that guy who does the algorithm at that studio in America will go, ‘You see? The algorithm now affirms that women’s films don’t make money.’”

 

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An interest in gender and relationships has been present in Morgan’s work from the beginning. Her 2000 play Splendour, revived at the Donmar Warehouse in London this summer, acutely observed a dictator’s wife, her friend, a journalist and her translator waiting anxiously for the tyrant’s return to the presidential palace during a civil uprising. The play felt newly relevant in the age of Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and was unusual in providing complicated, morally nuanced roles for four women, two of whom were over 50. Since then, she has tackled forced prostitution (the Channel 4 series Sex Traffic); arranged marriages in Britain’s Bangladeshi community (a film adaptation of Monica Ali’s Brick Lane); the glass ceiling in the 1950s (the BBC drama The Hour); and male sex addiction and alienation in present-day New York (Shame, co-written with Steve McQueen).

In the light of this, it comes as something of a surprise to discover that as recently as 2012 Morgan shied away from being called a “feminist writer”. Now she embraces the term but with the proviso that it doesn’t only affect how she writes about women. In her six-part drama River, currently airing on BBC1, Stellan Skarsgård plays a policeman haunted by hallucinations of people he has failed to help. In gender terms, it is the logical next step after Prime Suspect, which allowed Helen Mirren to play the type of hardbitten detective that had always been reserved for men. If women can be strong, Morgan asks, why can’t men be fragile?

Skarsgård, being Scandinavian, was down with this idea from the start. “At the press thing, someone said, ‘What’s it like to play a man so emotionally vulnerable?’” Morgan says. “He went, ‘It’s great. Why do I always have to play the hero? Can’t I be the one who breaks down for once?’” In the second episode, his character has a speech in which he talks about the strain of coping with grief and mental illness and how “in this world, it’s not enough. In this world, you have to smile and drink a pint and say you’re all right. That’s really what I wanted to write about. I wanted to write about men being vulnerable and going, ‘It’s fucking hard being a man in the workplace.’”

 

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Launching two major projects at once is not untypical for Morgan, although she downplays the achievement: “When people say to me, ‘You’re so prolific!’ it’s, like, no, I’m just hopeless with money.”

Perhaps she has a sense of the urgency that comes from starting a career late. She grew up in dressing rooms (her mother is an actor) and presumed that she would become an actor, too, studying English and drama at university. But a two-word review from her mother of an early performance (“No, darling”) quashed that ambition and she spent her twenties living in London, working as a property guardian for empty offices in Belgravia. “It was basically me and a cleaner and a changing turnover of two or three Irish security guards,” she says now. “I changed the flowers and made up the newspapers and was meant to type up a load of old architectural drawing numbers into a file, which I never did, and I wrote a play.”

That led to her first commission, thanks to Lucy Davies, now executive producer at the Royal Court Theatre in London, who read a script that she wrote on a TV-writing weekend course. Her big break was an offer of £500 to write a drama about a Victorian governess and it didn’t come until the age of 29, when she was close to giving up on writing to train as a teacher.

I mention Malcolm Gladwell’s thesis that we too often equate genius with precocity and ignore those who bloom in middle or even old age, such as the memoirist Diana Athill. “Or Mary Wesley,” she replies. “Or, you know, Samuel Beckett, who didn’t have his first play performed until he was 47.” Now, living in north London with her husband, Jacob Krichefski (also an actor), and two children, she has finally begun to enjoy life despite numerous creative knock-backs.

She is honest in assessing her career: “I have shows cancelled, I have bad reviews . . . My greatest films are still on the shelf and no one wants to make them,” she says. “But, you know, all work is a process of failure. Every single thing I write, I look at it and go, ‘Do better. That’s not good enough, do better.’ And so, that keeps me up at night. I just had to fill in a questionnaire that said, ‘How do you relax?’ and my husband said, ‘You don’t, you tense, awkward woman.’”

One repeated criticism is that her work is too dark. Even her most approachable series, The Hour, declined to hook up its two leads, despite the yearning of its fan base. At  the other extreme, Shame is an unflinching look at a cold, joyless, hopeless universe, scarred by addiction. Reviewers largely ­attributed those qualities to her co-writer, Steve McQueen, who went on to direct 12 Years a Slave. That strikes me as partially a gendered assumption, as well as reflecting how far removed Morgan’s demeanour – she has a chirpy curiosity, tilting her head to one side when a point particularly interests her – is from that of a tortured artist.

She has many stories of interviewers who have struggled to reconcile the polite, upbeat woman they see in front of them with the dark worlds she creates. “This morning, a journalist said to me, ‘So, did you find yourself getting really stroppy and cross with the world afterwards, like, were you really cross and, like, really angry in the house?’ And I went: ‘Do you say that to a man after he’s written an action movie? Do you expect him to forward-roll down the stairs, get a gun and shoot his wife?’”

She is fascinated by anger and violence in women – asked which film she would reboot with a female lead, she picks Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas– and the militancy on show in Suffragette might surprise viewers expecting a more rousing bonnet-fest. (It has already inspired direct action: Sisters Uncut occupied the red carpet at its London premiere to protest cuts to domestic violence services.) Maud becomes radicalised by a swirling mix of female friendship, male violence and police brutality and surveillance. Morgan notes that Emily Davidson was force-fed 49 times, a procedure the suffragettes described as “violation”, the same word they would have used for a rape.

In that context, picking an ordinary woman rather than a historical figure as the protagonist was an important decision, because it removes the sense of fated destiny that sucks the drama out of many biopics. Maud chooses militancy; she chooses her own version of a holy war; she renounces society and becomes an outlaw. “I wanted the purity of this woman who had no history, coming up against huge moments of history and then becoming history,” says Morgan. “I wanted this very quiet heartbeat of this very, very normal woman.” 

“Suffragette” is out now.

SARAH LEE/THE GUARDIAN
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