Soon after the attacks on Paris on Friday night, smartphones across the world lit up, as Facebook told us which of our friends were safe. The girl from your university course whose name you didn’t immediately recognise? She was safe. The friend you didn’t realise was in France in the first place? Safe, too. Alongside the list of the safe was another, unsettling one: those not yet accounted for.

Of all the reasons why the Paris attacks received such widespread attention, especially on social media, Facebook’s safety check seems particularly significant. It's hard to feel disconnected from tragedy as you receive personalised updates linking it again and again to your life and your friends'. As the updates arrived, it felt natural to flick from the Facebook app to Instagram, and republish Jean Jullien’s cartoon (at one point on Saturday morning, my feed was a solid wall of Eiffel Tower peace signs). When Facebook asked if we’d like a French flag on our profile pictures, it felt natural to say yes.  

The seamlessness of this process, and the outpouring of empathy it drummed up, came with a kickback. The night before the Paris attacks, a bomb attack killed 40 in Beirut, prompting no response from Facebook at all. As the weekend wore on, people began to ask questions. Who was safe in Beirut? Who wasn’t? Where were Beirut’s viral images and filtered flags? And what about Ankara, where over 100 people were killed by a blast last month?   

In response to the outrage, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg explained in a comment on his own, Tricolore-branded profile picture that the feature had only been used in natural disasters before. Its use during Paris attacks was a test, prompted by the high levels of Facebook activity surrounding the events. Yet as a piece in the Economist pointed out this week, this“doesn't explain why the hours between the [Paris and Beirut attacks] made such a difference”.

Last night, a bomb attack carried out by Boko Haram killed 32 in northern Nigeria. For the second time, Facebook turned on its Safety Check feature for a non-natural disaster, meaning those in the surrounding area could mark themselves as "safe". Was this because the company now believes it a useful response to acts of war, as well as of nature, or as a result of the criticism it received post-Paris? It's not clear. 

We may not know whether Facebook’s use of the feature in Paris was affected by a western-centric view of global conflict, but we can know with a degree of certainty that we, as average social media users, were. The barrage of Facebook posts and tweets accusing news outlets of ignoring attacks in Beirut and Ankara were misplaced: both events were covered extensively through liveblogs and news piece in outlets from the Guardian to the BBC. But these events didn’t filter into front pages, opinion columns or cartoons because they didn’t spark interest among readers. 

As such, while the rounds of “whataboutery” that follow any global even seem targeted at news outlets in particular, they also stem from our own feelings of guilt. As Max Fisher wrote at Vox, the anger about Paris coverage really comes from "a sense that the world at large has ignored Beirut's trauma and that it ignores similar traumas throughout the world if they occur in the wrong places".

Despite the fact that information is more readily available to us than ever before, we choose to consume it via ever-narrowing channels, often relying on our social networks for information. News comes to us via social media sites which are doggedly ruled by our tastes and those of our friends and networks: the BBC may forefront a Boko Haram story despite low numbers of readers, but Twitter or Facebook certainly won’t. If we’re not seeing stories on social media, it’s because we and our friends aren’t interested enough to read or share them. To paraphrase a colleague’s reaction to the “what about Beirut” tweets and Facebook posts: “If you’re not seeing those stories, you need to get new friends.” 

On the other hand, the nature of social media means it's within our powers to change the status quo. By asking Facebook “what about…?” users sent a strong message to the social network, one that seems to have resulted in positive action in Nigeria. If we actually care about conflicts around the world, as opposed to those in our backyard, we need to show it with our shares and clicks, not through virtue-signalling diatribes against Paris tributes. News outlets and social media cater, as exactly as possible, to our tastes. If we don't like what they're serving us, we should change what we're ordering. 

Last Sunday in Paris was a late autumnal treat. The sun shone and the sunlight was warm. Along the boulevards, those trees that still had leaves were putting on a final show of colour – all orange and golden brown. It was hard to believe that it was mid-November, when Paris normally takes on mists and a chill. The sunshine has been on and off in France for the past few weeks and most television news shows ended cheerily with reports of swimmers in La Rochelle or Biarritz.

All of that came to a sudden stop on the night of Friday 13 November, when the gut-wrenching news of the massacres in Paris came through. Today the city seems eerie and sinister – the abnormally good weather is another symptom of how weird life feels right now.

That didn’t stop people going out on Sunday for lunch, dinner, a drink or a walk. It was as if, after a grim Saturday when the city was all but deserted, we needed to re-assert our presence, to take up again the everyday pleasures of living in Paris. I went with my wife for lunch at one of the classic brasseries – the Zeyer – in the 14th arrondissement, where I live. For some reason I had an instinct to live well and do something Parisian. I was not alone. The place was packed with diners.

The Zeyer is quintessentially Parisian – a big, bustling eating machine, serving up a menu that has hardly changed in a century (it has been here since 1913). The waiters were funny and charming; the choucroute and wine were delicious. But, after the horrors of Friday night, as you sat in full view of the street, it was all too easy to imagine a gunman blasting a hole through the plate glass and to see the scene as a slaughterhouse. It took real effort not to be scared. And although the restaurant was alive with chatter, people had only one topic of conversation: are we now at war? And what does it mean?

There was also a guilty consensus that somehow, at some level that nobody wanted to articulate, these latest attacks were worse than the Charlie Hebdo killings. The guilt was there because those murders were, of course, terrible, but people felt even worse now. It was partly because this was a new, second and sickening blow but also because these killings were so indiscriminate – it wasn’t that Charlie Hebdo deserved it or had it coming but the killers, as disgusting as they were, had a rationale. None of this fresh horror seems to make any sense, or at least none that you can see.

Everybody I have spoken to over recent days, of all political hues, has been asking the same questions. Most have agreed that François Hollande was right when he declared that the mass killings were an “act of war”, although some are unsure about the follow-up attacks on Isis in Syria. They may be right; Hollande may have little choice but to retaliate, yet it does seem as if Isis is writing the script for the French.

Aside from the geopolitics, however, there are local issues. As the identities of the killers were revealed, it was with wearying inevitability that we learned that the group apparently included home-grown French radicals. France has been here before many times and the outside world is no longer unfamiliar with the issues of alienation, fractured identity, social exclusion and the sheer wretchedness of life in the poorest of France’s banlieue that have contributed to the process of radicalisation.

Yet there are complex questions that have a specifically Parisian dimension. If the killings were not random, who exactly were the Islamists attacking this time and why?

***

In recent days this has led to deeper speculation about the nature of the attacks. The eastern part of Paris, where most of the killings took place, was not chosen by chance. This is the home of the anti-establishment Parisian left, people who read Libération and Les Inrockuptibles. It is a multicultural and multi-ethnic part of the city. It is stylish but not posh – it is, indeed, one of the pleasure centres of Paris and the lifestyle here is largely about food, sex, music and drink. All of this is an obvious affront to the angry puritans of radical Islam. There are, however, other details that are important.

The Bataclan has been here in one form or another since 1864, when it began its existence as a music hall. Ever since, it has been a central part of the Parisian cultural landscape, hosting concerts by Mistinguett and Maurice Chevalier in the 1910s and Motörhead in the 1990s, by way of Jane Birkin, Lou Reed and Oasis, to name but a few. In the past few years, however, there have been rumours in radical Islamist circles in France that the concerts at the venue were used to fund causes in Israel.

Throughout the tail end of the 2000s, there were frequent threats made against the Bataclan. In 2008, a group of pro-Palestinian militants recorded a video in front of the concert hall, in which a masked man declares, “In Mantes-la-Jolie, in La Courneuve [suburbs of Paris], there are brothers who will not tolerate these provocations.”

In 2011, the newspaper Le Figaro revealed that a Palestinian group called Jaish al-Islam (which is considered to be al-Qaeda’s franchise in Gaza) had been plotting against the Bataclan because its owners were rumoured to be Jews.

It is impossible to say whether any of this was in the minds of the killers on Friday but it is equally impossible to believe that it would not have been known to them. So far, unlike the killings in January, there has been no explicitly anti-Semitic motive for what happened.

For most of the French left, it has been a long-standing taboo to be seen to be taking the Israeli side in the Israel-Palestine conflict. From this position, much anti-Jewish feeling on the left is then confused with anti-Zionism and the desire to be on the side of the formerly colonised in the post-colonial world. In his 2007 book The Lure of Anti-Semitism: Hatred of Jews in Present-Day France, the sociologist Michel Wieviorka describes how contemporary anti-Semitism in France is inextricably linked to colonial history and in particular the history of the so-called pieds-noirs, the white settlers who returned to France from North Africa after the French handed independence to Algeria in 1962 after a long war.

Wieviorka links this history to “Islamo-progressivism”. This is a term used by the philosopher Alain Finkielkraut and it is related to the merged strains of Islamist thought and leftist post-colonial narratives. As Islamo-progressivism has popularised itself, there has been an emerging anti-Semitic counter-narrative from the right, in particular the Catholic nationalist groups that have rallied against the issue of gay marriage. The academic Pierre Birnbaum has written powerfully about the convergence of “anti-modernism” and “anti-Semitism” in a recent study, Sur un nouveau moment antisémite (“A New Anti-Semitism”), noting that at the right-wing demonstrations against gay marriage in 2014, the slogan “La France aux Français” (“France for the French”) was accompanied by the cry “Mort aux juifs” (“Death to the Jews”).

Birnbaum identifies an unlikely but powerful alliance between Islamo-progressivists, open in their contempt for Israel, and the coalition of religious groups in and around a right-wing caucus in the Catholic Church. This is how the disparate forms of anti-Semitism in France today are able to speak to each other.

***

These elements came together in January with the Islamist attacks on the Charlie Hebdo offices and a kosher supermarket: both the Enlightenment spirit of political satire and Jewishness under attack in an amalgam of religious fanaticism and anti-Semitism. If anything, since then, the divisions have become deeper and wider in French society between those who believe in French universalism and those from a marginalised underclass who see France as a “totalitarian democracy”, in which Jews hold a privileged and controlling position.

From this point of view, the attacks of 13 November may have been a shock but they should not have come as a surprise. Throughout 2015, France has been the target of more than half a dozen frustrated or half-cocked attempts at murder by Islamist radicals. It feels as if variations on the same thing keep happening over and over again.

On 21 August, Ayoub el-Khazzani, born in 1989 in Tétouan, Morocco, was unfortunate enough to run into a group of vacationing Americans – two of whom were servicemen – on the Amsterdam-to-Paris train, as he was preparing to load a Kalashnikov. Overpowered by the Americans, el-Khazzani was prevented from murdering innocent train passengers in what could have been another disturbing but familiar display of nihilistic hatred.

There was something depressingly familiar, too, about el-Khazzani’s journey – alienated in his homeland, drifting between France, Spain and the Spanish enclave of Ceuta in North Africa, a young man in his twenties veering between delinquency and martyrdom. A massacre was averted but everybody in France – the intelligence services, the police, the government, ordinary people – was then just waiting for the next atrocity. And now it has happened: yet another massacre in a long war of shifting frontiers and elusive enemies.

There are no easy answers but what is certain is that the same political and cultural problems are being handed down from generation to generation. It is now nine years since Martin Amis used the term “horrorism” to describe the spectacular forms of violence that define contemporary terrorism. He was writing about the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, DC, trying to understand what had happened at the beginning of the century, “what was revealed to us” in the “vehement and desperate nostalgia” that led to mass murder: “maximum malevolence” in Amis’s words.

For Amis, 9/11 was not just an atrocity but the spectacle of an atrocity. This was what made it so terrifying. It is as if, following Guy Debord, what terrifies us most in the society of the spectacle is not just the experience of death but the image of death, transmitted globally. That is the terrible game of war that the radical Islamists are playing.

At the local level, there is now the feeling that we are on a front line and that bad things can happen to any of us at any time in France. That is why Paris remains so sleepless and edgy.

Andrew Hussey is a New Statesman contributor and the author of “The French Intifada: the Long War Between France and Its Arabs” (Granta Books)

Even those in Labour most hostile to Ken Livingstone's appointment as co-convenor of Labour's defence review are stunned by the speed with which he ran into trouble. After much resistance, Livingstone apologised this afternoon to shadow defence minister Kevan Jones, who has suffered depression, for declaring that "he might need some psychiatric help" and that "he should pop off and see his GP". Jeremy Corbyn, who one shadow cabinet minister told me was "absolutely furious", had ordered his ally to "apologise to him straight away". 

But the original controversy over Livingstone's new role will endure. MPs were stunned by the appointment of the Trident opponent when I tweeted the news last night. John Woodcock, the MP for Barrow and Furness, where the new nuclear submarines are due to be built, and the chair of the Parliamentary Labour Party defence committee, commented: "Every new day I think we have much reached the summit, but no: there always remains a fresh provocative absurdity." In the remarks that prompted Livingstone's attack, Jones said: "I'm not sure Ken knows anything about defence. It will only damage our credibility amongst those that do and who care about defence".  

Maria Eagle, the pro-Trident shadow defence secretary, is reported to be "furious" at Livingstone's appointment, which some say she first learned of through Twitter (a claim she has denied). Livingstone told the World At One: "I’ve know her [Eagle] since she was 21, back in 1981, when she invited me to come and talk to her Labour students club, and she took me out for a nice meal. And in the ensuing 35 years we’ve always got on fine. I don’t think Maria Eagle is excited about having nuclear weapons and being able to kill people. She wants to be able to see a way through this problem, to make us a safe country; so do I."

An aide to Eagle emphasised to me that she would "still be leading" the review. When I recently interviewed her, she pledged that she would examine Trident "with a completely open mind" on "the basis of facts and figures", adding that she was "not ruling out" backing unilateral disarmament. But the shadow defence secretary, who rebuked Corbyn for saying that he would never press the nuclear button, also conceded that it was "unlikely" she would change her view (and that the Labour leader was "not likely" to change his). 

In contrast to economic policy, where a middle way can usually be identified no compromise presents itself over Trident. Corbyn and Livingstone would not accept a mere reduced system and Eagle told me that she favoured full renewal (four submarines) to maintain a continuous-at-sea deterrent. Among shadow cabinet members and MPs, Corbyn is isolated. There are just four other confirmed unilateralists at the top table: Diane Abbott, John McDonnell, Jon Trickett and Ian Murray. Andy Burnham has pledged to resign if the party opposes Trident renewal and others would likely follow. Among the most committed supporters are the Tom Watson, Michael Dugher and Vernon Coaker. Though he rightly contends that he has a "mandate" to oppose Trident, Corbyn could not impose his position on the party without dramatic consequences. 

Before the review concludes, Labour will be forced to take a stance on Trident in the Commons. Most shadow cabinet members expect Corbyn to offer a free vote but others echo the position recently expressed to me by Dugher: "You can’t have a free vote on Labour Party policy can you? Everyone should vote in a way that’s consistent with Labour Party policy. If you’d like a different policy, change the policy. But you’ve got to go through a process." After this year's annual conference voted not to the debate the issue, the party's official policy remains to support full renewal. Some unilateralists advocate a members' referendum on the issue but Eagle was said to be "reassured" by Corbyn's commitment to existing process at their first head-to-head meeting last week. 

There is no conceivable conclusion that will satisfy both the Labour leader and his pro-Trident frontbenchers. As the last 24 hours have shown, the appointment of Livingstone has only sharpened the party's nuclear dilemma. 

During the 1987 general election campaign, Neil Kinnock was asked by David Frost how he would respond were the United Kingdom threatened by a nuclear-armed Soviet Union. The Labour leader, then an advocate of unilateral disarmament, replied: “This is a classical choice between exterminating everything you stand for and the flower of your youth, or using all the resources you have to make any occupation totally untenable.”

Margaret Thatcher ruthlessly exploited his remarks, deriding the party’s policy as one “for defeat, surrender, occupation and, finally, prolonged guerilla fighting”. Kinnock protested that his comments had been distorted – “There is no question of guerilla warfare or a Dad’s Army” – but the charge stuck. Labour was irrevocably branded as “soft on defence”.

When Jeremy Corbyn remarked two days after the Paris attacks that he was “not happy” with a “shoot-to-kill” policy against terrorists, it was the 1980s that MPs recalled. Shadow cabinet ministers suggested that it was the killing of three unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar in 1988, rather than the present threat of Islamic State, that shaped his thinking.

It was Corbyn’s MPs, not the Conservatives, who forced a clarification. A few hours after he made his remarks, Corbyn attended what several of those present described as the most extraordinary meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party they had witnessed. "I've never seen the leader shouted over before," one told me. Corbyn was challenged over multiple issues but shoot-to-kill most of all. The following day, after failing to win the backing of the shadow foreign secretary, Hilary Benn (“I can’t speak for Jeremy”), Corbyn stated in his leader’s report to the National Executive Committee: “Of course I support the use of whatever proportionate and strictly necessary force is required to save life in response to attacks of the kind we saw in Paris.”

But as in the case of Kinnock, it is the original quote that Labour MPs worry will endure. The former cabinet minister Ben Bradshaw told me: “The first responsibility of any government is the protection of its citizens and the defence of the realm. Trust in Labour on these issues was hard-won in the Eighties and Nineties and any equivocation on such vital matters is unhelpful.”

Corbyn’s riposte is that far from preserving national security, the policies pursued by the Conservative government and its predecessors have undermined it. In a speech that was postponed after the Paris attacks, he was due to say that “a succession of disastrous wars” had “increased, not diminished the threats” to the UK. Even some MPs who share this view fear that he will not win a hearing for such arguments after his recent statements.

Outraged emails from voters and Labour Party members followed his comments on shoot-to-kill, they say. In their constituencies, MPs are asked how a leader who has declared that he would never use the nuclear button can defend the nation. In the run-up to the Oldham West and Royton by-election in December, Ukip, which has sought to turn the contest into a referendum on Corbyn’s patriotism, is profiting, or so some believe.

Should David Cameron table a motion for air strikes against Isis in Syria, Corbyn will soon face the greatest test of party unity to date. After previously appearing to relinquish hope of winning Commons approval, the Prime Minister has been emboldened by a combination of the Paris massacres, pressure from Barack Obama and the possibility of an agreement with Russia.

“There’s definitely been a change in the mood,” Johnny Mercer, the Conservative MP for Plymouth Moor View and a former soldier, told me. “Part of protecting ourselves is pursuing air strikes. I think there’s a majority there, there’s a clear majority.” Daniel Kawczynski, a Tory member of the foreign affairs select committee, told me: “A lot of MPs who are sitting on the fence may not want to appear soft on [Isis], bearing in mind it could be London that’s targeted next.”

Having previously refused to rule out a free vote for Labour MPs on air strikes, Corbyn has now come close to doing so. The announcement was the first evidence of the more forthright approach he promised at a recent shadow cabinet meeting. Yet, because of his record of rebellion, few backbenchers will join him in opposing air strikes out of loyalty alone.

Meanwhile, Benn is growing in influence. Unlike the Labour leader, who has rejected the question of whether he would ever support the use of force against jihadists as “hypothetical”, the shadow foreign secretary told the PLP meeting: “To those that say that taking action in Syria will make things worse: I say things are pretty bad for those in Syria and for our citizens, too.” 

For David Cameron, the task is to persuade sceptics that he has what he lacked in 2013: a coherent strategy for Syria. Conservative sources are hopeful that as many as 30 Labour interventionists will counterbalance a maximum of 20 Tory rebels.

In his favour, Corbyn can cite a Survation poll conducted following the Paris attacks showing public support of just 15 per cent for independent UK air strikes on Isis in Syria. But though MPs acknowledge that many of his individual policies are popular, they fear that Labour’s collective offer is no longer “credible”.

For this reason, the question of deselection, be it of Jeremy Corbyn or of recalcitrant MPs, will persist. True unity will not be achieved until the PLP reflects the leader, or the leader reflects the PLP. “It’s pretty nasty. This is not the fraternal Labour Party I know,” Ian Lavery, a Corbyn supporter, told me. The continuation of “internal warfare”, he warned, would lead to “unmitigated disaster”. The more central the issues of foreign and defence policy become to British politics, the greater the potential for division. As they reflect on the chasm between themselves and their leader, it is the choice of a nuclear strike or of “prolonged guerilla fighting” that Corbyn’s foes now confront.

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

Read up on episode 6 here.

It’s a day off for the candidates. The men are playing poker while the women are scattered about the place doing unspecified household tasks. Whiskers Valente wears sunglasses indoors and a blazer over his zip-up cream fleece. Sam, lying back on the sofa, ostentatiously reads Tolstoy for the camera. These are the business brains of tomorrow. Bask forevermore in their manufactured domesticity.

But then an angry little lord turns up at the front door to ruin all the fun.

“Discount stores and pound shops have taken over the high street,” he informs the contestants. Bad news for local businesses and community cohesion. Good news, however, for clunky selling challenges on reality television. All hail the death of the high street! Alan Sugar 1, Mary Portas and society as we know it 0.

The candidates have to open their own discount stores. And they must travel to Manchester to do this, of course. Apprentice geography logic has been so compelling this series. Kent for manure. Inland London for fish. Calais for dinghies. The North for dirt cheap tat.

Gary, who works in retail, heads up team Versatile. Scott, who is a senior account manager in sales (who isn’t?) takes on team Connexus. His team members, having discussed how useful discount stores are for toiletries and cleaning products, decide promptly to sell electronic items instead.

Selina worries that this will only appeal to men. As opposed to no one at all. “I don’t necessarily say, ‘ooh, look at all these black wires’.” Nor do I, Selina. Especially not when they are peeled off the floor of a warehouse and sold at a preposterous markup in a deserted pop-up shop by desperate televised business clowns.

The teams pile their trolleys high with warehouse goods. “We’re gonna be able to sell bubblegums [to toddlers],” boasts Jo. The far less impressive version of selling ice to an Eskimo.

When each of their discount stores opens in Manchester’s Arndale shopping centre, the male contestants seem to have a competition for who can display the creepiest sales technique.

“Hey ladies, how are you doing?” asks Richard, moonwalking alongside some women. “I’m an ice skater.” Peering into another woman’s wallet, he sniggers, “you don’t want me to see it.”

“Can I show you something?” breathes Jo to some passersby.

“Thank you for acknowledging me,” cries Scott, as punters ignore his selfie stick.

“You’re making the manager very happy,” growls Gary, when a woman falls for the oxymoronic ‘mouthwash and lemonade’ deal. “Does Jammie Dodgers go with washing powder?” he later muses.

“Imagine if we were all shit,” reflects Selina, witnessing this carnage.

In fact, this seems to be the episode when the female candidates (there are only three left) rise up against their incompetent male oppressors. Charleine hammers price signs to the wall of the shop with one of her heels. “You look stupid,” she quips at Jo, who has put braces on over his discount store t-shirt. “It’s fucking bullshit,” remarks Vana breezily when she’s sent away from selling in the store. She later does a swift deal in fluent Chinese.

When they get back, Lord Sugar mutters, “this task was trying to replicate a discount store,” in the vague manner of someone who caught half of this week’s Apprentice on iPlayer but was ironing and checking the news on their phone at the same time.

Team Versatile wins, and both Vana and Brett lay into Scott’s leadership of Connexus. “Everyone’s got to self-preservate,” is Brett’s sayism.

Back in the boardroom, Scott decides his life was in grave danger, which is why he didn’t sell enough cheap portable speakers. “You said you’d smash my face in,” he says to Brett, cowering in his presence. “He said he’d smash my face in!”

“No, he didn’t say that,” says witness Karren Brady, drowning out the collective of sigh of disappointment emanating from the show’s producers.

Anyway, it is both “regretful” and “with regret” that Sam is fired, and he leaves with the haughty expression of a wounded cockatoo.

Candidates to watch:

Selina

Takes responsibility for nothing, blames everyone, wins The Apprentice?

Vana

I hope she swears more often, perhaps in the other four languages she’s fluent in.

David

He seems to be the only left who doesn’t make people want to smash his face in.

I'll be blogging The Apprentice each week. Click here for the previous episode blog. The Apprentice airs weekly at 9pm, Wednesday night on BBC One.

The UK Sport website boasts of how it “strategically invest[s]” National Lottery and Treasury money “to maximise the performance of UK athletes”. The £543m programme pays for, among other things, “sports science and medicine”, including special diets. So when the World Anti-Doping Agency reports that the Russian state, in effect, sponsors the use of performance-enhancing drugs by its athletes, I shrug my shoulders. The report accuses the Russians of a “win-at-all-costs mentality” and laments that athletes are likely to be left “without access to top-calibre coaches” if they refuse to take the necessary substances. In almost any major sport, participants will be excluded from the top levels if they don’t accept the coaches’ prescribed diet.

Doping is as old as sport. It is said that in ancient Rome competitors in chariot races drank herbal infusions. Victorian athletes dosed themselves on laudanum (which is 10 per cent opium) and in the early-modern Olympics, marathon runners were openly injected with strychnine. We like to think of sport as pure and natural but, at the highest levels, it inevitably involves artificial aids to performance, even if they amount to nothing more than restricting young men or women to intense training and fitness schedules and a completely atypical lifestyle.

The will to win is enough on its own to persuade some athletes to risk their health and sometimes their lives, as, for example, boxers, rugby players, Formula 1 drivers and even cricketers do. Growing financial rewards encourage more risk-taking.

I suppose the line must be drawn somewhere and I do not defend the evident corruption in Russian sport. But sports commentators should dismount from their moral high horses. The Russians are called “cheats” but no sport has yet been invented where competitors do not cheat and hope to get away with it. At least, unlike some cricketers, the Russians had only winning on their minds.

On Isis, do nothing

If the Russian flight that went down killing all 224 on board after leaving Sharm el-Sheikh was indeed bombed, a direct western attack on IS is surely only a matter of time. The alarmingly gung-ho James Rubin, the former Bill Clinton aide-turned-Sunday Times columnist, envisages terrorists “being let loose on the streets of London, Berlin, New York, Paris and Los Angeles”. He advises “fighting the Isis fire before it goes global” but warns that we shall need “a lot more than modest air strikes and a small contingent of special forces”. If we are “at war” again, he writes, “this time let us do what is necessary to win”.

My memory is that we did “what is necessary to win” in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. The results we know. Should we perhaps now try something different? Such as cutting air strikes to zero, withdrawing special forces and accepting that, beyond provision of humanitarian aid, western intervention does no good whatsoever?

Flash cash

The police commissioner for Bedfordshire proposes permanently switching on all speed cameras on the section of the M1 within the county with the aim of raising £1m a year for the cash-strapped force. Patrick McLoughlin, the Transport Secretary, says this would be illegal. If so, the law is an ass. McLoughlin argues that Bedfordshire Police would be “punishing drivers”. What is wrong with that? Drivers would be punished for breaking the law. They can escape punishment by observing the speed limit. Perhaps, as a side effect, a few lives would be saved and serious injuries averted.

Thatcher’s turbulent priests

While spending a weekend in Oxford, my wife and I attended the Remembrance Sunday service at the University Church of St Mary the Virgin. In his sermon, the vicar, Canon Brian Mountford, told an extraordinary story, which, if true, casts significant fresh light on the controversy over the service to mark the successful conclusion of the Falklands War held in July 1982 at St Paul’s Cathedral. Some leading clergy, particularly Alan Webster, then dean of St Paul’s, wanted a service that was less triumphalist and more reconciliatory than Margaret Thatcher planned. A compromise was finally reached, whereby the service included notes of penitence and concern for Argentinian as well as British casualties but not, as Webster wished and Thatcher vehemently opposed, prayers in Spanish.

According to Mountford, Thatcher agreed to this compromise only after the then Roman Catholic archbishop of Westminster, Basil Hume, threatened to hold, in Westminster Cathedral on the same day at the exact same time, a rival service on the lines favoured by him and other churchmen. Mountford said he heard this story from Webster who is now dead, as is Hume.

There is no mention of it in either Charles Moore’s Thatcher biography or the late Anthony Howard’s biography of Hume. Moore tells me he has never heard of it and considers it unlikely because Hume was not confrontational and wouldn’t have wanted to act unecumenically. Are any New Statesman readers able to corroborate it?

The glory that wasn’t Corbyn

Still in Oxford, browsing the Ashmolean, I learned about the “lost” Roman emperor Domitianus II. He was apparently acclaimed emperor around 271AD but never acquired significant support where it mattered and lasted only a few weeks. Historians didn’t know he existed until a coin, now displayed in the Ashmolean, was discovered in a hoard in Oxfordshire in 2003.

I fear that, with Labour MPs forming what is being called “a shadow shadow cabinet” and even members of the real shadow cabinet making policy without reference to the leadership, Jeremy Corbyn will be the Domitianus of our age. To ensure his place in history, I advise him to get one of those “Jez We Can” badges buried in an airtight box. Another job for Seumas Milne.

Tom Graveney, who scored 122 first-class hundreds for Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and England, died early this month aged 88. I met him a few times, not enough to justify first-name terms. But Graveney was always Tom; the informal and the affectionate fitted his personality. He was one of the most loved players of his generation, though not always the most revered. Colin Cowdrey became the game’s elder statesman, Denis Compton was the raffish film star. Graveney, often on the wrong side of the establishment, was just Tom.

He was an unforgettable batsman. I will always remember his famous cover drive, so elegant that everyone said he should have worn a black tie and dinner jacket. Too short to drive? Tom would rock back, front foot still forward, and pull dismissively, almost disdainful of the bowler’s bad manners for pitching short. His aura was open and friendly, as though fun mattered as much as winning. Opponents could – should – be friends as well as adversaries.

Tom held the bat high on the handle, his top hand pointing down the splice rather than the back of the bat: the style of the classical tradition, not the modern power game. The grip was light rather than choked. The bat was a pendulum, the swing in sync with the delivery. You batted with the ball, not against it. Batting was both felt and learned, craft taken to the brink of genius.

Yet the thing is, I never saw Tom bat, not once. As for television, I’ve seen only a few seconds of him at the crease, grainy footage, no more than a few balls all added up. So is my “knowledge” a fraud? No. I do know about Tom, but only because he was my father’s boyhood hero.

Tom was the beginning of a family obsession. I learned about cricket – the bloodline of English technicians, the differing aspects of competitiveness and self-expression, the texture of county cricket and English life – through hearing about Tom.

So, I did see Tom play. Only I watched him in my imagination rather than with my eyes. And because Tom’s batting was described to me so often and so well, my knowledge, though second-hand, is not second-rate. Sport is about memory as well as experience – not just our own, but also memories described by people we love. This is real sport, too. The layering of reminiscence and adoration, stories passed on and absorbed, is part of the game’s depth and hinterland.

I learned about sport by talking with my father. I am still learning now. He usually speaks as a fan and critic (in the best sense) but with hints of the teacher never far away. The wonder of the supporter coexists with the analytical rationality of the educator.

Listening to Dad revealed not only sketches of players, but also maps of ideas. What is timing? What is rhythm? Why do some players have more time, how do they create space? When it was my turn to try for myself, I had a long-standing vocabulary of ideas.

And it started with Tom. In the 1950s, Dad would go to Nevil Road in Bristol – Gloucestershire’s unflashy county ground, tucked away in a quiet row of terraced streets – and watch Tom play. He fell in love with cricket by watching Tom bat.

When I mentioned Graveney on Test Match Special the day after he died, I found myself getting irrationally emotional. The same thing happens when I watch footage of the Welsh fly-half Barry John, another hero in our family. How can distant figures, who belong firmly to another generation, exert such a disproportionate emotional pull? Because we love the things they did to the people we love.

There is another question about heroes. Why does one player rather than another of equal achievement lodge indelibly in the memory? It is, I think, partly about the charisma of the player, partly about our own receptivity. Absorbing sport is like reading a novel. The depth of the response is a question of luck and timing. Had I read The Go-Between aged 12 or 20 (instead of at 14) or The Great Gatsby aged 15 or 30 (instead of at 17), I am certain these novels would not have touched me so deeply. I was especially susceptible to their themes at the moment when I read them.

It is the same in sport. There are phases when our followership is unusually acute, when we are open to heroes, perhaps in need of them. The nature of that yearning is always changing. As an eight-year-old in 1985, watching David Gower’s golden batsmanship against Australia, I imagined his life to be perfect – heroic but nonchalant. (Incidentally, the mellow West Country voice describing Gower’s cover drives belonged to Tom Graveney – part of that summer’s elegant ambience.) As a teenager, suddenly getting serious, Graham Gooch’s defiance against the West Indies got into my blood.

We find different things in sport at different moments. The wondrous Wimbledon final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in 2008 – the year of my retirement from cricket – turned me into a serious tennis fan. If I had tuned in to tennis earlier, when I unavoidably watched sport with half an eye on playing it better myself, I might have seen the rivalry through Rafael Nadal’s spartan quest for relentless self-improvement. Instead, just released from the introspection of my own playing days, Roger Federer came to represent the joy of watching sport just for the indulgent pleasure – lessons and examples be damned.

So it was in the 1950s. At a cricket ground at the end of a Victorian terrace, well off Bristol’s beaten track, a beautiful batsman gave a young boy – who would play and teach and talk cricket – a glimpse of glamour and craft, style and substance, warmth and wonder. Much later, I would be a beneficiary. 

What a difference a year makes. On becoming First Minister 12 months ago, Nicola Sturgeon was popular, but not that popular; widely respected, but very much a Scottish rather than a UK politician.

Under her leadership, however, the SNP’s membership has more than doubled, while it won all but three of Scotland’s seats at Westminster in May. Indeed, it was the general election that transformed Sturgeon into one of the UK’s best-known politicians, making it a personal as well as political triumph.

Her appearance on the BBC’s Desert Island Discs a few days ago revealed a politician at the peak of her powers, simultaneously the smartest person in the room but also the most “authentic” and straightforward; unlike Ed Miliband, Nicola Sturgeon certainly does human.

She’s also learned the art of political humility, giving away just enough of herself to imply a certain vulnerability at which many contemporaries (and indeed her predecessor Alex Salmond) would balk. “In the early days of my career . . . I would don the persona of ‘Nicola the politician’,” Sturgeon told Kirsty Young, “that’s how I overcame the shyness.”

There’s no hint of shyness these days, rather Sturgeon exudes a cool authority that enables her to rise above the sort of slings and arrows that divert less confident individuals. Incidents both frivolous (leaked French memos) and more substantial (serious question marks over the SNP’s record in government) have generally slid off the First Minister’s Teflon-like coating.

Few doubt Sturgeon’s presentational gifts, but the substance of her first year in the job is more open to question. The curse of the progressive politician is high, often quixotic, expectations, and part of the trouble she now has as leader of her party and country has been the lofty rhetoric of the past decade: repeated promises of a more socially just Scotland – with or without independence.

Writing on the SNP’s website recently, Sturgeon said she was “proud” the Scottish government had recently built “strong foundations” allowing it to make a difference when it came to educational attainment, fair work, gender balance and childcare. A cynic might ask why this is only happening now (the SNP first won a devolved election in 2007), and also question the intellectual depth of an obviously sincere commitment to tackling inequality.

Beyond a continuing commitment to the potentially transformative (but also rather vague) qualities of independence, the First Minister does not appear to have given this much thought. Faced with a growing chorus of criticism over the attainment gap between rich and poor schoolchildren, for example, Sturgeon responded by plucking national testing out of nowhere, a policy solution one former SNP adviser judged as “simply not credible”. Redistribution of wealth, meanwhile, isn’t on the agenda, even with new powers over income tax.

To an extent, Sturgeon is trapped by the peculiar dynamic of modern Scottish politics. On accepting the Scottish Parliament’s nomination as First Minister she pledged that her administration would be “bold, imaginative and adventurous”, but the SNP has not become electorally successful by being any of those things. Rather it has appealed to Middle Scotland by at once pandering to its view of itself as radical and egalitarian while giving it lots of goodies – chiefly free university tuition, frozen council tax and greater universal (ie. free) provision in certain areas of healthcare. Keeping together the SNP’s broad coalition of electoral support depends upon cautious pragmatism rather than upsetting vested interests.

Sturgeon, therefore, often appears more comfortable with the campaigning aspects of being First Minister: opposition to Trident, austerity, Tory rule and foreign wars all come naturally. In that respect, as she put it to Young, she’s “just an Eighties girl at heart”, although that sits uncomfortably with political triangulation that would make (the remaining) Blairites proud.

As Sturgeon said in her recent conference speech, the SNP stands up “for the values, interests and aspirations of mainstream Scotland”. Voters “don’t just see left or right”, she added, “they see above all else a party that always seeks to do the right thing for Scotland.”

The “right thing”, of course, remains independence, an issue that Sturgeon has managed relatively skilfully since last year’s referendum defeat, cleverly convincing “the 45” that another plebiscite is on the cards (most likely in 2020/21) while also reassuring SNP-supporting Unionists (yes, they do exist) that her immediate priority is good governance rather than further constitutional upheaval.

Under attack from opponents, the SNP leader often reminds them how popular her party is, and that much is true. Popularity, however, isn’t everything. That, says one supporter, “always passes: policy and reform will carve her place in history”.

She certainly intends to stick around, telling one interviewer that she hoped to remain First Minister “for a considerable period of time to come”. At only 45, Sturgeon has time on her side, but it will be through deeds rather than words that she translates considerable goodwill into an enduring political legacy.

After ten weeks of intense talks, power sharing in Northern Ireland has been saved by a new agreement amongst local parties. Titled “A Fresh Start – The Stormont Implementation Agreement Plan”, it details a number of concessions made both by and to Sinn Fein and the DUP. The document ensures that power sharing stays standing in the form of the local devolved government rather than London having to step in and rule Northern Ireland directly from Westminster in the absence of local political consensus. 

Stormont had been left teetering on the brink of collapse after DUP leader Peter Robinson stood down as First Minister in September to protest an apparent IRA execution on the streets of Belfast. A number of Unionist politicians resigned and plunged the parliament into a state of uncertainty over the last two months.

At the core of the new agreement is that Sinn Fein has relaxed their stance on welfare reform. As a hard left party, with some Marxist strands among its membership, they have previously fiercely rejected Conservative plans to implement austerity in Northern Ireland as they have in England with cuts to unemployment benefits and disability allowances. Sinn Fein has now agreed to accept less money for welfare from the British government, on the condition that Stormont tries to soften the blow to welfare recipients by plugging the gap through savings made by other departments. Exactly how these savings will be made has yet to be specified.

Similarly, the DUP has softened their stance on the IRA and agreed to a new commission being established to deal with paramilitarism in Northern Ireland. However, the commission will have very few powers on the issue and appears largely symbolic, prompting the leader of the hardline Traditional Unionist Voice party Jim Allister to accuse the DUP of “sweeping murder under the carpet”.

Both parties have also secured an additional £500m for Stormont’s budget, which has already been earmarked for special needs schools and greater transport development. A number of commissions will also be established to consider whether Belfast’s “peace walls” can finally come down, as well as the political use of flags and other contentious emblems.

Crucially, the thorny issue of what responsibility the state has for victims of the Troubles and how it should help them has been left ignored. The contentious issue has been dividing politicians for years with both the DUP and Sinn Fein clashing over who counts as an official “victim” in any state programmes of support. The majority of Northern Ireland’s political parties have pushed for anyone who suffered under the conflict to be helped, while the DUP have argued for only “innocent” people who have never engaged in any violence to be eligible for state compensation or help. The Agreement’s failure to address this issue essentially kicks it into the long grass without holding the DUP responsible for the current void in help for victims.

On balance, the Agreement represents a significant win for the DUP. While they have compromised on the IRA threat, the issue is largely a symbolic one in Northern Ireland rather than one which represents genuine impending harm. Equally, the British and Irish governments have agreed to conveniently ignore their role in blocking help for victims due to the DUP’s dispute about the definition of victimhood. On the other hand, Sinn Fein’s acceptance of a cut to the welfare bill represents a significant climb down and one which will be hard to sell to their hard-left membership and voters.

Indeed, the number of concessions to the DUP by the British government perhaps reflects wider tensions within UK and indeed international politics. Given the Conservatives’ slim majority of just 12 MPs, the DUP’s 8 MPs could prove crucial in supporting the government in the House of Commons, particularly as the parliamentary term continues and rebellious backbenchers grow in confidence. Despite having 4 MPs, Sinn Fein famously boycott Westminster by refusing to take their seats and so hold no bargaining power in the chamber. The DUP voted against Cameron’s 2013 proposed intervention in Syria, a vote which the prime minister lost by just 13 votes. If Cameron is considering raising a similar issue again in the chamber as part of an increased international effort in Syria following the tragedy of last week’s Paris attacks, then having DUP support for government action could prove crucial in ensuring it passes in the chamber. 

Amid reports that Cameron has begun canvassing support from parties across the chamber for a new vote on military action in Syria, it will be interesting to see whether he succeeds in winning over the DUP and whether the concessions in the new Northern Ireland agreement will have played any part in that.

It’s International Men’s Day, when patriarchs the world over count the cost of being the dominant class, find it to be unconscionably high, feel a bit sad, then carry on regardless. Have a good one, men, for tomorrow it’s back to pretending that when you say “people”, you mean women, too.

I realise that this could sound harsh. It’s not that I don’t empathise with how tough it must be to find oneself stuck at the top of a gender hierarchy. Just as money can’t buy you happiness, neither can the systematic exploitation of female bodies and labour. That’s why, along with Emergency Aid for Rich People, we desperately need an International Men’s Day. I don’t begrudge you that. I just wish it could be done a little differently.

The official theme for this year’s IMD is Making a Difference for Men and Boys. The unofficial theme, currently being pushed by A Voice for Men, is Expanding Reproductive Options for Men. Yes, I know. Reproductive options for men, at a time when 47,000 women die every year due to complications of unsafe abortion and 830 die each day due to preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth. A Voice for Men are a right bunch of comedians, aren’t they? Still, at least they’re not the only MRAs on offer. As most of us will be aware – and as these two examples show – there’s good men’s rights activism and then there’s the bad sort.

The good sort provides us with a through the looking-glass version of liberal feminism, led by cheery therapist types such as Steve Biddulph. It’s all about making sure boys have good male role models, look up to their fathers, and keep rough and tumble play within reasonable boundaries (not that you’d mind, obviously, but still). The bad sort is all about hating on women because your ex-wife was a bitch and now she’s expecting you to pay child support and how do you even know that those kids are yours. The major issues of concern for these MRAs are family law (biased), rape (false accusations) and violence (women’s) ie all the issues with which radical feminism concerns itself, only played out in some parallel universe, whereover 90 per cent of violent crime is committed by women (can you imagine the trauma of growing up male in a world like that?).

If, like me, you are both a feminist and a mother of boys, it’s hard not to feel pressured to get behind the “good” version. After all, it’s not as if you don’t care about men’s higher suicide rates, greater exposure to violent crime and shorter life expectancy, is it? So what could you have against efforts to “highlight discrimination against men in areas of social services, social attitudes and expectations and law”? Isn’t it time, as Glen Poole puts it, for “the women’s sector to share the gender equality pie”? If women are seeking to liberate themselves from patriarchal oppression, isn’t it time for men to liberate themselves from, um, matriarchal oppression?

Actually, I think the answer to this is no.

If we care at all about men and boys – and if men and boys care about themselves – it’s time to drop the pretence. The systematic brutalisation of men and boys is not an equivalent to the oppression of women and girls; it is the price men pay to be the dominant class. Male socialisation is horrific, but it does not happen by accident and no amount of “highlighting positive male role models” can undo the harm this does. If men are, to quote Andrea Dworkin, “turned into little soldier boys from the day [they] are born”, it is because this is necessary for the maintenance of their power as a class.

Of course, the usual cry goes up: “How can male supremacy be real when men and boys are suffering? Why would men seek to protect something that causes them harm?” Patriarchy’s fetishisation of power can make it difficult to recognise that unhappiness can be an outcome of needing to fight to retain it. The desire to separate male violence from male suffering stands in the way of a clear analysis of what hurts men the most. As Dworkin points out, male supremacy requires men to enter into a cycle of violence and alienation:

“It means you can rape. It means you can hit. It means you can hurt. It means you can buy and sell women. It means that there is a class of people there to provide you with what you need. […] Now, the men's movement suggests that men don't want the kind of power I have just described. I've actually heard explicit whole sentences to that effect. And yet, everything is a reason not to do something about changing the fact that you do have that power.”

Instead of asking what this structure is that dictates that men cannot be nurturing or show emotion, men’s rights activism seeks to bypass analysis by barging on in and demanding “a unified celebration of manhood”. Well, no. Not yet. Manhood doesn’t deserve it.

In his book Irrationality, Stuart Sutherland offers an example of how “the rivalry between groups may be so irrational that each may try to do the other down even at its own expense”:

“In an aircraft factory in Britain the toolroom workers received a weekly wage very slightly higher than that of the production workers. In wage negotiations the toolroom shop stewards tried to preserve this differential, even when by doing so they would receive a smaller wage themselves. They preferred a settlement that gave them £67.30 a week and the production workers a pound less, to one that gave them an extra two pounds (£69.30) but gave the production workers more (£70.30).”

This seems to me a good analogy for how men’s rights activism functions. Men and boys must suffer in order to “preserve the differential” between them and women and girls. Events such as International Men’s Day seek to maintain male supremacy not only in spite of the huge cost it extracts from men and boys, but by using this cost as a justification. It’s clinging on to the thing that causes you pain in an effort to prove to yourself it was worth it.

But it isn’t. The shorter lifespan, the violence and the depression should tell us that it isn’t. If men want liberation, too, it’s time for them to cut their losses. Masculinity isn’t working; it’s time for men to let go.

The Chancellor is backed into a corner on tax credits – reduce the cuts or face an electorate who now distrust his plans for in-work benefits. Universal credit (UC) is one of the options that Osborne is looking at to save some of this £4.4bn.

Much of the focus so far has been on the savings he could achieve by increasing the amount of benefit that is withdrawn for every pound earned (the taper rate). We argue here that other elements of UC are vulnerable, assess the potential impact of cutting these elements and cost the potential savings. The impacts of these potential savings would be comparable to those the Chancellor is now under pressure to reverse – cutting the incomes of the poorest and most vulnerable families – relocating the pain rather than removing it.

In the summer budget, UC was cut drastically, mostly in the form of cuts to work allowances (the amount of earnings before support starts to be taken away). These allowances could be cut further, further weakening work incentives and reducing incomes. But a more likely outcome would be cuts to other parts of UC. There are two main ways that this could be done: taper rates and elements.

The taper rate (the amount of benefit that is taken away for every additional pound earned) is currently 65 per cent, but there are suggestions that it could increase to 75 per cent. Analysis by IPPR has found that raising the taper rate to 75 per cent would bring in £2.6bn in 2020. This compares to £3.3bn raised by work allowance cuts in 2020, as announced in the summer budget. A taper increase would affect all households who are earning more than the (now very low) work allowances – and would reduce the returns to work for these low income households. It appears that protests from Iain Duncan-Smith, who refuses to see UC further undermined, have made this option unlikely.

The second – and more likely – way the Chancellor may look for savings is in the UC "elements" (the value of the benefit awarded to each household/individual before the taper kicks in). The sums involved in the different elements of social security are considerable. For instance, around £25bn is spent on housing benefit per year, and around £13bn is spent on Employment Support Allowance (the replacement for Incapacity Benefit). Both of these elements are particularly vulnerable, given that they have been targets of recent reforms, and in particular target out of work benefit claimants.

The government have a number of options on cutting the 'housing element' of UC (currently housing benefit). One of the more likely is reviewing the Local Housing Allowance, the housing benefit subsidy in the private rented sector. In 2012, LHA was adjusted to subsidise rents at the 30th percentile of the market down from the 50th percentile (ie. rent subsidies used to fund rents in the middle of the rental market, and now correspond to rents in the bottom third). The government could for instance, reduce this to the 20th percentile of the market, saving an estimated £400m a year according to the IFS. Evidence shows that this does not generally reduce market rents - rather tenants end up paying more for where they live. This would be particularly damaging in high cost housing markets where, due to successive freezes to LHA rates coupled with rent rises, fewer and fewer properties are available at the 20th percentile of the market, let alone the 30th.

A second, similar option would be to make all housing benefit claimants pay 10 per cent of their rents – thus automatically saving around £2.4bn per annum, and affecting 4.8m households (IPPR analysis). While this might incentivise households to look for cheaper properties, for households living in the private rented sector, the average impact would be a loss of income of around £570 per year, and £460 per year for social housing tenants. Again, the impact would be particularly hard on those living in high cost housing markets, like London, Cambridge, York and Oxford.

Given recent trends, disability benefits may be also be targeted, as they were in the March budget with little fanfare but a potentially major impact. The budget announced that new claimants of Employment support allowance (ESA) Work Related Activity Group – who DWP consider will be able to work in the future – will from 2017 have their ESA benefits cut to jobseeker allowance rates – a cut of around £2,000 per year per claimant (for a claimant claiming for the entire year). Were the government to repeat this process for the other group of ESA claimants, by moving all Support Group claimants (those who have no current prospect of being able to work due to severe health problems), whose average claim is £137 per week to the current WRAG rate (averaging £113 per week), then this would result in a loss of income to seriously disabled people of around £1,200 per year, saving around £1.4bn a year.

The Chancellor is likely to seek savings to offset a partial tax credits U-turn in the years preceding the roll out of UC (from 2016/17), rather than exclusively at the end of the parliament (when UC is fully rolled out). The potential cuts described above could apply to the current system, and effectively roll over to UC. Though most families are yet to migrate to UC, it is changes to this system that will affect families in the long term. Yet the value of and distribution of support under UC will evolve from the current system – both should therefore be under scrutiny at the spending review and beyond.

UC could work well for millions of low income households. It simplifies the benefit system, smooths transitions in and out of work, and gets rid of tax credits’ income traps. But it is unlikely to survive further raids without ending up an ineffective poverty reduction tool that punishes the poorest households in the UK. Reversing the tax credit cuts by cutting universal credit will shuffle around this nasty outcome rather than stop it – and would hit families that are unable to compensate for their loss of income (such as those for whom disability precludes paid employment).

But Osborne doesn’t have to push the damage into UC – the Treasury would still achieve a surplus without any further cuts to either welfare system.

Giselle Corry and Bill Davies are senior research fellows at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR).

The morning after the murders, the people of Paris queued up to open their veins. In the days after terrorists from the apocalyptic cult calling itself Islamic State had slaughtered 129 people in Paris and 43 people in Beirut, ordinary Parisians queued for hours to give blood, even though the number of donors outstripped the number of wounded.

Of all the illogical responses to great violence, the impulse to give blood is perhaps the most sweetly symbolic. Terrified human animals come forward to offer, quite literally, the contents of their hearts, because they have no idea how else to help.

Grief makes people do strange things. Sometimes they go out and get drunk and pick fights. Sometimes they hurt themselves. Sometimes they start baking hundreds of cupcakes because they can’t think of what else to do. At moments of cultural shock, these behaviours have collective equivalents. Frightened, angry people are capable of extreme compassion, moments of breathtaking tenderness and responsibility, and they are also capable of being utterly vile to one another. Blaming, condemning, calling for more violence. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks on Paris and Beirut, we have seen all of that and worse.

The two most dangerous words in politics are “us” and “them”. In the past few days, calls for unity on every side have been accompanied by blame and implications that “we” had it coming. “We” brought it on ourselves. Rational analysis of the consequences of 14 years of military intervention in the Middle East has been lost in the scramble to point fingers at anyone who might possibly be responsible. It’s the students’ fault. It’s the feminists’ fault. It’s liberalism. It’s Islam. It’s British multiculturalism. It’s French assimilationism.

On the right, there were instant calls for more air strikes, more surveillance, more boots on the ground. The bodies of slaughtered French citizens had yet to be buried when Ukip’s leader, Nigel Farage, accused all Muslims of having “divided loyalties” and insisted that Britain close its borders. Republican leaders in the US demanded that their nation cease accepting Syrian refugees. Meanwhile, and more forgivably, people on the left have criticised one another for not seeming to be equally shocked by the murders in Beirut, as if the correct response to the death of hundreds of innocents were a scramble for the moral high ground.

I was pretty confident in my own moral high ground, convinced of my capacity to be equally moved by the slaughter of innocents from any culture and community on earth. But then those despicable bastards had to go and attack a gig. The single bloodiest attack in Paris was at the Bataclan concert hall, which happened to be hosting a rock band called Eagles of Death Metal. As such, I’ve spent the past three days considering the practicalities of summoning a world legion of vengeful rock music fans to put aside our differences and take out Isis.

Forgive me for trying to make you smile, but I’m also being serious. A tiny, twisted part of me actually thinks this sounds like a great idea. There is a reason why people in deep grief or profound shock are advised not to make big life decisions, such as whether or not to go to war. They have a tendency to act impulsively on the basis of feelings that are perfectly acceptable up until the point that they are acted upon.

I have no interest in policing the purity of people’s feelings. Feelings are not rational. People going through hell, or even watching it come to a city they love, are allowed to feel whatever they like. They are even allowed to feel, for a petty and furious moment while watching the news, that abandoning millions of Isis’s innocent Arab victims might be worth it if it saved one more European life. What is unacceptable is to behave for a single instant as if this were objectively the case.

What is despicable, moreover, is to exploit the grief of others to further an agenda of prejudice and hatred. If anyone might be forgiven for going on a regrettable racist rant in these circumstances, it would be the relatives of victims in Paris and Beirut, but the family members of those slaughtered have responded with a compassion that is humbling. Charlie Hebdo, the satirical magazine whose journalists were slaughtered by Islamic extremists in January, led with a cover declaring that ISIS might have guns, but France has champagne, so really, who’s winning here? By contrast, Donald Trump is calling for Mosques to be shuttered in the United States, and the Daily Mail is accompanying calls for a total freeze on immigration with cartoons comparing refugees to rats.

This sort of cowardly, craven response to violence appears to be what passes for courage in the logic of modern conservatism. But courage is not about pretending not to be afraid, or lashing out to make yourself feel more powerful. Courage is about behaving with decency and principle no matter how scared you are. Courage is about not giving in to fear, or letting fear turn you into a lesser version of yourself. The most immediate victory for Isis would be a reversal of Europe’s softening stance on refugees. Tolerance, openness, a commitment to human dignity: these are exactly the things that Isis does not want to see, and it has surely been watching.

These unbelievable bastards aren’t worried about the prospect of more air strikes, more civilian casualties, more callousness on the borders of Europe, more security clampdowns at its heart. They are looking forward to all of that. They’re probably rubbing their hands at the xenophobic attacks taking place right now across the continent, at the conservative calls for crackdowns on Muslims, at the imminent passing of further surveillance legislation that has proved dubiously effective in catching terrorists but extremely efficient in curbing the individual freedoms of ordinary civilians. What Isis wants is a holy war between two violently homogeneous civilisations, and the only way it will get that is if the West starts to behave like one.

The unity that terrorists fear is not unity of opinion or outlook. It is unity in principle. It is commitment to the principle that every human life is of value, that pleasure and diversity and liberty are not to be thrown away the instant some psychopath opens fire in a restaurant. We cannot say for certain that opening Europe’s borders would not allow a few terrorists to cross over into our cities along with hundreds of thousands of needy innocents. What we can say for certain is that closing those borders would allow the terrorists into our hearts.

Kindness, diversity and decency are weapons that can only be brought to one battlefield, and it happens to be the one territory that Isis cannot afford to lose. It is the territory of the collective human imagination, and it has no borders at all. We are allowed to be shocked. We are allowed to grieve. But if we allow ourselves to be provoked into bigotry, cruelty and intolerance, then the terrorists will have won. It’s the only way they ever get to win.

Spear’s is recruiting a new managing editor. This is a varied role and an excellent opportunity for an organised, efficient, imaginative person to help run a lively magazine, develop our marketing and enhance our brand.

You’ll be joining the close-knit team of an authoritative and well-respected media brand, which includes a magazine, a website, events programme and research unit. Spear’s covers every aspect of the high-net-worth world, from finance to philanthropy, art to entrepreneurialism, with insight, wit and style.

The managing editor will be responsible for the production of the magazine, running the editorial team and working externally with the MD, Editor and Editor-in-chief, Contributors, Advertisers and Print Providers, and internally with Production, Sales, Events and Marketing.

There will also be a strong business development aspect to the role, especially helping to develop brand partnerships with luxury brands, banks, law firms and other leading firms in the wealth management community. 

Key responsibilities

- Managing the publication’s day-to-day operations – this includes running the office (HR/general enquiries), Spear’s database, managing contributors, work prioritisation, allocation of resource, planning and monitoring of schedules.

- Coordinating the production schedule for the publication, creating flat plans, liaising with all the key positions (Editor, Writers/Reporters, Illustrators, Graphic Designers, Sub-Editors and Sales).

- Tracking and reporting on the progress of work to ensure copy and illustrations come in on time and that production runs to schedule.

- Developing marketing initiatives, partnerships with clients and raise brand awareness, always working with the Spear’s brand in mind. Working closely with the marketing and events team at a wide range of Spear’s events and seminars.

You should be willing to represent Spear’s at external events, and to help out with Spear’s own events including our annual Book Awards, Wealth Management Awards and Young Turk Awards.

There are plenty of perks to working at Spear’s, including luxury travel assignments, restaurant and bar reviews, so an ability to write well is an advantage.

How to Apply

Please send CV and covering letter to William.cash@spearswms.com. 

Comrade Corbyn has urged shadow cabinet Castros to keep their interventions brief. You can see why: the Labour leader was backed for the top job by just three of its 30 members. My snout inside the party’s parliamentary politburo tells me the brevity edict allows Brother Jeremy to avoid answering questions.

No wonder, when Jezza’s implacable opponents in Westminster are growing increasingly deranged. Aware that Corbyn must lose national elections if his support within the party is to be eroded, one moderate whispered that Blairite cohorts would be prepared to sacrifice Sadiq Khan at next May’s London mayoral contest if it would trigger a regime change.

Hoping the bus driver’s son is beaten by the Tory Zac Goldsmith is the latest counter-revolution by the dispossessed.

Randy Robert Halfon’s trysts with Tory totty are entirely his own private business – even if a bizarre alleged blackmail conspiracy involving a Conservative Party aide who was suspended in May this year has “public interest” stamped all over it. But the choice of hopping into bed at the collar-and-tie, gentlemen-only East India Club in St James’s Square was a risqué choice for an MP meant to be posing as the champion of beer and bingo for the great unwashed.

Riff-raff are kept out of the exclusive club by means of an application form that requires would-be members to send letters “stating fully the position of the candidate socially”. That presumably posed no hurdle for the Essex MP. The exposure leaves, I hear, another Tory minister sweating that his own fling will be aired in the papers.

The Tory defector Mark Reckless, Ukip’s former MP, is planning a comeback. After losing his Rochester seat last May, he aims to become a member of the Welsh Assembly. The “fat arse”, as David Cameron affectionately called his former colleague, is tipped to lead the Purple Shirts’ top-up list in South-East Wales, where the aptly named Reckless was recently seen loitering with political intent. The corner is easy to reach from London on the M4 and, according to my informant, Ukip fears he would be an unelectable liability standing for a normal constituency seat.

Why did the GMB’s Sir “just call me Paul” Kenny accept a knightood in the lead-up to retirement? “Because,” said a union source, “it would have gone to Usdaw’s John Hannett if he hadn’t.” Rivalry explains everything.

Alan Yentob, Auntie’s £300,000-a-year creative director, should buy a tin helmet. Word is the former chair of Kid’s Company, even more than its chief executive, Camila Batmanghelidjh, will be in the firing line when the public administration committee completes its inquiry into the charity’s expensive collapse. 

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

In the years since what Isis has described as the “blessed operation” of 11 September 2001, the world has never been free from the threat of jihadist terror. But there were periods when that threat appeared to be receding. The Paris massacres and their troubled aftermath were evidence that the menace is now greater than ever. In their scope, ruthlessness and malevolence, the attacks felt like the dawn of a renewed era of mass terror. “The first of the storm” was how Isis hailed its terrible deed.

Yet Paris and its people were also the latest in a grim catalogue of victims: Beirut, Baghdad, Sinai, Ankara, Tunisia. Since proclaiming a “caliphate” in June 2014, Isis has advanced with lethal speed. Unlike its precursor al-Qaeda, it occupies territory, having conquered swaths of Iraq and Syria. This quasi-state provides Isis with both an ideological basis for external aggression and a training ground for apprentice jihadists. The threat is not merely quantitatively, but qualitatively different from previous forms of Islamism. All those, Muslim and non-Muslim, who do not subscribe to the extreme Salafist doctrine of Isis are regarded as legitimate and even essential targets.

It was understandable that the president of France, François Hollande, confronted by what happened, used the language of “war” in response. Yet such rhetoric risks validating Isis’s pretensions of statehood and creating false expectations of “victory” against a Hydra-headed foe. As the former French prime minister Dominique de Villepin observed, the experience of the “war on terror” should be caution enough.

If France is now at war with Isis, it has been at war for some time. Indeed, its intensified air strikes on the Isis stronghold of Raqqa in Syria were cited by the group as justification for its murderous rampage. For more than a year, the UK has participated in air raids in Iraq “at the invitation of the Iraqi government”. The Prime Minister has long signalled his belief that Britain should extend its involvement to Syria. Fear of defeat in the Commons has prevented David Cameron from acting as he would wish.

There is an understandable and even admirable impulse to act. What are expressions of “solidarity” with France worth if the UK declines to join forces against Isis and allows its allies to defend its interests? Yet, without a multinational plan to destroy the terror group and reclaim the territory it has conquered, would British air strikes on Isis in Syria amount to anything more than a gesture?

The possibility of UK participation through Nato, as in the case of Kosovo, or through the UN should not be disregarded. However, as Mr Cameron is increasingly prepared to acknowledge, unless accompanied by moves towards a wider peace plan and political settlement in Syria, air strikes will be largely symbolic if not supported by ground forces.

In Britain, expressions of sympathy with France coexist with the fear and knowledge that such atrocities could be replicated in London. Seven terrorist attacks have been thwarted here in the past year; the threat, as assessed by independent officials, is “severe”.

It is a fortnight since Theresa May, the Home Secretary, introduced the draft Investigatory Powers Bill, which would provide the security services with new rights to monitor internet communications. Terrorists have failed without such legislation and could yet succeed with it but with sufficient judicial oversight, there is a strong case for the state’s capabilities to advance in line with those of its enemies. For this reason, the planned cuts to police numbers in the forthcoming Spending Review must also be re-examined.

It was through an open border with Belgium that three of the attackers entered France. Even before the massacre in Paris, the Schengen Agreement, permitting passport-free movement across 26 European countries (the UK and Ireland are exempt), was unravelling under the strain of the refugee crisis. After the attacks, it appears even less sustainable, a relic of an age of innocence. Europe must change in order to remain the same without compromising its values.

The Syria crisis demands that the EU, the US and their allies forge a grand strategy equal to the boundless ambitions of Isis. Military, diplomatic, economic and cultural power must be harnessed against global jihadism. Resolve and fortitude will be required but so, too, will doubt and scepticism – the antitheses of the dogmatic certainties of the jihadists. It is in recognising what Isis seeks to destroy that we also recognise what we must defend. 

Junior doctors in England have voted overwhelmingly in favour of going on strike. This is the culmination of an ongoing row between the medical profession and government over proposed new junior doctor contracts, with 98 per cent of junior doctors voting to strike in protest of the changes.

The doctors' union behind the strike vote, the British Medical Association, says health ministers have left doctors with no choice but to take action, as the new contracts would be "unsafe".

The planned new measures include a 25 per cent cut to the number of hours classed as unsociable (for which there is extra pay), and would scrap guaranteed pay increases linked to time in the job. There would be an 11 per cent basic pay rise for junior doctors, but the BMA argues that this would be offset by new curbs to other elements of a doctor's pay package.

The Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt's talks with the profession have broken down, leading to numerous protests against the upcoming contracts. This row has resulted in the first "all out" strike in NHS history.

Strikes will lead to thousands of routine appointments and planned tests and operations being cancelled and rescheduled, with emergency cases prioritised. The dates for this industrial action are 1 December (with junior doctors staffing solely emergency care), 8 December (full strike), and 16 December (full strike).

Over two-thirds of the workforce voted in the BMA's ballot.

Stanley Kubrick once mused on the idea of a sexually explicit film made with beautiful actors and expensive equipment. Terry Southern wrote this up as a screenplay and a novel (Blue Movie) but it was never filmed. Now the Argentinian director Gaspar Noé has married high production values with unsimulated sex in the way Kubrick envisaged. Love (18, dir. Gaspar Noé) is shot in 3D, a format purpose-built for poking or dangling bits and bobs in cinemagoers’ faces. Noé has combined the spectacular and the repellent in previous films such as the revenge drama Irréversible. His fourth feature, Love, is one in the eye – often literally – for those who doubted he could make a work of pure or peaceful intent.

Other directors (Michael Winterbottom in 9 Songs, John Cameron Mitchell in Shortbus) have dragged real sex away from the realm of porn, though never at quite this . . . well, length. Noé pieces together a love affair and its meltdown using sex scenes as his main storytelling tool. Talking of tools, Murphy (Karl Glusman) is prone not only to whip his own out at the drop of a dress, but to act like one, too. “I’m just a dick,” he says during one of his interior monologues. “And a dick has no brain. It has only one purpose. To fuck. And I’m only good at one thing. Fucking things up.”

It isn’t the sex in Love that is shocking, it’s the dialogue. You never know what is going to come out of the actors’ mouths. Or go into them, for that matter.

Murphy lives with his partner, Omi (Klara Kristin), and their son, but is preoccupied by memories of an earlier relationship with Electra (Aomi Muyock). Jump-cuts show how these reminiscences overpower the present. In the long opening scene, the couple’s bodies form a human pretzel as they masturbate one another. The next thing we know, Murphy is in bed next to Omi. The production design doesn’t differentiate between time frames. Either Noé is very fond of orange and avocado, or he got a good deal on a batch of Dulux. The lighting, predominantly warm and amber, switches to scarlet or pea-green during infidelity or distress.

There is also a correlation between the story and the kinds of sex shown. 9 Songs made the mistake of equating a woman’s use of a vibrator with the rejection of her partner, as though a toy could have no use other than as a replacement for a man. Love, though not as censorious, usually interprets any sex that is not in the missionary position as an expression of rage. If correct, it’s a theory that would make the Kama Sutra a very angry book indeed.

Many of the criticisms that could be levelled at Love can just as easily be neutralised by its loyalty to Murphy’s point of view. He is a film student who dreams of making a movie that depicts sentimental sexuality – the way sex feels between people who are in love. He talks a good film but we see no evidence of his work. The reason for this, it soon becomes clear, is that Love is the film he is talking about.

In the same way as the narrative of Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation starts to resemble the screenplay that the main character is writing, so Love adheres to the contours of Murphy’s dream project. It is ludicrous that a film which prides itself on explicitness becomes coy when he can’t sustain an erection (the only time that the camera shoots him from the waist up) or cuts away from a sexual encounter of which he is ashamed. But if Love is a manifestation of the film Murphy has in his head, then it makes sense that he would leave his own bad takes on the cutting-room floor.

The impression of being trapped inside a movie taking place in one man’s head is only amplified by the abundance of in-jokes. Murphy hides his drugs inside a VHS copy of Noé’s 1998 debut feature film, Seul contre tous, and names his son Gaspar. He also assaults a gallery owner called Noé. (Guess which controversial Argentinian director plays that part?)

Although Love features several happy endings and several climaxes, none of which occur at the conclusion of the film, it insists on an emotional foundation to its sex scenes that would be disastrous in pornography. Nothing would undermine a porn flick more quickly than worrying about whether those college girls got their own rooms so they didn’t have to share a bed for the rest of term, or if that handyman ever got round to fixing the broken boiler. 

“Celebrity,” said John Updike, “is a mask that eats into the face.” But what happens if a person’s fame is literally built on a mask? Does this mean they get off lightly, being able to opt in and out of fame according to mood? No. The rot just takes a different form. The game among the paparazzi is to capture you unmasked. In future, you will not be able to leave your house, or even open your front door, without first pressing that silly confection of plastic, sequins and velvet across the bridge of your nose. In the end, you have no choice but to look like the Lone Ranger everywhere but in front of your own shaving mirror.

This is the pitiful lesson of Jeanie Finlay’s remarkable documentary Orion: the Man Who Would Be King (16 November, 10pm, BBC4), screened in the BBC’s Storyville strand after a brief cinema release this year (the corporation was among the financial backers). Orion was Jimmy Ellis, a man from Orrville, Alabama, who sounded astonishingly like Elvis, and looked a little like him if the room was half dark and the audience had consumed enough bourbon. But what to do with such a singer? How to cash in?

In 1977, in the months that followed the death of Elvis Presley, there came an idea. A novelist called Gail Brewer-Giorgio had invented a character called Orion, who lived in a big white house that went by the name of Dixieland, and whose extreme fame had grown so intolerable to him that, in the end, he had faked his own death to escape it. No doubt you see where this is going. Couldn’t Ellis become Orion, and feed the lustful necrophilia of those still in mourning for their idol? Yes, he could – though if the plan was truly to work, his management insisted, he would have to wear a mask.

So, that’s what he did. For a time it worked, too, with the gigs selling out and the fan club swelling to 20,000 members, some of whom slept in their cars in order to stalk him. In the end, though, it was futile. Ellis hoped with all his heart that the “mystery” of his true identity would be “solved” and his career as a singer would proceed miraculously from there. When no one obliged, he began to feel the crowd was “applauding a ghost”. One day, unable to bear it any longer, he ripped off his mask, mid-gig. It was as if a spell had been broken. Now he was just a guy. Before too long, he was back in Alabama, running the pawn shop in which, in 1998, he would be murdered in a botched robbery. Indeed. As parables go, this one has everything, and Finlay told it bewitchingly well. If you missed it, watch it on catch-up – especially you, Victoria Beckham, imprisoned as you are by your vow never, ever to be caught smiling.

And now, a few thoughts on The Great Pottery Throw Down (last episode in the first series airs on 24 November, 9pm, BBC2). Unlike some, I think this show is going to be big – possibly huge – somewhere down the line. The numbers are going to build and build. Yes, its similarity to The Great British Bake Off is obvious but this is also irrelevant, for the simple reason that, unlike the other rip-offs – dressmaking, painting, allotment management, and on and on – there is something beautiful at its heart. The marriage of form and function achieved by a good potter, let alone a great one, is a more than ordinarily powerful and happy-inducing thing.

What a lovely lot they are, these vets and soldiers and teachers, and what skill they have. Most of us, at a push, can bake a cake, but how many of us know how to throw a vase or bowl, let alone glaze it so it resembles the sea on a rough day or the moss on an ancient stone? It has the wrong presenter. The former ladette Sara Cox, with her endless double entendres, has no feeling at all for the craft at hand. It’s just a gig for her and her insincerity is obvious, a blot. She has been chosen, this is crystal clear, for her Lancashire accent, so as not to make the proceedings seem irredeem-ably middle-class (all the more unnecessary given the diversity of the cast). But otherwise The Pottery Throw Down is close to perfect. Matthew the Yorkshire school-master to win! 

To Ronnie Scott’s in Soho for the opening of the London Jazz Festival and the launch of a new “BBC Music Jazz” pop-up station. “Intestinal,” notes my companion of the club’s dark red walls, further shadowed by all the usual elderly jazzos pressed into the interior’s nooks and crannies like benign colon polyps. Two technicians sit nearby over a mixer desk, unsmiling – this is going out live at any moment and the various acts are still crowding the small stage, double-checking positions while the presenter Jez Nelson shuffles through a script.

Standing in the middle of it all, a twentysomething woman with long, curly hair and very clear skin, wearing the sort of brown shift top favoured by Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Joan of Arc or an Open University maths tutor circa 1970, holds aloft a pair of drumsticks. There is something youthfully devotional about her: you imagine her sighing fiercely over favourite poems or pictures in school library books. And when the broadcast begins and this woman – a classically trained percussionist called Bex Burch, it turns out, with her group Vula Viel – starts whacking the hell out of an all-wooden xylophone that she learned to make and play living with the Dagaaba people of northern Ghana, the two unsmiling technicians turn to each other and very slowly mouth three simple words rarely uttered during the too-crammed Jazz Festival: “I like this.”

Not a person present isn’t stupefied as Burch pogoes high, hair a ferocious occluding cloud, stopping occasionally to crouch to the floor with a little axe and chopping pieces of wood to create notes of other timbres. “I first started needing to hit things in the church choir in Yorkshire,” she said in an interview once. In another, Burch mentions the “asymmetrical bell pattern driving with chaos” of this instrument she made, and the “mastery of space and silence”.

Listening back to the show later, I found this opening act didn’t sound much like jazz at all. It sounded like the oubliette that awaits so many radio listeners of the festival – from which you emerge not wanting to tune in to those samey rhythms and locutions for a long time – being put off, and put off again, indefinitely. Ingenious programming moment of the year, no question. 

The death of Jonah Lomu at the tender age of 40 comes as a great shock. The tributes have poured in, and will keep flowing. He has been described as a legend, a hero and a gentleman, and no doubt he will go down as such in the history of rugby.

Certainly there is a genuine case to say that he changed the game of rugby in a significant way. Before him wingers were slight, nippy and agile who used guile and speed to exploit the open spaces to score tries. Gerald Davies was a master at avoiding the opposition, using a range of delicate skills. But Lomu could cover 100m in under 11 seconds and at 6’5” and 19 stone he didn’t go round the opposition: he went through or over them.

At the age of 20, he was unstoppable. He burst onto the rugby landscape in the 1995 South Africa World Cup. With a stature more suited to a role in the pack, he changed rugby’s view of wingers and paved the way for players such as George North to pursue a similar career.

Despite the power and pace, or perhaps because of it, there was an aesthetic appeal to his play. He was a beautiful runner and when he received the ball both the crowd and opposition held their breath. It was like watching a school match where the big kid in the class swatted his smaller opponents out of the way effortlessly.

The beauty of sport is that there is always something new. The aim is to find new and different ways to outdo the opposition, to overcome unnecessary obstacles, to meet the test on offer. Lomu seemed to thrive on testing himself by running directly at the opposition, a personal challenge of his own physicality and prowess. His on field brilliance made him a global superstar and a role model.

But the burden of being a role model does not always sit comfortably with sport superstars and there are many who have suffered as a result of being thrust into the limelight at such a young age. In some cases, problems are self-inflicted and many a promising youngster doesn’t go on to have a career to match the talent and potential.

But Lomu’s career and eventually his life were cut short by a rare kidney disease, nephrotic syndrome, over which he had no control. He called time on his professional career in 2002 and underwent a kidney transplant in 2004.

Despite this, he approached the disease and his life with courage and determination. He continued to play, he turned his hand to other challenges, he raised money and he tried to live life to the full despite the constraints of the treatment he had to endure. He had a strong faith in God and was not afraid to hide his beliefs.

There are countless memorable moments from his rugby career, the bulk of which entail watching a huge, unstoppable force bursting through tackles. His character off the field, at least from an outsider’s perspective, reinforces my belief that athletes can be good role models and not just because of their athletic excellence. Despite their physical abilities, they are human beings who are vulnerable to illness, disease and disability. They are also vulnerable to the fear, anxiety and emotional pain that come in life.

His death, just weeks after the All Blacks – the team he had done so much to inspire – won their third World Cup, will be cause for national mourning. But Lomu dealt with his difficulties and his achievements in much the same way, to paraphrase Kipling, by treating those two impostors just the same: with humility and courage.

Carwyn Jones is a Professor in Sports Ethics at Cardiff Metropolitan University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.