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Friday June 14 2024 | thetimes.com | No 74435

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My dream
home on
the beach

The inside story of
Federer’s long goodbye
Times2

INSIDE
TIMES2

Bricks&Mortar

Women left in A&E after using Ozempic to slim for summer
Eleanor Hayward Health Editor

Young women are ending up in A&E
after buying Ozempic online, with the
NHS’s top doctor warning that weightloss injections should not be abused in
an attempt to get “beach body ready”.
Doctors in emergency care units report that “almost every shift” they see
“young, beautiful girls” with potentially

deadly complications who took the
drug despite being a healthy weight.
Weight-loss injections — including
semaglutide, better known by the
brand names Ozempic and Wegovy —
are being prescribed on the NHS for
people with obesity and type 2 diabetes.
Some patients, however, including
those with eating disorders, have lied
about their weight to get them privately

from online pharmacies or beauty clinics, leading to complications such as
inflammation of the pancreas.
The drugs are sold by companies
including Boots, Superdrug and Lloyds
for between £150 and £200 a month.
Doctors are calling for urgent regulation and control to ensure they are prescribed only to obese patients.
Professor Stephen Powis, NHS

England’s medical director, said the
drugs should not be treated as a “quick
fix for people trying to get ‘beach
body ready’ ”.
At the NHS Confederation conference in Manchester, he said: “We know
these new drugs will be a powerful part
of our arsenal dealing with obesity, but
they should not be abused. Buying
medication online without a doctor’s

supervision can lead to complications
and dangerous consequences.
“Drugs including Ozempic and Wegovy should only be used by people prescribed them for obesity or diabetes.
I’m worried about reports that people
are misusing them.”
The new generation of powerful
weight-loss medications, called GLP-1

‘Conspiracy
of silence’
on cuts and
higher taxes
Labour accused over manifesto spending plans
Steven Swinford Political Editor
Chris Smyth Whitehall Editor
Oliver Wright Policy Editor

Sir Keir Starmer has gambled on
growth in Labour’s manifesto as he
rejected warnings from “defeatist”
economists that Britain faces five years
of spending cuts and tax rises if his
party wins the election.
The Labour leader described his
plans for government as a “manifesto of
hope” and a “rejection of cynicism” as
he insisted that he could defy economic
forecasts by overhauling the planning
system and attracting billions of
pounds in private investment.
However, economists said Labour
was part of a “conspiracy of silence”
involving all the main parties over the
state of the public finances and the
trade-offs that would be needed whoever won the general election.
Although Starmer has said he would
not raise the main rates of tax — income tax, national insurance and VAT
— he has repeatedly failed to give the
same assurances over capital gains tax,
fuel duty and tax relief on pensions.
He has also accepted Tory plans to
freeze income tax thresholds until
2027-28, which would drag millions of
people into higher tax bands. Although
he has insisted there would be no return
to austerity, Starmer has also agreed to
plans that would involve significant
cuts to “unprotected departments”.
Starmer admitted there was “no

magic wand” and Britain’s problems
“won’t disappear overnight if Labour
wins” but insisted that his party would
succeed in growing the economy.
He said: “I have absolute confidence
in the plan for growth that we are putting before the country and I will not
accept the defeatism that says all we
can hope for in this country is to flatline. That is the absolute opposite of the
hope we inject through this manifesto.”
He said official forecasts showing
that economic growth would remain
stagnant were based on the absence of
a clear plan under the Tories.
“This manifesto is a total rejection of
that defeatist approach, that the only
levers are tax and spend,” he said. “I
understand the cynicism, I understand
that after 14 years of this, for many
people the hope’s been beaten out of
them. But this is a manifesto for hope, a
plan for growth, a plan for wealth
creation. I will never accept the defeatism that says we can never do better
than this. We can, we will.”
Starmer is promising to get Britain’s
economy growing faster than that of
any other G7 country, saying that
“growth is our core business — the end
and the means of national renewal”.
Labour’s plans rely on a threepronged approach: overhauling planning rules to build more houses and
infrastructure; an industrial strategy to
ensure workers have the right skills;
and investing £4.7 billion a year in green

The eyes have it Rishi Sunak left his troubles behind at the 50th G7 meeting, hosted by Giorgia Meloni in Puglia.

Poll places Reform ahead of Conservatives
Oliver Wright

Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party has
overtaken the Conservatives in a poll
for the first time in a symbolic moment
that deals another blow to Rishi Sunak’s
electoral hopes.
The YouGov survey for The Times
found that support for Reform had
risen by two points to 19 per cent,
with the Tories unchanged on
18 per cent.
It is the first time any poll has shown
Reform ahead of the Tories, a so-called
crossover moment. It will particularly
concern Tory strategists as it was
carried out after the party published its
manifesto on Tuesday. After the poll

Voting intention
Labour

37%

Reform UK

19%

Conservative

18%

Lib Dem

14%

Source: YouGov. Sample size 2,211 adults, June 12-13

was released, Farage said: “We are now
the real opposition to Labour.”
However, in somewhat better news
for the Conservatives the poll also
found that 80 per cent of those backing
Reform said that a very large majority
for Labour would be a “bad thing for the

country”. This week the Tories have
Voting intention
adopted
a strategy of warning that
people who vote Reform could hand
June 10-11
June 12-13
Labour a super-majority that would
38%Labour in power for a decade
37%
put
or
Labour
more — yet the poll highlighted the
Reform
UK 19%in
challenge facing Tory
strategists
18%
converting
this sentiment into votes.
18%
17% 22 per cent
Conservative
Only
of Reform voters
Source: YouGov. Sample size 2,211 adults

y(7HB7E2*OTSNPQ( |||+$!&'

Vot

Jun

18%

17%

Sourc

2

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

News

Today’s highlights
7am

Bim Afolami, economic secretary to
the Treasury
7.30am Wes Streeting, shadow health secretary
8.35am Keith Brown, deputy leader of the SNP
9.45am David Seaman, right, the former
England goalkeeper
10.30am A bonus How to Win an Election with
the political masterminds Peter
Mandelson and Daniel Finkelstein

Tom Parfitt

DAB RADIO l ONLINE l SMART SPEAKER l APP

T O D AY ’ S E D I T I O N
NEWS

SPORT

TIMES2

GOLDEN FIND
A ring owned by an
18th-century PM
was found in a field

‘I’M ON FORM’
Aleksandar Mitrovic
on his move to
Saudi Arabia

INNER TURMOIL
Pixar hits arrested
development with
its latest sequel

PAGE 13

PAGE 61

PULLOUT, PAGE 7

443

days since Wall Street Journal
reporter Evan Gershkovich
was detained in Russia
#FreeEvan

THUNDERER 24
LETTERS 26
LEADING ARTICLES 27

WORLD 28
BUSINESS 33
REGISTER 51

SPORT 56
CROSSWORD 66
TV & RADIO TIMES2

Can Labour fix our
broken economy?

The

Story

As the day of the election
draws closer, Britain’s
floundering economy has
been at the centre of the
national debate. So could
Labour get the country out of
its stagflation doom-loop?
Available on the Times Radio app or
wherever you get your podcasts

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THE WEATHER

16

24
14

17

16
16

17
19
16

20

Rain in northern and western
Scotland. Scattered heavy showers
elsewhere.

Russia accuses jailed journalist
Gershkovich of working for CIA
Russian prosecutors have claimed
that the American reporter Evan
Gershkovich was collecting secret information on a tank factory for the CIA
when he was arrested during a reporting assignment.
The general prosecutor’s office said
that it had sent Gershkovich’s case to
court and that he would be tried in the
city of Yekaterinburg, where he was detained last year.
The prosecutors said in a statement:
“The investigation has established and
confirmed with documentary evidence
that Gershkovich, an American journalist for The Wall Street Journal, on
the instructions of the CIA, collected
secret information in the Sverdlovsk
region in March 2023 about the activities of the defence plant NPK Uralvagonzavod JSC on the production and
repair of military equipment.”
Gershkovich, 32, who was accredited
as a journalist with the Russian authorities at the time of his arrest, could face
up to 20 years in jail if convicted on espionage charges. It is unclear when the

continued from page 1
Reform party ahead of Tories
thought Labour would win any kind of
majority.
The poll also suggested that Sunak’s
decision to leave D-Day commemorations early had badly damaged the
prime minister’s standing. Fifty-six per
cent described it as a “serious error” that
reflected badly on Sunak’s character,
including 64 per cent of Reform voters
and 48 per cent of people who had yet
to decide who to vote for. The story has
also cut through with the public: 68 per
cent of voters said they had heard at
least a “fair amount” about it.
Overall Labour retained a 19-point

continued from page 1
‘Conspiracy of silence’ on cuts
technology to attract investment and
create jobs in industries of the future.
“All of these things will make a material
difference” to growth, Starmer said.
The Labour manifesto, which was
published yesterday, contained no new
policy detail. Starmer dismissed concerns about the absence of a “rabbit” in
his manifesto with a jibe at Nigel Farage: “If you want politics as pantomime,
I hear Clacton is nice.”
Instead Starmer sought to define
himself against the political turmoil of
recent years, promising “an end to the
desperate era of gesture and gimmicks
and a return to the serious business of
rebuilding our country”.
However, Paul Johnson, the head of
the Institute for Fiscal Studies, said:
“This is a manifesto that promises a
dizzying number of reviews and strategies to tackle some of the challenges
facing the country. That is better than a
shopping list of half-baked policy
announcements. But delivering genuine change will almost certainly require
putting actual resources on the table.
And Labour’s manifesto offers no
indication that there is a plan for
where the money would come from to
finance this.”
Mike Brewer, chief executive of the
Resolution Foundation think tank, said
Labour’s “cautious approach to tax and
spend … sets the scene for a parliament
of tax rises and spending cuts for unprotected departments”.

trial will start or how long it may take.
The Wall Street Journal denies the
Russian claim and said that the reporter was only doing his job and was not
involved in any wrongdoing. The
White House has labelled his arrest “ridiculous” and President Biden has
called on Moscow to “let him go”.
While on assignment, Gershkovich
was said to have tried to speak to
employees of the defence plant,
which is in the city of Nizhny Tagil
and manufactures T-14 Armata and
T-90M Proryv tanks.
President Putin claimed in an
interview with the former Fox
News presenter Tucker Carlson in February that Gershkovich had been
caught “red-handed” when he “received classified information on a
secret basis”. The Russian prosecutors
allege that Gershkovich had “carried
out the illegal actions using painstaking
conspiratorial methods”.
In a statement Almar Latour, chief
executive of Dow Jones and publisher
of The Wall Street Journal, and Emma
Tucker, editor-in-chief of The Wall
Street Journal, demanded Gershkov-

ich’s immediate release and urged the
Biden administration to “redouble efforts to get Evan released”.
They said: “Evan Gershkovich is facing a false and baseless charge. Russia’s
latest move toward a sham trial is,
while expected, deeply disappointing
and still no less outrageous. Evan
has [been] wrongfully detained in
a Russian prison for simply doing his
job. Evan is a journalist. The Russian regime’s smearing of Evan is repugnant,
disgusting and based on calculated and
transparent lies. Journalism is not a
crime. Evan’s case is an assault on the
free press.”
After the death of the Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, 47, in a penal colony in February, his associates
revealed that negotiations had been
under way to swap Navalny and two
American citizens in jail in Russia for
Vadim Krasikov, an FSB-hired hitman
serving a life sentence in Germany. It is
thought that Gershkovich was one of
the American citizens who was part of
the planned swap. Putin appeared to
suggest last week that a swap involving
Gershkovich was still possible.

lead over the Conservatives, while the
Liberal Democrats were down one
point at 14 per cent. Anthony Wells,
head of European political and social
research at YouGov, said the poll was
significant as it was the first to reach the
“politically important point of showing
Reform ahead of the Conservatives”.
He added: “Obviously all polls have a
margin of error, so we can’t conclude for
certain that more voters now back
Nigel Farage’s party over the Conservatives. But what it does make clear is
that at the very least the Conservatives
and Reform are at a very similar level of
support to each other.
“That in itself is remarkable given
how close we are to an election when

we might otherwise have expected
smaller parties’ votes to be squeezed.”
The poll also suggested that the Tory
manifesto had had no positive impact
on voter sentiment. Asked to consider
what they had seen or heard about the
Conservatives’ plans, only 13 per cent of
voters said they would be good for them
and their family. Among voters backing
the Tories, 54 per cent said the plans
would be good for them, but only 15 per
cent of Reform voters said they would be
good. Twenty-three per cent of Reform
voters said they would be very bad.
YouGov questioned more than 2,200
adults in an online poll on Wednesday
and yesterday.

Promises are easy — but
the hard choices lie ahead
Paul Johnson
Comment

G

rowth. It was the focus
of the Labour manifesto.
Stability, planning
reform, regulatory
reform, an industrial
strategy. They should all help. I am
an optimist about the capacity for
good policy and good governance, to
promote economic growth. I am
also a realist.
Getting the policies right is hard.
The effects take a long time to be
felt. And there are nearly always
trade-offs. Take the welcome
commitments to reform our antigrowth planning system. We need to
do it. But don’t expect much thanks
from those living close to the new
houses, roads, pylons and the rest.
So, I applaud the commitment to
growth and I hope for the courage to
drive it through, not just on
planning but on tax reform,
relations with the EU, education,
investment, regulatory reform. But
we do need a plan for what to do if
extra growth doesn’t materialise
quickly because more likely than
not it won’t.
What is the plan for tax and
spending? That is a question to

which the manifesto offered no
answers. The commitment to the
“green prosperity plan” comes in at
£5 billion a year, funded in part by
borrowing and in part by “a windfall
tax on the oil and gas giants”.
Beyond that all the big promises
were about what Labour would not
do. They will not raise taxes on
working people. Though what does
that mean? We know income tax
will rise by some £11 billion a year
because three more years of freezes
to thresholds and allowances are
nailed in. There will not be
increases in rates of income tax,
national insurance, VAT or
corporation tax, which account for
three quarters of tax revenues. They
will also not have debt rising in the
fifth year of the forecast, the same
rule as that of Jeremy Hunt.
If you are going to follow that rule
then there really isn’t, on current
forecasts, any room for additional
spending on public services, unless
funded by new revenue streams.
The tone of the manifesto makes
cuts look implausible. How they will
be avoided, though, I do not know.
Labour has continued in what, at
the time of the March budget, I
referred to as a conspiracy of silence
on the hard choices to be faced.
Paul Johnson is director of the
Institute for Fiscal Studies

3

the times | Friday June 14 2024

News

Alas, poor audiences: tickets hit £200
Theatres struggle with
rising costs but the best
seats are out of reach
for many theatregoers,
writes David Sanderson
Romeo and Juliet “is now the two hours’
traffic of our stage” William Shakespeare informed theatregoers. For
which, he may now add, you will pay
£2.50 per minute.
For the first time the most expensive
tickets for plays in the West End has
topped £200, according to an annual
survey by The Stage website.
Three plays, including Romeo and
Juliet starring Tom Holland, breached
the £200 mark. The musical Cabaret,
however, emerged as the most
expensive production for the third
year running, with top-price tickets
costing £304.
Overall the average top-price seat for
plays was just under £155, which is a
9.3 per cent rise on last year’s figures,
while inflation, according to the consumer prices index, was 2.3 per cent
over the 12 months to April.
The Society of London Theatre trade
association defended the price rises.
Eleanor Lloyd, its president, said the
top-tier
ticket
prices allowed for
cheaper
access
schemes to attract
“new and diverse
audiences”.
She added that
producers
and
venues had been
dealing with rising
costs.
Average
ticket prices, she
said, had risen by
only half the rate of
inflation
since
the
pandemic,
which left many
operators close to
bankruptcy.
Several prominent
actors
warned of the
implications for
British theatre if
ticket prices continued to rise.
The Olivier Award-winning actress
Patsy Ferran, said it was “problematic” if prices were beyond the reach
of most people. The actor Sir
Derek Jacobi said that being charged
£150 for a seat in the stalls had
shocked him.
The Stage’s survey captured prices
for performances tomorrow evening,
with the data gathered last month.
Seeing Tom Holland, the actor of
Spider-Man fame, in Romeo and Juliet

Cabaret, which
starred Cara
Delevingne this
spring, was the
most expensive
production for a
third year.
Romeo and Juliet
and The Picture
of Dorian Gray
also breached
the £200 mark

For tighter budgets ...
6 The Royal Opera House’s prime
seats can also cost £300, but its
subsidy from Arts Council England
does allow for some considerably
cheaper options. A number of £4
tickets were available for
tomorrow’s ballet triple bill of Les
Rendezvous/The Dream/Rhapsody.
6 One may balk at paying even £15
to stay in Basil Fawlty’s Torquay
hotel but the same amount for a
Saturday performance of Fawlty
Towers: The Play seems far more
reasonable. Top-price tickets for the
commercial production were £125.
6 Heathers at @sohoplace came top
of The Stage’s cheap musical tickets,
with £15 securing a seat for
tomorrow’s performance. Other £15
tickets could — last month at least —
be found to see Ben Whishaw in the
Royal Court’s Bluets, and Dominic
West in A View From the Bridge at
Theatre Royal Haymarket.

would cost a maximum of £298.95 this
weekend — nearly £150 more than last
year’s most expensive play, a National
Theatre production of The Crucible
which transferred to the West End.
The play Cock was widely criticised in
2022 when its dynamic pricing model,
which reacted to supply and demand,
resulted in £400 tickets. This year Plaza
Suite with Sarah Jessica Parker had
tickets for £395 and The Picture of Dorian Gray with the Succession star Sarah
Snook had a top price of £289.
Musicals tend to be more expensive
to produce, although the average toppriced seat for tomorrow evening,
according to the Stage survey, was £168,
a 3.9 per cent rise from last year.
The survey highlighted significant
differences between the commercial
and subsidised or not-for-profit sectors.
The average top-price ticket in the
commercial sector — which includes
all the theatres run by the impresarios
Sir Cameron Mackintosh and Lord
Lloyd-Webber — had increased by
11.5 per cent to £167.
The most expensive seats in the subsidised sector — such as the National

Theatre — was down 6.5 per cent to
£105. The cheapest tickets in both sectors had decreased by similar amounts.
The biggest rises in top-tier prices
were all for musicals, with Moulin
Rouge, Tina and Hamilton each increasing by £50.
The two other plays that broke the
£200 barrier were Player Kings starring
Sir Ian McKellen and Stranger Things:
The First Shadow, the adaptation of the
Netflix sci-fi series.
Producers pointed out that there are
financial risks inherent with any West
End production, even if a star name is
attached to the project. Opening Night,
starring Sheridan Smith, closed
months earlier than expected due to
low attendances, which will have led to
seven-figure losses for investors.
Lloyd told The Stage that “despite the
rising costs of theatre production,
theatre works hard to offer affordable
tickets to encourage a vibrant theatregoing community”, adding: “This is
delivered in the context of producers
and venues facing rising costs, with
members experiencing a 120 per cent
rise in utility bills since 2019.”

Net gains from Netflix as Bridgerton boosts economy by £275m
Alex Farber Media Correspondent

The characters in Netflix’s Regencystyle series Bridgerton spend their time
moving from one glamorous ball to the
next without troubling themselves with
anything as distasteful as work.
But off-screen the show, in which Adjoa Andoh plays Lady Agatha Danbury
and Nicola Coughlan stars as Penelope
Featherington, has played an important role in creating thousands of jobs,
according to the US streaming giant.
Netflix has estimated that Bridgerton
has boosted the UK economy by
£275 million and supported 5,000 local
businesses, including food, transporta-

tion, design and waste management
firms, over five years.
Bridgerton’s executive producer,
Shonda Rhimes, 54, will open trading at
London Stock Exchange this morning
to celebrate the figures after yesterday’s
launch of the final half of the third
series. The chief executive of Shondaland, the show’s production company,
said the show has had “seismic impact”
on the British economy.
“The Bridgerton universe occupies a
special space in culture, resonating
with young and old alike, creating conversation, starting trends and influencing everything from baby names to
weddings,” Rhimes said. “It is clear that

the business of art and culture can
make a huge economic contribution to
local communities.”
The figure, calculated by Netflix,
includes its direct contracts with
suppliers as well as the money they go
on to spend for the show.
Ancillary revenues, such as the sales
of Regency-style embroidery sets,
lettering sets and cream tea ingredients, which have spiked after the show’s
return, are not included.
Visit West, which works to maximise
the visitor economy of west England,
has reported a boost in visits to the area
where much of the show is set, contributing over £5 million to the economy in

Bath’s Royal Crescent, featured in the
show, had thousands of extra visitors

Bath, Bristol and surrounding areas.
Thousands of extra visitors have descended on Bath’s Guildhall and the
Royal Crescent, Visit West said.
Anna Mallett, vice-president of
EMEA production at Netflix, said the
show has had a huge cultural impact
“The Bridgerton universe is another
example of Shonda Rhimes’s genius as
a storyteller and her global influence,”
she said. “The UK is our home and this
is one part of our huge investment in
creating stories our members will love.”
Kiddies Kingdom, a baby name website, has seen a surge in names inspired
by the show, including rises in searches
for Daphne, Eloise and Colin.

4

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

News
Quintagram® No 1968
Solve all five concise clues using
each letter underneath once only
1 Domestic dwelling (5)

----2 Meadow (5)

----3 Reap (7)

-------

4 Of the sense of sight (7)

-------

5 Dated term for a radio (8)

-------A

A

C

D

E

E

E

E

E

F

H

H

I

I

I

L

L

L

O

O

P

R

R

S

S

S

S

T

T

U

V

W

Solutions see MindGames p15
Cryptic clues MindGames p14

Breakfast:
6am to 10am
Our free radio station has all the
latest headlines, interviews and
debates every morning

Seed of creativity The Meadowland art installation at the wild botanic gardens in Wakehurst, West Sussex, is inspired by threatened habitats. It is open until September

Blow to PM as NHS waiting lists
rise for first time in seven months
Eleanor Hayward Health Editor

NHS waiting lists have risen for the first
time since last year in a further blow to
Rishi Sunak’s election hopes.
Monthly NHS performance data
released yesterday show that hospital
waiting lists increased to 7.57 million in
April, up from 7.54 million in March.
They were at 7.21 million in January
last year, when the prime minister
promised that they would fall under his
government.
So far during the election campaign
Sunak has argued that waiting lists are
coming down, because they have fallen
slightly from a record high of 7.77 million in September. However, yesterday’s statistics show that they are rising
again for the first time in seven months.
Labour and the Liberal Democrats
seized on the figures to highlight the
Tories’ failed promises on the NHS.
On Wednesday night Sunak was
heckled and booed by an audience at a

Sky News event when he blamed industrial action for the long waiting lists.
“I think everyone knows the impact
the industrial action has had, that’s why
we haven’t made as much [progress],”
he said.
However, the prime minister, will not
be able to blame striking junior doctors
for this latest increase in waiting lists
because there have not been any NHS
strikes since February.
Wes Streeting, the shadow health
secretary, said the figures had “blown a
hole in Rishi Sunak’s claim that the
NHS has turned a corner”. He added:
“He promised to cut waiting lists, but
they are 350,000 longer today than
when he became prime minister. He
can’t blame NHS staff — there were no
strikes last month, yet waiting lists still
rose. The blame lies solely with the
Conservatives.
“If Conservatives are given another
five years in government, waiting lists
will hit ten million and mortgage hold-

ers will be £4,800 worse off. Only
Labour has a plan to deliver the change
the NHS needs. We will deliver an extra
40,000 appointments at evenings and
weekends to beat the Tory backlog,
paid for by clamping down on tax
dodgers.”
The overall waiting list covers all
hospital care, including routine operations, such as hip replacements and
hernia repairs, as well as waits for MRI
scans and x-rays. Yesterday’s figures
include more than 300,000 people who
have been waiting more than a year for
this treatment.
The monthly data also revealed a
dire situation in emergency care, with
tens of thousands of people forced to
endure potentially life-threatening
long waits for ambulances and A&E
care. One in four people had to wait
beyond the four-hour target to be seen
in A&E, and one in ten patients are now
having to wait 12 hours.
Heart attack and stroke patients are

waiting 33 minutes on average for an
ambulance. The target is 18 minutes.
Performance for cancer patients’
care is also worse, with one in three not
treated within a two-month target.
Professor Sir Stephen Powis, the
medical director of NHS England, said
the long waits partly reflected the
record demand on A&E last month. He
said: “May was a record month for
urgent and emergency services, with
the highest number of A&E attendances, as well as being the busiest May for
the most urgent ambulance callouts.
“With junior doctors striking for five
days starting from the end of June, the
NHS is preparing for further disruption
to services in coming weeks.”
British Medical Association members will stage a five-day walkout just
before the general election on July 4.
They will strike from 7am on June 27
until 7am on July 2, causing tens of
thousands of NHS appointments to be
cancelled.

‘Life-threatening complications’ from weight-loss jabs
agonists, work by mimicking a
hormone that makes people feel full.
They are being introduced on the NHS
for severely obese patients with a body
mass index over 35.
Websites which sell them privately
ask patients to fill in details of their
weight, but most do not require in-person examination.
Dr Vicky Price, a consultant in acute
medicine and president-elect of the
Society for Acute Medicine, said: “I and
many other colleagues in acute medi-

cine across the UK are very concerned
about the increasing numbers of
patients we are seeing with complications from new weight-loss drugs they
have purchased online.
“Sadly we are seeing serious, lifethreatening complications including
inflammation of the pancreas gland
and alterations in blood salt levels in
these patients, who were not aware of
the risk they were taking.”
One doctor described the case of a
girl who was “not at all” overweight but
bought Wegovy through Boots Online

Doctor and arrived at A&E “feeling unwell, like she was going to pass out and
couldn’t stand up. She was really struggling to eat.” She needed urgent treatment for starvation ketoacidosis, a lifethreatening condition in which harmful substances called ketones build up
in the blood due to a lack of food.
Speaking to the Chemist and Druggist news website, the doctor said such
incidents were becoming more common, meaning that most A&E shifts
now involved patients with complications from the drugs. The doctor said:

“It isn’t people who need those drugs
that are doing this. This is people with
probably an element of eating disorder
and body dysmorphia and that’s what
terrifies me. I just look at these young,
beautiful girls. Oh, my word ... it really
makes me very sad.”
Boots said it had safeguards to ensure
such drugs were prescribed appropriately. Patients had to submit an ID
document and answer questions on
medical history. It said: “Boots Online
Doctor also informs each patient’s GP
of the prescription.”

Listen seven days a week
On DAB,
app,
website
and smart
speaker

Drugs blend
offers bowel
cancer hope
A combination of two immunotherapy
drugs could treat the most common
bowel cancer, scientists said after trials
showed tumours shrank or remained
stable in three out of five patients.
Researchers from Anglia Ruskin
University in Cambridge said botensilimab and balstilimab could “offer new
hope” for those with a type of cancer
that has previously not responded to
immunotherapy.
Both drugs trigger the immune
system to attack cancer cells. The team,
which described the treatment as
“potentially game changing”, said it
hoped officials would “move quickly”
in approving its use.
The researchers followed 101
patients in the United States who had
microsatellite stable metastatic colorectal cancer, the most common type of
bowel cancer.
After six months, tumours were
shown to shrink or remain stable in
61 per cent of patients. The researchers
said the most common side effects were
diarrhoea and fatigue.
Every year almost 43,000 people in
the UK are found to have bowel cancer,
with about 85 per cent classed as microsatellite stable.
The study was published in the
Nature Medicine journal.
Justin Stebbing, professor of biomedical sciences at the university, said the
results were “incredibly” exciting.
Dr Andrea Bullock, of the Beth Israel
Deaconess Medical Centre in the US,
said the results could offer “new hope”
to bowel cancer patients.
Lisa Wilde, a director at Bowel
Cancer UK, said the trial showed
“exciting” promise. She added: “We will
continue to follow with interest.”

the times | Friday June 14 2024

5

V2

News

Apple’s tech let wife see ‘deleted’ texts to escorts
Will Humphries

An unfaithful husband who arranged
meetings with prostitutes via messages
on his iPhone is pursuing legal action
against Apple after his wife discovered
that his deleted messages were still
stored on a linked computer.
Richard, not his real name, said he
had turned to prostitutes in the last
years of his marriage and had arranged
the meetings through the iMessages
app. After making the arrangements he
would delete the messages, believing
the trail of his infidelity had been
hidden. However, when his wife clicked
on the same app on the family iMac, it

showed that the last message he had
sent to another person’s iPhone was to
a prostitute.
When she looked further she found
several years’ worth of supposedly deleted messages to prostitutes. She filed
for divorce within a month. Richard, a
middle-aged businessman and father
who lives in England but does not want
to disclose his home town, is pursuing
legal action against Apple in the hope of
recovering more than £5 million he lost
in the divorce, plus legal costs.
He claims the company does not
make it clear to customers that iMessages sent to another iPhone user can be
seen on other linked Apple devices,

Steely-eyed An abstract sculpture made of steel by Brian Fell is one of 100 works
featured in the Show Your Metal exhibition at the Millennium Gallery in Sheffield

Mother tells Letby retrial: I
saw my girl take last breath
Tom Ball

The mother of one of Lucy Letby’s
alleged victims has told a court how she
watched her baby girl die in her husband’s arms three days after the convicted killer is said to have tampered
with her medical equipment.
Known as Baby K, the girl was born
more than three months premature on
February 17, 2016, weighing only 1lb 8oz.
Letby, 34, then a neonatal nurse at the
Countess of Chester Hospital, is
accused of attempting to murder her by
dislodging her breathing tube roughly
an hour and a half after she was born.
The prosecution alleges that she was
then caught “virtually red-handed”
when a consultant on the neonatal unit
walked into the nursery and saw Letby
standing beside the incubator “doing
nothing” as the baby’s blood oxygen
levels fell to dangerously low levels.
Baby K was later transported to
Arrowe Park Hospital, which specialises in caring for extremely premature
babies. She died there three days later.
The prosecution does not allege Letby
caused her death.
Yesterday a statement from Baby K’s
mother was read to Manchester crown

court in which she described having to
make “the hardest decision of my life”
to “let her go”.
She said: “Our daughter was in my
husband’s arms when she took her last
breath and silently passed away.”
Baby K’s mother wiped away tears as
she and her husband listened to the
statement being read to the court. They
sat less than ten metres away from LetLucy Letby was
convicted last
August of killing
seven children

by, who watched proceedings from
behind a glass-panelled dock.
The jury of six men and six women
has been told that Letby was convicted
last August of murdering seven children and attempting to kill six others at
the hospital in Cheshire.
Letby, who is serving a whole-life
prison term, is being retried on one
count of attempted murder that the
jury at the original trial was unable to
reach a verdict on. The trial continues.

even if they have been deleted on the
phone. He told The Times: “It’s all quite
painful and quite raw still. It was a very
brutal way of finding out [for my wife].
My thoughts are if I had been able to
talk to her rationally and she had not
had such a brutal realisation of it, I
might still be married.
“I think what had been a superb
marriage has been thrown away for
something which many men do, and
some women do, but mainly men.”
As well as the financial loss caused by
the divorce, Richard said the effect on
his health had been dramatic. “I was on
really strong beta blockers to try to
reduce my panic attacks,” he said.

He has engaged the London law firm
Rosenblatt to pursue legal action
against Apple. It is looking into
establishing a class action lawsuit on a
no-win, no-fee basis.
“Even if there are a couple of hundred people in the UK who have got
similar divorce payouts to me, then that
is a £1 billion claim and it’s probably a
global situation,” Richard said. Simon
Walton, from Rosenblatt, said: “Richard told us what had happened and
when we looked into it, we saw that
Apple had not been clear with users as
to what happens to messages they send
and receive and, importantly, delete.
“In many cases, the iPhone informs

the user that messages have been deleted but, as we have seen, that isn’t true
and is misleading because they are still
found on other linked devices — something Apple doesn’t tell its users.
“We have contacted Apple, and the
magic circle international firm of
solicitors who we have reason to believe
represents them, several times, but all
contact has been ignored. This strongly
suggests either Apple are sufficiently
concerned about this issue that they
hope ignoring it will make it go away, or
they simply do not care about their
users’ rights.”
Apple did not respond to a request for
comment.

6

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

News
News Politics

Labour’s manifesto promises
Sir Keir Starmer has set
out the details of his
plans for power, Oliver
Wright, Chris Smyth
and Matt Dathan write
TAX AND ECONOMY
What Labour will do
Labour has ruled out
raising income tax, national
insurance or VAT over the next
parliament, saying it wants to ensure
tax on “working people” is as “low as
possible”. However, Sir Keir Starmer
confirmed he would go ahead with
the Tories’ planned freeze on income
tax thresholds and his manifesto does
not rule out increasing other taxes
such as capital gains.
Labour says it will remove the VAT
and business rates exemptions on
private schools. It also wants to
abolish non-dom status, which allows
foreigners living in the UK to avoid
paying tax on overseas income for up
to 14 years. The party has committed
itself not to increase corporation tax
and says it will replace business rates
with a new system.
Like the Tories, Labour believes it
can raise money by tackling tax
evasion and avoidance. It puts this
figure at £5 billion.
Will it work?
Labour’s planned tax rises amount to
little more than a few billion pounds
in extra revenue. And it will do
nothing to fill the £10 billion black
hole in government spending plans
that economists say will lead to cuts
in public spending.
Starmer said he would not oversee
a new wave of austerity, which raises
the question of how he will fill the
gap. The suspicion will be that while
Starmer has “no plans” to raise
certain taxes now, plans will
materialise if Labour wins.
GROWTH
What Labour will do
The party is promising to
ensure Britain has the
highest economic growth in the G7,
saying it can achieve this through
restoring political stability, building
more and a new industrial strategy.
Starmer argues that this will allow
better funded public services without
tax rises. As part of this Labour says it
will set up a national wealth fund
with £7.3 billion of public money to
support capital investment in the
transition to net zero.
Will it work?
Starmer’s plans to expand the
economy with supply-side reforms,
such as changes to the planning laws,
should help lift GDP. But these are
changes that will take years to filter
through to the real economy and may
not have the kind of impact that
Starmer is gambling on. GDP growth
is also disproportionately affected by
changes outside the government’s
control, such as oil prices.
WORKERS’ RIGHTS
What Labour will do
Starmer pledges the biggest
overhaul of employee
rights in a generation. Plans include
banning zero-hours contracts, ending
fire-and-rehire, offering higher sick
pay and the repeal of trade union
laws. It says it will introduce this
legislation within 100 days but will
“consult fully” with businesses.
Will it work?
If it wins the election by the margin
expected, Labour will have no

problem forcing its package through
parliament. However, for a leader
gambling on economic growth, such
extra costs on businesses could be
counterproductive.
HEALTH
What Labour will do
Labour’s signature pledge
on the NHS is a promise to
provide an extra two million scans
and appointments in the first year to
bring down waiting lists. This would
be achieved by paying NHS staff
more to work overtime.
The party also promises 700,000
more dental appointments and says it
will ban the advertising of junk food
to children. It has also said it would
ban the sale of high-caffeine energy
drinks to the under-16s. However, it
has rejected a ban on buy-one-getone-free deals for unhealthy food.
Will it work?
The manifesto was published shortly
after NHS figures revealed waiting
lists had risen to 7.6 million. Health
chiefs doubt it will be possible to
bring them down significantly
without billions of pounds in new
NHS funding. Apart from targeted
boosts adding up to little more than
£1 billion, Labour has not said how
much it would spend on the NHS.
Many of Labour’s policies will
undoubtedly help make a big dent in
the waiting list. But their plan to meet
all significant NHS targets by the end
of a first term is seen as ambitious.
SOCIAL CARE
What will Labour do
Labour is promising to
implement Boris Johnson’s
£86,000 lifetime cap on social care
costs as the first step towards wider
reform. Starmer is promising a
national care service that in effect
sets quality standards. He is also
promising carers a pay rise.
Will it work?
A pay rise for carers could help to
resolve the crisis in recruitment that
means care homes are having to shut
to new residents, who end up
stranded in hospital. However,
successive governments have been
elected on a promise to reform social
care only for plans to be scrapped
following internal battles. Unless
Starmer provides more details of how
he will fund care, it is easy to see his
government also falling into this trap.
EDUCATION
AND CHILDCARE
What Labour will do
Labour is promising to
recruit 6,500 teachers in subjects
where there is a shortage. It is also
promising free breakfast clubs for
children in every primary school and
mental health support for secondary
pupils. This will be paid for by
imposing VAT on private schools. On
childcare Labour says it will create
100,000 places by converting primary
school classrooms into nurseries.
Last year Labour promised that
graduates would pay less tax but
there is nothing in the manifesto to
immediately reduce their payments.
Will it work?
Labour calculates that VAT on private
schools will raise £1.6 billion, which
would cover the cost of 6,500
teachers, but several analyses have
challenged whether this amount
would be raised. It would also take
cultural change and higher salaries to
attract new graduates. The 6,500
would equate to less than one teacher
for every three schools in England.
On higher education Labour would
inherit a situation where universities

Sir Keir Starmer launched his manifesto in Manchester yesterday, promising to grow the economy. A protester disrupted

are underfunded because tuition fees
have been in effect frozen but raising
fees would cause an outcry.
MIGRATION AND
SMALL BOATS
What Labour will do
The manifesto commits the
party to cutting net migration, which
stood at 685,000 at the end of last
year, but does not set an overall
target. It will aim to reduce the need
for overseas workers by improving the
training of the domestic workforce.
On small boats Labour will scrap
the Rwanda policy and use £75 million
earmarked for the scheme to set up a
new border security command to
target the gangs who facilitate illegal
migration. The party will also pursue
a migrant returns deal with the EU.
Will it work?
A pledge to reduce net migration is
one of the least ambitious of the
manifesto promises, given it has hit
record levels in recent years. Formally
linking immigration and skills
strategy will be welcomed by sectors
suffering from labour shortages but
will not lead to an immediate fall in
immigration as it will take time for
domestic workers to be trained.

On illegal migration, Labour is
focusing heavily on committing more
resources to law enforcement to
“smash the gangs”.
However, Labour lacks a solution
for arrivals from countries such as
Afghanistan and Syria who cannot be
sent back to their home countries.
CRIME AND JUSTICE
What Labour will do
Labour will dedicate 13,000
police officers to tackling
neighbourhood crime. The manifesto
also pledges to introduce “respect
orders” to punish adults guilty of
persistent anti-social behaviour. It
pledges to halve knife crime and
violence against women and girls.
The manifesto promises to build
the remaining 12,000 prison places
promised by the government that
have been stalled by delays to
planning permission. It says it will
designate new prisons as being of
“national importance” on public
safety grounds.
Will it work?
Crime is a complex concept to
evaluate, as the Conservatives have
found over the past decade, because
although statistics show crime has

broadly fallen, this has not translated
to public perception. That is why
Labour is focusing on restoring faith
in the criminal justice system,
whether that is tougher vetting
processes for the police or specialist
rape units in forces to ensure more
perpetrators are brought to justice.
Labour hopes its measures will
restore the public’s faith in their local
police because it believes this will
address the problems it is trying to
tackle, from antisocial behaviour to
run-down town centres. Its approach
is as much focused on preventing
crime as it is catching criminals.
ENERGY
AND NET ZERO
What Labour will do
Labour calls climate change
the “greatest long-term challenge”,
and lists making Britain a “clean
energy superpower” as one of its five
core missions. The manifesto strikes a
positive tone about reaching net zero:
the Tories framed it as needing a
“proportionate approach”, while
Labour called it a “huge opportunity
to create growth”.
One dividing line is Labour’s 2030
deadline for a clean electricity grid,

7

the times | Friday June 14 2024

News
News

change, but can party deliver?
TRANSPORT
What Labour will do
The party says it will fill in
one million potholes in five
years. It will also create a new
nationalised body to oversee the
railways. It promises to give local
authorities more power over bus
services.
Most radical is the blueprint for the
railways, which expands on Tory
plans for Great British Railways
(GBR). At its heart will be the
renationalisation of the whole
network, with train operating
companies brought into public
ownership as contracts expire.
Will it work?
A full-fat version of GBR is urgently
needed to get work started on any
meaningful reform. The new system
will also need the support of the
unions and will inevitably involve
some uncomfortable discussions for
Labour. How deftly the transport
secretary handles this will have a big
impact on whether it improves
passengers’ lives.
On the buses, it is a no-brainer to
hand more power to local leaders to
put out services to franchise. The big
test will be whether there are more
services in five years.
On roads the reality is that a onetime catch up in pothole repairs
would cost an estimated £16.3 billion
and would take ten years. An extra
£320 million, while welcome, will
barely scratch the surface.

the speech with a banner saying “youth deserve better”, while aides found a novel way to shelter from the northern rain

versus the Conservatives’ target of
2035. Another is the contrast on new
North Sea oil and gas licences, which
Labour would end.
The party would reverse Sunak’s
decision to scrap energy efficiency
standards for landlords. Funding for
insulating and making buildings more
efficient is double the Tory pledge.
Will it work?
A Labour government should quickly
be able to change the rules holding
back onshore wind farms. Setting up
its £1.7 billion-a-year Great British
Energy company in Scotland will take
longer, and it will take time for
households to see any promised cuts
in bills. The 2030 clean power goal is
considered Herculean but industry
figures think it will at least pull the
sector faster in the right direction.
HOUSING
What Labour will do
Labour is pledging to build
1.5 million homes within
five years. Its plans include changes to
planning laws to allow some greenbelt land to be built on and the
creation of the “the next generation
of new towns”.
Starmer has set a home ownership

target of 70 per cent, up from 50 per
cent, and promised a new mortgage
guarantee scheme. Local authorities
will have to have a target of at least
50 per cent affordable housing.
Will it work?
Labour’s house building targets do not
lack ambition but as successive
governments have found, ambition is
not the same as delivery. The big
problem Labour will have is how to
deal with councils that drag their feet
on setting realistic housing plans. It
has pledged that in these
circumstances it will impose plans,
but this will be time consuming and
will almost certainly be challenged in
the courts.
It will also take time for the
industry to increase capacity to build
the extra houses and some companies
may be reluctant to build too many
houses at once in case it cuts profits.
DEFENCE
What Labour will do
Labour will “set out the
path” to increase defence
spending from 2.3 per cent of national
income to 2.5 per cent, conduct a
defence review, maintain the nuclear
deterrent, establish an armed forces

commissioner to improve service life
and create a military strategic
headquarters and director of national
armaments.
Will it work?
Unlike the Tories, Labour has not
given any indication of when and how
it might increase the defence budget
and nor is there anything about
trying serious offences within the
military, such as rapes, in civilian
courts rather than military ones, as
previously called for by the party.
A strategic headquarters is intended
to provide greater oversight in the
Ministry of Defence so there is a
joined-up approach between the
services, a much needed,
sensible reform which
would make
procurement more
efficient. Morale in
the military has
worsened since 2021,
so improving service
life, such as by tackling
rat-infested, damp
houses, should be
easily solved and is
crucial if Labour is to
overcome recruitment
and retention problems.

ENVIRONMENT
What Labour will do
Improving the state of
rivers and seas is the party’s
top environmental priority. The key
promise is a ban on bonuses for the
bosses of polluting water firms, a
policy the Tories have pinched. There
is no new money for farming
subsidies or environmental regulators,
though there are pledges to expand
wetlands and create three national
forests to join the existing one.
Will it work?
Reforming rules on water companies
will be a priority. Labour is unlikely to
face huge opposition from companies
that have been expecting such
changes and are trying to rehabilitate
their image on the environment while
seeking to invest more. The party is
clear on its commitment to meeting
the Environment Act goals but fuzzier
on how it will do so. There is a lack of
numbers on the promises about treeplanting and peatland restoration.
CONSTITUTIONAL
REFORM
What Labour will do
Labour is promising to
allow 16 and 17-year-olds to vote. It
would create an independent ethics
and integrity commission to ensure
probity in government. It would also
introduce legislation to remove the
right of hereditary peers to sit and
vote in the House of Lords and create
a mandatory retirement age of 80.
Labour will also support an
immediate ban on
MPs from taking
up paid advisory
or consultancy
roles and set up a
committee to
reform Commons
procedures, raise
standards and
improve working practices.
Will it work?
Apart from the voting age
most of Labour’s
constitutional reforms
are incremental and,

with a large majority, should be
uncontentious. But with potentially
hundreds of MPs on their own back
benches with little to do, banning
them from taking up consultancy
roles could prove controversial,
particularly if MPs’ pay does not
increase.
FOOTBALL
What Labour will do
The manifesto promises to
introduce a Football
Governance Bill that will set up an
independent regulator to ensure the
financial sustainability of football
clubs in England. The legislation will
give fans a formal say in the way their
clubs are run.
Will it work?
The legislation is almost certain to get
through because there is broad crossparty consensus on the need for a
regulator. However, the Premier
League and English Football League
remain at loggerheads over the
regulator’s proposed powers to
enforce financial redistribution down
the football leagues.
BREXIT AND EUROPE
What Labour will do
The manifesto rules out
rejoining the European
Union or the single market and
customs union. However, Labour has
proposed measures that would bring
the UK and the EU closer, including a
mutual recognition of conformity
assessments that could reduce checks
on goods crossing the Channel.
Will it work?
The problem Starmer will face is that
many Labour MPs want him to go
further and set the UK on a path to
greater integration with the EU. They
are keeping quiet for now but expect
those calls to become louder and
stronger if the party wins power.
TRANSGENDER
RIGHTS
What Labour will do
Labour has promised to
“modernise, simplify and reform” the
laws concerning those who want to
legally change gender. This will
“remove indignities” for transgender
people, who deserve acceptance,
while retaining the need for a
diagnosis of gender dysphoria from a
specialist doctor, it says. Labour’s
manifesto also commits it to
continuing protection for single-sex
spaces under the Equality Act. It says
it will bring in the recommendations
of the Cass review of trans healthcare
to give those with gender dysphoria
“appropriate” NHS care. The party
also promises a “full trans-inclusive
ban on conversion practices” .
Will it work?
Labour’s plans to reform laws on the
changing of gender on official
documents have been branded “selfID by the back door” by campaigners.
Critics want Labour to clarify how sex
is defined in the Equality Act, to
increase support for single-sex spaces.
A ban on conversion practices may
be tricky for Labour. Experts have
said that while no LGBT group
should be subject to conversion
practices, doctors and psychologists
should not be criminalised for
exploring a child’s gender distress.
Additional reporting: Eleanor Hayward,
Adam Vaughan, Ben Clatworthy, James
Beal and Nicola Woolcock

8

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

News
News Politics

From migrants to
defence — what
Labour didn’t say
Chris Smyth Whitehall Editor
Matt Dathan Home Affairs Editor

Sir Keir Starmer made a virtue of the
lack of surprises in Labour’s manifesto,
insisting people who wanted “rabbits”
should go to the circus.
But for most voters, of more concern
than the absence of new policies will be
the absence of answers to familiar questions about the party’s plans.
The manifesto includes more than a
dozen reviews, eight strategies and promises of unspecified reform. Labour
argues that this is inevitable given the
limited resources of opposition, but it
means the manifesto gives more of a
sense of direction than concrete plans.
tax, spending and growth
The biggest uncertainty is over what
would happen if Starmer’s growth plan
falters: would he cut spending or raise
taxes? At the manifesto launch, he
refused to countenance the question,
saying it was “defeatist” to consider.
Labour insists growth forecasts will
be revised upwards as soon as independent experts see its plans in action.
But one does not have to be unduly
cynical to believe growth will not
remove all the difficult trade-offs facing
an incoming government.
immigration
Labour pledges to “reduce net migration” but does not set a target. Starmer
dodged the question when asked about
specific numbers. The party is promising to “reform the points-based immigration system” but does not commit to
anything beyond “appropriate restrictions” on visas. It will formally link
immigration and skills strategy, but the
only industries mentioned were health
and social care and construction.
small boats
Labour pledges to scrap the Rwanda
policy but does not say what would
happen to the tens of thousands of illegal migrants who cannot be returned to
their home countries, such as Afghans,
Iranians and Syrians.
The party commits more money,
staff and resources to law enforcement
agencies to “smash the criminal boat
gangs”. However, the manifesto gives
very little detail on how its approach
would differ significantly from what the
government is already doing on that.
education
While Starmer says education is a
priority, questions remain about the
future of schools and universities.
Labour is promising an “expert-led”
curriculum review, and declares that
higher education is “in crisis” and university financing broken. But after
Starmer dropped the pledge to scrap
tuition fees, it’s not clear whether they
would rise or be replaced. Labour is
promising only to “act to create a secure
future for higher education”.
private schools
Starmer has previously said that he
would impose VAT on private school
fees “straight away”. However, Labour’s
manifesto does not provide clarity on
timing. Labour is planning to hold a

Starmer apes Truss approach
Analysis

T

o listen to
some of Sir
Keir
Starmer’s
rhetoric
around the Labour
manifesto launch, you
might be forgiven for
thinking he had come
to the unexpected
conclusion that Liz
Truss was right (Chris
Smyth and Oliver
Wright write).
Of course the
Labour leader would
never say any such
thing, having amassed
a 20-point poll lead in
no small part because
of Truss’s disastrous
premiership.
However, Starmer’s
insistence that
economic growth is
his “number one
priority” is ironically
similar to the
argument at the heart
of Truss’s plan for
government.
Britain, both
Starmer and Truss
argue, is stuck in a
malaise because of a
decade or more of
anaemic growth that
has left families
struggling and public
services battered.
Both, furthermore,
argue that a series of
supply-side reforms

Liz Truss also sought
supply-side reforms

around planning,
national
infrastructure and
investment will
transform the UK’s
growth prospects and
deliver higher-thananticipated tax
receipts.
There are big
differences of course.
Truss hoped to
achieve this through
radical disruption and
deregulation. In
contrast, Starmer’s
manifesto is a model
of restraint, and he is
deliberately pitching
dullness as a strength.
Although he says
that he will make
growth a Labour
government’s number
one priority, there is
not a single spending
pledge in Labour’s
manifesto that would
necessitate it. Indeed
he argues that
economic stability
and caution are
essential to the end

budget in the autumn, by which time
the academic year will have started. Labour has also said that the policy would
cover the cost of 6,500 new state school
teachers, but some have challenged
whether this amount would be raised.
welfare
The manifesto also gives little detail of
the party’s far-reaching welfare reform
plans. Labour wants to reform welfare
to get people back to work because
rising sickness has become a defining
economic challenge. The party says it
would “reform employment support so
it drives growth and opportunity”, but
whether this involves changes to rates
or amounts of benefits is not set out.
The party’s “ambitious strategy to
reduce child poverty” seems to be that
it will not remove the two-child benefit
cap. The party is promising to work
with voluntary organisations and business to come up with other plans. Similarly Labour is promising to put Britain
“back on track to ending homelessness” — but the details are not clear.
health and social care
On the NHS, the party has more specif-

goal. The difference is
that Starmer is hoping
to invest any proceeds
of growth in areas
such as the NHS and
education rather than
tax cuts. And the logic
is understandable: If
Starmer can return to
average growth rates
seen at the start of the
New Labour years,
this would amount to
more than £30 billion
of headroom to spend
on his party’s
priorities. He would,
at least in terms of
this manifesto, have
under-promised and
over-delivered.
Of course, if his
plan for growth
works, the need for
such tough choices
will abate
significantly, although
Britain’s older, sicker
population means it is
never going to vanish
entirely. However,
even optimistic
analysts believe it will
be several years
before Starmer can
start to top up
spending.
The key question
for an incoming
Labour government is
whether voters, and
more importantly his
own party, have the
patience to stick with
the plan.

From left, Angela Rayner (Labour), Daisy Cooper (Liberal Democrats),
Penny Mordaunt (Conservatives), Carla Denyer (Greens), Nigel Farage
(Reform UK), Stephen Flynn (SNP) and Rhun ap Iorwerth (Plaid Cymru)
took part in the ITV debate moderated by Julie Etchingham

ic commitments on extra appointments and scans. Most analysts do not
believe Starmer’s proposals are enough
to ensure big reductions in NHS waiting lists without far more money.
Few would disagree with Labour’s
argument that social care “needs deep
reform”. But it is not yet clear whether
its promised national care service
would amount to more than a set of
minimum standards, nor how much its
promise of “fair pay” will boost wages.

net zero
An industrial strategy that uses government investment to kick-start green
industries is at the heart of plans for
both regional growth and cutting
energy bills through clean power.
But after the original £28-billion-ayear promise was scaled back, there are
questions about whether it would be
enough either to decarbonise the electricity grid by 2030, or attract the private investment needed for green jobs.

housing
Starmer and Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor, both cite planning
reform as the fastest thing they can do
to increase growth, promising changes
within 100 days.
So while there is more detail on its
housing plans than in many other
areas, questions need to be addressed.
Will the party impose housing plans on
councils that drag their feet on hitting
targets? Is it planning to change compulsory purchase rules to allow the
government to buy undeveloped land
far more cheaply? Is it willing to change
the rules to curtail local residents’
rights to object?

crime
Labour is promising to “return law and
order to our streets” with a series of
promises on neighbourhood policing,
banning persistent antisocial offenders
from town centres and mandatory
plans for those caught carrying knives
to prevent reoffending. But it is not
clear if a promised review of sentencing
would see more offenders sent to jail.
There are pledges to halve knife
crime and violence against women and
girls over the next decade, but with no
detail on how this would be measured.
defence
Labour is planning to have a strategic

defence review before it gives answers
about the size of the armed forces and
how it responds to growing threats
around the world. While it is promising
to put Britain “on the path” to spend
2.5 per cent of GDP on defence, it is not
clear how long it would take to do so.
trade
While Labour is ruling out a return to
the single market and customs union, it
is also not specifying how it would
improve trade with the EU beyond
“tearing down unnecessary barriers”.
constitutional reform
Labour vows to restore trust in government through an ethics overhaul. But it
appears to have softened its ban on
MPs holding second jobs, which now
applies only to consultancy roles. Only
jobs that “stop them serving their constituents and the country” will be prohibited, but it is not clear if that applies
to certain areas, such as legal work.
While Labour remains committed to
abolishing the House of Lords, the
manifesto kicks this into the long grass
with a pledge to make members retire
at 80 and eliminate hereditary peers.

the times | Friday June 14 2024

9

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News
News

Rayner tight-lipped
on capital gains tax

A

ngela Rayner
declined to say last
night whether
Labour would raise
capital gains tax if
it won the election as she
clashed with Penny Mordaunt
during a seven-way televised
debate (Steven Swinford and
Oliver Wright write).
Mordaunt, for the Tories,
asked Rayner during the ITV
debate whether Labour would
raise the tax, which is levied on
the sale of assets such as
shares or property. She asked:
“Will you commit to ruling
that out now?”
Rayner, Labour’s deputy
leader, responded by saying
that Labour would not raise
taxes on working people. “We
have set out that we would not
raise income tax, national
insurance and VAT,” she said.
“We do not need to raise taxes
on working people because our
manifesto is fully costed, unlike
the Conservatives.”
Pressed further she added:
“There is nothing in our
manifesto that requires us to
raise capital gains tax.”
However, she did not rule
out doing so if Labour won the
election. Rayner said that the
Tories could not be trusted
after raising the tax burden to
record levels.
During the debate Nigel
Farage declared Reform the
“opposition to Labour” after a
poll found that his party had
overtaken the Tories for the
first time. He said: “Just before
we came on air we overtook
the Conservatives in the
national opinion polls. We are
now the opposition to Labour.”
Farage was accused by
Mordaunt of being a “Labour
enabler”, to which he
responded: “We are now ahead
of you in the national polls. A
vote for you is a vote for
Labour.”
The party representatives
clashed on policy issues
including the state of public
services, migration and Brexit.
Rayner appeared to go
beyond the party’s official

policy when she said Labour
would not ever support taking
Britain back into the European
Union or single market.
On the NHS, Farage blamed
the “exploding population” for
longer waiting lists and
suggested that Britain should
move to a French-style
national insurance system.
Mordaunt claimed that
Labour would cut spending on
the NHS — something Rayner
denied. In an early exchange
on tax, Mordaunt claimed that
Labour had a “black hole” of
£38.5 billion in its plans. The
only way they were going to
fill it, she said, was by raising
taxes.
Rayner highlighted tax rises
under successive Conservative
governments, telling the
audience: “You can’t afford
another five years of the
Tories.”
Farage claimed that
problems in England’s schools
were directly related to
migration and accused other
parties of not acknowledging
the issue. “There is a problem
that nobody wants to discuss,”
he said. “The exploding
population means our class
sizes are getting bigger. And it’s
a constant problem that none
of the other panellists even
want to discuss.”
This was denied by Rayner
who said that pupil numbers
were actually declining.
On migration, Rayner said
that under the Tories the
government had been “overreliant on overseas workers”.
Farage said that Labour had
failed to include migration in
its six key priorities. He said
Reform would introduce a new
policy of zero net migration.
Farage was accused of “dogwhistle” politics, criticism that
he dismissed as “nonsense”.
Mordaunt said the
Conservatives would cap
family and work visas. The
Liberal Democrats, the SNP
and the Green Party spoke
positively of migration.
Stephen Flynn of the SNP said
he was “in favour”.

Keir goes for growth, the marvellous medicine to cure Britain’s ills
Tom Peck
Political Sketch

T

here was just one word
written on the lectern, the
same one as on the
backdrop: change. That
little touch was new. Other
than that, Labour’s manifesto launch
was entirely unchanged from the
past two times they’ve done it.
It was, almost down to every last
word in the script, an event kept
meticulously identical to the one
they had barely a month ago, which
it was too late to cancel when the
snap May election never happened.
It may have been the bestrehearsed manifesto launch there’s
ever been, and if it wasn’t it certainly
felt like it. Hecklers can no longer
derail the slow-moving Starmer
juggernaut. He kicked the eternal
protester, Jeremy Corbyn, out of the

party altogether, so a polite young
woman from a protest movement
called the Green New Deal wasn’t
going to stop him. Before the event
there were four of them gathered
outside behind a giant placard,
shouting the words “Youth Deserve
Better”. One attempted to do the
same during the event itself and so
at the end there were only three.
The fourth was assisting with
inquiries behind a police van.
The Labour leader was back at
one of his favourite places, the
atrium of the Co-op headquarters in
Manchester. Fifteen storeys worth of
balconies rise up above it like a kind
of corporate panopticon. On each,
staff had gathered to gaze down and
applaud. They presumably don’t find
it hard to get tickets to Co-op Live
across town, which finally opened
last month and was graced by Barry
Manilow. On this evidence they
don’t need them. Starmer is more
than enough. He was introduced, as

has now become almost customary,
by Nathaniel Dye, a cancer patient
who has been given three years to
live, for which he blames the NHS
missing many targets during his
diagnosis. The one switch on the
undercard from the last time Labour
did this was that now they had the
Iceland boss Richard Walker doing
the bit about how Labour is the
party of business. Last time out it
was Sebastian James, managing
director of Boots and David
Cameron’s old mate from the
Bullingdon. Walker understands
change better than most: this time
last year he was trying to become a
Conservative election candidate.
If this was the new dawn breaking
then it must again be pointed out
that Starmer was not dressed for it.
He must have been hoping that by
mid-June he would have stopped
being the only person in the room
on these occasions without a jacket
on. This was, again, not the case.

Judging by the number of coats on
the back of chairs, the new dawn
remains worryingly autumnal.
Starmer reckons the country
needs a “total change of direction”
but what’s coming up on the sat nav
feels frighteningly familiar. “Our
manifesto in two words: economic
growth,” announced Rachel Reeves
on her social media channels as the
manifesto was launched.
They are betting everything on
growth. “The growth lever is the
first lever we will reach for,” said
Starmer, for approximately the
hundredth time. “We don’t have a
magic wand,” he also said at one
point, but he does have extremely
high hopes for the magic growth
lever, which really does not exist.
He was asked, by The Times, what
he might do if the growth lever is
not as responsive to his aggressive
yanking as he hopes. There are only
three alternatives after all —
borrowing, cutting spending, or

raising taxes. All three were ruled
out. It’s going to be growth. It’s the
only way. It’d better work.
Starmer wants politics to be
boring again, or as he calls it, “to
put politics back into the service of
working people”. But there’s a
difference between boring
politicians and boring politics.
Neville Chamberlain was a very
boring man who found himself
unable to prevent things getting
quite lively. While Starmer spoke,
various NHS think tanks spoke of
the “profound political challenges”
in getting NHS waiting lists down.
In such circumstances, it is
arguably unwise to have as a de
facto member of your campaign
team a very sick man telling
everyone that you’re going to heal
the nation. If you want to make
yourself look like Jesus, you best be
sure you can pull off a miracle. If
you can’t, the hungry crowds won’t
be as bored as you hope.

10

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Friday June 14 2024 | the times

News
News Politics

G7 deal boosts Ukraine’s
war chest by $50 billion
Aubrey Allegretti
Chief Political Correspondent, Puglia

Ukraine has been handed a $50 billion
boost to its war chest after G7 countries
struck a deal to pay a loan funded by
frozen Russian assets. Rishi Sunak

described the move as a “game-changing package of support” and said western countries were determined to do
“whatever it takes” to beat Russia in its
war against Ukraine.
The prime minister met President
Zelensky of Ukraine at the G7 summit

in Puglia, Italy, where he reiterated
Britain’s unwavering support.
Sunak was forced to deny that he had
been snubbed by other G7 leaders after
holding no one-to-one meetings with
them on the first day of the summit.
The $50 billion will be underwritten

by the interest accrued on Russian
money that has been frozen in bank
accounts since sanctions were imposed
at the start of President Putin’s full-scale
invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
The sum is about a fifth of the total
value of Russian assets that were frozen,

but G7 countries have struggled to
agree on a plan for how to use the
money to fund the war effort.
Complex legal and financial frameworks have hampered the discussions,
as well as the fact that assets have been
seized at different times and in different
ways. The money is earmarked for
rebuilding Ukraine after the conflict.
Sunak held bilateral meetings with
Zelensky and Ursula von der Leyen, the
president of the European Commission,
yesterday, but had no one-to-one
audiences with other G7 leaders.
He denied suggestions that he had
been snubbed because his chances of
remaining prime minister looked slim.
Sunak said: “We’ve been here a half a
day already and I sat down with a bunch
of people I need to in the margins.

Justin Trudeau, of Canada, who is
tanking in the polls before elections
next year, and the scandal-plagued
Japanese prime minister, Fumio
Kishida.
Things are almost as bad for some
of the special guests, including
Narendra Modi, the prime minister
of India, and President Ramaphosa
of South Africa, who have both lost

their majorities in recent elections.
President Zelensky of Ukraine
will be worried that the pro-Kyiv
consensus of the group will ebb if
the present batch of leaders is
ousted by right-wingers such as
Donald Trump.
At least Zelensky can rely on
Meloni sticking around after she
boosted her support at the EU vote

and arrived in Puglia claiming she
had “the strongest government of
all”. As a sign of her swagger,
Meloni has put migration and the
perils of AI on the agenda — two of
her favourite topics — and irked the
French by allegedly trying to water
down a G7 declaration on
safeguarding abortion rights.
Now seen as a kingmaker at the

Meloni welcomes leaders
united by election woes

P

unished by voters and
plummeting in the polls,
G7 leaders have gathered
in Italy for what is being
described as a lame duck
summit at which quick deals will be
struck by protagonists fearful of
being ousted from office (Tom
Kington writes).
The leaders of Canada, France,
Germany, Japan, the UK and the US
were all smiles when they joined
Giorgia Meloni, the Italian prime
minister, yesterday at the Borgo
Egnazia resort in Puglia, but the
underlying mood was gloomy.
Battered by his rival, Marine Le
Pen, at last weekend’s EU elections,

President Macron has called snap
national elections while Olaf Scholz,
the German chancellor, finished
behind the hard-right Alternative
for Germany in the vote. The future
is just as grim for Rishi Sunak, who
risks electoral oblivion next month.
“Forget the G7s of Angela Merkel
when there was a solid European
bloc, this time the continent has
broken bones and the auspices are
not good,” said Teresa Coratella,
deputy head of the Rome office of
the European Council on Foreign
Relations, a think tank.
The Europeans were joined in
Puglia by President Biden, who
faces a tough election in November,

Aide says July 4 bet was ‘huge error’ Religious voters more likely
Aubrey Allegretti

The aide who acts as Rishi Sunak’s eyes
and ears among MPs has said he made
a “huge error of judgment” by placing a
bet on the election date three days
before the prime minister called it.
Craig Williams apologised yesterday
but refused to say whether he knew the
date at the time he placed the bet.
Sunak said the news was “very disappointing”. He declined to say whether
Williams had been present at any meetings about calling the election.
Williams, who is defending the seat
of Montgomeryshire & Glyndwr, is
alleged to have placed a £100 bet three
days before Sunak named the date as
July 4. He did so at a Ladbrokes in his
constituency and got odds of 5-1, The
Guardian said.
Since Sunak became prime minister

in October 2022, Williams has been his
parliamentary private secretary. He is
one of Sunak’s closest advisers.
He told the BBC yesterday: “I clearly
made a huge error of judgment, that’s
for sure, and I apologise.”
Sunak would not say what should
happen to Williams, including if he
would be disowned as a candidate. “It’s
very disappointing news ... You’ll know
that there’s an independent inquiry,
which is necessarily confidential. I’m
sure you’ll understand that it wouldn’t
be appropriate for me to comment
while that inquiry is ongoing.”
Lord Cameron of Chipping Norton,
the foreign secretary, called Williams’s action “very foolish”. He said that
as Williams was already standing as a
Conservative Party candidate “I don’t
think we can change that”.
The Liberal Democrats called for a

Cabinet Office inquiry to look into
what information Williams had at the
time he placed his bet. Sir Ed Davey, the
party leader, told broadcasters in Kent:
“If someone knows the outcome of
something, it seems to me morally
questionable for them to put a bet on it.”
Daisy Cooper, the Lib Dems’ deputy
leader, called it an example of “endless
sleaze and scandal”, adding: “The British people are sick to their back teeth
with it.”
The Guardian reported that the
Gambling Commission had written to
all licensed bookmakers this week
requesting information on anyone who
stood to gain more than £199 by betting
on a July election.
The watchdog asked bookmakers to
confine the search to all customers
making such bets in the first three
weeks of May.

to back government’s record
Kaya Burgess
Religious Affairs Correspondent

Anglicans are more likely than the general population to think the government has handled the cost of living crisis well, while Muslims are more likely
to support their running of the NHS,
according to an analysis of views by the
British Election Study.
Non-religious people are the harshest judges of the government’s record
on most issues. The research among six
groups, Anglican, Catholic, other
Christian, Islam, other religion and no
religion, conducted in May via YouGov,
found 8 per cent of the population
thinks the government has handled the
cost of living crisis “well” or “very well”.

This falls to 7 per cent among Muslims,
is 13 per cent among Anglicans and 9
per cent among Catholics.
Overall approval ratings for the Tories’ handling of the NHS are 6 per cent.
This falls to 4 per cent among people
with no religion, but rises to 9 per cent
among Muslims and Anglicans.
On immigration, 5 per cent of people
think the government has handled it
well. This rises to 9 per cent among
non-Anglican and non-Catholic Christians, 7 per cent among Muslims and 8
per cent among “other religion”, which
includes Hindus, Sikhs and Jews. It falls
to 4 per cent among the non-religious.
Muslims are the only group who believe, albeit only narrowly, that Britain
should allow in more asylum seekers.

11

the times | Friday June 14 2024

News
News
That’s kind of how these things work.”
He highlighted his garden walk with
Zelensky and said he spoke directly to
President Macron of France.
Sunak suggested that Britain’s
commitment to supporting Ukraine
would be under threat if Sir Keir
Starmer became prime minister, due to
Labour not matching his pledge to raise
defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP
by 2030.
He said: “I can sit there and tell
Volodomyr [Zelensky], ‘yep, as long as it
takes we will have the money to continue supporting you at the levels that
we are’. And Putin can see that because
we’ve been increasing our defence budget. The Labour Party can’t say that.”
Security was a theme Sunak was keen
to hammer home at the G7, given the

summit takes him away from the
campaign trail at a crucial stage, and
with one international trip, to Switzerland this weekend, still ahead.
Sunak joined President Biden and
Justin Trudeau, the prime minister
of Canada, in expressing “serious
concerns” that Russia was plotting to
influence elections in Moldova in
October. The trio claimed Moscow
was inciting protests, promoting
disinformation and sowing distrust.
Voters in the country, which borders
Ukraine, will elect a president and
participate in a referendum on its
attempt to join the EU.
Western leaders have grown increasingly worried about Russia’s influence.
In a joint statement Sunak, Biden and
Trudeau accused the Kremlin of using

“lies, deceit, corruption and disinformation to undermine sovereignty and
democracy”.
They threw their support behind
President Sandu of Moldova, who is
viewed as pro-European and running
for a second term. The three leaders
said: “We share President Sandu’s
strong concerns about the Kremlin’s
use of criminal groups to finance political activities and undermine Moldova’s
democratic institutions.”
They accused Russia of trying to
“foment negative public perceptions of
western governments, Moldova’s incumbent leadership, and Moldova’s
potential for EU integration”.
They also raised fears of a plot to
incite protests should a pro-Russia
candidate not win the presidency. “Part

of these [Russian] operations would
include spreading lies about the
incumbent president’s character and intentions, and about supposed electoral
irregularities,” the statement added.
Moldova became an independent
country after the collapse of the Soviet
Union in 1991. There are fears that,
President Putin could turn his attention
towards an invasion to bring it back into
Moscow’s sphere of influence by force.
Russia opposes Moldova’s attempt
to join the EU but has dismissed
allegations of election interference.
The UK had earlier announced new
sanctions against Russia’s “shadow
fleet” of ships secretly transporting
oil to fund the war in Ukraine. The
move is designed to target Russia’s
“most critical revenue source”.

The G7 leaders, including
Giorgia Meloni, left, Rishi
Sunak, far left, President
Biden, right, and Justin
Trudeau, below, were
chauffeured to San
Domenico Golf Club in
Puglia to watch a
parachute drop.
President Macron and
Olaf Scholz arrived after
a humiliating defeat in EU
elections last weekend.
Meloni’s party received a
boost at the vote,
prompting her to claim
she had the “strongest
government”

EU, she will want to huddle with the
commission’s president, Ursula von
der Leyen, about what top jobs she
can get in Europe, in return for
backing the German politician for a
second term.
After winning over the leaders
individually with her ready Roman
wit, Meloni’s toughest challenge
may be whether she has the

charisma to charm them all at the
same time.
“There is lots of work to do but I
am certain that in these two days we
can have a summit able to produce
concrete and tangible results,”
Meloni said brightly as the leaders
gathered round a table for their first
session.
Meloni embraced Sunak at the

entrance to the G7, welcoming him
back to Italy seven months after he
visited Rome last December to
attend a rally hosted by her
Brothers of Italy party.
The pair are close and have a
shared passion for tackling small
boat crossings, which have led to far
greater numbers of migrants
arriving on the shores of Italy than

in the English Channel. Meloni
and Sunak hugged and shared a
peck on the cheek when they
were reunited.
But Coratella said having
enfeebled allies did no favours to
Meloni. “This G7 is her first big
multilateral test and she will have
hoped for stronger members — this
doesn’t help her at all,” she said.

Head of King’s school calls VAT existential threat
Nicola Woolcock Education Editor

Labour’s VAT policy poses an
existential threat to private schools, the
head of Gordonstoun has said.
Lisa Kerr is standing down as
principal of the boarding school in
Moray, Scotland — the King’s alma
mater. She is to become the new
head of George Watson’s College in
Edinburgh.
She said the independent sector
should have spent the past few decades
extolling its wider benefits to society.
Gordonstoun, which was also
attended by the King’s father, charges
£53,000 a year and focuses on outdoor
activities. The school near Elgin was
founded in 1934 by Dr Kurt Hahn, a
German educationalist.
Kerr told a conference at Downe
House School, near Newbury, Berk-

shire, that the Labour policy posed an
existential threat to many schools. She
said significant change to taxation was
likely to be introduced despite a
superficial level of debate.
Labour has pledged to add
VAT to private school fees if it
forms the next government.
It says schools can choose
whether or not to pass this on
to parents. Many schools insist
that they cannot afford to absorb
the cost.
Kerr said: “It is an existential
threat, certainly for a lot of
people in the sector. There’s a
lack of understanding. Many
of the sector bodies recognise
that it would have been
really great if we’d spent the
last few decades building
deeper understanding of

the value that independent schools
bring to society. In Scotland, research
shows that independent schools
add half a billion pounds to the
economy.
“The unintended consequences
are really important to understand. I hope that whatever
happens with the development of
the policy, there will be a deep
look at the consequences
across
education
and
society.”
The head of a wealth
management firm has
urged young couples to
start saving now if they
planned to send any
children to a private school.
Lisa Kerr says private
schools benefit society

Chris Rudden, head of investment
consultants at Moneyfarm, said that
people who wanted to send their
infants to a private school should invest
lump sums topped up with regular
contributions.
“Prospective parents, particularly
those from the ‘squeezed middle’
may now feel that they have to give up
on the idea of privately educating
their children or take on debt,” he
said. “School fees are not just about
your salary but also about how you
invest.
“The sooner people start investing,
the better, which is why even people in
their 20s would be well advised to take
the plunge, even before children come
along, if private schooling is their
desired choice.”

Farage backs
candidates
over fascist
‘cobblers’
Tom Witherow, Aubrey Allegretti

Nigel Farage has defended the 41
Reform UK candidates found to be
social media “friends” of a fascist leader,
saying: “I apologise that not all of our
candidates have been to Eton.”
Close to one in ten candidates for the
party in England were connected on
Facebook with Gary Raikes, the British
fascist leader, The Times found.
Yesterday Farage claimed it was
“utter cobblers” to say they had Nazi
sympathies because “on Facebook
mates send each other things” without
“having any idea where it comes from”.
During a phone-in segment on an LBC
radio show, he said: “I can only apologise that not all of our candidates have
been to Eton, to Oxford, not all of our
candidates are part of the London set.”
Raikes, a former organiser for the
British National Party, founded the
New British Union in the image of Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists,
and has called for a “fascist revolution”.
Farage said he would consider disowning some candidates, but that they
could not be deselected because they
were legally on the ballot paper.
Farage, who this month announced
that he would lead Reform UK and
fight for the parliamentary seat of Clacton in Essex, defended his candidates,
saying that many of the comments
highlighted by newspapers reflected
how ordinary people spoke. “They’re
ordinary people ... that’s how they feel,”
he told the presenter Nick Ferrari.
“People are allowed to have opinions.”
When asked whether he would withdraw support from a candidate who
said “Islam and Nazis are the same
thing”, he said “probably not”, adding:
“Winston Churchill was clearly a very
bad man because he thought the same.”
The Times revealed last week that
Reform’s prospective MPs included a
racist who referred to a group of black
people as “baboons” and a magazine
publisher who suggested that the convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell
did her teenage victims “a favour”.
The party said its vetting procedures
had been “truncated” by the snap election, but only two of the list of about a
dozen names passed to the party were
deselected. Farage said he was unable
to remove Ian Gribbin, the candidate
for Bexhill & Battle, East Sussex, who
said that Britain should have accepted
Hitler’s offer of neutrality before the
Second World War. “What can you do,
his name’s on the ballot paper,” he said.
When asked whether he would disown his candidates, he added: “I may
well do that, I haven’t had time to think.”
The Times can reveal that Matthew
Warnes, the Reform candidate in
Mansfield, Nottinghamshire, who runs
a children’s entertainment firm, called a
Polish man “a job stealing twat that
can’t read English”.
He previously changed his Facebook
profile picture to a graphic featuring the
video game character Mario, which
read: “Don’t be a racist, be like Mario”,
adding that he “jumps like a black man
and grabs coins like a Jew”.
Robert Lomas, a Reform candidate in
Barnsley North, wrote online that asylum seekers had it “in their DNA to lie”
and that “black people of Britain” were
“grifting the race card” and should “get
up off your lazy arses”.
Warnes and Reform did not respond
to a request for comment.

the times | Friday June 14 2024

13

S1

News
The gold ring
belonged
to George
Grenville, a Whig
who was prime
minister for two
years in the 18th
century. It was
found by Tom
Clark, 85, in
a field in
Aylesbury near
the residence of
Grenville’s son
and has now
sold for £9,500
at auction

Former PM’s gold
ring found in field

A

gold ring
unearthed
by a metal
detectorist
in a
Buckinghamshire sheep
field has sold for £9,500
at auction after it was
found to have once been

in the possession of an
18th-century prime
minister (Jack
Blackburn writes).
The “seal” ring had
the name Grenvil
inscribed on it, which
led experts to discover
that it belonged to

George Grenville, who
was prime minister
between 1763 and 1765.
“Just as the country
focuses on who will be
the next prime minister,
we are pleased to be
looking back to who was
in power 260 years ago,”

said Nigel Mills of the
auctioneers Noonans,
who sold the ring this
week.
The field in which it
was found was close to
the home of Grenville’s
son, also named George,
to whom the jewellery

was bequeathed.
It is not clear
when the ring
was lost.
It was found by
Tom Clark, 85, near
Aylesbury last year,
10in beneath the
surface. “I didn’t watch

Families of Nottingham victims
demand action on police failings
Will Humphries

Families and friends of the victims of
the Nottingham attacks laid roses
where the two students were murdered
on the anniversary of their killing.
Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both 19, were stabbed by
Valdo Calocane, 32, as they walked
home after a night out celebrating the
end of exams on June 13 last year.
He also fatally stabbed Ian Coates,
65, a school caretaker, who had been on
his way to work.
Remembering the victims yesterday
morning, a trail of flowers was laid on
Ilkeston Road where the students died,
near their halls of residence.
In a joint statement, the families of
the three victims said that they would
“pause to reflect upon that tragic day
and remember the souls of the three vibrant, caring, hard-working and much
loved family members who are no
longer here”.
They said the “brutal, calculated and
unprovoked attack” by Calocane was
“carefully planned” and despite his
mental health issues they maintain that
“he knew what he was doing, he knew it
was wrong, but he did it anyway”.
Last month the Court of Appeal concluded that there was “no error” when
Calocane was given an indefinite hospital order instead of a prison sentence
because he was in the “grip of a severe
psychotic episode” during the attacks.
Calocane’s sentence for manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility was upheld by the judges, who said
they had the “greatest possible sympathy” for the victims and their families
but that the right sentence had been

Sinead O’Malley,
far left, was
hugged yesterday
a year to the day
after her daughter
Grace, Barnaby
Webber and Ian
Coates were
stabbed to death

handed down. The families say that the
authorities have failed to answer their
questions of why, if he was so unstable,
Calocane received no immediate mental health assessment in custody, no
treatment until mid-September and remained in prison until November.
They have also raised concerns about
shortcomings in the police investigation, including why toxicology tests
were not taken to rule out drug-taking.
Nottinghamshire police said that
Calocane had no history of drug abuse,
but the families found out that he had
attended a barbecue with a violent,
cannabis-using gangster two days
before the stabbings.
He would not have had the option of
a diminished responsibility plea if he
had taken drugs. O’Malley-Kumar’s

father, Dr Sanjoy Kumar, a GP and
former forensic medical examiner for
the police, has asked for police statements, psychiatric reports and a transcript of Calocane’s interview. All have
been denied. The authorities cite the
myriad continuing independent inquiries into decision-making and failings.
In a statement released on the anniversary of the killings, the victims’ families said: “Today is not the day for fight
but tomorrow is.
“We continue in our dogged pursuit
for appropriate justice, individual and
organisational accountability and real
lasting change to our society and laws
that will provide more protection and
public safety, appropriate punishment
for crimes and proper support for victims and their families. As three fami-

lies we stand united by grief and
loss, but fuelled by our anger at the
scale of failings, poor policing, weak
prosecution, dereliction of duty in
medical care and a series of catastrophic missed opportunities that would
and should have stopped these entirely
preventable deaths.”
The families said they had accepted
an offer of support in their legal fight
from Neil Hudgell of Hudgell Solicitors, and Tim Moloney KC, of Doughty
Street Chambers, and their legal teams.
“We have had to face so much over
the past 12 painful and agonising
months in our fight for answers and
justice and are utterly exhausted,” the
families said.
“Up until this point we have been
powerless and forced to be passive. It is
time to take the lead; and with this
support, to ensure our answers are met
and failures of Leicester Police, Nottingham Police, Nottingham Mental
Health Trust, amongst others, are exposed. No stone will be left unturned as
we will continue for however long this
may take.”
Hudgell said: “It is our responsibility
to ensure that we do everything we can
to help these families establish the
truth, effect change and find redress,
putting all those agencies who played a
part in these tragic events under the
most powerful of spotlights.”
O’Malley-Kumar’s mother, Sinead
O’Malley, said she had not read a letter
sent to her by Calocane’s family but understands that they blame the killings
on failings by the authorities. “I don’t
want to look into the faces of the people
that brought this monster into the
world,” she told the Daily Mirror.

the sale as I was out
metal-detecting,” Clark
said. He said of the
auction: “I am very
pleased ... I would like to
put the money in my
bank account, but I am
sure that my wife will
have ideas of how to
spend it.”
Grenville was not one
of our more memorable
prime ministers and had
one of the shorter
tenures too, at two years
and 85 days. His time in
office, however,
comfortably eclipses
that of Liz Truss, who
became the shortestserving prime minister
when she resigned after
only 45 days.
Grenville’s chief
impact was in the runup to the American
Revolutionary War.
“He tried to reduce
Britain’s growing
debt by raising
revenue in the
American colonies
with the
introduction of the
Sugar Act, the
Currency Act and
the Stamp Act,”
Mills said. “These
new laws ... were
strongly objected to
by the colonists and
stirred up protests,
which resulted in
George III dismissing
Grenville.”

US ‘contempt’
over Harry
Dunn inquest
Lara Wildenberg

The United States “obstructed” the
inquest into the death of Harry Dunn
and has treated British lives with “contempt”, his family said.
Dunn, 19, was killed when a car
driven by Anne Sacoolas, 46, a US government employee, collided with his
motorcycle outside an RAF base in
Northamptonshire in 2019.
Sacoolas then fled the country and
refused to return to give evidence, with
the US government asserting diplomatic immunity on her behalf.
Neither representatives of the US
embassy nor Sacoolas attended the
four-day inquest into Dunn’s death this
week. This prompted Radd Seiger, the
Dunn family spokesman, to suggest the
US government’s position was that
“lives of UK citizens like Harry ultimately do not matter”.
Speaking after the inquest concluded
yesterday, Seiger said: “They have positively obstructed the coroner’s inquiry
and deprived the family of the answers
they were entitled to as to why no one
has ever addressed the issue of safety of
UK citizens.”
Sacoolas said that she had made a
“tragic mistake” by driving on the
wrong side of the road in statements
read out at the inquest. In 2022 she
admitted death by careless driving and
received an eight-month prison sentence, suspended for 12 months.
Anne Pember, the Northamptonshire coroner, criticised the US government over a lack of training for diplomatic personnel at RAF Croughton.
She recorded Dunn’s death as being a
result of “injuries sustained during a
head-on collision” with a car.

14

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

News
Dress to impress
Clothes from
Dame Vivienne
Westwood’s own
collection go on
show at Christie’s
in London today
until June 24,
before being
auctioned to
benefit the late
couturier’s
foundation and
Médecins Sans
Frontières. The
sale has more
than 200 lots of
clothes, dating
back 40 years

Disabled tenants
‘still at risk’ after
Grenfell report
James Beal Social Affairs Editor

The failure to implement recommendations from the Grenfell inquiry is
putting the lives of disabled people at
risk, campaigners said on the seventh
anniversary of the fire.
The inquiry’s phase-one report in
2019 called for a change in the law to
force owners and managers of buildings
to prepare personal emergency evacuation plans (Peeps) for disabled tenants.
The government, however, has failed
to impose the law, leaving vulnerable
people in jeopardy. Adam Gabsi,
chairman of Harrow Association of
Disabled People in northwest London,
said before the seventh anniversary of
the Grenfell fire today that a law
change on Peeps was needed urgently.
Gabsi, 38, who has multiple sclerosis
and uses a wheelchair, said landlords
were able to place a value on a tenancy
but could disregard the value of their
tenants’ lives.
The second and final report into the
Grenfell Tower disaster, in which 15 of
the 37 disabled residents (41 per cent)
were killed, is due in September.
Gabsi, who lives on the sixth floor of
a high-rise building that is covered in
cladding, said: “How can we be confident they are going to implement phase
two’s recommendations when they
haven’t even done phase one?
“Regardless of who the next government is, they need to implement Peeps.
The government should be legally
bound to do this.”
Phase one of the report into the
west London fire that killed 72
people on June 14, 2017, was released in
October two years later with 15
recommendations.
The Conservative government has
previously indicated that it would not

be enforcing the recommendation of
Peeps amid concerns about the practicality and cost.
A spokesman for Grenfell United, the
organisation of survivors and bereaved
families that is demanding justice, said:
“Disabled residents are in the same
position they were in Grenfell Tower
that night — 41 per cent of the tower’s
disabled residents died.
“With a single staircase as the only
means of escape, they didn’t stand a
chance. We are calling on the next
government to implement personal
emergency evacuation plans for disabled residents.
“This crucial recommendation from
the phase-one report would mean
residents have a personal plan to get
them out of a building safely in the
event of a fire. The government has
dragged its feet for five years, telling us
it’s too costly. But you can’t put a price
on people’s lives. We lost 72. How many
more people need to die before we see
action?
“This must now be a cross-party
priority to implement this vital lifesaving recommendation. Everyone
deserves to be safe in their homes.”
The government has implemented 11
of the 15 phase-one recommendations
from the Grenfell inquiry. It ran a
public consultation, seeking views on
its plans to deliver the Peeps-related
recommendations in 2022.
It emerged last month that survivors
and bereaved families might wait
almost ten years after the fire before
they get justice and those responsible
for it are brought before a court.
The Metropolitan Police said that
files would be sent to the Crown
Prosecution Service next year, with
criminal charges unlikely before the
end of 2026.

Bills for insurance, phones
and broadband hit budgets
Andrew Ellson
Consumer Affairs Correspondent

A growing number of Britons are battling to stay afloat financially, new data
shows, after disposable incomes slipped
as households struggled to absorb
higher telecoms and insurance bills.
The average household is now
having to find an extra £133 a month to
pay their usual outgoings, an increase
of nearly 10 per cent since February.
The Household Money Index, which
tracks how much is spent on more than
30 regular outgoings, including groceries, mortgage and rent, found that Britons are spending 35 per cent more on
phone, life, health and pet insurance
than at the start of the year. The rises
have more than offset higher earnings
and the effects of tax cuts.
The index revealed that gross income
has increased by 3.2 per cent to an average of £31,642.30, with monthly income
up 5.5 per cent because of the reduction
in national insurance in April. When
taking all these factors into account,
people have £20 less disposable income
a month than three months ago.
The findings will be unwelcome news
for Rishi Sunak as he tries to convince
voters to give the Tories a record fifth
term. The prime minister met his

pledge, made at the beginning of last
year, to halve inflation, which was running at 10.7 per cent, with the most
recent data showing the consumer
prices index now at 2.3 per cent. However, even if price rises have been constrained for now, voters are unlikely to
feel much benefit.
Part of the problem has been rising
telecoms costs, with broadband and
mobile phone providers increasing bills
sharply in April. All the main providers
raise costs annually in line with inflation plus an extra amount for network
investment. For example, Virgin Media
raised prices by 8.8 per cent, February’s
retail prices index plus 3.9 per cent
while BT put its prices up by 7.9 per cent,
which was CPI plus 3.9 per cent.
Insurance costs have also been rising.
The index found spending on pet insurance was up by 25 per cent while health
insurance premiums rose by 22 per
cent. Car, phone and life insurance have
all also increased. Spending on nonessentials like streaming services and
gaming has risen as providers have
increased prices across the board.
The only areas where bills have fallen
are groceries, down 0.9 per cent, energy
bills that are down 2.2 per cent and loan
repayments (excluding mortgages)
which are down 3.4 per cent.

15

the times | Friday June 14 2024

News

Former Spandau Ballet singer, 36, accused of raping three women
Laurence Sleator

A former singer with the pop group
Spandau Ballet, who has been accused
of raping three women as they slept,
told one that she “deserved” it, a court
has been told.
Ross Davidson, 36, who was the
group’s frontman for a year in 2018, replacing Tony Hadley, is accused of sex
offences against five women and raping
three between 2013 and 2023.
Davidson, whose stage name is Ross
William Wild, also faces charges of voyeurism, intimidation and controlling

behaviour. At the start of his trial Wood
Green crown court in north London
was told that Davidson had a “darker
side” to the outgoing pop star he portrayed himself as, and that he used one
woman as a “sexual slave”.
The first incident was said to have
taken place at his flat in north London
in October 2013, where he secretly
filmed himself raping the woman after
an argument. She said: “I was in tears,
we were having an argument. He
suddenly became calm and was telling
me that this is what I want, this is what
I deserve. He then pushed me back on

to the bed, my top was down and he unbuckled my jeans and pulled my jeans
down somehow.”
She added: “The whole time I was
crying, it was pretty obvious I did not
want him on top of me, it was not my
choice for him to be there. He then said,
‘You look like you have just been raped.’
At the time, I was like, ‘Surely that did
not just happen.’” She said that she did
not report the incident straight away
because it took her a long time to process what had happened.
Davidson was also said to have filmed
himself touching another woman’s

One woman said that she was crying
while Ross Davidson was on top of her

breasts. This woman was interviewed
by police.
A third woman was allegedly raped
as she slept in Cannes, where the musician was attending the film festival in
May 2018, an incident the prosecution
described as “bizarre and perverted”.
He is accused of treating a fourth
woman as a “sexual slave” and filmed a
sex act without her consent. Afterwards
she went to the bathroom and rang her
mother, saying she’d been hurt.
Davidson denies all charges and said
all interactions were consensual.
The trial continues.

American fans’ goal is getting to the Euros
Andrew Ellson, Charlie Parker
Tracey Boles

With the T20 World Cup being held on
US soil for the first time, Americans are
having their first proper taste of international cricket. However, when it
comes to sports invented by the British,
it appears that football is their first love.
Sales data shared with The Times
show that Americans are snapping up
more spare Euro 2024 tickets than any
other nationality. Viagogo, the ticket
exchange website, has said football fans
from the US have bought more seats on
its platform than even the Germans,
who are hosting the tournament.
Canadians are the third most frequent purchasers with Britons back in
eighth, although tickets for England’s
matches are unavailable on the website.
The final, which will be held in Berlin
next month, is the most popular match
based on ticket sales. It is followed by
the opening match between Germany
and Scotland, which kicks off in
Munich at 8pm tonight.
Viagogo is a secondary ticketing
website where people who already have
tickets can sell them. Prices are usually
well in excess of their face value.
Uefa’s terms and conditions ban the
resale of Euro 2024 tickets except on its
own exchange, where they must be sold
at face value. Nonetheless, this official
exchange usually has few if any tickets
available while seats can almost always
be purchased on secondary ticketing
sites, such as Viagogo, albeit at vastly
inflated prices.
For example, the cheapest ticket
for the match between Portugal
and the Czech Republic on June
18 is £313, and the face value of
the ticket is £100.
Uefa said it reserves the right
to cancel any tickets resold
through unofficial channels,
but in practice, that rarely happens. Viagogo, meanwhile, has
said it offers buyers a guarantee
that they will get their money
back if they are denied entry.
Euro 2024 tickets are in high demand among Americans because of
the growing popularity of football — or
soccer, as they call it — across the
Atlantic. In 2004, only 2 per cent of
Americans named soccer as their

Football has soared in popularity in the US. Enrique Quintero and Andrea Vera, inset, travelled from Texas for the “vibe”

favourite sport, but last year that
figure had grown to 8 per cent,
driven largely by young people.
Growing numbers also watch
the game on television, with the
Premier League and international tournaments most popular. The most recent World Cup
final in 2022 received an average of
almost 26 million viewers in America, which was more than twice the average of the 2023 NBA basketball finals.
Football’s popularity across the
Atlantic has also been boosted by highprofile celebrities attending games or

buying British football clubs. Last year,
Kim Kardashian was pictured at an
Arsenal game with her seven-year-old
son, Saint. Ryan Reynolds and Rob
McElhenney, the Hollywood actors,
have also helped fuel interest in the
game after buying Wrexham football
club and filming their efforts for a documentary series on Disney Plus.
In Germany, “soccer-mad” Americans were scattered among thousands
of Scots in Munich before tonight’s
opening game. One couple from the
United States told The Times they were
desperate to “catch a game” and had

planned their entire tour of Europe
around Euro 2024 fixtures.
Enrique Quintero and Andrea Vera,
from Texas, said they “want to experience what it feels like to be in a game
here in Europe” because it “might be a
different atmosphere than the US”.
As bagpipes blared behind him,
Quintero, 42, said: “We know how it is
in America, so we’re trying to get the
European vibe.”

German police fear Serbian ‘ultras’ threat to England supporters
Charlie Parker Germany

Hooliganism fears are growing at the
European Football Championship after
thousands of Serbian supporters confronted police at their team’s camp.
Fans threw a flare at officers at the
Rosenau stadium in Augsburg, Bavaria,
where the Serbian squad is preparing to
play England on Sunday.
Up to 8,000 Serbians were reported
to have tried to enter the ground on

Wednesday but fewer than 3,000 were
allowed in, leaving many outside.
Police in the stadium had to stop a fan
who tried to race towards the players
while they did drills on the pitch. The
crowd booed and a burning flare was
thrown at officers when they led away
the man.
Uefa has banned pyrotechnics, including flares, fireworks and smoke
bombs, from all stadiums during the
tournament. The German newspaper

Bild reported that the man who threw
the flare escaped from the police. The
training session was halted briefly as officers calmed the situation. A witness
said: “Serbians here sure are rowdy.”
Up to 500 Serbian “ultras” are feared
to be looking for trouble at England’s
first Euro 2024 match in Gelsenkirchen, North Rhine-Westphalia.
Uefa has designated the match as
“high risk”. Peter Both, the city’s chief of
police, said the biggest challenge his

officers faced was identifying and intercepting “violence-seeking Serbian
hooligans”. Supporters from both sides
will be limited to low-alcohol beer.
The strong lager normally served in
Arena AufSchalke has been replaced
with a half-strength beer. A security operation involving 1,000 police will keep
apart the two sets of fans.
While most Serbian supporters who
have travelled to Germany are expected to be peaceful, officials are worried

by the small “criminal element”. A
Serbian fan said of the England team:
“On the pitch you will probably win but
off the pitch it’s not a contest. We aren’t
afraid of anyone.”
He told the Daily Mirror: “We learnt
everything we know from the Italians
and the English but they are no match
for strong Serbian men.”
An estimated 40,000 English fans
are expected at the game along with
about 8,000 Serbian supporters.

17

the times | Friday June 14 2024

News

Blair Witch cast haunted by missing out on millions
Alex Farber Media Correspondent

The original poster for the immersive
horror film The Blair Witch Project featured pictures of its three stars under a
“Missing” banner.
But 25 years after the release of the
influential low-budget “found footage”
movie, which went on to gross
$248 million (£200 million), the actors
have complained that it is their money
that has got lost.
Heather Donahue, Michael C Williams and Joshua Leonard have written
to the entertainment company Lionsgate, which holds the rights to the film,
to demand “retroactive and future residual payments” for their acting services equivalent to the amount that
they would have earned if they had
union or legal representation at the
time they were cast.
Williams said that their decision as
young actors to accept $500 a week to
appear in the film was a cautionary tale.
He told Variety: “I did a lot of work for
no pay so you’re like, ‘Oh, maybe I can
be a professional.’ Giant corporations
don’t care that this happens to young

artists and that’s got to change somehow. Hopefully, we will help somebody
to see: don’t do what we did.”
Their letter was sparked by a deal
struck in April by Lionsgate with the
horror film producer Blumhouse to revive the franchise to follow the second
and third instalments: Book of Shadows
in 2000 and Blair Witch in 2016.
Leonard called the revival “classless”
and accused Lionsgate of taking advantage of the trio. He said: “It’s 25 years of
disrespect from the folks who’ve pocketed the lion’s share of the profits from
our work. Art isn’t a write-off, and
workers shouldn’t be expendable.”
In their open letter to Lionsgate, the
actors wrote: “Our film has now been
rebooted twice, both times were a disappointment from a fan, box office and
critical perspective.”
Donahue claimed that the actors had
also been taken advantage of by retailers selling merchandise. She said: “It
became obvious that the uses [of the
film] were going to be constant. At that
point I thought to myself, ‘If this is what
success looks like, I would like to get out
of this business’.” They have requested

TMS

diary@thetimes.co.uk | @timesdiary

Queen versus
dotty David
Whatever happens on July 4,
officials in Downing Street and
Buckingham Palace will be spared
the dilemma in 2015 of a prime
minister in a coalition winning his
own majority. Lord Young of Old
Windsor, the late Queen’s private
secretary, says there was a late
“constitutional pickle” over the
wording of David Cameron’s
victory speech. Normally a PM
whose party is returned will say
they have “informed” the monarch
that they will form a government,
while a new PM will have been
“invited” to form one. In 2015, the
government wanted one phrasing,
the Queen the other. They were
still arguing as Cameron’s car came
down the Mall, Young says, but an
official found a fudge in an Agatha
Christie book, specifically an ellipsis
that is a turning point in The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd. “I have
been to see the Queen … and I will
now form a majority Conservative
government,” Cameron said, those
“unspoken three dots” handling the
quandary neatly. “Some things are
better left unsaid,” Young says.
Being able to cook fudge helps in
Whitehall. Lord O’Donnell, the
former cabinet secretary, says that
old projects can be made appealing
to a new government simply by
changing the badge. In 2010,
Cameron scrapped the PM’s
“delivery unit”. Too Blairite. It was
replaced by the “implementation
unit” in 2012. As O’Donnell tells
Heywood Quarterly: “I struggled to
see any real difference.”

rowing blues
The Olympic rower James
Cracknell, who is standing
for the Tories in Colchester,
was bemused when his
local party told him to
buy a wooden spoon. This
was not a pessimistic
prediction of his chances, he

tells the Political Party, but an
important tool for canvassing, as
he realised when his fingers were
first nibbled by a voter’s dog as he
pushed a leaflet through the
letterbox. Surely an oar would be
even better? But Cracknell, below,
is a bit disappointed over the
timing of the election. “He’s put it
slap-bang in the middle of Henley
Royal Regatta,” he said.

some things borrowed
A good vicar must be prepared for
every eventuality. The Rev Kate
Bottley was about to preside at a
wedding when the bride’s mother
broke the heel of a shoe as she
entered church. “Fortunately she
was my size, so she wore my
heels,” Bottley said, “and I had to
wear the only other shoes I’d got
in the car.” Which explains why
that couple’s wedding photos
memorably show the vicar
wearing a pair of wellington boots.
Subliminal messaging matters in
elections, so it was perhaps an odd
decision of the Conservative
candidate for Tottenham to do a
photoshoot in a graveyard.
“Tottenham needs someone who
will stand up for our community,”
he tweeted. And the dead shall rise
and vote Tory on judgment day?

chef’s cookery lesson
Being the child of a restaurateur is
no picnic. When Ruth Rogers was
starting the River Café, it
influenced the food that she served
at home, to the regret of her son.
On her podcast, the chef said she
didn’t realise the level of his
discontent until he rang her asking
to be collected from a playdate
where he had feasted on jam
sandwiches and sweets. Rogers
pointed out that the friend only
lived around the corner and he
could easily walk home
himself, but he insisted that
she come over. “He
wanted me to see what a
good mother’s fridge
looked like,” she says.
patrick kidd

“meaningful consultation” around any
Blair Witch-related spin-off projects including prequels, sequels, toys and
games in which their names or images
are used.
Williams said that he was forced to
continue working in furniture removals after the film’s release despite being
on the cover of Newsweek magazine.
“I’m embarrassed that I let this
happen to me,” he said. “Everybody’s
wondering what happened, and your
wife is in the grocery line and she can’t
pay because a cheque bounced. You’re
in the most successful independent
movie of all time and you can’t take care
of your loved ones.” The film, in which

The film’s stars Michael C Williams,
Joshua Leonard and Heather Donahue

the three actors appeared using their
own names, was shot on a shoestring
budget. Its story is told using footage
from cameras that are discovered a
year after they go missing in woods in
Maryland while investigating a local
myth about a murderous supernatural
entity, the Blair Witch.
The film’s directors and producers
said: “We’re hopeful Heather, Joshua
and Mike find a satisfying conclusion to
their conversations with Lionsgate.”
Leonard said that around the release
of the second film the actors had agreed
a settlement of about $300,000 each
from a buyout of their ownership
points.

18

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

News

‘Wanton’ law puts
drunken cyclist in
prison after crash
Laurence Sleator

Underground art Shadows on the Wall, drawings and models of scenes at Tube stations during the war by Henry Moore,
centre, feature alongside photographs taken by Roger Mayne in The Courtauld Gallery’s summer exhibition in London

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A drunk cyclist using a bicycle with no
brakes has been jailed after knocking
over a woman and leaving her needing
a new hip.
Lisa Wade, 46, was riding at a
“furious” speed when she hit Ruth
Kitching, 65, who was chatting on a
pavement in York in March last year.
At York crown court, Wade admitted
causing bodily harm by wanton and
furious driving and was sentenced to
eight months in prison.
The charge comes under section 35
of the Offences Against the Person Act
1861, a law originally drawn up to address the risk of horse-drawn carriages.
The court had been told that Wade,
who was “highly impaired” by alcohol,
came “flying” round a blind corner.
Wade was riding on the pavement
one-handed and carrying a large bag of
dog food. A police officer called to the
scene also later noticed there was “no
braking mechanism” on the bicycle.
Laura McBride, for the prosecution,
said that Kitching was standing on a
footpath when she was hit and was left
with “catastrophic” injuries.
After the crash Kitching lay on the
pavement waiting for an ambulance for
two hours. She was eventually taken to
Leeds General Infirmary and had a hip
replacement. She was discharged from
hospital on crutches the following
month and relied on friends and family
to do basic tasks.
Nicholas Hammond, representing
Wade, said that her actions were “reckless in the extreme” but she was “genuinely remorseful”.
Recorder Taryn Turner told her:
“You shouldn’t have been on the pave-

ment and your bike should have been
mechanically sound, but it wasn’t. I’m
quite satisfied you made a deliberate
decision to ignore the rules of the road
and had a total disregard for the risk
that your riding of this bike presented
[to others], which was obviously highly
dangerous.”
In 2022 Hilda Griffiths, 81, died from
head injuries 59 days after she was hit
by a cyclist doing timed laps of Regent’s
Park in London.
An inquest last month was told that
cyclists are not required to obey speed
limits. Detective Sergeant Ropafadzo
Bungo told Inner West London coroner’s court that there were “no specific”
speed limit signs for cyclists and a police
review had found “there were no crimiLisa Wade was
sentenced to eight
months in jail

nal acts which would allow prosecution” for cyclists who exceed limits.
Families of those killed or injured by
cyclists have long campaigned for new
legislation.
Matt Briggs, 53, whose wife, Kim, 44,
was killed by a cyclist in east London,
and who has been campaigning for a
tougher stance, said last month: “The
humble pedestrian lacks the support in
law. Your tragedy is compounded by
legal confusion.”
The cyclist in that case, who was riding a fixed-gear bike with no front
brakes, was jailed for 18 months after he
was found guilty under the 1861 law.

Gender-critical activists are
anti-rights, says UN group

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The organisation UN Women has been
criticised for saying that women’s rights
activists were “falsely” trying to claim
that transgender people pose a threat to
single-sex spaces.
UN Women, whose advocates
include the Duchess of Sussex, had
made several statements about gender
on Instagram for Pride month.
It said there was an “antirights movement” which was seeking
to “falsely portray the rights of
LGBTQ+ people as competing
with women’s rights”.
UN Women added: “Some try to
frame the human rights of transgender
people as being at odds with women’s
rights. For instance, asserting that
trans women pose a threat to the rights,
spaces and safety of cisgender women.”
UN Women is charged with working
for gender equality and the empowerment of women.
The Duchess of Sussex has previously been an advocate for the group, while
Emma Watson, the actress known for
her role as Hermione in the Harry Potter films, was a goodwill ambassador.
UN Women also linked to a 1,300word “explainer” titled LGBTIQ+ Communities and the Anti-rights Pushback:
Five Things to Know.
The document included the claim

that “state and non-state actors” in
many countries were attempting to roll
back rights and entrench stigma,
“endangering the rights and lives” of
LGBT people.
The explainer said there was a long
tradition in which anti-rights movements frame equality for women and
LGBT people as a threat to “traditional”
family values, which “gender-critical”
campaigners have taken to extremes.
Fiona McAnena, director of campaigns at the charity Sex Matters, said:
“It’s a sad day when UN Women lectures women’s rights campaigners on
the need to include men with transgender identities in our work.
“Labelling the grassroots campaigners and groups who are defending
women’s rights against a global tidal
wave of gender-identity ideology as an
‘anti-rights movement’ is outrageous.
“There is simply no way to defend the
claim that trans rights don’t compete
with women’s rights, so UN Women
had to resort to conflating the rights of
lesbian, gay and bisexual people with
those of people who claim a gender
identity in order to make its point.
“UN Women’s claim that campaigners are ‘putting lives at risk’ has been refuted time and time again — this is dangerous and irresponsible propaganda.”
UN Women has been contacted
for comment.

19

the times | Friday June 14 2024

News
Henry Winkler posed with
firefighters after his hotel
in Dublin was evacuated.
He played The Fonz,
below, for a decade

Fonz keeps his cool
after Irish hotel fire

T

o those who
find themselves
in a tricky
situation,
Arthur “The
Fonz” Fonzarelli would
always offer the same
advice: stay cool (Joshua
Thurston and Laurence
Sleator write).
Henry Winkler, who
played the Happy Days
character for a decade
from 1974 and 1984,
seems to have taken
his character’s advice
to heart.
The American actor
unexpectedly appeared
during a news report by
Ireland’s national

broadcaster about a
fire at a historic Dublin
hotel.
Despite being rushed
out of the Shelbourne,
Winkler was happy to
offer an impromptu
interview. “When I
heard the fire alarm, I
thought it was the clock
radio,” the 78-year-old,
more recently known for
his role in the sitcom
Arrested Development
and dark comedy Barry,
told RTE News.
“I thought somebody
had set the alarm before
we got there — like,
another guest. Finally, I
went into another

room, and it was still
buzzing, so I called
downstairs. The woman
said in a very calm
voice ‘Yes, we’re all
evacuating. You must
evacuate right now’.
And I left.”
Staff and guests were

forced to leave the
hotel, known as the
Grand Dame of Dublin,
on Wednesday after an
alarm was raised at
10.30am. The blaze was
brought under control in
less than an hour.
Winkler posed for

photographs with crew
from the six engines
that were sent to deal
with the fire on the fifth
floor of the hotel.
“Firemen are some of
my favourite human
beings, firemen and
firewomen. They run in

when other
people are
running out.
I think [their
hands]
deserve to be
shook,” said
Winkler, who
is in the Irish

Childminder who fatally shook
baby boy sentenced to 12 years
Mario Ledwith, Laurence Sleator

A childminder who fatally shook a
nine-month-old boy before trying to
cover up his death as an accidental
choking has been jailed for 12 years.
Karen Foster, 63, snapped after
Harlow Collinge fell out of his high
chair and started to cry.
Harlow was taken to hospital after
the incident on March 1, 2022, where
Foster hugged his mother and said that
she had tried to help him after the
“choking”. He died four days later.
A CT scan later showed that he had
suffered significant injuries to the
brain, with bleeding on both sides and
swelling. The injury caused cardiorespiratory arrest with a lack of oxygen
to his brain for a critical period, Preston
crown court was told.
When Foster dialled 999 she said that
Harlow had “something like a fit” in
what investigators said was part of a

“web of lies” to hide her actions. She
later tried to blame the injuries on his
mother, Gemma Collinge, who had left
him at Foster’s home in Hapton, near
Burnley.
Foster had been due to go on trial for
murder but pleaded guilty to manslaughter last week, and admitted that
“forceful shaking” led to his death.
Despite claiming benefits for ill
health, Foster was a registered childminder with nine years’ experience
who had been breaching care guidelines to make more money. She exceeded
Ofsted guidance on the maximum
number and ages of children who
should be in her care.
At a sentencing hearing, Foster was
told by Mr Justice Barry Cotter she
would be jailed for 12 years and seven
months. The judge said that Foster,
despite suffering ill health including hip
pain, chose to carry on looking after
more children than she should have

and this contributed to her “loss of
temper”. He said: “You should have been
a safe pair of hands to which Gemma
Collinge could ensure her precious
child. I have no doubt you snapped on
March 1, 2022, in part due to the fact
Karen Foster
admitted
manslaughter

that you were not coping with the
demands of caring for four children.
You lost your temper and he was on the
receiving end. You shook an almost tenmonth-old child so violently to cause
devastating injuries. His death was
caused in the course of an assault.”
Harlow’s mother, his father, Allen
Frangleton, older siblings and wider

family wept in the public gallery. In a
victim impact statement, Collinge said:
“How do I explain losing my son in such
horrific circumstances? Harlow was
enjoying his little life. He was a happy,
smiling baby.”
She said that she had been racked
with guilt since his death and had
missed “red flags” about Foster. She had
made arrangements to move Harlow
to a nursery six weeks after first using
Foster as a childminder, because of
concerns about her workload.
She had told the court that Foster had
tried to comfort her, claiming that
Harlow had choked on pasta. “She even
put her arms around me,” Collinge said.
“I can’t think of anything more evil. It is
despicable. I blame myself every day for
my son’s death. This monster, Karen
Foster, deserves nothing. I hope her
actions haunt her.”
The family want cameras installed in
places where childminders work.

Shops sell machete like one used by young killers
David Woode Crime Correspondent
Matt Dathan, Ben Ellery

Online “survival” stores are selling a
machete similar to that used by two
12-year-old boys to murder Shawn
Seesahai, 19, last year.
The Anglo Arms Panther machete
has a 16in blade and “grooved rubberised handle” and is sold for £24.95.
Springfields, an online shop selling it,
said that it worked with the Metropolitan Police and was “committed to

preventing knife crime and promoting
safe and responsible knife ownership”.
It said that it had not sold the murder
weapon.
A spokesman said: “We work closely
with trading standards, the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office to
try to push the industry forward to ensure retailers are doing everything they
can to keep bladed items from being obtained for the wrong reasons.”
The company took part in a meeting
with the police about the online sale of

Labour says that if it was elected it
would tighten the rules on knife sales

knives and is part of the National Police
Chiefs’ Council’s knife crime working
group. “Our checks are industry leading and our staff are trained to spot fake
IDs. If anyone tries to obtain a bladed
item using a fake ID, we pass those details on to the police,” he said.
Legislation making it illegal to possess, sell, manufacture or transport
“zombie” knives and machetes will take
effect in September. However, Labour
said that it plans to ban a wider range of
weapons not covered by existing laws.

capital promoting his
memoir Being Henry —
The Fonz and Beyond.
He described
the incident as
an “amazing
adventure”, adding
he “cannot wait to see
the rest of Dublin”.
The fire was not the
first time that Winkler
had made an
unexpected appearance
on a news broadcast.
In 2013, the actor was
stopped by a BBC
reporter in London and
asked about the
expansion of
Heathrow. On that
occasion, Winkler was
performing in a
pantomime in
Richmond, playing
Captain Hook in
Peter Pan.
When asked
about concerns
of noise
pollution in
Richmond, he
said it was “ a
lovely place”,
adding: “I
watch the
planes go
every day.
I hear
nothing.”

Briton dies in
French river
kayak tragedy
David Chazan Paris

A British man has died after his kayak
capsized on a river in southeastern
France. It is the second such fatality in
the area this week.
The man, described as an experienced kayaker in his fifties, was part of
a group of 11 on the River Durance.
“They got into trouble ten minutes
after entering the river,” Marion
Lozac’hmeur, a local prosecutor, said.
Rivers in southern France are unusually fast-flowing after heavy rain
this spring. Groups in some areas have
cancelled
kayaking
expeditions
because of the danger.
Police and firefighters began a search
operation along the Durance after receiving reports of kayakers in difficulty
on Tuesday afternoon. They found
three kayakers struggling in the water,
two of whom were trying to help the
third, who was unconscious. The two
were pulled out of the river unhurt, but
the third died in the water and paramedics were unable to resuscitate him.
The prosecutor said the group entered the river in Briançon, in the
Hautes-Alpes region. The man’s body
was retrieved from the river about an
hour after they set out. She declined to
give his name and said the British consulate was contacting his family.
A day earlier, a 73-year-old Irish man
had died while kayaking on the River
Ubaye near the Italian border, about 40
miles from Tuesday’s accident.
Last month a British kayaker died in
Switzerland. Bren Orton, 29, went
missing on the River Melezza on May
16. His body was found two weeks later.
The Foreign Office was contacted for
comment.

21

the times | Friday June 14 2024

News

Protesters derail Oxford’s exams Royals
The

with

Will Humphries

University of Oxford exams were
cancelled yesterday morning after
pro-Palestinian protesters entered a
building waving flags and chanting.
The Oxford Action for Palestine
group (OA4P), who have staged encampments in the city since May 6 and
occupied a university administrative
building last month, said it was not
aligned with the latest protest.
A member of the public, who wished
to remain anonymous, told the Oxford
Mail that about six protesters, some
with their faces covered, caused disruption to students taking exams in the
East Writing School building.
The witness said the protesters
“hung the flag and chanted out
the window” but were then brought
“under control”.
Cherwell, an Oxford student newspaper, said the gates to the Exam
Schools buildings had been locked after
the protest and students were not
allowed to enter or leave the marquee
where they wait before tests. Exams
being sat yesterday included preliminary and final examinations.
A spokeswoman for the University of
Oxford said: “The university is disappointed with this morning’s occupation of the Exam Schools and the absolutely unacceptable disruption caused
to our students.
“We are putting into place contingency plans to ensure all students will
have the opportunity to sit their
examinations with as little disruption
as possible. It is unclear who the occu-

Roya
and
Kate

Will the Princess
of Wales attend
Trooping the Colour?

Chanting protesters entered the Exam Schools at Oxford University, causing disruption to students trying to sit papers

pying group are representing, as they
claim to be acting without the knowledge of the OA4P encampments.
“While the university supports the
right to peaceful protest within the law
and our rules, this action goes beyond
the bounds of acceptable protest.”
Last month 16 student protesters
from OA4P jumped over the reception
desk of the university’s administrative
office and allegedly pushed past staff

before telling Irene Tracey, the vicechancellor, in her office that the university must “divest from Israeli genocide, apartheid, and occupation” in the
Palestinian territories.
Tracey ordered an evacuation
of the building and the students
locked themselves in a room before
being arrested on suspicion of aggravated trespass.
Oxford has accused the activist

group of spreading lies about the university, defaming the vice-chancellor
and lacking transparency about its
membership and interests.
In a statement about the latest demonstration, the OA4P group said the
“autonomous group of protesters” were
unaffiliated with them and the protest
was undertaken without its knowledge.
Thames Valley police said no arrests
had been made.

The Times and Sunday
Times royal editors
Kate Mansey and
Roya Nikkhah
preview tomorrow’s
ceremony in the
newest edition
of our podcast
Listen now on Apple, Spotify and
wherever you get your podcasts

22

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

News

A crowded
stage means
some swans
get in a flap
Dance Donald Hutera
Swan Lake
Royal Albert Hall, 170min
HHHII
Premiered in 1997 during his tenure
as English National Ballet’s artistic
director, Derek Deane’s expansive
staging of the Tchaikovsky classic
returns for the ninth time to its
original home at the Royal Albert
Hall. Tastefully designed for
mainstream consumption (and said to
have been seen by more than half a
million people worldwide), the
production’s most memorable
element remains the corps of 60 swan
maidens manoeuvring their
melancholy way through some
mesmeric —almost militaristic —
formations. Impressive? Yes, highly,
even if this year’s opening-night
performance was otherwise rarely
truly transporting.
In the scene-setting first act the
stage swarms with townsfolk,

Derek Deane’s impressive production, which premiered in 1997, features swan maidens by the dozen — but the sizeable ensemble take some time to find their feet

courtiers and their ladies, and even a
handful of jugglers and acrobats,
gathered to mark the birthday of
Prince Siegfried (Gareth Haw, making
his debut in the role). Kept on the hop
by Gavin Sutherland, conducting
ENB’s in-house orchestra, it took a
while for the company’s large
ensemble to find their feet. It takes us
time, too, to adjust to the distances
the dancers must cover while

retaining their expressive musicality.
Or, depending on where you are
seated, to realise that sightlines might
be temporarily blocked by dancers
waiting to spring into action.
After all the hubbub, the prince’s
first solo comes as a relief. Haw, a
strong and refined dancer, did it
justice, even if his emotional
conviction was less persuasive than
his technique. It is in the later acts

that Deane’s Swan Lake comes into its
own. Loads of dry ice by the lakeside.
The half-man, half-bird sorcerer
Rothbart (James Streeter; excellent
within the role’s limitations) sweeping
about fiendishly. And all those
downcast-eyed swans, superbly drilled
and in thrall to him. Chief among
them was the long, languid-limbed
Sangeun Lee (also making her debut)
as Odette. She was even better as the

sharp-footed, alluring trickster Odile
in a third act peppered with a swift
string of zesty national dances.
Love triumphs at the end of this
version, with Siegfried circling while
raising the liberated Odette aloft — a
fine and transcendent image, even if
the feelings it left me with were less
than swooningly deep.
To June 24, ballet.org.uk

Sunshine dumbs down political debate
Rhys Blakely Science Correspondent

As an election approaches, many voters
will be lamenting the quality of political
debate — but if the weather had been
better, could it have been even worse?
A study suggests that as temperatures rise, political discourse dumbs
down. The research examined more
than seven million parliamentary
speeches made in eight countries, including England, since the 1950s, and
found that higher temperatures were
linked to a significant reduction in the
complexity of language used by MPs.
“Heat has long been associated with

a range of negative health outcomes,
including increased risk of decreased
productivity and cognitive performance,” Dr Risto Conte Keivabu of the
Max Planck Institute in Germany said.
“Our study highlights that this phenomenon extends to politicians.”
Previous studies have linked hot
weather to a greater chance of political
rebellions and riots, but also to higher
voter turnouts and more support for
the incumbent party.
Researchers have also highlighted
a steady decrease in the complexity
of political language over the past
200 years, with some believing this af-

fects how we are governed. “Concerns
are often brought forward in connection to rising populist movements
and prominent populist leaders,
who allegedly use less complex political
language in order to strategically
appeal to and manipulate their
voters,” Conte Keivabu and his colleagues wrote.
Their study, published in the journal
iScience, looked at speeches by more
than 28,000 politicians. Computer programs were used to explore the connection between their language and daily
temperatures.
They also found evidence that older

politicians tended to be affected by
warm days more than younger ones,
with the effect kicking in when temperatures reached about 21C.
“This result increases our confidence
in the study’s findings. It is logical that
older individuals might be more susceptible to extreme temperatures,
which aligns with our observation and
underscores the robustness of our conclusions,” Conte Keivabu said.
He and his colleagues speculate that
hot weather may disrupt sleep and keep
politicians indoors and away from fresh
air, making them sluggish.
Dr Tobias Widmann of the Aarhus

University in Denmark, a co-author of
the study, said that the findings “suggest that heat can negatively affect cognitive functions even in professional
settings where precise and complex
language is crucial”.
He added: “The simplification of political discourse has mixed implications;
while simpler language can enhance
public understanding and engagement,
it might also signal reduced cognitive
performance.
“The impact of extreme temperatures on their cognitive performance
could have profound and far-reaching
consequences.”

23

the times | Friday June 14 2024

It’s the eve of the Euros
and Berlin’s off the rails
Martin Samuel
Page 24

Comment

Labour super-majority doesn’t mean red alert
Far from unleashing hard socialism, party bigwigs such as Pat McFadden will want to implement public sector reforms
Patrick
Maguire

@patrickkmaguire

O

ne morning Pat
McFadden wakes up and
discovers there are no
limits to his power. What
do you suppose he does?
I don’t expect you to have considered
this question before. But in three
weeks its answer could determine
the course of your life and mine.
Sir Keir Starmer’s national
campaign co-ordinator is one of the
most important people in the Labour
Party. Soon he will be one of the four
most important cabinet ministers in
the government. And if we are to
believe Grant Shapps and the opinion
polls, ministers such as McFadden
will rule with a parliamentary
majority of such outlandish scale
that it can do anything it likes.
So what do you suppose a
government run by McFadden does
if it can do absolutely anything?
When Conservatives like Shapps and
indeed Rishi Sunak warn of the
dangers of this scenario, what they
mean is that it will do the opposite of
what a Labour election campaign
run by McFadden now says it will do.
It veers immediately, and violently, to
the left. The front of the Daily Mail
put it more succinctly yesterday: “A
Tory Wipeout Risks One-Party
Socialist State”.
Whether our democracy would be
in a healthier place with a Labour
majority of 200 and an official
opposition of 75 squabbling Tories
— or even 60 delighted Liberal
Democrats — is a question worth

asking, regardless of which party is
doing the winning. Whether that
means this Labour Party dispenses
with every position it now holds and
starts running Britain as if it were
Cuba is quite another. Team Starmer
liken this argument to that
unsuccessfully deployed by Ken
Livingstone against Boris Johnson in
2008: that his rival for London
mayor was both a clown without a
plan and dangerously right-wing.
He couldn’t possibly have been both.
There are a few things I can
imagine McFadden doing if there
were no limits to his power. Maybe
he would legislate to proscribe
Glasgow Rangers or put up a statue
of Bruce Springsteen on Whitehall,
provided both proposals were fully
costed. What he wouldn’t do is seize
the opportunity to implement
socialism in one country.
I can say this with some confidence
because McFadden has worked for a
Labour government with a very big

The mushy middle of
the parliamentary party
is more problematic
majority and dysfunctional opposition
before. When he went to advise Tony
Blair in Downing Street after running
an election campaign that looked
an awful lot like this one in 1997,
McFadden did not then say it was
time to implement Michael Foot’s
red-blooded manifesto of 1983. One
of the perennial criticisms the left
makes of New Labour is that it did
not spend its vast reserves of political
capital governing like Old Labour
when it had a majority of 179 seats.
People such as Blair, McFadden and
Peter Mandelson could have done,
had they wanted to. But they didn’t,
because they didn’t want to.

Why would things be any different
this time? It’s true, yes, that a Labour
government could well end up raising
taxes. On railways, industrial
strategy and energy Starmer is well
to the left of New Labour, and in
choosing to separate day-to-day and
capital spending on its balance sheet,
it will also give itself more room for
borrowing than its rhetoric implies.
It is also true that four years ago this
Labour leader promised to do lots of
things that Blair unthinkingly
dismissed as mad, bad and
dangerous. Blair once said that he
would not run for election on a
Jeremy Corbyn manifesto even if it
would guarantee him victory. In 2020,
Starmer described those policies as
the bedrock of his leadership. But he
doesn’t say so any more and won’t say
so again, largely because he is now
surrounded by people like McFadden.
This is not a shadow cabinet that
talks about fiscal rectitude and an
NHS that embraces the private sector
because it’s politically expedient.
Rachel Reeves and Wes Streeting are
not pretending to hold these positions
until such a time that they can turn
their Billy Bragg records up again.
What leftward pressure is exerted on a
Starmer government won’t come from
within his inner cabinet, because that
is a road they would not take anyway.
We might reasonably ask whether
Starmer will be glad to be done with
the nasty business of electoral politics
and revert to technocratic type when
safely installed at the heart of the
mandarin class, but his aides — wary
of Joe Biden’s failure to spin a success
story to voters in the Rust Belt —
speak of a permanent campaign.
Labour MPs are a trickier
proposition. Sir Alan Campbell, who
in three weeks will be the government
chief whip, has not been war-gaming
majorities of varying sizes but believes
the magic number is 60. Should his

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Pat McFadden advised Tony Blair after
a Labour campaign similar to this one

majority exceed that threshold,
Starmer could easily survive any mass
rebellion by the Socialist Campaign
Group of Corbynite backbenchers,
which has already all but ceased to
exist as a going concern.
More problematic for a cabinet set
on crunchy reforms to public
services is what we might call the
mushy middle of the parliamentary
Labour Party. Frontbenchers with
long memories know that Blair twice
mislaid his massive majority on
tuition fees and foundation hospitals.
Labour’s candidate selection
machine is often described as if it
were J Edgar Hoover’s FBI: ruthless,
relaxed about extrajudicial killings
and utterly intolerant of left-wing
thought. Whether this is true will
only come out in the wash of
government. Some candidates are
unconvinced that the new intake is

entirely of like mind. They deride
other incomers as “sopping wet” and
question whether all will cope with
activist opprobrium. Will every new
MP hold their nerve when Reeves
refuses to reverse welfare cuts, their
inboxes are full of invective and Andy
Burnham is tweeting his disapproval?
Then there is Sir Alan’s other magic
number: 95, the maximum size of the
ministerial payroll in the Commons.
Should Labour win 400 or more MPs,
not everyone is getting a job. Some
shadow ministers will end up like Tom
Pendry, who was passed over for office
in 1997 and subsequently published a
memoir whose dust jacket bore the
faintly tragic testimonial: “The best
sports minister we never had”. I’m told
some will be directed towards the
chairmanships of select committees
instead, but even then these ranks of
the dispossessed, underemployed
and vain will be sizeable.
Put that scenario to the Labour
leadership and the response is blunt:
get real. Having reached government
via a road paved with Conservative
seats, they believe their new MPs will
have every incentive to stay the
course. And with his campaign
director, Morgan McSweeney,
Starmer has chosen time and again to
take decisions that cut sharply across
the leftish sensibilities of his MPs and
party members and speak to the
anxieties of voters in deep England.
If the prevailing voices at the
commanding heights of a Labour
government are those of Reeves,
McFadden, McSweeney, Streeting
and others like Bridget Phillipson, the
incoming education secretary, and
Shabana Mahmood, who will
be justice secretary, this will not
be a government that interprets its
mandate as a blank cheque to the
broad left — just look at their
manifesto. Instead it will take it as
licence to offend and disappoint them.

24

V2

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

Comment

If Britain were a stock, I would be buying
The economic fundamentals are good and governance is likely to improve after the election
Emma
Duncan

A

lthough I’ve been sentient
for 12 general elections,
I’ve never known a more
boring or depressing
campaign than this. It’s
boring because we all know what the
outcome will be, Labour refuses to say
anything that might frighten the
horses and nobody is listening to the
Conservatives. It’s depressing because
the economy is in a godawful mess
and trust in politicians is at a nadir.
The gloom is unusually deep
because both right and left are at
one about the state of the country.
Normally, if the right reckons that
the nation is going to hell in a
handcart, the left takes the view that
we’re headed for the sunlit uplands;
and if the left believes that we’re on
the primrose path to everlasting
damnation, then the right thinks that
we’re shaping up pretty nicely.
Now, however, the left thinks that
the country has been ruined by a
combination of Thatcherism,
austerity and Brexit, while the right
has worked itself into a ferment about
the approaching end of civilisation.
Add to that the Greens’ conviction
that global self-immolation is just
round the corner, along with the
latest data showing that the economy
has slumped back to stagnation, and
we have a nation sitting at the bar
with its head in its drink, the only
jollity provided by Sir Ed Davey, who
has apparently decided that flinging

himself into every polluted waterway
within a 50-mile radius is a foolproof
electoral strategy.
I am not widely regarded as a ray
of sunshine but I reckon that the
gloom is overdone. If Britain were a
stock, I’d buy: the price is low, the
fundamentals are good and the
quality of governance is bound to
rise after the election.
Politics looks particularly grim right
now because a party that has been in
power for too long always ends up
angry, divided and scraping the
bottom of the barrel for ministerial
talent. This lot have known for two
years that they’re on their way out, so
nothing they say matters and their
time horizons stretch about as far as

The new government’s
morale will be high
and time horizons long
the weekend. Labour seems likely to
have a huge majority and the
Conservative Party will need to spend
some years sorting itself out. The new
government’s morale is therefore likely
to be high and its time horizons long.
That in itself will make a huge
difference to the economy, the
primary determinant of the national
mood. What Britain needs is
investment, and what investors need
is stability. That’s precisely what has
been lacking for the past decade.
Business investment as a share
of GDP stalled in 2016, while it
continued on its normal trajectory
elsewhere in the world. Uncertainty,
as much as Brexit, explains Britain’s
underperformance.

I can illustrate the Conservative
government’s failure to provide
business with the stability it craves
without even mentioning the words
Liz or Truss, merely by looking at the
principal tax that firms face. Under
the Tories, the rate of corporation
tax has gone from 28 per cent to 20,
to 19, to 25. The rise to 25 per cent
was then cancelled, then reinstated.
Businesses make their plans on the
basis of expected future returns. If
they have no idea how much of their
future profit the British government
is going to take from them, they will
either invest their money elsewhere
or spend it on a Caribbean holiday.
So merely by not changing its
mind every five minutes the next
government can improve economic
governance. And simply by leaving
ministers in place for more than a
couple of weeks they can improve
political decision-making.
Sir Keir Starmer shows signs of
having understood that. Look at
housing: in the period during which
the government has had seven
housing ministers, Labour has had
one shadow housing minister,
Matthew Pennycook. A brainy fellow
who got the best degree in his year at
the London School of Economics, he
knows his brief inside out and will
therefore be in a far better position
to get stuff done than were his
transient predecessors.
His brief is another reason for
optimism. Housing provides the next
government with a single lever to
pull that can make a big difference.
Rather as deregulating the labour
market in the 1980s got Britain
working again, so liberalising the
planning rules can get Britain

building again. The costs to the
Treasury are zero; the potential
benefits huge. If “planning” were
translated not as “stopping
development” but as “enabling good
settlements”, young people would
have a chance of buying homes,
businesses could more easily expand,
the shrinking construction sector
would revive and our dodgy
infrastructure could be upgraded.
Further down the track, there’s
another cost-free, pro-growth policy
available to the next government. It’s
a crazy idea, but what if we were to
lower trade barriers with our biggest
trading partner? Given that the
country seems to be coming to its
senses and realising that Brexit was
stupid, a party less implicated in it
than the Tories will be in a good
position to start talks on reversing
the largest unforced political error
in living memory and thus recouping
some of the growth that we have
lost as a result of it.
None of this would help much if
the fundamentals weren’t strong, but
they are. Britons are, according to
the OECD’s Pisa score, better
educated than the people of any
other big European country. We’re
the second-biggest exporter of
services in the world. Our physical
and digital infrastructure are not up
to scratch, but that in itself is a
source of potential growth: merely by
catching up with our peers, we can
accelerate our economic engine.
None of this is inevitable. The next
government can easily mess things up
if it either sprays money around or
allows regulation to throttle growth.
Things will not necessarily get better.
But, on balance, I reckon they will.

“significantly reduced speeds”, which
seems a contradiction. I’m no Aimee
Betro — I don’t have the hair for it —
but even I think I could hit a slowmoving train if required. Not that I’m
planning to. I just want to get my
ticket for Saturday’s match.

they did. My hotel room looks into a
courtyard, beloved by pigeons,
judging by the window ledges. So the
owners have erected a model of a
bird suspended on a wire as a
deterrent. Except the bird looks a lot
like, well, a pigeon. Certainly, the
other pigeons seem to regard him as
an ally. “See old Dave’s hanging about
in that courtyard again. He must love
it down there. We should give it a
try.” Either way, it’s not working.

Martin Samuel Notebook

It’s the eve
of the Euros
and Berlin’s
off the rails

‘W

hat’s it like out
there?” everybody
keeps asking.
Football fever on
the streets, the
atmosphere building, the big kick-off
just a matter of hours away. Folks,
I’m in Berlin. It’s shut.
Not all of it, obviously. Just the bit
I need to get through. I arrived on
Monday night, something called the
Ukraine Recovery Conference
kicked off the next day. More than
2,000 participants from 60 countries,
most notably Volodymyr Zelensky,
the Ukraine president. You can see
why they’re skittish. It’s not exactly a
low-profile trip. Archduke Franz
Ferdinand’s blood-soaked uniform is
still on display in an adjacent
country. Things don’t always go so
well in these parts if you fail to look
after visiting VIPs.
And also, you may think,
stereotypical German efficiency at
play. Except it wasn’t. It was chaos,

just like our place. There were no
trains, but no one told you there
were no trains. And what trains there
were just went back the way they
came, but no one told you that
either. You could have shot a cannon
through the S-Bahn platform at
Friedrichstrasse station and not
harmed anyone in a hi-viz jacket.
Even the locals looked bemused.
The tourists just pointed
their phones at the sign
that read Staatbesuch! and
hit Google Translate.
“State visit!” we were
informed. Service
interrupted. But it wasn’t
interrupted. It was
kaputt. And prone to
further outbreaks of
kaputtness, even when
you thought you were
getting somewhere. The
U-Bahn, Berlin’s metro,
was running, but then
sometimes wasn’t. And
when it wasn’t we all just
milled around like poor
lost souls on Avanti West
Coast, wondering what
the hell was going on.
The fear, apparently,
was of stationary trains on
open stretches of track
becoming a target. Yet
there was also a directive
that trains would be
driven at

Kick-off chaos

I

t’s an unpromising start,
because the one hope
you have of a football
tournament held
in Germany is
organisational excellence.
I did the African Cup of
Nations in Burkina Faso
in 1998 and our passage
to one game was held
up by elephants on the
motorway. I was
in Portugal for
the European
Championships in
2004 and that was
actually worse. Baboons
would have been more
useful at imparting
information than some of
the staff. Hold anything in
France and all the public
services use it as a
negotiating tool and go
on strike. (The Olympics
are there later this
summer — just wait.)
But Germany? They
know how to get stuff done. Or

Shoehorned out

A

nd then you can have too
much efficiency. I’m currently
engaged in a war with the
maid over the placement of things.
I keep a tidy room, I’m not scared
to admit it. I’m not one of those
travellers whose space looks like
someone detonated their suitcase. I
hang up, I fold. I keep the work area
separate. It’s a little OCD, I know.
The maid, though. She’s something
else. I put a shoehorn on the bedside
table to the left, because that’s where I
put my shoes on. The next day, gone.
Tidied. Couldn’t find it anywhere.
Same with my room shorts. Shorts
I sleep in, or wear to potter around.
Left on the bed, neatly folded. Gone.
Still haven’t turned up. But good
news. While turning the room upside
down, I did locate the shoehorn.
Turns out I’m the Goldilocks of
efficiency. This one’s too efficient,
that one’s not efficient enough.

Labour must prove
it’s serious about
recruiting teachers
Harry Hudson

S

uch is the furore surrounding
Labour’s plans to place VAT
on private schools that it’s
almost a surprise Billy Bunter
and Tom Brown haven’t yet
been called to arms. But amid the
rancour, one thing has received
considerably less scrutiny — how
exactly does Labour intend to spend
the produce of its tax raid?
When Keir Starmer announced
Labour’s six “first steps for change”,
he thrust the increasingly desperate
issue of teacher recruitment high up
the political agenda — and was right
to do so. The dire state of recruitment
is finally starting to percolate through
to the political classes. To take just
one statistic, the recruitment target
for secondary teachers was missed by
50 per cent this year. Little wonder
that many schools are finding it
literally impossible to hire.
In this context, the ambition to
employ 6,500 more teachers is the
right approach. Nothing else that
Labour might want to achieve in
education can hope to succeed
without a sufficient number of highquality teachers. But it’s one thing to
identify the problem and quite another
to propose its solution. Even assuming
that the tax hike does survive the
private school lobby and raises the
much-vaunted £1.6 billion figure, the
party has been reticent to put forward
concrete proposals for how this will
actually lead to more teachers.
Precise detail was conspicuous by
its absence in a Labour policy
document released earlier this year.
Amid flummery about valuing
teachers, there were vague points
about reviewing bursaries and
restructuring retention payments —
measures which might have some
limited impact in the short term, but
certainly nothing close to what’s
needed to effect a significant and
sustained increase.
Only a net 259 full-time teachers
were added to the workforce in the
year to November 2023, meaning a
25-fold increase in recruitment will
be required for Labour to fulfil its
pledge. Yet no government is going
to be able to raise salaries to an
extent that will make people
seriously re-evaluate their
perceptions of teaching as a career.
Labour therefore must think more
innovatively about facilitating
career-changers into teaching,
allowing more flexible working
patterns, and even reconsidering
the position of teachers in society.
Labour has an opportunity here.
It has fixed upon a real and growing
problem but tinkering around the
edges won’t cut it. It needs to raise
the level of its ambition, and in doing
so could become the party that
finally raises teaching from the
trough into which it has fallen and
recasts it as a high-status profession
for the 21st century. That would be
something really worth voting for.

25

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Comment

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On the contrary, US justice hasn’t shed its tiers
Don’t fall for the idea that Hunter Biden’s felony conviction proves there’s no bias in the American judicial system
Gerard
Baker

@gerardtbaker

‘H

unter Biden’s conviction
shows there is not a twotier system of justice”,
declared a headline in
the Washington Post this
week. It’s a claim that has been widely
made by Democrats and their friends
in the media since the president’s son
was convicted on gun charges this
week — and on the face of it, there’s
a certain plausibility.
Following his conviction last month
by a Manhattan jury, Donald Trump
and his fellow Republicans fumed that
the judicial system was politically
rigged against him. A Democratic
prosecutor got a jury in a heavily
Democratic jurisdiction to convict the
Republican candidate for president
on highly dubious felony charges.
But now the Democratic president’s
own son has been found guilty by a
jury in a heavily Democratic state —
Delaware, the president’s home state,
no less — on felony charges. So the
accusations of biased, politically
motivated “lawfare” conducted by
Democrats against Republicans must
be baseless. Prosecutors prosecute

without regard to politics; juries
reach verdicts on the basis of the law
and the facts; the American system
works like Solon to deliver justice
without fear or favour.
Don’t believe it for a second.
First, consider the vast difference
in the legal basis on which each case
was brought. As I have explained
before, the case against Trump was a
mountainous confection of waferthin legal theory built on a trivial
breach of the law that rarely results
in real punishment. The Democratic
prosecutor turned what would
normally have been at worst a
misdemeanour over a bookkeeping
deception — the hush-money Trump
paid to a porn star in 2016, a charge
that carries the penalty of a small
fine at most — into an alleged felony
(with potential jail time). All on a
highly dubious legal claim that it
was done with the intent of
committing some other crime.
Even in the view of lawyers deeply
unsympathetic to Trump, this was
prosecutorial overreach of a high
order. Elie Honig, a former federal
prosecutor and commentator for
CNN, not exactly a Maga-friendly
figure, wrote in the New Yorker that
the prosecutor had “contorted” the
case against Trump, saying the
charges brought were “bespoke,
seemingly crafted individually for the
former president and no one else”.
Contrast that with the Hunter Biden

charges — about as open and shut a
case as you can bring in front of a jury.
Biden was convicted on several counts
of lying on documents in order to
obtain a firearm while he was under
the influence of drugs, a clear felony
in breach of federal gun protection
statutes. The evidence the prosecution
produced was incontrovertible —
troves of videos, emails, text
messages, etc documenting Biden’s
addiction to cocaine at the very time
he signed the gun papers.
Ah, you might say, the evidence
may have been persuasive but there

The trial also gave us
definitive proof of the
wider institutional bias
was no obligation on the government
to bring the case against him in the
first place. Surely if these lawyers —
justice department prosecutors —
were politically driven, they would
never have gone after the son of the
man to whom their department
ultimately answers?
But that’s not how it happened.
The federal prosecutor in charge of
the case, David Weiss, was appointed
by Trump when he was president,
but as is customary, principally on
the recommendation of Democratic
senators in his state of Delaware.
Hunter’s crimes were committed

in October 2018 and known to law
enforcement almost immediately, but
for years the justice department sat
on the investigation and, according
to two internal whistleblowers who
came forward last year, actively tried
to avoid prosecuting Hunter on
separate tax fraud charges for which
he was being investigated.
After all this became public, those
same prosecutors then struck a plea
deal with Hunter on both the gun and
the tax charges that would not only
have let him off with the lightest of
penalties but would have immunised
him against potential charges relating
to an entire five-year period in which
he has been convincingly accused of
lucrative influence-peddling while
his father was vice president.
It was only when an inquisitive
judge questioned the scope of the
plea deal as it was about to be signed
off last summer that it fell apart.
Federal prosecutors then finally took
the gun charges to court, along with
the tax fraud charges, which will go
to trial in September.
As Andrew McCarthy, another
former federal prosecutor and critic
of the Bidens, wrote in National
Review this week: “If Weiss and the
Biden justice department had had
their way, [the prosecution] wouldn’t
have happened at all.”
That’s not all, of course. The trial
that concluded this week showed that
it’s not just justice that is politicised in

America, with prosecutors under
control of a particular party favouring
one type of defendant over another.
The trial also gave us definitive proof
of the wider institutional bias — in the
media, tech companies, government
bureaucracy and elsewhere — that
leans in the same direction.
Much of the evidence on which
Hunter Biden was convicted — the
proof of his drug addiction — came
from a certain laptop. This laptop,
you may recall, first came to public
attention in the latter stages of the
2020 presidential election, when it
was uncovered by the New York Post
(a sister publication of The Times),
along with more allegations about
Hunter’s nefarious activities.
Days before a close election, nearly
all mainstream media outlets not
only ignored the story but actually
discredited it. Twitter and Facebook
actually blocked access to the entire
content of the New York Post. Fifty
former US intelligence officials came
forward — with absolutely no
evidence — to claim that the laptop
was a piece of Russian disinformation
designed to sway voters.
It was only long after the election
when Biden Senior was safely in the
White House that the laptop was
acknowledged to be real — and
formed the basis for the long-delayed
justice for his son. So yes. It’s true.
Let’s hear it: two tiers for truth,
justice and the American way.

26

Friday June 14 2024 | the times
Letters to the Editor should be sent to
letters@thetimes.co.uk or by post to
1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

Letters to the Editor

Labour’s focus on growth and prosperity

Economic activity
Sir, Regarding your report “More
than nine million people
economically inactive, says ONS”
(Jun 12), these people so described
might be painting a room, investing
their time studying to get a well-paid
job or caring for a family member
rather than relying on a carer
employed by their local authority.
Economic activity was going on for
thousands of years everywhere in the
world before the Office for National
Statistics adopted the definition used
today. It counts only those age 16 to
64 in jobs known to government
agencies. It thus dismisses as inactive
the majority of teenagers investing in
full-time study, often up to the age of
21. It also assumes that those who
start working at 16, often in arduous
manual jobs, should work for 48 years
before retiring.
The need to mobilise more people
to fill gaps in the labour market is
real. However, recruiting people into
paid employment will also reduce the
output of unpaid workers. It will also
encourage youths to stop studying at
16 and start earning money in dead
end unskilled jobs.
Professor Richard Rose
Author, Welfare Goes Global;
Helensburgh, Argyll & Bute

Charging patients
Sir, I disagree with Dr Michael Rivlin
that GP co-payments would cost the
NHS substantial amounts of money
(letter, Jun 13). In Jersey we pay about
half the cost of a GP visit (£24-£40)
and more for a home call-out
(£90-£100). Pensioners and those on
income support get further
reductions or are exempt — and have
a card — while those new to the
island pay the full amount. Friendly
receptionists take payment after your
visit. Admin costs are very low and
are largely borne by the GP. There is
no evidence that this retards visits to
doctors for serious conditions. The
result is of incalculable social and
medical benefit: I can get a 20-minute
appointment today or tomorrow with
a GP who actually knows me.
Simon Boas
Trinity, Jersey

Senseless phrases
Sir, I agree with Carol Midgley in her
castigation of meaningless words and
phrases (Times2, Jun 12). The ones
she quotes are annoying but the
phrase that I hate most is “to die for”.
It is used, always inappropriately, to
describe the most mundane things —
food, clothes, random objects. It is
an abomination.
Nina Essex
London SW17

Corrections and
clarifications
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feedback@thetimes.co.uk

Sir, Sir Keir Starmer says that a
Labour government’s “No 1 priority”
will be growth (“Growth and
prosperity our priority, says Starmer”,
Jun 13). Not defence? The recent
commemoration of the 80th
anniversary of D-Day reminds us of
the extreme cost of having to fight a
major war. Avoiding the need for any
sort of repetition is essential and is
best achieved by ensuring that our
defences are so strong that any tyrant
with designs on our country is clear
that victory would be impossible.
Whether the amount spent on
defence is 2.5 per cent, 3.5 per cent or
4.5 per cent of GDP pales into
insignificance when compared with
the price our forbears paid. Our next
government has a clear responsibility.
Rob Tooze
Darlington, Co Durham
Sir, As a Conservative supporter of
many years, there is no doubt in my
mind that the party does not deserve
to be re-elected. Having read your
summary of Labour’s manifesto, and
Peter Mandelson’s article (“Labour
won’t turn from tough road ahead”,
Jun 13), I think there are many
laudable aims within the manifesto.
However, as a resident of Sheffield,

where the national party has put
Sheffield Labour into special
measures and still enforces central
control, I have serious concerns about
Sir Keir Starmer’s intention to
devolve powers from central
government to the regions. Bringing
local interests in line with central
government intentions is not a given.
James Hunt
Sheffield

parents who send their children to
fee-paying schools make considerable
sacrifices to do so, and have also
already contributed to state school
costs through their taxes, so in effect
are paying twice. Why, then, is VAT
on school fees not considered to be a
tax on working people, which he has
publicly stated will not take place?
Sally Acloque
Norwich

Sir, Peter Mandelson advises that
when Labour says on entering
government that “nothing in our
plans requires any additional tax to
be increased” it has to mean it. On
the other hand he opposes “at best
irrelevant or at worst dangerous” tax
cuts. However, any self-respecting
socialist leader will sooner or later
target those who work hard for a
living — especially if they are
making profits.
Gerald Heath
Box, Wilts

Sir, Rishi Sunak urges people not to
judge him because of Liz Truss’s
actions. The Truss disaster came
about because the Conservative Party
gives the ultimate choice of a new
prime minister between general
elections to its party members rather
than MPs. Sunak’s plea would be more
persuasive if, having seen the result of
that system, the party had abolished it.
Dr Dorian Gerhold
London SW15

Sir, In his manifesto Sir Keir Starmer
states there will be no increase in
taxes for working people. He also
states that he aspires to create
growth, and that good education is
one of the paths to success. Many

Malnutrition check Cancel culture
Sir, It is positive to see that screening
for malnutrition is part of NHS
England’s health MoTs and a clear
sign that prevention in healthcare is
being taken more seriously (“NHS to
offer health check-ups for older
patients at A&E”, Jun 12). Without a
greater focus on prevention, pressure
on NHS resources will continue to
rise, and malnutrition alone is already
projected to cost £26.6 billion a year
by 2035. At present only 2 per cent of
people in England admitted to
hospital with disease-related
malnutrition are receiving a diagnosis,
so these measures will help to support
patients and reduce pressure on the
NHS. Earlier screening, diagnosis and
better nutritional support for patients
in the community can help to prevent
or reduce hospital stays and support
recovery. We need to see more
proactive measures like this put in
place by the next government,
so as to tackle a health issue that
affects millions of people and costs
billions of pounds.
Richard Hall
General secretary,
Danone UK & Ireland

ITALIAN
SOCIALIST
ABDUCTED
from the times june 14, 1924
Signor Matteotti, the Socialist
Deputy, was abducted in Rome on
Tuesday and has not been seen
since. He was one of the leaders of
the Reformist Socialists. Last night
in Parliament Signor Mussolini read
the following statement: “I believe
the House will be anxious to have
some information about Signor
Matteotti, who disappeared on
Tuesday afternoon in Rome in
circumstances justifying the
supposition of a crime calculated, if
it had been really committed, to
arouse the indignation and grief
both of the Government and of

Sir, Recommending a broadening of a
curriculum is one thing; rejecting the
work of some of the greatest thinkers
of any age on the basis of ad hominem
descriptions of them as “dead white
men” and “colonial” is quite another
(“Schools urged to ‘decolonise’ their
philosophy classes”, Jun 13). The
purpose of philosophy is to teach
people to think clearly. The apparent
criticism of these thinkers for being
logicians is harder to understand,
unless of course there is some hitherto
unknown form of logic that our
learned reformers have discovered.
Peter Smith
Woking, Surrey

In defence of yoga
Sir, Being one myself, I write in
defence of yoga teachers (“Naomi
Klein has a conspiracy theory — it’s
all the fault of yoga teachers”, Times2,
Jun 12). Yoga teachers are far from the
glossy, authoritarian, self-optimising
gurus trained in a few weeks who are
portrayed in the article. I am not on
Instagram and am not an influencer
Parliament. I myself gave direct
orders to the police for the search,
and the police are already in a
position to identify the culprits.”
Opposition groups met today and
passed a resolution stating that they
“consider it impossible to take part in
the work of Parliament until some
light has been thrown on the sinister
episode, of which Signor Matteotti
has been the victim”.
From the story of two or three
witnesses, it appears that at half-past
four on Tuesday afternoon Signor
Matteotti was going home when he
was seized in the street by five
persons and flung into a motor-car. A
lawyer who was at his window
witnessed the scene and said that
Signor Matteotti struggled violently
and cried for help. The lawyer
reached the street as the motor-car
was making off. He, however, saw the
number of the car and communicated
this to the police yesterday. It is
supposed that the car left Rome and

Sir, The Tories are worried about
Labour gaining a huge majority
(“Tory rethink amid fears of a Labour
super-majority”, Jun 13). This wouldn’t
happen if we had proportional
representation. Just saying.
Philip Sykes
Murviel-lès-Béziers, France
or “wellness” practitioner or
conspiracy theorist. I do not profess
to have a higher form of knowledge.
My aim is simply to teach yoga well
and for my students to practise it with
enjoyment. That is all.
Fran Stuart
Carlisle, Cumbria

Club’s sticky wicket
Sir, I was alarmed to read of the
potential new development at
Fenner’s, which would make playing
cricket there an ever less attractive
proposition (“Student housing puts
historic club on sticky wicket”, Jun 13).
When Francis Fenner opened the
ground in 1848 it was partly to keep
out the general public, who were
regarded as a nuisance on the freefor-all of Parker’s Piece. Perhaps it is
time to invite that public back in by
offering its facilities to a wider range
of local teams, especially during the
long summer holidays? If such
genuine community benefit could be
shown, perhaps it would not be too
late to halt the march of progress.
Giles Phillips
Author, On Fenner’s Sward: a History
of Cambridge University Cricket Club
went out into the open country, but
the direction it took is still
unknown. A man of large private
means Signor Matteotti had given
all his activities to the cause of
Socialism, and was the most disliked
and most powerful opponent the
Fascisti had in the new Parliament.
In consequence of Fascist action he
was unable to live in his native
province of Rovigo, but he went
there from time to time in disguise
in order to see his mother. Once
before, two years ago, Signor
Matteotti had been kidnapped,
being taken by Fascists out into the
country and left there in a pitiable
condition. He was a man full of
pluck and tenacity, and his speech
on the Address, which dealt chiefly
with the illegalities committed at
the general election, had very much
irritated the majority.
thetimes.co.uk/archive

Funding the arts
Sir, I agree with Lord Browne of
Madingley about arts funding: “If
sponsors are driven away, where will
arts funding come from?” (Jun 13). He
suggests four things, the first of which
is for the leadership of companies and
arts organisations to align their own
teams and purpose with the society
they serve, and the last whether
performers, artists and writers should
consider whether they are achieving
anything other than virtue signalling.
Unfortunately virtue signalling,
promulgating irrelevant partisan
agendas and a lack of altruism using
millions of pounds of “public” money
(actually levies on business) is the
way that Arts Council England works.
That ACE talks of “investing”, rather
than spending, is comparable to the
Post Office’s use of double-speak. The
Labour Party has published “Creating
Growth”, a proposed review of the
creative sector, and one hopes that an
incoming government will carry out a
wide review and restore ACE to serve
the nation, as Lord Browne suggests.
Patrick Hogan
Member, Arts Council England
southeast area council 2020-21;
Beaconsfield, Bucks
Sir, I am bemused by arts bodies
choosing, or being forced, to refuse
donations from organisations deemed
to be morally suspect. Surely we
should be forcing such organisations
to donate even more heavily? What
next — refusing to fine criminals on
the same grounds?
Christopher Gadsden
London EC2

Evocative scents
Sir, To Giles Coren’s list of evocative
smells (Notebook, Jun 11) I would add
the smell of Castrol R racing oil, used
by prewar and postwar racers in their
race cars and motorcycles. As lads,
many of us put a squirt of R in the
petrol tank of their road car to evoke
that heady smell from the exhaust.
Roger Skipp
Ex-classic motorbike and car racer,
South Godstone, Surrey
Sir, Not the smell of a coal fire
(letter, Jun 13) but rather a Hebridean
peat fire. It has fewer nasties in it
than coal smoke and is reminiscent
of so much more.
Roberta Kerr
Romsey, Hants
Sir, May I add the smell of a horse
and its warm leather saddle after a
summer’s evening riding in stubble
fields? And the tang of fresh dung,
knowing the delights it will bring to
my garden later on.
Lesley Thompson
Lavenham, Suffolk

Dazzled by science
Sir, Further to Dr John McCarthy’s
letter (Jun 12), it is possible for dental
students to enjoy fancy phrases too.
During a viva voce examination in
the mid-1970s two clinical academics
(wearing half-moon gold-rimmed
spectacles for the full effect) asked me
my first question. On my answering
“Polycythaemia rubra vera” with no
hesitation, they looked at each other
and then turned to me a little startled
and said: “Thank you Mr Mills, I
think that will be all.”
Dr Robin Mills
Devizes, Wilts
Letters to The Times must be exclusive
and may be edited. Please include a full
address and daytime telephone number.

27

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Leading articles
Daily Universal Register
UK: King’s birthday honours list published
this evening.
South Africa: Parliament meets to elect
president after May 29 elections.

Nature notes
Perhaps it’s time to
rethink our image
of Ratty. When
many of us picture a
water vole, we
immediately see the
languid boatman of
Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the
Willows, a riparian inhabitant who can only
ever live by the river. But though water voles
are semi-aquatic and perfectly adapted for
riverside life, there is a growing population
of these little mammals that live significant
distances from water, at least a kilometre.
Easterhouse in Glasgow is one of the best
places to see Ratty in his new, dryland
habitat. These animals are increasingly
becoming fossorial, foraging above the
ground but living in subterranean holes —
more like Mole. Has the Glaswegian Ratty
found a way of avoiding the American
mink? jonathan tulloch

Birthdays today
Steffi Graf, pictured,
former world No 1 tennis
player, winner of 22
grand slam singles titles,
55; Rod Argent,
musician, the Zombies,
79; Dominic Blakemore,
chief executive, Compass
Group, 55; Sir Leonard Blavatnik,
businessman, vice-chairman of Warner
Music Group, and philanthropist, 67; Lord
(Paul) Boateng, chairman, Archbishops’
Racial Justice Commission, Labour MP
(1987-2005), 73; Alan Carr, entertainer,
Amanda & Alan’s Italian Job (2023-24), 48;
Declan Collier, chairman, Office of Rail and
Road, 69; Stanley Druckenmiller, hedge
fund manager, founder of Duquesne Capital,
71; Ven Stephen Dunwoody, chaplain to the
Forces and archdeacon to the British Army,
53; Erik Engstrom, chief executive, RELX
Group, 61; Boy George, singer-songwriter
with Culture Club and DJ, 63; David Kerr,
professor of cancer medicine, University of
Oxford, 68; Lang Lang, pianist, 42; Andrew
Law, hedge fund manager, chairman and
chief executive, Caxton Associates, 58; Jim
Lea, musician, Slade, 75; Lord (Roger)
Liddle, special adviser on European affairs
to Tony Blair (1997-2004), 77; Dr Robin
Lovell-Badge, stem cell biologist, 71; Alfred
Lowe, recipient of the George Cross, “for
gallantry in attempting to save life at sea” in
1948, 93; Most Rev Malcolm McMahon,
Roman Catholic archbishop of Liverpool, 75;
Dame Yvonne Moores, chairwoman,
Florence Nightingale Foundation (2019-22),
83; Olaf Scholz, chancellor of Germany, 66;
June Spencer, actress, The Archers (1950-54,
1961-2022), 105; Colin Thubron, travel writer
and novelist, 85; Donald Trump, president
of the US (2017-21) and businessman, 78;
Rt Rev Lord (Rowan) Williams of
Oystermouth, Archbishop of Canterbury
(2003-12), 74; Joe Worsley, rugby union
player, England (1999-2011), 47.

On this day
In 1919 the American actor and director
Sam Wanamaker was born. He initiated the
project to rebuild Shakespeare’s Globe
Theatre, London, in 1949. He died in 1993
before the project was completed.

The last word
“Sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror
— for it is on the other side of that mirror
that the truth stares at us.” Harold Pinter,
English playwright, actor and director,
(Nobel lecture, December 7, 2005)

Riding to the Rescue
With tax and spend promises he cannot truly reconcile, Sir Keir Starmer is pinning
his hopes on a construction and tech boom to fuel growth and balance the books
Fans of old western films will recall how, just when
the surrounded settlers are about to be overwhelmed by the Apache, the bugle sounds and, as
out of nowhere, the 7th Cavalry appears, sabres
drawn, charging to the rescue. For Labour’s
embattled wagon train the cavalry is economic
growth. Because if it does not turn up on time and
in strength the party’s tax and spend promises,
enshrined in its manifesto, will be cut to pieces by
the pitiless forces of fiscal reality.
With victory within his grasp, and the Conservatives in seemingly terminal disarray, Sir Keir
Starmer, Labour’s leader, should have been unassailable yesterday as he launched his manifesto in
Manchester. But there was unease in the wings,
not about the election but about the shaky foundations upon which Labour’s future plans rest.
Over the last year Labour has progressively
boxed itself into a series of restrictions and promises (some explicit, some implicit) that simply
cannot be reconciled under current conditions.
For Sir Keir and Rachel Reeves, his shadow chancellor, there is one way only to square the circle:
the economy must grow, and grow quickly. Otherwise they will have to start breaking promises,
destroying the credibility they so assiduously cultivated to make Labour electable. The facts are

simple. Yesterday, Sir Keir ruled out absolutely a
return to austerity. Presumably, this means no
substantial cuts to already-strained departmental
budgets. There are two ways to fund public spending: tax and borrowing. If spending is not reduced
and the economy does not grow taxes will have to
rise to fund existing and new commitments. But
Sir Keir and Ms Reeves have been busy closing off
their options: income tax, national insurance,
value added tax and corporation tax, none of these
will be raised. That is three quarters of the tax take.
Sir Keir is coy about capital gains tax so there is
some scope there, and a windfall tax on oil and gas
giants will help fund a “green prosperity plan”
(which will still require £17.5 billion of borrowing).
This is a brutally restrictive straitjacket.
Borrowing is equally problematic. Labour has
signed up to the Tory commitment to have government debt falling as a proportion of GDP at the
end of the parliament. Without growth this target
is another paralysing constraint.
Healthy growth would change everything. Tax
receipts could rise without rates going up, and the
government could borrow more and still meet its
borrowing target, so long as the expansion of the
economy outpaced the growth in public debt.
What is striking about Labour’s manifesto is the

modesty of its spending. The promised 40,000
extra NHS appointments a week, together with
more dentistry, scanners, teachers, nurseries and
breakfast clubs, will cost £4.8 billion in 2028. A
drop in a public spending ocean of £1.2 trillion. Yet,
given parlous public finances, even these must be
based on rickety assurances about ending tax
avoidance and penalising non-doms, the latter a
pointless measure also foolishly backed by the
Conservatives. Or levying VAT on private school
fees, a vindictive exercise in class warfare supposed to raise £1.5 billion. Equally striking is how
this fiscally-conservative prospectus contrasts
with the 2019 manifesto issued by Corbynist
Labour, and endorsed by Sir Keir. It proposed
wholesale nationalisation.
While new spending is tiny, Sir Keir lists a whole
series of wrongs — failing social care, bankrupt
councils, child poverty — that must be righted.
But this would cost billions that are not there. It is
business, specifically tech and construction, that
Sir Keir hopes will ride to the rescue. A bonfire of
planning restrictions, an explosion of urban home
building, handsome new towns in the green belt.
These are his cavalry, bringing with them precious
growth. But will the bugle sound in time? Or will
his government end in broken promises?

Dangerous Company
If Reform UK aspires to electoral success, it cannot indulge the far right in its ranks
Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK and a late
entrant to the general election race, is becoming
increasingly grandiose in his ambitions. With a
recent YouGov poll placing Reform one point
ahead of the Conservatives in the polls, he has
begun to speak publicly of “a tipping point” whereby he emerges as the leader of a “national opposition” to a Labour majority.
At the same time, however, the Reform campaign has been dogged by deeply unsavoury revelations about its candidates. The party has already
been compelled to withdraw support for some of
these prospective MPs, including one who compared black people to “baboons” and another who
liked a Facebook post labelling the London mayor
Sadiq Khan “an undercover Jihadist”. Yet numerous others who have expressed inflammatory
views remain comfortably under the party banner.
While every political party suffers from rogue
representatives, Reform’s issues are of a different
scale and nature to most. An investigation by The
Times found that at least 41 Reform parliamentary
candidates, close to one in ten, are Facebook
friends with Gary Raikes, the British leader of a

group founded in the image of Oswald Mosley’s
British Union of Fascists. Mr Raikes’s activists call
themselves “blackshirts” and view parliamentary
democracy as an “obstruction”.
Against this worrisome backdrop, it is scarcely
reassuring that the party is standing by Ian Gribbin, its candidate in Bexhill & Battle in East Sussex,
who posted comments online in 2022 alleging that
Britain would be “in a far better state today” if the
country had “taken Hitler up on his offer of neutrality” in the run-up to the Second World War.
Although Mr Gribbin later apologised and withdrew the comments, the Reform party spokesperson defended them as “probably true”.
The physical attacks upon Mr Farage are to be
heavily condemned and punished: such intimidation must not be permitted to entrench itself in our
political culture. For his part, however, Mr Farage’s response to legitimate concerns about farright elements exploiting Reform has thus far
been a blend of defiance, bluster and calculated
ambiguity. He shrugged off the link between party
candidates and Mr Raikes as “utter cobblers” and
defended disturbing remarks by candidates as

“ordinary folk down the pub-speak”. Such relaxed
tolerance is in sharp contrast to his treatment of
the prime minister’s miscalculation in returning
early from D-Day commemorations. Mr Farage
went far beyond other politicians in his attack,
alleging Mr Sunak was “not patriotic” and didn’t
care about “our culture”. Those comments were
interpreted by many as a coded reference to Mr
Sunak’s immigrant background, a charge which
Mr Farage strongly denied.
The vast majority of Britons are rightly proud of
the role that this country, along with an estimated
two and a half million troops from the Indian subcontinent, played in defeating fascism. Nor is it
simply a faraway story to be weaponised for current political advantage. The ideas espoused by
Adolf Hitler and Oswald Mosley are as insidious
and repellent as they ever were, something it
behoves any credible UK politician to recognise
and root out where necessary. Yet Mr Farage has
instead complained that because of the snap election it’s been “impossible” for Reform “to do full
vetting of candidates”. In that case the answer is
clear: if in doubt, he should not be running them.

Prophetic Pooch
The arrival of Euro 2024 will once again test the powers of prognosticating pets
This year’s bumper summer of international sport,
kicking off today with the start of the group stages
of the Uefa European Football Championship,
provides an unsurpassed opportunity for the
attainment of sporting glory. Individual reputations will be broken or made under a vast global
spotlight. This applies to the competitions’ human
and non-human participants alike.
As recent tradition dictates, an oracular animal
has already been lined up to forecast the results of
the Euros. Ludwig, a three-year-old sausage dog
from Munich, delivers his verdicts by choosing
between three bowls of his favoured chicken

treats, each representing victory, defeat or a draw.
Playing it safe, the patriotic pooch’s first prediction
is that host nation Germany will defeat Scotland
in the tournament’s opening match.
Depending on whether or not Ludwig proves to
be barking up the right tree, his star could rise and
rise over the coming weeks. Despite the national
stereotype for cool-headed rationality, the Germans have long been content to defer to animal
instinct when it comes to divining sporting
success. The all-time great of the game was of
course Paul the Octopus, the German cephalopod
who went out on all eight of his limbs, correctly

predicting the results of all Germany’s fixtures as
well as an eventual Spanish victory in the final of
the 2010 World Cup. Revered for his clairvoyant
power, Paul was made an honorary citizen of a
Spanish village, and offered eye-watering transfer
fees from rival aquariums.
Paul’s legacy has been to give rise to a thriving
cottage industry in fortune-telling ferrets, clairvoyant cats and soothsaying seals, all of whom
have tried in vain to match his unbeaten record.
That baton now passes to Ludwig. Though the
odds are against him, he can hope that fortune will
favour the underdog.

28

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

World
Milei defiant after spending cuts
Argentina
Stephen Gibbs
Latin America correspondent

Hundreds of protesters threw petrol
bombs and clashed with riot police outside Argentina’s parliament yesterday
after the senate narrowly approved the
first stage of a sweeping austerity package backed by President Milei.
The reforms, including pensions cuts
and tax incentives for foreign investors,
form the foundation of an economic
“shock therapy” plan that Milei hopes
to bring to the South American nation.
The legislation, called the Base Law,
has taken months to work its way
through Argentina’s upper and lower
houses, and has been significantly
amended from its original version.
After a marathon 21-hour debate in
the senate that continued until the
early hours of yesterday, the vote was
drawn at 36-36. Victoria Villarruel, the
vice-president and head of the chamber, broke the tie by supporting the bill.
“For those Argentines who suffer,
who wait, who do not want to see their
children leave the country ... my vote is
affirmative,” she said.
Outside there were scenes of mayhem, as the police fired rubber bullets,
tear gas and water cannon to disperse
protesters who vowed that they would
go to almost any lengths to stop Milei
from carrying out what they portrayed
as a package targeting the poor.
“This poison has failed several times
in Argentina and we won’t allow this to
carry on,” Luis D’Elia, the activist and
picket leader, said.
Two cars and a row of city hire bicycles were set on fire during the protest.
At least 20 police officers were injured
and 15 people were arrested.
Supporters of the reforms pointed to
the protests as proof of why the country
needed change.
“Today there are two Argentinas,”
Villarruel said. “A violent Argentina
that sets a car on fire, throws rocks and
questions the exercise of democracy.
And another Argentina, with workers
waiting with great pain and sacrifice for
the change that they voted for.”
Milei’s office issued a statement
thanking the police and security forces
for their handling of “terrorists” who
were attempting a coup d’état.
“We are going to change Argentina,
we are going to make it the most liberal
country in the world,” Milei told a conference in Buenos Aires.
Included in the reform package are

measures designed to make the country more attractive, including a 30-year
tax break for investors and the weakening of labour laws that heavily favour
employees at present. It also includes
plans to privatise about a dozen public
companies.
Other measures among the bill’s 238

articles deal with reducing access to
minimum retirement allowances, and
have been criticised by Milei’s left-wing
opponents.
Argentina has been ranked as one of
the most expensive countries in which
to run a business, in part because of the
prohibitive costs that companies need

to pay to dismiss workers. For decades,
trade unions in Argentina have played
a dominant role in the country’s politics
— a legacy going back to the time of
Juan Perón, the army general who
became president in 1946, promising to
protect workers’ rights.
His followers, Peronists, have ruled

the country for much of the past 70
years, during which time Argentina’s
economy, once one of the strongest in
the world, has been mostly in decline or
stagnation.
Milei, a right-wing economist and
former television pundit, totally rejects
Peronism and has instead expressed his

Russian spies pose as diplomats to attack Europe, says Nato chief
Russia
Bruno Waterfield Brussels

The Russian diplomatic corps is a thinly
veiled front for spies preparing “acts of
sabotage” as part of President Putin’s
covert campaign to fracture European
unity, western allies have said.
After a wave of Russian cyberattacks
and disinformation campaigns during
European elections, Nato defence ministers have gathered to discuss the
increased threat and restricting travel
rights for Russian embassy officials.
Jens Stoltenberg, the Nato secretarygeneral, said Kremlin spies, operating
under the Federal Security Service
(FSB), the successor agency to the KGB,

were becoming “more active” in
Europe. Accredited diplomats, including spies running clandestine operations, are able to roam the Schengen
border-free area without restrictions.
Now the allies are seeking to
crack down, drawing up
“tighter restrictions on
Russian
intelligence
personnel”.
Reports of Russian
attacks in Britain,
Germany, Poland, the
Baltic states and the
Czech Republic were
discussed
by
Nato
defence ministers yesterday in Brussels. Later this

month the EU will discuss calls to restrict the travel of Russian diplomats.
“We have seen arson attacks, we have
seen sabotage against critical infrastructure,” said Stoltenberg. “We have
seen cyberattacks and we have
seen more of those over the
last weeks and months
than we have seen
before.” He added: “We
are helping to make
allies aware that this is
not an isolated instance,
this is actually a result of
Russian
intelligence
President Putin is testing
western resolve in Europe

being more active. And therefore, Nato
is increasing awareness, we are sharing
information, sharing intelligence. “
The Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands,
Poland and Romania are concerned
that the free movement rights help
Russian intelligence and that “preparation of sabotage acts are the main workload for a large number of Russian ‘diplomats’ in the EU”.
A letter, signed by the eight countries
and sent to Josep Borrell, the EU’s
diplomatic chief, on Tuesday, said:
“Free movement of holders of Russian
diplomatic and service passports, accredited in one host state, across the
whole Schengen area, is [enabling] ma-

lign activities.” Measures would “restrict the movement of members of
Russian diplomatic missions and their
family members to territory of a state of
their accreditation only”, allowing the
authorities to detain and expel those
found out of bounds.
EU diplomats said new restrictions
were long overdue. “The EU is a soft
touch and open door for Russian operatives using diplomatic cover. It has to
stop,” a senior diplomat said.
Nato has been alarmed by a wave of
Russian sabotage attempts including
an arson attack targeting a Ukrainian
business in east London, leading to
two arrests, as well as other attacks
across Europe.

29

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Tourist’s escape
from Isis gunmen
Page 30

provoke violence
Riot police fired
tear gas and rubber
bullets yesterday as
they clashed with
protesters who set
light to cars outside
the National
Congress in Buenos
Aires, below, where
a controversial
austerity package
was passed by one
vote

admiration for free-marketeers —
including Margaret Thatcher, an
especially controversial position in
Argentina, where feelings still run high
over the Falklands conflict of 1982.
A fierce critic of left-wing politicians
of all guises, the president believes that
only free enterprise capitalism, with

absolutely minimal state interference,
can lift people out of poverty.
The self-described “anarcho-capitalist” took office in December on a mandate of radical economic reform. His
push for a balanced budget marks a
stark reversal from that of most Argentinian governments over the past two

decades, which have built up vast deficits financed by printing money. Since
2001 Argentina has defaulted on its
international sovereign debt three
times, a world record.
Milei famously brandished a chainsaw on the campaign trail as he vowed
to slash public spending.
“What happened tonight is a triumph
for the Argentinian people and the first
step to recovering our greatness,”
Milei’s office said in a statement. He
also called the measures the “most
ambitious legislative reform of the past
40 years”.
But the legislative battle is not over
yet. The package will need to return to
the lower house of Congress for final
approval.
The resistance it will continue to face
was clear throughout Wednesday
night. Five serving members of Congress were among a group of protesters
who were pepper-sprayed and needed
hospital treatment. Dozens of others
received medical attention at the scene,
according to the health ministry.
Protesters were heard to chant: “The
country is not for sale”, and one banner
held aloft read: “How can a head of state
hate the state?”
One demonstrator, Miriam Rajovitcher, 54, a teacher, said: “If this law
passes, we are going to lose so many of
our labour and pension rights. I am so
much worse off.”
Another, Fabio Nunez, 55, a lawyer,
said the law would put Argentina “ back
100 years”, reported the AFP news
agency.
In order to get the legislation passed,
the government put on hold some of its
more controversial privatisation plans,
including proposals to sell off the Aerolíneas Argentinas state airline and the
national post office.
Only a handful of state-owned firms,
such as the national nuclear power
company, are now likely to be privatised
in the short term.
Another unpopular measure, to lower the income tax threshold to include
thousands more workers, also failed to
pass the second round of Senate voting.
Milei’s political party, Freedom
Advances, which was founded only
three years ago, holds only 15 per cent
of seats in the lower house and 10 per
cent in the Senate, limiting his ability to
push through his promised reforms.
Argentina’s bonds were sharply up on
international markets yesterday as
investors welcomed the passing of the
reform package.

‘Houston, we don’t have a problem’
United States
Kaya Burgess Science Reporter

As the International Space Station
orbited 250 miles above Earth a female
voice brought bad news. She said its
commander was unwell and must be
put in a space suit for “hyperbaric treatment”. He had severe decompression
sickness and would be lucky to live.
Soon, word reached those on Earth
tuned into Nasa’s live feed from the station. “Get [the] commander back in his
suit [and] get it sealed,” the voice said.
The commander, the Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, had only a “tenuous” chance of survival, the voice said.
As panic spread about the distress

message and a medical emergency,
Nasa scrambled to clarify that it was in
fact part of a simulation that was
“inadvertently” broadcast worldwide.
The voice, which appeared to be
coming from a flight surgeon, a doctor
who works with mission controllers on
the ground, asked crew members to
check the patient’s pulse and give him
oxygen and said: “Whatever you can do
is going to be better than doing
nothing.” They were advised to
attach a mask to their crewmate while
attempting to put his spacesuit on.
The voice was later heard to tell colleagues: “Unfortunately, the prognosis
for [the] commander is relatively tenuous”, adding that they were seeking a

hospital with “critical care facilities”. In
the early hours of yesterday, Nasa
posted a clarification on the ISS’s feed
on Twitter/X, stating: “There is no
emergency situation going on aboard
the International Space Station.”
In a twist, however, a planned spacewalk was postponed hours later after
one of the crew reported a “spacesuit
discomfort issue”.
The astronauts Tracy Dyson and
Matt Dominick had to climb back out
of their suits about an hour before their
planned exit into space.
About 30 astronauts and cosmonauts have died while on active duty,
but only three died in space, on board
Russia’s Soyuz 11 capsule in 1971.

Can Hollywood glamour
rescue President Biden?
Page 31

Le Pen surges
towards victory
as rivals implode
France

Plus ça change

Charles Bremner Paris

The populist party of Marine Le Pen
appeared to be on course for a parliamentary majority on the fourth day of
France’s snap election campaign yesterday as the mainstream conservative
party tore itself apart and a new leftwing alliance pulled ahead of President
Macron’s centrist bloc.
Le Pen’s anti-immigrant National
Rally is gaining momentum, polls show,
as voters turn a deaf ear to Macron’s
warnings of disaster if it emerges with
the strongest hand after the two rounds
of voting on June 30 and July 7.
The Rally, whose landslide in
European elections prompted Macron’s
gamble on Sunday, is on course to
increase its seats in the National
Assembly from 88 now to between 220
and 270, according to a survey by Elabe
for the French news channel BFMTV.
That is not far short of the 289 seats that
would give it an absolute majority,
forcing Macron to ask it to govern in
opposition to his presidency.
Macron’s centrist Renaissance bloc,
which is now the laregst party but is
well short of a majority, would be
further diminished and overtaken by
the New Popular Front, a revived alliance of the centre-left Socialist Party,
the radical France Unbowed, Greens
and Communists, the survey suggested.
To reach power, Le Pen and Jordan
Bardella, her protégé and campaign
leader, are trying to forge an alliance
with sections of the imploding Republicans, heirs to the conservative movement founded by Charles de Gaulle.
Weakened for years by the rise of
Macron’s centrist bloc and Le Pen’s
Rally, the Republicans’ leadership
collapsed this week after Éric Ciotti, its
chief, announced a pact with the Rally
without consulting colleagues. Yesterday they united to dismiss the hardline
MP from Nice and expelled him from
the party, but he has refused to go. He
turned up for work at party headquarters in central Paris and said he had
opened legal proceedings to annul
the “illegal” decision to oust him.
That was taken by heavyweights
including Valérie Pécresse,
president of the Paris region,
and Gérard Larcher, president
of the Senate, the upper house of
parliament.
“I’m president of the party,
I’m going to my office and
that’s it,” Ciotti said as he entered the headquarters. He
said his party’s grassroots
wants an alliance with the
Rally. His colleagues were
“far out of touch with
reality when they hammer
on about the ‘dangers of
fascism’,” he said.
Bardella has said Ciotti
is bringing “dozens” of
Republicans candidates to
join the Rally camp,
including sitting MPs,
but none has emerged so
far. The Rally is preparing

President Macron’s election
gamble has brought another career
change for Marion Maréchal, the 34year-old niece of Marine Le Pen.
Freshly elected as an MEP after
heading the campaign for Éric
Zemmour’s anti-Muslim Reconquest
party, she fell out with her boss. He
sacked her for trying to ally with her
aunt’s triumphant National Rally,
which he regards as his enemy. “I
am sickened and wounded by this
world record of betrayal,” he said.
Elected as National Rally MP at
the age of 22, Maréchal, below, has
experience of switching sides after
she turned her back on the Le
Pen clan to join Zemmour in the
2022 presidential elections.
By scoring 5.47 per cent of the
French vote, her campaign won five
Brussels seats for Zemmour’s party,
its first anywhere. She has accused
Zemmour of stirring division in the
nationalist camp but denied that she
is rejoining the Rally, and says she
will take up the European
parliament seat that she won on
Sunday as an independent.

a future government that will include
experienced conservatives from outside
its ranks, it says. “What we want to do is
a national unity government,” Laurent
Jacobelli, a spokesman, said.
Another breach was made in the
firewall between the parties when
François-Xavier Bellamy, one of the
Republicans’ two interim leaders, said
he would vote for the Rally candidate in
a run-off if the only choice was a
member of the left-wing coalition. “I
will do everything to stop France Unbowed reaching power,” Bellamy said.
The revolutionary party and its firebrand leader, Jean-Luc Mélenchon, 72,
dominate the parliamentary opposition
but their presence in the new coalition
unsettles many in the moderate
Socialist Party. Macron mocked the
alliance as “unnatural, baroque
and indecent”. He wondered, he
said, how it would reconcile the
radicals’ support for Gaza, hostility to the EU and approval of
President Putin with the Socialists’ pro-European and proUkraine doctrines.
On
Wednesday,
Macron depicted France
Unbowed as extremists
who are as “dangerous”
as Le Pen’s hard-right
movement but the
president’s “project
fear”
approach
seems to be having
little impact. The
Elabe poll of voting
intentions showed the leftwing front on 28 per cent,
compared with 31 per cent
for the National Rally and 18
per cent for Macron’s
Renaissance.

30

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

World

Tourist dived
under car for
refuge from
Isis gunman
Attempts by the Taliban
to open up Afghanistan
are fraught with danger,
Geoff Hiscock and
Haroon Janjua write
As he lay in the dirt beneath the car, Joe
McDowell could just about make out
the leather sandals of the man who had
shot him. Standing a metre away, all the
gunman had to do was bend down and
shoot again and it would be all over.
Remarkably, however, the Australian
holidaymaker escaped the attack that
left five travelling companions dead.
“I was watching his feet and estimated
he was far enough for me to wriggle out
the same side of the car I’d rolled
under,” McDowell said after returning
home to Perth in Western Australia,
where he is recovering from taking a
bullet to the rear. “I made a dash for a
nearby alley and escaped that way.”
McDowell, 38, a mechanic, was with
a group of 17 people, including two
guides, who had travelled to see the
remnants of Afghanistan’s Buddha
statues in Bamiyan, 130km west of
Kabul. The carved giant Buddhas,

Joe McDowell survived a shooting on a
visit to the Buddha statues in Bamiyan

which date from the 6th century, were
destroyed by the Taliban in one of its
most notorious acts in 2001.
Having returned to power 20 years
later, the Taliban has been attempting
to use the site to foster a nascent tourism industry. According to them, visitor
numbers are on the rise, with a 120 per
cent increase last year to nearly 5,200.
It was tourists, however, that found
themselves the targets of a shooting on
May 17, day two of a ten-day tour. Three
Spaniards and two Afghan guides were
killed, along with another civilian
caught up in the attack. Five, including
McDowell, were hurt.
“It was about 5.45pm, and our van
was parked on the street outside some
shops,” McDowell said. “We heard
some noise, like firecrackers, or maybe
shooting further away. Nobody realised
at first just how close the gunman was.”
Sitting in the front seat of the van and
talking to the passengers behind him,
McDowell was suddenly confronted
with a bullet smashing into the windscreen. “It was a bad situation. I felt
trapped in the van, so I opened the door
and started running away. I didn’t have

any real plan — just to get away from
there,” he said.
His fellow tourists were in a worse
position. They could not easily get to
the van’s side doors. But the gunman’s
first target was apparently McDowell.
He fired at least one shot at him, hitting
his behind. “I turned around. The gunman was looking at me with his gun
pointing at me, but for some reason he
didn’t fire any more bullets at me. I don’t
know why — maybe he was distracted
by something.”
That is when he rolled under a car,
certain that the gunman knew he was
under there. “At this point I felt very
concerned. I thought to myself — I
can’t move, I’m trapped,” he said.
After the shooting stopped and
feeling lucky to be alive, he returned to
the van. “I could see the dead and
wounded. One of our guides told me to
get into a sedan that pulled up in the
street, and I was taken to hospital. They
also put the dead civilian in the car. Some
people said he was a Taliban security
man, but I don’t know that for sure.”
In hospital, the authorities showed
McDowell pictures of various people to
see if he could identify the gunman. “I
couldn’t remember his face, but I was
able to describe the leather sandals that
he was wearing, along with the colour
of his pants. They were surprised by the
sandals — ‘not boots?’ they asked.”
Responsibility was claimed later by
Islamic State Khorasan (Isis-K), a
regional chapter of the terrorist group.
It operates in parts of Iran, Afghanistan
and Pakistan and was behind the suicide
bombing at Kabul airport in 2021 that
killed at least 170 Afghan civilians and
13 US service members.
Western officials also blamed Isis-K
for an attack on a Moscow concert hall
in March this year in which 144 people
were killed. In April, Germany charged
seven foreigners with plotting terrorist
attacks on behalf of Isis-K, saying they
intended to carry out attacks across
western Europe.
In a statement issued after the attack,
Abdul Mateen Qani, spokesman for
Afghanistan’s interior ministry, said a
number of people had been arrested
and he was “confident that the
criminals would be brought to justice”.
The shooting represents part of a
bloody war that the Taliban has fought
against Isis-K since coming to power,
one that it is keen not to let stand in the
way of its tourism industry.
While there is clear incentive for the
Taliban to downplay the extent of the
terrorist threat in Afghanistan, they
have boosted their intelligence capabilities to prevent the emergence of more
Isis-K cells, said Omar Samad, senior
fellow at the Atlantic Council and the
former Afghan ambassador to the EU.
For McDowell the drama of his visit
has not ruled out another one. “Maybe
I’ll go back in a year or so,” he said. “I like
to meet people, and get a sense of a
country that way. I’m definitely lucky
to have survived this. It was quite an
experience — not the one I wanted, and
certainly one I won’t forget.”

Demobbed
K-pop star
embraces
freedom

F

or a year and a
half they have
lived in obscurity,
isolated from
their fans and
one another, doing their
part to defend their
country against a North
Korean invasion (Richard
Lloyd Parry writes).
Now the South Korean
boy band BTS, one of the
most successful pop
groups in the world, have
begun their return to
public life, after the
first of their seven
members
completed his
military service.
Kim Seok-jin,
who performs
as Jin, was
discharged on
Wednesday
after 18 months
in the army. He
marked his first
day as a civilian
yesterday by
embracing a thousand
of the band’s millions of
fans at a “hugathon” in a
stadium in Seoul.
Cheering fans, most of
them women, formed a
long queue and mounted
the stage for a fleeting
embrace from their hero.
Many more queued for
hours for limited-edition
memorabilia.
“I tried not to cry, but I
cried twice because I was

Thousands of fans queued to hug the pop star Jin, who was
greeted by his BTS bandmate after leaving the army

so happy,” Jin, 31, said
during a live stream
broadcast. “I insisted on
holding the ‘free hug’
event. I really wanted to
go ahead with it because I
wanted to give warm hugs
to fans who waited the
long year and a half.”
The other six members
of BTS are still doing

their national service
and the last will not
be discharged for a
year. In a
concession not
allowed to many
recruits, they were
allowed out to
meet Jin as he
emerged from the
5th Infantry Division
training centre in
Gyeonggi province.
The leader of BTS, Kim
Nam-joon, 29, known as
RM, played the band’s
song Dynamite on the
saxophone.
“I, along with many
other people, applaud you
for completing your
duties without any
chicanery or privileges
and becoming an
exemplary model for
everyone else,” Oh
Se-hoon, the mayor

of Seoul, wrote on
Facebook.
Exemptions from
service are given to
international athletes and
classical musicians, but
not to pop stars, to the
frustration of BTS fans.
There was talk of
changing the law to
exempt K-pop stars of
international standing,
although the idea is
opposed by many young
South Koreans.
BTS were the first South
Korean band to find
lasting success outside east
Asia. However, when they
announced their hiatus in
2022, band members gave
the impression that it had
as much to do with
emotional and physical
exhaustion from the
pressures of stardom as
their military obligations.

31

the times | Friday June 14 2024

World

Voters doubt
VP ready for
Oval Office
United States
Hugh Tomlinson

Only a third of voters believe that
Kamala Harris would win a presidential election, a poll has found.
The vice-president has suffered persistently low approval ratings since
taking office and struggled to convince
voters as a potential leader while defining her own policy positions.
Three out of five Democrats and only
a quarter of independents think Harris
would win an election if she became the
Democratic nominee in 2028, the Politico/Morning Consult poll found. With
Biden’s own approval ratings dogged by
concerns about his age and ability to
serve a full second term, it underscores
doubts about her ability to step up if it
were necessary.
Harris, 59, has an approval rating of
42 per cent, a point behind Biden on 43
per cent. She has taken a key role in Biden’s campaign, touting White House
achievements, touring the country and
leading the offensive against Donald
Trump over abortion rights.
As the first black woman to be elected
vice-president, Harris has also spearheaded the push to win back African
American voters who have drifted
towards Trump over Biden’s handling
of the economy.
On those issues, Harris polls strongly. The survey showed her outperforming Biden among such voters and polling well on abortion, healthcare and
LGBT rights. Favourability among
Hispanic voters also betters Biden’s.
RL Miller, an outgoing member of
the Democratic National Committee,
told Politico that concerns about Harris
within her own party are underpinned
by the lingering trauma at Hillary
Clinton’s defeat to Trump in 2016.
“I am afraid Democrats have internalised the Hillary Clinton lesson —
that a woman can’t win. And I think it’s
sad,” Miller said.

Trump revels in his
Capitol Hill return

A

packed
room of
Republicans
sang Happy
Birthday to
Donald Trump, who
turns 78 today, as he
visited Capitol Hill for
the first time since the
rampage by a mob of
his supporters after

the 2020 election
(David Charter
writes).
Trump set out his
re-election plans to
separate meetings of
congressmen and
senators at a private
venue near Congress.
They were shunned by
the handful of

Donald Trump returned to Capitol Hill yesterday for
the first time since the riots on January 6, 2021

members who oppose
his return and have
not been purged or
resigned.
“We’re excited to
welcome President
Trump back,” Mike
Johnson, the House
Speaker, said. Asked if
he pushed Trump to
respect the peaceful
transfer of power,
unlike the violent
scenes on January 6,
2021, Johnson said:
“Of course he respects
that, we all do, and

we’ve all talked about
it, ad nauseam.”
Mitch McConnell,
the outgoing Senate
Republican leader
who once blamed
Trump for the
“disgraceful ...
insurrection”, said he
now endorsed him.
“He’s earned the
nomination by the
voters all across the
country,” he said.
The moderate
senators Susan
Collins, Lisa
Murkowski and Mitt
Romney, all of whom
voted to convict
Trump after his
impeachment trial, did
not attend, citing
scheduling conflicts.
Bill Cassidy, who
also voted to convict,
said he would
probably join the
senators’ meeting.
“He’s going to be the
next president, so you
have to work
together,” he said.
Republicans are
hopeful they will
reverse the
Democrats’ 51-49
advantage in the
Senate when a third of
seats are contested in
November.
Bennie Thompson, a
Democratic House
member from
Mississippi who
chaired the select
committee
investigating the riot,
said: “After inciting a
deadly insurrection
that defiled the halls
of Congress, how dare
Trump show his face
on these grounds? ...
He still presents the
same dire threat to
our democracy that he
did three years ago.”

Biden seeks star power in La La Land
Hollywood stars could
sway the key voters
who will decide the
White House race,
writes Will Pavia
Occasionally on screen, George Clooney and Julia Roberts have played
ex-partners thrust together once more
to complete a difficult task, such as
stopping their daughter from marrying
a man she loves, or pinching millions
from a casino, or stealing a Fabergé egg.
Tomorrow they will be reunited in
downtown Los Angeles for another
mission: to raise millions of dollars fast
and help a man in his eighties to win
re-election to the White House
Clooney and Roberts are the stars of
a Hollywood fundraiser for President
Biden’s re-election campaign that will
also feature Barack Obama, in a supporting role. The Biden campaign has
said that besides speaking at the event,
at the Peacock Theatre, the two actors
will be part of a contest, broadcast on
social media, to engage with small
donors and to draw in other members
of the Hollywood elite.
It could also test whether Hollywood
stars have any sway at all with the swing

voters who may decide this contest.
Evidence of this has tended to elude
political scientists, though it has been
tried time and again, since the Warren
G Harding campaign of 1920, for which
the actor Al Jolson sang, “We’re here to
make a fuss, Warren Harding, you’re
the man for us!”
“Frank Sinatra backed FDR,” said
Mark Harvey, author of Celebrity Influence. But before the 1960s, most actors
had contracts that stopped them from
making endorsements, he said.
George McGovern, the Democratic
presidential candidate in
1972, was helped by Warren Beatty. McGovern
actually described Beatty
as “the third or fourth most
important person in
the campaign”, albeit one that failed.
Summarising
these and later
celebrity-assisted
campaigns in a
2008 study, two
economists
offered
evidence
that Oprah WinGeorge Clooney
and Julia Roberts
are helping the
Biden campaign

frey’s endorsement of Obama had
drawn a million extra votes for the candidate. But this was in the Democratic
primary, where voters were choosing
between Democrats. It would take a far
greater force, most think, in a presidential election.
“What would it take a Biden supporter to vote for Trump or a Trump
supporter to vote for Biden?” asked
Matthew Beckmann, an associate
professor of political science at the
University of California, Irvine. “The
answer: a hell of a lot more than a celebrity endorsement.”
The all-important swing
voters tend to be “less interested and informed about
politics generally”, which in
turn means they are less
likely to notice or
remember a celebrity
endorsement, he said.
In a presidential election, “the ocean is so big
and the tides are so
strong,” he said.
By ocean, he did not
mean Danny Ocean, of
Ocean’s Eleven, in
which Clooney and
Roberts both star. He
meant the metaphorical ocean of all voters’
issues and concerns: “the

economy, foreign policy, partisan ideology. It’s very hard to think of how you
would change the ocean.”
On the other hand, Hollywood
actors are clearly very helpful when it
comes to raising money.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, who co-founded
the studio DreamWorks Pictures, was
an early supporter of Obama. He
staged a fundraiser for Obama in 2012
— held at Clooney’s house — that
raised $15 million.
Last year, Biden made Katzenberg
one of seven co-chairs of his re-election
campaign. Part of his job was fundraising, but it was also said that he could
offer the insight of a captain of the great
storytelling industry of Hollywood, on
how Biden should present himself to
the nation.
“I always just say, look, everybody
keeps coming into Hollywood for cash,
and they don’t come to us for the one
thing we do better than anybody, which
is tell stories,” Clooney told the Wall
Street Journal last year. “And so I think
it’s probably a very good idea that
they’re going to Jeffrey not just for raising money, but for narratives.”
Katzenberg was said to have told Biden to “own” his age and to regard it as an
advantage. In Hollywood, after all,
Harrison Ford, 81, recently reprised the
role of Indiana Jones, and Ridley Scott,
who is 86, keeps up an exacting sched-

ule as a director. Tom Rothman, head of
Sony’s film division, that distributed the
director’s 2023 film Napoleon, told the
New Yorker that “Ridley Scott is the
single best argument for a second term
for Joe Biden.”
Besides Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg, 77, his friend and a co-founder of
DreamWorks, is credited with helping
to prepare Biden on his speech to commemorate the D-Day anniversary in
Normandy. He has also been advising
the campaign on how best to present
Biden at the Democratic National Convention in August.
There have been suggestions that the
deployment of Hollywood moguls
might backfire. During the Iowa caucuses in January, a reporter asked Katzenberg if his position on the campaign
might serve to “underscore” a Republican argument that his party was dominated by coastal elites and had lost
touch with the working class.
The mogul bristled at the question.
New York Magazine, which reported
the exchange, also reported that Katzenberg had once insisted, to an employee, that he was well-placed to reach
younger people. “I’m not a child or
mother, but I made movies children
and mothers loved. I know millennials
better than millennials.”

32

V2

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

World

Goalie saves China’s football dream
China
Richard Spencer China Correspondent

Chinese football fans rarely have much to
cheer about. Of all the sports in which the
People’s Republic has aimed for world
leadership, success at the beautiful game
has been the most elusive.
The national team last made it to the
World Cup finals in 2002. It lost all three
games at the group stage. Its professional
league is constantly mired in corruption
and match-fixing scandals.
But at last the nation has a footballing
hero on whom it can shower its love. The
fact that he is a Singaporean semi-professional does not matter.
Fans have lavished Hassan Sunny with
praise and Chinese tourists have mobbed
the food stall in a shopping mall where he
does his day job as a chef. Grateful Chinese
stuck back home have even uncovered the
stall’s mobile payment system and sent
him random sums of money in gratitude.
Sunny’s performance in goal was undoubtedly heroic, albeit in a losing cause.
Singapore lost 3-1 to Thailand in a 2026
World Cup qualifying match on Tuesday
— Singapore, a small island nation, rarely
wins the big games either.
However, Thailand needed to win by

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three clear goals to go through to the next
round at the expense of China. The difference was the 11 sometimes startling saves
the veteran 40-year-old goalkeeper made
to prevent Thailand achieving that.
Online, commentators called him
“China’s honorary 12th man” and “a godlike creature”.
Several fans promised to pay a visit to
his food stall, which sells nasi lemak,
the Malaysian national rice dish,
next time they visited Singapore.
As local Singaporean journalists
who checked for themselves discovered, they were too late —
there was already no nasi lemak
left.
Instead, the seating area in
front of the stall, called Dapur
Hassan, in Tampines mall, was full
of Chinese social media influencers
taking photographs of each other.
Despite playing only semi-professionally Sunny is highly regarded as Singapore’s goalkeeper of 20 years’ standing,

The veteran Singapore
goalkeeper Hassan
Sunny’s heroics kept
China in the running for
a World Cup place

earning 115 caps. Given Singapore’s defensive record, he has had a lot of goal-saving
practice, and was once ranked among the
world’s best.
In Tuesday’s match he was recorded as
having made 11 saves from 35 attempts on
goal by Thailand, particularly in a frenetic
last few minutes as the attacking side went
all-out for the goal that would have taken
them to the third World Cup qualifying
stage. The qualifiers are a particularly gruelling ordeal for Asian fans. The continent’s large number of countries and relative lack of success — its best performance
was South Korea’s losing semi-final spot
against Germany in its home tournament
in 2002 — means a long and complicated
qualification process.
In this round, China’s 1-0 defeat by group
leaders South Korea meant that the 3-1
win by Thailand left both countries on the
same points and with the same goal difference. China went through by virtue of a
better head-to-head record.
World Cup glory is by no means assured,
though. The third round of qualifying has
18 teams, six of which can go straight
through to the finals but another six of
which have to make their fans suffer
potential fourth, fifth and sixth rounds.
President Xi would eschew British politicians’ fantasies of there being a link
between football performance and political standings for the ruling party. China’s
ruling Communist Party has, however,
made success in the Olympic Games a key
matter of national pride and Xi, a noted
football fan as well as being the man who
oversaw the 2008 Beijing Olympics, has
made clearing up corruption in the
national football league a personal
project.
The financial instinct dies hard,
however. One fan posted 100 Singapore dollars — about £60 — to
Hassan’s shop account. Such
post-match “bungs” are on a different ethical scale from those
usually faced by Chinese football, however: the head of the
Chinese Football Association
was jailed for life in March for
accepting £8 million in bribes.
Sunny has accepted the Chinese
fans’ thanks with the good grace that
has marked his career, posting a video
to Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of
Twitter, thanking them in Mandarin.

Ludwig sniffs German Euro 24 win
Germany
David Crossland Berlin

Paul the Octopus won a huge following as
a sporting soothsayer in the 2008 Euros
and 2010 World Cup. Fellow fortune-tellers have included Emma the pig, Nelly the
elephant, Konstantin the elk, the ferrets
Snow White and Freddy, Lorenzo the parrot, Fedor the tiger, Daisy the seal, Nanook
the polar bear cub and Flocke the penguin.
Now Germany has revived the tradition
of football tournament prediction, with
Ludwig the dachshund having picked the
home team to beat Scotland in tonight’s
opening match of Euro 2024.
At an event in his native Munich, the
“Dachshund Oracle” was presented with
three bowls of chicken treats: one by the
German flag, one by the cross of St Andrew and one by both, meaning a draw.
“He trotted determinedly over to the German bowl,” said Philipp Paulus, whose
marketing company organised the event.
“So Ludwig believes the German team will
win the opener against the Scottish team.”
The three-year-old dog, unfazed by the
photographers, also picked the tournament winner: Portugal. A local radio station may ask Ludwig for more predictions,
depending on the outcome of the match.
There are hopes Ludwig will be more

Ludwig the dachshund
was enticed more by the
bowl of chicken treats by
the German flag —
indicating a home win in
their opening Euro 2024
match against Scotland

accurate than Sisi, his predecessor as
Munich’s Dachshund Oracle, who picked
Bayern Munich to beat Chelsea in the 2012
Champions League Final and was “just a
little off the mark”, said Paulus (the Bavarians lost on penalties).
Volker Hiddemann, Ludwig’s owner, has
confidence in him. “He is a very relaxed,
even-tempered and thoughtful character
— especially for a dachshund.”
Germany’s fascination with animal oracles dates back to Paul the Octopus, who
lived in the Sea Life Centre in Oberhausen.
He correctly picked the winner in four of
Germany’s six Euro 2008 matches and all
seven of their matches in the 2010 World
Cup, as well as predicting that Spain would
win. Each time, Paul was offered two transparent boxes marked with a national flag
and containing a mussel. The first opened
marked the winner.
His fame grew with every correct prediction and at one point his hosts at the
Oberhausen Sea Life Centre posted a
security guard outside his tank .
Paul was made an honorary citizen of
the Spanish village of Carballiño and Russian reporters travelled to Oberhausen to
ask him to pick the winner of the next presidential election.

the times | Friday June 14 2024

33

S1

Business
world markets (Change on the day)

commodities

FTSE 100
8,163.67 (-51.81)

Gold
$2,298.31 (-36.66)

May 15 22

30

Dow Jones
38,647.10 (-65.11)

June 6

13

currencies
$

Brent crude (6pm)
$82.70 (-0.05)

$

£/$
$1.2763 (+0.0077)

£/€
€1.1864 (+0.0022)

$

¤

8,500

42,500

2,600

120

1.400

1.300

8,000

40,000

2,400

100

1.300

1.200

7,500

37,500

2,200

80

1.200

1.100

7,000

35,000

2,000

60
13

1.100

May 15 22

30

June 6

13

May 16 23

30

June 6

13

May 16 23

30

June 6

May 16 23

30

June 6

13

1.000
May 16 23

30

June 6

13

Bellway reveals it has made several offers for embattled Crest
Tom Saunders

Bellway confirmed last night that it had
made several takeover offers for Crest
Nicholson, with the news emerging
only hours after the latest in a string of
profit warnings by its embattled housebuilding rival.
Its latest bid, made on May 7 and
rejected by the target company’s board,
would have been equivalent to about
253p per Crest Nicholson share, valu-

ing the business at £667 million. Shares
in Crest Nicholson tumbled by 28p, or
11.6 per cent, to 212¾p yesterday after it
issued its profit alert.
Bellway said it believed there was a
“compelling strategic and financial
rationale” for a combination of the two
businesses, which would allow Crest
Nicholson to benefit from “a reduced
risk profile, lower indebtedness and an
enhanced land bank”.
It suggested that this had been only

the “latest non-binding all-share offer”
for the rival company, which has been
plagued by operational issues, most
recently a string of building defects at
about 140 of its sites.
Crest Nicholson disclosed yesterday
that it would have to spend £31.4 million
rectifying the issues, more than double
its original estimate of about £15 million, after it expanded the scope of its
review. The housebuilder’s shares have
underperformed the wider sector in the

past 18 months, although it retains an
attractive land bank. Analysts at
Investec, the broker, noted that only
about 5 per cent of its plots could be
considered “lower-margin” sites.
Crest has been working through its
lower-margin developments, which
has affected its overall profitability,
while it also has struggled with a drop in
demand, which it blamed on “volatility
in mortgage rates”.
News of the bid came hours before

Martyn Clark is set to take the top job at
Crest Nicholson from Peter Truscott,
who announced his plan to step down
as chief executive in January.
Clark formerly was the chief commercial officer at Persimmon, a larger
listed competitor. Truscott, who has
been in charge since 2019, announced
his plan to resign after the company
issued its third profit warning in five
months earlier in the year.

Musk wins
backing for
record pay
Tesla investors vote in favour of $56bn package
Louisa Clarence-Smith
US Business Editor

Elon Musk, Tesla’s chief executive, has
received shareholder backing to reinstate his $56 billion pay package — the
biggest in American corporate history.
Tesla confirmed that proposals to
ratify Musk’s pay deal and move the
company’s legal home to Texas had
been approved by shareholders, who
chanted “Elon Musk, Elon Musk” after
the preliminary results were revealed
at the company’s annual meeting at its
headquarters in Austin, Texas.
Speaking to shareholders after the
results were announced, Musk said:
“Hot damn, I love you guys.”
Musk has been fighting to get his
hands on the payout, first agreed in
2018, after a judge in Delaware, where
Tesla is presently incorporated, voided
the pay deal in January over concerns
about the board’s transparency and independence when it was approved.
Musk and Tesla’s board have spent
two months trying to convince shareholders to back the deal, to bolster their
chances of a successful appeal to the
Delaware ruling.
The vote has been interpreted on
Wall Street as a test of confidence in
Musk’s leadership of Tesla. Shares in
the carmaker are down 60 per cent
from their 2021 peak as EV sales have
slowed, leading to criticism that Musk’s
attention has been too divided between
Tesla and his other companies. Tesla’s
board has argued that Musk deserves
the package because he hit targets on
market value, revenue and profitability.
Shares in Tesla jumped 2.9 per cent,

or $5.18, to close at $182.47 yesterday
after Musk said preliminary voting
showed the key proposals had been approved by “wide margins”.
The vote win is a significant boost to
Musk, who this week has faced allegations that he pursued several female
employees at his company SpaceX for
sex. Musk has not responded to the
claims, published in a detailed report by
the Wall Street Journal.
However, he still faces a battle to
secure legal approval for the payout.
“Even if the shareholders do approve
the old package, it is not clear that the
Delaware court will allow that vote to
be effective,” said Adam Badawi, a law
professor at UC Berkeley.
Robyn Denholm, Tesla’s chair, had
suggested that Musk would leave the
company if investors voted against the
pay deal . Meanwhile, Musk had threatened to build AI and robotics products
outside Tesla should he fail to gain
enough voting control, which requires
the 2018 pay package to be approved.
The payout divided shareholders.
Those in favour included Ron Baron of
Baron Capital, who said Musk, with his
“relentless drive and uncompromising
standards”, was integral to Tesla.
Baillie Gifford & Co, the Scottish asset manager, and Ark Investment Management, the investment firm, also
backed the deal. Norges Bank, Norway’s sovereign wealth fund, and the
California Public Employees’ Retirement System intended to vote against.
Glass Lewis and Institutional Shareholder Services, the shareholder advisory firms, had also urged investors to
reject the pay package.

Yazmin Oukhellou and Scott Timlin, a Celebrity Big Brother winner, arrive at Westminster magistrates’ court yesterday

Influencers accused over trading scheme
Jonathan Ames Legal Editor

A reality television influencer has
pleaded not guilty to illegally plugging
unauthorised investment schemes on
social media.
Scott Timlin, who appeared on the
MTV show Geordie Shore, is one of nine
financial influencers charged by the
Financial Conduct Authority in relation to an unauthorised foreignexchange trading scheme.
Investigators have alleged that Timlin, 36, along with Emmanuel Nwanze,
30, and Holly Thompson, 34, used an
Instagram account to provide unauthorised advice on buying and selling
contracts-for-difference. These are
agreements between investors and brokers to exchange the difference in the
value of a financial product between
the time the contract opens and closes.

They were said to be high-risk derivatives, with 80 per cent of customers investing in them losing money.
Officials at the regulator described
the contracts as being “highly leveraged”, using debt in an effort to amplify
returns, “which can result in investors
losing more than they invested”.
In court the authority further alleged
that Nwanze had paid other social
media influencers to promote the account to a combined 4.5 million Instagram followers. They were Lauren
Goodger, 37, Yazmin Oukhellou, 30,
and Eva Zapico, 25, all of whom starred
in ITV’s The Only Way is Essex, and
Chris Biggs, 32, Jamie Clayton, 32, and
Rebecca Gormley, 26, contestants on
Love Island, also on ITV.
All of the defendants face one count
of issuing unauthorised communications of financial promotions. Nwanze

also faces one count of breaching a general prohibition under the Financial
Services and Markets Act 2000, which
prohibits the unauthorised conduct of
regulated activities in the UK.
Timlin, who won Channel 5’s Celebrity Big Brother in 2016, appeared in person at Westminster magistrates’ court
in London alongside Oukhellou,
Nwanze and Zapico. He pleaded not
guilty to one count of unauthorised
communications of financial promotions. Nwanze pleaded not guilty to the
same charge, as well as one count of
breaching the general prohibition.
Thompson, who appeared via video
link alongside Goodger, pleaded not
guilty to one count of unauthorised
communications of financial promotions. The remaining defendants provided no indication of their pleas.
Another hearing has been set for July 3.

34

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

Business

Need to know

1

Elon Musk has declared victory
in a campaign to win investors’
backing to reinstate his
$56 billion pay package. Shares in
Tesla rose after he claimed that
preliminary results showed that
shareholders had backed proposals
to ratify his pay deal.

2

Bellway, the housebuilder,
confirmed that it had made
several takeover offers for its
rival Crest Nicholson, which
issued the latest in a string of
profit warnings yesterday. Its latest
bid would have valued the
company at £6.5 billion.

3

A reality TV influencer has
pleaded not guilty to illegally
plugging unauthorised
investments on social media. Scott
Timlin, who appeared on the MTV
show Geordie Shore, is one of nine
influencers charged by the
Financial Conduct Authority over
a high-risk scheme.

4

England and Scotland
football fans drinking a pint
while watching the Euros will
be paying four times more duty
than the European average.
Scottish fans will pay 54.2p in
duty, compared with the 4.6p that
German fans pay when Scotland v
Germany kicks off tonight.

5

A key measure of US
producer prices fell last month
and more Americans claimed
unemployment benefits, raising
the prospect of interest rate cuts.
Monthly producer prices inflation
fell by 0.2 per cent in May after a
0.5 per cent increase in April.

6

Labour’s charm offensive with
business has soured slightly
over plans to reform workers’
rights. So it will likely see the
generally upbeat response from
industry to its manifesto as a
victory. Paul Johnson, the
economist, captured the mood as
he criticised the lack of “big
numbers” in its tax and spending
plans but welcomed the focus on
“growth and stability”.

7

More than 50 years after he
founded the company, the
executive chairman of
Renishaw is stepping down. Sir
David McMurtry, 84, a prominent
engineer, will become a nonexecutive director at the
engineering business from the
start of July.

8

As much as £1 billion was
wiped off the value of Wise
after the money transfer
platform said it expected income
growth to slow. Kristo Kaarmann,
Wise’s billionaire co-founder,
hailed “another very strong year”,
but the City was more focused on
his warning.

9

There are “tentative signs of
recovery” in the City after the
deals and trading drought of
the past two years, according to
the boss of Peel Hunt. Steven Fine
pointed to recent initial public
offerings in London and a pick-up
in trading volumes.

10

Across the board
increases in revenue,
profit, margins and its
dividend have cemented Halma’s
place as a FTSE 100 favourite.
Shares in the conglomerate closed
up by 13.4 per cent after a bumper
set of figures for the year to the
end of March.

Crest looks to
start rebuild
as rising costs
dent profits
Tom Howard

Crest Nicholson is having to spend
twice as much money as it had originally estimated fixing defects and issues at
dozens of its older developments, which
will put a big dent in this year’s profits.
The housebuilder, which has lurched
from one problem to another over the
past year, said it would have to spend
£31.4 million rectifying the issues at
about 140 sites nationwide, most of
which were completed before 2019.
Until now it had thought that £15 million would be enough to cover extra
work.
The additional costs partly explain
why Crest now believes that its adjusted pre-tax profit for the current financial year, which runs until October, will
be between £22 million and £39 million.
City analysts had been forecasting a
number nearer to £40 million.
The profit warning, the latest in a
string of gloomy updates from the company, sent Crest’s shares down by 28p,
or 11.6 per cent, to close at 212¾p.
Crest Nicholson was founded in the
1960s and is now one of Britain’s biggest
housebuilders. Its recent problems
have included repeated cost overruns
at a troublesome regeneration project
in Farnham, Surrey; a fire in a block of
flats that it built; and the recent
discovery of construction defects at
four sites.
Shareholders first learnt of those defects in March, when Crest said it would
spend about £15 million fixing them. It
then reviewed the rest of its older sites
to see if there was anything else that
might need doing.
As part of that review, Crest did not
find any other build defects, but it did
reassess how much it needed to spend
going back and finishing off surrounding infrastructure such as roads, drains
and open spaces at 140 other older de-

velopments. A third-party consultant
also told the company that the £15 million it had set aside to fix defects at the
first four sites was actually going to cost
nearly £20 million. “It wasn’t that we
found any new issues, it’s just that we’ve
tidied up the cost of the liabilities,”
Peter Truscott, the chief executive of
Crest, said. “It was a thorough comprehensive review so that we can give our
board and our investors some confidence that we’re on top of everything.”
Analysts suggested that this might be
Truscott, 61, “clearing the decks” for his
successor, Martyn Clark, who formally
takes over tomorrow.
The extra costs contributed to Crest
falling to a pre-tax loss of £30.9 million
between November and April, the first
half of its financial year. That compared
with a first-half profit of £28.4 million in
the same period a year earlier.
Crest’s profitability has been affected
further as it works its way through the
last of its lower-margin developments,
while there has been a drop-off in demand for new homes over the past
couple of months, which it blamed on
the renewed “volatility in mortgage
rates”.
“I think people are just waiting to see
the direction of travel on rates,” Truscott said. “Discretionary buyers are
more likely to be sitting on their hands
until they’re sure of which way they are
going to go.”
Crest delivered 788 homes in the first
half and had expected to complete up to
2,000 over the entire financial year.
However, it now thinks that 1,900, at
best, is a more realistic figure.
“The sales rate is as expected, but
we’ve got fewer outlets because it’s
taking longer to get planning consents,”
Truscott said. “Planning takes at least
twice as long as it did [30 years ago] and
probably a lot longer. You get there in
the end, but everything is delayed.”

Rocky foundations

Crest Nicholson counts cost
of its summer sales washout
Aug 22, 2023 Crest suffers
profits warning after a
summer slump in sales
Nov 17, 2023 Second
profit warning blamed
on “continued weakness"
in the market"

2023
Jul

Aug

Sep

Behind the story

P

eter Truscott, the outgoing
chief executive of Crest
Nicholson, freely admits
that he and his team were
too slow to identify some
of the issues he inherited when he
joined in September 2019 (Tom
Howard writes).
“The overall operating platform
that we’ve got is much better [than
five years ago], but there have been
some slip-ups in recent years,” he
said. “We haven’t identified some of
this legacy stuff as early as we
would’ve ideally liked.”
Brightwells Yard, a complex

Oct

Nov

Dec

regeneration scheme in Farnham,
Surrey, comprising several blocks
of flats, bars, restaurants and a
shopping centre, perhaps has been
the biggest thorn in Truscott’s side.
Work there has nearly finished, but
it has run way over schedule and
millions of pounds above budget, so
much so that Crest does not expect
to make any money out of it.
There are several other low or
even zero-margin developments
that the company has been working
through during Truscott’s tenure,
including in Hove and in Waltonon-Thames. The hope is that they
will be cleared by the end of 2025.
This year Crest delivered another

England fans pay most duty for a pint during Euros
Dominic Walsh

When England and Scotland football
fans sip a pint while watching their
teams in the Euros this weekend, they
will be paying four times more duty
than the European average and a dozen
times more than fans in Germany, the
tournament’s host country.
Scottish football fans will pay 54.2p in
duty, compared with the 4.6p that
German fans pay when the first game of
the competition, Scotland v Germany,
kicks off tonight. England fans, who will
watch their team play Serbia on Sunday, also also will pay 54.2p, rather more
than the 12.7p that Serbian fans will pay.
The British Beer & Pub Association,
whose members brew 90 per cent of the
beer sold in the UK and which between
them own more than 20,000 pubs, has
written to the leaders of the three
leading political parties calling for “fair
recognition” of the industry’s value. It
says it is “imperative that the next

government provides a sustainable and
proportionate fiscal and regulatory
framework”.
The association, which represents
numerous family-run regional brewers
and national pub companies, says that
since the turn of the century a quarter
of Britain’s pubs have closed permanently, with taxes being one of the main
factors. It says that to secure the industry’s future, a step-change is required in
the way it is dealt with.
Like the rest of the hospitality
industry, it has been hit badly by Covid
and the cost of living crisis. The government has frozen beer duty since 2020
and the present rate will remain in
place until February next year. The
trade body’s members have demanded
a cut in duty as a first step towards
bringing the sum they pay down to the
European average.
They are also asking for the amount
that pubs pay in business rates to be
reduced. Pubs alone pay £500 million a

Duty paid on a 5% beer
In the Euro nations
England
54.2p
Scotland
54.2p
Turkey
43.7p
Slovenia
29.5p
France
19p
Netherlands
18.5p
Average
18.1p
Italy
17.4p
Denmark
15.9p
Croatia
12.9p
Switzerland
12.9p
Serbia
12.7p
Poland
12.3p
Belgium
11.7p
Austria
11.7p
Hungary
11.1p
Portugal
10.7p
Slovakia
8.7p
Czech R
7.7p
Romania
5p
Spain
4.8p
Germany
4.6p

year in business rates, almost 3 per cent
of the total amount raised, but bring in
only 0.5 per cent of turnover across all
UK businesses. According to the
association, if business rates relief was
removed, most pubs would close overnight.
The association also wants VAT on
non-alcoholic drinks and on food sold
in in pubs to be removed to bring it in
line with the retail sector.
More than 80 brewing and pub company bosses have signed the letters.
They include Emma McClarkin, the
association’s chief executive; Nick
Mackenzie, the chief executive of
Greene King and chairman of the
BBPA; Simon Emeny, the chief executive of Fuller, Smith & Turner; Kevin
Georgel, the boss of St Austell Brewery;
David McDowall, chief executive of
Stonegate Group, Britain’s biggest pubs
company; and Lawson Mountstevens,
the managing director of Star Pubs &
Bars, which is owned by Heineken.

35

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Business

260p
Jan 15, 2024 Profit warning
number three as interest rates
rise and legacy costs escalate

240
220
200

Jan 24, 2024 Former
chief executive Peter
Truscott steps down after
the hat-trick of warnings

180
160

2024
Jan

140
Feb

Mar

Apr

blow to its shareholders by
revealing that it needed to spend
£15 million fixing defects at four
older developments.
It has not said where they are,
but at one it needs to sort out a car
park, the roof needs replacing at
another and the remaining two
have the same “particular
construction defect issue”. It has
not been disclosed what that defect
is, but it is not thought to be safetyrelated. An external consultancy
has told Crest that its £15 million
estimate is too low and that
£20 million is likely to be needed to
sort those out.
Now it has emerged that there

May

Jun

Source: FactSet

are 140 other developments that
need some work to properly finish
off. Crest said it had known about
these but that it hadn’t quite
understood how much it was all
going to cost. Somewhere north of
£10 million, it turns out.
None of the issues are to do with
building safety but are more related
to the surrounding infrastructure
— completing roads, getting them
adopted and finishing off the
drains. “A lot of the heavy lifting
has been done,” Truscott said, “but
I would’ve liked to have got through
some of this legacy stuff earlier and
getting the cost estimates right
sooner.”

UK property
prices set
to stagnate

Housing manifesto
subject to survey

Tom Howard

business commentary Alistair Osborne

House prices are now unlikely to rise by
much, if at all, this year, one prominent
forecasting house has claimed.
Capital Economics had expected
prices to rise by 2 per cent in 2024, but
it now thinks that growth of 0.5 per cent
at best is more likely.
Its about-turn came after the latest
survey from the Royal Institution of
Chartered Surveyors showed that estate agents were taking fewer enquiries
from would-be buyers, were agreeing
fewer sales and were reporting more
price reductions than they were only a
month or so ago.
Agents blamed the recent rise in
mortgage rates for sapping the confidence of would-be buyers, with the average five-year fixed-rate mortgage
now back above 5 per cent for the first
time since January.
“This softening in demand has come
at the same time as the most significant
sustained increase in supply since 2013,
aside from when the housing market
reopened after lockdown,” Andrew
Wishart, senior UK economist at Capital Economics, said.
House prices have held much firmer
than most had expected over the past 18
months, given the rapid increase in
mortgage costs. Most analysts agree
that is because the fall in demand has
been met with a decline in supply, with
fewer people putting their houses up for
sale.
However, the institution reported a
rise in new listings coming on to the
market last month. As such, Wishart
now expects “the market will move into
a state of excess supply” in the coming
weeks, which will cause prices to dip
over the summer.
The combination of more homes on
the market and mortgage rates staying
higher for longer than most economists
had forecast has prompted Wishart to
reduce his estimates for this year.
Other economists remain convinced
that house prices will end this year
comfortably higher than where they
began. Rob Wood, chief UK economist
at Pantheon Macroeconomics, another
consultancy, noted that “higher mortgage rates [are taking] a toll’, but he still
expected the Bank of England to cut interest rates this year, which would
“light the way to renewed buyer interest” and would push up prices by 3 per
cent in 2024.

US inflation fall adds to rate cut hopes
Mehreen Khan Economics Editor

A key measure of producer prices in the
United States contracted last month
and more Americans claimed unemployment benefits, raising the prospect
of earlier interest rate cuts in the world’s
largest economy.
Monthly producer prices inflation
declined by 0.2 per cent in May after a
0.5 per cent increase in April. Economists had forecast a rise of 0.1 per cent
for last month. It was the second consecutive “disinflationary” surprise,
after May’s measure of American
consumer prices also eased by more
than expected to 3.3 per cent.
The inflation data came as the US
Federal Reserve drastically cut back its
forecasts for interest rate cuts from
three to one this year.
A measure of jobless claims also rose
by 242,000 last week, the highest figure
in ten months, reflecting softening in
the labour market, where unemploy-

ment has been steadily rising this year.
The Fed kept its benchmark interest
rate unchanged this week at a range of
5.25 per cent to 5.5 per cent and said that
there had been only “modest progress”
on bringing inflation back to its 2 per
cent target.
Analysts at Bank of America said the
Jerome Powell has
said that inflation
is still “too high”

May inflation data could prompt the
central bank into loosening monetary
policy in September, before November’s presidential election.
“An easing cycle that begins in
September remains a possibility,
particularly if shelter inflation were to
moderate further in the next couple of

months, but we continue to see a
December cut as more likely,” Stephen
Juneau, of the bank, said.
Forecasts published on Wednesday
show that the US economy is still
expected to grow at a slightly abovetrend 2.1 per cent this year, with the unemployment rate remaining at its current 4 per cent through the year.
The median projection from ratesetters was for one quarter-point interest rate cut this year. Four Fed policymakers said there should be no cuts this
year. Seven said they would like to
make one quarter-point cut, while eight
supported two cuts. Jerome Powell, the
Fed chairman, said inflation “has eased
substantially” but was “still too high”.
Wall Street stocks were mixed in
choppy trading yesterday and US Treasury yields touched their lowest since
early April as investors reconciled the
cooler-than-expected inflation data
with tempered rate cut expectations
from the Federal Reserve.

H

ome truths can spoil a
manifesto launch. A
simple one? That since
2006, when a UK
government first set its
300,000 a year target for building
new houses, Britain hasn’t hit it once.
Governments of both stripes have
routinely missed, often by 100,000plus units a year. So plenty has to be
taken on trust with Sir Keir
Starmer’s pledge of building a fresh
1.5 million abodes to “restore the
dream of home ownership” over the
next parliament (report, page 36).
At least he’s started with a bit of
ambition, even if you wonder if selfpromotion, not getting stuff done, is
his key skill: did he really have to
put 32 pictures of himself in
Labour’s 136-page election missive?
Whatever, after the Tories’ bleak
house regime, Starmer doesn’t have
a lot to beat. This year Britain will
be lucky to get to half the target for
new-builds. And Starmer has
spotted the key problem: the mix of
Nimbyism and planning gloop
exemplified by Rishi Sunak caving
in to a backbench Tory revolt just
after becoming PM and junking
mandatory housebuilding targets
for local authorities. The result?
More than 60 withdrew their plans
for new homes, instead spending
£50 million on planning appeals — a
move that consultancy Lichfields
reckoned would lead to 75,000
fewer homes being built each year.
The damage is clear. The latest
housing pipeline report from the
Home Builders Federation shows
that in the first quarter of this year
only 2,472 sites were given planning
permission, the lowest figure since
2006. On top is a staff shortage. The
Royal Town Planning Institute
found net spend on local authority
planning wings fell by a real-terms
55 per cent to £480 million between
2009-10 and 2020-21.
Starmer says he’ll “immediately”
work to put all that right, “restoring
mandatory housing targets”,
ensuring authorities have up-todate “local plans”, using government
“intervention powers” where
necessary and hiring 300 planning
officers — funded by some of the
£40 million earmarked from a 1 per
cent hike in stamp duty for non-UK
buyers of residential properties. Yet
none of this is a quick fix. New
planning officers have to be trained.
And, as RBC analysts noted, the
industry reckons “£500 million will
be required over four years” to
tackle planning delays and the drop
in departmental funding.
Some of Starmer’s stuff is wishywashy, too. About 160,000 homes
remain unbuilt due to “nutrient
neutrality” rules — the need to
mitigate any extra nutrient load
from developments. Starmer glibly
says he’ll “unlock the building” of
such homes “without weakening
environmental protections”. But
how, exactly? He also plans to
deliver the biggest rise in affordable
homes “in a generation”. But aren’t
they the least profitable to build?
Dean Finch, the Persimmon boss,
is not alone, either, in calling for
more than a “mortgage guarantee
scheme” to get first-time buyers
struggling to raise a deposit on the
ladder — not least with interest
rates on the rise again. “Without a

stimulant, I don’t see how Labour is
going to hit its numbers,” he says.
And even if demand picks up,
Britain has an ageing construction
workforce and skills shortage — not
helped by post-Brexit resistance to
importing foreign labour. There’s
also a lack of smaller builders for
the sites of ten homes or fewer that
the big guns, such as Barratt,
Persimmon and Taylor Wimpey,
won’t touch. In short, Starmer’s
target is no easy hit. Still, at least
he’d be trying to bring it home.

Return to sender?

M

aybe Daniel Kretinsky will
hand over to the posties one
of his polluting coal-fired
power plants. Or a few metres of the
Eustream gas pipeline. Or perhaps a
stake in West Ham United.
How else, you wonder, can the
Czech billionaire fulfil the demands
of Dave Ward, the Communications
and Workers Union chief, to give his
110,000 Royal Mail members a
“significant and meaningful” stake
in the business? Or, for that matter,
meet the ambitions of Starmer, who
says vaguely that he’ll “explore new
business and governance models for
Royal Mail”.
If Kretinsky succeeds with his
£3.6 billion takeover of the Royal
Mail’s owner, International
Distribution Services, it’ll be
subsumed into his EP Group. He’s
said it will become a “core
subsidiary” — part of maintaining
EP’s investment-grade credit rating.
This is a private company owned by
him. So what mechanism is he
supposed to use to give the posties a
stake in EP’s Royal Mail subsidiary?
Some weird illiquid share scheme
that no one can value?
True, maybe he could offer some
sort of Royal Mail profit share. But if
Ward wants his workers to have a
stake in the business, it would be far
easier if it wasn’t sold to the Czech
Sphinx. Share options in a listed
business would do the trick nicely.

Frozen assets

W

annabe Tory MP one
minute, warm-up act for
Starmer the next. The
human chameleon Richard Walker
— the executive chairman of
Iceland — has thawed from blue to
red in no time. But even he can’t
totally reinvent his past.
Who can forget the puzzler he
posed in February 2021? “Why has
Iceland not followed some of the
other grocers in returning our
pandemic business rates relief to the
government?” The answer? Because
he and his dad, Sir Malcolm Walker,
spent some of the £40 million
freebie buying the frozen foods
company for themselves.
Thanks to the largesse of the
Tories, who Walker Jr is now so
“sick and tired” of, the family —
plus a few mates — had some extra
readies to buy out the 63 per cent
stake in the business held by South
Africa’s Brait. How lucky was that!
Who knew freeloaders cut so much
ice in the Labour Party?
alistair.osborne@thetimes.co.uk

36

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

Business

‘Details are thin but focus is right’
Business leaders and
experts react to the
launch of Labour’s
manifesto, write James
Hurley, Robert Lea
and Jessica Newman

industry, however. Analysts at Jefferies
said it appeared to dispel speculation
that “Labour would do something
drastic with Ofwat, such as replacing or
scrapping it”, which they view “as helpful for regulation stability”. Prices of
listed water companies rose.
royal mail
Labour indicated that it would intervene in the £3.6 billion recommended
takeover of International Distribution
Services, the Royal Mail owner, by
Daniel Kretinsky, the Czech billionaire,
promising “robust scrutiny” and “appropriate guarantees” for employees.
As reported in The Times yesterday,
Royal Mail’s main trade union is open to
a takeover, but only if Kretinsky grants
workers a stake and input into the
management of the group by an
employee collective trust.

Labour’s charm offensive with business
leaders has soured slightly in recent
months over its plans to reform
workers’ rights. As such, it is likely to see
the generally upbeat if muted reaction
from industry to its manifesto launch as
a victory.
Paul Johnson, the economist,
captured the mood when he criticised
the lack of “big numbers” in the party’s
tax and spending plans but welcomed
the focus in the manifesto on “economic growth and stability”.
“Planning reform, an effective
industrial strategy, promises of regulatory reform, all are needed,” he said.
“Details remain thin, but the focus
looks broadly right. However, delivering genuine change almost certainly
also will require putting actual resources on the table.” Here are Labour’s key
business pledges.
business tax
Looking to cement its concerted efforts
to be seen as pro-business, Labour said
it would cap corporation tax at 25 per
cent until the next parliament. It will be
more tricky to deliver its plan to overhaul business rates. The commercial
property tax is seen as outmoded and
unfair on high street retailers, but it is
also a significant source of revenue, one
that is easy to collect and hard to avoid.
Nik Moore, head of business rates at
Rapleys, a property consultancy,
warned: “It will be hard for any really
meaningful change to happen.”
The lack of a promise not to increase
capital gains tax fuelled speculation
that it could rise. Rachael Griffin, tax
and financial planning expert at
Quilter, the wealth manager,
said:
“Labour has
explicitly ruled out
increases to income
tax, national insurance, VAT and
corporation tax,
but makes no
mention of CGT.”
private equity
One of the more
contentious areas of
Labour
business
policy is its commitment to close the carried
interest loophole enjoyed by

workers’ rights
Labour has faced criticism from unions
over fears that it was watering down
plans for stronger workers’ rights, while
boardrooms feared disruption and
additional costs.
Its well-trailed proposals in the
manifesto include banning zero hours
contracts, ending “fire and rehire”
(whereby workers are sacked and then
immediately given a new contract on
new, less favourable terms) and introducing basic rights from “day one” to
parental leave, sick pay and protection
from unfair dismissal.

Labour promised the steel industry £2.5 billion investment and said it would also get Hinkley Point C, below, “over the line”

private equity executives. This allows
them to have profits taxed at 28 per
cent, the rate of capital gains tax, rather
than the combined income tax and
national insurance rate of 47 per cent.
Labour had been warned that closing
the loophole could trigger an exodus of
financial services workers. This led to
speculation that the party would
quietly drop its promise, but
the manifesto noted that
private equity was the
“only industry where
performance-related pay is treated as
capital gains”.
It reckons that
ending the tax
break will raise
£565 million
a
year by 2029, but
Jason Clatworthy,
managing director at
Alvarez & Marsal, the
consulting firm, noted
that many European nations

had carried interest in their tax
regimes, so “private equity managers
are already evaluating their options
and could aim to be ‘bag ready’ when
the reform comes in”.
building and planning
Labour promised to “get Britain
building again”, with 1.5 million new
homes during the next parliament, and
said wider planning reform would allow
the nation to “forge ahead with nationally significant infrastructure”.
Proposed planning reforms include a
stronger presumption in favour of
sustainable developments, funding for
more planning officers and a pledge
that government will intervene where
councils are seen to be blocking “the
houses we need”. It added that it would
restore mandatory housing targets.
Peter Truscott, the outgoing chief
executive of Crest Nicholson, warned:
“Land supply side is very constrained
and, regardless of which party wins the
election, this will not change quickly.”

utilities
Amid pledges to double onshore wind,
triple solar power and quadruple offshore wind by 2030, North Sea-focused
energy stocks dipped in response to the
manifesto after confirmation that
Labour would continue taxing big
energy producers and would not issue
new North Sea oil licences. Those
whose share prices were hit included
Harbour Energy, Serica Energy,
Enquest, Ithaca and Deltic.
The party also promised to get the
much-delayed Hinkley Point C “over
the line”, to create a new publicly
owned energy company and to invest in
carbon capture and storage, hydrogen
and marine energy.
Offshore Energies UK, a trade body,
warned: “Ramping up more carbonintensive imports from abroad will not
bring down energy bills for consumers
or attract the investment and skills we
need to decarbonise our economy.”
There were no nasty surprises in the
manifesto for the embattled water

industrial strategy
Certainty for industrial investment will
come with a ten-year plan overseen by
two new bodies, an Industrial Strategy
Council and a National Infrastructure
and Service Transformation Authority,
backed up by the creation of a £7.3 billion National Wealth Fund. That will
allocate £1.8 billion to ports; £1.5 billion
to battery-making automotive gigafactories; £2.5 billion for the steel
industry; £1 billion for carbon capture
schemes; and £500 million for green
hydrogen production.
Stephen Phipson, the chief executive
of Make UK, the manufacturers’ body,
said the manifesto sent a “powerful
signal on the importance of domestic
manufacturing”.
electric cars
Motor manufacturers and dealers will
be back to square one with the commitment to bring back the ban on the sale
of new combustion engine cars to 2030.
Rishi Sunak’s U-turn last autumn had
put the ban back to 2035.
Mike Hawes, chief executive of the
Society of Motor Manufacturers and
Traders, said “concerns over affordability and charging accessibility
remain significant barriers” to adoption.

Reeves hosts breakfast club in attempt to win over bosses
Katie Prescott
Technology Business Editor
Tom Howard

Labour is stepping up its charm
offensive on the City, bringing together
the bosses of some of Britain’s biggest
businesses to discuss its manifesto.
Sean Doyle, the chief executive of
British Airways, Clare Barclay, the chief
executive of Microsoft in the UK,
Nicola Hodson, of IBM UK and
Ireland, and Rob Perrins, the boss of
Berkeley Group, are among those
expected to meet Rachel Reeves, the
shadow chancellor, and Jonathan
Reynolds, the shadow business
secretary, in the City for breakfast this
morning.
Others on the list, seen by The Times,

include: Jody Ford, the chief executive
of Trainline; Sebastian James, the
managing director of Boots UK; Mark
Allan, chief executive at Land Securities; Shai Weiss, managing director of
Virgin Atlantic; and Simon Carter, chief
executive of British Land.
From the financial world, Matt
Hammerstein, the chief executive of
Barclays UK corporate bank, Clare
Woodman, the head of EMEA and
chief executive of Morgan Stanley,
TS Anil, chief executive of Monzo, and
Francesca Carlesi, the chief executive
of Revolut, are due to join the Labour
leaders.
Euan Blair, the chief executive of
Multiverse, an educational technology
company, and the son of Tony Blair, the
former Labour prime minister, is also

expected to attend the “senior business
leaders breakfast”.
Although no full agenda was set out
on the brief invitation, it will give
business leaders an opportunity to grill
the Labour leadership on the party’s
economic plans.
Business is wary of aligning itself to
one party during an election. An insider
said that several companies had asked
not to be named publicly because it
would be “too political”. One of those
attending said they planned to join
because “it was likely Labour would be
in power in a month’s time” so it made
sense to spend time with the leadership
and hear what they had to say.
A recent letter that Labour organised
to try to drum up business support had
a list of start-up bosses and former chief

executives but a paucity of active FTSE
company bosses.
Repairing relations with UK plc has
been a priority for Labour since the
years when Jeremy Corbyn led the
party. Reeves has spent time wooing
the City and engaging with businesses
on what has been called the “scrambled
eggs and smoked salmon offensive”.
The economy was top of the agenda for
yesterday’s manifesto launch and Sir
Keir Starmer said that Labour would
make wealth creation its “No 1 priority”
and that he was seeking a “mandate” for
economic growth.
There have been some concerns
about Labour’s plans to reform workers’
rights, such as banning zero hour contracts, a “right to switch off” from work
and giving workers full employment

protections on day one of a new job, but
the party has planned a “full and
comprehensive” consultation with
business and has diluted some of the
pledges. Starmer has announced that
he will not raise income tax, national
insurance or VAT.
Labour also has circulated a letter
around technology businesses aimed at
encouraging support for its policies. It
has not yet published the signatories to
the letter, but the Labour Digital group
said it had a “significant number” of
names on the list. Peter Kyle, the
shadow technology secretary, set out
his plans for the sector this week,
including easing planning regulation to
make data centres easier to build,
boosting the adoption of artificial intelligence and strengthening regulation.

37

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Business

Harry Wallop

Founder of
engineer
Renishaw to
step down

Therapy dogs? Old-fashioned
management skills have more bite

‘‘

This week, I
attended the
Festival of Work,
which sounds as if it
were a jolly
gathering held in a large tent in a
Herefordshire field. It was, in fact, the
Chartered Institute of Personnel and
Development’s annual conference, a
shindig for HR executives, held in the
bleak ExCel Centre in London, which
large amounts of bunting and a
campervan selling tacos could not
disguise.
It was, in many ways, like all
conferences held at the ExCel. There
were “fireside chats”, talks on “how to
diversify your workforce” and an
endless supply of corporate-branded
free ballpoint pens. But what really
struck me was how those in charge of
recruiting, managing and sacking
workers have had to morph into
quasi-therapists. Not only were there
four therapy dogs on site — the
queue for the Cuddle Club’s French
bulldog was far longer than the one
for the tacos — but also there was an
astonishing number of companies
specialising in workplace mental
health.
OpenUp is a firm that puts workers
in touch with psychologists. “Support
your employees, managers and their
families” is its pitch. It had a stand
next to YuLife, which runs Tesco and
Santander’s in-house “wellbeing
hubs”. There were divorce coaches,
wellbeing first responders and
companies offering desk yoga.
When did offices start to resemble
less a place to, er, work and more a
therapist’s couch? Max Donaldson, at
OpenUp, identified the main reasons
workers were accessing psychologists
as “stress and anxiety, and work
performance — ‘I don’t feel
motivated to turn up to work today’
or ‘I don’t feel I am being my best self
at work’.”
Many workers are finding work a
drag. This week Gallup, the vast
American polling company,
published its State of the Global
Workplace report, which it has been
running for the past 15 years. One
finding caught the eye of headline
writers in the UK, namely that 90 per
cent of British workers are “quiet
quitting”, costing the economy £257
billion in lost GDP.
Quiet quitting, for those unaware of
the Collins Dictionary words of the
year 2022, is a post-Covid version of

work-to-rule. Employees turn up on
time, leave on time and complete no
more tasks than they are
contractually obliged to undertake. In
short, every boss’s worst nightmare.
Can you axe them? No, because they
haven’t technically done anything
wrong, but they refuse to push
themselves or to volunteer for any
projects.
On TikTok videos, work-place
influencers talk about “acting your
wage”. Want me to work beyond
5pm? Then pay me more.
Jeremie Brecheisen, UK managing
partner at Gallup, said baldly: “The
dangerous threat to the UK economy
right now is a workforce that has
essentially given up.”
Is it really that bleak in UK plc? I’m
not so sure. The figure of 90 per cent
being quiet quitters was extrapolated
from a part of the survey that
measured employee engagement. It

found that only 10 per cent of
workers in Britain were actively
engaged in their work. This isn’t a
great figure, but it is only slightly
worse than the European-wide figure
of 13 per cent.
We came 33rd out of 38 countries
for engagement in Europe, but we
beat France, which economists often
view jealously for its higher rates of
productivity while enjoying roséinduced siestas and a 35-hour week.
The top-ranked countries in the
world, all on 41 per cent, were El
Salvador, Uzbekistan and Mongolia. I
am sure working for Gobi Cashmere
is very fulfilling, but I am not rushing
off to Ulaanbaatar, which has some of
the longest working hours in the
world.
And not being actively engaged
does not mean that you are a
modern-day machine breaker. Maybe
Brits just find it hard to enthuse about

Wall-to-wall laughter
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their jobs. “I think there’s a lot of
unhelpful noise around the idea of
quiet quitting, especially on social
media,” said David D’Souza,
membership director for the CIPD,
who is deeply sceptical of the idea of a
workforce in mass revolt. “I think we
would notice if 90 per cent of our
fellow workers were actively
disengaged from work.”
However, he did admit that there is
an increasing trend for Britain’s
workers to see their job in primarily
transactional terms. The CIPD itself
published its Good Work Index this
week, which found that 47 per cent of
workers saw their job as “just about
the money and nothing else”, a big
jump from the 36 per cent who said
this in 2019, before Covid.
The number of people agreeing
“yes” to the statement “I am willing to
work harder than I need” has fallen
from 57 per cent, but is still — just —
in the majority at 51 per cent.
It is a complex picture. While the
majority say they would enjoy a paid
job even if they did not need the
money, there is a growing minority of
people, especially younger workers,
who derive no real purpose and
certainly no identity from their
work.
This is clearly a threat to some
people over the age of 45, who enjoy
swapping war stories about sleeping
under desks and dropping
everything to fly to the other side of
the world on a boss’s whim. Their
early working life was defined by
forging a career and earning enough
money to put a deposit down on a
flat. Should they be surprised when
young workers — who will never be
able to afford to buy property and see
many industries under threat from
AI — do not want to work very
hard?
The answer is neither to blame a
whole generation for “giving up” nor
to hire endless therapy dogs in a
desperate attempt to prove you are a
good employer. It is old-fashioned
management, offering training,
support and career progression. And
accepting that some
workers never see
their job as anything
other than a pay
cheque.

’’

Harry Wallop is a consumer
journalist and broadcaster. Follow
him on Twitter @hwallop

ORDER
TODAY

Katie Prescott

More than 50 years after he founded
the company, the executive chairman
of Renishaw is stepping down from hsi
role.
Sir David McMurtry, 84, one of Britain’s most prominent engineers and
businessmen, will become a non-executive director at the FTSE 250 engineering firm from the start of July.
Richard McMurtry, his son, has been
appointed to the board as non-executive director. Like his father, he trained
as an engineer and played a key role in
product development and robotic systems, the company said.
Born in Dublin in 1940, McMurtry
studied mechanical engineering at
what is now the Technological University Dublin. He completed an apprenticeship with Rolls-Royce, where he
worked his way up to become assistant
chief designer. Here he became frustrated by the limitations of existing
measuring tools, in particular the inability to find a device with the accuracy
needed to measure precision parts for
use in Concorde.
Tinkering in his garage one day, he
decided to build one himself. McMurtry started to develop the idea for a device that froze readings at the point of
touch to get around the issue of knocking such tools when they were being
used, giving inaccurate results. It was
called the “touch-trigger probe”.
This inspiration led to the birth of
Renishaw, based in Gloucestershire,
which McMurtry co-founded with
John Deer in 1973. The devices became
game-changers in the manufacturing
world because they allowed companies
to make parts with unprecedented accuracy. He was knighted in 2001 for services to design and innovation.
The company grew steadily and its
range now encompasses measurement
tools from laser encoders to inspection
systems. The technology is used in industries from aerospace to healthcare.
Renishaw was floated in London in
1984 and its share price has risen more
than 2,000 per cent since then. Last
night it closed up 15p, or 0.4 per cent, at
£40. With about 5,000 employees —
3,000 in the UK — most of its research
and development is based in Britain. It
also has plants in Ireland and India.
In the six months to the end of 2023,
the company made a profit before tax of
£56.5 million, down 27 per cent from the
year before. McMurtry is known for his
philanthropic work, in particular his
support for engineering education.

GIFTS

38

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

Business

Wise warning of slowdown
in growth takes heavy toll
Patrick Hosking Financial Editor

As much as £1 billion was wiped off the
value of Wise after the money transfer
platform said that it expected its
income growth to slow this year.
Kristo Kaarmann, Wise’s billionaire
co-founder and chief executive, hailed
“another very strong year” for the

group, but the City was more focused
on his warning that the galloping
growth of the past three years would
slow to a comparative canter.
Underlying income growth in the
medium term would be 15 per cent to
20 per cent, which was also Kaarmann’s
new estimate for the year to March
2025. The shares promptly slumped by

up to 15 per cent as analysts had pencilled in 20 per cent growth for this year.
Wise, formerly Transferwise, has tended to easily beat its early guidance. A
year ago, it forecast income growth for
the year to March 2024 of 28 per cent to
33 per cent, but actually achieved
46.5 per cent.
Wise also revealed that after a period

THE ELECTION STATION

of raising its prices, it had started cutting them in April as part of a policy of
sharing the benefits of scale and growth
with its growing customer base.
Shares in Wise closed down by 97p,
or 11.5 per cent, at 746½p, significantly
below the 800p at which they were
listed three years ago. Its valuation has
dropped to about £8 billion, which
normally would be enough for inclusion in the FTSE 100, but Wise’s
unusual two-tier share structure, which
gives Kaarmann firm control, means it
is excluded from the index of London’s
biggest public companies.
It is the first time that Wise has set
out its medium-term expectations
since the listing, when it predicted
growth of more than 20 per cent.
The company, based in London, has
been a phenomenon, grabbing market
share from mainstream banks by offering a cut-price money transfer service.
Active customer numbers in the year
soared by 29 per cent to 12.8 million,
many won through word-of-mouth recommendation. Underlying profit
before tax leapt by 226 per cent to
£242 million, boosted by interest
earned on customer balances.
Kaarmann, 43, said Wise was trying
to hand back more of the cash it earned
on customer balances but had been
prevented from doing so in some
countries by regulations. It offered an
Assets product that rewarded customers for their balances and in the UK this
yielded 4.66 per cent, he said.
Wise also said that it aimed to make
a 13 per cent to 16 per cent pre-tax profit
margin, roughly equivalent to its old
target of earnings before interest, tax
and other charges. This would enable it
to “sustainably reinvest into the flywheel of growth, while generating the
capital needed to support a fast-growing global financial services business”.
The profit warning came after Wise
said in April that its business volumes
were lower than expected.
Kaarmann, who was born in Estonia,
said he had had no new information
from the Financial Conduct Authority,
which is still investigating after it
emerged in 2021 that he had been fined
£365,651 over an unpaid £720,495 tax
bill for the 2017-18 tax year.

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BRINGING YOU THE LATEST ELECTION
NEWS FROM AROUND THE COUNTRY

Nationwide
members
to vote on
boss’s bonus

39

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Business
Plenty to juggle: Debbie
Crosbie hopes to push
through a deal to buy Virgin
Money UK, a sponsor of the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe

M

embers of
Nationwide
Building
Society are
being urged
to vote in favour of a new
pay package for its chief
executive that will triple
Debbie Crosbie’s
maximum long-term
bonus from £1.14 million
to £3.42 million (Patrick
Hosking writes).

The potential pay rise
was because Crosbie’s
remuneration “currently
sits substantially below
UK banking peers of a
similar size and
complexity”, 16 million
members were told in
letters sent out this week.
Crosbie’s plan to buy
Virgin Money UK for
£2.9 billion in cash will
significantly boost the

mutual’s business banking
and credit card lending.
A former chief
executive of TSB, Crosbie,
54, could be paid up to
£4.8 million, the society
said, as a result of the
lifting of her maximum
long-term bonus to an
initial 190 per cent of base
pay. It appears that the
plan to lift the limit to
300 per cent eventually

would push the reward
still higher.
For the year to April 4
she was paid £2.41 million,
up from £1.75 million in
the previous year,
although the earlier
package was augmented
by a one-off payment of
£1.71 million to
compensate her for
bonuses sacrificed when
she left TSB.
An ad campaign with
Dominic West, the actor,
playing a branch-closing
bank boss backfired for
Crosbie when Nationwide
itself was scolded by the
Advertising Standards
Authority for misleading
viewers.
Virgin Money has
reported an 18 per cent
increase in half-year pretax profits to £279 million,
after it belatedly
published full results that
had been delayed by a
conflict of interest at
PwC, its former auditor.
Last month Virgin
Money shareholders
voted largely in favour of
the deal. Nationwide
members are not being
given a vote, leading to
protests from some and a
call to vote against all
resolutions at the mutual’s
annual meeting in July.
The deadline for
submissions to the
Competition and Markets
Authority, which is
investigating the deal,
closes on Friday. The
acquisition would push
Nationwide’s share of the
mortgage market from
12.3 per cent to about
15.8 per cent — still
smaller than Lloyds
Banking Group, which
owns the Halifax brand.
The deal, which is being
structured as a scheme of
arrangement, also
requires approval from
the Bank of England, the
Financial Conduct
Authority and the courts.

Peel Hunt sees
‘tentative signs of
recovery’ in City
Patrick Hosking Financial Editor

There are “tentative signs of recovery”
in the City after the deals and trading
drought of the past two years, according to the chief executive of Peel Hunt.
“While challenges remain, we are becoming cautiously more confident of a
broader recovery in equity capital
markets activity,” Steven Fine said. “A
switch has been flicked.”
He pointed to recent initial public offerings in London and a pick-up in trading volumes, which suggested an improvement in the malaise that has
soured sentiment in Britain’s markets
and has led to calls for drastic reform.
Although the pipeline of possible flotations was still “not great”, he detected
a more positive mood. “UK investors
are increasingly receptive to high-quality companies,” he said.
Peel Hunt advised on two recent
London floats: Raspberry Pi, the maker
of small computers, and Aoti, a woundcare technology company.
However, the improvement in sentiment came too late to boost Peel Hunt
in the year to March 31, for which it reported a worsening in pre-tax losses
from £1.5 million last time to £3.3 million. Revenue rose by 4 per cent in the
year, but this was offset by a larger increase in costs. Costs rose by 6.9 per
cent, with wages going up by 5 per cent
and non-employee costs — including
technology supplied by Microsoft and
Bloomberg — up 9.6 per cent.
Peel Hunt is one of the biggest
smaller-company brokers in the City,
with 145 corporate clients. As well as
helping companies to raise equity capital, it operates an execution-only sharedealing service. It has been a prominent
cheerleader in the recent campaign to
revive the City, calling for pension reforms, stamp duty cuts and listing
changes to sweeten the appeal of
London to companies and investors.
Corporate advice revenues grew by
39 per cent as Peel Hunt won 18 new
clients. Its average client size is rising
and its list will soon include three FTSE
100 companies once Vistry, the housebuilder, and London Metric, the property group, are promoted to the index

next week. Trading and research revenues, however, fell in the year by 12 per
cent and 6 per cent, respectively.
Fine said he was not talking to prospective merger partners and that the
strategy of consolidation and cost-cutting being pursued by rival brokers was
not the answer. “If you cut too deep, you
lose your capability,” he said. Panmure
Gordon is in the throes of a merger with
Liberum, while FinnCap and Cenkos
have combined to form Cavendish.
Investors have withdrawn money
out of UK-focused funds for 36 consecutive months, including £1.1 billion
pulled in May. “It’s been horrendous, it’s
miserable,” Fine said. He blamed the
devaluation and derating of Britain in
global indices, from about 8 per cent of
global stocks five years ago to 4 per cent
today. “That has to be wrong, but the
maths says it is totally right,” he said.
Fine conceded that some of the cur-

£3.3m

Pre-tax losses at Peel Hunt, compared
with £1.5 million in the previous year

rent investor scepticism about new
floats in the UK was caused by the collapse in values of so many of the companies that listed in the heady days of
2021. Musicmagpie, a retailer of
second-hand CDs, and ProCook, a kitchen products platform, were among
the investment disasters brought to the
market by Peel Hunt, although rival
firms have a longer list of turkeys.
Fine said the firm now advised
43 FTSE 250 companies and that the
average market capitalisation of its
clients had grown to £820 million. Its
biggest corporate client is JD Sports,
which weights at £6.3 billion.
Peel Hunt has lobbied hard for a British Isa, a tax-shielded product only allowed to invest in London-listed shares.
Labour has not set out whether it would
pursue plans for this Conservativenurtured policy proposal.
Peel Hunt shares fell 5p, or 3.6 per
cent, to close at 133½p.

BT attacks Vodafone merger with Three Lithium is grand prize in
Katie Prescott

BT has attacked the planned £18 billion
merger between Vodafone and Three,
saying the deal would result in higher
prices for customers, poorer network
quality and fewer incentives to invest.
The market leader said the new company would have “a disproportionate
share of capacity and spectrum, unprecedented in UK and western European mobile markets”. It argued that
the deal would directly harm BT’s ability to compete and claimed that British
consumers would not see the promised
benefits of lower prices or greater investment in digital infrastructure.
A joint venture between Vodafone’s
UK business and Three UK, which is
owned by the Hong Kong-listed CK
Hutchison conglomerate, would create
Britain’s biggest mobile network operator, bringing 27 million customers
together and reducing the number of
operators from four to three.
BT’s was one of several responses to
the Competition and Markets Author-

BT said customers would not see
lower prices or more investment

ity issues statement published at the
start of last month, which set out the
main points the regulator would consider when investigating the deal.
Which?, the consumer group, said
there was a “substantial risk” that the
deal would lead to “higher prices and
lower quality for consumers”. Stephen
Temple, visiting professor at Surrey

University focusing on mobile technology strategy, was supportive. “The proposed merger, subject to binding investment commitments, is the only
plausible option to re-energise mobile
infrastructure competition,” he wrote.
The competition watchdog announced in April that it was referring
the transaction for a full investigation
to further analyse competition concerns. It has found that the deal
between the British businesses could
lead to mobile customers facing higher
prices and reduced quality.
Ahmed Essam, chief executive of
European Markets at Vodafone, said:
“We aren’t surprised by the current
market leader’s response and naturally
we disagree with their comments. Currently the UK mobile sector needs
investment, with two large and two
sub-scale players. We firmly believe
creating a third mobile network operator, with the scale to invest and compete, will strengthen competition in the
UK’s mobile market, benefiting customers and the wider UK economy.”

deal for Trident Royalties
Helen Cahill

An Australian lithium miner has
secured board approval for a takeover
of the London-listed Trident Royalties
for £144 million.
Deterra Global, whose parent
company is listed in Sydney, has offered
49p in cash for each Trident share, representing a 22.5 per cent premium to
the target’s share price on Wednesday
of 40p. Trident’s shares closed up 8p, or
20 per cent, at 48p last night.
Trident is a mining royalty company
listed on London’s junior stock
exchange. It has exposure to a range of
commodities including lithium, gold,
copper and iron ore, with the majority
of its revenues derived from battery
metals and precious metals.
Deterra also has won support for the
deal from investors holding 28.7 per
cent of Trident’s issued share capital.
These include Regal Funds Manage-

ment, LIM Asia Special Situations
Master Fund, Ponderosa Investments
and Ashanti.
Peter Bacchus, 56, the non-executive
chairman of Trident, said: “While the
board remains confident in our ability
to succeed as an independent, Deterra
offers shareholders both liquidity and
an immediate cash premium. As such, it
presents an opportunity for them to
accelerate and de-risk the recognition
of Trident’s potential future value creation and realise a certain cash exit.”
The deal comes amid a flurry of
activity in the mining sector, with BHP
launching a £31 billion bid for Anglo
American. BHP ultimately abandoned
the bid as the two sides could not agree
on a structure.
Deterra said it was particularly interested in Trident’s lithium assets and
that its La Preciosa silver royalty and
Mimbula copper royalty would assist
Deterra with its diversification efforts.

Fashion’s fifth capital?

Visit Dubai

SPONSORED CONTENT

Fashion hotspot
Dubai Design District
Shining lights
Clockwise from right:
Arab Fashion Council
founder Jacob Abrian;
Dima Ayad designs;
BLSSD ready-to-wear

Just as Dubai was the clear choice to
stage the region’s fashion showcase,
Dubai Fashion Week’s location within
the city was also never in doubt.
“Dubai Design District is a fashion,
creative and artistic ecosystem,”
says Abrian of the hub known as d3,
which hosts most of the DFW events
in a newly built state-of-the-art
waterfront venue.
“It’s a city within the city of Dubai.
Creatives from around the globe
are based there, from emerging local
designers to some of the world’s most
important fashion labels. Over 5,000
people work in the area so you might
bump into the CEO of Chanel or Hermès
as you grab your morning coffee, or see
important local editors and stylists.
“If you want to make it in the fashion
industry, it’s the place to be.”
dubaidesigndistrict.com

Style supremo Jacob Abrian is on a mission to establish Dubai on the world
fashion week calendar – and with the city’s designers and legion of label
fans, it’s fast becoming a destination for industry players, says Saska Graville

S

eptember 1 to 5 will see
international buyers and
press gather for Dubai
Fashion Week (DFW),
the designer showcase that brings
together local and international
labels over five days of trade and
consumer retail events.
DFW was launched in 2015,
driven by Jacob Abrian, founder and
chief executive of the Arab Fashion
Council (AFC), whose vision was
to bring the creative buzz of the
world’s fashion capitals to his home
region of the Middle East. As a
young model and architecture
student, Lebanese-born Abrian took
inspiration from the city in which
he was studying, Milan, as well as
London, Paris and New York. His
goal? To establish Dubai as the
world’s fifth fashion capital – and to
bring the economic opportunities
that come with such a mantle.
The event, founded by the AFC,
which Abrian established when he
was just 22, is held in partnership
with Dubai Design District and
showcases the fashion talent of the

Designer Michael Cinco showed off his
Japan collection at Dubai Fashion Week

city and wider region. The sector in
the Middle East is a big deal – worth
$89 billion (£70 billion), according
to industry publication The Business
of Fashion. And Dubai’s high earners
spend, on average, more than $1,000
a month each on top labels.
But, for Abrian, creating a
showcase in the city was much more
than just a business opportunity –
it was personal. “It awakened
something in me,” he says of his
years spent in Europe. “I realised
that the Middle East region was
lacking a platform, which is why
local designers had to travel to
Paris, New York, London and Milan
to find themselves a future.
“When I was modelling, I’d meet
so many fashion creative directors
from the Middle East who were
working for top luxury brands in
Europe. I always felt, why can’t
they receive recognition at home?
That was the main push behind
both the Arab Fashion Council and
Dubai Fashion Week.”
The launch of the AFC unified the
talents of designers from across the
region under one organisation. The
choice of Dubai as the council’s
beating heart and the location for its
biannual fashion weeks – launched
as Arab Fashion Week and renamed
Dubai Fashion Week last year – was
never in any doubt. “Dubai was
already booming back in 2015,” says
Abrian. “I remember being in Rome,
meeting with the ambassadors of
almost every Arab country to show
them the fashion week plans and
secure their endorsement, and they
all said that it had to be Dubai to host
such an important project.”
DFW has since attracted more
than 150,000 visitors. “One of the big

I was excited
when I received a
best-of-luck note
from Anna Wintour
fashion groups in Paris told me
recently that they wanted to come
but couldn’t find a vacant hotel
room in the whole of Dubai during
Fashion Week,” says Abrian. “The
initiative has had huge benefits for
local hospitality, tourism and retail.”
He puts the incoming revenue
since 2015 at over 15 billion dirhams
(£3.2 billion), and hails the 1,000
jobs that are created every season
to put the event on: “It shows the
power of creative industries to
wield great economies.”
Even the timing of DFW on the
biannual fashion calendar – before
that of New York, which traditionally
kicks off the international schedule–
reflects Abrian’s economic
ambitions. “Fashion Week is an
important business platform and,
by going first, ahead of New York,
we can benefit from buyers’ budgets
not yet being spent. We’re ahead of
the game,” he explains.
Placing DFW within a global
context is vital for the image of Dubai
fashion that Abrian wants the world
to see. “There is a myth that fashion
in the region means wearing
traditional abayas and jalabiyas,
but that’s just stereotyping,” he says.
“Dubai Fashion Week has created a
much broader awareness. Fashion

here is a beautiful mix.” That mix is
evident in the DFW roster over the
years, which has boasted names such
as Jean Paul Gaultier and Moschino.
Meanwhile, homegrown talents
include Filipino designer Michael
Cinco, who moved to Dubai in the
1990s; he’s dressed Asian royalty,
had gowns featured in Crazy Rich
Asians, and fitted heiress to the
Swarovski empire, Victoria
Swarovski, for her wedding.
Another is Dima Ayad, a Lebanese
designer based in Dubai, who has
championed diversity and body
positivity in her designs. And
BLSSD, which was launched by
Lama Riachi to financially assist
those affected by cancer, also
stands out for its luxurious, elegant
ready-to-wear lines.
Perhaps it’s the approval of the
most famous international fashion
name of them all – American Vogue
editor-in-chief and Condé Nast
chief content officer Anna Wintour
– that confirms just how far Abrian
has come in realising his vision of
a fifth fashion capital. “I was excited
when I received a note from her to
say best of luck for Dubai Fashion
Week,” he recalls. “I’ve saved that
in my very special inbox.”

A year-round destination, Dubai
is a cosmopolitan coastal city set
between the desert and mountains,
offering unique fashion and design,
as well as accommodation and
activities for all budgets. Fly direct
from Birmingham, Edinburgh, Glasgow,
London, Manchester and Newcastle.
Be inspired at visitdubai.com

41

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Business

Motorpoint
steers back
into profit

Fuller’s
boosted by
return to
the office

T

he demise of
“Tuesdays,
Wednesdays
and
Thursdays”
workers — the socalled TWaTs — has
given a boost to Fuller,
Smith & Turner, with
a rise in after-work
custom across the
week (Emma Taggart
writes).
Simon Emeny,
Fuller’s chief
executive, said there
had been an increase
in sales at the pubs
group thanks to the
gradual return of preCovid lifestyles as
people reduce the
number of days they
work from home.
Emeny, 58, said: “In
terms of people going
to offices, it is better
than last year but still
down on pre-Covid
levels. I expect that
trend to continue to
improve year-on-year.”
The group’s central
London pubs
performed particularly
well, with urban pub
locations reporting a
16 per cent annual
increase in like-forlike sales. Emeny
added that the return
of tourists and events
to London had made a
“very positive impact”
on revenues.
Fuller’s, which has
about 400 managed
and tenanted

Robert Lea Industrial Editor

Fuller, Smith and Turner’s central London pubs performed particularly well, reporting a 16 per cent annual increase in like-for-like sales

pubs, announced pretax profits of
£14.4 million in the
12 months to March
30, up by 40 per cent
from £10.3 million the
previous year. Likefor-like sales grew by
11 per cent,
outperforming the
wider hospitality
industry by four
percentage points.
Annual revenue
increased by 9 per
cent to £359.1 million,
while the final

dividend of 11.12p
makes a total of 17.75p,
up from 14.68p.
However, the return
of pre-pandemic
spending behaviours
has not fully resumed.
“There’s still more to
come,” Emeny said.
“We don’t feel that the
journey towards full
recovery is over yet.”
He added that he
was glad to see pledges
to make changes to
the business rates
system by both the

Conservative and
Labour parties,
adding that it was
“long overdue. You
can see in high streets
up and down the
country the damage
that business rates are
doing.”
Despite high levels
of inflation over the
past 12 months, the
group reported a
14.5 per cent increase
in like-for-like food
sales and a 9.8 per
cent increase in like-

for-like drink sales.
“We navigated peak
inflation very well,”
Emeny said, although
as food and energy
prices remain elevated
“there is an element of
that recovery still to
come”.
The group has
enjoyed a strong start
to the present
financial year, with
sales for the ten weeks
to June 8 up by 8.8 per
cent, and it expects a
further boost as the

Playing it safe is paying
off yet again for Halma
Robert Lea Industrial Editor

Across the board increases in revenue,
profit, margins and, for the 45th year
running, its dividend have cemented
Halma’s place as a FTSE 100 favourite
among investors.
Shares in the industrial conglomerate closed up 314p, or 13.4 per cent, at
£26.64, a 29-month high, after it published a bumper set of figures for the
year to the end of March.
Halma has interests throughout the
safety, environmental and healthcare
sectors with a growing set of about
50 separate, autonomous, decentralised and localised businesses, employing 8,000 people in 20 countries.
The secret of its success has been
finding technology niches in which it
can enjoy rich margins that in turn fund
its continuous acquisition of similar
businesses. In the past year or so it has
acquired another nine companies at a
cost of £336 million.
With acquisitions accounting for
about a third of its growth in the year to
the end of March, Halma, which is
based in Amersham, Buckinghamshire,
reported 10 per cent growth in revenues
to £2.03 billion; 10 per cent growth in its
preferred measure of pre-tax profit to

£396 million; operating margins at
20.8 per cent; and a dividend increase of
7 per cent to 21.61p.
With its present order intake ahead
of last year, it expects further revenue
growth even before the addition of acquisitions and profit margins of 21 per
cent. The numbers exceeded City analysts’ forecasts.
Halma started life in the 19th century
as the Nahalma Tea Estate Company
Chief executive
Marc Ronchetti
said that “diversity
gives us resilience”

but had become a diversified engineering company by the time it had floated
50 years ago. Today it is worth more
than £10 billion on the stock market. Its
share price peak was £32 in the depths
of the pandemic, when it proved largely
immune to the economic destruction
suffered by other sectors.
Marc Ronchetti, 48, who stepped up
from finance director to become its
chief executive a little over a year ago,
said: “Diversity gives us resilience in

challenging economic times. What
unites us is delivering a safer, cleaner,
healthier world. The scale of opportunity is huge — as is the premium for
solving problems.”
The year was not all plain sailing. The
United States, which accounts for
44 per cent of the group’s business, delivered growth of 15 per cent. China,
which accounts for much of the 15 per
cent of the group in the Asia Pacific region, was in decline. Britain, which accounts for another 15 per cent of the
group, achieved growth of 14 per cent.
Safety, the bedrock of the company in
recent times with the group’s proprietary fire-detection sensor businesses,
accounts for more than 40 per cent of
the group, and grew by 10 per cent.
Environment and analysis, comprising about a third of Halma’s activity,
grew by 19 per cent, with its businesses
involved in photonics helping in digital
capabilities, data centres and analytics
all booming.
However, healthcare, which accounts for the rest of the group, saw a
marginal downturn, which the company blamed on constrained medical
budgets and destocking by life sciences
companies in the wake of supply chain
dislocations during the pandemic.

Euro 2024 football
tournament begins.
“People like to have
tables, they like to
have a meal, they like
to pre-order drinks,
and therefore we are
seeing a big increase
in bookings. But
clearly it’s very
dependent on England
performing well,”
Emeny said.
Shares in Fuller,
Smith & Turner closed
up by 8p, or 1.1 per
cent, at 728p.

The road back to stability in the secondhand car market after the pandemic is
being helped for Motorpoint by several
of its rivals ending up in the ditch.
Motorpoint is Britain’s leading
independent operator of used-car
supermarkets, with businesses in 20 locations. After the post-pandemic flurry
of mergers and acquisitions in the sector, it is one of only two car dealers left
on the stock market, the other being
Vertu Motors.
This appears to be good news for
Motorpoint after a difficult 2023, when
potential buyers sat on their hands as
the cost of car financing soared. In its
financial year to the end of March, it reported a widening pre-tax loss of
£10.4 million on revenues down by a
quarter at £1.09 billion.
“The past financial year was the most
difficult in our history,” Mark Carpenter, 52, Motorpoint’s chief executive,
said, “with multiple negative headwinds in the macro-environment, such
as rising borrowing costs and subdued
customer demand, coupled with
industry-specific issues such as lower
inventory and deflation.”
However, since the start of 2024
Motorpoint says it has profitable in
every month. It is also claiming a higher
market share, with volumes in the first
three months of 2024 up 8.9 per cent
compared with a nationwide rise of
6.5 per cent.
The City believes Motorpoint’s
recovery will be slow, with profits this
year of not much more than £5 million
and in 2025-26 no greater than £9 million. In the days before the pandemic,
Motorpoint was making £22 million.
“We are comfortable with those
forecasts,” Carpenter said. “They are
cautious and we would expect to beat
them.” Shares in Motorpoint fell 2½p, or
1.8 per cent, to 140p last night.

Wolseley restaurant owner
calls in restructuring advisers
Helen Cahill

The owner of the restaurant company
behind The Wolseley in the West End
of London has turned to restructuring
advisers two years after it was bought
out of administration.
Minor Hotels, owner of The Wolseley Hospitality Group, is being advised
by AlixPartners on cashflow issues.
The group, which also owns the
London restaurants The Delaunay,
Brasserie Zédel and Colbert, is seeking
external advice on how to improve the
business’s strategy, according to Sky
News.
Hospitality groups have struggled in
recent years with sharp increases in
interest rates, labour costs and other
bills, which many have been forced to
pass on to customers through higher
prices.
The Wolseley opened its doors in
Piccadilly in 2003 and it has now
launched a City branch of the restaurant. Baton Berisha, 42, chief executive
of the group, has said that it is “well positioned to grow the business both in
the UK and overseas”.
Minor International, the Thai hotel
group that owns Minor Hotels, has
raised the prospect of opening Wolseleys in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore.
In 2022 Jeremy King, the co-founder

of Corbin & King, was ousted by Minor
International, which had acquired a
majority shareholding five years
earlier. Minor used its controlling stake
to tip the business into administration,
claiming that Corbin & King was
“unable to meet its financial obligations”.
The Thai group went on to win an
auction held by FRP Advisory, the
administrator, with an estimated £60
million-plus bid.
King has now re-entered the hospitality business with the opening of
three new restaurants, the Arlington,
the Park and a reboot of Simpson’s in
the Strand, central London.
In an interview with The Times last
year, King said: “I did not want to lose
the Wolseley and those restaurants. I
never wanted to walk away from the
staff without even the opportunity to
say goodbye. Not being able to say
goodbye felt like a bereavement in
many ways.”
The Wolseley Hospitality Group
reported a revenue increase of 60.7 per
cent to a record £53.7 million for the
year to the end of December 2022,
compared with £33.4 million in the previous 12 months.
Adjusted earnings before interest,
tax and other charges also reached a
new high of £5.7 million, up from
£2.3 million.

42

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

Business Markets
news in brief

Lauren Almeida Tempus
Buy, sell or hold: today’s best share tips

IP Group sells Garrison

AI gives Apple users appetite for more
Market cap
$3trn

Compute”, where data is not stored
nor made accessible to Apple.

Seeking an upgrade

apple
PEG ratio
3.1

Market cap

T

apple waking up to ai
Apple announced “Apple
Intelligence”, a suite of new AI
features for its iPhone, Mac and
other devices. Starting later in 2024,
Apple will roll out a more
“conversational” version of Siri, its
12-year-old voice assistant, as well as
ChatGPT access that enables Siri to
use OpenAI’s chatbot when it cannot
answer a question by itself.
Its new AI tools are based less on
large-language models and more on
learning “personal relevance” from
data it has accumulated from its
users. At the developer conference,
Apple offered an example of a user
asking Siri when her mother’s flight
was landing; the digital assistant then
finds the flight details in her email
and cross-references them with realtime flight tracking to give an arrival
time.
The AI features will be available
from this autumn on the iPhone 15
Pro and the 15 Pro Max, as well as
iPads or Macs with M1 or later chips,
and when the language is set to
American English.
The big question is whether this
smarter iPhone can trigger a new
upgrade cycle. The iPhone remains
Apple’s most popular product,
accounting for more than half its net
sales, but they have been slipping. Its

iPhone unit sales

250m

3

200

2.5
150
2
100

1.5
1
Source: FactSet

he artificial intelligence
rally in Silicon Valley
threatened to leave Apple
trailing in the dust earlier in
the year. The company had
been dismissed as a laggard in the
space, with no discernible strategy
and no generative AI products of its
own. It was overtaken by both
Microsoft and Nvidia, the chipmaker,
in market value, with both hitting the
enormous $3 trillion milestone
before the iPhone maker.
However, Apple famously likes to
be the best, not first. So it was with
huge excitement that investors
greeted its new AI strategy at its
annual developer conference this
week, enough, indeed, to push the
shares up by more than 10 per cent
and earning it a belated spot in the
$3 trillion club.

$3.5
trn

Apple
Microsoft
Nvidia

50

0.5

2020

21

22

23

24

0

ADVICE Hold
WHY AI strategy could drive
strong upgrade cycle but does
not meaningfully differentiate
between Apple from its rivals
latest quarterly results showed a 10
per cent year-on-year decline and
the biggest drop in sales since the
summer of 2020, when many of its
factories were closed.
The new AI features may be just
the thing to convince the billions of
people who already own iPhones to
upgrade to a new device. Bulls
believe it could catalyse a longawaited “super cycle”, as there are
about 270 million iPhone owners
who have not upgraded their phone
in more than four years, according to
estimates by analysts at Wedbush,
the broker. In the long term, they
suggest that Apple could even
develop a bundled service around its
growing AI capabilities, which could
be a boost to its $85 billion services
business.
In the more immediate future,
there is hope that the incoming
upgrade cycle will convince some
people to switch to the iPhone from
other smartphones, such as the
Google Pixel and Samsung Galaxy.
Yet there are concerns about how
much the AI features will appeal to
iPhone owners in China, its third
biggest market, and whether they

0
2022

23

24e

25e

Source: Bank of America analysis,
FactSet consensus estimates

will be enough to persuade the
Chinese to upgrade. Most
smartphone users in China prefer the
We Chat social media and texting
app over iMessage, which makes it
harder for Apple’s AI to gather
information and personalise its
responses. Apple is also not the only
smartphone maker to integrate AI
tools into its user experience. Google
already offers Gemini, its own
generative AI system, formerly Bard,
and it unveiled its Astra AI assistant
last month. Some of Apple’s new AIpowered writing and edit features
already exist at Google and
Microsoft.
There is lots of interest in Apple’s
partnership with ChatGPT, but it
should not be overstated. Its role in
Apple’s AI system is relatively
limited, taking only questions that
Siri cannot handle itself. But the deal
has troubled Elon Musk, who set up
his own AI company, xAI, last year
to compete with Open AI. The
tycoon wrote on X, formerly known
as Twitter, that it was “absurd” that
Apple “isn’t smart enough to make
their own AI, yet is somehow
capable of ensuring that OpenAI will
protect your security & privacy!”. He
has threatened to bar Apple devices
from his companies if it goes ahead
with the deal.
Nevertheless, Apple has a good
reputation for its privacy
management and it is selling this
heavily in its AI package. It will use
what it calls “Private Cloud

eyes on washington
Apple’s foray into AI, though
arguably long overdue, is likely to
draw even more attention from
regulators. The Federal Trade
Commission, the American
competition regulator, has been
inspecting AI investments made by
big technology companies, including
the deal between Microsoft and
OpenAI. Lina Khan, who chairs the
body, previously has expressed
concern that the dominance of
powerhouses in California could risk
distorting innovation.
No doubt Apple shareholders have
grown accustomed to regulatory risk.
This year a lawsuit filed by the US
Department of Justice alleged that
Apple had reached its “astronomical
valuation” by “making it harder or
more expensive for its users and
developers to leave than by making it
more attractive for them to stay”.
Apple denies this, but investors love
its “walled garden”, an ecosystem of
connected devices and services that
keep its users within the Apple
universe.
are apple shares too
expensive?
Bullish investors believe that an AI
revolution could lead to an extra $1
trillion of spending over the next
decade. Nvidia, Microsoft and Apple
are among the early leaders and all
are now worth more than $3 trillion.
The next race will be to the $4
trillion milestone and investors
appear to be particularly confident in
Apple, with a forward price-toearnings to growth ratio of 3.1, above
both Microsoft and Nvidia, at 2.3 and
1.1, respectively. A multiple below 1 is
generally considered decent value for
a growth stock.
This column last rated Apple as a
“hold” in March, reasoning that
while it remained an extremely
high-quality business, its future
depended on how rapidly it could
find the next product to
revolutionise consumer technology.
A smarter smartphone may be the
key to this, but the 11 per cent surge
in the shares since the conference
appears to be based more on joy that
Apple has waded into the AI race
after a long silence.

PRICES
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herein is proprietary to Tradeweb; may not be copied or
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investment advice. Tradeweb is not responsible for any loss or damage that might result
from the use of this information.

Commodities

IP Group, the intellectual
property business, has sold
Garrison Technology to Everfox,
of the United States. Garrison
was founded by two security
professionals who previously
worked at BAE Systems. The
company builds cybersecurity
tools for governments, with a
focus on hardware-enforced
security. Everfox and Garrison
had been working as partners for
several years. The transaction is
subject to regulatory review and
is expected to be completed this
summer. Citi served as financial
advisor to Everfox.

St James’s Place hire
St James’s Place has hired
Caroline Waddington, from UBS,
as its chief financial officer as it
seeks to reform its practices amid
scrutiny of its high fees.
Waddington will replace Craig
Gentle, who joined the wealth
manager in 2016. The move
comes as the business took a
£426 million provision this year
for potential redress to customers
who had not received sufficient
advice after the Financial
Conduct Authority introduced its
new consumer duty rules.

Smurfit deal wins vote
Shareholders of Smurfit Kappa,
the Irish paper and packaging
company, and WestRock, its
American rival, voted to approve
a proposed merger. If the deal is
completed, Smurfit Kappa’s
investors would own 50.4 per
cent of the new $25 billion group.
The companies expect the deal to
be finalised on July 5, with
trading in Smurfit WestRock
starting on the New York Stock
Exchange on July 8. They first
revealed advanced talks to merge
last September.

Centrica pours cash in
Centrica, the owner of British
Gas, has invested £300 million in
a new “liquid air” energy project
along with the UK Infrastructure
Bank and several other partners.
Highview Power designed the
technology, which can store
renewable energy for several
weeks. It will use the money to
construct of one of the world’s
largest long-duration energy
storage facilities in Manchester.
Due to open in early 2026, its
construction will support more
than 700 jobs.

43

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Markets Business

Investors disembark with
Tracsis in election hiatus
Jessica Newman Market report

T
Boeing has
a riveting
new setback

T

he woes affecting
Boeing have
grown still
further with the news
that it has issues with
the rivets on its 787
Dreamliner long-haul
passenger jet (Robert
Lea writes).
The American
manufacturer
confirmed that
fasteners on some 787
fuselages had been
installed incorrectly.
Boeing found that the
problem involved
hundreds of rivets on
two undelivered jets.
“Our 787 team is
checking fasteners in
the side-of-body area
of some undelivered
787 Dreamliner

airplanes to ensure
they meet our
engineering
specifications,” a
Boeing official said.
“The in-service fleet
can continue to safely
operate. We are taking
the time necessary to
ensure all airplanes
meet our delivery
standards prior to
delivery. We are
working closely with
our customers and the
FAA and keeping them
updated.”
The US Federal
Aviation
Administration did not
comment.
Reports suggested
that it was not
necessarily the
mechanical rivets or
fasteners themselves
that were the problem
but their incorrect
installation, or that
they had not been
tightened to the right

torque. There are
about 900 fasteners on
each 787 fuselage
section.
There was no
indication of how
much remedial work
would be needed or
whether it would affect
delivery schedules. The
company is already
burning through cash
at a rate of $2 million
an hour over
production issues,
mostly surrounding the
Boeing 737 Max shorthaul jetliner. It
remains under
investigation by the
FAA since January’s
inflight blowout of a
panel on an Alaska
Airlines 737 Max.
United Airlines has
the largest order of
unfulfilled deliveries of
Dreamliners, at 221.
Shares in Boeing fell
by $1.99, or 1.1 per cent,
to $180.68.

The day’s biggest movers

Gold/Precious
metals

he freezing of decisionmaking in the weeks before
the general election hasn’t
helped Tracsis. The
technology company, whose
services are used for train timetabling,
rail safety and road traffic
management, has warned that
because of a “period of pre-election
activity restrictions” affecting the
ability of government and companies
to make decisions in the transport
sector, there will be a “one-off
impact” on its performance in the
final two months of its financial year.
The Aim-listed group also
highlighted troubles it faces in the
United States, with Tracsis now
expecting that revenues associated
with its North American pipeline will
not be realised in the present

Wall Street report
Both the S&P 500 and Nasdaq hit
new records, the former closing on
5,433.74, up 12.71 points, or 0.2 per
cent, and the tech-heavy latter
rising 59.13, 0.3 per cent, to 17,667.56.
The Dow Jones industrial average
fell 65.11, 0.2 per cent, to 38,647.10.
financial year. The two issues have
forced Tracsis to cut its full-year sales
outlook. It now expects revenue,
which analysts had predicted to be
between £84 million and £85.9
million, to be in the range of £80
million to £82 million.
Chris Barnes, its chief executive,
acknowledged that the update was
“unquestionably disappointing”, but
said it was “an isolated event outside
of our control”. He also was confident
that any potential government
changes on either side of the Atlantic
would not adversely affect the group’s
growth prospects next year.
Analysts at Stifel argued that
investors should look beyond the onetime election effect and even to take
advantage of the share price
weakness. Investors, however, were
not so confident as shares in Tracsis
tumbled by 100p, or 11.2 per cent, to a
six-month low of 795p.
The wider market was also reeling
as investors reacted to a hawkish
monetary policy forecast from the US

Money rates %

outsourcing

Capita to focus on core interests

L

egal & General’s
investor day may
have gone down
like a lead balloon
this week, but Capita’s
capital markets event
got a much warmer
reception from the
City.
The outsourcing
group unveiled plans
to focus on its core
segments as it aims to
improve its financial
performance and cash
generation.
It said it would
focus on its public
services, contact
centres and pension
business and would
restructure to reduce
costs and drive
efficiency. It also
revealed targets that

The outsourcer delivers
shore-based training
to the Royal Marines

include improving
margins to between
6 per ent and 8 per
cent, low-to-mid-digit
revenue growth and
free cashflow
generation from 2025.
The move comes
months after Capita
said it would

Federal Reserve, which now projects
only one interest rate cut this year.
The FTSE 100 slipped by 51.81 points,
or 0.6 per cent, to 8,163.67 and the
FTSE 250 shed 301.45 points, or 1.5
per cent, to 20,195.95.
Fresnillo, the Chilean goldminer,
was among the biggest fallers in the
leading index, sliding by 15½p, or 2.8
per cent, to 539p as rate fears put
pressure on prices of the yellow
metal.
Also lingering at the foot of the
index were Intermediate Capital
Group and Land Securities, which
fell by 126p, or 5.4 per cent, to £22.26
and by 20½p, or 3.2 per cent, to 622p,
respectively, as the pair traded exdividend.
Rate fears and Crest Nicholson’s
profit warning overshadowed
Labour’s pledge to build up Britain’s
housing supply, leaving Persimmon
down 57p, or 3.8 per cent, at £14.41
and Barratt Developments lower by
9½p, or 1.9 per cent, at 500¼p. But it
was Crest that had to endure the most

Dollar rates

implement
£100 million of costcutting measures
after swinging to a
pre-tax loss of
£106.6 million last
year.
Adolfo Hernández,
its chief executive,
said: “Our technology
strategy will be
organic with low
capital intensity ,
principally funded
through partial
reinvestment of our
previously announced
£160 million costsaving programme
and refocusing
towards more
profitable customer
solutions.” Capita’s
shares rose by ½p, or
2.7 per cent, to 14½p.

bruising session, its shares closing
down 28p, or 11.6 per cent, at 212¾p.
Given that there were no nasty
surprises in Labour’s manifesto
regarding the water sector, Severn
Trent’s shares flowed 101p, or 4.2 per
cent, higher to £25.20 and United
Utilities rose 31p, or 3 per cent, to
£10.50½. Analysts at Jefferies noted
that messaging from the manifesto
appeared to dispel speculation that
Labour would “do something drastic
with Ofwat, such as replacing or
scrapping it, which we see as
helpful for regulation stability in UK
water”.
Other decent performers included
BT, up 5½p, or 4.3 per cent, at 135p, as
investors reacted positively to Carlos
Slim, the Mexican billionaire,
amassing a 3.2 per cent stake in the
British telecoms company.
Halma was the real star, though,
climbing 314p, or 13.4 per cent, to
£26.64 after the maker of health and
safety instruments delivered stellar
annual results.

Exchange rates

Because of a technical issue, the gold fix
prices are from Wednesday.

Sterling spot and forward rates
Other Sterling
European money
deposits %

Data as shown is
for information
purposes only. No offer is made by
Morningstar or this publication

45

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Unit Trusts Business
The Times unit trust information service
Sell

Buy

+/­

Yld
%

Sell

Buy

+/­

Yld
%

Sell

Buy

+/­

Yld
%

Sell

Buy

+/­

Yld
%

Sell

Buy

+/­

Yld
%

Sell

Buy

+/­

Yld
%

British funds

SIMPLE AND CONVENIENT
YOUR ONE-STOP SHOP FOR SAVINGS

Simple & convenient to use
Competitive savings rates
Manage multiple accounts
with a single login

raisin.co.uk/offer-tmm0424

This is a paid for information service. For
further details on a particular fund, readers
should contact their fund manager.
Data as shown is
for information
purposes only. No offer is made by Morningstar
or this publication

46

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

Business Equity prices
Dividend yields Please note dividend yields are
supplied by Morningstar. The yield is the sum of a
company’s trailing 12-month dividend payments divided
by the last day’s closing share price.
12-month high and low Unfortunately, due to a
technical problem with our data provider, the
12-month highs and lows are currently inaccurate.

12 month
High Low Company

Price
(p) +/- Yld% P/E

12 month
High Low Company

Price
(p) +/- Yld% P/E

Price
(p) +/- Yld% P/E

12 month
High Low Company

Price
(p) +/- Yld% P/E

12 month
High Low Company

v

v
v
v

v

Price
(p) +/- Yld% P/E

v

v

v
v

v

Automobiles & parts

Price
(p) +/- Yld% P/E

v

v

v

12 month
High Low Company

12 month
High Low Company

v

v
v

v
v

Banking & finance

v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v
v

v

v

v
v

v

v

v
v
v

Consumer goods

v

v

v
v

v
v

v
v

v

v

v
v
v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v

v

Investment companies
12 month
High Low Company

Price
Yld Dis(-)
(p) +/- % or Pm

v

12 month
High Low Company

v

v

Price
Yld Dis(-)
(p) +/- % or Pm

v

v
v

v
v
v
v

v
v
v
v

v

v
v
v

v
v

Health

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v
v

v
v

v
v
v

v
v
v

v

v

Engineering

Construction &
property

v

v

v

v
v
v

v

v

v

v
v
v
v

v
v

v

47

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Equity prices Business
12 month
High Low Company

Price
(p) +/- Yld% P/E

12 month
High Low Company

Price
(p) +/- Yld% P/E

12 month
High Low Company

Price
(p) +/- Yld% P/E

12 month
High Low Company

Price
(p) +/- Yld% P/E

v
v

12 month
High Low Company

Price
(p) +/- Yld% P/E

v
v

v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v

Price
(p) +/- Yld% P/E

v

v

v

12 month
High Low Company

v

v

v

v

v

v
v
v

v
v

v

v
v

v

v

v

v
v

v

v
v

v
v
v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v
v

Real estate

v

Industrials

v

Professional &
support services

v
v

v

v

v

v

v

Retailing

v

v

v

v
v

v
v

v

v

v

v

v

v
v
v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v

v

v

v
v

Telecoms

v
v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v

Natural resources

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

Leisure

v

v

v

v

Transport
v
v

v

v

v
v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v
v

v

v

v

Technology

v

v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v

v

v
v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v

v
v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

Utilities

v

v
v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

Media

v

v

v

v

s

v
v

v

v
v
v

t

v

v
v

v

v

v

v

v

u

v

v

v

v

v

v
v

v
v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v

v
v
v

Data as shown is
for information
purposes only. No offer is made by
Morningstar or this publication

48

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

Business Recruitment

Do you have bottle for this industry?
The British wine sector
is expanding rapidly
and it is calling out
for more workers,
reports Jane Hamilton
With 1,030 vineyards, 221 wineries and a
vibrant community of wine experts, it’s
one of the most sought-after places to
work in the global wine trade. So are we
talking about Tuscany? Or Bordeaux?
Or Napa Valley? No, Britain.
English and Welsh bottles are the
toast of the wine world, with a string of
award-winners, including Hambledon
Vineyard’s première cuvée brut NV and
Three Choirs Vineyards’ white wines.
Seven per cent of UK wine is now
exported abroad, with rising demand
for its crisp, elegant flavours.
A recent report by Aldi showed that
15 per cent of customers considered
UK-produced wine to be the best in the
world, with the supermarket chain
reporting a 60 per cent surge in sales
over the past year.
To keep up with rising global sales, the
wine industry is expanding rapidly and
is now the nation’s fastest-growing
agricultural sector. Total hectarage has
risen by 123 per cent in ten years, with
experts predicting it will almost double
again by 2032.
According to Nicola Bates, chief
executive of WineGB, the national
trade body: “The English and Welsh
wine industry is innovative, internationally recognised as a standard for
high quality and growing at pace. It is
levelling up agricultural communities
through the provision of highly skilled
labour and a sustainable and increasingly high-tech sector.”
Tomorrow is the start of English
Wine Week, with employment opportunities being highlighted at growers
nationwide. The industry employs
2,300 full-time and 8,300 part-time and
seasonal staff, but with production
levels predicted to hit 28.8 million
bottles by 2032, a fresh influx of employees is needed to meet targets.
“The prospect for the domestic wine
industry is astonishing. English still and
sparkling wines are now widely seen on
wine lists throughout the hospitality
business and this will continue to grow,”
Michael Saunders, chief executive of
Coterie Holdings, a holding company
for wine interests including merchants,
warehousing and wine lending, said.
“It’s a rapidly growing sector and one
that is now attracting people from a
wide range of backgrounds, from traditional agriculturists and viticulturists to
marketers and brand developers and
even, in some cases, data analysts and
technologists.”
WineGB’s analysis shows strong
demand for new vineyard managers
and workers, as well as winemakers,
operations managers and cellar hands.
Alongside this, wine tourism is proving
popular with British and international

Six from the best
A third of the world’s food is wasted
and Mette Lykke, chief executive of
Too Good To Go, is dedicated to
changing this. As the world’s largest
surplus food marketplace, with
90 million users and
155,000 partners in 17
countries, the platform
fights food waste. Here
is her advice for
purpose-driven
businesses.
People are inspired by
people, not by
machines. Be yourself.
Showing vulnerability gives
your team permission to do the same.

1

Being a leader is being a
lifelong student. Stay
humble. The most
important thing for leaders
is realising that you have a lot to
learn.

2

Your ability to attract and
retain amazing talent will
be key. for your success.
There’s only so much you
can do on your own. Talented people
want autonomy and the right mix of
challenges and psychological safety.

3

Actively welcome
change. The world is
changing fast, especially in a
growth company. You have to make
sure the company, your team and you
develop fast enough to continue being
successful.

4

Revelling
in thrill
of the
harvest
Case study

N

ick CranCrombie, 52, is
the vineyard
manager at
Hambledon
Vineyard near
Waterlooville,
Hampshire. He worked in
the music industry for 20
years and then managed a
wine merchants before
taking up the role in 2018.
For him, the best parts

of the job are “working
alongside nature and the
biodiversity in the
beautiful South Downs
National Park and
being part of a likeminded team producing
world-class sparkling
wines.
“Vineyard managers
need good attention to
detail and confidence in
decision-making.

Tips of the trade
The wine trade is a
competitive industry to
break into, so James
Osborn, from WineGB
and Hambledon
Vineyard, offers these
tips.
6 Don’t wait for the job
advert but get in touch
directly with the wine
business or vineyard
owner. Highlight your
transferable skills and
the value you could
bring to their business.
6 Start your learning at
Plumpton College.

See plumpton.ac.uk/
courses/wine-division/
6 Get qualified with Wine
& Spirit Education Trust
courses.
See wsetglobal.com
6 Consider work
experience at a vineyard
or winery. Working a
harvest or picking grapes
is a good start.
6 Network at industry
events. Wine is a small,
collegiate industry full of
people happy to make
introductions.
6 Decide on an area that

you’d like to specialise in:
winemaking, viticulture,
sales, operations and
export, tourism and
hospitality or marketing
and communications.
6 Find a mentor. There
are lots of experienced
people who are willing to
support training.
6 Search for roles
at winejobsengland.com/
6 Apply for an
apprenticeship at any
age. Plenty of people are
retraining to work in
wine in their fifties.

Delegating tasks to teams
is essential with 90
hectares of vineyards to
manage. I do have WSET
[Wine & Spirit Education
Trust] and RHS [Royal
Horticultural Society]
qualifications, which are
beneficial, although an
overall passion for
viticulture is the best
quality for anyone
working in wine.”

visitors, accounting for 24 per cent of
income, according to its 2023 industry
report. Some vineyards are investing in
on-site restaurants and accommodation, opening up roles for hospitality
managers and staff.
The premier route into the sector is to
study at Plumpton College, East Sussex,
which offers industry-leading courses.
As managing director of the awardwinning Hambledon Vineyard, James
Osborn is at the forefront of the
industry’s growth. “Right now,” he said,
“the UK wine industry is a very exciting
place to be. I would encourage anyone
with a passion for wine, being in nature
and working in a sustainable business to
consider a career in English winemaking. The time is ripe for more inclusivity
and diversity in the sector.”

Working week

Supporting charities

AI can bring ‘meaning’

‘Labour hoarding’

Euros sick-note warning

With almost two in five charities
facing a skills shortage, The Well
Placed, a not-for-profit organisation,
is linking experienced mid-life
commercial marketers with six-month
paid placements in the sector in areas
such as fundraising, campaigns and
membership. Maya Bhose, its founder,
said it offered over-50s “a chance to
turn their expertise into purpose and
to help charities to find a solution to
their skills shortages”.

Staff in the UK spend a third of their
working day on “meaningless” tasks, a
study from Slack, the communication
platform, claims. The most common
low-value work includes unnecessary
meetings, unimportant emails and
excessive paperwork or data entry.
Christina Janzer, head of Workforce
Lab at Slack, urged companies to
adopt artificial intelligence for basic
tasks “to unlock a smarter, simpler
and more satisfying way of working”.

Robert Half, the recruitment agency,
has identified a new trend called
“labour hoarding”, with businesses
seeking to retain staff in light of a
dearth of specialist talent. According
to Matt Weston, its senior managing
director: “Employers are recognising
that if they can’t source the talent
they need when the economy is weak,
they will have less chance when it
bounces back. As such, they’re doing
their best to retain workers.”

Football fans are being warned they
could be disciplined, or even sacked, if
they call in sick after England’s Euro
2024 opener against Serbia. Jayne
Harrison, of Richard Nelson, a law
firm, said: “Due to the game being on
a Sunday night, it’s likely many
supporters enjoy a few drinks. If an
employer thinks their employee has
called in sick and it is not genuine —
such as to recover from a hangover —
they may take disciplinary action.”

Hang in there. There are
times where you have fun
and times where you
struggle. You grow and learn during
the latter.

5

Have a life outside work.
Spend time with loved ones,
exercise, practise your
hobbies: whatever gives you
energy, make sure you prioritise it.

6

Appointment of the week

Joining the nation’s fight
against terrorism
Counter Terrorism Policing is
recruiting for a business change
support officer to deliver a portfolio of
change across its network. The role
will involve supporting a team of
change managers to implement
complex projects and programmes,
which deliver sustainable change
across the national counterterrorism
policing network.
Candidates will need experience of
supporting change, alongside
excellent IT and Microsoft Office
skills, plus strong attention to detail
so that outputs are accurate and
contain necessary information to
support effective decision-making.
Further experience working for a
government, security agency or
within a policing environment would
be valued, as would experience of
working in a project environment.
Applicants must hold or undergo a
national security vetting check, with a
willingness to undergo developed
vetting once in post. Additionally, the
role is restricted to UK nationals or,
in approved circumstances, dual
nationals of which one element is
British. Apply at
appointments.thetimes.co.uk by
July 10.

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51

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Celebrated songwriter
of Suspicious Minds
Mark James
Page 52

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Obituaries

John Burnside
Acclaimed Scottish poet, novelist and memoirist whose lyrical writing stemmed from a childhood of poverty and addiction
“Who wants to be safe?” wrote John
Burnside in his memoir Waking up in
Toytown. “Who wants to be sane? Who
wants to be normal?”
Burnside epitomised the maxim that
art imitates life. His writing — elliptical,
surreal, shadowy — reflected a mind
that was singularly strange. Insanity
was, for him, a temperament to be admired, even coveted. “A mad person
isn’t someone who sees what isn’t there,
he’s someone who sees what is there,
but that others can’t see,” he said. “I
really believe that.”
If he had shades of the William Blake
visionary about him then such an attitude was also gleaned from a childhood
of poverty, in which he was raised by a
violent father and struggled with drug
and alcohol addiction. “The only gift is
knowing we belong”, he wrote in one
poem, “to nothing”.
A literary jack of all trades, Burnside
wrote three memoirs, 17 poetry collections and ten novels; he was part of a
lauded group of young Scottish writers
published by Jonathan Cape under the
editor Robin Robertson, including Irvine Welsh and Alan Warner; The
Spectator called him “by far the best
British poet alive”. Yet he had only
begun publishing in his thirties. He
barely wrote as a child — except to impress girls — because his father had
stamped on any burgeoning interests
and wanted to “kill off my finer — and
so, weaker — self”. He taught him to
trust no one and never rise above his
station.
And for a while, he did just that. In his
teenage years Burnside evolved into “a
socially clumsy working-class melancholic” and by 16 he was regularly
taking LSD. “Psychiatrists would say to
me, ‘How are you going to adapt?’ But I
kind of agree with Henry Miller when
he says: what kind of person would you
be if you had managed to adapt successfully to this society?”
When he was admitted to Fulbourn
mental hospital a friend asked him if he
was working on anything. He replied: “I
am not here to write, but to be mad.” Diagnosed with apophenia, a condition in
which someone searches for meaning
in random things, he began lining up a
dozen glass bottles filled with blood,
honey, alcohol, olive oil and urine and
balancing a feather on top, a spell of
sorts to “keep the universe in order”. He
sought God or the Devil in the last
scraps of a Pot Noodle.
After his second stint on the psychiatric ward he tried to create a sedate life
in the suburbs of Surrey, where he
worked as a civil servant, then a computer software engineer. He craved
middle-class convention. “I wanted a
normal life,” he said. “Sober. Drug-free.
Dreamless. In gainful employment. A
householder. A taxpayer. A name on
the electoral roll.”
Yet his wayward nature crept, perhaps inevitably, back in. Humdrum
days were peppered with nights of
binge drinking, tawdry affairs and visions; he went on odysseys with a
mother who laced her children’s orange
juice with Valium and a lover called
Crystal who once held a knife over him
as he slept.
The poems he began to write after
work were cryptic and elusive — populated by ghosts and lost souls. His “nor-

Wonderland (he felt most comfortable
playing the Mad Hatter in the school
play). “Naturally, Alice herself bored
me, but the other characters felt like the
friends and neighbours I should have
had,” he recalled. “It took me
some time to realise that, secretly, some of the dull folk in my
workaday world were actually
members of that divine cast of lunatics. My music teacher was definitely a White Knight, one of our
priests was a Mock Turtle and, for
a while there, the love of my life
bore a striking resemblance to
the Cheshire Cat.”
His mother died when he was
22 but lived long enough to see
him study, at her bidding, English
and European thought at Cambridge
Polytechnic.
“Her
memory of me would be the kid
who got expelled from school [for
smoking weed] when everybody’s saying he’s super smart,
goes to college to please her and
then works in a factory —
because I didn’t want to be part of the
system,” he said in one of his final interviews this year. “And now I’m a professor [in creative writing, from 2009] at
the University of St Andrews — she’d
have loved that.”
Burnside, though burly, was a quietly

His drunk and violent
father once threw his
sister down the stairs

A literary jack of all trades, Burnside wrote three memoirs, 17 poetry collections and ten
novels, though the slippery medium of poetry was his natural stomping ground

mal life” finally ruptured one morning
after a raucous office party in which he
arrived back at his keyboard to find a
sheet that read: “Jesus loves you
but everyone else thinks you’re an
arsehole.”
He quit the job and sent his poems to
magazines. His first collection, The
Hoop, was published in 1988, when he
was 33. It was his wife Sarah Dunsby,
who he met at one of his poetry readings, who persuaded him to send his
work to the poetry editor at Jonathan
Cape. She survives him with two sons,
Lucas and Gil.
Though he was a literary polymath,
the slippery medium of poetry was
Burnside’s natural stomping ground.
His poems “yearned for the wild edges
of the world”, wrote Christina Patterson
in The Independent, hovering perilously close to the supernatural. Black Cat
Bone (2011), his most famous collection,
which won the TS Eliot and the Forward prizes, was filled with unnerving
poems about tenebrous figures such as
a hunter who loses himself in the woods
in search of a mythical quarry. It was,
one Guardian reviewer noted, “a tour
de force of liminal expression”, but the
intention had been to pare back the
mystery a little.
“I realised I’d spent a lot of time in my
poetry trying to find a way of talking
about that whereof we cannot speak,”
he says. “This new book is about things

that nobody can deny ... it’s about sex,
love, death.”
He found novels much harder to
tackle. They were predictably strange:
his first, The Dumb House (1997), is narrated by a psychopath who performs
surgical acts on his twin children. The
Locust Room (2001) is about the 1970s
“Cambridge rapist” and in A Summer of
Drowning (2011) a malign spirit called
“the huldra” stalks a small island in the
Arctic Circle (to research the book he
walked alone in the Arctic Circle with-

‘The only gift is knowing
we belong’, he wrote in
one poem, ‘to nothing’
out a map or compass). “Burnside’s
poetry is a thing of softness and shadows, of small, shifting sounds,” wrote
Catherine Lockerbie in the Scotsman.
“John Burnside’s novel is a thing of ice
and steel, scalpel-sharp, chilling the
very heart.”
Yet neither his poems nor his novels
truly grappled with his past and in 2006
Burnside wrote his first volume of
memoir, A Lie About My Father (Waking
Up in Toytown was published in 2010
and I Put a Spell On You in 2014). “This
book is best treated as a work of fiction,”
declared the overleaf. “If he were here
to discuss it, my father would agree, I’m

sure, that it’s as true to say that I never
had a father as it is to say that he never
had a son.”
He died in 1988, the year Burnside
published his first book. When his own
son was born Burnside visited an aunt
who told him that his father had been
left on a doorstep in Fife. He wrote the
memoir as a way to come to terms with
the truth about his father, and the bitter
dregs he had left. “I had carried him
with me,” he said, “an ember of selfloathing in the quick of my mind, caustic and unquenchable.”
John Burnside was born in 1955 in
Dunfermline. He was raised in Cowdenbeath, west Fife, and Corby, an industrial
new town in Northamptonshire known
as “little Scotland”. His father was a
Catholic factory worker known as
Tommy to his friends and George to his
wife and John’s mother, Tess. He was unpredictable and violent; he once threw
John’s sister down the stairs and burnt
his favourite teddy bear. He disappeared
for days at a time and drank away his wages so that his wife had to beg food off
their neighbours. At one point John
waited in an alleyway with a knife, intent
upon murdering him.
There were no books in the house,
aside from the Bible, but Burnside’s imagination was lit by “a whole circus of
exterminating angels and wilderness
visions” and he read in the public library. His favourite book was Alice in

spoken and thoughtful man. Yet his intellect was of the unkempt, mad kind.
His whole body shook when he laughed
(sometimes uncontrollably) and he was
famous for his two-hour chats with students in pubs. One recalled discussing
paganism, Scottish history and whether a cooked heart bleeds or not.
He was self-deprecating to a fault —
when he won the David Cohen Prize for
Literature last year he thought it was
“some kind of prank” — but unapologetic when it came to the obscurity of
his work. “If you want something completely self-explanatory,” he once said,
“read the dictionary.”
One of the reasons Burnside was so
prolific was that he was a lifelong insomniac. In 2021 he published the
poetry collection Learning to Sleep after
surviving heart failure in a hospital
ward during the pandemic. He spoke
the following year on BBC Radio 4
about the hallucinations he had experienced when his heart stopped and he
was, in his words, brought back to life.
When he died, he predicted that he
would be reincarnated into a hyena. He
wanted a sky burial, he told his wife,
“where they put your dead body on a
platform in the open air and let the
birds eat you” (their solicitor said sky
burials were illegal in Britain). Yet he
was oddly rational in the face of death.
Perhaps it was the perfect stillness, or
the uncertainty, that he craved. “I like it
that I am going to die,” he said. “It beats
the alternative of living for ever. Imagine the horror of that.”
John Burnside, writer, was born on
March 19, 1955. He died after a short
illness on May 29, 2024, aged 69

52

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

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Mark James
Songwriter who riffed on his own marital difficulties to compose Suspicious Minds and revive Elvis Presley’s flagging career
Mark James was caught in a trap. Living
with his first wife in Memphis, he still
carried a torch for an old girlfriend back
in his home town of Houston. She had
since married someone else but they
had kept in touch and his jealous wife
was full of suspicions.
“I was in a situation where my heart
didn’t belong and my wife suspected I
had those feelings, so it was a confusing
time for me,” James recalled many
years later.
He decided to work through his confusion by doing what he did best —
writing a song. “Late one night, fooling
around on my Fender guitar, I came up
with a catchy melody,” he recalled.
Then, as he thought about his personal predicament, a lyric began to take
shape: “We’re caught in a trap, I can’t
walk out.” A chorus swiftly followed:
“We can’t go on together with suspicious minds ...”
The marriage did not endure but the
song did, although when James first recorded and released the song in 1968
under his own name, it flopped. However, a year later Elvis Presley booked
into a Memphis studio with a plan to
make a comeback album produced by
Chips Moman, who had also produced
James’s version of Suspicious Minds.
At the time Presley’s career was in a
slump. He had not had a No 1 single in
the American charts since 1962 and had
spent the previous few years making
formulaic films and releasing assembly-line soundtracks of sentimental
ballads. His popularity had waned. His
previous album, the soundtrack to the
1968 film Speedway, had not even made
the top 50.
The team around the singer decided
that the way to renew his fading appeal
was to return to a more rocking style.
The relaunch began when he dressed in
black leather for a 1968 Christmas TV
special. Three weeks after the show was
broadcast, he arrived in Moman’s studio
on a mission to record the earthiest,
funkiest record he had made in years.

Keen to submit a song for Presley’s
comeback album, James toiled fruitlessly trying to compose something
suitable. “He needed a mature
rock’n’roll song to bring him back but it
just wouldn’t come for me,” he recalled.
Then, three days before Presley was
due to begin recording and with panic
setting in, James’s publisher suggested
he forget about writing a new song; was
there an old number in his back catalogue that might fit the bill?
“I’d forgotten about Suspicious
Minds, then I realised that was the song
I’d been looking for,” James later said in
an interview on the podcast Songcraft:
Spotlight On Songwriters. “I looked up at
the wall and I swear I saw a golden
No 1. And what was great about it
was it was already written and I
didn’t have to roll up my
sleeves. It was perfect for Elvis. I
wanted to go and shake him
and say this is the song for you.”
He didn’t, of course, and instead adopted a subtler ploy by
asking Moman to play the song
he had cut a year earlier to Presley on his arrival at the studio. He
immediately fell in love not only
with the song but with James’s version of it and went on to record Suspicious Minds with an almost identical
arrangement.
Yet the fight had still to be won. It was
the custom of Presley’s management to
take half of the publishing rights to the
songs he recorded. Moman refused,
told them in no uncertain terms it was
blatant theft and threatened to halt the
recording session and burn the tapes.
Fortunately, Presley had “gone crazy
for the song” and took Moman’s side. It
was a fateful intervention. When Suspicious Minds went to No 1 on its release
in August 1969, it unleashed a flow of
royalties that would keep James in
clover for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, the writer had managed
to extract himself from his own Suspicious Minds scenario and after getting

1940 in Houston, Texas, he was the son
of an Italian-born building contractor
and a school teacher. In his youth he
played the violin and conducted his
high school orchestra. “But I don’t think
I realised how much I loved music until
I picked up a guitar,” he recalled.
When he began performing in the
Houston clubs he was soon told that the
name Francis Zambon was a non-starter and he became Mark James. At the
time it was his intention to record his
songs himself rather than give them to
other artists and he released his first
single Jive Note in 1959. Several more

‘I was in a situation with
my marriage where my
heart didn’t belong’

Presley enlisted James’s producer for a comeback
album after his 1968 Christmas TV special relaunch

divorced, he married his second wife,
Karen Taylor, in 1971. She survives him
with his daughters Sammie and Dana.
Presley went on to record further
songs by James including It’s Only Love,
Raised On Rock, Moody Blue and Always
On My Mind. The latter was released by
Presley in 1972 and was a hit again a
decade later for Willie Nelson, whose
version won James and his co-writers
Johnny Christopher and Wayne Carson a Grammy award as song of the
year. It became a hit for a third time
when the Pet Shop Boys had a UK
No 1 with a synth-pop version in 1987.
“I’d been working in the studio night
and day and was tired when I wrote that

song,” James recalled. “I needed a break
and was planning to go and see a movie
to watch someone else’s story for a
change. I was walking out when Wayne
said, ‘Mark, would you like to help us
write a song?’” Reluctantly but felicitously, he agreed and in a 2013 poll conducted by ITV to find “the nation’s favourite Elvis songs”, Always On My
Mind was voted No 1 while Suspicious
Minds was ranked in second place.
“Elvis trusted what I sent to him,”
James said. “After he died, I heard he’d
always asked the guys in the studio,
‘Did Mark send me any more songs?’
Golly, I wish I had known that.”
Born Francis Rodney Zambon in

followed as the Mark James Trio, including Running Back, a local hit in
1963, but his progress was halted a
couple of years later when he was drafted into the US army to serve in Vietnam
with the First Infantry Division.
On his discharge he moved to Memphis in 1968 to work for Moman’s publishing company as a staff songwriter.
His first top ten hit came with Hooked
On A Feeling, recorded by BJ Thomas,
an old friend from Houston. Inspired by
the same former girlfriend who was to
spark Suspicious Minds, the song became an even bigger hit in 1973 when a
cover by Blue Swede went to No 1 in the
American singles chart.
He was still writing songs more than
half a century later. “You’re only as hot
as your last record,” he said in 2017. “You
hope to write a song that becomes a
standard. But if you don’t move on and
try to come up with something unique
and new, you’re history.”
Mark James, songwriter, was born on
November 29, 1940. He died of
undisclosed causes on June 8, 2024,
aged 83

Tin Oo
Former commander of Myanmar’s army who became a close ally of Aung San Suu Kyi and was imprisoned for his beliefs
Aung San Suu Kyi, the long-imprisoned
Myanmar politician, is known the
world over. Tin Oo was less renowned,
but he was her close ally for four
decades and his story was in many ways
even more remarkable.
He spent the first half of his adult life
in the Tatmadaw (armed forces) in
Burma, now known as Myanmar, rising
to become commander-in-chief and
overseeing periods of brutal repression
by the country’s military regime.
He was then ousted and imprisoned
by that same regime, and became a fervent convert to the cause of democracy.
He co-founded the National League for
Democracy (NLD) with Suu Kyi, was
arrested again and spent 14 of the next
21 years in a prison or under house
arrest. During a brief period of freedom
he and Suu Kyi narrowly escaped death
when a mob of regime thugs attacked
their car.
The two leaders were finally released
in 2010 as the regime relaxed its grip on
power, and under their leadership the
NLD went on to win Myanmar’s first
genuinely free election in 2015. Tin Oo,
by then in his late eighties, declined to
become president.
The NLD won again in 2020, but the
military staged a coup, threw Suu Kyi
back in prison, and curtailed the country’s brief experiment with democracy.
Tin Oo, debilitated by a stroke, was allowed to live at home, but resisted overtures from the military.

Tin Oo helped found the National League for Democracy with Aung San Suu Kyi

“I love the military, but I love the
people more,” he told The New York
Times. “That is why I stood by the
people.”
U Tin Oo was born in the port city of
Pathein in 1927 when Burma was part of
British-ruled India. He was the oldest of
six children of a land surveyor.
He joined the military as a second
lieutenant in 1946, two years before
Burma won independence, and rose
steadily through the ranks. He was decorated for leading campaigns against
insurrections by Burma’s ethnic minorities and its Communist Party. He met

his wife, Tin Moe Wai, a doctor, while
being treated for injuries and they later
had two sons.
In 1974 he was appointed commander-in-chief of the Tatmadaw by General
Ne Win, Burma’s military dictator. In
that role he oversaw a bloody crackdown on student protests that erupted
in Rangoon after the death of U Thant,
the former Burmese secretary-general
of the United Nations and regime critic.
Within two years Tin Oo was
stripped of his position and convicted
on dubious charges of corruption and
keeping secret a failed coup attempt: his

supporters said he was the victim of a
power struggle. He was sentenced to
seven years’ hard labour, but released in
1980 under a general amnesty.
Thereafter Tin Oo’s life changed dramatically. He earned a law degree, and
in 1988 he and Suu Kyi co-founded the
NLD after the regime crushed a series
of pro-democracy protests.
The NLD won a sweeping victory in
the 1990 parliamentary elections,
taking 59 per cent of the vote, but the
ruling military junta refused to surrender power. By that stage Tin Oo, the
NLD’s president, had already been imprisoned. Suu Kyi, its secretary general,
was placed under house arrest and became one of the world’s most famous
political prisoners, winning the Nobel
Peace Prize in 1991.
Both were deprived of their liberty
for most of the next 20 years, but during
a brief period of freedom in 2003 their
motorcade was ambushed near a village in northern Myanmar by a regimeorchestrated mob. They escaped, but
scores of their supporters were injured
or killed. Suu Kyi and Tin Oo were
swiftly returned to house arrest.
Tin Oo was one of a small group of
former military officers who advised
Suu Kyi during her imprisonment and
were dubbed “the uncles”. Suu Kyi suggested her relationship with Tin Oo
was even closer. He was “like a father to
me”, she said.
The pair were finally released in 2010

as Myanmar edged towards democracy, and in 2015 the NLD won a landslide general election victory with Tin
Oo playing a prominent role. Suu Kyi
was constitutionally barred from becoming president because she had a
foreign husband and children, so Tin
Oo was touted for the job. He refused,
saying Suu Kyi should have the
post, and she became de facto prime
minister.
In 2017 a stroke curtailed his political
activities. In 2020 the NDL won a
second landslide victory, but this time
the military staged a coup. Suu Kyi was
returned to prison. General Min Aung
Hlaing, head of the military government, visited Tin Oo in his Yagon home,
but Tin Oo refused to support him. His
family instead hung a sign on his front
door reading: “No Visitors Allowed.”
“I have been a general, a political
prisoner, a monk, a law student, a lawyer and a founding member of a political party,” he once said. “I have had to
face up to the harm I did to people when
I served in the army. For this I have
apologised and committed myself
to the cause of human rights and
democracy.”
Tin Oo, soldier and politician, was born
on March 11, 1927. He died on June 1,
2024, aged 97

Email: obituaries@thetimes.co.uk

53

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Register
Court Circular

Births, Marriages and Deaths
Kensington Palace
13th June, 2024
The Prince of Wales this afternoon visited the Secret Intelligence Service.

Buckingham Palace
13th June, 2024
The King and Queen were
present at the Service of Celebration for the Life of the late
Lord Rothschild OM which was
held at Waddesdon Manor, Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, this
morning.
By command of His Majesty,
Mr Alistair Harrison (Marshal
of the Diplomatic Corps) called
upon His Excellency Mr Fahad
bin Mohammed Abdulla Abdulla Al-Attiyah at 1 South Audley
Street, London W1, this afternoon in order to bid farewell to
His Excellency upon relinquishing his appointment as Ambassador from the State of Qatar to
the Court of St James’s.

St James’s Palace
13th June, 2024
The Duke of Edinburgh, Chairman, The Duke of Edinburgh’s
International Award Foundation, this morning attended a
Trustees’ Meeting at Kents Hill
Park Training and Conference
Centre, Swallow House, Timbold Drive, Kents Hill, Milton
Keynes, Buckinghamshire.
His Royal Highness, Chairman, The Duke of Edinburgh’s
International Award Foundation, this evening held a Dinner
at St James’s Palace.
St James’s Palace
13th June, 2024
The Princess Royal, Patron,
Transaid, this morning visited
the Multimodal 2024 Exhibition
at the National Exhibition
Centre, Birmingham, and was
received by His Majesty’s Lord-

Lieutenant of West Midlands
(Sir John Crabtree).
Her Royal Highness, Patron,
Townswomen’s Guilds, afterwards attended the Annual
General Meeting at CLM Conferencing and Events, the Welcome Centre, 47 Parkside, Coventry, and was received by Ms
Carmen Watson (Deputy Lieutenant of West Midlands).
The Princess Royal, Patron,
Foundation for Future London,
this afternoon attended the UK
Cultural Exchange launch at Talent House, 3 Sugar House Lane,
London E15, and was received by
Mr Kim Bromley-Derry (Deputy
Lieutenant of Greater London).
Her Royal Highness, President, the Royal Society for the
encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, accompanied by Vice Admiral Sir
Tim Laurence, this evening attended the President’s Panel
Discussion and Dinner at 8 John
Adam Street, London WC2, and
was received by His Majesty’s
Lord-Lieutenant of Greater
London (Sir Kenneth Olisa).

Kensington Palace
13th June, 2024
The Duke of Gloucester, Vice
Royal Patron, the Almshouse
Association, this morning
visited Girton Town Almshouse, 22 High Street, Girton,
Cambridge, and was received by
His Majesty’s Lord-Lieutenant
of Cambridgeshire (Mrs Julie
Spence).
His Royal Highness this afternoon visited Isle of Ely Rowing
Club, Kiln Lane, Ely, Cambridgeshire.
The Duke of Gloucester afterwards attended the Centenary
Celebration of Cambridgeshire
ACRE (Action with Communities in Rural England) at St
Mary’s Church, St Mary’s Street,
Ely.
St James’s Palace
13th June, 2024
The Duke of Kent, former Colonel, Scots Guards, this evening
attended the Tumbledown Dinner at Boodle’s, 28 St James’s
Street, London SW1.

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MAY I never boast except in the cross of
our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the
world has been crucified to me, and I to the
world. Neither circumcision nor
uncircumcision means anything; what
counts is the new creation. Peace and
mercy to all who follow this rule — to the
Israel of God. Galatians 6.14-16 (NIV)
Bible verses are provided by the
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Births
ONSTENK on 7th June 2024 to Claire
(née Ford) and James, a son, Rupert
Montgomery Peter, brother to Kit.

Forthcoming Marriages
MR F. W. L. ROBSON
AND MISS E. LEEDS ARMSTRONG
The engagement is announced between
Frederick, eldest son of Mr and Mrs Rupert
and Alexandra Robson of Gloucestershire
and Switzerland, and Emma, daughter of
Mr and Mrs Richard and Andrea Leeds
Armstrong of Charlottesville, Virginia.

DR C. J. D. FRENCH
AND MR N. M. LUNGU
The engagement is announced between
Christian and Narcis-Mihai, who will be
married at Portmeirion,
Penrhyndeudraeth on Saturday 14th
September 2024 at noon. Iti dau inima
mea.

MR F. MCNEIL
AND MISS Z. E. PLANT

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have shaped our times

The engagement is announced between
Fraser, middle son of Mr and Mrs McNeil of
Urmston, Lancashire, and Zoë, daughter of
Mr Plant and Ms Smailes of Tickenham,
Somerset.

Deaths
ATWELL Michael James (Jamie) died
peacefully on 29th May 2024, aged 68.
Widower of Amanda, devoted father to
Rachel and much-loved grandfather of
Isabel and Robin. Private family funeral
followed by a thanksgiving service at All
Saints, Fulham, on Monday 1st July at 1pm.
No flowers please, but any donations to
Fulham Palace Trust, Fulham Palace,
Bishop’s Avenue, Fulham, SW6 6EA.

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on 6th June 2024, aged 76, at St Wilfrid’s
Hospice, Bosham. Beloved husband of
Jane, proud and loving father and
grandfather. Funeral at St John’s Church,
Westbourne, PO10 8UL, on Wednesday 3rd
July 2024 at 2pm. No flowers please.
Donations to the Shipwrecked Mariners’
Society may be sent c/o Reynolds of
Chichester, Tel: 01243 773311.

REEVES Eleanor died peacefully on 23rd
May, aged 87. Overcame a challenging
childhood to become a much-loved
headteacher and create her own happy
family. Service at Kingston Crematorium
on 21st June. No flowers please.

RUDDLE Fiona Eileen (née Forbes) died
peacefully on 31st May 2024. Mother of
Claire and Rachel, grandmother and greatgrandmother.

SCANLON Thomas William (Tom) died on
17th May 2024, aged 93. Beloved husband
of the late Elisabeth Margaret Scanlon and
dearly-loved father, grandfather, greatgrandfather, brother and uncle. Retired
teacher and ex-Royal Navy. Funeral at St
Charles Church, Gosforth, Newcastle upon
Tyne at 9.45am on 21st June 2024. Family
flowers only. Donations, if desired, to
‘SSAFA’ c/o W.S. Harrison Funeral Directors,
157 Salters Road, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE3 4HJ.

WEIR Arthur Buchanan Spottiswoode died
peacefully on 2nd June 2024, aged 91.
Deputy Chancery Master and President of
the Holborn and Westminster Law Society.
Beloved husband of the late Drina and
Penny, and father to Charles, Kirsty,
Malcolm and Pippa. A service will be held at
St Botolph’s Church, Swyncombe on Friday
28th June at 1pm. Family flowers only.
Donations if desired will be given to the
Henley Youth Choir. These can be sent
online at https://arthurweir.muchloved.com/ or sent c/o Tomalin &
Son Funeral Directors.

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BEAVEN Christopher John died on 29th
May 2024, aged 80. Brother of Maggs,
uncle of Shona and great uncle of Samuel
and Sarah. With thanks to the NHS in Leeds
especially the TAVI team at the LGI. The
funeral is to be arranged by the
undertakers Thomasons. 01294307892.

BUDWORTH Mrs Julia (of Earl Stonham).

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HOPKINS Laurie, Cdre, LVO, peacefully

Died peacefully at home on Sunday 19th
May 2024, aged 92. Funeral service will be
held at St Marys Church in Earl Stonham,
near Stowmarket, Suffolk at 2pm on Friday
28th June. Flowers welcome. Inquiries to L.
Fulcher Funeral Directors 01284 754049.

LEGAL, PUBLIC,
COMPANY &
PARLIAMENTARY
NOTICES
To place notices for
these sections please
call 020 7782 7553
Notices are subject to
confirmation and
should be received by
11.30am three days
prior to insertion

Legal Notices
RATE INFORMATION SERVICES LIMITED
Company No. 03017005
(In Members’ Voluntary Liquidation)
Trading Address: 69 Conifer Crest, Newbury,
Berkshire, RG14 6RS
Notice is hereby given that creditors of the Company are
required, on or before 7 August 2024, to prove their debts
by delivering their proofs (in the format specified in Rule
14.4 of the Insolvency (England and Wales) Rules 2016) to
the Joint Liquidators, Paul Ellison and David Taylor (appointed 7 June 2024), at KRE Corporate Recovery Limited,
Unit 8, The Aquarium, 1-7 King Street, Reading, RG1 2AN
or info@krecr.co.uk. If so required by notice from the Joint
Liquidators, creditors must produce any document or other
evidence which the Joint Liquidators consider is necessary
to substantiate the whole or any part of a claim. Note:The
Directors of the Company have made a declaration of
solvency and it is expected that all creditors will be paid in
full. Contact details for Joint Liquidators: Lee Lloyd, Email:
info@krecr.co.uk or telephone 01189 479090.
Paul Ellison, Joint Liquidator
In the matter of

DIANA FOOD LIMITED

(Company Number 04410778)
(formerly Map Technologies Limited (until 18
Dec 2014))
(in Members’ Voluntary Liquidation) (“the
Company”) and
in the matter of the Insolvency Act 1986 and
the Insolvency (England and Wales) Rules 2016
Notice is hereby given that written resolutions
were passed by the members of the Company on
25 April 2024 placing the Company into Members`
Voluntary Liquidation (solvent liquidation) and
appointing Nicholas James Timpson and Howard
Smith of Interpath Ltd as Joint Liquidators.
Notice is also hereby given, pursuant to Rule
14.28 of the Insolvency (England and Wales) Rules
2016, that the Joint Liquidators of the Company
intend to declare a distribution to the creditors of the
Company within two months of 17 July 2024.
Creditors who have not yet done so must prove their
debts by sending their full names and addresses,
particulars of their debts and the names and
addresses of their solicitors (if any) to the Joint
Liquidators at Interpath Ltd, 5th Floor, 130 St
Vincent Street, Glasgow, G2 5HF by no later than
17 July 2024 (the last date for proving).
The intended distribution is a sole distribution and
may be made without regard to the claim of any
person in respect of a debt not proved by 17 July
2024. Any creditor who has not proved his debt by
that date, or who increases the debt in his proof
after that date, will not be entitled to disturb the
intended sole distribution. The Joint Liquidators
intend that, after paying or providing for a sole
distribution in respect of creditors who have proved
their debts, all funds remaining in the Joint
Liquidators` hands following the sole distribution to
creditors shall be distributed to the shareholders of
the Company absolutely.
The Company is able to pay all its known liabilities
in full.
Joint Liquidators: Nicholas James Timpson (IP
number 20610) and Howard Smith (IP number
9341) both of Interpath Ltd, 10 Fleet Place, London,
EC4M 7RB.
For further details contact Marion Anderson on +44 (0)
203 307 4214 or at Marion.Anderson@interpath.com
Dated: 7th June 2024
Nicholas James Timpson, Joint Liquidator

55

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Weather
Weather Eye
Paul Simons

Today Rain in northern and western Scotland. Scattered heavy showers elsewhere. Max 19C (66F), min 4C (39F)
Five days ahead

Around Britain
Key: b=bright, c=cloud, d=drizzle, pc=partly cloudy
du=dull, f=fair, fg=fog, h=hail, m=mist, r=rain,
sh=showers, sl=sleet, sn=snow, s=sun, t=thunder
*=previous day **=data not available
Temp C

Rain mm Sun hr*

midday yesterday

24 hrs to 5pm yesterday

Aberdeen
Aberporth
Anglesey
Aviemore
Barnstaple
Bedford
Belfast
Birmingham
Bournemouth
Bridlington
Bristol
Camborne
Cardiff
Edinburgh
Eskdalemuir
Glasgow
Hereford
Herstmonceux
Ipswich
Isle of Man
Isle of Wight
Jersey
Keswick
Kinloss
Leeds
Lerwick
Leuchars
Lincoln
Liverpool
London
Lyneham
Manchester
Margate
Milford Haven
Newcastle
Nottingham
Orkney
Oxford
Plymouth
Portland
Scilly, St Mary’s
Shoreham
Shrewsbury
Snowdonia
Southend
South Uist
Stornoway
Tiree
Whitehaven
Wick
Yeovilton

13
12
13
15
13
15
13
14
15
15
14
13
13
14
10
14
13
16
16
12
15
15
14
12
14
9
12
16
14
17
14
15
16
13
15
15
12
16
13
14
13
15
13
11
17
12
12
13
13
12
14

PC
C
C
S
R
S
R
PC
C
C
PC
R
R
C
C
C
C
PC
PC
C
C
PC
C
PC
C
C
C
PC
C
C
PC
C
C
R
C
C
C
C
C
C
D
C
C
R
PC
C
C
C
C
C
C

0.0
2.4
2.0
0.0
0.6
0.0
5.6
0.0
0.2
0.0
0.0
17.0
4.4
0.0
0.2
0.2
0.0
0.2
0.0
6.6
0.0
1.0
0.6
0.0
0.2
0.2
0.0
0.0
0.8
0.0
0.8
0.4
0.0
12.6
1.0
0.0
0.0
0.0
10.0
2.0
10.4
0.0
1.0
6.6
0.0
0.0
0.0
1.0
1.6
0.0
0.6

0.0
9.9
7.9
0.1
**
**
1.1
**
3.9
**
4.1
13.2
5.2
4.1
4.0
5.2
**
2.7
0.8
1.1
**
12.5
**
1.9
**
0.0
3.8
0.3
**
1.8
3.6
3.9
0.8
**
**
1.2
0.1
**
**
**
**
3.0
6.5
**
1.2
**
2.3
**
7.3
**
6.5

Unsettled with outbreaks
of rain and showers,
turning a touch warmer
from Sunday
Tomorrow
An unsettled day with a mixture of
sunny spells and scattered heavy and
perhaps thundery showers. Showers
may merge into longer spells of rain
in Scotland.
Max 19C, min 6C
15

PC
PC
PC
PC
S
SH
B
T
PC
PC
DU
SH
**
S
B
S
S
B
PC
S
B
S
PC
PC
B
PC
S
S
PC
PC
C
S
S
PC
B
B
B
B
S
PC
B
PC
PC
PC
S
B
PC

22

Slight

Temperature

23

Moderate
Rough

28 (degrees C)

13
16

At 17:00 on Thursday there were
eight flood alerts and no warnings
in England and no flood alerts or
warnings in Wales or Scotland.
For further information and updates
in England visit flood-warninginformation.service.gov.uk, for Wales
naturalresources.wales/flooding and
for Scotland SEPA.org.uk

15
21

Aberdeen

NORTH
SEA
Edinburgh

Glasgow

23

Sunday

17

Dublin

Llandudno

16

16

Sunny spells with the chance of a few
showers, some of these may be heavy
in eastern areas.
Max 22C, min 6C

Tuesday

17

Bristol

20

20

Wednesday
Sunny spells with the chance of a
few showers, heaviest and most
widespread across Scotland and
northeast England. Driest and sunniest
in Wales and Northern Ireland.
Max 18C, min 4C
16

17
16

18

The Times weather page
is provided by

Today
Aberdeen
Avonmouth
Belfast
Cardiff
Devonport
Dover
Dublin
Falmouth
Greenock
Harwich
Holyhead
Hull
Leith
Liverpool
London Bridge
Lowestoft
Milford Haven
Morecambe
Newhaven
Newquay
Oban
Penzance
Portsmouth
Shoreham
Southampton
Swansea
Tees
Weymouth

14
5

Cambridge

London

Brighton

CHANNEL

scattered thundery showers. Moderate
southwesterly winds. Maximum
19C (66F), minimum 7C (45F).
SW Scotland, Glasgow, Argyll, Borders,
Edinburgh and Dundee, Lake District,
IoM, Moray Firth, Cen Highland,
Aberdeen: Cloudy with outbreaks of
rain in the morning, turning brighter
in the afternoon although there will
still be a scattering of heavy showers.
Gentle south or southwesterly winds.
Maximum 16C (61F), minimum
4C (39F).
Noon today

22

NW Scotland, NE Scotland, N Isles: A
cloudy and wet morning. Mostly cloudy
in the afternoon with showery rain.
Fresh to strong southeasterly winds in
the Northern and Western Isles, light
winds elsewhere. Maximum 16C (61F),
minimum 7C (45F).
Wales, SW Eng, NE Eng, NW Eng,
Cen N Eng, Channel Is: Sunny spells
with scattered heavy and perhaps
thundery showers. Gentle to moderate
southwesterly winds. Maximum
18C (64F), minimum 5C (41F).

HIGH
1016

07:44
--:-05:20
--:---:-05:26
06:04
11:33
06:05
05:55
04:30
--:-09:06
05:17
07:55
04:41
--:-05:30
05:08
11:37
--:-11:12
05:34
05:19
04:31
--:-10:01
--:--

Ht
3.5
-3.2
--5.3
3.5
4.0
3.1
3.3
4.6
-4.5
7.6
5.9
2.0
-7.5
5.1
5.3
-4.2
3.8
4.8
3.6
-4.6
--

20:35
13:18
18:07
13:11
12:00
17:44
18:50
23:49
19:25
18:07
17:19
12:18
21:36
17:51
20:04
15:41
12:40
18:05
17:44
--:-12:27
23:36
18:18
17:55
17:16
12:40
22:53
12:48

Ht
3.3
9.9
2.7
9.3
4.3
5.5
3.2
4.2
2.7
3.3
4.3
5.9
4.3
7.2
5.7
2.3
5.2
7.1
5.3
-2.8
4.4
4.0
5.0
3.8
7.2
4.4
1.3

1016
LOW

HIGH
1016

HIGH

HIGH
1016

1000
LOW
1008

LOW

LOW
LOW

992
1000

1008

1008
1016

1016 HIGH
LOW

1024
HIGH

Synoptic situation
An occlusion associated with an
area of low pressure tracking
slowly eastwards across
Scotland will bring outbreaks
of rain to northern Scotland
through today. Elsewhere, a
series of troughs and occlusions
will bring a day of sunny spells
and scattered showers. Some of
the showers will be heavy and
thundery, especially in southern
and eastern England.

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23

-15

Southampton

eter
Exeter

Plymouth

Tidal predictions.
Heights in metres
18

32

16
15

Tides

0
-5
-10

19
19

18

Outbreaks of rain will spread into
Scotland through the day. Sunny spells
with the risk of isolated showers
elsewhere. A longer spell of rain may
push into southern England later.
Max 21C, min 5C

41

Oxford

16

21

50

5

18

Birmingham

Cardiff

CELTIC
SEA

General situation: Outbreaks of rain
in northern and western Scotland.
Elsewhere, sunny spells with scattered
heavy and perhaps thundery showers.
N Ireland, Republic of Ireland: Sunny
spells with scattered heavy and
perhaps thundery showers. Cloud
and rain will spread into the far west
later. Gentle to moderate west or
southwesterly winds. Maximum
17C (63F), minimum 7C (45F).
London, SE Eng, E Anglia, Cen S Eng,
Mids, E Eng: Spells of sunshine with

59

10

Nottingham

Swansea

19
18

68

15

Sheffield

15

15

Channel Islands

77

20

Norwich

12

Cork

25

Hull

17

17

Shrewsbury

20

19

Manchester

Liverpoo
Liverpool

IRISH
SEA

Galway

86

rk
York

16

15

F
95

30

17

14

16

C
35

Newcastle

Carlisle

Belfast

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16

Londonderry

ATLANTIC
OCEAN

Showery rain in Ireland, Scotland and
northern England. Elsewhere, a day of
sunny spells and scattered showers.
Max 20C, min 6C

13

22

Flood alerts and warnings

18

Monday

Shetland

15

14

20

22
Madeira
25
Madrid
24
Malaga
23
Mallorca
28
Malta
9
Melbourne
Mexico City 27
27
Miami
20
Milan
31
Mombasa
18
Montreal
21
Moscow
31
Mumbai
16
Munich
23
Nairobi
26
Naples
New Orleans 32
23
New York
23
Nice
33
Nicosia
14
Oslo
20
Paris
19
Perth
17
Prague
14
Reykjavik
17
Riga
Rio de Janeiro 28
42
Riyadh
24
Rome
San Francisco 21
11
Santiago
25
São Paulo
24
Seoul
29
Seychelles
33
Singapore
St Petersburg 18
14
Stockholm
16
Sydney
32
Tel Aviv
24
Tenerife
23
Tokyo
16
Vancouver
20
Venice
19
Vienna
18
Warsaw
Washington 27
18
Zurich

Orkney

Calm

17

18

B
PC
S
PC
S
PC
PC
PC
S
S
B
PC
C
S
PC
PC
PC
M
S
**
S
S
B
R
B
S
S
R
S
B
S
S
PC
PC
PC
B
S
S
PC
PC
**
PC
PC
DU
S
PC
S

Sea state

(mph)

16

All readings local midday yesterday

23
17
37
15
38
33
31
21
31
29
20
18
28
23
18
30
20
20
39
35
9
20
32
14
29
44
39
12
23
23
19
20
22
16
32
28
29
32
18
32
**
25
24
16
24
21
40

34

16

The world
Alicante
Amsterdam
Athens
Auckland
Bahrain
Bangkok
Barbados
Barcelona
Beijing
Beirut
Belgrade
Berlin
Bermuda
Bordeaux
Brussels
Bucharest
Budapest
Buenos Aires
Cairo
Calcutta
Canberra
Cape Town
Chicago
Copenhagen
Corfu
Delhi
Dubai
Dublin
Faro
Florence
Frankfurt
Geneva
Gibraltar
Helsinki
Hong Kong
Honolulu
Istanbul
Jerusalem
Johannesburg
Kuala Lumpur
Kyiv
Lanzarote
Las Palmas
Lima
Lisbon
Los Angeles
Luxor

Wind speed

Highs and lows
24hrs to 5pm yesterday
Warmest: Kinlochewe,
Ross and Cromarty, 17.9C
Coldest: Kinbrace, -1.6C
Wettest: Scolton Country Park,
Pembrokeshire, 20.6mm
Sunniest: Camborne, 13.2hrs*

Sun and moon

For Greenwich
Sun rises: 04.42
Sun sets: 21.18
Moon rises: 13.06
Moon sets: 01.34 Sat
Full Moon: June 22

Cold front
Warm front
Occluded front
Trough

Hours of darkness
Aberdeen
Belfast
Birmingham
Cardiff
Exeter
Glasgow
Liverpool
London
Manchester
Newcastle
Norwich
Penzance
Sheffield

22:35-03:42
22:31-04:16
22:01-04:14
22:01-04:25
21:58-04:30
22:33-04:01
22:11-04:12
21:49-04:12
22:09-04:09
22:16-03:56
21:49-04:00
22:03-04:41
22:05-04:06

O

n this day in 1919,
Captain John Alcock
and Lieutenant Arthur
Whitten Brown took off
in a First World War
biplane from Newfoundland,
Canada, in a competition to fly
nonstop across the Atlantic.
Their twin-engine Vickers Vimy
only just managed to clear woodland
before turning towards Ireland. A
few hours in, the aircraft flew into
dense fog that prevented Brown
from using his sextant to navigate
and he had to rely on dead
reckoning. “The fog was very dense,
and at times we had to descend to
within 300 feet of the sea,” reported
Alcock. To make matters worse, the
electric generator used for powering
their radio and providing heat
packed up shortly after take-off.
Just after midnight the skies
cleared and they used the stars to
work out that they were on course,
but the good weather did not last. At
3am they flew into a large storm
that hurled them around in violent
turbulence and drenched the open
cockpit in freezing rain, sleet and
snow. The aircraft was covered in
ice, and it was in danger of stalling
and crashing. Alcock struggled to
regain control until he made a steep
nosedive before levelling out feet
above the sea surface, just enough to
melt the ice away.
At about 8.40am the adventurers
finally caught sight of Ireland and
the town of Clifden in County
Galway. Flying low, they saw what
looked like a promising flat green
meadow and came into land, but it
was a bog. The plane ploughed into
thick mud and fell over upright on
its nose, but Alcock and Brown
escaped unhurt.
They had flown 1,890 miles in 16
hours, 12 minutes, averaging
120mph, an extraordinary aviation
achievement and a hair-raising
venture. It earnt them a prize of
£10,000 for the first nonstop
transatlantic flight, and was also the
longest distance flown by man at the
time.
The flight became front page news
across the world, Alcock and Brown
were hailed as heroes, and were
later knighted by King George V.

Speak directly to one
of our forecasters on
09065 777675
8am to 5pm daily (calls are charged
at £1.55 plus network extras)

weatherquest .co.uk

56

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

Sport
Tour de France to
trial yellow cards
Cycling

‘Bookable’ offences include:

Elgan Alderman

The world’s best cyclists compete for
the Yellow Jersey at the Tour de France
but they will soon have to avoid
receiving a yellow card after the sport’s
governing body, the UCI, announced a
system to punish those who break the
rules.
The yellow card will be trialled at this
summer’s Tour de France before being
introduced in full on August 1. It will not
involve the sight of a referee brandishing a physical object, but rather will
simply be noted as a violation. Riders,
team staff and drivers are all eligible to
receive the new penalty. Among the
violations are a range of offences,
including dangerous sprinting, taking
off a mandatory helmet during a race
and improper conduct such as assaulting spectators or other riders.
The UCI has introduced three measures that will be trialled this year as part
of its “SafeR” project, including at “select stages” of the Tour. As well as the
yellow card, the rule that gives riders
the same time as their original group if
they crash or break down during the
final 3km of a flat stage will become
more flexible, increasing to 5km at the
Tour. Thirdly, the maximum time gap
between groups will increase from one
to three seconds (about 17 to 50 metres),

• Taking off a helmet during the race
• Disposing of waste outside litter zone
• Madison-style hand slings between
team-mates or other riders
• Holding on to a team car or getting
mechanical assistance from vehicle
• Sheltering behind vehicle’s slipstream
• Irregular feeding (sticky bottle)
• Irregular sprinting (includes physical
contact, deviating from line, etc)
• Deviation from race route
• Use of sidewalks/pavements/paths
that are not part of the race route
• Improper conduct (assaulting
spectators or other riders, indecent
behaviour)
• Interviewing riders during race
(includes media vehicle drivers and
journalists).

meaning non-sprinters can sit further
behind a sprint and not sacrifice time in
the general classification.
Until January 1 next year, the yellow
card will lead to riders being docked
points and fined. After that, repeat
offences could bring suspensions. The
proposals range from a seven-day ban,
for two yellows in a race, to a 30-day
suspension for six in a year. If a rider is
suspended during a race, they will be
ejected but will retain any results or
points gained on that stage.

Ready to tumble Team GB yesterday announced the gymnastics squad for this summer’s Paris Games, featuring (from left
to right) back row: Alice Kinsella, Luke Whitehouse, Bryony Page, Izzy Songhurst, Georgia-Mae Fenton; middle row: Harry
Hepworth, Max Whitlock, Becky Downie, Ruby Evans; front row: Joe Fraser, Jake Jarman, Abi Martin and Zak Perzamanos

British runner gets epilepsy diagnosis
Athletics
Rick Broadbent

The British runner Jess Warner-Judd
has provisionally had focal epilepsy diagnosed after suffering a seizure during
the 10,000m at the European Championships on Tuesday.
Warner-Judd, 29, dropped out on the
penultimate lap and had to be sedated
before spending the night in hospital.
The Olympian, who suffered a mid-race
seizure in March, wrote on X: “It has
been an incredibly tough couple of

months. I’m not sure what the future
holds. I’m not sure what my year will
look like but I’m eager not to let this stop
me and be back running soon.”
The 10,000m in Rome’s Stadio Olimpico drew some criticism for the overcrowded field and the lack of sponges to
cool down runners, but Warner-Judd
praised British Athletics’ medical staff
for their swift action. “From getting off
the bus to the warm-up track, I can’t explain it, something felt off,” WarnerJudd wrote. “I don’t remember much
about the race apart from, around 3k in,

my head felt incredibly tight, but I stubbornly persevered. With 600m to go I
suffered a seizure and was taken to the
medical centre. I suffered a further seizure and so was sedated and taken to
hospital where I spent the night.”
After a disappointing run in last
month’s Diamond League in Oslo,
Warner-Judd said “it’s just not happening” and revealed she had suffered a seizure during a 10,000m race in California
in March. Warner-Judd is the third-fastest British woman over 10,000m behind
Eilish McColgan and Paula Radcliffe.

Yesterday’s racing results
Newbury
Going: good to firm
1.45 (1m 2f) 1, Blue Yonder (Miss B Hampson,
14-1); 2, Expert Witness (10-3 fav); 3, Gert Lush
(11-1). 13 ran. NR: Sea Of Charm, Stormingin.
l, 1 l. A Watson.
2.20 (6f 110yd) 1, Anno Domini (W Buick, 11-8
fav); 2, Wild Clary (8-1); 3, Invited (18-1). 11 ran.
l, nk. C Appleby.
2.50 (1m) 1, Charming Whisper (Rossa Ryan,
7-2); 2, Sugarloaf Lenny (15-2); 3, Havanarama
(9-1). 10 ran. NR: Show Biz Kid. Nk, ns.
P J McBride.
3.25 (1m) 1, Great Acclaim (C Bishop, 7-1); 2,
Tayala (7-1); 3, Double Red (33-1). 10 ran. NR:
Global Asset. 1 l, nk. Eve Johnson Houghton.
4.00 (1m) 1, Clove Hitch (Oisin Murphy,
4-6 fav); 2, Izipizi (6-1); 3, Fior Di Bosco (8-1).
11 ran. NR: Bernalda. 8l, 8l. A M Balding.
4.30 (7f) 1, Sterling Knight (Rossa Ryan, 18-1);
2, Metaverse (15-2); 3, Zouzanna (6-1). 11 ran.
Hd, 1 l. E A L Dunlop.

5.05 (6f) 1, Sixties Chic (C Bishop, 13-2);
2, Starproof (13-2); 3, Whenthedealinsdone
(9-1). 12 ran. l, l. J Channon.
5.40 (1m 4f) 1, Wonder Kid (Oisin Murphy,
11-2); 2, Aulis (9-2); 3, Al Khawaneej River (12-1).
10 ran. 4 l, l. H Palmer.
6.15 (7f) 1, Fareedhat El Izz ( (D Muscutt, 17-2);
3, Rich Pulls Pitch ( (11-2). 7 ran. 1 l, 4 l.
J Owen.
Placepot: £467.70.
Quadpot: £72.10.

Nottingham
Going: good (good to firm in places)
2.10 (6f 18yd) 1, Aomori City (J Doyle, 4-6 fav);
2, Intrusively (4-1); 3, Dr T H G (11-1). 6 ran.
l, 12l. C Appleby.
2.40 (1m 75yd) 1, Indemnity (J Doyle, 1-2 fav);
2, Devious Devan (6-1); 3, Washeek (17-2).
10 ran. NR: Pacific Prince. 2l, nk. R Varian.
3.10 (1m 75yd) 1, Post Rider (S De Sousa, 15-8
fav); 2, Delicacy (100-30); 3, Phoenix Duchess
(6-1). 11 ran. Nk, l. P & O Cole.

3.45 (1m 75yd) 1, Great Blasket (Hollie Doyle,
3-1); 2, Obelix (18-1); 3, Benacre (11-2). 7 ran.
l, nk. Dr R Newland & J Insole.
4.20 (6f 18yd) 1, Lipsink (A Rawlinson, 16-1);
2, Enderman (4-1); 3, Rhythmic Acclaim
(2-1 fav). 12 ran. NR: Prince Of Bel Lir. 1l, sh hd.
M Appleby.
4.55 (5f 8yd) 1, Sir Benedict (J Hart, 8-1); 2, Mrs
Trump (3-1 fav); 3, Toptime (100-30). 11 ran.
Nk, ns. Mrs Stella Barclay.
5.30 (1m 2f 50yd) 1, Cryptos Dream
(J Doughty, 10-1); 2, Stintino Sunset (4-1 jt-fav);
3, Khangai (9-2). 11 ran. NR: Hurtle, Regency
Boy. Nk, hd. A W Carroll.
Placepot: £10.40.
Quadpot: £8.00.

Yarmouth
Going: soft
2.00 (7f 3yd) 1, Anif (S Feilden, 12-1);
2, Alexander James (13-2); 3, Realised (7-2).
7 ran. 1 l, 1 l. M Herrington.
2.30 (6f 3yd) 1, Good Good Good
(B Loughnane, 7-4); 2, Arkhalia Flynn (15-2);

3, Shibuya Storm (40-1). 6 ran. NR: Rhapsody
In Blue. 3 l, hd. G Boughey.
3.00 (1m 6f 17yd) 1, Hidden Pearl (Gina Mangan,
15-2); 2, Henry The Fifth (20-1); 3,
Kissininthebackrow (17-2). 9 ran. 2 l, l. J Berry.
3.35 (1m 3yd) 1, Atlantic Gamble (C Shepherd,
7-2); 2, Salamanca City (11-4); 3, Saachi (7-1).
9 ran. NR: Baroque Buoy, Beach Point, Duke
Wellington, Heavenly Fire. 1 l, 6l. W J Knight.
4.10 (6f 3yd) 1, Piper’s Fort (L Morris, 12-1);
2, Reine Des Coeurs (7-2); 3, Carmarthen (6-1).
9 ran. NR: Another Jack, Moreginplease.
2 l, nk. A Watson.
4.40 (6f 3yd) 1, Porfin (L Morris, 100-30); 2,
Mehigburn (16-1); 3, Bernard Spierpoint (18-1).
9 ran. NR: Autumn Flight. 2l, 1l. P S McEntee.
Placepot: £2,810.90.
Quadpot: £146.70.

Musselburgh
Going: good to firm (good in places)
6.10 (1m 2yd) 1, First Alliance (D Tudhope,
9-4); 2, National Interest (10-11 fav); 3, Dain Ma
Nut In (15-2). 10 ran. 1 l, hd. K R Burke.

6.40 (1m 7f 217yd) 1, Red Force One (C
Beasley, 3-1); 2, Tafsir (6-5 fav); 3, Desert Quest
(4-1). 4 ran. 4 l, 3 l. P A Kirby.
7.10 (5f 1yd) 1, Unspoken Love (D Tudhope,
2-11 fav); 2, J Street (10-1); 3, Harswell Dandy
(10-1). 5 ran. Nk, 4l. K R Burke.
7.40 (1m 208yd) 1, Rosenzoo (A Mullen, 13-2);
2, Elemental Eye (7-1); 3, Count Palatine (7-1).
5 ran. 1 l, nk. C Johnston.
8.15 (7f 15yd) 1, Patontheback (R Scott, 13-8
fav); 2, Moondial (33-1); 3, Scarriff (5-2). 9 ran.
2 l, l. G Tutty.
8.45 (5f 1yd) 1, Protest Rally (B Garritty, 11-1);
2, Havagomecca (9-4 jt-fav); 3, Golden
Rainbow (9-4 jt-fav). 8 ran. 1 l, 1 l. L Bailey.
Placepot: £59.80.
Quadpot: £11.60.

Worcester
Going: good
5.50 (2m 4f ch) 1, Calvic (C Hammond, 7-2); 2,
Jac Jumper (22-1); 3, Blazing Court (11-1). 9 ran.
NR: Noah’s Light, Sunshine Girl. Sh hd, 4 l. S
Edmunds.

6.20 (2m 110yd ch) 1, Matterhorn (H Cobden,
3-1); 2, Boombawn (2-1 fav); 3, Parc d’Amour
(11-4). 4 ran. 4 l, l. P F Nicholls.
6.50 (2m 7f ch) 1, Tiger Orchid (C Hammond,
15-2); 2, Ajp Kingdom (13-2); 3, Scrum Diddly
(6-4 fav). 8 ran. 1l, 1 l. Dr R Newland & J Insole.
7.25 (2m 7f hdle) 1, Bucko’s Boy (G Sheehan,
9-1); 2, Lallygag (7-2); 3, Mr Yeats (12-1). 10 ran.
5 l, 2l. Jamie Snowden.
7.55 (2m hdle) 1, Vocito (S Bowen, 8-11 fav);
2, Jacobs Acre (17-2); 3, Ebony Warrior (14-1).
10 ran. NR: Ghost Pepper, Groundbreaker.
4 l, 6 l. O Murphy.
8.25 (2m hdle) 1, Garitsa Bay (C J Todd, 100-30
jt-fav); 2, Ascension Day (7-2); 3, Quick Of The
Night (33-1). 9 ran. NR: Cawthorne Cracker,
The Sad Shepherd. Hd, 3 l. I Williams.
9.00 (2m 4f hdle) 1, Giulietta (H Skelton,
7-2 fav); 2, Mays Hill (13-2); 3, Asa (11-2). 11 ran.
11l, l. D Skelton.
Placepot: £97.80.
Quadpot: £10.40.

LICENSED RADIO PARTNER

57

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Racing Sport
York

Chester

1.50

1.40

Rob Wright

Handicap (£10,468: 7f) (16)

Rob Wright

Handicap (£7,246: 7f) (10)

2.05

Handicap (£6,019: 5f) (16)

6.40

Handicap (£6,621: 1m 6f) (9)

8.05

Handicap Hurdle
(£3,697: 2m 7f) (11)

7.15

Handicap
(3-Y-O: £5,574: 6f) (8)

2.15

Handicap (3-Y-O: £7,644: 6f) (12)

Newton Abbot
Rob Wright
2.40
2.25

Maiden Stakes (2-Y-O: £5,400: 7f) (12)

Selling Stakes (2-Y-O: £12,885: 6f) (15)
7.50

Handicap
(3-Y-O: £6,621: 5f) (7)

2.50

5.35

Novices' Hurdle
(£4,805: 2m 1f) (14)

Selling Stakes
(2-Y-O: £12,740: 7f) (12)

3.15

Handicap (£7,731: 1m 2f) (11)
8.20

3.00

Handicap (£6,283: 1m) (11)

Handicap (£18,039: 6f) (13)
3.25

6.10

Handicap Chase (£9,849: 2m) (8)

6.45

Handicap Hurdle

Handicap (3-Y-O: £7,644: 1m 2f) (12)
3.50

Handicap (3-Y-O: £6,019: 1m 2f) (10)

Market Rasen

(£6,680: 2m 2f 110yd) (9)

Rob Wright

4.00
3.35

Handicap (Div I: £7,644: 1m) (10)

Novice Stakes (2-Y-O: £15,462: 5f) (7)

4.25

Handicap

5.15

(3-Y-O: £4,449: 7f) (12)

4.10

Handicap (£36,078: 1m 2f) (17)

4.35

Handicap Hurdle
(£5,281: 2m 5f) (12)

7.20

Handicap Chase (£7,341: 3m 2f) (5)

7.55

Handicap Hurdle

Handicap
(Div II: £7,644: 1m) (10)

5.00

(£5,800: 3m 2f 105yd) (13)

Handicap
(3-Y-O: £4,449: 1m 6f) (6)

5.50

Juvenile Hurdle
(3-Y-O: £4,084: 2m 1f) (12)

5.10

Handicap
(3-Y-O: £7,644: 1m) (13)

Goodwood
Rob Wright

8.25
4.45

Handicap (£10,468: 1m 2f) (16)

5.30

Fillies' Stakes

6.25

(2-Y-O: £7,851: 6f) (14)

Handicap Hurdle
(£5,624: 2m 1f) (13)

Handicap Chase
(£5,677: 2m 5f) (7)

Sandown Park
Rob Wright

7.00

Handicap Hurdle
(£5,281: 2m 1f) (7)

9.00

Open NH Flat Race
(£3,812: 2m 1f) (9)

1.30

Novice Stakes

6.05

Handicap
(3-Y-O: £5,574: 1m 2f) (13)

(2-Y-O: £5,400: 5f) (12)

7.35

Handicap Chase
(£5,677: 2m 1f) (7)

58

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

Sport Tennis

Raducanu unveils lethal new serve
E Raducanu (GB)

6

6

D Snigur (Ukraine)

2

2

Taking chances on serve
In her two matches on grass this season,
Emma Raducanu has doubled her ace
percentage
Ace percentage
Hard
3.6%
Clay
3.6%
Grass
8.7%
Source: Opta

John Westerby

Emma Raducanu battled illness and
blustery conditions to book her place in
the quarter-finals of the Rothesay Open
in Nottingham, overcoming Daria
Snigur, the world No 127 from Ukraine,
6-2, 6-2 in 79 minutes.
Raducanu, the world No 209,
coughed and spluttered her way
through much of the contest, but said
that she was merely suffering from the
type of low-level illness familiar to
many people at this stage of a damp
summer. She will now face either Fran
Jones or Ashlyn Krueger for a place in
the semi-final, where she could meet
Katie Boulter, the British No 1.
At the start of the grass-court season,
her first for two years after missing last
summer to recover from surgery, Raducanu, 21, was able to point to real signs of
progress after her victory over Snigur.
The first relates to the potency of her
first serve, which she has been working
hard to improve in recent months. She
hit 11 aces, elbowed her way out of some
tight corners with punchy first serves,
and reached speeds of 111mph.
“The serve is very important, we’ve
been practising and I’m pleased to see
the rewards in competition,” she said. “I
don’t look at the speed gun, but when I
raise my game, like at break point down,
it’s nice to get a couple of free points a
game; it makes a huge difference. At the
start of the year, I don’t think I was able
to get that.”
While her ranking has slipped after
her eight-month spell on the sidelines
last year, the 2021 US Open champion is
still measuring herself in anticipation of
future contests against the world’s best
players. “I’ve realised when playing top
opponents, like Iga [Swiatek] or Aryna
[Sabalenka], you need a first serve to
play them. They’re very comfortable
holding serve and if you don’t have one
yourself then it’s very difficult to be on a
level playing field.”
After coming to terms with a breeze
that made ball-tossing tricky, Raducanu
began to find her range with her serve
and developed the happy knack of producing her best when it was most
needed. When Snigur, 22, had two
break points in the fourth game of the
first set, Raducanu responded with
three consecutive pinpoint first serves.
In the second set, leading 3-2 with a service break, she faced two more break
points. Snigur was unable to return
serve on the first and the second was
another ace. She then broke Snigur
again and held serve to earn her passage
to a second quarter-final of the season.
The other area of progress that gave
Raducanu particular pleasure was the
way in which she adapted to the windy,

First-serve percentage
65.7%
65.7%
58.7%
Points won behind first serve
63.2%
63.8%
70.4%

Raducanu had to contend with blustery conditions in Nottingham which affected her ball toss but eventually got to grips with the wind to seal her quarter-final place

chilly conditions. At the Australian
Open in January, she had faced Yang
Wafan, the world No 94, on a similarly
blustery day in Melbourne and lost in
three sets as her opponent adjusted
more smartly. In Nottingham, Raducanu felt that she was learning how to
tailor her game to the conditions.
“Dealing with the wind, dealing with
rain, with [umpiring] calls, it’s all part of
it,” she said. “In Australia, it was incredibly windy and I don’t think I managed it
too well. It showed more maturity, my
performance today. To overcome [the
conditions] and be in a better position,

I’m proud of my development.” She had
experienced frustration with umpiring
calls during her first-round match two
days earlier — she had claimed she was
playing “two versus one”, against Ena
Shibahara and the umpire — and while
there were occasional quibbles with line
calls here, they were mostly dealt with
in good humour. On one occasion,
when she felt a Snigur serve had drifted
long, she pointed out to the umpire that
a member of the crowd agreed with her.
“I have my line judge there,” she said.
“I’m not sure we’ll be using them,” the
umpire responded.

Raducanu had spoken this week
about how healthy she was feeling, but
she has since picked up a minor bug, and
was coughing into her towel at the
change of ends. “I’m a bit sick, but who
isn’t?” she said. “It doesn’t matter.”
In the quarter-final, she will either
face Jones, her close friend and fellow
British player, who is ranked No 249, or
Krueger, the American world No 70.
Jones, 23, was within two points of beating Krueger when the rain came down
in Nottingham, serving at 6-5 up in the
third set, only to be made to wait. “She’s
someone I’ve become close to and she’s

playing great tennis,” Raducanu said of
Jones. “We’re similar in the way we
think, we both have interests outside
and our conversations aren’t only on
tennis, which is refreshing. That’s one of
the main reasons we’ve become close.”
Meanwhile, Cameron Norrie suffered his latest setback when he was
beaten 6-1, 4-6, 4-6 by Jack Pinnington
Jones, the 21-year-old from Surrey who
is ranked No 773 in the world, in the
second round of the ATP Challenger
event in Nottingham. The defeat means
Jack Draper will overtake Norrie and
become the new British No 1 next week.

Wimbledon rejects Murray’s plea for earlier Centre Court starts
Stuart Fraser Tennis Correspondent

Wimbledon organisers have rejected
calls from Andy Murray and Novak
Djokovic for an earlier start time on
Centre Court.
After a review of scheduling at last
year’s tournament, the All England
Club has decided that the three-match
session on the main court will again
commence at 1.30pm this year. This
runs the risk of the match in the third
slot being postponed until the next day
because of an 11pm curfew imposed by
Merton council.
Djokovic and Murray were both
affected by the scheduling last year,
with their respective fourth-round and

second-round matches spreading over
two days. Murray also made clear his
concerns about changing playing
conditions for non-weather-related
reasons, with the last match often
taking place outdoors for the first part
and under the floodlit roof for the
second part after sunset.
The feedback from two of the sport’s
most high-profile players was dismissed yesterday by Wimbledon chiefs,
however, who insist that the scheduling
format does not require a change.
Although never acknowledged by the
club in public, it is well known in tennis
circles that the later start time of 1.30pm
was introduced in 2022 to allow for
more primetime coverage on the BBC.

“We’re very happy with what we concluded,” Sally Bolton, the All England
Club chief executive, said. “We’ve
reviewed it, we’ve thought long and
hard, looked at the data around the
length of matches and the trends
that are occurring in that space.
We’re very confident and happy
with the decision we have made.”
At least Murray, 37, is set to
receive a fitting tribute from the
club if he decides to proceed with
his plan to retire this year. Organisers have acknowledged that
“plans are in place” to honour
Nadal will miss Wimbledon to focus
on preparing for the Paris Olympics

the two-times singles champion
should he indicate to them that
this is his final Wimbledon. The
suggestion from one reporter of
a statue was not confirmed
but there is clearly a ceremony of some sort ready to
go ahead if needed.
“We’re ready and prepared but ultimately it is
Andy’s decision,” Bolton
said. “We have plans that
are very adaptable.”
Meanwhile, Rafael
Nadal has confirmed
that he has withdrawn
from Wimbledon to focus
on his preparation for the

Olympics. The 38-year-old had in
effect announced this after his firstround exit at the French Open but
finally went through the process
yesterday of removing his name from
the entry list. Nadal will return to
action on clay at the Bastad Open from
July 15 before heading to Paris.
“We believe that the best for my body
is not to change surface and keep playing on clay until then,” Nadal wrote on
social media. “It’s for this reason that I
will miss playing this year at Wimbledon. I am saddened not to be able to live
the great atmosphere of that amazing
event that will always be in my heart,
and to be with all the British fans that
always gave me great support.”

the times | Friday June 14 2024

59

S2

US Open Sport

Bogey-free
McIlroy looks
in mood to
end drought
Early first-round scores

Tom Kershaw

Pinehurst

There are several words to describe
Rory McIlroy’s travails at major championships over the past decade but boring is not one of them. There have been
dramatic and dreary collapses, daring
but unfulfilled comebacks, and even
the occasional bout of tears as his
decade-long drought has endured. This
US Open was bound to be no exception
after news emerged that the Northern
Irishman had reconciled with his wife,
Erica, shortly after he declared that he
has never felt closer to the cusp of catharsis.
You can only admire McIlroy’s optimism, but nobody was falling for his
other claim that he would play “boring”
golf this week. A five under par round of
65 was ignited by a chip-in from 22
yards at the 5th hole. There was a 329yard stinger at the 12th, a club thrown at
the 13th after a fine shot that settled on
the green. It was a measured bogey-free
display to top the leaderboard, but taming Pinehurst’s treacherous terrain is
not a dull task.
Patrick Cantlay is not so well regarded for an effusive personality, but the
American will go into the second round
tied for the lead with McIlroy after his
own magnificent 65. Ludvig Aberg occupied solo second after yet another
round that evidenced his preternatural
composure. Bryson DeChambeau was
among the late starters and had
preached a similar narrative about
playing conservatively. The 2020
champion barely missed a fairway either, but averaging over 330 yards off
the tee did not want for excitement and
he should be in contention barring a
late fiasco.
Matthieu Pavon, aiming to become
the first Frenchman to win a major
since Arnaud Massy in 1907, is two
shots back, while Tyrrell Hatton and
Martin Kaymer, who so spectacularly
defied Pinehurst’s peril in 2014, were
progressing well at two and one under
par respectively.
The prospect of carnage on the putting greens had loomed heavily over
this corner of North Carolina, with the
USGA insisting they would be “tough

United States unless stated
* denotes amateur
Par 70
65 P Cantlay, R McIlroy (N Ire).
66 L Aberg (Swe).
67 M Pavon (Fr).
68 T Finau.
69 S Bennett, C Conners (Can),
S García (Sp), Kim Seong-hyeon
(S Kor), A Rai (Eng).
70 Z Blair, E Grillo (Arg), R Henley,
S Jäger (Ger), B Koepka, L McAllister,
C Morikawa, R Rock (Eng), I Salinda,
*N Shipley, D Thompson, H English,
X Schauffele.
71 R Fowler, M Greyserman, Kim
Si-woo (S Kor), W Mack III, S Power
(Ire), C Smith (Aus), T Widing (Swe),
C Bezuidenhout (SA), Kim
Joo-hyung (S Kor), J Day (Aus),
S Scheffler.
72 N Echavarria (Col), A Eckroat,
N Hoejgaard (Den), *B Kim,
F Kjettrup (Den), M Kuchar, J Lower,
M Meissner, E Molinari (It),
G Woodland, B Thompson (Eng).
73 D Berger, S Burns, M Fitzpatrick
(Eng), R Fox (NZ), C Jarvis (SA),
C Jenkins, Lee Min-woo (Aus),
F Molinari (It), *O Morales (Mex),
J Rose (Eng), K Kitayama,
A Svensson (Can).
74 An Byeong-hun (S Kor),
D Burmester (SA), L Glover,
A Hadwin (Can), J Herman, Im Sungjae (S Kor), D Johnson, T McKibbin
(N Ire), T Woods, J Scrivener (Aus),
M Hubbard, B Hossler.
75 *A McCulloch (Can), W Simpson,
W Zalatoris, E Chacarra (Sp),
*W Williams, C Hadley, V Perez (Fr).

but fair”. Phil Mickelson might beg to
differ after a miserable round of 79 that
left him tied in dead last. Collin Morikawa would also be forgiven for feeling aggrieved after his bunker shot trickled
past the 9th hole and finally came to a
rest 43 yards away on the fairway, but
this was a great test that demanded far
more poise and imagination from the
world’s best players than the soft conditions at the US PGA Championship.
Cantlay might have drawn inspiration from his close friend Xander
Schauffele’s victory there, even if it
meant he arguably inherited the millstone of being the best current player
yet to win a major. He has an underwhelming record at all four and Can-

There was no shortage of drama in McIlroy’s round but he offered hope that he can finally break his major drought with a 65

tlay’s form has wavered this season as
he has become an increasingly influential voice on the PGA Tour’s policy
board, but beautiful ball-striking was
married with a deft touch on and
around the small and fiercely undulating greens. “I’ve been working really
hard on my game, and usually when
you make just a couple changes and
you’re working really hard, it’s just a
matter of time,” Cantlay said. “The
course played pretty difficult, but I
drove it well and I left it in the right
spots most of the time.”
Schauffele started less convincingly
with three errant drives eliciting bogeys
on the front nine but he recovered to remain in contention at even par alongside Brooks Koepka, for whom courses
set up to inflict misery have always
proven a happy hunting ground, most
famously at Shinnecock Hills in 2018,
when the USGA was accused of “losing
the greens” and Mickelson infamously
putted his ball while it was still moving
in protest. Scottie Scheffler was also out
of sorts and made just two birdies in a
round of 71 but his talent means he is
certainly within reach.
Robert Rock was playing his first US
Open since 2012 and harboured few expectations after making it through 36-

hole qualifying, but the 47-year-old En- fight to make it to the weekend, when
glishman somehow managed to finish the greens might well become even
one shot ahead of the world No 1. The more unforgiving. The contrast to
feverish obsession with Tiger Woods’ Aberg, their Ryder Cup team-mate in
ability to roll back the years did not pro- Rome, was somewhat absurd given this
duce as satisfactory a result, though. A is still only his third appearance in a
lively crowd cooed after his every shot, major — a fact easily forgotten given all
but there were more of them than the his success in less than a year as a
48-year-old would have hoped after a professional, including a runner-up
bright start during which he clung
finish at the Masters in April. His
to the first page of the leaderrelentless accuracy almost
board. Woods drove the ball
does provide the illusion of
well but sloppy approach
“boring golf”, with the
Day
Two
play betrayed the fact this
Swede failing to miss a
was only the eighth comfairway in his round, and
US Open, second
petitive round he has comthat positioning off the tee
round
pleted this year and a round TV: Sky Sports, from and mental discipline
of 74 left him in stark danger
could make him particular12.30pm
of missing the cut.
ly difficult to dislodge.
“The complexes are just so
“It’s really hard, especially
difficult and so severe that there arwhen you have a wedge in your
en’t that many scores that are low. It’s hand where normally you would go at
hard to get the ball close,” Woods said. the pin, but you can’t really do that here.
“In most golf courses you play, you hit It’s the US Open, it’s supposed to be
shots into where it’s feeding off of slopes hard,” he said.
into flags, where it’s collecting. Here,
It will become even harder, with
everything is repelling. If you miss it on Woods’s description of the week as a
the short side, you know it’s an auto- “war of attrition” prescient. McIlroy
matic bogey or higher.”
nullified it brilliantly for 18 holes here,
Past champions Matt Fitzpatrick and but history assures there will be no
Justin Rose did not fare much better shortage of drama, heroics and heartwith a pair of 73s and now also face a ache over the next three rounds.

Results

Fixtures

Football
International matches
Ecuador

(2) 3

Bolivia

Valencia 18
Yeboah 25
Caicedo 70 (pen)

Terceros 88

United States (1) 1

Brazil

Pulisic 26
60,016

Rodrygo 17

(0) 1

(1) 1

Cycling
Tour of Switzerland
Leading positions: Fifth stage (Ambrì to Carì,

148.6km): 1, A Yates (GB, UAE Team Emirates)
3hr 54min 37sec; 2, J Almeida (Por, UAE
Team Emirates) at 5sec behind; 3, E Bernal
(Col, INEOS Grenadiers) 16; 4, M Riccitello
(US, Israel-Premier Tech) 18; 5, E Mas
(Sp, Movistar Team) 22. Other British 6, O
Onley (Team dsm-firmenich PostNL) 54;
7, T Pidcock (INEOS Grenadiers) same time;
18, F Pickering (Bahrain Victorious) 2min
34sec; 23, J Shaw (EF Education-EasyPost)
3:06; 33, H Wood (Cofidis) 5:16; 44, B Tulett
(Team Visma Lease a Bike) 8:37; 55, E Hayter
(INEOS Grenadiers) 10:12. Overall 1, Yates
15:44:35; 2, Almeida at 35sec behind; 3,
Bernal 1:11; 4, Mas 1:49; 5, Riccitello 1:53.
Other British 7, Onley 2:21; 8, Pidcock 2:46;

22, Pickering 5:41; 37, Hayter 13:14; 38, Tulett
13:36; 46, Shaw 17:18.

Tennis
ATP Boss Open
Stuttgart: Second round B Nakashima (US)
bt R Gasquet (Fr) 6-3 6-4; J Struff (Ger) bt A
Rinderknech (Fr) 6-4 7-6 (7-0); M Berrettini (It)
bt D Shapovalov (Can) 6-4 6-4; J Duckworth
(Aus) bt B Shelton (US) 7-6 (7-5) 4-6 6-3.
Libema Open
‘s-Hertogenbosch, Netherlands: Second
round: Men S Korda (US) bt L Nardi (It) 7-5,
7-5; T Paul(US) bt A Popyrin (Aus) 5-7, 6-4, 6-3;
A Vukic (Aus) bt K Khachanov (Russ) 6-4, 5-7,

7-6 (7-4); A de Minaur (Aus) bt Z Bergs (Bel)
7-5, 6-4; M Raonic (Can) bt R Bautista Agut
(Sp) 4-6, 6-2, 7-5. Women E Alexandrova
(Russ) bt E Bektas (US) 7-5, 6-4; D Galfi (Hun)
bt V Kudermetova (Russ) 6-3 3-6, 7-5;
A Krunic (Ser) bt J Pegula (US) 7-6 (7-3), 6-7
(3-7), 6-4; L Samsonova (Russ) bt C Naef
(Switz) 7-5, 6-2; R Montgomery (US) bt
J Niemeier (Ger) 6-3, 6-3.
WTA Rothesay Open
Lexus Tennis Centre, Nottingham: Second
round E Raducanu (GB) bt D Snigur (Ukr) 6-2,
6-2; M Frech (Pol) bt T Maria (Ger) 3-6, 6-3, 6-1;
F Jones (GB) leads A Krueger (US) 6-4, 4-6, 6-5
— play suspended, rain.

Football
European
Championship:
Group
A
Germany v Scotland (8.0, Allianz Arena,
Munich).

Outlaws (5.30). South group: Chelmsford
Essex v Sussex Sharks (7.0). Utilita Bowl
Hampshire Hawks v Middlesex (7.0).
Taunton Somerset v Kent Spitfires. Kia Oval
Surrey v Gloucestershire.

Cricket

Rugby league

T20 World Cup: Group A: Lauderhill United
States v Ireland (3.30).
Vitality Blast (6.30 unless stated): North
Group: Edgbaston Birmingham Bears v
Yorkshire Vikings. Derby Derbyshire Falcons
v Northants Steelbacks (7.0). Leicester
Leicestershire Foxes v Lancashire Lightning.
Worcester Worcestershire Rapids v Notts

Betfred Super League (8.0): Castleford
Tigers v Wigan Warriors; Hull Kingston
Rovers v Huddersfield Giants; Warrington
Wolves v Salford Red Devils.

Tennis
Lexus Nottingham Tennis Centre Rothesay
Open.

60

S1

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

Sport T20 World Cup

England exploit painful gulf in class
Mike Atherton

Group B scoreboard

Chief Cricket
Correspondent,
Antigua

Oman
(balls)
†Pratik Athavale c Salt b Archer
5 (3)
Kashyap Prajapati c Livingstone
b Wood
9 (16)
*Aqib Ilyas c Jacks b Archer
8 (10)
Zeeshan Maqsood c and b Wood 1 (5)
Khalid Kail st Buttler b Rashid
1 (3)
Ayaan Khan b Wood
1 (5)
Shoaib Khan c Buttler b Archer
11 (23)
Mehran Khan c Ali b Rashid
0 (2)
Fayyaz Butt b Rashid
2 (7)
Kaleemullah b Rashid
5 (5)
Bilal Khan not out
0 (1)
Extras (w 4)
4
Total (13.2 overs)
47
Fall of wickets 1-6, 2-16, 3-24, 4-25, 5-25,
6-32, 7-33, 8-36, 9-47.
Bowling Topley 3-0-12-0; Archer 3.2-1-12-3;
Wood 3-0-12-3; Rashid 4-0-11-4.
England
(balls)
P D Salt b B Khan
12 (3)
*†J C Buttler not out
24 (8)
W G Jacks c Prajapati b Kaleemullah 5 (7)
J M Bairstow not out
8 (2)
Extras (nb 1)
1
Total (2 wkts, 3.1 overs)
50
H C Brook, M M Ali, L S Livingstone,
J C Archer, A U Rashid, M A Wood and
R J W Topley did not bat.
Fall of wickets 1-12, 2-20.
Bowling B Khan 2-0-36-1; Kaleemullah
1-0-10-1; Butt 0.1-0-4-0.
P W L T NR Pts NRR
Australia (Q) 3 3 0 0 0 6 3.58
Scotland
3 2 0 0
1
5 2.16
England
3 1 1 0
1
3 3.08
Namibia
3 1 2 0 0
2 -2.10
Oman
4 0 4 0 0 0 -3.06

England v Oman
North Sound (England won toss):
England (2pts) beat Oman by eight
wickets

In need of a mighty boost to their net
run rate, England found the perfect
opponents in hapless Oman, who were
ripe for the plucking and were totally
outclassed. On a hot and breezy day at
the Sir Vivian Richards Stadium in
North Sound, England bowled Oman
out in 13.2 overs for only 47, the
fourth-lowest score at a T20 World
Cup, and finished the match in time
for a sundowner.
Jos Buttler, the England captain, had
spoken about concentrating on the win
first and foremost and not being consumed by run rates, but at the halfway
mark, the contest was done. It was only
a matter, then, of how quickly England
could complete the task and how far
they could move the dial on their net
run rate, both of which were achieved
to satisfaction.
In the end it took them only 19 balls
to knock off the runs, amid much heaving and swinging, with the result that
their net run rate moved a long way into
positive territory, from minus 1.8 to
3.081 — superior to Scotland’s 2.164.
The task in front of them has become
much more straightforward now. Over
in St Lucia, Scotland’s rum punches
might have tasted a touch sour.
The gulf in class was painful to watch.
Oman had started their tournament
brightly, losing on a Super Over to
Namibia, and had held Australia in
check for a considerable time in their
second match. But against Scotland in
Antigua there were clear signs of trouble and here they had nothing
to offer in the face of
some quick and hostile bowling from
Mark Wood and
Jofra Archer and
some teasing leg spin
from Adil Rashid.
Those three shared the
ten wickets to fall.
England were not
quite pitch perfect in
the opening powerplay,
when four wickets fell,
with Moeen Ali dropping a
straightforward catch at first
slip, but they gave themselves
a near-perfect start. The wickets fell to the two quicks, Archer
and Wood, who enjoyed a firmer
pitch than in Barbados, one that
offered more pace and bounce.
Rashid was the pick of the
bowlers, taking four for 11

Buttler hit 24

runs from eight balls as England’s batsmen set about scoring quickly to improve the net run rate

There was no
need for Will
Jacks’ off spin on
this occasion, nor any
need for cutters and, of
course, there was little in
the opposition ranks to
worry them.
Retaining Wood over
Chris Jordan was a
positive call and the
right one. Jordan offers greater depth
of batting, and
brilliant fielding,
but
associate
nations such as
Oman rarely
see
bowlers
who bowl at
more
than
145kph,
as

Wood does, and they were clearly rattled by the pace here. Oman’s captain
Aqib Ilyas admitted as much. “Archer
and Wood are the fastest bowlers in
cricket and in the back of your mind is
that they might hit you,” he said. “We
tried to take them on too early.” Only
Shoaib Khan at No 7 made it into
double figures, scoring 11, on a sorrylooking scorecard.
Reece Topley had returned to the
team in place of Jordan and looked in
good order with the new ball, finding
swing from a strong cross-breeze. Leftarmers have gone well in the tournament so far, with Fazalhaq Farooqi of
Afghanistan looking among the most
threatening bowlers at the start of an
innings. Topley went wicketless, but
bowled well enough to be given three
overs in the opening powerplay, and
should retain his place against Namibia

tomorrow. Further evidence of
England’s aggressive intent came with
the catches taken by Phil Salt and Jacks
off Archer, both men being tight in on
the singles to narrow the angle, at cover
and backward point respectively.
When Archer gave way, Wood came
steaming in, taking a simple return
catch from Zeeshan Maqsood off his
first ball, before bowling Ayaan Khan,
to pocket his 50th wicket in T20 internationals. Wood’s jig of delight after his
first wicket spoke of a man relieved to
see an upturn in fortunes.
Buttler was then able to call upon a
classic combination when Rashid replaced Topley. Leg spin at one end, high
pace at the other. Rashid found drift on
the breeze and sharp spin from the dry
surface and looked a constant threat,
taking wickets in his opening two overs
and bowling through for figures of 4-0-

11-4. His final two wickets were taken
with perfectly pitched googlies that
spun back to clatter the stumps.
Buttler said afterwards that “with the
bat we just wanted to be ultra-positive”
and the intent was clear to see when
Salt smashed his first two balls for six,
before swinging across the line to Bilal
Khan and getting his off stump flattened. He waltzed off with a cool strike rate
of 400, to be replaced by Jacks who
skied a catch from his seventh ball. The
cricket had a slight air of madness at
this point, with England’s batsmen
swinging and carving at every delivery.
It was left to Buttler, who has exuded
an air of confidence and relaxation all
week, to apply the finishing touch. He
made 24 in eight balls, including four
fours and a six, and took 22 from Bilal’s
second over. Jonny Bairstow completed
the win with a pull to the square-leg
boundary and the players walked off at
4.50pm local time after a game that
lasted fewer than a hundred balls.
It was a totally one-sided contest, but
a contest was precisely what England
did not want in the situation they found
themselves. What they wanted was a
facile win and that is what they got. It’s
Namibia next tomorrow and a win in
that game — and a win for Australia,
who have never lost to an associate
nation in a World Cup, against Scotland
— will ensure England progress to the
super eight stage. England remain very
much in the hunt.

Cricket scoreboards
T20 World Cup: Grouo C
West Indies v New Zealand
Tarouba, Trinidad and Tobago (New
Zealand won toss): West Indies (2pts) beat
New Zealand by 13 runs
West Indies
(balls)
B A King c Conway b Neesham
9 (12)
J Charles b Boult
0 (5)
†N Pooran c Conway b Southee
17 (12)
R L Chase c Ravindra b Ferguson
0 (3)
*R Powell c Conway b Southee
1 (5)
S E Rutherford not out
68 (39)
A J Hosein c Neesham b Santner
15 (17)
A D Russell c Ferguson b Boult
14 (7)
R Shepherd lbw b Ferguson
13 (13)
A S Joseph b Boult
6 (6)
G Motie not out
0
(1)
Extras (lb 3, w 3)
6
Total (9 wkts, 20 overs)
149
Fall of wickets 1-1, 2-20, 3-21, 4-22, 5-30, 6-58,
7-76, 8-103, 9-112.
Bowling Boult 4-1-16-3; Southee 4-0-21-2;
Ferguson 4-0-27-2; Neesham 4-0-27-1;
Phillips 1-0-9-0; Santner 2-0-27-1; Mitchell
1-0-19-0.

New Zealand
(balls)
†D P Conway c Chase b Hosein
5 (8)
F H Allen c Russell b Joseph
26 (23)
R Ravindra c Russell b Motie
10 (13)
*K S Williamson c Pooran b Motie
1 (2)
D J Mitchell b Motie
12 (13)
G D Phillips c Powell b Joseph
40 (33)
J D S Neesham c King b Joseph
10 (11)
M J Santner not out
21 (12)
T G Southee c and b Joseph
0
(1)
T A Boult c Chase b Russell
7 (4)
L H Ferguson not out
0 (0)
Extras (lb 1, w 3)
4
Total (9 wkts, 20 overs)
136
Fall of wickets 1-20, 2-34, 3-39, 4-54, 5-63,
6-85, 7-108, 8-108, 9-117.
Bowling Hosein 4-0-21-1; Shepherd 3-0-36-0;
Russell 4-0-30-1; Joseph 4-0-19-4; Motie
4-0-25-3; Chase 1-0-4-0.
P W L T NR Pts NRR
West Indies 3 3 0 0 0
6 2.60
Afghanistan 2 2 0 0 0
4 5.22
Uganda
3 1 2 0 0
2 -4.22
PNG
2 0 2 0 0
0 -0.43
NZ
2 0 2 0 0
0 -2.42

Group D
Bangladesh v Netherlands
Kingstown, St Vincent (Netherlands won
toss): Bangladesh (2pts) beat Netherlands by
25 runs
Bangladesh
(balls)
Tanzid Hasan c De Leede
(26)
b Van Meekeren
35
*Najmul Shanto c Singh b Dutt
1 (3)
†Litton Das c Engelbrecht b Dutt
1 (2)
Shakib Al Hasan not out
64 (46)
Towhid Hridoy b Pringle
9 (15)
Mahmudullah c Engelbrecht
b Van Meekeren
25 (21)
Jaker Ali not out
14 (7)
Extras (b 4, lb 3, w 3)
10
Total (5 wkts, 20 overs)
159
Rishad Hossain, Taskin Ahmed, Tanzim
Hasan Sakib and Mustafizur Rahman did not
bat.
Fall of wickets 1-3, 2-23, 3-71, 4-89, 5-130.
Bowling Kingma 2-0-20-0; Dutt 4-0-17-2;
Van Meekeren 4-0-15-2; Van Beek 4-0-43-0;
De Leede 3-0-31-0; Pringle 3-0-26-1.

Netherlands
(balls)
M Levitt c Hridoy b Ahmed
18 (16)
M P O’Dowd c and b Sakib
12 (16)
V Singh st Das b Mahmudullah
26 (16)
S A Engelbrecht c Sakib b Hossain 33 (22)
*†S A Edwards c Ali b Rahman
25 (23)
B F W de Leede st Das b Hossain
0 (2)
L V van Beek c and b Hossain
2 (3)
T J G Pringle b Ahmed
1 (10)
A Dutt not out
15 (12)
Extras (lb 1, w 1)
2
Total (8 wkts, 20 overs)
134
P A van Meekeren and V J Kingma did not bat.
Fall of wickets 1-22, 2-32, 3-69, 4-111, 5-111,
6-117, 7-117, 8-134.
Bowling Rahman 4-0-12-1; Sakib 3-0-23-1;
Ahmed 4-0-30-2; Al Hasan 4-0-29-0; Hossain
4-0-33-3; Mahmudullah 1-0-6-1.
P W L T NR Pts NRR
SA
3 3 0 0 0
6 0.60
Bangladesh 3 2 1 0 0
4 0.48
Netherlands 3 1 2 0 0
2 -0.41
Nepal
2 0 1 0
1
1 -0.54
Sri Lanka
3 0 2 0
1
1 -0.78

Vitality Blast: South group
Middlesex v Essex
Lord’s (Middlesex won toss): Essex (2pts)
beat Middlesex by 16 runs (DLS Method)
Essex
(balls)
†A M Rossington c Cracknell
(14)
b Cornwell
20
D Elgar c and b Hollman
28 (17)
M S Pepper b Cornwell
23 (12)
J M Cox not out
31 (19)
P I Walter b Higgins
18 (14)
M J J Critchley not out
0 (0)
Extras (lb 3, w 6)
9
Total (4 wkts, 12.4 overs)
129
D R Sams, *S R Harmer, L M Benkenstein,
S Snater and A P Beard did not bat.
Fall of wickets 1-24, 2-69, 3-83, 4-121.
Bowling Helm 2-0-16-0; Cullen 3-0-33-0;
Cornwell 2.4-0-29-2; Brookes 2-0-22-0;
Hollman 2-0-20-1; Higgins 1-0-6-1.
Middlesex
(balls)
*S S Eskinazi c Elgar b Walter
15 (10)
M D E Holden not out
41 (24)

R F Higgins c Harmer b Walter
2 (2)
M K Andersson not out
0
(1)
Extras (lb 1, w 2, nb 2)
5
Total (2 wkts, 6 overs)
63
J B Cracknell, †J L B Davies, L B K Hollman,
T G Helm, H J H Brookes, B C Cullen and
N B Cornwell did not bat.
Fall of wickets 1-35, 2-38.
Bowling Sams 2-0-20-0; Snater 1-0-15-0;
Beard 1-0-11-0; Walter 2-0-16-2.

Glamorgan v Hampshire Hawks
Sophia Gardens (abandoned, rain): 1pt each
Somerset
Sussex
Surrey
Essex
Glamorgan
Hampshire
Kent
Gloucestershire
Middlesex

P
5
4
4
5
5
5
4
4
6

W
3
3
3
3
2
2
2
1
1

L
2
1
1
2
2
2
2
3
5

T NR Pts R/R
0 0 6 0.81
0 0 6 0.75
0 0 6 0.59
0 0 6 0.20
0 1 5 0.14
0 1 5 -0.47
0 0 4 -1.15
0 0 2 -0.69
0 0 2 -2.15

61

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Euro 2024 Sport

‘Pressure is all
on England
and I’m in the
form of my life’
Aleksandar Mitrovic
tells Alyson Rudd about
swapping Fulham for
Saudi Arabia –
and issues a
warning to
group C rivals

T

o speak to Aleksandar
Mitrovic is to be left with
the uncomfortable notion
that Serbia are far from
ideal opposition for
England’s opening group game at the
European Championship.
The former Fulham striker, who
has just finished the season unbeaten
with Al-Hilal in the Saudi Pro
League, paints a picture of a team
who have matured together and who
are passionate about making a mark
at their first Euros as an independent
nation. Just as England were undone
by Iceland’s cohesion, intimacy and
energy in their final preparation game
last week, so they could find Serbia to
be annoyingly tenacious.
“If you had to choose the hardest
game to play then I think that would
be England,” Mitrovic says. “Consider
the talent, their history. It’s the
toughest game you could ask for but
it’s a challenge for us. We look
forward to it. We have nothing to lose.
“England, for sure, are favourites,
and the pressure is on them to open
the Euros in the best possible way. We
will try to give our best to give them a
hard time and try to win the game, to
make a statement that we want to do
something big that nobody has done
before us. You want to make history.
This is why you fight hard to be in the
Euros, to play big teams.”
When I ask Mitrovic to describe
each of his team-mates, he offers a
mix of humour and earnestness, but

the overall impression is one of
Dragan Stojkovic’s team being a
family united by patriotism, hard
work and a deep understanding of
what each individual player is capable
of bringing to the whole.
The 29-year-old believes Serbia
can reach the knockouts in Germany.
“Of course, we have a lot of talent,
we have done some amazing things
together,” Mitrovic says. “This is
our third big competition together
after the World Cup in Russia, the
World Cup in Qatar and now the
Euros for the first time as an
independent Serbia [they reached
the quarter-finals as Serbia and
Montenegro in 2000].
“We are confident. If we play like
we know we can play we can do big
things. We showed that against
Portugal [Mitrovic scored the winner
away from home to secure Serbia’s
place at the 2022 World Cup], we
showed a glimpse of it against Brazil
[in Qatar when Serbia defended well
for much of the game before losing
2-0]. Hopefully we will not have
injuries like we had in the last World
Cup [where they went out at the
group stage]. It’s already history for
us but hopefully we can do more.”
Recent history has been
controversial for Mitrovic, who had
to force through a move away from
Fulham last summer, much to the
dismay of the supporters for whom
he had become a cult figure after
almost six years at the club.
The striker was viewed as simply
one of the many players seduced by
the big salaries on offer in Saudi
Arabia, but Mitrovic argues that he
needed a change of pace. Does he
regret, however, the manner in which
he departed west London?
“Not at all, it was not up to me,” he
says. “I had given the club everything.
I stayed a long time there, even when
we got relegated and then promoted.
When a lot of players were leaving I
was one who stayed. I had nothing
left to give.

Mitrovic, who scored 28
goals for Al-Hilal this
season, is confident that
Serbia can reach the
knockouts in Germany

“It was time for change for me and
my family. It was not just about
Fulham; when you play a lot of years
in the best league in the world you
are just mentally and physically
exhausted. One year in England is
like two or three years in a different
league in the world.
“That’s why the Premier League is
the hardest league in the world, and it
was time for me to change. I felt I
gave everything to Fulham — I had
nothing left to give. I felt Al-Hilal was
the right move. It was time to go
somewhere where I was going to fight
for trophies and score a lot of goals
and play for a team who are going to
create a lot of chances.”
This certainly came true. Mitrovic’s
tally of 28 goals was second only to
Cristiano Ronaldo’s 35 last season and
Al-Hilal won the league, the Saudi
Super Cup and the King Cup, leaving
Mitrovic with the sense that he is in
the form to excel in Germany.
“So far, I’ve felt the best I’ve felt in
my life — physically and mentally,”
he says. “I play a lot more games than
I used to play at Fulham and here I

play in the best team and I am scoring
a lot of goals. I play almost every
game. If you put that with a lot of
winning then I can continue to play
like that for my country.
“When you start winning games,
you build confidence. The more you
win, the confidence grows.”
Mitrovic has settled well in Riyadh.
His children attend the American
International School and after each
Al-Hilal match, Freed from Desire is
played so that the fans can sing
“Mitro’s on fire”.
“To be honest, we love it, we live in
a compound and the life is totally
different to England,” he says. “If I’m
not training, I’m by the pool relaxing,
life is really nice.
“In England, especially in London,
you get more privacy when you go
out. Here they are obsessed with
football and really passionate.
Wherever you go you are recognised
and when one person sees you
everyone sees you and wants to
take selfies.
“But it’s part of the job, you try to
give time to the fans, it’s lovely to see

that they love you. It’s different but
it’s really nice as well.
“Since we came here we didn’t one
time mention London. After eight
years, six in London and two in
Newcastle, it was time for us to
change, and so far we love life here.
“London is an amazing city and
we have a lot of friends there and
when we have time we will visit
London. But we are enjoying the
beautiful weather we didn’t have so
much in London.”
I first interviewed Mitrovic when
he joined Fulham in 2018 and was
struck by the intensity of his
patriotism — something that has
not dimmed.
“As you mature you understand
what it means to represent your
people,” he says. “Everybody is
watching you representing your
country and not many people have
the chance to do it — you don’t take
those moments for granted. The team
played a long time together and we
grew up together. It is special. I hope
I have a couple of years left and I put
myself in the service of my country.”

Model, warrior and Road Runner: Mitrovic on the Serbia team
Dragan Stojkovic 59, manager
He is a big motivator. Since he
came we have done stuff no
one had done before: we
qualified for the last World Cup
against Portugal at their own
ground. We qualified out of the
hardest group. He has the
biggest win percentage as
manager. He was the best
player we ever had. So far we
have done so well. He’s
sometimes tough but a really
positive guy.
Vanja Milinkovic-Savic
27, goalkeeper
Very tall. If you want one
sentence, he’s really very tall,
trust me. I don’t think you

realise it on TV but if you see
him in person you will say he’s a
very, very tall guy.
Nikola Milenkovic 26, defender
He’s my son. He’s the guy who
came into the national team
very young, I took him under
my wing and since then we
have a good relationship. We
talk a lot and he sits next to me
in the dressing room. I have the
feeling he is my boy.
Strahinja Pavlovic 23, defender
He’s too aggressive. It’s OK
during the game but on the
training pitch a lot of times he
trains like he plays and a lot of
times he steps on my foot. I tell

him before the game, don’t
be too aggressive. He’s a
good defender and I tell
him he’s born to play in the
Premier League.
Srdjan Babic (right)
28, defender
He’s a model. He’s a
tall, strong boy —
good body, six
pack, good hair.
And he’s well
dressed.
Andrija Zivkovic
27, midfielder
All that needs to be
said is that he is the
Serbian Messi!

Srdan Mijailovic
30, midfielder
He’s a warrior. He’s
the kind of player that
every manager likes to
have. No matter
what job you give
him, he will do
it well. He can
play any
position on
the pitch.
Sasa Lukic
27, midfielder
He’s my
brother,
we’ve known
each other a
long time. This

season he came to Fulham
and I was one of the reasons
he joined the club. I told him:
“Look, the football you play in
Italy is not the same sport.”
He said, “Football is football”
but after a few weeks, he said:
“This is not football, it is too
fast, it is not for me.” I said
that I took one year to adapt
after moving there and now
he loves London and he loves
Fulham.
Filip Kostic 31, midfielder
He’s another brother. He’s the
guy who is the runner, a very
important player for our team.
He’s like Road Runner from the
cartoon.

Sergej Milinkovic-Savic
29, forward
He’s a special player — the guy
with talent, the guy who can
change the game at any point.
Dusan Tadic 35, forward
He’s the leader, the captain, the
guy who connects everything
on the field and off the field.
. . . and what would Tadic say
about Mitrovic?
“Goal machine” or something.
He’s very happy with me. We
have a really good connection.
I can play without looking. I
know where he will cross the
ball, where he will pass. We can
play together with closed eyes.

62

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

Sport Euro 2024

Right, left or centre
– time for England
to see the real Foden
Player of the year had
a standout season for
City. Now Southgate
must make most of his
talent, writes Paul Joyce
Pep Guardiola sat Phil Foden down at
the start of the season and proceeded to
impart the sort of insight and advice
that only a mind as sharp as his would
have spotted.
The Manchester City manager recognises the homegrown talent is a
street footballer, and had come to hold
the view that he was prone to overly
complicate things. That Foden was permanently in sixth gear when sometimes in matches a spell in second was
necessary. And so that was the message
he relayed in his own inimitable way.
“He told me, ‘Just don’t try to be
Phil Foden in every action,’ ” the 23year-old said. The merit of that homespun chat would, by the end of a stellar
campaign, be measured in goals, 27 of
them, a host of personal accolades and
a sixth Premier League title.
Too much Phil Foden? The very idea
sounds impossible to those England
supporters who are waiting for him to
leave jaws dropping in the same way he
routinely does for his boyhood club.
Four goals in 34 appearances for his
country does not warrant the sort of
highlights reel that is commonplace on
YouTube from his City performances,
though over the next month there
stretches an opportunity to change all
that.
There is always a subplot for Gareth
Southgate to unravel while attempting
to steer England to glory, and now the
demand falls on him to extract the best
from the Premier League player of the
year.
Focus inevitably falls on where England plan to deploy Foden. Against
Iceland at Wembley last Friday he was
utilised in his favoured No 10 role, the
position from where he dazzled at the
end of City’s campaign.
Yet after a bright start, he found himself marooned on the periphery, with
his efforts to locate space cramped by
Harry Kane’s penchant for dropping
deep and Cole Palmer’s tendency to
wander infield from the right.
Those issues would not have occurred under Guardiola, who has
drilled into City’s players every last detail on where they should be at certain
times, and merely highlighted the
difficulties of international football,
when time on the training pitch is at a
premium.
It would be no surprise if Foden found himself on the left against
Serbia on Sunday, with Bukayo Saka restored to the starting line-up on the
right and Jude Bellingham handed the
licence to roam as a No 10.
That is his least-favoured position.
Some of his most memorable moments
for City have come when cutting in off
the right, on to his favoured left foot and
rifling a shot into the corner. Southgate’s rebuttal to the debate has been
clear. “There’s where they start and

Squad using £550 smart ring
Paul Joyce Blankenhain

W

rapped around the index
finger of Gareth
Southgate’s left hand is a
black metal band that England are
hoping can give them the edge at
Euro 2024. Southgate, inset, has
started wearing an Oura Ring, the
wellness tracker favoured by
celebrities such as Kim Kardashian,
as nothing is being left to chance in
preparation before — and during —
the tournament.
England’s players, including Conor
Gallagher, and FA staff, led by the
chief executive, Mark Bullingham,
have been sporting the health and
sleep-tracking device, which also
comes in silver and gold.
The ring measures and analyses a
number of metrics, including heartrate variability, blood oxygen rate,
body temperature and sleep
duration. That data, which
has a 99 per cent heartrate accuracy and 92
per cent on body
temperature,
links to a phone
and can then
be overseen by
analysts at the
FA, who are
able to flag up
any issues.
Prince Harry
and a number of
other A-listers are
already using Oura
Rings to monitor their

Unlocking his potential
Foden predominantly played down the
centre and on the right flank during
England's qualifying campaign, as this map
of his touches across all his appearances
shows. The role he appears most likely to
be given against Serbia - on the left-flank is one he rarely filled in qualifying.

5%

2%

1%

2%

3%

4%

5%

14%

8%

8%

3%

2%

8%

10%

2%

2%

5%

4%

0%

1%

1%

1%

2%

0%

0%

0%

0%

0%

8%
3%

Direction of play
% of touches per 90 minuites. Source: Opta

lifestyles, including the actors Will
Smith and Gwyneth Paltrow, and
the Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg.
An Oura Ring retails at between
about £300 and £550 depending on
which metal and style is chosen.
They have also been used by the
US Army and UFC competitors.
A blurb on the website of the
company, which is based in Finland
and has sold more than one million
rings worldwide, states: “Whether
you’re managing a professional
sports organisation or training elite
forces, ensure your team is always
performing at the highest level with
precise biometrics.
“Use accurate, continuous data
to prioritise rest, adjust training
schedules, monitor recovery, and
detect signs of illness, injury, and
fatigue.”
The tracker is the latest example
of how England are leaving
no stone unturned in
their attempt to win a
first major trophy
since 1966.
The pitches at
their base camp
at the Weimarer
Hotel and Spa
are next to a
giant white
marquee, which
houses exercise
bikes and other
equipment for the
sessions that precede
the main workout.
where you want them to end up,”
Southgate said. “And where you want
them to end up is inside the pitch. That’s
the key. That’s how the modern game is,
isn’t it? You write a formation down but
you’re never in it with or without the
ball really. So it just helps for the teamsheet.”
Of course, Foden must embrace that
mindset but there remain times when it
seems the weight of playing for his
country is a burden.
One of the problems with Southgate
packing his squad with attackers is that
it brings pressure on those who do start
to justify their inclusion, allied to the
threat that if they do not have an eyecatching opening half, they are 15 minutes away from being substituted.
Those close to Foden regard him as
being in a good place. He has always
been family-minded, but his girlfriend,
Rebecca Cooke, has had a big influence
on him. Their third child is due this
summer.
Foden’s growing maturity means he
has been able to ride any setbacks with
City more adeptly. When he gave away
a stoppage-time penalty from which
Crystal Palace equalised at the Etihad
last December, Guardiola’s tone was
not quite so soothing and rather more
acerbic. In the past that would have
weighed heavily on Foden to the point

that he would have obsessed over it. Instead, he moved on quickly from the
mistake, and to prove the point scored
in the final of the Fifa Club World Cup
against Fluminense six days later.
That was the third goal in a 4-0
trouncing of the Brazilians, though it
is Foden’s ability to make the difference
on the biggest of stages that Southgate
must tap into.
This season he has scored at Old
Trafford and the Bernabéu, and twice
on the final day of the Premier League
season when City had to beat West
Ham United to make sure of lift-off for
another title party.

The evidence against Iceland did not
support it, but Foden’s England teammates have been wowed by his impact
in their sessions.
“He’s been out of this world in training,” Declan Rice said at the end of last
week. “Everyone has been talking
about him. ‘Have you seen Phil in training?’ He’s that good. So, so special.
“We can perform well every week on
a Premier League level, but at the European Championship, all eyes are on it.
Can you step up? I’m sure our attacking
players are going to thrive off that.”
Will Foden find his mojo and answer
in the affirmative? To do so he needs

63

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Sport

Eze ready to be ‘finisher’
Southgate sorely needs
Foden trains at
England’s base
in Germany.
Above, with his
pregnant
partner,
Rebecca
Cooke, and
their children
Ronnie, four,
and True, two

the ball at his feet and to feel part of the
game. That is when he is at his happiest.
In the new book Dear England, written by Jonathan Northcroft, of The
Times, and fellow journalist Rob Draper, there is a wonderful anecdote that
sums up Foden’s obsessive nature.
It relates to a warm-up game against
New Zealand before the Fifa Under-17
World Cup in India seven years ago
when he received a blow to the head. He
passed concussion protocols, but the
manager, Steve Cooper, decided to taper his training the following day and
sent him inside after the warm-up.
Yet when England received the phys-

ical stats from that session, a familiar
name remained at the top of the list.
“Then we looked at the camera footage,” explained Cooper. “When we excused him from the rest of training,
what he’s done is he’s got a ball, drifted
on to the next pitch and he’s booting it
up in the air, chasing it, doing dribbles,
trying to hit the crossbar and hitting it
every time. Then pulling the ball down
when it comes back to him. That’s Phil.
He just loves football.”
Guardiola saw that and his tweaks
have made him better than ever. Now
Southgate must come up with a blueprint to do likewise.

Substitutes have rarely
been game-changers
for manager but the
25-year-old could be
different, says Paul Joyce

A

t the top of the list sits Jack
Grealish closely followed
by Marcus Rashford. They
head a table chronicling the
players who have had the
biggest impact as a substitute under
Gareth Southgate, though it is hardly a
tale of game-changing heroics that
have shaped the most important of
occasions.
Grealish has two goals and two
assists. Rashford two and one. Indeed,
of the 372 changes Southgate has made
across 95 matches as England manager
to date, there has been a grand total of
19 goals and 18 assists.
Southgate has previously stressed
that for England to prosper at the European Championship finals over the
coming weeks, it will require contributions from a sizeable chunk of the squad
beyond the starting XI.
Neither Grealish nor Rashford made
the final 26-man squad, overlooked in
favour of emerging talents such as
Anthony Gordon and Eberechi Eze
who are both taking part in a senior
tournament for the first time.
Eze, Crystal Palace’s attacking
midfielder, is understood to have
been impressing his team-mates
during training at England’s HQ at the
Weimarer Land Spa and Golf resort
with his ability to glide beyond rivals
and put doubt in the minds of his
markers.
The 25-year-old is unlikely to start
against Serbia in Gelsenkirchen on
Sunday, but Southgate will have a role
in mind for him if his training performances have been as crisp as it seems.
“It’s not just about the 11,” Eze
said. “It’s about the whole team, the
culture, the collective. You win the
tournament as a collective. It’s not just
the 11 players who have started, so
everyone is ready.
“Everyone knows that, everyone
wants to understand that. It’s putting
your ego to the side and being able to
focus on what’s important for the team.
I feel like if you have that type of
culture, which we do, you’ve got the
best chance.
“[The manager] has not spoken about
that specifically as yet, but we understand. He spoke about finishers — we
call them finishers. The players that
come on to the pitch.
“There is a mentality about it, there’s
a way to go about it. There’s importance
in that role, it’s not just about the 11.”
Southgate’s use of the terminology

United given
boost over
Branthwaite
Martyn Ziegler, Gary Jacob,
Charlotte Duncker

Manchester United’s ambitions of signing Jarrad Branthwaite, Everton’s England defender, have been given a huge
boost after the clubs agreed personal

Eze, the Crystal Palace attacking midfielder, has been impressing his England
team-mates in training and says: “It’s not just about the 11 players who start”

“finishers” is something he borrowed
from the former England rugby union
head coach Eddie Jones, with whom he
regularly swapped ideas.
Jones’s rebranding of the term “replacements” in 2017 prompted raised
eyebrows at the time, but he saw no
difference in those who started and
ended matches. Simply a team. Southgate has sought to implement that same
outlook during his tenure and, while
the buy-in has been strong, the results
have, ultimately, proved mixed.
England’s changes were unable to
stem Croatia’s rising tide of pressure in
the World Cup semi-final in Russia in
2018 and a 1-0 lead became an agonising 2-1 extra-time loss.
Grealish’s impact off the bench at
Euro 2020, particularly in the knockout
win over Germany, helped Southgate’s
side muster momentum that took
them through to the final before the
heart-wrenching penalty shoot-out
defeat by Italy. On that occasion, two of
those he brought on for spot kicks,
Rashford and Jadon Sancho, missed
from 12 yards.
In Eze, England have someone
primed to seize the chance to make a
difference.
A ruptured achilles suffered in train-

ing on the day he received his first
senior international call-up wrecked
hopes of going to Euro 2020. Yet the
setback only served to strengthen the
resolve of a player whose resilience
was already founded upon rejections
from Arsenal, Fulham, Reading and
Millwall, before shining at Queens
Park Rangers.
Eze recalled how reading that a
Russian gymnast, Artur Dalaloyan, had
recovered from the same injury inside
four months gave him the motivation to
be back playing for Palace after six
months out.
“Those types of experiences make
you stronger, they build your character
and they give you more strength going
forward,” he said.
“That’s the story of all footballers.
Anyone that’s a professional footballer
playing at the highest level, you have to
be resilient, you have to be strong and
be able to come back from setbacks.
“You fail more than you succeed in
this sport, so that’s not just me, it’ll be
everyone. I’m grateful to be in this
position and to have this opportunity
because I believe in myself and know
what I can do.”
That is whether as a starter or
stepping off the substitutes’ bench.

terms with the player’s representatives.
United have yet to agree a fee with
Everton — who are believed to be holding out for about £70 million — but the
agreement with the 21-year-old’s representatives is a significant step forward.
It would mean Branthwaite, who just
missed out on England’s Euro 2024
squad, being paid between £150,000
and £160,000 a week, according to
sources with knowledge of the negotiations. Everton’s beleaguered financial
situation means they may need to cash
in on their star to meet spending rules.
The signing would be a big statement
by United. Significantly, they are
understood to have moved quickly on

the day the transfer window opened.
Chelsea have revived their interest in
signing Michael Olise from Crystal
Palace, but face competition from
Newcastle United, Bayern Munich and
potentially Manchester United and
Manchester City. Chelsea are prepared
to meet Olise’s release clause, believed
to be about £60 million. Chelsea are
also in talks to sign Jhon Durán, 20, for
whom Aston Villa want £40 million.
Villa, for their part, are keen on
Chelsea’s Conor Gallagher, 24.
Meanwhile, players’ unions from
England and France have launched a
legal action against Fifa over its
expanded Club World Cup.

64

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

Sport Euro 2024

Munich submerged in kilts as
Michael Grant
Scottish Football
Correspondent,
Munich

The Tartan Army mustered only about
600 members for the odyssey to their
infamous World Cup in Argentina in
1978. Four years later came the Scotland support’s first mass mobilisation
overseas, when nearly 20,000 went to
Spain ’82, including those who turned
up for the game against the Soviet
Union with a banner that framed it as
an ideological battle of “Alcoholism
versus Communism”. At Italia ’90, the
travelling support again stood at about
20,000. Eight years later, for the
opening game of France ’98 against
Brazil, the estimate was of about 60,000
Scots occupying Paris.
Bigger than all of those were the
movements of Scots for the famous
“Wembley Weekends” against England
in London in the Sixties and Seventies.
Eventually, up to 70,000 flooded south
to turn the precious home of English
football into a yellow sea of Lion Rampant flags and a reservoir, also yellow,
of processed McEwan’s Export. This
was “Ally’s Tartan Army” in full force
under the charismatic but ultimately
doomed Ally MacLeod.
Well, Wembley housed the biggest
movement of Scottish fans until now,
that is. Similarities between MacLeod
and Steve Clarke begin and end with
the fact that both men became the
Scotland manager. MacLeod’s pretournament response when asked what
Scotland would do after the World Cup
in Argentina — “retain it” — will never
be beaten, but his team were.
Clarke could withstand hours of waterboarding without yielding a soundbite in the same ballpark as MacLeod’s
one-liners, yet this quiet leader has inspired the most enormous travelling
support Scotland has known. Clarke
would happily stand unnoticed at the
back of the room, letting others take the
spotlight and the credit, but he is the
figurehead who has created all of this.
Even the most conservative estimate
of how many Scots are descending on
Munich for tonight’s Euro 2024 opener
against Germany puts the number at
100,000, more than went to London in
that chaotic heyday of invading the
Wembley pitch and breaking the crossbar. Some projections, including from
the British consulate in Munich, put the
number at 200,000. All to follow a team
and a 60-year-old grandad who spends
his spare time fishing and sometimes
going to the racing. The official Scotland allocation is only 10,000 tickets for
each of the three group games. Clarke
has inspired more Scots to pack their
bags and hope for the best than even
MacLeod, Jock Stein, Sir Alex Ferguson
or Craig Brown managed.
It is a hell of a responsibility to keep
all those people upbeat, although in
fairness Clarke will not be doing it
alone. Beer will do a lot of the heavy lifting for Scottish fans in Munich, Cologne and Stuttgart, the host cities
where they will play Germany, Switzerland and Hungary respectively in their
first appearance at a major tournament
overseas since France ’98.
There is nothing patronising nor
judgmental about making that point,
merely an acknowledgement that the
vast majority of the Scotland support
will travel with a healthy blend of realism, anticipation and an admirably
lusty enthusiasm for making the absolute most of the next couple of weeks.
They have boasted of drinking Germany dry.

Germany v Scotland
Group A - Allianz Arena, Munich
Kick off: 8pm
TV: ITV1
Radio: talkSPORT, BBC 5 Live
Referee: C Turpin (France)
Weather: 16C
GERMANY
M Neuer
(4-2-3-1)
J Tah
J Kimmich
T Kroos
J Musiala

A Rüdiger
M Mittelstädt
R Andrich

I Gündogan

F Wirtz

K Havertz
C Adams
J McGinn
S McTominay
C McGregor B Gilmour
A Robertson
K Tierney

A Ralston
G Hanley

J Hendry

(3-4-2-1)

A Gunn

SCOTLAND

*Possible teams

Head to head
Germany 8

Draw 5

Scotland 4

First meeting: Most recent meeting:
Jun 1929,
Sept 2015, European
friendly:
Championship qualifier
Germany 1,
Scotland 2,
Scotland 1
Germany 3
English-based players in squad

Germany 2

Scotland 14

Population
German 83.3m

Scotland 5.4m

The fact that it is their first major
tournament overseas for 26 years is
genuinely important and it partly explains why the travelling numbers are
so astonishingly high. After France ’98,
Scotland did not qualify for anything
until Euro 2020, only for that tournament to be delayed by a year and then
played with the handbrake on because
of Covid.
To add insult to injury, Scotland did
not leave the British Isles. Two of their
games were at Hampden with crowds
of under 10,000 against the Czech Republic and Croatia, and the other one
was at Wembley in front of only 20,306.
Only now, free from pandemic restrictions, can a generation of supporters
experience the thrill of seeing their
team at a tournament abroad.
A rite of passage for an entire set of
fans, then, and an explanation for the
torrent of stories, pictures and footage
over recent days of one colourful show
of faith after another. There have been
all the packed flights, dozens and dozens of them taking various routes from
Edinburgh, Glasgow, Aberdeen and beyond. The ferry crossings, the Eurostar
journeys, the cars and buses. The camper van coming from Caithness.
Then there’s the supporter who spent
£10,000 on a three-game hospitality
package to fly 8,000 miles from Australia. Radio Scotland told yesterday
morning of fans flying from San Francisco. There are the two who cycled
from Scotland to raise money for charity, and Craig Ferguson from Paisley,
who was fundraising too, and arrived in
Germany having walked the 1,000
miles and 1.4 million steps from Hampden. All of them have steadily submerged Munich under a friendly blanket of kilts, Scotland flags and empty

bottles to a soundtrack of the drone of
the bagpipes and chants of “We’ve got
McGinn, super John McGinn”.
McGinn, Scott McTominay, Andrew
Robertson, Kieran Tierney and the rest
delivered a place at Euro 2024 for them,
but the leader is Clarke. It has been his
pragmatic, organised, meticulous management that has taken Scotland to
back-to-back European Championships for the first time in almost three
decades.
If he is the anti-MacLeod in terms of
showmanship, it still took his quiet charisma to deliver the most important
magnetism of all. Because the senior
players believed in him from day one,
Clarke got buy-in from the likes of Robertson and McGinn. The goodwill and
respect cascaded from there and a team
with a backbone of real quality have
grown up together in the five years of
Clarke’s reign.
These guys like their manager and
they like each other’s company. Gone
are the days when Scotland games were
a dispiriting chore, an exercise in negativity that studded their club seasons
and had to be endured like a trip to the
dentist or else ducked on the grounds of
some spurious injury.
Supporters used to find it easy to stay
away too. Clarke’s predecessor, Alex
McLeish, had only five home games in
his brief spell in charge and not one of
them drew more than 20,5000 fans to
Hampden. In the past year alone under
Clarke there have been nearly 50,000
for the matches against Norway, England, Georgia, Spain and Cyprus. Even
friendlies against Northern Ireland and
Finland drew a combined attendance
of almost 75,000.
The sea of humanity across Munich
became real for the Scotland management and players when their bus
weaved near the city centre yesterday
afternoon after the 60-mile trip from
the training base in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The sights and sounds would
have been thrilling and energising but
the weight of responsibility may feel
heavy on their shoulders too —
200,000 is a lot of people to satisfy.
A lot to disappoint too. The Tartan
Army are in a buoyant mood — “no
Scotland, no party” is another of the anthems being sung on a loop — but it is
not beyond many of them to let their
feelings be known if performances are
not up to scratch over the three group
games. They are proud and realistic but
not all are happy clappers. Their team
of heroes were booed off at half-time
and full-time in the defeat by Northern
Ireland at Hampden in March.
The mission statement has been
clear: Scotland have never made it beyond the opening group of a World Cup
or European Championship in 11 previous attempts, so now is the time to
make history. Aaron Hickey and Lyndon Dykes are the two regular starters
lost to injury and the team have won
only once in their past nine games. Did
they peak more than a year ago?
The defence have recently averaged
two goals conceded per game, a worry
when Toni Kroos, Jamal Musiala, Florian Wirtz and Kai Havertz will have
them in their sights. But Greece ran
Germany close with compact defending and breaking on counterattacks last
Friday, and Scotland — at their best —
are strong at that. That was how they
beat Spain last year, 2-0 at Hampden, in
the signature display that showed their
potential. If they are competitive
against Germany, even in a narrow defeat, it can be a springboard for the
games to come against Switzerland and
Hungary.
It is on Clarke to ensure that Scotland
are talked about for more than the glorious absurdity of 4 per cent of the population following them to Germany.

The biggest travelling support Scotland have assembled for
a tournament with bagpipes, above, bikes, below, beer
and even balls, main image, descend on Munich’s central
squares for the opener against the host nation with Clarke’s
team having given the Tartan Army cause for optimism

Can Euros unite a
Owen Slot
Chief Sports
Writer, Munich

I

n search of the heart of German
football, I headed for Issing.
Point yourself west from Munich
and you’re pretty soon in a
Bavaria that fits the chocolate
box metaphor. Pretty, well-groomed
villages, ornate buildings, towering
pine forests. Then stop after an hour
at Issing because this is where Julian
Nagelsmann, the Germany coach,
comes from.
I meet Günther Fent, the chairman
of FC Issing, who recalls the glory
season of 2009-2010. That was the
year that Nagelsmann, then a coach in
his early twenties, decided to come
back and play again with the mates he
grew up with and they won promotion
from level five. Not bad for a village of
1,000 people.
“We are so proud of him,” Fent says.
“Nobody from here achieved anything

like him before.” However, he does
then add that Issing once had a
second division MotoGP rider and
also Malik Harris who was, of course,
Germany’s 2022 Eurovision entry (a
disappointing 25th). Harris and the
motorcyclist also played for Issing in
their youth.
The football ground here is
particularly lovely. Two sides are
hemmed in by pine forest. Behind one
of the goals, boys and girls are training
in the after-school club. The sun is
shining, which is probably the work of
the late Franz Beckenbauer. He was so
omnipotent that they used to say that
he could control the weather. He was
a Bavarian too.
Fent recounts the occasion, while
Nagelsmann was Bayern Munich
coach, when he turned up one day at
the village school for pick-up and
drove one of the kids home who he’d
been told was badly ill.
But I am particularly intrigued by
the “maibaum” in the centre of the
village. A maibaum is a maypole, but
this one is blue and white-stripped
and at least 100 feet tall and with
decorations hanging from the sides.
This is a Bavarian tradition, explains

65

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Sport

200,000 Scots descend

Robertson:
We’re ready
to become
legends now
Michael Grant

Germany with far right on the rise?
Fent, with the maibaums being
erected on May 1, but there is a
clandestine competition between
villages: if one village can steal the
maibaum of another rival village,
before May 1, it is considered a great
triumph. Günther rolls his eyes and
recalls the disaster of four years ago
when Issing’s maibaum was captured.
It cost them 100 litres of beer to get
it back.
The picture here is so bucolic, of
wholesome communities drenched in
football, sunshine and friendly
competition. And if Germany’s hardright AfD party hadn’t just won 16 per
cent of the national vote in the
European elections, then maybe
Issing would indeed be at the heart of
German football.
If a TV survey hadn’t just reported
that 21 per cent of Germans wanted
more white players in the national
team “again”, then perhaps we could
indeed take Issing as a snapshot of
the nation.
At the very time when I was in
Issing on Wednesday, The Times was
reporting another story: that one of
the AfD’s most senior public officials
was in a relationship with a former

neo-Nazi who has posed with a
swastika flag and portrait of Hitler.
Meanwhile, there is another picture
of Germany that many are referring
back to, here, right now: the Germany
of the 2006 World Cup. Thomas
Hitzlsperger, who was in that
Germany 2006 squad, recalled it in an
interview with the BBC. “You were left
thinking,” he said. “That this was so
crazy, where did it even come from?”
A similar recollection comes from
Tim Jürgens, the deputy editor of the
football and culture magazine,
11Freunde. Jürgens was 36
years old and recalls
arriving at the opening
game which was in
Munich, just as this
opening game will
be too, and seeing
German flags
flying in the
kind of numbers
he’d never
witnessed in his
life. “My thoughts
Nagelsmann was called
on to pick more white
players in a TV survey

were: what is happening?” he says.
“But it was something really special.
A magical time.” It didn’t even matter
that Germany didn’t win. The “Fan
Mile” in Berlin leading up to the
Brandenburg Gate was packed nightly
in a kind of communal joy, and the
sun shone and that was still a time
when people could joke that
Beckenbauer was responsible. They
called it “the summer fairytale”. The
whole country looked like Issing.
Yet here is another snapshot. One
from last night. The best football bar
in Munich is the Stadion, a
pilgrimage for lovers of
football and beer
from far and wide.
Last night, the
very eve of the
tournament, the
Stadion held a
debate and the
subject matter
was not the
national team or
“Who might win
Euro 2024?” but:
“Football — a
playing field for
politics.”

Jürgens was one of the speakers, as
was an MP for the Green Party.
Now, as much as ever, does a
national football team shed light on
the nation it represents and the
Germany that this team currently
represents is one where many do not
believe Ilkay Gundogan should be the
national team captain because of his
Turkish heritage.
The hope, then, is that, over the
next four weeks, Nagelsmann’s team
will be sufficiently successful on the
pitch to be successful off it. And
success off it means bringing people
together again. Like 2006.
The question though, at a time of
rising nationalism across Europe, is
whether too much has changed. The
corruption charges against the late
Beckenbauer mean the sun no longer
even shines on him. There was a
wholesome national rebirth in the
fairytale of 2006. “I don’t know if we
can do that now,” Jürgens says.
A national team can give a nation
cause to celebrate. There is a thin line,
here, between that and a national
team being a cause for nationalism.
This is a troublesome time and a
complicated game.

The Scotland captain Andrew Robertson believes his team will become
national legends if they make history by
getting through to the knockout stage
at a major tournament for the first time.
Scotland have fallen at the first hurdle at eight World Cups and three
European Championships and their
attempt to halt that run begins with
a formidable 90 minutes against the
hosts, Germany, in the Euro 2024
opener in Munich tonight.
Steve Clarke, the manager, said all
of his players were fit and ready,
having travelled north to Munich by
coach after a final training session at
their training base in GarmischPartenkirchen.
Germany are the overwhelming
favourites to win in Bayern Munich’s
66,000-capacity Allianz Arena but
Scotland have a fighting chance of
making it out of group A given that
their other fixtures are against Switzerland and Hungary.
“We want to make history, we know
what’s at stake,” Robertson, the Liverpool full back, said. “We have so many
incentives here but becoming a legendary squad is the biggest. That’s what has
to drive us forward. The thought of
being the first Scotland team to make a
knockout round is our driving force. If
we manage that? You just never know.
“In the last Euros we played well in
getting a draw at Wembley [0-0 v England at Euro 2020], but in the other
two games we let ourselves down a bit.
We could have done better. We don’t
want to have any regrets this time. We
have to move on from that. We believe
we can be the team that makes history.”
The social and mainstream media
coverage of fans travelling to Germany
— it has been the biggest ever mobilisation of the Tartan Army, with estimates
as high as 200,000 — has been impossible to miss and the players have taken it
in. “We’ve seen all the videos of them in
the squares across the city,” Robertson
said. “We all know so many people who
are out here. It feels like most of the
country’s come over.”
Most of those fans have arrived in
Germany without one of the precious
10,000 tickets from the official Scotland
allocation. “Listen, we know they can’t
all get into the stadium. We wish they
could, but wherever they are, either
here or at home, we want to make them
proud,” Robertson said. “We’ve waited
years and years for this and now there’s
only one more sleep. We can’t wait.”
Robertson has a happy association
with tonight’s venue. The 30-year-old
played in the Liverpool team which
beat Bayern Munich 3-1 there in the
second leg of the Champions League
last 16 en route to becoming European
champions in 2019. “Last time I came
here was a massive win for Liverpool,”
Robertson said. “A lot of people had
written us off after we drew 0-0 at
Anfield, but we went in front of all those
Bayern supporters and beat them 3-1. It
was incredible to be part of.”
The defender’s German former
manager recently messaged him and
will be at the opening game. “Jürgen
Klopp texted when I broke the record
for captaining Scotland, which he didn’t
need to do and which was good of him,”
Robertson, who led his country for the
49th time in the 2-2 draw with Finland
last Friday, said. “I know he’ll be here
and I know who he’ll be supporting! I
hope he enjoys his night, but not too
much…”

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

S2

Sport
The

McIlroy magic

Back on track

Northern Irishman shoots 65
on day one at the US Open

England thrash Oman to
boost qualification hopes

UK-based
cash bid to
buy Everton

Euros

exclusive
Paul Joyce
Northern Football Correspondent

Germany
v Scotland
Tonight
ITV, 8pm

Kane warning to England
6 Serbia can hurt us on Sunday, says captain 6 Robertson: We can make history for Scotland
Paul Joyce, Alyson Rudd

Harry Kane has warned that Serbia
possess the attributes to “hurt” England
and flagged their aerial presence as a
significant threat in their Euro 2024
opener on Sunday. As John Stones returned to training after a 24-hour sickness bug, Kane, the England captain,
outlined the dangers that their group C
rivals will pose in Gelsenkirchen.
Serbia are 33rd in Fifa’s world rankings and Kane said that England can ill

afford to underestimate their opponents. “They’re a team that can hurt you
if you’re not set up correctly and defensively they’re really strong,” Kane said.
“They make it difficult with their
moves and they have tall players so they
can be very dangerous. If we’re not careful it could be a difficult game for us so
we need to make sure we get that right.”
Kane believes the present squad is
arguably the best England have had and
can go far by harnessing the “fearless”
attitude within the group. “This squad is

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one of the best, if not the best, we’ve ever
had when you look at the form and the
respective leagues that many of us have
played in,” Kane, 30, said.
Aleksandar Mitrovic, the Serbia
striker who played in the Premier
League for Newcastle United and Fulham, reinforced Kane’s message that
England face a stern test. “We will try
our best to give them a hard time,” he
told The Times. “We want to do
something big, that no [Serbia team] has
done before.” The tournament begins

tonight, when Scotland, backed by up to
200,000 fans who have travelled to
Munich, face the hosts, Germany. The
teams are in group A with Switzerland
and Hungary and as many as three of
the four could qualify for the knockout
stage, something Scotland have never
achieved. Their captain, Liverpool’s
Andrew Robertson, said: “We want to
make history. The thought of being the
first Scotland team to make a knockout
round is our driving force.”

across

down

1 Late reply disappointing Oliver?
(2,4)
4 American eagle acquiring
American identifier (8)
10 Undertakes large welcome for one
needing work (4,5)
11 Beat it with small clubs and
hammer (5)
12 Paris accepting blame ultimately
for artist’s murder perhaps (7,7)
14 Squash item to consistently
overlook or miss? (5)
16 One had on the first Apollo short
fire, tragically (5,4)
18 Bias seems to corrupt missions (9)
20 Mess up, having altered central
feature of spooks’ function? (5)
21 Where work is not coming to a
stop? Yes and no! (7,7)
25 Cried like a kid, ill, having to
swallow a tablet (5)
26 State where in the Vosges one’s
intercepting climber (9)
27 All maintenance very onerous? Not
all (8)
28 Bats on regardless, ultimately
inconsistent (6)

1 Replacement for one off their
trolley, possibly: including second
announcer (10)
2 Study features at college (3,2)
3 Favour old person like me cycling!
(7)
5 Strongbox not closing after chap’s
put in bundle (5)
6 Philosopher to take stock of
dictator? (7)
7 Article that has trashed RUC is too
shocking (9)
8 Steers away from horse, making for
trees (4)
9 Port originally consumed by a
storyteller in private? (8)
13 A boy my lord ordered to bring a
drink (6,4)
15 Cow to stand in entrance to field?
Half just inside (9)
17 Busy time in game’s doubly hard
for us (4,4)
19 Who knows when protests arising,
indeed (7)
20 Wimp draws naval officer doing
handstand? (7)
22 Material academic omitted from
transatlantic flight itinerary? (5)
23 Delivered letter promoting area (5)
24 Priest caught removing clothing (4)

The Everton owner Farhad Moshiri has
received a fresh bid to buy the club from
a UK-based investor, Vici Private Finance, which is backed by at least two
billionaires. The Times understands
that Vici initiated discussions with
Moshiri and his advisers several
months ago and has offered concrete
terms within the past week.
The Vici bid is being advised by Keith
Harris, who was brought on to Everton’s
board of directors by Moshiri in 2016
and was deputy chairman for a spell.
It involves no borrowed money and it
is believed proof of funds of about £1 billion in cash has been shown. As external
funding is not required, an agreement
could be executed quickly if Moshiri decides to give the group the green light.
Vici is a newly established UK multifamily office of investment funds that
has brought a financial consortium together, supported by two billionaire
owners’ funds and several foundations,
including a humanitarian fund.
The full and comprehensive offer to
Blue Heaven Holdings, the company
which holds Moshiri’s 94.1 per cent
stake, meets his valuation of the club
and also includes provision for shortterm funding before completion to
stabilise the club’s finances and an additional commitment towards restructuring and clearing debts.
Everton’s short-term debt stands at
about £200 million to £230 million and
there would be significant money made
available for squad strengthening subject to Profitability and Sustainability
Rules. In addition, Vici is keen to work
with the local authorities on the regeneration of the area by the club’s new
52,000-seat stadium at Bramley-Moore
Dock on the banks of the River Mersey.
Talks have already taken place with
local politicians.
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H E A DOV E

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E PO T
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A C A R
O O
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RH E E

A P
A
E RG
T C
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OO
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I O
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OO
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U I
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ARTS

June 14 | 2024

From
tennis god
to movie
smash

Roger Federer’s
last 12 days —
caught on film

2

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

the
arts column
times2

Richard Morrison
Art vandalism isn’t brave
— it’s old hat, and should
be punished properly

I

defer to no one in my dislike
of Jonathan Yeo’s portrait of
King Charles III, in which
the monarch seems
shrouded in pink candy
floss. So perhaps I should
have been mildly amused
when two animal activists
charged into the Philip Mould
Gallery in swanky Pall Mall and
stuck Wallace and Gromit stickers
on the painting, apparently to
protest against alleged cruelty on
farms “assured” by the RSPCA
(of which the King is patron).
But I wasn’t mildly amused.
I was more than mildly irritated.
The arts are such an easy target
for attention-grabbing stunts.
Every day the people running
galleries, theatres, museums and
concert halls achieve small
miracles to make their shows
truly accessible to the public.
That means removing as
many barriers, literal and
metaphorical, as possible.
Which leaves the art itself,
and those performing it,
largely unprotected. It isn’t
brave or radical to throw
soup at a Van Gogh in the
National Gallery or to let
off an ear-splitting glitter
cannon right by the
orchestra at Glyndebourne.
It’s infantile. It requires no
cunning. And, ludicrously,
it carries little risk of
meaningful punishment.
Well, let’s talk about
punishment in a minute.
First, some history. There’s
nothing new about this. It’s
110 years since the suffragette
Mary Richardson took a
meat cleaver to the Rokeby
Venus, the voluptuous
Velázquez nude hanging
(then as now) in the
National Gallery.
She was protesting not only
about the arrest of Mrs Pankhurst
but also, she said, about the way
that “men visitors gaped at it all
day long”. She probably had a
point, though as a card-carrying
fascist later in life she must have
approved of far worse behaviour.
And it’s 50 years since someone
scratched the initials IRA on
Rubens’ Adoration of the Magi in
the chapel of King’s College,
Cambridge. That wasn’t even the
most notorious vandalism of an
artwork in 1974. The artist Tony
Shafrazi, protesting about the
Vietnam War, had sprayed the
words “Kill Lies All” on Picasso’s
great anti-war painting Guernica,
which then hung in New York’s
Museum of Modern Art. (In case
you were wondering, he said his
odd syntax was inspired by James
Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.)
But such desecrations entered
the history books because they

were rare. They had real shock
value. They may even have
prompted sympathy for their
perpetrators’ beliefs. What’s
happening today is different.
Attacking art has become a cliché.
Across western Europe and the
US, just in the past two years,
there have been dozens of
incidents. Most have been
carried out by anti-fossil fuel and
climate-change activists, though
pro-Palestinian sympathisers are
also increasingly involved — as
appears to be the case with the
slashing of the portrait of Lord
Balfour in Trinity College,
Cambridge, for which nobody has
yet been charged.
There are signs that other
countries are finally taking steps
to curb these attacks. In the US a
woman who sprayed paint on the
pedestal of a Degas sculpture at
the National Gallery of Art has

Activists stuck a picture of
Wallace over the King’s portrait
been sentenced to 60 days in
prison followed by 150 hours of
community service. She must
also pay £3,100 towards cleaning
what she defaced. Another
activist allegedly involved is
charged with “conspiracy to
commit a crime against the US”,
which could lead to up to five
years in prison. He stands trial
in August.
In France, after incidents in
which environmental activists
threw soup at the Mona Lisa and
stuck posters on Monet’s Poppy
Field, the culture minister Rachida
Dati wants a new law specifically
to deal with attacks on art. Her
point is that if no real damage is
done to an artwork (as is often
the case), the perpetrator ends up
not being charged at all, despite
causing much inconvenience.

She certainly seems to have
Emmanuel Macron’s support. “To
attack a work of art is to attack
our values,” the French president
declared after an incident last
year. In Italy too there’s now a
law stipulating fines of up to
£50,000 for people who attack
monuments, though that new
law itself was cited as provocation
for an attack on a Botticelli
painting in Florence a few
months ago.
And here? Britain’s response to
these attacks on art can be
summed up in four words: inertia
and misplaced forbearance. If
we apprehend the perpetrators
at all, their cases take many
months to come to court and
rarely result in a substantial fine
or custodial sentence.
With the police, courts and
prisons so overloaded that even
robbers and rapists are going free,
one can understand the
reluctance to throw scarce
resources at this problem.
Especially when the
protesters turn out to be
(as was recently the case in
London) two “harmless”
ladies in their eighties
— one a priest.
Meanwhile the museums
and galleries themselves,
grappling with huge financial
pressures, simply don’t have
the funds to protect
themselves with more
security staff, glass coverings
or airport-style scanning
machines. Most don’t even
search bags manually.
Would a new government
offer new thinking? Don’t
hold your breath. You will
scan the manifestos in vain
for solutions to this problem.
And to be fair, it’s not the
most urgent crisis facing
the country.
Yet there is a way forward. The
usual verbal challenge thrown
down by those who defile art is
“are you more concerned about
protecting paintings than
protecting the planet?” The
answer is that people who value
the arts are also, in my
experience, likely to be highly
sympathetic to environmental
concerns. So it’s perverse for
eco-campaigners to alienate a
constituency who would
otherwise be right behind them.
The ideal solution would be for
the activists to work that out for
themselves and desist from
molesting any more defenceless
Old Masters. But handing out
a few unexpectedly severe
penalties, along the lines of what
the US has done to the Degas
defiler, might spur activists into
abandoning these self-defeating
tactics more speedily.

Rory McIlroy

The golfer is back with his wife only
a month after he announced he was
ending the marriage. Hilary Rose on
the chequered love life of a champion

U

ntil this week all I
knew about golf is
that it’s played with
clubs. Then Rory
McIlroy called off his
divorce, less than a
month after he filed
for it. Now I know
that the US Open is this week, two
men called Schauffele and Scheffler
are hotly tipped, and the Divorce That
Wasn’t bodes well for McIlroy’s form.
McIlroy’s form! Hark at me. It’s been
quite the ride, and I’m not the one
married to him.
Erica Stoll, on the other hand, is. On
May 13 she opened the front door of
their £10 million home in Palm Beach,
Florida, to be greeted by a bundle of
court documents and the news that
her husband thought their marriage
“irretrievably broken”. “The respondent
is not pregnant,” the petition
continued, “and no additional issue is
contemplated.” How nice it must have
been for Stoll to see her womb reduced
to a bullet point. McIlroy’s spokesman
stressed that “Rory’s desire to ensure
this difficult time is as respectful and
amicable as possible. He will not be
making any further comment.”
Four weeks later McIlroy’s made a
further comment: he’s changed his
mind, and now they’re undivorced.
“Over the past weeks, Erica and I have
realised that our best future was as a
family together,” he said in a

statement remarkable for its lack of
joy. “Thankfully, we have resolved our
differences and look forward to a new
beginning.” This may or may not have
implications for the status of Stoll’s
womb, and one can only hope that
she, and not McIlroy’s lawyer, will be
the first to know.
Either way she has endured a month
of marital limbo and speculation. Golf
is terrible for marriages, it’s been said,
although if five irons also had
spokesmen, they might reasonably feel
aggrieved and argue that the problem
isn’t the game but the men.
The couple had been leading
separate lives, it is said. He was away
on tour for much of the year; she kept
the home fires burning in Florida with
their three-year-old daughter, Poppy.
Rumours swirled of a liaison with a
blonde TV presenter, Amanda
Balionis, whose own marriage
collapsed this year. McIlroy was seen
flirting with her on camera, and is said
to have spent time with her out of
shot, in San Diego. Neither she nor
McIlroy denied a romance. One friend
described him as “not predictable”,
adding: “He just doesn’t know what he
wants.” Another told a tabloid: “He’s a
nice guy, a good friend and a great
golfer, but he’s not a great partner.”
His first partner, Holly Sweeney, was
his childhood sweetheart. They were
together for six years until she was 21.
She later spoke of her devastation

3

the times | Friday June 14 2024

times2

and the undivorce

when he dumped her
unexpectedly and soon started
dating the tennis player
Caroline Wozniacki. On New
Year’s Day 2014 he proposed
to her. Five months later he
changed his mind. In a threeminute phone call, four days
after the invitations had gone
out, he told her he didn’t
want to get married after all.
“There is never a good time
to end a relationship,” he
said, adding that the decision
was “mutual and amicable” but “the
problem is all mine”. He was not, he
said, ready for “all that marriage
entails”, but wished Wozniacki “all the
happiness she deserves”.
Stoll met McIlroy in 2012. She was
working for the Professional Golfers’
Association arranging transport for
players during that year’s Ryder Cup.
He overslept, and Stoll was tasked
with arranging a police escort to get
him to the course on time. Two years
later, after the Wozniacki wedding
invites had been pulped, she and
McIlroy got together.
“Erica that week was always the one
that was checking us in and out,”
McIlroy recalled, years later, of their
first meeting. “She was there at
transportation, so she was always in
the car park. But yeah, it’s still cool to
look around and think about that
week, and obviously everything that’s
happened since then.”
So 2014 was a busy year for McIlroy.
He was engaged to one woman at the
beginning of it and dating another
whom he would go on to marry at the
end. Somewhere in the middle was an
ambitious American actress called
Meghan Markle. Tom Bower’s book
Revenge recounts how McIlroy, then
25, celebrated winning the Open and

Rory McIlroy with
Meghan Markle
in 2014. Above,
clockwise from top
left: speaking to
Amanda Balionis
last month; with his
wife, Erica Stoll, and
daughter, Poppy, last
year; with his former
partner Caroline
Wozniacki in 2013

The
wedding
is said to
have cost
£400,000

the PGA Championship by partying
“nonstop across Manhattan with his
entourage”. The golfer was, he noted,
“reported to be chasing brunettes”.
By happy chance one particular
brunette from Suits was staying with a
friend near his hotel, and McIlroy
nominated Markle to do the Ice
Bucket Challenge with him. This was a
popular viral phenomenon in which
one person poured a bucket of ice over
another to raise awareness of and
money for research into motor
neurone disease. Justin Timberlake and
Oprah Winfrey were among many
celebrities who did it, and McIlroy was
duly filmed pouring ice over Markle’s
head on her friend’s balcony.
According to Bower they retired to his
hotel for a drink and the next day, at a
tournament, he was “worse for wear
following a hectic night”. Markle went
back home to her boyfriend in
Toronto and took to her blog, The Tig,
in her own inimitable style.
“Rory McIlroy. THE Rory McIlroy,”
she wrote, “whispered (and shouted) to
be the foremost golfer in the world,
loved by Tiger, respected by Palmer,
and dumper of frigid water on my
lone head. That Rory McIlroy.
He is a force who has the
propensity to actually work
hard and play hard —
relishing intense practices to
substantiate his title,
embracing nights of sipping
Opus One (his bold and
impressive choice of wine) ...”
and on, and on.
“The most endearing quality
of this man is his character,”
Markle continued, “as real and
honest as they come,
appreciating a simple smile,
never shunning a fan photo,
expressing a love for his parents
that is rarely seen in men his
age. He is not just the real deal …
he is real. And perhaps that is
what makes him even more
cherished.”
By the end of the year the
woman doing the cherishing was Stoll.
McIlroy proposed the year after,
arranged a prenup that both signed,
and they married at a 13th-century
castle in Ireland on April 21, 2017. The
wedding is reported to have cost
£400,000, and Stevie Wonder sang to
guests including Ed Sheeran, Chris
Martin and Jamie Dornan, who grew
up in the same town as McIlroy.
Now 35, and worth an estimated
£250 million, McIlroy is reported to
have balked at the prospect of losing
half his fortune to his 36-year-old wife
and spending less time with his
daughter. Friends and advisers
apparently suggested that he give the
marriage another six months and see
how things turn out.
The timing of the reconciliation
could be fortuitous for his form: he won
the PGA Championship days after
ending his relationship with Wozniacki,
and reconciled with Stoll on the eve of
the US Open. “For whatever reason,”
he once said, “I seem to play very good
golf whenever I have a lot of stuff
going on.” I note that Sky Sports is
promising 45 hours of live coverage
and “lots of extra tournament
programming”. Is that a euphemism?
I can hardly wait to find out.

Forget the pub. I tried my
dating app’s new run club
It’s Gen Z’s answer to speed dating: a 5k jog
for singles. Hannah Skelley gets set to go

I

t’s 10.30am on a
Saturday and I’m
all geared up for
my usual plod —
but this morning
I’m not alone.
I’m pounding
5km of London’s
streets with 150 other
singletons thrown
together for a new
dating running club.
That’s right: this
event isn’t about
pace, personal bests,
Strava kudos or
trying out your fresh
treads pre-marathon
— it’s about flirting,
mingling and hopefully
meeting your match instead.
If this sounds like your idea of hell
tinted lip balms being slipped into
— or a surefire way to twist an ankle
running belts. I even overhear one
while eyeing up the crowd — then
girl say she got a spray tan especially.
perhaps you’re too old. For the
The boys are mostly in all black
wellness-obsessed Gen Z, run clubs
(wise move as sweat won’t show up)
have become the hot new in-person
and strutting for suitors in
hunting ground.
highlighter pink or yellow socks and
It’s no coincidence that just as
garish bright Nike trainers. And
400 nightclubs have closed across
everyone’s had the same idea of
the UK since lockdown, 1,263
pre-sprint spritzing: a headacheSaturday morning Parkrun events
inducing cocktail of Marc Jacobs
have sprung up in their place. One of
Daisy perfume and Dior Sauvage
my girlfriends met her partner
aftershave hangs over the group.
during the warm-up at Puresport’s
Mike, a handsome 6ft 1in 31-yearweekly run club — they bonded
old property manager, strikes up a
when she accidentally walloped him
conversation with me mid-star jump
while doing leg swings.
— which we agree is the ickiest of all
No one’s meeting in the bar queue
any more. According to a survey of
2,000 people by Heineken 0.0,
Gen Z’s alcohol consumption has
dropped 25 per cent in the past four
years. Which may be why the dating
app Thursday has just launched a
run club (strapline: your pace or
mine?) and I’ve signed up. Tinder has
a run club called Solemates, in
collaboration with the Runna
training app. It’s one way to
warm-up exercises. As we set off,
set hearts racing.
dodging pedestrians, I learn he
At the Thursday start line,
lives locally, enjoys tennis, cricket
there’s a hum of nervous,
and cooking, and hasn’t been to a
excited energy as everyone
run club before. “I enjoy running
weighs up their options.
anyway so why not try and meet a
I’m concerned this is
like-minded girl?” he says.
going to turn into a
“Me too!” I reply
game of kiss chase.
breathlessly. Though it
The girls
seems I’m not his likeare dressed
minded match; I lose him
in bright
in the swell of runners
Lululemon
as we lap Wandsworth
co-ords, micro
Park. Soon I’m flanked
Free People
by Ally, a strapping,
running shorts and
flirty, 27-year-old
patterned Gymshark
software engineer. He
runsies (all-in-ones)
regularly attends various
with matching mega
run clubs across the city
scrunchies, Oakley
and has been on three
sunglasses and
dates as a result. “Strava
chunky On Running
is the new Hinge,” he
or New Balance
attests while panting.
trainers: the fitness
At the finish line people
crowd’s answer to a dateswap Strava profiles rather
night dress and heels.
than their numbers. I gain
All around me I see heads
four new followers, two of
of distinctively curled
whom later message me
ponytails made by Dyson
to meet for a drink. And
Hannah Skelley
Airwraps, braids and full
Ally? He was clearly right.
faces of make-up. Some have
We’re already planning
contoured and I spot various
our next running route.

For the wellnessobsessed, they
are the hot new
hunting ground

4

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

cover story

Love, sweat and tears
— the inside story of
Federer’s long goodbye
After Senna and Maradona, Asif Kapadia’s latest sports documentary
traces the final days of the tennis champion’s extraordinary career.
Geoff Dyer, who has followed every game, set and match, gets a preview

A

sif Kapadia’s new
documentary,
Federer: Twelve Final
Days, is not, as the
title might have
implied, about his
last 12 Grand Slam
finals (covering a
span of ten years from 2009) or even
his final 12 days on the tour proper,
which anticlimaxed with a straightsets defeat to Hubert Hurkacz in the
Wimbledon quarter-finals of 2021.
No, these are the 12 days between
announcing his retirement in 2022 and
his last pro match: doubles with Rafael
Nadal at the Laver Cup in London, a
tournament of Federer’s own
contriving. The Laver is fun for fans,
and the players make a fist of trying to
win their matches, but it’s really an
enhanced exhibition tournament —
so Federer’s announcement doubled as
a publicity blast for an event of
minimal significance in an already
crowded tennis calendar.
It’s unmentioned in Kapadia’s film,
but this particular ending began just a
week after another, of unavoidable
significance: the death of the Queen,
eliciting a clever republican
tribute from the French sport
newspaper L’Équipe: a fullcover picture of Roger
captioned “God save the king.”
Quite a claim in the home of
Roland Garros, where Nadal
was le roi du clay.
Federer, though, had
qualities that surpass statistics.
We can itemise these but they
all flowed into each other.
The pleasure of watching him
began even before he served.
I rank my fondness for players
in inverse relation to how
much time they spend before
getting ready to serve.
Nadal stretched not just the
25-second rule but human
patience to the limits with
the obsessive accumulation of
tics that served as compulsive
preparation. In the cases of
Novak Djokovic and
Alexander Zverev I measure
my aversion precisely by the
number of times they bounce
the ball. Federer, by contrast,
didn’t keep us waiting. He just got on
with it. Once the point was under way
there was the unhurried ease, the
sense of someone apparently operating

Roger Federer and
Rafael Nadal after the
final match of Federer’s
career at the Laver Cup
in 2022. Below: Federer
with Anna Wintour.
Bottom right: with the
Princess of Wales at
Wimbledon in 2023

Federer: Twelve Final
Days is on Prime Video
from June 20. Geoff
Dyer’s most recent
book, The Last Days of
Roger Federer, is
published by Canongate

within laws of gravity that weighed on
him less heavily than on everyone else.
This ability to float around the court
was all the more remarkable because,
as the American writer David Foster
Wallace pointed out, in an era
of power baseliners Federer
was working his magic while
trading blows with the biggest
hitters of all time. People
talked of his effortless grace,
but in the flesh one saw clearly
the athletic foundation on
which his elegance depended.
At a press conference at Indian
Wells a friend and I gasped
like teenage girls when we saw
him up close: he looked like a
Greek god. Federer was the
opposite of a grinder, and as he
grew older this least attritional
of players became steadily
more aggressive, looking to
finish points more quickly.
Lots of tennis players are
robotically tedious to watch;
Federer was never boring.
So our hunger for seeing
more of him remains
insatiable. It’s hard to imagine
a documentary-maker who
could bring more to the table
than Kapadia, whose
fascination with endings runs
like a watermark through his work.
Senna, his first documentary film, was
amazing, friends said, even if you
weren’t interested in Formula One.

This took some believing but turned
out to be true. The viewer looked into
Senna’s eyes and saw him being driven
by an implacable combination of
forces towards death. As such it had
the momentum and inevitability of
Greek tragedy. Amy, about the singer
Amy Winehouse, was appropriately
messier but no less compulsive.
Kapadia’s next subject was the most
fascinating yet. Diego Maradona had
not just risen to almost unimaginable
heights of greatness; in a deeply
religious city — Naples — he had
become a god. Evidence of this can
still be seen there, but relative to his
well-documented genius as a
footballer that metamorphosis was
impossible to capture on film, and his
decline lacked the teleological drama
of Kapadia’s earlier films.
So how would he deal with an
athlete not going down the drain but
simply retiring? The on-court footage
would take care of itself — even
people bored rigid by tennis would be
spellbound by sequences of slow-mo
ballet and glide — but beyond that
much would depend on Federer’s easygoing charm failing to conceal the fact
that his decision brought him to the
edge of a precipice.
Grace and ease tend to be viewed in
opposition to determination. Certainly
there is considerable satisfaction to be
had in seeing someone fight and scrap
to the death. But sometimes even
willpower can manifest itself stylishly.

The only time Federer seemed to give
up was in that 2021 Wimbledon match
against Hurkacz; in retrospect it
became clear that this was because his
knee had given up on him.
As a teenager he had thrown
tantrums; even as an adult he smashed
an occasional racket. He could be
imperious with umpires, but generally
he was poise and calm incarnate. This
didn’t stop him being ridiculous,
most famously when he took to
Wimbledon’s Centre Court wearing an
absurd cream suit. But that was fine
because — and this is crucial — he
obviously had a deep-seated sense of
humour. He loved joking around. And,
everyone agreed, he was incredibly
nice — no wonder we loved him.
And boy did he monetise that love!
At one point in Twelve Final Days he
praises Bjorn Borg for making it
possible for tennis players to be more
than tennis players, opening the doors
for them to become … “brand
ambassadors”. Even if we accept that
Federer’s sponsored Rolex has to be
prominently worn in the first shots of
the film, that kind of talk should not
be part of the lexicon of a legend.
Much of the above has been written
in the past tense. And that’s what
Kapadia’s film is about; not just saying
goodbye to tennis but to being loved
on a global scale. Will Federer’s future
condemn him to the past tense,
reliving moments of life-determining
tension? The problem is that the last

5

the times | Friday June 14 2024

cover story
a reluctance to pack it in, even as the
body insists that it’s had enough.
Federer was spared this long and
crumbling goodbye; or at least it took
place privately, in the gym and on the
practice court, rather than in the
unforgiving glare of continued
competition, where, contra Neil
Young, Andy Murray is somehow
managing to both burn out and fade

Times writers’ top
sports documentaries
Owen Slot, chief sports writer
Diego Maradona
2019, Now
An unflinching portrait of a genius
undone by celebrity, his rise and
fall in the Napoli years given the
brilliant, raw Asif Kapadia
treatment.

I gasped when
I saw him up
close — he was
like a Greek god

12 days documented by the film are
less interesting and significant than
the penultimate phase of his career.
When he was beating everyone in
sight we took Federer for granted.
Then, with the rise of Nadal and
Djokovic, we saw that the elegance
had a built-in fragility; that his most
beautiful shot, the single-handed
backhand, was vulnerable to high and
continuous assault. Having been
unbeatable he was regularly bested in
semis and finals by his nemeses.
But even if he was past his peak he
was more fun to watch than everyone
else — and there was no one else
people wanted so passionately to see.
Our loyalty was rewarded
when he came back from
knee surgery in 2017 and
went on a late surge that
saw him beat Nadal at
the Australian Open, win
Wimbledon and, in 2018,
the Australian Open
again. That was the blaze
of light near the end of
the day, when we were
blessed with the rare
sight of the aesthetic and
the functional coming
together. The most
beautiful way of playing
was also the most
efficient.
It was all a sort of
bonus, but we wanted
more — and very nearly

got it. His final final, so to speak, was
tragically close, losing in a final-set tiebreak to Djokovic at Wimbledon in
2019. After the defeat to Hurkacz in
2021 he disappeared.
Norman Mailer famously claimed
that the great heavyweight champions
“begin to have inner lives like
Hemingway or Dostoevsky, Tolstoy or
Faulkner”. Great tennis champions,
one sometimes gets the impression,
ideally have no inner lives at all. Or at
least their inner lives are entirely
preoccupied with … tennis! But if
Mailer’s claim extends from boxing —
with its unique level of existential risk
— to tennis, then one can understand

away. Only these titular 12 days have
gone public — or perhaps one should
say public relations. There is an
expensively perfumed whiff of an
inside job about the film: an ad-doc
generated by the Federer camp as a
post-career extension of brand RF.
Well, that’s the nature of many
sports docs these days (the series
Beckham on Netflix was exemplary in
this regard), and lamenting the
uncompromised access on which the
social documentarian Fred Wiseman
depended is like pining for the quaint
heyday of wooden rackets. And even if
the whole package seems too
pleasingly fragrant, there are some
telling moments. When Federer and
the other Laver guys, including Borg
and John McEnroe, alongside nextgenners like Matteo Berrettini, are in
the locker room or waiting around in
suits, bantering more or less
awkwardly, you realise — and maybe
it’s the same when astrophysicists get
together in a bar — that a full
understanding of Federer’s
achievement might not extend far
beyond this gathering of stars.
The star closest to him was of course
Nadal, and their playing (and crying)
together represented the perfect
send-off. Well, not quite perfect, as
they lost, but that’s the difference
between sport and pageant. By all
accounts other players liked Federer
and, while he was the sun around
which they orbited, the locker room
became a friendlier place. The
relationship between Federer and
Nadal showed that the fiercest rivalry
was compatible with good behaviour,
even friendship.
But the Laver cast also includes
Murray and Stefanos Tsitsipas, who
drove Murray mad with an extended
mid-match lavatory break at the US
Open in 2021 (“What’s he doing in
there?” Murray asked the umpire) and
who was in turn driven insane by the
loutish Nick Kyrgios at
Wimbledon in 2022.
My interest in tennis has
waned since Federer’s
abdication, but last week Jannik
Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz, the
new generation of friendly
rivals, were going toe to toe in
the French Open semi-finals.
Their rivalry doesn’t yet have
the intensity of Federer-Nadal,
but it was good to see each of
them acknowledge that a line
call had mistakenly been given
in their favour. That might be
a small part of Federer’s
gigantic legacy. It’s also a
reminder of something easily
forgotten: that, at the end of
the day, the purpose of sport is
to generate sportsmanship.

Alyson Rudd, senior sports writer
The Last Dance
2020, Netflix
Focusing on the Chicago Bulls’ sixth
championship in 1998, this film has
remarkable access and is beautifully
constructed, allowing the viewer
to understand the greatness of
Michael Jordan. Even if you don’t
like basketball, you’ll
like this.

George Foreman and
Muhammad Ali during
the 1974 Rumble in the
Jungle, the focus of
When We Were Kings.
Below: Michael Jordan,
whose final season
with the Chicago Bulls
is explored in The
Last Dance

Martin Samuel
Do I Not Like That:
The Final Chapter
1997
Accept nothing
less than the full
77-minute capture of
England’s tragicomic
failure to qualify for
the 1994 World
Cup. Like with This
Is Spinal Tap, you
notice something
new with each
viewing. Unlike This
Is Spinal Tap, it all
happened. And I know,
because I was there.
James Restall, head of sport
Orient: Club for a Fiver
1995, Prime Video
One of the cult classic sports
documentaries, this charts a chaotic
season at the struggling east London
football club Leyton Orient. It gets
its title from the chairman Tony
Wood, who put the club up for sale
for £5 after his coffee business in
Rwanda was seriously damaged
during the genocide of 1994. But the
“star” is the manager John Sitton,
whose frequent X-rated rants have
gone viral on YouTube.
David Bates, sports news editor
When We Were Kings
1996, Now
It took Leon Gast 22 years to
marshal the raw materials provided
by Muhammad Ali’s improbable
1974 victory over George Foreman
in the Rumble in the Jungle. The
result is staggering. And, of
course — from the lyricism of
his speech to the boldness of his
tactics in the ring — Ali is an
unrivalled centrepiece.
Stuart Fraser,
tennis correspondent
Tiger
2020, Sky/Now
This HBO documentary didn’t tell
us anything we didn’t know about
Tiger Woods already. But it is worth
watching for the ending of episode
one alone, with a piece of music
made famous by The Sopranos
playing as his former mistress
Rachel Uchitel walks into shot,
suggesting something sinister
lies ahead.

6

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

arts

THE CRITICS

Hopkins is an uncanny Freud

S

igmund Freud and CS
Lewis walk into a room,
sit down and for roughly
100 minutes discuss
nothing but the probability
of God, the demands of
faith and the destructive
impact of sexual repression
on family dynamics.
That’s the entirety of this wordy
and occasionally highfalutin drama
adapted from the stage play by
Mark St Germain, who based his
work on The Question of God by the
Harvard professor and editor of
The Harvard Guide to Psychiatry,
Armand Nicholi. So, no, not a car
chase or explosion in sight, though
the title Bad Boys: Ride or Die would
fittingly describe a film that is, despite
the precis, often thrilling.
The setting is Freud’s north London
home two days after the Second
World War has started, where the
father of psychoanalysis, played by
Anthony Hopkins, is hosting the
Oxford don and Christian Lewis
(Matthew Goode) for an intellectual
smackdown that never really
happened — the meeting is fiction. It
begins with Freud, who is struggling
with the symptoms of debilitating oral
cancer, taunting his opponent about
the flimsy basis for religious faith:
“Why would a man of your supreme
intellect abandon truth and embrace a
ludicrous dream and an insidious lie?”
At 86 (three years older than the
film’s Freud), Hopkins is impeccable
casting from the director Matthew
Brown and is the reason this film
works. The Oscar-winning actor has
previously played Nixon, Picasso and
Hitchcock so this 20th-century figure
seems a natural progression. There
are pleasing echoes too of Hannibal
Lecter here, in the great inquisitorial
shrink gleefully placing his subject,
Lewis, on the intellectual chopping
block. Best of all, there’s a ghostly
sense that this tête-à-tête will prove so
transformative for Lewis that he will
slowly morph, over time, into the later
life version of the author that we
encounter, played by Hopkins,
in Shadowlands.
As this particularly ornery Freud,
Hopkins is comfortably sublime, his

{{{{(
It was a queer cinema blockbuster
and a project that helped to redefine
Australian film of the Nineties
as creatively ambitious and
unashamedly populist (see
also Romper Stomper, Strictly
Ballroom, Dark City). But the core
of Stephen Elliott’s movie about
three drag queens on a no-hope
road trip from Sydney to Alice
Springs is a warm-hearted tale
about yearning for family.
The lines are to die for, such as
when Hugo Weaving’s Mitzi turns to
Guy Pearce’s nasty Felicia and snaps,
“There are two things I don’t like
about you, Felicia. Your face. So how
about shutting both of them?”
Terence Stamp remains the
film’s star turn, as the transgender
woman Bernadette Bassenger. He is
intensely compelling, and quite
gorgeous, in the role and steals the
entire movie while dancing deadpan
in the outback, lathered in lipgloss,
to I Will Survive.
KM
Rereleased in cinemas
range typically immense. And if it
sometimes appears that he’s coasting
along half-cocked (a bit of whispering,
then a bit of shouting), it’s sobering to
note that Hopkins half-cocked is still
more effective than most actors
blasting away with both barrels.
“It seems to me that we have never
matured enough to face the terror of
being alone in the dark,” he sighs,
sadly summing up his objections to
organised religion, before suddenly
barking out, very Captain Bligh
from The Bounty: “I have only two
words to offer humanity. Grow up!”
It’s not all about Hopkins, however.
Goode proves a suitable foil for our
octogenarian scene-stealer and is
required to carry most of the larger
narrative shifts, guiding the
conversation from faith and God to
a contentious subplot about Freud’s
psychologist daughter Anna (Liv Lisa
Fries), her mental health and a
paternal attachment disorder that

Terrific tête-à-tête:
Anthony Hopkins as
Sigmund Freud and
Matthew Goode as
CS Lewis

Freud’s Last
Session
12A, 109min

{{{{(

The Ian Charleson Awards recognise the best stage performances by actors under
30 playing a classical role. This year’s winners have just been announced, and to
celebrate, Times+ members have the chance to win two tickets to The Grapes of Wrath
at the National Theatre, a three-course meal at Lasdun and a stay in central
London courtesy of Edwardian Hotels.

T&Cs apply.

The Adventures of
Priscilla, Queen
of the Desert (1994)
15, 103min

seems to have been triggered by her
father’s incessant needs. The Anna
sequences don’t always work, and
certainly the optics of two learned
men puffing on cigars while
mansplaining the neuroses of an
accomplished female psychologist
(Anna was director of the Vienna
Psychoanalytic Training Institute)
can be jarring. However, the scenes
allow for some tense flashbacks to
Nazi-occupied Vienna and the
appearance of a suicide pill later plays
a key part in Freud Sr’s demise.
In the end the film’s appeal is
ideas-based. Cinemagoers who feel
that the global economy, immigration,
general elections and cultural politics
are the quintessential issues facing
modern humanity will not find much
to savour here. For anyone else with
even a passing interest in the eternal
“why” of it all, it’s sweetly essential
viewing. KM
In cinemas

Win a London trip to see The Grapes of Wrath

Visit mytimesplus.co.uk

the classic film

based on the novel by John Steinbeck
adapted by Frank Galati

Hugo Weaving as Mitzi

7

the times | Friday June 14 2024

arts
film reviews
Mixed emotions: Joy (Amy Poehler),
Anger (Lewis Black), Disgust (Liza
Lapira), Envy (Ayo Edebiri) and
Anxiety (Maya Hawke)

Arcadian
15, 92min

{{(((

Pixar hits arrested development

T

his is just unfair.
The original Inside
Out, from 2015, is
widely regarded as
peak Pixar. It was the
moment, following
three Toy Stories, a
couple of misfires and
the majestic Up, when Hollywood’s
pre-eminent animation studio reached
a creative and metaphysical apogee.
The film boldly premiered at that
year’s Cannes Film Festival and told
the story of an 11-year-old girl from
within and without, culminating in the
tear-jerking revelation that, even for
children, there is truth in suffering.
And now there’s this, the belated
sequel. And it’s just, well, fine.
And so our San Francisco-based
protagonist Riley (Kensington
Tallman) is back, but now she’s 13 and
the alarm bell marked “puberty” is
suddenly, and literally, ringing inside

Sasquatch Sunset
15, 88min

{{{{(
How audacious, beguiling
and disturbing is this crazy,
absurdist fantasy? Let me
count the ways. It’s a year
in the life of a North
American Sasquatch
family played by actors
including Jesse Eisenberg
and Riley Keough, who are hidden
underneath latex make-up and not
given a single line of dialogue. The
story is the family’s journey down
through the Pacific Northwest in the
early 1990s (there’s a telling musical
cue). Yet it also seems to be set in an
alternative post-apocalyptic US and
even, more strongly, a trippy
prehistoric age that’s somehow
anticipating the modern era.
The notable references include
2001: A Space Odyssey, Harry and
the Hendersons and Quest for Fire. It

the big film

The original was the studio at
the height of its powers. And
this belated second instalment?
It’s, well, fine, says Kevin Maher
Inside Out 2
U, 96min

{{(((

her mind. The movie is too prim to
address anything as icky as Riley’s
biological changes and instead
uses adolescence as a handy excuse
to re-establish the dramatic jeopardy
from the previous instalment.
And so we cut to Riley’s inner world,
where prime emotions such as Joy
(Amy Poehler) and Sadness (Phyllis
Smith) are joined by more complex,
teen-related feelings, like Anxiety
(Maya Hawke), Envy (Ayo Edebiri)
may be camp, crude
and profoundly silly, but
the cinematographer
Mike Gioulakis makes
it one of the most
beautifully shot films
of the year.
It is indeed crude.
These Sasquatches are
unapologetically sexual,
especially the frustrated
alpha male, played by
Nathan Zellner, who also
co-directs with brother
David. There are several brutal
attempts at coitus, actions that seem
both removed from and commenting
on contemporary society. The Zellners
are like that. Their film Damsel was a
western where death and sex erupted
into daily life despite the best civilising
efforts from some of the mostly
unsympathetic protagonists. Here the
civilising mission is absent and all
that’s left is a movie about the strange
curse of being animals, being human,
being animals, being human. KM
In cinemas

and Ennui (a fabulously jadedsounding Adèle Exarchopoulos).
In the first movie our diminutive
inner heroes were flung from Riley’s
mental headquarters and, while
enjoying some wacky misadventures,
forced to retrieve a glowing orb called
a “core memory”. In this one our
diminutive inner heroes are flung from
Riley’s mental headquarters and, while
enjoying some wacky misadventures,
forced to retrieve a glowing spherical
web called Riley’s “sense of self”. See
what they did there?
The writing’s often smart, and
there’s a great joke involving a
fantastical gorge nicknamed the
Sar-Chasm. But the climax can’t touch
the original’s devastating power.
Instead, the best that the Pixar brain
trust can concoct here, for a rousing
revelatory message, is that everyone
needs a hug. Oh dear.
In cinemas

Wilding
PG, 75min

{{(((
The inspiring subject of this new
environmental documentary is the
rewilding of the Knepp Castle estate
in West Sussex. Here, 3,500 acres of
barren, pesticide-drenched farmland
have been slowly transformed since
2000 into a biodiverse naturescape
full of turtle doves, grass snakes, pigs,
ponies and beavers. The problem is
that, as a piece of narrative filmmaking, Wilding is frequently bland
and sometimes breathtakingly dull.
“It’s the stuff of fairytales, in a way!”
Isabella Tree, the conservationist and
Knepp Castle co-owner, announces of
her eco-friendly adventure. Well, no.
Fairytales have villains, drama and
extreme emotions. This is the
respectable, overwhelmingly tasteful
story of how two people (Tree and her
husband, Charles Burrell) inherited
a castle, learnt about soil and

Sometimes it’s the little things that
matter. This post-apocalyptic horror,
starring Nicolas Cage, is set in the
vastness of a mythic American
landscape somewhere in the near
future. It was filmed, however, in the
international tax-break movie haven
that is rural Ireland. And so, when
Cage’s American hero Paul, and his
two American sons Joseph (Jaeden
Martell) and Thomas (Maxwell
Jenkins), jump into the family Jeep
and race across the wide American
plains to escape marauding aliens,
they’re actually driving across some
farmer’s field in Ashford, Co Wicklow.
And, wow, can you tell. It’s ridiculous,
and instantly collapses any suspension
of disbelief. Where are you going,
boys? Dublin’s that-a-way!
It might not have mattered had the
film been buttressed by dramatic heft
(Lars von Trier’s Palme d’Or-winning
Dancer in the Dark was set in
Washington state, but filmed in the
Swedish countryside and it looked
rubbish too). But here the plot is paper
thin and achingly derivative, and the
action indecipherable.
It transpires that America is under
attack from hairy, long-limbed aliens
that appear, in the few nanosecond
glances afforded to us by the director
Benjamin Brewer’s insanely frenetic
camera shakes, to approximate a gang
of skinny Chewbaccas with flip-top
skulls and pointy fingers. In a seeming
nod to I Am Legend, the aliens only
come out at night and, after killing
most of the other citizens of Wicklow,
sorry, America, they surround Paul’s
cottage for a Home Alone-style finale
that’s as tedious as it is unintelligible.
Stop shaking the camera! On its
own it does not imply excitement or
tension, but merely suggests that the
focus puller is having some sort of
neurological episode. Beautiful score,
though. Top marks for the composers
Kristin Gundred and Josh Martin. KM
In cinemas
mycorrhizal fungi, and then, hey
presto, a wildland project was born.
The greatest obstacles they seem to
have faced are meetings with angry
farmers worried about ragwort
overgrowth and then a tense period
when the estate’s flora was threatened
by some creeping thistle. Otherwise
this is We Bought a Zoo meets
The Good Life minus the laughs.
The director, David Allen, unwisely
attempts to foreground the funny by
inserting recreations of the rewilding
comedy years. Such as? There was this
one time, during a charity polo match,
when the Tamworth pigs broke into
the catering tent and ate several boxes
of powdered Mr Whippies.
The Knepp Castle project is a
pioneering development that suggests
a sustainable future is possible for
chemically denuded land. The
documentary about it, alas, boasts
little more ambition than a corporate
video. It’s a film that seems reluctant
to fully root around, with the fungi,
in the mud. KM
In cinemas

8

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

music reviews

Eerie, unnerving debut from a distinctive talent
The actress Sam
Morton channels
PJ Harvey at her
most intimate, says
Will Hodgkinson

Stars who sing
Russell Crowe
The Gladiator star fronted the
poetically named 30 Odd Feet of
Grunts for decades and this year
plays Glastonbury with his new
lineup, Indoor Garden Party.
Expect, he says, “R&B, gospel,
dirty country and dark waltzes”.
Damian Lewis
Lewis released his first album,
Mission Creep, last year, described
by The Times as “mellow jukebox
Americana”. The Billions star plays
Latitude next month — a gig we
hope will be more nuanced than
his epic national anthem at the
British Grand Prix last summer.
Kate Hudson
Twenty-four years after playing a
groupie in Almost Famous, Hudson
released the underwhelming softrock album Glorious, full of breathy
vocals and twinkling piano ballads.
Maya Hawke
The Stranger Things star’s third
album, Chaos Angel, was described
by The Times as “witty, spectral
indie-folk”. We’d expect no less
from a Gen Zer who grew up
with her dad, the actor Ethan,
in New York’s Chelsea Hotel.

A

lbums by actors
offer a world of their
own, and often it is
not a world anybody
wants to be stuck
inside. Jared Leto
putting his vanity
on display in
30 Seconds to Mars, Russell Crowe
being one of the lads with his straightup rock band, any number of starry
types discovering their lifelong love of
blues and country … all perfectly good
arguments for sticking to the day job.
Samantha Morton, however, is a
different proposition entirely.
Someone who had an early starring
role in Morvern Callar, Lynne
Ramsay’s 2002 psychological thriller
about a young woman who pretends
to have written her boyfriend’s novel
after he commits suicide, was never
going to make her recording debut
with the usual fluff — and so it proves.
PJ Harvey at her most intimate, the
Velvet Underground in their quieter
moments, even a psychologically
disturbed individual reciting nursery
rhymes before being taken away for
medication time all come to mind on
an eerie, unnerving album on which
Morton tackles personal issues in an
oddly detached fashion.
The genesis of the album came from
Morton’s 2020 appearance on Desert
Island Discs. Richard Russell, a record
producer and owner of the hugely
successful XL label, was impressed by
her choice of Dream Baby Dream by
the New York minimalist electronic
pioneers Suicide and I Remember by
Molly (mother of Nick) Drake, so he

pop
Sam Morton
Daffodils & Dirt
XL

{{{{(

got in touch to see if she would be
interested in a collaboration.
Lyrically, inspiration comes from
Morton growing up in the care system:
on Broxtowe Girl she recalls a riot in
a children’s home during which the
kids played UB40’s Labour of Love II;
Hungerhill Road finds her
remembering a “Ghostbusters sky”
mingling with “the smell of piss”, a
neat evocation of the way fun fantasy
and bleak reality shape the childhood
experience. Everything is hazy and
indistinct, like trying to capture distant
memories, and it draws you in.

Morton has a high, pure voice but
not a particularly strong one, which
she turns into a virtue via restraint.
She takes on a sing-song melody
for The Little White Cloud That Cried,
a hit for the professional crybaby
Johnnie Ray in 1951, and adopts the
stark, flinty cadences of traditional
English folk for Cry Without End,
which, from the sounds of it, is a letter
to the mother she hardly knew.
Russell’s arrangements veer from the
minimal and doom-laden to the lush
and expansive: the fear of family
violence captured in the ticking time

Jansen helps Makela to find the thrills in Sibelius

F

innish, just 28 and very
theatrical on the rostrum,
Klaus Makela is the young
conductor that every
orchestral management seems
to want. From autumn 2027 he, his
baton and floppy arms will be
controlling both the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra and
Concertgebouw Orchestra in
Amsterdam. Yet his recorded
performances have not up
to now been particularly
thrilling except for this
addition, but the reason
for that is not Makela,
instead the supremely
wonderful Janine Jansen,
right, with Makela.
From her opening note
in Sibelius’s Violin
Concerto, the Dutch
violinist (just about old
enough to be Makela’s
mother) grabs our ears
and never lets them go.
She is anguished and

ardent, gutsy and tender, or whatever
else the music requires, with every
emotional inflection firmly embedded
in the composer’s long singing lines.
Playing at full strength, the Oslo
Philharmonic sometimes sounds a
touch blowsy, but individual details
can be striking and nothing intrudes
at Jansen’s expense. The one stretch
where conductor and soloist obviously
deserve equal applause is the
concerto’s conclusion, jointly
delivered in a muscular way,
fully justifying the final bars
that can easily seem
grandiose posturing
without careful
preparation.
Jansen’s
kaleidoscopic range
and technical
brilliance are just as
clear in the smaller, more
brittle confines of
Prokofiev’s Violin
Concerto No 1, whether
her tone is lyrical or

classical
Janine Jansen/
Klaus Makela
Sibelius/
Prokofiev
Decca

{{{{(

Claire Booth/
Christopher
Glynn
Expressionist
Music
Orchid Classics

{{{{(

Jazz album
Waw! from the trio
Winther / Andersson /
Watts reviewed at
thetimes.com/arts

cynical, rough or smooth. But it’s the
Sibelius that makes this album special.
The booklet cover for Expressionist
Music shows the soprano Claire Booth
and her pianist partner, Christopher
Glynn, sauntering down a street. Their
nonchalance is in opposition to the
music they perform: 22 songs and two
piano pieces by Arnold Schoenberg,
the tonality-busting founder of the
Second Viennese School, famous, in
the popular view, for killing off tunes.
Booth and Glynn mounted this
recital as a rescue mission and it’s
largely a success. Cleverly grouped
round the titles of eight Schoenberg
paintings, the early-20th-century
repertoire twists tonality into knots
but doesn’t leave it a corpse. Booth
lavishes close attention on every word
and is thrilling when soaring into the
skies. I’d like to have seen her push
harder at times, but it’s a pleasure to
find these gifted performers digging up
beauty in thorny places and treating
Schoenberg with love.
Geoff Brown

bomb tension of Purple Yellow,
heavenly harmonies evoking dreams
of salvation on Loved by God.
It is all pretty serious, and at times
portentous — “Once upon a time,
there was a little girl who loved the
flowers and the butterflies,” she
announces of herself on The
Shadow — but also adventurous and
imaginative. Not since William
“Captain Kirk” Shatner’s 1968 The
Transformed Man (a misunderstood
masterpiece) has an actor so fully
dedicated themselves to a singular
musical cause.

John Cale
POPtical Illusion
Domino

{{(((
The title
suggests an
allegiance to
Andy Warhol,
the one-time
manager of
John Cale’s old
band the Velvet
Underground, but
there the connection ends. Cale’s latest
is challenging in all the wrong ways —
art rock filled with messages on the
state of the world that is too awkward
and joyless for it to have much chance
of being heard. Calling You Out
appears to be a warning against
enemies of a “shrinking world”,
Company Commander imagines a
fascist dictatorship, and Funkball the
Brewster aims Cale’s wrath at someone
or other. At 82 this lifelong proponent
of the avant-garde is pushing
admirably into a wide range of new
directions, but this is a slog. WH

9

the times | Friday June 14 2024

first night

From left:
Samantha Spiro,
John Hodgkinson
and Siubhan
Harrison

pop
The Killers

theatre
A Child of Science

3Arena, Dublin

Bristol Old Vic (150min)

M

M

{{{{(

{{{{{

r Brightside had left the
building when Brandon
Flowers, the Killers
singer, was asked about
his band’s future last year.
Reflecting on the neon-splashed
anthems that have been the Las Vegas
hit machine’s bread and butter, he
painted a gloomy picture. “I don’t
think you’ll see us making this type of
music any more.”
Ten months later, as the Killers
kicked off their new “best of” tour, the
mood had shifted. Flowers was coming
out of his cage and doing just fine as
he led his band through a murderously
enjoyable set.
Starting with the Springsteenesque
stomper Read My Mind, Flowers never
wilted. Soon to turn 43, he had the
ageless, slightly uncanny look of Tom
Cruise in a later Mission Impossible.
The smile was sharp, the eyes
pinpricks of tigerish enthusiasm as he
bestrode a diamond-shaped stage
decorated like a Vegas casino. He was
50 per cent pop deity, 50 per cent
Thunderbirds puppet, complete with
chunky eyebrows and plastic hair.
Early in their career the Killers’
great brainwave was to take a fistful of
British indie miserablism and chuck it
into a Vegas fruit machine. Out rolled
a musical bonanza, as demonstrated
tonight by Jenny Was a Friend of Mine,
a blustery banger that suggested Elvis
fronting Joy Division.
Despite Flowers’s on-the-record
ambivalence about continuing to
churn out huge, glittering crowdpleasers, the evening contained several
zippy newish numbers. A highlight
was the synth-fuelled Boy, which, on
release in 2022, drew comparisons
with Erasure’s A Little Respect — a
connection the Killers acknowledged
by going straight into a cover of the
Andy Bell/Vince Clarke classic.
Mr Brightside, their enduring smash
and officially the biggest-selling song
ever to fail to reach No 1 in the UK,
was saved for the encore. First came a
slowed-down synth version, prompting
fears the Killers were about to pull a
Bob Dylan and sabotage a high point
of their catalogue. Instead they
leapfrogged into an exuberantly
faithful reading that set the venue
ablaze with jiggling cameraphones.
Grinning like a shark that’s zoned in
on a kill, Flowers was in bloom and
living up to his rock god status.
Ed Power
Manchester Co-op Live, June 18-22,
then touring to July 11,
thekillersmusic.com

theatre
Suite in
Three Keys
Orange Tree Theatre,
Richmond (170min)

{{{{(

C

iven what Thames Water
has been up to lately, you
really do fear for Sir John
Falstaff when the order is
given for him to be dumped
in the river in this utterly joyous
modern-dress production. When he
finally reappears after his ordeal, the
wheeler-dealer’s three-piece suit looks
very mucky indeed.
It’s our good fortune that we have
two very different Falstaffs to choose
from at the moment. In the West End,
Ian McKellen gives us a gnarled minor
gangster in Player Kings, Robert Icke’s
condensation of Henry IV, Parts One
and Two. In Stratford, John
Hodgkinson — a memorably
foul-mouthed FA supremo in James
Graham’s Dear England — gives us
a pot-bellied antihero who manages
to be sleek and suave too, like some
paunchy alderman who has made a
tidy living selling dodgy timeshares.
It’s a performance that’s every bit as
engaging as McKellen’s. Hodgkinson
transfixes with his cheesy grins and
leering glances. You can easily
understand why this ageing charmer
thinks he’s in with a chance of
seducing Mistress Page and Mistress
Ford, Samantha Spiro and Siubhan
Harrison’s upright suburban ladies.
The RSC attracted publicity for its
online trigger warnings about
“bullying in the form of bodyshaming”, “domineering behaviour”
and even, horror of horrors,
“references to alcohol and characters
drinking alcohol on stage”. But

G

there’s not a hint of puritanical
tut-tutting in this zestful evening.
Instead you can simply enjoy the
immaculate comic timing of an
ensemble in which Jason Thorpe’s
Dr Caius, a smarmy dentist, splashes
Clouseau-esque Gallicisms in all
directions while Ian Hughes’s Welsh
parson, Sir Hugh Evans, totters about
on a bicycle. Shazia Nicholls gives us
a sharp-elbowed Mistress Quickly.
The class references are cheekily
done. The knot of respectable homes
on Robert Innes Hopkins’s cheery set
have old-school TV aerials, while the
mock Tudor pub, the Garter, sports a
satellite dish. As the regulars prepare
to watch England play Germany on
“Pie TV”, the director Blanche
McIntyre whips the intrigue along in
the spirit of a frothy sitcom.
Hodgkinson has a Benny Hill
moment early on when Spiro has to
squeeze past his mighty frame in a
doorway. She gets her revenge later in
the laundry basket scene, and together
with Harrison puts the old rogue
through more torments before he
finally admits defeat with a wry shrug.
John Leader’s Fenton and Tara
Tijani’s Anne Page make an innocent
pair of lovers. While an eight-piece
band supplies breezy Latin-pop, young
Patrick Walshe McBride quietly steals
scene after scene as a lovelorn Slender
— a dead ringer for the former
chancellor George Osborne in his
Bullingdon boy phase. It’s a vision of
the perfect twit in a glorious evening.
To September 7, rsc.org.uk

ore than 12 million babies
have been born by IVF,
so it seems extraordinary
that there was a time in
living memory when
tabloid journalists and the Pope were
united in publicly denouncing it as
an abomination. Gareth Farr’s
compassionate, ingeniously crafted
new play provides a sharp reminder
of the faith, courage and sheer
bloody-mindedness needed by the
reproductive pioneer Robert Edwards
and his team as they developed their
revolutionary treatment.
Matthew Dunster’s fleet-footed
production whisks us from 1958 to
1978, using sliding glass screens to
mark shifts between times and
locations. This brings a filmic fluidity
to a script that moves between pathos,
comedy and suspense, deftly evoking
the hopes and heartbreaks intrinsic
to the quest to start human life outside
the womb.
A huge part of the play’s success lies
in the fact that we never seem to be in
the throes of a lecture. In the visceral
first scene, a blood-stained woman
— in excruciating pain after a
backstreet abortion — is treated by
Jamie Glover’s compelling Dr Steptoe,
a gynaecologist with the radical idea
that his female patients deserve
empathy and respect.
In one fell swoop this scene — in
which the sound of the woman’s
speeding heartbeat resonates through
the auditorium — illustrates the extent
to which Fifties reproductive medicine
was in the dark ages, and why Steptoe’s
humanity made him a visionary.
Then, suddenly, the tone shifts to
light comedy: we’re in a genetics
laboratory where a female scientist is
teasing her obsessive colleague Bob
(played with introverted charisma by
Tom Felton) about whether he prefers
partying or lab mice.
Bob turns out to be Robert Edwards,
whose obsession — he prefers the lab
mice — led to him and Steptoe
presiding over the birth of the world’s
first IVF baby, Louise Brown.
The play is also a celebration of the
women who were essential to IVF’s
success, not least the nurse Jean Purdy
(played with steely resolution by
Meg Bellamy) and Adelle Leonce’s
courageous, mouthy Margaret (Patient
38). Niamh Gaffney’s haunting sound
design and Sally Ferguson’s artful
lighting provide the coup de grâce in
this gripping piece of storytelling.
Rachel Halliburton
To July 6, bristololdvic.org.uk

different eras (Suite in Three Keys was
written in 1965) shift beneath them.
Louie Whitemore’s meticulously
observed set is brittle with luxury. As
Shadows of the Evening starts, Linda
(Fitzgerald) darts nervously like
a bird looking for a place to
land as she awaits the
arrival of her lover’s first
wife, Anne (Fielding).
Of the three “keys”,
this is most obviously
minor — Linda’s news
is that the man they
both love, George
(Boxer), is dying. Though
Coward (who acted in
Suite in Three Keys) lived

until 1973, he was so ill that they had
to postpone rehearsals; this is his
philosophical attempt to come to
terms with love’s imperfections.
Fitzgerald and Fielding are
delightfully awkward as former
rivals, picking their way like
dressage horses through
a minefield. The
hostilities are more
open for Come into
the Garden, Maud, in
which Fielding morphs
into the monstrous
social climber AnnaMary Conklin, who
terrorises fellow socialites
and minor royals with

hospitality and purple rinse hair.
It’s in A Song at Twilight that the
underlying themes are most explicit.
The Second World War has destroyed
earlier chances of love, raising
questions of emotional compromise
that point to Coward’s homosexuality.
Fitzgerald’s glamorous Carlotta
appears to blackmail Boxer’s Hugo
Latymer, but in a brilliant exchange
neatly exposes the hypocrisy of his
concerns about a young male lover.
It would be another two years before
homosexuality became legal
— thankfully something that
Coward lived to see.
Rachel Halliburton
To July 6, orangetreetheatre.co.uk

Falling for the fat knight
An exceptional
RSC ensemble
contribute to a
glorious comic
evening, says
Clive Davis

theatre
The Merry
Wives of
Windsor
RST, Stratford-upon-Avon
(170min)

{{{{{

hampagne flows as freely as
the dry martini wit in this
glittering trilogy of late
works from Noël Coward,
but the shadows are lurking
too as three different scenarios unfold
in the same private suite of a Swiss
hotel. Emma Fielding and Stephen
Boxer, right, and Tara Fitzgerald deftly
switch between plays in which Coward
examines love and betrayal from the
darkened perspective of a man who
has felt the sting of mortality.
Tom Littler’s ambitious revival
carries echoes from earlier work such
as Private Lives and Blithe Spirit. While
the characters’ witty façade endures,
we can feel the tectonic plates of

10

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

music

Britain’s lord of the Ring

classical
Knussen Chamber
Orchestra/Wigglesworth
Snape Maltings, Suffolk

{{{{(

Anthony Negus,
the hero of this
summer’s must-see
Wagner, talks to
Richard Morrison

W

T

eutonic grandeur
meets English
eccentricity every
summer in the village
of Longborough, high
up in the Cotswolds.
About 30 years ago
Martin and Lizzie
Graham, an opera-loving couple,
converted an old agricultural barn on
their estate into a 400-seat theatre
and started a festival with the prime
aim of staging Wagner’s Ring cycle:
four vast evenings of mythic musictheatre that tax the resources of the
world’s best-equipped opera
companies.
Even well-disposed observers
thought they were bonkers and would
imminently be bankrupt as well. Yet
within a few years they had staged a
“pocket” Ring (condensed in length
and orchestral requirements), as well
as operas by many other composers.
A full-sized production followed in
2013. And this year a completely
different production — with the Ring’s
four constituent operas assembled one
by one over the past four years — is
given three cycles of performances.
Besides the Grahams, one other
person has been central to this
extraordinary achievement. Anthony
Negus conducted the entire 2013 Ring
and now, as he turns 78, he has
rehearsed and will conduct all three
cycles starting from Sunday. He has
also been tapped up by Grange Park
Opera in Surrey for the company’s
Ring operas later in the decade.
Negus has lived, slept, prepared and
conducted Wagner all his working life,
and was already obsessed with the
composer as a boy. “I was 15,” he says,
“when my parents first took me to
Bayreuth [the festival in Germany that
stages Wagner in the theatre the
composer built]. That was in 1961.
The following year I managed to get
into the pit to watch rehearsals. I did
that every year until 1966, then in 1971
I auditioned successfully to be part of

pop
Doja Cat
OVO Hydro, Glasgow

{{{((

B

the music staff there. So I was able to
watch such great Wagner conductors
as Rudolf Kempe, Karl Böhm and
Horst Stein.”
It was, however, a British conductor
— the maverick Reginald Goodall, who
conducted legendary performances of
the Ring for English National Opera in
the early 1970s — who made the most
impression on Negus, his assistant on
several productions. “He seemed to
have this inner channel direct to
Wagner,” Negus says.
And a uniquely intensive one-to-one
way of rehearsing Wagner, which
extended not just to the singers
but even individuals in the
orchestra as well. “Yes,” Negus
recalls. “I once looked through
the window of a rehearsal hall
and saw Goodall conducting
something with tremendous
passion. So I went inside and
found he was rehearsing just
the timpani player.”
Negus’s specially assembled
Longborough orchestra of about
65 players is not as big as Wagner
specified. “We don’t have Wagner
tubas, sadly,” he says, “and only double
woodwind rather than the triple
woodwind Wagner wanted. So we
need to have a flute and two clarinets,

onkers doesn’t do it justice.
The opening night of Doja
Cat’s debut UK tour was as
much a booty-shaking sex
show as it was a pop concert.
It was also an oddball ode to hair.
Always controversial, the 28-year-old
from LA, who broke through in 2018
with a novelty rap about cows (Mooo! )
and had her first hits in lockdown,
announced last year that she wanted to
be taken more seriously. Cue a fierce
rap album, Scarlet, and a visual
reinvention that included shaving her
head and eyebrows.
At an undersold Hydro, however, it
was Doja Cat’s stripper-style moves
more than her music that initially got
the crowd going. She arrived on stage

Rebecca Afonwy-Jones,
Katie Stevenson and
Mari Wyn Williams as
the Rhinemaidens with
Mark Stone as Alberich
in Longborough’s Das
Rheingold. Below:
Anthony Negus

rather than three clarinets, playing the
Rhinemaidens’ chords in Rheingold.
But you would need a pretty keen ear
to hear the difference.”
Since he has such vivid memories
of how other great Wagnerian
conductors tackled the Ring, is
Negus’s main challenge to find his
own unique path through the work?
“When I was doing the Ring ten years
ago I was always checking my
interpretation against Furtwängler’s,”
he replies. “Now I think I am finding
my own way with less and less
conscious effort.”
But what about people
daunted by the sheer length
and complexity of the Ring?
How would Negus entice
them? “First, I would say
don’t be put off because the
characters are all gods or
dwarfs or giants or
Valkyries,” he says. “The
essential point is they all
convey human emotions that
are incredibly true and real.
And then there’s the power of the
music. When you reach the end of
Götterdämmerung, you should be left
in awe by what you’ve heard.”
Longborough’s Ring cycles run from
Sunday to July 4, lfo.org.uk

wearing gigantic furry angel wings, a
waist-length platinum blonde wig, a
white bikini and, briefly, a white silk
shirt. When the wings came off, the
grinding began — every twerk of her
mostly exposed bottom was greeted
with a cheer.
Muffled sound was partly to blame
for the muted response to her early
songs. A four-piece band behind her, on
what appeared to be huge bales of hair,
struggled to make themselves heard.
The gig got going with Demons, a
song from Scarlet during which the
stage glowed red before catching fire.
Vast pyro blasts shot into the air,
toasting fans at the front and making
everyone fear for all that fake hair.
Can Doja Cat rap? Absolutely. When

she strode down a walkway into the
crowd flanked by backing singers, she
was magnificent. Her 2020, TikTokaided global hit Say So was roughed up
with grungey guitar and howled back at
her. Ditto 2021’s Need to Know, which
ended with a scorching guitar solo.
Few of Scarlet’s songs fared as well
as her golden oldies, but watching
Doja Cat twerk on a platform high in
the air was sufficient fun for some.
Plus, everyone knew that the highlight
was to come. Paint the Town Red, a
No 1 around the world last year, sent
Hydro into a frenzy. So loud was the
crowd that Doja Cat gave up rapping
and jiggled her breasts instead.
Lisa Verrico
Touring to July 14, dojacat.com

hat a spectacular
landscape,” the
passing concertgoer
said, feasting in the
interval on the reed
beds, wide open sky and other natural
wonders surrounding the Aldeburgh
Festival’s home base. Indeed it was
spectacular, though the view looked
small beside the landscapes the
composer Judith Weir described in the
piece heard on the interval’s other
side: her festival commission Planet,
inspired by three images of Earth,
deep space and the Milky Way.
Scored for an orchestra suitable for
the two Mozart works sharing the
Knussen Chamber Orchestra’s
programme, the 15-minute piece
nonetheless took a rather modest
approach. It followed the example of
the Eise Eisinga Planetarium, the 18thcentury orrery built into a humble
Netherlands sitting room ceiling. I
found Weir’s work an excellent and
individual creation, recognisably
English in its quasi-conservative
musical lineage, but radiant with a
sense of wonder — driven along by
textural and harmonic niceties ranging
from exhilarating ascending scales to
the unnerving sounds of two thrusting
double basses poking holes in a
timpani tattoo.
Guided by the composer/conductor/
pianist Ryan Wigglesworth, the
orchestra’s mix of Royal Academy of
Music students and professionals was
in particularly fine fettle here. Quality
dipped a bit in Mozart’s Jupiter
Symphony and Piano Concerto No 24,
where their enthusiastic attack tended
to smudge some of the clarity this
music needs. The wind section,
however, shone regardless.
The concerto’s slightly po-faced
soloist, Wigglesworth provided other
diversions from the usual course by
prefacing his performance with his
own festival commission,
Glasmelodien. The eight-minute
piano piece musing on Mozart’s little
adagio movement, K356, was written
for that eerie late-18th-century
phenomenon, the glass harmonica.
Sitting at the keys, Wigglesworth
conjured disconcerting harmonies
from every octave his piano offered:
an achievement luckily avoided
during his darkly coloured cadenza in
the concerto’s first movement, though
it did extend Mozart’s stylistic range
by at least 120 years.
Ensemble Diderot’s delightful
afternoon concert at Snape Maltings
shrank the musical forces to just four:
two violins, one cello and a
harpsichord so prettily coloured that a
knot of fans gathered round in the
interval to inspect it and admire.
The leader Johannes Pramsohler’s
enthusiasm for his 18th-century
French trio sonatas and whatnots
was most infectious. Highlights
included the hurtling finale of the
sample sonata by Jean-Marie Leclair
and a rollicking chaconne from
Louis-Gabriel Guillemain — a wild
card with an unhappy end:
death by 14 stab wounds,
supposedly self-administered.
Geoff Brown
Festival continues to June 23,
brittenpearsarts.org

11

the times | Friday June 14 2024

television & radio

Penelope and Colin power a steamy second half
Carol
Midgley
TV review

Bridgerton series 3, part 2
Netflix

{{{{(

I

t’s part two (the steamier part) of
Bridgerton, folks, so brace
yourselves for a sex scene between
Penelope Featherington and
Colin Bridgerton that lasts an
uninterrupted six minutes. You may
wish to make a cup of tea, feed the cat,
potter about — I certainly did — and
they’ll still be at it when you return. It
mostly happens on a chaise longue. If
they had to do a lot of takes for that
scene it may need reupholstering.
I am sure Bridgerton’s creative team
told themselves that it was “necessary
for the story” that Colin (Luke
Newton) made Penelope (Nicola
Coughlan) stand in front of a full-

Radio choice
Ben Dowell

length Cheval mirror then look at
herself as her dress flops to the floor,
leaving us all gawping at her exposed
breasts. They may at some point even
have believed it. But it still looks pretty
gratuitous, Penelope standing there
starkers while Colin, fully clothed in a
frock coat and boots, peers over her
shoulder into the mirror as if showing
her her own norks for the first time as
if she doesn’t in fact sleep with them
every night. Talk about the male gaze!
But I mustn’t be too po-faced
because Coughlan made a very funny
retort when, at a public screening
event, she was told she was “brave” for
baring all. “You know it is hard
because I think women with my body
type — women with perfect breasts —
we don’t get to see ourselves on screen
enough,” she said. “I’m a very proud
member of the perfect breasts
community. I hope you enjoy seeing
them.” Bravo. That’s a clever response.
And the good news is that this
second half of the series is much better
than the first, weaving in the threat
that Penelope’s secret that she is the
gossip diarist Lady Whistledown is
about to be exposed when the Queen
offers a cash reward for her identity.
Penelope’s friend Eloise (Claudia
Jessie) knows she is Whistledown and
is furious that Penelope is now
engaged to her brother Colin, who
doesn’t. Her scribblings will shame the
Bridgerton name (or something).

Times Radio

Digital, web, smart speaker, app
5.00am Rosie Wright with Early Breakfast
6.00 Chloe Tilley and Calum Macdonald with
Times Radio Breakfast 10.00 Matt Chorley.
An insider’s take on politics 1.00pm
Ayesha Hazarika 4.00 Cathy Newman with
Times Radio Drive. Friday’s headlines and
discussions 7.00 Ed Vaizey. The Conservative
peer and former MP sits in bringing his take
on the day’s news 10.00 Henry Bonsu
1.00am The Story 1.30 Highlights from
Matt Chorley 2.00 The Best of Times Radio

Radio 2
Heart and Soul: Last
Christians of Gaza
World Service, 1.30pm

A moving and timely
profile of George Antone,
above, a member of the
only Roman Catholic
church in Gaza and part
of a dwindling Christian
community whose roots
in this part of the world go
back to the 4th century.
When war breaks out in
October 2023, Antone is
convinced that staying in
Gaza City is the right
option — for safety, and to
continue bearing witness
to Christ’s teaching.
During that time he keeps
in contact with the BBC
producer Catherine Murray,
sending her WhatsApp
messages from a war zone
that builds a vivid picture
of life on the ground.

our tv newsletter

FM: 88-90.2 MHz
6.30am The Zoe Ball Breakfast Show. With
guests Boy George, Meghan Trainor and Kit
Harington 9.30 Vernon Kay. Pet Shop Boys
pick their Tracks of My Years 12.00 Jeremy
Vine 2.00pm Scott Mills 3.30 Scott Mills’
Wonder Years 4.00 Sara Cox 7.00 Michelle
Visage 8.30 Michelle Visage’s Handbag Hits.
Feelgood party classics 9.00 The Good
Groove with DJ Spoony. A mix of soulful
house and lyrical garage tunes 11.00 The
Rock Show with Johnnie Walker 12.00
Romesh Ranganathan: For the Love of
Hip-Hop (r) 1.00am Lionel Richie at the BBC
2.00 Radio 2 Unwinds with Angela Griffin (r)
3.00 Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s Kitchen Disco

Radio 3

FM: 90.2-92.4 MHz
6.30am Breakfast
Petroc Trelawny presents the classical
breakfast show with music that captures
the mood of the morning
9.30 Essential Classics
Georgia Mann plays the best in classical
music, featuring new discoveries, musical
surprises and plenty of familiar favourites
1.00pm Classical Live
Tom McKinney showcases the best
performances in unique recordings, including
highlights of French chamber music from
last month’s Hay-on-Wye Festival and
recordings of music reflecting England.
Francois Couperin/Thomas Ades (Les
Baricades Mistérieuses); Ravel (Sonatine);
Clarke (Viola Sonata); Purcell (”Music For
A While”; Pausanias Z. 585 — ”Sweeter
Than Roses”; and ”An Evening Hymn” —
arr. Britten); Haydn (Symphony No. 104 in
D major “London”); Ravel (Piano Trio);
Vaughan Williams (On Wenlock Edge);
Faure (Piano Trio); and Britten (A Young
Person’s Guide to the Orchestra)

Luke Newton as Colin and Nicola Coughlan as Penelope

4.00 Composer of the Week:
Gibbons (1583-1625)
Donald Macleod looks at the considerable
turmoil in the royal court, while Gibbons
consolidated his position as the leading
musician in the land. Gibbons (Fantasia No 1
for the Great Double Bass; Fantasia No 2
a 6. The Hunt’s Up — Peascod time;
The Second Service — Morning: Te Deum;
Fantasia No 4 a 6; The Cryes of London I & II;
and Blessed are all they that fear the Lord)
5.00 In Tune
Live music and interviews
7.00 Classical Mixtape
A sequence of music
7.30 Friday Night Is Music Night
Singers Tim Howar and Juliette Crosbie join
Stephen Bell and the BBC National Orchestra
of Wales in some of the most popular
American music from stage shows and films.
Recorded at Hoddinott Hall, Cardiff.
Presented by Clare Teal. Sherman (Mary
Poppins Overture); Menken (Beauty and the
Beast); Loewe (Luck Be a Lady); Arlen
(Somewhere Over The Rainbow — Wizard of
Oz); Styne (Don’t Rain on my Parade —
Funny Girl); Berlin (Annie get Your Gun);
Brown (Singing in the Rain); Rodgers
(Carousel Waltz); Leonard Bernstein (West
Side story Overture; Balcony Scene); Menken
(Be Our Guest); Lerner (Gigi); Justin Paul
(Waving Through a Window — Dear Evan
Hansen); Schwartz (Defying Gravity —
Wicked); and Dietz and Schwartz (That’s
Entertainment — The Bandwagon)
9.45 The Essay: Bohemians in T-Shirts
Michael Goldfarb examines the influence of
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, T-shirt
wearing Columbia University students, and
the events that propelled them towards the
writing that would become known as Beat (r)
10.00 Late Junction
Verity Sharp presents late-night oud playing
from Montreal’s Sam Shelabi. There is
wordless opera by Belgian composer
Baudouin de Jaer, performed on the
Geomungo, the six-string Korean bass zither
by virtuosos of the instrument, Lee Junga,
Shin Jihee, Sun Chaerin, Kim Joonyoung, and
Lee Sunhee. Plus, a previously unheard
recording of a Friends of Old Time Music
concert from April 1965
11.30 ’Round Midnight
Soweto Kinch presents the best in jazz with
a particular focus on the British scene
12.30am Through the Night
Arte dei Suonatori in an all-CPE Bach
programme from Poland’s Actus Humanus
Festival, with Marcin Swiatkiewicz on the
harpsichord. Penny Gore presents.

Radio 4

FM: 92.4-94.6 MHz LW: 198kHz MW: 720 kHz
5.30am News Briefing
5.43 Prayer for the Day
5.45 Farming Today
6.00 Today
News and analysis with Nick Robinson
and Mishal Husain
9.00 Desert Island Discs
Lauren Laverne talks to Shirine Khoury-Haq,
CEO of the Co-op group (5/14) (r)
10.00 Woman’s Hour
Magazine exploring issues from a female
perspective, presented by Anita Rani
11.00 The Food Programme
11.45 Book of the Week:
All That Glitters
By Orlando Whitfield. When Inigo tries to
extricate himself professionally from Jopling,
he crosses the Rubicon from which there is
no return. Read by Hugh Skinner (5/5)
12.04pm Rare Earth
Tom Heap and Helen Czerski discuss the
genre of nature-writing (2/10)
1.00 The World at One
1.45 Understand: The UK Election
Key elements of the General Election (5/10)
2.00 The Archers (r)
2.15 Drama: The Specialist
By Matthew Broughton (3/6)
2.45 Child
Examining the significance of a child’s
first birthday. Last in the series
3.00 Gardeners’ Question Time
Experts answer listeners’ queries
3.45 Short Works
Andy Clark reads The Invention of
Abandonment by Malachy Tallack
4.00 Last Word
A selection of obituaries
4.30 More or Less
Tim Harford presents the programme
that explains the numbers and statistics
used in everyday life (4/7) (r)
5.00 PM
6.00 Six O’Clock News
6.30 The News Quiz
Andy Zaltzman hosts the topical comedy
panel game (2/7)
7.00 The Archers
Fallon throws caution to the wind, while
Harrison struggles to let go
7.15 Add to Playlist
With organist Anna Lapwood and
singer-songwriter Andrew Roachford (4/6)
8.00 Any Questions?
Topical discussion, chaired by Alex Forsyth
9.00 Free Thinking
Ideas shaping modern life (11/13)

Various subplots, such as one
involving Francesca Bridgerton trying
to find a chap, are quite dull. But
others, like one centring on mean posh
girl Cressida Cowper (Jessica Madsen)
and the Whistledown subterfuge, are
more juicy. Her father arranges to
marry her off to a crusty old lord who
looks about 85 if he’s a day and
expects babies from her, “four or five”
of them. It’s a predicament that makes
you feel sorry for the antagonist.
But the main energy of this series
comes from the relationship between
Colin and Penelope which, I have to
admit it, teems with chemistry. I call
Bridgerton the “toffs, tits and titles”
show, but here another t-word is at
play — tenderness. In that sex scene,
which is long but also quite sweet,
Coughlan is luminously excellent,
showing both shy vulnerability and
the desire to rip his britches off as she
asks him “tell me what to do”.
It is an extraordinarily intimate
scene, as he explains “it may hurt” but
it should “only be this first time”. Bit
cringey that bit, to be honest. And
Coughlan’s breasts should get some
kind of award for all the heaving they
do. Good lord, they’re up and down
in those frocks like a pair of airbags.
As I said last time they really do
deserve a mention in the credits.
This is a rollicking, uplifting story
with great costumes. A fourth series
feels nailed on.

10.00 The World Tonight
With Shaun Ley
10.45 Book at Bedtime:
The Photographer
By Max Porter. The story behind a
photograph of a dying man. Read by
Tim McInnerny (5/5)
11.00 Americast
Analysis of the cultural and social stories
that define political debate in the US
11.30 The Bottom Line: The Decisions
That Made Me a Leader
Evan Davis hosts the business conversation
show, with insight from the people
at the top (6/6) (r)
12.00 News and Weather
12.30am Book of the Week:
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12.48 Shipping Forecast
1.00 As BBC World Service

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Come Home” 10.55 The Comedy Club
Interview. Jon Holmes speaks to stand-up
comedian Chloe Petts 11.00 The Problem
with Adam Bloom. Comedy with Brendon
Burns 11.30 Creme de la Crime. The
unsolved case of a vanishing lord 11.45 Irish
Micks and Legends. Humorous contemporary
versions of Irish folk tales. Last in the series

MW: 693, 909
5.00am Wake Up to Money 6.00 5 Live
Breakfast 9.00 Nicky Campbell 11.00 Chiles
on Friday 1.00pm Elis James and John
Robins 2.00 Colin Murray 4.00 5 Live Drive
6.30 5 Live Sport 8.00 5 Live Sport:
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Stephen Nolan 1.00am Lisa McCormick

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MW: 1053, 1089 kHz
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1.00am Extra Time with Martin Kelner

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FM: 100-102 MHz
6.30am Dan Walker 9.00 The Classic
FM Hall of Fame Hour with Dan Walker
10.00 Alexander Armstrong 1.00pm
Anne-Marie Minhall 4.00 Margherita Taylor
7.00 Classic FM at the Movies with Jonathan
Ross 9.00 Traditional Tunes with Iona
Stephen 10.00 Calm Classics 1.00am
Katie Breathwick 4.00 Sam Pittis

12

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

television & radio
Viewing Guide
James Jackson

Live Uefa Euro
2024: Germany
v Scotland
ITV1, 6.30pm

Early

Sound the
Top vuvuzela,
pick grab a
bratwurst
hot dog ... a football
takeover across BBC
and ITV is upon us,

beamed live from
Germany. The Euros
are here, and over the
next four weeks we can
surely expect some
thrilling top-quality
football. The home
nation tends to go far,
but we’ll know a bit
more about that after
tonight’s game in
Munich (kick-off 8pm),
because Germany have
only recently been
getting it together with

some impressive wins,
having looked in
disarray a few months
ago. Meanwhile, come
on Scotland! This is
unlikely to be an
opening game
lacking in passion
and urgency. ITV’s
anchor tonight will be
Mark Pougatch, and
among the team of
commentators in the
month ahead will be
Clive Tyldesley and

Sam Matterface. Its
studio pundits will
include Gary Neville,
Roy Keane and Ian
Wright, although we
can presume that
tonight it will be Graeme
Souness. Over on the
BBC, the star signing is
Wayne Rooney, and its
coverage will include
England’s first two
games, starting with
Serbia on Sunday
(at 8pm).

The Panorama
Interviews with
Nick Robinson
BBC1, 7.30pm

After this week’s light
evisceration of Rishi
Sunak, Nick Robinson
now gets the chance to
quiz Keir Starmer
about his manifesto
and, presumably, his
thoughts on Sunak’s
claims of a £2,000 tax
rise under Labour. That

will soon be answered,
along with other
pressing questions such
as, will Robinson wear
a tie this time? Indeed,
will Starmer?

Michael Mosley:
The Doctor Who
Changed Britain
BBC1, 8pm

It’s only fitting that
Michael Mosley, whose
death has shocked

everyone, gets a
primetime tribute. His
programmes delivered
all sorts of health
messages, from
intermittent fasting to
the benefits of a cold
shower. He also went
to extremes in the
pursuit of science,
such as ingesting a
tapeworm. With a
style that was warmly
accessible, he was a
great communicator.

BBC1

BBC2

ITV1

Channel 4

Channel 5

6.00am Breakfast 9.30 Morning Live. Magazine show
10.45 Scam Interceptors. An elderly man in a remote
community is targeted by scammers 11.15 Homes
Under the Hammer. Properties in Leicestershire,
Somerset and Blackpool are appraised (r) (AD) 12.15pm
Bargain Hunt. A pet-themed edition to celebrate the
RSPCA’s 200th anniversary (AD) 1.00 BBC News at One;
Weather 1.35 BBC Regional News; Weather 1.45 BBC
News at One; Weather 2.00 Hope Street. Finn suspects
an act of revenge at a new taxi business (AD) 2.45
Escape to the Country. Sonali Shah tours the East
Midlands in search of a property to suit buyers who, for
the last 23 years, have been living in America 3.45
Garden Rescue. Charlie Dimmock and Chris Hull head to
Warrington in Cheshire to design an eco-friendly garden
on the relatively small budget of £3,000 (r) 4.30 The
Finish Line. Roman Kemp and Sarah Greene host the quiz,
as contestants race in moving podiums across the studio
to try to win £5,000. Last in the series 5.15 Pointless.
Quiz hosted by Alexander Armstrong and Lucy Porter (r)
6.00 BBC News at Six; Weather 6.30 BBC Regional
News; Weather 6.55 Party Election Broadcast (r)

6.30am Homes Under the Hammer (r) 7.30 Clive Myrie’s
Caribbean Adventure (r) 8.00 Sign Zone: Mammals (r)
(AD, SL) 9.00 BBC News 12.15pm Politics Live 1.00
Impossible (r) 1.45 Mastermind. Clive Myrie hosts the
grand final of the quiz (r) 2.45 Five Bedrooms. While
everyone is frantically preparing the house to be sold,
Heather pulls after finding out two of them are moving in
with her ex-husband. Last in the series (r) (AD) 3.35
Stanley Tucci: Searching for Italy. The American actor sets
out to explore how Italian immigration has transformed
the food scene in his adopted home town of London (r)
(AD) 4.15 Great Bear Stakeout. The concluding edition
focuses on the bears catching hundreds of fish during the
great salmon run, helping them bulk up for the harsh
winter months (r) 5.15 Flog It! Paul Martin presents
previously unseen finds from the show’s travels round
the country, visiting Muncaster Castle, the Bowes
Museum and Norwich Cathedral (r) 6.00 Richard Osman’s
House of Games. Kevin Eldon, Sarah Keyworth, Laila
Rouass and John Whaite take part (r) 6.30 Clive Myrie’s
Caribbean Adventure. The newsreader explores Puerto
Plata in the Dominican Republic. Last in the series

6.00am Good Morning Britain 9.00 Lorraine.
Entertainment, current affairs and fashion news, as well
as showbiz stories and celebrity gossip. Presented by
Lorraine Kelly 10.00 This Morning. Daily magazine,
featuring a mix of celebrity chat, showbusiness news,
lifestyle features, topical discussion, health and beauty
advice and more. Including Local Weather 12.30pm Loose
Women. Celebrity interviews and topical debate from a
female perspective 1.30 ITV News; Weather 1.55
Regional News; Weather 2.00 Dickinson’s Real Deal. The
Dealers set up at Crewe Hall, as James Layte bargains
for a page turner, and Simon Schneider browses some
celebrity reading material (r) (AD) 3.00 Lingo. A mother
and daughter from London, a pair of friends from West
Sussex and an auntie and niece from Surrey and Herts
take part (r) 4.00 Tipping Point. Ben Shephard hosts the
arcade-themed quiz in which contestants drop tokens
down a choice of four chutes in the hope of winning a
£10,000 jackpot (r) 5.00 The Chase. Contestants from
Woking, Greenhithe, Doncaster and Chepstow take part in
the quiz show (r) 6.00 Regional News; Weather 6.10
Party Election Broadcast 6.15 ITV News; Weather

6.30am Cheers (r) 7.20 Everybody Loves Raymond (r)
(AD) 9.10 Frasier (r) (AD) 11.10 Ramsay’s Kitchen
Nightmares USA (r) 12.05pm Channel 4 News Summary
12.10 Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares USA. A failing
pizzeria in Los Angeles (r) 1.10 Car SOS. Revisiting
vehicles from the first four series (r) (AD) 2.10
Countdown. Sam Quek is in Dictionary Corner 3.00 A
Place in the Sun. Ben Hillman helps a couple find their
dream holiday home in Mojacar, Spain with a budget of
£125,000 (r) 4.00 A Place in the Sun. A fitness instructor
who first visited Málaga six years ago and fell in love
with the city and its surroundings is looking for a home
within a £100,000 budget 5.00 Sun, Sea and Selling
Houses. In Calp, Jo and Andrew Alderton assist a pair
who with a budget of €350,000, are looking for a
retirement home that they can enjoy with their pets
6.00 Four in a Bed. Payment day sees the holiday
hosts meet one last time to find out what they’ve been
paid and settle some scores (r) 6.30 The Simpsons.
Marge walks out on Homer for allowing an adult film
to be shot in their house, and begins a new life —
protecting endangered marine creatures (r) (AD)

6.00am Milkshake! 9.15 Jeremy Vine. Jeremy Vine and
Storm discuss the latest news 11.15 Storm Huntley.
Storm Huntley carries on the discussion and takes your
calls to discuss the biggest stories of the day 12.45pm
Friends. Rachel considers moving out (r) (AD) 1.10
Friends. Rachel tells her father she is pregnant (r) (AD)
1.40 5 News at Lunchtime 1.45 Home and Away. Bree
struggles to leave Remi in the past, Stevie puts Remi in
charge of entertaining her film crew guests and Roo
confronts Alf (r) 2.15 FILM: Dangerous Love (PG,
TVM, 2022) When recently divorced Laura meets a
stranger online, her daughter grows suspicious and is
determined to uncover the truth. Thriller starring Vivica A
Fox 4.00 Bargain-Loving Brits in the Sun. Colin Brown
prepares to welcome a family of seven to the B&B, and
enlists Sebastian to help him erect a gazebo to shade
from the unprecedented hot summer (r) (AD) 5.00 5
News at 5 6.00 Party Election Broadcast. By Plaid Cymru
6.05 Argos: How Do They Really Do It? For decades,
Argos has been a fixture of the UK’s high streets —
seemingly selling everything. This show reveals what
really goes on behind the counter (r) 6.55 5 News Update

TV Doctor Michael Mosley &
7PM

This week we hear the story of TV Doctor Michael Mosley and how he brought infectious enthusiasm and dedication
to his work. Plus that of astronaut William Anders, photographer of one of the most famous photos ever taken.
7.00 The One Show Live chat and topical
reports, co-hosted by Alex Jones

8PM

7.30 The Panorama Interviews with
Nick Robinson The journalist
questions Labour leader Sir Keir
Starmer. See Viewing Guide
8.00 Michael Mosley: The Doctor
Who Changed Britain A tribute
to the medic and broadcaster.
See Viewing Guide

Late

11PM

10PM

9PM

8.30 Outnumbered The arrival of
Pete’s goddaughter from Australia has
an unfortunate effect (3/7) (r) (AD)
9.00 Death in Paradise The New Year’s
Eve celebrations are cut short when a
masked man stabs a woman in her
own home. Crime drama with guest
appearances by Adrian Edmondson
and Nina Wadia (1/8) (r) (AD)

7.00 Digging for Britain: The Greatest
Discoveries Professor Alice Roberts
visits archaeological digs around
the country (3/4) (r) (AD)
7.30 Beechgrove Garden Kirsty Wilson
discusses what to sow and plant in
order to attract birds to a garden
8.00 Gardeners’ World Monty Don,
Nick Bailey, Adam Frost, Sue Kent,
Carol Klein and Frances Tophill are
Birmingham-bound for the Gardeners’
World Live event, and an expert grower
shares her passion for orchids

9.00 Hidden Treasures of the National
Trust A mysterious portrait of a
servant reveals its secrets, and two
rare hidden treasures are brought
back into the light. Last in the series.
See Viewing Guide (AD)

10.00 BBC News at Ten

10.00 QI Sandi Toksvig looks at tubes and
tubas in a totally tubular show (r)

10.30 BBC Regional News and Weather
10.40 MOTD: Uefa Euro 2024 Highlights
Germany v Scotland. Alex Scott
presents action from the Group A
match at Munich Football Arena,
as the tournament got under way

10.30 Newsnight Headline analysis
presented by Faisal Islam

11.25 Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (15,
2011) A former intelligence operative
is brought out of retirement to uncover
a Soviet mole in MI6. Cold War thriller
starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth
and Benedict Cumberbatch (AD)
1.25am Euro 2024 Match Replay Germany v Scotland.
A chance to see the Group A match at Munich Football
Arena. With commentary by Steve Wilson and James
McFadden 3.10-6.00 BBC News. The latest headlines

11.05 Dear Evan Hansen (12, 2021) Film
adaptation of the Tony and Grammy
Award-winning musical about Evan
Hansen, a high-school senior with a
social anxiety disorder. Starring
Ben Platt and Julianne Moore

1.10am Sign Zone: The Wrong Man — 17 Years
Behind Bars Documentary (r) (SL) 2.10 Andi Oliver’s
Fabulous Feasts. Andi revisits her past in west London’s
Notting Hill. Last in the series (r) (AD, SL) 3.10-3.40
David & Jay’s Touring Toolshed. A model helicopter
pilot puts the duo to the test (r) (AD, SL)

6.30 Live Uefa Euro 2024: Germany v
Scotland (Kick-off 8.00). Mark
Pougatch presents coverage of the
Group A match from Munich Football
Arena, as hosts Germany kick off the
tournament against Steve Clarke’s
side. Julian Nagelsmann’s team go into
the tournament having qualified
automatically, and are one of the
favourites to win the competition.
They are looking to win their first
major trophy since the World Cup
in 2014, and their first European
Championship victory since 1996.
Scotland qualified for their second
consecutive Euros after finishing below
Spain, but comfortably ahead of the
likes of Norway and Georgia. With
analysis from Graeme Souness, Roy
Keane, Ian Wright and Laura Woods,
reports by Connie McLaughlin, and
commentary from Sam Matterface and
Ally McCoist. See Viewing Guide

10.45 ITV News

11.20 Regional News
11.30 Terminator 2: Judgment Day
(15, 1991) Sci-fi adventure sequel
starring Arnold Schwarzenegger
and Linda Hamilton (AD)
1.40am Shop on TV 3.00 The Larkins. The family do all
they can to get Pop out of prison, while Mariette tells him
he is going to be grandfather, but swears him to secrecy.
Ma is surprised by an about-turn from Norma (r) (AD, SL)
3.50 Unwind with ITV 5.05-6.00 Katie Piper’s Breakfast
Show. With guests including Alexandra Burke (r) (SL)

7.00 Channel 4 News The day’s national
and international stories, plus sport
and weather

7.00 The Motorway Hotel Head Chef
James works with new apprentice
Kaylan, and the annual national Maize
Maze awards is meant to be in town,
but snowfall causes chaos (4/4)

7.55 Party Election Broadcast

7.55 5 News Update

8.00 The Dog House Trini from London
contends with sassy fluffball Balloo,
while Roz and John are desperate to
help their cockapoo Marnie following
the loss of her sight (2/7) (r) (AD)

8.00 Dalgliesh Adam and Miskin attend
the murder scene of Rita O’Keefe,
whose nephew Garry Ashe emerges
as chief suspect. At his trial, defence
barrister Venetia Aldridge smoothly
secures an acquittal, but when she is
also found dead, Dalgliesh is soon on
the hunt for a missing paperknife,
and a motive. Drama starring
Bertie Carvel and Carlyss Peer (r)

9.00 Celebrity Gogglebox A rolling cast of
famous faces — including Rylan, Mel B,
Nick Grimshaw, Zoe Ball, Clare Balding
and Jane McDonald — critique the
week’s biggest television shows (AD)

10.00 The Nevermets Twenty-four-yearold Leah and 38-year-old Matt meet
the objects of their affections, having
previously communicated with Chad
and Maria, respectively, through
online means (4/6) (AD)

10.00 Live UK vs Germany Fight
Night: Macaulay McGowan v
Abass Baraou Coverage of the bout
for the European Super Welterweight
title at Bolton Whites Hotel

11.05 The Inbetweeners Movie (15,
2011) Awkward teenagers Simon,
Will, Jay and Neil head to Greece for
a wild holiday — but things do not
go to plan. Comedy starring Joe
Thomas, Simon Bird, James Buckley
and Blake Harrison (AD)
12.55am FILM: Skyscraper (12, 2018) A security
expert must infiltrate a burning skyscraper when his
family is trapped inside. Action thriller starring Dwayne
Johnson (AD) 2.35 Ramsay’s 24 Hours to Hell and Back
(r) (AD, SL) 3.25 Come Dine with Me (r) (AD) 5.35
Escape to the Château (r) 5.45-6.10 Frasier (r)

12.05am Ultimate Police Interceptors (r) 1.00
Entertainment News on 5 1.15 PlayOJO Live Casino
Show 3.15 Secret Scotland with Susan Calman (r)
4.05 Britain’s Greatest Bridges (r) (AD, SL) 4.50 Wildlife
SOS (r) (SL) 5.15 House Doctor (r) (SL) 5.40
Entertainment News on 5 5.45-6.00 Paw Patrol (r) (SL)

13

the times | Friday June 14 2024

television & radio
Hidden Treasures
of the National
Trust
BBC2, 9pm

Long-past secrets offer
an air of mystery to the
final part. In Chirk
Castle in the Welsh
Marches, built in the
13th century to impose
English rule under
Edward I, hangs an
18th-century portrait of
a servant, and after

years next to an open
fire little can be seen of
the man under layers of
soot. As he is restored,
what stories will he
yield? Also tonight, a
rats’ nest in Oxburgh
Hall in Norfolk contains
scraps of centuries-old
clothes. In north Wales,
the National Trust
turns mediator in an
old dispute between
Penrhyn Castle and the
local community.

Paranormal:
The Village That
Saw Aliens
BBC3, 9pm/9.30pm

Are you a believer
or a sceptic? Radio 1’s
Sian Eleri is a sceptic,
but will she still be
after four episodes
of close encounters
of the Welsh kind?
In 1977, 14 schoolboys
claimed to see a UFO
in the playground. It

created a media frenzy,
which in turn triggered
a wave of uncanny
phenomena along
the Welsh coastline.
Eleri delves deep into
the evidence, things
taking a chilling turn
when she meets a
woman who says she
saw the UFO and
is still haunted by it
all. For all your
paranormal needs,
look no further.

Sister Boniface
Mysteries
Drama, 9pm

In the 1980s a killer
doll on screen meant
the horror film
character Chucky.
In 2024 it means a
plotline in a whimsical
1950s-set whodunnit. In
episode two of the latest
series of nun-sleuthing,
Sister Boniface must
face her phobia of dolls

when a local toymaker
is discovered stabbed to
death in, yes, a locked
room. A dead-eyed doll
called Harmony is
found near the body
holding the murder
weapon, the press has
seized on “killer doll”
headlines, and mass
panic is on the cards.
It is absurd, but
knowingly so.
As usual, all fun
Friday night escapism.

Film The Great
Escaper
Sky/Now

Michael Caine and
Glenda Jackson star in
a real-life tale about
war guilt and lifelong
companionship. He
plays a Second World
War veteran who fled
his care home to attend
D-Day 70th anniversary
commemorations.
(12, 2023)

Sky Max

Sky Atlantic

Sky Documentaries Sky Arts

Sky Main Event

Variations

6.00am NCIS: Los Angeles (r) 7.00 DC’s
Legends of Tomorrow (r) (AD) 8.00 The Flash
(r) 9.00 Stargate SG-1 (r) 11.00 NCIS: Los
Angeles (r) 12.00 The Flash (r) 1.00pm
MacGyver (r) (AD) 3.00 Hawaii Five-0 (r)
4.00 S.W.A.T (r) (AD) 5.00 DC’s Legends of
Tomorrow. Comic-book fantasy (r) (AD)
6.00 Stargate SG-1. The team is propelled back
to a top-secret military base in 1969 (r)
7.00 Stargate SG-1. Part one of two.
O’Neill wakes from cryonic suspension (r)
8.00 A League of Their Own: Mexican Road Trip.
Jamie Redknapp, Jill Scott, Micah Richards and
Mo Gilligan explore the city of La Paz (r) (AD)
9.00 The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live.
Post-apocalyptic horror starring Andrew Lincoln
10.00 Never Mind the Buzzcocks (r) (AD)
11.30 The Walking Dead. The Governor
restores order in Woodbury (r)
12.30am Brit Cops: Rapid Response (r) (AD)
1.30 Road Wars (r) 3.00 Hawaii Five-0 (r) 4.00
S.W.A.T (r) (AD) 5.00 Highway Patrol (r) (AD)

6.00am The Guest Wing (r) (AD) 7.55 Six Feet
Under (r) (AD) 10.05 Billions (r) (AD) 12.15pm
Game of Thrones (r) (AD) 1.20 The Sopranos (r)
3.30 Six Feet Under (r) (AD) 5.30 Billions.
Chuck, Axe and Prince have the ultimate
showdown (r) (AD)
6.35 Gomorrah. First episode of the Italian
crime drama, starring Marco D’Amore (r)
7.35 Game of Thrones. Jon and his men go
beyond the wall to capture a white walker, while
Daenerys has to make a decision, and tensions
between Arya and Sansa increase (r) (AD)
8.50 House of the Dragon. Rhaenyra tries
desperately to hold the realm together (r) (AD)
10.00 House of the Dragon: War Room. Sue
Perkins presents a look ahead to season two (r)
11.00 The Time Traveler’s Wife. Adaptation
of Audrey Niffenegger’s novel starring Rose
Leslie and Theo James (1/6) (r) (AD)
12.00 The Time Traveler’s Wife (r) (AD)
1.55am Euphoria (r) (AD) 3.05 Game of
Thrones (r) (AD) 4.20 The Guest Wing (r) (AD)

6.00am The Good Fight Club (r) (AD) 7.00
Discovering: Daniel Day-Lewis (r) 8.00 The
Directors (r) 9.00 The Eighties (r) (AD) 10.00
The Two Escobars (r) 12.00 Terry Venables:
A Man Can Dream (r) (AD) 2.00pm FILM:
Gascoigne (15, 2015) Documentary about
Paul Gascoigne 3.45 My Icon: Thierry Henry
(r) (AD) 4.00 The Directors (r) 5.00
Discovering: Daniel Day-Lewis. Profile (r)
6.00 The Eighties (r) (AD)
7.00 I Am Johnny Cash. A celebration of the
country singer-songwriter (r) (AD)
8.45 My Icon: Ebony Rainford-Brent (r) (AD)
9.00 FILM: Bowling for Columbine
(15, 2002) Documentary by Michael Moore
11.15 An American Bombing: The Road to
April 19th. Taking a look at the surge in
homegrown political violence (r) (AD)
1.15am Brillo Box (3¢ off) (r) 2.00 Stax:
Soulsville USA. New series. Documentary about
the soul music record label 3.10 The Apollo (r)
5.00 Discovering: Daniel Day-Lewis (r)

6.00am Sky Sports News. Round-up of the
sports news 7.00 Good Morning Euros 8.00
Good Morning Euros 9.00 Good Morning Euros.
Round-up of the all the news from the 2024
Uefa European Football Championship 10.00
Live Tennis: The Libema Open. Coverage of day
five of the WTA and ATP grass court events,
held at Autotron Rosmalen in s-Hertogenbosch,
the Netherlands, featuring the quarter-finals
12.30pm Live US Open Golf. Coverage of the
second day of the Major, held at Pinehurst
Resort in North Carolina. Rickie Fowler held the
lead at the end of the halfway stage last year
with eventual champion Wyndham Clark just one
stroke behind him. Meanwhile, Justin Rose, Phil
Mickelson, Justin Thomas and Jordan Spieth
were among the players who missed the cut
1.00am Live ICC Men’s T20 World Cup:
New Zealand v Uganda. Coverage of the Group C
encounter, which comes from Brian Lara Cricket
Academy in Tarouba 5.30 Sky Sports News.
Round-up of the latest sports news

BBC1 N Ireland
As BBC1 except: 6.55pm-7.00 Party Election
Broadcast (r) 8.30-9.00 Suzie Lee: Home Cook
Hero. Suzie reveals tips for cooking fresh fish

6.00am Charles Hazlewood: Beethoven & Me
(AD) 7.00 Classic FM Rising Stars with Julian
Lloyd Webber 2022 8.00 The Joy of Painting
(AD) 9.00 Tales of the Unexpected (AD) 10.00
Alfred Hitchcock Presents 11.00 Discovering:
Peter Ustinov 12.00 The Joy of Painting (AD)
1.00pm Tales of the Unexpected (AD) 1.55 Mae
West: Dirty Blonde (AD) 3.00 Camille Pissarro:
The Father of Impressionism 4.00 Discovering:
Ian McKellen 5.00 The Joy of Painting (AD)
6.00 Tales of the Unexpected (AD)
7.00 Alfred Hitchcock Presents
7.30 Alfred Hitchcock Presents
8.00 How the Beatles Changed the World.
Discover how four young men from Liverpool
transformed the world for ever
10.15 Discovering: John Lennon
11.15 Stuart Sutcliffe: The Lost Beatle
12.30am Guy Garvey: From the Vaults
1.30 Live from the Artists Den 2.45 Led
Zeppelin: In the Light 4.00 Cheltenham
Literature Festival 5.00 Auction

AUDIO

Astronaut Bill Anders

BBC1 Scotland
As BBC1 except: 11.15am-12.15 Homes
Under the Hammer (r) 6.55pm-7.00 Party
Election Broadcast 10.40-11.25 Sportscene:
Euro Highlights. Germany v Scotland
BBC1 Wales
As BBC1 except: 6.55pm-7.00 Party Election
Broadcast (r) 8.30-9.00 Iolo’s Valleys. Iolo
Williams heads up the valleys north of
Newport. Last in the series 10.40 Paranormal:
The Village That Saw Aliens. The biggest mass
UFO sighting in Britain (r) 11.10 Paranormal:
The Village That Saw Aliens (r) 11.40 MOTD:
Uefa Euro 2024 Highlights. Germany v Scotland
12.25am-1.25 Pitch Invasion: How the
Scottish and Irish Changed Football (AD)
BBC2 Wales
As BBC2 except: 7.00pm The One Show
7.30-8.00 Springwatch in Wales (r)
ITV1 Wales
As ITV1 except: 6.10pm-6.15 Party Election
Broadcast. By the Liberal Democrats
STV
As ITV1 except: 11.20pm-11.30 STV News
1.40am-3.00 Shop on TV 3.50-5.05 Night
Vision. News, sport and weather

Listen for free via the QR code or wherever
you find your podcasts

UTV
As ITV1 except: 6.10pm-6.15 Party Election
Broadcast. By Traditional Unionist Voice

BBC3

BBC4

Talking Pictures

Film4

More4

7.00pm Top Gear. Michael Sheen is the
Star in a Reasonably Priced Car (AD)
8.00 The Traitors US. A deadly mission sees a
player take their last breath in the game
9.00 Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens.
New series. The biggest mass UFO sighting in
Britain. See Viewing Guide (1/4) (AD)
9.30 Paranormal: The Village That Saw Aliens.
Sian Eleri heads to Haven Fort Hotel in order
to follow up on claims “creatures” were seen
there. See Viewing Guide (2/4) (AD)
10.00 A Very British Cult. An investigation into
a life coaching company that allegedly ruins lives
11.00 Ladhood. Liam is forced to confront
his mental-health problems
11.25 Ladhood. Liam prepares to perform
at a spoken-word gig in Leeds
11.50 I Kissed a Boy. There’s a chill in the air
as the dinner party concludes with heated
words and bruised relationships (AD)
12.40am Confessions of a Teenage Fraudster.
Elliot becomes more paranoid than ever (AD)
1.25 Boot Dreams: Now or Never (AD) 2.25
Ladhood 2.50 Paranormal: The Village That Saw
Aliens (AD, SL) 3.50-4.00 Press X to Continue

7.00pm TOTP: 1996. Mark Goodier presents
the pop chart programme
7.30 TOTP: 1996. Dale Winton presents
the pop chart programme
8.00 TOTP: 1987. Performances by John
Farnham, Bruce Willis, Beastie Boys, Run DMC,
Tom Jones, Whitesnake, ABC, Johnny Logan,
Whitney Houston and Jody Watley
8.30 TOTP: 1982. Featuring Roxy Music, Duran
Duran, ABC, Queen, Toyah and Adam Ant
9.00 Disco at the BBC: Volume 2. A selection of
disco with a celebration of nightclub classics
taken from the BBC’s archives, including George
McCrae’s Rock Your Baby, Ring My Bell by Anita
Ward and Baccara’s Yes Sir, I Can Boogie
10.00 Disco: Soundtrack of a Revolution. A look
at how disco conquered the charts (2/3)
11.00 Boogie Fever: A TOTP2 Disco Special.
Steve Wright presents performances of disco
classics from the BBC archives, featuring
George McCrae, Chic, Gloria Gaynor, Sophie
Ellis-Bextor, Edwin Starr and the Weather Girls
12.30am Sounds of the 70s 1.00 Disco at the
BBC: Volume 2 2.00 TOTP: 1996 3.00
TOTP: 1987 3.30-4.00 TOTP: 1982

6.00am FILM: She’ll Have to Go (U, 1962)
(b/w) 7.45 Come a Little Closer 7.50 FILM:
The Glass Cage (PG, 1955) (b/w) 9.05
FILM: Passport to Treason (15, 1956)
(b/w) 10.40 FILM: The Night Caller (15,
1965) (b/w) 12.20pm What’s On TPTV with
Noel 12.30 The Four Just Men (b/w) 1.00
Melvyn’s Talking Pictures 1.10 FILM: Mimi
(PG, 1935) Romantic drama starring Douglas
Fairbanks Jr (b/w) 3.00 Melvyn’s Talking
Pictures 3.10 FILM: Rebecca (PG, 1940)
Romantic thriller starring Laurence Olivier and
Joan Fontaine (b/w) 5.45 Look at Life
6.00 Worzel Gummidge
6.30 Fireball XL5 (b/w)
7.05 FILM: Millions Like Us (U, 1943) (b/w)
9.00 Cellar Club with Caroline Munro
9.05 FILM: Without Warning (18, 1980)
10.55 Cellar Club with Caroline Munro
11.00 FILM: Serpent’s Lair (18, 1995)
12.50am Cellar Club with Caroline Munro
12.55 FILM: Unearthly Stranger (PG, 1963)
Sci-fi adventure starring John Neville (b/w)
2.30 FILM: Deathsport (18, 1978) 4.10 The
Road to D-Day 4.45 Look at Life 5.00 Bonanza

11.00am 13 Rue Madeleine (U, 1946)
Second World War spy thriller starring James
Cagney (b/w) 12.55pm Anne of the Indies
(U, 1951) High-seas adventure starring Jean
Peters 2.35 Rio Grande (U, 1950) Western
starring John Wayne (b/w) (AD) 4.45 A
Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
(PG, 2019) Drama starring Tom Hanks (AD)
6.55 Sleepless in Seattle (PG, 1993)
Romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks,
Meg Ryan and Bill Pullman (AD)
9.00 Mission: Impossible — Fallout (12,
2018) Ethan Hunt, the IMF team and a CIA
assassin try to prevent a disaster caused by a
group of terrorists. Action thriller sequel
starring Tom Cruise and Henry Cavill (AD)
11.55 Con Air (18, 1997) A parolee on his
flight home intervenes when America’s deadliest
criminals hijack the plane. Action thriller
starring Nicolas Cage, John Cusack, John
Malkovich and Steve Buscemi (AD)
2.10am-3.55 Slice (15, 2018) A pizza
delivery driver is murdered on the job, so the
city searches for someone to blame.
Horror comedy starring Chris Parnell

8.55am A Place in the Sun 10.25 A New Life in
the Sun 11.25 Find It, Fix It, Flog It 12.30pm
Come Dine with Me 3.10 Four in a Bed 5.50
Château DIY. Anna and Edward face deadlines in
preparation for their next wedding booking (AD)
6.55 PopMaster TV. Music quiz show
7.55 PopMaster TV. Pop fans from Worcester,
Perth, Glasgow, Southport and Bedford take part
9.00 Astrid: Murder in Paris. A man is killed
in an ultra-secure factory and the main
suspect vanishes — only to return in
a haze of strange events. In French (3/8)
10.05 24 Hours in A&E. A 52-year-old woman
who suffers from MS is brought in with
a case of suspected sepsis (AD)
11.05 24 Hours in A&E. A 20-year-old woman
is rushed in after being involved in a high-speed
car crash, while a 78-year-old man is
transferred from his local hospital with
suspected internal bleeding (AD)
12.10am 8 Out of 10 Cats Does Countdown
1.15 The Twelve: Cinderella Murder. The
examining magistrate presents the
reconstructions of the crimes 2.25 24 Hours in
A&E (AD) 3.30-4.00 A Place in the Sun

ITV2

ITV3

ITV4

Drama

Yesterday

6.00am CITV 9.00 World’s Funniest Videos
9.30 Totally Bonkers Guinness World Records
10.00 Love Bites (AD, SL) 12.00 Dress to
Impress 1.00pm Deal or No Deal 2.00 Family
Fortunes 3.00 Veronica Mars 4.00 Dawson’s
Creek 5.00 Dress to Impress
6.00 Celebrity Catchphrase (AD)
7.00 Deal or No Deal. Game show
8.00 Bob’s Burgers. The kids are desperate to
get out of the house after being grounded (AD)
8.30 Bob’s Burgers. Bob becomes obsessed
with his new automatic helicopter (AD)
9.00 Love Island. At the end of a dramatic
second week in the villa, the remaining couples
try to ensure they are still in with the chance of
finding love and winning the £50,000 cash prize
10.05 The Stand Up Sketch Show
10.35 Family Guy. Meg offers to look after Joe
while Bonnie is out of town (AD)
11.05 Family Guy. Brian becomes a writer (AD)
11.35 American Dad! (AD)
12.05am American Dad! (AD) 12.35 The Sex
Lives of College Girls (SL) 1.45 Don’t Hate the
Playaz 2.30 Unwind with ITV 3.00 Teleshopping

6.00am Classic Emmerdale 7.00 Classic
Coronation Street (AD) 8.05 Agatha Christie’s
Poirot (AD) 10.30 The Royal (AD) 11.35
Heartbeat (AD) 1.40pm Classic Emmerdale
2.40 Classic Coronation Street (AD) 3.40
Inspector Morse (AD) 5.55 Heartbeat (AD)
8.00 Doc Martin. Al tries to raise some quick
cash, while Martin accidentally inflicts a minor
wound on an elderly patient — who walks out of
the surgery, vowing never to return (4/8) (AD)
9.00 Shetland. Perez and the team investigate
when body parts belonging to a young man are
discovered on the island, Drama starring
Douglas Henshall and Alison O’Donnell
10.20 Shetland. A discovery at the Hayes house
changes the course of the investigation. Perez
establishes the probable cause for Daniel’s
murder and his sister Zezi’s disappearance
11.30 Lewis. When a student’s body is hauled
from the canal with stab wounds, suspicion
falls on her lover — a young astrophysics
professor — and his jealous wife (AD)
1.10am Upstairs, Downstairs 2.05 Unwind
with ITV 2.30 Teleshopping

6.00am World of Sport 6.10 Minder (AD, SL)
7.10 The Sweeney (SL) 8.10 The Return of
Sherlock Holmes (AD) 9.15 Magnum, PI (AD,
SL) 10.20 Kojak 11.25 BattleBots 12.25pm
The Return of Sherlock Holmes (AD) 1.35
Magnum, PI (AD) 2.40 Kojak 3.40 Minder (AD)
4.50 The Sweeney. Regan gets a tip-off
6.00 Live World Series of Darts. Coverage of the
first day of the 2024 Poland Darts Masters
tournament, featuring commentary from
Dan Dawson and Mark Webster
10.00 All Elite Wrestling: Dynamite.
Hard-hitting action from the world of All Elite
Wrestling — the roster features world-class
talent including Jon Moxley, Chris Jericho,
Bryan Danielson and Claudio Castagnoli
12.00 Made in Britain. Discover how one firm
makes the wheelbarrows that helped rebuild
Britain (AD) 1.00am The Sweeney. The death of
a gangland leader sparks bitterness (SL) 1.55
The Protectors. A terrorist group steals an art
collection (SL) 2.25 Unwind with ITV. Daily
escape designed to calm the mind and encourage
relaxation and reflection 3.00 Teleshopping

6.00am Teleshopping 7.10 London’s Burning
8.00 Doctors 9.15 Classic Holby City 10.40
Classic Casualty 11.40 The Bill 12.40pm
Classic EastEnders 2.00 London’s Burning 3.00
Lovejoy 4.10 Tenko 5.15 Birds of a Feather
6.00 Waiting for God
6.40 Are You Being Served?
7.20 Last of the Summer Wine. Smiler finds
work as a door-to-door salesman
8.00 Father Brown. A convicted killer is given a
temporary reprieve and begs Father Brown to
help prove her innocence, but he only has
three days in which to do it (AD)
9.00 Sister Boniface Mysteries. Sister Boniface
is on the hunt for a killer doll when a toymaker
is stabbed to death. See Viewing Guide (AD)
10.00 New Tricks. The team’s feathers are
ruffled by the arrival of a retired detective
from Glasgow brought in to help reinvestigate
one of his original cases (4/10) (AD)
11.20 Soldier, Soldier. The fusiliers take up
guard duty at Windsor Castle
12.20am Lovejoy 1.30 David Copperfield
2.35 Classic Holby City 4.00 Teleshopping

6.10am Hornby: A Model World (AD) 8.00
Abandoned Engineering (AD) 10.00 The World
at War 11.00 World War Weird 12.00 Great
British Railway Journeys 1.00pm Antiques
Roadshow 2.00 Bangers & Cash (AD) 4.00
The World at War 5.00 World War Weird
6.00 Antiques Roadshow
7.00 Canal Boat Diaries. During a cold snap,
Robbie gets iced in on the Grand Union
Canal. Last in the series (AD)
8.00 Hornby: A Model World. Paramjit in
the Airfix team works on a Buccaneer fighter
jet in 1:48 scale (5/11) (AD)
9.00 Hornby: A Model World. The Hornby
team attempt to replicate the legendary
9F steam locomotive (6/11) (AD)
10.00 Bangers & Cash. Dave is on his way
to Grimsby to pick up an iconic 1980s
fast Ford, the Mk1 Fiesta XR2 (AD)
11.00 Abandoned Engineering. Yongma Land
— a South Korean dreamland (7/8) (AD)
12.00 Great British Railway Journeys
1.00am Abandoned Engineering (AD) 2.00
Scouting for Toys (AD) 3.00 Teleshopping

BBC Scotland
6.30pm The Seven 7.30 FILM: Whisky Galore!
(2016) 9.00 The Firm (r) (AD) 10.00 Still
Game (r) 10.30 Rebus (AD) 11.15-12.00
Confessions of a Teenage Fraudster (r) (AD)
BBC Alba
6.00am Alba Today 5.00pm Treubh an
Tuathanais (Big Barn Farm) (r) 5.15 Na
Clangairean (r) 5.30 Sionnach agus Maigheach
(Fox & Hare) (r) 5.40 AH-AH/No-No (r) 5.50
Peicein/Petit (r) 5.55 Stòiridh (r) 6.00
Pròiseact Plòigh (r) 6.20 Belle agus Sebastian
(r) 6.35 A’ Chuil (r) 6.40 Dùbhlain CBBC
ALBA (r) 6.45 Donnie Murdo (Danger Mouse)
(r) 7.00 An Là (News) 7.25 Dàn (r) 7.30
Machair (r) 7.55 Fraochy Bay (r) 8.00 Leugh
Mi (Book Show) (r) 8.30 Slighe Chladach
Fiobha (r) 9.00 Steelmen (Fir Stàilinn) (r)
10.00 An Clò Mòr (r) 10.30 Fèis Rois (r) 11.30
Belladrum (r) 12.00-6.00am Alba Today
S4C
6.00am Cyw: Olobobs (r) 6.05 Digbi Draig (r)
6.20 Cymylaubychain (r) 6.30 Patrol Pawennau
(r) 6.45 Y Diwrnod Mawr (r) 7.00 Brethyn a
Fflwff (r) 7.05 Pablo (r) 7.20 Da ’Di Dona (r)
7.30 Crawc a’i Ffrindiau (r) 7.45 Kim a Cet a
Twrch (r) 8.00 Timpo (r) 8.10 Ysbyty Cyw Bach
(r) 8.25 Jamborî (r) 8.35 Octonots (r) 8.45
Ahoi! (r) 9.05 Odo (r) 9.10 Anifeiliaid Bach y
Byd (r) 9.20 Dreigiau Cadi (r) 9.30 Pentre
Papur Pop (r) 9.45 Awyr Iach (r) 10.00
Olobobs (r) 10.05 Digbi Draig (r) 10.20
Cymylaubychain (r) 10.30 Patrol Pawennau (r)
10.45 Y Diwrnod Mawr (r) 11.00 Brethyn a
Fflwff (r) 11.05 Pablo (r) 11.20 Da ’Di Dona
(r) 11.30 Crawc a’i Ffrindiau (r) 11.45 Kim a
Cet a Twrch (r) 12.00 News; Weather
12.05pm Bwyd Bach Shumana a Catrin (r)
12.30 Heno (r) 1.00 Cais Quinnell (r) 1.30
Ma’i Off ’Ma (r) (AD) 2.00 News; Weather
2.05 Prynhawn Da 3.00 News; Weather 3.05 Y
Fets (r) (AD) 4.00 Awr Fawr: Olobobs (r) 4.05
Digbi Draig (r) 4.20 Bendibwmbwls (r) 4.30
Pentre Papur Pop (r) 4.45 Awyr Iach (r) 5.00
Stwnsh: Larfa (r) 5.05 Rhyfeddodau
Chwilengoch a Cath Ddu (r) 5.25 Siwrne Ni (r)
5.30 Un Cwestiwn (r) 5.50 News Ni 6.00
Gerddi Cymru (r) 6.25 Darllediad Etholiadol gan
y Democratiaid Rhyddfrydol 6.30 Garddio a
Mwy (r) 6.57 News 7.00 Heno 7.30 News;
Weather 8.00 Heather Jones. Singer Heather
Jones looks back at her 40-year career and
performs a selection of her best-loved songs (r)
8.55 News; Weather 9.00 Siwrna Scandi Chris
(r) 10.00 Cynefin (r) 11.00-11.35 Welsh
Whisperer — Ni’n Teithio Nawr! (r) (AD)

14

Friday June 14 2024 | the times

MindGames
Backgammon

Codeword

Chris Bray

The Karl Kraus effect
The Austrian satirist Karl Kraus
used to perform a sketch that involved him looking for a key in a
small pool of light. A passer-by offers to help and, finding nothing,
asks if that, indeed, is where the
key was lost. “Not at all,” says Kraus,
“I lost it over there”, and he points
to the dark. “So why are you looking here?” asks the passer-by.
“Because”, Kraus answers, “this is
where the light is.”
What has this got to do with
backgammon? I used this anecdote
in my corporate life to teach students that the easy solution is not
necessarily the correct one. I now
use the same idea to teach my backgammon students to make sure
they think about all possible solutions.
During the recent UK v Germany match, in the consulting doubles, Tim Cross and I were guilty of
only looking in the light for ways to
play this 32 as Black. We spent a
long time discussing the merits of
7/5, 6/3, playing safe, or hitting with
7/4, 3/1*. After some considerable
time, we chose 7/5, 6/3, which

Train Tracks

No 5241

turned out to be a double blunder.
We should have been looking in the
dark.
We took the micro view and only
looked at the immediate future
without ever discussing our overall
game plan — a cardinal sin. How is
Black going to win this game? Blitzing is certainly an option, but the
stronger plan is priming. If Black
can make the bar-point, White will
be in real trouble, barring a very
lucky roll.
Once you understand this then
the best play becomes clear: 13/11,
13/10. This puts the pressure on
White to roll an immediate six, and
if they don’t then in many scenarios
Black will have a strong but takeable
double next turn.
A couple of rolls later, our opponents committed their own blunder
by dropping a double they should
have taken. Eventually Tim and I
scraped home, winning 11-7.
This salutary tale reminds us that
you can never relax when playing
backgammon. The game is too difficult for that. Importantly, it reinforces the concept that you must
always keep your overall game plan
at the forefront of your mind.

No 2269

Lay tracks to enable the train to travel from village A to village
B. The numbers indicate how many sections of track go in
each row and column. There are only straight sections and
curved sections. The track cannot cross itself.

Quintagram®
Solve all five cryptic clues using each
Solveunderneath
all five cryptic
letter
onceclues
only using

each letter underneath once only

Every letter in this crossword-style grid is represented by a number from 1 to 26.
Each letter of the alphabet appears in the grid at least once. Use the letters already
provided to work out the identity of further letters. Enter letters in the main grid
and the smaller reference grid until all 26 letters of the alphabet have been
accounted for. Proper nouns are excluded. Yesterday’s solution, right
Cluelines Stuck on Codeword? To receive 4 random clues call 0901 293 6262 or
text TIMECODE to 64343. Calls cost £1 plus your telephone company’s network
access charge. Texts cost £1 plus your standard network charge. For the full solution
call 0905 757 0142. Calls cost £1 per minute plus your telephone company’s network
access charge. SP: Spoke, 0333 202 3390 (Mon-Fri, 9am-5.30pm).

Lexica
F

Winning Move
White to play.
This position is a variation from
Nasuta-Orzech, Katowice 2024.
Three pieces of generally sound
advice for the early stages of a
chess game: develop the pieces,
control the centre and get the
king safe. A huge number of
Winning Move puzzles feature
situations where the third of
these nuggets of wisdom has
been wilfully ignored. Today’s
position is a case in point. How
can White finish off?

KenKen

Difficult No 6233

C

Easy No 7471
N

E

D

E

E

O

R

W

A

T

X

A

E

O

T

A

I

T

I

B

E

S

O

E

C

end (7)

-4 Exhausted
- - -English
- -politician,
-------A

A

A

B

D

D

D

E

E

G

G

I

I

I

L

T

M

N

N

N

O

O

O

O

X

T

O

P

P

R

S

T

T

T

U

O

A

K

R

P
I

M

V

E

C

T

Slide the letters either horizontally or vertically back into the grid to produce a
completed crossword. Letters are allowed to slide over other letters

Futoshiki

-3 Mean
- -goblin
- harassed
- - pixie in the

-5 Gift-from
- -state-following
- - party (8)

H

D

R

-2 Minister’s
- - -father’s rocky rise (6)

unable to move? (7)

Hard No 7472
R

1 Try promotion to create incentive
(4)

No 4781

Challenge
your mind
with these
fiendish
word and
number
puzzles

Kakuro

E

thetimes.co.uk/
bookshop

What are your favourite
puzzles in MindGames?
Email: puzzles@thetimes.co.uk

No 3740
Fill the grid
using the
numbers 1 to 9
only. The
numbers in each
horizontal or
vertical run of
white squares
add up to the
total in the
triangle to its left
or above it. The
same number
may occur more
than once in a
row or column,
but not within
the same run of
white squares.

All the digits 1 to 6 must appear in every row and column. In
each thick-line “block”, the target number in the top left-hand
corner is calculated from the digits in all the cells in the block,
using the operation indicated by the symbol.

Fill the blank squares so that every row and column contains
each of the numbers 1 to 5 once only. The symbols between
the squares indicate whether a number is larger (>) or smaller
(<) than the number next to it.

15

the times | Friday June 14 2024

MindGames
1

2

3

4

8

6

7

11

+7

MEDIUM

83

x 2 + 49 ÷ 5 + 181 + 1/4

HARDER

14 SQUARE
IT

OF IT

x4

÷8

SQUARE
IT

+ 22 x 2

– 7 ÷ 11

10

14

15

16

17
18

19

20

OF IT

+ 5/7

OF IT

x 7 – 294

80%
OF IT

– 27 x 2 – 135

Solution to Crossword 9556

ASS
O
UME
M
SEU

I MB
E
T EMP
O O
PA I N
R
I
COSH

ERB
N O
ROU
A N
P T
T Y
US
R G
ERA
D L
SA
X
EY

Y
S

P
UR
O
AS
P
E
C
NT
U
ES

DRAB
H O
C I AO
Z S
NOUT
M
PECT
I
P SOM
L E
I AGO
N U
I GHT

+ 2/3

OF IT

x4

1/5

OF IT

+ 423

Divide the grid
into square or
rectangular
blocks, each
containing one
digit only. Every
block must
contain the
number of cells
indicated by the
digit inside it.

Set Square

18 One advancing to the next
stage of a contest (9)
Ventilate (3)
New Testament letter (7)
Artisan’s skill (5)
Racing toboggan (4)
Those who may pass on
a disease unawares (8)

Down
1 Curved entrance (7)
2 Young eel (5)
3 Magician (11)
4 Antenna (6)
6 In the open air (7)
7 Gave out (playing cards) (5)
10 Seller of fruit and
vegetables (11)
14 Inclination, tendency (7)
16 Fool’s gold (7)
17 Movie venue (6)
18 Subdue, suppress (5)
19 Belittle or humble
(oneself) (5)

Enter each of
the numbers
from 1 to 9 in
the grid, so that
the six sums
work. We’ve
placed two
numbers to get
you started.
Each sum
should be
calculated left
to right or top
to bottom.

Please note, BODMAS does not apply

Killer

Moderate No 9520

Solutions
Quick Cryptic 2701

Tetonor 474

18

♠ Q2
♥7 5
♦A K J 7 4 2
♣K 4 2

♠ J72
♥Q
♦Q 8 2
♣A K 9 6 4 2

♠ KJ74
♥J 4
♦A K 6 4 3 2
♣9

175

14 + 4 5

187

40

80

x 35 5 + 35 4

25

150

x 20

32

11 x 17 10 + 15 15 x 10 27 + 5

28

Naturally, this is somewhat
tongue-in-cheek, as it depends on
how often you play. The point,
though, is that you should play
most of your minor-suit-fit game
hands in 3NT. After all, you can
afford to lose twice as many tricks
in 3NT than in 5♣/♦.
Partner opens 1NT. What would
you respond with these?

Kakuro 3739

Codeword 5240

Train Tracks 2268
Sudoku 14,988

100

20

135

17 + 11 10 x 10 10 + 10 5

Andrew Robson

Twenty Bidding Maxims
11. Minor-suit games, only
once a month

No 3743

Yesterday’s answers
amok, atom, korma, mako, mark, mart,
mask, mast, moat, mort, most, postmark,
pram, prom, ramp, roam, romp, samp,
smart, soma, spam, stamp, stoma, stomp,
storm, stroma, tamp, tram, tramp, tromp

19
20
21
22
23

Need help with today’s puzzle? Call 0905 757 0143 to check the
answers. Calls cost £1 per minute plus your telephone company’s
network access charge. SP: Spoke, 0333 202 3390 (Mon-Fri 9am-5.30pm).

Bridge

No 5124

From these letters, make words of
four or more letters, always including
the central letter. Answers must be in
the Concise Oxford Dictionary, excluding
capitalised words, plurals, conjugated
verbs (past tense etc), adverbs ending
in LY, comparatives and superlatives.
How you rate 12 words, average;
17, good; 23, very good; 29, excellent

23

Across
1 Stateside citizen (8)
5 Ian Fleming’s secret agent (4)
8 Courteous, considerate (5)
9 Rowing or sailing event (7)
11 Armed conflict (3)
12 Unfairly blamed person (9)
13 Lemon or sulphur, eg (6)
15 Remove a covering of paper
from (a gift) (6)

50%
OF IT

Polygon

21

22

P
E
N
G
U
I
N

EASY

1/3

12

13

Cell Blocks

Just follow the instructions from left to right, starting with the number given to reach an answer at the end.
5

9

11

Brain Trainer

No 9557

ANSWER ANSWER ANSWER

times2 Crossword

56
the suits and note that there’s no
point in introducing spades on the
second because partner would
normally prefer to respond a fourcard major than support a minor.
The third is different. A 3NT bid
would gamble too much on the
spades. However, don’t bypass
3NT, instead bid your cheapest
stopper: 3♦. If partner has both
majors covered, she’ll bid 3NT.
With one major covered, she’ll bid
her stopper; if she bids 3♠ , you’ll
bid 3NT (as you have a heart
cover); if she bids 3♥ , though,
you’ll have to try 5♣ — but don’t
try it again for another month!
Dealer S

Sudoku 14,989

14 x

31

108

4 27 + 4 27 x

x 27

24

4 20 + 4

Set17Square
3742
4 4 Cell
4 5Blocks
5 10 5123
10 10 11 14 15
20 27 27
35

D

Killer

Deadly No 9521

R

O
A

N

D

D

E
A

D

S
O

D

R

M
A
L

I

L

L

Y

Sudoku 14,990

Futoshiki 4780

KenKen 6232

Lexica 7470
O
L

I

I
L

♠ KQ 5

♥6 5
With both the first and second,
♦Q 8 5 2
jump to 3NT. It is quite hard to
♣K 9 8 3
construct a hand for partner
♠ A 10 2
♠ J98643
N
where 5♣/♦ is making and 3NT
♥
K973
♥ A 10 8 2
W E
isn’t. Don’t even bother to jump to
♦K 9 6 3
♦10 7
S
3♣/♦ — there’s little to gain.
♣10 5 ♠ 7
♣7
The third is different — but
♥
QJ4
mainly because you have to inves♦A J 4
tigate a 4-4 major-fit (you’d prefer
♣AQ J 6 4 2
4♥ /♠ to 3NT if you had an eightS
W
N
E
card fit). You should bid 2♣
1♣
Pass
3♣
Pass
Stayman, asking for four-card
♦
(1)
Pass
3
♠
(2)
Pass
3
majors. You’ll naturally raise 2♠ to
3NT(3) End
4♠ ; if partner replies 2♦ or 2♥ ,
bid 3♦ — natural, forcing and (1) Cheapest stopper, looking for 3NT.
implying four spades. If partner (2) Spades stopped, not hearts.
now bids 3NT, pass — partner (3) Hearts stopped.
5♣ is hopeless (two down on ♥ 3
should have good clubs.
In our second exercise, you lead to ♥ A and ♦10 switch). West
open 1♣ and partner jumps to 3♣. led ♥ 3 v 3NT, East winning ♥ A,
returning ♥ 2 to (♥ Q and) ♥ K,
What now with these?
declarer winning ♥ 9 return with
♠ Q32
♠ J972 ♠ 74
♥K 5
♥A J
♥Q J 4
♥ J. Reading hearts to be 4-4 (West
♦A 10
♦K 8
♦KQ
led her lowest), declarer led up ♠ 7
♣AQ 9 6 3 2 ♣A K 7 6 3 ♣A KQ 10 6 2 to ♠ K for her ninth trick then
With the first and second, bid cashed six clubs and ♦A. Game
3NT — you’re stopped (ish) in all made. andrew.robson@thetimes.co.uk

Lexica 7469

V

A

U
I

M

A
C

M
E

R
P
L

O

Z

R
A

Y

Y

Today’s solutions
Killer 9518

As with standard Sudoku, fill the grid so that every column,
every row and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 to 9. Each set
of cells joined by dotted lines must add up to the target number
in its top-left corner. Within each set of cells joined by dotted
lines, a digit cannot be repeated.
Cluelines Stuck on Sudoku, Killer or KenKen? Call 0901 293
6263 before midnight to receive four clues for any of today’s
puzzles. Calls cost £1 plus your telephone company’s network
access charge. SP: Spoke, 0333 202 3390 (Mon-Fri 9am-5.30pm).

Killer 9519

Concise
Quintagram
1 House
2 Field
3 Harvest
4 Optical
5 Wireless

Cryptic
Quintagram
1 Goad
2 Pastor
3 Ignoble
4 Emptied
5 Donation

Suko 4142

Brain
Trainer
Easy 5
Medium 259
Harder 1,795

Word watch

Quiz

Ascian (a) One living
between the tropics (Collins)
Olecranon (c) The point of
the elbow (Chambers)
Dudeen (a) A short clay
tobacco pipe (OED)

1 Chernobyl disaster
2 Nineteen Eighty-Four
3 Scarecrow 4 Penicillin,
by Alexander Fleming
5 William Wallace 6 Sally
Bowles 7 Shane MacGowan
8 The Woolpack, in
Emmerdale 9 Tennis 10 The
Hardy Boys or Frank and
Joe Hardy 11 Alpha Centauri
12 Washington DC 13 Magnus
III or Magnus Barefoot
14 Ash 15 Phoebe Philo

Chess — Winning Move
1 Qf8+! leads to a lovely
bishop and knight mate: 1 ...
Rxf8 2 Ng7+ Kd8 3 Bxf6 mate

14.06.24

Word watch

Sudoku

Mild No 14,991

Difficult No 14,992

Fiendish No 14,993

David Parfitt
Ascian
a One living between
the tropics
b A computer
programmer
c A person born at a
propitious moment
Olecranon
a A dish of mashed
potatoes and cabbage
b A recently discovered
inert element
c The point of the elbow
Dudeen
a A short clay tobacco
pipe
b A fashionable
adolescent
c A cheap fabric for
clothing
Answers on page 15

Fill the grid so that every column, every row and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 to 9.

The Times Daily Quiz

Suko

Olav Bjortomt

11 What is the nearest
star system to our
solar system?

2 Which dystopian
classic by George
Orwell introduced
the concept of the
Thought Police?

4 Which discovery
of 1928 started the
antibiotic revolution?
5 The sculptor
Richard Price’s Spirit
of Scotland monument
shows an outline of
which Scottish hero
(d 1305)?
6 The British journalist
Jean Ross was the

12 Featured in the
classic horror film, the
Exorcist Steps is an
official landmark in
which US city?

original inspiration for
which singer in the
musical Cabaret?

2

Dingle and her son
Ryan Stocks?
9 Starring Zendaya and
Josh O’Connor, the
2024 film Challengers
centres on which sport?

7 Richard Balls’s
2021 book A Furious
Devotion is about the
life of which Pogues
frontman?

10 Which teenage
brothers were
introduced in the
Franklin W Dixon

8 Which fictional pub
is owned by Charity

3

4

7

5

6

10
11

12

13

16

14

17

15

18

19
20

23

21

24

14 Most snooker cues
are predominantly
made from which type
of wood?
15 Who is this Parisborn British fashion
designer?
Answers on page 15

Place the numbers 1 to 9 in the spaces so
that the number in each circle is equal to
the sum of the four surrounding spaces,
and each colour total is correct

For interactive puzzles visit
thetimes.com

Join hosts Georgie Frost and
Martyn James, plus special guests, as
they delve into the thornier money
issues for the brand new video series
from Times Money Mentor – where
nothing is off the table.

No 2702 by Teazel

8

9

How much money would you need to
make you happy? Are couples always
better off financially? Why don’t we all just
escape to the country? And is the second
wine on the menu really the worst?

13 Which King of
Norway reigned as King
of Man and the Isles
between 1099 and 1103?

15

The Times Quick Cryptic
1

Let’s talk about
money with
Bread & Honey

book The Tower
Treasure (1927)?

1 Which nuclear disaster
took place 60 miles
north of Kyiv in 1986?

3 Which character
in the 1939 film The
Wizard of Oz sings If I
Only Had a Brain?

No 4142

22

Across
7 Nervous, I change holiday
purchase (8)
8 Japanese drama about a
boatman (4)
9 Leave, and need regularly to
have escaped (6)
10 Beat poet? (5)
11 Antelope hung back to avoid
horse (3)
12 Born rascal that goes on foot
(6)
14 Place is in perfect shade (6)
16 Ulster’s remarkable outcome
(6)
18 Flag officer once? (6)
19 Memory rocky at first in the
morning (3)
20 Female competent to produce
old wives’ tale (5)
21 Change into suit (6)
23 Only a small body of water (4)
24 Shedding outside layer, initially
making a defensive move (8)

Down
1 Study poetry and talk (8)
2 Old poet in pandemic losing
head (4)
3 Nervous, and liable to fall?
(2,4)
4 Support for one in litter (4,2)
5 Asks how paper may be folded
(8)
6 Put down, face up (4)
13 Complained malingering
finally has been found out (8)
15 Connective tissue: mangle it
when injured (8)
17 Fish around river channel (6)
18 Raise me up above manager
(6)
20 Handle fine fish (4)
22 With which to shoot horse? (4)

To watch our Bread & Honey series
go to the Times Money Mentor
YouTube channel or scan the QR code
IN ASSOCIATION WITH

Yesterday’s solution on page 15

FRIDAY JUNE 14 2024

Life’s a beach (house)
CALIFORNIA? NO, CAMBER SANDS pages 6-7

2 Bricks & Mortar
2

Bricks
& Mortar

Friday June 14 2024 | the times
Friday June 14 2024
the times

£1.85 million

Buy into a rambling Jacobean mansion
with an artistic side. By Hugh Graham

A

grade I listed Jacobean
“There were lots of opportunities for
house with 17thhide and seek. There’s a secret back
century murals
staircase. On the second floor, between
painted on the
the maids’ rooms, there is a secret
ceilings, panelled
cupboard, nobody knows what it was
walls decorated with
used for, and it’s full of Jacobean
crowns in the style of
drawings on its walls. The garden has a
Charles I, original
Georgian coach house with the remains
1830s wallpaper and trompe l’oeil
of an 18th-century carriage.”
cornices: this sounds more like an
Borno filled the house with his
English Heritage property than a family
paintings and hosted clubs there for his
home. But this nine-bedroom house in
artist friends. He died in 2022, so the
Royston, Hertfordshire, was a wonderful
family are selling up but will be sad to
place to grow up, according to Zahra
leave. “When you’re younger you don’t
Akkerhuys.
appreciate it as much,” Akkerhuys says.
She experienced quite a culture shock
“Looking back it was really special. You
when the family bought the house in
can’t help but love Jacobean architecture
1985, however. She was 12, and had spent
— it’s so ornate and extravagant.”
her childhood in a three-bedroom 1960s
The family were hoping to sell it to
house in Essex. Her father, Emad Borno,
English Heritage, so that the whole
was a company director
country could enjoy its
and pharmacist, and a
Jacobean splendour. There
Sign up to our
passionate artist in his spare
is even a concealed mural
property newsletter waiting to be uncovered on
time. He spent two years
for
the
latest
analysis,
lovingly restoring the house,
one white painted ceiling.
gossip, tips and tricks Alas, the heritage body
which was built by a
every
Monday
at
Jacobean merchant to try
didn’t have the funds to
thetimes.com/
to impress James I, whose
buy it.
newsletters
hunting lodge was nearby.
Akkerhuys is hoping it
“We were horrified when
he bought it,” Akkerhuys, 51, says. “For
two years it was a building site, with no
heating and no hot water. But he had
real vision and drive to restore it to its
former glory.”
And the rambling mansion with three
floors and a coach house, set in two
thirds of an acre of grounds, was a fun
place for children to grow up. “My sister
and I shared a bedroom that had a
painted ceiling with figures of the
elements — earth, air, fire and water. At
night we would leave the shutters open
and the moonlight would come in
through the window and we would lie in
bed while looking up at the 17th-century
murals in the shadows.

goes to a buyer with a
passion for history, and hopefully
a family whose children can enjoy
roaming about the place. It’s a twominute walk from Royston Heath, where
sheep graze and wildflowers bloom.
Cambridge, where Akkerhuys went to
school, is 15 minutes away by train.
What does she love most about the
house? “I like the sense of many people
having lived here over the years. The
feeling that we were just passing through
and it will go on.
“Taking on a grade I listed building is
not for the faint-hearted. But we are
hoping that someone with my father’s
vision will love it as much as he did.”
£1.85 million; savills.com

What £825,000 buys you in . . .
West Yorkshire
This 1862 property in the village of
Haworth — which has plenty of Brontë
history — has recently been a B&B, but
now has planning permission to be sold
as a single residential dwelling. From
an impressive entrance hall with mosaic
floors, the first-floor landing beckons
with stained-glass windows. On the
ground floor there are three reception
rooms, bedrooms and bathrooms as well
as six rooms, a kitchen and conservatory.
The first floor has five en suite bedrooms
and on the second floor there are two
more bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom
and lounge. The gardens have stunning
views, a paved seating area and a
Victorian folly.
EPC D (potential C) — on a scale of A
(best) to G (worst)
Upside No chain.
Downside In need of renovation.
Contact dacres.co.uk

£800,000

Staffordshire
Originally part of Lord Lichfield’s
Ranton Estate — which sold in 2008 for
£34.55 million — Bumble Cottage, six
miles from Stafford, is a thatched cottage
dating from the late 16th century. Set
in the village of Ellenhall, the threebedroom home was extended during the
1960s. The living spaces include a large
drawing room, dining room and a boot
room. A hallway, conservatory, study,
shower room, WC and breakfast kitchen
(with a separate utility room) complete
the ground floor. In 1.17 acres of mature
gardens there are paddocks, an orchard,
a productive vegetable patch and
pond. A range of outbuildings includes
kennels, stabling and a workshop.
EPC E (potential B)
Upside Beamed ceilings aplenty.
Downside The conservatory looks
a little tired.
Contact knightfrank.co.uk

£825,000

Bricks & Mortar 3

the times | Friday June 14 2024

3

Brief encounter
Ask the expert
Party canvassers have been coming
to my front door during this
general election campaign. Do they
have legal rights to come on to my
property, and what happens if they are
injured on my land?

SG8 The postcode in numbers
In this part of Hertfordshire
53% of properties for sale
are under offer, falling
to 28% of those costing
£1 million or more

Increase
in buyer
demand
in the
past year

8%

Wiltshire
Wayside is a five-bedroom 2,844 sq ft
house in the hamlet of Mile End near
the market town of Calne. Chippenham
station is 15 minutes’ drive away, and
from there it’s a 70-minute train journey
to London Paddington — perfectly
commutable if you’re not required in the
office every day. The ground floor has
a large open-plan kitchen/dining room,
sitting room, snug, garden room and
office. Upstairs are four bedrooms and
two bathrooms, with the second floor
given over to the master bedroom with
a walk-in wardrobe and treetop views.
Outside are beautifully landscaped
gardens, as well as a double garage
and triple carport.
EPC E (potential B)
Upside Beautiful butcher block island
in the kitchen.
Downside The exterior is rather plain.
Contact fineandcountry.co.uk

£825,000

T
KE

53°

SE
LL

RKET
MA
S’
ER

The hotter the
market, the quicker
and easier it should
be to sell a home

BUYE
RS’
MA
R

TAKING THE TEMPERATURE
SELLERS' MARKET

Source: Propcast and Rightmove

£466,093 is the average house price

Anyone who goes
on to private land
without permission
commits a trespass.
But there obviously have to be
exceptions for some visitors and
callers to a property.
A letterbox in a door means
there is an implied licence for
people to come up to the door
to put letters through it. There
is a similar implied licence for
people to walk up the path to
knock on the door — as long as
they don’t cause a nuisance.
The implied licence is usually
asserted by Royal Mail when
postal workers are injured. For
example, in the 2021 criminal
case of Royal Mail v Watson,
a postman’s fingers were bitten
by a dog as he pushed post
through a letterbox.
The Court of Appeal said
“the letter box is an open
invitation to visitors to post
mail through it, and can involve
the insertion of fingers for a
short time” and that Amazon
and other companies that
make home deliveries
have a similar implied
licence. The implied
permission can be revoked
by putting up appropriate
signs. Notices saying “no free
newspapers” therefore have
some (limited) legal effect,
because they change the
deliverer from a licensee into
a trespasser.
The difference between
licensees and trespassers is
important if a visitor is injured.

France
In the rural heart of the Dordogne, two
minutes’ drive from Bergerac town,
is an imposing three-storey stone house
dating from the 18th century. The
property, which lies in more than three
acres of wooded grounds, has seven
bedrooms — several en suite — a hall,
fitted kitchen, large study, two lounges,
a dining room, two fireplaces and a
summer lounge. The attic could be
converted into a further bedroom or
another study. Outside there are two
barns, a heated saltwater swimming pool
and summer kitchen/barbecue. Bergerac
Dordogne Périgord airport is a fiveminute drive away, and Bordeaux and its
international airport an hour and a half.
Upside Seven bedrooms in wine
country for the price of a two-bedroom
flat in London, anyone?
Downside Feels rather isolated.
Contact hamptons-international.com

£818,601

The Occupiers Liability Act
1984 imposes a general duty of
care on householders to protect
lawful visitors from harm. The
statutory obligation to protect
trespassers from danger is
much less onerous.
Political party workers
therefore have an implied
licence to use your path and
post leaflets and literature
through your letterbox. You
can revoke this licence by
putting up signs, but you
cannot entirely exclude liability
if canvassers come to harm.
Mark Loveday is a barrister
with Tanfield Chambers.
Email questions to
brief.encounter@thetimes.
co.uk

4 Bricks & Mortar
4

Bricks
& Mortar

Friday June 14 2024 | the times
Friday June 14 2024
the times

Moving stories
Your tales from up and down the property ladder

How we turned our
camper van into a
property empire

T

hree and a half years ago
my partner, Nicole, and
I were renting a house
in Penrhyn Bay, north
Wales, when we decided
to buy a Crafter van,
with a long wheelbase,
with the intention of
turning it into a motorhome and taking
it travelling (writes Ryan Green, 28). We
spent about £10,000 on it, paid for it on
finance and all of our spare money and
time was spent on doing it up.
We didn’t go travelling in the end —
but it still changed our lives because,
improbably, that humble van helped us
to get on to the property ladder.
We decided to sell the van for £35,000
and with the profit we made we bought
our first house at auction in nearby
Llanddulas for £102,000 — and we
moved into it while renovating it. When
we got it refinanced it was worth about
£215,000 despite us spending only about
£35,000. At that moment we realised we

had a bit of a knack for
property investments —
something we never knew
before. I quit my job in
construction to adopt this
as my full-time career, while
Nicole (27) managed the
administrative side of our
property work at the same
time as continuing to work long
shifts in cardiology as a carer.
We then bought another house,
for £125,000, and spent £60,000 on the
renovation, which increased its value
to £250,000. After that we bought a
derelict old NatWest bank, which had
been empty for seven years, in
Penmaenmawr at auction. We paid
£31,000 and converted it into two units
with a shop in the front. After doing up
another commercial property our most
recent project has been taking on a
block of four apartments in Rhos-on-Sea
we got at auction for £250,000. They
were recently valued at £800,000.

Ryan Green and Nicole,
his partner; their van
Have your say
Would you like to share
your moving story?
Email carol.lewis@
thetimes.co.uk

We have always lived on site and every
time we have bought a new property to
renovate, we have moved into it, as it
allowed me to work late into the
evenings. It has been difficult, and to be
honest, living in the properties has been
horrendous right up to the end. Dust
gets everywhere and no matter how
many sheets and covers you use and
how often you clean it — and yourselves
— you can’t stop it. We will usually live
out of one room, which can be hard
with our three dogs — Bentley, Lottie
and Ruby, two shar peis and a labrador
— as we have to make sure they don’t
trip on something.
There have been challenges over the
years. For example, there was someone
living above the old bank and as soon as
we finished renovating the space a pipe

burst from the upstairs property and
flooded the entire thing. We had to redo
it and the same thing happened three
times, which was so disheartening. We’ve
had ups and downs but we have just had
to push through them.
I have a couple of lads who work with
me on the renovations, and my dad
works with me too. As we’ve started to
build our property portfolio we were
able to take him on full-time. I’ve
become quite handy throughout the
process and do all the plumbing myself
now. So between us we can do
everything.
We still own all of our properties —
some we turned into holiday lets and
others we rent out.
It has been a lot of hard work. Nicole
works 12-hour shifts in healthcare and
manages the Airbnb lets that we turned
some of the properties into. We’re pretty
much working all the time.
Over the past three years we have
been working towards making enough
money to buy a place for us to settle
down with the dogs. We’ve just had an
offer accepted on a 12-acre farm and our
next plan is to build a glamping site with
about 30 luxury pods. We want to get
animals and set up a dog sanctuary
there, and we are hoping that it will be
our forever home.
It is hard to say if we’ll stop there,
because the farm project is going to be
so big we will definitely be working on it
for a few years. After that, I don’t know
— it has been such a stressful time. We
might stop at that point as we’ll have
enough to live off then. But you never
know ... we will probably get bored
without a project.
Interview by Ella Kipling

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6 Bricks & Mortar
6

Bricks
& Mortar

Friday June 14 2024 | the times
Friday June 14 2024
the times

Abi Campbell in her
refurbished beach
bungalow, which has
interiors inspired by
“cabin and desert chic”

‘Camberfornia’
dreaming
C O V E R S T O RY

How the photographer Abi Campbell built a California-style beach
house — her Joshua Tree ‘wannabe’ — in Camber Sands, East Sussex

S

crolling through Instagram,
I stopped on a photograph
of a desert landscape with a
tarmac road narrowing to a
vanishing point on the
horizon. In bold font across
the centre was a quote by
JRR Tolkien: “Not all those
who wander are lost.”
On a California road trip in my early
twenties, I encountered Big Sur and
Joshua Tree National Park, both located
on energy vortices and with esoteric
forces beyond my understanding of
metaphysics. I can’t explain the
gravitational pull to return at pivotal
times in my life, but placebo or not, I’ve
always found clarity on pilgrimages to
these heart homes of mine.
Most of the people I met there were
city folk, seduced by nature’s silent
vibrations while passing through. These
deep thinkers relocated to relative
isolation to be more present,

inadvertently creating a community of
like-minded people. I have been making
plans to join this enlightened tribe for
three decades but the lack of a US
passport was a significant obstacle.
Then like so many others trying to
stay sane during the pandemic, I booked
a holiday on British shores between
lockdowns. I rented a clapboard house in
Camber Sands, East Sussex, and was
captivated by its unspoilt beauty.
Although this version of England was
unfamiliar to me, I felt a peculiar sense
of connection.
I explored the village. Behind the
dunes, 100 barefoot metres from the
beach, was a sand track with 12
properties. Like a true coronavirus
cliché, back at the rental, I poured
myself a glass of wine and opened up
Rightmove. For sale was a timberframed bungalow on the sandy road. I
rang the agent, who told me it was a
holiday let, unavailable to view, but he

could send me a video. I hurried back
to the house and made an offer of
£460,000 while standing outside. It was
accepted, and three months later I was
the owner — sight unseen.
This was a significant detour from my

I was captivated by
Camber’s unspoilt
beauty — I felt a peculiar
sense of connection
master plan to emigrate to America, but
with four years to go before reaching
“empty nester” status, skipping off into
the sunset alone wasn’t realistic. Still,
buying a house I hadn’t been inside, two
hours from where we lived, in a rural
community where I knew nobody was
impulsive and random to say the least.
I understood the raised eyebrows from
friends and family. The Pontins holiday

camp at Camber was famous for
complaints about “blood-stained walls”
and one review that read: “I’d rather eat
my own eyes than stay here.” Personally,
I liked the authenticity of Camber’s
British bucket-and-spade history and
how this holiday park now doubled up
as a metaphorical sieve for snobs.
I quickly learnt that Camber was a
magnet for eccentric creatives. I was the
third photographer who had bought a
house in my road that year, one of the
world’s biggest YouTubers lived at the
end and, opposite, a writer and magazine
publisher. In this tiny place, so off-grid,
there was an eclectic concentration of
professionals in immersive film, cosmic
healing, microbrewing, tech, crypto, art,
AI and more.
My Pinterest boards had been heaving
with California homestead inspiration
for years, a result of the cabin and desert
chic interiors I’d absorbed on my visits.
Aesthetically confident, I embarked on
building a prototype of the dream house
I would eventually build in America,
which I nicknamed my Joshua Tree
wannabe.
Post-Covid was a shocking time to
renovate; some building materials had
gone up 500 per cent, and trades were
charging heady premiums. Raising
adolescents, sourcing, ordering,
designing and budgeting, while
travelling two hours each way to project
manage, left me stressed out and
vulnerable. In the first two months a
window company went into
administration with my £18,000.
Not long after, my builder absconded
with £25,000, and then my landscaper
folded up his business with £15,000. As if
the fates thought I wasn’t humiliated or

Bricks & Mortar 7

the times | Friday June 14 2024

Bricks
& Mortar

A three-bedroom townhouse in Hay’s Mews, Mayfair, is being
marketed in the US for £6.75 million by Wetherell

Why Americans
are falling for
British homes
broken enough, I slipped on the site and
snapped my ankle in two places.
Ignoring bad omens, I soldiered on,
sanding and painting from dawn till
dusk; collapsing on to an inflatable
mattress at the end of each day in a shell
of a house with no electricity, running
water or fittings. I used the loos in the
beach car park, a garden tap to wash,
and I ate out. Locals knew me as the
knackered-looking woman with matted
hair, splattered with paint, who was
vocal at parish council meetings. But in
the three traumatic years it took me to
renovate, I made more meaningful
human connections than I had in 25
years of living in Surrey and London.
In October last year I moved in,

I sanded and painted
from dawn till dusk,
used the loos in the beach
car park and a tap to wash
having spent six figures on the
renovation. I walk on the beach most
days and weave my way to the highest
point in the dunes to watch sunsets.
In the evenings, I climb into bed to
stargaze through doors that open on to
my desert garden and I fall asleep to the
sound of the ocean. Life is quite silent,
except for the tinkle of the wind chimes
tied to my pine tree.
I’m bewitched by this place, in the
same way that California cast its spell on
me. My gorgeous friend Julie, known to
all as the Queen of Camber, arrived here
for a long weekend and has stayed for 30
years. She told me that Camber got
under her skin and that the village is
made up of people who share this story.
There is a local motto, based on the
Eagles song: “Welcome to the hotel
Camberfornia. You can check in any
time you like, but you can never leave.”
California is my spiritual placeholder,
it is where I evolved and continue to do
so. I don’t need to chase the dream of
relocating there. I’ve been wandering,
lost, searching for a place to be still.
Camberfornia is 16 hours closer to loved
ones, there’s free healthcare, no
rattlesnakes, guns, or Donald Trump.
What’s not to love?

Wealthy US buyers ‘love it here’ — no
wonder they are investing in prime
properties, says Emanuele Midolo

A

few days ago the British
comedian Simon
Brodkin asked New
Yorkers what they
thought of Rishi
Sunak. “Who?” A few thought
he was a DJ. “Techno DJ. Doof
doof doof.” The video went
viral on social media.
Although they may not
know much about British
politics, Americans seem to love
Britain’s homes. The pop star
Taylor Swift is reportedly renting
a £3 million cottage in Chipping
Norton in the Cotswolds. Tom
Cruise is also rumoured to be on
the hunt for a house there.
Since the pandemic US buyers
have snapped up trophy mansions,
penthouses and huge apartments
in some of England’s best addresses
— particularly in London.
Last year four in ten London
homes valued at £15 million and
above were sold to an American
buyer, according to an analysis by
the agency Beauchamp Estates.
This accounts for more than half
a billion pounds’ worth of
properties. The data, from the
property portal LonRes (plus
Beauchamp’s own insights), also
shows that 70 per cent of
purchases were made in cash.
When the chancellor, Jeremy
Hunt, announced in the spring
budget that he was scrapping the
non-dom tax regime, there were
worries that the change, which will
take place in April 2025, might
dampen foreign investments.
When it comes to American
buyers, at least, that doesn’t seem
to be the case — yet.
In the past two weeks alone
American buyers have snapped up
properties in London worth £150
million. Not even the prospect of
a Labour government pledging to
introduce higher taxes on foreign
ownership of UK homes, seems to
be denting their enthusiasm.
“None of [our American clients]
are really talking to us about a

This three-bedroom Mayfair
home was sold to a US buyer in
January, via Beauchamp Estates
Labour government or the general
election and how that may impact
them,” Camilla Dell, managing
partner of the buying agency Black
Brick, says.
Many of Dell’s American clients
are tech and finance professionals
living on the Pacific west coast
who want to buy a pied-à-terre or
a holiday home in Kensington and
Chelsea. Their budgets range from
£1.5 million to £8 million, she says.
“Many of them have business
links here,” Dell says. “They like
being in London and everything
the city has to offer: theatres,
shopping, parks. But they also love
to use the capital as a springboard
into Europe.”
London’s top agents agree that,
historically, US buyers have been
interested in period houses. “Some
of our houses are older than the
cities they come from,” says Jessica
Bishop from DDRE Global, the
super-prime boutique agency that
is the subject of the hit Netflix
show Buying London. About half of
DDRE’s clients are American, and
it uses a US brokerage model.
Bishop says US buyers dream
about the charm and character of
traditional British homes. “I’m

7

looking on behalf of a very
influential American at the
moment. Their focus is
particularly on the exterior of the
house, the stucco façades that you
see in Belgravia and on [the
Netflix period drama] Bridgerton.”
Another drive is the quality of
schools in England. Bishop has
just sold a multimillion-pound
townhouse in Notting Hill, west
London, to an American family
— they want their children to be
educated here.
Peter Wetherell, head of the
estate agency Wetherell, which
specialises in properties in Mayfair,
is selling a house in Hay’s Mews,
priced at £6.75 million, for the
third time in his career. “I sold the
house to an American lady back
in 1987, then in 2000 it was
purchased by another American
buyer, a Chicago financier, Ralph I
Goldenberg,” Wetherell says. “Now
his daughter, Jane, who is based in
Chicago, has asked us to sell the
house again. Our main focus is
marketing it in the United States.”
Wetherell says that for London’s
super-prime developers, marketing
to an American audience has
become “essential” and “mission
critical”, so roadshows for London
trophy homes regularly take place
in Manhattan, Miami and Chicago.
More recently American buyers
have started to hunt for newbuilds too, partly due to a lack of
available stock in addresses such
as Mayfair, Chelsea or Belgravia.
“Americans have never been as
prevalent in the London market
as they are now, and as more have
come in, they’ve diversified the
types of properties they buy,”
Claire Reynolds, managing
partner at UK Sotheby’s
International Realty, says. She
has just sold a two-bedroom
flat on Grosvenor Square in
Mayfair to an American
businessman for £23.5 million.
“This was a guy who was
opening an office in London and
just wanted an apartment that
could double up as a wardrobe,”
she adds. “He said that even if he
flies by private jet he doesn’t want
to bring anything beyond his
phone, wallet and passport.”
This trend is not exclusive to
prime London. Trevor Kearney,
who for 20 years sold prime
properties for Savills and has just
set up his own firm, the Private
Office, says that the private estates
in Surrey — including the
Wentworth Estate and St George’s
Hill — are also extremely popular
among Americans.
“They might have been aware of
them in the past but they’re now
looking to buy there and make a
home there,” Kearney says, adding
that there are two big ACS
international schools (formerly
known as American Community
Schools) in Surrey, one of them
in Cobham, close to St George’s
Hill, and the other in Egham, close
to Wentworth.
Kearney says he is advising two
American families looking for
large family homes in Surrey.
“Both originally came saying they
wanted traditional British homes,”
he explains. “They had a typical
Cotswolds cottage in mind. They
don’t any more. Both want sleek
design, security, high-tech facilities
and amenities.”
Neither prospective buyer, it
seems, could care less who the
next UK’s prime minister will be.

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Friday June 14 2024 | the times
Friday June 14 2024
the times

T

his week the UK’s main
political parties revealed
their plans to fix the
housing crisis, before
the general election on
July 4. From building
more houses to banning
“no fault” evictions, to
reviving Help to Buy to cutting capital
gains tax and stamp duty, we explain the
manifesto housing pledges and ask the
experts to assess them.

Conservatives
Housebuilding
The Tories have delivered the one
million homes they promised in
government, and they are pledging to
build 1.6 million more in the next five
years if re-elected. The latest data shows
that the Conservatives built 234,000
homes last year —it would have to build
320,000 a year to meet its new pledge.
They hope to do this by developing on
brownfield land — while protecting the
green belt — in the UK’s 20 largest cities
and revamping Euston, Old Oak
Common and Thamesmead in London,
as well as creating new quarters in
Leeds, Liverpool and York.
Melanie Leech, the chief executive of
the British Property Federation, which
represents small and medium-sized
housebuilders, says: “We need a clear
plan on how supply will be increased
across all tenures and the whole country
over and above building in the inner
cities. That needs reconciling with the
‘cast iron’ protection for green belt land.”
The £11.5 billion Affordable Homes
Programme will be renewed to improve
existing housing estates and build more
social homes.
Justin Young, the chief executive of
the Royal Institution of Chartered
Surveyors, says: “While it’s encouraging
to see the Conservatives committing
themselves to supporting small builders,
this will not address the quagmire of
laws that make up Britain’s restrictive
planning system.”
Tax cuts for buyers and landlords
First-time buyers will not have to pay
stamp duty land tax (SDLT) on a home
worth up to £425,000. The threshold at
which first-time buyers pay SDLT has
been raised temporarily from £300,000
to £425,000 from September 23, 2022,
until March 31, 2025; the Conservatives
have said this change will be made
permanent if they are re-elected. The tax
cut would cost the Treasury £2.34 billion
by 2030, according to manifesto costings.
Only 22 per cent of buyers would pay
tax on their first home, according to the
property portal Zoopla, whereas 30 per
cent will if the tax threshold returns to
£300,000. Richard Donnell, the
executive director of Zoopla, explains:
“The greatest beneficiaries are those
looking to buy across southern England
where up to half of first-time buyers are
looking to buy homes priced between
£250,000 and £425,000.”
Landlords would not have to pay
capital gains tax (CGT) for the first two
years of a newly elected Conservative
government if they sold their rental
property to their existing tenants. This
is projected to cost the Treasury
£40 million by 2027, but it could be “ripe
for abuse”, according to Graham Boar,
a partner at the accountancy firm UHY
Hacker Young.
He says: “There’s a risk that landlords
selling properties will structure them as
tenancies leading to sales, avoiding huge
amounts of CGT. A landlord could also
sell a property ‘on credit’ to a tenant,
who could then sell it on with no gain
and pay back their debt to the landlord.”
The average landlord will save £21,000
and the costings in the manifesto suggest
that a “whopping” 952 homes are

Which door
gets your vote?
How would the main political parties tackle the housing crisis? We ask
the experts to evaluate each manifesto. By Melissa York
expected to be sold under the policy,
according to Rowan Morrow-McDade, a
tax adviser at Alexander & Co. He says:
“Either this has been terribly forecast or
the scheme will be so restrictive almost
no one can use it.”

Landlords would

Studies, says: “While the government
may end up making a profit on the
scheme if house prices rise, experience
from past schemes suggests that some
of the subsidy will be captured by
developers in the form of higher prices
and profits.”

Revival of Help to Buy
not have to pay CGT for
Reform rental evictions
The biggest rabbit out of the
Conservatives’ hat is the
The Renters (Reform) Bill will
the
first
two
years
of
a
proposed revival of its Help to Buy
finally be passed; the present
new Conservative
scheme for three years. Like the last
parliament ran out of time before the
version of the scheme, it would allow
general election was called. The party
government
first-time buyers to put down a 5 per
has promised to finally fulfil its 2019
cent deposit on a new-build home and
manifesto
get an equity loan of up to 20 per cent of
pledge to ban Section 21 “no fault”
the property’s value interest-free for five
evictions while strengthening existing
years.
grounds so landlords can evict disruptive
Since 2013, there have been 328,346
tenants. It would also give local councils
properties bought using Help to Buy by
new powers to control the number of
first-time buyers, but the scheme came
holiday lets.
to an end in May 2023.
Ben Beadle, the chief executive of
The Conservatives have put aside
the National Residential Landlords
£1 billion of annual funding for the
Association (NRLA), says: “Reform of
revived scheme (the last version had a
the rental market should have taken
For analysis of Green
budget of £4 billion a year).
place in the last parliament. As we said
and Reform UK pledges
David Sturrock, a senior research
then, a balance between security for
go to thetimes.com
economist at the Institute for Fiscal
tenants and policies which retain the

confidence of responsible landlords
is crucial.”
Finish leasehold reform
The leasehold reform bill passed before
the dissolution of parliament, but a
newly elected Conservative government
has pledged to go further and cap
ground rents at £250 a year, reducing
them to a peppercorn “over time”. This
would allow leaseholders with onerous
ground rents to sell and move on. It was
left out of the final bill following
Treasury concerns about its potential
impact on pensions and threats of legal
action from freeholders.
The manifesto promises to abolish
forfeiture, where freeholders can seize
leasehold properties over unpaid bills,
continue to force developers to pay to
remediate unsafe buildings, and “make it
easier to take up commonhold”, but the
manifesto does not provide further
details on how ministers would do this.

Labour
Housebuilding
Labour has pledged to build 1.5 million

Bricks & Mortar 9

the times | Friday June 14 2024
Friday June 14 2024
the times

rights or limits to rent increases will
be introduced.
Dan Wilson Craw, the deputy chief
executive of the campaign group
Generation Rent, says: “It is good that
the manifesto recognises the various
ways renting isn’t working, including
discrimination, exploitation, poor
standards and rent increases, but we
have little detail of what action the party
would take.”

homes over the next five years. This is
300,000 homes a year, which was the
target set in the 2019 Conservative
manifesto before it was abolished by Liz
Truss’s government in 2022.
To help process more planning
applications, the stamp duty surcharge
levied on overseas buyers of UK
property will be increased from 2 per
cent to 3 per cent to fund 300 more
planning officers.
Labour is taking a brownfield-first
approach to building, with fast-track
planning approval for housing on
previously developed land in cities.
“Lower quality” green belt land may
be downgraded to “grey belt” to be
released for development, although
planning approval will be subject to
stricter “golden rules” than applications
for brownfield land.
At the centre of Labour’s plans are a
series of large-scale new towns across
England, although the locations are yet
to be confirmed. They will also make it
cheaper for councils and developers to
buy land to build homes.
Planning rules will require a bigger
proportion of affordable housing in
developments, but there will be no
increase in funding for the £11.5 billion
affordable homes programme, simply a
promise to make it more efficient.
Anthony Codling, an analyst at the
investment bank RBC Capital Markets,
says: “Of all the manifestos we have
reviewed, we believe Labour’s policies do
the most to boost housing supply. A
Labour victory is likely in our view to
lead to a significant increase in housing
supply over the coming five years, a
rising tide that we think will also lift the
share prices of the UK housebuilders.”
Affordability
First-time buyers will be given first
refusal to buy new-build homes, to stop

them being sold to international
investors. The manifesto doesn’t specify
whether sales to UK-based buy to let
investors would also be restricted.
Labour will introduce its own
mortgage guarantee scheme, similar to
the one introduced by the Conservatives
in 2021 that has helped more than
40,000 people buy their first home.
Matt Smith, a mortgage expert at the
property portal Rightmove, says: “We
think there is a greater opportunity for
the next government to review the
mortgage affordability criteria in a
responsible way. Longer-term solutions
need to be prioritised over short-term
fixes to help more first-time buyers to
get on to the ladder.”
Renting
Labour will require all private rented
properties to meet a minimum energy
performance certificate (EPC) rating by
2030 — two years after the
Conservatives scrapped their 2028
deadline. However, the manifesto also
promises that “nobody will be forced to
rip out their boiler as a result of our
plans”.
Section 21 “no fault” evictions will be
abolished “immediately”. Beadle says:
“All of the main parties are committed to
ending Section 21. What matters is
ensuring the replacement system works,
and is fair, to both renters and
responsible landlords.”
Awaab’s Law, named after Awaab
Ishak, the two-year-old who died in
2020 due to damp and mould in his
council home, will be extended to private
rentals so that landlords will have to act
on hazards in their properties within
14 days.
The manifesto also says it will end
unfair tenant discrimination and
“empower” tenants to challenge
unreasonable rent, which suggests new

Leasehold
Labour has pledged to end leasehold by
enacting proposals by the Law
Commission to make it easier for
leaseholders to buy their freehold and
collectively manage their building.
The manifesto promises to ban
new-build flats from being sold as
leasehold and make commonhold
the default tenure. It promises to
tackle “unaffordable” ground
a
rents although it does not
outline whether this would mean
abolishing the annual charge or
capping it. “Fleecehold” estates —
private housing schemes where residents
pay a service charge — will also be
banned.
Harry Scoffin, the founder of the
campaign group Free Leaseholders, says:
“After 14 years of broken Tory promises,
leasehold voters are most interested in
timescales. That is why we are
demanding that existing rights under the
2024 act, which Labour back, are
brought into force without further delay
and that a new commonhold bill comes
forward in the first King’s Speech, to end
leasehold for good.”
Labour ministers have promised
regulation to improve building safety in
the light of the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire,
and to consider better protection for
leaseholders from costs of fixing unsafe
buildings. Labour has committed to
increasing the speed at which these are
fixed and to chase “those responsible”
for putting it right.
Greener homes
There will be stricter planning rules on
new homes to make sure they are
climate-resilient.
If elected, Labour pledges £6.6 billion
for a Warm Homes Plan — funded by a
windfall tax on the biggest oil and gas
companies — to make five million
properties more energy efficient, which
is double the current funding available.
Local authorities will use it to offer
grants and loans to pay for better
insulation and other energy upgrades.
Simon McWhirter, the deputy chief
executive officer at the UK Green
Building Council, says: “The Labour
manifesto has no big surprises. And
while several of the policies point in the
right direction to address our climate
and cost of living emergencies, they
don’t go far enough, fast enough to really
tackle the problems head-on.”

Liberal Democrats
Housebuilding
The Lib Dems have the most ambitious
house-building target out of the main
parties. The party has pledged to build
380,000 homes a year — 80,000 more
than the Conservatives’ target — with
150,000 of those to be social housing.
They intend to do this by building ten
garden cities, although the party’s
manifesto does not specify where these
would be. To keep locals on side, the
planning process would have to take into
account whether local services and
infrastructure can take the strain of
more housing.
Two existing programmes would be
expanded: neighbourhood planning,
which allows residents to decide where
homes are built and what they look like,
and rural exception sites, which allow

Bricks
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9

land on the edge of villages to be bought
at a discount if it is used to build
affordable homes for local people.
Developers who sit on land without
building anything will have their
planning permission revoked, and they
face higher costs to get planning
approval as the Lib Dems will allow
council planning departments to set
their own fees.
However, the Lib Dems’ housebuilding
targets could clash with their green
ambitions. The party has pledged to
build on brownfield land while
introducing a “wild belt” where building
would be banned. New homes would
have to be zero-carbon with solar panels.
Anthony Codling says: “The 380,000
new homes a year target is certainly
aspirational, but it is unlikely to be
delivered. The sector struggles to
deliver about half of that.”

A Labour win
is likely to lead to
significant increase
More security for tenants
Section 21 “no fault” evictions
in housing supply
would be banned and three-year
in the next
fixed tenancies would be the default
contract. A national register would be
five years

created to weed out rogue landlords.
The party also propose overhauling
CGT to raise £5 billion for the NHS.
The proposal would create three bands
to be applied to taxable gains at
different rates: gains between £5,000
and £50,000 taxed 20 per cent, those
between £50,000 and £100,000 taxed at
40 per cent and those over £100,000 at
45 per cent.
Councils would be given the ability to
end right-to-buy to keep social housing
from being sold. For social renters
the Lib Dems would impose stricter time
limits for repairs and establish tenant
panels. Perhaps the most eye-catching
policy is the rent-to-own scheme
where rent payments would give social
tenants an increasing equity share over
a 30-year period until they owned the
property outright.

i
Key pledges
at a glance
Conservatives
6 Revive the Help to
Buy scheme for three
years
6 No CGT for two years
for landlords selling to
tenants
6 Keep stamp duty cut
for first-time buyers
Labour
6 Mortgage guarantee
and first refusal on
new-build homes for
first-time buyers
6 Lower quality
green belt land to be
downgraded to grey belt
6 End leasehold and
introduce commonhold
for flats
Lib Dems
6 Build 380,000
homes a year, including
150,000 social homes
6 New 30-year Rent to
Own Scheme for social
housing
6 Overhaul CGT

Support for eco upgrades
A home-energy upgrade programme will
offer free insulation and heat pumps to
low-income households, and grants or
loans for homeowners to install heat
pumps and solar panels “that cover the
real costs”, including a guaranteed fair
price for electricity sold back to the grid.
All new homes will be required to be
zero-carbon and landlords will have to
upgrade the energy efficiency of their
properties to EPC C or above by 2028.
The head of policy at the UK Green
Building Council, Louise Hutchins, says:
“Ensuring new homes have public
services, green spaces and are protected
from climate risks such as flooding are
sensible proposals. What we haven’t seen
is a commitment to fight for the scale of
public investment needed to make this
happen. Anything less than £64 billion
over ten years for home upgrades alone
is unrealistic.”
Abolishing leasehold
The Lib Dems have promised to abolish
residential leasehold properties and cap
ground rents to a “nominal fee” to allow
leaseholders to sell and move on. It is not
clear whether this would apply to new
homes as well as existing leaseholds.
Taxing and limiting holiday homes
A planning class would be created for
second homes and short lets so councils
could control the number of these in
their area. Local authorities would also
be able to increase council tax by up to
500 per cent where homes were bought
as second homes, with a stamp duty
surcharge on overseas residents who buy
such properties. It is unclear whether
this would be in addition to the existing
2 per cent surcharge on overseas buyers
of UK property.

10 Bricks & Mortar
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& Mortar

T

Friday June 14 2024 | the times
Friday June 14 2024
the times

How to retrofit a
period property

he spotlight fell on the
Duke of Westminster’s
wedding last week, with
Prince William among
the guests at the
Grosvenors’ country
seat, Eaton Hall in
Cheshire. However, it is
a less glamorous event on the same
11,000-acre estate that could make a far
bigger difference to six million families
with period homes.
In the village of Aldford, close enough
to Eaton Hall to enjoy the live music as
Hugh Grosvenor celebrated his union
with Olivia Henson, a Victorian semi has
just been retrofitted by the Grosvenor
estate. With three bedrooms (the duke’s
manor has 150) and a handsome brick
exterior, it is a typical pre-1900 home. In
fact this house was chosen as a blueprint
for retrofitting historic homes precisely
because it is so typical.
Its performance is now anything but.
Whole-life carbon emissions have been
cut by 83 per cent, annual energy usage
halved and emissions to heat the home
lowered by 94 per cent, according to
Grosvenor, the duke’s property group.
While tests confirm the semi is more
airtight than a new-build, it has lost
none of its Victorian charm.
“We absolutely love it,” says Mike
Devoy, 38, who rents the house with his
partner, Holly Ashbrook, 36, and their
children, Emelda, ten, and Milo, seven.
The family moved in a few weeks ago, at
a rent of £1,450 a month. “It’s got all the
charm of a period property, but it feels
very much like a modern home. It’s
noticeably warmer and the air quality is
fantastic,” Devoy adds.
The 33-year-old Duke of Westminster
was personally involved in the semi’s
retrofit, even signing off on window
types. His experiment did not aim for
the highest Passivhaus standards,
but a more attainable ambition
that could inform retrofit
across Grosvenor’s
buildings, including
It has the charm
1,750 listed properties
of
a period home,
in prime central
London and four
but
it feels modern.
rural estates. The
modern equivalents. If
The air quality
group has pledged to cut
you do that, condensation,
emissions from running its
damp and mould will ruin
is fantastic
buildings to net zero by 2030.
the building — and the health
Its prototype has lessons for
of residents. Yet Britain cannot hit
period homeowners across Britain.
net zero emissions by 2050 without
Such homes are hard to treat. Built to
retrofitting these homes.
breathe, historic buildings cannot be
“We’ve got about six million pre-1900
sealed and insulated in the same way as
homes in the UK, and we need to make
them warmer and more comfortable to
live in and cheaper to heat. That’s what
this project is all about,” says Diane
Hubbard, the founder of Green
Footsteps, which advised on the retrofit.
Despite the impressive results, the
semi’s energy performance certificate
(EPC) rating has improved only from E
to C. “This has underlined that the EPC
process isn’t fit for purpose for historic
buildings,” says Joby Howard, the
director of building services at
Grosvenor’s rural estates.
EPCs rate the energy efficiency
of a home on a scale of 0 to 100,
banded from A (best) to G
(worst). The current system
used to calculate most EPC
ratings, except those for new
homes, does not count
improved airtightness — even
though such upgrades
significantly reduce heat loss,
Hubbard says.
It also punishes you for fitting a
mechanical ventilation and heat
recovery (MVHR) system, which pumps
out stale air while extracting heat from it
to warm incoming fresh air. MVHR,
which is crucial in highly airtight homes,
“typically reduces the EPC rating by ten
or more points”, Hubbard says, because

The Duke of Westminster’s update of a Victorian semi
on his estate — the tenants love it — has lessons for
the UK’s six million historic homes. By Martina Lees

stone surrounds with “very effective”
secondary glazing, while the semi’s
solid-brick walls were 25 per cent more
thermally efficient than the EPC system
assumes for pre-1900 walls.
Embodied carbon
It usually takes far more energy to build
a home than to run it. That is why
Grosvenor calculated the whole-life
embodied carbon of the retrofitted semi,
including emissions that produce and
transport building products, heat and
cool the home and demolish it at the end
of its life.
They used natural, local materials.
They chose Gutex woodfibre board
insulation instead of panels made from
petrochemicals; lime plaster instead of
gypsum plaster; and limecrete instead of
concrete for the ground floor. The
timber frame of a two-storey extension
came from trees grown on the estate.
Likewise, bricks and roof slate are
reclaimed from estate property.
Decarbonised heating
A Bosch air source heat pump supplies
heating and hot water without burning
fossil fuels. A heat pump can produce
three to five units of heat for every unit
of electricity it uses. But the design and
installation of a heat pump system is
“critical” to its efficiency, Howard says.
“Partnering with knowledgeable advisers
and contractors is vital.”
The team also fitted waste water heat
recovery, which uses the warmth from
waste shower water to preheat cold
water for showers. An A+ wood-burner
has a direct supply of external
air, rather than using indoor
air, and is fuelled
with logs from the estate
forest.
Although the semi has an
electric car charger, it has no
solar panels. “It is in a
conservation area, so we were
concerned about
the aesthetic impact. We are
looking at a central solar
scheme,” Howard says.

Above: Mike
Devoy and his
family rent the
retrofitted home
on the Grosvenor
family’s estate,
right. Below:
Hugh Grosvenor
and Olivia
Henson on their
wedding day

the EPC calculations prioritise low
energy costs, not low-carbon emissions,
and assumes (usually wrongly) that
an MVHR system will push up your
electricity bill.
A new version of the EPC system, due
this summer, will factor in airtightness.
Howard is “pretty confident” that
redoing the retrofit’s rating under this
regime will increase it from C to B.
This isn’t a project done on a budget.
The duke — Britain’s richest man under
40 — gave Howard’s team permission to
“play” with the Victorian property.
Sensors for temperature, humidity and
air quality will monitor how the house
performs over the next year. Here is
what they have learnt.
A retrofit plan
Draw up a thorough retrofit plan,
Howard says. “There is an
overwhelming number of
emerging products and
technologies relating to
energy efficiency and lowcarbon retrofit. Homeowners
need professional advice on
which specifications are
appropriate for their property.”
To start with, Green Footsteps,
which specialises in historic retrofit,
did an airtightness test and a thermal
imaging survey to pinpoint where the
house leaked heat.
Tests showed the semi’s original
airtightness was “really good”, Hubbard
says. The original metal windows had

Airtightness
“Heat leaks out through air
gaps. Even a 1mm gap around
a window can lead to a significant heat
loss,” Howard says.
An unbroken layer of airtight
chipboard (Finsa SuperPan Vapourstop)
and airtightness membrane invisibly
seals the house. It has increased the
airtightness by a third from 6.3 to
4.2 air changes an hour. That makes
it twice as airtight as a new home,
Hubbard claims.
If you reduce airtightness below 5 air
changes an hour, the home also needs
an MVHR system to breathe. Without it,
you will get condensation and mould,
Howard warns. The benefits of MVHR
systems increase if airtightness is below
3 air changes an hour, Hubbard adds.
The more intricate the shape of the
building, the harder it is to avoid air
gaps. The insulation layer must also be
continuous with no gaps, to prevent
thermal bridges that allow the cold to
travel through the shell. This is simpler
to do with external wall insulation. But
because the semi is in a conservation
area, external wall insulation covered
in render was out of the question.
Grosvenor had to insulate internally.
Howard’s team had to redo work where
the complex roof of the Victorian semi
joins its walls.
Many contractors do not yet have the
skills to get it right, Howard adds. “Find
trusted suppliers to advise on your
retrofit project and be open to working
with good contractors who are honest
about their limitations and prepared to
learn on the job.”

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Discover our partners’ favourite tours and experiences
in Europe, North America, Africa and Asia
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Carefully-crafted
guided holidays
For more than 60 years, Travelsphere have been taking people on trips of a lifetime
and as a result, we can offer unrivalled local knowledge to help you get the best out of a
destination. You could sit at home pulling together your own itinerary, deciding which
flight to take, where to stay and what to see when you get there, why not let us take care of
the details instead.

Amalfi Coast,
Pompeii & Capri
Departures | October 2024 to October 2025

S

tretching for around 30 miles,
the Amalfi Coast overlooks the
shimmering waters of the
Tyrrhenian Sea and is known for its
spectacular scenery. Here, dramatic,
forest-clad cliffs plunge into the deep
blue sea and narrow winding roads
connect pastel-coloured villages with
exclusive towns and resorts. The
region is small enough to discover in
a series of day trips, so on this holiday
you’ll be based in an elegant, four-star
hotel perfectly positioned in the
village of Minori and discover all the
must-see sights including Amalfi,
Capri and the ruins of Pompeii.

• Seven nights in a four-star hotel
• Seven breakfasts, one lunch, seven
dinners and welcome drink
• Discover Amalfi, the hilltop town of
Ravello and the island of Capri

EIGHT DAYS FROM

£1,699*
per person

• Visit a winery in the Amalfi Hills with
lunch in a mountain hut
• Explore the ruins of Pompeii

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• Return flights from London and
overseas transportation

Sardinia’s
Emerald Coast
Departures | September 2024 to September 2025

Save up to
£350 per
couple*

The Best of Sicily
Departures | June 2024 to September 2025

Save up to
£350 per
couple*

S

ardinia is a sophisticated
Mediterranean island and a
unique Italian destination. From
glamorous resorts and marinas
filled with luxurious yachts to
medieval towns perched on rugged
cliffs, on this relaxing tour, you will
uncover everything that makes
Sardinia special.
You’ll see dramatic scenery and
explore an atmospheric sea cave,
visit an artist’s village and sample
delicious Sardinian cuisine. There is a
chance to admire ancient churches
and an old, fortified castle, and time
to browse upmarket boutiques. The
itinerary also includes three full days
at leisure, giving you the flexibility to
do your own thing.

S

icily has so much to offer, and on
this tour, you’ll experience it all!.
Take a cable car ride up Mount
Etna, one of the most active volcanoes
in Europe, and visit the island’s vibrant
capital, Palermo. You’ll learn about
Sicily’s Greek and Roman history at
well-preserved archaeological sites
and see the beautiful Monreale
Cathedral, a masterpiece of medieval
architecture.
With its unique style of Italian cuisine,
Sicily is also known for its food, and
you’ll have a chance to sample some
delicious local specialities including

Price includes
• Return flights from London and
overseas transportation
• Seven nights in a four-star hotel
• Seven breakfasts, seven dinners and
welcome drink
• Tour the Emerald coast
• Visit to Alghero including a boat trip
to Neptune’ Grotto
• Guided walking tour of Olbia

£1,599*
per person

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Palermo’s famous street food, and
granita, a refreshing semi-frozen
dessert in Taormina.

Price includes

EIGHT DAYS FROM

£1,649*
per person

• Return flights from London and
overseas transportation
• Seven nights half-board in four-star
hotels
• Explore Taormina and Palermo
• Ascend Mount Etna by cable car
• Discover the Valley of the Temples
• Visit the Roman Villa del Casale

*Discount on selected departures only. Prices correct at time of print. Prices shown are based on twin occupancy of a double or twin bedded room and
economy flights. All holidays are subject to availability. Images used in conjunction with Travelsphere. Operated by and subject to the booking conditions of
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EIGHT DAYS FROM

Treasures of Tuscany & Florence

£1,399*
per person

Departures | September 2024 to October 2025

Save up to
£300 per
couple*

This relaxing tour takes in the iconic monuments of Pisa and Florence, beautiful medieval towns,
and the stunning vineyards of Chianti.

J

oin this magical trip to Tuscany and
you’ll stay in a comfortable four-star
hotel in the delightful spa town of
Montecatini Terme. Situated between
Pisa and Florence and renowned for its
thermal waters, it’s the perfect place
to relax and unwind and to explore the
delights of Tuscany.
You’ll head out to explore all that Tuscany
has to offer on a series of day trips. We’ve
included a guided tour of the incredible
‘art city’ of Florence where you can
admire the city’s stunning architecture
and galleries packed with masterpieces
from the Renaissance period, shop for
unique souvenirs in the covered market
of Mercato Nuovo and walk across the
medieval Ponte Vecchio lined with fine
jewellery shops. There’s a visit to Pisa
where you’ll see the world-famous
Leaning Tower of Pisa within the equally
impressive Field of Miracles. You will
also discover stunning medieval towns
surrounded by beautiful countryside,
such as Vinci, famous for being the
birthplace of legendary Italian artist
and sculptor Leonardo da Vinci. As well
as enjoy a tasting of wine and local
specialities in Chianti – delicious!

In between the sightseeing you can make
your own plans, relax at the hotel, explore
independently, or join one of our optional
excursions, it’s your holiday so pick
whatever’s right for you. On our optional
trips, step back to medieval times with
visits to the charming hilltop town of San
Gimignano, Monteriggione, Montalcino
and the setting of the dramatic Palio
horse race – Siena.

Price includes
Return flights from London,
overseas transportation &
porterage
Seven nights in a four-star hotel
Seven breakfasts, one light lunch,
five dinners and welcome drink
Services of a Travelsphere Holiday
Director
See the Leaning Tower of Pisa and
visit the Leonardo da Vinci Museum
Trip to the ‘art city’ of Florence
Tour of medieval Lucca
Night at the Montecatini Opera
Festival (subject to timetable and
weather)
Local food and wine-tasting at
Castello di Vicchiomaggio in Chianti

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A thoroughly enjoyable tour, with Mario our Holiday Director. Nothing
too much trouble. A brilliant insight to Tuscany. A great fun bunch
of fellow travellers, super hotel, with friendly helpful staff. Our first
Travelsphere tour and it won’t be our last.
J Limbert

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*Discount on selected departures only. Prices correct at time of print. Prices shown are based on twin occupancy of a double or twin
bedded room and economy flights. All holidays are subject to availability. Images used in conjunction with Travelsphere. Operated by
and subject to the booking conditions of Travelsphere, ABTA Y6412, ATOL 11266 a company wholly independent of News UK.

EIGHT DAYS FROM

£2,999

*

per person

Price includes
Return flights from London and
overseas transportation
Seven nights in four-star hotels
Seven breakfasts, one lunch,
five dinners and welcome drink
Travel on the Bernina Express to
Tirano
Lake Thun cruise and Spiez Castle
Visit Trümmelbach Falls and Mürren

The Best of Switzerland

Save up to
£600 per
couple*

D

Travelling in comfort and style on worldfamous railways, you’ll soon discover that
Switzerland is a country with more than
its fair share of natural beauty. It’s a place
where dramatic snow-capped peaks meet
far-reaching skies and the air is as pure
and fresh as can be. Enjoy journeys on the
Bernina Express, the Golden Pass Train
and the world’s slowest express train, the
Glacier Express.
You will visit Europe’s largest
underground waterfalls, admire

Take the Golden Pass train
Lausanne free public transport card

Departures | September 2024 to September 2025

iscover the magnificence of the
great outdoors on this incredible
alpine journey.

Enjoy a journey on the Glacier
Express

panoramic views from the summit
of Schilthorn, also known as the ‘007
Mountain’, and enjoy a tranquil cruise on
a sparkling lake. Along the way, there’s
free time to explore elegant towns and
pretty resorts, and ample opportunity to
treat yourself to some traditional Swiss
specialities – think chocolate or cheese
fondue!

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FIVE DAYS FROM

£1,999*
per person

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Price includes
Return flights from London and
overseas transportation
Four nights in a four-star hotel
Four breakfasts, one lunch, two
dinners and welcome drink
Tromsø tour including the Polar
Museum & Arctic Cathedral
Cable car ride to the top of Mount
Storsteinen

Norway - Huskies and
the Northern Lights

Husky sledding experience
Reindeer sledding and Sami
culture evening

Departures | January to February 2025

I

n winter, Norway transforms into
a magical wonderland where the
ethereal Northern Lights dance
across the skies and landscapes are
blanketed in crisp white snow. On this
carefully-crafted five-day holiday, you’ll
stay in Tromsø, famous for its role as the
‘Gateway to the Arctic’ and your hotel is
perfectly located in the heart of the city
for you to discover more of the area. See
the modern architecture of the Arctic
Cathedral and take a cable car ride for
the most spectacular view in the city.

Our trusted
partner

Explore the outdoors on a husky sledding
ride, learn about Sami culture and enjoy
a traditional Sami dinner, and of course
(weather permitting) keep your eyes
peeled for a spectacular display of the
Aurora Borealis.

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*Discount on selected departures only. Prices correct at time of print. Prices shown are based on twin occupancy of a double or twin
bedded room and economy flights. All holidays are subject to availability. Images used in conjunction with Travelsphere. Operated by
and subject to the booking conditions of Travelsphere, ABTA Y6412, ATOL 11266 a company wholly independent of News UK.

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EIGHT DAYS FROM

£1,649

*

per person

Price includes
Return flights from London and
overseas transportation
Seven nights in a four-star hotel
Seven breakfasts and welcome
drink
Discover the highlights of Cannes
Visit the city of Nice and enjoy
candied fruit and crystallised
flowers at a Confiserie
Explore Monaco and Monte Carlo
Tours of St Raphael and St Tropez

Save up to
£350 per
couple*

French Riviera
Departures | September 2024 to September 2025

S

oak up the special atmosphere of
the south of France. Experience the
glitz and the glamour of the Cote
d’Azur’s most chic resorts from your
base in Cannes, known for its long sandy
beaches, designer boutiques and yachtlined harbour. Discover the highlights
of the city before heading to Nice for
sweeping views from Mont Boron. Your
glamorous getaway continues with a
visit to Monaco where you’ll explore the
district of Monte Carlo, renowned for

its casino and grand harbour filled with
expensive yachts. As your tour draws to
a close, visit delightful St Raphael and St
Tropez - one of the most beautiful resorts
in France.

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11 DAYS FROM

£2,649*

Save up to
£600 per
couple*

per person

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Price includes
Return flights from London and
overseas transportation
Three nights in four-star hotels
Seven-night exclusive cruise on
board the Deluxe MV Adriatic Pearl
Ten breakfasts, five lunches,
six dinners and welcome drink
Discover the islands of Korcula,
Hvar and Solta

Croatia Uncovered

Explore Dubrovnik, Zadar, Trogir
and Split
Visit Krka and Mljet National Parks

Departures | September 2024 to September 2025

T

his is a tour of two incredible parts
as you explore Croatia by land and
sea. On land, you’ll travel north from
Split to explore the medieval cobbled
streets of Trogir and Zadar, lined with
historic buildings that lead to charming
squares. Discover delicious local cuisine
at a rural estate and walk along the
picturesque trails of Krka National Park.
Step aboard the MV Adriatic Pearl for
the second part of this tour. This deluxe
ship is small enough to visit unspoilt
islands and drop anchor in secluded
bays as you sail along the Dalmatian

Our trusted
partner

Enjoy a Croatian lunch with a local
family
Coast. Visit Korcula with its striking city
walls, stop at Mljet with its beautiful
combination of saltwater lakes, dense
forest and Franciscan Monastery, take in
a quiet fishing village on Solta, and enjoy
the photogenic beaches and medieval
architecture of Hvar.

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*Discount on selected departures only. Prices correct at time of print. Prices shown are based on twin occupancy of a double or twin
bedded room and economy flights. All holidays are subject to availability. Images used in conjunction with Travelsphere. Operated by
and subject to the booking conditions of Travelsphere, ABTA Y6412, ATOL 11266 a company wholly independent of News UK.

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17 DAYS FROM

£4,199*
per person

Save up to
£450 per
couple*

Epic Wonders of the National Parks
Departures | September 2024 to October 2025

Cameras at the ready! On this incredible holiday across seven different states, you are going to
encounter some of the most spectacular sights and scenery the USA has to offer.

Y

our road trip starts in Denver,
Colorado and takes you to the
bright lights of Las Vegas. Along the
way, you will discover historic sites and
landmarks dedicated to those who helped
define the country’s history and step into
the cowboy world of the ‘Wild West’.
This meticulously planned journey travels
through no less than nine of America’s
national parks. Keep your eyes peeled for
wildlife, see spouting geysers, steaming

hot springs, boiling pools and bubbling
mud pots in Yellowstone - the world’s first
national park. Then prepare yourself for
the beauty of the Rocky Mountains in
Grand Teton, where snow-capped peaks,
lakes and glaciers await.
Over 17 days you’ll discover vast, rugged
landscapes shaped by the power of
nature, visit ancient cave dwellings and
marvel at geological wonders galore.
From dramatic red-rock arches to

hoodoos, towering cliffs and the iconic
Grand Canyon. We’ll also stop at ‘Native
Grill’, run by a local Navajo family, to
enjoy a traditional frybread taco. Your
journey ends in the neon-lit city of Las
Vegas, marvel at the epic buildings lining
the famous Strip, watch the incredible
dancing fountains outside the Bellagio,
try your luck in one of the elegant casinos
or shop till you drop; the opportunities
are endless! This trip is packed full of
once-in-a-lifetime experiences.

Price includes
Return flights from London,
overseas transportation &
porterage
15 nights in great quality hotel plus
one night in flight
15 breakfasts, one lunch, one dinner
and welcome drink
Services of a Travelsphere Holiday
Director
Visit Mount Rushmore, the Crazy
Horse Memorial and Monument
Valley
Enjoy time at nine national parks
including Yellowstone, Arches,
Grand Canyon and Zion.
Stay at the heart of the action on
the Las Vegas Strip

The scenery just got better every day, the scale of each National Park
was unbelievable. It was certainly an epic experience and a holiday of
a lifetime. If you love natural features and scenery to blow your mind
this is the holiday for you.
I Morgan

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partner

*Discount on selected departures only. Prices correct at time of print. Prices shown are based on twin occupancy of a double or twin
bedded room and economy flights. All holidays are subject to availability. Images used in conjunction with Travelsphere. Operated by
and subject to the booking conditions of Travelsphere, ABTA Y6412, ATOL 11266 a company wholly independent of News UK.

12 DAYS FROM

£3,699

*

per person

Save up to
£400 per
couple*

Price includes
Return flights from London and
overseas transportation
Ten nights accommodation plus
one night in flight with three meals
Discover Banff National Park and
Lake Louise
Drive along the Icefields Parkway,
stopping at the Columbia Icefield
Visit Maligne Lake and Maligne
Canyon in Jasper National Park
Rockies river safari on the Blue
River

Spectacular Rockies & Vancouver

Tour of Victoria, Vancouver Island
Vancouver city tour and Stanley
Park

Departures | September 2024 to September 2025

A

road trip from Calgary to
Vancouver in western Canada is a
holiday high on many a traveller’s
wish list and this is our version of that
incredible journey. You’ll see the snowcapped peaks of Banff National Park
and breathtaking jade-green waters of
Lake Louise before heading north into
Jasper National Park. Here, you’ll visit the
mighty Columbia Icefield and spectacular
Maligne Canyon and then there’s a treat
in store for wildlife enthusiasts with a
safari through Grizzly Bear Valley. Ending

Ultimate South Africa
Departures | September 2024 to November 2026

with visits to the vibrant coastal cities of
Victoria and Vancouver, this wonderful
holiday has something for everyone. To
explore even more, you can add on a host
of exciting experiences with our range of
optional excursions.

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17 DAYS FROM

£4,299*
per person

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Price includes
Return flights from London and
overseas transportation
14 nights in three & four-star hotels
plus two nights in flight
14 breakfasts, two lunches, seven
dinners and welcome drink

Save up to
£450 per
couple*

Cape Town Tour and Table
Mountain
Cape Peninsula, Cape Point and
Boulders Beach
Winelands tour and tasting
Game drive in Kruger National Park
Drive along the Garden Route and
the Panorama Route
The Zulu battlefields

S

outh Africa is a land of breathtaking
beauty and poignant history,
magnificent wildlife and wines.

This all-encompassing tour begins with
an overnight flight to the incredible city
of Cape Town. From here, you’ll explore
the wonders of the Cape Peninsula, travel to
the Western Cape Winelands and journey
along the famous Garden Route. Then, we
change gear and head to the Zulu Kingdom
for an evocative tour of the battlefields
before rounding off our adventure on safari
in Kruger National Park.

Our trusted
partner

Joining a carefully planned, fully escorted
tour is one of the best ways to discover
South Africa. You can relax, safe in the
knowledge that everything has been
arranged with your comfort in mind.

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*Discount on selected departures only. Prices correct at time of print. Prices shown are based on twin occupancy of a double or twin
bedded room and economy flights. All holidays are subject to availability. Images used in conjunction with Travelsphere. Operated by
and subject to the booking conditions of Travelsphere, ABTA Y6412, ATOL 11266 a company wholly independent of News UK.

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QUOTE TIMES

15 DAYS FROM

£2,999*
per person

Save up to
£300 per
couple*

Taj, Tigers, Temples and
Rajasthan’s Palaces
Departures | February to October 2025

Experience the very best of the Golden Triangle on this 15-day adventure that includes a world
wonder, exotic wildlife and golden temples.

Y

our journey begins in the bustling
city of Delhi. Uncover all the
highlights on a sightseeing tour,
which includes a rickshaw ride through
the fabled street bazaar of Chandni
Chowk. Amritsar is your next destination,
famed for its Golden Temple, also known
as Harmandir Sahib Gurudwara. You’ll
visit the temple and also have the chance
to experience a Palki Ceremony there on
an optional excursion.

provide the perfect habitat for more than
300 species of birds, as well as crocodile,
hyena, jackal and more. You’ll head out on
a morning and afternoon safari in search
of these local residents and if you’re
lucky, you may spot the elusive tiger or
the even rarer leopard.

You’ll delve into the cultural highlights of
India’s Rajasthan with stays in Udaipur
and Jodhpur exploring incredible sights
such as the Mehran Garh Fort. And if that
wasn’t enough, an evening cruise on
Pichola Lake will take you to Jagmandir
Island where sandstone palaces appear
to rise from the water.

Extend your stay in India and complete your adventure with 3 nights
in Goa - India’s answer to paradise. A colourful blend of Indian and
Portuguese cultures partnered with sun, sea and susegad - the
relaxed, laid-back attitude that Goans have towards life.

Return flights from London,
overseas transportation & porterage
13 nights in four and five-star hotels,
plus one night in flight
13 breakfasts, five lunches,
13 dinners and welcome drink
Services of a Travelsphere Holiday
Director
Discover Amritsar town and the
Golden Temple

You’ll journey to the Indo-Pakistan
‘Wagah Border’ village to watch the daily
changing of the guard – a ceremony full
of patriotic fervour and representing
the rivalry and respect between the
two countries. In Agra, an early start for
a dawn visit to the Taj Mahal is worth
the early alarm - seeing the sun’s light
dance on the white marble is a truly
breath-taking experience. You’ll also
visit the Agra Fort and Itmad-ud-Duala
known as ‘baby Taj’. Your time in Agra
comes to an end as you make your way
to Ranthambore National Park. Thick
forest interspersed with pretty waterfalls,

Extend your stay

Price includes

Explore the cities of Delhi, Agra &
Jaipur
See the Taj Mahal at sunrise
Morning and afternoon safaris in
Ranthambore
Visit Agra Fort and Amber Fort

CALL TODAY ON

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ts-goldentriangle

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Our trusted
partner

*Discount on selected departures only. Prices correct at time of print. Prices shown are based on twin occupancy of a double or twin
bedded room and economy flights. All holidays are subject to availability. Images used in conjunction with Travelsphere. Operated by
and subject to the booking conditions of Travelsphere, ABTA Y6412, ATOL 11266 a company wholly independent of News UK.