The Times Companion to 2017 Read online

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  Published by Times Books

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  First edition 2017

  © Times Newspapers Ltd 2017

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  eBook Edition: © October 2017

  ISBN: 9780008262648

  Version: 2017-10-12

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Introduction — Ian Brunskill

  Acknowledgments

  AUTUMN

  Meritocracy is the last thing Britain needs — Philip Collins

  Jeremy Paxman: ‘I’m not ashamed to say I’ve suffered depression’ — Interview by Janice Turner

  Bataclan: one year on — Adam Sage

  You can’t trust the people with democracy — Roger Boyes

  Burnt and tortured migrants filled decks as we rushed to help — Bel Trew

  ‘Tantrums and shocking racism’ of inquiry’s dysfunctional dame — Andrew Norfolk, Sean O’Neill

  Middle-aged virgins: Japan’s big secret — Richard Lloyd Parry

  Royal family are more secretive than MI5 — Ben Macintyre

  Inside Britain’s only transgender clinic for children — Louise France

  A bare-knuckle fighter in the bloodiest contest ever — Rhys Blakely

  Leonard Cohen — Obituary

  Let’s stop being so paranoid about androids — Matt Ridley

  WINTER

  Game’s soul is not at Lord’s. It is here — Mike Atherton

  Confessions of a middle-aged man — Jonathan Gershfield

  Terrible teaching is what makes Oxford special — Giles Coren

  Children killed in Duterte’s drug war — Richard Lloyd Parry

  Zsa Zsa Gabor — Obituary

  Cash belongs in the past so let’s abolish it — Ed Conway

  Wild swimming is a rare splash of freedom — Edward Lucas

  Children of the internet are happy to live a lie — Oliver Moody

  How I conquered my morbid fear of flying — Melanie Phillips

  Year of revolution — Leading Article

  The NHS is in need of emergency treatment — Janice Turner

  The hedgie with a 99.9% success rate — Harry Wilson

  Are you tough enough for ‘radical candour’ at work? — Helen Rumbelow

  Our week: everyone — Hugo Rifkind

  Tourist exodus leaves gigolos hungry for love — Jerome Starkey

  Big brands fund terror — Alexi Mostrous

  Being offended is often the best medicine — David Aaronovitch

  Our magical Wembley moments — George Caulkin

  Spinal column: I keep seeing the ghost of Melanie past — Melanie Reid

  SPRING

  Scraps, storms and trench hand all in a 23ft boat — Damian Whitworth

  We all need to learn how to talk about death — Alice Thomson

  What’s a nice Asian boy doing in a place like this? — Sathnam Sanghera

  Giving birth is a lethal gamble in Venezuela — Lucinda Elliott

  Chuck Berry was a political revolutionary — Daniel Finkelstein

  On Westminster Bridge — Leading Article

  It’s time to reclaim our rights from big tech — Iain Martin

  Our addicts turn blue, then they die: the town at the centre of new US drugs epidemic — Rhys Blakely

  This is the end of democracy, cry protesters as nation splits in two — Hannah Lucinda Smith

  Drought casts the shadow of death — Catherine Philp

  Nepal is back: ancient temples, mountains and Bengal tigers —Tom Chesshyre

  Le Pen can be president if she plays the long game — Giles Whittell

  Duke retires rather than grow frail in public — Valentine Low

  Landslide for Macron — Charles Bremner, Adam Sage

  Giving a voice to the lost girls of Rochdale — Andrew Norfolk

  Queer City by Peter Ackroyd — Review by Robbie Millen

  Watch out — here come the Bridezillas — David Emanuel interviewed by Hilary Rose

  The 10 worst crimes in horticulture — Ann Treneman

  Shock poll predicts Tory losses — Sam Coates

  SUMMER

  Investors priced out by the bank — Alistair Osborne

  Election 2017 — Leading Article

  Saved by friends from across the water — Patrick Kidd

  US banned tower cladding — Alexi Mostrous, David Brown, Sean O’Neill, John Simpson, Sam Joiner

  Helmut Kohl — Obituary

  Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill: how civil servants lived in fear of the terrible twins at No 10 — Oliver Wright, Francis Elliott, Bruno Waterfield

  Food and service in a time machine — Giles Coren reviews Assaggi

  Sovereign wealth — Leading Article

  The primitive lost society of love island — Ben Macintyre

  Small acts of kindness that can save a life — Libby Purves

  People thought I was mad to offer my spare room to a homeless stranger — Alexandra Frean

  Pocket money, phone, rambo knife — Rachel Sylvester

  The Dunkirk myth never told our real story — David Aaronovitch

  My career’s in reverse and I couldn’t be happier — Emma Duncan

  Puppy love — Caitlin Moran

  The conservatives are criminally incompetent — Matthew Parris

  Justin Gatlin reminds us that sport is not a fairytale — Matt Dickinson

  Starting nuclear war is president’s decision alone — Rhys Blakely

  ‘We’ll never be able to stop the hunger for revenge here’ — Anthony Loyd

  Photo Section

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  Like its predecessor this volume brings together outstanding writing, photography and graphics from a year in the life of the world’s most famous newspaper. It covers an eventful, unsettled 12 months, from September 2016 to August 2017. In a new-year editorial on December 30, 2016 (reprinted here on p125), The Times took stock. If 2016 had been a year of “shocks, setbacks and slaughter”, the paper thought it would also seem with hindsight “a year of revolution … part of a rolling transformation of political institutions, and of geopolitical shifts”. Britain’s EU referendum and the election of Donald Trump had been manifestations of a populist rejection of established elites. They expressed the deep-r
ooted grievance of millions of voters who felt ill-served by representative democracy and to whom the rapid expansion of global trade had not brought prosperity.

  The Times viewed the year ahead with trepidation, predicting that “the many cracks opened up in 2016 will widen in 2017”. To a degree they have. Britain, split almost down the middle by the referendum vote, is no less divided over Brexit than it was a year ago. Trump’s America is riven by dangerous tensions. Yet in some ways, this anthology suggests, the 2016 revolution may have stalled. Britain is no nearer knowing how Brexit might work or what it will mean, and a general election called to bring clarity had the opposite effect. President Trump’s efforts to turn rhetoric into policy have so far largely been frustrated. In France the presidential victory of Emmanuel Macron was no doubt a shock to the country’s political system, but the sudden rise of a wealthy, centrist, business-friendly financier hardly feels like a triumph of populism over the establishment. Meanwhile, around the world, elites cling stubbornly to power by whatever means they can.

  It’s a gloomy picture, perhaps, but it shouldn’t – and doesn’t – make for gloomy newspapers. In a world of conflict and upheaval readers want accurate, balanced, immediate first-hand reports. They want powerful human stories that bring developments alive, reliable facts on which to base their own judgments, authoritative commentary and analysis to put the news in context and explain why it matters. Times readers expect their paper to take them seriously. They need to know the worst, and to understand it. But they expect also to be entertained, by articles on fashion or football or gardens or dogs that are as lively and as expert as the coverage of politics and world affairs.

  An edition of The Times contains between 150,000 and 270,000 words. It never seems enough. Every night, as deadlines loom, good stories are cut back, held over or dropped altogether when something more urgent or important comes along. There are 110,000 words in this book. To claim such a tiny fraction of the paper’s annual output as “the best of” would be absurd. The hope is that the articles included nonetheless give an engaging picture of a momentous year, and show the quality and range of the journalism that The Times produces day after day.

  Ian Brunskill

  Assistant Editor

  The Times

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Special thanks to Matthew Lyons (production editor), Nasim Asl, Jack Dyson, Josie Eve and Ailsa McNeil (editorial assistants), Sarah Willcox (sub-editor), Mark Grayson and Andrew Keys (designers); and to Gerry Breslin, Jethro Lennox, Karen Midgley, Kevin Robbins and Sarah Woods at HarperCollins. Thanks also to the contributors and to the following Times colleagues: Grace Bradberry, Peter Brookes, Becky Callanan, Jessica Carsen, Magnus Cohen, Nigel Farndale, Hannah Fletcher, Richard Fletcher, Rana Greig, Fiona Gorman, Jeremy Griffin, Tim Hallissey, Robert Hands, Suzy Jagger, Nicola Jeal, Alan Kay, Alex Kay-Jelski, Jane Knight, Robbie Millen, Simon Pearson, Monique Rivelland, Fay Schlesinger, Tim Shearring, Mike Smith, Sam Stewart, Matt Swift and the Times graphics team, Craig Tregurtha, Emma Tucker, Pauline Watson, Giles Whittell, Rose Wild, Danny Wilkins, Fiona Wilson and John Witherow.

  AUTUMN

  MERITOCRACY IS THE LAST THING BRITAIN NEEDS

  Philip Collins

  SEPTEMBER 16 2016

  “IT IS NOT ENOUGH to succeed. Others must fail.” Gore Vidal’s waspish hopes for his friends captures, in an epigram, why Theresa May does not really mean what she says about meritocracy. Meritocracy does not mean meritocracy. At the beginning of their time in office every prime minister has to make the meritocracy speech. The ardour always fades because, looked at straight on, meritocracy is a radical and terrifying idea.

  The term itself was designed as a warning rather than an aspiration. Michael Young wrote The Rise Of The Meritocracy in 1958 to raise the alarm that a society based on a narrow definition of merit, embodied in an intelligence test at an early age, is a terrible place to live. Young’s meritocracy descends into disorder as the sheep and the goats start to fight. There is nothing wrong, of course, with a weaker version of meritocracy in which talent and effort are rewarded to a greater extent than their opposites. This is what every prime minister is initially getting at, translated into the bloodless jargon of social mobility. But even that they cannot really mean.

  This is why we have been treated to yet another turn of the wheel for the over-sold hysteria about grammar schools. When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair one of his first acts was to reform the royal prerogative powers, such as the declaration of war, that are carried out by the prime minister. Theresa May’s exhuming of grammar schools prompted the same thought I had then: is that all you’ve got? If a few grammar schools is all you’re about, then you’re not really about much. This will not be the full return of the binary distinction between grammars and secondary moderns. The school system is too diverse for that.

  Besides, Mrs May’s advisers know all the objections to grammar schools. They know the cause of social mobility in the 1960s was the conversion of Britain, between the end of the First World War and the end of that decade, from an essentially blue-collar economy into a mostly white-collar one. Suddenly there was more room at the top. Grammar schools coincided with this change but did not cause it. At the height of their popularity, of the grammar school children who gained two A levels, less than 1 per cent came from the skilled working class.

  This is a point so well established that it enabled even Jeremy Corbyn to get the better of Mrs May at PMQs this week. After the beating, Mrs May’s spokesman was unable to cite any evidence in support of her policy. That’s because there isn’t any.

  That has not prevented plenty of Tory MPs and columnists from elevating their autobiographies to the status of policy writ. There really is no more firmly established body of evidence in all of education. So why does it have to be said over and over? Are these Tories so arrogant that they are impervious to evidence? No, they just don’t know what they are talking about. They are simply observing that there were more people mobile in their generation and ascribing that fact, wrongly, to schools.

  The government’s green paper actually admits its own problem: “Under the current model of grammar schools … there is … evidence that children who attend non-selective schools in selective areas may not fare as well academically — both compared to local selective schools and comprehensives in non-selective areas.” The rest of the document is then an attempt to salvage selection from the jaws of this yawning disaster. The upshot will be that the conditions imposed on schools before they can opt to select will be so severe by the time the bill limps through parliament that there will be little incentive to do so. Most of the large academy chains have no need of selection. Mrs May’s speech on meritocracy was a grand vision saddled to a sorry policy.

  The fabled popular demand will dissipate too. Grammars were not abolished by Tony Crosland in a fit of socialist envy. They were closed by Margaret Thatcher because of middle-class parents complaining to local authorities that their children were not getting in. Young put the politics of grammar schools perfectly: “Every selection of one is a rejection of many.” Meritocracy has the unfortunate effect of making aspiration a zero-sum game. My very stupid children (well, not mine, yours), with all their good fortune, will have to fall down a snake while your bright poor child climbs a ladder. No ordinary middle-class parent is going to stand idly by while that happens. It therefore follows that the policy meritocrat will have to commit to some policies even more unpalatable than grammar schools.

  There is in fact a Meritocracy Party in Britain, which demands that the Queen abdicate and that only those with relevant experience, which would presumably include the Queen (Tory), be permitted to vote. They want inheritance tax at 100 per cent. I may have earned the money but my children have not and if advantage can be purchased, which it can, then the transfer from me to them impairs the principle of merit.

  Advantage goes back a long way. In 1693 John Locke wrote a parenting guide, Some Thoughts Concerning Education.
The best recommendation was that children should eat no vegetables but the rest has worn well. Locke points out that good citizens are created by good parents and it’s still true. Educated parents are marrying their own kind and talking to their children. High-income parents talk with their school-aged children for three hours more per week than low-income parents. By the age of three a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words at home than one from a professional family.

  It matters. How children perform in tests when they are three and a half is a strong predictor of how well they do at school years later. The best way to predict a person’s social position at the age of 19 is attainment at 16, which in turn is best foretold by attainment at 11. And you can tell who is going to do well at 11 simply by looking up who did well at seven. A meritocracy would therefore withdraw resources from the later years of life and spend earlier in the life cycle. The only government member I recall taking this seriously is a little-remembered person by the name of Andrea Leadsom.

  The regime in Young’s Rise Of The Meritocracy collapses when the government takes the children of the poor into care to ensure equality of opportunity. Every politician wants the soft version of meritocracy in which the poor do well but nobody suffers. It’s a fantasy and that is why the pertinent response to Mrs May is not hysteria about a return to the 1950s but simply this: is that all you’ve got?

  JEREMY PAXMAN: ‘I’M NOT ASHAMED TO SAY I’VE SUFFERED DEPRESSION’

  Interview by Janice Turner

  SEPTEMBER 24 2016

  JEREMY PAXMAN relished “war-gaming” interviews, a former Newsnight producer tells me: debating the research, plotting manoeuvres, setting bear traps into which ministers would tumble. So how do you war-game a man who knows all the moves? After his famous question about whether he prayed with George W Bush, Tony Blair cavilled at his intrusiveness and Paxo threw up his hands in faux innocence: “But prime minister, I’m just trying to work out what kind of chap you are.”

  What kind of a chap is Paxman, beneath the suits, the elaborate disdain, the position in our culture — vacant since he left Newsnight two years ago — as the scary tutor/imposing father who sees through our dissembling and flaws? His memoir, A Life in Questions, abounds with great hack yarns about Diana, Princess of Wales, and the Dalai Lama, war reporting, political scuffles and BBC crises, yet personal detail is sketchy. He has declared his three children and partner, Elizabeth Clough, absolutely out of bounds. Indeed, no girlfriend gets more than a single line. While Paxo the man — what he feels, whom he loves — emerges rarely and fleetingly from his carapace of high snark.