24 Sep 2022

Cornered

In this issue

Featured articles

At the start of the war in Ukraine, I was given a recording made by the Ukrainian intelligence services. It was described as an intercepted call from an officer at Russia’s nuclear missile base in Siberia to a relative in Kyiv. The line crackles and a man speaks in Russian: ‘I don’t know what I should do… His [Vladimir Putin’s] finger is hovering over the button. Maybe the commander--in-chief knows he’s got no way out.

‘Staying silent isn’t an option’: meet Putin’s new opposition

Not every critic of Vladimir Putin ends up in jail. It still suits Russia’s President to present his country as a democracy. Elections are occasionally held against opponents whom Putin goes on to defeat, so enemies are often tolerated if they don’t pose a serious threat. Last week, 70 local councillors from across Russia used this remaining freedom to sign a petition calling for his resignation. Their protest started with a letter from councillors in St Petersburg which called for Putin to be indicted on charges of treason and removed from office.

The Energy Price Guarantee may cost much less than is feared

Critics of ‘Trussonomics’ – and there are many – have been quick to claim that the new energy price plan puts its economic credibility at risk. Indeed, early estimates suggested that the ‘Energy Price Guarantee’ could cost the taxpayer £150 billion or more over two years, making it the most expensive economic policy in history. More than the furlough scheme, more than even the bank bailouts. Fortunately, the bill looks like it will be a lot smaller and sceptics are set to be proved wrong.

Brace yourself for a coup in Brazil

‘Jail, death or victory.’ These are the three alternatives Brazil’s incumbent leader says await him. It is an unusual rallying call for an election campaign, but this is Jair Bolsonaro, the ‘Trump of the Tropics’, and he may well be right. Bolsonaro was elected in 2018 when his initial rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, the country’s former president, was jailed midway through the campaign on corruption charges. Bolsonaro, a relative unknown, beat the replacement Workers party candidate by a ten percentage point margin.

There was no ‘hidden Unionist code’ in my Queen’s funeral anthem

There were two world premieres during the Queen’s funeral on Monday. One was a beautiful setting of some verses from Psalm 42 by Judith Weir, the Master of the King’s Music, and the other was an anthem by me, a setting of a passage from Romans 8, ‘Who Shall Separate Us From The Love of Christ?’ I wonder if Judith had to deal with some of the questions I got on the day. How could I have written the music so fast considering that Her Majesty only died on 8 September? Of course, these things are planned years in advance, so I composed the anthem some time ago.

Wes Streeting: ‘Keir’s not Superman, he can’t do it all by himself’

When Labour MPs gossip about who could be their next leader, Wes Streeting’s name invariably comes up. Like Angela Rayner, the party’s deputy leader, Labour’s shadow health secretary spends half his time insisting he’s not running for the top job. Also like Rayner, he’s never actually stood for it – yet. But there have been plenty of moments in the past year when some of his comrades have wished he was the leader of the opposition rather than Keir Starmer.

The sad demise of the church pew

Imagine a child’s drawing of the interior of a traditional English church and the elements the picture is likely to contain. There will be colourful stained-glass windows, an altar and, almost certainly, rows of sturdy wooden pews. Yet the sad truth is that in parish after parish, the pews – which are often centuries old – are being removed and replaced by grimly functional chairs, of the sort to be found in any meeting hall or conference centre.

Notes on...

The joy – and occasional pain – of a fountain pen

Our new King isn’t the only royal to have lost his rag over a leaky pen, as happened when he was signing a visitors’ book at Hillsborough Castle near Belfast. ‘Oh God, I hate this,’ King Charles said, before handing the pen to his wife, Camilla, Queen Consort. ‘I can’t bear this bloody thing… every stinking time,’ he added. Tired of having to wash his hands after every warrant-signing session, the 10th-century Arab Egyptian ruler the Fatima caliph al-Mu’izz demanded his servants find him a writing utensil that wouldn’t leak everywhere.

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