The Queen’s Platinum Jubilee is a tribute to her legacy

The most recognisable woman on the planet was once told by a customer in a shop at Sandringham that she looked like the Queen. ‘How reassuring,’ came the reply from the headscarf-wearing head of state.

Reassurance is what the Queen has provided to millions of people and what she will be rewarded for during the Platinum Jubilee festivities. A significant chunk of the population revere someone they don’t really know. For decades, a shy woman who’s not a natural ‘people person’ has been in our midst, yet set apart. When she opened the Elizabeth Line last month, the Queen was given a travelcard. She last commuted on the London Underground as a princess in 1939.

Oversharing isn’t in the lexicon of the fast-dwindling wartime generation for which the Queen remains a figurehead. The monarchical upper lip doesn’t droop and, according to her cousin, she keeps things buried. When she allowed the BBC to broadcast previously private home movies, the footage stopped in 1953. Elizabeth: The Unseen Queen is a very accurate programme title.

Remaining enigmatic is part of her success. So too is the fact she enjoys performing the role she wasn’t born to undertake. There’s a cushion in her sitting room at Balmoral that’s embroidered with the words: ‘it’s good to be Queen’. She has thrived on the regimented nature of the job and chafed during the lockdowns. Even in the darkest days, of which there were plenty in the Nineties, the red box was opened, and the job done.

She is sustained by her deep Christian faith and her belief that the coronation had a divine dimension. She has only thought about abdication once, a friend told me, and that was during a bad storm on the Royal Yacht Britannia.

Her rollercoaster reign began with Prince Philip by her side and when butter was still rationed. The nation is savouring her achievements at a time when she is adjusting to widowhood and war is once again raging in Europe. Sheer longevity has ensured several milestones have been passed. What she most wants to do is embed the Windsor line. A probable Buckingham Palace balcony appearance at the climax of the weekend events alongside Prince Charles, Prince William and Prince George will satisfy her greatly.

The widespread celebrations will prove a pleasing antidote to the ongoing challenges on the royal horizon. Increasing frailty and a job for life are uncomfortable bedfellows. In the months ahead, a virtual Queen will be complimented by in the flesh princes, Charles and William.

What to do with Prince Andrew remains unresolved. Lock the door and throw away the key isn’t the approach she favours. Harry and Meghan have gone, but the nature of their departure continues to inflict damage. They’ve abandoned their full-time positions in a family that will have to come up with an answer to the question of reparations for slavery in the former colonies where the Queen is still head of state. Laughing awkwardly, as Prince Edward did in Antigua, was toe-curlingly embarrassing and best not repeated.

For now though, a humble woman not given to pomposity can revel in the adoration she will receive. On her seventy-year long watch, the House of Windsor has suffered fractures, but no irredeemable faultline has appeared. The Queen has succeeded in being a unifying figure during times of dizzying change.

Her successors may struggle to pull off the same trick.

The holiday spots beloved by royals

Royal tours in glorious destinations might look like fun but they are technically classed as work. So where do the Royal Family choose to go to get their fix of sunshine and rest? Balmoral and Sandringham have always been favoured by the Queen but there are also several overseas spots that have become firm royal favourites.

Malta

Between 1949 and 1951 Princess Elizabeth, as she was then, and Philip lived in Malta in a small town called Pieta very near the Maltese capital of Valletta. Their home was the Villa Guardamangia, an eighteenth-century ‘garden palace’ loaned to Philip by his uncle Lord Louis Mountbatten while Philip was stationed in Malta for naval duties with HMS Magpie. Villa Guardamangia has since fallen into disrepair but the eighteen-bedroom limestone building is set to be turned into a museum according to recent reports. The Government of Malta purchased the building in June 2020 and it was entrusted to Heritage Malta who add that ‘Villa Guardamangia is the only property outside Great Britain in which the royal family has resided’. The building has a large garden complete with historic wells so will no doubt be a popular place for locals and tourists to visit.

Until the restoration is complete, non-royals can enjoy Valletta’s architectural beauty. A walled World Heritage City, highlights include the beautiful Upper and Lower Barrakka Gardens. A place for verdant reflection, both gardens overlook the sea. In the Upper Barrakka Gardens, cannons are fired at noon each day.

St John’s Co-Cathedral (so-called because it shares duties with St Paul’s Cathedral in Mdina 13 kilometres away) is another must-see. Its magnificent marble and gold interiors and central location make it an essential and significant place to visit.

Mustique

Princess Margaret described Mustique as ‘the only place I can relax.’ She stayed on the Caribbean island regularly at her home, Les Jolies Eaux, on the southern tip. It was here that she was photographed by the press with Roddy Llewelleyn, the landscape gardener, while she was still married to Lord Snowdon. News of her affair led to her eventual divorce from Snowdon but seemingly did little to colour her time on the paradise island. She would continue to visit Mustique at least twice a year for the rest of her life.

Les Jolies Eaux has been renovated into several villas and is now a popular holiday resort. The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have holidayed there with the Middletons. Tourists can take in the same picturesque sea views after a spot of swimming, beachcombing, golfing or horse-riding on the ten acres of land. A one-week stay in the luxury Plantation House (hosting a maximum of twelve guests) at the height of the summer will set you back $68,000 excluding connecting flights and food but including a butler, a chef, two housekeepers and mosquito nets.

Corfu

Prince Charles and Camilla have long been regular visitors to Kerasia on northern Corfu (once arriving there via a British Airways flight). Whichever way they choose to travel, one element remains constant: they always stay at the luxurious Rothschild villa. The Greek City Times states that the villa is widely known as the ‘Kensington Summer Palace’, an appropriate title as it was formerly a favourite of Princess Diana as well. The villa boasts beautiful gardens and views of the Ionian Sea, yet it feels distinctly secluded among olive groves.

Non-royals can enjoy the peace and quiet on Corfu with a walk on Kerasia Beach an hour away from the capital Kerkyra (Corfu Town). Treelined and secluded with clear waters ideal for snorkelling and swimming, it’s the best place to take in all of Corfu’s beautiful natural features. There are over 250 churches and monasteries on the island. A trip to Palaiokastritsa and its Monastery is an absolute must: twenty minutes north west of the capital, it’s a picturesque destination with villages up on a hill with very rewarding views from the top.

Klosters

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge love to ski and Klosters is a favourite destination for hitting the slopes. Klosters is a diverse ski resort with a variety of skiing options available, including an off-piste area for the pros. A pretty train ride takes you through the picturesque valley to Kublis and Davos. Many restaurants can be found on the mountains, although party goers might find Klosters a little flat, as hotel bars, sophisticated and chic, are the height of the après ski activity.

And closer to home…

Queen Victoria adored going to the Isle of Wight. Osborne House was her and Prince Albert’s holiday home and they would usually visit four times a year, aiming to spend their birthdays together there for private, family celebrations. When Albert died, Victoria went to Osborne House to grieve. His dressing room became the focus for family ceremonies and in the early days of her widowhood, Victoria used it for Privy Council meetings. Beatrice, Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, brought her family up at Osborne in the new wing built specially to accommodate her family.

Queen Elizabeth II, meanwhile, treasured every visit to St Mawes in Cornwall. A scenic fishing village at the end of the Roseland peninsula in southern Cornwall, there is lots of fun to be had on the beaches between sampling local produce from family-run restaurants and delis. Tourists can even stay in the same house as Her Majesty. ‘Penvola’ is a waterfront property run by St Mawes Retreats and offers a picture-perfect view straight across the water, with direct sea access via a private slipway.

Or, for a fun day trip in the style of royalty, visit Polesden Lacey in Surrey where King George VI and the Queen Mother spent their honeymoon.

The legendary food at Lord’s

Whatever the problems faced by England’s Test cricketers on the field lately – and they are legion – the players know that one thing at least will go right in this week’s match against New Zealand at Lord’s: the food. The fare at the home of cricket is legendary.

Ex-England and Middlesex batsman Mark Ramprakash says that in county matches he and his team-mates would sometimes deliberately get out just before lunch so they could ‘pile into’ the food. Even the two batsmen who were still in would promise each other, as they walked back out to resume play, that they wouldn’t run quick singles for a while. David Lloyd’s first lunch at the ground was accompanied by lager. He was dismissed soon afterwards.

Both players started their careers during the reign of Nancy Doyle, who ran the kitchen for over 35 years until her retirement in 1996. She never followed recipes, or even used scales to weigh ingredients, relying instead on the instincts she’d learned from nuns in her native Ireland. So impressive were the results that the players worshipped her. Too much, according to England captain Mike Brearley, who one day dared to suggest to Nancy that her typical lunch (soup, starter, roast lamb with roast potatoes, chips and vegetables, dessert accompanied by custard, cream or ice cream) might not be ideal for professional sportsmen. ‘Tell you what, Michael,’ replied Nancy, drawing herself up to her full height of five feet nothing, ‘you don’t tell me how to feed my boys, and I won’t tell you how to bat. OK?’

Such culinary excess is out these days, with dieticians and nutritionists ruling the sporting roost. Not that the players always listen. Glenn McGrath had seconds every time he played at Lord’s, according to Doyle’s successor Linda Le Ker. Shane Warne stuck to toasted cheese sandwiches (and cigarettes). One of Le Ker’s specialities was pasticcio, a layered pasta and mince dish that Marcus Trescothick loved so much he begged her for the recipe. This from a man whose nickname was Banger, after his love of sausages.

You can see why Australian players might remain unconcerned about healthy eating. England arrived down under for the 2013-14 Ashes armed with an 82-page cookbook of healthy meals, including ‘quinoa with butternut squash, apricot and parsley’ and ‘mung bean and spinach curry’. They lost the series 5-0. The following summer, back in England, the home players saw the visiting Indians getting McDonald’s and Nando’s takeaways delivered to the nets during training. The score in the one-day international series at that point was reflected in the Daily Mirror headline ‘Mung Beans O, Big Macs 3’.

There’s every chance that Nando’s could figure at Lord’s again this week, given new Test captain Ben Stokes’s fascination with the chain. During an under-15 festival in 2006 he spiked Joe Root’s Coke with Nando’s peri-peri sauce. And the night before his most famous innings of all (the match-winning 135 not out at Headingley in 2019), his dinner comprised a Nando’s and two Yorkie Raisin and Biscuit chocolate bars. The following night, he and Root celebrated the miraculous win by joining team-mates Jos Buttler, Chris Woakes and Rory Burns in a £55 McDonald’s drive-thru feast.

Cricketers have always loved their grub. W.G. Grace, who favoured champagne during drinks breaks and whisky with lunch, dined one night during the 1878 Cheltenham Festival on ‘lobster patties, stewed pigeons, veal cutlets and curried chicken’. Ian Botham’s famous Shredded Wheat adverts failed to reflect the player’s real appetite: ‘I don’t like sawdust with milk all over it’. However Derek Randall remained unimpressed with caviar when he tasted it for the first time on the 1976/7 MCC tour to India: ‘This champagne’s all right, but the blackcurrant jam tastes of fish.’

So famous has the players’ food at Lord’s become that the ground sometimes release the menu on Twitter. A typical offering from 2017 included monkfish wrapped in panchetta with lemon beurre blanc, braised lamb shank with baby onion gravy, and pea and shallot tortellini with watercress purée.The desserts on offer during the 2019 World Cup final included fruit tartlet with vanilla brulée.

So if a player has a bad morning session in the Test this week, don’t feel too sorry for him as he trudges back to the pavilion. His average might have taken a battering, but his stomach’s in for a treat.

Is Harry Styles really the new David Bowie?

There’s something ludicrous about old people trying to understand the pop music preferred by youth. Mind you, youth is relative and here I am at the age of 62, explaining Harry Styles.

Styles isn’t just a pop star, he’s a phenomenon and therefore worthy of examination by ancient people like me. Last week, Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today featured him alongside Ukraine and ‘partygate’, asking: ‘Does Harry Styles ever put a foot wrong?’

Having just played his first London gig in four years, where nearly 5,000 teenage girls sang every word to his latest album, this month he will play Wembley Stadium, entertaining 140,000 people over two nights. The album in question, Harry’s House, became the most streamed album by a male artist on its first day of release ever.

So what’s the secret of the 28-year-old who grew up above a Worcestershire pub before leaving school at 16 to work in a bakery, and whose career started when his manufactured boy band came third in the 2010 series of TV talent show The X Factor?

For a start, he’s not Ed Sheeran, the most successful pop star of our times, whose voice is best described as pasteurised ‘urban’ delivered with an insistent, hollow enthusiasm. Still only 31, the ginger whinger minger has sold more than 150 million records worldwide, been named ‘Artist of the Decade’ and conducted the highest-grossing world tour of all time.

As befits a dullard, Sheeran signed, along with numerous other pop stars, a letter drafted by bitter multi-millionaire Bob Geldof warning against a ‘botched Brexit’; this loss to the Brains Trust also described himself as a fan of Jeremy Corbyn. The child of an arts curator and a jewellery designer, he is yet another example of the privately-educated artists colonising rock and pop music, previously the most likely escape route for ambitious proletarian youth.

To put the nauseating cherry on the gluten-free artisan cake, Sheeran recently released an ode to his new baby, dribbling on thus: 

‘Welcome to the world/Through all the pain, you’re a diamond in the dirt/Don’t let them change you, words are only words/I stand beside you, for better or for worse/And I will find you whenever you’re lost/I’ll be right here.’ 

Sick bag, anyone?

It’s doubtful that Harry Styles will be procreating any time soon. For a start, he likes his women on the ‘mature’ side. Also, he seems to be sex-mad and not in the mood for the patter of tiny feet unless it’s a grown woman who wears a size 6 shoe.

From the moment he was lip-read by some television viewers (while still only 16!) whispering in the ear of X Factor winner Matt Cardle: ‘Think how much pussy you’re going to get’, to the performance last week when he apologised to his mother in the audience for using the words ‘cocaine’ and ‘side boob’, his reputation is that of a caring, sharing satyr.

There’s a photo of him running into two of his exes, the models Cara Delevingne and Kendall Jenner, holding hands on a staircase at an awards ceremony in 2014, and it’s one of those moments when one understands why old timers like Philip Larkin envy the young: they’re all at it!

But generally, Styles is keen on Mrs Robinsons rather than Miss Rights. At 17, he was the lover of 31-year-old Caroline Flack, the late television presenter whose surname became sadly onomatopoeic when his teenage fans went after her. By 18, he graduated to 23-year-old Taylor Swift; in return she is said to have honoured him with one of the songs she likes to write about her exes. Style referred to the youngster’s ‘long hair, slicked back, white T-shirt’, before griping: 

‘I say, ‘I heard that you’ve been out and about with some other girl’/ He says: ‘What you heard is true…’

But his true stripes as an ‘homme fatale’ came with his ongoing romance with Olivia Wilde; the 38-year-old American actress and director was the subject of a spectacular serving of child custody documents on behalf of her ex Jason Sudeikis while live on stage at the 2022 CinemaCon, where she was promoting the film during which she met her young star. Amusingly it was called Don’t Worry Darling.

Styles is such a classic swordsman – a wolf in lamb’s clothing – that it’s amusing to see the usual suspects fill their adult nappies claiming him as one of their own tribe of confused and mostly celibate attention-seekers, just because he wore a dress on the cover of Vogue.

I remember being told as a teenager by a member of the rabidly heterosexual New York Dolls that ‘the best way to get girls is to pretend to be gay – especially in England’. The remarkable sex lives of both Mick Jagger and David Bowie (both of whom Styles is now being compared to) certainly bear this advice out.

Bowie would probably laugh and ruffle Junior’s curls before asking for an autograph for his daughter. Jagger, on the other hand, has always been cattier, telling the Sunday Times:

‘I like Harry – we have an easy relationship…he doesn’t have a voice like mine or move on stage like me; he just has a superficial resemblance to my younger self, which is fine.’

It’s true that Styles is ‘only’ worth £100m according to the Sunday Times Rich List while Jagger is on £318m. But Styles has only been a performer since 2010 while Jagger is celebrating his 60th year in the racket; it’s entirely understandable that a man who is reported to have a defibrillator on standby (Start Me Up indeed) might not be too welcoming to a young upstart who resembles him somewhat.

No doubt many will deride Styles for coming to public attention as a scream idol – but so did George Michael, who grew into a fine singer-songwriter. Others will mock him as just a manufactured TV talent show act. But that’s how Girls Aloud started and they’re one of the greatest pop groups this country has ever produced.

Personally, I find his music the least interesting thing about him; having seen him act, the big screen may well be his final destination. His voice reminds me of Kelly Jones from the Stereophonics but the music is more like Howard Jones – or rather a turgid, washed-out approximation of something even Jones would have considered too bland to put out in the 1980s. The current single As It Was is better than the early ones, but it still basically just sounds like someone growling at a mobile phone ringtone.

But then, I’ve been spoiled; I was lucky enough to be young when pop titans – Bolan, Bowie, Bryan Ferry – ruled the airwaves and the bedroom walls alike. I grew up at a time when singing stars were routinely both sexy and profound, right up to Blondie.

And, as I said at the start, it’s always somewhat comedic when we sexagenarians try to understand what gets modern youth going.

What is the most significant year of the Queen’s reign?

Andrew Roberts

The most important moment came on 11 November 1975 when her governor-general in Australia, Sir John Kerr, dismissed the Labour government under Gough Whitlam, doing so in her name. Although the Queen knew nothing about it before it happened (indeed, she was asleep at the time), it reiterated the vital constitutional principle that there is a power above politicians, even elected ones as in Whitlam’s case. Whitlam had driven Australia to the brink of economic and social collapse, but Kerr saved the country using the Queen’s royal prerogative. His decision was enthusiastically endorsed by the Australian people at the subsequent general election, with a landslide victory for Malcolm Fraser. Even while she slept, therefore, the mere existence of the Queen’s prerogative rights reminded the world that her politicians are the servants of both her and the people, not the masters.

Peter Hitchens

1997 must now be seen as the year the fatal blow was struck at the monarchy. Two things sum this up. Both were to do with Blairism. The first was the general acceptance that New Labour was right to abolish the hereditary peerage, at worst a harmless survival and at best an obstacle to the tyranny of the party machines and their whips. Nobody significant could be bothered to defend it on principle. Yet the change was a frontal assault on the idea that constitutional power can legitimately be inherited. From that moment onwards, the Queen’s influence depended purely on her own personal popularity. Her heirs and successors, if they cannot attain popularity, or if they lose it, will have no generally accepted entitlement to sit on the throne. The BBC’s portrayal of Tony Blair’s arrival in Downing Street, including a fake crowd of Labour supporters waving Union flags in a street which the public are forbidden to enter, was the inauguration of a president in all but name, as everything which followed showed.

Robert Tombs

Though tempted to choose a year of uplift – the Falklands in 1982 or the 2016 referendum perhaps – I cannot escape the gravitational pull of 1963, Philip Larkin’s ‘annus mirabilis’, the climax of our cultural revolution. The Queen must have hated it. Kim Philby (Westminster and Cambridge) was belatedly exposed as a traitor. John Profumo resigned after lying about his affair with Christine Keeler, soon one of Britain’s most famous women. The Beatles became a sensation. Oh! What a Lovely War opened, ridiculing patriotic sacrifice. The media-friendly Bishop of Woolwich, Dr John Robinson, published Honest to God, a bestseller criticising traditional religion and morality: ‘Nothing can of itself always be labelled as “wrong”.’ Dr Alex Comfort, poet and former conscientious objector, appeared in a BBC series promoting sex as healthy recreation. The miniskirt was christened by Mary Quant. ‘Supermac’, now the butt of derision, left Downing Street. The long Victorian Age ended, and we suddenly seemed a different people. ‘The upper classes,’ declared one journalist, ‘passed unquietly away.’ But at least one remained, despising fashion: and she still reigns over us, holding the strands of history together.

Sinclair McKay

1977 was the final flowering of the hearty New Elizabethan sensibility: Blue Peter-ish jubilee street parties, papier-mâché pageants; the last time it would be possible to imagine some form of genuinely unified, sincere – and slightly silly – national celebration. By 1977, something was hardening in the nation’s heart: the leaden recognition that the UK was no longer great but instead tawdry and dismal and exhausted – a series of brutalist shopping precincts punctuated with seamy cinemas showing Swedish Nurse pornography double bills. Inflation was 16 per cent and seemed insoluble. Industry – a resentful state production line of brown cars – was class war. Mr Callaghan’s Labour government, not long back from the IMF, had to gingerly introduce us to the idea that Keynesianism wasn’t working. The shock of the Sex Pistols and their gobbing anthem ‘God Save the Queen’ was partly that it wasn’t such a great shock. England had already stopped dreaming. Optimistic regeneration would come again; but past this point, New Elizabethan innocence was impossible. The next generation of royalty – ‘Charles and Di’ onward – acquired the onyx aesthetic quality of American soap opera. We looked at the tea towels and saw the kitsch.

Antonia Fraser

The current one, 2022. This is because two bold, brave decisions were taken on behalf of the monarchy. First, Her Majesty announced that the Prince of Wales’s wife, known as the Duchess of Cornwall, would become queen when her husband ascended the throne. The official role of the former Camilla Parker Bowles in the royal family had begun with her marriage in 2005 in an atmosphere still clouded by grief and other less sympathetic emotions following the tragic death of her predecessor (hence she did not take the title ‘Princess of Wales’). It was understood that when Prince Charles succeeded, she would be some kind of princess consort. That was then. Years have passed in which the Duchess has proved herself an agreeable, hard-working, intelligent member of the royal family. Now the Queen has swept aside the past in favour of the future. Camilla will be queen. The second bold decision was to remain Queen Regnant herself, despite her advancing age. Long live Queen Elizabeth II!

Matt Ridley

The most significant year of the Queen’s reign is 1953, not because it saw the coronation that led to the longest reign, nor because it saw the climbing of Mount Everest, let alone because of the death of that ogre Stalin, but because of what happened in Cambridge on 28 February that year. The sudden and utterly unexpected discovery by Jim Watson and Francis Crick of the double helix of DNA, and hence that the key difference between living and non-living things is digital information written in a universal four-letter code, is in my view the most surprising and portentous eureka moment of all time, beating evolution, gravity, relativity, America, the atom and all the rest into a cocked hat.

Niall Ferguson

I was 13 in 1977, the year of the Queen’s Silver Jubilee. It was quite a time to be a bored Glaswegian teenager. The entire British economy was in the doldrums, but the shipyards and steelworks of Clydeside were in terminal decline. Scottish nationalism was enjoying one of its periodic surges, but the Glasgow gangs were more interested in mimicking the sectarian strife of Ulster. In short, we appeared to be living through ‘The Break-Up of Britain’, the title of a widely read tract by Tom Nairn. So I still recall with a frisson the first time I heard the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’, which perfectly expressed my adolescent sentiments. ‘God save the Queen / The fascist regime / They made you a moron / Potential H-bomb…’ Nothing in today’s popular culture remotely comes close to its incandescent ferocity. The reason 1977 was the most significant year in the Queen’s reign is quite simply that she – and the monarchy – survived it. ‘There is no future,’ snarled Johnny Rotten, ‘in England’s dreaming.’ So it seemed. And yet there was, and still is.

Joan Bakewell

1997 was the year Britain was swept by change. As Prime Minister, Tony Blair was to oversee a decade of progressive policies and civic prosperity. Whether the Queen approved or not, she could hardly be unaware of the strong change of direction: devolved governments for Wales and Scotland, more police, doctors, midwives, the introduction of minimum wage, better deals for pensioners, more young people at universities than ever before, the abolition of Clause 28, and the introduction of civil partnerships. The greatest of the Blair government’s early triumphs was the Belfast Agreement negotiations (initiated by John Major) – a stunning record of political commitment. The weekly encounter between Her Majesty and her Prime Minister can never have been less than exhilarating. Then he went and ruined it all by invading Iraq.

Mary Wellesley

Britain has changed irrevocably in the long reign of Elizabeth II, but it also had to reckon with what it once was. In 2011, four elderly Kenyans took the British government to the High Court, seeking reparations for the violence meted out to them during the Mau Mau uprising of 1952-1960. Just before the trial, the government disclosed that it held more than 1,500 files relating to the suppression of the uprising in a secret Foreign Office archive at Hanslope Park. They had been flown out of Kenya in 1963, lest they came into the hands of ‘successor governments’. The Kenyan plaintiffs won their case and, in 2013, the British government admitted that ‘Kenyans were subject to torture and other forms of ill treatment at the hands of the colonial administration’. The 2011 ‘Hanslope Disclosure’ revealed the extent of the violence enacted on behalf of the colonial administration, but also the way in which governments seek to edit history. The word ‘archive’ comes from a Greek word for government; archives are often tools of power. More than 8,000 files, pertaining to 37 former colonies, had been kept hidden. Normally a 30-year embargo is placed on such documents. Elizabeth II had been on the throne for some six decades before the British government was forced to admit the violence it had committed at the inauguration of her reign.

Were Liverpool fans sexually assaulted at the Stade de France?

The shambles at the Stade de France on Saturday night took a sinister turn on Wednesday as allegations emerged of incidents of sexual assault committed against supporters by gangs of local youths.

What unfolded outside France’s national stadium on Saturday evening as Liverpool and Real Madrid met inside in the final of the Champions League has dominated the news in France ever since. Most of the criticism for what is seen as a national humiliation is directed at Gérald Darmanin, the Minister of the Interior, who since Saturday evening has insisted that Liverpool supporters were predominantly to blame for the trouble. On Wednesday he received the indirect support of his boss, Emmanuel Macron, via his official spokeswoman, Olivia Grégoire, who assured reporters the president is ‘totally’ behind his beleaguered minister.

In the footballing world, when a struggling manager receives a vote of confidence from the club owner he is normally sacked within the fortnight. That is unlikely to happen to Darmanin, not with the first round of the legislative elections taking place on Sunday week. Macron’s new government is already embroiled in one ministerial controversy, the allegations of rape levelled last week at Damien Abad. In the short term the president will do all that he can to protect Darmanin.

But does Darmanin need protecting from himself first and foremost? His handling of the debacle has turned a drama into a crisis, antagonising the British, astonishing the media and angering many police officers who are openly contradicting his assertion that Liverpool fans were the source of the trouble on account of the high number of forged tickets they carried. Even the country’s intellectuals are pondering the signification of the ignominy, a sure sign that the national psyche is bruised.

On Wednesday Le Figaro published online a report claiming there were several instances of spectators being sexually assaulted outside the ground. A police officer on duty is quoted as saying: ‘What went on was crazy… I saw women having their breasts touched, they had their bags ripped away’. The officer said those responsible were gangs of young men from the area.

Le Figaro also cites testimonies from Spanish and English supporters, who grouped together in defensive circles to protect the women among them. One Spaniard told the paper that the youths ‘molested minors’ and he saw one girl in tears after being groped.

At a press conference on Wednesday Marine Le Pen called on Darmanin to resign, accusing him of suffering from ‘Cologne syndrome’. That barb will hurt. Few have forgotten what unfolded at Cologne on New Year’s Eve in 2015, when hundreds of young women were groped and assaulted by men, many of whom had recently arrived in Germany after Angela Merkel threw open Europe’s borders to an estimated one million refugees and migrants. The outrage grew when the Mayor of Cologne, Henriette Reker, suggested women should in future modify their behaviour to avoid a repetition.

According to Le Pen, Darmanin continues to blame the English fans because he’s in denial, ‘despite all the evidence, [about] acts of violence as soon as they are committed by immigrants’. Last year Darmanin mocked Le Pen in a TV debate for being ‘soft’ on Islam; she’s waited patiently for her revenge.

The left-wing La France Insoumise also defended Liverpool fans against Darmanin’s claims of ‘industrial’ forgery, accusing him of ‘lying’, and predicting that this is what awaits France in the next five years of Macron’s presidency.

Darmanin and the sports minister, Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, will be questioned on Wednesday evening by the Senate, which is dominated by the centre-right Republicans. Their senate president, Bruno Retailleau, has urged Macron to intervene because the crisis has become ‘grave’, calling into question ‘the image of France in the world’. That was a foretaste of what the interior minister can expect during his interrogation.

Will Darmanin stick to his line about Liverpool being to blame or will he offer a watery mea culpa? Either way his reputation is unlikely to ever fully recover from this fiasco, and his relegation will only be a matter of time.

Channel 4’s failed charm offensive

It’s Jubilee week in London. Boom times for royal hacks mean tough times for their lobby counterparts. Fortunately, today’s publication of the latest edition of the MPs’ register of interests is a godsend for story-starved journalists, scrabbling around to write about something that isn’t about Harry and Meghan.

Perusing the register this morning, Mr S was intrigued to see the name of Channel 4 popping up regularly as a frequent donor to MPs across the House. The public broadcaster has desperately been trying to fight a rearguard action against privatisation in recent months and appears to have launched something of a belated charm offensive to aid that goal. Sadly for the broadcaster, its nearly £11,000 in freebies to eight MPs looks to have been in vain, given Nadine Dorries’ ongoing determination to press ahead with the sale.

Among those enjoying tickets to the BAFTAs and its TV equivalent courtesy of C4 include Jess Phillips, Dehenna Davison and Boris critics Stephen Hammond and Paul Holmes. No less than three of Labour’s shadow culture team – Lucy Powell, Alex Davies-Jones and Chris Elmore – accepted six invites between them. In the Lords Lib Dem peer Don Foster – who sits on a committee currently looking into Channel 4’s future – also accepted an invite to the BAFTAs at the Royal Albert Hall in March from the broadcaster.

Culture is very much something of a theme in today’s update to the register. Not one but three Labour frontbenchers are now under contract to write books about various themes. Sir Keir Starmer is writing one on his vision for Britain, Lisa Nandy has another on local communities while Wes Streeting is writing one about, er, himself. Elsewhere, Angela Rayner has received some 11 dresses worth nearly £1,000 from a Hatfield clothesmaker with Lib Dem leader Ed Davey collecting two cases of wine from one of his Birmingham council candidates. Tory Mims Davies however opted for simpler pleasures: she now volunteers for a retro/dance show on her local community radio station in Mid Sussex.

Labour spokesperson Rosena Allin-Khan meanwhile took another £2,000 donation from a property developer criticised for its previously reported failure to remove dangerous cladding. The gaffe-prone Tooting MP has now received £22,000 in large donations from Henley Homes since January 2020 – including £5,000 for her failed bid to be deputy leader of the party. Her colleague Yvette Cooper meanwhile accepted another £15,847 from MPM Connect Ltd to fund her offices. The company is run by millionaire Peter Hearn – the only donor from which she has accepted money in the past two years.

Sadly the collapse of Amanda Wakeley’s firm means that Theresa May has also now lost her discount card there. The British fashion designer kitted her out in an infamous pair of £995 brown leather trousers back in 2016, with May wearing the brand the first time she went to meet the Queen upon accepting the premiership. Still, her new BA Premier membership will more than likely make up for it – as will her £109,000 speaking engagement fee from the Danish Bar society.

Good to see the former PM’s finances are going strong and stable at least.

What the French get right about guns

When a French friend invited me to the local shooting range here in my canton in the south of France, I was simultaneously intrigued and a little horrified, in a reticent British way. Guns are not really respectable in England. The carnage wrought by firearms in America would seem to make anyone advocating the right to own them something of a pariah.

The French have a different attitude. Guns are legal to own here. Not just shotguns for hunting and clay pigeon shooting. But semi-automatic rifles including assault-type long guns and more or less any kind of handgun, except for the ones that fire armour-penetrating bullets.

Here’s what I discovered at the shooting club. Shooting is, quite literally, a blast. After a couple of hours learning the basics of the Glock semi-automatic pistol, I was hooked.

My shooting club is located in the garrigue about 20 minutes away. An old railway car serves as the clubhouse. On the wall hang pictures of distinguished alumni: a French champion pistol shooter and a young woman who went on to join an elite police firearms squad. It’s officially a sport here and is an Olympic discipline. Baron de Coubertin, who revived the Olympics, was a keen competitive shooter.

There are two ranges. One is 100 metres for the hard-core distance shooters with their precision rifles. Another is 25 metres for pistol shooting. It’s all closely supervised by senior members of the club, called monitors. The rules are strict. No more than five shots in succession. Ear defenders compulsory. No human-form targets. And don’t you dare point a weapon anywhere but downrange. After an initial ‘baptême’ accompanied by an existing member, there are a series of hoops before you’re entitled to join the club and receive a permit to buy firearms and ammunition.

There are slightly different rules for small-calibre rifles and heavier duty weapons like an AK-47 or a handgun. I went for the most unrestricted version allowing me to own a 9mm pistol with a 17-round magazine. The first obstacle is to prove you are not mad. This requires a sign-off by your doctor. Typically, he will ask if you’ve ever wanted to shoot anyone. ‘I have a long list,’ will not be regarded as a conforming reply. The second is to attend an interview at the Gendarmerie where you must produce evidence that you have a gun safe, securely fixed to a masonry wall, capable of storing your arms and ammunition.

‘Have you ever been in prison?’ asked the officer when I showed up with my dossier of attestations and photographs. ‘Not yet,’ I replied, an answer that seemed to satisfy. Then the file gets sent to the prefecture, and in due course you’ll get a permit allowing the purchase of firearms, and for pistols and larger calibre long guns, a limited quantity of ammunition.

You are obliged to keep your guns under lock and key except when traveling to the range when they must be kept in a locked boot of the car. The gendarmerie might visit at any time, to check your guns are correctly registered and that storage conforms to the rules. There’s no open carry or concealed carry of weapons unless you can demonstrate an overwhelming need.

Buying guns here can be done by visiting an ‘armurerie’ or over the internet. Having upscale tastes, I bought a lovely Smith & Wesson .22 calibre target pistol with a five-round magazine, a gorgeous Finnish rifle with a walnut stock and what the salesman described as a ‘bolt like teenage sex,’ and an exotic Swiss-made 9mm parabellum pistol. For a while I went to the club every weekend. Shooting is zen. To get five shots into the centre of the target requires total mental calm. I learned to empty my mind of everything. And after a few months of practice, I became not terrible. Say it discreetly but guns are interesting and some represent craftsmanship of a high order. I suppose there must be something Freudian about this – it’s not hard to draw a connection. But the guys I shoot with seem perfectly normal. The gun club seems as much a reason to get away from trouble and strife than as a therapy for impotence.

France is amongst the most heavily armed nation in Europe with an estimated 31 guns per hundred people – many fewer than the United States, which has an estimated 120, four times as many. The UK has an estimated five guns per hundred people. Although compared to Britain, France is awash in firearms, guns hardly occupy the obsessional position they do in America. The cops in France are routinely armed but they are far less trigger happy than they seem to be in America, or as blatantly intimidating as British police with their Heckler and Koch machine guns. The rules of engagement for the police here are strict. A Gendarme friend tells me she was forbidden to shoot, even when an enraged man rushed at her and colleagues with a hatchet. They eventually took him down without a shot fired. The cops in Britain seem often to shoot first and ask questions later.

France has a serious gun problem. Urban gangs are heavily armed. There have been regular shootings by terrorists and criminals. But it’s extremely rare for a licensed gun owner to be implicated in any kind of crime, although hunting accidents and suicides are common. That’s probably because to own a gun here you must pass a rigorous vetting.

The right to bear arms in France is not as explicit as in the United States and is rooted in the post-revolution idea that everyone is entitled to hunt, not just the aristocracy. It remains ferociously regulated. It’s not impossible that a legally licensed gun owner in France might flip-out but it just doesn’t seem to happen.

I’ve sold my pistols because frankly keeping up to date with the paperwork was becoming a pain. But I’ve still got some long guns in the safe and admit, I quite like the idea of being able to defend myself against marauding zombies, should the need arise. And the reality is that if guns are outlawed completely, this will do little to arrest the proliferation of guns, or the adoption of other lethal weapons. This has certainly been true in Britain where police carry machine guns to defend themselves against outlaws with unregistered guns and legally bought machetes.

A grown-up debate is going to require an admission from abolitionists that their goal is utterly impossible and from gun owners that they must submit to serious regulations, as in France. Realistically however, neither is likely to eliminate the horrors we see in America.

Biden’s Ukraine policy should bolster the Western alliance

After the confusion about what weaponry the US would supply to Ukraine and growing talk of divisions within the Western alliance, Joe Biden has a piece in the New York Times trying to clarify what US policy is. Biden makes clear that he, like Zelensky, accepts that the war will end through diplomacy rather than total victory for one side or the other. He says that the US will supply Ukraine with weaponry, including longer range artillery, to ensure that it enters those negotiations in the ‘strongest possible position’. He is also adamant that the US will not pressure Ukraine to cede territory to try and bring an end to the conflict.

I think the best way to read Biden’s column is that he is saying he will support Ukraine in pushing the Russians back to where they were before the most recent invasion on 24 February.

Biden argues that the US is supporting Ukraine to bolster European security, deter future Russian revanchism and show others that territory cannot simply be seized by force. Previously Biden has suggested that if Russia succeeded in Ukraine, it would make China more likely to try and seize Taiwan.

Biden’s piece undoes some of the confusion caused by his comments about not sending Ukraine long range weapons. It also makes clear that Washington will carry on supporting Ukraine until Russia has been pushed back to where it was before 24 February. In public, nearly all other Western leaders could sign up to the Biden position – Scholz just praised it in the German parliamentary debate on Ukraine – even if in private there are some differences. But if the US is determined to lead, that will strengthen the resolve of the Western alliance.

We need to talk about Salvador Ramos

It’s been over a week now since Salvador Ramos burst in to an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas and fatally shot 19 children and two teachers. Still a question remains: why did he do it?

One answer is that he was evil: evil people do evil things. Another is that he was crazy: crazy people do crazy things. And yet another is that he was made to do bad things because of all the bad things that had happened to him: Ramos reportedly had a childhood speech impediment and was subjected to bullying because of this.

These explanations all share one thing: the conviction that human behaviour is broadly explicable. But some acts are so phenomenally wicked they test the limits of our capacity to understand them. They are just too morally grotesque, making it almost impossible to transport ourselves into the shoes – or blood-soaked trainers – of the perpetrator in question. The Uvalde massacre is one such criminal outrage.

You will have by now read or heard all about the horrifying grotesqueness of Ramos’s crime and the terror and suffering he inflicted on his young victims. It is difficult and deeply upsetting to imagine what must have been going through their minds when Ramos launched his attack. It is perhaps even harder to imagine what must have been going through Ramos’s mind. And it is harder still, bordering on the indecent, to imagine what he must have felt.

Many professional killers have testified how the act of killing, in the moment of its execution, made them feel supremely powerful, even God-like. One Russian hitman told the British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore that killing ‘gives you a secret something – a force, a confidence, afterwards’. Other killers have said something similar, but I’ll spare you the scandalous quotes. (The historian Joanna Bourke has an entire chapter on the ‘pleasures’ of war and killing in her book An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in Twentieth Century.) Did Ramos feel a sense of exhilaration as he carried out his massacre? It seems perverse even to raise this question, but if we’re to better understand such rampages then we need to do so.

Ramos, of course, was not a professional killer: he was a loner who had no criminal record and had only recently come into possession of the assault-rifle he used for his shooting spree. Professional killers tend to be deeply moralistic, if not laughably sentimental, about not killing children, while showing not the slightest moral unease about killing their older relatives. Ramos, clearly, had no moral qualms about killing children. Indeed, he seems to have deliberately targeted children. Why?

Given that Ramos is dead, we may never know. Although it seems that he had no specific grievances against the victims he killed. One possible answer is that he wanted to commit the most horrifying atrocity in recent memory. He wanted to do the worst of the worst and take his place in history as America’s most notorious mass shooter.

The terrifying truth is that this motivation is no surprise. Mass killers are intensely peer competitive. In their research on public mass shootings from 1966 to 2019, scholars Adam Lankford and James Silver found that many mass-shooters viewed ‘body counts as a competition, and therefore…attempted to surpass the death tolls of previous attackers’. The Sandy Hook shooter, Adam Lanza, had posted online that he admired Anders Breivik, who murdered 77 people in a far-right terrorist atrocity in 2011, and had likely wanted to exceed that grim toll.

But why would Ramos want such notoriety? And how could he have become so morally deformed as to murder scores of school children to acquire it? We don’t know and may never know. But whatever it is, it has to do an ordinate amount of heavy-lifting to arrive at the mass-murder of innocent school children.

Another possibility is that there is no real or coherent reason for Ramos’s murderous actions. In We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver’s novel about a school shooter, the protagonist tries out various motive-explanations for his murder-spree. None of them work and he concedes that he has no idea why he did what he did. Perhaps Ramos, like the fictional mass-killer in Shriver’s book, is similarly incomprehensible and that our efforts to understand him will be thwarted by the possibility that that none of what he did makes any sense at all.

Kate Forbes, Tartan Thatcher

The SNP’s political gifts know no bounds. Mr S has to take his bonnet off to Kate Forbes – Sturgeon’s finance secretary and heir apparent. For no Tory minister could have ever announced the spending cuts which she did yesterday without facing the wrath of the Scottish establishment. Couched in managerial jargon-ese, Forbes’ spending review statement promised a ‘reset’ in the country’s public services over the next five years. ‘Reset,’ of course, is simply a shorthand for ‘real term cuts’, with the funding axe set to fall on a swathe of different areas including local government, higher education, the courts service and cultural affairs. Despite all this, there is still some cash for the SNP’s own vanity projects, with £20 million put aside to plan for another referendum. Truly progressive stuff.

Forbes’ announcement comes days after the Institute for Fiscal Studies warned of a potential gap of £3.5 billion opening up in the Scottish government’s finances over the next few years. Her solution is to prune the public sector and trim the civil service headcount which has ballooned at Holyrood under the SNP’s leadership. She plans to reduce the overall size of the state workforce to pre-Covid levels, with the aim of keeping the total pay bill, as opposed to pay levels, at 2022-23 levels. This, ironically, bears a remarkable similarity to the policy of the hated government in Westminster, where Jacob Rees-Mogg has pledged to slash 70,000 jobs to cut numbers back to where they were in 2016. Something to bear in mind, perhaps, the next time Ian Blackford embarks on another one of his patented anti-Tory rants…

Amid the gloom however, it has been pointed out that some light relief is being provided by various ‘civic Scotland’ types trying their best to praise a spending review which, if it had been carried out by a Conservative, they’d already be marching against. For years pundits, bag-carriers and third sector types in Scotland bemoaned ‘Tory austerity’: now they have the chance to see the SNP/Green alternative in action. Naturally, the grievance game has already started, with Forbes complaining on Twitter that ‘our spending plans are balanced because they must balance by law’ – which begs the question as to why she previously sought credit for balancing it.

Still, at least Forbes – the McMilton Friedman of Scottish nationalism – is willing to address her critics. Over on the First Minister’s social media page, there was no sign of any comment on a budget which effectively gave a P45 to five per cent of her country’s public sector. Instead, Nicola Sturgeon preferred to retweet an advert for her forthcoming appearance at the Hay literary festival – on the day her colleague announced university funding cuts.

Balancing the books? Cutting back the state? Good to know there’s a Tory government in one part of the UK at least…

Why I love Her Majesty

I’ve often wondered whether Her Majesty the Queen glances through The Spectator from time to time. And if she does, I wonder whether her kindly eye lights on this column. And if it does, I wonder what she thinks of what she reads there.

‘Philip, there’s a man here writing about going to the Cheltenham Festival and messing his pents.’ ‘Very easily done at Cheltenham, my dear. I’ve often wondered why nobody has written about it before.’ Or, ‘Philip here’s that man again, the one who messed his pents at Cheltenham, assisting the ferret-judging at a country show. It’s frightfully interesting. The judge takes so long to judge each class, they drive a car into the tent so that he can judge them in the headlights.’ ‘Does he mess his pents again?’ ‘He doesn’t say.’

Karsh’s 1951 photo portrait of Princess Elizabeth hung in the family home until my mother died in 2019, aged 89. As a child I counted it as great good fortune to be born the subject of a queen, and one so beautiful. The feeling has increased, with the additional wonder that she has ruled over me with integrity and humility until she is the only one left in the kingdom – the one righteous individual staying God’s hand against us in our iniquity.

My parents would never have called themselves royalists, which would have associated the Queen with a vulgar ‘ism’, implying choice. She was our sovereign, the privilege was ours, that was that. Everyone we knew thought the same. To have spoken about the Queen with familiarity would have been an impertinence. If she appeared on the television, my father would stand before the set and sort of gurgle reverently. All of my older male relatives on my father’s side modelled themselves on her grandfather, King George V.

Beneath Princess Elizabeth’s portrait hung the famous Karsh portrait of Winston Churchill. Untinged by the mystery of royalty, Winston was one of us – in death as he was in life. Winnie we could praise and discuss. His pithier, more belligerent statements were never far from my father’s lips. My father once said that if Winston Churchill could believe in Queen Elizabeth’s divinity, then so could he.

‘Philip, have you looked in this week’s Spectator? It’s awfully interesting. That ferreting correspondent has been smoking washed cocaine through a homemade pipe and now he’s speaking on the telephone to a Scientologist who wants him to join the association so badly he is being rather a nuisance about it.’ ‘Good Lord. Can’t he just tell him to sling his hook?’

‘He says he feels detached enough not to mind.’ ‘Sounds like very thin stuff to me. Hardly worth writing about. What’s Taki got to say for himself this week?’ ‘He’s in gaol for possession of cocaine.’ ‘Good Lord, what rotten luck.’

I wish I’d seen the Queen in real life. Even a glimpse. I didn’t say meet her, mind. My legs would have turned to jelly. My friend Mick was walking down Harley Street once when he saw a black limousine draw up on the other side of the road. He works in the rag trade in Mortimer Street in London and is used to seeing famous people knocking about. If he sees one he’ll tell you about it. He dived into the nearest doorway to watch and see if he recognised who was getting out. Blimey, he thought – as he tells it – it’s Her Majesty the Queen! He stayed half-hidden in his doorway to feast his eyes on her. But to his horror she made right for the doorway he was standing in. It was not a wide space and Mick had to turn sideways to allow her to pass. He could have reached out and touched her. He felt he must say something. He couldn’t just goggle at her. So he made this stiff little chest-high salute and said, ‘All right?’ The story ends there. He doesn’t report whether or not she said: ‘Quite well, thank you. Just an MOT.’

Oh, Catriona’s met her; she’s met them all. Some of them more than once. Before we met, she was married to the Queen’s sculptor in ordinary, whatever that means, and they were invited to dinners and parties and whatnot. The Queen she just curtsied to. ‘So what was she like?’ I say. ‘Small,’ she says, miming looking down on something. ‘Well, you’re small so she must have been like a flaming Borrower then.’ She adores the Queen too. When the Queen had that smiley phase just after Philip died, her dear cheerful widowed face pictured in the newspaper buoyed us up for weeks.

Here I am prattling on dementedly about how much I love the Queen and it isn’t right. But to celebrate her 70 years of duty and service, I hope her grateful subject may be forgiven this one little vulgar and presumptuous outburst.

On the brink of delivering something special: Sky’s The Midwich Cuckoos reviewed

A youngish couple leave London and drive off excitedly to make a fresh start in more rural surroundings. They demonstrate their happiness by laughing all the way to their new town, where a cheery sign on the outskirts reads: ‘Welcome to Midwich’. So what could possibly go wrong?

In fact, even for viewers unfamiliar with John Wyndham’s famously spooky 1957 novel, from which Sky Max’s modern-day version of The Midwich Cuckoos has been adapted, it’s clear that something soon will. After all, a pre-credit sequence, set five years later, had shown the same couple cowering in fear before their five-year-old daughter. For now, though, while they marvelled at the idyllic views, we were efficiently introduced to their neighbours, before Thursday’s first episode went about its main business of increasingly unsettling us.

In my last column I reviewed Conversations with Friends, of which the phrase ‘slow burn’ has been much used in its traditional sense of ‘a bit boring’. Here, in a rare twist, the slow burn works precisely as it’s meant to: by quietly but insistently cranking up a feeling of anxiety.

So it was that the weirdness began in an understated, even slightly hoary way, with people’s lights flickering on and off. But fortunately worse was to come when mobile phones lost their signal, Midwich became electronically cut off from the outside world and one by one, with varying degrees of theatricality, the townsfolk collapsed unconscious to the ground.

There were, mind you, two characters who escaped this fate by the simple means of not being there at the time – and, as luck would have it, they were played by the biggest names in the cast. Dr Susannah Zellaby (Keeley Hawes), a child psychologist, arrived back from London to find Midwich cordoned off, leaving her in a frenzy about the troubled 23-year-old daughter who lives with her. Paul Haynes (Max Beesley) is the local policeman whose pregnant wife also featured among the comatose – and whose state of mind wasn’t eased when the security services showed up to throw their weight unhelpfully about.

Then, 12 hours after they’d fallen down, everybody in the danger zone suddenly woke up – which might have signalled a return to the old normal, except that all the women of child-bearing age are now not just pregnant but pregnant enough to be showing.

And in this, I’d suggest, they’re not unlike the series itself at the end of episode one. Judging from that pre-credit sequence, the real body of the show is still to come. Yet, with a large cast of characters neatly established – and the unforced parallels with our current worries about the world no longer feeling under our control deftly taking shape – The Midwich Cuckoos definitely seems on the brink of delivering something both mysterious and special.

And still with Sky, Once Upon a Time in Londongrad is looking pretty good too, especially if you can overlook the shameless self-promotion of BuzzFeed that accompanies the main story.

Not that this is always easy. The first of Tuesday’s two episodes opened with Heidi Blake ‘Senior Investigator BuzzFeed News’ (and the series’ consulting producer) explaining how she used to work for newspapers ‘with declining circulations’. But that was before she was approached by BuzzFeed, which she’d mistakenly thought was all about clickbait rather than unrivalled news reporting.

The way Heidi told it (not entirely convincingly), the starting point for her team’s terrific scoop came when she got a phone call out of the blue summoning her to a posh London address – and was, she claims, startled to discover the door being opened by Michelle Young, the ex-wife of Scot Young, who’d fallen to his death from a fourth-floor window in 2014. Luckily, our Heidi already happened to know a lot about the Youngs’ finances from their divorce proceedings, and so was well-equipped to investigate further when Michelle suggested that Scot had been murdered by his shady business contacts.

Before long, Heidi had unearthed Scot’s close connections to several London-based Russian billionaires for whom he apparently laundered money. This, in turn, led to a rather impressive summary of the rise of the oligarchs under Boris Yeltsin – and their fall from grace under Vladimir Putin: a man they’d helped to make Russian president in the mistaken belief that he’d let them continue to exert political influence.

Annoyingly, too, from what we saw the BuzzFeed team do seem to be right in their continual boasting about what a great job they did gathering documents, videos and contacts. By now, the fundamentals of the oligarchs’ tale may be familiar enough. But by laying out chapter and verse so assiduously, the series is a jolting reminder of how much they, and Putin, got away with for so long. In short, this is a smug programme with plenty to be smug about.

Serves Ethel Smyth’s opera magnificently: Glyndebourne’s The Wreckers reviewed

You’ve got to hand it to Dame Ethel Smyth. Working in an era when to be a British composer implied an automatic cultural cringe towards the continent, she didn’t miss a beat when Henry Brewster, the librettist of her 1906 opera The Wreckers, chose to write in French. The incoming music director at Covent Garden was the Frenchman André Messager; perhaps, Smyth reasoned, ‘to compose this opera in French would be the best chance of a performance in England of an English opera!’ Good call: 116 years later, you get the distinct impression that the opportunity to première the unheard French version of the opera (it’s been done numerous times in English) may have tipped the balance for Glyndebourne. Picnics, after all, are more easily digested when you don’t have to worry about the words.

This new production, directed by Melly Still, serves The Wreckers magnificently. A huge scholarly effort underpins every musical detail; scores have been re-edited and orchestrations restored, and the three acts are performed completely uncut, a privilege that Glyndebourne does not extend to Tristan und Isolde. Still’s updated staging uses choral choreography, lighting (Malcolm Rippeth) and video projections (Akhila Krishnan) to gripping and often startlingly beautiful effect: a rain-streaked, wave-lashed junkyard reimagining of the Atlantic coast that mirrors and complements the elemental forces at work in Smyth’s surging orchestral and choral writing.

That’s the soul of the piece. Comparisons with Peter Grimes are not entirely invalid: both deal with outsiders threatened by the sea and a hostile community – here, a Cornish village where ship-wrecking is actively endorsed by the vicar Pasko (who emerges, in a majestic performance by Philip Horst, as the single most potent character). But how those orchestral seascapes rage, how the chorus roars and swells! Nothing I’ve heard by Smyth had prepared me for sea music of such boldness and colour. Yes, there’s a healthy glug of Wagner in the mix: Smyth, like most of her British contemporaries, was a paid-up member of the continental cringe tendency. (The programme suggests that she was deprived of educational opportunities. In fact, her training in Leipzig went beyond anything offered to a shopkeeper’s son like Elgar.)

Yet there are passages – those huge, raw choral scenes (the Glyndebourne chorus sounded primal) and sudden, haunting shafts of orchestral sunlight on an overcast and restless sonic sea – that really do linger after the flood tide has receded. Robin Ticciati and the London Philharmonic whip it along, and their bravura helps offset the main problem with The Wreckers, namely the romantic plot and its characterisation. The basic set-up is promising: an adulterous couple defy a community in which conventional morality of life and death has been inverted. There’s real meat there, and the moral equivocations of Pasko, as well as a slut-shaming lighthouse keeper (James Rutherford) and his jealous daughter (sung with flashing malice by Lauren Fagan – Smyth’s notion of casting a soprano as the villainess is particularly inspired) are a lot more interesting than the dour central couple: Pasko’s unfaithful young wife Thurza (Karis Tucker) and her squeeze Marc (Rodrigo Porras Garulo), your basic pasteboard tenor hero, out to wreck the wreckers.

The pair sang splendidly, shining above the tempestuous climaxes of the final act. But convention dictates an Act Two love duet and a final Liebestod, and at these points Smyth’s inspiration, for whatever reason, simply chokes. You can hear her straining in the right general direction, without ever generating a memorable (or even particularly interesting) musical personality for either lover. Garulo and Tucker do what they can, but this is a drama in which a band of mass murderers is more credibly human than either romantic lead, and I’m not sure that was Smyth’s intention. It’s been suggested that The Wreckers is the most important English opera between Purcell and Britten. Well, between Sullivan and Vaughan Williams, maybe. In the absence of a Holbrooke, Stanford or Rutland Boughton revival, it’s impossible to say. But you’ll never get a better chance to judge for yourself than at Glyndebourne this summer. (It’s coming to the Proms too.)

In the Linbury Theatre, the Royal Opera presented a Stravinsky and Schoenberg double bill, directed by Anthony Almeida with lead performers from the Jette Parker Young Artists Programme. Mavra, a tiny clockwork replica of a vanished Russia by the newly exiled Stravinsky, received a playful if garish staging with April Koyejo-Audiger sounding sparky as the lovestruck young heroine. Almeida’s attempts to tie it thematically to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire (I think it was an ego/id thing) didn’t quite gel, but it didn’t really matter because Alexandra Lowe gave a serious star-is-born performance as Pierrot, sending her elegant, sensuous soprano skittering, rasping and swooning over the shot-silk sonorities that flickered up from the Britten Sinfonia and Michael Papadopoulos in the pit. The audience, naturally enough, exploded.

The closing of the Chinese mind

I was born in Nanjing five years after the Tiananmen Square protests. By then, records of the demonstrations and the Communist party’s brutal suppression had been scrubbed clean. So Tiananmen was not part of the national conversation when I was growing up. I only fully grasped what had happened when I visited Hong Kong in my early twenties (that would be harder now under the city’s new national security law). Tiananmen isn’t just absent from history books; the Chinese authorities keep an eye on literature and film, so anything that’s politically subversive is censored or driven underground and abroad.

One film that fell victim to this regime is Lan Yu, which I recently saw for the first time at a screening in Soho. It’s a gay love story between a poor university student and an older Beijing businessman set in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In one scene, injured young people from the Tiananmen protests are rushed away on carts and bicycles by their friends, gunshots ringing in the distance.

The film was released in 2001 (though not in mainland China), and it is enjoying an international revival thanks to a recent remastering. I met its producer, Zhang Yongning, through a friend last year. Introducing the film on stage, Yongning said he knew he needed to find a Hong Kong or Taiwanese director who wouldn’t be as limited by mainland China’s censorship. He settled on Stanley Kwan. Kwan, who is from Hong Kong, had seen much more reporting of the 4 June crackdown than any director from the mainland. No wonder the Tiananmen scene reminded me of documentary footage.

Yongning tells me that he thinks the film’s gay romance is more likely to have affronted the censors than its reference to the protests (homosexuality was only declassified as a mental illness in 2001, and gay references are often cut from Chinese releases of western films). Nevertheless, watching the film in the lead-up to the anniversary of Tiananmen – surrounded by other overseas Chinese – felt like an act of remembrance. Has our country become any better since those students defied the authorities 33 years ago?

China is richer now, of course. At the time of Tiananmen, 60 per cent of the Chinese population lived on less than $1.90 a day (the World Bank’s official measure of poverty). Now the figure is just 0.1 per cent. The average income has risen 30-fold. These are more than just stats to my family, whose lives are immeasurably better than they were a generation ago.

But this prosperity did not, as many hoped, bring wider liberalism. In many ways, China is more shut off today than it was back then. Just look at the rise and fall of Chinese cinema. The two decades after the Cultural Revolution were a golden age for film, which saw the rise of the so-called ‘Fifth Generation’ of directors who, legendarily, all happened to be contemporaries in Beijing Film Academy’s 1978 class.

As the Chinese economy opened up in the 1980s and 1990s, these directors pushed the boundaries of speech and artistic expression. In their films they depicted, for the first time, the suffering under Chinese communism. They showed the lives of the marginalised: gay and even transgender people, as well as mistresses, thieves and prostitutes. Their films represented a tantalising vision of a free and creative China – something those students at Tiananmen at around the same time fought to realise.

For that generation of directors and actors who lived through the Cultural Revolution, their work must have been cathartic. Watching their films now, it’s hard not to feel dizzy at the speed at which China changed. How can it be that a gambling aristo (at the start of Zhang Yimou’s 1994 film To Live) exchanges his silks for a Mao suit and becomes a family man living in a commune? Did that really happen all in one lifetime?

‘No matter how resourceful you are, you can’t escape fate,’ says one character in Chen Kaige’s 1993 Farewell My Concubine. This will have resonated with the Chinese audience – how could it not, when they knew it to be true from their own lives? Few had consulted them about the direction of their country or the pace of change.

Avant-garde Chinese films are thin on the ground these days. Beijing’s censors have become more ambitious and pernicious. Chinese directors used to be able to use international acclaim to pressure the authorities back home – the censors simply couldn’t impose a blanket ban on Farewell My Concubine, the first Chinese film to win the Palme d’Or, the highest accolade at Cannes. Then the government brought in severe punishments for those who sent their films to foreign film festivals before they were viewed in Beijing. The Blue Kite, which recounts the Great Leap Forward and other Maoist disasters, was entered into (and won) the Tokyo International Film Festival without Beijing’s approval. Its director, Tian Zhuangzhuang, was banned from filmmaking for almost a decade.

Formerly radical directors end up bowing to the pressure. Zhang Yimou now directs Olympics ceremonies. Chen Kaige’s latest, The Battle at Lake Changjin, is little more than a mindless action film and didn’t risk crossing the censors. The career of a courageous new director would be a short one.

I also worry China’s cinemagoers today are too superficial, too hubristic. They don’t want to see hard questions raised about their past and present. One family member suggested to me that Chen Kaige’s debut, Yellow Earth – about the breathtaking hardship and backwardness of northwestern China in the 1930s – was just poverty porn for westerners. What tops the Chinese box office now are absurdly pro-government action films such as Wolf Warrior and Wolf Warrior 2.

So Chinese cinema is failing. What about Chinese lives? Materially, they have improved. Yet politically, the people are still powerless, as the world has witnessed with the relentless lockdown in Shanghai over the past couple of months. No amount of wealth helped the city’s people resist the state in its devastating drive to achieve zero Covid – because, fundamentally, not much has changed since the tanks rolled in 1989.

I hope my son will inherit the Queen’s kindness

When I was asked by an old friend to write this diary, I did my usual thing of: ‘Yeah I’d love to do this and of course I can get it to you by your deadline…’ Then the deadline flew past. Now I feel like I am back at school desperately writing an essay, hoping to get it in on time. At least the subject is easier to write about than the Shakespeare we studied for English A-level. This year the country, the Commonwealth, our family and so many people are celebrating a magnificent woman. Her Majesty the Queen is an incomparable monarch who has reached a record-breaking milestone. She also happens to be my grannie, and I am a very proud granddaughter.

When I was thinking about memories of the 2012 Jubilee, I rang a few of my friends and family to jog my mind. One friend referred to it as a ‘festival of Britain’. A family member reminded me of Grace Jones doing hula-hoops at the Jubilee concert and Alfie Boe singing from the window of Buckingham Palace to the crowds. On the day of the regatta, we watched 850 boats floating down the Thames in honour of Her Majesty. Most of all, I remember seeing my grannie and grandpa standing for eight hours in the rain, waving and smiling, and keeping the family and the nation moving forward like they had done for so many years.

The Jubilee allows an opportunity to reflect on all the wonderful charities and organisations that Her Majesty supports. Over the years of her reign, she has – alongside the Duke of Edinburgh – supported more than 1,000. I remember in 2012 attending one of the Big Lunches, which was a fantastic way to meet those contributing to their communities. My sister and I will be lucky enough to go to another of these lunches this year to celebrate some incredible people. I am also delighted to hear that the Jubilee pageant will include volunteers and key workers who have worked tirelessly over the past few years.

Another celebration taking place this year is the Queen’s Green Canopy, a unique tree-planting initiative created to mark the Jubilee. Next week, I am due to visit Horatio’s Garden, a spinal injury charity of which I am honoured to be a patron. It has planted a Jubilee tree in its fully accessible garden in the London Spinal Cord Injury Centre at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. The garden is designed for both patients with spinal injuries and their loved ones who face long stays at the hospital. I received spinal surgery in this hospital as a 12-year-old and it brings me so much joy to be able to celebrate with them now.

Seventy years is really quite something, isn’t it? The Jubilee stands as a testimony to a woman who has transcended time and has been that constant rock for so many when the world can feel so fragile. I remember during the worldwide lockdown, when Her Majesty gave a speech saying ‘we will meet again’, and in an instant we were all connected in a collective confidence that everything would be OK and life would continue one day.

As I look back on the 2012 Jubilee and the one we are about to celebrate, I think about how my life has changed in that time. I am now a wife and a mother with so much more responsibility than I had as a 21-year-old just leaving university. I have given my life to my special little family and hope to impart even an inch of the values my grandmother has lived her life by. I think about my son August and what I’d like for him, what kind of world I’d like him to grow up in. And I think of my grannie and what she has stood for, for so many people and for our family during these 70 years. I’d love Augie to have her patience, her calmness and her kindness, while always being able to laugh at himself and keep a twinkle in his eye.

And for me… well I’d like the next ten years, after the uncertainty of the pandemic, to be filled with gratitude for Her Majesty’s dedication and service. I hope the next decade is also a time for reflection on how, as a nation, we really are quite a great one. I, for one, am excited to see how we all celebrate this Platinum Jubilee.

The toxic concept of toxic masculinity

Anyone who has passed through an education in the past decade will have encountered the term ‘toxic masculinity’. It is one of the many charming phrases that our age has come up with to pathologise ordinary people. Brewing for some decades, the concept of ‘toxic masculinity’ was brought into the mainstream in the last ten years by fourth-wave feminists intent on portraying half of our species as ‘problematic’, to use another of the delightful watchwords of our era.

The simple assertion of the ‘toxic masculinity’ crowd is that specifically male behaviours are a problem. The most extreme aspects of male misbehaviour are portrayed as though they are routine. So young feminists insist that we live in a ‘rape culture’, in which men are alleged to be allowed to rape with impunity. Likewise, male-on-female domestic violence is portrayed as a kind of pandemic. And the answer to all these things is essentially to feminise men – to tell specifically young heterosexual men that they must curb their masculinity and subdue many of their most natural instincts. In every direction their path is cut off. For instance, men who come to the rescue of women are dismissed as ‘white knighting’, as though even the wish to help a woman is proof of ‘toxic masculinity’.

Of course, the concept itself is toxic – quite as much so as if our age decided to talk about women in a similar way. There’s no reason why ‘toxic femininity’ couldn’t be made as popular a concept as its opposite number. There are certainly plenty of grounds for talking about such things. For if men are, for example, more prone to physical violence then the data also shows that women are more prone to subtler methods of undermining opponents, such as reputational destruction. There are behaviours that are more male and behaviours that are more female, and the fact that some members of each sex are quite capable of one or other, or both, does not negate that fact.

Nevertheless, we do not hear much talk of toxic femininity. It is men who have been portrayed in recent years as a problem. And if you don’t believe this, speak to any teenage boy. They will be able to tell you some version of this.

Yet there must be consequences to interventions this hamfisted. It is one thing to try to fine-tune our species; quite another to attempt to do so while wearing mittens. And that is what concepts such as toxic masculinity are. They are blundering, blunt, inept efforts at rewiring – efforts that must have consequences.

In New York last week a woman sitting on the subway was approached by a madman. Not a particularly rare occurrence in itself. But this interaction was of the kind that sticks in the mind. For the man sat down beside the stranger and when she got up he grabbed her by the hair and yanked her back down, holding her in place in this way. Clearly terrified and crying for help, there she stayed. Was this an example of ‘toxic masculinity’? It would be a stretch to say so.

What was clear was that the answer should have been a bit of good, decent masculinity. In such a situation the men in the carriage (and there were many) should have stepped forward and sorted this guy out themselves. Perhaps it would have just taken one of them to confront him, or perhaps it would have taken several. The man in question was clearly disturbed and violent. Still, the men present clearly ought to have done something. I would say they should now hold their manhood cheap, but I suspect they do already. One man filmed it on his mobile phone – the pinnacle of present-day courage. Others stared into their devices in the hope that it would all go away.

And in one way it is understandable. Everybody has heard stories in which someone has stood up to some thug and been knifed or shot for their troubles. And then there is the reputational risk of any bad interaction in the age of camera phones. Since the offender on this occasion was black, perhaps the other men in the carriage feared the possible racial component of any resulting footage.

In any case America had to confront this question on a far bigger stage this week. After the initial shock over the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, the country was shocked anew to learn that the police had been on the scene for a long time while the gunman was shooting elementary school children in their classroom. Every time there is a school shooting there is the inevitable discussion about whether the answer to a bad guy with a gun isn’t a good guy with a gun. But on this occasion it transpires that there were plenty of ‘good guys’ with guns. Nineteen of them, in fact. One for each slain child. For the best part of an hour and a half these policemen sat around in a corridor waiting for backup while the bad guy had the scene to himself.

Those defending the police say the commanding officer thought it was a hostage situation. But for 90 minutes phone calls were coming from inside the school, including from children, begging the police to enter. Until a Border Patrol tactical team finally made it to the scene, the most action the police saw was in handcuffing and tasering parents who were desperately trying to save their children.

Does this prove that masculinity is dead? Not in itself, no. But it should remind us that society needs men to behave in certain ways at certain times. In warfare masculinity is a very good thing, as it is for the police, firemen and many others. It would have been good to see some masculinity on that New York subway. It would have been good to have seen some male heroism in Texas. But there must be consequences to telling men that their instincts are wrong, that their behaviour is wrong, and that all their intentions are tainted by dint of their chromosomes.

Who’s to blame for the air travel crisis?

I sincerely hope you’re not reading this on a holiday flight that’s sitting on the tarmac with no indication as to when it might take off – or a sad train home after your flight was suddenly cancelled. Brace for three-hour delays at security, we’re told; don’t even try checking bags in, and at worst, as happened to Tui passengers at Manchester who thought they were going to Kos, watch out for a text after you’ve boarded telling you you’re going nowhere at all.

How and why? When the pandemic set in, airlines and airports – thinking, not unreasonably, that their industry was doomed – made mass redundancies rather than keeping sufficient staff on furlough. Now the industry is 100,000 staff short (10,000 at Heathrow alone), labour is scarce everywhere, rehiring is delayed by ‘airside security pass’ checks, and the Unite union is rubbing its hands at the scale of wage offers needed to address the problem. And as pay surges, so holiday prices will become unaffordable to those already skewered by cost-of-living rises.

Should the industry have started rehiring months ago? Should transport ministers have made it easier for them to do so? Of course. But they didn’t – and this is beginning to look like the summer for a quiet, Spectator–reading staycation.

Nothing like the 1970s

‘How many of you actually remember the 1970s?’ the Prime Minister asked his cabinet last week. Few hands went up, we’re told. But mine certainly would have done. Because I’m sure I have a more vivid recall of that dismal decade than does the then short-trousered Johnson, ten years my junior.

I remember, for example, the ‘three-day week’ provoked by miners’ strikes that blighted my first winter at Oxford. I won’t forget the day in 1975 when my father said we had to move house because, even though he was a top City executive, raging inflation and punitive tax rates meant he could no longer afford the outgoings on our London flat; nor the week in November 1976 when I was on a junior bankers’ training course at the Bank of England while Labour’s Chancellor, Denis Healey, was busy at the Treasury negotiating an emergency rescue loan from the IMF.

A rare flash of brightness: I can still picture the Queen in a sugar-pink coat-dress on her Silver Jubilee walkabout in Cheapside. Then a darker vision of the winter of discontent and a day of relief in 1979, before the Thatcher revolution kicked in, when I was told I was being posted abroad – to Brussels, but frankly I would have gone anywhere.

Britain then was a decaying economic wreck from which bright youngsters dreamed of escaping – to Hong Kong or New York, to Australia or South Africa, to teach English in Barcelona or study business at Insead. Maybe some today have the same dream – and if they do, they should go for it. But on the whole this country offers incomparably more choice, opportunity and colour, and less strife, than it did when I was starting work and Boris Johnson was an inky schoolboy. The Platinum Jubilee is a moment to recognise that transformation.

As price rises bite, we may well be heading for another winter of discontent. But only those who don’t remember the 1970s will believe it’s anything like as bad as the last one.

Old and proven

Is it time I stopped banging on about bank closures? Half of all UK bank branches have shut since 2015, according to Which?, and more than 200 will follow this year, making a total of almost 5,000 high-street premises remade as bistros and tanning salons without bringing the pillars of civilisation crashing down. And if more ex-banks now become charity shops, you might argue, that might actually help the cost of living crisis.

Well maybe, as I so often say. I still think something’s lost when the institution that holds our savings no longer has a human face or local presence; and history is diminished too. Consider this month’s closure of Child & Co., the NatWest offshoot in Fleet Street that is Britain’s oldest bank – dating from around 1664, so 30 years older than the Bank of England. Its last glossy brochure spoke of adapting to change while ‘retaining old and proven values’. But insufficient footfall these days means its handsome banking hall must be repurposed – unless at the last moment there’s an entrepreneur nostalgic enough to make an offer for Child & Co. and its customer list as a going concern.

A hopeless proposition? Not at all: just along Fleet Street is C. Hoare & Co., an upstart from 1672 that’s still family-run and setting benchmarks in bespoke personal banking. How much better if these two veterans carried on competing head to head, instead of one of them transitioning to a Specsavers or a Tesco Express.

Tip from a Master

Many readers are even crosser than I am about the slow death of branch banking and I salute Sebastian Payne – not the FT journalist but the Master of Wine of the same name – for an absolute scorcher of a letter on the subject of Barclays’ closure in Saffron Walden. Some years ago, I took a day-trip to Stevenage with my predecessor Christopher Fildes for a stupendous lunch hosted by Sebastian at The Wine Society – a rare model of a business that’s mutually owned by its customers and run for their benefit under the slogan ‘Passion before Profit’. Perhaps the rescuer of Child & Co. could offer a banking service on similar principles.

But this being a holiday weekend, you’ll expect a parting tip for bon vivant travellers – so here’s one also prompted by Sebastian Payne. If you’re motoring from the Eurotunnel towards France’s southbound A10 autoroute via an overnight stop at Chartres, ignore those boring chain hotels on the ring road; instead head for the elegant old Grand Monarque in the centre, call for the wine list and study it carefully. Why? Because, says our Master, ‘so few places in France still maintain proper cellars, but this one does’.

A self-regarding take on I’m-not-sure-what: Bergman Island reviewed

Bergman Island sounds, on first acquaintance, like a theme-park attraction. Roll up, roll up! Let us speed you through the shed where Max von Sydow is weeping and then plunge you downwards until you come face to face with a priest struggling with his faith. Then you’ll twist hard left – hold on! – to encounter Liv Ullmann suffering from a series of nightmares in which God appears graceless and indifferent. Or is God dead? To be fair, I’d probably go on such a ride. It may be more exciting than this, and over more quickly. That’s possibly too harsh, but this film is certainly most self-regarding.

Written and directed by Mia Hansen-Love, it is a meandering, literary, dreamy, inconclusive take on I’m-not-sure-what. It’s not wholly unbeguiling. You won’t wish you were dead like, say, God. But it is densely and tiringly meta. Hansen-Love wrote this while staying on Faro, the Swedish island where Bergman lived and worked and that’s where it is set. The main characters are a married American couple, Tony (Tim Roth, underused) and Chris (Vicky Krieps), who have come for a summer. He’s an established filmmaker, while she’s struggling to write a script (of course she is).

They are staying in one of Bergman’s houses (he owned four), which, as a local tells them cheerily, includes the bedroom ‘where he shot Scenes from a Marriage, the film that made millions of people divorce’. That’s not encouraging. We are, I think, meant to sympathise with her, especially as he’s rather in love with himself, but she tested my patience. The house comes with a stunning whitewashed old mill where she chooses to work, but it’s ‘too beautiful’ and ‘too perfect’ and it’s making her feel ‘oppressed’. She must be a nightmare on Tripadvisor.

Actually, the island is (in real life, as well as here) a sort of Bergman amusement park. There’s a Bergman museum, a Bergman cinema and a Bergman centre where you can buy sunglasses just like the ones he wore. There’s even a big-yellow-bus ‘Bergman Safari’ where there’s no Max von Sydow weeping in a shed but you can see the tree that was in Shame even if, as the tour conductor notes, ‘it’s bigger now’. The island’s visitors are Bergman fans and Bergman scholars, and Chris is sufficiently inspired to write a film that becomes the story within the story, starring Mia Wasikowska as Amy and Anders Danielsen Lie as Joseph. They are former lovers who have never managed to get their timing right and remeet on Faro to attend a wedding. On occasion, when we cut between the narratives, Chris and Amy are wearing the same clothes, so something is being said about Chris’s need for romantic fulfilment. But I couldn’t swear by it.

Is this an homage to Bergman? Or a takedown? It is far from clear. There is much reverence, with multiple gushing references to his films. But there are also moments when he’s reviled. Chris, for example, raises the matter of his personal life, and the fact that he was an absent father to the nine children he had by five women. Would he have created such a body of work ‘if he’d had to change diapers?’ Or there’s the fella at the wedding who says: ‘Fine, three critics thought he was amazing, but there’s a world outside your own asshole.’

More problematically, perhaps, matters referred to in passing are simply allowed to pass. Chris sneaks a look into Tony’s notebook at one point and you expect what she discovers to play out, but it never does, leaving you feeling somewhat cheated.

In short, it poses questions but never any answers. So we still don’t know if God is dead, alive, away on a spa break or just indifferent.

God save the Queen: the monarchy has become more valuable than ever

Rarely has a public figure taken a promise so seriously as the vow that Her Majesty the Queen made on her 21st birthday in 1947: ‘I declare before you all that my whole life – whether it be long or short – shall be devoted to your service.’ Predictions that she would take the occasion of her 60th, 70th, 80th or 90th birthdays to retire and enjoy an easier life have proved laughably wide of the mark. The celebrations this weekend are a reminder that the Queen has, as she pledged, given her life to her country.

There would be no disgrace if the Queen did retire in the manner of the much younger Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands, who abdicated in favour of her son nine years ago. Yet she has continued to serve, while adjusting her schedule to account for her 96 years. She remains not just a unifying force, but perhaps the most potent such force in public life. This is due not to her position alone but to her personal record, her character and service.

Britain in recent decades has often seemed a fractious place, but the constitutional under-pinnings of the country, as personified by Elizabeth II, have remained intact. Only a small proportion remember life in Britain before she was at the helm. It is not that the Queen is a great orator who has popped up on every occasion to motivate us. So often her power has resided in her restraint: it is the things she hasn’t said, the interventions she hasn’t made, which have proved so influential. She has understood that as monarch she does not need to join arguments.

There can be no better demonstration of the power of reticence than the Queen’s words in response to last year’s TV interview given by Harry and Meghan. ‘Recollections may vary’ must be among the three most poignant words uttered by any leader in recent years. Her work ethic speaks silently and instructively to others who have sought to use their position as a device for publicity and a segue into showbusiness or commentary.

Yet for all the Queen’s determination to continue with her life’s work, we must accept that we are going to see less of her in future. The daily round of engagements which has formed the backbone of her life for so many years has necessarily been pared down in recent months. Occasions such as the State Opening of Parliament have had to take place without her. Princes Charles and William are increasingly sharing her workload. We will have to accept, too, that public walkabouts are steadily being replaced with processions by buggy.

That, perhaps, is why the Platinum Jubilee is being observed with such anticipation: those celebrating are mindful that such occasions are very rare. Seldom does a monarch celebrate a 75th or 80th anniversary: there is no obvious name for these occasions. After Silver, Gold, Diamond and the lower–key Sapphire Jubilee of five years ago, we are running out of precious metals and stones.

Nevertheless, we are not entering a period of regency. The Queen remains very much an active participant in her own reign: the authority of Buckingham Palace has not been eroded by the strengthening of Clarence House, or by the drama between the houses of Sussex and Cambridge. Prince Charles, the holder of the longest apprenticeship in history, remains just that: a servant who is still learning from the boss.

This is not a week for looking too much to the future; rather it is for celebrating the treasures of recent decades and marking the here and now. It is a week which has confounded the predictions of republicans, who were quite sure that public regard for the monarchy would have long since faded by now. A conference of global republicans being held this weekend has struggled to capture much public support in Britain, or in any of the 54 Commonwealth countries where her Jubilee is being celebrated.

Rather than losing its relevance, the monarchy has become more useful than ever in the age of globalisation and mass migration. Newcomers to Canada, for example, are told that the oath of allegiance is about the present-day, not about nostalgia. ‘We profess our loyalty to a person who represents all Canadians – and not to a document such as a constitution, a banner such as a flag or a geopolitical entity such as a country,’ says the welcome pack for new citizens. ‘It is a remarkably simple yet powerful principle: Canada is personified by the Sovereign just as the Sovereign is personified by Canada.’

The same is true for Britain – and this weekend is an opportunity to reflect not just on Elizabeth II’s service but on all that she continues to bestow. Almost a century after her birth and after 70 years of her reign, we have more occasion than ever to say the anthem and the prayer: God Save the Queen.