Convenience Big Store: All eyes on Scotland after Labour’s dark day

7 May 2021

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Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

UK elections

All eyes on Scotland after Labour's dark day

The Tories' crushing victory in the Hartlepool by-election was worse than Labour's darkest nightmares, says Patrick Maguire in The Times. Despite fielding the "unloved and low-wattage" Jill Mortimer, the Tories won 52% of the vote, nearly 7,000 more than Labour and double the Tory share in 2019. In the English council elections that have declared so far, the story is of more Tory gains. But for all their "gnashing of teeth", Corbynite diehards such as Richard Burgon and Diane Abbott aren't saying Keir Starmer should resign – yet.

This "thumping" result is no surprise, says Stephen Bush in the New Statesman. Add the Conservative's 2019 vote to that of the now defunct Brexit Party and you get today's outcome pretty much on the nose. What's striking is Labour's shoddy performance, winning just 28.7% of the vote. The Tories are triumphant thanks largely to Boris Johnson's "vaccine bounce", which will only grow as we reopen further and the economy recovers. But Starmer "bungled the handful of calls he could make", personally choosing a vocal Remainer to contest a heavy Leave seat.

Starmer now has a political "riddle" to solve, says Gordon Rayner in The Daily Telegraph: why can Old Etonian Johnson connect to working-class northern voters better than "a toolmaker's son named after Labour's founding father"? The "uncomfortable truth" is that the Tories have already done the hard part: persuading Labour voters to switch for the first time. There's no guarantee they can be won back. Johnson's "high-spending, big state" Tories are dominating the centre ground and, by getting Brexit done, the party has "moved on from its decades-long internal struggle".

But there are more "profound" problems for Labour than the legacies of Corbyn and Brexit, says Daniel Finkelstein in The Times. For 15 years it's been losing working-class voters while attracting younger urbanites. This new demographic is nowhere near large enough to replace the old one. This may not last for ever: the Tory appeal to older, less urban, less ethnically diverse voters may eventually give Labour the demographic upper hand. "But eventually is a long time in politics."

The big picture

What matters now is Scotland, where they're having proper parliamentary elections that will determine the fate of Nicola Sturgeon and the cause of Scottish independence. We should get final results on Saturday night, but the SNP doesn't appear to be on track for a majority, pollster John Curtice has told the BBC. If Sturgeon falls short, she'll be in a tight spot, says Chris Deerin in the New Statesman. The PM will argue that the lack of a nationalist surge means Brexit hasn't converted significantly more Scots to independence. Alex Salmond and his Alba party will be "a constant thorn" in her side, "demanding more confrontation with Westminster and less caution". The coalition between the "indy-curious" and hardline nationalists could easily come unstuck.

Life

Getty Images

Bill and Melinda Gates: what went wrong?

It's hard to believe Bill and Melinda Gates are getting divorced, says Alice Thomson in The Times. Unlike so many celebrity couples, the Microsoft founder, 65, and his wife, 56, seemed truly settled. They told me that they meditated together – "Not cross-legged or anything," said Bill, "but on chairs next to each other." When they went for a stroll in the woods, Bill would go first to check the path because "Melinda doesn't like cobwebs".

They met in 1987, when Melinda became the first female MBA graduate to work at Microsoft and Bill the world's youngest billionaire. They were placed next to each other at a business dinner, she says in her memoirs, and a few months later Bill asked her out in the office car park – are you free for dinner in two weeks' time? "I laughed and said: 'That's not spontaneous enough for me. Ask me out closer to the date.'" Two hours later Bill rang her at home, suggesting supper that evening. It went well. He loved that she could beat him at Cluedo. She loved his methodical mindset. At their 1994 wedding – a $1m ceremony in Hawaii – Bill did mental maths to cut the wedding cake fairly. Every guest got an identically sized slice.

So what went wrong? Why have the couple, who have three children, declared their 27-year-marriage "irretrievably broken"? Maybe it was because Bill negotiated an annual weekend away with his ex-girlfriend, software entrepreneur Ann Winblad. Each year Bill and Ann retreated to her North Carolina beach house for a weekend of hang-gliding, long walks on the beach and crazy golf. It was strictly a meeting of minds, Bill told Time magazine in 1997. "We can play putt-putt while discussing biomechanics."

Or maybe it was their Seattle mansion. Bill built the $123m property when he was a bachelor, and you can tell, says Fortune. The lavish pad has 18 bathrooms, a Leonardo da Vinci notebook, a trampoline room and "enough software and high-tech displays to make a newlywed feel as though she were living inside a video game". It was not Melinda's style. "We won't have that house for ever," she told The New York Times in 2019. "I'm actually really looking forward to the day that Bill and I live in a 1,500 sq ft house."

It's going to be an expensive break-up, says Joe Pinsker in The Atlantic. The couple own more farmland than anyone in the US, as well as $26bn in Microsoft stock. That's the trouble with super-rich divorces. "The usual dilemmas of who still hangs out with which friends and where the kids go for the holidays are mixed in with the fate of enormous charitable efforts and large tracts of land."

Property

THE COTTAGE Dating from Tudor times, Grade II listed Water Lane Farm is on the fringes of Storrington, West Sussex. It has three bedrooms, three bathrooms and a drawing room with exposed beams, oak flooring and an inglenook fireplace. There are outbuildings in the half-acre of mature gardens. along with a well and a pond with a waterfall. For trains to London, head to Pulborough station, 10 minutes away. £650,000.

Everyone's watching

Nomadland

I'd love to tell you Nomadland is overhyped, says Tom Shone in The Sunday Times. It scooped the top Oscars without anyone in the UK having clapped eyes on it, and sounds miserable: widowed sixtysomething Fern (Frances McDormand) loses her home and drifts around America in a van, looking for work. But "the open road has never looked better" than in writer and director Chloé Zhao's "melancholy poem about loss and restlessness". McDormand, who won her third Oscar for the role, has "the promise of mischief in her grin and a little lunacy in her eyes". Her sprightly stoicism "comes close to comedy".

Halfway through she "takes a dump in a bucket", says Johnny Oleksinski in the New York Post. She doesn't exactly scream "GIMME OSCAR NOW!" when she does it, "but you can see the words burning in her eyes". The film's real stars, however, are the "actual, remarkable nomads" Zhao found to play versions of themselves. We never forget that this is a real America of "often unforgiving environments", but we also don't lose hope.

Somewhere inside this "lovely and desperate" 108-minute masterpiece, there's "the ghost of a western", says Anthony Lane in The New Yorker. Fern's horse is her van and the enormous skies of violet and rose look down on her country. Motion pictures lean towards movement: "The medium is not made for staying still." While the possibility of danger "hangs around", it stays away from Fern, packed tight away in her snug van. "On she goes."

Nomadland is available on Star (Disney+). Watch the trailer here.

From the archives

S.O.S.

For the first time in 38 years, Abba are releasing new music. Here they are in 1975, in their famous cat costumes, which doubled as a tax-dodging tactic. Swedish law said the costumes could be tax-free, so long as they were so outrageous you could not wear them on the street.

Vintage fiction

"I'm writing a book about us when we were little," Nancy Mitford wrote to her sister Jessica on April 13, 1945. "It's not a farce this time but serious – a novel, don't be nervous!" The Pursuit of Love, Nancy's fifth novel, was a roman à clef: the vivid, spirited Radletts and their eccentricities were mined from her own aristocratic family.

It's narrated by Fanny, sensible cousin, daughter of "the Bolter" (named for her inability to remain faithful) and witness to the dramas of beautiful Linda and her siblings: "always either on a peak of happiness or drowning in black waters of despair... they loved or they loathed, they laughed or they cried, they lived in a world of superlatives". When not congregating in the airing cupboard for essential Hons meetings, or to discuss matters of sex, gleaned from Ducks and Duck Breeding, there was the thrilling possibility of being "hunted" by Uncle Matthew and his bloodhounds.

The story's genius lies in its wicked humour, said Olivia Laing in The Observer, "which remains relentlessly uplifting even as the Blitz begins to smash all the hopes of that prewar Arcadia". Linda escapes into a series of "wildly unsuitable liaisons" before falling in love with an "endearingly wicked" French duke, Fabrice de Sauveterre (based on Nancy's own great love, Gaston Palewski).

Published in December 1945, the book was an instant success and sold in its thousands – Mitford heard the Duke and Duchess of Windsor were giving copies as Christmas presents, "which tickles me very much". As her friend Evelyn Waugh, who suggested the title, once wrote to her: "The charm of your writing depends on your refusal to recognise a distinction between girlish chatter and literary language."

Quoted

"Something that Keir Starmer is going to have to understand if he's going to get ahead in politics – most people have had an encounter with a lawyer who was cleverer than them and they rarely remember it with fondness."

Simon Evans on Radio 4's News Quiz