Convenience Big Store: New tensions in an old conflict

14 May, 2021

Hello,

The rich are indeed different. For £127,000, according to the FT's How to Spend It, you can buy the "ultimate" self-playing Steinway grand piano. Who on earth wants a piano that plays itself? But then, unlike Jeff Bezos, I'm not sure I'd want a vast $500m superyacht either. Sounds tiring.

As a woman in Silicon Valley told The Times, if you want to pick up a rich man here, the "odds are good" but the "goods are odd". See the piece below in our highlights from the latest weekly issue of The Knowledge. And if you want to read more about Jeff Bezos, see Moneymakers in the issue itself, available now on the app and the website.

All good wishes,

Jon Connell

Editor-in-chief

Israel

New tensions in an old conflict

My wife, six children and I have taken to huddling in our living room, says Refaat Alareer in The New York Times. We reckon that's "the place least likely to take a stray hit from Israeli missiles". Part of me wants to take the kids outside, so we're not "sitting ducks" – but at least at home we would "die together". This is life in Gaza, where Israeli missiles are raining down on us once again. Our children are being killed: 31 at the last count, along with 88 adults. Our homes and infrastructure are being destroyed. And with talk growing of an Israeli land invasion, the population is "living in constant dread".

It's much the same in Tel Aviv, says James Inverne in The Jewish Chronicle. You're eating dinner and the air-raid siren goes off. A panicked run to the "missile-proof (we hope) safe room". Uncertain smiles to reassure the kids. And all to the constant "thump, thump" of the Iron Dome defence system, which automatically launches projectiles to intercept Hamas rockets. Without it the Israeli death toll of eight would be much, much higher. As unsettling as they are, those thumps have become "the vital beating of a country's heart".

As usual, the conflict was "sparked by tensions old and new", says Felicia Schwartz in The Wall Street Journal. Jerusalem saw its "worst violence in years" ahead of a looming Supreme Court decision – now delayed – about the eviction of Palestinians from their homes in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood. That overlapped with the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and an Israeli holiday celebrating the capture of the city in 1967. Eventually Hamas started firing rockets from Gaza into Israel – more than 1,600 have been launched since Monday. And Israel retaliated with airstrikes.

The fighting "serves political agendas on both sides", says The Washington Post. Hamas was denied a chance to take over the Palestinian leadership last month when the leader of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, postponed a promised election. By "deliberately crossing an Israeli red line", the group hopes to "complete the discrediting" of Abbas and disrupt Israel's newly friendly relations with several Sunni Arab states. Meanwhile, Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has just "failed to form a new government" and faces being dumped out of office – leaving him open to prosecution on corruption charges. As is so often the case in these never-ending wars, "no one on either side stands to benefit from the fighting, other than the feuding political leaders".

Love etc

Hunting billionaires in Man Jose

San Jose, at the heart of Silicon Valley, has become known as "Man Jose": a place where eligible bachelors outnumber single women. You might think this would make it the perfect hunting ground for husbands – and if that's your aim, "the odds are good", a woman from Silicon Valley tells The Times. "But the goods are odd."

These computer nerds in "pizza-stained T-shirts" are serial philanderers in disguise. Why? Because they can be. In 2012 the public offering of Facebook is thought to have created 1,000 young millionaires. Nowhere else on earth is so saturated with "young, intelligent and wildly overcompensated hyper-achievers".

These nerdy men are looking for "the whole package" – an Olympian supermodel with a PHDs in, say, astrophysics. But when one of those can't be found, the men of Man Jose settle for polyamory, a life of skipping from women to women, sometimes three in a night.

Among the revellers, once, was Bill Gates, who more than 30 years ago became America's youngest billionaire at 31. According to stories that have surfaced this week, he celebrated by hosting "naked parties with strippers." Well, he was still unmarried, so why not?

Property

THE COUNTRY HOUSE At the end of a mile-long drive, Grade II listed West Woodyates Manor is a "magnificent house surrounded by wonderful gardens", says Country Life. Built in the 18th century by Thomas Pitt, "the diamond-smuggling adventurer" who founded the political dynasty, the 12-bedroom house is set in 970 acres of gardens and parkland, with a four-bedroom cottage, and is 11 miles from Salisbury. £18.5m.

Long read shortened

Populism's first casualty is the truth

"Ruthless and truthless." The words are true not just of Boris Johnson, but of Labour's triple election winner Tony Blair, says Ferdinand Mount in the London Review of Books. The key to Blair's success, as it is to Johnson's, was centralising power in 10 Downing Street. When Mrs Thatcher was PM, fewer than 70 people worked there. Under Blair, the number rose to 225. The increase was made not "simply in the interests of better government, but of dominating 'the narrative' – that postmodernist vogue word which was unknown in British politics before Blair".

No one worried if the narrative was accurate. To justify going to war with Iraq in 2003, Blair's right-hand man, Alastair Campbell, compiled the "Dodgy Dossier", at the heart of which, as of Blair's subsequent statement to the Commons, was "a deliberate untruth" – that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The "facts" were fixed to fit the policy.

As with Blair, so with Boris Johnson, a politician who is also happy to stretch the truth. Take his claim during the Brexit negotiations that there would be no border checks between Great Britain and Northern Ireland. He also insisted our fishermen would be protected, but the agreement he signed "preserves a huge share of the catch for Continental fishermen". Blair got away with everything thanks to his "softening charm". Johnson gets away with it – with his "oafish betrayals" and "shameless self-contradictions" – by playing the clown. But neither of them, as Peter Oborne vividly shows in his new book, is a great respecter of the truth.

Peter Oborne's The Assault on Truth is published by Simon & Schuster (£12.99). Read the full article here.

Inside politics

Ben Houchen, the Teesside mayor who was re-elected with a "whopping" 73% of the vote last week, has imagination, verve, and vision, says Will Hutton in The Observer. His "do it if it works" approach spans nationalising the local airport and creating the "deregulatory free-for-all" Teesside Freeport. He's also getting on board with the green industrial revolution by setting up a plant to make wind turbines and backing a hydrogen transport hub. The result? A "self-reinforcing virtuous circle" of jobs and investment.

Voters "like what they see" – as does Boris Johnson, who has backed Houchen's projects "to the hilt". That's the reason 750 Treasury jobs are being moved to Darlington rather than Leeds, the obvious northern centre. Labour will find it hard to paint Houchen as a "same old Tory". Indeed, "Houchenism is a threat to Thatcherites, Blairites and Corbynites alike. It could even win 73% of the vote across Britain."

Life

Wild times with the "bonkers baron"

The eccentric Lord Merlin, played by Andrew Scott, steals the show in the BBC adaptation of Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love, but he's not a patch on the author's inspiration for the role, says Alison Boshoff in the Daily Mail. Having inherited a fortune from his uncle, the 14th Baron Berners was in his mid-forties when he moved into 12-bedroom Faringdon House, Oxfordshire, in 1931. A pet giraffe roamed the grounds and he dressed his dogs in necklaces. He dyed his flock of doves the shades of the rainbow and urged neighbouring farmers do the same with their cattle.

In the garden, the "bonkers baron" erected a 140ft viewing tower for his lover, Robert "Mad Boy" Heber-Percy, who was 28 years his junior. (A sign on the tower read: "Members of the public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk.") And he enjoyed startling his neighbours by wearing a pig mask while driving his Rolls-Royce, which had a portable clavichord under the driver's seat.

The extravagance of Berners and "Mad Boy" made them the toast of British society for the next two decades. Guests at their house parties included the Mitfords, HG Wells, Gertrude Stein, Igor Stravinsky and Salvador Dalí. Cecil Beaton photographed John Betjeman's wife serving tea to her white Arab horse, Moti, in the drawing room. The socialite Doris Delevingne tried to seduce the gay Cecil Beaton at Faringdon, telling him: "There is no such thing as an impotent man, only an incompetent woman."

Berners died at 66, leaving the house to Heber-Percy. Only then was his final act of mischief revealed: he had drawn moustaches on every family portrait.

Read the full article here.