Convenience Big Store: The feuds behind great drama

22 July, 2021

In the headlines

Empty supermarket shelves are prompting fears that panic buying will return as the "pingdemic" strikes supply lines. It's "shelf isolation", says Metro. A close ally of Dominic Cummings has called his claim that he and a "few dozen" colleagues plotted to oust Boris Johnson days after the 2019 election "total bollocks". The insider tells Henry Zeffman in The Times that "his friends have been telling him for weeks to stop". The director of the opening ceremony for the Olympics has been sacked for anti-semitism a day before the Tokyo Games begin. Today is Prince George's eighth birthday – he's "officially old enough to stop wearing shorts", says Marie Claire.

Comment of the day

Werner Herzog, left, and Klaus Kinski on the set of Aguirre, Wrath of God. Alamy

The feuds behind great drama

Feuds are the secret of creative success, says Ben Lawrence in The Daily Telegraph. Take Laurence Olivier and John Gielgud. On the surface the two actors were friendly, but underneath things were unbearably tense. Neither liked the other's performance style. While Gielgud was mellifluous and bookish, Olivier was physical and earthy. After the latter's turn as Romeo, Gielgud sniffed that he "was inclined to be too athletic in the bedroom scene with Juliet". The actor Klaus Kinski and director Werner Herzog were the same. When Kinski threatened to quit Herzog's 1972 film Aguirre, Wrath of God, the director allegedly held him at gunpoint to make him stay. "Extreme? Perhaps, but the end result was one of the masterpieces of modern cinema."

But in our new "caring, sharing world", such feuds are under threat. "Theatre practitioners are under pressure to make rehearsal rooms 'safe spaces' and the mantra #BeKind echoes from every social media chamber." We mustn't let them win. After all, disagreements force artists to reassess their opinions and egos – improving their work in the process. "Even if it creates a nasty atmosphere, the best culture thrives on conflict."

Read the full article here (paywall).

Don't be fooled by the polls, Boris

Have we reached "peak Johnson"? It may seem an odd question, says Robert Shrimsley in the Financial Times. The Tories are comfortably ahead in the polls and Boris's personal rating is "far higher" than Labour leader Keir Starmer's. Given his "imperviousness to political gravity", calling peak Boris is risky. But the cracks are starting to appear: missteps over reopening, by-election defeats, last weekend's rapid U-turn over whether or not he should self-isolate. No 10 is back to "infighting and counter-briefing", and the PM's "levelling up" speech was a flop.

He doesn't need "new converts"; he just needs to keep the supporters he has. But knowing this makes him "more risk-averse", delaying or diluting important decisions that might upset his base, and leaning into divisive "wedge issues" around culture. He has failed to spend any of the political capital from the vaccine success on building support for tough decisions on crucial issues such as climate change and funding social care. Yet, while struggling to tackle Covid aftershocks, he still has expensive "big ambitions", tricky for a PM who "fears new taxes". And "there is no tribe of Johnson loyalists". His standing with MPs is shallow and based entirely on his ability to win. Boris's stock is still high, but if he wastes the opportunity to do the "political hard yards" now, he will regret it.

Read the full article here (paywall).

Gone viral

Here's professional cliff diver David Colturi leaping into the Cave of Light, a natural pool on Ibiza. A team of divers sponsored by Red Bull made the perilous 82ft jump from a narrow rock in the cliff face. They had to dive 20ft away from the platform to ensure that they cleared the rocks and hit the tiny landing spot – a leap of faith Colturi, a 32-year-old American, described as "nerve-racking".

Tomorrow's world

Dubai is so hot – temperatures in the emirate recently topped 50C – that the government is paying top boffins to make it rain. And it works. Scientists from the University of Reading have zapped clouds with electricity using drones. Jolting the water droplets in the clouds clumps them together, creating larger raindrops that fall to the ground instead of evaporating midair (the normal fate of water droplets under the baking desert sun).

Snapshot

Noted

Tomatoes can make themselves taste worse to ward off insects, says the Telegraph. Australian researchers report that when the fruit senses bugs nearby, it sends electrical signals to the main plant, which floods itself with chemicals, including hydrogen peroxide – used in bleach and hair dye – so the fruit tastes appalling.

Zeitgeist

A police chief in southwest Russia who used traffic permit bribes worth £187,000 to build a "palatial" home, with a gold toilet, baroque mirrors, a double-ended bath and a bathroom chandelier, has been sacked for corruption. After appraising Colonel Alexei Safonov's garish residence in Stavropol, one Russian newspaper lamented: "It's sad that in 30 years we've learnt how to steal, but not how to spend the money."

Snapshot answer

It's a wedding dress made out of face masks. The dress was stitched together by British designer Tom Silverwood using 1,500 recycled face coverings. It has two purposes, he says on the wedding website Hitched: to mark the lifting of restrictions of weddings and to raise awareness of mask waste. Britons throw away an estimated 100 million disposable masks every week.