Convenience Big Store: The Afghan lesson we didn’t learn in 1842

30 August, 2021

In the headlines

After Britain's ignominious exit from Afghanistan, Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab might also soon be on the way out. He has "about as much chance of being in a top four position by next spring as Arsenal", a government source told The Sun. Astonishingly, the man tipped to replace him, Michael Gove, was spotted at an Aberdeen club at 2.30am on Saturday night. The 54-year-old, who is getting divorced from his wife, Sarah Vine, was filmed "hip jolting and headbanging with fellow ravers", who allegedly bought him drinks all night. "I'm almost sure he was by himself," clubber Emma Lament told Scotland's Daily Record. Hurricane Ida has slammed into New Orleans overnight, bringing 150mph winds on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. More than a million people in Louisiana were left without power.

Comment of the day

The Remnants of an Army by Elizabeth Butler, part of the Tate collection

The Afghan lesson we didn't learn in 1842

Britain's latest defeat in Afghanistan was "to a near-absurd extent" a replay of the first, says William Dalrymple in UnHerd. The same groups of rivals fought the same battles in the same places, 170 years later. In 1842, 18,500 British soldiers retreating from Kabul were annihilated by "scantly clad tribesmen". Dodgy intelligence had cooked up a phantom Russian invasion, triggering Britain's decision to go to war. Only one surgeon escaped on a collapsing nag, immortalised in Elizabeth Butler's painting The Remnants of an Army. There is no Butler today to paint the explosions outside Kabul airport "or the desperate crush around American C-130 transport planes".

The "disaster of Kabul" cast a long shadow. Harold Macmillan told his successor, Alec Douglas-Home: "As long as you don't invade Afghanistan, you'll be absolutely fine." Afghanistan is "less a state than a kaleidoscope of competing tribal principalities", hard to take and impossible to hold. As the saying went: "Behind every hillock there sits an emperor." Misunderstanding the pride of Afghan tribes is hubris. The "lofty" deposed president, Ashraf Ghani, a moderniser who took part in TED Talks, pushed away tribal leaders. He told clan elders who had trekked across Afghanistan they had "10 minutes", took off his shoes and put his feet up, a sign of huge rudeness. "In the end, few were willing to die to keep Ghani in power." The West never learns. But Afghanistan remembers.

Boris's ambitious next-door neighbour

The relationship between Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak is "a highly combustible cocktail", says Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. In a leaked letter this month, the Chancellor argued for easing Covid restrictions early. "Maybe it's time we look at Rishi as the next secretary of state for health," the PM told aides, infuriated by a leak that made him appear weak. He was so troubled by Sunak's anti-lockdown agenda, I'm told he referred to the Treasury as "the pro-death squad". Yet while Johnson is pummelled for Covid failures and Afghanistan, the "much younger" Sunak "artfully swerves the opprobrium".

No wonder he's paranoid about this "heir apparent". Sunak was expected to be pliant, "willing to rubber-stamp all the cheques that the prime minister wanted to cash". Instead this "fiscal conservative" has cut "cakeist" Johnson off. He has a talent for charming Tory MPs, and the debt-ridden PM may also envy his money. A former investment banker who is married to the daughter of a billionaire, Sunak is thought to be Britain's richest MP, and "pointedly" let it be known he'd paid for a No 11 refurb himself. He has just received planning permission for a pool, a gym and a tennis court at his Grade II listed manor house in North Yorkshire. "That will do as a facsimile of Chequers until he gets a chance to bid for the real thing."

Tomorrow's world

India's vast train network is getting an upgrade, with facial recognition cameras installed at 500 of the country's 7,349 railway stations. The aim is to catch fare dodgers and people traffickers – and to spare conductors the task of eyeballing every one of the 22 million passengers who ride the lines each day.

Inside politics

A 1982 interview with a precocious 12-year-old Jacob Rees-Mogg, sitting in the back of a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce, has resurfaced on YouTube. The future Tory MP sets out three ambitions: make millions ("or billions"), become PM by the age of 70 and remain a bachelor. The married millionaire father-of-six is now 52, so has just 18 years to fulfil his one outstanding ambition.

Noted

Sky-high demand has made staycations pricier than trips abroad. A week's accommodation at a top hotel near Windermere, in the Lake District, is now almost four times more expensive than a swanky stay on Lake Garda, according to a Which? study. And a week at a hotel in Nice costs two-thirds as much as a week in Brighton.

On the way out

Men's suits, which M&S stopped selling at more than half of its 254 clothing stores as casual wear took hold during the pandemic, says the BBC. It follows a decade-long decline in spending on suits, according to data analysts Kantar, from a high of £534m a year in 2011 to just £159m in the 12 months to July.

Snapshot

Sport

A children's soccer game in New York in 2013 was short of a referee, so a Hispanic-looking man in a baseball cap stepped out of the crowd of watching parents to volunteer, says Simon Kuper in his new book, Barça: The Inside Story of the World's Greatest Football Club. As well as refereeing, he kept stopping play to advise both teams on positioning, which irked the parents. "Come on, let them play," they shouted – unaware that the ref was Pep Guardiola, Barcelona's former coach and the most successful football manager on the planet.

Snapshot answer

It's a market in Málaga, Spain, where local crochet teacher Eva Pacheco, enlisted her students to replace a tatty old plastic awning. Crochet is hot right now: British Olympic diving champion Tom Daley was spotted with crochet needles by the pool throughout the Tokyo Games. "His dive won gold," said NBC News. "His knitting won the internet."