Convenience Big Store: Why China is courting the Taliban

13 September, 2021

In the headlines

Boris Johnson will shortly unveil his winter plan to avoid a Christmas lockdown, says The Sun. Booster jabs for the over-50s are on the agenda and vaccine passports are not. Good, tweeted the chairman of the Covid Recovery Group, Mark Harper. Vaccine passports are "pointless, damaging and discriminatory". What's more, children aged 12 to 15 could start getting their Covid jabs as early as next week, says Ben Riley-Smith in the Telegraph, and may only need a single dose for protection. Thriller writer Lee Child has no regrets about twice turning down the chance to write a James Bond novel. Bond was a creation of the 1950s, he says. "It is effectively a period piece." Perhaps he was right and Bond is past his sell-by date, says the Daily Star. "We should all live and let die."

Comment of the day

A lithium mine in Chile. Bloomberg/Getty Images

Why China is courting the Taliban

It might be unglamorous but the rising price of lithium matters "quite possibly more than the debacle in Kabul", says Jeremy Cliffe in The New Statesman. The batteries needed to store and transport sustainable energy are made from the metal, which will be "as fundamental to 21st-century industrial economies as oil was in the 20th century". China is leading this new resource race: the country developed too late to influence the geopolitics of oil, so at the turn of the millennium it identified electric cars and their components as a future area of influence. Now China has a 42% market share for electric vehicles, while the US has just 11%, and Chinese firms are the world's biggest lithium producers.

This "lithium race" explains China's presence in Africa, and in the "Lithium Triangle" of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, which together are expected to provide up to 70% of the world's supply by 2025. China provided $43.5bn of loans to Latin America from 2015 to 2019, and has plied the region with its Covid vaccines. The US, which failed to stop Huawei building 5G networks across the same region, has been left in the dust. Even more "galling" is that the budding romance between the Taliban and China might have something to do with the huge lithium deposits buried in Afghan soil.

The media is poisoning politics

We always see the worst in our politicians, says Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times. "Tony Blair? The butcher who took us into Iraq. Gordon Brown? The sucker who sold gold on the cheap. George W Bush? The president with the IQ of a chimp." What about the flip side? Bush saved millions of lives through his malaria initiative in Africa. Blair saw through the Northern Ireland peace process. Brown's handling of the credit crunch had a great and lasting effect. And Theresa May – "the clown who messed up Brexit" – introduced laws to stamp out modern slavery.

We are poisoning our political system, resorting to "lazy character attacks" and reducing nuances to "parodies". During the doctors' strike Jeremy Hunt asked me to Whitehall for advice on patient safety. We discussed life-saving reforms as protesters cried "F*** Jeremy Hunt" on the streets below. Afterwards I spoke to the protesters, who said Hunt was trying to weaken the NHS and kill off vulnerable patients. This is the health secretary who secured the NHS's largest funding increase. And with Priti Patel we indulge in "a tsunami of nastiness" with hysterical attacks and cartoons that, to many, are racist. Priyamvada Gopal, a professor at Cambridge, has labelled her a product of "cultural eugenics". Boris, too, was condemned as a "eugenicist" for failing to lock down sooner during the pandemic. How to deal with this novel crisis was of course "blindingly obvious" to us "armchair Abraham Lincolns". We should give our politicians more credit. After all, it was us who put them there.

Moneymakers

A running joke among Emma Raducanu's US Open team was that she hoped to earn enough money to replace the Apple AirPods she lost at the beginning of the tournament, which cost about £109. With her £1.8m champion's cheque, she could buy more than 16,500 pairs.

The 40th MTV Video Music Awards gave viewers the complete TV package last night, says The Cut. Everybody's favourite "dad band" Foo Fighters was upstaged by Gen Z heroes Olivia Rodrigo, 18, Justin Bieber, 27, and Lil Nas X, 22, who was in "full marching-band regalia". He then "immediately stripped down, just as the MTV gods intended". After months of "trying-their-best, socially distanced" awards shows, it was a nice, "thrillingly horny" change.

Inside politics

A letter sent from parliament to an inmate at HMP Coldingley, Surrey, has been found to contain a "significant" amount of ecstasy, reports The Sun. Written on House of Commons headed notepaper, the reply to a request for information fell foul of the prison's scanning equipment when it arrived. A formal investigation has now been launched to find the partying parliamentary staffer.

Snapshot

Noted

"Just saying the words 'Emma Raducanu' causes people to light up and become lyrical about her incredible trajectory, her fluid, almost balletic playing style, or the fact that she is so charming in interviews, with her giant smile and her teenager's lack of guile. She seems to possess everything that is good about being young: energy, fearlessness, focus and drive. She is wonderful to look at, in repose and in motion … Then there is her wholesomeness, the sort of glowing, clean-limbed athleticism that so transported John Betjeman [see below]."

India Knight, The Sunday Times

Snapshot answer

It's Winston Churchill. The wartime PM's artwork is selling better than ever, says art critic Waldemar Januszczak in The Sunday Times, not that I can understand why. "His work would not even have made it past the first round at the Royal Academy Summer Show." Still, earlier this year a Churchill owned by Angelina Jolie went for £8.3m, and one given to the Onassis family went for £1.3m, and this "paint by numbers" scene above is expected to fetch up to £2.5m. Adolf Hitler, also a keen artist, was definitely more talented. "But his auction record is a measly £100,000. So that's another war Churchill is winning."