Convenience Big Store: Why France should be wary of the Germans

30 September, 2021

In the headlines

Susan Everard, the mother of Sarah Everard, told her daughter's murderer at a court hearing: "Every evening at the same time she was abducted, I let out a silent scream – 'Don't get in the car, Sarah. Run!'" Former policeman Wayne Couzens, 48, was today jailed for the rest of his life. Labour leader Keir Starmer's 90-minute address at the party conference polled better than Boris Johnson's first conference speech, says Politico. But Starmer's words will be "long forgotten by the time Johnson opens his mouth in Manchester" at next week's Tory conference, says Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian. There really is a James Bond-style boffin called Director Q designing gadgets for spies at MI6's headquarters in London, an agent called "Emma" told Radio 4 this morning.

Comment of the day

Why France should be wary of the Germans

France's elites need to end their "neurotic fascination" with Germany, says Jean-Loup Bonnamy in Le Point. There's no "privileged relationship" at stake: after reunification in 1990, Germany's centre of gravity shifted east to central Europe, which it uses as a manufacturing base. And for 15 years Berlin "has pursued a strictly selfish policy". It imposed drastic austerity on the Greeks, despite never honouring its war debts to them. It gave up nuclear power and fired up its coal plants in 2011 without consulting its allies. Worse, it's opposing the EU's attempt to class nuclear power as renewable.

That's not the only "bone of contention". In 2013 Berlin provided "derisory support" to France's anti-terrorism mission in Mali – a mission that protects German investments in the country. In 2020, when France supported Greece against Turkish aggression in the Mediterranean, Germany merely told both sides to "avoid escalation". Days after the fiasco of our cancelled Australian submarine contract, Germany signed a space technology agreement with the Aussies. No surprise, really, given that it plans to "kill" the French defence industry to protect its own. As Angela Merkel bows out, so should our "illusion of the Franco-German couple".

The Tories need to make a U-turn fast

Labour's "fifty shades of red" agree on almost nothing, says Clare Foges in The Times – but they all concur that the imminent removal of the £20-a-week uplift in universal credit "is a very bad decision". And they're right. The removal from 6 October "may sound trivial to we who spend that much on a round of chai lattes". But the biggest reduction in basic social security since the Second World War will be felt in "countless domestic catastrophes and indignities": worrying a child will smell at school because you can't afford to wash their clothes; picking green bits out of bread; feeling the "throat-constricting anxiety" of putting one more thing on the credit card.

The Tories must perform a U-turn. Politicians fret too much about changing course, underestimating public respect for leaders who listen, respond and rethink in the light of new evidence. The energy crisis and soaring food prices offer ample reason to abort. And if the Conservative party's task of detoxifying its image were a game of snakes and ladders, "this would be a giant green anaconda taking the government all the way from the top of the board back to square one". More than a third of those on universal credit are in work. These are the van drivers, care workers and cleaners who politicians fall over themselves to slap on the back. How is this levelling up? It's "not just morally wrong; it is a huge political error".

On the way out

Pens, which are losing out to smartphones and tablets. Nearly one in 10 of us have not picked up a pen in a year, according to a survey by the family history website Ancestry, as gadgets make handwriting obsolete.

Gone viral

More tickets for Yayoi Kusama's sellout exhibition at Tate Modern, Infinity Mirror Rooms, went on sale at 8.45am today. But it's no easy feat to get one for the Japanese artist's immersive light installations – Twitter users have complained of sitting in virtual queues of 40,000 people for more than 24 hours. Don't take your eye off the ball: when you finally get to the front, you have just 70 seconds to book before you lose your place.

Weather

Google's DeepMind AI division has turned its computing might to the weather, claiming it can predict rain in the next two hours more accurately than any other forecaster, says Linda Geddes in The Guardian. This brave new world of "precipitation nowcasting" uses machine learning to turn the most recent 20 minutes of radar data into a short-term forecast.

Film

Young James Bond fans with £90,000 to spare might be interested in the Oxfordshire-based Little Car Company's forthcoming two-thirds scale replica of the Aston Martin DB5 driven by Daniel Craig in No Time to Die. An electric engine powers it to speeds of 45mph and gadgets include toy machineguns that emerge from the headlights, a smokescreen and LCD screens that mimic the original's spinning numberplates.

Life

Comedian Jimmy Carr recalls how he and astrophysicist Stephen Hawking, who died in 2018, would go out for a curry and a musical – they became friends after meeting during the interval at a West End play in 2013. "We'd do shots together sometimes," he tells The Guardian. "His care team said tequila would be too much, so he'd be on the Cointreau."

Quoted

"Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're 15 and 35 is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're 35 is against the natural order of things."
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