Convenience Big Store: “Really, there’s only one global monarch”

29 October, 2021

In the headlines

The French ambassador has been hauled to Whitehall after a British trawler was seized in French waters yesterday. We're being "kicked in the scallops", says the Daily Star, with Paris threatening to choke off UK trade at Calais. Kathleen Stock, the academic hounded for her insistence that biological sex is fact, has quit her job at Sussex University. "Scarcely believable, and a terrible commentary on the poisonous atmosphere" at some of our universities, says Joan Smith in UnHerd. "How could it come to this?" Rubbish piles and "rats the size of four Big Macs" will greet Cop26 delegates this weekend, says Eddie Barnes in the Daily Mail, after Nicola Sturgeon's SNP failed to stave off a strike in Glasgow. "Rats and Scots Nats – we've had our fill of them up here."

Comment of the day

The Queen in Windsor in 2016. Samir Hussein/WireImage

"Really, there's only one global monarch"

There are "about 27" royal families around the world, says Serge Schmemann in The New York Times. But I bet you don't know many of them. "Few people are even aware that Norway has a king (Harald V) or can name the ruler of Thailand (Maha Vajiralongkorn Bodindradebayavarangkun)." Really, there's only one global monarch: Elizabeth II. Why is she so good at her job? First, she's a hard worker. As banknotes change to reflect her age, the Queen trundles along, performing her royal duties. At 95, she's the longest-living, longest-reigning British monarch. If she's still on the throne on May 27, 2024, she will beat Louis XIV of France as the longest-reigning European monarch ever. He got the job when he was four.

She can be funny, too. In 2003 she insisted on driving Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia around Balmoral, because women weren't allowed to drive in his country. He asked her to slow down. But mostly she keeps quiet. The Queen has never given an interview to a reporter. The most revealing thing she has said was calling 1992 – a year when three royal marriages fell apart and fire gutted 100 rooms in Windsor Castle – her "annus horribilis". "And that was in Latin." But although we know so little about her, "the image of the sturdy, politely smiling little queen in pastel-colored coats and matching hats, at times accompanied by an equally sturdy little Welsh corgi, has become a reassuring constant over the decades. There are not many."

Eric Zemmour at a debate in Paris this month. Chesnot/Getty Images

Zemmour's mortal enemy: the English

Eric Zemmour, the far-right French presidential candidate who is now polling in second place behind Emmanuel Macron, has a new "mortal enemy": English-speakers. In a rally last week, he described D-Day as an act of American colonisation and the English as France's "greatest enemies for a thousand years", says Gavin Mortimer in The Spectator. Perhaps he should remember the "successive generations of young British men who gave their lives to liberate France". As for American colonisation – if only! Maybe France wouldn't have burnt through 21 administrations in the 12 years after the Second World War if Uncle Sam had stuck around.

We Brits now know how France's Muslims feel on hearing Zemmour's "political dog whistling". He proposes to end all immigration, legal or illegal, and says immigrant children born in France should be given French names. Presumably he thinks Ahmed Merabet, the policeman shot dead as he advanced alone towards the Charlie Hebdo killers, "would have died more gallantly had his first name been François". Immigrants kept working during the pandemic while "well-heeled Parisians" fled to second homes, and it will be immigrants who will take on, if anyone does, France's 400,000 unfilled jobs. Thankfully Macron, though uninspiring, should see off Zemmour's challenge. The majority of the French "will not vote for a xenophobe".

On the way in

Gender-neutral passports, which are now available to Americans. Ten other countries, including Canada, Germany and Australia, already offer an "X" gender category for those who don't identify as male or female.

Property

Getty Images

This Caravaggio fresco featuring Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto is up for sale – but you have to buy the villa in which it was painted. Bids for Villa Aurora, a 16th-century mansion in Rome, will start at €471m when it goes to auction in January, which would make it the world's priciest home. Caravaggio's only completed ceiling painting accounts for about €310m of that. "Let's say you're buying a Caravaggio with a house thrown in," the seller, Princess Rita Boncompagni Ludovisi, tells The Times.

Quirk of history

"With her long Edwardian dress hiding her pregnancy," Briton Rose Spencer became the first woman to take the helm of a flying machine in 1902 – a year before the Wright brothers' plane took off in North Carolina. A new book says she took to the air alone aboard her husband's airship, piloting it above Crystal Palace for half an hour as luminaries including Arthur Conan Doyle and WG Grace watched below.

Snapshot

Zeitgeist

Rishi Sunak's choice of socks with sliders for his Budget preparations marks him out as part of a burgeoning male demographic, "Slider-Men", says Polly Vernon in The Times. A Slider-Man is usually 40-ish and a huge fan of Taylor Swift and pastel-coloured clothes, who "makes a real point of reading novels written by women". "His favourite meal is brunch, and he doesn't think there's anything effeminate about that, yet equally he doesn't think there's anything wrong with being effeminate."

Snapshot answer

It's Buzz Lightyear. Yesterday Pixar released a teaser trailer for Lightyear, due out next summer, which will introduce us to the human Buzz Lightyear on whom Toy Story's intrepid astronaut is based. He'll be voiced by Chris Evans. "Sorry, but Buzz Lightyear is hot now," says Mia Mercado in The Cut. "Gimme that big ol' chin."