Doomed by a "shared faith"? |
Liz Truss's leadership pitch "promised radicalism, but up to a point", says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. Almost no one expected the "sheer size" of the £45bn in tax cuts Kwasi Kwarteng announced last week. The timing was terrible: trying to "rip up failed orthodoxies" and "purge complacent mandarins" is all very well, but doing it at the same time as asking markets to lend you an extra £70bn? That is, "shall we say, brave". The world is midway through an "agonising" transition away from the easy-money era. "Mortgage rates have been surging from Auckland to Arizona." Truss should have waited until this took hold in Britain before announcing her financial plans. "Now," says one minister, "she has pinned a Tory rosette to mortgage rises." |
Tax cuts are Truss and Kwarteng's "shared faith", says James Forsyth in The Times, so they're unlikely to row back on them now. The next step is real-terms spending cuts, by freezing government budgets rather than raising them in line with inflation. This is politically risky: depriving the NHS of cash would mean every problem it encounters this winter "gets blamed on the Tories". It also means little room for pay bumps for employees. When you're borrowing money to cut taxes for the rich, "how do you explain that there is no money for a close-to-inflation pay rise for nurses"? It's hard to see a way forward for No 10 "that is both politically palatable and economically possible". |
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THE PENTHOUSE This lavish $250m flat in New York is America's most expensive home. It occupies the top three floors of the 1,550 ft tall Central Park Tower, a skyscraper on "Billionaire's Row" on the southern edge of the park. It boasts 17,545 sq ft of interior living space, with seven bedrooms, a library, a gaming lounge and a ballroom. The 27 ft ceilings frame vast windows offering views over Manhattan; the property's terrace is the highest in the world. Elsewhere in the building, amenities include a gym, a cinema, two pools and a private bar and restaurant with menus designed by Michelin-starred chefs. |
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Macron: dressed for winter. Ludovic Marin/AFP/Getty |
Heroes Polo neck jumpers, which are helping the French government beat the energy crisis. "You will no longer see me with a tie but with a polo neck," finance minister Bruno Le Maire said on France Inter radio this week. Le Maire is urging civil servants and other office workers to follow a trend he and President Macron adopted two winters ago: wearing sweaters with their suits instead of shirts and ties. |
Hero Derbyshire, which has won Tom Cruise's heart. The A-list actor, who has been filming scenes for Mission Impossible 7 in the county, has praised its "breathtaking" landscapes and welcoming residents. "I found myself wanting to explore more and more," Cruise gushed to Derbyshire Life. "I have made a few other visits in my own time that have nothing to do with work." In summary: "Wow! Derbyshire – what a fantastic place!" |
Villains A Brazilian couple who dyed a waterfall electric blue for a "gender reveal" party. A since-deleted social media video shows the Queima Pé river, a popular tourist destination, running blue to show that the pair are having a boy. Government officials are now investigating whether the products used were harmful to the environment. "What happened to cutting into a cake?" asks one Reddit user. |
Hero Dirty Dirk, an elderly Galapagos tortoise which is putting in overtime to propagate the species. The "hyper-virile reptilian pensioner", 70, has manged to father eight babies in a calendar year, says The Daily Telegraph – four with one partner and four with another. "Due to his incessant frolicking and significant bulk, it is not uncommon for the females to sport minor battle wounds from their trysts with the Galapagian philanderer." |
Giorgia Meloni in 2020. Tiziana Fabi/AFP/Getty |
Women on top: the new face of the far right |
Fascism and far-right politics are usually seen as hyper-masculine, says Alan Posener in Die Welt. Women under regimes like that of Nazi Germany were treated as "machines for cooking and giving birth". But today many "key figures" in European right-wing populism are women: Alice Weidel is co-leader of Alternative for Germany; Marine Le Pen heads the National Rally in France; the Brothers of Italy's Giorgia Meloni is about to become PM. And though they all tout traditionalism to voters, their own lives are strikingly modern. Weidel is a lesbian in a civil partnership with a Sri Lankan-Swiss film producer; Le Pen is twice divorced; Meloni is an unmarried mother. |
Their prominence shows just how confused the modern far right is. The "supposedly glorious past" the women hark back to is one in which they probably wouldn't have been able to have careers, especially alongside having children. Though they share a "hostility to the left", they all profit from the rights for women largely won by the left. And though they support the patriarchal values of the past, they also target the "toxic masculinity" of today, labelling Islam as sexist and backward. This contradiction between the "propaganda of traditional values and the practice of modern values" is a paradox liberals should seek to exploit. |
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A staged train crash at the 1932 Iowa State Fair |
It's hard to imagine now, says The Retrospectors podcast, but at the turn of the 20th century one of America's favourite pastimes was watching staged train crashes. The collisions attracted tens of thousands of spectators. At one infamous event in 1896, in Texas, the boilers on both trains exploded, "sending thousands of pieces of red-hot metal hurtling through the air". Two spectators were killed and many others maimed; a Civil War veteran present said it was "more terrifying than the Battle of Gettysburg". The organiser, William George Crush, was immediately sacked by the Missouri-Kansas-Texas Railroad – but the deadly event generated so much media coverage he was rehired "the very next day". |
Marías: If my typewriter went, I'd give up writing. Quim Llenas/Getty |
A diet of fags, Coca-Cola and Manchego cheese |
Javier Marías, who has died aged 70, was Spain's "greatest contemporary literary figure", says Charlie Connelly in The New European. His 16 novels, known for their "long, ruminative sentences", sold almost nine million copies worldwide and were translated into 46 languages. He was as curious a character as he was a novelist. Marías had two flats in Madrid: "one furnished entirely in black, the other in white". He had no internet connection and wrote everything on an ancient and much-loved Olympia Carrera de Luxe typewriter. If it ever gave up the ghost, he said, he would have to give up writing. |
Marías communicated "almost exclusively by fax", only eventually agreeing to use a smartphone so he could file his newspaper column by WhatsApp – "sending the editor photographs of his typewritten pages". He was also a "ferocious" smoker, known to turn down international awards if the trip to receive them involved too much time on a plane or in buildings where he couldn't have a puff. His diet was simple: "cigarettes, Coca-Cola, cigarettes, serrano ham, Manchego cheese and cigarettes". |
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"The only sure way to avoid mistakes is to have no new ideas."
Albert Einstein |
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