Convenience Big Store: Rolls-Royce promises on a Skoda budget

16 January, 2023

In the headlines

The police are to be given powers to shut down protests before they cause any disruption, under government plans announced this morning. The amendment to the Public Order Bill is designed to help officers counter the "guerrilla tactics" of groups such as Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain. Italy's most-wanted mafia boss has been arrested in Sicily. Nicknamed U Siccu ("the skinny one"), 60-year-old Matteo Messina Denaro had been sentenced in absentia to life in prison for his involvement in dozens of murders. Young people are ditching God and turning to Satan, says the Daily Star. Some 5,054 respondents said they were followers of Beelzebub in the 2021 census, compared to just 1,893 in 2011. London-based Satanist Chaplain Leopold says only a minority actually worship the Prince of Darkness – they just "like rituals".

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Rolls-Royce promises on a Skoda budget

You may have missed it, says Robert Colvile in The Sunday Times, but Keir Starmer's "moderate, mainstream" Labour Party has just committed to the "most ambitious nationalisation in half a century". Specifically, the shadow health secretary Wes Streeting promised to turn GPs into salaried employees of the state. And he did so, incredibly, with no indication of how this £5bn-plus move would be funded. Meanwhile, Starmer is promising "one of the biggest expansions of the NHS workforce in history", paid for with the £3bn his government will supposedly pocket by abolishing non-dom tax status. His "bullish" logic assumes a full 99.7% of this "highly mobile group" will meekly stay put while extra tax is whacked on their overseas earnings.

Then there's Yvette Cooper's pledge to hire 13,000 police officers for £360m. The shadow home secretary hasn't revealed where that money will come from, either – and given the Tories are spending north of £1bn on hiring 20,000 extra officers, it'll probably cost much more than she says. This is the "central tension" for the Labour Party: frontbenchers are "itching to spend", but there's simply no money. They're stuck promising "Rolls-Royce services on a Skoda budget". It could be immaterial: voters "conditioned by Johnsonian cakeism" may accept that you can simultaneously keep taxes low and splurge £28bn a year on a green industrial transformation. But Labour's vagueness shows that the party is far from the "polished machine of the 1990s".

Art

The winners of the International Dog Photography Awards 2022 have been announced. They include Dalia Fichmann's snap of a border collie in avalanche rescue mode; shots of leaping hounds in an agility competition in Italy (by Francesco Junior Mura) and in snowy Slovenia (by Kjara Kocbek); and Daniela Schmid's picture of a tiny puppy cradled in a human's hands. See the full list of winners here.

Zeitgeist

Forget the power lunch, says The New York Times – for high-flying executives in the US, it's all about the spa. Clients are being entertained in infrared saunas; brainstorming sessions take place in ice baths; possible hires are being interviewed over vitamin drips. "No one is interested in team yoga any more," says Kane Sarhan, a founder of the spa chain Well. "It's much more dynamic stuff like IVs, group support circles, sound baths, energy work." The most popular spot? The foot rub area. I've seen "dozens and dozens of meetings" take place there, says Sarhan. "People have their computers out on their laps." 🧖‍♀️ Mmmmm, bliss.

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On the money

American bosses have found a cunning way to avoid forking out for overtime, says Bloomberg. Because of a legal loophole, managerial staff don't get paid for extra work – so employers are bestowing lowly workers with fancy-sounding job titles such as "lead shower door installer", "price scanning coordinator" and "carpet shampoo manager". The ruse saves US firms about $4bn a year.

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René Redzepi at work in the 2015 documentary Noma, My Perfect Storm

How I fell out of love with fine dining

Last week René Redzepi – the much-lauded chef at three-Michelin-star Noma in Copenhagen – announced he was shutting up shop because the luxury restaurant business had become "financially and emotionally" unsustainable. It's about time, says Jay Rayner in The Observer. I once ate at a different Parisian three-star restaurant every day for a week, and "my love affair with the finest of fine dining began to crumble". There were sublime moments – a pea dish at Restaurant Guy Savoy "elevated the humble legume to god-tier status". But what really stayed with me was the "grim, preening, massively unenjoyable artifice".

Part of the problem is that people who can afford "£500 a head or more for lunch" tend to be so "grossly entitled" that the service becomes stuffy and mannered to suit their expectations. Le Cinq in Paris hands women menus without prices even if they booked the table. At Manresa in California, the waiters marched to our table in a column, "one arm pinned behind their backs". Then there's the ludicrous volume of food. "A chef once served me 26 courses, then came out and barked: 'Did I win?'" Presumably these people have never sat through their meals themselves, so have no idea what it's like being "pelted with tweezered morsels of varying quality" hour after hour. There's nothing wrong with spending a few quid on smart nosh if that's your thing, "but it has to be worth it". Redzepi is right: "a certain type of luxury dining experience really ought to be put out of our misery".

Afterlife

Prince Harry's memoir reveals he recruited a "woman with powers" to communicate with his mother from beyond the grave. "He's not alone," says Tatler: mysticism is taking high society by storm. West London types flock to Moya Guichet, based in Ladbroke Grove, who specialises in contacting the deceased; Ruth Nahmias, an astrologer trusted by the likes of Princess Eugenie, charts a "DNA map of your soul" that apparently reveals your "past life, purpose and future". Helena Bonham Carter (pictured) went so far as to hire a psychic to contact the late Princess Margaret and check she was happy for the actress to depict her in The Crown.

Tomorrow's world

Korean tech start-up 10minds has developed a pillow that detects when the user is snoring and gently nudges their head into a different position to stop the racket. The Motion Pillow uses machine learning to tune into the timbre of each person's particular snore. When the grunts begin, it slowly inflates to improve the sleeper's airflow.

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Snapshot answer

It's the hole in the ozone layer above Antarctica, which has rapidly closed up and should be fully healed by 2066, says The Sunday Times. Eagle-eyed British boffins noticed the gap in the 1980s, and quickly identified CFCs – common chemicals used in fridges and aerosols – as the cause. In "a rare example of swift international environmental cooperation", CFCs were banned globally under the 1987 Montreal Protocol, and the ozone layer has been on the mend ever since. Jonathan Shanklin, the scientist who discovered the hole, gives Margaret Thatcher much of the credit. Because she was a chemist and "understood the science very clearly", he says, "she was able to convince the other political leaders that this was something that they needed to act upon".

Quoted

"We never know the whole man, though sometimes, in quick flashes, we know the true man."