Convenience Big Store: The true story of the Boston Tea Party

9 December, 2023

Behind the headlines

Chip Somodevilla/Getty

Could America become a dictatorship?

It's time to "stop the wishful thinking" and face reality, says Robert Kagan in The Washington Post: America is on the path to dictatorship. In 13 weeks, Donald Trump will have effectively sewn up the Republican presidential nomination. Then it'll be the general election, and he's currently tied with – or beating – President Biden in all the latest polls. And if he does win, he'll become "the most powerful person ever to hold that office". None of the usual constraints will apply. The justice system? By winning the election in the face of multiple prosecutions, Trump will have shown it to be "impotent". Congress? The Republican Party is even more pro-Trump than it was when it declined to convict him after his (second) impeachment. As for the federal bureaucracy, which stymied many of his more extreme proposals when he was president, his team has made it clear they will only give jobs to true believers.

Trump hasn't exactly been coy about his plans. In a Veterans Day message, he promised to "root out the Communists, Marxists, Fascists and Radical Left Thugs", calling them "vermin" that will "destroy America". He has already named various turncoat officials he intends to go after, such as his former chief of staff, John Kelly, and the retired military head Mark Milley. Who'll be able to stop him? Democrats will "yell and scream". But if Republicans don't join them – and they won't – it'll just look like "the same old partisanship". Even if the conservative-leaning Supreme Court tried to rein him in, it's an open question whether he'd listen. America is closer to dictatorship than it ever has been. And yet most of us "drift along", blindly hoping that some unspecified intervention will spare us the consequences of our "collective cowardice". Chances are, it won't.

Heroes and villains

Hero

Hugh Grant, for being refreshingly honest about the motivation behind his work. The former heartthrob plays an Oompa Loompa in the new film Wonka, using motion capture technology he recently described as "very uncomfortable" and like wearing "a crown of thorns". When asked why he took the role, he replied: "I slightly hate making films, but I have lots of children and need money."

Villain

Lincoln council, which has cancelled the city's Christmas market – the oldest in England – because it posed "a significant risk to public safety". What exactly does this mean, asks Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. "Were customers brawling over the last novelty snow globe? Was the mulled wine laced with absinthe and Carlsberg Special Brew?"

Hero

Simon Schama, who has donated a 1635 Rembrandt etching plate to Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. The historian and his wife have owned the artwork, which depicts St Stephen being stoned to death, since they bought it at auction in 1994. They knew it would cost an "insane amount of money", Schama tells The Times – about as much as they had set aside to renovate the kitchen. "So I called my wife. 'What will it be?' I asked her, 'Rembrandt or the kitchen?' 'Don't be silly,' was her decisive answer, 'the kitchen can wait'."

Hero

A very persistent learner driver in Redditch, Worcestershire, who finally passed the theory test on the 60th attempt. The ordeal cost £1,380 in exam fees and set a new record for the most attempts ever made, according to the AA Driving School, outdoing someone who passed on the 58th go in Hull and another who clocked up 55 unsuccessful tests in Guilford.

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Property

THE LANDMARK This flat is on the first floor of the brutalist Barbican Estate in central London. A galley kitchen opens on to a large living space, which has warm timber flooring throughout, while an expansive balcony offers views of St Paul's Cathedral. The bedroom overlooks expansive, leafy gardens, and the iconic complex's theatre, art gallery and other public facilities are moments away. Barbican Tube station is a two-minute walk. £935,000.

On the money

The trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI racked up 85 million views in one day

The most profitable entertainment product ever

Grand Theft Auto has "left its tyre marks all over the zeitgeist" with a trailer for the sixth entry in the iconic video game series, says Ed Power in the I newspaper. The 90-second clip racked up 85 million views on YouTube within 24 hours, more than any other video has managed in a single day. The new instalment, which will be released next year, is the most expensive video game ever produced, with an estimated budget of more than $1bn. And it'll probably be money well spent: the franchise is the most profitable entertainment product of all time, beating every other game, film, album and book.

It all began in Dundee in the mid-1990s, when a team of "rookie coders" were trying to finish a cops-and-robbers-style game despite the objections of their head office in America. The original plan was for the player to be the police. "But that was boring, so the developers flipped the tables and put you in control of the robber." The first Grand Theft Auto was released in 1997, and the publicist Max Clifford was hired to promote it. "He called the tabloids and told them all about a new game where you stole cars, beat up pedestrians and shot police officers. A moral panic ensued." The game was criticised in the House of Lords; the Scottish Motor Trade Association warned that it would "make children think it is okay to rob cars and kill". Naturally, this all sent copies flying off the shelves.

🚌🚄 The first game took up "around 75% of my life" when I was 11, says Greg James, also in the I newspaper. When I'd had enough of the killing sprees, I used to hijack the buses and trains and calmly transport people around. "It's good to give a bit back sometimes."

Quirk of history

A postage stamp celebrating America's founding lie. Getty

The true story of the Boston Tea Party

America's founding myth has it that on Thursday 16 December 1773, a posse of more than 100 true-born patriots raided three East India Company ships in Boston Harbour, and threw 92,000lbs of tea overboard. The 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party is being celebrated this month, says Andrew Roberts in The Spectator, to commemorate the proud Americans who fought back against the "greedy British and their oppressive taxation policies", an act that ultimately led to the American Revolution. Trouble is, it's a load of rubbish. The Boston Tea Party was actually a "highly co-ordinated assault" by rich gangsters and their henchmen against a government attempt to halve the price of a cuppa.

The East India tea that those self-branded "patriots" destroyed was due to be sold for around half of the $1-per-pound that New Englanders were then paying. The only people who stood to lose out were the local "smuggler-barons", who feared that the imported tea would fatally undercut their dodgy business. So they hired a band of thugs to attack the vessels. Under cover of darkness, three well-organised teams of mercenaries dressed up as Mohawk Native Americans – using soot for "blackface" – stormed the three galleons, hacked open 342 chests of tea and tossed it all overboard, all in the space of about two hours. It was the English over-reaction – among other things closing the port of Boston until the East India Company was fully compensated – that turned a "mere squalid act of racketeering" into the spark that ignited the American Revolution.

Inside politics

Kigali's business district. Getty

Here we go again: more "Tory psychodrama"

As Rishi Sunak tries to convince his party that his latest Rwanda plan is a winner, talk in Tory circles is "turning to a leadership challenge", says Fraser Nelson in The Daily Telegraph. Of course, the idea of installing a sixth Tory PM since 2010 – "as many as Labour has had in its history" – is "obvious madness". But such a rebellion may well happen if enough MPs feel voter angst about migration is so strong that they need to "define themselves against Sunak" to save their seats. He would survive any challenge, but "another serving of Tory psychodrama" would do nothing for the party's election chances.

Another, perhaps more likely, act of protest would be to rebel against the new Rwanda Bill when it comes to a vote next week. Disgruntled MPs could demand an amendment preventing asylum seekers from using the Human Rights Act to appeal against deportation. Sunak argues this would be "pointless" – Rwanda would rather kill the deal than go down that legal rabbit hole. Kigali is hoping to do "good business saving Europe from its refugee mess", not just with the UK but all around – the Germans, Danes, Austrians and Italians are all talking about similar arrangements. So Sunak is "begging" rebels to step back from what would be an "unrecoverable civil war", and back him. To think a better deal is available, he says, is delusional. "On this, he is probably right." MPs going to war would be "self-defeating, facile, self-indulgent and the biggest Christmas gift that Starmer could hope for". But it could very well still happen.

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Zeitgeist

Quail jelly truffle toast and oak film strip at The Fat Duck

"In the cheese-and-wine haze of December, it's easy to find yourself thinking morosely about missed opportunities or days unseized," says the Evening Standard. But there are many things it's worth never doing – things to put on your "f***-it list", rather than your bucket list. Among our staff, f***-it list items include sex parties ("even the most aesthetically pleasing people are rendered unappealing when they're writhing around on a mattress on the floor"); prosecco (it "gives you a brain-shrivelling headache", and Lidl's £8.99 crémant is much better); eating at Heston Blumenthal's The Fat Duck ("spending £300 on bacon-flavoured ice cream does not give you a personality"); and the Northern Lights (they're better in photos, and a friend who saw them confessed "the green isn't even that green").

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