The Sunday Times November 14, 2021 23
COMMENT
rerelease them as “Taylor’s
version”. The latest, Red,
came out on Friday.
Just imagine for a moment
redoing your entire year’s
work from, say, 2015. I can
barely stand rereading my
journalism, never mind
rewriting it. She’s an
extraordinary force.
So, yes, I’m not ashamed to
admit I’ve become a Swiftie of
sorts. And when I needed to
select a song for our civil
ceremony last weekend,
there was only one option:
Love Story, Taylor’s version.If you’d told me four years
ago I would walk down the
aisle to the sound of Taylor
Swift, I’d have asked what you
were smoking. It took my
girlfriend two years to come
out to me as a Swift addict, or
Swiftie, as they’re known in
the business. I was sceptical
at first. Aren’t Swift’s songs
just soppy earworms?
Well, some of them are.
And some of them really
aren’t. Over time I’ve been
semi-converted to the church
of Tay-Tay. Her finely crafted
lyrics, prodigious output andseemingly endless wellspring
of nostalgia have convinced
me Swift is one of today’s
great artists, unfairly
dismissed by conceited snobs
like yours truly. It’s been a
rather humbling lesson.
I’ve also become
fascinated by Swift’s fight to
liberate her back catalogue
from the clutches of the
music executive Scooter
Braun and his private equity
chums. So determined is
Swift to own her music that
she is re-recording albums in
their entirety so that she canJosh Glancy
Week Ending
I got married to Taylor Swift — but it
took two years to see the attraction
lThe other thing I like
about Swift is that she’s one
of many people I know who,
like me, are in an Anglo-
American relationship — in
her case with the actor Joe
Alwyn.
They’re everywhere in
my life, these special
relationships. Over time I’ve
concluded one reason they
tend to work well is that
there’s just the right amount
of mutual incomprehension
to keep things fresh and
interesting.
Whenever you think
you’ve finally agreed upon a
shared interpretation of the
English language, a new
source of confusion crops
up.
For instance, in a recent
message aimed at my new
American in-laws, I
described my flat in London
as “dinky”. This did not go
down well.
As domestic readers will
know, in British English
dinky is defined as
“attractively small and
neat” — exactly what I was
going for. But in American
English the word has a
rather different meaning:
“disappointingly small and
insignificant”. What a
perfect illustration of the
difference between our two
nations.A real place
in history
I don’t know why bankers
waste millions on buying
peerages, when the greatest
honour in modern life comes
free: having a question read
out on Dominic Sandbrook
and Tom Holland’s The Rest
Is History podcast.
On Thursday I asked these
two archdukes of the annals if
we’ll keep remembering the
First World War with such
passion, now that it has
passed out of living memory.
Sandbrook confirmed my
sense that the inevitable fade
is already happening. In time
the Somme will surely seem
as distant as Trafalgar or
Waterloo. Yet somehow I
can’t imagine anything ever
seeming quite so pointlessly
tragic. I certainly hope not.The Elgin Marbles give
millennial new meaning
NEWMAN’S
VIEW
I’m ashamed to say it took
me 34 years to visit the
birthplace of democracy,
but I finally made it to
Athens in a last-ditch
attempt to get some late
autumn sun.
“Athens is the new
Berlin,” the locals told me,
and I could see why: it’s hip
and cheap, and lots of
expats are setting up shop
there.
But it was the city’s past
that really captured my
attention. Only when you’ve
stood on the Acropolis can
you properly understand
the fuss about the Elgin
marbles. It’s a historical site
that doesn’t disappoint,
radiating an ancient, awe-
inspiring religious fervour.
They’re cross about those
marbles, the Greeks. Much
crosser with us, it seems,
than the Turks, who stored
gunpowder in the
Parthenon; or the
Venetians, who managed to
ignite said gunpowder; or
the French, who also
nabbed a bunch of marbles
on the sly.
But when you’ve seen the
staggering power of the
Acropolis, and the beautiful
new museum built to house
its treasures, you can kind of
get their point. The
contrarian in me is tempted
to let the Greeks froth about
the perfidious Albion for a
while longer, but on balance
we should probably hand
them back.This petty
mockery of a
case should
never be
allowed to
happen again
COMMENT
Now we see why royals shouldn’t scrap with
commoners in court: it just isn’t a fair fight
Camilla Long
W
hen does royalty stop
being royalty? Answer:
when everything is
dragged through the
courts. For centuries the
family has avoided this
form of scrutiny, not only
because it is embarrassing
but because of the awkward grey areas it
creates and the basic bad messaging.
You can’t pretend to be above
everything — neutral, apolitical, even
godly — if you are scrapping with the
plebs in some lowly court. But, similarly,
is any royal ever truly treated like an
ordinary citizen? Mix royals and legal
proceedings and it is a recipe for serious
anger and a sense that justice is not
being done. For example: in the case
between the Duchess of Sussex and The
Mail on Sunday, do you really think
Meghan is going to be treated like a
normal person, or a duchess?
They were at it again last week: the
paper supplied new evidence in its
appeal against the ruling in Meghan’s
favour in February. To say the material
given by her former press officer at
Kensington Palace was dynamite is to
totally understate how much he
confirmed what some of us already
suspected about this grasping, image-
obsessed couple. They’re just like
everyone else, is what they’re always
telling us. Sadly, this has turned out to be
more than true — they are actually
worse.
To recap: the duchess won a case
against the paper nine months ago, after
it printed extracts of a letter she had
written her father, which the judge ruled
was “private”. It was a surprising ruling
— crashed through in a summary
judgment, when half the world knew
palace aides were queueing around the
block to give evidence at trial. I
remember saying at the time: if that isn’t
special treatment, I don’t know what is.
Anyway, life comes at you fast. It now
looks as though the duchess misled the
court — although I have another word for
it. She claimed she hadn’t helped thepeople who wrote Finding Freedom, a
book about her and her husband, when
in fact she had. The press officer, Jason
Knauf, who now works for Prince
William, revealed she “authorised
specific co-operation” for him to meet
the authors in 2018, giving him a list of
“background reminders” of things to
discuss. If you want to know what is
embarrassing, it is sending your press
officer a list of pathetic corners to fight,
including “how the tiara for her wedding
had been selected”, and letting him
know he should slut-shame her sister
Samantha by saying she had children
with “different fathers”.
The duchess apologised to the court,
claiming she “had not remembered”
email exchanges with Knauf about the
meeting — but, again, who’s going to
believe that? For any normal person an
apology for misleading the court would
be the death knell for their case. They
could face six months in jail for making
the mistake. Will Meghan?
My instinct is she will be saved a trial.
The appeal judges will conveniently
ignore the fact she had to apologise,
preferring to focus on the holes in what
Knauf said. No one really wants a trial:
not the royals nor the judges — they
won’t want to rat on their colleague in
such a high-profile case. So Meghan will
probably swerve this one yet again, just
because she’s a member of a family she
is meant to hate.
It is tempting to say: who even cares?
Nothing about it is serious, and support
for this couple is waning anyway. Even
in the deepest enclaves of white north
London many people reached a turning
point last week. Structural racism may
make you do many things but it does not
make you conveniently forget.
But it does matter, and it is serious,
because it is important that nothing like
this petty, embarrassing mockery of a
case should ever be allowed to happen
again. Time and again during the
proceedings I asked myself: why are the
cleverest men in the country arguing
about People magazine? Why are QCsWhat has lockdown done to
women? Shut us up and
drained the life out of us — it
is 1950 again. It seems likely
that, after 18 months of poor
childcare and no schools,
juggling illness and
homework, many women
may never get back into the
office. They will miss the vital
“spontaneity” of meetings
and working with colleagues.
“There’s the people who
are on the virtual track, and
people who are on the
physical track,” said
Catherine Mann, a senior
economist at the Bank of
England. “And I do worry we
will see those two tracks
develop, and we pretty much
know who’s going to be on
which track, unfortunately.”
It isn’t even that working
from home is a bad thing — I
have not been in the office
for ten years and enjoy being
able to see my kids. But I am
in a tiny minority — most
women are naturally social
and crave the camaraderie
of the office: it gives purpose
to life.
So if we really do want to
go back to normal, we must
fight for it, and companies
must be forced to help us.
Boris Johnson can tackle
care homes, so why can’t he
address the deleterious
horror of expensive,
inefficient, unsatisfactory
childcare?Women have
to battle for
equality
once more
Harry and
Meghan on
Wednesday,
when she was
forced to
apologise for
misleading the
court. Any
normal person
could face six
months in jaildiscussing avocados, and what happens
in a royal press office? Why are we being
subjected to Meghan’s self-interested
statements about her victimhood,
presented as fact in court?
It is weird to feel that royalty is
dragging you down to its level. This is
before we even get to the letter: the most
preposterous turducken of a literary
endeavour ever created. I feel ashamed
of the way we are being induced to
accept this manipulative document as
remotely “private”. It is private in the
sense that the Trojan horse was a
convenient mode of transport. It looked
like a letter and felt like a letter, but in
fact it was something else entirely: her
way of getting her “truth” out. “Words”,
as she put it to Knauf, “I could never
voice publicly”.
We know from Knauf, who helped
Meghan draft the letter, that she had
been “meticulous in her word choice”
because she believed it would be leaked.She numbered the pages specifically so
that people other than Thomas Markle
would know how long the letter was.
She ended pages halfway through a
sentence so no one could reproduce it
partly. Most despicably, she addressed
her father as “Daddy”, according to
Knauf, because “in the unfortunate
event that it leaked it would pull at the
heart-strings”.
How “unfortunate” do you think she
thought it would be if it did actually leak?
After she had written the letter, she sent
a message to Knauf: “Honestly Jason I
feel fantastic. Cathartic and real and
honest and factual.” I feel factual. I
mean, really — put it on the letterhead. If
we have any kind of contract with the
royals, it is this: we are happy to
celebrate them, lionise them, confer
on them enormous power and respect,
on the sole condition they don’t let us
know how much they look down on us.
Meghan did that.CRAIG RUTTLE/AP