26 Wednesday January 26 2022 | the times
Comment
flesh-and-blood thing: the tension,
the conviviality, the delicious sense
of collective human sin.
We slipped into the back row of a
show by the Magic Mike troupe:
beautiful men, dancing and singing,
mostly with their trousers on. Have
you ever sat among a horde of
prosecco-fuelled women on hen
parties? Do you know what
hundreds of women, all screaming,
sound like? I was close to panic.
I’m going back. Not for Magic
Mike and not for roulette, but for
the steak restaurant, the marvellous
roof bars, and to breathe again
London’s air of free-and-easy.
But, oh, those poor dwarfs.Risky business
I’
ve been thinking hard since
then about gambling, one of
the few behaviours (like
eating, drinking, sex and
fighting) shared by every
human culture known to
history. Plainly the
instinct has a Darwinian
explanation: an appetite
for risk may advantage
the individual and
tribe. Grandpa Parris’s
predilection for the dogs
troubled Grandma, and
may come out in his
grandson in a curious way.
I often find I’m making
myself a bit late withoutreason: if it’s touch-and-go whether
I’ll get there in time, that spices up a
journey. And for no reason at all I’ll
drive on past a motorway service
area, with the needle hovering on
empty, to see if I can make it to the
next one. “Enjoy the fear” as
mountaineers say. I did once
consider going for a private pilot’s
licence. You can see why that would
be a bad idea.Waiting in the wings
I
went to Verdi’s Nabucco at
the Royal Opera House last
Thursday. Great music, great
soloists, great chorus, dreadful
production, dreary and grey.
Except for this, and I can’t get
it out of my head. Right near
the start a youngish actor, with
something to him, a certain
stage presence, sauntered
down, stage left, and
watched the action:
curious but separate,
disinterested.
Throughout, he kept
appearing, never
forefront, but observing.
And at the end, the
same. You wondered
when he’d sing, talk, pile in.
But he never did. Was he a
cipher for the composer?
The librettist? The director?
The audience, even? Some
kind of chance witness?E
xit London’s Leicester
Square Tube station and
facing you across the
junction is a rather
remarkable building.
Announcing itself, as it has since
1900, as the Hippodrome, it has a
kind of braggadocio and early
Edwardian swagger about it. But
beyond that, it’s not at first clear
what it actually is. Theatre? Casino?
Bars? Restaurant? “Exotic” doesn’t
quite capture it; “vulgar” isn’t quite
right; try “extraordinary”.
Last Wednesday I visited. The
Hippodrome today is all those things,
and in its 122 years has been many
more. Think performing elephants;
dwarfs high-diving from its dome to
a great pool in the pits. Think
nightclubs, Stringfellows, Talk of the
Town and saucy floor shows. At the
Hippodrome’s heart today is a casino.
Watching the players I realised how
online gambling from your bedroom
is a wretched apology for the real
Soaring gas prices could lead to global famine
Russian pressure on the market will have a devastating effect on fertiliser costs and crop yields
terrible starvation in the 1990s when
people were reduced to eating grass,
so Kim has attuned his dictatorship
to prepare for the worst in terms of
food supply. Now he is not that far
ahead of the loop. The four
horsemen of the apocalypse, it
seems, are saddling up. There’s
nothing quite like the prospect of a
European war to get the fabled
demons — conquest, war, pestilence
and famine — mounted and ready to
wreak chaos. And famine always
rides in last to claim those weakened
by misgovernment and disease.
The way the West chooses to fight
its battles often makes famine worse.
A US warship recently intercepted a
40-ton load of fertiliser from Iran to
Yemen. The cargo, said the US, could
have been used as explosives and
confiscated the lot. Syria can’t import
nitrogenous fertilisers for a similar
reason. And the US treasury is trying
to get Lithuania to block the
transport of potash fertiliser from
Belarus, in order to punish dictator
President Lukashenko.
This kind of blockade may penalise
regimes but it comes with a price tag,
the sacrifice of moral high ground to
tyrants at the expense of their
people. That’s why disconnecting
Russia from the international
payments system, should it invade
Ukraine, is such a complex decision.
Strategic planners have spent
decades worrying about World War
III but they were missing the point.
War, when it comes, will have some
20th-century features but probably
won’t be fought in multiple
interlocking theatres. Rather, the
fighting will be swift and confined —
but the victims will be worldwide.mobilised road-blocking protests by
farmers in Pakistan; they complain
that wheat output, sugar cane and
maize will be affected.
Here then is the knock-on effect of
a confrontation between Russia and
Ukraine: the potential for famine.
Conventional political sloganeering
in Britain suggests the hard-up face a
winter choice between heating and
eating. But what is beginning to
happen worldwide goes well beyond
that dilemma and its banal advice to
put on a sweater and perform a few
star jumps in the living room.
The UN Food and Agriculture
Organisation predicts famine
conditions affecting 45 million. “The
world,” it says, “hasn’t faced such a
risk of widespread famine affecting
multiple countries so severely in over
a decade.” That includes countries
like Taliban-governed, difficult-to-
access Afghanistan where severely
malnourished children are
overwhelming health centres. The
menace of extreme weather will
continue to flood and scorch arable
land in Africa and Asia.
Incompetently run states will continue
to fail their vulnerable citizens.
The exploding cost of gas,
however, has been impossible to plan
for. Kim Jong-un’s North Korea, cut
off from Chinese fertiliser, has
instructed rural communities to
supply their own manure, in the
form of human excrement
(euphemistically called “night soil”).
Access to markets is denied to
farmers who can’t produce a manure
pass, a logbook recording how much
homemade fertiliser has been
generated that week. North Korea is
a famine barometer. It experiencedR
ussia has always held open
the option of deploying its
natural gas supplies to the
West as a weapon, one that
could either complement
its tank divisions or replace them.
States that displeased the Kremlin
were sometimes confronted with
sudden “technical” pipeline issues in
the midst of a cold winter. Gazprom
officials visiting central and east
European customers were treated like
princelings, at least to their faces.
Russian gas has become an
instrument of punishment and reward.
Now the West is anxious that
already high gas prices will add to a
looming cost of living crisis at home.
As the Russians tighten their
stranglehold on Ukraine in an
unusually stretched out and public
period of antebellum, so the price
of short-term gas has climbed to
three times the price in January
last year, and six times the typical
pre-pandemic level. When Russian
gas supplies slumped before
Christmas — supposedly because of
unusually cold temperatures but
probably also as a reminder to a new
German government to approve
quickly the Nord Stream 2 pipeline
— prices soared even higher.
The cost of energy is, of course,
politically toxic. Not least in Britain
as Ofgem prepares to raise its energy
bill cap. Britain is less dependent
than many of its European
neighbours on Russian gas but it
cannot stay immune from galloping
global prices. If Russia marches into
Ukraine, or even if it just prolongs
the current stand-off through the
winter, the stress on the gas market
will render it more volatile than in a
decade. For separate reasons,
including an Iranian-backed Houthi
rebel drone attack on the United
Arab Emirates, oil has already hit a
seven-year high this month and
Brent crude seems set to reach $100
a barrel by September.
But it’s gas that is the problem and
it is folly to look at the trends through
a parochial spectrum. Natural gas isessential to the production of
nitrogenous fertilisers, of urea,
ammonium nitrate. For the past six
months farmers across the world have
struggled with the cost and scarcity
of fertilisers. Unable to scrape
together enough to fertilise and
enrich their fields, unable to secure
credit to tide them through to
harvest, they warn that this year’s
yields will be low.
Fertiliser plants are closing or
operating at half strength because
there is no way of predicting how far
prices will rise. China has banned the
export of phosphate fertiliser since
last autumn to ensure its own
farmers get enough. That hits India’s
wheat sowing. The urea shortage hasNorth Korean farmers
are told to use human
excrement on the land
The gods? Destiny? Was he, perhaps,
Rory Stewart?Positive spin
W
e were driving through
Sheffield, en route to
somewhere else, when my
partner remarked: “Sheffield’s not as
bad as you’d think.” And he’s right:
the city, with its hills, is a mildly
pleasant surprise. Places tend to
choose rather exaggerated tag lines,
like New Hampshire’s “Live Free or
Die”. Why not instead acknowledge
the doubts? I liked the once-drug-
tainted Colombia’s “The only risk is
wanting to stay”. Sheffield should
consider “Better than you’d think”.
Leicester might do well with “Some
unexpectedly nice bits”, Lincolnshire
with “By no means all flat”, and
Penzance with “Flashes of
unexpected charm”. Any suggestions
for Birmingham?Lick of paint
A
friend has employed an
excellent Polish decorator, Piotr,
to redecorate his east London
terraced house. Surveying his
handiwork, Piotr remarked that it
looked like 10 Downing Street. “I used
to work in Downing Street,” said my
friend. Piotr was quick to respond.
“Why not use my company to
redecorate there?” It’s a thought.
Someone could soon be wanting to
revisit the last chap’s décor.Matthew Parris Notebook
This magical
venue has
something
for everyone
Don’t shut the
unvaccinated out
of public debate
James Kirkup
T
he BBC has asked for
people who haven’t had the
Covid vaccine to be part of
the Question Time audience,
in the hopes of hearing
about why they haven’t had the jab
and debating the issue of vaccine
hesitancy. This is a good thing.
Not everyone thinks so. The Times
this week reported unease in
government that the broadcast could
undermine attempts to increase
uptake. A Guardian column asked “Is
this a disaster waiting to happen?”
and suggested there’s “no point”
debating with people who implacably
hold bad ideas. Those points are
made in good faith but they are not
good reasons to shut the
unvaccinated out of public debate.
I am not a vaccine sceptic. I’ve had
three doses and would have a fourth
if asked: the benefits to me and
others clearly outweigh any risks I
face. I can’t really understand why
anyone wouldn’t do the same.
And that’s the point. The
unvaccinated are probably the least
understood group in British society
today. We simply don’t know enough
about why they aren’t willing, because
we don’t hear enough from them.
Of course, some people do imagine
that they know why the refuseniks
refuse, having read or heard about
some of the noisy “antivax” protesters
who peddle conspiracy theories. But
taking the angry mob as
representative of several million
vaccine-hesitant people makes about
as much sense as assuming that every
one of the 17 million who voted for
Brexit resembles Nigel Farage.
Political discourse based on
ignorant caricatures of those who
disagree with us is poisonous to
democracy: we all need to hear from
people who take differing positions.
Which is why the BBC should be
commended for bringing the
unvaccinated into the conversation.
Of course, Question Time is hardly
the best place for measured debate;
for that you need Any Questions? on
Radio 4. But the central idea of
trying to engage with and hear from
people on all sides of an issue is the
right one and should always inform
journalism. That’s especially true for
a public broadcaster serving the
whole nation, not just parts of it.
Will members of that unvaccinated
audience ask misinformed questions
and make dubious, unscientific
claims? It’s quite likely. But such
questions and claims are the ones
with the greatest need to be aired
and discussed. The case for
vaccination should be strong enough
to survive such discussion. For good
reasons, the consensus position across
British politics, society and media
favours that pro-vaccination case. But
any consensus should be tested. Left
unchallenged, consensus becomes
dead dogma, doomed to lose support.James Kirkup is director of the Social
Market FoundationRoger
B oyes@rogerboyes