28 Wednesday May 25 2022 | the times
Comment
the middle (he recounts) of on-stage
mockery of dudes who wear shades
indoors to look cool, he spotted one
in the front row, and invited him up
on stage. By the time he saw the
white stick it was too late. As the
fellow tap-tapped towards him, he
had five seconds (he says) to save his
career. Steer into the skid! Embracing
the man he exclaimed, “Thank
goodness you didn’t bring your dog”
— and the rest was laughter.
It strikes me we know someone at
No 10, plus a former US president,
who have profited from the same
philosophy. Humphries shows us
Dame Edna’s interviews with the
younger Boris Johnson and
Donald Trump. Trump, bemused,
doesn’t realise Edna is not a
woman. Johnson (then Mayor of
London) does, and plays along.
“That man will be prime
minister,” Edna says.Ugly talk
I
won’t steer into the skid
in reacting to a more-
in-sorrow-than-anger
letter from Lepra, the
British leprosy charity.
In a column some
weeks ago about the
danger of turning Russia
into a pariah state, I used
the word “lepers”
figuratively for “rejects”. I
shouldn’t have: the charityreminds me that the disease remains
a huge menace in many developing
countries, and the stigma that goes
with it not only wounds but makes
the battle harder. I’m sorry I
overlooked this and won’t do it again.
But a wider observation: the English
language, with its rich store of
imagery, makes wonderful use of
illness, ugliness and disability.
Arthritis, obesity, amputation, speech
defects, old age, hair loss, insanity,
hearing difficulties, learning
difficulties, poor eyesight — where
would English metaphor be without
them? “It should be baldly stated
that, crippled by indecision, deaf
to all advice, blind to the cancer
in their midst, and fat on their
unearned income, the company’s
board, half of them in their
dotage, should do better
than stammer out a few
poxy excuses for an
arthritic half-year
performance, impotent
leadership, a lunatic
marketing strategy,
toothless management
and the economics of
the madhouse.”Wild things
T
hree years ago I fenced
off half our land —
about seven acres —
from livestock. We planted
3,000 trees then let theB
arry Humphries’s British
tour is terrific. We went to
see him last week at Buxton
Opera House (he’ll be
popping up all over the
country until June 12) and came
away amused and astounded.
Astounded that an 88-year-old who
used to play a lecherous Australian
drunk and a preposterous Melbourne
housewife can still hold a packed
theatre in the palm of his hand for a
two-hour monologue about his life,
and how his alter egos, Sir Les
Patterson and Dame Edna Everage,
came into being. Without self-pity,
and illustrated with remarkable
archive footage of Les’s and Edna’s
early triumphs, Humphries
chronicles his false starts and
failures, and goes a long way toward
explaining his success.
He describes his theory of
“steering into the skid” — the time-
honoured advice to motorists who
lose control on a slippery road. In
Xi reaps whirlwind of bromance with Putin
China’s leader thought he couldn’t lose from backing the Kremlin’s war, but it is ending in tears
Nato trainers since the first incursion
in 2014. What if these techniques
were employed by the Taiwanese
when the Chinese went in? It could
prove messy. Xi promises to take
Taiwan “by force if necessary”; it was
a boast he would have amplified at
the 20th party congress this year. He
may be thinking twice about that.
Xi is having to learn plenty about
his friend Putin. How can he stand
shoulder to shoulder with a regime
that has plainly been so deeply
penetrated by western intelligence
agencies? Chinese spooks now see
Russian military technical data as a
legitimate hacking target. How can
Russia be cut out of the global
financial system with such ease? Xi is
determined before autumn to make
China siege-proof. And perhaps, just
perhaps, he will change the way
China is governed. “Maybe allowing
one man to turn an authoritarian
system that was benefiting myriad
interest groups into a personalised
fiefdom that risks everything isn’t
such a good idea after all,” writes the
Cold War scholar Stephen Kotkin in
the latest issue of Foreign Affairs.
Chiefly, Xi has to understand that
the Ukraine war, with its
Putinflationary effect on global food
and fuel prices and his supposed
meeting of minds with the Kremlin
leader, is a shortcut to catastrophe
for China. The souring bromance on
top of other governing blunders is
leading to huge capital outflows,
plunging growth rates and an
increasingly open questioning of Xi’s
judgment. It may even require him to
rethink his confrontation with the
US. High time, President Xi, to
choose your friends more carefully.Europe, and to accept, too, that it
was in harness to a military
incompetent.
Since so much of the theatre of
this unhappy axis was based on a
personal understanding between the
two supposedly invincible leaders, Xi
will take a political hit. Suddenly, due
to extend his presidential tenure
later this year, Xi does not seem to be
infallible. The quietly ambitious
prime minister, Li Keqiang, may soon
be considered to have sounder
judgment than Xi.
After a fortnight of combat,
Moscow was already asking for
ammunition and kit, and only then
did Xi realise he had walked into a
mantrap. Russia, after all, was
Beijing’s main arms supplier: what
kind of crisis on the battlefield could
have so dramatically reversed that
role? China was ready to buy Russian
oil when Europeans started to
boycott it, but even then it demanded
a rebate. It was also ready to help
Putin sidestep western sanctions.
Hatred of western financial warfare
was, after all, a common cause. But
rearming Russia would make China
an active participant in the war,
multiply the sanctions risk from the
US and close down options.
This friendship turns out to have
plenty of limits. China is spending
more time analysing Russia’s
mistakes than devising ways to help
Moscow out of its mess. “It appears
that Putin’s hoofs are stuck in the
ooze,” a Taiwanese military
commentator tells me, not without
some schadenfreude. The Russian
army, once the model for all Chinese
generals, has been losing to a
Ukrainian force schooled by US andW
hat happens when a
geopolitical
bromance curdles?
Xi Jinping and
Vladimir Putin swore
friendship with “no limits” when
they met in Beijing before the
Ukrainian invasion but it was never
clear where this relationship was
going. Did they see themselves as
creators of a new world order, like
the blood brothers Augustus and
Agrippa, the Roman empire-
builders? Or as an anti-western
partnership bonded by mutual
grievances? Three months into the
war, it’s worth asking if there is still a
meaningful Xi-Putin axis or whether
it’s already buckling under the strain.
The terms of their arrangement
seemed to suggest that when Russia
made its grab for Ukraine, China
would watch Moscow’s back. It
would not seek to exploit the
westward shift of almost the entire
Russian army from the far east. If, as
anticipated, the West piled on
sanctions, China would help the
Kremlin out of its squeeze. And
Russia would do the same for China
should Xi invade Taiwan.
That was quite an entente. As
recently as 2009 China conducted
large-scale military exercises that
some Moscow analysts understood
as a dress rehearsal for an invasion
of Russia. It took some years of
elaborate courtship for quiet to fall
on the eastern front.
But as bromances go, this one was
always going to be more Molotov
and Ribbentrop than Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid; that is, short-
lived, with a whiff of imminent
betrayal from the start. Xi did not, it
appears, demand too many details
about Russia’s gathering invasion
force on Ukraine’s eastern and
southern borders, trusting perhaps in
Putin’s command of the battlefield.
China, after all, had almost no recent
experience of conflict, unless you
count the short 1979 border war
against Vietnam.
Xi was content to let Putin’ssoldiers pay in blood for the cost of
speeding up the inevitable decline of
the West. He couldn’t lose, he must
have told himself: at the worst, Biden
would have to beg him for help in
calming down Putin, in urging the
Russians not to use tactical nuclear
weapons.
Yet Xi was subjected to some rude
shocks from the first weeks of Putin’s
invasion. There was no surrender by
Volodymyr Zelensky, no puppet
regime installed in Kyiv, no
triumphant welcome of Russia’s
tanks, no Russian military governor.
Just very public setbacks for the
Russian military, and the creeping
realisation that China was going to
have to bankroll a protracted war inXi has taken a political
hit. Suddenly he no
longer seems infallible
land, often boggy, run wild. Every
spring since then has seen an
increase in bird, insect, amphibian
and mammal life. So far, so obvious,
you say? But have you any idea how
quickly this happens? “Nature,” a
friend told me, “comes flooding in.”
Beetles of many shapes and sizes are
arriving. Moths flit around the lights.
There are brown and white
butterflies everywhere, and millions
of tiny flying things dance above
water in the slanting light.
Neighbours have put cautionary
hedgehog signs by the lane, we’ve
seen two larks (larks had
disappeared) in the field, and as I
write I’m watching a big brown hare
lolloping across the grass. I’ve heard
cuckoos before, but for the first time
in my life I’m hearing a cuckoo in
our wood. Ours is only a tiny venture
into rewilding but we’ve been
surprised at the almost theatrical
speed with which everything seems
to come back.
I know it’s a delicate balancing act
framing environmental concern.
Overdo the sense of crisis and
disaster and you invite despair, yet
you do need to jolt people out of
inertia. But hope matters, and I
merely remark that after only three
years of simply doing nothing, seven
acres of “severely disadvantaged”
Derbyshire hill land are teeming
with new life. A small investment
with a big, rapid return.Matthew Parris Notebook
Drive like
Dame Edna
and steer
into the skid
Older people need
a champion to take
on the digital world
Esther Rantzen
T
he digital revolution is
causing millions of older
people distress and anxiety.
It’s not that we oldies resist
change: many of us do our
best to learn and to take on each
new challenge, whether it’s online
banking, shopping or booking GP
appointments without speaking to a
single human being.
But who is taking seriously the extra
difficulties this causes older people?
The forms used in online banking are
designed by young people who don’t
care that boxes outlined in pale grey
on white are almost invisible to
mature eyes. Car parks and meters
demand a fee that can be paid only
via a mobile phone app.
These are not trivial problems;
they cause real distress, anxiety and
heartache. This week the writer Pete
Paphides recounted on Twitter the
ordeal his father suffered trying to
pay a parking fee when he left his car
outside a church to attend a friend’s
memorial service.
Faced with a demand to pay by
app, and being of the generation that
conscientiously pays what he owes,
his father panicked, parked and
asked Paphides to find someone to
speak to, hoping he could sort out
the payment later. But there was no
human being to talk to, and although
Paphides filled in an online form for
his father, he was landed with a fine
that is still being pursued by a debt
recovery service, even though
Paphides senior has since died.
This is not an unusual experience.
The response to this story from other
older people and their families shows
that it is all too common. The Silver
Line helpline hears from isolated
older people who find themselves still
more cut off and intimidated in the
new digitised world. Even basic
grocery shopping, once an
opportunity to meet and greet other
people, has become an automated
maze of scanning and bagging.
We oldies desperately need a
minister for older people, and one
with real clout. Twenty years ago,
when it became obvious that many
children were victims of abuse and
neglect and that they needed a
strong advocate, a children’s
commissioner was appointed. Yet it
has been glaringly obvious for
decades that older people’s needs are
routinely ignored — or worse, they
find themselves blamed for the
suffering they endure, and are called
bed-blockers or house-blockers.
When Alf Morris became the first
minister for disabled people in 1974,
he forced every government
department and organisation to
scrutinise their plans for the impact
on disabled people. That’s exactly
what older people need now: our
own older people’s minister to
protect us, support us and value us,
while you still have us.Dame Esther Rantzen is the founder of
The Silver LineRoger
B oyes@rogerboyes