The Sunday Times - UK (2022-02-06)

24 The Sunday Times February 6, 2022

COMMENT

expense of everyone else.

The government should not

shirk its responsibility for

fear of losing influence or

favour with wealthy donors

and friends.

James Perry, Julia Davies,

Gary Stevenson, Nick Marple,

Akshay Singal, Jonathan

Bloch, Gemma McGough,

Kristina Johannson, Graham

Hobson and Phil White

Patriotic Millionaires UK

London NW5

Levy on the young

The working-age population

has borne the main financial

and social cost of Covid

restrictions. We did so

willingly, to protect the

vulnerable. Now Covid will

have to be paid for, and I am

reconciled to paying more tax

— but I expect the bill to be

spread fairly.

The government’s increase

in NI will affect employers,

employees and the self-

from less affluent

backgrounds who could do at

least as good a job as our

present cabinet and be very

happy to do it for the current

rate. It is not low pay that is

the issue: it is the culture of

greed — both in parliament

and in business.

Helena Fielder

Southsea, Portsmouth

You can’t buy honesty

Syed is usually hard to

disagree with, but his idea

that we could stop corruption

Ministers are

sullied by greed

Matthew Syed argues rightly

that the West must address its

own legalised corruption

(Comment, last week).

However, in his solution —

that we quadruple ministers’

salaries — he fails to grasp that

the real problem is the vast

chasm between the super-

rich and the rest.

In fact there are many

capable aspiring politicians

Feeble publisher

be damned

The way Picador has treated

the brilliant Kate Clanchy,

whose memoir attracted

accusations of racism, is

despicable (News, last week).

I shall now be boycotting

Picador and its authors.

Apologies to the latter — but

the lack of spine in the

actions of the former is

beyond belief.

Quentin Lotte, London SW6

Focus on real racism

When will this witch-hunt

stop? How can we hope to

eradicate racism when it is

being trivialised by the

nitpicking persecution of

every book ever printed?

The Ashkenazi-nosed

Madeleine Bender

London NW10

Shown up by children

I despair. Clanchy is an

empathetic individual who is

ready to acknowledge where

she may unintentionally have

caused offence (for example

in relation to autistic

children). Would that those

who judge her so severely

showed even an ounce of her

humanity. At least the pupils

— who are the most important

people in this whole story —

unambiguously support her.

Pauline Collier, Oxford

Death by tweet

I sympathise with Clanchy.

Waking up to a Twitterstorm

is horrifying. Analysing it to

learn that it’s a handful of

noisy, disturbed people in a

false universe is enlightening.

The grossly disproportionate

after-effects in the real world

can be life-destroying.

Annabel Tall, Bristol

Let that be a lesson

If Clanchy had not denied

that the quotes appeared in

her book, when they did,

none of this would have

happened. I don’t agree with

cancelling anyone, but,

considering how many

articles have appeared in

support of Clanchy, I do not

consider her cancelled.

Jacqueline Harris, Barnet

LETTERS

TO THE EDITOR

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London SE1 9GF

Email: letters@

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vet, who couldn’t find any

wound. I drove home and

went into the living room ...

to find a punctured tube of

red paint.” Hedy added: “As a

‘human vet’ (A&E doctor) I

once rushed to help a child

with horrific facial burns —

only to realise she’d been

face-painted as a tiger.”

In an astute essay on

motherhood Rosie Kinchen

wrote of a pregnant woman

desperately seeking happy

stories about childbearing.

She need look no further. “I

don’t much get the misery,”

said Mrs Fox. “Yes, children

are hard work. But in front of

us are little human beings. It

is a privilege to help them

develop.” “Forget about silks,

satins and cashmere,” agreed

Deep Joy: “there is no luxury

like the silky head of a baby

just under your chin.” Billie

D enthused: “The births of

my three children counted as

the most exciting days of my

life. What could be more

important or powerful than

the ability to make a new

human?” For Kentish maid

that was too much: “I

wouldn’t count producing

babies as a personal

achievement. Pregnancy and

childbirth are just bodily

functions.” But she was

outnumbered: “I thought I

was the cleverest person in

the world when I had my

babies,” wrote Mrs R. “It

easily outstripped anything

else I ever did.” Who needs

Mumsnet when you have the

ST comments board?

Rob Nash

Your comments from

thesundaytimes.co.uk

Vets have, it’s fair to say,

come in for the odd nip from

readers. But last week they

got to tell their side of the

story, under our interview

with the author of Never Work

with Animals. Surrey vet

recalled: “Many years ago,

when I’d just qualified, I was

called out at 3am by owners

screaming that their cat had

broken its leg and the bone

was sticking out of the skin. I

threw some clothes on over

my pyjamas and raced to the

clinic. The cat and all its four

legs were fine: the ‘bone’

sticking out from the skin was

a half-chewed wine gum.”

Jayne Arrowsmith

sheepishly admitted: “I came

home to find my puppy

bleeding from the side of his

mouth. I rushed him to the

Last week we asked:

Should the UK do more to help defend Ukraine?

From a poll of 6,169 Times and Sunday Times readers

This week’s question:

Has Boris Johnson been a good prime minister?

Have your say at sundaytimes.co.uk/poll

NO

70% 30%

YES

READERS’ POLL

1918 Women of property

over 30 gain right to vote

1952 Elizabeth II becomes

Queen while in Kenya

1958 Air crash in Munich

kills 23, including eight

Manchester United players

Rick Astley is 56 today

Party games

Boris Johnson is inventive

with his excuses. It can only

be a matter of time before he

tells us that, when he was

appointed party leader,

nobody told him it wasn’t

that type of party they had in

mind.

John Cotton, Aylesbury

Up heel, down dale

You report that rescue

workers are encountering

Three Peaks walkers who are

unsuitably attired (News, last

week). This is not new. In the

1970s an experienced hill-

walker friend and I puffed

our way to the top of Great

Gable, where we were joined

by a group of young Italians.

One of the young ladies

stopped briefly before

striding off again — wearing

high-heeled sandals. Hard to

know whether to tut-tut or be

rather envious.

Linda Marriott

North Hykeham, Lincolnshire

If the cat fits

You can sing the praises of

cats all you like (“Four-legged

trends”, Editorial, last week).

But, as you tacitly admit, in

reality a cat is just a lazy

person’s dog.

Paul Phillips

Calf Heath, Staffordshire

Sneaky felines

The solution to a surfeit of

dogs is surely not to

encourage an explosion in

the cat population. They are

selfish predators that offer

affection only on their own

terms, foul neighbours’

gardens and terrorise smaller

creatures. Urgh: think again.

Ian Middleton, Leeds

Spike’s millennials

Nick Newman’s sadness that

young people are unaware of

Spike Milligan (Culture, last

week) brought to mind a

2007 visit to the Sydney

Opera House, where we saw

not an opera but a play about

Spike’s time on The Goon

Show. Most of the audience

were over 60, but next to us

were two young men in their

twenties. My wife asked them

why they had an interest in

the Goons. Their reply:

“Good parenting.”

Christopher Webster

New Malden, Surrey

Swear if you love me

David Baddiel is spot-on

when he writes about how his

father expressed his love for

his sons by calling them

“wankers” (News Review, last

week). That generation had

their own ways. My father

never once told me he loved

me: if he had, it would have

sounded weird and awkward.

Yet he did, and I never for a

moment doubted it.

Peter Grimsdale, London SE21

Safety in neutrality

Why doesn’t Ukraine make a

declaration of perpetual

neutrality? There is a

precedent: Austria declared

its perpetual neutrality in

foreign political affairs in 1955

— the Cold War era. Ireland

has done it too. Why is it not

appropriate for more

European nations?

Anthony Briginshaw, Hove

Action on gambling ads

Your editorial rightly

compares gambling addiction

to drug, alcohol and tobacco

addiction (Comment, last

week). So surely it follows

that we should restrict the

gambling industry’s

advertising, as we have for

the alcohol and tobacco

industries. It cannot be right

that gambling giants

advertise games of chance all

day long on all commercial

channels — and to all ages.

Peter McGregor, Sheffield

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by paying ministers four

times their current salary — in

exchange for barring them

from entering “sweetheart

deals” with companies after

leaving office — does not hold

water.

Paying people more to be

honest never works. Devious

people do as devious people

do, and, when it is so easy to

set up complex company

structures to hide payments,

they will always find a way.

Stan Hogarth

Strathaven, Lanarkshire

Rick Astley, singer, 56

Jeremy Bowen, reporter, 62

Sir Michael Ferguson,

biochemist, 65

Quentin Letts, journalist, 59

Natascha Mair, ballerina, 27

Axl Rose, rock star, 60

Jimmy Tarbuck, comedian, 82

Ann Treneman, journalist, 66

Kevin Whately, actor, 71

Don’t tax workers — we millionaires should pay

In their article justifying the

rise in national insurance

(News, last week) Boris

Johnson and Rishi Sunak said:

“We have always supported

people through the

pandemic.” As a group of

very wealthy people we

agree: they have certainly

supported us. In fact for

decades our wealth has

enjoyed incredibly low tax

rates — at the cost of

everyone else.

So we ask them to review

their decision to raise NI,

which is a tax on working

people. They should tax us,

the wealthy, instead.

They could start by

aligning capital gains tax with

income tax, generating

£14 billion a year, more than

is expected from the NI rise.

A small, progressive wealth

tax for multimillionaires

could raise much more.

The cost-of-living crisis will

not hurt us but it will cripple

hard-pressed families. We

cannot continue on this

divisive path, where the rich

get endlessly richer at the

employed; but swathes of the

population will not pay their

fair share, including affluent

older taxpayers with income

from pensions and

investments.

Lockdowns applied to

everyone. I fail to see why

many older and wealthier

taxpayers should be excluded

from the fiscal burden.

Gus Gayford, London NW3

Eat or heat

The increase in NI will not

affect me or millions like me

who are “comfortable”. We

will probably not even notice

it. But it will push many over

the edge at a time of increases

in food and fuel prices.

This is shameful. Basic

fairness demands that instead

we should raise income tax

for the better-off, and other

wealth taxes on unearned

income. Such increases

would affect me — but I would

rather that than know that

another family had to choose

between eating and heating.

Maureen O’Brien

Sutton, London

On another planet

We earn a middling income

and have cut our outgoings to

the bone over the past two

years. This NI increase will tip

us over the edge.

We have seen huge price

increases in petrol. Grocery

prices have rocketed, even in

Aldi and Lidl: the cost of our

weekly shop would have

doubled if we hadn’t changed

what we buy. We face

crippling rises in utility bills.

Unlike Johnson, who can

borrow from rich friends, and

Sunak, whose family has

billions, we live in the real

world — which they do not

understand.

Adriano Luzzi, Elie, Fife

Bus line

I have scrutinised Johnson

and Sunak’s article and, try as

I may, can find no mention of

the Brexit bus slogan: “We

send the EU £350 million a

week — let’s fund our NHS

instead”. Well, we’ve taken

back control. So where is all

that money going?

Richard Weldon, Folkestone

Johnson and Sunak could distribute taxes more fairly

JACK HILL/REUTERS

Rockers right to

take a vax stand

Rod Liddle criticises Neil

Young and Joni Mitchell for

withdrawing their work from

Spotify in protest against

Covid vaccine

misinformation (Comment,

last week). His argument

might have carried more

weight had he acknowledged

that both artists have a

personal insight into the

subject of vaccination: they

were unfortunate enough to

contract polio in the early

1950s.

This dreadful disease left

Young partially paralysed on

his left side, and Mitchell has

resorted to playing guitar in

as many as 50 altered tunings

because her post-polio

fingers aren’t strong enough

to hold down chords in

standard tuning. All this was

caused, of course, before the

availability of a polio vaccine.

Whatever you may think of

Neil and Joni’s relevance

today, their experience

means that they have good

reason to make an informed

decision about who can

stream their music — and

their stance against

promulgators of antivax

rhetoric is to be applauded.

Bill Walker, Alton, Hampshire

Sixty years of

rude Wordles

Your article “Wordle: what

the way you play says about

you” (Culture, last week) says

the game’s origins are pure

and that James Wardle created

it for his partner. Given his

age, that may be so. He

probably was not around in

the 1960s, when this game —

or something I recall as being

pretty much identical — was

very popular in London.

Played with a pencil and

paper, it was called “fluck” —

a combination of “luck” and

“f***”, which sums up the

intricacies of the game.

Clearly the appeal is still as

strong. Those who played it

then are now enjoying

playing it online!

Dr Priscilla Macquire-Samson

Bristol

More or less identical

Wordle may be new but it

isn’t an original idea. I was

playing a pencil-and-paper

version in the 1960s under

the name “plus or minus”.

It was a competition

between two people to guess

each other’s five-letter word.

Each guess generated a “+”

for each letter in the correct

place, a “-” for a correct letter

in the wrong place (unlike in

the online version, you did

not know which letter that

was) and a “0” for no

common letters. More

logically taxing, perhaps, but

in essence the same game.

Mel Austin, Wiltshire

civil servant of their generation. If “Party

Marty” was the best we have, God help

us all.

But it’s also about how the building

actually works. Should we really be

running a major economy from an

awkwardly retrofitted set of Georgian

townhouses? Does it make sense for

No 10 to function as a cramped, ungainly,

dilapidated hybrid of command centre,

event space, provincial museum and

family home — in which your influence is

dictated largely by your physical

proximity to the PM’s office?

Then there’s the way we treat those in

charge. Leaving aside your views on the

incumbent, does it sound like a recipe

for peak performance to have the prime

minister living in a flat above the shop,

with no dedicated catering, cleaning or

childcare (sharing the space, in this case,

with two very young children)? To have

no on-call GP, so that when he catches a

potentially fatal disease, he is essentially

locked in his flat, with meals shoved

under the door, until he has to be carted

off to hospital? That’s before we even get

to the whole system of red boxes, in

which the people running the country

are handed a sheaf of printouts every

evening and asked to make billion-

pound decisions armed with a marker

pen and bottle of wine.

A

ddressing his staff — well, his

remaining staff — in Downing

Street on Friday, Boris Johnson

drew on the wisdom of Rafiki

in The Lion King: “Change is

good, and change is necessary,

even though it’s tough.”

Probably a better choice,

under the circumstances, than another

line from the film: “A king’s time as ruler

rises and falls like the sun.”

So much has happened over the past

week that the publication of the Sue

Gray report seems like a lifetime ago. But

its most interesting paragraph — in fact,

given its Met-police-mandated

bowdlerisation, the only interesting

paragraph — was about change. It argued

that the power and staffing levels of

No 10 have grown dramatically in recent

years, but the supporting structures

have not adapted to cope.

It was this paragraph that the prime

minister seized on in the Commons,

during the brief part of his apology when

he actually sounded apologetic. He

promised to make changes to the way

Downing Street runs, including the

creation of a new Office of the Prime

Minister.

The departure of five senior aides

certainly makes that task more pressing.

Indeed, given the centralisation of

power that Gray noted, losing the people

in those positions may be more

disruptive to the affairs of state than

replacing even a cabinet minister.

Yet at the same time the obsessive

focus on Whitehall deckchair-shuffling —

and even on the prime minister’s own

position — distracts us from a deeper

truth.

It’s impossible to argue that Britain

has been particularly well governed in

recent months. But that’s been the case

for years. In fact, it’s hard to think of

many recent prime ministers whose

careers didn’t end in failure.

Those who have worked in Downing

Street, under prime ministers of every

stripe, tell stories of horrendous

dysfunction. When the pandemic hit, as

Johnson told the nation, parts of

government were so sluggish in their

response that “sometimes it seemed like

that recurring bad dream when you are

telling your feet to run and your feet

won’t move”.

Partly this is about the standard of

personnel. For me the most shocking

thing about the email urging No 10 staff

to “make the most of the lovely weather”

by holding a lockdown-busting knees-up

was the sender. Martin Reynolds was the

PM’s principal private secretary. That

job generally goes to the most promising

Johnson may not have the political

capital to make such sweeping

changes. But what he could do is start

the debate. Let’s set up a cross-party

commission that takes evidence from

every living prime minister about how

No 10 is run. And their senior civil

servants, and their advisers. And the

many business leaders who have tried

and failed to fix Whitehall. And

academic experts, data gurus,

entrepreneurs and anyone who has set

up and managed an organisation that

delivers high performance, day in, day

out. And those from other countries,

such as Singapore, who have managed to

attract the best talent to government and

have the most impressive record of

growth.

Given all the pressures on the

government, it may not seem the right

time for such an exercise. But the

reason so many political careers end in

failure is that the entire system is set up

that way. Changing that would help not

just the politicians themselves but also

the country they run — not least in

confronting crises such as the

pandemic. As Rafiki says later in that

scene: “The past can hurt, but the way I

see it, you can either run from it or learn

from it.” And we surely need to.

@RColvile

business agenda to get GDP up, we will

remain in the awful trap of low growth,

high spending and high taxes.

But how are we going to thrive in the

21st century with a power structure

designed for the 19th? We’ve kept things

going via a series of bodges — but no one

can argue this is how you would do

things if you started with a blank sheet of

paper, or even one half-covered in

crayons by one of the prime minister’s

kids who had wandered into the office.

Johnson may well find good people to

fill the vacancies. The new head of his

policy unit, Andrew Griffith MP, used to

chair the advisory council for the think

tank I run, and is a passionate champion

of entrepreneurship, with a glittering

business career. But how do we ensure

that we get the best people, every time,

for every job in Westminster and

Whitehall? And how do we put the best

structures around them?

Most other countries give their

leaders far better personal support, and

far more policy staff. (They also usually

get higher salaries: the British PM is paid

substantially less than his equivalents in

Australia or Luxembourg.) So why not

merge the prime minister’s office with

the cabinet office and move the whole

shebang into a modern office space in

Whitehall?

They are asked

to make billion-

pound decisions

armed with a

marker pen and

a bottle of wine

Robert Colvile

When the boss lives in a cramped flat over

an old shop, what hope has Britain got?

A few weeks ago Tony Blair gave a big

speech arguing that Britain was utterly

unprepared for the challenges it faced.

In particular, our long-term growth rate

is “woefully insufficient to pay for the

services we expect”. I hosted an event

on Thursday with the director-general of

the CBI, at which we both made the

same point: without a radical pro-