30 Wednesday April 13 2022 | the timesComment
real treat of this tour has been
playing some proper comedy clubs,
with the audience right up close. At
the Glasgow Stand I could reach into
the wine bucket of one couple to see
how much of their prosecco they had
polished off (all of it). At the Brighton
Komedia a young student, Ewan, sat
awkwardly during some of the more
“adult” material (eg “we all know
what Matt Hancock had his fingers
in, and it wasn’t the till”) as he
protested: “I’m here with my dad!”.
Things took a turn though when I
flashed up a photo of Liz Truss,
and Ewan’s dad involuntarily
blurted out his affections: “Well
I would”. It derailed the second
half, gave the audience
something to remember, and
Ewan plenty to forget.Over the moon
I
f the mirror has got
lights around it, I’m
happy. Pure showbiz.
Anything beyond
that is a bonus. At
the fabulous
Chorley
Theatre, they
went overboard.
Normally getting
a free bottle of water
is a win. Here I was
presented with rows of
drinks — Diet Coke,
Coke Zero, Coca-Cola,7-Up, Fruit Shoot, flavoured water,
still water, sparkling water — and so
much food: bags of handmade
Lancashire crisps, plus bananas,
strawberries, grapes, nuts, Chorley
cakes iced with the theatre logo and
packet sandwiches as far as the eye
could see. Eat all that and it’s not a
show I’d have been ready for but a
sleep.
The Marine Theatre in Lyme Regis
has easily the best dressing room
view in the country: a bay window
which looks out at the sea from three
sides, the sandstone cliffs of
Golden Cap to the left, the
famous Cobb harbour to the
right, the sun setting behind. I
left it too late to take a
picture. It was dark. Even so,
the moonlight twinkling on the
sea was better than any
mirror lights.Slices of delight
I
had some fun with the
explanation from the
Tory minister Conor
Burns that during his
cabinet room birthday
party/work event, Boris
Johnson “was, in a sense,
ambushed with a cake”. Like
he was the army. I asked the
audience to suggest cake war
films. They ended up writing
the best part of the show:
Duncake. Cookie Jarhead.A
ll this is my fault.
Whenever I go away,
politics goes mad. Theresa
May calls the 2017
election? I was at
Disneyland. Labour MPs quit to form
the Independent Group? I was in
Somerset. David Cameron caught in
the Panama papers? Lyme Regis. Boris
Johnson calls 2019 election? On tour
with my first stand-up show. As my
second tour got under way in
February this year, Partygate was
exploding. Now as I type this on a
beach in the Dominican Republic, my
phone erupts with blame for the news
emerging that Boris and Carrie and
Rishi are being fined. I will of course
issue a full apology to the nation and
resign. Just as soon as they have.A night he won’t forget
M
ore than 4,000 miles, 24
dates, more than 50 hours on
stage, many more times that
on trains, planes and automobiles. APutin sees Ukraine war as a spiritual mission
When soldiers believe they are fighting with God on their side, atrocities seem to be fair game
offensive but they still seem to
believe this depraved war is a just
cause. They have Kirill’s icons to
prove it and his assurance that Putin
is a “miracle from God”. Those in the
security services expressing doubts
are being purged. Only pan-Slav
loyalists will survive in the higher
echelons of the security apparat. At
the end of it all, the Ukraine
slaughter will have to be dressed up
as a historic victory for Russia.
The Ukrainians understand better
than their western supporters what
they are up against. Ask the curators
who are wrapping up Ukrainian
artworks in battered Kharkiv, bubble
wrap as precious in its way as body
armour. Some masterpieces have
found their way via Lviv to Krakow
in Poland. Volunteers are being
mobilised not just to fill sandbags but
shift paintings. In a war of cultural
annihilation no one can count on
invaders respecting the 1954 Hague
Convention on the protection of art
and antiquities.
When Sergey Lavrov, the Russian
foreign minister, visited the Balkans
last year he was presented with a
300-year-old eastern Orthodox icon
by the Bosnian Serb leader, Milorad
Dodik. Experts later realised the icon
had probably been looted from a
church in Luhansk by Bosnian Serb
mercenaries fighting alongside
Russian-backed forces in eastern
Ukraine in 2014. Lavrov returned the
icon to Dodik but he has yet to
return it to Ukraine. Why should he,
he might be thinking, when Russia,
his great protector, is declaring
Ukraine to be a non-state, an adjunct
of Putin’s expanding empire? A place
to be plundered?minorities everywhere.
A similar thought process seemed
to be under way in the Russian
military. The Greater Russia
advocate Aleksandr Dugin, who used
to lecture on geopolitics at the
Russian general staff academy,
argued the Cold War was not about
the victory of liberal democracy over
communism but merely the first
phase in a civilisational conflict
between Eurasia and the Euro-
Atlantic world.
To this mix came the Moscow
patriarchate, which under the
leadership of Kirill has essentially
become part of Putin’s armoury. At a
sermon a few days ago in the Main
Cathedral of the Armed Forces in
Moscow, Kirill sought to rally the
troops and stiffen their fighting spirit.
At another ceremony the patriarch,
once a KGB officer, handed an icon
to the head of Russia’s national guard,
which is fighting alongside Putin’s
army in Ukraine. The icon depicts
the appearance of the Virgin Mary to
Russian soldiers during the First
World War. For Kirill, Ukraine is a
battlefield against western influence
and decadence. And it is part of a
campaign to bring Ukrainian bishops
back under his control.
These may seem like rather
obscure turf wars, the politics of
resentment. But for Putin they add
up to a spiritual mission. In his world
view there is a seamless continuum
between silencing supposedly
western-inspired critics at home and
bombarding the cities of his
neighbours. The core establishment
is on board. The generals may be
biting their tongues about the
mismanagement of the militaryA
trocities in war occur
when soldiers have a
sense of impunity, when
they feel unobserved,
when they are heady with
power — and sometimes when they
are convinced they have God, any
god, on their side.
The alarm bells should have
sounded when Kirill, the Moscow
patriarch of the Russian Orthodox
Church, prayed for victory in the
“holy war” against Ukraine. That was
the moment when it should have been
clear to all that the conflict was not
about national state interests, the sort
that can be ended with conventional
diplomacy, but rather a civilisational
war aimed at the elimination of
Ukrainian national identity.
When attacking troops understand
that message the gloves are off. Take
the murder of Ukrainian civilians in
Bucha. Why would an army do that?
Why would their victims’ hands be
tied behind their backs? Why would
they be dumped outside their houses
like roadkill? The conventional
answer — that they were tortured
for information — is not entirely
plausible. More likely, it seems to me,
they were killed by professional
killers, mercenaries, who picked up
their techniques in earlier conflicts in
Chechnya or Syria. Muslim burial is
supposed to occur within 24 hours.Placing corpses on public view and
booby-trapping them so as to blow
up their relatives became a cruel and
cynical counterinsurgency tactic.
The Ukrainians are not Muslims,
not insurgents, not waging jihad,
don’t wear suicide vests, but they are
standing in Vladimir Putin’s way of
creating a Greater Russia. His claim
that he’s mounting an operation
against Nazis is used to justify a
growing list of atrocities: the
bombing of a crowded railway
station; the flattening of Mariupol.
The Russian war is being led by
officers who won their spurs killing
Syrian civilians. Ukrainian statehood
is being treated as if it posed the
same mortal challenge as Isis.The toxic idea of annihilating
Ukrainian culture may have taken
hold of Putin in 2007 when he met
the dissident and blistering critic of
the Gulag, Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
It was an unlikely encounter but it
turned out Putin was a fan of
Solzhenitsyn’s Greater Russia
convictions. Here’s the writer on
pan-Slavism: “We all together
emerged from the treasured Kyiv
from which the Russian land began.
The return of these lands to Russia
was viewed by everyone as
reunification.” For Putin, Russky Mir
— the Russian world — was defined
by the blood shed over the centuries
rather than territorial boundaries. It
was his duty to protect RussianUkrainians stand in the
way of the creation
of a Greater Russia
Bridge Over The Apple Pie. The
Guns of Mascarpone. Where Eccles
Dare. Full Metal Pancake. Tinker
Tailor Soldier Pie. The Torte Locker.
Good Morning Viennetta.
Jambusters. The Hunt for Red Velvet.
Top Bun. Pie Hard. And the one that
got me every time: Black Forest
Gateau Hawk Down.Friends united
T
here is no more absurdly
grandiose a sentence for me to
utter than “this is my tour
manager”. I’ve been lucky to have
had three on different stages of the
tour, Harry, Callie and Stephen. One
of them asked who I preferred: like
children, I love them all equally,
obviously. The long car journeys, the
unprintable in-jokes, the strange
sense that approaching 40 you don’t
often get to make new friends like
this. Not work friends, or schoolgate
friends or friends of friends. But just
new friends. I shall miss them.Just the job
T
he reaction from the audience
has been brilliant. One woman
in Guildford fell off her chair.
Dominic Maxwell very kindly gave
me four stars in The Times. But only
one review mattered. A post-show
text from the editor: “You’re not
fired.”Matthew Parris is awayMatt Chorley Notebook
Joke’s on me
again as big
news breaks
and I’m away
A serious plan of
action is needed to
save our high streets
Nick Plumb
H
igh streets were once the
beating hearts of our local
communities. More than
just places to shop for
weekly essentials, they
were where we came together to
celebrate, to socialise and to work.
Today, with a record 16 per cent of
shops across the country standing
empty and for longer than ever,
they’ve reached a tipping point. The
cost-of-living crisis will only further
compound the struggles of Britain’s
ailing high streets.
Many of today’s high streets are
unfit for purpose. The growth of
out-of-town retail and, more recently,
a shift towards online shopping has
left them vulnerable. They need a
radical reimagining if we are to bring
them back to life. In places up and
down the country the high street is
being revived with community-owned
pubs, cafés, shops, leisure centres,
libraries, markets and community
gardens. But they face an uphill
struggle to get a foothold in their town
centres. At Power to Change, the
organisation which supports the
growth of community businesses inEngland, we believe a £350 million
high street buyout fund is the way to
do it. Designed to help communities
on to the high street property ladder, it
would bring vision and purpose along
with greater stability to the high street.
The fund would be able to move at
the pace of private capital, to help
local people to secure empty high
street buildings and compete with
private investors, some of whom
don’t have the long-term interest of a
place at heart. It has the potential to
transform more than 200 neglected
high street properties across the
country by leveraging £250 million
of commercial and social investment
against a £100 million government
grant from the levelling-up fund,
making public money go further.
Forty per cent of people say that
buildings on high streets should be
owned by local people who are
genuinely invested in the success of
an area; 37 per cent feel that the
prevalence of distant high street
landlords and overseas investors has
a negative impact on their town.
With public awareness of foreign
ownership increasing, the demand
for change is clear to see. With
elections on the horizon, our
analysis shows that red wall regions
are experiencing the highest rates
of high street vacancy across
England. These vital community
spaces play a central role in our
national pride. We must not allow
them to disappear.Nick Plumb is policy manager at
Power to ChangeRed wall regions have
the highest rates of
vacancy in England
Roger
B oyes@rogerboyes