July 2023, Issue 39 The Critic

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WHY WE NEED CENSORS | CAN SUNAK STILL WIN? | VAN GOGH’S FINAL FLOURISH

The July 2023 Issue 39 | £6.95 thecritic.co.uk

THE UNIVERSITY LIE

How could the corporate body of the British university — the lecturers and scholars every bit as much as the armies of administrators and hangers-on who have gained ascendancy over the academic staff — tolerate the idea that they, by definition, should really stand apart from the life of the nation? That instead of being a voluminous part of the national fabric, they must be a rare ornament adorning the country. And that

if they sink to the quotidian level of mere schools they lose the very distinction that set them apart. Namely, an appetite — and an aptitude — for learning, as opposed to the need for instruction. Our universities are legion and they think of themselves as being central to public, social, commercial and moral life in modern British society. Who are you and what are you without a degree? This is your rank and your requirement, and it is

doled out by paper mills indifferent to quality. Be it yours, with your inflated degree, or theirs, with their indifferent admissions barely tempered even by what it takes to balance their books. Yet who’s to say they’re wrong? The degree has come to occupy exactly the place that the people who have done so much to destroy the true idea of the university wanted it to possess. It’s a mark of conformity and orthodoxy. But it is also essential for everyday life in a way that scholarship is incapable of truly being.

The modern university is, in short, a lie. The self-flagellation, be it over racism, sexism, transphobia, “violence”, mental health, is pretence. And it is a fakery that is necessary simply because there is nothing like the scholarship, still less the scholars, to justify the scale of the contemporary British academic establishment. In simple words, the rapid expansion of the sector has ensured that too many, particularly in the humanities departments, have little of value to do. So they have to act up, like frustrated, everstunted, children. The value which is squandered here is the possibility of meaningful intellectual life. But to keep the show going, and endowments topped up, and taxes raised and public monies spent, and futile debts imposed, every single university in this country pretends that it must be the size it is, and larger still. Not one university will

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Professor Ahmed has been one of the half-dozen academics to the fore whenever Cambridge has done the right thing admit that it has vastly outgrown any credible intellectual need. It is not surprising that modern British universities divert themselves with these carnivals of condemnation in which achingly right-on poseurs claim both every crime going — many contrived for the day of the week it is — and the lanyard worn for it. This gives them a more urgent sense of purpose than scholarship ever could.

Are the universities worth saving? No, not in anything like the number that currently exist. There is no case for the quantity and size of institutions masquerading as offering the university life, but in reality providing a

CHR IS RADBURN/T HE T IME S/NEW S LICE NSING

What are universities for? That question should be answered with one word which has a plain meaning: scholarship. This is not a means to an end, it is the end. And what it ought to produce is nothing more than its intellectual fruits. These should be gathered in a congenial and collegiate atmosphere conducive to study and — except in specific professional disciples such as medicine and law — the activity is not primarily vocational in character. For students, attending university should be a holistic experience and not a credential-harvesting passing of the termly seasons. Yet, of how many British universities can this still be said to be the case? University is justified in terms of pitifully crude — and largely unevidenced at lower-tier level — materialism: what it supposedly can do for your prospects economically; and what graduates can then in aggregate do for gross domestic product. Or country, as we might quaintly call it. The flip side of this materialist approach is promoted by the progressive left — universities are the tool to remedy injustice, spread diversity, and include the intellectually average. They are engines to decolonise and transgress, to queer and deconstruct. And all the while — controlled as they long have been by some of the most average British progressives going — they also mysteriously discriminate, oppress and exclude to hysterical and parodic extents. So much exhausts the tormented souls who go now to our universities.From where is there any desire to stand up for irrelevance, disinterest and self-containment as the true basis of scholarship properly understood?

parody of it. Contrary to the spirit of grade inflation they have actively promoted, they should be allowed to fail. What then of the universities that we should want, and the academics and students at them? In this issue we profile the inestimable Arif Ahmed, who is to defend academic freedom in an academic environment that fears it. No better man could be found for the role. He had the courage to invite our columnist, Helen Joyce, to his Cambridge college, which its master and senior tutor denounced as “offensive”. Beyond his college, Professor Ahmed has been one of the half-dozen academics always to the fore whenever Cambridge has done a right thing this century. The undoing of — the now thankfully former — Cambridge vice chancellor Stephen Toope was as much Professor Ahmed’s work as any other academic at the university.

That Cambridge retains the structures — free and secret ballots in Regent House — where defeats can be inflicted upon a Toope or his successors is a miracle. After all, the Toopes are relentless. For to be defeated once is not enough to stop them from mysteriously subscribing to all the discredited nostrums of critical theory, CRT and a tyranny of HR-invigilated complaints of

subjective microaggressions. Most Toopes don’t need votes to achieve their ends, they just need administration and personnel. Which they have in inexhaustible numbers. Professor Ahmed’s new post, as a de facto “Director of Freedom” had many champions, and, at least in the telling of Professor Matthew Goodwin, was the determined work of a counter-vanguard, who played the Left at their own game. And who for once in the dismal 13 years of Tory educational misrule, got their — rather than the blob’s — way. All well and good, but so many hopes, so often so silent and so fearful, rest on Ahmed’s shoulders. But what can he truly do? Take just one real world example which would have confronted him, had any Tory education secretary stopped posing and created his post years earlier: the “deplatforming”, at minutes’ notice, of the former Home Secretary, Amber Rudd, in Oxford three years ago. This was done by an undergraduate society that a state-appointed regulator is now to have supervision over, with powers to punish. How will that official establish what the crime against freedom was here?

The martyrs of the “marketplace of ideas” that Sebastian Milbank so sceptically assesses in this issue insist no one has the right to a platform nor a right not to be criticised. So why can’t a private, autonomous body withdraw an invitation as readily as they make it? What business is it of a quango or its appointees, however currently agreeable they are, to look into this? But most of all, how would they establish what has unacceptably been done here? And how would they punish whatever that was? No one should doubt who is trying to police the universities (and intolerantly destroy the careers of those they disagree with). It’s the Left, slyly or militantly as circumstances permit. However, while trying to protect the freedom of scholars is a noble end, it’s far from clear that the Office for Students can do anything of the sort. O ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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Contents COLUMNS 8

Helen Joyce The pornification of everything

6

Law Yuan Yi Zhu: Royals in court

9

Woman about Town Lisa Hilton: Head for the hills

10

Nova’s diary Home from Hiroshima

11

Serious business Ned: Work and wine don’t mix

13

My Woke World Titania McGrath: Jesus Christ was a trans woman 23 Arty Types D.J. Taylor on Celestria Parfitt

33

Henry Hill Can Sunak turn the polls around?

34

Everyday Lies Theodore Dalrymple: Falling into addiction

36

Sounding Board Marcus Walker: Uganda’s horrific anti-homosexuality law

37

Economics Tim Congdon: How the Bank lost the plot

40

Ellen Pasternack Noise annoys

44

Romeo Coates Counterfeit Cleese

76

Adam Dant on … The British hornets’ nest

52

On the passing of the great generation Mahan Esfahani bids a fond farewell to two musical giants, the organist Simon Preston and countertenor James Bowman 45

STUDIO William Cook: Van Gogh in Auvers-surOise: His Final Months, Amsterdam 48 7KLVPRQWKōVFRYHULV LOOXVWUDWHGE\0DUWLQ2ō1HLOO

Rethinking “free speech” Sebastian Milbank says that censorship is both desirable and necessary for a functioning democracy 18 Don’t mention the war Peter Hitchens on the folly of the Covid-obsessed Twitter critics who conflate lockdown with World War Two’s fight for freedom at almost any cost 22 The elegant extremist John Self argues that novelist Ian McEwan has always tempered his shocking stories with polished prose 24 Master of sword and word Robert Lyman says Bill Slim was not only our greatest general, but our best soldier-writer, too 26 Twilight with Venus Des Power on Henry Miller’s late infatuation with a Playboy pin-up 60 years his junior 28

FEATURES

Paradise dimmed Jaspreet Singh Boparai laments that Paradise Lost seems to be fading from public view 30

Don’t hobble the House Richard Johnson says proposals for constitutional reform will only weaken our parliamentary democracy 14

The dissenting doctor Yasmin Zenith on the leading psychiatrist who fears his treatment for gender dysphoria is under threat 35

Profile: Professor Arif Ahmed The philosopher tasked with protecting free speech on campus is fiercely independent, unafraid to take on vested interests and difficult to pigeonhole 16

Breaking taboos with clay Jo Bartosch interviews uncompromising ceramicist Claudia Clare, whose challenging work has rattled the art establishment 38 ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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BOOKS D.H. Robinson: The Conservative Party After Brexit by Tim Bale; Johnson at 10 by Anthony Seldon and Raymond Newell; Tory Nation by Samuel Earle 54 Haydn Middleton: Bowie Odyssey 73 by Simon Goddard; David Bowie: Rock’n’Roll With Me by Geoff MacCormack 56 David Thomas: Pathogenesis: How Germs Made History by Jonathan Kennedy 57 David Goodhart: Who Cares: the Hidden Crisis of Caregiving, and How We Solve It by Emily Kenway 59 Inaya Folarin Iman: This is Not America: Why Black Lives in Britain Matter by Tomiwa Owolade; It’s Not About Whiteness, It’s About Wealth by Remi Adekoya

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Sheehan Quirke: About Architecture: An Essential Guide in 55 Buildings by Hugh Pearman 62 Robert Hutton: The Battle of the Beams by Tom Whipple 64 Mark Glanville: Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder and the Hijacking of History by Benjamin Balint 65 Iain MacGregor: Goodbye Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land by Jacob Mikanowski 66 David Conway: Europe and the Roma: A History of Fascination and Fear by Klaus-Michael Bogdal 67 Sophie Nicholls: Confinement: The Hidden History of Maternal Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Britain by Jessica Cox 68

COV ER I LLUSTR ATI O N BY MARTI N O’ N EI LL/C UT IT O UT

Letters

Twin totems of Teutonic angst Daniel Johnson explains the German fascination with Hamlet and Faust 41

July 2023 | Issue 39 Graham Elliott: The Long Journey of English: A Geographical History of the Language by Peter Trudgill

70

Ben Sixsmith: Fancy Bear Goes Phishing: The Dark History of the Information Age, in Five Extraordinary Hacks by Scott J. Shapiro 71 Peter McDonald: Beryl: In Search of Britain’s Greatest Athlete by Jeremy Wilson

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John Self: I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home by Lorrie Moore; August Blue by Deborah Levy; Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

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THE SECRET AUTHOR Agent secrets

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THE CRITICS MUSIC Norman Lebrecht We are indebted to Otto Klemperer

78

OPERA Robert Thicknesse Why it’s time to drop Don Giovanni

79 80

Country Notes Patrick Galbraith wonders how best to have a countyside for all 92

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Deluxe Christopher Pincher on a glove affair 92

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Drink Henry Jeffreys on the colourful world of English winemakers 94

POP Sarah Ditum Perfect, plastic, pop princesses

ART Michael Prodger When painters lose their sight

THEATRE Anne McElvoy BBC embattled in Donmar’s latest

CINEMA Robert Hutton CA RTO ON B Y LEN H AWK IN S; C RI TI C FOX B Y JAS ON F OR D/ H E ART

We don’t need another (super)hero

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TELEVISION Adam LeBor Diamond geezers in Antwerp

85

RADIO Michael Henderson Remembering an unfashionable writer 86

ARCHITECTURE Charles Saumarez Smith Modern houses buyers actually want

87

Turf Account Stephen Pollard pays tribute to racing’s greatest-ever trainer

95

Style Hannah Betts hangs out the white flag 96 Hot House Claudia Savage-Gore frets over an upcoming birthday party

97

IN PRAISE OF

TABLE TALK Eating Out Lisa Hilton enjoys some classics in a timeless taverna in Greece

“We’ll always have Paris … more’s the pity.”

Film novelisations: the people’s prose by Sean Egan 98 89

Eating In Felipe Fernández-Armesto recalls meals fit for a king at an Oxford dining society 90

Visit The Critic online for exclusive daily political commentary, podcasts, features and reviews. With insights from columnists like Victoria Smith and Peter Caddick-Adams, and contributors including Simon Evans, Julie Bindel, Andrew Tettenborn, Robert Hutton, Ellen Pasternack, Adrian Pabst, Jacob Phillips, and Charlotte Gill.

THIS SPORTING LIFE Nick Timothy: The art of spin Boris Starling: Man in the middle Patrick Kidd: Oars and roars

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The Critic website is the home online for thoughtful and fearless debate, satire and analysis www.thecritic.co.uk

Pornification of everything

Helen Joyce

the observation that on the internet you can find porn featuring every imaginable protagonist and situation — is now so banal that it’s been ages since I’ve seen it mentioned. It is said to have originated 20 years ago with a webzine cartoon of a man staring in horror at a screen. The speech bubble reads “Calvin and Hobbes?”, and it’s captioned “Rule #34: if it exists, there is porn of it. No exceptions.” With hindsight, those were innocent times. The intervening decades have seen the arrival of Pornhub, now the world’s largest porn site; smartphones, which put free porn in everyone’s pockets, including children’s; and OnlyFans, which disaggregated and disintermediated live sex work. Porn aesthetics have reshaped women’s bodies, with trout pouts and Brazilian waxes now mainstream, and breast and butt implants nearly so. Meanwhile porn tropes have made their way into bedrooms: young women report that spitting, slapping, choking and anal are now normal expectations on the dating scene. Anti-porn campaigners tend to have three concerns: what porn does to the performers; what it does to the viewers; and what it does to the wider culture. The zeitgeist is uncongenial to thinking seriously about such issues. Self-denial and delayed gratification are out of fashion. The rising identitarian mode of politics conceives of people as bundles of innate characteristics — not just race, sexuality and gender identity, but specific and sometimes outré sexual tastes framed as “kinks”, which supposedly come pre-installed. The main task of teenagers and young adults is thought to be self-discovery, not building character.

◉◉◉ In today’s dating market, women who would prefer porn practices kept out of their bedrooms have little negotiating power

To this way of thinking, porn cannot teach arousal to distasteful material, only reveal that it is what the viewer was always fated to enjoy. For young people so open-minded that their brains have fallen out, the only sexual no-no is “kinkshaming”. It’s not your fault — or Pornhub’s — if you get off on urinating on people or soiling an adult nappy; indeed self-actualisation means learning that immutable fact about yourself early and acting upon it often. The sole admissible moral consideration concerning sexual encounters is consent. ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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But as Louise Perry writes in her excellent book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, consent is too shallow a concept to capture what is going on in today’s dating market. The pill, dating apps and porn have shaped it to suit only high-status, commitment-phobic men. Women who would prefer porn practices kept out of their bedrooms have little negotiating power. Is a teenage girl really able to say no to booty calls, choking and anal when she knows any boy she fancies has tastes and expectations shaped by porn? Some campaigners put their hope in measures such as parental controls, age verification and blocking online payment and clearing services. I fear, however, that these will do little hold back the tide of filth. Meanwhile porn is once more being reinvented by technology — in ways that may alleviate the impact on performers, but at the cost of speeding up the pornification of everything.

◉◉◉ The latest development is hyper-realistic CGI video of AI-generated characters. These are not “deepfakes”, in which stills or videos of real people are manipulated (often by superimposing female celebrities’ faces on the bodies of porn performers). Rather, they feature original characters created by machine-learning algorithms. The result will soon be visually indistinguishable from flesh and blood, except in being impossibly beautiful — or simply impossible, endowed with flexibility and stamina beyond human capacity, and proportions beyond the dreams of plastic surgeons. The technology still has glitches: an image of four ridiculously lovely blonde, bikini-clad camgirls that went viral on Twitter earlier this year managed the faces and curves well, but fell down when it came to the hands. Even so, it garnered appreciative comments from men who didn’t spot the flaws — and many predictions that artificial beauties created and directed by men will soon displace performers on OnlyFans and other adult-content sites. Some OnlyFans creators pushed back, saying that their subscribers value a personal connection. And indeed some porn viewers may be willing to pay for something they perceive as authentic, just as people still queue to see the Mona Lisa rather than settling for a faithful reproduction. Or they

PO RTR A IT B Y VAN ESS A DELL

Every meme has its day, and “Rule 34” —

may value the proprietorial feeling of owning a private performance or direct link with a creator. That is, after all, why NFTs (non-fungible tokens, which create verifiable title to the original of digital art) have taken off. Female celebrities might still be able to make money from adult performances, should they wish to — though few do now; very beautiful women usually have better options. The market in pretty young nobodies willing to be filmed having sex, however, is surely approaching its expiry date. How can they compete with artificial women whose expressions, anatomy and every move have been shaped by a man’s insights into other men’s desires? And you’d have to be very naïve to think men who cannot tell or do not care about the difference between faked female orgasms and real ones care much about authenticity and personal connection.

An AI generated image: “The result will soon be visually indistinguishable IURPŴHVKDQGEORRG except in being impossibly beautiful”

PUB LIC DO MA I N

◉◉◉ Taking the performers out of pornography would do a great deal to increase the sum total of human happiness. The average OnlyFans creator makes just $150 a month, and few porn performers’ careers last for more than a few years. This is an industry that chews up gullible young women and spits them out with mental and physical injuries from PTSD to anal prolapse. The shortness of careers in porn is largely because of the “Coolidge effect” — men’s evolutionarily-endowed desire for variety and novelty in sexƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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ual partners. It’s named for a possibly apocryphal anecdote about the former American president visiting a farm with his wife. On hearing that a particular rooster mated dozens of times a day, Mrs Coolidge supposedly said, “Tell that to the president.” Later, when he hears the same tale, the president asks “Same hen every time?” and when the answer is no, he says: “Tell that to Mrs Coolidge.” As for the escalating demands on performers, they are driven in part by an effect common to all media. I don’t think it’s been named, but I think of it as action-filmitis: the repeated one-upmanship in which one film’s car chase is trumped by the next one’s bomb on a bus, and thence in turn by high-speed smash-ups involving helicopters, planes, rockets, satellites and spaceships. The porn equivalent is bigger, harder, faster and longer. It’s more partners, more implants, more orifices, more bodily fluids, more violence and degradation.

◉◉◉ The effect is amplified by the way exposure to any type of content desensitises the audience, and by algorithms that autoplay ever more extreme content. Material that once would have turned viewers’ stomachs becomes ejaculation fodder. AI-generated porn, unconstrained by the need to keep performers at least minimally happy — or even alive — will further accelerate this process. It remains to be seen just how far AI-driven porn will stray from simulating reality. The female equivalent — written erotica — has always been more ingenious and varied. That is in part because evolution has shaped women to respond to a wider range of sexual cues than men, but also because the written word is less constraining than liveaction film. Given the chance, might large numbers of men like to watch AI-generated women having sex with the werewolves, vampires, demons and human-animal hybrids who stalk romance novels and fanfic? Might they be aroused by plots involving sex magic, soul bonds and time-travel? I fear rather that the backhanded compliment paid by Rule 34 to the range of men’s erotic imagination will turn out to have been too generous. To adapt Orwell, if you want a picture of the future of porn, imagine a freakishly endowed man pounding into an impossibly pneumatic woman — for ever. O

Letters

LOBBY FODDER David Littlefair’s article (THE “ON BEHALF OF” LABOUR PARTY, JUNE) highlights issues of candidate selection that aren't restricted to that one party. It is the norm among the political class — witness Nick Clegg’s career for a start. One of the few Labour MPs to not be part of this out-of-touch class is Carolyn Harris, the MP for Swansea East, who has a background of working-class community involvement. The established narrative is that parties select “the best” or “excellent” candidates. For Labour, this typically means candidates drawn from the ABC1, and the same is true for the other parties. Such “excellent” candidates continuously endorsed the extensions of the ruinous Coronavirus Regulations and called for more stringent lockdown and with more state spending. The national

most socialist prime minister was the public school-educated Clement Attlee. Mark Taha

london

“We used to be the Petty Crime Division…”

calamities we’ve suffered for decades are documented all around us in the media. This is what “excellent” candidates have given us. When she was the Labour MP for Bishop Auckland, Helen Goodman gave an eloquent speech about the natural beauty of the village in her constituency whose fair she attended. The details of the natural beauty of Ingleton she described in her speech didn’t apply to that village, but to another village of the same name some 70 miles away, represented by a different MP. But at least her PPE from Oxford made her eminently selectable as lobby fodder. I know of many people with good insight, judgement, and solid principles who would make excellent MPs, but none of them would be visible to any party, even if they could be persuaded to put their names forward. Meanwhile, the same identikit and compliant candidates get selected, with the same lack of original ideas and different insight. Richard W. Jones

welshpool, powys FORGET THE MANUAL David Littlefair’s article reminded me of the late 70s novel Grass Roots in which a young steelworker elected as a Labour MP is told that he might be the last Labour MP to have done manual labour. I remember describing John Prescott as New Labour’s token worker but must admit that the ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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CROSS-QUESTIONING I was amused at Catherine Lindsay’s expression of frothing outrage (LETTERS, JUNE) at the Scotticisation (We’ve got “anglicise”, so why not?) of, er … Scotland. All symbols of Britishness have been removed from the public sphere, she says. In their place the Scottish Saltire flutters wherever it can find a flagpole. The impertinence — flying their national flag in their own country — don’t they know their place? “No pro-UK Scot I know imagines this can be outsmarted by Unionists prancing down Sauchiehall Street as if they’re at the Last Night of the Proms,” she laments. She’s right about outsmarting, but if she takes a trip west along the M8 to Glasgow on the 12th of July she’ll see enough union flags to gladden her heart. She’ll also see plenty of Unionists prancing down Sauchiehall Street, playing flutes and wearing Ruritarian uniforms. It won’t much resemble the Last Night of the Proms, but she’ll be in the company of like-minded people. Thorfinn Johnston orkney THE INTERSECTIONAL FOX Thanks for Sebastian Milbank’s article (THE KIDS ARE ALT-RIGHT, MAY).

Apart from having the best headline I’ve seen so far this year, it was an objective and helpful discussion of a trend that the mainstream press seems eager to miss. This is why as a leftie I read The Critic, despite having to wade through monetarist economists, Tory boys, ranting rich kids, arty narcissists and Peregrine Worsthorne reincarnations — these categories are not mutually exclusive, btw — as you have your own peculiar version of intersectionality. You somehow manage to pull it all off. Very British. And I love the fox. Douglas Hayward

london

CARTO O N B Y R ICH AR D J OLLE Y

WASP STINGS I greatly enjoyed Samuel Rubinstein’s take-down of Dr Mary Rambaran-Olm and Dr Erik Wade (ANGLO-SAXON EXTREMISTS, JUNE). If woke American activists disapprove of the term “Anglo-Saxon” because it is an exonym (a name not much used by the people to which it refers), but also because of its association with the term "WASP" (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant), they should be aware that WASP too is an exonym, having been coined in 1948 by a black writer, then popularised by an American sociologist in the 1960s, and more recently used to refer to the American hegemonic class that lasted from the early nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Similarly, the term "African-American" (with or without that hyphen) has only become fashionable of late. Progressive black intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois used the term "Negro" (with a capital N) and sometimes "Abyssinian" as a term denoting African-American pride, even though many African-Americans had no historical association with Abyssinia. Christopher Silvester london

Write to The Critic by email at [email protected] including your address and telephone number

YUAN YI ZHU ON LAW

Royals on the witness stand Prince Harry is not setting a precedent with his recent appearance in court

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ast month, Prince Harry

P O R T R A I T B Y VA N E S S A D E L L ; A D R I A N D E N N I S / A F P V I A G E T T Y I M A G E S

graced this country with one of his rare visits in order to testify in his lawsuit against Mirror Group Newspapers for alleged phone-hacking. His Royal Highness was the first senior member of the Royal Family to testify in court in 132 years. On that occasion, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), had been at a house party where a guest, the tiger-stalking and married women-chasing LieutenantColonel Sir William Gordon-Cumming, Bt., was accused of cheating at baccarat, a card game then at the height of its inexplicable popularity. Gordon-Cumming had signed a mealy-mouthed non-confession in order to, he said later, protect the Prince’s reputation. All those involved swore to remain silent forever, and GordonCumming promised to not play cards again for as long as he lived.

But when people began to whisper behind his back, Gordon-Cumming issued writs for slander against his accusers. The Prince had to go in the witness box, which was most awkward since the playing of baccarat for money was illegal. As a witness, he made a poor show, displaying none of his customary jollity and giving his answers in a barely audible voice. He did not see any cheating, he admitted, but accepted at face value the evidence of his former friend’s accusers. Gordon-Cumming lost the case and was cashiered by the Army; the Prince was booed when he appeared at Ascot. More dubious would be the legal position of a ruling monarch who wishes to testify in court. A long line of authorities, from Hale to Chitty, agree that the King cannot give evidence in cases of treason or felony “for if

the King do wrong there is no remedy against him” (if he, for instance, committed perjury) and because of the conflict of interest involved (until 1870, anyone convicted of treason or felony automatically forfeited his lands and chattels to the Crown). But a minority opinion held that the sovereign may voluntarily testify in person, though unsworn, since he could not be prosecuted for lying under oath.

The question was so

Harry was the first senior member of the Royal Family to testify in court since the Prince of Wales 132 years ago

unsettled that when the judges were asked to give their opinion on the matter during the reign of Charles I, they refused to provide an answer, “not being able to discern the consequences which might happen to the prejudice of the Crown from these general questions”. And the situation in cases of misdemeanour or in civil cases was even less clear. The question might seem academic, but it was anything but for George V when the anarchist Edward Mylius alleged in an article titled “Sanctified Bigamy” that the King had secretly married the daughter of an admiral when he was a naval officer in Malta, making his marriage to Queen Mary invalid and their children illegitimate. The first British king to not have taken a mistress in a century, George V was understandably appalled, and wished to clear his name. The attorney-general duly issued an ex officio information against Mylius for criminal libel, a misdemeanour. Remanded to Brixton Prison, Mylius sent a letter to the King, politely asking him to testify voluntarily, though noting that as subpoenas were issued in the King’s name he could hardly compel him to come into the box. The law officers told King George to ignore the letters, and the Lord Chief Justice

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declined to compel him to testify. After Mylius was convicted, the attorney-general dramatically waved a piece of paper, said to be written in the King’s own hand, denying that he had ever married anyone other than the Queen and stating that he would have given evidence in person were it not for the advice of the law officers that doing so would be unconstitutional. Mylius had his martyrdom and the King vindicated his reputation, so that all parties got what they wanted.

Of course, none of this applies to foreign royals, those with sovereign immunity aside. European princes and Arab sheiks have long seen the Royal Courts of Justice as a neutral arena in which to settle their personal disputes, freely giving evidence if necessary, which is all very convenient since so many of them have houses in London. An exception was Prince Abdulaziz bin Mishal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud, who was sued by his former business partner in the High Court a decade ago. After unsuccessfully trying to claim sovereign immunity (rejected as he was not sufficiently high-ranking) and attempting to have the trial held in camera (journalists objected), he refused to sign his witness statements, delegating the task to an underlying. According to the Prince, Saudi royal protocol forbade him from doing anything so vulgar as personally partaking in litigation, let alone signing witness statements or, God forbid, testifying. But there was no evidence such a protocol existed: an even wealthier royal relative of his had testified in the High Court only a month earlier without demurring. Without a witness statement, Prince Abdulaziz’s defence was struck out and he lost the case. An appeal to the Supreme Court duly failed. Perhaps he could learn something useful from Prince Harry. O

Woman About Town LISA HILTON S tessa spiaggia, stessa mare

(“same beach, same sea”): the rituals of the Italian holiday season have remained unchanged for generations. On 1 May, the bathing stations on the Venice Lido set up their beach huts and umbrellas for the opening weekend, despite it being

ten degrees and pouring down. May in La Serenissima is now the season of pac-a-macs and weeping brides.

*** Head for the hills ... Smart Venetians have concurred that it’s no longer the thing to attend the “exclusive” preview days of Biennale — too many people, too many parties, too much fawning coverage of painfully inadequate exhibits. Unless one has to be in town for professional reasons one goes (or pretends to go) up to Cortina, reserving the inauguration of the social season for September’s far more refined Glass Week. Before skedaddling, I did catch one brilliant show at the Prada Foundation at Ca’Corner. “Everybody Talks About the Weather” combines contemporary and Old Master artworks with climate science installations, developed in conjunction with Ca’Foscari university, in an exhibition at once rapturously beautiful and utterly terrifying. Responding to our misinformed age, the curators have also included “Research Stations” where visitors can consult a library of books, scientific journals and interviews with scholars and climate activists, a tool which feels far more original than the confrontational urge still adopted by so many contemporary shows.

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eal-world confrontation was seen this

month in demonstrations against the city’s muchloathed mayor, Luigi Brugnaro, best known for his resistance to banning cruise ships from the Venetian lagoon. At least he has a sense of humour; a man who could make Berlusconi’s mixing of business and political interests appear a model of transparency, he is currently plotting to close one of Venice’s few hospitals, the Giustinian, in order to use the building for the proposed headquarters of the European ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

commission against money laundering. With Venice’s population now below 50,000, depriving residents of healthcare facilities can only accelerate Brugnaro’s policy of willed depopulation. Venetians made their objections clear in a series of flashmob protests. “Hands off Giustinian!” was the optimistic slogan, but as in the case of the mega boats, there won’t be much chance of saving the site unless central government intervenes.

*** Stand and deliver Brugnaro has provoked further outrage with his proposal to construct a huge sports stadium behind Marco Polo airport on the mainland using a combination of EU funds, public money and a €40 million mortgage charged to the Venetian taxpayer. The EU has wisely refused to finance the project, but since Brugnaro has failed to sanction any alternative schemes (which in order to receive funding have to be completed by August 2026), Venice now looks set to miss out on €93 million of investment in housing, transport and urban renewal. Venetians yet again brought out their banners, trumpets and whistles, but the syndicate which governs the city now proposes to fund this absurd and unwanted project (by a construction company whose investors reportedly include a blind trust for one L. Brugnaro), by flogging off a few of its priceless artworks.

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ond as I am of a demo (my homemade “Cruisers

are Losers” sign was a hit), a hopeful sign for Venice is the number of creatives who are moving here. At the launch of his book Ateliers of Europe at Palazzo Contarini della Porto di Ferro, John Whelan, design wunderkind and new resident, explained his decision to relocate to the lagoon: “Venice is the Lindisfarne of culture. When the lights have gone out everywhere else, it will endure.” Other new recruits include Kieron Quirke, writer of the brilliant This England, and artist Patrick O’Reilly whose exquisitely restored eyrie near Accademia boasts one of the

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NOVA’S DIARY

O

“What on earth are you wearing?” Akshata is worried DERXW5LVKL+HōVGUHVVHGLQVKRUWVŴLSŴRSVDQGD hoodie. He looks like the man who comes to clean our