1— “Debate has raged”
Some headline news from the budget: Labour is finally, after an 18-month internal battle, scrapping the two-child benefit cap. How did they get here? Ailbhe is here, as always, with the inside track. Finn
2—“Mortal danger”
Is it all over in Ukraine? The country cannot fight a war for another year, that much is clear. Europe is facing a lonely future, without its American guarantor and with an expansionist, unchecked Russia. Andrew Marr assesses the grave situation. Finn
3—“How did this happen?”
Will Dunn makes an unappetising expedition for the sketch this week. There is “a hulking glacier of crap 500 feet long in the heart of the Oxfordshire countryside.” Criminals used it as an illegal rubbish tip. Will holds his nose and follows Ed Davey once more unto the heap. George
4—“Her rally or his…”
It’s Your Party conference weekend, and it’s going to be massive. Some predict a barney, some a bust-up. We’ve got two pieces for the meantime. First, Megan Kenyon sat down with Jeremy Corbyn to discuss his apology to Your Party members, his breakfast meeting with Zack Polanski and his ambitions for the leadership. Watch here, and read here.
And then we have a weekend essay from the left-wing veteran, Andrew Murray. He has some advice for the Your Party high-ups, most saliently to “to stop doing stupid stuff”. Nicholas
5—“Who was Salman Rushdie?”
This is a major one. When one colleague asked Tanjil how he felt to be writing about Sir Salman Rushdie, he said, “Well, I have been reading him since I was a boy.” And Tanjil’s boyhood is foreground and background in this essay-cum-meditation-cum-memoir. Not a dry eye in the house. Nicholas
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6—”Here’s the trick”
It takes a village (or un village?). While Will Dunn was inspecting the giant trash heap I was thoroughly investigating this year’s Beaujolais nouveau. Come along for a glass of summer in the bleak mid winter: the unassuming Gamay grape can teach us more than you might think about life. Trust me, or read me, to find out what. Finn
7—“Hymns of isolation”
I’ve always thought of Radiohead as headphone music: that falsetto over those arrangements, it’s something intense and private, not for 20,000 people standing in a field. But, in this wonderful review of the band live, George has won me round to the alternative. Nicholas
8—”Just-so satisfaction” William Nicholson and the pleasure in the paint No one can really agree on how significant William Nicholson’s contribution to 20th century painting was. Probably thanks to all those plodding still lifes. Michael Prodger jumps in to tell me to stop being such a hater – there is real pleasure in the close reading, he says. Convinced? Finn
9—”Like the Stasi in East Berlin”
Ethan Croft scopes out a faction with traction in the Labour party. Blue Labour involves a “bricolage of calls for reindustrialisation and lower migration, inspired by Catholic social teaching”. Others write it off as a load of Tories. Its influence has gone up, then down, then up, and so on. Right now they’re riding high. Ethan never fails to provide your quotient of gossip and Labour infighting. George
Elsewhere Naomi Klein: surrealism against fascism (from the brilliant new mag, Equator)
Why would China want to trade with us?
Guardian investigates the Free Birth Society
New Yorker: Airport lounge wars
Atlantic: Stranger Things comes to an exhausting end
Ryan Lizza/Olivia Nuzzi latest
Gamma the tortoise dies in her prime, at 141 :(
Recipe of the week: Nigel Slater’s pear and chocolate crumble (a crowd pleaser)
And with that…
Something smells fishy! And snail-y. And wine-y. I am talking, of course, about the recent spate of luxury grocery theft. Some thieves have stolen €90,000 worth of snails, intended for the restaurant trade. The producer (funny word for that job, I thought) said he was shocked when he learnt of the disappearance of 450kg of snails from his farm in Bouzy, in – get this – the Champagne region of France. The Times described the theft as “yet another blow to a struggling sector”.
Meanwhile, closer to home in Chelsea, a woman has been caught on CCTV making off with a box of langoustines, stolen from the doorstep of the Michelin-starred restaurant Elystan Street. That’s about £200 worth of big prawns. And in Virginia, a couple posed as wealthy collectors in order to secure private tours of restaurant wine cellars. While one distracted the sommelier, the other swiped. In their haul? A rare 2020 Romanée-Conti, worth $24,000.
I can’t help but think about the Louvre jewel heist in October: a crime of extraordinary effort. To pull it off, you do not just need to outsmart Louvre security, you then have to work out how to sell the things. And as Michael explains, flogging stolen jewels without alerting the authorities is a hard task. Snail theft is starting to sound appealing: no need for a cross-border pan-European crime network or experts in recutting precious stones; just a hot oven, some salted butter, chopped parsley and a splash of dry white, and you have already succeeded.