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CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Introduction — Ian Brunskill

Acknowledgments

AUTUMN

Meritocracy is the last thing Britain needs — Philip Collins

Jeremy Paxman: ‘I’m not ashamed to say I’ve suffered depression’ — Interview by Janice Turner

Bataclan: one year on — Adam Sage

You can’t trust the people with democracy — Roger Boyes

Burnt and tortured migrants filled decks as we rushed to help — Bel Trew

‘Tantrums and shocking racism’ of inquiry’s dysfunctional dame — Andrew Norfolk, Sean O’Neill

Middle-aged virgins: Japan’s big secret — Richard Lloyd Parry

Royal family are more secretive than MI5 — Ben Macintyre

Inside Britain’s only transgender clinic for children — Louise France

A bare-knuckle fighter in the bloodiest contest ever — Rhys Blakely

Leonard Cohen — Obituary

Let’s stop being so paranoid about androids — Matt Ridley

WINTER

Game’s soul is not at Lord’s. It is here — Mike Atherton

Confessions of a middle-aged man — Jonathan Gershfield

Terrible teaching is what makes Oxford special — Giles Coren

Children killed in Duterte’s drug war — Richard Lloyd Parry

Zsa Zsa Gabor — Obituary

Cash belongs in the past so let’s abolish it — Ed Conway

Wild swimming is a rare splash of freedom — Edward Lucas

Children of the internet are happy to live a lie — Oliver Moody

How I conquered my morbid fear of flying — Melanie Phillips

Year of revolution — Leading Article

The NHS is in need of emergency treatment — Janice Turner

The hedgie with a 99.9% success rate — Harry Wilson

Are you tough enough for ‘radical candour’ at work? — Helen Rumbelow

Our week: everyone — Hugo Rifkind

Tourist exodus leaves gigolos hungry for love — Jerome Starkey

Big brands fund terror — Alexi Mostrous

Being offended is often the best medicine — David Aaronovitch

Our magical Wembley moments — George Caulkin

Spinal column: I keep seeing the ghost of Melanie past — Melanie Reid

SPRING

Scraps, storms and trench hand all in a 23ft boat — Damian Whitworth

We all need to learn how to talk about death — Alice Thomson

What’s a nice Asian boy doing in a place like this? — Sathnam Sanghera

Giving birth is a lethal gamble in Venezuela — Lucinda Elliott

Chuck Berry was a political revolutionary — Daniel Finkelstein

On Westminster Bridge — Leading Article

It’s time to reclaim our rights from big tech — Iain Martin

Our addicts turn blue, then they die: the town at the centre of new US drugs epidemic — Rhys Blakely

This is the end of democracy, cry protesters as nation splits in two — Hannah Lucinda Smith

Drought casts the shadow of death — Catherine Philp

Nepal is back: ancient temples, mountains and Bengal tigers —Tom Chesshyre

Le Pen can be president if she plays the long game — Giles Whittell

Duke retires rather than grow frail in public — Valentine Low

Landslide for Macron — Charles Bremner, Adam Sage

Giving a voice to the lost girls of Rochdale — Andrew Norfolk

Queer City by Peter Ackroyd — Review by Robbie Millen

Watch out — here come the Bridezillas — David Emanuel interviewed by Hilary Rose

The 10 worst crimes in horticulture — Ann Treneman

Shock poll predicts Tory losses — Sam Coates

SUMMER

Investors priced out by the bank — Alistair Osborne

Election 2017 — Leading Article

Saved by friends from across the water — Patrick Kidd

US banned tower cladding — Alexi Mostrous, David Brown, Sean O’Neill, John Simpson, Sam Joiner

Helmut Kohl — Obituary

Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill: how civil servants lived in fear of the terrible twins at No 10 — Oliver Wright, Francis Elliott, Bruno Waterfield

Food and service in a time machine — Giles Coren reviews Assaggi

Sovereign wealth — Leading Article

The primitive lost society of love island — Ben Macintyre

Small acts of kindness that can save a life — Libby Purves

People thought I was mad to offer my spare room to a homeless stranger — Alexandra Frean

Pocket money, phone, rambo knife — Rachel Sylvester

The Dunkirk myth never told our real story — David Aaronovitch

My career’s in reverse and I couldn’t be happier — Emma Duncan

Puppy love — Caitlin Moran

The conservatives are criminally incompetent — Matthew Parris

Justin Gatlin reminds us that sport is not a fairytale — Matt Dickinson

Starting nuclear war is president’s decision alone — Rhys Blakely

‘We’ll never be able to stop the hunger for revenge here’ — Anthony Loyd

Photo Section

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Like its predecessor this volume brings together outstanding writing, photography and graphics from a year in the life of the world’s most famous newspaper. It covers an eventful, unsettled 12 months, from September 2016 to August 2017. In a new-year editorial on December 30, 2016 (reprinted here on p125), The Times took stock. If 2016 had been a year of “shocks, setbacks and slaughter”, the paper thought it would also seem with hindsight “a year of revolution … part of a rolling transformation of political institutions, and of geopolitical shifts”. Britain’s EU referendum and the election of Donald Trump had been manifestations of a populist rejection of established elites. They expressed the deep-rooted grievance of millions of voters who felt ill-served by representative democracy and to whom the rapid expansion of global trade had not brought prosperity.

The Times viewed the year ahead with trepidation, predicting that “the many cracks opened up in 2016 will widen in 2017”. To a degree they have. Britain, split almost down the middle by the referendum vote, is no less divided over Brexit than it was a year ago. Trump’s America is riven by dangerous tensions. Yet in some ways, this anthology suggests, the 2016 revolution may have stalled. Britain is no nearer knowing how Brexit might work or what it will mean, and a general election called to bring clarity had the opposite effect. President Trump’s efforts to turn rhetoric into policy have so far largely been frustrated. In France the presidential victory of Emmanuel Macron was no doubt a shock to the country’s political system, but the sudden rise of a wealthy, centrist, business-friendly financier hardly feels like a triumph of populism over the establishment. Meanwhile, around the world, elites cling stubbornly to power by whatever means they can.

It’s a gloomy picture, perhaps, but it shouldn’t – and doesn’t – make for gloomy newspapers. In a world of conflict and upheaval readers want accurate, balanced, immediate first-hand reports. They want powerful human stories that bring developments alive, reliable facts on which to base their own judgments, authoritative commentary and analysis to put the news in context and explain why it matters. Times readers expect their paper to take them seriously. They need to know the worst, and to understand it. But they expect also to be entertained, by articles on fashion or football or gardens or dogs that are as lively and as expert as the coverage of politics and world affairs.

An edition of The Times contains between 150,000 and 270,000 words. It never seems enough. Every night, as deadlines loom, good stories are cut back, held over or dropped altogether when something more urgent or important comes along. There are 110,000 words in this book. To claim such a tiny fraction of the paper’s annual output as “the best of” would be absurd. The hope is that the articles included nonetheless give an engaging picture of a momentous year, and show the quality and range of the journalism that The Times produces day after day.

Ian Brunskill

Assistant Editor

The Times

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special thanks to Matthew Lyons (production editor), Nasim Asl, Jack Dyson, Josie Eve and Ailsa McNeil (editorial assistants), Sarah Willcox (sub-editor), Mark Grayson and Andrew Keys (designers); and to Gerry Breslin, Jethro Lennox, Karen Midgley, Kevin Robbins and Sarah Woods at HarperCollins. Thanks also to the contributors and to the following Times colleagues: Grace Bradberry, Peter Brookes, Becky Callanan, Jessica Carsen, Magnus Cohen, Nigel Farndale, Hannah Fletcher, Richard Fletcher, Rana Greig, Fiona Gorman, Jeremy Griffin, Tim Hallissey, Robert Hands, Suzy Jagger, Nicola Jeal, Alan Kay, Alex Kay-Jelski, Jane Knight, Robbie Millen, Simon Pearson, Monique Rivelland, Fay Schlesinger, Tim Shearring, Mike Smith, Sam Stewart, Matt Swift and the Times graphics team, Craig Tregurtha, Emma Tucker, Pauline Watson, Giles Whittell, Rose Wild, Danny Wilkins, Fiona Wilson and John Witherow.

AUTUMN

MERITOCRACY IS THE LAST THING BRITAIN NEEDS

Philip Collins

SEPTEMBER 16 2016

“IT IS NOT ENOUGH to succeed. Others must fail.” Gore Vidal’s waspish hopes for his friends captures, in an epigram, why Theresa May does not really mean what she says about meritocracy. Meritocracy does not mean meritocracy. At the beginning of their time in office every prime minister has to make the meritocracy speech. The ardour always fades because, looked at straight on, meritocracy is a radical and terrifying idea.

The term itself was designed as a warning rather than an aspiration. Michael Young wrote The Rise Of The Meritocracy in 1958 to raise the alarm that a society based on a narrow definition of merit, embodied in an intelligence test at an early age, is a terrible place to live. Young’s meritocracy descends into disorder as the sheep and the goats start to fight. There is nothing wrong, of course, with a weaker version of meritocracy in which talent and effort are rewarded to a greater extent than their opposites. This is what every prime minister is initially getting at, translated into the bloodless jargon of social mobility. But even that they cannot really mean.

This is why we have been treated to yet another turn of the wheel for the over-sold hysteria about grammar schools. When Gordon Brown took over from Tony Blair one of his first acts was to reform the royal prerogative powers, such as the declaration of war, that are carried out by the prime minister. Theresa May’s exhuming of grammar schools prompted the same thought I had then: is that all you’ve got? If a few grammar schools is all you’re about, then you’re not really about much. This will not be the full return of the binary distinction between grammars and secondary moderns. The school system is too diverse for that.

Besides, Mrs May’s advisers know all the objections to grammar schools. They know the cause of social mobility in the 1960s was the conversion of Britain, between the end of the First World War and the end of that decade, from an essentially blue-collar economy into a mostly white-collar one. Suddenly there was more room at the top. Grammar schools coincided with this change but did not cause it. At the height of their popularity, of the grammar school children who gained two A levels, less than 1 per cent came from the skilled working class.

This is a point so well established that it enabled even Jeremy Corbyn to get the better of Mrs May at PMQs this week. After the beating, Mrs May’s spokesman was unable to cite any evidence in support of her policy. That’s because there isn’t any.

That has not prevented plenty of Tory MPs and columnists from elevating their autobiographies to the status of policy writ. There really is no more firmly established body of evidence in all of education. So why does it have to be said over and over? Are these Tories so arrogant that they are impervious to evidence? No, they just don’t know what they are talking about. They are simply observing that there were more people mobile in their generation and ascribing that fact, wrongly, to schools.

The government’s green paper actually admits its own problem: “Under the current model of grammar schools … there is … evidence that children who attend non-selective schools in selective areas may not fare as well academically — both compared to local selective schools and comprehensives in non-selective areas.” The rest of the document is then an attempt to salvage selection from the jaws of this yawning disaster. The upshot will be that the conditions imposed on schools before they can opt to select will be so severe by the time the bill limps through parliament that there will be little incentive to do so. Most of the large academy chains have no need of selection. Mrs May’s speech on meritocracy was a grand vision saddled to a sorry policy.

The fabled popular demand will dissipate too. Grammars were not abolished by Tony Crosland in a fit of socialist envy. They were closed by Margaret Thatcher because of middle-class parents complaining to local authorities that their children were not getting in. Young put the politics of grammar schools perfectly: “Every selection of one is a rejection of many.” Meritocracy has the unfortunate effect of making aspiration a zero-sum game. My very stupid children (well, not mine, yours), with all their good fortune, will have to fall down a snake while your bright poor child climbs a ladder. No ordinary middle-class parent is going to stand idly by while that happens. It therefore follows that the policy meritocrat will have to commit to some policies even more unpalatable than grammar schools.

There is in fact a Meritocracy Party in Britain, which demands that the Queen abdicate and that only those with relevant experience, which would presumably include the Queen (Tory), be permitted to vote. They want inheritance tax at 100 per cent. I may have earned the money but my children have not and if advantage can be purchased, which it can, then the transfer from me to them impairs the principle of merit.

Advantage goes back a long way. In 1693 John Locke wrote a parenting guide, Some Thoughts Concerning Education. The best recommendation was that children should eat no vegetables but the rest has worn well. Locke points out that good citizens are created by good parents and it’s still true. Educated parents are marrying their own kind and talking to their children. High-income parents talk with their school-aged children for three hours more per week than low-income parents. By the age of three a poor child would have heard 30 million fewer words at home than one from a professional family.

It matters. How children perform in tests when they are three and a half is a strong predictor of how well they do at school years later. The best way to predict a person’s social position at the age of 19 is attainment at 16, which in turn is best foretold by attainment at 11. And you can tell who is going to do well at 11 simply by looking up who did well at seven. A meritocracy would therefore withdraw resources from the later years of life and spend earlier in the life cycle. The only government member I recall taking this seriously is a little-remembered person by the name of Andrea Leadsom.

The regime in Young’s Rise Of The Meritocracy collapses when the government takes the children of the poor into care to ensure equality of opportunity. Every politician wants the soft version of meritocracy in which the poor do well but nobody suffers. It’s a fantasy and that is why the pertinent response to Mrs May is not hysteria about a return to the 1950s but simply this: is that all you’ve got?

JEREMY PAXMAN: ‘I’M NOT ASHAMED TO SAY I’VE SUFFERED DEPRESSION’

Interview by Janice Turner

SEPTEMBER 24 2016

JEREMY PAXMAN relished “war-gaming” interviews, a former Newsnight producer tells me: debating the research, plotting manoeuvres, setting bear traps into which ministers would tumble. So how do you war-game a man who knows all the moves? After his famous question about whether he prayed with George W Bush, Tony Blair cavilled at his intrusiveness and Paxo threw up his hands in faux innocence: “But prime minister, I’m just trying to work out what kind of chap you are.”

What kind of a chap is Paxman, beneath the suits, the elaborate disdain, the position in our culture — vacant since he left Newsnight two years ago — as the scary tutor/imposing father who sees through our dissembling and flaws? His memoir, A Life in Questions, abounds with great hack yarns about Diana, Princess of Wales, and the Dalai Lama, war reporting, political scuffles and BBC crises, yet personal detail is sketchy. He has declared his three children and partner, Elizabeth Clough, absolutely out of bounds. Indeed, no girlfriend gets more than a single line. While Paxo the man — what he feels, whom he loves — emerges rarely and fleetingly from his carapace of high snark.

So in 300-plus pages we glean that he sits on the toilet shooting squirrels out of the bathroom window, he’s happiest fishing and (thanks to an anecdote about Orthodox Jews) that he is uncircumcised. Yet those who know him well speak of a complicated man roiling with self-doubt who “struggles with existence”. Ask about his father, they say, whose approval he sought in vain. Ask about his depression. Ask Paxman if he is happy.

We meet at Galvin La Chapelle in east London and I have bagged us a table alone on the mezzanine high above the shiny City lunch crowd. Paxman is late, caught in cross-town traffic from his Notting Hill flat where he lives three days a week rather than commute from his family home near Henley, Oxfordshire. I watch him walk very slowly up the stairs. He wore out his knee running, is considering replacement surgery and is clearly in pain. (Later, when I see him wincing and offer to carry his suit bag, he splutters and tells me to f *** off.) Otherwise he looks splendid for 66: lean apart from a slight bay-window belly; thick, almost white hair; fine skin with that rich man’s holiday burnish. His azure linen jacket with elaborate stitching is very natty.

Old age, however, seems much on his mind and appears to revolt him. His most recent headlines were for blasting the magazine Mature Times for its stairlift ads and portrayal of people his age as “on the verge of incontinence, idiocy and peevish valetudinarianism”. (He has a rather Alan Partridge-esque vocabulary, calling party conferences the “gallimaufry of our democracy”.) I note that his memoir is rather ageist: he refers to “whiffy old wrinklies” and tells an unkind story about John Gielgud needing help to go to the loo. He writes that old people who don’t pay “direct” taxes (ie aren’t working) shouldn’t be allowed to vote.

Does he use his free bus pass? The eyebrows shoot up.

“I don’t have one.”

Why not?

“Because I’m still earning and I’m very happy if people want to give you a discount because you’re over a certain age. But I’ve just done four weeks filming a series about rivers. The week after next I’m in Washington. Why should I expect others to pay my Tube fare?”

Why do you believe you should be allowed to vote but people who’ve retired from jobs you can’t do in old age — roofers, say — should not?

“I did not say that!”

You said no representation without taxation.

“Yes. And there will come a point of course when no one asks me to do anything. It happens to all of us.”

So in the meantime you should be allowed to vote but they shouldn’t?

“Sometimes, life is like that, Janice. Unfair.”

For the first 20 minutes, after Paxo has ordered “heritage tomato” salad (scorn about what “heritage” means), mutton (scorn about how much “lamb” is really mutton) and a glass of white wine (which he believes doesn’t count as real booze), the interview comprises me asking a question and him knocking it down. It feels like a bizarre stress dream in which I’m on Newsnight playing Jeremy Paxman while the real Jeremy Paxman harrumphs and sneers. He calls me (humorously, maybe …) “a silly woman”, accuses me of misquoting him, tells me to “cast a more artful fly” and, as if abrading dim University Challenge contestants, cries, “Oh, come on!”

How the hell, I think, am I going to ask about his father? In the book, Keith Paxman is a puzzle, a shape-shifter, a domineering presence but also an invisible man, whom his son has clearly spent his whole life trying to fathom. Jeremy, his eldest child, was born near Leeds while Keith, a naval officer, was away at sea, and screamed when introduced to him. “Relations between us never really improved much.” His father had a vile temper and beat him for any perceived insubordination with sticks, shoes, cricket stumps or his bare hand. “Did I love my father?” he writes. “My feelings ranged from resentment to passionate hatred.”

Paxman is scathing about his father’s social pretensions and evolving accent as he leaves the navy and tries, falteringly, to rise in the world. Keith resents his wife’s family wealth, which pays for Jeremy, his two brothers and little sister to attend private schools. He becomes a typewriter salesman then ascends to manage factories across the Midlands. The family home grows to a country house and Keith adopts brass-buttoned blazers, a monocle and plus-fours. Paxman sees him as a try-hard and a phoney who once introduced his son to his golf-club friends as “one of those homosexual communists from the BBC”.

Moreover, the family’s social standing is precarious: middle class “by our fingernails”. Jeremy never feels at ease at Malvern College “with the boys who genuinely belong to the professional classes”, and a sense of not truly belonging and a bad case of impostor syndrome have never left him.

Later, when Labour nationalises the steel industry, his father quits and is transformed into a comedy huckster, buying cosmetics from a company called Holiday Magic in a pyramid scheme, then a chain of laundrettes. Finally, Keith reappears at the end of the book, as a coda, having moved to Australia and broken contact with his family. Paxman goes over to find him but the encounter is so vaguely explained, we don’t learn if his mother had been divorced or had died. It is as if Paxman, having started to exhume this painful matter, finds it too difficult to finish.

I ask what lasting effect his father had on his life. “There comes a point, about the age of 40, when you have to stop saying how you are is a consequence of how you were brought up. And particularly when you are 66, it is pathetic to say, ‘I am as I am because of things that happened in my childhood.’

“I understand what you’re digging for. I’m just …” I’m not digging — I’m asking about your memoir. “Yes, you are digging.” It’s my job to dig. “Well, you just said, ‘I’m not digging.’ Make up your mind.”

Wouldn’t you ask, in my position?

“Well, I might.” Eventually, Paxman says quietly, “I will not be portrayed as a ‘poor little me’ figure.”

The “homosexual communist” remark, he says, was “an example of wardroom humour”. But it stuck with you? “Oh, I remember it vividly, where it happened.”

Did your father ever say he was proud of you? “I expect so …”

Did you feel he was proud?

“It wasn’t a terribly … It wasn’t that sort of close, intimate relationship. But I do understand that if I answer your question saying, ‘Oh, I never felt he was proud of me,’ I know how you will write that. I’m like the boy in the jam factory who didn’t eat jam because he knew what went into it.”

When his father left, Paxman was about 24, a BBC trainee. He does not report whether his departure was expected or sudden. “I don’t recall. I wasn’t at home.”

Didn’t you all wonder over time why he didn’t come back? “No.”

He sees his siblings from time to time — his brother Giles was British ambassador to Spain — but they aren’t terribly close. “If we don’t see people very often … Intimacy is the consequence of familiarity, isn’t it?” He assumes his parents divorced, because his father eventually remarried in New Zealand and his stepmother brought Keith’s ashes to scatter in England. When I wonder how his father’s example influenced his own parenting he is instantly angry, accusing me of asking about his children. Which I wouldn’t dare. Then he says, “I think everyone is scared to some extent of becoming their parents and I suppose that would have been the case. The family relationships, I find they don’t resonate happily to me.”

Paxman’s mother, however, barely features in the book, except as quietly running the household. He doesn’t even note when she died.

“Both my parents are dead,” he says, taking off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “It’s strange, death, isn’t it? However old you are, when you’ve finally lost both parents, there is a feeling of being orphaned. And I think it’s very cruel that all the very vibrant memories I have of my mother are now intertwined with the memory of how she looked at the point of death.” Was he there? “Yes, the skin kind of collapses on to the skull and you recognise the person, but you don’t recognise them. They’ve clearly passed from one state of being to another … I remember when she was young and she had this luxurious black hair which she kept pinned back in a bun. And she had three boys within three and half years or something. And boys are quite difficult …”

I ask how old his mother was when she died.

“I’m ashamed to say I cannot tell you.”

After his father had been gone for more than a decade, sending only curt Christmas cards, Paxman went to Australia to find him.

“I was astonished by his lack of curiosity. I mean, there were grandchildren he’d never seen, spouses he’d never met. It seemed as if we were part of a life he’d put behind him.”

Was it the journalist in him who wanted to go, or the questing son?

“Both of those things, I think. I wanted to see if he was all right and I was slightly concerned in case I was becoming him.” It is the most revealing thing he’s said in an hour. And I recall a childhood incident he describes of his sister finding their father sobbing on the bathroom floor. “I didn’t want to feel I was living my life as he lived his life … I think he was actually a vulnerable man and he probably thought cutting himself off was the only way to survive.”

Paxman refers to his depression (“I spent several years seeing a therapist, and several more on antidepressants,” he says in his foreword) in several brief incidents. When he was studying at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge, friends recall him standing on a bridge saying, “It is completely and utterly meaningless, isn’t it?” then going to the pub. Aged 35, after stints in Belfast during the Troubles and as a war reporter in Zimbabwe and Lebanon, and having lost three good friends, he suffered insomnia and nightmares: “I didn’t exactly have a breakdown. But it was pretty like one.”

He has refused to talk about it before. “I don’t see any reason to be ashamed of saying I’ve suffered depression, as have a vast number of people. What I’m really not willing to do is try to appear as a victim.” As when discussing his father, Paxman’s greatest fear is of appearing to whine or look pitiful and weak.

Has he learnt anything during his years of treatment he’d care to pass on?

“The great thing is that unless we are all finished, the sun’s going to come up tomorrow. It’s always worst in the middle of the night, and what seems insurmountable at 3am, at 8am looks completely different. The critical thing they teach you doing CBT [cognitive behavioural therapy] is there is another way of looking at things. I would really like to learn that skill.”

Did CBT help him?

“I don’t think I was conscientious enough. But that is the key question: when everything seems black and shrouded in gloom and there seems no way out, is there another way of looking at it? Though,” he adds quietly, “if you’re in the grip of really serious depression, that’s almost impossible.”

Before I meet Paxman, I call several senior Newsnight colleagues who say many warm things. He is not a sulking prima donna: although intolerant of mediocrity, he would voice his view, then get on with the job. Nor is he a bully who “punches down”; he was patient with junior staff and, says one female executive, “was more receptive to women’s voices in the newsroom than most men in the Nineties”. But it is his complexity that instils loyalty. “Why he is a great broadcaster, not just a good one, is because beneath that outer shell of suave sophistication, there is an inner vulnerability.” This, points out another former colleague, explains his sensitivity when interviewing Terry Pratchett about facing death or the MP John Woodcock about his own mental illness.

In his memoir, Paxman expresses regret about his crueller questions to Gordon Brown (“Why does no one like you?”) and asking Charles Kennedy, “Why does everyone say of you, ‘I hope he’s sober’?” He believes his famous monstering of hapless junior treasury minister Chloe Smith was needed to bring the government to account, but asking, “Are you incompetent?” was “unanswerable and unkind”.

The media, he says, can only accommodate one idea of a person. “I know that I will always be Mr Rude or whatever,” he says. “But I know that’s not me. It’s a small part of any human being.” Yet that impenetrable outer shell, his air of not caring what anyone thought of him, created jeopardy. When you switched on Newsnight and saw Paxman was presenting, nothing seemed unsayable. And his jaded, nihilistic belief that fame, TV, politics, indeed much of human activity, is basically meaningless can be a useful mindset when dealing with the powerful. “The most striking thing about some of them,” he writes of establishment luminaries, “is how unimpressive they all are.”

The problem with Paxman is this default position — “You’re all lying fools” — solidified into a shtick. He quotes Alan Bennett on irony, the English amniotic fluid “washing away guilt and purpose and responsibility. Joking but not joking. Caring but not caring. Serious but not serious.” It encapsulates his father’s cruel wardroom humour, his own supercilious sneer.

At times he sounds high-handed, especially when discussing peers. Newsreaders, Jon Snow aside, are failed actors, not proper journalists. Nicholas Witchell is a “rather buttoned-up reporter who had written a book about the Loch Ness monster”. He says producers cried of one excitable broadcaster, “Stick a fresh battery in the news bunny.” (Is this Huw Edwards? “I have no comment to make.”)

Although he doesn’t dignify his existence with a mention in the book, he was reportedly most unpleasant to Jeremy Vine, whom he saw as a threatening younger version of himself. In Vine’s memoirs, he recalls that if he left a mug or family photo in the newsroom they were removed secretly by Paxman. “Jeremy Vine has written his memoirs?” he spits out with disdain. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” But you called him your “mini-me” and “the sorcerer’s apprentice” on air. Paxman huffs. “Did I? Good.”

What interests him now more than the TV ephemera of catching out politicians are the bigger questions. “Is there a purpose?” he says. “What do things mean? What is the right way to live? I would rather spend an evening talking about those than how to manage Vladimir Putin or reform the NHS. My great discovery in the past year or so is that news doesn’t really matter.” He doesn’t watch Newsnight — “It stops me having to tell people what I think of it.”

Since he left the programme he’s kept busy writing this memoir, a column for the Financial Times and making several TV series. Work, he finds, keeps the black dog at bay. Yet one question nags him: has he fulfilled his potential? “We all ought to ask ourselves that as we approach the finishing line. Could I have done something else? I haven’t got any great talents. Well, perhaps I could have put them to better purpose.”

Does this come from his father’s view that making things was more worthwhile than just reporting on them? “I think that’s a fair observation, and that is what I feel.”

The Conservative Party made a tentative approach about him being candidate for London mayor. But he says he’d make terrible lobby fodder. He sees himself as a maverick — “I’ve never been part of the establishment,” he insists — which seems at odds with his membership of the Garrick Club. He tells me, off the record, how it came to pass that, after initially being blackballed, he was allowed to join. But he is not naturally clubbable anyway, likes being alone or in his coterie of wealthy fishing mates including Robert Harris and Max Hastings.

We’re already late for the photoshoot and I’m pink in the face from the exertion of interview combat. At the end of a TV interrogation, Paxman always asked his subjects, “Happy enough?” Almost always they said yes. So I ask him.

“I’m going to say no,” he cries. “I shall say, ‘This is a disgrace!’”

But are you ever happy enough?

“I remember at school,” he recalls, “three of us talking about what to do. One chap wanted to be a doctor. I didn’t know what I wanted to be. The third fellow said, ‘I don’t mind what I do, as long as I’m happy,’ and I remember saying, ‘What a ridiculously superficial ambition,’ and he just looked slightly gobsmacked.” Then, a few years ago, Paxman heard the man worked for the United Nations and wrote saying their conversation had haunted him all his life: “I want to apologise because you were right and I was wrong.” The man responded, “Very nice of you to write, but I’ve no recollection of this at all.”

His friends have called him an Eeyore: “It’s always damp in my part of the forest,” he says. “But who wants to be Tigger? Who wants to be happy?”

So we head for the photographer’s studio where Paxman surveys clothes brought in by the stylist (“Look at these ridiculous trousers!”) then reappears in his own dark suit, barely worn since he left Newsnight. Seeing him there, back in his old armour, standing legs astride, braced for battle, with ministers to slay, I feel that old tingle of late-night jeopardy. And I miss that fearless, melancholy knight.

BATACLAN: ONE YEAR ON

Adam Sage

OCTOBER 1 2016

“I CAN REMEMBER thinking, ‘This is not the right day for my death.’”

Claude-Emmanuel Triomphe was lying in a pool of blood on the floor of Café Bonne Bière bar in Paris. It was just after 9.30pm on November 13, 2015, and the worst terror attack in modern French history was under way. Triomphe — a balding 57-year-old intellectual who has taught in Paris’s most prestigious university, worked in the upper echelons of the civil service and founded a think tank specialising in employment issues — had gone to Café Bonne Bière after a chance encounter with an American traveller.

They had just sat down and were about to order a drink when bullets ripped into the bar and into customers’ bodies from the pavement.

“I knew straightaway that I’d been hit. I realised it was serious. I lost an enormous amount of blood, the rescue services had not arrived, and I felt the strength leaving my body. I had time to think — and I can say this very calmly today — I had time to think about death.

“I thought, ‘I am going to die.’ I would not say I was panicking just then, but I was not in a good way and I was afraid.”

Later on, in hospital, Triomphe discovered that he had been hit by three bullets. One stopped 2mm short of his intestine, another cut through his sciatic nerve and a third went through his arm. He tells the tale now with alacrity, almost amusement, as we sit in another bar near his Parisian home.

At the time, the ambulance crew was unsure whether he would pull through.

“I realised they were afraid that I would faint and at one point I really felt a sort of great tiredness, like I would slip into sleep. I realised I had to fight against that, and I made enormous efforts to not slip into that sleep.”

Outside there was chaos. The three jihadists who had attacked Café Bonne Bière had sprayed five other bars and restaurants with bullets. Minutes earlier three more had detonated suicide vests outside the national football stadium in the capital’s suburbs. A further three were in the process of slaying concert-goers during a gig by the US rock group Eagles of Death Metal at the Bataclan venue.

The French equivalent of the 999 line faced an avalanche of calls — more than 6,000 to the police alone. Operators struggled to work out who had been shot and where. Ambulance crews wondered whether they would be targeted while tending to the wounded. Police squads were sent to one location, then diverted to another. And journalists — me included — tried to work out what on earth was going on.

The newsdesk asked me to go the Stade de France when the first bomb went off. I ordered a taxi, then discovered that there was a siege at the Bataclan and told the driver to go there. I never reached it. Paris was in lockdown and a line of police blocked me a couple of hundred metres away.

I sat on a bench and interviewed a man whose son had been shot in the foot in a restaurant farther to the east — or that is what he had been told by his son’s friend, who had phoned him. Like me, he was stuck behind police lines watching columns of armoured vehicles rumble towards the scene of the shootings. Like me, he had no idea what to do.

For want of a better idea, I took the Parisian version of a Boris bike to cycle through streets deserted by everyone except armed officers. The Rue de Rivoli was eerily empty, the Marais devoid of life. Bars and clubs had closed, and been ordered to lock their customers inside. I got into one — the only place I could find with an internet connection at 1am — and ended up writing my dispatch amid inebriated nightclubbers struggling to comprehend what had happened.

We discovered the next morning that 130 people had died and 414 were hospitalised.

Now, with the first anniversary of the shootings and bombings approaching, I am going back over the events of that night, and they still seem as absurd and macabre as ever.

The people I interviewed for this article — the injured, the bereaved, the emergency service representatives — share anger and pain but also perplexity at the sheer senselessness, the incredible stupidity of it all. The attacks — and those that followed in Nice, where 86 people died on Bastille Day, and in Normandy, where a priest was murdered in his church — have propelled France into a disturbing new era. There is distrust and fear, and a widening gulf between the white majority and the Muslim minority.

Yet among the survivors I met, there was little expression of hatred for the Kalashnikov-wielding thugs who perpetrated the Paris shootings — more a sense of withering disdain. “Cretins” was how the father of one victim described them. Triomphe said they were pawns in a sinister game that they did not understand.

Ten months earlier, 17 people had been killed in attacks on the satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and on a Jewish kosher store in Paris.

Parisians knew another massacre was likely. Islamic State had called on its followers to target the French because of their involvement in the Syrian bombing campaign and their perceived hostility to Islam. The movement had more jihadists from France in its ranks than from any other European country and many had returned from the war zone. Nevertheless, the attack, when it came, caught Paris by surprise.

“We heard loud noises but we didn’t pay any attention. We just said to ourselves, ‘They’re Americans, they are putting on a show, they’ve got out some bangers.’”

Sophie is among 1,500 people who experienced at first hand the blind callousness of Islamist fanaticism when it struck at the Bataclan during a concert. She is a 32-year-old rock music fan who works in a baby-sitting agency, and we meet in her studio flat, which is decorated according to her distinctive tastes. There are several model Tardises that bear witness to her passion for Doctor Who.

On the back of the front door Sophie has stuck tickets from countless concerts and films she has seen. But there have been hardly any additions since last November. Sophie and Léa, her friend, had found a vantage point on a platform at the back of the Bataclan and the band was playing Kiss the Devil, one of its hits, when Foued Mohamed-Aggad, 23, Ismael Omar Mostefai, 29, and Samy Amimour, 28, burst into the venue.

First came the noise. Then the confusion and panic.

“All of a sudden, I had a big pain in my leg, it was like I’d been hit with a hammer, and that’s when I realised what was happening,” says Sophie. “I turned my head and saw three people with guns in their hands who were shouting at us, who were shouting that they were doing this for Syria and for Iraq.”

The majority of the 90 people who died in the Bataclan were killed in the first 7 minutes, when the terrorists sprayed the crowd with bullets. That, probably, is when Sophie was hit.

Then, for a quarter of an hour, Mohamed-Aggad, Mostefai and Amimour walked through the crowd cowering on the floor and executed people, apparently at random.

Sophie saw them approach. “They were three metres from me, and then I was really, really frightened because when they made eye contact with someone, they shot them.

“I had a T-shirt with skeletons and tattoos on my arms and I was afraid they would see me, so I quickly put on my jumper and thought if they don’t see me, if I don’t exist, I’ll survive.”

Earlier — before the killings — a young man had caught her when she stumbled. Now he had been shot and was lying beside her. “I saw his chest stop moving — he was right next to me — and with Léa, we put him on us to protect ourselves.” The terrorists went past without noticing them under the now lifeless body.

At about 10pm, two local police officers entered the venue and shot dead Amimour. Mohamed-Aggad and Mostefai fled upstairs, and silence descended upon the Bataclan. Sophie and Léa — and hundreds of other terrified rock fans — ran for the exit and carried on running until finally she sank to the ground by a door in Boulevard Voltaire.

“In fact, I was really hurting, but it was only when I saw the mass of flesh on my leg — it was absolutely horrible — that I realised I had been hit with a bullet. I smelt the smell of blood, and my shoe was full of blood,” says Sophie. Léa stopped a minicab and told the driver to head for the nearest hospital. Sophie had been hit twice, in the calf and the thigh, and was almost unconscious when she got there. She was bloodied, terrified, shocked — but alive.

At about the same time — 10.10pm — Chief Superintendent Christophe Molmy was entering the concert hall. Molmy, 47, is a tough cop — powerfully built, exuding understated authority and with a nose that looks like it has been flattened by a baseball bat. He heads the elite Parisian police Research and Intervention Brigade (BRI) and is accustomed to arresting hardened gangsters.

Shoot-outs are his bread and butter. He had been involved in one two days before November 13 when kidnappers had got jumpy during a ransom handover. He recounts the incident as you or I might recount the breakdown of a photocopier in the office. An ordinary problem in an ordinary day’s work. The Bataclan was different: haunting, traumatic, life-changing, even for him.

Molmy had created a rapid intervention unit after the Charlie Hebdo killings: 15 men who take their guns and stun grenades home at night so they can scramble within minutes. Now they were picking their way across a mass of bodies in a silence interrupted only by the sound of phones ringing as relatives sought news of their loved ones. Some were dead, some injured, some too frightened to move.

“We were destabilised because we had the wounded pulling at our trousers and asking us to help them while we were advancing. The members of the team all have medical training and tried to do what they could, applying tourniquets and talking to people, but you advance nevertheless. If you don’t do things with method they do not work out well.”

His unit had to make the venue safe for medics, rescue workers and forensic scientists. Molmy had no idea if the terrorists were still there. Perhaps they had fled with the 900 or so spectators who had left with Sophie and Léa. Perhaps they had booby-trapped the hall.

The team took 50 minutes or so to check the ground floor as survivors emerged from the toilets, the cupboards, the electrical cabinets, the suspended ceilings where they had been sheltering. Each one had to be checked in case they had explosives strapped to their bodies — a common Islamic State tactic in Syria. None did.

But of Mohamed-Aggad or Mostefai there was not a trace. “There was no noise, no shots, nothing,” says Molmy. “I said to myself that they had probably left, but we advanced prudently just in case.”

At about 11pm, the unit went upstairs. Still there was silence. Still they went on.

Suddenly a petrified voice shouted, “Stop. Don’t advance. They have taken us hostage.”

Molmy realised that Mohamed-Aggad and Mostefai had not fled. They were hiding in a corridor, and dozens of people were trapped with them: 15 to 20 behind the door, equal numbers in rooms off the corridor, and about 40 on the roof. Among them was a pregnant woman and a boy of 12.

Shouting through the door to the corridor, officers persuaded the terrorists to give them the number of one of the hostage’s phones so the brigade’s negotiator could call them.

The negotiator talked five times to them, at 11.27pm, 11.29pm, 11.48pm, 12.05am and 12.18am. “They were very nervous and tense and a bit incoherent,” says Molmy. “They were saying, ‘We want you to leave,’ but obviously we weren’t going to.

“They recited the jihadist diatribe, ‘It’s your fault — you’ve come to wage war in Syria so we are bringing the war to you.’”

The negotiator asked the jihadists to release the child. They refused. He asked them to release the women. They refused again.

The negotiator said he was getting nowhere — how could he with people determined to die and to kill? — and Molmy came to the conclusion that an assault was inevitable. The corridor was 1.35m wide and 8.5m long, it was full of hostages and at the far end were Mohamed-Aggad and Mostefai. “It didn’t look good to us. We thought there would be damage for us — dead and wounded — and deaths among the hostages.”

As soon as the officers entered the corridor, Mohammed-Aggad and Mostefai opened fire. Bullets flew everywhere: 27 hit the bulletproof shield on wheels (nicknamed the Ramses) behind which the officers were sheltering. Others hit the ceiling, the walls. A ricochet flew into the left hand of one of the officers.

Astonishingly, that was the only injury. For 90 seconds — an eternity, says Molmy — hostages were crawling under the shield or slipping beside it amid constant gunfire from the terrorists, and none was hit. “My colleagues at the front did an extraordinary job,” says Molmy. “They are heroes: they were being shot at all the time and they hardly responded. Throughout the intervention, from beginning to end, we fired a total of just 11 shots.”

When all the hostages had been pulled out of the corridor, Molmy’s team advanced on the terrorists behind the thud of stun grenades. But in the smoke-filled corridor, the two officers pushing the Ramses did not see the stairs at the end. The shield — 80kg of it — escaped their grasp and fell down the steps, and the terrorists sprang forward, guns pointed at the officers. The two men at the front of the police column reacted faster. Mohamed-Aggad and Mostefai were shot dead before they could pull the triggers on their Kalashnikovs.

It was 12.20am and the siege had ended.

An hour or so later Professor Philippe Juvin, head of the accident and emergency department at Georges Pompidou Hospital, learnt that the wounded were being evacuated. He was told to expect a large number of casualties.

Juvin had already asked the usual Friday night array of patients waiting in A&E — the drunks, the hypochondriacs, the footballers who had sprained their ankles — to go home unless they were critical. All but two did. He had summoned all available staff and put out a Twitter message asking for help from doctors or nurses in the vicinity.

Juvin, 52, is a slim, energetic doctor who speaks with a quietly reassuring certainty. He does not look like the sort to panic in a crisis and he is used to dealing with bullet wounds inflicted by combat rifles. Not only did he spend eight months with the French army in Afghanistan, but his A&E department regularly receives gangsters injured in gunfights.

The wounds are not pretty — “If a pistol bullet hits the foot it goes in and out,” he says. “With a Kalashnikov bullet, there is no foot left” — but at least they rarely get more than one victim at a time.

That night, his department treated 53 patients with Kalashnikov wounds. “The big difference is that the people we get with bullet wounds are usually the bad guys. We treat them because it’s our job but we don’t necessarily have much sympathy for them.

“On November 13, we were getting people like you and me, or like our children. We could identify with them. There was an emotional load.”

It was a frantic night. There were too many ambulances — 30 or so — for the A&E reception area. No one had imagined so many turning up at once. They created a traffic jam and Juvin had to go into the street to cast an eye over the casualties in the ambulances. Signs of an internal haemorrhage? He waved the ambulance on. A bullet in the arm? He told the patient to do the last 50m on a stretcher.

Juvin and his improvised team — the hospital’s doctors and nurses and those who had turned up to help — checked pulse, blood pressure, wounds. Who needed an immediate operation? Who could wait until the next day?

They flew down corridors, bandaged injuries, made rapid life-or-death decisions. Yet Juvin’s abiding memory of that night is of silence. “They had debilitating wounds that were probably very painful, and nobody spoke.

“Usually people tell you when it’s hurting. There, everyone was in a state of stupefaction. I went into a cubicle and there was a man with a badly damaged leg. I think he was in pain, but he was saying nothing. I said to the doctor treating him to give him morphine anyway.

“He was somewhere else and could not express his pain. When you have experienced something like that, you enter a dimension that no one can describe.”

By 6.30am A&E was empty, the patients all having been dispatched to operating theatres or to other departments. None had died in care during the night.

Juvin went home to sleep. He couldn’t. He came back to the hospital. There was a queue of people waiting to give blood and families turning up to ask whether their relatives had been hospitalised at Georges Pompidou. Among them was Georges Salines, a doctor who heads the Environmental and Health Office at the Paris council. He had gone to bed the previous evening unaware that Lola, his 28-year-old daughter, was at the Bataclan. He had not watched the television and had no idea that anything untoward was going on.

At midnight Lola’s brother called. He knew about her plans and knew what had happened at the concert hall. He had tried to call her. There had been no answer.

Salines, 59, a slender, fit-looking man with a welcoming smile and a precise discourse, telephoned the emergency helpline set up by the authorities after the attacks. He could not get through. He phoned again, and again, and again. The operator who responded at last — hours later — had no information about Lola and advised him to get in touch with the Paris hospitals. Hospital receptionists said they would phone back. None did.

Somebody told Salines that Georges Pompidou Hospital had patients whose identities had not been established. But when the family arrived, managers said that was untrue. The patients had been identified. Lola was not among them.

“It was only at the end of the afternoon that we discovered her death in very painful circumstances,” said Salines. A friend had telephoned the emergency helpline, which was functioning correctly by now, and the operator disclosed that Lola’s name was on the list of the dead.

Word got around. It appeared on the internet. There was a denial and confusion. Salines called the emergency number himself. The operator confirmed Lola’s death.

“My daughter died for nothing, for an illusion, for a folly. It’s absurd,” Salines said in L’Indicible de A à Z (The Unspeakable from A to Z), a book about his reaction to the attacks.

In it, he describes Lola, who worked in the children’s books department of a publisher, in these terms: “You liked books, films, drawing, travelling, rock music, children, Billy the Cat, lemon tart, Belgian beer, brunch at the Bouillon Belge bar, singing while playing the ukulele, roller derbies, your friends, your mum, your brothers, your boyfriend, your girlfriends, a kiss on the cheek, making love. You loved life. And all those who knew you liked you.”

The months have passed and the scars remain — physical or psychological — for those involved.

Sophie needed two operations, three general anaesthetics — the third to change her bandages — and 43 stitches. She has a bullet in her pelvis and fears that grip her day and night.

“When I go to sleep, I still see what happened almost every night. Either I see them or I hear them. There is the fear. For a long time it was very complicated to leave home. I still don’t take the métro or commuter trains. I only take the bus.

“Before, it was simple to make plans. Now I advance day by day. When I go to bed I wonder what will happen tomorrow and what will I see on the news.”

Christophe Molmy has been affected, too: “You don’t emerge unscathed from an intervention like the Bataclan. It’s impossible.”

He organised sessions with psychologists for his brigade and gave them and their families the opportunity to make appointments on a one-to-one basis. Some did; the majority did not. “We are still in a macho culture where we say, ‘Nah, I don’t need that,’ but in fact we need it,” he says. “I saw the psychologist.”

We meet in his office at the end of a warren of corridors in the 19th-century building that is the Parisian equivalent of Scotland Yard. He had never confronted terrorism before 2015. Now he lives permanently with the threat — a phone at his side at all times, in the shower, everywhere — and admits it has changed his job. “We always used to intervene against gangsters whom we tried not to kill. Today if we go in against terrorists, we go to kill the terrorists. We won’t manage to get them to put their hands up.

“We are becoming a little like paramilitaries. We are training and equipping ourselves like soldiers to fight a war.”

He talks about the old days of fighting criminals with a certain fondness. “We arrested them; they behaved well; we understood each other. We could have a bite to eat together. But what am I supposed to do with people who come to die? The human relationship is not the same. I don’t even know if there is a human relationship.”

Surprisingly, perhaps, Georges Salines seems almost the most sanguine of all, despite the loss of his daughter. When we meet in his office, he looks bright-eyed, and says in his book, “I am sad from time to time, I sometimes cry, but I sleep, I work, I talk and I sometimes laugh. You can’t avoid the suffering but resilience is possible, particularly in a family whose members love each other.”

Salines is head of 13 Novembre: Fraternité et Vérité, an association set up by victims two months after the attacks, and he has used the post to denounce the shambolic organisation faced by relatives of victims in the aftermath of the attack — some being shown the wrong body in the morgue. But he is not vindictive, and insists on the need to heal the split in French society, to avoid marginalising Muslims and pushing them into the arms of the terrorists.

He says in his book that he has no hatred for the jihadists. “I have never experienced this feeling,” he says. “I cannot hate the sinister cretins who took my daughter’s life and lost theirs in this business. They are victims, too.”

Antoine Leiris, a French radio journalist, has written a book, too, after losing a loved one — Hélène Muyal-Leiris, his 35-year-old wife — at the Bataclan. As with Salines, the book is more about love than hate: Vous N’Aurez Pas Ma Haine (You Will Not Have My Hatred) is the title.

Leiris recounts his love for his wife, and for Melvil, their 17-month-old son — and his fear, uncertainty and pain at the realisation that he will have to bring up Melvil on his own. Of the killers, he has little to say. “I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know. You want me to be frightened; you want me to look at my fellow citizens with suspicion; you want me to sacrifice my liberty for security. I won’t.”

Claude-Emmanuel Triomphe, who had two operations and a month in hospital after being injured in Café Bonne Bière, says much the same thing. “I feel indifference for them. I feel no hatred. I tried to have hatred; I thought it’s not normal after all they did to me. If I must express a feeling it is rather pity — pity in the sense that these guys have massacred their own lives: ‘Not only have you massacred the life of other people but you have messed up yours as well.’”

He says he has no nightmares, no worries about going out. After months of lethargy he has rediscovered some of his old intellectual energy, too. Nothing is quite the same now, however.

Having given up his post as head of a think tank, he wants to specialise in the estates that are home to a generation of second-generation immigrants, among whom a handful have turned to radical Islamist violence.

“I need to understand why my country is affected by terrorism, why my country has manufactured more jihadists than any other in Europe. It’s not to say that other countries are not affected, but France is particularly so.”

The incomprehension is widespread in France, and it is Sophie, perhaps, who sums it up best. “You ask yourself questions: what was in their heads when they did that? The youngest terrorist at the Bataclan was 23. Me at 23, I was in Lyons, in university and thinking how I was going to dress the next day and not going to a concert hall to kill people. These are questions that remain and to which we will not have an answer.”

YOU CAN’T TRUST THE PEOPLE WITH DEMOCRACY

Roger Boyes

OCTOBER 5 2016

IT MUST HAVE seemed like a shoo-in for the Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos. After four years of negotiation with Farc guerrillas, a peace deal was unveiled to the accompaniment of a choir singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. After half a century of debilitating war, how could anyone vote against peace in the subsequent referendum? In the end, though, he set himself up. It was a bit like the US civil war general whose last words, glancing at the enemy lines, were: “They couldn’t hit an elephant from that dista …”

It wasn’t just the Colombian referendum that went awry. There is a quiet revolt under way across the globe. In vote after vote, people have been rejecting the guidance of political establishments, baffling elites and adding to the sum of anger in the world. In the age of rage, direct democracy is a risk. Referendums are infallible only for dictators — think of Napoleon, master of the strategic plebiscite — when instructions are handed down to voters, when ballot boxes are stuffed and there’s a secret police snitch living next door.

The fact is that in free societies a government should not abdicate its responsibility to govern by using a single-issue vote to demand guidance from ordinary punters. Clearly if you want to avert a populist avalanche you should keep capital punishment or mosque-building off the ballot paper. And by now leaders should have learnt too that referendums are not a suitable vehicle for deciding on war, peace or immigration. Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, has just asked his citizens the impossibly loaded question: “Do you agree that the European Union should have the power to impose the compulsory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of the National Assembly of Hungary?” Of those who voted, 98 per cent rejected the idea, as was intended. But most voters stayed at home, perhaps sensing that the vote wasn’t about migrant quotas at all (since they are more or less off the table anyway) but rather propelling Orban to a new level in his gladiatorial contest with Brussels. Many Hungarians are quite comfortable inside the EU.

The problem with referendums is that they become a receptacle for grievances and bear little relationship to the question posed. Take Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, who earlier this year was saddled with a referendum on the ratification of an economic deal between the EU and Ukraine. The treaty had been agreed by the government, ratified by all other EU states and was 2,135 pages long. The Dutch rejected it, not because they had done their homework but because they were railing against weak government, against EU dogma and against the possibile eastward expansion of the union. Rutte was ambushed and called the No vote “disastrous”. Vladimir Putin rubbed his hands with glee and called it a truly democratic act.

The fact is that voting in a referendum can, without knowledge and preparation, become an almost random transaction between leaders and led. The political philosopher Jason Brennan calculates that the probability of your individual vote changing policy is about as low as winning the lottery. You could of course win hundreds of millions but it is still irrational to buy a ticket. And so it is with direct democracy. Voters, he says, “have no incentive to be well informed. They might as well indulge in their worst prejudices — democracy is the rule of the people but entices people to be their worst.”

Most democratic governments that deploy referendums do so out of weakness. In doing so they fool themselves that the wisdom of the people must inevitably support their world view. That’s how Juan Manuel Santos and David Cameron ended up in the same leaky canoe without a paddle. The Brexit referendum was a way of pacifying the Conservative Party. Cameron failed to grasp the potency of a national vote that fused mild dissatisfaction with the EU and the seeming inability of the government to get a grip on immigration or shield British jobs from a global slowdown.

By the end of this year there will have been eight major referendums — the next crucial one is Matteo Renzi’s attempt to secure backing for his constitutional reforms in Italy. It’s too late for the Italian premier to call it off now. If he loses in December, he could also lose office. If the Five Star movement and the Northern League take power in the resulting election they are promising a referendum on Italy’s membership of the euro. Few analysts would now rule out an Italian No vote. But whatever the verdict, the uncertainty of a referendum campaign would bring chaos to Italy, where the banks are already wobbly, and speed the unravelling of the eurozone.

The watchword has to be: listen to the people at your peril. Referendums can act as the safety valves of democracy but never as their engine. If legislators run away from their responsibility to consider and scrutinise complex questions, then power will seep away from the centre. The biggest risk posed by Donald Trump is surely that he could undermine or circumvent instititutions that keep America on an even keel. James Madison, the fourth American president, identified the problem: democracies endanger the right of minorities and must therefore devise solid institutions to protect those rights, civil liberties and free trade. Referendums, over-used and cynically steered, can end up subverting rather than enhancing democracy.

It is too late for the Colombian president and for David Cameron, but let’s declare a five-year moratorium on referendums. And yes, that means you too, Scotland.

BURNT AND TORTURED MIGRANTS FILLED DECKS AS WE RUSHED TO HELP

Bel Trew

OCTOBER 8 2016

Saturday, October 1

“Dignity is a dancer,” jokes Captain Louis Ferres when the floor lurches sideways as we drop off a 2.5m wave. The battered ship that can hold up to 450 people is one of three that Médecins Sans Frontières uses to patrol the Mediterranean, searching for migrants in distress. Everyone on board, including Carla the cook, works on the rescues. Dignity pirouettes her way to the search and rescue zone 20 nautical miles off the Libyan coast where most migrant boats run into trouble. Huge waves wash over the deck. Half the non-sailors aboard are in their bunks throwing up.

We are told we may not see a rescue as even the most ruthless smugglers don’t force migrants into the sea in bad weather. But we still spend the afternoon putting together 450 emergency care packages — socks, nutritional biscuits, water and a towel. There is a strict cleaning schedule to prevent disease spreading through the ship. On Saturday night it’s my turn to scrub the inner decks, which I manage without vomiting.

Sunday, October 2

We are woken by news that there will be a rescue at 9am. More than 100 migrants in a rubber dinghy called the Maritime Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Rome by satellite phone at dawn but it takes Dignity four hours to reach the position. By the time we arrive the dinghy is nowhere to be seen. Courtney, the ship’s nurse, begins to worry. They would have been at sea now for at least ten hours.

Likely weakened by months of starvation and ill-treatment in Libya, many don’t last a couple of hours exposed to the blistering heat of the sun. A co-ordinated effort with helicopters and nearby warships finds the dinghy. I jump aboard the rescue speedboat, which cuts through choppy waves to the dinghy. The terrified faces of women and children peer up from the bottom of the waterlogged tub, where they are crouched in lines as if on a slave ship.

This is the dangerous part. Desperate and delirious, people may try to jump aboard and risk turning the boat over. “Try to stay calm, we will rescue all of you,” urges MSF’s Nicholas over a megaphone while we hand out life jackets. The sickest — including an emaciated Ethiopian boy of 16 — are hauled aboard in the first round. When everyone is on deck and registered, people open up about the hell they escaped in Libya: floggings, rape and kidnappings for ransom. They are transferred to a Save the Children vessel returning to Italy.

Monday, October 3

The shriek of the rescue alarm wakes us. It’s 6.30am and a drifting boat has bumped the Dignity. The rescue goes well but the MSF team is told of a second, third and fourth boat in the area. The smugglers spotted a break in the storms and packed thousands into life rafts then scuttled home to make more quick profits before the winter ends the crossing season.

The stink of fuel knocks the breath out of me as the survivors of the second rescue stagger on board, their skin coming off in strips. The medics rush to treat a few who have stopped breathing. One pregnant woman grabs my arm and, pointing at a raw strip of flesh, screams. Another woman writhes on her back on the floor, screaming too. A third points to her shredded calf. Then it hits me: these are chemical burns from boat fuel.

“Get their clothes off and shower them now,” a voice shouts. We strip most of the 90 men, women and children and hose them down. I carry semi-conscious women to the showers. “We need to support a woman in the hospital to sit upright so she can breathe,” says Irene, grabbing me. I end up, covered in blood and faeces, cradling Lovett to keep her breathing.

I hold the hand of her pregnant sister, Joy, who dies on the bed beside us. Her body is packed in ice and placed in the bow. Lovett and the little boy are airlifted to hospital by the Italian coastguard, who won’t take Joy’s body.

Tuesday, October 4

The soft sobs of the Nigerian woman who lost her two boys, aged four and five, the day before are heard on deck. With nearly 420 migrants on board, including toddlers and a corpse, Dignity sails back to Italy. We are posted in shifts as guards to defuse any arguments, spot medical problems and regulate the endless queue for the toilet.

In French, Arabic and English, the men on deck, fleeing Ivory Coast, Mali, Nigeria and Sierra Leone, tell their stories. In the evening I check on the Nigerian girls from Monday’s horrific sinking. They giggle at photos of my stupid cat and tell me about their favourite sugar-cane recipes.

Peace, who is spattered with torture scars, asks: “Do white people in Europe like black people? I’m afraid. We’re always treated like animals.” At night, while on watch on the men’s deck upstairs, I listen to Michael, 17, from Nigeria, talking of “making [his] mother proud” in Italy. “Do you think they will let me study? I want to be a doctor.”

Wednesday, October 5

Overnight the Italian coastguard again refused to take Joy. Her corpse is beginning to smell. In the morning we dock and the ship goes quiet. Everyone is split into groups depending on their injuries and their ages. They go ashore for medical checkups and registration.

The UN says that more than 80 per cent of Nigerian girls landed in Italy are trafficked into prostitution. I warn the girls to keep together and stay in the reception centres. Hope is mortified that she has only a blanket to wear. I wash and dry my pyjamas to give to her.

Hours later, as I leave the boat, I hear my name called. The girls are still being processed. Hope, wearing my pyjamas, is grinning. We hug and they board buses, promising to stick together.

Thursday, October 6

More than 10,000 people were pulled from the water in 48 hours this week. We have no idea where people have gone or if Lovett and the others made it. I add as friends the few who have Facebook. Kougan, 23, from Cameroon, who kept me company on night watch, pops up on Messenger: “I very grateful to become your friend Bella, take care for ur self.”

‘TANTRUMS AND SHOCKING RACISM’ OF INQUIRY’S DYSFUNCTIONAL DAME

Andrew Norfolk, Sean O’Neill

OCTOBER 14 2016

ON A SUMMER afternoon this year Dame Lowell Goddard stood at the doorway of her Westminster office and shouted in anger. Unless she got her own way, she is said to have declared, “I’m going to pack my bags, go back to New Zealand and take this inquiry down with me.”

A visitor to the headquarters of the national child sex abuse inquiry might have been shocked, not least because the threat was made by the judge paid £500,000 a year to lead an investigation forecast to run for a decade at a cost of £100 million.

Dame Lowell’s staff, however, barely flinched. They were used to her tantrums, and worse. Multiple senior sources have told The Times that the judge peppered her 16 months at the helm of Britain’s biggest public inquiry with racist remarks and expletive-ridden outbursts. Insiders say that Dame Lowell, 67, also appeared to have memory lapses and failed to grasp legal concepts.

She allegedly said that Britain had so many paedophiles “because it has so many Asian men” — a comment that left colleagues stunned. “I was so shocked to see the number of ethnic people,” she is said to have told a colleague, while she allegedly commented that she had to travel 50 miles from London to see a white face. Her home in the capital was a smart, taxpayer-funded flat in Knightsbridge.

Several sources described Dame Lowell’s reluctance to question the propriety of the royal family. Discussing the Prince of Wales’s friendship with a bishop jailed last year for sex offences against young men, the judge is said to have insisted: “Prince Charles couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with that, not with his breeding.” The source added: “For someone who claimed not to understand what the establishment was, she had a reverence for it that was quite astonishing.”

On the 23rd floor of Millbank Tower, where the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (IICSA) has its offices, staff soon realised that they had a problem. They were supposed to be putting in place the foundations of an investigation into suspected abuse at dozens of institutions, including schools, care homes, the church, the armed forces and parliament.

Since being launched by Theresa May in 2014, IICSA has hired more than 150 staff, opened three regional offices, started the Truth Project to allow abuse victims to give testimony anonymously, commissioned an academic study and begun a legal disclosure exercise demanding that institutions under investigation hand over millions of pages of documents.

Yet it was so dysfunctional under Dame Lowell’s leadership that work often ground to a halt because senior staff felt “totally paralysed”, one said.

Former colleagues, who have asked not to be named, were puzzled then increasingly troubled. One said that staff who were committed to the inquiry’s success felt trapped in “an impossible situation”. They felt they were led by someone who at times behaved “like a very angry child”.

“The pressure was immense. She was rude and abusive to junior staff, she didn’t understand the issues and, worse than that, she used appalling terms all the time. It was almost intolerable,” the insider claimed.

Senior staff held furtive meetings to discuss their options. It was agreed that the best hope lay in sharing their concerns with the Home Office. Mrs May, then home secretary, hired Dame Lowell. Only she could fire her.

Whitehall’s instinct in the face of calamity is often to hide it, however. Until now, the true picture remained secret. Observers have pointed to the irony of a body established to dissect a culture of institutional secrecy, denial and cover-up becoming an exemplar of the problems it was designed to expose. The inquiry’s senior team were all complicit, said one insider. “Goddard should never have been appointed and she should have been removed so much earlier than she was. She was catastrophic.”

Dame Lowell arrived in the UK from New Zealand after two false starts in the search for someone to lead the inquiry. Its first two chairwomen were forced to step down in quick succession over their alleged closeness to the British establishment, and the home secretary could not afford a third mistake. When the appointment was announced in February last year, it was claimed that Dame Lowell had been selected after 150 nominees were put through an exhaustive vetting process. The lead counsel, Ben Emmerson, QC, hailed a due diligence exercise of “unprecedented depth and detail”.

Insiders tell a different story, of the Home Office’s “blind panic” after the resignation in October 2014 of the inquiry’s second chairwoman, Dame Fiona Woolf. She survived a month; her predecessor, Baroness Butler-Sloss, had lasted six days. “They were desperate. It couldn’t be a judge from England and Wales so they decided to look at the Commonwealth, but they also wanted a woman. There wasn’t much choice. Then Goddard’s name popped up. It was all signed and sealed very quickly,” a source said.

Doubts over Dame Lowell soon emerged. She spent six weeks negotiating a pay deal that eventually included a £360,000 salary plus a £110,00 annual housing allowance, a chauffeur-driven car and four return flights a year to New Zealand with her husband, Christopher Hodson, QC. One senior source viewed such perks as “completely inappropriate for a public servant”. Dame Lowell, however, is said to have been outraged that the deal only entitled her to business-class not first-class seats.

“We all had to tiptoe around her. It set the tone for an organisation that became secretive,” said a source who accused the judge of behaving like an “autocratic and dictatorial” monarch.

Sources described her regular use of racist language as like “going back to the 1950s”. One described a sense of shame that no complaints were made. “You’ve got someone making racist comments who clearly has a racist attitude, and nobody says anything because we’re all bloody pussy-footing around.”

Dame Lowell was heavily reliant on Mr Emmerson, 53, a leading human rights QC who is not renowned for his emollience or team-working skills. In early 2015, before he began working with her, he described Dame Lowell as a woman of “courage, independence and vision”. Within weeks of her arrival he is understood to have thought differently. In tandem, said one observer, their impact was “utterly toxic”, adding: “So many people were devoted to trying to make the damn thing work, to getting to the bottom of some really egregious societal problems. They all deserved so much better.”

In public, every senior figure stayed silent, including Professor Alexis Jay, then a panel member, who won praise for her leadership of the Rotherham child abuse inquiry. She became IICSA’s fourth chairwoman after Dame Lowell abruptly stood down.

Mr Emmerson resigned last month, 24 hours after being suspended for undisclosed reasons. His departure came two weeks after the unexplained resignation of his junior counsel, Elizabeth Prochaska, 35.

Professor Jay, 67, and others may yet be asked to explain why they did not challenge Dame Lowell. Insiders insist they took the only course of action open to them and prayed for an intervention from Mrs May.

Sources described many months of behind-closed-doors discussions during which panicked staff were assured their concerns were being shared with the Home Office, yet officials “sat there and did nothing”. The Times has been told that those “kept in the loop” included Mark Sedwill, the Home Office permanent secretary, and Liz Sanderson, Mrs May’s special adviser.

Eventually the concerns entered the public domain. At a hearing in late July, the judge’s stumbling performance did not go unnoticed. When she admitted her unfamiliarity with “local law”, the inquiry was exposed to ridicule. Finally, insiders made their move. On August 4 The Times revealed she had been overseas for three months of her first year in office. Within hours, she resigned.

The events of that final day have remained secret until now. That morning she was approached by senior colleagues and informed that her position was no longer tenable. Her response was a two-sentence resignation letter that she sent to the Home Office before leaving for lunch. Amber Rudd, the newly installed successor as home secretary, swiftly accepted it. After lunch, the judge tried to withdraw her resignation. Her reversal was not accepted, and the inquiry lost its third head. That loss should have come many months earlier, her colleagues believe.

Dame Lowell’s lawyers denied all the allegations last night.

MIDDLE-AGED VIRGINS: JAPAN’S BIG SECRET

Richard Lloyd Parry

OCTOBER 26 2016

EVERYONE HAS AT least one bad date story, but few have the twist in the tale told by Takeshi Yokote. It was 1995 and the 21-year-old Yokote was a student at a prestigious Japanese university. His companion was a young woman from his drama club on whom Yokote was painfully keen. He was nervous in the cinema and tongue-tied over dinner. His date’s boredom and discomfort were obvious, and it was no surprise that he did not see her again. Yokote shrugged it off, returned to his studies (ancient Greek philosophy was his field) and set about looking for another girlfriend.

Then the unexpected happened: nothing at all. There was no doubt that Yokote liked girls and he met plenty of them as a student and, latterly, as a teacher. He had no difficulty forming friendships with women and he was, and remains, a man of above average looks: neat, slim, articulate and gentlemanly. However, that awkward evening 20 years ago was not only the worst date of his life, it was the only one. At the age of 42 he has never touched or kissed, let alone been to bed with, a woman. And in Japan he is one among millions.

A recently published survey by a government institute provides the latest evidence of what has become increasingly clear over several years — the loveless lives led by more and more young Japanese. As it does every five years, the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research polled 5,300 single people aged 18 to 34 about their sex lives, past and present, and their romantic aspirations. One of its findings was at first glance encouraging: 86 per cent of men and 89 per cent of women hoped to marry. However, 70 per cent of men and 60 per cent of women in the sample were not in a relationship.

Most striking was the answer to the question about sexual experience. The results showed that 42 per cent of single young men and 44 per cent of single young women were virgins, several percentage points higher than when the question was last posed. The survey has been criticised because it inquired only about heterosexual experience — sexually active gay men and women who took the pollster’s question at face value will have gone down in the data as chaste. Even allowing for this bias, it reveals a population of millions of adults who have no romantic attachments, no sexual experience and whose numbers have been growing for a decade.

“It’s very common,” says Yokote. “In any crowd of people I can see them — the ones who don’t give any thought to what they wear, who look withdrawn, who look down rather than looking you in the eye. There are lots of people like me.”

This is not a collective moral choice, by which young people are consciously “saving themselves” for a future husband or wife. It is more as if an entire generation is losing the knack of intimacy. “As a student I didn’t know what to do to take it to the next stage,” says Yokote. “I didn’t have anyone who could teach or advise me. I still don’t know now.” And apart from the personal loneliness and isolation experienced by Japan’s virgins, they are part of a demographic and economic catastrophe.

Japan is farthest along a path, on which many developed countries also find themselves, towards inundation by the “silver tsunami”. About 1.3 million Japanese died last year, but only a million were born. The total fertility rate, the number of children the average woman will bear in a lifetime, is 1.43, far below the “replacement rate” of 2.1. Old people are living longer and longer but the bill for their pensions and medical bills falls to a shrinking number of taxpayers. If the decline in population continues the Japanese will become extinct in the next century. Long before that happens the country will be bankrupt.

High among the reasons for this crisis is the difficulty of being a Japanese parent. Working mothers are still treated as an aberration; inadequate nursery care and lack of flexibility in the workplace often enforces a choice between career and family; many people, especially women, choose the former. However, there is something more mysterious going on: a growing distaste among the young for relationships.

“The research is consistent,” says Masahiro Yamada, a professor of sociology at Chuo University in Tokyo. “Japanese young people are losing interest in, and a desire for, relationships and sex.”

Yokote’s story goes some way towards illuminating the reasons. He was on the shy side as a boy, but had plenty of friends, girls among them. In his later years at school, the more confident students formed couples, although Yokote’s mild crushes never led anywhere. One thing he remembers distinctly is the poor quality of Japanese sex education, which Yamada cites as one of the causes of the problem. “It invariably emphasises the negative aspects of sex,” he says. “The risks of pregnancy and disease. Sex education in Japan means scaring people off sex.”

After his undergraduate degree, Yokote moved to Tokyo to start a PhD; he packed it in after a few years partly because of the isolation imposed by the scholarly life. As his academic career petered out, he embarked on the life of what the Japanese call a freeter, a casual worker in low-paid, low-status jobs. He earned two million yen a year (then about £12,000), just enough to live on, but with nothing left over.

“I got jobs working at the university: washing dishes, putting out rubbish, fetching and carrying,” he says. “There were girls around me and I badly wanted a relationship, but I felt that I just couldn’t ask them out because of my financial situation. It didn’t seem an odd life — there were lots of people around me doing the same kind of thing.”

Fifteen years earlier, at the peak of Japan’s inflated “bubble economy”, a bright graduate such as Yokote would have been eagerly snapped up by a big Japanese company; now they were cutting recruitment to save the jobs of existing employees.

There are other factors that have given rise to the virgin generation, according to Yamada, among them the ease and availability of internet pornography. The decline of traditional matchmakers, who used to arrange unions between young single people, has also played its part, as has the habit among young Japanese of socialising in groups, making it harder for men and women to break off as couples.

A great deal of the problem, he believes, simply comes down to money — for restaurants, entertainment, presents and the other accoutrements of romance, but also to establish a life of self-respect and independence. Eighty per cent of single Japanese live with their parents; Yamada’s research shows that while salaries among male workers have declined, women’s expectations of income in a potential mate remain unrealistically high.

“The physical aspect of sex is not the problem,” says Shingo Sakatsume, who more than anyone else is tackling Japan’s virginity crisis head on. “Most people, once they get to that point, can work out that for themselves. It’s the social part that is most difficult.” Sakatsume is a social worker and the founder of Virgin Academia, a correspondence course for unwilling celibates. It originated in his specialised work providing counselling on sexual matters to people with disabilities. He quickly recognised that a large number of the able-bodied also needed help.

The year-long course is based on his textbook Virgin Breaker, which attempts to guide its students towards “graduation” from their virginity. Students follow the book, write essays based on its contents and correspond with Sakatsume by email (most are too shy to meet in person). Month by month Sakatsume attempts to build their confidence, encourages them to create opportunities to meet potential mates and guides them through the niceties of online dating. In three years, 40 people aged 20 to 42, all of them men, have taken the £400 course. Only six have successfully graduated. “It’s hard to get past the first step,” Sakatsume admits. “Some of these men get to the end of the year and they still haven’t signed up to a dating site.”

His organisation, White Hands, also organises life classes in which naked models, male and female, pose for an audience of virgins with paints and pencils. The point is to show real human bodies to people whose only experience of them may have been the stylised and aggressive universe of online porn. Yokote went to one and was mesmerised. “Each body was different,” he said. “Each one had such beauty. I had never seen a naked woman before. It gave me the impression of such freshness and such life.”

Inspired by the experience, Yokote has made a conscious effort to seek out more opportunities to meet women, and to open up — with a certain, hesitant success. A friend introduced him to a woman he likes very much; they meet as often as once a week. “I don’t yet have the confidence to say that we are dating,” he says, “but I am very fond of her and I want to see more of her. The first time we met, I told her that I was a virgin. I felt I could be so honest with her and it seemed very natural to talk about it.” How did she respond? “She said, ‘You could practise with me.’”

ROYAL FAMILY ARE MORE SECRETIVE THAN MI5

Ben Macintyre

OCTOBER 29 2016

A VAST SPLURGE of royal history is coming our way with the release next week of The Crown, the dramatised story of the Queen from her wedding to the present day. Spanning six seasons, in 60 episodes, it is the single biggest and most expensive bio-epic ever made.

Yet it is an incomplete story because the royal archives remain closed to the public, accessible only to approved scholars, rigorously controlled by unaccountable royal archivists: a glaring, profoundly undemocratic anomaly in an age of supposed openness.

MI5 now regularly reviews and releases its files to the national archives; the royal family feels no such obligation. The most prominent family in the world remains more secretive about its past than the Security Service.

Held in the Round Tower at Windsor Castle, the royal archives consist of more than two million documents covering 250 years of royal history. “The Royal Household is committed to transparency,” declares the royal website, “and to making information available, where appropriate.” The royal household alone defines what is “appropriate”.

For decades, academics have chafed against the way the archive is run, which allows only selected scholars access to certain parts of the collection, and suppresses royal history that might reflect badly on the institution of monarchy. There is no publicly accessible catalogue, so researchers can only request files already identified in the footnotes of works by “authorised” writers. Fishing without a permit in royal historical waters is strictly forbidden.

This restricted access is justified by royalists on the grounds that this is a private archive and that the royals have a right to defend their privacy like any other family. The royal household is not defined as a public body, and therefore is not obliged to release its files under the 2000 Freedom of Information Act.

Therein lies the central ambiguity of the Queen’s position, being at once a constitutional figure and a private person. The monarchy infused and deeply influenced British public life throughout the 20th century, most emphatically in its first half. Successive monarchs and other members of the royal family have played crucial political roles in our past.

The history of the royals is also the history of Britain, and it belongs to the British people; what the royals regard as their history is truly ours and of overwhelming public interest. The royal household has never seen the archive that way, and the story of the sometimes stumbling royal progress through the 20th century has been heavily edited by the royals themselves.

“I am much against destroying important letters,” wrote Queen Victoria, yet ordered her youngest daughter Beatrice to rewrite her journal, deleting “painful passages” and burning each original volume as she went. Virtually all the private papers of Edward VII were burnt on the orders of Queen Alexandra. Princess Margaret destroyed hundreds of letters collected by the Queen Mother.

However, there is still much inside those archives that should be fully opened to the light of scholarship. They undoubtedly contain revealing information on Prince John, George V’s mentally disabled and epileptic youngest son, who was removed to a farm on the Sandringham estate and died young. Similarly, papers relating to Edward and Mrs Simpson and the abdication crisis remain inaccessible to the public.

The most controversial part of the archive, though, relates to the interwar years, when members of the royal family, in common with others of the British ruling class, were great admirers of Hitler. Some of the more embarrassing material is believed to have been filleted out and destroyed in 1945, but undoubtedly a great deal survives that would elucidate, once and for all, the complex relationship between the royals and the Third Reich, a key to understanding British foreign policy in the run-up to war.

The royal family needs to take a leaf out of MI5’s book and open up its past to public scrutiny. In the wake of the Spycatcher scandal, the Security Service came to the realisation that excessive secrecy was damaging its credibility. In the absence of documentary evidence, historians were forced to rely on snippets of gossip and rumour, occasional explosions of scandal and the semi-reliable accounts of disgruntled former employees. (These are precisely the same sort of sources that tend to inform royal stories.)

Starting in the 1990s, MI5 began to release its files to the National Archives on a systematic and logical basis: releasing nothing that could affect national security, compromise the secrecy of other organisations or embarrass living individuals, but everything else, warts and all. MI5’s extraordinary role in the Second World War is now largely declassified, but last year the Security Service also released files on the spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, whose escape to Moscow in 1951 was one of the most spectacular cock-ups in spy history.

The royal archives should be placed in the public domain in the same transparent way: material genuinely distressing to living persons could be excluded, but everything of political relevance should be released under the 30-year rule. This would hugely benefit the royal family too, by enabling its 20th-century history to be written on the basis of hard evidence rather than speculation and rumour.

That seems unlikely to happen soon, for the royal archivists seem more concerned about brand management, secret-keeping and damage limitation than history. Last year’s discovery of home-cinema footage showing a very young Elizabeth performing the Nazi salute (which any historian worth their salt would publish) prompted outrage among royalists and a promise to investigate how the material had been obtained from the royal archive.

The results of that investigation, if one ever took place, have never been revealed: a secret inquiry, into a secret archive, by a most secretive organ of state.

INSIDE BRITAIN’S ONLY TRANSGENDER CLINIC FOR CHILDREN

Louise France

NOVEMBER 5 2016

NINE-YEAR-OLD ASH skips across the main road, a blond ponytail swishing from side to side. She — Ash was born a boy but has wanted to be known as a girl since she was four — has just emerged from an appointment at the Tavistock and Portman Hospital’s Gender Identity Development Service (GIDS) in north London and what she really fancies is chicken and fries from the local KFC.

She’s jittery. A cocktail of relief and adrenaline. Ash is bright and she’s researched the facts (Google is useful like that). She knows about hormone blockers: monthly injections that will, if she is prescribed them, put her puberty on hold. She enjoys talking to the child psychotherapists and family therapists. They understand where she’s coming from. But sometimes they want to know how she feels, and that is tough to articulate when you’re not ten yet. You’re being asked to talk about big, embarrassing stuff like puberty when you don’t want to look at your body in the bath; when you’ve convinced yourself you are developing breasts although this is biologically impossible.

At least for now.

She tells the consultant that when she’s older she’ll have a womb transplant and have a baby. (She’s read about it online. “They do it in Sweden,” Ash says.) The consultant explains that it isn’t always straightforward, but that’s not what she wants to hear. When the questions feel too difficult, Ash, who wants to be a trans model when she grows up, gets teary and asks to leave the room.

It’s at home in southern England where she lets rip and it’s her mother, Terri, on whom she takes out the fear and confusion. Shouting, slamming doors. In the past she’s been taunted at school, beaten up, called a “she-male”. When she was seven she sent her mother suicidal texts. Sometimes family life revolves around how Ash feels from moment to moment.

GIDS at the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust (or Tavi, as it’s known by locals in the leafy, affluent streets near by) is Britain’s only multidisciplinary clinic specialising in children and adolescents who are concerned that they were born the wrong sex. Eighteen years ago, when GIDS began, a team of five received about 30 referrals from children a year. By 2009 referrals totalled 96. In 2014 it was 697. This year about 1,419 children came for help, referred by GPs faced with a condition that they’ll most likely have very little experience of.

While, to put the figures into perspective, these numbers account for only 1 in 10,000 young people, the service is under huge pressure. Sixty new members of staff are about to start. Builders have been employed over the summer to carve up the office space in the Tavistock building, an incongruous, anonymous block with a statue of Sigmund Freud in the car park.

The average age of the young people who arrive in reception, with its gender-neutral toilet, is 14, but they are increasingly receiving inquiries from parents of children at primary school. Occasionally there are referrals for children as young as three. One concern is that if these children socially transition — dress as the opposite sex, change their names — at this age, what happens if they change their minds?

I meet Ash and Terri again at home two weeks later. Ash is just back from school, quiet and hungry. She desultorily kicks a football about in her uniform (T-shirt, short grey skirt) and disappears to her bedroom (cluttered, shocking pink). Make no mistake, she looks like a girl. I catch myself staring at her, searching for clues to her biology. Ash is one of the main characters in the first episode of an ambitious and revealing new Channel 4 documentary series — three years in the making — about the Tavistock. It’s directed by Peter Beard, who won awards for his last documentary, My Son, the Jihadi. The first episode focuses on GIDS. It’s the first time they have allowed cameras inside.

We sit in the back garden and her mother explains why she’s decided to let Ash appear on television. “I wanted people to see that my kid is not a freak,” she says. Terri has wholly taken on board Ash’s feminine identity: she lets her wear nail varnish and crimp her hair, although she draws the line at lipstick on school days. “She is not a boy in the wrong clothes; she is actually a girl in the wrong skin. I wanted people to see how hard this is — this is a massive thing for a little kid.”

Ask Ash about being born a boy and she makes sense of it by splitting off her masculinity. She says the male part of herself was an older brother “that died or fell off a cliff”.

“From the moment Ash could talk, she has been like this,” Terri says. “She wanted to have dolls and wear princess dresses.” At first she was not concerned. She had other children and they’d wanted to dress up. “It wasn’t an issue.”

At nursery Ash wore dresses. “I’ve never seen her play with a boy,” her mum tells me. She sat down to pee despite having brothers. When her father, a scaffolder — Ash’s parents split up when she was two — gave her trains for Christmas she refused to play with them. (Recently he has begun to accept Ash’s trans status, to the point of accompanying her to a meeting at the Tavistock. “I wouldn’t have her any other way,” he says in the documentary.)

Did Terri ever think, maybe my son is simply a girlie boy? Yes, she tells me. Her hunch was that Ash would grow up to be gay. “She just seemed to be an extremely camp gay man. And that was fine. We’re an open family. We have a lot of gay friends. It wasn’t an issue.”

Then, when Ash was four, she said: “Why do you keep calling me a boy? Why do you keep saying he? I am a girl. I am a she.” Terri remembers the moment vividly. Her distressed son was sitting on her lap in the living room, dressed in a Rapunzel dress with a wig. “She asked me, ‘Who is going to take my willy off?’ She wanted to know if I would take her to the doctors or would it fall off? That’s when I thought, this is a bit more than dressing up.”

Might Ash’s behaviour just be a phase? It’s common for children to experiment with gender roles. Terri explains that she has never once wavered. When school started, every morning was a battlefield. (Start talking about gender and you realise how traditional schools still are about the sexes: boys told to go on one side, girls on the other, unisex school uniforms uncommon.) “For the first year I tried to get her into the boy’s uniform, but she hated it. She’d be punching me, biting me, scratching me.” In the end, Terri asked the head teacher if Ash could wear a skirt and he agreed.

Any ambivalence has been around whether to tell strangers. Is it better to be taken for a girl and carry the burden of the secret, or to be open about what is happening, with all its complexities? But what Terri would like are answers. “I’d really like to know why,” she tells the consultant at the Tavistock. “Where did this come from? She can’t have made it up, because she was too small. We didn’t know anyone who was trans. She’d never even heard of it. I know it’s normal for little boys to play with dolls but to never be interested in one car? To never be interested in Spider-Man? I’d like a reason. But it looks like I’m never going to get one.”

There is just one photograph left of Ash as a boy. It’s on Terri’s phone. All the others have been deleted or shredded. “We did it together,” Terri tells me.

What would Freud make of Ash, born Ashton Andrew, name changed by deed poll this year to Ashley Julianne? In a very short space of time the idea that someone can be born into the wrong body has become mainstream. The word “trans” — short for transgender — has become part of our language. So much so in the LGBT world (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender), it can seem as though it’s the T that’s taking up all the oxygen. And now it’s trans children who are making the headlines. The award-winning US drama series Modern Family has introduced an eight-year-old trans character. Last month CBBC aired an online drama about a boy who wants to be a girl. Tumblr and Reddit have become a virtual space where children share their treatment options.

Yet I’d suggest that Dr Polly Carmichael, the consultant clinical psychologist who leads the GIDS unit, has one of the most challenging jobs in the NHS. Until now she has turned down media requests, concerned that their work will be misrepresented. (The most common misconception, she says, is that the service’s main job is to prescribe hormone drugs.)

Carmichael is a softly spoken, cheerful woman, who laughs easily. Watch her in the consulting room and she has a stillness about her that is calming. She also chooses her words carefully. This is an area where even the language used is hotly debated. (For instance, a trans teenager who was born a boy is referred to as a “natally assigned male”. An outsider can start to tie themselves up in verbal knots.)

On the day we meet Carmichael has to choose the new colour scheme for the department’s revamp. Much trickier is the task of negotiating the demands of a vocal trans community together with meeting the needs of children with complex emotional lives. Not to mention parents coming to terms, or not, with a child who says they are trans.

At the same time there is another group gaining ground: people who argue that we are at “peak trans”, that we’re living in a sexualised culture within which there is enormous pressure on children to fit gender stereotypes and where being trans has become a glamorous “lifestyle choice”. There is a view that this is a generation for whom, unconsciously perhaps, becoming the opposite sex is actually more acceptable than being gay, or not fitting clichéd ideas of what it means to be male or female.

No one can agree on what causes gender dysphoria. And why so many children now say they are experiencing it, or even what it is exactly. Is it a biological condition? A psychological one? Is it genetic or learnt behaviour? Is it nature or nurture? Nor is there one reason why there has been such a dramatic rise in cases — a 100 per cent increase in the past 12 months in Britain. Research is patchy.

What is indisputable is that this is an area that is moving faster than anyone might have imagined, even two years ago. “We are all learning,” says Carmichael. “There is no certainty in this area. Certainty is about being closed, which is unhelpful. It’s all about being thoughtful, and careful, and treating everyone individually. We don’t take a view on the outcome of a young person’s gender identification. Our job is not to presuppose anything about what they are going through.”

She goes on: “Some adolescents come here who are very troubled. They have only just told their parents.” There are a few who contact the unit directly, without having told their parents or their GP. “There is a feeling that you have to act as quickly as possible, often because of fears of self-harm.” According to a survey by the trans charity Mermaids 48 per cent of trans people under 26 say they have attempted suicide. “But on the other hand,” she says, “there are many young people we see who are doing really well. It’s all about promoting resilience in these young people.”

The difficulty is that building emotional confidence takes time and for some young people whose bodies are developing — and their parents who may just want this “sorted” — time feels like the enemy. “For families it can be very difficult because they are seeking certainty, but the reality is that we don’t have certainty.”

The explosion in the figures has led to the impression in the media that there are swathes of children gaily changing gender. The reality is more complicated. About 80 per cent of the children who come to the service before adolescence eventually change their minds. Most decide that they are gay, or bisexual. Conversely, for those who come during adolescence, the figures are reversed and about 80 per cent do pursue sex reassignment.

I’m allowed to sit in on a staff meeting where therapists bring along cases they want to discuss. Young children like Ash may be unusual, but they are not rare. Some have been coming to the unit for 12 years. Many of them, like Ash, will have been living as the opposite gender since they were at nursery and have built up long-standing relationships with their case workers. But one of the therapists mentions the case of a “natally assigned girl” who has been taken by his parents to America for a mastectomy. Children in a hurry to change gender — and parents who fear for their psychological wellbeing — are making potentially traumatic life-changing decisions that cannot easily be reversed.

This is what Carmichael and her team must grapple with. The increase in demand means that children who used to be seen within 18 weeks currently have to wait nine months (although it is hoped that the recruitment drive will change that). Transgender groups complain about the delay and argue that experts at units like the Tavistock are too cautious. Much of the debate swirls around hormone injections: both hormone blockers — prescribed at puberty to inhibit the development of secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts or facial hair — and cross-sex hormones, which the Tavistock prescribes at 16 to masculinise or feminise the body. Thus, a girl who wants to be a boy (a natally assigned girl) will be given testosterone (or “T”, as it’s known in the chat rooms). It’s after this that, when the person is 18 and goes into the adult service, they can opt for surgery.

Hormone blockers are seen as a chance to put the brakes on development, to pause and think about the future. However, 90 per cent of patients go from hormone blockers to cross-sex hormones, hormones that leave teenagers infertile. And it’s these cross-sex hormones that cause the most controversy. In America they are prescribed at private clinics to patients as young as 12. There are some in the trans community who argue that the age limit is too high in the UK.

Helen Webberley, a GP in Wales, has set up a private gender clinic and recently started treating children, a “handful” of whom, according to news reports, she has started on cross-sex hormones, including a 12-year-old. Meanwhile, the internet means that there is little to stop under 16-year-olds from buying cross-sex hormones online.

“Currently the zeitgeist is that you go with the child, following the child’s lead and wish at every step,” says Carmichael. “There has been a large decrease in the age at which cross-sex hormones are available, particularly in the US.

“The big debate at the moment is the pressure to introduce cross-sex hormones earlier and earlier. We have done so at around 16 and we might introduce some flexibility around that. But 12? That is a big departure. The reality is that for some young people, things change all the time. For example, starting a relationship with someone can be associated with them thinking very differently about their gender. This isn’t straightforward.

“If young people are being given the strong message that it is the end of the world if they don’t get hormones immediately — perhaps the suggestion you should fast-track people who are self-harming — that is potentially damaging.” As she says, with some understatement, “It is tricky, really tricky.”

Matt, born Matilda, is one of the increasing numbers of natally assigned girls who wish to change gender. The trend at the Tavistock used to be more boy to girl by 3:1, but in the past five years the ratio has reversed.

Matt is also on the autistic spectrum, which complicates the issues (according to the documentary, as many as 30 per cent of male-to-female cases are on the spectrum, a link no one can explain). Matt’s diagnosis means that he finds it especially hard to talk about his emotions and the therapists must try to work out if the gender dysphoria is real or an obsessional fantasy. As Carmichael says, “We know he has an incredible imagination. Might it be a story he has created for himself?”

Rachel, Matt’s mother, was clear when she agreed to take part in the Tavistock series that she didn’t want to sugar-coat what Matt and the family has been — and continues to go — through. They live in Wales. It’s fair to say that in their part of the world transgender rights are not on many people’s radar. Sometimes it’s the small things that resonate. Matt, who loves swimming, was recently disqualified from a competition for being in the boys’ team. “I said to my partner, Pete, ‘Don’t flower it up.’ I want it as gritty as it gets so people see what it’s like.”

At the Tavistock, Matt’s caseworker, Dr Charlie Beaumont, encourages him to unpick his feelings, but Matt finds it painfully difficult to talk. His caseworker is concerned there “is a lack of consistency of gender presentation”. On the other hand, if not prescribed blockers, might Matt self-harm? Matt is 12. There are signs that breasts are beginning to develop. It’s not long now before periods will start.

There is a sense that time is running out, but Rachel tells the doctors tearfully: “I’m not quite ready to lose Tills.” She struggles with the impression that has come from Hollywood that being transgender is easy. “I hear all the stuff about people being gender fluid and think, this isn’t a fashion thing. There are people in the media who make this all look easy: a man one day; a woman the next. But the reality is it’s hard work. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody. This isn’t left-wing parenting. I’m not somebody going, ‘Look how fluid I am with everything.’”

Matt, who loves writing stories and is a massive fan of David Walliams (who wrote the children’s book The Boy in the Dress), is round-faced, with short hair and expressive big brown eyes. At passport control the authorities often cast around for a girl — “Where’s Mathilda?” — and don’t believe his mum when she points to Matt. So much so, the family has a letter from GIDS for whenever they go abroad.

As early as aged two and a half, a health visitor commented that Matt — then known as Matilda, or Tills, which is what Rachel still frequently calls him, perhaps betraying her own bewilderment at the turn of events — had an unusually deep voice. “As she got older I always thought she was just a very strong tomboy,” Rachel says, looking back. “Detested wearing dresses, didn’t want to have her hair combed. I remember buying her knickers and thinking, why on earth does everything have to be covered in princesses? Aged five, she told me she wanted hair that didn’t move. In other words, she wanted me to shave her hair off.

“I wasn’t too bothered. Not until she started telling everyone she was a boy. At that point, I thought I’d better go to the doctor.” Hormone tests were carried out and the assumption was that this was a child who was intersex. When the tests came out negative, Rachel was referred to the GIDS unit.

What was that like? “Oh, they make you question everything,” she says. “I think they are trying to find out if this has been nurtured at all. Is this the child or is this the parent pushing their child to be something they don’t want to be? But I think they identified quickly that I wasn’t happy about it. Why would anybody want their child to face the kind of prejudice that was likely to come her way?”

Matt struggled with his education and being bullied until he got a place at a specialist school where he is accepted as male. “At the old school I’d beg them not to be so gender specific. Now I worry that I sent him to the wolves every day.” Despite his being happier at school, Rachel still checks on Matt through the night because she is worried he might hurt himself. She has got rid of anything that could cause harm — the cords on a blind, dressing-gown ties.

In the documentary we watch Rachel weighing up the pros and cons of hormone blockers. “My concern is that it suppresses things. Maybe if she did go through puberty, she’d click into girl mode and be actually, ‘I want to be a girl now.’ I don’t think that will happen, but my worry is that I really am interfering. Now this isn’t nature, it is nurture. On the other hand being able to press the pause button could be a good thing.”

What does Tills/Matt think? “Tills thinks the rest of the world has gone mad. Just leave me alone. What’s wrong with me? I’m just me.”

Stephanie Davies-Arai is a parent coach behind a website called Transgender Trend, concerned about the rise in the number of children referred to gender clinics. She argues: “We are setting children off on a path towards sterilisation: medicalisation. It is an experiment that has no precedent … Are we really willing to so readily accept that a child is the ‘wrong’ sex at this age rather than address the bullying and the culture that tells him so?” It’s a view, she says, that has lost her friends — “There’s a feeling that if you don’t go along with current trends, you are transphobic.”

At first I presumed Transgender Trend was religiously or politically motivated, but that doesn’t seem to be the case when we meet. Her view, thoughtfully argued, is that when she was a teenager she, too, would have questioned her gender. “I would have been trans. Because I was not only a tomboy; in my head I was a boy. My sister and I went through our pre-pubescence calling each other Mike and Bill. Until my mid twenties, I didn’t want to be a woman. I was a rebel. I look at what is going on and think, I would have gone for this.” She doesn’t think children can make a decision about gender until their mid twenties when the brain has reached maturity, and that living as the opposite sex at a young age means “you are changing that child’s brain, you are building a new identity and by the time you are 12, puberty is the enemy”.

Her concern is that, with the help of social media, there might be more awareness around trans, but we’re ignoring the issue of social contagion. Davies-Arai argues that it’s become cool to be “trans”, more accepted than being a lesbian, for example, which is one possible reason why referrals of teenage girls have increased so dramatically. She has heard of clusters of girls binding their breasts and saying they are boys; that parents complain their children are coming home saying, “I’m not sure if I am a boy or a girl,” after a class talk about transgender. “Any kid who is like I was — outside the crowd, a bit awkward, the ones who don’t fit in — all ‘gender nonconforming’ kids are included under the trans umbrella now and they are being given no alternative way of understanding their feelings of distress.”

But what would she do if her traumatised seven-year-old child announced he/she wanted to change sex? “I would say, be quite casual about it. Don’t make a big fuss. Take it away from gender. Parents are advised now to take it very seriously — and I think that is the last thing you do. Address the bullying instead.”

If Davies-Arai does have an agenda, it is a feminist one. Almost 1,000 natal females were referred to the Tavistock last year. Might this be more about girls struggling with puberty and their bodies? “There’s nobody asking, why do so many teenage girls not want to become women? I think that’s what we should be asking, rather than accepting the least likely answer, that they are really boys. It seems a way for us not to seriously look at the culture we are bringing our girls up in.”

To some degree, Carmichael might have sympathy with this last argument. What she and her team try to figure out, over months and years, is, “How far are the physical changes one seeks motivated more around feeling that you fit in and are accepted by others?

“You might think, gosh, what are we doing?” says Carmichael. “But there isn’t a right and a wrong. No one has the answers. It is an evolving picture with many voices contributing. All we can go on is that people who have taken this route feel this was the right thing to do.”

In the documentary, Beard, the director, says to Ash: “Some people change their minds …”

“Some people. Not me,” she responds. Do you think you’ll be a girl for ever, he asks. “Yes,” she replies. And turns a cartwheel.

A BARE-KNUCKLE FIGHTER IN THE BLOODIEST CONTEST EVER

Rhys Blakely

NOVEMBER 8 2016

IT BEGAN WITH a ride down a golden escalator in the marble atrium of a New York skyscraper. It was June 16, last year, and Donald Trump was announcing a run for the White House. America had no idea what was about to hit it.

Some of the crowd had been paid $50 apiece to turn up at that first campaign event and Mr Trump made headlines with a 40-minute speech in which he praised his golf courses, promised to build a “great wall” along the southern border and called Mexican immigrants rapists. The most wildly unpredictable US election in living memory had begun.

In the months to come, Mr Trump would feud with the family of a fallen Muslim soldier, a Hispanic beauty queen, the leadership of his party, and the Pope. Defying the pundits, this former reality TV star, whose divorces and sex life had kept New York’s tabloids entranced for decades, would become the first presidential nominee of a major US party to have no experience in office since Eisenhower and the very first to have boasted about the size of his manhood in a presidential primary debate.

On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton would face another populist. The former secretary of state announced her candidacy in April last year. She set off on an image-softening road trip to Iowa. The path ahead was rockier than she imagined. The rivals she feared most — Joe Biden, the vice-president, and Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator — stayed out of the race. But Bernie Sanders, a septuagenarian socialist senator from Vermont, would electrify Democrats suspicious of Mrs Clinton’s ethics, her ties to big business and her support for free trade.

She endured a bruising primary while the FBI investigated a secret email system she used while leading the State Department. In February Mr Sanders effectively battled her to a tie in the Iowa caucus, the first primary contest, and then trounced her in New Hampshire. Mrs Clinton was running to be the first woman president, but young women shunned her candidacy.

As the primary race headed to the South, black voters saved her campaign. But questions lingered over whether she could animate Obama voters. She emerged as the second most unpopular nominee of a major US party since polling began. The silver lining? She was running against the first.

It was often predicted that Mr Trump’s candidacy would fade. Seventeen Republicans had thrown their hat into the ring: it was a good year to run as a member of the Grand Old Party. A Democrat had occupied the White House for two terms, and rarely has a party kept it for three. Most voters thought the country was on the wrong track. There were six past and current Republican governors and five senators in the race.

Few thought that a brash, twice-divorced celebrity could make a mark. Early on, though, Mr Trump displayed two skills. The first was for attracting media coverage. His mastery of Twitter and of insults bamboozled his rivals. It was estimated that he garnered “free” media coverage worth $2 billion.

The second skill was reaching voters who felt overlooked and left behind, especially white men without a college education. His candidacy coincided with a new scepticism about what he called “the siren song of globalisation”.

Mr Trump’s diatribes against political correctness, free trade and illegal immigration electrified a section of the right. Supporters quickly forged a consensus on what made him special: his outspokenness, his business acumen, wealth that made him immune to cronyism and his outsider status.

At his first “town hall” event, in the critical early voting state of New Hampshire, Jim Donahue, 65, a maths teacher, thought that Mr Trump could be “America’s Vladimir Putin — a nationalist to make the people think that the country could be great again”.

It was not until the first Republican primary debate, on August 7 last year, that his rivals realised that Mr Trump was a threat. He was leading the polls and placed at the centre of the stage. His demeanour was glowering, his tan a striking shade of orange. In the opening seconds, the moderators asked the ten men who had qualified to participate if any would refuse to rule out running as an independent in the election.

A theatrical pause — then one hand crept up: Mr Trump’s, of course. The crowd booed this challenge to Ronald Reagan’s 11th commandment: thou shalt not turn on a fellow Republican. The atmosphere was somewhere between game show and a bare-knuckle boxing match. It was riveting television. The audience broke records.

That evening, aides of Marco Rubio, the Florida senator whom the Clinton campaign feared the most, realised something: untethered to an ideology, unburdened by a respect for facts, and willing to say things no other candidate would dare, Mr Trump was unmanageable.

But that first debate also highlighted his flaws. Megyn Kelly, a star presenter, confronted him on how he had called women “fat pigs, dogs, slobs and disgusting animals”. Later that evening he was swarmed by a mob of reporters. Amid the mêlée, Mr Trump fumed. “I think Megyn behaved very nasty to me,” he said. That night he retweeted a message that called her a “bimbo”. He later suggested that she had asked him unfair questions because she had been menstruating.

That pattern would recur: Mr Trump could not let slights slide. Fourteen months later, when they met for three presidential debates, Mrs Clinton, apparently on the advice of psychologists, baited him. In Las Vegas she said he would be a “puppet” of Vladimir Putin. Mr Trump could barely contain his fury. “No puppet. No puppet,” he spluttered. “You’re the puppet.”

Voters were already worried about his temperament. In the final days of the campaign his aides had blocked him from Twitter, to stop the acts of self-sabotage that frequently cost him support. His treatment of women would come back to haunt him, too.

The summer of last year, however, became known as the “summer of Trump”. While the Clinton campaign churned out thousands of words of policy proposals and dodged press conferences, Mr Trump did things no candidate had ever done. At a fair in Iowa he gave children rides on his helicopter. He spent more money on “Make America Great Again” baseball hats than on polling. He demurred when he was asked to denounce a leader of the KKK. He did not release his taxes. He had fun: “We will have so much winning if I get elected that you may get bored with winning,” he said.

Last February a second place in the Iowa caucuses for Mr Trump was followed by a victory in the New Hampshire primary. As the primaries headed first to the conservative Deep South and then north to the rust-belt states of the upper Midwest and the industrial Northeast, Mr Trump kept on winning. May 4 marked the Indiana primary. Mr Trump started his day by alleging without a shred of evidence that the father of Mr Cruz, one of only two rivals still standing, had helped to assassinate President Kennedy. By the end of the day the contest was over: Mr Trump was the Republicans’ presumptive presidential nominee.

Mrs Clinton, meanwhile, was making campaigning look like solemn work. In July the FBI said it would not recommend charges after investigating whether she had broken the law by using a private email server. The revival of that investigation ten days before the election would send Democrats reeling, and the unflattering inner workings of Mrs Clinton’s campaign were revealed when private emails were hacked, probably by Russia.

Time and again, though, Mr Trump defied the laws of political gravity. He won the votes of evangelical Christians despite saying: “I’m not sure I have ever asked God’s forgiveness.” He said: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”

He called the voters of Iowa “stupid”. He said that women who had abortions should be punished. The leaders of his own party denounced his attacks on a Hispanic judge as racist. He made remarks some interpreted as promoting violence against Mrs Clinton. He was forced to fire his second campaign manager over alleged links to Kremlin-sponsored strongmen, praised Mr Putin and asked Moscow to hack Mrs Clinton. In the final presidential debate, he suggested he might keep the country “in suspense” and not accept the results of the election.

America has seen populists before. None, though, rose as far or as fast. US politics will never be the same.

LEONARD COHEN

Obituary

NOVEMBER 11 2016

FOR SOMEONE WHOSE songs earned him the epithet “the godfather of gloom”, Leonard Cohen had a highly developed and mischievous sense of humour. “I don’t consider myself a pessimist,” he noted. “I think of a pessimist as someone who is waiting for it to rain — and I feel soaked to the skin.”

The subject of his songs over a career that spanned half a century was the human condition, which inevitably led him into some dark places. He suffered bouts of depression and his mournful voice and the fatalism of his lyrics led his songs to be adopted by the anguished, lovelorn and angst-ridden as a personal liturgy.

However, there were also what Cohen called “the cracks where the light gets in”. Despite his image as a purveyor of gloom and doom, the inherent melancholia of his songs was nuanced not only by deep romanticism but by black humour.

A published poet and novelist who was in his thirties before he turned to music, Cohen was the most literate singer-songwriter of his age. With Bob Dylan, he occupied the penthouse suite of what he called “the tower of song”. Together Cohen and Dylan not only transformed the disposable, sentimental métier of popular music into something more poetic and profound but, for better or worse, made the pop lyric perhaps the defining form of latter 20th-century expression. In an era in which anyone who warbled about “the unicorns of my mind” was liable to be hailed as a poet, Cohen was the genuine article.

Many of his best-known songs — Suzanne, So Long, Marianne and Sisters of Mercy — were romantically inspired by the women in his life. In Chelsea Hotel #2, the theme of longing, love and loss turned to pure lust as he described a liaison with the singer Janis Joplin as she gave him “head on the unmade bed/ While the limousines wait in the street”.

Story of Isaac and The Butcher touched on religious themes, and war and death loomed large, particularly after his experiences during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war when he offered to fight for Israel and ended up performing for Jewish troops in a tank division that was under fire in the Sinai desert.

Depression and suicide also informed several songs, including Seems So Long Ago, Nancy and Dress Rehearsal Rag. This tendency to lapse into morbidity led one critic to wail, “Where does he get the neck to stand before an audience and groan out those monstrous anthems of amorous self-commiseration?” Yet if his writing had a philosophical stock-in-trade, it was more stoical perseverance than the abandonment of hope.

Many of his compositions shared a search for self and meaning and were driven by a restless quest for personal freedom, nowhere more so than on Bird On The Wire, which opened with probably his most quoted lines “Like a bird on the wire/ Like a drunk in a midnight choir/ I have tried in my way to be free”.

The song was covered by dozens of artists, including Johnny Cash, Willie Nelson, Judy Collins and Joe Cocker, and was once memorably described as a bohemian version of My Way, sans the braggadocio.

Even at his darkest, the prospect of redemption and perhaps even a glimmer of salvation was evident. He described Hallelujah, perhaps his best-known composition — and certainly his most covered, with some 300 versions performed or recorded by other artists — as an affirmation of his “faith in life, not in some formal religious way but with enthusiasm, with emotion”.

The song took him years to write as he pared back 80 draft verses until each line felt right, as with the second verse: “Your faith was strong but you needed proof/ You saw her bathing on the roof/ Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you/ She tied you to a kitchen chair/ She broke your throne, and she cut your hair/ And from your lips she drew the hallelujah.”

It was characteristic of the meticulous way he worked to make every word count and led to a well-documented exchange with Bob Dylan, who expressed his admiration for the song: “He asked me how long it took to write, and I lied and said three or four years when actually it took five. Then we were talking about one of his songs, and he said it took him 15 minutes.”

Unfailingly courteous and possessed of an unfashionably old-world charm, Cohen’s intellectual coming of age predated the advent of rock’n’roll. His early cultural heroes were not Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry but the beat writer Jack Kerouac and the poet Lorca, after whom Cohen named his daughter. His artistic leanings were liberal and bohemian, but he was never a hippy. Dressed in dark, tailored suits and smart fedoras, he had an elegance that was perhaps the legacy of his Jewish father, who owned a clothing shop. Sylvie Simmons, his biographer, reckoned he looked “like a Rat Pack rabbi, God’s chosen mobster”.

He spoke in a sonorous voice that was full of a reassuring calm and yet animated at the same time. If it was a great speaking voice, it was perhaps not a natural vehicle for a singer, although he developed his own idiosyncratic style to overcome its limitations, one which was compared by the critic Maurice Rosenbaum to a strangely appealing buzz-saw: “I knew I was no great shakes as a singer,” Cohen said, “but I always thought I could tell the truth about a song. I liked those singers who would just lay out their predicament and tell their story, and I thought I could be one of those guys.”

He was handsome in a rugged and swarthy way, and women found the combination of his physical attraction and the sensitivity of his poetic mind to be irresistible. In turn he described love as “the most challenging activity humans get into” and took up the gauntlet with prolific enthusiasm. “I don’t think anyone masters the heart. It continues to cook like a shish kebab, bubbling and sizzling in everyone’s breast,” he said.

Yet whether love ever bought him true happiness is debatable, and in his 2006 poetry collection, Book of Longing, he mocked his reputation as a ladies’ man as an ill-fitting joke that “caused me to laugh bitterly through the ten thousand nights I spent alone”.

He never married but perhaps came closest to contentment with Marianne Ihlen, the inspiration behind several of his early songs and with whom he lived on the Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s. Their relationship lasted a decade through numerous infidelities. He also had a long relationship with the artist and photographer Suzanne Elrod, with whom he had two children. His son, Adam Cohen, is a singer-songwriter who produced his father’s 2016 album You Want It Darker. His daughter, Lorca, is a photographer, who gave birth to a surrogate daughter for the singer Rufus Wainwright and Jörn Weisbrodt, his partner.

For all his protests to the contrary, his love life was complicated, almost Byronic in its profligacy. As well as his assignations with Janis Joplin and Joni Mitchell, for example, he rested his head on the perfumed pillows of the fashion photographer Dominique Issermann, the actress Rebecca De Mornay and the songwriter Anjani Thomas. Mitchell, who once said the only men to whom she was a groupie were Picasso and Cohen, celebrated their year-long relationship in several songs, including A Case of You, in which her lover declares himself to be as “constant as a northern star”. He certainly was not, and yet she sang that he remains in her blood “like holy wine”.

Summing up Cohen’s lifelong serial inconstancy, his biographer, Simmons, wrote that his “romantic relationships tended to get in the way of the isolation and space, the distance and longing, that his writing required”.

Yet he was as fixated on metaphysical matters as he was on carnal pleasures, and many of his best lyrics fused the erotic and the spiritual. In the 1990s his search for enlightenment resulted in him disappearing from public view to live an ascetic life in a Zen Buddhist monastery on the snow-capped Mount Baldy in California. Although he remained a practising Jew, he was ordained as a Buddhist monk in 1996.

He came down from the mountain three years later and returned to civilian life, only to find that while he was sequestered he had been robbed by his longtime manager (and, perhaps inevitably, former lover), Kelley Lynch. He issued legal proceedings against her for misappropriating millions from his retirement fund and swindling him out of his publishing rights. Left with a huge tax bill and a relatively modest $150,000, he remortgaged his home. He was awarded $9 million by a Los Angeles court in 2006.

When Lynch — who was later jailed after violating a court order to keep away from Cohen — was unable to pay, he undertook his first concert tour in 15 years to replenish his funds. It was estimated by Billboard magazine that he earned almost $10 million from the 2009 leg of the tour alone.

A golden period of late creativity followed. After releasing a parsimonious 11 studio albums in 45 years, he released three in four years between 2012 and 2016, including Old Ideas, which became the highest-charting album of his career, when he was 76.

Leonard Norman Cohen was born in Montreal in 1934 into a prosperous and middle-class Jewish family. His father was already approaching 50 when his son was born, and died when Cohen was nine years old, leaving him with a small trust fund income. His mother, Masha, was the daughter of a rabbi and brought him up steeped in Talmudic lore and the stories of the Old Testament. He later recalled a “Messianic” childhood.

In an era before rock’n’roll he was drawn to the folk and country music he heard on the radio. He learnt to play the guitar as a teenager “to impress girls” and formed a group called the Buckskin Boys. Women also loomed large in his adolescent life. After reading a book about hypnosis, he tried out the technique and persuaded the family’s maid to disrobe. He was 13 at the time.

At the age of 15 he stumbled on a volume by the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca in a second-hand bookshop in Montreal. Inspired by Lorca’s erotic themes, he decided to become a writer and adopted his lifelong credo that his creative muse was best served via the entanglement of heart and limbs.

At McGill University he chaired the debating society and won a prize for creative writing. His first book of verse, Let Us Compare Mythologies, appeared in 1956. A second volume, The Spice-Box of Earth, was published five years later and put him on the literary map. By then wanderlust had set in and he travelled widely, spending time in Castro’s Cuba before buying a small house without electricity or running water on the Greek island of Hydra. There he wrote further books of verse and the novels The Favourite Game and Beautiful Losers, as well as conducting a decade-long romantic relationship with Ihlen.

His books were critically acclaimed and one enthusiastic reviewer gushingly likened Beautiful Losers to James Joyce. But good reviews don’t put food on even Greek tables and his books initially sold fewer than 3,000 copies. In need of cash, he returned to north America in 1966, planning to try his luck as a singer and songwriter in Nashville.

“In retrospect, writing books seems the height of folly, but I liked the life,” he recalled. “It’s good to hit that desk every day. There’s a lot of order to it that is very different from the life of a rock’n’roller. I turned to professional singing as a remedy for an economic collapse.”

He never got as far as Nashville. After landing in New York, he was “ambushed” by the new music he heard all around him. “In Greece I’d been listening to Armed Forces Radio, which was mostly country music,” he said. “But then I heard Dylan and Baez and Judy Collins, and I thought something was opening up, so I borrowed some money and moved into the Chelsea Hotel.”

Collins became the first to record one of his songs and invited him to sing with her on stage. His first live performance caused him to flee with stage fright, but his shyness appealed to the audience who encouraged him back and set him on his new career as a troubadour. Already in his thirties, he was described by one critic as having “the stoop of an aged crop-picker and the face of a curious little boy”.

His singing, too, provoked mixed reactions but John Hammond, the legendary Columbia A&R man who had already signed Bob Dylan to the label, was not one to be put off by an unconventional voice. “He took me to lunch and then we went back to the Chelsea,” Cohen remembered. “I played a few songs and he gave me a contract.”

He spent two years living in the Chelsea Hotel, fell in with Andy Warhol’s set, became infatuated with the Velvet Underground’s German chanteuse Nico and released his debut album. Sales in America were initially modest but the record found a cult following in Europe and Britain, where he was dubbed “the bard of the bedsits”.

Among his most memorable concerts from this time was his appearance at the Isle of Wight Festival in 1970. Unpromisingly he had to go on after an electrifying performance by Jimi Hendrix, yet instead of bringing down the mood he managed to win over the pumped-up, 600,000-strong crowd by telling them gentle self-deprecating anecdotes in a hushed voice, in between his equally low-key numbers.

Although his early records sounded austere, centred around little more than his voice and a softly strummed guitar, in later years he expanded his musical palette, adding a full band and chorus of backing singers. Initially he appeared to be a literary aesthete, aloof from the hurly-burly of rock’n’roll, but by the mid-1970s his life was unravelling in a midlife crisis in which LSD experimentation featured. “I got into drugs and drinking and women and travel and feeling that I was part of a motorcycle gang or something,” he admitted 20 years later.

His confusion led him to record with Phil Spector, whose production banished the simplicity of his earlier recordings in favour of melodramatic rock arrangements. One grotesque track, Don’t Go Home With Your Hard On, featured a drunken chorus of Cohen, Dylan and Allen Ginsberg repeating the title line over and over again.

Working with the volatile Spector was a fraught process. “I was flipped out at the time and he certainly was flipped out,” Cohen recalled. “For me, the expression was withdrawal and melancholy, and for him, megalomania and insanity and a devotion to armaments that was really intolerable.”

At one point during the sessions, Spector locked Cohen out of the studio, put an armed guard on the door and would not let him listen to the mixes. When Cohen protested, Spector threatened him with a gun and a cross-bow.

The resulting album, Death of a Ladies’ Man in 1977, was a career nadir that horrified his fan base, and he swiftly returned to something closer to his old style. When five years passed between the release of albums it appeared that his inspiration had dried up, a blockage that he later attributed to having become addicted to amphetamines. Various Positions in 1984 was a triumph and included Hallelujah. It sparked a revival both creatively and commercially as Cohen adopted the mode of a fashionable boulevardier.

With an increasingly sardonic humour he surveyed the wreckage of the modern world in songs such as First We Take Manhattan, Democracy and Everybody Knows and painted an apocalyptic picture of the world. It was a vision that struck a hellish chord with the film director Oliver Stone who included three of Cohen’s songs from the period in his horrifyingly violent, dystopian movie Natural Born Killers. Shortly after the film’s release, Cohen retreated to his Zen Buddhist monastery.

When he returned to recording and live performance after a decade-long break, he was treated more like a guru than a peddler of popular songs. Seated on a stool, guitar in hand, or cupping a microphone (“as Hamlet held Yorick’s skull”, one critic suggested), his concerts became acts of communion, with reverential audiences treating his every utterance as if it were holy writ.

Age seemed to suit him, uniquely emphasising his sagacity, while the advancing years simply made other fading rock stars appear irrelevant. Eschewing make-up, surgery and denial, he embraced getting old as “the only game in town”. That he was still writing compelling songs and releasing records into his eighties was “the ash” that showed his life was still “burning well”.

Despite continuing his recording career until his final months, Cohen stopped touring in 2013 and hinted at his preparedness for the end in the summer of 2016. After the death of Marianne (obituary, August 27), a letter from Cohen was released in which he said goodbye to his muse and former lover. “Our bodies are falling apart and I think I will follow you very soon,” he wrote.“Know that I am so close behind you that if you stretch out your hand, I think you can reach mine.”

Leonard Cohen, poet and songwriter, was born on September 21, 1934. His death, aged 82, was announced on November 10, 2016

LET’S STOP BEING SO PARANOID ABOUT ANDROIDS

Matt Ridley

NOVEMBER 21 2016

THE TECH INDUSTRY, headquartered in Silicon Valley, is populated largely by enthusiastic optimists who want to change the world and believe they can. Yet there is one strand of pessimism that you hear a lot there: the robots are going to take all our jobs. With artificial intelligence looming, human beings are facing redundancy and obsolescence. However, I think this neo-Luddite worry is as wrong now as it was in Ned Ludd’s day.

“Any job that is on some level routine is likely to be automated, and if we are to see a future of prosperity rather than catastrophe we must act now,” warns Martin Ford, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, in his book The Rise of the Robots.

“With the technology advances that are presently on the horizon, not only low-skilled jobs are at risk; so are the jobs of knowledge workers. Too much is happening too fast,” says a Silicon Valley guru, Vivek Wadhwa.

“Think of it as a kind of digital social Darwinism, with clear winners and losers: those with the talent and skills to work seamlessly with technology and compete in the global marketplace are increasingly rewarded, while those whose jobs can just as easily be done by foreigners, robots or a few thousand lines of code suffer accordingly,” says Tyler Cowen, an economist at George Mason University, Virginia, in his book Average is Over.

Yet we have been automating work for two centuries and so far the effect has been to create more jobs, not fewer. Farming once employed more than 90 per cent of people, and without them we would have starved. Today, it’s just a few per cent. Followers of the mysterious “Captain Swing” who destroyed threshing machines in 1830 were convinced that machines stole work. Instead of which, farm labourers became factory workers; factory workers later became call-centre workers. In both transitions, pay rose and work became safer, less physically demanding and less exposed to the elements.

In 1949 the cybernetics pioneer Norbert Wiener warned that computers in factories could usher in “an industrial revolution of unmitigated cruelty”. In 1964 a panel of the great and the good, including the Nobel prizewinners Linus Pauling and Gunnar Myrdal, warned that automation would mean “potentially unlimited output … by systems of machines which will require little co-operation from human beings”. This hoary old myth just keeps coming round again and again.

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