Monday, May 12, 2025
Blog Page 502

Green Templeton elects new Principal

Matthew Unwin
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Green Templeton elects new Principal

Sir Michael Dixon has been elected the new Principal of Green Templeton College and will assume the position in September 2020.

Sir Michael has previously served as the Director of the Natural History Museum in London for over 15 years, having announced last year that he would retire from the post.

Whilst Sir Michael was Director of the Museum, its attendance almost doubled, from 3 million visits a year to 5.3 million. Sir Michael has also overseen the delivery of the museum’s Darwin centre, its biggest single development since the 1800s, which opened to the public in 2010 to widespread acclaim.

In 2014, the success of Sir Michael’s tenure as Director led to a knighthood in recognition for his services to museums.

Prior to his role as museum Director, Sir Michael worked for two decades in scientific, technical and medical (STM) publishing with John Wiley and Sons and Thomson Corporation and later served as Director General of the Zoological Society of London.

The college is a graduate community with a focus on business and management, health and medicine, and social sciences.

It has around 600 students from over 70 countries, with more than 300 fellows.

On his election, Sir Michael said: “I am delighted that the Governing

Body of Green Templeton College has selected me to be the next Principal. “I look forward to building on the

legacy of previous Principals in making the college a vibrant, stimulating community for research and learn- ing where fellows and students can thrive.”

Sir Michael will be replacing Professor Denise Lievesley, who has stepped down after five years as principal.

On her successor, she said: “Green Templeton is a vibrant international community focused on bringing academic research of the highest quality to bear on real-world problems.

“I have enjoyed my time as Principal immensely and will miss our magnificent students and staff. I am proud to pass the baton on to Michael and look forward to hearing about the continuing success of the college.”

Storm Ciara destroys part of Oxfordshire Wildlife Rescue

Joe Stonor
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Storm Ciara destroys part of Oxfordshire Wildlife Rescue

Storm Ciara, which has ravaged much of Britain and parts of mainland Europe over the course of the last week, has turned its wrath upon an Oxford animal sanctuary.

Oxfordshire Wildlife Rescue, based in Didcot, is now faced with a large rebuilding job after “significant damage” partially destroyed the rescue centre’s ‘Hedgehog Hospital’, forcing the emergency relocation of the hedgehog population among volunteers.

According to the centre’s Face- book page, the total cost of the damage is £2700, as well as breaking the ‘spirits’ of volunteers.

A video posted to the site illustrates the scale of the damage, showing a roof partly caved in and a cluttered and chaotic interior.

The founder of the organisation, Luke Waklawec, spoke in the video, outlining the scale of the problem facing the centre:

“It’s not just the structural damage – we have lost the ICU (intensive care unit), which we had literally just bought, and the microscope and cages, they are just beyond repair. The electrics are knackered.

“We’ve put countless hours, days, months and years into this – for nothing.”

Mr Waklawec, writing on Facebook, also commented that the storm has left the hedgehog hospital “unstable and totally unsafe to use”:

“In the mass of destruction we have lost several vital pieces of equipment and very much possibly the building itself.

“At this moment in time we are unfortunately unable to take in anymore hedgehogs until we can establish or fix the new hospital and replace all broken equipment lost in the mess.

“This is a very bitter blow for us all here at OWR as the hospital was nearing completion and we were ready to move to our bigger location with funding saved up. This may now have to put back”.

The hedgehog hospital was itself the product of a fundraising campaign last year.

Now a new fundraiser has been launched to help with the reestablishment of the unit, as well as to give money towards the construction of “a new location”.

The link to donate can be found on the Facebook page by searching ‘Oxfordshire Wildlife Rescue’.

Oxfordshire Wildlife Rescue is an emergency response Wildlife Rescue unit that covers the Oxfordshire area.

They rescue, care and rehabilitate all sick, injured and orphaned British animals.

Jesus professor one of GQ’s 50 most influential people

Emma Weitzman
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Jesus professor one of GQ’s 50 most influential people

Sir Nigel Shadbolt was recognised by GQ for the work he does with the Open Data Institute, which GQ describes as the ‘“not-evil” WikiLeaks’.

He co-founded it with Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, in 2012.

Professor Shadbolt is also the Principal of Jesus College and a Professor in the Department of Computer Science where he specialises in human centred computing, a new and increasingly important field in AI.

The President of the Jesus College JCR congratulated Shadbolt on their behalf, saying “we are very lucky to have such a caring principal.

“He’s really made our college a better place. Huge congratulations to Nigel! We are all very happy for him!”

He was also congratulated by the University and the department of Computer Science via twitter.

Shadbolt and Berners-Lee’s brainchild, the Open Data Institute, was created after both worked as Information Advisors to the Coalition government, where they supervised the release of many public data sets as open data.

It specialises in the use of open data to support innovation, training and research by governments and private companies.

It receives funding from the UK Technology Strategy Board and includes Deutsche Bank and Ocado Technology as its members.

In GQ, Shadbolt has propounded the benefits of increased use of AI, saying “every aspect of how individuals, corporations and governments function can be more effectively managed with the right application of the right data.”

However, in light of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, he has also argued that “consumers and citizens should be empowered, not oppressed by data and its analysis.”

This scandal demonstrated how data mining could be used to political ends without the knowledge of the public or authorities.

The personal data of up to 87 million Facebook users were acquired through the 270,000 Facebook users who used a Facebook app called ‘This Is Your Digital Life’, breaching the digital terms of service.

Furthermore, data has left it possible for political actors of all sizes to launch software strikes with increasing force, such that Professor Shadbolt has called for ‘enforced conventions, treaties and limitations’ in the digital world.

This may be in response to increased tensions over foreign government interference in elections through digital means, including alleged Russian interference in the 2015 US Presidential election and the 2016 UK EU referendum.

Strikes can also be launched by individuals, like when the NHS was subject to a cyber attack causing the shutdown of hundreds of thousands of computers in 2017.

As well as specialising in data and AI, Professor Shadbolt has researched and published on topics including cognitive psychology, computational neuroscience and the Semantic Web.

Some of his current research focuses on the theory and practice of social machines, applications that succeed by integrating humans and computers.

This will lead to greater support from machines in ways that seem more similar to humans as through the accumulation of data and use of AI machines can resemble closed loved ones.

Interview with Professor John Curtice

William Atkinson
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Interview with Professor John Curtice

Remind me never to do an interview again. Not that speaking to Sir John Curtice – Professor of Politics at the University of Strathclyde, Britain’s leading psephologist, BBC election analyst and all-round nice guy – wasn’t deeply enjoyable. I’m an election-nerd, he’s the doyen of elections so there’s no way our chat would not be enlightening. But whilst I’m very marginally enlightened in psephology (the science of elections, for the uninitiated) I’m deeply unenlightened technologically. Failing microphones, bad signal and Skype mishaps almost conspired to prevent our interview. Fortunately, Sir John had a saint’s patience, and once Eduroam pitied me, I settled down to chat with a man who has forgotten more about elections than most PPE students will ever know.

Professor Sir John Curtice is most well-known as the BBC’s go-to election analyst. Like a psephological Rachel Riley, he crunches the numbers, works out the swing and tells Huw Edwards what the hell is going on. He’s been a reassuring presence on our screens, and a popular one. Despite his insistence to the New Statesman (Cherwell’s less highbrow older brother) that he “didn’t want to be a media celebrity”, Sir John’s polling wisdom and Professor Branestawm looks has meant he’s acquired a big social media following, including Twitter’s remarkable page “Is John Curtice on TV?”. His fame is well-earnt though; through exit polls and quality analysis, he’s successfully predicted general elections for BBC viewers since 2005. With his interest and involvement in elections going back much further.

“My first political memory is the death of Hugh Gaitskell and the subsequent Labour party leadership election. I followed the 1964 election, particularly the day after when it was quite close and we weren’t sure whether they were going to get a majority.” Nail-biting election results aren’t a recent development then. Before long the future Sir John was at Magdalen doing PPE, revealing “I was clear it was the politics I was most interested in.” From there to graduate studies at Nuffield and an eventual PhD which was on the Liberal Party. It was here Sir John was first pulled into the election-telly nexus. At Nuffield he was taught by David Butler, “the telly Don of his age”, as Sir John put it, and his 1970s equivalent, essentially. It was through Butler’s ubiquitous television appearances that Sir John became involved in the glamourous world of BBC election analysis. His job was “to sit behind [David] in the BBC studio in 1979. My primary job was to sit with a programmable calculator and be able to calculate the swing very quickly, should the BBC computer system go down,” fortunately, “it did in rehearsals but actually didn’t do so on the night.” His first job, “was looking at what’s going on and trying to provide the occasional piece of advice. Most of which he largely ignored, but there we go.”

It was characteristic of Sir John to play down his undoubted brainbox status and play up his luck. But his first big break at the BBC came from his own initiative. With a colleague at Nuffield, he persuaded the BBC to let him give an instant analysis of the 1981 London Council elections using the Oxford university computer. Leaving aside that it was the University’s sole computer, what Sir John was doing was ground-breaking for British television. It might sound old-hat now, but “instant analysis for television was at the cutting edge of what you could do with digital technology” then. After that symbolic entrance, Sir John has “been involved on the production sides of BBC elections for the last 40 years,” he states, “the rest is history.”

Indeed it was, as Sir John has had a front-row seat at every election since Mrs Thatcher swept to power in 1979. So with all that experience, I asked Sir John if he could provide any historical comparisons for last year’s remarkable election result. How similar was the Tory smashing of the so-called “Red Wall” which was erected in Blair’s landslide of 1997, where, as with Johnson’s capture of traditionally Labour seats like Workington in 2019, Blair (“Call me Tony”) took seats like Enfield Southgate which were supposed to be as solidly Tory as a strongly-worded Port and Policy speech…

Sir John was sceptical, revealing “it’s certainly true that in 1997 Labour won constituencies it would not usually be expected to pick up. One example is Scarborough. I remember a Channel 4 news thing going off to Scarborough and the interviewer saying that according to the opinion polls the Labour Party could win Scarborough. It seemed incredible but Labour dually won Scarborough. I think what happened in 2019 is probably more analogous to what happened in Scotland in 2015.”

That was the year the SNP swept 56 of Scotland’s 59 Westminster constituencies, overturning decades of Labour dominance. “The point about some of the seats the Labour party lost in 2019 is that they had become more marginal relatively recently,” he said, “in many ways 2019 is the end of the story because these were seats were moving away from Labour under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. They moved further after Brexit. The loss of Leave voters by the Labour party is partly the story in these seats.” Comparing to the Scottish story in 2015 he echoed, “the analogy, of course, is that the 2014 Scottish independence referendum destroyed Labour’s longstanding electoral basis in Scotland. Sure, I think in 1997 in terms of seats, but in terms of the consequences from a referendum then 2015 in Scotland is probably the closest analogy.”

I asked, what was it that’s been driving voters away from Labour? and “therein lies the long tell.” Sir John started by unpacking Labour’s experience in Scotland. Rather than shooting the nationalist fox, New Labour’s devolution settlement meant what “we discovered fairly rapidly was that if you provide an environment in which the question is who can best run Scotland as opposed to who would be best to send to Westminster then voters gave a different answer.” As Labour stumbled, the SNP built up support, winning a majority at the 2011 Scottish Parliament elections. This got them the thing they most wanted (asides from a Braveheart sequel), an independence referendum. John continued, “the problem for Labour, once we got into the independence referendum, was twofold. One is that independence is not simply a left/right issue. Labour is a party that exists to articulate arguments about inequality and the role the state should play in dealing with inequality. It struggles when you’re asking questions about constitutions.”

It was, of course, time for that dreaded B-word, and just why so many former Labour voters backed Leave in 2016 and Johnson in 2019. John revealed that “academic research essentially says Labour’s problem among working-class voters is the combination of Blairism and Corbynism” and thus we can see, “on the one hand abstentionism amongst working-class voters goes up. Basically, New Labour was perceived to be close to the centre. Labour became seen much less as being working class in its image. So rebranding as New Labour means you start losing voters in these constituencies.” The other factor was Brexit, which caused Labour to lose ground with these voters somewhat in 2017, but especially in 2019. This was because “Brexit is again not a left-right issue. It’s an issue that divides social liberals against social conservatives. Left-wingers were just as likely to vote for Brexit as right-wingers once you define it as the role of the government dealing with inequality in the economy.” That was the crux of it, he says, “it’s an issue that splits the Labour coalition. As we saw in 2019 they tried to sit on both sides of the fence but ended up falling off.”

I was intrigued by the social liberals versus social conservatives point he raised. Remembering I was writing for Cherwell and not auditioning to be a paler, more English and less talented Andrew Neil, I asked if he thought the impact of more people going to university than ever before both explained the instinctive social liberalism of young Brits and their greater likelihood to back Labour and Remain. He revealed, “it’s old versus young and it is university educated versus those who with little in the way of education or qualifications. These things are related, but… independently.” He goes on that, “there’s what I call enculturation. Younger people have been brought up in a society and educational system in which they’ve been socialized into the idea that the UK is a multicultural, multiethnic country.” He states that “the second cultural thing is that the experience of university tends to make people more liberal. So there’s a cultural thing going on, but there’s also a real interest difference.” Sir John explains how younger people with university qualifications are more likely to migrate than those older voters, and that was “reflected in the Brexit referendum”.

Is it as simple as that? Are we stuck with the inter-generational conflict in Britain? Sir John laughs, well “that’s the $64,000 question about Brexit and immigration: to what extent are these issues going to continue to dominate our politics. It’s something to which we don’t know the answer.” He explains how getting Brexit done doesn’t mean the future’s all bright for the Conservatives. The strong identification of voters with Leave and Remain means that these polarities might take a long time to shift. But as they skew older, the Tories can’t rely on Leavers forever. “At the moment everybody’s going around saying ‘Oh God, Labour’s in a terrible state’. Let’s think about what the future looks like for the Conservative Party. Unless Conservatives can make ground in your generation and those not so much older than you then they are going to be in trouble.”

I asked, surely, despite all the anxiety, this must have been a great decade to be studying elections? “Yeah, especially a psephologist in Scotland. It’s an extraordinary political time.” Sir John started to get philosophical (as well as psephological) at this point, pondering “it’s fascinating that much of the debate about Scottish independence and about Brexit are about relatively familiar themes. They’re both about sovereignty, about identity, about whether you’re better off on your own or in combination with somebody else economically. The major difference is that Brexit was about immigration and the Scottish referendum wasn’t, but there’s a credible similarity in these arguments. They are intense arguments that cause very high levels of political debate. And to that extent, yes. Of my six and a half decades, certainly, the last decade has been the most interesting.”

With that Sir John was off. Whatever the next decade holds politically – another four elections, another Scottish Independence referendum or a second EU Referendum, having Professor Curtice presiding over the results will be a reassuring constant in the sea of political lunacy. Long may he continue.

Queer Victoriana: Sex in the City

Lewis Roberts
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Queer Victoriana: Sex in the City

In 1881, The Sins of the Cities of the Plain was published privately in 250 copies. It purports to be the memoirs of Jack Saul, a rentboy or “Mary-Ann”, and is one of the most explicit pornographic gay novels of the 19th century. For the hefty sum of four guineas, one could read in intense detail about the scandal of Thomas Boulton and Frederick Park, two Victorian cross-dressers who were tried at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in 1871.

            This strange book is important because it represents the emergence of a now important trope in Queer writing: sex as solidarity. It is pornographic, but not gratuitously so. Its intimate descriptions have the intention of defending unfortunate souls such as Boulton and Park. Jack Saul spends the night in the transvestite couple’s rooms and the next day has breakfast with them “all dressed as ladies”.

            Traditionally, and a cynic would say this is still often true, gay writing was fixated on sex, and barely connected to the real world. Pornography, straight or gay, was loud, obscene and often amusingly so. What The Sins of the Cities does differently is to depict believable and close homosexual relationships. Indeed, the author’s descriptions of meeting covertly in Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens are imbued with a joy and fear known viscerally by gay men in London both now and then.

            Such realism is not matched in the book’s authorship. Many different people have been suggested as its composer, not least the renowned pornographer James Campbell Reddie. Another suspect, to use a sadly operative word, is the Pre-Raphaelite Jewish painter Simeon Solomon. While this ascription is largely based on the circumstantial evidence of Solomon’s friendship with Boulton and Park, Solomon did try his hand at sexualised penmanship at various points in his life. His A Vision of Love Revealed in Sleep, a mystical tale of Hebraic voyeurism, published as a prose-poem in 1871, has much in common with the shifting sands of The Sins of the Cities.

            Solomon was a man for whom the lasciviousness of meeting in Pleasure Gardens and dressing up in costume was second nature. He would often entertain the likes of Charles Algernon Swinburne and Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his rooms, dressed as an intoxicating Arabian prince, or otherwise more literally intoxicated. Perhaps unusually in the history of Queer Victoriana, he was able to enter a form of popular culture. Walter Pater wrote of how Solomon’s painting Love Among the Schoolboys was incredibly common to be hung on the wall of any Oxford undergraduate aspiring to popularity. It played a double role, signifying both the student’s fashionableness in having his finger on the pulse of artistic modernity, and, more putatively, noting to his friends his openness to experimentation.

            The Sins of the Cities is part of a genre not as uncommon as one might think. The Victorian period, with its explosion in printing and London’s particular densifying in the period, meant that a book of such explicitness could go unnoticed enough not to arouse attention, except by those who wanted their attention aroused. Indeed, it is easy, and not unfounded, for 21st century commentators to see the period as a time of intense oppression of homosexuality, where one could barely move for a threatening copper on every corner. In reality, when Boulton and Park were tried in 1871, since there was no evidence of anal sex (one wonders what the relevant authorities were looking for as evidence of this), and, despite the prosecutors’ best efforts to persuade otherwise, dressing in women’s clothing not being a crime, they were acquitted of all charges.

  At the risk of creating my own obfuscating metropolis in this article, I shall introduce a further book to push this point. Around 1888, an odd text by “Walter”, entitled My Secret Life, began to appear in London in several volumes. It is a sprawling and disorganised collection of, at times, quite repellent writing about growing up gay at public school and in adolescence. It is at once beautiful – as an insight into the confused and developing mind of a Victorian gay boy: a 19th century Sex Education – and obscene – the narrator is a clear pervert throughout and damages his own body in his escapades. The point is thus: to find gay characters in 19th century literature, one needn’t search for masturbation in classic novels (see Eve Sedgwick on Jane Austen), or read only between the lines to find David Copperfield’s latent lust for his various father-figures. That is not to say there is no value in doing these things, only that 19th century London offers up its own homosexuality with great fecundity, and it is perhaps there, where the sex was actually happening, that we should start looking, rather than in the nooks and crannies of the classics.

Could YouTube punditry bring about a revolution in the way we follow sport?

Thomas Lyne
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Could YouTube punditry bring about a revolution in the way we follow sport?

The archetypal pundit for televised coverage a football or rugby fixture is easy to identify. A white male, between the ages of 45 and 70, and a former player. We can find some comfort in the fact that tentative moves have been made towards a sorely-needed diversification of this Boomer/Gen X white man’s domain, as we saw with the introduction of Eni Aluko at ITV and Alex Scott at the BBC for the 2018 FIFA World Cup. However, no such progress has been made when it comes to another distinguishing feature of the industry. It would seem that the posteriors of players who have hung up their boots continue to exercise a stranglehold on TV-set sofa space.

Sports punditry is a big-money business. It’s no surprise that in the UK, the growth of the business has been most palpable in football, where the domestic television broadcast deal for the Premier League has soared to the dizzying heights of £1,665,000,000 per season. In July 2019 it was revealed that Gary Lineker was the BBC’s highest earner in the financial year 2018-19, raking in a salary of £1.75 million. Adam Bennett at the The Sun was quick to point out the remarkable rise in pay in the sector: Lineker’s wage represents a thirteenfold increase from the £130,000 (adjusted for inflation) that Jimmy Hill, who presented the show between 1973 and 1988, had been earning. 

The BBC is injecting equally staggering sums of money into its coverage of Rugby Union. Jonathan Davies was reported in 2017 to be in a wage band securing him £150,000-£195,999 a year. If this is what has to be forked out to bring a legend of the game into the line-up, I can’t help but wonder if they could be getting a bigger bang for the buck. Jonathan Davies’ dulcet tones, and his outbursts of endearing bias whenever his Welsh compatriots take to the field, make for great telly. But perhaps former players like Davies could find a perfect complement in a pundit with a more holistic tactical perspective.

Thank goodness I stumbled upon the Squidge Rugby YouTube Channel during the Rugby World Cup last year. The 2019 edition of the tournament was the first that I’d followed with any real sense of purpose, but this was no coincidence. It was Squidge’s coverage that sparked a revival of my interest in the sport, which had admittedly been waning ever since my playing career, far from stellar by all accounts, was cut short by an ignominious broken finger in Year 9. I’ll never know if I would’ve been making a name for myself in the Varsity Match, but now that I’ve been enlightened by these new insights, I can at least pretend to know what’s going on in a rugby game. 

What more could you want? A bright and witty young Welshman named Robbie Owen whose videos somehow reconcile the extremely technical aspects of rugby with the ridiculousness of a game where, as he notes in his YouTube channel description, “not even the ball makes sense”. His videos may be meticulously prepared, especially given the mammoth editing task his ambitious surveys on years of footage no doubt bring to the table, but the irony remains sharp and spontaneous. 

In years of half-hearted Six Nations and World Cup viewership, I don’t think I’ve ever heard the term ‘forward pod’ or any meaningful considerations of the formation of the forward pack. Squidge makes it his mission to highlight these nebulous tactical phenomena. His videos are never stat-driven, like the baseball analysis behind the Oakland Athletics’ ‘Moneyball’ strategies of the early-2000s (watch Bennett Miller’s 2011 film Moneyball to see what I mean). Instead, they are a series of punctiliously precise observations, which speak much louder than the territory or line breaks that punctuate BBC and ITV coverage. Squidge’s analysis achieves the same kind of victory over people who have ‘been there, done that’ as Billy Beane’s denunciation of his hubristic team of ‘experienced’ scouts as depicted in the film.

I remember the first video I watched was his post-match analysis of Wales’ narrow 29-25 victory over Australia in the World Cup. This video does exactly what punditry can and should do. It identified the method in the madness and has indelibly changed the way I look back on that game. His analysis of Dan Biggar’s 36th second drop goal epitomises this. When watching it live, I attributed this unorthodox spark of brilliance to impulsive opportunism. This was by no means the case. from the kick off, the ball was fired straight at Michael Hooper, Australia’s notoriously menacing flanker, taking him out of the game, and with him, the wind out of Australia’s sails in the breakdown. And then, Squidge shows us, Wales sent in a pack of their most effective counter-ruckers to chase the ball – Alun Wyn Jones, Aaron Wainwright and Ken Owens. Instead of following traditional wisdom and sending in their quickest players, they send in ‘some big Welsh blokes’ and win the ball back in a flash. What’s wonderful here is that there is no barrage of technical clichés, and no tedious contextualisation, just a quick, tongue-in-cheek dose of critical perspicacity.

Moreover, his engagement with the sport on his channel extends far beyond the analysis of what happens on the pitch. His 20-minute-long aside on the Israel Folau homophobia scandal earned him an unexpected feature on Australian breakfast television. To top it off, he never shies away from a niche international rugby story either. It would be hard to imagine Uruguayan, Namibian or Canadian rugby being granted more than a passing remark in game commentary given the overwhelmingly Tier One-centric perspective of the traditional broadcasting and publishing outlets. Sparing no effort, Squidge devotes his time to even the smallest of rugby markets. 

The channel’s rise has hardly been easy. The Six Nations made a copyright claim against his channel in 2019, and he only survived the scare because of his community’s intervention. The strikes on YouTube were removed, but this wasn’t the end of his trouble – during the World Cup, his channel once more faced copyright claims, this time coming from World Rugby. Instead of offering us the full videos, he was forced to create videos without game footage, in a format he dubbed ‘Squidge Abridged’. Though his channel is now back to full strength as we progress through the early stages of this year’s Six Nations, what’s clear is that the legal situation is never as cut and dried as we’d like when it comes to using video material in the way he does. For ‘outsider’ pundits like him, especially those coming from YouTube, a platform which presents an existential threat to the media establishment, there are bound to be setbacks, so it’s hardly surprising that YouTube sports channels are often wary of these game footage-heavy video formats.

What’s at once promising and concerning is that Robbie is finally getting the recognition he deserves. An in-depth interview with Rugby World, and a spate of appearances on BBC Two’s Scrum V reflects not only his surge in popularity – his channel now has more than 113,000 subscribers – but also some degree of receptiveness to a new form of pundit. What’s more, though it might seem strange, at the same time he was being stifled by their copyright claims, he was working with World Rugby’s YouTube team. One can only hope that even if he ever gets welcomed into the fold of the establishment, he doesn’t descend into spouting the same truisms about ‘game management’ or ‘quick ball’ that plague prime-time punditry. 

The emergence of a generation of tech-savvy fans who’ve made a name for themselves on the internet is certainly something worth getting behind. Squidge is looking to provide an alternative view on a sport where coverage is monopolised by a firmly-established set of ‘insider’ experts. But in football, I’m yet to find something that gives me the same sense of satisfaction. The only real equivalent in football for what Squidge is doing is the work done by ‘fan channels’ like Arsenal Fan TV, The Redmen TV and FullTimeDevils. These channels may offer a similar sense of grassroots authenticity, but they have a tendency to churn out ‘fan reactions’ and are overly preoccupied with clickbait and catchy soundbites to offer meaningful in-depth analysis. One thing’s for sure: MoTD and Sky Sports are hardly quaking in their boots.

I’m not asking for outbreaks of intuitive lyricism, nor am I asking for strokes of tactical genius. All I want is something that changes the way I watch the game. Not something that frames or supplements it, but a meaningful critique of the sporting spectacle, one that demystifies, but doesn’t disenchant. And perhaps a side order of superfluous terminology to add to my arsenal of sporting jargon. I think I’ve found a guy who provides me with all of that, but sadly, I don’t think a YouTube pundit in the mould of Squidge will be giving Gary Lineker a run for his money (of which he has a lot) any time soon. But thankfully that means they won’t be wearing nothing but boxers on prime-time television any time soon either. 

In Conversation with Baroness Hale

Tilly Walters
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In Conversation with Baroness Hale

The diaries of Lord Hope, the first Deputy President of the UK Supreme Court, describe Baroness Brenda Hale: “Brenda is not easy to deal with, frightens some people and is so relentless in her pursuit of her agenda about women.”. First impressions of Hale don’t fit with Hope’s picture of a difficult woman on the warpath; she is immediately warm and welcoming. 

In December, Baroness Hale retired as President of the Supreme Court. She became a prominent name after her central role in blocking Boris Johnson from proroguing parliament before Brexit’s deadline on 31st October. Her role in 2017’s Miller 2 drew criticism from the press, including the Daily Mail who branded her an “Ex-barmaid with a spider brooch who spun legal web that snared PM.” Since retiring at 75, Hale has hardly stopped working. She’s accepted new jobs as a visiting fellow at Mansfield, LMH and UCL. 

She plans to tour the world as a visiting judge, speaking in Hong Kong and California. But today, Hale is at New College, Oxford, speaking at an event to celebrate the 40th anniversary of women matriculating to the college.  We sit down in the Warden’s lodgings before her lecture; Hale is wearing one of her signature brooches, although not the spider brooch that brought her tabloid attention. 

She’s been the pioneer in many roles in her life, and she describes how men in the institutions she went into “were a bit frightened to have a woman, didn’t know what to make of me to begin with.”

When Hale studied at Girton College, Cambridge, she was just one of six women reading law in her year. “I think the women, when I was there, almost all felt very privileged to be there. We didn’t feel entitled. Whereas we were surrounded by a lot of men who didn’t think they were privileged. They just thought they were entitled. Though, Cambridge was quite good fun, as you can imagine”. 

“I think the fact that the colleges are now all mixed in Oxford in Cambridge means the gender balance is more even, and this has made a huge difference.”

She matriculated in 1963, received the highest mark in her year for Law, graduating with a starred first. After graduating, she decided to go into academia, becoming Professor of Law at Manchester in 1986. By then, she had already started part-time work as a barrister. 

We discussed how 62% of those reading law at Oxford are women. “It’s probably slightly less than nationally, but certainly there are more women reading law than men. I’m a bit worried if it got too far the other way. I think 60/40 either way is acceptable, but once you go either side of that, it’s damaging.” 

For women in the law profession, “things are getting better,” says Hale. She cites that although the QC rate has been going up about 1% a year for the last 10 years, it shows how low it was 10 years ago.

“The acceptance rate for QC applications by women is higher than it is for men. So, the trouble is you don’t apply to be a QC until you’ve got a certain sort of practice. And, until recently for a variety of reasons, women were not developing that sort of practice. 

However, “It’s still a bit of a problem. We did a study of the number of women barristers who were instructed to appear in the Supreme Court. The figures were depressingly low.” The study shows that, out of 709 leading counsel, just 94 were female (13.3%). Of the 709 first juniors, 203 were female (28.6%), compared to the 38.7% of the junior Bar which is female.

“We felt that most of those were juniors, not actually on their feet. So the number of women on their feet in the Supreme Court is less than it really should be. That is a problem because obviously those are the women who are the most successful. I don’t say that’s the only route onto the higher judiciary, but nevertheless, it’s the principal route onto the course. So if there are not enough of them being instructed in the court of appeal and the Supreme Court, that’s something to be tackled.”

Hale has been the pioneer in many of the roles she has held, and is the role model for women whether students of the law or not. I ask whether it has been difficult without a female role model.

“In almost everything I have done I’ve either been the first or one of the first. I’ve sometimes been the second – sometimes it’s harder to be the second than the first, not for yourself, but for the powers that be to psych themselves up to have a second woman. So I’ve been very fortunate in the first women that I have followed. So I don’t think I have generally had role models among women in the law for that reason. Elizabeth Butler-Sloss was the first in the court of appeal, the first woman president of the family division, was a role model to some extent. She and I get on incredibly well, but we couldn’t be more different, which is a good illustration that women are as different from one another as men are. but mostly I’ve had to do it my way, because there was no other way that I knew.”

“Of course, I can follow the male role model. It was more dramatic becoming the first woman Law Lord in 2004 than becoming President, as it was more of a step change from the court of appeal. They were a bit frightened to have a woman, didn’t know what to make of me to begin with. It took them time to get used to me. So that was much more of a change than becoming the first woman president because we’re a small organization and they all knew me, hey get what I was like. I think they mainly thought they could get on with me, and I had a very good role model to follow in my predecessor, Lord Neuberger. I didn’t feel being President was actually that difficult.”

I ask her about the cases she’s been involved with that she’s most proud of, and she is quick to mention some that have made extremely important developments in the field of family law.  The solution to Stack v Dowden, a ruling to deal with properties held in joint names, she thought was “blindingly obvious.” 

Secondly, she was “very pleased” with the case ZH (Tanzania), which gave priority to the interests of children in all public law decisions, but particularly immigration ones.

Thirdly, her work on Yemshaw v London Borough of Hounslow broadened “the understanding of domestic violence from physical to emotional.”

Anticipating a the inevitable question, frequent since her jugement in Miller 2 shot her into the national consciousness, she admits that “the prorogation case has to be my number one judgement.”

Both Miller cases received intense press scrutiny. I mentioned the Daily Mail front page that labelled three High Court judges ‘Enemies of the People’ for their judgement in favour of Miller. On the relationship between the media and the judiciary, Hale was decisive. 

“Well, it’s not for the judiciary to balance it. We have a free press, a free media. So it is up to them to decide within the limits of the law what they say. I think in terms of ‘the enemies of the people’ front page, it was of course the Lord Chancellor’s job to defend the independence of the judiciary. And I don’t think that would have been difficult.”

“I think had I been Lord Chancellor, I would have said: “We have a free press in this country. You are entitled to say and print what you like, but it is my job as a senior member of the government charged with defending the independence of the judiciary to tell you you’re wrong. Simple as that. You are wrong. These are conscientious judges, making a judgment in accordance with their traditional oath to uphold the law.”

“And there is a right to appeal and we shall see what the Supreme Court says about it. Of course, the Supreme court upheld [the High Court’s judgements]. If I’d been feeling very bold, I might’ve gone on to say: beware what you wish for. Because if you are serious about respect for the rule of law in this country, you have to be very careful about undermining public confidence in the integrity of the judiciary and the integrity.”

“I think I’d have liked to have been in a position to say all of that. I wasn’t in a position to say because I was on the appeal court. There was nothing we could do about it. That was the problem. There was no way in which the judiciary could defend itself against that. That was why it was the job of a certain member of the government.”

Hale was dismissive of Boris Johnson’s call for an appointment system decided by Parliament: “That’s another beware what you wish for, because if you have political appointments, you have political judgements and at the moment we don’t have political appointments and we don’t have political judgments. On the whole, like it or dislike it, very few people think that the judgments of the Supreme Court are motivated by party political considerations. I don’t know the party politics of my colleagues. I can guess with one or two people and I’m probably right. Not so much with the current ones in fact, but one or two in the past it was fairly clear. But generally speaking we don’t know one another’s party politics.”

“We know more about their judicial and legal philosophies than we do about their party politics. And they don’t go hand in hand.”

Does she have any plans to try her hand at the House of Lords, where she has automatically become a crossbencher?

“Although I have taken the oath in the house of Lords, I don’t see myself spending much time there for some time to come unless there’s something there I really don’t feel I can keep my mouth shut about. But that hasn’t turned up yet. And of course, while there’s anything going on to do with Brexit i’m not going to do anything. But that’ll be interesting to see. Obviously the retired judges are all crossbenchers and I’m one of life’s crossbenchers anyway. 

“I’m not signing up to any of the political parties. I will say, I couldn’t possibly take a party whip. 

“In the Lords the party whips are pretty powerless, but nevertheless I couldn’t take one because that’s agreeing to vote for things that you don’t necessarily agree with. But that’s a long time down the track.”

Photo Credit: Jonathan Kirkpatrick

Review: Shadows of Troy

Justin Kendall
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Review: Shadows of Troy

Translating and adapting two Greek plays and then squeezing them into one production was an ambitious undertaking, but Shadows of Troy has pulled it off.

The first act – a version of Iphigenia at Aulis by Euripides – was compelling, particularly towards its end. It follows the leaders of the Greek army as it waits for the weather to sail to war, and the events leading up to the sacrifice of Agamemnon’s daughter. As Iphigenia, Maddy Page was outstanding, subtly balancing her character’s conflicting emotions of courage and terror. Her relationship with her father (Tom Bannon) was also very well handled. Agamemnon himself was interestingly characterised as brooding and insecure, and the more brutish male characters of Menelaus (Alex Marks) and Achilles (Luke Buckley Harris) did well to overpower him convincingly. Katie Friedli Walton was a perfect Clytemnestra: her embrace of the sobbing Iphigenia towards the end of the act was a standout moment.

Despite great individual performances, there were points towards the beginning of the play when energy and variation was lacking: the reunion scenes upon Clytemnestra and Iphigenia’s arrival home, for example, were unnecessarily morose. To see more joy in these relationships (in spite of some of the characters’ knowledge of the circumstances) might have heightened the sense of tragedy when they are eventually ripped apart.

Providing some of the necessary energy, however, was the absolutely fantastic chorus, who vitalised the more exposition-based sections of the play. This was with the help of excellent choreography, lighting and sound, which were essential to the play’s overall aesthetic and which quietly guided the audience’s attention without becoming intrusive. But even when not centre-stage, the chorus was an ominous presence, constantly calling into question and often undermining the play’s assumed power dynamic. The attention to detail in this regard made small moments powerful – their blocking of the exits when Iphigenia contemplates fleeing is one that comes to mind. 

At the interval I felt as if the play should have finished in its entirety, but it was in Act Two (based on Ajax by Sophocles) that Agamemnon and Clytemnestra really shone. Tom Bannon’s portrayal of his character’s madness was deeply moving, as well as being an extreme but natural development of the Agamemnon we saw in the first act. His suicide echoed his daughter’s sacrifice, bringing together the two parts of the play and suddenly making it feel like one unified piece. Unfortunately, the end of the play seemed like a missed opportunity. Having watched such a powerful end to the first act (the curtain descended on the motionless actors in the blackout, with the wind howling) I was left underwhelmed. Luckily this did not significantly detract from the play as a whole, which was impressive and devastating in equal measure. Particularly given the scale and ambition of the project, Shadows of Troy is a formidable achievement.

Queerness, Revulsion and Magic – the Dissonant Worlds of Angels in America

Luke Dunne
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Queerness, Revulsion and Magic – the Dissonant Worlds of Angels in America

‘Children of the new morning, criminal minds 
Selfish and greedy and loveless and blind. 
Reagan’s children’ 

Angels in America is a play about bodies. Kushner revels in giving his characters bodies which fail them, which defy their self-aggrandisement, which betray their religious principles, or which simply give up entirely and cease to function, leaving even his most powerful or seductive character bed ridden and forcibly benign. It is impossible, I think, to write not just a play with queer characters but a self-titled ‘Gay Fantasia’ without focusing on and addressing the body, and its relationship with queer identity. 

The primary role the body played for gay men in 1980s New York, where the play was set, was fundamentally destructive. The AIDS crisis ripped through vulnerable communities, whilst the term ‘gay plague’ was thrown around derisively by the hand wringing moralists of the Evangelical Right, the word plague itself feels strangely apt. When Kushner wrote the first part of Angels, doctors weren’t entirely sure what caused AIDS – blaming HIV was only the ‘best guess’. It’s difficult to imagine what that must have been like, to have your friends struck down, suddenly and with startling regularity, with a disease about which nothing was known other than that it leads to a swift and painful death. 

Add to that, of course, the fact that for queer people at the time, as with many today, friends could never be just friends. They became your family, too, because in many if not most cases living openly meant giving up your ‘real’ family. Because AIDS wasn’t the only betrayal from your body, oh no your body had already betrayed you when it decided that you should be attracted to the wrong kind of person. That sense of profound self-disgust is found in Angelsmore often when characters struggle to come to terms with their sexuality than with their illness. At the time, the distinction for some was not clear cut – at the time when Angelswas first performed, the World Health Organisation still classified homosexuality as a mental disorder. 

Roy Cohn, the macho, sadistic lawyer who turns out to have AIDS, isn’t concerned with his impending demise. Rather, he demands his doctor pretend, to the outside world and even to Roy himself, that he has liver cancer. According to Roy, he is not a homosexual. He can’t be, because homosexuals are men who ‘know nobody, and who nobody knows. Men with zero clout’. Roy has a lot of clout, and because he sits above homosexuals in the ‘pecking order’, he is not one of them, merely a ‘heterosexual guy who fucks around with dudes’. 

Roy Cohn is not, unlike the other characters in Angels, wholly fictional. He is closely based on the real Roy Cohn, a man who amongst other things worked for Joe McCarthy during the ‘Red Scare’. Part of his work for McCarthy involved outing, accurately or otherwise, thousands of supposed homosexuals who worked for the U.S government. Destroying the person lives of fellow sufferers seems, for Kushner, to lie just behind the power and the glory of the American dream. Wealth, class, race – all critical to achieving a certain kind of power, but nobody can save you from the selfishness and distrust which permeates a society fundamentally ill at ease with itself. ‘History is about to crack wide open’. 

But disgust is not merely turned inwards. Distrust of the bodies of others, categorising them as ‘dangerous’ or simply abnormal, is the main vector for action in the play. Joe describes his wife’s intellectual disobedience as ‘emotional problems’. Pathologizing things you cannot understand can almost feel natural when everyone is ill, or desperately terrified about becoming so. Homophobia is not rational, it is a reptile brain response. It is pure, physical disgust, horror which characters in the play seeks to articulate in various ways. And as with any such feeling, animal instincts are the fundamental motivation. Roy appeals to the notion of a fundamental hierarchy, with homosexuals lacking in moral fibre placed at the very bottom of the ‘food chain’. For Joe, homosexuality is an afront to God. But whereas for Joe his religious convictions haunt him throughout the play, feeding his sexual ill ease, driving a wedge between himself and anyone who loves him. Both views, both held by gay men, are essentially motivated by a desparate need to elevate themselves above those who society has rejected. They must find some identity greater than the abnormal, the strange, the quite-literally queer. Fear and greed lie at the heart of the American psyche, and never is this so clearly expressed than in the way homosexuals are treated. 

Harper sees things far more simply. When confronted for the first time with Prior, an actual real life in the flesh gay man, she simply informs him that her church doesn’t believe in homosexuals. His immortal reply, that his church doesn’t believe in Mormons, elicits a moment of confusion, a laugh and then an innocent change tack from her. 

Harper is, in a sense, the bellweather for reason – she isn’t clouded by the same personal struggles Joe is, and so she is able to adapt. She has to – her immediate reality is utterly hopeless, boring, the goldfish bowl of domestic drudgery which even in the 1980s was the lot of many American woman. She has become addicted to Valium, the quintessential substance abuse problem of the bored housewife. But Harper is so much more than the life she has been left with – she is thoroughly intelligent but above even that, she is marked out for her imagination. She creates worlds for herself – filled with fanciful characters, transcending the real world so thoroughly that snowy New York City transforms into Antarctica, and homeless people keeping themselves warm can become eskimos lighting fires across the ice. Harper’s hallucinations seem at first to be the expression of profound nihilism. This world is too tedious, so selfish and filled with distrust that substance abuse and escapism of all kinds is to be actively encouraged. 

But as the play progresses, above all the horror there emerges another world. Harper’s dreams may be only dreams, but nevertheless this is a world filled with ghosts, with angels, with divine messages and a fate in heaven. This is a Gay Fantasia, after all, and the aesthetics of campness are toyed with throughout only to create a wonderful, decadent metaphysical system of voices and angels. This is the kind of spirituality which has been turned against gay people for generations, used as a moral justification for generations of stigma, reimagined by Kushner into a magnificent technicolour picture of higher reality. It is the fantasy of acceptance and love and beauty so obviously missing from the world of the body. But it is still, even by the end of the play, ultimately a fantasy. Having a world as brutally realist as the one Kushner paints overlaid with these magical moments creates a cognitive dissonance that is never fully resolved. But the overall sense is one of loss, of grief for the kind of beauty which can only be imposed on the world through theatre and artifice. Kushner’s stage directions for the Angel’s appearance and for the use of stage magic is that it should be stage magic – the wires should show. Angels in America is a play where the only possible response to reality is make believe, where imagination becomes a necessary form of self-preservation. The tyranny of disgust, the tyranny of the body and its weakness is too great and hopeless to bear. What Kushner offers, if only for a moment, is the possibility of ecstatic make believe. And a moment is, perhaps, just enough. 

Angels in America Part 1 is playing at the Keble O’Reilly Theatre Wednesday 19 – Sunday 23 February at 7:15pm with a matinee on Saturday at 2:30. You can buy tickets here: https://fixr.co/event/648021306?fbclid=IwAR2OG4RVZYxQnAxubBGh1RJ95LtrQdbpynO4qrzAyuGnnRV6ZuNKI3r_ZrE

Review: Bad Nick

Nia Brown
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Review: Bad Nick

Nicholas is a critically acclaimed author, a literary genius, and a winner of no less than fourteen Man Booker prizes…except that all of his novels were actually written by his wife. Now that she’s left him for the local butcher, Nicholas finds himself embroiled in an mad scheme to win back the love of his life (and, of course, his literary career), as he attempts to save Nicola from the clutches of a potentially dangerous ‘midlife crisis’.

And so begins Bad Nick, a 70-minute play at the Michael Pilch Studio that is packed to the brim with laughs and even has the odd song thrown in for good measure! If the singing is at times a little patchy then it does nothing but add to the delight of a show that refuses to take itself too seriously. Throwing caution to the wind, the play relishes in calamity and the ridiculous incompetence of its characters. 

With minimalist staging, all focus is honed in upon the actors who deliver Shepherd-Cross and Brown’s script with impeccable comic timing. Harry Berry is perfect as the exasperated, yet excitable, Nicholas Martin. With an ability to elicit laughter with nothing more than a kooky grin and a 90s hairdo, Berry radiates a loveable charm that helps buoy a remarkably hopeless character, unable to write so much as a semi-colon. Amelia Holt offers a wonderful counterbalance as the brilliant Nicola Martin, a vexed author trapped in an industry where it seems impossible for a woman to have written such thoughtful works of literature. Thankfully, the character of Nicola resists the frustratingly common trope of the comedy’s dull and rational female voice, and Holt does well to convey a character whose absurdity is an equal match to that of her husband.

Their son, played by Sam Scruton, helps deliver a resounding highlight of the show in the form of a hilariously twisted rendition of ‘Baby it’s Cold Outside’ alongside Cameron Forbes as the butcher. Meanwhile the dynamic duo, Emily Lockyer and Rory Wilson, run riot as two police officers more concerned with petty intellectual theft than any of the other, more glaring crimes that take place. Whether they take on the role of a crafty editor or a confounded journalist, there is no weak link in the cast as they shift between one blundering character to the next. Particularly brilliant was Cameron Forbes’ rendition of a melodramatic vicar belting out his impassioned power ballad. 

Whilst seeming to throw itself into humour with reckless abandon, Bad Nick is a well-structured and well-executed comedy. Running jokes recurred frequently enough to push humour to new heights without letting the jokes themselves go stale. Fast-paced and funny, Frog’s Legs’ production of Bad Nick is effortlessly witty and engaging.

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