Heroes and villains

22 March 2024

Hero
Anna Wells, a climber from Inverness, who has become the first woman to climb all 282 of Scotland’s Munros in one winter season. The 34-year-old took 83 days to scale the peaks – classed as mountains higher than 3,000ft, or 914 metres – overcoming injuries, illness and 87mph winds.

Hero
Ewan McGregor, for using an intimacy co-ordinator to film a sex scene with his own wife. The actor has been widely mocked for the decision, says Carol Midgley in The Times, but that’s unfair. Like so many married couples, the McGregors are probably just “out of practice”. Perhaps they need someone to remind them to “rip each other’s clothes off” rather than “fold them neatly by the bed or pop them in the washbasket, saying: ‘Is this for the whites, love?’”

Villain
Damien Hirst, who appears to have been passing off recently made formaldehyde animal sculptures as having been created in his heyday. Whistleblowers told The Guardian that three sculptures – preserving a dove, a shark and two calves – were created in 2017 but dated by his company to the 1990s. Hirst’s company says the date he assigns to art reflects the date of the work’s “conception”, not its “physical making”.

Villain
Margaret Thatcher, according to the V&A Museum, which has listed the Conservative prime minister as a “contemporary villain” alongside Osama bin Laden and Adolf Hitler. The reference comes in a piece of explanatory text beneath a set of Punch and Judy dolls, with the three bracketed together as “unpopular public figures”.

Heroes
Norfolk County Council, which has taken on Apple in court and won. The council successfully argued that the tech giant had defrauded shareholders – including the Norfolk Pension Fund – by covering up lower demand for iPhones in China. Apple settled the lawsuit by agreeing to pay $490m.

Villains
Simon Case, the head of the civil service, and MI6 chief Richard Moore, who have both quit the Garrick Club after the male-only establishment’s membership was published by The Guardian. Funnily enough, says Ephraim Hardcastle in the Daily Mail, The Guardian didn’t see fit to mention the membership of its former political editor, Michael White, or that former editor Alan Rusbridger only “handed back his salmon and cucumber tie” when someone he nominated for membership was rejected.