From backing bin Laden to toppling Assad

Villain
An audience member in the West End who kicked up such a fuss about not being able to immediately return to his seat after a loo break that the entire performance had to be paused for 15 minutes. Staff at the Harold Pinter theatre pulled David Tennant (playing Macbeth) off stage and raised the house lights while security dealt with the peeved punter.

Hero
Nigel Richards, a New Zealander who won this year’s Spanish World Scrabble Championships despite not being able to speak Spanish. This isn’t the first time Richards – known as the “Tiger Woods of Scrabble” – has “shattered linguistic barriers”, says The Guardian. He won the Francophone edition of the competition in 2015, and again in 2018, despite speaking no French. “He reportedly memorised the entire French Scrabble dictionary in nine weeks.”

Hero
Daisy, an AI-generated “granny” developed by O2 to talk to scammers on the phone and thus keep them from bothering real people. Daisy’s details have been put on lists of numbers that the fraudsters use to find their victims – when they get through to her, she can keep them on the line with her automated responses for as long as 40 minutes.

Heroes
Clean-living Gen Z, whose lack of interest in clubbing has led to so many UK nightclubs closing that on the present trajectory there will be none left by 2030. Cheers to that, says Giles Coren in The Times. If we care as much about young people’s mental health as we always claim, then surely a world with fewer opportunities to “drink, fight, smoke, do drugs, get pregnant and lose sleep” is to be wildly celebrated? “Or rather, sorry, celebrated quietly at home, with a nice cup of camomile tea.”

The lost art of the savage school report

As the first term of the academic year draws to a close, says Tanith Carey in The Spectator, school reports will soon be landing, “encrypted and password-protected” on parents’ smartphones. And what a bore they’ve become. In our “super-sensitive age”, schools couch all comments as positives and only use “approved adjectives”. Even the time-honoured put-down “could do better” is off the menu. Today’s parents must work out what the hell a teacher is implying when they say little Johnny might try a “more self-directed approach to learning in order to reach his full potential”.

I preferred it when school reports had the scope to be “character assassinations”. When the actor Richard Briers was at Rokeby in the 1940s, his headmaster wrote: “Briers thinks he is running the school and not me. If this attitude persists, one of us will have to leave.” Stephen Fry came in for a similar roasting at Uppingham, where one teacher’s report read simply: “He has glaring faults, and they have certainly glared at us this term. I have nothing more to say.” At Malvern College in the 1960s, one of Jeremy Paxman’s teachers spotted that “stubbornness is in his nature” but that it “could be an asset when directed to sound ends”, if only he would “learn tact”. Perhaps most famous is the report Boris Johnson’s Eton housemaster wrote in the 1980s, ascribing to the 17-year-old qualities that would later become familiar to the nation: “I think he honestly believes that it is churlish of us not to regard him as an exception, one who should be free of the network of obligation which binds everyone else.”

Why the West keeps falling for despots

Bashar al-Assad was “no one’s idea of a despot”, says Janan Ganesh in the FT. The soft voice helped, as did the “weak chin and gawky height”, the medical training in London, and the “urbane” British wife. Soon after he released some Syrian political prisoners in 2000, the French awarded him the Legion of Honour. Looking back, the best that can be said about the “courting of Assad” is that it wasn’t the worst misjudgement of a dictator around that time. Vladimir Putin was another “guy we can do business with”, as were Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi. Why does this keep happening?

First, we live in a world of “dire options”. Liberal societies have long survived by backing lesser evils against greater ones: Soviets against Nazis, mujahideen against Soviets, Ba’athists against jihadis. There’s also a “generational” element to Western naivety. At a formative stage in their careers, the leaders who later fell for Putin and Assad watched the Soviet Union’s Mikhail Gorbachev and South Africa’s FW de Klerk wind down their own autocracies to “face Westward”. What turn out to have been isolated instances of “freakish statesmanship” were mistaken for a transferrable template. (Forged in disappointment, the coming batch of spies, diplomats and politicians will not be so innocent.) And it’s worth remembering that autocrats tend to “harden over time” as power intoxicates them, courtiers dial up the praise and access to reliable information dries up. In other words, the West probably was right about Assad and Putin, until it wasn’t. Today, nothing could be more pragmatic than cultivating Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “In 2030, though?”

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