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Jeremy Corbyn, his “socialist motorbike”, and me
🤐 Welsh only | 🖼️ “Believe the hype” | 😍 Priapic PM
Love etc
Corbyn and Abbott in the 1970s
Jeremy Corbyn has never been much of a romantic, reveals Diane Abbott in her new memoir, A Woman Like Me, excerpted in The Guardian. When the two left-wingers briefly dated in the late 1970s, and Abbott complained that they weren’t doing enough as a couple, Corbyn pondered for a few days then told her they were going for a trip. “Feeling excited, I dressed up nicely and we bundled into the car. I had no idea where we were going – perhaps a nice wine bar?” No such luck. “It turned out Jeremy’s idea of a social outing was to drive me to Highgate cemetery and proudly show me the tomb of Karl Marx.”
Earlier in their relationship, she agreed to join him for a camping holiday in the south of France. “We travelled by motorbike and, Jeremy being Jeremy, it was a socialist motorbike, an East German model. It broke down regularly.” Naturally, Abbott was looking forward to some “delicious Gallic cuisine”, so she was horrified when “Jeremy unpacked his motorbike saddlebags to reveal a week’s supply of instant macaroni”. After much negotiation, she managed to secure “one restaurant lunch”. At Christmas that year, the couple went to Shropshire to stay with Corbyn’s parents – “a lovely couple who could not have been kinder or more welcoming” – and witnessed “true socialist frugality”. Abbott was used to “jolly Jamaican Christmases”, with all the customary foods, “plus all the Caribbean specialities”, including rice and peas, spicy stewed chicken, curried goat, rum cake, and of course plenty of booze. Christmas with the Corbyns was something of a shock. “Dinner seemed mostly about boiled vegetables; a turkey was their sole concession to the festive season. The house was freezing and there was no alcohol.”
A Woman Like Me by Diane Abbott is available for pre-order here.
Property
THE BOLTHOLE This one-bedroom flat on Clapton Square, east London, makes up the ground floor of a Grade II listed Georgian townhouse. A grand sitting room, lit by two large arched sash windows with panelled shutters and bullseye cornicing, is connected to the roomy bedroom by traditional double doors. Original features like ornate pedestals above the doorframes and fireplaces are complemented by a recently reappointed kitchen and a bathroom with underfloor heating. Hackney Central overground station is a 10-minute walk. £675,000.
Heroes and villains
Sir Alan and Lady Bates. Mar Javierto/weddingsvirgingorda.com
Villain
The King, for forcing the Post Office campaigner Alan Bates to get married. Bates says that after he was knighted in the King’s birthday honours list in June, no one knew how to address his long-term partner, Suzanne Sercombe. So the couple tied the knot in the British Virgin Islands last month, and Mrs Sercombe is now Lady Bates. “Personally, I blame the King,” Sir Alan told The Sunday Times. “It’s been 34 years and we’ve managed to never do it but he really dropped me in it.”
Hero
Jon Bon Jovi, for helping talk an apparently suicidal woman off the edge of a bridge. The rock star, 62, had been filming in Nashville, Tennessee when he and a colleague spotted the woman standing on the wrong side of a safety railing. After a brief conversation, the pair helped the woman to safety, and Bon Jovi gave her a long hug.
Heroes
JP Morgan, for capping the amount of work its junior bankers can do at 80 hours a week. That still means working, say, six days a week from around 8.30am to 10pm, says The Wall Street Journal, and the bank plans to “make exceptions” when staff are working on live deals. But these young masters of the universe already have it pretty easy: the bank officially forbids them from working between 6pm Friday and noon Saturday, and guarantees a full weekend off once every three months. Slackers.
Raygun wowing the judges in Paris. Ezra Shaw/Getty
Hero
Australian breakdancer Rachael “Raygun” Gunn, who has stuck it to the critics of her infamously underwhelming Olympics performance by – somehow – topping the sport’s world rankings. The World DanceSport Federation has helpfully explained that Olympic events don’t count, meaning many athletes were ranked based on a single event – in Raygun’s case, a regional competition last October where she finished first.
Villains
Botwnnog community council in Gwynedd, North Wales, which wants to ban people who don’t speak Welsh from moving into a proposed housing development, on the basis that they would pose a “danger” to the “fabric of the community”. Imagine if an English council said the same about non-English speakers, says Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. I can’t be sure, but I think they’d “probably get six months in prison”.
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What to see
Van Gogh: Poets and lovers
This extraordinary collection – including Sunflowers, The Olive Trees and The Bedroom (above) – is a “beautifully put-together exhibition about a blisteringly original vision”, says Laura Freeman in The Times. The paintings are gathered to celebrate 200 years of the National Gallery, and don’t so much invite you to look at them as “ambush you and demand it”. The exhibition covers the “feverishly productive” months van Gogh spent in Arles between February 1888 and May 1889 and then, “after the episode with the ear”, in the asylum at Saint-Rémy until May 1890. He killed himself that July. I’m generally sceptical about “once-in-a-century” exhibitions. But in this case, “believe the hype”.
Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers is at the National Gallery from 14 September 2024 to 19 January 2025. Book your ticket here.
Books
“I love you more than words can say”: Asquith and his “darling love”. Culture Club/Getty/Alamy
The wartime PM who put state secrets in his love letters
Robert Harris’s new novel Precipice is one of his very best, says Nicholas Coleridge in The Independent. The “slam dunk of a plot” is based on the true story of 60-year-old prime minister HH Asquith’s infatuation with an aristocratic woman 35 years his junior. Over a period of three years, the elder statesman wrote the Hon Venetia Stanley more than 700 letters, sometimes as many as three a day. She was perhaps an unlikely recipient of his ardour: a “barely educated, time-rich socialite” living at home with her parents, splitting her time between two big country houses and a Mayfair townhouse, “awaiting a suitable husband”. Today she would probably be an Instagram influencer – “entitled but enticing”.
Asquith’s letters survive, and Harris quotes them throughout – dozens of yearning, sentimental missives composed during cabinet meetings and addressed to “my darling love” and declaring, for example: “I love you more than words can say, with every fibre, and whatever I have that is worth having and giving.” The letters became increasingly obsessive as the Great War progressed, and frequently contained the “most confidential information on British strategy and affairs of state”. With “astonishing recklessness”, the married Liberal PM enclosed top-secret dispatches from ambassadors, generals and royals, all to “engage his paramour”. Harris’s cleverness lies in his “psychological sophistication”, carrying the reader along the “twists and turns of this dubious love story”, as the greater drama of the war in the trenches, vast casualties and disastrous landing at Gallipoli plays out offstage. It’s a wonder Harris has not won more literary prizes. His works are “infinitely more informed” than most Booker winners, and “at least as emotionally perceptive”. Alas, such awards are forbidden to “big, quality blockbusters that shift by the truckload”. Their loss.
Precipice by Robert Harris is available to order here.
Weather
Quoted
“The times are urgent – let us slow down.”
Nigerian proverb