The Times-010424

da i ly n e w s pa p e r o f t h e y e a r More than 250 people in England are dying each week because of long waits for A&E care, figures from emergency physicians suggest. The excess deaths among those who wait more than 12 hours for a bed are a rebuff to Rishi Sunak’s £1 billion pledge last year to improve urgent and emergency care by cutting long waiting times. The latest figures — which estimated that there were 14,000 excess deaths last year — were compiled by the Royal College of Emergency Medicine based on the continuing high number of patients waiting for admission, and the death rates associated with such delays. There were 1.54 million emergency patients who waited 12 hours or more in the NHS in 2023 and a million of those were waiting to be admitted. The total figure is a small decline from 1.66 million in the previous year. For its latest estimates, the college used a study of more than five million NHS patients published in the Emergency Medicine Journal in 2021. This found that there was one excess death for every 72 patients who spent eight to 12 hours in A&E. The risk of death started to increase after five hours and grew worse with longer waiting times. The college estimated that 268 excess deaths a week were likely to have occurred last year. That was a drop of 17 per week compared with 2022 when applying the same methodology. Adrian Boyle, president of the college, said: “Too many people are spendhad “paused” the legislation yesterday while ministers negotiated with rebels. More than 40 Conservative MPs, including most of the One Nation group of moderate Tories, have made clear they would vote against the bill. “The government is panicking about the scale of the rebellion because they know if it gets pushed to a vote they will lose,” one of those involved in the debate said. “But we’re not backing down or giving way. The ball is in the government’s court. They need to listen or it will be desperate for them.” The bill, which was introduced last year by Suella Braverman, the former home secretary, would give police and local authorities powers against “nuisance” rough sleeping in England and Wales. Rough sleepers could be moved on, fined up to £2,500 or jailed. However, critics say the bill is so broadly drawn that someone could be considered a “nuisance” simply for sleeping in a doorway, having an “excessive smell” or looking as though they may intend to sleep rough. They say that if the proposals were to stand, the bill would “punish people simply for being homeless”. Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Tory leader, and Damian Green, the former deputy prime minister, are among the MPs who have signed amendments that would remove the Dominic Kennedy I N T H E N E W S Rise in minimum pay Minimum wages rise by more than £1 an hour today, with the top band up from £10.42 to £11.44. The hospitality sector has raised concerns about the impact on businesses. Spills at bathing sites Water companies discharged sewage into bathing areas for 228,098 hours last year — an increase of 80 per cent on 2022, a Liberal Democrat analysis has revealed. Rafah set for invasion Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, said his war cabinet had authorised plans to invade Rafah just before he underwent a hernia operation yesterday. Amex pension freeze American Express has dashed the hopes of thousands of British pensioners, telling them it is freezing their pension payments for the tenth successive year. Maanum collapses Arsenal’s Frida Maanum collapsed during the Conti Cup final against Chelsea. She was carried off on a stretcher, but was able to go home with her team. y(7HB7E2*OTSNLS( |||+=!&' Monday April 1 2024 | thetimes.co.uk | No 74371 Public support The Queen and King attended the Easter service at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. The King, making his first big public appearance since starting cancer treatment, told wellwishers he was touched that they had come. ing too long in accident and emergency. This is not good for their health and is causing additional deaths. This is a fixable problem.” The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) said: “This is the worst it has ever been for care in inappropriate places. Small fluctuation must not be read as real improvement. People are dying who shouldn’t be.” The prime minister has made cutting waiting times one of his five priorities. However, the slow progress being achieved at A&E will magnify concerns about the state of the health service. Sunak admitted in February that performances in A&E and on ambulance waiting times were “not good enough” and he said that the government had “not made enough progress”. He blamed strikes and said ministers had “invested record amounts in the NHS”. One of the contributing factors identified by emergency doctors is that the NHS has been given a target to reduce the proportion of patients waiting four hours in A&E but not the same incentive to reduce those waiting for 12 hours. The target of 76 per cent of patients being admitted, transferred or discharged within four hours has not been met, with the proportion reaching only 70.9 per cent in February. This was an improvement from January. Boyle said: “There is a focus on fourhour targets. That is a bit helpful, but the problem is when somebody gets past four hours, they get stuck.” He added that he cared less if someone Tory revolt over law to target homeless Oliver Wright Policy Editor Ministers are facing a revolt from Conservative MPs over plans to criminalise the homeless that form part of the government’s flagship justice bill. Under proposals that are due to be voted on by MPs before the general election, ministers intend to give police powers to fine or move on “nuisance” rough sleepers. The move has infuriated dozens of Tories on both the left and right of the party, who have warned whips that they will vote against the measures in the Criminal Justice Bill, which is going through the House of Commons. Senior government sources said they £2.80 £2.00 to subscribers (based on a 7 Day Print and Digital Subscription) Get cracking The big Easter quiz The Game Advantage Liverpool in INSIDE title race Pullout TIMES2 Long waits in A&E kill 250 people every week Figures add to concerns about state of the NHS

2 Monday April 1 2024 | the times News with a sprained ankle took four hours and five minutes to be treated than “about the 85-year-old who waits 24 hours”. The NHS said it was delivering improvements for emergency patients. Pat Cullen, general secretary of the RCN, said: “This crisis is taking lives and nursing staff in England’s hospitals are forced to witness it every shift.” The royal college used different methodology last year that produced a higher estimated deaths figure, which has now been revised down using more detailed data. It is the latest in a series of damning revelations about the NHS. Figures last week revealed that public satisfaction with the health service had fallen to its lowest recorded level of 24 per cent. The Times also revealed at the weekend that patients in the worstperforming hospitals for long waiting lists would be offered treatment in the private sector or elsewhere in the NHS. It is part of a “carrot and stick” approach adopted by Victoria Atkins, the health secretary, who wants to target a small number of hospitals with the longest waiting times. In response to the figures, NHS England said: “We have seen significant increases in demand for A&E services, with attendances in February up by 8.6 per cent on last year and emergency admissions up 7.7 per cent. The latest NEWS published data shows our urgent and emergency care recovery plan — backed by extra funding with more beds, capacity and greater use of measures like same day emergency care — is delivering improvements, alongside continued work with our colleagues in community and social care to discharge patients when they are medically fit to go home, freeing up beds for other patients. The cause of excess deaths is down to several different factors.” The Department of Health and Social Care said: “We are committed to ensuring people get the emergency care they need, when they need it, and all patients attending A&E are assessed by a doctor or nurse before any treatment takes place to ensure the most seriously unwell people are treated first.” The NHS is stepping up a national campaign to recruit former members of the armed forces. Today it will announce a drive to target military veterans to help the health service by retraining for a range of “allied health professions”, such as becoming radiographers, paramedics and physiotherapists. Ashley Smith, who was a trainee electronics technician in the army and is now a dietician, said he could see similarities between his former career and working in the NHS. “In the forces you have experienced being part of [a] very big organisation that operates in a pressured environment and in both careers your team is crucial,” he said. Voice-cloning AI tool kept from public Debbie White OpenAI is withholding a voice-cloning tool from the public amid safety fears. The US company behind ChatGPT said its Voice Engine program could copy and reproduce a human voice from 15 seconds of recorded speech. It announced the technology on Friday, a week after seeking a trademark. “We recognise that generating speech that resembles voices has serious risks [in] an election year,” it said, adding that its planned preview of the tool would be limited for the time being because of the dangers of misuse. The company said that early Voice Engine testers had agreed not to impersonate people without their consent and to disclose that cloned voices had been generated using AI. Officials in New Hampshire are investigating reports that automated calls impersonated President Biden during Democratic party primary elections in November. Elon Musk said at the time that AI was “one of the biggest threats” to humanity and urged Britain to establish a “third-party referee” that could regulate the technology. Signs of cancer could be spotted years before symptoms appear, according to a research centre that is striving for a preventative approach. The Early Cancer Institute at the University of Cambridge is dedicated to risk prediction and to the detection of cancers at an early stage. Researchers are developing tests to detect early warning signs of cancers with the poorest outcomes and latestpresenting symptoms, such as those of the oesophagus, stomach and liver. Rebecca Fitzgerald, a professor of cancer prevention and the director of the institute, said that cancer research typically had focused on treatment rather than on detection and prevention. “You have to be patient and to make the investment in those kinds of studies and until recently there hasn’t really been an appetite to do it,” she said. While even large tumours can present themselves very late, she said that the sensitive technologies needed to spot small tumours and pre-cancerous biomarkers had become advanced enough only recently. Similarly, while Experts aim to identify cancer years before symptoms emerge Lara Wildenberg treatments can be tested on small study groups of advanced cancer patients, research into detection can require thousands of people followed over multiple years. “The prize is to get it early and now is the time to make the investments to actually make those breakthroughs,” Fitzgerald said. Survival rates in the UK for several common cancers were revealed in January to be among the worst in comparably wealthy countries. For instance, the country ranked as low as 28th out of 33 for five-year survival for both stomach and lung cancers. The institute has successfully created a test using a capsule sponge to detect an early warning sign of oesophageal cancer, which is diagnosed in 9,000 people in the UK each year. The test, which is being offered in some hospitals to those on an endoscopy waiting list, can be administered on a wide scale, in short appointments and without the need for sedation. The cytosponge, a tiny capsule on a string, is swallowed like a pill and then expands into a sponge in the stomach. It is pulled back up the gullet to collect oesophagus cells. If cells contain a protein called TFF3, found only in precancerous cells, patients may be at risk of oesophageal cancer and will be monitored. The NHS tested the cytosponge test in more than 8,500 patients. Almost eight out of ten were discharged without the need for further testing, reducing the need for an invasive endoscopy in thousands of low-risk patients. Another research group within the institute is using blood samples to identify the genetic changes that occur years before symptoms of blood cancer, which is diagnosed in 40,000 people each year in the UK. Researchers have repurposed a “goldmine” of 200,000 blood samples provided for other trials to identify the genetic changes in donors who were diagnosed with a blood cancer a decade or even two decades later. The institute, which is set to be renamed the Li Ka-shing Early Cancer Institute after the Hong Kong-based billionaire philanthropist, opened in September 2022. It recently received £11 million from an anonymous donor, which has been matched by the university to convert and update its existing building. new police powers. The campaign is being co-ordinated by Bob Blackman, joint secretary of the 1922 Committee of Conservative backbenchers. “A lot of colleagues believe that the bill as it stands is completely unacceptable because it would have the effect of criminalising people who have no choice but to sleep on the streets,” Blackman said. “We are urging ministers to think again.” Green said he supported Blackman’s amendment because it represented “a practical way forward to help people off the streets” rather than criminalising them. “People are not homeless because continued from page 1 Long waits in A&E they want to be,” one MP said. “These plans are even worse than the Vagrancy Act that was first introduced after the Napoleonic wars that this is supposed to be replacing.” The bill is seen as a critical part of the Tories’ strategy to present the party as tough on crime before the next election. As well as new laws on begging, the bill would expand police powers to test suspects for drugs on arrest and to enter premises to search for stolen goods such as mobile phones. It also would give probation officers the power to administer lie detector tests to sex offenders and terrorists after their release from prison. The broad nature of the bill has allowed MPs to “tack on” more amendments, including proposals to decriminalise all abortions and to ban so-called conversion therapy. Ministers are concerned that the bill will be overshadowed by such controversies, including the homelessness debate. “There is a reason why the bill hasn’t seen the light of day yet,” one said. “There are a lot of things we need to try to fix.” Polly Neate, the chief executive of Shelter, the homeslessness charity, said: “Parliament must not enact this legislation. Instead of punishing people for being homeless, politicians should be trying to prevent them from ending up on the streets.” continued from page 1 Tory revolt on homeless bill SOUL SEARCH A lost stash of Marvin Gaye music has been found PAGES 16-17 TEAM EFFORT The Saracens kit chief says rugby helped his PTSD PAGES 48-49 THE WEATHER 14 25 17 9 11 15 13 11 9 7 Sunny spells in northwest Scotland. Showers or longer spells of rain elsewhere. Today’s highlights DAB RADIO l ONLINE l SMART SPEAKER l APP 7am 8am 11am 2pm 7pm T O D AY ’ S E D I T I O N SPORT TIMES2 PLAY ON How to get children into Shakespeare PULLOUT, PAGE 9 days since Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich was detained in Russia #FreeEvan 369 THUNDERER 20 LETTERS 22 LEADING ARTICLES 23 WORLD 24 BUSINESS 29 REGISTER 37 SPORT 43 CROSSWORD 50 TV & RADIO TIMES2 New name. New hosts. More in-depth stories The Story is the new name for our daily news podcast. Hosts Manveen Rana and Luke Jones take you to the heart of the stories you need to know, plus monthly agenda-setting interviews from William Hague Available on the Times Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts Story The OFFER Save up to 30% with a subscription to The Times and The Sunday Times THETIMES.CO.UK/SUBSCRIBE Kevin Hollinrake, business minister Dr Adrian Boyle, president of the Royal College of Emergency Medicine Sir Jeremy Quin, Conservative MP and defence committee chairman Emma Pinchbeck, right, chief executive of Energy UK Nadine Batchelor-Hunt and George Parker on the day’s big stories

the times | Monday April 1 2024 2GM 3 News Humans will have to learn to live with seagulls after forcing them out of their natural habitats, scientists have said. Factors such as avian flu and, in particular, diminishing fish stocks have led to a declining population of wild gulls and have prompted them to migrate to urban areas. Paul Graham, professor of neuroethology at the University of Sussex, said that instead of seeing gulls as pests, respect should be given to the “clever birds”. He told the BBC: “When we see behaviours we think of as mischievous or criminal — almost we’re seeing a really clever bird implementing very number and distribution of populations overwintering in the UK. In February NatureScot, the Scottish government agency responsible for licensing the destruction of bird nests, said that it would reduce approvals for controlling gulls in Scottish towns and Tom Ripley was born here, if we are to believe his creator. Early one morning in 1951 on this pebbly grey beach at Positano on southern Italy’s Amalfi coast, the idea for the murderous sociopath at the centre of Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels came to life. The novelist, who was holidaying there, stepped out on to the terrace of her hotel to observe a young man walking alone on the beach. She had the feeling that he was an American tourist and was struck by his air of pensiveness, even unease. “And why was he alone?” Highsmith wrote in 1989 in the literary magazine Granta. “He did not look like the athletic type who would take a cold swim.” Highsmith never saw him again, but the embryo of an idea had formed. Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley has been adapted for the screen once more with a black and white mini-series starring Andrew versity and a biographer of Highsmith, the author visited Positano in 1950 and 1951. The first time she was accompanied by Kathryn Hamill Cohen, the beautiful and wealthy wife of her publisher. The next she was with Ellen Blumenthal Hill, a sociologist with whom she had a four-year relationship. A prickly character who hopped from one damaging relationship to another, Highsmith was fascinated by the violence and duplicity she gave expression to in Ripley. There were numerous parallels between Ripley and Highsmith’s own life, including a weakness for social climbing and a desire to manipulate reality, Bradford said. Highsmith was drawn to Europe as a romantic destination potentially more tolerant of her homosexuality than McCarthy-era America. Film royalties from her novel Strangers on a Train had enabled her to enjoy the Grand Tour experience that drew wealthy Americans to Europe after the Second World War, Bradford said. This period of Highsmith’s life was marked by indifference and perhaps cruelty. She abandoned Hill, who had taken an overdose in the Manhattan apartment they shared. “Highsmith didn’t seem to care. Within weeks she started The Talented Mr Ripley,” Bradford said. “Her work is so interesting, complex and basically good because she wasn’t.” Last week at dawn, two tourists stood alone in the middle of Ripley’s beach, filming the peaceful scene on their mobiles. Encountered as they climbed the steps, they turned out to be from Philadelphia. Anthony Penna and Catherine Myers, both 24, had decided to mark their last day in Italy by watching the sunrise from the beach. Perhaps the tourist Highsmith saw had an equally innocent story. After all, the author herself wrote decades later that she was unsure if the image of the man on the beach even mattered at all: “[It was] just an image for me and needed another element to spring to life: imagination, which came many months later.” Patricia Highsmith holidayed in Positano, which inspired her novel. It also featured on the jacket of the British first edition Andrew Scott stars as Tom Ripley in a new Netflix adaptation nection had not been used to promote tourism. She showed us to Room 210 overlooking the bay where, according to hotel lore, Highsmith took her lovers. Positano was important for The Talented Mr Ripley and it featured on the dust cover of the British first edition in 1957. However, when filming the new adaptation directed by Steven Zaillian, the nearby village of Atrani, east along the coastline, stood in for Mongibello. The novel previously was adapted in a 1999 thriller starring Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. According to Richard Bradford, a professor of literature at Ulster UniThe jewel of Amalfi coast that gave rise to Mr Ripley Scott, Johnny Flynn and Dakota Fanning to be released on Thursday, but in Positano few are aware of the connection. At the Hotel Miramare last week, where Highsmith stayed several times in the 1950s, the door was off its hinges as the hotel underwent a spring clean before reopening on Friday. It was here that Highsmith took her female lovers and most likely it was from here that she spotted the man on the beach. After the second season of The White Lotus was broadcast in late 2022, tourism in Sicily soared. Could Positano, the inspiration for Mongibello of the Ripley novels, enjoy a similar effect? Carmela De Martino, 30, a receptionist at the Miramare, acknowledged that the Highsmith conPhilip Willan Positano When the chips are down, thieving gulls deserve our respect intelligent behaviour. I think we need to learn how to live with them.” Graham said that human activities had forced species such as the herring gull out of their natural habitats, leaving them little choice but to move into urban areas to scavenge waste. Many consider the birds’ behaviour to be a nuisance, but it can be a sign of intelligence. Graham said: “During their lifetime they learn which items that are discarded might be food and they’ve probably learnt that by observing older birds. Over time they’ll build a repertoire of quite skilled behaviours which enables them to liberate food either from your bins or from humans directly.” He suggested simple solutions to keep them at bay, including using larger, secure bins and educating people not to leave leftover food accessible. The call for coexistence comes amid growing conservation concerns for gulls. There are fifty species around the world, six of which come from Britain. Although they are protected under national and European wildlife legislation and directives, the numbers of black-headed gulls, common gulls, Mediterranean gulls, lesser blackbacked gulls and great black-backed gulls are declining. According to the RSPB, the pinkfooted, curved-bill herring gull that is often found among rubbish tips, fields and bodies of water is red-listed as being of conservation concern. In January a national survey of winter gulls took place to determine the cities because of population concerns. Scots were advised to carry umbrellas and to wear PPE to protect themselves against dive-bombing attacks. Emma Caulfield, who runs The Winter Gull Survey, defended their behaviour: “They’re very charismatic creatures and definitely get a bad rap for sometimes aggressive behaviour in the breeding season. But they are part of our natural world and just taking advantage of the hand they’ve been dealt.” More data on winter gulls will be collected towards the end of the year and anyone who can distinguish between the various gull species can volunteer to help. The data will be used to enhance conservation strategies. Georgia Lambert Gulls’ behaviour is notoriously bold

4 2GM Monday April 1 2024 | the times News Hard work never did anybody any harm, or so we are told, but that attitude appears to be going out of fashion. Research by Adzuna, the jobs search engine, identified almost 300,000 “anti-hustle” job adverts promoting a work-life balance, the most in five years. The evidence suggests that jobs encouraging hustle culture — the idea that prioritising work and long hours are the routes to success — are falling out of favour. Andrew Hunter, the Minimum wages rise by more than £1 an hour today, with younger workers set to benefit sooner from higher benchmarks. The national living wage (NLW) rises from £10.42 to £11.44 an hour in the top band, the biggest increase in cash terms and equivalent to a pay rise of about £1,800 a year. The age at which it is paid is also being cut from 23 to 21. The NLW was introduced in April 2016, originally for workers aged 25 and over. The national minimum wage (NMW), which is for younger workers when they leave school, is also going up by what is estimated to be the secondhighest increase in percentage terms. The rate for people aged between 18 and 20 will increase from £7.49 an hour to £8.60. Pay for those aged 16 or 17 will rise from £5.28 to £6.40. The rates for the NMW and NLW are A A C C C D D E E G I I I K K L M N N N O O P P R R R S S T T Y Solve all five concise clues using each letter underneath once only 1 Huge bird of prey (6) 2 Abduct (6) 3 Miserly, mean (6) 4 Weak flow of liquid (7) 5 Run like a mouse (7) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Quintagram® No 1904 Solutions see MindGames Cryptic clues see MindGames Naval reserves Second World War works by Norman Wilkinson are among art stored at the Prince Philip Maritime Collections Centre in Greenwich, southeast London Breakfast: 6am to 10am Our free radio station has all the latest headlines, interviews and debates every morning Listen seven days a week On DAB, app, website and smart speaker Minimum wages up £1 an hour with boost for younger workers both set by the business department on the advice of the Low Pay Commission. The voluntary real living wage calculated by the Resolution Foundation think tank, based on what people need to live, is set at £12 an hour across the UK and £13.15 in London. Although it is a criminal offence for employers to avoid paying the statutory minimum wage, companies continue to breach the rules 25 years to the day after their introduction, according to the accountancy and business advisory firm BDO. Since the imposition of the NMW, HM Revenue & Customs has carried out 87,000 investigations, fined companies £86 million and enforced £117 million of arrears. In February HMRC named and shamed more than 500 employers and ordered them to pay back £16 million in arrears. The NMW and NLW changes will add £3.2 billion to hospitality payrolls, which account for more than half of the industry’s operating costs. Licensed businesses pay £40 billion in wages and employment costs and increases in business rates have added £224 million. The trade body UKHospitality said that rising costs meant openings of new licensed premises were at their lowest level for three years and two thirds of businesses were pessimistic about their prospects for the next 12 months. Research into business rates by the property consultant Altus Group found that almost 220,000 shops, pubs, restaurants, offices, factories, schools and hospitals across England will face the biggest rise in business rates for 33 years today. The group’s property tax global president, Alex Probyn, said of the £1.66 billion increase in bills for the coming financial year: “This is no way to encourage investment and foster economic growth.” UKHospitality says that the government’s failure to tackle costs on the industry in the budget means the investment needed to achieve forecast industry growth of 6 per cent a year is at risk. Almost two thirds of the hospitality sector’s annual £5.4 billion investment in growth could have to be diverted into the new payroll and business rates costs, the trade body claimed. It said the three levers that ministers could most easily pull to help the industry were to fix business rates, temporarily cut employer national insurance contributions, and reduce VAT on hospitality, leisure and tourism to 12.5 per cent to compete with continental rivals. Kate Nicholls, the UKHospitality chief executive, said the industry was contributing £140 billion in revenue, £54 billion in tax receipts and providing 3.5 million people with jobs. “All of those benefits to Britain, our lives and communities are put at risk by the ... budget hangover hitting the sector,” she said. Airport woe hits tourists in Algarve Passengers were forced to wait hours to fly home from a Portuguese airport yesterday after problems with staffing and electronic gates. Faro airport, in the Algarve, suffered a lack of staff and technical problems with the gates, which some airports have brought in as a replacement to border control workers. Jess Booker was travelling from Faro to Britain after spending 11 days in Portugal. She said the delays were “down to a lack of staff, the automatic gates not working and a high number of UK flights arriving at the same time”. She said that although she had managed to make it on to her flight back to London, other people had been stranded in the queue for passport control and had missed their flights. Jeff Stelling, the former Sky Sports host, posted a photograph on Twitter/X of queues, with the caption: “Not enough staff, electronic gates that don’t work. People stuck for over three hours and not moving. Happy Easter.” He clarified later that he was not at the airport himself. Anna Soubry, the former Conservative business minister, said in response to his post: “Appalling. As you say, they don’t have enough staff on and the e-gates are barely ever open. At least the sun is now shining! My better half is stuck in the same queue.” Mark Tate said he had missed two work meetings owing to the “farce at the airport”. He was travelling to Portugal to visit fruit suppliers and said it had taken two hours to get through passport control on arrival. Faro airport did not respond to a request for comment. Work-life balance beats the hustle for jobseekers from the pandemic. Sir Tim Martin, the chairman and founder of the Wetherspoons pub chain, said that taking the pressure off could result in getting more out of workers. “We’ve found that the opposite of a hustle culture works best. Avoid personal criticism if you can. Try and stick to a 40-hour week and try not to phone people outside office hours. Provide free meals and shares. Be polite and say thank you a lot. It seems to work. Pub managers have been with us for an average of 15 years and kitchen managers for ten years.” ing can negatively affect workers’ mental and physical health. The study by Adzuna’s data science team analysed four million adverts from March 2019 to last month to find the sectors still encouraging the hustle culture and those taking the opposite approach, and how that had changed since the pandemic. More than 30 per cent of job postings put the emphasis on work-life balance in the analysis, up from 12.2 per cent in March 2020. Employers ditched the glorification of very long hours as Britain emerged co-founder of Adzuna, said: “Coming out of a burnout pandemic, workers have reassessed their priorities, and greater work-life balance is a necessity employers can’t turn a blind eye to any more.” For previous generations, working life was often about adopting a can-do attitude. Employers recruited work hard/play hard types who were fastpaced and ready to work long hours or to take on overtime at the drop of a hat. The latest research came to a somewhat different conclusion: overworkDominic Walsh Jessica Rawnsley Dominic Walsh

the times | Monday April 1 2024 V2 5 News The British Museum is facing an investigation by the Information Commissioner’s Office over claims that it is hiding information about 11 sacred Ethiopian altar tablets. The tabots, stolen by British forces after the Battle of Magdala in 1868, are held in the museum’s archives but are so holy that the museum has agreed previously that they can never be displayed, handled, studied or even seen by staff. Tabots are replicas of the Ark of the British Museum faces inquiry over looted tablets it can’t display Covenant in Egyptian and Eritrean Orthodox Christianity. They may be seen or handled only by bishops and priests and on some religious occasions, such as Timket (a celebration of the baptism of Jesus), they are taken to a church’s courtyard wrapped in cloth to conceal them from public view. The return of a tabot from St John’s Episcopal Church in Edinburgh in 2002 was greeted with huge celebrations in Addis Ababa, the Ethiopian capital, including a procession from the airport to its resting place in a cathedral. Westminster Abbey drew up plans this year to return the one tabot in its possession, but this may require royal permission as the site is under the jurisdiction of the King. A clause in the British Museum Act 1963 covering the disposal of objects in its collections allows for them to be returned if they are “unfit to be retained” and if their removal would not be to the detriment of scholars. However, despite legal advice in 2021 suggesting that the British Museum could easily return its tabots under existing law, no progress appears to have been made. This led to an appeal being made to the Information Commissioner after the museum refused repeated freedom of information requests by Returning Heritage, a nonprofit organisation, for information about meetings of the board of trustees in which the tabots were discussed. The museum said that releasing the information could prejudice Britain’s relationship with another state. The Information Commissioner’s Office has now turned to an investigation. In a blog post, Returning Heritage wrote: “Retaining [the tabots] is shameful for an institution whose published aim is to ensure the collection is ‘housed in safety, conserved, curated, researched and exhibited’. “As they can never be exhibited, photographed or studied, it’s clear they are ‘unfit to be retained’ by an institution that exists for educational purposes. Nobody will ever miss them as nobody is ever allowed to see them.” The British Museum was approached for comment. Emma Yeomans A group of models is calling for the BBC to release video and audio they say would help them to bring rape allegations against a former boss of one of the world’s top modelling agencies. The alleged victims of Gérald Marie, the former European head of Elite, have set up a petition asking the BBC to provide video that has been buried in the archive for 20 years. The material constitutes hundreds of hours of video and audio obtained during a three-year investigation into industry abuse by the group’s founder, Lisa Brinkworth, a former BBC reporter. In January the BBC wrote to Brinkworth to say it would not hand the material over. Brinkworth posed as a model in a documentary for the BBC’s MacIntyre Undercover series in 1998. She alleges that she was sexually assaulted by Marie during filming. Brinkworth says that after a dinner with other models and Marie’s business friends, she accompanied a small group, including Marie, to a club, where he pinned her to a chair and sexually assaulted her. Afterwards, she recorded her account of the assault on camera. She says she did not go to the police because the show did not want her to break her cover. After the documentary was Lisa Brinkworth founded a group of other alleged victims Models plead with BBC to release ‘sex claim’ video broadcast in November 1999, Elite Models sued the BBC, alleging misrepresentation. They reached a confidential settlement, which included the BBC not broadcasting the documentary again. The BBC told Brinkworth that the settlement agreement prevented it from providing the materials to her. Brinkworth is the founding member of Victorious Angels, which includes eight other alleged victims of Marie and Jean-Luc Brunel, a model scout who killed himself in his prison cell while awaiting trial. Sixteen women from the US, UK and Australia have provided depositions to French officials. These detail rapes and serious sexual assaults perpetrated by Marie in Paris and one in Milan. He has denied the allegations. In 2020 the women successfully asked the French authorities to open a criminal investigation into rape and sexual assault allegations against Marie. However, the court then decided that the allegations were beyond the statute of limitations, which is 20 years in France. Last November Brinkworth initiated an appeal against the court’s decision not to hear her case, arguing that the BBC settlement had prevented her from taking legal action at the time. She wants to obtain the materials and documents relating to the settlement. Although the other women’s allegations will not be tried because of the limitations, Brinkworth wants to call them as witnesses in her case so their allegations can be heard. She said: “We have listed the materials we need and none of these has been released to us. The BBC has provided very scant materials, not nearly as significant as those we have repeatedly requested, including my recorded testimony of the assault against me in the minutes after it took place. “That was made as my personal record and never for broadcast and should be immediately handed over. The BBC says it is restricted by Ben Ellery Crime Editor A hundred areas and not a single car thief caught Ben Ellery Not a single car thief was caught by the police in more than 100 neighbourhoods where vehicles were stolen in England and Wales last year. Figures reveal that in a further 558 neighbourhoods where there was at least one vehicle crime a week, less than 2 per cent were solved, with a suspect caught and charged. The data, published in The Observer, showed that a total of about 336,000 vehicle crimes across England and Wales were closed without a suspect having been identified — about 85 per cent of all vehicle offences recorded. Keyless car theft is on the rise and now makes up about half of all stolen vehicle claims. Mike Briggs, president of the UK branch of the International Association of Auto Theft Investigators, told the newspaper that the police did not have the resources to deal with the present level of vehicle crime. He said: “The thieves now have the technology to beat the security systems and the police are on the back foot.” Under EU laws a vehicle’s software systems were readily accessible, he said. “It is like building a fortress and giving away the front door key.” Briggs said the police needed better training to detect thieves’ sophisticated technology. The figures, published on data.police. uk, a site for open data on crime and policing, showed that of the areas where no vehicle crimes were solved, Blyth in Bassetlaw, Nottinghamshire, had the highest rate of offences. All 126 vehicle crimes there were closed without a prosecution in the year to September 2023 — 54 for every 1,000 residents. Next was the Courtfield ward in the London borough of Kensington and Chelsea, with 26 vehicle crimes for every 1,000 people, the villages of Awsworth, Cossall and Trowell in Broxtowe, Nottinghamshire, with 23 for every 1,000 people, and Chichester Central with 21 for every 1,000 people. The West End of London was the neighbourhood with the highest total vehicle crime, 1,171 — 98 per cent of which failed to result in a prosecution. Ladywood ward in Birmingham was next, with 989 vehicle crimes. Despite overall vehicle crime having fallen in recent years, car thefts are at their highest for a decade, up more than 50 per cent to 130,270 in the year to March last year from 85,803 in 2012. A Home Office spokesman said: “We expect police to take vehicle crime seriously and investigate thoroughly,” adding that progress had been made in tackling vehicle-related theft. “We have recently introduced provisions in the criminal justice bill to ban electronic devices used in vehicle theft,” he added. the legal settlement the corporation agreed with Elite, which in itself was a betrayal of not just me but all the victims, it enabled a sex predator to continue working with teenage girls for another two decades. “The public interest would be properly served by the BBC assisting a criminal rape and sexual assault investigation. “The BBC knows that time is running out for us, and the distress being caused by what is now a four-year fight for this evidence. Why do they not assist us?” Brinkworth says the BBC had failed to hand her the material, despite it giving it to an external production company to make a separate documentary, Scouting for Girls. She has written to Dame Caroline Dinenage, the chairwoman of the culture, media and sport committee, calling for her to force the BBC to hand over the documents and footage. A BBC spokeswoman said: “We have already provided documents to the French authorities to help Ms Brinkworth pursue the matter and investigators have assured us they have what they currently need from the BBC. We will continue to do whatever we can to assist with the process.” The original Elite has since been split into two separate companies, with both entities under new ownership. As an undercover model for the BBC in 1998, Lisa Brinkworth, left, said she was assaulted by Gérald Marie, above, the model Linda Evangelista’s ex-husband

6 2GM Monday April 1 2024 | the times News The King joked with wellwishers on a surprise walkabout as he attended Easter Day service in his first big public appearance since he began treatment for cancer. He and the Queen looked delighted as they emerged from St George’s Chapel in Windsor to applause from crowds and cries of “Happy Easter”. Charles, 75, withdrew from public duties after starting treatment for an undisclosed form of cancer almost two months ago. He is now taking what the Palace called “gentle steps” towards returning to some public-facing duties in the summer. He and the Queen arrived at the chapel in the state Bentley and joined other members of the royal family for the 10.45am Easter matins service. The service was smaller than usual because the Princess of Wales, 42, is also being treated for cancer and has paused her public duties. She and the Prince of Wales were absent from the chapel as they are spending the Easter holidays with their three children. Members of the crowd urged the King to get well soon. “I’m doing my Analysis I nside St George’s Chapel there is one seat that, according to tradition, is reserved for the monarch: the Sovereign’s Seat. Yesterday it was occupied as the congregation sang the national anthem (Kate Mansey writes). The King’s presence, and particularly the customary “walkabout” that followed, was the surest sign yet of reassurance from an institution that has been battling ill health. Typically, palace aides are cautious, but they felt confident enough about his condition that they confirmed his attendance beforehand. What followed, though, was a carefully choreographed message. It was designed, on doctor’s advice, to allow him to undertake the minimum amount of personal contact inside as part of a “risk management” strategy as he continues his cancer treatment. A palace source said: “Today was a significant step. As can be seen, the King has responded to treatment very encouragingly over past weeks and his doctors were thus able to adjust their guidance slightly on what His Majesty is now able to undertake, including attendance at the Easter service and greeting wellwishers who had turned out to show their support. “To be clear, His Majesty’s treatment continues and caution is, of course, the watchword, but as diary plans are evolved towards summer, we hope to see more of these carefully calibrated steps towards the resumption of some public-facing duties for the King, with adjustments made where necessary.” Afterwards, the King and Queen went to a reception that was held for the royal family, before heading off. They will not be seen for a while as they take a break, but the Easter reassurance mission appears to have been a success. More importantly, it has bought the Palace time. King Charles and Queen Camilla, above, waved to crowds outside St George’s Chapel yesterday. The Princess Royal, above right, the Duke of York and Sarah, Duchess of York, left and the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh, right all attended the Easter matins service News Royal family King tells crowds of Easter Day Katie Gibbons best,” he said. The King shook hands and spoke with those who had gathered at Windsor and told them: “You’re very brave to stand out here in the cold.” He spoke with Anne Daley, who was waving the Welsh flag and giving her best wishes to the Princess of Wales. “I wanted to show my support for King Charles and the Princess of Wales, we are all wishing them well,” she said. “We want to show them that we miss them. Wales misses her. She may not be here, but she is not forgotten.” The occasion provided the strongest sign yet that the royal walkabout has returned in full force with a predictably unpredictable encounter between a senior royal and a member of the public. Daley told Charles: “Camilla is 17 now.” The King and his 76-year-old wife appeared slightly baffled until it transpired that the ardent royal fan was talking about her pet dog, a Cavalier King Charles spaniel. Charles went along with the joke and told her: “You’ll need a new one.” Another woman, wrapped in a Union flag, gave the King a homemade get well soon card. “Thank you very much, that’s very kind. Did you make it?” he asked. Katrina Warne, 62, also greeted the King. “I sent my best and said we all wanted him to get well soon,” she said. “He told me, ‘I’m doing my best.’ He looked remarkably well, I have to say. Much better in the flesh than he has done in his recent portraits. It was amazing to see him.” The King asked another wellwisher if she had come to see the castle. “No, we’ve come to see you,” she told him. “I am very touched,” he replied, smiling. One member of the public urged him to “keep going strong” and another told him that “we’re all rooting for you, we’ve all got your back”. The King’s attendance was part of a carefully planned and pared-down Easter morning, during which he had little personal contact with others inside to shield him from infection during his treatment. His walkabout came just over a week after his daughter-in-law had released an emotional video disclosing that she had started a course of preventive chemotherapy for a cancer that was discovered in tests after abdominal surgery. The palace described the King as being “so proud” of the princess for her courage in speaking out and he was said to be in “the closest contact with his beloved daughter-in-law”. He and the Queen smiled and waved at the crowd as they arrived at the service shortly after other members of the royal family, including the Princess Royal and her husband, Vice-Admiral Sir Timothy Laurence, the Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh and the Duke of York. Sarah, Duchess of York also attended. The King had not previously made any significant public appearances since starting treatment, which was announced after treatment for an enlarged prostate. He still performs some official duties, including weekly meetings with the prime minister. After his five-minute walkabout, the King was driven back to the castle and was followed by the rest of the family on foot. The Duke and Duchess of Edinburgh exchanged “Happy Easter” wishes with members of the public, but the Duke of York did not join in. Before Easter, the King reaffirmed his coronation pledge “not to be served, but to serve” with “my whole heart” in an audio address broadcast to a congregation at Worcester Cathedral, where the Royal Maundy service was held in his absence on Thursday.

the times | Monday April 1 2024 7 News The Archbishop of Canterbury has used his Easter sermon to call on people to confront the “evil and pain” caused by people smugglers and county lines gangs. At Canterbury Cathedral, the Most Rev Justin Welby said that the Church of England was not party political and that Christian belief called for “courageous action” to address wrongs. He also encouraged the congregation to “pray” for the King and the Princess of Wales during their cancer treatment and commended their “dignity” in response to the diagnosis. He said: “We must confront evil and pain. Whether it is the evil of people smugglers or county lines in our schools, or the pain and suffering in a family riven with grief or rage or substance abuse, Jesus, the God-man who experienced every pain and temptation, is calling us to love in action. “Let us seek action amongst the starving children of Gaza and Sudan — and the parents who try desperately to find food for them, action for the hostages held by Hamas, action for those in the trenches and cities and fears of Ukraine, action in at least 30 but probably closer to 50 other places of armed conflict, action for the 25 to 30 per cent of children in this country in poverty.” Welby said members of the Church were “all different” in their politics, “but we do not pick causes by opinion polls or human pressure, we show love in action and word because of who God is, revealed in Jesus. “We act because of what God says, found in the Bible and to be lived out by Pope urges PoW exchange and Gaza hostages release Philip Willan Rome Pope Francis called for an end to global conflicts in his Easter message, appealing for a wholesale prisoner exchange between Russia and Ukraine, the release of Israeli hostages captured by Hamas and unimpeded humanitarian access to Gaza. His appeal, delivered from the central balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, was met with applause from the 60,000 people gathered in the square. “In calling for respect for the principles of international law, I express my hope for a general exchange of all prisoners between Russia and Ukraine: all for all,” the Pope said. Some 200 prisoners were exchanged in January in a deal brokered by the United Arab Emirates, but Russia is believed to be holding around 4,000 Ukrainian prisoners of war and thousands of Russian troops have been captured in Ukraine. The conflicts were having dire repercussions for civilian populations, he added, and particularly for children. “How much suffering we see in the eyes of children. The children in those lands of war have forgotten how to smile. With those eyes, they ask us: Why? Why all this death? Why all this destruction? War is always an absurdity, war is always a defeat!” Francis has made numerous pleas for peace in the Holy Land since the October 7 attacks. While acknowledging Israel’s right to self-defence, the Vatican has denounced the war and the loss of more than 30,000 Palestinian lives. He called for peace in Syria, Lebanon, and Armenia, and highlighted the collapse of government in Haiti, which had resulted in “acts of violence, devastation and bloodshed”. He also mentioned Sudan, the Kivu region in the DRC, and the Cabo Delgado province of Mozambique. He also appealed for the oppressed Rohingya people in Myanmar, praying that “every logic of violence may be definitively abandoned”. Francis, 87, has been suffering from bronchitis and at times appeared breathless. He delivered his address while sitting down and made his customary use of a wheelchair, touring St Peter’s Square in his popemobile after Mass to greet the enthusiastic crowds. He had skipped the Way of the Cross ceremony at the Colosseum on Friday evening, following doctors’ advice to conserve his energy for the weekend. Elsewhere on Easter Sunday, the Archbishop of Canterbury, right, and Pope Francis — doing battle with blustery conditions — used their addresses to spread messages of social justice and calling for the end to global conflicts News wellwishers: ‘I’m doing my best’ Confront the evils of people smugglers and drug gangs, says Welby Emma Yeomans the church — in over 30,000 social projects, in 8,000 food banks. “We proclaim the righteousness of God who acts for the poor and vulnerable, for the rich and comfortable, with love and perfect justice for all, good and bad.” Rishi Sunak said that Easter was a time to “pause and reflect” and the prime minister praised the contribution made by Christians around the world to their communities. He said: “To the churches, charities, volunteers and fundraisers who live the Christian values of compassion, charity and self-sacrifice, supporting those in need and demonstrating what it means to ‘love thy neighbour’ — many, I know, will also be thinking of those in pain and suffering around the world and Christians persecuted because of their faith who are unable to celebrate Easter freely.” Sir Keir Starmer used his message to say that people would use Easter to think about “our future and how things can change for the better”, weeks before the May local elections. He said: “The Easter story is one of hope and renewal, of overcoming adversity and light prevailing over darkness. As families and friends gather to celebrate the holiday, we turn our thoughts towards new beginnings, our future and how things can change for the better. “Faith is really important. It’s a place where people can invest a lot of themselves and find comfort, hope and a sense of security. This Easter I’d like to express my gratitude to the Christian community in the UK and beyond for their generosity and compassion.”

8 Monday April 1 2024 | the times News Questions of honour and a showdown on the Rock Gibraltar’s police commissioner and elected leader are locked in the sort of feud associated with banana republics . . . and now some of Britain’s best legal minds are getting involved. Fiona Hamilton reports running and insists all his decisionmaking has been in its interests. Asked about concerns raised over his propriety, Picardo cites a former prime minister whose own motives were often called into question: “Much like Tony Blair said when he left, politics is, in very great measure for most of us, the pursuit of very honourable purposes.” Picardo, 52, has accused his critics of trying to usurp him and to bring in direct rule from London, evoking alarm about a system associated with a bygone colonial age, and says he was outraged when experts warned that Gibraltar could be put on a global corruption list. The Foreign Office is accused of turning a blind eye, not wanting to stoke controversy over the strategically important territory because post-Brexit negotiations are at a critical phase. It all points to a spectacular showdown next month when the inquiry begins and some of the country’s best-known silks go headto-head. Among them are Caoilfhionn Gallagher KC, an into the kind of spectacle usually associated with a banana republic: police officers arrested for allegedly fabricating evidence; claims that the government has improperly induced witnesses and that it shut down a prosecution that might have shed light on corruption; and the passing of legislation that could impede the independent inquiry set up to examine these alleged activities. Speaking at government headquarters below the towering rock that dominates Gibraltar, Picardo’s face takes on a wounded expression as he complains that he has been depicted “as a tinpot dictator”. Recently elected for a fourth term and formally appointed by the governor of Gibraltar, who represents the British monarch, Picardo is responsible for the territory’s daily T he sign that welcomes arrivals to Gibraltar promises there is “more than meets the eye” to the British overseas territory, urging them to look beyond its “little Britain” reputation. Now, however, an explosive corruption inquiry, embroiling Gibraltar’s chief minister and other senior figures — who are flying in some of Britain’s top KCs to represent them — threatens to permanently tarnish the image of the tiny territory. The public inquiry was prompted by claims that Fabian Picardo, Gibraltar’s leader for more than a decade, was involved in the improper removal of its police commissioner as he investigated alleged fraud at the heart of government. Since then the story has evolved internationally renowned human rights barrister who represents Jimmy Lai, the Hong Kong publisher and democracy campaigner, and Patrick Gibbs KC, who secured Kevin Spacey’s acquittal at the actor’s sexual assault trial last summer. One local wag quipped that Gibraltarian democracy was being replaced with a “barristocracy”. The city is already dominated by the legal profession, with more than 30 firms for a population of 30,000. Picardo emphasises his legal credentials as he tries to reassure the public he is behaving ethically: “I went to one of the top universities in the United Kingdom [Oxford]. I spent 20 years at one of Gibraltar’s top law firms.” But his relationship with that law firm, Hassans, where he remains a partner on sabbatical, is at the heart of the public inquiry. Ian McGrail had been Gibraltar’s police commissioner for two years when he says he was berated by Picardo in May 2020 after officers carried out searches of Hassans and of the home of James Levy, its senior partner and a close friend of Picardo.

the times | Monday April 1 2024 9 News Gibraltar, the small, sunsoaked British territory at the foot of the Iberian peninsula, home to about 300 Barbary macaques, is experiencing a high-profile corruption case. Charles Gomez, left, is representing the former police commissioner, who filed claims against the elected leader shut down public inquiries or to restrict the public’s access to the evidence. Picardo says he is bringing Gibraltar in line with UK law. He promises that evidence related to him will not be affected and that any restriction decisions will be made by Gibraltar’s cabinet. He cannot recuse himself from such decisions, he claims, because they relate to issues “in the public interest”. Azopardi described it as a “constitutional outrage”, while Transparency International, the campaign group, warned that any attempt to fetter the inquiry’s independence would “severely undermine confidence in the quality of Gibraltar’s governance”. Although Gibraltar is a separate jurisdiction responsible for its own affairs, the UK government can instruct its governor to reject legislation. Picardo’s bill received assent last week even after McGrail’s legal team had requested British intervention. Picardo states that Azopardi and McGrail’s legal team have subjected him to “trial by media” and a character assassination. He insists that he will prevail when the inquiry, which is expected to last several weeks, begins on April 8. The public could believe wrongdoing only if they were to “fall into the trap of genuinely believing that the politician is never able to act honestly. “I’ve said repeatedly that I am very relaxed about everything I have done. The only way that any allegations against me can be made is by constructing a narrative which is far more excessive in its imagination than anything that [the novelist] John Grisham has ever managed.” record until that search warrant. Everything has been a shock.” McGrail was charged with sexual assault last year after a female officer claimed he had squeezed her on the bottom at police headquarters in 2018, two years before his retirement, something he strenuously denied. At trial McGrail’s legal team raised concerns that she had received a letter signed by the chief minister and questioned why detectives had interviewed her at Hassans, rather than a police station. McGrail was cleared and the magistrate found there was no evidence the woman had been induced to give evidence. Keith Azopardi, Gibraltar’s opposition leader, says Picardo’s signature on the letters, given his history with McGrail and involvement at the inquiry, was a “very big example of an inability and unwillingness to contain his conflicts of interest”. Some police who came forward have been arrested and accused of giving false statements after receiving the letters, which do not appear to have any basis in whistleblowing legislation. Picardo insisted the letters were a process of “excellent government” that offered proper protection, that his signature had to be on them as the head of a small administration and that he was unaware of the details of each case. On March 1, Sir Peter Openshaw, the McGrail inquiry chairman, announced that it would investigate allegations that incentives had been offered in exchange for giving evidence to the inquiry. Days later Picardo announced legislation, which came into force last week, allowing his government to defamation by Gibraltar’s government for putting their case to the inquiry. McGrail, meanwhile, was not enjoying a comfortable retirement. He faced a slew of allegations of wrongdoing from police colleagues, who had been given letters of assurance by the government that if they spoke out and their positions became untenable, they could be transferred with the same pay and conditions to other government departments. The letters were signed by Picardo. Charles Gomez, McGrail’s Gibraltarian lawyer, claims that the weight of the state has been brought upon his client. Gomez’s firm is a few minutes’ walk from Main Street, where tourists shop in Marks & Spencer and where the historical attractions include browsing in Mothercare, long gone from the British high street. Gomez has practised here for 42 years. “I have never seen anything like this,” he says. “I’ve never heard of anything like this. “It’s an incredible assault on Ian. He had a completely unblemished conspiracy to defraud. All three denied wrongdoing and in January 2022, a month before a scheduled dismissal application and before the government bowed to pressure to call a public inquiry over McGrail’s abrupt departure, the prosecutions were discontinued. The attorneygeneral deployed a rarely used mechanism known as a nolle prosequi, saying there was enough evidence for a trial but terminating proceedings, citing “matters in the wider public interest”. A dam Wagner, the British barrister known for highlighting shortcomings in coronavirus lockdown legislation, who is also acting for McGrail, asked at a preinquiry hearing in October whether the discontinuation was to protect the “political reputation” of Picardo and the government from the fallout of a public trial examining a company with which they shared financial and other links. Wagner and Gallagher have been threatened with a claim for The investigation, known as Operation Delhi, concerned alleged fraud connected to a lucrative government security contract. The potential beneficiary was a company in which partners at Hassans had a 33 per cent stake. It meant, according to McGrail’s legal team, that both Levy and Picardo “stood to gain financially”. Picardo denies any conflict of interest, saying that he had helped to instigate Operation Delhi and had made clear in writing that the security contract would not go to the Hassans-linked company. He insists he had no issue with McGrail investigating Levy, who was never charged, is no longer a subject of police investigation and has denied any wrongdoing. However, Picardo says he was misled by McGrail — who denies this — and was simply angry that McGrail had used a search warrant instead of a production order (a legal request to pass over documents and other material), which would not have been so heavy-handed. McGrail’s team alleges that he was subjected to improper pressure over the criminal inquiry before he was “muscled out” and effectively forced to retire. They claim that Picardo was “extremely angry and used intemperate language” after learning of the search warrant. While Picardo and Nick Pyle, who was the acting governor at the time, claim that they lost confidence in McGrail over a string of unrelated issues, including a fatal collision at sea involving police, McGrail’s team point out that the independent report on that incident had not been released at the time and that other cited issues pre-dated his leadership. Developments since then raise further troubling questions for Picardo and his colleagues, as well as about the probity of Gibraltar’s institutions. Operation Delhi led to three other people, including a senior civil servant, being charged with Fabian Picardo, left, the chief minister of Gibraltar, is involved in a corruption case. Ian McGrail, the former police commissioner, alleges he was “muscled out” The weight of the state has been brought on my client . . . I’ve never seen anything like this “

the times | Monday April 1 2024 11 News Water companies discharged sewage into bathing areas for 228,098 hours last year, analysis has revealed. The research, conducted by the Liberal Democrats, warned swimmers of the potentially serious health risks from contaminated water, adding that families enjoying the outdoors over the bank holiday would be “horrified” by the extent of sewage spills. The total duration of sewage discharged by eight water companies last year increased by 80 per cent from the 125,808 hours in 2022. The total was spread across 31,363 sewage spills, 47 per cent higher than in 2022 and the equivalent of 86 a day. The analysis included beaches officially classified as bathing waters, which should be protected from pollution. Last month it was revealed that 2023 had been the worst for sewage spills in England since monitoring began. The Times’s award-winning Clean It Up campaign has called for tougher action to protect waterways and to crack down on polluters. Among the bathing areas most The beaten Oxford men’s team considered changing three crew members on the eve of the 169th boat race after sewage in the Thames left them infected with E. coli. Environment Agency figures revealed last week that raw sewage spills in England had doubled last year. Crews from both teams were told to avoid swallowing river water splashed up during Saturday’s races. However, for some rowers, having trained on the Thames, it was already too late. Lenny Jenkins, of the Oxford men’s crew, revealed after the race that he had Lara Wildenberg Rising tide of sewage spills at bathing sites affected was Allonby in Cumbria, a beach that has views across the Solway estuary, which was blighted by 4,500 hours of sewage spills last year. Haverigg, also in Cumbria, experienced 3,600 hours of sewage spills, followed by Middleton-on-Sea, just east of Bognor Regis in West Sussex, where sewage was dumped for the equivalent of 3,500 hours. Giles Bristow, the chief executive of Surfers Against Sewage, said: “Picture the scene: the long weekend, an excitable dash to the coast, you run to the water’s edge and you’re met with the sickening stench of sewage. “This is not a fiction. This scene is being played out right now, right across the UK, with our spectacular coastline, coves and beaches being treated with utter indifference by our profiteering water companies. We need to turn the tide on the sewage scandal now.” Surfers Against Sewage is organising nationwide protests about the sewage scandal on May 18. Nearly 2,000 people reported becoming ill after entering British waters in the year to November 2023, according to the campaign group. Of these incidents, 60 per cent were at bathing waters classified as “excellent”. The Lib Dems called for the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies to review the health implications of sewage spills, particularly for swimmers. “People visiting the seaside over the Easter bank holiday will be horrified to know that sewage has been dumped on to our country’s popular beaches,” Tim Farron, the party’s environment spokesman, said. “Water firms and this Conservative government should be hanging their heads in shame.” United Utilities, which supplies northwest England including the Cumbrian beaches most affected, was the worst offender among water companies, with 10,467 sewage spills over 76,259 hours. South West Water was responsible for 8,500 spills over 59,000 hours, followed by Southern Water, Wessex Water and Thames Water, respectively, which dumped more than 11,000 hours of sewage into bathing spots last year. Water companies blamed one of the wettest years on record for an increased number of storm overflow operations. Mark Garth, the wastewater services director at United Utilities, proposed a £3 billion plan to tackle the problem in the northwest between 2025 and 2030. John Penicud, director for wastewater operations at Southern Water, called reducing storm releases a “top priority” and noted the company’s £1.5 billion storm overflow reduction plan. Coastal attraction Visitors to Blackpool Tower’s 120m tall viewing platform will be able to enjoy the panoramic sights when it reopens for the season on April 6 Oxford boat crew almost sunk by E coli been vomiting that morning, adding: “It would be a lot nicer if there wasn’t as much poo in the water.” Sean Bowden, their chief coach, said three rowers had suffered so badly from an E. coli infection that they almost did not make the race. “We were definitely thinking about having to change the crew on Friday,” he said. Late changes have happened before. Four days before the 2018 race, Bowden replaced Josh Bugajski, a member of the Great Britain squad; in 2008, Cambridge replaced Shane O’Mara days out after doctors had detected a heart murmur. In both cases the crews lost. While very critical of the sewage levels, Bowden emphasised that this affected every rower in the country. “It’s not just the Thames,” he said. “Most British waterways have become the dumping ground for effluence. A country of the status we aspire to should do better.” It is not only a British problem. In February it was reported that water quality in the River Seine in Paris, which will stage the Olympic opening ceremony in July and the Games’ openwater swimming events, remained below an acceptable standard. A World Cup swimming competition there was cancelled last year because of E. coli levels. Patrick Kidd Clean it up water campaign campaign of the year Verandas, Glass Rooms, Patio Awnings and Canopies supplied and installed throughout the UK. 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12 2GM Monday April 1 2024 | the times News Conservative voters who have abandoned the party for Reform UK could be tempted back if Rishi Sunak promises a national referendum on migration, new research has claimed. The biggest poll so far of voters who say that at the next election they will support Reform, the Nigel Faragebacked successor to the Brexit Party, has found that the majority have defected from the Tories and that many cannot be won back by the government, whatever its promises. However, 42 per cent would consider backing Sunak at the next election if the prime minister took hardline action on migration, including holding a referendum on the issue. Tory MPs face a challenge from Reform, which has pledged to put up a candidate in every seat in England, Scotland and Wales, unlike at the last election, when it agreed to stand aside to allow Boris Johnson to win. In the Midlands, polling has shown that Reform is neck-and-neck with the Tories and an MRP poll for The Sunday Times found that the party’s share of the vote was set to surge across Britain, with the party likely to come second in seven seats and with its overall vote share up to 8.5 per cent. Home Office figures showed that 349 people crossed the Channel on Saturday, taking the total known figure for the year so far to 4,993. More than three times as many migrants have crossed the Channel this month compared with March last year. With more crossing yesterday, the figure is now likely to be more than 5,000. Last year, that figure was not reached until April 17. Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the former Conservative leader, said yesterday that voters angry with the Conservatives had turned to Reform. He told Times Radio: “We’ve got to show by getting these flights [to Rwanda] off the ground that we’re serious about dealing with [migration].” He said: “The problem about Reform is they’re likely to end up delivering a Labour government.” A new report from the Legatum Institute, a pro-Brexit think tank, has found that in many cases it is too late for the Conservatives to regain those voters. Legatum’s research found Reform voters “tend to be middle-aged or elderly, with a slight bias toward men”. They “live outside London and Scotland”, were “overwhelmingly” supportive of the Tories at the 2019 election and were very likely to have backed Brexit. It found that “Reform UK is drawing the bulk of its support from disillusioned former Tories who supported Labour should give default British citizenship to millions of European Union citizens settled in the UK to help to assuage fears that migrants do not contribute to the economy, Sir Keir Starmer has been told. Labour Together, a think tank with close links to the party, found voters were far more likely to accept migrants if they became a British citizen because they believed they were more likely to contribute to the economy. Its recommendations include an American-style route for migrants to become citizens after a certain amount of time and the granting of citizenship to those from the Windrush generation. However, it also says that the 3.7 million EU citizens granted settled status after Brexit — allowing them to continue to live, work and study in the UK indefinitely — should be made British citizens automatically, with the Make migrants citizens, Labour told two million more with pre-settled status likely to follow. Labour previously had been considering giving extended voting rights to EU citizens and in 2020 Sir Keir Starmer called for all EU nationals to be given full voting rights in the UK. Last year Jonathan Reynolds, Labour’s shadow business secretary, said: “We believe if people make a contribution to this country, if they live here, there’s an argument for having them involved in [the democratic] process.” The party said at the time that no final decisions had been made. Labour Together found that people were more likely to believe that migrants contributed to society if they had British citizenship. “Citizenship enables migrants to fully participate in our society, to plan and to invest in their communities,” its report says. “The British public wants migrants to do exactly these things. The hurdle to this, noted above, is they do not want the state to cover the cost. It is worth noting, even among migrationsceptic respondents, there was positivity about migrants demonstrating a commitment to the UK by acquiring British citizenship.” It also found that voters who saw immigration as one of their top issues would have a “disproportionate impact on the outcome of the next election” and that 60 per cent of that group would vote for a different party to 2019. Therefore, the report recommended, Labour must be “bolder” on its immigration policy. Christabel Cooper, director of research at Labour Together, said: “The public is looking to the government to make sure migration is controlled. “While the current government focuses on divisive gimmicks like Rwanda, our new research shows policies encouraging immigrants to take British citizenship and which promote integration are popular.” Labour was contacted for comment. Geraldine Scott A referendum on immigration could shore up Tory vote Geraldine Scott Senior Political Correspondent leaving the European Union and might have turned to Reform UK to vent their frustration with the direction of contemporary conservatism”. Its voters tended to point to one issue of concern: immigration. The issue is more important to Reform voters than the economy, the NHS and even managing Brexit and 37 per cent said the most important thing to them was stopping the small boats crossings in the Channel. Eighty-five per cent of those asked thought immigration had made life in Britain worse. The poll asked would-be Reform voters whether a national referendum on bringing down the rate of net migration from about 700,000 to less than 100,000 would make them more likely to vote Conservative at the next election, with 42 per cent saying it would. “This does suggest, then, that a significant chunk of the Reform electorate might be convinced to return to the Conservative Party by a bold and radical offer on immigration, such as a national referendum,” the report said. However, 40 per cent said they would still not back the Tories even if such a vote were delivered. The research also found that Reform voters were “united by a sense of pessimism about the direction of UK society”. Seven in ten think measures on net zero have “made life worse”. “They appear convinced the future will be worse than the present and that the present is already worse than the past,” the report found. In a sign of Reform’s ambitions the Tory MP Bob Seely revealed yesterday that he had been approached to defect to the party. The revelation came after Lee Anderson left the Tories for Reform to become its first MP. A Tory party spokesman said: “A vote for anyone apart from the Conservative party risks putting Keir Starmer into No 10. This would tear up the progress that has been made on the economy and take us back to square one.” Key figures Net migration 2012-2023 2014 Year ending 16 18 20 22 23 900 600 300 0 -200 Thousands EU referendum Numbers rounded to nearest thousand. Figures for 2022 onwards are provisional Source: ONS Non-EU EU Total British End of EU transition period News Politics L iz Truss has been mocked for posing holding a lamb outside a derelict church in her constituency (Geraldine Scott writes). The Tory former prime minister, 48, posted the picture on X, formerly Twitter, wishing her followers a happy Easter. But it was soon noticed that the church behind her, St Mary’s in Beachamwell, in her South West Norfolk seat, was boarded up and fenced off, with safety signs warning people to stay away. A footpath sign had fallen to the ground. The comedian Joe Lycett imitated Truss by standing in front of a construction site with a white towel, asking: “Who wore it best?” The church was devastated in a fire two years ago, with work to reopen it continuing. Truss is no stranger to a colourful photo opportunity. During a trip to Estonia in 2021 as foreign secretary Truss mocked over Easter lamb pose

the times | Monday April 1 2024 13 News It has been fired over the Scottish capital almost every day for more than a century and a half. But never in anger. Now it seems as if Edinburgh’s one o’clock gun has defeated its first actual enemy: health and safety killjoys. Sources at the Ministry of Defence say they have saved the weapon’s traditional daily blast from officials who thought that it was too noisy. Army insiders claim that the gun was to have fired its last blank on Holy Saturday last weekend — amid concerns for the hearing of crowds who gather to watch. But Grant Shapps, the defence secretary, has since intervened to ensure that Edinburgh gets its loud bangs every day. An MoD source said: “The one o’clock gun has been fired for more than 160 years without complaint and health and safety killjoys are trying to bring it to an end. “This level of risk avoidance is ludicrous. Yes, keep people at a safe distance and make sure young children are OK, but this is truly health and safety gone mad. “The defence secretary and a lot of people at the MoD thought it might be an April Fool’s joke when they first heard about it. “Anyone who’s been to the New Year’s Eve celebrations in Edinburgh and heard the fireworks will know that’s louder. But he’s determined to make a sensible assessment of the risk and the gun will keep firing. “It’s a great tradition loved by the people of Edinburgh, the military and tourists.” The gun is fired every day from the Mills Mount Battery, except on Sundays, Christmas Day and Good Friday. It has done so since 1861 — originally at noon to help ships in the Firth of Forth to set their clocks, something that is essential to their ability to navigate. The idea of a time-keeping cannon was imported from Paris, which had a noon gun, by a businessman called John Hewat. Other cities around the world, including Hong Kong, Rome and Cape Town, still fire cannon at midday. Glasgow, however, stopped The number of nursery places available fell at the end of last year, piling pressure on the sector just as an expansion of free childcare comes into effect. From today, thousands of working parents across the country are entitled to government-funded childcare of up to 15 hours a week for two-year-olds. This will be extended to working parents of all children older than nine months but younger than five from September, before a rollout of 30 hours a week to all eligible families next year. However, providers have warned they could “go bust” under the expanded offer, while parents have complained of high costs and long waiting lists. Analysis of Ofsted data by Labour found that the number of childcare places fell by more than 1,000 between March and December last year. Last month research from Coram, the children’s charity, found that less than half of local areas reported having enough childcare for working parents, a fall of 11 per cent on last year. Some 43 per cent of local authorities told Coram that their providers had reduced the number of funded early education places that were available. Bridget Phillipson, the shadow education secretary, said the government had a “childcare pledge without a plan” and published a dossier that Labour said outlined the “childcare chaos” parents face. One mother, Diana from Rugby, told Labour that costs were “outrageously high” and “like paying a second mortgage”. Laura, from Northampton, told the party that, despite being entitled to free childcare, “due to the funding rates being so poor, our nursery have decided to become completely private so we can no longer access this ... and all other Fewer places for parents to access free childcare Geraldine Scott local nurseries have an 18 month-long waiting list”. Claire Richmond, from Goslings Nursery in Coventry, told Labour that her business was likely to “go bust” under the pledge. Gerry Garvey, owner of Muddy Boots Nursery in Cumbria, said this month’s expansion “will see a lot of disappointed parents unable to claim as there are a lack of nursery places, due to systemic underfunding and lack of staff to provide the places”. In March last year, Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, announced that eligible families of children as young as nine months in England would be able to claim 30 hours of free childcare a week by September 2025. The government said more than 150,000 children were on track to secure government-funded places from this week and it was “confident” the sector was ready. Gillian Keegan, the education secretary, called the policy a “lifeline for working parents” that “also contributes to economic growth and opens up new careers opportunities in a hugely rewarding sector”. However, Neil Leitch, chief executive of the Early Years Alliance, said: “If there is one thing that the first phase of the entitlement expansion has shown, it’s that simply promising ‘more free childcare’ is meaningless if you’re not willing to invest in the infrastructure needed to deliver it.” He added that many nurseries, childminders and preschools have had “no choice” but to limit the number of new funded places. “It’s completely unsurprising, therefore, that many parents accessing a place for the first time have found it difficult, if not impossible, to do so,” Leitch said. “Ministers have made a big promise to parents. Only by providing the support that the sector needs will they be able to keep it.” How they stand Labour Con SNP Lib Dem 2019 2024 projection 203 468 365 98 48 41 11 22 Seat totals Source: Survation/Best of Britain Survey of 15,029 adults, between Mar 8 and 22, 2023 The cost of living crisis and high taxes have caused real anger towards the Conservatives, a former leader of the party has said, after a poll predicted that the Tories will have fewer than 100 seats after the next general election. Sir Iain Duncan Smith, the MP for Chingford & Woodford Green, said yesterday that polls predicting the government’s downfall were “a mile wide but an inch deep”, with concern spread across a number of areas. He said he could “understand fully” the frustrations expressed towards Don’t turn against Sunak, warns Iain Duncan Smith Geraldine Scott nation either to return you to government or to punish you for the difficulties they face?” He added that in the “few months before an election” the party should not “turn in on ourselves and start discussing how we can change this by changing the individual — who by the way will have next to little time to be able to establish themselves in the mind of the public”. Conservative MPs have become increasingly jittery about Rishi Sunak and his leadership as the polls have worsened, and speculation about a leadership challenge has increased. That unease will have been fuelled by a poll published by The Sunday Times yesterday, which indicated that Labour is on course for a landslide win, with a projected 286-seat majority. The poll of 15,000 people was used to create a seat-by-seat breakdown, which indicated that the Conservatives would be wiped out in Scotland and Wales and hold only 98 seats in England — with even the prime minister’s previously safe seat of Richmond at risk. The Survation study for the internationalist campaign group Best for Britain put Labour on 45 per cent with a 19-point lead over the Tories. The constituency forecast suggested that Labour could win 468 seats. The poll suggests the Scottish National Party would pick up 41 seats, the Liberal Democrats 22 and Plaid Cymru two. In 2019 the Conservatives had 365 seats, Labour 203, the SNP 48, the Lib Dems 11 and Plaid 4. Claire Coutinho, the energy security secretary, said in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph that her advice to the prime minister was to “keep going”. She added: “We are winning the fight.” ministers, and there were “clear issues”, including the “cost of living, the problems that came post-Covid, the amount of money we had to spend, therefore the higher levels of taxation and the economy, which had been in difficult”. He told Times Radio: “So all of those are quite good reasons why the public is angry, annoyed and fed up with the difficulties that they face.” But he said the question of whether a change of leader would help was one of the imponderables. He said: “Is it all about individuals or is it about the way that people feel about their lives and therefore their determifiring because it scared horses in the city centre. Edinburgh Castle officials widened the cordon around the gun last year to protect the ears of people in the crowd who gather every day to hear it fired. A message on the castle’s website said: “We are currently implementing some new measures with the Ministry of News Edinburgh cannon fights off killjoys David Leask Defence in relation to the viewing of the one o’clock gun.” It said the measures include asking visitors to arrive at marked areas ten minutes before firing. They were put in place, MoD sources said, after a safety notice was issued after initial noise trials carried out by an army team. Military sources said castle officials were still worried that spectators were too close. The army uses a small field artillery piece, an L118 light gun, to fire the daily blank. However, insiders said that from June the gunners, who are from the Royal Artillery, will use quieter ammunition. Edinburgh Castle is managed by Historic Environment Scotland, a Scottish government quango. A spokeswoman said there was no threat to the tradition and that they had acted on military advice. “The MoD recently issued new UK-wide guidance requiring a wider safety zone around the firing and viewing of all ceremonial guns, which includes the one o’clock gun at Edinburgh Castle,” she added. “The geography at Edinburgh Castle can facilitate the wider cordon required by these new army guidelines and the one o’clock gun will continue to be fired.” The defence secretary said Edinburgh’s 1pm gun would keep firing she recreated one of Margaret Thatcher’s most renowned photos by wearing protective gear — including a bulletproof vest and helmet — standing in a tank. As trade minister she posed on a Brompton bicycle in Sydney with a Union Flag umbrella in the rain. When she became prime minister in September of 2022, Truss’s old Instagram photos resurfaced, including some of her dressed as a devil at Halloween, milking a cow, and in a selfie with Taylor Swift. Liz Truss in the Easter photo posted on X. The church was damaged in a fire two years ago. Left, her Sydney Brompton picture

14 2GM Monday April 1 2024 | the times News A Labour-run council in west London is making £1 million a month from one low-traffic neighbourhood. Hammersmith and Fulham has issued more than 341,000 penalty charge notices in eleven months from five cameras in the South Fulham (west) low-traffic neighbourhood, data obtained under freedom of inforThe charity that arranged for Abdul Ezedi, the chemical attacker, to be given a Muslim burial could face sanctions from the regulator after it used a false name to raise money for the service. The Muslim Burial Fund appealed to the public for donations to give Ezedi, 35, a burial at an Islamic ceremony in east London last month, raising more than £6,000. The appeal gave his name as “Abdul Wahed” and claimed he had “died tragically in suspicious circumstances”. Ezedi’s body was found in the River Thames in February after CCTV showed him leaning over the railings at Chelsea Bridge before disappearing. Hours earlier he had thrown corrosive alkali at a former girlfriend and her two children in Clapham, south London. He came to Britain from Afghanistan in 2016 and was given a Muslim burial despite claiming at an asylum tribunal that he could not return to his homeland because he had converted to Christianity. Yesterday Gerald Oppenheim, chief executive of the Fundraising Regulator, said that it could take action if it received complaints from donors who felt they had been misled. The Muslim Burial Fund is part of the Charity lied to raise funds for chemical attacker’s funeral 13 Rivers Trust charity. The fundraiser made £6,596 before it removed the advert. The appeal read: “Please give our brother a dignified Islamic burial. He died tragically in suspicious circumstances with no one to claim his body.” The charity said his family in Afghanistan had requested a Muslim burial. Punitive action could include giving advice to the charity or removing its Fundraising Regulator accreditation. “Fundraising has to be transparent, open and honest,” Oppenheim said. “You could argue that fundraising in a particular cause that isn’t real, or in this case an individual, could be construed as misleading.” Last week documents obtained by The Times revealed why Ezedi had been granted leave to remain in Britain. The Rev Roy Merrin, a retired team leader at a church on Tyneside, wrote a letter saying he had baptised Ezedi, who attended worship regularly. Judge William O’Hanlon, who granted Ezedi asylum, said Merrin’s evidence had been “compelling”. The documents also showed Ezedi was unable to answer basic questions on Christianity. The Muslim Burial Fund said: “Regardless of any person’s faith, be it Muslim or Christian, if the next of kin decide their loved one wants such and such a burial, that’s what will happen.” Ben Ellery Crime Editor Low-traffic zone nets council £1m a month mation laws has shown. The council made almost £8 million from 105,000 fines between February and December last year, with CCTV monitoring vehicles that wrongly entered restricted areas. A further 34,507 fines are deemed “open” and could earn the council £4.5 million if they are paid at the full £130 rate. The Sunday Telegraph reported that 197,200 fines had been classified as “cancelled”, covering people who were wrongly fined and had penalties overturned. While there were 45,283 fines for contraventions in February 2023, generating £1.3 million, the monthly total fell by more than half to 21,299 in December last year. The council said: “Since the trial began, fines have tumbled ... while pollution from congestion has become a thing of the past in residential streets.” David Woode Old habits The Royal Armouries Museum in Leeds hosted a jousting tournament for teams from Britain, Italy and France

the times | Monday April 1 2024 15 News England’s national parks have warned that a funding crisis means they are having to cut back on maintaining footpaths and rights of way, threatening public access to their unique landscapes. Steve Barclay, the environment secretary, has pledged to create “more opportunities for people to access nature” and last year he started the process of picking a new national park. Ministers have promised that everybody should be able to reach green spaces within 15 minutes. However, England’s ten existing parks have warned that they are facing a funding squeeze that threatens their wildlife, habitats and infrastructure. Several said that as a result they had cut back on maintaining footpaths and rights of way. Walkers are struggling already to reach green spaces because of private rights of way. The Yorkshire Dales said it had already reduced its rights-of-way maintenance programme, which cost £1 million a year. Exmoor, too, has trimmed how much it spends on protecting rights of way. “Rights of way are vital access routes It is a brave prison governor who gives their inmates tools and tells them to dig. However, at HMP Erlestoke in Wiltshire, it was not the start of a jailbreak: it was a case of Porridge meets Time Team. The inmates were part of an archaeological dig at the prison designed to give them skills before their release. To much surprise, they found a Inmates unearth a love of archaeology (and some 8,000-year-old tools) Jack Blackburn History Correspondent locally important Mesolithic site, which captured the imagination of the prison at large. “Everybody was queueing up waiting for me coming back, asking, ‘What did you find today?’ ” said Sam (not his real name), who took part in the dig. “Everybody was fascinated.” Alongside ancient flints, the men made finds from across Britain’s history, including Roman pottery, Victorian clay pipes and a lost item from prisoners past. The idea for the scheme came from Wessex Archaeology, one of the nation’s leading excavators, which gained the support of Erlestoke, the Ministry of Justice and the National Lottery, which provided £116,000 towards the project. It is hoped that unusual educational work such as this can help to maintain a trend in the past three years in which the number of former offenders who got jobs within six months of release has doubled. Erlestoke — parts of which were once a manor house where Queen Victoria and Elizabeth I were said to have stayed — is a category C jail, a grade above an open prison, and the scheme’s participants were selected only after passing security checks. The men helped to plan the excavation, dug the trenches, catalogued the finds and are now writing the report. They also have curated an exhibition about their work. Phil Harding, the archaeologist best known for his appearances on Time Team, came to the prison to investigate the large number of flints the men had found and told them that they had discovered man-made items that could be 8,000 years old. The concentration was such that they can now mark Erlestoke as a site of human activity in British prehistory. Other finds also enthused. Sam loved the clay pipe he found, while all the men had a special place of affection for the discovery of an HM Prisons cigarette lighter, dated to the 1960s. Many have been inside long enough to remember when they were still in use before the smoking ban. For Henry, release was days away when he was interviewed about the project. He loved history as a child, having visited Pompeii in Italy and the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. “I’m thinking of taking up an apprenticeship — I got involved with it that much,” he said. “I’m glad I’ve done it. It’s opened my eyes to different opportunities.” One of the more modern finds was a 1960s lighter Easter parade Luna Robert, 19 months, enjoyed sunshine and daffodils in Bearsden, Glasgow, yesterday. More typical wet weather returns today. Forecast, page 41 Children say they want more greens More than three quarters of children want to spend more time in nature, research suggests. The National Trust and First News, a newspaper for children, asked 1,000 youngsters aged seven to 14, as well as more than 1,000 of their parents, about access to the outdoors. The poll, conducted by Censuswide in February, found that 76 per cent of children wanted more time in nature and 56 per cent wanted better access. It also found that 80 per cent of parents agreed that the government should ensure children are no more than a 15- minute walk from green space. In January last year Rishi Sunak announced a plan for everyone to live within 15 minutes’ walk of green space or water as part of plans to restore nature. Government figures showed that 38 per cent of people were more than a 15-minute walk from natural spaces. Late last year, The Guardian newspaper reported that the government had rejected making this legally binding. According to February’s poll, 63 per cent of parents took their children to green space once a week or less. Thirtyone per cent of parents from lowerincome households cited cost as the main barrier to accessing nature. Studies have shown that access to green space and nature has numerous benefits for development and physical and mental wellbeing. Cuts threaten national park paths landowners failing to protect rights of way, with obstacles including overgrown vegetation, locked gates and even, in one case, a garage built across a path. Hiking the national parks, from the rolling South Downs to the stepping stones of the Peak District, is one of their main attractions, but keeping the paths clear and properly signposted is becoming harder. Confirmation of the parks’ funding for 2024-25 came only on Thursday last week, leaving authorities uncertain about their budgets until a few short days before the new financial year. Both the Lake District, England’s biggest national park, and Exmoor had faced a £500,000 shortfall in their budgets. These were plugged only by a £5 million cash injection from the government, which was shared equally between the parks. However, several are facing huge shortfalls for future years, forcing them to contemplate cutting measures designed to improve access to nature. The Yorkshire Dales is facing a £4 million hole for 2025-26. Dartmoor is assuming that one of its three visitor centres will close. This year Exmoor will relocate its visitor centre in Dulverton, west Somerset, from the high street to its headquarters elsewhere in the town. The Peak District is weighing up the commercial viability of facilities supporting visitors. The issue facing all the parks is that their collective £48.8 million core grant from the government has been frozen for the past five years. Accounting for inflation, they have suffered a realterms cut of 40 per cent over the past decade. Footpaths are on the front line for potential cuts. The North York Moors, which faces a £200,000 funding gap in 2025-26, said that it was trying to find funding from other sources but could not reduce the costs of maintaining into and across our national parks. They are one of the ways for people to experience and connect with nature within protected landscapes,” Jayne Butler, executive director for National Parks England, said. The funding crunch has cast a shadow over the 75th anniversary of the National Park Act and has caused concerns over the cost of the new park, which is expected to be in the Cotswolds, the Chilterns or Dorset. Nick Hall, of the Campaign for National Parks, a charity, said: “Over a decade of damaging cuts have pushed national parks to the brink, with many forced to sell off public land and shut down vital services such as park rangers to balance the books. “With the designation of a new national park coming soon, the funding squeeze is getting even more urgent.” The government said it was fully committed to supporting the parks. Adam Vaughan Environment Editor The Yorkshire Dales national park has a £4 million hole in its 2025/26 budget

16 Monday April 1 2024 | the times News School leaders should be given suicide prevention training due to high levels of mental illness among teachers, a union has said. Teachers’ mental health is in “crisis” and some staff are being “driven to the point of suicide” by the stresses of the job, delegates at the National Association of Schoolmasters Union of Women Teachers (NASUWT) annual conference in Harrogate were told. A motion called on the union’s executive to campaign for mental health first aid-trained staff in all schools and colleges, as well as fully funded mandatory mental health training. Attendees voted for the union to campaign for suicide prevention training for all school leaders, as well as training for caseworkers and union representatives. The vote came after the death of Ruth Perry, the head teacher at Caversham Primary School in Reading, who took her own life after an Ofsted report downgraded the school from its highest rating to its lowest over safeguarding concerns. Row Martin, a NASUWT executive member who listed the names of teachers who had taken their lives in recent years, including Perry, said: “We cannot afford to lose any more teachers.” The motion, which was unanimously carried, warned of a “rise in suicide, suicide attempts and suicidal thoughts” Teachers in plea to help suicidal staff among teachers. A poll by the union found that 23 per cent of teachers increased their alcohol intake in the past year because of work, while 12 per cent reported using antidepressants. Among the members questioned, three per cent said that they had self-harmed in the last year because of work. The survey, of 11,754 NASUWT members in the UK between October and December last year, found that 84 per cent of teachers have experienced more work-related stress. Claire Ward, a union representative, spoke of a suicidal member who had contacted her to say they had planned to take their life and written their note. She said: “I was shaking. I couldn’t think of anything other than what had happened for days. It woke me up for weeks on and off.” Ward added: “I hadn’t had any official training and the experience left its mark.” A spokesman for the Department for Education said: “We recognise the extraordinary work that headteachers, teachers and other staff in schools provide and we take their wellbeing very seriously. “Our education staff wellbeing charter ensures that staff wellbeing policy is integrated within schools’ culture alongside the expansion of our £2 million investment to provide professional supervision and counselling to school and college leaders.” Emma Yeomans F ans of Marvin Gaye mourning the 40th anniversary of his death today could soon get two new posthumous albums from the singer after a cache of cassettes was uncovered in Belgium (Bruno Waterfield writes). The American spent about 18 months in the country at the invitation of a local music producer. The stay, beginning in February 1981, came at a tumultuous time in his life, coinciding with a cocaine addiction, debt trouble and the breakdown of his second marriage. However, his time in the Belgian seaside resort of Ostend was happy and, after getting fit by jogging on the flat North Sea beaches, he returned to the studio reinvigorated to record Sexual Healing. Forced to leave Belgium abruptly in August 1982 after visa problems, the singer left boxes of letters, stage costumes and 30 cassettes with 13 hours of music behind with the What’s going on? Stash of Marvin Gaye music is found US$800 simply MORE SHORE EXCURSION CREDIT Polynesian Dreams PAPEETE to HONOLULU 15 Days | 15 Sep 2025 | Regatta FARES PER GUEST FROM Penthouse Suite £10,029 Concierge Veranda £8,689 Veranda Stateroom £8,289 TERMS & CONDITIONS: Offers and fares expire 30 June 2024. All fares are per person in Pounds Sterling, valid for residents of the United Kingdom, based on double occupancy – except fares for Solo category are for a single traveller, and subject to availability and may be withdrawn at any time. Complete Terms and Conditions may be found at OceaniaCruises.com/terms FOR MORE INFORMATION CALL 023 8010 2342, VISIT OCEANIACRUISES.COM OR CONTACT YOUR TRAVEL ADVISOR Pre-cruise overnight hotel stay required (not included). FREE Airfare FREE Airport Transfers FREE Gratuities FREE US$800 Shore Excursion Credit FREE Champagne, Wine & More FREE Gourmet Speciality Dining FREE Unlimited WiFi Experience MORE with the best value in luxury cruising.

the times | Monday April 1 2024 17 News afford to keep a roof over their heads, with spiralling rents and rising bills threatening to push many towards the brink of homelessness.” Bristol has become the most expensive place to rent in Britain outside London, with an average private rent of £1,734 a month. There are several reasons that people give for living in vans. Some are trying to escape homelessness or are dealing with addiction and mental health problems. Others say that it is the only way they can save enough money in the hope of affording a deposit for a house. For others it is a lifestyle choice that fits around an itinerant work life or helps them to leave behind the stress of paying rent and bills and living with strangers in shared housing. Adrian, a single lorry driver in his thirties, who did not want to use his real David and Daniela Fernandes raised a family in their home outside Rio de Janeiro, but now they live in a van on a roadside in Bristol and insist that their quality of life is better. The middle-aged couple, who left Brazil four years ago and work as takeaway delivery drivers, are among the hundreds of people living in vans in Bristol that make it Britain’s vehicledwelling capital. “It’s easy to move from place to place and we don’t have to pay rent and all the other things,” David Fernandes, 51, said. The crises in housing and the cost of living have led to a surge in the number of people living in motorhomes, converted vans and caravans on the nation’s roadsides. Bristol has the highest total of any local authority in Britain, according to its city council. In a report, it estimates that 800 people live in 600 to 650 vans and caravans on the city’s streets. Before the pandemic there were about 100 to 150 vehicle dwellers in the city. Marvin Rees, the mayor of Bristol, said that the demographic of people living in vans had shifted dramatically from a lifestyle choice to a necessity. “Our need for affordable housing is huge,” he said in the report. “Households across Bristol are struggling to High rents turning Bristol into UK’s van-life capital name, lives in a row of caravans on the edge of The Downs, an open green area popular with dog walkers near the affluent areas of Clifton and Redland. “I don’t want to be part of six-month and 12-month tenancies and these crazy bidding wars where people put up three and six months of rent to secure a tenancy,” he said. Last year Bristol council carried out a survey of 72 vehicle dwellers. It revealed that 54 per cent were male and 42 per cent were female. Most were aged between 25 and 49 and lived alone. The council said the “most appropriate way” of addressing the rise in vehicle dwellers was to look at increasing the number of sites where vans can be parked and where those living in them can have access to fresh water, can empty chemical toilets and dispose of rubbish. As long as camper vans are taxed and have MOTs, there is little that local authorities can do to move them on. Caravans, which do not need to be taxed or to have an MOT, normally are allowed to be left on residential streets as long as they do not contravene local parking regulations. However, the city council has used injunction orders to force vehicles to be moved if their presence is deemed to be having a high impact on residential streets. Will Humphries Southwest Correspondent family in whose house he was staying. The collection was described as an “unlikely treasure” by Alex Trappeniers, the lawyer for descendants of Charles Dumolin, a Belgian musician who befriended Gaye. Dumolin, who died in 2019, bequeathed tapes containing 66 pieces of complete music by Gaye. Trappeniers will hold talks with a lawyer representing the singer’s three children today. Under Belgian law, any property a person acquires automatically becomes theirs after 30 years, but that does not apply to intellectual property. This means it is unclear which family might have the right to publish the tracks — Dumolin’s or Gaye’s. “Some of them are really full-fledged songs,” Trappeniers told the broadcaster VRT. “I think one song on the cassettes is even as strong as [Sexual Healing]. If we work together — and I assume we will — we could release one or two new albums.” Marvin Gaye, pictured on stage in Ostend, Belgium, in 1981, left behind a set of cassettes including 66 pieces of completed music Rows of caravans line the streets in affluent areas like Clifton and Redland

18 Monday April 1 2024 | the times News because they bang on the wall. My eldest will go to bed with ear defenders on just to block out the music, the shouting, the screaming, the banging. “I never used to suffer with anxiety but I have really bad anxiety going out. I have to really psych myself up to go on the school run.” Despite making multiple approaches to the police, her housing association and other authorities, her case has remained unresolved. A system that seems to favour the perpetrator In another case, a man in his sixties described how he and his wife had faced three years of abuse by their neighbours. This included loud noises at all hours of the day, food waste tipped on their drive, swearing and car headlights being shone into their living room. The man, who asked not to be named, said: “The quality of our life is just awful.” While they were frustrated at the lack of action by the police, the couple later worked with the council to secure a civil injunction. The man added: “In terms of the criminal justice system, everything seems to be in favour of the perpetrator and there’s not enough for the victim. You have really got to go out of your way to prove what they of Victim Support, took steps to fireproof his house. “The strain was huge,” he said. “You imagine: you’re trying to sleep, and you’re being shouted at all night. It’s difficult. The main bedroom is against [the neighbour’s] wall and I still sleep in the spare room. I sleep in the car some nights to get away from it all.” The situation took a huge toll on his partner — who ultimately moved out — and the relationship broke down. Scott wants to sell the house but “will have to declare that there has been that issue, which will put people off”, he added. “It’s a massive worry.” Loud noise turned into verbal abuse Sophie Moore, a mother of two from Norfolk, claimed she was forced to take time off work as a result of the stress and anxiety caused by antisocial behaviour by neighbours. She had been renting privately and, when her circumstances changed in 2021, had no choice but to accept the housing association property that was offered to her. Moore, who is in her twenties and works at a hospital, said that loud noise was the initial problem when she first moved in. This escalated into abuse, with the neighbours screaming insults when they saw her and calling her children “really vile, vulgar names”, Moore claimed. She has gone to stay with family for weeks at a time to get some respite and her children have missed school. Victim Support has given her a personal safety alarm to carry when she leaves the house. Moore said: “My youngest won’t sleep in her room — she’s petrified Ian Scott had only just moved into his new house when he first heard an elderly neighbour loudly shouting at someone several times a day to “shut up”. Because he and his partner lived quietly, they thought little of it and assumed the woman must be addressing someone inside her own property. Scott, 58, from Lancashire, had never imagined this would be the starting point of a three-year tirade of abuse and noise that would lead to the breakdown of his relationship, nights spent sleeping in his car and plans to sell the house. “We had walked into a nightmare,” he said. But for Scott, who works in aerospace engineering, the most exhausting battle was finding a solution. The local council was unable to resolve his concerns and due to the nature of some of the threats, suggested contacting the police, who could not help. He became one of the thousands of victims of antisocial behaviour living across the country who have been bounced between authorities after being told their case was not a criminal matter. “I try not to take it personally. I’m a fairly resilient, strong person — but there were times I was really struggling,” Scott said. Most cases are not classed as crimes According to Victim Support, of the 10,039 victims of antisocial behaviour it helped last year, 81 per cent had been told their experience did not meet the criminal threshold. “We hear time and again from victims that the process of trying to address antisocial behaviour with authorities quickly becomes as draining and distressing as the problem behaviour itself,” said Katie Kempen, the charity’s chief executive. “For years, victims are passed from pillar to post, stuck in a hinterland between housing providers, the council and police. They are often left feeling completely abandoned.” In an initiative starting today, every police force in England and Wales will receive at least £1 million to increase patrols of antisocial behaviour hotspots. While Victim Support has welcomed the efforts, it has raised concerns that the measure stops far short of solving the problem. Alex Mayes, its external affairs manager, said: “I definitely think there is some logic in targeting funding ... where the evidence suggests it is needed. “But the fact of the matter is that antisocial behaviour is something that impacts everybody, wherever you might be in the country. Some of the people we’ve worked with might live in urban areas and high-rise towers, and there are people who might live in rural villages. “People are impacted everywhere and I think what we have at the moment is a bit of a postcode lottery in support and in the approach to tackling antisocial behaviour and supporting victims.” The charity has been among organisations and campaigners backing amendments to the Victims and Prisoners Bill to include victims of non-criminal antisocial behaviour. This would give this group access to the same support services as victims of crime and make them subject to the victims’ code. Complainants passed from pillar to post For Scott, it was unclear who to seek support from and “this is where the whole system falls down”, he said. His neighbour, who was suspected to have a mental illness, was convinced he was running an illegal laundry and her abuse escalated after complaints were lodged. Scott had initially sought advice from a local councillor, who told him that the previous residents had suffered similar problems and advised him to submit a noise complaint. Nothing came of this and the noise and abuse continued. “It escalated to the point of ‘you want burning alive, you should be taken out into the street and flogged’,” Scott said. He continued to talk to the council and said that at one point, he was advised to call the police due to the nature of the threats. They are said to have been unable to help because the abuse and noise was coming from within the woman’s home. The police also said the behaviour was not malicious and that they suspected mental illness, Scott claimed. He embarked on further rounds of calls to the council and, with the help Victims of antisocial behaviour are abandoned and lost in the system Neighbours subjected to threats say seeking support can become as stressful as the abuse, writes Charlotte Wace Ian Scott’s neighbour said that he should be “burnt alive”. Garry Newlove’s widow has fought for action after her husband, right, was murdered in 2007 are doing to you.” In other cases, people have stopped going to work, have become isolated from their families and have had to move houses, leaving jobs in the process. In one case Victim Support is aware of, someone was so afraid to leave their house that they had not seen their son in three months. For one older couple, antisocial behaviour led them to move away from their local area completely. They used to spend time with their grandchildren three times a week but now go for “weeks on end” without seeing them. ‘It was a lovely neighbourhood — but Garry was still killed’ Baroness Newlove, the victims’ commissioner, has been one of the most prominent voices raising awareness of antisocial behaviour and in backing amendments to the Victims and Prisoners Bill. She has vociferously campaigned for tougher action since her husband, Garry, was murdered in 2007 when he confronted a group of youths whom he suspected of vandalising vehicles outside his home. For Newlove, a major concern is how antisocial behaviour is often perceived to be a lower-level problem, but then it can escalate, as she experienced. “We were continuously going through it, [even though] it was a lovely neighbourhood,” she told The Times. “It was only when I’d been to a community meeting that I said: ‘They are not going to do anything until somebody loses their life.’ Little did they know, it was Garry.” In one case study that has emerged during her work, 280 incidents of antisocial behaviour were reported over ten months, including noise, nuisance, anonymous harassment, threats and intimidation. It culminated in a firebomb attack on victims’ property. In the majority of cases Newlove has seen over the years, victims end up moving because the police haven’t resolved the problem. “They think they have nothing else to do but leave, and that doesn’t solve the issue for the next person who comes along, or the rest of the community,” she said. Antisocial behaviour is “a cancer”, Newlove added. “If you leave it untreated, it will just gather pace and I don’t want to see anybody else hurt.” A government spokesperson said: “We know the serious impact antisocial behaviour can have on both individuals and the wider community. “This is why we launched our antisocial behaviour action plan last year, backed by £160 million of funding, to restore public confidence that antisocial behaviour will be quickly and visibly punished. “Since 2010 our communities are safer, with neighbourhood crimes down 48 per cent and violence down 51 per cent.” A source said that as cases of noncriminal antisocial behaviour do not go through the criminal justice system, the measures in the Victims and Prisoners Bill and code are not always appropriate for them.

Never mind the etiquette, a spoon does the business Sathnam Sanghera Page 20 Even Tories seem ashamed of their record With grandees scrambling to distance themselves from the past 14 years, you’d think 2010 was the end of a golden age Comment of grand national decline. In their exquisite self-flagellations they seem to take it for granted that their party is solely to blame for the state of the nation. The trick is to make yourself central to the historic drama while shedding responsibility for what happened in it. If in any real doubt, just blame Boris Johnson for everything. Do players of the Tory blame game realise that they’re in public, on the record? They speak, whether they are One Nation grandees or splenetic New Conservatives, as if they are in private. A defence of the Conservative record across 14 years is anathema to all of them. If they can’t defend their record, why should the public vote for them? The players have accepted some odd, myopic premises. One that will not stand the test of time is that this Tory era is worse than the New Labour governments that preceded it. Serious shortcomings in the British state were apparent under Blair and Brown in everything from Britain’s adventures in the Middle East to a failed £12 billion NHS software programme that cost more than the Iraq war. When they left office, Liam Byrne left a gentlemanly letter for his successors in the Treasury: “I’m afraid there is no money.” What will the Conservatives leave behind them in 2024? Books, podcasts, essays, briefings and interviews all saying the same thing. Never trust us with anything again. It’s a message clear enough to shake Rishi Sunak out of Kirby Sigston. moon-eyed podcasting empath has been breathtaking to watch. The only difference between Stewart and, say, Matt Hancock is the level of educational achievement among their respective fanbases. Both have rippled far away from their party and their time in government. Both bring to mind rodents and the paralysed ships they scurry from. A cynical eye would only see the financial incentives behind these manoeuvrings. A Tory who has made an eleventh-hour conversion to mainstream niceness is a more saleable asset than a nasty one. You can burn your house down, be free of its burdens, then collect the insurance money on the way out. I’m not so sure that’s right. MPs often have rather heroic selfimages. The story that these Conservatives collectively tell is one The latest polling suggests that even Rishi Sunak’s seat may not be safe bravely anonymous cabinet minister under Theresa May. They were judging her Brexit policy. May herself has performed a pivot to respectability so screechingly loud it could burst eardrums. In 2018, May was still secure enough in her record to refuse to apologise for her “hostile environment” policy. She told the BBC that its aim was to “ensure that those people who are here illegally are identified and appropriate action is taken”. This is otherwise known as “having a border” and, although successive Conservative governments have struggled to ensure that Britain has one, it is nothing to be ashamed of. Yet by the time May was publicising her watery memoir last autumn, the words “hostile environment” were “not a good term to use”. Was she writing with an airbrush? Either way, she happily came out as “woke and proud” in another book-pushing interview. You have to wonder what Suella Braverman will have to do to cleanse her sins when she has a memoir to sell. A tearful, heavily photographed mea-culpa visit to that migrant camp in Calais is surely possible. I can’t quite see Braverman on Strictly Come Dancing, although the show seems designed for a bathetic round-one exit by a sequinned Ben Wallace. The most successful players of the great Tory blame game started early. For about ten years, Sayeeda Warsi has chipped away at her old colleagues with drill-like persistence. In different contexts this would look like harassment, but because the baroness has been attacking increasingly unpopular flavours of Conservative government she is celebrated. Rory Stewart’s pirouette from eccentric rural High Tory to T here is no good parking in the village of Kirby Sigston. No school, no pub, no community-owned shop, and no post office. Kirby Sigston’s residents are served by a 12th-century, grade I listed church and by the man who bought the local manor in 2015. The buyer just happens to be the prime minister. Rishi Sunak became the MP for Richmond (Yorks), a constituency of phlegmatic hill farmers, drystone walls and occasional sheep rustlers, which was then one of the safest Conservative seats in the country, in the same year. Back then the Conservatives were desperate to buff their image by pushing (sometimes) reluctant local party memberships into accepting more ethnic minority candidates. Now if a weekend “mega-poll” is to be believed, Richmond is desperate to see the back of Rishi Sunak. A blue rosette pinned to a confused cow could have won this seat for the Conservatives during any year in the past century. Sunak will probably still hold Richmond. But it’s not difficult to imagine him shortly leaving Kirby Sigston and British politics for good. And it’s not hard to ventriloquise his first post-prime ministerial interviews. On some Palo Alto tech festival stage, released from his obsessive spreadsheet management and relaxed by weeks of SoulCycle classes, Sunak could let it all out. He might claim it was a “weird time” in British politics, that he had an “impossible job” made worse by his “irresponsible” predecessors. The bemused Californian crowd, waiting for a more prestigious speaker to come, would applaud politely and ask each other who this guy was. Sunak’s excuses would be hazily registered by the eyes of Yorkshire farmers when they appeared the next day in Richmond’s local paper. Such words will ensure a respectable professional life after Downing Street for Sunak. Distance yourself from your party, from your own record in government, and from what the Conservatives have done to Britain. The prime minister will be late to this ball. The most notable thing about current and former Conservatives is how eager they are to blame everyone else for their conservatism. Last week an impossibly long autopsy of the past 14 years of Tory rule appeared in The New Yorker magazine. Its thesis (Britain is basically Guatemala but with worse weather) was less notable than the candour with which prominent Conservatives attacked each other, while inadvertently shredding their own reputations. George Osborne yakked away (again) about the “lie” of Brexit. The former Treasury hatchet man David Gauke fretted about — of course — austerity going “too far”. Dominic Cummings popped up to accuse Boris Johnson of “cake-ism”. He sounded like a Guardian columnist. “Absolute shit. Abominable,” was the verdict of one Theresa May’s pivot to respectability is so loud it could burst eardrums If MPs are in any real doubt, just blame Boris Johnson for everything Will Lloyd @will___lloyd ASK BETTER QUESTIONS Every week, the TLS publishes book reviews, essays and poems by leading writers from around the world. Surprising, authoritative, often provocative, we inspire our readers to ask better questions. How did Scandinavia go from pillage to hygge? SALE NOW ON Visit the-tls.co.uk or scan the QR code Times Literary Supplement the times | Monday April 1 2024 19

20 Monday April 1 2024 | the times Comment community in Wolverhampton, I first encountered knives and forks at school, and have never mastered using them properly. Though I didn’t grow up eating only with my hands either: my parents encouraged me to scoff Punjabi curries with a combination of chapattis, hands and spoons. If I had to choose one of these implements over all the others, it would be the spoon. Chopsticks are hard work if you want to eat rice. Forks are useless for beans/peas. Knives are an unnecessary fuss. Sauces get messy with your hands. A spoon, in contrast, does all you need: it scoops up and can, if necessary, be used to cut things up. The only problem in Britain, as I discovered in Bristol, is the staring. Never the twain I t was remarkable that I managed to eat anything, given I had just learnt that I was dead. Apparently it was a peaceful demise: although my “physical mobility diminished with age, technology became an invaluable tool” to maintain connections with the world, as I faded away. And the response to my demise was warm: my old college at F amished before a book event in Bristol the other day, I popped into the restaurant with the highest Google rating in the neighbourhood and ordered one of the most popular dishes on the menu. Some chicken with black bean sauce arrived soon afterwards, accompanied by a solitary spoon, which had me reflecting on cutlery norms. It’s a topic I’ve been dwelling on ever since appearing on an episode of Hands Down, a new YouTube show in which the comedian Eshaan Akbar talks to guests over meals eaten, in the traditional way (for Pakistanis and Indians), by hand. He makes the interesting point that people eating with their hands in British Indian restaurants might be asked not to do so, when it’s still the way that billions consume their food on the subcontinent (and elsewhere when it comes to pizzas, burgers, tacos, etc). As for me, growing up in a Punjabi Never mind the etiquette, a spoon does the business Cambridge “organised symposiums and lectures” in my honour. But there was no getting over the downer at the end of the book in my hands: my “earthly chapter” had “quietly closed”. The unnerving revelation came to me via a biography sold on Amazon for £9.99 and published by Ghalaka Press. I’ve not been able to find out much about this publishing outfit, beyond the fact that it seems to have produced a similar “biography” of David Baddiel, who obtained a copy last year and tweeted to say he was surprised to discover it referred to TV shows he had never made, including Jews on the Moon, and claimed he had received a Bafta for his documentary The Boy With the Topknot (my memoir, which was dramatised, not turned into a documentary, without any involvement from Baddiel at all). I don’t know how many other bizarre instant biographies there are out there, or how they’re being produced (with AI? Via cheap labour in southeast Asia?), but it’s surreal, funny and horrible, all at the same time. I know from my journalism training that you can’t libel the dead but is it libellous to suggest that someone is Kahneman captured man’s struggle to endure The pioneer of behavioural economics understood the flawed ways in which we make choices animal instincts pull us back, like the rock that keeps rolling back down in the story of Sisyphus. I think our deep affinity with the messiness of human behaviour also explains why we have a visceral disgust of people who seem perfectly rational: they are inhuman. Thomas Gradgrind in Charles Dickens’s Hard Times is the perfect example. Those who treat life like a laboratory are more alienating to us than nonhuman characters infused with a passionate intensity: this is why John Milton’s Lucifer is so attractive. He is bad — but so humanly bad. There is something humbling about the fact that we share a universal human nature. That beneath our differences in terms of race, sex, class, nationality, family background and upbringing, we are all shaped by a common set of instincts: for recognition, for safety, for love. This provides a robust basis for equality. The fact of our imperfection also explains why compassion is a crucial aspect of any belief system worth its salt. Making mistakes is inevitable; we all do it. We should thus all strive to be forgiving, as much as we can, when others make mistakes. In his bestselling 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Kahneman argued that “we are prone to overestimate how much we understand about the world and to underestimate the role of chance in events”. By emphasising the importance of contingency over certainty, humility over arrogance, we can all become that little bit wiser and better endure the many struggles — significant and quotidian — that constitute human existence. worthy of comic derision but we treat eternal pessimists with reverence. Another profoundly useful concept developed by Kahneman is the halo effect: once we perceive a positive quality in someone, we assume that person has other great qualities. He is an amusing speaker so he must be a terrific leader. She is hard-working so she must be trustworthy. One of the reasons why we get bad politicians is that so many of us fall for this fallacy. I once watched a debate between two people. One was a smooth speaker but was talking nonsense. The other was a dull speaker who was expressing arguments that were evidently true. The audience voted for the smooth speaker by a large margin. Kahneman is famous above all for distinguishing between two types of thinking: fast and slow. Fast is us at our most animal. It is the everyday thinking with which we are all born. Slow thinking, by contrast, requires more effort. It uses our analytical brain: when we break things down, bit by bit, rather than vividly experiencing them in the moment. Kahneman’s thought emerged in the second half of the 20th century but it reflects wisdom that spans millennia. It is intuitively true to anyone with a taste for tragedy and irony that we are all irredeemably flawed creatures. Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex dramatises the pitfalls of trying to control our destiny with reason; the Old Testament is full of characters struggling to make sense of a pitiless world; modern thinkers, from Sigmund Freud to Albert Camus, have used ancient stories to analyse the condition of modern man. We try to be rational but our P addington to Penzance on Good Friday afternoon. This is an ideal place from which to judge the vagaries of human behaviour. The journey from west London to deepest Cornwall was delayed: this was the first frustration. On entering the train, after being pushed and hit by a horde of people with deadly pieces of luggage, my companion and I were relieved. We had made it in one piece into our carriage. Our contentment didn’t last long. We were confused when we saw someone at our table sitting down in a reserved seat without having booked. Our aisle soon became like musical chairs but with pensioners involved instead of little kids. At least we were sitting down. The people standing up looked like human sardines. The grunts, the miscommunication, the fight for physical territory: it was like seeing humans go back to their huntergatherer roots. My companion, the wisest woman under 30 I have ever met, said: “This whole experience has aged me about ten years.” I grinned slightly and thought: “If you think this is bad, imagine living in a third-world country.” The experience reminded me of something I should never forget but sometimes do: humans are irreducibly animal. We are not sovereign beings who act with unsullied rationality; we are shaped by primal desires. This is one of the important insights expressed by the Israeli-American psychologist Daniel Kahneman, who died last week. The branch of social science he pioneered, behavioural economics, is dedicated to exploring the irrationality of man in making individual choices. The New York Times writer David Brooks described Kahneman and his long-time collaborator Amos Tversky as “the Lewis and Clark of the mind” — a reference to the American duo who explored much of interior America under the supervision of the president, Thomas Jefferson. One of Kahneman’s key concepts is loss-aversion. We feel the loss of things twice as intensely as we feel the gain. The pain felt in starting with £100 and losing £50 is more intense than the pleasure of starting with nothing and gaining £50. The bitterness of an old money family on a downward economic spiral is more intense than the sunny disposition of the nouveau riche. No matter how much progress we make as a society, the shadow of loss is ever-present. We have access to an abundant pool of knowledge and culture that would make Plato blush with pleasure. Yet we complain incessantly about how effectively we use it. We find eternal optimists We try to be rational in life but our animal instincts pull us back Sweden shows us the way to defend our infrastructure Elisabeth Braw W ho’s going to look after our critical national infrastructure in case of a crisis or even a war? Don’t suggest the army: the armed forces will be busy attending to duties for which only the military possesses the necessary expertise. This is exactly the dilemma that the government sought to solve when, in the Integrated Review 2021, it promised to “explore options for a wider civilian reserve”. Now Sweden is showing us how to do it. In January, the government reactivated the civil defence duty that existed alongside military defence duty during the Cold War. In its new iteration, the civil defence duty obliges citizens to assist first-responder agencies — and the national grid. Last week the government said that about 1,000 Swedes would be called up for civil defence duty to protect the grid. That figure may rise to 5,000 a year. “Called up” is, in fact, not quite the right term. The civil defenders will be selected from among the country’s population. If you’re a skilled electrician or a talented 18-year-old, you may receive an invitation from the national grid. Once enrolled, you will be trained in tasks ranging from cable repair to staffing power plants. While being selected for such a crucial assignment is a distinct honour (imagine what our western societies would be like without constant provision of power), the service also comes with advanced training of a kind only a few companies can offer. If Sweden’s national-grid service turns out to work anything like Norway’s selective military service, it will be a win-win: for the country, which will be able to form a reserve force of grid defenders that can be called up in case of crisis, and for those selected, who will receive a prestigious entry on their CVs and attractive expertise to boot. Britain’s planned civilian reserve didn’t get very far, although it hasn’t been canned. But Sweden shows what can be done if those in charge decide that protecting the country against every form of harm is a top priority. And the beauty of involving the breadth of the population in the country’s defence is that people will discover they want to be involved in keeping the country safe. The UK could adopt and adapt Sweden’s national-grid duty. Imagine if our National Grid, and the NHS, the fire service, the ambulance service, National Highways and other indispensable agencies each got to select 2,000 to 3,000 crisis trainees. It would be an unsurpassed opportunity for young people to be chosen for highly regarded programmes on the basis of talent alone. And, most importantly, it would make the country safer. dead when they’re not? It’s some consolation, I suppose, that I get to repeat a quote ascribed to Mark Twain on the premature publication of his obituary: “The report of my death is greatly exaggerated.” Speak your weight I was hungry again after the Bristol event and hit the minibar in my hotel room. I don’t have great self control with snacks, and the only reason I’m not the size of a 747 is that I don’t generally allow them near me, sometimes asking my partner to hide things she may have brought home. But the humiliation at the hotel checkout desk the morning afterwards, when I had to list the items I’d consumed, to an audience of five, gave me an idea for a weight-loss programme. Computer-monitored cupboards and fridges for the home, which broadcast your consumption as you eat. We’d all think twice about that box of Pringles if every scoffed crisp was listed on Facebook or, for that matter, in your Times Notebook. Tall tale S ocial media post of the month, from @daveguitarjones on Twitter/X: “Lord Nelson was 5ft 6in. His statue is 17ft 4in. That’s Horatio of 3:1.” Sathnam Sanghera Notebook @sathnam Tomiwa Owolade @tomowolade

the times | Monday April 1 2024 21 Comment Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826 Our privatised utilities are a busted flush Experiment with public services that began in 1979 has not taken account of investor greed and the delusions of CEOs analysis in the Harvard Business Review stated, after much cogitating, the obvious: “The key question is under what conditions will managers be more likely to act in the public’s interest?” Quite. One is competition, impossible in water services and in most of Britain a ludicrous pretence when it comes to railways. Another condition is efficient central regulation, although our spineless quangocracy demonstrates how ineffective that can be. A third is wariness about organisations getting “too big to fail”. Even the Harvard analysts conclude that: “The simple transfer of ownership from public to private hands will not necessarily reduce the cost or enhance the quality of services.” That sentence, a dazzling glimpse of the obvious, should have been spoken to ministers more often from 1979 onwards. But they forgot about human cunning, money-fornothing investor greed and the overpaid self-delusion of chief executives believing their vast dominion will not be allowed to fail. It’s hard for a political party to admit the demise of an idea: easier to prop up privatisation out of sheer embarrassment, just because it was St Margaret’s legacy and because pension funds and foreign speculators will howl. Bankrupt it, pick up the assets dead cheap and run it properly. by the nation under a new government, with harsh financial treatment of its over-rewarded shareholders and managers, there will be more to unpick. It is worth challenging the very principle of privatisation: that if you have to pay out dividends to profit-seeking shareholders, your management needs to be preternaturally brilliant to do the job better than when they could spend all the takings on the actual job (like fixing sewage sensors and building reservoirs). Apart from perhaps BT, few of our privatisations shine. Ofgem has had to fix power prices and bail out companies. The rail industry is swallowing more subsidy in real terms than British Rail did, and while travellers and businesses suffer from strikes, government stands on the sidelines bleating “nothing to do with us”. Look elsewhere and find Royal Mail flogging off valuable city centre sites cheap to laughing developers and wriggling out of its five-day postal obligations. And let’s not start on the Post Office, whose entrepreneurial business management has brought it under suspicion of actual crime. Risk capitalism is fine. It grows economies and enables bright people to have vigorous ideas and sell shares to others willing to take a punt. But clear-sighted national leaders ought to admit its limits. One solemn that any service managed by government employees would always be sluggish compared with the innovative dynamism of “business”. The idea of the marketplace as a bracing discipline flowed from Reagan’s America where, as in Britain, the New Deal and then a postwar mood had brought a lot of big-state ownership. But Reaganomics’ line was “don’t just stand there, undo something”: get government out, because business knowhow knows better. Here the Conservatives (and later New Labour) followed: the Treasury pocketing billions, regulation a skimpy afterthought. Other countries were more cautious: Ireland’s mail, rail, buses and water have stayed public; Denmark’s national grid is state-owned, like the immaculate Swiss railway system and France’s postal service. All work notably well. Scottish Water stayed public and is the most trusted and low-priced utility in Britain. Indeed we are, globally, a notable outlier in having entrusted clean water to private profit. But even if water gets taken back I n these times of anxiety about triggering, spare a thought for all the online warriors unsettled after finding that they agree with Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg. Gulps of astonished agreement met his statement that Thames Water should be allowed to go bankrupt and shareholders lose their equity: “They took too much cash out so deserve no sympathy ... this is capitalism.” As an investment-banking multimillionaire he knows capitalism intimately but what he does not say is the obvious: that it needs putting in its place, which is not to be entrusted, barely supervised, with a monopoly on essential services. Thames Water is failed capitalism. To its financial disgrace, news now adds an engineering one: a third of its sewage monitors are faulty, twice as many as in other companies, so its pollution may be even worse than declared. That failure, like the shortcomings of our other water companies — their ownership now spread from Canada to Abu Dhabi — is spectacular. But it is only one of many screaming indications that privatising essential services is a dead 1980s dream, fit to join Joan Collins’s Dynasty shoulder pads in the dustbin of history. In 1979, when Mrs Thatcher came to power, it was not illogical to sell Labour’s recently nationalised manufacturing industries — steel, aerospace, shipbuilding — back into private hands. Even some on the left thought it might boost international investment and replace weary jobsworth managements with gogetting business-like dynamism. But then re-elections brought telecoms and aerospace into private hands and over the next decade even more critical services: power, railways, water supply and sewerage. By 1990 more than 40 state-owned businesses were sold, often below their potential asset value. The proportion of employees in nationalised industries and services fell from nine per cent of British workers to a mere two. Mostly NHS. One motive was bringing in shareholders’ cash, not only corporate but personal (remember that 1986 “Tell Sid” campaign promising we’d make money out of British Gas?). As we became a nation of householders, they said, we would likewise be a nation of investors: they dreamt it would boost solidity, citizenship and conservatism. The other motive was the belief Scottish Water stayed public and is the most trusted utility in Britain Libby Purves @lib_thinks

24 2GM Monday April 1 2024 | the times World isolation constitute protected speech,” he said, referencing the First Amendment of the US Constitution. “Maybe if you are banging on a dorm-room door, targeting a student, then it constitutes harassment.” A number of views could fall foul of a ban on language that could be seen as calling for genocide. Pro-Palestinian activists say Israel is engaged in genocide so “supporting either side of this could be seen as calling for a genocide,” he said. “Trans activists are saying that bans on gender-affirming care is genocide on trans people, pro-life people say abortion is genocide against the unborn.” The apology Magill later issued, where she said the university was to revise its policies, looked “like a hostage video” to Perrino. Magill resigned in December; Gay, in January, after she was engulfed by a second controversy over allegations of plagiarism. US universities turned disciplinarian after deaths blamed on hazing rituals practised by sports teams and college fraternities and, in the early 2010s, in response to widespread reports of campus sexual assault. Colleges were accused of failing to take it seriously and On the day of Claudine Gay’s inauguration as president of Harvard, there was a cappella singing and Indian folk dancing, and one graduate told the crowd, assembled in the pouring rain, to surround her in one “humongous hug”. She was the college’s first black, female president and would lead Harvard through a reckoning over race, one speaker said. She would be the voice not of one college but of every university in the land, another said. There was “joy and elation” among the staff, a director from the IT department said. It was not just the staff. “We don’t normally talk about administrators in the dining hall,” Jeremy Ornstein, a final-year student, said. “There really was hope.” This soon faded. Within weeks, Gay faced a campus divided like never before. Within months, she had resigned. So had the president of the University of Pennsylvania. At a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses they had both refused to confirm whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their college’s rules. Since the autumn, campuses all over America have been riven by protests over the war in Gaza and claims of a rise in both antisemitism and Islamophobia. Students faced off against each other, wealthy alumnae threatened to stop donating and long-simmering concerns over free speech and the way colleges police the lives of students came to the boil. Harvard was suffering an “annus horriblis”, Steven Pinker, a leading psychologist at the university, said. The tumult was like nothing many academics had seen. “I grew up in the Sixties,” Paul Reville, a Harvard professor of education policy and administration, said. There was the civil rights movement and protests over the Vietnam war and the draft. But students were on the same side against the establishment. “Now for the first time we have two sides,” he added. “Ideological diversity is not one of our strengths. We don’t have a lot of experience with this.” Colleges also faced a barrage of criticism from without. “The university seems to be under attack,” Reville said. So what do the students think about all this? Firstly, it can be hard to find those willing to talk. “It’s been a little uncomfortable,” Harry, 23, a final-year statistics student, who declined to give his last name, said. He was finishing his lunch in the smart concrete and glass science and maths department building. Next year he will start working Claudine Gay said that calls for genocide did not necessarily break Harvard’s rules Free speech and genocide: colleges at war over words in 2011, the Obama administration sent out a letter warning that under Title IX, they could lose their federal funding. Colleges did as they were told, setting up systems for adjudicating complaints. Then, legal observers began warning that students accused of assault were being interrogated without being told of the allegations against them. The Trump administration revised the rules in the other direction, the Biden administration is revising them again. At the same time there have been complaints of colleges cracking down on fraternities, sororities and social clubs. Disciplinary proceedings can result in a probationary period, or a suspension, or outright expulsion. At Stanford, it has been described as a months-long process in which students find themselves corresponding with lawyers. In 2022 the process there made headlines after Katie Meyer, a college soccer player, took her own life. She was accused of deliberately spilling coffee on a student she believed had sexually assaulted a team-mate. She was found dead in her dorm after receiving a disciplinary letter from campus authorities. Suzanne Nossel, author of Dare to Speak, has argued that more stringent rules on parties may have inadvertently fostered division, by forcing students to socialise off campus. A student newspaper, the Harvard Crimson, recently accused the administration of pursuing an “abstinence-only approach to fun”, including by providing “strict guidelines on how parties must be registered, what drinks can be consumed and even how they may be advertised”. At Stanford, a party “may last a maximum of four hours”. Drinking games are banned and hosts must say how they plan to check IDs. Ornstein recalled an official once stumbling upon him and some friends drinking champagne when they returned to college after the pandemic — they were forced to pour it down the lavatory. By US law they were all underage at the time. He was more concerned when a “bulldog-like” professor he respected was reported for being too aggressive. But he is generally optimistic. He thinks the Trump years taught his generation to listen to other views. “I think, more and more, we are ready to hear voices we find repugnant,” he said. “How pathetic it is that so many of us wrote off Donald Trump as a blustering idiot. So few of us reasoned with what he said.” Ornstein says antisemitism is clearly rising. “Recently at a party, someone was saying: ‘Everyone thinks I’m a Jew.’ I said: ‘Do you want to be?’ ” Ornstein recalled. “He said: ‘Yes, I could be rich and control everything.’ I said: ‘You wouldn’t want to be in the generation born during the Holocaust.’ He said: ‘I don’t think it was that bad.’ ” Ornstein sighed. “He was drunk.” But “then, sometimes there is criticism of Israel that is kind of antisemitic but also contains a bit of truth”, he said. What does he say to those arguing that his generation of students are unable to cope with someone who disagrees with them? He frowns and then stretches out his hands. “I say meet me in Tatte!” he cried. “And buy me a cup!” Netanyahu Binyamin Netanyahu said Israel’s war cabinet had authorised military plans to invade Rafah just before he underwent a hernia operation yesterday. “The IDF [Israel Defence Forces] is preparing to evacuate the civilian population and provide humanitarian aid,” the prime minister told a press conference, adding that nothing would stop Israel from entering the southern Gazan city, which is crammed with 1.5 million displaced people. “Not American pressure, not any other pressure.” Netanyahu spoke as he headed for his second operation in less than a year. His office said doctors discovered the hernia during a routine examination. Yariv Levin, the deputy prime minister and justice minister, will serve as acting prime minister in Netanyahu’s absence. The surgery comes at a crucial time for the prime minister, with increasing Gabrielle Weiniger Tel Aviv Protesters marched in Tel Aviv on Saturday, Middle East crisis has led to campus conflict, write Will Pavia in Harvard and Keiran Southern in Stanford A Republican congressman has provoked outrage after suggesting that nuclear weapons should be dropped on Gaza “like Nagasaki and Hiroshima”. Tim Walberg, a representative for Michigan, was speaking at a gathering with constituents. Responding to a question about President Biden’s plan to build a pontoon off Gaza’s coast to boost the flow of aid, Walberg said the US “shouldn’t be spending a dime on humanitarian aid”. Referencing the two Japanese cities where America dropped atomic bombs at the end of the Second World War, he said that “it should be like Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Get it over quick.” Video of the incident spread on social media and the Council on American-Islamic Relations said it was a “clear call to genocide”. A spokesman for Walberg said that the comments were “not a literal statement, but a metaphor to show urgency to defeat these enemies swiftly”. Walberg is seeking re-election in November and could find that his comments backfire at the ballot box. Michigan has one of the largest Muslim populations in America. At the Democratic presidential primary election in February more than 100,000 Michigan voters marked their ballots “uncommitted” to signal fury at Biden’s refusal to demand a permanent ceasefire. ‘Hit Gaza with nuclear bomb’ Hugh Tomlinson Washington at a hedge fund. “I’m very pro-free speech,” he said. But “there is an overwhelming feeling that one half of the campus hates the other”. The day was overcast and a wind whipped across the plaza. Mili Costabel, 21, a political science undergraduate, sat on a concrete bench, her dark hair blowing about, her guide dog, a black Labrador named Indio, nuzzling her knee. “You might be able to speak freely,” she said. But students think: “What are the consequences for us, in the university, and for our careers?” There was a feeling that “you have to be really careful”. When student groups led by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee released a letter hours after the October 7 attacks, holding the “Israeli regime entirely responsible for all the unfolding violence”, the hedgefund billionaire Bill Ackman said he and other chief executives wanted the names of anyone attached to those groups, “to ensure that none of us inadvertently hire any of their members”. A conservative non-profit group deployed a truck with a digital billboard to the campus, displaying photographs of students under the banner: “Harvard’s Leading Anti-Semites”. “That was kind of crazy,” a graduate student named Claire, who teaches in the engineering school, said. “It felt arbitrary who was on the truck and who wasn’t.” Ornstein, a social studies student, is the grandson of Holocaust survivors. He saw the faces of friends on the truck. He said the feeling on campus was one of “tense nerves”. He is 23 and earnestlooking, with pink cheeks, brown eyes and a scratchy moustache. He met me in a café called Tatte that was full of students reading or tapping away at laptops. “The best of Harvard is scholars who want to be right but are ready to change their mind. They want to argue with you,” he said, rocking on his stool. The thing that he liked about Gay, when she took over at Harvard, was the way she spoke. “I remember the feeling of a clear stream,” he said. “I had confidence in her.” This was shaken by her appearance before a Congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses. Gay and Elizabeth Magill, president of the University of Pennsylvania, were asked by Elise Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman, whether “calling for the genocide of Jews” violated their college’s rules. Both said it depended on the context. Nico Perrino, vice-president of the Foundation for Individual Rights, that monitors free speech on campuses and is often highly critical of Ivy League colleges, thinks they were right. “The conversation preceding that question was all about “globalise the intifada” and “from the river to the sea”. These are chants that in

the times | Monday April 1 2024 2GM 25 The thought of her pious, law-abiding husband being dragged away by the Israeli military, forcibly conscripted or put in jail for desertion, makes Hadassah call out for mercy. “God forbid they try to take him, God forbid,” the 25-year-old repeats. Her name has been changed here to protect her in the ultra-Orthodox, insular Haredi community in Bnei Brak, east of Tel Aviv, where it is not advised to speak without first receiving permission from the rabbi, or at least her husband. “If they come for him, he will not go, even though he is of age. Our husbands’, brothers’, fathers’ studies are our lineage, our reason for existence. It’s the most important thing in the world,” Hadassah says. Some women in the community feel their husbands and sons may nevertheless be conscripted as Israel moves to draft ultra-Orthodox 18 to 26-year-olds into the military, an existential battle for the identity of the state that some see as a declaration of religious war, and which at the very least threatens to tear apart the coalition government. Today Israel’s military will begin to draft members of the community who have thus far avoided conscription by annually claiming exemption for their religious studies. Those yeshivas, religious schools, which fail to send their students to military service will have their funds frozen. The deal with Israel’s Haredi community, which makes up 13 per cent of the population, has been in place since the state was founded, but that settlement is now being shaken by the need for soldiers in the war with Hamas. Aaron Rabinowitz, an Israeli journalist who specialises in Haredi affairs said that what was once a sustainable conscription immunity for the community in the 1970s, which then made up 2.5 per cent of Israel’s youth, has broken down. Almost a quarter of Jewish 18-year-olds are Haredis, who should otherwise be joining the army. “The Israeli army has said, ‘No, we can’t sustain this any more’,” Rabinowitz said. “So on Monday, the majority of boys who were supposed to recruit in July last year, thousands of yeshiva students, are now criminals on paper, and therefore the government cannot fund them. As time passes, more and more will become criminals.” Some members of the Haredi public are willing to go to prison rather than join the army, which they see as a secular institution that will corrupt their carefully protected way of life. “We are in the most critical time, where we should be uniting, but they are killing us from the inside,” said Rabbi Avraham Menkes, who leads demonstrations against the ultra-Orthodox draft that often turn into violent clashes with police. He has previously been jailed for his activism and his son, Arik, 18, will face jail for desertion. “We’re beached whales,” Menkes said. “We’re committing suicide if conscription to this anti-democratic, radithat one blood is worth more than the others.” For Koehler and his movement of reservist soldiers, Brothers and Sisters in Arms, the failure to enact a law to draft ultra-Orthodox young people is just an effort by Binyamin Netanyahu, the prime minster, to cling to power, possibly at the cost of losing the war. “[Netanyahu] proves he is good for draft dodgers. The Titanic has already hit the iceberg, and he is still only busy with political survival,” the group said in a statement. “To win, the army needs soldiers, and in a war of existence, everyone falls under the stretcher.” Brothers and Sisters in Arms clashed with Haredi residents of Mea Sharim and Geula, two ultra-Orthodox neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, over the conscription exemption law. For Hadassah, conscripting religious men instead of allowing them to study will bring down the whole nation. “We say the Torah holds up the Nation of Israel. Without study, the army wouldn’t succeed. If my husband doesn’t study ... the soldiers cannot win in war.” Draft law tears up 80-year deal with ultra-Orthodox cal left and anti-religious army comes to pass, right at the moment where we need to stay united.” Menkes accused Israel’s army of being a secular melting pot that is not reflective of the country’s complex Jewish identity. While he leads a more radical Haredi sect, the belief that contributing to the country via religious studies is equal to army service is prevalent. “People who study Torah are in service of the state,” said Tzippy YaromDiskind, a correspondent for the Haredi newspaper Mishpacha. “These people that aren’t willing to see that — it hurts, it’s a betrayal. The people who give their lives to study also guard and protect the country. Without the Torah, Israel would have disappeared a long time ago.” Israel is working on legislation that will extend compulsory military service for men and women and call reservists for longer periods each year. The war in Gaza has only further energised critics of the Haredi exemption. Ronen Koehler, 60, a reservist navy captain who petitioned the Supreme Court last August to rule Haredi draft dodging as illegal, said: “Before the war, when we appealed to the Supreme Court, we would have said it’s unfair, it’s unjust. But now, it makes me furious, Israel Gabrielle Weiniger Bnei Brak How Orban came under threat from a former ally Page 28 The bears of Ukraine are winning their own war Page 26 Bnei Brak ISRAEL WEST BANK Two miles Tel Aviv demanding the resignation of the Israeli prime minister, who they say has been an obstacle in talks over Hamas hostages approves Rafah invasion pre-surgery pressure from families of Israelis held hostage and the public for him to step down. The international community has also increased its demands for a ceasefire as the war in Gaza reaches the six-month mark. For the first time, on Saturday night relatives of Israeli hostages called for Netanyahu to step down, in the largest demonstrations held. Netanyahu said new elections would “bring Israel and the negotiations to a standstill for at least eight months in the midst of war”. At the main protest in Tel Aviv, 50,000 people took to the streets. Some dressed as hostages with their wrists bound or in cages. Twenty families of the 134 hostages called on the longtime prime minister to step down. Einav Zangauker, whose son Matan, 24, is being held in Gaza, said: “From this moment on, we will act to immediately remove [Netanyahu] from power.” The families and survivors of the October 7 massacre united with the weekly Saturday-night protest on Kaplan Street in Tel Aviv to bring down Netanyahu. Clashes took place between protesters and the police, with one officer accused of pushing the father of Liri Elbag, a female soldier and hostage. Forces used water and sound cannon to push back the protest, and 17 people were arrested. The change in tack from the relatives of hostages marks a challenge for the prime minister who has, until now, had a mandate from them and freed hostages to bring back the captives. “Prime Minister Netanyahu, after you abandoned our families on October 7, and after 176 days in which you didn’t achieve a deal, and because you are continually engaged in torpedoing a deal, we have realised that you are the obstacle to the deal,” Zangauker said. “You are the obstacle. You are the one who stands between us and the return home of our loved ones.” “From now, we will work to immediately replace you. … We will demonstrate and demand your ousting. We will publicly hound you.” The protesters continued yesterday, setting up a “tent city” outside Israel’s parliament, the Knesset. The demonstrations took place as Netanyahu sent a delegation to Cairo in renewed hostage negotiations. The Gazan ministry of health, run by Hamas, said 17 Palestinians were killed on Saturday as they were waiting for food aid at the Kuwaiti Roundabout in Gaza City. The Israeli army said it had “no record of the incident”. At least 32,782 people have been killed in Israel’s military campaign, most of them women and children, according to the health ministry. Meanwhile in Israel, police shot dead a suspect in a knife attack in a bus terminal in the southern city of Beer Sheva. There have been knife and carramming attacks across Israel and the West Bank since the war began.

26 2GM Monday April 1 2024 | the times World tion centre in Ukraine, home to 31 bears who were either abandoned or mistreated in captivity. Among its residents is Nastya, brought there as a cub after hunters killed her mother. Bundziak said wildlife was also benefiting from growing environmental conscientiousness. The country lags far behind European Union standards, but there have been gradual improvements over recent years, including stricter punishment of animal cruelty and many new national parks, of which Synevyr, founded in 1989, is the oldest. “People understand that conservation is the sign of a civilised country,” Bundziak said. Additional reporting by Viktoria Sybir The Ukrainian poet and musician Serhiy Zhadan is set to join the ranks of the Ukrainian National Guard’s 13th Brigade, Khartia, and even plans to create a military radio station. Zhadan has emerged as one of Ukraine’s most lauded writers, with his 2021 novel The Orphanage winning him a nomination for a Nobel prize. Artem Dmitrichenkov, the trumpeter in Zhadan’s ska-punk band Zhadan I Sobaky, said his 49-year-old colleague had “mobilised”, and hoped to create a radio station, called Radio Khartia, for the brigade. Many have reacted strongly to Zhadan’s decision, with researchers and academics describing the news as “heartbreaking”. He had previously said “there are no writers, musicians” but rather “citizens of Ukraine who feel responsible for their country, and there are citizens who are trying to avoid this responsibility”. As Russian aggression results in advances in the east of the country, mobilisation has quickened in Ukraine. Zhadan has been an extremely active volunteer, helping to transfer aid to the front and touring relentlessly with his band since Russia launched its fullscale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, performing around the country and across Europe to raise morale and funds. Zhadan was born and grew up in Starobilsk, in the Luhansk region, but is now based in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city. Although the population is largely Russian-speaking, the Ukrainian language has seen a big resurgence there since Russia invaded. Zhadan himself writes in Ukrainian but grew up speaking “Surzhyk” — a combination of the two languages. Since 2014 his writing has gravitated towards depicting the bleak struggles and difficult winters of the ordinary civilians who are living in besieged eastern Ukraine. bear population in one part of the Ukrainian Carpathians had grown from 90 in 2021 to 104 last year. The population of lynxes had grown from 120 to 137. This year the government said that the war had caused about £44 billion of environmental damage. “But on the other hand there has been an amazing comeback of wildlife because of the hunting ban. For the first time in a long time the animals have been left undisturbed,” Mykhailo Nesterenko, head of the non-profit Rewilding Ukraine, said. Synevyr is known for its lake. Local legend has it that there were once star-crossed lovers called Syn and Vyr; when Vyr was killed by his prospective father-in-law, Syn cried so much her tears formed the lake. Nearby is the largest bear rehabilitaOne morning last autumn, Yaroslav Bundziak arrived at work to find that someone had stolen his honey. Smashed and oozing in the grass lay what remained of two beehives. He knew straight away that this could only be the work of one culprit. “A few years ago you would never get a bear coming so close to human habitation,” said Bundziak, head of the Synevyr National Park bear rehabilitation programme, deep within the Carpathian mountains in southwest Ukraine. But now a ban on hunting, prompted by the outbreak of war, may have begun an unlikely resurgence. Only a week ago two hikers had made a rapid descent from one of the peaks above a nearby village after they found bear prints in the snow. “The fact we are seeing them here is a sign that the bears are thriving,” Bundziak said. Three thousand years ago brown bears roamed throughout Europe, from the Wicklow Mountains in Ireland to the forests of Anatolia. Today – excluding Russia, where there are thought to be more than 100,000 — there are only about 15,000 in Europe, scattered across the continent in pockets of wilderness. By far the largest enclave is in the Carpathian Mountains, where roughly 8,000 bears live, mostly in Romania and Slovakia. In Ukraine, a tenth of which is covered by the mountain range, there are estimated to be 300. Experts blame hunting. After the fall of the Soviet Union there was a decade when trophy hunters would pay thousands of pounds for a permit to shoot a bear, reducing the population from about 600 in 1991 to less than half that by 2000. In 2003 bears were put in a national list of protected species, but a study in 2020 by the World Wide Fund for Nature estimated that hunters were illegally killing 40 to 50 a year. Their luck may be changing since a ban on hunting imposed after the Russian invasion in 2022 to restrict firearm use and keep civilians from stepping on mines in the countryside. A study shared with The Times by the ministry of ecology found that the Bears of Ukraine winning their war Ukraine Tom Ball Synevyr, Carpathian Mountains Celebrated poet to join the ranks Aliide Naylor Brown bears were once common throughout Europe but they are now thriving in Ukraine in rare pockets around areas like Lake Synevyr ROMANIA Carpathian Mountains SLOVAKIA UKRAINE Synevyr National Park 50 miles on a gurney, I photographed the boy. Doctors quickly discharged Mohammed as they struggled to cope with the flow of wounded soldiers and civilians coming in. He would have died within days were it not for Save the Children, the P ain is no longer his constant companion. Memories of the flames have faded from his mind. The deep scars remain, though these, too, have softened with time. Yet lies about his injuries still chase him. When I spoke with Mohammed Hamid last month, it was four and a half years since, at the age of 13, he had been set ablaze during the Turkish bombardment of his street in Ras al-Ayn, after a sudden US withdrawal from key areas in northern Syria precipitated an attack upon Kurdish-led forces there. I first saw him one morning in Terror is fading for horribly burnt boy accused of being fake news October 2019, when he was rushed into a field hospital run by Syrian Kurds in Tal Tamr, northeastern Syria, his upper torso and arms terribly burnt. The boy’s father, Hamid Mohammed, described how a Turkish airstrike the previous night had set the street alight: “He was on fire. Even when we had ripped his clothes from him, it seemed the fire would not stop.” The burns were unusual, both in their intensity and the resistance the flames had shown to being extinguished. Weapons experts suggested the injuries may have been caused by white phosphorus munitions or by an improvised shell used by Turkey’s Syrian militia allies. White phosphorus is used by Nato armies for smoke cover, but its use in civilian areas is banned. Mohammed had 70 per cent burns (40 per cent fourth-degree burns, and 30 per cent third-degree) and his terrible screams silenced the lesser wounded and quieted the chatter of the medical teams. Once he had been given morphine and put British charity, which arranged for his immediate evacuation for treatment in northern Iraq. From here, after the direct involvement of President Macron of France, Mohammed was flown to Paris for treatment. Yet even before the first of seven skin grafts, Turkey — stung by the accusation that it had used incendiary shells on a civilian area — launched a counter-narrative. Despite the boy’s injuries having been extensively documented by journalists and staff in the field hospital in Tal Tamr and his appearance in a burns unit in Paris, Turkey alleged that Mohammed Hamid was an actor, part of a conspiracy to discredit Ankara. “There is no redness in the eyes, no shortness of breath,” a newsreader for TRT, Turkey’s state broadcaster, said. Those days seemed far away when I met Mohammed, who now lives with his family at a refugee camp outside Al-Hasakah, a fortnight ago. By any standard his survival is remarkable, a testament of childhood resilience and survival. “Luckily, I remember little of those times,” he said. “When I returned from Paris, I had to spend the next two years living inside, and missing out on school, just to keep my burns out of sunlight. But now I’m back in lessons and can move around as I please. The pain took a long time to go, but it has left me.” In October last year the counternarrative changed tack. A Turkish reporter posted the photograph I had shot on Twitter/X claiming that he was a Palestinian boy burnt by Israeli white phosphorus in Gaza. “I have recovered as best I can,” said Mohammed, “and try not to think about the war at all. But it seems that in Turkey people will always try to hide what was done to me, make it fake news, or blame it on someone.” Anthony Loyd from our correspondent hassaka, syria Mohammed Hamid pictured in hospital and as he is today

the times | Monday April 1 2024 27 World The French have long enjoyed a reputation for effortlessly staying slim while enjoying fine food and wine, but these days they are having to try harder to keep their figures. With nearly half of adults in France overweight or obese, many upmarket restaurants have become minimalist, trimming portions. Now, however, there appears to be a backlash against doctors’ strictures and peer group pressure to garder la ligne. France’s latest foodie craze is for “gonzo” restaurants that serve traditional dishes in the copious quantities that earlier generations enjoyed. Buffets or large portions are the order of the day at restaurants such as Les Grands Buffets in Narbonne and Pedra Alta in Paris. François Simon, a prominent food critic and author, said the growing popularity of such establishments was an table. It offers an all-you-can-eat buffet for €57.90, but Louis Privat, the owner, said its “revival of the classic French feast does not put quantity above quality. We cater for bons vivants. People don’t come to eat like Gargantua. They eat copiously, but the idea is to savour the pleasures of traditional fine French cuisine with elegance.” Privat said his restaurant followed the precepts of Auguste Escoffier, the The Mayor of Orleans has accused President Macron’s government of sending migrants from Paris to his city before the Olympic Games. Serge Grouard said that 519 migrants had arrived since May last year under a programme described by charities as the “social cleansing” of the capital. The government said that Orleans was one of ten towns and cities to which the homeless were being transported. victory over the English to end the siege of Orleans in 1429. “They’ve been trying to do this in secret,” he said. The government said that of the 519 people sent to Orleans, 146 had been given a bed in a shelter for asylum seekers, 335 had been put up in emergency housing and 38 had left the area. Locals, however, say that many have ended up on the streets of the city. Grouard claimed that their presence could reverse a fall in crime in the city, where offences recorded by the police Adam Sage Paris French forget about waistlines and feast their eyes on portions of past France David Chazan Paris “anarchistic reaction against the diktats of a society that urges us to weigh our food, eat five fruits, five vegetables and exercise”. Simon, rumoured to have been the inspiration for the character Anton Ego, the food critic in the 2007 animated film Ratatouille, wrote in La Tribune: “We must see in these tables of dietetic despair a sort of food adrenaline rush.” Visitors to Les Grands Buffets will find an abundance of food that would have delighted Gargantua and Pantagruel, the giants with colossal appetites depicted in the 16th-century novels of François Rabelais. The menu includes iconic dishes such as canard au sang (pressed duck in a sauce of its blood and bone marrow), hare à la royale (braised in red wine and served in a sauce made from its heart, liver and blood), lobster à l’Américaine (cooked in a tomato, garlic and brandy sauce), calf’s head with gribiche sauce (made with egg yolks and mustard) and a 30m-long cheese 19th-century chef and author, often called “the father of French cuisine”. At the three Pedro Alta restaurants in Paris the portions are huge. Specialising in Mediterranean dishes and seafood, it offers “royal rice” for two with two lobsters, eight king prawns and crab for €74.80, or prime rib for two with roast potatoes at €42.90. In their search for haute cuisine that will not leave your waistline bulging, Parisian chefs are increasingly influenced by Asian cuisine. But Privat said: “We are losing ... our traditional cuisine.” Simon said the servings were generous enough “to give a Scotsman a stroke”. He cautioned against overindulging in the vast selection of desserts, with pastries crowned by Crème Chantilly whipped cream, and likened the “gonzo”experience to driving “the wrong way down a one-way street with a smile on your face ... and glimpsing ecstasy before final nausea”. Paris accused of ejecting migrants before Olympics Ministers denied that the transfers were linked with the Olympics. They said that with shelters in the Paris region full, the aim was to find beds outside the capital. A total of 3,800 people had been bussed to provincial cities in the past year and not all were migrants, they added. Grouard was unconvinced. “They want to empty Paris of its migrants,” he said, adding that coaches had started to arrive just after last year’s annual parade to commemorate Joan of Arc’s dropped from 8,659 in 2001 to 1,661 last year. “Orleans must not become the new crack hill,” he said, in reference to a wasteland in north Paris known as the Colline du Crack because of the number of drug users. Amélie Oudéa-Castéra, the sports minister, said: “On the difficult and sensitive question of emergency housing [for migrants], decisions are taken every week in France and that’s got nothing to do with the Olympic Games. There is no social cleansing.” Penguin eggs for a different Easter treat South Africa Kate Bartlett Johannesburg South Africans have been encouraged to forgo chocolate eggs this Easter in favour of “adopting” a real penguin egg to protect an endangered species. Since January the Southern African Foundation for the Conservation of Coastal Birds has been incubating 200 African penguin eggs, rescued from two colonies in the Western Cape province. The species could be extinct by 2035, the foundation said. A century ago there were up to three million of the penguins in South Africa and Namibia, but now there are fewer than 10,000 breeding pairs. In the past decade South Africa’s population has fallen by 55 per cent because of commercial fishing, which is depleting their main food source of anchovies and sardines. About 600 chicks are rescued each year around the Cape of Good Hope, mainly birds abandoned during weather events such as extreme heat or flooding, Ronnis Daniels, the charity’s resource development manager, said. Once the eggs hatch, the chicks are hand-reared for four months before their release into the wild. Egg “adoption” costs about £13. For double the fee you can “adopt” and name a penguin. Peruvian president in Rolex raid Peru Stephen Gibbs Latin America Correspondent President Boluarte of Peru has said she will not resign after a raid on her private residence by police investigating allegations that she failed to declare at least 12 luxury watches she owns. “I took office with clean hands and thus I will retire from the presidency in 2026,” she said in an address to the nation, calling the raids disproportionate and abusive. Before dawn on Saturday, about 20 police officers and prosecutors searched her home in Lima, in an operation broadcast live on television. They used a battering ram to enter the property as Boluarte’s son was apparently slow to open the door. The investigation began two weeks ago, shortly after a Peruvian podcast detailed the collection of expensive watches and jewellery the president had been seen wearing at public events since she took office in December 2022. One report claimed she wore a Rolex worth more than £14,000 at an event in which the theme was battling poverty in vulnerable populations. Public prosecutors took up the case, amid suggestions that Boluarte could have broken laws against unlawful enrichment and failure to declare assets. Peru’s elected officials are required to declare any personal assets worth more than 10,300 soles, about £2,500. Boluarte, 61, a former lawyer, said the watches had been acquired over many years from her accumulated earnings. Peru has an unmatched record in prosecuting its presidents. All six who have been elected since 1990 are either in jail, have been in jail or have faced a detention order. Little angels Filipino children dress up for a procession where the images of Jesus and Mary meet at the St Peter Parish and Shrine of Leaders in Quezon City, Manila Traditional meals such as lobster à l’Américaine are proving popular

28 Monday April 1 2024 | the times World An obscure Hungarian official has come from nowhere to upend his country’s politics, threatening to bring down the once unassailable Viktor Orban, Hungary’s populist leader. Known most widely for running the country’s student loans authority and for being the former spouse of Judit Varga, the high-flying justice minister, Peter Magyar, whose surname means “Hungarian”, has become a political megastar. He is the first of Orban’s closest allies in the Fidesz party to publicly break with him, promising to oust the nationalist prime minister after a torrid few days of corruption allegations and bitter fighting with his former wife, who has remained loyal to the government. With many television and radio appearances since accusing Orban and Antal Rogan, his cabinet chief, of corruption, Magyar, 43, has become one of the most popular figures in Hungary, with polling putting him on a theoretical 13 per cent of the vote. “Until a few weeks ago, Magyar was virtually unknown. Now he is dominating conversations and headlines in Hungary, causing discomfort for Orban and the government,” said Anna Donath, a liberal MEP and a leader of the Hungarian opposition. His revolt is the first significant Orban faces threat from former ally turned rival crack in Orban’s famously loyal inner circle, of which Magyar was once seen as a key part. One veteran Hungarian conservative, who has known Orban since they were young dissidents under the communist regime in the 1980s, believes that dissent among the ruling figures of Fidesz will lead to the government’s downfall. “Viktor has always managed to keep his circle loyal or under control,” he said. “When that loyalty breaks, that is what will bring him down, not the opposition, who are useless.” The son of a lawyer, Magyar joined Fidesz in 2002, before the party was the dominant force in Hungarian politics, which separates him from opposition socialists and liberals who are tainted in voters’ minds by close links with “progressive” American and European Union funding. Hungary’s marginalised opposition is hopeful that Magyar could turn around their fortunes. “We will only be able to overthrow the Orban system with one or more ex-Orbanist groups and cadres,” Sandor Revesz wrote in Heti Vilaggazdasag, the opposition newspaper. Not long ago Orban, Europe’s longest-serving prime minister, was predicting an earthquake for populists and nationalists in European elections, where Varga, 43, would be the party’s multilingual, pan-European face. Then, on February 10, everything went wrong. Katalin Novak, an Orban protégée and the president of Hungary, was forced to resign for giving a presidential pardon to a care home official who had helped to cover up a paedophile scandal. The pardon had come at the request of Zoltan Balog, a bishop and head of the Hungarian Reformed Church, who is close to Orban and Fidesz. Varga, who signed off the pardon while justice minister, also was forced to resign. Magyar, the father of her three children, leapt to her defence, accusing Orban of hiding “behind women’s skirts” and launching himself as a public opponent to the government. Magyar has proved his worth in political combat with a vendetta against Rogan, 52, a key cabinet minister who is in charge of national security and is seen as a potential heir to Orban, 60. On March 15, the holiday marking Hungary’s antiHabsburg revolt of 1848-49, Magyar stole the show by launching a “Stand Up for Hungarians” movement in front of a huge crowd in Budapest. Last week Magyar threw a political grenade with the publication of a recording of him talking to his wife in January 2023, when she was justice minister. The recording appeared to suggest that Rogan had pressured prosecutors in a big bribery case. It was made last year in the MagyarVarga family home as their marriage collapsed into acrimony. Hungary Bruno Waterfield was an agreeable life, very satisfying.” Lijian Villoria, a Sister of St Joseph, said: “We didn’t have roots here, but we grew up together and created a community. We are like a privileged tribe, the colonisers.” Settlers at Gevora near Badajoz and a modernist detail from Llanos del Sotillo near Jaen. Franco wanted to transform barren territory Catholic church went hand in hand. Mili now works the land in Nuevo Francos, a thriving village. It remains intact — unlike others built E milio “Mili” Martin recalls the day he arrived aged four at his new home (David Sharrock writes). “I’d never seen anything like it. All the roads were paved. All the houses had bathrooms with taps.” The Martins were among thousands of families during the Franco regime who moved to settlements inspired in part by the kibbutz movement. An exhibition in Madrid shines a light on the world of the 60,000 people who took part in fascist Spain’s greatest urbanising project, intended to transform barren territory through large-scale waterworks irrigating the land. Mili’s father was a baker who leapt at the opportunity of a home with 15 acres of land and a new life in a village built to the precepts of the Falangist movement, in which self-sufficiency and proximity to the Franco’s rural utopias shed taint of fascism under the auspices of the National Institute of Colonisation, established when the civil war ended in 1939. A law passed in 2022 banned all public exaltation of the fascist regime, including place names alluding to the dictator. There are 300 “Franco” villages whose architectural and artistic value has gone unnoticed. An exhibition at Madrid’s ICO Museum shows how the villages were praised in propaganda films as Spain’s version of Stakhanovism, rebuilding the nation through engineering and labour. Less remarked upon has been how a generation of architects created villages of significant Modernist value from scratch in the least expected of places. A young group of artists were contracted by the ministry to decorate churches with sculptures, frescoes and mosaics. Mili said: “I started work when I was eight. It might not sound it, but it QUEEN MARY 2’S Literature Festival at Sea 2024 Departure November 13, 2024 CALL TODAY ON 0808 239 9455 thetimes.co.uk/litfest2024 QUOTE TIMES Scan the QR code with your camera app to view more details. SEVEN NIGHTS FROM* INSIDE: £1,419 PP BALCONY: £1,719 PP GRILL SUITE SOLD OUT OUR TRUSTED PARTNERS *Cunard Fares shown are based on two adults sharing. Fares for sole occupancy and supplementary fares are available on request. For full terms and conditions visit cunard.com. ‡Cover charge applies for alternative dining options. †Programme of Literature Festival at Sea talks are included in your fare. Literature Festival at Sea workshops will be at an additional charge and are available to book on board. Other activities may incur an additional charge. 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PRICE INCLUDES Seven-night Transatlantic Crossing on board Cunard’s Queen Mary 2 from Southampton to New York Economy-class flights and transfers from New York to the UK All meals and entertainment Programme of literary events throughout the voyage Complimentary money to spend on board Access to additional events when you book direct with Cunard and quote TIMES Ruth Jones Louise Minchin Mark Billingham Find yourself in literary heaven, surrounded by authors, poets, journalists, historians, and fellow book lovers, on this seven-night sailing, dedicated to the power of the pen. Curated by the programming team of Cheltenham Festivals, this unique voyage celebrates the written word in its many forms. Sailing aboard Queen Mary 2 is the ultimate way to cross the Atlantic. You’ll find an incredible sense of freedom from the space she offers. Whether you’re in the mood for complete relaxation or something more active, you can find it. 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30 Monday April 1 2024 | the times Business operation or in construction. China has an estimated 100. Despite our pretensions to be a major industrial player, the UK has only one, appended to the Nissan car plant in Sunderland, which is promising to build three electric models later this decade. A gigafactory has just begun construction in Somerset for Jaguar Land Rover but production will be a few years off yet. Another gigafactory for as yet undisclosed customers could spring into action at the site of the old Coventry Airport. Jaguar says it will only build electric cars from 2025 but at this point in its reand the electric-only Polestar, was at 26 per cent. But there are significant laggards: Stellantis, which includes Peugeot, Citroën, Vauxhall and Fiat, was only at 13 per cent in 2023. Nissan and its partner Renault were at around 8 per cent. Ford, which has been promising a big bang in moving to electric in 2025, was at just 3.5 per cent last year. Meanwhile, the electric car manufacturing industrial revolution has thus far mostly passed Britain by. On the European mainland, there are 35 gigafactories or production facilities for electric car batteries, in charging at motorway service areas, and though the majority of homes in the UK have access to home charging we also need action to address the far higher price of public charging. Otherwise there is currently much less of an incentive for many to make the switch.” The other major barrier to the transition is the capital cost of electric cars themselves, which is typically at least 50 per cent higher than their petrol equivalent, at a time of continued high inflation and high interest rates contributing to tightened consumer spending. That may change with more lowerpriced models coming on to the market, especially from China, but there is still no single electric car in the showroom that could be described by many as “affordable”. The good news is that electric cars could tumble in price this year because of the introduction by the government of the zero emission vehicle (ZEV) mandate. New AutoMotive reckons carmakers could resort to double-digit percentage discounts of up to £10,000 in an effort to shift vehicles in a stalling market. In broad terms, the ZEV mandate demands that carmakers sell at least 22 per cent of their vehicles as zeroemission products in 2024 or face financial penalties. Some major brands will be slashing prices to achieve the requisite volumes, according to New AutoMotive. In its latest report on the electric car market, State of the Switch, the consultancy says: “We predict that consumers can expect price cuts and discounts — potentially up to £10,000 — for sales of some new electric vehicles, especially from the brands that make up the Stellantis family, as well as Nissan and Ford.” It continues: “This will cut — and potentially eliminate altogether — the price differentials between battery electric vehicles produced by these manufacturers and their petrol and diesel equivalents.” Its data indicates few brands are already meeting the target in the UK. Tesla as an electric-only manufacturer, obviously does. Mercedes-Benz, including Smart cars, is at 31 per cent of all its sales in zero emission. BMW, including Mini, was still below 20 per cent at 2023 year-end but its proportion of electric car sales is trending up sharply. MG, the old British brand now owned and assembled in China by SAIC, was at 28 per cent while another Chinese maker, Geely, owner of Volvo 1 Minimum wages rise by over £1 an hour today, with younger workers set to benefit sooner from higher rates. The national living wage rises from £10.42 to £11.44 an hour in the top band and the age at which it is paid is being cut from 23 to 21. 2 Research by Adzuna, the jobs search engine, has identified almost 300,000 “anti-hustle” job advertisements that explicitly promote a work-life balance, the highest level in five years. 3 The US banking group American Express has dashed the hopes of thousands of British pensioners, telling them it is freezing their pension payments for the tenth year in a row. 4 About half of British households think their property cannot cope with hotter summer weather, which risks putting more pressure on the electricity grid. Without better home insulation, energy consumption required for cooling could almost double by the end of the century, the think tank Green Alliance estimates. 5 The house of the former agent of the England football manager Gareth Southgate has been repossessed after a disastrous £25 million commercial property investment involving Fortress Capital Partners. Financial difficulties at Round World Real Estate UK, a company owned by Terry Byrne, have led to the repossession, according to an insolvency report. 6 Business leaders’ optimism about the year ahead bounced back last month amid signs of recovery in the UK economy. The Institute of Directors’ economic confidence index stood at -12, an improvement on its reading of -25 in February. 7 Most women working in the financial services sector believe they are unfairly paid, according to a survey by eFinancialCareers, the recruitment company. Just 23 per cent said they felt they were fairly paid. The gender pay gap in the sector is over 20 per cent. 8 The UK’s newest and largest indoor music arena, opening in Manchester this month, will be the first all-electric venue in the country. Co-op Live, which will have a capacity of 23,500, has been called Europe’s “most sustainable” venue. 9 Activity in China’s manufacturing sector expanded for the first time in six months in March in a sign that recovery in the world’s secondlargest economy is gathering pace. The official purchasing managers’ index for manufacturing rose to 50.8 from 49.1 in February, according to China’s national bureau of statistics. 10Does size matter? William Whitaker, Skipton’s own Willy Wonka, thinks it doesn’t. He leads his family-owned chocolate manufacturer with the goal of creating a “better, not a bigger business”, an aim that led him to drop his largest customer during the pandemic. Need to know Is UK running out of road In the first of a fourpart series, we look at the obstacles in the way of EV carmakers and the progress so far Cumulative electric vehicle registrations in the UK Total cumulative UK car sales of all fuel types 1m 800k 600k 400k 200k 0 2m 1.5 1 0.5 0 2019 2020 2021 2022 2023 J F M A M J J A S O N D Gas Diesel BEV Hybrid Petrol 2023 Power trip continued from page 29 Football agent’s home seized liabilities, Begbies said. Round World Real Estate UK has also reached an agreement with Begbies to buy out the security on the Wigmore property for £320,000, it added. However, Begbies said that because of the difficulties of Round World Real Estate UK and insolvency proceedings, Byrne’s house has been repossessed. It is unclear who has repossessed the house or its address. Meanwhile, Byrne’s Round World Group also received £160,000 from Fortress and is in default on the loan, according to Begbies’s report. A demand for a repayment of about £660,000 has been made, including interest. “No payment has yet been made and it is believed that the whole group is insolvent and this remains under review,” Begbies has told Fortress’s creditors. Byrne did not respond to requests for comment. Disabled talent pool ‘being ignored’ The main political parties could boost businesses’ access to talent as well as win over voters by developing policies that allow more disabled people to join the workforce, according to the chairman of Scope, the disability charity. Sir Robin Millar, an award-winning music producer turned executive who has been blind since his teens, believes disabled people have been left behind in the progress companies have made in improving inclusivity among their employees. He points out that disabled people often have “founder” on their email signature as they find themselves having to set up companies themselves. Millar is the founder of Blue Raincoat Chrysalis Group, the independent record label and artist management company. He produced the classic 1980s album Diamond Life by Sade. “Last year I was announced by Power 100 as the most powerful disabled person in the UK in business and finance,” he said. “I’ve built run, sold and rebuilt businesses now worth hundreds of millions, including music firm Blue Raincoat Music, bought in 2019 by a US Nasdaq-listed company. “I’ve done this from scratch. No one has ever offered me a job — least of all a major plc or a FTSE 100 company who, at the last count, did not have a single declared disabled CEO. But if I’m the most successful disabled businessperson in the UK, what does that say about opportunity today? It says there are no disabled people running a single large plc. It says little has changed since I started out over 40 years ago. “Without people in power realising the value of including us in the conversation and setting out an action plan for giving us opportunities, the UK is missing out on a huge talent pool.” Millar says that the next government should introduce legislation that requires companies to report on the number of disabled people they employ. Parties are putting the finishing touches to their 2024 election manifestos. “Under their noses is a golden opportunity to win the support of half the country, a demographic never considered by focus groups,” he said. “There are 16 million disabled people in the UK. If we include a brother, a sister, a spouse or a parent, suddenly that’s over half the voters who will decide who governs Britain.” Tracey Boles road to zero emissions One in six new cars registered in the UK every month are now fully electric, indicating that we are on the road to widespread adoption of zero-emissions vehicles. In Britain last year, 300,000 new pure battery electric cars were registered. Estimates suggest that the number of zero-emission cars on the road in the UK should top 1.3 million by the end of this year. Compared with the rest of Europe, Britain is towards the front of the grid in battery electric adoption: a little behind the Benelux countries where battery electric sales are one in five, but significantly ahead of Germany where the figure is one in nine. While the UK total may seem a large number, it still amounts to only 3 per cent of all cars registered in this country. And we are only 11 years away from the government banning the sale of new cars with internal combustion engines. For the motoring public, the two main hurdles to fully embracing the electric revolution are cost and progress on charging infrastructure, which creates “range anxiety” for drivers fearful that they will run out of charge during their journey. The public recharging network may be growing at a rate of 40 per cent a year but there is still only one charging point for every 20 electric cars; not enough 20-minute fast chargers; and an uneven distribution around the country and even among neighbouring towns and boroughs. In short, consumers believe they cannot rely on the infrastructure to prevent them being caught short on the open road. Baroness Worthington, environmental campaigner, crossbench peer and chairwoman of the electric motoring consultancy New AutoMotive, says action is needed “to resolve the mess of Robert Lea Industrial Editor Sir Robin Millar says disabled people often set up their own firms

the times | Monday April 1 2024 31 Business Cost of car insurance is on the way down The rapid rise in the cost of car insurance over the past two years appears to be over, with premiums slowly starting to fall. The average fully comprehensive premium was £892 in February, according to the comparison site Compare the Market, up 46 per cent on the same month last year but down from a peak of £951 in November. The market researcher Consumer Intelligence also found that price rises in car insurance premiums had flattened out. Premiums for new customers rose by 59.7 per cent between February last year and December, but have fallen slightly since. Ian Hughes, chief executive of Consumer Intelligence, said there were signs that the rise in the cost of car parts, repairs and second-hand cars, which had driven up premiums, had eased. “This caught insurers out at first and they have been playing catch-up, but this has now peaked,” he said. “Given that most consumers shop around, insurers will look for ways to bring those costs down as quickly as they can.” Two of Britain’s largest insurers suggested last month that the pace of premium rises had peaked. Milena Mondini de Focatiis, chief executive of Admiral, said the insurer had slightly cut some of its prices to be more competitive as cost pressures had eased. Last week Direct Line, which has had to increase its premiums over the past year to rebuild its balance sheet after it was caught out by rising claims inflation, said the rate by which it increased motor premiums would fall from 24 per cent last year to an estimated 20 per cent this year. However, home insurance prices do not appear to have peaked. Compare the Market said the average combined buildings and contents quote rose to £209 last month, up from £159 a year ago and £193 in the last three months of 2023. As with car insurance, insurers have been hit by the higher cost of building materials and labour. An index published by the Building Cost Information Service consultancy, which tracks the rebuilding costs of homes, found a property would cost 33.4 per cent more to rebuild in January than in 2021. George Nixon fully electric by the end of the decade. The barbs from political and industrial commentators have been that Britain has been “asleep at the wheel” or “sitting on the sidelines” or simply “failing to compete” with the rest of Europe and the rest of the carmaking world. There is still time to get it right. British factories may not have been an earliest adopter in the electric revolution but the coming half decade will dictate how much the UK remains in the global automotive game. 6 Tomorrow: Why the charging infrastructure is failing drivers and how the problem could be solved imagining as a Tesla of the West Midlands, that means it will be building a mere one model next year. Bentley in Cheshire had planned to be all-electric by 2030 but has now admitted that the success of hybrid models carrying a petrol engine, and cash flow coming in from them, means that its deadline has been quietly dropped. Aston Martin in Warwickshire has yet to coherently voice its road map to go electric. Mini at Oxford has lost the contract to produce next generation electric Minis to a BMW plant in China, though its German parent is still promising that Mini’s UK operations will be on its electric ambitions? Source: New Automotive O ver a century of fossil fuel-powered road transport is coming to an end. By 2035 every new car, van or light truck sold in Britain will be zero emission — electrified or, perhaps, hydrogen-fuelled. The UK has a legal commitment to achieve net zero by 2050. Road transport, the country’s biggest carbon emitter, must lead this change. Most vehicles — and there are 40 million in the UK — stay on the road for about 15 years, so the logic of the 2035 end-of-sale date becomes clear. To get there, the UK has a mandate that compels an increasing proportion of new car and van sales — up to 80 per cent by 2030 — to be zero emission. But mandates don’t make markets. Fleet renewal will depend on cost, convenience and choice. We have choice: more than 100 electric cars, 20 electric van models, a similar number of electric HGVs and a nascent hydrogen sector. But despite impressive growth, the electric vehicle (EV) market remains at the early adopter stage. We need to move to mass market, and fast. Key to that is cost, ensuring an affordable transition for all. Zeroemission vehicles are inherently more expensive, with batteries roughly treble the cost of an engine. Industry is driving down those costs, but more is needed. Compelling incentives are already spurring businesses and fleets to go electric. Private retail buyers, however, have no similar support and are holding off. There are other inequalities. Carbon-cutting technologies such as heat pumps and solar panels incur no VAT. Buy a car, however, and you’ll pay 20 per cent VAT whatever its emissions. Temporarily halving VAT on new EVs would save the average private buyer about £4,000, putting 270,000 more electric, rather than petrol or diesel, cars on the road and cutting CO2 . Additionally, cancelling the distorting vehicle excise duty “expensive car supplement” — to which most EVs are likely to be subject from next April — would send the right message, and reducing VAT on public charging from 20 per cent to 5 per cent to match home charging would make EV use fairer. While zero-emission cars and vans get most attention, heavy vehicles are the biggest contributor to road transport emissions. Progress is being made. The UK is Europe’s biggest zeroemission bus market, with almost half of all new buses electric or hydrogen. HGVs, meanwhile, serve a vast variety of uses — from refuse vehicles to cement mixers, longdistance haulage to retail delivery. Decarbonising such operations will take a range of technologies, including electrification and hydrogen. But with operators facing higher capital expenditure, a paucity of charging infrastructure, planning constraints and grid delays to depot upgrades, uptake is low. The HGV grant, state funding to roll out up to 370 zero-emission trucks, covers only a fraction of models. Convenience is another key barrier. EV charging should be as easy as refuelling. Most will still need to top up at public points and EV drivers routinely cite chargepoint infrastructure as inadequate. We must build ahead of need, so there should be binding chargepoint targets aligned to EV targets. Government has set the world’s most ambitious targets; now we need equally ambitious policies to help on cost and convenience, to speed up the switch and put Britain in pole position for clean, green transport. Mike Hawes is chief executive of the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders Mike Hawes Comment We need ambitious policies to speed green transport switch Green shoots of recovery in economic optimism poll Business leaders’ optimism about the year ahead bounced back last month as signs of green shoots in the UK economy started to emerge. The Institute of Directors’ economic confidence index stood at -12 in March, higher than its reading of -25 in February when it suffered an “unexpected low”. The index gives a net reading of answers to the question: “How optimistic are you about the wider UK economy over the next 12 months?” The business lobby group’s survey also found that director confidence in prospects for their own organisations rose to a measure of 42, up from 37 in the previous month; and expectations of increasing investment levels increased to 18, from 13 in February. Roger Barker, director of policy at the institute, said: “Although it would be premature to claim that the economy has definitively turned the corner as recently asserted by the prime minister, our latest poll figures do argue in favour of some emerging green shoots.” A monthly economy tracker from Lloyds Bank showed economic growth had broadened across the UK’s private sector to reach a 10-month high in February, raising hopes that the economy has come out of a short-lived recession. An index from GfK showed consumers’ confidence about their personal finances hit the highest level in more than two years in March, while Bank of America’s survey of fund managers indicated they are feeling more optimistic about the outlook for the global economy than they have in two years. Jessica Newman Women in finance feel unfairly paid The majority of women working in the financial services sector believe they are unfairly paid, according to a study. The survey of 6,000 respondents, by the recruitment company eFinancialCareers, showed big differences in salary satisfaction between men and women working in the sector in the UK. Just 23 per cent of women surveyed said they felt they were fairly paid. The pay gap in the sector stands at over 20 per cent, with men working in the industry earning an average of £55.16 per hour compared with £45.46 per hour for women. “Whilst there’s been significant progress in the last six or seven years, it’s still not enough to really change that imbalance,” Peter Healey, chief executive of eFinancialCareers, said. Salary satisfaction was found to change throughout a career. The only age at which women felt more satisfied with their salary than men was in their twenties, when their salary satisfaction peaked at 36 per cent compared with 35 per cent for men. By the time women are in their forties, only 18 per cent believe they are fairly paid compared with 28 per cent of men. “What you can see is, at entry level, things are pretty similar in terms of pay and confidence,” Healey said. “But then as you get into the late twenties and then more senior positions, the disparity is created. “The year-on-year increase from a bonus perspective was more significant for males than for females and that probably does drive some of that sense of ‘Am I being fairly paid?’” The study also exposed a job security gender gap among financial services workers in the UK: 58 per cent of men said they felt secure in their job compared with 48 per cent of women. “A lot of our data is coming from investment banking, private equity, hedge funds,” Healey said. “They are some of the areas where there are the biggest challenges when you look at the disparities.” Last month a report from the Commons Treasury committee recommended that the threshold for businesses reporting on gender pay gaps be widened to include companies with more than 50 employees, stricter than the current 250-person requirement. The committee report found the financial services sector had the widest gender pay gap of any UK sector. In 2022-23 the average pay gap in financial services companies was 23.7 per cent, compared with 11.7 per cent in all other industries, according to PwC. This pay gap widened even further in large banks, with HSBC reporting a mean hourly pay gap of 43.2 per cent and Barclays 42.9 per cent. Emma Taggart

the times | Monday April 1 2024 33 Comment Business Paul Johnson Favouring the low paid has backfired on the public sector David Wighton I f generative artificial intelligence is going to transform our lives in the way experts have predicted, what skills will be needed to thrive in this new world? Will it be “hard” technology skills or “soft” people and communications skills? The answer is not obvious, judging by a session I chaired at a recent conference. “Engineering, mathematical, computer-driven skills: it’s all about computer science. That’s the area you’ve got to be specialist in,” Alasdair Haynes, founder of Aquis Exchange, a challenger stock exchange said. Er, not exactly, replied his fellow panellist Anna Anthony, UK financial services managing partner at EY. “The skills our people will need will be the things that computers can’t do … the relationship-building, the ability to have a conversation, all the faceto-face stuff,” she told the Financial Services Skills Commission conference. In truth, the difference between them was not quite as stark as it sounded but it highlighted the huge uncertainty over the impact of AI. Some experts reckon it will reduce the demand for core technology skills. Emad Mostaque, founder of the London-based startup Stability AI, has predicted that there will be no human computer programmers in five years’ time. Few would go that far, but generative AI technology dramatically increases the productivity of human coders. If it continues to improve, could that ease the current shortage of coders and other technology staff? Not really, says Matt Candy, managing partner for generative AI at IBM Consulting. Every company, from carmakers to law firms, is becoming a software business, building software applications alongside their existing products and services. So companies will continue to need more technology specialists. However, at the same time generative AI will “democratise” programming, with non-technical employees able to turn their ideas into code. Softer skills such as creativity, problem-solving, critical thinking and collaboration “are going to be critically important”, he says. Quite what balance of these skills will be needed by businesses is hard to predict but one thing seems pretty clear — there will be a big training challenge. Companies will not be able to rely on the education system or poaching from their competitors, they will have to find or develop the skills to use AI effectively within their existing staff. If the enthusiasts are right, the potential rewards are huge. The good news is that more UK companies are early adopters of generative AI than their counterparts in the United States, China, France and Germany, according to a recent PwC survey. The bad news is that the record of UK companies on training is dismal. Spending is half the European Union average and has fallen by a fifth per head in real terms over the past decade. This has exacerbated the UK’s skills shortage, which is only going to worsen as the population ages. Poor training may be one reason why British companies’ productivity is low, despite spending on IT being higher per head than in France and Germany, according to figures from Gartner, a technology research firm. The answer, according to Andy Haldane, former chief economist at the Bank of England, must involve more spending on training and more collective action by companies to raise skills in their sectors rather than a self-defeating strategy of poaching rivals’ staff. Some industries are already well down that track. In finance, for example, the industry set up the Financial Services Skills Commission in 2020 to address its widening skills gap. Some AI experts believe employees won’t need that much formal training in the use of the new AI tools as these will be so intuitive. They will be like apps on your phone that you can work out how to use by yourself. Maybe. But how many of us, particularly those of a certain age, make the most of the technology we already have in our pockets? Training will surely be one of the key factors that will decide the winners in the AI race. David Wighton, a former business editor of The Times, is a columnist for Dow Jones Companies must spend more on skills to be winners in the AI race since time immemorial. But that means that what has happened over the last 15 years has not been some form of correction, or approach towards the private sector norm. Quite the reverse: it has pulled public and private sectors even further apart. The signs are beginning to become quite clear that we have taken this too far: doctors’ strikes and teacher shortages being among the most obvious symptoms. Sometimes people who are paid more than the national average do have a case for being paid even more. In the end the market will force our hand. If we want high quality, highly qualified people delivering vital public services then we can’t let their pay fall ever lower relative to what is available elsewhere. Actually, there is another option. We could rely on international recruitment. We have become used to recruiting many of our doctors and nurses from overseas. Last week we learnt that more than a quarter of applicants for initial teacher training are from outside Europe. While acceptance rates are low overall, more than half of those accepted for training as physics teachers come from abroad. Not that we are anywhere close to recruiting as many as we need. Are these the first steps to a school system, like our health system, heavily dependent on recruiting from India, sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere? Naturally a government claiming to want to restrict numbers of immigrants doesn’t trumpet this as its policy, any more than it has trumpeted changes in visa rules to bring in tens of thousands of care workers. But that is the choice it is making. As with so much else over recent years, the treatment of public sector workers seems to have been determined year by year, crisis by crisis. There is no hint of a long-term strategy, no sense of direction. The consequence: strikes, staff shortages, large-scale immigration to paper over cracks, and a public realm that is increasingly struggling to deliver the services on which we all rely. I wrote a fortnight ago about how this Tory government has been rather more redistributive through the tax system than you might expect. They have cut direct taxes for those on modest earnings, while raising them for the rich. Their unexpectedly socialistic instincts have also characterised policy towards the 5.7 million or so members of the workforce who are employed by the state. Not by increasing their salaries overall to be sure, quite the reverse, but by increasing the pay of low earners while squeezing the highest earners, and squeezing them hard. As my colleagues Jonathan Cribb and Laurence O’Brien showed in a recent paper, the 25th percentile of public sector earnings — that is, earnings a quarter of the way up the distribution — increased by 16 per cent in real terms between April 2007 and April 2023. Meanwhile, the 75th and 90th percentiles of public sector pay (the higher earners) fell by 8 per cent and 10 per cent respectively. In 2007 pay at the 75th percentile was 2.4 times higher than pay at the 25th percentile. By last year it was just 1.9 times higher. That is quite some compression. Pay in the private sector has also compressed — lower earners have done better than higher earners — though the differences are nothing like so stark. Because men tend to earn more than women, this period has also seen a considerable closing of the gender pay gap within the public sector: average pay for men has fallen by more than 10 per cent, while for women it has grown by about 4 per cent. Some of this will be down to changes in the composition of the workforce. If automation means that government is employing fewer staff doing low-skilled administrative work, as has happened in some parts of the civil service, that will have an effect. But most of what we see in the figures can be traced to deliberate policy decisions. Three times since 2010 there have been pay freezes for most of the public sector, but with exemptions for the lowest-paid. Meanwhile senior civil servants, doctors and experienced teachers have been singled out for especially harsh treatment. The pattern is clear within different professions. Experienced teachers have lost out relative to newly trained ones. Classroom assistants have done better than both. In the NHS, consultants have seen the biggest pay cuts, followed by other doctors, then nurses. Some support grades have had modest pay increases. Senior civil servants have fared worse than their more junior colleagues. Policy towards public service pensions has pointed in the same direction. These pensions remain far more generous than anything available in the private sector. But reforms since 2010 have tended to hit the highest-paid hardest, both by increasing their contributions and capping the value of their pensions. Some of the reforms have, albeit somewhat inadvertently, even been to the benefit of some lower-paid workers. Hence the closing in the pay gap will actually understate the extent to which overall rewards have been equalised. Splendid, you might be thinking. A bit more “fairness” in the pay distribution is all to the good. If you’ve got limited resources, then obviously it’s best to focus them on the lowest-paid. An economist might make a slightly different argument. The government is almost the only employer of doctors and most teachers. There are, by definition, no private sector civil servants. Once you’ve served a few years in such specialist occupations in the public sector you’ve started to limit your outside options unless you’re willing to retrain and start again doing something else, or willing to move abroad. Government is exercising its market power on behalf of the taxpayer. To some extent that has always been the case. Pay has been more compressed in the public sector than in the private “ ’’ Paul Johnson is director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Follow him on @PJTheEconomist The gender pay gap in the sector is closing, with women seeing their pay increase by 4 per cent For the latest financial and economic news from our business editors, subscribers can sign up to the business newsletter by going to ‘My newsletters’. To try a digital subscription, visit thetimes.co.uk/trial or scan the QR code Expert business analysis straight to your inbox SUBSCRIBE TODAY DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION

34 Monday April 1 2024 | the times Business beautiful fudge, the most expensive in the world, and it was selling, but it was taking up space.” In its place he brought in engineering expertise that had been outsourced previously to firms that kept going bust. The skills were needed to maintain and improve production lines, such as its dozen high-speed foil-wrapping machines, which package 300 to 400 pieces of chocolate a minute. It was also able to make some of the components that regularly wore out. The next piece of the jigsaw was to invest in automation. New chocolate box erecting and flow-wrapping lines were added, enabling six skilled operatives to be moved to other tasks and taking output from two million boxes of fondant creams to three million, many of which now end up in overseas markets such as Canada and Australia. “If we hadn’t focused our mind on how to do our own production line better, which required space, we would not have been able to do it,” Whitaker said. “Our biggest customer William Whitaker, pictured below and Yorkshire’s Willy Wonka on road to golden ticket D oes size matter? William Whitaker, Skipton’s own Willy Wonka, doesn’t think so. He leads his family-owned chocolate manufacturer with the goal of creating a “better, not a bigger business”. This pursuit of excellence led him to drop his largest customer, a wellknown chocolate retailer, in the midst of the pandemic. At the time it represented about 15 per cent of his £10 million annual sales. Whitaker, 63, a Yorkshireman, would rather make money than be a busy fool, chasing low-margin work for another brand. The decision, taken without outside help, has resulted in new product lines, orders and a fresh approach for Whitakers Chocolates. The company, founded in 1889 as a grocery shop before becoming a confectioners, is perhaps best known for its fondant creams, mint thins and, more recently, dark chocolate gingers. “The factory is filled with smells: the aroma of chocolate and, depending on the flavour of the day, it might be coffee, strawberry, mint,” said Whitaker, the great-grandson of the founders John and Rebecca who has worked in the business for 45 years, 30 as managing director. Most of the ten million chocolates it makes each week end up in supermarket own-label boxes or as the single chocolates presented by hotels, airlines and restaurants at the end of meals, but they are also sold directly to consumers. Its work for its competitor began in 2010 when the retailer decided to close its own production in Britain (Whitaker still cannot name the brand). “It was a bit of an accolade to end up producing for our competitor. It gave us volume and the opportunity to learn,” he said. By the start of 2020, Whitakers generated half its revenues from the food service sector and the rest from retailers. Then Covid hit and food service in effect stopped for a year, taking Whitakers’ dependence on its retail competitor to as much as 30 per cent of sales. The first lockdown also resulted in the temporary closure of the factory and warehouse and it provided Whitaker with an opportunity to rejig the layout, working with Ben Rowland, his head engineer. “What we did was realign the whole factory floor. If you can imagine, when you are putting in new parts and processes and machinery in a fixed space, over time you have to put them where there is room and not necessarily where the best place is for the flow.” Two mezzanine floors were built in the factory, adding 3,000 sq ft to take the total to 40,000 sq ft, freeing up space for Whitaker’s next idea. By properly assessing the cost of producing his competitor’s products, he realised that it was not paying him enough to contribute to his overheads. After making its Christmas orders in 2020 he bit the bullet and told the competitor that he would not renew their contract, giving a year’s notice. It came back and asked for a one-year extension on better terms, before the relationship came to an end in 2023. Free to scrutinise every part of his factory, Whitaker realised that he should stop producing fudge, a sideline but one that was dear to the family as it drew on a recipe handed down from his grandmother. “It was Business Times Enterprise Network T enterprise network manufacturing Big decisions have paid off handsomely for William Whitaker and his company, reports Richard Tyler The Story is the new name for our daily news podcast, Stories of our times. Hosts Manveen Rana and Luke Jones take you to the heart of the stories you need to know, plus there will be monthly agenda-setting interviews from William Hague. Listen for free via the QR code, on the Times Radio app or wherever you find your podcasts New name. New hosts. More in-depth stories. LISTEN NOW AUDIO

the times | Monday April 1 2024 35 Business T Enterprise Network News, inspiration and advice for business leaders on how to run and grow their companies as the UK economy recovers from the impact of the coronavirus Sign up now for The Times Enterprise Network’s weekly newsletter for tips and insight from leading entrepreneurs thetimes.co.uk/ten Cocoa, said last week that “this surge, fuelled by climate change and market speculation, is shaking the foundation of chocolate production and pricing, putting smaller chocolate companies at risk”. Whitaker recognises the challenge: “We have two hard years ahead with all the issues in the market, but we are better placed to deal with them.” Profits have taken a hit, as capital expenditure has doubled to £300,000 a year and the company raised its prices by only 5 per cent in 2023, when 10 per cent was required. “It was an expensive decision, but it has proven correct in terms of the value of the turnover over the last two years, which is back up to where it is, even without [its old big customer].” His plan to keep up the pace of modernisation, over four years, has proven more daunting. “For the first two years that was pretty good. Then, when you realise you have to do it for another two years, you think, ‘Wow, I probably underestimated it a bit.’ You have to think of it as effectively accelerating your investment. You would have done that over eight years, but you have put yourself in a position to capitalise on it. You could not do a halfway measure.” He also has one eye on the future as he has no children involved in the business. “I have to prepare for the possibility of a management buy-in, or a buyout. I have to be flexible,” he said. with Ben Rowland, his operations manager, at the redesigned factory in Skipton, has big plans for his chocolate maker Business You might not be for turning, but sometimes I am May’s tenure as prime minister, dominated by a calamitous Brexit, led to near-constant media coverage of her decisions being labelled as indecisive “flip-flops”. Meanwhile, figures like Churchill are lauded for their pragmatic and tactical shifts in position. His political alliances morphed several times before and during the Second World War and he famously shifted from a defensive to an offensive strategy following the entry of the United States into the war. It is unimaginable for a great, strategic leader such as Churchill to be accused of something as flippant as a flip-flop. So the phrase “I changed my mind” felt blasphemous to me for many years. Recently, however, I read that Apple had cancelled its multibillion-dollar electric car project. Apple, one of the most impressive and influential companies in the world, has changed its mind. Is this a failure? A few years ago, back in 2021 when Tesla’s market cap was peaking at $1 trillion, Apple’s original move made a lot of sense, but the data has changed. This year, BYD has beaten Tesla’s production for a second consecutive year and the market is now significantly more saturated, with huge bottlenecks around charging infrastructure and battery production. When the data changes, as a good leader, you have the right, perhaps even the responsibility, to change your mind. Upon launching my company into the US market, I decided to deploy a mirrored approach, using the data I had on all the things that worked best for us in the UK and replicating them. This included a sales strategy that was primarily targeted at media agencies, such as WPP and Publicis. A year later, I have learnt so much about the US advertising landscape. I have learnt that the agencies may be in New York, but their clients are spread across all 50 states — PepsiCo in Connecticut, Lay’s in Dallas, Ford in Michigan, McDonald’s in Chicago, Nike in Oregon — and, perhaps in part because of these huge distances, the agency-client relationship is vastly different. So I have new data. The decision was a two-way street and now it is time to reverse. I am reallocating our sales resources and rethinking our outreach. It is daunting, but this new decision has also generated fresh energy and a renewed sense of direction. Just as a chef perfects her knife skills and a barrister powders her wig (I assume?), a truly strong business leader must learn how to hang a U-ey with grace. Amy Williams is the founder and chief executive of Good-Loop, a B-Corp registered technology platform that encourages people to engage with online advertisements by paying for their time through charity donations ‘You turn if you want to. The lady’s not for turning.” Well, sorry Margaret, but this lady loves to hang a U-ey. Since moving to America and opening Good-Loop’s first US office just over a year ago, I have spent a lot of time thinking about decisionmaking. Not least because the decisions I made 12 months ago are still knocking down dominoes today: some I placed in neat, beautiful rows, others I had no idea where they would lead. As chief executive, decisionmaking is essentially my full-time job. Well, that and making great PowerPoints. Man, I make a lot of PowerPoints. Realistically, though, once your business reaches a certain size, the only time the chief executive is meaningfully pulled into something is when a tough decision needs to be made. In his autobiography, Barack Obama talks about how no decision that landed on his desk had an easy, tidy answer. If it did, someone else on his team would have already been empowered to make it. I really like this idea that if your job as a leader is extremely hard, that is a good sign that the team you have built around you is well oiled and effective at handling almost everything else. So if my full-time job is decision-making, I had better be halfway decent at it. The first element of any decision I make is data. What is the information available? How can I gather it and understand it as effectively as possible? The reality is that I can never know if I have made the best decision, but I can know if I made it based on the best data available to me at that moment. The second consideration is the nature of the roads forking ahead. Are they one-way streets or two-way streets? This is the very useful idea, popularised by Jeff Bezos, that irreversible decisions should demand much more of your attention than reversible ones. My team and I are getting better at asking each other “Is this a one-way street?” and, if the answer is no, that permits us to be more agile. This brings me to the third consideration, my personal favourite, the U-turn. For many years since founding my company, I was honestly terrified of the U-turn. As a young, female founder, quite used to being the youngest and/or female-ist person in the room, I have always been careful to project an image of strength and gravitas. Indecision has long been a staple of the prejudice women face in and out of the boardroom. Theresa “ Amy Williams Indecision has long been a staple of the prejudice women face in and out of boardrooms doing a deal with him on the bits of machinery I wanted. By that summer, in the spare space in the factory that we had vacated from saying goodbye to our customer, we installed a really high-value, low-maintenance production line [for the chocolate gingers]. The value per tonne was twice that of our previous customer.” The changes were happening while the business was being buffeted by soaring energy, labour and raw material costs — the latter has accelerated, with cocoa prices hitting a record high of $10,000 a metric tonne, a 400 per cent increase from last year. James Cadbury, scion of the famous chocolate-making family who has founded his own brand, Love had become a barrier for us to develop other processes that we were good at, but needed to get very good at.” With the fudge gone, Whitaker was “a product short of a full house”. In November 2022 he had a call out of the blue from his longstanding supplier of dark chocolate-covered ginger, which was based in Turkey. “He was closing his factory and I thought, could we get back into chocolate ginger, which is a highvalue product? I also realised that most of the sales of dark chocolate ginger in the UK were produced by him and that we had a shared common customer. “In February 2023 I was in Turkey

the times | Monday April 1 2024 37 Register In November 1979 the BBC found itself — not for the first time nor the last — caught in a political crossfire. It was during the Troubles and after an anonymous tip-off, a Panorama documentary team, including the presenter Jeremy Paxman and producer David Darlow, had filmed hooded IRA gunmen blocking traffic in the border village of Carrickmore, Co Tyrone, seemingly in protest about the increasing presence of the British Army in the area. In reality it was a propaganda stunt. “What was going on was a nonsense. They were examining the underside of cars as if for suspect bombs, and this in a staunchly republican village. There was a nudge-nudge, wink-wink atmosphere about the whole thing,” Darlow recalled. The footage was not broadcast but news that it existed began to spread; the British papers accused the BBC of colluding with the IRA and the newly elected prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, who had made clear her intention not to negotiate with IRA terrorists nor tolerate media exposure of their activity (thereby giving them the “oxygen of publicity”), warned in a Commons debate: “It is time that the BBC put its house in order.” At the centre of the storm was John Gau, the head of current affairs at the BBC, an equable man who had a reputation for being fair and clear-sighted. His favourite journalistic truism, which he regularly told his staff, was: “What we really need is a cracking good yarn.” In Gau’s eyes, the handling of the Carrickmore controversy seemed to tarnish everything he held dear at the BBC. He had joined the corporation in the early 1960s — a time, he said, of greater journalistic integrity and relative freedom, which persisted even after the Troubles began. By the late 1970s the BBC was overspending and a schism developed between management and the board of governors (who would increasingly be made up of Thatcher’s allies) with Panorama accused of breaching standing instructions. An internal inquiry was launched and Scotland Yard’s antiterrorism squad began an investigation under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which made it an offence to withhold information that might lead to the capture of terrorists. When they raided the BBC offices it was the first time the broadcasters were forced to hand in untransmitted film footage. Such actions were anathema to Gau, an old-school journalist who believed passionately in the independence of the media and was uncompromising when it came to protecting his staff. He was a stickler for what he considered to be the truth — often to his detriment. “I joined a BBC that was fiercely independent, journalistically courageous and steadfastly loyal to its staff, especially those under fire,” he wrote in a memo sent to the chairman and the director-general, in which he took “full responsibility” for the footage taken by the Panorama team of the IRA’s propaganda stunt at Carrickmore. The inquiry concluded that there had been no collusion between the IRA and Panorama, but that Panorama should have informed the Northern Ireland controller before it responded to the tip-off. Roger Bolton was fired as the programme’s editor — he was later reinstated after protestations from colleagues — and Gau was reprimanded. As Bolton recalled in his autobiography, Death on the Rock, Gau dealt with the outcome with typical humour and levity. Every Friday lunchtime the current affairs editors would meet to discuss the programmes and to exchange gossip. That week they were subdued as they waited for the result of the disciplinary interviews. When Gau entered, the room fell quiet. “He staggered forward clutching his bottom as if he’d just been beaten by the headmaster,” wrote Bolton. “Cor,” he groaned. Tension was replaced with relief and John went on to detail what had happened, impersonating Gerry Mansell [deputy director-general of the BBC] and the formal bureaucratic style that seemed a world away from Shepherd’s Bush.” Gau had been widely tipped to be the next controller of BBC1 but the governors voted against it and he left the BBC somewhat embittered in 1981. With his wife Susan Tebbs, an actress, he founded one of the first independent production companies in Britain around the same time that the founding of Channel 4 revolutionised British broadcasting by outsourcing production instead of keeping it inhouse. John Gau Productions helped to establish the independent sector as a veritable competition to the dominant British broadcasters, the BBC and ITV. He was born John Glen Mackay Gau in London in 1940 to South African Obituaries Oscar-winning actor in An Officer and a Gentleman Louis Gossett Jr Page 38 John Gau Old-school TV producer and former BBC head of current affairs who became embroiled in a political storm with the Thatcher government Gau as executive producer of The Faiths Next Door (1985), a miniseries introduced by Prince Charles, and working with Robin Day in the 1970s rama, between 1969 and 1973. Although politics was left at the door, Gau was regarded as a “populist”, Bolton recalled; affable but quiet, with a ready smile and a toughness when required. In 1972 he became deputy editor of Midweek and in 1975 editor of Nationwide. Three years later he was promoted to head of the BBC’s current affairs group. Under Bill Cotton’s leadership the corporation was trying to mimic the success of the Johnny Carson show in America with a proposed Michael Parkinson show five days a week. The idea was overruled by the board of governors — Bolton said he thought Parkinson never quite forgave him and Gau for also voting against it — and to fill the gap, Gau sketched an idea for Question Time on BBC TV, inspired by Radio 4’s Any Questions, on the back of a white envelope. He was also instrumental in the creation of Watchdog. Bernard Clark, a BBC director, approached him with an idea for an investigative show. “He had his shoes off and had just come back from lunch — John liked his vino,” Clark recalled. “‘Good idea, luvvie, got a name?’ he said. Well, it would replace Pigeon Post with Glyn Worsnip, so I said ‘maybe Guard Dog?’ He said, ‘Dog Watch?’ then we both said together: ‘Watchdog’.” Their next collaboration was an investigative documentary about members of the All England Lawn Tennis Club, some of whom had been accused of antisemitism. The head of BBC Sport turned up at the edit suite, demanding that the film be culled. “I think it’s rather good, actually,” said Gau, gently chuckling. He later took the problem to Cotton, who gave the green light. He continued his quest for a good story after leaving the BBC. He created a broad brush of programmes, from Neil Kinnock’s official Labour Party broadcasts after he became leader in 1983 to Soldiers: A History of Men in Battle (1985) and Triumph of the Nerds (1996), a three-part documentary shown on Channel 4 about how the explosion of the PC made unlikely billionaires of a group of computer geeks, including interviews with Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. Though it was initially rejected by a string of broadcasters, and took years to get off the ground, the project was ahead of its time. When Jobs died in 2011 the fulllength interview, which included never-seen footage, was released in the acclaimed documentary Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview. Gau also interacted with royalty as the executive producer of The Faiths Next Door (1985), a TV miniseries that was introduced by Prince Charles, who was already interested in interfaith work. Gau was director of programmes at British Satellite Broadcasting, before it merged with Sky, between 1988 and 1990. He always had a taste for the absurd — that was what had drawn him to the story of the tech billionaires — and one of his later shows was Plane Crazy, a 1997 series about the journalist Robert X Cringely’s madcap attempt to build an aircraft in four weeks. The “cracking yarn” was not spoilt when Cringely was unable actually to make the plane. Gau simply stitched the failure into the drama. If he was an establishment figure — he smoked cigars, enjoyed his role as chairman of the Royal Television Society and was appointed CBE in 1989 — he was also experimental and always looking for innovative ways to tell a story. He loved poetry, Shakespeare and the Times Crossword, which he diligently completed every day in retirement in the south of France. He is survived by Susan, whom he married in 1966, and two sons: William is a wine merchant and food consultant, and Chris is a comedy screenwriter. Although the footage of IRA gunmen was not broadcast on Panorama, it was shown decades later as part of David Dimbleby’s 2022 documentary series Days That Shook the BBC. John Gau CBE, television producer, was born on March 25, 1940. He died of complications after a fall on March 3, 2023, aged 83 parents; his father, Cullis, known as Bill, was an engineer who had met John’s mother, Nan Munro, an actress, on a boat bound for England. He died in 1944 and John was sent to live with relatives in South Africa during the war. On his return to England, Nan remarried, to the actor Rayne Kruger after starring with him in a West End production of Pygmalion (she played Eliza). Kruger left her in 1973 after revealing a 13-year secret affair with the cookery writer Prue Leith, the daughter of Nan’s business partner, Margaret Inglis. John, meanwhile, had been sent to Haileybury, a boarding school in Hertford. He was popular, self-reliant and even at that age level-headed, rarely losing his temper. During a classics degree at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, he was sent for a year’s placement in Wisconsin, where he spent most of his time in a campus television studio. His career path was decided: after graduating he spent a few months teaching then applied to the BBC as a trainee film editor in 1963. He would stay with the BBC for 18 years — first as assistant film editor, then producer on 24 Hours and Pano- ‘It’s time that the BBC put its house in order,’ PM told the Commons

38 Monday April 1 2024 | the times Register Gossett as Emil Foley, with Richard Gere as his recruit. He won the 1983 best supporting actor Oscar, the first black man to win in that category, below left Actor and a Gentleman. “I realised this was happening because I was black and had been showing off with a fancy car, which, in their view, I had no right to be driving.” Later that evening after dinner at his hotel, he eschewed the car and went for a stroll, only to be arrested by a police officer, who told him that walking around Beverly Hills was prohibited after 9pm. Two more officers arrived and he was handcuffed; it was past midnight before he was released without charge. “I had come face to face with racism, and it was an ugly sight,” he wrote. “I had to act as if I was second class. The only time I was really free was when the director said ‘action’ in front of a camera. That’s when I flew.” He is survived by his sons Satie, a film producer from his second marriage, and Sharron, a chef, whom he adopted after seeing him as a seven-year-old in a TV news story about children in desperate situations. His first marriage to Hattie Glascoe was annulled and his second, to Christina Mangosing, ended in divorce in 1975. His third marriage, to Cyndi James-Reese, an actress, also ended in divorce. Louis Cameron Gossett was born in 1936 in Brooklyn, New York, the only child of Hellen (née Wray), a nurse, and Louis Gossett Sr, a porter. At Abraham Lincoln High School he was an outstanding sportsman, excelling at baseball, track and basketball. He had no interest in acting until a leg injury forced him to miss an entire sporting season and his English teacher persuaded him to audition for the 1953 Broadway show Take a Giant Step. He was 16 and won the lead role over more than 400 other contenders. “I knew nothing about acting. I had never even seen a play,” he said. “I should have been scared to death as I walked on that stage but I knew too little to be nervous.” He enjoyed the experience so much that he gave up the chance of becoming a professional basketball player with the New York Knicks and took a degree in drama at New York University. He then honed his craft at the Actors Studio in New York where James Dean became a friend and he studied alongside Marilyn Monroe and Steve McQueen. Much of the 1960s was spent on the Broadway stage, not only acting but also singing in musicals. A talented folk musician, he wrote the anti-war song Handsome Johnny for Richie Havens, who performed it at Woodstock. Gossett said the song saved him from being made homeless — a substantial royalty payment arrived just as the bailiffs were about to seize his furniture in lieu of rent. His breakthrough came with his eloquent portrayal of Fiddler, the elderly slave who taught Kunta Kinte to speak English in the epic 1977 TV mini-series Roots. Gossett had been reluctant to play what he called an “Uncle Tom” character but on reading the script came to admire the survival skills of Fiddler and based his portrayal on his own grandparents, who had grown up on a plantation in the Deep South. The part was “a tribute to all those people who taught me how to behave,” he said, and by its final episode, the series was attracting 100 million American viewers. Gossett won an Emmy for his role. In 2010 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer and a decade later he was admitted to hospital with Covid-19, but he recovered and was still working until the end. His most recent on-screen appearance came in the 2023 film The Color Purple. In his final interview two months ago, he reflected on his own mortality. “I’m not afraid to die and the fact of going to Heaven,” he said. “I know they are having some great concerts up there.” Louis Gossett Jr, actor, was born on May 27, 1936. He died of undisclosed causes on March 29, 2024, aged 87 Louis Gossett Jr Oscar-winning actor who memorably played the no-nonsense drill sergeant Emil Foley in An Officer and a Gentleman at Cumnor House school in Sussex and continued his education at St Edward’s, Oxford, where he rowed and played rugby. After graduating from University College London with a degree in economic history, National Service took him to Ghana, which had recently gained independence under Kwame Nkrumah. He Peter Earle Economic historian whose maritime expertise was sought by treasure hunters and led to books such as The Pirate Wars In 1641 a galleon named the Nuestra Señora de la Concepción was returning home from the Spanish Main when it struck a coral reef and was shipwrecked somewhere near the island of Hispaniola. As the flagship of the Almiranta, the vice-admiral of the Spanish fleet, the 600-ton galleon was loaded with bullion, silver coins and jewels, some of which were recovered 40 years later by the New England adventurer William Phips, best remembered as the Massachusetts governor who set up the court that conducted the Salem witch trials. However, Phips was only able to salvage part of the booty and when the log from his expedition went missing, future generations of treasure hunters had few clues where to look. Among those who failed to find the wreck was Jacques Cousteau, who mounted a search in the 1960s. That the site was finally located in 1978 was due to the forensic research of Peter Earle, a professor of economic history at the London School of Economics. Using 17th-century Admiralty documents and a log that was uncovered in a private archive, Earle narrowed down the site to a one-mile triangle named Silver Shoals, some 80 miles north of the Dominican Republic. His calculations were spot on. Not a trace remained of the Concepción’s wooden hull but almost 300 years after Phips’s expedition, the remainder of the treasure was salvaged by the American divers Burt Webber and Jack Haskins, who struck a deal with the Dominican government granting them an exclusive licence in return for a 50 per cent share of the loot. Earle returned to his quiet life in academia and wrote a book based on his research titled The Wreck of the Almiranta; Sir William Phips and the Hispaniola Treasure. His fascination with piracy on the high seas was the subject of several further works. On his retirement from the LSE in the early 1990s he continued to write and lecture prolifically but he also found a more lucrative sideline. His role in locating the wreck of the Concepción had made him a legendary figure and he spent the next 20 years travelling the world at the behest of treasure-hunting companies researching further wrecks. Peter Earle was born in 1937 in Purley, Surrey, one of six children of Dorothy Raven (later Lady Dorothy Sargent) and James Basil Foster Earle, a director of Tarmac. During the Second World War he was evacuated to board together in Suffolk, where he continued to spend weekends with the family. His maritime interests were explored in The Sack of Panama: Sir Henry Morgan’s Adventures on the Spanish Main (1982); Sailors (1998), a magisterial history of English merchant seamen; and The Pirate Wars (2003), chronicling 250 years of history from the great privateers of the Elizabethan Age to the hanging of the last pirate captain in 1835. It was published in the same year that Johnny Depp made his debut as Captain Jack Sparrow in the first of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. Earle would have made an erudite consultant on the series, but he perhaps did not quite approve of the “Disney-fication” of piracy. Reviewing the book for The Sunday Times, Giles Milton detected a “sneaking admiration” for some of the more swashbuckling buccaneers but noted Earle’s fundamental purpose was to counter a “distorted” romanticism and to show that pirates were “desperadoes and criminals whose grotesque adventures wrought untold misery”. Peter Earle, economic historian, was born on June 13, 1937. He died after a short illness on February 5, 2024, aged 86 Earle’s forensic research located a Spanish flag ship When Louis Gossett played the tough, no-nonsense drill sergeant Emil Foley in An Officer and a Gentleman, mercilessly pushing to the limit the young recruit Zack Mayo, played by Richard Gere, his role had originally been written for a white actor. Jack Nicholson turned down the part in Taylor Hackford’s 1982 film and none of the other white actors on the producers’ wish list was available. At that point, the screenwriter Douglas Day Stewart was on a visit to a US navy base in Florida where he found that several of the top drill instructors were AfricanAmerican. Surprised that black enlisted men had “make or break” control over whether white college graduates would become officers, Stewart realised that he had hit upon a juxtaposition that could lend a new dynamic to the film he was writing. “At that moment I changed the casting profile and started meeting actors of colour,” he recalled. “Lou Gossett came to see me and I hired him on the spot. His Sergeant Foley may have been the first black character in American cinema to have absolute authority over white characters.” At 6ft 4in with an athlete’s physique, Gossett was already an imposing presence, but he got into both character and shape for the part by training for 30 days at a Marine Corps recruitment division. “They put the steel in my butt, so that when I’d walk on the set and shout, ‘Get down and give me 50’ to the cast, by God, they’d do it,” he said. The role, which culminated in a memorable martial arts fight scene with Gere, won Gossett an Oscar as best supporting actor. He was the first black actor to win in that category — and only the third black recipient of an Academy Award, following Hattie McDaniel in 1940 for Gone with the Wind and Sidney Poitier in 1964 for Lilies of the Field. He also won a Golden Globe for the role. “The Oscar gave me the ability of being able to choose good parts,” he said. These included the acclaimed TV miniseries Sadat, in which he played the assassinated Egyptian leader and was given the personal endorsement of Sadat’s widow, Jehan; and the role of Colonel Charles “Chappy” Sinclair, leading dangerous rescue missions in Iron Eagle (1986) and its three sequels. Yet not as many doors opened as Gossett had hoped. He asked his agent to seek opportunities to play “anything but those stereotypes reserved for black actors”, but was disappointed with much of what was offered. “It did create opportunities, but I thought there would be more,” he said. His dissatisfaction contributed to several years struggling with alcohol and cocaine addiction. He emerged from rehab and found new purpose when in 2006 he established the Eracism Foundation, a charitable organisation dedicated to eradicating racism that runs education and anti-violence initiatives for disadvantaged black youths. The motivation to establish the foundation was rooted in his own experience when he arrived in Hollywood for the first time in 1961. He was due to appear with Poitier in the film version of the play A Raisin in the Sun, in which both had already enjoyed a successful run on Broadway. On landing at Los Angeles airport he hired a cherry-red Ford Fairlane and headed to Beverly Hills. Within minutes of leaving the airport he had been stopped and questioned by police. He was allowed to go on his way, but ten minutes later he was stopped again by a screeching highway patrol of four police cars and accused of driving a stolen vehicle. “I had no choice but to put up with this abuse but it was a terrible way to be treated, a humiliating way to feel,” he wrote in his 2010 memoir An regarded the two years he spent training a platoon of African soldiers as one of the formative experiences of his life. Back in Britain he tried various jobs, including a year spent working with his father at Tarmac. Office life, though, was dull and he found more excitement working on a Dutch barge, which ran into trouble in a storm in the North Sea, resulting in Earle and the rest of the crew being rescued by an RNLI lifeboat. The experience did nothing to diminish his love of life on the ocean, which was to be the subject of much of his work after he became a lecturer at the LSE in the late 1960s. His first book, Corsairs of Malta and Barbary (1970), was inspired by visits to the island where his wife Susan (née Jackson) was born. He is survived by their two sons, Nick, who works in computer security, and Jo, who runs a transport company. He and Susan divorced but bought a house

the times | Monday April 1 2024 39 Register The simple way to place your Birth, Marriage or Death announcement in the Register. Available 24 hours a day. Go to: newsukadvertising.co.uk Politics with no boring bits Listen to Matt Chorley on Times Radio, Monday to Friday at 10am There is no Court Circular today. A total solar eclipse on April 8 will grab the headlines this month. The track of totality runs across North America, ensuring a broad audience for this grand natural spectacle. While those not lucky enough to be there in person can enjoy totality online, observers in western parts of the British Isles will see a partial eclipse at sunset. In Ireland, Scotland, northern England, west Wales and most of Cornwall, the show starts just before 8pm, with sunset a little over half an hour later. The moon will only be grazing the sun’s surface, but it should still be easy to see with appropriate equipment. Looking directly at even the eclipsed sun is dangerous, so use either eclipse glasses (check they are free of holes by looking at a bright lightbulb first) or my preferred piece of equipment, a tea strainer or colander, which will project images of the eclipse on to the ground. Eclipses are the most predictable of celestial events. For example, we already know that the next total eclipse to cross the British Isles will occur in 2081 in the Channel Islands. The same cannot be said of comets, which Total solar eclipse steals the show are mercurial beasts, and stargazers will spend much of this month hoping Comet PonsBrooks will put on an unexpected show. Pons-Brooks is usually one of the brightest of the regular, periodic comets and visits the inner solar system every 71 years. However, its interest lies in its unusual propensity for outbursts of activity, which can brighten it considerably. Last July, for example, such an outburst turned what appeared to be a perfectly standard nucleus with a short tail into a body with two long, trailing “horns”. At the time of writing, PonsBrooks is just visible to the naked eye from dark skies. Will an outburst promote it into being something spectacular? It is impossible to predict, but worth keeping an eye on. Perhaps the easiest time to see the comet will be in the second week of April, when it approaches Jupiter in the sky. The giant planet is now well past its best, low in the northwest, though its brilliance means that it is still prominent in twilight. With none of the other bright planets well placed this month, it is a good time to pay attention to the stellar sky. At the centre of our map is the Plough, with the two pointers, Merak and Dubhe, furthest from its handle pointing the way to the Pole Star, Polaris, which is marked on this month’s map. Polaris is not the brightest star in the sky; indeed, it barely scrapes into the top fifty. Its fame comes from its position nearest the north celestial pole, the point around which the sky turns. Its constant position is therefore of great use to navigators, who can use its altitude as a reliable measure of latitude. The Pole Star lies at the end of the tail of Ursa Minor, which is easily found in dark skies. At the other end of the constellation, the red giant Kochab stands sentinel. Once the nearest bright star to the pole until about 1,700 years ago, this is a variable and double star, split by large telescopes. Over on the southern horizon, the evening April sky is home to the realm of the galaxies. The large zodiacal constellation of Virgo and the neighbouring Come Berenices are home to relatively nearby galaxy clusters, favourite targets for professional astrophysicists seeking to understand galaxy evolution and for amateur astronomers with large aperture telescopes. Next to Virgo is Boötes, and beyond that to the east is the small but recognisable constellation of Corona Borealis, the northern crown. Some time in the next six months this will be the site of an unusual nova. T Coronae Borealis, the object in question, is recorded as being brighter than expected in monastic accounts dating back to the 13th century, and seems to brighten reliably every 80 years. These repeated outbursts are the result of material building up on the surface of a white dwarf, the dead remnant of a sun-like star, which is consuming material from a companion red giant. When enough material has accrued on the surface of the white dwarf, an explosion results, and a star normally faint enough that it is only visible in telescopes becomes bright enough to see with the naked eye. The predicted brightness is similar to Polaris; not spectacular, but can be easily spotted if you know where to look. Chris Lintott To use this chart hold it up so that the direction in which you’re actually looking is at the bottom of the chart. The bottom edge of the chart will then represent your real horizon and the centre represents the point directly overhead. The view is correct for the UK at midnight (00:00) GMT on April 1, 11pm GMT on April 15, and 10pm GMT on April 30. Night Sky April Maurice Bembridge David Allsop writes: My father, Alan Allsop, organised the Kenya Open golf competition between 1967 and 1971, and I, as an eightyear-old, was lucky enough to follow Maurice Bembridge (obituary, March 25) as he played the final round at Karen Country Club, on his way to winning the 1968 competition. In those days, there were no ropes to keep players and spectators apart. Maurice, Sean Hunt and Russell Meek, fellow professionals, had visited our house earlier that week for dinner and I thought I was his best friend as a result of sharing that time with our family. After listening to me yabbering away at him for the first three holes of that final round, Maurice quietly explained to me, in polite terms, the equivalent of “buzz off kid”. I was temporarily deflated but was delighted at the end when he was declared the winner. I can still picture in my mind some of the joyous clubhouse celebrations, with corks being popped from champagne bottles. My dad wasn’t too pleased with my behaviour when he found out from my elder sister what had happened earlier, but it’s a moment in time that I remember well. David Seidler Bill Kay writes: I met David Seidler (obituary, March 18) at the Writers Guild of America in Los Angeles, where he was generous with advice for a screenwriter trying to break into Hollywood. He also told bitterly of the difficulties he had had in obtaining an agent. Most turned him down because his age, in his sixties then, meant that they would not get enough work out of him to make him worth spending time on. Maurizio Pollini David Leibling writes: Your very full obituary (March 24) of the Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini in The Times did not mention his outstanding performances of the Beethoven Sonatas Nos 30, 31 and 32 (opus 109, 110 and 111) which I heard him play with such vigour as part of a complete Beethoven sonata cycle at the Royal Festival Hall in 1996 (which he also recorded for Deutsche Grammophon). His dynamic playing matched perfectly the unusual rhythms and tonal patterns in these late and innovative Beethoven works. Lives remembered There are no Birth, Marriage and Death notices for April 1st. A collection of Times obituaries Now available in paperback from bookshops as well as amazon.co.uk and thetimes.co.uk/bookshop Delve into the lives of the quirky and unorthodox

the rankings, so her achievement came somewhat out of the blue. She is only the second unseeded women’s champion at this WTA 1,000 tournament, after Belgium’s Kim Clijsters in 2005. She will rise back up to No 22, putting her on track for seedings inside the top 32 at the French Open and Wimbledon, but still intends to quit at the end of the year regardless of the trouble she can cause the best players, as the world No 4 Elena Rybakina discovered in a 7-5, 6-3 defeat in Saturday’s final. Asked if she would delay her retirement, Collins said: “No. I feel like these questions are coming from a good place, because I feel like a lot of people would like to continue seeing me play. But I have some health challenges, and with those health challenges, it makes things for me away from the court a little more difficult. I hope everyone can respect that. It’s a very emotional and personal thing.” This tournament is particularly meaningful for Collins, who was born and raised in Florida. It is the first time she has won a WTA 1,000 event — the tier below the four grand slams — following a WTA 500 title at the 2021 Silicon Valley Classic and a WTA 250 title at the 2021 Palermo Open. Collins revealed after her success that she did not attend the Miami Open during her childhood, with her father, Walter, telling her: “You’re only going if you play.” In her sixth appearance she has claimed the trophy, dropping only one set in seven matches during a popular run in front of friends, family and supportive locals. “What a dream come true to have played at the level that I have played consistently over the last two weeks,” Collins said. “This has been such a journey for me. It’s just been amazing to go out and to have felt the energy that I felt from the fans and literally feel like I’m playing in front of thousands of my best friends. That was just surreal. I will never forget this day because of that. “Everywhere I looked, people were, like, ‘Let’s go, Danielle. You can do this.’ The encouragement I got, it was hard for me to hide the emotion. These are the moments that we live for and we don’t always get to have them.” Sinner’s win was his 25th in his past 26 matches. Collins, inset, claimed the women’s title — but insisted she would still retire Jannik Sinner has Novak Djokovic in his sights at the top of the rankings after winning the Miami Open to become the world No 2 for the first time. The 22-year-old from Italy continued his tremendous run of form by claiming a 25th success in his past 26 matches. A comfortable 6-3, 6-1 win over Grigor Dimitrov, the world No 12 from Bulgaria, secured a third title of the season, after his triumphs at the Australian Open in January and the Rotterdam Open in February. This moves Sinner up one spot to replace Spain’s Carlos Alcaraz at No 2. On a total of 8,710 ranking points, he is now 1,015 points behind Djokovic, giving him the chance to climb to the summit after May’s Madrid Open. Sinner’s performance in the Miami final showed why he is the standout player on the tour this year. Not only can he dominate play with his powerful groundstrokes, including a ferocious forehand, his movement has improved significantly in recent months, allowing him to chase down the ball in defence and send it back with interest. There was a brief spell of pressure for Sinner in the early stages when he had to save a break point on serve at 2-1 down, but he took a hold of the match from there by breaking for 3-2 with a couple of pinpoint passing shots. Sport Sinner takes Miami title – and eyes No 1 Tennis Stuart Fraser Tennis Correspondent Another backhand pass down the line sealed a double break for the first set. The second set was completely onesided as Sinner dropped only one game. A powerful backhand winner down the line on his first match point at the 73- minute mark made him the first Italian to win the Miami Open after he narrowly fell short in the final here in 2021 and 2023. Next up is the European claycourt swing, during which he will have the chance to catch Djokovic. Both are due to compete at the Monte Carlo Masters, which begins on April 8. “I am really proud,” Sinner said. “I just try to improve and also enjoy the moment. This is a special moment. You never know whether this is the last time or not, so you have to enjoy this for one day. For sure the hard-court season up until now has been really good.” Meanwhile Danielle Collins, the women’s champion, has insisted that she will not reconsider her retirement plans despite winning the biggest title of her career in Miami. The 30-yearold from the United States announced in January that this would be her last season as a professional and has made no secret of her wish to start a family, although becoming pregnant may be made more challenging given she has endometriosis, a condition in which tissue that normally lies inside the uterus grows elsewhere in the body. A former world No 7 after finishing runner-up at the 2022 Australian Open, Collins had dropped to No 53 in TOO HOT TO HANDLE? LEICESTER v NORWICH 12:30 K.O IPSWICH v SOUTHAMPTON 17:30 K.O LEEDS v HULL 20:00 K.O PLUS STOKE v HUDDERSFIELD 15:00 K.O LISTEN TO FREE RADIO COMMENTARIES OF ALL FOUR CHAMPIONSHIP TITLE CONTENDERS ON RADIO ONLINE ON THE APP the times | Monday April 1 2024 2GM 43

46 2GM Monday April 1 2024 | the times Sport Gallagher Premiership Bangladesh: First Innings M H Joy b Kumara 21 M Z Hasan not out 28 T Islam not out 0 Extras (b 4, lb 1, w 1) 6 Total (1 wkt, 15 overs) 55 *N H Shanto, M Haque, S Al Hasan, S H Dipu, †L K Das, M H Miraz, S K Ahmed and H Mahmud to bat. Fall of wicket 1-47. Bowling Fernando 3-1-12-0; Fernando 4- 0-21-0; Kumara 4-3-4-1; Jayasuriya 4-1- 13-0. Umpires R K Illingworth and R J Tuckers Golf PGA Tour: Texas Children’s Houston Open Texas, USA Final scores: 268 S Jaeger (Ger) 69, 66, 66, 67. 269 T Detry (Bel) 70, 64, 67, 68; T Finau (US) 69, 62, 72, 66; T Moore (US) 64, 71, 67, 67; S Scheffler (US) 65, 70, 66, 68; A Tosti (Arg) 66, 67, 68, 68. 270 M Greyserman (US) 67, 69, 67, 67; B Horschel (US) 71, 68, 67, 64; A Rai (Eng) 66, 70, 67, 67; D Skinns, 67, 69, 65, 69. 271 A Bhatia (US) 67, 68, 67, 69; N Dunlap 68, 71, 63, 69; A Noren (Swe) 69, 71, 66, 65. Rugby union Gallagher Premiership Sale 41 Exeter 5 Sale: Tries Roebuck 3, Cowan-Dickie, Warr, Quirke. Cons G Ford 4. Pen G Ford. Exeter: Try Feyi-Waboso. HT 22-0. 6 Table, see above Women’s Six Nations Ireland 21 Italy 27 P W D L F A B Pts England 2 2 0 0 94 10 2 10 France 2 2 0 0 53 22 1 9 Italy 2 1 0 1 27 69 1 5 Scotland 2 1 0 1 25 33 0 4 Ireland 2 0 0 2 38 65 1 1 Wales 2 0 0 2 28 66 1 1 Rugby league Betfred Super League London Broncos 6 Huddersfield Giants 26. P W D L F A Pts St Helens 6 5 0 1 130 44 10 Catalans Dr’s 6 5 0 1 158 78 10 Warrington 6 4 0 2 180 90 8 Wigan 5 4 0 1 148 66 8 Hull KR 6 4 0 2 132 73 8 Leeds 6 4 0 2 108 88 8 Salford 6 4 0 2 127 118 8 Huddersfield 6 3 0 3 120 104 6 Leigh 5 1 0 4 104 86 2 Hull 6 1 0 5 64 196 2 Castleford 6 0 0 6 62 204 0 London Bron 6 0 0 6 60 246 0 Tennis Miami Open Women’s final D Collins (US) bt E Rybakina (Kaz) 7-5, 6-3. Men’s final (2) J Sinner (It) bt (11) G Dimitrov (Bul) 6-3, 6-1. coach, confirmed after the match that he had referred the incident to Paul Hull, the head of the RFU’s Professional Game Match Officials Team (PGMOT). “I flagged it with the referee after the game but there is not a lot he can do on the pitch, he wasn’t even aware of it,” Van Graan said. “We went through our team manager and we made the fourth official aware. It was a massive call in the context of the game with the player that came back on making the tackle in the corner.” John Westerby Roebuck hat-trick keeps Sale’s Nations squad without making his international debut, and he was lining up against Immanuel Feyi-Waboso, the Exeter wing, who made such a vivid impression during the championship. While Feyi-Waboso made the most of slim pickings by scoring from the one opportunity he was given, Roebuck demonstrated the all-round quality of his game, dominant in the air and showing a classic poacher’s nose for the tryline. For his hat-trick, he earned himself a new pair of trainers, an arrangement he had struck with Sanderson. “I owe him a pair of Nike Air Max and that [gift] will go into the salary cap,” Sanderson said. “He’s showing more sides to his game. He’s always been ace in the air, that’s what got him into the England squad. What they’ve been working on is his turn of pace and ability to finish. We saw that today.” With their season on the line after a six-match losing streak, so many of Sale’s big-name players turned in statement performances. In blustery conditions, George Ford controlled the play masterfully, dragging Exeter around the field with his kicking game, and combining potently with Manu Tuilagi in midfield. Tuilagi, who recently announced that he will be leaving Sale for Bayonne next season, a move that will end his international career, seemed to make ground every time he touched the ball. “Manu was showing why he’s so well loved, by the fans and the players,” Sanderson said. “He wants to leave this country on a high.” It is no coincidence that Sale’s recent slips have come during a period when both Curry twins are injured. Tom Curry remains out for the rest of the season, but Ben returned to the starting line-up and made a huge impact, winning turnovers on the floor, regularly smashing Exeter back in the tackle and carrying hard. All of which led to Exeter being soundly punished for an error-strewn first half that left them 22-0 behind by the break. When these sides met in October, during the final stages of the World Cup, Exeter’s revamped team won 43-0 at Sandy Park, and Sale were happy to turn the tables. “Sometimes you just have to take your hidings and move on,” Rob Baxter, the Exeter director of rugby, said. “When we were starting to put this new team together, we knew there would be days when we weren’t quite on it, and today was one of those. Everything you shouldn’t do in this game today, in those conditions, we did. Today doesn’t cause us any damage, as long as we learn from it.” The first of Roebuck’s tries had come as early as the tenth minute, as Sam Dugdale burst into the Chiefs’ 22 to put Sale on the front foot from a lineout move. The ball was moved right and then back left, where Curry’s forceful burst sucked in defenders, allowing Ford’s soft hands to find Roebuck, perfectly timing his run off his fly half’s left shoulder. The second try for Sale came from a face Exeter know all too well. After Exeter had been penalised for blocking, Ford kicked to the corner, Cobus Wiese claimed the lineout and Luke CowanDickie, the former Chiefs hooker, positioned himself at the back of a rapidly accelerating maul before touching down triumphantly. In his first season with Sale, having recovered from a serious shoulder injury, Cowan-Dickie was recalled to the England squad during the Six Nations and recently agreed a new one-year contract with Sale. Already beginning to flounder, Exeter’s chances were further hampered when Josh Hodge, the full back, was sent to the sin-bin for a deliberate knock-on and Sale scored twice more while he was sidelined, either side of half-time. First Cowan-Dickie’s offload and Roebuck’s surge down the right created the position from which Gus The match ball was delivered by a flying commando, top, before Roebuck ran in the first of his three tries, above, on a day when Tuilagi’s Sale ran the show, right How they stand P W D L F A B Pts N’hampton 14 10 0 4 381 352 9 49 Bath 14 8 0 6 402 355 12 44 Saracens 14 8 0 6 410 311 10 42 Harlequins 14 8 0 6 360 340 10 42 Bristol 14 8 0 6 412 345 8 40 Exeter 14 8 0 6 380 328 8 40 Leicester 14 8 0 6 337 294 7 39 Sale 14 8 0 6 287 307 5 37 Gloucester 14 4 0 10 305 407 10 26 Newcastle 14 0 0 14 194 429 5 5 Sale Sharks Exeter Chiefs 41 5 Cricket Bangladesh v Sri Lanka, second Test Chattogram Zohur Ahmed Chowdhury Stadium (second day of five): Bangladesh, with nine first-innings wickets in hand, trail Sri Lanka by 476 runs Sri Lanka: First Innings (overnight 314/4) L D Chandimal c Das b Al Hasan 59 *D M de Silva lbw b Ahmed 70 P H K D Mendis not out 92 N G R P Jayasuriya lbw b Al Hasan 28 M V T Fernando run out 11 C B R L S Kumara b Miraz 6 A M Fernando run out 0 Extras (b 4, lb 2) 6 Total (159 overs) 531 Fall of wickets 1-96, 2-210, 3-263, 4-289, 5-375, 6-411, 7-476, 8-497, 9-518. Bowling Ahmed 20-2-71-1; Mahmud 24- 5-92-2; Al Hasan 37-5-110-3; Miraz 46-7- 146-1; Islam 32-6-106-0. Referee ‘unaware’ of error Results The governing body released a statement yesterday, which read: “The RFU PGMOT acknowledge and apologise for an error during the Gallagher Premiership match between Harlequins v Bath, where a yellow card sanction resulted in Irné Herbst returning to the pitch approximately three minutes too soon. “We would like to apologise to both teams for this mistake. As is the usual process the PGMOT will review all games to ensure continued improvement and learnings. “The result of the match remains final.” continued from back Beaten finalists in the Gallagher Premiership last year, this was a game that Sale Sharks dared not lose if they were to maintain hopes of featuring in the end-of-season play-offs again, and the urgency of the situation brought them back to their best after a slump. “Do or die” was how Alex Sanderson, the Sale director of rugby, described the importance of the game and they comprehensively outplayed Exeter Chiefs yesterday, clinging on to play-off hopes themselves, scoring six tries to one, including a hat-trick for Tom Roebuck, the right wing. Roebuck, 23, had spent much of the past two months in England’s Six

the times | Monday April 1 2024 47 Sport season alive Warr, the scrum half, weaved his way over. Then Roebuck caught a high kick, looked up and, in Hodge’s absence, was surprised to see open field ahead of him, sprinting clear to score and clinching the bonus point for Sale. Feyi-Waboso’s powerful sprint down the right gave Exeter a brief moment of respite, but Raffi Quirke soon replied from a quickly taken tap penalty. Now it was a question of whether Roebuck could close the deal on that new pair of trainers. His first chance to do so went begging, as he knocked on over the line after outpacing Olly Woodburn and kicking deftly ahead. But another opportunity was not long in coming, as he ran on to Rob du Preez’s pass to score. Roebuck, 23, is still uncapped and Steve Borthwick, the England head coach, is acutely aware that the wing also qualifies for Scotland, but Roebuck enjoyed his time in camp with England. “I’d say it’s made me a better player by a mile because you’re working with the best players and coaches in the country,” he said. “It was a bit disappointing that I didn’t get to play a game, but that’s not in my control. I need to play as well as I can and wait for the opportunities to come.” Scorers: Sale Sharks: Tries Roebuck 3 (10min, 42, 59), Cowan-Dickie (27), Warr (40), Quirke (55). Cons Ford 4. Pen Ford (23). Exeter: Try Feyi-Waboso (49). Sale Sharks J Carpenter; T Roebuck, R du Preez, M Tuilagi (S James 66), T O’Flaherty; G Ford, G Warr (R Quirke 53); B Rodd (R Harrison 58), L Cowan-Dickie (T Taylor 58), J Harper (A OpokuFordjour 58), C Wiese, J Beaumont, E van Rhyn (S Dugdale 9), B Curry (H Andrews 66), J-L du Preez (B Bamber 60). Exeter Chiefs J Hodge (sin-bin 35); I Feyi-Waboso, H Slade, W Rigg (Z Wimbush 56), O Woodburn; H Skinner (W Haydon-Wood 58), S Townsend (T Cairns 53); S Sio (D Southworth 46), J Yeandle (D Frost 46), E Painter (M Street 46), D Jenkins, C Tshiunza, R Vintcent (L Pearson 2-10), R Capstick (J Dunne 58), G Fisilau (Pearson 53). Referee H Smales. Attendance 7,103. Choppy waters and dodgy stomachs did for favourites Oxford So it was on Saturday, as Cambridge, seen as the underdogs in the men’s and women’s races, made the best of the conditions. The women trailed at Hammersmith Bridge but trusted in their rhythm to overhaul Oxford, while the men also had a very competitive first half before Cambridge pulled away. The Light Blues were glad they had built a six-length lead when exhaustion got the better of their stroke, Matt Edge, who was barely able to dip his oar after Barnes Bridge, but Oxford revealed afterwards that they had had their own health concerns last week. Three rowers suffered so badly from an E. coli infection that they almost didn’t make the race. “We were definitely thinking about having to change the crew on Friday,” Sean Bowden, their chief coach, said. Bowden seemed surprised to be told that Lenny Jenkins, his No 7 who had won a World Cup regatta in the Britain four in 2022, had been sick that day, but refused to blame illness. After all, Cambridge had trained on the same river. Instead, he said his crew had themselves to blame for making a mess of the start in choppy water. “There was a lot of wash and we didn’t handle that,” he said. “We made mistake after mistake and the race went away from us. A crew should be able to get back into it but we weren’t rowing well enough.” Bowden has won 15 Boat Races, 13 with Oxford and two with Cambridge; he knows better than most how the Thames can be a great leveller. Despite being a man down at the end, Cambridge won by 3½ lengths, while their women had a seven-length win after Oxford’s cox mistimed his rash attempt to bump Cambridge and get them disqualified while off their station. The umpire, Richard Phelps, had been strongly warning Oxford when the incident occurred. Only Osiris’s victory over Blondie in the women’s reserves race prevented Cambridge from having a second successive clean sweep of all six men’s, women’s and lightweight races. Pollution concerns meant there was not the usual dunking of the winning coxes. Ed Bracey, the Cambridge men’s cox, said he would be happy to be thrown in but his coach, Rob Baker, suggested instead that his crewmates empty a bucket of water over his head. The Boat Race Patrick Kidd Farrell will be punished if he keeps losing the plot T here is something enigmatic about this season’s Saracens. It’s not a word with one would usually associate with the north London club. Toulouse? Yes, they can be glorious, occasionally awful. It’s part of their charm; not knowing which Toulouse will turn up. That has never been the Saracens way. The greatest of English club sides based their success on an extremity of efficiency that has been broadly unmatched by their English rivals in the professional era. The version of Saracens that face Union Bordeaux Bègles in the Investec Champions Cup round of 16 on Saturday are nothing like their hard-nosed ancestors. They can be fantastic to watch. They can also be flawed in a way that stuns seasoned Saracens watchers. Cast your mind back to the European pool match against next weekend’s knockout opponents in France in January. Humiliation after humiliation was heaped on the champions of England. The 55-15 scoreline was a fair reflection of the gulf between the sides. The loss has since been described as Saracens’ turning point but if this really was the case, how can the 41-30 hammering Northampton Saints inflicted upon them on Friday night be explained? The Saints savaged them. Saracens showed nous and fight to notch a bonus-point try but they were outplayed for large parts of the game. They were flaky; throwing passes to no one in particular, shrugging shoulders; almost Harlequins-like in their insouciance. Yes, Harlequins, the team that tanked Bath for 50 minutes on Saturday before crumbling in an extraordinary final 30. Harlequins can play through all four climactic seasons in 80 minutes. The same Harlequins who were dispatched by a brilliant Saracens side in their 52-7 victory at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium. That was the best performance of controlled attacking rugby the Premiership has witnessed this campaign. Six days later Saracens themselves subsided against a team who leaked half a century a week earlier. Northampton, Harlequins, Bath, they’ve gone Gallic on us — but surely not Saracens, the archetypal efficient English team? journey, bumpy roads and all. Saracens have a chance in Bordeaux if they make a fast start. If they come out of the blocks as they did against Harlequins they have a chance against anybody. Early scores are hugely important to a transitional team like this. The confident start, the kick to the corner and driving lineout try gave them the platform to play. Farrell and his men never looked back. But it was quite the opposite in Northampton: 17-0 adrift after 17 minutes, they scrambled back to 17-10 courtesy of a Saints charged-down kick and a Farrell penalty without ever imposing their game upon their opponents. There’s a good reason. Half the Saracens tries emanated from lineouts. When McCall’s men are in front and confident, the majority of penalties which result from their waves of pressure are kicked to the corner. As often as not, the end result is seven points. The scoreboard rattles along as Saracens play their game, impervious to the opposition. Being ahead enables teams to relax, just as being behind creates what is known as scoreboard pressure. When they are behind, the habit is to kick for goal, not the corner. This is a team perpetually chasing, not imposing. In the Bordeaux pool game, Saracens took a 3-0 lead but within three minutes it was 7-3 to the home side. Within 20 minutes it was 19-3, all control gone. Farrell, in control, is a master. Farrell on the hop is another species: volatile, uncertain, the centre of the problem as opposed to the control centre. The skill doesn’t disappear, the confidence does. It has been his problem with struggling England teams. In a Saracens side learning a variety of ways to play, he will dictate when in control. As Bordeaux in particular and Northampton — to a lesser extent — revealed, he can lose the plot when the game escapes him and his team. If Saracens start fast, score early tries and build their confidence, they and their skipper have the game to beat Bordeaux. If the French side take the initiative, expect another head-scratching heavy loss for this not-so-efficient bunch of enigmas. Like so much else with Saracens, the enigma is wrapped in their soonto-be-departing captain, Owen Farrell. In Bordeaux he summed up his side, embarrassingly outplayed by his opposite number, Matthieu Jalibert, who, along with Damian Penaud, was rested for their defeat by Lyon in the Top 14 on Saturday. It was a case of chalk and scrumptious French cheese. Farrell couldn’t put a foot right, Jalibert not one wrong. Racing 92 must have briefly wondered what they were thinking, signing the Englishman. On Friday against Northampton, the match finished for Farrell in the 70th minute. His last act was a pass thrown to the ground, no one in sight. Earlier in the second half, the fly half with the much practised ability to pick out the tryscoring pass was throwing it flat into congestion, while Elliot Daly (also staggering in his degraded form) ghosted into the space Farrell failed to identify. Against Harlequins, Farrell picked every pass to perfection. He played as though the ball was attached to his hand by a piece of string.It was wonderful to watch him pull those strings. In such form, he and Saracens looked to have a great chance of turning around the Bordeaux form lines, but six days later their European future was appearing bleaker. Mark McCall knows what he is doing. Saracens’ director of rugby is the best of the best but the inability to maintain their oldfashioned efficiency leaves them prone to the odd and unforeseen pummelling. They were good enough against English opposition to regain the Premiership last season, even as they played their way through an evolving game, but Europe was and is another matter. With the improving attacking game of teams such as Northampton and Bath, the domestic competition is a tougher test this term too. But McCall’s men are playing their way through the past to a more varied future in which Europe can be once more targeted. They are still on that Stuart Barnes Farrell flourishes when his side are in control — but when under pressure he can start to crumble For 120 years a stone pillar topped with the letters UBR has stood on Putney Embankment, a target for slack-bladdered dogs and the marker for the start of the Boat Race. Last autumn it was moved back ten metres to create an esplanade, making it about the only thing on land further from the water than it had been after the winter of unending rain. It has been joined by a bronze inscription on the pavement: “The best leveller is the river we have in common.”

48 Monday April 1 2024 | the times Sport Rugby union Barbarians at Kingsholm. “That is when the dark thoughts first started,” he says. “In January 2000, out of the blue, there was a picture of me at the airport published in a newspaper. The very picture of me when I was stuck. It was almost like it was tormenting me. “It was a bleak time. They had told me I would never play rugby again — but it was the only thing keeping me alive. The Army head coach said if I got myself fit for the Army-Navy game at Twickenham he would give me an opportunity. And I played. “In a twist of fate, Harlequins moved to Aldershot [where I was based]. I asked Zinzan Brooke if I could come down and train with them. I did a few sessions and they said, ‘Do you want to sign up for a year?’ ” Dawling featured in nine Premiership games while also playing army rugby. “That was my downfall,” he From Kosovo to kit room: Saracens’ Former Harlequins and Gloucester flanker Andy Dawling speaks to Alex Lowe about how latest role is helping him to rebuild his life after tours of duty in war zones and being diagnosed with PTSD A ndy Dawling is piecing his life back together. With nowhere permanent to call home, there are nights after work at Saracens when he finds shelter and sleeps on his old army bed. But he is getting there, slowly edging his way back from the brink. This month Dawling returned to the village in Kosovo where, 25 years ago, he witnessed a scene so horrific that it would change him for ever. Three piles of unexploded cluster bombs detonated after being cleared from a school, killing two British soldiers and three locals. Dawling, now 50, was first on the scene. Three weeks earlier he had been playing rugby for Gloucester on sabbatical from his parachute regiment. When the dark thoughts first enveloped him upon his return from Kosovo, it was rugby that saved his life. An abrasive flanker for the Army, Dawling signed for Coventry in 1999 and played Premiership rugby for Harlequins the following year before representing England Sevens. Dawling, whose father had been in the RAF, then became one of the first professional rugby players to go to war. He embarked on tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, each adding new layers of suppressed trauma and guilt, which he carried into civilian life. “I remember having real conscious thoughts that I didn’t feel anything,” he says. “Nothing got me high. Nothing got me low. I just felt nothing.” Dawling began coaching the Saracens academy in 2016, where he helped Theo Dan develop into an England hooker. When posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) finally consumed him 18 months ago, triggering suicidal thoughts, rugby saved him again. He is now the Saracens kit manager. Telling his story is part of the rehabilitation process. Returning this month to Kosovo and the village of Arllat, where he discovered a plaque in honour of those who died, was an important step. “I wanted to update my thinking,” he says. “My mind was stuck 25 years ago.” shell-shocked Having served in Bosnia, where he was first exposed to the horrors of genocide, Dawling took a sabbatical and spent the 1998-99 season with Gloucester, scoring a try on his Premiership debut against London Scottish. On June 2, 1999, he received a call asking if he wanted to rejoin 7th Para Royal Horse Artillery, part of the UK’s rapid response force, and deploy to Kosovo. Philippe Saint-Andre, Gloucester’s director of rugby, wished him well. Two days later he was flying to North Macedonia in an unmarked 747 and pitching camp near the border. “We slept in the airfield and adjoining cornfields and watched the aircraft flying in and blowing up Kosovo,” he says. The Nato air campaign lasted 78 days, launched to try to halt a “humanitarian catastrophe” and protect the largely Albanian population. A peace deal struck on June 10 changed the intended mission of the British paratroopers to enforced peace-keeping, although they were briefly back on a war footing during a tense stand-off with Russian soldiers who had taken Pristina airport. Dawling’s regiment came across evidence of ethnic cleansing two days after crossing into Kosovo. “One of my good friends — a rugby boy, a prop, a Gloucester man — he went to the mass grave in this little village and it done him,” Dawling says. “He came back to the UK and one of the lads caught him trying to kill himself. Kosovo was seeing humanity at its worst.” A week later, on June 21, Dawling was driving his Troop Sergeant Major on a recce mission when, just after midday, an enormous explosion ripped through the village of Arllat, 23 miles from Pristina. The Nato forces had used cluster bombs to disrupt road and runway infrastructure but the failure rate was up to 20 per cent, which meant thousands of unexploded bomblets remained on the ground. Lt Gareth Evans and Sgt Balaram Rai from the Royal Engineers were clearing the ordnance from a school when they exploded. “We were the first people on the scene and it was horrific,” Dawling says. “They had moved the bomblets into a ravine. They put them into three piles and one of them went off. You can imagine the devastation, the force they created. “One of the guys who had been killed [Lt Evans], I had played rugby against him five months before. He had been completely vaporised. We didn’t find anything of him. “The Nepalese staff sergeant was in a bad way. I got hold of him and the Chinook came over. We were panicking because of the down-blast. It landed in the school and we stretchered him on to it. “I had been at Gloucester, a fit bloke, 25 years old and everything in front of me. Suddenly you are watching a man die. We were all a bit shell-shocked but none of us knew it. “The guy who was in charge, he didn’t say anything to me and I didn’t say anything to him. But I now know that he was seriously affected. There was another guy there, a 19-year-old called Donny, and it didn’t work out for him either. “You ask how I carried on. We had no option. I can look back now and recognise the decoupling of my feelings and thoughts. We were on radio silence but I was allowed a compassionate call. I couldn’t really talk. I remember coming off that call and just feeling alone. The young lad Donny, he burst out laughing. Hysteria really. Just trying to suppress it.” Five days later the paratroopers were back at the airport, this time for a display of unity between Nato and the Russians. But Dawling still had it in his mind that they were the enemy. “There was a blown-up MiG next to me. Journalists were asking about the aircraft and I couldn’t talk,” he recalls. “I was outside of my body saying to myself, ‘F**king talk.’ And I couldn’t talk. I was stuck there. The stress levels were just so overwhelming.” ‘rugby was keeping me alive’ Dawling’s regiment were living in an Opel car garage in Pristina for the final days of their tour. When it was over, a senior officer thanked him for his service and offered another year on sabbatical. Dawling immediately phoned his agent and signed for Coventry. But within months he had broken down physically, suffering prolapsed discs as he warmed up to play for the Combined Services against the Dawling, above right, is seen on active duty with fellow rugby player Lee Soper and, right, the picture that appeared in a newspaper that caused him torment

the times | Monday April 1 2024 49 Sport deal with being around people. The following year his back went again, requiring surgery and generating further guilt because he missed two tours of Afghanistan. “The army were trying to kick me out,” he says. “I was desperate to go out to Afghanistan. I persuaded them but I wasn’t allowed out of the camp gates. I was hoping to get my connection back with my mates and relinquish some of the guilt at missing the earlier tours, but it wasn’t lived. “I had a horrendous job. There was a lot of repatriation of guys who had been killed. The job was to fire the gun salute. The sense of isolation I felt was compounded on January 1, 2011, when the first fatality of the year was a big Fijian guy called Joseva Vatubua. I was director of rugby at bloke, 25 years old, everything I’d just been at Gloucester, a fit in front of me. Suddenly you “ are watching a man die Dawling, in action against Rotherham in 2000, left, made nine Premiership appearances for Harlequins but would later be forced to focus on the military. It was after several tours on which he witnessed horrific scenes that he had PTSD diagnosed; he is now working on his mental health with the help of duties at Saracens, right. Above, preparing for a tour of Iraq with colleagues, where he experienced combat for the first time in March 2003 army man on how rugby saved him Aylesford Bulls at the time and six months earlier I had got him playing rugby for us.” Layer upon layer of trauma. ‘everyone has a story’ Dawling served at the London Olympics in 2012, popping in to watch Super Saturday, before leaving the army in 2013. He worked as a performance coach at Sutton Valence School in Kent and with the Bulls, before leaving the club in 2016 to join Saracens. Staying busy kept his emotional state suppressed. When lockdown came, it all began to bubble over. Dawling used to own a business with Steve Thompson, the World Cup winner who has had early onset dementia diagnosed. Initially he thought he was developing the same condition until an SAS friend said, “Mate, you have got PTSD.” “I went into a bit of a collapse. A loss of feeling and self-worth. A lot of brain fog. And with that came a lot of suicidal thoughts,” he says. “Just getting through the day was a real challenge.” Dawling confided in Mike Hynard, the Saracens academy manager. “Mike was incredible. He said, ‘Whatever support you need.’ The club have a psychiatrist and within a couple of days I was talking. It became more apparent that the complexities and the layers of over 20 years in the army was a major factor.” Dawling asked for some time off and he walked 1,000 miles around Wales, raising funds for military and rugby charities. He was joined by friends from the forces and it proved a breakthrough opportunity for them all to start talking. “There was an expectation in the Parachute Brigade that we just got on with things,” Dawling says. “A lot of the challenge I have is fragmented memories and the guilt of, ‘Could I have done more?’ Everyone has got a story. I have some mates who are in a state. I feel that together we can help each other. I do see this as my calling.” ‘rugby is my haven’ Thread by thread, Dawling is unravelling the complex web in his mind. For nine years he had worked at Sutton Valence alongside Major Prem Ale, a Nepalese soldier who ran the school’s Combined Cadet Force. “I knew he had been in Kosovo as a Royal Engineer,” Dawling says. “I’d thought, ‘He is bound to have known Sgt Rai,’ but I could not talk to him about it. “This time last year, before I went to Wales, I thought, ‘You have just got to do it.’ We spoke about the incident and he said, ‘He was my best friend.’ He had been Sgt Rai’s coffin bearer.” Dawling has stayed in touch and is now planning a memorial walk, starting at Hadrian’s Wall in the north west and finishing on the Kent coast on June 21, the 25th anniversary. Another opportunity, he says, to highlight the importance of talking. “There are so many stories.” Two years after the war the United Nations declared Kosovo clear of ordnance but the Halo Trust, which clears land mines and explosives, has been working there ever since. Ten cluster bombs were found in Arllat last year, including one ten centimetres from where a man had planted a tree in his garden. The Halo Trust are soon to complete one final sweep of the village and Dawling has been invited to the official handover ceremony. “The timing is uncanny,” he says. Dawling concluded while walking in Wales that he needed a change. He has stopped coaching but rugby remains his haven. Within five minutes of his first conversation with Mark McCall, the Saracens director of rugby, and Phil Morrow, group general manager, they had offered him the job of kit manager. “They have been brilliant,” he says. “Being in a professional sports environment is special. It is all about human performance and getting the best out of each other. I am extremely fortunate to have the support.” Dawling still has work to do on himself. He may face a life-long quest to unpick the layers of guilt and trauma but he is also developing tools to help other struggling soldiers. And for the first time in 25 years, he is starting to sleep easier at night. Even if it is occasionally on his old army bed. 6 Donate to Dawling’s Wolf Pack Pilgrimage at justgiving.com/crowdfunding/wolfpackpilgrimage says. Dawling was cited for punching an opponent in a regimental game. He received a two-month ban and was the subject of an investigation by the military police. “I was devastated,” he says. Dawling switched to Sevens, which was an attractive option given the travel destinations and the influx of Fijian soldiers. He played in the Army’s victory at the 2001 Middlesex Sevens and represented England at tournaments in New Zealand and Malaysia. “After that I had to focus on the military,” he says. “September 11 had happened.” shots fired Dawling experienced combat for the first time in Iraq. On March 19, 2003, his regiment fired the first coalition rounds of the war. They had been tasked with supporting the Americans to secure the Rumaila oil fields and search for weapons of mass destruction. “It was more kinetic than Kosovo,” he says. “I needed it. I was prepared to make the sacrifice. Once I got myself in that mindset, I was 100 per cent committed. “As soon as we got some incoming fire, we fired upon all the outposts, took them out and the Americans busted through. We had two weeks of heavy scrapping. There were tanks coming for us, armoured vehicles.” Dawling and his colleagues were firing eight 45lb shells per minute when the norm was six. Warnings of “gas, gas” would frequently come over the radio. “There were so many incidents,” he says. “We took over an Iraqi camp and there were 200 mortar rounds lying around. We had to make them safe and stack them up. It [the memories of Arllat] was all flashing back.” Dawling has not yet managed to untangle all of his emotions around Iraq. “In Kosovo, I 100 per cent believe what we did was the right thing,” he says. “There was ethnic cleansing, a million refugees and war crimes. It was something I felt proud we did. “All the rhetoric we were given about Iraq was weapons of mass destruction. It was never our job to get involved in politics. A lot of my friends are able to justify it and say, ‘That is not our decision and we did a good job.’ I agree with that. “But when you come back and find out there was the biggest protest the world had ever seen and we never found any weapons of mass destruction, there is moral guilt around that.” Dawling threw himself straight back into his rugby and won another Middlesex Sevens title in 2004 but socially he was struggling, unable to

Times Crossword 28,879 across down Prize solution 28,872 Check today’s answers by ringing 0905 757 0141 by midnight. Calls cost £1 per minute plus your telephone company’s network access charge. SP: Spoke 0333 202 3390. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 P O L E C A T L I A I S O N A U H R E P T O R E C K O N I N G P L A I N E I I N S R M O F O R T I F I C A T I O N M E D T I N S E U R O S T A R E S T A T E L P D R E N T A R T A R D E A D L O S S I O R Y S P E N O T B E F O R E T I M E G A T O A N N B P O T T Y H O R T E N S I A O O R O C P U H T O R P E D O H O T S P O T 1 There’s only so much a bowler can take? (6) 5 Nick a Kandinsky perhaps (8) 9 Yells about wound? Quite so (10) 10 Husband no longer wanting sex in retirement (4) 11 Forlorn, being without one’s valet? (8) 12 Fit Soviet leader moving in (6) 13 Captain given warning to turn back (4) 15 Manages to get a hearing in these distant parts (8) 18 Drink making you sanctimonious? (4,4) 19 Try to make Republican leader? That won’t fly (4) 21 Start to jeer, with pressure on workers (4,2) 23 Model free to waste time meeting poet without family (8) 25 Worry European drivers will go wrong way (4) 26 Etonian pal mistaken for an Italian (10) 27 Calmly dishonest, taking in English court (8) 28 Wife ignoring important figure (6) 2 Better to leave case behind and walk (5) 3 Nothing will stop sweet academic, that’s certain (9) 4 Increasingly rowdy yob almost upset wine (6) 5 Treatment of initially acute hysteria proven to work (8,7) 6 Acrobatic performer making kids very excited (8) 7 Grasses on European copper (5) 8 Companion well informed about fashionable porcelain (9) 14 Speak after cover up or disappear? (9) 16 Youngster knocking over girl’s pint (9) 17 Stupid to restrict island’s power supply (8) 20 Repudiate participants in Greek overreaction after upheaval (6) 22 Letter governor sent in to Times needing answer (5) 24 Accommodate expert after change of heart (5) The winners of Prize Crossword No 28,872 are J Birnie, Hemel Hempstead, Hertfordshire H Bosley, Frittenden, Kent G Darvill, Winchester, Hampshire P Mason, Salhouse, Norfolk M Moran, Penrith, Cumbria Newspapers support recycling The recycled paper content of UK newspapers in 2020 was 67% For Jumbo Crossword see T2 page 4 The RFU has apologised for the officiating error that allowed the Harlequins lock Irné Herbst to return from the sin-bin three minutes early in their victory over Bath on Saturday — but the result of the match will stand. Herbst, 30, was shown a yellow card in the 64th minute, with Harlequins leading 40-13, but was inexplicably back on the field at the Twickenham Stoop by the 71st minute. He made a crucial tackle on Will Muir, the Bath wing, as the home side survived a late fightback to win 40-36 and move to within two points of their opponents in the Premiership table. Both teams are in the thick of a tight play-off race, with Bath in second place and Harlequins moving up to fourth. Johann van Graan, the Bath head Klopp celebrates after Liverpool’s win over Brighton returned his side to the top of the Premier League, before the later draw at the Etihad kept them at the summit Monday April 1 2024 | the times Sport 16 pages of the finest football analysis The Game Kosovo, PTSD and Saracens – harrowing story of a kit man ‘Rugby saved my life’ Maanum scare mars cup final Kit Shepard RFU sorry for sin-bin error John Westerby The Arsenal forward Frida Maanum was able to travel home with her team-mates after collapsing during the Conti Cup final against Chelsea. The incident occurred just before the end of normal time. Maanum, 24, lay motionless as play was stopped and received oxygen on the pitch, before being taken off on a stretcher. The game resumed after a nine-minute delay, with Arsenal winning 1-0 in extra time. Arsenal soon announced that the Norway international was “conscious, talking and in a stable condition” and her head coach, Jonas Eidevall, confirmed after the game that she was with the squad. The final’s climax was feisty, as Eidevall was pushed by Emma Hayes, his Chelsea counterpart, who accused him of “male aggression”. ‘Liverpool are favourites’ Pep Guardiola admitted that Liverpool were favourites to lift the Premier League title after Manchester City and Arsenal played out a 0-0 draw at the Etihad Stadium. Arsenal began the day in pole position, but Liverpool went above them after coming from behind to defeat Brighton & Hove Albion at Anfield. The match that followed failed to live up to its billing as City could not break down an obdurate Arsenal. It left City in third, one point behind Arsenal, and three shy of Liverpool, with nine matches left. “Yes,” Guardiola said when asked if Liverpool were “clear favourites” to win the title. “It’s not in our hands — all we can do is think of our next match.” 6 Klopp’s side go two points clear after Arsenal hold City 6 Guardiola admits Anfield most likely destination for title Liverpool 2 Brighton 1 Manchester City 0 Arsenal 0 Premier League top three P GD Pts Liverpool 29 40 67 Arsenal 29 46 65 Man City 29 35 64 Paul Hirst

the times | Monday April 1 2024 9 arts She drew from the moment she could hold a pencil. She remembers going for her “interview” at the village school at four and being asked to draw a picture by the headmistress, who scolded her grip. “I was holding the pencil in my fist. I was so proud of my drawing and she just commented on my incorrect hands.” Sutton didn’t let the headmistress put her off. She studied at the Edinburgh College of Art and then at the Rhode Island School of Design. Readers may know her for her bestselling nature books with Nicola Davies, her fabrics for the design collective St Jude’s, her packaging for Charlie Bigham’s ready meals and her covetable biscuit boxes for Betty’s Tea L ast night I read Coriolanus, Titus Andronicus and Henry VI, Parts I, II and III before bed. “Swot!” I hear you say. “Show off!” Confession: the versions I read were ten pages each. I have before me a sumptuous copy of Shakespeare’s First Folio. Not an original, of course — the last time an original 1623 First Folio was sold at auction it went for $10 million — but an illustrated edition for children, the first of its kind. Shakespeare’s First Folio: A Children’s Edition is a labour of love that reads like a dream. It is a collaboration between the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Walker Books, the Shakespeare scholar Anjna Chouhan and the illustrator Emily Sutton. The book, out on Thursday, is part of a year of celebrations to mark the 400th anniversary of the publication of the First Folio, which fell on November 8, 2023. This is Shakespeare at a canter: every one of the plays in the First Folio cut to no more than a dozen parts. It is aimed at children aged seven to fourteen and each play is meant to be performed aloud with classmates and friends in under 20 minutes. Bagsy Bottom. I have been romping through the plays I’ve never read or seen before. The illustrations are a delight. On the phone from her studio in York, Sutton says she “was never somebody who was super clued-up on Shakespeare”. She has learnt on the hoof, tackling the plays in the order they appear in the First Folio: 36 plays means 36 title pages, 36 cast lists with individual character portraits, 50-odd swords, scrolls, trumpets, drums, coin purses and wedding rings, a further 20 decorative borders, the thistle end papers and a frontispiece portrait of Will Shakespeare himself. Oh, and different covers for the £30 hardback edition and the special £100 limited edition. That’s more than 150 illustrations, drawn first in pencil then worked up in watercolour. Thanks to eBay, Sutton has amassed a library of books on Tudor textiles, costumes and weapons, as well as a pop-up model of the Globe itself. She ran her sketches of props by the trust for advice on whether they were right for the period. When I mention the suitably Tuscan Romanesque church in the background of The Taming of the Shrew’s title page, Sutton laments that, alas, there was no research trip to Padua and occasionally the internet had a part to play. Nor did she travel to Egypt for the exuberantly “Nile style” title page to Antony and Cleopatra which she saved, slightly out of sequence, “as a treat till last”. (Cymbeline is the final play.) Venice she knew from previous visits and her Merchant of Venice page is a riot of candy-cane pillars, fan-topped chimneys and a flamboyant Bridge of Sighs. If you look closely you’ll spot an Easter egg: Sutton has included tiny portraits of her dog Mouse and her friend’s dog Edgar (good Shakespearean name) lounging on the prows of their respective gondolas. “I love details,” Sutton says. She nominates Richard Scarry, Beatrix Potter and Jill Barklem’s Brambly Hedge books as early influences. “I would pore over the illustrations.” Later she discovered Brian Wildsmith, Victor Ambrus and the husband-and-wife illustrators Martin and Alice Provensen. Rooms in Yorkshire. The First Folio was a commission of a different magnitude: “Definitely the most intricately illustrated book that I’ve done,” she says. It was Chouhan, who is super clued-up about Shakespeare, who took on the task of abridging the plays. She was nine when her aunt gave her a children’s edition of Twelfth Night. “I was fascinated,” she says. “I’d never read anything like it. Of course I didn’t understand all of it but I was just mesmerised and I thought: I really want to understand this.” Chouhan has been working on this edition since 2016, when she cut Romeo and Juliet for a school that wanted to put on a play. When she saw the performance, she found they had added the prologue (“Two households, both alike in dignity”), which is not in the First Folio. She was struck by the fact “these children and their teachers had gone, ‘You know what’s really iconic…?’” So, in one of about a dozen departures from the First Folio, Romeo and Juliet comes with its prologue. She started by typing out every line “to reacquaint myself with every single word and to remind myself why it’s there”. Only then did she start cutting. She recorded in a spreadsheet what percentage of each play had been kept and cut — 5.8 per cent of Romeo and Juliet remains. Mercutio’s “Queen Mab” speech is out, but “A plague o’ both your houses!” is in. “I wanted seven-year-olds to at least hold this book and flick through it and think, ‘Yes, I feel empowered to access some of this language.’ I also wanted slightly older children to think, ‘Yes, I can do this entire play, I can do the whole of Coriolanus.” Mindful that this is Shakespeare for children, some amendments have been made. “Bed tricks”, in which one character is duped into sleeping with another under the impression they are someone else, and outright rape have been “omitted or adapted”. Which brings us to Thomas Bowdler, who, with his sister, published an expurgated Family Shakespeare in the 19th century, removing anything that might be offensive, and in so doing gave us the word “bowdlerise”. Chouhan sticks to her guns: “What we’ve created is for children and Shakespeare didn’t write for children.” I put it to her that were she doing a workshop with GCSE students she would be frank about the rape of Lavinia in Titus Andronicus. “Exactly.” If we’re talking about Bowdler, we need to also talk about Charles and Mary Lamb and their Tales from Shakespeare. “What they did was extraordinary,” Chouhan says. But the Lambs turned the plays into prose and Chouhan really wanted the plays to be plays — to be performed aloud. What she wanted to champion above all was the “theatricality” and to help readers understand that “drama is as worthy as every other art form”. The trust will donate 6,000 copies to primary schools and 3,000 copies to libraries. I ask Chouhan to pick a few choice Shakespeare coinages. “Where do you want me to start? The long and short of it. Bedazzled. Eyeball. The whole notion that we didn’t have a word for eyeball! Assassination.” Then there are the insults: rampallion, tardy sluggard, irksome brawling scold. Since reading Coriolanus (or 6 per cent of it) I’m itching for the moment to shout “dissentious rogues!” at Question Time. Feast your eyes on this bedazzling book and start your children on a lifelong love of Shakespeare. Zounds! How to get kids into the Bard Laura Freeman is beguiled by a sumptuous new children’s edition of Shakespeare’s First Folio Sutton’s illustration of Shakespeare, above. Below: a First Folio Shakespeare’s First Folio: A Children’s Edition is published by Walker Books on Thursday

10 Monday April 1 2024 | the times times2 Your weekday brain boost More puzzles Pages 14-16 TRAIN TRACKS CODEWORD FUTOSHIKI SUDOKU Thursday’s solutions SAMURAI KILLER SUKO Solutions in tomorrow’s Times2 Mini Sudoku Fill in the grid so that every column, every row and every 3x2 box contains the digits 1 to 6 Codeword Every letter in the crossword-style grid, right, is represented by a number from 1 to 26. Each letter of the alphabet appears in the grid at least once. Use the letters already provided to work out the identity of further letters. Enter letters in the main grid and the smaller reference grid until all 26 letters of the alphabet have been accounted for. Proper nouns are excluded. Suko Place the numbers 1 to 9 in the spaces so that the number in each circle is equal to the sum of the four surrounding spaces, and each colour total is correct Fill each grid so that every column, every row and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 to 9. Where the puzzles overlap, the rows and columns do not go beyond their usual length. Every day, Monday to Thursday, a page of extra puzzles to give your brain an extended workout Samurai easy Sudoku super fiendish Fill the grid so that every column, every row and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 to 9. Each set of cells joined by dotted lines must add up to the target number in its top-left corner. Within each set of cells joined by dotted lines, a digit cannot be repeated. Killer deadly Train Tracks Lay tracks to enable the train to travel from village A to village B. The numbers indicate how many sections of track go in each row and column. There are only straight sections and curved sections. The track cannot cross itself. Futoshiki Fill the blank squares so that every row and column contains each of the numbers 1 to 5 once only. The symbols between the squares indicate whether a number is larger (>) or smaller (<) than the number next to it. Solve Times puzzles interactively with same-day solutions at thetimes.co.uk MINI SUDOKU

14 Monday April 1 2024 | the times MindGames Fill the grid using the numbers 1 to 9 only. The numbers in each horizontal or vertical run of white squares add up to the total in the triangle to its left or above it. The same number may occur more than once in a row or column, but not within the same run of white squares. Kakuro No 3676 Fill the blank squares so that every row and column contains each of the numbers 1 to 5 once only. The symbols between the squares indicate whether a number is larger (>) or smaller (<) than the number next to it. All the digits 1 to 6 must appear in every row and column. In each thick-line “block”, the target number in the top left-hand corner is calculated from the digits in all the cells in the block, using the operation indicated by the symbol. KenKen Easy No 6169 Futoshiki No 4717 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 Across 1 Very hot curry of Goan origin (8) 5 Italian town square (6) 9 12-inch forerunner of the CD and DVD (9) 11 Group of nine musicians (5) 12 German bread typically eaten around Christmas (7) 13 Family name of the 1982 and 2016 Formula One world drivers’ champions (7) 14 US first lady from 2009 to 2017 (8,5) 16 Author of acclaimed but abstruse novels such as Gravity’s Rainbow and V. (6,7) 20 Post-industrial town to the east of Glasgow (7) 21 Discoverer of the effect of relative speed on the observed frequency of waves (7) 23 City with the world’s largest metropolitan population (5) H O N D U R A S G B S T A U P H E A S A N T B O B F O S S E O R H S F T C A F F E I N E C O T F T L W O R D S W O R T H C O P E P I I E U N N F E L L I N I T R I C E P S U A D S S I R C U B S J A N E T B A K E R H O A O B M S T R U M M E R Z A I I D M K O E S T L E R A D A M B E D E R T R S Y R L E O S A Y E R Last week’s solution 24 Metal fastener associated with babies and punks (6,3) 25 Folklore creature resembling an elf or fairy (6) 26 --- Bucket, Patricia Routledge’s incorrigible snob in the sitcom Keeping Up Appearances (8) Down 1 Small overnight travelling case or bag (6) 2 Jo ---, Norwegian creator of the detective Harry Hole (5) 3 Synthetic paint or fibre (7) 4 Luxury rail service that ran from Paris to Istanbul (6,7) 6 Romanian-born pioneer of the theatre of the absurd (7) 7 Fred ---, director of High Noon and From Here to Eternity (9) 8 Nationality of the West Indian cricketing knights Viv Richards and Curtly Ambrose (8) 10 Simon Armitage’s predecessor as poet laureate (5,3,5) 14 James Bond adventure with Hugo Drax as its villain (9) 15 Mythical continent said to have sunk into the ocean (8) 17 Construction named after John Lennon in Liverpool and George Best in Belfast (7) 18 Pertaining to the liver (7) 19 Official language of Benin, Gabon and Guinea (6) 22 Garden plant producing tall brightly coloured spikes of flowers (5) Slide the letters either horizontally or vertically back into the grid to produce a completed crossword. Letters are allowed to slide over other letters Every letter in this crossword-style grid is represented by a number from 1 to 26. Each letter of the alphabet appears in the grid at least once. Use the letters already provided to work out the identity of further letters. Enter letters in the main grid and the smaller reference grid until all 26 letters of the alphabet have been accounted for. Proper nouns are excluded. Saturday’s solution, right Cluelines Stuck on Codeword? To receive 4 random clues call 0901 293 6262 or text TIMECODE to 64343. Calls cost £1 plus your telephone company’s network access charge. Texts cost £1 plus your standard network charge. For the full solution call 0905 757 0142. Calls cost £1 per minute plus your telephone company’s network access charge. SP: Spoke, 0333 202 3390 (Mon-Fri, 9am-5.30pm). Lay tracks to enable the train to travel from village A to village B. The numbers indicate how many sections of track go in each row and column. There are only straight sections and curved sections. The track cannot cross itself. Train Tracks No 2208 Lexica No 7331 No 7332 T A L H L U E V E E K E M E L H E M O P U Y N F I A P S E U B L T F M E T L R E O M L N Codeword No 5177 Winning Move General Knowledge Crossword No 227 White to play. This position is a puzzle composed by Hieronymus Fischer. This puzzle has the stipulation of White to play and mate in one move. A mate in one sounds easy but this puzzle has an unexpected twist. The clue is that it has been specifically chosen to appear today. A A A A B C D D E E E G G H I L L L N N O O O P R R S T T T V Y 1 Become different, later, when drunk (5) 2 Part of important agenda, the last part (3,3) 3 Work hard in attempt to make pot (6) 4 American soldier recalled impressive base (7) 5 Brandy and soda knocked back after five, after short visit (8) Solve all five cryptic clues using each letter underneath once only - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Quintagram® Solve all five cryptic clues using each letter underneath once only Challenge your mind with these fiendish word and number puzzles thetimes.co.uk/ bookshop

the times | Monday April 1 2024 15 MindGames Divide the grid into square or rectangular blocks, each containing one digit only. Every block must contain the number of cells indicated by the digit inside it. Enter each of the numbers from 1 to 9 in the grid, so that the six sums work. We’ve placed two numbers to get you started. Each sum should be calculated left to right or top to bottom. From these letters, make words of three or more letters, always including the central letter. Answers must be in the Concise Oxford Dictionary, excluding capitalised words, plurals, conjugated verbs (past tense etc), adverbs ending in LY, comparatives and superlatives. How you rate 1 words, average; 2, good; 3, very good; 4, excellent 1 New Year’s Day 2 Las Vegas 3 Lewis Carroll, as in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass 4 Long John Silver 5 Chemotherapy 6 The Mayor of Casterbridge 7 Henry Moore 8 Eyesight or vision 9 Bear Grylls 10 Leicestershire. It is close to the village of Fenny Drayton 11 Michael Spicer 12 Cured and fermented shark meat, typically Greenland shark 13 Quasicrystals or quasiperiodic crystals 14 Cricket 15 Mel Giedroyc Kakuro 3674 Futoshiki 4715 G C O R N H O T M O R G U E I G R C R A Y O N Lexica 7330 V E T A G I N J U R E R O I O I M N I N E Set Square 3677 Lexica 7329 Suko 4078 Train Tracks 2207 Fredaine (a) A practical joke (Collins) Nickum (b) A mischief maker (Collins) Balatronic (a) Pertaining to buffoons (Brewer’s) Word watch There is no actual mate in one but a quick count reveals that Black has nine pawns. Therefore the position is illegal unless a black pawn is removed. The removal of any black pawn allows a mate in one as follows: a7-pawn, 1 Qb6; b7-pawn, 1 Nc6; c4-pawn, 1 Qb4; d3-pawn, 1 Qe4; e3-pawn, 1 Bxf2; f7- pawn, 1 Ne6; f2-pawn, 1 Bxe3; g6-pawn, 1 Rg4; h3-pawn 1 Rh4 Chess — Winning Move 1 Condor 2 Kidnap 3 Stingy 4 Trickle 5 Scamper Concise Quintagram Quiz Easy 102 Medium 510 Harder 84 Brain Trainer KenKen 6168 Codeword 5176 1 Alter 2 Tag end 3 Trophy 4 Ignoble 5 Calvados Cryptic Quintagram Today’s solutions Saturday’s answers dhoti, dight, ding, dingo, dink, dint, doing, doit, doting, gink, high, hight, hind, hint, hoki, hongi, ikon, ingot, into, kind, king, kinghood, kino, kith, knight, knighthood, knit, nigh, night, oink, thigh, thin, thing, think, tigon, ting times2 Crossword No 9493 Brain Trainer Just follow the instructions from left to right, starting with the number given to reach an answer at the end. ANSWER MEDIUM 77 + 33 – 128 DOUBLE IT TRIPLE + 321 IT 85/ OF IT + ÷ 6 x 7 54/ OF IT + ANSWER EASY 60 ÷ 5 x 3 DOUBLE IT + 4 HALVE IT + 6 4 x 7 3/ OF IT – + 25 ANSWER HARDER 315 ÷ 12 HALVE x 17 ÷ 9 IT 15 + 144 9/ OF IT – DOUBLE IT 7 3/ OF IT – SQUARE IT 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Across 1 White-billed water bird (4) 3 Sport performed in a canoe-like craft (8) 8 Hold spellbound (7) 10 Statement of belief (5) 11 Cause a fuss (4,3,4) 13 Aspects, features (6) 15 Formal discussion (6) O S S I F I E D N I K E S C R A M B L C O R N Y S T A M I N A A O U T R Z T R E L A P S E I M A G E S L R N D S E G R E G A T E T Y G S B A S T I R G A V O T T E S R A H I U A S H I A T S U S C A N T E C E N T R E L I K E S T E A D Y O N Solution to Crossword 9492 17 Come to nothing (2,2,2,5) 20 Ivan ---, Czech-born tennis player and coach (5) 21 Like an animal (7) 22 Hybrid soft fruit (8) 23 Lump of earth (4) Down 1 Go away! (5,3) 2 Pertaining to vision (5) 4 Slumbering (6) 5 Female religious recluses (11) 6 Disinclination to move (7) 7 Continue; talk at length (2,2) 9 Vegetable casserole (11) 12 Razed to the ground (8) 14 Power of an argument to convince (7) 16 Supple, flexible (6) 18 Bay window (5) 19 Mass of coagulated liquid such as blood or cream (4) Cell Blocks No 5060 Polygon Set Square No 3679 Please note, BODMAS does not apply Killer Gentle No 9392 Solutions Killer Tricky No 9393 As with standard Sudoku, fill the grid so that every column, every row and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 to 9. Each set of cells joined by dotted lines must add up to the target number in its top-left corner. Within each set of cells joined by dotted lines, a digit cannot be repeated. Need help with today’s puzzle? Call 0905 757 0143 to check the answers. Calls cost £1 per minute plus your telephone company’s network access charge. SP: Spoke, 0333 202 3390 (Mon-Fri 9am-5.30pm). Cluelines Stuck on Sudoku, Killer or KenKen? Call 0901 293 6263 before midnight to receive four clues for any of today’s puzzles. Calls cost £1 plus your telephone company’s network access charge. SP: Spoke, 0333 202 3390 (Mon-Fri 9am-5.30pm). Two East-West pairs (out of six) found their making grand slam on today’s deal from the Camrose Trophy (for home nations) in Manchester: Ciran Coyne-David Walsh for Ireland, and Ian LindsayIan Hamilton for Northern Ireland. However, finding their way to 7♥ proved a mixed blessing (actually, not really a blessing at all) for the Northern Ireland pair ... Peter Crouch-Simon Cope of the victorious England team found a brilliant and unlikely vulnerable sacrifice in 7♠. Declarer, Crouch, ruffed West’s queen of diamonds lead and, knowing the club layout from the bidding, led a spade to the king at trick two, West discarding. He then ran the queen of clubs. East could ruff the club and cash the ace-queen of spades but, with clubs running, that was only four down and E-W +1,100. That was less than the small slams bid and made at four of the six tables, let alone the 2,210 E-W would have scored (and Coyne-Walsh did score) in 7♥. As it’s a certain foolish day of the year, let’s think of some outlandish bridgey suggestions — apart from being able to bid Eight of Something. How about dummy coming down before the lead? Or passing your hand to your left after the auction (that’s really farout)? Or playing a duplicate session in which you never bid (Terence Reese used to do that — invariably scoring about 55 per cent)? Or playing a duplicate session in which you can’t declare (or defend) the same contract twice? [email protected] Contract: 7♠ Dbled, Opening Lead: ♦Q Dealer: North, Vulnerability: Both N W E S Pass(1) 1♦ Pass 2♥(2) 4♣(3) 6♣(4) 6♠(5) 7♦ Dbl(6) 7♥ Pass Pass 7♠(7) Dbl (End) (1) Simon Cope of Hertfordshire wisely chooses not to pre-empt in clubs, given his five-card major on the side. (2) Traditional strong jump shift. (3) Natural pre-empt but, given his failure to pre-empt initially, he must have a side major (which could only be spades in the light of West’s heart bid). (4) Void-showing splinter, a grand slam try. (5) Great bid. The inference of partner’s spades is not lost on South, Peter Crouch of Surrey. All his cards tell him to sacrifice — no points in the reds, everything in partner’s blacks. And spades outrank the reds at the same level, unlike clubs. Notably, you can save in 7♠ over 7♦/♥; but you can’t save in 8♣ (the rules don’t allow it, even though there’s perhaps no real reason why it shouldn’t be allowed — given that you are not bidding to make). (6) Lightner double, calling for an unusual opening lead — North is ruffing hearts. (7) However, with East having shown a void club, North has no defence to 7♥ and wisely saves, despite being vulnerable. S(Crouch) W(Hamilton) N(Cope) E(Lindsay) ♠AQ104 ♥7642 ♦AK1065 ♣- Teams ♠J7532 ♥- ♦3 ♣A1097432 ♠K986 ♥J53 ♦92 ♣QJ65 ♠- ♥AKQ1098 ♦QJ874 ♣K8 Bridge Andrew Robson Sudoku 14,798 Killer 9391 Cell Blocks 5059 Quick Cryptic 2636 Tredoku 1831 Square Routes 264 D I A N A E N M T R P R E N O U A L N S S R G E S

01.04.24 Word watch Sudoku Easy No 14,799 Difficult No 14,800 Fiendish No 14,801 David Parfitt Fredaine a A practical joke b A month in revolutionary France c An Italian frozen dessert Nickum a A police officer b A mischief maker c A half-suppressed laugh Balatronic a Pertaining to buffoons b Gullible c A poem in praise of foolishness Answers on page 15 The Times Quick Cryptic No 2638 by Alex Across 7 Start to cook tough vegetable (5) 8 Lieutenant protected by very thin shield (7) 10 Counterpart merely returning washing machine (4,3) 11 Distinctive character of those moving last to first (5) 12 Repugnant sailor with house by river split (9) 14 Cold greeting in Greek letter (3) 15 Druid oddly is no good (3) 16 Money private investigator gets initially finding pet (6,3) 18 Bit of lamb I threw in range (5) 20 Predator in tavern immediately left (4,3) 22 Dirt bus dispersed causes upset (7) 23 Poem disturbed Cyril (5) Down 1 Dastardly con destroyed police headquarters (8,4) 2 Knocked around Northern Ireland and drove off (8) 3 Correct leaders of European directorate in triplicate (4) 4 Working in America getting billed regularly (6) 5 Transplant trees and let develop (8) 6 Want thing by church (4) 9 Single carpet moved into bedroom perhaps (7-5) 13 Just disagreeable head is missing (8) 14 Prize pig beginning to destroy item of furniture (8) 17 Drink that is covering minute part of apron (6) 19 Fish deep (4) 21 Annoy king having a fortune but missing penny (4) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Friday’s solution on page 15 15 Fill the grid so that every column, every row and every 3x3 box contains the digits 1 to 9. Place the numbers 1 to 9 in the spaces so that the number in each circle is equal to the sum of the four surrounding spaces, and each colour total is correct The Times Daily Quiz Olav Bjortomt Answers on page 15 1 What was the first bank holiday of 2024? 2 Which city in Nevada has used the slogan: “What happens here, stays here”? 3 Martin Gardner’s 1960 book The Annotated Alice incorporates two works by which writer? 4 Tim Curry played which resourceful pirate in the 1996 film Muppet Treasure Island? 5 Which catch-all term is used for medication to kill cancer cells? 6 The city in the title of which 1886 novel by Thomas Hardy is based on Dorchester? 7 King and Queen is the only sculpture depicting solely a pair of adult figures by which English sculptor? 8 Created by William Horatio Bates, the Bates method is used for “improving” which of the senses? 9 In 2010, the US knife company Gerber entered an endorsement partnership with which British survival expert? 10 Ordnance Survey gives the geographical centre of England as Lindley Hall Farm in which county? 11 Which comedian states: “I was The Room Next Door Man” in his YouTube bio? 12 What is the Icelandic national dish kaestur hakarl or hakarl? 13 In 1981, which structures were predicted by a five-fold symmetry study by the crystallographer Alan Lindsay Mackay? 14 Harold Pinter described which sport as “the greatest thing that God created on Earth”? 15 Who is this TV presenter and comedian? Suko No 4078 For interactive puzzles visit thetimes.co.uk For Jumbo Crossword See page 4 SUBSCRIBE TODAY Sign up to the Times Puzzles newsletter, delivered straight to your inbox every Saturday. Subscribers can sign up by going to ‘My Newsletters’. To try a digital subscription, visit thetimes.co.uk/trial or scan the QR code Enjoy a puzzling weekend with our newsletter DIGITAL SUBSCRIPTION

thegame All the action from the weekend PAGES 2-5 MONDAY APRIL 1 2024 YOU SHALL NOT PASS Arsenal’s imperious centre backs keep Haaland quiet as Arteta’s side show steel to earn gutsy draw at the Etihad ROBBIE JAY BARRATT/AMA/GETTY IMAGES PAGE 13 Upwardly mobile Barrow are thriving in home away from home PAGE 16 Too little too late for Dortmund after crushing Kane’s title hopes Erling Haaland finds an Arsenal defence, and in particular Gabriel, in defiant mood as the much anticipated clash between City and Arsenal ended goalless yesterday

2 2GG Monday April 1 2024 | the times thegame features. The clock ticked down, and the jeopardy rose. Trossard broke, precisely released by Odegaard, but placed his shot too close to Stefan Ortega when he scould have squared to Martinelli. The temperature rose in the dugouts. When Havertz went down far too easily, Guardiola waved him up, then waved dismissively at a protesting Arteta. Guardiola then looked on in frustration as Haaland needed attention after Saliba accidentally headed him. Haaland’s difficult afternoon against Arsenal centre backs continued when Gabriel eased him out of the way. City’s No 9 appealed for a penalty, and Gabriel walked close and delivered a swift admonishment. Saliba then ensured Haaland could not get the right purchase on a ball whipped in by De Bruyne. The afternoon also contained the sight of the City fans’ group, The 1894, displaying a banner reading “Record Profits but Record Prices. Stop exploiting our loyalty!” Two stewards soon came over and confiscated the banner. The group later called on City “to talk to fans properly now instead of being defensive about ticket pricing and policy”. Arsenal were not the only ones making a point. Chief Football Writer At the Etihad Stadium On the hour, Guardiola made two attacking substitutions. Doku and Grealish came on, respectively right and left. Foden, who got no change from White, and Mateo Kovacic went off. Silva moved across into the centre alongside Rodri. Echoing a chess game, Arteta responded. Thomas Partey replaced Jorginho within four minutes while Takehiro Tomiyasu came on for Kiwior. Jesus soon departed, replaced by Leandro Trossard, and applauded by many supporters of his former club. Saka was slowing, having committed so much energy to defence, and was replaced by Gabriel Martinelli with 13 minutes remaining. The Brazilian was an immediate threat and had a shot blocked by Rúben Dias. De Bruyne’s movement and vision was one of the game’s redeeming create even more. Foden played every second of England’s friendlies and looked drained. Foden simply could not escape Ben White, who had snubbed England. Nathan Aké played every second of Holland’s friendlies against Scotland and Germany, and limped off here after 27 minutes after just failing to score, placing his header from a De Bruyne corner too close to David Raya. At least there were positives in the return of Jack Grealish, who brought more of a threat than Jérémy Doku. In occasional possession, Arsenal looked for counters and set-pieces. White was typically busy down the right, lifting in a cross that Kiwior laid back to Jesus who fired wide. City finished the first half with a halfchance, Haaland unable to connect fully with Josko Gvardiol’s cross partly because of the close attentions of Gabriel and Kiwior. The second half began with greater intensity. Lewis spun around Kai Havertz. Arsenal broke out briefly, Odegaard finding a yard of space, finding a gap in City’s defence and Saka. The England international crossed low and the sliding Jesus just failed to make contact. Attention immediately returned down the other end. White’s exceptional defending continued, throwing himself in the way of Rodri’s shot. Mikel Arteta came for a point and he came with a plan. His Arsenal players delivered the first point in eight visits here by doubling up on Erling Haaland, by dropping deep, by grappling at corners, by utterly frustrating the champions. It was not so much parking the bus as leaving the fast car in the garage. It was not pretty but it was Arteta smiling at the end and Pep Guardiola scowling. Arteta outwits Pep with Depicted as soft a year ago while fading in the title race, Arsenal demonstrated a hard streak here. They are not only in the mix for the title with Liverpool and City; they deliberately mix it with them. This was a different Arsenal, more steel than silk, more mentally and physically robust. This was speedchess, City making a move, and Arsenal instantly blocking their way. Arsenal were well drilled, very well disciplined, showing they had learned some streetwise tricks from their meeting with Porto. This was about Arteta’s plan that demanded total concentration to deny a side who had scored in their past 57 home games. Arguably the real winners were Liverpool, who had earlier defeated Brighton & Hove Albion, but Arsenal, their players and supporters, will be buoyed by this. Arteta had outwitted Guardiola. His plan worked. William Saliba was immense, being joined by Gabriel in marshalling and muscling Haaland out of the game. Out of possession, as they were for all but 28 per cent of the game, Arsenal dropped deep in 5-3-2 formation and shielded their goal in numbers. Declan Rice, Jorginho and Bukayo Saka were almost on the toes of a back four bolstered by Gabriel Jesus tracking back as an extra left back. Arsenal’s stifling tactics led to Ben White controlling Phil Foden, and when the City firefly was forced inside, he was hunted down by Jorginho. When Rodri tried to attack one of Kevin De Bruyne’s inswinging corners, his freedom of movement was curtailed by Rice baulking him, wrapping arms around him, anything to stop him reaching the ball. City understandably became annoyed, eventually angered by Anthony Taylor’s leniency at Arsenal’s tactics, their occasional wrestling and fouling. When Haaland turned away brilliantly from Rice, he was cynically tripped. City fans screamed for a booking but Taylor was determined to show celemency. Haaland threw his arms up in bemusement. Jakub Kiwior blocked Bernardo Silva, stopping him cutting inside. More appeals for sanction. More mercy from Taylor. De Bruyne held up four fingers, signalling the number of offences, when Jorginho fouled Rico Lewis, and Taylor again had a word not a card. Gabriel tugged Haaland’s shirt and again Taylor’s cards were conspicuous by their absence. Taylor’s aim was clearly to let such a big game flow, and not interfere but ironic cheers rolled around the home stands when he finally located his cards after 65 minutes, brushed away the cobwebs and took Jesus’s name for delaying City’s attempt to take a free kick. City were not averse to tactical fouls. Jesus should have been followed into the book by Silva for a blatant and cynical trip on Saka as he attempted to sprint clear. Saka was starting, to nobody’s surprise, after withdrawing from the England squad for the friendlies against Brazil and Belgium. City paid the price for international week. The home team lost Kyle Walker to a hamstring when England played Brazil and lost some of their drive down the right. John Stones tweaked an adductor against Belgium and made it only as far as the bench here. When Stones plays, and steps into midfield, De Bruyne can roam and 0 0 RATINGS Manchester City (4-2-3-1): S Ortega 7 — M Akanji 6, R Dias 7, N Akê 6 (R Lewis 27min, 6) , J Gvardiol 6 — Rodri 7, M Kovacic 6 (J Grealish 61, 6) — B Silva 7, K De Bruyne 6, P Foden 6 (J Doku 61, 7) — E Haaland 6. Arsenal (4-3-3): D Raya 7 — B White 7, Gabriel 6, W Saliba 7, J Kiwior 6 (T Tomiyasu 66, 6) — M Odegaard, 7, Jorginho 6 (T Partey 66, 6), D Rice 7 — B Saka 6 (G Martinelli 78), K Havertz 6, G Jesus 5 (L Trossard 72). Booked Jesus, Raya. Referee A Taylor. Man City Arsenal HOW THEY STAND TITLE-RACE FIXTURES Liverpool Sheffield United (H); Manchester United (A); Crystal Palace (H); Fulham (A); Everton (A); West Ham (A); Tottenham (H); Aston Villa (A); Wolves (H). Arsenal Luton (H); Brighton (A); Aston Villa (H); Wolves (A); Chelsea (H); Tottenham (A); Bournemouth (H); Manchester United (A); Everton (H). Man City Aston Villa (H); Crystal Palace (A); Luton (H); Tottenham (A); Brighton (A); Nottingham Forest (A); Wolves (H); Fulham (A); West Ham (H). P W D L F A GD Pts Liverpool.............29 20 7 2 67 27 40 67 Arsenal.................29 20 5 4 70 24 46 65 Man City...............29 19 7 3 63 28 35 64 Aston Villa...........30 18 5 7 62 42 20 59 Spurs.....................29 17 5 7 61 43 18 56 Man United.........29 15 3 11 40 40 0 48 West Ham............30 12 8 10 49 54 -5 44 Newcastle............29 13 4 12 63 51 12 43 Brighton...............29 11 9 9 51 46 5 42 Wolves..................29 12 5 12 42 46 -4 41 Chelsea.................28 11 7 10 49 47 2 40 Fulham.................30 11 6 13 46 47 -1 39 Bournemouth....29 10 8 11 43 53 -10 38 Crystal Palace....29 7 9 13 34 49 -15 30 Brentford.............30 7 6 17 42 55 -13 27 Everton*...............29 8 7 14 30 41 -11 25 Nott’m Forest**.30 6 8 16 36 52 -16 22 Luton....................30 5 7 18 43 62 -19 22 Burnley.................30 4 6 20 31 65 -34 18 Sheff Utd..............29 3 6 20 27 77 -50 15 *Deducted 6pts; **deducted 4pts HENRY WINTER STANDING FIRM The Arsenal centre back William Saliba gave a commanding performance at the Etihad Stadium Duels won 8 Team ranking 1st Possession won 8 1st Successful passes 25 1st Successful tackles 2 1st Touches 50 1st Nowhere to run: Arsenal managed to shackle Haaland for much of the game despite City enjoying most of the possession CITY YET TO BEAT A TOP-FOUR RIVAL v Liverpool Home Draw, 1-1 Away Draw, 1-1 v Arsenal Home Draw, 0-0 Away Defeat, 0-1 v Aston Villa Home Fixture on Wednesday Away Defeat, 0-1 2 2GG Monday April 1 2024 | the times

the times | Monday April 1 2024 2GG 3 thegame Gregor Robertson visits ??????????????? TONY CASCARINO Weekend talking points Mikel Arteta is a man on a mission. His team came to the Etihad with one aim: not to get beaten by Manchester City, as they were twice last season. Arsenal have bought into the belief that if they can finish above City, they will be champions. Liverpool may be sitting on top at the moment, but Jürgen Klopp’s team take far more and far bigger risks in the way they play than their two title rivals and opposition teams get chances when they play against them. Brighton & Hove Albion certainly had their share yesterday. This makes them susceptible to dropping points in the run-in, which I think Arteta believes they will do. Arsenal were determined not to lose to City and that they have not been beaten by the champions this season makes a statement. They effectively concentrated on shutting City down and I understand that, because teams who try to take on Pep Guardiola’s team can leave with a bloody nose. Arteta resisted the temptation of allowing his side to play their natural attacking game. With Jorginho working hard in the middle to make sure City found no joy there, the home side were forced to go wide. But Gabriel Jesus and Bukayo Saka were charged with protecting Arsenal’s full backs — Saka in front of Ben White and Jesus helping out Jakub Kiwior in keeping Bernardo Silva quiet. Neither goalkeeper had a serious save to make and that the centre halves got all the plaudits tells you a lot about the game. Arsenal will now feel confident that they have the tools and mentality not to fall away as they did last season. TEAM OF THE WEEK E Martínez A Villa E Konza A Villa W Saliba Arsenal K Ajer Brentford T Cairney Fulham 4-3-3 A Mac Allister Liverpool J Cullen Burnley I Toney Brentford A Gordon Newcastle B Johnson Tottenham J Gomez Liverpool Mac Allister looked every bit a World Cup winner Liverpool are on top but Arsenal will still believe Alexis Mac Allister was a World Cup winner at Brighton & Hove Albion but still had moments when he didn’t have the aura of one. He could be in and out of that side at times, but now at Liverpool I believe he is playing the best football of his career. He was magnificent in the win over his former club yesterday. He kept his head and was a calm presence despite picking up an early booking. The Argentina midfielder showed brilliant vision and won possession for his team, his passing was superb, and he was always on the turn when receiving the ball. It can be hard for South American players to settle over here but he has adjusted brilliantly. That is mainly because he has handled the physical side of the game, despite not being the biggest in stature. He can mix it when needed. Luis Díaz and Mohamed Salah scored the goals yesterday but Mac Allister was the reason Liverpool won the game. Injury to Saliba would be killer blow to title charge William Saliba was magnificent at the Etihad yesterday — as he has been so far this season — and must now be considered one of the outstanding centre backs in the Premier League. His injury late on in effect killed off their hopes of the title last season. Arsenal missed him badly. His partnership with Gabriel has been a feature of their challenge this campaign, as illustrated by the way they marshalled Erling Haaland yesterday. The Frenchman has grown into a centre half in the mould of Tony Adams, with a never-say-die attitude, and has shown the composure of Liverpool’s Virgil van Dijk when his team have needed it too. He has been one of the best defenders in the league this season and if he can remain fit and on form for the remaining matches of the campaign then Arsenal really can go all the way to the title this time. Card-happy approach did not spoil Anfield spectacle There were no really contentious incidents in either of the big matches yesterday to provoke any controversy, but it was still very interesting to see how the two referees approached the games. At the Etihad, Anthony Taylor went for the lenient approach — he appeared to want to keep play moving and let the game flow as much as he could. He awarded 29 fouls but felt the need to caution only two players: David Raya, the Arsenal goalkeeper, and his team-mate Gabriel Jesus. Despite this, the match failed to live up to its expectations as a spectacle. At Anfield, though, David Coote blew up for 26 fouls but bandied cards around for some very innocuous incidents, resulting in eight players being booked. Despite the stop-start nature that came with these cautions, the game was far more exciting than the one at the Etihad. FANS STAGE PROTEST A Manchester City fans’ group accused the club of “exploiting their loyalty” during a protest over season ticket prices prior to the match against Arsenal. Before kick-off, The 1894 unfurled a banner that read: “Record profits but record prices. Stop exploiting our loyalty.” City announced last month that season ticket prices would increase by an average of 5 per cent. The hike came even though City won the Treble last year, posting profits of £80.4 million. The 1894 group said that stewards confiscated the flag and asked for names of three of their members. City said ground regulations dictate that all banners draped over advertising boards should be removed, and that fans’ groups were aware of this. “The banner said nothing offensive and was only up pre-match, never during the game,” an 1894 spokesperson said. As well as the 1894 group, City Matters, and the MCFC Fans Foodbank Support, a group that collects and supplies food to the poor in Manchester, hit out at the club over the increase. “We call on the club to now come out and talk to fans properly about ticket prices and policy instead of being defensive,” an 1894 spokesperson added. “All main City supporters’ groups are in favour of a price freeze and also have concerns over ticketing policies generally, so we are not speaking just for ourselves but on behalf of a large number of supporters.” show of steel TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER BRADLEY ORMESHER MATT WEST/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK

Mikel Arteta said that yesterday’s result at the Etihad Stadium demonstrated how much progress his Arsenal team had made this season. Arteta refused to be downbeat despite surrendering top spot to Liverpool after drawing 0-0 against the title-holders Manchester City. The Arsenal manager pointed out that his team had gone to the Etihad in April last year when they were also top of the league, and were hammered 4-1. This time Arsenal played far more defensively, restricting City to one shot on target although they had only two of their own. “No way can you be fully happy [with a point] but we have made a big step today,” Arteta said. “We had the Arteta: PAUL HIRST 4 1GG Monday April 1 2024 | the times thegame Haaland enjoyed a bruising encounter but little goalmouth reward. It is 75 matches since City previously played out a goalless draw. No wonder Guardiola looked perturbed. He isn’t used to going 90 minutes without that dopamine rush. Perhaps teasing Arteta, his mentee, Guardiola had described winning a first title as “easy” before the match. Retaining it, he insisted, was harder. And maybe it is easier, if joining a club that had won two of the previous six championships, as Guardiola did. Yet Sir Alex Ferguson thought the opposite. He felt his first title at Manchester United was his hardest, maybe because his club hadn’t won it for 25 years when that happened. And Arsenal are at 19 years, and counting. There is so much a club, and a team, in that state must go through to get to the tunnel’s light. So this wasn’t any old dull goalless draw. This was as big as dull, goalless draws can get. Pouncing if Liverpool falter is Arsenal’s next big test. Well that, and nine straight wins. League visit to north London. There are some beautiful footballers in this Arsenal team but those qualities were not showcased here. Jorginho and Martin Odegaard stuck to duties lacking in adventure. It was, for the most part, dull, dull, dull. But that’s fine, if it’s the plan. And anyone who has seen Arsenal at their strident best in this campaign will have identified this as a dogged plan B, not some miserable accident. At the end, Pep Guardiola could be seen in a high state of agitation apparently explaining to the substitute Jack Grealish the game he could have played. Too late now. This was City’s chance to put Arsenal away, and it is gone. Pointless blaming injuries too. Missing John Stones, even Kyle Walker, is not matchdefining with Arsenal so cheerfully unambitious. City had all the players they needed in Erling Haaland, Phil Foden and Kevin De Bruyne, and Arsenal kept them at arm’s length. Foden was as quiet as he has been on occasions in an England shirt. WHAT DIFFERENCE A YEAR MAKES Arsenal were thrashed 4-1 at the Etihad in April last year in a match where they had 48 per cent possession. Yesterday they drew 0-0 despite only seeing 28 per cent of the ball Before the rush to judgment on Arsenal begins, remember this: last year they came up here with the title on the line and lost 4-1. And had they tried to play like this on that day, had they tried to contain and frustrate and come away from the Etihad Stadium with a point, do you know what would have happened? They would have lost 4-1. Arsenal were a margin of three goals the wrong side of Manchester City when it mattered last season, and now they are not. That’s progress, however dull it may have appeared; that’s positive. Mikel Arteta didn’t look as though he would be cracking open the champagne on the journey home, and the table suggests the biggest winners were at the west end of the M62, with Liverpool now holding a two-point advantage. Yet not every match can be viewed through the prism of here and now. If Liverpool win the title by a point, Arsenal may look back on this and wonder if they could have been braver. No more, however, than they would look back at losing to West Ham United at home, or Fulham away, back to back in December, or to defeats against Aston Villa and Newcastle United. Fulham have taken four points out of six from Arsenal this season. That could be the title surrendered, right there. Not here. This was another right of passage for Arsenal under Arteta, another afternoon when his callow group came of age. They defeated Manchester City at the Emirates Stadium in October, and that was huge, obviously. Yet this, strangely, felt even bigger. For a start, the timing made it so. Points won or lost early in a season never feel seismic, with so much of the campaign remaining. It is different on Easter Sunday, the holiday weekend it was once felt decided the title A year ago this plan B would have failed – that is progress back in the days when multiple games were played Saturday to Monday. It was around this time last season that Arsenal’s campaign fell apart. By the time they arrived in this part of Manchester, they were as good as done and a thrashing merely confirmed what was already apparent from the league table. Had Arsenal lost here, certainly had they gone down by a similar margin, they would have been written off as pretenders just the same. So while Arsenal will almost certainly record 30 or so performances that are far more pleasurable to watch than this across the season, it could still go down as one of the pivotal days. City could not find a way through and, more surprisingly, Arsenal looked comfortable, shepherding the game to safety. Of course, near the end, there were hairy moments; they always happen when one team is seeing out a point. Arsenal loyalists may not recognise the mood of confidence and conviction reported by neutral observers. Yet it was there. Arsenal made changes to shore up the game and that is what they did. William Saliba was exceptional, so too Declan Rice, the defensive shield. No cavalier excursions here. It took about 15 minutes for Arsenal to settle into their rhythm and, once there, they were as happy as they previously appeared making fools of Sheffield United and West Ham. It was a 0-0 as satisfying as a 6-0, in its own way. Goalless at the Etihad must feel like six at some of the Premier League’s more accommodating venues. It was also, in its own way, a throwback of a game. We have grown spoilt by title races in which Manchester City and Liverpool go hammer and tongs at the prize. We think titles are won throwing the kitchen sink at victory, battling it out like one of those Beano cartoon fights, all arms and legs emerging from a swirling cloud of dust. That wasn’t how Jose Mourinho did it. Not how Arsenal and Manchester United did it, necessarily, in what we imagine to be the good old days. Yes, theirs was a fabulous rivalry. But the games could also be wars of attrition. Physically combative but hardly an exhibition. There was no shortage of beef here, either. At times, Arsenal’s cussed intent could even be compared to the way Porto approached their recent Champions MARTIN SAMUEL At the Etihad Stadium Arsenal captain Odegaard embodied Arsenal’s dogged style 4 Monday April 1 2024 | the times

Muniz magic tempers pain of missed opportunity The disappointment for Fulham of missing out on victory and two extra points that should, on the balance of play, have been theirs was tempered by the continued prolific form of the Brazilian striker Rodrigo Muniz. Since the start of February, no Premier League player has scored as many as the eight goals claimed by the 22-year-old forward. His goals had delivered Fulham to the brink of the European places and, with more luck and composure at Bramall Lane, Marco Silva’s side would be in the thick of the that chase this week. Instead, the visit to Bramall Lane was a frustrating one for a Fulham side that should, really, have collected a fourth win in five games, with Muniz looking lethal and twice hitting the woodwork before his spectacular finish for the game’s final goal, three minutes into added time. “He does it in training, we know he’s capable, very good at that acrobatic finish and it’s unbelievable for him,” said substitute Bobby De Cordova-Reid, scorer of Fulham’s second goal after 86 minutes. Sheffield United’s defence, still on course to be the worst in Premier League history, had clearly failed to heed the memo about Muniz’s finishing prowess. Initially limited by the presence of Aleksandar Mitrovic, after signing from Flamengo in 2021, Muniz has still only started 13 league games for Silva, although early signs are that he has the potential to fill the boots of the departed Serbian cult favourite. “It was nice to see him handle all the game because he had a tough week,” said Silva. “Ten days ago he got an injury in training, he just trained the last two days so it is nice to see him handle the 105 minutes and to be decisive again.” For United, who had conceded at least five in each of their previous four home games, squandering a 3-1 lead felt very much like the final death roll of a side that will be back in the Championship next season. If plans are being formulated for next season’s promotion bid, then the emergence of England under-20 midfielder Oliver Arblaster, making his first home league start against Fulham, is a cause for optimism. Impressive on loan at League One Port Vale this season, his spell there was cut short by an horrific gashed leg picked up in an Carabao Cup quarter-final with Middlesbrough. His recovery and development after nearly three months out have been impressive, as was his home debut, especially as he had played a full game, and scored, in England U20’s midweek 3-1 friendly win in the Czech Republic. His manager Chris Wilder, had hoped his international exposure had not been so considerable. “He played 90 minutes so I’m delighted he got a cap but I like to think he might have been protected,” said Wilder. “Everybody knew he was going to make his (home) Premier League debut for his local club.” Sheffield United Brereton Diaz 58, 70, McBurnie 68 3 Fulham Palhinha 62, DeCordova-Reid 86, Muniz 90+3 3 IAN WHITTELL experience of playing here last season and have come across in a different way today. We played the game in an exceptional way, and in other parts we could have done much better, with the ball in the final third. “I liked the commitment from the players, the discipline that they had in the defensive parts when we were really high up the pitch.” The last time that City played out a goalless home Premier League draw was in 2021, against Southampton. Pep Guardiola admitted his players struggled to get through Arsenal’s defence. Asked how City could have broken the low block, he shrugged his shoulders and replied with a chuckle: “Kill someone? Play with nine? “They defended a lot and with a lot of people. They surrounded Erling [Haaland] and they were patient and found the pass. They did well with the press and then after the block.” Guardiola refused to criticise his City team even though their chances of becoming the first English topflight team to win four titles in a row is now in serious doubt. “We prefer to win, obviously, but we will take a point,” he said. “I recognised my team, I’m so proud. They tried. I told them after the match not to be sad. Arsenal are an exceptional team.” Bernardo Silva, the City midfielder, said that Arsenal had matured a lot since that 4-1 loss. “Last April they went man to man for the whole game and when you do that it is a bit of a 50-50,” he said. “Today it was different. They have young players that are now one year more experienced. They felt what it was like to play here last season and today they were much better.” We learnt our lessons from thrashing Guardiola makes a point to Jack Grealish after the final whistle yesterday JASON CAIRNDUFF/REUTERS the times | Monday April 1 2024 1GG 5 thegame MARTIN RICKETT/PA; CATHERINE IVILL/ALEX LIVESAY/GETTY IMAGES In April last year City beat Arsenal 4-1 to end the London club’s title hopes. Goals from Stones, top right, Haaland, above, and De Bruyne ensured City secured the title at Arsenal’s expense the times | Monday April 1 2024 5

6 1GG Monday April 1 2024 | the times thegame 2Diaz 27 Salah 65 RATINGS Liverpool (4-3-3): C Kelleher 7 — C Bradley 7, J Quansah 7, V Van Dijk 7, J Gomez 7 — A Mac Allister 8, W Endo 7 — D Szoboszlai 7 (R Gravenberch 90min) — M Salah 7, D Núñez 7 (H Elliott 83), L Diaz 7 (C Gakpo 89). Booked Mac Allister, Van Dijk, Gomez, Gakpo. Brighton (4-2-3-1): B Verbruggen 7 — J Veltman 6, J Van Hecke 6, L Dunk 6, P Estupinan 6 (V Barco 90) — C Baleba 7, P Gross 6 — T Lamptey 6 (F Buonanotte 70, 6), J Moder 7 (A Lallana 83), S Adingra 7 (E Ferguson 83) — D Welbeck 7. Booked Gross, Welbeck, Van Hecke. Referee D Coote. Attendance 60,061. Liverpool Brighton 1Welbeck 2 For all the intrigue about who — and what — comes next at Liverpool, sometimes it is worth taking a moment simply to revel in the present. This was a victory that bore all of the characteristics Jürgen Klopp has ingrained at Anfield during a tenure that remains on course for a glorious conclusion. That there was a certain inevitability that Liverpool would prevail, even after falling behind in the opening skirmishes, perfectly encapsulated everything Klopp has painstakingly built over the past nine years. His side were courageous, relentless, hungry and — when the moment demanded — cucumber-cool as Mohamed Salah scored the winning goal on an afternoon when he had not been at his best. Finding a way to win can be added to the list of Liverpool’s qualities. Klopp had never beaten Roberto De Zerbi in four previous meetings with the Brighton & Hove Albion head coach, but timing is everything when a Premier League title is at stake. Liverpool are back at the top of the table, and that this was also Klopp’s 300th win as Liverpool manager in 480 games in all competitions made it a landmark day in more ways than one. It is a statistic that highlights the PAUL JOYCE NORTHERN FOOTBALL CORRESPONDENT A victory to savour straight standards whoever succeeds him must attain and for De Zerbi, who is among those being considered for the position, to see his potential audition end in defeat did not really put a black mark against his name. Rather, he was confronted by opponents whose capacity to problem solve has been undimmed this season. The Italian would have taken little consolation from seeing Alexis Mac Allister, the former Brighton player, orchestrate a revival with an array of clever touches backed up by an unstinting work rate. The crescendo arrived midway through the second half when he collected a pass from Dominik Szoboszlai and ushered Salah into space behind Pascal Gross. An emphatic finish followed and the Egyptian finally eked out a reward from a personal performance that, until then, had lacked his usual ruthlessness. It had not been for lack of trying as Salah ended the game with 12 shots, the most he has ever registered in a league fixture. Mac Allister’s influence on this Liverpool side has grown considerably in recent weeks. He has been liberated by the presence of Wataru Endo in the midfield anchor role and there have now been two goals and four assists in his past six league games. “The assist for the second goal was incredible,” De Zerbi said. “I am proud for him because he deserved to be an important player in a big team.” The crisp passing and calm finish that provided the winning goal served as something of a contrast to what had gone before, with the equaliser more of a scrambled effort. A corner was cleared by Lewis Dunk only as far as Salah, whose header was then sliced towards his own goal by Joel Veltman. Luis Díaz pounced to hook a right-footed effort beyond the exposed Bart Verbruggen in the Brighton goal. De Zerbi would have considered it a rather soft concession back at the ground where he had introduced himself to English football in October 2022 with a thrill-a-minute 3-3 draw. The desire for his team to take risks had been evident then and he has not deviated from the bravery of that blueprint since. Here, they were without Solly March, João Pedro, Kaoru Mitoma and Billy Gilmour, among others, but still endeavoured to entertain, even if Liverpool’s high press meant they had more problems building out of defence than normal. In the jet-heeled Simon Adingra they also possessed another talent who will be attracting admiring glances from elsewhere, with his firsthalf display occasionally electrifying. The Ivory Coast international was instrumental to Brighton’s breakthrough, providing impetus on the counter after Pervis Estupiñán had picked off Salah’s wayward pass. A ball intended for Danny Welbeck was diverted towards Virgil van Dijk by the outstretched leg of Szoboszlai, but a ricochet squirted back to the striker. Welbeck thrashed a shot into the net from just inside the area. Less than two minutes had elapsed. Liverpool, of course, have become accustomed to this scenario. This was the 13th time in the league this season they had conceded the opening goal, though the stakes are now higher and the margin for error non-existent. Still, they exude positivity in everything they do and that remained even when, trailing by a goal, Salah volleyed Mac Allister’s pass into the crowd — with Darwin Núñez screaming for a square ball — and the Egyptian shot tamely at Verbruggen when clear. There are old hands — Salah and Van Dijk — who have been in this situation before, but many have not and Klopp’s affection for this group was strengthened by the manner in which they stuck to their task, launching attack after attack. Caoimhin Kelleher, the Liverpool goalkeeper, turned a Dunk header round the post late on and the substitute Adam Lallana shot wide for the away side, but Salah was also denied a second by Verbruggen’s brilliant save in stoppage time. So, Liverpool’s bandwagon rolls on and Klopp is determined to enjoy the ride. “It will be tough, sometimes it is nerve-racking and the heart rate will be 180, 200 or whatever,” he said. “But if we all enjoy this, we have a chance. If we don’t, we still have a chance but it is much more difficult.” Díaz, inset, turns home the Liverpool equaliser with a close-range volley after 2-1 SALAH, 65min 1-1 DÍAZ, 27min T&Cs apply. © Eddo Hartmann, Sony World Photography Awards 2024 Half-price tickets to the Sony World Photography Awards 2024 exhibition The highly anticipated Sony World Photography Awards exhibition returns to Somerset House, London from April 19 - May 6. This year has a refreshed curatorial approach, bringing awe-inspiring photographs to life. Times+ members can enjoy half-price tickets to the exhibition. Visit mytimesplus.co.uk 6 Monday April 1 2024 | the times