Monday
There have been worse gaffes in politics – Joe Biden referring to Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “President Putin” at the Nato summit in July springs to mind – but Keir Starmer’s assertion on Monday that Hamas needs to release the “sausages” was one of the more pleasing recent slips, adding a touch of Alfred Jarry-like surrealism to the prime minister’s earnest affect. (Starmer corrected himself immediately, but it was too late.)
It’s a mark of the general state of things that sausage release was only the second oddest moment in politics on Monday. The first prize went to Liz Truss, no longer an MP but still very much in the running for weirdest person ever to have set foot in Westminster, who, stung by Rachel Reeves’s repeated references to the “£22bn black hole” at the heart of the nation’s finances, uploaded a video to X to defend her record. (In Truss’s X bio, by the way, she describes herself as a “Sunday Times bestselling writer” first and the “former prime minister of the United Kingdom” second, accurately placing her skills in descending order of merit.)
Like all the best writers, Truss, who videoed herself sitting in front of a bookshelf, appears to arrange her books by colour code. Anyway, “if the mini-budget hadn’t been undermined by the economic establishment,” she said in an address to camera, “the economy would be growing”. Truss’s “mini-budget”, you may remember, was the 2022 raft of tax cuts that tanked the economy, cratered the value of sterling, led to a hike in interest rates, and was reversed 10 days after Truss announced them, shortly followed by her own resignation.
It wasn’t her fault, said Truss, and if we’d stuck with her we’d be paying lower energy bills right now – “thanks to getting on with fracking”, was the curious rationale. Instead, said the former prime minister, we were in an “economic doom loop”, a phrase she repeated several times until “doom loop” started to sound like the depressing off-brand cereal you put in front of your kids when they’ve run out of Mateys. All this, of course, delivered as if … there was … an ellipsis … written into … the script … every couple … of words. Classic Liz!
Tuesday
A premise for a surprising odd-couple comedy is thrown up this week with news that Sean “Diddy” Combs, the rapper charged with sex trafficking, is being held in the same dormitory-style room in Brooklyn’s notorious Metropolitan detention centre as Sam Bankman-Fried, the convicted crypto-fraudster! (Former guests of that establishment: Ghislaine Maxwell and R Kelly.)
The MDC, as it is known, is a hulking facility just south of Park Slope that anyone enjoying the bougie delights of Industry City – a converted warehouse complex full of boutiques and craft beer stalls – can idly glance at and wonder what is going on inside. As the two most famous inmates, will Combs and Bankman-Fried team up or be rivals? Will they hatch business plans to exploit the lesser mortals around them, or find that in prison their status inverts?
Meanwhile, poor Caroline Ellison – perhaps “poor” is out of place; the former CEO of Alameda Research was found complicit in her ex-boyfriend Bankman-Fried’s fraud, but she has looked so bedraggled since her arrest that it’s hard not to feel sorry for her – was sentenced to a surprising two years in the slammer on Tuesday, despite being the government’s star witness. While awaiting sentencing, Ellison spent her time contributing to a maths textbook and writing a novella set in Edwardian England that is “loosely based on her sister Kate’s imagined amorous exploits” – details shared with the court by her mother in a clear attempt to cast her as an odd duck who got out of her depth and drum up some oh-god-she’s-doomed sympathy.
Wednesday
Casting details emerged this week for a new film version of Wuthering Heights – never overlook the power of your A-level syllabus if you’re stuck for ideas – to be directed by Emerald Fennell and feature, to everyone’s hand-clapping delight, Margot Robbie and Jacob Elordi. Yes, it is a whimsical touch, isn’t it, casting the sunny star from the Gold Coast as damp and scowling Catherine Earnshaw opposite the Aussie heart-throb from Saltburn as Heathcliff.
Is it brilliant or terrible? Always so hard to tell with a Fennell production, but I’m erring towards brilliant and of course there are so many questions. Will Elordi go the Olivier-as-Othello route to capture Heathcliff’s “dark-skinned gypsy”? How will makeup deal with Robbie’s million-dollar movie star teeth? And, most pressing of all, will they do Last of the Summer Wine accents?!
Thursday
It’s a big news week for the Brontë heritage industry as on Thursday conservators went into Westminster Abbey to right a terrible wrong on the Brontë memorial in Poets’ Corner. Installed in 1939, the stone memorial honours the three sisters Charlotte, Emily and Anne but – a knife to the heart of production pedants everywhere – left off the two dots over the “e” in the family name.
Those dots are called diaereses, we learn, and after a successful appeal to the abbey by Sharon Wright, the editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, the correct spelling of the name was restored, above the memorial’s legend, “courage to endure”. An incitement which, one feels, members of the Brontë Society will have to keep keenly in mind when Fennell’s Wuthering Heights is released.
Friday
It has been a trend in the UK for years, but finally the “alpaca cut” – beloved of Premier League footballers and British teenage boys – has hit America, where, among others, the Kansas City Chiefs quarterback Patrick Mahomes and the pop star Bad Bunny (no idea, either) have embraced it. The do, which involves shaving the sides of the head to leave a little pouffy area on top, like a head of broccoli or an alpaca, is officially called a “textured fringe” and the Americans have run reams of coverage – without, predictably, allowing that it was ever anywhere else in the world first.
