Monday
Late morning, Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe gave an interview, jointly with her husband, Richard, to the BBC. He expressed gratitude to the foreign secretary; she did not. “How many foreign secretaries does it take to bring someone home?” she said, feelingly. My friend and I spent the rest of the day wondering how long our marriages would last if we got home after six years to find our husbands expressing gratitude to Liz Truss. My opening bid was that we’d be separated by that evening, though the divorce might take a while to come through. My friend pointed out that Nazanin is obviously much more mature than us, as she prefaced her disagreement with an explicit statement of love and respect (for Richard, not Truss), the kind of move that a marriage counsellor might invite you to try, but only a really decent person could credibly pull off.
She unleashed the beasts, predictably if unfortunately. One guy spoke for the worst of the nation when he called an LBC phone-in to say, “it would have been nice of Nazanin to say thank you”. He went on to suggest that all proceeds from anything she writes (or does?) from now on should go to charity.
It was said in ire, one assumes, but had an underlying logic – people mistook the British debt to Iran, finally paid to secure this release, for a ransom. By this (ir)rationale, Zaghari-Ratcliffe had actually cost the taxpayer £400m, rather than been the victim of a shameful bit of government contract-breaking going back to 1979. Arron Banks speculated aloud that she probably had been politically active in Iran, after all. The hashtag #sendherback started trending on Twitter. The counter-hashtag #WelcomeHomeNazanin was born.
Just another ordinary start to the week, then, on Horribly Divided Island. But how immensely weird it must be for Nazanin. She went off to visit her parents, spent six years in prison for a crime she didn’t commit, finally made it home, only to find her previously normal nation had lost its marbles and was now engaged full-time in a culture war, of which she’s the new poster-person. Welcome home, Nazanin; sorry we didn’t take better care of the place.
Tuesday
I have thumped on about blood donation before; I swear I am not bragging. It is a perfectly normal act of civic duty of which I am not unduly proud.
Nope, in private, though, I am immensely proud of my type-O blood, the best kind, since anyone can use it. When you’re marked for a type O, everyone smiles at you and repeatedly tells you how important you are, and you get a special keyring saying “first responder”. I’ve never attached it to my keys, because I’m not sure what it entails – if I were walking past an accident, would I be expected to respond there and then? – but I flex incessantly at home, to my husband, who has some inferior blood type such as AB.
To get today’s appointment, because I’ve travelled to Mexico this year, it had to be established whether or not I might have contracted the Zika virus, via a number of questions such as: did I have sex while I was there? Well, not with anyone new, I said, and the lady laughed and said “hopefully him neither”, and this, filtered through my energetic ego, became “the blood donation lady said that if an AB blood person transmits Zika to an O, that’s essentially treason against the NHS.”
Then I said that the reason my appointment was at 9am was in case they needed to use my precious blood that very day. Sadly I used up all my headroom with this bullshit, got my appointment time wrong, missed it by an hour, had to rebook. You can look forward to more dispatches from the blood aristocracy some time soon.
Wednesday
It was the spring statement and Rishi Sunak hadn’t made many friends in the run-up. He’d been heard in some Commons bar bragging about his new second (third? fourth?) home in California, and MPs, who – even the best of them – have a near infinite tolerance for other people’s wealth, finally started griping about him.
It cracks open a lot about the British character, as well as its political culture, when the chancellor has a personal fortune into nine figures. By and large it is considered impolite to mention it. There’s a weird code of conduct, a disparity switcheroo, and the rules are these: if a regular MP on an MP’s salary puts a KitKat on his expenses, that is a fine thing to explode about. Rail against him, write comedy sketches about his confectionary needs, fill your boots. If, on the other hand, an MP votes to reduce disability entitlements, housing benefit, axes the universal credit uplift, votes against free school meals in the holidays, when he personally, never mind with policy, could stop the nation’s children going hungry (maybe with a little help from his even richer wife), everyone just stares at their metaphorical shoes. Honourable exception, here, to Sunak’s local pub, which barred him after the free school meals vote.
Where did this peculiar courtesy and discretion come from? Do we have an exaggerated respect for wealth? A sense that any potshot might be a little too easy? Nobody knows, but this week the inexplicable omertà exploded. We just could not stomach one more mouthful of a chancellor whose measures made the poor poorer, at a time of such desperate straits, when he is so stratospherically far from understanding what that might feel like.
Suddenly, everything he did was ridiculous. His Marie Antoinette moment came when he tried to sound relatable while also dodging a question about how inflation was affecting him personally. It was hard for him to say how much groceries had gone up by. In his house, he said, they ate all different kinds of bread. Absurd. He borrowed someone else’s Kia for a photo op of filling up a tank. Nice try, sunshine, but you’d be better off borrowing someone else’s Keir. All the mysterious rules of Sunak were turned on their head to land us back in reality: his fiscal measures will never make sense, because he will never know how to take the most serious questions seriously.
Thursday
They called it the most unlikely pairing in fashion history, though that can’t be true, because when fashion does something truly unusual, they don’t say “pair”, they say “team” (“nice cardigan, have you tried teaming it with a belt made of the teeth of sheep?”). Birkenstock, purveyor of the sandals so comfy, durable and completely unchanging that you only ever need one pair until you lose them, has partnered with Manolo Blahnik, designer of shoes that are vertiginous, fragile and in a constant state of flux – no sooner have you bought some than you need some new, totally different (but actually quite similar) ones for the new season.
The result is more Birk than Blah, a familiar sandal shape in a jazzy colour with a diamanté clasp. Yet I wonder whether this is not really about the shoe but an attempt to draw the Long 90s finally to a close.
The logical endpoint of the age of irony came when shoes were no longer made for walking. It was part of a postmodern package when history had also ended, ideology was over and debt was a construct that only little people worried about. Reality has bitten in the most painful ways, but at least your feet no longer have to hurt.
Friday
“In Russia, television is made for people who for one reason or another are too lazy to use alternative sources of information,” said Dmitry Likin, the art director of the state-controlled Channel One, as he quit. It wasn’t as dramatic as Marina Ovsyannikova’s resignation live on air, but it’s part of a steady stream of news creators simply refusing to collude with Vladimir Putin’s propaganda. Another correspondent, Zhanna Agalakova, gave this bleak analysis as she resigned earlier in March: “Many thinking people are sensing their own guilt. And there is no exit, you understand? Simply asking for forgiveness is not enough.”
This has been an ongoing theme of the war in Ukraine, that the wall of disinformation coming out of the Russian state apparatus has split families apart. Those who consume Putin’s news simply cannot believe their nation is the aggressor, even if they have a cousin calling them from an apartment as it’s being shelled. Likin may be right to cite laziness, but there is much more going on, a long-term corrosion of critical thinking. Fake news makes all other news impossible, it poisons the ecosystem, so the more you believe it, the more you have to rely on it. Unlike his military apparatus, Putin’s media ramparts have been extremely well maintained. But much like the army, its foot soldiers are losing morale.
