I received a note the other day from Sally Lane, the mother of Jack Letts, the British teenager who went to Syria in his gap year and who remains uncontactable in a Kurdish prison camp, along with tens of thousands of others, suspected of involvement with Islamic State. Sally has written a book, Reasonable Cause to Suspect, about Jack’s five years of incarceration and the family’s efforts to have him freed to face justice at home.
I met her a few years ago, with her husband, John Letts, and wrote about the trial in which the British government thought it worthwhile to prosecute them for “funding terrorism” (they had sent £223 to Jack, to buy a new pair of glasses and to try to find a way of getting back to the UK). She knows that there are plenty of people with little sympathy for her son, who was 18 when he went to Syria without their knowledge in 2014.
Jack remains a symbol, however, of this government’s shameful unwillingness to confront the hardest of its responsibilities. Jack and Shamima Begum, the two highest profile prisoners, had their UK citizenship revoked in response to media outrage.
Meanwhile, at least 300 other former IS volunteers were anonymously allowed back into Britain without sanction. Sally Lane is campaigning in vain for her son to be repatriated to Canada, the country of his father’s birth, where she now lives. Meanwhile, she remains in purgatory with him.
Follow the money
The list of likely buyers for Chelsea FC includes property developer Nick Candy. If that sale goes ahead, all proceeds should go to London’s world-leading fund in black irony. Candy and his brother cornered the market in oligarch-chic as far back as 2001, when they sold a £5m apartment in Belgrave Square to Boris Berezovsky, a former business partner of Roman Abramovich. The apartment, it was reported, came complete with “bullet-proof CCTV cameras, fingerprint entry systems and laser beam alarms that activated smoke bombs”.
The last word in oligarch style was perfected by the Candys with their development at One Hyde Park, where Kazakh politicians and Nigerian oil billionaires competed to throw money at the most expensive real estate on the planet. In 2014, Ukrainians chose the building to protest outside because of resident Rinat Akhmetov’s links to the disgraced Yanukovych government. Plus ça change…
Last words
On Wednesday, I went up to Edinburgh for the funeral of my old friend and Observer colleague Euan Ferguson. Euan’s life was all story and everyone had a dozen single malt anecdotes, but one that rang true for me came from his younger brother, Donald. He recalled how as boys he and Euan had been going together to visit their grandfather, who was in poor health after a stroke. “Let’s try to make him 100% happier!” Euan announced on the way. Donald did not know what a percentage was at the time, but the ambition was memorable enough to have stuck with him 50 years on.
Euan had suffered grim health himself in the past decade after a stroke of his own, but as anyone who was lucky enough to share a bar-room table with him – or read one of his peerless opening paragraphs – knew, that generous determination to make the world around him not just a little bit jollier never left him. It remained true at the funeral; it was a horribly sad day but, even so, no one could think of Euan for 10 seconds without giving in to a smile.
• Tim Adams is an Observer columnist
