Life
Flores with Maduro: the “first combatant”. Alfredo Lasry/Getty
Venezuela’s Lady Macbeth
Since the spectacular capture of Nicolás Maduro last weekend, says Alonso Moleiro in El País, little attention has been paid to the arrest of the Venezuelan strongman’s wife, Cilia Flores. The first lady, or “first combatant” as she prefers to be known, has long been one of the most powerful and influential figures in the nation’s politics. Raised poor in a mud-brick shack, Flores rose to public prominence in 1992 when, as an ambitious young lawyer, she visited Hugo Chávez after he had been jailed for a failed coup attempt and offered to represent him. After successfully securing his release in 1994, she became a trusted part of his inner circle and “one of the leading voices of the Chavista cause”.
Flores met Maduro through their respective closeness to Chávez, who gave them jobs when he took office in 1999. Flores later succeeded Maduro as president of the National Assembly. The first woman to hold the position, she immediately began to consolidate power, appointing some 40 of her relatives to public posts and facilitating her own – and her close associates’ – “extravagant spending and luxurious lifestyles”. Her two nephews, who were regularly seen speeding through Caracas in Ferraris, became known as the “narco nephews” in 2015 after they were convicted of smuggling 800kg of cocaine into the US on a private jet. Flores has since been sanctioned by several nations, accused of conspiring to undermine democracy and of having ties to some of the government’s “most high-profile corruption cases”. Despite recent attempts to present a more palatable persona, including a TV show called En familia con Cilia, many view her as a Latina Lady Macbeth. As the former head of the Venezuelan intelligence agency, Manuel Cristopher Figuera, said in 2020: “Flores pulls the strings.”
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Property
THE HIGHLANDS HOME This old stone croft house sits within the vast Cairngorms national park in Scotland, says The Guardian. On the ground floor are a kitchen and dining room, a living room with a woodburner, and a large bedroom. On the first floor are two further bedrooms, one of which is en-suite, and a shower room. A bothy provides another double bedroom and an eight-person bunk room as well as two family bathrooms. Outside is a large deck with a hot tub, barbecue and outdoor dining area, along with a firepit and a sauna. Nethy Bridge village is a five-minute drive. £745,000. Click on the image to see the listing.
Heroes and villains
Andreas Rentz/Getty
Hero
Claire Foy, for going against the Hollywood grain by refusing to offer her opinions on everything in the news. “I have absolutely no authority to discuss or proclaim about anything other than what I do as an actor,” the 41-year-old The Crown star told an interviewer. “If you’re just making noise for the sake of it, then you should probably shut up – so I tend to shut up.”
Hero
South Korean president Lee Jae Myung, for bringing attention to an “under-recognised enemy”, says Timothy Martin in The Wall Street Journal: baldness. At a televised policy meeting to discuss healthcare, the (adequately hirsute) 62-year-old suddenly interjected to say: “Hair loss is a disease, is it not?” When told that the condition generally isn’t covered by the state’s healthcare plan, he retorted that young people with thinning hair view their plight as a “matter of survival”.
Instagram/@pennydeutschland
Villains
Fifty sheep in Bavaria that caused utter chaos when they became separated from their flock and charged into a supermarket. The ovine outlaws were filmed barging past bewildered shoppers before congregating in the checkout area, possibly after mistaking a shopping bag for a feed bag. Although as Deutsche Welle noted, they may just have been “baa-rgain hunters”.
Villains
British voters, for undervaluing Keir Starmer, according to his biographer Tom Baldwin. “The idea that [he] is worse than Boris Johnson or Liz Truss is nuts,” said Baldwin after Ipsos declared Starmer the most unpopular prime minister in polling history. “Something is going on with the electorate.” Perhaps this is why the PM has postponed so many local elections, said Michael Deacon in The Daily Telegraph. “Sir Keir is simply giving the electorate time to see the error of its ways. Voters will be permitted to vote again only when they’ve demonstrated that they are fit to do so.”
Hero
A passerby who saved a man who had fallen into a frozen lake in Essex trying to rescue a dog. The unidentified Good Samaritan crawled on all fours across the ice in Epping Forest, at one point falling into the water himself, before pulling the other chap to safety. Both men were unharmed, if a little chilly, and the dog was safely reunited with its owners.
Inside politics
Henry Nicholls/AFP/Getty
Reform UK’s “vigilante mum”
For Reform UK, says Felix Pope in UnHerd, Laila Cunningham represents a shot at “mainstream respectability in the capital”. The former CPS prosecutor, who will stand for the party in London’s next mayoral elections, is a practising Muslim and the child of Egyptian immigrants “outraged at the failure of other Muslims and immigrants to properly integrate”. She believes Egypt thrived under British rule, and resents the rise of Islamic extremism. She deplored Robert Jenrick’s remarks about not seeing any white faces in a Birmingham neighbourhood – “I don’t think being British comes down to the colour of your skin” – but agrees that parts of London no longer resemble England. “All the shops are in a different language,” she says. “Women are walking around in burqas, and I’m like, ‘what, what’s happened?’”
According to Cunningham, if communities have become more segregated, it’s not so much down to mass migration as to Labour’s obsession with “multiculturalism”. Growing up in London, she says, she had friends from all walks of life. “Honestly, we never even saw colour, we never saw religion.” Today the mother of seven, who was once dubbed a “vigilante mum” by local papers after she stalked a group of muggers she suspected of targeting one of her sons, is fronting Reform’s campaigns on crime. Cunningham blames the widespread feeling of lawlessness on a lack of visible policing and an absence of police stations. She would like to see higher rates of stop and search, and rejects the claim that this would drive a wedge between the police and black Londoners. “That’s the political narrative,” she says. “The real narrative on the ground is mums do not want boys carrying knives on the street.”
The Knowledge Crossword
Comment
Engineers on The Flying Scotsman: the “era of the stiff upper lip”. Nigel Roddis/Getty
Let men enjoy their “companionable silence”
Men are always being told “it’s good to talk”, says Gaby Hinsliff in The Guardian. Often it’s by women bemused that men can spend all night at the pub with friends they’ve known for decades and return home with no clue how X feels about his break-up or how Y is coping with the death of his father. For these women, whose own friendships revolve around an “encyclopaedic knowledge” of each other’s innermost feelings, bottling everything up seems not only “oddly empty and sad” but possibly the reason that more than a quarter of British men say they have no close friends, or why men won’t go to the doctor “until they are practically dying”.
According to the anthropologist Thomas Yarrow, that’s doing the merits of the “strong and silent” friendship an injustice. After studying a group of elderly male volunteers at an English steam railway for four years, the Durham professor concluded that the value of friendships centred around “doing things together, often in companionable silence”, particularly among men raised in the “era of the stiff upper lip”, is underrated. For all the rail enthusiasts’ aversion to feelings-talk, they still found ways to communicate love and care. When one volunteer failed to turn up for a few weeks then returned with obvious breathing difficulties, his friends didn’t ask what was wrong, they just set about making him cups of tea, cracking jokes and being discreetly supportive while keeping things normal. Despite what many think, this muted model of friendship is no worse or better than the intimate friendships of women. “Just different.”
Weather
Quoted
“The whip in the House of Lords is a whip so gentle that it doesn’t even count as BDSM.”
Michael Gove
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