Comment
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Why is Putin hiding from his own military?
There is a concept from Greek tragedy that perfectly captures Vladimir Putin’s current predicament, says Alexander Etkind in The New Statesman: “nemesis”. Not revenge, which requires some external agent, or justice, which would require institutions capable of holding the Russian president to account, but nemesis – the self-destruction of a hubristic villain in a feedback loop where every action produces the opposite of the intended effect. Putin feared Nato expansion and brought it to his western border. He feared Ukrainian nationalism, and “conjured it into an existential force”. He feared European unity, and “forged it”. He feared the dissolution of Russian power, and set in motion the “military exhaustion, elite fragmentation and regional resentment” that make dissolution more likely. It’s everything he feared, only “bigger and more horrifying”.
What’s remarkable, says a former Russian government official in The Economist, is how clearly Russians now see it: Putin has led their country into a dead end. The first manifestation was the subtle shift in the language used by senior officials – “our” Ukraine war is now decidedly “his”. People are fed up with the extraordinary cost of fighting, with no compensation in pride or purpose. The elites who were called back from London at the start of the conflict are fed up because they’ve been parted with an estimated $60bn in their personal wealth. Russia’s leverage has evaporated – Europeans now get their gas elsewhere and Russia’s security council seat has been devalued along with the rest of the UN. It’s what chess players call zugzwang: all moves make things worse. The irony is that Putin started the conflict to preserve power. Now, for the first time, Russians are starting to imagine a future without him.
🪖👀 A striking detail from a recently leaked Kremlin document was that Putin won’t go near any location with anything to do with the Russian military, says Christian Caryl in Foreign Policy. One theory is that the Russian spies who passed the document along to the Western press are playing their own game, perhaps trying to sow discord and distrust in the Kremlin. Rumours of coup plots in Moscow are “rampant”.
Property
THE COTTAGE This Grade II-listed four-bedroom thatched cottage in Somerset dates back to the 15th century, says The Guardian. Period features include exposed timber beams in the kitchen and an inglenook fireplace with a wood-burning stove in the sitting room. The principal bedroom has a vaulted ceiling and fitted wardrobes, along with a slipper bath in the en suite. Outside, there is just over half an acre of gardens with wisteria, honeysuckle, roses and a recently planted orchard. Taunton station is 13 miles away, with trains to London in one hour 45 minutes. £850,000. Click on the image to see the listing.
Life
Turner and Fonda in 1991. Vinnie Zuffante/Getty
The serial womaniser who invented live news
When Ted Turner launched CNN, the world’s first round-the-clock news channel, in 1980, says The Times, it didn’t get off to a good start. There were a series of gaffes – a cleaner once emptied a presenter’s bin live on air – and losses totalled $1m a week. Cable News Network, as it was then, became known as Chicken Noodle Network. But within a few years Americans, and the rest of the world, were hooked. Viewers saw the 1981 assassination attempt on Ronald Reagan in real time, and watched the Challenger space shuttle explosion five years later in “mesmerised horror”. Henry Kissinger called CNN “the global town crier”; Bill Clinton had it playing in his bathroom. As co-anchor Lois Hart said in the channel’s debut broadcast: “The news continues from now on, and forever.”
Turner, who has died age 87, was born in Ohio and took over his family’s billboard business aged 24, after his father shot himself. He was an avid yachtsman, winning the America’s Cup in 1977, and an enthusiastic hunter, owning two million acres of US ranch land. His contacts book was unparalleled: he encouraged Mikhail Gorbachev to disarm, had a long-standing friendship with Jimmy Carter, and went duck-shooting with Fidel Castro (who sent him contraband cigars in a diplomatic bag). He was also a serial womaniser. His first marriage ended in part because he’d often return home with lipstick on his collar; his second (to the pilot of his private jet) because he made no attempt to hide his affair with a former playboy model; and his third, to Jane Fonda, when she joined the Baptist Church, which he said was for “losers”. In 2012, aged 73, he told Piers Morgan he had four girlfriends. It was complicated, he said, but “nonetheless easier than being married”.
🥇😇 Turner was never one for self doubt. “I’m trying to set the all-time record for achievement by one person in one lifetime,” he said in 1998. “And that puts you in pretty big company: Alexander the Great, Napoleon, Gandhi, Christ, Mohammed, Buddha, Washington, Roosevelt, Churchill.”
Fashion
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The Met Gala has become a fairground freakshow
I’m no fashion expert, says Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail, but even I could have done better than the guests at this year’s Met Gala, the celeb-filled fundraiser hosted by Vogue’s Anna Wintour in New York. The theme was “Fashion is Art” but a better one would have been “No Amount of Money Can Buy You Style”. Lauren Sánchez Bezos, who with her husband Jeff Bezos sponsored the event to the tune of $10m, made her bespoke Schiaparelli gown, supposedly inspired by the John Singer Sargent painting Madame X, look like something out of a 1980s Littlewoods catalogue. In allowing the “inherent Bezos tackiness” to infect the gala, Wintour devalued the “rarified world of Vogue”, perhaps for ever.
The rest of the A-list were no better. Heidi Klum brought a “ghoulish element” to proceedings, dressed as a living marble statue with painted grey teeth. Katy Perry paired her Stella McCartney dress with a chrome-painted mask in a bid to channel “astro-chic” but instead looked “astronomically hideous”. Kim Kardashian resembled a Lucozade bottle, and her half-sister Kylie Jenner appeared in a ludicrous dress designed to look like it was falling off. Then there was the actress Sarah Paulson, who tried to make a political statement against “greed and corruption” by wearing a dollar bill mask over her eyes. “It fell rather flat when critics pointed out she is worth £9m and tickets to the event cost £73,000.” The whole thing was less “fashion as art”, more “fairground freakshow”.
🧑🪞 America’s top plastic surgeons must have been very, very busy in the run-up to the gala, says Lisa Armstrong in The Daily Telegraph. Almost all the celebs are at it, undergoing everything from deep-tissue scar healing and tummy tucks to deep plane facials and knee, neck and butt lifts. And as ever, this is massively skewing everyone else’s expectations of how they should look. Always remember that these are heavily airbrushed, surgically altered celebrities. In other words: “This. Is. Not. Normal.”
The Knowledge Crossword
Comment
Neville Chamberlain after returning from signing the Munich Agreement in 1938. Getty
Our costly obsession with World War Two
In a recent book, The Age of Hitler and How We Will Survive It, the historian Alec Ryrie makes an intriguing argument, says Janan Ganesh in the FT: World War Two has replaced the Gospel as the story that “anchors” Western civilisation. People still believe Jesus was good, says Ryrie, but not with the same “fervour and conviction” that they believe Nazism is evil. I think he’s on to something. The example of the war has produced dogmas for all tastes: the left can accuse almost any act of cultural conservatism of being the “thin end of a wedge whose fat end is Hitlerism”; the hawkish right can frame almost any autocratic regime as a “threat that demands a heroic military response”. And our obsession with it keeps getting the West – “especially the Anglo-American world” – into trouble.
When Keir Starmer refused to join the war in Iran, Donald Trump accused him of being an “appeaser” like Neville Chamberlain. The use of this word to hush dissenters would be easier to take if hawks occasionally emulated the allies by winning. But sensible moments of “appeasement”, whatever the baggage appended to the word, are numerous. Ending the Cuban Missile Crisis involved removing US missiles from Turkey; Jimmy Carter recognised Red China; Britain freed domestic paramilitaries from jail and let their chums hold political office in Northern Ireland. Which of these appeasements would you reverse? And unlike World War Two, most conflicts since have been local (Ukraine), morally complex (Vietnam) or ultimately inconclusive (Korea, Iraq, Afghanistan). As a “binding myth” for us winners, the war is useful: the stakes were existential, the morality clear-cut, and the result definitive. But it’s a hopeless template for strategy in the 21st century.
Quoted
“Imperfect action beats perfect inaction every time.”
Harry Truman
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