‘Out in a year’: what the papers say about Tory vote on Boris Johnson

Only the most stridently supportive titles stand vocally behind prime minister after 41% of his own MPs vote for his removal

Boris Johnson has survived a no-confidence vote, but some UK papers question how long he will stay in power. Composite: Times/Mail/i /Herald/Telegraph/Guardian/Mirror/ Express

Martin Farrer

Tue 7 Jun 2022 

A haunted-looking Boris Johnson stares out from the front pages of many of the papers after a dramatic night of Conservative party bloodletting at Westminster.

The prime minister is shown being driven back from the Commons to Downing Street after he won a Tory no-confidence vote in his leadership by 211 to 148.

Although he called the victory decisive and vowed to “bash on” in government, the reaction of some Tory-supporting newspapers suggests he will not be able to draw a line under his Partygate woes any time soon.

“A wounded victor”, says the Times, alongside the picture of Johnson that seems eerily similar to the famous one of Margaret Thatcher being driven away from Downing Street after she was ousted in a Tory party coup.

The paper adds that it was a worse than expected result for Johnson and throws up another parallel with Thatcher by noting that the same proportion of MPs voted against her as against her current scandal-plagued successor. She resigned two days later.

The Daily Telegraph’s front page headline says “Hollow victory tears Tories apart” and carries a secondary headline saying Johnson’s authority has been “crushed” as rebels circle to finish him off.

 Photograph: The Daily Telegraph

The Financial Times also suggests that the prime minister is badly damaged by the vote with its lead headline saying “Johnson wounded in confidence vote as 41% of Tory MPs rebel”.The paper’s columnists line up to give a damning verdict on Johnson’s prospects for leading the party into the future with Tim Stanley declaring simply: “The PM is toast.”

The Mirror proclaims “Party’s over, Boris” and says that the prime minister has suffered a “brutal attack” by his own side “and is warned that he will be out in a year”.

The Guardian’s splash says “PM clinging to power after vote humiliation”, with columnist Martin Kettle writing: “He is irreparably damaged. Politicians don’t recover from such things.”

The i’s front page says “Wounded Johnson in peril” and inside its political editor, Paul Waugh, says Johnson is the “sick man of Downing Street, infecting all those around him”.

The Metro also thinks it’s time for Johnson to go: “The party is over Boris”.

However, the prime minister still has some defiant backing from his cheerleaders in the national papers. Reflecting the concern of some Tories that dumping Johnson is electoral suicide, the Mail has mocked up a red button marked “Lib Dems Labour SNP” and says “MPs hit the self-destruct button by opening door to smirking Starmer’s coalition of chaos”. Underneath, its main headline says “Boris vows: I’ll bash on”.

 Photograph: Mail

The Express also tries to strike an upbeat note with

 a headline which reads: 

“Defiant and unbowed … Boris: I’ll lead party to victory”.

The Sun’s splash is “Night of the blond knives”,

 saying that Johnson has been “stabbed in the back by 148 MPs”.

In Scotland the Herald says “Wounded and weakened,

 but Johnson vows to stay in office”, while the Press and Journal 

says “Boris body blow despite winning confidence vote”.

 Photograph: The Herald

The Record opts to throw Johnson’s election-winning slogan

 back at him with its front page headline: “Get Borexit done”

The Northern Echo says “Carry on Boris (for now)“, 

while the Newcastle Journal asks “Is he on his way out?”.

Bug v killer cactus: Kenyan herders fight to stop a plant destroying their way of life

A woman removes invasive cactus plants in Laikipia County, Kenya. Photograph: Peter Muiruri

Imported insect offers a last hope against the invasive prickly pear cactus killing off grasslands and the animals that graze them

Global development is supported by


Peter Muiruri in Laikipia

THEGUARDIAN

Mon 6 Jun 2022

In single file, women brightly wrapped in colourful Samburu cloth come out of a small greenhouse. They carry buckets stuffed with the only weapon left in their fight against an enemy that threatens their very way of life.

They are heading to a field that despite its attractive appearance hosts the invasive Opuntia stricta, a prickly pear cactus that is taking over large swathes of northern Kenya’s rangelands, inhibiting grass growth in a landscape with poor rainfall.

There will be no grass with opuntia. No grass means no livestock. With no livestock, we cannot feed our children

Priscilla Kilua

Here in Laikipia county, some studies indicate the cactus has taken over 50-75% of communal grazing fields. It is listed among the 100 worst invasive alien species by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

To the largely pastoralist community living within Naibunga community conservancy, the thorny plant is a deadly enemy. It lacerates the mouths of livestock and causes blindness, as its fine spines, or glochids, get lodged in animals’ eyes. The indigestible seeds also clog the animals’ intestines and, unable to feed, they become emaciated and die.

“This is our only hope,” says Florence Liosoi, a mother of five from the nearby Il Pollei group ranch as she dips her hand into a bucket of cochineal (Dactylopius opuntiae), a scale insect or “true bug” bred in greenhouses here and released to suck the sap out of the cactus and kill it.

Cochineal is an hemiptera insect that which dye carmine is extracted. 

Photograph: agefotostock/Alamy

The insects only eat Opuntia stricta and do not harm other forms of vegetation. The bug was imported from South Africa where it was used to control the spread of the plant in Kruger national park. In Laikipia, the bug was quarantined and trials were held in nearby Ol Jogi wildlife conservancy before it was released to the wider areas being swallowed up by the cactus.

Liosoi is among 20 women who collect cochineal-infested plants from the greenhouse and place them next to uninfected cacti in the fields. They then return to the greenhouse with fresh cacti to be covered with cochineal. It is a delicate process that leaves the women with itchy hands and legs.

NRT regional director Jacqueline Nalenoi. Photograph: Peter Muiruri

Jacqueline Nalenoi, a director with the Northern Rangelands Trust, an organisation that helps people combat the spread of the plant, says involving women in the control of the plant is crucial, since they are the ones who suffer most when fragile economies collapse due to land degradation. She says: “When livestock die, it is the women who lack the daily necessities of life such as food and proper shelter. When children get constipation as a result of eating the fruits of the cactus, it is the women who care for them. Even when there was little money to fight the invasive plant at the height of Covid-19, it was the women who volunteered to grow cochineal in the greenhouses and take it to the fields.”

Local people say the cactus was introduced here as an ornamental hedging plant by a British colonial administrator who served in nearby Dol Dol in the 1950s. Unlike indigenous plants, the cactus has no local name, so people just call it imatundai, or fruity plant in the Samburu language. “It is nutritious,” says Nalenoi. “People would eat the fruits during drought, but nobody knew how dangerous it would be to the ecosystem. It is also beautiful and made for a good potted plant. It is now threatening the existence of a whole community.”

Baboons cleverly roll cactus fruits in the dirt to brush off the thorns and fine hairs that can cause infections and digestive issues.

 Photograph: Gina Rodgers/Alamy

Ironically, the largely successful elephant conservation programme in Laikipia has contributed to the rapid spread of the invader. After feeding on the succulent plant with no observable harmful effects, elephants help spread the seeds through their dung to far-flung regions. “A single elephant can spread at least 2,000 seeds a day,” says Nalenoi. “In addition, small chunks of the cactus that break off the main plant can grow independently with very little water, hence the spread of the cactus in arid northern Kenya.”

Olive baboons and birds also help propagate the seeds after feeding on the plants’ reddish-purple fruits.

Harrison Saikong has lost over 100 sheep as a result of the animals feeding on Opuntia stricta. Photograph: Peter Muiruri

Harrison Saikong is walking his sheep along the dusty road past Munishoi village, the harsh midday sun shining down on him. It is his third day away from home, and he has walked close to 50km in search of water and pasture. In arid Laikipia, both are hard to come by and his livestock want to feed on the cactus instead.

“This plant has finished my herd,” says Saikong, 32, sheltering under an acacia tree. He lifts a sheep to show its badly lacerated and smelly mouth. “I used to have 180 sheep before many of them died after consuming this thing. I have lost 20 sheep on this journey alone. Only 40 are left.”

A cow feeds on Opuntis stricta in Naibunga conservancy. Photograph: Peter Muiruri

While elephants have accelerated the spread, unsustainable grazing practices and the climate crisis have degraded large sections of the rangelands, giving space for the cactus to take hold. In an area where livestock determines social status, it is not easy to persuade herders to offload their animals during drought and restock when conditions allow.

This becomes apparent at the home of George Sintaroi, a few kilometres down the road. His emaciated herd of cows includes some too thin to stand for long. Like Saikong, Sintaroi, 68, lost at least 20 cows through eating the plant. “I am not sure how long these ones will stay alive,” he says. “Look at this field. There is not a blade of grass, but bare earth. Opuntia is all around, and even the rains might not be of much help.” Sintaroi is trying to hold on to his remaining flock, competing for the meagre resources with wild animals, including a herd of elephants foraging near his village.


‘It’s a struggle for survival’: why Kenya – and its wildlife – need tourists to return

Sammy Leseita, director of livelihood at the Northern Rangelands Trust, says continued degradation of land will lead to unstable economies and conflict over resources. While his organisation has been helping local people mitigate the effects of climate crisis by providing watering holes, Leseita says practising sustainable livestock keeping will help stem the tide.

“Overgrazing leads to poor breeds that fetch little in the market. You have a pastoralist keeping 300 cows without enough body mass that butchers prefer. It is better to keep 20 cows that will be more profitable. Large herds only contribute to land degradation, as grass never gets a chance to produce seed since it is eaten up before reproduction,” says Leseita.

A Samburu woman removes cactus plants in Naibunga Upper Conservancy. 

Photograph: Luis Tato/AFP/Getty Images
Advertisement

But people around Naibunga conservancy are at a crossroad. They need livestock to survive, but the animals fall victim to the cactus. They would like to earn money from tourism, but elephants, which are key attractions in Laikipia, are super-spreaders of Opuntia stricta seeds. “Sometimes it feels like we are just going round and round,” says Priscilla Kilua, one of the women in the team. “There will be no grass with opuntia. No grass means no livestock. With no livestock, we cannot feed and clothe our children.

“Opuntia must go. If not, then one day we shall tell our children that we used to rear goats.”

This article was amended on 6 June 2022. An earlier version incorrectly referred to cochineal as beetles; they are in fact true bugs, in the order Hemiptera and suborder Sternorrhyncha.

OLD THINGS ARE NEW AGAIN

Kate Bush thanks Stranger Things fans as Running Up That Hill climbs charts


Singer celebrates ‘fantastic, gripping’ show in a rare statement, after her 37-year-old song entered the UK top 10

‘It’s all really exciting!’ wrote Kate Bush after an episode of Stranger Things introduced her song Running Up That Hill to a whole new generation of listeners. 

Photograph: Peter Mazel/Sunshine/Rex


Sian Cain
THE GUARDIAN

Mon 6 Jun 2022

Kate Bush has said it is “really exciting” that her song Running Up That Hill has reentered music charts around the world, 37 years after release, due to it appearing in an episode of Stranger Things.

Issuing a rare statement to thank her legions of new fans, the musician wrote on her website on Sunday: “You might’ve heard that the first part of the fantastic, gripping new series of Stranger Things has recently been released on Netflix. It features the song, Running Up That Hill which is being given a whole new lease of life by the young fans who love the show – I love it too!


The strangest thing? Why Kate Bush is back at the top of the charts

“Because of this, Running Up That Hill is charting around the world and has entered the UK chart at No. 8. It’s all really exciting! Thanks very much to everyone who has supported the song. I wait with bated breath for the rest of the series in July.”

Running Up That Hill plays a key role in the latest season of Stranger Things, being the favourite song of the character Max, played by Sadie Sink, and appearing as a motif throughout. The song has become a particular hit among Gen Zers, who were not born when the song was first released in 1985, appearing in TikTok after TikTok since Friday.

After the song appeared in the Netflix show last week, Running Up That Hill reached No 8 in the UK charts, based on streams and downloads, three decades after it reached No 3 on its initial release. Running Up That Hill also re-entered the UK charts in 2012 after it was used in the closing ceremony of the London Olympics.

Running Up That Hill is also the most-streamed song on Spotify in the US and the UK, just shy of Harry Styles’ As It Was in Spotify’s global chart, and in the same No 2 position on Apple Music. The song is also expected to place highly in the US charts, which are announced on Tuesday.

Lou Reed’s earliest Velvet Underground demos unearthed for reissue

Recordings from May 1965 were sealed for nearly 50 years, and reveal folk-like renditions of songs including I’m Waiting for the Man and Heroin

Lou Reed performing with the Velvet Underground in 1966. 

Photograph: Adam Ritchie/Redferns

Ben Beaumont-Thomas

THE GUARDIAN
Mon 6 Jun 2022 

Lou Reed’s earliest versions of some of the Velvet Underground’s greatest songs, including I’m Waiting for the Man and Heroin, have been unearthed and will be released in August.

The US record label Light in the Attic, in partnership with Reed’s widow Laurie Anderson, will release Words & Music, May 1965 as the first album in a new archival series.

It features demos of songs that Reed recorded with future Velvet Underground bandmate John Cale, and mailed to himself in a notarised package as a way of securing copyright on the recordings without filing the official paperwork. The five-inch reel-to-reel recordings remained sealed for nearly 50 years and have been heard by almost no one before.

Reed performs the songs on acoustic guitar and harmonica, with Cale adding vocal harmonies, making the performances more akin to the folk music of the time than the avant garde rock that the Velvet Underground would soon pioneer. Two months later, in July 1965, guitarist Sterling Morrison had joined the group for another round of demos, by November they were called the Velvet Underground, and by December their lineup was finalised with Maureen Tucker on drums.

Of the songs demoed in May 1965, I’m Waiting for the Man and Heroin would end up on their 1967 debut album, The Velvet Underground & Nico, while Pale Blue Eyes would be released in a substantially different version on the band’s self-titled 1969 album.

Some of the lyrics on the May 1965 demos also deviate from the later versions: the demo of Heroin opens with the line: “I know just where I’m going,” and has some distinctive Reed lines that didn’t make the finished recording: “People selling people pound by pound / And the politicians and the clowns / And the do-gooders with their frowns.”

Writing the liner notes for the release, US rock critic Greil Marcus said: “The poverty in these songs – the bathtub-in-the-kitchen you hear in their clumsiness, the fifth-floor-walkup you can hear in their defiance – lets you hear them, now, as chalk on a wall, not the markings that wash away in the next rain but inscriptions that somehow become part of the brick, even if in a year or two no one will be able to read them.”

The reissue also features Reed-penned songs that have never been recorded since, such as the doo-wop-tinged Too Late, and the R&B track Buzz Buzz Buzz. Another folk-tinged song, Men of Good Fortune, shares a title with a track from Reed’s solo album Berlin but is completely different. Included with some versions of the reissue are unheard Reed songs from home recording sessions in 1963 or 1964, plus doo-wop number Gee Whiz, recorded by Reed in 1958 when he was 16 years old.

 

Words & Music, May 1965 will also be available on single LP, CD, cassette and 8-track formats, as well as on streaming and download services. Clips of the songs can be heard now on Light in the Attic’s website.

‘The beginning of a conversation’: the Met examines a complex history of emancipation art

Installation view of Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast. 

Photograph: Photo by Anna-Marie Kellen, Courtesy of The Met

In a new exhibition, the popularity of antislavery art is revisited with a critical eye on what is being shown and why it’s being celebrated

Walker Mimms

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 7 Jun 2022 

Museum exhibitions are traditionally about objects. But in a provocatively commentated show of Black portraits from the 18th and 19th centuries, the Met confronts itself.

Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast centers on Why Born Enslaved!, the bust Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux modelled in 1868 and produced in popular editions thereafter. Life-size, she is bound at the chest with rope, glowering upwards in knowledge and pain – a captive with no doubts of the crime she’s been dealt.



‘It’s so joyful and full of promise’: a modernism exhibition aims for hope

The Met already owned Carpeaux’s terracotta version of the famous work. Then a rare marble (one of two from his studio) went on sale in 2018. “When the opportunity to acquire this bust came up,” Elyse Nelson, the conceiver and co-curator of the show, told me, “we acquired it with the idea that this could be the lynchpin for an exhibition.”

“Sculpture requires patronage, requires wealthy patrons, so is often associated with the state,” Nelson explained. That state, the court of Napoleon III, was very proud of the emancipation decree from back in 1846, a generation before America’s. Carpeaux’s work offered a belated congratulations to France. The emperor was among its first buyers.

But when art is tied to regimes — especially regimes as grabby as the Second Empire – it has trouble gaining our trust. There was something unclean about the Met’s acquisition: by purchasing an enslaved woman, the show’s catalog asks, “can we be other than complicit in the aestheticization of slavery?”

In this spirit, the show interrogates Carpeaux across his early sketches of the bust, his marble, his earlier versions, and his renderings of a larger public work related to her. It must be the fullest examination ever staged of his iconic sculpture.

For the catalog Wendy S Walters, a professor of non-fiction at Columbia and Nelson’s co-curator, explores the work as a record of subjection, even fetishization. “We have historically understood enslavement,” Walters explained to me, “to think that the sexual component of enslavement was separate from the work component.” They were not.

Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (French, 1827–1875) Why Born Enslaved!, modeled 1868, carved 1873. 

Photograph: Paul Lachenauer/The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace, Wrightsman Fellows, and Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Foundation

Walters argues that Carpeaux revisits that sexual component a little too readily: the hyperrealism where rope meets breast, the artist’s alleged aggression toward women, his commodification of a slave’s likeness for financial gain and political favor.

Viewers will leave either outraged by such politicization of art or equipped with a more nuanced understanding of the touchy era following abolition, a time when European heads of state made grand gestures toward equality while they plotted the Scramble for Africa.

Carpeaux’s contemporaries appear and give him context. Familiar works by Charles Cordier field unsparing questions about the white gaze. Once a gem of the collection, the Black man of Jean-Leon Gérome’s Bashi Bazouk (1868-69) still adorns the cover of the Met’s official guidebook, but now it is scrutinized “through the prism of European imperialism”.

One of the show’s virtues is to reach back before Carpeaux, to the golden era of protest when his abolitionist vocabulary was first being forged. One display is devoted to Josiah Wedgwood, the English potter whose medallion from 1787 took off like wildfire among activists of the time. No bigger than a thumbprint, it shows a Black man chained and begging for our sympathy. Here he is reproduced on a glass cologne bottle, on a pearlware jug, and on a gilded seal fob modified to show a female slave.

Though Wedgwood’s intentions were good and his timing ingenious, such finery smacks of the black Instagram square, the corporate pledge to “do better”, the pint of Juneteenth ice cream.

The most illuminating guest is Jean-Antoine Houdon, Carpeaux’s forebear in marble. Locals have long admired Houdon’s Bather (1782) in the Met’s sun-drenched court of European sculpture. Braced for a splash, the bather is lovely – the arch of her outstretched foot fixed nimbly on a stone, a detail both structural and emotive.

Jean-Antoine Houdon - Head of a Woman, circa 1781.

 Photograph: Musée Municipal de Soissons / Bertrand Coutellier

It turns out she didn’t wash alone. The bather was commissioned for a fountain in the forty-five-acre pleasure garden (now the Parc Monceau) of the King’s cousin, the duc d’Orleans. Above her originally stood a Black woman carved in lead, a servant who pumped water through a ewer onto the pure white back of her stone mistress.

Though the servile half of the fountain disappeared during the Revolution, a plaster of her head appears on loan from Soissons. Far from Houdon’s famous realism (see his exquisite Ben Franklin in the American wing), this head depicts a simplified, obsequious, very unfortunate, smiling mammy.

Worse, when France freed her slaves the first time, in 1794, Houdon converted his slave’s likeness into terracotta, scrawled an abolitionist caption into her base, and mass-produced her as a souvenir of emancipation. The Met have brought out their copy of this miniature for the show.

Here is expert curation: the plaster slave, the clay freedwoman, the implied connection to the marble mistress across the wing. “I think this project changed me as an art historian,” Nelson said of such timebombs. “I think that this is just the beginning of a conversation, and that a larger conversation could follow.”

If the parable of Houdon teaches anything, it’s how greasily the feudal values of the ancien régime could masquerade as liberalism. These masqueraded in artist and patron alike: having installed Houdon’s “happy slave” fountain in his wonderland, the duc d’Orleans, one of the richest men in France, renounced his title when revolution arrived and rebranded himself “Philippe Egalité”. (The guillotine got him anyway.)

The curators believe Houdon’s cheap intentions with his smiling slave “served as precedents” for Carpeaux 90 years later. But Why Born Enslaved! is not so easily reduced – not quite.

Yes, Carpeaux’s patrons, like Houdon’s opportunist duc, were the worst kinds of virtue signalers. While Napoleon III sent troops to steal Mexico from behind the back of a war-torn America (a Union general had to shoo them out), his empress used her bronze of Why Born Enslaved! to broadcast republican sentiment back home.

And yes, Carpeaux borrowed from his own racialized fountain, his globe allegory in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris (1874). Now anonymous, the sitter for Why Born Enslaved! was visibly the same woman who modelled his “Africa” in that monumental public work. The chain around Africa’s ankle might well be construed as a degrading and irrelevant icon. “That was very common,: an emancipated figure, even decades after abolition, would still be carrying the vestiges of their captivity,” Walters explained.

Kehinde Wiley (American, born 1977) After La Négresse, 1872, 

2006 Photograph: Courtesy of the artist and Sean Kelly Gallery, NY

For context, Walters and Nelson include earlier “four continents” allegories in porcelain and on paper. For all its realism, Carpeaux’s fountain – and by extension his bust – derived from a time-worn menu of ethnic tropes that put Europa first.

But these facts cannot dim the absolute electricity of the woman’s gaze. Against her ropes she spins sharply to the left, and as you spin with her, encircling a back-to-back display of the terracotta and the later marble, you’ll detect from that early draft to the final one a faint sharpening of her brow — as if a wound that began in entreaty has hardened into reproach. Against the glib Wedgwood and the shameless Houdon, Carpeaux creates nothing less than a human.

Janet Jackson owned a reproduction, Beyoncé posed with one, and Kehinde Wiley depends on the sincerity of Carpeaux’s original for the strength of his own homage, which is wisely on display: a small bust critiquing exploitation in modern sports.

Carpeaux’s endurance, as this searching and feisty exhibition makes clear, can and should exist alongside the paternalizing traditions and the dirty money in spite of which his work took such vivid life.

“The figures themselves carry multiple valences,” Walters offered, “and if we allow them to carry multiple valences, then we’re really starting to think critically about what representation is, which to me seems to be the purview of a museum.”

Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast is on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York until 5 March 2023