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‘The support feels good’: UAW members embrace Biden and shrug off Trump

In Fort Wayne, Michigan, union autoworkers react to Biden showing up to pledge his support and to Trump avoiding them


Tom Perkins in Wayne, Michigan

Tue 26 Sep 2023

On a damp and windy day, members of the United Auto Workers (UAW) picketed outside a sprawling Ford plant in Wayne, Michigan, burning logs in barrels for warmth.

The plant makes the Ford Bronco, and workers there were among the first to strike when union contract negotiations between the UAW and the car companies collapsed earlier this month.

Strikers wearing red shirts and carrying signs chanted: “What do we want? Contract! When do we want it? Now!” and “No pay no parts,” as drivers passing by on the busy highway blared their horns in support.

The UAW strike has pushed into its third week, and unlike many strikes, it has managed to stay in the news – not least because on Tuesday, Joe Biden became the first US president to join strikers on a picket line in what feels like the unofficial kick-off to the 2024 campaign season.

“Stick with it. You deserve a significant raise,” Biden told the crowd in a minute-long speech. “We saved them [the car companies]. It’s about time they step up for us.”

The speech may have been short and sweet but the reaction was overwhelmingly positive.

Walking the picket line, Larry Hearn, a 61-year-old UAW committee member, said: “We’re out here on the frontline taking the brunt for everybody, losing money. The support feels good. We don’t need him to get in our business and secure us a contract, but his support is enough. It hits home with people.”

The Donald Trump campaign called Biden’s visit to the picket line a “cheap photo op”, but at least some workers disagree with that assessment.

“It’s about time a president stood up for workers instead of the billionaire class and donor class,” said Quintin Tucker, 57, who works in the plant’s final assembly department.

Trump will visit a non-union auto shop tomorrow, a fact that was not lost on those outside the Wayne plant.

“That’s where his loyalties lie,” Walter Robinson, a 57-year-old quality inspector, said. “If he wants to be with working people who are struggling, then he would be here. I don’t know who he is playing for – is he playing for working people, or corporations?”

“He has to go to a non-union plant because if he came here, we wouldn’t let him in,” added Hearn. “If he pulled up in his motherfuckin’ motorcade right now, we would not let him in.”



But it’s too early to count Trump out, said Robinson. The former US president did beat Hillary Clinton in the state in the 2016 election and still has his fans.

Trump gets a lot of support among union members because of “guns, gays and taxes”, Robinson said, and inflation has not helped Biden.

“That resonates with a certain sector of people,” he added, estimating that there is about a 60-40 split at the plant in support for Biden and Trump respectively.

Hearn said he is a Democrat and that most union members will say they are, but added, “You never know what someone is going to do when they get behind the booth.”

Frank Wells, a 27-year plant veteran, is a Democrat who is not impressed by Trump, especially because he is visiting a non-union shop.

“Let’s be real. He doesn’t support what we’re doing. He’s corporate. He’s a billionaire, a businessman, but we’re out here fighting for our lives,” Wells said.

Tucker estimates support for Biden and Trump in the plant is closer to 50-50, and that Trump draws support for his “cult of personality” and effective use of social wedge issues.

Trump does not really support the UAW, Tucker said, because “he is from the billionaire class and it’s against his interest”. Still, he added: “People vote against their economic interest in favor of cultural issues.”

He scoffed at Trump’s planned visit to a non-union shop. “The anger that we’re feeling right now - he doesn’t want that to rub off on him so he went somewhere safe, where they don’t have any skin in the game.”

UAW strikes: Biden visits picket line as Ford pauses Michigan battery plant

Pras Subramanian
·Senior Reporter
Updated Tue, September 26, 2023 

A momentous day arrived for the United Auto Workers (UAW) union and its ongoing strike with the Big Three as President Biden joined the picket lines in Michigan, just as Ford (F) announced a big update on an upcoming battery plant in the state.

Biden met with UAW picketers at GM's Van Buren Township parts distribution center in Michigan. "Wall Street didn’t build this country, the middle class built this country. The unions built the middle class," Biden said to UAW workers on strike. "Let’s keep going, you deserve what you’ve earned. And you’ve earned a hell of a lot more than you’re getting paid now."

UAW president Shawn Fain joined Biden at the picket line as well, thanking the president for joining the strike, but stopped short of endorsing Biden ahead of the 2024 presidential election.

U.S. President Joe Biden speaks next to Shawn Fain, President of the United Auto Workers (UAW), as he joins striking UAW members on the picket line outside the GM's Willow Run Distribution Center in Bellville, Wayne County, Mich., Sept. 26, 2023. (Evelyn Hockstein/REUTERS) (Evelyn Hockstein / reuters)

The White House says Biden’s visit was the first time a sitting president has visited a picket line in modern times. The move comes as his Republican rival, former President Trump, indicated he would be visiting the state as well. On Wednesday, Trump is expected to hold a rally with 500 former or current union members in Clinton Township, Mich.

The Big Three — Ford, GM, and Stellantis — put out statements ahead of Biden’s visit, though they did not criticize the president for joining the UAW strikes.

“On the first day of the strike, President Biden said UAW workers ‘deserve a contract that sustains them and the middle class.’ We agree and presented a record offer,” Stellantis (STLA) said on its UAW negotiations website.

President Joe Biden joins striking United Auto Workers on the picket line, in Van Buren Township, Mich. (Evan Vucci/AP Photo) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)

GM (GM) also stated that its “focus is not on politics but continues to be on bargaining in good faith” with the UAW to reach an agreement.

Ford also issued the statement on the president’s visit, which notably is where the company’s big Michigan Assembly Plant is located. “Ford and the UAW are going to be the ones to solve this by finding creative solutions to tough issues together at the bargaining table. We have a shared interest in the long-term viability of the domestic auto industry, the industrial Midwest and good-paying manufacturing jobs in the US,” the company said.

Ford also made waves on Monday when the automaker announced that it is pausing development on its $3.5 billion battery plant in Marshall, Mich., claiming the automaker had concerns about “competitively” operating the plant.

Ford Motor Company executive chair Bill Ford announces Ford will partner with China-based Amperex Technology to build an all-electric vehicle battery plant in Marshall, Mich., during a press conference in Romulus, Mich., Feb. 13, 2023. (Rebecca Cook/REUTERS) (Rebecca Cook / reuters)

Ford declined to say what specifically changed in its planning, but the company stated it has not made a final decision on the planned investment at the site. Note that Ford is partnering with China’s CATL to license CATL’s LFP (lithium iron phosphate) battery tech for new EVs. Ford had said in the past that it would own the battery plant, and would employ all the workers, but it is possible guidance on battery credits Ford would receive from the government changed due to Ford’s licensing agreement with CATL, leading to the pause in development.

Nonetheless, the UAW pounced on Ford’s decision, claiming it was a move to punish the union and union jobs, because of the UAW’s ongoing demands for higher wages.

“This is a shameful, barely veiled threat by Ford to cut jobs,” UAW's Fain said in a statement. “Now they want to threaten us with closing plants that aren’t even open yet. We are simply asking for a just transition to electric vehicles and Ford is instead doubling down on their race to the bottom.”

Pras Subramanian is a reporter for Yahoo Finance. You can follow him on Twitter and on Instagram.

Bernie Sanders Continues Battle For 4-Day, 32-Hour Workweek With Same Pay But Warns, 'Benefits For The Working Class Won't Be Easily Handed Over By The Corporate Elite'

Jeannine Mancini

AP
Tue, September 26, 2023 

In his op-ed for The Guardian, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders propels the American labor conversation forward by arguing for a 20% cut in the standard 40-hour workweek, without any loss in pay.

He points to the 480% increase in worker productivity since 1940, asserting that such gains have mainly enriched corporations while leaving the working class in a perpetual state of struggle.

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Sanders' rallying cry resonates with the ongoing initiatives by labor unions, especially the United Auto Workers (UAW), which recently initiated strikes against major automotive companies such as Ford Motor Co., General Motors Co. and Stellantis. The UAW is also pushing for a four-day workweek while preserving the pay for a five-day week, a demand that Sanders supports. This is part of a long-running struggle by unions to balance productivity gains against working hours that has seen little progress over the years as real wages in the auto industry have declined by 17%.

Research backs the concept of a reduced workweek, with a study led by Boston College Professor Juliet Schor indicating that efficiency can increase without requiring workers to cram more tasks into fewer hours.



International examples provide practical confirmation. In France and Norway, shorter workweeks are either in place or under consideration. A U.K. pilot study involving 3,000 workers in over 60 companies demonstrated increased happiness and productivity with a four-day workweek, prompting 92% of the participating companies to adopt the new schedule permanently.

Public opinion in the United States is also aligning with this idea. A Morning Consult survey showed that 87% of employed adults in the U.S. are interested in a four-day workweek, and 82% believe it could work on a broader scale. Likewise, a study by 4 Day Week Global revealed that none of the companies participating in four-day workweek experiments in North America have plans to revert to a traditional five-day week.

Despite these positive indicators, Sanders acknowledges the uphill battle to win these changes. Any benefits for the working class won't be "easily handed over by the corporate elite," he said.

Yet, as automation and technological progress, like the anticipated efficiencies in electric vehicle manufacturing, continue to threaten traditional work structures, they also underscore the feasibility of a reduced workweek.

The synergy between the voice of labor unions, the American working class, international examples and influential policymakers like Sanders makes the vision of a four-day workweek not merely a pipe dream but a realistic, achievable objective that could reshape labor norms for future generations.

1933

‘Even Lucifer was using a fan’

Brazil bakes as mercilessly hot spring begins

Having just emerged from its warmest winter since 1961, the country is sweltering amid unforgiving and unseasonal temperatures


Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro and Constance Malleret in São Paulo

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 26 Sep 2023 

People cool off at Macumba beach, in the west zone of Rio de Janeiro, on Sunday. Photograph: Tercio Teixeira/AFP/Getty Images

A ferocious heatwave was sweeping South America, and samba composer Beto Gago (Stuttering Bob) saw only one thing to do: pop out for an ice-cold beer with his drinking buddy Joel Saideira – Last Order Joel.

“Damn, it was grim around here yesterday,” the 76-year-old musician grimaced as he stood outside his home in Irajá – reputedly Rio’s hottest neighbourhood – with a bohemian’s potbelly spilling out over his lilac shorts.

“It was bloody miserable. Even Lucifer was using a fan! He couldn’t bear the heat either!” chuckled Gago’s son, a 36-year-old sambista called Juninho Thybau.

Irajá – a No 3-shaped chunk of north Rio famed for its samba stars and oppressive heat – is far from the only corner of Brazil that has been baking under unforgiving and unseasonal temperatures. Having just emerged from its warmest winter since 1961, South America’s largest country is experiencing a mercilessly hot start to spring.

With temperatures soaring towards – and in some places over 40C (104F) – newspapers and weather forecasters have drawn comparisons with global hotspots including Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and even Dallol, Ethiopia, which is reputedly the world’s hottest inhabited place.

People visit Ipanema beach in Rio de Janeiro amid the heat. Photograph: António Lacerda/EPA

In the town of São Romão, in Minas Gerais state, temperatures hit 43C on Monday – “only two degrees less than in the Sahara desert”, reported one local newspaper. A week earlier, Irajá’s residents endured 41C temperatures – “higher than Death Valley in California”, according to the television news.


Even São Paulo, supposedly Brazil’s cloudy “Land of Drizzle”, is sweltering, with temperatures hitting 36.5C on Sunday – its sixth hottest day since 1943.

Neighbouring Paraguay – where the rural town of Filadelfia suffered 44.4C heat – and Peru – where the mercury rose to 40.3C in the Amazon outpost of Puerto Esperanza – are also feeling the burn, as is north Argentina.

“I don’t know much about meteorology, but ... it’s definitely getting hotter. The whole world is, isn’t it?” Juninho Thybau said on Monday, as Rio’s most stifling post code braced for more extreme weather.

On the evening news, a weather presenter, Priscila Chagas, warned Wednesday could be the hottest day of 2023. “This is the crazy spring,” she declared, forecasting temperatures of 41C.

Climatologist Karina Bruno Lima said the succession of record-breaking temperatures was unusual and “extremely concerning”. The heatwave follows a similar hot spell in August – shortly after the world’s hottest month on record – during the southern hemisphere winter.


‘Winter is disappearing’: South America hit by ‘brutal’ unseasonal heatwave

Lima believed more research was needed to determine precisely how climate change affected individual weather events. But “we’re already in a context of a changing climate, of a warmer atmosphere and oceans, and we must understand that more frequent and more intense extreme weather events are now a systemic occurrence”.


Experts partly blame the heat on the climate-heating event El Niño, which also causes flooding in some regions. “But it’s not the main factor,” argued Lima, from Rio Grande do Sul’s federal university. “The main factor truly is anthropogenic global heating.”

“In much of the world we can observe an increase in heat-related extreme events. And in Brazil, and South America overall, the tendency is for this to get worse.”

An aerial view of the Rio Negro with very low water levels at the Cacau Pirera district in Iranduba, Amazonas state. 

Photograph: Michael Dantas/AFP/Getty Images

That is bad news for the 100,000 residents of already-scorching Irajá, which also suffers from being dissected by Avenida Brasil, one of Rio’s busiest and most polluted motorways.

As he shot the breeze on his veranda, Beto Gago reminisced about his childhood in the neighbourhood during the 1950s. Hog plum, guava and mango trees were everywhere. Nearby forests were still standing and kept temperatures down. “It was always hot around here. But there used to be this cool breeze,” remembered the shirtless sambista.

“These days, it’s hard to tell which neighbourhood’s the coolest because the whole of Rio is bloody roasting,” said his son.

Samba composer Beto Gago (Stuttering Bob) with his son, Juninho Thybau.

Photograph: Alan Lima


Nearby, at Irajá’s sprawling food distribution centre – reputedly Latin America’s second largest – sweat-drenched workers stacked fruit onto handcarts despite the relentless heat. “You sweat in the shade and, if you stay in the sun, you melt like an ice lolly,” joked Geraldo Lima, 56, a homeless man who earns about £8 a day loading trucks.

Lima was unsure if global heating was the culprit: “The truth is only God knows.” But market workers were certain temperatures were rising. “Each day’s worse than the last,” said Thiago dos Santos, a 17-year-old porter, as he hauled dozens of wooden crates off to a neighbouring favela for recycling.

Juninho Thybau, who is the nephew of Brazil’s most famous samba musician, Zeca Pagodinho, insisted Irajá remained the city’s best place to live and was not Rio’s only extreme heat hotspot.

He remembered a recent performance in nearby Nilópolis, another area famed for its samba scene and blistering heat. “Holy shit, brother, it was so hot it felt like I was in hell,” he said, fretting that the worst was still to come.

Thybau, who holds a monthly jam session outside his house, said a friend at city hall had warned him “a catastrophe” was heading Rio’s way with the start of summer in December likely to bring heavy rains and more severe heat.

Other adaptation methods beside ice-cold would be needed if the samba was to go on. “We’re going to have to hire a water tanker to soak the crowd – or one of those fans that pumps out water.”

‘Our drummer used human tibia bones’: the hellish birth of Brazil’s heavy metal scene

Responding to police brutality, hard labour and the threat of nuclear war, members of Sepultura, Holocausto and more explain their decidedly anti-tropical music


Alex Deller

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 26 Sep 2023 

‘Our songs were considered bad and poorly played, but there was a scene of headbangers who adored us’ … Zhema and Angel of Vulcano. Photograph: Courtesy of Marcelo R Batista

Heavy metal has always revelled in its us-against-the-universe attitude, remaining steadfast in the face of hostility and outright ridicule; its bands were often born in the shadow of industrial decline, recession or the cold war. Few, though, can claim to have faced the struggles of Brazil’s early extreme metal acts, as their country emerged from a 21-year military dictatorship where poverty, torture and hopelessness were the norm.

“The Brazil of girls and coconuts and paradise beaches existed, but not in our reality,” says Max Cavalera of Sepultura, who remain the country’s most famous heavy metal export. “Our Brazil was dirty and grey and all it offered was crime, drugs or fucked-up factory jobs. We wanted music that made sense to us as young, pissed-off Brazilian kids.”

Pooling resources and sharing or stealing instruments, acts like Sepultura, Sarcófago, Vulcano, Holocausto and Chakal took inspiration from groundbreaking overseas acts like Venom, Hellhammer and Discharge, kicking against a repressive church and state with feral and often blasphemous attempts to emulate their heroes. The scene is now documented in a mammoth 528-page book – United Forces: An Archive of Brazil’s Raw Metal Attack, 1986-1991 – that pools the work of Marcelo R Batista, whose United Forces fanzine documented it all.

Igor (left) and Max Cavalera of Sepultura, pictured in 2023.

 Photograph: Jim Louvau

Sepultura would slough off their crude, knobbly edges to sell 20m records while shaping the path of thrash, groove and nu metal. Formed in 1984 by teenage brothers Max (vocals, guitar) and Iggor Cavalera (drums), the band wielded their crude material like a medieval weapon. “It was always about attitude over perfection,” says Max. “You don’t know how to play well, you don’t sound that good, but you love what you’re doing. That’s pretty much what got us signed, our attitude.” Switched on to rock’n’roll at a Queen concert, the brothers took in AC/DC and Motörhead – “the gateway drug to the bad shit,” chuckles Max – and then a mix of nascent black metal and hardcore punk. For teenagers who’d lost their father and were facing a bleak, uncertain future, these ugly sounds provided the perfect soundtrack.

For all the anger, Iggor is keen to point out the role naivety and joy had to play in the band’s early days, including painting double AA batteries for makeshift bullet belts: couture of choice for any self-respecting metalhead. “It was tough, but at the same time we had fun doing it,” says Iggor. “It wasn’t that we were hating life. And I think every artist invests way more than you get out. But if you can balance that out where you’re happy enough to continue, then it’s all good.”

This said, the dictatorship remained a chilling memory (“we all knew of at least one person that disappeared,” says Iggor) and police brutality was a constant threat, with every interviewee recounting tales of being stopped, harassed, beaten and threatened. “We used to stay at my aunt’s house in Belo Horizonte,” Max recalls. “Her apartment faced the back of the police station and one of the most vivid memories I have is hearing people being tortured in the night. I couldn’t go to sleep because of their screams, it was fucking horrible. We used to joke with our friends that we were more scared of the police than we were the devil. They really scared us, because you could get dragged into the back of a police car and nobody would ever see you again.”

Issue two of United Forces fanzine. 

Photograph: Courtesy of Marcelo R Batista

This intimidation didn’t just stop at individuals, but also the scene’s burgeoning infrastructure. By now, Sepultura and others had “awakened in other kids the feeling that they could start bands or help promote the metal scene by setting up gigs or running their own fanzines,” says United Forces author Batista. Belo Horizonte’s Cogumelo Records was also key: founded in 1980 by João Eduardo de Faria and his wife, Patty, the shop catered to the area’s growing hoard of metalheads and later morphed into an influential label. Cogumelo Produções released Sepultura’s earliest material and, in 1986, the classic Warfare Noise compilation, which gave the world outside Minas Gerais its first bitter taste of Chakal, Mutilator, Holocausto and Sarcófago. By then, democracy was settling in, but de Faria faced “severe censorship of the lyrics of the songs, and our store was the target of constant police raids looking for evidence of drug use.”

If some were harassed for merely looking like troublemakers or dissidents, others like Vulcano practically begged for interference. A São Paulo band with its roots in Brazil’s 70s hard rock scene, the band’s sawtoothed thrash proved highly influential. “Vulcano was considered an ugly duckling at the time,” says bassist Zhema Rodero. “Our songs were considered bad and poorly played, but there was a scene of headbangers who adored us. We started playing around São Paulo and those were totally insane gigs: just the audience and the band, no barriers, security, roadies, nothing! At the time our drummer used two human tibias to play, the singer’s microphone was clamped on to a human femur and we spread human bones onstage. That caused us some huge problems.”

Back in Minas Gerais, another Cogumelo band were courting their own controversies. Beginning as Asmodeu in 1984 before transitioning into Holocausto, the band’s Campo De Extermínio debut confronted the horrors of Nazi Germany, and its crude, borderline-childlike sleeve remains gut-churning to this day. “It was a crushing time for the Brazilian population,” says vocalist Rodrigo Magalhães, a heavy metal lifer who has served with the likes of Impurity and, now, Tormentador. “In geopolitical terms, we lived on the verge of a nuclear war. We didn’t know if there would be tomorrow, so what we wanted was to fuck with everything, all the time. We had no pretensions and no specific purposes beyond screaming and shocking to the fullest. We had no political conscience or knowledge. Through music, we tried to show the horrors of war. Among all miseries, the scourge of war is one of the most absurd and terrifying.”

While Rodrigo views Holocausto as a “cursed band,” often loathed for its controversial themes and imagery, Cogumelo’s João Eduardo remains more philosophical when it comes to the work of his early charges. “All of the Warfare Noise bands were heavily criticised,” he says. “The names of the bands themselves were controversial, and we had a lot of criticism trying to distribute the products. But Holocausto depicted an illusion-free view of the real world and warned that nothing changes. Just look at the world today – fascism is coming back.” Jair Bolsonaro’s 2019-2022 presidency mirrored similar populist shifts in the US, UK and swathes of Europe. “He brought back every nightmare and stupidity of those horrible years of dictatorship,” says Batista. “The Bolsonaro years were like a bad trip into hypocrisy and bigotry, not to mention the corruption cases, crimes against nature and the lack of respect for those who died during the worst days of the pandemic.”



The protean recordings, photoshoots and album sleeves snapshotted by United Forces would later be championed by influential second wave black metal acts outside Brazil such as Darkthrone, Mayhem and Blasphemy, and they remain touchstones for many fans seeking raw, untamed sound.

But many of those involved continue to look forward as well as backwards. Cogumelo has celebrated 40 years of operation, while Marcelo’s early fanzine set him on a path that would take him from working in a steel mill to founding a record label (releasing music by overseas acts he’d championed in United Forces, such as Fear of God and Agathocles) and Extreme Noise Discos, the record shop he runs with his wife in downtown São Paulo. While no longer members of the band they formed, Max and Iggor Cavalera remain deeply connected to their earliest material, rerecording and touring (under the name Cavalera) the songs from 1985’s Bestial Devastation and 1986’s Morbid Visions, still savage but now more audible and in-tune.


‘I got 12 years and 74 lashes’: Confess, the band jailed for playing metal in Iran

Max has never stopped exploring audio brutality, his sons Zyon and Igor continue the Cavalera dynasty in the bands Soulfly and Go Ahead and Die, and Iggor performs as one half of extreme electronic duo Petbrick. “I didn’t realise how political the Brazilian metal scene was at the time,” he says of the early days that forged him. “There was a lot of resistance. I think everyone that participated should be proud, because we had to build something from nothing and we opened a lot of doors. Now, if you hear about a Brazilian band, you’re not surprised. But I remember people laughing, saying ‘they’re in the jungle, there’s no music there!’ So the bands, the tape traders, promoters and fanzine writers made that scene, and it was important.”

United Forces: An Archive of Brazil’s Raw Metal Attack, 1986-1991 is published by Bazillion Points

‘His work seems endless’: music stars pay tribute to the incredible life of Moondog

The eccentric musician, dressed like a Viking playing songs on the streets of New York, is being celebrated by names such as Rufus Wainwright and Jarvis Cocker on a new album

‘There’s a cinematic feel to his music too, like the score to a movie nobody made’ … Moondog in 1976. Photograph: Philippe Gras/Alamy

Jim Farber

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 26 Sep 2023 

Most tourists who come to New York City for the first time seek out sights like the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and Central Park. But between the early 60s and 1972, visitors with a more adventurous nature had a different agenda. “Certain people flying into the city at that time would jump into a cab and tell the driver – ‘take me to Moondog!’” said Robert Scotto, author of a book about the eccentric musician and composer who went by that luminous name. “The driver would take them straight to 6th Avenue and 53rd Street because everyone knew that’s where he was.”

Certainly, no one who passed by that busy stretch of the city during that era could have missed him. Outfitted like a fantasy Viking, complete with a double-horned headdress, a doomy black tunic, an eight-foot spear and a long white beard, Moondog had an imposing presence to say the least. It only magnified the intensity of his appearance that he was blind, a fact he refused to hide behind dark glasses. From his reliable perch, Moondog would pull from his pockets reams of poetry, sheet music, 78rpm recordings and broadsides he had written to sell to curious passersby. Some people thought he was a freak or a vagrant. (He was, in fact, homeless during several short stretches of time.) Others saw him as the ultimate counter-cultural figure, while some major musicians viewed him as a visionary, including the jazz greats Benny Goodman and Charlie Parker and classical artists from Arturo Toscanini to Leonard Bernstein. Janis Joplin covered his existential composition All Is Loneliness, on her first album with Big Brother and the Holding Company, and pop acts from T-Rex to Prefab Sprout referenced him in their lyrics. Moondog was written up in many local and national papers and, in 1969 and 1971, he had two albums on Columbia Records which, at the time, was headquartered on the same block he haunted.

Today, it’s mainly musicians and fans of the arcane who have any awareness of Moondog at all – an oversight which inspired the creation of a new tribute album to amplify his legacy, titled Songs and Symphoniques: The Music of Moondog. The project was initiated by the Brooklyn-based jazz-chamber ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra in collaboration with the Kronos Quartet, and also features vocal performances from stars such as Rufus Wainwright, Jarvis Cocker and Joan as Policewoman. “Over the years, I’ve become a kind of evangelist for Moondog,” said Ghost Train Orchestra’s leader, Brian Carpenter. “I want more people to know about the joy and wonder of his music. And, luckily, there’s so much of it.”

Moondog in 1972. Photograph: CBS Photo Archive/Getty Images

In fact, when Moondog died in 1999 at 83, he left an archive filled with hundreds of compositions, many of which have yet to be transcribed or recorded. The range of the material in that archive, located in Münster, Germany, is broad and varied enough to embrace many kinds of music. “I always say that Moondog was a composer’s composer,” Carpenter said. “He wrote for string ensembles, percussion ensembles, solo percussionists, choirs, reeds, brass, but he also wrote pop songs with lyrics and jazz pieces. His work seems endless.”

To capture the dizzying and unusual range of sounds in his head, Moondog created his own instruments, much in the manner of another inventive American composer, Harry Partch. “Over time, his instruments became more and more elaborate,” Scotto said. “You would look at it and say, ‘how does one play this?’ And he was very fussy about their construction. It had to be a certain kind of wood and the cymbal had to be a certain kind of metal.”

His best-known invention was a triangle-shaped percussive contraption called the “trimba”. “You could get an enormous number of percussion sounds out of it by hitting different parts of the wood block,” Carpenter said.


There was also a triangular-shaped harp he called the “oo”, a stringed instrument named the “hüs” and more. Moondog made his own clothes too, many of which were modeled after Norse myth. It’s all a logical byproduct of a life based almost entirely on self-invention. The man who would become Moondog was born Louis Hardin in 1916 in Marysville, Kansas, to a religious family. His father, an Episcopalian minister, moved the family to Wyoming when the boy was young, and it was there that he discovered his first major musical influence, which came from Indigenous American culture. His eureka moment occurred after his father took him to an Arapaho Sun Dance where he met Chief Yellow Calf who showed him how to play a tom-tom made of buffalo skin. A lifelong fascination with rhythm was born. At 16, however, his life changed radically after he came across an object while playing that he didn’t realize was a dynamite cap. The device exploded in his face, blinding him. “Moondog later told me that for almost a year after that he felt as if he couldn’t breathe,” Scotto said. “The life had drained out of him.”

His sister was instrumental in rallying his spirits, reading to him works of philosophy and mythology that helped him form the character he would later become. While attending the Iowa School for the Blind he learned music, which he began to compose in braille. In 1943, he took that knowledge to New York where, shortly after he arrived, he adopted the name Moondog for a canine he knew who howled at the moon. He had yet to develop his Viking character when he began his career by recording his own compositions for small labels, some of which proved impressive enough to earn the attention of Artur Rodzinski, conductor of the New York Philharmonic, who invited him to perform with them.

To capture the dizzying and unusual range of sounds in his head, Moondog created his own instruments. Photograph: Dan Grossi

He also had an odd connection to the formative days of rock’n’roll. The seminal DJ Alan Freed named his show The Moondog Rock and Roll Matinee, and used the composer’s piece Moondog Symphony, as his theme song without credit. Moondog sued and won, preventing Freed from using the music or his name. At that time, Moondog was handsome, tall and gaunt, earning him the nickname “the man with the face of Christ”, a sobriquet that incensed him since he was anxious to rebel against the religion he grew up with. “Norse mythology was the exact opposite of what he saw as the facades of Christianity and the Greco-Roman tradition,” said Scotto. “But he wasn’t only drawn to it as a rebel. He also saw in it a great source of metaphor, poetry and, ultimately, musical adaptation.”

More, he recognized that the Viking get-up “was a great come-on”, Scotto said. “He knew it would get him attention and he definitely had a sense of humor about it.”

He chose to anchor his act on 6th Avenue in midtown Manhattan because so many jazz clubs and record labels were located in the area at the time. He became so well-known for occupying that spot that an advertisement in the 60s for the nearby Burlington Mills clothing company read, “come see us – right next to the Hilton Hotel and Moondog!”

Though Moondog usually eked out just enough money from selling his creations to keep a roof over his head – and, eventually, his life proved stable enough for him to marry several times and father a child – he sometimes lived on the streets. In the early 60s, his situation inspired the Village Voice to write an article that asked, “where are Moondog’s friends?” Scotto recalled. “Someone should take him in.”

That someone turned out to be the composer Philip Glass, who let him live on his couch for a year. In return, he got an important musical education. “Philip Glass told me that he learned more from Moondog than he did at Juilliard,” Scotto said.

There’s a clear correlation between Moondog’s compositional process and Glass’s trademark minimalism. “Glass’s music is very sparse and has an enormous amount of repetition, which is what Moondog did all the time,” Scotto said. “As a blind man he could only put a certain amount of information down at a certain time. He would use a large index card and get a complete piece on just that, which is why he often wrote rounds, canons and madrigals.”

Rufus Wainwright, who recorded Moondog’s Be a Hobo for the Songs and Symphoniques tribute album.

 Photograph: Miranda Penn Turin


The new tribute album surveys the full range of Moondog’s music, from madrigals to symphonic pieces to songs like All Is Loneliness. According to the Janis Joplin biographer Holly George-Warren, Loneliness came to Joplin via the Big Brother guitarist James Gurley who was a Moondog fan. Still, Scotto said the composer was disappointed by their version because “the song was written in 5/4 time, and they did it in 4/4.” The version on the tribute album, solemnly sung by Petra Haden, restores the original time signature.

Many other interpretations on the album take liberties with the original takes. Sam Amidon’s version of Behold turns it from a madrigal into an Americana folk ballad, while the cover of Down Is Up, emphasizes its proto-psychedelic chords. (The piece was written in the 1950s.) Other songs capture Moondog’s sense of whimsy, including Enough About Human Rights, whose lyrics playfully ask “what about goat rights?” and “what about lark rights?” Rufus Wainwright opens the album with a mantra of a piece, Be a Hobo. “It’s a song about letting go of our power so we can just be human,” said Wainwright, who also recorded Moondog’s song High on a Rocky Ledge for his latest album, Folkocracy. “When I first heard Moondog, it was a mystical event,” the singer said. “At first, you’re seduced by the simplicity of his music, but then you hear an underlying sophistication which is the hallmark of genius.”

The tribute album also honors Moondog’s love of street sounds by integrating car horns and pedestrian chatter into the music, just as he did. “He loved the natural world around him in a way that a blind person responds to it – by its sounds, not its sights,” Scotto said.

Despite its grounding in the external world, Moondog’s music also has an otherworldly feel, a sense emphasized by his visual presentation. “Like Sun Ra, Moondog created a cult of personality and a whole mythology around him,” Carpenter said. “There’s a cinematic feel to his music too, like the score to a movie nobody made.”

The efforts to spread the message of Moondog by Ghost Train Orchestra and the Kronos Quartet won’t end with this album. They’re planning a follow-up set and a tribute show at Carnegie Hall to take place in November. Moondog’s compelling backstory always helps in spreading the message, but Scotto says his essence lies elsewhere. “Listen to the music,” he said. “That’s where you’ll meet the man.”

Songs and Symphoniques: The Music of Moondog is out on 29 September

ARCHITECTURE

Trowbridge ‘gargoyle’ finds its home in global architecture of spite

‘Spite buildings’ intended to cause irritation have a long and proud history from Beirut to Buenos Aires

Caroline Davies

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 26 Sep 2023 

Trowbridge’s town council leader, Stewart Palmen, has found himself the subject of a carved addition to the roof of an aggrieved builder. Photograph: Stewart Palmen

From view-blocking houses to nose-thumbing towers, revenge is the mortar that binds the bricks in “spite buildings”, constructed with the sole aim of causing irritation.

The Al Ba’sa (The Grudge) house in Beirut, was built on a sliver of land in 1954 by one feuding brother merely to obstruct the sea view of the other. At just 60cm wide at its narrowest point, it remains the thinnest habitable building in the city, and has become a tourist attraction.

The Inat Kuca (Spite House) in Sarajevo was built in 1879 after its owner refused to move to make way for a planned town hall unless his original home was dismantled brick by brick and reconstructed across the river. The house, now a restaurant, is seen as a symbol of Bosnian defiance against the Austrian-Hungarian empire.

Now we can add to this esteemed list “the Gargoyle”, a foot-high unflattering stone carving of the Trowbridge town council leader, Stewart Palmen, added by an angry builder to the roof of a building at the centre of a Wiltshire planning dispute. If it was designed to insult, however, it seems to have backfired, with Palmen declaring he would like it for his garden.


Spite buildings: when human grudges get architectural – in pictures

“It’s very funny. It’s great,” said Dr Timothy Brittain-Catlin, who runs the architecture apprenticeship course at Cambridge University. As an example of “spite’ architecture, it’s a classic: motivated by malice, as public a protest as is possible, and, like all good spite architecture, a daily reminder of a painful slight.

Brittain-Catlin thinks spite buildings do add to the world of architecture. “I think that they show that the purpose of building is not just the functional, practical thing, which is how many people see it. There are many things buildings can do. They can prove a point, which is what these buildings are doing. They are a demonstration of your power,” he said.

Among his favourites is a column by the architect Quinlan Terry, commissioned by former Conservative party treasurer Lord McAlpine for the gardens of West Green House in Hampshire. Positioned for all to see by the road, it was McAlpine’s response to Labour’s threat of a wealth tax, with its inscription in Latin, translating as: “This monument was built with a large sum of money, which would have otherwise fallen, sooner or later, into the hands of the tax-gatherer.”

The 77-metre (253ft) Wainhouse Tower in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, built from 1871-75, is said to owe its great height and viewing platform to the factory owner John Wainhouse’s desire to annoy his neighbour and local dignitary Sir Henry Edwards, who had boasted of his estate being the most private in Halifax, and which was now overlooked by the folly.

Neighbour disputes have led to many an imaginative protest. An argument over a fence in South Wootton made headlines when one man ended up erecting a large sign reading “Ugly Fence House” in anger at his neighbours’ fencing. One woman famously painted red and white “candy stripes” on the property she bought for £15m in South End, Kensington, after her initial plans to redevelop were challenged by neighbours and rejected by Kensington and Chelsea council.

Often spite buildings are the result of inheritance disputes, such as the Skinny House, Boston, built in about 1874, when one man returning from the American civil war discovered his brother had taken up most of the plot they had inherited, so constructed his own skinny house on the remaining land, blocking out the sunlight and his brother’s view in the process.

One of the most impressive is the 33-floor Kavanagh Building in Buenos Aires. In 1936, Cora Kavanagh, a millionaire whose lover, a member of the aristocratic Anchorena family, was forced to break off their relationship by his family, instructed an architect to design a skyscraper that would block the Anchorenas’ view of the church they had built.

Oliver Wainwright, the Guardian’s architecture and design critic, says: “The history of cities is a history of spite – they are grudges and vendettas wrought in bricks and mortar. Landowners have always tried to get one over on their neighbours, whether it’s the Tuscan merchants competing with ever taller towers in San Gimignano, or the bristling shafts of London’s Square Mile blocking each other’s views, or the sun-eclipsing leylandii hedges of feuding English suburbia.”

“It seems that the built environment is becoming increasingly spiteful, from the proliferation of anti-homeless spikes and anti-skateboarding studs, to the recent legal ruling that has allowed residents of multimillion-pound Thameside flats to have half of Tate Modern’s roof deck shut down. Despite the efforts of the planning system, the sacred right of the property owner always manages to trump the wider public good.”

Observatory built to represent Einstein’s theory of relativity reopens in Germany

Einstein Tower has undergone extensive renovations to preserve it for future generations

Einsteinturm (Einstein Tower) before and after renovation. Composite: Thomas Wolf/Wüstenrot Stiftung

Kate Connolly in Potsdam

THE GUARDIAN

Tue 26 Sep 2023

A solar observatory built to substantiate Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity has been reopened near the German capital after a renovation project to preserve it for future generations.

The Einsteinturm (Einstein Tower) on Telegraph Hill in Potsdam, 16 miles (25km) south-west of Berlin, spent a year under scaffolding while work was carried out using modern techniques to seal its many thousands of cracks, cure it of extensive dampness, and to save its domed zinc roof, while retaining its authenticity.

Constructed between 1920 and 1922 by the architect Erich Mendelsohn in collaboration with the astronomer Erwin Finlay-Freundlich, the 20-metre tower, said at the time to resemble a “gawky spaceship”, has long been a lure for architectural enthusiasts and astrophysicists alike.

Mendelsohn had intended his work to represent and facilitate Einstein’s relativity theory, arguing the tower had been inspired by “the allure around Einstein’s universe”.


‘Healing a wound’: from neglected East German relic to lauded art gallery

The amorphous construction, the first major work by Mendelsohn who also applied his pioneering dynamic functionalist style elsewhere, is considered a landmark in expressionist architecture. It has no right angles, a curvaceous wooden staircase, and contains an elaborate system of mirrors and lenses that draw sunlight from the telescopes on the roof down to the spectrograph and observation laboratories in the basement.

The tower is very much still in operation as a working solar observatory today, run by the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics (AIP), where it is mainly used for the study of solar magnetic fields.

It was originally planned in concrete. A lack of materials after the first world war, however, meant it was produced in stucco-covered brick, resulting in the building being structurally problematic from the start. It later suffered heavy damage during allied bombing in the second world war.

Hagen Mehmel, the project engineer who oversaw the renovations that cost about €1.2m (£1m) and required an estimated 10,000 hours of labour, called it a “fantastic structure – in my eyes it’s a sculpture, but from a structural engineering point of view it’s a fiasco”, speaking at the opening ceremony.

The tower was originally designed and constructed with the main purpose of verifying Einstein’s general theory of relativity, his groundbreaking theorem of motion, light and space, which he had published in 1911. It became particularly useful for measuring the phenomenon recognised in the theory of the slight movement of the spectral lines in the sun’s gravitational field, which is now referred to as the “red shift”.

Standing under the dome beneath a blue sky, Alexander Warmuth, the deputy head of the solar physics section of the AIP, pointed out that the telescopes he was operating were the original ones installed almost 100 years ago.

“The Einstein Tower might no longer be at the forefront of research but it’s not a mere museum piece,” he said. “It’s still very much in use to train students as well as developing and testing instrumentation for new bigger solar telescopes and testing.

“Following its renovation it’s probably now in a better condition than it was when it was inaugurated almost 100 years ago. As I spend a lot of time in its basement developing parts of an instrument on a spacecraft which is currently orbiting the sun, it’s very close to my heart.”

A digital exhibition has been launched to give more information to visitors, most of whom will only view the tower from the outside.

By all accounts, Einstein never showed much enthusiasm for the building. After Mendelsohn had eagerly taken him on a tour of it, he reportedly waited hours for a response from the scientist who later murmured the single-word conclusion: “Organic.”

Europe’s ‘mini-Trumps’ survived his fall. Now they’re hoping for his comeback

From Orbán in Hungary to Fico in Slovakia, populists are looking to a Trump win to boost their power in the EU

Paul Taylor
THE GUARDIAN

Tue 26 Sep 2023

When Donald Trump lost the White House in 2020, Europe’s strongmen, populists and climate change deniers lost a powerful ally and a protector. Yet most of Europe’s mini-Trumps have survived his fall, his denial of defeat and the storming of Congress by his supporters, and are now hoping that a comeback for the Republican frontrunner in next year’s US presidential election will put fresh wind in their own sails.

In his four years in office, Trump described the European Union as a “foe” and Nato as “obsolete”. He had earlier openly applauded the UK’s vote for Brexit and encouraged other countries to follow suit. He pulled the United States out of global agreements to fight climate change, tore up arms control treaties, slapped tariffs on his allies and picked fights with Germany over trade and defence spending. And he rolled out the red carpet for the populist leaders of Poland and Hungary just as they were defying EU censure over moves to snuff out judicial independence, civil rights and media pluralism.

No wonder senior officials in mainstream EU governments are quaking at the prospect that Trump may win in 2024 despite facing several impending trials over his efforts to overturn the results of the election he lost to Joe Biden. With Trump holding a commanding early lead in the race for the Republican nomination, European fears are exacerbated by his refusal to back Ukraine against Russian aggression and his vow to slap tariffs on EU imports.

Continental European practitioners of Trump’s attack-dog politics such as the Hungarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, and the de facto Polish leader, Jarosław Kaczyński, are still in power and continuing to fight Brussels over the rule of law, migration and LGBTQ+ rights.

Indeed, they may gain a new illiberal ally if Slovakia’s former prime minister Robert Fico, who has lifted tactics straight out of the Trump playbook, achieves a comeback in the general election on 30 September. Fico claims the incumbent liberal government is trying to steal the election because some of his associates, including a former police chief, have been arrested in corruption investigations.

Fico, whose Smer party is a member of the European Socialists and Democrats group, blames the west for Russia’s war on Ukraine and says he’ll stop all aid to Kyiv if he wins. Slovakian analysts fear he will dismantle the country’s judicial independence and purge corruption fighters, as Orbán and Kaczyński have done, and that he will join them in fighting the EU’s migration pact, which requires member states to either take a share of asylum seekers or contribute financially to their reception in other countries.

Smer party leader Robert Fico and Progresivne Slovensko party leader Michal Šimečka in a TV election debate in Bratislava, Slovakia, 21 September 2023. 

Photograph: Jakub Gavlák/EPA


After Bratislava, the big test for Europe’s Trumpists will be in Warsaw, where Kaczyński’s conservative nationalist Law and Justice (PiS) party is bidding for an unprecedented third term on 15 October by relentlessly demonising liberal centre-right opposition leader Donald Tusk and bashing Russia, Germany, Brussels and now even Ukraine, accused of ruining Polish farmers with grain imports.

Hungary’s Orbán, who last year hosted the US far-right Conservative Political Action Conference (Cpac) in Budapest and is a buddy of former Fox TV host Tucker Carlson, used his grip on the media, social media and state apparatus to see off a challenge by a united opposition last year. He tarred his challengers as stooges of an EU depicted as trying to thrust gay and transgender propaganda on Hungarian schoolchildren.

PiS is trying to pull a similar trick in Poland by staging a referendum on the same day as the election with four slanted questions including: “Do you support the admission of thousands of illegal immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, in accordance with the forced relocation mechanism imposed by the European bureaucracy?”

Former Slovenian prime minister Janez Janša, who jumped the gun and tweeted congratulations on Trump’s “victory” in 2020 while votes were still being counted, was beaten by liberal opponents in 2022. But the veteran populist still leads the largest opposition party and may yet rise again from the political graveyard.

Trump’s tactics of attacking and bypassing the mainstream media while favouring rightist news outlets that spread “alternative facts” have caught on in Europe. Kaczyński and Orbán have brought public broadcasters under their thumb. The sprouting of Fox News-style hard-right broadcasters in some countries, such as CNews in France, has given politicians of the radical right a platform to propound their narratives without facing the scrutiny of independent journalists. Elsewhere, populists are going direct to their followers on social media.

However, efforts by Steve Bannon, a former Trump strategist, to forge a unified European hard-right front to wield influence in the European parliament and undermine the EU from within have had little success. Bannon’s attempt to found an academy for young rightist “gladiators” in an Italian monastery ended in legal eviction. Europe’s mini-Trumps remain divided among themselves, notably over whether and how strongly to support Ukraine.

Some pre-war Putin sympathisers, such as Marine Le Pen’s French National Rally and Italian deputy premier Matteo Salvini’s League, sit in the hard-right Identity and Democracy (ID) group in the EU legislature. Others, who have backed Ukraine, sit in the European Conservatives and Reformists (ECR) group, including Kaczyński’s PiS and Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy. Yet others, such as Orbán’s pro-Russian Fidesz party, are not attached to any political family. This has so far marginalised their influence in European affairs.

The manifest damage of Brexit to the UK’s economy has led Europe’s radical right to mostly dump manifesto pledges to leave the EU or the euro, and to pledge instead to work for a “Europe of nation states” in which national law would take primacy over EU rules, unravelling the European legal order.

Whether a Trump return to the White House would galvanise his European friends and admirers into building a united Eurosceptic movement is far from certain. But it would create a host of political, diplomatic and potentially military headaches for which Europe’s governments are ill-prepared.

Paul Taylor is a senior fellow of the Friends of Europe thinktank

UK
Who gains from Rishi’s ‘long-term’ thinking? Not the planet, not the north … not even him

‘Let Rishi be Rishi’, is the new Tory catchphrase. So far, that seems to be code for ‘let Britain be rubbish’ – and Suella Braverman is circling

‘Sunak comes across as a sort of robo-carer, whose display reads, ‘We’re doing everything we can.’’ Photograph: Reuters

Marina Hyde

THE GUARDIAN
Tue 26 Sep 2023 

Buy shares in gun turrets, because Suella Braverman has made landfall in Washington to offer her esteemed take on the 1951 UN refugee convention. As a former practitioner in the field of … hang on, let me get my magnifying glass … planning law, the home secretary will regard herself as vastly superior to any of the legal minds who collaborated on the multilateral postwar treaty – as well as far better suited to rocking a “Suella 4 Leader” T-shirt at any future pledge drive/torchlit pitchfork procession. In the strict interests of appropriate venues, the United States has never actually ratified the convention – but that’s not important, because the home secretary obviously thinks one of its soft-wingnut thinktanks will serve as a cool backdrop. Think of her trip as the international equivalent of one of those primary school visits that a campaigning politician uses to announce a new weapons contract or crackdown on sex offenders. It’s top-flight politics: this is just how we do it.


Back at home, meanwhile, things feel less full of promise for Suella’s beleaguered line manager. The prime minister’s handlers seem to have alighted on a plan that some summarise as “let Rishi be Rishi” – a strategy that assumes Rishi Sunak has a personality other than “billionaire dweeb with a govern-like-no-one’s-watching decal on his kitchen wall”. Nonetheless, breaking the glass on this timeworn phrase formulation does perhaps indicate we have reached a particular stage of the game. As with “let Truss be Truss”, “let Boris be Boris” and even “let Gordon be Gordon”, this exhortation tends to come late in the political day. It always feels like a nice way of saying that the individual in question is terminally inadequate, but that all options for disguising this have now been exhausted.


Still, what does Rishi being Rishi look like? Instructed to buy a character off the peg, the PM seems to have decided his defining trait is long-termism. And in order to show his frustration with short-termism, Sunak has hit on the galaxy-brain idea of rowing drastically back on two long-term projects. Both HS2 and net zero targets now seem destined for one of Sunak’s seven bins – a hint that he hasn’t taken the country’s rejection of his party in the opinion polls too well. The net zero U-turn in particular suggests our spurned hero is at the stage of buying sulphuric acid and going to the country with the slogan “If I can’t have you, no one can.”

In fact, next month’s Conservative party conference will be held under a banner reading “Long-term decisions for a brighter future” – a slogan so tedious that I can only read up to the word “decisions” before having to break off and stare defeatedly out of a window for an hour. Somewhat awkwardly, the aforementioned party conference will take place in Manchester, meaning that Sunak is currently having to pretend that that bit of the HS2 line might still happen. Then as soon as he is back in London, he can effectively reveal he was just being polite. As I say: this is top-flight politics. It’s how we do it.


Yes, as things are mooted, the long-planned, hugely expensive London-to-Manchester HS2 line will go to neither London nor Manchester – a genuine feat of infrastructural dadaism that should receive some kind of global recognition. This may well be the most embarrassing British folly since Watkin’s Tower, a late-19th-century attempt to build a tower in Wembley Park that was almost an exact rip-off of the Eiffel Tower, except 150 feet higher. Only the bottom layer was ever built, before it was discovered that the foundations were unsteady and the builder went bust. It was eventually brought down in a controlled explosion.

In fairness to Sunak, the over-budget, under-managed horror show into which HS2 has thus far descended isn’t really his fault – but it is arguably a bit of a pisser for a man who only last week decided to lay out what he felt was British people’s major gripe about our politics. “They feel that much gets promised, but not enough is delivered.” We really are through the looking glass if cancelling some more delivery is the answer. Despite having correctly diagnosed the problem, Sunak comes across as a sort of robo-carer, whose display reads, “We’re doing everything we can.” The impression is of an administration that has stopped trying to fix problems and is now trying to convince people that they need to live with them. It’s palliative politics, giving the tacit impression that the best the UK can be offered is a sort of end-of-country care.

Of course, an even less appealing option is available, and as Rishi lets himself be Rishi, we are – almost incredibly – starting to see sightings of it in the wild. Last week, following the net zero announcement, Tory MP Chris Skidmore refused to rule out submitting a no-confidence letter, while another former minister told the Guardian: “There is a sense [Sunak] can’t win an election. People are thinking about that and increasingly irritated. In November his 12 months are up, and it only takes 15% to call a no-confidence vote … ” Surely, surely not – and I do mean that. Even so, the most realistic short- and medium-term advice you can offer to anyone hoping to hear much less from Suella Braverman is … get used to disappointment.

Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist