The science behind Olivia Colman’s left-wing face

The new hunting year formally started last week. Do I need to subscribe again? Politically, the prospects are bleak. In February, Steve Reed, the shadow environment secretary, announced that Labor would introduce a ‘complete ban on trail hunting’, on the grounds that there were ‘loopholes in Labour’s hunting ban’. This is even though, when advocating the original ban, Labor said it was in favor of trail hunting (trail hunting had not yet been invented) and was only concerned about live quarries. Mr Reed included his ban pledge in a speech announcing his party would treat rural voters with “more respect”. His two goals conflict. The idea that chasing a scented rag – an activity that no one can consider cruel – should be banned because some might exploit it to chase a living creature is like banning cars for speeding. It’s illiberal. Instead of showing more respect for rural voters, it is an insult to them. One consequence would be that packs of dogs would no longer engage in any permitted activity. Their bloodlines, their skills, the dogs themselves, they will all die. Politically, it makes no sense whatsoever, except – to use an inappropriate, non-vegan metaphor – as red meat to be thrown at the animal rights monomaniacs of the Corbynite far-left. Tony Blair made a similar gesture with the 2004 ban, coming to publicly regret the resulting bad feeling, waste of parliamentary time and poor legislation. Sir Keir Starmer is right to think that votes are available in rural areas. Traditional rural loyalty to the Tories has disintegrated, mainly due to crude regulation, planning, attacks on agriculture and monstrous energy costs. He may think trail hunting is a “many, not few” problem, but in reality he would be far better off letting sleeping dogs lie. The statesmanlike response would be to announce a Law Commission review of the Wildlife and Countryside Act, involving all rural interests. In the meantime, more hopefully than expected, I’ll resubscribe.

We live a few miles from Hastings, my beloved hometown. Most of the area was without water over the holiday weekend due to a break in the Southern Water pipe. A friend sends me his primary care report. It took him an hour to drive across the city because of the water queue at Asda: ‘On the way I saw a Nigerian colleague waiting for a bus that would certainly never come, with a twelve liter carton of water in his hands. I gave him a lift and joked about how embarrassed I was when I was told as a child that African children had to walk miles for water and now he had to do the same in Hastings! He corrected me: “Actually no, I have never had to do anything like that in Nigeria… if you belong to the middle class, you drill your own borehole and have a water supply with a filter system and generator. I had to come to England for this experience.”’ At the front, where my friend saw ‘many more people than usual bathing in the sea’, the cafés flourished: ‘Only their mains-powered espresso machines didn’t work, so the flat white mochaccino drinkers had only filter coffee to live on. Several times I was approached by concerned-looking DFLs (Down From Londons) asking me for the nearest café where they could buy “real coffee.” As he bumped over potholes in St Leonards, he ‘reflected on the fact that the world-leading infrastructure that Decimus Burton built the city for is largely a thing of the past’.

Southern Water, says my friend, ‘is the enemy of Hastings and St Leonards. We are surrounded by their shortcomings. On our sea side they pollute our beaches to the point that we are often not allowed to swim and people who do can become quite ill. Their mismanagement of the sewage system has led to two major floods in the last 18 months, devastating businesses in the city centre. To solve this, ugly industrial pumps have been dumped on the beach; It’s supposed to be temporary, but no work has started to replace them yet. And now they can’t even provide us with drinking water from the north.’ WH Auden says: ‘Thousands have lived without love, none without water.’ Southern Water appears to be daring Hastings to live without either.

Some time ago I wrote that actress Olivia Colman, who was set to play the late Queen Elizabeth,… The crown, could be unsuitable because she had a ‘left face’. I caused offense but didn’t mean anything: it was just something I noticed. I’m happy to receive scientific confirmation from a reader of my general point – an online first publication from the American Psychological Association entitled ‘Facial recognition technology and human raters can predict political orientation from images of expressionless faces, even when controlling for demographics and self-presentation’. The authors, Kosinski, Khambatta and Wang, claim that their predictive model, based on standardized images of 3,401 politicians in the United States, Britain and Canada, showed such recognition. Their other experiments confirmed this point. For example, conservative types “tended to have larger lower surfaces.” Liberals, however, “tend to smile more intensely and sincerely.” The authors warn: ‘Our findings underscore the urgency for scientists, the public and policymakers to recognize and address the potential risks of facial recognition technology to personal privacy.’ I say: if one mugshot can reveal someone’s politics, no Conservative will ever get a job in the public sector or the BBC again.

It was a disheartening failure of MI6’s intelligence that its head of intelligence, Richard Moore, failed to notice that the Garrick Club, of which he was a member, did not admit women. It wasn’t until he read Amelia Gentleman’s pieces in the Guardian about this shocking turn of events, which had lasted for almost 200 years, he resigned. There are now two types of major London clubs: gentlemen’s clubs and gentlemen’s clubs. All contemporary Widmerpools who would like a career in the establishment will prefer the latter in the future.