The Bluestocking, vol 295
he’s emerged from his chrysalis, a swole monarch
Happy Friday!
Three pieces from me this week: on the Armistice Day marches, the reshuffle, and the future of gender critical feminism. Now I’m off to Cambridge to chair some events at the literary festival: Hadley Freeman on Good Girls, her anorexia memoir; Janina Ramirez on medieval women; and David Runciman on how we handed over power to corporations, states and AIs.
Oh, and here is an advert from the latest Private Eye about a BBC series I’m working on, provisionally entitled Helen Lewis Has Left The Chat. If you have a private messaging app drama, use the email below (or hit reply) and tell me about it. Some of the stories I’ve heard so far have been crackers (and in at least one case, far too rude for 10am on Radio 4). Also if anyone finds out what the Trevor business is all about, I’m also interested in that.
Helen
Lauren Sánchez Is Looking to the Future (Vogue)
Much has been made of [Jeff] Bezos’s evolution from round-shouldered online bookseller to Tony Stark titan of industry and the third richest man in the world. Once insular and press-shy, he formed a tight cocoon around Amazon, his then wife, MacKenzie, and their four children in Seattle. Now it’s as if he’s emerged from his chrysalis, a swole monarch, no longer Amazon CEO (a role he ceded in 2021) but an empty nester who is venturing not only into the Adriatic but into outer space. [Lauren] Sánchez, by all accounts, is the perfect partner for all of it—unbridled in her enthusiasm (seven people I spoke to described her as a “force”) but also socially adept, attentive, a diplomat of a kind. “Lauren has amazing intuition, almost witchy powers in that regard,” says Bezos. “She sees things that other people don’t see. She’s really very sensitive to other people and what they’re thinking.”
It is one of the great tragedies of the modern world that rich people give very few interviews, because this one with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his fiancee Lauren Sanchez is a corker. Apart from anything else, the sheer amount of middle-aged horn here is astounding.
If you’ve been reading my work for a while, you’ll know that one of my pet peeves is rich celebrities pretending to be normal. No! Get a helicopter licence and build a giant underground clock! Make each other custom baseball caps with loving slogans on them! Pose for Annie Leibovitz in a gold foil coat that makes you look like the world’s most glamorous three-bird roast! Good luck to them both.
PS. Many people on the internet remarked that they had trouble believing the photo above was real, not a Midjourney AI output. Two things: Annie Leibovitz has always done a lot of photoshop and compositing (sometimes resulting in errant limbs—and here is Sam Mendes inexplicably wearing half a coat). Second, presumably AIs have been trained on her photos.
Anyway, I thought I would give DALL-E a crack at this prompt: close up of Lauren Sanchez, a woman wearing a white vest and jeans, with her arm wrapped around Jeff Bezos, who is wearing a cowboy hat and jeans, in the front seats of a yellow van with the steering wheel visible. Jeff Bezos looks like a swole monarch
This is pretty plausible, and the AI has even got into the Leibowitz spirit by giving Bezos one nightmare hand, and running Sanchez’s rear arm for 10ft along the windowsill.
The Panda Phase of the British Conservatives (The Atlantic)
And wow, is the Conservative Party in trouble. It has now been in power since 2010 and has cycled through five prime ministers in that time, including one who lasted just 49 days. Only No. 2, Theresa May, resigned after losing an election; the others were felled by Conservative psychodrama. Cameron quit after losing the Brexit vote he was bounced into by the Tory right, whereas Boris Johnson and Liz Truss went after their own ministers decided that they were a liability. That has had unfortunate consequences. When a leader is sent packing by the voters, their failure is unarguable (unless you’re Donald Trump). But when a leader is knifed by their own colleagues, it creates new fissures and new grudges, and fertile ground for conspiracy theories. Before the reshuffle, the big news in British politics was a truly unhinged book by former Culture Secretary Nadine Dorries—think of her as our Marjorie Taylor Greene, only with romance novels instead of CrossFit—that railed against her fellow Conservatives for bringing down Johnson. She attributed his downfall to a group she called “The Movement,” which her sources suggested was influenced variously by shadowy bureaucrats, Mossad, gay men, and a mysterious figure known only as “Dr. No.”
Despite the best efforts of Dr. No, the Conservatives have lagged far behind Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in the polls all year. Even Tory parliamentarians are quietly acknowledging that they expect to lose the next election—one little-remarked-upon subplot of the reshuffle was how many junior ministers stepped down voluntarily, either to devote themselves to defending their seats or to prepare for jobs in the private sector. More than 50 Tory members of Parliament, one-seventh of the party caucus, have already announced that they will not stand again.
The return of Cameron and the pivot to moderation suggests that the Tories think they have already lost the socially conservative voters of the northern-English towns they won at the last election and are now trying to shore up their traditional base in the more affluent, more liberal counties surrounding London. But even if they secure a mere defeat rather than a shellacking, the next election promises to be one of those generational turnovers in British politics, like Margaret Thatcher’s victory in 1979 or Tony Blair’s in 1997.
I wrote about the post-Suella Braverman reshuffle for the Atlantic. And yes, I read Nadine Dorries’s book, which was exactly as bananas as you might expect.
Chaser: Twitter user AndrejNKV scaled the British prime ministers according to the number of days they spent in office. Look at Chonk Blair vs the Sliver of Truss. A swole centrist monarch, if you will.
Quick Links
“Journalists have to stand apart from activists. Not doing so was what got us into this mess in the first place.” Last week I gave a speech at an event organised by A Woman’s Place on media coverage of the gender debate, called “From The Gaslighting Era to the Culture War Era”. I thought I would upload it in case anyone is interested.
I went down to the Cenotaph on Armistice Day to cover the far right protest there, and then I follow the Gaza march from Hyde Park to Victoria. I wrote about what I saw for the Atlantic here.
Enjoyably crazy amateur dancing Seinfeld edit (twitter).
“A few days later, he came to New York, and we didn’t see each other. He called me from the plane taking him back to Los Angeles to tell me, through the static, that he had got the job. He was moving to my city. PFSlider was dead. There would be no meeting him in distant hotel lobbies during the baseball season. There would be no more phone calls or E-mail messages. In a single moment, Pete had completed his journey out of our mating dance and officially stepped into the regular world—the world that gnawed at me daily, the world that fostered those five-night stands, the world where romance could not be sustained, because so many of us simply did not know how to do it.” Meghan Daum’s 1997 piece about a “cyber romance”. PFSlider in her inbox was sexy and thrilling. Pete in real life was not. (New Yorker, payfence)
Ben Shapiro gives a great answer to why a pro-life libertarian like him would support vaccine mandates. If you know anyone who wouldn’t listen to the hated MSM, maybe send them this clip (twitter).
Someone turned Adrian Chiles headlines into a poem.
I have become unhealthily invested in the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce relationship, even though it looks like a rerun of Hiddleswift. And it’s not just because I have discovered the phrase “tight end.” His early 2010s tweets are . . . from a simpler time.
“A political ideology, whether left-leaning or right, puts heavy pressure on a work of art. The work stands or falls on the depth, breadth, and vitality of its vision of human truth; ideology narrows and abstracts human truth to fit its messy contingencies inside an impersonal framework.” George Packer on why activism leads to so much bad writing (The Atlantic).
See you next time!
“By calling in his predecessor, Rishi Sunak has conceded that he can’t survive in the wild.” Just perfect.
If anyone wants to watch the creation of a rowing boat made from a hyper-realistic mould of Jeff Bezos’s head - and I imagine most of Helen’s followers broadly fall into that category - then I highly recommend you search for “Jeff Bezos Rowing Boat” on YouTube. Darkly hilarious, and does also involve Bobby Fingers transplanting a bottom hair to the top of his scalp and a pirate shanty. The best thing I’ve seen for years.