Factiva

Addresses are an under-used resource

A patriotic member of the Russian duma has proposed that the US embassy in Moscow be assigned a new address: 1, North American Dead End. The suggestion is a cheery response to Washington’s decision to rename a section of Wisconsin Avenue outside the Russian embassy last year. By unanimous vote of the city council the embassy’s address is to be 1, Boris Nemtsov Plaza, after the pro-democracy activist shot dead in front of the Kremlin in 2015.

This sort of street name diplomacy is relatively new. So far the pattern is for local or second-tier politicians keen to make a splash to come up with renaming wheezes at which their superiors can chortle indulgently but with full deniability. And so far those superiors have been in charge of nuclear superpowers, fond of showing the world that they are not afraid of giving offence.

This does not mean that the practice cannot be adapted to suit smaller powers anxious to make friends rather than enemies. Britain, for example, as it heads out of the EU to the largely unknown place called Global, should regard the gazetteer of the London A-Z as a diplomatic asset to be rewritten in the national interest.

With a view to a sharp uptick in trade with North Korea, Gunnersbury Avenue should be renamed Kim Can Alley in honour of its embassy there. Similarly, Mao Know How Way instead of Portland Place (for China), not to be confused with Mau Mau Now Boulevard, for Kenya. Zimbabwe’s embassy on the Strand might feel more at home highlighting shared interests with its host country on Revitalisation of Export-Led Growth Avenue. Australia House, on the Aldwych, should obviously be on Hug Australia Close. And just in case Brexit turns out to be a terrible mistake, EU embassies could be relocated en masse to Ever Closer Crescent, pronounced, naturally, croissant.

Minister threatens to withdraw aid funding

More than 120 workers for Britain’s leading charities were accused of sexual abuse in the past year alone, fuelling fears that paedophiles are targeting overseas aid organisations.

As new figures emerged revealing the extent of the crisis, Priti Patel, the former international development secretary, warned “predatory paedophiles” had been allowed to exploit the aid sector.

Last night her successor, Penny Mordaunt, threatened to withdraw funding from Oxfam and “any other organisation that has safeguarding issues”. She condemned the “horrific behaviour” of some Oxfam staff and said it was “utterly despicable” that allegations of abuse persisted in the aid sector.

Mordaunt expected charities to “co-operate fully with . . . authorities, and we will cease to fund any organisation that does not”.

Speaking on the Andrew Marr Show this morning, Mordaunt said Oxfam had demonstrated an “absolute absence in leadership”.

“I think it’s shocking and it doesn’t matter how good the safeguarding practices are in an organisation, if that organisation does not have moral leadership to do the right thing, and where in particular they have evidence of criminal activity to pass that information to the relevant authorities including prosecuting authorities, that’s an absolute absence of leadership,” she said.

When pressed as to whether she felt the charity had failed in its moral leadership, Mordaunt said “yes, I do”.

Mordaunt plans to meet Oxfam tomorrow to discuss the scandal and afford the charity “the opportunity to tell me in person what they did after these events”.

Figures collated by charities cover sexual harassment in Britain and abroad. They raise troubling questions about regulation within the charity sector.

Oxfam recorded 87 incidents last year, Save the Children 31 — 10 of which were referred to the police and civil authorities — and Christian Aid two. The British Red Cross admitted there had been a “small number of cases of harassment reported in the UK”, believed to be up to five. All four receive money from the Department for International Development.

Of the Oxfam cases, 53 were referred to the police or other statutory authorities. A total of 20 staff or volunteers were dismissed. The charity employs 5,000 staff and has a further 23,000 volunteers.

Caroline Thomson, Oxfam’s chairwoman of trustees in the UK, said it was working to “address the underlying cultural issues that allowed this behaviour to happen”.

“We also want to satisfy ourselves that we do now have a culture of openness and transparency and that we fully learn the lessons of events in 2011,” she said.

She said Oxfam staff had come forward with concerns about the recruitment and vetting of workers involved in the scandal.

She added: “We will examine these in more detail to ensure we further strengthen the improved safeguarding, recruitment, vetting and staff management procedures that were put in place after 2011.”

Incidents involving charity workers that have come to light since The Times revealed Oxfam workers in Haiti in 2011 were dismissed after using local prostitutes for sex parties include:

● The Charities Commission criticised the Grail Trust, which raises funds for a disadvantaged children’s charity in India, last March for failing to report an allegation of child abuse in India and for initially publicly rejecting the claim.

● Teacher Simon Harris, who was head of a charity in Kenya, abused children at a school there. He was jailed for more than 17 years at Birmingham crown court in 2015.

Andrew MacLeod, a former aid worker for the Red Cross and the UN, told The Sunday Times there was a lack of response to “institutionalised paedophilia” among aid workers. He said he was shocked by what he saw in the Philippines.

“Walk near the Greenbelt Mall [in Manila] and you would see businessmen, tourists and aid workers meeting local girls for the night. You would say: ‘How old do you think these women are?’ They’d look at you with a twinkle in their eye and say: ‘She says she is 18.’

“Many aid workers will have to ask themselves: ‘What did I do to try and stop it?’”

It is not clear from last year’s figures how many allegations were made by other staff or whether the alleged victims were beneficiaries of the charities’ work.

Save the Children said all 31 cases of alleged abuse had taken place abroad and 16 people had been dismissed as a result.

Christian Aid said: “In the past 12 months, Christian Aid has investigated two incidents of sexual misconduct, both of which occurred overseas. One investigation led to the dismissal of a staff member, while the other case resulted in disciplinary action [not dismissal].”

It emerged last night that Oxfam did not give the Charity Commission full details about the use of prostitutes by some aid workers in Haiti seven years ago.

Haiti’s ambassador in London, Bocchit Edmond, criticised Oxfam for failing to inform the country’s authorities about the scandal and said it should publicly apologise.

The commission said: “We have written to the charity as a matter of urgency to request further information regarding the events in Haiti in 2011. This information will be considered as part of an ongoing case regarding the charity’s approach to safeguarding.”

Mordaunt said the Department for International Development was not told about the events at the time.

She said “They [Oxfam] initially said that they were investigating misconduct and when they concluded that report they did not tell us the nature of these events.

“They did tell the Charity Commission that there was sexual inappropriate behaviour, bullying and harassment of employees but they did not report that to us.”

She added that Oxfam also reassured the department that no harm was done and there was no involvement of any beneficiaries.

Andrew Marr said: “That was a lie, wasn’t it?”

Mordaunt replied: “Well, quite.”

She said she did not know what Oxfam’s motivation was for handling the investigation as it did, and warned that its relationship with the government was at risk.

“If the moral leadership at the top of the organisation is not there then we cannot have you as a partner,” she said.

Mordaunt said the charity had done “absolutely the wrong thing” by failing to tell the Charity Commission and prosecuting authorities the full details of the allegations.

She added: “If they do not hand over all the information that they have from their investigation and subsequently to the relevant authorities including the Charity Commission and prosecuting authorities then I cannot work with them any more as an aid delivery partner.”

Former international development secretary Priti Patel told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Pienaar’s Politics she was aware of abuse involving aid workers in disaster zones and had done her own research on the issue

She told the programme: “People knew in DfID, I raised this directly with my department at the time.

“I had quotes from the United Nations reports on the number of people.

“I think even the secretary-general last year said there were 120 cases involving something like over 300 people, and that was just the tip of the iceberg.”

We moved around a lot when I was a child, as my father was an admiral in the Royal Navy. But wherever we lived, from Portsmouth and Chatham to Gibraltar and Malta, the garden was an important part of family life. It’s where I developed a lifelong passion for plants and the natural world. My father and I are still competitive about who has grown the biggest broad bean.Where is home now?Split between my Wellbeing business in Battersea, southwest London, and a 350-acre sustainable, organic farm in the West Country, where we moved 16 years ago. My husband, Patrick Drummond, is a photographer and farmer, and we have 70 pedigree Hereford cows alongside 300-400 sheep, all 100% grass-fed. Picnics, farm walks and hedgerow foraging make for simple, yet special family times.

We rebuilt the old farmhouse pretty much from scratch, using Chilmark, a soft, mossy-green local stone.Which room do you gravitate towards?The classic farmhouse kitchen has such a lovely light, and I am at my happiest when I have all five of my children, aged between 7 and 26, together round the old Chalon table. As they get older and leave home, these occasions become rarer and so are even more special. I love to cook, and use a four-oven cream Aga.How would you describe your style?I love soft, tactile fabrics and comfort, so you’ll find chairs covered in velvet and big squashy sofas. There’s also a botanical theme that flows throughout, captured in paintings of flowers or small details, such as a vintage tapestry cushion.Is your home a temple of wellbeing? I’m a big fan of bringing the outside in by filling the home with flowers and plants. Always make the most of natural light — especially if you work from home — by positioning your desk near a window and using venetian blinds to lessen any glare on your computer.Do you have a strict daily beauty and exercise routine?I’m pretty low-maintenance, so in the morning it’s a quick cleanse followed by a serum, then cream blusher, neutral eye shadow and black mascara. To get a bit of volume in my hair, I just tip my head upside down and give it a good spritz of unscented hairspray. I’m a convert to running and love my early-morning runs around the farm. I also love Nordic walking, using poles to stride out across the fields, as it works the entire body and is especially good for releasing tension from shoulders and neck while toning the upper arms.Tell us more about your garden — and your top gardening tipsI have a kitchen garden and love pottering at the weekend, growing seedlings and trying out lots of varieties. I’ll go and pick whatever’s ready, whether it’s beans, asparagus or tomatoes, and make a huge salad. Growing vertical crops such as tomatoes means you can produce more if you have limited space; other vegetables I’ve had vertical success with include pumpkin, squash and peas.

I also keep pots of herbs around the house as it is such an easy way to add fresh flavours to cooking; if you keep them by the door or window, they also help deter flies and other insects. I plant french marigolds among my veggies to act as natural pest-deterrents.What are your most treasured possessions? My photo albums. I make a single leather-bound album for each year, filled with the best family pictures. I have more than 30 and would be devastated to lose them.Are you a good party host?I love hosting. There’s nothing better than getting family and friends together — especially over botanical cocktails. I’m known for my gut-healthy kombucha martinis and probiotic canapés.Could you ever live in a commune? I’d enjoy the companionship, but like most entrepreneurs, I also like to lead from the front. That could cause issues.What has been your best property investment?To paraphrase Karen Blixen, I have a small farm in Africa. It is near Lake Naivasha, in Kenya, and we bought it 16 years ago. It’s good to see parts of the African property market flourish as more local people can afford proper housing. We spend much of our winters there; I go to write and visit the charity projects I’m involved with — I set up LiveTwice in 2010. And I love heading out into the wilds of northern Kenya with friends from the Samburu tribe who show me the leaves, twigs and berries they use for their own wellbeing.Liz Earle has teamed up with Hillarys to boost wellbeing in the home and workplace hillarys.co.uk/inspiration[https://www.hillarys.co.uk/inspiration/]

Afua Hirsch has ignited a fierce debate with her book on race and identity. Here, she discusses the subtle ways in which people of colour are still made to feel they don’t belong

The discovery last week that ancient Britons were likely to have been black could not have come at a better time for Afua Hirsch. In the past few weeks the author — who has written a new book, Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging — has been called everything from a “self-obsessed woman” to a “high priestess” of the “religion of anti-racism”.

Hirsch, 36, who is of Ghanaian, English and Jewish descent, spent much of her childhood believing “the further away from whiteness you were, the less British you were”, she says when we meet near the Victoria and Albert Museum.

The secrets offered up by Cheddar Man’s DNA are helpful because “if I had grown up with stories like this and images like this, it would have helped me understand that things are much more complex than they are often presented”.

Hirsch’s book was written as much to understand her own identity as it was to point out the ways in which, when a mixed-race woman is poised to join the royal family, our society still struggles with racial prejudice. The reactions it has provoked range from swivel-eyed outrage to genial confusion — best summed up by the assertion, made on a television panel show, that if something is well intentioned then it cannot be racist.

With her tall frame enveloped in an electric pink coat, Hirsch makes no effort to blend into the grey surrounds of South Kensington, nor is she cowed by the anger that her book has generated. “It’s so interesting because on one level it proves the point I’m making,” she says.

“We have got to a point in society where we can all agree that to attack someone verbally or physically because of their race is bad.” The problems that interest her are “more subtle and slightly harder to communicate”.

These include the ever-troublesome question “where are you from?”. Hirsch has been asked this so many times over the years that she can role-play it fluently: “You say London and they say ‘Yeah, yeah, but where are you really from?’. Then you say Wimbledon and they say, ‘Where are you originally from?’ And on it goes.”

The question itself is not offensive, Hirsch agrees, but it serves as a constant reminder that as a British person of colour “you need some explanation; that you can’t just be”. Nor can it simply be attributed to curiosity, she argues, because white Britons, who often have fascinating hinterlands, are not asked the same thing.

This argument has for the most part been met with a chorus of tiny violins. Largely, I suspect, because she is the one making it. Hirsch’s story isn’t the typical immigrant tale of triumph over adversity. She is the daughter of a geophysicist, grew up in the leafy London suburb of Wimbledon, went to a private school and on to Oxford, where she studied the most establishment of degrees: politics, philosophy and economics before qualifying as a human rights barrister. She later switched to journalism.

Her experiences of prejudice — being nicknamed “Troll” at school and forced to wait outside one of the exclusive boutiques of Wimbledon village — although painful are not the most dramatic, nor do they compare with those experienced by her partner Sam, a lawyer of Ghanaian descent who grew up on a council estate in Tottenham, north London.

She is well aware of the perception that she is quibbling over trivialities when she ought to be “grateful” for the opportunities she has had but this, according to Hirsch, is a big part of the problem.

Gratitude, she says, is a defining trait of first-generation migrants to the UK and there is plenty of it in her family history. Her paternal grandfather, Hans Hirsch, was able to flee Berlin just before the Second World War thanks to Isaac Shoenberg at the London-based electronics and record company EMI, who offered young Jews with a talent for engineering a job and a way out of Nazi Germany.

His younger brother Kurt escaped on the kindertransport. Both integrated into their adopted home: Hans — who changed his name to John — went on to become a professor at Birkbeck, University of London while Kurt, who became Peter, was knighted for services to metallurgy.

Her maternal grandfather, meanwhile, the son of a cocoa farmer, left Ghana for the UK when he got a scholarship to Cambridge in 1944 — one of a handful of African scholars granted the chance to study at Oxbridge each year, with the expectation that they would return home to run the colonial administration.

This imperial exchange scheme was so important to the British, Hirsch says, that even at the height of the Second World War “they were willing to pay for a ship with submarine guard to sail these guys from Ghana to Liverpool”.

Her grandfather read English literature and “fell in love with Chaucer”, becoming the first person to translate The Canterbury Tales into Twi, a Ghanaian dialect. He returned to Ghana and helped to set up its post-independence education system, fell out of favour with the political regime and had to flee to London.

“People like my grandfather were incredibly grateful to the British,” Hirsch says, but the expectation that this gratitude should endure into the second generation and beyond is problematic.

“The idea that I should somehow be grateful to this country even though I’m British — why should I feel differently towards Britain than any other British person?” The implication is that “you’re not quite a real British person if you look like me, you’re still lucky to be here”.

To some extent Hirsch does not help herself. She is a Guardian columnist and delights in the rather tedious language of “micro-aggressions” and “othering”.

Nor is she against stoking the flames of outrage. One column she wrote about the American trend for pulling down historical monuments that celebrate the slave trade was headlined “Toppling statues? Here’s why Nelson’s column should be next”. The headline was misleading she says now: “I never said that we should knock it down.”

Rather, the point of the piece was “let’s put our history in context”. Which may be true, but she did nonetheless declare that Nelson was “without hesitation, a white supremacist” who used his seat in the House of Lords to “perpetuate the tyranny, serial rape and exploitation organised by West Indian planters”. A point of view and turn of phrase intended to drive some of her fellow countrymen apoplectic with rage.

Like many provocateurs, Hirsch is a lot less radical in person than on paper. The comments by Beyoncé’s father last week that his daughter’s success is linked to the paleness of her skin are relevant in the UK as well, she believes: “When I grew up there were very few images of black people in the media, in advertising and in fashion and now there are many more, but many of them are light-skinned or my kind of complexion.”

One of the most prominent of these, Adwoa Aboah, the British model of Ghanaian descent who recently appeared on the cover of Vogue, is a family friend.

Her willingness to antagonise is a shame because Hirsch’s points about race and identity are likely to become more significant as Britain’s mixed-race population grows (according to some estimates, almost 40% of the population will be mixed race by 2050). Perhaps if she acknowledged the progress that has been made as well as the distance left to go, people would be more willing to listen. “It’s like they want to be congratulated for it, that’s fair,” she says.

Then she rallies: “I don’t feel grateful for the fact that I don’t get beaten up for being black. I have high expectations of this country, I am proud to admit that.”@rosiekinchen[http://www.twitter.com/rosiekinchen]

'Predatory paedophiles exploit aid sector'

More than 120 workers for Britain's leading charities were accused of sexual abuse in the past year alone, fuelling fears paedophiles are targeting overseas aid organisations. Priti Patel, the former international development secretary, said "predatory paedophiles" had been allowed to exploit the aid sector and called for charities to be stripped of government funding unless they improve their response to sexual abuse and exploitation.

Figures collated by charities cover sexual harassment in Britain and abroad. Not all relate to paedophilia but they raise troubling questions about regulation within the charity sector.

Oxfam reported 87 incidents last year, Save the Children 31 — 10 of which were referred to the police and civil authorities — and Christian Aid two. The British Red Cross admitted there had been a "small number of cases of harassment reported in the UK", believed to be up to five. All four receive money from the Department for International Development.

Of the Oxfam cases, 53 were referred to the police or other statutory authorities. A total of 20 staff or volunteers were dismissed. The charity employs 5,000 staff and has a further 23,000 volunteers.

Incidents involving charity workers that have come to light since The Times revealed Oxfam workers in Haiti in 2011 were dis-missed after using local prostitutes for sex parties, include: l The Grail Trust, which raises funds for a disadvantaged children's charity in India, was criticised by the Charities Commission in March last year for failing to report an allegation of child abuse in India and for initially publicly rejecting the claim.

l Teacher Simon Harris, who was head of a charity in Kenya, abused children at a school there. He was jailed for more than 17 years at Birmingham crown court in 2015. Andrew MacLeod, a former aid worker for the Red Cross and the UN, told The Sunday Times there was a lack of response to "institutionalised paedophilia" among aid workers. He said he was shocked by what he saw in the Philippines.

"All you needed to do was walk near the Greenbelt Mall [in Manila] at about 5.30pm and you would see businessmen, tourists and aid workers meeting local girls for the night. It was that blatant.

"Many aid workers will have to ask themselves: 'What did I do to try and stop it?' " It is not clear from the figures for last year how many of the allegations were made by other staff members or whether the alleged victims were beneficiaries of the charities' work.

Save the Children said all 31 abuse allegations took place abroad and 16 people had been dismissed as a result.

A Christian Aid spokesman said: "In the past 12 months, Christian Aid has investigated two incidents of sexual misconduct, both of which occurred overseas. One investigation led to the dismissal of a staff member, while the other case resulted in disciplinary action [not dismissal]."

It emerged last night that Oxfam did not give the Charity Commission full details about the use of prostitutes by some aid workers in Haiti seven years ago.

The commission said: "We have written to the charity as a matter of urgency to request further information regarding the events in Haiti in 2011 to establish greater clarity. This information will be considered as part of an ongoing case regarding the charity's approach to safeguarding."

Last night William Shawcross, chairman of the commission, said: "Charities must always be held — and hold themselves — to the highest standards. When they fail to do so … the damage concerns us all."

Penny Mordaunt, the international development secretary, described sexual abuse and exploitation in the aid sector as "utterly despicable". She will meet the commission this week to discuss what more can be done about it.

Report, page 4. Editorial, page 24 'AID WORKERS MUST ASK THEMSELVES: WHAT DID I DO TO TRY TO STOP IT?' EX-RED CROSS WORKER

Cash and property deeds were missing from an open safe in the Nairobi home of a prominent American conservationist who was found dead last week from a stab wound to the throat.

The body of Esmond Bradley Martin, the heir to a Pittsburgh steel fortune who became one of the world's leading authorities on the poaching of elephant tusks and rhino horn, was discovered by his wife Chryssee at their mansion in a Nairobi suburb.

Police have two lines of investigation, a source told The Times: either a robbery gone bad, or a planned murder linked to Mr Martin's efforts to thwart the illegal wildlife trade.

Mr Martin, 76, had been working on a report about trafficking in Burma and had previously posed as a buyer to expose illegal markets for animal parts in Angola and Sudan. Friends said he had attended a fundraising event organised by the Friends of Nairobi National Park shortly before he was killed. His wife was out for a walk at the time of the killing and most of their domestic servants were off duty, including a gardener who doubled as a guard.

A friend who asked not to be named said the safe in the house was found lying open and its contents had gone.

Four people, including a cook and a gardener who worked at the property, were questioned after Mr Martin's body was discovered. However, the source said the servants' mobile phone records ruled them out as suspects. "They had taken good care of the property" during the couples' lengthy absences for work overseas, the source added. The police are thought to have no suspects yet.

Mr Martin grew up in a Palladian mansion on the north coast of Long Island, called Knole. He moved to Kenya in 1967 with his wife and built the home where he was murdered next to Nairobi National Park.

The house, set in a 20-acre garden, was unusually formal even by Kenya's colonial standards and the couple were attended by a retinue of servants, although that is not unusual for wealthy expatriates in east Africa. All but one of the staff, a cook, were off duty on Sunday afternoon, when Mr Martin was attacked. A post-mortem examination has concluded that he died from blood loss as a result of his neck wounds.

At the time of his death he had been investigating trafficking in Burma with a fellow conservationist, Lucy Vigne. They had worked together often in the past, including the trafficking exposé in Angola and Sudan.

Mr Martin is not the first conservationist to meet an untimely death in Africa in recent months. In August last year Wayne Lotter, 51, the co-founder of an anti-trafficking charity, was shot dead in Tanzania while being driven from the airport to his hotel. He had received numerous death threats related to his work before his murder. In 2014 an assassination attempt on the Belgian prince and conservationist Emmanuel de Merode failed when he was shot four times in an ambush in a national park in the Democratic Republic of Congo but survived. More than 160 rangers have been killed protecting the World Heritage Site over the past 20 years. Other prominent victims include the primatologist Dian Fossey, who was hacked to death in 1995 in her mountain cabin in Rwanda, and Joy Adamson, author of Born Free, who was stabbed to death in 1980 by a disgruntled worker. George Adamson, her husband, was killed nine years later aged 83 by Somali bandits in Kenya.

Legendary big-game hunter and safari guide

When he was eight, Harry Selby started hunting antelope, guinea fowl and gazelle and was soon providing enough bush meat to keep his family supplied with chops for dinner almost every night. By the age of 14 he had shot his first elephant after driving into the bush in Kenya, where he grew up. "Lions used to be classified as vermin in east Africa and you shot all you wanted," he would recall.

The last of a breed, Selby was a professional hunter who plied his trade across Kenya and Tanzania and hosted clients including Indian maharajas, European royalty and authors and adventurers such as Ernest Hemingway. As hunting became more difficult he helped to build the wildlife-tourism industry in Botswana, including the first lodges for photographers.

A sturdy khaki-clad 5ft 10in with a broad, handsome smile and weathered face, he looked every inch the hunter and was rarely seen without a rifle. Robert Ruark, an author who travelled with him, once said: "Every woman he meets wants to mother or marry him and every man respects him. I have seen him slap a lion in the face with his hat. I have seen him hide from a woman. His business is killing."

In reality, Selby was a quiet, unassuming man with more of a taste for Coca-Cola than a stiff drink. He had an ulcer, which put him off alcohol. He was most happy with his wife and two children at his house on the Khwai River in Botswana where he spent his spare time fixing his Land Rover or in his carpentry shed. He hated fanfare and never collected trophies. "A lamp fashioned from the drumstick of an ostrich strikes me as rather gauche," he said. He shrugged off malaria — all the family had had it, he said — and enjoyed swimming in the crocodile-infested river each morning.

As a guide, Selby had an easy-going nature, politely managing to console even the most temperamental customer. "It is my duty and responsibility to treat each client as though he were a gentleman, no matter what sort of spectacle he may make of himself," he said. On one occasion a duchess was forced to climb a tree to escape a rhino. "Mr Selby was running around the tree with the rhino snorting behind him," she recalled. He asked her if she would mind moving up another branch.

On remote safaris, especially in the heyday of hunting in the 1940s and 1950s when trips often lasted months, he acted not just as a guide, but as mechanic and doctor too. Ever resourceful, he cooked food over a fire of wildebeest dung when wood ran out, but made sure there was a supply of immaculate table linen and candlesticks. Recalling his favourite moment, he said: "It was a day when we saw the antelope grazing on the plain, with the lions watching them. It was the same day we saw the rhino giving birth to her calf, the day we saw the zebra stallions on the ground, wrestling. I had never seen anything like that before."

Later, he lamented that the hunter's role had largely become that of "a booking agent who secures plane tickets and animal heads".

John Henry (Harry) Selby was born in Frankfort, South Africa, the youngest of six children of Arthur and Myrtle Selby. His family took over a 40,000-acre cattle ranch in Kenya when Harry was three. He went to local classes, travelling in an ox cart, before going to boarding school in Nairobi.

As a boy Harry watched herds of zebra and impala and slept to the sounds of hyenas and lions. He learnt to hunt from a Kikuyu tribesman who taught him to use his eyes, ears and nose and remain motionless for long periods. He became a mechanic for the renowned hunter Philip Percival and found himself looking after Hemingway. During the Mau Mau uprising he worked for the British colonial government, tracking rebels.

In 1951 Selby took Ruark and his wife on safari in Tanzania, after which the author wrote Horn of the Hunter: The Story of an African Safari. Selby gained almost legendary status and at one point was booked five years in advance. He briefly ran a safari company before taking a directorship with the Kenyan firm Ker & Downey in 1962 to run a new arm of the business in Botswana. "What we found exceeded our wildest expectations," he said.

He had met his wife, Maria "Miki" Elizabeth Clulow, a stewardess with South African Airways, in 1953. The couple had two children: Mark, who was also a hunter but died in 2017; and Gail, who became a camp operations manager. At their house near the Khwai River, they hosted visitors from all over the world, serving fresh grapefruit for breakfast in a garden shaded with frangipani and citrus trees.

Selby retired at the age of 75, but continued to go out walking among the wildlife and sleeping in tents. "I think that if I had to choose something for real fun, it's to creep up into a herd of buffalo and have them all around you — your senses are completely alive," he said. "That's probably one of the greatest feelings that big game provides."

Harry Selby, hunter and safari guide, was born on July 22, 1925. He died on January 20, 2018, aged 92

A duchess was forced to climb a tree to escape a rhino

Lizzy Yarnold (skeleton): Lizzy succeeded me as the Olympic champion and thrives on pressure and competition. That makes me think she is definitely a medal contender again, even though she has not had the perfect season so far. She has taken some time away since 2014 and it has taken a bit longer to click on the sled than she might have wanted, but she is a proven winner. Most athletes do not constantly get better and reach a plateau. Lizzy has never had that because she’s always been on this huge curve and never had the highs and lows. But she is in a good place and confident. Don’t count her out.Heats, Fri, Feb 16, 11.20am-1.10pm GMT. Final, Sat, Feb 17, 11.20am-1.40pm.Laura Deas (skeleton): She has had a better season than Lizzy and has always been around that fourth or fifth place in the big races. I used to be mentor to the skeleton team and remember emailing Laura track notes when she did her first World Cup in Vancouver where I’d won gold in 2010.

Why are we so good at skeleton given we have no tracks? We train hard, the talent identification is good, and because the start is so vital, we get good sprinters. We don’t have anything to train on but we tick all the other boxes. Nations without an ice track have to learn quickly and that is what you need to do at the major events like the Olympics when you only have six runs before a race. Where we excel is by being fast learners. Heats, Fri, Feb 16, 11.20am-1.10pm. Final, Sat, Feb 17, 11.20am-1.40pm.Elise Christie (short-strack speed skating): She had a torrid time in Sochi where she was disqualified three times, but she is easily good enough to bring home a few medals on her own. She has won multiple titles, including the 1,000m, 1,500m and overall gold at last year’s World Championships, and has raced so often over the last four years that I’m sure she is over Sochi. She is happy and confident and knows what she needs to do. The whole team wants it and there is a lot of pressure on her shoulders. I told her that she has to make that all disappear out of her head.500m — heats, tomorrow, 10.44-11.20am. Quarter-finals to final, Tue, Feb 13, 10am-12.15pm. 1,500m — Sat, Feb 17: Heats, 10-11.30am. Semi-finals and final, 11.13am-12.20pm. 1,000m — heats, Tues, Feb 20, 10-10.45am. Quarter-finals to final, Thurs, Feb 22, 10.14-11.35am.Eve Muirhead & Kyle Smith (curling): We have a great record in curling with the men and women’s team winning silver and bronze respectively in 2014. This time Eve Muirhead and her team[https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-muirhead-family-mean-business-in-pyeongchang-curling-competition-2jnj6hv3c] look to be better placed and will definitely be going for gold. It looks easy on the TV but I had a go on an outside rink at St Moritz and it’s only when you try it that you realise it is a sport of huge skill where millimetres decide the results.Women — round-robin: Wed, Feb 14, 5.05am, then Sat 17, Sun 18, Mon 19, Wed 21. Semi-finals, Fri 23, 11.05am. Bronze medal, Sat 24, 11.05am. Gold medal, Sun 25, 0.05am. Men — round-robin: Fri, Feb 16, 11.05am, then Sat 17, Sun 18, Mon 19, Wed 21. Semi-finals, Thurs 22, 11.05am. Bronze medal, Fri 23, 6.35am. Gold medal, Sat 24, 6.35am.Dave Ryding[https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/sport/dave-ryding-if-i-win-a-medal-the-popularity-of-british-skiing-would-explode-58398gzzh] (alpine skiing — slalom): Nobody will be expecting too much from him because it is skiing, but he has the form to do really well and had a second place in the World Cup in Kitzbuhel last year. He just has to block out all the noise. When I went to the Olympics in 2010 I did it by literally sticking my fingers in my ears and singing “la, la, la” so that I wouldn’t know anyone else’s times. It’s about what you do, when it matters, and everything else is irrelevant. After my last run in Vancouver I didn’t know I’d won until I got off the sled and hugged my coach. I asked where I’d come and he just said, “Olympic champion”. Dave knows he can beat the best because he has done it. Now he just has to do it on the right slope at the right time. I am sure traditional alpine nations frown upon his background on dry ski slopes, but he has an outside chance.Thurs, Feb 22, 1.15-6.40am.James Woods (freestyle skiing — slopestyle): This is where they do tricks and jumps as they come down the course. James is a lovely guy. I’ve spent some time with him over the years and done stuff with him for Ski Sunday. He is too cool for school and I think he should be a snowboarder with his approach, but he is a serious competitor too, with an X-Games gold medal behind him. People sometimes ask whether you have to have a screw loose to do the skeleton. I say the same to James. You really must be bonkers to do flips that are higher than a double-decker bus.Sun, Feb 18 — Qualification runs, 1-3am. Final runs, 4.15-5.50am.Lamin Deen (bobsleigh): The men’s four-man team, led by pilot Lamin Deen[https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/sport/lamin-deen-the-military-thats-baby-stuff-compared-to-bobsleigh-77qkxz6wm], won a World Cup medal in Whistler in November and are ranked tenth in world. I’ve been in skeleton races where the top ten are covered by a tenth of a second and bobsleigh is similar, meaning that the start is vital. They practise them at the push-start track at Bath University, but that is on wheels so it’s a different friction to ice. Watching them start is phenomenal: four 6ft-something guys get on at precisely the right time. They have to load in perfectly so they hit that first corner fast and without any wobbles. It’s a great event and they have shown they can mix it with the top teams.Heats, Sat, Feb 24, 00.30-3am. Final, Sun, Feb 25, 00.30-3am.Shaun White (snowboard half-pipe): The American, nicknamed the “flying tomato” because he used to have long red hair, has won everything. He won Olympic gold in 2006 and 2010 but was only fourth in Sochi so he wants another title. He is big star, with video games and huge sponsorship deals, but had two major crashes at the start of season. It’s going to be fascinating to see how it goes for him.Qualification, Tues, Feb 13, 04:00. Final runs, Weds, Feb 14, 01:30-03:00Lindsey Vonn (alpine skiing): She is another famous face. The first American woman to win the Olympic downhill gold (in 2010) – after a therapy that included applying cheese curd to her sore knee — she missed the Sochi Games due to another injury. Missing an Olympics must be a terrible thing and that means she has been waiting eight years for this.Super-G, Sat, 17 Feb, 02:00. Downhill: Heats, Sun, 18 Feb, 02:00, Mon, 19 Feb, 02:00, Tue, 20 Feb, 02:00. Final, Wed, 21 Feb, 02:00. Alpine combined, Heats, Thu 22 Feb, 02:00, Fri, 23 Feb, 02:00, Final, Thu, 22 Feb, 05:30Seun Adigun (bobsleigh): It’s good to see more African competitors at the Winter Olympics. This year we have got the first African bobsleigh entry, Nigeria’s team piloted by Seun Adigun, while Akwasi Frimpong will become Ghana’s first skeleton Olympian. The Games should be open to all, not just traditional winter sport nations.Heats: Sat, 17 Feb, 01:00, Sun, 18 Feb, 01:00, Mon, 19 Feb, 01:00. Finals, Tue, 20 Feb, 11:50, Wed, 21 Feb. 11:50.● Amy Williams is an ambassador for Dream Challenges. For more information see www.dreamchallenges.co.uk[http://www.dreamchallenges.co.uk]

Today the eyes of the world will turn to South Korea for the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games.

Over the next two weeks we will see the very best athletes from 93 countries compete for gold on the ice and snow of Pyeongchang.

Unfortunately, the lead up to a major international sports event has yet again been dominated by doping.

While this is a matter for the International Olympic Committee and the Court of Arbitration of Sport it is absolutely vital that athletes have faith that they are competing on a level playing field and the integrity of sport is protected.

I am out in South Korea for the opening weekend, supporting Team GB. I hope that as the Games get under way the attention shifts to the sport and athletes that have been preparing for four years have the chance to showcase their talents to the world.

These Games could be a record-breaker for our Winter Olympic and Paralympic athletes.

After fantastic performances in Sochi four years ago, Team GB are aiming for their best ever medal haul at a Winter Games with a target of at least five.

And our Paralympians are going for at least seven medals, which would be the team’s best result since National Lottery funding was introduced in 1996.

While these targets might sound small compared with the incredible success of our summer Olympic and Paralympic athletes in Rio, they represent a huge step forward for Britain in elite winter sport.

Very few countries are truly world class in both Winter and Summer Olympics, and historically our medals have come from a narrow pool of sports, such as curling, figure skating and bobsleigh. But in recent Games British athletes have broken new ground. Eight years ago Amy Williams won our first ever gold in skeleton and last year Jenny Jones secured a historic bronze in snowboarding.

Thanks to sustained National Lottery and government funding, Britain is now genuinely competitive in more disciplines and our medal chances have increased. Elise Christie in short-track skating, the slalom skier Dave Ryding and the para skier Millie Knight are all genuine medal contenders.

Lizzy Yarnold, the Sochi Olympic champion, and Laura Deas should also be right in the mix for medals in the skeleton and it is important that we also acknowledge the huge bravery of our athletes as they compete in dangerous disciplines on the snow and the ice.

It takes some courage to throw yourself downhill on a sled at more than 70mph.

However, success in Pyeongchang is about more than just climbing the medal table. The Olympics and Paralympics capture the public’s imagination perhaps more than any other sporting event and inspire people to get active and try something new.

There is also a significant economic benefit to Olympic and Paralympic sport, with a recent study showing that it is worth £19 billion a year to the UK economy.

As well as supporting Team GB and Paralympics GB, I am also using my visit to celebrate the strength of the UK-South Korean relationship and bang the drum for Britain as a leading tourism and cultural destination.

The British embassy is converting the ambassador’s residence into a special British House, which will champion the UK as a modern, innovative and welcoming place to visit, study and do business.

Before it has started the Winter Olympics has already shown the unique power that sport has to make the seemingly impossible possible.

The Nigerian female bobsleigh and skeleton team is one of the great stories of the Games while Jamaica are also fielding a women’s bobsleigh team for the first time. Ghana too has an athlete making history by becoming the first to compete in the skeleton.

The fact that North and South Korea are fielding a united women’s ice hockey team also shows how sport can bring people together.

Global politics aside, it is the action on the slopes, rinks and half-pipes that will rightly be centre stage. The jeopardy of winter sports is part of what makes it such compelling viewing.

And while we cannot say how many medals Team GB and Paralympics GB will come away with, I know that our athletes will be doing all they can to bring us more inspirational sporting moments to make the nation proud.Tracey Crouch is sports minister

Tullow Oil will consider reinstating its dividend this year, after reporting an operating profit last year for the first time since crude prices crashed.

The FTSE 250 explorer and producer said that it was gearing up, too, for an ambitious return to "wildcat", or more speculative, drilling campaign over the next three years after getting its debts under control.

Tullow, which is known for its frontier exploration prowess, is listed in London and Ireland and has assets in 16 countries. It is primarily focused on finding and developing oil and gas in Africa and South America.

It stopped paying a dividend from the second half of 2014 as Brent crude prices plummeted and as it amassed huge debts from investing in the Ten development off Ghana. It held a $750 million rights issue last year, which, along with $543 million of free cashflow, has helped it to reduce its net debt to $3.5 billion, from $4.8 billion a year earlier, bringing its gearing to within a whisker of its target level.

The group reported an operating profit of $22 million for 2017, rebounding from a $755 million loss a year earlier and beating market expectations of a $104 million loss, thanks to higher production than expected from the Ten field.

On a pre-tax level, it reported a $299 million loss because of financing costs, an improvement on the $908 million loss it reported a year earlier. It last made a profit on either measure in 2013.

Tullow said that its healthier cashflow had created "a broader range of options" for capital allocation, but added that it had decided against paying a dividend because it was focusing on investing in its assets and paying off its debts.

Les Wood, chief financial officer, said that the level of debt was still too high to reinstate the dividend for 2017, but that it would be "part of the conversation" if the year went well.

The company drilled only one wildcat well last year, off Surinam, and it came up dry. It plans to drill a "highrisk, high-impact" well off Namibia this year, to explore prospects in the "industry hot spot" off Guyana and Surinam next year and is weighing up exploration campaigns in Ivory Coast and Peru, where it could drill in 2019 or 2020. Tullow's shares closed 2½p higher at 186p last night.

Tullow Oil, the Africa-focused oil and gas producer, swung back into profit last year after three years in the red, and outlined plans to begin production in Kenya by as early as 2021.

The London-listed company is targeting east Africa — including Uganda but particularly Kenya — as its next frontier after developing two large fields in Ghana earlier this decade.

The recovery in oil prices to more than $60 a barrel by the end of last year, as well as higher production from its west African fields, enabled Tullow to boost revenues and sharply reduce debt. This helped it to focus on new projects and exploration for new fields. Tullow, which entered Kenya in 2010 and has more than 48,000 sq km of acreage there, said that after appraisal drilling and well tests,it estimated the land-locked South Lokichar basin to contain 560 million barrels in so-called 2C — proven and probable oil reserves.

Tullow had previously estimated reserves of 750 million barrels, according to a different metric. In terms of Kenya's best-case future potential, Tullow increased the upper range yesterday from 1 billion barrels to 1.23 billion.

The company said it had proposed to the Kenyan government to start developing the basin's Amosing and Ngamia fields and construct a processing facility with a capacity for 60,000 to 80,000 barrels a day, to be exported via pipeline to the coastal town of Lamu. Tullow expects a final investment decision in 2019 and first oil production by 2021-22.

Discussions with the Kenyan government on the pipeline construction were under way, Paul McDade, the company's chief executive, said, adding that 2022 was a more realistic timeframe for first oil. "We are pretty much ready to go on two fields and ramp up production," he said.

Tullow, which holds 50 per cent of the Kenyan development, would seek to reduce its stake once a final investment decision was reached, he added. The Toronto-listed Africa Oil has a 25 per cent stake in the Lokichar project.

The Kenyan development is expected to cost $1.8 billion, while the pipeline would require $1.1 billion, Tullow said.

"Tullow is in a much better position now than a year ago. We also think that the return of the growth function in the group is sensible and controlled," analysts from Davy Research said.

Tullow's net debt fell 27 per cent to $3.5 billion as higher revenue allowed the company to end 2017 with $543 million of free cash flow. Mr McDade said that oil prices in the high $60 range would create an opportunity for Tullow to grow its free cash flow. The company forecast 2018 capital expenditure of $460 million, more than double its 2017 spending of $225 million. It reported an operating profit of $22 million for last year, helped by higher production and cost cuts.

The UK premiere of Jaha’s Promise was held last Friday in Facebook’s new London office, a stone’s throw from Oxford Street.

If Facebook’s premises are strikingly modern, the subject matter of Jaha’s Promise — female genital mutilation (FGM) — is a practice as old as the hills, dating back to the time of the pharaohs.

Today, thousands of years later, FGM is still prevalent in at least 30 countries and more than 200 million women and girls are affected.Jaha’s Promise is the story of just one of those women, Jaha Dukureh, who flew to London for the premiere and mingled with the audience both before and after the showing. If the film itself was stirring enough, Jaha’s presence made it even more so.

Born in the Gambia in west Africa 27 years ago, Jaha was subjected to FGM when she was little more than a week old. After her mother’s death she moved to New York at the age of 15 for an arranged marriage that had been planned years earlier.

In the film she doesn’t mince her words: “When you force a girl into a marriage you give a man the right to rape her every day.”

The marriage broke down and Jaha moved in with family members, enrolling in a New York high school after being rejected by ten other schools because she did not have the consent of a legal guardian.

At 17, with her first marriage dissolved, she moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and remarried, this time to a man who understood and supported her determination to end FGM.

The bulk of the film focusses on Jaha’s efforts to end FGM in her home country. Some of the most moving scenes are those where Jaha tries to reason with her own father who is, to say the least, sceptical. “We have heard from our ancestors” her father says, “that it [FGM] is an Islamic obligation.”

Jaha replies respectfully that this is not the case. Jaha goes back to meet the midwife who had been responsible for her own cutting. She tries to reason with her too but the midwife is not convinced: “If a woman is not circumcised, how will the baby be born? We will only stop if the elders and the imam tell us to stop.”

With a loyal band of helpers wearing t-shirts emblazoned with anti-FGM slogans, Jaha visits the Gambia’s rural villages and homesteads. She talks to members of the government.

Amazingly, her campaign succeeds. There is a climactic moment when the president of the Gambia himself proclaims: “as from today, FGM is banned”.

Jaha Dukureh is realistic enough to know that banning FGM is one thing; implementing the ban is something else altogether. The battle has to be fought not just in the Gambia but in every country where FGM is still practiced.

This Tuesday was the International Day of Zero Tolerance to FGM. The new message this year was that FGM should end worldwide by 2030. This is not an impossible goal.

The women’s group Donor Direct Action tells us that in countries such as Kenya, Liberia, Burkina Faso and Egypt work to end FGM is having a positive impact with significant falls in the number of woman affected.

The international community, after an unconscionably long slumber, seems to have woken up to the urgency of the situation. The EU and the UN last year launched the Spotlight Initiative to address all forms of gender-based violence, including sexual abuse, physical assault, domestic violence, economic exploitation and harmful practices such as child marriage and FGM.

We will see how much of this funding gets to frontline organisations, who have regularly been left out of other similar initiatives.

The UK has contributed fully to these and other initiatives and, hopefully, will continue to do so after Brexit. Anti-FGM campaigners also hope that both national and international aid will be increasingly focused to delivering direct help to grassroots leaders, avoiding unnecessary layers of bureaucracy.

Women on the ground doing the bulk of the work need to be trusted and supported. FGM is, of course, not just a problem for other countries, it is our problem too. 137,000 women and girls have been affected in England and Wales — a staggering number.

One of us — Nimco Ali, co-founder of Daughters of Eve — shared a platform with Jaha Dukureh for a Q&A session after the film was over and talked about the need for FGM awareness to be part of PSHE education in British schools and to prevent the “medicalisation of FGM” wherever it occurs.

Nimco talked about her experience as a seven-year-old girl who had just undergone FGM. When she told her teacher in the UK her response was that this happens to “girls like her”.

We hope that a seven-year-old girl who tells her teacher today about feeling worried about FGM will get a different response. Things have moved on dramatically since then — both in attitudes and in practice.

We no longer see FGM as something that happens “over there” and the UK and others are doing what we can do make sure that it is assigned to the history books within the next 12 years.Stanley Johnson is former MEP and former senior advisor to the UN population fund and author of Kompromat. Nimco Ali is co-founder of Daughters of Eve and a leading campaigner against FGM.

Formidable Kenyan farmer and adventurer who flew vast distances in search of rare plants and was once arrested as a spy

Some years ago, an SAS team on manoeuvres parachuted from a Hercules aircraft over Kenya, only to find on landing that they were not where they should be. At that point, a tall, grizzled, unmistakably British-looking figure, dressed in bush shirt and shorts, appeared and, with scrupulous politeness, firmly re-directed them to the neighbouring farm that was their proper objective.

The soldiers might have expected a more effusive welcome, but there is another post-colonial Kenya beyond the world of Happy Valley and Gilfrid Powys was its commanding officer. He was above all a countryman, happiest with his herds, but his deft, constructive, un-blimpish touch with politicians made him the natural spokesman for the farming community. This included the larger ranchers of European ancestry and the local smallholders, with whom he was wholly at ease.

Although his father had been British, Powys felt himself to be Kenyan and was much more content in a native coffee shop than at the Muthaiga Country Club. The family decided to remain in the country after independence and he had his roots in its soil, above all at his ranch, Suyian. Although situated on the Laikipia plateau, between Mount Kenya and the Rift Valley, admirers sometimes compare its landscape to the mythical Elysian Fields.

He took over the management of the farm — which he renamed, in the Maa tongue, "African Wild Dog" — from his father in 1963. On its 44,000 acres, he managed 8,000 head of cattle as well as sheep. Powys was especially proud of his zebu beef and won the Supreme Champion trophy for one of his boran bulls in 2016.

Powys was also chairman for many years of a second large family farm, which grew wheat, and he was involved in a third venture that raised some 30,000 cattle. Yet, while his wealth might have tempted another man to have taken his ease, Powys would rise at 4am to do his round of chores. His house was little more than a shack, where visitors would be given a cup of tea sweetened with milk from his camels and perhaps a dollop of acacia honey (often with the bees still attached). This came from one of the traditional hives, made from hollow tree trunks, which he tended to.

Formidably tough and vigorous, with hands like sandpaper, Powys had an adventurous nature that led him into many a scrape. His great enthusiasm was for aloes and succulents, and he would range wide in search of rarities. He trekked for weeks with his camels and Osman, his chief hand, as far as the Ethiopian border. During the Mengistu era, he was arrested by the dictator's troops at the border before being imprisoned for several months for being a spy — he had been carrying a compass.

On another occasion, he and an Italian friend were in the borderlands of the Ilemi triangle looking for plants when they were confronted by a large group of bandits. The men shot up the aircraft and stole their clothes. Having enough language in common to persuade the brigands not to kill them, the pair worked frantically, shivering as the cold and dark set in, to clear an airstrip for their Cessna aircraft. Despite the bullet holes, nothing vital had been hit and somehow they got home.

Powys learnt to fly when he was young and clocked more than 15,000 hours in the air, although he was an inveterate pranger of planes. He would land by lamplight after dark and think nothing of downing wheels to check a road sign. Once, needing bacon for breakfast, he flew to the nearest town and landed by the butcher's.

Risk was a way of life for Powys and accepted as such. In the early 1990s, he was attacked on his farm, in the open, by a trio of Somali intruders armed with automatic weapons; Powys accounted for all three with as many shots of his rifle. During the recent invasions of many farms by Pokot and Samburu pastoralists, his daughter's tourist lodge was burnt down.

During his final years, he shattered a hip after a buffalo charged him and was severely stung after he fell from a tree while tending a hive. He had recently received treatment for prostate cancer.

His end came, however, when charged by an elephant, which came at him unseen from dense bush as he cleared other females from rejuvenating land. He received a tusk to the chest and died instantly.

John Gilfrid Llewellyn Powys was born at his parents' farm in 1938. His father, Will, was one of 11 children of a Somerset vicar; his brothers included the writer John Cowper Powys, author of Wolf Solent. Will went to Kenya in 1914 and, after serving in the First World War, drew land in the lottery for former soldiers around Kisima.

Family legend had it that he met his wife, Elsie Douglas, when she was out hunting a rogue baboon; she had dropped her pistol in a ravine and he returned it to her. Douglas, who was the granddaughter of the 1st Viscount Cross, Benjamin Disraeli's home secretary, served as a nurse in the war. She won the Military Medal for keeping calm and carrying on after being blown off her feet during an air raid in France. As a vetertan, she too drew land in Kenya and subsequently married a fellow settler, Alex Douglas. The couple had a daughter, Delia, who became a prominent conservationist of rhinoceroses. After separating from her husband, Elsie had three more children with Will Powys: Rose; Charlie, who died while cleaning a rifle aged 28; and Gilfrid, who was sent to school at Gordonstoun in Scotland.

By then, he was already used to rounding-up sheep by himself on horseback, with a rifle for protection. When Powys returned from Scotland, he worked for the district office in wildlife control at Meru before, at the time of the Aden Emergency, doing his National Service.

In 1966, Powys married Patricia Holyoak, with whom he had two daughters: Anne, who is a guide and botanist as well as running her lodge; and Marian, who is a farmer. He and Patricia shared a love of Africa's plants, but over time they grew estranged, although they never divorced and continued to live near to one another.

Powys was well-known thereafter for his appeal to other women and his numerous subsequent companions included Kuki Gallmann, the author and conservationist. He had recently been walking in Patagonia with — as far as anyone knew — Crystal, his last girlfriend.

Another passion was conservation. The rapid growth of Kenya's population to 45 million people in the past four decades, as well as changes in the climate, have had a severe impact on the wildlife around Suyian.

In his day, Powys had been a hunter. He became, however, the founding chairman of the Laikipia Wildlife Forum, which in recent decades has helped significantly to protect and restock the number of lions, elephants and other endangered species in the region.

Powys was also a avid supporter of Welsh rugby and he displayed a dragon flag on his veranda. He did not own a television but watched matches at the next farm. He formed a particular fondness for Katherine Jenkins, the mezzosoprano who is the team's mascot, and wrote to invite her to visit him.

She never replied.

Gilfrid Powys, conservationist and farmer, was born on January 15, 1938. He was killed by an elephant on December 27, 2017, aged 79.

He once flew his plane to the nearest town and landed by the butcher's

One of the world's most respected poaching investigators has been stabbed to death at home in Kenya.

Esmond Bradley Martin, 75, was found by his wife with a single stab wound to his neck. He had spent decades working undercover in Africa and Asia to undermine the black markets in ivory and rhino horn.

He had been writing a report from his latest fact-finding trip to Burma. For an earlier report on Laos he and a colleague had gone undercover, posing as dealers and mingling with gangsters to establish that the country had the world's fastest-growing ivory trade.

Mr Bradley Martin, a geographer, was a former UN special envoy for rhino conservation, and emigrated to Kenya from the US in the 1970s as elephant poaching was booming. With a shock of white hair and, invariably, a handkerchief tucked into the breast pocket of his jacket, he cut a distinctive figure. His reports shed light on the methods and motives of the international wildlife trafficking network. His work was credited with helping to bring about China's ban on the rhino horn trade in the 1990s, and its ban on domestic sales of elephant ivory, which came into force last month.

The American government has contributed millions of dollars as well as military support to the efforts to stem poaching and trafficking. Robert Godec, the US ambassador to Kenya, said: "African wildlife has lost a great friend, but Esmond's legacy in conservation will endure for years to come."

Paula Kahumbu, chief executive of Wildlife Direct, the conservation charity, in Kenya, said: "Esmond was at the forefront of exposing ivory markets in the USA, Congo, Nigeria, Angola, China, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Laos and recently Burma. He worked with many of us, generously sharing his findings and views." Police have opened a murder inquiry.

There were suggestions that Mr Bradley Martin's death, on Sunday afternoon, may have been the result of a botched burglary at his home in the Nairobi suburb of Langata. Police called at his house in response to reports of a disturbance, but left after finding the door locked. Mr Bradley Martin was later found by his wife when she returned from a shopping trip. The neighbourhood has some security barriers and guards on main roads.

However, many will suspect that the crime was not random; Mr Bradley Martin had disrupted lucrative trafficking networks with many local operators, some of who were allegedly operating with the support of Kenyan government figures.

Last year Wayne Lotter, the South African head of the Pams conservation foundation, which provides antipoaching support across Africa, was shot dead in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on his way from the airport to a hotel. He had received death threats.

Save the Elephants said Mr Bradley Martin's death would make the battle against poachers and traffickers harder. "His surveys shone a powerful spotlight on the wildlife markets around the world that are sucking ivory‚ rhino horn and countless other African species into their maw," it said.

"By charting the scale of these markets and tracking fluctuations with rigour and consistency‚ he provided a solid foundation for action to close them down. Conservation has lost an important figure; elephants have lost a great champion, and the shock of Esmond's death will be felt around the world."

Elephant poaching has declined for five successive years in Africa, but the illegal wildlife trade is still thought to claim between 20,000 to 30,000 elephants every year. There are thought to be about 415,000 on the continent now, a fall of more than 100,000 since 2007.

A far-right supporter who allegedly tried to kill six African migrants in a series of drive-by shootings was charged last night amid warnings that more racist attacks were likely as tensions rise before elections next month.

Luca Traini, 28, a former nightclub bouncer with a Nazi tattoo on his forehead, is said to have draped himself in an Italian flag after the shooting spree with a Glock handgun in Macerata, central Italy, given a fascist salute and shouted “Long live Italy” before surrendering to the police. The victims said they were lucky to be alive.

About 200,000 migrants in Italy are awaiting decisions over asylum claims and populist politicians are making the issue the dominant theme in their campaigns for the elections on March 4.

“We have another month ahead of us and the risk that hatred generates more violence is extremely high,” Marco Minniti, the interior minister, said. The anti-migrant Northern League, which is high in polls and could enter a coalition with Silvio Berlusconi’s party, came under fire as it emerged that Mr Traini had stood as a candidate for the party in local council elections last year. Matteo Salvini, the party’s leader, has said that the 500,000 illegal migrants in Italy must be expelled.

Laura Boldrini, a candidate with the Free and Equal party, said: “What happened in Macerata shows that inciting hatred and legitimising fascism, as Salvini does, has consequences.”

Mr Salvini has refused to accept any responsibility for the shooting. “If anyone is to blame, it is the government, which has allowed hundreds of thousands of illegal migrants to come here without any limits,” he said yesterday.

Mr Traini apparently drove around Macerata, a town of 42,000, for about two hours on Saturday morning in his black Alfa Romeo 147, shooting at migrants with his legally registered pistol. Before the shooting spree began he is said to have stopped for an espresso at a café near his home and told the waitress: “Ciao, I am off to Macerata to carry out a massacre.”

Festus Osa, 32, a Nigerian migrant who arrived in Italy a year ago after fleeing anti-Christian persecution, said: “I was at the migrant centre where I live and saw it live on TV. The manager said, ‘Everyone stay here. They are shooting at blacks and we don’t know who is next.’ ” Walking cautiously down a Macerata street on Sunday where the gunshots had been fired 24 hours earlier, he added: “That man has been arrested, so we are free again.”

The six migrants, who did not suffer life-threatening wounds, came from Nigeria, Mali, Ghana and Gambia. Ogie Igbinowania, from Nigeria, was waiting with his girlfriend, Jennifer, also from Nigeria, at a bus stop when a car pulled up. “I saw a black car with a man in it pointing something at us. I leant down to get a better look and saw a pistol,” Mr Igbinowania told La Repubblica.

“I pushed Jennifer to get her out of the way, throw myself to the ground and heard a shot — boom!”

The bullet wounded Jennifer in the shoulder but would have struck her in the chest if she had stayed upright, he said. The police said that Mr Traini had told them that he was taking revenge after a Nigerian asylum seeker was arrested in connection with the murder of Pamela Mastropietro, 18, whose dismembered body was discovered in two suitcases in countryside near Macerata.

“The most likely hypothesis is that [Mr Traini] carried out this mad gesture as a form of vendetta,” Michele Roberti, a Carabinieri police commander, said. “He was lucid, determined and aware of what he had done.”

Residents of Tolentino, a small town near Macerata where Mr Traini lived with his mother and grandmother, said that he was a loner whose rage at migrants had grown after he received no votes in last year’s local elections. “What can I tell you? That my son is a good boy? You won’t believe me, but it’s true,” his father, Enzo Traini, said.

Mr Traini’s modern flat sits above a take-away restaurant where residents queued to pick up lasagne for lunch after Mass. “He would come in, always alone, give a fascist salute and tell anyone who would listen that we need to make migrants respect us,” Gianluca, a manager at the restaurant, said. “But I never thought he would do this.”

Above his right eyebrow Mr Traini has a tattoo of a swastika-like symbol used by a neo-fascist group called the Third Position. In his flat the police found a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf and a flag with a Celtic cross, which is used as a symbol by fascist groups.

Mr Traini, who had no criminal record, was recently thrown out of his local gym for giving salutes and making racist remarks, the gym’s owner, Francesco Clerico, said, adding: “He was ruined by the wrong kind of friends from extremist circles. He has been like this for about ten years.”

Mr Clerico said that Mr Traini had boasted that a psychiatrist he visited had described him as “borderline”.

Local people condemned the shootings but said that they were exasperated with migrants and asylum seekers being sheltered in their town.

“The real news here is that a girl was killed by an illegal immigrant in what may have been a voodoo rite,” Anna Rita Ortolani, 53, the manager of a jewellery shop, said.

“That’s Nigerian culture. They are used to using machetes. When we heard of Pamela’s murder many people thought this is out of control. This shooting was bound to happen and it could be the start of a war between whites and migrants.”

Outside the restaurant three Africans picked up speed as they walked past the queue. “I have been here ten years and people have been good to me,” a Senegalese man said. “But now we are scared.”AnalysisRight-wing parties have been lifted in the polls by tapping into and fomenting anti-migrant sentiment prompted by the arrival of 625,000 migrants by boat to Italy, mainly from north Africa, over the past four years.

The ruling Democratic party’s ratings, meanwhile, have been sinking, despite a 34 per cent reduction in the number of arrivals from Libya last year to 119,000, thanks to deals with various parties in the chaotic north African state.

Many of the arrivals have headed further north into Europe, but about 200,000 are waiting on asylum claims in centres around Italy. To avoid intolerance building up in large cities migrants have not been placed in urban centres but dispersed to small towns up and down the country. Critics say, however, that the policy has simply spread intolerance more widely. Unable to work legally while their claims are settled, migrants are forced to do little, since the Italian government has organised neither job nor language training on a par with destinations like Germany.

As migrants stroll the streets of villages to pass the time locals often feel that they are sponging off the state. A further complaint from voters is that there are too many, but statistics from Macerata show that there are far fewer than voters may think. Throughout the town and its surrounding province there are close to 1,000 asylum seekers, just 0.3 per cent of the overall population of 320,000.

Landing stations for transatlantic cables are key to our infrastructure, but lax security could leave them open to attack

INVESTIGATION

Internet cables that connect Britain to the world are being housed on remote farms with barely any security, leaving them vulnerable to terrorist attack or sabotage by foreign spies, an investigation by The Sunday Times has revealed.

In a serious security breach, a reporter for this newspaper was able to gain access to two sites in Cornwall that contain fibre-optic cables that transmit huge amounts of data every second, including financial information, to America, the Middle East, India and Africa.

The reporter strolled into both facilities in daylight without being challenged. He was able to enter the heart of both complexes through unlocked doors and access areas that housed large electrical equipment.

Ministers faced calls this weekend to tighten up security at such sites amid warnings that an attack on Britain's communication cables would deliver a "catastrophic" blow to the country.

The security lapses will cause even deeper embarrassment after Gavin Williamson, the defence secretary, claimed just nine days ago that Russian disruption of Britain's energy pipelines and cables could cause chaos and kill thousands of people.

About 97% of global internet traffic and telephone calls are transmitted through a network of about 200 undersea cables. Every day the cables carry about $10 trillion of financial transfers at speeds of 180,000 miles per second.

Eleven large cables, which are each roughly the size of a hose pipe, cross the Atlantic and come ashore on beaches in the UK, along with other cables that arrive from the Middle East, via the Mediterranean, and from Africa. The cables usually run underground for a short distance until they surface at so-called cable landing stations.

The US lists eight landing stations in the UK as overseas infrastructure "critical" to US security, according to a document released by Wikileaks in 2010. Last week The Sunday Times visited one of the stations on a farm on the north Cornish coast. The facility, which is owned and managed by Vodafone, houses the transatlantic Apollo North cable, one of Britain's most powerful internet connections.

Every second, 3.2 terabits of data can fire down the cable, taking milliseconds to complete the 3,800-mile journey to another landing station in Long Island.

The site also houses the Europe-India Gateway, a 9,300-mile cable to Mumbai that connects the UK to 11 other countries and the Glo-1 cable, which runs to Ghana and Nigeria.

The reporter approached the front entrance of the facility and entered through an unlocked door, finding an area full of pipes and large air-conditioning units. There was no fence to stop intruders and the reporter did not see any security guards.

Later he visited another landing station, also on a Cornish farm, that houses the Atlantic Crossing 1 cable, capable of transmitting data in 65 milliseconds and believed to have been the fastest transatlantic cable until just over two years ago. A cable launched in 2015 shaved six milliseconds off that time.

The reporter was again able to enter the facility and walk around after entering through a door that had been left ajar with a key in the lock.

Kevan Jones, a former Labour defence minister, said the revelations were "absolutely shocking", adding: "The fact that a piece of critical national infrastructure is so vulnerable needs to be addressed as a matter of urgency."

Telecoms industry sources say disabling one landing station is unlikely to have a significant impact but attacks against several locations could cripple communications.

A report by the think tank Policy Exchange in December warned that the sabotage of cable infrastructure is an "existential threat" to the UK and could lead to "economic turmoil and civil disorder".

Gabriel Elefteriu, of Policy Exchange, said this weekend that the government's Centre for Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) should review how landing stations are protected.

Alasdair Wilkie, chairman of the Atlantic Cable Maintenance Agreement, which represents companies that operate and maintain undersea cables, said landing stations should have biometric and chipand-Pin security codes and double doors, where only one can be opened at a time.

Meanwhile, it was claimed this weekend that British intelligence officials were warned about the vulnerability of the Cornish sites 12 years ago.

Bob Fonow, a US management consultant to the telecoms industry, spent three days in Cornwall in 2005 reviewing the security of cable infrastructure after being asked to write a report for a university funded by the US Pentagon. He said he was "shocked" at what he discovered.

"One of the problems is profitability in that none of the cable service providers want to undertake the expense of protecting their cables. I don't think any government really wants to undertake [commit] the money to provide the security.

"Your security officials in London, and presumably GCHQ, have been briefed on this on numerous occasions." Fonow warned that the "internet is fragile", adding: "Governments need to address this."

Vodafone said the reporter did not gain access to a secure part of its facility and none of the equipment he saw was "critical". He was "seen within less than four minutes of approaching the periphery of the site" and there were multiple levels of security "which would not have been visible to your reporter".

"At no point would it have been possible for your reporter to interrupt the operations of the facility."

CenturyLink, a US telecoms company that owns and operates the Atlantic Crossing 1 cable and its landing station, said the facility was "intentionally nondescript to blend into the landscape". Security controls prevent access from the "utility room", accessed by the reporter, to "sensitive or critical areas".

"The reporter encountered Century-Link personnel immediately upon entrance to the facility and never gained access to vital areas."

The government said the CPNI provides guidance to the operators of landing stations and "we take this issue extremely seriously".

@markhookham

ST DIGITAL

Video: how we got inside data cable sites — and why they're so important Go to thesundaytimes.co.uk or our apps

Undercover and unchallenged

A Sunday Times reporter was able to approach two separate cable landing stations unchallenged and enter them through unlocked doors He was able to walk around areas housing pipes and electrical equipment Both facilities are regarded as 'critical' to US security because they house transatlantic wires The Atlantic's undersea internet arteries Britain relies on a network of ibre-optic undersea cables that carry the world's internet and telephone trafic. Huge quantities of data can be transmitted in milliseconds. The cables are vital for the UK economy Cables to America Atlantic Crossing 1 Apollo North Flag Atlantic 1 GTT Atlantic TAT 14 Yellow/Atlantic Crossing 2 Tata TGNAtlantic Tata Atlantic South Hibernia Express Super-fast cables Between four and 200 ibre-optic lines are bundled together in each cable that can transmit data at about 180,000 miles per second How cables connect the world 1 The cables, which are the width of a garden hose, are laid by ships using machines that dig trenches on the seabed 2 They come ashore on UK beaches, hidden 6ft under the sand 3 Several cables will then emerge together at 'landing stations' nearby. A 10,000-volt current runs through each cable Optical ibres 97% of global internet trafic and telephone calls are transmitted through undersea cables THE CORNISH CONNECTION

Inspired to go? Book our bespoke itinerary to the heart of the Serengeti, designed for readers by the experts from Africa Travel

Nothing can prepare you for the epic scale of the great migration — as long as you get to the right place at the right time. This trip has been put together to ensure you have the best seat in the house. You will explore the Ngorongoro Crater, one of the richest wildlife spots in East Africa, track the migration in the Serengeti and stay in the finest camps. Prepare for drama on an epic scale.

DAY 1 DEPART Fly from London Heathrow to Nairobi on Kenya Airways.

DAY 2 ARUSHA On arrival in the morning you will take a connecting flight to Kilimanjaro and then transfer to Arusha Serena Hotel, an attractive, stone-built cottage, where you will stay for one night on a B&B basis.

DAY 3 NGORONGORO CRATER This morning you will be taken to Arusha Airport for your lightaircraft flight to Lake Manyara, where you will be met by a guide from the Highlands camp. Take a drive (about two hours) to the camp in the extraordinary volcanic landscape of Ngorongoro for a three-night stay. This rich, fertile area is a prime wildlife-viewing area. All meals, local drinks, park fees and activities are included for the duration. In the afternoon, take a walk on the Olmoti volcano, visit a local Masai village and gain an insight into a way of life that has existed in this part of Africa for centuries.

DAY 4 NGORONGORO CRATER Today, enjoy a game drive in the spectacular Ngorongoro Crater, complete with a banquet lunch on the crater floor. The Ngorongoro Conservation Area that surrounds the camp is an astonishing place, home to leopard, buffalo and elephant.

DAY 5 EMPAKAAI CRATER This morning you will drive to the Empakaai Crater, where you will hike through the dense forest to the crater floor to explore the lakeshore before walking back up to the crater rim.

DAY 6 FLY TO THE SERENGETI Today you will fly from Lake Manyara to the Serengeti National Park for a three-night stay at Ubuntu Camp. The camp moves three times a year, aiming to be close to the migratory herds. Depending on the timing of your visit, the camp may be in the plains of the southern part of the park, the western corridor near the Grumeti River, or in the north, close to the Mara River. Over the next few days you will have ample opportunity to see some of the astonishing wildlife of the Serengeti in the company of the camp's expert guides.

DAYS 7-8 SERENGETI Take morning, afternoon, or fullday game drives with the guides, exploring this world-renowned national park. Its abundant wildlife includes big cats and, of course, the vast herds of wildebeest and zebra that make up the great migration, which you will drive to see if they are close to the camp.

DAY 9 DEPARTURE Time to bid farewell to the Serengeti and your guides at Ubuntu. Today, you will take a flight to Kilimanjaro, then connect to your overnight flight to Amsterdam. Alternatively, add five days to your holiday with a stay on the beautiful island of Zanzibar, at the superb Breezes Beach Club & Spa, with diving and snorkelling options.

DAY 10 RETURN HOME Morning arrival in Amsterdam, followed by a flight to London.

WHAT WE LOVE EXCLUSIVE READER DISCOUNT Save £150pp on your trip to the heart of the Serengeti if you book by the end of February  GREAT GUIDES Let the best guides in the business take you to the prime vantage points  SUPERIOR ACCOMMODATION Stay in Tanzania's best camps, tried and tested by our experts YOUR ACCOMMODATION THE HIGHLANDS This camp is set in a remote location in the Ngorongoro Crater. Our expert reviewer Lisa Grainger says, "The Highlands is miles away from the tourist throng and is very cosy and very cool — the best way to see the Ngorongoro without the crowds."

Times Expert Traveller rating: 7/10 ARUSHA SERENA HOTEL A tranquil retreat and an ideal introduction to Tanzania. Stay in a stone-built cottage, with its own veranda and french windows, and set in landscaped gardens.

UBUNTU CAMP This tented camp shifts with the wildebeest to the best locations for seeing them. It's all geared around ensuring you have the best safari experience.

OUR RECOMMENDED PARTNER Africa Travel is the UK's premier specialist offering travel to Africa. Its award-winning team has been creating exclusive and authentic itineraries for more than 30 years.

BOOK THIS TRIP? Three nights at the Highlands camp ? Three nights at Ubuntu Camp ? Park fees and guided game drives in Ngorongoro Crater and Serengeti National Park ? Guided hikes on Olmoti Crater and Empakaai Crater ? Visit to a local Masai school and village ? Optional Zanzibar extension PRICE INCLUDES:? Exclusive £150pp discount* ? Return economy flights between Heathrow and Kilimanjaro ? All transfers and domestic flights in Tanzania ? Breakfast in Arusha, meals and local drinks on safari ? One night at the Arusha Serena Hotel Departures available from April 26, 2018, to March 7, 2019 10 DAYS FROM TO BOOK £4,850pp* (Limited offer: book by February 28) 020 8712 5877 Use code S0402 thetimes.co.uk/migrationtour TERMS AND CONDITIONS: *book by February 28, 2018; from price based on twin/double share, single supplement from £395; Zanzibar extension from £845pp. Holidays are operated by and subject to the booking conditions of Africa Travel, a company wholly independent of News UK. Africa Travel: 227 Shepherd's Bush Road, London W6 7AS; ATOL 3384, ABTOT 5185.

The Highlands is very cosy and cool — the best way to see the Ngorongoro without the crowds LISA GRAINGER Travel writer, The Times

The Constant Gardener (2005) ITV3, 12.40am A notably passionate film for an adaptation of a John le Carré novel, Fernando Meirelles's movie entwines a full-bloom love story and a thorny polemic in its tale of a green-fingered British diplomat (Ralph Fiennes) whose politically engaged wife (Rachel Weisz) meets a suspicious fate while they are stationed in Kenya.

SUNDAY Queen And Country (2014) Film 4, 11.05pm John Boorman's sequel to his semi-autobiographical Hope and Glory (from 1987) shows that film's hero as a national serviceman in the 1950s. Another evocative picture of a bygone Britain takes shape, though without the level of drama the earlier movie found in the Second World War.

Elizabeth (1998) C4, 11.15pm In its own way, Shekhar Kapur's high-gloss account of Elizabeth I's early years is as preposterous as the history films made in old-time Hollywood, but it has the brio it needs to carry it along. Much of this comes from Cate Blanchett's performance in the role that brought her to international attention.

Yves Saint Laurent (2014) BBC2, 12.25am As far as its superficial and prosaic screenplay is concerned, this biopic of the great French fashion designer (played by Pierre Niney) is cut from the same plain cloth as most other life-story films, but its outfits and decor are — unsurprisingly — a pleasure to look at. Dir: Jalil Lespert MONDAY The Freshman (1990) Sony Movie Channel, 2.25pm The script for this light comedy — the story of a film student (Matthew Broderick) who meets an Italian-American redolent of The Godfather's Vito Corleone — is lively enough to do justice to the movie's casting coup: Marlon Brando sending himself up. Dir: Andrew Bergman Lincoln (2012) Film 4, 9pm If Phantom Thread (now in cinemas) does indeed prove to be Daniel Day-Lewis's final movie, as he reckons it will, then his penultimate one will be this biopic, in which he plays the Great Emancipator. His beguiling performance may have you hoping the real man was exactly like this version. Dir: Steven Spielberg Zoolander 2 (2016) TG4, 9.30pm Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson starred in the 2001 original, and in this jaded sequel, also directed by Stiller, they return as past-it models at the centre of a conspiracy involving murdered celebrities. Adding gratuitous glitz, big names from the fashion world pop up in cameo roles, while Kristen Wiig plays a Donatella Versace-like designer.

TUESDAY Terror In A Texas Town (1958) Film 4, 11.10am The director Joseph H Lewis is remembered for enhancing pulp movies with novel ideas, and in this marvellous western he sends a Swedish sailor (Sterling Hayden) to the Lone Star state and concocts a final showdown that involves an unusual weapon. (B/W) 13 Hours (2016) Film 4, 9pm Championing the security guards who defended an American diplomatic compound in Benghazi when it was attacked by militants in 2012, Michael Bay's dramatisation is an unsubtle propaganda piece that occasionally summons up the flair of a good action movie.

Midnight Cowboy (1969) Sky Cinema Greats, 10.25pm John Schlesinger's tale of street life has a rich mood and heroes who evoke team-ups of cartoon animals found in Disney films. Jon Voight's naive gigolo, Joe Buck, resembles a noble but dopy lion, and Dustin Hoffman's vagrant, Ratso, is a chatty rodent.

WEDNESDAY The Dressmaker (2015) Film 4, 9pm Starring Kate Winslet as a clothes designer and seamstress who, in 1951, returns to her home town in the Australian outback to restitch pieces of her past, Jocelyn Moorhouse's film is an overdone patchwork of comedy and revenge drama, but its game cast wear it well. They include Judy Davis as the heroine's frayed, unbuttoned mother and Hugo Weaving as a policeman with a sartorial secret.

Harmonium (2016) Sky Cinema Premiere, 10.10pm It may be named after a musical instrument, but there is nothing melodious about this Japanese film, a gruelling melodrama in which a couple (Furutachi Kanji and Tsutsui Mariko) are hurled into misery by the actions of a house guest (Asano Tadanobu), a figure from the husband's past. As arduous as the story is, however, the surprises in its structure — along with the strength of the performances — may well keep you gripped. Dir: Fukada Koji THURSDAY The Diary Of A Teenage Girl (2015) Film 4, 10.45pm A drama about a 15-year-old (Bel Powley) who has a fling with her mother's boyfriend (Alexander Scarsgard), Marielle Heller's film — set in 1970s San Francisco — will be too grubby for some, but others will be happy to accept a bit of seaminess as part of the movie's best quality: its bracing, poignant candour.

Gremlins (1984) TCM, 11.35pm Joe Dante's film about vicious furry critters that spring from a seemingly innocuous source has held up well against the test of time. The outrages committed by those evil cousins of the Muppets as they rampage through a small town are depicted with a cheerful black-comic vigour that transcends the ageing of the film's special effects.

The Odd Couple (1968) Sky Cinema Select, 5.30am Although Neil Simon's play about apartment-sharing middle-aged friends loses none of its slick New York wit in Gene Saks's film, the best thing here is not the script but the casting. Jack Lemmon, as the couple's fastidious half, and Walter Matthau, as the household slob, are both terrific individually, yet their double act is still greater than the sum of its parts.

FRIDAY Baywatch (2017) Sky Cinema Premiere, 11.45am/8pm Dwayne Johnson and Zac Efron, as rival lifeguards, have quite a good rapport in this comic reworking of the 1990s television show, so you might want to take a quick look to witness that, but the countless damning reviews were fair: the film's lousy script makes the TV version look like high art. Dir: Seth Gordon The Night Has Eyes (1942) Talking Pictures TV, 12.25pm Playing a mysterious recluse found in his moorland home by a young woman ( Joyce Howard) investigating a friend's disappearance, James Mason broods superbly in this British thriller. His demeanour is a perfect match for the film's classically dark and stormy mood. Dir: Leslie Arliss (B/W) The Constant Gardener (2005) ITV3, 12.40am In adaptating a John le Carré novel, Fernando Meirelles entwines a love story and a thorny polemic in its tale of a British diplomat (Ralph Fiennes) whose politically engaged wife (Rachel Weisz) meets a suspicious fate while they are stationed in Kenya.

SATURDAY Die Hard 4.0 (2007) C4, 9pm The feats performed by Bruce Willis's action-hero cop in this sequel are a betrayal of the previous movies' faint respect for realism, but though purists might fairly object to this shift, the film's malarkey is entertaining in its own manner. Dir: Len Wiseman Truly Madly Deeply (1990) BBC2, 10pm A romantic comic drama about a grief-stricken woman ( Juliet Stevenson) whose dead lover (Alan Rickman) returns as a benign ghost, Anthony Minghella's second film uses down-to-earth humour to counterbalance its moments of unworldly tweeness.

Ted (2012) C4, 11.35pm Seth MacFarlane's hit comedy about a living teddy bear who has left childlike innocence far behind is certainly not for anyone averse to rude humour, and even if you enjoy the ursine urchin at first, you might feel the jokes wear thin too soon.

Previews by Edward Porter and Mel Clarke

Friday February 9: our television, film and radio picks

CRITICS’ CHOICE They’re all absolutely fabulous The Bold Type (Amazon Prime)The Devil Wears Prada for the Instagram age, or a millennial version of Sex in the City (in its dreams, at least), this snappy new drama is set in the offices of glossy women’s magazine Scarlet. The action revolves around three former interns who are now slowly moving up the corporate ladder: uptight Jane (Katie Stevens) newly promoted to the position of writer and exposing more of her private life than she ever wanted; Kat (Aisha Dee), the social-media director who finds her sexual identity is more fluid than she thought; and Sutton (Meghann Fahy), the least successful of the trio who is conducting a secret affair with a lawyer on Scarlet’s board of directors.

Hovering over all of them is the formidable editor-in-chief, Jacqueline (Melora Hardin), subverting the stereotype by being firm but fair, rather than Meryl Streep monstrous. It is not the TV equivalent of a long read, but the fact it makes few demands on the viewer is part of its charm.Victoria SegalJamestown (Sky 1, 9pm)Warning, germophobes: season two of the colonial drama opens with a water birth that raises worrying hygiene issues. There is plenty of spiritual grime, too, though, with corruption and violence remaining the settlement’s key values. The story of the slaves widens the show’s perspective; elsewhere, Jocelyn (Naomi Battrick) is in trouble and rumours of a “Catholic plot” add to the paranoid miasma hanging over the town. (VS)Grand Prix Driver (Amazon Prime)Those readers who enjoy shows about men in suits talking about cars will enjoy this documentary. Narrated by Michael Douglas, the four episodes spend a year with the McLaren Formula 1 team. It is an excellent corporate video: everything looks shiny and tidy and media-savvy drivers Fernando Alonso and Stoffel Vandoorne conduct anodyne interviews, but there is a lack of on-track action. Helen StewartWinter Olympics Opening Ceremony (BBC1/Eurosport, 10.30am) Thirty years after Seoul hosted the summer games, the Olympics return to South Korea with additional diplomatic intrigue to spice up the speed skating and alpine skiing. The opening ceremony is at the chilly Pyeongchang stadium, built especially for the opening and closing events, with 3,000 athletes from 92 countries lining up for the symbolic pigeon release. (VS)Cruising With Jane McDonald (C5, 9pm)“I’m cruising round the world. Do you wanna come?” Who could resist such an offer from the former Loose Woman, touring the California coast in the first episode. Her fun-girl act honed by years on stages big and small, she delights travellers as she wanders around the supersized Ruby Princess with her selfie stick, and her visits to Los Angeles and San Francisco cover considerable ground. (HS)FILM CHOICEThe Constant Gardener (2005) ITV3, 12.40amA notably passionate film for an adaptation of a John le Carré novel, Fernando Meirelles’s movie entwines a full-bloom love story and a thorny polemic in its tale of a green-fingered British diplomat (Ralph Fiennes) whose politically engaged wife (Rachel Weisz) meets a suspicious fate while they are stationed in Kenya.Baywatch (2017) Sky Cinema Premiere, 11.45am/8pmDwayne Johnson and Zac Efron, as rival lifeguards, have quite a good rapport in this comic reworking of the 1990s television show, so you might want to take a quick look to witness that, but the countless damning reviews were fair: the film’s lousy script makes the TV version look like high art. Dir: Seth GordonThe Night Has Eyes (1942) Talking Pictures TV, 12.25pmPlaying a mysterious recluse found in his moorland home by a young woman (Joyce Howard) investigating a friend’s disappearance, James Mason broods superbly in this British thriller. His demeanour is a perfect match for the film’s classically dark and stormy mood. Dir: Leslie Arliss (B/W)Safe House (2012) C4, 12.10amDespite that title, there is no refuge for the lead characters in Daniel Espinosa’s movie: Denzel Washington’s rogue CIA man and a junior agent (Ryan Reynolds) thrown into his orbit. They spend most of this flashy potboiler being hounded through Cape Town locations by persistent enemies.Edward PorterRadio pick of the dayThe Wu-Tang Clan Radio Show (6 Music, 7pm)Bliss for middle-aged rap fans as RZA and DJ Mathematics of Staten Island hip-hop potentates Wu-Tang Clan host two hours of old soul, 1970s funk, vintage hip-hop and new rap. More off-the-hook mathematics in CrowdScience (World Service, 8.30pm) as Marnie Chesterton asks if you can prove the existence of dark matter with a packet of popping candy.Andrew MaleSports choicePremiership Rugby Bath v Northampton Saints (BT Sport 1, 7pm)Winter Olympics (BBC1, 12.20am)You sayCan’t tell you how annoyed I am. You would think someone would have shown Penny Coomes and Nicholas Buckland, the ice-dancers representing Britain at the European championships as a warm-up for the Olympics. How embarrassing. Vanessa Green

Reassuringly, I’ve just seen the first Monty Don programme this year. Can spring be far behind?Bramble Coppins

Sadly, Don has succumbed to presenters’ disease, thinking he is more interesting than his subject.Robert ParkerSend your comments to: telly@sunday-times.co.uk[mailto:telly@sunday-times.co.uk]

West Ham United sacked their director of recruitment yesterday over his reported criticism of the attitude of African players.

It had been claimed that Tony Henry had said in a leaked email to an agent and club official that West Ham were no longer interested in signing African players because they “can have a bad attitude” and “caused mayhem” if they were not in the side.

A club statement read: “West Ham United have today terminated the contract of director of player recruitment, Tony Henry, with immediate effect following his unacceptable comments that were widely reported in the press. Our action follows a full and thorough investigation. West Ham United will not tolerate any type of discrimination.

“The West Ham United family is an inclusive one where, regardless of gender, age, ability, race, religion or sexual orientation, everybody feels welcome and included.”

Henry reportedly said that the allegations were “nothing racist at all”, but the FA will investigate the matter.

David Moyes, the West Ham manager, had described the allegations as “a massive shock” and denied any suggestion that Henry’s comments reflected his own attitude. The proof, Moyes insisted, was that he had been trying to sign Cameroonian-born Ibrahim Amadou from Lille and Algeria striker Islam Slimani from Leicester City before the transfer window closed on Wednesday night.

Henry, he said, had been involved in discussions in which the two were targeted. “If we were signing two African players on deadline day, you would have to say, ‘Well, it’s incorrect and wrong.’ ” Moyes said. “You can see the players we have signed, the club has signed over the years. We sign good quality players, the best we can get. It doesn’t matter where they are from.”

Moyes and Henry go back a long way. Henry had been Everton’s chief scout when Moyes was manager at Goodison Park, leaving in 2013 and joining West Ham in 2014. But Moyes defended his own track record of signing and playing African footballers at Everton. “Yakubu, [Joseph] Yobo, [Steven] Pienaar, we signed a boy, [Magaye] Gueye, Victor Anichebe — they were all very much part of our environment and very important players for me,” he said. “I signed Steven Pienaar three times.”

After the transfers this week of Diafra Sakho, of Senegal, to Rennes and André Ayew, of Ghana, to Swansea City, West Ham have only two African-born players in their first-team squad in Cheikhou Kouyaté, of Senegal, and Arthur Masuaku, of DR Congo. However, others are of African descent and Moyes said that he had approached some of them in an attempt to clear the air before today’s match away to Brighton & Hove Albion.

“I had a frank conversation with them, but it will remain private,” Moyes said. “The players have worked really well. I’ve spoken to one or two of them and hopefully we can move on.”

He admitted that the reports had been an unwelcome distraction while the team attempt to move further away from the relegation places. “We’ve got some good results in the last month or two, we’re trying to be positive, we’re trying to give everybody at the club a real lift and we’re trying to show the supporters that we’re doing things the right way and I think in the main most of them would agree with that. And we want to try and do that, we want to keep it going. But obviously we don’t need incidents that have happened recently.”

Kenya's attempt to clamp down on the media was thwarted yesterday after the country's high court ordered the government to halt its ban on broadcasters. The government shut down three independent TV stations with about 50 per cent of the audience share because they sought to broadcast the "illegal" mock swearing-in of Raila Odinga, the opposition leader, as president. Journalists slept in their newsroom to avoid being detained by plainclothes police officers waiting outside the headquarters of NTV.

Chacha Mwita, a high court judge, ruled that the government must restore the transmission for the Kenya Television Network, Citizen TV and NTV, and must not interfere with the stations until a case challenging their shutdown was heard. By mid-afternoon yesterday they had not returned to air but were broadcasting online.

One television reporter told The Times: "It's very scary. Everyone is looking over their shoulders."

Mr Odinga, who claims to have electoral commission data proving that he beat President Kenyatta in the election in August, said the ban showed that the ruling party was panicking.

Theatre

Royal Exchange, Manchester

***

It's nice to take a walk, isn't it? Get some exercise, clear your head and while you're at it explore the black British experience from a new perspective. And if this theatrical walking tour from the writer Testament (aka Andy Brooks) is guilty of trying to pack too much into its 80 minutes, it's never guilty of the far more serious sin of being boring. Black Men Walking is an amusing, stimulating trek round some personal and identity issues. It makes you look forward to hearing more from Testament, who is also a rapper.

It was inspired by a black walking group in Sheffield that seeks to help ethnic minorities to reconnect with the environment. Testament has handed each of his three men a particular need for some fresh air. Matthew (Trevor Laird), a doctor, is having problems with his marriage. Richard (Tonderai Munyevu) is being asked to pay for the funeral of his father in Ghana. Thomas (Tyrone Huggins), the booming father of the group, is having a breakdown as he reconnects with the hidden centuries of black British history.

How do you stage all that walking? Dawn Walton's production nimbly uses mime techniques to get the men walking on the spot. The moments when Dorcas Sebuyange runs on in slow motion from behind the black gauze screen on Simon Kenny's set successfully walks that fine line between the elegant and the overdone.

Such mystical, mythical moments are a mixed blessing, as is the weather warning that Thomas ignores so that the story can move towards a bit of a crisis. The show is at its best when it just lets its characters talk, tease, clash and joke. The debate is natural, fond and vivid. And contentious too, when the men are joined by an MC, Ayeesha (Sebuyange), an insistent counterpoint in age, sex and politics who mocks them as a "black Last of the Summer Wine". No time to do more than stroll through the issues, yet this is an enjoyable, stimulating change of scene.

Dominic Maxwell

Box office: 0161 833 9833, to Sat. Tour details: eclipsetheatre.org.uk

An opposition politician who was due to be sworn in as Kenya’s vice-president at a mock inauguration claims to have survived an assassination attempt.

Kalonzo Musyoka said that bullets were fired and a grenade exploded at his home after he was prevented from attending the ceremony. He claimed that the attack, in the upmarket Nairobi suburb of Karen, was politically motivated.

Police said a stun grenade was thrown at a gate at Mr Musyoka’s home and two live bullets were found.

The opposition leader Raila Odinga held the mock presidential swearing-in ceremony at a park in the centre of the capital on Tuesday.

Tensions have risen sharply since elections last year that returned Uhuru Kenyatta as president. His victory in the first presidential poll in August was overturned by the Supreme Court, which accused the electoral commission of irregularities. Mr Odinga pulled out of a rerun of the poll in October, saying that changes to the polling procedure were insufficient — and Mr Kenyatta won by a landslide.

Tom Kajwang, an MP from Mr Odinga’s National Super Alliance coalition, who took part in the mock ceremony, was arrested yesterday. Kenya’s interior minister suggested more arrests would follow over what he called an “attempt to subvert or overthrow the legally constituted government”.

Swansea City 3 Arsenal 1

Arsenal lost their sixth away game in the Premier League with such a lack of gumption that it is hard to remember how it is that Arsène Wenger’s team had recently claimed their place in the first cup final of the season. That, though, is what defines Arsenal. They undo their best efforts with alarming regularity. They are the game’s Jekyll and Hyde team, one day mesmeric and classy, the next, stuttering and shaky and prone to mishaps.

Wenger is either the man concocting, still, a solution or he is the root cause, but he was at a loss to explain this performance, stating there was “no rational explanation” for the many “big mistakes” made by his players.

It was not all about Arsenal’s lack of backbone. This was a spirited Swansea City display that hauled them out of the relegation zone. Carlos Carvalhal has lost only one of his eight games with the Welsh club. He has forged the impossible by giving a floundering side the energy and self-belief to pass their way out of despair, to forge understandings on the pitch. No wonder they played Daydream Believer at the final whistle.

He spoke of the team gaining self- belief and oxygen. He even dared to dream that victories in quick succession over Liverpool and now Arsenal might convince one or two players who might have balked at the idea of moving to a team at the foot of the table to rethink their reticence and sign for the club today.

Olivier Giroud was last night an Arsenal player but this morning is expected to belong to Chelsea. The striker began the evening on the bench alongside Henrikh Mkhitaryan in an obvious “in with the new and out with the old” exposition. Transfers are rarely this poignant. Given how finely poised were the deals revolving around Giroud, it was something of a shock to see him come off the bench.

But there was nothing Machiavellian going on; Wenger simply needed to freshen up a limp attacking force and the Arsenal manager was almost poetic in his tribute to the striker and how his commitment to the club was so deep that he could trust him to give his all, even when on the cusp of leaving.

Wenger might not have been able to rationalise the defeat but he saved his visible ire for a telling moment in the match. Swansea were able to take the lead thanks to a slapstick error from Petr Cech, who suffered in the slippery conditions, but Wenger was angry with Nacho Monreal’s decision to allow the ball to go for a throw-in, which he then took to give the ball to Shkodran Mustafi, whose back pass Cech mis-controlled.

“I was angry because there was no need to let the ball go out,” Wenger explained. “When you have a throw-in for you and you are nine v ten on the pitch why should we put a handicap like that on our own team? We can play the ball and attack straightaway.”

That may have been the most glaring error but the mistakes were myriad before that as the home side created most of the early chances. Jordan Ayew’s strike looked as though it might bounce over the head of Petr Cech and in, and then Aaron Ramsey came to rescue with an alert tackle as Nathan Dyer’s cross caused havoc with Sam Clucas ready to pounce.

It was, shortly afterwards, Mohamed Elneny’s turn to conjure a last-ditch tackle as Dyer’s through ball to Clucas would almost certainly have resulted in a goal had he not timed his stretched interception so well.

Aggrieved not to have won a penalty, the Swansea players kept on pushing and Ki Sung-yueng came close with a long-range strike that he hoped the wet conditions would take beyond the Arsenal goalkeeper.

A shot on the turn from Alfie Mawson after a short corner came closer still to beating Cech as Carvalhal’s side continued to enjoy the slip-slide-away conditions — and no one enjoyed them more than Ayew, who embarked on a long elegant run that Arsenal did so little to try to stop that their manager was aghast.

Against the run of play, Monreal dashed nimbly into the area to give Arsenal the lead, latching almost casually on to a finely judged pass from Mesut Özil. The lead, though, lasted but one minute as Clucas, who had been clearly itching to make his mark, benefited from a lapse of judgment from Özil to equalise.

Clucas wasted an excellent cross with a weak header but the former Hull City midfielder was relentless in his willingness to either find space or make runs beyond an Arsenal defence still unsure of the conditions. It was so slippery that Cech found himself performing a backwards somersault after executing an awkward clearance.

Wenger stood in his technical area, as a Dyer cross was only just grasped by Cech, chatting in depth with Mkhitaryan before the former Manchester United player replaced Elneny.

Within 50 seconds of his Arsenal debut, Mkhitaryan’s new team were behind thanks to Ayew. The Ghana international might never be so close to such a slapstick error again in his career and he was almost embarrassed to score his seventh goal of this campaign.

Leroy Fer, in so much space he must have become disorientated, missed a glaring chance to extend Swansea’s lead, and Mkhitaryan had a chance to equalise with a header. But the home team were not to be denied. Clucas was ready with another clever run to make it 3-1, this time linking up with Ayew. Clucas’s subsequent forward roll was celebratory but it also made for a neat contrast with the tumbles and stumbles of Arsenal that peppered their performance and illustrated how Wenger’s team never settled, never imposed, never made the side threatened with relegation feel insecure.

When, at the final whistle, Carvalhal approached Cech it was not to sympathise for the cruel mistake but to ask for the goalkeeper’s shirt as requested by Carvalhal’s son. The Swansea manager was embarrassed to ask but nowhere near as embarrassed as Arsenal’s players were last night.

* Swansea City (5-4-1): L Fabianski 6 — K Naughton 6, M van der Hoorn 6, F Fernández 5, A Mawson 7, M Olsson 6 — N Dyer 6 (sub: T Carroll 83min), L Fer 5, Ki Sung-yeung 6, S Clucas 8 (sub: W Routledge 90+2) — J Ayew 7 (sub: W Bony 88). Substitutes not used

K Nordfeldt, T Abraham, L Narsingh, K Bartley.

* Arsenal (4-2-3-1): P Cech 4 — H Bellerín 5, L Koscielny 5, S Mustafi 4, N Monreal 6 — M Elneny 5 (sub: H Mkhitaryan 60), G Xhaka 5 — A Iwobi 5 (sub: O Giroud 76), A Ramsey 6, M Özil 6 — A Lacazette 4. Substitutes not used D Ospina, C Chambers, A Maitland-Niles, S Kolasinac, E Nketiah. Booked Elneny, Bellerín, Özil.

* Referee Lee Mason. Attendance 20,819

* Swansea City (5-4-1): L Fabianski 6 — K Naughton 6, M van der Hoorn 6, F Fernández 5, A Mawson 7, M Olsson 6 — N Dyer 6 (sub: T Carroll 83min), L Fer 5, Ki Sung-yeung 6, S Clucas 8 (sub: W Routledge 90+2) — J Ayew 7 (sub: W Bony 88). Substitutes not used

K Nordfeldt, T Abraham, L Narsingh, K Bartley.

* Arsenal (4-2-3-1): P Cech 4 — H Bellerín 5, L Koscielny 5, S Mustafi 4, N Monreal 6 — M Elneny 5 (sub: H Mkhitaryan 60), G Xhaka 5 — A Iwobi 5 (sub: O Giroud 76), A Ramsey 6, M Özil 6 — A Lacazette 4. Substitutes not used D Ospina, C Chambers, A Maitland-Niles, S Kolasinac, E Nketiah. Booked Elneny, Bellerín, Özil.

* Referee Lee Mason. Attendance 20,819

The leader of the Kenyan opposition has been threatened with arrest after he staged an unofficial swearing-in ceremony as an alternative president.

Clutching a Bible, Raila Odinga took a mock “oath of office” led by an MP from his coalition who is also a High Court barrister. “I, Raila Amolo Odinga, in full realisation of the high calling, assume the office of the people’s president of the republic of Kenya,” he declared in front of a crowd of tens of thousands in Uhuru Park, central Nairobi.

The security forces did not try to halt the ceremony, but police fired tear gas to disperse the crowds afterwards.

Kalonzo Musyoka was due to be sworn in as Mr Odinga’s vice-president but was forced to miss the ceremony when a grenade was thrown at his home. Describing the incident as an assassination attempt, Mr Musyoka said that his home came under gunfire hours after his police protection was withdrawn.

“I knew we were vulnerable but I didn’t think they would strike that fast,” he told the Associated Press.

The government tried to censor coverage of the event, with President Kenyatta warning media organisations that they would be stripped of their licences if they broadcast it live. At least three broadcasters were taken off air but resorted to streaming it on their websites.

The country’s Union of Journalists condemned the attempted censorship as “draconian”, adding that it would serve only to “strengthen our resolve to carry out our duties as a watchdog”.

The government responded to Mr Odinga’s stunt with a statement by Fred Matiangi, the interior minister, declaring the National Resistance Movement, part of Mr Odinga’s Nasa coalition, a criminal organisation — paving the way for the arrest of Mr Odinga and other senior leaders. Being a member of an organised criminal group carries a prison sentence of up to ten years.

Githu Muigai, the attorney-general, had warned that Mr Odinga’s actions amounted to a treasonable challenge to the legitimate presidency of the nation.

As well as deepening the constitutional crisis in Kenya, there have been warnings that the ceremony could trigger a repeat of the bloodshed that followed disputed elections in 2007 in which at least 1,000 people died.

Asked how Kenya would be run with two presidents, Norman Magaya, the opposition’s chief executive officer, said there was only one legitimate president, adding: “There has only been an imposter.”

Before he left the stage, surrounded by bodyguards, Mr Odinga told the crowd: “We have accomplished our promise to Kenyans.”

His Twitter account was quickly changed, hailing him as “the Rt Hon Raila Amolo Odinga, President of the Republic of Kenya”.

Earlier he told a local broadcaster: “The will of the people for change in our country, to ensure that there is electoral justice, judicial independence, ethnic inclusivity, a proper police force, devolution restructured and strengthened and the executive restructured — the quest for these will not die away. This is just the beginning of a new journey.”

Mr Odinga has repeatedly accused President Kenyatta of cheating his way to victory in last year’s election, aided by a partisan electoral commission. The result was declared invalid by the country’s Supreme Court, which accused the electoral commission of “irregularities and illegalities”.

Mr Odinga, 73, who had taken part in three other presidential votes, demanded a series of changes, and then boycotted October’s re-run on the grounds that they had not happened.

Mr Kenyatta, 56, the son of Kenya’s first post-independence leader, Jomo Kenyatta, was declared the winner with 98 per cent of the votes cast in October, although the turnout was significantly lower than normal.

Mr Kenyatta was out of the country at an African Union summit when Mr Odinga’s mock swearing-in took place, but returned hours later.

Robin Pagnamenta looks at President Xi's grand expansion drive as the prime minister arrives in Wuhan today

After she steps on to the tarmac of a freezing Wuhan airport today, Theresa May will be followed by one of Britain's biggest overseas trade delegations, intent on securing a share of the "golden fruits" that China's ambassador to London says are up for grabs. That feast, however, may depend not on their best efforts but on the prime minister's; specifically, her willingness to endorse President Xi's pet foreign policy project.

Originally announced by Mr Xi in 2013, the Belt and Road Initiative is the grandest of ambitions, a $900 billion investment splurge aimed at forging closer links with China's neighbours. Its bridges, railways, roads, deepwater ports, oil pipelines and power plants are planned to extend across 60 countries, from Asia to Europe and deep into Africa.

It has been described as the biggest development push in history, dwarfing America's Marshall Plan to support Europe's shattered economy after the Second World War. And, given its vast scale, it has been greeted with suspicion in some western quarters, wary of whether it can live up to the hype, over the governance of Chinese infrastructure projects and about a reliance on local contractors that win 89 per cent of the building work.

Jue Wang, associate fellow at Chatham House, the foreign affairs think tank, is convinced, therefore, that a public show of British support would mean a lot: "Beijing would welcome an endorsement from the UK. Theresa May is promoting this idea of 'global Britain' and China is crucial because it's the world's biggest market."

Mr Xi's initiative aims to boost China's economic muscle by bringing investment to its poorer periphery, regions such as Tibet, where ethnic minorities have enjoyed fewer of the fruits of the country's boom than its coastal manufacturing heartland.

More conspicuously, it is intended to cement Chinese influence overseas, envisaging the creation of two corridors, land and sea, that together would tie up trade with 60 per cent of the world's population along routes with echoes of the ancient Silk Road — and projecting Beijing's hard power into new regions where previously it has played a less assertive role, a development that worries western security hawks.

High in the Karakoram mountains, Chinese engineers are busy planning the construction of an ambitious land route linking China's remote Xinjiang region to a new deepwater port at Gwadar in Pakistan on the Arabian Sea. Connected by a sprawling network of railways, roads, power plants and industrial parks, China is planning to invest $54 billion in the China Pakistan Economic Corridor alone.

In Sri Lanka, China is bankrolling the construction of a $1.1 billion port city in Colombo. In Kenya and Ethiopia, new railways built with Chinese cash already trundle hundreds of miles into Africa's interior, easing the extraction of minerals and oil for export. Another high-speed rail line from southwest China to Singapore will cost more.

In landlocked Kazakhstan, Cosco, the Chinese shipping group, is building the Khorgos Gateway — a dry port for handling cargo for trains rather than ships. It takes up to 50 days to send goods from China to Europe by sea; less than half that by train via Central Asia.

If western leaders and rivals such as India bristle at China's ambitions and fear what it means for their own influence overseas, Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, thinks that this is self-defeating. He is "not sure that snubbing China achieves a great deal. People can be as scared as they like, but for a lot of countries China is the only game in town."

The big, unresolved question, he says, is "what kind of animal is One Belt, One Road going to turn into?" Will it be a benign commercial project that will help to increase trade, raise living standards and foster peace in some of the world's poorest countries? Or does it represent a grand imperial design to bolster Beijing's power while snuffing out democracy and free speech? Mr Frankopan believes that it is too early to say, but suggests that Britain and other countries have more to gain by engaging with China, rather than shunning it. "It's all very well to criticise, but if we can't come up with suggestions of our own, then what's the point?" As she meets Chinese officials this week, Mrs May has, at least on one level, a good story to tell. UK exports to China are up 60 per cent since 2010 and China is expected to be one of Britain's top foreign investors by 2020.

Philip Hammond visited China last month, promoting London as a financial centre for Chinese currency transactions and announcing up to £25 billion of support for UK companies involved in the initiative.

"We believe there will be real oppor-tunities for British companies to work with Chinese partners in third countries," the China-Britain Business Council said in a report.

Britain's ability to obstruct or block Mr Xi's project is minimal. The question Mrs May face this week is whether or not to engage with China, thereby helping UK companies share in any benefits.

Beijing's global ambitions China plans to pump $150bn into belt and road projects each year Put together they would create trade ties linking 60% of the world's population An estimated $900bn in projects are planned or under way Projects in 60 countries including: high-speed rail, highways, bridges, oil and gas pipelines, ports and power stations

Kenya threatened to arrest the leader of the opposition yesterday after he took part in an unofficial swearing-in ceremony as an alternative president.

Mr Odinga took a mock “oath of office” on a stage set up in Nairobi’s central Uhuru Park before a crowd of thousands of cheering supporters.

Clutching a Bible and led by an MP from his coalition who is also a high court barrister the 73-year-old veteran opposition leader said: “I Raila Amolo Odinga, in full realisation of the high calling, assume the office of the People’s President of the Republic of Kenya.

“We have accomplished our promise to Kenyans,” he told the roaring audience, before leaving the stage surrounded by bodyguards.

The government of Uhuru Kenyatta responded by declaring the opposition a criminal organisation, paving the way for the arrest of Raila Odinga, and other senior leaders of his Nasa coalition, for treason.

The ceremony came after Mr Odinga accused President Kenyatta of cheating his way to victory in last year’s election, aided by a partisan electoral commission.

Mr Kenyatta’s victory in August was invalidated by the country’s supreme court, which accused the electoral commission of “irregularities and illegalities”.

Mr Odinga a veteran opposition leader who had taken part in three other presidential votes, demanded a series of changes, and boycotted October’s re-run because they did not happen.

Mr Kenyatta, 56, the son of Kenya’s first post-independence leader Jomo, was declared the winner by 98 per cent of the ballot in October, although the turnout was significantly lower than normal.

Mr Kenyatta was out of the country at an African Union summit when the swearing-in took place but returned hours later as the interior ministry in effect outlawed the “people’s movement” launched by the opposition after last year’s elections.

The government had already moved to censor coverage of the event, with Mr Kenyatta summoning media editors beforehand to warn they faced their licences being stripped if they broadcast it live. At least three major broadcasters were taken off air, but resorted to streaming it on their websites.

Kenya’s attorney-general warned that challenging the official president amounted to treason.

The country’s Union of Journalists condemned the attempted censorship as “so draconian that it can only strengthen our resolve to carry out our duties as a watchdog”.

As well as deepening the constitutional crisis in Kenya, there have been warnings that there could be a repeat of the bloodshed that followed disputed elections in 2007 in which 1,000 people died.

However, there was no repeat of the clashes between protesters linked to Mr Odinga’s movement and the police yesterday that left more than 100 people dead after the August election. Police maintained a limited presence at the ceremony, but numbers were increased in the slums around Nairobi where Mr Odinga has most support.

“There is a psychological benefit that people feel their voices are heard, but more important it will mark the real start of our resistance,” he said.

Asked how Kenya would be run with two presidents, the opposition’s chief executive officer Norman Magaya said there was only one legimitate president, adding: “There has only been an imposter.”

Mr Odinga told a local broadcaster before his “inauguration” that it was the most historic event in Kenya since independence from Britain.

“The will of the people for change in our country, to ensure that there is electoral justice, judicial independence, ethnic inclusivity, a proper police force, devolution restructured and strengthened and the executive restructured. The quest for these will not die away,” he said.

“This is just the beginning of a new journey.”

Kenya took several television and radio stations off air today after they began to broadcast live coverage of an imitation presidential “swearing in” ceremony promised by the opposition leader Raila Odinga.

About 2,000 supporters of Mr Odinga’s opposition coalition gathered at Uhuru Park in central Nairobi early today to watch the planned ceremony, but before senior party leaders arrived independent media stations were forced off air by government, they claimed.

Mr Odinga claims to have won August’s presidential election, which was declared for the incumbent, Uhuru Kenyatta, but the result was then overturned by the supreme court amid claims of skulduggery and mishandling by the electoral commission.

A rerun was ordered, which Mr Odinga boycotted and Mr Kenyatta, 56, the son of Kenya’s first post-independence leader Jomo Kenyatta, was declared the winner with 98 per cent of the vote. The opposition Nasa coalition announced a “people’s parliament” and campaign of civil disobedience in response.

This week it said it would “swear-in” Mr Odinga and his deputy, Stephen Kalonzo Musyoka. The party chief, Normal Magaya, said: “We intend to hold a peaceful event in total compliance with the constitution and the law.”

However Kenya’s attorney-general warned that challenging the official president amounted to treason.

Kenya Editor’s Guild, a body representing the country’s media, said that Mr Kenyatta had called editors to a meeting at State House and threatened to switch off and revoke the licences of any television stations that broadcast the event live.

The Kenya Editors’ Guild chairman, Linus Kaikai, defended the rights of members to cover the event, saying: “The media remains a mere messenger and a chronicler of any events happening in our country. We condemn and reject the threats and purported instructions issued at State House and call on media houses and journalists to carry on their work diligently and to report impartially.”

Police maintained a low-key presence around the park where the ceremony was due to take place but deployed in large numbers to slum areas which are Mr Odinga’s strongholds.

By lunchtime there was still no sign of Mr Odinga, but he assured them he was still coming. “There’s no doubt, many of our supporters have turned up and we are going to be joining them shortly,” he told KTN, which streamed its content on its website after it was taken off the television networks, pledging that the ceremony would go ahead.

He denounced the government censorship of independent television stations that defied the ban on broadcasting the event. “This is very unfortunate indeed that this has come to our country and it must be condemned by all civilised people,” he said, adding that his swearing in represented “a historic day for Kenya, the most important since the day we received our independence from Britain”.

“The will of the people for change in our country, to ensure that there is electoral justice, judicial independence, ethnic inclusivity, a proper police force, devolution restructured and strengthened and the executive restructured. The quest for these will not die away,” he said. “This is just the beginning of a new journey.”

A tear gas cannister was fired as a group of people defaced a coat of arms symbol bearing the name of President Kenyatta on a roundabout near the park.

Commentators greeted news of Mr Odinga’s planned swearing in with alarm and warned it could bring the country’s simmering political tensions to a head. Previous clashes between rival supporters of Mr Odinga and President Kibaki, largely along tribal lines after the 2007 election, saw 1,000 people killed and 600,000 left homeless.

Mr Kenyatta and Mr Odinga were playing a “high-stakes game of brinkmanship” that could result in “significant bloodshed”, according to the International Crisis Group, a mediating organisation.

It said that were Mr Odinga arrested, it could provoke “protests, further police crackdowns and much avoidable destruction and bloodshed, while deepening already dangerous levels of polarisation”.

Its Kenya analyst, Murithi Mutiga, said.“Time is running short, but both sides should urgently show restraint: Odinga should call off the ceremony; President Kenyatta should agree to an audit of Kenya’s electoral authorities.”

TRAVEL BRIEFS

Combine urban pleasures with time exploring a spectacular natural wonder, thanks to new Kenya Airways flights linking Cape Town with Livingstone in Zambia and Victoria Falls in Zimbabwe.

kenya-airways.com

John Bramwell Leave Alone the Empty Spaces AllPoints Six albums of surpassing brilliance failed to give I Am Kloot the success they clearly deserved, making the Manchester trio's split in 2016 an understandable, if sad, decision. Their former singer's solo debut, all winter hues, scuffed acoustica and careworn vocals, serves as yet another reminder of his ability to magic the simplest melodies and lyrics into musical gold. Reflective, doleful, filled with hard-won wisdom, Bramwell's new songs (highlights include Time's Arrow and the title track) are spellbinding. DC Rae Morris Someone Out There Atlantic The Blackpool singer's second album cements her position as one of Britain's foremost exponents of dream-pop. Someone Out There was co-written with Fryars (aka Ben Garrett), and captures the dawning of a relationship between the pair sparked by working together.

It dips a bit in the middle (the album, that is, not the relationship), but the songs either side — including the explosive, pointillist Reborn, the lilting, libidinous Do It and Dip My Toe, the searingly emotional title track and Rose Garden — are sensational. DC Rhye Blood Caroline Taking five years to follow up a hyped debut may be dangerous, but this LA-based duo have never been in a hurry. Their intimate, seductive music suggests a languid pace of life, yet, thanks to live percussion and piano, Blood is more muscular than its predecessor, Woman. Feel Your Weight tiptoes into disco and funk, but feels as light as a feather; the fragile piano ballad Please drifts by on a soulful breeze. Close your eyes and Mike Milosh's airy, androgynous vocals could transport you to a beach or a bubble bath. LV Nils Frahm All Melody Erased Tapes "The music I hear inside me will never end up on a record," Frahm has said of this album; but if he can't quite realise his original sonic vision ("My drum machine would sound like an orchestra of breathy flutes"), the music that escapes while he tries is extraordinary. Here, his trademark modified piano meets collaborators such as the cellist Anne Müller, marimba player Sven Kacirek and trumpeter Robert Koch, whose mournful improvisation on Human Range echoes Jon Hassell's ambient work with Brian Eno. ME Guy One #1 Philophon Mali continues to hoover up the world-music column inches, so it's reassuring to discover that Ghana hasn't been left out of the picture. There's an enticing, collage-like quality to the work of this exuberant singer-songwriter, who wields a two-string lute, the kologo. The instrumentation and vocal harmonies here are ambitious at times, yet you can still get the feeling that you're listening to raw street recordings. CD John Oates Arkansas Thirty Tigers If the title song has a whiff of U2 bombast, the singer-guitarist who used to be one half of Hall & Oates does his credentials no harm at all in an amiably laid-back set that apparently started out as a tribute to the country bluesman Mississippi John Hurt. My Creole Belle and Spike Driver Blues receive gentle makeovers, and there's enough pedal-steel guitar to keep Nashville types happy. CD

The week’s essential new releases

ALBUM OF THE WEEK SIMPLE MINDS Walk Between Worlds BMGSome Simple Minds fans were traumatised by the band’s last album, in 2016. On Acoustic, the new-wave pioneers turned stadium rockers revisited their own classic tracks in the guise of Radio 2-friendly troubadours. Those bitter at the betrayal can now breathe easy, because, although it’s not immediately apparent, the influence of Acoustic has resulted in the band’s best album in decades.

Walk Between Worlds is fully plugged in, but devoid of the bombast that derailed Simple Minds during the late 1980s. In stripping back their big hits, they remembered what made them magical.

Charlie Burchill’s shimmering guitar takes centre stage and slinky synths hark back to the sticky dancefloors where kids used to copy Jim Kerr’s crouch. Yet their streamlined sound doesn’t date them. Lyrically, there’s lots of looking back, but the eight new songs here, which clock in at just over 40 minutes, sound mean and modern.

Recording in a Glasgow studio near the council estates where Kerr and Burchill grew up helped them blow out the bluster and get back to basics. Kerr’s whispery vocals still love a mystical lyric — the glorious opener Magic and the cinematic closer Sense of Discovery are songs steeped in faith — but the singer prefers getting groovy to preaching. Only the 6½-minute, strings-drenched Barrowland Star comes close to the overblown band of old, but even then Simple Minds sound as though they’re having a blast. Not bad for a group who just turned 40. LVBuy via ST websiteJOHN BRAMWELLLeave Alone the Empty SpacesAllPointsSix albums of surpassing brilliance failed to give I Am Kloot the success they clearly deserved, making the Manchester trio’s split in 2016 an understandable, if sad, decision. Their former singer’s solo debut under his own name, all winter hues, scuffed acoustica and careworn vocals, serves as yet another reminder of his ability to magic the simplest melodies and lyrics into musical gold. Reflective, doleful, filled with hard-won wisdom, Bramwell’s new songs (highlights include Time’s Arrow and the title track) are spellbinding. DCBuy via ST websiteRAE MORRISSomeone Out ThereAtlanticThe Blackpool singer’s second album cements her position as one of Britain’s foremost exponents of dream-pop. Someone Out There was co-written with Fryars (aka Ben Garrett), and captures the dawning of a relationship between the pair sparked by working together. It dips a bit in the middle (the album, that is, not the relationship), but the songs either side — including the explosive, pointillist Reborn, the lilting, libidinous Do It and Dip My Toe, the searingly emotional title track and Rose Garden — are sensational. DCBuy via ST websiteRHYEBloodCarolineTaking five years to follow up a hyped debut may be dangerous, but this LA-based duo have never been in a hurry. Their intimate, seductive music suggests a languid pace of life, yet, thanks to live percussion and piano, Blood is more muscular than its predecessor, Woman. Feel Your Weight tiptoes into disco and funk, but feels as light as a feather; the fragile piano ballad Please drifts by on a soulful breeze. Close your eyes and Mike Milosh’s airy, androgynous vocals could transport you to a beach or a bubble bath. LVBuy via ST websiteNILS FRAHMAll MelodyErased Tapes“The music I hear inside me will never end up on a record,” Frahm has said of this album; but if he can’t quite realise his original sonic vision (“My drum machine would sound like an orchestra of breathy flutes”), the music that escapes while he tries is extraordinary. Here, his trademark modified piano meets collaborators such as the cellist Anne Müller, marimba player Sven Kacirek and trumpeter Robert Koch, whose mournful improvisation on Human Range echoes Jon Hassell’s ambient work with Brian Eno. MEBuy via ST websiteGUY ONE#1PhilophonMali continues to hoover up the world-music column inches, so it’s reassuring to discover that Ghana hasn’t been left out of the picture. There’s an enticing, collage-like quality to the work of this exuberant singer-songwriter, who wields a two-string lute, the kologo. The instrumentation and vocal harmonies here are ambitious at times, yet you can still get the feeling that you’re listening to raw street recordings. CDBuy via ST websiteJOHN OATESArkansasThirty TigersIf the title song has a whiff of U2 bombast, the singer-guitarist who used to be one half of Hall & Oates does his credentials no harm at all in an amiably laid-back set that apparently started out as a tribute to the country bluesman Mississippi John Hurt. My Creole Belle and Spike Driver Blues receive gentle makeovers, and there’s enough pedal-steel guitar to keep Nashville types happy. CDBuy via ST websiteHC MCENTIRELionheartMergeThe Mount Moriah frontwoman’s first solo album comes with a clear manifesto — “to reclaim country music from the hetero-normative, homogeneous shtick of tailgates and six-packs and men chasing women”. Job done, I’d say. Whether McEntire is trying to reconcile her sexuality with her faith on A Lamb, A Dove (“It’s a fine line, and I’ll walk it with grace”), or with her Southern home on Quartz in the Valley (“This gravel road don’t need paving”), she delivers her message with a swagger and a sure ear for a hook. MEBuy via ST websiteGAME-CHANGER KATE BUSH The Kick InsideRhino Forty years old next month, this remains one of the most remarkable debuts in pop history. It was released when Bush was just 19, and many of its songs were written when she was even younger. The utterly alien Wuthering Heights was the first No 1 single written solely by a female artist (a shocking detail in itself). Her audacity, steely self-confidence, complete originality, operatic vocals and gothic lyrics paved the way for contemporary pioneers such as Björk, Lorde and St Vincent. DCBuy via ST websiteBREAKING ACT ANAISWho is she? The Franco-Senegalese singer grew up in Toulouse, Dublin, Dakar, Oakland and New York (where she attended Clive Davis’s Institute of Recorded Music alongside the producer Arca). Now based in London and signed to Virgin EMI, Anaïs is set to release her brilliant new EP, Before Zero, whose lead track, Nina, is an ode to one of her heroes, Nina Simone. A serpentine, Lauryn Hill-like vocal and melody are the bellows beneath a fiery lyric that takes as its inspiration Simone’s statement “I’ll tell you what freedom is to me: no fear”. A childhood dominated by displacement, confusion and trepidation have given way to expression and affirmation. They make for a bold and defiant sound.When’s the music available? Now, at soundcloud.com/anaiszero[http://www.soundcloud.com/anaiszero]. DCHOTTEST TRACKSRudimental feat Jess Glynne, Macklemore and Dan Caplen: These Days Glynne lends her formidable pipes to the east Londoners’ soon-unavoidable gospel-tinged new track.Listen via ST websiteJames Blake: If the Car Beside You Moves Ahead Undulating synths, pitch-shifting vocals that sound like a malfunctioning robot, a fug of claustrophobia hanging over it all: wow, this is weird.Tracey Thorn: QueenFrom her imminent album, this is a wistful “what if?” trip down memory lane, all glistening electro-pop and dolorous vocals. DCListen via ST website

Much-loved South African trumpeter who endured rehab and exile but created Afro-jazz and wrote the anti-apartheid anthem Soweto Blues

When Hugh Masekela was a boy, his grandmother put him to work as a lookout for the illegal “shebeen” she ran for black migrant workers in the Transvaal mining town that was their home. If he spotted a white policeman in the street, his instructions were to run into the bar and warn the drinkers that a raid was imminent while his grandmother hid the incriminating bottles.

It was an early lesson in the harsh realities of black life in South Africa, cruelly reinforced when one day he heard some Afrikaner children saying to their mother: “Look at that little monkey, dressed up like white folks.”

The slur was a seminal moment in his political education and the start of a journey that was to take him from township poverty into exile and international recognition as one of the world’s best-loved trumpet players and a musical ambassador for the anti-apartheid cause. “I was five years old and that was the day when I realised that the deal was bad,” he said.

The deal was to get a lot worse: by the time Masekela was nine, the National Party had come to power and the legal enforcement of white supremacy and racial segregation known as apartheid had begun.

Born Hugh Ramopolo Masekela in April 1939 in the coal-mining town of Witbank, to Thomas Selema Masekela, a health inspector, and Pauline Bowers, the daughter of a Scottish mining engineer, he was sent to St Peter’s Missionary School near Johannesburg, where his response to the injustices of apartheid was to become a junior hoodlum, modelling himself on the gangsters he saw in American films.

“I was one of the worst delinquents, always fighting with the teachers and going into town stealing,” he said.

A life of criminality and prison appeared his likely fate, but redemption came at the age of 14 when he saw the film Young Man With a Horn, in which Kirk Douglas played a hero based on the American jazz trumpeter Bix Beiderbecke. Fascinated by the music, Masekela approached the noted anti-apartheid campaigner Trevor Huddleston, his school chaplain, who was fighting a losing battle to keep his teenage charges out of trouble.

Masekela offered him a deal: “If I can get a trumpet, I promise I won’t bother you any more.” Huddleston raised enough money to buy him a battered second-hand instrument and found a Salvation Army trumpeter to teach him to play. The future archbishop recalled Masekela “sitting outside the school making hideous noises”. Yet his off-key notes inspired his school friends also to ask for instruments and the Huddleston Jazz Band was formed as South Africa’s first black youth orchestra.

Huddleston left South Africa in 1956, but he remembered his trumpet-playing pupil. Shortly after, Masekela was delighted to receive a package from America: a top-of-the-range instrument that Huddleston had persuaded Louis Armstrong to donate. There’s an extraordinary photograph of Masekela taken in the township of Sophiatown on the day the trumpet arrived, leaping for joy with the instrument waved triumphantly above his head.

He was on his way to becoming a professional musician and before he turned 20 he was playing with South Africa’s finest musicians in the Jazz Epistles and in the orchestra of the musical King Kong, which starred his girlfriend Miriam Makeba, and transferred to London’s West End. However, under the hated “pass laws”, life under apartheid was becoming increasingly painful and dangerous. Makeba went into exile in 1959 and, after narrowly escaping arrest, Masekela followed her a year later.

The final straw in his decision was the Sharpeville massacre in which 69 anti-pass-laws protesters were shot dead. The resulting state of emergency, which banned gatherings of more than ten people, extinguished the Jazz Epistles’ ability to make a living and two months later Masekela was on a flight to London. It would be another 30 years before he was to return home.

With Yehudi Menuhin and John Dankworth as his sponsors, he enrolled at the Guildhall School of Music in London, although he never took up his place. With the support of the popular American singer Harry Belafonte, he opted instead for the Manhattan School of Music in New York, where Makeba was living. They married in 1964 and their volatile union ended in divorce two years later, although they remained lifelong friends and comrades in arms.

Masekela’s introduction to New York was intoxicating. On his first evening he managed to meet most of the city’s jazz aristocracy, visiting a club to see Thelonious Monk and Dizzy Gillespie, who then took him to another nightspot to hear Charles Mingus and Max Roach. To finish off the night he stopped off at the Half Note, where John Coltrane was performing. He studied classical trumpet in New York for four years, later noting that “I knew more than most of the teachers, but I learnt classical music and composition and orchestration”. He absorbed even more outside the classroom by throwing himself into the jazz scene, where his ability to imitate all of the great horn men impressed, until Miles Davis sagely advised him to change his style.

“ ‘You’re just going to be a statistic if you play jazz,’ ” Masekela recalled him saying. “ ‘But if you put in some of the stuff you remember from Africa, you’ll be different from everybody.’ ”

The result was a glorious fusion of American jazz and lilting township rhythms, which reached its commercial apogee on Grazing in the Grass, which topped the American charts in 1968. The record sold four million copies and became part of the soundtrack of a long hot summer of civil rights protests in the wake of the assassination of Martin Luther King.

By then Masekela had moved to California, where he was embraced by hippies protesting against the Vietnam War and by the black power movement. He performed at the Monterey pop festival on the same bill as Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin and the Who, and played the trumpet on the Byrds’ hit So You Want to Be a Rock’n’Roll Star.

His growing politicisation led him to help to found the South African Student Association to assist black scholars to escape their home country to study abroad, and he reacted furiously when the US State Department asked him to join a government sponsored trip to Africa, including a visit to apartheid South Africa.

“You’ve got a f***ing nerve asking me to visit my own country under your auspices,” he said.

He caused further headlines when he married Chris Calloway, the daughter of the jazz singer Cab Calloway, and she quit the Broadway cast of Hello Dolly! to join him in California. The out-of-court settlement for her breach of contract cost him $50,000. It was a high price to pay, given that the marriage lasted only three months, although he later said that the amount of alcohol and drug abuse involved had made it feel like 30 years.

His son, Selema Masekela, an American television sports presenter, was born in 1971 to a Haitian mother, Jessie La Pierre. A daughter, Pula Twala, who helped to manage his later career, was born in 1979.

He was married for a third time, to Jabu Mbatha, in 1981. They divorced in the 1990s after he had returned to South Africa and he is survived by his fourth wife, Elinam Cofie, whom he had met in her native Ghana two decades before their marriage in 1999.

Shortly after divorcing Calloway, Masekela’s Malibu house was raided for drugs. He escaped a prison sentence, but was given two years’ probation. By his own admission, he struggled to deal with the success that Grazing in the Grass had brought. “I became obsessed with the pleasures of the flesh, which only led to sleepless nights, mind-boggling immorality, dishonesty, broken hearts and hungover mornings,” he wrote in his highly readable but self-flagellating autobiography in 2004.

By then he had been clean and sober for seven years, after finally entering a rehabilitation clinic in 1997. “The book was an opportunity to apologise to the people whose heads I stepped on during my way up and through my madness,” he said.

The pain of exile, though, resulted in some wonderfully unique music. Songs such as Soweto Blues and Stimela, which recounted the hardship of black migrant workers in South Africa’s coal mines, became memorable anti-apartheid anthems.

Yet although his music spoke movingly of the struggles and sorrows of his people, at the same time it was imbued with a resilient joy and defiant passion for his country.

By the 1970s he was pining to return to the continent of his birth. He spent time in Guinea, Nigeria, Ghana and Liberia, and although the South African government would not let him return home, in 1980 he and Makeba played to vast audiences in Lesotho.

He moved to Botswana, where he founded a music school, set up a mobile studio and formed a new band. His stay came to an abrupt end when his neighbours, the prominent ANC supporters George and Lindi Phahle, were assassinated by a South African hit squad. Fearing for his own life, Masekela fled to London, where he appeared at anti-apartheid rallies and recorded 1987’s Bring Him Back Home, a joyous praise song to Nelson Mandela that became another ANC anthem.

Yet he provoked the anger of the ANC when, together with Makeba and the South African vocal group Ladysmith Black Mambazo, he joined Paul Simon on his Graceland tour. Simon was accused of breaking the UN’s cultural boycott by recording in South Africa and when the tour reached the Royal Albert Hall in London, the concert was picketed. “It’s our music and our country,” Masekela said. “Who are these people to tell us how we should get together?”

When Mandela was released from prison in 1990, Masekela’s sister Barbara became his chief of staff, and Masekela was finally able to return home. For a while he was frustrated by the corruption he saw around him and impatient that the pace of change in the new “rainbow nation” was not fast enough. However, he emerged from rehab in the late 1990s a changed man.

Now a benign and avuncular elder statesman of the post-apartheid era and universally known as Bra’ Hugh, he spent much of his time and energy mentoring younger South African artists, even while battling the cancer that was first diagnosed in 2008. “I’ve had a very rich life,” he said. “The best thing I can do now is to encourage a new generation of talented people to come through.”Hugh Masekela, jazz trumpeter, was born on April 4, 1939. He died from cancer on January 23, 2018, aged 78

Australia won by three wickets with 13 overs to spare chasing 196, as Travis Head — opening instead of the injured Aaron Finch — made 96 on his home ground to take a first victory in a series already decided in England's favour. But, boy, they made awfully hard work of it.

It was much more of a contest than ever seemed possible when England were eight for five in the day's seventh over. That they recovered was down to Chris Woakes, who made 78 so that humiliation was avoided, but their early collapse was eerily reminiscent of their slipping to 20 for six against South Africa at Lord's last year. That was a dead-rubber match too and the ball moved around, as it did here.

There has been rampant praise for England's fearlessness with the bat, so perhaps we should not jump too quickly to criticise them when an early calamity such as this arises, but it has to be said that there will be times when circumstances and conditions have to be more judiciously judged and acted upon than they were here.

It had been a crucial toss to win for Australia. There had been some unexpected rain before play so the pitch sweated under the covers, and with some live grass already on the pitch to quicken it up, it made for an ideal mix for the fast bowlers.

The ball really zipped around. Josh Hazlewood and Pat Cummins are topclass operators and they naturally seized this opportunity.

Once Jason Roy had gone second ball without scoring, there were ducks everywhere, four in all. Roy went driving at Hazlewood, with Steve Smith taking a good catch at backward point.

Alex Hales went next, bowled off his pad by Cummins, the classic way to dismiss him, running the ball back into him as he adopts his natural shape of stroke towards extra cover. Jonny Bairstow went eight balls without a run before he drove at his ninth, persuaded by Hazlewood's wide position on the crease that the ball might be angled in, when in fact it held its line.

Not even Joe Root could salvage such a situation. On his seventh ball he was surprised by a Cummins bouncer and aimed an indeterminate hook shot at it with head ducked. Once he lifted his head, he knew he was going to be caught at fine leg by Hazlewood. England were six for four in the sixth over.

Soon it was that horrific score of eight for five in the seventh, but for that Jos Buttler can be spared censure. The ball from Hazlewood that dismissed him was an absolute beauty.

It moved only a fraction, but often that is all that it requires. It duly found the edge of Buttler's bat as he tried to defend, and we truly did wonder whether England would reach 35, the lowest total in a one-day international, let alone their own lowest, 86 against these opponents, at Old Trafford in 2001.

Eoin Morgan made 33 before hooking at Cummins, gloving down the leg side. England were 61 for six. Step forward Woakes. Did this scenario worry him? Did it heck. Soon he was easing Adam Zampa's leg spin over extra cover for four with delicious ease. In the same over he hit Zampa over long on for six. Next he hoisted Mitchell Marsh high over deep square leg for six.

Before you knew it he had passed 50, picking Hazlewood up over the leg side for four. It had taken 62 balls, with four fours and those two sixes. It seemed so easy, in complete contrast to the early struggles when a single run appeared a triumph.

Moeen Ali had given Andrew Tye his first ODI wicket but Woakes just kept batting, always positive, always confident. He hit three more sixes before departing for 78 when deceived by one of Tye's very clever slower balls. It had been some innings, though. And he is some No 8 to have. He is in the batting form of his life.

Tom Curran, summoned in place of the stricken Liam Plunkett, played a useful hand, making 35 from as many balls, even hitting Tye for six. Tye finished with three wickets, but it was Hazlewood and Cummins who had done the real damage.

Hazlewood ended with figures of 10-0-39-3 and the brilliant Cummins with 10-2-24-4. Unsurprisingly, he was named man of the match. But thank goodness the rested Mitchell Starc wasn't playing because, if one is being critical of Smith's captaincy, he did let England off the hook a little, especially when bowling Head early.

David Warner went first in reply, edging Woakes behind, before Cameron White was leg-before to Tom Curran. It was plumb and he left with everyone still at a loss as to why he had been recalled. He has been a good cricketer, but he is 34 now. It has been an odd selection.

Smith fell to a brilliant catch at slip by Root as he attempted a cut to Adil Rashid. It has not been a good series for him. He looks shattered. All those Ashes runs have taken their toll.

Mitchell Marsh hit some meaty blows in making 32 from 35 balls but he drilled one back at Rashid and the leg spinner somehow managed to cling on. Marcus Stoinis played a rather skittish innings, before skying Rashid to cover.

Rashid finished with three for 49 from his ten overs, having bowled excellently — he is in his element when merely hunting wickets — with Morgan's field placings aiding him. Indeed England, with few runs to play with, fought tenaciously throughout.

Head pulled Mark Wood to mid-on just four short of his second ODI century, and then Cummins was needlessly run out, but Tim Paine and Tye just about saw Australia over the line.

It was only their second win in 12 ODIs. And you could see why. They seemed almost scared to win.

A disastrous situation salvaged by the No 8 0-1 Jason Roy 4-3 Jonny Bairstow 4-3 Jonny Bairstow 8-5 Jos Buttler 4-2 Alex Hales 6-4 Joe Root

adelaide scoreboard England (balls) J J Roy c Smith b Hazlewood........0 (2) J M Bairstow c Paine b Hazlewood........0 (9) A D Hales b Cummins.........................3 (11) J E Root c Hazlewood b Cummins..........0 (7) *E J G Morgan c Paine b Cummins.........33 (61) †J C Buttler c Paine b Hazlewood.......0 (2) M M Ali c Head b Tye.......................33 (50) C R Woakes c sub b Tye.................78 (82) A U Rashid c Paine b Cummins.......7 (8) T K Curran c Marsh b Tye..............35 (35) M A Wood not out................................2 (2) Extras (b 1, w 4)......................................5 Total (44.5 overs)........................ 196 Fall of wickets: 1-0, 2-4, 3-4, 4-6, 5-8, 6-61, 7-112, 8-120, 9-180. Bowling: Hazlewood 10-0-39-3; Cummins 10-2-24-4; Marsh 5-1-24-0; Tye 7.5-0-33-3; Head 2-0-9-0; Zampa 7-0-42-0; Stoinis 3-0-24-0. Australia (balls) D A Warner c Buttler b Woakes..........13 (11) T M Head c Morgan b Wood......96 (107) C L White lbw b Curran...................3 (7) *S P D Smith c Root b Rashid.......4 (16) M R Marsh c & b Rashid...............32 (30) M P Stoinis c Roy b Rashid..........14 (11) †T D Paine not out...........................25 (31) P J Cummins run out........................3 (9) A J Tye not out.....................................3 (1) Extras (w 3, nb 1).................................4 Total (7 wkts, 37 overs)............197 A Zampa and J R Hazlewood did not bat. Fall of wickets: 1-25, 2-48, 3-70, 4-112, 5-136, 6-180, 7-185. Bowling: Woakes 7-0-36-1; Wood 9-0-58-1; Curran 2-1-10-1; Ali 8-0-41-0; Rashid 10-0-49-3; Root 1-0-3-0. Umpires: K Dharmasena (Sri Lanka) and S Nogajski (Australia). Series details: First ODI: England won by five wickets (Melbourne). Second: England won by four wickets (Brisbane). Third: England won by 16 runs (Sydney). Fifth: Tomorrow (Perth Stadium).

Shocking starts Canada v Holland, 2013 75, ended on 67 all out England v Australia, 201718 85, 196 Papua New Guinea v Scotland, 201718 105, 147 Pakistan v West Indies, 199293 125, 71 Canada v Sri Lanka, 200203 125, 36 Pakistan v West Indies, 199293 145, 71 India v Sri Lanka, 201718 165, 112 India v Zimbabwe, 1983 175, 2668 Kenya v Australia, 2002 175, 84 Pakistan v New Zealand, 2003 175, Pakistan v South Africa, 2000 185, 153 Zimbabwe v Sri Lanka, 2004 195, 35 Australia v South Africa, 200809 195, 131 West Indies v Australia, 201213 195, 70 England v South Africa, 2017 205, 153 Sri Lanka v Pakistan, 201718 205, 103 England were the 16th team to be 20 for ive or worse in the irst innings of a one-day international

879 Runs that Woakes has scored at No 8 in ODIs, seventh in the all-time list. He also has the highest score as a No 8 of 95*

31.39 His average at No 8 in ODIs. Only L Klusener (58.66), C Harris (39.92) and J Faulkner (31.61) have better (min. 20 innings)

Marissa and Hannah Brandt, who will represent Korea and the United States at next month's Winter Olympics, tell James Gheerbrant their story

One afternoon in 1993, Greg and Robin Brandt, a couple from suburban Minnesota, got in the car and made the half-hour journey to Minneapolis-Saint Paul International Airport. After many years of trying unsuccessfully to conceive, the Brandts had adopted a young girl from South Korea and, rather than travel to Seoul to pick her up, had decided to have her flown with a chaperone to begin her new life in the American Midwest.

They were accompanied by a joyous platoon of friends and family — Greg still has the whole thing on video — and, these being the days before 9/11 and its legacy of hypervigilance, the entire party was able to process as far as the gate, to witness the moment when the chaperone entered the terminal, carrying Marissa, the little girl that Greg and Robin had yearned for, into their lives. There was, however, a twist in the story. Robin was three months pregnant.

Growing up, Marissa and Hannah — sisters born within 11 months of each other in maternity wards half a world apart — were different, but inseparable. "Being that close together [in age], people told us, 'They're going to be so competitive, be careful,' and it couldn't have been more different — they were so close, such good friends and so happy for each other all the time," Greg remembers.

But while Hannah enjoyed playing baseball in the street with the neighbourhood boys, Marissa preferred rollerblading and dancing. While Marissa loved figure-skating lessons, Hannah wasn't very good at it. But when Marissa joined her younger sibling's ice-hockey team, their distinct personalities found a common home: Marissa's balletic grace meshed with Hannah's barnstorming competitiveness.

Now they are going to the Winter Olympics, but while Hannah will be representing the Stars and Stripes, Marissa will be competing under the flag of her birth country, with its central redand-blue taeguk that symbolises yin and yang, two opposite halves of a united whole. Different, but inseparable.

It is an extraordinary story, though not entirely unprecedented in an increasingly interconnected world. The brothers Granit and Taulant Xhaka represented different countries (Switzerland and Albania) at Euro 2016.

Likewise, the runners Bernard and Viola Lagat, of the United States and Kenya, at the 2016 Olympics. But at a historical moment of heightened tension between the US and the Korean peninsula, the Brandts' story has an added poignancy. It is a story about identity, about belonging, about nature and nurture.

As a child, Marissa kept a lid shut tight on her Korean heritage. "I didn't want to stand out at all: I didn't want to look different, I didn't want to stick out, I just wanted to look like my sister and fit in as much as possible," she recalls.

When Greg and Robin sent the sisters to Korean culture camp during the school holidays, it was Hannah who enjoyed it. "I loved eating their food, learning about the language, and the taekwondo and the Korean dance," she remembers. Her sister was less enthused.

"I really didn't like going to it, just because I was really shy about being Korean," Marissa says. "Going to Korean culture camp forced me to learn about my roots and my heritage, and that kind of made me feel uncomfortable, and I wasn't really ready to embrace that."

It would be too clichéd to suggest that ice hockey provided an escape, that Marissa relished the anonymity behind the facemask. The reality is that she simply wanted to play with her sister. "My sister was very tomboyish," she says. "I was very girly-girl, so I really enjoyed figure skating, because I could dress up and it was fun. But I chose hockey, because I wanted to be with Hannah."

But for Hannah the hockey rink represented something else as well: the locus of a dream. "I remember watching [the Winter Olympics on TV]," she says. "I always had the dream of going to the Olympics."

"Hannah would ask, 'How will they find me to play in the Olympics?' when she was young," Greg remembers. "We didn't really know, but we would tell her, 'There are programmes, they'll find you.' " And they did. At 14 Hannah was invited to USA Hockey's national development camp in Lake Placid, New York. She impressed and kept being asked back. For Marissa, the invitations were less frequent. At 18, Hannah was in the senior USA squad for the 2012 world championships and had a scholarship to the University of Minnesota, a college ice hockey powerhouse. Marissa could not be assured of playing significant minutes at Minnesota, so accepted a place at Gustavus Adolphus, a small school in the third division of college hockey.

In 2014, however, Hannah's meteoric rise suddenly hit a skid when she was cut from the American squad just before the Sochi Winter Olympics. "We picked her up at the airport, she was pretty stoic, but when she got home and actually saw Marissa and talked to her, that was when she started to cry and you could tell how badly she felt about it," Greg remembers. "That's the sisterly bond."

While Hannah gathered herself for the tribulations of another Olympic cycle, Marissa thought her days of competitive sport were over. But ice hockey is a game of improbable ricochets and whiplash changes of direction, and she was about to receive a phone call that would change her life.

Becca Baker, the South Korea goalkeeping coach, happened to coach one of the colleges in Marissa's division. She asked Marissa if she wanted to fly to Korea to try out for the team.

Marissa had not been back to South Korea since leaving the children's home at four months old. "I was really terrified," she remembers. "I don't speak the language and I didn't know anybody here." Arrangements were so dauntingly ad hoc that, as she wheeled her luggage nervously through the arrivals hall at Incheon airport, she didn't even know who was supposed to be picking her up.

South Korea is a relatively minor ice hockey nation. Ranked 22nd in the world, they owe their spot in Pyeongchang to their host-nation status. A player of Marissa's calibre was too good to pass up. She soon became a mainstay of the team, flying back and forth between Minnesota and Seoul; each sweat-soaked match in the redwhite-and-blue jersey of her homeland dissolving a little more of the reticence that she felt towards her blood heritage.

"It has definitely been a journey of selfdiscovery, and really being comfortable with who I am," she says. "In April 2017, we played in the world championships here. We won gold, so we were skating along the ice and the national anthem was playing, and I remember in that specific moment thinking to myself I was very proud to be Korean ... I started to become OK with myself and this side of me."

In Pyeongchang, she will wear her birth name, Park Yoon-jung, on the back of her jersey. "It's very special for me to be able to wear my Korean name," she explains. "I could choose between that or Brandt, and I chose my Korean name. It was the name my birth mother gave me, and it was really my one connection to Korea — it was the only tie that I knew I had there."

Marissa is reluctant to discuss the politicallymotivated integration of North Korean players into the team — 12 players have been added to South Korea's original 23-strong squad, with the stipulation that at least three must be selected in the match-day squad — but it is clear that she has forged a strong bond with her South Korean team-mates.

On September 23, the South Korean squad visited Minnesota for a training camp, and on their day off, the Brandts hosted them in their home city of Vadnais Heights, where neighbours were waiting, waving South Korean flags. Robin cooked chicken breast and spaghetti, and they all danced to K-pop in the basement.

"They seem to really get along with Marissa and look up to her as a person," Hannah says. "It makes me super-proud of my sister, the way she's gone over there and not just tried to get through the days, but made a difference on that team and been a great leader for them."

In Vadnais Heights, September 23 has now been declared Marissa and Hannah Brandt Day. The mayoral proclamation read: "Hannah and Marissa Brandt, through their support and love for each other, are great role models for young girls around the world." And perhaps there is something fitting given that, after Hannah's Sochi disappointment, they have reached the summit of their sport together. Different teams, different countries, but still inseparable.

14 days to Winter Olympics

'It's very special for me to wear my Korean name - it was the only tie that I knew I had there'

This racism-obsessed polemic is tiresome and clichéd, says Michael Henderson

Brit(ish) On Race, Identity and Belonging by Afua Hirsch Jonathan Cape 384pp; £16.99 'The struggle of my life has been to come to terms with my identity," writes Afua Hirsch, adding that it was a struggle "that chose me". Nor is that struggle over, because she has taken it upon herself to enlist others in her quest to redefine what it means to be black and British, and will not cease from mental fight until she has built her very own Jerusalem in a land she appears neither to like nor understand.

At first sight the 36-year-old author of this polemic-cum-memoir seems to have done well. Brought up in Wimbledon, the well-spoken daughter of an English father and a mother from Ghana, she attended the kind of private schools that provided an ideal preparation for Oxford University. After that she was called to the Bar and, despite having no apparent journalistic experience other than a spot of teenage scribbling, has subsequently worked as a reporter for newspapers and television. But oh, that struggle!

Wimbledon is of course famous for its tennis tournament, which attracts the world to its herbaceous borders every summer. But for this Miss Valiant for Truth it is "like a microcosm of how Britain sees itself — polite, wholesome, home to what we imagine to be 'British culture' — an obsession with the weather, picnics and deckchairs, umbrella in hand, eating strawberries and cream, cheering the underdog, forming endless orderly queues". So that's what being British means!

Oxford, sadly, proved no more agreeable than "pampered, preened" Wimbledon, home of "'the genteel sport', meant for the upper-class white elite". She endured "quiet suffering despair" amid the dreaming spires, although she did act "as a kind of cultural interpreter" for black American students who were perplexed by "the white supremacist underpinnings" of the university. There are pages and pages of this stuff — the "intimidating" medieval hall at Lincoln's Inn, with its "grand paintings of dead white men" and "the Englishness of its protocol". Yet she never adequately defines or quantifies this "supremacism". It is something to be taken on trust. Heritage, identity, community: the clichés are as plentiful as conkers in autumn, with the choicest chestnut being "identity angst". She writes of narratives and value systems, and all the other woolly words and phrases that people cling on to for dear life when they enter the thickets of the modern liberal forest.

Although, as a woman of mixed race, she hates misrepresentation, she is quite happy to misrepresent others, which means she sees privilege, prejudice and snobbery everywhere. The British establishment has "perfected" vilification of the working classes. No, it hasn't. "White supremacy is ever present in British society." No, it isn't. "This country of mine has never allowed me to feel that it is where I belong." But where does she belong? "Africa was born in me," she declares, yet when she goes there, fresh out of Oxford, "'to leave being British", she finds that Senegal fails to supply the necessary affirmation, and it's back to Blighty. "I had gone to Senegal to find the place where my identity could become whole." Instead she realised, "I am the eternal outsider." Sniff, sniff.

But she bravely overcomes her misery, this privately educated Oxford graduate for whom doors open at the sound of her footsteps, to work in the street of shame. There is a decent book to be written about race and identity in modern Britain, but this isn't the one. The author is repetitive — she has an obsession with "weed" — and her style is dull. Although she has read a few books she appears to have no real hinterland, as a list of her favourite songs underlines. The African parts are convincing only in the way they amplify what Conor Cruise O'Brien, observing some of the less intelligent Irish-Americans at play in the Republic of Ireland, called "the reopening of the wounds tour".

She may despair of British culture, and denounce "western civilisation" as a heresy, but as those ranks of dead white men included Milton and Newton, Beethoven and Rembrandt, even she may acknowledge there is something to be said for the individual voice and national traditions. Whether she likes it or not, the culture of Europe, social and political, has been forged over centuries by men who are white and dead.

Had she travelled more widely around Europe this self-obsessed woman, so anxious for certainty, would soon have learnt that "the uniquely British problem we have with race and identity" is nonsense. Race and identity will always be matters for debate so long as human beings live side by side, but her contribution to the conversation, with the constant references to colonialism and imperialism, supplies more heat than light.

When she writes of "the horrifying and indiscriminate wave of violence and abuse that swept the country" after the referendum of June 2016 she enters the realm of fantasy. The British have never given succour to politicians of the far right, or the far left, which makes this country unusual in European history. We are not perfect people, and there are aspects of our national story that are shaming, but we have done far more good than bad.

Hirsch will not, one suspects, find much happiness in her lifelong struggle, even if that frightful bounder Nelson is toppled from his column, as she hopes he will be. Her nose is too close to the frame for her to see the whole picture. If only she could take a step back, she would surely admire the world a bit more. With all its imperfections, and prejudice is one of them, it's a better place than she thinks.

She hopes that frightful bounder Nelson will be toppled from his column

The Ukip leader, a semi-comic, semi-tragic figure after leaving his wife for a racist girlfriend, tells Andrew Billen he just wants to do the right thing

Henry Bolton with Jo Marney. He said that since a childhood tragedy he had "felt this sort of need to try and protect people" In Henry Bolton's ideal world — which is manifestly some light years from the one in which the beleaguered, love-crossed leader of Ukip actually lives — this interview would be about fishing quotas.

It is how, at least, it starts. We are in the not-as-grand-as-it-sounds Captain's Table restaurant at Folkestone quay, close to where the newly reborn bachelor is renting a flat. Mr Bolton sits to the left of me as Terry Noakes of the local fishermen's association explains how EU quotas have brought low his livelihood. Mr Noakes sort of, almost, says that Mr Bolton, for all his embarrassing romantic travails, remains the man to ensure a better tomorrow on our high seas. After this initial briefing, cunningly arranged to demonstrate that Britain needs Mr Bolton to save Brexit from Bino (Brexit In Name Only), we leave the seaman for the Ship pub. As I feel is expected, I buy Mr Bolton a pint of London Pride and local cod and chips. It's good but he eats very little of it. He is 54, svelte and perfectly groomed, his hair brushed left from a widening parting. His checked shirt is fastened by a thin, claret-coloured tie as tightly done up as an army cadet's. Over them, he wears a zip-necked, sea-worthy navy jersey. He looks me in the eye, and his eyes look sad.

On Sunday Ukip's national executive unanimously passed a no-confidence motion in him. He refused to resign, thereby leaving his fate to an extraordinary general meeting on February 17. He was in the mire because over Christmas he had left his wife and two small daughters and within days taken up with a recently met 25-year-old model and Ukipper called Jo Marney. Ms Marney, it was soon discovered, had greeted Prince Harry's engagement with online messages in which she used the n-word and described black people as "ugly". In a eugenicist flourish, she feared Meghan Markle's "seed" would "taint" the royal family.

He denounced the sentiments but merely downgraded their relationship from carnal to close. From a distance, it might look as if he, by remaining Ukip leader and Ms Marney's bf, is having his crumpet and eating it. Up close, it is more that he is politically impotent and minus a sex life.

"I mean, I need none of this," he says. "There is nothing whatsoever that is convenient or advantageous to me personally in staying on. Nothing. Absolutely nothing."

Not even the preservation of his pride? "That's getting quite a knocking at the moment. My private life is in turmoil and I'm focused on the party. So, it's a sacrifice. Most people would want to step out of it and deal with the home issues."

Why doesn't he? "Because I believe this is actually something more important."

Than his happiness? "Than me and my happiness."

Which he said had been greater than for years since meeting Ms Marney? "And now it's just been slapped away. You know, if I had time to dwell on it I'd probably feel a bit bitter about it."

Here Gawain Towler, the Ukip PR who is next to us, makes winding up and shoving gestures, as if to move his leader back on message.

"But the thing is, the focus has got to be on sorting the party out to provide the platform it needs. If I fail, I want to be able to at least tell myself, 'I gave it my best shot.' But, yes, personally, financially, career-wise ..." Financially? "Yes, I'm skint." Like the romance, his leader's stipend is on hold pending the extraordinary general meeting.

"The military have an expression: selection and maintenance of the aim. And the aim is independence from the European Union and making sure that we come out of the European Union on a trajectory that will take us to a prosperous, secure and optimistic future."

Before he says all this, while better remembering his brief, he maintains that Ms Marney was an excuse used by his enemies on the national executive to get rid of him. This shower has already led Ukip into debt. A leadership election will be costly, make the party even less credible than Mr Bolton has, and threaten disaster in the local elections, just when the Brexit screw needs to be tightened on the government.

But what I want to know is how he can still love a racist. "I think on that, all I'm going to say is that a lot of young people say things on social media these days that don't necessarily — which is strange for our generation — reflect what they think."

Tweeting as a performance art? "Correct."

Still, he must have been horrified? "I was stunned but I've discussed that and I'd really rather not go into it."

His relationship with Jo Marney (he always calls her that, perhaps avoiding the Bill Clinton "Miss Lewinsky" kind of thing) will be sorted out after his leadership is, but why not sort it now by ending it? "Because we're humans and I like to think that I do the right thing, not necessarily the thing that everybody expects me to do, but the right thing. And I don't yet know what the right thing is."

Ms Marney has been traduced — she was never a topless model, for instance — and is now being hounded by the media waving chequebooks. "I cannot describe how utterly devastated she and her family have been — as have my wife and so on — by this whole thing."

No, I say, his wife was upset because he walked out. "Yes, absolutely, but, you know, one could — and I'm not going to — trawl over the last 12 years of my relationship with my wife ..." There'd be fault on both sides? "I think everybody would acknowledge that in any relationship there are good things and bad things on both sides."

It just does not look good: three marriages kaput. For almost two minutes, he itemises his highly impressive and brave career in the police, the army, the Territorial Army and as a special government adviser in Kosovo, Albania, Afghanistan, Libya and Ukraine.

"And then I went to the leadership of Ukip." We laugh.

"What I'm saying is: yes, there might be some flaws in my character. I'm human. But you know what? None of the above is conducive to sustaining a relationship."

Better to have stayed single? "Correct. But I'm also a man. I'm also a human and I want relationships. I want company. I like women."

And they like him? "Well that's for them to answer, isn't it? I mean, one of my marriages broke up as a direct result of the fact that I'd been basically embedded in warfare for several years — albeit I'd say fairly limited warfare, just Balkan conflicts and so on."As well as a grown-up daughter from his first marriage, he has two with his Russian wife of 11 years, Tatiana. "I spoke to them last night. One is just 20 months and the other is four and I miss them terribly. They're the light of my life. I could almost get choked up over that."

I wish he would go back to them. "Well, maybe I shall at some point."

Is Ms Marney managing? "Just.

Only just. I've been — as has her mother — seriously concerned for her welfare at certain points."

That she might harm herself? "Absolutely." Poor girl! Silly girl!

"Yes, absolutely, and she's admitted it. It was absolutely stupid and unnecessary. But I feel real anger over this because we know, and we've got proof of this, that the whole intention of some within the party has been to attack her in order to question my judgment. They have been prepared to destroy that young woman's life."

Perhaps the best thing for her would be to leave? Did he ring her last night? "Yes. We speak most days on the phone. If I were to do that, I'm not quite sure what the consequences for her would be." I suppose no one considers that she might actually love him? "Exactly. Everybody assumes that she's just a quick leg-over or something. There are real feelings there on both sides."

So certain of his views on Europe — hardened if not formed while working for the EU and witnessing its "appalling response" to the Ukrainian and immigration crises — he could not, I conclude, be more unsure in his private life. I turn my recorder off, but he starts talking again. I can write about it if I like.

He was born Kenya ("Keenya," he pronounces it) but the family moved to Devon. One day, when he was five and his younger brother was two and a half, they were playing outside. "He wandered off around the corner and there was an ornamental pond and he climbed over the low wall and that was that. I mean, I didn't see that, but that's what happened. My first vivid memory is of my mother carrying him in her arms, having found him. He was in a pond. And then I recall the efforts to revive him.

"I think ever since I've felt this sort of need — hence the army, hence the police, hence everything, it sounds a rather sort of pretentious thing to say — to try and protect people, do the right thing by them, because I didn't then. Because I let him wander off. I mean, I was five years old, what did I know? But I just never again want to feel that out of self-interest I've made a decision that caused harm."

The self-interested thing, in summary, would be to stay with Ms Marney, whom he clearly loves, and leave the party, which may soon turn out not to love him. "Exactly but it's not where I am. And," he says, this semi-comic, semi-tragic hero, "I don't really understand that myself."

Curriculum vitae Born March 2, 1963, Kenya.

Education Graduated from Sandhurst as best cadet; City & Guilds leadership and management degree. Career British Army from 1979-90 then an officer with Thames Valley police. Advised Albania's deputy prime minister during Nato campaign in Balkans. Border management consultant for the EU in 2003. Stood as a Lib Dem in Runnydede & Weybridge in 2005. Appointed OBE for leading government's stabilisation unit in Afghanistan. Joined Ukip in 2014.

Family Divorced twice and recently separated from his third wife, Tatiana. Three children.

Quick fire Model girlfriend or model citizen? Both Boxers or briefs? Briefs Presidents Club or Soho House? Neither and there aren't any clubs in Folkestone I can think of Meghan or Kate? Oh, that's unfair, isn't it? Both Danish pastry or a Russian salad? Given that I had Danish and Russian wives? Russian salad.

Hard or soft-boiled? Soft if we're talking about eggs Beret or helmet? Beret. Well, a military one Nigel Farage or Nigella Lawson? Nigel Farage Page 3 or back page? Back page Donald Tusk or Donald Trump? Donald Trump. He's more entertaining Eurovision or Eurotrash? They're the same thing Tinder or Match.com? Neither Britannia or McMafia, left? Are they TV programmes? Land Rover or Lamborghini? Land Rover

safariluxx A South African design duo are behind the new-look safari resorts that eschew the dark wood and khaki of old for something a little bolder

You love Africa and you love safaris, but do you sometimes feel that lodges are a bit ... boring? Too much khaki and canvas, yet another animal skin, endless faux-colonial steamer trunks and miles of dark wood? Not any more. Meet Lesley Carstens and Silvio Rech, leading the charge for a bold breed of lodge designers. Think of any cool new lodge of the past decade and the chances are that this architect/design duo, based in Johannesburg, are the brains behind it. North Island in the Seychelles, Ngorongoro Crater Lodge in Tanzania, Angama Mara in Kenya — all of those and, most recently, King Lewanika in Zambia and Miavana in Madagascar. Each is different, but they have one thing in common — they've dumped the "traditional" safari feel in favour of a bright, stylish and authentic look.

Take Miavana. There's no leather, no khaki and no pith helmets. Instead there's bone-white sandstone and pale wood. There are also bright pops of colour, cool dip-dyed turquoise fabrics and vast ocean-facing terraces big enough to do cartwheels on.

"There's definitely been a shift," Rech tells me. "European and American designers used to look east to Bali to get that 'zen' look. Now, though, they're looking south. New African art, African design — it has all shifted the meridian from east-west to north-south."

He's right. Many of the most creative launches of the past year cropped up in Africa — the Nicholas Plewman-designed Bisate Lodge in Rwanda, for example, or Thomas Hetherwick's Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa in Cape Town.

"It's all about working with a local design philosophy," Rech says. Each project — and they only take on one at a time — has an individual feel that works with its surroundings. They use local labour as well as local, natural building materials and local knowledge.

"When we started we didn't have a proper construction company, so we went to nearby villages, met with the chief, had a big ndaba [discussion] around the fire and he'd say, 'That guy is a carpenter, this guy can weave grass, that guy can work with metal.' We'd cobble together a team of craftsmen and the end product was innovative."

Spending as much time as possible on site is key. "It really helps if you live on site," Rech says. They spent two and a half years living on North Island. "We slept in a rubber duck [a dinghy], we had a baby there ... It's like method acting — we lived the part every day."

What's next? A project with a well-known, minimalist hotel brand and a gorilla lodge in the Democratic Republic of Congo. At the root of each is what Rech calls the "genius loci". Or, as he puts it: "When people go to a place they want to differentiate it from the last place they were at. We'd like people to enter into a different world."

Jihadis fighting with Somalia’s al-Shabaab are defecting in record numbers and providing valuable information to help the government in its battle against the entrenched terror group, security sources claim.

A total of 45 mid and high-level jihadis, including commanders, the former head of intelligence and a major regional warlord, have crossed to the government's side, 22 of them in the last year.

In return for the promise of a new life, they provide inside information on the group’s military tactics and its leaders and seek to persuade others to switch sides, the Somali authorities said.

They claim the initiative could prove crucial in turning the tide against an insurgent group that despite inferior numbers has resisted the combined attempts of an African Union force, western advisers and the Somali National Army to stamp it out over the past ten years.

Al-Shabaab is backed by al-Qaeda and seeks to overthrow the Somali government and impose its own strict interpretation of Islamic law.

Despite having been driven out of the capital Mogadishu seven years ago and then losing significant territory since, it continues to launch attacks on civilians, the Somali army and African Union troops around the country and over the border in Kenya.

Although amnesties are not new in Somalia, the latest has its roots in a 60-day deal announced by the country’s new president, Abdullahi Mohamed Farmajo, in February last year. It is thought to have had greater success than previously because of his cross-clan support base and apparent incorruptibility.

Britain partly funds the project through a charity that works with the Somali security ministry. A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: “Through this work the UK supports Somali led efforts to degrade al-Shabaab capability and reduce the threat of terrorism and violent extremism, in a region where there are significant UK interests.”

The initiative is also backed by the United States, which has stepped up airstrikes under President Donald Trump and has extended the supply of military advisors to include combat troops.

“The United States supports a Somali-led process of degrading al-Shabaab’s influence using a comprehensive approach, including through high-level defections, reconciliation, and improved governance and service delivery,” the State Department said.

Defectors have revealed that al-Shabaab lines the cabins of trucks using in suicide bombings with bullet-proof plates so their drivers cannot be neutralised before reaching their targets, according to a Reuters investigation.

They are also said to have revealed the groups’ preference for renting houses with wooden floor boards so they can hide weapons underneath, and the fact that there were widespread recriminations within the group for a Mogadishu truck bombing in October last year in which more than 500 people died.

One, the former al-Shabaab deputy leader and spokesman Mukhtar Robow Abu Mansur whose defection was announced in August, gave blood following the bombing and denounced it as “irreligious”.

Another, named only as Nasteh, told Reuters he became disillusioned after the group turned on fellow Muslims, naming three clerics who he said were killed. Al-Shabaab has previously targeted Muslim leaders accused of spying for the authorities, or because they denounced their activities.

"They were killing without consultation, it was just the guys at the top deciding,” he said speaking via video link from a safe-house.

Somali critics say anyone involved with al-Shabaab should be prosecuted, not given a new life abroad or employed by the government, as some have been.

Al-Shabaab said the defection claims were an exaggerated attempt to “manipulate public opinion”. "As for the so-called deserters, most of them were already working as spies for the apostate regime,” al-Shabaab spokesman Sheikh Abdiasis Abu Musab told Reuters.

Advanced facial recognition technology that will help conservationists to track elephants and send alerts when poachers are near by is being worked on by London Zoo and Google.

The software is already capable of recognising people within images, but now animal and tech experts hope that automatic cameras hidden in the wild and triggered by heat and motion will allow local authorities to monitor endangered species and keep them safe.

Elephants are among the mammals being tracked with the new technology. While the Google App imaging system was designed to scan people’s eyes, nose and chin, the conservation project will use it to identify trunks, tusks and tails.

As well as recognising animals, the Google machine learning software will also search for the shape of potential poachers and will send out warnings if they appear to be suspicious.

The Zoological Society of London (ZSL) said that the technology could be effective in the battle against poachers as it would be able to “get to know” pachyderms: very large mammals such as the elephant, rhinoceros and hippopotamus. When new animals are captured by the automatically activated cameras, a conservation worker will initially record their features and put the data into the system. If the same individual wanders into frame again, the software will manage new images independently and will be able to build a profile for the animal.

About 1.5 million of the animals on ZSL’s database have been scanned onto Google’s servers so far, including giraffes in Kenya and orangutans in Borneo. It is hoped that entire herds will eventually be tracked by the computers.

The software was released last week to allow organisations to build their own machine learning programmes without the need for specialists. The chief scientist at Google Cloud’s artificial intelligence branch said that the company had released a more user-friendly version of the software to “lower the barrier of entry” and make AI accessible to the “largest possible community”. It has already been put to use by businesses, with companies including Disney and Urban Outfitters using it to organise product categories and improve search and shopping on their websites.

Wildlife workers said that AI could also help to protect endangered species by saving manpower, removing the need for humans to trawl through large volumes of images. Technology developers also hope to program it to recognise when animals are injured.

“We are tracking wildlife populations to learn more about their distribution and better understand the impact humans are having on these species,” Sophie Maxwell, ZSL’s conservation technology chief, said. “We have deployed a series of camera traps in the wild that take pictures of animals when triggered by heat or motion. The millions of images captured by these devices are then manually analysed and annotated with the relevant species, such as elephants, lions and giraffes, which is a labour-intensive and expensive process.

“Our conservation technology unit has collaborated closely with Google’s Cloud team to help shape the development of this exciting technology, which ZSL aims to use to automate the tagging of these images.”

Protesters have objected to a chain of "Blighty" cafés in north London that they say glorifies colonialism (Jack Malvern writes).

The Blighty UK Café in Finsbury Park, which serves tea in Winston Churchill mugs in a room decorated with model Spitfires and a statue of the wartime leader, has had to remove a mural after it was repeatedly vandalised. Protesters sprayed words such as "scum", "warmonger" and "imperialist" on the walls.

Another branch, the Blighty India Café in Tottenham, is the subject of a petition on the campaigning website 38 Degrees, calling for it to be redecorated to avoid causing offence. There is no evidence that the protests are connected.

Zainab Ali Khan, Ewa Leszczynska and Jasmine Davies, who live in Haringey, have gathered 71 signatures for their petition, which includes an open letter to David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham.

They claim that the café "insensitively evokes the memory of the Empire", writing: "We understand that many see the Commonwealth as a celebration of a group of countries but it has little to do with cafés. While Blighty does make a point of sourcing its coffee from countries that are in the Commonwealth, we feel its framing of the Commonwealth is an outdated concept using its history in a light-hearted 'fancy dress' manner. We ask them to adjust their brand while there's still only two branches."

Blighty India's decor includes a neon portrait of Gandhi, Bollywood posters and India flags. The menu includes a vegan breakfast called The Gandhi as well as Bombay Hash and Eggs Kerala. It has curry nights and yoga classes. Chris Evans, the coowner, hopes to expand his Blighty Commonwealth Cafés by opening Blighty Kenya.

One Haringey resident wrote that he was "taken aback" by Blighty India's decor. He said that the portrait of Gandhi was "perpetuating the cult of personality" of someone scholars had found to be a "racist, misogynistic, abusive apologist for the caste system".

Mr Evans said that the vandalism had been an unnecessary headache. "We never imagined that Churchill or Gandhi would attract complaints. We thought they were both widely liked and admired figures."

One resident responding to the campaign wrote online: "Is this a joke? They're a small business providing employment. Stop harassing them!"

Anthropologist who found the 2.5million-year-old 'Black Skull'

When Alan Walker heard that his team of African fossil hunters working on the shores of Lake Turkana, in one of the most remote parts of northern Kenya, had found only one tiny piece of human skull, he assumed that there would be no more bones. "Our hearts sank when we saw the small fossil, a rectangular piece about one inch by two inches, and the wretched little slope on the opposite bank on the river," he later wrote. Then "Turkana Boy" appeared — the remains of a youth who had lived 1.6 million years ago and the most complete skeleton found of an early human ancestor.

Walker recalled the sequence of events from 1984. The archaeologists — led by Richard Leakey, the African-born heir to the family of fossil-hunters — had already been at work for weeks in the arid region. As others nursed their aching backs and sore feet, did their washing and wrote letters home, Kamoya Kimeu, the supervisor of the so-called Hominid Gang — a team of Africans trained over the years by Walker and Leakey — kept walking until suddenly he spotted a scrap of skull.

Although he was a man of little formal education, Kimeu had a keen eye for bits of bone and fossil and knew immediately from the thickness that it was Homo erectus — "upright man". The archaeologists doggedly set about following their lead. The gang began clearing the site of twigs, pebbles and leaves and, after breaking up the surface with picks, wheelbarrows were loaded with shovelfuls of earth and then sieved. Hours went by, then suddenly they made their discovery. Piece followed piece — facial bones, teeth and vertebrae.

For the next four years Walker, the Leakeys and the gang spent each field season at the site. "For the first time in history," said Walker, "we were able to look at an almost complete skeleton ... a bony record of one individual's life."

He worked around the clock with Meave Leakey, the palaeontologist and wife of Richard, to glue the skull shards together. As they saw the brow ridge form they realised that their find was a boy. Among the secrets the remains of this youthful Homo erectus revealed was that early man had been taller and better built than previously thought — had he lived to adulthood he would have probably grown to more than 6ft in height.

A year later, again near Lake Turkana, he discovered the 2.5 million-year-old "Black Skull". With its protruding face, large teeth, a powerful jaw and a well-developed sagittal crest on top of the skull, indicating large chewing muscles, it helped to define a new species, the Paranthropus aethiopicus.

Alan Walker was born in Leicester in 1938, the second of four sons born to Cyril Walker, a carpenter, and Edith Tidd Walker. He had a childhood fascination with animals and often went out on his bike to collect fossils. His secondary school, the Gateway School, taught a mixture of academic subjects and practical skills such as learning to engrave lithographic stone in art classes, as well as printing, metalwork, pottery and making boots. Known to his teachers as a boy of intense curiosity, Walker was torn between his interests in art and science. His headmaster told him to make art a hobby.

He earned a scholarship to St John's College, Cambridge, where he read natural sciences, and worked as a porter on the railways over the holidays to make ends meet. After a doctorate at the University of London, he developed a system of working with living and fossil primates to interpret movement from the shape of limbs and inner ears, and primate diets from tooth enamel scratches. Between postings — including 20 years at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine in Baltimore, various African institutions and Penn State — summers were spent fossil hunting in east Africa.

In 1974, although already married, he fell in love while in the field in western Kenya after a colleague persuaded him to take a young PhD student on an expedition to Fort Ternan. Walker said "No" several times, but finally agreed. "Ok, then," Walker said, "he can come." "Oh," the colleague added, "the student is a woman."

The relationship endured and after the visiting student, Pat Shipman, had analysed the Fort Ternan fauna for her PhD, they were married in 1976. They had no children; Walker had a son, Simon, who works in information technology, from his first marriage to Patricia Dale Nicholson in 1963. Walker and Shipman wrote a book together, The Wisdom of the Bones.

They settled upon retirement in North Carolina, his wife's birthplace, in a house set in ten acres of woodlands with a river at the bottom of the hill providing homes for birds, squirrels, possums, turtles and raccoons.

Walker enjoyed spicy cuisine, having spent so many years living on curries in Kenya, but he also remained fond of some classic British foods. He was renowned for his traditional Christmas puddings made from an 1863 recipe in a cookbook his grandmother had owned. He used to make several every October, inundating them weekly with brandy until they were ready. Many were posted to friends around the world.

Alan Walker, palaeontologist, was born on August 23, 1938. He died of pancreatic cancer on November 20, 2017, aged 79

'We were able to look at an almost complete skeleton'

Farah to take on Bekele in London Marathon Athletics Mo Farah will have to beat the very best if he is to win the London Marathon on April 22 after Kenenisa Bekele, the triple Olympic champion on the track and widely regarded as the best middle-distance runner of all time, confirmed yesterday that he would be racing in the capital. The Ethiopian was third in 2016 and runner-up last year behind Daniel Wanjiru, of Kenya, after struggling with blisters. Eliud Kipchoge, the Olympic marathon champion from Kenya who won the event in 2015 and 2016, will also be in the field.

Positive exchange Penny Mordaunt, the international development secretary, meets mothers at a World Food Programme centre funded by Britain in northern Kenya

Former hurdler and her team are ready to make history as first Africans to compete in bobsleigh

At first glance, it didn't seem to have much in common with its namesake, the pilgrim ship that brought its passengers to the New World. It looked more like it had come from Ikea, a rectangular, upside-down table on rickety wheels, made of wooden panels bolted together. But this Mayflower, spelt Maeflower after its creator's late stepsister, would also make history, carrying its passengers to Pyeongchang as the first Nigerians to represent their country at the Winter Olympics, and the first African athletes to compete in bobsleigh.

"It could have just been something that laid a footprint, opened opportunities for African countries and women in the sport," says founder and driver of the Nigerian bobsleigh team, Seun Adigun. "Or it could be a big deal. Either way, we knew it was something bigger than us."

Adigun, a newly-qualified chiropractor, and her teammates Akuoma Omeoga and Ngozi Onwumere were all born in America to Nigerian parents, and were living in Houston, Texas, when they decided that hurtling down the ice at 80mph was their calling. "We had our first meeting in October 2016, in Texas," says Adigun. "I don't know if they knew what they were signing up for."

Adigun was an accomplished 100m hurdler. She won the African championtook ships in 2010 and raced at the London Olympics in 2012, but failed to qualify for the semi-finals. After that, she retired. In 2014, she found herself drawn to bobsleigh while supporting former track and field teammates who were competing at Sochi: "I got a spark of ideas and this breath of fresh air for Olympic redemption, Olympic fever again."

In 2015, the US bobsleigh team announced they would host trials in Houston. In her pitch to crowdfund the first Nigerian bobsleigh team, two years later, Adigun wrote: "I am not a believer of 'coincidence'." She squeezed in some last-minute training and made the team as a brakewoman.

She hammered together the Maeflower so that she could practise in Houston when her academic commitments her away from training. In February 2016, she won gold with US teammate Nicole Vogt in the North American Cup.

"I knew Nigeria didn't have a team, which was why I joined the US team. But then I learnt that Africa had never been represented in the sport and I thought, 'I need to do something about it.'" Adigun approached Chief Solomon Ogba, the first vice-president of the Nigeria Olympic Committee. "If this was going to start, it had to start as an entity that was accepted in Nigeria," says Adigun. Ogba would have been forgiven for reacting with disbelief but he agreed to help and is now the president of the new Bobsled and Skeleton Federation of Nigeria. Approaching him was a way of Adigun seeking her motherland's blessing, not funding: "From the beginning, our intention was not to take away from the country of Nigeria, it was to bring something to the country. It was designed to be a gift, not to be us presenting as a financial burden, because we understand how expensive the sport is.

"We wanted to give Nigeria the opportunity to start going through the approval process for funds for winter sports, because it's not something that is sitting in a vault waiting for winter athletes to come around. It's a sub-Saharan climate, that's just not going to happen."

Adigun plundered her savings, spending about $10,000 (£7,000) on snow gear, travel and accommodation, sleigh rentals and ice time. When she recruited Omeoga and Onwumere, she knew they had to find more money. In November 2016 they launched a crowdfunder and went viral, drawing comparisons to the 1988 Jamaica bobsleigh team that inspired the film Cool Runnings. They raised $75,000 and attracted the attention of big-name sponsors. She hopes that their innovative financing will pro-vide a "backbone" for the future of winter sports in Nigeria.

After running the Maeflower around dirt tracks in Texas, the women finally landed on ice in January last year, in Park City, Utah. Adigun had moved into the driver's seat. "That was our first race, the first time the ladies saw ice, saw a bobsleigh, saw a bobsleigh track," says Adigun. "We had a lot to do." There were five Olympic qualifying races last year and they had to maintain their world ranking (44th) to make the Games.

They will fly out to South Korea from Nigeria. "My dad is in Nigeria and said it has gone crazy," says Adigun. "People are so proud. He said, 'All people talk about is the bobsleigh team.' That is amazing. What people don't realise is that because we weren't raised in Nigeria, our loyalty and commitment and our strive to be able to represent it is even greater."

The Cool Runnings comparison endures and she says it is an honour: "These are men who changed the game, they changed the world." Last week Jamaica announced they would also be taking a women's bobsleigh team to Pyeongchang, 30 years after their men's team made history. "We're close to all the warm-weather teams: Brazil, Jamaica, Australia, Ghana. We call ourselves Team Green because we all have green in our countries' flags or colours."

Nigeria will also be represented in skeleton by Simidele Adeagbo, who was inspired by Adigun's mission. Her first time on the ice was in August last year. "I'm so honoured that she believed in what I was trying to do and my vision," says Adigun. Adeagbo will be the first Nigerian, African and black woman to compete in the skeleton.

As the coach in Cool Runnings said: "Not only are they going to qualify, they're going to turn heads doing it."

THE TRAILBLAZERS

Akwasi Frimpong, Skeleton, Ghana

A former track and field and bobsleigh athlete, Frimpong is the first Ghanaian to qualify for the skeleton. Born and raised in Ghana, he moved to Holland aged eight

Simidele Adeagbo, Skeleton, Nigeria

Born in Canada, raised in Nigeria and then Kentucky, she slid on ice for the first time in August. She was third in recent races at Lake Placid

Sabrina Wanjiku Simader, Alpine Skiing, Kenya

Born in Kenya and raised in Austria, she will be the second Kenyan to compete at the Winter Olympics

The adventurer has braved Arctic storms, 40,000ft balloon rides, Everest's death zone — and the sea off Weston-super-Mare

From my late teens onwards, hitchhiking was a regular way of getting from A to B. In Kenya, Steve Vincent, my climbing partner, and I were on our way to Mount Kilimanjaro when we were picked up by a couple of old nuns. They got tired of driving, so we actually drove for them.

Another time, when we were hitching back down the Alaska Highway after climbing Mount McKinley, an elderly couple picked us up in a motorhome, and within about 10 minutes we had a puncture. The old boy took two hours to repair it; we set off again and got two more punctures, which Steve and I fixed. Fed up at the lack of progress, we eventually caught a Greyhound bus at Whitehorse.

Childhood holidays were spent at Weston-super-Mare, or Weston-super-Mud, as we called it. My brother and I would brave the freezing sea, and I used to try to drown him, but never quite succeeded. Back then, a trip overseas was a big deal. When I went to New York for the first time, on a student exchange aged 17, we flew from Stansted to Shannon, then to Gander, in Newfoundland, to refuel, and finally on to New York.

My three girls learnt to ski when they were about three, and have all taken to the outdoors. I took them up Mount Fuji when they were young, and I remember encouraging them with an "eat as much chocolate as you like" bribe. Amelia, aged 8, wrote her "what I did in the holidays" essay on her return to school, which wasn't believed until she provided accompanying photographs.

At 13, I started my Duke of Edinburgh's Award with a trip to the Brecon Beacons with 30 other boys. We were put in an army tent and allowed to roam, which just wouldn't happen now. Getting my bronze award was — notwithstanding getting to the North and South Poles, or up Everest — one of the hardest things I've ever done.

I've had lots of hairy moments over the years. When I broke the world altitude record in a Rozière balloon in 2004, it was -70C, I was on oxygen at more than 40,000ft and, after I hit the record point, I couldn't get the balloon to descend. It was a real "Oh my God" moment before it finally started to respond.

Having a polar bear stick its nose into my Sir David Hempleman-Adams, 61, was the first person to reach the geographic and magnetic North and South Poles, as well as climb the highest peaks in all seven continents. He was knighted in 2017 for services to the Duke of Edinburgh's Award scheme. He lives in Wiltshire and has three grown-up daughters. His book Open Water, Breaking Ice is out now (Halsgrove £25) tent at 2am on a solo trip to the Arctic in 1984 wasn't exactly relaxing. And in 2011, when I was climbing the treacherous north side of Everest, I had to sleep in a tent without a sleeping bag at 27,000ft — in the so-called "death zone". I got Third Man syndrome, which is when you start hallucinating. I was convinced a Frenchman had come into my tent during the night and helped me keep a fire going in the -40C temperatures.

My last big adventure was a sailing trip around the North Pole in 2016. We took a small yacht through the Northeast and Northwest Passages in one season, which shows just how fast the climate is changing. During an enormous Arctic storm, I genuinely thought we were going to sink.

If I'm going to take a bit of time out now, I enjoy city breaks and visit the opera and theatre. But sitting on a beach is definitely not for me.

Interview by Roz Lewis

Comparisons with dad Abedi Pele irk star who is ready to shock Liverpool

Jordan Ayew watches but with not quite the enthusiasm expected. Swansea's communications head is showing him a viral the club put together: Ayew's effort on a split screen alongside that famous strike of Ricky Villa's at Wembley. The similarities are remarkable. There he is, beginning in a central position outside the box, driving into a gap then slaloming left, drawing four defenders. He dismisses them with a sudden change of direction, going round a fifth and, just as a sixth closes, he beats goalkeeper Will Norris. Ayew scored this masterpiece against Wolves on Wednesday, in the FA Cup, and Swansea are right to hang it alongside Villa's goal for Spurs in the 1981 final replay against Manchester City. But Jordan Ayew smiles very thinly as he looks at the screen. He just does not like comparisons.

And would you, if you were him? Andre, his older brother, has had a fine career and Rahim, his half brother, is a fellow Ghana international. One uncle, Kwame, was a great goalscorer in Portugal. And of course his father: Abedi 'Pele' Ayew, Jordan's dad, is rated by many as the best African player ever.

Abedi lived a fairytale: he grew up in a poor village, shared a home with 18 siblings, played on red dirt fields and had never even heard of Pele, the legend he was soon compared to, because there were no televisions in his community. Abedi was three times African Footballer of the Year. He won the European Cup with Marseilles, a Nations Cup with Ghana, and captivated the world with his attacking midfield play.

He married Maha, daughter of a wealthy Accra family whose father disapproved, in something of a Romeo and Juliet story, and they have just celebrated 30 years together: Abedi remains one of Africa's most famous men.

"It's more difficult in every way," says Jordan, describing what it was like to make his way as youngest scion of such a revered football family. "There was too much spotlight especially on me, because there was my dad and then there came my brother who was doing really well. But I don't compare myself to my dad or brother. Everyone has their style of play and way of doing things.

"In life, people want to compare. Today it is Messi and Ronaldo. You compare and maybe that is how you create competition, but it is not something I care about. I try to do my job in the best way possible. Nothing else is important."

Abedi Pele was playing for Marseilles when Jordan, 26, was born. He later played in Italy, Germany and Dubai but Jordan grew up in Accra, in a big house where his aunts, uncles, siblings and cousins lived. He saw his dad playing in the odd television clip and visited him during holidays, at whatever club he was starring for at the time.

"We're Africans," Jordan smiles. "We grow up together and it's just a positive thing. You guys will see me with my cousin and think it's my brother, we're so close.

"My dad was the head of the family. He came from a massive family himself and did really well, because he had to take care of every single person."

What Jordan inherited, as much as talent, he believes, was mentality. "My parents educated us the best way possible and that's part of where our mentality comes from. But not just from them, from my aunties, uncles, my grandparents, every single person in our family has this mindset of never give up, the sky's the limit if you do your best. The most important thing my dad said was when you're doing something always give a hundred per cent and when you go home, don't have any regrets.

"My cousins work in big companies, some are businessmen or women, and are doing well in their jobs. From all my elders the mindset of the family was transferred to me, and I have to transfer it to my kids as well."

Wednesday's goal was his fourth in seven games and he is in his best run of form since he arrived in England in 2015. He was signed from Aston Villa by Paul Clement 12 months ago but his surge of form began when Clement departed, to be replaced by Carlos Carvalhal in late December.

Carvalhal, a loquacious Portuguese, has given more freedom to Swansea's attackers but also greater responsibility. On his first day he pulled Ayew aside. "He said [he] knows my quality and that I need to do more and I agreed with him."

Ayew is a dribbler by nature, and Carvalhal has licensed him. Can Swansea survive? "We have 15 big games, 15 finals, and need to win most of them. It's a difficult situation but I'm confident. It's only four points [needed to get out of the bottom three] and I know we are moving in the right direction." Against Liverpool tomorrow night? "We start at zero-zero, in front of our fans at home. If we're positive and take our opportunities, maybe we can make a surprise."

The transfer window brings an intriguing prospect: among Swansea's targets is Andre Ayew, and if he leaves West Ham the brothers could be reunited, having started out together at Marseilles. They also lived with each other while at the French club. They remain in constant contact, and very close.

They are forever trying to get the whole family to come over from Ghana, dad included. "But they complain it's too cold. They know in the holidays we will come home."

His own young children, two boys and a girl, are his day-to-day world outside football; he is a little shy and the vehicle he drives provokes teasing in the dressing room: a Smart Car.

"Simple things make me happy, and that's how we were brought up," he says.

The RSC's Hamlet swaps gloomy Elsinore for sunny Africa, but the real revelation is its lead, Paapa Essiedu. A decade ago, he'd never been to the theatre — now he's a star on stage and screen

Elsinore, home of Hamlet, is generally a drab affair, all stone and shadows. So it's no surprise that critics and public alike feasted on the RSC's 2016 take, which moved Denmark to a zesty African kingdom and reinvigorated a whole lot more in the process. Central to it all was its particularly fresh type of prince, Paapa Essiedu.

"We have an understanding of Elsinore and Hamlet as being grey and dour — low-energy, essentially," says the 27-year-old actor, who was born and bred in Walthamstow, east London. His turn as the not-so-Danish heir was hailed as a revelation. "And yeah, of course, there's a place in the world for those Hamlets — but the play is robust and rich enough to be transported from that."

The production didn't move on from Stratford-upon-Avon straightaway, much to his disappointment: this was his breakout role, and he must have been frustrated it wasn't reaching a wider audience. Eighteen months on, though, it's about to tour, reaching Manchester, London, even Washington.

In the meantime, Essiedu has continued his dizzying upward trajectory. Last autumn, you may have spotted him in Murder on the Orient Express; at Christmas, he featured in the BBC's The Miniaturist; and he is now in Channel 4's Kiri, as the errant father under suspicion of murdering his child. Despite all this, sitting in a south London restaurant, he tells me not much has fazed him so far, not even the prospect of being an untested Hamlet.

"I wouldn't say I was scared, no — it never felt out of my reach," he shrugs. Speaking softly, wanderingly, he could almost seem nonchalant, if his huge commitment to the work didn't keep bubbling up. Wrapped in a blue zip-up Adidas jacket, he seems both a little untouchable and heartbreakingly sweet. Is this all due to self-belief? "I mean, I guess," he says, munching on a virtuous lentil salad. "But it's also realism. It's all about preparation, the work, the effort you put into what you're doing. I worked really, really hard, in rehearsals and in everything that brought me up to that point."

Essiedu's Hamlet is the director Simon Godwin's Hamlet, too, and the work sounds distinctly collaborative. "I met Simon a couple of times before I agreed to... " He checks himself. "I say, 'I agreed to do the part.' Before I begged him to allow me to do it!" It seems Essiedu brought two distinct things to the table: first, his deeply felt African heritage, both his parents being Ghanaian; and second, his experience of grief, both those parents having passed away. His father, who lived in Ghana, died when he was 14; his mother, who brought him up in a single-parent home, when he was 20. "For me, grief was an obsessive focus when I was taking the part."

Hamlet's wild sadness, felt at a particularly young age, "makes sense", he says. "A lot of people look at the play and think, 'Oh, I don't get why he treats so-and-so like that — what is that madness thing about?' They're trying to apply the logic of somebody who's totally fine. But we're talking about somebody who has suffered incredible trauma."

The African influence helped unlock some of the trickier aspects of the play — its supernatural element, for one. Hamlet, lest we forget, is spurred to action by a ghost, and that isn't something this production tries to hide behind a trendy metaphor. "We've all seen too many productions where there's a bit of a raised eyebrow," Essiedu says. "And if everyone's embarrassed to be there, why the f*** are you doing it in the first place?" He goes back regularly to Ghana, where he has extended family. His full name is Paapa Kojo Kwakye Essiedu, which reflects the day he was born (Kojo, for Monday) and his heritage: Paapa Kwakye means "grandson of Kwakye". Just before he met Godwin, he had been talking to a cousin there about juju, the ancient tradition of black magic.

"He told me this story about a man who'd dug up a body in a graveyard and carried it on his shoulder, and he'd done laps of the town centre with it. It's black magic, essentially. But the thing about the story is that it wasn't told with any sense of irony or cynicism. You tell these stories with 100% belief. It's true. I believe it. I believe in juju."

The production is a landmark for Essiedu for another reason. It heads in March to the Hackney Empire, in east London, which is where he saw his first professional play, aged 17: "It feels significant, it feels like a full circle." When asked what the production was, he remembers the name, Accidental Death of an Anarchist, by Dario Fo, but not much else. "I think I was probably quite overwhelmed by the fact that I was in a theatre. I'd never been in one before, so I didn't really understand what the rules were going to be. I remember I wanted to eat popcorn and chat to my friends, and it was, like — bang!" In other words, Essiedu has managed all of this, from first epiphany to RSC, BBC and a whole lot more, in just 10 years. He concedes it looks like a short time, but then reminds me wryly: "It's a third of my life." Until he decided to pursue acting, he had been applying to study medicine at university, having attended the well-reputed, fee-paying Forest School as a scholarship student. "I would never say I had a difficult upbringing," he says. "I was always supported in the things I wanted to do. I was pushed really hard and supported really hard."

Naturally, Essiedu's late mother, in particular, looms large over the conversation, in a positive way. Is he still grieving? "When you lose someone like that, an enormous power in structuring your life, it becomes a lifelong process to deal with it." Grief, he says, metamorphoses through time and surprises you at unexpected moments. "I remember, five years after I lost my mum, I was touring a play in Lancaster and we'd gone on a day trip to the Lake District. When I was faced with this huge, epic landscape, there was something about it that just triggered something in me, that core of emotion and sadness and anger and all sorts of things — and that's five years after the event."

All in all, he says, he "embraces" the loss. "I accept that it's going to be an ongoing process, just because... I want it to be. I mean, you don't want a process like that to end, to just be 'done' with it."

Discussing how this might inform his Hamlet seems more interesting than asking him what it's like to be a "black Hamlet". For what it's worth, yes, he is the RSC's first black Danish prince, and he doesn't deny the importance of this. He does, however, cringe at the crudity of the debate. "A lot of people ask, 'What does it feel like to be a black man playing Hamlet?' That's a stupid question. It's not like I woke up one day and remembered I was black. It's part of my everyday experience."

Inevitably, the conversation turns to diversity and racism within the arts. In short, he thinks a lot, lot more needs to be done. He is excited by Kwame Kwei-Armah's appointment as artistic director of the Young Vic ("I would chop off all my limbs to work with him"), but decries recurrent artistic programmes of all-white directors and all-white writers as racism, pure and simple. Theatre always gets it in the neck, though — what about TV? Any better? He bursts out laughing: "No!" "I've been in a number of readthroughs and TV productions where I'm the only person of colour, so from my experience..." He insists the work has to be done at every level, behind the camera as well as in front. "It's not just about the actors you see in the window. The way I see it is, you've got a mannequin at Selfridges. Now, mannequins are not necessarily representative of what's going on on the floor. It's about changing the entire shop, as opposed to just putting more sexy mannequins in the window."

About Kiri we can't say too much, as that would involve spoilers. He has nothing but praise for its writer, Jack Thorne, and star, Sarah Lancashire: "There is no doubt that her being the nation's darling is well earned." He also has a lot of praise for Kenneth Branagh, who gave him a small role in Orient Express. But he saves most of his enthusiasm for young black British talent coming through, be it the director Roy Alexander Weise (whose Nine Night opens at the National in spring) or the writer-actor Michaela Coel, whose autobiographical sitcom Chewing Gum has been a cult hit.

Essiedu admires Coel's autonomy and her enterprise; generating your own material is the way to go, he says. "That's something I'd definitely like to express." What would his own Chewing Gum be like? He gives a naughty laugh. "I think I need to give it a little more thought before I share it with The Sunday Times. I'll come to you — you can have an exclusive!" You (nearly) heard it here first. c The RSC's Hamlet tour starts on Friday: rsc.org.uk/hamlet

I wouldn't say I was scared, no. Hamlet never felt out of my reach

FAME AND FORTUNE VINCE CABLE The veteran Lib Dem lost his seat in 2015 but is now back in the Commons, leading his party and gracing the ballroom, says York Membery

After 18 years as an MP, Vince Cable lost his seat in Twickenham, southwest London, in 2015. He wasn't out of politics for long: he recaptured the seat at last year's snap election and became leader of the Liberal Democrats in July. Born in York, Cable read economics at Cambridge. After graduation, he worked as an economic adviser to the Kenyan government. He lectured at Glasgow University from 1968 to 1974 and was a consultant to the World Bank before becoming chief economist at Shell in 1995.

Cable, 74, was Lib Dem Treasury spokesman from 2003 to 2010, which he combined with the deputy leadership of the party from 2006. He was business secretary in the coalition government of 2010-15 and was knighted in 2015.

His first wife Olympia, the mother of his three children — Aida, Hugo and Paul — died in 2001. In 2004 he married Rachel Smith.

How much do you have in your wallet? Forty quid. Two £20 notes to be precise. I still operate in the cash economy, but I never carry more than £100 in cash.

What credit cards do you use? I operate on a debit card basis and use that for most of my day-to-day financial transactions. I don't use a credit card except in exceptional circumstances — for instance, when I'm travelling abroad.

Are you a saver or a spender? Mainly a spender. Although I have pension funds from my previous employment with Glasgow University and Shell so I have that underlying security. My instincts are to live life to the full.

How much did you earn last year? My MP's salary [£74,962] was my only real source of income, apart from the modest royalties I received from sales of my books. I've written a memoir, Free Radical; two further non-fiction books, The Storm and After the Storm; and a novel, Open Arms. Any money I make from my speaking commitments I give to charity.

The books have done quite well and Open Arms — a political thriller in the McMafia mould — has sold respectably in hardback; it comes out in paperback in a couple of months. I may write another thriller in the future.

Do you own a property? Yes, a four-bedroom semi-detached house, with the usual suburban extensions, in my Twickenham constituency. It's a 1930s house and I bought it for £12,500 in 1974. It is now fully paid for. I haven't had it valued recently, but I imagine it's worth £800,000-£900,000. It's the only property I own, but my second wife, Rachel, has a cottage on a smallholding in the countryside.

When did you first feel wealthy? I have never felt especially wealthy.

I feel comfortable — no more, no less.

Are you better off than your parents? Undoubtedly, although they were pretty comfortable by the end of their working lives. My parents, Len and Edith, were factory workers and left school at 15, like most people of their generation. But my father was strong on self-improvement. He became a lecturer at a technical college and through a combination of hard work and savings we progressed from a terraced house with an outside loo to a detached house.

Have you ever been really hard up? When my first wife, Olympia, and I got married we had no savings and no help from our parents, so initially it was quite tough. We were entirely dependent on what we could earn and lived off a substantial overdraft. We worried a lot about getting overcommitted.

What was your first job? Working as a finance officer for the Kenyan treasury. I was there for two years from 1966 and was paid as a Kenyan civil servant, so my salary was quite modest. It was a fantastic job and I got married while I was out there but never planned to stay. My eldest son now runs a social enterprise that is doing some great work starting up schools in Kenya, so we've maintained the family connection with the country.

Most of my civil servant's salary I splurged teaching myself to fly. I got a pilot's licence but I haven't renewed it since returning to the UK so it proved to be a bit of a waste of money.

What has been your most lucrative work? Probably a period I spent as a consultant to the World Bank. Shell also paid well, if not extravagantly.

Do you invest in shares? I invest in one of the big unit trusts so I have a portfolio of different funds: emerging markets, start-ups and so forth. When I was in exile [out of parliament] for two years, I did get involved in a couple of west London tech start-ups and I have made a modest investment in them, though neither of them is fully off the ground. They are still in the stage of becoming viable — time will tell whether they'll be successful.

What's best for retirement — property or pension? Well, you need a combination because you have to have a stream of income. In effect I had to give up my parliamentary pension in order to go back into parliament because you can't have both a parliamentary salary and a pension.

What has been your best business decision? Probably buying my Twickenham home. Like lots of people of my generation, I've benefited from massive house-price inflation. We made some improvements, but most of it is unearned wealth. The mortgage was paid off 20 years ago.

What has been your best investment? A piano, of all things. In the 1970s I made a decision that many people might consider rather reckless but financially it's turned out to be one of the best things I've done: I borrowed on an overdraft to pay for a £700 Steinway grand piano for Olympia. She loved it and it proved to be a very good investment — it must be worth a fortune today. It's still in the family.

And your worst investment? I wasted three years investing time, or rather part-time, in a PhD when I should have been doing something more challenging, such as starting a company.

What's your money weakness? I'm not wildly extravagant, but Rachel and I like having a good holiday in a comfortable hotel. We also take an annual skiing holiday, which we love. I only learnt to ski when I was 62 so I'm not exactly an experienced skier. But that is quite an expensive treat.

I also go for a dancing lesson every week with a couple of exceptional young professionals and I don't begrudge the money I spend on that. However, I don't have the usual vices: I don't smoke, hardly drink and don't gamble. I'm fairly puritanical in my personal tastes.

Which aspect of the tax system do you wish you had been able to change? If I had had greater freedom to fix the tax system it would have been to align property tax more closely to value.

What would you change about the business or financial world? An enormous amount needs to be changed — it's very unhealthy. The financial system in the UK is far too short term and banks are heavily skewed towards lending money to people to buy property when they should be lending to promote good long-term businesses and new technology companies.

For that reason, I think Britain is falling badly behind [in some sectors of the economy]. As business secretary, I tried to set in train some reforms to address this, but it's very deep-rooted.

What is your financial priority? To maintain income and asset levels sufficient to be comfortable and to enable me to be generous.

What would you do if you won the lottery jackpot? I'd probably give most of it away because I support a lot of charities. I'm also patron of several local charities in my constituency — for carers, homelessness, a children's hospice — and a couple of small development charities in India.

What is the most important lesson you've learnt about money? Not to lie awake at night worrying about it.

I only learnt to ski when I was 62 so I'm not exactly experienced. But I love it

The striker is in top form as Swansea aim to surprise Liverpool tomorrow — but don’t go comparing him to dad Abedi Pele or brother Andre

He watches but with not quite the enthusiasm expected. Swansea’s communications head is showing him a viral the club put together: his effort on a split screen alongside that famous strike of Ricky Villa’s at Wembley. The similarities are remarkable. There he is, beginning in a central position outside the box, driving into a gap then slaloming left, drawing four defenders. He dismisses them with a sudden change of direction, going round a fifth and, just as a sixth closes, beats the goalkeeper.

He scored this masterpiece against Wolves on Wednesday, in the FA Cup, and Swansea are right to hang it alongside Villa’s goal for Spurs in the 1981 final replay against Manchester City. But Jordan Ayew smiles very thinly as he looks at the screen. He just does not like comparisons.

And would you, if you were him? Andre, his older brother, has had a fine career and Rahim, his half brother, is a fellow Ghana international. One uncle, Kwame, was a great goalscorer in Portugal. And of course his father: Abedi ‘Pele’ Ayew, Jordan’s dad, would be the choice of plenty of Africans as the best player ever from their continent.

Abedi lived a fairytale: a boy who grew up in a poor village, sharing a home with 18 siblings, who played on red dirt fields and had never even heard of Pele, the legend he was soon compared to, because there were no televisions in his community. Abedi was three times African Footballer of the Year, he won the European Cup with Marseilles and a Nations Cup with Ghana, captivating the world with his electric attacking midfield play.

He married Maha, daughter of a wealthy Accra family whose father disapproved, in something of a Romeo and Juliet story, and they have just celebrated 30 years together: Abedi remains one of Africa’s most famous men. So, think Kasper Schmeichel with not just Peter to live up to but a host of goalkeeping uncles and brothers.

“It’s more difficult in every way,” says Jordan, describing what it was like to make his way as youngest scion of such a revered football family. “There was too much spotlight especially on me, because there was my dad and then there came my brother who was doing really well. So it’s not like it was easy or anything. But I don’t compare myself to my dad or brother. Everyone has their style of play and way of doing things.

“I think in life, people want to compare. Today it is Messi and Ronaldo. You compare and maybe that is how you create competition, but it is not something I care about.

“Even today you have people saying, ‘Abedi Pele, George Weah — who was better?’ and it will be like that until the end of their lives. But the way my parents brought us up was to be ready to accept [pressure] and I try to do my job in the best way possible. Nothing else is important.”

We are in the media room at Swansea’s training ground in Fairwood Common on the beautiful Gower Peninsula. The sun is shining, for the first time here in days, and Jordan is relaxed... until our photographer asks him to go outside where, despite the blue sky, it is still freezing.

Abedi Pele was playing for Marseilles when Jordan, 26, was born. He later played for Lyons, Torino, 1860 Munich and Al Ain in Abu Dhabi before his retirement in 2000, but Jordan grew up in Accra, in a big house where his aunts, uncles, siblings and cousins lived. He saw his dad playing only in the odd television clip and visited him during holidays, at whatever club he was starring for at the time.

“We’re Africans,” Jordan smiles. “I think for most of the African players, it’s something that is normal for us. We all grow up together and it’s just a positive thing. You guys will see me with my cousin and think it’s my brother, we’re so close.

“My dad was the head of the family. He came from a massive family himself and did really well, because he had to take care of every single person.” What Jordan inherited, as much as talent, he believes, was mentality.

“My parents educated us [he and Andre] the best way possible and that’s part of where our mentality comes from. But not just from them, from my aunties, uncles, my grandparents — every single person in our family has this mindset of never give up, the sky’s the limit if you do your best.

“The most important thing my dad said was when you’re doing something always give a hundred per cent and when you go home, don’t have any regrets. My mum was important too, also uncles and aunties and my cousins work in big companies, some are businessmen or women, and are doing well in their jobs. From all my elders the mindset of the family was transferred to me, and I have to transfer it to my kids as well.”

Wednesday’s goal was his fourth in seven games and he is in his best run of form since he arrived in England when he signed for Aston Villa in 2015. He was bought for Swansea by Paul Clement 12 months ago but the surge of form began when Clement departed, to be replaced by Carlos Carvalhal in late December.

Carvalhal, a twinkling, loquacious Portuguese, has given more freedom to Swansea’s attackers but also greater responsibility. On his first day he pulled Ayew aside and told him he had to step up. “He said [he] knows my quality and that I need to do more and I agreed with him.”

Ayew is a dribbler by nature, and the way he sees his game is, “I try to create and make something happen; sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”

Carvalhal has licensed him. Can Swansea survive? “We have 15 big games, 15 finals, and need to win most of them. It’s a difficult situation but I’m confident. It’s only four points [needed to get out of the bottom three] and I know we are moving in the right direction.” Against Liverpool tomorrow night? “We start at zero-zero, in front of our fans at home. If we’re positive and take our opportunities, maybe we can make a surprise.”

The transfer window brings an intriguing prospect: among Swansea’s targets is Andre Ayew, and if he leaves West Ham the brothers could be reunited, having started out together at Marseilles. They also lived with each other while at the French club. They remain in constant contact, and very close.

They are forever trying to get the whole family to come over from Ghana, dad included. “But they complain it’s too cold. They are right of course, but we want to see them as well. But they see us on television and that’s fine for them. They know in the holidays we will come home. If I have six weeks holiday I spend five and a half in Ghana, spend time with them and enjoy the moment.”

Maybe it is because there is so much family in his life that Ayew says, “I am not someone who has a lot of friends.” His own young children, two boys and a girl, are his day-to-day world outside football; he is a little shy and the vehicle he drives provokes teasing in the dressing room: a Smart Car.

“Simple things make me happy, and that’s how we were brought up as well,” he says. Son of a superstar but making his own simple path. Mind you, watch the video below if you still haven’t seen it — that strike against Wolves was one superstar goal.ON TV TOMORROWSwansea v LiverpoolSky Sports Main Event, ko 8pm

A British Airways pilot was hauled off a flight from Gatwick over fears that he was drunk.

Take-off was delayed as armed police were deployed to remove the man, who would have been at the controls for part of an 11-hour flight to Mauritius.

Staff who believed they smelt alcohol on the man were said to have raised the alarm. Police headed “straight for the cockpit” and took the pilot away in handcuffs, an airline source told The Sun.

A 49-year-old man from Harmondsworth, west London, was taken into custody.

Police were called to the Boeing 777 at Gatwick South Terminal at 8.25pm on Thursday, five minutes after the scheduled take-off time. The flight eventually departed just before 11pm, landing in Mauritius nearly two hours behind schedule.

BA said it was taking the incident “extremely seriously”. A spokesman told the BBC: “We are sorry for the delay to our customers. The aircraft remained at the gate until an alternative third pilot joined the flight crew.”

The airline is also facing allegations of poor hygiene this weekend. Ghana has threatened to impose sanctions over the cleanliness of its flights and a leading gallery owner, Michael Hoppen, said he had found someone’s “half-eaten lunch[https://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/news/british-airways-faces-boycott-over-sticky-seats-and-filthy-tables-grxmjvmvr]” down the side of his his bed.

A leading gallery owner has launched a scathing attack on British Airways, accusing the flag carrier of leaving its planes in a filthy state.

Michael Hoppen said that he has started using other long-haul airlines as an alternative to BA after being confronted by dirty tables, sticky seats and blankets covered in stains.

The airline said that it had contacted him to apologise.

Mr Hoppen's comments came days after it emerged that a BA flight from Heathrow to Ghana had to be groundyears.

ed when the cabin crew refused to fly following an outbreak of bedbugs.

It was revealed yesterday that the Ghanaian aviation minister had threatened BA with sanctions unless they improved cleanliness on flights to the country. Cecilia Dapaah told reporters that planes travelling to Ghana should be fumigated, adding: "If we ever see one bedbug, or any untoward thing on their flight, we will take drastic action."

It was the latest in a handful of bedbug incidents to hit the company. One passenger complained of being bitten up to 150 times on a business-class flight to Cape Town just before new year while a family from Canada also said they were left covered in bites during a nine-hour journey from Vancouver to London last autumn.

In a letter to The Times, published today, Mr Hoppen, who has run the Michael Hoppen Gallery in Chelsea since 1993, said he had "found someone's half-eaten lunch buried deep in the crease on the bed" and that he had "started to use other airlines because its planes have become so dirty".

He praised the efforts of onboard cabin crew but said he would use alternative airlines where possible.

Mr Hoppen, brother of the interior designer Kelly Hoppen, told The Times: "It has got worse in the last four to five I have started using other airlines: Virgin, American Airlines. They are clean."

The comments follow claims of cutbacks at BA as it attempts to compete with low-cost rivals. It has recently announced plans to add seats on to some planes out of Gatwick and has cut economy class meals on short-haul flights.

In a statement, the airline said: "We place huge importance on the cleanliness of our aircraft and wherever they are in the world they are cleaned after every flight. We have recently introduced a team of our own managers to work alongside our cleaners at Heathrow to carry out increased inspections. "The presence of bedbugs is an issue faced occasionally by hotels and airlines all over the world… reports of bedbugs on board are extremely rare. The comfort of our customers is always a top priority and when issues are reported, our engineering team will always take immediate steps to resolve." Letters, page 26

She was married to George Harrison but obsessively pursued by Eric Clapton. Both would write songs about her; both would cheat on her. In a new documentary, Pattie Boyd reveals what it was like to be at the heart of music's most toxic love triangle. Nina Myskow meets her

When Pattie Boyd was 21 she married a Beatle. Wearing a Mary Quant dress and fox fur coat, the archetypal dolly bird model - all long legs and big eyes - married George Harrison, making her the most envied girl in Britain. It was the swinging Sixties and she was the epitome of glamour, inspiring Harrison to write Something, one of the best love songs ever written.

That was only the beginning of her story. Fellow guitarist and rock star Eric Clapton was so consumed with unrequited love for the wife of his friend that he wrote Layla, declaring his anguish and passion for her.

In a story woven through with obsession, drug addiction and alcoholism, and tortuous heartbreak for both of them, when he eventually wooed her away, he wrote another love song. "I remember it so clearly," Pattie Boyd says now. "We were going out to a party, and Eric was just playing his guitar as he always did, and I thought, 'Oh God, what should I wear?' and I was trying on all sorts of things.

"I took so long that when I came downstairs I thought, 'He's going to get really angry with me.' But he didn't. He said, 'Listen to what I've just written.' And he played Wonderful Tonight. They didn't play it in the film last night," she says. "I don't know why. It's a great song."

The film is Eric Clapton: Life in 12 Bars, a documentary about his life, and we are meeting in Boyd's flat in Kensington the day after she has seen a screening in London. "We were together 13 years, and it doesn't really mention that, or that we got married."

However, Clapton's obsession with her is a major part of the film, a portrait of a deeply troubled man. "It's a brutally honest film," says Boyd, now 73, in her rather well brought up tones. "A very honest portrayal of someone in pain. I think he's brave to have done it. It showed me that so many of Eric's problems stemmed from his childhood and how unbearably cruel his mother was."

He grew up not knowing that the woman he thought was his mother was his grandmother and that his real mother was actually the person he thought of as his sister. She fell pregnant at 16 to a Canadian soldier during the Second World War, and had moved to Canada. By the time she came back to visit with another son in tow when he was nine, he knew the truth and reached out to her, only to be rejected.

"It broke my heart watching it and I think it affected him throughout his life," she says. "He didn't really trust women." She watched the film with some sadness, "Because our relationship didn't work out ultimately. Part of me thought that we got together a bit too late.

"Eric was pursuing me and I was so indecisive about leaving George. Then Eric sank into this mess of taking heroin - he vowed he would if I rejected him. It was only after that that we got together and maybe it was four years too late. Who knows? Maybe he wanted to go the heroin route anyway."

It was a scene much less innocent than the one the teenaged Boyd encountered when, as a model who'd been on the cover of Vogue, she landed a role in the Beatles' 1964 film A Hard Day's Night. "My agent said, 'You just need to dress in a school uniform and only say one word.' I thought, 'It can't be that difficult.' "So that's how I met the Beatles. George and I had this wonderful, instant attraction. I just thought he was the most gorgeous man.

"Both of us being shy it was, on reflection, quite sweet." She laughs. "I found him charming and very funny. I'd never heard a Liverpool accent before. At the end of the day he said, 'Would you like to come out with me tonight?' And I said, 'I'm sorry, I'm seeing my boyfriend.' "A week later I was asked back to Twickenham Studios for a press shot and George, said, 'So how is the boyfriend?' I said, 'He's not in my life any longer.' He said, 'That's wonderful! Let's go out tonight then.' And that was it." She laughs.

Boyd was catapulted into the Beatles' world. "It was enormous fun. If one of them wanted to go out for dinner, or to a club, we'd all go in a big group. Paul was just cute and adorable, and Ringo even more adorable.

"John was great fun, if a little scary because you would never know what he was going to say, but he was fascinating, riveting, clearly the leader. He was very attractive, very sexy, and I loved that he thought that I looked like Brigitte Bardot. He was very cool." Did she have a fling with him? "No way! Cynthia [Lennon's first wife] was a very sweet girl. I think when they moved from Liverpool she felt out of her depth. I tried to encourage her to come to London from their home in Surrey but she never really wanted to.

"I was very lucky to be hanging out with the guys. We'd stay out all night and leave at dawn when the birds were waking up." Booze and drugs? "Not so many drugs. We smoked dope, that was our big thing when they came back from a tour of America - Bob Dylan had turned them on to it.

"It was natural cannabis and made us giggly. Whereas today people use skunk and it's a downer. Very antisocial. We were the opposite. It's very different nowadays."

They hung out with the Rolling Stones, all going to the same clubs: "Mick was very attractive but I would never have been a girlfriend of his. He's not my type. Marianne [Faithfull] was absolutely gorgeous. A bit of an outrageous girl, but great fun."

Faithfull, although later rehabilitated, became a casualty, and lived on the street in Soho for two years, an anorexic junkie. How did Boyd manage to float through relatively unscathed? "Choice of drugs, when it comes down to it," she says. "The Beatles weren't as hardcore as the Stones. I know John started taking heroin when he moved to New York, but basically they were a cleaner version of a band. They were the nice boys."

Boyd and Harrison married in 1966. "I was happy apart from the realisation that I was married to one of the most famous men on the planet and that there were all these girls who hated me. They would write letters, 'That horrible bitch has married my George.' "I thought, 'I'd love to have a baby,' but nothing seemed to be happening. I put it off because we were young and exciting things were going on. For example, Brian Epstein said, 'I've booked you a holiday in Tahiti.' "So John and Cynthia and George and I went. It was so exotic. Everything was organised; I don't ever remember holding a passport but there must have been one somewhere. It was an extraordinary life. Taxis were paid; the car was filled; I didn't see any bills at all. I lived this amazing life, nothing practical."

One day Harrison played a recording of a song he'd written for her. It was Something. "Oh my God," she says. "I was bowled over. Frank Sinatra said it was one of the most beautiful love songs he'd ever heard."

The oldest of a family of six growing up in Kenya, Boyd was packed off to boarding school at the age of eight. "So I grew up without good support - I didn't have that grounding that should have been instilled by parents.

"I was sort of airy-fairy, and I would go along with anything. 'Come play with me?' 'Oh, all right.' 'Come take drugs!' 'Yes, OK.' Maybe that's attractive to a creative man. Now I would have a louder voice, a stronger voice."

She and Harrison bought a huge estate, Friar Park in Henley, so that Harrison could have his own recording studio. But it was not idyllic. George became withdrawn and depressed. And then there were the drugs. Into this scenario came Clapton, who fell obsessively in love with her and pursued her.

The film details how the toxic triangle took hold. Boyd resisted until the day Clapton invited her to his London flat in South Kensington and played her Layla for the first time: "The song got the better of me." She slept with him for the first time. That night, they went to his manager Robert Stigwood's party, which George had not wanted to attend. However, he turned up later, and it was at dawn that he came upon the pair of them in the garden.

To Boyd's horror, Clapton said, "I have to tell you, man, that I'm in love with your wife." She shakes her head. "George said, 'Well, what are you going to do? Are you going home with him or me?' And I said, 'Oh George, I'm coming home with you.' Eric was distraught. He slunk into a black hole of heroin for four years."

Harrison must have been deeply hurt? "No, George couldn't give a damn," she says, surprisingly. She adds, "I didn't realise until I saw the film last night that Eric knew that George was messing around all the time." Had she known? "Not until the film's director, Lili Fini Zanuck, came here. She told me. I didn't know when we were married. I knew he was at the end, because I knew who she was and it was right in front of me." The other woman, Boyd's 2007 autobiography revealed, was Ringo Starr's wife, Maureen.

Boyd left Harrison and Clapton tracked her down to where she was staying with her sister in Los Angeles. "Come and join me on tour in America," he said to her. "Seeing him on stage was amazing. My heart just burst with joy."

She and Clapton married in 1979 in Tucson, Arizona. But he too was incapable of fidelity. She says ruefully, "I tried to right everything in my mind by thinking, 'Maybe all men are shits. This is what happens to everybody.' He behaved badly on tour. None of the other guys in the band were married, so they would have all these girls in their rooms after the shows."

And he had replaced drugs with alcohol. This was the period of Clapton's life when, as he himself once put it, he was a "basket case".

"He wasn't always a basket case. There were times when he wasn't drinking so much and we could have conversations. But I'd have to get him at the right time of day," she admits.

"I was so in love with him, in love with the man I knew he really was behind the alcohol façade, that I kept thinking, 'That man might come back.' " At one point Boyd tried to keep up with him. "God, I looked such a wreck."

Stigwood eventually got Clapton into a treatment centre in America. He came back sober but he had changed his addiction. Boyd rolls her eyes. "Because he's an obsessive person, he started fishing every single day. He'd come back with a basket of trout. Every day, 20 trout."

She laughs uproariously. "I bought a big freezer and learnt how to gut these bloody things, wrap them in tinfoil."

Months later, he fell off the wagon on tour, emptying his hotel mini bar. "He'd become unbearable. He was slowly killing himself."

Equally damaging was the infidelity. "He had that affair on tour with the Italian woman [Lory Del Santo], and he had the baby [Conor]. It was a stab in the heart. I wanted to have children and I'd tried everything: IVF, Chinese medicine. Nothing. A doctor examined me and said one tube was out of action, but that shouldn't have stopped me getting pregnant."

The end came one morning after Clapton had been up all night drinking. "He was uncontrollable," she says. "Hysterical. He was screaming so loudly that I thought the veins in his neck were going to burst. 'That's it,' I said. 'I can't stand it.' It was my birthday. I left."

They divorced in 1989. Two years later, Conor died falling from a 53rd-floor window in a Manhattan apartment building. She attended the funeral at Clapton's request.

The birth and death of Conor became the catalyst in Clapton's rehabilitation. Today, he is decades sober, married to Melia McEnery with three daughters (and another, Ruth, from a previous relationship). In 1997 he founded Crossroads Centre, a luxury rehab centre in Antigua.

In the meantime, on her own after the divorce, Boyd had to learn to make her own way with little support and no practical skills. "I hadn't been on public transport for 30 years," she says. "I had no money. I didn't have a bean." She turned her hand to photography and has held several exhibitions. "I'm over 70 now and I'm still having to work," she says.

She and Rod Weston, a property developer, married in 2015 after 20 years together. They first met 30 years ago and Weston has brought some peace to her life. "With Eric I was living on a rollercoaster. When I started seeing Rod I was going to see a psychotherapist and I said, 'The weird thing about him is that he's sort of like the same, all the time.' The psychotherapist said, 'Pattie, that's normal.' I'd never realised that before."

In the past, there have been a lot of tears. "I cried so much I ran out of them. When George became a nightmare, and Eric became a nightmare, there were tears all the time. I thought, 'I'll never be able to cry again in my life,' and I don't think I have.

"The good thing about ageing is that you don't care so much," she says. "There is that disappointment of the disintegration, but you have to have a sense of humour.

"It would be nice to have a waist," she goes on, laughing and clutching at her midriff. "When did I get this tummy? And these batwing things … I didn't order that!" She walks Freddie, her Irish terrier, does Pilates, swears off wine two nights a week and makes her own almond milk to have with her daily porridge.

She is still in touch with Clapton. "We text each other when we have news about friends. And he was very happy to see me last night. Big hug and kiss, and he said to me, 'Oh, I didn't know if you were coming. I have to warn you, it's a bumpy ride.' "It was weird watching our relationship on screen, knowing he was watching it, too. Because when I see him, there's still that little connection that was always there. And I don't want it to be there … But I was once so mad about him."

What did she think of her younger self on screen? "I wanted to shake her! I thought, 'Why is she just standing there looking pretty.' How lucky, to be pretty, because I was in those days. But really …" Clapton's story is one of redemption and the film's ending is uplifting. Boyd's, too. "It's a good life. I have a lovely husband, a beautiful dog, the best of friends and I'm happy. I've survived George, and I've survived Eric. So I'm very lucky."

Can she decide between the two men these days? Who was the love of her life? "I think it was George. George was always very loving. Even after we split he was always my friend, we'd still speak on the phone. And he came to see me before he died [of cancer in 2001]. If you love somebody, you do that.

"And I think he always did love me." And Eric not? "Eric loves himself. I don't think there's much room for me." n

'Eric started taking heroin - he vowed he would if I rejected him'

Who was the love of her life? 'i think George. he was always very loving'

In the past the royal family were honoured by foreign dignitaries with gifts of gold, jewels and thoroughbred stallions. The Queen is now more likely to receive scarves, framed photographs and a purple fleece dog bed.

The highlight of the annual disclosure of presents received by the royal family was a gift from Felipe VI of Spain during his state visit to London last July. He presented the Queen with a velvetcovered Book of Hours used by Philip II, who ordered the Armada to invade England. Buckingham Palace later said that the book was a facsimile.

The Queen received an ostrich egg decorated with Maasai beadwork as a 91st birthday present from President Kenyatta of Kenya and Major Tim Peake, the first Briton to form part of the International Space Station crew, gave her the flag from his spacesuit.

Prince George and Princess Charlotte were given 59 gifts on their tour to Poland and Germany in July, including two lollipops and two pairs of socks.

Official gifts eventually become part of the Royal Collection, held in trust by the Queen for her heirs and the nation.

The heavily pregnant wife of a church preacher was killed after laying down on the tracks ahead of a high-speed train, a coroner has heard.

Zdenka Yabani died Slough station, Berkshire, half a mile from the St Andrew’s Methodist Church where she lived with her husband and their two other children.

Mrs Yabani, 39, bought a ticket and walked along the platform before climbing on to the tracks shortly after 9am on Monday last week.

Peter Bedford, senior Berkshire coroner, told the opening of the inquest in Reading: “It is confirmed as part of the investigation that she was eight months pregnant at the time of her death. Confirmation of her identity was given by her husband, Jude Yabani.”

Mrs Yabani was born in the former Czechoslovakia and she and her husband attended university in the Czech Republic.

Her husband, who is listed as a minister and caretaker at the church, said after the hearing: “I’ve told the police everything.”

Mr Yubani, 40, is a trustee of one charity which provides aid in his native Ghana and of another based in east London which provides community services.

The inquest was adjourned until June 21.

Acacia Mining said that production of gold plunged at the end of last year as a tax dispute with Tanzania's government continued to disrupt operations at its three mines in the country (Robin Pagnamenta writes).

The FTSE 250 miner said that output in the final quarter had dropped by 30 per cent to 148,477oz compared with a year ago.

Acacia Mining is Tanzania's largest gold producer, with one deep mine and two open-cast sites. A bitter dispute over taxes prompted a ban exports of gold in March 2016, which led to the shutdown of the Bulyanhulu deep mine in September.

Acacia also has exploration projects in Kenya, Burkina Faso and Mali. Its biggest shareholder is Barrick Gold, which spun it off in 2010 and holds a 63.9 per cent stake.

A tentative deal to give Tanzania a 16 per cent stake in the mines has not been finalised. In November, Brad Gordon, chief executive, and Andrew Wray, finance director left as part of an effort to mend relations.

Peter Geleta, interim chief executive, said: "We are continuing to support efforts towards a negotiated resolution with the Tanzanian government."

The shares rose 3p to 197½p yesterday.

Batsmen share record secondwicket stand in win over UAE

A record second-wicket stand in one-day internationals and ODI bests for William Porterfield and Andy Balbirnie ensured victory for Ireland and two wins out of two against UAE for new coach Graham Ford at the tri-series in Dubai.

The partnership of 201 between Porterfield (139) and Balbirnie (102) was only Ireland's second double century stand in the 50-over format but was a timely reminder that the batsmen that played in the last World Cup are still the best to lead their qualification bid for England and Wales 2019. That tournament, in Zimbabwe, begins on March 2, with the schedule being announced tomorrow.

Ed Joyce, who scored his sixth ODI century in the first game against UAE, was rested for this one but, batting at No 4, he would have been surplus to requirements as the hosts only took their second wicket in the 44th over.

Boyd Rankin was the other absentee from the four-wicket victory on Thursday, but his pace and bounce were missed as the Emirates reached 143 for three in reply with 19 overs left to reach their victory target of 302.

George Dockrell was hammered for 35 runs in his first five overs and although the recalled Andy McBrine — playing his first game for 10 months — took two wickets and bowled his 10 overs for 40 runs, Porterfield had to turn to Paul Stirling, in the hope that he could complete Dockrell's quota.

As it turned out, Stirling was no better, conceding 18 from two overs but Mr Dependable, Kevin O'Brien, returned to take two wickets in three balls — he added another to finish with four for 41 — and after that it was just a matter of when Ireland would complete victory; it was in the 49th over by 67 runs.

O'Brien took the new ball, in place of Rankin, but it was Barry McCarthy, at the other end, who made the breakthrough in his fourth over, thanks to a superb legside catch by Niall O'Brien, and first change Peter Chase struck immediately to reduce UAE to 40 for two.

McBrine, who had taken the third wicket, returned to break the dangerous fourth wicket stand (68 in 71 balls) with his second ball, the third of O'Brien's four catches behind the wicket to add to his record-breaking five in the first ODI.

O'Brien had been left out by Phil Simmons, after choosing to play in the Bangladesh Premier League rather than an Intercontinental Cup match in Kenya in 2012 but, at the age of 36, and retired from county cricket, he is proving he is as good as ever and ready for a Test match debut in May.

The four batsmen above him in the order look to be nailed on as well and although Paul Stirling was again an early wicket (20 off 26 balls) after his third-ball duck on Thursday, Porterfield and Balbirnie hit the ball to all parts of the ICC Academy Ground in the next 35 overs.

Porterfield was first to his 50, from 68 balls with eight fours, but Balbirnie, although hitting just five boundaries, was only seven balls slower to his first landmark. The captain went to his century, his 10th in ODIs and his 17th in all, in the grand manner, with his first six to go with 13 fours.

Balbirnie followed three overs later, passing his previous ODI best of 97, against Zimbabwe at the 2015 World Cup, from 102 balls with 12 fours and a six. He was caught at cover two balls later but Ireland still scored 55 off the last six overs despite Porterfield and Kevin O'Brien (24 off 17 balls) both perishing in the deep, and Niall O'Brien bowled for four in the last over.

Scotland join the Tri-Series this week and face Ireland on Tuesday and Thursday.

Stirling and Simi Singh are the two Ireland players who have put their names into the IPL auction on January 27.

ATHLETICS

Double European champion crosses first after taking baton when third

Double European indoor champion Laura Muir anchored Great Britain to victory in the mixed team relay event in the Great Edinburgh Cross Country.

Muir took the baton in third place behind Europe and Belgium, but wasted no time in hitting the front and powered away to a comfortable win around the 4x1km Holyrood Course.

The British quartet of Tom Marshall, Alexandra Bell, Adam Clarke and Muir finished in 11 minutes 33 seconds, seven seconds ahead of Belgium, with Europe third and Ireland fourth.

Scotland A were fifth, ahead of a Scotland B team, with the United States seventh and England in eighth. Muir, 24, told BBC Sport: "When Adam came round close to the front I thought I've got to work really hard and make sure. I got to the front and left a little bit in the tank till the very end and put the foot down in the last 200 [metres] and came away with the win, so really pleased."

Muir's final year of veterinary studies means she is unable to contest the Commonwealth Games in Australia, but she added: "We've been lucky that the vet school's been so supportive and my coach Andy [Young] as well, he's been by my side every step of the way.

"We planned years in advance, we knew I wasn't going to do the Commonwealths quite a while ago. It's just a matter of getting it all done now this year, hopefully winning a medal in the World Indoors, graduating as a vet and then hopefully a medal in the Europeans as well.

"It is very tough, but you've just got to have good time management. When your priorities are running and veterinary, that's all you do."

Britain's Emelia Gorecka finished just two seconds behind winner and defending champion Yasemin Can in the women's 6km race, with Phoebe Law sixth and Verity Ockendon in eighth.

Gorecka, 23, said: "I can't not be happy. As the race got going I thought I could be top five or top three and I was second and so close to first.

"It's a world-class field and I'm absolutely over the moon to be second and by such a small margin as well."

American Leonard Korir also made it back-to-back wins in the men's 8km race, finishing three seconds clear of Europe's Kaan Kigen Ozbilen, with Britain's Ben Connor in fifth.

The two Kenya-born runners broke clear of the leading pack in the latter stages, with Ozbilen leading until Korir sped away in the final metres to win by three seconds.

Korir, who ran a time of 24:32, which was 29 seconds slower than last year, said: "Last year, when I went home, I said I must come back and, when I said I must come back, I said I must win again and I am so happy.

"If you go out hard at the start, it will take it out of you, so you have to be patient and be ready for the final kick."

In the team competition, Europe ran out commanding winners ahead of Great Britain and the United States.

Muir will not decide until shortly before the World Indoor Championships in Birmingham at the beginning of March whether to go for a 1500m and 3,000m double.

She won gold in both events at the European Indoor Championships in Belgrade last year and is among the best hopes for home success when the world indoors are staged in Britain for the second time.

"We have not made a decision on Birmingham yet," Muir said. "I don't know if we'll double up. We won't make the decision until a couple of weeks beforehand."

Muir began her indoor season last weekend, showing fine form when winning over 3,000m in Glasgow.

Team Scotland runner Steph Twell admitted that the Great Edinburgh Cross Country race was all about preparing herself for the Commonwealth Games.

The 28-year-old, who will compete in the 5,000m and 1500m events on Australia's Gold Coast, said before the cross-country yesterday: "From my own personal perception outside of the race, I'm starting to put the pedal down and cut down into the distance and get the speed for a championship.

"The Commonwealth Games is a championship performance and this is a great start for me."

The Games mark another major championship for Twell, who has been to 12 so far in her career but due to circumstance has often not been at her best, with injury hampering her at home in Glasgow four years ago.

The Ministry of Defence has quietly paid a "significant sum" to a former artillery gunner who claims his career was destroyed after taking Lariam, a controversial antimalarial drug.

The settlement is believed to be the first of its kind in Britain and was made weeks before an expected court case. Hundreds more former soldiers could sue the MoD at a cost of millions of pounds of taxpayers' money.

Lariam — which has been linked to depression, hallucinations and panic attacks — was given to 17,368 military personnel between April 2007 and March 2015. A parliamentary inquiry in 2016 criticised the MoD over the way it issued the drug.

The former gunner in the Royal Horse Artillery was given Lariam in 2012 before being deployed to Kenya. It is claimed he and his comrades were not given any warnings or advice about the drug.

He began to suffer badly broken sleep, personality changes and irritability in Kenya and later had two seizures, the first, in Canada, requiring evacuation by helicopter. The 26-year-old father of one was deemed unfit for service and medically discharged in 2014.

"I felt like the world had come to an end," he said. "I was devastated. I had lost everything, my home, my job, my friends."

His solicitor, Ahmed Al-Nahhas, said the MoD admitted breaching its duty of care but maintained that this had not resulted in any injury or loss to the soldier.

This weekend, the MoD said respected health bodies continued to recommend Lariam "as a safe and effective form of malaria prevention". @markhookham

The accidental killing in 18th-century Uganda of an adopted son by his father, Kintu Kidda, sends a curse down the bloodline. In 2004, four of Kintu's descendants are feeling the ripple effect, starting with a violent murder in a slum outside Kampala. First released in Kenya in 2014, Makumbi's debut was inspired by the creation myths of the Baganda tribe. But the finely shaped characters in this family saga feel thoroughly modern: they discuss masculinity, homosexuality, relationships and the pressures of a priapic society. The legacy of Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart is obvious, although unlike Achebe, Makumbi (who was raised in Uganda) skips the period of colonialism altogether, in a multicharacter epic that emphatically lives up to its ambition.

The Earlie King & the Kid in Yellow by Danny Denton Granta £12.99 pp368 Years of torrential rain threaten to cripple Ireland. Reduced to a sodden network of riverside shanty towns, the country is on the brink of collapse. In this Blade Runner-ish dystopia, Ireland is a "cesspool for deranged life" where gangs have taken power — namely, the Earlie Boys. When a 13-year-old known only as "the kid in yellow" falls in love with T, the teen daughter of the Earlie Boys's King, trouble comes closer to home, as T dies in childbirth, sending "the kid" on the run with their "babba". Denton's debut can be filed alongside a flurry of recent experimental Irish fiction (Eimear McBride, Lisa McInerney), but at times its structure is too forced, with pages printed in different fonts, "alternative" punctuation and unnecessary illustrations. Smart pacing makes up for the indulgence, as does Denton's sparkling turn of phrase, but the effect might grate on less patient readers.

The Life to Come by Michelle de Kretser Allen & Unwin £16.99 pp384 The fifth novel from the Australian de Kretser is not an easy book to love. It is structured as five seemingly distinct stories set in Sydney, Paris and Colombo, and the character who passes through them all is Pippa Reynolds, a shallow writer intent on success ("her reading is confined to books about women's lives published in the past 20 years, and nothing in translation"). This would be fine, but de Kretser never properly commits to the satire, which, like her previous works, skewers the immigrant experience. "Only people from the 'burbs have lattes now," says one. "You're no one if you don't ask for a flat white." The final story of best friends Christabel and Bunty is touching, and worth persevering with. Overall, however, although de Kretser's characters make fleeting cameos in each other's lives, they never quite connect.

Louisa McGillicuddy

Over the next three weeks we will get a look at some of the potential stars of the future when the Under-19 World Cup takes place in New Zealand.

It is a tournament that England have won only once, in 1998, with a side that contained five players who went on to gain full England honours — Graeme Swann, Robert Key, Chris Schofield, Owais Shah and Paul Franks.

What is the format? There are 16 teams in four groups: the ten Test teams, Namibia (the best associate team in the 2016 World Cup) and five qualifiers (Kenya, Papua New Guinea, Canada, Afghanistan and Ireland). The top two from each group progress to the quarter-finals. The bottom two teams in each group enter a plate competition. The tournament will be played across seven venues in four cities — Whangarei, Tauranga, Christchurch and Queenstown — over 22 days, with the final on February 3.

What are the groups? Group A Kenya, New Zealand, South Africa, West Indies. Group B Australia, India, Papua New Guinea, Zimbabwe. Group C Bangladesh, Canada, England, Namibia. Group D Afghanistan, Ireland, Pakistan, Sri Lanka.

Who is in the England team? Harry Brook Captain. Classic Yorkshire batsman but with the added element of having been brought up in the T20 era. Comparisons to Joe Root have been made.

Savin Perera Left-handed opener moved to the UK from Sri Lanka as a teenager and is a regular in the Middlesex 2nd XI side. Tom Banton Attacking batsman and wicketkeeper who impressed on Somerset debut with a smart stumping of Dawid Malan. Will Jacks Vice-captain. Batting all-rounder who bowls useful off spin. Scored a century against India in an U19 Test match. Liam Banks Batsman who has already made his first-class debut for Warwickshire. Powerful hitter along the ground. Euan Woods A talented left-handed batsman called up to replace Tom Lammonby. Finlay Trenouth Scored 330 not out for Somerset Under-17 and smashed a 41-ball 73 in England's opening warm-up game against Ireland. Jack Davies Tidy wicketkeeper who is strong off the back foot and square of the wicket. Tom Scriven All-rounder who will likely come in down the order. Scored a record 288 for Hampshire Under-17.

Luke Hollman Youngest in the squad at 17 years and 119 days, bowls bouncy leg breaks and strikes a clean ball down the order. Ethan Bamber Seamer with a strong action and good accuracy who will look to probe away at off stump.

Adam Finch Seamer made his Under-19 debut against India last year and impressed with his height.

Dillon Pennington Natural credentials to be an imposing fast bowler: height and probably the quickest through the air.

Prem Sisodiya Slow left-arm spinner. One of two Welshmen, along with Walker, in squad. Roman Walker A tall seamer on Glamorgan's books. Playing adult cricket since he was 11.

Words by Elizabeth Ammon

President Trump today denied describing large swathes of the developing world as “shithole” countries, amid a fierce backlash from astonished world leaders.

The White House did not initially contradict reports that during an Oval Office meeting Mr Trump had used foul language to blast the American tradition of welcoming immigrants.

Leaks of the private conversation suggested that the president said: “Why do we want all these people from ‘shithole countries’ coming here?” He rejected a proposal to extend entry to immigrants from places such as El Salvador, Haiti and African nations that had suffered natural disasters.

“Why do we need more Haitians? Take them out. Why do we want all these people from Africa here?” he was quoted as saying. The meeting was to discuss immigration issues, such as the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhool Arrivals (DACA), which grants reprieve to immigrants who came to the US without papers when they were children.

This morning, Mr Trump backtracked, tweeting: “The language used by me at the DACA meeting was tough, but this was not the language used. What was really tough was the outlandish proposal made — a big setback for DACA!”

Mr Trump was meeting with senators to discuss the future of the policy and the status of the so-called Dreamers who benefited from it. He was reported to have said that he would prefer more immigrants from places such as Norway, rather than Haiti or Africa.

Mr Trump said he did not insult Haitians. “Never said anything derogatory about Haitians other than Haiti is, obviously, a very poor and troubled country. Never said ‘take them out’,” he tweeted. “Made up by [Democrats]. I have a wonderful relationship with Haitians. Probably should record future meetings — unfortunately, no trust!”.

Mr Trump’s denial, however, was immediately disputed by Lindsey Graham, a Republican, and Dick Durbin, two of the senators at the meeting.

Mr Durbin, an Illinois Democrat who was a sponsor of the immigration proposal, told CNN that the president “said those words and said them repeatedly”. Mr Durbin said the comment was “vile and racist”.

The Haiti government said that Mr Trump’s migration comment reflected a “racist view” of its community.

Earlier, Mr Trump claimed that he had rejected the immigration proposal because the “USA would be forced to take large numbers of people from high crime countries which are doing badly”. He wanted a merit-based system, which he claimed would benefit national security and stop drugs from entering the country.

This week, he ended a programme to give protective status to refugees from natural disaster-stricken places, which mostly benefited groups such as Salvadorans and Haitians. About 200,000 Salvadorans, the largest group affected, may be deported due to the policy change.

His comments prompted a backlash as soon as they were reported in the US media, with thousands of people from those countries posting photos of the stunning landscapes of their homelands.

Laurent Lamothe, the former Haitian president, tweeted that Mr Trump’s comments had taken the world to “a new low”: “[It was] uncalled for [and] moreover it shows a lack a respect and IGNORANCE never seen before in the recent history of the US by any President!”

Kwame Raoul, a Democratic member of the Illinois senate, whose Haitian parents migrated to the US in the 1950s, said: “I don’t think there’s any apologising out of this.

“He’s demonstrated himself to be unfit, unknowledgeable about the history of this country and the history of contributions that immigrants, particularly Haitian immigrants, have made to this country.

“It makes me embarrassed to have this guy as the president of my country.”

Rupert Colville, the UN human rights spokesman, told a Geneva news briefing: “There is no other word one can use but ‘racist’. You cannot dismiss entire countries and continents as ‘shitholes’, whose entire populations, who are not white, are therefore not welcome.”

Some media struggled with the taste issue of covering his description and the comments were paraphrased in countries where politeness is prized. Taipei’s CNA news agency translated his turn of phrase as “countries where birds don’t lay eggs”.

The Japanese daily newspaper, Sankei Shimbun, translated the termm as “countries as dirty as outdoor toilets”. Closer to home there were fewer qualms: the New York Daily News cover published a poo emoji embellished with Mr Trump’s unmistakable hairdo, above the headline: “S**T FOR BRAINS”.

Others pointed to acts of heroism or patriotism performed by such immigrants. Bill Kristol, the conservative political commentator, wrote: “Two weeks ago a 26-year-old soldier raced repeatedly into a burning Bronx apartment building, saving four people before he died in the flames. His name was Private Emmanuel Mensah and he immigrated from Ghana, a country Donald Trump apparently thinks produces very sub-par immigrants.”

The horror writer Stephen King pointed out that Norwegians, with their long life expectancy and public healthcare, would be unlikely to want to move to America.

Obituaries Maverick literary agent who lived in the shadow of his formidable mother and whose clients included Bernard Cornwell and Jung Chang

When Toby Eady first read a draft of Wild Mary, an authorised biography of his mother, the novelist Mary Wesley, he was so stunned he did not speak for a week. It gave a detailed account of how, as a young woman, Wesley had bestowed her affections liberally. In her own words: "It got to the state where one woke up in the morning, reached across the pillow and thought, 'Let's see. Who is it this time?' " Wesley, who had raven black hair and a deep laugh, worked for MI5 during the war and would "hunt in pairs" with her friend Betty, who, like her, favoured men in RAF uniform. She did not start her successful novel-writing career until her seventies.

In 2002, at the age of 90, she talked to the biographer Patrick Marnham, one of Eady's clients, on the condition that nothing would be published until after her death. She had provided her reminiscences from her sick bed, and had reflected: "Have you any idea of the pleasure of lying in bed for six months, talking about yourself to a very intelligent man? My deepest regret was that I was too old and ill to take him into bed with me."

Eady, who favoured a straw hat, as well as bright red socks and scarves, inherited some of his mother's individual sense of style, as well as her direct manner. Neither shrank from speaking their minds. Although Eady's frankness could sometimes be a little too refreshing, he nevertheless won the respect of publishers, and his client list, kept deliberately small, was starry, including as it did Bernard Cornwell who wrote the Sharpe novels and Jung Chang, the author of Wild Swans. "I'm not a post office," he once said. "I can only sell manuscripts I love. My relationship with my clients is deeply personal. I take on responsibility for their hopes, dreams and fears. It's hard to find the personal touch in a big agency, which may handle upwards of 150 clients."

As an agent he always tried to act on instinct. "I can tell whether somebody can or cannot write after five minutes," he liked to say.

Toby Eady had an unconventional childhood. Born out of wedlock in Boskenna, Cornwall, where his heavily pregnant mother was evacuated in 1941, he was the second of three sons Mary had with three men. His biological father was Heinz Otto Ziegler, a Czech political scientist who became an RAF pilot. Eady's mother had had an affair with him while married to Lord Swinfen. The dashing Ziegler was killed in action in 1944. Lord Swinfen, whom Mary described as "a perfectly nice but remarkably boring" barrister, acknowledged Toby as his own and saw no reason why he and Mary should divorce. They nevertheless did, at Wesley's insistence, because after spending two days in bed with Eric Siepmann, a novelist, scriptwriter and all-round rogue, she had fallen in love with him. They married in 1953 and had a son.

The worst period of Toby's childhood — indeed his life — was when he went to Summer Fields boarding school in Oxford, aged seven. "The education was atrocious, and the cruelty was ghastly," he recalled. "The whole school was based on fear." In later years he professed bewilderment about why his parents had sent him there. "They could see I was unhappy, it was quite apparent: right up to the age of 13 I used to cry before each term began. They would be rather embarrassed."

After refusing to go on to Eton, which he imagined would be even worse, he went to Bryanston in Dorset instead and quite enjoyed it there. One of his classmates was the future conductor John Eliot Gardiner.

He was 18 when his mother told him, in her blunt way, that he was illegitimate. Because he had always felt something of a stranger in the Swinfen family, having little in common with his nominative father, he was quite pleased. That his real father was an intellectual and a war hero he considered a bonus. When, however, his mother added that she had been determined to have three sons by three different fathers, he felt irritated and asked her: "Did you ever think what problems it would cause?" In later life his friends suspected this state of affairs made him something of a commitment-phobe.

After Wadham College, Oxford, where he read history, he worked in banking for Warburgs. It didn't take long for one of the partners to suggest that his gifts might be better suited to the world of books. He founded the literary agency Toby Eady Associates in 1968, in the days when, as he might put it, a gamble was taken on a writer rather than a bet on a second-rate celebrity.

His first book was the Ted Lewis novel Jack's Return Home, a gritty thriller set in the north of England later made into the Michael Caine film Get Carter. His curt phone manner was the stuff of legend, according to his friend Fiammetta Rocco, the literary editor of The Economist. "He could be cutting and sharp and was always allergic to pomposity and self-regard. Silence was a powerful negotiating tool for him. Publishers would feel uncomfortable and fill it with a better offer." She first met him in 1971 when he turned up at her parents' house in Kenya with only a toothbrush stuck in a book. "He was a free spirit," she recalled.

He moved to New York in 1974 and remained there off and on for 14 years.

Ostensibly this was for work, but in private he admitted that it was partly to get away from his mother, who he felt intervened too much in his love life.

While still in New York he fell out with his older halfbrother Roger, who is now in the House of Lords. Toby had been appointed executor of Lord Swinfen's will in 1977 and the two went to court over the inheritance. Toby won but was left with debts. As a consequence of the row, Mary is thought to have never spoken to Roger again.

Eady met Isobel MacLeod while discussing a book project that never came to anything — other than marriage in 1989. As a stepfather to her three children — Jessica is a literary agent, Alex, a consultant plastic surgeon and Julian works in private equity — he was a great believer in broadening horizons, taking them to far-flung places, from China to the Great Rift Valley.

A formidable physical presence, sprawled in his chair behind a huge oldfashioned desk in his office in Bayswater, Eady was always possessed by eccentric passion about some radical political cause or other. Sometimes this was illuminating, but often it was inchoate ranting. He became most animated when discussing Asia, which he regarded as a lamentably neglected subject of serious writing. He was no friend to technology; his emails were printed out for him to write or dictate answers to and they were often infuriatingly Delphic. Above all, as an agent, he believed that even in a cynical world, writing could be a noble, idealistic and even heroic undertaking.

MacLeod described him as "a complex man and a man of integrity, but not insecure. If anything his unconventional background had given him a certain armour plating. He had a reputation for being a tough negotiator in business."

When Gillon Aitken (obituary, October 31, 2016), a rival agent, rang Eady to say that Jung Chang had defected to him, his reply suggested he thought she was not the easiest of clients and that he was not sorry to lose her: "We're opening the champagne," he said.

Actually, as a committed bon viveur, he preferred expensive white burgundy, a taste he had acquired in the company of Robert Bolt, who wrote the screenplays for Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago and A Man for All Seasons, and who had an affair with Mary Wesley when she was in her seventies. His other passions were fly fishing and walking on the Stourhead estate in Wiltshire where, thanks to his friendship with the Hoare banking family, he had a cottage.

Toby and Isobel divorced after ten years and he married Xue Xinran, the bestselling author of The Good Women of China, in 2002. They were introduced through Jung Chang. "We fought for two years after we first met," Xinran recalled, "because he thought he knew China better than me. But then we became good friends. He always said he was going to learn Chinese but he never did. He only knew five Chinese words and one of them was a swear word."

When Wesley met Xinran she asked her with typical directness: "What does Toby think of me?" Xinran replied in her equally forthright way: "He considers you a best friend but not the best mother." Wesley fell silent for an ominous minute, then nodded and said: "That's fair." They hit it off and it was Wesley, ever the interventionist, who persuaded Toby to propose.

When diagnosed with cancer in 2015, Eady arranged a merger of his agency with David Higham Associates. He never attempted to write himself because he felt his mind was too coloured by the writing of other people, especially that of his mother who had drawn on her own life, and therefore also on his, for her novels, such as The Camomile Lawn.

In 1990 there was a sort of ending for their own drama. Eady went with his mother to visit Heinz Ziegler's grave in the Budapest War Cemetery. He was disconcerted to see the normally unsentimental Wesley start to cry. "You can't be sure someone is dead," she said once she had composed herself, "until you see their grave."

Toby Eady, literary agent, was born on February 28, 1941. He died of cancer on December 24, 2017, aged 76

He was pleased to learn he was the illegitimate son of a war hero

The comedy writer and actress Michaela Coel talks to Dominic Maxwell about her roles in Black Mirror and Chewing Gum — and why men dislike female comics

Being a funny woman has had an unexpected sideeffect for Michaela Coel. "It can really affect your sex life quite a lot," the 30-year-old says, in the kind of judiciously outsized, conspiratorial stage whisper that wouldn't be out of place on her internationally successful Channel 4 sitcom, Chewing Gum.

"It's a weird thing. Because once you're funny …" She trails off. Has she found that men feel threatened by her, then? She laughs. "It's not threatened. It's unattracted."

There was a time, she says — actually, no, hang on, there still very much is a time — when women in comedy tended to be "incredibly sexual" beings, clumsily lusted after by "goofy guys". In her two seasons of Chewing Gum Coel has done her best to tilt that axis. Her character, Tracey, is a goofy woman in her mid-twenties who takes 12 frank, frisky episodes to lose her virginity. In the course of that, we will see her several postcodes away from the usual tropes of sitcom protagonist and rom-com heroine.

Did we ever see even Bridget Jones being sick on her chest while failing to have full sex with a man in a disabled toilet? That's the kind of thing that happens to Tracey. "The waify, perfect, commercially beautiful woman," she says, "it's so boring."

Chewing Gum established Coel as a writer and performer. The first series won her a Bafta for best female comedy performance. It also won her a breakthrough-talent Bafta for her scripts. During her acceptance speech, in May 2016, she urged "anyone out there who looks like me" never to undervalue themselves. Now she is a face, a name, who has spent the past year simply acting.

She has a role in the latest series of Charlie Brooker's satirical sci-fi series, Black Mirror. She has a starring role in a London-set musical, Been So Long, that will be on Netflix this year. If you didn't blink, you will have caught her three-word cameo on board a rebel spaceship in the latest Star Wars film ("They've found us!"). And once she's got some other big-deal project out of the way — she can't tell me what it is, she says apologetically, although it took up a lot of 2017 — she will start work on a third series of Chewing Gum.

So she barely has time for a relationship, even if she hadn't found dating so disastrous of late. "I can't be bothered. Being a woman, it's just a bit weird, mate, sometimes." Even as a girl she was never one for the fairytale idea of a prince who would come to sweep her off her feet. She mimes being a girl getting big eyes at the sight of a princess — something she never did. "And I think women are preferred in that kind of way."

Instead she and a group of friends have decided they want to get rid of the old version of happily-ever-after. "We have all made a pact that we will just live in a big house and have girlie nights all the time, and work, and we will invite a man, and we will sample him, and we will bond with him, all of that, but we don't want to do the whole marriage thing. But I do need sex. We do need sex, so we need to find a way to have the sex."

This, she concedes, is more a utopian dream than a new year's resolution. It is of a piece, though, with what she is trying to do in her work. To jigger with the idea of what's the "normal" way for a young woman. For the past year or so she has had close-cropped hair, after chopping off her locks for Been So Long. "I wanted to be strong as well as vulnerable, I wanted to go against the grain, provide something different for young people to aspire to be."

She shot it shortly after her role in USS Callister, the Black Mirror episode that pastiches the original Star Trek series. She plays the heavily coiffed communications officer, so, yes, she took the original show's Lieutenant Uhura as her reference point. Only after a bit of research, mind. Until she got the role she had never seen an episode of Star Trek. Still hasn't seen a Harry Potter film, a Twilight film or a Twilight Zone.

"I am not very sci-fi," she says. She puts that down to growing up in a "very religious, all-female household" on a council estate in Whitechapel, east London, with her elder sister and her Ghana-born mother.

Hard as she worked in 2017, it felt like a bit of a holiday compared with looking after her own series. "I think acting is a lot easier than doing the writing and the production." Chewing Gum has given her a global profile after it went on Netflix outside Britain. "It's very touching — people write to me from all over the world."

When she starts on the third season this year, though, things in it will change a bit. For a start, Tracey has finally lost her virginity. She will still be naive, suggests Coel, but in new ways. And Coel, who wrote each of the first 12 episodes alone, plans to bring in other writers. "Because I don't want to die. My sets are not peaceful. It's a beautiful catastrophe. I am running around like a headless chicken. I don't sleep. It's manic. I love it — I don't know if I would want it any other way, but I've learnt from working with proper people like Charlie; they really prepare in advance."

Is she a bit of a control freak? For her own show, absolutely. She's known to rewrite it even as they shoot. "You can always make it better, can't you? Other people draw a line and I can't."

She lives in a shared house in Hackney, not too far from where her mother still lives in Whitechapel. If there was no Captain Kirk in her childhood, there weren't many other men around either. Which may have been part of why it was only four years ago that she started thinking seriously about the sort of gender issues that preoccupy her. She appeared in Blurred Lines, a play about sexism, at the National Theatre in 2014.

"Suddenly the last 24 years of your life unravel. I was so busy being black that I didn't even clock the whole woman thing. And suddenly it was like, 'Whoa!' It wasn't important growing up. I went to a girls' school; I didn't see the difference at all."

She was a cradle Catholic, but not a devout one. Then, from the age of 18, she became involved in Pentecostalism for five years. Looking back at it, she thinks it was subconsciously because she had dropped out of college early and her friends had gone into investment banking or were pregnant or in prison. "None of those options appealed to me." Then a girl in the year above her at college, a dancer, invited her along to the Christian Union. Before she knew it she was running to the altar in tears.

During that time she performed her religious poetry, including at the Hackney Empire, where one night she was spotted by the playwright and director Ché Walker, the writer of Been So Long. He invited her to come along to his acting workshops free of charge. She did, then took a degree in acting at Guildhall that led her to drop religion. By that time, though, she had brought her family and boyfriend at the time into the fold. They are still devout; she is not. Which has its downsides: she had an "existential crisis" last summer and saw a therapist, who advised her to "embrace the uncertainty" of her life. She's working on it.

We're sitting in a posh London hotel suite; Coel is wearing an elegant green trouser suit, dolled up for a screening of Black Mirror later. She looks amazing, but she insists it's not the real her. "We live in a world where women are very much not into their absolute selves. We are told to put on a thing, that is why I have tons of make-up on now. I spent 25 minutes ironing this outfit and I don't iron!" So although her career is, if nothing else, more lucrative than it was when Chewing Gum started life as a one-woman play called Chewing Gum Dreams — and before that a 15-minute graduation project — she plays down the gap between her life before and after success. "Even when I was a poet and I was driving a Fiat Punto to gigs and getting paid the fuel fare, to me I was a success. So when people go, 'Oh my God, you've made it!' I go, 'I made it back when I was driving a Fiat Punto.' "I mean, I am grateful. I put my life and soul into writing this story and actually people heard it. People write scripts and nobody ever sees or hears them. And I have never written a script that people haven't seen. I try to give advice to others too, even though I'm still in a sense thinking, 'What's going on?' I think I am quite alienated by the idea of what is going on in my life right now. It's all quite strange."

So fans of Chewing Gum need not worry, she says: the emotional and romantic misadventures that she mined for the series are carrying on unabated, never mind her high profile. "Surprisingly, my life hasn't got any less embarrassing. My friends are always, like, 'Why is this always happening to you?' So I haven't run out of material." She laughs. "Sadly." Black Mirror: USS Callister is available on Netflix now. Been So Long will be on Netflix later this year. Chewing Gum is on 4OD

My film sets are not peaceful. I run around like a headless chicken

Tempus Buy, sell or hold: today's best share tips

british american tobacco First-half revenue £7.6bn First-half profit £2.8bn He is rugged, independent and rides horseback far across the American West. He inhabits a world of vivid sunsets and canyons, chain-smoking along the way as he lights up one of the 20th century's most famous marketing campaigns.

David Millar, the real-life Marlboro Man, died of emphysema years ago and the advertising campaign was stubbed out in 1999 when Philip Morris, the brand's owner, was forced to accept strict new marketing rules. But Marlboro Man rides on, both in popular imagination and as a symbol of Big Tobacco's financial clout.

These days, Americans are smoking fewer cigarettes. With adult smoking rates in the United States hovering around 15 per cent, down from 25 per cent in 1995, cowboys are almost as likely to be vaping or smoking cannabis as traditional cancer sticks.

Nevertheless, tobacco groups such as Philip Morris and British American Tobacco, its biggest rival after a $49 billion takeover of Reynolds American last year, still wring huge profits out of North America, where, despite lower volumes, tobacco revenues are surging thanks to years of price rises.

According to Euromonitor, the number of cigarettes sold in the United States fell by 37 per cent between 2001 and 2016. Over the same period prices per packet rose, lifting revenue by 32 per cent to an estimated $93.4 billion last year, a big chunk of the $700 billion global market.

Despite there being fewer smokers in the more health-conscious US these days, the tobacco business is booming and yesterday BAT, owner of the brands Lucky Strike, Pall Mall and Dunhill, suggested that recent smoke signals surrounding the industry had been positive. It said that President Trump's tax cuts would boost earnings per share by 6 per cent in 2018. That equates to about £400 million or 2 per cent of total sales — a fillip that could help BAT to compete more aggressively in the growing market for what the industry likes to call next-generation products: e-cigarettes, vaping devices and other nifty tobacco gizmos in which the group is investing big money.

BAT aims to find £500 million in revenue from the next-generation business this financial year, rising to more than £1 billion in 2018 and £5 billion in 2022. It expects the division to break even by the end of this year and to deliver what it described as "substantial profit" by 2022. Its plans are more developed than those of Philip Morris, which many sector analysts think is dragging its heels on next-generation products.

The tax cuts could not have come at a better time for BAT. Having recently integrated Reynolds American, the company is more heavily exposed to the American market than it has been for nearly two decades. Meanwhile, it retains a strong presence in emerging markets such as Indonesia, Egypt and Pakistan, where rising populations and incomes are driving robust sales of traditional cigarettes.

To many observers, outside the City in particular, tobacco may feel like a dying industry, but its appeal to investors unfazed by the obvious ethical concerns remains clear: a track record of coughing up chunky dividends year-in, year-out.

At £49.59½, shares in BAT may not be particularly cheap, but they are 12 per cent less than the high of £56.43 in June. There are risks, of course, not least a bribery investigation being undertaken by the Serious Fraud Office into its activities in Kenya. US Food and Drug Administration plans to regulate nicotine to non-addictive levels also could be a swerve-ball. That said, tobacco companies have proved remarkably adept at shrugging off such regulatory threats in the past to ride boldly on.

ADVICE Buy WHY BAT remains well positioned to benefit from tax cuts in America and the recent takeover of Reynolds American

Smoke signalsCigarettes sold in the US Billions Sources: Euromonitor/ Bank of America Merrill Lynch £60 400 20 15 10 50 300 200 100 0 £55 £50 £45 Mar 2017 May Jul Sept Nov Jan 2018 Total US tobacco proit pool $ billions 2006 08 10 12 14 16 2006 08 10 12 14 16

He is rugged, independent and rides horseback far across the American West. He inhabits a world of vivid sunsets and canyons, chain-smoking along the way as he lights up one of the 20th century’s most famous marketing campaigns.

David Millar, the real-life Marlboro Man, died of emphysema years ago and the advertising campaign was stubbed out in 1999 when Philip Morris, the brand’s owner, was forced to accept strict new marketing rules. But Marlboro Man rides on, both in popular imagination and as a symbol of Big Tobacco’s financial clout.

These days, Americans are smoking fewer cigarettes. With adult smoking rates in the United States hovering around 15 per cent, down from 25 per cent in 1995, cowboys are almost as likely to be vaping or smoking cannabis as traditional cancer sticks.

Nevertheless, tobacco groups such as Philip Morris and British American Tobacco, its biggest rival after a $49 billion takeover of Reynolds American last year, still wring huge profits out of North America, where, despite lower volumes, tobacco revenues are surging thanks to years of price rises.

According to Euromonitor, the number of cigarettes sold in the United States fell by 37 per cent between 2001 and 2016. Over the same period prices per packet rose, lifting revenue by 32 per cent to an estimated $93.4 billion last year, a big chunk of the $700 billion global market.

Despite there being fewer smokers in the more health-conscious US these days, the tobacco business is booming and yesterday BAT, owner of the brands Lucky Strike, Pall Mall and Dunhill, suggested that recent smoke signals surrounding the industry had been positive. It said that President Trump’s tax cuts would boost earnings per share by 6 per cent in 2018. That equates to about £400 million or 2 per cent of total sales — a fillip that could help BAT to compete more aggressively in the growing market for what the industry likes to call next-generation products: e-cigarettes, vaping devices and other nifty tobacco gizmos in which the group is investing big money.

BAT aims to find £500 million in revenue from the next-generation business this financial year, rising to more than £1 billion in 2018 and £5 billion in 2022. It expects the division to break even by the end of this year and to deliver what it described as “substantial profit” by 2022. Its plans are more developed than those of Philip Morris, which many sector analysts think is dragging its heels on next-generation products.

The tax cuts could not have come at a better time for BAT. Having recently integrated Reynolds American, the company is more heavily exposed to the American market than it has been for nearly two decades. Meanwhile, it retains a strong presence in emerging markets such as Indonesia, Egypt and Pakistan, where rising populations and incomes are driving robust sales of traditional cigarettes.

To many observers, outside the City in particular, tobacco may feel like a dying industry, but its appeal to investors unfazed by the obvious ethical concerns remains clear: a track record of coughing up chunky dividends year-in, year-out.

At £49.59½, shares in BAT may not be particularly cheap, but they are 12 per cent less than the high of £56.43 in June. There are risks, of course, not least a bribery investigation being undertaken by the Serious Fraud Office into its activities in Kenya. US Food and Drug Administration plans to regulate nicotine to non-addictive levels also could be a swerve-ball. That said, tobacco companies have proved remarkably adept at shrugging off such regulatory threats in the past to ride boldly on.ADVICE BuyWHY BAT remains well positioned to benefit from US tax cuts and the recent takeover of Reynolds AmericanStock Spirits Group Stock Spirits Group is that ultimate initial public offering cliché: a private equity-owned group that floated, got off to a decent start in year one before stumbling badly in year two. The shares have recovered only in the past few months, rising past the 235p at which they were first offered for sale in 2013.

A price war in Poland, its biggest market, was among its main problems, but Stock, which specialises in selling spirits and liqueurs across eastern Europe, was able to announce in its pre-close trading statement yesterday that its Polish business business had performed well.

It’s hard to say that a line can be drawn under its Polish problems, because of the unpredictability of Stock’s biggest competitor there, Roust. In the past year Roust has filed for bankruptcy protection, come out of bankruptcy, fired most of its senior management and announced price increases. Whether those price increases will be implemented and stick remains to be seen. If so, it would be great news for Stock.

The company’s other big market is the Czech Republic, which also performed well. However, there was no update for Italy, where it has struggled because of its lack of scale and the country’s economic issues. Selling trendy flavoured vodka to younger drinkers is difficult with youth unemployment at 40 per cent.

Stock was seen initially as a mini-Diageo, capable of snapping up and revitalising brands, but its difficulties mean that an acquisition strategy has been put on hold. Only two small deals have been done in the past eighteen months. Nevertheless, it has the firepower to speed up here: strongly cash-generative, it brought down net debt to €53 million from €60 million in the year.

The company looks on track to report earnings per share of 15.8p in respect of the year just gone and to produce a total dividend of 8p. After the 7½p rise in the share price to 272p, they trade on a multiple of 17 times 2017 earnings and yield 2.9 per cent. That looks about fair, given the uncertainty about Poland and Roust. The shares have risen by 150 per cent since the depths of the Polish setback and look pretty up to date with events.ADVICE HoldWHY Good recovery, but doubts about market solidity

Theresa May will move or sack at least six members of her cabinet in a reshuffle tomorrow designed to refresh her top team. An aide said she wanted to “make sure the government reflects the modern and diverse country” we live in.

Boris Johnson has been spared demotion and, along with Philip Hammond, Amber Rudd and David Davis, will stay in his post. But a group of younger women and non-white MPs will be drafted into the ministerial ranks.

Those tipped to move or be sacked include party chairman Patrick McLoughlin; education secretary Justine Greening, said to have annoyed May with her “patronising” tone; Greg Clark, the business secretary; and Andrea Leadsom, leader of the Commons — who are all seen as “dead wood”.

The plan to promote female and ethnic minority MPs into the ministerial ranks is an attempt to banish the Tory image as “pale, male and stale”. The cabinet reshuffle has been mapped out on a whiteboard in May’s private office in No 10; changes to lower ministerial ranks will be announced on Tuesday.

Among those tipped for promotion are Suella Fernandes, leader of the backbench Eurosceptics, whose parents came to Britain from Kenya and Mauritius; Seema Kennedy, May’s parliamentary aide, whose father was Iranian; Nusrat Ghani, who helped review the party’s general election performance; and Rishi Sunak, a star of the 2015 intake. Female ministers such as Margot James, Harriet Baldwin, Claire Perry and Sarah Newton could all move up the ladder.

High-flying MPs Lucy Frazer, Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Victoria Prentis are also expected to be given jobs for the first time. Johnny Mercer is tipped for a ministerial post, and May’s aides are considering whether to give jobs to Jacob Rees-Mogg and Tom Tugendhat, two of the most high-profile backbenchers.

May will also take a chance on members of the 2017 intake with Kemi Badenoch and Bim Afolami at the front of the queue. They may be found non-ministerial jobs alongside leading ministers.

May will appoint a first secretary of state to replace Damian Green, who resigned from the Cabinet Office last month. Jeremy Hunt and Chris Grayling have been linked to the role. If Jeremy Hunt moves, Anne Milton and Dr Phillip Lee have been tipped to be his replacement. Hunt’s wife has told friends her husband is “going to have a good year”.

The prime minister will also say today that she is scrapping a vote to end the ban on foxhunting, first revealed by The Sunday Times.New stars on the riseNusrat Ghani, 45The MP for Wealden in East Sussex is a rising star of the 2015 intake. A member of the group of MPs who call themselves “the peloton” because they support each other in the limelight like a cycle racing team, she was drafted in by the party bosses to help run the inquiry into the Tory general election setback.Suella Fernandes, 37Head of the European Research Group, comprising Eurosceptic Tory backbenchers, she is already a party power broker.Rishi Sunak, 37The MP for Richmond in Yorkshire is seen as one of the brightest stars of the 2015 cadre of MPs and is already tipped as a future chancellor or even leader. Has impressed with his Brexit policy ideas on “free ports” and cyber-security.Kemi Badenoch, 38The London-born MP for Saffron Walden grew up in Nigeria and is regarded as the shining light of the 2017 intake. Seema Kennedy, May’s parliamentary aide, is tipped for promotion; Badenoch could become the prime minister’s envoy to Tory MPs.

Dave Clark refuses to feel sorry for himself despite living for seven years with condition that led to his father taking his own life. By David Walsh

In the kitchen of his home in south London Dave Clark is speaking about Parkinson's, the degenerative disorder he was diagnosed with seven years ago. He talks without pity, his attitude to living with the disease, the early fears that he would lose his job as a Sky Sports presenter and his determination to keep battling it.

Then, without changing tone or mood, he slips unsentimental reality into the conversation. "There is no happy ending with Parkinson's, that is the problem," he says. "At the moment it is a one-way street." He would never say he walks this street with his head up and his chest out but this is nevertheless the case.

The specialist who gave him the bad news on January 25, 2011, tried not to be too blunt about it. "Do you have a mortgage, kids?" he asked. Clark laughs at the memory, thinking the blunt route might have been better. Back then the prognosis was for Clark to have two years of life in front of the camera. Two, at most.

That was seven years ago. Last week the 20-1 shot Rob Cross won the PDC world darts championship at the Alexandra Palace in north London that for 16 days Clark presented for Sky Sports. You could argue about whose was the greater achievement.

With Parkinson's there are days when it's OK, days when it's not. For more than two years after being diagnosed, Clark kept his battle private. "I was diagnosed in 2011. Two years later I was doing a Ricky Burns world title fight in Glasgow, the on-air clock was ticking down and I was desperately trying to do my buttons up but my hands weren't working because my meds hadn't kicked in. I just thought, 'This is ridiculous'. There was no one to help me because I hadn't told anyone. Not long after, I was interviewing Phil Taylor, who'd won the world title, and I could feel this internal shake which I thought was visible though it wasn't. But I was thinking about my shaking, not the questions I was asking Taylor. I was afraid of being labelled disabled and losing my job. I had a wife, two kids and a mortgage."

Soon Clark told his boss at Sky he had Parkinson's and he received more support than he'd imagined possible. He then went public with his story and was humbled by the degree to which people cared. His disease is degenerative and life in front of the camera gets harder, but he's still doing it. "When I am on air sometimes I hold a pen," he says. "That's to stop me shaking. Sometimes during the world championship I had to jam my hand down the side of the chair just to stop it shaking. I am not embarrassed by it but I just think for the viewers it would be a distraction."

Though diagnosed at 44, Clark has lived with the implications of Parkinson's for much of his life. At 17 and an A-level student at Ilkley near Leeds, he returned home from school one afternoon to find his dad Alan on the floor of the family home. Afflicted with Parkinson's, he had taken an overdose with the intention of ending his life.

"My dad used to be a paint salesman in Bradford," he says. "A sales rep who people used to accuse of being drunk because his Parkinson's made him unsteady.

"He lost his job, lost all of his self-confidence, lost his driving licence. You know, terrible. Tried to kill himself. When I found him I carried him upstairs. Two weeks later he did kill himself."

Alan Clark hid his Parkinson's from everyone except his wife and his older boy. Dave recalls playing football and rugby matches hoping that his dad wouldn't come to watch, and that his friends wouldn't see what Parkinson's was doing to him. When Alan ended his life, the loss hit Dave hard.

"At his inquest, the coroner said he did a brave thing. I thought, 'It is not a brave thing.' I had lost my Dad. I understand how the lack of dopamine causes Parkinson's and brings with it depression. I know how Dad felt about what he'd lost but I couldn't see what he did as brave. In a way, it's helped me. Made me stronger. It is another reason why I try and do everything opposite to what he did. I'm open about it. I talk about it. This can affect people.

"I was doing Premier League darts in Belfast last year and this guy came up to me and said, 'Thanks for saving my uncle'. I said 'what do you mean, saving your uncle?' He said that after being diagnosed with Parkinson's his uncle had given up, just sat on the sofa, shut himself off from the world. 'He read your story and decided to get up and do something about it. Started walking, started going to the shops, started socialising.'" Accepting that he was on a one-way street, Clark made changes to his life. He had been a go-to presenter at Sky, boxing one week, darts the next, football the one after that. Wherever he was needed. Sky understood the new need for a life more evenly shared between work and his family. Besides, he wanted to spend more time with his wife Carolyn and their two boys George and Harry. He is married to the right woman. "Carolyn was with me when we got the diagnosis," he says. "She is a clinical psychologist so I am her case study. She has been brilliant, fantastic. Won't let me slip downhill, gives me a kick up the backside anytime I'm feeling sorry for myself."

They have travelled as a family. To the Campbell River in British Columbia where they stayed on a floating hotel and watched bears pluck salmon from the water. They swam with turtles on the Great Barrier Reef. They went to the Masai Mara in Kenya where the elephants, lions, leopards, giraffes, zebras, cheetahs, buffalos and hippos roam freely. And Clark got to another Bruce Springsteen concert. And then another. "I am just living the moment a bit more. Amazing how well Bruce has kept going, a four-hour show and his optimism, his brilliance, still makes him the man. Positive energy makes me feel good. Gets the dopamine flowing, what little I have left. I go to a Bruce concert and I feel great for the next week. They reckon there is an addictive nature to the drugs I am on as well but my addiction to Bruce came long before the Parkinson's."

Last year he walked from St Bees Head in Cumbria to Robin Hood's Bay in Yorkshire, a 200-mile trek that enabled him and some friends to raise more than £200,000 for Parkinson's UK. Between one thing and another, more than £500,000 has been handed over to Parkinson's UK since he was sentenced seven years ago.

He trained with an SAS operative for the coast-to-coast walk. Going up murderous Pen y Fan in the Brecon Beacons, the SAS man didn't say a lot and revealed virtually nothing about himself. He did, though, tell the exhausted Clark to stop every once in a while and look down below, just to see how far he'd climbed.

That became a metaphor for his life with Parkinson's. He knows the journey ahead is going to be difficult, so he stops as he goes to consider again how far he's come. At 14 he went to a local hospital in Leeds and asked to work for the hospital radio. That's how much he wanted to be a broadcaster. Sports broadcasting took him to pretty much every event he'd dreamt of covering. Along the way he made a lot of friends. He met Gary Anderson recently and the darts player gave him £1,000 for Parkinson's UK.

People meet him in the street and hand him £10 or £20. Beyond "thank you" he doesn't know what else to say. Though his battle with Parkinson's has been intense and unforgiving, the disease has taught him things too. "It is a mad thing but when you are going to lose your ability to walk, every step becomes fantastic," he says. "I walk every day now. It takes something to come along to make you appreciate things. You take things for granted, then something happens and every sunrise becomes a big one."

when you are going to lose your ability to walk, every step becomes fantastic

Theresa May will recast her government tomorrow as the most diverse Conservative administration, promoting female and ethnic minority MPs into the ministerial ranks as she tries to banish the Tory image as "pale, male and stale".

The prime minister will shuffle her cabinet tomorrow and the lower ministerial ranks on Tuesday. Her cabinet plans are mapped out on a white board in May's private office in No 10. One aide said she wanted to "make sure the government reflects the modern and diverse country" we live in.

Among those tipped for promotion are Suella Fernandes, leader of the backbench Eurosceptics, whose parents came to Britain from Kenya and Mauritius; Seema Kennedy, May's parliamentary aide, whose father was Iranian; Nusrat Ghani, who helped review the party's general election performance; and Rishi Sunak, a star of the 2015 intake. Female ministers such as Margot James, Harriet Baldwin, Claire Perry and Sarah Newton could all move up the ladder.

High-flying MPs Lucy Frazer, Anne-Marie Trevelyan and Victoria Prentis are also expected to be given jobs for the first time. Johnny Mercer is tipped for a ministerial post, and May's aides are considering whether to give jobs to Jacob Rees-Mogg and Tom Tugendhat, two of the most high-profile backbenchers.

May will also take a chance on members of the 2017 intake with Kemi Badenoch and Bim Afolami at the front of the queue. They may be found non-ministerial jobs alongside leading ministers.

If Jeremy Hunt moves from health to the Cabinet Office, as some aides have suggested, Anne Milton and Dr Phillip Lee have been tipped to be his replacement. Hunt's wife has told friends her husband is "going to have a good year".

Editorial, page 22 NEW STARS ON THE RISE Nusrat Ghani, 45 The MP for Wealden in East Sussex is one of the most highly thought of members from the 2015 intake. A member of the group who call themselves "the peloton" because they support each other in the limelight like a cycle racing team, she was drafted in to help run the inquiry into the Tory election setback.

Suella Fernandes, 37 Head of the European Research Group, comprising Eurosceptic Tory backbenchers, she is already a party power broker.

Rishi Sunak, 37 The MP for Richmond in Yorkshire is seen as among the brightest of the 2015 cadre of MPs and is already tipped as a future chancellor or even leader. Has impressed with his Brexit policy ideas on "free ports" and cyber-security.

Kemi Badenoch, 38 The Londonborn MP for Saffron Walden grew up in Nigeria and is regarded as being on the top rung of the 2017 intake. Seema Kennedy, May's parliamentary aide, is tipped for promotion; Badenoch could become May's envoy to Conservative MPs.

THURSDAY 11 JANUARY

CRITICS' CHOICE

Death In Paradise (BBC1, 9pm)

Agatha Christie's Cards on the Table features a card game, a death, four sleuths and four suspects. So does this, although the detectives are just the Saint Marie team and poker is the game, not bridge. When a professional is murdered mid-tournament, the only suspects are his rivals (played by Theo Barklem-Biggs, Nigel Planer and Zoe Telford), plus Mark Benton's compere — whoever it was, they pulled off the crime despite being continuously visible.

Both aided and hindered by a temporarily promoted Duane (Danny John-Jules), Jack (Ardal O'Hanlon)

confirms his reputation for ingenuity by working out the means used as well as naming the villain. Surprisingly little has been done so far, though, to characterise him as something more than a generic latter-day Sherlock. Whereas Richard was a pernickety Englishman abroad, and Humphrey was bumbling but brilliant, their successor's personality still remains frustratingly undefined. John Dugdale Taithí Gan Teorainn (TG4, 9.30pm)

Indebted to Toughest Place to Be, this series examines the experiences of young Irish people who have travelled to countries such as Kenya and Kyrgyzstan to try their hand at jobs done by local workers. An array of professionals — including farmers and nurses — are forced out of their comfort zones, and in this first edition we see how two chefs fare in cookhouses in New Delhi, India's capital. (MC)

Big Cats (BBC1, 8pm)

There is so much feline beauty on display in this three-part series that the science bit is almost superfluous. Still, there are fascinating insights into cat life, with revelations about snow leopards and their long-distance courtship techniques and — slightly undermining the programme's title — an introduction to the rusty spotted cat, the world's tiniest wild feline. Warning: giraffe lovers might want to swerve the lion sequence. (VS)

Amazing Spaces (C4, 8pm)

George Clarke begins his seventh series by inspecting two projects — a leaky canal boat turned into a home and a cattle trailer converted into a luxury camper van — that involve nice workmanship but don't necessarily merit the word "amazing". Truer to the title are the structures seen in Clarke's solo segments, such as a zany, multicoloured Japanese house he visits and describes as "like being inside a Cubist painting". (JD)

Ear To The Ground (RTE1, 8.30pm)

Although this series broaches difficult topics — last week, sudden adult death syndrome — two reports in this edition are uplifting. We meet a man who uses his farm's oats to make gluten-free porridge and flour, which form the basis of a business. In another slot, a family determined to keep its dairy herd on an island farm has established an ice-cream parlour and coffee shop to attract tourists. (MC)

Henry Bolton has led the UK Independence Party for just over three months now, at a time when the dominant political issue is, well, UK independence. So how has he seized the moment?

It’s true that nobody could accuse the former soldier of being invisible, but he is surely living proof that all publicity is certainly not good publicity.

In that time, the newspapers have shown real interest just twice. In October, there was gleeful coverage of his claim — during a tongue-in-cheek interview on the Russian-owned television station RT — that he could strangle a badger with his bare hands. Then, last week, he made the front page of The Sun as the paper teasingly asked: “Which party leader has ditched wife for model?” Well, it was never going to be Jeremy Corbyn, was it?

Mr Bolton, it was revealed, has left his wife, Tatiana, and is in a relationship with a 25-year-old model, actress and Ukip member called Jo Marney.

There must have been times in the past few days when Mr Bolton wished he had stuck to his career as — so his LinkedIn profile claims — “the top international trouble-shooter”.

His victory in September, supported by the former leader Nigel Farage, was rather a surprise. He wasn’t well known in the party, let alone the country. You might even think him a rather unusual recruit to Ukip. He certainly had experience of standing for parliament, against Philip Hammond in 2005, but as a Liberal Democrat.

Born in Kenya, he grew up in Berkshire and developed an early interest in security issues. When he was a teenager, he reportedly called the White House from a phone box in Thatcham and demanded to speak to President Jimmy Carter about the US missiles at nearby Greenham Common.

He joined the Royal Hussars, and after leaving the army in 1990 joined the Territorials, while also serving as a Thames Valley police officer. According to his entry on LinkedIn, his time with the Territorials including a spell as a “French commando”.

It was after leaving the police that he began his career as a defence and security expert. He advised the Albanian government on the Kosovo refugee crisis and served as a UN district governor in Kosovo itself.

He was made an OBE in 2013 after working for the foreign office “stabilisation unit” in Afghanistan. Speaking after he was made an OBE, his mother said: “He has done things that no one else in their right mind would have done.” Does that now include leading Ukip?Life in BriefBorn: Kenya, March 2, 1963Education: Kennet School, Thatcham; Royal Military Academy, SandhurstCareer: Trooper and NCO, Royal Hussars, 1979-1990; Thames Valley police officer, 1992-2001; Lib Dem candidate in Runnymede and Weybridge, 2005; head of OSCE Borders Unit, 2006-2009; foreign office adviser, Afghanistan, 2010-2013; awarded OBE for services to international security, 2013; elected leader of Ukip, 2017Personal life: Separated from Tatiana Smurova. They have two children. Bolton also has a daughter from a previous marriagePaul Pogba

Take cover behind the sofa! It looks like Manchester United’s Paul Pogba is lining himself up to be the scariest Doctor Who villain yet. The midfielder posted a picture on Instagram last week, posing in a special “anti-ageing” mask that looks like a cross between the Phantom of the Opera and a Cyberman. The Opera LED, which costs just under £2,000 (plus VAT), claims to combat the effect of sun damage, and boosts vitamin D with “non-invasive” light therapy. Other celebrity users include the reality star Kourtney Kardashian and the actress Kate Hudson. Mr Pogba is a sprightly 24.Lily Cole

Who would Emily Brontë want to help celebrate the 200th anniversary of her birth this July? Certainly not the supermodel Lily Cole, say traditionalists in the Brontë Society, which maintains the author’s home in West Yorkshire. Lily, who has a double first from Cambridge in history of art, will be working on a project that examines Wuthering Heights, but the critic Nick Holland said last week: “The central question should be, what would Emily Brontë think if she found that the role of chief ‘artist’ and organiser in her celebratory year was a supermodel?”

Presumably she’d say: “What on earth is a supermodel?”Paris Hilton

Congratulations to the hotels heiress Paris Hilton, who last week announced her engagement to her boyfriend, Chris Zylka. The actor and model apparently popped the question in the ski resort of Aspen, Colorado (where Paris, in woolly hat and dark glasses, appeared to be dressed as Ali G), and presented her with a diamond engagement ring worth about £1.5m.

On the upside, if he rolls up with a ring worth that much she’s really not going to say no, is she? On the downside, she has now had to hire security guards to keep constant watch on her ring finger.

Liverpool 2

Milner 35 (pen), Van Dijk 84 02

Everton 1

Sigurdsson 67

Oliver Kay Chief Football Correspondent As the final whistle was blown, signalling a dramatic Liverpool win, all eyes were on Virgil van Dijk. The £74 million man, the most expensive defender in world football, scored the winning goal on his debut, but even amid the wild celebrations there was a sense of trepidation at the potential fallout from this fierce, frenetic FA Cup third-round tie.

Long before Van Dijk's 84th-minute winner at the Kop end, there had been a serious flashpoint between the Everton defender, Mason Holgate, and the Liverpool forward, Roberto Firmino. After a flare-up on the touchline, Firmino reacted angrily to being pushed into an advertising hoarding and shouted something at Holgate. The Everton defender was furious and, judging by the television pictures, appeared to claim he had been racially abused. Video footage suggested otherwise, but it remains to be seen what Bobby Madley includes in his referee's report to the FA.

This was a hugely demanding evening for Madley, who awarded Liverpool a penalty on 35 minutes when Adam Lallana felt Holgate's hands on his shirt and threw himself to the ground. James Milner converted the penalty — justice, Jürgen Klopp might say, for the similar penalty that was awarded to the opposition in their Premier Team Liverpool League fixture here last month — and that appeared likely to be that until a spirited Everton performance, typified by the excellent Phil Jagielka, was rewarded with a fine equaliser from Gylfi Sigurdsson.

6 Van Dijk had the last word, though, sending Liverpool through to the fourth round and leaving Everton still waiting for their first trophy since 1995. Liverpool's more recent fortunes have been little better — a solitary League Cup success since 2006 — but Klopp will hope they have the momentum to push forward in the FA Cup as well as the Premier League and Champions League.

There was no Jordan Henderson (hamstring), Mohamed Salah (groin) or Philippe Coutinho (Barcelona-itis), but Klopp went with a strong line-up, starting with Van Dijk and Sadio Mané, who was in Ghana 24 hours earlier for the African Player-of-the-Year award, in which he finished runner-up to Salah. Sam Allardyce ensured that his younger players had some older heads alongside them — not just Wayne Rooney but Jagielka and James McCarthy, who were restored to central defence and midfield respectively. McCarthy was in the thick of the action in the early stages, bringing the aggression that Allardyce would have wanted. It started out like one of those Merseyside derbies of old, with some forceful tackles and, unusually these days, a willingness to dust themselves down afterwards. The exception was a wild, dangerous challenge from Rooney on Joe Gomez in the seventh minute. It left Rooney walking a tightrope that he was in danger of falling off before being substituted early in the second half. He looked aggrieved, but his frustrating evening could have been a lot worse had Madley taken a less lenient view of that early foul.

changes Everton It was certainly fast and furious, but the most pleasing aspect was Everton's willingness to have a go. In their previous visit to Anfield, in the Premier League on December 10, they barely attacked until the 77th minute when Rooney equalised from the controversial penalty. This time there was a bolder approach, helped in part by Yannick Bolasie, whose runs down the right wing had Milner racing back in support of Andrew Robertson. Sigurdsson and Jonjoe Kenny pushed forward to join the attack, but Everton could not quite get the final ball right.

5 Aside from a wayward shot by Mané, little was seen of Liverpool as an attacking force until the 26th minute when Gomez picked out Milner, whose sidefoot volley flew across the face of goal. That was a warning for Everton, but perhaps not for what followed nine minutes later.

From Emre Can's first-time pass, Lallana controlled the ball on the edge of the penalty area and was looking to turn. He was held by Holgate and responded as, sadly, so many players do, throwing himself to the ground. As for whether that constitutes a penalty, it is safe to assume views on Merseyside have been reversed since Everton won a similarly soft one in the previous fixture. Either way, Rooney's composure on that occasion was replicated by Milner, and Liverpool were 1-0 up.

Tensions were rising when Holgate and Firmino chased a loose ball towards the touchline. The Liverpool forward reacted angrily, though that was nothing compared to the indigna-tion with which the Everton defender responded, even pulling the referee out of the way. Madley, at a loss to work out what had happened, felt unable to take action against either player.

Liverpool went in search of a second goal early in the second half, threatening when Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain set up Lallana and Van Dijk in quick succession. The Lallana chance was the better of the two as Oxlade-Chamberlain sent him clear of the defence but, with Jagielka at his heels, the midfielder shot just wide.

Just like last month, though, the home team were caught cold by an Everton counterattack. From a Liverpool corner, the ball was cleared and, with Joël Matip among those left out of position, Bolasie carried the ball forwards and Ademola Lookman kept it moving before picking out the unlikely figure of Jagielka. The defender's lay-off was perfect and so was Sigurdsson's shot, taken first time in his stride, and stroked beyond a wrongfooted Loris Karius.

Klopp sent on Georginio Wijnaldum, Trent Alexander-Arnold and Dominic Solanke, looking to add more pace to a tiring team, but Liverpool seemed to have lost momentum.

Then, just as Everton's fans were looking forward to a replay at Goodison Park, Oxlade-Chamberlain swung over a corner from the left and Van Dijk rose highest, above Jagielka and Jordan Pickford, to score with a header. He ran off, beating his chest, before sliding on his knees in celebration. It was quite a moment for the 26-year-old, having waited so long to play for Liverpool, and it was quite a night for the club, albeit with the fallout from the Firmino-Holgate incident still to come.

Liverpool (4-3-3): L Karius 5 — J Gomez 7 (sub: D Solanke 77min), J Matip 6, V van Dijk 8, A Robertson 6 — A Lallana 6 (sub: G Wijnaldum 70), E Can 6, J Milner 7 (sub: T Alexander-Arnold 77) — A Oxlade-Chamberlain 7, R Firmino 6, S Mané 6. Substitutes not used D Ward, D Lovren, R Klavan, D Ings. Booked Solanke.

Everton (4-4-1-1): J Pickford 5 — J Kenny 6, M Holgate 7, P Jagielka 8, C Martina 6 — Y Bolasie 7, J McCarthy 7 (sub: T Davies 86), M Schneiderlin 6, G Sigurdsson 7 — W Rooney 4 (sub: A Lookman 52, 7) — D Calvert-Lewin 5 (sub: O Niasse 82). Substitutes not used J Robles, A Williams, B Baningime, N Vlasic. Booked Rooney, McCarthy.

Referee B Madley. Attendance 52,513.

Team changes Liverpool Everton 6 5 Would VAR have ruled on Holgate's five minutes of madness? The authorities snubbed the chance to trial VAR in this fixture — which was a blessing and a curse for Mason Holgate. The Everton centre back conceded a penalty (1), but replays suggested Adam Lallana went down easily. Holgate himself was lucky when going unpunished for shoving Roberto Firmino into the crowd (2,3) and then pulling at the referee (4). A video official may not have been so lenient.

"We have to show them respect," Jürgen Klopp said, referring to his decision to allow Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mané to fly all the way to Ghana and back for the Confederation of African Football's annual awards ceremony just 24 hours before Liverpool were due to play Everton in the third round of the FA Cup.

Klopp's respect was karmic, you could argue, in the sense that, at Thursday evening's glittering event, Salah received the African Player of the Year award, and Mané was voted runner-up.

Whether his players then flew back, invigorated by the love, to run rings around Everton last night or fell asleep with jet lag before the kick-off, we write too soon to know.

But that's all irrelevant. It's the principle. Because, frankly, Klopp was wrong. The respectful thing to do (in the sense of respectful to the sport of football as a whole) would have been to explain to Salah and Mané that they play a team game, with its own in-built annual honours system, and that swanning around in lounge suits at awards ceremonies at any point in the season — and even after it — is unacceptable, and continues to be unacceptable whether the ceremony is seven hours away in Accra, two hours away in Park Lane or just up the road in Knowsley.

There was an important stand to be taken here. Disappointingly, Klopp, who is usually unerring in these larger moral areas, sat down.

A fit-again Maro Itoje is on a quest to learn as much as possible about leadership, he tells John Westerby

A player can learn more in one defeat, the wise men say, than from any number of victories. But when, like Maro Itoje, you have the enviable problem of finding defeats hard to come by, wisdom must instead be gleaned from mistakes made along the way.

It is almost two years now since Itoje burst into the broader sporting consciousness, a 21-year-old England lock of rare athletic gifts, emerging seemingly word perfect in the harsh language of international rugby. But it had not always been so. Itoje had merely shown a striking capacity to learn from formative experiences, such as the time he prepared to launch into one of his first pre-match speeches as the young captain of Saracens' LV= Cup team in 2014. "I was 20, that's relatively young in captaincy terms, and there were a lot of older players in the side," he said.

Itoje does not, as we know, do things by halves and the speech had been diligently crafted and rehearsed. And then, with the older players looking on expectantly, came the new leader's moment to take a deep breath and announce himself. "I totally messed up my speech," he said. "I stood there and I was very embarrassed. But as soon as it was over, a number of the senior players came up to me, saying, 'Come on, it doesn't matter, you'll be good.' I needed that. And I knew then that I had their backing, no matter what."

In a secondary domestic competition, Itoje had been made captain at such a young age for that very reason: to harness his natural leadership skills for the good of the team — but also to accelerate his own development. After that false start, Saracens went on to win the competition. "I learnt a lot," he said. "That experience made me better from a speaking point of view and it hasn't happened since. At certain times, you have to go through those uncomfortable moments in order to grow. Like with muscles, you have to break them down before you build them. There's always a little bit of damage when you want to grow further."

Itoje will be back in the second row for Saracens this weekend, the recent damage to his jawbone repaired well ahead of schedule, and he is fit to play his first game for a month away to Wasps tomorrow. Even before a return to match fitness, Eddie Jones, the England head coach, placed him in the thick of preparations for the NatWest Six Nations Championship at England's training camp in Brighton last week, directing operations at the lineout. Itoje may have won only 14 England caps, to which he added three more for the British & Irish Lions, but those natural leadership qualities make him one of the team's guiding lights.

At a time when the debate over Dylan Hartley's position as captain rages on, it is a curiosity that England are probably more certain of their captain for the 2023 World Cup in France than for the tournament in Japan next year. Itoje, almost certainly, will become captain in the next World Cup cycle and, once he has taken on the job, he can be expected to keep it for a while. Captaincy is not a role he covets, but leadership is a subject that animates him. The first guest on his dream dinner party invitation list, as he disclosed in an interview with The Times last year, would be the late Kwame Nkrumah, leader of Ghana's independence movement; a nod to the pride in his own African roots (his family is Nigerian) and his studies in African politics, but also to his reverence for leaders of stature.

"I've never heard it said of a team that there are too many leaders," he said. "Leadership for me is not about being captain of the side. It's more about understanding your role within the side and magnifying that to make it something more beneficial to the team. The more leaders you have, the better, whether that's playing five-a-side football, playing rugby for Saracens, or playing for England."

Given his famous presence and poise, it might be assumed that Itoje has captained every team he ever played in. As a teenager, though, he was less sure of himself. When he joined Saracens at 14, as a boarder at the nearby St George's School in Harpenden, he would not have been a natural captain. "I was a really nervous player, in fact I was pretty nervous about anything back then," he has said. "I was a lanky 14-year-old in the background just trying to find his way. Slowly but surely I came out of my shell."

As a result, the captaincy roles came as his confidence burgeoned. "I wasn't captain of my school team, although I had leadership roles within it, the same with my academy," he said. "It was only in the [England] Under-20s when I was made official captain of the team."

His powerful performances were instrumental in leading England to victory in the Under-20 World Championship in New Zealand in 2014. "On the back of that, Mark McCall [Saracens' director of rugby] made me captain of the second team," Itoje said. Saracens Storm went on to win the Aviva A League that year, so McCall extended the job to the LV= Cup team, during which he made his fateful speech and recovered to lift yet another trophy. "That was really special," he said. "I still look back at photos and think, 'Wow, that was a cool time.' " The run of success has continued, of course, since his promotion through the ranks, with two Premiership titles, two Champions Cup successes, a Lions series and 13 victories in his first 14 appearances for England. He has not been captain for a while — he has led Saracens' senior team only once from the start of a game — but he has continued to develop his leadership skills. "I've spoken to people in the military, people in business, the CEOs and owners of some pretty big firms," he said. "Of all the people I've spoken to, if you break down what they've said, take the specifics of their environment out of it, a lot of them are saying more or less the same thing.

"And having a broader perspective on life does help. In a squad of 40 players, you'll have 40 different attitudes, mindsets, different environments in which they were raised. As a result, they have different triggers, different ways of thinking about life. You need to find a way to get them all to buy into a set of values, a culture and an identity."

Itoje could never be accused of having a narrow outlook on life, but tomorrow he will relish a return to the visceral thrills of combat at the Ricoh Arena, the start of a heady period encompassing two vital Champions Cup fixtures and the Six Nations to follow. A month out of action has sharpened his appetite after a wincingly painful injury sustained when his jaw was fractured in a collision with Mike Brown. He now has two metal plates in his chin and two more on the left side of his jawbone.

"That was the most excruciating pain I have ever experienced," he said. "At first I thought, my jaw hurts, then I tried moving it and it hurt a bit more. Two or three minutes later, the pain hit me. I can't think of anything more painful. Fortunately, I was able to have an operation that same day and I was able to start the recovery."

He packs down at lock tomorrow alongside Nick Isiekwe, having spent the season shuffling between lock and blind-side flanker for both club and country. "I genuinely don't mind which I play," he said. "The real differences are with where you start in the scrum and maybe you have slightly different roles on attacking maps. You have slightly more opportunities to carry at No 6, more licence to roam in outside channels."

Ball-carrying is one area of Itoje's game that is a work in progress, as he continues his quest for perpetual self-improvement. And he is still developing those leadership skills, too. "I want to be the most rounded individual and player I can be," he said. "There are improvements in terms of leadership I feel I can make." Any specifics? He pauses and chuckles. "Yeah, there's a few, but I'll leave that one open."

He will not seek the captaincy of club or country, but inevitably the roles will find him. "I've never gone up to a coach and said, 'I want to be captain,' " he said. "It just kind of happened." Things keep kind of happening for Itoje. And it is no coincidence that, since his coming of age for club and country, so many extraordinary things have happened.

Maro Itoje was speaking on behalf of Ricoh. Go to rugby.ricoh.co.uk to find out more about The Business of Rugby

1.31 Turnovers per 80 minutes that Itoje has won in the Premiership this season — the most of anyone who has played 300 minutes

75 Saracens' win percentage when Itoje is playing since his debut (39 out of 52). Without him it is 62 per cent (21/34)

A new independent service is giving Muslim parents the tools to challenge children when they develop extremist views, Danielle Sheridan writes

Aafreen noticed that one of her teenage sons was becoming aggressive towards her. He told her she was "not a very good Muslim" and that her understanding of Islam was weak. Eventually all communication stopped and her son fled to Syria, where he was killed.

Aafreen's (not her real name) story is one of many that has inspired the founding of Supporting Affected Families from Extremism (SAFE). The scheme, launched in November, is giving parents advice that is independent from their Muslim communities and the authorities. It will offer "theological support" where parents — and if possible the child — are invited to sit down with imams who have experience of talking to radicalised children. "The pastoral care is about settling, and refocusing them and providing a world view to the young person that challenges their polarised thinking and uses Islamic theology to provide alternatives," says Fiyaz Mughal, the founder and director of Faith Matters, which set up the project.

He added that a common theme among Muslim parents who contacted Faith Matters was that their child had become withdrawn and was questioning the way their parents practised their religion. "There are numerous cases where the young person repeatedly challenges the religious and world view of his or her parents and cites their displeasure that their family is acting against the will of God," Mr Mughal added.

The scheme to try to deal with such alienation is the first to have a national reach and it is hoped that it will be a more effective alternative to Prevent, the government's counterterror strategy that since 2003 has aimed to guard against young people becoming radicalised. However, Prevent and its initiatives, such as the Channel project, have been criticised for being counterproduc-tive, because they cast suspicion on young people when some would argue that they need nurturing.

SAFE is led by Michael Evans, whose brother, Thomas, a British jihadist known as the "white beast", was killed in Kenya in 2015. After he fled to the region in 2011 to join the jihadist group al-Shabaab, Thomas Evans was said to have been involved in the attack on a town called Mpeketoni in Kenya, where the terrorists went from door to door killing Christians.

Raised in a secular household, Evans was drawn to Islam after breaking up with a girlfriend. As he became more obsessed with the ideology, he constantly scolded his younger brother and mother and refused to eat in the family home because the food was not halal.

In a speech at the Quilliam Foundation, a counterextremism think tank, his mother, Sally Evans, said: "I began to understand how toxic and deadly Islamist radicalisation can be, because it doesn't only destroy the lives of young men and women who are struck by its spell, but it also indirectly devastates the lives of the parents and siblings." She added that she was never opposed to her son becoming Muslim as she hoped it might "settle" his behaviour. However, Thomas stopped respecting his mother's right to be secular and told her she was "destined for hell" unless she converted.

Qari Muhammad Asim, the senior imam at the Makkah Mosque in Leeds, says that parents are often the last ones to learn about the radicalisation of their teenage children. "I have come across parents who feel completely vulnerable and exposed when their children, with an apparent new-found understanding of their religion, challenge them, or even look down on them due to their perceived lack of religious knowledge. Agencies such as SAFE can signpost parents to seek further assistance to challenge and theologically explore some of the new-found arguments proposed by young people."

Many feel that it is important for such an organisation to be independent of Muslim communities so that parents can freely express their concerns without fear of judgment. "If the children do something wrong the family have an enormous pressure on them and can be shunned by the local community," says Amina Lone, a co-director of the community charity the Social Action and Research Foundation. "Muslim families can be cautious of the state and do not feel they can turn to their local imam out of fear of judgment and the fact that they cannot be sure the conversation will remain confidential. "In some of the cases where we have intervened, the family's faith is challenged by what they see. Something that is a part of their life has been turned on itself within their children and this creates a trauma for them."

About 850 people have fled Britain to join jihadist groups in the past few years, according to figures from the British government, but Michael Evans is confident that SAFE can go a long way to preventing extremism by providing families with more options.

"Extremism has no borders, and ideas which can promote extremism and lead to terrorism can spread quickly. So building on awareness and understanding in communities will divert young people from engaging with these materials. It is a form of resilience-building that is needed right now."

One boy told his mother she was destined for hell unless she converted

“Once again, we got a very bad decision against us. We have to account in our preparations for that’s what we have to face.” (Arsène Wenger, speaking after Chelsea were awarded a penalty in the 2-2 draw against Arsenal on Wednesday)Exclusive extracts from Wenger’s training diary:Thursday morningThe new drills seem to be going well. Adapt and survive, they say. Well, we’re doing our best. This morning the team warmed up as usual but then, instead of breaking into units for rondos, we did 15 minutes on farcical decisions. This was essentially a six-a-side game with Boro Primorac refereeing and giving arbitrary and inexplicable penalties — all the while dressed as a vicar with his trousers around his ankles, just to emphasise the farcical aspect. Tomorrow Boro has agreed to wear stockings and suspenders, just to mix it up a bit.

Meanwhile, to convey that the world is an unfair place where bad and unreasonable things happen, Steve Bould went out to the car park with a baseball bat and battered a few headlights. Then we sent the squad off to find out whose cars had been damaged, brought them back in and got Tony Colbert, our fitness coach, to measure their recovery time. Some room for improvement there, but it will come. Then we worked on set plays before concluding with some light credulity-stretching.Thursday afternoonOpened the session with a team meeting. Across the top of the whiteboard, I wrote in big letters the heading “Concerning Coincidences.” Then, using pins and coloured string, I gathered the overwhelming evidence of the entirely premeditated campaign against us by referees: the decisions against us away to Stoke City, Watford, Manchester City and West Bromwich Albion and now at home to Chelsea.

By the end of my two-hour lecture I had not only demonstrated that Eden Hazard should have been given a yellow card after Héctor Bellerín kicked him, I had also conclusively linked Mike Dean, not just to the scene of the crime at The Hawthorns, but also to the Illuminati, an elite cabal of reptilians in human form, led by David Elleray and the Kardashian family, who rule the world according to their dark, anti-Arsenal desires.

Then I asked if there were any questions.

After a long silence, Shkodran Mustafi put his hand up. “To be fair, boss, I was marginally offside for that goal against Tottenham. And West Brom should probably have had a pen at our place. And we got a really soft one, late doors, at Burnley. And if the ref spots Jack’s dive the other night, it’s a second yellow and he’s not on the pitch to score our equaliser. So . . .”

I was furious. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My voice was low but I was struggling to control it. “What exactly is your point?”

The room had gone very quiet. Mustafi looked around at the other players who shifted nervously.

“Well, you know... swings and roundabouts?”

I exploded. The bottle of water I was holding hit the wall behind Mustafi’s head and burst, soaking everyone in the vicinity. “Wrong!” I screamed. “Weren’t you listening? Not swings and roundabouts! Not for Arsenal! Only the Manchester clubs and Chelsea can afford swings AND roundabouts. For us, it’s only ever swings. It’s only. Ever. Swings.”

I was trembling with anger. I stopped the meeting and sent the players out to run round the pitch ten times and instructed Bould and Primorac to trip them up randomly while they were doing it. But especially Mustafi.Friday morningOur next game is away to Nottingham Forest in the FA Cup, so, in the video analysis room, we went over the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination. “So, now you’ve had the chance to have a look at it,” I said, “who was at fault?”

Alexandre Lacazette was first to reply. “It’s got to be Lee Harvey Oswald from the book depository for me. All day long.” At that, Ainsley Maitland-Niles let out a sigh and said, “Honestly, Laco, you’ll be saying Americans actually went to the moon next!” Everybody laughed.

“No,” Maitland-Niles continued. “The angles are all wrong. Plus the extent and direction of the blood spatter doesn’t support the lone assassin theory. All the visual evidence points to a supplementary shooter on the grassy knoll, and that, in turn, raises the whole question of Mafia involvement, not to mention the possibility of government collusion. It wouldn’t be prudent to rule out Mike Dean at this point, either.” Bright lad, that Maitland-Niles. Reckon I’ll start him against Forest.Friday afternoonSomeone has smashed up my car. Thought I made it clear to Bould: not the big silver Volvo. But maybe it wasn’t Bould. Maybe this goes much deeper...Mourinho crisis appeal gathering paceWe cried out, and you responded. We’re thrilled to announce that, following last week’s major launch in this space, our José Aid campaign totaliser now stands at £2.20 on its way to our declared target of £75 million to boost Manchester United’s insufficient (according to José Mourinho) transfer coffers.

On top of the £1.20 that we personally pledged to get the ball rolling, we were moved to receive a promise of 50p from

an anonymous Chelsea-supporting donor, whose anonymous brother-in-law has generously pledged to match that donation, thus making a guaranteed £1 in total and nudging us tantalisingly closer to our goal.

And, yes, a Chelsea supporter: heart-warming signs, there, of the football community setting partisanship to one side and coming together in the interests of making United financially competitive again.

Our next move: a bucket collection outside football grounds. We’ll get back to you.Weary travellers lose moral compass“We have to show them respect,” Jürgen Klopp said, referring to his decision to allow Mohamed Salah and Sadio Mané to fly all the way to Ghana and back for the Confederation of African Football’s annual awards ceremony just 24 hours before Liverpool were due to play Everton in the third round of the FA Cup.

Klopp’s respect was karmic, you could argue, in the sense that, at Thursday evening’s glittering event, Salah received the African Player of the Year award, and Mané was voted runner-up. Whether his players then flew back, invigorated by the love, to run rings around Everton last night or fell asleep with jet lag before the kick-off, we write too soon to know.

But that’s all irrelevant. It’s the principle. Because, frankly, Klopp was wrong. The respectful thing to do (in the sense of respectful to the sport of football as a whole) would have been to explain to Salah and Mané that they play a team game, with its own in-built annual honours system, and that swanning around in lounge suits at awards ceremonies at any point in the season — and even after it — is unacceptable, and continues to be unacceptable whether the ceremony is seven hours away in Accra, two hours away in Park Lane or just up the road in Knowsley.

There was an important stand to be taken here. Disappointingly, Klopp, who is usually unerring in these larger moral areas, sat down.

Army officer who negotiated with the North Koreans in the 'joint security area'

When Margaret Thatcher visited South Korea in 1986 she was escorted to the Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) on the northern border by Tim Hackworth, a Royal Signals officer. He knew North Korea's poker-faced representatives better than any other Englishman, having held talks with them eight times at the Panmunjom "joint security area" in the heart of the DMZ. Although there had been a truce between North and South Korea in 1953, they were still technically at war and the DMZ was a place where western officers had been killed in outbreaks of violence. For her visit, the prime minister needed to be in a pair of hands as safe as Hackworth's.