‘Sunburn’ can make food more nutritious
UK campaign has exposed the PM’s character flaws, but luckily for the Tories, they’re nowhere near as bad as Jeremy Corbyn’s.
Even after Manchester, the significant moments of this general election have probably not changed. The crucial dates to bear in mind, as the polls bounce and commentary becomes excitable, are September 24, 2016 when Jeremy Corbyn saw off the anaemic challenge of Owen Smith and July 13, 2016, when Theresa May succeeded David Cameron as prime minister. It can be all but impossible, with the army on the streets, to remember that most events, while they matter profoundly for other reasons, do not swing elections. May, though, is doing her best to make the campaign matter.
A conventional interpretation will settle about this terrible week, in which May was saved from her botched manifesto by the need to be prime ministerial in response to an atrocity.
The temporary suspension of campaigning, it will be said, came at the ideal moment for her and changed the subject from social care to security, on which she is strong and Corbyn is weak.
It’s always a mistake to read the election up so close, though. Almost all elections are won by fundamental questions determined long in advance of the campaign itself. When Jo Cox was murdered during the European referendum campaign there were confident predictions about its impact. In the event, there was no impact. The campaign had been going 40 years.
It is invariably the case that the party in the lead at the beginning of an election period is in the lead at the end. It would, however, be an exaggeration to say the campaign does not matter at all: campaigns help to enthuse supporters and they can be useful in getting the vote out. But a wise campaign is not a lot more than an elaborate series of lifts to the polling station.
The chief surprise of this election is that the strategic intelligence in this regard has come entirely from Labour. The Corbyn team are running the right campaign. They are, essentially, repeating the tactics masterfully arranged by Peter Mandelson in 2010 for Gordon Brown. Accepting that victory was impossible, Mandelson set out to minimise the defeat. Faced with the mediocre David Cameron, he met his limited aim.
This is why Corbyn is quite right, by his own lights, to play to the gallery of the faithful. Election campaigns are not acts of persuasion. Not many people decide how to vote on the basis of them even though all the protagonists have to pretend that they do. Whenever there is a shift in the polls, even a rogue one, someone can be found to say that there is still all to play for. There rarely is. Most voters tune in to politics only occasionally and an election is one of those moments. That does not mean they arrive with no prior view at all. Even the minority of people who make up their minds during the campaign do not do so on the basis of events in those frenetic weeks. It is merely that the campaign happens at the end of the process, close to the deadline for them to decide.
The best books about campaigns are Theodore White’s series The Making of the President, which had editions in 1960, 1964, 1968 and 1972. The enduring wisdom of these books is not their content but their style. White writes as if the politicians were characters in a novel which, in an important sense, they are. The character of the leader is the key to defining a party. It embodies the party’s brand and if that character takes a beating, the implications for the party are profound.
At every general election since 1979 the party whose leader has been most favoured has won. This is why May’s extraordinary decision to scribble over her own character in the novel of the Tory campaign was so strange and potentially the most important event of the election.
May’s campaign strategy had been to speak to nobody and hope that Diane Abbott was on the radio a lot, doing sums. Then she inexplicably broke her vow of silence with a manifesto pledge to take the payment for social care from the estates of the one in four people who are capriciously affected. To break a silence with a promise of one of the most hated of all taxes was eccentric, to put it kindly. In 2007 George Osborne staved off a Gordon Brown election victory by promising to protect inheritance. A decade later, May did pretty much the reverse policy, with much of the reverse effect. What was worse, though, was that she then repeated Brown’s error, from which he never recovered. Announcing that there would be no election in 2007, Brown claimed, quite implausibly, that he had never looked at the opinion polls. It was laughable. May’s cover version of that avoidable error was her wholly incredible insistence that, having added a cap to the policy where none had existed four days before, nothing had changed. This was instantly no longer about social care. It was about the character she plays in the novel called The Making of a Prime Minister. Stability and candour were supposed to be her traits. That was weak and untruthful and May was exposed as not being quite the woman advertised. She has been rumbled as not very good and there is no turning back from that. The calculation behind holding a snap early election was to win a sweeping victory before the truth got out. This is the virtue of the campaign and why it is a vital democratic process which, especially after Manchester, we need to resume with vigour. It is hard to hide who you are for long. There is a debate going on in the Labour Party about how to define success once the votes are counted. May has now made the measure plain. Anyone remotely good would win this election. If Labour loses, the defeat is a poor one and the leader must be held culpable. When all seems to be in flux, go back to basics. Only a few weeks ago local elections took place that the Conservatives won, on a projected national vote, by 11 percentage points. Most of the Ukip vote will go to the Tories. Nobody ever wins an election if they are significantly behind on the key issues of the economy and leadership, as Labour are now. For it to have a chance of winning the 2022 election, the party must act decisively to address its weaknesses as soon as this one is over. The next campaign begins on June 9. The Times Giving fruit, vegetables and other raw ingredients the botanical equivalent of sunburn can make them more nutritious, experiments have shown.
British supermarkets are already selling mushrooms treated with ‘‘pulsed light’’ to enhance their levels of vitamin D2, and the technique appears to have similar effects on a range of crops, from cauliflowers to elderberries.
The flashes, each lasting a few ten thousandths of a second, are thought to provoke a stress response that makes plants and fungi churn out beneficial compounds to protect themselves.
The method was invented to kill off unwanted microbes on the surface of food, but the remarkable side effect has increasingly come into its own over the last few years. Scientists have used it to more than double the activity of antioxidants in tomatoes, to boost vitamin C in mangos, and to increase colourful anthocyanins in figs.
In the latest study, published in the journal Innovative Food Science and Emerging Technologies, researchers in Spain and Ireland achieved the feat with sliced carrots, using a powerful lamp to make them much better at clinging on to several vitamin A precursors.
The process involves bursts of light at wavelengths across the spectrum, from ultraviolet through visible light to infrared. It is sufficiently safe and straightforward that some academics say the devices could ultimately find their way into people’s kitchens.
The downside is that in some cases, the stress response can prompt unwanted effects. In one experiment with potato peel, the scientists found that the stress resulted in elevated levels of glycoalkaloids, a form of natural pesticide.