Diva elegance with a dash of Butlin’s camp cheer ... it could only be Adele
5 years since her last proper UK gig, look who’s back in town
MINUTES before Adele appeared, the sun burst through the grey evening skies and bathed the Hyde Park stage in a golden light. If it was an omen, it was a good one. Of sorts.
‘Hello,’ she began to sing on the eponymous opening number . And then she almost broke down, overcome with... what? Emotion, nerves, stage fright?
No one knew for sure but our girl quickly rallied. ‘Help me,’ she pleaded and 60, 000 fans provided an emotional boost with a hearty sing along.
With her honey blonde hair swept up in a chignon and wearing a black halter dress with gold and pearl earrings, Adele looked the very picture of diva elegance. But looks can be deceptive.
‘I’m sh***in’ meself,’ she announced before launching into a note-perfect rendition of I Drink Wine, a slow burn torch from her latest album. ‘I hope I learn to get over myself and stop trying to be someone else,’ she sings. Afterwards she added that it was ‘so strange to be in front of an audience again’. It was, for all of us.
Earlier this year Adele cancelled her run of Las Vegas shows the day before they were
Barely a moment where she is not in total control
scheduled to start, blaming Covid and delivery delays. ‘I’m gutted but it just ain’t ready,’ she said, in a tearful social media post.
Since then there have been two television specials, both a carefully controlled performance filmed in front of invited celebrity audiences in Los Angeles and London.
Apart from these showcases it has been five long years since Adele last played a gig in the UK, or anywhere else. And two of those shows
– at Wembley stadium – were cancelled because of voice problems.
Yet here she was at last, turning a grey summer night in the city into an emotional homecoming, into something unforgettable.
She sang highlights from the four albums that have chronicled the journey of her life; each named after the age she was when they were recorded. First there was 19 in 2008, followed by 21 (2011), 25 (2015) and then last year’s divorce album, 30.
On stage, she does not disappoint, with her dagger manicure and perfect maquillage, a woman who is forever lush of lash and rich of voice, with a repertoire that ranges from the conversational and raspy to the tonsil-rattling power ballads such as Skyfall.
She stopped singing that too – but this time only to direct responders to someone who had been taken ill in the crowd.
Why does she get so nervous? There is barely a moment when she is not in total control on stage.
The songs kept on coming, tracing Adele’s arc from teenage girlfriend to lover, wife and mother. It is all there – the men she ‘cried high tides’ over; the good loves gone bad; the working life where she has tried to find ‘balance in the sacrifice’.
To some she is the queen of mumrock but to her millions of fans she sings about matters of the heart and to her millions of fans, that is all that matters.
Hers is an empire of ballads built on heartbreak, pain and the aftermath but I have to say, sometimes it is a little too much. ‘Any mums in the crowd tonight,’ she says, with a Butlin’s camp cheer.
Once upon a time she was simple Adele Adkins from Tottenham, now she is one of the biggest selling singers in pop history. So successful that, like Bono, Madonna and Elvis, she has become a mononym, known to all by her first name only.
So much has changed for her! Marriage, baby, divorce. Then a mansion buying spree in the Hollywood Hills and a new glutenfree, gym-rich lifestyle in California which clearly suits her well. She must like it there, for she even has a tattoo of the LA skyline on her arm – yet at heart Adele is a London girl who has not changed and never will.
At the Brit Awards in February, she won best artist and best album to add to her groaning trophy cupboard. And in her acceptance speech she had some advice for new artists. ‘Never lose sight of why you are who you are. The reason people are into you is because there’s something you have in you,’ she said. ‘Don’t ever let go of that. Ever.’ Well it has certainly worked for her.
A repertoire that ranges from the conversational and raspy to tonsil-rattling power ballads
LIke many parents, the lockdowns of the last two years afforded Clare Page an unexpected insight into her daughter’s school lessons. Her then 13-year-old — who we will call Isla — attended Haberdashers’ Aske’s Hatcham College, a 1,400-pupil state secondary school in South london. And with teaching taking place online, some of the material she saw unfolding on her daughter’s laptop at home was little short of horrifying.
Isla’s ‘lessons’ — 46-year-old designer Clare uses the term loosely — included a lecture on white privilege; playing a rap song with the lyrics ‘our Prime Minister is a real racist’; and an art lesson where pupils were encouraged to produce their own Black lives Matter poster after being shown an image of black and white people stabbing each other.
Sex education meanwhile — delivered under the new ‘ relationship and sex education’ policy that has become a compulsory part of the curriculum since 2020 — was no less disturbing. It turned out to be provided by the dubiously named ‘ School for Sexuality education’, an external organisation with links to a commercial website that promotes pornography and sex toys.
At its workshops, pupils were informed they lived in a ‘heteronormative’ (straight) world, that this was a bad thing, and they should be ‘sex positive’ instead.
Appalled at what she saw as little short of highly politicised dogma disguised as ‘learning’, Clare asked the school if she could see the material used in some lessons.
She was told she couldn’t, and her repeated — and ultimately futile — attempts to do so have now led her to make a formal complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office, an independent authority set up, among other things, to promote openness and transparency in public bodies.
She believes that, if asked by a parent, schools should be legally obliged to provide information about the ‘lesson plans’ they use. At present, it is a matter of dispute as to whether they have any obligation to provide the information.
CLARE is not alone in her concern: in recent years, a number of campaigning groups have sprung up to tackle what they see as the overt politicisation of children, while a slew of stories has also highlighted the way in which gender and racial politics have crept into the provision of education.
In the last week alone, a feepaying Christian school in Oxfordshire has become engulfed in a row following a diversity- driven makeover in which the library was garlanded with rainbow LGBT flags, while Michelle Donelan, the Minister for Higher education, has written to universities warning them that signing up to equality and diversity schemes could hamper free speech.
On Thursday, Conservative MP Miriam Cates spoke of her concern that recent guidelines are opening doors to ‘ age inappropriate’ and ‘extreme’ content being taught in schools.
Clare, however, is one of the few parents prepared to talk openly about the problem, although understandably she has asked for anonymity for her family.
‘I believe passionately in what I am fighting for, but as a parent I also want to protect my daughters,’ she says. ‘ A lot of people are terrified of discussing this territory, but someone has to question what is going on.’
‘Otherwise, it means that there is no transparency for parents regarding the messages being handed to our young people.’
Clare and her husband are unlikely lightning rods: impeccably liberal, since marrying in 2001 they have lived in the london borough of lewisham, a neighbourhood they chose for its diversity.
While privately educated herself, Clare was happy for both her daughters — Isla, now 15 and 12-year-old Natasha — to be schooled in the state system.
Both attended the local primary where, in 2018, Clare had an early insight into the gender politics at play when Natasha, then nine, announced she’d been told to refer to historical figures as ‘they’ rather than he or she because those who had come before us were unable to choose their preferred pronouns and that there were ‘many more than two genders’.
‘That was when the warning bell rang,’ says Clare. ‘I complained to the school and was staggered by the pushback from governors and the head teacher.
‘It was basically a case of “there is no way you can touch this”.’
Clare’s concerns mounted when she learned that representatives from an organisation called ‘Pop’n’Olly’ — a self-styled ‘lGBT+ equality educational resource’ created by author and illustrator Olly Pike — were visiting the school during antibullying week.
‘No one is against the idea of an anti-bullying week — but suddenly this message is being conflated with other more complex material,’ she explains.
‘The first thing I knew about it was when I arrived home to find my daughter watching an Olly Pike cartoon about a girl who has an overnight sex change which solves her bullying problem.
‘even if you take away the issue of whether you should be discussing trans- sexualism to children in primary school, this is highly misleading.’
When Clare complained, she was told that Olly Pike was recommended by the lGBTQ+ lobby group Stonewall which, in turn, was backed by the Department for education.
Around the same time, Isla had started secondary school at Haberdashers’ Hatcham College in lewisham — one of a guild of schools founded by a legacy from 17th century benefactor robert Aske. His name was removed from the school last year because of his purported links to slavery and, at Hatcham, his oil portrait has been removed and his statue repurposed.
A state comprehensive, Hatcham’s intake is 83 per cent black and ethnic minority and 17 per cent white, but Clare says that children from all backgrounds largely got on well.
‘It’s an inner- city school so there are fights and there have been knife fears,’ she says. ‘But, overall, it is a successful, cohesive community and Isla has got very good friends.’
Nonetheless, Clare said she had become concerned about what she saw as overt politicising by teachers, not to mention the peddling of misleading and in some cases downright inaccurate information in lessons.
‘The first thing that made me prick up my ears was when Isla told me her english teacher had come in on his last day at the school wearing a Jeremy Corbyn T-shirt and telling them all they had to vote labour,’ she recalls.
Not long afterwards she learned that one of her daughter’s peers — a ‘youth coordinator’ for the climate change activists extinction rebellion — was leafleting classmates, encouraging them to join the movement and try to get arrested. ‘The teachers were overtly congratulating her,’ she says.
Clare raised her concerns with the school but says she was ignored, despite repeated attempts to secure a meeting.
THEN came the first national lockdown of March 2020. With lessons taking place online, it gave Clare and her husband a chance to see what Isla was being taught. What they saw alarmed them, particularly in the aftermath of the tragic death of George Floyd at the hands of U.S. police officers in May 2020.
‘One english teacher gave a lesson implying that America was a fascist police state and introduced the kids to a U.S. activist called Tamika Mallory,’ says Clare. ‘Some of her speeches are pretty incendiary, saying things like: “I don’t care if you burn down buildings.” ’
She was further alarmed to learn that in another lesson, a teacher had played a song by a rap artist called Dave which features the lyric ‘our Prime
Minister is a real racist’, while Isla and her school friends — then just 13 — had also been shown a painting in an art class of white and black people stabbing each other to
inspire them to make their own Black Lives Matters posters.
‘ It’s deeply unwise to use a picture of people stabbing each
other in a place where there is genuine worry that people might carry a knife,’ says Clare.
‘Some of the resultant images produced by the children and praised by the teacher included a police station on fire and a girl being shot in the head.’
Clare complained once more, and this time received a phone call from a Deputy Head who said they were under huge pressure from staff to respond to Black Lives Matter in the curriculum.
‘I said I wasn’t against that, but they had to be cautious as the organisation at its core is not just an equality movement but a political movement. The conversation was reasonable enough,’ Clare recalls.
But what followed was a series of four assemblies that talked about white privilege and systemic racism. ‘There was a slide that said: “Is your curriculum too white?”’ Clare recalls. ‘Children were also told that the point of the BLM phrase is that black lives were being treated as expendable
by the police and the government that employs them.
‘This is against a backdrop of citizens burning things in America and in a London borough that had rioting in 2012. I felt it was completely irresponsible.’
Again Clare and her husband complained until eventually, by autumn 2020, her grievance was heard before three school governors who upheld her complaint
about the art class imagery and rap song, but insisted none of it was politically motivated.
‘It meant our overall complaint about indoctrination was not upheld,’ says Clare. ‘One governor, an ex-High Court judge, concluded that my “ideals and background” were misleading me.’
By this stage Clare and her husband had already made the decision to send their youngest daughter to a private school. But with Isla settled, they were reluctant for her to move schools in the run-up to her GCSEs.
For a while, things were calm — but then last autumn, Clare was alarmed to learn of the nature of the school’s RSE provision.
Previously told the lessons would focus on ‘inclusive consent’, in
reality, there was also lengthy discussion about ‘heteronormativity’ and the need to be ‘sex positive’.
On paper, the latter is defined by the need to have a healthy, shamefree attitude to all aspects of sexual conduct — but in reality, says Clare, is often a Trojan Horse via which to convey more troublesome ideologies.
Emboldened, Clare asked once more to see the lesson plans, and was once more denied access. ‘ At first, they wouldn’t really tell me what the problem was, but then said the School of Sexuality — which, remember, provided content for the RSE lessons — had
told them I couldn’t see them because of their commercial interests. That seemed extraordinary to me,’ she reflects.
Clare then took matters into her own hands and called the School for Sexuality directly.
‘I had a pleasant enough tenminute conversation with the woman who answered the phone who seemed to agree that I could have access,’ she says.
‘In the wake of that, I learned the Chief Executive had contacted the school and accused me of harassment. She said on no account must the school show me the lesson plan as I was likely anti-LGBTQ+ and organisers “would not be safe” if I was given the lesson plan.’
At the same time, Clare’s own research led her to discover that Nadia Dean, the organisation’s ‘workshop facilitator’, runs a side
business promoting sex toys and pornography.
‘There was a link to that website on the organisation’s own website.
Another lady on the website links to her blog where she sings a song with her ukulele which features the words “Let’s all masturbate”.’
After initially being told that the links would be removed, Clare was informed the school would no longer be using the provider.
‘I was clear they needed to do more than that — that they should notify the DfE that organisations,
many of them funded by taxpayers’ money and rubberstamped by government, are peddling deeply troubling ideas under the banner
of promoting social justice.’
ASPOKESPERSON for the school said: ‘At Hatcham College we want children to critically engage with a wide range of opinions and views that challenge received wisdom.
‘PSHE lessons provide children with the space to explore difficult topics of historical and societal importance, and the vast majority of our parents are supportive of our approach.
‘All our teaching and resources adhere to the Secretary of State’s statutory guidance and best practice, in which they acknowledge areas of “understandable and
legitimate areas of contention” due to its depth and breadth.
‘We are grateful to Ms Page for raising her concerns, and although her views are unrepresentative of our school communities, we recognise their legitimacy and the part they play in opening an interesting and wider debate about PSHE curricula and access.’
Nonetheless it is clear many parents remain discomfited, while Paul Conrathe, Senior Consultant Solicitor at education specialist Sinclairslaw, says schools that hide behind commercial confidentiality are ‘skating on thin ice’.
‘The critical question is whether it is in the public interest not to disclose those materials,’ he says. ‘ How can it be in the public interest to withhold curriculum materials that deal with controversial and sensitive matters on sexuality, sex, gender and race from parents?’
For Clare, a principle is at stake. ‘It has been difficult,’ Clare admits. ‘I’ve had to ask myself all the way through whether this is the right
thing to do, whether I am burdening Isla too much with this.
‘There’s been a lot of talking, but ultimately, she has always agreed that what she is encountering doesn’t feel right.
‘We are agreed that parents have a right to know what is being taught to their children.’
TONY BLAIR has a new mission: to be the mastermind behind a centre-Left government that would replace the ailing Tory administration of Boris Johnson at the next General Election. That doesn’t mean a return to electoral politics for the former New Labour prime minister himself. He’s realistic enough to know that’s never going to happen.
The scars of his misbegotten war in Iraq are too deep, the security risks to him of campaigning in public too grave.
He once told me in the safety of his suitably anonymous London office that his permanent security detail wouldn’t even let him cross the road to have a coffee in the local cafe, such was the visceral hatred of him that the Iraq misadventure had instilled among so many.
He could hardly run for high office from his basement, as Joe Biden managed to run for president in 2020 thanks to the restrictions of the pandemic.
And, though at 69 he would not be thought too old to be U.S. president in America’s increasingly gerontocratic politics, it would almost certainly count him out returning as prime minister of Britain, where there is less reverence for old age.
But that doesn’t mean he can’t once again play a pivotal role in British politics. Indeed, he’s already on manoeuvres.
That was clear from Thursday’s Future of Britain centrist jamboree, organised by the Tony Blair Institute. Many Blairite blasts from the past were there, from Patricia Hewitt to Andrew Adonis, plus new camp-followers such as former Tory Leftie Rory Stewart and archRemain litigator Gina Miller.
It was very much a convocation of Remainers from the centre-Left and Right, but Blair was astute enough to emphasise that its purpose could not be to re-open the Brexit issue, even if that is what most would really like to do — and will likely attempt somewhere down the road.
Rather, its aim was to begin the process of drawing up a new agenda for the centre and centre-Left. Nothing of substance was decided at this first gathering — indeed it never got beyond the blandest generalities and vague subject headings demanding attention. But Blair and his institute aim to put flesh on its bones.
As with so much of our politics these days, Blair’s newfound enthusiasm for British politics has its origins in lockdown. Instead of circling the globe serving his various billionaire clients, he was forced to spend much of the pandemic in his faux-Chequers pile in Buckinghamshire.
From there he spent more time observing domestic politics than he had for years. It reinvigorated his interest and he decided to become more involved. He has all the money he needs, he’s taken care of his family with multigenerational wealth and the jet-setting had lost its appeal.
He’d also come to some pretty firm views about what needed to be done.
Some think he’s out to create a British version of Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche, the centrist movement straddling Left and Right that replaced the mainstream French parties, propelled Macron to the presidency in 2017 and re-elected him for another five years in May.
But Blair is canny enough to know that what happens in France cannot be easily replicated on this side of the Channel.
For a start, French parties have always been much weaker than their British equivalents, constantly forming, dissolving and reforming, often around big personalities.
Labour and Conservative have proved much more durable. Second, the French presidential system is more open to dramatic upheaval. Britain’s parliamentary culture is much more resistant to radical change.
What Blair has in mind goes much more with the British grain. He’s concluded that, despite all the Tory government’s woes, Labour under Keir Starmer is highly unlikely to win an overall majority come the next election (Ed Balls said the same to me a few weeks ago).
There will have to be some sort of accommodation with the Liberal Democrats and the Greens (assuming they win a few seats).
Better to start now on the sort of policy agenda that could bring them together, not in a formal David CameronNick Clegg coalition but in a working arrangement in which certain key policies are agreed.
If there is a European template, it is not France. It is the German centre-Left government of Social Democrats, Greens and Free Democrat liberals, of which Blair speaks warmly, as did David Miliband when I interviewed him in New York last month.
Blair had something like this in mind in the run-up to the 1997 general election.
But he won by such a landslide that he had no need of Paddy Ashdown’s Lib Dems, who he’d been courting beforehand. Blair thinks Starmer will not be in such a fortunate position.
For Blair this is personal. If New Labour was Margaret Thatcher’s ultimate triumph, in the sense that not only did she transform her own Tory party, she changed the Labour opposition out of all recognition, so Brexit was Blair’s ultimate rejection — a disavowal of all his efforts to make us a mainstream European-style social democracy.
How better his legacy would look if he could be the guiding hand behind a new Blairism 2.0 for the 2020s. The strategy is not ignoble. But it requires a reality check. The Future of Britain conference blurb laments ‘a vacuum where the populism of Left and Right has thrived’. But is populism thriving in Britain?
There is no question Jeremy Corbyn represented a populism of the hard Left, with its multiple spending promises and all sorts of free stuff ( including broadband), all magically paid for with extra taxes only on the richest. But the British people comprehensively rejected this Leftpopulism in December 2019.
Remainers will for ever regard Brexit as an incomprehensible populist surge of the Right. But even if you grant them that, there is not much else that is populist about the Johnson government, with its centre/ centre- Left support for rising public spending, high taxes and net zero carbon emissions.
Even Blair was forced to admit in his closing remarks
at his conference that it was actually pretty mainstream.
Moreover, if populism has been rampant in recent years, what caused it? Perhaps Blair should look in the mirror: for much of it was a reaction to the untrammelled centre-Leftism he pushed and still espouses.
When the European Union was enlarged in 2004 to take in Eastern Europe, most EU members went for a managed transition by taking advantage of provisions that allowed the phasing-in of the new members’ right to free movement of labour. But not Blair’s Britain, which opened its borders from day one.
Official UK forecasts, which predicted between 5,000 and 13,000 a year would come to Britain, were quickly made to look ridiculous. More than 850,000, many low- skilled, came in the seven years after 2004 (equivalent to 3 per cent of the UK working population). And more people travelled here in the years after that.
Many arrived in areas such as the East Midlands, where jobs, housing, schools and other public services were already under pressure. Within these
Blair knows Starmer is unlikely to win majority
He wants a legacy of being behind Blairism 2.0
figures lie the roots of Brexit, the rise of Nigel Farage and the outcome of the 2016 referendum. It was an entirely self-inflicted own goal by Blair and his cheerleaders, a classic example of what happens when an over-confident elite loses touch with those it’s meant to be representing.
But Blair’s fanning the flames of populism didn’t stop there. One year after his first landslide in 1997, he introduced a Human Rights Act. At first it seemed entirely proper. After all, what can be more British than human rights?
But over the years, in the hands of activist judges and Left-wing lawyers, it became harder, if not impossible, to deport foreign murderers and rapists, send back failed asylum seekers or illegal immigrants, put justice for victims on a far higher plane than the rights of criminals.
And as this seeped into our national life so the seeds of populism were further kindled.
As the Blair years progressed, many people became further estranged. Nearly all the country’s great institutions, from the BBC to the National Trust to NHS trusts to almost every university and major museum, were increasingly in the hands of those who shared Blairite centre-Left views of the world.
This created a new, well-paid public sector aristocracy ( the quangocrats) whose views were remarkably similar: pro - globalisation, anti- Brexit, obsessive about diversity (unless it involved including people from poor backgrounds), anti-grammar schools (while sending their own kids to private schools), net-zero zealots (as they flew the globe), promass migration ( they needed nannies and plumbers), antiTory (naturally).
None of these views is necessarily wrong in itself. Some I agree with. But if you didn’t hold them all then a major public appointment was unlikely to come your way.
And the millions who didn’t hold them suddenly found themselves being bossed around by those who did. More petrol on the populist flames, which were further fanned when the public sector aristos slipped comfortably into the vanguard of the new world of wokery and cancel culture. There is much to be said for sensible, moderate, centrist government. But when it becomes arrogant, remote and elitist, it ends up creating the very populism it affects to abhor.
France may not be the template for Blair’s new mission but it contains a sober warning.
Yes, Macron destroyed the old parties of the centre-Right and centre-Left and created a new centrist ascendancy. But where did that leave those disaffected by his all-encompassing centrism? They had nowhere to go but the extremes and in last month’s parliamentary elections that’s exactly where they went.
The second largest party in France’s National Assembly is a Left- wing coalition led by Jean-Luc Mélenchon, a French version of Jeremy Corbyn, though more Left.
The third largest party is Marine Le Pen’s hard-Right National Rally, which increased its representation tenfold and now has 89 seats in the assembly. Imagine the sense of national crisis and shame — the cries of anguish from Remainers — if the House of Commons had elected 89 hard-Right MPs in 2019.
The consequence of Macron’s centrism has been to unleash populist forces on the Right and the Left and to make France politically
He laid the foundations for Brexit and beyond
unstable — possibly even ungovernable. It is a dangerous brew.
After Labour’s brief fling with Corbynista neo-Marxism and the exhausting rollercoaster shenanigans of the current aimless Johnson government, I can well understand the attractions of a return to Blairite government.
New Labour largely respected the new Thatcherite settlement but brought much-needed extra spending to our schools and hospitals. Taxes were lower, spending more restrained, economic growth higher and inflation less than under Johnson.
But, unchecked, centrism — or more accurately — a centre-Left ascendancy, risks creating the very populist forces to which it’s supposed to be an antidote.
As Blair contemplates his reincarnation as the éminence grise of the country’s centre-Left forces, he needs to learn not just from Macron’s France but from his own record in Britain, which unwittingly laid the foundations for Brexit and beyond.