Read/Watched/Listened/Ate

24: June 2026

Book: Last week I read It’s Our Turn to Eat by Michela Wrong as a themed reading to coincide with my trip to Kenya - and it fit the brief perfectly. The book tells the story of the Anglo-Leasing corruption scandal of the mid-2000s, and more generally the dashed hopes for a cleaner politics following the election of President Mwai Kibaki in 2002, and the wider social and historical context that led to that outcome. It’s depressingly resonant today: almost everybody I spoke to was disenchanted with the government and disgusted with politicians. And yet a paradox remains: however rotten the political system is, it seems to be delivering results. Health, economic, infrastructural indicators have generally improved - often substantially in the past 25 years - and as a visitor the country feels remarkably functional for a country with an apparently rotten political system. I think Wrong would say I’m falling into the same trap as generations of aid donors, overlooking crookedness and venality because I’m dazzled by the metrics. And I was genuinely shocked by the account in the book of of development institutions from the World Bank to DfID failing to exert the power they had to support anti-corruption efforts. But equally I think Wrong goes too far in downplaying the good that aid can and has done (another striking feature of my Kenya visit - the number of USAID stickers in medical settings) - and thus the costs of withholding funding. There’s much more to the book, including interesting discussions of tribal, economic and linguistic divisions - in particular, the dominance and resentment of the Kikuyu. Given the timing of the events, the contested 2007 election cast a shadow over most of the book, but when they came I found the descriptions of the violence horrifying and heartbreaking. I hadn’t appreciated just how traumatising those events still are - with an election coming next year, people are already anxious over the risk of old tensions being inflamed. I truly hope it’s not as bad as they fear.

Article: I read and disagreed with Labour needs a contest, not a coronation by George Eaton (Arguably). George argues that “Burnham deserves more scrutiny as a putative prime minister, rather than merely a by-election candidate, and Labour needs to decide what it is truly for”. I agree that it would be good to have a test of Burnham’s abilities as a PM, of running a government. But a leadership election would only test his abilities as a campaigner, which aren’t really in question. My worry is that any leadership election would just encourage gimmicky policy commitments that would make the job of governing harder (did the 2022 leadership contest strengthen the Tory PM candidates or encourage a dumb bidding war?). I also just don’t think there is a big important philosophical divide to put to the members. I really don’t think an argument about fiscal policy is helpful or enlightening (it’s not 2010), I’m not convinced nationalisation is actually that big a deal (it’s not the 1980s). How much and how quickly to spend on defence would be a worthwhile debate but I don’t believe that’s what we would get. In any case, all of the political philosophy arguments would (rightly given the threat!) be subordinated to the question of who can beat Farage. And I don’t think we need a membership vote to resolve that question.

Film: I watched Aapish (Office), a Bengali film about the parallel lives of a middle class woman and her domestic servant, charting their shared feminist struggles to achieve power and independence within their relationships and society. It wasn’t great: I found the plotting heavy-handed and the acting stagey. But I’m just fascinated by the strange relationship between rich families and their servants (White Tiger is one of my favourite novels), and this film takes an interesting line in highlighting the mutual dependence - demonstrating it’s not just the poorer women who relies upon her employer for her livelihood and career. It’s all a bit Hegelian. The movie is also intriguing because in its crude feminism it is unclear what the moral of the story should be: is domestic service a good, mutually beneficial, even necessary thing? The pat answer would be to say men need to do their part - but in the Indian context, the film struggles to suggest either that the husbands could be reformed or that the women might be better off without them.

Live Sport: I went to see Australia v Bangladesh and India v Netherlands at the Women’s T20 Cricket World Cup, the most exciting World Cup right now (even for Scotland - I wish I had gone to last night’s near-upset as well). Both games were relatively sedate early round fixtures, in which the favourites came through comfortably. A few reflections:

• It’s a privilege to get to see Ellyse Perry play (and get player of the match again, like the other time I saw her). Absurdly impressive that one of the best cricketers in the world has also scored a goal at the football World Cup.

• Smriti Mandhana is so elegant.

• DJing sporting events is hard, but I find the music at these sorts of events a bit intrusive.

• Kids really like counting, huh? There were a bunch of school groups and they were most excited for the countdowns (before each innings, every DRS check).

Food: Between coming back from Kenya, and taking the week off for my birthday, I have eaten an obscene amount of food across a number of cities. beit é selam, a stylish pan-African restaurant in Nairobi was probably the best meal I had in Kenya (blackened cauliflower). I finally tried Padella in London, which is top tier as advertised - though I’d say Notto and Bancone offer more pleasant atmospheres and comparable quality pasta. Dosa at Tharavadu. But probably the highlight was taking advantage of an extended break in the cricket to eat at Lupe’s Cantina (Leeds), an unpromising place that looks like a converted garage by the side of the road but which serves the best tortillas I’ve had up north. I ate enfrijoladas, which involved the best kind of corn and bean mush, while my brother might have bested me with fish tacos in a delightfully delicate batter.

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