The Critical Commentator

 Self-esteem is one of the oddest, most misguided and even dangerous ideas to emerge from the 20th century. It is also one of the most durable. Originally an emanation of 1970s California counterculture, self-esteem has achieved the ultimate status for any idea: it has become common sense. Searching through The Times over recent years, you can find hundreds of people talking about their self-esteem: teachers, parents, actors, writers. Since its 1990s heyday self-esteem has been referred to thousands of times in parliament, usually as a sort of abstract, unimpeachable moral good, the same way Victorian politicians once talked about piety. This is a sign of its impeccable establishment status. Indeed, presumably because of the way it was pressed on to my generation in childhood, self-esteem is enjoying a second flowering in the guise of related concepts such as "self-care", "self-cherishing". "self-acceptance" and "self-compassion". But you don...

Buckingham Palace Viewed from St James's Park British School Photo Credit: Leeds Museums and Galleries [CC BY-NC-ND]  ...Why doesn't the Queen let her people enjoy Buckingham Palace gardens? Previous royal dynasties gave the nation Hyde Park, Regent's Park, Epping Forest, Kensington Gardens. We can roam freely around Richmond Park, created by King Charles 1. Alas the Windsors seem incapable of such gestures. Land across the UK was grabbed and enclosed by the ruling classes; exclusion ruthlessly enforced... Members of the Country Land and Business Association own 50 per cent of all rural land in England and Wales. Public footpath mileage is half as long as it was 100 years ago... Royals and aristocrats own 1.5 million acres - the highest category after charitable organisations and environmental preservation zones. The Windsors are exempt from proper scrutiny. Businessmen, autocrats and oligarchs, the Church of England, too, fiercely protect their interests and keep out curio...

 There is a new block of public conveniences at the park where my children play and apart from the most important detail of all there is nothing obviously unusual about them. The interior, like most Japanese lavatories, is clean and odourless. The latrine itself is the latest model of "Washlet": those high-tech lavatories, ubiquitous in Japan, that squirt a cleansing jet of water between your buttocks at the touch of a button, and give you a blow dry. One thing distinguishes these conveniences from all the others though: their glass walls are transparent. From the outside, the basin, urinal, Washlet and anyone inside are visible for all to see. It is only when the lock is turned that the glass becomes opaque and privacy descends. The convenience was designed by the prizewinning architect Kengo Kuma, one of 16 world-class designers commissioned to bring their creative genius to bear on the least glamorous public buildings in the world... I have visited the laboratories at Toto...

 Boris Johnson is "an unrepentant and inveterate liar" who feels he is not subject to the same rules as others, Sylvie Bermann, the former ambassador to the UK during the Brexit vote, says in a new book... She predicts Johnson will seek to use Covid to mask the true economic cost of Brexit to the UK... Describing him as intelligent and charming, she said he uses "lies to embellish reality, as a game and as an instrument of power. The ends justify the means. He has no rules. Asked at a Royal United Services Institute thinktank event about her description of him as an unrepentant liar, She said: "He would not object to being called that. He knows he is a liar He has always played with that. He was fired from his first post for that reason." (Patrick Wintour, The Guardian, 2021) * The Assault on Truth: Boris Johnson, Donald Trump and the Emergence of a New Moral Barbarism - Peter Osborne Truth and Falsehood Alfred George Stevens ( 1817-1875) Photo Credit:The Fitzw...

Almost 450 executives at Barclays each received annual pay packets of more than £1 million, the bank disclosed yesterday, despite group profits slumping by 30 per cent. While Jes Staley, the chief executive, received a 32 per cent pay cut to £4.01, the bank's annual report discloses that total bonuses at the bank went up by 6 per cent to £1.58 billion. Three unnamed bankers were paid more than £6 million, eight were in the £5 million-to-£6 million bracket and ten were in the £4 million-to-£5 million category... Overall, 448 Barclays employees were paid more than £1 million each, up from 399 in 2019. By contrast, more than 25,000 Barclays employees were in the "under £25,000" category. Staley's pay was 90 times median earnings at the group, down from 140 times in 2019... (Patrick Hosking, The Times, 2021) Your pay is cut by 32% and you still receive £4 million pounds. Your pay is 90 times median earnings. What kind of madness is that?  Maxwell and the City Gangsters Em...

 A wanted man handed himself in to police in West Sussex to avoid having to spend any more time in lockdown with the people he lives with. The man, whose identity was not disclosed, presented himself voluntarily to Sussex police on Wednesday afternoon, reportedly in the hope of getting some "peace and quiet"... The Prisoner of Chillon William Daniels (1813-1880) Photo Credit: Walker Art Gallery [CC BY-NC] Psychologists have reported a rise in people experiencing symptoms of sustained stress similar to burnout at work, including problems with sleep and concentration, and many people are desperate for human contact after months of relative or total isolation, Going back to prison appears to have been more appealing than being cooped up with certain others. Insp Darren Taylor of Sussex police tweeted: "Peace and quiet!  Wanted male handed himself in to the team yesterday afternoon after informing us he would rather go back to prison than have to spend more time with the peo...

 In Britain the queen is supposed to act on the advice of her government. The monarch, it is said, merely signs the laws that ministers bring her... Britannia John Thomas (1813-1862) Photo Credit: National Railway Museum [CC BY-NC] Yet documents in the National Archives reveal that Her Majesty managed, in secret, to get laws changed - in favour of her personal interest - before they were introduced. The Guardian found four instances between 1968 and 1982 where the palace had lobbied to get the law altered. In 1973 the Queen's lawyers intervened to allow her to hide her private wealth from the public. The royal family clearly has significant power to influence the government behind closed doors before final decisions in parliament are made. The device used to do this is Queen's consent... It is clear that an anarchic and mysterious convention affords a level of protection to the personal financial interests of the sovereign that no private citizen could dream of. This gives rise...

  The Cheat Detected Edward Bird (1772-1819) Photo Credit: Sir John Soane's Museum [CC BY-NC-ND] In New York you're now eligible for a vaccine if you're an "educator". Who falls under that definition? Stacey Griffith, a celebrity SoulCycle instructor who yells motivational quotes at her clients from an exercise bike, decided she did. So off she went to Staten Island to get a shot, documenting the adventures on social media like the modern wellness guru that she is. Bless her healthy heart, she appeared to be genuinely surprised at the backlash she received. "It saddens me that people go so dark and mean," Griffith told the Daily Beast. "I'm really just trying to do the right thing and be safe." So were a lot of schoolteachers... Then there is the Canadian casino executive Rod Baker and his wife. The millionaire couple recently broke quarantine and flew to a remote Indigenous community where they posed as local motel employees to get their j...

 The year 2020 will go down in the record books as one of the worst in global history. Nearly 2 million people died from coronavirus, tens of millions more lost their jobs and countless others faced unprecedented disruption to their daily lives. Mammon George Frederick Watts (1817-1904) Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] However, it was a very profitable year for the elite few financial executives betting on the health of the global economy. The world's top 15 hedge fund managers collectively made $23.2bn (£16.9bn) last year... The best performing hedge fund manager, Chase Coleman 111, the founder of Tiger Global Management (TGM), made $3bn in performance management fees and gains on his personal investment in the fund, according to a Bloomberg analysis of regulatory filings. Coleman's personal pay last year was more than the GDP of dozens of countries including the Gambia, Bhutan and Eritrea, according to the International Monetary Fund... Also on the list is Bill Ackman, the fo...