Illustration by Lucas Varela with art direction by Erica Weathers.
Anxiety nation: why is modern Britain so ill at ease?
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Rafael Behr on Maria Miller’s resignation and how David Cameron misjudged the public mood
Unfinished business: Jimmy Carter tells John Bew about his crusade for women’s rights
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Unfinished business: Jimmy Carter tells John Bew about his crusade for women’s rights
John Bew meets the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and international development expert Jimmy Carter to discuss his campaign to stop violence and discrimination against women.
In person, Carter is charming, warm and impossible not to like. In Britain we would call him a “national treasure” – a sort of Tony Benn figure, with whom you don’t have to agree in order to respect his integrity. But as one of only three one-term presidents since 1945, Carter exudes the sense of having unfinished business to attend to.
The 89-year-old former US leader tells Bew that he became aware of the scale of the problems facing women through the Carter Centre, which he founded in 1982. And he believes that the slave trade in women is bigger now than it was in the 19th century.
Is Carter aware of the recent work by William Hague and the British Foreign Office, together with Angelina Jolie, in campaigning against sexual violence in conflict zones? “Absolutely,” he says, and both he and his aide nod vigorously when I mention the forthcoming summit on the subject in London in June. Hague, Carter says in his Georgian drawl, “is an active hero of mine; he and Miss Jolie are doing a successful and admirable job”.
Discussing foreign policy, Carter declares Bashar al-Assad one of “the most obdurate individuals I have ever met” and suggests the US government was mistaken to demand the Syrian leader’s resignation as the civil war broke out.
Carter also warns that although he believes Russia’s annexation of Crimea is a “special case”, the US and its allies must present a united front to stop further incursions by Moscow.
Rafael Behr: the politics column
The delay over Maria Miller’s departure as culture secretary shows David Cameron is a poor judge of public feeling, argues the NS political editor, Rafael Behr, in his column this week.
No 10 invited Miller’s assassins in the press and parliament to desist but failed to erect a bulletproof shield around her. Her resignation exposed Cameron as a slow reader of the mood in his party and the country.
But Behr also points out that Cameron’s continuing reluctance to condemn Miller has much to do with his unease about gender imbalance in the cabinet:
The joke among Tory MPs is that the only way to get promoted in Cameron’s regime is to be an Old Etonian, female or Matt Hancock (the skills minister is a favourite of the Chancellor, as is the new Culture Secretary, Sajid Javid). It is widely suspected that Cameron’s reluctance to surrender Miller owed much to her precious status as one of the few women in the cabinet.
Cover story: anxiety nation
As the number of people in the UK with an anxiety disorder reaches three million, Sophie McBain presents the anatomy of an epidemic.
It is difficult to quantify whether it is our feelings of anxiety that have changed, or whether it’s just our perception of those feelings that is different: are we increasingly viewing ordinary human emotions as marks of mental illness?
If one in seven of us is taking pills to control or ward off anxiety, are we just medicalising an ordinary human emotion? Did the purveyors of the early anti-anxiety medicines such as Miltown – discovered in the 1940s, and the first in a line of blockbuster drugs including Prozac and Xanax – manage to create a new problem along with the solution they offered?
Or maybe the UK’s epidemic of anxiety isn’t pathological at all but a product of historically unprecedented good health and affluence. Perhaps anxiety is a luxury that comes with wealth, freedom and the privilege of having nothing fundamental to fear in our modern society.
Mark Lawson on King Charles III
The NS’s critic at large, Mark Lawson, reviews King Charles III, Mike Bartlett’s new play at the Almeida Theatre in London, which, unlike such Elizabeth II fictions as The Audience, “enters areas that British patriotism and tact tend to avoid”.
Half a century after [Harold] Wilson fretted about portrayals of the Mountbatten-Windsors on the boards, Bartlett, a 33-year-old whose previous work includes Love, Love, Love and 13, has written the boldest and most provocative play about the royal family in British theatrical history . . .
While the press and public of the second Elizabethan age may approve of [Bartlett’s] view of Charles as a meddling monarch, they may be more startled by the presentation of William and Catherine as baddies. In the most remarkable scene, the ghost of Diana appears to her elder son, who is now Prince of Wales and heir to the throne. If the Lord Chamberlain still policed the stage, Bartlett would be in the Tower. This is the first piece of theatre to treat the royals like any other subject.
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