On supping with the devil

Some (largely) non-culinary lessons

This isn’t actually a Devil’s Food Cake, but it does look vaguely Satanic

Last night, as I watched the news, I Googled recipes. Devilled eggs. Devilled chicken. Devil’s Food Cake. You get the idea. I wanted to find food that the Devil might eat because I wanted to find a way to write this piece that might, at least in part, cheer you up.

I had no idea, until I Googled, what it meant to “devil” food. It’s obvious when you think about it that it means to add flavour or spice. It means, for example, to turn eggs from a bland, nothing-y kind of food to something that makes your mouth zing.

A Devil’s Food Cake, which I have never made because I don’t make cakes, isn’t spicy, but it apparently has a deeper flavour than a normal chocolate cake because it uses cocoa powder rather than melted chocolate. I have no idea why this would make a difference, but then I feel as if I might as well be writing about nuclear fusion.

The one pudding I do make, and serve to pretty much everyone who comes to dinner, is just a mix of very, very dark chocolate and eggs. I think I’ll start calling it Devil’s Mousse because it sounds - well, it sounds a bit more appealing than “easy chocolate mousse”, which I think is what it was called when I found the recipe 30 years ago. To be honest, I would quarrel with that “easy”. “Easy” is shoving a Charlie Bigham fish pie in the oven, as I did last night. I’ll call my mousse “easy” when Chat GPT can separate the yolks from the whites of six eggs.

Anyway, you can tell I’m putting off the meat of this piece. I could, I suppose, “devil” it. I could add salt, spice, curry powder, cocoa powder (I did once have steak and chocolate sauce in South Africa, but never again). I could try to make it taste a bit better, but if the meat is rotten, what do you do?

And friends, Romans, Brits, Americans, global citizens, the meat is rotten. We are in trouble. And I don’t know what we do.

I am not going to write about Charlie Kirk. It is, obviously, desperately sad that in a very violent country, with crazy gun laws, a young man has been brutally murdered. It would be sad if he had no followers on Instagram or if he had ten million, which he did have. It’s desperately sad for his wife, his children, his parents, his friends and for the health of the democracy he lived in. Which now appears to be even sicker because its leaders are using it to stoke yet more division.

No, what I want to write about, or feel I have to write about, is something else. It’s about devils and long spoons.

I think we can probably all agree that Jeffrey Epstein was a very bad man. Four years ago, I reviewed a book about his life by the journalist who helped to bring him down. She’s called Julie K Brown. Her book is called Perversion of Justice. She risked her livelihood, and even perhaps her life, to expose what she doesn’t hesitate to call his “evil”. There was a reason so many people didn’t speak out about Epstein and it wasn’t because his henchmen asked them nicely. The Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, for example, squashed a piece he had commissioned about Epstein after finding a bullet outside his front door and a cat’s head in his front yard.

Peter Mandelson, on the other hand. Well, what do we need to say? We all know now that, like Clinton, like Trump, like Prince Andrew, like Bill Gates, he loved spending time in the homes, on the island, on the private jets and at the parties of the paedophile who got kicks from raping fourteen-year-old girls. We already knew that Epstein told Trump biographer Michael Wolff that Trump was his “best friend”. Trump was equally effusive. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years,” he told New York Magazine in 2002. “Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

There’s a word for some of those “beautiful women” who were “on the younger side”. It’s “children”.

This Devil is from the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence. The trouble is that art, as Milton pointe out, tends to make being a devil look like fun.

What we also know, from the events of the last few days, was that Peter Mandelson called Jeffrey Epstein his “best pal”. After he was convicted for sex trafficking, he urged him to “fight for early release”. He told him that “your friends stay with you and love you”. He said “I think the world of you and I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened. I can still barely understand it. It just could not happen in Britain.”

If that’s not trying to “pervert justice”, I’m not at all sure what is.

We now know that when he said, all those years ago, that he was “intensely relaxed” about the “filthy rich”, he absolutely meant it. Relaxed about the wealth and relaxed about the filth. It’s all just fine with Mandy.

What won’t be fine with Mandy is losing his job. Not because he needs the money. I very much doubt he needs the money. No, because he will hate, hate, hate losing the status and the power.

And the trouble is, it’s bad for us, too.

Do we want our leaders cosying up to criminals and rapists? In an ideal world, clearly not. But the leader of the western world, who himself enjoys cosying up to genocidal dictators, is a convicted felon and a rapist. (A judge said that E Jean Carroll’s assertion that Trump raped her was “broadly true”, which is why Trump lost his defamation case against her.) So the leader of our country has no choice but to deal with a convicted felon and rapist. If he wants to stop hundreds of thousands of people from losing their jobs, which is what would happen if we had no trade deal with the US, and if he wants to try and stop Putin from invading more countries in Europe, then this is what he has to do.

This is why we, as in the British state and sovereign, will be hosting a state visit for Trump next week. Do we really think our environmentalist monarch, who’s never happier than when sketching a landscape in a Romanian farmhouse (I’ve been there, it’s gorgeous!) wants to roll out red carpets for a nature-trashing wannabe autocrat who wants to turn Gaza into Trump-Tower-style real estate bling?

Zalanpatak, the place in Transylvania where King Charles loves to go. (I went in 2017 and took this photo then.)

He’s doing it because he has two options: abdicate or die. And he probably believes it’s in the best interests of the country he was born (literally, poor thing) to serve.

Peter Mandelson was good at his job. He’s great at networking with the “filthy rich”. He knows how to do trade deals. He knows how to keep paedophiles, rapists and criminals on side. I understand why Keir Starmer appointed him to the job. I don’t understand why he didn’t sack him as soon as the emails emerged. But he’s always too late, our Keir. He can never work out the right thing to do until it’s far too late.

By “right thing”, I don’t mean, of course, the morally right thing. I’m sure Keir Starmer has a vague sense of wanting to do “the right thing”, even if that changes all the time. I’m sure when he appointed Mandelson to that job, he thought the risks were worth taking for the good of the country. And I’m sure he does worry about “the good of the country”. Which is more than Boris Johnson ever seemed to do. (The Boris Johnson who has, we learnt this week, made millions from some of the Middle Eastern contacts he made in office.)

The trouble isn’t that Keir Starmer doesn’t seem to know what’s for “the good of the country”. It’s not even that he doesn’t have “a story to tell”. Which story do you want? Cinderella? Little Red Riding Hood? Terminator?

The trouble is that the story Starmer seems to be telling is Hamlet. Tortured man dances on a pinhead as nation wriggles around in horror. And this leaves us all with a ghastly choice.

Sure, we can throw brickbats at this agonised man. We can wish he was different, wish we had a different leader, wish we had someone who was more decisive about: fill in your blank. The left wants him to spend more and tax more, but only if the taxes are on someone else. The right wants him to tax less and spend less, but only if the spending cuts hit someone else. The first option will spook the bond markets and send the cost of borrowing soaring. The second option is electoral suicide. Unfortunately, both options appear to be electoral suicide and no one has come up with an option that isn’t.

As things stand, Labour are in line to lose the next election. As things stand, Reform are in line to win it. If you want to have some idea of what that might be like, study the footage of the Reform conference last weekend. Mavericks drunk on the whiff of power.

There are many ways to sup with a devil. Those of us who voted for this government may feel we’re doing that every day. We may wish for a different leader and for different policies. We have every right to criticise our leader and every right to argue for different policies. That’s the joy of living in a democracy and let’s hope someone listens.

But let’s also be clear about the maths. The choice at the next election is not going to be between Farage and the candidate you adore. It’s going to be between Farage and whoever is Labour leader, however disappointing, however flawed.

We can dream of a better leader. We can pray for a better leader. Perhaps we’ll even find by then that we have a better leader. But perhaps it’s also time for us to acknowledge that sometimes we really are better off with the devil we know.

What do you think about the political shenanigans of the last week? I’d love to hear your views.

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