CLEANING is one of those jobs no one really enjoys doing, but sprucing up your fridge could actually save you cash.

That’s because if you neglect cleaning certain appliances, it’s not just unhygienic, but it can be costly too.

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With energy bills rising by £149 annually for the average household at the beginning of this month, we’re all looking for ways to save.

And the key to saving cash could be giving your fridge a good scrub.

But only a fifth of households clean their fridge just twice a year, according to Lakeland’s Trends Report.

Some 18% of households clean their fridge twice a year, while 16% do it on an “ad hoc” basis only when it becomes noticeably dirty.

But kitchen experts actually advise that you should clean your fridge after every big supermarket shop.

Not only will this prevent bacteria from lurking, it can also help it to run more efficiently.

Simply cleaning and dusting the coils at the back of your fridge can slash energy consumption by up to 25%, according to Which?.

This is because dust on the coils can prevent the fridge from cooling properly.

You can vacuum away the dust and dirt to get your fridge freezer working more efficiently again which should bring down your energy usage.

You can prevent dirt and grime from clogging the coils by using reusable food covers to stop spills from opened packets or leftovers.

Covermate elasticated covers cost just £3.49 for a pack of eight from Lakeland. Or Tesco sells three reusable silicone lids for £3.

If you do have a spillage, it’s important to make sure that you clean it up straight away.

Flash kitchen cleaning spray costs at little as 40p at Morrisons.

Of course, it’s important to compare prices to make sure you’re getting the best deal.

Supermarkets change their prices all the time, sometimes multiple times daily, so it’s worth checking you’re getting the best price.

You can use websites like Trolley to see how the major supermarket’s compare in terms of price on any number of goods.

Other tips to cut fridge freezer costs

If you don’t defrost the freezer compartment in your fridge regularly, it could add significantly to your bills.

The frost buildup increases the amount of work your freezer’s motor has to do.

And if the motor is working harder, then this means it’s using more energy.

You can chip away at any build-up once it starts to look a little glacial inside and then your energy bill won’t have to take such a hit.

It’s also important to clean the condenser coils on the back of the appliance, as dust on the coils can prevent the fridge from cooling properly.

Replace damaged door seals to ensure cold air cannot escape and be wasted and let food cool down completely before refrigerating.

New seals are often available online for £30 to £100.

If you’re looking to replace an old model with a new eco-friendly version you could also save on your energy bills each year.

It’s worth shopping around to make sure you’re getting the best model at the best price if you decide to go down this road.

Do you have a money problem that needs sorting? Get in touch by emailing money-sm@news.co.uk.

Plus, you can join our Sun Money Chats and Tips Facebook group to share your tips and stories

George Orwell died in 1950, but he’s in the newspapers nearly every day. In the past few years alone, the British press has quoted him on whether Britain is an unserious country, whether book blurbs are degenerate and why a good British pub should be revolting. Writers ask what he would have made of the end of British coal, and repeat his counsel on how to make the perfect cup of tea. They cite him on why English people love queueing, the importance of having hobbies, why “cancel culture” is a poor substitute for free speech. They ask what he can teach us about Israel and Palestine and when Britain will tire of its culture wars. One might just as well ask when Britain will tire of the obligatory Orwell reference.

How is it that Orwell has become the single answer to so many questions, in so many different subjects, for so many people? His name conjures an amorphous idea of fair play and “common sense”; his spare prose supposedly brings cool nonpartisanship to a world of impassioned blusterers. In keeping your sentences clean, the theory goes, you practise intellectual hygiene (“good prose is like a windowpane” and all that). A single word, “Orwellian”, evokes the great man’s foresight about the dangers of an overweening nanny state, a censorious far-left or whatever else may be getting your goat that day.

Orwell now stands for a set of broad assumptions: that free speech is good and purple prose is bad, for instance; for the importance of careful proportionality; for the idea that, in a wild world of populist extremism, the sensible counterweight might actually be not to have an opinion at all. Or, rather, to have an unopened mystery box of opinions labelled “George Orwell”. Orwell, the thinker, elaborated his views with rigour and specificity. Orwell, the figure quoted by other writers, has become a substitute for doing just that.

For years, journalists, critics and columnists have vied for his posthumous approval, in the quest to become that most enviable of figures — the truly impartial observer, who stands apart from the fray. Above all, his fans admire the idea that it might be possible to take a courageous stance precisely by refusing to take a side at all.

That most of Orwell’s acolytes are English, as was he, seems not to undermine his neutrality. The theory is simple: first you master spare prose, then you master cogent and neutral thought, and finally you impart your cogent, neutral thoughts to the wider public.

The seeds for this rather mad idea — to stay on the right side of history in 2024, all you have to do is write like one specific dead guy — can be found in “Politics and the English Language”, an essay published in the immediate aftermath of the second world war. Here, Orwell posits that swindlers and fools swaddle up their opinions in unnecessary verbiage, whereas, in forcing ourselves to write plainly, we think better. “If you simplify your English, you are freed from the worst follies of orthodoxy,” he writes, “and when you make a stupid remark its stupidity will be obvious, even to yourself.” The essay is nostalgic for plain Saxon English, fine British values, simpler days.

The way we use English has evolved since then. Orwell’s hope that spartan language could unmask stupidity looks decidedly naive in today’s political landscape. Our modern-day swindlers and fools speak much more clearly than the Latin-quoting bloviators of Orwell’s time, yet their lunacy is not always exposed by simple phrasing. “Get Brexit done” was a) plain as can be, and b) persuasive enough to many people that they voted for it in droves. Donald Trump may be in a fraught situationship with grammar, but his English isn’t at all flowery. As the literary critic Houman Barekat wrote in a 2013 re-evaluation of “Politics and the English Language”, “If the verbal currency of daily exchange is superficially more straightforward than it was in the 1930s and 40s, the art of bullshitting is nonetheless alive and well.”

The shared Englishness of Orwell and his admirers comes to seem less coincidental the more he draws a link between Saxon words and a sort of vitality, versus Latinate ones and pretension. The myth of an uncorrupted English is appealing. It enables the suggestion that some international ill wind carries over bad ideas, while Englishness itself remains sound. If we’d only stick to the West Germanic roots of our language, surely it would keep us honest. (Or rather, “truthful”, as “honest” is another of those pesky Latinate interlopers.)

This “pure” English is a myth, of course. Neither the Saxon nor the Norman half of English is native to the island of Britain. Neither language family is intrinsically more politically sensible; Germans have, in fact, managed to be fascist in German. What’s more, one cannot be history’s most prolific global coloniser without accepting changes into the language. The words we use to discuss politics show these ties: the English took “pundit” from Hindi and “slogan” from Irish. They took a lot more too, but the pay-off, linguistically, is that English no longer belongs to the English. Its former colonies now have far more English-speakers, and consequently the majority vote on how the language will change.

Orwell, the thinker, elaborated his views with rigour. Orwell, the figure quoted by other writers, is a substitute for that

Still, English Orwell acolytes take a certain comfort in the binary of “homegrown English/sensible opinions” versus “foreign English/pretentious sophistry”. These fans don’t dwell explicitly on this point; today’s English journalism gives little cause to complain about polyglot showboating. But in uncritically citing stylistic advice that discourages internationalising the language, the Orwell crowd still implicitly buttress their own sense of superiority. They say, without having to actually say it: “Stick with me here in the sane United Kingdom, not the wild world beyond our prudent shores.”

In a 1980 essay for the New Statesman magazine, “Tourism Among the Dogs”, Edward Said considered Orwell’s influence on a generation of journalists. The ideal of a professedly stakeless bystanderism, Said argued, could serve to mendaciously neutralise the analyst, veiling the power that “put [them] there in the first place”. He described such a figure, witheringly, as the “obviously concerned reporter who is beyond Left piety or right-wing cant” looking on at the “Asiatic and African mobs rampaging”.

These writers identify with Orwell in part because he invites them to. He assumes that his reader is already in the fold, and, from this position, begins to scold. You are in the straight-talking Saxon camp, he tells them, but from within this camp you need to take a hard look at yourself. The clarity of your language will test the clarity of your moral force.

Was Orwell actually all that impartial? Certainly his left-wing anti-totalitarianism aligns with prevalent views today. But it’s self-flattery on our part to imagine that he arrived at this position through an objectivity forced by clear language.

For contrast, consider the work of G K Chesterton. I agree with the Catholic apologist on fairly little, and yet the man could write; his concision and wit have much in common with Orwell’s. In his 1909 book, Orthodoxy, Chesterton makes a punchy claim: “I am still as much concerned as ever about the Battle of Armageddon; but I am not so much concerned about the General Election.” Stylistically, Orwell could easily have written this sentence; ideologically, he would rather have died than write it. Later in the book, Chesterton rails against “long comfortable words that save modern people the toil of reasoning”, which could have come straight from Orwell — yet the chapter proceeds to defend a belief in miracles. Orwell was an avowed atheist. Two English men use the aesthetics of impartiality to take opposite stances. They can’t both be objectively right.

When did the Orwell mania start? In 1983 Harper’s magazine ran a cover story titled “If Orwell Were Alive Today”, which argued that the great man would surely have shrugged off his leftist togs and become a neoconservative, given enough time. Ten years later, British prime minister John Major commemorated Orwell’s idealised England of “old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist” in a speech to the Conservative Group for Europe. But it was not until 2002, when Christopher Hitchens published a book about his hero, that the unfettered appreciation of Orwell’s thinking and its expression was raised to an art form.

In Why Orwell Matters, Hitchens painted a picture of a man who was almost always on the right side of history. “It matters not what you think, but how you think,” goes his argument. For Hitchens, Orwell’s independent spirit and moral clarity mark him for praise more than any particular view he held. This is a difficult negative to prove. Hitchens must show not only that Orwell thought particular things, but that he wasn’t put up to it by others.

In his quest to promote Orwell as a pioneering individualist, Hitchens manages to credit him with an outlandish range of achievements. “It might not be too much to say that the clarity and courage of Orwell’s prose . . . also played a part in making English a non-imperial lingua franca,” he claims. “It would not be too much to say that he pioneered ‘cultural studies’ without giving the subject a name.”

There are indeed some international contexts in which English is seen as the most neutral language (though it is rather an astonishing hop, skip and jump to suggest that this makes it non-imperial). People did indeed engage in what we might consider cultural studies before the term gained currency in the 1960s. Possibly, Orwell played some small part in both developments. But Hitchens is hedging for a reason. It might not be too much to say these things. It also might not be too much to say that Orwell invented the bra and engineered the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Let’s recap what Orwell actually wrote. Between 1933 and 1949 he produced six novels and three works of non-fiction, as well as pamphlets, poetry and journalism. The forgettable first four novels would not still be in print if it weren’t for the famous final two: Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). The non-fiction books are Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), a memoir of middle-class Orwell’s time living in poverty in both cities; The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), whose first half reports on the living conditions in working-class Lancashire and Yorkshire and whose controversial second half examines resistance to socialism among the British middle-class (it is here that Orwell comes out with his much-quoted rant against sandal-wearers, vegetarians and nudists); and Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of the Spanish civil war.

The essays and journalism most famously argued for democratic socialism and against dictatorship, but they covered an eclectic range of other topics: the ideological underpinnings of boys’ weekly magazines, writing, colonialism in Myanmar, Tolstoy’s reading of Shakespeare, what it means to be English. In “The Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, Orwell describes a nostalgic England of “solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes”. The measure of irony with which he relates all this seems lost on his groupies, as does his rubbishing of the delusion that the English are especially practical, “as they are so fond of claiming for themselves”.

For all its lapses into sentimentality, the essay is not so naively jingoistic as it is often portrayed. Orwell maintains that England is violating its own principles so long as “the refugees who have sought our shores are penned up in concentration camps, and company directors work out subtle schemes to dodge their Excess Profits Tax”. A reader from a former colony might retort that these are exactly the values they associate with England, but Orwell’s contention is that views of the sort now championed by prominent nationalists betray England’s very nature. Still, even despite the essay’s actual excoriation of English conservatism, the idea people get from selected quotes has contributed to Orwell’s resurgence in an era of neopatriotism.

In an article in The Telegraph this year on Ireland’s “Brexit hypocrisy”, the former Brexit secretary David Frost drew on Orwell’s, “Notes on Nationalism”, citing his comment that, for nationalists, “a known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside . . . or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact”. He then went on to engage in precisely the sort of fair-play positioning that Edward Said outlined.

Frost, the neutral Orwell buff, expressed exasperation that the tricksy Irish, engaged in such “doublethink”, wouldn’t come to some reasonable solution over an immigration dispute. When he wasn’t congratulating himself on his own even-handed restraint, he referred to the largest Irish democratic socialist party as “the Sinn Fein monster” (“Féin” was, of course, printed without its accent, rendering it nonsense in Irish). The British, he wrote, were expected to “put up with” this monster in Belfast, as if voters in Northern Ireland were not themselves citizens participating in a thing called democracy. Frost’s reasoning was sloppy, but quoting Orwell enabled him in that sloppiness, shoring up the nexus between Englishness, rational thinking and truth.

There are two kinds of proud Englishmen (and it’s nearly always men) who like to brandish Orwell. Both have in common a desire to claim the judicious middle ground and feel with confidence that Orwell is one of their own. But they each want to deploy Orwell in defence of different world views. On one hand are the sentimental patriots like Frost, who use him to shore up their nationalism. On the other are liberals like Hitchens, who use him to reclaim England from the first lot. For the latter group, “true Englishness” is something different, a sensible, cosmopolitan globalism. Because Orwell wrote prolifically over decades on many topics — sometimes changing his mind, as humans are wont to do — all either side really has to do to claim him is catch him in a particular mood.

This, in a kernel, is what the Orwell fans want: for their hero to step in and put things right

Consider a 2022 column in The Guardian about the Conservative government’s dangerous posturing on Ukraine, which quoted Orwell on the British “innate distaste” for dramatic flag-waving statements. Ah, the piece continued, but things have changed. Now the crazy people run the show. “If a single Russian toecap steps into Nato territory, there will be war with Nato,” it quoted the former Tory minister Sajid Javid as saying. By contrast, the writer lamented, the old-fashioned English ways of “caution and level-headedness”, of “nuance and calm” and (of course) of “liberal values” were dying out. Such hand-wringing raises a question: what exactly would we rather politicians were saying about Ukraine? The answer is unforthcoming, but whatever Orwell would have said, it seems, would be fine. His spectral presence becomes a substitute for bringing a thought to its conclusion. It is enough to decry the extremity of others, to dismiss it by juxtaposition, framing other voices as hysterical. Not taking a stance becomes a virtue.

This sort of last-sane-man commentator is so common now as to have been parodied by an X account. “Simon Hedges”, aka @Orwell_Fan, embodies the Orwell-quoter: a middle-of-the-road disdainer of strong opinions, a stalwart in a polarised society. The parody was so successful that in 2019, Hedges was mistakenly nominated for the “Civility in Politics Awards”, a prize set up by members of the House of Lords and campaigners seeking to fight a “crisis of trust and crisis of civility”.

When news of the error blew up on social media, the CPA moved Hedges into a hastily invented category of “best parody account” with the comment “fair play Simon”.

In an interview, the creator of the account said he was parodying political commentators who provide us with no concrete analyses, no clear politics, just rhetoric — a view of the world where “the smart sassy people turn up and make everything OK”. This, in a kernel, is what the Orwell fans want: for their hero to step in and put things right.

Such commentators are not wrong that the world grows ever more difficult and dangerous. But to find a way through the chaos, you need to ask questions that you can’t answer without compromising your neutrality. Why exactly is social democracy a better way? And how should it work in today’s wild world? Calmly telling fascists they’re being rather fascist, when really they should be liberals, is not the devastating rhetorical blow that Simon Hedges thinks it is.

I will admit, under duress, to being a writer. Suffering as I do from this crucial personality flaw, I can sympathise with the hero-worship when I read Orwell’s essay, “Why I Write”. In it, the author is endearingly frank about the main motives for writing, which he sets out as: (i) sheer egoism (“It is humbug to pretend this is not a motive, and a strong one”), (ii) aesthetic enthusiasm (“Above the level of a railway guide, no book is quite free from aesthetic considerations”), (iii) historical impulse (“Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity”) and (iv) political purpose (“Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after”). To the latter, Orwell adds: “the more one is conscious of one’s political bias, the more chance one has of acting politically without sacrificing one’s aesthetic and intellectual integrity.”

If we each have an Orwell we relate to, this is mine — the leftwing aesthete who can’t quite reconcile a desire to be useful with a love of form for form’s sake. “So long as I remain alive and well,” he writes, “I shall continue to feel strongly about prose style, to love the surface of the earth, and to take pleasure in solid objects and scraps of useless information. It is no use trying to suppress that side of myself. The job is to reconcile my ingrained likes and dislikes with the essentially public, non-individual activities that this age forces on all of us.” Beautiful. Here, Orwell’s charisma comes from his self-doubt, his wry acceptance of his own limitations, his determination to pick a side, and take a stance, nonetheless.

It is this Orwell that is lost to us thanks to hagiographies like the one Hitchens wrote. He’s the worst sort of wingman — one who puts you off the guy who could have chatted you up just fine by himself. In his fussy, unfocused book, Hitchens spends much of his time quoting and rebutting scattergun academic criticisms of Orwell, accusing his foes of “first-year [howlers]”. At such moments, one feels Hitchens’ pulsing desire to be considered Orwell’s heir, to have it written that Hitchens, too, matters. A Nation article posthumously obliged him in 2021, though the use of his full name in the headline, “Why Christopher Hitchens Still Matters”, suggests he remains a crumb short of Orwell’s stature.

Orwell “would appear never to have diluted his opinions in the hope of seeing his byline disseminated to the paying customers”, Hitchens asserts. And later: “various authors . . . make the common mistake of blaming [Orwell] for his supposed ‘effect’”. Yet Hitchens’ veneration of Orwell has helped reduce the great writer to a rent-a-quote. Once we no longer admire Orwell for what he believed but for the way he believed it, he becomes a cipher, one of his own “dead metaphors”, and fair play for anyone to use.

I don’t want to lay all the blame at Hitchens’ feet; it might have happened anyway. Writers who want to position themselves as voices of unquestionable reason without saying anything too exact or refutable were always going to find some vehicle for their vanities.

Naoise Dolan is an Irish novelist

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From a secret door concealed in the British Museum’s oak-panelled Enlightenment Gallery, staff or VIPs occasionally appear as if out of thin air, a Harry Potter moment spooking visitors engrossed in this haven of classical antiquities. It’s typical of Hew Locke’s quietly subversive approach that he begins his remarkable exhibition what have we here? with carnivalesque fabric and papier-mâché figures stepping out through this door, their brilliant colours and ornamental costumes disrupting the monochrome orderly space. Gaze up and more Locke revellers — gold masks, rainbow hats — surge into view, waving from the top of the colossal antique Piranesi Vase.

What have we here? Such gaudy characters originally turned up in Locke’s 2022 installation “The Procession” at Tate Britain. This new crop, called “The Watchers”, are as exuberant in their densely layered allusive outfits, each different and absorbing: helmets or horned headdresses, appliquéd with colonial share certificates or skulls, sprouting flowers or feathers. Led by a child bearing an outsize replica of an East-West Africa war medal, they are joyous emblems of individuality and survival first, history puzzles second.

Invited to interrogate the British Museum collection, what it means, where it comes from, Locke — Scottish-born, Guyana-raised, and a British Museum visitor for 40 years — has paired dramatically contrasting installations: interventions in the long rectangular Enlightenment space, and a jumble of mostly unfamiliar African, Asian and South American artefacts colliding with his own quirky mixed-media sculptures in the semicircular Great Court gallery upstairs. Here some dozen further “Watchers” perch above the displays, warily surveying us and the strange, incongruous gathering of objects.

The immediate impression is of being at sea among a flotilla of Locke’s exquisite wooden and brass model boats. “Windward” is a gorgeous 18th-century galleon with images of pre-Columbian art on its sails. “Armada”, based on the USS Constitution, a civil war vessel, is decked with African masks and cut-out gunmen. “Wine Dark Sea Boat BB” is a ghost ship, draped with a mesh of translucent fabric embroidered with warriors, skeletons, a sunburst Roman god. For Locke, “boats symbolise the journey from life to death or are containers of the soul”. Myth holds sway with politics.

Alongside the boats sound the bells: two dozen bronze forms, some anthropomorphic or carved as animal heads, others geometric abstractions, cast across a thousand years — 900-1900 — in Nigeria. They are anthems to the past, summoning ancestors; also warnings, calls to action.

Locke’s way is to question through visual enchantment. Beauty glints everywhere: bright, eerie Caribbean necklaces made from green beetles and stuffed hummingbirds; an Indian ruby and emerald tiger’s head from Tipu Sultan’s throne; a heart-shaped Yotoco gold breast plate, embossed with a human face, earrings, nose ornaments, 200BC-1200, from Colombia.

Locke’s glittery faux-memorabilia are comic intruders. In “Souvenir 20”, his flamboyant bust of Queen Victoria, synthetic braids from a Brixton hair shop explode out of the brass filigree of imperial regalia, medals, jewels, snakes, swamping the face — the freight of the past. “She was the head of an empire,” runs the caption, “she’s not innocent.”

So from the dazzle emerge dark or complex stories connecting sovereignty, trade, conflict, the treasures that end up in museums. An engraved Akan drum with antelope skin crossed the Atlantic from Ghana to Virginia, used en route to force enslaved people to exercise by “dancing”. Intensely vital 13th century Taino sculptures “Boinayel the Rainman” and a birdman spirit figure, rare tropical hardwood survivors of Caribbean heat, “are Jamaica’s Elgin Marbles, symbol of collective memory”. A 15th-century copper-gold “Buddha from Dolpo” was stolen from a Tibet monastery by British soldiers in 1904. Much here is “raw loot”, Locke concludes.

Museums categorise by chronology and geography. Locke’s collage across time and place distils a bigger picture: the entire collection a story of the flow of goods, ideas, people, multicultural avant la lettre, beneficiary and witness of the empire’s grand reach. William Daniell’s prints of London’s West India and East India Docks, 1802-08, the river at its magnificent bend, quays neatly arranged, a calm view bathed in morning sun, beams across the gallery. It’s breathtakingly far from the site today, Canary Wharf’s skyscrapers. “These two docks encapsulate the whole Empire,” Locke says, but in a “sanitised” rationalist depiction: where, for instance, is the quay nicknamed “Blood Alley” because heavy sugar sacks carried along it tore the skin off workers’ backs?

A St Kitts sugar merchant brought the Piranesi Vase from Rome to England. Slavery is as indissolubly part of the museum collection as it is of British trading history. Locke chooses not to show broken black bodies, but there are centuries of documents — from Charles II’s slavery charter in 1663 to 19th-century post-abolition “compensation” claims, chilling for the brute legality of lives priced (£100 for “inferior field labourers”, £33 for those “aged, diseased or otherwise ineffective”). Borrowed from Merseyside’s Maritime Museum, William Jackson’s “A Liverpool Slave Ship” (1780) depicts a splendidly rigged vessel, sails billowing; only close-up comes the shock: ventilation holes below deck, small boats with enslaved people about to be thrown into the hold.

Occasionally I felt hectored by the captions. Why should Charles II be primarily remembered for having “kick-started something truly horrendous” — slavery is not Britain’s only history. Are Maria Sibylla Merian’s sparkling watercolours “Muscovy duck wrestling with a snake” and “Toucan eating a small bird” made in 1700s Surinam really metaphors for the violence of slavery? Merian was a zoologist explorer, concerned to document the natural world.

But mostly Locke allows objects to tell their own tangled tales. A bronze jug engraved with falcons, stag and lions, made for Richard II around 1390, became a precious trophy in the 18th-century Asante court — today’s Ghana — until British soldiers snatched it after the 1895 Anglo-Asante war. A Sanofa gold weight bird, turning to look back, was collected by Britain’s “Inspector of Mines in the Gold Coast” in the 1920s-30s; it illustrates a Ghanaian proverb that it’s never too late to look back and correct mistakes.

The British Museum knows it must examine the past in order to move forward. The Black Lives Matter movement, restitution claims, especially Unesco’s recommendation for the Parthenon Marbles’ return to Athens, the broader need to retell global history, will transform the museum in the next decade.  

Among Locke’s most gripping exhibits are replicas of great Nigerian art of the 1300s-1500s, cast by craftsmen in London in the 1940s: an Ife head sculpture, slightly elongated, with almond shaped eyes and lines of holes around the mouth, a triumph of stylised naturalism, and a Queen Mother Idia mask, “the African equivalent of the Mona Lisa”. Today, sophisticated reproductions and virtual art are shifting fetishes about authenticity. Locke’s show is installed in packing crates, suggesting precariousness. The tide of history that brought objects here is changing direction; not everything will stay forever.

Locke modestly calls what have we here? a trip “down a rabbit hole”. Actually it is an unruly off-track companion to the multicultural highway of the museum’s current Silk Roads exhibition: a wise balance of pleasure, protest and constructive hope.

To February 9, britishmuseum.org

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The Japanese yen has fallen sharply in recent weeks, hitting levels not seen since before a sudden surge in the summer that reverberated across global markets.

The yen last week sank below ¥150 to the US dollar, and has lost about 5 per cent over the past month as investors bet on a slower pace of interest rate rises from the Bank of Japan, at a time when the US Federal Reserve is also expected to cut rates more slowly than previously thought. Dovish comments from Japan’s new prime minister, who had previously been critical of the BoJ’s very loose monetary policy, have helped the currency resume a slide that carried it to 34-year lows earlier in the year.

The shift, investors said, has rekindled interest in the so-called yen carry trade, where investors borrow in yen to fund bets in higher-yielding currencies, a bet that blew up spectacularly in August after the BoJ raised borrowing costs.

Hiroki Hashimoto, a senior fund manager at Royal London Asset Management, said the recent weakness could “likely be explained by the recent widening interest rate differentials between the US and Japan”. He said the risk that the governing party loses its lower-house majority at a snap election this month “could have led to the less hawkish comments” from new Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba. 

This month, Ishiba said that the economy was “not in an environment” for further interest rate rises by the BoJ.

The central bank raised interest rates this year for the first time since 2007. Its benchmark rate now stands at 0.25 per cent, and traders in swaps markets are putting a low probability on a further increase at the BoJ’s two remaining meetings this year.

Recent declines in inflation have already raised questions over how much further Japanese borrowing costs are likely to rise, according to Tomasz Wieladek, chief European economist at asset manager T Rowe Price. “It will become increasingly difficult for the BoJ to keep hiking without risking undershooting the [2 per cent] inflation target,” he said.

Strong economic data in the US have also piled pressure on the yen by boosting the dollar.

Mark Dowding, chief investment officer at RBC BlueBay Asset Management for fixed income, said the “big move in yen has really come from a big move in US rate expectations”, coupled with investors pushing back the timing of expected rate cuts by the Bank of Japan. Yen carry trades had been making a “small comeback”, he added.

The currency’s renewed decline last week prompted Japan’s top currency official to warn that he was monitoring “speculative moves” in the market “with a high sense of urgency”. Japan spent a record ¥9.8tn ($65bn) from late April to May to boost the yen.

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Throughout history, leaders have sought to reshape the Middle East. From the heights of my village on Mount Lebanon, I can contemplate the passage of successive empires: the beautiful remnants of a Roman temple, a Byzantine church or a (much less charming) French military bunker, there to remind me of the region’s magnetic pull and the fleeting nature of power. 

The area stretching from the Taurus Mountains to Arabia Deserta and from Shatt al-Arab to the Mediterranean is strategically located, symbolically intense, socially diverse and, therefore, politically unstable. Imposing some kind of order on its vulnerable states and uncertain, volatile identities has been a temptation for conquerors and politicians alike. Cyrus of Persia and Alexander of Macedonia tried; so, more recently, did George W Bush. 

As the 20th-century colonial empires receded and the era of independence bloomed, a largely arbitrary political map took shape, distributing among the new (non-nation) states mountains and plains, plateaus and deserts stretched around the Jordan, Orontes and Euphrates rivers. These modern creatures proved to be fragile, permanently threatened by ethnic strife and political mismanagement. 

State-building is a desperately difficult endeavour in plural societies, never accomplished, always reversible and often viewed as a mere cover used by one group or another (Alawi, Tikriti, Maronite) to impose its will. It is rendered even more difficult when emerging regional hegemons keep attempting to transform these fragile units into obedient satellites. 

The Middle East has of late experienced many such episodes. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt used a fervent wave of Arab nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s to try to impose its primacy, only to be brutally contained in its ambition by Israel’s superior arms, conservative Arab regimes’ machinations and active western hostility. Khomeinist Iran, promoting Shia emancipation and political Islam, engaged in a similar project from the very first days of the revolution, leading among other effects to a horrible eight-year war with Iraq, and the sponsoring of non-state armed groups such as Lebanon’s Hizbollah, Iraq’s Hashd al-Shaabi and Palestine’s Hamas. Tehran tried to organise that network into an “Axis of Resistance”, which looked very much on the ascendant until recently. Not to be outdone, Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has tried its hand at reasserting Ankara’s influence, through subtle means as well as less subtle ones, over an area that had lived under Ottoman rule for some four centuries. 

The latest to be tempted is Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu. He talks about his ambition and demonstrates, one tactical victory after another, that he means what he says. Following the brutal Hamas eruption of October 7 2023, he transformed Gaza into a huge field of ruins, displacing, bombing, starving and dehumanising its population at will. Then he moved north to put an end to the low-intensity warfare Hizbollah had engaged in against Israel in support of Gaza, and he did it alla grande. 

He bombed the port of Hodeidah in Yemen to punish the Houthis, who had considered it their duty to help Gaza by disrupting international navigation and firing missiles at Israel. He kept hitting arms depots and, of course, Iranian and pro-Iranian militants in dismembered, disabled Syria. At the time of writing, he is preparing to bomb Iran, a response to the missile attacks of October 1 that not only entails overflying a few neighbouring countries but also drawing the US into providing support.  

Meanwhile, Netanyahu has never let anybody forget that his most cherished aim remains the annexation of the occupied West Bank (and therefore the extinguishing of any possible Palestinian state), where assassinations of militants, destruction of whole villages and expropriations of land are, if anything, redoubled. His finance minister Bezalel Smotrich is busy altering the legal system of “Judea and Samaria” in anticipation of what many fear will be full-fledged annexation and possibly the transfer of some 3mn Palestinians east of the River Jordan; recently he has been ruminating publicly about a Jewish state that could extend from Iraq to Egypt. 

Militarily, Israel’s behaviour in Gaza has looked instinctive, chaotic, a retribution rather than a war (Isaac Herzog, the Israeli president, has accused all the Strip’s inhabitants of being accomplices of Hamas and therefore legitimate targets). During the year that followed October 7, Israel kept bombing hospitals and schools, mosques and churches, villages and camps, without stating, without probably knowing, what to make of the “day after”.  

In Lebanon, its war has been, by contrast, a meticulously planned one: the most recent confrontation with Hizbollah in 2006 was inconclusive, and Israeli cognoscenti have believed since then that a new confrontation with Hassan Nasrallah’s fighters was inevitable. Hence the implementation of a war plan that has been refined down to its smallest details and regularly updated during the past 18 years. The result is a campaign that combines almost sci-fi intelligence with relentless bombing from a dominating air force and state-of-the-art drones, all areas where Israel has a clear superiority, not to say supremacy. By the end of last month, in the wake of Nasrallah’s assassination, Netanyahu was half declaring victory, hailing Israel’s success in “changing the balance of power in the region for years”.

Israel’s cascade of tactical successes on both fronts is indisputable — still more so following the news this week that its troops had killed Hamas leader Yahya Sinwar in Gaza. Military experts are feverishly anticipating the next Israeli innovations. Many pro-Israeli observers are in a state of awe, if not euphoria, and all this has inevitably encouraged Netanyahu to start thinking of a new Middle East, re-engineered by Israeli arms and reflecting the new hegemon’s will. Israeli cartographers are regularly asked to equip their prime minister with maps to show from the UN lectern in which a flourishing and prosperous Middle East is on the verge of replacing a tenebrous, barbaric one. 

There indeed is no doubt that Israel has altered the balance of power, substantially crippling Hamas and Hizbollah, and putting itself in a position where its government thinks it can dictate the new regional configuration — helped as it is by its victorious army, by Arab passivity, American generosity (in weapons, dollars and diplomatic support) and a broken international system. How to remain rational, let alone modest, under such a constellation of stars? 

The question is not that of this substantial change’s reality but of its durability. If anything, past attempts to reshape the Middle East have generally ended in failure: Israeli prime minister Menachem Begin entered a deep depression when examining the results of his attempt in 1982, and Bush might be ruminating still over the US-led initiative, proclaimed in 2003, to export democracy across the region through regime change. 

Starting the re-engineering of the region with an incursion in Lebanon has, in particular, been a curse for Israeli politicians: Begin and his defence minister Ariel Sharon had to resign after their 1982 large-scale invasion of their northern neighbour, which had been justified in terms very similar to Netanyahu’s now. Shimon Peres was defeated in the elections that followed his “grapes of wrath” campaign of 1996 and Ehud Olmert’s misadventure there in 2006 combined with corruption cases to bring about his downfall. The repeated promise of a “new Middle East” after each of these invasions has naturally not seen daylight. 

Could the present Israeli prime minister do better? There are a few good reasons for scepticism. First, aspiring hegemons need to be ready to redraw borders and promote regime change. Some application of force is indispensable and that’s why only countries with substantial military resources (Saddam Hussein was under the illusion that he possessed them) engage in such endeavours. 

However successfully they are pursued, these goals usually exact a heavy price in human lives and material resources. Netanyahu has gone so far as to predict regime change in Iran “a lot sooner than people think”. But grabbing more land while imposing obedient leaders on a few neighbouring countries is probably a tall order; Israel can hardly do both at the same time, as each objective (and sometimes both) will be vigorously opposed by other players. 

The second reason for scepticism is that Arab regimes’ passivity during the past year is very much linked to the identity of Israel’s main targets, two pro-Iranian champions of political Islam. By destroying them, Israel is also hitting what most Arab regimes consider their most serious adversaries. If and when Israel’s activism goes beyond this fortuitous convergence of interests, Arab passivity could suddenly disappear. Attempts to transfer Palestinians into neighbouring countries would in particular be opposed as a major source of political instability. Israeli attempts to impose a form of political hegemony in the Levant would not be acceptable to Egypt or Saudi Arabia and other would-be regional hegemons.  

A third reason is that the excessive use of force will keep Israel’s adversaries in a state of anger: Israel can accumulate tactical wins but it cannot translate them into a stable hegemony. With the fundamental issues remaining unresolved, Hamas (or a successor group) and Hizbollah can reinvent themselves any time in the coming years, their most recent humiliation playing as an incentive rather than a deterrent (there are reasons to believe that, while being pounded like hell, both groups have been able to attract new recruits). 

Fragile states in the region, when not accomplices of anti-Israeli movements, can hardly prevent the re-emergence of groups with deep cultural roots and what they consider a legitimate cause. It seems likely that the Palestinian cause will continue to play the role of the Bible’s burning bush, extinguished only to be reignited immediately after. 

Fourth, an Israeli hegemony would be built on sheer, naked, arrogant power. All Israel’s neighbours are presently on the defensive: Syria is effectively occupied; Iraq has not recaptured its national unity since its “liberation”, nor been organised by strong, transparent institutions; Jordan fears the annexation of the West Bank and its own transformation into an alternative Palestinian state (something that had been part of the programme of Netanyahu’s Likud party for decades and has recently risen up the agenda in Tel Aviv and possibly in Mar-a-Lago as well). 

As for my country, Lebanon, it is financially bankrupt, politically paralysed (with no president, a government with limited powers and a dormant parliament) and threatened by the recurrence of civil war. Israel’s hegemony, if it is established, would be an easy victory but in an unstable, frustrated, angry environment that could hardly be pacified. Even if the war stopped today, Lebanon would still need years to recover. Israel might find informants in such an environment but would search desperately for allies and proxies. 

This is more so because the kind of regional hegemony Israel is attempting to build is totally non-Gramscian: it does not seek to integrate the defeated but, on the contrary, keeps excluding him. Its expansionist messianism is unpalatable even to the least bellicose of the region’s populations simply because they could have no part in it. They consider themselves utterly removed from the Holocaust inflicted by Europeans on the Jews and are therefore unwilling to pay, yet again, for Europe’s misdeeds. Integration of the weak into the powerful’s domain, as analysed by Antonio Gramsci or, long before him, by the great Ibn Khaldūn (who wrote of a process by which the weak accept a lesser standing as long as they are part of the ruler’s network, probably a precondition for sustainable hegemony), is impossible in these circumstances. 

In this respect, the domestic evolution of the country is a mirror. Since its victory in the 1967 war, Israel has changed. This can be seen in the Druze community, traditionally a disproportionate source of recruits to the Israeli military, where there is growing unease about a redefinition of Israel that solidifies their standing as second-class citizens. It was evident too in the protests throughout the spring and summer of 2023, when liberal Israelis demonstrated in hundreds of thousands against the Netanyahu government’s “reforms” of the judiciary, meant to constrain its autonomy.  

In other words, a reconfiguration of Israel as a religious entity (as illustrated by the settlers’ increasing influence on politics or the large increase of religious militants in the officer corps) makes it even more exclusivist: liberal Jews and — certainly — Arab citizens of the state are not welcome. This transformation of the Israeli polity (not its mere “slide to the right”, as often reported) has been going in parallel with the attempt at regional hegemony, a combination that can hardly reassure large segments of the Israeli population or the country’s neighbours in the region. 

Those the gods afflict with hubris free themselves from reason. UN secretary-general António Guterres was declared persona non grata only because he reminded Israel that international humanitarian law also applies to it. Emmanuel Macron was promised hell because he suggested that arms deliveries to Israel should be halted. The International Criminal Court was demonised when it spoke of war crimes being committed; we do not know whether it will issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders. Even countries that have normalised their relations with Israel are disoriented by its elastic definition of its security and contempt for others’ concern for theirs.  

Similarly, the idea of Israel as a bulwark of civilisation against barbarism is a pretension that finds an echo in the west (certainly in the US Congress) but can hardly describe the region’s ancient civilisations nor adequately reflect the Israeli army’s behaviour in Gaza. Closer to reality is Israel’s attempt to be an advanced military fort for the west, and many in the west are happy with that role. But an advanced military fort cannot be a regional hegemon, much less a beacon of civilisation. 

In this tortured, agitated, broken region, there still is a way to avoid the worst. It is by bringing back to the forefront the heart of the matter, the issue that has been around for a century and a half of conflict, the issue that many Israelis want to forget: the Palestinians’ basic political rights. Israel’s regional adventures often look like a flight from that ever-present, painful fact. Unless the Palestinians’ right to a state of their own alongside Israel is recognised and materially implemented, they will not cease to be a source of (fully legitimate) disruption, making their life and that of their neighbours impossible. 

The aspiring hegemon has concluded that if force does not pacify the Palestinians and those who, sincerely or cynically, support their cause, the remedy is in the application of even more force. If history is of any use, it teaches us that the use of force to settle complex political issues is always sterile and often counter-productive. In any case, the ruins left by Israel’s present pounding of Lebanon have none of the charm left by Romans and Byzantines in my village: they are instead the mark of an unconstrained, unbearable hubris.

The writer is a professor of international relations emeritus at Sciences-Po (Paris) and a former senior adviser to the United Nations secretary-general

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