‘Kane has found a gentlemen’s agreement is meaningless in the brutal world of football’

(Image credit: Chris Brunskill/Fantasista/Getty Images)

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1. Spurs fans won’t easily forget that ‘one of their own’ wanted out – Harry Kane must explain himself
2. The limits to protest are not for Extinction Rebellion to decide
3. Kabul retreat leaves the UK on a bridge to nowhere
4. Nevermind the lawsuit – maybe the Nirvana baby deserves more than a dollar now he’s a grown-up?
5. Prison island: Australia’s Covid fortress has become a jail

published 26 August 2021

1. Spurs fans won’t easily forget that ‘one of their own’ wanted out – Harry Kane must explain himself

Henry Winter in The Times

“From start to retreat, Harry Kane’s handling of his craved move to Manchester City has been naive, ending in embarrassment for him yesterday and a salutary lesson to others eyeing greener pastures,” writes Henry Winters in The Times. “Kane tried to play poker with the Tottenham Hotspur chairman Daniel Levy, didn’t see who held the aces, and was predictably trumped,” he writes. “The sound of Kane reversing up Hotspur Way, and staying at the club for now, shows that contracts should be respected, and that players cannot always have their way,” Winters continues. “It confirms that gentlemen’s agreements, as Kane believed he had with Levy, are meaningless in such a brutal world.”

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“A hallmark of a free society is the right to legitimate protest. The key word in that sentence is legitimate. Who decides?” asks Philip Johnston in The Telegraph. As Extinction Rebellion starts a new two-week campaign in London, “people whose lives are disrupted by their antics are entitled to know whether their rights are also to be respected by the law,” he writes. On the question of “who decides the legitimate boundaries of free protest in a liberal democracy, the answer is Parliament,” writes Johnston, “so MPs and peers have a duty to get this right.” As they grapple with the new Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill, “Parliament must ensure both clarity and certainty”, says Johnston. “When XR activists return with their superglue and pink tables next year they, the police, the courts and the rest of us should know where we all stand.”

“The parallel with Suez may be inexact, but 65 years later the lessons for the UK are much the same”, writes Philip Stephens in the Financial Times. When it comes to Afghanistan, “the defeat is shared, and the anger is on the British side”. “The manner of the West’s scuttle from Kabul damages the Americans but humiliates their ally. The US is powerful enough to shrug off the blow,” he continues. “The thread back to Suez is a relationship that, for Britons, has often looked as supine as special”, he writes. “After Brexit, Boris Johnson’s government hailed the UK as an independent actor on the global stage”. Now, the pullout from Afghanistan, “where among allies the UK was the biggest contributor to the US-led mission, has revealed its utter dependence on Washington.”

“Is there anything more apt than the Nirvana baby desperately grabbing at a dollar as a grown-up?” asks James Moore in The Independent. “The legal swim he’s taking as an adult is a fairly tasteless one,” says Moore, with Spencer Elden, cover star of the band’s classic album Nevermind, claiming the nude image of him as a baby constitutes child pornography. “But while we might abhor the approach he and his lawyer have taken, it’s hard to complain about the man seeking to get paid.” After all, “[h]e became an unwitting part of a pop cultural phenomenon before he was even conscious of pop culture or any other kind.”

“Australians have a reputation for rugged individualism, grit and competence. But when it comes to the pandemic, we have seen another side to my country: insecure, anxious and frozen by the fear of death from Covid,” says Alexander Downer in The Spectator. Indeed, due to a widespread policy in the state governments of ‘Covid elimination’,“two-thirds of Australians – some 18 million people – are locked down”, says Downer. “For a while, Australia’s policy was feted the world over as a success, but neither Australia nor New Zealand have worked out how to live in a world where Covid is endemic”, he writes. “The risk is Australia will end up isolated, wrestling with repeated lockdowns and spiralling national debt.”

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