Digested week: Caroline Kennedy swoops on RFK Jr with talons out

The Guardian

31-01-2025

'Trying not to upset the French' could be a chapter in a Debrett's guide to etiquette and manners, one that may have been taken to heart by the government this week with its decision to change the name of a new submarine. The Astute-class attack vessel is still being built, but on Sunday night, the Royal Navy announced that what was to become HMS Agincourt would, instead, be given the more Franco-friendly name of HMS Achilles. Up pops Grant Shapps, the former Conservative defence secretary, to dust off his opportunism and accuse the navy of bending to Labourite 'woke nonsense'. It's just like riding a bike!
The naming of ships in this country is famously fraught after the saga of Boaty McBoatface, one of those jokes that was supposed to advertise the country's jaunty irreverence and ended up being flogged into tiresome half wittedness. But back to the submarine formerly known as Agincourt. The government insists the vessel hasn't been renamed because it might make the French feel bad, but rather to pay tribute to a previous ship of the same name that received 'battle honours' during the second world war.
This would be more credible if Achilles had been the first idea out of the gate and not the substitution for a name that honoured the defeat of the French by Henry V at Agincourt in 1415. Times Radio, meanwhile, managed to whistle up an angry former Royal Navy commander, Chris Parry, who had the courtesy to deliver exactly what they were looking for and call the renaming a 'craven and contemptible surrender to ideology being pushed by the government'. We must be grateful no one put in a call to the British Legion. (The Daily Express probably did. I can't bring myself to look.)
It was Kennedy v Kennedy in the US Senate this week at the confirmation hearing for the presumptive health secretary and anti-vaxxer, Robert F Kennedy Jr. The son of RFK came up against perhaps the only person in the US with greater surname capital than his own – Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of JFK, which makes her assuredly an outranking FK – who released a video in which she read out a statement enumerating all the ways in which her first cousin was a terrible person who was unfit for office.
Caroline Kennedy wasn't messing around. Like a playful assassin, she opened gently, referring to RFK Jnr as 'Bobby' and contextualising him fondly as one of 'a close generation of 28 cousins who have been through a lot together'. That tone soon evaporated. Bobby, said Caroline, was 'dangerous and wilfully misinformed' on vaccines, lacking in any relevant medical or government experience, and wholly unsuited to the job of health secretary. And this was just the warm up.
Reminding us that the Kennedys didn't accumulate their wealth and influence via charm alone, Caroline then flatly informed the Senate panel and the American public that her cousin was a 'predator' who, 'no surprise', keeps birds of prey and – who saw this detail coming? – once 'put baby chickens and mice in a blender to feed his hawks'. We look forward to the Republican-run Senate confirming RFK Jr to take his rightful place alongside Kristi Noem, the freshly confirmed homeland security secretary, who admitted in her recent memoir to having shot her dog.
To the theatre, to see the acclaimed adaptation of Annie Ernaux's book of auto-fiction, The Years. The five women in the cast are fantastic, the staging is perfect, and – bonus drama – the 'graphic scenes' of abortion that have been knocking out audience members intermittently since the play opened, caused someone in the audience to faint. The show stopped for 10 minutes.
As the action resumed, I found myself wondering if it was a man or a woman who'd keeled over. The scene was graphic to the extent that fake blood poured down the character's legs and the dialogue painted an even grimmer and more upsetting picture. Still – and sorry to be gross – the experience of having your bathroom turning into a scene from Straw Dogs is pretty familiar to most women I know, especially if they're approaching menopause. I assume it was a man who passed out.
Anyway on with the play, in which there were cigarettes and existentialism and of course, blood, very much in line with the French idea of womanhood as hard work and less aligned perhaps with the British fondness for defensive flippancy. As we left the theatre, an older British lady in front of us laughed and remarked to her companion: 'I think we'll need some ice-cream after that.' Well said, madam.
Menopausal ladies are big business at the moment. After Davina McCall's and Jen Gunter's bestselling menopause books, comes Dare I Say It, a menopause memoir by movie star Naomi Watts, and a new 'viral' menopause workout by Jennifer Aniston.
Aniston's partnership with a fitness brand called Pvolve – no, I don't get it, either – offers a rigorous programme of low-impact exercise designed for middle-aged women. Fine, lovely, it's nice to see a historically ignored demographic get our moment of rigorous commercial exploitation. The upside to the Pvolve programme is that you don't have to leave your house to do it. The downside is that it involves buying a load of Pvolve-branded gear – an exercise ball, a 'heavy ankle board', 'glider discs' – to gather dust in your house when, two weeks into the programme, you understand you are not turning into Jennifer Aniston and give up.
An impact of the pandemic on very young children is that, according to a survey of 1,000 teachers released this week, many of those who started reception last year spoke with vaguely American accents from too much screen time and were 'unable to climb a staircase'. Intellectually, I understand the concerns this might raise, but from experience it all looks normal to me. When my own tiny three-year-olds started the equivalent of reception, they spoke with American accents, struggled with stairs because we didn't have any, and one of them was still in pull-ups. Somewhere in the intervening seven years we figured it out.