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Fraud inquiry into new jobs scheme

June 28th, 2009 | No Comments

Recruitment companies getting tens of millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to find jobs for the unemployed are at the centre of a fraud probe after staff made false claims of getting people into work.

The Observer found that A4e, one of the government’s biggest private contractors, is at the centre of the Department for Work and Pensions inquiries. It is understood that at least two other recruitment companies have been probed by the DWP. Last night Yvette Cooper, the work and pensions secretary, confirmed that investigations were under way and said she could cancel multimillion-pound contracts if widespread fraud was uncovered.

The revelation comes weeks after A4e was earmarked for £100m of contracts for the government’s Flexible New Deal, in which private companies will be paid for each person they place in a job.

One of A4e’s consultants is David Blunkett, a former work and pensions secretary who advocated private involvement in welfare reform. Blunkett, now a backbench MP, is paid up to £30,000 a year by A4e, which is based in his Sheffield constituency. There is no suggestion of impropriety by Blunkett, but he may be embarrassed by the probe as details of MPs’ earnings outside parliament are published this week.

The DWP started its investigation into A4e’s Hull office in May 2008, after discrepancies emerged in “confirmation of employment” forms submitted by the company. Two recruiters filled in forms meant for employers who agreed to take on workers. In some cases, employers’ signatures were falsified.

One of the recruiters had also entered into a fraudulent deal with a local temp agency. In January, the recruiter was sacked, while the other resigned. “It had the smell of a conspiracy,” a source close to the company said.

An A4e spokesman said it had found only 20 fraudulent claims. It remained unclear last night why the DWP investigation has been going for 13 months, when A4e was a bidding for major government contracts. A4e is expected to repay £15,000. Another recruitment company has been asked to repay £48,000 following a DWP inquiry.

The controversy has echoes of the 2001 crisis that forced the government to abandon individual learning accounts, under which training providers were paid for each person given vocational training. The £268m initiative initially fell prey to small-time fraud, but later it was proved that the providers invented phantom claimants to get a “starter fee”, costing the government hundreds of millions.

A DWP spokeswoman named no companies in the welfare probe, but said: “Specialist employment organisations help 200,000 people back to work every year. Unfortunately our audit processes have uncovered some specific cases of fraud involving particular individuals who have since been sacked and money paid back. Our investigations found no evidence of systematic abuse.”

A4e, with a turnover of £145m, claims on its website to have helped 19,725 people into work. Its spokesman said it had begun its own investigation and was co-operating with the DWP. “While we tackled these matters swiftly and transparently, and have strengthened our anti-fraud proce

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Ferrara as fabulous as Florence

June 28th, 2009 | No Comments

Author Sarah Dunant set her latest novel in Ferrara, a town that captivated her with its rich history – especially that of its grand medieval convents

The first problem I had when I started writing a novel set in a 16th-century convent in Ferrara was that my spellchecker kept trying to turn the city into a car. It was one of many realisations that this history-rich place on the banks of the River Po is one of Italy’s hidden treasures.

We’ll get inside the convent later – first, Ferrara itself. I arrived there early one summer morning on a train from Florence. My walk to Florence station had been an obstacle course of cars and crocodile files of sweating tourists so busy adjusting their commentary earphones that they barely managed to lift their eyes to see what particular Renaissance wonder the guide was instructing them to appreciate.

An hour and a half later, hopping on a bus from Ferrara station, which is situated outside the massive, crumbling medieval walls, I found myself in a well-nigh perfectly preserved medieval and Renaissance city, with barely a car or a tourist to be seen and with a prevailing soundtrack of bells – the bass ones coming from the churches and the upper register from the hundreds of bicycles that are the lifeline of transport for the modern Ferrarese.

For those with the time and energy to travel outside the accepted tourist trail of Florence, Venice and Rome, north-east Italy is a goldmine. Padua, Verona and Mantua are each treasures in their way, but for my money Ferrara is the best of them all. An energetic, aggressive city state until the Papal States gobbled it up in 1597, it was run for centuries by the d’Este clan, who started out as barely concealed thugs but morphed into sophisticated Renaissance patrons, with an eye for town planning and an ear for fabulous music. The buildings you can still see; the music takes a bit more imagining.

A great boulevard divides the medieval quarter from the Renaissance side, conceived and built in the early 16th century by Duke Ercole d’Este. In the Renaissance city all is space and dignity: parks, palazzi and grand houses. In the medieval quarter the humble Ferrarese brick (one of the many wonders of this city is that much of it is built from warm brick rather than the colder glory of marble or stone) lights up a criss-cross of tiny jumbled roads, packed with churches, cloisters, old palaces and ordinary houses. The variety and ingenuity of their arches, windows and grilles are worth a small slideshow of photos in their own right.

In the middle of the divide stands the outrageous d’Este castle: half palace, half fortress, even down to its surrounding moat. Inside, under baroque sweetness lies a history of naked power. It was here, in 1425, in the marital bedchamber and the dungeons, that Niccolò d’Este had his second wife and her lover – his own son, Ugo – murdered for an alleged affair. This venting of medieval righteous anger is perhaps understandable until you learn that he himself boasted of sleeping with 800 women and that the chroniclers of the time talked of how, “left and right of the river Po, everywhere there are children by Niccolò”.

Luckily, visitors to Ferrara can now find safer places to rest their heads. Writers, of course, travel on pathetic budgets, but one can still nose out a little style. Suite Duomo on Corso Porta Reno is slap-bang in the middle of town: if you ask nicely they will give you a room with a view of the cathedral facade and you can breakfast on a terrace that overlooks the grand piazza in front. On my second day I woke to find the market in full swing, as it would have been for centuries. Amazingly, the grand cathedral had shops built into its side, and while the majority of the cheap clothes on sale now may come from China, the vegetables, meats and cheeses still roll in from the surrounding countryside.

How you spend the rest of your days (and I would recommend at least a long weekend) will depend on whether your taste leans towards ostentatious art or more humble secret architecture. By my third visit, the writer in me was already in a convent in my head, so I no longer had any time for the splendid decadence of the Palazzo Schifanoia – its name roughly translates as “avoiding boredom” – with its salon of frescoes by 15th-century Ferrarese masters depicting peasants and gods at work and at play (I leave you to guess which are doing what).

Instead, I was sticking my nose inside churches and cloisters. Casa Romeo is a beautifully restored 14th-century merchant’s house that once abutted an old convent, its central courtyard silent and serene. An equally perfect and even sweeter example of medieval cloister architecture is to be found at the entrance to the cathedral museum, right in the middle of the city’s most thriving modern thoroughfare. Opposite is a popular local wine bar where the quality of the wine is as high as the prices are low. Somewhere off that same street I found a great secondhand clothes shop (had I had one or two fewer glasses of wine I might have remembered the exact address, but at least it gives the visitor something to aim for), where I bought a leather jacket so fine I am considering being buried in it.

Which brings me to the churches. And the convents. Five hundred years ago, Ferrara, like all other Italian cities, was so nervous about female sexuality that as soon as respectable women reached the age of menstruation they were either married off or – more likely, given how expensive dowries were by this time – incarcerated in convents. “Christ is the only son-in-law who doesn’t cause me any trouble,” wrote the great Ferrarese Renaissance patron Isabella d’Este, after walling up two of her own daughters for safety.

But while no one can deny the appalling unfairness of the practice, it was not all terrible. Sisters, nieces, aunts and cousins within a family would all have been nuns – and, bearing in mind the forced marriages, abusive husbands, lack of birth control and death toll from childbirth outside the walls, convents could be sanctuaries as well as prisons. Those nuns with fine voices could use them daily (convent choirs were a source of great glory to a city like Ferrara); others played instruments and even in some cases composed music or wrote plays. The more you dig, the more a portrait emerges of small republics of women with their own dramatic ebb and flow of power.

Most Italian convents were disbanded after Napoleon invaded but among the glories of Ferrara two working ones still exist, both of them rich in history. Corpus Domini is famous both for its visionary 15th-century nun and for the tomb of the infamous Lucrezia Borgia, who married into the Ferrarese royal family in 1502 and produced a crop of heirs.

The other, Sant’Antonio in Polesine, on which I based my novel Sacred Hearts, is even more special. Originally a thriving Benedictine convent for noblewomen, it now sits serene and secluded at the edge of the city wall, home to just 17 elderly nuns.

Like the nuns of Corpus Domini they are enclosed, but if you visit between certain hours and ring the bell, a sister will talk to you through the grille, then crack open the door and guide you to the inner chapel, the walls of which are filled with wonderful, delicate frescoes from the time of Giotto.

Later you can sit in the outer church and listen while those 17 nuns sing public vespers on the other side of the altar grille. Their ageing voices are cracked and desperately sad compared with the great choir that would have enthralled the city’s dignitaries 500 years ago, but like so much in Ferrara, the experience is a reminder of the unexpected delights that this jewel of a city has to offer the more intrepid tourist.

Essentials

Ryanair (ryanair.com) flies from Edinburgh, Birmingham and Stansted to Bologna, 35 miles from Ferrara. Suite Duomo (00 39 0532 793888; suiteduomo.it) has doubles from €80. The Monastero di San Antonio in Polesine (leabbazie.it/emilia_romagna/ferrara) is open from 3.15pm-5pm on weekdays. The Monastero di Corpus Domini is currently closed for restoration but check the website above for opening hours. Further tourist information from ferraraterraeacqua.it.

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Just how did caravanning get cool?

June 28th, 2009 | No Comments

Airstream, the iconic US caravan-maker, has launched its first range designed for Europe. But would the sleek curves and power-assisted gadgets be enough to help Tim Moore convince his family that caravanning really could be fun?

Middle age isn’t all bad. Here is just one of the unsung bonuses: if you passed your driving test before 1997, you’re already qualified to raise merry hell on public roads at the wheel of a car-plus-caravan “outfit” of up to 8.25 tonnes in weight. So when you see someone under 30 towing a caravan, be content that at least they know what they’re doing, having proven so in a stringent supplementary test. Except you won’t, because unless they’re stealing it or are en route to some Top Gear-sponsored demolition derby, no one under 30 tows a caravan.

Two things threaten that demographic. First, recession: a domestic caravan holiday is cheap, which explains why bookings at Caravan Club sites are up by 40 per cent this year. Second, Airstream – the only caravan it’s OK to want, or indeed ever to refer to by name – has just released a modish European range. These factors are fated never to work in tandem, however, because Airstreams are tremendously expensive.

In the deeply conservative world of caravan design, standing out from the crowd is a simple matter of not looking like a big margarine tub. With their curvaceous silver flanks and their smoked glass, the new Airstreams manage this with some ease. The European range pays strident homage to the US firm’s iconic 1936 launch model, a gleaming, bullet-nosed embodiment of that era’s obsession with aerodynamics and shiny metal, fittingly crafted by the designer responsible for Charles Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis monoplane. It’s a testament to their timeless appeal, and aluminium’s rust-resistant durability, that an astonishing 70 per cent of all Airstreams ever made are still on the road.

Mindful that I live in a road of modest breadth and challenging geometry, I elected to pick up my Airstream International 684 – and the mighty Land Rover thoughtfully provided by the firm to save my turn-of-the-century Mondeo estate any embarrassment – from the car park of our local B&Q. The prudence of this arrangement asserted itself at once. The principal distinction of Airstream’s European models, I’d been told, was that they’d been condensed in sympathy with our cramped and twisty-turny continent. Compact was not a word that sprang to mind as I surveyed my family’s home and haulier for the weekend ahead: a shining, eight-wheeled convoy that filled the tarmac chasm between garden deliveries and the trolley rack. It would have looked more at home trundling across Red Square on May Day.

Two shimmering tonnes and 50 grand’s worth of hand-riveted aluminium and high-end consumer electronics: on the caravan spectrum, this was well away from Father Ted’s holiday home, and closer to the sort of thing that Russell Crowe might be found losing his temper inside. If Jeremy Clarkson’s tireless caravan-baiting suggests a man protesting too much, his guilty secret would be an Airstream at the back of the quadruple garage.

My daughters were won over before they even got in, by the step that electrically projected itself to welcome them up to the door. My son was never going to be a tough nut to crack, institutionalised as he is to bijou living after 15 years in a box room, sleeping on a stilted bed with his nose a foot from the ceiling. The permanent queen-sized mattress installed at the Airstream’s very distant back seemed to placate my wife who, like me but with greater foreboding, had expected to assemble something from many lengths of sofa cushion.

For me, one glance around the interior – flat-screen telly, downlighters, climate control – emphasised how wonderfully little this weekend would share with my solitary relevant experience, a family tour of North Wales during an earlier recession-related caravanning boom in the mid-70s. That caravan, borrowed from my grandfather, was built from hardboard and Formica, and offered only two berths. So it was that every night my older siblings and I huddled together at the mildewed flaps of an earwig-colonised army-surplus tent pitched alongside, watching my parents knock back the Mateus Rosé. Justice was served when our chemical toilet overturned during an ascent of Britain’s second-steepest road, shedding its grim load across their sleeping quarters.

The last time I looked, which in fairness wasn’t recently, caravans were still exclusively furnished in horrible brown gingham and made out of old kitchen units. The Airstream really is not. Pimped up beyond all recognition, it hardly deserves to be called a caravan. Bold colours and elliptical storage holes impart the retro-futuristic vibe of a space-station shuttle in 2001. The bathroom sink is one of those swanky counter-top porcelain troughs, and the white-piped leather and louche cushions give the U-shaped seating zone the look of a holding area for high-class groupies. If you’re not a glutton for attention, look elsewhere for your mobile accommodation. We weren’t so much going on holiday as going on tour.

The 684 is Airstream’s hugest model, something I came to appreciate as the cheery man who’d delivered it walked me around the preposterous perimeter. Street-legal I might have been, but it wasn’t hard to understand why Airstream had politely insisted on bolstering age with a little experience. The week before, at their behest, I had travelled to the Caravan Club’s training centre in Sussex for a half-day caravan-manipulating masterclass. Under the calm eye of instructor Bernie Jones, I very nearly succeeded in backing a much smaller and less valuable caravan through a precise 90-degree turn, the standard campsite-parking procedure.

“It’s all about confidence,” Bernie said after one of my more complete failures, but it was actually about defying every tenet of spatial logic. A mastery of parallel parking isn’t going to help: you’re better off calling on an aptitude for cutting your own hair. With a left-handed scythe, in the dark. You turn the wheel very slightly one way, and the caravan goes drastically the other; a tiny corrective adjustment and your outfit is swiftly jack-knifed at five-to-one. Then Bernie tells you to do it again using only your big sticky-out mirrors, and this time everything goes wrong in reverse. It’s like the Highway Code redrafted by Escher.

The stand-out message of that day: when it comes to opportunities for cartoon misadventure, the caravanner is spoilt for choice. He can forget to crank down the prop stands in each corner, and have the caravan and its contents seesaw destructively to earth when his family climbs in. He can forget to crank them back up before he leaves, doing terrible things to the caravan chassis and anything in its path. He can drive away with the electric cable or the waste-water container still plugged in, or the little front jockey wheel still lowered. He can leave a window ever so slightly open, and arrive at his destination to find the caravan internally slathered with road filth, or omit to attach the “breakaway cable”, and arrive to find it gone.

Bernie had already given me a 16-point pre-departure checklist, and attempting to acquire familiarity with the Airstream man’s supplementary 12-pointer (“10: prime toilet”) meant we lurched out into Chiswick roundabout at the height of Friday’s early evening rush hour. The Land Rover acknowledged its monstrous burden with only the slightest hint of inertia; I did my white-faced expressionless best to ignore whatever might be going on at the Airstream’s unseen rear, a couple of postcodes behind.

The motorway was better, despite the jolt of panic that accompanied every reflex glance in the rear-view mirror, and the accompanying revelation that we were being aggressively tailgated by a New York subway carriage. Every time we approached a service station a growing number of family members pleaded for refreshment and, later, bladder relief, but they pleaded in vain. A close-quarter manoeuvre before a baying crowd of Happy Eaters just wasn’t going to happen.

Other motorists seemed torn between covetous rubber-necking and exhibiting their Clarkson tendency.

Glamorous, huge and shiny it might be, but it was still a caravan. Kids in passing cars would beam and wave, then their dads would cut me up. Only lorry drivers gave their unreserved headlight-flashing approval, and even they dropped back in embarrassment once we left the M40 and its forgiving expanses of carriageway and began waywardly punishing kerbs and mini roundabouts.

To those with partners less fixated on Tudor pageantry, the West Midlands may not seem an obvious choice for a weekend break. Yet something had lured dozens of large white boxes to the Caravan Club’s immaculate Chapel Lane site, south of Birmingham, and it can’t just have been the newly restored Elizabeth Garden at Kenilworth Castle. The rain that now fell steadily had long been predicted, as had the unseasonal chill in the air. Most caravan owners are campers made good: perhaps part of the fun of caravanning is doing it in weather that makes you really glad you’re not in a tent.

The sight of our Zeppelin nosing up to the gates brought faces to many plastic windows. “Caravan parking is a voyeuristic sport,” Bernie had warned me, “especially when someone turns up towing a massive silver cigar.” My navigational probings proved so instantly and shriekingly inept that within moments the site warden had trotted up and was talking me in – left hand down, full lock, to me, to you. Every order was the precise opposite of my expectation, but in a minute we were geometrically aligned in position A.

Almost at once the first of many curious neighbours squelched over. “I said to the wife, ‘Stick your wellies on, love – we’ve got to have a look at that’.” He probably meant the Airstream, rather than the spectacle of a wet family losing a fight with a stubborn jockey wheel. It was 40 minutes before everything was unhitched, cranked down, clipped on and plugged in to my semi-satisfaction, yet despite that and the weather, anticipation was somehow sustained. The electric step hummed out and we piled aboard. A night in a caravan: an experience that life had thus far denied each of us, to the regret of very nearly all.

Fiddling with switches and finding the corkscrew occupied a happy half hour. Then we microwaved ready meals, and ate them perched on those groovy leather banquettes, watching Casualty. Washing up five plates and priming the odd toilet somehow accounted for all our 40 litres of water: over the weekend we had to refill the drum five times. Caravanning is certainly an effective way to confront the reality of human wastefulness, and indeed human waste. But parenting is so much easier when you’ve got emptying the toilet cassette in your armoury of punishments.

Huw Edwards said goodnight, and in the absence of Freeview and board games the entertainment options instantly withered. This could have proved an awkward juncture in the holiday schedule: a couple of hours of parental us-time ahead, with the only place to enjoy it now waiting to be turned into our children’s bed. But the journey had left me spent, and you can’t make teenagers go to sleep at 10.30pm on a Friday. My wife and I and our 10-year-old stumbled off to the big bed at the back, and left the other two to enjoy some them-time. It should have been an incendiary situation: a small space and two physically determined young people deep into a phase of mutual hatred. It is a tribute to the convivial mood engendered by Airstream life that we were woken by birdsong not bloodshed.

An unedifying fry-up fuelled us for Kenilworth, and after a complementary side-trip to Warwick Castle we got back to Chapel Lane in time for the Eurovision Song Contest. Despite the mood lighting and surround sound, I was by now detecting the odd echo of my childhood caravanning experience: the mysterious underfloor gurgles, the ropey TV reception, the banged elbows, the cupboard doors dashed into faces. Spill a pint of milk at home and it’s a pain. In a caravan it’s an apocalypse.

Crammed round the table, we all got alarmingly into Eurovision. With one loud voice we cheered and chortled and roared ugly partisan abuse. The enhanced camaraderie was almost unavoidable: stick a family in a caravan and you bring it together in the most literal sense. Already I could feel the first twinges of regret that in the morning we’d be stepping down that electric step for the last time. But this was tempered with the surging, untrammelled glee that having done so, we would – by very gracious arrangement with the Airstream man – be driving back down the M40 gloriously unencumbered.

Essentials

Airstream (015396 24141; airstreameurope.co.uk) offers European-spec models from £29,950 for the Bambi to £49,715 for the 684 model. Land Yacht Holidays (airstream4rent.co.uk) rents Airstream 684s, like the one Tim used, from £599 for a three-night weekend, £999 for a week. The company delivers it to the site of your choice. Airstream Rentals (0845 070 5990; airstream-rentals.co.uk) offers a luxury service aimed at events – the Gallagher brothers currently have one each on tour – from £1,000 a day. For details of Caravan Club sites see caravanclub.co.uk or call 01342 326 944.

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Cows on list of countryside dangers

June 28th, 2009 | No Comments

A herd trampling on a woman vet and injuries inflicted on former home secretary David Blunkett highlight the risk of attacks by cattle, especially if calves or dogs are nearby. Anushka Asthana reports on the need for ramblers to be ‘animal aware’

Thomas De Quincey, the 19th-century critic and essayist, once stated: “Cows are amongst the gentlest of breathing creatures.” Many might disagree.

Farm worker Mike Scriven, for instance. He was left with severe bruising last week after being chased across a field by a 450kg cow. Scriven, 46, who was trapped under the animal’s body for almost an hour, escaped only by gouging its eyes repeatedly.

Or David Blunkett, the former cabinet minister, who is nursing two broken ribs after being charged by a cow while walking his guide dog, Sadie, in the Peak District this month.

A third incident ended in tragedy last weekend. Liz Crowsley, 49, a vet, was trampled to death by a herd of cows in the Yorkshire Dales. Her two dogs, a spaniel and collie cross, fled to safety.

Perhaps the animal for which De Quincey professed a “deep love” is not always as docile as city dwellers might think. Figures reveal that attacks by cows are by no means unusual. According to data released by the Health and Safety Executive (HSE), there have been 67 incidents in the past five years in which a member of the public has reported being injured by cattle. In six of the cases, which do not cover 2009, the person was killed.

The risk is even greater for farm workers whose injuries are recorded separately. Over the same period there were 23 fatal incidents involving farmers and their employees, another 300 that resulted in “major” harm and 277 in which the injury took more than three days to heal. Far more go unreported.

Blunkett has been inundated with messages from people who have suffered similar attacks. “I have had letters flooding in – from people telling me about personal experiences, family experiences, who have been in hospital for three weeks after an incident, who have had family members killed, and a couple of letters from people whose dogs were crushed,” he said. People had also thanked him for drawing attention to the problem: “If I hadn’t been who I am, no one would know about it. Although I went to hospital I doubt they would have reported it. There is usually a category for road traffic accident – but for being crushed by a cow?”

Blunkett, MP for Sheffield Brightside, was out walking with his son on his 62nd birthday when they came across the cattle. They put Sadie on a lead to walk around the animals when one cow broke away and charged towards them. “My son was trying to protect me but the cow decided to have a dive at the dog and it knocked me down,” he said. “I think it kicked me because I have bruising all over and a couple of broken ribs.”

After the incident, Blunkett said he had found out there was a new cross-breed of cow. “A particular strain from Europe that is more aggressive,” he said, arguing that in such cases temporary electric fencing should be used. “Most of the rights of way in the Peak District cross over fields, so I think fencing should be considered, and walkers have to be extremely careful – especially if they have dogs.”

Since right to roam legislation opened up vast areas of the countryside, the HSE has published guidance about the “potential hazards” posed by cattle. It tells farmers to “plan and take action”. Tips include assessing if the animals are generally placid or well behaved, erecting temporary fencing and placing signposts on paths. “If you have an animal known or suspected to be aggressive, then you should not keep it in a field that is used by the public,” it warns.

Tony Mitchell, from the HSE’s agriculture and food sector safety section, said: “Cattle are classed as a non-dangerous species and by and large are generally docile. Their inquisitive nature is often mistaken for aggression. However, if they feel threatened by unusual disturbance, such as dogs, or when maternal instincts are aroused, then they may react in a threatening manner.”

According to the HSE, the two most common factors in attacks involving members of the public are “cows with calves” and “walkers with dogs”.

“Over the years a lot of people have been under the misconception that a bull in a field is the most dangerous thing,” said Alistair Bull, livestock manager at Thelveton Farms, near Diss in Norfolk. “The most serious incidents take place when there are groups of suckler cows that have calves with them – because they have that maternal instinct to protect their calves. You would not walk into a pen with elephants or giraffes when they have just given birth.”

Bull said he advised walkers not to let dogs off their leads when close to cattle. “What happens is the dog gets chased and it runs straight back to its owner with a cow in hot pursuit. And cows do not tend to attack singly. If you think of wildlife programmes, the matriarch comes forward with her infantry behind. To a person from town, that dog is part of the family so their first instinct is to rescue it, but the next minute they will have 750kg cows charging around them. It is a recipe for disaster.”

Part of the problem, said Bull, was that more and more people coming to the countryside were “less animal aware”. But he admitted it was not just the public who were at risk. The “most scary” moment of his life was when he and a colleague used a dog to help round up a herd of suckler cows. “Within 20 seconds one of the cows attacked the dog. Then the others started bellowing – a warning cry. The dog came galloping back to us and within seconds we were surrounded by 40 cows. We were petrified – we thought we’d had it. They turned from docile cows to a mob.”

Adrian Morris of the Ramblers’ Association said walkers should appreciate that the countryside was a working environment. “We get two to three queries a week related to incidents involving animals, with one or two a year that have been serious. Quite often we hear stories about people having to run across a field to the nearest stile. It is difficult to know how much is perception and how much reality.”

A spokesman for the National Farmers’ Union added: “Attacks by cattle are extremely rare. If you feel threatened, just carry on as normal, do not run, move to the edge of the field, and if possible find another way round. And remember to close the gate.”

Others pointed out that livestock were also at risk from ignorance of country ways. “We are aware of many reports of animals being attacked by dogs off the lead, or of dogs being injured when a herd is frightened and pursues the dog,” said Katy Geary, a spokeswoman for the RSPCA. “We believe that tens of thousands of livestock are killed or maimed. Terrified sheep and cattle have been chased over cliffs and into rivers, had their throats and intestines ripped out, or been caused to miscarry through dog attacks. People find it hard to believe their pet can be a hazard to livestock.”

Whatever triggered the attack on him, Blunkett knows he is lucky to be alive. “I didn’t realise the seriousness at first – I had no idea I had broken my ribs.” He says he has lived in the countryside since he was a boy and had never been worried about bulls or cows. Along with others, he may now steer well clear.

Six tips for safety

If confronted by cows…

• Do be prepared for cattle to react to your presence, particularly if you are with a dog.

• Do move quickly and quietly – and if possible walk around them.

• Do keep your dog close and under proper control.

• Don’t hang on to your dog if you are threatened by animals – let it go.

• Don’t put yourself at risk. Find another way round and rejoin the footpath as soon as possible.

• Don’t panic. Most cows will stop before they reach you. If they follow, just walk on quietly.

• Report any problems to the highway authority.

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Ulster loyalists finally lay down their arms

June 28th, 2009 | No Comments

Terror groups boost Northern Ireland peace process by disposing of guns and explosives

After inflicting almost 1,000 deaths and engaging in nearly 40 years of terrorism in Northern Ireland, loyalist paramilitaries announced yesterday that they were disarming.

In a significant boost to the province’s power sharing settlement, all three main loyalist terrorist organisations – the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Red Hand Commando and the Ulster Defence Association – said their guns and explosives were being disposed of.

The British government said it was an “historic day” for the people of Northern Ireland. Secretary of state Shaun Woodward said: “For those who have doubted the political process it is proof that the politics works and guns have no place in a normal society. Today’s acts of leadership are further testimony to the transformation in Northern Ireland.”

The UVF and RHC held a joint press conference during which an unmasked middle-aged man in a business suit read out a statement on behalf of the groups. “The leader of the Ulster Volunteer Force and Red Hand Commando confirms it has completed the process of rendering ordnance totally, and irreversibly, beyond use,” he said.

Inside a packed church hall on the Newtonards Road in east Belfast, before an audience that included many former UVF prisoners and the widow of the late loyalist political leader David Ervine, the UVF member disclosed that decommissioning was almost scuppered by Real IRA and Continuity IRA attacks. He said: “In March 2009, all preparations were suspended following the attacks on UK citizens at Masserene Barracks and Craigavon. Assurances were sought from the government, and the Irish government, that those responsible, in whatever jurisdiction, would be vigorously pursued … Only when the forthright assurances were give, and it became clear that they would be honoured, did our process resume.”

Billy Hutchinson, who was a UVF prisoner and is now a representative of the UVF-linked Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), confirmed that the destruction of guns and bombs took place in the presence of three “independent international witnesses” as well as officials from General John de Chastelain’s independent decommissioning body. He said the three witnesses reported back to three governments, the US, Britain and the Republic of Ireland.

During his speech, Hutchinson and his PUP colleague Dawn Purvis paid tribute to Ervine in his efforts to push loyalists towards peace and disarmament. With tears in her eyes, Ervine’s widow Jeanette said: “I just wish David had been here to see all the hard work he put into the peace process coming to what he called ‘the endgame’. This day is what he was working towards and I’m so proud he played his part to get us here.”

About 90 minutes after the joint announcement, in an office 200 yards along Newtonards Road, the UDA issued a statement saying it had begun to put all its arms beyond use. “We have held meetings with General John de Chastelain and his team, who have witnessed an act of decommissioning … by carrying out this act we are helping to build a new and better Northern Ireland where conflict is a thing of the past. The dark days are behind us and it is time to move on. There is no place for guns and violence in the new society we are building.”

A rebel faction of the UDA, the South East Antrim Brigade, is the only loyalist group that has not disarmed. However, the unit’s leadership told the Observer it is in negotiations to disarm before London’s August deadline, after which police will hunt for arms in loyalist hands.

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Tax case rocks champion of India’s lowest caste

June 28th, 2009 | No Comments

Kumari Mayawati Das, the low-caste champion who became a political star in the run-up to the recent Indian general elections, has become embroiled in fraud allegations, amid accusations that success has gone to her head.

Mayawati, the self-styled queen of the Dalits [untouchables], suffered a setback when her Bahujan Samaj party took only 20 seats in her home state of Uttar Pradesh instead of the expected haul of 60-plus.

An intemperate attack on the memory of Mahatma Gandhi provoked protests in the streets after she dismissed the revered father of the nation as a “fake” for failing to do enough for Dalits.

Now Mayawati is facing even worse trouble, as the cult of personality that has carried her so far threatens to prove to be her undoing.

On Friday she is due to unveil 40 statues – including six of herself – at a lavish ceremony in Lucknow, the Uttar Pradesh state capital. The statues include a large number of elephants, symbol of her party. Such grandiose gestures have prompted widespread derision and left her facing a legal action which accuses her of misusing state funds for her “self-glorification”.

But even that crisis is dwarfed by the scale of the latest disaster to befall the 53-year-old politician. An investigation by the income tax authorities into her vast personal fortune has concluded that she has been dramatically understating the scale of her income for a number of years. As a result, she is now facing a 100m rupees tax bill (£1.25m) after the revenue decided her real income for one year alone [2006-7] was 220m rupees, rather than the 22m she had declared.

At the root of the financial inquiry is the question of whether the millions of rupees presented to Mayawati every year by supporters and those seeking favour as “birthday presents” constitute income. The investigators think so and are determined to overturn an earlier decision to grant her tax relief on the “presents”. They believe the “presents” amount to income and noted that after her birthday her bank balance swelled significantly.

For her part, Mayawati claims in her appeal against the department that “gifts given to her on occasion of her birthday celebrations were personal in nature and did not accrue to her due to her office or occupation and there was no quid pro quo or service provided to donors.”

Plans are going ahead for the unveiling of the statues, despite a public interest petition to the supreme court from two lawyers which seeks an inquiry into the use of state funds for the projects.

But with Mayawati determined to press ahead in front of a crowd of 6,000 guests on Friday, another problem has surfaced. Stonemasons working on two stupas, or Buddhist domes, at the Ambedkar memorial – another of her grand projects – will not be able to complete them in time.

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Under the Gaydar

June 28th, 2009 | No Comments

Ten years ago, Henry Badenhorst helped a friend find a date online – and the idea for Gaydar was born. But with success came scandal – and the tragic death of his long-term partner. Here, the man behind the world’s biggest dating site reveals what makes him click Interview Patrick Strudwick

Henry Badenhorst has certainly been a quiet revolutionary. As Gaydar, the website he co-founded 10 years ago, became the world’s most successful online dating site, Badenhorst remained silent. The site has transformed the way people relate to each other on and offline, an influence reaching far beyond its original ambition of hooking up single gay men. But apart from Badenhorst’s regular namechecks on gay power lists – he tends to vie for position alongside the likes of Elton John, Ian McKellen and Evan Davis – we know almost nothing about him.

He’s had his reasons to keep quiet. Gaydar has hardly lacked for publicity – on the contrary, it has been a godsend to media scandal stories. When Lib Dem MP Mark Oaten was found to have engaged in a sex act with a rent boy “too disgusting to describe in a family newspaper” – as one paper noted – it was Gaydar that was implicated as the place where they’d met. When Labour MP Chris Bryant was found pictured on the internet sporting nothing but his pants, that was Gaydar, too. And when Boy George was convicted for falsely imprisoning a male escort earlier this year, it emerged that he had found the escort – you guessed it – on Gaydar. But through all the success and infamy, Badenhorst has remained publicly mute. Especially, since Gary Frisch, the co-founder of the site and his former life partner, died after jumping off his eighth-floor balcony in a drugs haze in early 2007.

Now Badenhorst is finally ready to speak, but not before a preliminary off-the-record chat in a central London hotel. I pass the test, it seems, because I’m invited to his office: Gaydar HQ. Not the chrome Soho penthouse one might expect, but a characterless 60s office block set back from a residential side street in Twickenham, southwest London, not far from the rugby ground. At first I struggle to hear him. He speaks in such a gentle voice that I have to lean in to make out what he’s saying.

He starts at the beginning of the Gaydar story. “It was June 1999,” he recalls. “We [he and Frisch] had a Dutch friend called Frank who was single and said: ‘I need a boyfriend – can you help me?’” Frank didn’t have time, it seems, to visit bars so, recalls Badenhorst, “we put him on Excite [a search engine], which had a dating section where you could upload a picture. But it took two weeks for him to get a response, so we said that we were sure we could create something specifically for the gay market.” By November the site had launched.

Badenhorst and Frisch had moved to London from South Africa in 1997 to set up the IT firm QSoft, which provided revenue-management systems for airlines. They launched and ran Gaydar together – the innovation that set the site apart from Gay.com (the other destination for the date-hunting homosexual) and ensured its success was the creation of “profiles”. These are simply a single web page for each user, an idea that’s now standard on dating sites from Match.com to Mysinglefriend.com (neither of which are as popular as Gaydar, despite their larger target market).

Pictures were uploaded on to the profile pages, and information – basic, personal, sexual – could be written. There were sections for “stats” – height, weight, hair colour, as well as hobbies and interests, adult or otherwise, and a section on what members were looking for. The profile provided an opportunity to imprint some humanity on the anonymity of cyberspace. And to inform people as to whether or not, for instance, you still have your foreskin.

“Gaydar started as something we did on the side,” says Badenhorst. “We didn’t realise what we were creating, but then people started coming to the site. I placed some ads in [free gay magazine] Boyz, which drew in a few people, and slowly it grew. It certainly didn’t take off from day one – the first year we had a several thousand, then the second year was 75,000 and then suddenly, in the third year, in 2001-02, there were more like 220,000.”

Initially the site was targeted at those who already led an active gay life, going to bars and clubs. “I had a friend who helped me create the first ad. It said: ’3am, the club was crap, I’m horny as hell, use your Gaydar.’” Ten years on, the success of the site has been blamed for gay bars and clubs going under. “Just an excuse,” retorts Badenhorst. “If you have a good venue, people will not stay at home night in, night out.” Now the majority of people who use Gaydar are not what in gay parlance would be called “scene queens”. But the greatest transformation of all has been the way it has enabled those in rural areas – or countries where homosexuality is illegal or taboo – to connect with each other. “When I was a teenager,” Badenhorst recalls, “I knew I was gay but I thought I was the only one; but these days boys go online and see there are plenty of gay men.”

Plenty indeed. Five million people around the world subscribe, spending on average more than an hour on the site with each visit. Most pay a monthly £5 subscription, with the rest of the company’s revenue coming from advertising. Now advertising is not difficult for Gaydar to come by, but in the early years “no one would come close,” says Badenhorst. “We wouldn’t even get as far as pitching – potential clients would just say they weren’t interested.” In 2004 that began to change. “Ford was the first. One of the people working on its campaigns was a Gaydar user!” American Express, BMW and Virgin followed.

Until then, they had even more fundamental problems with other companies. “The Royal Bank of Scotland closed our merchant account with just 24 hours’ notice. They said someone had complained about it and so took the view that it was too much of a reputational risk.” Now, of course, RBS has slightly bigger risks to its reputation than a few snaps of unclad gay men. But that wasn’t all. “No hosting companies would deal with us either; they wouldn’t touch anything with even remotely sexual content – but I’m sure the gay thing came into play. So we had to host the site ourselves – we had fibre-optic cables running into our house.” (They initially ran the business out of their home in Twickenham.)

But by 2004, the success of the site could not be ignored by those eager to benefit from the pink pound. Also, by that stage the website had a new, “cleaner” sibling: GaydarRadio (which now has 1.6m listeners). “Suddenly here was a brand that people could associate with because it was nonsexual,” says Badenhorst.

The site had already been very publicly associated with sleaziness. In 2003 the MP for Rhondda, Chris Bryant, could be found in his Y-fronts helpfully offering details of his requirements to anyone who chanced upon his profile. Then there was the Mark Oaten affair. “I think it’s most unfortunate when these things happen, because it’s just people going about their lives and it gets blown out of proportion,” says Badenhorst. “It makes me angry because this [Gaydar] is for the gay community – who are you to judge them? If this was a straight site, would it be such an issue?”

Are there other politicians signed up to Gaydar?

“I’m sure there are. But I certainly don’t search the database to see who’s on there. If politicians want to use the site we’ll do our damnedest to make sure their identity is protected.”

The most recent Gaydar-related scandal involved Boy George. The singer was jailed in January for falsely imprisoning Norwegian escort Auden Carlsen after meeting him on Gaydar; he’s since been released.

“George was always a great supporter of Gaydar, and in the early days he had a whole lot about it on his radio show, which we were always very grateful for.” Presumably Badenhorst felt distinctly less grateful after the escort episode. “The Gaydar brand gets pulled into it,” he agrees. “It’s one thing using the site to meet people, but what you do thereafter is your problem. It was wrong what George did to that guy. It’s not something you do to another human being.”

But it is precisely the way in which gay men treat each other on Gaydar that has caused much of the controversy about the brand. Particularly surrounding the issue of “barebacking” – the practice of wanton, unsafe sex. Last year a More4 News report about how Gaydar has changed the lives of gay people concluded that Gaydar makes it easier to indulge an interest in barebacking. But Badenhorst is unrepentant. “People are going to have unsafe sex whether you tell them to or not.”

But you allow people to advertise on their profiles that they are looking for condom-free sex – surely you could intervene?

“That would create more damage, because all you would do is push the whole barebacking thing underground. I would rather be in a situation where people are honest about their sexual practices, so whoever contacts them can make informed decisions about whether to meet up with that person.”

Badenhorst also points to the work he and the site do to encourage safer sex. They have volunteers from the Terrence Higgins Trust in the chatrooms for any user to speak to whenever they want, and the company has a history of supporting other such charities, like Freedoms, a free condom-distribution company, and the National Aids Trust.

Another common concern is the extent to which Gaydar can encourage the baser aspects of male sexuality, objectifying potential mates into a sexual shopping list of attributes.

Badenhorst agrees – in part. “Online,” he says, “it’s easier for coupling to become a criteria of things you want.” One of the more practical of the site’s facilities is the “GPS” (Gaydar Positioning System), where you can locate all members who live within a mile radius. This can lead to your neighbourhood morphing into a veritable minefield of former conquests. One imagines. But on the more starkly dial-a-pizza-and-choose-your-toppings end is the “power search”. Here, if you want to seek out a Middle Eastern 33-year-old with blue eyes who practises safe sex, is circumcised, has a stocky build, a hairy body but a bald head, who wears sporty clothes, is sexually passive, who smokes socially, drinks often but never takes drugs, who is a Sagittarius and has a small penis, then you can. It really is that specific.

But when I press Badenhorst further on this topic, a hilarious admission spills out. “Well, I don’t always see how people interact on there,” he says. “Because I don’t use the system.”

What? I splutter. You don’t have your own profile on there? Badenhorst laughs.

“No… no… can you imagine?” he says.

But why not?

“I had a few bad experiences of people stalking me. When Gary died they got my name and then found my details from Companies House, so I would get weird things sent to me and people would phone my house in the middle of the night or leave abusive messages. I had to get lawyers involved.”

So how does Badenhorst meet people?

“The old-fashioned way,” he replies. “I go to bars.”

For the first and only time in our conversation, Badenhorst clams up when I probe him on his current personal life. Have you been dating recently?

“Yes,” he says, his eyes sparkling. Has that been a recent thing? “Absolutely.” How does that feel? “Exciting.” Do you feel any twinges of guilt? “Not any more,” he replies, sadly.

Having worked relentlessly on the site for 10 years now, he seems somewhat fatigued by it all. “You see so many images [of nudity] that you start noticing things in the person’s room – ‘Ooh, look at the wallpaper!’” He is, however, proud of the many millions of connections – fleeting or otherwise – he has facilitated. “It’s only when you meet people and they tell you how it’s affected their lives that you go back and think: ‘This is what I’ve done.’”

Badenhorst’s success, however, has not been unerring. Last year, QSoft had to lay off a few editorial staff from GaydarNation, their offshoot entertainment website. In March, Badenhorst closed Profile, the Soho bar he co-owned. But, he insists, this was not for commercial reasons, and the bar will reopen under a different name. The lesbian arm of the site, GaydarGirls, while in no way a failure (325,000 users) has not caught on with anywhere near the same whoosh as Gaydar.

“The product is not right for them,” he says, with Gerald Ratner-esque honesty. “The behaviour of gay men and lesbians is different.”

Badenhorst was born and raised in suburban Johannesburg. His mother gave up her job as a theatre nurse when she married his father, who worked for the transport services. The second of four boys, young Henry was always different. “My mother must have known [that he was gay]. I never played with my older brother, or played rugby – I was always in the kitchen doing things. But I had a normal Afrikaans upbringing.” Popular at school and never bullied, he instead had the Afrikaans church to contend with. “I had to go to a church that believes it’s a sin to be gay and you’ll burn in hell for it, so for years I struggled with why the church wouldn’t accept me for who I was.” Unresolved, he later left suburbia to move to Hillbrow – “the Soho of Johannesburg” – where he started attending a church “that was OK to be gay in”. So OK, in fact, that “It turned out to be just a huge cruising ground – so that didn’t last long.”

Military service came at 18. “I had a great time,” he says, laughing mischievously. Badenhorst was still not “out” to his parents. In fact, he says it was only “two or three years ago that I had an open conversation with my mother about it”. Only then did his parents realise exactly what he did for a living.

In 1991, Badenhorst, who is now 42, met fellow South African Gary Frisch, two years his junior, in a “cruising ground… I always make jokes that he was the one-night stand that never went away.” The laugh that follows is almost forced. On 10 February 2007, Frisch did finally go away. That Saturday afternoon he took ketamine, the animal tranquiliser and recreational drug, and jumped off the eighth-floor balcony of his Battersea home. The inquest recorded a verdict of “misadventure”.

They hadn’t been a couple in the last few months of Frisch’s life. After 15 years together, and eight years running Gaydar, Frisch moved out. “We got to a point where we had become friends and because we worked together were seeing each other 24/7, so it was a mutual decision to break up. And Gary got to a point where he was tired of working the hours and wanted to have a bit of fun and live a bit, so he did things in that last six months before he died that he’d always wanted to do. He went white-water rafting in Zimbabwe, he went bungee jumping, he was recapturing his youth. He was going to bars and clubs and loved it. I couldn’t understand it because I’d been there and done that.”

And it was that recapturing of youth, that wanting to feel alive that led to his death? Badenhorst goes to say yes, but his voice cracks. “That was what I struggled with the most – if we hadn’t parted, would the outcome have been different?”

How did he learn of Frisch’s death?

“I got a call from the police that day… It was about 6pm that Saturday, and I was at home.” The memory registers on his face like physical pain. What did the police say?

“That he had died; how he had died. And they said: ‘I’ll phone you back in 10 minutes. Phone somebody, get someone round and get yourself together.’ I was alone at home.”

So what did he do? Henry makes an exhalation from the back of his throat.

“You know, it is… it was the worst day of my life, the realisation that this had happened. I had shared a life with him for 15 years; I absolutely loved him. For minutes I would stop and think: ‘Maybe it’s not true, maybe I’m just imagining this,’ and I think what I did was phone [friends and colleagues] Anna and Trevor, and they immediately came over.”

The police questioned Badenhorst. “They wanted to be sure there was no reason it was anything other than an accident.” But Badenhorst knew it was nothing more than that.

“I knew because I spoke to him 10 minutes before he died. He phoned me, we had a decent conversation. On the Friday I was quite worried about him because his frame of mind was not right. So he phoned me about 12 o’clock on the Saturday afternoon. He was busy getting ready, about to go shopping. I knew there was somebody there and I knew he was uncomfortable telling me who it was, and I didn’t ask. But I got off the phone and thought: ‘You know what? He’s going to be OK.’ They took the drugs prior to going shopping and so never made it out.”

The man with Gary was Darren Morris, who later told the inquest that Frisch had stayed up all night on his own, and in the morning he found Frisch sitting on the floor with some magazines, saying: “Thank you, Lord; praise you, Lord.” Then, according to Morris, Frisch put music on, started dancing and talking incoherently: “I came into the living room and I saw him standing on the balcony with his hands on the rail. He somersaulted over the top.”

Stephen Ruddock, an estate agent, was outside when it happened, and revealed that Gary made a “Waheey” sound as he jumped. “It was a celebratory thing,” said Ruddock. “I saw his body come into my line of sight. It arced in the air and hit the ground.”

On the Monday morning the story was out. Speculation as to the cause of Frisch’s death and his “mental wellbeing” began to grow. Was it an accident? Was it drugs? Depression? Badenhorst was besieged by reporters. “The media was camping outside my door, trying to get an interview, trying to find out if I was with Gary when it happened. I just said: ‘I’m not going to talk to you.’ It got so bad the police phoned a few papers and said: ‘Please stop doing this.’”

Knowing that the press would run with the story on the Monday, Badenhorst was desperate to tell his employees of Gary’s death before they read about it. So, first thing, he assembled the 70 employees at the offices and told them. “We did it in a group situation and made sure we had grief counsellors on hand for everyone. There was a lot of shock – some people cried uncontrollably, some people could talk about it, and some people are still uncomfortable with me talking about it.”

Thousands of tributes poured in from gay men around the world whose lives had been changed for the better because of the website. But Badenhorst was busy taking care of the grimmest task of all – doing the ring-round, telling Gary’s brother (his parents were dead) and friends. Then he had to clear out Frisch’s flat. “That was the hardest thing, especially going back to the place where it happened.”

At the funeral Henry was too distressed to speak. “I wrote something but somebody read it for me. I wasn’t able to.” At this, his eyes begin to glisten.

In the aftermath of the funeral and the inquest, there was something else going on. An old “friend” of Frisch’s was suing Gaydar for a percentage of the company. “He wanted huge amounts of money. He claimed he supported Gary in the beginning, that there was a conversation between Gary and him that he would get a percentage.”

Proceedings had begun before Frisch’s death. “He was never somebody who could deal with stress very well. There was a lot of emotion going on with him dealing with issues around his mother’s [recent] death, so adding litigation on top of that didn’t exactly help.”

Badenhorst concedes, however, that what led Frisch to taking ketamine – known for its hallucinatory effects – was “a combination of things”: the stress coupled with his determination to recapture his youth.

Badenhorst’s anger over the court case is palpable – a low, rumbling rage. “I was fighting for what Gary and I had built together. It meant I couldn’t come to peace with Gary’s death and I couldn’t let it go, because every single day I was digging into the past to prepare for the case. I held our position, and he [the litigator] eventually went away. It went on for more than a year.” They settled out of court.

What does Badenhorst miss most about Frisch? A long pause follows.

“His honesty. He would say what he thought, whether or not it would embarrass himself or anybody else. And his kindness. If anything bad ever happened to me it was amazing how much concern and compassion he would have. He always protected me.” Indeed, even in his death, he did so, leaving Badenhorst the bulk of his estimated £6.5m estate.

The long-term implications have been profound. Even the website needed a year’s work on it to unravel all the programming Frisch had done for it. “He hated documentation, so it was all in his head.”

But only when that and the court case were over did Badenhorst begin to take stock. “I am finally looking at my life and realising what I’ve been through – at the time you’re just on survival mode.” Badenhorst says he wants to cut down his hours, and admits that now, with Frisch gone, his passion isn’t what it was.

“If you had asked me before he died if I would ever retire, I would have said: ‘Absolutely not.’ I always wanted to be in control, and it was something that we were passionate about together. So you start viewing your life differently and start thinking: ‘Maybe there is more to life than just working on Gaydar.’”

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