Shooting images of heavily laden RAF Tornado GR4 Bombers from RAF Marham heading for operations to support UN Security Council Resolution 1973 for the European Pressphoto Agency this week has proved challenging to say the least. Long periods of waiting followed by a brief moment of action and a rush to file images for publication for what has been a fast moving news story. Technically the difficulties of photographing fast moving aircraft was made far worse by heat haze from the runway being magnified by the use of  extremely long lenses along with most of the missions beginning after dark.

Over at RAF Lakenheath, the USAF F15 Strike Eagles are a little more theatrical in their preparations. There tend to be more people hovering around the aircraft before departure giving the image a greater sense of scale.

Images may be licensed for publication by clicking here.

Web Clippings Operation Odyssey Dawn and Ellamy – Images by Jason Bye

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Words by Jan Moir. Photograph by Jason Bye for the Daily Mail.

Today, Julia Budworth is in tweedy heather hues, a vision of genteel country living. Her good Spanish loafers march smartly across the pale green carpet in her drawing room, her good, thick hair is curled just so, the pearls at her neck gleam.

‘These?’ she says, giving them a rattle. ‘Oh they are just Woolworths. Nothing fancy, I assure you.’

Fancy pronounced fency. Mrs B’s voice has the cocktail piano rinkle-tinkle of a bygone age, her manners squeak with the varnish of money and breeding.

At the family estate in Suffolk, oils of her ancestors hang above a roaring log fire. On the mantelpiece, alongside a parade of Meissen china, there is a print of the Annigoni portrait of Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, her first cousin and great friend.

‘Oh Debo is furious, too,’ cries Mrs Budworth. ‘She thinks the whole thing is just ghastly.’

Over the last week Mrs Budworth, co-owner of Britain’s oldest women’s weekly, The Lady, has launched a sustained attack on the magazine’s high-profile editor, Rachel Johnson. She has called Rachel vain and snobbish, a self-promoting careerist who is obsessed with penises.

‘God knows where all the penises come from. She never stops, does she?’ cries Mrs B. ‘Penis this, penis that. It is simply extraordinary. Rachel cannot speak about any subjects, whether it is somebody on the moon or Trident, without bringing the conversation back to penises. What is the matter with the girl? Grow up.’

Mrs Budworth’s rage has been on a slow burn since Johnson, the sister of London mayor Boris, was appointed to stop sliding sales at The Lady a year ago.

Mrs Budworth and her son Ben, who is The Lady’s chief executive, chose Rachel from a parade of hopefuls, despite Johnson’s lack of editing experience. The son still supports the editor. The mother wants her out.

‘Recently she said to me, “Oh I know you really only chose me for editor because I came from a famous family.” She actually said that!’ says Mrs B, in a clipped shriek.

‘And I said, wait a moment. Famous family? Do you mind? If you want a famous family, you should try the Mitfords. The Johnsons? I mean, really. I told Debo this. I don’t know how pleased she was, but I was so rattled at the time.’

Debo, the last remaining Mitford sister, has close connections with the magazine. Her father, David Mitford, once worked there as a manager. Debo even recommended Rachel Johnson for The Lady job, a decision she has come to regret.

‘Eugh yes, I know. It’s all very sad,’ says Mrs B.

The magazine was launched in 1885 by Mrs Budworth’s grandfather, the journalist and Conservative politician Thomas Gibson ­Bowles, and has been in fragrant decline for the past 20 years.

Once the go-to publication for gentlewomen who needed a top-drawer nanny or some helpful hints about cob-nut ­collecting, its core market seems to have gone the same way as spats and bustles.

‘Well, they say that the Queen reads The Lady, but whether that is true or not, I don’t know. It does go to Buckingham Palace, of course,’ says Mrs B.

When sales dipped to below 28,000, Rachel Johnson’s brief was to stop the rot,
gently sex up the ­content, increase circulation and raise the profile.

And that’s when the trouble began. First, as part of a relentless publicity drive which seemed to promote Rachel above all else, there was a Channel 4 fly-on-the-wall documentary, in which Johnson called The Lady ‘a piddling little magazine that no one reads’.

On camera, she had an argument with Ben; something mother did not approve of.

‘She was immeasurably rude to him. Blasting him down. She flew at him, saying: “Grow a pair of balls. No one wants to read your rubbish newspaper.” Something like that. Why he didn’t just open the door and say “Goodbye Miss Johnson”, I’ll never know.’

This week there was more bad news with the publication of Johnson’s book, A Diary Of The Lady — serialised in the Mail last month — chronicling her first year at the helm of the magazine.

Within the thickets of name drops and wily self-promotion that clot the pages, Rachel turns her guns on Mrs Budworth. There is much mockery of the proprietor’s fears that the button eyes on a teddy bear featured in the magazine could fall off and harm children.

Johnson also writes of an incident when the ‘formidable’ Mrs Budworth ‘stormed’ into her office ‘bellowing’ that she wanted to murder her.

‘When I went in to murder Rachel, it was a joke for heaven’s sake. I wasn’t really planning any injury,’ says Mrs Budworth, who feels aggrieved at being sidelined and ­ridiculed by her brash new editor.

‘I am not the dragon she is portraying me to be. I’m just sticking up for myself a little bit,’ she says.

The two very different worlds of these women collided at Johnson’s book launch, held at The Lady’s pink Georgian offices in central London on Thursday night.

In extraordinary scenes, Mrs ­Budworth held an impromptu press conference in a cupboard under the stairs, briefing journalists against her own editor, while the party roared around her.

Among the smart metropolitan crowd, the publishers of Johnson’s book joked that plastic penises would be packed into the party bags. The Johnson family were there en masse — including father Stanley and brothers Boris and MP Jo — their big white Johnson fists clasped around the free drinks, their big Johnson laughs booming off the Georgian walls.

How galling it must have been for Mrs Budworth, considering that she probably paid for it all: the canapés, the wines — certainly the Johnson’s salary, reputed to be just south of a six-figure sum for a four-day week.

‘That’s about right. And all of it my money. That makes me not very happy. And she can hardly speak to me on the phone; she is always too busy — it’s just these little things. One does feel completely sidelined and trampled over. And I wouldn’t mind if I thought she was doing The Lady a lot of good, but she isn’t.’

Well, I venture, Rachel’s book did make me want to go out and buy a copy of The Lady, an impulse hitherto resisted. And Johnson has got sales up 7 per cent and people talking about the magazine.

‘Yes, she has, but they talk in a derogatory way! It’s about clever Rachel battling with fuddy duddy old me. It’s all about the heroine, Ms Johnson, struggling away with the dreadful Mrs Budworth. Bah.

‘I sent her book back to her unread. I would slit my throat before I would buy a copy of it, and my friends feel the same. Would it kill her to be polite instead of rude?’

Well what did the Budworths expect? The Johnsons (family motto Grabitus Freebie Firstus) are notoriously opportunistic and exploitative, with hides thicker than bison pelts. At the buffet table of life, you certainly would never want to be in the queue behind them, unless you were partial to fresh air and crumbs.

As Rachel reports in her book, my Daily Mail colleague Ann Leslie once wrote that the Johnsons are ‘like Hungarians — they enter a revolving door behind you but always come out in front’.

Certainly, the intelligent, amusing, seventy-something woman I have tea with strikes me as a very different person from the bellowing monster Rachel Johnson has portrayed.

‘Oh, you look like a young Antony Armstrong-Jones (Lord Snowdon),’ she says to our photographer, full of twinkling mischief.

And despite the wealth, she has had her share of tragedy. In 1974, her husband was killed in an air crash; leaving her with five sons aged between 20 and eight to bring up.

Ten years later, her eldest son was drowned in a ‘ghastly accident’. Today, two sons are barristers, one works in security and helicopter pilot Ben is running The Lady.

The boys all went to public schools, which, she says, was a terrible drain on the family finances.

‘The two eldest went to Wellington and Gordonstoun, the three youngest went to Harrow.

‘No school was better than another, they were all pretty awful. By the time they got to Harrow, a frightful old drunk was the ­headmaster. That was quite an expensive do.’

Did she never ­consider sending them to state schools instead?

‘Eeurk?’ Mrs Bedworth makes a noise like a strangled pheasant. ‘I don’t think so. At the end of the day there is the old boys’ network, and I think it helps. State schools are a bit up and down.’

The family fortune was left between Julia (two-sevenths) and her brother Tom (five-sevenths). She claims that he’s the real villain of The Lady, a recluse who lives at the top of The Lady building and has been ‘living off’ the money for years, while letting the magazine run down.

He only recently relinquished his hold on the family business, allowing Mrs Budworth — who has been ‘itching’ to get to grips with The Lady for years — to stick her oar in.

And look what happens!

Ironically, Julia and Rachel are both women who have struggled to make their mark in male-dominated families; if only they could understand that they have more in common than they realise.

‘The thing about Rachel is that she has made such a Horlicks of so much that my faith in her is shaken,’ says Mrs B, throwing another log on the fire. ‘It has been quite a year.’

Indeed it has. Can it only be 12 months ago that Rachel Johnson, the 45-year-old author and journalist, was appointed editor of this hitherto unremarkable publication?

‘More hip, less hip replacement,’ she said at the time, nicking a line of Emma Soames’s when she took over Saga magazine. Six months into her editorship, Rachel writes of a lunch with Soames who tells her that The Lady will not be the last thing Rachel edits, just ‘a starter-mag for self’.

A few months later, according to her diary, she is sending in pitches for television shows starring that same self. The message is clear; for Rachel Johnson the mag is a stepping stone.

For Mrs Budworth, it is a lifeline. Rachel wants The Lady to be more like a feminised Spectator — the right-wing polemical magazine — featuring all her smart, metropolitan chums. Mrs Budworth wants it to be a little more like Country Life.

‘Perhaps with some lovely wild flowers on the cover?’ she suggests, more in hope than expectation. She gazes out the drawing room window, her view taking in the rich folds of Suffolk countryside, ­Budworth land as far as the eye can see. The grounds were designed and landscaped by Mrs B herself, and feature a lake she had built where a lone swan now glides across the surface. Back and forth it goes, unperturbed and serene.

In front of the Palladian mansion stand a pair of handsome chestnut trees, while next to the front door Mrs Budworth has planted a ­buddleia to attract butterflies. However, it wasn’t always this perfect. When the Budworth family moved here 42 years ago, there was a ­hideous turquoise swimming pool blocking the bucolic view.

‘Oh it was vile. Vile. Utterly viiiiiiiiiiile,’ says Mrs B, with a shudder. So she got rid of it. ‘I said to ­everyone, “Just leave it to me”,’ she says, ‘and off it went to the rubbish tip.’

Now something else is spoiling her view. Something, or should that be a certain someone else, is blocking out the Budworth ­sunshine, raining on Julie ­Budworth’s parade. How long, I wonder, before the family wrecking ball is called into action once more?

This article originally appeared in the Daily Mail on 3rd October 2010 and can be seen online at:

Julia Budworth hits back: After Boris’s sister boasts of sexing up the most genteel magazine, the owner accuses her of being obsessed with (ahem!) male appendages | Mail Online

Jason Bye -

Flowing, thrilling and subversive — the Sixteen sing Tudor choral music as it should be sung – as a labour of love

Words by  Hugh Canning. Photograph by Jason Bye

Back in the year 2000, two of Britain’s leading specialist chamber choirs embarked on ambitious millennial concert tours. John Eliot Gardiner’s Bach Cantata Pilgrimage with the Monteverdi Choir programmed all 200 of Bach’s church cantatas, mostly in churches around Britain, Europe and New York. It almost bankrupted the company and led to the conductor’s rift with his then label, Deutsche Grammophon, which had planned to record all the concerts, but withdrew as costs spiralled (the mostly excellent musical results are now emerging on Gardiner’s in-house label, SDG).

Harry Christophers and the Sixteen’s Choral Pilgrimage of great British cathedrals and churches may have been more modest in scale, but it has proved a popular fixture on the country’s concert calender. Now celebrating its 10th year, the pilgrimage started in February and runs to October, making 26 stops in the most magnificent ecclesiastical buildings — the cathedrals of Winchester, Norwich, Peterborough, Wells and Durham, the minsters of York and Southwell, Oxford’s University Church, the chapel of St John’s College, Cambridge, Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirk and Tewkesbury Abbey — with a programme drawn from the golden age of English polyphony, Ceremony and Devotion: Music for the Tudors, by John Sheppard, Thomas Tallis and William Byrd.

This week, BBC Four will broadcast the final episode of a second series of Sacred Music, performed by Christophers and the Sixteen, and fronted by the music-loving actor — and former choral scholar — Simon Russell Beale. The first four episodes — The Gothic Revolution; Palestrina and the Popes; Tallis, Byrd and the Tudors;

Bach and the Lutheran Legacy — have just been issued on DVD, and concerts of the music from the television programmes will form part of the Easter weekend celebrations at the Southbank Centre. In September, the music will reach an even wider audience when the entire series is repeated on BBC2, a clear indicator of its success.

Locating suitable venues for the music has evidently been a labour of love, and has resulted in several surprises. Brahms and Bruckner — featured in the second series — was recorded at Douai Abbey, near Newbury, while Fauré and Poulenc went to Arundel Cathedral — “the closest we’ve got to a French gothic building”, Christophers says. “The Italian church in Clerkenwell, modelled on Santa Maria Maggiore, in Rome, was the setting for Palestrina and the Popes, Waltham Abbey for the Tudors.”

“My happiest discovery,” he continues, “was the little Lutheran chapel for the Bach programme in Aldgate East, built by the German community — sugar merchants — about 40 years after Bach’s death. It’s not in use now, and the acoustic was not ideal, but visually it was perfect. The look of the programmes, thanks to the architecture, is gorgeous.”

It’s the music, and Russell Beale’s and Christophers’s enthusiasm for it, which has made the series so beguiling. The Sixteen may be known best as a specialist choir, but its repertoire ranges widely, from medieval to the baroque, then a big leap, bypassing most of the Romantics, to the 20th century.

“We recorded all of Poulenc’s choral music for Virgin years ago,” the conductor says. “We’ve done Frank Martin and all of the Britten pieces, which we will repackage for the centenary of his birth in 2013. I’ve perhaps left out Brahms and Bruckner, but there is a financial consideration, because you need much larger forces.”

Recording is central to the Choral Pilgrimage project. Christophers makes no bones about the attraction of recording a programme, taking it around the country and selling it on disc. This is one of the realities of the classical record industry today. The multinationals insist on their artists touring their programmes, and the Sixteen, which has its own label, Coro, has made it a centrepiece of its marketing strategy.

The company gets no core funding for its everyday operations, but this year’s pilgrimage has an Arts Council grant of £25,000. (Last year, it was £50,000 for a Handel anniversary programme based on the Coronation Anthems, which require bigger numbers, including an orchestra.) The rest — including the company’s office space in Fleet Street, donated by Quadrant Chambers — comes from sponsorship and box-office income.

During the 10 years of the Sixteen’s pilgrimage, Christophers has presided over a huge surge in public enthusiasm for Tudor music, and he brings a passion and sensuality to the great Roman Catholic anthems and motets that some of his more austere rivals abjure.

“To do this type of music, you need special singers,” he says. “The way we do 16th-century music is, I hope, more adventurous than other specialist choirs. I don’t just strive for a beautiful sound — people expect that, of course, excellent tuning and ensemble, but that’s not the be-all and end-all of this music.”

The meaning of the texts, even when sung in Latin, is obviously of paramount importance to his interpretation of the music. “Often, it depends on the piece,” he says. “Something like Sheppard’s Media vita, where you’ve got long melismas [florid melodic sequences set to a single syllable], you have to put the effects across in the shape of the music.

“Back in the old days, when I was at Oxford, there was no bending of the tempo, but to me this music has to have ebb and flow and light and shade. It has to be interpreted just as much as, say, a Handel oratorio. Byrd is complex and quite dense, but the political messages that are going on in his music are fascinating.

“The other big piece we’re doing this year is his Infelix ego. It’s a setting of a paraphrase of the Miserere mei psalm, written by the visionary friar Savonarola in prison, shortly before he was burnt at the stake. One of the great things about the BBC’s Sacred Music series was performing Byrd’s four-part masses with only four singers at Ingatestone Hall [in Essex]. Byrd wrote them for secret Masses celebrated there, so the forces must have been minimal. Infelix ego would also have been sung one voice to a part, because it’s pretty political. There can’t have been much doubt about the subversive content of the text.”

Certainly, hearing Byrd’s great protest anthem in University Church, Oxford, where Archbishop Cranmer was tried and degraded before being taken to the stake, hammered home the relationship between music and the religious politics of the era in which it was written. Sheppard’s staggering 24-minute Media vita, probably written in memory of a deceased colleague at Magdalen College (where the composer was informator choristarum from the last four years of Henry VIII’s reign to the first of the Protestant Edward VI) sounded thrilling in this historic church, resonant with contemporary echoes.

Christophers believes that the current popular interest in the Tudors has fired an interest in the music of the period. “The guy who plays Tallis in the television series The Tudors looks exactly like him [more than can be said for Jonathan Rhys Meyers’s Henry VIII]. Of course, Byrd and Tallis have been done in cathedrals for ages, but the dean and chapters aren’t going to allow choirs to sing pieces that last more than 15 minutes in services.

“What groups like ours have done is to bring some of the more obscure and larger pieces of the Tudor repertoire to life for contemporary audiences.”

This article originally appeared in the Sunday Times Culture Magazine on 28th March 2010 and can be seen online at:

Pilgrimage of the Sixteen – Times Online

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Rose Tremain: more than ‘just’ an historical novelist

The author who made her name with Restoration deserves to emerge from the shadow of her illustrious peers

Words by Erica Wagner. Photograph by Jason Bye for the Times.

Jason Bye -