In a country where so much of society is still bisected along class lines, many have a very particular image of a clever person – and it’s roughly Stephen Fry. A grand-seeming Oxbridge-educated man with a posh accent and an interest in art and opera, who can recite passages of classic literature. Rob Rinder, the criminal barrister, broadcaster and host of Judge Rinder, fits well into this mould and loves all things “high culture” and intellectual pursuits. He is, as his co-host Rylan Clark says, “one of the cleverest blokes I know”. Meanwhile, Rinder says Clark “doesn’t know his arts from his elbow”. However, over the course of the three episodes of Rob and Rylan’s Grand Tour, Clark emerges as the brilliant mind, with levels of intelligence, wit and profundity that may have been overlooked because there remains a perception of what a clever person is like.

The pair position themselves as an odd couple from different sides of the tracks, being good mates, both going through “painful divorces” who, despite their divergent interests, have decided to embark on a journey that represents a fresh start. The series follows them through the “hedonism” of Venice, the Renaissance feast that is Florence and the baroque glory of Rome, replicating a journey made by Lord Byron, 200 years after his death at just 36. But as the series reminds us, this was not just a journey that Byron made: many of the “poshos” of the era would journey to Italy as a rite of passage, a form of cultural education to establish themselves as erudite individuals who understood art, history and the ways of the world.

We first see Rinder in Venice aboard a gondola, wanting to take in the historical traditions of the city. Clark is in a glitzy speedboat and is a little intimidated by all the art and opera ahead. But while Rinder is moved and fascinated by the galleries, concerts and archaeology of this and the other two cities, his response comes across as a little more shallow than Clark’s reflections. When discussing Caravaggio, castratos or the Colosseum, Rinder always seems to give the prototypical clever-person answer, while Clark connects to his surroundings on a molecular level, seeing in ancient ruins existential questions that connect to his own mortality and desire to achieve greatness.

Clark also brings a gorgeous vulnerability to the screen. Not only is he dealing with heartbreak, but also with the lingering insecurity of having been an object of ridicule in his early career. It’s a truly remarkable journey that he has been on, having first come to public attention as the runner-up on Signed By Katie Price before being labelled a “joke act” on The X Factor and finally hitting his stride as a presenter on This Morning, Big Brother’s Bit on the Side and Ready Steady Cook. But even if he is best known for being a larger-than-life camp icon who pokes fun at himself, it has become clear over the years – and is further illuminated by this programme – that Clark is an extremely smart and talented man who should not be underestimated.

The relationship between Rinder and Clark proves surprisingly sweet and tender, too. Although they often fall back into the clever one/silly one shtick, they seem to hold each other in equally high regard. Clark has little ego around the gaps in his knowledge and soaks up what Rinder tells him about the historical significance of the places that they visit. Rinder also gazes at him adoringly when Clark interprets what the Botticellis hanging in the Uffizi or the Venetian mask worn during the carnival symbolise to him.

While Rinder and Clark seem quite transformed by their journey and time together, ending the trip with their hearts a little less broken and open to the possibility of finding love again (albeit with an iron-clad prenup), what’s most interesting about the programme is how it challenges our perception of Clark. For centuries, the Grand Tour was undertaken by those who more closely resembled Rinder, people with the right sort of class and education, unlike Clark, who was a “ginger kid from a council flat in Stepney Green”. But it is lovely to behold where that kid has ended up, see his formidable mind absorb the glories of the journey Bryon once embarked on and watch his confidence bloom in the Italian sunshine.

Three people were killed and at least 12 were wounded Saturday night in a shooting at party in south Alabama.

Andre Reid with the Baldwin county sheriff’s office’s investigation division told WALA-TV that about 1,000 people were attending a May Day party near the community of Stockton when an altercation started and gunfire erupted. Reid said most of the victims were “younger people”.

There was not immediate word on whether arrests had been made. The Associated Press left a message with the sheriff’s office Sunday.

Stockton has a population of about 400 people. It is roughly 30 miles (48.3km) north-east of Mobile, Alabama.

Reid said no law enforcement officers were involved in the shooting, which was among more than 150 mass shootings reported in the US so far this year, according to the Gun Violence Archive.

The nonpartisan archive defines a mass shooting as one in which four or more victims are killed or wounded. Perennially high numbers of mass shootings in the US have prompted some to call for meaningful gun control, though Congress for the most part has not delivered it.

The mass shooting in Alabama was only one instance of high-profile gun violence seen in the US over the weekend, which culminated in Mother’s Day on Sunday.

Three Atlanta police officers were hospitalized with gunshot wounds after a confrontation that left a suspect dead Saturday evening, authorities said.

And in Euclid, Ohio, a police officer was shot and killed after being “ambushed” while answering a disturbance call, and a suspect was being sought, authorities said Sunday.

The Associated Press contributed reporting

Vladimir Putin has removed his longtime ally Sergei Shoigu as defence minister in the most significant reshuffle to the military command since Russian troops invaded Ukraine more than two years ago.

In a surprise announcement, the Kremlin said Andrei Belousov, a former deputy prime minister who specialises in economics, will replace Shoigu.

Putin, who was sworn into his fifth term as Russia’s leader earlier this week, proposed that Shoigu take the position as head of Russia’s powerful security council. It is currently led by Nikolai Patrushev, a hawkish former spy and one of Putin’s closest advisers.

Shoigu, Russia’s longest-serving minister, assumed leadership of the defence ministry in 2012 after his tenure as the emergency services minister. He has been leading Russia’s military through its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began in 2022.

As defence minister Shoigu was tasked with modernising Russia’s military and was believed to have direct access to Putin, going on regular hunting and fishing trips with him in Siberia.

Shoigu’s popularity in Russia grew after the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, which he was credited with orchestrating.

But he has come under intense criticism for Russia’s military setbacks after the February 2022 invasion, as well as for his inability to root out the widespread corruption that continues to plague the army. Most dramatically, Shoigu was forced to fend off an armed uprising last summer by mercenary leader Yevgeny Prigozhin, who had called for his arrest.

Shoigu’s position appeared to have weakened last month when the security services arrested his long-term confidant Timur Ivanov, a deputy defence minister, and charged him with large-scale corruption.

On paper, Sunday’s reorganisation places Shoigu in a position formally considered higher ranking than his role in the defence ministry in what some observers believe is a move by Putin that allows his old ally to save face.

Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said that Putin decided to appoint Belousov, a veteran economist, to lead the defence ministry after Russia’s war spending had vastly increased.

“It’s very important to put the security economy in line with the economy of the country so that it meets the dynamics of the current moment,” Peskov said.

Peskov added that the Russian president had decided a civilian should head the defence ministry to ensure the department was “open to innovations and advanced ideas”.

Russia has presided over a massive ramping up of industrial military production over the last two years, with total defence spending rising to an estimated 7.5% of its GDP.

A former defence official who has worked with Shoigu, speaking on conditions of anonymity, said: “The Kremlin wants the ministry to be led by an economist who knows how to streamline its operations.

“The defence ministry is supposed to be efficient and well run, while the actual decisions on the battlefield are left to the military.”

Valery Gerasimov, the veteran chief of Russia’s general staff and someone with a more hands-on role when it comes to the fighting, will remain in post, the Kremlin said.

It remains unclear what position will be taken by Patrushev, who has led the security council since 2008 and is believed to have helped mastermind the invasion of Ukraine.

Peskov told Russian state media late on Sunday that Patrushev’s new role will be announced in the “next few days”.

Earlier this week it was announced that his son Dmitry Patrushev, formerly agriculture minister, will be promoted to deputy prime minister.

The television cut-aways to the ­enclosure housing the Arsenal ­supporters perfectly captured the anxiety. It was not supposed to be like this, not against this ­Manchester United. But the lesser spotted a­cceptable version of Erik ten Hag’s team was on show, fighting for the badge, and Arsenal were made to suffer.

Leandro Trossard scored their goal midway through the first half after a United defensive malfunction – of course it was – but the advantage was slender and everyone knew, most of all Mikel Arteta, that it could take only one moment to rub out.

With five minutes to go, there was thunder and lightning. Very, very frightening. Arsenal had not exactly made a habit of winning here in recent years, doing so only once in their previous 16 Premier League visits. They desperately needed the points, to answer Manchester City’s victory at Fulham on Saturday, to jump back above them at the top of the table, to make sure that their ­challenge would go to the final day next Sunday.

Arsenal got the job done, relief ­fusing with the euphoria when it was all over. The downpour at the very end was almost biblical, the ­hailstones pelting down too, the notorious Old Trafford roof getting a thorough examination and it ­certainly made for a vivid backdrop when Arteta and his players celebrated in front of the travelling fans.

Arsenal were well below their best in creative terms; their star players were defenders, namely Ben White and William Saliba. The result was the only thing that mattered. Does ­anyone think that City will slip up; they play their game in hand at ­Tottenham, of all places, on Tuesday night? City have never done so under Pep Guardiola when the title has been within their grasp. For Arsenal, it remains about believing.

Any pre-match optimism had been difficult to locate in United hearts and yet there was a ­tremendous roar from the home crowd upon the first ­whistle; excellent support ­throughout. It was surely in spite of the evidence contained on the team sheets. Call it blind faith, defiance. Or just backing your club.

Arsenal had been unchanged, ­bristling with assurance, ­momentum behind them. What remained so ­disorientating about United was the sheer number of absentees, ­especially at the back, where Casemiro ­continued alongside Jonny Evans in the wake of the horror show at Crystal Palace last Monday. There was no one else.

Arsenal were odds-on with some bookmakers to score at least three. Digest that, for a moment. Yet United appeared determined to show some personality and they might have scored first when Scott ­McTominay won the ball high up off Thomas Partey and, suddenly, ­Rasmus Højlund had a clear ­shooting chance. He slipped at the crucial moment.

United were good for the opening 20 minutes, winning a few duels, although Arsenal threatened on ­corners, Aaron Wan-Bissaka ­having to make one important clearing header. The problem, of course, is United’s near constant vulnerability, the sense that a structural breakdown is never far away.

It came when André Onana went long, Casemiro having shown for the short ball and White took a header from Saliba to feed it back up the inside right for Kai Havertz. The Arsenal centre-forward looked ­offside. That was until we looked along what passed for United’s line and saw Casemiro was still 10 yards back. Havertz ran around Evans to cross low. Trossard lost Wan-Bissaka to touch home.

Arsenal might have scored again on 29 minutes when White worked a give-and-go with the ­disappointing Bukayo Saka, burst away from Casemiro and lifted just off target. United, though, held their own up to the interval, despite struggling for clear-cut openings.

Ten Hag had recalled Sofyan ­Amrabat in midfield and he brought some muscle, earning a generous ovation when he was substituted late on. Amad Diallo, who started ahead of Antony on the right wing, showed twinkle toes and sharp turns. Kobbie Mainoo looked as if he could make something happen.

Arteta had won here previously as a manager, Arsenal’s lone league ­success of the recent past coming under him in November 2020 – the 1-0 pandemic ghost game that was ­settled by Pierre-Emerick ­Aubameyang’s penalty. Arteta needed his team to manage the game in the second-half. The longer it stayed at 1-0, the more his insides churned.

Declan Rice saw a shot blocked by Wan-Bissaka but with Diogo Dalot and Alejandro Garnacho driving variously up the left, the home crowd sensed an equaliser.

Garnacho was stopped in his tracks by one excellent Saliba tackle. On another occasion, the United winger dropped his shoulder to open up a shooting chance, stepping inside only to get the curler all wrong. ­Garnacho’s final action was too often a frustration.

It was nervy for everyone ­connected to Arsenal. They sat deep at times, in the second-half, inviting United to make the game. Martin Ødegaard sent one shot too close to Onana but at the other end Antony – having come off the bench – pinched the ball ahead of Takehiro Tomiyasu before fluffing the shot.

Garnacho kept going, it kept on being nearly but not quite for him while Onana tipped over from the Arsenal substitute Gabriel Martinelli. The goalkeeper would also paw clear a Wan-Bissaka backwards flick and a drive from Rice.

A concerned Novak Djokovic says he will undergo extra medical tests in relation to being struck by a water bottle after crashing out in the third round of the Italian Open.

The Serb had been signing autographs on Friday after his second-round win over Corentin Moutet when a metal bottle fell out of a fan’s backpack and directly on his head. After the initial blood and nausea, Djokovic said he had felt fine on Saturday as he returned to training, even entering the practice court jokingly wearing a helmet. On Sunday, though, he felt like a “different player” as he was defeated 6-2, 6-3 by Chile’s Alejandro Tabilo, the 29th seed.

“It was unexpected obviously,” said Djokovic. “I wasn’t even looking up. Then I felt a very strong hit in the head. That has really impacted me a lot. After that I got the medical care. Been through half an hour, an hour of nausea, dizziness, blood, a lot of different things. I managed to sleep OK. I had headaches.

“The next day or yesterday was pretty fine, so I thought it’s OK. Maybe it is OK. Maybe it’s not. I mean, the way I felt on the court today was just completely like a different player entered into my shoes. Just no rhythm, no tempo, no balance whatsoever on any shot. It’s a bit concerning.”

Tabilo arrived in Rome full of confidence after winning an ATP Challenger event in Aix-en Provence, rising to a career-high ranking of No 32. Still, Sunday marked by far the biggest win of his life. Despite his own issues, Djokovic was complimentary about the 26-year-old’s game. “I was trying not to think about it, trying to keep it point by point. And no, I can’t believe it, it’s crazy,” said Tabilo.

An athletic left-hander with a sweet serve and forehand, Tabilo stepped up to the world No 1 determined to take the first strike with his forehand, to control as many exchanges as possible and keep Djokovic on the move. It soon became clear that there was minimal resistance across the net. Djokovic gave away his opening service game with two double faults, including one on break point, and as Tabilo became increasingly comfortable on the front foot, the Serb struggled badly.

Alongside his passive play and unforced errors, Djokovic was extremely flat emotionally and he rushed between points, seemingly determined to get off the court as quickly as possible and his tournament ended with a miserable double fault off a 115mph second serve. Afterwards, Djokovic said that he did not undertake any medical checkups on his day off but, with two weeks until Roland Garros, he will now.

“I have to check that,” said Djokovic. “Training was different. I was going for kind of easy training yesterday. I didn’t feel anything, but I also didn’t feel the same. Today under high stress, it was quite bad – not in terms of pain, but in terms of this balance. Just no coordination. Completely different player from what it was two nights ago. Could be. I don’t know. I have to do medical checkups and see what’s going on.”

Djokovic produced one of the best seasons of his career in 2023, winning the Australian Open, French Open, US Open and ATP Finals, but this has been a curious year so far. The defeat means that Djokovic, who turns 37 this month, will head to the French Open yet to win a title in the season for the first time since 2018 and just the second time since he won his first title in 2006.

Meanwhile, Aryna Sabalenka continued to rebuild her momentum as she reached the fourth round with a 6-4, 6-2 win over Dayana Yastremska. It is the Australian Open champion’s first victory over the Ukrainian.

“I’m a better player right now,” said Sabalenka. “I got more stuff in my pocket to get this win against her. Yeah, our last matches were a long time ago when I was kind of on and off.

“I was just trying to find my way. I was going quite confident into this match knowing that I have everything to get the win. I’m super-happy to finally get the win against her.”

Donald Trump on Saturday praised fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter “as a wonderful man” before segueing into comments disparaging people who have immigrated into the US without permission.

The former president’s remarks to political rally-goers in Wildwood, New Jersey, as he challenges Joe Biden’s re-election in November were a not-so-subtle rhetorical bridge exalting Anthony Hopkins’ cannibalistic Lecter in Silence of the Lambs as “late [and] great” while simultaneously condemning “people who are being released into our country that we don’t want”.

Trump delivered his address to an estimated crowd of about 80,000 supporters under the shadow of the Great White roller coaster in a 1950s-kitsch seaside resort 90 miles (144.8km) south of Philadelphia.

The occasion served for Trump to renew his stated admiration for Lecter, as he’s done before, after the actor Mads Mikkleson – who previously portrayed Lecter in a television series – once described Trump as “a fresh wind for some people”.

Among other comments, Trump on Sunday also reaired lies about having “been indicted more than the great Alphonse Capone”, the violent Prohibition-era Chicago mob boss.

Trump since the spring of 2023 has grappled with four indictments attributing more than 80 criminal charges to him for attempts to subvert the outcome of the 2020 election he lost to Biden, retaining classified materials after his presidency and hush-money payments to an adult film actor which prosecutors maintain were illicitly covered up.

The trial over the hush money is set to enter its fourth week Monday.

Yet Capone was indicted at least six times before his famous 1931 tax evasion conviction.

Trump nonetheless used the occasion to call the charges against him “bullshit”, with spectators then chanting the word back at him.

The Philadelphia Inquirer noted that the former president’s supporters had poured into Wildwood in “pickup trucks decked out in Trump flags” from up and down the east coast.

According to the outlet, hundreds of people set up camp overnight on the boardwalk to get into the event.

“The country is headed in the wrong direction,” Kelly Carter-Currier, a 62-year-old retired teacher from New Hampshire, told the Inquirer. “So, hopefully, people will get their shit together and vote the right person in. And if they don’t, I don’t know. World War III?”

On the other hand, New Jersey Democrats dismissed the significance of the event.

Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill said many of the Trump supporters expected would be from out of state. “Jersey is not going to be a welcoming place for Trump,” Sherrill said.

Sherrill’s fellow New Jersey Democrat Andy Kim, a congressman running for the US Senate, said that generalized apathy toward government helped Trump’s support.

“I hope people recognize that he is not somebody that has an agenda that’s going to lead to a better type of politics,” Kim said.

A British man settled in Italy who has a rare cancer has been unable to receive the free healthcare he is entitled to because local officials do not understand the Brexit withdrawal agreement, he has said.

Graham Beresford, 61, has spoken out days before the foreign secretary, David Cameron, who triggered the Brexit referendum, has his first major meeting with the European commission vice-president Maroš Šefčovič in Brussels about post-Brexit relations.

Under the withdrawal agreement, Beresford should be entitled to the same access to healthcare as an Italian pensioner, but he has repeatedly been told this is not correct and has faced demands of €2,000 (£1,700) for an Italian health card.

Campaigners say Beresford is one of hundreds of Britons in this situation.

“Brexit is the cause of this. Brexit is an absolute disaster, an act of self-harm of the worst kind for absolutely nothing. I don’t know why anyone voted for it,” said Beresford, who cannot, despite trying for years, persuade the local authorities he is entitled to healthcare under the Brexit deal.

Beresford managed energy for the local council in Glasgow, but took early retirement and moved to Italy in January 2019 to realise his retirement dream before the Brexit drawbridge in January 2021 which put a stop to free movement.

Initially he relied on savings, but when he reached 60 he was able to access his pension of about €10,000 (£8,600) a year.

Local authorities have told him that the withdrawal agreement gives health rights only to British nationals who were in the country for a full five years before the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020.

Attempts to convince authorities that they are making an error have been futile.

Cameron’s meetings with Šefčovič on Thursday – as part of the EU-UK joint committee and the EU-UK Partnership Council – are his first official stocktake of Brexit, and come eight years after he resigned over the referendum result.

One will focus on the trade and co-operation agreement, where energy co-operation, the fisheries deal and post-pandemic health security will be discussed, and the other on the withdrawal agreement in which citizens’ rights and an update on the Northern Ireland Windsor framework are on the agenda.

In February, the campaign group Brexpats – Hear Our Voice managed to get the Italian health ministry to circulate a two-page letter to local authorities confirming that Britons who were in Italy before Brexit were entitled to register for free with the Sistema Sanitorio Nazionale, the Italian version of the NHS.

This is also referenced on the UK government’s Living in Italy page.

When Beresford took a copy of the minister’s letter to the local authority, he was still met with resistance. “She told me ‘we need further clarification’,” he said, and they refused to issue him with his health card.

“Cameron needs to provide funding for the embassy to employ someone to help British citizens with Brexit issues,” said Beresford. “Brexit was not all enacted at once by the UK, it has been implemented transitionally, so it only stands to reason that citizens will be affected transitionally as each new act is implemented.”

Campaigners in Italy wrote to Cameron about the issue in January but have not received a reply.

Beresford, who is on chemotherapy drugs, said: “I just want to be able to have healthcare without having to worry week to week whether we are going to get a prescription or not.”

Clarissa Killwick from Brexpats – Hear Our Voice said Beresford’s case “highlights how extremely vulnerable some people are”, particularly because of the lack of “joined-up communications” which she said was a clear breach of article 37 of the withdrawal agreement.

She added: “The funding from the UK government for dedicated assistance for people such as Graham stopped in 2021 and, unlike in the UK, there is no independent monitoring of withdrawal agreement implementation. It is easy for 1.3 million people to become invisible when they are scattered across 27-plus countries.

“To have a hope of things functioning as they should, information needs to be timely, unambiguous and easily accessible.”

A spokesperson for the Foreign Office said: “Access to healthcare for British nationals living abroad under the UK-EU withdrawal agreement is a top priority for the UK.

“We are pressing the Italian authorities for clarity for those who are facing problems accessing healthcare services or where there is confusion around eligibility, and supporting affected individuals.”

To the dismay of Democrats, blue-collar voters have lined up increasingly behind Donald Trump, but political experts say Joe Biden can still turn things around with that large and pivotal group by campaigning hard on “kitchen table” economic issues.

With just six months to go until the election, recent polls show that Trump has stronger support among blue-collar Americans than he did in 2020. But several political analysts told the Guardian that Biden can bring back enough of those voters to win if he hammers home the message that he is helping Americans on pocketbook issues – for instance, by canceling student debt and cutting insulin prices.

According to Celinda Lake, a pollster for the Democratic National Committee, Biden needs to talk more often and more effectively about how his policies mean “real benefits” for working families and how he’s battling on their behalf against “villains” like greedy pharmaceutical companies.

“We need to have a dramatic framing that we’re going to take on villains to make the economy work for you and your family,” said Lake, who did polling for Biden’s 2020 campaign. “The villains can be a lot of things – corporations that don’t pay any taxes or drug companies that make record profits while they gouge you on prices.”

Republicans have won over many voters by attacking Democrats on cultural issues, but Lake said Democrats can overcome that. “We need to recognize that the economic message beats the cultural war message,” she said, adding that the economic message should focus on specific examples of how Biden’s policies have helped workers and their families.

“We have to make sure the economic message isn’t focused on GDP and low unemployment rates and lower inflation, but on real benefits, things that people feel at the kitchen table,” Lake said. She talked of reduced prescription drug prices, limits on banks’ junk fees and increasing taxes on the wealthy so the nation can invest in things like making childcare more affordable.

Patrick Gaspard, president of the Center for American Progress, also stressed the importance of economic messaging. “Biden needs to speak more on the economy, but you shouldn’t do it in terms of spiking the ball, which we’ve done too much of. You need to pick some fights,” said Gaspard, who was executive director of the Democratic National Committee under Barack Obama. “You have to pick fights with greedy corporations. It’s good to say, ‘I lowered insulin to $35 a month, and I’m bringing down the cost of a dozen drugs.’ But also say, ‘Big pharma is suing to stop us, and Maga Republicans and Donald Trump are standing with them on that. The fight is on, and I’m fighting for you on this.’”

Several Democrats voiced concern about the party’s current messaging, arguing that the White House and the Biden campaign are too insular and in ways locked into an outdated vision – that if a president delivers good things to voters, like good-paying construction jobs created by the $1.2tn infrastructure package, and runs campaign ads about those things, that will win over many voters. One political consultant warned that many voters are uninformed, telling of a focus group where one woman was delighted that she would soon begin paying $35 a month for insulin, down from $350, but she had no idea that the Biden administration was largely responsible for that lower price.

Even if the Biden campaign runs ads to make that point, several political experts said, Americans are so cynical about candidates and their campaigns that those ads might do little persuading. “The level of cynicism is so high that for many people, anything that comes from politicians or elected officials doesn’t pass the smell test,” said Steve Rosenthal, a longtime political consultant.

Rosenthal said groups that blue-collar voters trust – labor unions, community groups and Facebook pages – need to step up to communicate important, election-related information, such as the fact that Biden played a major role in capping insulin costs.

Speaking about crucial battleground states like Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, Michael Podhorzer, a former political director of the AFL-CIO, the nation’s main labor federation, said, “It rests on the people in those states, the unions in those states, the civic institutions in those states to make clear what the stakes of a Trump presidency will be – for instance, he’ll push to repeal the Affordable Care Act.”

Podhorzer acknowledged that Biden is having problems with blue-collar voters even though, he said, “Biden has done more by a large margin than either President Clinton or Obama to appeal directly to working people – and not just symbolically by joining the UAW’s picket line.” In the 2020 election, 48% of voters without a college degree voted for Biden, while 50% supported Trump, according to exit polls, White voters without a college degree backed Trump over Biden 67% to 32%, while voters of color without a college degree supported Biden, 72% to 26%. All told, 59% of 2020 voters didn’t have a college degree. Biden won the overall election because his comfortable 55% to 43% margin among college graduates more than offset his narrow loss among non-college graduates.

Several Democratic consultants said that if the election were held today, Trump would win. A recent Wall Street Journal poll found that Trump was leading Biden by between one and six percentage points in six of the main battleground states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada. A Fox News poll in April found Trump leading by three points in Michigan and six in Georgia but tied with Biden in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.

“There’s an enormous amount of work that has to be done, and there’s a lot of room for movement,” Rosenthal said. “When the labor unions kick into gear and really start to communicate with their members, the numbers can change pretty dramatically.”

Lake added, “I don’t think it’s too late at all.”

Mike Lux, a political consultant who has worked on six presidential campaigns, helped write an influential report called Factory Towns that found that the Democratic presidential vote in the midwest declined most sharply in communities that suffered the steepest drops in factory and union jobs. Ever since Franklin Roosevelt was president, Lux said, blue-collar voters saw the Democrats as the party that would protect them, but many have drifted away, convinced that Democrats weren’t doing enough to protect them.

Many blue-collar voters remain angry at Bill Clinton for getting Congress to ratify the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) and normalize trade relations with China – trade moves that caused many US factories to close. “Working folks expected Democrats to fight for them,” Lux said. “But folks feel like Democrats have forgotten about them. They don’t feel like Democrats are talking to them or caring about them. It’s true that Republicans don’t do anything to help them, but they show up and wave the flag and pound their chest and say, ‘Nobody cares about you, but we do.’”

Lux said many blue-collar voters were unhappy that presidents Clinton and Obama pushed the idea that everybody should go to college. “A feeling started to develop that working-class people weren’t as welcome in the Democratic party,” Lux said.

In his eyes, the 2007-2009 recession, largely caused by Wall Street, has also been a big problem for Democrats. “There was a feeling that Barack Obama bailed out Wall Street and did not do much to bail out regular workers,” Lux said. “That was a huge moment. It led to folks giving the finger to the establishment, and that helped elect Donald Trump in 2016.”

Ruy Teixeira, a political scientist and co-author of the book Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, agreed with Lux. “Working-class people were counting on them [the Democrats]. They were the party that was on the side of the working class, and they felt betrayed.”

Teixeira said the free trade initiatives “showed that the Democrats were not worrying about deindustrialization, not worrying about what’s happened to the median voter in the middle of the country. The Democrats were increasingly responsive to Wall Street. So some folks decided to give the Republicans a try.”

Taking a position that has angered many progressives, Teixeira said the Democrats’ stance on “crime, race, gender and climate is a whole can of worms” that has turned off many blue-collar voters. He said the Democrats are obsessed with climate change in a way that alienates many blue-collar voters, who, he said, fear that the push for renewable energy will mean higher energy prices. Teixeira also said that Democratic concerns about transgender rights – a culture war focus of the Republicans – has turned off many blue-collar voters.

“The Democrats have to orient themselves away from the median liberal, college- educated voter who they get a Soviet-style majority from and orient themselves toward the median working-class voter, not just white, but non-white voters,” Teixeira said. “It’s not easy to do. They have to turn the battleship around.”

Another reason blue-collar voters have turned away from Democrats is the decline in union membership – from 35% of all workers in the 1950s to 10% today. Rosenthal remembers going to a steelworkers’ union hall in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, several decades ago – it had 15 bowling lanes and a bar. “Around 30% of workers were in unions,” Rosenthal said. “Another 10% or 15% were in union households, and a lot of other workers drank at the bar or bowled there.” The steelworkers’ hall served as a community center where people received information from the union and there was robust support for Democrats. The new book Rust Belt Union Blues describes a transformed landscape where many union halls have closed and gun clubs have often replaced them as gathering places for the working class – and there, the ambience is pro-Trump.

Another factor contributing to the Democrats’ woes is that over half the nation’s local news stations are in the hands of Sinclair and other rightwing owners, said Lux. That often makes it harder for Biden and other Democrats to get their message across.

As a result, Lux said, Democrats have to work extra hard to get their message out – for instance, through community Facebook pages that explain that the new bridge in town is being built thanks to Biden or that the Biden administration has helped blue-collar Americans by extending overtime coverage to 4 million more workers and banning non-competes that cover 30 million workers.

“The Democrats have to lean into issues that mean a lot to working people,” Lux said. “We have to keep showing up in Ottumwa [a working-class town in Iowa] and keep showing up in Youngstown [a blue-collar Ohio town].”

The Biden administration often seems to communicate its economic agenda in dribs and drabs. One day it blocks two giant grocery chains from merging, saying the merger could push grocery prices higher. Another day it caps banks’ junk fees, and yet another day it boasts about the low unemployment rate.

Lake says the administration is going about this the wrong way. “They tend to start the message with their accomplishments,” she said. “They need to start the message with the overall narrative and then go to their accomplishments.”

Lake said Biden’s economic message wasn’t getting across effectively. “They need more repetition,” she said. “They need more volume. It’s really difficult to break through.”

Several political analysts said love it or hate it, Donald Trump – unlike Biden – has an unmistakable narrative: Make America great again. Too many immigrants are crossing the border. The elite and deep state are out to get you.

“In a war between good policies and good stories that speak to people’s identities and emotions, good stories are going to win,” said Deepak Bhargava, president of the JPB Foundation and former head of the Center for Community Change.

Gaspard said Biden had a good economic story to tell and agreed that he wasn’t telling it very effectively. “He needs to talk more and more about growing the economy by building out the middle class,” Gaspard said. “Talking about the amount of dollars going to a big social program does nothing to sway voters. You need to talk about how Donna is going to be able to afford insulin and Josh is going to be able to afford to send kids to daycare. Things that are relatable to people.”

He said it was important to point to villains and draw contrasts with the other side: “You need to say Trump will cut taxes on the wealthy and that will hurt the working class. You need to ramp up efforts to say Trump will raise prices and hurt working families with his 10% across-the-board tariffs. That will mean a $1,500 tax that’s passed on to all working families. That’s massive, and it makes it painstakingly clear that Trump isn’t concerned about workers.”

Gaspard said that in his economic messaging, Biden needed to “recognize the insecurities that working folks – white, Black and brown – are feeling” whether about the cost of living or other matters. “Biden needs to call out General Mills and Kimberly-Clark for raising the price of cereal and diapers,” Gaspard said. “People like it when you’re fighting for them.”

Amid all the talk about wooing blue-collar voters, Lake said young voters were too often forgotten. She urged Biden to address their concerns. “They’re very hard-pressed economically,” she said. “We haven’t been talking enough about issues facing young voters. It’s not just student loans. They’re worried about how much jobs pay and for many of them, it’s impossible to buy a house.”

With his blue-collar support soft, Biden is looking to labor unions to help put him over the top in crucial swing states like Michigan and Pennsylvania. Unfortunately for Biden, his lead over Trump in union households has slipped: from 56% to 40% in 2020 exit polls to 50% to 41% early this year, according to an NBC News Poll.

Rosenthal, who like Podhorzer used to be the AFL-CIO’s political director, said it was vital for unions to step up – and soon – emphasizing that they can make the crucial difference in battleground states where the victory margin can be just a few thousand votes. Rosenthal said the labor movement had a huge amount at stake, considering that Biden has been the most pro-union in memory – he has invited union organizers to the White House and appointed many pro-union officials to the National Labor Relations Board.

“If Biden loses, and if he loses because he didn’t win Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, and if he doesn’t win those states because the union household vote isn’t where it should be, there will never be another Democratic candidate who will give a shit about the union movement,” Rosenthal said. “Why should they, if he can’t win in those critical states? There is way more at stake for the labor movement in this election than for the rest of the country.”

Lennox Lewis pauses thoughtfully when he considers whether his achievement in becoming the last undisputed heavyweight champion of the world, after he beat Evander Holyfield in 1999, means he should be bracketed alongside great names of the past from Jack Johnson and Joe Louis to Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali. His answer, when it comes, is emphatic: “Yes, absolutely. I truly believe I belong in the same room as them.”

The 58-year-old Lewis’s reflections on the once glorious but now fractured history of boxing feel fresh just a week away from next Saturday night’s fight between Tyson Fury and Oleksandr Usyk. Unless there is a draw in Saudi Arabia, either Fury or Usyk will become boxing’s first undisputed world heavyweight champion this century.

Before Lewis breaks down an intriguing bout, which will be held in Riyadh, and identifies his likely successor, he talks in compelling detail about his two fights with Holyfield 25 years ago. In March 1999, after comprehensively outboxing Holyfield in their first unification match at Madison Square Garden, Lewis was robbed by a travesty of a draw which would be subject to a judicial investigation. He clearly won the rematch in Las Vegas nine months later to add finally Holyfield’s WBA, IBF and IBO titles to the WBC belt he already owned.

“I did feel the magnitude,” Lewis says as he remembers his emotions when fighting for the undisputed title. “I’d never met Holyfield but I saw this HBO documentary about him which said how great he was and he was the perfect champion. I’m like: ‘How can you call him that great and he didn’t fight me?’ I wanted to prove I was the undisputed champion and I said: ‘Holyfield’s never seen a fighter like me.’”

Lewis remembers that, before the first bout, “when I went into the ring, and I saw Holyfield singing a gospel song as he came out, I was thinking: ‘He’s not taking me serious.’ I wanted to show him that: ‘Yo, I’m real and he’s got somebody in front of him that’s taking him very serious. I’m not singing coming into the ring.’”

In the buildup, the normally relaxed and low-key Lewis had suggested that Holyfield’s seemingly devout faith could not obscure his messy private life. Was this a way of getting under his rival’s skin? “Absolutely, and it did,” Lewis says with a smile. “He admitted it.”

A riled Holyfield promised he would win by knockout in the third round. That claim, even now, makes Lewis exclaim in disbelief. “Preposterous. I saved my breath until that round and I was like: ‘Show me what you can do.’ But it actually winded him.”

Lewis easily held off Holyfield’s desperate assault and, as he says, “throughout the fight I felt in total control. But he actually made me a better fighter because Holyfield had more technical skills than other heavyweights. He needed them because of his size [Holyfield had originally been a cruiserweight]. But you know how he really made me better? Because he used his head [to butt Lewis]. There was no use crying to the referee so I had to make a mental change: ‘OK, this is the situation. Can you adjust?’ So I adjusted.”

He was far more skilful and powerful for most of the 12 rounds and so Lewis’s face was etched in disbelief when he heard that one judge, the disgraced American Eugenia Williams, declared Holyfield the winner while the British official, Larry O’Connell, scored it a draw. Only Stanley Christodoulou, the vastly experienced South African judge, got it right and matched the consensus of almost everyone else who watched the fight when he gave a clear decision to Lewis.

“I could not believe it was a draw,” Lewis says, “when the punch count was so overwhelmingly in my favour. I threw and landed so many more punches. I was crazy and telling my manager at the time, Frank Maloney: ‘Yo, they didn’t add it up right. Go check. There’s a mistake.’ I was in shock. But you know what took me out of my shock? The fact that everybody was saying: ‘You won the fight.’ All I wanted was for everybody to see that I’m a better fighter and that I’m the true heavyweight champion of the world.”

The result was such a scandal that Williams was eventually brought before a federal grand jury to answer questions about her links to Holyfield’s promoter, Don King.

I was in Las Vegas for the rematch in November 1999 and remember how battered and sad Holyfield looked after Lewis carved out a unanimous victory on points. Lewis’s pride, against all the odds, can still be heard in his voice today: “I’d gone through hills and valleys and potholes and I actually made it to the mountain top. It wasn’t easy as I had to do it twice and, before that, they were trying to keep me away by not fighting me or blocking me. There were barriers to stop me before I became the undisputed world heavyweight champion.”

Almost 25 years later, and with his status as boxing’s last great heavyweight sealed, it’s timely to hear Lewis’s assessment of the imminent battle between Fury and Usyk in Riyadh. “You’re looking at two very good, very determined fighters, guys that have never lost [a professional bout]. We’re going to see, 18 May, who is the best in this era.”

Lewis is unequivocal in choosing Fury. “I believe the bigger guy, the better guy, wins. They both have good skill and Usyk has good movement, with good balance, and puts his punches together well. But he’s going up against a 6ft 9in guy and, for me, Tyson Fury is very elusive even if he is so big. If he makes you miss, he makes you pay.

“It’s an interesting matchup but I always say if two guys have the same technical skill, the bigger fighter wins because he can force his size on the other guy. It’s happened before where the smaller guy won but, in this case, Tyson Fury’s got lots of different weapons in his arsenal. He has shown in the [three] fights with Deontay Wilder he is aggressive and moves forward well. Those fights really showed his skill, his talent, his ring generalship. I would put money on Fury – as long as it is the 100% focused Fury.”

In his last, near-disastrous fight over six months ago, Fury was floored and nearly lost to Francis Ngannou, the former Ultimate Fighting Championship heavyweight title-holder making his boxing debut. “If it had been me against Ngannou,” Lewis suggests, “I would go in there and show that boxing is way different to UFC. Fury should have gone after him and knocked him out. Anthony Joshua did that a few months later.

“But Fury was not at his best. He was way overweight and didn’t take the fight seriously. Joshua showed that boxing is different. He hit Ngannou with a very good right hand and it didn’t look good the way he fell. This is a dangerous sport, where we don’t play.”

Would Fury at his best have presented Lewis with an exacting test? “Yes, because of his size. I’ve been watching him for a long time and he’s a good boxer. He is the one that shadow-boxes the most out of all of them. You can tell.”

What would have been his strategy against Fury had they met in Lewis’s prime? “That’s an interesting and really good question. But I’m a pugilist specialist and I don’t want to tell people how I’d do it. I don’t want anybody to use my information without me.”

Is Lewis convinced he could have beaten Fury? “Absolutely. Everybody’s got a flaw – you just have to find it. Holyfield was very effective when he boxed me, because he kept me turning. That put me off a couple of times but I found a way.”

He and Holyfield both beat Mike Tyson but Lewis is adamant he will support his old rival in July, when the by-then 58-year-old Tyson fights the YouTuber Jake Paul in a dubious but officially sanctioned bout which will receive massive publicity. “Absolutely, absolutely,” Lewis says in echoing endorsement of Tyson. “I’m looking forward to it because you’ve got to look at these guys as entertainers. The public love them and want to see them in action.”

But, knowing the damage that boxing can do, is Lewis concerned about the safety of a man closing in on 60 and a boxing novice? “I’m concerned for Jake Paul,” Lewis says. “Tyson still knows how to punch, as you can see when he’s hitting a bag. If Jake Paul gets hit by one of those punches, he’s going to feel it. I know Jake Paul doesn’t want to get hit.

“Tyson comes forward and he knows how to cut off the ring. It could be a matter of time, as how good is Jake Paul’s defence? I saw Mike a couple of weeks ago and he looked good. He was walking around without a shirt and showing off his body so he’s getting ready.”

Do hucksters still try to entice Lewis back into the ring? “Yeah, they do. But, as my friend says, I ain’t no fool.” Hopefully that means a rejection of any stunt of a comeback for an undisputed champion as significant as Lewis? He laughs. “I was seeing if I could catch you out there. For me, money talks, bullshit walks.” Does this mean he would consider an astronomical offer to make a return? “That’s what I’m saying. I’d 100% consider it.”

Lewis is still smiling when I ask if he works out regularly. “Yes, I do. I ran five miles this morning, swam a couple of lengths, 100m. Then I woke up and took a shower.”

We laugh at his joke and agree that it matters far more that he became one of only three world heavyweight champions to retire while in possession of their title. Gene Tunney and Rocky Marciano preceded him. “That mattered to me because setting goals and reaching marks is a big thing. When Manny [his last trainer, Emanuel Steward] told me to take that last fight against Vitali Klitschko, he said: ‘You’ll beat him and be known as the greatest in this era and the next.’ I’m like: ‘I’ll take it. I’ve been undisputed champion already. What’s higher than that?’ I thought that was a good challenge for me.

“Muhammad Ali was my hero and people always asked: ‘Why do you think he stayed in boxing too long?’ I looked at the aspect of why do all these champions come back? For me, the answer was money. I can understand because everybody that you meet [in retirement] says: ‘Hey, champ! When are you back in the ring?’ I’m like: ‘Yo, dude. I finished 20 years ago.’”

Lewis smiles one last time, his wisdom being as apparent as his amusement. “As my friend in showbusiness says,” he murmurs, “I decided to retire and leave them wanting more.”

Rose Boyt’s memoir, Naked Portrait, is, in the narrowest sense, her account of sitting for three paintings for her father, Lucian Freud. In the first, she sprawls, unclothed, legs spread wide on her father’s chaise, aged 18. In the second, at 31, she is buttoned up in a dark shirt, hair cropped, refusing the artist’s gaze. And in the third, at 39, she perches on a sofa arm, beside her husband, Mark Pearce, his son Alex, and their new baby Stella, in a homemade floral patterned dress.

You might say that the loose triptych represents a sort of allegory of independence for Boyt, from the wildly overbearing legacy of her father, and in some ways her book has that sort of triumphant, survivor’s note. But, as with anything concerning Freud, the reality is way more complicated than that.

Boyt, one of Freud’s 14 acknowledged children, is now 65. She has a special place in the famous pantheon of heirs in that Freud chose her, alongside a lawyer, to be the co-executor of his £96m estate, a process that has occupied her for a great deal of the 13 years since his death. One way of thinking about her memoir might be as a climax to that other consuming task. Plenty of people have had their say on Freud’s entirely singular life (“I don’t read any of that crap,” Boyt says) but no one is better placed than her – also the author of three novels of chaotic families – to weigh its extremes.

At the heart of her memoir is a diary that she kept when she was sitting for the middle portrait, which she has now re-examined in light of her own experience of parenting and therapy and #MeToo: “Until I had read the diary I had completely forgotten all that sex talk [with Dad],” she writes at one point, of her father’s compulsion to overshare with her about his wolfish libido. “I just smiled and laughed when I should have put my hands over my ears and screamed: SHUT UP YOU SICK FUCK,” she suggests. But, then, in the next breath: “We [the children of different mothers] won’t have a word said against him.”

One of the compulsive aspects of Boyt’s book is that, as a reader, you get to listen in on her trying to make honest sense of events that go well beyond what any daughter might be expected to fathom. The book is 416 pages long, and having started it one morning a couple of weeks ago, I ended up reading it in one sitting, well into the early hours of the following day, taking notes such as these: “LF brings two live lobsters to house on day Rose is born and insists her mother boils them up for supper in nappy bucket”; “Rose travels world on cargo ship with mother and three siblings; boat sinks”; “Rose first time in New York: Andy Warhol draws ring on her finger and ‘proposes marriage’”; and “Rose says her father ‘never was in love or made anyone happy’”.

A couple of days after this immersion in her story, I sat with Boyt on the sofa in the elegant Islington townhouse in which she has lived in for 33 years. Where to start? One of the things that struck me, reading her book, I say, to begin with, was that her father’s infamous fear of domesticity, of anything ever being mundane, seemed infectious. Did everyone in his orbit feel under pressure to be extraordinary all the time, to catch his interest?

She concedes that “being the child of a sort of gorgeous genius makes people’s expectations of you unbelievably high,” but also contends that she is her mother’s daughter at least as much as her father’s. One of the psychological challenges of her adult life, she says, has been that nothing shocks or surprises her. “I think,” she says, “living on the ship did that.”

So we talk first about how when she was seven, Boyt, her mother and her three young siblings sailed around the world on a leaky cargo ship her mother had sold their home to buy. It began, like much of Boyt’s life, by accident. Suzy Boyt was Freud’s student at the Slade, 17 years his junior when they met; in what became a familiar pattern with his women, she had his children in quick succession, and all but gave up her own artistic ambitions.

“You’ve got to picture my mum, this beautiful glamorous artist, with four kids,” she says. “One day, she’s in this Mini at the top of a hill and she decides to put the brakes on and slide down the hill because it is icy. It all went wrong and she crashed. And then this tall, blond Germanic sea captain appeared out of nowhere to rescue her.”

This was a man Boyt calls only Uwe in the book; having swiftly fallen in love with him, Suzy Boyt thought it would be a “a marvellous adventure” for the kids to sail around the world with him on a cargo ship. Is that how Rose saw it?

“I think in real time, as a child you don’t actually think, ‘Oh, bums, I won’t be able to go to school any more,’” she says. “You’re up for it. It’s taken me a long time to describe how it really was: I always felt loved. But I didn’t feel safe.”

It was often Rose’s job to look after her baby brother Kai on deck. “The first time I lost him we found him hanging from his fingertips over the mouth of the hold, a sheer drop of 30 feet,” she writes. “The second time he had gone overboard… Mum and Uwe jumped over the gunwale and fished him out of the freezing water…” The adventure lasted about 18 months and ended with the family in Trinidad and a drunken telegram from Uwe from a solo voyage: “SHIP SUNK, GO HOME”; they were repatriated, penniless, back to Islington.

The experience left her with a kind of outlaw sense. She recalls taking a big knife into her primary school, and being outraged that the headteacher confiscated it. “I was probably pretty strange,” she says. “It’s why I’ve spent much of my later life trying to be as bougie and normal as possible.”

By that time, her father had established the pattern of his life: numerous lovers, heavy gambling, high- and lowlife friends, all organised around the intense 24-hour compulsion of his painting. How big a presence was he in her life in those years?

“He was around plenty enough,” she says. “I can remember saying to Mum, once: ‘Where’s Dad?’ And her saying: ‘Oh, he’s at work.’ And I just thought: ‘Oh, dads go to work, whatever.’ But I kind of knew we were different. I can remember going to the house of a girl from my secondary school. They had a bowl of peaches on the table. And I remember trying not to stare, ogle the peaches. After that I was aware that other people had bowls of peaches on the kitchen table. We didn’t.”

Understatement is Boyt’s default tone. “Dad was certainly confusing,” she says. She recalls the occasion that he took her off to Patisserie Valerie in the West End, and put his fingers in every cream cake on offer, before leaving an outsize tip for the waitress. “I knew that at home mum had, like, one onion, one tin of tomatoes, one bag of spaghetti for five children,” she says. “I thought about putting that tip in my pocket for her, but I didn’t.” Her mother never asked for any money from Lucian.

As Boyt got older, she must have become more aware of the cruelty of that financial disparity between her parents?

“I left home when I was 15. I was just: I’m out of here,” she says. “But also, Dad could not really be blamed for Mum having bought the ship and it sinking.” (As she notes in the book, it is still a reflex for everyone around the artist to make excuses for his behaviour – even, as Boyt notes at one point, her own therapist.)

One of the prompts for her leaving home was the trauma of being raped, at 14, by one of her older brother Ali’s friends. The general response from the family seemed to be “shit happens”. There were other sexual traumas; she had lived in fear of being alone with Uwe, who, among other things, was in the habit of having the children line up naked on deck and dousing them with cold water. The drunken sailor returned to haunt the family in London for a while, before attempting to kill himself by jumping off Tower Bridge. Boyt moved in with her boyfriend round the corner from her father at 15, a sort of self-conscious wild child, working for a while in Vivienne Westwood’s King’s Road shop and looking for ways to inveigle her way more closely into Lucian’s life. She cooked him fried eggs on toast after school and cleaned his studio; she was a convenient friend for his lovers.

It was around this time that her father asked her to sit for him.

That memory first prompted her book. She had written an essay about it for an exhibition catalogue, but when she really came to think about that account, she felt she hadn’t been quite honest.

“I started it with the description of going into my father’s studio. Nothing had been discussed about what I should do. But I just seemed to think: ‘Oh, yeah, I’m supposed to be naked.’ As the writing of the book progressed, I allowed myself to be more angry, more straightforward about all that.”

She realised that her previous essay “was a version that I created not to shame myself, or my father”. Now she recalled the full range of emotions she felt. Her father spent some time asking her whether she was OK with the dramatically exposed position on the chaise she had to hold night after night. She didn’t really know what she was giving permission for, until she got to look at the canvas, “and saw what he was seeing… I was really shocked,” she says. “I was thinking: ‘Have you got a periscope? Can you see around corners?’”

As with all Freud’s work, the painting went on, dusk till dawn, several nights a week over months. He wanted to call the finished work The Artist’s Daughter, a title “that would make anyone think of incest,” Boyt says. “Not that I wanted to have sex with him, nor him with me, just in case you were wondering…” she writes. He called it Rose as she requested.

She had liked to think of their relationship at the time as being “like that between two teenagers”. In retrospect, she recalls more “of what I now might call micro-aggressions”, deeply controlling behaviour and stabbing himself in the thigh with his paintbrush if things were not to his liking.

“When you’re sitting you feel incredibly unimportant, because [his] world’s full of naked girls, half of whom are your sisters,” Boyt recalls of those mixed emotions. “There’s just too many sitters, too many sisters. And then at the same time, you are feeling so very important, because you’re being scrutinised.”

That process inevitably left her with identity issues. “If you see yourself naked in a painting, and the painting’s been painted by your genius father who knows everything, you then think: ‘Is that who I am?’ You’re so valuable because of the painting – but then are you valuable in other contexts?”

The temptation, particularly in our censorious times, might be to condemn Freud out of hand for his most extreme behaviour. But Boyt refuses even to attempt to come to a settled judgment about her father – which is exactly what makes her book feel so truthful.

“I think that ambiguity is a luxurious position,” she says. “You can’t allow yourself ambiguity when things are very unstable. And I think my achievement is to allow a massive level of ambiguity. I realised in the writing that I was contradicting myself every five minutes: I love him, I hate him. He loves me, he doesn’t. Everything’s up for grabs. I mean, I obviously wasn’t going to write this to cancel him or whatever. And I wasn’t going to write a book about him being the god of me. We maintained a lot of respect and affection despite being two awkward cusses.”

By the time of her second portrait, she was a far more reluctant sitter and tried to refuse, “but,” she says, “there was not really an option for him to be able to say: ‘Oh, yes, that’s fine.’”

Her determination was at least to keep a private record of their nights together. She would take furtive notes about their endless conversations in toilet breaks and type them up when she got home. She says she had not looked at that diary in decades when she uncovered it during house renovations.

She was embarrassed by a lot of it when she did. She laughs. “There’s way too much about wanting a husband. It’s very Bridget Jones.” She couldn’t look at it for a while after the death of her father, but then the plan was to go back and extract “all Dad’s stories, which I remembered as being hilarious, stories about gangsters and film stars, lords and ladies”. But then when she got into it, “it all turned into something else”.

The change was partly a change in the culture; women were suddenly speaking out about patriarchal power, Boyt’s therapist encouraged her to re-examine her memories.

“When I started it, there was no sense of myself as having had crimes perpetrated against me, none of that. It was only reading the diary, and then typing it up. It was only then that I started to think: ‘Oh: me, too.’”

She is angry in the book that her parents did not respond to the fact of her rape, or her anxieties around Uwe.

“I think I had secrecy bred into me,” she says. (Outrageously at one point, Freud, who disliked the confessional tone of her first novel, Rose, tried to appeal to artistic discretion on the basis of “family feeling”.)

She wrote in her diary of a persistent sense of worthlessness; that her life was not supposed to work out; that happiness wasn’t for her. Has she conquered that?

“I had always felt that I had no right to mind what happened to me, but now I feel different,” she says. “For me, the feeling of working through shame and recognising it, and not being implicated in it, has been really important. Just being able to speak out. I mean, take this interview, for example; rather than thinking: ‘Oh, my God, he’s going to stitch me up’; I’m trying to think: ‘Oh, a chance to tell my story…’”

By the time of that third family portrait, the power balance between ageing father and daughter had begun to shift. Her Bridget Jones efforts had borne fruit in her mid-30s in the most unlikely of places – she met her husband, Mark Pearce, a recent widower, across the hospital bed of her friend, the Observer theatre critic Susannah Clapp, whom they were both visiting. One result of that marriage was that Boyt for the first time was able to make some demands of her father. She said she would not sit for another portrait unless she could do it with her husband. And, looking back, she says: “I must have known that I was in with a chance of getting pregnant – I made the dress that I was going to wear in the painting, and it was one of those crossover wrap dresses that ties behind that could expand.” After some months she conveyed the happy news to her father.

Inevitably Freud’s first thought was the painting. “‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’ he raged… and then he was really happy for me…”

The announcement changed their relationship. “Obviously, once you’re pregnant, you have power: ‘Sorry Dad, I need to go to the bathroom.’ ‘Sorry Dad, I need to get some food.’ I wasn’t trapped in the studio any more. And then I went away, and had the baby.”

Freud pestered her and Mark to return. “The baby’s going to be in the painting, you know that?” she said. The artist had a mortal fear of prams but, as she says, “even he knew you couldn’t just leave babies at home any more. Stella was nine months old. Alex [Pearce’s son from his first marriage] came with us too, obviously. And nine months later, I was pregnant again. This time, Dad realised that there was nothing he could do about anything. And so he painted this cute little embryo like seaweed with a flower or something [under the final painted layers of her dress]; it was very joyful; the painting was finished just before Vincent was born.”

Boyt claims to have no real idea why he asked her to be his executor.

“He must have thought you were trustworthy and wouldn’t piss the others off too much,” I suggest.

“Maybe. But that would imply that he couldn’t trust anybody else, which wasn’t true.”

She is very anxious not to place herself centre stage among her siblings. “I don’t think anyone else was fighting to do it,” she says. “But I was thrilled, really. It really made me feel seen in a different way to the naked portrait. I thought: ‘That’s a side of me that’s not been valued, or that hasn’t been noticed.’” She has enjoyed the responsibility of the process, “and no one has tried to kill me yet”.

Boyt doesn’t really want to talk about her father’s last days, because they are not only hers to share. One thing she does confide is that when she sat by Lucian’s bedside she read two books to him: one was The Man in the Blue Scarf, which is critic Martin Gayford’s account of sitting for Freud. The other was Middlemarch.

She chose the latter, she says, perhaps because it was the book that did for her what her parents hadn’t done – given her an understanding that doing the right thing might be something worth striving for.

“It’s funny,” she says, “but when I read Dad quotes from Martin Gayford’s book – things he had said himself – he would be like: ‘I couldn’t agree more.’ But when I read Middlemarch, Dad was constantly railing against the authorial voice: ‘Why is she telling me what to think and what to feel?’”

I wonder if now that the business of their father’s legacy is mostly concluded, his children still find good reasons to get together?

“All the time,” she says.

And do they spend all their time trying to get these stories of the past straight?

“No, we don’t really talk about that,” she says. “Everyone’s got their own thoughts and feelings and relationships with Dad. My brother Ali [who also has a book in the works] sometimes tells preposterous stories about him and Dad on the razzle, but that’s about it. The other day it was Bella’s party. We have these big parties when nearly everyone goes and we talk about our own children – and our own grandchildren…”

Before I go, I wonder how her own formative years shaped her as a mother – her children are now 26 and 25.

“I feel blessed that neither of them have been interested in drugs and alcohol,” she says. “Put it this way, I don’t think I was ever going to create a daughter who wanted to leave home when she was 15.” She smiles. “I’m certainly not the biggest fan of chaos.”