A government minister and I dined just after the fiasco of the 2017 general election, with Theresa May clinging to office. We agreed our feelings: ‘Well, she’s utterly useless, but she’s got to stay.’ Similar emotions arise today. Nobody – and I genuinely mean nobody – can truthfully say that Sir Keir Starmer is doing a good job, but politics is not, thank goodness, a logical occupation, so it does not necessarily follow that he should resign. If you lead your party to a victory fair and square in a general election, it is your duty to try to go on governing until the next one. You owe it to voters and colleagues. It could even be said that you owe it to the office itself. The British premiership must not decline into a ‘King for a day’ stunt. Dreadful though Sir Keir’s situation is, it is not objectively impossible. He has a secure majority, no obvious successor in his own party and no opposition party ready to assume office. The cabinet realised just in time that if the leader of the opposition in the Scottish parliament could kick a prime minister out of 10 Downing Street, they would all be humiliated.
Although I do a journalistic sideline in standing up for the disgraced, and indeed have often argued the political case for Peter Mandelson, I was astonished that the Times last Saturday ran an interview with him in its magazine. A news interview could have been justified, of course: Mandelson is in the news and we want to hear his side of the story. This, however, was a ‘Peter at home’ sort of interview. From their country kitchen, his husband Reinaldo calls out: ‘Does everyone like spicy food?’ In one photo, a lovable pooch looks on as Peter cracks what might be an egg into a pan on the Aga. In another, he lounges on an easy chair and footstool eating cake. The Strange Survival of Liberal Britain by the great Vernon Bogdanor sits respectably beside him, and you can see the bird table in the garden beyond. Peter’s fault in that Epstein business, says Peter, was to be ‘too trusting’. What next for him? ‘Hiding under a rock would be a disproportionate response to a handful of historical emails, which I deeply regret sending.’ He shows almost no sense of the effect of his actions on others, and the Times scarcely challenges him. ‘From ambassador’s residence to Wiltshire domesticity’, says its magazine cover, as if this were House and Garden. The text half admits that the interview began five days earlier and was altered in the light of later revelations. That does not make the reader less queasy.
Messages from Reform advertising press conferences, conversion experiences etc flood my inbox nowadays. Recently I received one headed ‘Major Nigel Farage speech – Birmingham’. I bristled. Is that fellow now claiming a military background, like those conmen in comedy films of the 1950s, acted by Terry-Thomas or Leslie Phillips, who passed themselves off as majors without ever having worn a uniform, I asked myself. Only once I had climbed on to my high horse of disapproval did I realise that, in this case, the word ‘Major’ was an adjective, not a rank. I apologise to plain Mr Farage.
But you can see why I might have had my suspicions. In this column (17 January), I expressed the thought that Nadhim Zahawi’s defection from the Conservatives to Reform might be of more financial than political use to his adopted party. He has a web of wealthy connections in the Middle East and has been seen clinging closely to Dr Sultan, the mover and shaker of Abu Dhabi. Sure enough, a fortnight later, news reports quoted Mr Farage saying how badly the British government had treated the UAE (of which Abu Dhabi is the leading part) by blocking its bid to buy the Daily Telegraph. Before Mr Zahawi’s arrival, Mr Farage had robustly taken the opposite view.
Some criticise the ‘Turner & Constable’ exhibition at the Tate for its very idea. Why should one be incited to decide for one or the other, they ask. As with George Steiner’s book called Tolstoy or Dostoyevsky?, why not answer ‘Both’? Yet I found the exhibition exciting and must admit that the sense of competition added to the excitement, as it did in the artists’ lifetime. I may be slightly biased because of a maternal connection with East Bergholt, but I did come down in favour of Constable, great though Turner can sometimes be. Years ago, the painter Lawrence Gowing told me that Constable’s letters were the best ever written by a painter about painting. This was because of their utter dedication to the art itself, and the very exact (but not pedantic) engagement with nature. That engagement is so successful that I think of a landscape as resembling a Constable more than a Constable resembling a landscape.
One of Constable’s best paintings in the show is ‘The Leaping Horse’. Critics have admired how it conveys pictorially the movement of light, the feel of the wind, even, said one, the sound of hooves. I wonder if it may also convey something which would have seemed more dramatic then than now. The horse was leaping because tow horses were trained to jump across cattle barriers on the towpath. Two hundred years ago, however, it was much rarer than today for horses to jump. The painting’s title draws attention to the unusualness of the scene. The fashion for ‘lepping’, which changed everything by the mid-19th century, had hardly begun. Constable’s boy rider has no saddle or stirrups, so he is doing something difficult. Perhaps he is also doing something not archetypal to painter or audience, but modern.
How many sightings does it need to spot a trend? Since Christmas, I have seen five men, four young and one middle-aged, wearing bowler hats in London. None appeared to be hotel doormen. Is this the latest retro-chic?
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