Features

Thursday

Nick Cohen

Enemies of history

At the start of the 21st century, no one felt the need to reach for studies of ‘third-period’ communism to understand British and American politics. By 2016, I would say that they have become essential. Admittedly, connoisseurs of the communist movement’s crimes have always thought that 1928 was a vintage year. The Soviet Union had decided that the first period after the glorious Russian revolution of 1917 had been succeeded by a second period, when the West fought back. But now, comrades, yes, now in the historic year of 1928, Stalin had ruled that we were entering a ‘third period’ when capitalism would die in its final crisis. As the Wall Street crash was only months away, this was not as fanciful as it seemed.

Sam Leith

A few good books

It is a truth universally acknowledged that whenever ITV or the BBC decides — the latter usually with charter renewal in the near or middle distance — that it needs to make some of that World-Class Drama it’s so proud of, its thoughts turn to regency frocks, scruffy urchins, pea-soupy London, agreeable country houses and the incessant clip-clop of hoof on cobble. Classy costume drama — invariably based, for extra classiness, on classy fiction of the sort you might find in Penguin Classics — is one of our major exports. But in the range of its source material they consider, its makers are as blinkered as the inevitable horse that draws Mr Darcy’s inevitable carriage in the inevitable tracking shot round Pemberley.

Ariane Sherine

What a shower

The fact that we get sun when we expect hail and hail when we expect sun provides those of us who live in Britain with a handy subject to cover the most awkward of conversational lulls. The weather forms the backbone of our national discourse — perhaps because our own personal observations and doom-laden predictions are about as likely to be as accurate as the official forecasts. Ariane Sherine and Lara Prendergast discuss why our weather forecasters just can't get it right: To look on the sunny side for a moment, perhaps this should cheer us. If we can’t predict what the weather is today, then perhaps — since we can do precious little about it — we should not be quite so alarmed about climate-change predictions.

Thursday

Conrad Black

What Trump is getting right

Freddy Gray and Scott McConnell discuss the American tragedy with Isabel Hardman: Almost anyone who has followed the US presidential selection process closely could realise what a brilliant campaign Donald Trump has conducted. He saw that in its self-absorption, the US political class had completely failed to grasp the extent of public anger at the deterioration of almost everything. American public policy has brought about the greatest sequence of disasters since the 1920s, when the liquor business was given to gangsters by Prohibition, followed by the equities debt bubble and the Great Depression.

Freddy Gray

American horror story

Freddy Gray and Scott McConnell discuss the American tragedy with Isabel Hardman:  Cleveland, Ohio ‘Whatever complicates the world more — I do,’ Donald Trump once said. If you can’t decipher what that means, don’t worry, that’s the point. ‘It’s always good to do things nice and complicated,’ he added, by way of explanation, ‘so that nobody can figure it out.’ That was 1996 and Trump was talking about business. But 20 years later, his approach to politics seems informed by the same perplexing mentality. Trump is the confusion candidate for President of the United States, and his platform is chaos. He promises to Make America Great Again. In reality, he’s Making America Madder Than Ever.

Elif Shafak

Turkey’s continental drift

In Turkish the word ‘yurt’ has two definitions. It means ‘place’, ‘land’, ‘territory’, ‘homeland’. It could also indicate a round, portable tent, the likes of which have been used by nomadic tribes for centuries. In my imagination I have always liked to combine the two definitions, wondering if motherlands could be just as peripatetic as their people. I know, for one, that no matter how itinerant I might have been all my life, it follows me like a shadow, this sad motherland of mine. Turkey’s many problems occupy my mind, crush my chest, weigh down my soul, invade my dreams. Not only me, of course. There are so many who just cannot help worrying about this beautiful country.

Liam Halligan

The bust that wasn’t

It has been a month since the UK voted to leave the European Union — but something is missing. Where is the economic collapse? What of EUpocalypse Now? Where is the Brexageddon that we were promised? To the shock of many — not least business titans who bankrolled the Remain campaign — the instant collapse doesn’t seem to be happening. The UK economy is, for now at least, taking Brexit in its stride. The oft-predicted job losses? During the three weeks from 23 June, job listings were up 150,000 compared to the same period last year according to Reed Group, a recruitment consultant. ‘That’s an 8 per cent rise,’ says James Reed, its chairman. ‘The vote hasn’t affected things — people are still hiring.

Frances Robinson

Never gonna give EU up

June the 24th was a grim morning for Remain voters, and we’ve been working through the seven stages of grief ever since. Given that nobody has the faintest idea when, how or even if the UK will actually leave, acceptance is still some way off. But Remainers are a pragmatic bunch and many have now worked out that their own personal Brexit can be deftly avoided by taking another EU nationality. Likewise, UK citizens living in the EU, who have found to their horror that they are pawns in a very complex game of migrant chess between Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker, are concluding that now is a wise moment to complete the paperwork for residency or citizenship. So which variety of passport would we most like? Controversially, Belgium is the top of many Remainers’ wish lists.

Geoff Dyer

Beat echoes

Laid out flat, running the length of the exhibition, the original scroll of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road forms the spine of the large Beat Generation show at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. Even for those familiar with the published version of the manuscript seeing this holy relic — the founding document for all sects of Beat worshippers — is a powerful experience. For about a minute. It’s everything else — the movies, the posters, the paraphernalia — that takes the time and generates an exhibition on such a tremendous scale. But how could it not sprawl? You start with the writers — Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs — and before you know it there’s jazz, Neal Cassady, the Merry Pranksters, acid, you name it.

Simon Barnes

What wasps do for us

Dom Perignon, Pimms, Carling Black Label, Coca-Cola — one’s as good as the other, so far as they’re concerned. Even if they don’t manage to drown in the stuff, they spoil the taste for drinkers by creating panic out of all proportion to their size. They destroy the ardour of al-fresco lovers in an instant. They are the joy-killers: the destroyers of summer, determined to prove that the wild world is a plot against humanity. Is there anything good about wasps? Is their sole purpose in life to harass humans seeking the fleeting joys of summer? Does this black-and-yellow air force exist only to ruin the few fine days reluctantly given to us? If you garden, wasps are among your best friends.

Thursday

Isabel Hardman

May’s man of influence

Civil servants in the Home Office, even the senior ones, always felt a little nervous when walking towards Theresa May’s office. It wasn’t so much the meeting with the Home Secretary that they dreaded as the characters who lurked in the room directly outside hers. One senior official describes a typical scene: Fiona Hill, one of May’s special advisers, ‘sitting back, getting ready to go out with her stockinged feet on the desk, giving a civil servant an absolute rollicking’. May’s two other special advisers, Nick Timothy and Stephen Parkinson, were also forces to be reckoned with. Now, it seems, this team is being reassembled — to help her run Britain. All three have taken a break from government in the past couple of years.

John Osullivan

She’s another Chamberlain

One name leapt off the text of Theresa May’s Birmingham speech, which began as the launch of her leadership campaign but morphed instantly into a programme for her government this week. It was that of Joseph Chamberlain, who was listed by the new Tory leader in her apostolic succession of great conservatives. It became clear as May developed the themes of her new Conservatism, moreover, that Chamberlain senior wasn’t being praised just because she happened to be speaking in Birmingham — the city he made into a worldwide symbol of great municipal government. She intended to follow in the footsteps of ‘Radical Joe’. And that could take her along very different paths from those trodden by both David Cameron and Margaret Thatcher.

James Forsyth

‘She doesn’t do likes’

As Tory MPs gathered at St Stephen’s entrance in Parliament to await their new leader on Monday afternoon, a choir in Westminster Hall began to sing. The hosannas spoke to the sense of relief among Tory MPs: they had been spared a long and divisive nine-week leadership contest. A period of political blood-letting brutal even by Tory standards was coming to an end. The United Kingdom would have a new Prime Minister. More than relief, there was hope for the bulk of MPs who had previously not been marked out for advancement. Theresa May’s accession shows that the narrow rules which were thought to govern modern British politics are not hard and fast. May is not one of the shiny people. She isn’t a member of a gilded political set.

Dan Hitchens

Pilgrimage’s progress

If Christian Britain is fading away, what will survive of it? One answer seems to be pilgrimage. In the past decade, 30 pilgrimage routes have been created or rediscovered; holy places have seen a 14 per cent growth in visitor numbers since 2013. These figures are recorded by a new organisation, the British Pilgrimage Trust, which wants to ‘revive the British pilgrimage tradition of making journeys on foot to holy places’. The BPT stresses that not all pilgrims are religious: ‘Bring your own beliefs’ is the slogan. Guy Hayward, who co-founded the BPT with Will Parsons, observes: ‘We have to tread very carefully around the language of spirituality and religion.

Georgia Grimond

Olympic shames

 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil ‘Welcome to hell’ was printed on a banner written in English at Rio de Janeiro’s international airport recently. ‘Police and firefighters don’t get paid. Whoever comes to Rio will not be safe,’ the message concluded. It’s fair to say not everyone is feeling the Olympic spirit ahead of the Games that start here next month. Bad news abounds. The city’s mayor made headlines by declaring the security situation ‘horrible’, and body parts were reported to have washed up near the Olympic beach volleyball venue. Then an investigation by Human Rights Watch exposed an alarming number of murders by Rio policemen. Earlier in the month a baddie was-busted out of hospital by his gang mates.

Christopher Caldwell

Cops and killers

 Washington, DC Considering how heavily its citizens are armed with pistols, hunting rifles, shotguns, military semi-automatics, crossbows and nunchucks, considering how ethnically diverse and historically divided the place is, and considering that it is home to a third of a billion more or less rootless people, it is surprising Americans don’t kill each other more. The United States is well policed, even if it has been hard to say so lately. In the space of a couple of days in July, black men were shot dead by policemen in two separate incidents in Louisiana and Minnesota. Video flew round the internet.

Thursday

Fraser Nelson

‘I had to step up’

On the way to interview Michael Gove, we meet a government minister, an Old Etonian, who suggests we ask him, ‘How can anyone trust you ever again?’ Just a fortnight ago, proposing such a question would have been unthinkable: the Justice Secretary had a reputation for being one of the most consistent, decent and honourable men in the cabinet. When Gove agreed to back Boris Johnson’s leadership bid, the pair seemed a dream team. But on the morning of their campaign launch, Gove announced that Johnson was unfit for the job, so he’d stand himself instead. Then, he was knocked out by Conservative MPs who were still recovering from the drama.

Fraser Nelson

A new workers’ party

We are living through the most intense political drama in modern British history. The vote to leave the European Union is the greatest act of defiance against the establishment since the coming of universal suffrage. It has triggered leadership challenges crises in the three most popular political parties: Labour, the Conservatives and Ukip. As Tony Blair might have put it, the kaleidoscope has been shaken and the pieces are in flux. We’re midway through a very British revolution. As in other revolutions, a seismic event has caused a vacuum. It turns out that Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were telling the truth about not using the referendum campaign to further their leadership ambitions.

Elif Shafak

Sleepless by the strait

In my novel Three Daughters of Eve, a well educated housewife with kids looks at her motherland, Turkey, and thinks: ‘They are not that different. My own life and this land of unfulfilled potentials.’ I wrote this novel in English first. It was then translated into Turkish by a professional translator, after which I rewrote it with my own rhythm and vocabulary. It’s a bit crazy, this constant commute between English and Turkish. There are things I find much easier to express in English — e.g. humour, irony, satire — and others I find easier to say in Turkish — melancholy, loss. The book is published in Turkey this summer before being published in the UK in winter. So I fly from London, where I live, to Turkey for a week long book tour.

Ysenda Maxtone Graham

Imperial ambitions

Early on the morning of Friday 24 June, Darren Gratton went into his butcher’s shop in Barnstaple and changed his wall signs, which at this time of year are mostly about barbecue packs. Emboldened in the Brexit dawn, he deleted all references to ‘kg’ and replaced each one with ‘lb’. Tempted to do the same to the labels inside the display cabinets, he decided not to, for fear of a threatening call from Trading Standards. But that small act of wall-chart insurrection was enough to spark an article in the local paper, which triggered a deluge of emails from other shopkeepers across the country in support of his brave action with the squeaky pen.