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Imperialism still overshadows our intellectual history
Peter Watson begins his survey of the history of ideas in Britain with the assertion that the national mindset (which at that time was the English mindset) changed significantly after the accession of Elizabeth I. His book – a guide to the nature of British intellectual curiosity since the mid-16th century – begins there, just as England had undergone a liberation from a dominant European authority: the shaking off of the influence of the Roman Catholic church and the advent of the Reformation, and the new opportunities that offered for the people.
He describes how a culture based largely on poetry and on the court of Elizabeth then redirected the prevailing intellectual forces of the time. This affected not just literature (Marlowe, Shakespeare and Jonson) but also helped develop an interest in science that grew remarkably throughout the next few centuries. The ‘imagination’ of Watson’s title is not merely the creative artistic imagination, but also that of scientists and inventors and, indeed, of people adept at both.
The book is, according to its footnotes, based on secondary sources, so those well read in the history of the intellect in Britain since the Reformation will find much that is familiar. There is the odd surprise, such as one that stems from the book’s occasional focus on the British empire and the need felt today to discuss its iniquities. Watson writes that the portion of the British economy based on the slave trade (which must not be conflated with empire) was between 1 per cent and 1.4 per cent. He also writes that for much of the era of slavery the British had a non-racial view of it, since their main experience of the odious trade was of white people being captured by Barbary pirates and held to ransom. While this cannot excuse the barbarism endured by Africans shipped by British (and other) slavers across the Atlantic, it lends some perspective to a question in serious danger of losing any vestige of one.
Watson does not come down on one side or the other in the empire debate, eschewing the ‘balance sheet’ approach taken by historians such as Nigel Biggar and Niall Ferguson; but he devotes too much of the last section of his book to the question, when other intellectual currents in the opening decades of the 21st century might have been more profitably explored, not least the continuing viability of democracy. Earlier on, he gives much space to an analysis of Edward Said, and questions such as whether Jane Austen expressed her antipathy to slavery sufficiently clearly in the novel Mansfield Park.
But then some of Watson’s own analyses of writers and thinkers are not always easily supported. He is better on the 18th century – dealing well with the Scottish enlightenment (giving a perfectly nuanced account of Adam Smith) and writers such as Burke and Gibbon – than he appears to be on the 19th. He gives Carlyle his due, but cites an article in a learned American journal from 40 years ago to justify his claim that Carlyle’s ‘reputation took a knock’ in 1849 with the publication of his Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question. Watson says readers were offended by the use of the term ‘Quashee’ to describe a black man. They may well, if so, have been unsettled by the still less palatable title that the Discourse was subsequently given, which was The Nigger Question: it appeared thus in a 1853 pamphlet and in the Centenary Edition of Carlyle’s works in 1899. That indicates the Discourse did Carlyle’s reputation no lasting harm at the time, whatever it may have done since.
In seeking to pack so much into fewer than 500 pages of text, Watson does skate over a few crucial figures. Some of his musings on empire might have been sacrificed to make more space for George Orwell, for example. A chapter in whose title his name appears features just one brief paragraph on him, about Homage to Catalonia, and later there is a page or so on Animal Farm, which says nothing new. Of Orwell’s extensive and mould-breaking journalism there is nothing – somewhat surprising in a book about the British imagination when dealing with one of its leading exponents of the past century.
Watson emphasises scientific discovery and innovation, and the effect on national life and ideas caused by the Industrial Revolution. These are all essential consequences of our intellectual curiosity, and he is right to conclude that the historic significance of Britain in these fields is immense. He includes league tables of Nobel prizewinners by nation in which Britain shows remarkably well. But these prizes are not the only means by which the contribution to civilisation and progress by a people are measured.
There are notable omissions. Although Watson talks about the elitist nature of ‘high culture’ – such as Eliot and The Waste Land – he does not discuss how far the British imagination, and the British contribution to world civilisation, might have advanced had we taken the education of the masses more seriously earlier. We were, until the Butler Education Act of 1944, appalling at developing our human resources, and have not been much better since. It is surprising that there is no discussion of British music, one of the greatest fruits of the imagination of the past 150 years. And there is no analysis of the role of architecture, which, given its impact and its centrality to many people’s idea of themselves as British, surely merited examination. The book shows extensive and intelligent reading, but trying to cram so much information and commentary into one volume has not been a complete success, or resulted in something entirely coherent.
The past is another country: Ripeness, by Sarah Moss, reviewed
Susie Mesure has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Sarah Moss is a prolific and vital novelist whose books encompass an array of subjects from Victorian social reform and 19th-century Japan to broken Brexit Britain and eating disorders. She combines teaching at University College, Dublin with writing in real time: The Fell, set during the second lockdown, came out in the summer of 2021, while My Good Bright Wolf, an experimental memoir about her anorexic breakdown in late 2020, was published last year.
A forthcoming Channel 4 adaptation of Summerwater, which explored national identity and isolation against the backdrop of a soggy Scottish holiday park, may catapult her into the sort of gold-foil territory enjoyed by Maggie O’Farrell or Ali Smith. If not, then perhaps Ripeness, her ninth novel, will.
Set partly in contemporary Ireland and partly in 1960s Italy, this is a tender book that explores issues such as identity, belonging and consent, themes that fit into Moss’s wider oeuvre. ‘Ripeness, not readiness, is all. Life has no form, you don’t get to choose.’ So mulls the protagonist Edith, riffing on Shakespeare’s familiar lines, pitting a youthful Hamlet’s readiness for death – ‘voluntary, an act of will’ – against an ancient Lear’s ripeness – something that ‘happens to us as to plums and pears, regardless of agency or volition’.
The age dichotomy is deliberate. The novel features two different Ediths at two different life stages. The first is 73, living alone and happily divorced in present-day Ireland. The second is 17, taking a gap year before studying at Oxford. It is the mid-1960s and hemlines are rising everywhere, but ‘had not reached the thigh of Italy’. Edith has been dispatched there by her mother, where her sister Lydia, a ballet dancer, is waiting out the final weeks of an unwanted pregnancy in her ballet master’s sumptuous villa.
Moss alternates chapters and perspectives, switching between third person for the older Edith and first person for her teenaged version, who is recounting her Italian adventure to an unnamed ‘you’. This, it emerges, is her sister’s child, who is handed over for adoption at birth. Edith writes without expectation that her words will ever be read but can’t think what else to do.
Despite the dark underside to what happened to Lydia, which has a parallel in the older Edith’s story, this feels like a novel Moss had fun writing, not least because she gets to indulge the childhood love for ballet she detailed in My Good Bright Wolf. Her imagery is vivid. A jar of plum jam is ‘still slightly warm, as if asleep’; Irish dry stone walls have ‘a kind of stone lace… a tracery’.
In Moss’s hands, ripeness is more than just old age: it represents every woman’s fertile body, to which too many men have helped themselves over the ages. This is an important and convincing book.
The titans who shaped Test cricket
Cricket histories are a dangerous genre both for writers and readers. They can be incredibly boring, the dullest of all probably being John Major’s weighty tome, which said everything you knew it would say as drearily as you feared. So Tim Wigmore, a young shaver who writes on cricket for the Daily Telegraph, has entered hazardous territory. Speaking as a proud cricket badger, who even has a book by Merv Hughes on his shelf (Dear Merv, 2001), I will admit that I have read rather too many cricket histories, and I swore that it would be a cold day in hell (or possibly at the county ground in Derby) before I would willingly start another. But Wigmore has written a splendid, comprehensive book full of good stories and droll asides. It dips a little in the middle when Shoaib Mohammad starts batting, and keeps on batting, but what book of 578 pages does not? (Shoaib, who retired in 1995, is still batting in his dreams and my nightmares, and has just played an immaculate forward defensive down to silly mid-off.)
In fact Test Cricket is as sparkling and entertaining as any book this long has a right to be. Wigmore has taken as his subject the pinnacle of the game, possibly the pinnacle of any game in the world, the Test match – played over (once) three and (now) five days between no more than a dozen nations (or collections of nations) whose first-class structures justify their hallowed status. So there are no Test matches between Brazil and Argentina – nor are there likely to be until there are first-class stadiums in both countries where regional teams play two-innings matches in whites, with lunch at 1 p.m. and tea at 3.40 p.m. Pork pies would need to be sold locally and everyone would run indoors at the merest sniff of rain or bad light.
No, this book starts off with the old rivalry between England and Australia in the 1870s; adds South Africa a quarter of a century later; and then the West Indies and New Zealand on the same day in the 1930s. England fielded two separate XIs against these two teams for their first Tests – an experiment they have never been strong enough to repeat. (Australia often put out two teams in one-day internationals in the 1980s and 1990s, both of which would then beat England, which wasn’t that hard at the time.)
Wigmore supplies a clean and focused narrative structure. ‘Within the space constraints,’ he writes, ‘I have been led by a sense of Test cricket’s overarching story, paying particular attention to players who helped shape the game.’ This means a lot of pages are devoted to people such as Abdul Kardar and Tiger Pataudi, while ‘titans in less successful or declining sides’, like Graham Gooch and Shivarine Chanderpaul, get far fewer. I have no trouble with any of this, although the lack of mention of my own favourite cricketer, Derek Randall, who scored an epic 174 in the centenary Test match in 1977, is obviously shameful.
Wigmore has an eye for the telling detail. In a passage on the Australian batsman Victor Trumper, inspired by the photograph of him leaping out of his crease to drill a half-volley back over the bowler’s head, we hear that in 1902 Trumper became the first batsman to score a century before lunch on the first morning of a Test match. This was something only five batsmen from any country have done since. I also didn’t know that Trumper was the first man to popularise wearing the same national cap at every Test. ‘The lore of the baggy green cap, then, is also the lore of Trumper.’
Between 1895 and 1904, Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji scored 21,576 first-class runs at an average of 60.94. Then he became the Maharajah Jam Sahib of Nawanagar and had to stop batting for Sussex and England. In 1929, Ranji’s nephew Duleepsinhji took part in one Test against South Africa, the only occasion in that country’s first 172 Tests, until their readmittance to Test cricket in 1992, that they played against someone who didn’t have white skin. South Africa, and their supporters in the MCC, don’t come out too well from this book.
When an Australian Services XI played the first of five matches against an England XI at Lord’s in 1945 tickets cost a flat one shilling (five new pence) anywhere in the ground. That’s as opposed to the £160 a friend of mine paid recently for one of this summer’s Tests.
At less than a fifth of the cost, this book represents a serious bargain. It’s not quite as good as seeing Joe Root score 100 in the flesh, but it’s not far off.
Who started the Cold War?
Over a few short months after the defeat of Nazism in May 1945, the ‘valiant Russians’ who had fought alongside Britain and America had ‘transformed from gallant allies into barbarians at the gates of western civilisation’. So begins Vladislav Zubok’s thorough and timely study of the history of the Cold War – or, as he nearly entitled the book, the first Cold War. For the themes that underpinned and drove that decades-long global conflict – fear, honour and interest, in Thucydides’s formulation – are now very contemporary questions. ‘The world has become perilous again,’ writes Zubok, a Soviet-born historian who has spent three decades in the West:
Diplomacy ceases to work; treaties are broken. International institutions, courts and norms cannot prevent conflicts. Technology and internet communication do not automatically promote reason and compromise, but often breed hatred, nationalism and violence.
Historians tend to be wary of drawing direct parallels between the present and the past, and Zubok is too wise to arrive at any glib conclusions. The bulk of this concise, pacy book is a narrative history of the postwar world and the great superpower rivalry that defined it. Yet, as we face a new period of strategic realignments, it’s inevitably to the dynamics of the Cold War we must look for a mirror of our times.
There are many surprises – one being that Joseph Stalin and his entourage had been expecting their wartime alliance with London and Washington to be followed by a period of cooperation. ‘It is necessary to stay within certain limits,’ recalled the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov. ‘[If you swallow too much] you could choke… We knew our limits.’ Stalin, unlike his rival Trotsky, had never been a believer in world revolution and indeed shut down the Communist International during the war. Zubok argues that the Cold War was caused by ‘the American decision to build and maintain a global liberal order, not by the Soviet Union’s plans to spread communism in Europe’.
Yet nearly four years of nuclear imbalance between Hiroshima and the first Soviet A-bomb test fuelled Stalin’s paranoia. And a bloody hot war in Korea could very easily have escalated into a third world war had Douglas MacArthur been given his way and dropped nukes on Pyongyang. Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, revived international communism as a fifth column weapon against the capitalist world as the Cold War got into full swing. The great power rivalry became the wellspring for every post-colonial conflict, from Cuba to Angola, Mozambique, El Salvador and the rest.
Zubok argues that the Cold War was caused by ‘the American decision
to build a global liberal order’
But what is surprising is that, despite propagandists’ eschatological framing of the conflict as a fight to the death between rival worlds, there were always pragmatists at the pinnacles of power in both Moscow and Washington. Khrushchev and Richard Nixon, vice president at the time, had heated but cordial man-to-man debates in an American show kitchen at Sokolniki Park in Moscow. Even the arch-apparatchik Leonid Brezhnev became ‘a sponsor and a crucial convert from hard line to détente’ early in his career, writes Zubok. And the great Cold Warrior Ronald Reagan was a surprising champion of jaw-jaw over war-war.
Some of Zubok’s assertions are puzzling. Rather than the USSR simply ‘running out of steam’, its collapse was ‘triggered by Gorbachev’s misguided economic reforms, political liberalisation and loss of control over the Soviet state and finances’. But that formulation suggests that it was Gorbachev’s choices that crashed the ship of state – and raises the possibility that had he not embarked on his reform programme the fate of the USSR might have been different. But Yegor Gaidar, Yeltsin’s economic reformer-in-chief, demonstrated in his classic 2007 study Collapse of an Empire that the implosion followed the iron laws of capitalism. The leaky bucket of the Soviet economy had been kept artificially full by high post-1973 oil prices but began to drain fatally after the Saudis collapsed prices a decade later. The USSR could not feed itself without buying US and Canadian grain for petrodollars. Gorbachev or no Gorbachev, the economy was doomed once the oil money dried up.
Where Zubok gives Gorbachev credit is in the relative bloodlessness of the loss of the Soviet empire, a world-historical achievement that has long been ignored by modern Russians. Today, Gorbachev is reviled by his countrymen as a traitor and a fool who allowed himself to be taken in by American lies. Yet it is he who is the truly vital character on which any useful comparison between the first and (possibly) second Cold Wars hinges.
The first Cold War was, as the Harvard political scientist Graham Allison has argued, born of the ‘Thucydides Trap’, whereby war emerged from the fear that a new power could displace the dominant one. But Gorbachev envisioned a world where competition for influence and resources would be replaced by cooperation. Rivalry did not have to mean enmity. Zero sum can be replaced by win-win.
Sadly, neither Vladimir Putin (who is merely cosplaying as a superpower leader) nor Xi Jinping (who actually is one) have shown anything like Gorbachev’s collaborative wisdom. But we can only live in hope that The World of the Cold War is ‘a record of dangerous, but ancient times’, as Zubok puts it, rather than a warning for the future.
Often seen as an existential battle between capitalist democracy and totalitarian communism, the Cold War has long been misunderstood. Drawing on years of research, and informed by three decades in the USSR followed by three decades in the West, Zubok paints a striking new portrait of a world on the brink.
The fragility of the modern city reflects humanity’s vulnerability
As I reached the final pages of the German writer Gregor Hens’s essayistic travelogue The City and the World, news of the blackout across Spain and Portugal snatched my attention. Madrid and Lisbon were at a standstill. Images of gridlocked round-abouts and commuters rushing out of pitch-dark subway tunnels plunged me into a fatalistic mood. When will it happen here? Hens, I realised, had nailed an important point: the ‘stunning complexity’ of modern cities makes them fragile. The metropolis, he writes, has become so intricate, its limits so stretched, that in it, ‘we are always living on the verge of catastrophe’.
A seasoned globetrotter who spent his formative years ‘guzzling jet fuel with abandon’, Hens has lived in cities around the world, from Berlin (his current home) to Los Angeles. He has visited a host of other far-flung locations, from Shanghai and Shenzhen to Las Vegas. Each place a person visits, Hens suggests, becomes plotted in the ‘galactic city’ of their mind, a network ‘whose intricately folded map actually offers the most surprising connections’.
This is urban wandering on a rather different scale to that of Charles Baudelaire, whose 1863 essay ‘The Artist, Man of the World’ paved the way for a host of successive writers, most notably Walter Benjamin, to delight in roaming a single city on foot. Hens takes stock of our modern technologically dictated movements within and across cities, investigating how these places have come to sprawl far beyond the possible step-count of even the most determined walker.
His understanding of the word ‘city’ encompasses entities that aren’t cities in the obvious sense: libraries, viruses, cemeteries and the brain. These each have ‘cityness’, apparently, because they are networks. Hens is careful to acknowledge that this insight owes something to the work of writers like Rebecca Solnit (‘a city is built to resemble a conscious mind… a network’) and Michel Foucault (‘our experience of the world is… that of a network’). His critique is bricolage-style: he makes incisive links between ideas, even if not quite delivering a decisive overriding argument of his own. This suits his subject. Cities are, he argues, constituted of ‘the rubble of history’, so are ‘no longer spatially and temporally comprehensible’ as a whole.
Messiness is, for Hens, what makes cities interesting. He sees Los Angeles, in its orderly layout, as an outlier, envying ‘anyone who manages to get lost’ in it. The greatest cities, it seems, allow room for the inhabitant or visitor to forge their own geography, one which overlaps with but doesn’t quite match what’s on Google Maps. Our encounters, Hens suggests, are many-layered and varied. Some cities, like New York, are so ingrained in the public imagination that ‘we first know [them] from our dreams’. Others, like Chongqing or Wuhan, are ‘generic cities’ that ‘arouse no longings’ for Hens. Mostly, though, we can know a city only ‘in an excerpted form’: outside of the webs we weave between bars and offices, homes and parks, much remains terra incognita.
This is Hens’s second book to be published in English and in it he has doubled down on a tested formula. In his 2015 memoir Nicotine (also elegantly translated by Jen Calleja), he surveyed his life as a smoker, using stories of memorable cigarettes like signposts in the mazy network of his experience. In The City and the World, the mechanism is essentially the same, but this time cities are the cigarettes.
It works and it doesn’t. On one level, the book satisfyingly blends memoir with literary criticism, travelogue and social commentary to create an experimental text reminiscent of other Fitzcarraldo Editions favourites such as Brian Dillon’s Essayism. At the same time this fragmentary approach, which jumps back and forth between different cities and does away with chapters, doesn’t feel quite as fresh as it did in Nicotine. That book’s central subject was precise and sexy enough to carry the reader through its more meandering passages. The concept of the city isn’t as tight – especially not once houses and children’s playgrounds are included in Hens’s definition. Yet his tentacular style makes sense as a response to the overstimulating, frenetic character of modern cities. How we think and live is mapped on to the metropolis. If the city is fragile, then we are too.
Can we get RealClear?
RealClearPolitics, the polling data aggregator, is undergoing a round of cuts.
In a letter to staff last Wednesday, seen by Cockburn, publisher David DesRosiers writes: “Good people, our people, and the families that they serve will be impacted. We are sorry.”
While cuts to media are nothing new given the challenging business environment, the reasoning behind RealClear’s reductions is somewhat unusual. “We find ourselves under attack from a shadowy new threat – this time from the Right,” writes DesRosiers.
“A cabal of so-called conservatives is now attempting to stamp out independent voices. They have persuaded some of our previous benefactors who supported RealClearFoundation while it benefited them to withdraw philanthropic support. Their desired endgame is a hostile takeover with a mind toward debasing, if not killing, RCP.” The RealClearFoundation is the nonprofit wing of RealClear through which their websites are funded.
Cockburn reads RCP on a daily basis. Their aggregation of stories draws from all sources. For example, this morning the offering includes the New Republic, the American Prospect, Fox News and the American Mind. The heterodoxy is very Spectator in spirit. Whether that crucial selling point would remain intact under new “conservative” leadership is unclear.
Who are these prospective new owners? Cockburn understands RealClear is another target of John Solomon and Mark Meckler’s proposed roll-up of right-leaning outlets. Perhaps that explains where they plan to get the audience from…
On our radar
TANKS VERY MUCH A collection of tanks and self-armored guns is being amassed on the National Mall ahead of Saturday’s parade to commemorate the US Army’s 250th anniversary (which happens to be on President Trump’s birthday).
BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES Civil unrest is ongoing nationwide after Trump deployed the National Guard at the end of Saturday’s “anti-ICE” protest in Los Angeles. There are reports of looting in the city.
FETTERWORTH’S Senator John Fetterman, the Democrat from Pennsylvania, stopped by “MAGA haunt” Butterworth’s last night. This evening the bistro will host Francis Fukuyama at a sold-out Wisdom of Crowds event.
New York mag gets Maced
In a new docuseries about Alex Cooper, the Call Her Daddy podcast host accuses her former coach Nancy Feldman of sexual harassment during her time playing soccer for Boston University. Step forward New York magazine, who poured kerosene on the story with a Freudian slip for the ages. In a Monday X post sharing an article about the allegation, the magazine referred to “Boston University soccer coach, Nancy Mace.”
Naturally Congresswoman Mace reacted with the measured resolve you would expect from someone who represents the austere office of– oh, who are we kidding?
“NOT ME. WRONG PERSON,” Mace wrote, alongside a screenshot of the error. “Let me be absolutely clear: I’ve never met her. I’ve never coached soccer at Boston University. And I have never – ever – sexually harassed anyone. @NYMag, and anyone repeating this lie: Take it down or lawyer up. We are demanding an immediate retraction and full correction. You don’t get to smear me with a lazy, dangerous typo.” She then quote-tweeted her own tweet to say, “So sick of the lamestream media.” A postscript was then added to the article that reads, “Cooper’s coach was Nancy Feldman. A post on X incorrectly identified her.”
Cockburn was wondering – did anyone else see Mace’s screenshot post on social media long before they’d come across the Cooper story? And are any of his readers familiar with the Streisand Effect?
The Buck stops here
Cockburn spent Sunday evening up in Friendship Heights at the house of his Spectator comrade Jacob Heilbrunn and his wife Sarah Despres, who were hosting a book party for Sam Tanenhaus’s long-awaited biography of William F. Buckley Jr. Buckley: The Life and the Revolution That Changed America is a thousand-page doorstop that took 27 years to complete – “closer to 30,” noted one guest. “This book,” wrote Christopher Sandford in his recent Speccie review, “is the product of immense learning and shows a rare familiarity with its subject and his times.” The host, dapper as ever in his Neapolitan jacket, introduced his friend Tanenhaus by quipping that Buckley’s biographer was dressed as though he were auditioning for membership in Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society of which Buckley was a notable member.
Guests supped white wine and snacked on samosas and chicken satay – and later, pizza. Future soirées may find themselves catered by Oscar Heilbrunn: the 19-year-old son of the hosts has ambitions to open a restaurant in DC one day. Heilbrunn Sr. also showed off the monstrous sound system in his basement to a few attendees, blasting Shostakovich and Duke Ellington.
In attendance: Deputy Director of National Intelligence William P. Ruger, Modern Age’s Daniel McCarthy, the Atlantic’s David Frum, the Washington Post’s Damir Marusic, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, Newsmax’s James Rosen, the Atlantic Council’s Melinda Haring and Rachel Rizzo, Steve Clemons, David Klion, James Kirchick and The Spectator’s Freddy Gray.
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A.C. Benson enters the pantheon of great English diarists
All great diarists have something intensely silly about them: Boswell’s and Pepys’s periodic bursts of lechery and panic; Chips Channon’s unrealistic dreams of political greatness leavened with breathless excitement over royal dukes and handsome boys; Alan Clark’s fits of romantic, almost Jacobite, dreaming; James Lees-Milne’s absurd flights of rage. I dare say the mania that drove the Duc de Saint-Simon in his demented campaign against Louis XIV’s attempts to create a place in court hierarchy for his bastards seemed ridiculous to his more sober contemporaries. Often the silliness comes from a mad overestimation of the writer’s ability. There is no more fascinating diary than Benjamin Haydon’s. He was an indifferent painter who never achieved the success he dreamt of. But in every sentence of his diary it is apparent to us what he himself never realised: that, though a painter of mediocrity, he was a writer of genius.
A.C. Benson, born in 1862, had the sense to make arrangements for his diary to be published after his death. The rest of his writing, with the possible exception of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’, pales to insignificance next to it. His published work is astonishingly bland. There is a screamingly funny parody of him by Max Beerbohm in A Christmas Garland: ‘More and more, as the tranquil years went by, Percy found himself able to draw a quiet satisfaction from the regularity, the even sureness, with which, in every year, one season succeeded to another.’ (Having read Benson’s staggeringly tedious Watersprings, I can report that Beerbohm does not exaggerate.) The diary, on the other hand, stretching to more than four million words, is vivacious, beadily observed and takes advantage of Benson’s position as a favourite of the great. In this beautifully edited two-volume selection by Eamon Duffy and Ronald Hyam we see what a well-placed diarist can do.
Benson was an irregularity at the heart of Victorian society, guaranteed respectability by being the son of an Archbishop of Canterbury. That archbishop, however, had his odd aspects. He proposed to his wife when he was 23 and she was 11. When they married, it soon became apparent that she was lesbian in tendency. All six of their children were lesbian or homosexual, including Fred, the sunniest of them. (Georgie, in his Mapp and Lucia novels, must be a self-portrait.) Arthur was at the centre of things, a pillar of Eton and later Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge. Queen Victoria liked him well enough to invite him to a Frogmore mausoleum service in 1900, and he later edited her letters. He went everywhere, but the degree of his waspish indiscretion was only apparent in the diary. (One of his many curious observations was that Edward VII’s heels ‘project a long way behind his ankles’.)
Cambridge University life was less demanding then than now. When Benson first arrived at Magdalene to lecture on English literature, it had only 33 students and four Fellows. He was, nevertheless, fantastically industrious, publishing more than 20 books by his early forties as well as writing the diary and as many as 40 letters every morning. Somehow this still left time for the business of getting out and paying close, sometimes unforgiving, attention to his world. There is no witness like him.
One of the joys of the diary is its engagement with the trivial squabbles of Cambridge University
One of the joys of the diary is its committed engagement with the trivial squabbles of Cambridge. In May 1914 a row erupted. The Fellows of Magdalene found that their garden had been colonised by the Master, who, without asking, had let his children keep their chickens in it. The dispute – ‘this wretched business’ – ran on for months, gloriously chronicled. When war broke out shortly afterwards, hostilities were on much the same scale.
It’s the dedication to the utterly insignificant, especially when Benson encounters celebrities, that gives the diary its special flavour. There is the visit to the elderly poet Swinburne, long withdrawn from society and living under the guardianship of Theodore Watts-Dunton. The eccentric household, unused to entertaining a guest, provides an unforgettable set piece. A pair of Swinburne’s socks were draped over the fender in the drawing room: ‘“Stay!” said Swinburne, “they are drying.” “He seems to be changing them,” said W-D.’
Certainly Benson was absurdly rapturous in important company. ‘I forgot to say that a great and memorable moment was the bringing in of a glass of lemonade for the Queen.’ But for the most part he saw things clearly. He was often in a position to record credible anecdotes at one remove – for instance, Mrs Gladstone irritating her husband on his deathbed by ‘tripping into the room’ and saying ‘You’re ever so much better’, when Gladstone was set on striking noble final attitudes.
The outbursts of judgment are often bizarre. The King of Portugal is ‘a very common-looking young man’. Belloc and Chesterton ‘really ought to be more ashamed of looking so common’. Many of Benson’s confident dicta would have been considered stuffy even by Victorians: ‘Women ought never to run on the stage. One is inclined to throw an orange at them.’ But he would often give the benefit of the doubt to a truly beautiful young man. The diary becomes steadily more open about the pleasures of conversation with intimates such as the young George Mallory, the great mountaineer. Some people evidently noticed Benson’s partiality; he was a sitting target for a slutty operative on the make like Hugh Walpole.
What really elevates the diary is the vividness of the prose. Harry Cust (in a fantastical rumour sometimes said to be Mrs Thatcher’s real grandfather) is ‘a crumpled rose-leaf, singed gnat’. The aged Dean of St Paul’s is ‘like a lion’s skin in a billiard room’. Writing like that lasts forever: and this wonderful, extensive selection is highly recommended. Duffy and Hyam have done a superb job in what is surely a labour of love. The footnotes are frequently a joy. One Master of St John’s was ‘a keen alpinist into his sixties, but so corpulent that his climbing companions refused to be roped to him in case his weight dragged them down a crevasse’. An Eton pupil, Sir Robert Filmer, ‘who succeeded to his baronetcy at the age of eight, fought at the Sudanese Battle of Omdurman on 2 September 1898. He died in France of wounds received while retrieving his pince-nez from a trench’.
Long acknowledged by archival explorers to be a great diarist, A.C. Benson has now been placed in the position where the rest of us can read him and concur. Silly as he was, and remote from commanding anything like agreement at any point, he enters the diarists’ pantheon for readers to shake their heads over in perpetuity.
Admirable in their awfulness – the siblings Gus and Gwen John
‘In 50 years’ time,’ Augustus John gloomily reflected following his sister’s death on 18 September 1939, ‘I will be known as the brother of Gwen John.’ He was right. In 2004, when the Tate mounted a joint retrospective of Augustus and Gwen John, it was Gwen who had become the major artist. The ‘variable strident chords’ of the self-styled Gypsy King, likened in his youth to Michelangelo, Rembrandt and Raphael, had been supplanted by the ‘sustained minor key’ of the nunlike recluse.
The first decades of the 20th century were what Virginia Woolf described as ‘the Age of Augustus John’; but the praise lathered on him after his own death, aged 83, in 1961 – ‘one of the greatest artists in British history’, ‘a man in the 50-megaton range’, ‘the last of the Titans’ – now seems embarrassing. The reputation of Gus, as Gwen called him, with Judith Mackrell following suit in her absorbing dual biography, had been on the wane since the 1930s. In the 1940s he despaired that ‘my work’s not good enough’. ‘I’m just a legend,’ he said in the 1950s, ‘I’m not a real person at all.’
Again, he was right: Augustus John is remembered now for his flamboyant hats, gold earrings, open marriage and the 100 offspring he is rumoured to have sired. When he walked through Chelsea, it was said, he patted the head of every child he met in case it was one of his own. Aged 82, he wrote to one of his daughters, Amaryllis, that should she ‘ever feel the need’ to have a baby, ‘just give me a nudge and I will do my best’. His suggestion, Mackrell comments, ‘might have been judged goatish, or even outlandish, to an outsider’, but to Amaryllis, ‘it reflected only their private code’.
The middle two of four children, Gwen and Gus were raised in the Welsh seaside town of Tenby, where they ran wild with their sketchbooks. Gwen was eight when their mother died in 1884, and Gus six. ‘Mama’s dead! Mama’s dead!’ the siblings chanted, charging through the house in a crazed state. The near-demented erotic pursuits of their adulthood were born from this early abandonment.
A figure of ‘vast carelessness’, as Mackrell describes him, Gus was a man on the run, brawling and shagging, while Gwen, inward-looking and fearing attention, lived and painted in slow time. He was 6ft and lavishly handsome; she was a wiry and feral 5ft; he was agnostic and she was a Catholic; he chose a large metropolitan existence and she a small life in rural France. They would appear to observers like the tortoise and the hare, but on closer inspection they were, as Gus put it, ‘much the same, really’.
Gus described the force of
his desire as ‘a sort of paranoia or emotional hailstorm’
It is the similarities that Mackrell draws out with her customary care. Cut from the same cloth, brother and sister were both monsters. Artists to the core, they were equally selfish, obsessive and dangerous to know, particularly if you had the misfortune to be loved by one of them. Gus described the force of his desire as ‘a sort of paranoia or emotional hailstorm’; as soon as he was attracted to one woman, who invariably became his model, she would be ‘immediately obliterated’ by another. Gwen was less fickle, but more terrifying. Her passions for both men and women were similarly immediate and overwhelming, affecting her, as she put it, ‘beyond reason’. She behaved like a stalker, besieging her love objects with daily letters, debasing herself, waiting on their every word. Even her mentor Rodin, with whom she was besotted for a decade, was afraid of her. His death in 1917 freed Gwen from her sickness, but her place in his life had been ‘a secret so small’, as Mackrell puts it, that she was not even invited tohis funeral.
When Gus went to the Slade, aged 16, in 1894, Gwen followed suit, but only after a fight. Doors swung open for Gus, but everything Gwen did involved a struggle, initially with their father, Edwin. When he would not let her go to Paris to be taught by Whistler, Gwen marched round the house singing ‘to Paris, to Paris’ until he gave in. When Edwin then told her that she looked, in the white dress she had copied from a painting by Manet, like a prostitute, she excised him from her life.
Included in the Paris trip was Ida Nettleship, Gwen’s best friend at the Slade before she became Gus’s wife when they were both aged 23. His maîtresse-en-titre, the beautiful and otherworldly Dorothy ‘Dorelia’ McNeill, was similarly stolen from Gwen, who then tried to steal her back when Dorelia joined her on a walking tour to Rome. The two women set off together, says Mackrell, like a ‘giddy eloping couple’, but there was what Dorelia called a ‘hard and queer’ quality to Gwen’s character and, having got as far as Toulouse, she eloped instead with a Belgian called Leonard.
No one was allowed to leave Gus, who importuned Dorelia to separate first from Gwen and then from Leonard, and live instead in ‘wonderful concubinage’ with himself and Ida. Gwen, with nothing left to lose, now sided with her brother. Even Ida, who wanted her freedom back, could see the benefits of including Dorelia in the household. Living with Gus, ‘a mean and childish creature’, was pushing her towards a breakdown. And so docile Dorelia, who did what others wanted her to do, returned to England and devoted the next 60 years to Gus and his spawn. When Ida died exhausted, aged 30, after giving birth to her sixth son, Dorelia (who died in 1969) took over the household, at which point this once radiant figure disappears from view.
It is not surprising, given his raids on her emotions, that Gwen now cordoned herself off from Gus. Moving to France, she refused to visit her nephews and nieces in England or use the studio that Gus built for her in his garden. Family was everything to Gus, while for Gwen, ‘the family has had its day. We don’t go to Heaven in families now, but one by one’.
Gwen behaved like a stalker, besieging her love objects with daily letters, waiting on their every word
While Gus’s unconventionality became a pose to sell his paintings, Gwen’s refusal to conform to any socially acceptable female norm was the cost of competing as an artist on equal terms with men. He was greedy, but she was an extremophile. As a student, she was so poor that she would break into abandoned buildings in order to sleep. When she lost her adored cat, she slept in the forest. She died, aged 63, in Dieppe, where she had gone for an overnight stay without bringing any luggage. In the chaos of war, the cause of her death, which appears to have been starvation, was left unspecified on her death certificate, and the details of where she was buried were lost. Her friend Louise Roche described Gwen at the end as ‘treating her body as though she was its executioner… To go to the doctor inconvenienced her, to take solid nourishment inconvenienced her’.
As tough and implacable as a medieval saint, Gwen painted for God. Her pictures were ‘prayers’, not objects to be bought and displayed. Despairing of her unworldliness, her patron, the American collector John Quinn, despatched his mistress, Jeanne Robert Foster, to form a friendship with his elusive genius. ‘All the pathetic dramatisation of life has fallen away,’ Jeanne reported to Quinn. ‘Gwen is real.’
Her life, said Wyndham Lewis, was ‘chaste and bare and sad’. Why, he wondered, had she kept herself ‘so isolated from the influences of her age’? She influenced, however, our own age: the successor of Gwen John is Celia Paul. Gwen’s intransigence and resolve, what Mackrell calls her ‘stubborn grit’, can be seen in her first self-portrait, painted in 1899-1900, when Gus and Ida were falling in love. Here was a woman, hand on hip, who would be no one’s wife or mother, who saw anything but the most primitive domestic conditions as ‘bourgeoise’. Gwen was not eccentric: she had a demon inside her.
It is hard to tell, Mackrell says in her opening pages, if Gus and Gwen were ‘admirable or awful’. By the end of this haunting book they seem admirable in their awfulness.
Tories score double the donations of Reform
How much have political donors gifted to their party coffers? Well, the results are now in. Today’s Electoral Commission figures bring some long overdue good news for Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives, who have come out on top: the Tories received a whopping £3.3 million of donations between the 1 January and 31 March 2025. In fact, Badenoch’s boys in blue took £1 million more than the Labour lot who received £2.3 million, and over double the £1.48 million of donations Nigel Farage’s Reform UK took. Talk about raking it in, eh?
And the Tories have more than just the raw figures to boast about: it transpires that onetime Labour supporter and video game entrepreneur Jez San donated a staggering sum of £1 million this quarter. More than that, Carphone Warehouse founder, the philanthropist David Ross, has resumed his donations to the party for the first time in three years – and he will become, the party has announced today, the group’s senior treasurer in the autumn. Today’s stats follow figures from the last quarter that revealed the Tories had received £1.9 million in donations despite their historic election defeat. Swings and roundabouts…
Sir Keir Starmer’s army didn’t do quite as well, raising £2.3 million in donations with over 50 per cent of this sum coming from unions. Discounting the trade union input altogether, Labour took just over half a million pounds from donors. £350,000 of this was from a single bequest, as the Telegraph reports, while the rest comes from just four donors – including Lord Alli who, as Mr S reported at the time, has previously spent a rather large sum on the Starmer’s clothes…
Despite its performance in the polls, Reform UK hasn’t managed to draw in quite as much money it might have hoped. Today’s figures also throw doubt on the claim that Farage’s crowd raised £1 million at a fancy £25,000-per-ticket Mayfair dinner filled with ex-Tory donors. And while Reform’s treasurer and property mogul Nick Candy promised last year he would donate a ‘seven-figure sum’ to the start-up, the money hasn’t quite transpired yet. Given the company belonging to the party’s deputy leader Richard Tice had to contribute over £600,000 this quarter, Mr S looks forward to seeing whether Candy will plug the gap next time…
David Bull is Reform UK’s new chairman
‘There are no disasters, only opportunities.’ Boris Johnson’s famous mantra is being embraced by Nigel Farage as he tries to turn Reform into a vehicle for government. Zia Yusuf’s un-resignation as party chairman last week offered Farage the chance to restructure his top team. At a press conference this morning, a chastened Yusuf handed over the baton to his successor, shaking hands under Farage’s watchful eye.
Reform’s new chairman is Dr David Bull, a former GP, TalkTV personality and onetime MEP for the Brexit party. Yusuf lavished praise on Bull, declaring him a ‘more affable and charming man than I am’ and ‘universally loved across the party’. That is a tacit acknowledgement of some of the tensions caused by Yusuf’s professionalisation drive since his appointment last summer.
Bull’s duties will be focused on rallying the Reform UK’s grassroots and sharing the burden of media duties, with back-office functions handled by a deputy. The splitting of the role is a sensible move. The Tories have long split the functions of their party chairman between a forward-facing MP and a peer focused on fund-raising. Doing both, as Yusuf found, can prove to be too much of a burden.
Bull is both a gregarious character and a longtime Farage loyalist. ‘Can’t spell ebullient without Bull’, says one insider. The new chairman fondly told his audience that Reform was ‘founded at my kitchen table’ out of the auspices of the Brexit party. Having been replaced as Reform deputy leader by Richard Tice in July 2024, Bull has impressed with his subsequent willingness to compere events like the party’s Birmingham rally in March. His medical experience could help deflect Labour attacks about Farage’s past comments on the NHS too.
It was left to Bull’s leader to handle questions from the assembled press. Farage said that his long-awaited borders announcement, expected in May, had now been ‘overtaken’ by events; no new date has yet been set for when the party’s policy will be published. Asked about today’s Electoral Commission figures which show the Tories raised £3.3 million in Q1 of 2025 compared to Reform’s £1.48 million, he pointed out that this figure was five times higher than the previous quarter.
Farage defended Nick Candy, the party’s Honorary Treasurer, but not all within Reform are impressed by him. ‘The emphasis is very much on the Honorary’, remarked one senior aide last week. For all Bull’s cheerleading, further sums will be required if Reform can compete against Labour’s unions and the Tories’ City contacts in 2029.
Did Greta Thunberg refuse to watch the October 7 video?
Did Greta Thunberg refuse to watch footage of Hamas’s 7 October atrocities? That’s the accusation being made by Israel’s defence minister, Israel Katz. Greta and her crew, upon their arrival in Israel last night, were taken into a room to be shown the harrowing truth of what Hamas did 20 months ago, says Katz. But when the video started rolling, and ‘they saw what it was about’, they ‘refused to continue watching’, he alleges.
Israel just saved you from a bloody warzone and you accuse it of war crimes? How about showing some gratitude?
This is a serious charge. Thunberg and her fellow sailors should address it with haste. For if what Mr Katz is saying is true, if they really did look away upon being shown footage of the torture and slaughter of the Jews of Southern Israel, then we need to know why. To shut one’s eyes to the grim reality of Hamas’s anti-Semitic barbarism is to be wilfully blind to one of the great horrors of our age – did you do that, Greta?
Greta’s boat, the Madleen, was intercepted by Israeli forces. She and 11 other keffiyeh-wearing agitators had been hoping to land in Gaza, to ‘break the blockade’. It was a ‘selfie yacht’, in Israel’s salty words, that was carrying a ‘tiny amount of aid’. Israel towed the boat to its port city of Ashdod. The crew, these self-imagined saviours of Gaza, are being repatriated to their countries of origin this week.
Many shrill claims are being made about Israel’s interception. We’ve been ‘kidnapped’, said Greta. They haven’t. They’re fine and they have sandwiches. ‘If anything happens to us, this is a war crime’, cried one of the boat folk as the IDF boarded. This is teenage petulance masquerading as activism. Israel just saved you from a bloody warzone and you accuse it of war crimes? How about showing some gratitude?
If these people want to see real war crimes, they could do worse than watch Hamas’s own footage of the racist terror it inflicted on the innocents of Israel. And yet, according to Katz, they turned a ‘blind eye’ to those war crimes. They looked away from the screen. His allegations are being widely reported in Israel and beyond.
Self-styled warriors for human rights refusing to watch one of the bloodiest assaults on human rights of the 21st century so far? Implacable anti-racists turning away from the worst act of anti-Jewish racism since the Nazis? If this is true, then it surely speaks to a profound moral blindness among the activist class, where they will sympathise with suffering humans everywhere except in Israel.
We await comment from Greta and the rest about whether they ‘refused’ to watch – and if so, why. To my mind, if this shunning of truth did occur, then it is of a piece with the left’s agonised and sometimes outright shameful attitude towards 7 October.
Greta and Co would only have been doing physically what the ‘pro-Palestine’ set has been doing morally for nearly two years: refusing to grapple with the enormity of what Hamas did to the Jews on that darkest day.
The activist set has a truly tortured relationship with 7 October. Some deny it, in a gross rehash of Holocaust denialism. It’s exaggerated, they cry. Women weren’t raped, they claim. Others say it was ‘resistance’. ‘This didn’t start on 7 October’, they snivellingly say, as if Hamas’s fascistic actions, its slaughter of Jewish women and burning alive of Jewish families, were an ‘understandable’ response to Israeli policy. The last people who thought a pogrom was a legitimate response to political grievance were the Nazis.
The anti-Israeli mob can’t make their minds up. They can’t decide if 7 October didn’t really happen, or it did and it was justified. Their swirling post-truth disorientation, their sick refusal to speak honestly about what an army of anti-Semites did to Jews in this very decade, is born of a depthless moral cowardice. For they know that the truth of 7 October threatens to utterly shatter that precarious moral high ground they teeter on.
To admit that Hamas visited Nazi-style violence on innocent Jews would be to admit that leftists took the wrong side in the aftermath of that grimmest crime against humanity. For self-styled anti-fascists to acknowledge that they made excuses for the worst act of fascist violence of our times is unthinkable. So they bury, or at least downplay, the truth of Hamas’s atrocities, all to the low end of preserving their own phoney moralism. Nothing as trifling as the suffering of Jews can be allowed to meddle with the self-aggrandising narratives of the new left.
We cannot know for sure if Greta and her friends really ‘refused’ to watch the 7 October footage. If they did, might this be why – because they could not bear to glimpse the barbarism committed by the Palestinian side in this war? By the side whose flag they wave and whose keffiyehs they wear? They must tell us what happened. This is important.
Progressive Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson hammers nail into DEI coffin
The Supreme Court’s recent decision in Ames v. Ohio Department of Youth Services didn’t dominate the headlines – but it should have. In a unanimous ruling, the Court quietly dismantled a legal fiction that has distorted civil rights law for decades. And in a twist no one saw coming, the opinion was authored by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the progressive icon of the bench.
At the heart of Ames was a question few Americans knew they needed to ask: can equality before the law coexist with unequal legal standards? “In 2019, Ames – a straight, white woman – interviewed and was passed over for a newly created management role, which was instead awarded to a lesbian. Days later, she was demoted, and her former spot was filled by a gay man, whom Ames alleges was far less qualified. She brought suit, asserting Title VII protects any individual from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation – majority or minority alike.”
For years, some lower courts imposed a “background circumstances” requirement on so-called majority-group plaintiffs – typically white, male, or straight individuals – forcing them to provide extra evidence to prove employment discrimination. In other words, unless they could show their employer had a “history” of discriminating against people like them, their claims often died in the cradle.
That’s not equity. That’s legalized bias.
And yet, it passed for civil rights in the age of DEI. What Ames does – what Jackson’s opinion affirms – is restore the original intent of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act: to protect everyone from discrimination, not just a preferred few. As a black conservative, I come from a community that has endured slavery, Jim Crow and redlining. And believe me when I say – despite what the liberal narrative often assumes – I want the absolute best for my community. I love seeing black lawyers, black doctors, and black CEOs. But we cannot get there by using discriminatory tactics in reverse. That’s not justice – it’s revenge. And this isn’t about “respectability politics.” It’s about true equality, as envisioned by the civil rights movement: a fair shot, access to opportunity, hard work, and maybe some luck. That’s the formula.
This ruling matters. It matters because, somewhere along the way, we began confusing justice with revenge. We stopped believing in a level playing field and started pretending the only path forward was to tilt the scales – systematically, institutionally and indefinitely.
DEI bureaucrats call it equity. But it’s just discrimination with a friendly face.
What’s striking is how deeply this mindset has infiltrated not just hiring decisions, but the law itself. Under the now-overturned “background circumstances” test, employers could engage in blatantly unfair practices, so long as the outcome appeared progressive. Even if you had valid reasons to fire someone – poor performance, lack of qualifications – if they belonged to the right demographic and had a plausible story, courts often treated that as enough to move forward with a discrimination claim.
Imagine being punished not for what you did, but for the optics of who you are. That’s not justice. It’s institutionalized scapegoating.
Most Americans, regardless of race, don’t realize how far we’ve drifted from the ideals of the civil rights movement. The 1964 Civil Rights Act was never about replacing one racial hierarchy with another. It was about equality – real equality. Individual dignity. The end of state-sanctioned favoritism.
It wasn’t about imposing quotas or guilt-tripping employers into hiring based on skin color, sexual orientation, or identity group checklists. It was about ending all forms of discrimination – not rebranding them as “anti-racism.”
To be clear, none of this means we ignore injustice. Disparities exist. Historical wounds haven’t vanished. But fairness doesn’t require us to discard merit or individuality. If someone lacks access due to poverty, geography, or adversity, help them – yes. Use income, ZIP code or educational background as indicators of disadvantage. Target outreach to the overlooked. Give people a chance to compete on merit.
But that’s not what DEI has become. Today’s diversity regime treats racial identity as a proxy for virtue and victimhood. It’s a worldview obsessed with group outcomes, not individual stories. And the result is a Kafkaesque system where some are punished for being born in the “wrong” demographic.
We see it in elite university admissions, where disadvantaged white or Asian students are leapfrogged by wealthier peers from “underrepresented” groups. We see it in corporate hiring, where racial quotas are dressed up as “benchmarks” and middle managers are told that skin color can double as a résumé booster. And we’ve now seen it – thankfully, for the last time – in a courtroom, where white plaintiffs were forced to prove they deserved justice in the first place.
That’s what Ames ended. Not just a legal technicality, but a moral failure.
Justice Jackson deserves credit here. Though she has championed progressive causes, her opinion in Ames affirms something deeper than politics: that the law cannot deliver justice by making it conditional on identity. She, more than many liberals today, seems to understand that you can’t fix discrimination by flipping the script. You don’t end bias by institutionalizing it in reverse.
What’s needed now is the courage to apply this principle far beyond the courtroom. Colleges, companies, media outlets and political institutions must realize that genuine fairness can’t be achieved by favoring some at the expense of others. Real inclusion happens when individuals are judged on their merits, their efforts, and their potential – not their racial credentials.
The original civil rights vision wasn’t a color-coded spoils system. It was radical precisely because it treated all Americans as moral equals. That vision has been hijacked by a new class of racial administrators who see every imbalance as injustice and every unequal result as evidence of oppression.
But with this ruling, the tide may finally be turning. The Supreme Court – unanimously, no less – has sent a message: the law is not a tool for managing grievances. It is a shield for everyone. Even the unfashionable. Even the majority.
Watch: Eco-activist Greta Thunberg deported from Israel – by plane
Well, well, well. After the failed attempt by Greta Thunberg and her comrades in the Freedom Flotilla Coalition on ship Madleen to take aid into Gaza, it transpires that the climate activist has now been put on an, er, plane as Israel deports her to France. The eco-zealot has long been vocal about her disdain for air travel and so her own carbon-dioxide emitting journey back to Europe in what Mr S assumes Thunberg believes is a frightfully polluting jet – calculated, by the Telegraph, to likely emit more than half a tonne of CO2 per person – is a final twist of the knife by the Israeli government.
The eco-zealot has long been vocal about her disdain for air travel
The 22-year-old is currently travelling to Paris before she will then take further transport to Sweden. Her ejection from the Middle East comes after her and her team persistently ignored calls from Israel to abandon their mission. The activist group was then intercepted by the country and taken to the Israeli port of Ashdod, where they were instructed to watch a video of the 7 October attack by Hamas on Israel – but, according to the country’s defence minister, they refused to do so.
The legal rights group representing the activists in Israel, Adalah, confirmed that Thunberg – along with two other activists and a journalist – had agreed to be deported from the country. A spokesperson from the firm told the Daily Mail that Thunberg had claimed: ‘I do more outside of Israel than if I am forced to stay here for a few weeks.’ And even President Donald Trump has waded into the debacle after a clip emerged on Monday morning in which Thunberg claimed she had been kidnapped by Israel. ‘I think Israel has enough problems without kidnapping Greta Thunberg,’ Trump remarked. Ouch.
Watch the clip here:
Civil servants told to quit if they don’t like Gaza stance
To Whitehall, where Foreign Office staff are kicking up a fuss about the UK government’s stance on the Israel-Palestine conflict. As the Times reports, last month over 300 civil servants wrote to Foreign Secretary David Lammy to protest the continued arms sales to Israel – blasting it as a ‘disregard for international law’. The mandarins also criticised Israel’s foreign minister’s visit to London that took place ‘despite concerns about violations of international law’ and insisted the Labour lot’s stance had led to ‘the erosion of global norms’. Oo er.
The letter didn’t much impress permanent secretary Sir Oliver Robbins and his deputy Nick Dyer. Responding, the duo stated it was in the civil servant job description to enact government policy ‘wholeheartedly’ – even if they disagreed with it. While there exist mechanisms in place for staffers to challenge policy they didn’t like, the pair said that if that didn’t work then mandarins should leave. They added: ‘If your disagreement with any aspect of government policy or action is profound, your ultimate recourse is to resign from the civil service. This is an honourable course.’ That’s them told!
For its part, the Foreign Office has said in a statement that staff are expected to provide impartial advice as is explained in their civil servant code. It added: ‘Since day one, this government has rigorously applied international law in relation to the war in Gaza… There are systems in place which allow [civil servants] to raise concerns if they have them.’
And yet the response of the top two has still sparked ‘outrage’, according to a civil servant signatory of the letter, while an ex-official who had sight of the exchange blasted Robbins’s reply as ‘obfuscation’. ‘This simply provides the government with supposed “plausible deniability”,’ they fumed, while the first raged to the Beeb: ‘[There’s] frustration and a deep sense of disappointment that the space for challenge is being further shut down.’ But annoyed as they may be by the response of their seniors, will there be a mass exodus of ‘honourable’ mandarins over the matter? Don’t hold your breath…
J.D. Vance: deport Derek Guy
Forget the protesters versus police clash on the West Coast: this week’s fiercest battle of wits is between a Vietnamese fashion critic and the Vice President of the United States.
The man running an anonymous X account dedicated to critiquing politicians’ attire, Derek Guy, may find himself America’s next top deportee.
Guy, who has criticized Pete Hegseth’s USA socks and Sam Altman’s strange trouser bagginess, took to X Sunday evening, to come clean about his own illegal residence and disgust with the Trump administration’s deportation agenda.
“My family escaped Vietnam after the Tet Offensive and went through an arduous journey that eventually landed them in the Canada,” Guy wrote. From Canada, his dad went to the US to work, overstaying the legal timeframe. He and his mom joined him, he explained. “The border between Canada and the United States was pretty porous (as it is today, for the most part). But either way, since I came here without legal documentation, I eventually fell into the category of being an undocumented immigrant.”
Guy said he believes it’s “unreasonable to deport millions of people who have contributed positively to society.”
Trump-era deportation rates have never been higher, and the rising deportee rate averages about 850 per day, according to the New York Times.
Tech entrepreneur Daniel Francis, aka growing_daniel on X, got the Vice President’s attention and referenced Guy’s post: “JD Vance I know you’re reading this and you have the opportunity to do the funniest thing ever.”
Vance responded to Daniel’s post with a GIF of Jack Nicholson in Anger Management, slowly nodding and smiling.
The X exchange did not end there. Guy, who has criticized Vance for his pants being too short and tight responded, “i think i can outrun you in these clothes,” alongside images of Vance’s tight fits to prove his point.
Several hours later, the Department of Homeland Security piggybacked off the exchange with a Spy Kids GIF, perhaps indicating that they would look into the matter.
Guy and Vance’s back-and-forth followed violent protests in Los Angeles, largely led by the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights. Over the weekend, more than 1,000 protesters in LA surrounded and “assaulted ICE law enforcement officers, slashed tires, defaced buildings and taxpayer funded property,” according to a DHS press release. The department added, “It took the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) two hours to respond.”
Trump fanned the flames from Truth Social, posting in all caps, “Arrest the people in face masks, now!” and “Looking really bad in L.A. BRING IN THE TROOPS!!!” The President also deployed the National Guard, including 300 California National Guard troops. The unrest has continued throughout the week. Guy has yet to comment on the outfits worn by the activists.
Keir Starmer must raise defence spending higher and faster
Mark Rutte, the former prime minister of the Netherlands, has been secretary general of Nato for less than nine months. Rutte knew when he decided to seek the job that it would not be easy, but even the famously phlegmatic and unflappable Dutchman cannot have foreseen the intensity of events. Even so, he has stepped up to the challenge. At the Royal Institute of International Affairs, yesterday, he issued a stark warning:
This is a huge political and financial headache for Sir Keir Starmer
Because of Russia, war has returned to Europe… Russia has teamed up with China, North Korea and Iran. They are expanding their militaries and their capabilities. Putin’s war machine is speeding up – not slowing down… Russia could be ready to use military force against Nato within five years.
This threat led logically to the conclusion that Nato must spend far more on its defence than it currently does, especially in light of a likely reduced commitment from the United States. It was true that all Nato member states were likely to reach the target of spending 2 per cent of GDP on defence this year, but, Rutte pointed out, that commitment dated back to 2014. (Actually, he is being generous: it was originally included in the Ministerial Guidance of Nato’s Defence Planning Committee in 2006.)
The situation is now transformed, and, according to Rutte, it is inevitable that the summit will agree a ‘Nato-wide commitment’ to spend 5 per cent of GDP: this will comprise 3.5 per cent on core military requirements and 1.5 per cent on ‘defence and security-related investments, including infrastructure and building industrial capacity’.
The secretary general explained that this was not a figure chosen at random, but represented the fact that Nato needs a ‘quantum leap’ in defence. His list of requirements was daunting: a 400 per cent increase in air and missile defence, thousands more tanks and armoured vehicles, doubling of logistics, transportation, medical support and other capabilities. Nevertheless, it is hard to say Rutte is wrong in any of this. As he stressed, ‘if we do not invest more, our collective defence is not credible’.
This is a huge political and financial headache for Sir Keir Starmer. It is barely three months since the Prime Minister announced that he would increase defence spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP from April 2027, and that the government’s ‘ambition’ was to go further and spend 3 per cent ‘in the next parliament’. This was welcome but insufficient, especially as countries bordering Russia were racing ahead beyond 3 per cent; Poland, for example. will spend 4.7 per cent this year.
In his introduction to the Strategic Defence Review (SDR), published last week, Starmer declared that he wanted the United Kingdom ‘to lead in Nato’. That will not be possible without a specific commitment, not merely an ambition, to increase our defence spending considerably beyond 2.5 per cent. With the United States stepping back, there is a genuine opening for a greater leadership role: France still does not participate in Nato’s Nuclear Planning Group, while Germany has a long way to go to make the Bundeswehr anything like a credible fighting force. But the UK cannot assume that role on the cheap.
Where does the money come from? This week’s spending review is likely to see substantial increases for healthcare (perhaps £30 billion) and transport (£15.6 billion), and other departments are already envious of the Ministry of Defence’s extra £5 billion a year. It is not enough. Starmer will not give a date for increasing spending to 3 per cent, and got into a God-awful mess on the issue last week. Meanwhile, the additional £40 billion of taxes in last year’s Budget were a one-off ‘to restore financial stability’, so further increases would be politically difficult.
I fear the Prime Minister will try to talk his way round the problem. He declared last week that he was ‘100 per cent confident’ that the SDR would make the UK ‘ready for war’, but the reviewers made it clear that increasing spending even to 3 per cent was ‘vital’. Vital, not an ambition. Downing Street has been spinning that defence capabilities are ‘not just about cash’, pointing to the nuclear deterrent, the Royal Navy’s aircraft carriers and the ‘quality’ of personnel.
Obfuscation, sleight of hand and hair-splitting will not wash. Hard decisions, dreadfully hard ones, will need to be taken. Mark Rutte was clear: ‘Let’s not kid ourselves, we are all on the eastern flank now’. Afterwards, his remarks were even more devastating:
If you would not go to the 5 per cent, you could still have the National Health Service… the pension system, et cetera, but you had better learn to speak Russian.
Your move, Sir Keir.
How has the media wronged Nadiya Hussain?
Nadiya Hussain’s recipes have become staples in households across the country and acquired for the TV presenter and cookery writer the status of national treasure. However, her reaction to the BBC’s decision not to commission a new series from her leaves a bitter taste and prompts the thought that her secret ingredient all along might have been celebrity entitlement.
Over the weekend, the Great British Bake Off winner posted a video update on Instagram for her 950,000 followers. After explaining her social media absence (events in Gaza were making it ‘hard to post about food in a positive way’) and letting us know about changes in her professional dealings (‘I’m way more mindful of who I work with, brands I work with, especially if they are brands that support the genocide’), Hussain revealed that the BBC had ‘decided that they didn’t want to commission a show’. This marked ‘a huge turning point because it’s something I’ve done for the past ten years’ but she was ‘really excited’ about the future and would be ‘trying to be my truest, most honest self’.
She explained:
‘I was already on this steady trajectory of change and I was kind of thinking about where I wanted my career to go, and when BBC decided that they didn’t want to commission the show anymore, it really did kind of solidify everything for me, and it made me kind of dig my heels in and think “Okay, I know where I want to be.”’
Pare back the first-world-problems confessional prose and the jarring metaphors – can you dig your heels in while on a trajectory of change? – and what you’ll find is grievance. Hussain wants us to know not only that the BBC hasn’t invited her to make another programme, a decision that would naturally be disappointing for her, but that she is a victim.
Of what, you ask?
She continues:
‘Actually, you know, it’s really difficult as a Muslim woman, I work in an industry that doesn’t always support people like me or recognise my talent or full potential. There’s a lot of gaslighting, making me feel like what’s actually happening isn’t happening.’
That ‘as a Muslim woman’ comes out of nowhere and squats unpleasantly at the centre of this drama. Hussain does not elaborate, so it is difficult to tell if something has happened behind closed doors to make her feel that her religious affiliation is implicated here. It would be unusual if that were the case given how heavily the BBC has invested in her as a face of the corporation’s lifestyle programming. Might it be that, rather than the media industry changing, it is Hussain herself and her outlook that have changed? In 2017, she shared her concern that she might have been Bake Off’s ‘token Muslim’, when she considered her Muslim identity ‘incidental’, but by 2020 she was telling the Observer a different story.
In that interview, she described herself as ‘a brown Muslim woman, working in a very male-dominated, Caucasian industry’, admitting that, had she been asked about these matters five years previously ‘I wouldn’t have entertained it. I would have said, Look, can we just talk about the cooking and the baking?’ However, she pointed to the Black Lives Matter movement as a turning point, saying that the conversations it provoked ‘would have made me uncomfortable’ in the past because part of me wants to be a part of the white middle-aged Caucasian industry’. Hussain had since decided that: ‘The truth is, I’m never going to blend in. They will always tower over me, they will always be whiter than me, and they will be more English than I am, and they’re men. I will never, ever blend in.’
That the industry she reproaches has gone out of its way to promote her
Her ‘as a Muslim woman’ makes more sense in this context. If she has been mistreated or discriminated against because of her Islamic faith or her skin colour, that is reprehensible and those responsible should feel profound shame at treating anyone in that manner, let alone a great British success story like Hussain. Certainly, she has come in for contemptible racial and religious abuse in the past, but it is hard to imagine such attitudes being commonplace in the highly progressive and evermore diverse worlds of London TV production and publishing.
Then again, her reference to the BLM movement in that Observer interview possibly hints at something else. The summer of madness that followed the murder of George Floyd taught us many things, and one of the most informative was the success of identity politics in recruiting hitherto apolitical people to its army of righteous victimhood. Viewing every event, personal and political, local and global, through the lens of race and other immutable characteristics became socially acceptable, if not virtuous, if not compulsory.
Maybe that’s all that’s at work here, identity politics narcissism, and if so, it’s nothing we haven’t heard from plenty of other celebrities. But it still doesn’t account for Hussain’s assertion that her industry ‘doesn’t always support people like me or recognise my talent or full potential’. Without wishing to be rude, if she feels her talent and potential haven’t been properly recognised after a decade of fame and fortune in which she became almost inescapable on TV, newspapers, magazines and bookstores, what would it take to satisfy her? Baking a cake for the Royal Family? Done it. Appearing on Desert Island Discs? Been there. An MBE? Got one.
Has Hussain considered that, far from being hard done by, she is a very privileged woman who has had opportunities heaped upon her for the last ten years? That the industry she reproaches has gone out of its way to promote her, in one venture after another? That just because, after all this, she still expects more, doesn’t mean she’s entitled to it?
Apart from The Great British Bake Off, The Chronicles of Nadiya, Nadiya’s British Food Adventure, Nadiya’s Family Favourites, Nadiya’s Party Feasts, Nadiya’s Asian Odyssey, Nadiya’s Time to Eat, Nadiya Bakes, Nadiya’s American Adventure, Nadiya’s Everyday Baking, Nadiya’s Simple Spices, Nadiya’s Cook Once, Eat Twice, 18 appearances on The One Show, 15 appearances on Loose Women, a column in The Times, ten cookbooks, six children’s books, three picture books, and an autobiography, what has the media industry ever done for Nadiya Hussain?
Can Trump have Newsom arrested for fiddling while LA burns?
A great American city is descending into chaos, and the leader most capable and concerned enough to save it is 2,500 miles away, sitting in the Oval Office. Meanwhile as they can see the smoke rise from their houses, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom are so desperate to see President Donald J. Trump fail, they would sacrifice their own constituents on the altar of political expediency rather than intervene to protect life and liberty.
For his part, the President has suggested that border czar Tom Homan was right to threaten to arrest Newsom. “You cross that line, it’s a felony to knowingly harbor and conceal an illegal alien. It’s a felony to impede law enforcement doing their job.” But unlike Wisconsin state judge Hannah Dugan, currently under federal indictment for obstructing ICE, it does not appear that Newsom has actively enabled the escape of an alien or personally obstructed any law enforcement agent in the course of his duties.
President Trump is keeping his campaign promise to end the invasion of America’s southern border by illegal aliens, including human traffickers, narcotics cartels and criminal gangs, among others. Nearly 11 million people entered the United States illegally during the Biden administration.
Since the President’s return to office, in cities from Miami to St. Paul to New York City, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been rounding up illegal aliens in large-scale raids. On June 6, protests erupted in Los Angeles in response to the arrests of aliens with significant criminal histories including murder, rape, and child abuse. On June 7, President Trump activated 2000 National Guardsman to begin to restore order. Rioters in Los Angeles, some waving Mexican flags and wearing keffiyehs, hurled rocks, projectiles and concrete at officers; smashed windows; and torched vehicles to impede law enforcement.
On June 8, Newsom demanded that Trump rescind his deployment of the National Guard and claimed, bizarrely, that “We didn’t have a problem until Trump got involved.” Meanwhile, masked protesters spat on and burned American flags, blocked major freeways, and chanted obscenities about the President. The violence, now into day four, shows no sign of abating. Local and state officials show no intention of moving to protect the citizenry. Indeed, Newsom has threatened to drag the President into court over the deployment of troops.
Nevertheless, and contrary to the claims of his political adversaries, the President can and should act in the face of immediate and ongoing danger to persons and property. The situation in Los Angeles also threatens the work of law enforcement agents and may poison illegal entry enforcement efforts underway across the country. President Trump and his Cabinet have at least three federal statutory tools at their disposal to quell the riots.
The Insurrection Act of 1807 has been used by chief executives from Thomas Jefferson to George H.W. Bush to quell internal rebellion. The statute permits the President to call up the militia (i) upon the request of the state governor; (ii) at the behest of the state legislature; (iii) as necessary to enforce the laws of the United States or to suppress rebellion against the authority of the United States.
Under Title 10 the President possess the authority to press the National Guard into federal service to repel a foreign invasion, suppress rebellion, or faithfully execute the laws of the United States. Section 10 authority does not require the active cooperation of a sitting governor. Indeed, President Lyndon B. Johnson utilized Title 10 authority in 1965 to protect civil rights demonstrators marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, unsheltered by avowed segregationist and Alabama Governor, George Wallace.
The Department of Homeland Security has power under Title 40 to protect federal property and persons on such property. While more limited in its application, this provision would protect the federal buildings and officers that have come under attack in recent days.
The President’s musings about sending in the marines would be more unusual, but again, not unprecedented, and again, not unfamiliar to the golden state. In 1992, Governor Pete Wilson pleaded with President George H.W. Bush to send in the military after the Rodney King riots upended all sense of order in Los Angeles. Under the Insurrection Act, President Bush deployed thousands of army and marine servicemen to join the National Guard in what was essentially a military occupation of a city spiraling out of control. Let us pray Los Angeles in 2025 does not come to that.
Sizewell C won’t save Ed Miliband
Ed Miliband has suddenly realised that you cannot run an electricity grid on intermittent renewables alone. The Energy Secretary’s announcement this morning of £14.2 billion worth of funding for a new plant at Sizewell C, together with cash for Small Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) and continued research into the holy grail of nuclear fusion, is an admission that energy policy so far has been far too concentrated on wind and solar.
Ed Miliband has promised that his green energy policy will reduce our bills by £300 a year by the end of this Parliament
But nothing that Miliband has unveiled does anything to help the energy and climate secretary achieve his ambition to decarbonise the electricity supply by 2030 – or ease the coming crunch as he tries to reach that target. It has already been 15 years since the government approved plans for a new nuclear plant at Hinkley C – which developers EDF promised would be ready to cook our Christmas turkeys by 2017. The earliest it will now open is 2029, by which time it will have cost at least £46 billion.
Hinkley C is proposed to use the same design, which has proved difficult and costly to build in France and Finland, too. Why Miliband should think it will be any different this time around is hard to tell. To judge by past experience, it will be the 2040s before Sizewell C is cooking our turkeys. The only change in Sizewell C’s case is that the UK taxpayer will be bearing far more of the construction costs. In Hinkley C’s case, EDF is supposed to be bearing all the risk; with Sizewell C, that has been mostly transferred to the taxpayer.
Nor are SMRs going to save Miliband. There is logic in reducing the scale of nuclear reactors so that they can be built on a production line rather than by bespoke design on-site. It is good that Rolls Royce has won the competition for government cash to develop its SMR design, £2.5 billion funding for which has also been announced today. Nevertheless, there is hardly anyone who believes that SMRs will be up and running before 2035. There is also no guarantee they will prove cheaper than existing large nuclear plants.
As for nuclear fusion, that is still worth pursuing, such is the potential prize. But the International Energy Agency (IEA) believes that the second half of this century is a more realistic timescale to expect the technology to be commercialised – if even then. That will be a hundred years after the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission suggested that his children’s generation would live to enjoy electricity which was “too cheap to meter”. It is unlikely to be in time for the government’s overall 2050 net zero target, let alone Miliband’s 2030 target for decarbonising the grid.
Meanwhile, existing nuclear plants are rapidly approaching the end of their lives, with all but Sizewell B scheduled to close by 2030. According to the National Energy Systems Operator (NESO), the 6.1 GW of nuclear power the UK had available in 2023 will fall to between 3.5 GW and 4.1 GW by 2030, even if the lives of some current plants can be extended.
While we are unlikely to see new nuclear power before 2030, the bill for building Sizewell C certainly will begin to land on our doormats by then – either through a surcharge on energy bills or through general taxation. That is something of a problem for Miliband because, as we should never stop reminding him, he has promised that his green energy policy will reduce our bills by £300 a year by the end of this Parliament. That is looking a more foolish pledge by the day.
Farewell to the Frederick Forsyth I knew
We writers generally live dull and boring lives, tied to our desks painfully wresting words out of mundane experiences: not so Frederick Forsyth, who has died aged 86.
Freddie’s life was almost as exciting as the plots of one of his bestselling thrillers
Freddie’s life was almost as exciting as the plots of one of his bestselling thrillers, embracing as it did the triple careers of novelist, foreign correspondent, and spy. The other unusual thing about him compared to most other modern writers is that he was a convinced and outspoken small c conservative. Forsyth had a fully justified scorn for the inanities and dangers of the contemporary Left.
I first got to know Freddie around 2000, when I was trying to contact former members of the OAS, the French secret army of right-wing terrorists. That group’s near-miss attempts to assassinate president Charles de Gaulle for his betrayal of the cause of French Algeria formed the subject matter of Forsyth’s first, and best known, thriller: The Day of the Jackal.
I suspected, knowing Freddie’s political views and his admiration for military men, that he had a touch of sneaking sympathy for the OAS desperadoes and would know where to find them. I was correct. After he had put me in touch with the daughters of Colonel Jean-Marie Bastien-Thiry, the rocket scientist who organised the ambush of de Gaulle that opens Jackal, (and was shot by a firing squad for his pains), I got to know Forsyth. I soon developed an awed admiration for a man who became something of a hero to me.
Though we were of different generations and I could never have called this intensely private man a friend, we did have things in common that drew me to him: we were both only children. Both the sons of parents who had kept a shop in the same small market town: Ashford in Kent. This background in ‘trade’ had led to severe bullying at his public school, Tonbridge, to which he had won a scholarship.
He escaped from there to join the RAF as a pilot, leading to a lifelong love for flying. After that, he worked as a reporter for the East Anglian Daily Times and then joining Reuters, where he was posted to Paris, then Germany. Here he found plenty of material for both Jackal and his subsequent thriller, The Odessa File.
France in the early 1960s was embroiled in the hopeless and bloody attempt to cling on to its huge North African colony, Algeria, which had a population of a million Europeans, against a rebellion by the Arab nationalist FLN representing the majority population. Brought to power to crush the revolt and maintain French rule, de Gaulle instead opened talks with the FLN, which led to them taking over an independent Algeria and the mass flight of Algeria’s white population to France.
The OAS came close to both killing de Gaulle and overthrowing his regime in a military coup. For all his love for law and order and respect for authority, the romantic in Forsyth admired these men of violence and their devotion to a lost cause.
It was the same romantic streak and sympathy for the underdog that led Freddie to his second career as a spy. He only publicly revealed in his autobiography in 2015 what his admirers had long wondered about: that the authentic atmosphere and meticulous detail of his books was drawn from personal experience as a secret agent. While reporting for Reuters from West Germany at the height of the Cold War, Forsyth was approached by two English gentlemen who invited him for dinner. Over the meal they identified themselves as MI6 officers and asked Forsyth to cross the newly-erected Berlin wall and take a message to ‘friends’ in the communist East.
The patriot and the adventurer in Freddie didn’t hesitate: “Was I supposed to tell them to ‘naff off’?”. Using his cover as a journalist he operated as a courier in East Germany and other Communist states, keeping one step ahead of the Stasi and the KGB as he travelled back and forth across the Iron Curtain.
Forsyth’s third thriller, The Dogs of War about white mercenaries attempting to oust an African dictator, was also grounded in raw personal experience: this time of the tragic Nigerian civil war in the late 1960s. Forsyth had joined the BBC and was sent to Nigeria to cover the attempt by the Christian south-eastern portion of the country to break away from the Muslim-dominated north and set up the independent state of Biafra.
The BBC faithfully reflected the then-Labour government policy in backing the Nigerians, even when this led to mass starvation among the Biafrans. Forsyth, who passionately sided with Biafra, soon found himself at odds with the corporation. Forsyth had formed a close friendship with the charismatic Biafran leader, Emeka Ojukwu. His partisan reporting from the Biafran side inevitably led to a parting of the ways with the BBC.
Back in London and unemployed, he wrote his first book, The Biafra Story, a non-fiction account of the war. Seeking a lucrative means of earning a living, he holed up in a friend’s flat and began writing The Day of the Jackal. His former employers at the BBC, puzzled by his disappearance, sent a minion round to visit him in case he had committed suicide, only to find him hard at work bashing out the book on his old-fashioned typewriter. (Freddie was notoriously averse to modern technology, and used a typewriter rather than a computer to the very end).
A novel by an unknown author about an assassination attempt on a man who we know died of natural causes did not immediately find a publisher. But Forsyth persisted; on his 14th attempt, Jackal was accepted. Serialised in the London Evening Standard, it swiftly became a wildly successful bestseller.
Readers prized the gritty detail and breathtaking tension of Forsyth’s books. They were more realistic than the fantasy world of Ian Fleming’s James Bond, and the plots more simple and clear cut than the convoluted ambiguities of his left-wing rival John le Carre. For the next half century, Forsyth’s books continued to sell in spades.
Director Fred Zinnemann’s faithful translation of the Jackal to the silver screen starring Edward Fox as the suave hitman anti-hero, cemented Forsyth’s place as the best-read of contemporary thriller writers, his books selling 70 million copies worldwide in 30 languages. His two follow-up thrillers, including The Dogs of War were also made into popular movies. Forsyth became a millionaire with a luxury lifestyle to match.
Taking advantage of Ireland’s generous tax breaks for authors, Forsyth moved to a rural retreat there with his first wife Carrie and their two sons. But the Troubles were still in full spate. Fearing that a patriotic right-wing Englishman and his family might make a tempting target for the IRA, Freddie soon returned to his native land.
After his first marriage failed, Forsyth and his second wife Sandy settled in a bungalow in Buckinghamshire, leading a quiet domestic life only interrupted by his trips to trouble spots abroad to research his carefully plotted later thrillers like The Fourth Protocol, Icon and The Afghan. Unlike le Carre, Forsyth was unashamedly on the side of the western world in its successive struggles against Communism and later the threats of Islamism and a resurgent and hostile Russia.
An old-fashioned English gentlemen in the best sense, Forsyth continued to take a close interest in current affairs, writing a robustly right-wing weekly column in the Daily Express until 2023. Despite, or because of his experience in Europe, he was a committed Brexiteer. He disliked political correctness, and was notably lukewarm about a ‘progressive’ updated version of the Jackal screened last year starring Eddie Redmayne. (Although he cheerfully pocketed the royalty cheque). As a writer he was in the grand tradition of John Buchan and Geoffrey Household. He had no le Carre style pretensions to be a great novelist. Forsyth was happy to be a storyteller who sought simply to entertain. In that aim, he more than succeeded.