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Stalemate over Taiwan is the best we can hope for
The United States of China, anyone? The idea that a federal China might be able to accommodate within it a relatively autonomous Taiwan is one of the more radical solutions mooted to the thorny problem of Taiwan’s status. The difficulty, of course, is that neither the Chinese Communist party nor Taiwan’s leaders would find such an outcome remotely acceptable. The CCP will not countenance a loosening of its control over mainland China; the Taiwanese, for their part, see in Hong Kong’s recent sad trajectory a vision of their own future should their politicians ever accept an offer of special status within China.
At the other end of the spectrum lies the possibility that a sacrifice may one day be made of Taiwan by its erstwhile friends around the globe – offered up to China in exchange for a bit of peace and quiet alongside a stable global economy. To many, this smacks of appeasement. Yet any attempt by a powerful and determined China to force Taiwan into the fold would carry extraordinary risks. How many civilian casualties and how much damage to Taiwan’s infrastructure would the island’s leadership tolerate before giving in to Chinese demands? And when push came to shove, how far would the Americans and the Europeans be prepared to go to help Taiwan defend itself? Alongside the appalling economic fallout should maritime trade suffer serious and prolonged disruption there is the prospect of escalation between the US and China culminating in a nuclear exchange.
For Kerry Brown, a former diplomat and now Professor of Chinese Studies at King’s College, London, talk of Taiwan as an international flashpoint tends to obscure the experience of the people who call it home. The Taiwan Story is in part an attempt to remedy this, offering readers a short survey of the island’s history and in particular its trajectory since Chiang Kai-shek and his army fled there from the mainland in 1949. Intended as a temporary retreat during the Republic of China’s fight against the Chinese communists, it ended up becoming home. The result has been two Chinas, their paths steadily diverging across the second half of the 20th century and into the present.
Brown reveals Taiwan to his readers as a place of fascinating pluralism, where the culture of the island’s aboriginal peoples has mixed and mingled with Chinese Confucianism, Christianity, the legacies of Japan’s colonial empire, industrial modernity and, most recently, liberal democracy. We learn of the wildly successful bet made, back in the late 1980s, on semi-conductors, which have since become integral to our computerised way of life. So complex are the technology and associated supply chains required for making the most advanced chips – just one of the lasers used in the process contains more than 450,000 components – that even now China remains around a decade behind Taiwan in this crucial endeavour. Analysts talk of Taiwan’s ‘silicon shield’: so essential is the island to global electronics that even China may think twice about risking the profound economic instability that an attack would bring.
The Taiwan Story is less a deep dive into Taiwan’s life and culture than a clear-sighted assessment of the international trade-offs that govern its people’s fate, most of all the trade-off between prosperity and security. ‘Chinese conflict with Taiwan,’ writes Brown, ‘would remake the world, leaving behind it a planet that is poorer and even more profoundly divided than it is at present.’ Yet analysts disagree, we discover, over the value of the silicon shield. Taiwan’s semiconductor supremacy surely serves to heighten the territory’s value to China. And should production be set back during an attack on Taiwan, China’s competitors would suffer just as much as China itself. All this is part of a deeper fate that the Taiwanese have come to share with other peoples in the region: having China as their major trading partner and the US as their major security guarantor.
A difficult reality, no doubt – but, argues Brown, the alternatives are worse. He makes a strong case for the status of Taiwan being essentially irresolvable on the basis of current thinking about sovereignty and identity, both within East Asia and beyond. It is possible that our conceptions may evolve, says Brown, citing climate change as an example of a challenge that has required new thinking about sovereignty and international co-operation. In the meantime, the priority must be to avoid what he calls ‘zero-sum thinking’: an insistence on seeing the Taiwan question as part of an inevitable cultural and ideological clash between China and the West which must one day be settled in armed confrontation. Brown notes the unhelpful role played here by politicians, including Mike Pompeo and Liz Truss, who visited Taiwan after leaving office and made grand pronouncements about a ‘global battle for freedom’ (Truss) rather than seeking to understand the complex sensitivities of this particular issue.
There are situations, thinks Brown – and no doubt this is the diplomat in him – where stalemate is actually rather a good outcome. Profoundly uncomfortable though it must be for the people of Taiwan, the best that we can presently hope for is tacit recognition on all sides that we currently lack the means to solve this particular dilemma. Passing on one’s problems to a future generation is usually considered bad form. In this case, it may be an act of great wisdom and mercy.
Playing Monopoly is not such a trivial pursuit
Which came first to the designers of chess: the rules or the metaphor? It feels impossible to prise the system from the story: a military battle between two monarchs, each with perfectly symmetrical assets and equally balanced capabilities. Yet there have been dozens of ‘reskins’ of chess, swapping the kings and their minions for characters from, say, Lord of the Rings, or The Simpsons, or even, bewilderingly, M&M chocolates.
Play is the primary way in which every human first tests and explores the world
Sometimes the new metaphor imbues the game with a socio-political frisson. A recent example pitches rockers – white men in leathers holding screaming guitars – against jazz musicians – black men in white suits nursing saxophones. Here chess is transformed into a mid-century fight for cultural dominance, a clash between old and new forms, with a rippling subtext of race and appropriation. Beneath the costumes, however, chess’s ancient mechanics remain unchanged, even while, to our minds, the game feels freshly pointed.
‘What is internally consistent within a game need not reflect anything about reality,’ writes Kelly Clancy, a neuro-scientist and the author of Playing with Reality, a poised and compelling history of games as an intellectual force, as well as a grave warning about their role in shaping the future. ‘Yet games have been increasingly adopted as models of the world.’ Clancy has a straightforward definition to help narrow the elastic term ‘game’: ‘A system furnished with a goal.’ For her, a carefully themed game can function as a tool to serve a dogma, rewarding players for ‘adopting its precepts’. Games are more than models of the world, she writes: ‘They’re models that reward us for believing in them.’
Games can be a particularly potent form of propaganda, not least because play is the primary way in which every human first tests and explores the world. They transcend language, too, so their messages can travel more frictionlessly than books or speeches. And they have staying power. Many have outlasted empires. History shows that games can provide a steadying sense of routine familiarity in people’s lives, offering refuge when food is scarce or war proximate, and can bind families and communities together. Games are often dismissed as trivial things and yet they often shape how we think. From Monopoly to Civilization, it is often through games that humans bring ‘the wilderness of reality into the realm of the understood’.
It’s a position shared by Tim Clare, a writer, poet, podcaster and boardgame aficionado, in his celebration of play, The Game Changers. Games ‘surround us as the ocean surrounds squid’, he writes. Ergo we take them for granted. They are played in pubs and bars, private homes, on campsites and streamed to millions of viewers on Twitch. Children and retirees play them with equal interest, as smartphone apps, or on the back pages of newspapers, or using no more than a piece of chalk on a pavement. Studies show they can ‘reduce depression and anxiety’. But their ubiquity is mainly a function of their elemental purpose: to enable us to understand society’s systems, to exercise rivalries or alliances within a figurative space, to learn how to win, lose or draw with equal grace, equipping us for the world at large.
Clare, who believes we are amid a ‘golden era of boardgames’, provides a warm, enthusiastic survey of games, which he believes, like poetry, provide us with ‘an invitation to break free of the tyranny of efficiency’. Yet, like Clancy, he too believes that play is more than time-wasting. A well-designed game can provide a persuasively critical experience of a society’s systems. He tells the story of Monopoly – the world’s bestselling trademarked boardgame (as well as the one most looked down upon by aficionados). It is a well-chosen centrepiece, a game familiar to almost everyone, with perhaps the best back-story of any boardgame, a thriller involving the question of authorship and, relatedly, remuneration.
Famously, the game’s original bald critique of capitalism was twisted into something else, a story Clare tells with compelling panache. ‘Games are politics you can touch,’ he writes, even if the winner of a game of Monopoly will regret the systems that presented them with their lonely victory. More to the point, games like this remind us that the systems around us were designed by humans, and that, as such, are neither inevitable nor indestructible: ‘We can change them.’
Clare’s book is filled with personal anecdotes and almost romantic scenes of gameplay among friends and family members. Clancy’s book is filled with first-hand experiences, too; but as a former employee at DeepMind, the Google-owned company leading efforts in artificial intelligence, there are notes of both concern and urgency to her wintrier survey. She too is most interested in games that simulate reality. Chess began as a means of teaching battlefield tactics, she explains. Then the Prussian war-games of the 18th century helped generals to refine those tactics and influence thinking, ideas still used in today’s advanced military models.
The use of games to simulate reality and forecast outcomes soon broke out of war rooms. Today, game theory is used to predict and shape responses to everything from financial markets to what we watch on Netflix, to how we might vote. Clancy, however, warns that it cannot accommodate unpredictable events, and often assume relentless capitalist self-interest on behalf of those it models: ‘Game theory is not a very good model of people. But it’s good enough to be trouble.’
Both books demonstrate, with approachable rigour, how games increasingly shape the world around us, in gamified workplaces, social media apps, political campaigning and financial markets. They often cast us in player-like roles we did not choose, but which we soon become entranced by as they ‘maximally engage our reward systems’. Games, too, are being used to train artificial intelligences, causing real-world impact.
The purpose of playing games, as human beings, is to learn about the world and how we might best survive within it; artificial intelligence, by contrast, is ‘endowed by researchers with a desire to win’. It’s a subtle change of emphasis. The games are becoming ever more consequential. By creating systems built on greedy maximising functions, Clancy believes ‘we’ve invented new monsters to slay’. This time, the enemies we face are no longer metaphorical.
The spy who came back from retirement: Karla’s Choice, by Nick Harkaway, reviewed
Publishing is a business. Authors are its brands and books its products. When, as sometimes happens, one of the bigger brands inconveniently dies or retires, there’s an understandable desire to keep the brand going and to attach its lucrative name to new products.
And why not? If it’s done well, everyone benefits – publishers, readers and authors’ estates. In the past 60 years, there have been few bigger brands than the late John le Carré, so it’s no surprise to find a posthumous outing with the words ‘A John le Carré novel’ plastered over the cover. Its author, Le Carré’s youngest son Nick Harkaway, is a well-established novelist in his own right, albeit in a different genre. He served his apprenticeship by completing his father’s last book, Silverview (2021).
Karla’s Choice stakes out its ground from the start. It’s another outing for George Smiley, one of 20th-century fiction’s best-known figures, and it deals with his long-running battle with his Russian counterpart, Karla, the yin to Smiley’s yang.
Harkaway tells us in a preliminary note that his father always intended that there should be more books in the nine-volume Smiley sequence. Karla’s Choice fills a small part of the ten-year gap in the fictional chronology between The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Set in 1963, the story opens with the arrest of a beautiful boy in East Germany and moves swiftly to the disappearance of László Bánáti, a London literary agent, from his office in Primrose Hill. Shortly afterwards, a Soviet assassin arrives. He’s had a change of heart and wants to defect to the West and act in a film with Peter Sellers. We all have our dreams.
Bánáti’s personal assistant, Susanna Gero, copes admirably with both emergencies. Like Bánáti, she’s a refugee from communist Hungary. She is soon talking to a familiar cast of characters from the Circus, Le Carré’s stand-in for MI6. Smiley, bitterly disillusioned after the events of The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, has retired from the Service. He reluctantly agrees to debrief Susanna.
One thing leads to another. Smiley is rapidly embroiled in a murky, often brutal affair involving the Circus’s key Stasi asset, Mundt, as well as the search for Bánáti and the reason why the powerful Thirteenth Directorate of Moscow Centre so badly wants him dead.
From the start, Karla’s Choice feels as if it belongs in Le Carré’s universe. It’s not just the familiar people, slang and procedures; Harkaway channels his father’s oblique, allusive narrative technique, forcing the reader to strain to understand what’s happening. Best of all, Smiley and his colleagues feel authentic.
But does the novel work on its own terms, rather than as an effective pastiche? There were moments in the first 150-odd pages when I had my doubts. This was partly down to simple confusion: names bombard the reader from all directions – first names, surnames, cover names, nicknames. It can be hard to remember who’s who. Mini lectures and ruminations occasionally impede the smooth flow of the story like lumps in custard. And some of the passages between Smiley and Lady Ann, his wife, may make more cynical readers feel a little queasy.
But persevere. My doubts were entirely swept away in the second half of the book when the narrative moves abroad to East Germany, Austria, Hungary and Portugal. Harkaway shrugs off the weight of his father’s legacy and lets his story tell itself.
And what a story. It has the pace and drama of a very fine thriller as well as a moral dimension that harmonises perfectly with Le Carré’s own novels. It’s beautifully written, too. The Circus may be under new management but it’s in safe hands. Let’s hope we shall have more of it.
Saint Joan and saucy Eve: a single woman split in two
Fresh out of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz introduced herself to Joseph Heller: ‘Dear Joseph Heller, I am a stacked 18-year-old blonde on Sunset Boulevard. I am also a writer.’ It was 1960, and while her writing was the sheerest bliss, ‘Eve Bah-Bitz with the Great Big Tits’, as she was known, was herself a work of art. Beauty, she learned at school, was power and ‘the usual bastions of power are powerless when confronted by beauty’.
So it was her stack (36 DD) that opened doors for her until, in 1972, her friend Joan Didion told Rolling Stone magazine to publish Eve’s first story, ‘The Sheik’. That same year, Didion also got Eve’s art into Vogue. As a result, Eve was ‘fucked up in the extreme’ about Joan. When, in 2016, Lili Anolik wrote about Didion’s L.A. years in Vanity Fair, Eve called her up: ‘Lili, you did it, you killed Joan Didion. I’m so happy somebody killed her at last and it didn’t have to be me.’
Everyone has heard of Joan Didion and few people of Eve Babitz, but when they became friends in 1967 it was Babitz with the big reputation. The daughter of a violinist and the goddaughter of Ivor Stravinsky, Eve was what Anolik describes as ‘a low-high, profane-sublime bohemian-aristocrat by birth’. Didion’s husband, John Gregory Dunne, called Eve ‘the Dowager Groupie’, but she was, Anolik explains, a courtesan. She was also a painter, photographer and collagist who designed a classic album cover for Buffalo Springfield, slept with Jim Morrison before he was famous, went on diets with Linda Ronstadt, knew Harrison Ford when he was a bum, and got Carrie Fisher cast as Princess Leia in Star Wars.
In 1963, Eve was photographed naked by Julian Wasser, playing chess with a fully dressed Marcel Duchamp. This was her revenge on her boyfriend Walter Hopps, the curator of the Duchamp retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum, for not inviting her to the private launch because his wife would also be there. ‘I thought it was maybe the best idea ever,’ Eve said of the now iconic photograph. ‘Not only was it vengeance, it was art.’ ‘I knew she’d blow Duchamp’s mind,’ recalled Wasser, ‘and you know what? She did. She blew his mind!’
The Babitz breasts, spilling out of her bikini, appeared again on the cover of her first novel, Eve’s Hollywood (1974), in a photograph taken by Annie Liebovitz (another of Eve’s lovers). The blurb contained an observation by Earl McGrath, a friend of both Eve and Joan: ‘In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz. It is usually Eve.’ The book, edited by Didion and Dunne, is dedicated to ‘the Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not’.
The meaning of this message is the subject of Anolik’s red-hot and propulsive Didion & Babitz, a reappraisal composed of interviews, gossip and wisecracks which tries hard to be a joint biography but is really all about Eve. It is also about Eve and Lili, because it was Anolik who, in an article for Vanity Fair in 2014, brought Babitz back from the brink. Before Anolik found her in 2012 living in squalor and dying of Huntingdon’s disease, Babitz was L.A.’s best kept secret, the city’s genius loci. It is thanks to Anolik that Babitz’s seven books are now back in print, and following this one she will soon be more starry than Didion.
Eve’s Hollywood, which had mixed reviews and minimal sales, was followed by Babitz’s masterpiece Slow Days, Fast Company (1977), the slipshod Sex and Rage (1979), L.A. Woman (1982) and Black Swans (1993). Eve’s subject was herself and Los Angeles, the city at the centre of the world. She hated New York and Europe, except for Rome, which reminded her of Hollywood, and she was appalled when Didion left for Malibu in 1971. ‘It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A.,’ Babitz wrote in her essay ‘Daughters of the Wasteland’.
Saint Joan and saucy Eve, naked in the garden: they seem like polar opposites, and it’s impossible not to take sides. Each channelled the power of her body into her prose style. Babitz had big-bosomed, va-va-voom sentences which she described as ‘spurts’, while Didion, who never spurted anything, taught herself to write by typing out sentences from Hemingway. Eve was excess, Joan was reduction; Eve was flesh, Joan was bone. ‘Could you write what you write if you weren’t so tiny, Joan?’ Eve asked her in a magnificent unsent letter:
Would you be allowed to if you weren’t so physically unthreatening? Would the balance of power between you and John have collapsed long ago if it weren’t that he regards you a lot of the time as a child so it’s all right that you’re famous? And you yourself keep making it more all right because you are always referring to your size.
One of these references is to a passage at the end of Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem:
My only advantage as a reporter is that I am so physically small, so temperamentally unobtrusive and so neurotically inarticulate that people tend to forget that my presence runs counter to their best interests. And it always does.
Babitz is raw, Didion cooked; Babitz is blowsy, Didion precise; Babitz is life, Didion lifestyle; Babitz is amoral, Didion upright; Babitz is loose, Didion tight.
Saint Joan and saucy Eve in the garden: they seem like polar opposites and it’s impossible not to take sides
Didion was a ‘predator who passed herself off as prey’, says Anolik, while Babitz was prey passing as predator. Didion was deadly serious about her writing, while Babitz, who made a sign saying ‘I USED TO BE A PIECE OF ASS, NOW I’M AN ARTIST’, didn’t take seriously that women artists needed to be serious to be taken seriously. Didion looked like a child but acted like a grown-up; Babitz looked like a woman but acted like a schoolgirl. Didion ensured her own immortality, while Babitz invested in the death drive.
Had they been a married couple, they would be Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller. While Babitz was not wife material, Didion was so dependent on Dunne to edit, promote and protect her that they were ‘connected’, as Eve put it, ‘at the typewriter ribbon’. Their celebrated happiness was, however, fake. Dunne, Anolik reveals, was both violent and gay. Isherwood called them ‘Mrs Misery and Mr Know-All’.
Anolik is right to describe Babitz and Didion as ‘a single woman split in two’. While Eve is Joan’s ideal self, Joan, devoted to winning, needs someone to live the anarchic life she’s missing out on. They are also, Anolik says, the two halves of American womanhood, the superego and the id, Thanatos and Eros, yang and yin.
They had other things in common besides. Both were alcoholics, derailed by inherited illnesses. Didion’s weekly migraines, described in her essay ‘In Bed’, were passed down from her father and grandfather, as was the Huntington’s Chorea that Babitz died from in 2021, nine days before Didion’s own death. Didion held on for an extra week out of spite, tweeted the journalist Maris Kreizman, ‘so that she could officially outlive Eve Babitz’. Never putting a foot wrong, Didion, Anolik notes, was even good at death: ‘Merely to acknowledge her passing’ on Twitter ‘was a sign of status’. It’s Eve, however, who gets the hagiography.
Were the Arctic convoy sacrifices worth it?
You need only mild interest in the second world war to be aware of the Arctic convoys of 1941-45, escorted by the Royal Navy through savage weather and unimaginable cold to deliver supplies to Russia. Their purpose was to keep Russia in the war; the conditions were such that storms could last nine days, blowing ships hundreds of miles apart and playing havoc with communications. That’s not to mention enemy action by submarine, air attack and large surface raiders such as the Tirpitz and Scharnhorst. Some 4.5 million tons of aid were delivered at the expense of 119 ships and 2,763 lives lost. Was it worth it?
Opinion at the time was divided. Some maintained that there was no point in diverting scarce resources to Russia following the German invasion because it would soon either collapse or reach a separate peace deal. Others argued that the point was political, a gesture to keep Russia in the fight because, with its vast resources and willingness to incur any number of casualties, it would eventually prevail unaided. Yet others claimed Russia could be adequately supported via Persia (now Iran) and the Far East, with no need for convoys. Others again thought it essential both politically and militarily to provide Russia with the wherewithal to continue fighting, especially in the early years. This latter view, urged from the start by Churchill and gradually by Roosevelt – in both cases against the inclinations of senior naval and military staff – prevailed. Russia was ‘the key to breaking German land power and limiting the western blood price’.
Soviet appreciation of the efforts and sacrifices made was often grudging, while the demand was for ever more
Andrew Boyd’s account of these and other machinations is authoritative and compelling. He eschews blow-by-blow individual accounts of convoy life on the grounds that these are well covered elsewhere, concentrating instead on the how and why of the strategy at governmental and command level, while offering a continuous and penetrating analysis of its effectiveness.
Boyd also shows how the convoys came to serve another purpose: to deepen Hitler’s fear of a major British assault on German-occupied Norway, which he saw as ‘of decisive importance to the outcome of the war… the zone of destiny’. His anxieties were reinforced by commando and SOE raids, leading him to maintain a substantial garrison in Norway to the end of the war and to station battleships and cruisers in the fjords which could have been more usefully deployed in the Atlantic.
Soviet appreciation of the efforts and sacrifices made – in 1942, 20 per cent of British tank production was sent to Russia – was often at best grudging, while the demand was for ever more. There were occasional instances of gratitude and comradeship, but frequently the treatment of Allied crews and servicemen was curmudgeonly and even hostile. During the Cold War, the Russians downplayed the entire Allied contribution, despite the fact that their armies had relied not only on the weaponry provided – by mid-1942 western explosives underpinned about 50 per cent of Red Army firepower – but also on the locomotives and trucks that moved them, and on vital materials such as telephone wire, rubber and aluminium. Unfortunately, many western commentators swallowed this line, even after it was known that Stalin had privately admitted that his army could never have triumphed without western aid.
Convoy PQ17 notoriously suffered the worst losses – 22 out of 36 ships – on being ordered by the Admiralty to scatter. Boyd’s analysis of the reasons for this disaster is detailed and fair-minded, demonstrating the interplay between personalities, partial knowledge and understandable but erroneous assumptions. Similarly, his analysis of the subsequent Battle of the Barents Sea, in which the naval escort beat off a greatly superior German fleet, shows how luck and chance cut both ways.
But good luck is often earned and Boyd is surely right to stress the navy’s superior seamanship throughout the Arctic operations, along with the aggressive attitude promulgated by the navy’s 1939 Fighting Instructions. These urged commanders to trust their own judgment and always, in Nelson’s words, to ‘engage the enemy more closely’. When in doubt, they added, ‘steer for the sound of the guns’.
It is hard to imagine that Boyd’s comprehensive account will be superseded. No one writing on the subject in future will be able to ignore it, and anyone with the smallest interest in that war will want to read it.
Doppelgangers galore: The Novices of Lerna, by Angel Bonomini, reviewed
Resurrection has become its own literary genre. Though hardly a new phenomenon (Moby-Dick, for example, was out of print at the time of Herman Melville’s death), the success of such ‘forgotten’ classics as Suite Française, Stoner and Alone in Berlin proved that an author’s death and/or obscurity were no barrier for readers. So publishers from Faber to Virago, from the British Library to Penguin Modern Classics are hunting through back catalogues looking for writer recommendations, searching for the next unjustly lost voice. In Angel Bonomini, Peninsula Press has found an ideal candidate.
How can such a powerful story have remained un-rediscovered for so long?
A contemporary of Borges, Bioy Casares and Silvina Ocampo, Bonomini was, in life, well-regarded as a writer and poet, winning several Argentinian and international awards. But after his death in 1994, he drifted into obscurity in his native Argentina and remained untranslated into English. Reading The Novices of Lerna, you can both see why and also wonder how such a powerful story has remained un-rediscovered for so long.
The novella’s voice – self-important, self-doubting, self-lacerating sometimes – belongs to Beltra, a recent graduate who is invited by the University of Lerna in Switzerland to apply for a six-month fellowship. It is a generous offer and one that answers many of his post-university financial and romantic troubles. However, the strange and cloying tone of letters from the university, and the astonishing level of detail required on the application form, give him significant pause. ‘Visiting Europe,’ Beltra writes ‘is something that every Argentine keeps in reserve as an unquestionable inheritance.’ And so he accepts, despite his misgivings.
On arrival, he is greeted by a man who might be his twin. The two men are virtually identical. The nature of the fellowship is then made clear. There are 23 other doppelgangers at the campus; 23 identical versions of himself. And they are to spend six months in each other’s company.
It is a cunning premise, one that feels both out of time and very much of our age. Themes of surveillance, identity and individualism are explored with light touches, suggestive glances and a creeping sense of dread. Beltra’s growing isolation is tempered by his growing dependence on the other members of The Project. What is it all for anyway? What is the point?
And this is the slight frustration with The Novices of Lerna. It promises so much, teases so much, yet ultimately Bonomini leaves too many questions unanswered, too many themes hanging. In different hands – it’s hard not to think of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in this regard – the minor characters would become more central to the narrative. Yet they fade away like smoke and fold into the background, like one of the many doppelgangers. It is a novella – and a very short one at that – but it feels as though it could be far more than that.
Jordan Landsman’s translation is fluent, clear and alive to humour, though occasionally prone to a strange word choice (‘onesie’ for ‘jumpsuit’ for example). We should be indebted to him – and to the always excellent Peninsula Press – for bringing us this hauntingly intelligent and psychically unnerving fiction. It might not be perfect, but it will not easily be forgotten again.
Reliving the terror of the Bataclan massacre
On Friday 13 November 2015 France suffered the deadliest terrorist attack in its history. In quick succession, gunmen and suicide bombers struck the outer concourse of Paris’s Stade de France; then the pretty canal-side cafés and restaurants of the tenth arrondissement; then, most notoriously, the Bataclan theatre, where the doors were blocked and, over the course of an hour, 90 people massacred.
The subsequent trial was not just a gargantuan administrative undertaking (20 defendants faced around 2,000 plaintiffs, and the proceedings occupied the purpose-built courtroom for the best part of a year); it was a cultural phenomenon. The judicial reckoning with ‘V13’, as the Paris atrocities soon became known, has spawned columns, podcasts, discussion panels and even a Netflix feature that picked through the carnage with all the prurience of a true-crime documentary. It will doubtless generate many literary responses in France, where high culture has always been unusually alert to current events. From all this spectacle, though, it is hard to imagine a book emerging that will manage to be more informative, moving or likely to last than Emmanuel Carrère’s V13.
In some ways Carrère is an unlikely stenographer for France’s trial of the century. Though he is undoubtedly the country’s most distinguished living writer of non-fiction, it is his own life that has tended to draw out his eloquence. His previous book, the 2020 memoir Yoga, considered another terrorist atrocity – namely, the 2015 Charlie Hebdo attacks – but only insofar as the events deranged his own mind, plunging him into a deep depression that required an emergency course of electroconvulsive therapy.
By contrast, V13 is a remarkably well-behaved piece of reportage. Carrère, who attended every day of the trial for L’Obs magazine, is strictly chronological. We begin as the trial itself began, with the victims and their testimonies, the teeming schedule of witness statements and cross-examinations showing off the author’s talent for swift characterisation. Particularly well conjured are the oddballs – such as Flo, the appalling busybody and fabulist who trawls V13 support groups in search of the friends she has never quite been able to make in life without a national tragedy to act as an ice-breaker.
It is here, too, that we meet the person at the heart of the book: Nadia Mondeguer, a bereaved mother with whom Carrère strikes up a friendship that conveniently allows his authorial attention to wander outside the courtroom – into the family apartment, the neighbourhood, the morgue. Yet Carrère also knows when to step back. Nadia’s chapter is immediately followed by a nightmarish prose poem, stitched together from fragments of testimony of those who were trapped in the Bataclan when the attackers opened fire. Whatever else it may be, V13 is a horror story, and Carrère knows when to temper his editorialising impulses and let the horrors speak for themselves.
Only after being pulverised by 100 pages of testimony are we invited to consider the attackers. It is as if Carrère has set himself a challenge: how do we understand, even sympathise with them, knowing what we now know? His solution is to skirt all discussion of religious motive (instead, we are summarily pointed to a few academic works), in favour of sociology and psychology. These are not divinely inspired warriors, but brooding modern neurotics, straight out of the pages of Dostoevsky.
It is hard not to sympathise a little with the attackers’ bungling auxiliaries (the procurer of fake ID cards; the renter of automobiles) who claimed to have had no idea what they were doing as they hurtled into the history books. But more compelling are the bona fide terrorists, particularly Salah Abdeslam, the young ‘star of the trial’, whose suicide vest mysteriously never detonated. As the prosecutors try to figure out why, Abdeslam swings from petulance to defiance to silence, determined to make a mockery not just of this spectacle but of the law itself.
It is the sense that this grand, solemn procedure teeters on the brink of futility that lends V13 its pathos. In a sense, the challenges faced by court and court reporter are one and the same: both need to hone something incalculably vast and monstrous into a nice, crisp pronouncement for the public record. V13’s final section, which considers the lawyers themselves, tempts us to wonder whether it is ever possible to ‘do justice’ in this way, teasing out the bureaucratic absurdity of projects such as France’s ‘Guarantee Fund for the Victims of Terrorist Attacks’, designed, quite literally, to put a price on others’ suffering.
Abdeslam certainly remains unconvinced, complaining to his prosecutors: ‘Everything you say about us jihadists is like reading the last page of a book. What you should do is read the book from the start.’ But I suspect that if such a book ever could exist, it would look a lot like the one Emmanuel Carrère has written.
Turkish delights: the best of the year’s cookbooks
‘Recipes are like magic potions. They promise transformations,’ says Bee Wilson in her introduction to Sylvia Plath’s Tomato Soup Cake (Faber, £12.99), a collection of classic authors’ recipes. You have to pray that tinned tomato soup will indeed be transformed into something nice-tasting, or that Noel Streatfeild’s filets de boeuf aux bananas will not be as revolting as it sounds. Not much hope of that, I’m afraid – but this is more of a book to enjoy reading without tasting.
Some of the writers confess to failing miserably in the food department. ‘I am a very bad cooker, as the children put it,’ warns Beryl Bainbridge, as she launches into a heartless recipe for violently boiled mince. Others cannot help but insert stylish metaphors, just as they would in their day job. Instructing us on how to boil the perfect egg, Vladimir Nabokov says you know when all has gone wrong if the egg cracks in the water and ‘starts to disgorge a cloud of white stuff like a medium in an old-fashioned séance’. Delia could have done with that line. This is a conversation piece of a book, completely eccentric – a definite for the literary person’s Christmas stocking.
By chance, a dazzling self-published book has come my way and is already a treasure on my shelf. Jess Elliott Dennison’s Midweek Recipes (order from www.elliottsedinburgh.com) is ideal for busy food-lovers. A former restaurant owner, now a cookery teacher with a studio in Edinburgh, Dennison shares her simple recipes in the year’s prettiest book, illustrated with her own atmospheric photographs. She is a pickles enthusiast, using them to add ‘layers of texture, colour and acidity’ to many of her recipes. There are quick pickled onions and herbs to add punch to her recipe for fried halloumi; also fried herbs and capers to scatter over tomatoes on toast. Her chapter on homemade flatbreads with fulsome fillings is brilliant, and the section on cakes and sweet things practically perfect. This is a book about good eating habits, with large helpings of passion.
With unique access to centuries of the royals’ menu archive and their chefs, Tom Parker Bowles has compiled a very enjoyable book for royal watchers. In Cooking & the Crown: Royal Recipes from Queen Victoria to King Charles III (Octopus, £30),we are, thankfully, spared larks’ tongues and boar roasts in favour of recipes likely to have been enjoyed more routinely, ranging from family breakfasts to plates served at state banquets.
For many decades, royal cooking relied chiefly on French haute cuisine. There are remoulades and mousselines; aspics and consommés; dishes à la crème; bombes and soufflés. Much of this dates to when the royal kitchens were influenced by such star chefs as Auguste Escoffier and Marie-Antoine Carême. With successive reigns, however, the fuss becomes less, the number of courses served fewer and the ingredients more modest, until we eventually arrive at Queen Camilla’s relaxed, homely recipes.
Sebze: Vegetarian Recipes From My Turkish Kitchen by Ozlem Warren (Hardie Grant, £28) might inspire a bulk-buy of filo pastry in order to make the crisp, coiled cheese-stuffed treats and baklava described in this radiant, sunny book that would cheer any kitchen in these dark days. The recipes are joyfully festive, with pilafs and vegetable roasts ideal for any cook entertaining non-meat-eaters this Christmas. I love the regular use of walnuts in salads and dips for meze, plus the tangy pides (Turkish pizza) and pickles. I shall be cooking Kestaneli Ic Pilav, a multicoloured rice studded with chestnuts and apricots, baking a layered dish of potatoes with onions, tomatoes and olives and revisiting Imam Bayildi, the greatest stuffed aubergine recipe of all time.
Crisp, coiled cheese-stuffed treats and baklava would cheer any kitchen in these dark days
Jay Rayner’s Nights Out at Home (Fig Tree, £22) is a book that only a longstanding restaurant critic could have written, taking recipes from his favourite chefs and adapting them to home cooking. Rayner describes it as ‘my love letter to the places that have been the cornerstone of my working life for so long’. It’s a useful book, not least because Rayner has ‘reverse engineered’ recipes, either to make them easier or to upscale the numbers they serve. The Calabrian chef Francesco Mazzei’s ‘seafood fragola’ is a challenge to make for one, so has been adapted for four. Other treats include Michel Roux’s ultimate cheese toastie made with raclette, Montgomery cheddar and Ogleshield cheeses; there is Scott Hallsworth’s method for Nasu Dengaku (miso-glazed aubergine) and a lovely recipe for grilled leeks with pistachio Romanesco sauce. There’s plenty of text to read, too, with explanations of the whys and wherefores of every dish.
There are more recollections from Nigel Slater in A Thousand Feasts (Fourth Estate, £20). Slater is a diarist and dedicated note-keeper, always jotting about travelling, eating and cooking. Whether night-bathing in Japan, taking perilous car journeys in Goa, eating mulberries in Croatia or pottering around his own beloved garden in London, he makes you want to better your life.
The New Zealand-born Ben Shewry cooks at the acclaimed Attica restaurant in Melbourne, and his Uses for Obsession: A (Chef’s) Memoir (Murdoch Books, £17.99) is a book all cooks should read. It reminded me that the profession has come a long way from the alpha-male-dominated kitchens of the early 1990s when I first began taking a serious interest in food and the restaurant world. I only tried working in one restaurant ‘brigade’ in those years, momentarily thinking I might want to be a chef rather than a private cook catering in other people’s homes. It took me just a week to get the hell out. As the only woman in the team, I was ordered to carry the heaviest pans of boiling-hot stock while being constantly shouted at, ribbed and humiliated by hyped-up colleagues for my feminine weakness.
If only there had been more chefs like Shewry about then. The part of his story that gripped me most was about what he calls ‘the Book’. This is Anthony Bourdain’s much admired memoir Kitchen Confidential. How we loved the late New York chef’s tales of macho kitchen culture. To find anything wrong with the Book is considered sacrilege in the temple of chefdom. But Shewry bravely says that reading about ‘the truth of bro culture, overt sexualisation of women, glamorisation of excessive drinking and drug abuse and general poor behaviour in restaurants’ made him uncomfortable, and that it is time for restaurants and their kitchens to be a safe place for staff. If more restaurants were run by the likes of Shewry, we might get to eat more good food made by women.
I end with another memoir – a second by Stanley Tucci. What I Ate in One Year (Fig Tree, £20) is the perfect present for those who like a bit of a gossipy look into a Hollywood actor’s unusual life, beginning with Tucci’s time filming Robert Harris’s novel Conclave in Rome (with Ralph Fiennes, Isabella Rosselini and John Lithgow). But the fun is being transported into a huge, simmering pot of pasta meals as he guides us round the great restaurants of the city with his family and friends, each plateful sounding more delicious than the last. How does he remain so neatly trim? At least he plays a cardinal, and one can hide a lot under a crimson frock.
Freedom fighters of the ‘forgotten continent’
On 18 May 1781, Tupac Amaru II’s rebellion came to an abrupt and grisly end. Seized by Spanish forces, the Peruvian muleteer-turned-popular-revolutionary knew the game was up. Still, he refused to go quietly. After Tupac’s captors’ horses failed to wrench off his limbs, the executioner reached for his axe. ‘You kill only me,’ legend has Tupac shouting as the blade descended. ‘But tomorrow I will return as millions.’
As Laurence Blair’s Patria assiduously demonstrates, death rarely has the last word in the ‘forgotten continent’ of South America. In the case of Tupac, his narrative of a ‘Peru for Peruvians’, free from colonial oppression, would later be resurrected in radical leftist movements from Uruguay to Venezuela. Even the Black Panthers in 1960s New York managed to shoehorn a space for him – cue the rapper ‘2Pac’.
Bolivia continues to maintain a navy in the expectation of one day regaining its route to the Pacific
Search for stories of native heroes in the official record, however, and they are difficult to find. If names such as Tupac, Zumbi or Marshal Lopez resonate at all, they do so as passing factoids, dredged up to win a pub quiz but otherwise blotted out. With the passion of a convinced revisionist, Blair, a British journalist based in South America, sets out to ‘defamaliarise us from what we know’, and in the process reveal the contemporary resonance of the region’s ‘crushed alternatives’.
He dismisses the lazy trope that South American history ‘begins and ends with the Incas’, and the first rabbit hole he dives into belongs to the Chincha. An affluent coastal civilisation once located in southern Peru, this ancient maritime kingdom was said to count some 100,000 ocean vessels at its peak in the early 16th century. The secret of its success was simple: guano. The Chincha had worked out that the gulls’ droppings coating the rocky islands off the coast were a perfect fertiliser.
Three centuries after the Chincha’s demise, word of the miracle muck spread. Between 1840 and 1880, 13 million tons of Peru’s white gold were shipped overseas. Presiding over one of the world’s ‘first global commodity rushes’ was a Brit called William Gibbs – proof that South America’s colonial story is not, as often presented, an exclusively Iberian affair. Today, a small group of Peruvian naturalists serve as the ‘spiritual inheritors’ of the Chincha, who held the islands sacred. Now it is dynamite-wielding fishermen rather than spade-carrying colonialists who are threatening the area’s seabirds, but the fight is just the same.
Patria introduces eight other similar ‘lost countries’. It makes for a varied list, ranging from a kingdom of escaped slaves in north-eastern Brazil to an ‘African army’ who fought against the Spanish on the promise of a ‘United States of South America’, via a guerrilla force of Incan warriors deep within the Peruvian jungle. In each case, Blair maintains, their stories live on just below the surface, ‘like bones pressing against skin’.
The Mapuche in Chile exemplify his point. In 1641, their warlike ways persuaded Spain to offer them a treaty of ‘perpetual peace’ – a diplomatic move that continues to inspire their descendants’ fight for their ancient territorial rights. Bolivia, a country whose very name is anchored in the continent’s fight for freedom (christened, as it is, after the ‘Great Liberator’, Simon Bolivar), is similarly illustrative. Landlocked since Chile occupied its coastal access in 1879, this nation continues with the upkeep of a navy in the expectation of one day regaining its route to the Pacific.
Yet Patria’s premise of ‘crushed alternatives’ needs to be treated with care, since nothing in history is preordained. Yes, Paraguay may have had a tinpot dictator in the 1860s who aspired to turn his country into a regional superpower, but to posit this as a realistic path is clearly misleading. The dream collapsed with a disastrous six-year war (1864-70) against Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay which left as many as nine in ten of Paraguay’s fighting-age men dead. But the end could just as easily come via a military coup, a Marxist revolution or a mafioso-style bout of casino capitalism – Latin America has tried them all.
To his credit, Blair is no political ideologue or historical determinist, avoiding macro-narratives such as Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America thesis of resource-led exploitation. But that leaves him with a challenge: how to glue together what can otherwise feel like disparate individual narratives. The answer proffered is the link between past and present, though here Patria fights shy of providing any connecting theory or binding conclusions. Official histories may be written by the winners, but alternative histories are not authorless. So who (other than Blair) is giving these stories rebirth, and to what end?
That said, an exciting investigation is currently under way into how Latin American history is interpreted and understood – something this book brings to the fore. A work of scholarship in its own right (the endnotes alone run to 70 pages), Patria also has a descriptive flair that lifts Blair’s stories off the page. Best of all, it introduces us to the myriad voices within South America that are retelling their own past and, in so doing, nudging Tupac’s millions to wakefulness.
Books of the Year II
Peter Parker
The New Zealand novelist Catherine Chidgey ought to be much more celebrated in this country than she is. Do not be put off by the fact that The Axeman’s Carnival (Europa, £14.99) is narrated by a magpie; whimsy is entirely absent from this highly original, thrillingly dark and often very funny novel. The bird is adopted by the wife of a cash-strapped farmer and learns to speak, becoming an internet sensation and so providing useful income. At the same time, its guileless chatter includes picked-up phrases that inadvertently expose what is really going on in the household where it has made its home.
Treat of the year was Sheila Robinson’s Balance, Humanity and Nature (Random Spectacular, £27.50), a clumsily titled but beautifully produced and lavishly illustrated account of the life and work of this wonderful printmaker and illustrator, whose career has sometimes been overshadowed by the other (male) artists associated with Great Bardfield.
Daniel Swift
Caroline Lucas was the UK’s first Green party MP and also did a PhD in English Literature. Her Another England: How to Reclaim Our National Story (Hutchinson Heinemann, £22) deftly marries the political and the literary. Ranging over the myths and visions of England and Englishness offered by poets, novelists and politicians including Edward Thomas, P.D. James, William Blake, Stanley Baldwin and Boris Johnson, she argues that our literary history gives us rich material from which to build a new sense of this country, our place in it and how we might face the future. Another England is idealistic, naive and freewheeling, as urgent and lively books often are. I loved it and it is certainly my book of the year.
Stephen Bayley
Although I could never be described as a rural person, two books have excited the bosky sprite in my generally undisturbed elfin grot. The first was Alexandra Harris’s The Rising Down (Faber, £26). Harris is a cultural historian whose previous book was Weatherland, an account of how native artists and writers have reacted to weather. The Rising Down is enchanting, if undefinable. It manages to be both impressively scholarly and delightfully conversational. It’s a macro account of Sussex which goes into micro details – part social history, part geology, psychogeography and personal memoir. There’s a lot of drilling down into this AONB, but of the speculative, not extractive, sort. Harris gives impressive new status to the concept of ‘local history’. It’s a very fine and touching book. Beautifully written, too.
Entirely different in character, if not so very different in ethos, is Will Jones’s Cabin – how to build a retreat in the wilderness and learn to live with nature (Thames & Hudson, £20). We all know the poetics of cabin life from the fantasist Henry David Thoreau, but Jones has written a practical guide. Here you can learn how to set a saddle and beam into a concrete block, assemble your necessary tools (pickaxe, caulking gun, blowtorch, tin snips, block plane) and fashion for yourself a replica Navajo hogan. Truly, the stuff that dreams are made of.
Justin Marozzi
For those of us who love a good spy thriller and long ago exhausted John le Carré, it’s been slim pickings in recent years, Mick Herron notwithstanding. Then along came the former CIA analyst David McCloskey with Damascus Station in 2021 and things have never been the same again. Moscow X (Swift Press, £9.99), his follow-up, is equally enjoyable – marginally less gut-wrenching on the torture front but just as tense – and a timely reminder of how ghastly rich Russians are.
The Oxford professor Eugene Rogan is as good a guide as any to the Middle East. The Damascus Events: The 1860 Massacre and the Destruction of the Old Ottoman World (Allen Lane, £30) is a masterful blend of academic rigour and storytelling flair. That happy synthesis is also achieved by Rachel Kousser in Alexander at the End of the World: The Forgotten Final Years of Alexander the Great (Blackstone, £33). Her Macedonian empire-builder is a brilliant, reckless, obsessive psychopath. In Battleground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East (Yale, £18.99), Christopher Phillips offers a lucid and highly readable account of a region that tragically continues to self-immolate, with a little help from its friends.
Andrea Wulf
Normally I find it difficult to choose the best book of the year, but not so this time. My absolute favourite is Richard Powers’s Playground (Hutchinson Heinemann, £20). He is one of our finest storytellers, taking important present-day subjects, from environmental issues to AI, and turning them into riveting novels. What his Overstory did for trees, Playground is doing for the oceans. Powers weaves together science, emotions and our wonder at nature. The result is a mesmerising, hugely important tale.
I also enjoyed a very different kind of book – non-fiction, quieter, slower, but also fascinating. Martin Goodman’s My Head for a Tree (Profile, £14.99) is about the Bishnois, a community in India who protect trees with their lives. They are the first true environmentalists and their story is remarkable.
Throughout the year, I’ve immersed myself in Maggie O’Farrell’s back catalogue, and the more I read, the more I admire her genius for creating worlds into which I can disappear. There is a joy in acquainting oneself with a writer’s oeuvre, a pleasure which I haven’t really allowed myself since my early twenties (too many books, too many writers, too many stories, too many distractions). I’m refusing to pick one of her titles because the delight lies in their entirety.
Hilary Spurling
Xinran’s Book of Secrets: A Personal History of Betrayal in Red China (Bloomsbury, £25) tells the true story of Jie, an idealistic young revolutionary unconditionally dedicated to the Chinese Communist party. He survives the Japanese invasion in 1937, civil war, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the ensuing famine that killed nearly 40 million people and the chaotic violence of the Cultural Revolution. Ten years in a labour camp wrecked his home life and led to implacable political persecution that ended only with his death. ‘In modern China, all human lives are being re-carved under the knife of the party,’ writes Xinran, who has spent the past two decades telling stories like this one that show the price paid in human terms.
Hitler, Stalin, Mum and Dad (William Collins, £10.99) is another book of horrors related with extraordinary grace, warmth and clarity by Daniel Finkelstein, whose family on both sides was decimated by the Holocaust.
Boyd Tonkin
Good novels about the processes – and principles – of politics are vanishingly rare; funny, artful and exuberant ones are almost non-existent. Yet in The Night-Soil Men (Salt, £12.99), Bill Broady conjures the careers of three north country Labour party pioneers (Philip Snowden, Fred Jowett and Victor Grayson) into an improbably entertaining carnival-chronicle of high ideals and low skulduggery. In another fictional galaxy, Samantha Harvey’s eerily beautiful Orbital (Vintage, £9.99), a group of International Space Station astronauts become rapt witnesses to the greatness, and smallness, of humanity as they/we hurtle through the void.
In The Island (Faber, £25), an epic study of the young W.H. Auden, Nicholas Jenkins brilliantly scales up fine-grained literary criticism into wide-angled cultural history. And a pair of unbowed truth-tellers splendidly unite courage, comedy and defiant verve in their reports from the planet of trauma and recovery: Salman Rushdie in Knife (Cape, £20) and Hanif Kureishi in Shattered (Hamish Hamilton, £18.99).
Graham Robb
Roger Lytollis is that rarissima avis: a shy investigative reporter. His Panic as Man Burns Crumpets (Robinson, £16.99) is a hilarious and depressing account of the shrivelling of local journalism and the abuse flung at the ‘sad wankers’ who produce it. Lytollis was one of the last remaining wits of the Cumberland News. Now, an adjustment to the price of a fast-food product counts as a major event. Reports of council and court proceedings are rare and skimpy, and the only humour is accidental: ‘A dog owner was fined because their dog wasn’t wearing a mussel.’
The closure of Britain’s last coal-fired power station induced me to read Richard Llewellyn’s bestselling novel of 1939, How Green Was My Valley, which I had been warned was mawkish lowbrow literature. It is a brilliantly narrated account of growing up in a Welsh mining community. I have only the faintest idea why the Oxford Companion to English Literature excludes it.
Ruth Scurr
The best novel I have read this year is Roz Dineen’s Briefly Very Beautiful (Bloomsbury, £16.99). In the tradition of haunting dystopian fiction by women (Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood), Dineen begins her novel in a London-like city ravaged by climate degradation and terrorism. From this desperate setting, she draws a tender portrait of maternal love. Her central character, Cass, has three small children to protect: two stepchildren and one biological child by her absent partner. To Cass, the children are everything – ‘mine-mine’ she says, holding her stepson close and deciding the time has come to leave the violent, smoke-filled city. Briefly Very Beautiful is a poetic and sensual page-turner that perfectly captures motherhood on the brink of apocalypse.
Andrew Lycett
Having excoriated the East India Company’s exploitative practices in recent books, William Dalrymple adopts a different approach to power (mainly soft) in The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury, £30). He celebrates how, through trade, missionaries and sometimes might, India’s influence expanded into Central and South-east Asia, giving rise, for a millennium and a half from around 250 BC, to an ‘Indosphere’, where its ideas, art and religions dominated. With a mind-boggling mastery of sources, Dalrymple weaves a thrilling tale of India’s cultural hegemony, not forgetting its invention of mathematics and related disciplines still used today.
History in the House by Richard Davenport-Hines (William Collins, £26) is a splendid account – acerbic, learned and unabashedly politically incorrect – of how history has been taught at Christ Church, Oxford, inculcating a gentlemanly tradition of public service (13 prime ministers studied there), in what was long the university’s most exclusive and aristocratic college.
I inwardly groaned on hearing that Nick Harkaway was taking up his father John le Carré’s mantle to write a George Smiley ‘continuation novel’. But Karla’s Choice (Viking, £22) is brilliant – every bit as suspenseful and knowing as the original, and often more humorous.
Rod Liddle
Because I do almost all of my reading on Kindle, I am no longer aware of either the title of each book I’ve read or the author. This is a problem when I particularly like a book and wish to read more by the same writer, and also when I’m asked to do stuff like this. I do recall getting around to The Offing by Benjamin Myers (Bloomsbury, £8.99), which was kind of unexpectedly wonderful – lyrical, evocative and even uplifting. I say ‘unexpectedly’ because it wasn’t what I expected from a Brutalist whose first venture was The Book of Fuck.
That mischievous little monkey Jasper Fforde was on his best form yet with Red Side Story (Hodder & Stoughton, £20). For once it was possible to invest a little in the characters, as well as enjoying the incessant puns and Fforde’s marvellously eccentric imagination.
I spent the first few months of the year reading every book written by David Mitchell – no, not that smug comedian – having thrilled to Cloud Atlas. I can report that the best of the rest is The Thousand Summers of Jacob De Zoet, followed by Black Swan Green. But they are all worth reading – he is surely our finest living novelist.
I also read The Seventh Son by Sebastian Faulks (Hutchinson Heinemann, £22) and was enjoying it greatly until the grave and despicable act of sexual transgression at the end. Oi, Faulks! No! No!
Mark Cocker
Kapka Kassabova’s Anima: A Wild Pastoral (Cape £22) is a hymn to our continent’s last shepherds in Bulgaria’s Rhodope mountains. The author displays great courage during her summers of near-total isolation and literary daring in arguing for the importance of a non-human realm in the affairs of all Europeans.
Yet my book of the year (and the century) explains with unparalleled clarity why the biosphere should be central to all human values. Iain McGilchrist’s The Master and His Emissary (Yale, £14.99) documents in exacting detail how the hemispheres in our brains create separate, if complementary, versions of ‘reality’. The author is a top neuroscientist, but his arguments draw on all western civilisation, particularly the arts. No work better accounts for our current ecological crises or explains more clearly why we should lead lives fully integrated with the natural realm. It is a monumental achievement: a touchstone for all environmental action.
Claire Lowdon
My inner medieval history geek was roused from dormancy by Bart Van Loo’s gloriously rambunctious The Burgundians: A Vanished Empire (Apollo, £12), which tells the tale of the Burgundian dukes who presided over Flanders during its extraordinary late-medieval boom time. Van Loo whisks the reader through bloody battles, scurrilous in-fighting and plenty of political intrigue, accompanied by memorable character portraits of murderous John the Fearless, randy Philip the Good and creepy Charles the Bold. As in so many Early Netherlandish paintings, however, the star of the show is the background detail, from descriptions of eye-poppingly lavish Burgundian feasts to discussions of technology, textiles and the medieval relationship with time. In Nancy Forest-Flier’s lively translation from the Dutch this ostensibly obscure chapter of European history feels both otherworldly and startlingly modern.
Sara Wheeler
Like all Ian Frazier’s books, Paradise Bronx (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, £26.60) shows that seeing is more important than travelling. Frazier paints a portrait of a New York borough crouching in the shadow of Manhattan – one the size of Paris, with 42 branches of McDonald’s and a single bookshop. He brilliantly pulls off the hardest thing – to blend history and personal narrative and not let the joins show.
On another note, I enjoyed Thom Gunn by Michael Nott (Faber, £25). The book reveals slowly, but rather wonderfully, how a great writer makes the choices that shape him. Nott conveys, with tenderness, what happens when desire takes the upper hand.
Mary Beard
My book of 2024 was first published in 1925 but has long been out of print. Reissued this year, it is Jane Ellen Harrison’s Reminiscences of a Student’s Life (McNally Editions, £14.99) – a short, quirky memoir of a notorious classicist and Britain’s first professional female ‘academic’ in the modern sense of the word. If that sounds a little niche, I promise that it isn’t. The book is full of Harrison’s hilarious anecdotes: facing down William Gladstone; being expected to curtsy to the young Hirohito on his visit to Cambridge (it was, she said, some consolation to know that he believed himself to be a god); and her sometimes capricious leniency as a magistrate on the Cambridge bench (she claimed to have let off an Armenian simply because he spoke such a difficult language). It’s a wonderful evocation of women’s resilience and spirit in a university that still excluded them from degrees.
Roger Lewis
Should you be white, married with children and properly educated, forget about ever receiving public recognition in the arts – the Royal Society of Literature, for example, routinely cancels such wretches. Far better to be transgender – that’s becoming compulsory. For this reason I lapped up Bonjour Mademoiselle: April Ashley and the Pursuit of a Lovely Life by Jacqueline Kent and Tom Roberts (Scribe, £22). What’s here coyly described as ‘gender-affirming surgery’ was much more graphically described in Duncan Fallowell’s biography April Ashley’s Odyssey (1982) – worth finding and ripe for republication. Unlike subsequent studies in the field, it’s a work of literature.
Tom Holland
The Eagle and the Hart (Allen Lane, £25) is a brilliant achievement in which Helen Castor fashions out of the lives of the two royal cousins, Richard II and Henry IV, not just a glorious work of history but a gripping and haunting tragedy. She is not, of course, the first writer to have made a drama out of the crisis that brought the Lancastrians to power, but it is the measure of her genius for narrative and character that the tale she tells does not remotely suffer from comparison with Shakespeare. Two men of remarkable but opposed talent, yoked together in mutual hatred, in death as in life, each doomed forever to be defined by the other: here is tragedy indeed. There was no book published this year, novels included, that I found richer in character; no plot more taut.
William Dalrymple
How did the great schism within Islam between Sunni and Shia develop? In The House Divided (Profile, £25), Barnaby Rogerson traces the way in which the 16th-century confrontation between the Ottomans of Turkey and the Safavids of Iran cemented what had previously been a much more porous division. Rogerson is an eloquent and always fascinating guide to one of the crucial turning points of Persian and Middle Eastern history. Few British authors understand the region so intimately.
Another wonderful writer is Stephen Platt, whose dauntingly erudite and beautifully crafted study of the Opium Wars, Imperial Twilight (Atlantic, £25) is a superb narrative history, full of fabulous characters and well-plotted twists. Platt demonstrates a complete mastery of the complex world of mid-19th century China.
Whole libraries have been written on the Ramayana and the question of the historicity of the most popular of the South Asian epics, but the legacy of the demon Ravana is less well known. In Ravana’s Lanka (Penguin India, Rps 320), Sunela Jayewardene searches her beloved island for evidence for Rama’s greatest adversary and comes to a series of often surprising conclusions about his realm. At once a personal quest for the roots of a nation and an exploration of the meaning in a myth, the book is also a beautiful written celebration of one of the loveliest islands on Earth.
Finally, Pankaj Mishra illuminates a far darker landscape in The World After Gaza (Fern Press, £20). As scholarly and subtle as it is brave and original, it’s by a long way the saddest and most thought-provoking book I have read this year.
Brits predict a Kamala win as Americans go to the polls
In a few hours, US election results will start to roll in, and while Britons this side of the pond have no say on the outcome they’ve been keen to give their opinions to prowling pollsters. New YouGov polling of 6,520 UK adults has revealed that almost four in ten Brits expect Kamala Harris to emerge victorious in this year’s election – regardless of who they would personally prefer to win.
The survey shows that 38 per cent of participants are predicting a Harris victory while just under a third of Brits (31 per cent) think Donald Trump will be elected president a second time. Not that the gamblers quite agree – as Steerpike’s friends in the Speccies’ data dungeon pointed out earlier, with money pouring in behind The Donald. In fact, the former president’s chances of return to the White House in January remain over 60 per cent, according to an analysis of implied probabilities. How very interesting…
The new poll comes after Norstat’s survey for the Times on Monday showed that, out of western Europe, Trump has amassed the most support from Scots – with a quarter of the country backing the Republican candidate for the win. Of the rest of the UK, only 16 per cent are pro-The Donald.
Not that everyone has an opinion one way or the other, however, with today’s YouGov analysis showing the remaining 31 per cent of Brits have confessed they ‘don’t know’ quite what they expect the result to be. Perhaps that’s not hugely surprisingly – the same survey reveals that 40 per cent of UK adults have admitted they have not followed the US election campaign very closely this year, with only 8 per cent of Brits ‘very closely’ keeping an eye on proceedings. Well, there’s not long left now until the speculation will all be over. Tick tock…
More evidence that the Budget raises taxes for workers
Six days on from the Budget, and things don’t look any better for Rachel Reeves’s claim that her Budget won’t negatively affect working people. Today and tomorrow, it is the turn of the Commons Treasury Select Committee to pick through the wreckage.
What have we learned so far?
David Miles from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) doubled down on the effect of the rise in employers’ National Insurance (NI). The OBR has already estimated that three-quarters of the effect will be on wages – thereby contradicting Reeves’s claim that working people will not suffer from the rise. Miles went further, saying that many economists would argue that 100 per cent of the effect of higher employers’ NI will eventually be borne by employees. Miles also said the OBR calculates that the rise in NI will cost 50,000 jobs.
Richard Hughes, the OBR’s chair, also revealed that the body had expected bond yields to rise last week – as they did – because it guessed that the extent of the extra borrowing announced in the Budget would surprise markets.
This afternoon it was the turn of economists to give their views on the Budget, including Paul Johnson, the outgoing director of the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS). In recent weeks, Johnson has become markedly more outspoken than he has previously been in his 14 years in the job, and he has not come down on the side of the Chancellor. The NI rise, he argued, will give employers a powerful incentive to shift low-paid workers onto self-employment, because of the growing disparity in the bill for NI contributions. It is not so much the 1.2 per cent rise in employers’ NI that is the problem for businesses, he said, as the reduction in the threshold at which employees become liable for their employers to pay NI. This has been reduced from £9,200 a year to £5,000 a year.
That will mean employers having to pay NI on large numbers of part-time workers who previously fell below the threshold. Proportionally, the changes will affect the employment of low-paid workers far more than that of higher-paid workers. It is they who are likely to find themselves shifted onto self-employment. As Johnson pointed out, this rather works against Labour’s efforts to give employees more rights. The practical consequence is that workers are likely to find themselves shifted from zero-hours contracts employment into casual self-employment.
Johnson also had severe words for the rise in stamp duty on second homes and investment properties. ‘My head hit the table,’ he told the committee. ‘You take the worst tax we have and increase it. I find it extraordinary.’ The extra 2 per cent stamp duty on additional properties, he said, will make it prohibitively expensive to buy investment properties, which will impact on the rental market. But if renters are in a position to buy their own homes, they will find stamp duty going up, too, as a result of Reeves’s decision not to extend a reduction in stamp duty for first-time buyers introduced by the Conservatives two years ago.
The IFS has always prided itself on being an independent voice on fiscal matters, and it can hardly be said to have been batting for the Tories in recent years. Indeed, for much of his time leading the think tank, Johnson came across as a little to the left of his predecessor, Robert Chote, who went on to become the first head of the OBR. But as he reaches the end of his term at the IFS, he is certainly not giving Reeves an easy ride. The Chancellor’s own session before the Commons Select Committee, by the way, comes on Wednesday afternoon.
The danger of America’s long presidential handover
As the US presidential race rollercoasters towards its finale, many Americans are already bracing themselves for a close and highly contested vote. The uncertain outcome of the election is just the beginning of what could be a fraught period for the United States and the world.
There are 76 days for mischief, or worse, between this year’s election date and the transition to a new president being sworn in on 20 January. Traditionally, this period has been used by the president-elect to piece together a cabinet, reward staffers and large campaign donors with senior positions, refine policy priorities, entertain foreign officials eager to ingratiate themselves, and studiously avoid any hard commitments that may handicap the administration down the road.
Questioning the legitimacy of the election results will increase the risks for the United States
Post-election, outgoing presidents and their administration are the lamest of lame ducks and eager to move on. Joe Biden will be doling out last-minute political favours, hosting farewell dinners, and hiring an architect for his presidential library – as well as raising the money to pay for it. His senior team will be busy parlaying their government jobs into private sector sinecures, signing on with speaker’s bureaus, and re-acquainting themselves with their family members.
The dangers of this political twilight period are entirely self-inflicted. Much of what happens during this two-and-a-half month period could be done well before or immediately after the election.
The US has legislation on the books designed to telescope the orderly transition of power. The Presidential Transition Act requires that office space and IT support is provided to the two candidates as soon as they are officially nominated at their political conventions. The Act also requires the existing administration to begin transition planning six months before election day, and to designate a senior career official to coordinate transition planning across all departments and agencies.
Separate legislation allows each candidate to submit requests for security clearances for transition team members who may need access to classified information. The law directs that these security clearances be completed by the day after the election, if possible. While the president can appoint more than 4,000 people, many senior officials could be vetted, confirmed by the Senate, and ready to assume their responsibilities soon after the election.
This transition period actually used to be longer. When the Great Depression hit during the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt had to wait until 4 March,1933, to be sworn in. By that time, the banking system had crashed and unemployment was close to 25 per cent. In response, the 20th amendment to the US constitution moved the inauguration date up to 20 January, where it remains.
The British system eliminates this uncertainty. The prime minister voluntarily evacuates 10 Downing Street soon after losing an election. (Surprisingly, there is no legal requirement to do so.) There is no ambiguity over where governmental authority resides.
Questioning the legitimacy of the election results will increase the risks for the United States. The Republican National Committee is involved in more than 120 lawsuits across 26 states to ensure, it claims, that people do not vote illegally. They are planning to recruit and deploy 100,000 ‘election integrity directors’ in battleground states, along with an ‘election integrity hotline’ to report any alleged irregularities. Republicans have introduced legislation in Congress and in state houses around the country designed to prevent voter fraud, thereby laying the predicate for legal challenges if the election results don’t go their way. Democrats argue that sufficient laws and other safeguards already exist and these efforts are merely designed to deter people from voting.
Trump has already suggested that his accepting the outcome is conditional on it being ‘a fair and legal and good election’. If he loses, it is likely his supporters will again reach for extrajudicial remedies, as they infamously did on 6 January, despite far more precautions in place this time around.
The risks extend well beyond America’s shores. Foreign governments like Iran, Russia and China are already exploiting social media to promote disinformation, inflame public opinion, and sow domestic dissension, and they will continue to do so. The spectre of unrest and violence engulfing Washington or other major cities across the United States would give comfort to authoritarian regimes.
Bad actors could also seize this window of opportunity to issue threats, start a conflict, develop nuclear weapons, or generally behave badly. Putin’s war against Ukraine shows no signs of abating and, indeed, may escalate. North Korea’s Kim Jong Un could test another nuclear device, which would spur additional calls in South Korea and Japan to acquire their own nuclear arsenals.
The Middle East is already aflame with multiple wars ongoing across the region, and may expand further. The regime in Tehran is reported to be only days away from assembling a nuclear weapon. The ayatollahs could decide that a presidential transition presents the best time to complete Iran’s decades-long project of becoming a nuclear power. And China continues to claim vast swathes of the South China Sea, arm Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, and repress its own people.
So here we are, only a few days away from the most consequential election since the end of the Cold War – buckled in, white knuckled, and pulling Gs as the rollercoaster races through its final hairpin turns. Among all these uncertainties, having an extended period to transfer presidential authority seems both unnecessary and dangerous.
Listen to more election coverage on Americano:
Labour’s hospital smoking ban is doomed to fail
I have spent a quarter of a century caring for people dying from smoking. Deaths of this sort are not only premature but often horrible. My mother’s death from lung cancer was both. The puritan nature of my medical heart should, therefore, leap up at the new restrictions of the Tobacco and Vapes Bill, introduced to parliament today. Smoking, Labour have declared, should be banned outside schools and hospitals. How they intend to police the ban, they haven’t said.
Self-righteous pleasure at seeing other people’s freedoms being reduced – unhealthy freedoms one disapproves of – should come naturally to a practising doctor. Instead, I’m struggling to feel even a frisson of morally superior joy. Something is amiss. The problem is not that I lack the instinct to take pleasure in the diminishment of other people’s enjoyments. The problem is the Bill.
Taxes and restrictions and making smokers feel like lepers has saved lives
This isn’t the first time restrictions on smoking in hospitals have been brought in. Decades ago, hospitals started corralling smokers into shelters, with some success. Bureaucracy never sleeps, however, and from 2018 the NHS Smokefree Pledge introduced a zero-tolerance policy to smoking which banished the shelters. With nowhere to smoke in sprawling hospital grounds, the predictable result occurred – people went back to smoking everywhere. Hospitals and the Department of Health were able to congratulate each other on time and money well spent while in reality their decisions were as helpful as a split fingernail.
Has there ever really been a zero tolerance policy that meant what it said and actually worked? That the Tobacco and Vapes Bill could prevent smoking around hospitals and schools is a dishonest illusion. Smoking on NHS property is already banned to the highest degree. No hospital is without its sign saying that smoking is not allowed. But beneath every sign stands a smoker. No one enforces these no-smoking rules, and it is perfectly obvious that nobody should. Staff, their smoking shelters taken away, make mild efforts to be furtive. Visitors don’t bother, and to see them puffing away in front of these signs tells you what weight hospitals put on their own rules.
Then there are the patients, often lacking the physical ability to leave the grounds. Some want to quit smoking but can’t, others freely choose to continue. Still more have no sane reason to quit at all. Many are dying already, and smoking gives them pleasure and comfort. This NHS policy, with its failure to provide anywhere for patients to smoke, with its pretence that putting up a sign means the issue is solved, with its utter indifference to enforcing its own rules, is simply hypocritical virtue-signalling, laced with dishonest cruelty.
Today’s Bill offers more of the same. Restrictions on vape sales are welcome but the government has backed off banning smoking in the gardens of pubs and restaurants. If your motivation was to attack smoking rates effectively, that would be the step to take. Enforcement there is feasible, just as it was when smoking was banned indoors in pubs and restaurants. Licences to operate were on the line and action was taken.
Doctors will always want fewer people to smoke. Smoking deaths peaked early in Britain’s modern history: in the early 1960s, more than half of Brits smoked. Today that figure is 13 per cent and falling. We were quick to take up the habit of industrially produced cigarettes and became world leaders in giving it up.
Sir Richard Doll’s 19050s study of smoking in British doctors established that smokers had a one in two chance of dying from their habit, and lost a decade of healthy life along the way. More influentially, it demonstrated that this fact was even true amongst the doctors themselves. Studying the disease hit home in the medical profession. Doctors began to quit smoking and they campaigned for others to do the same; their campaigns were more effective because they’d put their willpower where their mouths were.
The magnitude of harm from smoking is hard to overstate. A lifelong habit does enough harm to cancel out all the rises in life expectancy for an individual since World War Two. It makes sense to want to ban it: eliminating smoking would have the same impact on the health system as would be gained by preventing every single form of cancer. These assertions are based on the highest quality evidence and they matter hugely: these are facts, not factoids.
Public health campaigns against smoking have certainly been intrusive but they have also been effective. Taxes and restrictions and making smokers feel like lepers has saved lives. But can the intrusion on freedom planned by Labour through today’s Tobacco and Vapes Bill be justified in the same way? To make up rules that will never be followed is an intrusion that’s no help whatsoever.
All of us dream of being better versions of ourselves. Maybe our hospitals and schools dream of being free of smoke. Legislation can also be usefully seeded with dreams, but – like life – it should never be based on fantasy. Smoking matters to those who enjoy it and to those who wish to reduce its costs to human health. This Bill looks set to trivialise both.
Live coverage: the 2024 election
Welcome to The Spectator’s live 2024 election coverage. Stay tuned throughout the night as our writers bring you news, analysis and commentary on the presidential race and others from across the country.
The Trump-Harris election has broken America
‘Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all,’ said Balfour. Tell that to the American political class on the day of the 2024 presidential election. After months of the Trump–Biden–Harris drama – the criminal indictments, the disaster debates, the President dropping out, the assassination attempts – the nation is in a state of nervous exhaustion.
Team Harris and Team Trump have both been clear: 2024 is existential
‘I just want this to be over,’ America’s politicos almost all say, as they tell you in the same breath that their country could, in fact, be on the brink of a long and possibly violent civil conflict.
Team Harris and Team Trump have both been clear: 2024 is existential. If Trump wins, according to Harris, democracy is done for and women will be forced to have babies. If Harris wins, according to Trump, free speech is finished, the American dream is over, and the Republican Party will be bankrupt. Each side predicts the other will need psychotherapy if the result doesn’t go its way.
The dread feeling – on both sides – is only exacerbated by the likelihood that, after today, we probably still won’t know. America doesn’t have one presidential election. It has 50 presidential elections at once. Each state has its own procedures and processes, and some states might still be counting the votes until late next week. In an extremely tight race, that means the result could be impossible to call for days. Or it could be all over.
Add to that the reverse fear: what if the polls have missed the point, again, and the election is in fact a clear early win? What if the Trump movement really is as big as it looks in all those rallies? Or what if Team Harris was right all along, and a significant majority of women will come out to defend their right to abort their unconceived children?
The clearest split between the two campaigns really is the gender divide. Harris–Walz has been almost absurdly feminised: its late adverts urged married women to lie to their husbands about voting for the Democratic candidate. Trump–Vance has, by contrast, made a clear pitch for the forgotten macho man: summed up by its excitement last night that Joe Rogan, the biggest podcast bro on the planet, had at last endorsed the Donald. The age of equality has pushed us towards a great clash between the sexes. And the struggle between man and woman is one that matters to us all.
Listen to Freddy Gray’s election coverage on the Americano podcast:
Five of Labour’s worst Trump attacks
The countdown is on, with just days left until the result of the US presidential election is announced. With pollsters across the world undecided about the likely outcome, Sir Keir’s Starmer’s government is trying to hedge its bets. Health Secretary Wes Streeting has insisted on the airwaves today that ‘there will be a really good working relationship’ between the Labour lot and Donald Trump if the former president emerges victorious – despite hordes of Labour volunteers travelling stateside to canvas for Kamala.
But is there too much water under the bridge to repair relations? Reform leader and Trump ally Nigel Farage said last month it was ‘ludicrous’ for Starmer’s army to ‘get the relationship off to a bad start’ with Trump after the presidential hopeful accused Sir Keir’s party of ‘election interference’ over the volunteer palaver. And it’s not like the Starmtroopers have been all that complimentary about the Republican candidate in the past. In that vein, Mr S has trawled through the archives to remind readers just how scathing Labour’s attacks on the ex-president have been…
David Lammy
The UK Foreign Secretary has quite the history of hitting out at Trump, with many of his old tweets coming back to bite him. Back in 2018, the Labour politician blasted the then-president as being a ‘neo-Nazi sympathising sociopath’ in a Time magazine op-ed. In the piece, published ahead of Trump’s first presidential trip to the UK, the Labour MP promised he would be among the ‘tens of thousands on the streets, protesting against our government’s capitulation to this tyrant in a toupee’, adding that the Republican was a ‘dangerous clown’ and a ‘profound threat to the international order’. Charming!
Wes Streeting
Despite his assertion today that Labour will ‘be able to work effectively [with a Trump administration] as partners and and as allies’, Streeting is no stranger to slamming the presidential hopeful. Back in 2017, the now-Health Secretary took to Twitter to lambast the then-president, writing acerbically: ‘Trump is such an odious, sad, little man. Imagine being proud to have that as your president.’ This may not age as well as Streeting might have hoped…
Sadiq Khan
In yet another attempt at relevance, the London mayor also waded into the conversation with an attack on Trump earlier this year. Speaking to Politico, the lefty politician denounced the presidential hopeful as ‘a racist. He’s a sexist. He’s a homophobe.’ Going on, Khan urged his colleagues to ‘call him out’, adding: ‘I worry about a Donald Trump presidency.’ It’s not the first time that the London mayor has locked horns with the Republican candidate, however. Back in 2019, the US businessman described Khan as a ‘stone cold loser’ and ‘very dumb’. Ouch.
Ed Miliband
The former Labour leader-turned-eco-zealot may be more than a little worried about the prospect of a Trump presidency – and exactly what it might mean for the transition to net zero. Last year the Republican candidate praised then-prime minister Rishi Sunak after he chose to water down his climate pledges (on the sale of gas and diesel cars as well as gas boilers). Trump called Sunak’s decision ‘smart’, before going on to insist the climate crisis is a ‘green new hoax’. In 2021, Miliband blasted the former US president’s administration as ‘four years of Trump acting as a roadblock to progress’. But that’s not the worst of it. Back in 2016, Miliband attacked UK politicians who said Trump’s win was good for Britain – branding the idea a ‘delusional fantasy’. Going on, the eco-activist raged: ‘The idea that we have shared values with a racist, misogynistic self-confessed groper beggars belief.’ Good heavens!
Angela Rayner
The Deputy Prime Minister has not been particularly effusive about the Republican candidate in the past either. Taking to Twitter after Biden’s inauguration in 2021, Rayner wrote: ‘I am so happy to see the back of Donald Trump’, adding: ‘but even more so to see Kamala Harris as Vice President.’ It followed the Labour politician’s furious post on the day of the Capitol Hill riots, in which the now-DPM blasted Trump’s ‘lies after the election’ and condemned ‘the violence Donald Trump has unleashed’ as ‘terrifying’. Back in 2020, after the US election, Rayner applauded ‘all the activists and organisers across the USA who worked day and night [and] fought Trump’s voter suppression’. Whether she will be able to tweet similar sentiments this year is quite another matter…
The sheer joylessness of Kamala Harris
Whatever happened to Kamala Harris’s promise of ‘joy’? Joy was in catastrophically short supply among her supporters I met in the United States last week. I’ve never encountered a more glee-less crew. It was all Nazi this, Nazi that, ‘The world is burning’, ‘We don’t want a rapist in the White House’. If this really is the ‘vibes’ election, then the only vibe I got from these folk was clinical depression.
It is almost entirely negative: Vote Kamala or the world gets it
I saw them amassed on the streets outside Madison Square Garden in New York City last weekend where they had gathered to protest Donald Trump’s big rally. ‘Welcome to your Nazi rally!’, they jeered at Trump’s fans. An army of boomer men in Kamala caps and T-shirts stood on the steps to Penn Station holding little placards with one-word descriptions of the orange man they love to hate: ‘Rapist’, ‘Psychopath’, ‘Unfit’. It hardly roused the soul.
‘Eat ass, Trump’, someone had scrawled in chalk on Eighth Avenue. ‘F**K TRUMP’, said a flag held aloft by the most mournful assembly of antifa nerds I’ve ever seen. They were dressed in black, fittingly, given they were essentially at the funeral of their own sense of moral proportion. ‘If Trump wins, the world burns’, said one. I didn’t know whether to slap him or hug him.
You’d see Kamala cheerleaders outside Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue every day. You know the type: in anoraks, whatever the weather, covered in crazy badges, holding aloft four or five placards each, because why only have one? ‘F U Trump’, their signs cried. One wore a sticker saying: ‘Stop The Donald – let’s stop the disease once and for all.’ One was left with the dystopian vision of a pandemic of fake-tanned fascism washing over this once great republic. Joy!
In Philadelphia, a gathering of Kamala campaigners warned passers-by of the consequences of a Trump victory. I heard the words ‘disastrous’, ‘tyranny’, ‘climate emergency’. You soon clocked that this is not a movement for Kamala, whether for her ‘joy’ or her thin, ever-changing policy positions. No, it’s a campaign against Trump, which is to say against evil, which is how many of these political depressives view The Donald. It is almost entirely negative: Vote Kamala or the world gets it.
Joy has been well and truly jettisoned by the Democrats’ top dogs too. ‘I am TERRIFIED’, said Dems bigwig James Carville in an email yesterday. His ‘heart rate’ is ‘SPIKING’, he said. So was mine after being bombarded by his all-caps panic. The source of his dread? The ‘dark money’ that is ‘FLOODING’ into this race and threatening to defeat the Dems standing for the Senate. If we lose, then everything we’ve fought for will ‘go RIGHT into the dumpster’, he yelled, as madly as any of those slogan-adorned Trump-phobes on Fifth Avenue. Mate, chill – it’s not the end of the world.
Or maybe it is. The Kamala-backing media is convinced that if she doesn’t get to the White House, then the rest of us might not get to live. A Trump victory could ‘reverberate for a million years’ because this ‘oligarch’ might ‘break the planet’s climate system’, says the Guardian. Nurse! A Trump victory would represent the ‘return of chaos’ and a heightened ‘risk of cataclysm’, says a writer for Vox. Yeah, because the world is so stable right now.
‘Welcome to your Nazi rally!’, they jeered at Trump’s fans
Harris herself slowly drifted from the ‘joy’ thing. As even the BBC noted, she ‘moved from “joy” to calling Trump “a fascist”’. Even the Los Angeles Times’ cringe-inducing gushing over Kamala’s celeb-heavy rally in Philadelphia last night – Oprah and Lady Gaga ‘bring back the joy’, it feebly insisted – cannot disguise that this is a campaign motored more by fear than joy. By a borderline apocalyptic dread. They’re pleading with voters not to let Kamala do her thing – whatever that might be – but rather to save the world from the fire and chaos of Trump.
After a week in the US, I’m starting to understand Kamala’s famous laugh. It’s less the laughter of joy than the infernal laughter of the lost, lonely soul that has convinced itself the world is ending. Her campaign feels entirely dispiriting. It feels a tad undemocratic too, with voters reduced to the mere negators of ‘evil’ rather than people who might get to choose a fresh direction for the nation. When I saw those brunching, bourgeois New Yorkers holler ‘Nazi’ at the out-of-towners who’d come to see Trump, I understood instantly why so many voters choose The Donald over the alternative.
The sheer joylessness of the Kamala camp captures a truth about the modern-day Dems: they’re now little more than a rearguard movement against populism. They see it as their duty, less to lead the republic onto a shining new path, than to forcefield it from what they view as the swirling idiocies of Trump and his support base. They’re essentially promising to defend America from those Americans. What a bleak pit the ‘joyful’ have dug for themselves.
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How accurate are the US election polls?
Is Donald Trump going to lose Iowa? That’s the conclusion many US pundits came to after a bombshell poll over the weekend. That poll, conducted by the psephologist Ann Selzer, put Kamala Harris three points ahead of Trump in Iowa, despite Trump having comfortably won the state by almost ten points in the past two presidential elections.
So Iowa could tonight return to swing state status. In past elections voters in the state have backed Reagan, Clinton, Obama, and Trump: now they might turn to Harris. However, at the same time as the Selzer poll was published, a contradictory but less-covered poll indicated another strong Trump victory. This poll from Emerson College concluded that Trump is still ten points ahead of Harris. Once again, US pollsters have been left scratching their heads. How could two polls just two days apart with the same sample size in the same state be so different?
One problem for pollsters is the increase in early voting in recent US elections. This year, at least 76 million voters cast their ballots before polling day. The pandemic changed early voting, making it harder for pollsters to tell whether shifts in polling reflect changes in voters’ preferences or if they had returned to pre-election patterns. Complicating matters, Axios analysis says more voters have misled pollsters on purpose and, as the NYT’s Nate Cohn warns, numerous ‘late deciders’ will have a similar effect: telling pollsters their voting intention before changing their minds on the day.
Every election, the make-up of these early voters changes. In 2020, a third of Republicans voted early compared with almost half of Democrats. This year, 36 per cent Republicans and 39 per cent of Democrats voted early. In this election, the difference may be down to women who make up 55 per cent of early voters. Selzer says women voters were the main factor in her poll since as a whole they prefer Harris to Trump. But there’s still some issue with the polling as a whole. Selzer says: ‘As neither of the major candidates gets to 50 per cent, there’s still a little squishiness in what could actually happen.’
The effect of ‘squishiness’ is less of a problem for California. Despite early voting starting 29 days before election day, polling consistently places Harris 25 points ahead of Trump (and the state has consistently voted Democrat since 1992). But using polling to judge the outcome in swing states is tougher, and in possible swing states tougher still. Some 37 per cent of Iowans have already cast their ballots and the polling cannot determine whether the result is on a knife edge or not.
Such differences in polling compared with election outcomes can be staggering. In the 2020 presidential election, a record 101 million Americans – some 63 per cent of the electorate – voted early during Covid. For pollsters, that election was the most inaccurate in 40 years. Pew Research found that 93 per cent of polls overstated Biden’s support, leading to a much closer race than expected.
Pollsters say their surveys show that the current election is the closest since 2004. But even still, the polls still miss the true result by a small margin. Nate Silver’s former polling site FiveThirtyEight says:
Even if all polls were conducted on election day itself (no temporal error) and took an infinite sample size (no sampling error), the average poll would still miss the final margin in the race by about two points.
It’s a pretty damning statement from one of America’s top polling sites, but it points to the reality of how the number of possible election outcomes increases as the polling narrows but the margin for error remains the same or widens. This finding is also shared by the American Association for Public Opinion Research which says that polls conducted within the last two weeks of a US campaign are wrong in either direction by 5.1 pts on the state level.
The margin for error for the seven swing states (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and perhaps including Iowa as number eight this time around) is widening. In these states, some 93 electoral college votes (99 if you include Iowa) are up for grabs. That’s around a fifth of the total number of electoral college votes.
The seven swing states have polling aggregates of two points or less yet maintain wide error margins. This means that if the polls are off by two or three points, as previous elections suggest that most are, then landslides are still possible for both candidates.
The message from pollsters is that the closeness of this election cannot be overstated. Nate Silver ran 80,000 simulations of his election model of which Harris came first in 40,012 of them. The outcome was closer than flipping a coin: ‘Empirically, heads wins 50.5 per cent of the time, more than Harris’s 50.015 per cent.'
Listen to election coverage from Freddy Gray and Kate Andrews on the Americano podcast:
Has the police watchdog learnt nothing from the Chris Kaba debacle?
The uproar following the acquittal of Police Sergeant Martyn Blake over the death of Chris Kaba exposes a deep unease with the police complaints process. Even without knowing about Kaba’s past criminal record, the jury spent barely three hours before acquitting Blake. Yet last night’s BBC Panorama documentary suggests that those in the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) – who took the original decision to refer the case to the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) – remain convinced they were right to do so. This apparent failure to learn lessons raises worrying concerns about the IOPC’s approach.
An IOPC probe led to misconduct hearings for officers who shot and injured a robber in Wimbledon
Sal Naseem, who led the investigation, appears to confirm that the very decision to announce a homicide investigation may have been motivated by the fear of public disorder. ‘It was fed back to us…that if we hadn’t done it at that time then it’s likely there would have been a level of disorder,’ says Naseem. ‘Things were on a knife edge’
The decision to prosecute Blake over the shooting in September 2022 astonished many, possibly including the jury. It reflects a pattern of decisions suggesting the IOPC is more comfortable pressing on with action, however dim the prospect of success, than facing flack from families and ‘community groups’ if it doesn’t act.
Naseem stands by the decision to refer the case to the CPS. He argues his own assessment of whether there was a ‘significant threat to life’ and the use of lethal force was ‘absolutely necessary’ justifies this call – though, in fact, the central question the criminal law asks is whether the officer had an ‘honestly-held belief’ that the risks meant lethal force was proportionate and necessary.
In the last couple of years, the IOPC insisted on pursuing PC Paul Fisher, who was prosecuted for dangerous driving for an error he made rushing to a terrorist stabbing incident in Streatham in 2020. He was subsequently acquitted.
An IOPC probe also led to misconduct hearings for officers who had shot and injured a robber in Wimbledon in 2018, even after the CPS offered no evidence against the men on the first day of their trial. They similarly insisted an officer face a misconduct hearing after a public inquiry had ruled lawful the shooting of Jermaine Baker, shot dead by police in 2015 as he attempted to free a criminal from a prison van.
Naseem has now left the IOPC and seems to be pursuing a career as a diversity writer and campaigner. But the culture of the organisation goes further than one individual.
The IOPC’s five-year strategic plan, or its statutory guidance on complaints, isn’t the most exciting document, but it hints at the underlying mindset. Throughout the document, the focus appears to be on encouraging complaints. A key aim is to: ‘Raise awareness of the outcome of complaints, particularly where they have led to resolution for complainants and improvements in policing’. It’s as if communicating that the police acted reasonably in very difficult circumstances might be of less importance.
The IOPC’s credibility is very much on the line
But what about the burden on officers subject to investigations that can drag on for years? Or the possible chilling effect that the IOPC’s decisions may have on police operations that are critical for public safety?
In the Baker case, the IOPC successfully argued all the way to the Supreme Court that the test to be applied to officers’ actions in misconduct cases should be an objective one based on whether their actions were ‘reasonable’, as opposed to what the officer actually believed at the time of the incident. This opens the door to potential gross misconduct proceedings, even if an officer acts in good faith and in accordance with their training.
In its plan, the IOPC says that its ‘thematic work’ ‘has focused on issues of most concern to the public – including race discrimination, abuse of power for sexual purpose and violence against women and girls’. There is, however, little evidence that the public have been properly consulted on these priorities. Instead, we’re told, ‘this shift in approach will be driven by our understanding of what matters to communities. We have developed our understanding through much-improved stakeholder engagement, and by the information, evidence, and trends we see in our operational work’. Who are these ‘stakeholders’ and by what authority do they speak for the public? There is a risk that a new class of diversity activists, and those who know little of the reality of policing, are being listened to over those who know what they are talking about.
Even by the standards of ‘arms length bodies’ (ALBs), the IOPC is unaccountable. It is a non-departmental public body of the Home Office. Ministers have no input into strategy documents it produces. The Director General has a broad statutory responsibility to secure efficiency, independence and public confidence. The Secretary of State can choose the Director General and ‘ask for reports’. But that is about it.
The Policy Exchange report ‘Getting a Grip on the System’ identified the growing problem with accountability. It is one thing not wanting ministers to be making decisions on individual cases. But it is absurd to deny that the choices IOPC are making are political ones; appearing to prioritise complainants and stakeholder groups over the concerns of police officers and, arguably, the protection of the public.
Ministers must have more control in being able to set the strategic direction for all ALBs, including the IOPC. They should insist the IOPC review its strategy and other documents to ensure they show a better balance, and avoid issues like this happening again. The IOPC’s credibility is very much on the line.