-
AAPL
213.43 (+0.29%)
-
BARC-LN
1205.7 (-1.46%)
-
NKE
94.05 (+0.39%)
-
CVX
152.67 (-1.00%)
-
CRM
230.27 (-2.34%)
-
INTC
30.5 (-0.87%)
-
DIS
100.16 (-0.67%)
-
DOW
55.79 (-0.82%)
Watch: Marjorie Taylor Greene turns on Times Radio
What is it with Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Brits? First, she advised the-then Foreign Secretary David Cameron to ‘kiss my ass.’ Then, she told ex-BBC star Emily Maitlis to ‘go f**k off’. And now she has pinned the blame for the Trump assassination attempt on, er, British broadcasters at Times Radio. Clearly the spirit of 1776 is alive and well with this one…
In an interview with Times Radio reporter Jo Crawford at the Republican National Convention, Greene bristled at criticism of Trump’s pick for vice-president, JD Vance. After Crawford asked about Vance previously likening Trump to Hitler, Greene snapped and suggested that the reason ‘I have some of the most highest amount of death threats [is] because of people like you.’
She continued ‘shame on you, shame on you’ and declaring ‘we have to put up with the most unreal amount of bulls**t because of little liars like you that take your job and turn it into political activism.’ ‘Your job is the press. You should report the news’, she added before concluding:
You’re the cause of our country being divided. You’re the cause of our country being divided. You’re the cause of President Trump almost being assassinated. You’re the cause of everything wrong in evidence for these claims. No, no. You’re done. You’re done yet. Go back. Thank you.
Ouch. You can watch the exchange below:
r
Boris reunites with Trump at Republican jamboree
The great and the not-so-good of the international conservative movement have descended on Wisconsin this week. Liz Truss and Nigel Farage are among the Brits jetting in to toast President Trump’s formal nomination at the Republican National Convention. But what of the man they once called ‘Britain’s Trump?’ Boris Johnson yesterday made a rather low-key appearance at the conference, appearing at vaping panel that was remarkable only for its poor turn-out.
But Johnson, it seems, has been busy behind the scenes. It turns out that the former prime minister has actually met with Trump, away from the glare of the cameras, to discuss a subject close to his heart – ongoing western aid to Ukraine. Johnson shared a picture of the two men giving a thumbs up and grinning. ‘Great to meet President Trump who is on top form after the shameful attempt on his life’, Bozza declared. ‘We discussed Ukraine and I have no doubt that he will be strong and decisive in supporting that country and defending democracy.’
Steerpike wonders what JD Vance – the America First conservative whom Trump picked as his running mate – makes of all that. Talk about a special relationship eh?
Biden gets snappy in Lester Holt interview on NBC
On Monday, in the aftermath of Trump’s shooting, President Biden sat down in the White House with NBC’s Lester Holt for an “unedited” interview, which aired in the evening.
The president successfully made it through without any major gaffes, appearing combative when questioned about his mental acuity.
He started off a little shaky after Holt called out his incendiary language, in particular his remarks it was time to put Trump in the “bullseye.” Biden suggested this was a mistake, claiming he meant “focus on him” and what he’s doing, “on his policies, the number of lies he told in the debate.”
He was quick to bring up the “existential threat” Donald Trump presents. When asked if he had done any “soul-searching” regarding some things he said, Biden replied: “How do you talk about the threat to democracy, which is real, when a president says things like he says?”
When asked if Saturday’s debacle was a massive security failure, Biden said he still “felt safe with the Secret Service” after the events on Saturday, claiming that what mattered is that the Secret Service was willing to “give their lives” for the former president.
Holt then turned the conversation to SCOTUS’s ruling on presidential immunity. Biden said he felt the Supreme Court made a “terrible decision” and that the justices were not “in touch with what the Founders intended.” He also mentioned he was “not surprised” by Judge Cannon’s decision to dismiss the Mar-a-Lago case.
Then Holt finally brought up what’s on most Americans’ minds: Biden’s decision to stay in the race. The president said that nothing had changed for him, and his decision to remain was based on the fact that his “job [is] not finished.” He even went so far as to compare his presidency to FDR’s — claiming it is the most successful since Roosevelt’s time, “passing more legislation no one thought you could get done,” putting together a consensus, uniting NATO. Not sure how this compares to the man who led America out of the Great Depression and through World War Two.
“Do you feel like you’ve weathered the storm on — on this issue of whether you should be on the ticket or not?” Holt pressed on. “Look, 14 million people voted for me to be the nominee in the Democratic Party, OK? I listen to them,” Biden responded.
But Biden lost his cool when the June 27 debate was brought up. “Quite frankly, you appeared to be confused,” Holt said. “Why don’t you guys ever talk about the eighteen — twenty-eight lies that he told? Where — where are you on this?” Biden exclaimed. “I had a bad, bad night,” he added. “I wasn’t feeling well at all.”
“We have reported on many of the issues,” Holt protested. “No you haven’t!” Biden snapped back.
He also lashed out at Holt when asked about a potential additional debate with Trump before the planned one in September. “I’m gonna debate him when we agreed to debate.” “But if — if the opportunity came up to do one between now and then? Is there — is there a sense of wanting to get back on the horse?” Holt asked again. “I’m on the horse. Where have you been? I’ve done twenty-two major events, met thousands of people, overwhelming crowds,” Biden piped back.
Holt tried to amicably end the interview, thanking the president for his time, to which he replied, “Sometimes come and talk to me about what we should be talking about.”
Britain’s economy is growing faster, but not fast enough
Another day, another small piece of good economic news. Today the International Monetary Fund has produced its World Outlook report for July, which revises UK growth for 2024 upwards, from 0.5 per cent to 0.7 per cent. This news follows on from last week’s monthly GDP update, which showed growth in May at 0.4 per cent – notably above economists’ predictions.
These are still not numbers to boast about. The IMF’s revision is still slightly below the 0.8 per cent the Office for Budget Responsibility predicted at the last Budget. But it shows the IMF’s downgrade for 2024 growth in April was too negative (it held its 2025 forecast for the UK at 1.5 per cent). The UK economy is slowly moving in the right direction. And while these growth rates are nowhere near enough growth to plug the multi-billion pound black holes in the public finances, it does seem that the dreary narrative around the UK economy – including its fall into recession at the end of last year – is lifting.
According to the IMF, Britain has gone from being towards the bottom of advanced economy rankings to sitting comfortably in the middle of the pack. This is still far off Labour’s promise to deliver the fastest sustained growth in the G7: the average growth rate for advanced economies this year is estimated to be 1.7 per cent. But it’s better to work your way up to the top from the middle – and Labour are going to benefit from economic updates coming down the track, including the slow and steady reduction in interest rates.
It’s worth noting that Labour has set itself a very ambitious target: the United States is forecast to grow by 2.6 per cent this year. Unlike trade wars, growth wars are no bad thing – but what Labour will have to do to significantly boost GDP is going to be politically challenging, even with its significant majority in Parliament. Building millions of new homes combined with a serious reduction in the NHS waitlist (and helping people with long-term sickness back to work) are two monumental tasks that the party has yet to give many details about how it will deliver.
A growth competition could get interesting. Over in the States, Donald Trump has just named JD Vance his vice presidential nominee, who takes a harder line on protectionism than Trump does, actively promoting tariffs. Were the Trump-Vance ticket to win, this could create an opportunity in Europe to present itself as a free-market alternative; it could also find itself in tricky territory trying to navigate trade with the US. All this will have an impact on GDP.
Starmer will have to navigate relationships abroad as well as public policy at home if he’s to get anywhere near the kind of growth figures he’s promised. But his supermajority has won him some time – something Rishi Sunak denied himself when he made his five pledges – including to get the economy growing, which he said would be achieved by the end of 2023.
No doubt had Sunak given himself a bit more time – and perhaps a later election – the economic story could have been framed slightly differently, and certainly more positively. A better economy this autumn is going to be a very helpful tool for the Labour party. But it is only the jumping-off point to deliver what Starmer has promised.
JD Vance appeals to trad America
I’m meant to maintain some air of objectivity at Trump’s selection of JD Vance for vice president, but I can’t be bothered. It’s just excellent. By appointing him, Trump guarantees that the Republican party will never go back to being neo-con warmongers run by Wall Street. To channel Kamala Harris, I believe Vance shows us what the Republican party could be, unburdened by what it has been.
The biography is well versed – white trash made good, author of Hillbilly Elegy, convert to Trump – but the philosophy is under-appreciated. The first thing to know is that he has a philosophy. How rare is that?! Most politicians ride into office on half-baked vibes and narcissism, but Vance is a thinker who has risen through the movement, someone who has paid attention to the times and what’s been written about them.
He sees America as broken, maybe the whole West. No cheap patriotism, please. Like drowning your sorrows in beer and cocaine, it’s deeply unhelpful.
There’ll be a lot of focus on the material aspects of his thinking – free trade, military aid – but his key point is that America has been remade since the 1960s by liberalism, and the experiment has hurt the very people it was meant to help because liberalism is decadent. It’s good at maximising freedom, bad at encouraging responsibility, maturity, seriousness, duty. In his Hillbilly Elegy, he demonstrated how individuals can become corrupted by self-pity. As a politician, he’s become more interested in how corporations and the state make it hard for us to live as dignified citizens by undercutting pay or polluting the culture with bad ideas.
Mass migration, even illegal, looks good – perhaps of moral benefit – to the wealthy liberal, because it means diversity and growth. To the working class, it means drug trafficking, low wages, rapid social change. The libertarian conservative is reluctant to reduce it either because they sympathise with the liberal’s cultural values or because they don’t like meddling with market forces. The populist conservative looks at the administrative state and says, ‘well, if it can be used to liberal ends, why not use it for conservative ends?’ It’s plainly never going away!
The vision of Vance is a society of happy, healthy families living on a single income. You don’t just get there through tax cuts; you must actively promote domestic industries and a healthy society. If there’s a legitimate criticism of Vance it’s that he leans towards European-style big state conservatism without going the whole hog. If we’re going to save the steel industry or ban TikTok, why not also promote unions, expand cheap healthcare or clean up the environment? But even if Trump/Vance isn’t heading there yet, it at least points American conservatism in the right direction.
Much will be made of his conversion to Catholicism, not least among liberal, cradle Catholics who despair of the conservative variety. Isn’t there a tension, they ask, between the universalism of the Church and Vance’s populist nationalism?
I think so; it is a serious problem. But Catholicism is drawing a lot of converts on the New Right because it has a rich heritage (Vance chose Augustine of Hippo as his confirmation saint); because the Church made the western civilisation they wish to preserve; and because Catholicism addresses what Barry Goldwater called ‘the whole man’. The Catholic isn’t just a Catholic in church, but at play, rest, even in bed, and it makes us part of something bigger and older than ourselves.
Westerners are not just consumers, but also producers; not only individuals but members of a community; and not self-invented citizens, but custodians of historical tradition that stretches back to Lincoln, Adams, Augustine and St Paul. In a speech to the National Conservatives conference, Vance dismissed the notion, popular on left and right, that America is a creedal nation, the product of ideas. Rather, its governing ideas are the product of religion, culture, time and place; the historical nation is real, it has a substance. It must be cherished and passed on.
The Trump phenomenon was motored by personality: you were really voting for him. Vance is driven by philosophy: his fans like what he thinks. Whether he loses or wins, he’ll likely be the Republican nominee in 2028 – and thus the baton passes to a new generation of conservatives.
Watch more on SpectatorTV:
Watch: Labour MP retakes oath after republican protest
Well, well, well, constitutional monarchy looks set to continue after all – despite the best efforts of Labour’s Clive Lewis. The MP for Norwich South was forced to swear in to parliament for a second time after his first attempt didn’t quite, er, cut the mustard…
Last Wednesday, Lewis drew attention to himself when he omitted to swear allegiance to King Charles and his ‘heirs and successors’, instead remarking: ‘I take this oath under protest, and in the hope that one day my fellow citizens will democratically decide to live in a republic.’ That’s not quite how it works, Clive…
It has now transpired that the parliamentary office sent Lewis a letter later that day warning him that he could be liable for legal action, endless fines and even a by-election under the Parliamentary Oaths Act 1866, if he didn’t ‘remake the affirmation in the words prescribed by law’. Crikey. MPs are also unable to participate in debates, vote or get paid until they swear in.
Lewis didn’t quite fancy facing those repercussions and duly rejoined the back of the queue earlier today. The Labour man seemed rather miffed at having to read it all out a second time, but just about made it through the ‘heirs and successors’ bit correctly. His lefty colleagues in the background could hardly contain their smirks as they watched the Norwich MP being forced to toe the line. A coup now looks unlikely this session, as both Lewis – and, to the Labour MP’s obvious displeasure – the King remain in place.
Watch Lewis’ first attempt here:
And his second…
A David and Goliath battle involving a billion-dollar pornography website
Laila Mickelwait’s Takedown describes in fascinating and often distressing detail both why Pornhub, the Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, needs to be destroyed and how this might be achieved. It’s not the story of a movement against the porn industry, like the one I have been involved with for decades, but more a woman’s lone, Erin Brockovich-like crusade to shut down a major distributor.
The book relates how, through investigative journalism, Mickelwait discovered that one of the world’s biggest websites was knowingly profiting from sex trafficking, and reveals her subsequent fight to hold Pornhub accountable for its distribution and monetisation of child sexual abuse and rape. She is the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and the founder of the Traffickinghub movement – but she is no ideologue. Indeed, she is keen to specify that what she seeks to abolish is illegal trafficking, not the legal pornography industry. Her view is that as long as it is ‘lawful and not harming another person’, what happens between consenting adults is their business. She points out that she herself has ‘hardly lived the life of a prude or an enemy of the entertainment business’, and has been known to spend New Year’s Eve at a Playboy mansion party.
Pornhub was storing all videos of child sexual abuse ever to have been on their site. That is a felony
But she is a Christian, and looked to prayer for inspiration in tackling the monster of the porn trade; and she eventually succeeded in getting Pornhub to publicly confess to a federal felony, with Katie, a senior staff member, disclosing that the company had access to every single video in their huge collection – dating to pre-2009. In so doing, Katie admitted that Pornhub was storing all videos of child sexual abuse ever to have been on the site. That is a criminal offence.
After spending countless hours combing through comments on Reddit, Mickelwait realised that what she was looking at was ‘a gold mine of incriminating comments from Pornhub’s own mouth’. On one thread, a user seeking advice stated: ‘There is child porn all over Pornhub.’ Katie offered reassurance: there was no need to inform a law enforcement agency – just send the evidence to them. In other words, a senior manager at Pornhub was telling someone not to report to the authorities the child sexual abuse videos they had found on the site.
Mickelwait chronicles the investigations conducted by herself and colleagues, who have spoken with rape survivors, moderators and former employees of Mind-Geek – which owned Pornhub until June last year. The revelations, written in potboiler form, drop ‘live’ on to the page. When she describes chasing criminals in an attempt to hold them to account in US courts the style is hyperbolic – but, then, there is much that is dramatic about the online porn industry.
I have known the author for some years, occasionally bumping into her at conferences where global experts gather – including tech men capable of policing the internet for illegal content. Feminists have long argued that pornography in itself represents abuse of women, which in turn helps build misogynistic attitudes and behaviour among boys and men. Mickelwait’s focus is on the rape and child abuse imagery that manages to end up online without triggering any penalties: not for the rapists, not for those who filmed the crimes, not for the host sites (such as Pornhub) and not for the consumers of illegal content.
A Canadian X account, @EyeDeco, targeted Serena, who, having discovered videos of herself being abused as an underage teenager on Pornhub, came forward to Mickelwait. This account posted old Instagram images of Serena in an attempt to shame her. It was unmasked as Grace Sinclair from Montreal, operating on behalf of MindGeek.
This is not just about the odd video depicting a criminal act that sneaks in among the many millions of videos hosted on such sites. Pornhub is the tenth most visited website in the world and operates in plain sight. Its free content – which makes up the vast majority of the videos available – is a smokescreen for its pay-to-download content. It hosted countless images of child abuse, rape and sadistic sexual violence – the largest collection in the world. The author’s portrayal of those responsible for such crimes – the rapists, traffickers and sadists – is all the more terrifying when you realise that these are just regular, everyday men.
And Pornhub is clearly culpable. Out of more than 1,200 employees, just one person was tasked with reviewing the hundreds of thousands of films flagged for depicting real crimes of child sexual abuse, rape and trafficking. At one stage, there was a backlog of 700,000 films. INHOPE, the international association of internet hotlines which purports to lead the fight against child sexual abuse material online, has taken money from Pornhub – ignoring the conflict of interest and helping Pornhub present a clean image.
Having interviewed women whose rapes and sexual assaults were filmed and uploaded to Pornhub, I understand something of the extent of their trauma, of knowing that the men viewing these videos were taking sexual pleasure from their suffering. Some women who have worked in the porn industry have sued Pornhub for ‘conduct amounting to rape’ on set. The number of lawsuits against the company rises constantly. Mickelwait documents the cases, and her mission is clearly personal. But her depiction of herself as a lone crusader is disingenuous. There is in fact a proud history of such work, including the outstanding contribution made by Gail Dines, the author of Pornland. Yet Mickelwait neither acknowledges the wider movement nor provides any of the historical context.
There have been complaints from adults who say that images of themselves being sexually abused as children have been uploaded, and there is irrefutable evidence that Pornhub has hosted rape, trafficking and child abuse content. It claims that there were no videos of extremely young children being raped – ‘Every video and photo is reviewed manually before upload by a large and extensive team of human moderators’ – yet the site was heaving with illegal content.
Takedown is a testament to the tenacity of Mickelwait and others who refuse to ignore grave injustices. Documented in an accessible and highly entertaining style, her campaign did more than just clip Pornhub’s wings: it also served, through her collaboration with high-profile journalists, to educate the general public about the reality of the porn industry.
Today, porn drives technology. It also generates more profit than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Fighting this is a classic David and Goliath battle. But what Takedown tells us is that the struggle to hold the industry to account must be a concerted, multi-pronged effort. One woman can make a difference, but she can’t do it alone.
‘I’m a hypocrite and a total fraud’ – the confessions of a French Surrealist poet
Michel Leiris (1901-90) was one of those intellectual adventurers who are the astonishment of French literature in the 20th century. Their achilles’ heel is that most were communists, in a few cases Nazis; and nothing kills the life of the mind more thoroughly than preaching. Their saving grace is that many were eccentric characters, and their autobiographical work can often be their most luminous legacy.
Among Leiris’s subjects are his dogs, his ideal hotel, his hatred of Wagner, his Anglophile snobbery and his tailor
Because they were anti-form, the ideal prose vehicles became ‘aphorism’ or ‘fleuve’. The most brilliant of the French aphorists, Emile Cioran (though he was Romanian), exclaimed in an interview ‘Expression – that’s the cure!’, meaning not society’s cure but the writer’s. Leiris usually chose the fleuve route; and since he was a psycho-mess and wanted lots of therapy, there’s plenty of outpour. He married a rich woman, and so there was plenty of time too. This exemplar of Tom Wolfe’s ‘radical chic’ divided his days between an apartment on the quai des Grands-Augustins and a country house not too far from the agonising toils of St Germain. Plus official visits to communist regimes and several forays into primitive society.
This, the fourth and final volume of his autobiography, was published in Paris in 1976 and is now translated by Richard Sieburth. I was put off by his rendering of Leiris’s sweet title Frêle Bruit as Frail Riffs. In the event, the translation reads well, often beautifully – no mean task, given that Leiris was a neurotic hair-splitter and auto-contrarian, tying up his pages in endless loops of subordinate clauses.
Here, as before, he is writing at length on the impossibility of achieving anything by writing, whether it be an intellectual goal or change in the external world. In the former case he is surely wrong, since literature is a triumph of our species. In the latter case, he was also wrong, though not in the sense he implied. Words have often wrought murderous destruction in the real world via literal addiction to scripture or to political formulae.
‘Whatever I do I only half do,’ he wails. He became a Surrealist, but soon fell out with André Breton. He became an ethnographer (sort of). He tried his hand at novels. Though a fleuviste, he wonders if instead he should ‘go for something far more incisive… little batches of phrases that say a great deal in a few words’. In many hands this has proven a highly successful idea, to replace the old-fashioned railway journey of a prose work with something like a small galaxy. He’d done it himself, in a much earlier autobiographical book on his sex life, L’âge d’homme. Many of the entries here, in contrast to the autobiography’s three previous volumes, are indeed short: poems (they are very clever), brief incidents. But it doesn’t satisfy him. He always needs to explain the explanation.
It is embarrassing when Leiris comes to the Revolution, because like all masochists he is a sentimentalist. He believes an earthly utopia should be striven for, ‘to get to that place where poetry and revolution might blend into each other’. He thinks you can legislate for ‘the marvellous’ and for ‘love’. Walter Pater’s hard, gemlike flame is ever before him: ‘… to live the marvellous at the highest and most accelerated intensity…’ Unsurprisingly, he was a lifelong insomniac. He never visited a gulag.
When all this gets too much even for Leiris, he writes about his dogs, his ideal hotel, the decadent night-owl in white tie and tails, his Anglophile snobbery, his hatred of Wagner, his love of the Mediterranean and tropical lands, the respective merits of town and country, the nobility of not having children, King Arthur and the Round Table, his tailor, ‘the fetishistic affection I feel for my clothes, which like my writings represent a feature of my person as it appears to others’.
This dossier of a book is as unique as its author’s fingerprints, something that all autobiographies should be and which few are. He is oddly genial throughout, even as the pages wither away in self-laceration and pirouettes of futility: ‘This idea keeps gnawing at me: deep down, I’m a total fraud.’ What dandiacal impudence! Maybe that is the secret of his improbable appeal. He says he is a hypocrite, that his writing is mere bricolage. He decides the only way forward is to conduct his private life with ‘graciousness and extreme modesty’. So is this the end of it? Not at all. Much more autobiographical work bodied forth well into his eighties. Meanwhile, he’d kept a secret journal from 1922 to just before his death. A thousand pages from it was published in Paris in 1992. What’s next – the letters?
In search of kindred spirits: An Absence of Cousins, by Lore Segal, reviewed
In Lore Segal’s An Absence of Cousins, Nat Cohn, a fellow at the Concordance Institute, a small college in Connecticut, browses through a children’s novel during a staff meeting and exclaims: ‘We don’t write stories like this any more. Chronic plot deficiency is our problem.’
The problem for contemporary novelists is that tightly woven plots of cause and effect belie the way their readers experience the world. Like her compatriot Elizabeth Strout in Olive Kitteridge and Olive Again, Segal addresses it by featuring a single protagonist, Ilka Weisz, a young Austrian émigrée, and various recurring subsidiary characters, in a series of closely interlinked stories.
Many of these first appeared in the New Yorker and all were collected in Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2008) – the Shakespeare in question being either Leslie, the Institute’s director, or Eliza, his brash, outspoken wife, who take Ilka under their wing when she moves to Concordance from New York. Segal’s choice of the less snappy title for this reissue underscores her intention to focus on her central theme: the need to cultivate a broad network of friends and acquaintances who fulfil the roles traditionally played by extended families.
She carefully delineates the smalltown Connecticut setting while leaving the period vague, although, given that Ilka left ‘Hitler’s Europe’ at the age of seven and has a baby around the time the Institute installs its first computer, it is safe to assume that it’s the mid- to late-1960s. This is a time when the Institute staff and their friends are free to enjoy long, boozy gatherings in the middle of the working day, and their most distinguished colleague, the Nobel laureate Winterneet, is so often absent from his desk that Ilka starts to wonder whether he actually exists.
Winterneet, who does eventually make a brief appearance, is just one of the richly eccentric characters – Institute members, their wives, children and students, not to mention a conscience-pricking dog – whom Ilka encounters in Concordance. Most memorable of all is Gerti Gruner, a fellow Viennese refugee, whom Ilka shuns, seemingly because she reminds her too much of herself.
The tone shifts in the later section of the book when adultery, death and echoes of the Holocaust and Hiroshima enter its pages. But Segal’s precise, witty prose and boundless empathy ensure that, even at its darkest, Ilka’s world of ‘elective cousinship’ is one filled with enchantment.
Margaret Tudor – queen, regent and hapless intermediary
The history of princesses and queens has become well-trodden ground in the women’s history genre, particularly the Tudors. Linda Porter’s The Thistle and the Rose, a life of Margaret Tudor, queen consort to James IV and mother of James V, provides a refreshing change in subject.
Margaret has had to share the stage with some of the most famous names and voices of the 16th century: Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth of York; Henry VIII and his wives; and, of course, her namesake, Margaret Beaufort, the formidable Tudor matriarch who deftly helped place her son, the victor of Bosworth, on the throne. Margaret Tudor, though less considered in popular history, held equal if not greater sway in her contribution to history, as Porter demonstrates in her meticulously detailed biography of the English princess turned queen of Scotland.
The relationship between England and Scotland was fraught, with two centuries of war played out in the borderlands, a frontier zone peppered with garrisons. Margaret’s marriage to James IV of Scotland was intended to put an end to the fighting. Margaret’s importance to Anglo-Scottish peace has perhaps been overlooked by historians, but to her contemporaries, her marriage was a significant one. Aged 13 (young even by the standards of the time), Margaret travelled from Richmond to Scotland while still in mourning. The recent loss of her mother and her brother Arthur ‘shook the royal family to its core’. Henry VII and Elizabeth had lived in fidelity, having built a marriage on love as well as duty, a union following the Wars of the Roses. If Margaret had the same expectations for her relationship with James IV she would be disappointed.
James was young, attractive and a notorious philanderer, with an established mistress. (His reputation later prompted Walter Scott to suggest that en route to Flodden he seduced the Lady Heron, resulting in her abandoning the defence of Ford Castle.) Nonetheless, James doted on his young wife, gifting her an intricately detailed Book of Hours which later included a miniature of Margaret kneeling at an altar bearing the words ‘God us Defend’. As queen, she did her duty and throughout her late teens she was almost constantly pregnant. Though there was much adversity in her life, the real tragedy was the loss of nearly all of her eight children, some in utero, others in the cradle or childhood. The emotional impact of this must have been unbearable, which perhaps – this being such an important part of a woman’s life – could have been given more attention in the narrative.
The couple did, however, have one healthy son, the future James V. His birth precipitated the death of his father at the Battle of Flodden in 1513, a scene colourfully described, from the position of the armies to the detail of the cannons and the eventual bloody fate of James IV. Noting the atrocity of the battle, Porter writes: ‘The scene of slaughter was so appalling that, at its height, the loss of life rivalled in intensity some of the actions of the Somme.’
It was James IV’s wish that his wife would act as regent in the event of his death, and she did so with grit. Her main incentive was the security of her surviving son and, this being a man’s world, her regency soon felt unsteady. Margaret made the ill-fated decision to remarry. In a secret ceremony, she wed Archibald Douglas, a member of one of Scotland’s oldest and most notorious families. For Porter, this was not a lustful whim but a carefully considered decision to protect the future of her children, ‘looking to shore up her power base and build on it’. Her plan rendered her regency obsolete and she was forced to flee to Henry VIII’s court, but following a well-timed return to Scotland, she eventually saw to it that her son was installed as James V.
Telling the lives of women is challenging, owing to the scarcity of information available. Even for royal women the evidence is scant. The archive itself is gendered. When the record has little to offer, there is even greater need for a close reading of the material that is available. In places, the book might have offered a bolder, more creative perspective to avoid the story orbiting around ‘great men’.
A valuable source, however, is a collection of Margaret’s personal letters. These detail her disputes with her brother Henry VIII, indicating Margaret’s determination to secure her immediate family by showing strength and resolve against a notorious tyrant. The letters, interwoven with literary material and immense detail concerning the state of Anglo-Scottish politics, make The Thistle and Rose a fine example of royal biography and a welcome addition to Tudor narrative history.
Repenting at leisure: Early Sobrieties, by Michael Deagler, reviewed
Garlanded with praise from Percival Everett (‘the real deal’), Michael Deagler’s debut novel Early Sobrieties arrives with a fully formed literary voice best described as hysterical understatement. ‘Like all histories,’ Deagler’s twentysomething ex-alcoholic protagonist Dennis Monk tells us early on, ‘my family’s seemed composed of a series of recurring mistakes that, while theoretically avoidable, tended nevertheless to repeat themselves.’ Back living with his folks in suburban south Philadelphia after seven years of solid boozing, Monk is at leisure to repent his former life – a narrative of ‘utter shock and tragedy, a knee-capped bildungsroman’. The hysteria, while always close to the restrained surface of the prose, never quite breaks through.
This episodic novel has no plot as such: all we have is Monk’s peripatetic wanderings and the pleasure of his voice, which is consistently funny and wise. Realising that self-awareness was ‘recent, revelatory and bleak’, Monk sets about making amends for his drunken misdemeanours, though with little success. He spends much time reconnecting with old buddies in bars, ‘jealous of everybody for everything’, unable to interact socially, downing glasses of water while they get happily hammered: ‘With every round he ordered me a water… though I hardly needed so many. The accumulation of half-empty cups made it look like I was preparing a glass-harp performance.’
Unable to find work other than as a delivery driver (‘I’d been misinformed regarding the centrality of F. Scott Fitzgerald to the American job market’), Monk leaves his parents’ house and drifts from couch to couch, staying with college friends, also witnessing drunken altercations whose violence is described in prurient, albeit drily comic, terms. There’s a sense of dislocation or dissociation in this recovering addict’s observations, which Deagler perfectly articulates. Only when describing the suburban sprawl of Philadelphia, with its ‘cheesesteaks the size of dachshunds’, its malls, bland highways and the ‘vegetable stink of the Delaware’, does Monk really escape from his interior musings.
With its shifting cast of characters, Early Sobrieties perhaps lacks a sense of unity or narrative drive, presenting itself more as a series of linked short stories. Indeed, some chapters have appeared as standalone pieces in McSweeney’s, Harper’s and elsewhere. This is a shame, as we never learn about that family history of recurring mistakes. Monk’s postman father and weary paralegal mother disappear after the opening pages. We’re enticingly told: ‘An Irish Catholic family abhors nothing so much as a frank conversation.’ We want to know about why Monk started drinking in the first place, apart from having an addictive personality.
What makes the novel cohere, and what makes it such a pleasure, is Monk’s stream-clear voice and his growing insight into his condition. The ‘early’ of the title can only refer to the daunting lifetime of stringent self-control that lies ahead of him. ‘Take my years,’ he says at the end. ‘Just leave me my days.’
Another mistress for Victor Hugo: Célina, by Catherine Axelrad, reviewed
Recently I visited Hauteville House, Victor Hugo’s home on Guernsey, now magnificently restored, where he spent 15 years of exile in opposition to the autocratic regime of Napoleon III. His third-floor eyrie, a crystal cage with walls and ceilings of plate glass, resembles a greenhouse. Hugo wrote there, standing at a small, flat-topped desk, gazing out across the water at the distant coastline of France. He slept in one of two adjacent attic rooms. In the other slept a chambermaid, summoned by her master with a few light taps on the partition wall.
Vulnerable but resilient, Célina accepts the two francs left under her pillow for a night of sexual favours
The publication in the 1950s of coded entries in Hugo’s account books revealed payments for sex to a succession of serving maids. One of these was Célina Henry, the narrator of Catherine Axelrad’s novella. Published in France in 1997, the book has been translated into English by Philip Terry with some nice demotic touches.
Axelrad takes the bare facts about Célina – born into poverty on Alderney, joining the Hugo household in the late 1850s, and dying from tuberculosis in 1861 – and weaves them into a story of a vulnerable but resilient young woman who accepts the two francs left under her pillow for a night of sexual favours while eavesdropping during the day on the life taking place above stairs. Célina’s curiosity and intelligence provide her with insights about Hugo’s marriage and his relationship with the mistress he keeps down the street. She adopts the tragedy of Hugo’s family life, the drowning of his elder daughter in the Seine years earlier, as if it were her own. She grows jealous for her intimacy with Hugo when he briefly turns his attention to the local seamstress.
The extraordinary quality of Axelrad’s writing is the silence that envelops it. There is a featherweight lightness to it all that is a supreme contrast to the heavy mournfulness one feels after reaching the final page. Célina is not a submissive character, and life’s blows, including fears of impending death, glance off her, seemingly without leavinga mark. Nor is she subversive (unlike Célestine in Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, whose employer fetishises her boots and ends up dead with one of the boots stuffed in his mouth). She knows that her social standing limits her freedom and the options open to her, and that it’s not, as one character says, ‘a crime to sleep with a servant’. Nevertheless, within those limitations, she is able to exert her individuality and choose her own lovers, including one disastrous final relationship after she leaves Guernsey.
At the end, I could almost believe that Axelrad’s Célina could have had some influence on Hugo’s creative life, perhaps as a prototype of Fantine, one of the most attractive characters in Les Misérables, forced to become a prostitute before she, too, dies from tuberculosis.
The irrepressible musical gift of Huddie Ledbetter
Huddie Ledbetter, better known by the prison moniker Lead Belly, was a musical genius born in the southern United States just as Jim Crow laws were starting to bite. He fell foul of an unapologetically racist legal system and ended up serving on a chain gang in 1915, later doing time in state penitentiaries in Texas (1918-25), Louisiana (1930-34) and at Rikers Island in New York (1939).
Sheila Curran Bernard takes as her focus the years 1933 to 1935 when, after years of imprisonment, Ledbetter took an academic, John Lomax, to be his manager and organise his entrance into the larger musical world of northern America. She reveals for the first time what a catastrophically bad decision that was, because Lomax’s greed and racism led him to treat Ledbetter as little more than a chauffeur, making him dependent on what could be raised by passing round the hat at the end of concerts – a sum averaging, she notes, 50 cents a day.
Lomax called Ledbetter ‘my convict negro’, making him dress up in his old prison uniform, and told audiences that Ledbetter had a reputation for being drunk, irascible and violent. The newspapers went crazy: ‘Sweet Singer of the Swamplands Here to Do a Few Tunes between Homicides’ was one headline in the Herald Tribune, and as recently as 2019 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (to which Ledbetter was inducted in 1988) described him as ‘a man possessed with a hot temper and enormous strength’.
It was all lies. Huddie’s best friends never saw him drunk and insisted he didn’t start trouble, adding: ‘He loved children and he loved people.’ His wife described him as a gentle man. What makes him exceptional is that his musical brilliance survived 11 years within the most brutal prisons in the US. Three prisoners died in the chain gang of which he was part in May 1932. Whippings were frequent, on bare skin with leather straps; three blows were enough to break the skin, most prisoners screaming by the sixth or seventh blow.
It says much about his strength of mind that, despite such terrors, he applied to the state governor for a pardon – granted in August 1934. But then this was a man of exceptional quality. He stored in his head countless songs which, over the course of the next century, would permeate the culture. ‘Midnight Special’ has been covered by Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Abba, among many others; ‘Goodnight, Irene’ by Tom Waits, Ry Cooder, Bryan Ferry, Rod Stewart and Nick Cave.
Bernard aims to demonstrate the extent to which Ledbetter was a victim of a racist legal system and, when he was released from prison, of an exploitative manager who deprived him of all but the barest means of existence. She has written a revelatory volume that rescues its subject from misconceptions that still circulate, enabling us to see more clearly a composer and performer who was the peer of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bessie Smith, who both performed with him.
But this is a work of academic research which most readers will find difficult, disjointed and hard to navigate. That is hardly Bernard’s fault – her book is designed for the specialists who will make use of her 40 pages of annotations and the five-page list of sources. It’s easy to imagine a life of Lead Belly from birth to death which tells the story of how a young man with an irrepressible musical gift found his life derailed by a series of rigged trials in a racist country and later went on to become a widely admired singer and composer. Perhaps Bernard’s book will encourage someone to commission it.
An AI visionary looks forward to the best of all possible worlds
In 1993 Vernor Vinge popularised the notion of the Singularity – the point at which exponentially accelerating trends in multiple technologies move out of control in an endless positive feedback loop. Vinge was a science fiction writer; Ray Kurzweil is not. In 1993 he had already pioneered optical character recognition and synthesisers that could precisely mimic real instruments. His mission crystallised into making Vinge’s conceit a reality. He is principal researcher and ‘AI visionary’ at Google – and principal proselytiser, too, through any number of portentously titled books.
The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) set out his stall; The Singularity is Near (2005) staked a claim for human-level intelligence in computers by 2029 and a generalised apotheosis in 2045. So, on his timescale, we are roughly half way between 2005 and a third book in the trilogy, presumably The Singularity is Now – although by that time no one will be reading books because adaptations to our neocortices will mean that all the world’s information will be available to everyone, everywhere, immediately, inescapably.
Faced with this prediction, the obvious questions are: will this happen? Will this happen on this timescale? And will the world be better as a result? Yes, says Kurzweil, and yes and yes. The least interesting parts of the book run a victory lap on his previous predictions. Twenty years ago he was regarded as wildly over-optimistic about the possible pace of change. Now, compared with a lot of Silicon Valley boosterism, he looks conservative. It is a truism of futurism that we overestimate changes in the short term and underestimate them in the long. Since 2005, the compounding effect of two decades of Moore’s Law (that computer power doubles roughly every 18 months) has brought in its revenges. In 2005 a dollar would buy you around 12 million computations per second. Today that number would be around 48 billion.
Timetables being what they are in book publishing, some of Kurzweil’s commentary on AI and Large Language Models feels almost quaint, as the technology has been so widely covered. (LLMs, in particular, are coming for the livelihoods of white-collar workers who use words for a living, so, unsurprisingly, those people have paid considerably more attention to the transformation than they did when technology was replacing manual work.) Recent research by Epoch AI suggests that AI improves by a factor of just more than four every year – so by 2029 it could be more than 1,000 times as powerful as today.
More contested are the social effects of the Singularity, or at least the run-up to it. This comes as a combination of interlocking technologies, principally advances in computing power fuelling AI; nanotechnology; and life extension. Kurzweil’s argument is that over the broad sweep of history, technology makes people’s lives better and more rewarding. Literacy is up; perinatal mortality is down; solar power is spreading rapidly. Democracy is becoming more embedded (although the record of the last two years has put that into reverse).
The effect on jobs is shrugged away, as is easy if you take a sufficiently long view, although that long view is not one in which anyone’s life is actually lived. He makes a case for the importance and desirability of life extension: more life in good mental and physical health is an unalloyed blessing, and life extension offers that kind of old age rather than eternity as a Struldbrugg. From there he hops to the belief that soon ageing will be a can that can be kicked down the road indefinitely. If 100-year-olds in the next decade start living to 150, that offers 50 more years to solve the problem of living to 200, and so on. Kurzweil was born in 1948, so feels the timelines of this particularly acutely.
His penultimate chapter flags up some existential threats to humanity and therefore to the Singularity. There could be a nuclear war. New biochemical threats could emerge. Nanotechnology could reduce the world to a grey goo. AI itself could run rogue. But he pronounces himself ‘cautiously optimistic’.AI makes these problems easier to solve: ‘We should work towards a world where the powers of AI are equally distributed, so that its effects reflect the values of humanity as a whole.’
That sentiment is precisely where The Singularity Is Nearer, for all its limning of technical possibilities and its Panglossian extrapolation of back-of-the-envelope calculations into visions of a transhumanist future, fails to make its optimistic case convincingly. Kurzweil is a master of all sciences except politics. When he hymns the possibilities of 3D-printing, he notes in passing the dangers of 3D-printed guns invisible to scanners. His considered conclusion: ‘This will require a thoughtful re-evaluation of current regulations and policies.’ Well, indeed. More broadly, when he discusses distributional issues, his premise is that the ‘idea that wealthy elites would simply hoard this new abundance is grounded in a misunderstanding’. Has Kurzweil never met any of the wealthy elite?
Every single technology discussed in the book will in the short term create losers faster than it creates improvements for society as a whole – not to mention a whole realm of unpredictable unintended consequences. And the capacity of political systems to navigate challenges of that sort has not, to put it mildly, been improving exponentially.
Snobbery in the garden: U and non-U borders
Richard Sudell is the forgotten hero of the gardening revolution in Britain between the first and second world wars. A Quaker, born in Lancashire in 1892, the son of a straw and hay dealer, he left school at 14 and became a gardener, worked at Kew, then went to prison as a conscientious objector in 1916. On furlough from his first prison sentence, he worked with the Vacant Land Cultivation Society to help create allotments for London’s poor. When the first world war ended, he moved to Roehampton with his first wife. There he began writing a monthly gardening column in the Roehampton Estate Gazette advising his neighbours, most of whom had never had a garden before, on how to ‘beautify’ the debris-strewn patches of mud outside their new front and back doors. His columns were drawn together in his first book, The Town Gardening Handbook (1924), aimed at promoting horticulture throughout London County Council’s innovative housing estates.
‘Vegetable rats!’, Humphrey Brooke screamed at some neatly pruned yellow roses in a suburban front garden
A Sudell-inspired garden was structured, full of bright colour and labour-saving. It was not ‘a gardener’s garden’, where children, animals and games were taboo, but a small, practical space, easily maintained at weekends. Sudell recommended pyracantha, hanging baskets, manicured lawns, tea roses and pansies; he was also an advocate of crazy paving and suggested paths should be straight, so that washing could be dried alongside them. The estate tenants lived under permanent threat of eviction:
In those days if your garden was not up to scratch, the superintendent in his bowler hat, striped trousers and umbrella – the treatment – would knock on your door and give you a fortnight to put it right. If not, goodbye.
Michael Gilson’s Behind the Privet Hedge combines biography and social history to resurrect Sudell’s contribution to the ‘beautification’ of Britain. As secretary to the London Gardeners Guild, Sudell encouraged flower shows, lectures, competitions, communal ownership of garden tools and purchasing of discounted seeds and bulbs through the Guild. He started writing for Ideal Home in 1928 and moved to the Daily Herald in 1930, where his columns had a readership of two million. The English garden, Sudell opined, should be a space where the household could rest or read and ‘take their meals in the open air’. His book Landscape Gardening (1933) argued for extending the beautification project from behind the privet hedge to factories, hotels, golf courses, roadsides and petrol stations. On eBay it is still possible to buy a full set of Sudell’s 50 Wills cigarette cards providing practical advice on growing flowers from ageratum to zinnia.
The backlash against suburbia was vicious and immediate. ‘It is estimated that the combination of private and council house building between the wars contributed more than 200,000 hectares (500,000 acres) of new garden,’ Gilson writes. But many lamented or sneered at the vulgar taste of the suburban denizens: their ritualised visits to garden centres, the cheap furniture, water features and garden gnomes adorning their minuscule Edens. Edith Sitwell compared D.H. Lawrence to ‘a plaster gnome on a stone toadstool in some suburban garden’. Gilson notes the snobbery bursting from Sitwell’s ‘some suburban garden’ that she couldn’t be bothered to locate, and the irony of Lawrence’s own hatred for suburban houses, which he called ‘horrid little red rat traps’. Gilson points out that in the heated debate about whether suburbia was taking over Albion, the actual inhabitants of the new garden cities had no voice. Sudell spoke up for them.
Richard Mabey is at the opposite end of the gardening spectrum to Sudell. Best known as a nature writer since his first book Food for Free (1972), revered as the author of the plant bible Flora Britannica and other inspirational books, his many readers probably don’t think of him as a gardener at all – more an advocate for a new non-domineering understanding of the relationship between human beings and the rest of the natural world. His latest book, The Accidental Garden, is centred on the Norfolk garden that he and his wife Polly have curated over the past 20 years.
During the heatwave of 2022 Mabey and his wife ‘felt more vulnerable, less in charge of our own territory’. The odd feeling of gardening during a climate change emergency was exacerbated by perceptions of ageing and Mabey’s recent dependency on a stick ‘the natural world’s first tool… my Instrument of Minimum Intervention’. Accepting that their garden needed to adapt to the changing climate caused Mabey to reflect on their intentions when they moved into their house 20 years ago. ‘It feels disrespectful now how casually we treated our predecessors’ accoutrements, given we assumed without question that whatever we planned would last forever.’ In the garden they inherited was ‘an island bed plumped with azaleas and hebes’ that they condemned, along with the other cultivated beds ‘on which we quickly began delivering capital sentences’.
Towards the end of his meditative book is a chapter entitled ‘Rose-Tinted’, in which Mabey describes taking his friend Humphrey Brooke, an art historian, curator and renowned collector of shrub roses at Lime Kiln, to the local pub. On the way they passed a suburban front garden containing some neatly pruned yellow garden-centre roses, at which Brooke, to the astonishment of the deadheading proprietor, screamed: ‘Vegetable rats!’ Mabey comments:
It was a spectacular hissy-fit and a very odd epithet for a class of roses whose worst sin is maybe having a touch of bling. But I could see what he disliked in them – their waxen petals and brash colours, and an absence of what might be called the essence of rosaceousness – that wild, unkempt, headily perfumed fandango of crumpled silk petals and tangled thorn.
Wisely, Mabey acknowledges that, ‘the full saga of the rose dynasty is an epic narrative of social and cultural history’. The old roses he favours in his own garden are Fantin Latour, Willie Lobb, Omar Khayyam and the White Rose of York. Naturally he has no space for the shocking pink masses of Dorothy Perkins or the hybrid tea rose Mrs Sam McGredy. James Bartholomew’s Yew and Non-Yew (1998), extending Nancy Mitford’s ‘U and Non-U’ distinction to the horticultural world, remains relevant today. Marigolds and dahlias are Non-U, peonies are U, in case you need to know. Snobbery in the garden will never go away, even if we are all gardening against the apocalypse now.
The rape of Ukraine continues while the world’s sympathies move on
‘Write and record’ was the dying instruction of the historian Simon Dubnow – shot by Nazis in the Riga ghetto – and two books recently emerging from Ukraine embody this spirit in spades. Now that the world’s anger and sympathies have largely moved on to the Middle East, they may do something to rekindle that earlier sense of outrage and remind the ‘caring’ classes of atrocities closer to home.
‘My hatred flows from the
small things to the big things. Every fibre is filled with it’
The first, Our Daily War, comes from Andrey Kurkov, the celebrated Russo-Ukrainian novelist and author of 2022’s Invasion Diary, a detailed on-the-ground account of Putin’s attack on his country. Kurkov’s new work, bookended by the Russian invasion and Alexei Navalny’s murder, seems not so much a diary as a series of dated articles, almost letters to the reader – sometimes a day, sometimes a fortnight apart – giving us news of what is happening in his country: ‘Every day I write and think about the war. I surround myself with the war and allow its horrible mass to pass through me.’ That ‘mass’ is one Kurkov has digested for the reader with notable self-discipline. Thoughtfulness nearly always prevails over anger; the pieces are flawlessly structured; the tone is devoid of self-pity.
Those looking for horror will of course find it here. Kurkov tells us, page after page, of the rape Russia is inflicting on his country. In the occupied territories, locals are forced through filtration camps, and those with the wrong tattoo or ill-advised social media posts are ‘according to some eyewitness accounts… killed immediately’. When the corpse of the children’s writer Volodymyr Vakulenko is finally found, it’s clear he hasn’t been shot in hot blood by the enemy but executed: ‘Two bullets from a Makarov pistol were taken from Vakulenko’s body. Russian soldiers do not have pistols, only machine guns. Officers have pistols.’ In Kyiv, a friend, the rector of a university, commits suicide: ‘He left a note explaining that he could not live like this any more.’
Yet saturating the book is a note of savage black comedy, the farce of a world made weird by unimaginable violence. Treasure hunters with metal detectors offer their services (at a considerable price) as clearers of minefields. With the attacks on power stations, Kurkov finally finds a use for all the lame scented candles and granny-knitted socks he’s been given for Christmas over the years. The city of Chernivtsi is now home to a flock of wild green parrots, ‘released from their cages before their owners fled’.
So dense, over the book’s 340 pages, is the accumulation of anecdote and detail, you can’t help but wonder if it wouldn’t have hit harder as two slimmer volumes. In his defence, Kurkov himself would surely have preferred to write a shorter book, too. In December 2022, we find him prophesying to friends that the war will end in the New Year; two months later, that the tenth anniversary of the annexation of Crimea will be marked by Ukrainian victory. This, alas, is Kurkov the novelist speaking. In reality, those dates have come and gone and the ‘horrible mass’ of war, so well described, continues to grow.
A less detached, more ‘Old Testament’ work is The Language of War. Oleksandr Mykhed, an author turned soldier, forced to flee with his wife from their home in the Kyiv suburbs, gives us many things here: a personal account of displacement, a study of what happens to children’s heads during wartime, of how war changes people utterly and what they discover about themselves in the process.
But what readers will surely take away from Mykhed’s book – which eats into the mind like phosphorus – are not only his love of life but, more strikingly, his steadily growing, limitless hatred of Russia, offered up with chilling candour and allowing no one off the hook. Amid pitiless, relentless descriptions of child rape, child abduction, of the deliberate mass killings of civilians (Bucha, from which his parents finally escaped after a long ordeal, is the dark heart of The Language of War), Mykhed studies the course of his rage, as though mesmerised and slightly in awe of it:
My hatred flows from the small things to the big ones. Every fibre is filled with it. Hatred towards the smallest particle of Russian collective consciousness and to their greatest symbols… And should I consider this hatred as a new experience? How should I manage this anger? Or should I?
There is nothing politically correct about this, of course, but liberal western audiences, reading the book under electric light in heated or ventilated rooms, would do well to pause before passing judgment. With the possibility that before long an unsatisfactory peace may be forced on the country, Mykhed’s implacable wrath and those legions of Ukrainians who share it, are, like Russia itself, not going away.
Will the Olympics ever be politics-free?
Michael Beloff has narrated this article for you to listen to.
The modern Olympics, first held in Athens in 1896 in a genuflection to their Grecian predecessors, was the creation of Pierre de Coubertin, a French aristocrat. As this septet of books shows from allusive angles, Coubertin’s best known quotation – ‘the most important thing in the Olympic Games is not winning but taking part’ – must rank as a paradigm example of a precept more honoured in the breach than the observance. It is rivalled only by his anticipation that the Games would be ‘a vehicle for increasing friendly understanding among nations’.
In an elegant series of vignettes entitled Aux Armes! Sport and the French: An English Perspective (Fairfield Books, £9.99), the sports writer David Owen notes that as early as 1900 the French authorities saw the Games as ‘a competitive fulcrum in which to stress test new, potentially strategic, technologies: shooting, motor vehicles and balloons’. Lord Desborough, rightly rescued from the oubliette of history by Sandy Nairne and Peter Williams in Titan of the Thames: The Life of Lord Desborough (Unbound, £25), organised the first London Olympics in 1908. They were marred by various nations taking umbrage at perceived slights even in the opening ceremony.
In Paris in 1924 there were outbreaks of nationalistic friction across a range of sports, including rugby, boxing, tennis, fencing and water polo, among both athletes and spectators, leading to a pessimistic headline in the Times: ‘Olympics doomed.’ By the time of the Berlin Games in 1936, no one could seriously credit the concept of a separation between politics and the Olympics.
A false glow was cast over the reality of sport by the Oscar-winning film Chariots of Fire, loosely based on the Paris Olympics exactly a century ago. In Chariots Return: Saving the Soul of the Games (Keep It Real Publishing, £24), Mark Ryan uses the careers of the two British sprinter gold medallists, Harold Abrahams and Eric Liddell, as a way to fast-forward the Olympic story, highlighting the abandonment of the Coubertin ideal of amateurism, of which Abrahams was a passionate aficionado but simultaneously a prophet of its demise, caused by the influx of money. The no-pay principle was only removed from the Olympic Charter in 1980. In Paris this summer, medal-winning track and field athletes will receive financial prizes too.
The difference between the old-fashioned amateur sportsman and the modern professional is well illustrated by comparing Lord Desborough with Iwan Thomas – the toff and the tough. The former was a fencing silver medallist and all-round sportsman, excelling in eclectic pursuits; the latter was also a silver medallist and a single-minded track specialist, who pushed himself into temporary depression, as he uncomfortably recounts in Brutal: My Autobiography (Bloomsbury Sport, £20). No more foxes, only hedgehogs.
In Amsterdam, in 1928, Paris’s forgotten third man of British athletics, Douglas Lowe, won the 800 metres for the second time. Those Games also saw women compete in athletics. The distress shown by some female competitors running the same distance as Lowe restricted their further participation in sprints until Tokyo 1964, though their cause was supported by Abrahams, whose wife later gave her name to an annual trophy for the best British woman athlete.
Curiously for an opponent of arbitrary discrimination, Abrahams led the fight against a British boycott of Hitler’s Olympics, arguing that it would do more harm than good. In The Other Olympians: A True Story of Gender, Fascism and the Making of Modern Sport (Ebury Press, £22), Michael Waters spurns the conventional analysis that those Games dealt a fatal blow to Hitler’s belief in Aryan supremacy because of the exploits of the black sprinter Jesse Owens – whom Abrahams later befriended. The author concentrates instead on the stories of two athletes, Zdenek Koubek, a Czech sprinter, and Mark Weston, a British thrower, both assigned as female at birth but later identified as biologically male. Neither competed in the Games, but the winner of the women’s 100 metres, the American Helen Stephens, was perceived as transgender. The dispute surrounding this disparate trio of athletes led to the introduction of the first Olympics sex tests, whose current version means that transgender persons will not compete in Paris this year, and intersex persons only under strict conditions.
As for doping (the principal cause of the distortion of a level playing field in sport), Abrahams denied not only its utility but its existence. Ben Johnson, the Canadian sprinter who won the 100 metres at Seoul in 1988, but took the downward route from hero to zero in the space of 48 hours,was the subject of the most notorious Olympic scandal. Mary Ormsby’s valiant case for his defence in World’s Fastest Man: The Incredible Life of Ben Johnson (Sutherland House Books, £21.99) cannot bypass the fact that Johnson’s steroid use was protracted and deliberate.
In pursuit of the crucial aim of fair competition, international governing bodies prescribe protective policies for elite athletes to deal not only with gender inequality and drugs but differences of weight, age and impairment. In Regulating Bodies: Elite Sport Policies and Their Unintended Consequences (OUP, £22.99), Jaime Schultz contends that such measures, if benign in aim, can have adverse effects.
Roger Bannister, the first sub-four-minute miler and medically trained neurologist, had a particular interest in such issues. Peter Whitfield’s Roger Bannister: Athlete and Philosopher (Wychwood Editions, £18), recalls that only his relative failure in the 1,500 metres in the 1952 Helsinki Olympics prompted him to extend his sporting career into 1954, his annus mirabilis. Bannister, while still a teenager, had declined an invitation to be part of Team GB in the 1948 London Olympics, but as a spectator he speculated on whether the Games were ‘changing their nature. Was a new form of professionalism creeping in, with the athlete maintained by his country for the purposes of prestige? Might not the Olympics accentuate the political struggle between different nations?’ But he perceptively ended his soliloquy: ‘At the beginning of each Games, such questions are raised. Then they are forgotten as the moving drama of success and failure unrolls itself.’
Nothing in this collection of unorthodox Olympics books casts doubt on the sportsman-savant’s conclusion. The medallists this year will vindicate the first three themes of the Olympic motto – plus vite, plus haut, plus fort – even if the fourth (ensemble) may remain aspirational. From Paris 1900, a five-month extravaganza where the core hallmark sports were complemented by peripheral outliers such as polo and pelota, to Paris 2024, where the equivalent outliers will be skateboarding and breakdance, in terms of the sporting agenda one may say: Chacun à son goût. In terms of the overall Olympic balance sheet the apt apophthegm would surely be: Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The Senedd, like Holyrood, has failed its people
There are disturbing parallels between the meltdown of the Labour administration in Wales and the recent chaos of the SNP government in Scotland. Dodgy fundraising issues, votes of no confidence, forced resignations, woke policies, ever-lengthening NHS waiting lists and even scandals over deleted WhatsApps during Covid. What’s going on? Is there something systemically awry with devolution?
The Scottish and Welsh parliaments, established after referendums 25 years ago, were supposed to bring power closer to the people and improve the quality of government. In the recent past, at least, they have succeeded in doing neither. Reckless incompetence in both administrations has further diminished respect for politics and delivered demonstrably inferior government.
Welsh First Minister Vaughan Gething has today resigned after only four months, following a vote of no confidence which he initially tried to dismiss as an ‘opposition gimmick’. He had been accused of impropriety in accepting a £200,000 donation from a company that had earlier received £400,000 from the Development Bank of Wales when Mr Gething was the minister responsible for it. There is no suggestion that the Prif Weinidog broke any law. Gething denies any wrong-doing. But the owner of the company that made the unprecedented donation was revealed to have been convicted of environmental offences. The resignation this morning of four of Gething’s own ministers made his tenure as FM unsustainable.
Both Labour in Wales and the SNP in Scotland have delivered derisory national leadership
In Scotland, the long-running police investigation, Operation Branchform, into fundraising irregularities in the SNP is still hanging over the party of government. The former chief executive of the SNP, and husband of Nicola Sturgeon, Peter Murrell, was arrested in April and charged with embezzlement, which he denies. The investigation earlier focussed on a £100,000 campervan which was seized by police from outside the home of Mr Murrell’s mother.
Nicola Sturgeon was also arrested as part of Operation Branchform, but released without charge in June last year. She had already resigned precipitately from her post as first minister following a scandal over the transgender double rapist, Isla Bryson, also known as Adam Graham, being placed on remand in Cornton Vale women’s jail. Ms Sturgeon has since confirmed that the abuse she received during the trans row played a major role in her decision to stand down. Her flagship Gender Recognition Reform (Scotland) Bill, had been blocked by the UK government under Section 35 of the Scotland Act. Ms Sturgeon had also been criticised for a decline in Scottish educational performance and for mismanagement of the Scottish NHS, while trying to use the courts to force a repeat referendum on independence.
Gething, of course, is a unionist, and has not been trying to break up the UK. But as in Scotland, the background to the present troubles has been a failure to deliver on pressing issues like NHS waiting lists in Wales. He had also promoted ill-considered and unpopular legislation like the country-wide imposition of 20mph speed limits, which had to be scrapped after a public outcry. Gething had also taken Wales down the trans route. He promised to make Wales ‘the most LGBTQ+ friendly nation in Europe’ and attacked Rishi Sunak’s block on the Scottish gender bill. As in Scotland, evidence that Welsh schools are promoting trans ideology, has alarmed parents.
But all that aside, the real failure of the devolved administrations over the past two decades has been in the performance of their core responsibilities: health and education. Both Wales and Scotland receive substantially more public spending per head than England, yet the performance of public services has been demonstrably poorer. In Wales, one in five are languishing on NHS waiting lists, while in Scotland one in seven are in medical limbo. Since 2019, Scotland has recorded an 80 per cent increase in patients going private according to the Nuffield Trust. In Wales the number has more than doubled. Scotland has the worst drug deaths in Europe. Wales is not far behind.
Both Labour in Wales and the SNP in Scotland have delivered derisory national leadership. Humza Yousaf, the first Muslim leader of a western democracy, who took over from Surgeon last year, presided over a catalogue of policy errors, from ferry contracts to recycling schemes. He resigned in April after facing a vote of no confidence following the collapse of the SNP-Green coalition. Gething, the first black leader of a European nation, attempted to carry on even after a no confidence vote in the Senedd. He has now bent to the inevitable, following a ministerial revolt over the donations scandal and his sacking of a minister, Hannah Blythyn, for allegedly leaking evidence that the FM had been deleting WhatsApp messages during Covid. Blythyn denied responsibility for the leak, saying she was ‘deeply shocked’ by the dismissal.
Keir Starmer once suggested that Wales was a ‘blueprint’ for the UK under a Labour government. Not anymore. The Prime Minister would be wise to review his commitment to devolving more powers and more money to Wales and Scotland until there is firm evidence that they’ve got their respective houses in order.
Southgate’s strengths were also his undoing
After yet another dose of Euros final heartbreak for England, Gareth Southgate has resigned as manager.
Southgate has been manager of England at a time where the overall quality of international football is not as high as it was in the past
On paper, Southgate – who led England to two Euro finals and a World Cup semi-final – has done far better than many of his predecessors. One of his vital contributions was successfully managing to move the English national team away from the paralysing culture of club tribalism that defined the so-called Golden Generation of the 2000s. Southgate also naturally understood how the national football team can be an incredible source of togetherness; a force for social unity. He has openly expressed his pride in the fact that the young players he has introduced to the England senior set-up collectively embody modern Britain – which, for its flaws, is a relatively successful example of a multi-racial democracy. Southgate, who clearly values a traditional and stable family life, has never embarrassed his country – which can’t be said for many others who have been in positions of national leadership.
But the reality is that Southgate’s traditionalism proved to be his undoing – adopting an overly cautious tactical approach and being hyper-loyal to certain players who simply didn’t deliver the goods. He has had an embarrassment of energetic attacking riches at his disposal, yet a lethargic Harry Kane started as a lone striker throughout the tournament. He was Southgate’s captain and part of his so-called ‘leadership group’, but sometimes a degree of ruthlessness is required to be a truly world-class manager, and Southgate lacks that. It is criminal that Ollie Watkins – who fired England into the final with a clinical late winner against the Netherlands – only spent a total of 38 minutes on the pitch this tournament.
Another player who was ‘overplayed’ was Kieran Trippier, one of Southgate’s ‘favourites’ who was shoved into the first XI for most of the tournament in an unnatural left-back position. With Luke Shaw unable to play until the later knockout games, Southgate made a mistake by not taking another left-footed full-back to Germany – perhaps Tyrick Mitchell, who has made 108 Premier League appearances for Crystal Palace in the past three seasons. But arguably the gravest injustice was the fact that a woefully underperforming Phil Foden played more than ten hours of football, while Cole Palmer played just over two.
The reality is that Southgate has been manager of England at a time where the overall quality of international football is not as high as it was in the past. Some of his predecessors were in charge during the Brazilian period of excellence between 1994 and 2002; the France team which won both the 1998 World Cup and Euro 2000; and the Spain side of 2008 to 2012 that won three major international tournaments on the trot. These periods covered genuine legends of the game – the likes of Ronaldo, Ronaldinho, Zidane, Henry, Xavi, and Iniesta. Compared to other national managers, Southgate had one of the finest pools of players to select from in the world. There have been moments that his conservatism held him back when England were very much on the front foot – such as the Euro 2020 final against Italy at Wembley. Spain were the best team in this tournament and deserved winners, but some will be left wondering how the final would have panned out if the pacy Watkins and classy Palmer had been in the starting XI.
Putting aside the ‘ifs’ and ‘maybes’, Southgate should be thanked for his service. But if England wish to maximise the potential of a hugely talented crop of young players, they will need someone more adventurous and ruthless with a strong managerial track record.
There is a certain German who fits the bill who might enjoy taking on the challenge.
Biden bats down attempts to get him to stand aside
Even amid inner Democratic turmoil over his capability to stay in office, President Joe Biden refuses to step down.
In terms of proving he is too diminished to run, Cockburn is not sure what more evidence the Democratic Party needs. Biden mumbled through his Complex news interview with Speedy Morman on Friday. A few people in the comments on the interview said they had to turn on subtitles to understand him.
Biden also said, “In 2020 when Barack asked me to vice president…” Cockburn can forgive the guy for making a simple mistake, having been Barack Obama’s VP from 2009-2017. And yet with repeated evidence of memory mix-ups — not pertaining to normal, everyday mistakes, but to serious questions of mental acuity — each infraction is increasingly concerning.
On Monday, Biden defensively refocused on the the unifying factor of the Democratic Party: Trump is a danger to society. In his interview with NBC’s News anchor Lester Holt, Holt addressed Biden’s phone call last week where he said, “It’s time to put Trump in the bull’s eye.” Biden responded with: “It was — it was a mistake to use the word… I meant to focus on him.”
Biden also addressed many questions about his age, including Holt’s question about whether he had watched the debate. After admitting that he had not, Biden said: “I had a bad, bad night. I wasn’t feeling well at all. And — and I had been — without making — I screwed up.” This colorful cover-up is old news to Cockburn.
It seems with each new revelation about Biden’s decline, he is more determined to run for another four years. As Biden will “1,000 percent” — as he told Speedy — be running for re-election, there are only tenuous scenarios in which he would not be the Democratic nominee. When the time comes to select a nominee, delegates could technically vote against the candidate they are pledged to support. But Cockburn considers this highly unlikely, as the candidate has the right to review and make changes to their slate of delegates in each state.
Because of an election law in Ohio, Biden will actually be nominated over a virtual vote in late July, which makes things messy, but even more likely for Biden to maintain delegate loyalty. Cockburn wants the Zoom link.
President Biden put it best in his interview with Speedy: “We will 1,000 percent — in your words — see you on the ballot this November?” Morman asked. “Unless I get hit by a train, yeah,” Biden responded.