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Why state bureaucracy is crucial to our happiness
Francis Beckett has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Most days, outside the local courtroom where I live in Finchley Central, a man holds up a placard that says in big black capitals: ALL OUR BRAINS ARE MICROCHIPPED BY THE SECURITY SERVICES. It’s a foolish conspiracy theory, of course, but it’s also a symptom of the fear and loathing of the state which has grown in recent years and which, according to this lucid and persuasive book, threatens to return us to a time when we were governed by the whims of a monarch whose wishes were implemented arbitrarily by his family, friends and flatterers.
The problem, say Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, is not that this presages an end to democracy. It does; but the threat is to ‘modern state administration in general – upon which any workable democratic system of government must depend’. If you destroy this administration, you get bad, authoritarian and worst of all unpredictable government. One of the reasons dictatorships are so awful to live under is that there is no rulebook. You cannot know how to keep safe. Most victims of Stalin’s purges honestly believed they had done nothing to offend the dictator.
Democracy is necessary, but not sufficient. Leaders such as Narendra Modi, Victor Orban and Donald Trump can claim to have been elected democratically. In 1933, Adolf Hitler could properly make that claim, too. Neither is this a left-right battle. Now, the main danger comes from what we call the far right, with its ‘deep state’ conspiracy theories and its demonising of the civil service and judiciary. But the phrase ‘deep state’ started out on the left, whose rhetoric sometimes suggests that the state stands between the people and socialism. Get rid of the civil service, the judiciary, the police and the security services, and who will protect you when the leader you’ve elected turns on you? Right now the danger comes from politicians such as Trump, Marine Le Pen, Orban and Benjamin Netanyahu sabotaging the machinery of government in the name of democracy.
Lest we think Britain is immune, it is only eight years since the Daily Mail ran pictures of senior judges on its front page alongside the headline ENEMIES OF THE PEOPLE – a phrase associated with Stalin to describe those who were liquidated during the terror. The crime these judges had committed against the people was to rule that Brexit could not be triggered without a Westminster vote. Perhaps the newspaper thought, as Trump would have, that they were part of the ‘deep state’. In the same spirit, Netanyahu, as the authors put it, ‘serially attacked the courts, the civil service, universities and the police,’ the instruments of what he too called the ‘deep state’.
The mantra is: ‘They’re all the same.’ It’s now most often heard from the far right, but was also the theme of a book by Ken Livingstone called If Voting Changed Anything They’d Abolish It. The argument is that it’s no good voting in a new government if you have the same old civil service, judges and experts. (Authoritarians hate experts.)
It is rubbish. What stops democratic politicians from delivering on their promises is not an intransigent bureaucracy but their own lack of will or clarity or grip. In Britain, as in other democratic countries, prime ministers who know what they want and do their homework can use the civil service to deliver for them. Since 1945, we have had two such prime ministers, Clement Attlee and Margaret Thatcher, and they both turned the supertanker around without needing to replace the state’s experts with their own placemen.
‘The assault on the modern state has not yet destroyed it,’ say Hanson and Kopstein, ‘but it has generated a global struggle between two principles of rule – in short, the rule of law versus the rule of men – the outcome of which has yet to be decided.’ The authors, who are American academics, believe it has three roots: Christian nationalism, anger at encroachments on Republican presidents by ‘liberal judges and bureaucrats’, and libertarians. The new authoritarians, they say, take their inspiration from Vladimir Putin, who relies on old friends to advise him.
Hanson and Kopstein write:
When the state as we know it disintegrates and is replaced by the arbitrary rule of powerful men and their political households, it will become perfectly clear that neither libertarianism nor social democracy is attainable – only the politics for survival for oneself and one’s loved ones in a violent world of competing clans and empires.
Their book is short, clearly written and dreadfully important. It does not advocate this or that political or economic theory. It does not even particularly defend democracy. It gives us the unwelcome but unavoidable news that state bureaucracy – the thing we love to hate, the pantomime villain of politics, the second best source of jokes after mothers-in-law – is crucial to our happiness, freedom and well-being, and is in mortal danger.
Could anyone be trusted in Tudor and Stuart England?
‘Spies, you are lights in state, but of base stuff,/ Who, when you’ve burnt yourselves down to the snuff,/ Stink, and are thrown away.’ Ben Jonson likened his fellow secret agents to a tallow candle: a grotty necessity, to be discarded without regret.
Who now remembers Arthur Gregory, and his ‘admirable art of forcing the seal of a letter; yet so invisibly, that it still appeared a virgin to the exactest beholder’? Or the scrivener Peter Bales, so dainty with his quill that he could forge any handwriting, and who touted at Elizabeth I’s court the Renaissance equivalent of microfilm, a script so minuscule that he could fit the Lord’s Prayer, the Credo, the Ten Commandments, two short Latin prayers, his name, motto, and the date ‘within the circle of a single penny… so accurately wrought as to be very plainly legible’?
Secret messages could be hidden in a Royalist’s wooden leg or in an aristocratic lady’s towering bouffant
These and other precarious grafters have been fished out of the bin of history by Nadine Akkerman and Pete Langman in Spycraft. A companion piece to Akkerman’s acclaimed 2019 Invisible Agents, about the flourishing of women spies in the English Civil War, it wears the weight of its impeccable learning even more lightly, as it canters through forgeries, codes, disguises, invisible inks and poisons.
Done badly, the book would still have what, in spy novel circles, is called ‘how-stuff-works appeal’; done well, as it is, there is joy on every page. ‘How usual it is for buffoons to be used as spies,’ observed Robert Cecil, and Clouseau moments abound. Take the hapless Gunpowder Plotter Henry Garnett, who in his correspondence from the Tower of London decided marmalade would have to do as his invisible ink; or envious reports from Venice of such gadgets as ‘a pocket Church book with a pistol hid in the binding, which turning to such a page, discharges’.
Amid these capers is a serious message: that ignorance about the nuts and bolts of Renaissance spycraft leads to bad history. When Mary Queen of Scots took a week to respond to Babington’s inept invitation to a plot, it was not, as some historians infer, because she was wrestling with a dilemma. In fact, because encrypted correspondence was such a sluggish business, it was tantamount to an instant ‘Yes!’.
Akkerman and Longcroft put their knowledge to good use, serving up a couple of (rather chewy) scoops, and testing and tabulating all the early modern techniques in a valuable appendix. The result is anything but dry: rather, the reader comes to share the paranoia of an age when even the Pope was using human guinea pigs, Dr Mengele-like, to test poison antidotes. Secret messages could be anywhere: in a Royalist soldier’s wooden leg; in an aristocratic lady’s towering bouffant; even in a raw egg, according to Thomas Lupton’s 1579 book, A Thousand Notable Things. (An egg soaked in vinegar for six hours becomes soft, so that a slit can be made in the shell, and a piece of paper insinuated. Another soak in cold water renders the egg unsuspiciously brittle again.)
For those who found Christopher Andrew’s soup-to-nuts history of spying, The Secret World, uneven or unwieldy, Spycraft offers a satisfying microcosm: the birth of an English secret service. So primitive was espionage in the court of Henry VII that he was obliged to learn the rudiments of ciphers from his more worldly Spanish daughter-in-law Katherine of Aragon. A hundred years later, Francis Bacon could justly claim to have devised ‘the perfection of a cipher, which is to make anything signify anything’ and yet seem to the hostile observer ‘void of all suspicion’.
There were constant setbacks – when William Cecil tried to start an archive of the late Mary I’s papers, he was told that the documents were unavailable because they had just been used to stuff her corpse. But, broadly, this is a success story, of England’s explosive innovation in a high-stakes information war that has many echoes of our internet age. (Robert Dudley would sign his letters to Elizabeth with a doodle of watchful eyes: ‘an early modern emoji’.) Spycraft also culminates in an amusingly topical hate object, ‘the general Post Office’, founded by Oliver Cromwell not for the benefit of letter-writers but explicitly for surveillance – that his spy chief might ‘discover and prevent many dangerous, and wicked designs… by letter’.
Even the most down-and-out characters here cannot help but think in poetry, like the cryptanalyst Thomas Phelippes, thwarter of the Babington Plot, who later complained from debtor’s prison to Robert Cecil that the code he had been sent to break was of ‘such kind as will ask time to tread it out’. We might look back with condescension upon an age that believed poison could be neutered by dipping a ‘bezoar ston’ into a goblet of wine (as both Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots nervously did), but they in turn might pity us our leaden use of the English language – the one technology that has surely deteriorated since the time of the Tudors.
The downside to being rich: Long Island Compromise, by Taffy Brodesser-Akner, reviewed
Fleishman is in Trouble was one of the funniest novels of 2020, and it catapulted Taffy Brodesser-Akner, a New York Times journalist, into the spotlight with a US TV series two years later. Long Island Compromise is a rollicking family saga written with the same sardonic wit. It is centred around a wealthy family living in a suburb of Long Island, who owe their fortune to the late patriarch, a Jewish European émigré who set up a successful factory making polystyrene foam moulds. There’s a backstory to this, which we learn later, but his indomitable widow and his son Carl’s wife Ruth rule the roost. At the beginning, Carl is kidnapped, then returned traumatised, and the implications of this violent act affect Ruth and their children Nathan, Beamer and Jenny.
Brodesser-Akner can spin an excellent yarn with intelligence and wit. She is very much a post-modern writer, using brackets to expound on details in gossipy, amusing asides, such as telling us what Carl’s secretary thought when he didn’t turn up for work on the day he was kidnapped.
The characterisation of Nathan and Beamer are sources of much hilarity, and although pushed to the point of parody, they are elevated to heights of comic genius by surreal touches, such as Beamer’s obsession with procuring the actor Mandy Patinkin for his lame, cliché-ridden screenplay. The author is master of the scathing put-down:
Beamer, after a storied high school career in which he relieved nearly a full quarter of his class’s virginities, became a moderately successful screenwriter, most notably of a trilogy of action movies that are in constant replay on certain basic cable channels (and sometimes the pay ones, but only the less prestigious ones, and only late at night).
The asides are as delicious:
Ludmilla the housekeeper and Paulette the nanny were bustling around… trying to read the tea leaves of their mistress’s absence in order to anticipate her mood.
And: ‘Ludmilla made her face into the Slavic stone that she had trained it to be.’
Only slightly let down only by a mawkish death scene which serves as a device to clarify the back-story, this will be one of my books of the year.
At last, a private education that wasn’t unmitigated misery
There has been a spate of books recently about private education, ranging from academic denouncements of their malign effects on society, such as Francis Green and David Kynaston’s Engines of Privilege, to Charles Spencer’s grim chronicle of neglect and abuse, A Very Private School. Though technically falling within this genre, 1967, the singer-songwriter Robyn Hitchcock’s diverting account of his formative spell at Winchester College, seems to hail from a rosier era. It is one where matron’s buttered crumpets rather than bullying were the chief topics of Billy Bunter-esque reminiscences that proclaimed schooldays the happiest of one’s life. Indeed Hitchcock even wonders whether his parents got their ‘money’s worth’, since, contrary to expectations, he was not ‘beaten up, sodomised or ritually humiliated by the other inmates’. He seems almost dis-appointed in retrospect that nobody stuck his ‘head down a toilet bowl’ or ‘stripped and mocked’ him.
Instead, Winchester, or more specifically the communal gramophone in his school house, was to give Robyn (born in 1953) the musical marrow to suck on that has provided him with a decent income for close to half a century. It was there that Bob Dylan, the post-moptop Beatles, Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix and the Incredible String Band all came his way. The chorus refrain of ‘How does it feel / to be on your own?’, from ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, heard blaring from the house gramophone shortly after he was deposited at school by his parents, made him an instant Bobcat convert. Dylan, he felt, seemed to be addressing him personally – those lyrics speaking to his own sense of ‘being marooned alone in an alien world’.
Nevertheless, having grown officer-class tall by the autumn term of 1967, he worries about being unable to look up to his idol, who is now ‘nearly a foot shorter’ than him. And his worst fears are soon realised when this mythic year slips away and Dylan returns in 1968 with John Wesley Harding, after a prolonged silence and rumours of a motorcycle crash. This country rock album recorded in Nashville, Tennessee, Hitchcock characterises (rather unfairly to my admittedly state school-educated oik’s ears) as ‘flat, beige and not much fun to listen to’. Yet, ironically, Hitchcock himself would wind up both living and recording in Nashville.
Few British artists have been quite so feted stateside but largely ignored at home as Robyn Hitchcock. Cited as an inspiration to REM and Yo La Tengo as well as a mainstay of American college radio stations since the 1980s and the subject of a live concert film by Jonathan Demme. Hitchcock initially came to prominence in the late 1970s as the lead singer of the Soft Boys. A Cambridge-based post-punk outfit, they were considered a little too enamoured of the Byrds to be taken seriously by a UK music press then championing the northern gloom of Joy Division. They split up in 1981.
While the band’s former lead guitarist Kimberley Rew, a Jesus College archeology graduate, would go on to enjoy success with Katrina and the Waves, penning the FM radio staple ‘Walking on Sunshine’ and their 1997 UK Eurovision winner ‘Love Shine a Light’, along with ‘Going Down to Liverpool’, a hit for the Bangles, mainstream fame has mostly eluded Hitchcock. He has always worn his 1960s influences on his sleeve, following a determinedly narrow path of literate, psychedelia-tinged folk rock that has earned him a devoted following and the admiration of similarly singular peers such as Nick Lowe and XTC’s Andy Partridge, with whom he has collaborated.
The book makes clear what was previously only sonically implicit, offering more than a few join-the-dots moments. Familiar Hitchcockian obsessions – fish, cheese and public transport – are present, as is an admission to being on the autistic spectrum. There are also wonderfully surreal turns – an imagined conversation with a lager-lime-drinking Dylan about the New Vaudeville Band’s novelty number ‘Winchester Cathedral’ among the comic set pieces.
We encounter, too, a young Brian Eno, the former Roxy Music man and record producer, then a teacher at the nearby art school but seemingly already making waves locally as a convener of groovy happenings. And there are affectionate if unsentimental portraits of Hitchcock’s parents, whom he credits with instilling in him a love of words. From his father, Raymond, he also inherited a mania for drawing. A taciturn veteran of the second world war injured in the D-Day landings, Raymond was an engineer turned would-be Francis Bacon who went on to write the bestseller Percy, eventually adapted into a sexploitation romp starring Hywel Bennett in 1971. Hitchcock’s mother, Joyce, an avid reader (whose family money helped bankroll Raymond’s artistic ambitions), introduced Robyn to William Faulkner and bought him his first guitar and LPs by Bert Jansch. They, of course, also sent him to the same school as our former prime minister Rishi Sunak, a self-declared Taylor Swift fan, although with notably different results. But then you pays your money and you takes your chances.
A haunting apparition: Bonehead, by Mo Hayder, reviewed
It is well established that women are happy to read novels written by men but that male readers rarely extend a reciprocal courtesy. The late Mo Hayder is a case in point, since despite the extraordinary sales of the novels she wrote before her premature death in 2021, her fan base remains overwhelmingly female. It may be that the extreme violence often found in her books (‘lurid’ would not be unfair) strikes men as a trespass on what has traditionally been a male preserve. Whatever the reason, male reviewers tended to shy away – I know that, since I was one of them.
Yet just ten pages into Bonehead, her posthumously published novel, I found myself completely drawn into Hayder’s story and the haunted creepy world it depicts. Alex Mullins is a young policewoman who, after time in London spent with the Met, has come home to Gloucestershire to work locally and live with her mother. She also hopes to shed the inner demons triggered by a terrible accident two years earlier. A coach carrying former students on a class reunion swerved off the road into deep water, and most of the occupants drowned. Alex, though injured, was one of only seven survivors, along with her close friend Aaron, who has also joined the police. What haunts Alex, and brings her back to work in the countryside, is the image of a female figure she is convinced she saw on the road just before the coach’s fatal swerve.
The novel is told unusually – through the first-person voice of Alex that alternates with the third-person viewpoint of Aaron’s mother, Maryam. She is a woman of little confidence who has married a ‘catch’, but remains convinced she doesn’t deserve him. Like Alex, Maryam lives near woods said to be haunted by ‘Bonehead’, a mythic female whose presence there begins to seem more credible as strange things start happening in both households, including the disappearance of each family’s dog.
The mystery of the ghoulish face Alex thinks she saw slowly unravels; but the real interest of the novel is its exploration of the varying impacts the crash has had on the survivors and the families of those who died. We get to know Alex best, but though we grow attached to her and indeed to Maryam, it’s not that we particularly like either of them so much as they become familiar.
The writing is restrained but beautifully descriptive, the pace varied according to the tensions it is intended to create, and the plotting is – almost throughout – clever, even ingenious. I say ‘almost’ because the book’s climactic ending is both gruesome and unconvincing – the opposite of most finales of the genre. I cannot help but feel (as other reviewers have noted), that had the author had more time, she would have changed it.
Otherwise, the talent at work here is remarkable. Although Hayder’s death means there will be no more books from her, readers new to her work (yes, mainly men like me) have the consolation that there are 11 others to read.
Richard Flanagan rails against wrongs ‘too vast to have a name’
‘Is it because we see our world only darkly that we surround ourselves with lies we call time, history, reality, memory, detail, facts?’ Richard Flanagan’s memoir opens at the Ohama coal mine in Japan, once home to his father and a host of other POW slave labourers. It then spirals outwards via his childhood (in a remote Tasmanian settlement), his much-put-upon mother (who hoped Richard would become a plumber), his semi-present, kindly, traumatised father Archie (enshrined in The Narrow Road to the Deep North) and on through all the now-familiar Flanagan themes. These include the horror of drowning; the Dickensian characters of 19th-century Van Diemen’s Land; the mighty Huon pine; the monstrous origins of modern Australia; man’s insane war against nature; fabulous lost books; wildfire; James Joyce; and the incommodious and vicious recirculation of historical time – the ripples resetting, sporadically, to the moment Major Thomas Ferebee of the US Air Force released the world’s first atom bomb on 6 August 1945.
‘Why do we do what we do to each other?’ Flanagan asks, retooling Chekhov’s infamous mathematical riddle: ‘That’s question 7.’ Oh, and whether that unprepossessing horndog H.G. Wells was in fact the father of atomic warfare. No self-respecting Flanboy would have been hoping for a dully chronological autobiography – but still; that’s quite a lot to pack into 288 pages.
There are some facts, such as Flanagan’s decision, aged four, that he would like to be a writer; his not-uncomplicated Tasmanian heritage; and his entirely disheartening time at Oxford in the 1980s. But, all in all, Question 7 is less a life story than an investigation into the chain reaction of who (and how) he is. Pushing back hard against our tendency, as Einstein put it, to ‘overestimate the role of rational thought in human life’, he joins the dots from Wells kissing Rebecca West to a) everything in the world, b) himself, and c) the present volume, writing in numbered sections, as if to keep a grip on all these various threads and to highlight the essentially chance nature of their connectivity.
Though not too earnest to joke about his brother’s farts, reflect wryly on burnishing his self-image in his novels, and pivot mischievously from his own near-demise at the age of 21 (see Death of a River Guide) to Leo Szilard in the bath in the 1930s – frequently punctuated by a shrugging, Vonnegut-ish, ‘That’s life’ – the default setting is Flanagan’s hallmark mode of terrible, sad beauty, fuelled by the deep moral anger of his crusading non-fiction.
He comes to see life as a pair of (parallel) tracks, one public, one private, one run according to firm facts and figures, the other a shifting realm of ‘necessary illusions’ in a meaningless universe. And what good are these facts, anyway, he wonders – noting, dismayed, that no one knows the accurate death toll from Hiroshima. The fact, meanwhile, that he himself was once a surveyor’s ‘chainman’, slashing his way across Tasmania to measure, codify and/or define it, is almost suspiciously perfect in its guilty Victorian-ness.
‘There is no memory without shame,’ he writes, and at the heart of this – perhaps of everything he’s written – is Tasmania’s original sin, ‘the ur-story of the end of the world’, the genocide (acknowledged by that word’s creator) of the aboriginal population, for which Flanagan has often seemed obliged to play the role of national sin-eater.
Memory itself is also everywhere in question. The publisher’s listing calls Question 7 ‘genre-bending’, and Flanagan himself routinely says things like: ‘There is no truth. There is only why.’ Reality is ‘often no more than the enthusiastic answer we give to our dreams and nightmares’, and our lives all ‘ongoing inventions’. He wonders if he did indeed die back on the Franklin River and his whole ‘life’ since has merely been a novel. It’s hard not to read the present non-fic version as the birth – battered, naked and dazed – of Richard Flanagan the writer: ‘Alive dreaming I was dead dreaming I was alive.’
And yet some human complexities – forgiving war criminals, for instance – it seems remain too big even for Booker-winning novelists. ‘There is no equation of horrors’ he adjudges of the decision to nuke Japan – a decision which directly saved his father’s life. Continuing to rail against wrongs ‘too vast to have a name’, he concludes that love is probably our only hope.
If ‘Questions Posed by a Mad Mathematician’ was ‘the archetypal Chekhov story’, then Question 7 surely is the archetypal Richard Flanagan:
All I knew was what I first experienced as a child… a world within which the measure of things was not man-made and of which you existed as a minuscule fragment. Finding words for it was, in one sense, my life’s work and my life’s failure.
May we all hope to fail quite so compellingly.
The rewards of being the ‘asylum capital of the world’
They came on a small, crowded, leaky boat from Calais towards Dover in seas that could turn from placid to treacherous in an instant, around 30 people seeking sanctuary from persecution, unsure of the welcome they would receive. ‘We were seized by horrible vomitings and most of the party became so dreadfully ill they thought they were dying,’ one of the group, a young mother accompanied by her two children, wrote later.
The year was 1620 and quite possibly among the refugees might have been a forebear of Nigel Farage. This small boat, one of many hundreds that crossed the Channel in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, was full of Huguenot asylum seekers fleeing Catholic France and the Lowlands.
The reaction to refugees is always the same: first the welcome mat, then some politician voicing the ‘people’s concerns’
By the American academic Matthew Lockwood’s calculation in this vividly told, panoramic history of 1,000 years of Britain as the ‘asylum capital of the world’ (an early 19th-century soundbite, intended at the time as a great compliment), there was an ‘invasion’ of more than 115,000 Huguenot refugees, when Britain’s population was around 4.5 million. Lockwood has a keen eye for irony and the moral dilemmas of history. Who has thought there was a Huguenot problem here for the last 350 years?
In the interests of full disclosure I will declare that I am a refugee. My family came to Britain from Hungary after the failed revolution against the Soviets in 1956, when I was an infant, along with around 40,000 others. Naturally I have a personal interest in this story and something of an axe to grind. But this really is a brilliant book – topical, profound, deeply researched and in places beautifully written. For anyone who wants a broad historical perspective on today’s great ethical/ political/ environmental question, this is as good a place as any to start.
Lockwood is neither a kneejerk liberal, nor a dyed-in-the-wool reactionary. His main point, obvious but often overlooked, is that we have been here before in Britain many times and there is no new argument in the debate. Most people welcomed the Huguenots and showed enormous generosity. Yet in 1592 – when half the families in Sandwich were Flemish refugees – the locals rioted and all the ‘alien strangers’ were forcibly expelled because, as one protestor said: ‘They leave us no homes or employ.’ This was about ten miles from the Dover port that regularly sees huge anti-immigration protests more than four centuries later.
Through stories about American slaves who managed to reach freedom in Britain – many more than I had realised – to the 120,000 fugitives who arrived after the French Revolution, the reaction has been the same: first the welcome mat, then some politician or other voicing the ‘people’s concerns’. In 1792, at the height of the Terror, the influx of refugees to Britain prompted the foreign secretary Lord Grenville to say: ‘The majority of these people are of a suspicious description… and very likely to do mischief themselves or be fit tools of those who may be desirous of creating confusion.’
Lockwood is excellent at finding powerful and entertaining characters to make his points, from a wonderfully drawn portrait of the American slave Frederick Douglass, who fled from the US in the 1840s, to Freddie Mercury, whose parents escaped from Zanzibar in the 1960s, via the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin, Sir Tom Stoppard, a Czech refugee, and the erstwhile Bugandan King Freddie Mutesa, thrown out of Uganda by Idi Amin in the 1970s.
One brilliant chapter, about the arrival of Russian Jews escaping the pogroms after 1880, shows how the usual pattern was followed. At first great generosity and an outpouring of hatred against the brutal Tsarist regime. Then, when more Yiddish speaking, alien-looking immigrants arrived – well over 100,000 by 1900 – a tub-thumping demagogue emerged, the MP for Stepney Major William Evans-Gordon, who tapped into popular xenophobia and launched the British Brothers’ League. ‘Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders,’ he said (often). The government ran scared and in 1903 proposed an Aliens Bill that would bypass existing laws and send vast numbers of East End Jews to remote parts of the Empire.
One of the main opponents of the Bill, Lockwood notes, was a young MP who said he would represent traditional British values: Winston Churchill. There were several reasons why, in 1904, Churchill ‘crossed the floor’ and left the Tories to join the Liberals, where he remained for 20 years. Free trade was one, but the proximate cause was his loathing of the Aliens Bill. His speech in the Commons against it, which, again in a very British way, was later substantially watered down, makes interesting reading today:
The whole Bill looks like an attempt by the government to gratify a small but noisy section of their own supporters and to purchase a little popularity in the constituencies by dealing harshly with a number of unfortunate aliens who have no votes.
Dedicated to debauchery: the life of Thom Gunn
Philip Hensher has narrated this article for you to listen to.
In 1876, writing to his friend Gertrude Tennant, Gustave Flaubert set down a principle that artists and writers should live by: Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d’être violent et original dans vos œuvres. (Be regular in your life and ordinary as a bourgeois, in order to be violent and original in your work.)
The life of the English poet Thom Gunn had its disciplined aspect (he managed to hold down a job at least), but, overall, it was so dedicated to debauchery and excess that it’sa wonder it lasted as long as it did. The story, told in detail by Michael Nott, makes even the least censorious reader sometimes wonder why this seemed like a good idea.
Gunn was born in Kent in 1929 to an upper-middle-class intellectual family. (At one point they sold their house in Frognal, London, to Penelope Fitzgerald’s father E.V. Knox.) His own father was an important journalist and newspaper executive. His parents divorced and remarried. When his stepfather in turn left his mother, she committed suicide. Gunn and his younger brother, both in their early teens, discovered her body.
Quite soon, Gunn said, Aids stopped affecting him because almost everybody he knew had died of it
At the University of Cambridge, Gunn fell in love with a number of men, including a visiting American called Mike Kitay. When Mike returned to America, Thom went with him. At first, in the mid-1950s, they were discreet. Mike was serving in the military and came under investigation; Thom was by then a published poet, often grouped with others of a brilliant generation such as Ted Hughes. What he found most appealing in San Francisco was the nascent gay leather scene, obsessed with James Dean and Marlon Brando, acting out taciturn manliness, often venturing into recreational whips and chains.
This was a time of sexual promiscuity, and in less than a decade Mike and Thom’s relationship had become sexless. Mike fell in love serially, with individuals; Thom was more of a guy for ‘tricks’ and ‘trade’, in the terms of the day – casual pick-ups and sex with strangers in bars and clubs. The names of these places are wonderfully period now – the Ramrod, Boot Camp, the Why Not?, the Hole in the Wall (from which Thom was eventually barred for bad behaviour). Some of his new acquaintances stuck, and quite soon his house became home to a number of men, almost all of whom had butched their names down to monosyllables. It’s sometimes hard to work out who was having sex with whom in the ‘family’, but I expect it was the same at the time:
Although Don spent most of his visit in bed, Thom was still grateful for his company. Mike and Bob had rented a cabin for the summer on the Russian River; Bill and Jim hid themselves away to smoke PCP.
The distinguished poetic career continued, with an evidently successful teaching job at a university. The poetry started to cover Thom’s weekend excesses more overtly, but the two worlds he inhabited only occasionally overlapped. I kept wondering what a visiting academic friend, Tony Tanner, made of a friend called Clint Cline hanging around for sex and drugs. Sometimes the overlap threatened disaster. On a visit to London, Thom’s publisher Charles Monteith took him to the Travellers for lunch. He found he’d risked expulsion from the club after his guest appeared wearing full leather fetish gear.
San Francisco was at the centre of hedonistic discovery, continuing despite the casualties. When HIV/Aids struck in 1981, Thom’s circle was at the centre of the catastrophe, too. He knew some of the very first recorded victims. His sexual practices, though liberally bestowed on half the neighbourhood for decades, were not those which most efficiently transmitted the virus. Gunn was clear. He remained an observer, as dozens of his closest friends died in rapid succession, recording it in his much-admired collection The Man With Night Sweats. Quite soon, he said, HIV/Aids stopped affecting him because almost everybody he knew had died of it.
On he went. By the late 1990s, to the rest of the gay community he was a perfect museum piece, his wardrobe straight out of 1960s Tom of Finland drawings. As people who once had huge sexual success find, it is traumatic when it deserts them in time. But Thom had a solution: ‘He developed other ways of finding sex: namely by offering guys drugs to get them to go home with him.’
It must have occurred even to Gunn that this was not a very good idea, and the men attracted by an offer of this sort from a pensioner might not be the best company in other respects. ‘A strange night,’ Thom writes in his diary. ‘I end up smoking crack with someone called Allen on the street.’ Other boys are commended because they are really good at injecting Thom with amphetamines. The pleasures are quite hard to understand. Nott writes:
The highlight of Thom’s summer was ‘an exquisite holiday,’ a four-day trip to Los Angeles with Robert Gallegos, now a good friend. They stayed at Coral Sands, a famously cruisy motel where ‘everyone was on crystal’. They pooled their speed and went to Long Beach to buy more. By the third day, Thom was ‘hallucinating magnolia bushes as Bosnian refugees with their luggage’…It was all ‘drugs and brittle fun… swimming pools and frivolity’.
Even the family of Bob and Bill and Mike and so on were getting fed up with the ‘frivolity’. In reality, this meant a parade of homeless drug addicts through Thom’s bedroom, putting up with the sex in exchange for a gram of speed and the chance to steal some stuff. Thom was quite a gruesome spectacle by now, his dedication to wearing leather at all times unaffected by age and decrepitude. Mike, still around in quite a saintly way, observing Thom’s breakfast ensemble, said cattily it was a wonder that he didn’t wear leather underwear.
It ended in a predictable way for a 75-year-old promiscuous drug user with high blood pressure. A homeless man came home with him, injected himself and Thom with a cocktail of drugs, and scarpered, leaving a member of the family to discover Thom’s body on his bedroom floor. A cautionary tale, one might say, except that very few of us would ever possess anything like the energy to begin to emulate it.
The poetry certainly has merit. Gunn was dedicated to the Elizabethan lyric, and much of his best work is beautifully formal, whatever the subject. He was a good phrasemaker, though sometimes the gap between an educated English voice and the thing described is a little wide. It is curious that his leather-biker-fetish poem ‘On the Move’ concludes in the schoolmasterly ‘One is always…’ Free verse comes in, and syllabics, sometimes well handled, sometimes not. His best book is Moly, about magical transformations, myth, lyric and (largely allusively) the first ecstatic wave of Californian free love. The Man With Night Sweats was and is much praised for the gravity of its subject, but it must be said that some of its poetry, such as the extended ‘Lament’ in rhyming couplets, is quite embarrassing.
This is a very thorough life, well documented and with a proper backing of interviews with people who knew Gunn over decades. I suspect more of the playmates of his later years might be tracked down, butI wouldn’t envy the biographer’s task of getting useful information out of them. Nott rightly draws attention to the fact that Gunn paid hardly any attention to women – like some homosexuals of his generation, half the human race meant so little to him that he didn’t even venture into routine misogyny.
The biography tells Gunn’s story in borderline-gruelling detail. Sometimes I felt that the narrative had skimped on the lives of those close to him, so that occasionally one had to deduce that a housemate had come through an HIV diagnosis or developed a crack addiction since their previous appearance. But on the whole it will do very well. In the end, Gunn left a trace on the grass, like the snail in one of his best poems – but unlike Phil Monsky, the Speed Brothers Eric and Rick, Randy Glaser, Allan Noseworthy III, Clint Cline and a guy named Chuck, all lost to the streets, dead in what should have been their prime, abandoned in the memories of people themselves long forgotten.
Watch: Farage attacks Bercow in first Commons speech
To the House of Commons, where party leaders are making their first post-election speeches. And for the first time, Nigel Farage MP gets to join in too. The Reform leader and newly-elected member of parliament for Clacton addressed his colleagues this afternoon, dubbing his party’s five MPs ‘the new kids on the block’, admitting to chuckles that ‘we have no experience in parliament whatsoever, though many us have tried, many times over the years previously, to get here’.
But the laughter turned to groans after Farage praised current Speaker Lindsay Hoyle – and turned his speech into an attack on his predecessor…
We can’t judge you for working in this place, but we can judge you from the way the outside world sees you. I don’t just mean the United Kingdom, I mean the world – because Prime Minister’s Question is global, box office politics.
And it’s pretty clear to everybody that you act with neutrality, that you bring tremendous dignity to the role as Speaker. So we absolutely endorse you entirely for this job. And it is, I must say, a marked contrast to the little man that was there before you and besmirched the office so dreadfully in doing his best to overturn the biggest democratic result in the history of the country.
Ouch. Farage’s comments allude to Bercow’s anti-Brexit credentials. He caused outrage among Brexiteers when he allowed rebel Tory MPs to delay legislation for leaving the EU. The Remainer then defected to the Labour party two years later before being suspended in 2022 over bullying allegations. Mr S can imagine the former Speaker won’t take too kindly to Farage’s rather inflammatory remarks…
Watch the clip here:
What Keir Starmer revealed in his first Commons speech as PM
Keir Starmer has just made his first Commons speech as Prime Minister. Both he and Rishi Sunak spoke at the election of the Speaker Lindsay Hoyle this afternoon in what was, by tradition, a largely jovial occasion. He paid tribute to Hoyle’s work in the previous parliament, and also cracked a joke about Sir Edward Leigh, now the Father of the House, writing a book of quotations dating back to 3000 BC – ‘which might be said to cast some light on the Tory mind – after the last six weeks, I think it might be time for a new addition’. He was also careful to praise Diane Abbott, now the Mother of the House. This bit was rather awkward, and there were some sounds of disapproval from around the chamber, given Starmer had nearly booted Abbott out of the Labour party at the start of the campaign. She later gave her own speech where she pointedly didn’t talk about him at all.
Starmer then set out one of the key themes he wants to have as Prime Minister:
As a new parliament, we have the opportunity and the responsibility to put an end to a politics that has too often seemed self-serving and self-obsessed. And to replace that politics of performance with the politics of service.
Because service is a precondition for hope and trust and the need to restore trust should weigh heavily on every member here, new and returning alike. We all have a duty to show that politics can be a force for good.
Stirring words, but much easier to say before you’ve done any governing – and even easier to say, perhaps, if you hadn’t had to pay tribute to someone you had treated very badly.
Rishi Sunak spoke for the first time from the opposition benches, facing the dispatch box he was standing at only seven weeks ago, and with a small bunch of Tory MPs on his side. He congratulated Starmer and said the pair ‘still respect each other’ after all the arguments of the past six weeks. He then said ‘sorry’ once again to the MPs who hadn’t made it back into the Commons. ‘We have lost too many diligent, community-spirited representatives, whose wisdom and expertise will be missed in the debates and discussions ahead.’ He promised that the Conservative party would ‘take up the crucial role of His Majesty’s official opposition professionally, effectively and humbly’. Whether that actually happens isn’t really up to Sunak, though: his party is still largely in the numb stage of grieving, but soon it will get down to business. It’s not yet clear whether that business will consist of infighting or doing that loyal opposition work.
How radical will Wes Streeting’s NHS reforms be?
Wes Streeting has spent years talking about NHS reform – but he’s always had a red line on ‘free at the point of use’. At the start of the year the Health Secretary suggested he’d rather ‘die in a ditch’ before giving up on this principle. But is something about to give?
What’s interesting about Streeting’s comments is the reframing of ‘free at the point of use’ as a matter of affordability
Asked today at the Tony Blair Institute’s conference if the UK needed to keep ‘free at the point of use throughout the NHS’ – or if some kind of top-up system could be considered for those who can afford it – Streeting did not give his usual, straightforward answer. Instead, he seemed to create a new definition for the concept.
‘Free at the point of use is about fairness and equity,’ he said. ‘And defending a system that means when you fall ill, you do not need to worry about the bill. And I think that’s an equitable principle that’s worth fighting for.’
The Health Secretary then went on to reiterate his case for more private sector involvement in NHS care. ‘People are already making the choice. And what we’re seeing is the opening up of a two-tier system,’ he noted. ‘‘Why should those without means wait longer while those who have means are seen faster. That’s an affront to my left wing principles.’
This comes after Streeting’s comment over the weekend that the new policy of the health department ‘is that the NHS is broken’. So what can we make of his description of ‘free at the point of use’ – and his refusal to rule out changes to that principle?
What’s interesting about Streeting’s comments is the reframing of ‘free at the point of use’ as a matter of affordability. Not paying anything upfront for treatment has long been the UK’s way of making sure no one is landed with a bill they can’t afford due to sickness. But rather than ruling out charges completely, Streeting leaves open the idea that perhaps some people would be able to afford a small bill – or something like a copayment – in a way that would not be seen as unfair.
If Streeting is as serious about reform as his comments often indicate, it’s wise not to rule out the possibility of co-pays or top-up charges, like those used in social health insurance systems throughout Europe (which still guarantee universal access to care).
It is also very hard to imagine a system in the UK that has anyone being asked for credit card details when they arrive at a hospital. But having spent time in Australia and Singapore late last year, Streeting is well aware that there are plenty of ways to structure a health service – and if he’s given the opportunity to seriously reform the NHS, he can come up with a bespoke model that fits within the fundamental principles he wants to protect, including access to healthcare regardless of one’s income or wealth.
Streeting seems acutely aware of his limited time frame to make such changes – not just on system reform, but on tackling the NHS waitlist as well. Streeting heads from the TBI conference into his first conversations with the junior doctors this afternoon, who are preparing a new ballot for August if an agreement cannot be reached.
Streeting said again this morning that while pay discussions remain on the table, a pay rise of 35 per cent is not going to be possible. He has also said that he is ‘genuinely angry about’ the way junior doctors are treated by the NHS.
This will be a telling moment, not just for the government’s negotiation tactics, but for the BMA’s ultimate goal. While the 11 junior doctor’s strikes over the past 20 months certainly had political elements to them, their main goal was to increase pay. That goal has, presumably, not changed just because the government has changed.
Streeting only has a matter of weeks, then, to avoid another strike. The most recent walkout, just ahead of election day, is estimated to have led to over 60,000 cancelled appointments. If the strikes continue, it’s going to take much longer for the NHS waitlist to fall. And fighting constantly with the doctor’s union is going to take up much of the time the Health Secretary is going to need to reform the NHS.
Update: Since publishing, the Health Secretary’s team has been in touch to confirm that Streeting categorically rules out NHS charges, clarifying that when Streeting said, ‘I think that is an equitable principle that is worth fighting for’, that was to mean that there would be no changes.
Dyson won’t be the last business to cut jobs
A major new factory from one of the American tech giants perhaps? Or a new lab from one of the pharmaceutical giants? Or, best of all, a huge new green energy fund. The newly appointed Chancellor Rachel Reeves was probably hoping for some positive investment news for her first week in office, especially as she has decided, in an unprecedented move, to make ‘growth’ a ‘national mission’. Instead, one of the UK’s best businesses has cut almost a third of its UK workforce – and that will just be the start of the corporate exodus from Labour’s Britain.
Dyson will argue that its decision to axe 1,000 jobs in the UK, announced today had nothing to do with the election of a new government. It had been planned for months. Well, perhaps. In fact this is a company that racked up record revenues of more than £7 billion last year, up 9 per cent year-on-year. It is hardly in trouble. It would have known Labour was about to take power and planned accordingly. The timing, to put it politely, seems designed to make a point.
In reality, it seems unlikely that Sir James Dyson, a man who has built up a company worth many billions, can be bothered with a ‘partnership’ with Rachel Reeves. Even though she claims her few years as a junior economist at the Bank of England means she ‘knows how to run the economy’, it is perfectly reasonable for Sir James to decline her advice. Likewise, the new business secretary Jonathan Reynolds, despite his experience as a ‘political assistant’ to Labour MPs, probably doesn’t know much about running a research and design intensive manufacturing company either. On top of all that, Sir James won’t want all the extra taxes, the social obligations, or the employment rights, Labour is about to legislate for either. Given that Dyson is a global company, it makes sense to focus elsewhere.
Everyone can agree that the UK needs to improve its growth rate. And yet in preparing for office Reeves and Sir Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister, have been extraordinarily complacent about what it will take to accelerate the economy. Both seem to think businesses want their input. In fact, most would prefer they simply got out of the way. Dyson has clearly decided it is better to expand elsewhere. And, more quietly perhaps, many other major companies will make the same decision over the next few months.
Labour’s disturbing devotion to devolution
One of the defining themes of the new government will be devolution. Sir Keir Starmer and Angela Rayner’s plan, according to the Labour manifesto, is to ‘transfer power out of Westminster, and into our communities.’ It’s a signal of the priority they place on these reforms that the Prime Minister and his deputy hosted English regional mayors at Number 10 this morning to discuss how this power transfer will take place.
The new government should be holding out central government as the mechanism for delivering the changes it has promised
The manifesto pledged to ‘deepen’ devolution settlements for combined authorities while ‘encouraging’ councils to merge and assume additional powers. Among the areas identified for further devolution are transport, adult education and skills, housing, planning and employment support. The trade-off will be a legal requirement to produce ‘local growth plans’, while consulting employers, educational institutions and industry bodies on municipal policy and infrastructure.
Growth plans will have to ‘align’ with the government’s UK-wide industrial strategy, hinting that their purpose is more cosmetic than substantive. Labour also promised multi-year funding settlements to end uncertainty and allow local authorities to take strategic decisions as well as an end to competitive bidding, a costly practice that saw councils go up against each another to secure funds.
This morning’s roundtable set out how the government will put its plans into action, with an emphasis on ‘public service, respect and collaboration’. The rhetoric is not mere kumbaya; under the Tories, and particularly while Boris Johnson was in Downing Street, regional mayors and local authorities complained of disregard and disrespect from central government. Rayner tasked mayors with establishing ‘local specialisms’ and feeding them into both growth plans and the national industrial strategy.
The meeting should be viewed in the context of Labour’s plans for the nations, which will see yet more powers drained from Westminster and transferred to Holyrood and Cardiff Bay. Devolution has become religion in the Labour party, rivalling even its commitment to equality. It makes sense that a party of progressive managerialism would conclude that the answer to Britain’s political, economic and constitutional woes is redrawing the organisational chart. Devolution to Scotland has been a disaster, handing power and an international platform to separatists while producing grim outcomes in health, education and drug deaths. While heaping more powers onto local government doesn’t come with the same secessionist threat, there are two risks which Labour-minded devolutionists consistently overlook.
The first is that subsidiarity is really a conservative idea, emerging from Catholic social teaching and developed by Luigi Taparelli, a 19th century Jesuit aristo nicknamed ‘the hammer of liberal ideas’. He advocated leaving to ‘each lower level society the being and activity that are proper to it’ not out of any great enthusiasm for democracy but because he saw what he termed ‘tyrannical centralism’ as a tool of revolution. Modern UK progressives regard subsidiarity as benign because it a) underpinned campaigns for Scottish and Welsh devolution, b) seemed to be embodied by the Greater London Council’s resistance to Thatcherism, and c) became a key principle of the European Union. The idea that policy decisions are best taken at the level closest to those affected by them is therefore coded progressive.
There is some truth to this as an observation but hardening it into a doctrine is where problems begin, at least for those on the centre-left. The promise of a Labour government is the opportunity to make social change but devolution dilutes central government’s monopoly on power, dispersing decision-making across rival levels of administration which then must be consulted, coaxed and compromised with in order to achieve the government’s political aims. Central government has coercive power of course, and local growth plans might prove to be an example of that, but having gone to the trouble of handing mayors and councils more authority it could become a political controversy if ministers then try to pressure local government to use its new powers in the ‘correct’ way.
Bob Conquest said that everyone is a conservative about what they know the best, and what people know most intimately is their lives and their communities. Devolve more power to the local level and you strengthen the ability of mayors and councils to improve their areas but you also concentrate opposition to change. Mounting resistance to local policy initiatives is much easier than doing so with measures introduced at the national level. To some degree, Labour understands this, which is why the Chancellor has announced the reintroduction of mandatory housing targets.
The second risk is more nebulous but no less important. Labour’s ideological affinity for local devolution leads it to traduce national decision-making and the institutions involved in it. Listen to some of the government’s rhetoric from this morning. The Prime Minister said that ‘those with skin in the game are the ones who know best what they need’. The deputy prime minister said: ‘for too long a Westminster government has tightly gripped control and held back opportunities and potential for towns, cities and villages across the UK. That’s meant misguided decisions devastating the lives of working people, while our elected local leaders are forced to beg for scraps at the whim of Whitehall.’ Rayner even used the phrase ‘take back control’ to describe local government assuming powers currently held by Westminster.
A common mistake in politics is to absorb the lessons of your last defeat so fully that when you eventually win you are unable to adapt to the circumstances you now face. The lesson of 2019 – other than don’t put Jeremy ‘our friends from Hezbollah’ Corbyn up for prime minister – was that Labour had lost touch with some of its traditional voters outside of London, the cities and the university towns. Talk of taking back control from an out-of-touch Westminster is evidently intended to address these voters and their feeling of being left behind. But in addition to making Rayner sound like a grim hybrid of Nicola Sturgeon and Nigel Farage, it is backwards looking towards the old battles. The new battles for this government are ones that call for national effort and initiative to rescue Britain from long-term decline, revive economic growth, return the opportunities lost under the Tories (not least home ownership), and carve out a fresh place on the world stage. These challenges require unity and a populace that thinks of itself as British rather than belonging to various sectional and regional groupings. Instead of pouring scorn on Westminster and encouraging us-versus-them grievance narratives, the new government should be holding out central government as the mechanism for delivering the changes it has promised the country.
Central government doesn’t have all the answers and empowering local government isn’t always a bad idea, but Labour’s doctrinal attachment to devolution risks getting in the way of its national ambitions. Seek government to govern, not to hand powers to others.
Is ‘True Gretch’ pure Michigan?
Gretchen Whitmer’s memoir, True Gretch, couldn’t have been released at a more suspect time. As the Michigan governor disavows calls for Joe Biden to step down as the Democratic nominee, the book and its subsequent national tour seem to indicate that a self-interested plot is in the works. And without any disastrous revelations about shooting her dog, it could very well work.
True Gretch hides Whitmer’s national ambitions behind the facade of a relatable working mom. The memoir is divided into self-help entitled chapters, like “Be a Happy Warrior” and “Seek to Understand,” with examples of Whitmer overflowing with the eponymous virtue in each. She’s real Midwestern nice, for example, and once even sent a birthday cake to a state senator who called her “batshit crazy.” True Gretch is also about being authentic, which in this case means painting Whitmer as just another beer-drinking Michigander. It’s why the book is full of family photos, playlists, her grandmother’s clover rolls recipe and shameless plugs for merchandise.
The memoir also capitalizes on being a woman in politics. Whitmer recalls how her life and body were put into the spotlight upon becoming governor. After her first State of the Union address, for example, Whitmer was outraged at the media’s attention to her fashion rather than her policy. “The following evening, the Detroit Fox News affiliate aired a story on… my dress,” she wrote. “Or rather, on the comments people made about it, and more specifically about my body, on Fox 2’s Facebook page. The comments Fox 2 chose to highlight read like a giant sexist haiku.”
Whitmer also recalled the time a man told her she looked slimmer in person than on TV and when a woman was relieved she was finally buying better-fitting bras. “No matter how many times it happens, I’m somehow always surprised at the things people are willing to say not only about me, but to me.”
Whitmer isn’t afraid to be vulnerable either and explained how she’s gotten some of her more unflattering nicknames, including Greedy Gretchen, Gravity Gretchen and That Woman from Michigan. Unfortunately the book doesn’t reveal the origins of Cockburn’s personal favorite Stretchin Gretchin — although it does detail the time she was so hungover she threw up on her high school principal.
While she has mellowed out since her teenage years, True Gretch paints the picture of an ever spunky rebel. It was as a middle-aged woman, after all, that Whitmer decided to get two tattoos, a smiley face and a shark. The shark is a nod to her obsession with the phrase, “It’s Shark Week, motherfucker,” apparently a euphemism for menstruation. After a video of Whitmer mouthing the phrase before the 2020 Democratic National Convention went viral, she plastered it on her shoulder permanently.
Much of the memoir is devoted to Whitmer’s draconian handling of Covid-19 and the ensuing death threats it earned her, both of which catapulted her to national fame. True Gretch doubles down on banning outdoor activities and closing whole sections of retail stores, although Whitmer did apologize for the one time she was caught unmasked in a Lansing dive bar less than six feet apart from her friends. She described it as “one of her biggest flubs in politics” but also downplayed it via comparison. After all, the incident really isn’t as bad as Gavin Newsom dining at the French Laundry. “Gavin and I have that in common — even though he was dining at a Michelin three-star restaurant and I was in a dive bar,” she wrote. Watch out Gavin, Whitmer is eyeing the White House.
Braverman turns on Jenrick
All is not well in the Conservative party. Tory leadership hopeful Suella Braverman has turned on fellow MP Robert Jenrick in a scathing attack on her rival. The former home secretary previously worked closely with the ex-minister while their party was in government – but was this week keen to draw up dividing lines between the pair at Washington’s National Conservatism conference.
Braverman blasted her former colleague for coming ‘from the Left of the party’, slamming Jenrick as a Remainer who ‘was a big, kind of centrist, Rishi supporter’. Burn…
The ex-home secretary went on:
I remember talking to him about leaving the ECHR a year ago, and him looking horrified by that prospect. It’s really good that he’s moving in a different direction. Wasn’t the story that he was sent by Rishi to keep an eye on me in the Home Office?
Talk about shots fired. Jenrick left his immigration minister post in December last year because he believed his party’s Rwanda plan did not go far enough. Although Jenrick hasn’t officially declared he will stand for the leadership, his is one of many names being circulated. Braverman has so far positioned herself as the right-wing candidate, telling GB News that ‘we are facing an existential threat from Reform. We need to change ourselves to ensure that we neutralise that threat, that we bring those people back home.’
But she has already suffered a blow to her leadership bid after reports emerged on Monday that former backer Danny Kruger would support Robert Jenrick instead – with one Tory source describing her campaign in the Times as being, er, ‘dead before it even started’. Oh dear…
Braverman says that she expects leadership rivals to ‘conduct ourselves with an attitude of the amicable and friendly’. Perhaps the former home secretary might consider leading by example…
The newly disciplined Trump is driving the left nuts
For years now Republicans have voiced some version of the same opinion: “If only Donald Trump could get out of his own way…” things would be going much better for them. In the DC swampland, this usually was followed with some comment about his tweets and personal feuds. Outside, if it came from older voters, it was usually expressed as “I wish he’d just put down the phone sometimes.” And if it came from middle-aged supporters, it was more than once expressed to me that Trump just needs to “stop tripping on his own dick.”
The attitude is ubiquitous among some portions of the president’s base: they just think he’d be better off if he could focus and not give Democrats so much material. But because this hypothetical has never emerged, we never really got to find out if it was true — until now.
Since Joe Biden’s utterly disastrous debate performance, Trump has displayed incredible restraint and focus, not giving any fodder to the media to distract from the Biden White House’s flailing inability to deal with this moment. Democratic commentators have openly complained about the lack of public events from Trump, as if desperate for him to do something, anything to shift the focus. Amid House Democrats’ demoralized caucus meeting, frustrated donor calls and Sorkinesque fantasies about a “convention blitz” of replacement candidates, Democrats and their media allies would love to have anything gifted to them from Trump to talk about instead.
It’s an amazing trend to behold. The left got so used to this happening over the past eight years, they just took it as a given — now they’re practically begging Trump to do something crazy. Could he pretty please say something racist or sexist or start beef with another Republican? The T-Rex is out there in the forest, but he won’t come eat the goat.
Now, this could change. Tonight in Florida Trump will hold his first in person rally since June 28, alongside several of his potential choices for vice president. The White House has to be hoping he announces his choice tonight to pull attention away from the NATO gathering that puts more pressure on Biden than ever. But personally, I think he’ll keep waiting. Trump loves to keep people in suspense anyway — and instead of frustrating Republicans, this time, it’s giving the other side fits.
This disciplined Trump is something we haven’t seen before for any extended period, and it’s working out incredibly well for him, with Biden’s poll numbers sinking after each passing day as Democrats spin in the wind. They want Trump to save them from spending another week talking about the worst thing to happen to their party since 1968 — and he won’t.
Old dog. New trick.
There’s a reason Eton is cracking down on smartphones
Eton College has just announced that it will ban new pupils from bringing smartphones to school from September, and will give them a basic, school-issued Nokia handset instead that can only make calls and send texts. Currently Eton does not allow pupils to have phones on them during the day, and all pupils up until Sixth Form must hand in all devices at night. Many other private schools are pursuing similar policies: from September, year seven pupils at Brighton College will not be allowed to have internet-enabled phones on site, and all offline devices will still have to be locked away during the school day. The deputy head at Alleyn’s in Dulwich has written to parents of incoming year sevens urging them to only buy ‘dumbphones’ for their children.
We already have overwhelming evidence that smartphones fundamentally rewire every mental, physical, social and emotional aspect of children’s lives
This is not unique to the private sector. Many state schools already have admirable initiatives designed to crackdown on smartphone use. For example, pupils at John Wallis Church of England Academy in Ashford, Kent, have to put their phones in a magnetically sealed fabric pouch kept in their bag, and the magnetic lock is only released at the end of the day. This has had an impressive impact: since introducing the scheme in January, the school has seen a 40 per cent drop in detentions and a 25 per cent reduction in truancy. Wilson’s School, an all-boys’ grammar in Sutton, already bans smartphones for the youngest boys, whilst All Saints Catholic College in Notting Hill has already trialled a 12 hour school day to help break phone addiction, and any phones spotted on school premises are confiscated and locked in a safe for five days.
Unfortunately though, these schools tend to be the exception rather than the rule. Despite the vast majority of schools having some sort of phone ban in place, only 11 per cent of schools in England and Wales actually physically separate students from their phones for the duration of the school day, even though we know the mere presence of a phone is a distraction in and of itself. Lots of schools still allow pupils to use phones at break-time or lunchtime, or turn a surreptitious blind eye to the occasional under the desk phone check because it is easier than having to deal with the backlash from pupils and, all too often, parents.
It’s also worth noting that there is a difference between introducing a smartphone policy like this in a boarding school like Eton – which is already a highly controlled and supervised environment, where schools are acting in loco parentis – and a day state school where kids only attend for six or seven hours. For the latter, schools can have all the lockboxes they like, but they still have to deal with all the problems and consequences of students having unlimited access to smartphones for the rest of the day: sleep deprivation, poor concentration, cyberbullying, low self-esteem, access to inappropriate content, and the toxic cycle of addiction and anxiety. Unless schools can get parents on board, and stop them buying younger teenagers smartphones altogether, then the relentless dopamine stimulation of digital life still inevitably takes its toll.
There is also a wealth gap here that needs to be acknowledged. Although it seems somewhat counter-intuitive, children from lower socio-economic backgrounds are more likely to own mobile phones at an early age. Their parents are also much less likely to impose screen time-limits on them (which makes sense, given that they will have less access to extra-curricular activities and other clubs, or may be working or single parents, and so less able to monitor phone use). According to Smartphone Free Childhood, the data shows that the harms caused by smartphones therefore affect those in the lowest economic households the most: on average they spend twice as much time a day on screens, and are twice as likely to report being physically threatened online.
Now is the opportune time for the Department for Education to step up and think about how we can make sure all children and young teenagers are free from the impact of smartphones, not just the most privileged.
We don’t need yet another consultation or study into the impact of phones – we already have overwhelming evidence that smartphones fundamentally rewire every mental, physical, social and emotional aspect of children’s lives. What we do need is support and guidance to help schools and, more importantly, parents, start this digital detox. For example, what about a national, coordinated campaign encouraging parents to wait until a certain age before buying their children a smartphone, or introducing more stringent age verification measures for social media? There are options out there, but the longer we drag our feet, the greater the risk to our children’s health and happiness.
J.D. Vance a ‘GREAT GOP candidate,’ says Ron Klain
The final days of the veepstakes are upon us — and Senator J.D. Vance may have an unusual ally in his corner: his longtime business partner, who just so happens to be President Joe Biden’s former chief of staff. Ron Klain called Vance a “GREAT GOP candidate” a few years ago.
While President Donald Trump’s veep pick is still unknown, it’s rumored to be down to Senators Vance and Marco Rubio, along with North Dakota’s governor, Doug Burgum. Ironically, old tweets from Klain, and not Trump, are flying around the GOP ecosystem, drudging up Vance’s awkward ties to one of Biden’s closest aides.
In 2017, Vance joined Revolution, a DC-based investment firm where Klain worked as a vice president. It was run by Steve Case, the liberal billionaire founder of AOL. The next year, Vance considered running for both Senate and governor in Ohio, ultimately deciding against both, in part because “he was particularly concerned that his opposition to Trump would turn off base GOP voters.” Klain rejoiced at this news “b/c: (1) We love him at @Revolution ; (2) He’d be a GREAT GOP candidate!” he tweeted at the time.
Vance teamed up with Klain and Case on Midwestern road trips. “Come on @SteveCase @JDVance1 finish up in #AnnArbor and bring the bus here. We’re ready for @RiseOfRest in #Indy,” Klain tweeted in 2017. Vance appeared on multiple panels while on tour with the prominent Democrats. One of their guests was Chef Jose Andres, well known for his anti-Trump commentary in his own right. Another was Indiana’s then-Democratic senator Joe Donnelly, who was up for a competitive reelection in 2018.
In addition to his work with Klain, Vance famously worked with the now-virulently anti-Trump GOP megadonor, Peter Thiel, prior to his decision to ultimately run for Senate in 2022 when he beat Democratic yoga enthusiast Tim Ryan by almost double digits. In order to win, Vance prevailed in a contentious GOP primary where his past critiques of Trump proved insufficient to prevent the former president from endorsing him.
While Thiel’s money helped Vance win last cycle, his relationship with Vance may have turned from an asset to a liability in the veepstakes. Thiel, who famously spoke in support of Trump at the 2016 RNC, said last week that “if you hold a gun to my head I’ll vote for Trump,” while adding that he will not be financially supporting the campaign.” Another Vance 2022 investor, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, saying that Vance “wouldn’t be here but for my efforts” may also harm him with the anti-McConnell forces is Trump’s orbit.
Klain, a prolific tweeter, has been mum in his praise of his former business partner since he potentially emerged as Trump’s right-hand man.
Labour’s landslide is a triumph for Britain’s Sikhs
For years, there have been very few Sikhs – who make up around one per cent of the population of England and Wales – in the Commons. Labour’s landslide victory has changed that. Among the hundreds of new MPs are a dozen Sikh heritage MPs: more than there’s ever been in parliament’s history.
There’s some poetic justice in particular in Juss’s victory: he represents Enoch Powell’s former constituency
The achievements of Sikhs in British politics have historically been overshadowed by the incredible electoral success of Sikhs across the pond in Canada. It wasn’t long ago that Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau boasted to an American audience, ‘I have more Sikhs in my cabinet than Modi does’. The influx of newly-elected Sikh Labour MPs – six men and six women – goes someway to bridging that gap.
Three of the Sikh heritage Labour MPs will already be familiar faces: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Slough) and Preet Kaur Gill (Birmingham Edgbaston) were both elected in 2017; Nadia Whittome (Nottingham East) – a Corbynista, whose dad is Sikh – entered the Commons in 2019. But now there will be far more Sikhs on the Labour benches, including Gurinder Singh Josan (Smethwick), Jas Athwal (Ilford South) and Warinder Juss (Wolverhampton West). There’s some poetic justice in particular in Juss’s victory: he represents Enoch Powell’s former constituency. In the late 1960s Powell supported a ban on Sikh bus drivers wearing their turbans to work, metaphorically describing the dispute as ‘a cloud no bigger than a man’s hand that can so rapidly overcast the sky’. The ban was, of course, lifted. But not even Powell, infamous for his Rivers of Blood speech, could have foreseen Juss’s election victory.
It’s a proud day for Sikhs everywhere. It sends a powerful message, particularly to young Sikhs, who can watch parliament and see people who look like them. Most of this new cohort of MPs are second, or third generation, British Sikhs. As you’d expect, they ran campaigns on issues that matter to all their constituents, rather than Sikh-specific issues, or parochial matters pertaining to the Indian sub-continent. However, some MPs were presented before the election with a ‘Sikh Manifesto’, which is supported by the fringe group, Sikh Federation UK (SFUK). SFUK has historically been the secretariat for the All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for British Sikhs, and, in that role, has invariably pushed its own relatively narrow agenda – not least the absurd Sikh ‘ethnic’ tick box census campaign. Unsurprisingly, the ‘Sikh Manifesto’ urges MPs to join the said APPG. On this, they must proceed with caution.
What is clear is that this is a moment to celebrate. The record number of Sikh heritage MPs in Starmer’s government is a major milestone for the community and a matter of great pride for British Sikhs.
Labour was, of course, not the only party to field Sikh heritage candidates. The Conservatives had three, including Satbir Gill for the Scottish Conservatives and Ashvir Sangha, a former president of the Oxford Union. The Lib Dems fielded two – thankfully they weren’t forced to campaign on a waterslide alongside their party leader – and both Reform and the Workers Party of Great Britain (WPGB) had several too. England cricket legend Monty Panesar, perhaps one of Britain’s most high-profile Sikhs, also put his hat in the ring with George Galloway’s party, before abandoning his campaign after a few days.
Reflecting on the 12 Sikh heritage MPs, Lord Singh of Wimbledon, the Director of the Network of Sikh Organisations, pointed me to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, where Polonius gives advice to his son Laertes: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’
Lord Singh told me: ‘These words are excellent advice to the new Sikhs entering Parliament. If they can be true to Sikh teachings on social and political justice, and as we say in our daily prayer the wellbeing of all in our one human family, they will make a much-needed contribution to wider society.’
What will Starmer’s fellow world leaders make of him at the Nato summit?
In Westminster, Sir Keir Starmer is still in the honeymoon period as Prime Minister. In Washington, where Starmer heads for the start of the Nato summit today, the welcome is likely to be somewhat less warm.
The new British team, made up of Starmer, foreign secretary David Lammy, defence secretary John Healey, and Nick Thomas-Symonds, now Cabinet Office minister in charge of ‘European relations’, will be greeted with courtesy and encouragement. But the red carpet won’t be rolled out: Nato leaders liked, rather than loathed, Rishi Sunak’s government. They felt him to be a man with whom they can do business. They will be eager to know if the same can be said for Starmer, a man who deliberately made his election strategy vague and anodyne. It’s true that the PM’s endlessly stated seriousness of purpose will be welcomed, but Nato leaders will want to know in real terms how British foreign and defence policy will change. Labour has committed to increasing military expenditure to 2.5 per cent of GDP, but has refused to promise a timescale. Hard questions will be asked of Starmer on this subject.
Hard questions will be asked of Starmer on this subject
For Nato, there is little time for niceties. As I wrote in April, the alliance is facing challenging times. The conflict in Ukraine grinds on, and while Western support for president Volodymyr Zelenskyy continues, and the Ukrainian armed forces are still fighting with both resolve and ingenuity against the invaders, there is no conclusion in sight. Most expect the war to extend at least into 2025. Dramatic victory for either side seems a remote possibility. Healey has already visited Ukraine, meeting Zelenskyy, and promised renewed British support including more artillery, ammunition and missiles. But the hoped-for moment of victory remains out of reach.
Nato is itself in a moment of potential transition. US president Joe Biden continues to face calls to end his candidacy for re-election in November, and his fellow leaders will all be aware that they could soon be dealing with Donald Trump in his stead. After the French parliamentary elections, president Emmanuel Macron has persuaded his prime minister, Gabriel Attal, to stay in post for a few days but a new council of ministers will have to be formed which has the support of the new National Assembly. Significantly, it is the swansong for Nato’s secretary general, Jens Stoltenberg, who leaves office after ten years on 1 October. He will be replaced by former prime minister of the Netherlands Mark Rutte, a candidate to whom no-one objected but who lacks dynamism and vision.
Could this period of change present an opportunity for Starmer? A key plank of Labour’s international relations is a new security pact with the European Union; 21 of the EU’s 27 members are also in Nato but others, from the United States to Canada and Turkey, will want to understand how such an agreement would affect the UK’s commitment to the alliance and its security posture more generally. Here Starmer can reassure his fellow world leaders. But he must do so in a way that does not alienate voters back home.
The Washington summit offers Starmer some easy wins. He is striding the world stage as the newly appointed prime minister of the world’s sixth-largest economy, a G7 member and a nuclear power with a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. He will be photographed looking serious and being taken seriously by serious people, and at this stage in his premiership that is valuable.
But while the optics are good, progress in Washington is likely to be limited. There are few opportunities for major decisions or breakthroughs, and the meet-and-greet aspect will represent Starmer’s biggest achievement. He and his ministers should, however, think ahead and lay the groundwork with allies now for decisions they will take over the next six to nine months. Nato remains the foundation of the UK’s national security but it is a complex web of relationships. This is where Starmer must carry out the ‘delivery and service’ of which he has spoken so much.
Major international summits like this week’s gathering are always a combination of form and function. It is an invaluable opportunity for Starmer and his national security team to meet global counterparts in an official setting: he has already encountered many of them, but now he carries the imprimatur and responsibility of the premiership. That makes a difference. Starmer can move from ‘I would…’ to ‘I will…’. Likewise, Lammy, Healey and Thomas-Symonds are now holders of high office and will have the support of the civil service when they meet fellow ministers. And we saw at the D-Day commemorations which Rishi Sunak abandoned that Starmer knows the value of photo opportunities.