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Unionists are right to feel furious with Nigel Farage
Nigel Farage likes to see himself as a reliable pal, so it was very much in that spirit that Reform UK’s new leader said that he was endorsing two Democratic Unionist Party candidates, Ian Paisley Jr in North Antrim and Sammy Wilson in East Antrim. Both are DUP stalwarts. Both are very likely to be re-elected on 4 July. Farage’s endorsement rests on their support for him during the long years of fighting to achieve and secure the UK’s departure from the European Union. The only problem is that Reform UK had previously signed a formal ‘memorandum of understanding’ to support the candidates of their rivals, Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) – the unionist party founded by former DUP politician Jim Allister.
Reform UK, like the Brexit party before it, is not in any meaningful sense like other parties
This pact was unveiled at TUV’s annual conference in March, which former Reform UK leader Richard Tice and deputy leader Ben Habib attended, and was presented as a major achievement.
Allister is somewhat dismayed at Farage’s endorsement of the two DUP candidates, which he discovered through the media. He called it ‘disappointing’, and said that he had entered into the arrangement with Reform UK ‘in good faith’. He had every reason to do so: Habib told the TUV conference in March that the two parties were ‘firmly hitched at the hip’. Allister added that Farage’s action was ‘not compatible with the content of a conversation I had with him last week’.
What does Reform UK say about this apparent snub? In a statement, the party claimed it was still ‘committed’ to the alliance with TUV:
‘Candidates will be standing under our joint logo throughout Northern Ireland. Nigel Farage was giving a personal view in respect of two DUP candidates with whom he has worked closely in the past, but he has not changed the policy and does not intend to do so.’
Ben Habib, Reform UK’s deputy leader, attempted to make sense out of nonsense by telling the BBC that this was a matter of two specific people who were ‘old beer buddies of Nigel’s’.
Sammy Wilson is, of course, teetotal, and Paisley’s father, who founded the DUP in 1971, condemned alcohol as ‘the Devil’s buttermilk’. Habib added: ‘The alliance with the TUV absolutely stands. We endorse every single TUV candidate.’
Farage himself is supremely unfazed by the row: ‘New leadership brings change. I wish the TUV well, but I’m gonna stand up to support Sammy Wilson and Ian Paisley as people I fought with all through the Brexit years.’
There is an irony here: the politics of Northern Ireland, and particularly that of hardline unionism, are steeped in the narrative of undertakings broken and betrayed, and agreements not being worth the paper they are written on. From Allister’s point of view, he made a solemn and serious commitment with Reform UK, and it has been cast aside without a thought at the whim of Nigel Farage. This is not a mere abstraction: Matthew Warwick is standing against Sammy Wilson in East Antrim while Allister himself is TUV’s candidate against Paisley in North Antrim.
Let that sink in: the leader of a party with which Jim Allister signed a formal memorandum of understanding to field joint candidates three months ago has endorsed his opponent in the constituency in which he, Allister, is seeking election. That must sting.
None of this should be surprising. Reform UK, like the Brexit party before it, is not in any meaningful sense like other parties. It is, it seems, a platform for the continuing political career of Nigel Paul Farage, newly announced as its leader but always its controlling force. Farage’s casual remark has left Reform UK in a truly absurd, literally nonsensical position: according to its deputy leader, it is endorsing every TUV candidate, but its own leader is endorsing two of TUV’s opponents, including a candidate standing against the leader of TUV.
Because Northern Ireland is a polity unto itself, complex and largely ignored by the rest of the United Kingdom, this will not do Farage or Reform UK much harm. It may not, in the end, have much bearing on TUV’s success or otherwise: it has never managed to become more than a fringe party, outraged and red-faced on the sidelines of Ulster politics. But what has unfolded speaks profoundly to Farage’s character and style. He has done what he wanted to do, and what it suited him to do, irrespective of any previous commitments. If Tice had made a solemn undertaking a few months ago, well, so what? That was before. The important factor is how Farage feels about Ian Paisley and Sammy Wilson, not some niminy-piminy matter of agreements or undertakings or commitments.
Nigel Farage is a one-man band, and he always has been. That is not to dismiss the level of his success: he will be remembered as one of the most influential British politicians of the early 21st century. But he adheres to his own lights and his own priorities. Jim Allister and Traditional Unionist Voice are merely the latest victims of that.
Join Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Kate Andrews for a post-election live recording of Coffee House Shots in Westminster, Thu 11 July. Bar opens 6.30pm, recording starts 7pm
An audience member had the best line during the Scottish leaders’ debate
Scottish Tory leader, Douglas Ross, has said he’ll resign after the 4 July election following criticism of his treatment of a rival Tory candidate and questions over his expenses. It is unusual, to say the least, for a party leader to announce their intention to step down during a general election campaign rather than after it. Even more singular for that leader to continue representing his party in leadership debates, as Ross did on the BBC last night.
That elicited the best line of the night from a quick-witted audience member: ‘You need to tidy the flat before you move out, John’
With this in mind, the best question of the night came from the BBC presenter, Stephen Jardine, who asked Ross: ‘Why should anyone vote for a party you don’t even want to lead?’. The Tory leader replied that he was happy to spend more time with his children, and then seamlessly returned to his stump speech about this election being an opportunity for Scottish voters to concentrate on matters important to them, not the SNP’s ‘obsession with independence’. He went on to blame the nationalists for declining education standards and 800,000 Scots on NHS waiting lists. ‘I have constituents risking giving birth on the A9’, said Ross, providing the most disturbing image of the night.
Ross gave it his best shot, but this debate was an uphill struggle. The other six party leaders were determined to dump on ‘Tory austerity’ for every current and future social ill. They spent most of the evening vying with each other over who was best placed to ‘get rid of this rotten Tory government’ as the Scottish Labour leader intoned six times.
‘In 23 days’ time the Tories could be gone’, Sarwar announced, in case anyone was had forgotten. To which the SNP leader, John Swinney, replied tartly: ‘But they’ll be replaced by an austerity-welding Labour government and £18 billion of public spending cuts according to the IFS’. Aye, ye canny trust the Red Tories as every nationalist knows. ‘Westminster holds Scotland’s purse strings’, Swinney went on, ‘and Labour are not being straight on spending’.
Sarwar was having none of that: ‘Read my lips’, he shouted, ‘no austerity under Labour!’. One red-shirted member of the audience did so and, visibly angry, asked why Sarwar was ‘lying to the public’. Labour would ‘continue the austerity of the Tories’, he asserted.
Sarwar hit back that he was the only one ‘who’s made specific promises’: a genuine living wage, GB energy, a windfall tax on the oil and gas giants, closing the non-dom tax loophole.
‘But what are you going to do to improve the situation in Gaza?’, asked Mr Red Shirt in one of the evening’s many non sequiturs.
‘My views are known’, Sarwar cried over audience applause: a two state solution, immediate ceasefire and ‘Benjamin Netanyahu is committing war crimes’. Not sure that’s quite how Keir Starmer would put it. But for Anas Sarwar at least Gaza is clearly an issue in this election – though none of the other party leaders appeared to agree.
The main issue of the night was undoubtedly spending and who was the real Tory in disguise. The Scottish Green co-leader, Lorna Slater, who was in government with the SNP until two months ago, revealed that the annual bloc grant from Westminster: ‘puts you in impossible positions…you have to cut and cut again..you have to do everything with this tiny packet of money’. Ross pointed out that it is currently the largest ever packet of money and that Scots get generous spending thanks to the Barnett formula.
Taking a poke at Labour’s self-imposed tax-restraint, Swinney said that only the SNP had been prepared to increase taxes on the better off. Slater still wasn’t happy. It is ‘disingenius’ (sic), she said twice, to believe that the ‘super wealthy’ could not be hit with what she called ‘entrepreneurial taxes’ raising ‘billions and billions’ for baby boxes and free bus travel. Good luck with that in a country, Scotland, where only 30,000 earn enough to pay the 47p top rate of tax.
‘It’s all about mental health’, interjected the Scottish Lib Dem leader, Alex Cole-Hamilton, apropos of nothing. He called for a digital services tax to raise cash from the media giants who’re to blame for mental illness in the young. ‘Hope and change are only around the corner’, he added optimistically. ‘You just need to vote for it’.
As in the last Scottish leader’s debate, independence figured only tangentially in the exchanges. Sarwar was in conciliatory mood and appealed to independence supporters: ‘We may disagree on final destination but we all agree on getting rid of this ROTTEN TORY GOVERNMENT’.
Swinney went lyrical and and said that breaking up the UK was ‘an exciting and beautiful proposition’. That elicited the best line of the night from another quick-witted audience member angry at the lack of dental services and the difficulty of getting GP appointments: ‘You need to tidy the flat before you move out, John’. The SNP leader had no answer to that.
Join Fraser Nelson, Katy Balls and Kate Andrews for a post-election live recording of Coffee House Shots in Westminster, Thu 11 July. Bar opens 6.30pm, recording starts 7pm
Why is Australia culling wild horses?
A government-sanctioned programme to cull the brumby mobs of wild horses in Australia’s High Country has become a hot political issue in New South Wales and Victoria, the two states whose border is straddled by the Snowy Mountains. Immortalised in Australian literature through the famous 1890 bush ballad ‘The Man from Snowy River’, by the poet and journalist Andrew ‘Banjo’ Paterson, to many, these wild horses represent a living part of the Australian national legend.
Set in the Snowy Mountains, the poem tells the story of a posse of riders who chase down a mob of wild horses – brumbies – to recapture an escaped racehorse colt who has joined them. It’s a story that triggers pride in a great many Australians. It plays to our national self-image of ourselves as courageous, never-say-die individualists, laughing at danger and willing to take the greatest risks in pursuit of goals greater than oneself. Unsurprisingly, then, the two state governments’ decisions to cull these wild horses is controversial.
The Australians of Paterson’s epic poem, and the horses they celebrated, are not the Australians of today
For environmentalists, it’s a matter of sustainability. A brumby population in the tens of thousands has a profound impact on the terrain and the vegetation it supports; the culling programme is intended to reduce numbers from over 20,000 to around 3,000. Environmental zealots oppose even this drastic reduction, and want the brumbies exterminated altogether. In 2021, 69 scientists signed an open letter to the responsible New South Wales minister, declaring ‘to protect the native Australian plants, animals and ecosystems of Kosciuszko National Park, and other national parks affected by feral horses in NSW, such as Barrington Tops, Guy Fawkes, Oxley Wild Rivers and Blue Mountains National Parks, we recommend a goal of removing all feral horses from NSW protected areas’. With the exception of those 3,000 horses, the cullers have got their way.
Opposing the cull, however, are people from High Country communities and their supporters, including animal cruelty activists. Their fight has involved costly court actions and, controversially, civil disobedience including harassing park rangers and shooters involved in the culls.
The anti-cull argument is simple. Thanks to Paterson and the legendary image of Australianness his ballad created, High Country brumbies are part of Australia’s cultural heritage. They roam in regions not wanted for farming or grazing, and few people actually visit the rugged terrain and blasted heaths the brumbies have made their own. Former conservative MP for the area, Peter Cochran, recently told the Times that ‘over a couple of hundred years, a cultural identity was established in the Snowy Mountains connected to the image of “The Man from Snowy River”. And the brumbies played an important part in it.’
It’s a head versus heart issue. The head says brumby numbers are unsustainable and the cull must proceed. The heart says that shooting these beautiful horses is to shoot the Australian character they represent.
But there’s the rub. Contrary to claims the cull has divided Australia, outside the affected High Country, and a little bit of national and international news coverage, it’s barely registered on the wider public agenda.
The sad reality is that the Australians of Paterson’s epic poem, and the horses they celebrated, are not the Australians of today. Even when Paterson wrote it 135 years ago, it represented a legend of Australians as they wanted themselves to be, not what they were.
As we saw in the darkness of the Covid years, when Australia became the most repressed and locked-down nation in the Western world, modern Australians are not rugged individualists cocking snooks at authority. Rather, we are a nation of conformists, obsessed by political correctness and nanny state rules, and ever willing to comply with the most excessive and absurd public safety instructions if they are decreed by lawful authority. There would be no 2024 ‘Man from Snowy River’: occupational health and safety officers would put paid to that.
What’s more, the chattering classes and the anti-colonialists in our midst condemn the sentimental Paterson-inspired imagery. They prefer to see the brumbies as symbols of the colonial destruction of pristine habitats and lives of the Aborigines who lived and hunted there. If you accept this ideological nonsense, why vandalise statues of Captain Cook or, this week, George V when we can cull living relics of the white man’s settlement?
If the country inhabited by brumbies is so harsh and unforgiving, exterminating all these beautiful horses for the sake of the environment is going too far. Let them roam, but in numbers that are both manageable and sustainable, including ensuring sufficient forage for the surviving horses themselves. Shooting them is undeniably brutal and cruel, but the slow death of thousands of horses by starvation in overgrazed countryside surely is worse.
But, alas, leaving the horses untouched simply to honour a sentimental, romantic allegory of a legendary Australia that existed only in Banjo Paterson’s vivid imagination and abandoned by modern Australia if, indeed, it ever existed at all, is not enough.
Why is Putin still so desperate for western validation?
Everyone loves Russia, or at least echoes its talking points – if you believe the country’s state media. Why should it be so important for Vladimir Putin, who tries to appear impervious to foreign criticism, to magnify any seemingly supporting words?
It underlines a centuries-old insecurity at the heart of Russia
There was a distinct absence of western guests at last week’s St Petersburg International Economic Forum (SPIEF), once Russia’s shop window for investment and trade deals and nicknamed the ‘Russian Davos’. There was the Hungarian foreign minister (who presented attending as an act of maverick courage), but otherwise the main dignitaries there came from the Global South – or World Majority, as Moscow has taken to calling it – and even the Taliban.
So perhaps as compensation, the official media is suddenly full of past and present bigwigs apparently confirming Vladimir Putin’s lines. Karin Kneissl, the former Austrian foreign minister, told the TASS news agency that she remembered ‘that long before 2022, people were making statements saying that it would be more reasonable if there was some kind of balkanisation of Russia, you know, like a collapse, disintegration.’ TASS didn’t see fit to mention that she infamously danced with Putin at her wedding and now lives in Russia, but was happy to note that this confirms what her erstwhile dance partner had claimed, that western leaders ‘say that Russia needs to be divided into dozens of small entities. In order to then subjugate it to one’s will and exploit it in one’s own interests.’
While it is true that especially hawkish figures such as Estonia’s Kaja Kallas have said that we should not necessarily fear any potential disintegration, the western consensus is actually that such an outcome might be dangerous, and should certainly not be our goal. But such nuance has no place in TASS.
Meanwhile, Slovak prime minister Robert Fico, still recuperating from an assassination attempt, is quoted in the Kremlin’s newspaper of record, Rossiiskaya Gazeta, as saying that the ‘large western democracies do not want peace, but an escalation of tension with Russia.’ The recent decision by some donor countries to allow Kyiv to use their weapons in limited attacks on the Russian mainland is interpreted – just as Putin has been saying – as proof that they are using Ukraine as a proxy in a ‘militaristic adventure’ against the Motherland.
Even an interview with Erik Prince, the founder of the mercenary company which used to be called Blackwater (which was one of Moscow’s inspirations to set up its own Wagner force in 2013-14) is mined for the right sentiments. In conversation with controversial US media figure Tucker Carlson, who has had his own Putin interview, Prince criticises Joe Biden for not plainly stating that Ukraine would not join Nato, claiming that this would have forestalled war. For the Russian media, this became an opportunity to trumpet that the war could end quickly – if only the West abandon Kyiv.
At a time when Putin is trumpeting his contempt for the West, its decadent values and its habitual mendacity, why is it so important to be validated by its populists, has-beens and fringe figures? Why do they always get top billing? Why, for example, is home-grown nationalist philosopher Alexander Dugin cited in support of Prince, rather than vice versa?
Of course, it is always useful to be able to reflect back western voices in the bid to encourage those in Europe and the United States who are opposed to current policy over Ukraine. As governments harden their positions while ‘Ukraine fatigue’ actually grows, the scope to exploit this to disruptive effect only increases.
Yet these are media outlets largely speaking to Russians, not foreigners. Here, it is hard not to conclude that it also reflects a deep-seated insecurity within the country in general and Putin and his regime in particular. At the SPIEF, when pressed by hawkish academic Sergei Karaganov to agree that Russia ought to reorient to Asia, Putin reaffirmed that the country was a European one, even if, in his opinion, western Europe was losing the values and identity for which it had once stood. Most Russians would wholeheartedly agree on both points.
Given that he (or at least his administration, which continues to poll the popular mood obsessively) knows that his Ukrainian invasion is not especially popular – most Russians favour negotiations, if not concessions – then claiming that the ‘real’ westerners are either on Russia’s side, or at least confirming Putin’s narrative, is an attempt to give it some greater legitimacy. In the process, it also underlines a centuries-old insecurity at the heart of Russia, as it seeks to confirm its place in a Europe it also often resents and fears. To think that it is now the bastion of true European values, and that Europeans also recognise this, must be something of a consolation for being locked away by sanctions and travel bans.
Is stress always a problem?
‘Cerebral climaxes’ are those moments when we experience a high, a life-changing realisation, a joyous epiphany. I have studied these brain peaks for many years, and they are associated with crises and extreme emotions. The American psychologist Abraham Maslow called them ‘peak experiences’, but the truth is that we know surprisingly little about how these climaxes come to pass – and, indeed, about how the brain itself works.
If other complex systems can do this magic trick, the brain must surely be able to do it too
Our ignorance was highlighted recently when Harvard and Google AI experts announced that they had successfully mapped one cubic millimetre of brain tissue (about one millionth of an adult human brain). The imaging and mapping exercise produced 1.4 million petabytes of data. One neuron was found to have over 5,000 connection points to other neurons, of which we have an estimated 86 billion. A member of the Harvard team, Professor Jeff Lichtman, said: ‘We don’t understand these things, but I can tell you they suggest there’s a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.’
These days, many people mistrust the brain’s ability to cope with crises, as though the most awesome object known to science were an obsolete computer unfit for purpose. Some swallow brain-modifying drugs, afraid to face the pace or pressures of work or even day-to-day problems. There’s no doubt that fear, anxiety and depression cause enormous suffering, and that some biological brain abnormalities do require medical intervention. But when poor mental health accounts for so many work-related illnesses (around 51 per cent of long-term sick leave is due to ‘stress’, depression or anxiety, according to Mental Health First Aid England), something has gone seriously wrong. This whole epidemic has been presided over by a ‘stress management’ industry. Managing what, exactly?
When my book, The Truth About Stress, was published in 2006, the New Statesman said of me: ‘Angela Patmore is widely regarded as a heartless bitch’. The reason was that I had presented 440 pages of evidence that the ‘stress’ concept was bogus. The book did not say that emotional anguish was bogus, or that anxiety, fear, grief and depression were not real and eviscerating. It made the case that ‘stressology’ was gaslighting people and undermining their ability to face threats and challenges. In the years since, this conclusion has become increasingly hard to ignore. All too often, worried people with problems who desperately need practical help or coping skills are being offered calming medication. Is this really the answer?
The theory that we need calming down is based on the work of endocrinologist Hans Selye in the 1930s. Funded by the ‘calming’ tobacco industry, Selye borrowed the stress concept from engineering and applied it to living things. In science, this flaw is known as ‘false extrapolation’, and this is why there are thousands of different and opposite definitions of ‘stress’. Selye observed that tortured rats got sick and blamed this on the corticosteroids (now known as ‘stress’ hormones) produced by the adrenal glands as the animals struggled to survive. But the real cause should have been obvious. When the rats realised there was no escape from his experiments, they simply gave up. Resignation shuts off the immune system.
The disastrous effect of the stress ideology has been to pathologise the physiology of arousal, especially the fight-or-flight response, now sometimes referred to as a ‘syndrome’ – a survival mechanism apparently designed to harm us.
One neuron was found to have over 5,000 connection points to other neurons, of which we have an estimated 86 billion
I wrote two of the earliest sports psychology books in the UK on ‘pressure’ in sport, interviewing scores of competitors including world champions. What happens inside people’s heads in the clutch of high-level competition? I analysed the interviews and found a metaphorical patois of hundreds of expressions to do with blood, heat and pressure, tension and stretching: ‘I had a rush of blood’, ‘He got hot under the collar’, ‘his blood was up’, ‘I was pumped up’, ‘I nearly burst a blood vessel’ and so on. The words ‘stress’/ ‘distress’, ‘distraught’ and ‘strain’ all refer to stretching or pulling asunder, as do a lot of our ‘nervousness’ metaphors like ‘tight’, ‘strung out’, ‘on tenterhooks’, ‘wired’, ‘keyed up’ and ‘nerve-racking’.
My sportsmen’s metaphors evidently described a process. It culminated for these individuals, if they had the guts to go through with it and not ‘choke’, in a marvellously clear and focused state called ‘being in the zone’, where you played ‘like God’s professional’ with calm visionary certainty. But you didn’t get to be in the zone without the more unpleasant feelings of pressure and tension first.
I puzzled over this peculiar patois. Then one morning walking over a field with my dog I stopped dead. It’s blood ‘pressure’! They’re talking about the physiology of threat situations. I referenced those potted endochrinology lessons beloved of the stress industry that I studied as a research fellow at UEA, about what happens during fight-or-flight. Blood circulation reverts to an arterial tree. It withdraws from our extremities, orchestrated by vasodilation and vasoconstriction, and it goes to the large muscles we may need for fighting or running away. But it also goes to the brain.
A minutely controlled ‘rush of blood’ enables the brain to up its game, using an enriched supply of oxygen and glucose, micromanaged by vasodilation within its circuitry. This expands the neural networks, so nerve fibres or axons undergo literal nervous tension. The feelings of being stretched or about to burst a blood vessel may simply describe the brain’s internal processing, doing its job of making connections, delivering fusion and focus. None of this is abnormal, but when the brain makes a particularly big connection, this may well stop us in our tracks and give us a ‘high’, or a eureka moment.
There are two ways in which we can experience an epiphany. The first is involuntarily; in a life crisis. Bill Wilson, founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, was lying in bed in a New York dosshouse having lost everything and thinking he was about to lose his sanity as well. Terrified, he sat up and experienced ‘the hot flash’ that vouchsafed his vision of the Twelve Steps to get off alcohol that have helped millions to overcome their addiction. Countless others have described epiphanies that suddenly rescued them from hell. Mine cured me of panic attacks.
We may never fully understand how our brains work
The other method of achieving a brain peak is voluntarily. We get them in our leisure pursuits, which artificially create crises and climaxes, perhaps because the brain likes to rehearse the whole thing. Sport has nip-and-tuck competition rising to unbearable tension and finally a result. Childhood dares and adventure activities offer high-tension and relief. Theatre builds tension as the characters sweat it out and finally reach an outcome. Fiction and movies follow the same pattern. Classical music communicates its tension and crescendos direct to the brain. And then there’s human sexuality. Other animals, so far as we know, use the biological drive for making little animals, but we have turned it into an art form so we can experience lots of cerebral climaxes.
While we may never fully understand how our brains work, Francis Crick, one of the hardest of hard scientists, wrote in 1994 that: ‘Much of the behaviour of the brain is emergent.’
Complex systems, at the very zenith of their complexity and on the verge of apparent chaos, suddenly produce order, as though at the throwing of a switch. Shoals of fish, computer automata, a big pile of sand, the money markets, the Earth’s weather systems – all can undergo this phase transition known as emergence. Take for an obvious example a pan of water heating up. All the water molecules behave more and more randomly and chaotically, until suddenly they all form a hexagonal convection pattern and start to simmer.
If other complex systems can do this magic trick, the brain must surely be able to do it. And if we interrupt the process – as ‘stress management’ urges us to do – we risk interfering with one of the wonders of science in the midst of its work. So when you walk through the storm, hold your head up high. It has your miraculous brain in it.
The rise of the village vigilante
Living off the beaten track was idyllic until one night last November. At 1 a.m. during a particularly heavy downpour, a group of hooded men came onto our property and tried to burgle us. Lulled into a false sense of security after three months in our rural home, we’d casually left our 25-year-old Land Rover Defender next to our barn, rather than locked away inside as it would normally have been.
What if the crims refuse to leave and want a fight? What if one of them gets fatally injured on my property? What if I get banged up like Tony Martin?
The thieves had come prepared. Two of them scaled the fence and disabled our electric gates, ready for a quick getaway. Another one waited in the lane, engine running. The men opened the Defender’s door but were stopped in their thieving tracks by a metal security box that sits locked over the pedals. Luckily for us, they hadn’t quite brought all the right tools for the job.
Our newly installed Ring doorbell caught all of this on camera. Weirdly it didn’t actually ring an alert, nor did our dog bark. We all slept soundly, discovering the next morning the electric gates swinging gently in the breeze, the opening mechanism sawn clean through. It was weird and unsettling knowing that we’d had intruders, the only small comfort being that they hadn’t got away with their intended prize. But my overwhelming feeling was one of dread that they might come back the following night to finish off the job.
Kent Police, to their credit, responded quickly to my online report of the incident and requested our camera footage. But that’s all that happened. I wasn’t surprised. Policing of rural crimes is famously ineffective, so it’s no wonder that country folk sometimes take matters into their own hands.
You have to be of a certain age for the name of Tony Martin to resonate. He was a Norfolk farmer at the end of his tether after numerous break-ins and a lack of action by the police. One night, Mr Martin lay in wait for the thieves, cradling his shotgun. He ended up in prison for shooting dead a teenage burglar, but the case prompted an outpouring of anger from a public fed up with property owners being punished rather than the thieves. People spoke out saying that they, like Tony Martin, would have defended themselves if the police were unable to help them.
This was back in 1999, a more innocent time and crucially before everyone had a smartphone in their pocket. The Blair government pledged to inject more cash into rural policing, but 25 years on and now a victim myself, I’m wondering if anything has really changed?
In 2023, the New Forest villages of Lyndhurst and Minstead held the dubious honour of having the most unsolved burglaries in the entire country – not a single crime had been solved for three years. Residents posted incidents on WhatsApp instead of bothering to call 999, relying on each other for clues and evidence to try and catch the perpetrators, a kind of Neighbourhood Watch for the instant messenger age.
At our local pub a few weeks after our attempted Land Rover theft incident, we were invited to join one of these local and longstanding WhatsApp groups. ‘It’s really effective’ said the burly chap leaning on the bar holding his tankard, ‘as soon as you get any more trouble, just stick it on the WhatsApp and I promise you, three or four pick-ups with a couple of big blokes will do their best to be at your gates as quick as they can, day or night’.
I asked if that might not antagonise the situation if thieves were tooled up and intent on getting away with my property? ‘Nah’, he said confidently. ‘They get scared off easy enough when we turn up, it’s not worth the hassle for them – they’ll go elsewhere’. He said there was no point involving the police; much easier to use small village networks to report suspicious incidents and warn others that troublemakers might be in the area. That in itself, he said, acted as a deterrent to the criminals.
But what if they don’t get ‘scared off easy’ when the pick-up men arrive? What if the crims refuse to leave and want a fight? What if one of them gets fatally injured on my property? What if I get banged up like Tony Martin?
Government statistics show that rural crimes are much lower than those in urban areas, but that doesn’t tell the whole story. In a town you are surrounded by people, on foot, in cars, living next door, above or below – out in the sticks it’s a very different vibe. We do have neighbours – one sort of next door and another about half a mile away across an orchard. But I’m aware that if I were home alone and had sudden cause to scream, nobody would hear it. Hopefully, if I could get to my phone and alert my neighbours through WhatsApp, they would come to the rescue.
In defence of energy drinks
With Britain so sluggish, Keir Starmer and the Labour party should want to reenergise the country. Indeed, they are preoccupied with energy, and not just the dire state of the British electrical grid but energy drinks. Labour is set to propose a ban on the sale of energy drinks to under-16s. Most British supermarkets have already introduced voluntary bans but this would make them comprehensive and legally binding.
Our governing class doubtless sees energy drinks as being rather coarse compared to coffee
There’s an irony here. Labour wants to extend the right to vote to 16-year-olds. At the age of 16, in other words, Keir Starmer thinks you are mature and informed enough to have a decent understanding of Britain’s domestic and international prospects but only just mature and informed enough to decide whether you want to have a sweet caffeinated beverage. I’m going to need a lot more caffeine before I can wrap my brain around that one.
Should young people consume a lot of energy drinks? Well, no. Fizzy drinks with three coffees worth of caffeine, as well as a big old whack of sugar or artificial sweetener, probably isn’t bad for you if you drink it every now and then. But it’s likely to be bad for you if you do it again and again.
It’s also unwise for young people to consume a lot of coffee, or cola, or chips, or crisps, or pizza. Should we ban them too? Where does the banning end? That argument could have been made about cigarettes and alcohol, I suppose, but caffeinated drinks probably won’t give you cancer and certainly don’t make you inebriated. Perhaps I’m being a bit of a hypocrite in saying all this because I have an energy drink every day.
Yes, it would take an contrarian to argue that energy drinks are likelier to be advantageous than detrimental for your health. That said, the call to ban them smacks of an attempt to find a scapegoat for youthful dysfunction. A recent meta-analysis linked them with worse sleep and concentration – which makes sense, of course – but also claimed that they were ‘associated’ with everything from unsafe sex to suicide.
What is more plausible here? That energy drinks made people likelier to have unprotected sex and want to kill themselves or that young people who have unprotected sex and want to kill themselves are likelier to drink energy drinks? Correlation – as I’m sure the authors know but their readers might forget – is not causation.
When Britain’s most tedious man, Jamie Oliver, calls Labour’s idea ‘really exciting’ it depresses me. It may excite him but it won’t excite young people. It is good to care about their health, of course, but we can’t ban them into being happy. They need inspiration, not just prohibition, if they are going to make the most of life.
Perhaps I’m just feeling sensitive. Our governing class doubtless sees energy drinks as being rather coarse compared to coffee (as they look down on vapes, too). But this would have more weight if so many coffee drinkers were not ordering pumpkin spiced glooperinos with five pumps of syrup and a mountain of cream. A Red Bull isn’t that much of a shock to the system.
Is banning energy drinks for young people some sort of insane and despotic act in and of itself? No. But it’s part of a general drift towards prohibition. We build less, and invent less, and create less, and the government occupies itself with finding new things to forbid. That’s partly why I love my morning Monster – even if I know I should cut back for the sake of my circulation. It jolts me into activity, into actually doing something.
The timeless appeal of Clacton Pier
You approach the pier at Clacton-on-Sea by passing under an elegant bridge, one which in Venice you would probably stop to admire. But this is Essex and the stonework is emblazoned with the town’s coat of arms and motto, Lux, salubritas et felicitas – light, health and happiness.
Here you can admire the turning blades of the 172-megawatt Gunfleet wind turbine array or the grey masses of distant container ships
Those familiar with this East Coast town will know that these qualities are in pretty short supply here – the constituency in which Nigel Farage hopes to be elected the next MP. Indeed, if George Orwell were chronicling Britain’s social failures today, this would be just the place to come. Clacton ranks in the country’s top 1 per cent of most deprived towns with only 51 per cent of the population deemed economically active, compared to an English average of 80 per cent.
Yet for all that, Clacton still has its pier. Opened in 1871, ‘No. 1 North Sea’ is 1,180ft of Lux, salubritas et felicitas protruding from a town that money and time forgot. Besides the main entrance there’s a fish and chip shop – ‘cash only’– that is worth visiting in its own right. Here the whitebait and salad is a bargain at £7.95.
In the pavilion, electric singsong voices and tunes assail you from all around, as well as bright, flashing screens, shouting signs and chrome-rimmed machines all demanding your attention and small change. There are motorbike and car racing games, shoot ’em ups bristling with large plastic bazookas, basketball hoops to shoot and glass boxes filled with cheap stuffed toys waiting to be pinched to freedom – or not – just as they have been for decades. There’s even one of those Zoltar fortune teller machines – complete with eerie life-size mannequin – last seen in Tom Hanks’s 1988 film, Big.
A sign tells you that the pier has been named best family attraction in Essex in 2024 (and, indeed, it was named ‘pier of the year’ in 2020 by the National Piers Society). Another sign exhorts you to ‘take your darts to the next level’ at the Boardwalk Bar and Grill, beyond a phalanx of chorusing fruit machines. If this hasn’t yet been visited by the Reform UK candidate then it’s only a matter of time.
In the main hall, a Wacky Races-themed machine adorned with Penelope Pitstop and Dick Dastardly invites you to insert your two pence pieces in order to win more teetering coppers from the shifting shelves. From the ceiling above huge stuffed Disney characters hang by their necks in bunches, like the victims of a mass toyland gibbetting. It’s all very bright, clean and cheering, like an Ealing Comedy but in colour.
Feeling peckish? The presentable Captain’s Table cafe sells the sorts of delicious foods that scientists now warn are likely to cause early onset bowel cancer: pizzas, ‘fully loaded’ wraps, hot dogs and side dishes that include cheesy garlic pizza bread.
Nearby, surrounded by towering palm trees, there’s a cracking crazy golf course with significant water features and an outdoor section with sea views that will keep children sated for an hour or more. At £6, it’s cheap at thrice the price. Next along is the towering, multi-level netted soft-play area – not for the faint-hearted, which has its own deep-fried family restaurant. Here your kids can get lost for hours for just £8 each (plus £1.50 for each adult) while you sink yourself with chips. What could be better?
I assure you, however, that the appeal of Clacton Pier has just begun. As well as Jurassic Pier (an ‘immersive dinosaur walkthrough and 4D experience’ which left by my four-year-old terrified out of his skin) there’s the fairground. Leave the pavilion and there it is: a rickety looking rollercoaster overlooking sea, and a socking great go-karting ring arranged over two levels. What wonders. There’s also a waltzer, of course, one with a jazzy paint job reminiscent of Top of the Pops c. 1985, as well as a plausible looking log-flume and a vertical ride decorated with pictures of bikini-clad ravers designed (I think) to give you whiplash. Even discounting for sad-looking ‘bumper boats’ stand in the corner – think chlorinated dodgems with outboards – this is an impressive line-up. And there’s a bloody great ferris wheel, too, of course.
Then you’ve got the helter-skelter for a Victorian expression of abandonment, as well as yards more of railway sleepers to tramp across before arriving at what was once the end-of-the-pier theatre. This is now mostly the Jolly Roger Restaurant, where the salt and pepper pots wait with bottles of vinegar on each table for ham, egg and chips at £9.95 – accompanied by a 180-degree-view of the North Sea. Here you can admire the turning blades of the 172-megawatt Gunfleet wind turbine array or the grey masses of distant container ships, and an estuarine seascape that, thanks to the mud, will always be brown no matter how blue the sky.
Looking towards shore you can see the glorious sandy beach going on for miles either way and the hillside dotted with hotels and mansion flats. Squint and it could be 1925. You might even see Poirot with a parasol. Somehow there are people are fishing for bass at the end of the pier. They’ll eat what they catch too. Clacton Pier caters to life’s small hedonisms – the universal joys of ingesting sugar and fat, and of games of chance and skill – as well as offering the proximity of the sea, where we all began.
Inmates are running the newsroom asylums
Say what you want about Washington Post hypochondriac tech reporter Taylor Lorenz, but she was correct when she said that “the journalism industry is overrun by rich, elite, underqualified entitled, nepo babies.”
In several high-profile mainstream media outlets, the inmates are still attempting to wrest control away from those put in charge of running the asylum.
This was evident last week when Washington Post CEO Will Lewis announced the sudden departure of executive editor Sally Buzbee, who oversaw a tumultuous period as the Post slid off the deep end of progressive politics. Lewis was blunt with his staff, announcing a restructuring of staff resources. When Lewis appointed new management, staff members reportedly asked him if he had interviewed any women or people of color.
It was reported that when Lewis was confronted at an all-hands meeting, he spoke candidly with the Washington Post staff, saying, “We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it. It needs turning around. We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff.”
Maybe it’s the dry British bluntness, but he’s absolutely correct. The Washington Post could absolutely benefit from a fresh start and from a journalistic perspective that doesn’t tell its audience what to think. That brashness lasted all of a couple of days. Then Lewis issued an apology that came on the back of several news outlets hammering him for his treatment of his staff.
This has become a common theme in recent years — journalists running to other news outlets to tattle on their employer. Such was the case with Felicia Sonmez, who created a social media storm by throwing shade at her own colleagues.
Another case happened this week when National Review published a piece, thin gruel though it seemed, about the slow-motion car wreck inside of the Wall Street Journal over similar decisions. Whenever new editors are brought in, the inmates resort to tropes about gender and race, thus proving the point of new management. No one is reading their work anymore — and more importantly, the trust in media outlets is at all-time lows, somewhere beneath Congress and toxic sewer sludge.
At every point, these young activist journalists are given feedback, constructive criticism, blunt honesty about what they’ve become — and at every point, they push back, insisting the problem is not with them, but with a sexist, racist, hierarchal system of management. They will either learn or they won’t.
Perhaps it simply is a case of foreign British editors coming into American newsrooms without the perspective of race and gender narratives. Both Will Lewis of the Washington Post and Emma Tucker of the Wall Street Journal are of British origin (through no fault of their own); perhaps they were hired specifically to quash these petulant rebellions within their own establishments, obsessed with race-based coverage of every newsworthy event under the sun.
One thing remains, however, that until that day comes, these newsrooms will still be run like liberal arts college campuses. There might even be a few tent encampments in the main lobby of the buildings. If the worst thing Tucker and Lewis are accused of is being out of touch with what their inmates demand, then perhaps the answer is not to cater, cave and apologize. Perhaps the answer is to stand firm — and tell them no.
Hunter Biden found guilty in gun trial
Hunter Biden was found guilty of all three counts of federal firearm charges on Tuesday, concluding a six-year investigation into whether the first son had lied on a federal form for a background check and illegally possessed a firearm while under the influence of illicit drugs.
Hunter was struggling with an addiction to crack cocaine in 2018 and had at least one stay in a rehab facility during the summer. However, as multiple witnesses testified during the trial, he had quickly relapsed by October 2018, the month that he purchased a gun. His ex-wife, Kathleen Buhle, painted a picture of a deeply troubled man whose constant drug abuse led to the dissolution of their marriage.
Hallie Biden, Hunter’s sister-in-law turned paramour, said she repeatedly searched Hunter’s car to make sure it as safe for her kids to be inside, only to find the gun and drug paraphernalia. Hallie took the gun and the pouch it was kept in, which tested positive for cocaine residue, and tossed it in a grocery store dumpster. Prosecutors also revealed a series of texts in the days surrounding the gun purchase that showed Hunter making plans to meet up with his crack dealer and using veiled references to various illicit substances.
The defence hoped to make Hunter look more sympathetic by calling his daughter Naomi to the stand. But as Naomi testified that she had seen her father in October and that he seemed ‘great’ and ‘hopeful’, text messages in the days following the gun purchase revealed Hunter was quite erratic and often unreachable. As Axios put it, ‘probing questions and old text messages presented by the prosecution on Friday made the president’s son look more like an erratic dad than a good father who was getting sober in the week after he bought the gun.’
The defence ended up pulling one of its witnesses, presumably Hunter’s uncle James, in the aftermath of Naomi’s disastrous testimony.
The jury started deliberations on Monday and returned the guilty verdict late Tuesday morning. Hunter faces up to 25 years in prison and a $750,000 fine.
Politically, the case all but nullifies the Democratic party and Biden campaign strategy of repeatedly reminding Americans that his opponent, Donald Trump, is a convicted felon. President Biden has said in interviews that he has ruled out pardoning his son if found guilty.
This article first appeared in The Spectator’s World edition.
Why didn’t Geert Wilders do as well as Marine Le Pen?
‘We are really by far the biggest winner this evening,’ said Geert Wilders, leader of the Dutch far-right Party for Freedom (PVV), when the European election exit polls were published last week.
But although the Netherlands was first to go to the polls – with strong indications that the far right would be victorious – his ‘win’ fell short of the storming result of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, which has sparked a political earthquake in France.
Wilders, an anti-Islam, anti-immigration politician, surprised everyone in the country, including himself, when his PVV became the largest political party in the Netherlands in November. A man who has lived with 24/7 security for two decades is currently putting together a four-party, right-wing coalition government with an experimental ‘business’ structure and former spy chief Dick Schoof as the next prime minister.
Despite (or perhaps because of) his criminal record for his comments about Dutch Moroccans, Wilders has been dominating the polls for months. His party still managed to gain five seats out of 31 in the European parliament, a record result for the PVV. But, unlike in France, the Netherlands has seen a lean to the right rather than a landslide.
First of all, Wilders came second to the GreenLeft-Labour alliance, which won eight seats to his six. Secondly, the far-right vote in the Netherlands has increased, but only slightly. As Arjan Noorlander, a political correspondent for the current affairs programme Nieuwsuur pointed out on election night: ‘the pro-European vote has won: about two-thirds of the Dutch voted for a party that is emphatically for European cooperation.’
The Dutch far-right has long been deeply Eurosceptic. Wilders for years advocated for ‘Nexit’ – following the example of Brexit. But this April he shifted his approach to advocating for ‘change from within’. He backed Le Pen’s idea of uniting with the Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni to form a European super-group of the radical right. Last week, Wilders invited the international press to a campaign event in the Hague, where he urged his voters to not boycott the European election and vote for his party. In the end, just over half of his supporters did.
It’s unclear what Wilders’ changed strategy in Europe will mean. ‘It could, in the long term, go both ways,’ said Léonie de Jonge, the author of The Success and Failure of Right-Wing Populist Parties in the Benelux Countries. ‘On the one hand, we might say that it helps Wilders: the far right did well in France and Germany, so the far-right voice will sound louder in the European Parliament. On the other hand, it could complicate things. For instance, the new cabinet wants quite far reaching opt-outs when it comes to immigration. But other countries will also want such opt-outs. That will inevitably lead to friction between far-right leaders.’
The next Dutch government’s manifesto is hugely dependent on Europe: it wants to opt-out from the bloc’s new migration pact in order to stem immigration. It also wants laxer agricultural pollution rules and lower future fiscal contributions. But the European radical right also tends to be nativist, and this could complicate matters. Why would the French support Dutch farmers being given more latitude on spreading manure, for instance, if this gives them a competitive advantage over French farmers?
In the Netherlands though what this week’s results show most clearly is the fragmented nature of politics, in a country where unpopular lockdowns, government scandals and an asylum shelter and housing crisis have severely eroded faith in politicians.
The popularity of established parties has continued to fall, especially the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), which has traditionally helped keep the self-interested Dutch ‘trader’ spirit in check. By comparison, the nativist Farmer Citizen Movement (BBB) won two seats and the New Social Contract gained one. Both of these parties are offshoots of the CDA and both are in Wilders’ new coalition. The pro-Europe party Volt, meanwhile, won its first two seats.
For years, nobody wanted to work with Wilders, whose policies included a ‘head rag tax’, and who called Dutch democracy a ‘fake parliament’. Then Dilan Yeşilgöz-Zegerius, the head of the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy (VVD) opened the door to working with him last autumn – leading Wilders to promise to respect the constitution and put his anti-Islam stance ‘on ice’.
After his subsequent election win, Wilders may have failed to win the confidence of his parliamentary colleagues to become Dutch prime minister. But as this European vote demonstrates, he is not keen to go back into the cold.
The good old ways: nature’s best chance of recovery
Britain is one of the most nature-depleted places on Earth. The consequences for human wellbeing and resilience, as well as for non-human life, are grave. Conservationists and others say it doesn’t have to be this way. But when it comes to recovery, what should we aim for? How much can we know about what was once present? How much is it practicable or sensible to restore? What does recovery, let alone ‘rewilding’, really mean in a rapidly heating world? Sophie Yeo does not have the answers to all of these questions. Nobody does. What she does offer in Nature’s Ghosts are insights that could help shape a better informed and more constructive debate.
Corncrakes, rare to vanishing in Britain, flourish in a patchwork
quilt of fields in Transylvania
One of the first stops in Yeo’s explorations around Britain, and places in Europe that may offer lessons for Britain, is the Carrifran Wildwood in southern Scotland. Here, half a million or more trees of diverse indigenous species have been planted since the late 1990s in a glen formerly given over to grazing by sheep. In addition to the regrowth of the woodland itself, this has resulted in a spectacular increase in animal and bird life, including willow warblers, chaffinches and other woodland and scrubland birds, as well as mammals. But one of the most remarkable changes has been in floral diversity, with the recovery and spread of plants such as sea campion, which is usually associated with coastal landscapes.
As a rewilding project created through deliberate replanting, Carrifran may seem to present a paradox. There’s nothing wrong with this, say Yeo and her interlocutors. The idea of a ‘great wood of Caledon’ – a vast pine forest covering most of Scotland – is partly myth: the forest was never as extensive or as long-lasting as is often supposed. But humans can choose what they love and wish to encourage. Christopher Smout, Scotland’s Historiographer Royal, tells Yeo:
We should be planting new pine woods or extending existing ones not out of nostalgia for some dubious myth, but because we are lovers of Scotland and Scots pine, modern improvers who treasure the… ecosystem and relish the sight and smell of the woods today.
For Yeo, Carrifran offers glimpses of past wonders and future possibilities:
I see it not so much as a faithful replica of a vanished ecosystem but as an attempt to translate an ancient text. There may be gaps in the poetry, but that does not detract from the beauty of the endeavour.
Meadows of the Transylvanian and Carpathian basins are another stop on Yeo’s journey. Situated at the western edge of the vast Eurasian steppe, these lands appear to have been largely unforested since at least the start of the Holocene, roughly 12,000 years ago. For the last few thousand of those years, traditional agricultural practices, in which the production of hay for livestock plays a central role, have helped maintain an extraordinary diversity of wildflowers, as well as a human culture – ‘haylife’ – that strikes what Yeo describes as ‘a balance between [religious] belief, ecology and economy’. Corncrakes, which are rare to vanishing in Britain, flourish in a patchwork quilt of fields in different stages of cultivation and disruption, their numbers depleted only by well-meaning but ill-designed schemes imposed by central government. Without such interventions, what we are looking at is ‘not the conservationist’s dream’, says Nathaniel Page, a former diplomat at the British Embassy in Bucharest who now works with Fundatia ADEPT, a charity that supports traditional farmers and farming practices. Rather, ‘the hay meadows are this lovely compromise, where they are pretty productive but they are very species-rich as well… practical landscapes, not museum pieces’.
From North Karelia, in Finland, Yeo reports on the work of Snowchange Cooperative, an organisation that seeks both to protect the environment and foster traditional ecological knowledge through practices such as ice fishing in the region’s lakes. ‘Nature is not about pretty scenery and simple cures: it is about death and the surrender of the self,’ says Snowchange’s president, Tero Mustonen. The point is for humans to become part of an ecosystem who actually help it to flourish. Instead of wilderness, which in the modern western imagination has tended to exclude humans, the goal is erämaa, a Finnish word for a place neither entirely civilised nor completely untouched. It seems to work well in a nation that is among the world’s most prosperous and innovative.
Yeo also investigates some of the potential lessons for Britain and beyond from the deeper past. Global heating caused by the unchecked burning of fossil fuels is putting the world on track for temperature rises and ecological disruption on a scale not seen since the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, some 56 million years ago. The good news, according to Yeo, is that ‘for millions of years, the natural world has shown itself to be remarkably resilient in the face of extreme heat’. But this is no reason for complacency. Without space to thrive in a hot and human-crowded world, the outlook for non-human nature is bleak.
Nature’s Ghosts concludes with determination and hope. In Yeo’s telling, there are at least two good reasons for looking to history in times of rapid change. First, the landscapes of the past were richer and more abundant than today and, she believes, people in Britain now have a moral duty to recreate those qualities for the sake of nature itself: ‘Perhaps the greatest danger of ignoring the past is that we forget how magnificent the Earth can be, and accept too little from the future as a result.’ The second reason is that ‘by looking to the past, we can reinvigorate our relationship with the natural world’.
A third reason comes to her in the course of writing the book – the birth of her first child:
What seems most important of all is that my new daughter has the chance to live a happy and meaningful life. That she can experience the full spectrum of emotions that the world has to offer.
Disgusted of academia: a university lecturer bewails his lot
There’s a beautiful moment in I Am the Secret Footballer (2012), a Guardian column turned whistle-blower memoir, when the anonymous author is momentarily freed from an enveloping depression caused by his career as a professional sportsman. He’s at Anfield to play against Liverpool in one of the biggest games of the season when he picks up a pristine, unused football before a warm-up drill and, inexplicably, sniffs it. With that inhalation he’s transported from the corruption, pressure, scandalous abuse and monstrous egos of elite sport and for a few seconds becomes a kid uncontainably excited at the prospect of kicking a new ball around his council estate. This Proustian reverie, a rediscovery of the simple pleasure of playing a game with other people, is treasure, because it reminds him why he chooses to do what he does with his time as an adult.
It’s impossible to dissent from the author’s self-assessment that he’s ‘a sad man in a dark place’
By contrast, it’s difficult to understand why the author of The Secret Lecturer is still an academic. After 15 years as a lecturer in an unnamed Arts and Humanities subject at an unspecified institution, he’s still clearly smart and funny – some vignettes of the foibles of middle-aged men in the workplace are sharply observed – but there is nothing to suggest that he takes, or, indeed, has ever derived, any happiness from his chosen career.
Some sense of that pleasure – the excitement of a new research project; an adrenaline rush during a lecture that you suddenly realise is pitch-perfect; the camaraderie of reading and thinking with others – would have made the disappointment and pain he clearly experiences in his working life more impactful and understandable. Even though he has not ‘set out to be deliberately gloomy’, he admits that he ‘probably accentuates the negative aspects of my job’. There is precisely zero ‘probably’ about it.
In a series of diary entries framed to mirror a single academic year – the events recounted actually take place over a longer timeframe in this decade – the Secret Lecturer blows the lid on how administrators, colleagues, managers, politicians, HE-sector wonks and students consistently fall short of his ethical and intellectual standards. The people employed to provide learning support to students with disabilities and additional needs at his own institution are ‘dull-witted’. While he works a 90-hour week and acknowledges that plenty of other academics also put in a proper shift, he’s obsessed by rogue ‘lazy bastards’; he goes to a colleague’s lecture to first-year students and reflects: ‘I would have learned more by drilling a hole in my head and pouring my brains down the loo.’
Don’t get me wrong, I love wry, acidic commentary as much as the next paunched miserabilist. But, tonally, this book often crosses a line dividing the sardonic from the sneering or unbalanced. Escaping his ‘dump’ of a campus, where the ‘only diversity is the expansive range of bigotry’, he attends a conference, only to find that the PhD students giving their first papers are ‘earnest’ and ‘worthy’, but their ‘delivery and content aren’t very sophisticated’. He despises one apparently vastly overpromoted colleague for doing a ‘comedy’ Chinese accent, but isn’t above mocking a department administrator for her speech impediment during a row about access to a stationery cupboard. When he fails to get a job at a university overseas and is angered by their lack of feedback, he’s twice accused of harassment by them. He regards this response as ‘blackmail’ by an institution that’s ‘even more morally defective than my current employer’, and promptly writes to an international job website to ‘warn them about this institution’s unethical ways’. It’s impossible to dissent from the author’s self-assessment that he’s ‘a sad man in a dark place’.
The entire UK higher education sector is, of course, now deep in its own midnight. Recently an online tracker kept by colleagues at Queen Mary, University of London, recorded that there were 49 institutions – that’s just under a third of all UK universities – currently going through redundancy programmes. Disciplines affected included ancient and modern languages, biology, chemistry, drama, engineering, English, history, mathematics, music and theatre. As the Secret Lecturer observes, this situation has not, pace the Daily Mail’s headlines, been occasioned by the influx of woke academics intent on turning once revered institutions into safe spaces for the leftist indoctrination of indolent snowflakes. It has been precipitated by the marketisation of higher education according to a funding model that is manifestly unfit for purpose.
I have worked in higher education for a quarter of a century, and the mood in the sector is far worse than I’ve ever known it. Because of where we’re at in an election cycle, no one knows how the main political parties plan to resolve a funding crisis whereby, because of capped fees and stubborn inflation, institutions are actually losing money for every home undergraduate they teach. As universities shrink or freeze uncertainly in the face of this impasse, those academics lucky enough to remain in post are all in danger of becoming Secret Lecturers, miserably going about our business, too scared to leave before we’re pushed.
Kapows and wisecracks: Fight Me, by Austin Grossman, reviewed
Superheroes are the trump card of genres. As a rule of thumb, if a novel has a murder, it’s ‘Crime’; if it has a murder on a space station, it’s ‘Science Fiction’; and if it has a murder on a haunted space station, it’s ‘Horror’. But a novel with crimes, robots, faeries, cavemen, magic, cyborgs and time travel can only be ‘Superhero’. It is rarely successful outside the graphic variety, possibly because such strenuous suspension of disbelief is best managed in comics.
Yet it can be done. Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay is one, while Lavie Tidhar’s Our Violent Century and Nick Harkaway’s Titanium Noir are both clever and witty. Perhaps the most recognisable success was Austin Grossman’s smart 2007 Soon I Will Be Invincible. Sample quote: ‘It was time for me to stop punishing myself, and start punishing everybody else.’ His Fight Me returns to the field (as do its characters), and for all the kapows and wisecracks, it is a strangely sweet and sentimental novel.
The narrator is now a mild-mannered, bespectacled academic called Rick Tower. Except he used to be Alex Beekman, and on uttering a special word a wizard told him became ‘Prodigy’. He vowed to use his powers only for good, and was warned about a Dark Adversary. After some unpleasantness at school with his new powers, he is put into educational special measures, alongside the future Doctor Optimal, a teenage assassin called Cat, and Stefanie, the Princess of Power, usurped by her sister from the Throne of Summerdwell. Together they form a team called the Newcomes, and have their own nemesis, Sinistro. Sinistro is technically dead, but as the narrator notes:
There are many, many gadgets that villains shouldn’t be allowed to have – hyperdrive, bombs of any description, large magnets, objectionably long stilts – but time machines make up their own special cases of contraband. Even good people shouldn’t be allowed to have them.
The murder of Alex’s long-lost mentor necessitates getting the gang back together. The novel is split between the present and their origin story and heyday. It seems that the real enemies are boredom, loneliness, nostalgia, under-achievement, litigation, disappointment and being passé. Teenage grudges and slights still linger, even though the gang members ache for the recklessness and hedonism of their youth. (Setting much of the novel in 1990s was a shrewd decision.) It is fun spotting the in-jokes and references. The conceit has been done before, but not with quite as much charm.
At last we see Henry VIII’s wives as individuals
Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived. Nearly 500 years after the death of Henry VIII, can there be anything new to say about his queens: Katherine of Aragon, Anne Boleyn, Jane Seymour, Anne of Cleves, Katherine Howard and Katherine Parr? Does the world need another book about this sextet?
The answer to both questions, as this elegantly written and sumptuously illustrated volume makes clear, is a resounding yes. Published to coincide with the National Portrait Gallery’s exhibition of the same name (20 June-8 September), Six Lives is a collection of concise, accessible essays written by experts with specialist knowledge of Tudor painting, music, jewellery, manuscript illumination and book binding, among other topics. What makes the book so engaging and rewarding is that one comes away from it with a palpable sense of Henry’s queens as individuals, each possessed of a distinct life and afterlife.
Some of the nearly 200 illustrations are well-known images – none more so, perhaps, than Hans Holbein the Younger’s 1539 painting of a richly attired Anne of Cleves in three-quarter length, hands clasped demurely in front of her at waist level. This is the portrait which persuaded Henry to take the sitter as his fifth wife, only for him to exclaim with dismay, upon seeing her in the flesh, that she was not so fair as he had been led to believe. It was a turn of events which contributed to the fall of Thomas Cromwell – though Holbein, unlike Cromwell, kept his head.
One of the volume’s many pleasures is the way in which familiar images sit cheek by jowl with lesser-known ones. Holbein’s Anne of Cleves, for example, is juxtaposed with later copies by other painters, including the Pre-Raphaelite Richard Burchett and the Impressionist Edgar Degas. A direct line of descent is drawn, too, from Holbein’s meticulous rendering of Anne of Cleves’s clothing and jewellery to the costume designs for her character in several semi-fictionalised dramatic productions, from the BBC’s The Six Wives of Henry VIII (first aired in 1970, just as colour television was becoming more widely available) to the 2021 RSC staging of Hilary Mantel and Ben Miles’s The Mirror and the Light.
Portraiture is the chief lens through which this book considers the lives and legacies of Henry’s queens. But many other types of cultural artefacts – ranging from jewels to maps, musical instruments and furniture – are also mined for what they reveal about these women. A choir book linked to Katherine of Aragon, for example, is shown to be a moving testament to the ‘brutal cycle of hope and despair’ in which Henry’s first queen – desperate to produce a male heir after the death of one son, followed by multiple stillbirths and miscarriages – found herself trapped. Not only does it feature a motet by Jean Mouton calling upon St Anne, the patron saint of mothers and pregnancy, to bring forth children, but its exquisite illuminations, by the Fleming Petrus Alamire, include – rather suggestively – a flower in which the stamens have been replaced by the initials ‘H’ and ‘K’.
By the same token, a letter from Katherine Parr to the King, written a little over a year into their marriage, helps to excavate the experiences and personality of Henry’s sixth queen. Like everything else to which she put her name as queen, this missive is signed ‘Kateryn the Queen KP’ – the use of the ‘KP’ monogram an apparent attempt, by the third Queen Katherine in the space of just ten years, to assert a distinct identity for herself. If so, the strategy was only partially successful. Katherine Parr may have distanced herself from both Katherine of Aragon and Katherine Howard; but, until recently, her image has often been confused by posterity with that of her one-time ward, Lady Jane Grey.
Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived. This book of essays has liberated Henry VIII’s queens from the reductive tyranny of a pithy, six-word rhyme.
The diary of a dying man: Graham Caveney’s poignant cancer memoir
Reading this third memoir by Graham Caveney, a knot in my chest tightened. It wasn’t only because it’s a cancer memoir; it was because the unfolding of history so often shows that abuse begets self-destructive behaviour. To parody Auden:
I and the public know
What all healthcare staff learn
Those to whom evil is done
Destroy themselves in turn.
Caveney’s two previous memoirs, The Boy with the Perpetual Nervousness and Agoraphobia, outlined his working-class childhood in Accrington, Lancashire, and his winning of a place at a Catholic grammar school. But where the school succeeded in helping him achieve his aim of becoming a writer, it also screwed with his head, because he was not only taken to plays but also played with by a member of staff.
Caveney then embarked for a few years on a course of self-destruction, involving alcohol and drugs, though it’s testimony to his talent that he still managed to forge a successful career as a writer. Sadly, all such actions have consequences, and however understandable it was that an angry man should take refuge in heavy substance abuse, in May 2022, after several surreal episodes of hiccuping while eating, Caveney was endoscoped and a malignant tumour in his oesophagus was found.
As he and his partner Emma struggled to absorb this shock diagnosis (Caveney was only 57), they were told that the subsequent CT scan showed that the cancer had spread to the liver, and that he had six months to live without treatment, and perhaps 18 months with it. Caveney’s initial reaction was that he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life on NHS wards; but he reconsidered, and underwent an onerous course of chemo-therapy, each cycle of which left him exhausted, breathless, and with signs of peripheral neuropathy. Mouth ulcers became the norm. His mood changed more frequently than the British weather.
The Body in the Library is much more than just a cancer diary. Caveney’s enquiring mind, familiar from his previous books, is wonderfully evident here, too. He muses on how many writers he admires have led lives mired in ill health or, like Chekhov and Somerset Maugham, have been doctors themselves. He looks back on his childhood, and his parents when they were ill. His dying father became ‘impossible’, according to his late mother. The wide-angled lens also takes in our addiction to medical dramas, our need for the comfort of the ideal nurse and the way the sick become observers of society, excluded from the productive world.
The machine-gun fire of Caveney’s endless analyses could become a distraction, but for his passion and scholarly knowledge. Reading his book can sometimes feel like having John Cooper Clarke bark his poems at you without a break:
We lie in order to make sense of the chaos of our lives, to carve a realistic account out of the daily Dada. We impose causality and order on events which have neither and serve them as Gospel. The lies we tell ourselves become the stories we tell our doctors.
But Caveney is too smart to bore us, and just as he senses we’ve had enough existential fury, his tone will change again.
As a connoisseur of hospitals, I recognise one aspect of sickness – often ignored – that Caveney tackles head on: mood. Knowing that your lifespan is severely limited not only makes you sad. It can also make you angry, impatient and intolerant, which overflows on those around you. But Caveney corrects his focus when it sways off course. He decries the government for the underfunding of the NHS. Yet there is also deep tenderness when he talks about Emma, and about the two swans which circle the lake near their home and become a symbol of hope and possibility. I loved this poignant, erudite book. Caveney’s writing will keep his memory alive for decades to come.
Jam-packed with treasures: the eccentric Sir John Soane’s Museum
Sir John Soane’s Museum is one of London’s most eccentric buildings, containing a riot of classical fragments, paintings, architectural models and plaster casts jammed in to overflowing narrow galleries packed into a Georgian town house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Soane viewed it as a reflection of his busy intellect, ‘studies for my own mind’, he said, and Bruce Boucher’s new book reveals how the architect, famous for designing the Bank of England, put together the remarkable collection that visitors can still see today.
The author was director of the Soane Museum from 2016 to last year, and his privileged access to its archives ensures we get an insider’s view of the quirky institution and its more than 40,000 eclectic objects. Describing it as ‘one of the most intensely autobiographical statements conceived in three-dimensional terms’, Boucher reveals how Soane (born ‘Soan’) emerged from a very humble family of bricklayers to win a Royal Academy Gold Medal for his skilled architectural drawing and a travel scholarship for a Grand Tour of Italy. Taking two years, it was the beginning of his exposure to classical culture.
But it was only after his marriage in 1784 to Eliza Smith, the heiress to the City Surveyor of Paving, that he had the considerable funds to buy properties in Lincoln’s Inn Fields and fill them with an enormous range of objects. Eliza shared her husband’s passions and together they acquired art and statuary. Her death in 1815, only two years after moving into their renovated home, determined Soane to ensure his collection should be as much a memorial to her as a record of his career and influences.
His skilled use of overhead shafts of natural lighting in both the Bank of England and the Dulwich Picture Library was deployed in his home, allowing objects, including an ancient Egyptian tomb, to be illuminated even though they resided in the basement. The sarcophagus, originally excavated by the Italian adventurer Belzoni in the Valley of the Kings, was acquired for £2,000 after the trustees of the British Museum turned it down. A hole had to be knocked into the back of the house to allow its lowering into the basement and the arrival was accompanied by three days of festivities.
The delightfully higgledy-piggledy nature of the collection filling walls floor to ceiling may have been inspired by the Italian artist Piranesi’s prints, which Soane also collected, showing antique objects piled upon each other, as in his view of the Appian Way. It was also fairly typical of wealthy collectors displaying works in their houses at the time, such as Thomas Hope’s mansion in Duchess Street with its juxtaposition of historic styles. The rich, earthen wall colours were inspired by recently rediscovered Roman villas and their frescoes. Soane haunted auction houses and was happy to scoop up collections from suddenly impecunious enthusiasts.
Boucher claims that it was the shocking discovery that his wayward son George was living in a ménage à trois with his wife and her sister, with whom he had a child, which helped convince Soane to protect his museum as a public entity by a parliamentary bill, ensuring it remained intact and free to visit for posterity.
Richly illustrated with new photography and material uncovered from museum archives, John Soane’s Cabinet of Curiosities is a treasure house of anecdotes and analysis that does full justice to the spectacle of Soane’s breathtaking wunderkammer.
The sheer drudgery of professional tennis
Wimbledon’s starched whites, manicured flower beds and hushed silence enable tennis to present itself as a genteel sport. But Wimbledon only represents tennis in the way that an Olympic 100m final represents athletics. It is the best players in the best setting for a brief period. Actual tennis, the day-to-day life of a regular player on the circuit, is very different. It is relentless, stingy and unsentimental. The most surprising thing about The Racket, Conor Niland’s bruising account of his career as a good (but not great) tennis player, is that he emerges with both his sanity and his compassion intact.
Tennis is not an easy game to break into. Niland, born in Birmingham but brought up in Ireland, would appear to have had a fortunate start: his parents were sporty and his older sister, Gina, had some success as a junior player. The Nilands built a court in their garden for daily practice. But, as Conor discovers, even these leg-ups left him trailing in the wake of the true elite. Aged 13, he was being trained by his dad on their home court for an hour after school. At the same stage, Rafael Nadal was hitting balls with Carlos Moya, a former world number one. Niland later wins a scholarship to Millfield, a private school with an excellent reputation for producing athletes. He later notes that Roger Federer, Andy Murray and Nadal all left school at 16 to focus purely on tennis.
For budding professionals, the promised land is the ATP Tour, a series of lucrative, well-organised tournaments, contested by men ranked in the top 100. Below that are two other sets of competitions: the Challenger Tour (for those ranked between 100 and 300) and the Futures, which is home to ‘tennis’s vast netherworld of more than 2,000 true prospects and hopeless dreamers’. Winning matches at these events earns ranking points, and the goal is to climb the rankings faster than everyone else.
Life is infinitely harder at the bottom. Players must book their own travel, pay for their own coaches (if they have one) and source their own equipment. Often the tournaments seem actively hostile to their participants. Niland wastes untold hours in hotel rooms waiting to play because organisers can’t (or won’t) tell him with any precision when his games are due to start. He is clearly good company, but he admits he ‘made virtually no lasting friendships on tour through my seven years’. Although he is surrounded by young guys of the same age doing the same thing, his potential mates are also his direct competition and no one wants inadvertently to give a rival a boost by being kind. Also, the money is dire. The winner of a Futures event might get $1,000, from which he has to deduct tax, travel and expenses:
Surviving on the Futures and Challenger tournaments isn’t just about being good at tennis. It’s about being able to cope with the strange bedfellows of regular boredom and constant uncertainty. Not many succeed.
Yet Niland does. Although he is unsparing in his depiction of the drudgery of tennis and is regularly badgered by friends from home wondering how long he is going to stick at it, he is completely devoted to the sport. That his dedication never wavers even as he realises that he lacks the skills to compete with the very best is even more remarkable. He is able to cope with the disappointment of stumping up for a long-haul flight, only to lose in the first round of an unknown tournament. All the while he retains enough focus gradually to improve his set-up. He wins his first Futures title, then his first Challenger competition, and becomes the first Irish man to compete in a Grand Slam qualifier in years.
Eventually, he cracks Grand Slam qualifying, too. On winning the match that puts him in the main draw of Wimbledon for the first time, he collapses. ‘All that tension leaving the body at once will do that to a person,’ Niland explains. His exploits at Wimbledon 2011 and the subsequent US Open are genuinely dramatic.
In 2012, suffering from a deteriorating hip injury that he could not afford to treat, Niland decides that he is done. It is a moment of supreme anticlimax:
I didn’t inform anyone at the ATP of my retirement. I didn’t sign anything. I just stopped turning up. Nobody from the tour contacted me to ask where I was. There were hundreds of guys ready to fill my place.
Ultimately, tennis needs Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic and Carlos Alcaraz. It did not need Conor Niland. In a sentence that ought to chill the blood of the game’s administrators, Niland realises that ‘my day-to-day life genuinely improved when I quit tennis’. He will not be the only one.
The costly legacy of Margaret Thatcher’s monetarism
Post-war British economic history is littered with failed policy panaceas. Keynesian demand management would solve the unemployment problem; the Exchange Rate Mechanism would provide an anchor for stability and end sterling’s perennial weakness; the Barber and Kwarteng budgets – separated by 50 years – would throw off the shackles of Treasury orthodoxy and put the country on a path to higher growth.
On the face of it, monetarism – the theory that if you control the money supply, you control inflation – fits squarely into this paradigm. As soon as government sought to control the money supply, the historic relationship between money and inflation broke down. But partly because inflation did come down, albeit at the cost of high unemployment, and partly because its politics remains a dividing line between left and right, monetarism still represents disputed territory – the more so because of the Bank of England’s recent experiment in so-called quantitative easing.
Tim Lankester’s book is therefore a timely review of the high-water mark of the monetarist experiment. The author had a ringside seat. Not only was he Margaret Thatcher’s private secretary when she was prime minister, responsible for economic affairs, but because Thatcher chose not to appoint an economic adviser, preferring to rely on her Treasury ministers Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson, he was the only economist working in No. 10 between 1979 and 1981.
Lankester describes himself as a ‘disbelieving monetarist’, someone who went along with monetarism because the markets believed in it even if he didn’t. But he admired Thatcher, and was all too aware of the failings of economic policy under Edward Heath, Harold Wilson and James Callaghan. He’s a reliable witness. And his analysis of where monetarism went wrong is compelling.
The first problem is that money is a slippery concept. Is it simply notes, coins and the reserves created by central banks? Or is it something wider, taking in current and deposit accounts held within the broader banking system? The narrow definition is easier to control. But it is the broader definition that monetarist economists observed had the closest relationship with inflation.
Containing growth in the money supply proved much more difficult than expected. Interest rates were an imperfect instrument. In the short run, higher interest rates tended to increase borrowing by businesses as they responded to a downturn in demand for their goods and services. And though abolishing exchange controls and wider restrictions on bank lending was the right thing to do since it further liberalised the economy, it distorted the relationship between the money supply and prices.
And instead of tempering their wage demands in response to monetary targets, as some theorists predicted, trade unions increased them. Here, the wider context did not help. The near doubling of VAT in Howe’s first budget, Thatcher’s decision to implement in full the Clegg commission’s recommendations on pay comparability, and the wider effect of the second oil crisis led to a doubling of inflation in the Tories’ first year in office.
In the end, it was old-fashioned deflation, in the form of high interest rates and a succession of restrictive budgets, which brought inflation under control. As Milton Friedman, the high priest of monetarism, later observed: ‘The use of the quantity of money as a target has not been a success.’ And by the mid-1980s, Lawson, if not Thatcher, was looking to the exchange rate rather than monetary targets to provide an anchor for economic policy.
Ultimately, it was the microeconomic changes – such as the curbing of trade union power, tax reform and the ending of industrial subsidies – rather than monetarism that transformed British economic performance in the 1980s. Lankester argues that had the Thatcher government implemented trade union reform as a precursor to monetarism, history might have been different. Certainly, greater flexibility in the labour market has resulted in more recent economic shocks, such as 2008 and 2020, having a much smaller impact on unemployment. But tactically, Thatcher made the right call in waiting for the unions to be weakened by recession before taking them on. And arguably the only way to reduce inflationary expectations once and for all was a severe deflationary shock.
But by restricting demand, deflation will generally contain a strong monetary element. And in this respect Lankester underestimates the importance of money and credit. He goes on to argue that quantitative easing has little to do with the recent return of inflation, but ultra loose credit conditions surely enabled the double digit inflation of 2022-23.
Purists will argue that it’s inappropriate for a civil servant to write about his time in government. And I have some sympathy for this view. But in Lankester’s defence, he is writing more than 40 years on. All the papers are in the public domain. And, though very readable, this book is more for policy makers than for the mass market. There is little gossip and few jokes, apart from a humorous aside about a conversation between Callaghan and his minister for weather, Denis Howell. But it’s an important contribution to economic history. Thatcher rightly observed that economics is not a science. At best, it’s a set of principles, supplemented by a set of ever evolving relationships. And so when it comes to economic policy making, history is probably the best guide there is.
A long goodbye to Berlin
Lucasta Miller has narrated this article for you to listen to.
Christopher Isherwood pioneered what is now known as ‘autofiction’ long before it acquired that label. His best known work, Goodbye to Berlin (1939), which later inspired the musical Cabaret, was based on the diaries he kept while living in the Weimar Republic in his twenties. He’d already used the material before in Mr Norris Changes Trains (1935), a brilliant black comedy thriller that deserves to be read alongside more supposedly serious works of modernism. Forty years later, he reworked the experiences yet again in Christopher and His Kind (1977), in which he finally made explicit, for the new gay liberation era, what had been suppressed in the earlier works: his homosexuality, which had previously been outlawed.
Isherwood was already composing autofiction aged six, dictating his first work to his mother
Although Isherwood emigrated to America in early 1939, and spent the second half of his life in California, he could never quite say goodbye to Berlin. Nor could he give up exploring the ambiguous boundaries between memoir and fiction, a habit that was inculcated early. Born in 1904 into the decaying English gentry, he was already composing autofiction aged six, dictating his first work, The History of my Friends, to his mother, herself an inveterate diarist. Although he so identified with her in childhood that he dressed up in her clothes, he later experienced her as a suffocating presence who needed to be ejected, along with the entire English establishment. But he would carry on in the same literary vein throughout his long and prolific career, transforming his personal acquaintance into ‘characters’ in book after book, from his literary confrères W.H. Auden and Stephen Spender in Lions and Shadows (1938) to his parents in Kathleen and Frank (1971).
Most famously, he transformed Jean Ross, the rebellious, young, upper-middle-class Englishwoman he befriended in Berlin, into the subsequently iconic Sally Bowles, though his version has none of the slick glamour of Liza Minelli in the 1972 film. Ross’s daughter later complained that her mother had been unfairly caricatured. The real Ross – who later became a war correspondent and a lifelong committed communist – had more gumption. (She was also enough of a mover and shaker to secure Isherwood his first screenwriting gig, an experience he went on to cannibalise to brilliant effect in his 1945 autobiographical novel Prater Violet.)
Unlike Minelli, the Sally Bowles of Goodbye to Berlin is not choreographed into hyper-professionalism by Ken Fosse. Her nightclub performance is embarrassingly amateurish, its unsettling charisma deriving instead from her desperado disinhibition. She’s a contradictory character: a combination of naivety and bravado; of self-deception and vulnerable verve; of entitlement and disempowerment; of alienation, attitude and authenticity. Isherwood may not give a full and fair account of Ross, but he uses the character to tell us more – about the fatalistic atmosphere in Weimar that Hitler exploited; about class and sex; and also, perhaps, about himself.
Goodbye to Berlin’s most famous line, ‘I am a camera’, has Isherwood adopting a pose of passive detachment. But it’s worth remembering that he went on to extend the photographic metaphor to acknowledge the imaginative shaping and selection that went into his seemingly objective reportage: ‘Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.’ As Katherine Bucknell suggests in this new life: ‘His alterations get closer to the truth than mere documentation ever could.’
In the early Berlin stories, the personal suppressions and hidden ironies involved seem to provide an undertow of creative tension that ultimately adds to, rather than detracts from, their superb quality as works of literature. Curiously, Isherwood later couched the supposedly more open confessionalism of Christopher and His Kind in the third person, creating an odd sense of dislocation by referring to himself as ‘Christopher’ rather than ‘I’ throughout.
Perhaps his autofictive mode was always driven by a complicated, ironised sense of his own self as simultaneous observer and observed. Backstage, in real life, the experience may have been more messy and painful than the consummate control of his best prose suggests. It was perhaps the yogic emphasis on the dissolution of the ego that led him to convert to Hindu mysticism under the guidance of a celebrated swami shortly after arriving in California. Cabaret audiences might be surprised to hear that his translation of the Vedas remains perhaps his bestseller, though he balked at becoming a monk due to the celibacy requirement.
In California he also met Don Bachardy, who became his life’s partner, despite their eye-popping age difference of 30 years. He had scoffed at Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears for their seemingly bourgeois ‘marriage’, but he ended up, despite periods of angst and infidelity, in a relationship of long-term domestic intimacy that eventually saw the two become a celebrated gay couple, subject of a dual portrait by their friend David Hockney. It’s perhaps a testimony to their bond that Bachardy never became a ‘character’ in his partner’s work.
The fact that Isherwood was so often his own autobiographer makes him a problematic subject for biography. As the editor of his voluminous diaries, Bucknell has devoted her career to his memory. Complementing Peter Parker’s excellent 2004 life, this empathetic, exhaustively documented account is also testimony to the author’s friendship with Bachardy, now 90. Running to more than 800 pages, it offers a level of immersive detail that is out of synch with the current trend for pithier lives, though the minutiae are often intriguing. Who knew, for example, that circumcision was a requirement for entry into the Combined Cadet Force (CCF) at Repton in around 1918, a painful operation to have in adolescence, described by Isherwood’s doting mother as ‘the Event’? This book will be of value to scholars for years to come. It also reminds us of Isherwood’s genius in crystallising what he called his ‘shapeless blob of potential material’ into art.