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Did the SNP miss the boat on saving commercial shipbuilding on the Clyde?
Scotland’s SNP government would like nothing better than to be seen to have saved commercial shipbuilding on the Clyde. It likes the idea so much it has spent almost half a billion pounds of taxpayer money on the effort while trying to produce two new ferries for Scotland’s island communities. How ironic would it be if an opportunity emerged to finally create a commercially viable yard in Glasgow only for nationalist politics to get in the way of it coming to fruition? Yet that may well be what has happened in recent months.
If anyone is going to save commercial shipbuilding on the Clyde, it probably won’t be the SNP
The fatal moment appears to have been November of last year, when the SNP administration effectively kiboshed a plan from managers at Ferguson Marine, the nationalised shipyard at the centre of the ferries scandal, to make the yard long-term sustainable via a combination of new boat production and regular contract work for the UK military.
The yard’s then boss, the recently sacked David Tydeman, had asked for £25 million of investment in a new steel plating production line and other upgrades to raise productivity. The Scottish Government’s Economy Secretary, Neil Gray, rejected the request, insisting the yard should ‘refine’ its business plan before agreeing extra funding. Tydeman, who took the helm at Ferguson in February 2022, was subsequently relieved of his duties in late March.
His sacking came as something of a surprise. After previous costly failures, Tydeman had finally managed to get to grips with the production and design issues that had held up the building of the Glen Sannox and Glen Rosa, the two overdue, overbudget boats the yard had been struggling to build. At the time of his departure, the Glen Sannox was in the water conducting sea trials, while the Glen Rosa is in the final stages of completion.
Tydeman had also, for the first time, produced a serious plan for making the yard commercially sustainable. With the £25 million of new investment, he argued the yard would be in a strong position to build several new small vessels the Scottish government will soon commission as well as fulfil regular contract work on new ships for Britain’s navy.
UK defence contractor BAE has a shipbuilding yard in Govan. Insiders report that the yard is so busy its management is eager to utilise capacity elsewhere, so long as quality and productivity standards can be met. Tydeman appears to have recognised this opportunity early on. Not long after taking on the management of Ferguson he started sending a team of welders and platers to Govan on a day-rate basis. This then led to a formal pilot project for the state-owned business to produce three units for the Govan yard’s Type 26 frigate programme.
This went well, and there was every reason to believe ongoing military contract work alongside more precarious civilian full vessel construction could form the basis of steady future revenues. A formal five-year business plan was created, in line with recommendations from independent consultants brought in to produce a report (currently secret) on turning the yard into a commercially competitive operation.
The £25 million investment seemed a relatively small amount to create a business that would no longer be a drain on government finances and could finally be seen as a national asset.
There is an obvious incentive for nationalists to allow the yard to fail to become reliant on British defence procurement
However, timing was critical. For Ferguson to secure more contracts with BAE, and possibly also with Babcock’s defence shipping yard in Rosyth, and for the business to be in a position whereby it could competitively build smaller ferries, a new plating line had to quickly be ordered – some of the equipment has two-year lead times. One person close to the management team at the time says that when Neil Gray refused to give the go-ahead for purchase orders to be placed, BAE’s enthusiasm for Ferguson dissipated.
In a statement at Holyrood at the time, Gray said state aid rules prevented him giving a commitment on the new funding. He told MSPs the government’s ‘independent due diligence’ on the request had concluded it would not meet a ‘key legal requirement’. However, state aid rules only potentially apply to any contract for the small ferries the Scottish Government plans to order. Upgraded facilities are needed regardless – at least if the goal really is to create a commercially sustainable yard.
But was that Gray’s goal? Politically it might be easier to keep the business afloat but uncompetitive to get beyond the next Holyrood election. There is also the possibility that nationalist ideology has gotten in the way of pragmatic commercial considerations. Had Tydeman’s plan come to fruition it would have tied the sustainability of Scottish commercial shipbuilding directly to Scotland remaining within the UK. There is an obvious political incentive for a Scottish nationalist administration to conveniently find a way for the yard to fail to become reliant on British defence procurement. What an irony it would be if what was meant to be a totem of the independence cause emerged under nationalist control as a symbol of being ‘better together’.
As with so many aspects of the SNP’s ferries fiasco, the ministerial decision-making from November might never fully and honestly be explained. What is clear is that there was an opportunity last year for the yard to have a shot at becoming a sustainable business. That opportunity seems to have been forfeited.
That said, Scotland now has a new first minister who is smarter than the last one and seemingly eager to tone down the nationalism. Will John Swinney’s government be pragmatic enough to invest to boost yard productivity and get the military contract work back online? I wouldn’t bet on it. A repeat of past mistakes seems more likely.
If anyone is going to save commercial shipbuilding on the Clyde, it probably won’t be an SNP government.
Guns, drugs and beatings – I loved boarding school
My son and various well-meaning friends have been advising me to abandon writing history books and cash in on the trend for boarding school misery memoirs. On the face of it, as someone who was sent away aged seven and remained in these institutions until I was 18, I am well qualified to add my contribution to what has now become a recognised sub-genre of English literature. My problem, though, is that I quite enjoyed my time at boarding schools and I cannot claim – as so many do – that it adversely affected my life; rather the reverse.
In his extended essay ‘Such, such were the joys’, George Orwell recorded his awful schooldays at St Cyprians, a snobbish boys preparatory school in Eastbourne. There he suffered the fetid smells of urine, dried crud on porridge bowls, pathetic canings by the headmaster and the sadistic antics of his wife Flip. Though some contemporaries claimed Orwell exaggerated his account, the damage was done. Prep schools were forever pictured as hellholes.
I was beaten there too of course, but justly so, for attempting to steal rifles and a Bren machine gun
In 2021, Louis de Berniers wrote about abuse at his boarding school, Grensham House. In the same year, Old Radleian Richard Beard argued in his book Sad Little Men that boarding schools damage their pupils while preparing them for power, thus create old boys like Boris Johnson who damage us all. This year, Charles Spencer’s memoir, A Very Private School, detailed his experience of prep school cruelty. It topped the charts. The Times and Telegraph have published similar accounts by Simon Mills and A.C. Grayling. Even the Speccie has joined the chorus: my friend Robin Ashenden has recently given an account of his own boarding school terrors in these very pages.
So I feel almost perverse in stating that in my case boarding school gave me some of the happiest days of my life – in spite of receiving more than my fair share of beatings, for I was an incorrigible rebel against all forms of authority and discipline. I hope I don’t sound too callous about the pain of others when I say that I got over such things with relative ease, though after my first beating I threw myself on the floor whimpering and writhing in agony.
That punishment was inflicted by an old monster called F.W. ‘Sammy’ Sanders (long dead) who typified the traditional picture of a prep school master: reeking of stale tobacco and BO, with leather elbow patches and hair sprouting from ears and nostrils. You get the picture. Sammy had himself been a pupil at the school and after graduating from Oxford he couldn’t wait to get back and teach at it. He hated me with passion – no doubt with good cause – and the feeling was mutual.
Founded by a Liberal MP called J. Howard Whitehouse, Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight was dedicated to the ideals of Whitehouse’s hero, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin. Strangely, however, Whitehouse was also a fervent admirer of Benito Mussolini and the boy Sammy Sanders had led a party of pupils to pay homage to the Duce in Rome before the war.
Not all punishments were as physical as the beatings: I once had to stand in front of the school for half an hour with my tongue protruding – a penalty for having a ‘sharp tongue’ which the headmaster claimed I used to ‘cheek the staff.’ I also bucked the system by leading a mass Great Escape-style breakout: more for the fun of it than as a flight from tyranny. Five of us got away, only to be detained trying to board a ferry for the mainland. All things considered, it was hardly a surprise when my parents were told that they should find a new school for me when I reached puberty.
The next school – like the establishment in Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall – was in rural North Wales and provided the erotic and theatrical thrills which make my later schooldays so rich in my memory. By the end I preferred being at school with my mates than being at home with my parents. I was beaten there too of course, but justly so, for attempting to steal rifles and a Bren machine gun from the armoury of the school’s cadet corps while planned mutiny while under the influence of Lindsay Anderson’s famous film If…
Even more influential were the dances we were allowed to hold, attended by convent schoolgirls from Wrexham and young ladies from a nearby posh girls’ boarding school called Moreton Hall. We were awash with adolescent testosterone and I don’t think I have ever had a more exciting experience than dancing with a Nigerian princess: a real one.
Almost as enthralling were our experiments with drugs. An American friend used to smuggle pockets full of weed through Heathrow from Miami and when we had smoked our way through his supply, we filched ether from the chemistry lab for clandestine sniffing sessions. I only stopped doing that after a chequer board pattern on the floor of the room where I took my first sniff mysteriously reappeared on the grass of the playing field where I took the second sniff days later and I wondered what the stuff was doing to my mind.
An aspiring actor, I was chosen to play Richard Rich, the villain who betrays Thomas More in A Man for all Seasons. The performance was enlivened when the headmaster who was producing the play had a midnight flit with another master’s wife on the eve of production and was never seen again. An enterprising teacher called Alec Wilding White took over the play and managed to get us a week’s gig at Liverpool’s Everyman Theatre where we trod the boards before bemused Scousers in between live performances by Roger McGough.
Another time I was caught red handed by the head boy while breaking into the school’s clothing store with a couple of confreres. Our punishment for this offence did at least show a touch of imagination. The headmaster ordered us to draw a tent from the school’s scout troop; bread, beans and cornflakes from the kitchen and, totally unsupervised, told to disappear into the wild Welsh countryside and make ourselves scarce for three glorious days.
Hoping to enhance our basic diet with a chicken, I drew the short straw and was selected to break into the hen house of the farm where we were camping and grab the necessary bird. Catching a chicken that doesn’t want to be caught was more difficult than I expected and the resulting din made me fear getting my arse peppered with the farmer’s buckshot.
At last I got my bird in hand but then came the problem of despatching it. I had never wrung a neck before and so – I am still ashamed to recall – I ended by drowning it in the nearby Llangollen Canal. It must have ingested too much water, for halfway through the lengthy plucking process we smelt the distinct odour of decomposition, so the chicken ended up buried in the field outside our tent instead of in our stomachs. These days the headmaster who decreed our temporary banishment would be prosecuted for criminal neglect, but I can only look back in wonder and gratitude on my wild schooldays.
The hell of interior design
I spent seven hours yesterday cutting up cardboard boxes into little square pieces with a Stanley knife and stuffing them into rubbish sacks. I’ve just moved house and my home is piled high with bulging black bags and looks like Leicester Square during the Winter of Discontent. Given that I don’t currently have the necessary bin from the council, I could end up living with them forever.
These are just some of the stresses of moving into a newly bought flat. Everyone knows the legal process of buying a place is an ordeal – the multitude of documents you can’t find and questions you can’t answer, the survey that over-stresses all the problems, apparent 11th hour impediments to closing the deal that, as in a Hollywood film, finally evaporate as completion day approaches.
The room now has a clinical look, soulless and arctic. You feel less happy inside it
But just as strenuous is the period after you’ve moved in – a world of endless decisions and choices, each one of which may be wrong and will cost money to repair. I’ve already bought a dud tablecloth and pair of curtains, both of which will have to be returned (I’m tempted to just give them to Oxfam and avoid the red tape). But both of these pale beside the long-awaited armchair, which was so quietly disillusioning it seemed to teach me something about life itself.
I’d wanted this armchair – from a certain well known Swedish manufacturer of furniture products – for such a long time. It had a pleasing 1950s solidity, a kind of four-square quality, that made me think of the early Bond films. But when it arrived, it turned out to be – the first disappointment – self-assembly, and no armchair in God’s earth should be that. Armchairs ought to look as solid as Mount Rushmore, as though they’ll outlast you and your grandchildren, and there should be something arcane, known only to experts, about their composition. I already felt I knew too much about this one’s secrets and that daylight had been cast upon magic. But it was when I’d constructed the thing – a collection of shapes, all covered in a horrible papery material which I then had to tug the fabric onto – that reality started to dawn. The armchair was nothing like I’d imagined.
It was just so much bigger than one could have expected it to be. I know we have an obesity problem in this country and that these people, if overlooked, tend to get whiny and litigious. But this chair seemed to bite great chunks out of my living space, and had a seat so needlessly outsized it was possible to sit on it and feel lonely. I’d obviously made a mistake too ordering it in grey. There was now a white elephant in the room. Perhaps visitors would be kind enough to skirt over it and pretend it wasn’t there.
Actually, they won’t need to. The company has a generous returns policy and, disassembled once more (thank God I didn’t cut the labels off), the beast goes back today. I’d also pondered sending back the Shaker-style daybed it took me nine hours and every inner resource of patience and coolheaded thinking to put together, and which turned out to have a hairline crack in one of its feet. But I just couldn’t face taking it apart and looking at so much particle board again (a substance I now nurse a settled loathing for), so the daybed stays. Some mistakes have to be lived with.
There is also bathroom-gate to deal with. I just knew the magnolia my bathroom had come in was all wrong and that it should be white – a virginal, pristine white, the white of freedom and space and light and clean new beginnings. Having masked up the entire room (it has black ceiling beams) and taped polythene to the floor, I duly splashed five litres of ‘Brilliant White’ matt emulsion over it. At the end, having listened to the entire audiobook of David Nicholls One Day (a singularly misnamed book – doing the bathroom took three) I grabbed a moment to stand back and survey the effect. The room now has a clinical look, soulless and arctic. You feel less happy inside it.
So it’s back to the drawing board/Homebase with that one too. My sister tells me these mishaps on the way to having a pleasantly decorated home are quite normal, and that, in furniture terms, you have to bark your shins a few times and factor in the odd cock-up to get the look and atmosphere you’re after. I’ve heard wise people say you should live in a flat for a few months and just let it speak to you before you make any decisions about doing it up. But who has the time? A kind of madness has overtaken me. I just want to get the job done.
So what colour should I paint the bathroom in? Going back to magnolia will be a climbdown, and I’m sure there’s something bold and off-the-wall – some cool cascade of aquafresh blue, an invigorating mint green – that would work miracles in there. Perhaps there’s some secret bathroom colour I don’t know about, which will take me to a peak of bath time serenity, a shade so tranquil and sedative it will stop me worrying, worrying about things like what colour to paint the bathroom in. I can’t balls it up again, so now have a fistful of tester pots from Dulux, with names like ‘Willow Tree’, ‘Marine Splash’ and ‘Nordic Sky’ (none of them, on first splatter, quite living up to the lyricism of these titles).
Among them is a low-risk number called ‘Fine Cream’, and this is probably what I’ll plump for – what I have already, just in a warmer version. I am, I realise, probably an off-white kind of person. It seems preferable, on balance, to sit in a neutral bathroom fantasising about all the bright, bold paints you could have done it in than actually to choose and commit to one of those colours, which may let you down or start to grate at a future moment in a way that off-white never does. Anyone who wants to see this as a metaphor for wider things in life is welcome to. But I probably shan’t be inviting them round when the place is finished.
Real Southerners never liked Elvis
Cowboy boots are ubiquitous in Nashville – although not hats. ‘That’s Texas,’ one woman told us earnestly. Locals say, ‘y’all,’ ‘yes, ma’am,’ and make eye contact when they speak to you. Despite the lack of cowboy hats, this is still the South. Welcome to Music City, the capital of country and the gleaming buckle of the Bible Belt. Nashville is home to over 700 churches and numerous evangelical choirs. The Union Gospel Tabernacle, built in the 1890s by a Tennessee businessman, was once the largest church in the city. Now its simply the Ryman Auditorium. After the first world war, the owners found they made more cash booking secular performers.
The audience hated it, Elvis bombed and vowed never to return
For over 30 years, the Ryman was home to the Grand Ole Opry, a radio show broadcast live across America every evening. The Opry had been kicked out of its previous venue thanks to its rowdy crowds; the producers were said to be particularly drawn to the Ryman’s wooden pews because of how hardy they were.
A slot performing on the show became a rite of passage for country music stars and a pilgrimage for old-timers. Johnny Cash, Loretta Lynn, Emmylou Harris and Patsy Cline are among those who have played there over the years. The most famous become lifetime members and are allocated a postal locker for fan mail (Dolly Parton’s is no.163; according to the Opry staff she reads every letter she gets). But there’s still one big flop that everyone talks about: Elvis. The king of rock n’ roll made his debut at the Opry in October 1954 with a gyrating rendition of his soon-to-be hit ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky’. The audience hated it, Elvis bombed and vowed never to return. Even now, 70 years on, the city has an uneasy relationship with Tennessee’s greatest son.
In the 1970s, the Opry moved on – this time to a purpose-built auditorium on the edge of town. But still, fans flow into its quaint auditorium to perch on replica Ryman pews (this time cushioned) to hear musicians rattle through a few of their best tunes. Each act is introduced by the host, dressed in a sharp grey suit. He stood behind a lectern, reading off the bands’ biographies before they came on. In the breaks he also read aloud a list of adverts: one for shoes, another for a state-wide chain of diners. One band I saw there were making their debut. They barely looked old enough to drink and were dressed in cowboy hats – Texans, perhaps? – and sang in pacy harmony. Their mothers whooped from the row behind me.
To hear some rougher material, you’ve got to head for the honky tonks. Narrow and crowded, with dim lighting and sticky floors, these bars are where country musicians go to test out their latest songs or just entertain the crowds with classic covers. Most of them are open from midmorning until the early hours.
At that time of night, normal people find themselves tiring of bluegrass and go in search of food. Nudging my way up the street through the crowds of tourists and hen parties, I arrived at Prince’s Hot Chicken in a brightly-lit modern food court nearby. Legend has it the first Prince’s Hot Chicken restaurant was started by a womaniser whose lover had tried to take her revenge by spiking his favourite hot chicken with extra chilli and spices. He loved it – and, like a true-born American, turned it into a money-spinner.
Nine dollars will get you four enormous tenders served on thick white bread with a few pickle slices laid on top. Simple, sure, but far from plain. The sharpness of the pickles cuts through the richness of the greasy chicken – helpful for packing in the last few mouthfuls. Only the bravest, though, would dare go above ‘medium’ on the heat scale (it goes all the way up to ‘XXX hot’). I slipped off home, away from the noise of Broadway and back to the Bobby hotel. Low-lit with thick red carpets, my room felt like a hideaway in which to finally succumb, gratefully, to jetlag.
The Biden administration’s race-based tax plan is disgusting
Do you like scary stories? How about this recent report from the United States Treasury, “Advancing Equity through Tax Reform: Effects of the Administration’s Fiscal Year 2025 Revenue Proposals on Racial Wealth Inequality.”
That sleep-inducing mouthful of grade-A bureaucratese may seem anodyne, the sort of thing that requires a surgeon general’s warning. But even a cursory trip through this twelve pages of reader-proof gobbledegook will be enough to give any sentient being nightmares. For what this malodorous blueprint aims at is nothing less than the confiscation of your wealth and property.
Beginning with its title, this report bristles with loaded buzzwords —“equity,” “racial wealth inequality.” Behind those abstractions, however, is a malevolent plan to destroy middle-class prosperity by brandishing the chief shibboleth of the age: race.
Race! Ergo, we are going to demonize whites.
Race! Ergo, we are going to punish success.
Race! Ergo, we are going to fiddle with the tax code in order to figure out ways of penalizing those with wealth, most of whom turn out to be whites and Asians.
The first sentence gives the show away. “For generations, entrenched disparities in our society and economy, at times facilitated by the federal government, have made it harder for Americans of color to have access to opportunity.”
“Americans of color,” forsooth. I am an American of color — a pleasing pink, if you must know — and so, even if you are an albino, are you. To distinguish among citizens on the basis of skin color — preferring some hues to others — is not only invidious, it is un-American. It should also be illegal.
But here we have the Department of the Treasury telling us about how the Biden administration has plans to tax Americans differently depending on their race. It is disgusting.
It will also be very expensive. A central plank in their plan is to tax capital gains — most of which are currently taxed at 20 percent — as ordinary income, which might by 40 percent or more. Their reasoning is this: blacks as a group do not have capital gains because, as a group, they do not tend to own stocks and other assets that appreciate to the same extent that whites, Asians and other groups do — and not for lack of opportunity. This is what Al Gore calls an “inconvenient truth,” but it is a truth nonetheless.
Much more could be said about this, but for now I want simply to note the immorality of taxing capital gains at any rate.
What are capital gains? They work like this. You take, say, that $1,000 you have managed to accumulate after paying all the “Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises” the bureaucracy has already levied against you.
You then risk that sum by investing it in the engines of prosperity, i.e., various companies that make or service the economy. With luck, patience and wisdom, your $1,000 may, over time, turn into $2,000, $10,000 or even more. The difference between your original $1,000 and the sum for which you eventually sell your asset is your capital gain. Why should you be taxed on the result of your patience and willingness to risk your hard earned money? Why?
The two fundamental tenets of communist economics are the abolition of private property and the equalization of wealth.
The horrible people who now govern us toil daily to realize both goals. This latest tax plan is yet another big step towards the holy grail of the socialist/communist enterprise: universal immiseration (except, of course, for the nomenklatura).
The only difference between what Joe Biden’s myrmidons are proposing and what Lenin and Stalin imposed on their unhappy people is the disgusting (and, incidentally, racist) invocation of “people of color” to justify their confiscatory aims.
I have been thinking of investing in companies that make pitchforks and supply the world with tar and feathers. I know, I know: any proceeds I might realize will be taxed into insignificance. But the knowledge I was doing my bit to bring down this rotten regime is its own reward.
Winston Churchill was right. “Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” We are hurtling towards that philosophy with increasing velocity. Is it too late to break free? Or has the ship called Penury achieved escape velocity?
I do not know the answer to those questions. All our livelihoods rest on the answers.
Prince Harry loses bid to name Murdoch in phone-hacking trial
As much as Prince Harry claims to hate the media, he never manages to stay out of the spotlight for long. Now it transpires that the renegade royal has been reprimanded by a High Court judge for trying to bag ‘trophy targets’ — and has been told that he cannot take phone-hacking allegations against Rupert Murdoch to trial.
The pampered Prince’s team claimed at a court hearing in March that Murdoch, owner of News Group Newspapers (NGN), was aware of unlawful activity taking place at his media outlets as far back as 2004. The allegations made against Murdoch suggest the media mogul ‘turned a blind eye’ to reports while he oversaw a ‘culture of impunity’. Lawyers for the monarch of Montecito approached the High Court for permission to update their case against the Sun publishers — but today Mr Justice Fancourt ruled that the additional claims added ‘nothing material’ to the case. In a further blow for Harry, the judge also ruled that the ex-royal would be unable to introduce new claims of phone hacking.
And Fancourt didn’t stop there either. He told the Prince’s team that:
I also consider that there is a desire on the part of those running the litigation on the claimants’ side to shoot at ‘trophy’ targets, whether those are political issues or high-profile individuals… This cannot become an end in itself: it only matters to the court so far as it is material and proportionate to the resolution of the individual causes of action.
NGN denies the allegations raised by Harry’s lawyers, saying today that the court decision has ‘thoroughly vindicated’ the organisation’s position. Meanwhile, the Prince was informed by Fancourt that he could, ‘in principle’, change some of the details of his case to name ‘certain further journalists and private investigators’ before the trial is determined next January — but received a slap on the wrist for not complying with a July order that prevented him from bringing claims against the Sun and News of the World. Oo er.
The High Court judge went on to add that the Prince’s lawyers ‘cannot resist adding more and more detail to the claim, as more and more missing pieces of the jigsaw are found’ — but, he reminded the royal rebel, ‘the trial is not an inquiry’. That’s them told…
What’s really behind the Tories’ present woes?
The problem is, we really need a Tory party. Whether we have one at the moment is another question. Political debate requires a significant and trustworthy proponent of personal freedom, of the limits of government, of personal responsibility, of strict limitations of government expenditure, of independent enterprise which may succeed through a lack of intrusive state control or may fail without hope of public rescue. Not everyone will share those values. But I think everyone should accept that it’s proved catastrophic that those values have apparently disappeared from public policy.
History rhymes, but does not repeat itself. The lessons of previous periods when major economic policies of an interventionist sort were agreed with no serious dissent ought to have been learnt. In particular, the disasters of the Heath government, which went as far as reintroducing Wilson’s National Board for Prices and Incomes, should be considered.
There has been a collapse of any kind of trust in the Tories, because they seem, and indeed are, utter hypocrites
At the moment we have a situation where it seems to be almost universally accepted that millions of people perfectly capable of work should be supported in full or in part. The abandonment of social principles that trusted personal responsibility at the outset of the Covid pandemic still seems to me quite remarkable. I wrote a novel about it which began: ‘The State gave an order. We obeyed the order. Everyone obeyed the order. And the world changed.’ I still find it quite incredible that the state at the time was under the control of the Tories, who were supposed to value personal independence.
The severe lockdown had a number of consequences. The economic burden will be felt for decades. We are just finding out what lockdown turned that generation of children, school and university students into – in many cases, unsocialised, obsessed with victimhood and tiny slights, full of undirected rage. Worst of all, with lockdown came an end to the social mobility that education used to offer children who had little parental support. It probably made no difference in the end to the course of the virus – and I say that as someone who was extremely ill with it, unprotected, as it turned out, by the severity of lockdown.
Now, people may have chosen to support all those consequences. They may have been right to have done so. But there was nobody in the supposed party of freedom, as far as anyone could see, holding their nerve. The consequence is the collapse of any kind of trust in the Conservative party, because they seem, and indeed are, utter hypocrites. What was wrong with those Downing Street jamborees was not that they took place, spreading the virus among young, healthy people who were taking their chances, as they ought to have been free to do. The disgrace was that those people were demanding enforced restrictions that they evidently didn’t believe in, imposing policy from outside the mainstream of Conservative thought with results catastrophic for the nation, and even more for the Tory party itself. Some choice of ideas should have been presented to the nation – in quite cartoonishly broad form, it was, in 2017, between Boris Johnson’s mayor-in-Jaws shtick and Jeremy Corbyn’s antediluvian interventionism. What the nation got, when a predictable but unforeseen event struck, was the opposite of what it thought it had asked for.
It is fair to point out that Geoffrey Wheatcroft doesn’t agree with this point at all. He strongly criticises Johnson’s government, not for its abandonment of its presumed principles, but for not acting in a still more authoritarian way and closing down society earlier, and more strictly. Lockdown, however, is only part of the analysis. As long ago as 2005, Wheatcroft wrote an excellent and very amusing book, The Strange Death of Tory England, about the woes of the Conservatives, running up to Tony Blair’s third triumph. Now he returns to the scene of the crime. It might be thought that his obituary was premature, followed as it was by the revival of the party under David Cameron, a 2010 coalition government and from 2015 a series of Tory governments. But those governments have not had much to show in the way of successes, despite some very talented and able ministers, and increasingly have lurched from one disaster to another.
It now appears widely accepted that millions of people perfectly capable of work should be supported in full
The two root causes of the present lamentable state are what Wheatcroft identifies. First, the disastrous revision of the leadership election procedure to hand the final choice to a small and unrepresentative party membership. As was said long ago, if the members had had the choice, Edward Heath would still have been in place in 1992, having lost his sixth successive general election. There is a strong case for saying that the people who make the best choice are those who know the candidates best, the parliamentary party. Knowing that the membership will have the final say not only robs that decision of finality, but makes them second-guess what their members think, with repeatedly disastrous effect. Will they have the nerve to go for Kemi Badenoch, clearly the modern-day equivalent of their 1975 gamble on Margaret Thatcher? We will find out.
The second cause was Cameron’s ill-advised turn to the referendum as a device to govern. Wheatcroft reminds us of Clement Attlee’s brisk dismissal of a suggestion by Winston Churchill, that he could ‘never consent to the introduction into our national life of a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum, which has only too often been the instrument of Nazism and fascism’. (Hitler held four.) Cameron managed to get rid of the question of proportional representation with his first referendum, in 2011. The second, on Scottish independence, poisoned debate and pushed a grossly incompetent and posturing nationalist party into power without adequate controls. And the third was on Brexit, with consequences we are still finding out about.
As it turned out, the conduct of the European Union in the Brexit negotiations was such as to defeat any moderately competent and natural collegiate leader, such as Theresa May. Once she had gone, the only choice appeared to be to go for what might be termed the madman option. In the 1980s, the Cold War debate shifted decisively because the Soviet Union believed for the first time in decades that they had an American president who might genuinely want to fire nuclear weapons at them. In the same way, the Europeans didn’t believe for a second that May would ever commit to Brexit without a deal, but just could not be sure that the same applied to Johnson. He might be capable of anything. That, in the end, was quite a good thing for delivering a conclusion to Brexit. But was it a good motive for choosing a prime minister? The processes imposed on us during Covid answered that question decisively.
This is an amusing, though somewhat rancorous book, and unlike its predecessor gives a slight impression of heckling from the sidelines. Some people come off without their merits recognised – Michael Gove did a magnificent job at Education, for instance. A few good anecdotes are repeated by Wheatcroft from before, and, though there is a fine and very convincing parallel drawn between Johnson’s career and Disraeli’s, there may be a little too much remote history in a fairly short polemic. Wheatcroft is a splendid and convincing phrasemaker – a United States of Europe would be ‘an answer without a question’ – and enjoyably feline in his malice. Some people will think his observation on the last days of Queen Elizabeth a bit much – that ‘having to see the two of them [Johnson and Truss] in turn might be enough to polish off any frail 96-year old, and two days later the Queen died’. The rage, however, at the national low point reached by the brief and embarrassing Truss premiership can only be justified.
The Conservative defeat in the coming general election is all but certain. During the Labour party’s Corbyn period, the shadow front bench looked comically unprepared (Richard Burgon, Diane Abbott). Now, as in Blair’s shadow cabinet before 1997, a lot of the figures look at least as competent as their opposite numbers – a very bad sign for a government.
There may be some positive indications. The Tories seem to have abandoned their bizarre flirtation with ill-founded bien-pensant social ideas, for instance. If a longish stretch in opposition enables the party to find a new leader, just as it did in 1975, committed to core principles of freedom, limited expenditure and a shrinking, not an expanding, state, then we might at some point feel that we are presented with a proper choice. Better still, with a sense that we are being trusted to listen like grown-ups to ideas. That hasn’t been the case for some time.
How Margaret Thatcher could have saved London’s skyline
Looking around London on the eve of the millennium, it would have been difficult to think that the UK government had an adviser on architectural design. The 1990s had been a dismal decade. Yet such a body existed in the quaintly named Royal Fine Art Commission, refounded in 1924.
The original Commission had been created as a way of giving Prince Albert, recently married to Queen Victoria, something to do – contriving the decorative scheme for the new Palace of Westminster. Fresco, the chosen medium, was not ideal in that damp position beside the Thames since the plaster took three years to dry; and the Duke of Wellington did not help the project by declaring he could not remember having met Blücher on the field of Waterloo, as depicted by Daniel Maclise. When the Prince Consort died, the RFAC as then constituted did not survive him for long.
The name never suited its 20th-century successor. The politicians, civil servants and architects who called it into being were inspired less by Prince Albert than by the United States. Sir Lionel Earle, one of the prime movers, knew America well and admired the United States Commission of Fine Arts, convened to advise the federal government on proposals for Washington. When its chairman was asked if he found the ‘Fine Arts’ element of the name an embarrassment, given the Commission’s focus on architecture, he replied: ‘We would if we ever paid the least attention to it. But we do not.’ Back home, the idea that public taste should be directed by an official body appointed by the state appealed so much to Britain’s first Labour government that it established the RFAC as one of its first actions – although, this being Britain, it had to be Royal.
Who should be on it? In The Battle for Better Design, Robert Bargery reveals that ‘official papers record a series of unsavoury judgments, as unsuspecting artist and architects had their professional and (more often) personal defects examined’. William Lethaby’s vacillation ‘was little short of maddening’. Albert Richardson was cranky (‘we do not want another cockney or another professor’). William Rothenstein had a German name. Given his pre-eminence, Edwin Lutyens was inevitable, as well as being ‘fantastic and frivolous’ – much more fun than Herbert Baker.
Pandora’s Box opened, and out flew Nine Elms Lane and other horrors
to plague humankind
Lutyens remained on the RFAC until his death in 1944, urging that ‘the height of all buildings’ should be reduced ‘to the width of the streets on which they stand and in no case higher than 80 feet, with these heights again ruled by the aesthetic needs of historic buildings’. Alas, his words merely illustrate the impotence of the RFAC. While perhaps managing to lop a storey or two off some offenders and getting others re-sited, they could not prevent the skyline of London from being despoiled, although what seemed outrages at the time were nothing to what would come. Tinkering could not prevent the proposed National Gallery extension in the early 1980s from becoming a ‘monstrous carbuncle’, as the then Prince of Wales famously called it.
The RFAC was at its best when obsessing about the small, if important things of life: street lamps, red telephone boxes, postage stamps, whether to put the equestrian statue of Earl Haig in the middle of Whitehall, near the Cenotaph, or in the Mall, where it wouldn’t obstruct traffic. Margaret Thatcher made the RFAC a plaything for her unlikely friend, the foppish Lord St John of Fawsley. How could she have ignored the obvious candidate? Prince Charles would have fitted the Prince Consort’s shoes to perfection.
After 1997, New Labour made a bonfire of British traditions and the RFAC joined the other institutions going up in smoke. It was replaced by the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE), under a property developer who had to resign after a conflict of interest. CABE was in turn scrapped by the Tories. While these shenanigans were going on, successive mayors of London opened Pandora’s Box and out flew Nine Elm’s Lane and other horrors to plague humankind. Any Briton who visits Paris can only regard London as a national shame.
The Battle for Better Design has been reissued (without mention of the fact) to celebrate the centenary of the RFAC’s second foundation. Bargery is the executive director of the Royal Fine Art Commission Trust. Cleverly established by Lord St John, the Trust strives to improve public taste – a hopeless yet noble task. It isn’t the absence of a government commission that explains the sorry state of architecture but the lack of visually informed clients.
Was the flapper style of the 1920s so liberating?
I had held Beauty’s sceptre, and had seen men slaves beneath it. I knew the isolation, the penalty of this greatness. Yet I owned it was an empire for which it might be well worth paying.
—Olivia Shakespear, Beauty’s Hour (1896)
All the Rage is a perfect title for a book about terrible beauty. The phrase means what’s fashionable at a particular time; but rage is a violent, sudden anger, stemming from the same Latin word that gives us rabies – mad, passionate, dangerous. Beauty, and its attainment, preservation and curse, are all things Virginia Nicholson chronicles and analyses in this compelling history spanning a century and focusing on its western, female manifestation.
Nicholson, named after her great-aunt Virginia Woolf, is the granddaughter of Vanessa Bell – to my mind, two of the most beautiful and stylish women of the past century. In her introduction, she reminisces about playing at dressing up in the 1950s at Charleston in clothes from the Victorian and Bloomsbury era. This would have made anyone a dedicated follower of fashion, as well as a devotee of the beautiful.
Nicholson is a specialist in women’s history and culture, the author of, among other books, Perfect Wives in Ideal Homes: The Story of Women in the 1950s, and How Was It For You? Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s. She casts her net wider this time, from mid-Victorian days to the start of the ‘contemporary’ – from corsets and infinite buttons to pedal pushers and pop tops.
Amid massive and unprecedented advances for women ‘into the economic, educational, sexual and political strongholds reserved for men’, a woman’s body progressed too – from the mid-19th century when ‘women’s anatomical realities were refashioned from the exterior, via sharp steel and galling whalebone’ to around 1960, when women were ‘able to appear in public places wearing a bare minimum of clothing. It was a convincing transformation from captivity to liberation – or was it?’ The vexed question of liberation is Nicholson’s chief theme:
This book is an attempt to understand and to reconcile the history of the liberation of the female body in light of an incongruity: that, at the very time that women’s economic, educational, sexual and political chains were being unlocked, the shackles of perceived ‘femininity’ were tightening their grip.
Each section of All the Rage is prefaced with the portrait of a woman well known in her day as a ‘professional beauty’ or an avatar for how to look: Alexandra of Denmark, Lillie Langtry, Diana Manners, Freda Dudley Ward, Prunella Stack, Betty Grable and Brigitte Bardot – ‘white, western celebrity influencers, movie stars and icons’ from a period when ‘beauty, privilege and whiteness’ were all predominant in fashion. But women of colour were also beginning to be influential, and Nicholson stresses the input and inspiration of such trendsetters as Josephine Baker, Mamie Garvin Fields and Madam C.J. Walker.
La Crème Ramey, supposed to eliminate fat and wrinkles, had as its active ingredients thorium and radium
The book is packed with stories within stories. Beginning with a photograph of ‘the Jersey Lily’ stretched out on a recamier, figure shaped into a perfect hourglass by her constricting clothing, Nicholson gives us Langtry’s biography as she analyses the studio image. What could working-class women and girls do to emulate Langtry in striving for beauty? How did the rational dress movement push against those corsets and long, heavy dresses with hundreds of buttons?
Belle-Époque women were also interested in exercise and dieting – or ‘banting’ as it was called, after the obese funeral director William Banting, who ‘lost 46lb by giving up sugar, carbohydrates and dairy products’. His Letter on Corpulence (1863), one of the first dieting guides, was a bestseller, and remains in print. It was deemed unfeminine to straddle a bicycle, but women swiftly embraced that means of getting around, and gave up their skirts to ride it, too. Call yourself a cyclist and be damned for your ‘loud-hued leggings’; call yourself a pédaleuse, and acceptance could be easier. Details like this made me smile, and also sigh in sympathy: just use a French word to make something more attractive and ‘feminine’ to a resistant English audience.
Nicholson creates a fascinating kaleidoscope of information that all feels connected, as if the reader were a woman in that time, trying to figure out how to process the possibilities. At the beginning of the period discussed, there seemed a certain strange liberation in strictures:
Self-starvation was rare, and had no medical name. Body hair was left in situ; pedicures were irrelevant, and respectable women didn’t use make-up. It was impossible to make unfavourable body comparisons on the beach when your swimwear – including black stockings – hid everything in sight.
Metal hoopskirts and crinolines worked not just as fashion but a comfort and deterrent: the widespread skirts literally kept men at arm’s length and gave legs room to relax. ‘They could also be artfully arranged to conceal pregnancy.’
With the advent of the ‘new woman’ and a new century, some changes were for the better, others questionable. The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 had been a tremendous boon. Until then, a woman’s property, unless cleverly entailed, belonged to her husband, as did their children. For a woman to escape a bad marriage with her children was almost impossible. In 1860, there were 103 divorces in England and Wales. By 1928, there were 4,018. Emancipation, of a sort.
Then there were the changes made possible by rampant modernism and its technological and scientific advances: La Crème Ramey, which was supposed to eliminate fat and wrinkles, had as its active ingredients thorium and radium. Horribly unsafe cosmetic treatments included injecting paraffin into the face (which damaged the spectacular looks of Gladys Spencer-Churchill, Duchess of Marlborough). A relief to many women was the shearing of hair into a jawline-skimming, or even earlobe-level, bob. Victorian tresses took hours to arrange properly, and literally weighed women down as they walked. When Virginia Woolf had just completed the first draft of Orlando early in 1927, she and her friend, the poet and playwright Beatrice ‘Bobo’ Mayor, drank too much Spanish wine and Mayor cut off Virginia’s long hair. ‘It’s as short as a partridge’s rump,’ Virginia reported delightedly to Vita Sackville-West – surely the sweetest description ever of a ruffled Jazz Age bob.
Radclyffe Hall; Hattie McDaniel as Mammy in Gone With the Wind; Phyllis Anna Chadwick, the diathermic knife; eugenics; Bardot in her bikini; Pamela Harriman in Dior – they’re all here, from the well-known to the near-forgotten or in many cases newly brought to light and analysed. Nicholson’s research, and her talent for shaping her vast material into a compelling, thoughtful tale, are most impressive. She stops before the explosion of the 1960s. The decades since, however, have not answered the question with which Nicholson leaves us: ‘Will we ever declare a truce on the beauty front line, that danger zone which for so long has kept women from parity and peace of mind?’ Indeed, modern times only seem to vex the question further, and All the Rage gives you some very good ideas as to why this is.
A walled garden in Suffolk yields up its secrets
In the hot summer of 2020, during the Covid pandemic, Olivia Laing and her husband Ian moved from Cambridge to a beautiful Georgian house in a Suffolk village and began work on restoring the neglected, extensive walled garden behind it. She was vaguely aware that the garden had been owned and loved by the well-known garden designer and plantsman Mark Rumary, who had died in 2010. He had been the landscape director for the East Anglian nursery of Notcutts, and I remember him as a genial man overseeing extensive, award-winning tree and shrub exhibits at the Chelsea Flower Show in the 1980s.
I once owned a copy of the Notcutts Book of Plants, written by him, which was an indispensable reference book for garden designers before the advent of the internet. Many of the plants that Laing discovered, as she painstakingly cleared the rampant perennial weeds, such as hardy hibiscus, corkscrew hazel, Akebia quinata, Yucca filamentosa, Lavalle’s hawthorn, Rosa ‘Blanc Double de Coubert’, were well described in the Notcutts book. The Garden Against Time is, at least partly, the story of how she discovered Rumary through his garden.
It is also part Covid reminiscence, part political polemic, part family memoir, part potting-shed diary, all skilfully interleaved. Lockdowns and the process of renovating the garden, give her leisure and the desire to interrogate the nature of gardens and, in particular, the meanings of Eden and Paradise. There are interesting, if sometimes overlong, essays on, inter alia, John Milton, John Clare, Derek Jarman, the Diggers, William Morris, Eliot Hodgkin and Andrew Marvell. Many follow well-trodden paths, but Laing has done useful archival research into the slave-owning Middletons who built Shrubland Hall, and her account of Iris Origo’s war in Italy, uplifting and sad in equal measure, may be unfamiliar to British readers.
Laing’s prose exhibits that hypersensitivity to atmosphere and beauty that we all felt (though could not have so well expressed) when our lives became well-nigh intolerably circumscribed – observing every open flower, every bird flying across the garden. There are a scatter of accomplished linocuts by John Craig, although I could have done with a plan of the garden, as well as the position of house and outbuildings. It’s asking a lot of readers that they understand the layout of a complex garden, made up of ‘rooms’, entirely by the written word.
The glimpses of personal memoir are intriguing: a rackety childhood, followed by youthful environmental activism, work as a herbalist, and a more tranquil middle age as a writer, married to a retired Cambridge don. But then the pandemic was a time when we all looked to our histories. That said, Laing’s careful descriptions of hard graft in the garden over two years are accompanied, and sometimes overlaid, by her evident angst that we are hurtling to hell in a handcart.
Only late in the day does Laing seem to appreciate the deep privilege of owning a garden
There were times when reading the oh-so-earnest political sentiments that I felt as though I were being beaten over the head by a sheaf of contemporary left-liberal preoccupations: Trump, tick; climate catastrophe, tick; historic homophobia, tick; ecological degradation, tick; transatlantic slavery, tick; exploitative colonialism, tick; the horrors of Brexit, tick; the threat of fascism, tick; the evils of capitalism, tick; persistent power inequalities, tick. (One of the few current catchwords missing is ‘rewilding’, perhaps because Laing would have had to admit that she was doing the exact reverse.) Without the salt of humour, or even much light and shade, to add savour and variety to the fine writing, it felt like a pummelling. The irony is that Laing is not a lone, righteously furious voice, for her views line up neatly with those of many of the most powerful and influential people and institutions in the land.
As for historical figures, poor Capability Brown, who created much of lasting beauty from which we can all still gain spiritual refreshment, comes in for some stern anachronistic judgment. All in all, I found the combination of finger-wagging at the past, which can’t answer back, and pessimism about the present, had a progressively lowering effect on my spirits – not surprisingly, since, in John Buchan’s words, ‘pessimism is the only ism that kills the soul’. It certainly withered mine, for I couldn’t help thinking how fortunate Laing was. Only late in the day does she seem to appreciate the deep privilege of owning a garden, and the deeper consolation that comes from caring for it. Almost at the end, she describes opening her garden to visitors, to raise money for the National Gardens Scheme, which gave her ‘probably the best day of my life’. A common paradise found, at last? Let’s hope so.
Abba’s genius was never to write a happy love song
Memories. Good days. Bad days. In 1992, U2 mounted their Zoo TV tour. U2 being U2, the gigs were over-earnest affairs, their showbiz razzmatazz never emulsifying with their agitprop posturing. But disbelief was colloidally suspended the night the show hit Stockholm – and U2 were joined on stage by Benny Andersson and Björn Ulväeus for a cover of ‘Dancing Queen’. In truth, that evening’s take on one of Abba’s meisterwerke was a lumpen affair. Bono had to drop his voice an octave for what ought to be the song’s soaring refrain. And while Björn looked happy enough strumming a few chords on an acoustic guitar, Benny, at a keyboard the size of a slipper, was patently flummoxed at how little of the song’s harmonic majesty could be retained when a beat combo is laying waste to your melodic line. Bono is a hard man to agree with even when he is right, but when he bowed to Benny and Björn and told them ‘we are not worthy’, he was spot on.
The clothes, it turned out, were ridiculous by design – the better to be tax deductible
Then again, says Giles Smith, in 1992 Abba themselves weren’t all that worthy. Ten years on from their break-up, their stock was low. Polygram, which had recently acquired their back catalogue, hadn’t a clue what to do with it. A little market research revealed that while people wouldn’t mind hearing Abba’s hits again, they wouldn’t want photos of the group on the album’s sleeve.
Glance through the picture section of Smith’s My My! Abba Through the Ages and you’ll be reminded why. Though what you might call the A side of Abba were as pulchritudinous as pop ever got, the group was still a mess: Benny’s beard; Björn’s barnet – not to mention his bell-bottom dungarees; and what Smith artfully calls the ‘peek-a-boo onesie’ once sported by Agnetha (blonde, soprano). Those clothes, it turns out, were ridiculous by design – the better to be tax deductible. But as Björn acknowledged: ‘We looked like nuts.’ Add in the fact that they sounded like fish (Abba was also the name of a Swedish fish cannery; the company did not object, provided the band did nothing to bring creamed crab and curried herring into disrepute), and you have to wonder how they lasted 50 minutes, let alone 50 years.
But here we are, half a century on from their triumph at the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest in Brighton, and Abba still prevail. Indeed, Smith suggests, with the stage musical Mamma Mia! packing them in in the West End these past 25 years, and Abba Voyage (a show starring digital avatars of the four), they are more present in our lives now than they were in their 1970s heyday.
This isn’t just because Benny and Björn wrote some of the catchiest tunes ever. It’s because, Smith argues, Abba were adults in the playroom of pop. Though the foursome were of an age with most of the other popsters of the 1970s – Bowie, Bolan, Elton, etc – they always seemed older. Björn and Agnetha married in 1971, and had their first child in February 1973 – a year and more before anyone outside Sweden had ever heard of Abba. And while Benny and Anni-Frid (brunette, mezzo) didn’t have children together, they did have two apiece from earlier marriages. Hence, Smith argues, the potency of Abba’s bust-up songs. They’re not just about teens going their separate ways. They ‘involve property, furniture and children’. A couple of years after its release, the Bay City Rollers’ ‘Bye Bye Baby’ can’t but have seemed callow to even its most devoted fan. Songs like ‘Knowing Me, Knowing You’ and ‘The Name of the Game’ have only accreted meaning as they – we – have aged.
Which goes to the heart of Abba’s genius. They never wrote a happy love song. Their bounciest melodies are ballasted with melancholy. Even ‘Money, Money, Money’, a tango about the joys of wealth, is in A minor. Smith is never not sharp, but he is at his most acute when he describes Agnetha (who as a child wanted to be a shrink; who never understood, let alone enjoyed, the adulation of her fans; whose mother committed suicide) ‘narrowing the gap between singing and crying until there’s only a breath between them’.
But then there is little that escapes Smith’s ears. His eyes are a little less reliable. Certainly he seems unaware that what he calls the repeated motif in Abba videos of ‘close-ups of the band as couples, one in profile, the other face-on, the focus shifting between them’ is an hommage to Ingmar Bergman’s homage to catatonia, Persona. Otherwise, he has the band bang-a-boomerang to rights. Who but he has spotted that whereas Frida dances to the rhythm of a tune, Agnetha moves to its melody? That ‘S.O.S.’s perpetually startling repetition of a musical phrase first over a minor chord then over a major chord (play it yourself and ‘you stare at your fingers in disbelief that the melody hasn’t moved’) is a steal from Richard Rodgers’s ‘My Favourite Things’? That Benny (whose solo album Piano transforms ‘Thank You for the Music’ into a Chopin ballade, and ‘The Day Before You Came’ into a mash-up of Beethoven’s ‘Pathetique, and ‘Appassionata’ sonatas) can’t read a note of music? Praise be that Smith can. And that he can write English that’s a joy to read. At last, a book that’s worthy of Abba.
A haunting mystery: Enlightenment, by Sarah Perry, reviewed
As ghosts go, Maria Vaduva, who haunts Enlightenment, is not a patch on the wild, tormented figure who stalks the pages of Sarah Perry’s previous novel, Melmoth. Where Melmoth, in rage and despair, haunts everyone complicit in history’s horrors, Maria is crossly plaintive. The disappearance of this unrecognised 19th-century Romanian astronomer from Lowlands House, a manor in the fictional small Essex town of Aldleigh (where marriage has brought her), becomes the obsession of Thomas Hart.
He is an unlikely columnist of the Essex Chronicle, and Enlightenment’s central character. It could be said that he is at odds with life and that achieving harmony (on Earth and in heaven) is the novel’s underlying theme. Hart has a double life, living straight in his home town and gay in London. Also, like his young friend and kindred spirit Grace Macauley, he is a semi-lapsed member of the Bethesda Baptist Chapel. Semi-lapsed, because, as Grace remarks, to abandon chapel would be like ‘abandoning our bones’. Both characters retain a ‘longing for the sacred’.
Enlightenment opens in 1997, the year of the Hale-Bopp comet. As in her other novels, Perry deals with time by using letters, reports, diaries, found scribbles and, in this case, the seemingly interminable columns of the Chronicle, which take us through to 2017. In a way, the novel follows on from Perry’s much-garlanded The Essex Serpent, in being concerned with the conflict between faith and science. Fans of that book will be pleased to find the naturalist Cora Seaborne and the handsome minister William Ransome making posthumous appearances here.
Maria almost becomes ghost-in-residence in Hart’s home. His quest to find out who she was and why she disappeared leads him to a study of the moon and the orbits of the stars – likened to the orbits of an individual life. This allows him to arrive at the belief that worshipping the stars and worshiping God are much the same.
There are a lot of ideas in Enlightenment. In part it is both a meditation on loneliness and a serious study of unrequited love. Hart falls for the head of the local museum, the happily married James Bower; Grace falls for the sixth-former Nathan, a boy who, free from the Baptist upbringing of Thomas and Grace, has ‘the ease of a creature never told it was a sinner from the womb’.
In her ghostly way, Maria, too, is a survivor of unrequited love. The story, such as it is, is driven by the quest to discover who Maria was and to validate her discovery of a comet. Though more exotic than the real-life astronomer Caroline Herschel (sister of William), who discovered seven new comets, the fictional Maria is somehow less interesting.
There is very little action in this long, somewhat overwritten novel. The religion- science conflict has perhaps lost its currency, and has now become more psychologically sophisticated than Perry portrays it. How-ever, recent news about the James Webb Space Telescope, which apparently can look back into the beginnings of time, gives Enlightenment’s exploration of astronomy a needed dash of contemporaneity.
In a final column from the Essex Chronicle, Hart writes: ‘I’ve heard it said that at the first sip from the glass of the natural sciences you become an atheist – then at the bottom of the glass, God will be waiting for you.’ One can hope. Meanwhile today’s astronomers have discovered what they call ‘ghostly particles’.
Western economies are failing – but capitalism isn’t the problem
Real wages have barely increased for more than a decade. Banks have had to be bailed out, and many still exist on a form of state life support. Growth has stalled, taxes are at 70-year highs, yet governments are still bankrupt. Unless you happen to be part of a tiny plutocracy made up mostly of tech entrepreneurs and financiers, there has rarely been a point, at least since the nadir of the mid-1970s, when the economic system seemed beset by quite so many challenges as it is today. The left has smartly stepped into the intellectual space that has been created with a series of well-timed polemics, which, while they vary in precise analysis and on solutions, have at least one thing in common. They argue that the system is fundamentally broken, and it will take radical action to fix it. And, in fairness, they have a point, even if it is not quite the one they think they have identified.
Joseph Stiglitz’s The Road to Freedom is the most heavyweight of the three books under review – as you might expect from a winner of the Nobel Prize for economics, and a former chief economist at the World Bank. He makes the case for ‘progressive capitalism’ – what the rest of us might, more simply, refer to as the Labour party manifesto. The book is designed primarily for people who worry that a speech by the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves might be a little too exciting for their tastes. It is a blueprint for technocratic social democracy – think Gordon Brown on roller skates – with lots of pledges of big-spending government programmes to humanise raw capitalism, and global systems of taxation and welfare to tame its animal spirits.
George Monbiot and Peter Hutchinson’s The Invisible Doctrine is the slightest of the trio. With very short chapters, and lots of secret societies, hidden codes and deep conspiracies stretching far back in time, it is a kind of eco Dan Brown. You half expect the Knights Templar to turn up brandishing a plan to privatise the NHS. Yet the main mystery about the book is how it took two people to write it.
Perhaps surprisingly, the most substantial is Grace Blakeley’s Vulture Capitalism. Although she has few academic credentials beyond a degree in PPE, Blakeley is grounded in Marxist theory, which she passionately updates for the 21st century. To her credit, she engages with capitalism as it is, warts and all. From bank bailouts, to money-grubbing private equity firms, to the ruthless data trading of the web giants and the rigged markets of the City and Wall Street, she gets into the grimy plumbing. And like so much plumbing, while we can defend it as necessary, even its champions have to admit that it often doesn’t smell very sweet.
Another thing the books have in common, apart from the fact that they are all from ‘the left’, is that they are obsessed with the Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. Indeed, even the title of Stiglitz’s book is a riff on Hayek’s classic The Road to Serfdom. He writes:
Hayek… claimed that a too-big state was paving the way to our loss of freedom. It is evident today that free and unfettered markets advocated by Hayek and [Milton] Friedman… have set us on the road to fascism.
According to Monbiot:
In 1947, Hayek formed the first organisation to promote neoliberalism, the Mont Pelerin Society. There he and others began to create what has been described as ‘Neoliberal International’, a transatlantic network of journalists, academics and business people seeking to develop a new way of seeing and running the world.
How did that work out? Blakeley argues:
The neoliberals won. As the 20th century wore on, they supported the election of politicians who crushed the powerful labour movement, privatised public companies and marketised the welfare state. And they did this in the name of ‘freedom’.
There are two problems with this thesis, one minor, the other major. The minor one is that if the ‘neoliberals’ really are a cabal secretly running the world they are not doing a very good job of keeping the whole sinister project under wraps. After all, three books in the space of a month have called their number, and there are many more on the shelves. They may not actually be up to the whole ‘secretly running the world’ thing after all.
The major problem is this. All three authors, along with much of the left, vastly overestimate the influence of Hayek, and any of the other free market post-war philosophers. In the UK, you can probably count the number of ‘Hayekians’ on your fingers. Even Margaret Thatcher didn’t have much time for him; in her government he was barely read and even less understood.
In reality, we could hardly be further from a purely Hayekian world than we are today. Instead, we inhabit a global economy where the state is more dominant than it has ever been. In France, the state accounts for 58 per cent of GDP, for 53 per cent in Belgium, and 45 per cent here in the UK. In communist Cuba, it is 48 per cent, while in Venezuela under Hugo Chavez it was 36 per cent. Meanwhile, taxes are close to an all -time peacetime high as a percentage of income, and more redistributive than ever, with, in the UK, the top 10 per cent of earners paying 60 per cent of all income taxes, double the level they paid in the 1970s. Under President Biden, the US has embarked on the most ambitious industrial policy in its history, and the EU is matching it. The only reason the UK doesn’t join in is because our political class is too hopeless to organise one.
Is that really a world in which ‘the blazing insurrectionary confidence of neoliberalism… has become the norm’, as Monbiot puts it? Is this really the ‘heyday of neoliberalism’, as Stiglitz argues? It doesn’t feel like it. Instead, the state is larger, taxes more, and increasingly intrudes on everyday life. All three books are right to identify that something is badly wrong with the economic system – that it doesn’t deliver the well-paid, secure jobs, comfortable, affordable homes and generous welfare systems that people want. It is just a shame that the diagnosis, and the solutions, are so misguided. In reality, the problem is growth, not capitalism. And if you were to address that, it might – quelle horreur! – involve admitting that the state was too large. It might even make you a neoliberal.
From Cleopatra to Elizabeth Taylor, women have found jewels irresistible
When workmen demolished an ancient building in Cheapside in 1912 they saw something glinting out of a broken wooden box. They had stumbled on what became known as the Cheapside Hoard – a collection of jewels dating from around 1600, its star, the Cheapside Emerald, a wonderful stone holding a miniature watch. It came from Colombia, still the source of the world’s finest emeralds, probably the world’s most ancient gems. The first recorded instance of them is on an Egyptian papyrus around 2400 BC. Their beauty and rarity made them the favourite of the élite, with Cleopatra probably their most famous fan. The Rockefeller Emerald fetched $5.5 million in 2017.
Helen Molesworth, now the senior jewellery curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, after years spent as a jewellery expert for Sotheby’s and Christie’s auction houses, and a lecturer on gemology at Geneva University, has produced a magnificent compendium of everything one could ever want to know about jewels: their symbolism, physical construction, worth and history. Gems such as the Koh-i-Noor, Hope and Wittelsbach-Graff Diamonds come with a comet-tail of legend and provenance.
Molesworth has visited almost every mine she writes about, sometimes with her students. There were hair-raising journeys on mountain roads to the emeralds of Bogota, and kidnapping risks on the way to the fabled ruby mines of Myanmar. Burmese rubies have a claim to be the world’s best: their depth of colour and almost fluorescent inner glow is what sets them apart, especially those from the fabled Mogok mine. ‘The ruby is a male gem,’ Molesworth writes, worn for centuries by rulers and historically associated with power, blood and fire.
Gemstones, formed millions of years ago deep inside the Earth, have been discovered through earthquakes, landslides and even floods. Sapphires, for instance, found among the pebbles of Sri Lankan riverbeds, were traded as long ago as the time of Alexander the Great. Today alluvial mud is still strained through bamboo sieves to find them. The most highly valued sapphires ever found come from Kashmir, first discovered fortuitously when a landslide tore off part of a mountainside at 15,000 feet, revealing a deposit that could only be mined during the fleeting summer months. Associated with virtue and status, the sapphire is a stone beloved by royalty. One of the most famous examples is the engagement ring worn by the present Princess of Wales, handed down by Princess Diana.
Dark red garnets were a staple not only of 18th- and 19th-century jewellery but of a much earlier time. The treasure found at Sutton Hoo revealed the gold-hilted sword and belt inlaid with garnets of a seventh-century Anglo-Saxon warrior king. Most fascinating of all to Molesworth is the purse decorated with a hunting scene in garnets – ‘the open-mawed hounds, rearing horses and moustachioed men had me rooted to the spot’.
‘A woman needs ropes and ropes of pearls,’ decreed Coco Chanel, who lived up to that precept wholeheartedly. The royal family do, too: it is seldom one of them is seen without some form of pearl adornment. In the Armada portrait, Elizabeth I is smothered in them. ‘Pearls are a universal fashion statement,’ writes Molesworth; they can be worn anywhere, ‘suitable for a picnic in the country or going to a ball.’ They are probably also one of the oldest gems ever to be worn, dating back to the sixth millennium BC.
In 1969 one of the most precious pearls in the world, La Peregrina (fished from the Gulf of Panama and once owned by the Spanish royal family and the Bonapartes) came up for sale, and was bought by Richard Burton as a $37,000 Valentine’s Day gift for Elizabeth Taylor. This 2.5cm teardrop pearl was so heavy that one day it fell out of its setting. Taylor, aghast, went down on hands and knees to look for it, terrified that Burton ‘in one of his Welsh moods’, would ask her what she was doing. Suddenly she saw one of their two Pekineses chewing on something. ‘I just casually opened the puppy’s mouth and there was the most perfect pearl in the world. And – thank you, God – not scratched.’
As for diamonds, Molesworth quotes Pliny the Elder, who described them as ‘the most valued of human possessions’. They still are – the rare pink and blue diamonds being the most expensive of all gemstones. The world record, still standing, is for the 59.6 ct Pink Star Diamond, sold by Sotheby’s in 2017 at a Hong Kong auction for $71 million. Today, a helicopter flying over a South African mine means an important stone has been found and is on its way out; and in the Alexander Bay area it has been illegal since the late 1990s to keep homing pigeons. Miners would smuggle them in in their lunch boxes, attach tiny sacks of diamonds to their legs and release them. (If one of them, weighed down by too heavy a bag, landed in the street, it was literally torn apart by scrabbling crowds.) I shall never look at a diamond in the same way again.
A middle-aged man in crisis: How to Make a Bomb, by Rupert Thomson, reviewed
Philip Notman is going through what looks like a midlife crisis. Travelling home from an academic conference, he feels sick and disoriented to the point where he is barely able to function. Back in London, he can’t quite explain to his wife Anya, or indeed to himself, what’s ailing him. Is it just me, he wonders, or is everything unbearably toxic? Instead of working on his next book during a sabbatical, he sets off on a journey in search of a remedy.
Rupert Thomson’s new novel has no full stops. In their place are paragraph breaks, with sentences abandoned on the page, increasing the sense of dislocation:
Everything sick, he thought
Everything in pain
Starting from the title, the atmosphere grows increasingly ominous. Thomson skilfully balances things on the brink of explosion, creating suspense worthy of a thriller in a work grounded in literary tradition.
Set over several months in 2019, the book leads us through the ‘poisoned labyrinth’ of contemporary western ills that Philip is desperate to escape. He flies to Spain to see Inés, a young woman who may or may not have triggered his predicament. Their platonic conversations do little to solve it – Inés can’t give him more than a sympathetic ear – and when the thrill of adventure peters out, Philip moves on to Greece. On his way there, he loses his phone, cutting himself off from what was once his life.
Holed up in a Cretan village, he tries quiet contemplation, poetry, physical work and religion. Eventually he realises that what he is experiencing is ‘civilisation sickness’, a condition inflicted by modern times. Then a local man relates a violent episode from his past, the tale nudging Philip to the conclusion that there is only one solution to the world’s problems. Returning to London, he starts working on it.
The other characters – Anya, Inés, strangers Philip meets – are sketchily drawn, the better to focus our attention on the hero. Seeing everything through his eyes, we are impressed by his sharp vision. Whether he’s remembering his romance with Anya, whose heart he won with his humour, or watching random street scenes, his descriptions are lucid and mostly relatable. Things get less convincing when he tries to express his worldview in a manifesto. ‘We have been seduced or coerced into an existence that is completely factitious’, he writes, proposing a ‘steady-state or degrowth version of society’ as the antidote. Styling himself as a latter-day Don Quixote, he presses on, despite suspecting he might be ‘simply dredging up old arguments’.
Every now and then, Philip’s thoughts return to Anya and their son, a troubled teenager – people he deeply loves. It does occur to him that they need him more than the rest of humankind ever would:
He had sacrificed everything – and for what?
For an idea
By now, though, he is ‘trapped in a double bind of his own making’, and it’s too late to turn back. Or is it?
This eloquent novel manages to give a new resonance to the big questions of our age, inviting us to look for answers within. Along with the protagonist, we remain uncertain about what is to be done. One thing transpires clearly: to change the
Learning the art lingo: the people, periods and -isms
When she first starts working as a security guard at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, Bianca Bosker is so bored that she prays someone will touch the art. ‘Do it, I urged silently from my spot by the wall. Do it so I can tell you not to.’ She’s to stand for hours on end, staring into space, reporting anything that could pose a threat. On the first day she radios her supervisors to alert them to a stray leaf: ‘Not exactly a suspicious package, but I needed something to interrupt the tedium.’
Wheedling your way into a self-contained world about which you know next to nothing is no mean feat
The job is one of several Bosker picks up in her quest to understand why art matters. An aspiring artist turned journalist, she’d hoped to become ‘an art appreciator, if not an art maker’ until she moved to New York and swiftly became overwhelmed by everything she didn’t know – ‘the people, the periods, the -isms’. She felt so uninformed and out of place that she considered giving up going to galleries altogether; only she couldn’t shake the sense that she was missing out, because of the obsessive devotion the art she was seeing inspired in others. ‘It was thrilling. Or maybe it was bullshit? Either way, my life looked drained of colour by comparison.’ So, she set out to discover the truth by handing herself over to artists, gallerists, curators, collectors – the experts and the fanatics.
Wheedling your way into a self-contained world about which you know next to nothing is no mean feat, but Bosker has past experience. Just as Get the Picture takes readers inside ‘the throbbing jumble of genius, money, and love’ that is the contemporary art world, her Cork Dork (2017) popped the cork on the sommelier industry and wine snobs. Which means she has a format – total immersion – and plenty of practice at bluffing her way into exclusive afterparties and jobs she isn’t qualified for.
To start, a couple of gallery gigs: the first at a small space in Brooklyn, the second on the Lower East Side. She learns the lingo – pieces are placed (not sold) to collectors (not buyers), who enquire about a work they hope to acquire – and the basics when it comes to gallery models. She gets to grips with the geography of Manhattan, and the fact that, in general, ‘the further an artist’s work travels up the island… the more ensconced its place in art history’. There are brief forays into key periods and figures: ‘Duchamp is so influential that there may be a law requiring me to mention him.’ She attends art fairs – ‘either a necessary evil or just evil’ – and to her surprise comes away exhilarated.
After brushing up on the rituals of presenting and placing art, Bosker craves a glimpse of the creative process, which she gets working as a studio assistant to the up-and-coming artist Julie Curtiss. As well as scheduling DHL pickups and responding to emails, she watches Curtiss at work and learns to look at art like a maker. Having previously been hindered by the idea that you can’t appreciate art without knowing the context, she finds being around someone whose response to a work is ‘intuitive, effortless, as innate as taking a gulp of water’ to be both a relief and a revelation.
It’s easy to see how Bosker managed to get her foot in the door (often with tape recorder in hand). She comes across as relentlessly curious, plucky and an extremely hard worker. Her tone is pleasantly chatty and humorous, though I could have done without the chummy asides: ‘I know I’m not supposed to admit this…’ and ‘between you and me…’ and ‘I hear you….’ I found myself wishing she’d devoted more pages to the art and less to the glitz and glamour and gossip and jealousies surrounding it. Then again, getting to the stage where you’re comfortable sitting with art free from distractions can take time, as her experience shows.
What she realises once she does get there is, as she points out, painfully obvious – that ‘the more time we spend looking at an artwork, the better we understand it’; that there’s no fixed way of viewing, and we can trust our own observations. Back at the Guggenheim, one of her favourite things is hearing what other people see in a work: ‘Their responses moved me way more than anything I read in the wall labels.’ A Brancusi sculpture begins to feel to her ‘more like a companion than an object’. She finds works she can fall in and out of love with. ‘Art,’ she writes, ‘knocks us off our well-worn pathways. Other things can do that, too,’ (a bottle of wine, for example), ‘but art… is arguably designed specifically for that purpose’.
Can the Tories ensure the infected blood scandal never happens again?
Are the compensation payments announced today for victims of the infected blood scandal a just response to what happened? Paymaster General John Glen announced that on top of the £100,000 interim payments already made to victims, an additional £210,000 will be paid within 90 days. Glen explained the urgency: ‘I recognise that each week members of the infected blood community are dying from their infections. There may be people – indeed, there will be people – listening today who are thinking to themselves that they may not live to receive compensation, so I want to address those concerns, too.’
Families and carers for those infected will be able to claim in their own right, and an arms-length body administering the compensation will be set up immediately. People infected with HIV could be eligible for between £2.2 million and £2.6 million, and those infected with both HIV and hepatitis between £2.3 million and £2.7 million. Glen did not provide details of the total bill, which has repeatedly been estimated at £10 billion, but he said ‘there is no restriction on the budget… where we need to pay, we will pay’.
Tackling institutional failings on this scale will be a Herculean effort
Interestingly, the focus of the questions from MPs after the statement was more on how to avoid another scandal and how the institutions that should have prevented it failed. That included parliament, with Chris Bryant pointing out that there had been no select committee investigations and few questions from MPs, save a few noble exceptions such as Diana Johnson. He warned that ‘this will all happen again, unless we change the way our do our parliamentary politics, because parliament failed, as did the whole of British politics’.
Others, including David Davis, demanded that the recommendations in yesterday’s report for a statutory duty of candour on public servants be implemented immediately. Davis said ministers could use legislation going through parliament now to introduce this duty.
Labour’s frontbench made similar noises: Nick Thomas-Symonds said: ‘Sir Brian Langstaff’s findings on institutional defensiveness, and on putting the reputation of people and protection institutions above public service, follow on from other scandals such as Hillsborough and Horizon. That is why we must deliver a duty of candour and the political leadership that we need to replace that culture of defensiveness with openness and transparency.’
These points weren’t really within Glen’s remit, though he promised that the government would ‘respond powerfully to that, and we will, in due course’. As I said yesterday, though, tackling institutional failings on this scale will be a Herculean effort: one for a government far stronger and with much greater longevity than this one.
How Israel should fight back against the ICC’s lawfare
The application for arrest warrants against Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu and defence minister Yoav Gallant is an act of lawfare. In seeking the detention of Israel’s political and military leadership during its war against Hamas, Karim Ahmad Khan, the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), is inviting that body to intervene in the conflict. Granting these warrants would require ICC signatory countries such as the UK to arrest the men if they set foot in their territory and hand them over. The likely effect of their arrest would be to cripple Israel’s war effort and throw the country into political chaos. Khan is proposing, in effect, that the ICC prevent the democratically elected government of a sovereign state from defending itself against the terrorist regime that invaded its territory, murdered 1,100 people, raped women and took 250 hostages.
Israel must take the lead in standing up for itself
Khan has also issued arrest warrant applications against three senior Hamas leaders. This is objectionable in its implicit drawing of equivalence between murderous terrorists and the democrats fighting them, but there is something more objectionable than that. The applications relating to Hamas leaders are little more than fig leaves. Terrorist organisations can function pretty well despite arrest warrants. Yahya Sinwar has been living under threat of Israeli assassination since 2017, when he assumed the leadership of Hamas in Gaza, and still he was able to mastermind the 7 October pogrom. Lawfare is a mere inconvenience to terrorists but to democrats it is a grave threat to their ability to lead their country. It is hard to believe this difference does not register with Khan.
His announcement came on the same day that other international institutions, from the EU to Nato, rended their garments for Ebrahim Raisi, the Butcher of Tehran, claimed by the first fatal helicopter crash in which the only victim worth mourning was the helicopter.
Khan’s decision was met with coruscating and utterly disingenuous rhetoric from the Biden administration. The president said the applications were ‘outrageous’, that ‘there is no equivalence – none – between Israel and Hamas’, and that ‘we will always stand with Israel against threats to its security’. What a crock. There would be no applications without the tacit approval of the United States. The administration, and specifically its furiously anti-Israel State Department, views the ICC as a leash that can be placed on Israel’s war efforts.
Congressional Republicans previously warned Khan not to move ahead with applications or face consequences. Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas said: ‘Target Israel, and we will target you.’ It’s time for Khan and his institution to face those consequences. These might include barring ICC officials from entering the United States, freezing any US-based personal assets, and lobbying American allies to indicate their opposition to this prosecution. While the executive branch will want to pare back any sanctions to the bare minimum, it will have to reckon with the strong, bipartisan support for Israel that remains in the Senate and House of Representatives.
However, it is Israel that is being targeted by the ICC, and Israel that must take the lead in standing up for itself.
Avraham Russell Shalev, a lawyer with the Kohelet Policy Forum, recommends four responses. First, relations with the ICC should be taken out of the hands of the government’s legal advisers and placed under the ambit of the Prime Minister’s office. The ICC is really a political rather than a legal threat to Israel and should be combated as such.
Shalev’s second recommendation is that Israel’s Knesset pass a law in the vein of the American Service-Member’s Protection Act, which barred US government agencies from cooperating with the ICC without a political direction and authorised the use of any means necessary to liberate American soldiers or officials seized under an ICC warrant. Third, Shalev wants bilateral immunity agreements styled after those in place between the United States and its allies. This would allow Israeli officials wanted by the ICC to travel without fear of being detained and handed over to the ICC.
Shalev’s fourth and final recommendation is that Israel embark on a public relations campaign to expose the ICC’s anti-Israel bias. While the ICC prosecutor can afford to lob a few token prosecutions in the direction of Hamas, it will be more difficult to do the same with the Palestinian Authority, a serial human rights abuser and terrorism facilitator but one that enjoys the diplomatic support and financial backing of the international community. Shalev suggests that Israel offer to release its extensive dossiers on the PA’s involvement in war crimes against Israelis and Palestinians. If the ICC fails to take forward prosecutions, it will have exposed itself as a political rather than a legal entity and one institutionally and ideologically hostile to Israel.
I would add another, more fundamental remedy. Israel and its supporters should begin in earnest a campaign arguing for mass withdrawal from the Rome Statute, which would effectively abolish the ICC. The very notion would be scandalous to law professors, the human rights industry and progressives but the ICC has existed for just 22 years. In that time, it has typically been accused of anti-African bias for its focus on alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity on that continent, but this should be understood as a contested body gradually building its standing before it begins throwing its weight around more widely. Shalev documents its partiality in favour of the Palestinians and against Israel but if the ICC were to successfully prosecute Israel, it would not stop there.
The ICC is really a political rather than a legal threat to Israel and should be combated as such
The ICC’s member states signed up in good faith and on the assumption that it would limit itself to preventing or prosecuting atrocities of the kind seen in Rwanda and Bosnia. But like every other international body, it is susceptible to capture by political interests and progressive ideology. Stopping Israel from defeating Hamas would embolden the ICC to intervene against other states engaged in conflict or embroiled in territorial disputes. We might also see a more activist ICC expanding its interpretation of crimes against humanity to justicialise domestic policy questions within nations and outwith the context of any conflict. Given what we know about how quickly and completely progressives and other activists can place an institution at the service of their ideology, it isn’t difficult to imagine the ICC sitting in judgement on matters that Rome Statute signatories never intended to become part of the court’s caseload.
Legal academics work themselves into ecstasy at the thought of international law breaking new ground in the imposition of global norms. Phrases like ‘rules-based international order’ issue forth like testimonies at a tent ministry. But while the intentions behind such an order are often noble, the fair and even application of rules on almost 200 countries is nigh on impossible.
As long as state sovereignty exists and serves the national interest, international law will continue to operate more in ambition than in application. As long as some states are vastly more powerful than others and able to insulate themselves from a system of justice that is only truly binding on less powerful states, that system of justice is going to be regarded as highly compromised and contingent. As long as bodies charged with upholding international law continue to be as influenced by political considerations as by legal facts and processes, there will be campaigns nationally and internationally to reform those institutions or divest from them altogether.
The ICC has contributed little to the upholding of the Fourth Geneva Convention in its two decades of existence and has evolved into a thoroughly political organisation. To the extent international law can be enforced except in disputes between states or maritime regulation, it is clear that the ICC is not the body to do this. It should be wound up and, if possible, a more suitable institution found to fulfil its purpose.
Gareth Southgate has finally shown some bottle
The provisional England squad for the Euros unveiled by manager Gareth Southgate contains one notable omission: Jordan Henderson. That’s a big surprise, not because the midfielder deserves to be on the plane to Germany this summer, but for what it says about the thinking of the normally ultra-loyal Southgate, who is often accused of picking his personal favourites for the squad, regardless of club form.
His decision to omit Henderson and some other under-performing England stalwarts sends a strong message to all the players.
The England manager had this to say about why he left Henderson out: ‘The determining factor was the injury he picked up in the last camp. He missed five weeks and wasn’t able to get back up to the level of intensity. It was a difficult decision. He will be a miss. He’s an exceptional individual and fantastic human being. He’s been in that leadership role for a long time.’ Fine words aimed at softening the blow to the midfielder’s pride but – make no mistake – Henderson’s England career is over.
Few neutral observers will shed tears on his behalf. Henderson has paid the ultimate price for his decision last summer to leave Liverpool and play in the Saudi Pro League. At the time, he said it was important for him to play more regularly: ‘England is a big thing for me. You have got the Euros coming up.’ It is fair to say that things haven’t quite worked out as he hoped. The Saudi move damaged his reputation among the LGBT+ community, who had come to believe the midfielder was their most vocal supporter in the game. Many felt betrayed. Henderson insisted the move was not motivated by money and sought to appease his critics by suggesting that he would be a force for good in the country: ‘Having someone with those views and values in Saudi Arabia is only a positive thing.’ The mental gymnastics on display were embarrassing: Henderson is no villain, just a fool.
Things unravelled pretty quickly. Henderson decided to terminate his contract with Al Ettifaq less than six months into the deal, and opted to move to the Dutch giants Ajax in January. It hasn’t quite worked out for him there either: his form has been indifferent at best. The payback has been brutal, more so because it comes at the hands of Southgate. In the past, the England manager has chosen to stick with Henderson through thick and thin, despite widespread ridicule and disbelief from fans and pundits alike. To be fair, Southgate is not the first England manager who has found it hard to let go of a player he deemed a part of the core group, a trustworthy and capable lieutenant, charged with imposing the manager’s instructions on the field of play. No longer. Even Southgate can see that Henderson, who would have turned 34 this summer, is no longer up to it. The England manager is right to pull the plug, and Henderson can have few complaints.
There are quite a few other surprises in today’s announcement. A number of notable contenders didn’t make the cut, including Marcus Rashford. Few could have predicted last year that Rashford would not feature at the Euros. He scored 30 goals in all competitions last season but his form has fallen off the cliff this campaign. He will be gutted, but he simply doesn’t merit a place. Raheem Sterling, Reece James and Ben Chilwell are out as well. Anthony Gordon, who has been a revelation at Newcastle – makes the cut. So too does Jack Grealish, who has been in and out of the title-winning Manchester City side. A quintet of five uncapped players, including Jarrad Branthwaite of Everton and Curtis Jones of Liverpool, feature in the squad.
England, packed with young talent, are one of the favourites to win the tournament. Yet Southgate has often come across as stubborn and lacking in tactical imagination when it comes to the big moments in the final stages of international tournaments. His journey with England must surely come to an end this summer – unless he wins the Euros. His decision to omit Henderson and some other under-performing England stalwarts sends a strong message to all the players. Southgate has been ruthless for once. More please.
Is Venezuela preparing for war?
Earlier this month, two American supersonic fighter jets flew over Georgetown, the capital city of Guyana. The US show of force is not only for the attention of Venezuela’s socialist regime who has been escalating toward a military conflict with its smaller neighbor since at least September 2023 when Nicolás Maduro returned from Beijing. The message of sending two F/A-18 Super Hornets flying from a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier sailing in the Caribbean Sea is also for the Islamic Republic of Iran.
At first glance, the Venezuela-Guyana conflict is about a century-old border dispute of a dense territory called the Esequibo that makes up two-thirds of Guyana’s land mass but only 15 percent of its population. But the conflict is much more than that and has less to do with Guyana’s land border and more to do with the maritime domain.
An Iranian warship, a merchant ship converted to a military vessel for the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Navy called the Shahid Mahdavi crossed the equator into the Southern Hemisphere for the first time on May 4. Its mission is secret and destination unknown. Three years ago, two other warships from Iran’s conventional navy followed a similar route when they sailed around the Cape of Good Hope and crossed into the South Atlantic with a reported destination of Venezuela. Back then, the warships changed course and proceeded around West Africa en route to St. Petersburg.
It’s unclear whether the Shahid Mahdavi will cross the Atlantic this time but what is clear is that the IRGC’s armament has already arrived in bulk quantities to Venezuela.
While the IRGCN warship sails somewhere in the Southern Hemisphere, a Venezuelan naval vessel, the Guaiquerí-class patrol vessel PC-21 was spotted on May 8 sailing toward Guyana’s territorial waters equipped with stealth technology and anti-ship missiles courtesy of China and Iran. This happened at least once before in recent weeks but this time the Venezuelan naval vessel was escorted by Iranian-made Peykaap-III small boats, the most advanced fast attack craft in the IRGCN arsenal that arrived in Venezuela last year.
For more than a decade, Iran has been equipping Venezuela with modern weaponry to include long-range drones, smart bombs, cruise missiles, rockets, and, of course, the combat boats. These weapons systems are not meant to be used in a conventional military fashion but instead used in asymmetric amphibious assaults, like the tactics used by the Houthi rebels off the coast of Yemen and in the Red Sea.
The Iran-sponsored, Houthi long-range piracy attacks against commercial vessels that froze commercial shipping through the Red Sea is a template that needs to be carefully studied by Latin American military analysts. The net effect of choking off the Egyptian economy and further isolating Israel as it fights a three-pronge war against the Houthis, Hezbollah and Hamas is a modus operandi that Iran is taking across the Atlantic into the Caribbean. This time aimed at the United States with the mounting Venezuela-Guyana conflict as the catalyst.
Most analysis of the Venezuela-Guyana conflict revolves around the Esequibo region. The dense jungle between Guyana and Venezuela was delineated by the UK in the late nineteenth century when Guyana was a colony and negotiated with Venezuela via the United States. Venezuela cried foul and argued that backdoor shenanigans were involved in the 1899 Paris Arbitral Award that established the Esequibo as part of Guyana’s sovereign territory. Decades later, Venezuela took its case to the UN who mediated the 1966 Geneva Agreement known as the “agreement to come to an agreement” tabling the border dispute for resolution in the future.
The future arrived in 2020 when the International Court of Justice accepted the Esequibo case under its jurisdiction and began the proceedings to arbitrate the border dispute. Venezuela’s Maduro regime does not recognize the ICJ’s authority and, instead, held a national referendum about the Esequibo on December 3, 2023, to prompt the passage of a new law last March in the regime-controlled National Assembly declaring the “Guayana-Esequiba” as Venezuela’s twenty-fourth state. This is the casus belli for Venezuela’s war.
The history is important, but the current framing of this dispute as one of recovering lost territory and claiming sovereign lands is what the Maduro regime’s propaganda machine wants the world to believe. Venezuela neither has the means nor motivation to recover a territory that effectively has been governed by Guyana for more than a half century. This conflict is not about the Esequibo. It’s about the Atlantic.
Even if Maduro were to “invade” the Esequibo with ground forces, the Venezuelan military would be withered away by Mother Nature while the Guyanese continues to grow its GDP at more than 30 percent per year by bringing the largest recent offshore oil discovery in the world to market. The 11 billion barrels of light crude discovered in 2015 is the source of Guyana’s recent economic boom.
But the boom could be a bust if Venezuela and Iran are able to disrupt commercial shipping in the maritime corridor that connects the Atlantic to the Caribbean Sea.
If Israel and Ukraine have taught us anything it’s that the second and third order economic effects of those wars are what is changing the geopolitical landscape of the world, especially in the maritime domain. In the case of the Ukraine war, it’s the inflation of food prices due to supply chain disruption of wheat and fertilizers produced in Russia and Ukraine that has impacted African and Latin American agro-industries and economies. In the Gaza war, it’s the shutting down of shipping lanes through the Suez Canal that has slowed humanitarian aid, further pressuring Israel and diverting maritime traffic around the Cape of Good Hope, where the IRGCN warship is currently headed.
The South Atlantic is a maritime domain that is arguably among the strongest in illicit trade and weakest in maritime security. Known for transatlantic criminal and terrorist networks, notably Hezbollah who operates from Brazil to Guinea Bissau. It’s a body of water, prime for revisionist, authoritarian powers in Iran, Russia, and China to test out their ambition for a new multi-polar maritime security belt.
Iran, Russia and China have already carried out a half-dozen joint naval exercises in the Gulf of Oman and Indian Ocean since 2018 and aspire to bring these drills to the Atlantic Ocean. Venezuela may provide them the pretext to do so.
The third smallest country in South America with the fastest growing economy in the world is about to enter the fight of its life. But Guyana is not Ukraine and does not have the military means to deter Venezuelan aggression. This war, however, is not really about Guyana.
Iran, Russia and China have ensured their proxy, Venezuela, is ready to start the first inter-state war in Latin America since 1941, when Ecuador and Peru fought a border war that lasted less than a month. But unlike that war, this is less about the local conflict and more about the international context of turning Great Power Competition into Great Power Conflict. After Ukraine, amid Gaza, it’s now Venezuela’s turn to take proxy warfare to the shores of a US-allied nation.