Robin Ashenden

Svetlana Alliluyeva, Joseph Stalin’s daughter, would have been 100 years old today, and she is one of history’s curios worth remembering. Born when Stalin was already installed as Lenin’s successor, and dying in 2011, well into the rule of Vladimir Putin – whom she referred to as an ‘awful former KGB-SPY’ – Alliluyeva, who defected to the West in 1967, embodied all the violent ups and downs of her age. As her biographer Rosemary Sullivan put it, ‘The epoch drove right through her because she was Stalin’s daughter; all the pluses and minuses of this system went straight through her.’ ‘Something in me was destroyed’, she wrote.

The current Labour government, those ‘adults…back in the room,’ are now the UK’s unofficial Party of Sleaze. In the wake of lurid revelations about the Mandelson-Epstein love-in – not least that Mandy allegedly passed secret, prejudicial information to the late disgraced financier and may have been guilty of misconduct in office – Labour is under constant attack, even from within. As the Prime Minister attempts to blame the security services for Mandelson’s appointment, it’s worth remembering the way he himself spoke about such matters Dame Emily Thornberry mutters about ‘the weaknesses in our vetting process and in our due diligence process.

If Kemi Badenoch needs a little relaxation from the ‘psychodrama’ of Robert Jenrick’s defection to Reform, she could do a lot worse than watch Shekhar Kapur’s 1998 Elizabeth. The historical drama, about the plots and betrayals surrounding the early days of Elizabeth I’s reign, is uncannily reminiscent of recent events in her own party. With her bitterest opponent now banished from the court – pushed before he could jump – those looming May elections hold fewer fears for the Tory leader The film (spoilers aplenty) begins as Mary I dies childless, leaving her callow and inexperienced half-sister a tattered kingdom. ‘Your majesty has inherited a most parlous and degenerate state,’ one advisor tells her.

One of the origin stories about Kemi Badenoch’s career as politician is that, while waiting to be interviewed as candidate for Saffron Walden, she sat alone, listening through headphones to Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ – that pounding, sinew-stiffening theme to Rocky III. Given the ups and downs of her year as leader – not unlike a Rocky film in itself – it now seems a prescient choice of song. Kemi, in the past month, has finally come out punching. It was Badenoch’s tour de force response to Rachel Reeves’s Budget of Broken Promises, that seemed to change her fortunes Perhaps the wait was unavoidable – few newly-elected party leaders have had to face so many difficulties in their first year.

The late Claude Lanzmann, director of the monumental Shoah – the nine-and-a-half hour documentary about the Holocaust, released in 1985 and widely considered the greatest cinematic work on the subject – would have turned 100 this week, a destiny he missed by only eight years, dying in 2018. What would the filmmaker – who devoted almost a decade to his masterpiece, nearly obliterating himself in the process – make of Europe in 2025, a place where idealistic crowds of the young march for Israel’s annihilation, where the words ‘Dirty Jew’ are spray-painted on Parisian walls, and where, in the first six months of 2025, there were a registered 646 anti-Semitic acts in his native France alone?

For anyone born as I was, in the seventies, Edward Heath – who died 20 years ago this week – was a frequent presence in the news, and not always for the best of reasons. He was the silver-haired, curmudgeonly ex-prime minister nursing an implacable rage against his successor Margaret Thatcher, the cabinet colleague who’d ousted, then eclipsed him. Against her monetarist policies he railed, perhaps justly, though in a way that seemed at times bitingly personal. Heath deserves more credit than he’s customarily given On global issues, with which he much concerned himself, Heath often appeared to be defending the indefensible.

Does anyone still talk about Harold Wilson, the Labour prime minister who died 30 years ago today? Though the Labour party often seems keen to forget a leader who won – almost uniquely – four out of five elections, he was, perhaps more than anyone, the prime minister who ushered in the modern age.  When he stood in the general election of 1964, he was widely billed as a moderniser. Up against Tory Alec Douglas-Home – the grouse-shooting Old Etonian Earl, who described the old age pension as ‘donations’ to the elderly and had used matchsticks to understand economics – Wilson seemed like the dawning of a new age.

Current MPs in Britain seem, at times, a drab and depressing bunch. ‘The quality of parliamentarian,’ Ann Widdecombe said on a recent podcast, ‘is the lowest I can ever remember.’ It was not just the reluctance most sensible people feel about exposing themselves to such overwhelming and intrusive media focus, she explained, that was putting better candidates off. It was also down to the identity-driven shortlists all three main parties have embraced in the past few decades.