Robin Ashenden

Twenty years or so ago, in a Madrid cinema, I witnessed something I’ve never seen before or since: an entire audience of regular filmgoers bursting into applause at the end of a film.  The film was The Lives of Others, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck’s picture of life in East Germany under the Stasi, and it drew plaudits on all sides. ‘Simply put, it’s stunning,’ wrote Harry Guerin of RTE. ‘It wouldn't be out of place on any list of the top films of the past five decades.’  Anthony Lane, in a superlative New Yorker review, wrote that if there were any justice, it would receive the Academy Award for best foreign picture (it did).

‘All life is a struggle,’ wrote the Victorian ‘self-help’ philosopher Samuel Smiles. ‘Under competition, the lazy man is put under the necessity of exerting himself; and if he will not exert himself, he must fall behind. If he do not work, neither shall he eat…Do your own share of work you must.’ Attitudes may have changed since the mid-nineteenth century, but Kemi Badenoch, it seems, is in full agreement Attitudes may have changed since the mid-nineteenth century, but Kemi Badenoch, it seems, is in full agreement. One clear message comes repeatedly out of the Conservative leader's public announcements: that Britain must get off benefits and back to work.

How will our time be remembered? The age of anger? The age of grievance? The age of victimhood, or of revenge? Perhaps all these things, but it will also be remembered as something else: the Golden Age of the long-form interview. Universities may be dumbing down, people reading less, we’ve stopped writing letters or having dinner parties In the 1990s, when I was young, many of us yearned for such discussions, but usually got, on our four TV-channels, mere 15-minute slivers of the great and good.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Estonia – a potential flashpoint, we’re told, for a future Russian invasion – has been much in the news. But what do most people actually know about the country and its culture? A good place to start is the poetry of Jaan Kaplinski, who died five years ago today. Kaplinski, born in 1941, lived through many of Estonia’s twentieth-century traumas. Great tracts of his native city Tartu were wiped out by Soviet bombing, while the country was subsumed, brutally, into the USSR. His father, a literature lecturer, died in a Stalinist gulag, his mother was blacklisted as a teacher, while he himself was dogged for decades by the KGB.

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?