Sunday round-up 13 October 2024

What connects Paul Simon, Edwina Currie and Sacha Baron Cohen? Not an antisemitic conspiracy but a shared birthday! We also remember St Edward the Confessor

Unwrapping the latest offers from Waterstones and tucking John Lewis gift vouchers in their purses or wallets today are Greek singer, presenter and former MEP Nana Mouskouri (90), singer-songwriter and folk and world music legend Paul Simon (83), Formula 1 team founder Peter Sauber (81), former Conservative health minister, illicit John Major squeeze and no friend to the poultry industry Edwina Currie (78), singer-songwriter, poet and advocate of silence Joe Dolce (77), effortlessly stylish design critic and historian Stephen Bayley (73), creator of The X-Files Chris Carter (68), singer, actress and famous Mormon Marie Osmond (65), comedian and actor Matt Walsh (60), American figure skater and notorious assault victim Nancy Kerrigan (55), comedian, actor and I-don’t-know-there’s-just-something-that-makes-me-uneasy Sacha Baron Cohen (53), Democratic Representative of New York’s 14th District Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (35) and heiress and “socialite” Tiffany Trump (31).

Those for whom the birthday cake has now gone stale include Henry VI’s heir Edward of Westminster, Prince of Wales (1453), reigning Duchess of Brittany and Queen Consort of France Claude de Valois-Orléans (1499), courtier, writer and subject of caricature by Pope and Fielding Lord Hervey (1696). Scottish portraitist Allan Ramsay (1713), actress and intimate of King Edward VII Lillie Langtry (1853), actor and radio presenter Wilfred Pickles (1904), jazz pianist Art Tatum (1909), actor and singer Yves Montand (1921), pioneering comedian and morphine over-enthusiast Lenny Bruce (1925), Britain’s first woman prime minister Margaret Thatcher (1925), former Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales Lord Bingham of Cornhill (1933), Guardian journalist and author Hugo Young (1938), legendary Qawwali singer Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan (1948) and actress and wife of John Travolta (after a brief engagement to Charlie Sheen) Kelly Preston (1962).

This date in 1307 is a major one for mediaeval historians and conspiracy theorists. At dawn on Friday 13 October, on the orders of King Philip IV of France, Jacques de Molay, Grand Master of the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon (otherwise known as the Knights Templar), was arrested along with scores of fellow knights. The charges were of lurid impiety, indecency and heterodoxy, including forcing new recruits to spit on the cross, deny Christ and engage in indecent kissing, worshipping idols and encouraging homosexuality. The arrest warrant began ominously Dieu n’est pas content, nous avons des ennemis de la foi dans le Royaume (“God is not pleased. We have enemies of the faith in the kingdom”). Other, less scandalous, charges of fraud and corruption were added, and many of the knights confessed under torture. On 22 November, Pope Clement V issued the bull Pastoralis praeeminentiae, which ordered the arrest of all Knights Templar across Europe and the seizure of their property. There was, inevitably, another story behind this: two years previously, the pope had raised the idea of merging the Templars and the Knights Hospitaller, and there had been accusations, generally agreed at the time to be unfounded, of various financial misdeeds by the Templars. Philip IV, however, was heavily indebted to the order, having borrowed enormous sums of money to finance a war against England, and saw an opportunity to eradicate his liability. The pope was at that point resident in Avignon and therefore under the French king’s influence, and was pressured into co-operating with the coup against the order. It was formally dissolved at the Council of Vienne in 1312.

Today in 1792, at noon, in the newly established City of Washington, Territory of Columbia, the cornerstone was laid of the United States Executive Mansion, which would become the official residence of the president. (It would become known colloquially as the White House in the 1810s and then officially renamed by President Theodore Roosevelt in 1901.) The architect was an Irishman called James Hoban, whose Neoclassical design had been selected a few months earlier; he had based it in part on Leinster House in Dublin, then the seat of the Duke of Leinster, sold to the Royal Dublin Society in 1815 and now the location of the Houses of the Oireachtas, Ireland’s bicameral parliament. The Executive Mansion was first occupied on 1 November 1800 by the second President of the United States, John Adams.

It is the feast of St Edward the Confessor, the only English king to be canonised. Well: it is an optional memorial in the Catholic dioceses of England, and a Lesser Festival in the Anglican Communion, 13 October marking the date of his translation to a new tomb in Westminster Abbey in 1163 and again to a grander resting place in the abbey in 1269. When the monasteries began to be dissolved in the 1530s, the Benedictine monks at Westminster hid Edward’s remains for safekeeping but the shrine was largely destroyed when the abbey was closed in 1540, the gold feretory which had housed his coffin being confiscated by royal agents and melted down. During the monastic community’s brief revival under Mary I from 1556 to 1559, one of the few significant architectural projects was the construction of a new shrine which remains in place. It was more modest, made of wood on the stone base of the previous tomb, and dedicated on 16 April 1557. The Queen gifted jewels to replace those which had been removed, though these were later lost.

Also in on the veneration racket today are St Theophilus of Antioch (d. c. AD 183), an early scholar and theologian of the church; St Gerald of Aurillac (AD 855 -AD 909), who devoted himself to God after childhood illness, gave away his possessions and took a vow of chastity—he is the patron of a curious combination of bachelors, counts, disabled people and the Upper Auvergne; and St Daniel and companions, seven Friars Minor martyred in Ceuta on the North African coast in 1227 by the local Marinid sultan who objected to their preaching Christianity (though in fact they probably never existed).

In more worldly terms, it is the Day of Azerbaijani Railway; Rwagasore Day in Burundi which commemorates the assassination in 1961 of the second prime minister of Burundi, Prince Louis Rwagasore; the first day of Doi taikomatsuri in Shikokuchūō in Japan, a three-day harvest festival; Paramedics’ Day in Poland; and globally, as declared by the United Nations General Assembly, it is International Day for Disaster Risk Reduction, a cause I think we can all support.

Factoids

1. Given the government’s agreement with Mauritius to cede sovereignty of the British Indian Ocean Territory (which includes the Chagos Islands), there will be 13 remaining British Overseas Territories (formerly British Dependent Territories), of which two (plus the BIOT) have no permanent resident population. The inhabited ones are (say it with me): the Sovereign Base Areas of Akrotiri and Dhekelia (Cyprus), Anguilla, Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar, Montserrat, the Pitcairn Islands, St Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha, and the Turks and Caicos Islands. The territories with no permanent residents are the British Antarctic Territory, and South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands. All told, they number fewer than 275,000 people, with the most populous being the Cayman Islands (78,554 in 2022).

2. The last dependent territory to be surrendered was Hong Kong, on 30 June 1997. It is easy to forget now, but the removal of the territory from British control was politically and economically significant: the population of Hong Kong at the handover was 6.5 million, and its economy was roughly a tenth of the size of the whole United Kingdom’s. Our possession came in three parts: the UK had acquired the island and harbour of Hong Kong under the Treaty of Nanking in 1842, Kowloon Peninsula thanks to the First Convention of Peking of 1860, and the northern part of Kowloon, which became the New Territories, under the Second Convention of Peking in 1898. The first two were outright cessions, but the third, crucially, was a 99-year lease.

3. Cornish, the Brittonic Celtic language which still survives precariously in the far west of England, uses base 20 for its counting system. Numbers from 21 to 39 are “x on 20”, from 41 to 59 “x on two 20” and so on. The Cornish for 20 is ugens, so 21 is onan warn ugens, or “one on 20”. The number 400 can be rendered as oll-ugens, or “all 20”. Welsh uses a similar vigesimal system of counting.

4. You may never have given much thought to the fork (I had not until recently). As an eating implement it is of some antiquity: examples made of bone were being used in China four thousand years ago, and the Romans used forks for cooking and serving. However their use as a personal utensil did not reach western Europe until the 10th century, when the Byzantine princess Theophanu, who married the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II (AD 973-AD 983), astonished the imperial court: she “used a golden double prong to bring food to her mouth” rather than simply picking food up with her fingers. Even then, England held out against such continental prissiness: forks were used for carving meat, though even that was not universal, and it was not until the Restoration in 1660 that even the aristocracy were using knives and forks as we do today. They were still at that point two-pronged, with a third tine arriving in the 18th century. Nigel Farage would be proud.

5. The story of Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda is relatively well known: sent to Lubang Island in the Philippines in December 1944 to organise guerrilla resistance against the American military, he fled to the mountains after the Allied invasion of Lubang in February 1945. There he remained, refusing to believe that Japan had surrendered, until he finally capitulated on 20 February 1974. However, the belief that news of Japan’s defeat was an Allied hoax also flared, briefly and bizarrely, in the Brazilian state of São Paulo in 1946 and 1947. A terrorist organisation called Shindo Renmei, composed of Japanese immigrants, created a communications network which insisted than Japan was undefeated, and compiled a list of makegumis, those who accepted defeat. These targets were sent letters urging them to commit seppuku, ritual suicide, to redeem their honour—none did—and in 1946 and early 1947 the group killed 23 and wounded 147 Japanese-Brazilians, with firearms or katanas. Most of the assailants, having fulfilled what they saw as their duty, then surrendered to the police.

6. As we are commemorating St Edward the Confessor, he died on 5 January 1066 in his early 60s. Critically for English history, he died without a direct heir, having no children with his wife, Queen Edith of Wessex. This created a succession crisis, with four leading contenders for the throne of England: Edgar, the grandson of King Edmund Ironside and known as “Ætheling” (æþeling), an Anglo-Saxon terms for those eligible for kingship; Edward’s brother-in-law Harold Godwinson, Earl of Wessex, the most powerful of the English nobles; King Harald III of Norway, known as Harald Hardrada (harðráði), meaning “resolute” or “severe”; and the Duke of Normandy, William II. On Edward’s death, the Witan, the king’s council, chose Harold Godwinson as his successor and he was crowned as Harold II. In September, Harald Hardrada invaded Northumbria in alliance with King Harold’s brother Tostig, but was defeated and killed at the Battle of Stamford Bridge on 25 September. Three days later, William of Normandy landed at Pevensey in Sussex with a substantial invasion force, and met Harold at the Battle of Hastings on 14 October, where Harold was killed. Edgar was briefly declared king by a group of English nobles and clerics but then quickly abandoned, and he did homage to William the Conqueror at his coronation as King of England on 25 December. How different it might have been if Edward the Confessor had had a son!

7. Harold II was the first English king to be killed in battle, although Edward the Elder, son of Alfred the Great, who died in AD 924, expired from injuries sustained while putting down a rebellion near Chester. He would not be the last: Richard I, the Lionheart, died of a gangrenous crossbow wound at the siege of Châlus-Chabrol in 1199 and Richard III was killed at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485. By contrast, 11 kings of Scots, beginning with Constantine I in AD 877 and ending with James IV at Flodden in 1513, died while undertaking military action.

8. The last British king to lead his troops in battle in person, albeit rather nominally, was George II, who commanded the 35,000-strong army of British, Hanoverian and Austrian troops at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743. Operational command was actually exercised by Field Marshal The Earl of Stair, a veteran Scottish soldier and diplomat, and the allies defeated a smaller French force under Marshal of France The Duke of Noailles.

9. Earlier this year I went to see an excellent production of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night at the Wyndham Theatre, starring Brian Cox (Dundee not D:Ream) and Patricia Clarkson. One of the great interpretations of the play was the Royal National Theatre’s 1971 staging with Laurence Olivier as James Tyrone and Constance Cummings as his wife Mary. Cummings, born in Seattle, moved to the United Kingdom in the early 1930s after marrying playwright and screenwriter Benn Levy: he had written the dialogue for Blackmail (1929), the first British sound feature film, directed by Alfred Hitchcock (who also co-wrote the screenplay). Levy had a parallel career, however, as Labour MP for Eton and Slough from 1945 to 1950 and an active member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. During his brief parliamentary career, he lobbied unsuccessfully to abolish the authority of the Lord Chamberlain to censor theatre productions (which lasted until the passage of the Theatres Act 1968).

10. Alex Salmond, first minister of Scotland from 2007 to 2014, died suddenly on Saturday. In the 90 years since the Scottish National Party was founded, there have been 16 leaders, two of whom have served twice, John Swinney (2000-04 and 2024-), and Salmond, who led the party for 20 years all told, from 1990 to 2000 and 2004 to 2014, nearly a quarter of its existence. The SNP was created on 7 April 1934 from the merger of two existing groups, the centre-left National Party of Scotland and the short-lived and strange Scottish Party, which had been founded by Unionists who favoured Scotland becoming a separate dominion within the British Empire. The chairman of the latter in its brief existence was the 6th Duke of Montrose. That melding of unlikely allies is still, though decreasingly, reflecting in a duality within the SNP, which used to court centre-left votes in urban areas and right-wing support in the countryside, where its members were often labelled “Tartan Tories”.

“Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we would have people standing in the corners of our rooms.” (Alan Coren)

1. “Bombing Brighton: The Plot to Kill Thatcher”: a fascinating BBC documentary on the Provisional IRA’s bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton 40 years ago yesterday, on 12 October 1984. The deadly attack on the Conservative Party’s annual conference—five people were killed, including the government’s former deputy chief whip, Sir Anthony Berry—was, in cold, rational terms, a considerable coup for the Provos, though it could have been even more so: Margaret Thatcher had been in the bathroom of her hotel room, which was badly damaged, two minutes before the bomb exploded. It was the most significant attack on the highest tier of British government since the Gunpowder Plot of 1603 and shocked public opinion; I confess that I find Thatcher’s defiant speech to the party conference later that morning incredibly impressive. Robin Butler, then her principal private secretary, makes the interesting observation that the bombing cemented a streak of uncompromising implacability in Thatcher’s character which came back to haunt her later career.

2. “Threads”: in 1984, Mick Jackson directed and produced this dramatic portrayal of the effect and aftermath of a nuclear war on Sheffield. Written by Barry Hines, author of A Kestrel for a Knave, it was made for only £400,000 and is horrifyingly believable in its unfolding apocalypse. It was broadcast on BBC2 on 23 September 1984, repeated on BBC1 1 August 1985 and then not shown again until October 2003. By reducing the theoretical notion of a massive nuclear exchange to a human and familiar level—Sheffield!—it was a chilling warning of the reality we all faced in the 1980s. Watch with caution, but watch.

3. “The War Game”: a worthwhile companion piece to Threads is 1966’s The War Game, a pseudo-documentary written, directed and produced for the BBC by Peter Watkins. It also depicted the first moments and unfolding consequences of a nuclear attack, but was so realistic and so savage that the BBC deemed it “too horrifying for the medium of broadcasting” and allowed only a three-week limited screening at the National Film Theatre in April and May 1966. It would not be shown on television until 1985, the day before Threads was repeated, despite having won an Academy Award for best documentary in 1967. If you exercise caution watching Threads, The War Game is another level. Yes, you will think: yes, this what it would have been like. Every detail is chilling and dreadful but it should be seen.

4. “Top Gear: The First Episode”: on Saturday, to mark Angela Rippon’s 80th birthday, BBC4 screened a night of programmes including this fascinating period piece, the first ever episode of Top Gear. It was broadcast on 22 April 1977, the “first of a monthly series for road-users”, hosted by Rippon and Tom Coyne, a presenter from the North East who had made his name on Nationwide. I just about remember Top Gear in the years BC (Before Clarkson), when it was a genuinely informative, worthy if slightly dull magazine show actually about cars, presented by solid, reassuring figures like William Woollard, Chris Goffey, Sue Baker and, towardly the more light-entertainment end of the spectrum, Noel Edmonds and former rally co-driver Tony Mason. It became something very different, rather than worse, but this is a snapshot of a genuinely vanished world.

5. “Leading: Alan Johnson”: I make no apology for stealing so freely from this strand of the podcast The Rest Is Politics, because Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell get excellent guests, ask interesting and informed questions, and, with the encounters lasting around an hour, give them room to expand and be discursive. Johnson is a fascinating character, amiable, friendly, down-to-earth, sharp and manifestly able, regarded by many as Labour’s most sorely missed ‘lost leader’ of recent years. His back story is gripping and hugely illustrative of so many things including changes in British society, and he tells his story with humour, insight and candour. Enormously impressive.

“We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” (Anaïs Nin)

1. “The US city on the banks of the Thames”: an intriguing article by Sir Charles Saumarez Smith in The Critic tracing the origins of the modern financial colossus which is Canary Wharf. It was supposedly the brainchild of Michael von Clemm, chairman of Credit Suisse First Boston, who visited the Isle of Dogs with Reg Ward, chief executive of the London Docklands Development Corporation, in search of a site for a food processing plant for Roux Restaurants Group (of which he was also chairman). Around the disused West India Docks, von Clemm saw an area like the recently renovated harbour of Boston; at first he considered if it might be a suitable location for his bank’s back office, but then had the idea of creating a second financial district away from the City of London. Margaret Thatcher’s imagination was captured by the notion and the result is with us today.

2. “Going gray on a global scale”: a hard-hitting essay from Thomas P.M. Barnett’s Substack. I frequently bang on (and will continue to do so) about discovering Tom’s work when, while browsing YouTube, I came across his electrifying 2008 TED talk Rethinking America’s military strategy, and he continues to impress and delight with punchy, provocative but well-argued geopolitical insights. Here he addresses the pressing and unavoidable issue of demography: the world is ageing, people and living longer and fertility is dropping, and this is hitting some countries more seriously than others (China especially). The only region to buck the trend is sub-Saharan Africa. It will be one of the key influences on foreign and domestic policy for the rest of this century, probably: certainly until the global population peaks, which may be around 2075. Fascinating stuff and impossible to ignore for ever.

3. “The threats to Britain”: this week the director general of the Security Service (MI5), Ken McCallum, made a rare public appearance to deliver a speech on the threats currently facing the United Kingdom. McCallum became head of MI5 in 2020 after a career which included counter-terrorism in Northern Ireland and protecting the 2012 London Olympic Games, and, like his counterparts at the Secret Intelligence Service (MI6), has gradually raised the profile of his position in the evolving media world. But these kinds of public pronouncements remain rare and are therefore always worth paying attention to. Speaking at the Counter Terrorism Operations Centre in London, McCallum addressed terrorism by Islamist and right-wing extremists, including a disturbing revival of al-Qa’eda and Islamic State, autocratic state actors including Russia and Iran, the complex case of China and the ever-increasing role of technology in international security. Here’s a headline to take away: since 2017, the Security Service and the police have stopped 43 late-stage attack plots, some of them in the final days before their intended execution. Our safety is a thin veneer.

4. “The Most Dramatic Shift in U.S. Public Opinion”: Rogé Karma, writing in The Atlantic, examines a staggering swing in public opinion in the United States in an extraordinarily short space of time. In 2020, Joe Biden pledged to “restore our moral standing in the world and our historic role as a safe haven for refugees and asylum seekers” on his way to winning the presidency over Donald Trump. Barely a quarter of voters at that point thought immigration should be reduced. Now it is more than half, and Vice-President Kamala Harris speaks the language of tough-but-fair controls rather than compassion and idealism. As Karma says, the speed and scale of this shift is almost unprecedented, and in part seems to be a reaction to huge increases in migration across the border from Mexico. Whatever one’s own stance, politicians have to adapt to the electoral landscape, and on this issue it is almost unrecognisable from the last presidential election.

5. “Cabinet and its Committees”: one for Whitehall connoisseurs, Henry Newman’s latest Substack piece analyses the just-published details of cabinet committees under the new government and explains what they mean for power dynamics within the administration and what the effect on governance will be. The two striking revelations for me are, firstly, the huge power of Pat McFadden, Cabinet Office minister and regularly now dubbed “the real deputy prime minister”, and, secondly, the relative lack of radicalism, with no transformative power of “mission boards”, despite all that was said before the election. This hidden wiring of Whitehall (to borrow Peter Hennessy’s invaluable phrase) really does matter, and this is worth reading and keeping for future reference.

Great is the art of the beginning…

… as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow concluded, but greater is the art of the ending. Ta-da! Tschuss.