Sunday round-up 14 April 2024
The Feast of St Lidwina and the anniversary of the shooting of President Abraham Lincoln come as the Middle East threatens to catch fire again
I wondered if this round-up would be overshadowed by a full-scale conflict in the Middle East, but that seems, at least for the moment, to be one step away. But we live from day to day, so let’s get on with what passes for normality in the meantime, shall we?
Today is the anniversary of the presentation to the National Assembly of Hungary of the declaration of independence in 1849. It was issued by one of the country’s national heroes, Lajos Kossuth, who was then proclaimed governor-president of the Kingdom of Hungary, but the bid for freedom was not to last, and he stepped down in August as the Habsburg monarchy reasserted control.
It is also the anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s ill-fated visit to Ford’s Theatre in Washington DC, to see a performance of Tom Taylor’s farce Our American Cousin. He and Mrs Lincoln were supposed to attend with General Ulysses S. Grant, commanding general of the United States Army, who had been present at a cabinet meeting that morning, but Grant and his wife Julia decided to go home to Burlington, just outside Philadelphia. At 10.10 pm, John Wilkes Booth, an actor and Confederate sympathiser, slipped into the presidential box armed with a .41 calibre Deringer pistol, and waited for the gale of laughter he knew would follow one of the play’s “funniest” lines:
Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal; you sockdologizing old man-trap!
He then stepped forward and shot Lincoln in the head, just behind the left ear. The wound was quickly determined to be mortal, and although doctors located the bullet and some fragments of bone, the president haemmorhaged repeatedly during the night, and died at 7.22 am the next day.
On a lighter note, today is World Quantum Day, which I will leave to the scientifically minded. It is also the feast of the Dutch mystic St Lidwina (1380-1433), the patron saint of chronic pain and ice-skating, who may have suffered from multiple sclerosis (though a diagnosis at this distance of time is difficult to make with certainty). Her relics are housed at the Basilica of St Lidwina and Our Lady of the Rosary in Schiedam, and there are some modest merchandise opportunities.
Factoids
One word that keeps recurring in the coverage of the war in Ukraine is Donbas. It is the easternmost region of Ukraine, is claimed and currently occupied by Russia, and takes its name from a portmanteau of “Donets Coal Basin”. For centuries it was home to a succession of nomadic tribes but in 1721 coal was discovered in huge quantities along the Donets river. To exploit this vital ingredient of industrialisation, the city of Donetsk was founded in 1870—by a Welshman, John Hughes of Merthyr Tydfil. It was originally called Yuzovka (Юзoвка), “Yuz” being as close an approximation of “Hughes” as Russian-speakers could reach. Hughes had made a fortune in ironworking in Newport, was bought out by the Millwall Iron Works Company and became its manager, winning a contract for armour plating with the Imperial Russian Navy in 1868. Welsh workers migrated in large numbers to the new settlement, and by 1900 Yuzovka had a population of 50,000 as well as an English school, Anglophone social clubs and an Anglican Church of St George and St David.
No-one is famous forever. In 1924, reflecting the changing political climate in the new Soviet Union, Yuzovka was renamed Stalin (the authorities experimented with the racier sounding “Stalino” between 1929 and 1931), though some sources suggest it was briefly known as Trotsk, after the commissar for military and naval affairs Leon Trotsky, for a few months in 1923. But 1961 saw a wave of de-Stalinisation by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, and the city was given its current name of Donetsk.
This story is attributed to a number of participants but I am taking on trust the late Sir David Frost. As he recalls it, he hosted a show in the late 1960s with the editor of Newsweek (then Osborn Elliott), the editor of Time (Henry Grunwald) and the head of the New York branch of TASS, the Soviet state news agency. During a discussion of great historical “what-ifs”, a journalist wondered what would have happened if Nikita Khrushchev, not John F. Kennedy, had been assassinated in November 1963. The Soviet official was quite certain. “Well I can tell you one thing, Aristotle Onassis would not have married Mrs Khrushchev.”
Next week sees the publication, long awaited by some, no doubt, of Liz Truss’s memoir-cum-apologia, Ten Years To Save The West: Lessons from the only conservative in the room. She is our shortest-serving prime minister, only managing 49 days in office, but we should not overlook the fact that she is also our shortest prime minister, at 5’3”. Actually, she shares that distinction with Spencer Perceval, the Anglo-Irish aristocrat who served from 1809 to 1812 and is the only prime minister to have been assassinated. He was known as “Little P” on account of his diminutive stature, though his fatal shooting in the lobby of the House of Commons has given him rather more distinction.
At the other end of the scale, the Downing Street website used to list James Callaghan (1976-79) as the tallest prime minister, at 6’1”. However, David Cameron (2010-16) is the same height, and it is claimed that Sir Alec Douglas-Home (1963-64) was also 6’1”. Nevertheless, the winner is almost certainly the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury (1885-86, 1886-92, 1895-1902), a heavyset, looming Tory who was around 6’4”.
The United States is clearly more concerned with height in its leaders. Since Kennedy (6’0”) was elected in 1960, only one president, Jimmy Carter (5’9½”), has been less than 5’11”. Eight of JFK’s successors have been more than six feet tall (though, predictably, there is controversy about exactly how tall Donald Trump really is: 6’3” seems an accepted estimate). Abraham Lincoln, shot on this day in 1865 (see above), is the tallest of all, at 6’4”, but Lyndon Johnson was only half an inch behind him.
Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn’t have in your home (David Frost)
“Henry VIII’s Enforcer: The Rise and Fall of Thomas Cromwell”: this was originally released in 2013 but shown again on BBC4 this week and is well worth a watch. Professor Diarmaid MacCulloch is a Cromwell fan, it is fair to say, hardly surprising as his doctoral studies were supervised by Sir Geoffrey Elton, and in 2018 he wrote a superb biography of the Tudor politician, Thomas Cromwell: A Life. Hilary Mantel, of course, somehow encouraged people into armed camps over Cromwell—pure-hearted evangelical reformer or amoral devotee of realpolitik?—and the answer is “both” and “neither”. But this is briskly presented and skilfully argued, as you’d expect from MacCulloch, emeritus professor of the history of the church at the University of Oxford.
“When Abba came to Britain”: it was the 50th anniversary of Abba’s Eurovision on 6 April, when the Swedish quartet triumphed in Brighton with “Waterloo”. This BBC documentary uncovers the cunning-yet-heartfelt origins of their performance: an English-language song would have much broader appeal than something in Swedish, of course, but the band was also eager to make their bid for stardom in the United Kingdom, home of the Beatles and so many other musical legends. There is a comforting dose of nostalgia in this, and the depiction of a simpler, less fraught life, but it also reminds you that Abba are extraordinarily popular, with fans you wouldn’t necessarily expect.
“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”: Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 cinema interpretation of John le Carré’s 1974 espionage classic suffered by comparison with the BBC’s seven-part television adaptation made in 1979. Look, I bow to no-one in my admiration for the TV series, about which I have written at length, and the film is not perfect. I saw it twice, and on the first viewing was disappointed in the ways I’d expected, only seeing some of its virtues on the second attempt. Its evocation of the shabbiness of 1970s Britain is brilliant, and there are some outstanding performances, especially John Hurt as Control and Colin Firth as Bill Haydon. Whisper it quietly, but Tom Hardy may even be a better Ricki Tarr than Hywel Bennett. (Kathy Burke is awful as Connie Sachs, while Beryl Reid had stolen the show in 1979, and Benedict Cumberbatch as Peter Guillam is left to manage a wholly pointless and clumsy gay sub-plot.) If you can watch it as a stand-alone spy thriller, however, I think Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is well above average, cleverly nuanced and vividly brought to life.
Good prose is like a window pane (George Orwell)
“It doesn’t pay to be a working-class professional”: a fascinating Financial Times piece by Pilita Clark, which uses the person of Sue Gray, Sir Keir Starmer’s chief of staff, as a measure of the dominance of university graduates in British public life. Gray joined the civil service straight from school after her father died, and rose to be a permanent secretary, which is virtually unheard-of. As Clark points out, “class can have a bigger effect on your chance of being promoted than gender, ethnicity or sexual orientation”, and the UK is bedevilled by very low social mobility. There is (I think) a growing acceptance that the Blairite revolution in higher education, with tuition fees and an expectation that half of school leavers will go to university, was not the answer. Scaling back the number of graduates seems politically difficult. But something is not working, and it is more than 30 years since John Major spoke of his ambition of “a classless society”.
“Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed”: I accept that a book which analyses how state institutions work, written by a Yale political scientist and anthropologist, is not the easiest sell, but this 1998 work by James C. Scott will change the way you look at the world. He began with the question of why “the state” seemed always to be the enemoy of itinerant populations and the proponent of what he calls “sedentarization”, and came to realise that what governments, what all forms of state apparatus, are intended to do is make a society “legible” so that the state can carry out its basic functions of taxation and conscription. Scott can swoop from earnest anthropological detail to high whimsy and his scholarship is profound. Approach this with an open mind and you genuinely will reframe the institutions the existence of which we take for granted.
“Beyond a Fringe: Tales from a reformed Establishment lackey”: this memoir was released just before the veteran Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield was recalled to government as minister for international development, and he was in the news only this Friday when he was named “deputy foreign secretary”. Mitchell turned 68 last month but seems to have been around for ever: he was first elected as MP for Gedling, in Nottinghamshire, in 1987, and for 10 years shared the House of Commons with his father, Sir David Mitchell (Basingstoke 1964-83, North West Hampshire 1983-97). He was a whip and then a social security minister under John Major before losing his seat, but returned to become a specialist in overseas aid, respected across the political spectrum. Appointed chief whip in 2012, he was forced to resign after six weeks following an altercation with police officers at the gates of Downing Street which became known as “Plebgate”. I found this breezy autobiography a very easy read but also surprisingly engaging. Mitchell is ready to be self-critical and has no particular illusions about himself, but is clearly motivated by genuine political passions. Certainly a volume after which I thought more, not less, of the author.
And that’s the way it is, April 12…
… to paraphrase the sign-off of the legendary CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite. To switch to Winston Churchill, let us go forward together.
Mitchell loathsome shit is symbolic of sheer malevent hatred of wc by so many tories ken clarke anothet and uber witch may all together is why im voting labour us pleb proles are sick of tories treating us like filth. Id rather risk starmer than sunnak.