Sunday round-up 20 October 2024

Imagine a party for Kamala Harris, Danny Boyle, Ian Rush and "Thunder Thumbs" Mark King: that's our birthday shindig, which Abu Musab al-Zarqawi will miss by being dead

Wondering whose birthday card you forgot to post? It could be one of high-pitched actress and David Tennant mother-in-law Sandra Dickinson (76), director, producer and screenwriter Danny Boyle (68), jazz guitarist Martin Taylor (68), hereditary cricketer Chris Cowdrey (67), “Thunder Thumbs” Level 42 bassist Mark King (66), actor and professional King of Men Viggo Mortensen (66), comedian and Neighbours legend Mark Little (65), moustachioed Welsh footballist and dairy promoter Ian Rush (63), Democratic presidential candidate Vice-President Kamala Harris (60), successful director and long-time EastEnders miserablist Susan Tully (57), rapper, stimulant enthusiast and probably-not-his-real-name Snoop Dogg (53), singer, actress and less famous sister Dannii Minogue (53), actor and film-maker John Krasinski (45), model and philanthropist Candice Swanepoel (36) and singer-songwriter Jess Glynne (35).

In yesteryear it was all cake and presents for imperial sibling Pauline Bonaparte (1780), two-time prime minister and “not safe in taxis or anywhere else” aristocrat Viscount Palmerston (1784), Tom Brown’s School Days author Thomas Hughes (1822), poet and surrealist avant la lettre Arthur Rimbaud (1854), trades unionist and Liberal cabinet minister John Burns (1858), composer Charles Ives (1874), Hungarian-American screen legend Bela Lugosi (1882), durable film and stage star Anna Neagle (1904), humorist Art Buchwald (1925), National Motor Museum founder and homosexual cause célèbre Lord Montagu of Beaulieu (1926), Law & Order star Jerry Orbach (1935), related-to-everybody novelist Emma Tennant (1937), controversial and trenchant former Chief Inspector of Schools Sir Chris Woodhead (1946), rock icon and Traveling Wilbury Tom Petty (1950) and peg-leg “Sheikh of the Slaughterers” and now-in-kit-form jihadist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (1966).

Today in 1803, the United States Senate ratified the Louisiana Purchase. Under the arrangement, America acquired the territory of Louisiane from the French First Republic, led by First Consul Napoléon Bonaparte, a total of 828,000 square miles, for the sum of $15 million (equivalent to around $370 million today). The area comprised most of the Mississippi basin west of the river itself, extending from New Orleans in the south up to beyond the modern border with Canada in the north, but only a small proportion of it had been settled and controlled by France. The non-indigenous population amounted to only 60,000 or so, of whom half were enslaved Africans. What the United States had essentially bought was a pre-emptive claim, by treaty or conquest, on land inhabited by Native Americans, and it doubled the size of America in one fell swoop. Bonaparte had decided that an empire beyond the Atlantic was no longer a realistic or valuable proposition for France, which made Louisiane nothing but a strategic vulnerability. He feared that Britain might attempt to seize the colony so realising capital from its sale to the United States seemed like a neat and obvious solution, although the foreign minister, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, opposed the deal. A month later, France withdrew its remaining 7,000 soldiers from its colony of Saint-Domingue in the west of Hispaniola, which had been in rebellion under its former governor-general, the manumitted slave François-Dominique Toussaint Louverture, since 1801. It marked the end of French colonial presence in the Western Hemisphere, and Saint-Domingue became independent as Haiti on 1 January 1804 (though was not universally recognised until much later).

Exactly 15 years later, on this day in 1818, the United Kingdom and the United States concluded the Convention respecting fisheries, boundary and the restoration of slaves, otherwise known as the London Convention. This set a border between the United States and British North America along the 49th parallel and provided for joint control of the Oregon Country (known by the British as Columbia District) on the Pacific Ocean for a period of 10 years: on the British side it was administered by the Hudson’s Bay Company, still a private enterprise today.

On this date in 1947, the US House of Representatives Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), chaired by New Jersey Republican J. Parnell Thomas, began an inquiry into Communist infiltration of the film industry in Hollywood. The previous May, Thomas had travelled to California to meet film industry executives to discuss the threat of subversion, especially the potential inclusion of Communist material by members of the Screen Writers Guild. Initially, the committee heard from witnesses who shared its fears: Walt Disney, president of Walt Disney Productions, Jack Warner, president of Warner Bros. Pictures, actors Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor and Adolphe Menjou, and Ronald Reagan, president of the Screen Actors Guild. But many other leading figures in the industry formed the Committee for the First Amendment and protested against what they regarded as harassment. A group of 19 people of interest to HUAC were classified as “hostile witnesses” because they had announced they would not give evidence to the committee; 11 were called to testify on 27 October, but only one, playwright Bertold Brecht, co-operated, and even he gave evasive answers and left the United States the following day, never to return. The others refused to answer the committee’s questions and were cited for contempt of Congress. The Association of Movie Picture Producers released a statement saying the “Hollywood Ten” would be fired or suspended without pay and not re-employed until they were cleared of contempt charges and had sworn that they were not Communists. This was the first blacklist: Alvah Bessie, Herbert Biberman, Lester Cole, Edward Dmytryk, Ring Lardner Jr, John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, Samuel Ornitz, Adrian Scott and Dalton Trumbo. It may not have been wholly coincidental that six of the 10 were Jewish.

Today in 1977, a mere five days before I was born, a Convair CV-240 ran out of fuel and crashed into a wooded area near Gillsburg, Mississippi, en route to Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It had been chartered by the rock bank Lynyrd Skynyrd, due to play at Louisiana State University to promote the new album Street Survivors. Of the 24 passengers and two crew members, six were killed in the crash, including lead vocalist Ronnie Van Zant, guitarist and vocalist Steve Gaines, backing vocalist Cassie Gaines and assistant road manager Dean Kilpatrick. The pilot, Captain Walter McCreary, and the first officer, William John Gray, also died. Lynyrd Skynyrd disbanded as a result of the crash, reforming in 1987 under Van Zant’s brother Johnny.

There is a respectable haul of saints awaiting your commemoration today. It is the feast of St Acca (AD 660-AD 742), bishop of Hexham in Northumbria from AD 709 to AD 732, who supplied a great deal of material to the Venerable Bede for his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, and whose shrine is at Hexham Abbey (now an Anglican parish church). We also remember St Caprasius of Agen (d. AD 303), martyr and possibly prelate; St Artemius of Antioch (d. AD 362), a Syrian general martyred by Julian the Apostate; St Irene of Tomar (AD 635-AD 653), martyred in Portugal by a would-be fiancé; St Aderald (d. 1004), archdeacon of Troyes, who brought a piece of the Holy Sepulchre back from the Holy Land to France; St Magdalene of Nagasaki (1611-34), a translator and catechist who surrendered to the Japanese authorities, was tortured for 13 days, suspended upside down from a gibbet in a pit full of offal and then drowned when it was filled with water; and St Maria Bertilla Boscardin (1888-1922), a nun from the Veneto who looked after sick children and died while being operated on to remove a tumour.

In Kenya it is Mashujaa Day or Heroes’ Day, to commemorate those who fought for the country’s independence (sorry about that, lads), until 2010 known as Kenyatta Day after the first president of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta. It is also Vietnamese Women’s Day (Ngày Phụ nữ Việt Nam), marking the founding of the Vietnamese Women’s Association in 1930, and Arbor Day in the Czech Republic, to encourage the planting of trees.

We are also marking World Osteoporosis Day and World Statistics Day, presumably against one and in favour of the other.

Factoids

1. The House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill began its journey through the House of Commons this week, and will, if agreed to, removed the remaining 92 hereditary peers who still sit and vote in the House of Lords. (I dislike the bill quite intensely and explained why at some length on Thursday.) However, even after it takes effect at the end of this session of parliament, there will still, unless mortality intervenes, be two hereditary peers in the upper house, Viscount Hailsham (Con) and Viscount Chandos (Lab): both also hold life peerages, as Lord Hailsham of Kettlethorpe and Lord Lyttelton of Aldershot. As it happens, they are also both grandsons of Conservative cabinet ministers, old Etonians and Oxford graduates (Christ Church and Worcester College, respectively).

2. In 1985, a made-for-television movie called John and Yoko: A Love Story was screened on NBC. Directed and written by Canadian Sandor Stern, it is an indifferent cinematic biography of the Beatle and his Japanese wife from their meeting in 1966 to Lennon’s murder in 1980, though it features amusing early performances by Mark McGann as John Lennon, Peter Capaldi as George Harrison and Mike Myers as a nameless delivery boy. McGann, however, was not the first actor cast in the lead: initially Lennon was to be played by young English actor Mark Lindsay Chapman. But the former Beatle had, of course, been murdered by a man called Mark David Chapman. The actor was quietly paid off and the role recast.

3. Chapman (the actor) did, however, later play John Lennon in the 2007 film Chapter 27. Written and directed by Jarrett Schaefer, it starred Jared Leto as, well, Mark Chapman (the murderer).

4. In 2014, India became the first nation in Asia to send a space probe to orbit Mars, its Mars Orbiter Mission, known as Mangalyaan, entering the planet’s orbit on 24 September. The programme cost $75 million, which is a small sum for such an ambitious mission. The following year, 2015, 20th Century Fox released director/producer Ridley Scott’s The Martian, a film about an astronaut (played by Matt Damon) who is abandoned on Mars. The budget eventually came to $103 million.

5. On 10 February 1972, the city of Calama in northern Chile experienced a thunderstorm and sudden downpour of rain. What was significant was not so much that the rain was sufficiently heavy to cause mudslides, but that the settlement had not seen any rainfall since records began in 1570. It is possible it had never rained before.

6. The Olympic rings—five interlocking circles of blue, yellow, black, green and red on a white background—were designed in 1913 by Baron de Coubertin, the co-founder of the International Olympic Committee. They may have been intended to represent the five inhabited continents of Europe, America, Asia, Africa and Oceania, but certainly the colours were chosen because they represented the colours of every flag of the nations then competing in the Olympic Games. At least one of the colours can still be found on any flag of a competing nation.

7. According to his creator, Naoto Oshimi, video game designer for Sega, Sonic the Hedgehog’s character was based on the then-governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who would shortly become president of the United States. He told an interviewer: “If there was a problem, Bill Clinton took action right away. I saw that American attitude on TV. That was the kind of character I wanted to make.”

8. In February 1861, the King of Siam, Rama IV, sent a ceremonial sword to President James Buchanan of the United States as a gift of friendship between the two countries. In the accompanying letter, the king noted that he had been informed there were no elephants in America, and offered to make good this deficiency by providing several pairs which could be “turned loose in forests and increase till there be large herds”. These would be useful for the as-yet-unsettled parts of the continent “since elephants being animals of great size and strength can bear burdens and travel through uncleared woods and matted jungles where no carriage and cart roads have yet been made”. However, Buchanan left office a fortnight after the king wrote the letter, and given the speed of communication in the mid-19th century it was his successor as president, Abraham Lincoln, who received the message. A year after it had been composed, in February 1862, Lincoln wrote a reply. He thanked Rama IV for the gifts and for the offer of elephants, but politely declined, explaining “our political jurisdiction, however, does not reach a latitude so low as to favor the multiplication of the elephant, and steam on land, as well as on water, has been our best and most efficient agent of transportation in internal commerce”. What an opportunity missed.

9. From 2019 to 2024, the Nebraska Tourist Commission used an unconventional if attention-grabbing slogan to advertise the state as a destination: “Honestly, it’s not for everyone”. This was not, as is often supposed or stated, the official motto of Nebraska, which is and has always been since statehood in the 1860s “Equality before the law”. But its radical candour was in the same vein as the advertising slogans proposed in the 1990 Dudley Moore/Daryl Hannah comedy Crazy People, including “Volvo: they’re boxy but they’re good” and “Jaguar: for men who’d like hand jobs from beautiful women they hardly know”. Less complimentary still was the fancy of Bill Bryson, who announced in the opening line of his 1989 travelogue The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America “I come from Des Moines. Somebody had to.” In it, he alleged that there was a sign outside the capital of Iowa which read “Welcome to Des Moines. This is what death is like.”

10. The woolly mammoth disappeared almost entirely as a species about 10,000 years ago. However, a small colony of between 500 and 1,000 mammoths were isolated on Wrangel Island in the East Siberian Sea, above the Arctic Circle, and their descendants survived until about 1650 BC. That was around the end of the Thirteenth Dynasty in Egypt, where leavened bread had only recently been developed, and the reign of the Pharaoh Mersekhemre Ined. The Great Pyramid of Giza was already 1,000 years old, as was the central part of Stonehenge. The Minoan civilisation was flourishing in Crete and was beginning to spread to Mycenae, while the Adaside dynasty had recently become kings of Assyria, ruling from Assur on the western bank of the River Tigris in modern-day Iraq. In Britain it was the beginning of the Bedd Branwen Period and the early stages of Wessex culture. A fresco of saffron gatherers painted on a wall in Akrotiri, in Santorini, survives from almost exactly that time.

“Bad television is three things: a bullet train to a morally bankrupt youth, a slow spiral into an intellectual void, and of course, a complete blast to watch.” (Dennis Miller)

1. “Nothing Like A Dame”: the BBC broadcast this brilliant 2018 conversation with acting legends Dame Eileen Atkins, Dame Judi Dench, Dame Maggie Smith andm Dame Joan Plowright (Lady Olivier), in honour of Smith’s recent death. They had a combined age of 342 when it was made, and the other three are still very much with us—Plowright will turn 95 in eight days’ time. Supported by marvellous archive footage, these four titanesses of British film and theatre are funny, sharp, fascinating and most obviously just having a whale of a time. Jean Brodie, Minerva McGonagall, Desdemona, M, the Dowager Countess of Grantham, Betsey Trotwood, Portia (x3), Beatrice (x2), Elizabeth I (x2), Lady Macbeth (x2), Titania, Queen Victoria, Ophelia, Sally Bowles, Lady Bracknell, Major Barbara (x2), St Joan of Arc (x2), Virginia Woolf (x2), Queen Mary: it really is all there. Sparkling.

2. “The Today Podcast: Michael Gove”: I was slightly unkind about Radio 4’s Today programme acquiring a podcast offshoot when it began last autumn, and there’s still a nagging question of what it’s for except more of the same. That doesn’t mean there is never any good content, though, and this is a case in point: Nick Robinson and Amol Rajan talk to former Conservative cabinet minister and new editor of The Spectator, Michael Gove. I’m quite aware that Gove is a divisive figure, and there are many who find him impossible to endure at any cost, but, firstly, I like him a great deal and this is my blog, but, second, whether you like him or not, he has been one of the most important and influential figures in Conservative politics over the last 20 years. I suspect his return to journalism indicates that Gove intends to remain active and engaged—he has only just turned 57, after all—and he speaks intelligently and frankly about the career he leaves behind. Plenty to learn from this encounter.

3. “Spectator TV: Assisted dying debate”: Kim Leadbeater (Lab, Spen Valley) has introduced her Private Members’ Bill, the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, into the House of Commons and it will be debated for the first time on 29 November. The government has indicated that it is minded to support the bill, so in some form it may well pass into law. The idea of “assisted dying” (or whatever term you prefer) is an incredibly complex and intellectually, morally and culturally knotty issue—I don’t know what my verdict is, for one thing—and some debates are in better humour and faith than others. The Spectator brings together Lord Falconer of Thoroton, who is broadly in favour, and Lord Moore of Etchingham, who is firmly against, and the exchange is thoughtful and polite. In purely intellectual terms, Charlie Falconer I think has the better of the encounter but if you want to think more about this issue and hear genuinely held, well articulated opinions, this is worth watching.

4. “History Undone: What if the Normans lost the Battle of Hastings?”: James Hanson presents a series on Times Radio History looking at counter-factual military history, and, given the recent anniversary of the Battle of Hastings in 1066, here he examines the conflict between Anglo-Saxons and Normans and what might have happened had the result gone the other way. This particularly caught my eye as Hanson and Rear-Admiral Chris Parry are joined by Professor Robert Bartlett, who was one of my tutors at St Andrews and has made a late-career foray into televisual history. The fate of the English crown after the death of Edward the Confessor in January 1066 was extremely precarious, as I examined in last week’s round-up, with Edward Ætheling, Harold Godwinson, Harald III of Norway and Duke William of Normandy all staking claims. That the year would end with the Norman invader, known before this point as William the Bastard because he was the illegitimate son of Robert I of Normandy, was not at all certain. This is an enjoyable and thought-provoking examination of that confused year and all its contingencies.

5. “David Owen: A radical life”: Lord Owen, now 86, recently retired from the House of Lords and drew a 58-year parliamentary career to a close. Here Freddie Sayers interviews him at length for UnHerd and takes in the various aspects of his long and sometimes quixotic political life. An accomplished physician, a young Labour minister in the circles around Roy Jenkins and Anthony Crosland, propelled into the cabinet as foreign secretary by the latter’s sudden death in 1977, one of the “Gang of Four” and a founding member of the Social Democratic Party, EU co-chairman of the Conference for the Former Yugoslavia, unlikely Brexiteer: Owen is hard to sum up but he speaks frankly and trenchantly, and there is little sign of regret or changes of heart. The rancour of his relationship with the late Lord Jenkins of Hillhead bubbles up once or twice in this interview, but it was entirely reciprocal…

“Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything. You read and you’re pierced.” (Aldous Huxley)

1. “Intermezzo—Sally Rooney”: there is a tiresome and recurring skirmish in the culture wars over Sally Rooney, which is really much less about her as a writer and more about using her and her novels as totems or targets according to taste. I wouldn’t argue for a moment that everyone must like her work, but I do, a great deal, and think she’s a ferociously gifted author. Intermezzo, her fourth novel, takes a little bit of immersion as it’s written from several points of view and that of Peter, the elder of the two Koubek brothers, is a very Joyceian stream of consciousness which is effective once you’ve tuned in. A book of many emotions, joyful, bitter, sad, elegiac, nostalgic, but full of observations which make you catch your breath. I thought it was dazzling.

2. “Iran has the most to lose if it closes the Strait of Hormuz”: a sharp and provocative piece from The Spectator by Jonathan Campbell-James, a former colonel in the Intelligence Corps who has extensive experience of the Middle East. The West has an ongoing fear that Iran, if “provoked” too far, will cause enormous disruption to the international flow of oil by closing the Strait of Hormuz with leads into the Persian Gulf and at its narrowest is barely 20 miles wide. But Campbell-James argues that this would be an act of economic and strategic self-harm, damaging relations with the Gulf Cooperation Council and China, as well as depriving Iran of its lucrative oil trade with the Far East. Increasingly, informed commentators are starting to argue that the West is almost afraid if its own shadow when it comes to relations with Iran: the Islamic Republic is now fragile and weakened, and there may be the opportunity for change in the air so long as we don’t allow ourselves to be intimidated.

3. “Nigeria’s economic transformation must succeed”: it’s easy to forget that, by population, Nigeria is the sixth-largest country in the world, with more than 230 million citizens; with around half of those being Muslims, it is also the fifth-largest Islamic population. In this article for The Financial Times, Indermit Gill, chief economist at the World Bank, points to signs of economic growth and prosperity, and argues that Nigeria must now focus on non-oil growth, address inflation and create a fertile environment for the expansion of private enterprise. If it can do all of these things, its potential is huge and it could be an engine of growth for sub-Saharan Africa. Another reminder that, while events in Ukraine, the Middle East and the Far East understandably occupy the minds of Western policy-makers, Africa has to feature prominently in longer term thinking because of its size, potential for development and young demographic. If foreign ministries don’t have an Africa strategy, they need one.

4. “What Liz Cheney and other honorable Republicans should do next”: in The Washington Post, Jennifer Rubin contemplates what many US conservatives have tried to ignore or avoid thinking about, the possibility—I’m now inclined to see it as a probability—that Donald Trump’s personal capture of the Republican Party is not a passing phase. While the GOP has become essentially a cult of personality, indifferent to ideological consistency or coherence, the assumption of power by MAGA-inclined loyalists has been thorough and extensive. I think Rubin is right to say that even victory for Kamala Harris in next month’s presidential election and the second rejection of Trump by the American electorate in four years (of course he lost the popular vote in 2016 as well) would not necessarily be enough to wrest control of the party away from Trumpists again. So what do never-Trump Republicans do? Rubin explores the options, from joining the Democratic Party and attempting to shift its ideological centre of gravity, to founding a new organisation. None of them is easy.

5. “British industry has forgotten how to use its voice”: a punchy but ultimately balanced argument in The Critic by my friend Chris Bayliss that large sections of the private sector have effectively ceased attempts to fight their corner or present their own narrative in the face of assertion and demand by government and a voluble strand of public opinion. Note that Chris is not part of the tendency which has reacted so violently to, say, climate change advocacy that it had retreated into denialism and, more or less, ranting at a Toyota Prius. His point is that the energy sector would tell you, on consideration, that transition to a carbon-neutral economy will probably take a little longer than the arbitrary deadline politicians have sought to impose. But instead of framing this truth as acceptance of the objective and proposing a more realistic if longer process to achieve it, many businesses are simply assenting to unreality or the imposition of high economic penalties. The private sector needs to recapture its self-confidence and get on the front foot.

The unknown future rolls toward us…

… as Sarah Connor concludes Terminator 2. I face it, for the first time, with a sense of hope. Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too. Slán go fóill.