Sunday round-up 30 June 2024
Birthday cake for "Iron" Mike Tyson and Geordie pugilist Cheryl, independence day for the DR of Congo and the 90th anniversary of the Night of the Long Knives
Today is the 182nd day of the year, so very near the halfway point (which is tomorrow). Lining up for the bumps with varying degrees of enthusiasm are king of the television soundtrack Tony Hatch (85), chair of the Royal United Services Institute Sir David Lidington (68), former first minister of Scotland Lord McConnell of Glenscorrodale (64), screen stalwart Rupert Graves (61), pugilist and nibbler Mike Tyson (58), pugilist and Geordie songstress Cheryl Tweedy/Cole/Fernandez-Versini (41), comedian Katherine Ryan (41) and the most successful Olympian in history Michael Phelps (39).
Those who celebrated in times gone by include German Communist Walter Ulbricht (1893), singer and civil rights activist Lena Horne (1917), the world’s oldest cockatoo Cookie (1933) and ground-breaking novelist, playwright and screenwriter Barry Hines (1939).
Today in 1860, the great and good of British intellectual life gathered at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History on Parks Road to discuss the propositions contained in Charles Darwin’s recently published On the Origin of Species. John William Draper, an English scientist who was professor of chemistry at New York University, gave an apparently dull paper entitled “On the Intellectual Development of Europe, considered with reference to the views of Mr Darwin and others, that the progression of organisms is determined by law”, but the main event was the discussion afterwards. The star turns were Samuel Wilberforce, bishop of Oxford and a noted opponent of Darwin, and Thomas Huxley, professor of natural history at the Royal School of Mines who was known as “Darwin’s bulldog” for his support of the theory of evolution. The exact details of the discussion are uncertain, but tradition has it that Wilberforce asked Huxley whether it was through his grandfather or his grandmother that he was descended from a monkey; Huxley reputedly responded that he would not be ashamed to have a monkey for his ancestor, but he would be ashamed to be connected with a man who used his great gifts to obscure the truth. Inevitably, both sides claimed victory, but the event was generally seen as a coup for Darwin and his supporters.
This date in 1934 is remembered as the Night of the Long Knives (Nacht der langen Messer), Adolf Hitler’s dramatic purge of his enemies within the Nazi state. He had become chancellor in January 1933, emasculated other political parties in February and sidelined the Reichstag in March, but remained wary of the power of his paramilitary organisation the Sturmabteiling (SA), under Ernst Röhm, which saw itself as an alternative to the armed forces. By the middle of 1934, forces were aligning to persuade Hitler to act: the minister of defence, General Werner von Blomberg, wanted the SA neutralised, the stupid but well-connected vice-chancellor, Franz von Papen, was warning of a “second revolution”, and Nazi insiders like Hermann Göring, Joseph Goebbels and Heinrich Himmler were urging a crackdown on the enemies of the chancellor (Hitler would not begin using the title Führer until the death of President von Hindenburg in August 1934). Early on 30 June, Hitler and his coterie flew to Munich, where a mob of brownshirts had been on the rampage the night before, and the purge began. The total number of deaths is disputed, although even the Gestapo admitted to 77, but they included: Röhm himself, former chancellor General Kurt von Schleicher, Gregor Strasser, one of the Nazi Party’s earliest members, Röhm’s deputy Edmund Heines and Gustav Ritter von Kahr, former minister-president of Bavaria. Hitler would arguably never face a serious challenge to his authority again, at least until the assassination attempt of July 1944.
Five years ago today, President Donald Trump became the first US president to set foot in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea when he stepped across the demarcation line in the demilitarised zone to shake hands with Kim Jong Un. Through a translator, the supreme leader said to Trump “I never expected to see you in this place”. One can understand his surprise. After a 40-minute meeting, Trump declared “Nobody knows how things go, but certainly this was a great day. This was a very legendary, very historic day.”
Sacramentally it is the feast of St Martial, the 3rd century missionary known as the “Apostle of the Gauls”, and St Theobald of Provins (1033-66), a French hermit who is the patron saint of charcoal-burners, belt-makers, wine-growers and panic attacks. The Orthodox Church commemorates the First Martyrs of the Church of Rome, an unknown number of early Christians put to death by Nero in AD 64 after a fire devastated the city and was blamed on their supposed agency. (It is an optional memorial in the Roman Catholic Church.)
The Democratic Republic of Congo marks its independence from Belgium (as the Republic of the Congo-Léopoldville) in 1960, while its northern neighbour the Central African Republic (good work on the name, lads) celebrates General Prayer Day. Globally it is Asteroid Day, the date chosen for the Tunguska event in 1908 and designed by the United Nations to raise awareness about asteroid strikes. Eeek. It is also Log Cabin Day and National Corvette Day. Truly something for everyone.
Factoids
On this day in 1559, Henri II of France was wounded during a joust when a splinter from a broken lance entered his eye. His physicians decided to wait and see, and they waited to see him die of sepsis 10 days later. He is remembered principally as the husband of Catherine de’Medici and for sowing the seeds of the religious persecution of the Huguenots, but in the longer run his real legacy is that he introduced the specification requirement for patents, that is, a description of the form and purpose of an invention. The first was submitted in 1551 by Abel Foullon, the director of the Mint, who had invented an early range-finder (“Usage & Description de l’holomètre”), and the description was not published until the patent expired in 1561. It became a fundamental part of international patent law.
The prime minister of Estonia, Kaja Kallas, of whom I am an enormous fan, is slated to be the next high representative of the European Union for foreign affairs and security policy and vice-president of the European Commission. By joining the commission, she will be following in her father’s footsteps for the fourth time: Siim Kallas has been a member of the Riigikogu, the Estonian parliament, since 2019 (having previously sat from 1995 to 2004); he founded and led the Estonian Reform Party of which she is now leader; he was prime minister from 2003 to 2004; and a vice-president of the European Commission under José Manuel Barroso from 2004 to 2014. He was also president of the Bank of Estonia from 1991 to 1995, beginning with 11 employees after the country regained its independence from the Soviet Union.
When the German battleship Bismarck was sunk by the Royal Navy on 27 May 1941, slipping under the surface of the ocean at 10.40 am, most of her crew was lost: there were only 114 survivors from a total of more than 2,200. However, so it is said, a black and white cat was also rescued by HMS Cossack, a Tribal-class destroyer, supposedly the pet of one of the sailors on the Bismarck. He was named Oscar, since the letter O in the International Code of Signals stands for “man overboard”. However, HMS Cossack was torpedoed and severely damaged on 24 October 1941, sinking a few days later. Oscar had by then been transferred to another destroyed, HMS Legion. Rechristened “Unsinkable Sam”, the cat was then adopted by the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal, but fate had been tempted, and she was torpedoed and sunk on 14 November. Sam, described as “angry but quite unharmed”, was found floating on a plank and rescued by HMS Lightning, but then rehomed by the governor of Gibraltar. It was just as well. HMS Legion was sunk in 1942 and HMS Legion in 1943. Unsinkable Sam, however, retired to a seamen’s home in Belfast and died in 1955.
We think of the United Nations has having its home in New York, on a plot on the East River in Manhattan donated in 1946 by John D. Rockefeller. Sometimes we recall that the United Nations Conference on International Organization met in San Francisco in 1945, mainly meeting in the War Memorial Opera House, and that the General Assembly and the Security Council first met at Methodist Central Hall in London in January 1946. The acting secretary general from October 1945 to February 1946 was the British diplomat Gladwyn Jebb, who had been executive secretary of the Preparatory Commission of the United Nations and would later (1950-54) be the UK’s second permanent representative to the UN. However, the whole circus almost found itself based in Connecticut. The commission for which Jebb worked considered a plan for a sprawling, 100-square mile site in North Greenwich and Stamford dubbed “UNOville”, which would have entailed the construction of construction of skyscrapers, highways, railways and airports. This scheme was considered confidentially but unearthed by a local Connecticut newspaper Greenwich Time, thanks to a tip-off from banker and local Republican Prescott Bush (father of President George H.W. Bush and grandfather of President George W. Bush). There was widespread local opposition and a referendum in February rejected the idea by 5,505 to 2,019. Boston, Philadelphia and San Francisco all expressed interest in hosting the new organisation by the Rockefeller donation of land won the day for New York.
Since we’re talking about potential locations of headquarters, it is worth bearing in mind that Washington DC was only chosen as the capital of the United States under the provisions of the Residence Act of 1790. Nearby Georgetown had been founded in the Province of Maryland in 1751, its university established in 1789, but Washington did not exist. The act set a deadline of 1800 for the new capital to be ready and designated Philadelphia as the interim seat of the federal government. Until that time, the administration of the United States had convened in no fewer than eight locations: the Second Continental Congress (1775-81) had met mainly in Philadelphia but had also come together in Baltimore, Maryland, and (even-handedly for English historians) Lancaster and York, Pennsylvania; and the Congress of the Confederation (1781-89) sat in Philadelphia, Princeton, New Jersey, Annapolis, Maryland, and Trenton, New Jersey, before ending up in New York in 1788. The US Congress then met in Congress Hall in Philadelphia from 1790 to 1800, when the move to Washington took place. The Confederate States of America, which seceded in February 1861 and were comprehensively defeated four years later, were governed briefly from Montgomery, Alabama, but the interim capital was established in Richmond, Virginia, in April 1861 (the Constitution of the Confederacy planned a new capital and invited bids). After the fall of Richmond in April 1865, the government met in Dansville, Virginia, for eight days.
The capital of the United Kingdom, and before that Great Britain and England, has been fixed for centuries: London was effectively the capital after the Norman Conquest in 1066, although the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England, which had been formed in AD 927, was centred on Winchester. During the English Civil War, Charles I was based in Oxford from 1642 to 1646: he lived in my old college, Christ Church, using the Deanery as his official residence and summoning MPs and peers to meet in the Great Hall in 1644/45. Eighty-two peers and 175 MPs attended.
By contrast, Edinburgh has only been the capital of Scotland since the 15th century. James II was crowned there in 1437 and James III (1451-88) described it as “principalior burgus regni nostri” (“the principal burgh of our kingdom”). Prior to that, the monarchy had been based at Scone in Perthshire since the 9th century AD, and the Parliament of Scotland had often met there after its emergence around 1235; Dunfermline had been an important royal centre since the 11th century; and the peripatetic mediaeval court often stayed in Stirling and Perth, James I (1406-37) particularly favouring the latter.
It might be worth noting that Cardiff was only recognised as the capital of Wales in a parliamentary answer by the home secretary and minister of Welsh affairs, Major Gwilym Lloyd-George, in December 1955. Before the conquest of Wales by Edward I in the 1270s and 1280s, Wales had generally been divided between a number of smaller kingdoms. The Kingdom of Gwynedd was based in Abergwyngregyn; Llywelyn the Great had held a council at the Cistercian convent of Strata Florida Abbey in Ceredigion; Owain Glyndŵr convened a Welsh parliament in Machynlleth in Montgomeryshire; and the Council of Wales and the Marches was based in Ludlow in Shropshire from 1473 to 1689. The ecclesiastic capital of Wales in St Davids, in Pembrokeshire, which is also the smallest city in the United Kingdom (population 1,751).
The eagle-eyed will recognise this list in an Only Connect way: Limehouse, Walthamstow West, Woodford, Warwick and Leamington, Bromley, Kinross and West Perthshire, Huyton, Bexley, Cardiff South East, Finchley, Huntingdon, Sedgefield, Dunfermline East, Witney, Maidenhead, Uxbridge and South Ruislip, South West Norfolk, Richmond (Yorkshire)… Holborn and St Pancras? They are, of course, the constituencies represented by post-war prime ministers during their premierships. Attlee, Churchill, Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Wilson, Heath, Callaghan, Brown and Johnson held other seats, at least nominally, during their careers: Churchill sat for five constituencies—Oldham, Manchester North West, Dundee, Epping and Woodford—while Eden, Thatcher, Major, Blair, Cameron, May, Truss and Sunak only sat for one electoral division in their whole careers. Only eight of the 17 went on to the House of Lords (so far), and nine (so far) have been appointed to the Order of the Garter (of the other eight, Macmillan turned down the Garter in 1964, Alec Home was a Knight of the Thistle before he became prime minister, and Brown would likely be offered the Thistle rather than the Garter, but was made a Companion of Honour this month.
Despite the House of Lords attracting strong sentiments in many politicians, few are known categorically to have refused a life peerage if offered. While Heath, Major, Blair and Brown have done so, for various reasons, other refuseniks include former Labour leader Michael Foot (who disapproved of the upper house), Labour MP, television pioneer and ambassador John Freeman (who saw no attraction), Conservative and Ulster Unionist MP and early monetarist Enoch Powell (who opposed life peerages as opposed to hereditary ones) and first secretary of state for Wales James Griffiths. Two politicians who turned down promotions within the peerage are Sir Basil Brooke, 1st Viscount Brookeborough, prime minister of Northern Ireland from 1943 to 1963, who was offered an earldom when he retired but considered he had been sufficiently ennobled (he nevertheless became a Knight of the Garter in 1965); and Quintin Hogg, 2nd Viscount Hailsham, later Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone, who was offered an earldom at some point in the late 1950s or early 1960s but declined because, as a reluctant peer, he hoped some mechanism might be introduced to disclaim peerages (as it was with the Peerage Act 1963) but sensed that being a peer of the first creation might rule him out. Famously, of course, Sir Winston Churchill turned down a dukedom in 1955 rather than hinder the by-then-non-existent political career of his largely odious only son Randolph.
Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there’s no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds (Tallulah Bankhead)
“The Damned United”: some of you will know that I really, really hate football, yet this 2009 sports drama from the pen of Peter Morgan (The Queen, Frost/Nixon, The Other Boleyn Girl, The Crown), shown on BBC2 this week, is compelling. It is a stylised retelling of Brian Clough’s 44 days as manager of Leeds United in 1974, but it is really about Michael Sheen’s towering, magnetic performance as the domineering, irascible, messianic Clough, nicknamed “Old Big ’Ead”. Sheen has an uncanny ability to inhabit the personae of people to whom he bears little or no physical resemblance—Tony Blair (severally), David Frost, Kenneth Williams—and become them to their very fingertips. The Damned United is also a brilliant snapshot of English football in the early 1970s, and there are some outstanding supporting performances from Timothy Spall as Peter Taylor, Colm Meaney as Don Revie and the late Tony Gubba as, well, himself. A masterpiece.
“Suranne Jones: Investigating Witch Trials”: I have included this Channel 4 two-parter not because I enjoyed it—I hated it with a fiery, visceral passion—but I am big enough to recognise that I am not, especially on the historiography of witchcraft, typical. You may find this an engaging and informative watch (Lucy Mangan in The Guardian gave it four stars) and you may be able to overlook elements like Bat For Lashes showing off a deck of Tarot cards. My hatred of it was inspired by the same thing that usually makes me irate when people look at early modern witchcraft: they proceed from the assumption that (as we all know) witchcraft is not real, therefore the prosecution/persecution of witches must have had another underlying motivation (misogyny, obviously). Now, you won’t find me arguing that 16th century society was not misogynist, but witchcraft was taken to be as real as any other part of belief. When witch-hunts looked for witches, they expected to find them. It wasn’t a cover for anything. If you don’t grasp that fundamental fact, the whole exercise is pointless. But hey! Maybe you’ll like it.
“Hill Street Blues”: what used to be All4, the Channel 4 streaming service, has been revamped and we are being encouraged to plunder the platform’s exceptional archive, so go with the flow and bathe in Steven Bochco’s revolutionary police procedural drama which ran for seven seasons from 1981 to 1987. My parents were addicted to Hill Street Blues when I was very young, and the opening credits are still a strong childhood memory-prompt for me, with Mike Post’s fantastic theme music. What Bochco and Michael Kozoll created was simply like nothing television had ever seen, dazzling ensemble pieces strung together around a police station in an unnamed US city (the opening credits were filmed in Chicago but there are frequent allusions to New York). During its run, the show won 26 Emmy Awards, and it remains fresh, crisp and superbly performed. Daniel J. Travanti as Captain Frank Furillo anchors the whole thing but it would not have been as great as it was without Barbara Bosson (Bochco’s wife) as Fay Furillo, James B. Sikking as Sergeant Howard Hunter, Joe Spano as Sergeant Henry Goldblume, Michael Conrad as Sergeant Phil Esterhaus or Veronica Hamel as public defender Joyce Davenport. It’s wholly a treat, brilliant actors and brilliant writers at the top of their game and clearly having a ball. No Hill Street Blues, no LA Law, no NYPD Blue, no Sopranos, no Breaking Bad…? Let’s be careful out there.
“Biden-Trump Presidential Debate”: not a recommendation, exactly, but Thursday’s CNN-hosted clash between President Biden and Donald Trump is something you should watch if you’re interested in politics because it may well end up being an important point in the election campaign. I watched it live, because I seem to be a glutton for punishment, and even with low expectations I was shocked by how bad it was; that Trump was bombastic, mendacious and boastful was priced in, but the sheer weakness of Biden’s performance and his apparent lack of acuity were horribly striking. The president will turn 82 later this year, and, being charitable, he is clearly not at his sharpest all the time, but even if you regard this simply through the lens of appearances, voters who watched or who see snippets on the news or social media will see a head of state who looks like he should be eased towards the exit, rather than elected for another four-year term. There are still four months till polling day, but, on Thursday’s performance, the Democrats stand a good chance of losing in November largely on the strength (or weakness) of Biden as a candidate. Sobering stuff.
“Alex Chalk, Lord Chancellor: How To Fix Britain’s Prisons?”: the long-form interviews Rory Stewart and Alastair Campbell conduct under the “Leading” banner of their podcast The Rest Is Politics are reliably fascinating and worthwhile, the 45-minute length giving them the opportunity to delve into issues and get under the skin of interviewees. This week, for the first time, their guest was a serving cabinet minister (for the moment…), Alex Chalk, lord chancellor and justice secretary. He is not the most high-profile Conservative figure and was only promoted to cabinet in April 2023, but his current brief—the court system, prisons and probation, human rights and civil liberties—is hugely important and immediate. Chalk was a few years ahead of Rishi Sunak at Winchester then read history at Oxford before becoming a barrister, then won Cheltenham back from the Liberal Democrats in 2015. He is reserved and occasionally awkward but appealingly human, and tries to engage honestly and fairly with his interlocutors, and comes across as someone with a genuine sense of public service. But he held his seat by only 981 votes in 2019, so this is likely his swansong for the moment, which is a shame.
Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing (Benjamin Franklin)
“Leadership in modern war”: I’ve cited the excellent Substack of Mick Ryan, Futura Doctrina, before, and this first part of a meditation on military leadership is typically excellent, drawing on his careful study of the war in Ukraine. You may recall that Ryan’s last major job before “retirement” was four years as commander of the Australian Defence College, the education and training provider for the Australian Defence Force, so this is a subject in which he’s steeped. The conflict in Ukraine since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 has been a smörgåsbord of lessons in doctrine, strategy, tactics and military technology, and academies around the world will be studying it for years to come. One section struck me in particular, a reminder that we do not always do what logically serves our own interests: “it is far from certain that all of the current generation of political leaders will heed all of these lessons. It is up to voters in democracies to select those political candidates for office who are most likely to have learned from them.” Amen to that.
“The only comforting thing about Biden vs. Trump: One of them will lose”: George Will in The Washington Post again, for which I apologise not one jot (nor tittle). He is a veteran conservative and a never-Trumper, and he neatly illustrates the absurdity to which American politics has brought itself: two terrible candidates (not equally bad, but both bad), and an electorate which is now in some parts simply telling itself lies. While in office, Donald Trump, uniquely in modern US political history, never achieved a 50 per cent approval rating, but now more than half of voters rate his 2017-21 presidency a success. We can all draw our own conclusions about which perspective is more accurate. Perhaps the most ominous phrase is this: “Not since 2004 has a majority said the nation is on the right track”. Still, Will is right to say that, come 6 November (or so), one of the two, Biden or Trump, will have lost, and that is some small comfort. But these are dark days.
“Assange flies home”: the long-running, rather grubby saga of Julian Assange has finally drawn to a close. The Australian WikiLeaks founder agreed a plea bargain with American prosecutors whereby he appeared in a US court in Saipan in the North Mariana Islands, admitted guilt on one charge of conspiracy to obtain and disclose national defence information, was sentenced to time already served and allowed to fly home to Australia. The case is now closed, though Assange cannot visit the United States except by invitation. I have a visceral aversion to Julian Assange and cannot overlook the fact that he released all the information he had illegally obtained without redaction, knowingly endangering lives, but here is not the place for an extended discussion of the issue. I draw attention to this Substack by the excellent, learned and thorough Joshua Rozenberg which will, at the very least, inform.
“Producer Jerry Bruckheimer on studios vs streamers, Axel Foley’s return and trying to make Top Gun 3”: if you are my age (and I am), the films produced or co-produced by Jerry Bruckheimer loom large in your cultural landscape: Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun, Crimson Tide, The Rock, Con Air, Black Hawk Down, Pirates of the Caribbean. They are both diverse yet familially connected, bold, brash, unashamedly commercial movies but made to the highest standards and with greater depth and texture than at first is apparent. At 80 he is still busy, with Beverly Hills Cop: Axel F about to appear on Netflix and another sequel, Bad Boys: Ride or Die, having arrived in cinemas in recent weeks. This profile in The Financial Times by Danny Leigh is a fascinating examination of a man who first tasted Hollywood success in an era that now seems impossibly distant but who has absorbed and understood the changes in entertainment and culture. He explains his ability to make films which find large audiences simply: “My great advantage is I usually feel the same way they do”.
“What Would a Far-Right Victory Mean for French Foreign Policy?”: today sees the first round of voting in the unexpected elections for the French National Assembly, called by President Macron after the Rassemblement National performed strongly in the European Parliament election earlier in the month. He hopes that the French electorate, faced with the prospect of Marine Le Pen’s party taking power, will shy away and return to more centrist groups, but his gamble is looking fragile. This Foreign Policy analysis by Célia Belin and Mathieu Droin examines what effect an RN victory would have on international relations, traditionally the preserve of the president rather than his prime minister. There is a fundamental ideological tension between Macron and the RN, the latter focused on a sovereign France free from both American hegemony and onerous European obligations, and Le Pen has been markedly less enthusiastic in support for Ukraine than the president. Nothing is certain, but this provides some useful indicators.
Whenever I have bid a hasty goodbye to a loved one…
… as the great Robert Plant once said, I’ve always made sure that my record collection was safely stored away in the boot of the car. Worth thinking about. À bientot.