Sunday round-up 9 June 2024
It is the feast of St Columba, the Apostle of the Picts, and there is cake for Charles Saatchi, Patricia Cornwell, Aaron Sorkin and Johnny Depp
The perennial reminder of those for whom a hastily scribbled birthday card inexplicably slipped your mind today: former Conservative MP and long-time Michael Heseltine loyalist Michael Mates (90), advertising guru, art benefactor and sometimes-assault enthusiast Charles Saatchi (81), Glaswegian Booker Prize winner James Kelman (78), gazillion-selling crime author Patricia Cornwell (68), legendary screenwriter, playwright and produced Aaron Sorkin (63), actor and campaigner Michael J. Fox (63), actor and professional rogue Johnny Depp (61) and Academy Award winner Natalie Portman (43).
Also born on this day but, for good or ill, no longer with us: Peter the Great, tsar of all Russia (1672), “Father of the Railways” and perhaps the greatest ever Geordie (maybe even source of the appellation “Geordie”) George Stephenson (1781); composer and songwriter Cole Porter (1891); motor industry savant and tortured US secretary of defense Robert McNamara (1916); legendary stand-up comedian and rabbi Jackie Mason (1931); and soul singer and “Mr Excitement” Jackie Wilson (1934).
On this day in AD 68, Nero—surely the most annoying Roman emperor?—facing a rebellion and learning that the Senate had declared him a public enemy, decided to commit suicide. “Qualis artifex pereo!” he muttered as he paced. “What an artist the world is losing!” He couldn’t quite bring himself to do it: first he asked one of his companions to set an example and kill himself, which was not received well, then eventually he asked his private secretary, Epaphroditus, to perform the deed. His death marked the end of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, and turmoil was ahead: AD 69 was the “Year of the Four Emperors”, as Nero was succeeded by Galba, who was assassinated in January; the leader of the revolt, Otho, became emperor for three months before stabbing himself in the heart; Vitellius, a man so cruel he was rumoured to have starved his own mother to death, reigned for eight months before being seized by rebels, killed and thrown into the Tiber; and in November the imperial dignity was taken by a relatively modest-born general, Vespasian. He would manage 10 years.
On this day in 1959, the USS George Washington was launched at the General Dynamics Electric Boat shipyard in Groton, Connecticut. She was the world’s first nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarine, the lead boat of a class of five, and the launch was overseen by Ollie Mae Anderson, wife of the Treasury secretary Robert B. Anderson (who had been secretary of the Navy 1953-54). The Soviet Union had been able to launch ballistic missiles from submarines since the mid-1950s, though only when the submarine was on the surface, but the George Washington, armed with 16 Polaris A-1 missiles, changed the game: now, nuclear missiles could be launched from a submarine underneath the ocean and, being powered by a nuclear reactor rather than a diesel motor, she could stay on patrol and submerged for periods of time limited only by the available stores and the endurance of the crew. This combination of capabilities led ultimately to the concept of continuous at-sea deterrence (CASD), the policy of always having a nuclear-armed submarine on patrol somewhere in the world. The Labour Party this week committed to retaining CASD, and it is quite something to reflect that at every moment since April 1969, there has been a Royal Navy submarine on patrol, theoretically able to launch nuclear missiles.
Today is Autonomy Day in Åland, a tiny, autonomous, demilitarised region of Finland. It consists of Fasta Åland, an island on which 90 per cent of the population of 30,129 live, and around 6,500 islands and skerries to its east. Ceded by Sweden to Russia in 1809, Åland was demilitarised under the provisions of the Treaty of Paris which brought the Crimean War to an end in 1856. In 1919, shortly after the Grand Duchy of Finland gained its independence from the Russian Empire, the overwhelming majority of the Åland population petitioned to be allowed to rejoin Sweden, but Finland refused and made a counter-offer of autonomy. The question was referred to the nascent League of Nations in 1921, and the Åland Convention was agreed in October and signed by Sweden, Finland, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, Denmark, Poland, Estonia and Latvia. It was the league’s first international agreement. Autonomy Day is celebrated today to commemorate the first plenary session of the Lagting, the regional assembly, in the capital Mariehamn in 1922.
It is the feast of St Columba, the “Apostle of the Picts”, who travelled from Ireland to Scotland in AD 563 and began converting the population to Christianity. He was in his early 40s at that stage, a monk born in Gartan in the Kingdom of Tyrconnell (roughly modern-day Donegal) and spent the remaining 34 years on his life in missionary work, founding the abbey of Iona where he would die and be buried (although his relics were removed in AD 849 and shared out between Ireland and Scotland). In AD 565, he encountered a great “water beast” which attacked his disciple Lugne, and banished it to the depths of Loch Ness. It has been suggested this was the famous monster which some still claim to see (the most recent sighting was in 2021). St Columba is the patron saint of Derry/Londonderry, floods, bookbinders, poets, Ireland and Scotland.
For Americans, today is National Donald Duck Day and National Strawberry Rhubarb Pie Day. You do you, honeys. It is also Writers Rights Day, behind which I am very happy to place myself. Very specifically, for those of a Hertfordshire disposition, it is Stevenage Day.
Factoids
Until recently, the longest named street in the world was (arguably) Dundas Street in Ontario, which ran from the Beaches area of Toronto to Kensington Bridge in London, a distance of nearly 200 kilometres. Its earliest sections were laid out as Governor’s Road in Coote’s Paradise at the western end of Lake Ontario in 1793 and soon renamed in honour of Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, secretary of state for war (1794-1801). In 2022, however, Toronto City Council voted to rename the street because of Dundas’s links to the transatlantic slave trade. There is a hint or irony in that Dundas supported the abolition of the slave trade and agreed in principle with William Wilberforce’s parliamentary activities to bring it about, but worried in practical terms that instant and wholesale abolition would simply drive the problem to other countries. This was obviously insufficient zeal.
For those who share that zeal, some inconvenient and otherwise admirable former slave owners include Simón Bolívar, first president of Colombia, Roman statesmen Cato the Elder and Marcus Tullius Cicero, Founding Fathers George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Hancock, Berber scholar and explorer Ibn Battuta, leader of the Haitian Revolution Toussaint Louverture, Mansa Musa, ruler of the Malian Empire, Greek philosopher Plato and, of course, the Prophet Mohammed. The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.
Mentioning the Founding Fathers, it occurred to me that I didn’t know where many US presidents had been born. The information surprised me: the 45 men who have held the office came from 20 states (or their colonial-era equivalents), one (Andrew Jackson) from a territory between North and South Carolina the borders of which were vague. It is hardly surprising that eight presidents were Virginians, as the state was the first major British colony and remained the largest and wealthiest. But seven presidents came from Ohio, the 17th state to join the Union, and three of them served in succession from 1869 to 1881: Ulysses Grant, Rutherford Hayes and James Garfield. Twelve states have contributed only a single president, including, perhaps surprisingly, the mighty State of California.
Now that we are in the swing of a general election campaign, I have been thinking more than usual about records set by Members of Parliament. The shortest service by an MP, certainly in “the modern era”, to use that weaselly and inexact formulation, was Alfred Dodds, elected Labour MP for Smethwick at the 1945 general election. Although polling took place on 5 July in most constituencies, the results were not declared until 26 July, to allow for votes cast by service personnel overseas to be collected and counted. Dobbs was therefore formally declared the winner, and the next day set off for London. Driving through Doncaster, he swerved to avoid a child in the road, hit a military vehicle and was killed instantly. He had been a Member of Parliament for less than a day.
Some records award the shortest service to Thomas Higgins, a member of the Irish Parliamentary Party elected MP for North Galway in 1906. But this cannot really be counted: on the night of the election, 25 January, Higgins was taken ill, and died of a heart attack, aged 40, at 1.30 am on 26 January. Later that day it was announced that he had beaten the incumbent, independent Nationalist Lieutenant Colonel John Philip Nolan, by 1,521 votes. But he was, of course, by then already beginning to cool.
A handful of MPs have gone on to be heads of government in other countries: Sir James Craig, first prime minister of Northern Ireland from 1921 to 1940, was Unionist MP for East Down 1906-18 and Mid Down 1918-21; W.T. Cosgrave, president of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1932, was Sinn Féin MP for Kilkenny City 1917-18 and North Kilkenny 1918-22 but, like all Sinn Féin Members, did not take his seat; Éamon de Valera, president of the Executive Council (1932-37) and taoiseach (1937-48) of the Irish Free State, then taoiseach of Ireland 1951-54 and 1957-59 then president of Ireland 1959-73, was Sinn Féin MP for East Clare 1917-22 and East Mayo 1918-22, but took neither seat; and Sir Gerald Strickland, prime minister of Malta from 1927 to 1932, was Conservative MP for Lancaster 1924-28.
In Thursday’s essay on D-Day, I mentioned one of the veterans attending the 80th anniversary commemoration in Portsmouth, Keith Whiting, who had been a Royal Marines corporal serving in one of HMS Ramillies’s gun turrets as the battleship provided fire support for the landings. Whiting mentioned that the commanding officer, Captain Gervase Middleton, wore a piupiu, a traditional Māori skirt, over his naval uniform. This was not a random gesture: in 1939, Ramillies had sailed to New Zealand to escort the dominion’s first group of soldiers to the theatre of war. She was the first battleship to visit New Zealand, and a delegation from the Ngāti Pōneke Young Māori Club, a pan-tribal cultural organisation, presented the captain with a ceremonial piupiu which had been blessed for good fortune. Ramillies left Wellington on 6 January 1940 and a large crowd gathered to bid her farewell, singing Pō Atarau (Now Is The Hour), a faux-traditional Māori song popular between the wars. When Middleton became captain in 1943, he often wore the piupiu, “over his uniform, together with his tin hat and his walking stick”, in times of danger to bring Ramillies good luck. It seems to have worked on D-Day: three German torpedo boats engaged Ramillies and her companion HMS Warspite, firing 15 torpedoes, and all but one missed (one struck and sunk a Norwegian destroyer).
Dolphins perceive their environment in part through echolocation, emitting high-frequency clicks from a mass of fatty tissue known as a melon and absorbing the reflections in the lower jaw. One side effect of this method of perception and navigation is that they seem to be able to identify when women are pregnant, detecting changes in their echo profile and “seeing” the foetus. There are reports of the mammals then becoming more curious, attentive and gentle around pregnant women.
Writing about the forthcoming general election specifically in Northern Ireland, I had cause to look at the results of the most recent census in 2021. It is a place dominated by religion and religious identity, of course, but the non-Christian communities are tiny. I noticed, in particular, that 439 people identified as Jewish by religion, while just 62 did so by ethnicity. (The population overall is around 1.9 million.) That said, the Jewish community in Belfast dates back to at least 1652, and the city had a Jewish lord mayor in 1899-1900 and 1904-05, the prosperous linen exporter Sir Otto Jaffe of the Irish Unionist Party. Chaim Herzog, president of Israel from 1983 to 1993, was born in Cliftonpark Avenue in Belfast in 1918, where his father, Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, was a rabbi.
The first Jew to be elected mayor in Ireland was centuries before that, however. William Annyas, whose grandfather was a Marrano Jew who had emigrated from Portugal, became mayor of Youghal, in County Cork, in 1555. This was more than a century before the Edict of Expulsion was revoked in England, when Jews could not be elected to Parliament and there were no universities in Ireland.
Watching TV is the closest you can get to being dead, which is why it’s so relaxing (Sara Pascoe)
“Vasa: The Ghost Ship”: BBC4 showed this excellent documentary about the Swedish warship Vasa, which sank 1,400 yards into her maiden voyage in Stockholm harbour in 1628, was rediscovered in the 1950s and then raised, her hull almost intact, in 1961. Historians and archaeologists have learned an extraordinary amount from the ship and her contents and she now rests in a dedicated museum on the shoreline in Stockholm. It is fascinating not just for the insights into the life of the sailors and soldiers on board but also as a reminder that, for a short time from about 1611 to 1718, Sweden was a major European power, dominating the Baltic Sea. If you ever go to Stockholm, go and see the Vasa. It is simply incredible.
“Traitor”: Friday was the 30th anniversary of the death of Dennis Potter, the controversial and inimitable playwright and screenwriter who authored Pennies From Heaven, Blue Remembered Hills, The Singing Detective and Lipstick On Your Collar. This 1971 drama, part of the BBC’s Play for Today series, stars John Le Mesurier as Adrian Harris, a former Foreign Office official who has defected to Moscow and is facing questions from Western journalists. The character of Harris owes much to Kim Philby, the SIS officer and Soviet double agent who fled to Moscow in 1963 and lived out the remaining 25 years of his life there. Le Mesurier is outstanding, especially if you are largely familiar with him as Sergeant Wilson in Dad’s Army, and he presents an absorbing combination of defiance, pride, anxiety and guilt. He believes he has betrayed his upper-class roots but not his country and is an unapologetic communist, and drinks heavily to comfort himself. Le Mesurier was deeply anxious at taking on such a serious role, but came to regard it as “the best part I ever had on TV” and won the BAFTA for Best Actor in 1972. Scintillating, nuanced, brilliant.
“President Reagan’s Address for the 40th Anniversary of D-Day”: in 1984, Ronald Reagan travelled to France for the 40th anniversary of the Normandy landings, as his successor Joe Biden did this week for the 80th anniversary. One of Reagan’s engagements was at Pointe du Hoc, a fortified position overlooking Omaha Beach the seizure of which in 1944 was entrusted to the US Army’s 2nd Ranger Battalion under Lieutenant Colonel James Rudder. They had to scale daunting cliffs to reach their objective and suffered appalling casualties. In the presence of 62 veterans of the assault, Reagan gave a speech written for him by the brilliant Peggy Noonan, and her text and his delivery produced one of the best pieces of presidential oratory of all time. Reagan, an actor by profession, was a deceptively dazzling performer, able to imbue finely wrought prose with a simplicity, a sincerity and a sense of history that resonated and felt authentic. The cadence and rhythm are mesmerising: “These are the boys of Pointe du Hoc. These are the men who took the cliffs. These are the champions who helped free a continent. These are the heroes who helped end a war.” If you don’t weep, I can’t help you.
“Insomnia”: one of the seemingly numberless movie channels was showing this 2002 Christopher Nolan thriller this week. I first saw it years ago, possibly even at the cinema, and found it very striking and effective. Al Pacino plays an LAPD detective sent to Nightmute, Alaska, to investigate a murder during the months of perpetual daylight and is plagued by insomnia as he struggles to adjust. Nolan brilliantly conceives a weird, disconnected dream-like atmosphere which mirrors the detective’s wooziness. Robin Williams is uncharacteristically but brilliantly controlled and sinister as local crime writer Walter Finch, while Hilary Swank, a young local detective, and Maura Tierney as a Nightmute hotel owner are both superb. Seamlessly and tightly shot and filmed, like all of Nolan’s films, it’s a strangely unsettling watch.
“When the UK’s Economy Capitulated | Kwasi Kwarteng”: this episode of the Rory Stewart/Alastair Campbell podcast series Leading, an offshoot of their wildly successfully The Rest of Politics, is an extended conversation with former chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng, who is leaving the House of Commons. His reputation, for better or worse, is currently pretty low, and many will have little sympathy or regard for him, but it is worth watching as he shows himself, I think, to be quite frank, open and reflective, certainly willing to admit to mistakes. Kwarteng is clearly an intellectually able man, and Stewart remembers encountering him first when they were at Eton together (Stewart is two years older). The young Kwarteng had a self-confidence which has never left him and can come across as arrogance. Nevertheless, I thought this was a fascinating profile, and it is interesting that even Alastair Campbell, a man rarely inclined to flatter ideological opponents, clearly enjoyed Kwarteng’s books on the the imperial phenomenon, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World (2012) and War and Gold: A Five-Hundred-Year History of Empires, Adventures and Debt (2015). The former Spelthorne MP has only just turned 49, and it will be interesting to watch his next move.
If your aim is to change the world, journalism is a more immediate short-term weapon (Tom Stoppard)
“The Big Sleep”: writing an essay about prose last week I returned briefly to Raymond Chandler, the extraordinary Anglo-American pioneer of noir fiction, and felt again the punch and power of his prose. If you’ve never read him, you should and must: Philip Marlowe is the archetype for so many fictional detectives over the past 85 years, and this 1939 novel is his debut. It is dark, complex and sourly witty, taut and spare, and Marlowe was brilliantly portrayed on film in 1946 by Humphrey Bogart. This is where much modern fiction starts, and it is an absolute joy.
“What The West Can Learn From Singapore”: a perceptive and analytical article from Foreign Policy by Graham Allison, professor of government at the Harvard Kennedy School. It examines the effectiveness of governance in the United States, the United Kingdom and Singapore, finding that by a substantial number of criteria Singapore performs far better than either of the others, while lagging behind them substantially in political freedom and personal liberty. This is a particularly timely comparison as one vision of a post-Brexit Britain, emphasising free trade and economic liberty, was caricatured as “Singapore-on-Thames”. Allison makes an effective job of explaining the balancing of rights and opportunities, and there is only one false note I would pick up. He says “From a Western perspective, the possibility that a more autocratic state could govern more effectively than a more open democracy seems almost unthinkable”, which seems to me diametrically wrong. It is surely very possible that an autocracy could govern effectively, but our fundamental desire for freedom requires us to seek a way of navigating between those two imperatives.
“God or Trump?”: Marie Le Conte’s entertaining and sparky Substack, Young Vulgarian, led me to this article from Commonweal, America’s oldest Catholic journal, by Chicago lawyer Thomas Geoghegan. Essentially it suggests that the most fanatical of Donald Trump’s supporters have bestowed almost divine status on him so that they can look to him, rather than to the Bible and traditional Christian morality, as guides for their own behvaiour. Obviously, if Donald Trump is your moral arbiter, very little is off the table. Geoghegan argues, persuasively, that many MAGA devotees were tired of being judged, and Trump “relieves his followers of this sense of shame”. Of evangelical Christianity, so strong a feature of US politics in a way which is utterly absent from our mainstream debate, and its leaders, he suggests “there is no longer any need for them, as they merely offer more secular political ideology, and as Trumpism itself has become more like a real religion”. Usefully, he reminds us that Trump himself is not remotely religious—it would be hard to think of many less observant or spiritual presidents—but his leadership is effectively religious, based on assertion, dogma, tests of faith and absolute, unquestioning loyalty and obedience. Not an uplifting read, but very thought-provoking.
“The problem with Nigel Farage”: this profile of Reform UK’s new leader in The Critic is not utterly unsympathetic. Its author, Paul Goodman, was a Conservative MP from 2001 to 2010, leaning towards the right of the party, but left the House of Commons somewhat disillusioned in the wake of the expenses scandal. From 2013 to this year, he edited the influential website ConservativeHome, and in April he was introduced to the House of Lords as Lord Goodman of Wycombe. He acknowledges some of Nigel Farage’s better qualities and calls him an “icon of protest”, but argues, as I have many times, that Farage is a man to identify problems rather than provide solutions: “he has never held executive office. He has never been Minister for anything. And so he has never been accountable for anything.” Additionally he observes that Farage has always been about Farage and is a deeply unreliable ally, reeling off the names of those he has “left behind/shafted/dicked over”. It is a long one. I recognise the enormous influence Farage has had on British politics over the last 30 years, but there is a tiny sliver of optimism in my heart that, despite all the predictions, perhaps he is pretty much played out. We will see on 4 July.
“Ruth Bader Biden”: a sharply observed piece in The Atlantic by Mark Leibovich which argues that President Biden’s determination to run for re-election on November risks damaging the Democratic Party’s chances of retaining the White House, given the frustrating fact that Donald Trump’s recent conviction on 34 felony charges seems not to have damaged his standing in the polls substantially. Biden will turn 82 a fortnight after election day, and Leibovich makes the telling comparison that Ronald Reagan was 77 when he retired after two terms as president. His supporters may insist that Biden is mentally sharp and focused but there are substantial numbers of voters who see evidence to suggest he is not. Essentially, the party could have chosen a better candidate. The title of the article is a reference to US Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, heroine of the liberal left, who refused suggestions she should resign while Barack Obama was president and therefore would nominate her successor and died in office in 2020, aged 87. Her successor, Amy Coney Barrett, was nominated by President Donald Trump and her confirmation rushed through before that year’s presidential election (the first justice to receive support only from the majority party in the Senate since Justice Joseph Bradley in 1870). The polls in America are still too close to call, but if Trump does return to the presidency, many will ask if Biden’s pride and entitlement allowed the convicted felon to win.
In the words of George Burns…
“Say goodnight, Gracie.”
“Goodnight.”
"it suggests that the most fanatical of Donald Trump’s supporters have bestowed almost divine status on him"....this is worrying. I'm reading Ian Kershaw's 'The Hitler Myth' and Hitler's most ardent followers believed exactly the same thing.
"A handful of MPs have gone on to be heads of government in other countries: ......"
I would question how valid it is to regard post-1922 Northern Ireland as a different country from the pre-1922 United Kingdom. Northern Ireland post-1922 was still a part of the UK, the only difference being that the 26 southern counties had left the Union. Indeed I would extend the same argument to the Southern politicians you mention. They would perhaps say their country hadn't changed, their state had. It depends on how you define "country". How would you classify Sir Charles Gavan Duffy, elected MP for New Ross in 1852, who subsequently emigrated to Australia and ended up as Prime Minister of Victoria?