Reflections on politics of the week

Merkel's legacy and enduring hold, a new Master for Balliol is sought and an MP demands blasphemy laws to protect Islam

The big story of the week was the Second Reading debate in the House of Commons on Kim Leadbeater’s Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill, in which the bill was passed by 330 to 275 and send to its committee stage. There was also a ceasefire agreed between Israel and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon, while Louise Haigh made a late bid for the limelight by resigning as Transport Secretary over a 2013 conviction for making a false report to the police. In the news agenda’s second tier, there were a few items that I wanted to scoop up and flag in the now-traditional way.

Mutti make it better

I have been thinking about Angela Merkel this week. The former Chancellor of Germany has just released her dauntingly weighty memoirs, Freedom, and was interviewed for The Sunday Times Magazine by Decca Aitkenhead. Merkel led Germany for 16 years, only 10 days shy of the record of Helmut Kohl (1982-98); if she had been a British prime minister, only Robert Walpole (1721-42) and William Pitt the Younger (1783-1801, 1804-06) would rank above her for length of tenure. Partly but not wholly for that reason, she holds a powerful fascination for fellow politicians across Europe.

At the same time, her time in office notwithstanding, that fascination is in some ways unlikely. In January, I wrote about leaders who demonstrated an innate flair, a Fingerspitzengefühl or “fingertip sensitivity”, for the profession of politics, and I mentioned in particular Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Boris Johnson. I was also reminded of a review I read recently of a book by professor of sociology and communications Julia Sonnevend, Charm: How Magnetic Personalities Shape Global Politics.

Merkel, by most conventional standards, has none of the usual aspects of charm, charisma or personality which he stereotypically expect in hyper-successful politicians. In a way which many have tried without success, she created a strange but potently winning image by making a virtue of her quiet, undemonstrative, restrained personality which allowed her a huge political dominance in the 2000s and 2010s.

There are superficial but ultimately misleading comparisons with Thatcher, the acme for successful female politicians: Margaret Roberts and Angela Kasner both grew up in the provinces, the former in Grantham in Lincolnshire, the latter in Templin, 50 miles north of Berlin; both had fathers who were public leaders in religion, Alfred Roberts a Wesleyan Methodist local preacher and Horst Kasner a pastor in the Evangelical Church in Berlin-Brandenburg; both trained as scientists, Thatcher reading chemistry at Somerville College, Oxford, Merkel studying physics at Karl Marx University, Leipzig; both went on to research posts, Thatcher at BX Plastics then J. Lyons & Co., Merkel (with greater distinction) at the Central Institute for Physical Chemistry at the Academy of Sciences of the GDR where she was awarded a doctorate in quantum chemistry.

Thereafter I think the comparison fails to apply. Thatcher was politically active from a very early age, served as President of the Oxford University Conservative Association and had fierce ambition and a determination to succeed. She stood for Parliament unsuccessfully in Dartford at the general elections of 1950 and 1951, when she was 24 and 26, before being elected MP for Finchley in 1959, at the age of 33. Merkel, by contrast, partly by virtue of growing up in East Germany, showed no real interest in politics until she joined a new, anti-Communist, Christian democrat party called Democratic Beginning (Demokratischer Aufbruch) at the end of 1989, when she was 34. Despite this, Merkel vaulted to the front rank, being appointed to cabinet rank Helmut Kohl in January 1991 as Minister for Women and Youth (a role the very existence of which Thatcher would have abhorred). By contrast, Thatcher, though obviously able and hard-working, did not reach the shadow cabinet until 1967 and the cabinet itself until 1970.

Their personalities fundamentally differ. In her interview with Merkel, Decca Aitkenhead talks of the former Chancellor’s “distrust of extremes, belief in steering a middle course… understated, depersonalised politics… mastery of consensus-building”, and concluded with a telling sentence: “As we say goodbye, I tell her how many people asked me to beg her to return to political life. Looking not displeased, she says: ‘No.’” By contrast, Margaret Thatcher never fully reconciled herself to the loss of office in November 1990, and her approach to politics was summed up in a speech in Cardiff during the general election campaign in 1979:

I am a conviction politician. The Old Testament prophets didn’t say, “Brothers, I want a consensus.” They said, “This is my faith, this is what I passionately believe. If you believe it too, then come with me.”

Why should Merkel’s anti-charisma, for want of a better phrase, have wielded such almost hypnotic power? Aitkenhead says her “impact is electrifying. It’s as if living history has just walked through the door.” She describes how the former Chancellor “carries herself with a self-contained air of stillness” and attests to a formidable manner in person.

Everything about Merkel’s presence is a study in the exercise of power and control, made all the more formidably impressive for its subtlety. Even her greeting—a level gaze, a steady handshake—feels intimidating. At the end, after she has left, the photographer’s assistant and I exclaim simultaneously: “It’s like she can see everything.” When she looks at you, you feel as if you are being scanned by a human x-ray machine.

That may have been a factor in her dealings with other world leaders. It is telling that she still keeps in contact privately with Barack Obama, Emmanuel Macron and Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission from 2014 to 2019 and before that Prime Minister of Luxembourg for nearly 20 years. It is not the kind of personality which translates to the mass media, however, and there must be more to her popularity and endurance. She led the Christian Democratic Union of Germany into four federal elections, after all, and always won the largest number of seats in the Bundestag. She evicted Gerhard Schröder from the Chancellery in 2005 and then bested three successive leaders of the Social Democratic Party, Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Peer Steinbrück and Martin Schulz.

I have a theory, though it is only that, as I am not German and have never lived in Germany. But I think some of her appeal lay in a combination of two things. The first is that her staid, unflappable, low-wattage image was obviously authentic and honest; she was not creating a persona for public consumption, let alone in a bid to win electoral support. We have an innate distrust of artifice, of a constructed personality, because, after all, if a politician will seek to deceive us about the core of his or her self, what else is a deception, a misdirection or an evasion? (There is one striking exception to this rule in the person of Boris Johnson, whose wholly contrived and calculated image nevertheless endeared him to many people who were not otherwise his natural supporters.)

The second factor, I think, is our admiration for and attraction to the contrary and the counter-intuitive. Although, as voters, we have ourselves created a political culture which prizes charisma, fluency and “relatability”, we still sometimes react positively to a politician who refuses to play that game, who disdains convention and remains true to their instincts and nature. This was part of John Major’s against-the-expectations general election victory in 1992. After the imperial nature of Thatcher’s last years in office, Major was very obviously a less imposing, more ordinary and self-effacing figure. He also came from a more disadvantaged background in socio-economic terms than probably any other leader the Conservative Party has had and had known the grinding effects of genuine poverty and underachievement.

During the election campaign, visiting Luton on 28 March 1992, the Prime Minister was confronted by a crowd of Trotskyists ready to shout him down and disrupt his appearance. When he got off the coach, an aide produced a rudimentary wooden soapbox, on to which Major climbed, and handed him a megaphone. Somehow, this back-to-basics approach (for want of a better phrase) was electrifying. John Simpson described the scene.

Now Major began to orate. Something came over him, some distant memory of being a Young Conservative in the sixties, perhaps, and he grew louder and more confident, and his voice started to drown out the shouting. There was no actual violence, though somehow the unworthy thought came to my mind that if he took a bottle on the head and a trickle of blood were to run down those decorously mild features, it would be worth at least ten marginals to him… Of course, the sight of chanting, egg-throwing lefties did wonders for John Major’s standing. “No one’s going to keep me away from the people,” he proclaimed in his harsh, much imitated, amplified voice, as though anyone was trying to. “We’re going to win this election, we’re going to go on winning it, we’re going to have a clear majority.”

He was right. They did. That simplicity and straightforwardness cut through to the voters. Not only was it a stark contrast with his predecessor, but it emphasised, to his benefit, Major’s ordinariness at a time when the Leader of the Opposition, Neil Kinnock—hardly from a much more exalted background than Major—had become much more polished and statesmanlike, in dark, double-breasted suits and wire-framed glasses.

Look at some of Merkel’s counterparts during her long tenure as Chancellor: Tony Blair, Barack Obama, David Cameron, Emmanuel Macron, Silvio Berlusconi, Donald Trump, Boris Johnson. Different characters but none of them dull or unobtrusive. That allowed Merkel to be seen a safe pair of hands, a reassuring, maternal figure who came to bear the sobriquet “Mutti”. She also benefited from some political successes like a strong economy and deft management of some aspects of the Eurozone crisis and the Global Financial Crisis, and the cumulative reputational effect of being in office for so long.

As Merkel releases her memoirs, her legacy looks a little more tarnished. The coalition government in Berlin has fallen apart and there will be early elections for the Bundestag in February, in which, to be fair, Merkel’s CDU is likely to perform well. But it is hard to decouple her decision to admit a million Syrian refugees in 2015 from the societal crisis in Germany which saw the Alternative für Deutschland win 94 Bundestag seats in 2017 and remain a potent force in German politics. The decision in 2010 to abolish conscription and transform the Bundeswehr into an all-volunteer force, Merkel’s appointment of the utterly ineffective Ursula von der Leyen as Minister of Defence from 2013 to 2019 and the virtual stasis of the defence budget (1.07 per cent of GDP in 2005, 1.33 per cent in 2021) all look like misjudgements in light of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Equally, her government amended 2010’s Energiewende or energy transition in the wake of the Fukushima nuclear disaster in March 2011, and began a phasing out of Germany’s nuclear power stations which was completed in April 2023. It relied heavily, however, on imported gas from Russia, and when those supplies decreased after the invasion of Ukraine, the German government was forced to reactivate coal-fired power stations which had been mothballed in order to make good potential shortages. Even without the benefit of hindsight, pinning so much of the country’s energy policy on imports from Russia was optimistic at best, notwithstanding the active involvement with Gazprom, a Russian state-owned energy giant, of her predecessor Gerhard Schröder.

(James Price, a former special adviser to Conservative cabinet minister Nadhim Zahawi, has written a stinging denunciation of Merkel in The Critic.)

Despite all this, as Decca Aitkenhead noted in her interviewed with former Chancellor, there are lots of people who long for the days of Merkel as the unofficial leader of Europe. It is, in the end, a demonstration of our susceptibility to “vibes”; those who yearn for the days of Merkel remember a time when politics was less polarised, less vicious, less fraught, and when the world was a quieter, less war-torn place. It is easy to forget any hardships or mistakes or policy failures in the 2000s when we look at a world at war in Ukraine, the Middle East and Sudan, with rising tensions in the South China Sea and instability in the Sahel, awaiting a second Trump presidency and feeling cracks appear in relationships around the globe.

I wrote a piece for CulturAll recently on prime ministerial memoirs, ahead of the release of Boris Johnson’s carnival of mendacity, Unleashed, which is even longer than Merkel’s Freedom. I argued that modern autobiographies had become almost wholly exercises in self-justification, creating an instant apologia for a premiership and rebuttal of potential criticisms. I am sure that Merkel’s book is more honest and reflective than Johnson’s, but it is a reminder that at this short distance from her time in office—it is not quite three years since she stepped down—everything is still in flux and the historical assessment of her leadership is very much a work in progress.

The question is, which is to be master?

Jack Blackburn in The Times Diary has spotted that Balliol College, Oxford, is advertising for a new Master, to take office on 1 July 2026 or no later than 1 October 2026, succeeding Dame Helen Ghosh. Before her election as Master of Balliol in 2017, she was Director-General of the National Trust after a 33-year career in the civil service culminating in nearly two years as Permanent Secretary at the Home Office.

Balliol is one of the most prestigious colleges at Oxford, founded in 1263 by John de Balliol and reinforced by further donations by his widow, Dervorguilla of Galloway. (One of their probably six sons was King John of Scotland from 1292 to 1296.) Using that date it lays a claim to be the oldest college in the university, but that is contested by University College, which originated in a grant in the will of William of Durham in 1249, and Merton College, the statutes of which were laid down in 1264 by Walter de Merton, Bishop of Rochester and Lord Chancellor. With 805 students (395 undergraduate and 405 postgraduate) last academic year, it is the seventh-largest of 36 colleges and has assets of about £150 million.

The college has a reputation of formidable scholarship and high academic standards. It secured its place Oxford’s pantheon during the Revd Benjamin Jowett’s tenure as Master between 1870 and 1893. A brilliant and precocious classical scholar, he arrived at Balliol as with an open scholarship in 1836 and remained at the college for the rest of his life. He was, exceptionally, made a Fellow while still an undergraduate and was awarded a first-class degree in 1839, going to be ordained in the Church of England and become a tutor. In 1855, not yet 40 years old, he was appointed Regius Professor of Greek, having been unsuccessful in his bid a year before to become Master of Balliol (his fellow Greek scholar, Revd Robert Scott, was elected). In 1870, however, Scott was appointed Dean of Rochester, and Jowett was named as his successor.

Over the next two decades, Jowett made Balliol a haven of liberal inquiry and outstanding scholarship. The year after his election, the Universities Tests Act 1871 abolished the need to be a communicant member of the Church of England to hold various offices at Oxford, Cambridge and Durham including professorships, fellowships and studentships, and forbade religious tests for any degree except one in divinity. (The Oxford University Act 1854 had allowed non-Anglicans to matriculate for the degree of Bachelor of Arts but not for higher degrees.) Jowett had been an important advocate of this liberalisation, and it paved the way for more extensive scientific inquiry and challenging questions about the origins of mankind.

Jowett had always cultivated his pupils and been keenly aware of their promotion to positions of influence in the university and in public life more broadly, and that remained the case when he was Master: he attracted able young undergraduates, inculcated them with a strong sense of collegiate identity and saw them extend the college’s influence widely. Undergraduates during his tenure as Master included H.H. Asquith, Alfred Milner, Arnold Toynbee, George Curzon, Edward Grey, Herbert Samuel, Hilaire Belloc, H.W. Fowler, Henry Marten and Cosmo Gordon Lang. His insistence on admission by open examination not only increased the intellectual calibre of undergraduates but also allowed those without family connections or influence to compete on a fairer basis. It contributed to creating the college’s distinctive “tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority”, in the words of Asquith.

Balliol has over the years produced four prime ministers (Asquith, Macmillan, Heath and Johnson), five Nobel Prize winners, two Kings of Norway and a president each of Germany and Botswana. In 1996, the three heads of the judiciary in the UK were all Balliol men: Lord Bingham of Cornhill, Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales; Lord Rodger of Earlsferry, Lord President of the Court of Session and Lord Justice General; and Sir Brian Hutton, Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland. Other Balliol graduates include political economist Adam Smith, Justice John Marshall Harland II of the United States Supreme Court, former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Dame Cressida Dick, writer and journalist Christopher Hitchens, poets Robert Browning, Matthew Arnold and Gerard Manley Hopkins, novelists Graham Greene, Anthony Powell, Nevil Shute and Aldous Huxley, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, recently retired Chancellor of Oxford Lord Patten of Barnes, Labour Deputy Leaders Lord Jenkins of Hillhead and Lord Healey, Liberal Party leader Jo Grimond and the current Home Secretary, Yvette Cooper.

Blackburn’s Diary piece mischievously suggested that one Balliol alumnus who might see the attraction in being Master is Boris Johnson. The college is, according to the notice advertising the post, looking for “a substantial personal record of achievement and a robust commitment to the values of teaching, research, and intellectual excellence” and “effective chairing skills, a consensual and inclusive style, and the capacity to work with the Fellowship to design a strategic vision for the College’s future”. The new Master must be “able effectively to promote and protect the College’s interests and studies with a range of internal and external audiences”, and Balliol is, as must be stated nowadays, “keen to encourage applications from women and under-represented groups”. Whether Boris Johnson fulfils any of these criteria is a matter of personal taste.

The successful candidate need not be a former Balliol student; Dame Helen, the incumbent, studied at St Hugh’s College and Hertford College; half of her predecessors since 1900—Andrew Graham (St Edmund Hall), Sir Colin Lucas (Lincoln), Sir Anthony Kenny (St Benet’s Hall), Sir David Keir (New College), Lord Lindsay of Birker (University College)—did not study at Balliol but were fellows or tutors.

If Johnson is an improbable candidate, are there any high-profile names who might find favour? It is far from me, as a matriculated student at Christ Church once upon a time, to make a window into the soul of Balliol, but some prominent Balliol alumni are Rory Stewart, Robert Peston, Sir Geoff Mulgan, George Stephanopoulos, Professor Raj Patel, Matthew Syed, Dan Snow, Rana Dasgupta, Stephanie Flanders and Nicola Horlick. Lord Stevens of Birmingham will become Chair of the Governing Council of King’s College London in January. Simon Case (Trinity College, Cambridge) is about to leave the civil service but is doing so through illness. I imagine Balliol alumna Ghislaine Maxwell is ineligible for some reason or another.

Blasphemer!

At Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, Tahir Ali, the Labour MP for Birmingham Hall Green and Moseley, asked an extraordinary question.

November marks Islamophobia Awareness Month. Last year, the United Nations Human Rights Council adopted a resolution condemning the desecration of religious texts, including the Koran, despite opposition from the previous Government. Acts of such mindless desecration only serve to fuel division and hatred within our society. Will the Prime Minister commit to introducing measures to prohibit the desecration of all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions?

Now, the obvious, slam-dunk answer to this is “Respectfully, no”. The idea that the “desecration” of a religious text would be an offence under the criminal law in the United Kingdom is unthinkable, or should be. Scribble a cock-and-balls on one of the stick figures in your Good News Bible? Fast-tracked through the magistrates’ court, sunshine.

Sir Keir Starmer was less emphatic than one might have liked. Admittedly he is rarely a powerful and emotive speaker, and one can understand the instinct to choose your battles, realise this is an area in which there is little benefit to be had and move on discreetly. Nevertheless his platitudinous urge was at its strongest.

I agree that desecration is awful and should be condemned across the House. We are, as I said before, committed to tackling all forms of hatred and division, including Islamophobia in all its forms.

There are a number of questions one could raise at this point. What is “desecration”? Literally, of course, it is the removal of something’s sacred status, but by extension it means showing disrespect to or damaging something holy; we think instinctively of desecrating graves of violating churches or other sacred spaces. To an extent, though, it can only be defined by those to whom the object or space is holy. Some Hindus believe it is a sign of disrespect to touch any book, let alone a religious text, with the foot, while some Islamic scholars argue that women should not handle the Qu’ran on the grounds that they could be menstruating and therefore ritually unclean. These are infractions which would clearly be impossible to write into law.

What qualifies as a “religious text”? Ali referred to “all religious texts” and “the prophets of the Abrahamic religions” (that is, Judaism, Christianity and Islam), and such a category would obviously be expected to include the Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvin (collectively the Tanakh) as well as the Talmud, the Bible, the Qu’ran and the sunnah and hadith, the Vedas of Hinduism, Theravada Buddhism’s Pāli Canon and the Guru Granth Sahib. What about religions with much smaller followings in the UK? Surely respect cannot be dependent purely on the number of adherents, so why would one except the Thirteen Classics of Confucianism, the Daozang, the Avesta, the Writings of the Báb or the Holy Piby? Does the Book of Mormon qualify, or the writing of Raël? L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics?

Very few religions have a clearly defined and universally accepted canon. The Gnostic gospels are undoubtedly religious texts but are not acknowledged by mainstream Christianity. Are liturgical works like the Book of Common Prayer and the Roman Missal “religious texts”? The Kitab al-Majmu’ of Alawism? The Umm al-Kitāb? Kabbalist texts? Unless we decide that the definition of a religion should be written into statute, then a “religious text” is largely in the eye of the beholder. It is one because someone says it is.

We know this is not what Ali meant. He was speaking almost exclusively about Islam and about the Qu’ran, and his purpose was clear: he wants the Muslim faith to have protection in law against the “desecration” of its holy texts, but seeks to present a more universal case by a careless invocation of “all religious texts and the prophets of the Abrahamic religions”.

And the answer is no. The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act 2008 finally—albeit grotesquely late—abolished the common law offences of blasphemy and blasphemous libel in England and Wales, although blasphemy was still technically an offence in Scotland until this April, when the woeful Hate Crime and Public Order (Scotland) Act 2021 finally came into force. In Northern Ireland, alas, blasphemy and blasphemous libel remain common law offences.

My position is very simple: no belief system, whether religious or secular, should be protected by law from challenge, criticism or ridicule. That can sometimes extend to what its adherents or subscribers see as “desecration”. The obvious example of why this should be so is perhaps the controversy over the cartoons of the prophet Mohammed which appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, the violent reaction to which left hundreds dead worldwide. It is the criminalisation of giving offence, and offence is a subjective, personal and often irrational feeling. If you say you are offended by something, you cannot be told you are wrong; your motivation and justification may be flawed, but that emotion still exists. But the criminal law cannot be used to transfer the responsibility for what you are feeling to someone else, and apply a sanction to them.

There is a separate category for incitement to hatred or violence. It may be that the act of “desecration” is performed in a way which falls quite properly within the ambit of these offences, and that can be prosecuted under existing laws. That, however, is a determination of intent rather than the mere action.

Imagine that I wittily decided to make a stinging critique of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by having the script and lyrics of the musical The Book of Mormon printed on to the pages of a copy of the actual Book of Mormon. Devastatingly satirical. I have no doubt that many Mormons would find that offensive and insulting, perhaps upsetting, although if I were minded to criticise Mormonism then that would rather be the point. They could argue that it falls within the definition of desecrating a religious text. Tahir Ali’s proposition is that I would be liable for prosecution under a new law, and that, frankly, I find both risible and sinister.

Sam Bidwell in an article in The Critic suggested that Ali was “responding to the pressures of an electoral system in which pandering to particular ethnic or religious groups is a necessity in large parts of the country”. He may have a point. Certainly the general election showed that there are votes to be won by courting—let’s not be coy about this—Muslim voters on issues like the war in Gaza. In theory, there is nothing wrong with MPs tailoring their messages to specific parts of their constituencies’ demographics. On the issue of blasphemy, however, there can be no such appeal without undermining what should be one of the fundamental values of our society, freedom of speech and expression, which includes the freedom to criticise, mock and ridicule.

The Prime Minister’s response on Wednesday was tepid and evasive. On one occasion, that does not matter so much. All parties, however, need to be clear when this issue returns, as it will, that there is no special protection under the law for any religious faith, or any system of philosophical belief. You may not incite hatred or violence, but in a free and liberal society, you absolutely may cause offence. We rely on it.