Sunday round-up 1 December 2024

You won't find Bette Midler, Gilbert O'Sullivan and Georgy Zhukov mentioned together often, but they all have (or had) birthdays today; also the feast of St Edmund Campion

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Today we’ve organised a surprise party—drinks and canapés, BYOB—for American golf legend Lee Trevino (85), somehow-still-alive Doors drummer John Densmore (80), actress, comedian, singer, author and gay icon Bette Midler (79), repeatedly abandoned Irish singer-songwriter Gilbert O’Sullivan (78), second Bulgarian in space Aleksandr Panayotov Aleksandrov (73), director, producer and playwright Stephen Poliakoff (72), “Voice of the Balls” Alan “Deadly” Dedicoat (70), Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell (66), Dallas star and Larry Hagman protegée Charlene Tilton (66), reliably classy actor Jeremy Northam (63), comedian, actress and singer Sarah Silverman (54), journalist and Formula 1 presenter Lee McKenzie (47), actor and (apparently) rapper Riz Ahmed (42), actress, singer, model and celebrity offspring Zoë Kravitz (36) and marvellously monikered basketball player and former Michael Jordan son-in-law Rakeem Christmas (33).

Faded birthday cards of yesteryear for an eclectic crowd including Byzantine princess and historian Anna Komnene (1083), sculptor and godmother of waxworks Marie Tussaud (1761), long-suffering deaf Danish wife of Edward VII Queen Alexandra (1844), Tarka the Otter author and bit-of-a-Nazi Henry Williamson (1895), hero of the Great Patriotic War Marshal Georgy Zhukov (1896), ballerina and choreographer Dame Alicia Markova (1910), Henry VIII-prone actor Keith Michell (1926), friend of Princess Margaret and owner of Mustique Lord Glenconner (1926), comedian, actor, producer, screenwriter and occasional self-immolator Richard Pryor (1940), drug lord and narcoterrorist Pablo Escobar (1949), bass player, songwriter and producer Jaco Pastorius (1951), versatile actor Treat Williams (1951) and singer-songwriter, musician and actress Julee Cruise (1956).

The last best hope of earth

Today in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln delivered his second State of the Union Address to the 37th Congress. He had only been sworn in as President on 4 March 1861, the first Republican ever to win the presidency, and between his election and his inauguration, seven southern states had left the Union: South Carolina, Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana and Texas. The South Carolina militia attacked the United States Army garrison at Fort Sumter on 12 April 1861, and the Civil War began. In his 1862 address, Lincoln stressed the necessity of ending slavery; 10 weeks before, he had issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation which declared that, as of 1 January 1863, “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free”.

At 8,385 words, it was Lincoln’s longest State of the Union Address, and, like every president at that point apart from Washington and Adams, he sent it as a written text. There would not be another State of the Union Address delivered verbally to Congress until Woodrow Wilson in 1913. The war had reached something of an impasse. On 17 September, Major-General George McClellan, commanding the Army of the Potomac, had checked the advance north of General Robert E. Lee’s Army of Virginia at the Battle of Antietam, near Sharpsburg, Maryland. It was and remains the bloodiest day in American history, leaving 22,727 dead, wounded or missing on both sides, and although McClellan’s losses were marginally higher, it is regarded as a Union victory as it brought Lee’s offensive to an end and turned the tide of events. McClellan, however, failed to pursue Lee and exploit the victory, and was relieved of command in November to be replaced by Major-General Ambrose Burnside.

In these circumstances, Lincoln was sober but resolute. Always a wordsmith of outstanding ability, he dug deep for the closing remarks.

The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves, and then we shall save our country. Fellow-citizens, we can not escape history… We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We, even we here, hold the power and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give and what we preserve. We shall nobly save or meanly lose the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which if followed the world will forever applaud and God must forever bless.

His phrase “the last best hope of earth” has subsequently been quoted by Presidents Franklin Roosevelt, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama and Biden. It seems that President Trump has not reached for the phrase.

We’re going to need a new map

This date in 1918 saw a number of political and geographical changes across Europe. It had been only 20 days since the armistice on 11 November had brought the fighting of the First World War to an end. It was initially to last until 13 December, though three extensions would prolong the ceasefire into 1920. Wilhelm II had abdicated as German Emperor and King of Prussia on 9 November, and the monarchy had been abolished, replaced by a Council of the People’s Deputies under the chairmanship of Friedrich Ebert of the Social Democrats. The Austrian Emperor, Karl I, had “relinquish[ed] every participation in the administration of the State” on 11 November and made a similar proclamation as King of Hungary on 13 November, but had carefully avoided an explicit abdication. The Republic of German-Austria and the First Hungarian Republic were proclaimed—neither would last long—as the Habsburg lands fractured and split.

The Kingdom of Romania had absorbed Bessarabia, until 1917 part of the Russian Empire, in March 1918. On 28 November, Bukovina, having only joined the new West Ukrainian People’s Republic at the beginning of that month, was occupied by Romanian forces. Finally, on 1 December, 1,228 ethnic Romanian delegates from across Transylvania, Banat, Crișana and Maramureș gathered in Alba Iulia in central Transylvania and, as the National Assembly of Romanians of Transylvania and Hungary, declared themselves in union with Romania. The so-called Great Union is still commemorated as the national day of Romania, although Bessarabia and Bukovina have since been lost again.

Further north, Iceland and Denmark agreed the Danish-Icelandic Act of Union, which recognised the Kingdom of Iceland as a sovereign state in personal union with the Kingdom of Denmark. Iceland declared its neutrality, and asked Denmark to represent its interests in foreign affairs and defence. First settled by Norwegian migrants in AD 874, Iceland had been established as a commonwealth in AD 930 with the creation of the Alþingi, still the parliament of Iceland today. It had gradually come under the sway of Norway in the 13th century, the chieftains signing the Old Covenant in 1262 to become a vassal of the King of Norway, then in 1380 became part of the Kalmar Union with Sweden, Denmark and Norway. Sweden became independent again in 1524, while Norway became a separate kingdom in 1814 then joined with Sweden within months, leaving Denmark in control of Iceland. A constitution was granted in 1874 and revised in 1903, and in 1904 the Minister for Iceland, a member of the Danish cabinet, was made responsible to the Alþingi, with the stipulation that he was resident in Reykjavik and could read and write Icelandic. Christian X of Denmark became King of Iceland (as Kristján X), although he would be the only holder of the title. Iceland became a republic on 17 June 1944 after a constitutional referendum the previous month.

In the Balkans, where in one sense the First World War had started, the State of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs had been declared in October 1918 in the former Habsburg domains. Its unicameral parliament, the National Council of Slovenes, Croats and Serbs, quickly sought unification with the Kingdom of Serbia. On 1 December, the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes was created, with the 74-year-old Serbian monarch Peter I becoming king and his son Prince Alexander as regent. The government was headed by Stojan Protić, the Serbian Minister of Finance. The new state was informally referred to as Yugoslavia, the “Land of the South Slavs”, and in 1929 was officially renamed as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. The monarchy was abolished in November 1945.

The Habsburgs were not quite played out. In March 1919, the former Emperor left Austria for Switzerland. As he left, he issued a proclamation in which he said “Whatever the national assembly of German Austria has resolved with respect to these matters since 11 November is null and void for me and my House”. The Constitutional Assembly of German-Austria responded on 3 April with the Law concerning the Expulsion and the Takeover of the Assets of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine, which officially dethroned and exiled the Habsburgs. In Hungary, however, a conservative coalition reestablished the kingdom in February 1920 but it was clear that the Allies would not permit a return of the Habsburg monarchy. On 1 March, the National Assembly invited the last Commander-in-Chief of the Austro-Hungarian Navy, Vice-Admiral Miklós Horthy, to become Regent for an absent (and unidentified) monarch.

Karl, in exile in Switzerland, believed that Horthy would support his restoration and that he would be welcomed by the people. In March 1921, he crossed into Hungary and arrived in Szombathely near the Austrian border, and lodged with a prominent monarchist, Count János Mikes. In the early hours of 27 March, Karl held a small privy council meeting then drove to Budapest to meet Horthy. The Regent advised his Emperor to return to Switzerland, doubting the Allies would accept his restoration or that the people would greet him warmly; the assembly returned from its Easter break to pass a resolution supporting the status quo and praising Horthy; and Karl, disappointed and dejected, left. He returned in October and this time bypassed the Regent, but assembled a military force to take Budapest. The army refused to join him, however, and the country teetered on the brink of civil war, until Karl and his pregnant wife Zita were arrested. A few days later, the imperial couple were transferred to HMS Glowworm and taken down the River Danube to the Black Sea, where HMS Cardiff collected them and took them to exile in Madeira. On 9 March 1922, the Emperor caught a cold which developed into bronchitis and pneumonia, and died of respiratory failure on 1 April at the age of 34.

A woman about the House

On this day in 1919, Viscountess Astor became the first woman to take her seat in the House of Commons. She had been elected Unionist MP for Plymouth Sutton on 28 November, at a by-election caused by her husband Waldorf’s succession as 2nd Viscount Astor (he had been an MP since 1910). Nancy Astor was not the first woman elected to the House of Commons: that distinction goes to Constance Markievicz, returned for Sinn Féin in Dublin St Patrick’s at the general election of December 1918, but as an Irish Republican, she had not taken her seat. Instead Markievicz had been recognised along with her Sinn Féin colleagues in the first Dáil Éireann, although she was at that point in Holloway Prison.

Astor was an American, born Nancy Witcher Langhorne in Virginia, the eighth of 11 children. She had previously (1897-1903) been married to socialite Robert Gould Shaw II, before moving to England with her younger sister Phyllis in 1905. The following year she married the (also American-born) Waldorf Astor, eldest son of Anglo-American hotelier, newspaper owner and philanthropist William Waldorf Astor. With a country seat at Cliveden in Buckinghamshire and a London home at No. 4 St James’s Square, Nancy became a leading society hostess and became close to members of the circle around former High Commissioner for South Africa Viscount Milner. Among “Milner’s Kindergarten”, she formed a close bond with the charming, aristocratic and probably repressed homosexual Philip Kerr, later 11th Marquess of Lothian. He had just experienced a spiritual crisis and turned from his Roman Catholicism to an interest in Christian Science, and he and Nancy converted to the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1914.

She was not in every respect an obvious politician. Nancy had little detailed knowledge of political issues, could be virulently anti-Catholic and antisemitic, was a vocal campaigner for teetotalism and could be cuttingly waspish. But she was clever and witty, and her American (relative) informality held a peculiar charm for the voters of Plymouth. She was shrewd enough to moderate the expression of her views on alcohol, and evinced a new-found interest in women’s suffrage. The by-election was not even close: although her share of the vote was considerably less than her husband’s a year before, she still won more than 50 per cent, and had a majority of 5,203 over the Labour candidate.

Astor was introduced into the House by the Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, and the Lord President of the Council (and former Prime Minister) A.J. Balfour. She would remain an MP until 1945, when, aged 66, she retired, her Plymouth Sutton seat falling to Labour’s Lucy Middleton. She did not go willingly: her husband, with whom her relationship had become strained after he suffered a heart attack, told her he and the family would not support her candidacy if she stood for re-election, and she was becoming a political embarrassment because of her tendency to speak freely but without judgement. Her antisemitism became more pronounced, and there was a widely believed rumour, which she denied, that she had referred to soldiers serving in Italy as “D-Day dodgers”.

There are a number of witticisms attributed to Astor, many in exchange with Winston Churchill but of dubious provenance. One which is more likely than some to be true is that he asked her what disguise he should wear to a masquerade ball. She responded “Why don’t you come sober, Prime Minister?” Nancy Astor died on 2 May 1964, aged 84.

In other news…

If you’re feeling like a spot of veneration, it is the feast of St Castritian, a mid-3rd century AD Bishop of Milan about whom almost nothing is known; of St Ansanus (AD 285-AD 304), a Roman aristocrat who was arrested for preaching the Gospel in Bagnoregio, scourged and thrown into a pot of boiling oil then decapitated; of St Ursicinus of Brescia (d AD 347), a bishop who participated in the Council of Serdica; of St Eligius (AD 588 -AD 660), a Frankish goldsmith who became Bishop of Noyon-Tournai and is the patron saint of the Royal Electric and Mechanical Engineers; of St Grwst the Confessor (5th-6th century AD) who was a missionary to the Kingdom of Gwynedd; of St Alexander Briant (1556-81), St Edmund Campion (1540-81) and St Ralph Sherwin (1550-81), three Catholic priests and missionaries to Elizabethan England convicted of high treason and hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn; and of St Charles de Foucauld (1858-1916), a French soldier and priest who went to live among the Tuareg in southern Algeria and was murdered by Bedouin raiders.

Away from the saints of Heaven, it is World AIDS Day, Sovereignty Day (Fullveldisdagurinn) in Iceland (see above), Restoration of Independence Day in Portugal, Freedom and Democracy Day in Chad and Damrong Rajanubhab Day in Thailand.

Factoids

1. President Rutherford B. Hayes (1877-81), a Republican from Ohio, installed the first telephone in the White House. There are conflicting reports of the date but it seems to have been some time in 1878, and the device was placed in the telegraph room. The telephone number was 1, and it was connected to the United States Department of the Treasury, which was located across the road at 1500 Pennsylvania Avenue.

2. Hayes had already become the first US President to use a telephone. In June 1877, he travelled to Warwick, Rhode Island, to address Civil War veterans at a clambake. Alexander Graham Bell, the Scottish-born inventor who had patented the telephone the previous year, was in an hotel 13 miles away and had arranged for a device to be provided for the President. When Hayes put the telephone to his ear, Bell said solemnly “Mr President, I am duly sensible of the great honour conferred upon me in this for the first time presenting the speaking telephone to the attention of the President of the United States. I shall be very glad to hear something in reply, if you please.” Hayes had perhaps not considered the historic nature of the moment, because the first words ever spoken by telephony by a president of the United States were “Please, speak a little more slowly”.

3. The overlooked irony of entitling a charity record to raise money for Ethiopia “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (see below) is that when it’s Christmas in western Europe, it isn’t in Ethiopia. The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church celebrates Christmas, or Ganna, on 7 January, which in its calendar is the 29th day of Tahsas. (The Russian, Greek and Serbian Orthodox Churches also mark the birth of Christ in 7 January.)

4. The Orthodox Church of Ukraine formerly celebrated Christmas on 7 January like the other Orthodox communities. In May 2023, however, its Council of Bishops approved a proposal to adopt the Revised Julian Calendar, which would move Christmas to 25 December. This decision, to switch from the date recognised in Russia to that recognised in western Europe, may not have been unconnected to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

5. Karl I, the last Emperor of Austria-Hungary (see above), was succeeded as head of the House of Habsburg by his eldest son, Archduke Otto, who was nine years old when his father died. Karl had never formally abdicated, so legitimists regarded Otto as Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. He was baptised Franz Joseph Otto Robert Maria Anton Karl Max Heinrich Sixtus Xaver Felix Renatus Ludwig Gaetan Pius Ignatius, with the intention that he would eventually reign as Franz Joseph II, and his mother, Empress Zita, made sure he spoke not only German but also Hungarian, Croatian, English, Spanish, French and Latin in preparation for his eventual restoration (she lived until 1989). After his father died in Madeira, he lived in the Basque country, Belgium, France, Portugal, the United States, France (again), Spain (again), Austria and Germany. In May 1961, he renounced any claim to the Austrian throne in order to be able to enter the country and became a citizen in 1965. From 1979 to 1999, he represented the Bavarian Christian Social Union in the European Parliament, eventually becoming the most senior member. Dr Otto von Habsburg died in July 2011.

6. If the Habsburg monarchy had survived beyond 1918, Otto, presumably using the regnal name Franz Joseph II, would have been Emperor for 89 years (1922-2011). That would have made him comfortably the longest reigning monarch in history, beating King Louis XIV of France (1643-1715), who ruled France for 72 years.

7. It may be apocryphal, but it is said that Otto once inquired of some people watching a football match who the participating teams were. “It’s Austria-Hungary,” he was told. “Against whom are they playing?” he asked in response.

8. On Friday the House of Commons debated the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill introduced by Labour MP Kim Leadbeater. She represents Spen Valley, previously Batley and Spen, and is the fourth woman of five Members of Parliament for the area since 1983, following Tracy Brabin (2016-21), Jo Cox, Leadbeater’s older sister (2015-16) and Elizabeth Peacock (1983-97).

9. The constituency of Spen Valley had previously existed between 1885 and 1950. It was the scene of a dramatic by-election on 20 December 1919 (although the votes were not counted until 3 January 1920). The sitting MP, Sir Thomas Whittaker, a businessman approaching his 70th birthday, had been elected as a Liberal in 1892, and at the 1918 general election had received the so-called “Coupon” which indicated he had the support of Lloyd George’s coalition government. After his death, the Liberal faction which supported Lloyd George nominated Colonel Bryan Fairfax, a distinguished army officer, while the candidate of the official Liberal Party, still led by former Prime Minister H.H. Asquith, was Sir John Simon, the ex-Home Secretary who had been defeated in Walthamstow East the year before. Labour put up Tom Myers, a 47-year-old former miner and glass worker who sat on Dewsbury Borough Council, and with the two Liberal candidates splitting the vote, Myers came through the middle to win by 1,718 votes ahead of Simon, with Fairfax a disheartening third. It was a humiliation for the coalition government, The Times calling it a “political event of great significance” and “a humiliation which cannot be explained away”. It was also indicative of the headlong rise of the Labour Party: from two MPs in 1900, they had grown to 29 in 1906, 40 in January 1910, 42 in December 1910 and 57 in 1918. At the following general election in 1922, while Myers lost Spen Valley by 787 to Sir John Simon, Labour would see 142 MPs returned as the party took second place from the Liberals. By January 1924, the first Labour government was sworn in.

10. Sir John Simon is one of only two politicians, along with the Conservative Rab Butler, to have held three of the Great Offices of State—Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary and Home Secretary—but never to become Prime Minister (James Callaghan is the only person to occupy all four). Simon was Home Secretary twice (1915-16 and 1935-37), Foreign Secretary from 1931 to 1935 and Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1937 to 1940, and Churchill appointed him Lord Chancellor in 1940, in which role he excelled. At Oxford, he had played in the Wadham College Rugby XV with F.E. Smith, like him Solicitor General, Attorney General and Lord Chancellor, and C.B. Fry, the legendary England cricket captain who also played in the 1902 FA Cup Final for Southampton, represented the University of Oxford and Barbarians in rugby, stood for Parliament three times as a Liberal and turned down the throne of Albania. Simon began his career as a radical Liberal, drifted rightwards, created and led the National Liberal Party in 1931 which broke with the official party over free trade, and by the late 1930s, as Neville Chamberlain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, was effectively a Conservative. A chilly and aloof man, he invited cabinet colleagues to call him “Jack”, but only Jimmy Thomas, the good-natured Labour MP and former trade unionist, could bring himself to do so.

“Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.” (George Will)

1. “Michael Mann on Ferrari, Heat, Collateral and his career to date”: earlier this year the director/producer/screenwriter was interviewed at BFI by Edith Bowman and, like most outstanding filmmakers, is worth listening to. Mann took a degree at the London Film School in 1967 and worked in Britain for some years so is an adopted native. He became famous for the TV series Miami Vice, stylish, stylised and compelling, and went on to make films that should guarantee his place in the cinematic pantheon: Manhunter (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Ali (2001), Collateral (2004), Ferrari (2023). (He also produced The Aviator (2004) and Ford v. Ferrari (2019).) He is currently working on the screenplay for Heat 2, so, we’ll see. For me, there’s something absolutely distinctive and visually gorgeous about Mann’s films: the opening panoramic shots of The Last of the Mohicans are breathtaking and Manhunter is one of my favourite films. He’s still very much up in the hunt, and his conversation with Bowman is full of interest and insight.

2. “The Making of Do They Know It’s Christmas?”: it is 40 years—I know, I know—since Bob Geldof and Midge Ure gathered the biggest music stars of the day at SARM Studios in Notting Hill to record a charity single to raise money for the famine in Ethiopia. Geldof had contacted the artists individually, using his uniquely persuasive charm to ask them to donate their time, and he had one criterion: how famous they were, because that, he knew, would determine the sales of the record. It was an astonishing roster: U2, Spandau Ballet, Duran Duran, Bananarama, Paul Weller, Status Quo, Paul Young, Heaven 17, the Boomtown Rats, Kool and the Gang, George Michael, Ultravox, Marilyn, Sting, Jody Watley of Shalamar, Phil Collins and Culture Club, Boy George flying back from New York on Concorde to take part. This documentary assembles footage of that chaotic day which showed that even debauched, fame-drunk 1980s stars were, at their core, generous and kind people.

3. “Open Book: Winston Churchill”: yesterday was the 150th anniversary of Churchill’s birth. Here, on his Open Book podcast, Anthony Scaramucci speaks to Professor David Reynolds about the wartime prime minister and his reputation in the light of Reynolds’s most recent book, Mirrors of Greatness: Churchill and the Leaders Who Shaped Him. There is a great deal of controversy at the moment about the historiography of Churchill, much of which seems, to me, to skirt round a fundamental point. He was imperfect, hugely and sometimes gloriously flawed, but he was also a titanic figure whose breadth and depth outstripped any of his contemporaries, and in 1940 he was a rare historical instance of the right man at the right time. Reynolds is anything but an apologist or hagiographer, and he sets the tone and context perfectly.

4. “This Week (1973): Mortgages, interest rates and the housing market”: from 1956 to 1992, with only an eight-year hiatus, Thames Television’s weekly current affairs programme was a huge presence in the news landscape. I came across this 1973 edition by chance, and while a challenging housing market and hard-pressed consumers may be resonant now, I include it because it reminds us just how different politics on television was half a century ago. Jonathan Dimbleby, then not quite 30, speaks to former Chancellor of the Exchequer Reginald Maudling, Shadow Environment Secretary Anthony Crosland and Roy Cox of the Alliance Building Society. Maudling and Crosland were intellectual heavyweights who make no concessions to a lay audience but neither had long left: Crosland was dead within four years, Maudling within six (ironically Maudling was sacked as Shadow Foreign Secretary a few days after Crosland took on the Foreign Office). Invigorating.

5. “Britain’s Killer Wave of 1607”: I’ll be honest and confess I watch very little on Channel 5, but this enjoyable documentary tells the little-known story of the floods in the Bristol Channel in January 1607 which killed more than 2,000 people. With no modern flood defences, the inundation devastated hundreds of square miles of low-lying land in Somerset, Devon, Gloucestershire, Monmouthshire and Carmarthenshire. Its cause is thought to be a combination of a high astronomical spring tide, strong winds and stormy weather (there was coastal flooding the same day in East Anglia), though it has also been ascribed to a tsunami, an explanation which is not universally accepted. Predictably, a Puritan preacher, William Jones of Usk, saw the hand of the Almighty, publishing a pamphlet entitled God’s warning to his people of England By the great over-flowing of the waters. To the people of the time, however, such sudden and unimaginable devastation must have seemed like a punishment for something.

“I write to discover what I know.” (Flannery O’Connor)

1. “Friedrich Merz may be the only man to save Europe”: William Hague’s column in The Times this week looked at Friedrich Merz, leader of Germany’s centre-right Christian Democratic Union and the overwhelming favourite to emerge from the impending Bundestag elections as the 10th Chancellor of Germany since the Federal Republic was established in 1949. Hague identifies three pan-European crises—low growth, an aggressive Russia and the rise of mass migration—and argues that Germany is the only country large and powerful enough to take a lead in addressing them. There is a degree of irony, in this era on anti-establishment and populist feeling, that one of the best hopes of mainstream conservatives rest with a 69-year-old upper middle-class corporate lawyer and multimillionaire who has worked with some of the bluest of blue-chip companies including Ersnt and Young, HSBC, BlackRock and Deutsche Börse. Merz, direct, assertive, sometimes hard-edged, is not an easy man to like, but, as Hague says, “It will be up to him whether Germany can escape from its own despair… and give the lead no one else can any longer provide”.

2. “A Guide for the Politically Homeless”: a thoughtful article from The Atlantic by veteran political scientist Eliot A. Cohen on the difficulties facing those who find their political allegiances out of kilter with their traditional parties. The Republican Party is now almost wholly in the grip of the Trump cult of personality and Führerprinzip, while there is a strong element among Democrats of identitarianism and a radical progressivism in social and cultural matters. If you look at where the two parties were in 1980, let alone in 1960, they are all but unrecognisable. Cohen offers a series of questions for “conservatives” to pose to themselves to understand better where they fit in a political spectrum and who their natural allies might be. The challenge is all the more stark in the United States because the two main parties are the only shows in town, and have been for 170 years (excepting perhaps the brief flourishing of Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive Party in the 1910s). I wonder if the Republican Party has much life left in it now, and whether there is any prospect of non-Trumpian centre-right politicians and voters creating a viable new movement: it would be one of the greatest upheavals in American politics if it were to happen.

3. “The United Kingdom constitution—a mapping exercise”: it is a commonplace the the United Kingdom lacks a written constitution, but it isn’t true. What we lack, compared to some countries, is a codified constitution, a single document which sets out what the UK is and how it is governed. Instead we rely on an eclectic mix of statute, the royal prerogative powers, case law and convention, which makes our constitutional arrangements flexible or fragile, depending on your perspective. The hugely knowledgeable Dr David Torrance of the House of Commons Library has bravely attempted the codification we lack, setting out in detail all of the sources of the UK’s governance in as logical a way as possible. I’m not in favour of a written and codified constitution and think our arrangements are more robust than some people give them credit, but in any event this is a useful and interesting exercise.

4. “No. 10: The Geography of Power at Downing Street”: I read this a couple of years ago but was reminded of it this week when I found myself sitting next to its author, Dr Jack Brown, at a dinner. It combines a description of the Prime Minister’s official (and iconic) residence off Whitehall and entertaining anecdotes about the history of the building with a very serious consideration of the ways in which the physicality of Number 10, which is in reality three slightly ramshackle late 17th century townhouses knocked together for Sir Robert Walpole in the 1730s, has influenced those who live and work there. It is a frequent complaint that Downing Street is utterly unsuited as the office of the head of government of a major power: Jonathan Powell, Tony Blair’s Chief of Staff, wanted to relocate the prime minister’s staff to the Queen Elizabeth II Conference Centre on Broad Sanctuary, just behind Parliament Square. Number 10 is cramped, its facilities are poor and it is badly laid out, yet, nearly 300 years after Walpole took possession, his successor as First Lord of the Treasury is still in residence. Which is, I think, very British.

5. “A columnist’s first 50 years”: one of my favourite writers on politics and the world in general, George F. Will, has been writing op-ed columns for The Washington Post for half a century, beginning in the early months of the Ford presidency. America was still reeling from the unprecedented resignation of the 37th President of the United States, Richard Milhous Nixon, over the Watergate scandal. There are times now when those fraught times seem almost idealised in their orderliness and high-minded sobriety. This meditation on the role of the columnist is gently lyrical, affectionate and wise, and, if you spend much of your life both reading and writing op-eds, as I do, it hits hard. God preserve you, Dr Will.

The story of love is hello and goodbye…

… as Jimi Hendrix said the night he died, until we meet again. Bis zum nächsten Mal.