Sunday round-up 1 June 2025

Birthdays for Morgan Freeman, Brian Cox and the "Son of Sam", Anne Boleyn is crowned Queen and Adolf Eichmann is executed

Postal orders and novelty socks today for staggeringly-popular-in-his-day singer, songwriter, actor, author and philanthropist Pat Boone (91), architect Lord Foster of Thames Bank (90), cartoonist, satirist and illustrator Gerald Scarfe (89), actor, producer and screen legend Morgan Freeman (88), versatile stage and screen actor and Jesus of Nazareth incarnate Robert Powell (81), actor, noted swearword-user and Dundonian Brian Cox (79), businessman, former Formula 1 team principal and McLaren Group founder Sir Ron Dennis (78), stage and screen actor Sir Jonathan Pryce (78), Rolling Stone and indestructible rock and blues musician Ronnie Wood (78), serial killer, resident of Shawangunk Correctional Facility, “Son of Sam” and has-a-parole-hearing-next-May David Berkowitz (72), former Supreme Court Justice Lady Black of Derwent (71), former President and Prime Minister of Mongolia and ex-University of Leeds student Nambaryn Enkhbayar (67), World Sportscar Champion, Le Mans 24 Hours winner and broadcaster Martin Brundle (66), The Cure bassist Simon Gallup (65), singer, actor and noted heterosexual Jason Donovan (57), model, broadcaster, producer and businesswoman Heidi Klum (52), singer-songwriter, musician and actress Alanis Morisette (51), pocket-sized former Liberal Democrat MP and minister Sarah Teather (51), comedian and actress Amy Schumer (44), stand-up comedian Nikki Glaser (41) and not-the-historian-the-other-one-in-the-fillums Tom Holland (29).

Missing out because of mild death are Tudor and Stuart statesman Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury (1563), Mormon leader Brigham Young (1801), noticeably German first King of Greece Otto I (1815), United States Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan (1833), doctor, missionary and pioneer of fingerprinting Henry Faulds (1843), Poet Laureate John Masefield (1878), engineer and father of the jet engine Sir Frank Whittle (1907), legendary journalist, editor, Conservative MP and cabinet minister Lord Deedes (1913), no-description-needed Marilyn Monroe (1926), comedian, writer and presenter Bob Monkhouse (1928), hard-eyed actor Edward Woodward (1930), novelist and neuroscientist Colleen McCullough (1937), excellently named actor Powers Boothe (1948) and former chef, mercenary, oligarch and Wagner Group supremo Yevgeny Prigozhin (1961).

The end of the line

Today in 1879, the imperial house of Bonaparte came to an end. It had arisen in unlikely circumstances: Napoleone di Buonaparte, descended from minor Tuscan and Lombard aristocracy, was born in Corsica in 1769 just over a year after the Republic of Genoa had ceded the island to France under the Treaty of Versailles, and his father, Carlo Maria Buonaparte has supported Pasquale Paoli in the resistance against French rule. Yet Napoleon rose to become Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1814 and again for three months in 1815, while his nephew Louis Napoléon became President of the French Republic in 1848 and then restored the Empire in 1852, becoming Emperor Napoleon III. The Second Empire was dissolved after France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, and the former Emperor went into a rather bourgeois exile in Chislehurst in Kent, before dying on 9 January 1873.

The Empress Eugénie, a Spanish aristocrat by birth, had accompanied her husband into exile. Their only son and heir, Louis Napoleon, the Prince Imperial, had gone ahead a few months before, aged 14, and after the imperial family settled in Kent, he attended some elementary lectures in physics at King’s College London then in 1872 enrolled at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, which trained officers for the Royal Artillery and Royal Engineers. Louis Napoleon finished seventh in his class of 34 and for a time served at Aldershot as an officer in the Royal Artillery. On the death of his father in 1873, he had also been acclaimed by die-hard Bonapartists as Emperor Napoleon IV, and he retained hopes of claiming the throne if the Third Republic, established in 1870, were to falter. There was also some discussion of his marrying Queen Victoria’s youngest daughter, Princess Beatrice, although Louis Napoleon remained a devout Roman Catholic.

In January 1879, after Sir Henry Bartle Frere, High Commissioner for Southern Africa, had demanded that the Zulu king Cetshwayo effectively become a client of the British Crown, Lieutenant General Lord Chelmsford led an expeditionary force into the Zulu Kingdom to impose British control. The Zulu War had begun. The Prince Imperial, conscious of his heritage, was desperate to take part (the irony of a Bonaparte fighting in the British Army is striking), and through the persuasion of his mother and of Queen Victoria, the Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, HRH The Duke of Cambridge, provided him with a letter of introduction to Chelmsford. Louis Napoleon left England at the end of February, and, after arriving in Durban, joined the General Headquarters as an aide-de-camp in April.

Chelmsford was aware of the responsibility which the Prince Imperial represented. On his first patrol, Louis Napoleon proved so reckless and impervious to instruction that the officer in charge refused to take him under his command again. Chelmsford decided to attach him to the staff of the Assistant Quartermaster General, Lieutenant Colonel Richard Harrison of the Royal Engineers, hoping to keep him busy but relatively far from any real danger. He also made it clear that the Prince Imperial must have adequate protection at all times, and a French-speaking officer of Guernsey descent, Lieutenant Jahleel Brenton Carey of the 98th (Prince of Wales’s) Regiment of Foot, was assigned to accompany Louis Napoleon.

On the morning of 1 June 1879, then Prince Imperial was permitted to join a reconnaissance party further into Zululand ahead of the main force, into an area between the Ityotosi and Tombokola rivers thought to be free of enemy forces. Louis Napoleon was so impatient that the party set off early and slightly underprepared, and he then assumed command, despite Carey having seniority. At noon, they halted at an apparently deserted kraal and lit a fire, Louis Napoleon and Carey making some sketches of the terrain, but the Prince Imperial failed to post a look-out as he believed there was no imminent threat. Just as they were preparing to leave, a group of about 40 Zulu warriors fired at them then ran towards them screaming.

One soldier was shot but Carey and the others managed to mount their horses and begin to escape. The Prince Imperial, however, could not get his foot into the stirrup and grabbed desperately at the saddle holster, at which point his terrified mount bolted. He managed to hold on for 100 yards or so before the holster tore away, he was kicked in the belly by his horse and winded and he fell, his right arm being trampled. Louis Napoleon drew his revolver with his left hand and started to run, but the Zulu warriors easily outpaced him; he fired three shots, all of which missed, then slowed to allow himself a better aim, but his subsequent two shots also missed.

One of the Zulus, Langalibalele, threw a spear at the Prince Imperial but missed his mark, while another, Zabanga, hit his target in the left shoulder. Louis Napoleon took the spear thrown by Langalibalele in his crushed right hand, holding his revolver in his left, but there was no chance of victory. He was outnumbered and wounded, quickly sinking to the ground, where Zabanga stabbed him with an assegai, followed by a similar blow from another warrior, Gwabakana. A fourth Zulu, Klabawathunga, delivered the fatal blow, his assegai piercing the Prince Imperial’s right eye and going into his brain.

When Louis Napoleon’s body was recovered the following day, it bore 18 stab wounds, but only eight of these, it transpired, had been inflicted pre-mortem. The Zulus had performed a traditional ritual known as hlomula, derived from hunting animals, in which all the huntsmen would stab the body of the fallen prey if it had fought especially fiercely, in recognition of its bravery. Klabawathunga also made a small incision in the Prince Imperial’s abdomen as part of the qaqa ritual: this was intended to allow a contagious ritual pollution known as umnyama to escape the body of someone killed in battle. Zulus believed that the way corpses swelled and bloated after death was the result of this contagion being trapped inside.

Louis Napoleon was 23 years old when he died. His body was brought from South Africa to Spithead in board HMS Orontes, then transferred to HMS Enchantress to be taken to Woolwich Arsenal; the Prince Imperial lay in state in the western octagonal guardhouse overnight, then a funeral procession took his body to Chislehurst where he was buried in the graveyard of St Mary’s Church, a Gothic Revival Catholic church built in 1853-54 where Napoleon III was interred. In 1888, Louis Napoleon’s remains were translated to the Imperial Crypt at St Michael’s Abbey, a Benedictine house endowed by the Empress in 1881. Her husband and son were buried side by side, and she was laid to rest with them after her death in 1920.

As an only child with no issue, Louis Napoleon had named Prince Napoleon Victor as his heir in his will; he was the son of Prince Napoléon-Jérôme, the second son of Napoleon I’s youngest brother, King Jérôme of Westphalia, and was styled Napoleon V by some Bonapartists. That the Prince Imperial overlooked Napoléon-Jérôme and preferred Napoleon Victor led to a breakdown in relations between father and son, and Napoléon-Jérôme, who died in 1891, excluded Napoleon Victor from his will and named his second son, Prince Louis, as head of the house of Bonaparte. There are now two claimants to the defunct imperial title: Charles, Prince Napoléon (Napoleon VII), grandson of Prince Napoleon Victor, was bypassed as dynastic heir in his father’s will in favour of his own son, Jean-Christophe, Prince Napoléon (Napoleon VIII).

The banality of evil

Just after midnight on this day in 1962, for the first and (so far) last time, a sentence of death handed down by a court of the State of Israel was carried out. 56-year-old Otto Adolf Eichmann was hanged at Ramla Prison for war crimes, crimes against humanity, crimes against the Jewish people and membership of three criminal organisations, the SS, the SD and the Gestapo. He had been convicted and sentenced by the Jerusalem District Court on 15 December 1961 and an appeal to the Supreme Court of Israel had been heard in March 1952 and dismissed in May. Eichmann petitioned the President of Israel, Yitzhak Ben-Zvi, for clemency; the Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion, held a special meeting of the cabinet to consider Eichmann’s case and recommended to the President that the request be denied. The decision was relayed to the condemned man at 8.00 pm on 31 May.

Present at the execution were a small group of Israeli officials, four journalists and a Canadian clergyman, William Lovell Hull, who had been Eichmann’s spiritual adviser since his imprisonment; the executioner was a Yemeni-born prison guard, Shalom Nagar, who had been one of the 22 guards assigned to Eichmann during his capitivity. Before the trapdoor opened, Eichmann, who had refused a blindfold, declared:

Long live Germany. Long live Argentina. Long live Austria. These are the three countries with which I have been most connected and which I will not forget. I greet my wife, my family and my friends. I am ready. We’ll meet again soon, as is the fate of all men. I die believing in God.

Rafael Eitan, a graduate of the LSE and the Mossad officer who had led the team which had captured Eichmann, later claimed that he heard the prisoner then mutter, “I hope that all of you will follow me”.

Eichmann was killed by a 30-foot drop, the noose abrading the skin of his neck and covering his chest and protruding tongue in blood. Nagar was responsible for putting the corpse on to a flimsy trolley and transferring it to a specially built oven in which—an ironic nod to his millions of victims?—he was cremated. Within hours of his execution, Eichmann’s ashes had been scattered from an Israeli Navy patrol boat into the Mediterranean Sea, beyond Israel’s territorial waters.

Eichmann was born in Solingen in the Rhineland but grew up in Linz, in Austria, after his father, a bookkeeper, was employed as commercial manager for the Linz Tramway and Electrical Company. He attended the Kaiser Franz Josef Staatsoberrealschule, the state-run secondary school the alumni of which included, 17 years earlier, Adolf Hitler. A poor student, he was withdrawn by his father and sent to a vocational college but left without a degree and spent several years in sales jobs. In 1934, he joined the Sicherheitsdienst (SD), the intelligence arm of the SS, initially monitoring Freemasons, before transferring to Section II/112, the Jewish department, where he investigated the Zionist movement and various Jewish groups. In 1937, Eichmann and his superior, Herbert Hagen, visited Mandatory Palestine (on forged press credentials) to explore the possibility of the emigration of German Jews, but they concluded that such a movement might lead to the foundation of an independent Jewish state, and was unlikely anyway without allowing German Jews to transfer money there, which was against German policy.

In 1939, Eichmann was appointed head of the Reichszentrale für jüdische Auswanderung (Reich Central Office for Jewish Emigration), part of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (RHSA, Reich Main Security Office). The RHSA, headed by Reinhard Heydrich, brought together various state security organs including the Kriminalpolizei or Kripo, the SS foreign intelligence service and the Geheime Staatspolizei (Secret State Police), more commonly known as the Gestapo. Eichmann’s department was under the umbrella of the Gestapo, and his immediate task was to organise the deportation of the Jewish populations of Ostrava and Katowice in recently conquered Poland. In December, his office was reorganised as Referat IV-B4, Amt IV of the RSHA being the Gestapo, IV-B the unit responsible for “sects” and Eichmann’s IV-B4 dealing with Jews. Heydrich described Eichmann as his “special expert” on Jewish issues.

On 20 January 1942, Heydrich convened the administrative leaders of the Nazi state at a villa at 56–58 Am Großen Wannsee in the Berlin suburbs which was used as a conference centre by the SD. Eichmann was one of the 15 officials invited and was nominated as secretary to oversee the stenography and prepare the formal records of the meeting. He was also to act as the liaison between the various departments in carrying out the plan agreed, the Final Solution to the Jewish Question. This would systematise the genocide of the Jewish population which was already well underway, not only in countries already occupied by Axis powers but the United Kingdom and neutral countries like Switzerland, Sweden and Spain. Heydrich estimated that 11 million Jews would be eliminated. The meeting lasted for about 90 minutes.

For the rest of the war, Eichmann carried out the Holocaust with meticulous bureaucratic efficiency. Referat IV-B4 collected detailed information on the Jewish population in each area, organised the confiscation of their property and arranged transport by train to concentration camps and death camps. Although he was based in Berlin, he carried out regular visits to camps and ghettos across Europe, including Auschwitz-Birkenau and Chełmno.

After the war, Eichmann lived in Germany under an assumed identity until 1950 when he moved to Argentina. Damning evidence of his central part in the Holocaust had already emerged at the post-war trials at Nuremberg and elsewhere. In 1953, the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal received information that Eichmann had been seen in Buenos Aires, and by 1957 Mossad were investigating reported sightings too. Zvi Aharoni, an Israeli intelligence agent, travelled to Argentina in March 1960 and confirmed Eichmann’s identity; Argentina had repeatedly refused extradition requests for suspected Nazi war criminals, so Ben-Gurion authorised a team of Mossad agents to kidnap him and bring him to Israel for trial. He was snatched near his home on Garibaldi Street on 11 May 1960 and arrived in Israel 12 days later. Ben-Gurion announced Eichmann’s capture to the Knesset the following afternoon. For nine months, he was questioned daily, producing 3,500 pages of transcript, and his trial began before a special tribunal of the Jerusalem District Court on 11 April 1961.

Eichmann was charged with 15 counts under the Nazi and Nazi Collaborators (Punishment) Law 1950, including multiple counts of crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity against both Jews and non-Jews, and war crimes. The Attorney General of Israel, Gideon Hausner, led the prosecution, while a German lawyer, Robert Servatius, acted in Eichmann’s defence. He had been a defence lawyer at the Nuremberg trials after the Second World War; his fee was paid by the Israeli government as Eichmann could not afford it.

The trial was broadcast by Capital Cities Broadcasting Corporation, an American channel, with tapes being flown from Jerusalem to the United States every night for screening the following day. It lasted for 56 days and saw 112 witnesses called and hundreds of documents cited; Hausner had begun the prosecution by declaring “It is not an individual that is in the dock at this historic trial and not the Nazi regime alone, but anti-Semitism throughout history”, and the weight of evidence he presented, far more than was needed to condemn Eichmann, was intended to stand as a wider record of the Holocaust. The defendant stated that he had not made any executive decisions, and that, in carrying out policy determined by others, he felt no guilt, though he admitted to disliking Jews and regarding them as enemies of Germany. But he consistently denied any personal guilt. Hausner presented him with evidence that he had said in 1945, “I will leap into my grave laughing because the feeling that I have five million human beings on my conscience is for me a source of extraordinary satisfaction”; initially Eichmann argued that he had meant simply enemies of the Reich such as Soviet soldiers, but later admitted he had meant Jews, and that it had been an accurate reflection of his opinion at the time.

The judgement of the court ran to 227 pages. It dealt extensively with the legal, intellectual and philosophical basis for the charges and the State of Israel’s jurisdiction to bring them, and dismissed one of the defence’s arguments, that many of the charges related to so-called “Acts of State” for which Eichmann as an individual could not be held responsible. It also ruled that the circumstances of Eichmann’s abduction from Argentina did not affect the legitimacy of the prosecution. It then rehearsed his career in painstaking detail, piling horror upon horror in calm, relentless prose, demonstrating the central role Eichmann had played and the sheer bureaucratic and organisational endeavour the Holocaust had been. Having set aside as inadmissable Eichmann’s arguments in his defence, the judges convicted him on every one of the 15 charges. Hannah Arendt, reporting on the trial for The New Yorker, later compiled her coverage into Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). The book’s subtitle was “A Report on the Banality of Evil”.

Red-letter days

Some of you may be surprised at the number of saints who seem to be remembered each time I do this. Bear in mind that the Catholic Church alone recognises more than 11,000 saints, which is around 30 feasts every day, and more are canonised regularly. I am, however, reliably informed that seating capacity is not an issue.

Today we are remembering St Justin Martyr (AD 100-AD 165), a Greek born in Samaria who explored Stoicism, Aristotelianism, Pythagoreanism and Platonism before embracing Christianity before being martyred along with a number of his students; St Crescentinus (d AD 303), a Roman soldier who converted to Christianity, fled the Diocletian persecution, slew a dragon and evangelised in Umbria before being beheaded (and is, amusingly, invoked against headaches); St Fortunatus of Spoleto (d AD 400), of whom little is known save his charity and love of the poor; St Ronan of Locronan (6th century AD), an Irish pilgrim and hermit who retreated to Brittany and whose relics were believed to have miraculous properties; St Íñigo of Oña (d 1057), a Benedictine monk and hermit who became a reforming Abbot of San Salvador in Burgos and for whom St Ignatius Loyola was named; and St Annibale Maria di Francia (1851-1927), a well-born Sicilian who joined the Secular Order of Discalced Carmelites, was ordained a priest and founded the Rogationist Fathers of the Heart of Jesus and the Daughters of Divine Zeal, as well as establishing a number of orphanages.

It is World Milk Day, established by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to recognise the importance of milk and the wider dairy sector. In Mexico, it is National Maritime Day, in honour of the merchant marine, while Libya is celebrating National Technology Day. Kenya is marking Madaraka Day, or “Self-Governance Day”, marking the date in 1963 on which the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya attained internal self-rule prior to full independence from the United Kingdom later in the year. It is Independence Day in Samoa, which in 1962 gained its freedom from New Zealand to become the first Polynesian sovereign state to be recognised in the 20th century.

Factoids

1. As you all know, the American presidency has a long and detailed line of succession which if necessary could provide for maintaining a head of state even in the event of a fairly catastrophic event or series of events befalling the federal government. In many ways, the vice-presidency only really exists to provide a ready substitute in case the worst happens—and there’s a fair chance it might; 45 men have held the office of president of whom eight have died in office, four of them (Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy) assassinated. So if you become President of the United States, then, actuarially, you have something like a one in six chance of not surviving, and a one in 11 chance of being murdered. Those are not good odds, when you think about it.

2. In fact, only the Vice-President succeeds to the office of President in the event of a vacancy. According to the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, if there is no Vice-President for whatever reason, then the next available person in the line of succession assumes the powers and duties, but not the office, of President. The likelihood of both the presidency and the vice-presidency falling vacant is small, except in the case of some mass casualty event, but it is only since the ratification of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1967 that there has been a mechanism for replacing a vice-president who dies, resigns or succeeds to the presidency. Before that point, there were several instances of the vice-presidency being vacant and therefore the first in the line of succession being absent until a new one could be elected at the next presidential election.

3. But who are these people, in fact? Well, while I say no harm of anyone, if something were to remove Donald Trump from the presidency, he would be replaced by Vice-President J.D. Vance (40). After him, lining up to assume the powers and duties of the presidency are, in order: Rep. Mike Johnson (53), Speaker of the House of Representatives; Senator Chuck Grassley (91), President pro tempore of the Senate; Marco Rubio (54), Secretary of State; Scott Bessent (62), Secretary of the Treasury; Pete Hegseth (44), Secretary of Defense; Pam Bondi (59), Attorney General; Doug Burgum (68), Secretary of the Interior; Brooke Rollins (53), Secretary of Agriculture; and rounding out the top 10, Howard Lutnick (63), Secretary of Commerce. Don’t have nightmares.

4. Michael Stone, United States Secretary of the Army 1989-93 under President George H.W. Bush, was a Royal Navy veteran of the Second World War. Born in London, he emigrated to America with his family aged four, in 1929, and attended the Taft School in Connecticut before going on to Yale University in 1942. He left his degree course in 1943 to volunteer in the Royal Navy and qualified as a pilot in the Fleet Air Arm, serving latterly with 1831 Naval Air Squadron on board HMS Glory in the Far East. He was demobilised in 1945 and returned to Yale to complete his degree, then attended New York University Law School. After a career in the private sector, Stone sold his business to join the US Agency for International Development (USAID) and was head of mission in Cairo (1982-85) then Director of the Caribbean Basin Initiative (1985-86). In 1986, he moved to the Pentagon as Assistant Secretary of the Army (Financial Management) from 1986 to 1988 and Under Secretary of the Army and Army Acquisition Executive from 1988 to 1989. President Bush nominated him to head the Department of the Army where he remained for the whole presidential term. He died in 1995, and is the only foreign-born Secretary of the Army to have held office.

5. One claimant of the (admittedly niche) title of the world’s oldest extant intelligence organisation is India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB). On 23 December 1887, the government of British India established the Central Special Branch, initially sharing premises and personnel with the Thuggee and Dacoity Department in Simla, the General Superintendent of which, Colonel Philip Henderson, double-hatted as head of the Central Special Branch. In cooperation with the Provincial Special Branches, the new organisation was responsible for the collection of intelligence on political, social and religious movements which might threaten law and order. In April 1904, the Central Special Branch was subsumed by a new Central Criminal Intelligence Department (later Department of Criminal Intelligence) under Sir Harold Stuart, which became the main foreign and domestic intelligence agency of the government of British India. The Government of India Act 1919 referred to an “Intelligence Bureau” and the Department of Criminal Intelligence was accordingly renamed in 1920. The IB was placed under the control of the Home Department within the British Indian government and reported directly to the Viceroy. It was preserved, formally as the Central Bureau of Intelligence, in Schedule VII of the Constitution of India after Partition and now falls formally under the Ministry of Home Affairs, though the Director of the Intelligence Bureau (currently Tapan Deka) is a member of the National Security Council and has direct access to the Prime Minister. It is a shadowy organisation but known to have responsibility for domestic intelligence, counter-intelligence and counter-terrorism as well as intelligence-gathering and other activities in border regions.

6. Since the tenure of Sir Thomas Erskine May (1871-86), originator of the Treatise on the Law, Privileges, Proceedings and Usage of Parliament, most Clerks of the House of Commons spent their careers working in Parliament before reaching the highest office. (Formally, the Clerk of the House of Commons is Under Clerk of the Parliaments, the Clerk of the Parliaments being the chief official of the House of Lords.) One striking exception was Sir Courtenay Ilbert, Clerk of the House from 1902 to 1921. He was called to the Bar by Lincoln’s Inn in 1869 and worked in property law, developing an expertise in drafting trusts and other legal instruments. Ilbert came to the attention of Sir Henry Thring, First Parliamentary Counsel, a barrister and the government’s chief parliamentary draftsman, and he was engaged to assist in preparing bills to be put before Parliament. From 1882 to 1886, he was the Law Member of the Viceroy’s Council, effectively the cabinet for British India, in which capacity he drafted a Bill to amend the Code of Criminal Procedure, 1882, known as “the Ilbert Bill”; it provided for non-white judges being able to hear cases involving white plaintiffs or defendants. On his return to England in 1886, Ilbert became Assistant Parliamentary Counsel before succeeding Sir Henry Jenkyns as First Parliamentary Counsel in 1899. At the beginning of 1902, the Clerk of the House of Commons, Sir Archibald Milman, was forced to retire due to ill health, and Ilbert was named his successor. He would remain as Clerk of the House for nearly 20 years, retiring at 80, no doubt to the impatient chagrin of his younger colleagues.

7. Sometimes you find sets of siblings that are simply overachievers. John Miller Andrews was the second Prime Minister of Northern Ireland from 1940 to 1943, while a younger brother, Sir James Andrews, was the third Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland (1937-51). A third brother, Thomas Andrews Jr, was a naval architect and shipbuilder who became managing director of Harland and Wolff in his mid-30s (perhaps assisted by the fact that his uncle, Lord Pirrie, was chairman of the shipbuilding firm) and oversaw the design of three new ocean liners for the White Star Line. He was part of Harland and Wolff’s “guarantee group”, who travelled on the maiden voyages of all the company’s ships to observe their operation and look for problems, which unfortunately meant that he was on board the RMS Titanic when it set out from Southampton for New York on 10 April 1912. He was lost with the ship on the night of 14/15 April and his body was never recovered.

8. The rate of growth in 19th century America was of course staggering by modern standards, but Chicago stands out even in context. Consider this: if you were born in 1840, just seven years after the Town of Chicago was formally established, you were a native of a small settlement of just under 4,500 people. By the time you turned 30, the population was 300,000. If you reached your 50th birthday, the city had broken the barrier of one million inhabitants, and by the turn of the century your birthplace was the fifth largest city in the world, with a population of 1.7 million. Only London, New York, Paris and Berlin were larger. Chicago would hit its peak in the 1950s, at 3.6 million in the 1950 census, then begin a slow decline, to an estimated population today of 2.7 million. It has still to mark its 200th anniversary.

9. There are 193 sovereign states in the United Nations. Only two of them are named after women: Saint Lucia, after the martyr St Lucy of Syracuse (AD 283-AD 304); and Ireland, the name of which in Irish is Éire, derived from the goddess Ériu, daughter of Delbáeth and Ernmas of the Tuatha Dé Danann, a supernatural race in Irish mythology.

10. Ériu was represented in ancient Greek by the name Ἰουερνία or “Iouernia”, which in Latin became “Hibernia”, the Roman name for the island of Ireland.

“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” (Thomas Jefferson)

1. “Fiona Hill: Trump is terrified of Putin, I’ve seen it first hand”: Dr Fiona Hill is not the most likely modern media celebrity. Born in Bishop Auckland in County Durham and educated at the University of St Andrews then Harvard, she has spent more than 30 years in the United States as a foreign policy specialist and intelligence analyst. From 2017 to 2019, she was Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs at the National Security Council in President Trump’s first term. Here interviewed by Cameron Henderson for The Daily Telegraph, she talks about Trump’s relationship with Vladimir Putin, having seen the two men at close quarters: Trump, she says, defers to Putin not least because he is terrified of the prospect of the Russian President initiating a nuclear conflict. However, while she characterises Trump as stuck in a 1980s geopolitical mindset (those are generous terms), Hill warns that the more immediate threat lies in asymmetric and “grey zone” conflicts, with critical national infrastructure being targeted and Russia specialising in assassinations and deniable proxy action. For the past 10 months she has been one of the three senior figures conducting the UK’s Strategic Defence Review, due to be published tomorrow. Her contribution is keenly anticipated.

2. “Voters want the state to guarantee economic gain without any pain”: Oliver Shah, Associate Editor of The Sunday Times, puts his finger on a hugely difficult issue for British politicians. Since the global financial crisis of 2008, voters now expect the government to protect businesses from harm and underwrite employment, a mentality reinforced by the profligate spending during the Covid-19 pandemic when the government spent £400 billion to cushion the economy from shocks. Yet large sections of the same public dislike and distrust “big business”, support nationalisation and think welfare is too generous, so long as it applies to other people. But this is not credible or sustainable policy. As Shah concludes, “public addiction to the morphine of state spending, and an unwillingness to take short-term pain in pursuit of the long term, pull politics away from what is needed to get growth… attention spans are short and the desire for safety nets is long”. Politicians have to lead public opinion as well as follow it, and most of our current senior figures are either unwilling or unable to do so.

3. “The Talented Mr. Vance”: in The Atlantic, Pulitzer Prize winner George Packer provides a fascinating and detailed attempt to wrestle with the strange, seemingly contradictory figure of Vice-President J.D. Vance, the never-Trumper who became, in Packer’s phrase, “only-Trump”. It is illustrative that Vance’s preferred presidential candidate in 2012 was former Governor of Utah and US Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman Jr, a Republican so moderate he “made Mitt Romney seem a bit extreme”. The Vice-President has travelled a long way, becoming harder, sharper, less forgiving and simply nastier, nothing ameliorated by his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2019, but, for all the anti-elitism of his genuinely intelligent and revealing 2017 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, he has turned away from the conventional elite only to embrace others, not only the foaming nationalism of Steve Bannon but the multi-billionaire creed of tech bros like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk. On the most generous interpretation, Vance is searching for an ideology which will champion the working-class communities from which he sprang; others may see little but visceral ambition mixed with a good deal of contempt for others.

4. “Shifts, Not Shocks: Rethinking Rust Belt Decline”: Norbert Michel and Jerome Famularo of the Cato Institute tackle one of the lazy tropes of American political discourse, that China, admitted to the World Trade Organization in 2001, exploited the inattention of other states, bent or broke the rules and, by making huge steps forward in economic prosperity, also precipitated the decline on manufacturing in the United States. It’s a brilliant narrative for nationalists, isolationists and the anti-globalisation movement, but is that what actually happened? The authors argue that if you look at a broader context, a longer timescale and the economic data, you begin to see a different picture.

5. “What would a Reform government be like?”: Sam Freedman, a former Special Adviser at the Department for Education under Michael Gove and author of the thought-provoking Failed State: Why Britain Doesn’t Work And How We Fix It, tries to imagine how Reform UK might behave in government if its current trajectory were maintained and it won the next general election. The party’s strong showing in last month’s local elections means Reform UK mayors and councillors now have executive power in their hands and will be judged on how they use it. His conclusions are unapologetically negative: he points to the wild inconsistencies and contradictions in Reform UK’s manifesto and evolving policy platform and the inexperience of most of its leading figures, as well as the slippery, canny laziness of its leader, Nigel Farage. I share his view that a Reform UK government would be extremely chaotic, but Freedman has tried to analyse the various types of chaos which would be manifested.

6. “American Bushido in Practice”: a fortnight ago I recommended the first part of this Substack essay by Secretary of Defense Rock as “an excoriating polemic” and “scintillating”. The second part does not disappoint or slacken the pace: it reiterates the criticism of America’s fixation with the “warrior ethos” and argues that a full-scale war, if it comes, will be won not by “lethality and grit” but “mass and logistics”. The West in general and the United States in particular is not prepared, economically, militarily, industrially or psychologically, for a long, grinding and bloody conflict against a peer adversary like the Second World War. Worse, it has wrongly analysed the conditions necessary for victory, which will require not an elite warrior class but in fact the diametric opposite, a citizen army directing the whole nation’s efforts towards victory. Some lessons have been learned from the conflict in Ukraine but those relating to sheer weight of human numbers have not. The conflict in Iraq cost 4,419 American lives and has traumatised the nation and shaped its approach to the rest of the world; but there were 58,281 deaths in the Vietnam War and 405,399 in the Second World War. Modern society feels it can no longer tolerate heavy casualties, but the Ukraine conflict tells us they would be inevitable in a full-scale war. What will break first?

7. “Germany’s Bundeswehr bears no resemblance to an actual army”: perhaps because of the insight and context she brings from being an historian, and because she’s funny and curious and passionate, Katja Hoyer has established herself as easily one of the most interesting commentators in English on modern Germany. This article in The Spectator examines the condition and culture of the Bundeswehr, the Federal Republic of Germany’s armed forces, arguing that, because of the country’s difficult relationship with its pitch-dark past, it has not treated the Bundeswehr primarily as a capable, combat-ready military force but a symbol of and vehicle for a new sense of post-war German society. It makes extensive provision for its citizens in uniform to answer to their consciences and act according to their individual “inner guidance”. In effect it has preserved the traditional German General Staff theory of Auftragstaktik, senior commanders setting objectives for their subordinates but allowing them extensive initiative in terms of how to achieve them. But it is “now minus the element of absolute structural obedience”, potentially opening the door to chaos. Chancellor Friedrich Merz has talked about substantial increases in defence expenditure, but, as Katja points out, is not simply a financial issue. Instead it is intertwined with the conception of Germany as a nation and Germans’ sense of self-respect and identity. Will the new government rise to the challenge?

8. “Risk aversion in the defence ministry is holding Britain back”: in The Financial Times, Labour MP and former Royal Marines captain Fred Thomas argues that the most serious obstacle to rebuilding and rearming the armed forces is not “procurement inefficiencies, overstretched budgets, or the lack of financing options for start-ups and small businesses”, but the grindingly slow process of “adoption”: the point at which the Ministry of Defence formally recognises a capability as a requirement and places it on a long-term budget line. Until that point, the armed forces cannot train with whatever technology or equipment is in question, and will not take account of it in revising tactics and doctrine. Thomas spent seven years in the Royal Marines—although there was some dispute over the exact nature and extent of his record—and is a member of the House of Commons Defence Committee (he also bears the middle name Theseus, which cannot always be easy), so he speaks with a degree of authority and it is an argument worth bearing in mind. I am not certain that adoption is the overwhelming problem he suggests in comparison with others, and for partisan reasons he has to be in my view over-optimistic about the likelihood of change: praying in aid the recent security and defence partnership between the UK and the European Union, a fairly empty vessel, does his case no favours. But it highlights one aspect of defence modernisation that is not talked about as much as others and should be in the mix.

9. “‘Slippery Sam’—Britain’s man in Madrid”: Engelsberg Ideas is such a varied journal that there are always unexpected and fascinating pieces, and this profile by historian and journalist Tim Bouverie of Sir Samuel Hoare, 1st Viscount Templewood, is a great example. Hoare, Conservative MP for Chelsea from 1910 to 1944, held some of the highest offices of state, as Foreign Secretary, Home Secretary, India Secretary and three times Secretary of State for Air, but, along with Sir John Simon, he became seen as one of the most prominent faces of appeasement and it was a condition of the Labour Party joining the coalition government in 1940 that Hoare was excluded. Winston Churchill was more than happy to oblige, and sent the clever, ambitious, unpopular and almost certainly homosexual 60-year-old grandee to Spain as British ambassador; it was little more than a device to eject him from the political scene at Westminster (though he did not give up his seat in the House of Commons until 1944), but, as Bouverie relates, his embassy was a reminder than he was a man with many talents and he proved unexpectedly successful in a delicate and challenging role. His principal objective was to keep Franco’s Spain out of the Second World War, and he did so with great aplomb.

10. “A tale of two myths”: Ali Ansari, Professor of Modern History and Founding Director of the Institute for Iranian Studies at the University of St Andrews, is not only hugely knowledgeable on the history of Iran and its application to contemporary politics but his Substack is an elegant and fascinating resource for anyone interested in the long and complex history of a country which has antecedents going back 6,000 years. In his essay he explains the importance of myth and tradition to the Islamic Republic of Iran and its leadership and the way in which contemporary political disputes can be cloaked in analogy, and considers the relationship between Islam and democracy, hotly contested by Muslims and non-Muslims alike: it is especially interesting on the different attitudes of Sunni and Shia to popular representation.

Jukebox jury

No hard sell, no cultural analysis, just a few pieces that have spent more time than usual in my head this week and which I would always recommend.

1. “The Circle Game”, Joni Mitchell

2. “Where Have All The Cowboys Gone?”, Paula Cole

3. “A Lady of a Certain Age”, The Divine Comedy

4. “Doctor My Eyes”, Jackson Browne

5. “Lady Grey”, Katzenjammer

From the archives: “Why I love America”

Henry Fairlie was a journalist of high talent, sharp insight and chaotic personal habits. His father was a hard-drinking Fleet Street editor while his mother was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, an impossible but somehow characteristic combination, and after a degree in history at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, during the Second World War, Fairlie followed in his father’s footsteps and took a job at The Manchester Evening News in 1945. After a brief stint at The Observer, then edited and part-owned by the exacting and high-minded David Astor, he joined The Times in 1950, quickly becoming its chief leader writer on domestic politics. He then became a freelance journalist in 1954.

Fairlie was a trenchant, colourful and perceptive political writer and formidable phrase-maker. In The Spectator his “Political Commentary” column, written initially under the nom de plume of “Trimmer” and then his own byline, more or less created the template for the modern political column. For his 23 September 1955 entry, he explained how friends and colleagues of two Foreign Office employees, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, had diverted the attention of the press away from the men’s families after they had disappeared, widely (and correctly) believed to have defected to Moscow. To describe the intricate and influential network of personal, social and professional connections upon which people like Burgess and Maclean could rely, he coined a phrase we now take wholly for granted: “the Establishment”.

I have several times suggested that what I call the ‘Establishment’ in this country is today more powerful than ever before. By the ‘Establishment’ I do not mean only the centres of official power—though they are certainly part of it—but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The exercise of power in Britain (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognised that it is exercised socially. Anyone who has at any point been close to the exercise of power will know what I mean when I say that the ‘Establishment’ can be seen at work in the activities of, not only the Prime Minister, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Earl Marshal, but of such lesser mortals as the chairman of the Arts Council, the Director-General of the BBC, and even the editor of The Times Literary Supplement, not to mention divinities like Lady Violet Bonham Carter.

As a summation, it was classic Fairlie: groundbreaking and taboo-busting, sharply insightful, witheringly witty and presented with the faintest air of impatience that the reader had taken so long to realise what was surely as plain as day.

If his journalism was swashbuckling, his personal life was handled in like manner. His affair with Hilary Amis, wife of his friend Kingsley, in 1956 nearly ended the Amises marriage, and was not Fairlie’s only exploit in that regard. He was drinking more and more heavily and, unable to control his personal finances, he was often in debt. In 1965 he insulted Lady Antonia Fraser on television, leading to a lawsuit against him and the Independent Television Authority.

It was the same year, 1965, that Fairlie visited the United States for the first time and he was captivated, moving permanently across the Atlantic a few months later. He quickly became well known in Washington, a strange and unpredictable Tory who often found himself more in sympathy with Democrats than Republicans, and from the 1970s until his early death in 1990 he was a regular contributor to The New Republic; from 1976 to 1982 he also wrote a biweekly column, “Fairlie at Large”, for The Washington Post. Moving away from a strict diet of politics, he became an acute observer of American life and manners, an affectionate outsider with the vital critical distance that can often bring. On 4 July 1983, he wrote a column for The New Republic which encapsulated his feelings towards his adopted home, entitled “Why I Love America”.

The column is worth reading carefully, savouring, not just for its journalistic skill, although Fairlie was an excellent prose stylist. I find it revealing and resonant: I was 22 when I first visited the United States, holidaying in Boston, Vermont and New Hampshire in the presidential election year of 2000, and, in Fairlie’s vein, I revelled in the country. I am in some ways very British, and I think I become more so in America; I cannot truly say there are not things about America and Americans which annoy and frustrate me. There are huge swathes of it I have never visited and many I never will. But there is a huge amount to admire, enjoy and love about the country. Fairlie’s opening paragraph, while anchored in a specific time, nevertheless conveys some of that wonder that I felt in my own way.

I had reported from some twenty-four countries before I set foot in America. I will never forget the first shock—even after having been in every country from the Sudan to South Africa—at realizing that I was in another place entirely, a New World. In the casbah of Algiers during the first referendum called by de Gaulle in 1959, when the women hurrying down the steep streets to vote for the first time pulled their yashmaks around their faces as they passed a man (which seemed to me only to make their dark eyes more fascinating), I was still in the Old World, however strange it was. But here in America it was all new.

Of course the America of 1983 is not the America of now, and in general we had to work much harder 40 years ago to know about the rest of the world. But Fairlie’s love letter—I think it is not too strong to call it that—is complex, textured, sometimes sharp but wholly heartfelt. Read and reflect for a little while, which we should all do more anyway. And look up Henry Fairlie if you’ve never encountered him. A review of a collection of Fairlie’s journalism in 2009 began “Christopher Hitchens may be the hard-drinking, contrarian Brit journalist of the moment, but long before Hitchens arrived on our shores, there was Henry Fairlie”. It’s a fair comparison, and does justice to both.

Every parting gives a foretaste of death…

… as Schopenhauer (who I suspect was not known to his friends as “Funtime Arty”) wrote, every reunion a hint of the Resurrection. Sounds exhausting but there is, I think, a degree of optimism in there. So here’s to resurrection.