Sunday round-up 15 June 2025

Magna Carta is agreed, the Battle of Kosovo is fought, birthday cake for Simon Callow, Noddy Holder, Xi Jinping and Ice Cube and we dance to mark St Vitus's Day

One more trip around the sun for former Deputy Air Officer Commanding RAF Strike Command and Trustee of the Imperial War Museum Air Chief Marshal Sir Joseph Gilbert (94), Iranian-born Jewish businessman and recently retired Liberal Democrat peer Lord Alliance (93), long-time CIA officer and former acting Director of Central Intelligence John McLaughlin (83), former Prime Minister of Denmark Poul Nyrup Rasmussen (82), papabile former Archbishop of Conakry and Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments Robert Cardinal Sarah (80), Slade lead singer, actor and mutton-chopped Black Country legend Noddy Holder (79), former First Minister of Scotland Henry McLeish (77), booming-voiced actor, Dickens enthusiast, Four Weddings icon and luvvie’s luvvie Simon Callow (76), Air Supply lead vocalist Russell Hitchcock (76), not-short-of-a-bob-or-two ArcelorMittal Executive Chairman Lakshmi Mittal (75), former Welsh Secretary, Thatcherite economist and unconvincing anthem-mimer Sir John Redwood (74), President of China, human rights sceptic and bearer of no resemblance to Winnie the Pooh Xi Jinping (72), actor, adequate comedian, cannabis farmer and gout sufferer Jim Belushi (71), model, actress and Airplane! legend Julie Hagerty (70), improbably named Scottish footballer and broadcaster Alan Brazil (66), Days of Our Lives, The Young and the Restless and The Bold and the Beautiful star Eileen Davidson (66), actor, director, producer and merciless satirist Chris Morris (63), actress, director and producer Helen Hunt (62), actress and Bruce Springsteen music video icon Courteney Cox (61), rapper, producer, actor and occasional amateur antisemite Ice Cube (56), actor, singer and presenter Neil Patrick Harris (52), definitely-independently-famous singer-songwriter Laura Imbruglia (42) and Liverpool FC forward Mo Salah (33).

Our regular I’d-love-to-but-that-specific-day-finds-me-dead crowd includes Edward, Prince of Wales, the Black Prince (1330), subject of the Mona Lisa and arguably the most famous model in history Lisa del Giocondo (1479), Henry VIII’s only publicly acknowledged bastard Henry FitzRoy, Duke of Richmond and Somerset (1519), prime mover behind the Acts of Union 1707 the Earl of Godolphin (1645), inventor of hazelnut chocolate Charles-Amédée Kohler (1790), railroad tycoon and first Mayor of Chicago William B. Ogden (1805), composer and pianist Edvard Grieg (1843), Rape of Nanking overseer Lieutenant General Kesago Nakajima (1881), influential Jesuit priest and public intellectual Fr Martin D’Arcy (1888), Walloon nationalist, Rexist Party leader and perfectly-OK-with-the-Nazis SS-Oberführer Léon Degrelle (1906), impressively bearded and booming actor, Reuters correspondent, ice hockey player and League of Nations peacekeeper James Robertson Justice (1907), The Railway Series author Rev Wilbert Awdry (1911), Chairman of the KGB and briefly General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Yuri Andropov (1914), former President of Israel (and nephew of first President Chaim Weizmann) Major-General Ezer Weizman (1924), broadcaster and author Richard Baker (1925), former Governor of New York Mario Cuomo (1932), Outlaw singer-songwriter and guitarist Waylon Jennings (1937), singer-songwriter Harry Nilsson (1941), French rock-and-roll legend and increasingly leather-faced enigma Johnny Hallyday (1943) and Greek-Egyptian chanteur, Abigail’s Party lynchpin and kaftan-adjacent “Singing Tent” Demis Roussos (1946).

Just initial here, and here

On this day, 810 years ago, King John met the leaders of a group of rebellious barons at Runnymede, a water meadow on the south bank of the River Thames west of London. It was a significant location: the name derives from two Middle English words, runinge (taking counsel) and mede (meadow), and the Witan of the Anglo-Saxon monarchy, the council of noblemen and clergy which advised the King, had sometimes met there, particularly during the reign of Alfred the Great as King of Wessex (AD 871-86) and King of the Anglo-Saxons (AD 886-99). John was facing two problems: he was deeply unpopular with the nobility, and he was broke. An expensive and unsuccessful campaign to reconquer his ancestral lands in France had ended in defeat at the Battle of Bouvines the previous July, forcing him to sue for peace with the King of France, Philippe II, and pay compensation. His autocratic rule had alienated many barons, and by the end of 1214 landowners in the North and East were organising against the King, taking an oath to “stand fast for the liberty of the church and the realm”.

John summoned a council in London in January 1215 to discuss potential reforms and concessions, and allowed negotiations between his representatives and the rebel barons at Oxford over the following months. Both sides appealed to Pope Innocent III for assistance, but the King had hopes of receiving papal favour: he had (in desperation, admittedly) declared himself a vassal of the papacy in 1213, and he now took an oath to go on crusade. This in theory granted him immunity from interest payments on loans and provided some protection against legal suits. In April, letters from the Pope arrived which supported John, but by then the barons had already begun mustering an army. They met at Northampton in May and proceeded to occupy Lincoln, London and Exeter. As a last gambit, the King proposed referring the dispute to a committee of arbitration headed by the Pope, but the barons saw little gain in that.

There was nowhere for the King to go, so he asked the Archbishop of Canterbury, Stephen Langton, who had leant towards the side of the barons, to organise peace talks. John and the barons met for the first time at Runnymede on 10 June, and the barons presented a draft of their demands for reform, the “Articles of the Barons”. They set out a number of property rights, legal entitlements and limitations on royal power and ability to levy taxation. Over the following days, with Langton acting as mediator, the King and the barons quickly agreed a final text. The articles were rearranged, reworded and expanded, but it is significant that only one provision from the original text did not find some expression in the final draft; this was Article 13, “Assizes of novel disseisin and mort d’ancestor are to be expedited, and other assizes likewise”.

On 15 June, what was now referred to as the Charter of Runnymede was engrossed and sealed by John. Four days later, the barons renewed their oath of loyalty to the King and copies of the charter were formally issued. The name “the Charter of Runnymede” does not echo down English history; but at the end of 1217, it was reissued along with a document containing more limited provisions, the Charter of the Forest. To distinguish the more expansive document, it was referred to as the Great Charter of Liberties, or simply, in the sense of the larger of the two documents, the Great Charter: Magna Carta.

The agreement of the Charter of Runnymede had not stopped or curtailed a conflict between John and his barons. An element of the settlement had been that a council of 25 barons would be nominated to supervise the King’s adherence to the charter’s terms, in return for which the rebel army would be dispersed and the barons would surrender London to the King. With a certain inevitability, the most hardline of John’s opponents were nominated to the council, the barons refused to stand their army down or surrender London and the King appealed to the Pope once more, arguing that the strictures of the charter infringed his feudal relationship with the papacy. Innocent III promptly declared the agreement “not only shameful and demeaning, but illegal and unjust”, and excommunicated the rebels. By September, there was open warfare in England.

In September 1216, the King contracted dysentery while campaigning in East Anglia. It was an affliction known to mediaeval medicine as “bloody flux”, a type of gastroenteritis causing extensive and repeated diarrhoea with blood, mucus or pus, accompanied by extreme abdominal pain, rectal pain and a low-grade fever. John travelled west but when he reached Newark Castle in Nottinghamshire his condition was worsening rapidly and he could not be moved any further. He died during the night of 18/19 October, two months shy of his 50th birthday. John’s elder brother Henry, “the Young King”, had also died of dysentery in 1183, and it would go on to kill Edward I, Edward the Black Prince and Henry V, as well as the French kings Louis IX and Philippe V.

John left five children by his second wife, Isabella of Angoulême, of whom the eldest, Henry of Winchester, aged nine, became King Henry III. His younger son, Richard of Cornwall, was elected King of the Romans and heir to the Holy Roman Empire in 1257 but was never crowned as Emperor and wielded little influence before his death in 1272. Of John’s three daughters, Joan married Alexander II, King of Scots; Isabella became the third wife of the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II; and Eleanor married first William Marshal, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, 25 years her senior, then Simon de Montfort, 6th Earl of Leicester, who led the baronial opposition to her brother in the Second Barons’ War and convened two of the earliest Parliaments of England, the Oxford Parliament (1258) and the Parliament of 1265 which, for the first time, included representatives of the larger towns and cities as well as the nobility, higher clergy and knights of the shire.

They really won’t let it lie

There have been at least five clashes of arms remembered as “the Battle of Kosovo” throughout Balkan history but today is the anniversary of the most significant and psychologically influential. On this day in 1389, an invading Ottoman army under Sultan Murad I met a smaller force commanded by St Lazar Hrebeljanović, Prince of Serbia, on Kosovo Field, a few miles north-west of modern Pristina. Lazar was supported by a contingent led by his son-in-law Vuk Branković, the most powerful Serbian nobleman, and a force of Bosnian soldiers sent by King Tvrtko I and under the leadership of the Grand Duke of Bosnia, Vlatko Vuković, Voivode of Hum.

Details of the battle are scarce and inconsistent, and no eyewitness accounts survive. The Ottoman army probably numbered between 30,000 and 40,000, while Lazar’s forces may have totalled 20,000, making it one of the largest battles in mediaeval European history, and both sides were formidably heterogenous: Murad commanded a small core of around 2,000 elite Janissaries, Christian children kidnapped and raised as Muslim warriors, the regular Ottoman army joined by Turkmen auxiliaries from the Beylik of Isfendiyar in northern Anatolia as well as Bosnian, Albanian and Hungarian soldiers, and perhaps even some Aragonese or Catalan mercenaries.

Lazar’s coalition of Christian forces was dominated by his own Serbian troops and the Bosnian units under Vlatko Vuković. But he also had Croatian, Hungarian and Bulgarian soldiers and as well Albanian contingents led by Teodor II Muzaka, Lord of Berat, and Dhimitër Jonima; some accounts relate that Đurađ II Balšić, Lord of Zeta and the Coast, also fought with Lazar but this is dubious, as others claim he was an Ottoman vassal by 1389. It is also possible that there was a contingent of Knights of the Order of St John of Jerusalem (the Knights Hospitaller), commanded by the Ban of Croatia, John of Palisna; but the Domine Johanne Bano mentioned in some accounts could perhaps have been the Croatian-Hungarian nobleman John Horvat, previously Ban of Macsó.

Reconstructing what happened is difficult. Battle seems to have been joined at sunrise, around 4.00 am, with Ottoman archers loosing their arrows towards the powerful Serbian heavy cavalry in Lazar’s centre, who then charged the Ottoman positions. The Serbian horsemen shattered the Ottoman left wing but made much less impact against their centre and right, and once their energy was spent, now encumbered by their heavy armour, they were attacked by Ottoman light cavalry and light infantry. Vuković’s Bosnian soldiers closed on the Ottoman right wing, which was commanded by the Sultan’s eldest surviving son Bayezid, and inflicted heavy casualties; later Bayezid mustered a counter-attack which defeated the Serbian forces in the centre of Lazar’s line and put many of them to flight. But Lazar’s flanks held steady, though Vuković had to edge his Bosnians towards the centre to compensate for the Serbian losses.

By this stage, it may have been hard to tell which way the advantage was tilting. The orthodox narrative is that 12 Serbian knights, including the nine Jugović brothers, breached the Ottoman line, after which one of them, Miloš Obilić, pretended to be an informer or a defector and was brought before the Sultan. He then produced a hidden dagger and stabbed Murad in the throat and abdomen before being cut down by the Sultan’s bodyguard. Whatever the choreography, Murad was certainly dead, the only Ottoman sultan ever to die in battle. Bayezid, learning of his father’s death, proclaimed himself Sultan, and later did what many Ottoman princes would do, had his younger brother Yakub Çelebi strangled to eliminate any rivals for the throne.

Taking command, Bayezid ordered a counter-attack. The superior Ottoman numbers finally began to tell, and the Serbian and Bosnian troops were forced back, some beginning to retreat northwards towards Vucitrn and Mitrovica. Branković, Lazar’s son-in-law, withdrew, either because he saw the battle was lost or, according to some, in a calculated act of betrayal. Either way, that seems to have set off a chain reaction, and the Serbian line buckled and broke. It was only around 8.00 am, the battle having lasted about four hours (unusually long for a mediaeval encounter). Prince Lazar was captured by the advancing Ottoman army, and was bearing several wounds. He was taken to the new Sultan, Bayezid, who ordered him beheaded.

On the face of it, the Battle of Kosovo was catastrophic for all concerned. Both armies suffered extremely heavy losses, to the extent that most historians dismissively write of them being wiped out, and both the Sultan and the Prince of Serbia were killed. Contemporaries seem initially to have been perplexed, and the focus at that stage was on the assassination of the Sultan, a terrible blow for the Ottomans. Some seem to have regarded it as a Serbian victory, albeit a costly one, and the Bosnian king, Tvrtko I, claimed in its aftermath to have defeated the Ottomans. Bayezid withdrew to Edirne to consolidate his grip on the throne: the following year he would marry St Lazar’s daughter, Princess Olivera Despina, and recognise her brother, Stefan Lazarević, who was only 12 or 13, as ruler of Serbia.

Ultimately, the battle was a numbers game. In a way it prefigured the great First World War naval encounter at Jutland in 1916: losses being even, what mattered was what came next. The Serbian nobility was broken, its forces were all but eliminated and they could not be replaced, leaving the principality undefended and at the mercy of the Ottomans, as well as being pressured from the north by Hungary; Bayezid, by contrast, may have lost tens of thousands of men, but he retained a significant army further east, and was able in the aftermath of the battle to eliminate last bursts of opposition to Ottoman rule in Macedonia, Bulgaria and eastern Hungary. The ability of the Ottomans to consolidate and recover after the devastating losses indicated that they could no longer be stopped in the Balkans, and their conquest was a matter of time.

Serbia survived for a time. Once Prince Stefan (later, like his father, canonised) submitted to the Sultan’s vassalage, he was able to retain a great deal of autonomy. Coming of age on 1393, he fought alongside the Ottomans several times, then in 1402, the year in which Bayezid suffered a crushing defeat by the Mongol ruler Timur (also known as Tamerlane) at the Battle of Ankara and was taken prisoner, he visited Constantinople and was granted the title of Despot by Emperor John VII, standing as regent for the absent Emmanuel II. The status of a despot was usually that of a Byzantine vassal, but imperial rule was now so weak that Stefan was effectively independent ruler of Serbia. Allying himself with King Sigismund of Hungary, he was awarded Belgrade, where he made his new capital, Mačva in central Serbia and the fortress of Golubac.

Stefan died childless in 1427 but had named his nephew Đurađ Branković as his heir. The despotate was occupied by Ottoman forces from 1439 to 1444 before Đurađ was restored by a Christian coalition (which included a contingent under the Voivode of Wallachia, Vlad II Dracul, who would partly inspire Bram Stoker’s vampire novel 500 years later), but a new Sultan, Mehmed II, ambitious and calculating, came to the throne that year and began expanding his empire. In 1453, he captured Constantinople, finally extinguishing the Byzantine Empire after more than a thousand years, and six years later it was the turn of Serbia: the Despotate fell to Mehmed II on 20 June 1459. There would not be a stable Serbian state again until Sultan Mahmud II granted the Principality of Serbia autonomy under Ottoman suzerainty in 1815; it became a kingdom when the Prince of Serbia, Milan Obrenović IV, was proclaimed King Milan I of Serbia in 1882.

You may be wondering why the intricacies of a 14th century clash of arms in the Balkans merits so much attention. It took place, after all, only 18 months after the Battle of Radcot Bridge, which even those with a decent grasp of English history barely recall (Henry Bolingbroke, later Henry IV, surrounded an army loyal to Richard II and under the command of Robert de Vere, Earl of Oxford, at a crossing over the River Thames and forced its surrender). Yet the Battle of Kosovo, 636 years ago, is still a central event in Serbian national identity and folklore, drawn on to bolster the idea of Serb nationalism in the 19th century and persisting through the 20th, sometimes with horribly fatal consequences.

The heart of the Kosovo Myth (the Kosovo Legend, the Kosovo Cult) is the portrayal of St Lazar as an explicitly Christ-like figure. His dinner the night before the battle is equated with the Last Supper, he was joined by his nobles and advisers who stand place for the disciples and one of them, his son-in-law Vuk Branković, who may have betrayed him towards the end of the battle, is Judas Iscariot. Lazar was offered an ultimatum, to pay homage to the Sultan and become his vassal, or to fight the larger Ottoman army, and chose to fight; further, the night before the battle, he was visited by a grey hawk or falcon from Jerusalem and offered a choice between an “earthly kingdom”, meaning victory in battle, or the Kingdom of Heaven, which meant defeat and martyrdom. Like any good Christian hero, he chose the latter. His choice identified the Serbs as having a special heavenly status, and the Serbian soldiers went into battle declaring that they would have freedom in the Kingdom of Heaven but would never be enslaved on earth. Miloš Obilić proved his devotion to Lazar and to Serbia by killing the Sultan, knowing that in doing so he was guaranteeing his own death.

This combination of a glorious past and a sense of being a providential people was played on heavily after Serbia regained autonomy then independence in the 19th century. Serbs were especially holy and the last bulwark of (Orthodox) Christianity against Muslim invaders, and there were lavish commemorations for the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo in 1889. The actions of Obilić were a conscious inspiration to members of the Serb nationalist movement Young Bosnia from its foundation in 1911, and were certainly intimately familiar to the 19-year-old Bosnian Serb Gavrilo Princip when he assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, and his wife Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914. The myth also helped create a self-image of Serbs as noble victims of history.

The horribly toxic aspect of the Kosovo Myth was its use to paint Albanians, and especially Kosovar Albanians, as a violent and treacherous group who collaborated with the Ottoman occupiers, their co-religionists, and persecuted Christian Serbs communities. This undermined any claim they had to live in Kosovo, which was, after all, effectively territory sanctified with Serbian blood, the site of one of the most important and sacred events in the people’s history. There had been successive waves of expulsions of Albanians from Serbian territory, beginning in 1830 and designed to create a more homogenous Serbian state; more than 150,000 Albanians were expelled and by the 1870s Serbia had effectively removed its Muslim population. Another wave of forced migration took place in 1877/78, but it would take more than a century from then for it gain the horrible euphemism which nonetheless conveyed exactly what it was: “ethnic cleansing”, a straightforward translation of the Serbo-Croat term etnicko ciscenje.

The monstrous Slobodan Milošević, who was President of Serbia from 1989 to 1997 then President of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 to 2000, began chipping away at the autonomy of Kosovo, and of Vojvodina to the north of Serbia, as soon as he came to power in 1989, and was not afraid to harness Serb nationalism: in 1987, during a visit to Kosovo, he had pledged to angry Serb protesters “No-one will beat you again”. A breakaway Republic of Kosovo was declared by ethnic Albanian leaders in September 1991, and three years later the Kosovo Liberation Army was formed in defence of the Kosovar Albanian population but also advocating a “Greater Albania”. An attempt to suppress this movement by the Yugoslav Army saw the region slide towards full-scale and brutal conflict, in the wake of which came more enforced mass migrations and war crimes: Yugoslav Army and Serbian police units, as well as Serbian paramilitary groups, murdered between 7,000 and 9,000 Kosovar Albanians, indulged in systematic rape of civilians, destroyed entire villages and communities and displaced a million people from their homes. Atrocities were also committed by the KLA but not on such a scale. In March 1999, NATO began a series of air strikes against Serbian forces to compel them to withdraw from Kosovo, and in June a NATO-led peacekeeping force, KFOR, was inserted to maintain order. It is still deployed there today.

Ethnic and sectarian tensions occur everywhere in the world, and we know this as well as any population from the experience of Northern Ireland. The Battle of Kosovo in 1389 did not cause the hostility and suspicion, often spilling over into communal violence and atrocities, which have plagued the Balkans for centuries. But the events of the Battle of Kosovo, or rather, a particular construction placed upon the otherwise-sketchy and partial record of events, were put to work in creating a distinctive and deliberate narrative which served Serb nationalism again and again. The Battle of Kosovo was not just a bloody clash in the late 14th century. In its own way, it has continued to claim lives and fuel conflict ever since. It remains alive and almost hyper-real in the imagination.

Gon’ sip Bacardi like it’s your saint’s day

A varied assembly of the sanctified in the mix today. It is the feast of St Vitus (AD 290-AD 303), a Sicilian martyr who was tortured and executed during the Diocletianic persecution aged 12 or 13, the dancing to celebrate whose feast day led to the neurological condition Sydenham’s chorea being dubbed “St Vitus’s Dance” and who is invoked by dancers, actors, comedians and other entertainers, on behalf on dogs and against snake bites, epilepsy, oversleeping and storms; of St Abraham of Clermont (d AD 479), a Syrian-born Persian who travelled to Gaul, was founder and abbot of the monastery of St Cyriacus near Clermont-Ferrand and is invoked against fever; of St Trillo (early 6th century AD), son of Armorican prince Ithel Hael and one of nine brothers who were all canonised, who accompanied St Cadfan to Wales as a student and disciple and founded a number of churches and religious communities; of St Landelin (AD 623-AD 686), an aristocrat from the Low Countries who turned away from an early life of dissolute brigandage to be ordained, founded and oversaw several monasteries and spent his retirement in self-imposed austerity; of St Eadburh of Winchester (AD 921-AD 951), daughter of King Edward the Elder who became an oblate at the convent of St Mary’s, Winchester, at the age of three and remained there for the rest of her life, gaining renown as a singing nun; of St Alice of Schaerbeek (1220-50), a Cistercian lay sister from Brabant who contracted leprosy at the age of 20 and had to be isolated in a small hut where she prayed for the souls of the departed despite intense physical pain and is the patroness of the blind and paralysed; and of St Germaine Cousin (1579-1601), born into poverty near Toulouse suffering from scrofula and with a deformed hand, whose mother died when she was young and who was then isolated and neglected by her stepmother, becoming a shepherdess and a pious and austere devotee of the Blessed Virgin Mary and dying at the age of 22.

In Britain it is National Beer Day, so you know what to do, this celebration presumably unrelated to the coinciding Global Wind Day. In Italy it is Engineer’s Day, and further east they are marking the National Salvation Day of Azerbaijanis, commemorating this day in 1993 when Heydar Aliyev, Chairman of the Supreme Assembly of the Nakhchivan Autonomous Republic and former First Deputy Premier of the Soviet Union and head of the KGB in Azerbaijan, was installed as Chairman of the Supreme Soviet of the Azerbaijan Republic, becoming President of Azerbaijan later that year. In Denmark, it is a double celebration: the Day of Valdemar, marking the victory of King Valdemar II over the pagan Estonian forces at the Battle of Lindanise in 1219; and Reunion Day, commemorating the reunion of Sønderjylland (South Jutland) with the Kingdom of Denmark in 1920 following a referendum, the only post-First World War territorial concession by Germany never contested by Adolf Hitler.

Factoids

1. Simon Callow (above) was briefly a student at Queen’s University Belfast. It is a fine institution but one we tend to associate predominantly with “home” students from Northern Ireland or the Republic of Ireland. More surprising or unfamiliar alumni include physician and suspected serial killer Dr John Bodkin Adams, broadcaster and Crimewatch presenter Nick Ross, long-serving Malaysian cabinet minister Tun Lim Keng Yaik, newly appointed Governor of Penang and former Speaker of the Dewan Rakyat Tan Sri Ramli Ngah Talib, Latin American feminist anthropologist Rita Segato, shadowy Maltese Trump-connected foreign policy adviser Dr Joseph Mifsud, former Turkish Minister of National Defence General Hulusi Akar, Foreign Affairs senior editor Ty McCormick and terrorist and perpetrator of the 2007 Glasgow Airport attack Kafeel Ahmed.

2. Before his famous tenure as Librarian at the University of Hull, poet Philip Larkin was Sub-Librarian at Queen’s University Belfast from 1950 to 1955, which seem to have been some of the most contented and satisfying of his life. He had a relationship with Patsy Strang, who was in an open marriage with one of Larkin’s colleagues, philosophy lecturer Colin Strang, and conceived but miscarried a child by Larkin. During this period he also advised his friend Kingsley Amis on his brilliant comic novel Lucky Jim, which Amis dedicated to Larkin.

3. Colin Strang (above) was the son of Sir William Strang, Permanent Secretary at the Foreign Office 1949-53. Sir William was ennobled as 1st Lord Strang in 1954 and went on to serve as Deputy Chairman of Committees and Deputy Speaker of the House of Lords (1962-68) and Convenor of the Crossbench Peers (1968-74). Colin succeeded as 2nd Lord Strang in 1978 when he was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Newcastle (1975-82) and Dean of the Faculty of Arts (1976-79). The peerage became extinct on his death in 2014.

4. Yitzhak HaLevi Herzog, the first Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi of the State of Israel (1948-59), was a rabbi in Belfast from 1916 to 1919 (I say “a” rabbi; I suspect “the” rabbi). Born in Łomża in Russian Poland in 1888, he moved with his family to Leeds when he was nine years old, then studied at the Sorbonne and undertook a doctorate at the University of London. After his rabbinate in Belfast, he was a rabbi in Dublin (1919-21), learning to speak Irish fluently and supporting the First Dáil and the Republican cause in the Irish Civil War with such dedication he became known as “the Sinn Féin rabbi”. He was then appointed the first Chief Rabbi of Ireland, ministering to a population of less than 4,000 of whom maybe four out of five lived in Dublin. In 1936, he became the second Ashkenazi Chief Rabbi for the British Mandate of Palestine, relocating to Jerusalem, continuing his role when the State of Israel was established in 1948. Herzog died in 1959, aged 70.

5. Yitzhak Herzog has the unique distinction of having a son and a grandson both of whom rose to the presidency of Israel. His elder son Chaim Herzog was born in Belfast, called to the Bar by Lincoln’s Inn, served in the Royal Armoured Corps and the Intelligence Corps during the Second World War then joined the Israeli Defence Forces on their creation and retired as a major-general in 1962. From 1975 to 1978, he was Israel’s Permanent Representative to the United Nations, he won a seat in the Knesset in 1981 and in 1983 he was elected by that body to be the sixth President of Israel. He served the maximum permitted two five-year terms and retired from public life in 1993, dying four years later aged 78. Chaim’s younger son Isaac Herzog was Cabinet Secretary under Prime Minister Ehud Barak (1999-2001), then was elected to the Knesset representing the Labor Party in 2003. He served in various ministerial offices between 2005 and 2011, then was Leader of the Opposition (2013-18), stepping down to become Chairman of the Jewish Agency for Israel. On 2 June 2021, he was elected the 11th President of Israel by a historically large majority in the Knesset, receiving 87 votes to the 26 of his opponent, independent candidate Miriam Peretz. His term of office as President will expire in 2028.

6. Later this month, 25 June marks the anniversary of the Battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876, at which somewhere between 1,100 and 2,500 Lakota Sioux, Dakota Sioux, Northern Cheyenne and Arapaho warriors overwhelmingly defeated the United States 7th Cavalry Regiment commanded by Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer. It is also known as Custer’s Last Stand, as he was killed on the battlefield. But it was a blacker day for the Custer family than that: George’s two younger brothers, Thomas, a two-time recipient of the Medal of Honor and captain in the 7th Cavalry serving as George’s aide-de-camp, and Boston, a civilian contractor and forage master for the 7th Cavalry, were also killed, as were Custer’s nephew, Henry Armstrong Reed, 18 years old and a herder with the regiment, and Custer’s brother-in-law, Lieutenant James Calhoun, acting commanding officer of L Company, 7th Cavalry.

7. In the period during which the Great Britain and then the United Kingdom were held in a personal union with the Electorate and then the Kingdom of Hanover (1714-1837), the Hanoverian Privy Council maintained an office in London called the German Chancery (Deutsche Kanzlei). Britain being larger, more powerful and wealthier than Hanover, the five monarchs who ruled both—George I, George II, George III, George IV and William IV—inevitably spent most or all of their time here rather than in Germany, which suited the Privy Council of Hanover well and allowed it to exercise a degree of power without royal oversight. The Hanoverian minister in the German Chancery was responsible for transmitting memoranda between the monarch and the Privy Council and had little direct power, but was required to be intimately familiar with political events in London and the standing of the various factions and parties in Parliament, as well as having personal access to the King. The Chancery was housed in two rooms in St James’s Palace; it acquired a greater prominence during the French Revolutionary Wars, and especially in the tenure of Ernst Graf zu Münster (1805-31), who sought to keep the plight of Hanover, occupied periodically by the French between 1803 and 1814, in the minds the British people. By the 1830s, the German Chancery was all but defunct, and was no longer required after 20 June 137 when William IV died and was succeeded as monarch of the United Kingdom by his niece Victoria and as King of Hanover by his younger brother Ernest Augustus, Duke of Cumberland and Teviotdale.

8. Los Angeles has been much in the news, and it has forced a little light on to some of the oddities of local government in and around the City of the Angels. Los Angeles County, the local jurisdiction which includes LA, Long Beach, Pasadena, Glendale and other major population centres, has no fewer than 9,757,179 inhabitants. To put that in context, that single county has a larger population than 40 of the 50 states in the Union. Its administrative seat is the City of Los Angeles, at 3.8 million the second most populous city in the United States after New York. The county is governed by a five-member Board of Supervisors, which employs nearly 120,000 people and has an annual budget of $49.2 billion (£36.3 billion), yet I can all but guarantee you will never have heard of any of the five supervisors. Their budget, for comparison, is about half the UK’s annual expenditure on defence. And they are running a single county of the United States.

9. Change is afoot, however, though do not expect too much radicalism. Last November, voters approved a plan known as Measure G (officially the Los Angeles County Government Structure, Ethics and Accountability Charter Amendment). It was agreed 52 per cent to 48 per cent: sound familiar? Under Measure G’s provisions, by 2028 there will be a County Executive elected on a county-wide basis who will be the head of the administration; in 2032, the Board of Supervisors will be expanded from five to nine seats, of which seven will be elected cross-county as before, from which two will be randomly selected to be elected to initial two-year terms which will not count toward term limits; and in 2034, two additional supervisors will be elected and the two given two-year terms will be eligible for re-election, bringing the Board of Supervisors to nine. The County Executive will have an enormous budget and electoral mandate and could, as this Politico article suggests, instantly be a major political player.

10. In light of Israel’s air strikes against Iran this week and the desperate search by commentators for a plausible prognosis, I was reminded of the experience of Sir Anthony Parsons, British Ambassador to Iran 1974-79. In May 1978, he was asked for his assessment of the political situation in Iran, where there were growing protests against the autocratic rule of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and increasingly strong Islamic dissent. At that time, the United Kingdom sourced 14 per cent of its oil from Iran and had recently agreed military sales worth billions of pounds, and the government in London wanted to know if these investments and liabilities were at risk. On 10 May 1978, Parsons sent a telegram to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in London.

    It is easier for an ambassador to predict the worst than to give a relatively optimistic forecast. If the worst happens, he is congratulated on his foresight: if nothing happens, his prophecy is forgotten. But my honest opinion is that the Pahlavis, father and son, have a good chance and my guess is that they will make it.

    The Shah went into exile on 16 January 1979 and would never return. The monarchy was abolished on 11 February, and the Shah, suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukaemia and following a botched splenectomy during which his pancreas had been damaged, died at 9.15 am on 27 July 1980 in Cairo.

“Journalism will kill you, but it will keep you alive while you’re at it.” (Horace Greeley)

1. “Stephen Miller: the architect of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policy”: in The Financial Times, James Politi profiles Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s White House Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy and Homeland Security Advisor. Miller is one of the strongest influences on immigration and homeland security policy in the current administration. He has a maximal vision of executive and presidential power and an uncompromising and hardline approach to border security and immigration enforcement, stoking the fires which having been taking place in Los Angeles: he described LA as “occupied territory” and characterised the disorder and attempts to bring it under control as a “fight to save civilisation”. A bone-deep conservative who read Ayn Rand and the Federalist Papers in high school, Miller fundamentally rejects the notion that immigration has benefited the United States and has said that “America is for Americans and Americans only”. Whatever one thinks of the direction of travel of the policies Miller has devised and now espouses, his disregard for checks and balances and eagerness for a truly imperial presidency is a source of justified anxiety.

2. “The Rahm Emanuel I know: Separating caricature from character”: former White House Chief of Staff, Mayor of Chicago and US Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel has been mentioned as a potential Democratic presidential candidate for 2028 (though at this stage in the electoral cycle and given the state of the Democratic Party, if your name hasn’t been mentioned and you’re not Gary Hart or actually dead, then really, what are you doing?). Emanuel has always interested me, partly because of his reputation as a highly divisive partisan attack dog and partly because of his decision to move from Beltway politics back to his hometown and the mayoralty. In The Hill, former New York Congressman Steve Israel, a friend of Emanuel’s, disavows any knowledge of whether the former mayor will run or not, but argues that he has to be judged as a politician who is highly focused on winning partisan battles, but as a means to an end rather than an end in themselves. “The calculation is clear, simple and paramount in his mind: you achieve victory in order to govern with values. Nothing else matters.” Emanuel will be three weeks shy of his 69th birthday on Election Day 2028, though Donald Trump and Joe Biden have, in their different ways, shows us that age is a flexible factor in modern politics, and as I am neither American nor a Democrat there is a limit at this stage to how accurately I can predict the chances of any candidate. But this snapshot is a useful addition to the literature on a nomination battle which, in truth, is already underway.

3. “The Death of The Soldier and the State”: another penetrating Substack essay by Secretary of Defense Rock, addressing last weekend’s federalisation of elements of the California Army National Guard by President Donald Trump and the employment of a regular United States Marine Corps infantry battalion in law enforcement. (I examined some of the legal, constitutional, historical and practical issues earlier in the week.) The author regards Trump’s political rally at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, on Tuesday as “the most serious breach of American civil-military norms in the 21st century”, not just blurring but erasing the line between an apolitical professional military establishment and the civilian politics it is supposed to serve without bias. I think his concern is valid and proportionate, and agree with his observation that “each time something like this happens… it gets rationalized as a fluke. The damage, however, is cumulative.” The long-revered if imperfect model of “objective control” proposed by Samuel P. Huntington in his 1957 volume The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of Civil-Military Relations is on the verge of implosion. I simply don’t think it is any more a controversial statement that, being circumspect, Trump has a taste for militarism and the threatened use of force, conducts his presidency in an autocratic manner in many respects and does not believe in the notion of the armed forces owing loyalty to the Constitution rather than to him personally. All of those propositions seem to me hard to refute. And Trump’s inclinations in that direction are likely to grow more, not less, marked and more, not less, hungry.

4. “Ahoy! It’s Trump’s USS Protectionism. Hope it has plenty of life jackets.”: former Governor of Indiana Mitch Daniels takes a light-hearted but not unserious swing in The Washington Post at President Trump’s childishly and incoherently named One Big Beautiful Bill Act, which has been passed by the House of Representatives and now awaits scrutiny in the Senate. Daniels invokes the recent embarrassment in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, when a 5,000-ton Choe Hyon-class destroyer toppled over during its launch in front of the country’s Supreme Leader, Kim Jong Un; and the capsizing of the Swedish warship Vasa in Stockholm harbour in August 1628, 1,400 yards into its maiden voyage. (If you’re ever in Stockholm, go to the Vasa Museum: it’s brilliant.) The common thread, he argues, is a leader who is heedless to advice and advisers who are no longer candid, “all the elements of personalized government run amok”; and this, he fears, will be the fate of Trump’s “dangerous and impractical” tariff régime, which “violates the spirit and likely the letter of the Constitution”. He nods to the handful of Republican legislators who are sceptical of the benefits of tariffs and who believe that the authority to set tariffs claimed by the President violates Article I of the United States Constitution. I suspect the bill will pass—as I wrote in The Spectator in April, the Republican Party as anything more than a cult following of Donald J. Trump is all but dead by its own hand—but one of the mottos of politics is “You never know”.

5. “The price of Iran’s nuclear prestige”: [NB I wrote this before the Israeli strikes on Iran on Thursday/Friday, so bear that in mind when you read.] Engelsberg Ideas is always a rich and varied diet, and Professor Ali Ansari, whom I’m lucky enough to know a little and who is a scholarly adornment of and Founding Director of the Institute of Iranian Studies at my alma mater, the University of St Andrews, is the best, most elegant and most incisive commentator on Iran that I’ve encountered. Noting the recent death of Akbar Etemad, the godfather of Iran’s nuclear programme, Ali paints the country’s investment in both civil nuclear power and the development of nuclear weapons as a prestige project and an insurance policy, one which in its first years under the Shah relied heavily on assistance and expertise from the United Kingdom. By the time the Islamic Republic revisited nuclear plans some years after the revolution, the strategic and economic context had changed immeasurably, but Iran’s attitude had perhaps not. In security terms, for many years, “NATO assessments concluded that Iran was building the infrastructure for a bomb but would not take the next step”, but the development of a nuclear capability by India and Pakistan in the 1990s and the advent of the Global War on Terror after 11 September 2001 polarised the issue. What is Iran’s stance now? Good question: some argue for the benefits of constructive ambiguity—keep ’em guessing—while others look at the conflict in Ukraine and wonder if Russia would have invaded had not Ukraine surrendered its nuclear weapons (ironically to Russia) in 1994.

6. “White lies hide dark truths”: a thoughtful meditation from former Conservative minister Tom Tugendhat’s Dispatches Substack on the language used to discuss “assisted dying” and the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill currently before Parliament. Precision of language matters enormously in public debate and is, of course, absolutely critical in drafting and amending legislation. If Members of Parliament are not clear and certain about what they mean, then by definition they have not understood the subject they are considering, while if they deliberately choose words which obfuscate, distract or conceal, then that too is damaging. (It is also, of course, true that it can be as damaging purposefully to choose language which inflames, exaggerates and exacerbates.) Whether you support the principle behind “assisted dying” or not, I think you ought to agree that we should call things what they are, neither more nor less, and the bill’s sponsor, Labour MP Kim Leadbeater, has sometimes seemed squeamish on this front. But Tugendhat’s observations apply more broadly, and bring me back (as I return again and again) to a sentiment from Sir Stephen Fry’s dazzling debut novel The Liar: “The English language is an arsenal of weapons; if you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or no they are loaded you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time.”

7. “A fearless, serious historian”: Dr Robert Crowcroft of the University of Edinburgh pays tribute in The Critic to the historian John Charmley, who died in May. I suppose I first encountered Charmley when he published Churchill: The End of Glory in 1993, the year before I first went up to university, and I remember the effect it had on the historiographical community. “Revisionist” doesn’t quite do it justice: Charmley declared that “Churchill stood for the British Empire, for British independence and for an ‘anti-Socialist’ vision of Britain”, then pointed out that by 1945 the Empire was on its knees and India was only a couple of years from partition and independence, the Second World War had effectively bankrupted the UK and entrenched the growing dominance of the United States and Britain’s dependence on it, and the electorate had just voted for the Labour Party in a landslide. As well as revising Churchill’s reputation downwards, Charmley attempted to breathe life into the standing of Neville Chamberlain, but that was perhaps a task too far. Although, as Crowcroft says, “he delighted in debunking reassuring narratives of both the left and the right”, there was no sense (none that I detected anyway) that he was a revisionist out of inherent contrarianism or that he let enthusiasm take him further than the evidence would allow. I think Crowcroft is right that Charmley’s works “constitute serious, powerful statements of a doctrine of pessimism and prudence in statecraft”, and certainly always made, and make, for stimulating reading.

8. “Farewell to Frederick Forsyth, the master of the thriller”: another obituary of an important conservative writer, though of a rather different stamp: in The Spectator, Alexander Larman pays tribute to thriller writer Freddie Forsyth (was any man ever more a “Freddie” than FF?) who has died at the venerable age of 86. First an RAF pilot then a journalist, he took a snippet of news—the attempted assassination of President Charles de Gaulle in August 1962 by the nationalist paramilitary Organisation armée secrète (OAS)—added a discovery that it was ludicrously easy to obtain a false identity in the UK by using the birth certificate of a child of the right age who had died in infancy and the result was The Day of the Jackal (1971), a brilliant, taut, methodical thriller which should be fatally flawed. After all, before you even pick the book up, you know, without a shadow of doubt, that de Gaulle will survive: when the novel was published, the French leader had only been dead for seven months, suddenly felled by an aneurysm while watching television. The book was a triumph, as was the 1973 cinema adaptation by Fred Zinnemann, starring Edward Fox in perhaps his best screen performance. If you haven’t read Forsyth’s autobiography, The Outsider: My Life in Intrigue, I strong recommend it. As Larman indicated, he was a man of very many more parts than most people realise, and a force of nature.

9. “We don’t just watch films anymore. We curate them.”: from my great friend Mark Heywood and his Inkjockey stable, a fascination analysis of and meditation on the way films have changed and the way our reaction to them has changed. As in many other aspects of life, especially in culture, we are no longer passive recipients of an objet presented by its creator, nor must we any longer simply accept or refuse it. We can take an experience or an idea or an aesthetic and mould it to our own sensibilities and purposes. By doing so we participate in a kind of self-generating feedback loop, which need not be a negative thing, but which can carry us far from the auteur’s starting point. Typically, because he’s both imaginative and pragmatic, Mark accepts what is and looks for ways to leverage reality: “The vibe economy is real. And it’s wide open. Come and play in it.” Fascinating.

10. “Let Them Run Wild”: written a year ago but revived in light of Brian Wilson’s death this week, journalist and critic Ross Barkan’s review of the Disney documentary The Beach Boys is much more than a review (as all the best reviews are): it is a jumping-off point for a careful, thought-provoking essay on the band, their music, success and milieu, and a very enjoyable one. (I will be trying to write an obituary of Wilson for CulturAll over the next few days.) Whatever your estimation of Mike Love’s contribution—and I’m willing to be generous to man of 84 who is now one of only two surviving original members of the band—the Beach Boys would not have been what they were without Brian Wilson and his strange, melodic, agonising genius. It is also, I think, significant that when you look at the band as a whole, they are really not meaningfully comparable to any other group, from their origins in clean-cut close harmonies inspired by the Lettermen and aspirational Californian surf culture (only one of the band, Dennis Wilson, actually surfed, and he died by drowning) to the Spector-esque wall of sound and a complexity and vision which could see them go toe-to-toe with the Beatles in their pomp. It seems pointless to say of Wilson “we shall not see his like again”, because of course we won’t.

Jukebox jury: the Beach Boys

With the death of Wilson, one of the outstanding musical minds of modern popular music, there is a theme to this week’s offerings.

1. “God Only Knows”, The Beach Boys

2. “California Girls”, The Beach Boys

3. “Good Vibrations”, The Beach Boys

4. “I Get Around”, The Beach Boys

5. “Love and Mercy”, Brian Wilson

From the archives: “Not only will victory be ours, but we shall be worthy of it.”

I was listening to Iain Dale being interviewed about his new, concise biography of Margaret Thatcher published as part of a series of prime ministerial studies; it comes in anticipation of the centenary of Thatcher’s birth on 13 October 2025. Dale talked about attending the Conservative Party conference in Brighton in October 1978, the last conference season before the general election which would see her win power, become the country’s first female Prime Minister and begin what turned out to be 11½ years in Downing Street.

Dale was 16 years old and, he admits, a member of the Liberal Party but curious to hear what the Leader of the Opposition had to say. Throughout the summer of 1978, the Labour Party, after a few disastrous years, was polling ahead of the Conservatives by a handful of points, and it was widely expected that the Prime Minister, James Callaghan, would cash in on this by calling an election in the autumn. There was good reason to think he would win, achieving a workable parliamentary majority—Labour had scraped a three-seat advantage in October 1974 but by 1976 it had melted away and he was running a minority administration—and extending the government’s lifetime to 1983. Defeat at the hands of the avuncular “Sunny Jim” Callaghan would probably have doomed Thatcher’s leadership and her wary colleagues might well have concluded that her disruptive radicalism after succeeding Edward Heath in February 1975 had been a failed experiment.

Then Callaghan had defied expectation and decided there would be no election in 1978. At the Trades Union Congress annual conference in September 1978, also in Brighton, the Prime Minister had teased his bemused colleagues and baffled voters by singing an old music hall song, Waiting at the Church, made famous in the 1900s by Vesta Victoria. As the 1974 Parliament would reach the end of its life in the summer of 1979, that meant going to the country in the late spring or early summer. The 1978 conference season was, therefore, set up as a launch pad.

It was Thatcher’s fourth party conference as Conservative leader. I wrote about her path to the top of her party a couple of years ago: her elevation was unexpected, and came about in part because of the implosion, faint-heartedness or scrupulous loyalty to Heath of other senior Conservatives like Willie Whitelaw, Edward du Cann and Sir Keith Joseph. Thatcher had not been a major figure in the Heath government of 1970-74, firmly corralled at the Department of Education and Science, away from the centre of power, although she had brilliantly exploited the opportunities presented to her in the 11 months of opposition from March 1974 to February 1975. When the crisis of Heath’s leadership came, however, it was Thatcher who was willing to step up: cometh the hour, cometh the woman… although many were still deeply sceptical of the very concept of a female party leader, let alone Prime Minister.

Dale told his interviewer that he was so profoundly struck by Thatcher’s conference speech in 1978 because it had clarity and determination, persuasively analysing the problems afflicting Britain and proposing solutions. You may find many of those problems eerily familiar: disappointingly low living standards, poor productivity, a loss of pride, self-confidence and identity, excessively high taxation, the decline of law and order…

Margaret Thatcher was not a great orator in a stylistic sense. Although her set-piece speeches, both in the House of Commons and on the conference platform, tended to be livelier and more human in performance than on the page, they often read as slightly flat and ordinary (though there are fleeting and unexpected glimpses of wit). All of these things are true about the speech she gave to the party conference on Friday 13 October 1978. But what struck Dale and is perhaps even more striking to a more jaded and disillusioned audience now is her plain, straightforward clarity of thought and exposition. She was not hiding in the obfuscatory reeds of nuanced language nor seeking to strip her words of anything which might be objectionable to anyone at all. She began trenchantly.

Our party offers the nation nothing less than national revival, the deeply-needed, long-awaited and passionately longed-for recovery of our country. That recovery will depend on a decisive rejection of the Labour Party by the people and a renewed acceptance of our basic Conservative belief that the State is the servant not the master of this nation… at home we are a country profoundly ill at ease with ourselves, while abroad a darkening and dangerous world scene confronts us.

The Labour government was not, she insisted, made up of “remarkably foolish” or “unusually wicked” people. Ministers had the country’s best interests at heart. But what had led the administration astray was a lack of honesty with itself.

There have been enough good intentions to pave the well-worn path twice over. The root of the matter is this: we have been ruled by men who live by illusions, the illusion that you can spend money you haven't earned without eventually going bankrupt or falling into the hands of your creditors; the illusion that real jobs can be conjured into existence by Government decree like rabbits out of a hat; the illusion that there is some other way of creating work and wealth than by hard work and satisfying your customers; the illusion that you can have freedom and enterprise without believing in free enterprise; the illusion that you can have an effective foreign policy without a strong defence force and a peaceful and orderly society without absolute respect for the law.

This was the zenith of trades union militancy and power, but Thatcher did not predict or promise a Manichaean conflict with organised labour. She addressed union leaders directly, and explained, simply and clearly, what was needed.

We Conservatives don’t have a blue-print for instant success. There isn’t one. But at least we start with this advantage. We know what not to do. That path has been clearly signposted. If a government takes too much in tax, everyone wants higher wages. If a government bails out those who bargain irresponsibly, where does the money come from? The pockets of those who bargain responsibly. If a government tries to level everyone down, with year after year of totally rigid incomes policies, it destroys incentive. If a government enforces those policies with the underworld sanctions of blackmail and blacklist, it undermines its own authority and Parliament’s… The right way to attack unemployment is to produce more goods more cheaply and then more people can afford to buy them. Japan and Germany, mentioned several times this week—and rightly so—are doing precisely that and have been for years. Both have a large and growing share of our markets. Both are winning your customers and taking your jobs.

The remedy, she concluded, was straightforward but not painless: strict control of the money supply, the abolition of incomes policies, less state control and lower personal taxation. Competition and free enterprise would lead to greater profitability, and there had to be incentives for hard work and excellence. If all of this could be achieved, if a Conservative government had the sense of purpose and the fortitude to pursue the measures necessary, then the nation could be made new again. “Then not only will victory be ours, but we shall be worthy of it.”

It is a remarkable speech in many ways. Read it. Look at how it is put together, how it argues, how it presents Thatcher’s case. And, alas, note the impossibility of imagining it being given today, if the current political culture does not change.

I do no­body harm, I say none harm, I think none harm…

… as Sir Thomas More wrote to his daughter Margaret from his imprisonment, but wish everybody good. And if this be not enough to keep a man alive, in good faith, I long not to live.

That might not be 100 per cent true of me. The “say none harm” bit. Still.