Sunday round-up 17 November 2024

Scorsese, DeVito, Jack Vettriano and RuPaul are all celebrating, but we mark the death of Mary I and of Catholic England

Who did you forget and who’s going to get a giant Toblerone and some petrol station flowers? Former Chief of the Defence Staff Field Marshal Lord Guthrie of Craigiebank (86), cinema legend Martin Scorsese (82), actress and model Lauren Hutton (81), actor, director, producer and alleged Schwarzenegger twin Danny DeVito (80), Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels (80), versatile director and producer Roland Joffé (79), Lindisfarne co-founder Rod Clements (77), former Governor of Vermont and notorious screamer Howard Dean (76), ex-Speaker of the House of Representatives and no stranger to a glass of wine John Boehner (75), much-maligned but staggeringly successful Fife painter Jack Vettriano (73), President of South Africa Cyril Ramaphosa (72), actress and singer Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio (66), television host and celebrity rhotacism sufferer Jonathan Ross (64), iconic dude-looks-like-a-lady RuPaul (64), former United States National Security Advisor Dr Susan Rice (60), actress, director, screenwriter and reliable femme françoise Sophie Marceau (58), under-the-radar Canadian and actress Rachel McAdams (46) and annoyingly young bestselling novelist Christopher Paolini (41).

Cake and candles put away now for the departed who include Roman Emperor Vespasian (AD 9), penultimate King of France Louis XVIII (1755), mathematician, astronomer and creator of the eponymous strip August Ferdinand Möbius (1790), brilliant but spiky Field Marshal Viscount Montgomery of Alamein (1887), father of method acting Lee Strasberg (1901), pioneering automotive engineer Soichiro Honda (1906), iconic American Civil War historian Shelby Foote (1916), screen heartthrob with a secret Rock Hudson (1925), first lady of the double entendre Fenella Fielding (1927), legendary psephologist Anthony King (1934), troubled genius Peter Cook (1937), Canadian folk supremo Gordon Lightfoot (1938), journalist, author and celebrity offspring Auberon Waugh (1939), founding member of The Dubliners Luke Kelly (1940), under-recognised Byrd and country-rock luminary Gene Clark (1944), pin-up of the long-faced and soulful Jeff Buckley (1966) and Girls Aloud stalwart Sarah Harding (1981).

A dark day for English Catholicism. Today in 1558, at around 7.00 am, Queen Mary (my historiographical beloved) died at St James’s Palace, at the age of 42. She had been on the throne for just over five years. She had been obviously ill and in pain for at least six months, with what is now thought likely to have been some form of cancer, perhaps ovarian or uterine; there is a grim irony that it may have been that very cancer and the tumours it was causing which led her to think she was pregnant late the previous year. She was desperate for a child and heir, partly because of naturally maternal and maritorious instincts but also because her heir presumptive was her younger half-sister Elizabeth, who was a Protestant of some complex kind. After her marriage to Philip of Spain in 1554, he became King of England and joint ruler, but the terms of Queen Mary’s Marriage Act 1554 stipulated that his authority came to an end with her death and the whole of her reign was predicated on preparations for a polity which would be handed on to their children. Despite recurring false pregnancies, however, there would be no children, which made her undoubted achievements provisional: a more-or-less accepted restoration of Roman Catholicism and the Catholic hierarchy, with an attendant revival in festivals and popular celebrations; reform and renewal of the church and clergy; the beginnings of fiscal reform and a stabilisation of royal income under the Lord High Treasurer the Marquess of Winchester; tentative support for overseas exploration and colonial enterprise including the grant of a royal charter to the Muscovy Company, the world’s first joint-stock enterprise and still in existence; and the foundations of later naval expansion, overseen by the Lord High Admiral Lord Howard of Effingham, whose son (ironically) would defeat the Spanish Armada 30 years later. Without an heir, though, none of this was secure, and Mary died childless and disappointed. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Reginald Cardinal Pole, a pious, nervy, indecisive and vaguely heretical man who was her chief religious adviser, died about 12 hours later of influenza. He was 58.

On this day in 1869, the Suez Canal was inaugurated. A procession of ships entered the French-controlled waterway at port Said at the northern end, officially headed by the Emperor’s yacht L’Aigle; in reality, HMS Newport, a Philomel-class gunvessel captained by Commander George Nares, had navigated to the head of the line of ships the previous night in complete darkness and without lights, and could not now be passed. The Royal Navy vessel was therefore the first ship to traverse the canal, for which Nares received an official reprimand and an unofficial vote of thanks from the Admiralty. French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps had formed the Compagnie universelle du canal maritime de Suez in 1858 to exploit the concession he had extracted from the Wāli of Egypt, Mohamed Sa’id Pasha, five years before and build a canal which would radically cut journey times from Europe to India and the Far East. Its initial ownership was 50 per cent in the hands of French private investors, 44 per cent was held by the government of Egypt and the remaining six per cent had been purchased by other private investors, mainly Ottoman subjects. The canal is 120 miles long, extending from Port Said to Port Tewfik, and when it opened it reduced the journey from the Arabian Sea to London by approximately 5,500 miles, to 10 days at 20 knots or 8 days at 24 knots. In 1875, Sa’id Pasha’s successor as ruler of Egypt, Isma’il Pasha, unable to pay his bank debts, sold his 44 per cent stake in the Suez Canal Company to the British government.

On this date in 1950, the 14th Dalai Lama, the spiritual leader of Tibetan Buddhism, took formal control as head of state of Tibet. He was 15 years old, had been selected as the tulku or manifestation of the Dalai Lama in 1937 and was recognised as the 14th Dalai Lama in 1939. After his status was approved by the government of the neighbouring Republic of China, which made a territorial claim to Tibet but had not sought rigorously to enforce it, an enthronement ceremony took place in Lhasa on 22 February 1940. Tibet was ruled by a dual system of government known as Cho-sid-nyi (ཆོས་སྲིད་གཉིས), or “Dharma and temporal”, which saw religious and secular power exercised side-by-side by different but cooperating instruments. The Ganden Phodrang, the government of Tibet, expelled the official Chinese delegation in Lhasa in July 1949 as the Communists under Mao Zedong seemed likely to prevail in the civil war in China, and on 1 October the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed. The Ganden wrote to the US State Department and to Mao proclaiming its independence and its determination to preserve its autonomy, but incorporation of Tibet into the Chinese state, along with Taiwan, Hainan and the Penghu Islands, was a key aim of the new PRC. There were desultory negotiations between Tibet and China in September 1950, but Chinese troops crossed the border on 7 October and captured the border town of Chamdo within two weeks. Tibet, with an army of only 8,500, had no chance of resisting militarily. The regent for the Dalai Lama, Ngawang Sungrab Thutob, third Taktra Rinpoche, invested him with temporal as well as spiritual authority, in an effort to find a resolution to the crisis. On 23 May 1951, the Tibetan delegation in Beijing was coerced into signing the Seventeen Point Agreement, presented without negotiation by China, which gave the PRC control over Tibet. That control remains in force. The Dalai Lama fled Tibet in March 1959 and continues to live in Dharamshala in northern India.

A relatively quiet day on the festal front. Today we remember St Gregory Thaumaturgus (AD 213-AD 270), a philosopher and theologian who became Bishop of Neocaesarea and was responsible for the city’s conversion to Christianity; SS Acisclus and Victoria, brother and sister from Hispania martyred in the Diocletianic Persecution in AD 304 (though Victoria may not have existed); St Aignan of Orleans (AD 358-AD 453), a one-time hermit and bishop from Vienne who helped Flavius Aetius defend Orléans against Attila the Hun; St Gregory of Tours (AD 538-AD 594), a Frankish chronicler known as “the father of French history”; St Hilda of Whitby (AD 614-AD 680), a Deiran princess who became a nun in Northumbria and was Abbess of Hartlepool then Abbess of Whitby; and St Elizabeth of Hungary (1207-31), who married the Landgrave of Thuringia, was widowed at 20 and gave generously to the poor, and is the patroness of the Third of Order of St Francis, hospitals, nurses, the falsely accused, bakers, brides, countesses, dying children, exiles, homeless people, lace-makers and widows (what a Venn diagram).

Today is International Students’ Day, marking the anniversary of the storming of the University of Prague by German security forces in 1939 and the execution of nine academics and students. In a similar vein, Greece marks Athens Polytechnic Uprising Remembrance Day, marking the 1973 suppression of a student protest by the Regime of the Colonels and the deaths of around 40 civilians. (The junta would collapse in July 1974.)

The state of Odisha in eastern India marks the death in 1928 of Lala Lajpat Rai, the “Lion of Punjab”, a revolutionary, author and member of the Congress Party who sustained ultimately fatal head injuries in a baton charge during a protest in Lahore against the Simon Commission.

Factoids

1. It is the birthday of the late and famously rebarbative Auberon Waugh (see above), eldest son of Evelyn Waugh. He was commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards to undertake his National Service and deployed to Cyprus during the Emergency. On one occasion the machine gun on his armoured car jammed, and Bron, with characteristic irritation, seized the barrel of the weapon and shook it furiously. This relieved the blockage but resulted in him being shot several times in the chest. He was given life-saving first aid by his troop sergeant and taken to Nicosia General Hospital, and (obviously) survived but his spleen, one lung, several ribs and a finger. Technically, therefore, while vituperative and verbally brutal, he was not in fact splenetic.

2. Like England, Scotland has had one and only one King John. After the death of Alexander III in 1286 and of his granddaughter and heir presumptive, Margaret, the “Maid of Norway”, aged seven, in 1290, there was no dominant claimant of the throne of Scotland. The country had been governed since Alexander’s death by a group of six regents, the Guardians of Scotland, and on the death of Margaret, with a dizzying 13 candidates for the crown coming forward, they turned to Edward I of England to arbitrate in an attempt to avoid a civil war. He then nominated 104 “auditors” who, under his presidency, would adjudicate the claims. Of those, 24 were his own nominees, while the two strongest candidates for the throne, John de Balliol and Robert de Brus, 5th Lord of Annandale, each named 40 auditors. Balliol’s claim, through his mother, Dervorguilla of Galloway, was that he was the great-great-great-grandson of David I (1124-53), while de Brus was David’s great-great-grandson, but through a younger child; this made Balliol senior in genealogical primogeniture but de Brus in proximity of blood. Today in 1292, the auditors met in the Great Hall of Berwick Castle and pronounced in favour of Balliol, who became John I, King of Scots, and was inaugurated at Scone on St Andrew’s Day, 30 November. His reign was short and unhappy: never fully in control of the kingdom, he was humiliated as a feudal vassal by Edward I, marginalised by a new group of guardians and, after an English invasion, he abdicated on 10 July 1296. He was known, not fondly, as “Toom Tabard”, or “empty coat”. This was either a reference to his coat of arms, a red shield with a white border known in heraldic terms as an inescutcheon voided, or to the supposed tearing of his royal arms from his tunic by Edward I after he was captured in 1296.

3. John I’s father, also John de Balliol, is rather more positively commemorated. He was an English nobleman with estates in the north, around Barnard Castle and Gainford, but his marriage in 1223 to Dervorguilla of Galloway, daughter of Alan, Lord of Galloway, and Margaret of Huntingdon, gave him status and lands in England and Scotland. He was a leading adviser to Henry III and became Sheriff of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, and was then joint protector of the young Alexander III of Scotland. Following a dispute with the Bishop of Durham, Walter of Kirkham, Balliol agreed to provide support for scholars to study at Oxford: they took up their places in 1263 and their establishment is now Balliol College, Oxford. Balliol claims to be the oldest college in the university, which is disputed by University College and Merton College, but certainly all three were extant before 1280. Particularly since Benjamin Jowett’s tenure as Master from 18970 to 1893, Balliol has had a reputation as the most formidably (and self-consciously) intellectual of Oxford colleges.

4. Balliol College has produced four prime ministers: H.H. Asquith (1908-16), Harold Macmillan (1957-63), Edward Heath (1970-74) and Boris Johnson (2019-22). You may make of that list what you will. Other political heavyweights include Stafford Northcote, Edward Grey, Alfred Milner, George Curzon, Herbert Samuel, Leo Amery (and his son Julian), Roy Jenkins, Denis Healey, John Boyd-Carpenter, Frank Soskice, Jo Grimond, Ian Gilmour, Nicholas Ridley, Chris Patten and Bryan Gould. (I mention only in passing that Christ Church, my own college, has produced 13 prime ministers, including Liverpool, Canning, Peel, Derby and Gladstone, but still, well done, Balliol.)

5. I have never tried it myself but I’ve seen Fred Zinnemann’s 1973 masterpiece The Day of The Jackal and I know assassination isn’t an easy business. One of the most bizarre attempted assassinations, however, took place in 218 BC in Han, in central China. It had been defeated by neighbouring Qin in 230 BC and one of the vanquished statesmen, Zhang Liang, swore revenge on the Qin ruler Qin Shi Huang. He devoted his entire fortune to the enterprise, hired a strongman and commissioned a 160-pound iron hammer. Discovering that Qin Shi Huang was undertaking a tour of Han, he and the strongman lay in wait for the imperial procession to pass through Bolangsha, whereupon the strongman threw the hammer at the most highly decorated coach. They reasoned that this must be the emperor’s carriage, and it was destroyed and its occupants killed, but Qin Shi Huang had been travelling in the next coach and escaped unharmed. All I’m saying is that, for example, when Artaxerxes III, the Achaemenid ruler, was assassinated in 338 BC, his killers poisoned him. No hammers involved.

6. Polyaenus, a 2nd century Roman Macedonian author and rhetorician, wrote a history of warfare called Stratagems in War. One of his claims, not universally accepted, is that at the Battle of Pelusium in 525 BC, the Achaemenid king Cambyses II exploited a psychological weakness in his Egyptian opponents: realising that they venerated cats and would do nothing to harm them, he ordered his soldiers to carry cats in front of them as they advanced to thwart any attacks. According to Polyaenus, “the Egyptians immediately stopped their operations, out of fear of hurting the animals, which they hold in great veneration. Cambyses captured Pelusium, and thereby opened up for himself the route into Egypt.” The view of the cats is unrecorded.

7. In 1944, a Toxteth-born dual British-American citizen joined the United States Navy as a pharmacist’s mate. His name was William Patrick Hitler. His father, Alois Hitler Jr, was the half-brother of Adolf and had fallen out with their father Alois, moving to Ireland, where he worked as a waiter in the Shelbourne Hotel in Dublin. He met an Irish woman, Bridget Dowling, and they eloped to London to marry in 1910, then moved to Liverpool, where William Patrick was born in 1911. Alois abandoned his family in 1914 and returned to Germany. When William arrived for military service, the induction officer asked for his name, which, quite truthfully, he gave as “Hitler”. The response was “Glad to see you, Hitler, my name’s Hess”. He was discharged from the navy in 1947 and probably wisely changed his name to Stuart-Houston. The Führer’s nephew died in Patchogue, New York, in 1987, leaving four sons: Alexander Adolf (seriously?), Louis, Howard Ronald and Brian William. None of them had children of their own. His widow, Phyllis Stuart-Houston, died in 2004.

8. President-elect Donald Trump should not be accused of lacking a spirit of bipartisanship. From 1987 to 1999, he was a registered Republican, although he was asked to host the Democratic Congressional dinner in 1988. He denied any ambition for public office but said “I believe that if I did run for President, I’d win”. The same year, he approached Vice-President George H.W. Bush’s campaign manager, Lee Atwater, asking to be considered as Bush’s running mate in the presidential election, which Bush found “strange and unbelievable”. Trump then joined the Reform Party in 1999, tentatively seeking its nomination for president. He won primaries in California and Michigan but dropped out of the race. In 2001, he became a Democrat, endorsing Senator Hillary Clinton in the 2008 nomination race as someone who would be “a good president”. However, he went on to support Republican candidate Senator John McCain, “a smart guy”, in the presidential election and returned to the Republican Party in 2009. Quite a journey.

9. Major Henry Rathbone, a 27-year-old staff officer in the United States Army, accompanied President Abraham Lincoln and Mrs Lincoln to Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865. (General Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia, among others, had declined the invitation.) After John Wilkes Booth had entered the presidential box and shot Lincoln in the back of the head, Rathbone attempted to seize Booth, who produced a dagger and made to stab him in the chest. Rathbone raised his arms in self-defence and the blade cut his left arm from the shoulder to the elbow, and he passed out due to loss of blood shortly after assessing the president’s condition as fatal. Although the wound was serious, nearly severing an artery, he made a full recovery, but was plagued by guilt about his failure to stop the assassination. He resigned from the army in 1870, and found it difficult to maintain a job due to his mental distress. He became convinced that his wife Clara was unfaithful to him, and that she intended to sue for divorce and take away their children. The family moved to Germany when Rathbone was appointed US Consul in Hanover, but he was overcome by a fit of rage on 23 December 1883 and attacked their three children, Henry (13), Gerald (12) and Clara (12). Clara Rathbone attempted to defend the children but her husband fatally shot and stabbed her, then stabbed himself in the chest five times in an apparent suicide attempt. Declared insane, he was committed to an asylum in Hildesheim, south-east of Hanover, where he died on 14 August 1911.

10. The couple’s elder son, Henry Riggs Rathbone, returned with his siblings to the United States after their mother’s death and they were raised by their maternal uncle William Harris. After graduating from Yale and the University of Wisconsin, Rathbone began practising law in Chicago in 1894. He was a delegate to the Republican National Convention in 1916, held in Chicago, at which Charles Evans Hughes, an associate justice of the Supreme Court and former governor of New York, was comfortably nominated for president. (He lost relatively narrowly to President Woodrow Wilson who was seeking re-election.) Rathbone was elected to the United States House of Representatives as one of two congressmen for Illinois’ at-large electoral district in 1922 and remained in office until his death, aged 58, in July 1928. Unusually, he both succeeded and preceded female representatives, Winnifred Huck and Ruth Hanna McCormick.

“Television has the obvious benefits of regularity and intimacy.” (Graydon Carter)

1. “Wolf Hall—The Mirror and the Light”: for reasons of academic specialism, I am a tough crowd when it comes to Tudor drama, and easily annoyed or disappointed. But Peter Kosminsky’s adaptation of the third and final book in the late Dame Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Thomas Cromwell is dazzling. Peter Straughan delivers a superb script, written almost in parallel with the novel, the direction is superb and the cast is one outstanding turn after another. Mark Rylance has an other-worldly brilliance as Cromwell, calm, clever, pragmatic, almost fatalistic, but capable of sudden outbursts of violence and fury. Damian Lewis is terrifying and charming by turns as the ageing Henry VIII, now in his mid-forties and only recently having suffered the jousting injury which would mar his later years. Jonathan Pryce, if perhaps physically too slight, is a weary and increasingly hunted Cardinal Wolsey in flashback sequences, while Timothy Spall makes a lugubrious and angry replacement for the late Bernard Hill as the Duke of Norfolk. And a special note for Dame Harriet Walter as the stiff, stoical Lady Margaret Pole. This is historical drama at its best: I will watch avidly.

2. “Immigration: How British Politics Failed”: the BBC is turning out some consistently gripping and heavyweight political documentaries at the moment, and this two-parter goes back to the heyday of New Labour and David Blunkett’s tenure as Home Secretary to trace the evolution of successive governments’ uneven and often poorly considered policies on immigration. The talking heads are almost comprehensive: Tony Blair, David Blunkett, Charles Clarke, Andrew Green, Michael Howard, David Cameron, Alan Johnson, David Yelland, Nigel Farage, Suella Braverman. (Gordon Brown is a notable absence.) Various reviewers have approached the documentary as a platform for their political views, which rather misses the point, as it is intended to show how the subject of immigration became, by the 2024 general election, one of the most important and emotive in voters’ minds. It is, apart from anything else, a reminder of just how long ago the early Blair years are now.

3. “Collateral”: it seems hard to believe that Michael Mann’s eighth film was released 20 years ago. For some reason I didn’t see it when it first opened and caught up much later, but couldn’t understand why I’d left it so long and was gripped. Max Durocher (Jamie Foxx) is a Los Angeles taxi driver whose fare, Vincent (Tom Cruise), tells him he needs to visit several locations to complete a real estate deal. Of course it transpires that Vincent is in fact a contract killer, and Max is drawn inescapably into the tangled mess of Vincent’s hits. Foxx and Cruise are both on great form, Stuart Beattie’s script delivers a taut and urgent plot and the whole thing looks typically Michael Mann stylish. High-quality thriller that fits together perfectly.

4. “Hilary Mantel: The Road to Wolf Hall”: in March 2015, Dame Hilary Mantel gave a lecture at the Frick Collection in New York on her Wolf Hall trilogy, their adaptation for stage and screen and the historical figures that feature in them. (The Frick holds Holbein’s portraits of Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell.) There has been a degree of frantic hagiography about Mantel since her unexpected death, but she was a very skilled and imaginative writer who gave a vivid impression of what life at the Tudor court at least could have been like, in a way few other authors of fiction or non-fiction managed. I don’t join her in the Team Cromwell camp, but the three novels—Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies and The Mirror and the Light—are major cultural artefacts which achieved and continue to achieve enormous commercial success.

5. “The Lost Genius of Irrationality: Rory Sutherland at TEDx Oxford”: I am unashamed in my continuing championing (not that he needs it from me) of Rory Sutherland, Vice-Chairman of Ogilvy Group and one of the most imaginative, versatile, insightful and funny thinkers in public and commercial life. He has an extraordinary knack of leading you through a light-hearted conversation with what seem like straightforward observations, but you end up realising that he has shifted your perceptions in profound ways. This talk takes in a fascinating approach to football, the power of social biases on our decision-making and the concept of choice architecture. Predictably brilliant.

“I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else.” (Cormac McCarthy)

1. “Manufacturing fetishism is destined to fail”: Martin Wolf in The Financial Times reassured me I wasn’t mad by making a point I had been nursing for some time. Too much economic and industrial policy at the moment is being made to preserve or revive manufacturing, and it is, of course, a fundamental element of Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement. But what economic law says that because a country or a region has previously excelled in a specific sector it will or should always do so? Isn’t that an insane defiance of the idea of progress? I made this point last month in my City A.M. column. Wolf points out that there comes a time in a country’s development when the proportion of the workforce in manufacturing starts to fall, for basic reasons. “In the US, these have been falling for seven decades. The idea that this process is reversible is ridiculous. Water flows downhill for a good reason.” Moreover, mass production more than anything else is ideal for mechanisation and the use of robots. As Wolf says, “the overwhelming probability then is that in a few decades nobody will work on a production line”. Trying to recapture a lost past is not only doomed to failure, it distorts economic policy and stops governments addressing reality.

2. “The strange death of the Office for Place”: this round-up is not intended as a fan site for Nicholas Boys Smith but he does keep writing interesting and informative articles. This piece in The Critic recounts the government’s decision to close the Office for Place, an executive non-departmental body of the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government which was established in 2021 “to create beautiful, successful and enduring places that foster a sense of community, local pride and belonging”. The underlying idea was that it would, in Boys Smith’s words, exist “to champion the policy reforms, to “own” them and, above all, to help guide confused councils to a planning system that could be very different, more visual, more predictable and more respectful of local preferences”. The Minister for Housing and Planning, Matthew Pennycook, announced this week that, while recognising its good work and the validity of its aims, the OfP’s functions should be brought into the department to “allow experience to be better reflected in decision-making, as well as integrated within an existing delivery team in Homes England already focused on design and placemaking”. I am in two minds: on the one hand I think government has suffered from a proliferation of arm’s-length bodies which have not added to the efficiency or accountability of administration. On the other hand, Boys Smith is justified in worrying whether the slightly niche work the OfP carried out will endure “without a small body committed to supporting councils putting them into practice with enabling and popular local plans”. The onus in on Whitehall to prove it has made the right decision.

3. “Tulsi Gabbard’s Nomination Is A National-Security Risk”: President-elect Donald Trump has kept a breathless commentariat busy with a string of eyebrow-raising, astonishing and sometimes insane nominations for executive office in his second presidency, and it is hard to pick the most absurd. In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols focuses on Trump’s proposal of former US Representative Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. The role was established in 2004 to address failures of coordination between America’s intelligence agencies, now numbering 17, and provide overall leadership of the US Intelligence Community and advice of intelligence issues to the President. Trump made the post a cabinet-level office in his first presidency and Joe Biden maintained that status. As Nichols points out, Gabbard has no professional qualifications in intelligence at all: she spent eight years representing Hawaii in the House of Representatives and is a lieutenant colonel in the National Guard but has worked principally in medical, police and civil affairs roles. More alarmingly, she has an almost-pathological need to take the side of dictators, from Bashar al-Assad to Vladimir Putin, againt the United States, and is, as Nichols comments, “a walking Christmas tree of warning lights”. Will the Senate, now controlled by the Republican Party, confirm her in post? Is this, as Nichols suggests, a bait-and-switch to allow Trump to nominate someone else, perhaps as a recess appointment, if the Senate baulks at Gabbard? In any event, she is not only woefully inadequate but actively dangerous as DNI.

4. “Right-wing pop culture is top of the charts”: my attention was drawn to this James Marriott article in The Times by Michael Gove, oddly enough, and it makes an interesting and counterintuitive argument. It is a standard position of the right wing that liberals dominate culture, entertainment and academia (as Marriott puts it, “tear-stained Oscars night pleas for progressive causes, faultlessly diverse Disney films”), but there is a vigorous right-wing presence in other media, especially in podcasting and other internet outlets. Marriott points to the popularity and reach of Jordan Peterson, who recently sold out the O2 Arena, and Joe Rogan, the most popular broadcaster in the English-speaking world, as well as figures like Ben Shapiro. There is a degree of inevitability to this: as Marriott said, popular culture thrives on “outrage, provocation and rule-breaking”. Another useful reminder that we need to thinking carefully and deeply about culture, politics and society before we make conclusions.

5. “Explaining the Inexplicable”: from Alex Massie’s enjoyable and informative Substack The Debatable Land, a sober and balanced early analysis of Donald Trump’s election win. He rightly points out that the Democrats never had a clear, focused, stripped-to-the-essentials message, that Biden’s late departure from the race was an enormous hindrance, and that, frankly, nothing in past performance suggested that Kamala Harris was a sure-fire election-winning candidate. He also makes a very important observation with which too few, I think, have come to terms: Trump may be a dreadful president and human being (for clarity, I think he is) but that does not make him definitionally wrong about everything, nor does it make that perspective inevitable or universal. Clearly, a lot of American voters could at the very least live with the idea of a second Trump presidency, and it is irrational and improbable to assume they are all slavering ethno-nationalist demons. Politics is persuasion. Trump won narrowly—a couple of percentage points in the end—but win he did. For Democrats, Republicans, independents and those of us watching from overseas, it’s time to bear in mind President Jed Bartlet’s mantra in The West Wing: “What’s next?”

There it is, I cannot be beside you, cannot breathe the air you breathe…

… as Guido declares in Oscar Wilde’s The Duchess of Padua. Let me go hence, I pray; forget you ever looked upon me.

(Obviously don’t.)