Sunday round-up 19 January 2025

Huge birthday wishes to the magnificent Dolly Parton, as well as Tippi Hedren, Jenson Button and Pete Buttigieg, and an important anniversary for freedom of speech

Dreaming of Pizza Express in Woking with Prince Andrew today are birthday boys and girls including actress, model, animal rights activist and celebrity mother Tippi Hedren (95), prolific director, producer and screenwriter Richard Lester (93), actor, singer and comedian Michael Crawford (83), novelist, essayist and critic Julian Barnes (79), indisputable icon and philanthropist Dolly Parton (79), composer of “Horse With No Name” and America co-founder Dewey Bunnell (73), actor, musician and nepo-baby-to-rule-them-all Desi Arnaz Jr (72), famously curly-topped conductor Sir Simon Rattle (70), russet-locked stalwart actor Paul McCrane (64), designer and entrepreneur Wayne Hemingway (64), former BBC correspondent and lying-through-the-teeth wrong ’un Martin Bashir (62), former Speaker of the House of Commons and self-enthusiast John Bercow (62), versatile tennis ace and coach Stefan Edberg (59), Ugly Kid Joe founder Whitfield Crane (57), proverbially unsuccessful Formula 1 driver Tarso Marques (49), silky-smooth Formula 1 world champion and Frome native Jenson Button (45) and former Secretary of Transportation and presidential wannabe Pete Buttigieg (43).

Former cake-gorgers and fizz-quaffers include the splendidly named Byzantine empress Pulcheria (AD 399), first husband of Mary Queen of Scots and briefly King of France Francis II (1544), legendary inventor, engineer and Clydesider James Watt (1736), General in Chief of the Armies of the Confederate States Robert E. Lee (1807), poet, writer and critic Edgar Allen Poe (1809), post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne (1839), author, critic and habitué of the Algonquin Round Table Alexander Woolcott (1887), fifth Secretary-General of the United Nations and Prime Minister of Peru Javier Pérez de Cuéllar (1920), dark-imagining novelist Patricia Highsmith (1921), writer Nina Bawden (1925), former President of Bangladesh Ziaur Rahman (1936), singer-songwriter, guitarist and famous sibling Phil Everly (1939), television stalwart and Howard’s Way fixture Tony Anholt (1941), singer-songwriter and “27 Club” member Janis Joplin (1943) and singer-songwriter, love addiction diagnostician and outstanding suit-wearer Robert Palmer (1949).

You can’t say that in here!

I want to take a little time over this anniversary, since it touches on freedom of speech and political discourse, which seems, to say the least, timely.

John Wilkes (1725-97), the radical journalist and politician, is, I suspect, remembered only by connoisseurs of 18th century political and parliamentary history (they do exist, I’ve met them), which is a disservice to his significance. Possessing a squint and a protruding jaw, he was notorious as “the ugliest man in England”, but balanced it with almost supernatural personal charm, especially towards women, and he boasted that it “took him only half an hour to talk away his face”. In a snappy supposed exchange, the Earl of Sandwich, a cabinet minister and supposed inventor of the food format which bears his name, declared “Sir, I do not know whether you will die on the gallows or of the pox”. Wilkes responded “That depends, my lord, on whether I embrace your lordship’s principles or your mistress”.

I really should read a proper biography of Wilkes—recent studies are available by Arthur H. Cash and Robin Eagles—but his importance on this 19th day of January is that it was today in 1764 that he was involved in an affair which would have resonance for democracy until this very day. A supporter of William Pitt the Elder and enthusiast for the Seven Years’ War (1756-63), although of course contemporaries did not know it would eventually bear that name, he had been elected Member of Parliament for Aylesbury in Buckinghamshire in 1757 and returned again at the general election of 1761. (Initially, and confusingly, he represented the two-Member constituency alongside John Willes, who was succeeded in 1761 by the more easily differentiated Welbore Ellis, previously MP for Cricklade then Weymouth and Melcombe Regis.)

In October 1760, King George II died and was succeeded by his grandson, George III, only 22 years old. At this stage the government was still heavily dependent on the favour of the monarch, and George III sought to promote his former tutor and trusted adviser, the Earl of Bute. The Scottish peer wanted and expected office and power, but the incumbent ministry of the Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle, and Pitt as Secretary of State for the Southern Department, saw its supporters do well at the general election which by law at that time followed the death of the sovereign. Bute therefore, appointed Secretary of State for the Northern Department in March 1761, inserted himself between the two leading ministers, allying with Newcastle against Pitt over the latter’s desire to declare pre-emptive war on Spain. Pitt, his advice rejected by all but one of his cabinet colleagues and described by the King as “a snake in the grass”, resigned in frustration in October.

Pitt declined a peerage—though his wife was created Baroness Chatham in her own right, but could not sit in the House of Lords—and agreed with George III he would not directly oppose the government. In May 1762, the King, who disliked Newcastle as a “knave”, dismissed him and appointed Bute as Prime Minister, the first Tory to hold the (unofficial) position. He did not see out 12 months, being replaced in April 1763 by the leading Whig George Grenville, but the comings and goings at the centre had already affected Wilkes profoundly.

In June 1762, he anonymously published the first edition of a new Saturday newspaper, The North Briton, a rapid response to Tobias Smollett’s The Briton, which had made its debut eight days previously. Where The Briton was a doughty defender of Lord Bute’s ministry, The North Briton, its title an utterly unaffectionate tribute to the Prime Minister’s (and, glancingly, Smollett’s) widely distrusted Scottish origins, was relentless in its attacks on the government. It was published weekly throughout Bute’s time in office, but it was its 45th issue, which appeared on 23 April 1763, which was genuinely incendiary.

The Treaty of Paris had concluded the Seven Years’ War on 10 February 1763. It favoured a victorious Great Britain, which gained much of France’s territory in North America as well as Dominica, Grenada, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines and Tobago, and regained possessions captured during the conflict. Bute’s government was regarded as having conceded too much to the defeated French, and he had resigned as Prime Minister of 8 April (he would never feature in front-line politics again, though he remained in the House of Lords as an elected Scottish representative peer until 1780 and died in 1792). Parliament was then prorogued on 19 April, and George III delivered a speech prepared by the new premier, Grenville, in which he described the recently agreed treaty as “so honourable to My Crown, and so beneficial to My People”.

In The North Briton that Saturday, Wilkes launched a searing attack on the government and the monarch: the treaty had “drawn the contempt of mankind on our wretched negotiators”, ministers had forced the King to make “unjustifiable declarations” to Parliament and made him appear to endorse “the most odious measures” which the Treaty of Paris contained. Wilkes was very meticulous in acknowledging that the address was “the Speech of the Minister” but his vehemence appeared nonetheless on attack on the King himself, a criminal offence. Three days later, the Earl of Halifax, Northern Secretary, issued a warrant for “Seizing & apprehending the authors, Printer & Publishers of a seditious and treasonable Paper, Intitled The North Briton Number XLV”. The following day, the Attorney General, Charles Yorke, adjudged the newspaper article “libellous invective upon the King’s Speech”, though he stopped short of declaring it treasonable and recommended a prosecution for seditious libel, a criminal offence of inciting contempt of the Crown or rebellion by published words or images.

Wilkes was arrested under the warrant issued by Halifax, but was quickly released when he raised a number of legal objections at his initial hearing in the Court of Common Pleas: he had not been charged on oath; it was a general warrant for the authors, printer and published for No 45 of The North Briton but named no individual; and, decisively, he claimed that as an MP he was protected by parliamentary privilege. The Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, Sir Charles Pratt, himself a former MP and attorney general, found that last argument compelling, though he also strongly condemned the use of general warrants, which would soon become incendiary in the North American colonies.

The matter was not at an end. The new session of Parliament began in November, and while the House of Lords considered and condemned previous writings by Wilkes, the Commons resolved that his article in The North Briton did indeed amount to seditious libel. Samuel Martin, the MP for Camelford who supported the King, challenged Wilkes to a duel, and on 16 November the two met in Hyde Park, Wilkes being severely wounded in the stomach by Martin’s pistol shot. On 24 November, the House of Commons decided that parliamentary privilege did not extend to protection against a charge of seditious libel, the Lords agreeing five days later.

Wilkes fled to Paris on Christmas Day to avoid a renewed prosecution. There is some evidence that he initially intended to return to face the House of Commons, but on 11 January 1764 he wrote to the Speaker, Sir John Cust, pleading ill health. On 19 January, the House met and a motion to adjourn until the following day was defeated 102-239, followed by a decision 275-70 to proceed with charges against Wilkes of seditious libel as author and publisher of The North Briton. After evidence had been heard from witnesses, Lord North, MP for Banbury, heir to the Earl of Guildford and future Prime Minister, moved two motions: the first was that Wilkes was the author and publisher of a “false, scandalous and seditious libel”; the second was that he be expelled from the House. It was into the early hours of 20 January when the House agreed to both motions.

This all matters for political, legal and constitutional history. The case against Wilkes sounded the death knell in England for general warrants, otherwise known as writs of assistance, being used for the arrest of persons, although the Revenue Act 1767 reaffirmed their validity in matters relating to customs and excise. Critically, though, it refined the notion of parliamentary privilege and freedom of speech available to MPs.

Parliamentary privilege, deriving from Article IX of the Bill of Rights 1689, states “That the Freedome of Speech and Debates or Proceedings in Parlyament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any Court or Place out of Parlyament”. This means, in general, that MPs and peers may not be subject to legal action for their words in Parliament. But in view of Wilkes’s case, the Commons determined that this was not absolute, and that “privilege of parliament does not extend to the case of writing and publishing seditious libels, nor ought to be allowed to obstruct the ordinary course of the laws, in the speedy and effectual prosecution of so heinous and dangerous an offence”. Another limitation, clearly recognised today, is that it is only “debates or proceedings in Parliament” which attract privilege; Wilkes, of course, had made his remarks in a newspaper, not in the House or in a committee where today they would be protected.

MPs and peers do not enjoy immunity from criminal charges, on the grounds that all must be equal before the law. The House made that explicit in November 1763. Sedition and seditious libel were criminal offences (they were abolished by the Coroners and Justice Act 2009), so Wilkes had no defence on grounds of privilege on that basis either. Some legislatures, however, do grant much broader immunity to their members: under the 1988 Constitution of Brazil, members of the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate enjoy immunity from any charges except for crimes where they are caught in flagrante and there is no possibility of bail, and even that can be overridden by a vote of the appropriate chamber; broadly the same provisions apply to the unicameral Parliament of the Hellenes under the Constitution of Greece, whereby members are also not required to provide any information to any authority regarding their legislative functions and deliberations, though, at the request of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the assembly may vote to waive an individual member’s immunity.

Like our constitutional settlement more widely, parliamentary privilege and the regulation of what we can and can’t say rests in part on self-imposed boundaries. I think that’s good. Free speech extremists, like extremists of any persuasion, lack perspective and tend towards monomania. The rules of the House of Commons allow MPs to say what they like—although the Speaker will stop unparliamentary language, including “the imputation of false or unavowed motives”, “the misrepresentation of the language of another and the accusation of misrepresentation” and “charges of uttering a deliberate falsehood”—and the advice of Erskine May, the “Parliamentary Bible”, should always be at the forefront of MPs’ minds: “good temper and moderation are the characteristics of parliamentary language”.

In fact the freedoms afforded by parliamentary privilege is rarely abused. Even disputed cases are rare, like Lord Hain’s naming of Sir Philip Green in October 2018 as the man being investigated by The Daily Telegraph for workplace misconduct but subject to an injunction granted by the Court of Appeal. We should expect our politicians to be responsible and to use their privileges, and privilege in the technical sense, carefully and, if you will forgive the pun, judiciously. And the current situation was in important ways defined by the conduct and fate of John Wilkes.

Monsters exist…

Eighty years ago today, on 19 January 1945, units of the Soviet 8th Guards Army commanded by Colonel General Vasily Chuikov liberated the city of Łódź in central Poland. It had been home to the second-largest Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe after Warsaw, with a population of 163,777 when it was sealed off in April 1940. It absorbed another 40,000 Jews in its first two years, but from early 1942 deportations began to the death camp at Chełmno, 30 miles to the north.

By the beginning of 1944, there were discussions at the highest level of the German government about the future of the Łódź ghetto. 72,000 men, women and children defined as “dispensible” had been transported to Chełmno and murdered, but Albert Speer, the Minister of Armaments and War Production, favoured the ghetto’s continued existence as a source of labour. By summer, however, the decision had been taken to liquidate the ghetto. Between 23 June and 14 July, 10 transports of 7,000 people were sent to Chełmno; the death camp had been closed in May 1943 because the surrounding area had been declared Judenfrei, but it was reopened to accommodate incoming victims from Łódź who were gassed. There was a pause for the second half of July 1944, but when the Warsaw Uprising began on 1 August, it was clear that the ghetto had to be destroyed.

Another 25,000 people were taken to Chełmno and gassed, their bodies burned immediately afterwards. On 17 August, the authorities declared that any Jews seen on designated streets in the ghetto would be shot on sight. Some survived in hiding and some were allowed to remain for a time to clean up the site.

When the Soviet soldiers “liberated” the Łódź ghetto, once home to more than 200,000 people, they found 877 Jews; 12 were children.

Ce-le-brate good times

Today is the feast of St Pontianus of Spoleto (AD 156-AD 175), a young Italian aristocrat who was denounced as a Christian and beheaded; of SS Marius, Martha, Audifax and Abachum (d AD 270), a married couple from Persia and their two sons who were executed in Rome for refusing to renounce their faith; of St Bassianus of Lodi (AD 320-AD 413), a Sicilian who converted to Christianity, became Bishop of Lodi and cared for the sick; of St Wulfstan (1008-95), Bishop of Worcester and the last Anglo-Saxon prelate, born in Warwickshire and named after his uncle who became Archbishop of York, who is the patron saint of peasants, vegetarians and dieters; and of St Henry of Uppsala (1100-56), probably an Englishman and acquaintance of the only English Pope, Adrian IV, who travelled to Scandinavia and may have met a martyr’s death in Finland.

In Texas, somewhat controversially now, it is Confederate Heroes’ Day, originally marking the estimated 258,000 soldiers who fought in the Confederate Army during the Civil War (1861-65) and chosen to mark the birth of Robert E. Lee (see above). There have been repeated attempts to strike the holiday from the public calendar, but these have so far not been successful.

Factoids

1. The 1984 Embassy World Darts Championship, held at Jollees Cabaret Club in Stoke-on-Trent, saw Eric Bristow, the “Crafty Cockney”, win his third title, dropping only one set in the whole tournament. It also occasioned perhaps the most magnificent piece of sporting commentary in history, from the legendary Sid Waddell. As Bristow celebrated his win, Waddell mused, “When Alexander of Macedonia was 33, he cried salt tears because there were no more worlds to conquer… Bristow’s only 27.”

2. The United States, being in possession of a written and codified constitution, has very clear procedures for most eventualities. This includes the death of a sitting president, as there is a explicit line of succession most of which is encapsulated by the Presidential Succession Act of 1947. If the President dies or is removed from office, he is succeeded, naturally enough, by the Vice-President. If there were some greater, King Ralph-style calamity, however, the next in line after the Vice-President is the Speaker of the House of Representatives (currently Rep. Mike Johnson of Louisiana). Following the Speaker is the President pro tempore of the Senate, a position now generally given to the longest-serving senator from the majority party. The current President pro tempore is Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, who has served in the Senate since 1981. Senator Grassley is 91, and was born only six months after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first inauguration in March 1933.

3. Like many elements of the United States’s constitutional arrangements, the office of President pro tempore of the Senate is more ill-defined than one might imagine. Its appointment is provided for in Article I, Section 3 of the Constitution, which states that the Vice-President of the United States is President of the Senate (but not himself or herself a senator), and that “the Senate shall chuse… a President pro tempore, in the Absence of the Vice President”. But the Constitution says nothing on who is eligible for the position, though an incumbent senator has always been chosen. Unlike the Vice-President, the President pro tempore has no power to cast a deciding vote in the event of a tie; equally, like the Vice-President, the President pro tempore rarely undertakes the duty of presiding over sessions, with more junior senators from the majority party being appointed acting presidents pro tempore on a day-by-day basis to build their experience of the procedure of the Senate.

4. Margaret Thatcher is rightly recognised as having taken a giant step by becoming the United Kingdom’s first female Prime Minister in May 1979; indeed, she was only the sixth female head of government in the world. We have since had two more women leaders, Theresa May (2016-19) and *cough* Liz Truss (2022), while Kemi Badenoch (2024-) is the fourth female leader of the Conservative Party (the Labour Party has never had a woman as substantive rather than acting leader). Yet in her 11½ years in Downing Street, Thatcher only appointed one other woman to the cabinet: Baroness Young, who was Leader of the House of Lords from September 1981 to June 1983. The Iron Lady otherwise seemingly preferred splendid feminine isolation.

5. When John Major succeeded Thatcher and formed his first cabinet in November 1990, it was all-male. At the next rung down the ministerial ladder, minister of state, there were only five women: Gillian Shephard (HM Treasury), Lynda Chalker (Overseas Development), Angela Rumbold (Home Office), Baroness Trumpington (Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food) and Virginia Bottomley (Department of Health). By contrast, seven members of the government were called Tim.

6. As far as we are aware, Pope Pius II (1458-64) is the only pontiff to have written erotica. Enea Silvio Bartolomeo Piccolomini was born in Corsignano (modern-day Pienza) in the Republic of Siena in 1405 to a noble but impoverished family and read civil law at the University of Siena. He became secretary to the Bishop of Fermo in 1431, and in 1435/36 undertook a diplomatic mission to England and Scotland for Niccolò Cardinal Albergati, Pope Eugenius IV’s legate to the Council of Basel. In the early 1440s he was secretary to Antipope Felix V before becoming a protonotary in the chancellery of the Holy Roman Empire, under the patronage of the Chancellor, Kaspar Schlick. In 1444, he wrote one of the first epistolary novels, Historia de duobus amantibus (“The Tale of Two Lovers”), set in Siena and charting the love of a couple, Euryalus and Lucretia; it was first printed in Cologne between 1467 and 1470, after the author’s death.

7. From his seizure of power in 1959 until his death in 2016, the Cuban leader Fidel Castro exercised a dreadful fascination for the United States government, and particularly for the more robust parts of its intelligence community. The Central Intelligence Agency, although it was flatly denied at the time, made several attempts to kill Castro, though the exact number is unclear: in 2006, Fabián Escalante, a former head of Cuba’s Departamento de Seguridad del Estado, claimed there had been 634 assassination plots or attempts by the CIA; the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (the Church Committee) found proof of eight such attempts between 1960 and 1965. However, an insistence on plausible deniability made some of the operations complex, almost farcical. There was an unsuccessful attempt to line Castro’s diving suit with tuberculosis; a plan to pack a conch with explosives and plant it underwater in the hope that Castro would pick it up while scuba diving; a plot for his lover, Marita Lorenz, to place a jar of cold cream laced with poison in his bathroom; and a proposal to present Castro with an exploding cigar during a visit to the United Nations in New York. Castro retired as President of the Council of State of Cuba in 2008 and died eight years later in his sleep, aged 90.

8. The murder of the Prime Minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, on 28 February 1986 was a shocking intrusion of violence into a political culture in which the head of government lived a relatively normal and uncossetted existence, often going out in public without security protection. Palme was shot fatally in the back at close range as he and his wife Lisbeth walked home from the Grand Cinema in Stockholm, where they had seen a new Suzanne Osten comedy, Bröderna Mozart, and pronounced dead on arrival at Sabbatsberg Hospital exactly 45 minutes later. The identity of the assassin remains unknown nearly 40 years later. Christer Petterson, convicted of manslaughter during a street brawl in 1970, was identified by Lisbeth Palme and convicted of her husband’s murder in 1989 but the Svea Court of Appeal overturned the verdict a few months later because of lack of evidence or motive. The Supreme Court denied a petition for a new trial from the state prosecutor. In 2020, chief prosecutor Krister Petersson (no relation to the man previously convicted) named Stig Engström, a right-wing graphic designer who died in 2000, as the likely culprit and closed the investigation, although very little evidence was presented in support of the case. There are many other theories, including the involvement of South Africa’s nascent Civil Cooperation Bureau, a death squad controlled by the Department of Defence, and, inevitably, the CIA in concert with the suppressed Italian pseudo-masonic right-wing organisation Propaganda Due.

9. Some jokes have a format which becomes so widespread that they can be reduced to a formula, and filling in the details can be unnecessary. Such is the case with “Yo mama” jokes, in which someone responds to an insult or accusation with a disparaging quip about the other’s mother. This genre, at least, is a venerable one, and can be found in Shakespeare: in act four, scene two of Titus Andronicus, Chiron, a son of the Empress Tamora, says to Aaron, her Moorish lover, “Thou hast undone our mother”, to which Aaron can only respond “Villain, I have done thy mother”.

10. American states seem to have an urge to have an official state everything, from flag and motto to flower and animal. Many have an official state sport, the first state to adopt one being Maryland in 1962. The state sport of Maryland is jousting. You heard me.

“Television provides the opportunity for an ongoing story.” (David Lynch)

1. “Lucy Worsley Investigates: The Gunpowder Plot”: I know Dr Lucy Worsley, who recently stepped down as joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces, is not everyone’s tasse de thé but I’ve always found her enthusiastic and charming without diluting the historical aspects of her broadcasting. If a woman wants to don a bonnet and a hoop skirt from time to time, I am relaxed about that (as someone who regularly wore a sword as part of my working attire for some years). Her new series of Lucy Worsley Investigates… examined the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, and, while it may not have shaken the historiographical consensus to its core, it was a useful and well-crafted synopsis of the extraordinary enterprise of Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators. Worsley also serves to remind the viewer just how epochal the plot would have been if successful: it would have been a terrorist outrage on an unprecedented scale, decapitating the English political community. It might not have led to the restoration of Catholicism, but it would have been one of the most important events in our nation’s history.

2. “What REALLY Caused the Tenerife Airport Disaster?!”: an article in The Spectator pointed my curious and novelty-seeking mind in the direction of Mentour Pilot and a YouTube channel examining notable aviation disasters, and I found it oddly compelling. This kind of forensic, techno-geeky investigation always holds some interest for me, and the scale of the disaster in Tenerife in March 1977, when two Boeing 747s collided on the runway killing 583 passengers and crew, is still hard to comprehend. Petter Hörnfeldt, a Swedish former airline pilot, has an engagingly earnest manner and speaks with authority and experience, so if you really want to know how some of the worst catastrophes in aviation history happened, almost minute-by-minute, this is a treasure trove. If you don’t, then, well, I don’t know what to tell you. You won’t enjoy it so much.

3. “Beverly Hills Cop II”: my friend Sophie Grenham, an excellent Dublin-based writer and just a lovely human being, recently posted something on Instagram which posited the idea that your experience of 2025 would follow the pattern of the film which was at the top of the box office charts on your 10th birthday. I had to check, but for me (25 October 1987) it was Beverly Hills Cop II, which, by coincidence, ITV screened earlier in the week, so I took the chance to revisit it. Let’s be honest, it isn’t a match for the original 1984 film, but we have to remember just how ground-breaking and good that was, with the casting of a black stand-up comedian in the lead role of what is essentially a mainstream Hollywood action/comedy/thriller. Eddie Murphy remains on brilliant form in the (first) sequel and the plot is coherent and workable, but it doesn’t sparkle in the same way, as Murphy himself freely admitted, calling it “probably the most successful mediocre picture in history”. The commercial imperative to make a sequel undoubtedly overcame any absence of a creative need, but it remains, in the right spirit, an enjoyable and absorbing 103 minutes of entertainment. If that amounts to a prediction of my year to come, I could do a lot worse.

4. “The Biggest Manhunt in FBI History: The Assassination of Martin Luther King”: I make absolutely no apology for repeatedly recommending episodes of The Rest Is History, because I think it remains a series of astonishing breadth, grasp, humour and perspective, and this is a great episode. As part of their examination of the United States in 1968, Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland tell the story of the Rev Martin Luther King Jr’s death in Memphis, Tennessee, on 4 April 1968, aged only 39. It has so many fascinating aspects: King’s declining popularity among increasingly alarmed and depressed white American voters, the impatience of younger black activists with his non-violent approach to civil rights, the contradictions within King’s character and the bizarre coda which saw the assassin, James Earl Ray, flee to London and end up robbing the Fulham branch of the TSB.

“Journalism can never be silent: that is its greatest virtue and its greatest fault. It must speak, and speak immediately.” (Henry A. Grunwald)

1. “Britain should stop pretending it wants more economic growth”: Janan Ganesh makes the retrospectively straightforward point in The Financial Times that politicians talk about the overriding priority of economic growth but, intentionally or not, fail to admit that no-one beyond the fringes of politics pursues growth to the exclusion of all other considerations. There are always qualifications. It would be nice to think we could end up in a culture in which we could have the kind of discourse which involves this kind of frankness and texture, but I think we are some way from it, especially with a Prime Minister who thinks “laser-like” and “ruthless focus” are instances of inspiring rhetoric.

2. “The West still doesn’t understand Iraq: 2025 will be even worse”: I always find something thought-provoking or informative in David Patrikarikos’s writing, and this essay for Unherd is stimulating and frank on the systematic and ongoing failure of western foreign policy establishments to approach Iraq with realism and practicality. There is a nagging sense among many commentators on the Middle East of assumptions about what the citizens of Iraq and other countries want without any exploration of whether it is true, and this leads to the worst of all worlds: seeming to care what those affected by our foreign policy think and feel, but getting it fundamentally wrong. Can the West draw a line under the past 20 years or so and devise a credible and sustainable new approach to Iraq?

3. “Taiwan: The technology of freedom”: former Minister for Security and Conservative leadership contender Tom Tugendhat recently spoke at Taiwan’s Institute for National Defense and Security Research and in City A.M. writes in glowing terms of the country’s “open, ideas-led culture” and embrace of innovation. He contrasts it with the centralising and ultimately stifling autocratic nature of the Chinese Communist Party and makes the case for the United Kingdom forging a close alliance with Taiwan based on “values we share: transparency, fairness, respect for individual rights and commitment to the rule of law”. Some will criticise what they see as Tugendhat’s idealism but as a former military intelligence officer and Chairman of the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee he is hardly a naïf, and politics needs ideals and ambitions. A worthwhile read.

4. “Biden’s presidency got an early start on its road to ruin”: the great George F. Will argues in his Washington Post column that Joe Biden’s presidency actively created many of the conditions that would lead to Donald Trump’s victory in las November’s election: inflation, vast industrial subsidies, a hectoring of anyone tempted to vote for his opponent and enormous executive overreach in pursuit of policy objectives he deemed morally correct. There has certainly been some fawning and hagiographical commentary on the 46th President’s record, largely because he is Not Donald Trump, but there remains a great deal to criticise—and Will is not a member of the Trump personality cult but an old-school Goldwater/Reagan conservative. Some sharp words, elegantly dipped in acid as ever, but they find their mark.

5. “An Expert in Grand Strategy Thinks Trump Is on to Something”: the always-interesting Thomas P.M. Barnett examines Donald Trump’s notions of foreign policy for Politico and suggests that the incoming president’s singular, instinctive nature might enable him to help the United States “be great again without assuming undue global responsibilities and a return to Boomer-esque Cold War-standoffs with both China and Russia”. Barnett identifies three global trends—decoupling of East and West, a reorientation of perspective on North-South lines and rivalry among great powers in “adapting to climate change, winning the energy transition, achieving AI supremacy”—and argues that Trump may choose to swim with rather than against those tides but present his actions in a way which does not alienate his supporters. It will be instructive to re-read this a few months or years into Trump 2.0.

The goodbyes we speak…

… as Stephen King observed, and the goodbyes we hear are the goodbyes that tell us we’re still alive.

Let’s try to keep that true for another week, then do it all again. Sayonara.