Sunday round-up 2 February 2025
Where else will you find Graham Nash, Ken Bruce and Dog the Bounty Hunter together? Happy birthday to all as we mark Candlemas and Groundhog Day
Today’s recipients of book tokens, bath salts and woolly socks include writer, critic and socialite Anthony Haden-Guest (88), former cabinet minister and Lord Speaker of the House of Lords Lord Fowler (87), actor, director, producer and National Treasure™ Sir David Jason (85), influential singer-songwriter Graham Nash (83), economist and academic Lord Eatwell (80), engineer and Chairman of the National Infrastructure Commission Sir John Armitt (79), entrepreneur and philanthropist Duncan Bannatyne (76), actor and Star Trek android of choice Brent Spiner (76), journalist and author Libby Purves (75), presenter, BBC stalwart and Popmaster supremo Ken Bruce (74), bounty hunter and mullet enthusiast Duane “Dog” Chapman (72), actress, model and businesswoman Christie Brinkley (71), actor and the one who isn’t any of the other ones Stephen McGann (62), singer-songwriter and Eurovision Song Contest winner Dana International (56), singer and actress Michelle Gayle (54), singer-songwriter, producer, actress and humble breasts-owner Shakira (48), stage and screen actress Gemma Arterton (39), Sunderland-born international footballer and “Queen of the Jungle” Jill Scott (38) and actor, heart-throb, neck-chain devotee and hope to culchies everywhere Paul Mescal (29).
Late to the party today and indeed late at the party because six feet under are former celebrants including radical Anabaptist and self-proclaimed King of New Jerusalem John of Leiden (1509), only son of the Bard of Stratford Hamnet Shakespeare (1585), actress, royal mistress and soi disant “Protestant whore” Nell Gwyn (1650), long-serving Habsburg chancellor Wenzel Reichsfürst von Kaunitz-Rietberg (1711), legendary French foreign minister Charles de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754), railway magnate and leading yachtsman Frederick William Vanderbilt (1856), philanthropist Solomon Guggenheim (1861), high-ranking Nazi official and Nuremberg defendant Konstantin Freiherr von Neurath (1873), paternal grandfather of HM The King and professional-level monocle-wearer Prince Andrew of Greece and Denmark (1882), writer James Joyce (1882), novelist and influential conservative advocate Ayn Rand (1905), veteran Israeli diplomat and foreign minister Abba Eban (1915), former President of the French Republic Valéry Giscard d’Estaing (1926), saxophonist Stan Getz (1927), comedian, author and multitalented autodidact Les Dawson (1931), Minder stalwart Glynn Edwards (1931), flamboyant organist and conductor Sir Andrew Davis (1944), Coronation Street and Keeping Up Appearances star Geoffrey Hughes (1944), actress, model and influential hairstyle-owner Farrah Fawcett (1947), former world darts champion Andy “The Viking” Fordham (1962), felled-in-her-prime songstress Eva Cassidy (1963) and youngest of the 9/11 terrorists Salem al-Hazmi (1981).
Déjà vu all over again
On this day in 1887, Groundhog Day was celebrated for the first time in Punxsutawney, Philadelphia. There is an old superstition among the Pennsylvania Dutch (who, you will remember, are originally German, Deitsch in dialect, not Dutch) that of a groundhog emerges from his (or her) burrow on 2 February and sees his (or her) shadow, he (or she) will retreat and there will be six more weeks of winter. If he (or she) does not see a shadow, there will be an early spring. It is related to a tradition in Germany by which Candlemas, celebrated today (see below), is also known as Dachstag or “Badger Day”, with a badger performing a similar climatic prognostication role. The behaviour of bears and foxes was also studied in other regions for the same purpose. A local adage runs: Sonnt sich der Dachs in der Lichtmeßwoche, so geht er auf vier Wochen wieder zu Loche (“If the badger sunbathes during Candlemas-week, for four more weeks he will be back in his hole”).
The Pennsylvania Dutch began arriving in the United States and Canada in the 17th century, largely from the Rhineland but also from Baden-Württemberg, Hesse and Saxony, and settled in the Delaware Valley, south central and north-eastern Pennsylvania and Ontario. They were predominantly Lutheran but also included Calvinists, Moravians, Amish, Mennonites and Anabaptists, seeking refuge from religious persecution in Europe and the devastation which the Thirty Years’ War (1618-48) had wrought.
There is mention of a “Groundhog Day” in 1840, but the first “official” celebration as we know it today took place in Gobbler’s Knob, just outside Punxsutawney, in 1887. The driving force behind popularising the event was Clymer Freas, city editor of The Punxsutawney Spirit, with the ceremony being carried out by members of the Punxsutawney Elks Lodge, part of a social and charitable organisation. Two years later, the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club was founded. The lore is maintained that the groundhog, Punxsutawney Phil, is the same animal who first participated in the ceremony in 1887 (though this seems unlikely, the average life span of a groundhog being around three years).
Traditionally, the ceremony at Gobbler’s Knob drew a crowd of about 2,000, but this exploded after the release of Groundhog Day in 1993 and can now be as high as 40,000, substantially more than the population of Punxsutawney (5,700). Phil’s appearance and prognostication is now also live-streamed. His predictions are rarely optimistic: only 21 times since 1887 has the groundhog failed to see a shadow and therefore suggested an early spring, although four of those—2016, 2019, 2020 and 2024—have been in the last decade, which perhaps indicates that climate change is real.
Neutral territory
As the 19th century drew to a close, Australia had no specific political meaning. The land mass was divided among six self-governing British colonies: Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania, South Australia and Western Australia. Each had its own government and parliament, but for decades there had been proposals to form a single federation (the British provinces in North America had confederated as the Dominion of Canada in 1867). Political initiative was not lacking but the public seemed doggedly uninterested.
By the 1890s, however, the tide was turning, a federation seemed increasingly advantageous and likely. A federal conference met in Melbourne, the capital of Victoria, in 1890 to discuss the potential institutional structure of an Australia-wide government but foundered in the face of opposition. But in 1897, New South Wales, Victoria, Tasmania and South Australia held elections to choose delegates to a federal convention which met later that year in Adelaide, then in Sydney. In March 1898, it met in Melbourne and agreed the text of a bill which would form the Commonwealth of Australia.
If the broad outlines had been agreed, there were still some details to be finalised. On 29 January 1899, the premiers of the six colonies met privately at Parliament House in Melbourne to make the necessary changes and refinements to the architecture of the new country. One question was especially controversial: what should the capital of Australia be? There were two obvious contenders: Melbourne was the largest city, but Sydney, the capital of New South Wales, was the oldest and there was a bitter rivalry between the two. Victoria was supported by South Australia and Western Australia in proposing Melbourne, while Sydney’s candidacy promoted by New South Wales was backed by neighbouring Queensland.
Eventually, on this day in 1899, the premiers reached a compromise which echoed the choice of Washington DC as capital of the United States. A brand new capital would be built somewhere between Melbourne and Sydney, pending which Melbourne would act as the capital on an interim basis. Section 125 of the Australian Constitution set out the criteria for selecting the new seat of government: the choice would be made by the new federal parliament, it would be located within the territory of New South Wales but it would be at least 100 miles from Sydney.
A site 190 miles south-west of Sydney was selected in 1908 and on 1 January 1911 the New South Wales government ceded an area of just over 900 square miles to the Federal Capital Territory (later renamed the Australian Capital Territory). Like the District of Columbia in the United States, it would be separate from the states. On 12 March 1913, the name Canberra was chosen for the capital. It would be a slow process; most government departments relocated to Canberra in the 1950s, but the High Court of Australia did not move from Melbourne until 1980.
Ora pro nobis…
Today is the feast of St Cornelius the Centurion (1st century AD), a Roman officer based in Caesarea who is believed by some to be the first Gentile convert to Christianity when he was baptised by St Peter; of St Adalbard of Ostrevent (d AD 652), a Frankish nobleman and courtier of King Clovis II who was assassinated in uncertain circumstances in Aquitaine; and of the Martyrs of Ebsdorf, four bishops, 11 noblemen and an unknown number of soldiers killed at the Battle of Lüneberg Heath in AD 880 when Louis the Younger, King of Saxony, was defeated by the Great Viking Army.
It is also Candlemas, or the Feast of the Presentation of Jesus Christ, marking the event of the infant Christ being taken to the Temple in Jerusalem 40 days after His birth to complete the Virgin Mary’s ritual purification. Until 1886, this was a Quarter Day in the Scottish legal calendar when contracts and leases would begin and end, servants would be hired or dismissed, and rent, interest on loans, and ministers’ stipends would fall due.
In the Philippines, it is Constitution Day, marking the ratification of the current constitution in 1987, while Russia celebrates a Day of Military Honour to commemorate victory at the Battle of Stalingrad in 1943. It is also World Wetlands Day.
Factoids
The town of Coventry in northern Vermont had a population of just 1,100 at the time of the last census in 2020. However, in August 2004, the psychedelic rock band Phish staged what they billed as their final concert at Newport State Airport. Heavy rain deterred some fans but the eventual audience of between 65,000 and 68,000 made Coventry temporarily the state’s largest centre of population, comfortably outstripping the largest city, Burlington, home to around 39,000 at that time.
As the movement to create a federal Australia developed in the late 19th century (see above), it was mooted that the Colony of New Zealand and the Crown Colony of Fiji should be included. In October 1883, the Governor of Fiji, Sir George William Des Vœux, while supporting the idea of federation in principle, announced that his colony would not be in a position to join because of its many differences from the Australian colonies. Meanwhile New Zealand had participated in colonial conferences since the 1860s and the Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 included New Zealand in its definition of Australian states in order to keep the option open. In 1900, Richard Seddon, the Prime Minister of New Zealand, established a Royal Commission on Federation chaired by Albert Pitt, but its report, published in May 1901, concluded that joining the federation would bring no material benefits.
Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin, the second person to walk on the Moon in 1969, was admirably frugal. On his return from the historic Apollo 11 mission, he submitted a claim for expenses of $33.31: Houston→Cape Kennedy→the Moon→the Pacific Ocean→Hawaii→Houston. Seems like a bargain.
Few of us are in a position to choose our last words, but it is, generally, one of the few advantages of being executed. But not everyone gets it right. Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, was executed by guillotine at 12.15 pm on 16 October 1793, and her last words are recorded as “Pardonnez-moi, monsieur, je ne l’ai pas fait exprès” (“Pardon me, sir, I did not do it on purpose”). She had trodden on the executioner’s shoe.
At the beginning of 1922, there were six former emperors scattered around the globe: Wilhelm II of Germany, Karl I of Austria-Hungary, Puyi of China, Yuan Shikai of China, Sunjong of Korea and Lij Iyasu of Ethiopia. Karl died in April that year but their exclusive club gained a new member in November when the Ottoman sultan, Mehmet VI, was deposed.
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words.” (Mark Twain)
“It’s Not Amateur Hour Anymore”: a meticulous article by Paul Rosenzweig in The Atlantic uncovers the scale and speed of action taken by the Trump administration after the 47th President formally took office last month. He shows the depth of preparation in terms of drafting executive orders and planning implementation and staffing changes that had been done in advance of the inauguration and the way this has translated into sweeping activity across government. A lot of progressives—and even anti-Trump conservatives—have found solace in the notion that the President is sound and fury signifying little, choosing to underestimate the effect he will have. It is a foolish self-deception: Trump himself has no eye for detail for any grand narrative sweep, but there are dozens of clever, painstaking and sharp-eyed men and women in his slipstream who know exactly what they want to do and how to do it. This is not a drill.
“Musk is right—US government badly needs a digital makeover”: I include this article by Gillian Tett in The Financial Times because it seems to me to sum up a number of problems commentators are encountering when attempting to analyse the new Trump administration. I take nothing away from Tett: the Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, is fearsomely able and imaginative, a fine observer of politics, the economy and business. Here, however, she addresses Elon Musk’s appointment to head the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and hopes that the billionaire might find radical ways of streamlining the federal administration. There are several problems. It is still not clear what DOGE actually is or how it will work; we know that, despite its name, it will not be an executive department of government, which only Congress can establish, but will rather be some kind of presidential advisory commission, and therefore there is a question over how directly Musk will be able to implement ideas. Tett hopes that Musk will focus less on baiting his opponents on social media and more on institutional reform, yet it is clear that the former is hardwired into his character. And she seems to me to assume on some level that Donald Trump has any fundamental or philosophical commitment to what Musk and DOGE are tasked to do, which is not at all clear to me. It seems to be a common trope currently, perhaps as a defence mechanism, to hope that Trump will be other than he essentially is or somehow change, and thereby pursue policies which commentators support. What I see is a president who wants to accumulate power, receive homage and punish his opponents. Beyond that I can construct no systematic case for optimism, but we will get nowhere by pretending.
“The thoughtlessness of guilt by association”: writing in The Critic, Professor Alan Sokal of University College London identifies an increasingly common, disapproving and absolutist tendency for people to abandon ideological positions because they are shared by the “wrong” people. We’re seeing an illustration of this in the Bundestag at the moment, with former Chancellor Angela Merkel criticising Friedrich Merz, the CDU leader, for proposing immigration measures with which the far-right Alternative für Deutschland happen to agree. So far as I can discern, Merkel objects to the plans in principle because the AfD supports them, which seems an intellectually mad and topsy-turvy stance. This is a trait of fundamental intellectual weakness: if your opponent agrees with an idea, the only explanation can be that the idea is flawed and must be revised. The concept of having confidence in your argument is simply not considered.
“American and European populism don’t mix”: in The Financial Times, Janan Ganesh points to the ideological differences between a spectrum of populist leaders and parties in the America and Europe and argues that this diversity of opinion makes the landscape difficult to navigate. I’m not sure it’s quite as simple as he implies, that American populists are small-state, non-interventionist economic liberals while their European counterparts are more paternalistic with a larger conception of the role of government. Nevertheless, the inconsistency is there and obvious, for which you need look no further than Donald Trump’s addition to tariffs and Javier Milei’s uncompromising support for free markets. It suggests to me that populism is a style, a register, a vocabulary rather than an ideological position, but it certainly makes for strange bedfellows.
“When trust in government collapses, that’s how you get RFK Jr.”: the great George Will on fine form as usual in The Washington Post, laying bare Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s glaring unsuitability not only to be Secretary of Health and Human Services but to be anywhere near a senior role in the federal government. He is not alone in this: at the very least, Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard should both be rejected without hesitation for their nominated roles. But it is turning attention on the 53 Republican senators who, if they cleave to the party line and the whim of the President, can approve any candidate. Three—Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky—broke ranks to oppose Hegseth’s nomination, requiring Vice-President Vance to resolve a tied vote, but I’m not convinced any will be rejected outright. That, I fear, will be an indication that the GOP members are interested only in toeing the party line.
“Television is good at telling you things, and it should teach those who want to know, not confirm the intellectual snobbery of those who think they already do.” (A.A. Gill)
“The Man Who Founded MI6”: I’ve been catching up with The Rest Is Classified, the latest offering from the mighty Goalhanger Podcasts. This strand, presented by writer and broadcaster Gordon Corera and novelist and former CIA analyst David McCloskey, deals with intelligence, espionage and the world of spies: the presenters have a very easy, affectionate and respectful relationship and tread that fine line between expertise and the wide-eyed fascination they hope the audience will bring to the podcast. This episode profiles Captain Sir Mansfield Smith-Cumming, the inaugural Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) from 1909 to 1923, whose impatient monogram “C” is still the designation of the head of the organisation today. Funny, pacey, expert and hugely informative.
“Groundhog Day”: since today is in fact Groundhog Day, it is surely the ideal time to (re)watch the 1993 Harold Ramis classic starring Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. In a way, the plot is almost laughably straightforward—irascible older man stuck in day repeated again and again uses the experience to woo the woman who shows no interest in him, and gradually they fall in love and become better people—but it is made and performed with extraordinary charm and wit. A compact and effective 101 minutes, it manages to balance romance and sentimentality with wise-cracking cynicism; Murray was at his quicksilver best and MacDowell (not, I confess, a favourite of mine) is on fine form. For a fantasy film with an obviously otherworldly premise, it is strangely convincing, heartwarming and satisfying. A comedy classic.
“Brian and Maggie”: I admit that I’m cheating slightly here, as I’ve yet to watch the Stephen Frears/James Graham two-part drama telling the story of Brian Walden’s last television interview with Margaret Thatcher in 1989, which permanently ruptured their friendship. However, I have read Rob Burley’s excellent Why is this Lying Bastard lying to me?, on which it is based, and I have heard highly complimentary reports of Steve Coogan as Walden and Dame Harriet Walter as Thatcher, so I would advise you, if you have any interest in politics, news or the media, to give it a go, comfortable in the expectation that it will be good.
“A Very English Scandal”: as we have mentioned Stephen Frears, it is always worth revisiting his three-part dramatisation of the fall of Liberal leader Jeremy Thorpe (Hugh Grant on brilliant form), if only to remember just how mad, lurid and improbable the whole affair was. Ben Whishaw is nicely cast as the rather whinging Norman Scott, the former model who became Thorpe’s lover then tormentor, and Alex Jennings is reliably first-rate as the unsettling, unpleasant Peter Bessell, Liberal MP for Bodmin who had sought to be Thorpe’s fixer and consigliere. Everything depicted happened: bear that in mind.
Halt your footsteps…
… as Aeneas entreats Dido, and do not take yourself from my sight. What do you flee? This is the last speech with you that Fate allows.
But perhaps not. Perhaps we shall fend off Fate a little longer, at least until next week.