Sunday round-up 2 June 2024

Happy birthday to Tony Hadley, plus Thomas Hardy, Edward Elgar and Barbara Pym, as we celebrate the feast of St Elmo and remember the sack of Rome

Whose birthdays have you missed? Well: Garth-of-Wayne-and-Garth Dana Carvey (69), Dutch motor racing legend Jan Lammers (68), Spandau Ballet front man Tony Hadley (64), Australian cricketing twins Steve and Mark Waugh (59), fleeting chancellor of the Exchequer Nadhim Zahawi (57), Keane songwriter and keyboard player Tim Rice-Oxley (48) and actor Zachary Quinto (47).

Gone but certainly not forgotten are author Thomas Hardy (1840), composer extraordinaire Sir Edward Elgar (1857), novelist Barbara Pym (1913), sitcom legend Johnny Speight (1920), Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts (1941) and the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe (1946). Some, it’s fair to say, more lamented than others.

This day in AD 455 was a big one—a Vandal army led by King Geiseric captured Rome and sacked the city for two weeks. It was not unprecedented, as Alaric and his Visigoths had sacked the Eternal City in AD 410, but the Vandals were (appropriately) more destructive. The Western Roman Empire never really recovered. Petronius Maximus, recognised as emperor only a few months before, had been killed by a mob as the Vandal army approached, and he was eventually succeeded by Avitus, who was at that point ambassador to the Visigothic king Theodoric II in Toulouse. But he was the first in a series of eight short-lived rulers who staggered through the following decades, mostly not recognised by the Eastern emperors in Constantinople, until Romulus Augustus was deposed in AD 476 by the barbarian general Odoacer. It was effectively the end of the Roman Empire in the West: Odoacer proclaimed himself King of Italy and recognised the Emperor Zeno as his nominal overlord. The imperial regalia was sent from Rome to Constantinople.

Exactly a hundred years ago, President Calvin Coolidge signed into law the Indian Citizenship Act. This extended United States citizenship to all Native Americans born within the territorial limits of the US. Although the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, adopted in 1868, had defined citizenship as applying to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States”, courts had generally interpreted this as excepting Native Americans. However, some were still denied the right to vote until 1948, as suffrage was governed by the states rather than the federal government.

In 1953, Elizabeth II was crowned in Westminster Abbey, almost 18 months after she had ascended to the throne. It was the first coronation to be televised, and 27 million Britons watched it, more than half the population. If you want some bits and pieces about coronations in general, I wrote an essay last year ahead of King Charles’s ceremony. When she was crowned, Elizabeth was, among other titles, Queen of South Africa, Queen of Pakistan and Queen of Ceylon.

Today is the feast of St Elmo, an Italian bishop who died around AD 303 and is the patron saint of sailors and abdominal pain (perhaps a case for the Oxford comma?). The electrical discharge often seen around the masts of ships was regarded as a sign of his protection and is thence known as St Elmo’s Fire, giving its name to one of the mightiest of all Brat Pack films, 1985’s St Elmo’s Fire, with a peerless cast including Emilio Estevez, Rob Lowe, Andrew McCarthy, Demi Moore, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy and Andie MacDowell. From this sprang John Parr’s anthemic St Elmo’s Fire (Man in Motion). God, I miss the 1980s.

In other news, it is National Cancer Survivors Day for Americans, Republic Day (Festa della Repubblica) in Italy to commemorate the 1946 referendum which abolished the monarchy and, for our readers in Azerbaijan, it is the Day of Civil Aviation, which is a somewhat niche celebration, but I’m not judging.

Factoids

1. Richard I, immortalised as the Lionheart or Cœur de Lion, was King of England for a decade, from 1189 to 1199, but quickly went to France, set out for the Holy Land on crusade in 1190, was taken prisoner by Duke Leopold V of Austria in 1192, returned briefly to England on release in 1194 and spent the rest of his reign fighting to defend his continental possessions in Normandy and Aquitaine. In total he may have spent as little as six months in England as king, and although he spoke French and probably Occitan (or Old Provençal), it is likely he spoke no English. He managed a slightly greater presence than his wife, Berengaria of Navarre, who, if she ever visited England at all, only did so after Richard’s death.

2. You will all have used the phrase “since time immemorial”, to mean something which dates from before recorded history or, metaphorically, is of great antiquity. In English law, however, it had a very specific meaning, which was anything before the accession of Richard I on 3 September 1189. It was an important concept for establishing prescriptive rights, but was superseded by the Prescription Act 1832, which replaced the burden of proving “time immemorial, or time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary” with a perioid of up to 60 years.

3. No physician has ever become prime minister (though Gordon Brown is a doctor of philosophy from the University of Edinburgh). However, Henry Addington, who had a three-year stint as prime minister from 1801 to 1804, was the son of William Pitt the Elder’s physician, Dr Anthony Addington. The elder Addington received an MA and an MD from Trinity College, Oxford, and specialised in the treatment of insanity. He was one of the first doctors consulted when George III started to exhibit strange behaviour, and through his care of Pitt the Elder, later 1st Earl of Chatham, came to know his son, William Pitt the Younger. Pitt was a precocious child, admitted to Pembroke College, Cambridge, a month before his fourteenth birthday, and suffering an attack of gout that same year. Dr Addington prescribed a bottle of port a day as a cure, to which the younger Pitt took very readily, and his son Henry, who would succeed and be succeeded by Pitt as prime minister, remarked “Mr Pitt liked a glass of port very well, and a bottle better”. It is likely the port did not help Pitt’s gout.

4. Henry Addington had one of strangest political careers of any prime minister. He was speaker of the House of Commons for nearly 12 years, from 1789 to 1801, elected at the age of just 32, then uniquely moved from the speaker’s chair to the premiership when Pitt, ill and facing political challenges, stepped down. But he was an indifferent orator and a poor parliamentary manager, and a revived Pitt ousted him in 1804 to resume the leadership of the government. Addington remained a political force, however, so at the beginning of the following year Pitt arranged for him to be ennobled as Viscount Sidmouth and take the cabinet position of lord president of the Council. He was lord privy seal in 1806, lord president again in 1806-07 and 1812, and then served the longest continuous term of any home secretary from 1812 to 1822.

5. Joseph Robinette Biden Jr is the 46th president of the United States, but only the 45th man to hold the office. Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, was president for non-consecutive terms in 1885-89 and 1893-97 and is officially recorded as the 22nd and 24th president. Likewise, if Donald Trump wins November’s election, he will become the 47th president, having been 45th from 2017 to 2021.

6. The 10th president of the United States, John Tyler, a Whig, held office between 1841 and 1845. He has a living grandson, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, a chemical engineer and businessman who is 95 years old.

7. With a general election now underway (Parliament was dissolved on Thursday 30 May), there is talk of high-profile casualties and the search for a “Portillo moment”. The 1997 general election saw seven cabinet ministers lose their seats: aside from Michael Portillo (defence secretary), there was defeat for Malcolm Rifkind (foreign secretary), Ian Lang (president of the Board of Trade), Tony Newton (leader of the House of Commons), Michael Forsyth (Scottish secretary), Roger Freeman (chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster) and William Waldegrave (chief secretary to the Treasury). That remains the biggest cull of incumbent cabinet ministers. It is quite likely Portillo, Rifkind and perhaps Lang would have been candidates for the Conservative leadership when John Major stepped down.

8. Catastrophe can come for anyone, however. No fewer than 18 party leaders have been defeated at general elections, two of them twice. Deep breath: Keir Hardie (Independent Labour Party, 1895), A.J. Balfour (Conservative Party, 1906), John Dillon (Irish Parliamentary Party, 1918), H.H. Asquith (Liberal Party, 1918 and again in 1924), Arthur Henderson (Labour Party, 1931), Ramsay MacDonald (National Labour Party, 1935), Herbert Samuel (Liberal Party, 1935), Ernest Brown (National Liberal Party, 1945), Sir Archibald Sinclair (Liberal Party, 1945), Gwynfor Evans (Plaid Cymru, 1970 and again in 1979), Harry West (Ulster Unionist Party, October 1974), Gordon Wilson (Scottish National Party, 1987), Gerry Adams (Sinn Féin, 1992), Robert McCartney (UK Unionist Party, 2001), David Trimble (Ulster Unionist Party, 2005), Peter Robinson (Democratic Unionist Party, 2010), George Galloway (Respect Party, 2015) and Jo Swinson (Liberal Democrats, 2019).

9. On Wednesday, Pat Cullen, general secretary and chief executive of the Royal College of Nursing, announced that she was standing down to seek the Sinn Féin nomination for Fermanagh and South Tyrone. In 2019, Michelle Gildernew, the Member from 2001 to 2015 and since 2017, won the seat, a long-time marginal, by a mere 57 votes ahead of Tom Elliott of the UUP (who had been the MP 2015-17). A slender majority, you might think, and comparable to her result in 2001 when she first won the seat by 53 votes, but emphatic compared to her win in 2010, when she beat independent Unionist Rodney Connor by four votes.

10. The smallest majority is not, as you might imagine, one vote. At the general election of July 1886, in Ashton-under-Lyne, the incumbent Conservative, John Addison QC, and his Liberal opponent, Alexander Rowley, both received 3,049 votes. Contemporary electoral law gave a casting vote to the returning officer, who chose Addison.

That insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly (Ray Bradbury)

1. “The Age of Innocence”: if you were choosing a director for a loving, intimate cinematic version of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence, the name of Martin Scorsese would not, I suggest, be at the top of your list. After all, the three films he’d made before this 1993 production were Cape Fear, Goodfellas and The Last Temptation of Christ. But his friend Jay Cocks, who co-wrote the screenplay, had given him a copy of the book in 1980 and told him he should make a film of it, as it represented Scorsese’s sensibilities. The result is a stylish, restrained masterpiece. The cast is brilliant, and the young Winona Ryder is heart-stopping as May Welland, but the central pairing of Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer as Newland Archer and Ellen Olenska are absolutely magnetic. There is absolutely no flesh on view but their interaction is one of the most chokingly erotic relationships committed to cinema.

2. “Talks at Google: Christopher Hitchens—God Is Not Great”: I have said many times before how much I adored Christopher Hitchens, even if our politics were strikingly different on most issues. He seemed to me everything that is best about a writer and public intellectual: passionate, articulate, erudite, curious and infused with a profound love of language. And he was fearless. This 2007 talk at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, was to promote his polemic against religion, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, and is vintage Hitch. He never seemed flat or half-hearted (though sometimes he looked exhausted or hungover), and took no prisoners, but he expected no quarter in return. I genuinely can’t think of anyone who has taken his place.

3. “Liz Truss’s Warning to the West”: normally I recommend things because I think readers will enjoy them or find them interesting and enriching, but this is slightly different. The former prime minister courted controversy this week by accepting an invitation from the right-wing podcast The Lotus Eaters, a platform founded by the grim far-right agitator Carl Benjamin (his Twitter handle is “Sargon of Akkad”, and no, it’s not an especially clever reference). Truss was actually interviewed by Connor Tomlinson, who describes himself as a “Zoomer Catholic Reactionary” but is also a member of the Conservative Party. It’s not a particularly skilful interview but I think it’s worth watching simply to see how far off the reservation Truss has gone. She is vehemently maintaining the “deep state” line and warning that civilisation is at risk, while continuing to disavow any responsibility for the shortcomings of her 49-day premiership. This must, surely, be the furthest to the fringes of politics any former prime minister has gone, at least in the modern era. Truss being Truss, it is delivered awkwardly and blankly but with unwavering self-belief. Astonishing to watch.

4. “Exit interviews: My front-row seat to the fall of Liz Truss”: Matt Chorley’s “exit interviews” on Times Radio with politicians who are leaving front-line public life are often revealing because he catches his subjects feeling relaxed, reflective and unguarded. This one with Chloe Smith, a cabinet minister under Liz Truss and then again as maternity cover under Rishi Sunak, is particularly interesting because Smith is leaving the House of Commons at the age of 42 after an eventful career; she summarises it as “baby, election, baby, election, pandemic, cancer”. I’m fond of Smith as I remember when she was first elected at a by-election in 2009, aged 27, and I was responsible for parts of her swearing-in. She was friendly, unassuming and normal, which is rarer than you’d hope in Parliament. Hers is a story which has highs and lows, professional and personal, the trajectory of an able MP and minister who was probably lucky to make it as far as cabinet but endured some reverses along the way. Illuminating and enjoyable.

5. “Timewatch: Bloody Omaha”: one from the archives thanks to the BBC iPlayer, but timely as we approach the 80th anniversary of D-Day. In this edition of the Timewatch series, Richard Hammond (no, I don’t know why either) examines one of the five beaches on which the Normandy landings took place, codenamed “Omaha”, a five-mile stretch of coast from Sainte-Honorine-des-Pertes to Vierville-sur-Mer. The mission was assigned to the US 29th Infantry Division, 1st Infantry Division and nine companies of US Army Rangers, who vastly outnumbered the German defenders of the 352nd Infantry Division, but almost everything that could go wrong did go wrong, and American casualties were horrific. Estimates vary but there may have been 5,000-6,000 killed, wounded or missing, something like 15 per cent of the total strength. I included it in an earlier Sunady round-up, but this article from The Atlantic in November 1960 is a useful companion piece. As I said in an essay this week on counter-factual history, it’s important always to remember that nothing seems inevitable at the time, and at Omaha Beach it must have seemed as if the landing might fail.

Journalism largely consists of saying “Lord Jones is Dead” to people who never knew that Lord Jones was alive (G.K. Chesterton)

1. “The unstoppable rise of country music”: you don’t necessarily expect to find an engrossing read on country music in The Spectator, but this piece by Michael Hann is fascinating and well-informed. Beyoncé releasing a country album, Cowboy Carter, seems initially off-the-wall for a British audience, but that’s partly because we have never fully “got” country music. It runs deep in America’s psyche, and is huge business. That it now has many different manifestations, from ultra-commercial to reverently authentic, is a function of its reach and success: five of the 10 best-selling artists in the US last year were country musicians of some kind, headed by the all-conquering Taylor Swift. Full disclosure: I love country music, have seen the late Toby Keith play live and cannot recommend enough the annual Country to Country festival at the O2.

2. “Confronting Another Axis? History, Humility, and Wishful Thinking”: this insightful but hardly reassuring essay by veteran diplomat Philip Zelikow in the Texas National Security Review makes a cogent argument that we are facing a period of global instability which is as dangerous as previous flashpoints like the 1930s. Without resorting to alarmism, he suggests that the possibility of a full-blown military confrontation between the United States and its allies on the one hand and a coalition of Russia, China and perhaps Iran and North Korea is by no means remote, and that our potential adversaries are already preparing for such an outcome. It’s a powerful and persuasive pitch to make us reassess our security policies.

3. “The UAE’s rising influence in Africa”: this “Big Read” from The Financial Times is not perfect—there are some preconceptions and slight condescension—but it’s a fascinating subject. The increasing reach of the United Arab Emirates is being achieved almost entirely through wealth rather than military power, but that in some ways is one of their strengths as they offer an alternative to the encroaching influence of the United States and China. Africa is rather neglected in our news at the moment, as Ukraine, Gaza and the South China Sea muscle their way past to the top of the agenda, but it is going to provide a huge proportion of human population growth over the next decades, and probably a high proportion of migration. We need at least to be better informed, but, even better, we need a strategy.

4. “RFK Jr’s Philosophy of Contradictions”: this profile of Robert F. Kennedy Jr by John Hendrickson in The Atlantic is a brave attempt to unpick the weird character and ideas of the independent presidential candidate. My own view is that RFK Jr is an intellectually sloppy and self-satisfied crank who would barely have registered on the public consciousness if it were not for his surname and ancestry: his father, Robert F. Kennedy, was United States attorney general, senator for New York and candidate for the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 1968 until his assassination; his uncle was the 35th president of the United States, John F. Kennedy. Hendrickson explores the mish-mash of ideas which amounts to Kennedy’s ideological platform and skewers the strange atmosphere around him and his supporters which is a kind of denial of reality as if sheer willpower can alter electoral arithmetic. There is no plausible scenario which sees Kennedy get anywhere near the presidency, but his candidacy could be hugely influential for one of his rivals: but which?

5. “Consulting Firms Have Stumbled Into a Geopolitical Minefield”: an absorbing Foreign Policy piece by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman, charting the complications facing international consultancy firms in an age of information security and the guarding of data among rival state competitors. The most iconic of all, McKinsey and Company, has suffered reputational blows of late, for example in Walt Bogdanich and Michael Forsythe’s When McKinsey Comes To Town: The Hidden Influence of the World’s Most Powerful Consulting Firm, and this article explains the challenge of a new world in which “information increasingly comes to be seen not solely as an economic input, but also as a source of geopolitical risk and disadvantage”.

At that, as if it had been the signal he waited for…

… Newland Archer got up slowly and walked back alone to his hotel. (Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence. Watch the film. Do it.)