Sunday round-up 20 April 2025
Surrexit dominus! if that's your thing, with birthday wishes to George Takei, Sebastian Faulks and Andy Serkis (but probably not Adolf Hitler)
Our happy band marking the passage of time and not-being-dead today includes businessman and one of the remaining 92 hereditary peers Viscount Eccles (94), Star Trek legend George Takei (88), former Norwegian prime minister Gro Harlem Brundtland (86), Liberal and Liberal Democrat former deputy leader Lord Beith (82), conductor and director Sir John Eliot Gardiner (82), actor and director Michael Brandon (80), Oscar-, Emmy- and Golden Globes-winning actress Jessica Lange (76), author, journalist and first-rate pasticheur Sebastian Faulks (72), sculptress Dame Rachel Whiteread (62), actor and director Andy Serkis (61), professional daredevil Felix Baumgartner (56), model and actress Carmen Electra (53), musician and son-of-Bob Stephen Marley (53), model Miranda Kerr (42) and comedian and writer Harris Wittels (41).
Those for whom celebration is only a memory include one-time friend and ally then opponent of Luther and Protestant theologian Johannes Agricola (1494), anti-Catholic fraudster and Popish Plot imaginer William Bedloe (1650), first President and second Emperor of France and nephew of his more famous namesake Napoleon III (1808), first King of Romania and fashionable German-imported monarch Carol I (1839), mediocre watercolourist, far-right Austrian demagogue, Chancellor then Führer of Germany and generally acknowledged wrong ’un Adolf Hitler (1888), actor, comedian and producer Harold Lloyd (1893), actress and voice of Cruella de Vil Betty Lou Gerson (1914), long-time Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States John Paul Stevens (1920), actor, producer and legendary smoothie Leslie Phillips (1924), Formula 1 World Champion and multiple Le Mans 24 Hours winner Phil Hill (1927), director, screenwriter and co-creator of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister Sir Antony Jay (1930), actor and Hollywood heartthrob Ryan O’Neal (1941), Soviet and Russian general and one-time presidential candidate Alexander Lebed (1950) and singer-songwriter and producer Luther Vandross (1951).
In the name of God, go!
On this day in 1653, the Member for Cambridge and Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, Oliver Cromwell, attended the House of Commons. Parliament had first been summoned in September 1640 by King Charles I, meeting on 3 November, after 11 years without a parliament having been held until the abortive Short Parliament of 13 April to 5 May 1640. It had been dominated by opponents of the King and rapidly impeached the Earl of Strafford, former Lord Deputy of Ireland, and Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud. Time and again it was rumoured that the King intended to dissolve Parliament but by 1642 he was resigned to a more substantial clash, and left London accompanied by Royalist MPs and peers. In March that year, Parliament, now left in the hands of the King’s enemies, declared that its Ordinances had the full force of law, even without Royal Assent.
In 1644-45, Charles I, having made his headquarters in Oxford, intended to summon his own parliament. Sir Edward Hyde, Chancellor of the Exchequer and a close adviser of the King, counselled against dissolving the parliament already sitting at Westminster, so all MPs and peers were summoned to Christ Church, and 82 peers (most of the House of Lords) and 175 MPs (a third of the Commons) met in the college’s Great Hall. Little is known of what was discussed or agreed in its two sessions, as its records were burned just before Oxford fell to Parliamentarian forces in 1646.
By 1648, Parliament had been sitting sporadically for eight years and was increasingly fractious and divided. By now the King was in captivity and the prisoner of Parliament, but as monarch he retained considerable influence, and opinion was divided on how far Parliament should negotiate with him. Those at the top of the New Model Army were becoming convinced that Charles had to be removed altogether rather than reach any kind of compromise. By the middle of November, they feared that Parliament might restore the King unconditionally. On 6 December, the day after the House of Commons had voted 129 to 83 to continue negotiating with Charles, a group of soldiers commanded by Colonel Thomas Pride and Colonel Sir Hardress Waller arrived at Westminster, dismissed the Trained Bands who had previously protected the Commons and took up positions on the stairs leading to the Chamber. As MPs arrived, Pride checked their names against a list of those considered enemies of the New Model Army; 140 from a list of 180 were prevented from entering the House, of whom 45 were arrested. Pride’s Purge left the Rump Parliament of around 156 MPs in London, many of whom now refused to attend, and the vote to end negotiations with the King was taken by only 83 Members.
The Long Parliament, now in its Rump form, lingered in, vastly diminished in number. Charles I was executed on 30 January 1649 and the monarchy abolished, and on 14 February a Council of State was established to be the executive organ of government. It had 41 members elected by the House of Commons, but a quorum of only nine, and at its first meeting, with Cromwell in the chair, there were only 14 present. Cromwell was eager to create a more direct form of control for himself, but knew that he could not do so in defiance of the Parliament which had lasted all the way through the Civil War and was still in existence. But a death spiral had begun: Parliament’s popularity was waning fast, as a result of which it felt the need to maintain more and more soldiers, but doing so was expensive and required Parliament to impose ever-heavier duties, which made it more unpopular still. By the end of 1652, the new Commonwealth was skirting dangerously close to bankruptcy, Parliament’s deficit having passed £700,000.
Parliament was debating a wide-ranging constitutional reform bill in the name of Sir Arthur Haselrig, the Member for Leicestershire and a former Lord President of the Council of State, which some suspected would become a vehicle to perpetuate its existence rather than hold new elections. On Sunday 20 April—ironic that a Parliament influenced by Puritans should be sitting on the sabbath—one of Cromwell’s allies, the Fifth Monarchist Major-General Thomas Harrison who was MP for Wendover, realised that the House was ready to put the question on the bill. He rose to speak, solely to delay the business, and sent word to Cromwell, who arrived shortly afterwards with a troop of soldiers. Dressed in black, with grey worsted stockings, Cromwell took his seat and appeared to be listening to the debate, and as the Speaker, our old friend William Lenthall, was about to put the question muttered to Harrison, “Now is the time; I must do it”.
Cromwell rose to speak and berated the House violently. “You think, perhaps, this is not parliamentary language,” he went on. “I know it; nor are you to expect such from me.” He then, by many accounts, told the Commons they were dismissed, in words which have been used again and again, most famously by Leo Amery against Neville Chamberlain in the Norway Debate of May 1940.
You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately ... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!
Repeating “You are no longer a Parliament, I say you are no Parliament!”, he strode to the middle of the Chamber and stamped him foot, whereupon 40 musketeers entered and ordered Members to leave. Cromwell ordered one of the soldiers to take away the Speaker’s Mace, calling it a “fool’s bauble”, and Harrison made to remove the Speaker. Lenthall, who must have been put in mind of the King’s irruption into the Chamber in 1642 and his attempt to arrest the Five Members, told Harrison he would not leave unless he was pulled out, but, seeing the impossible odds, submitted when Harrison seized his arm. Once the Chamber was cleared, Cromwell had the doors locked, and returned to Whitehall.
The last gasp
Today in 1945 marked Adolf Hitler’s 56th (and final) birthday. He had left the Wolfsschanze, his headquarters near Rastenburg in East Prussia, on 20 November 1944, moving to the Adlerhorst, built into and around Kransberg Castle in the Taunus Mountains in Hesse, to supervise the Ardennes offensive. When that last roll of the dice failed, he retreated to Berlin, and on 16 January 1945 took up residence in the Reich Chancellery on Voßstraße, with the Führerbunker 55 feet underground as a sanctuary from air raids. He was accompanied by his senior staff, including Martin Bormann, Personal Secretary to the Führer and Chief of the Party Chancellery, and his lover, Eva Braun.
A renewed Soviet offensive on the Eastern Front had begun on 12 January, surging forward from a line along the River Vistula. The Red Army advanced 300 miles in just over two weeks, reaching the River Oder. Soviet forces were now just 40 miles from Berlin. By mid-February, Hitler had begun sleeping in the Führerbunker but coming up to the Chancellery to work, and by mid-March he moved his headquarters underground entirely. The Red Army had paused on the Oder while it extinguished resistance in Pomerania.
But the Nazi high command was disintegrating: Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, who had been under the care of his doctor since the middle of February, was dismissed from his command of Army Group Vistula on 20 March; a week later, Generaloberst Heinz Guderian, a brilliant tank commander, was sent on medical leave and replaced as Chief of Staff of the Army High Command by the adequate, deeply antisemitic and out-of-his-depth General der Infanterie Hans Krebs; Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, Commander-in-Chief of the virtually destroyed Luftwaffe and still theoretically President of the Reichstag, Minister-President of Prussia and Reichsminister of Aviation and Forestry, flitted through the scene in a cloud of morphine, lovingly cataloguing his looted artwork and jewels.
The Soviet offensive resumed on 16 April with a massive artillery and rocket bombardment, involving tens of thousands of guns and launchers and lasting up to two hours. Generaloberst Gotthard Heinrici, Himmler’s replacement at Army Group Vistula and a devout Lutheran reckoned to be the Wehrmacht’s best defensive general, had dug his dwindling forces into well-chosen positions on the Seelow Heights to the east of Berlin. But Heinrici’s 110,000 men faced Marshal Georgy Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian Front of a million soldiers. It was a foregone conclusion, though it took Zhukov three days to shatter the German resistance.
On his birthday, Hitler emerged from the Führerbunker into the ruined garden of the Chancellery to award Iron Crosses to a group of Hitler Youth who had knocked out Soviet tanks on the outskirts of the city. He was huddled in an overcoat and shuffling, his left arm tucked behind his back to still the almost-constant trembling of what was probably Parkinson’s Disease. Notwithstanding the mental stress and physical exhaustion, Hitler’s health was wrecked; his quack physician, Theodor Morell, administered dozens of drugs on a daily basis, including methamphetamine, barbiturates, opium, cocaine, potassium bromide, atropa belladonna, extract of bovine testosterone, Strophanthus gratus, oxedrine tartrate and salvarsan.
This macabre awards ceremony was filmed. The Führer shook hands with the boys, the oldest of whom was 16, stopping to pat the cheek of the youngest, 12-year-old Arthur Czech. Hitler then returned to the bunker. It would prove to be his last trip to the surface alive. Around midnight on 28/29 April, Hitler married Eva Braun in a small civil ceremony in the Führerbunker. Later that day, he dictated his personal will and an accompanying political statement, which were witnessed by Bormann, Dr Joseph Goebbels, the Reichsminister for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, and Colonel Nicolaus von Below, Hitler’s Luftwaffe adjutant (personal will) and Bormann, Goebbels, Krebs and General der Infanterie Wilhelm Burgdorf, Chief of the Army Personnel Office.
By 30 April, Soviet troops were barely 500 yards from the Chancellery. At around 3.30 pm, Adolf Hitler shot himself in the right temple, while Eva Hitler bit a capsule of cyanide. Both died almost instantly. In accordance with his instructions, Hitler’s body and that of his wife were taken outside to the Chancellery garden, placed in a shell crater, doused with petrol and set alight. Goebbels and Bormann gave a final Nazi salute as the corpses began to burn.
That… makes no sense
Five years ago today, amid an oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia and plummeting demand due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the price of oil dropped below zero for the first time in history. Producers were paying to get rid of the oil they were producing. West Texas Intermediate futures dropped to −$37.63 a barrel.
Death is swallowed up in victory
Obviously in festal terms today is the big one for Christians, Easter Sunday, marking the resurrection of Christ after His crucifixion. In many Middle Eastern Christian communities it is known as Resurrection Sunday, while the Eastern Orthodox Church refers to it as Pascha (derived from the Jewish festival of Pesach, or Passover, as the crucifixion and the resurrection took place during Pesach). This year, Easter falls on the same day for the Western and Eastern churches, which last happened in 2017 but will happen again in 2028; the reason for the divergence is that Eastern in the Western tradition is calculated on the Gregorian calendar while the Eastern Orthodox Church still adheres to the Julian calendar.
Away from the main event, it is the feast of St Theotimos (d AD 407), a Scythian writer and Bishop of Tomi who was a friend of St John Chrysostom and tried without notable success to convert the Huns; of St Beuno (d AD 640), an aristocratic Welsh abbot and confessor who undertook missionary work, founded a monastery and raised seven people from the dead; and of St Agnes of Montepulciano (1268-1317), a Dominican prioress of noble birth who was able to heal the sick but suffered from long periods of ill health herself and was found after death to be incorruptible.
Elsewhere, it is United Nations Chinese Language Day, one of six days celebrating each of the six official languages of the UN, and 4/20, a (stereotypically?) loosely organised celebration of cannabis smoking with its origins in (no surprise) California in the early 1970s.
Factoids
Viscount Eccles, who celebrates his 94th birthday today, is not the oldest serving member of the House of Lords—that would be Labour’s Lord Christopher, who turns 100 next Friday—nor is he the only peer whose spouse (Baroness Eccles of Moulton) sits in the House with him. But they are collectively the oldest couple, as Baroness Eccles is 91, giving them a combined age of 185.
Until the general election of 1950, some parliamentary constituencies returned two MPs. It had once been very common practice but had dwindled away, but it does give you some interesting double acts. From 1807 to 1809, the two Tory Members for Newport on the Isle of Wight were Viscount Palmerston and Major-General (then Lieutenant General) Sir Arthur Wellesley, later 1st Duke of Wellington. Both would go on to be Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister.
From 1858 to 1866, Stamford returned two Conservatives, Lord Robert Cecil (later Viscount Cranborne) and Sir Stafford Northcote. Cranborne succeeded as 3rd Marquess of Salisbury and was three times Prime Minister; Northcote, created 1st Earl of Iddesleigh, was First Lord of the Treasury in Salisbury’s first cabinet of 1885-86, then Foreign Secretary at the beginning of his second ministry in 1886. His tenure as Foreign Secretary was not happy, and he was visiting Salisbury in 10 Downing Street on 12 January 1887 to discuss his resignation when he suddenly fainted at the foot of the stairs and died 20 minutes later. He was 68.
When Somaliland declared its independence from Somalia in 1991 (still, alas in my view, unrecognised internationally), there was discussion over what name the new state should take. It regards itself as the successor to the Somaliland Protectorate, a territory controlled by the United Kingdom from 1884 to 1960 and for its first 14 years administered on behalf of the Government of India by the British resident at Aden. On 26 June 1960 it gained independence as the State of Somaliland, but five days later merged with the Trust Territory of Somaliland (formerly the colony of Italian Somaliland) to form the Somali Republic. In that short period of independence it was recognised by 35 countries, including three permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (the United States sent a congratulatory telegram but stopped short of formal recogntion). At the Grand Brotherhood Conference of the Northern Clans at Burao in April and May 1991, when the leaders of northern Somalia decided to revoke the union with the rest of Somalia, delegates considered the name “Puntland”, the Land of Punt being an ancient kingdom in the Horn of Africa from about 2,500 BC to 980 BC. My favourite proposal was “Shankaroon”, which means “better than five” in Somali, a reference to the five regions inhabited by the Somali people: Somaliland, Somalia, Djibouti (French Somaliland 1884-1967), what had been the Northern Frontier Province of British Kenya and the Ogaden region of Ethiopia.
I mentioned above it is the birthday of the second Emperor of the French, Napoleon III, who reigned from December 1852 to September 1870, having previously spend four years as the first President of the French Republic. The eagle-eyed reader will notice that “Third” does not follow immediate after “First”. There was indeed a Napoleon II, the only natural legitimate child of Napoleon I (who adopted two children and fathered one acknowledged child out of wedlock, though there were almost certainly others) and his second wife, Empress Marie Louise (Archduchess Maria Ludovica of Austria). From birth he was styled Prince Imperial of France and King of Rome, and when Napoleon abdicated on 4 April 1814, he named his son, then three years old, as his successor and the Empress as regent. However, Tsar Alexander I of Russia insisted that his abdication be unconditional, and two days later, Napoleon abdicated fully, both for himself and his descendants; the subsequent Treaty of Fontainebleau granted his son the titles of Prince of Parma, Piacenza and Guastalla, three dukedoms over which the Empress was given complete sovereignty and which would pass to the young prince. After escaping from exile and reclaiming his imperial title before being defeated at Waterloo in June 1815, Napoleon I abdicated again on 22 June, once more notionally in favour of his son, which was affirmed in a proclamation by the provisional government on 24 June. However, another proclamation issued two days later announced that the law would operate “in the name of the French people”, and the entry of the Allies into Paris on 7 July ended any theoretical reign the young boy had. He never ruled or had effective control over any of France during his two very brief stints as titular emperor but his cousin observed the theoretical existence of his rule and became Napoleon III.
Here I must give due credit to a Substack entry by my old friend Fr Thomas Plant: the word “atonement” is, in fact, “at-one-ment”, and originally denoted the act of reconciliation with God and unity with Him. It can be traced back to the 14th century and the priest and theologian John Wyclif (1328-84), a reformer whose followers became known as “Lollards” and who had some involvement—how much is disputed—in a translation of the Latin Vulgate Bible into English, where the word appears as “at onement”. It was in the early part of the 16th century, at the hands of St Thomas More or possibly William Tyndale, that the words were joined in the modern formulation with which we are familiar. The meaning of reconciliation with God through the death of Christ at Easter then came more broadly to mean a sense of restitution or making amends.
I received an email yesterday—sadly, not a personalised one—inviting me to “have my say” on the future of the BBC, which cast my mind back, because that’s the way I am, to the corporation’s creation over a hundred years ago. Well, that’s slightly imprecise: the British Broadcasting Company, a commercial enterprise licensed by the General Post Office, was incorporated on 18 October 1922 with a share capital of £60,006, the shares held equally by the Marconi Company, Metropolitan Vickers, the Radio Communication Company, British Thomson-Houston, the General Electric Company and Western Electric. The Chairman was Lord Gainford, a Darlington-born former Liberal MP who had been H.H. Asquith’s Chief Whip 1908-10 then a Cabinet minister 1910-15 and 1916. Within two months, a towering Scottish engineer, John Reith, who bore a prominent facial scar from his service in the First World War and had no connections whatever with broadcasting, was hired as managing director. By the end of 1922 the BBC had four employees. A review of broadcasting was conducted in 1925-26 by a committee chaired by the Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, a former Cabinet minister and keen collector of Victorian erotica who had, coincidentally, been Conservative Chief Whip shortly after Gainford had held the role in government for the Liberal Party. On its recommendation, the BBC was brought into public ownership as a non-commercial Crown-chartered body and on 1 January 1927 it became the British Broadcasting Corporation. Reith, knighted the same day, made a seamless transition from Managing Director to Director General and remained in post until 1938.
In its infancy, the BBC was subject to what seem now extraordinary strictures at the behest of obvious vested interests. In its first, commercial incarnation it was prohibited from broadcasting news bulletins before 7.00 pm, Fleet Street having successfully lobbied the government to prevent competition to newspapers. The BBC also had to use wire services as news providers rather than reporting its own.
The General Post Office, which granted the BBC its initial licence, was a department of state exercising a government monopoly on the dispatch of items from a specific sender to a specific recipient from the 1630s until it was turned into a statutory corporation by the Post Office Act 1969. As a government department, it was overseen by a minister, the Postmaster General, who could trace his office back to Sir Brian Tuke, Master of the King’s Post from 1517 to 1545, and who was usually a Cabinet minister. Notable names to hold the office include the 4th Earl of Sandwich (1768-71), of portable bread-based snack fame, the 8th Duke of Devonshire (1868-71), the 6th Marquess of Londonderry (1900-02), Sir Austen Chamberlain (1902-03), Neville Chamberlain (1922-23), Clement Attlee (1931), Ernest Marples (1957-59), Anthony Wedgwood Benn (as he then was) (1964-66) and John Stonehouse (1968-69).
The first of the various assemblies of dubious legality and legitimacy which assembled after the Long/Rump Parliament was dismissed in April 1653 (see above) was an assembly of 140 nominated members (129 from England, five from Scotland and six from Ireland) which met in the Privy Council Chamber at Whitehall on 4 July to hear a two-hour oration from Oliver Cromwell. It reconvened the following day and chose Francis Rous, Provost of Eton College and the brother-in-law of John Pym, as its chairman (later Speaker), but it would become known as Barebone’s Parliament after the active and influential nominee for the City of London, Praise-God Barebone. He was a leather-seller and Fifth Monarchist preacher, and there is some evidence to suggest that “Praise-God” was a kind of diminutive, his full baptismal name being “Unless-Jesus-Christ-Had-Died-For-Thee-Thou-Hadst-Been-Damned”. Which doesn’t trip from the tongue.
“All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath.” (F. Scott Fitzgerald)
“When the Going Was Good: An Editor’s Adventures During the Last Golden Age of Magazines”: I can’t fully explain why but I’ve always had a romantic, rather dazzled attraction to Vanity Fair, which Graydon Carter edited for a quarter of a century, from 1992 to 2017. There is a glamour and style about both him and the magazine, not quite effortless and certainly sometimes strikingly self-absorbed, but at the same time this memoir is, in its own way, startlingly honest. It traces Carter’s life from subdued, middle-class Ottawa in the 1950s and 1960s to the commanding heights of New York society, and its honesty comes in the author’s unwillingness, or inability, to trim for popularity or to tone things down. Yes, there is some chronic name-dropping, and some phraseology of pretentious heights which will make you cringe or weep with laughter; at the same time, Carter gives a very vivid sense of what it was like to be there and to be him, which is the most one can expect from a memoir. I enjoyed it hugely.
“Donald Trump and the ’80s Aesthetic”: it will not surprise regular readers that Jacobin, a democratic socialist-cum-Marxist magazine based in New York, is not usually on my subscription list, but one of the wonders of a Google search is the unexpected places it can take you. Michael Grasso looks at the strange way that Donald Trump draws support from the Zoomer generation through his 1980s aesthetic and the degree to which he typifies certain aspects of a time which Zoomers cannot remember. There is a group of young right-wing voters who see the 1980s as a time of visceral competition in which America was winning, there were still “traditional” gender roles or at least a commonly accepted sense of them even if they were under challenge, and optimism was the order of the day. A fascinating exploration of an important element of Trump’s undoubted electoral potency.
“Three ideas to energise British tech”: in The Financial Times, Innovation Editor John Thornhill rights identifies a significant cleavage between, to be Johnsonian about it, the doubters, doomsters and gloomsters who see nothing but decline in the UK’s future and those who are buoyant and optimistic for a shining tomorrow (he calls them “Empties” and “Fullies”). This, he goes on to set out, is especially true in the technology sector, and is partly a matter of choosing your evidence: Britain as “home to three of the top 10 global universities, the world’s third most developed start-up ecosystem after the US and China, and the biggest pool of venture capital in Europe”, or a country witnessing “the recent slowdown in start-up investment and the widening chasm between the UK and AI-infused Silicon Valley”. He sets out three areas in which the government could act to help the tech sector (no spoilers) and encourage the economic growth which is not by itself a solution to all our problems but certainly a sine qua non to finding answers.
“Labour is destroying its chance to reform the Lords”: I draw attention to this piece in The i Paper by Ian Dunt not because I agree with it—I vehemently disagree on several points—but Dunt is a thoughtful and informed, if increasingly angry and monotone, commentator on politics whom no-one can accuse of a lack of dedication or seriousness. I have said ad nauseam that I think the House of Lords (Hereditary Peers) Bill is a mean, cramped, pointless piece of legislation and I wholly stand by that. Singling out Boris Johnson and Liz Truss for nominating “party donors, utter non-entities and an assortment of right-wing cranks and cronies” is a little disingenuous, as, save for perhaps the “right-wing” moniker, it is a temptation for prime ministers of all stripes, thought I am happy to agree that Johnson was an especially free abuser of patronage. My main point of difference, though, is perhaps estimation of intent on the part of the government: I suspect on some level that ministers have really very little interest in what Dunt regards as regrettably left out of the bill—“size… standards… the appointments process”—and are well aware that if they can get this legislation through they will have (for the first time in history) created a wholly appointed House of Lords. After that, I suspect that enthusiasm for anything which makes the Lords more powerful or more able to hold the government to account will dwindle dramatically. In a strange way, Dunt and I agree that the government should do it all in one or not at all, the difference being that he is in favour of “all in one” whereas I’m much more relaxed about “not at all”.
“This is 10-thumbed, fumbling, overconfident governmental progressivism”: yet again the mighty George F. Will in The Washington Post, on especially excoriating form as he dissects the incoherence and idiocy of President Trump’s “policy” agenda. He highlights the ideological somersaults which camp followers like Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent are both able and willing to make, from lambasting Joe Biden for a “discredited economic philosophy of central planning” and “subsidizing supply in favored industries and restricting it in disfavored ones”, to being a leading member of an administration which seeks by federal fiat to revive whole swathes of the economy and restore some kind of cosplay 1950s “prosperity”. As Will notes, “Trump’s protectionism might yet be the largest peacetime government intervention in the economy” the United States has ever seen—and that’s not a compliment.
“A story should have a beginning, a middle, and an end… but not necessarily in that order.” (Jean-Luc Goddard)
“How politics and the English language are connected”: a delightful, acute and wise TEDxHousesofParliament talk by national treasure Peter Hennessy, Attlee Professor of Contemporary British History at Queen Mary University of London, in which he takes George Orwell as an inspiration to rail against fussy and messy jargon but also to argue for the importance of clarity and precision in political communication. It is one of those messages which, when articulated in the right way, is so blindingly obvious yet so frequently ignored or abused: how can politicians persuade, explain and defend their ideas if they cannot even accurately express what they are in ways that are intelligible but also unambiguous? Unfortunately ambiguity is often the safe house of halfwits and muddy thinkers now, but, as ever, Peter allows you to think, even of only for 20 minutes, that things can be better.
“Inside the UK’s last blast furnace as its fate hangs in the balance”: a brief report from Sky News’s economics editor Ed Conway but a useful to get some context and colour for the debate over the government “taking control” of British Steel to save it from the immediate depredations of its Chinese owner Jingye Group. I’m writing something on steel which has (you will be astonished to know) become longer than I expected, but I’ve mined Conway for a lot of information and some very sharp insights. The bottom line is that the blast furnaces in Scunthorpe are on borrowed time anyway: they are ravenously carbon-hungry, ageing and simply out of date. Technology has moved on. But, as is so often the way, the difficulties lie not in the destination but in getting there.
“When Snooker Ruled The World”: I don’t particularly like snooker: it’s deathly dull to watch, it lasts for days and I’m no earthly good at playing it. Yet this BBC documentary is a delight, taking us back to the high days of the 1970s and 1980s, an utterly different world, when nearly 20 million viewers would turn on their televisions for the biggest snooker events and the players were genuinely household names: Ray Reardon, Bill Werbeniuk, Alex “Hurricane” Higgins, Cliff Thorburn, Dennis Taylor, Steve “Interesting” Davis, Willie Thorne, Jimmy White. It made no sense as a ratings hit, yet it is indelibly part of my recollections of childhood as a common subject of discourse. (I do, however, have an insatiable appetite for Snooker Loopy by Chas and Dave.) Wonderfully nostalgic and without irony.
“What’s Opera, Doc?”: discussing the relative merits of Warner Bros, Hanna Barbera and Disney with my friend Allie on Friday, I had an urge to rewatch this 1957 masterpiece which I must have seen dozens upon dozens of times as a child. Essentially, Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd cram the operas of Richard Wagner into slightly less than seven minutes, they lose nothing in the condensing and are rather funnier than in their original version. I’m not joking when I say that this short cartoon probably taught me most of what I know about Wagner, and it is an absolute delight, a knowing and sharp parody of Der Ring des Nibelungen, Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser and Die Walküre in particular, with Elmer as Siegfried and Bugs as… well, you’ll see.
In my Father’s house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you…
… I go to prepare a place for you. And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again, and receive you unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be also.
Something like that, anyway.