Sunday round-up 21 June 2026

Happy birthday to HRH The Prince of Wales, as well as Sir Malcolm Rifkind, Brandon Flowers, Increase Mather and Lil Bub; and the Imperial German Navy has a final surprise

Varying numbers of bumps for lyricist Don Black (88), trades unionist and Labour peer Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (84), Kinks lead vocalist, guitarist and songwriter Sir Ray Davies (82), rally and rallycross driver Per Eklund (80), former Labour minister and MP Baroness Hoey (80), former Foreign Secretary and Conservative MP Sir Malcolm Rifkind (80), ex-Co-Chairman of the Conservative Party, M+C Saatchi and Saatchi and Saatchi co-founder and advertising guru Lord Saatchi (80), Aerosmith drummer Joey Kramer (76), former Master of the Rolls Lord Etherton (75), singer-songwriter and guitarist Nils Lofgren (75), political scientist Patrick Dunleavy (74), football player and manager and three-time Ballon d’Or winner Michel Platini (71), former Conservative MP John Baron (67), Shakespears Sister singer-songwriter and guitarist Marcella Detroit (67), country and bluegrass star Kathy Mattea (67), multilingual singer-songwriter and guitarist Manu Chao (65), actor and director David Morrissey (62), director, producer and screenwriter Lana Wachowski (61), eBay founder Pierre Omidyar (58), actress and singer-songwriter Juliette Lewis (53), singer-songwriter and Killers co-founder Brandon Flowers (45), HRH The Prince of Wales (44), whistleblower, activist and leaker of classified information Edward Snowden (43) and singer-songwriter Lana Del Ray (41).

You’re not singing any more (because you’re dead), Pope Leo IX (1002), Puritan cleric, President of Harvard College and not-fond-of-witches Rev Increase Mather (1639), composer and harpsichordist Johann Christian Friedrich Bach (1732), outspoken naval officer and Member of Parliament for Rochester Admiral Sir Sidney Smith (1764), Bishop of Oxford and Regius Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford William Stubbs (1825), pharmacist and Dr Pepper founder Charles Alderton (1857), economist, senior civil servant and businessman Lord Stamp (1880), former Commander-in-Chief Middle East and twice Commander-in-Chief India Field Marshal Sir Claude Auchinleck (1884), theologian and ethicist Reinhold Niebuhr (1892), philosopher, author and paedophile-adjacent sexual wrong ’un Jean-Paul Sartre (1905), JCB founder and excavator guru Joseph Bamford (1916), actress, singer and cleavage promoter Jane Russell (1921), Labour Shadow Cabinet minister and MP and mordant wit Sir Gerald Kaufman (1930), journalist, professional Yorkshireman and Margaret Thatcher’s eyebrow-first Downing Street Press Secretary Sir Bernard Ingham (1932), pianist, composer and conductor Lalo Schifrin (1932), author and playwright Françoise Sagan (1935), film director and producer Tony Scott (1944), twice Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto (1953) and celebrity cat Lil Bub (2011).

You’re going down

Three weeks ago, I commemorated the Battle of Jutland, which took place on 31 May 1916. It was ironic that a conflict which had been triggered in no small part by a naval arms race only saw one major sea battle between the main fleets of the protagonists, the Royal Navy’s Grand Fleet and the Imperial German Navy’s High Seas Fleet, and on the face of it the clash of dreadnoughts at Jutland was indecisive. The Royal Navy lost more ships—twice the tonnage, 113,300 tons to Germany’s 62,300 tons—and there were tactical errors by the British: as Vice-Admiral Sir David Beatty, commander of the Battle Cruiser Fleet, remarked to his flag captain, “Chatfield, there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today”.

The German gunnery was in many ways superior to that of the British, and the Grand Fleet learned the hard way that its practice of propping open magazine flash doors and removing safety curtains to achieve a higher rate of fire was a disastrous miscalculation: the battlecruisers HMS Queen Mary, HMS Indefatigable and HMS Invincible were all destroyed by catastrophic explosions when German shells penetrated their decks and ignited the magazines. Almost all hands were lost on all three ships, with casualty figures of 1,266 (HMS Queen Mary), 1,016 (HMS Indefatigable) and 1,026 (HMS Invincible).

Grievous though these losses were—the Royal Navy lost 6,094 killed, more than double the High Seas Fleet’s death toll of 2,551—they were secondary to the bigger strategic picture. The Grand Fleet did not inflict a fatal blow on its German counterpart, but it returned to its bases in good order and was ready if necessary to sail again within about 48 hours. The High Seas Fleet, however, could not sustain more battles of attrition on the scale of Jutland, and its Commander-in-Chief, Admiral Reinhard Scheer, abandoned all but very minor and cautious raids into the North Sea. Instead, the Imperial German Navy focused more on its submarine campaign and patrolling the Baltic Sea. Acknowledging Britain’s effective control of the North Sea meant that it was much harder to combat the Allied blockade on Germany, and that blockade would become more and more choking as the First World War went on. By 1918, rations for the German population often amounted to only 1,000 calories a day, with severe shortages of grain, potatoes, meat and dairy produce.

Not only was the High Seas Fleet prevented from any more major confrontations with the Royal Navy, but by early 1917 there were the first signs of resistance to the war appearing among ships’ crews. What began as passive resistance, like posting anti-war slogans, became more assertive: work refusals, hunger strikes and unauthorised absences. Whatever the object of the protests, there is a name for this in any navy: mutiny.

October 1918 was the month when everything began to fall apart. The last-ditch German offensive on the Western Front, the Kaiserschlacht or Ludendorff Offensive, had failed and the Allies had begun to recover the territory lost. The French scored a major victory at the Battle of Soissons in July; then on 8 August, General Sir Henry Rawlinson’s Fourth Army, using a plan devised by the Australian Lieutenant General Sir John Monash, took the Germans completely by surprise at the Battle of Amiens. Using nearly 600 tanks, an unprecedented concentration of very new technology, they shattered the German lines on what was called “the black day in the history of the German Army”. The man who used those words was the First Quartermaster General of the Great General Staff, the often-inspired but increasingly unpredictable General Erich Ludendorff. As deputy to the Chief of the General Staff, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg, almost 71 years old, Ludendorff was the managerial force at the Supreme Army Command (Oberste Heeresleitung, OHL), which was in effect the government of Germany as well as its military headquarters. Ludendorff, a relative stripling of 53, was subsisting on perhaps an hour of sleep each night, and after the blows of Soissons and Amiens, he had a nervous breakdown.

After his recovery, Ludendorff, together with Hindenburg, made a realistic assessment of the situation and put their verdict to the Kaiser. On 29 September, they told an astonished and appalled Wilhelm II that there must be an immediate armistice, and they could not guarantee the security of the Western Front for two hours. So the collapse began, or rather accelerated. The Chancellor, Georg Freiherr von Hertling, a Catholic from the Zentrum, or Centre Party, older again than Hindenburg and in poor health, had resigned along with his cabinet on 30 September, and on 3 October, the Kaiser somewhat reluctantly appointed Prince Maximilian of Baden as his successor.

The new Chancellor was as unenthusiastic as the Kaiser had been: he was asked to form a government based on the support of the Social Democrats, the Centre and the Progressive People’s Party, and immediately approach the United States President, Woodrow Wilson, to seek an armistice. Maximilian was liberal in his own limited way, and had a good humanitarian reputation from working with the Red Cross. A homosexual who had done his dynastic duty by marring and producing an heir, he claimed no great ability as a politician, had no interest in liberalising the Empire’s constitution and regarded greater parliamentary and democratic accountability as at least unfeasible until after the war, and even then had no enthusiasm for them. At the same time, his credibility with the Wilson administration was inherently low because of his status as a member of the ruling house of the Duchy of Baden, cousin and heir to Friedrich II, Grand Duke of Baden.

Meanwhile, as I touched on briefly last year, Admiral Reinhard Scheer, now Chief of the Naval Staff and Chief of the Admiralty Staff, and Admiral Franz von Hipper, Commander of the High Seas Fleet, knew as well as Hindenburg and Ludendorff that the war was both lost and unwinnable. However, they were planning to stage a last major fleet action, sending every ship available to confront the Royal Navy in the North Sea. They had no expectation of victory, and in fact knew it was a death ride which would incur very high casualties, but they believed it could force the Allies to agree to more favourable terms in an armistice. Scheer had also entertained the idea that the Kaiser should sail with the fleet and seek an heroic death aboard SMS König, the lead ship in the Navy’s most advanced class of battleships. In any event, they could see no alternative, since it was unthinkable to them that the fleet would simply surrender.

The operation was due to begin on 29 October, orders having been issued only the previous day to attempt to maintain secrecy. The Chancellor, Prince Maximilian, had been neither consulted nor informed. But when the time came to set sail, the crews of several battleships mutinied, and it had to be abandoned. A few days later, on 3 November, sailors in Kiel also mutinied, and by the end of the following day, around 40,000 rebellious sailors, soldiers and workers were in control of Kiel; two days later, Wilhelmshaven also fell under revolutionary control. The German Empire was now ceasing to function. The Kaiser was under pressure to abdicate, and had been devastated by the insurrection in his beloved Navy, but, even dithering yet vainglorious, he devised a plan to abdicate as German Emperor but remain King of Prussia and thus an influential figure in the post-war settlement.

It was impossible for many reasons, but one was simple legality: the Constitution of the German Empire, finalised in 1871, explicitly tied the imperial crown to the Prussian monarchy: Article XI stated that “the Presidency of the Confederation belongs to the King of Prussia, who bears the name of German Emperor”. But in any event Wilhelm had no conceivable role in a post-war Germany. On 9 November, Prince Maximilian forced the imperial hand and announced the Kaiser’s abdication; a republic was declared the following day; and on 11 November an armistice finally came into force. The First World War was—largely—over.

There had been disagreements between the Allied Powers behind the scenes about what should happen to the Imperial German Navy. A consensus existed that submarines should be surrendered without question of eventual return, but what should be done with the German surface fleet? The Americans suggested the vessels be interned in a neutral port while a final decision was reached, but the two prospective countries approached, Norway and Spain, both refused. The First Sea Lord, Vice-Admiral Sir Rosslyn Wemyss, who was the United Kingdom’s senior delegate to the armistice negotations, proposed instead that German warships be impounded with skeleton crews at Scapa Flow, the anchorage in Orkney which was the Royal Navy’s principal base, where they could be supervised by the Grand Fleet. Perhaps simply faute de mieux, or because it delayed the necessity for a final decision, the idea was agreed.

The terms were transmitted to the Germans on 12 November, with instructions that the High Seas Fleet should be made ready to sail by 18 November; failure to comply would result in the Allies occupying Heligoland, an archipelago in the German Bight which had been a British possession from 1807 to 1890 but ceded to Germany under the Anglo-German Agreement of that year. Because the islands, though tiny, commanded the approaches to Kiel, Wilhelmshaven and the Kiel Canal, they had been heavily fortified after Germany had taken possession; the threat of losing Heligoland was more than enough to guarantee German compliance.

On the night of 15/16 November, Rear Admiral Hugo Meurer, appointed by Hipper to lead the negotiations, met Admiral Sir David Beatty, now Commander-in-Chief of the Grand Fleet, on board the latter’s flagship, HMS Queen Elizabeth. U-boats were to go to Harwich and surrender to the Harwich Force, commanded by Rear Admiral Sir Reginald Tyrwhitt, while surface vessels would make for the Firth of Forth and surrender to Beatty at Royal Naval Dockyard Rosyth, to where the Grand Fleet had moved in April that year. After surrender at Rosyth, the fleet would be taken under escort north to Scapa Flow and interned.

Hipper refused to lead his fleet into internment, so the High Seas Fleet was commanded by Rear Admiral Ludwig von Reuter, Commander of Reconnaissance Forces and I Scouting Group, when it arrived at Rosyth on 21 November. There were 70 German ships in all: 10 battleships, five battlecruisers, six light cruisers, 15 destroyers and 34 torpedo boats and other small craft. Over the course of 25-27 November, they were relocated to Scapa Flow, the destroyers to Gutter South and the other ships to the north and west of Cava. They were guarded by the Battle Cruiser Force.

Morale among the interned sailors was very poor. They were confronted everyday by the fact of their captivity and Germany’s humiliation, the food was poor and monotonous, discipline was lax and the living conditions were often squalid and filthy. Incoming and outgoing post was censored. The German sailors were confined to their own ships as the British authorities would not permit them either to go ashore or to visit other German vessels. Their numbers were, however, quickly whittled down: 20,000 had sailed the High Seas Fleet to Scapa Flow, and 4,000 were returned to Germany on 3 December, 6,000 on 6 December and 5,000 on 12 December, leaving only 4,815 personnel; 100 were to be repatriated each month.

The Allies remained at loggerheads. France and Italy each wanted to seize a quarter of the ships, while Britain wanted them destroyed in order to safeguard the Royal Navy’s numerical advantage over all the world’s other fleets. Article 31 of the Armistice Agreement prohibited Germany from destroying the ships itself, but Beatty and his second-in-command, Vice-Admiral Sir Charles Madden, had already discussed plans in the event of the Germans attempting to scuttle the fleet. It was not an outlandish possibility: at the beginning of 1919, Reuter mentioned the idea to his Chief of Staff, Commander Iwan von Oldekop.

The idea came back to Reuter in May 1919 as he began to learn of the likely terms to emerge from the Paris Peace Conference. At that point he began making detailed plans for scuttling the High Seas Fleet, and this seems to have been emphasised by orders from the naval hierarchy in June. On 18 June, another two transport ships left to repatriate German sailors, and Reuter had arranged that those who now remained were reliable and their loyalty unquestioned. He sent orders to each ship in he High Seas Fleet, paragraph 11 of which said:

It is my intention to sink the ships only if the enemy should attempt to obtain possession of them without the assent of our government. Should our government agree in the peace to terms to the surrender of the ships, then the ships will be handed over, to the lasting disgrace of those who have placed us in this position.

The Treaty of Versailles was scheduled to be signed at 12.00 noon on 21 June. Men of the Royal Navy’s First Battle Squadron made preparations to board the German ships at that point to frustrate any attempt to scuttle the ships.

That was too late. At 10.00 am on this day in 1919, Reuter sent a flag signal around the High Seas fleet ordering crews to prepare for scuttling. A further signal at 11.20 am said “To all Commanding Officers and the Leader of the Torpedo Boats. Paragraph Eleven of to-day's date. Acknowledge. Chief of the Interned Squadron.” Seacocks and flood valves were opened, internal water pipes smashed and drain valves on sewage tanks opened, but some preparations had already been made: portholes had been loosened, watertight doors propped open, holes bored in bulkheads—anything to speed up the sinking of the fleet. Seacocks had been throughly lubricated left needing only one turn to open them, while sledgehammers had been left next to water valves.

It was noon, 20 minutes after the scuttling operation had begun, before there was any visible sign. SMS Friedrich von Groose began listing heavily to starboard, all the ships hoisted the Imperial German Ensign at their mainmasts and the crews began to abandon ship. Most of the Royal Navy warships were at sea on an exercise, and the guards at Scapa Flow consisted of three destroyers, one under repair, seven trawlers and a number of drifters. Vice-Admiral Sidney Fremantle, Commander of the First Battle Squadron, received word of the scuttling at 12.20 pm and immediately ordered his ships to return to base. But time was not on his side.

Fremantle’s first ships returned to Scapa Flow at 2.30 pm, by which time only the larger ships remained upright and in any sense above the waterline. The last German ship to sink was SMS Hindenburg at 5.00 pm. In a little over five hours, 15 capital ships, five light cruisers and 32 destroyers and other smaller vessels had slipped below the surface. The remaining ships—one battleship, SMS Baden, three light cruisers and 18 other ships—survived, some of them seized, others cannibalised and scrapped, and Fremantle, on the grounds that they had broken the terms of the armistice, proclaimed that German personnel, previously interned, were now prisoners of war.

Wemyss was privately philosophical about the scuttling.

I look upon the sinking of the German fleet as a real blessing. It disposes, once and for all, the thorny question of the redistribution of these ships.

Meanwhile, Reinhard Scheer was jubilant.

I rejoice. The stain of surrender has been wiped from the escutcheon of the German Fleet. The sinking of these ships has proved that the spirit of the fleet is not dead. This last act is true to the best traditions of the German Navy.

He perhaps overstated the case. The Imperial German Navy had been in a bad way, and it had found precious little occasion for celebration during the war. Perhaps was Reuter had done was to provide an epic metaphor: just as the High Seas Fleet made its way to the ocean floor, so too, in retrospect, had the utility of such huge bodies of capital ships strung out across a body of water. Naval warfare was changing, and Germany’s future maritime power would be exercised below the surface, not on it.

It’s a nice day for a…

Today is the feast of St Martin of Tongres (d AD 350); of St Alban of Mainz (4th-5th century AD); of St Mewan (AD 570-AD 617); of St Engelmund of Velsen (d AD 739); of St Aloysius Gonzaga (1568-91); and of St John Rigby (1570-1600).

Greenland today celebrates its National Day, and the date on which it gained self-government from Denmark in 2009. It is now an autonomous territory of the Kingdom of Denmark, with most areas of internal policy the responsibility of the Naalakkersuisut (Government of Greenland) and its Naalakkersuisut siulittaasuat (premier), presently 34-year-old Jens-Frederik Nielsen (he turns 35 tomorrow). The King and the government of Denmark are represented by the High Commissioner of Greenland (Kalaallit Nunaanni Naalagaaffiup Sinniisoqarfia or Rigsombuddet i Grønland), currently Julie Præst Wilche, a former senior civil servant.

It is also a commemoration dear to my heart and central to my lifestyle, Go Skateboarding Day, organised by the International Association of Skateboard Companies and first observed in 2003. In a similar vein, if not quite as solemn, it is also World Humanist Day and the United Nations-sponsored International Day of Yoga.

In Northern Ireland, it is the Day of Reflection, first held in 2007 and timed to coincide with the summer solstice to emphasise the opportunity for looking forwards as well as back. It is designed to encompass reflections of all kinds on the Troubles, without, Heaven forfend, focusing on blame or responsibility.

Factoids

1. Conservative candidate Douglas Lumsden’s victory in Thursday’s Aberdeen South by-election was the first such win for the party in Scotland since November 1973. The previous month, the MP for Edinburgh North, Lord Dalkeith, had succeeded his father as 9th Duke of Buccleuch and 11th Duke of Queensberry, so vacating his seat in the House of Commons. Johnny Dalkeith, as he was known, had contested Edinburgh East at the 1959 general election then won Edinburgh North at a by-election in May 1960 after William Milligan, the Lord Advocate, was appointed to the judiciary. Dalkeith was paralysed from the chest down in a riding accident near Hawick in March 1971 and used a wheelchair for the rest of his life; when he was released from hospital and returned to the House of Commons in September 1971, he became the first MP to use a wheelchair since the Second World War. Alex Fletcher, a 44-year-old chartered accountant and company director who had contested West Renfrewshire in 1970, was selected as the Conservative candidate for the Edinburgh North by-election and beat Labour’s Robert Cairns by 2,741 votes despite the then-Conservative government’s unravelling in the face of industrial action and an energy crisis. Edinburgh North was substantially redrawn by the Boundary Commission for the 1983 general election and Fletcher, who was Under-Secretary of State for Scotland responsible for education, industry, sport and the arts 1979-83, transferred successfully to Edinburgh Central and was Minister for Corporate and Consumer Affairs at the Department of Trade and Industry 1983-85 before returning to the backbenches. He lost Edinburgh Central to future Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling in 1987. Sir Alex Fletcher died in 1989, aged 60.

2. The United Kingdom’s first minimum wage of any kind was introduced—and this may come as a surprise to some readers—by Winston Churchill. In 1908, he was appointed President of the Board of Trade by the new Liberal Prime Minister, H.H. Asquith. At 33, Churchill became the youngest Cabinet minister since Lord Hartington (later the 8th Duke of Devonshire) had been made Secretary of State for War in February 1866 in the Earl Russell’s second (short) ministry. He oversaw the passage of the Trade Boards Act 1909 which provided for the creation of boards which could establish legally enforceable minimum wages for specific sectors. Churchill told the House of Commons at the bill’s Second Reading that “It is a serious national evil that any class of His Majesty’s subjects should receive less than a living wage in return for their utmost exertions”. It was targeted at trades which were historically very low-paid, either because there was a surplus of available workers or because they were low-skilled, and initially it applied to chain-making, ready-made tailoring, paper-box making and machine-made lace making. The provisions of the bill were expanded by the Trade Boards Act 1918, introduced by President of the Board of Trade Sir Albert Stanley, and the basic philosophy would culminate in the National Minimum Wage Act 1998.

3. Churchill was as surprised as many contemporaries when Stanley Baldwin appointed him Chancellor of the Exchequer after the landslide Conservative general election victory of October 1924 resulted in a majority in the House of Commons of 209. Churchill had been elected MP for Epping as a “Constitutionalist” after losing his seat in Dundee as a National Liberal in November 1922 and was not Baldwin’s first choice: he initially offered the Treasury to Neville Chamberlain who had briefly been Chancellor from August 1923 to January 1924. Chamberlain, however, preferred to become Minister of Health, having held the post from March to August 1923 and feeling he could achieve more in direct policy terms. When Churchill was offered the post by Baldwin, he was overcome with emotion and may have wept, telling the Prime Minister, “This fulfils my ambition. I still have my father’s robe as Chancellor. I shall be proud to serve you in this splendid Office.” His father, Lord Randolph Churchill, had been Chancellor (and Leader of the House of Commons) for a short period from August to December 1886 in the Marquess of Salisbury’s second administration of 1886-92.

4. The robe in question, made of black silk damask, heavily embellished with gold embroidery, braiding, and tassels, had been made for Lord Randolph’s chancellorship, replacing one commissioned by William Gladstone at the end of 1852 when Benjamin Disraeli, Chancellor from February to December that year, refused to return the previous robe. That garment, believed to have been worn by William Pitt the Younger, is now on display at Hughenden Manor, Disraeli’s country home. According to George Osborne, Chancellor from 2010 to 2016, the robe commissioned by Lord Randolph Churchill and worn by his son, went missing some time during Gordon Brown’s 10-year tenure (1997-2007), but until 1997 had been worn annually by the Chancellor in his capacity as Master of the Mint at the Trial of the Pyx, a centuries-old judicial proceeding to test the coinage. A Freedom of Information request made in January 2020 about the location of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s robe was refused by HM Treasury.

5. Sir Albert Stanley was brought into the wartime coalition government as President of the Board of Trade in December 1916 by the new Prime Minister, David Lloyd George. He was only 42, and had been Director-General of Mechanical Transport at the Ministry of Munitions since the previous year, but his background was in railways. Emigrating to the United States with his family as a child, he had been General Superintendent of the Detroit Street Railways Company (1894-1903), then Assistant General Manager (1903-04), Department General Manager (1904-07) and General Manager (January-February 1907) of the street railway department of the Public Service Corporation of New Jersey. He then returned to Britain to become General Manager of the Underground Electric Railways Company of London (UERL), the holding company for the District Railway, the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway, the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway and the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway. He became Managing Director in 1910, developed with Commercial Manager Frank Pick the UNDERGROUND branding and was knighted in 1914. Lloyd George had initially promised to appoint Sir Max Aitken, Unionist MP for Ashton-under-Lyne and owner of a controlling interest in The Daily Express, to the Board of Trade, but instead Aitken resigned his seat in the House of Commons to be created 1st Lord Beaverbrook and Stanley stood unopposed in the ensuing by-election for Ashton-under-Lyne. He did not stay in public service long: he resigned as President of the Board of Trade in May 1919, returning to UERL, and at the beginning of 1920 vacated his seat in the Commons on being ennobled as Lord Ashfield in the New Year Honours. He was Chairman of UERL from 1919 to 1933 then of the London Passenger Transport Board from its formation under the London Passenger Transport Act 1933 until its dissolution in 1947.

6. From 1801, when the Parliament of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland first met, until its dissolution in October 1922 in advance of a general election, Dublin was represented in the House of Commons. From 1801 to 1885, it was a single constituency which returned two Members of Parliament; then, for the general election of November-December 1885, it was divided into four single-Member seats, Dublin College Green, Dublin Harbour, Dublin St Stephen’s Green and Dublin St Patrick’s. In the first three-quarters of the 19th century, the city generally returned a mixture of Tory/Conservative and Whig/Liberal MPs, although at the 1832 general election, two Irish nationalist candidates in favour of the repeal of the Acts of Union 1800, Daniel O’Connell and Edward Southwell Ruthven, were elected and re-elected at the 1835 election, both then losing their seats to Conservatives the following year when a petition accusing them of benefiting from corrupt electoral practices was upheld. After 1880, supporters of Home Rule for Ireland of one kind or another began to dominate the city’s elections. At the election of December 1918, the last to be held while Ireland was part of the United Kingdom, Sinn Féin carried all four seats, with Seán T. O’Kelly (College Green), Philip Shanahan (Harbour), Thomas Kelly (St Stephen’s Green) and Constance Markievicz (St Patrick’s). Markievicz was the first woman ever returned to the House of Commons, though she was an inmate of HMP Holloway when elected; O’Kelly went on to be President of Ireland from 1945 to 1959; Shanahan ran a public house on Foley Street in Dublin’s notorious Monto red light district; Thomas Kelly, a founder of Sinn Féin, was elected Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1920 but was imprisoned in HMP Wormwood Scrubs at the time. None took their seats at Westminster but instead joined the First Dáil Éireann which met at the Mansion House in January 1919.

7. Prominent MPs for Dublin included Henry Grattan (1806-20), formerly a Member of the Irish House of Commons who had opposed the Acts of Union and sought an independent Irish Parliament linked to Britain by common loyalty to the Crown; Louis Perrin (1831-32), a barrister and mercantile lawyer who was Third Serjeant, First Serjeant, Attorney General for Ireland and a puisne judge of the Court of Queen’s Bench; George Hamilton (1835-37), who stepped down from Parliament and was the most senior civil servant in HM Treasury from 1859 to 1870; Sir William Gregory (1842-47), who was later Governor of Ceylon and whose wife, Augusta, Lady Gregory, was a playwright and founder of the Abbey Theatre in Dublin; Sir Dominic Corrigan (1870-74), a physician and heart specialist for whom Corrigan’s pulse, the abnormal “collapsing” pulse of aortic valve insufficiency, is named; William Martin Murphy (St Patrick’s 1885-92), known as William “Murder” Murphy, founder of The Irish Independent and The Sunday Independent, Chairman of Dublin United Tramway Company and owner of Clerys department store and the Imperial Hotel; James Campbell (St Stephen’s Green 1898-1900), later Lord Glenavy, Solicitor General and Attorney General for Ireland, Lord Chief Justice of Ireland, Lord Chancellor of Ireland and Cathaoirleach of Seanad Éireann; Joseph Nannetti (College Green 1900-15), a trades unionist and Lord Mayor of Dublin who appears as a character in James Joyce’s Ulysses; and Alfred Byrne (Harbour 1915-18) who was Lord Mayor of Dublin 1930-39 and 1954-55.

8. Constance Markievicz was born Constance Gore-Booth, elder daughter of Arctic explore Sir Henry Gore-Booth. With her younger sister Eva, she was the subject of W.B. Yeats’s 1927 poem In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art in London and joined the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (who were suffragists rather than suffragettes), led by Millicent Fawcett and committed to legal and non-violent means of campaigning. In 1900, she married Polish aristocrat, playwright, theatre director and painter Casimir Dunin-Markievicz, who styled himself Count Markievicz; the Okhrana, the Russian secret police, told Constance’s family that Markievicz was not entitled to the style of “count” and that there had never been a Count Markievicz, though he was, the Department of Heraldry of the Governing Senate of Russia confirmed, entitled to claim membership of the Szlachta, the hereditary noble estate of the Kingdom of Poland which by 1900 numbered over a million. Constance’s style of Countess Markievicz was therefore equally bogus. She joined Sinn Féin not long after it was founded in 1905, as well as Inghinidhe na hÉireann (Daughters of Ireland), a radical Irish nationalist women’s group formed in 1900 by Maud Gonne, muse and object of unrequited love of W.B. Yeats. Markievicz was a member of the Citizen Army during the 1916 Easter Rising and according to one account shot 28-year-old Constable Michael Lahiff of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, who later died of his injuries. She was imprisoned in solitary confinement in Kilmainham Gaol, tried for taking part in an armed rebellion, convicted and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment “solely and only on account of her sex”. Transferred to Mountjoy Gaol, HMP Holloway then HMP Aylesbury, she was released in 1917 as part of a general amnesty but then arrested again in May 1918 after the spurious “German Plot” and was still confined when elected to Parliament. She went on to be Minister of Labour (1919-22), only the second woman to be a government minister in Europe after Alexandra Kollontai, People’s Commissar of Social Welfare of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1917 to 1918. Markievicz again fought in the Citizen Army in the Irish Civil War in 1922-23, left Sinn Féin and in 1926 chaired the inaugural meeting of Fianna Fáil, founded by Éamon de Valera, in La Scala Theatre and Opera House on Prince’s Street. She died in July 1927, aged 59, of complications from two operations for appendicitis. Ruth Dudley Edwards described her as “a snob, a fraud, an exhibitionist, a murderer who neglected her own child but trained other people’s children to kill and die for Ireland”.

9. Grafton Street, one of the principal shopping streets in Dublin, was developed in the early 1700s primarily as a residential street, beginning in 1708 and largely complete by 1727. It was named for Charles FitzRoy, 2nd Duke of Grafton, who was Lord Lieutenant of Ireland from 1720 to 1724 and owned land in that part of Dublin. Duke Street, which runs off Grafton Street and was originally a street of townhouses built between 1720 and 1730, was named for Henry FitzRoy, 1st Duke of Grafton, illegitimate son of Charles II and Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland, who died aged 27 after being wounded leading an assault on a breach in the walls at the storming of Cork in September 1690.

10. Until the passage of the Acts of Parliament Numbering and Citation Act 1962, acts of Parliament and various other official documents and occasions were dated by the monarch’s regnal year, that is, how long into their reign they were. Therefore the first year of Elizabeth II’s reign (1 Eliz. 2) ran from 6 February 1952 to 5 February 1953. Most but not all monarchs measured their regnal years from their accession, but some used their coronation date instead. One such monarch was King John (1199-1216), who used the date of his coronation as the beginning of his reign, but this led to complications: he was crowned on Thursday 27 May 1199, but that day was Ascension Day which is a movable feast, and during his 17-year kingship, the beginning of his regnal years varied from 3 May (1201) to 30 May (1213). His regnal years were also, accordingly, of varying length, as they ran from Ascension Day to the day before the next Ascension Day. His 3rd, 5th, 8th, 11th, 14th and 16th regnal years were the longest at 384 days, while his 2nd, 6th, 9th, 12th and 15th were the shortest at 349 days.

“Writing only leads to more writing.” (Colette)

1. “Burnham camp divided over chancellor pick as UK finances worsen”: Sam Fleming, Ashley Armstrong and George Parker for The Financial Times report that Andy Burnham’s closest advisers have met “a wall of scepticism from the City of London over the MP’s ability to impose fiscal discipline”. With Rachel Reeves’s inexplicable hopes of remaining at the Treasury seeming to fade, a number of possible candidates have emerged for what is always a central role in government as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Burnham needs “to build a relationship with bond investors, some of whom have been unnerved by his sometimes loose rhetoric around government debt”, one factor which has damaged the prospects of Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary Ed Miliband. The former Labour leader had made no secret of his ambition, but there are now also concerns that as Chancellor he would seek to create a rival powerbase in government. There is the possibility, though it seems remote and shrinking, that Wes Streeting could stand aside from any leadership contest in exchange for the Treasury, while Shabana Mahmood, considered by Burnham as an act of balance between factions, has made it as clear as possible that she would rather remain Home Secretary. The current Foreign Secretary, Yvette Cooper, is sufficiently dour and humour;ess at last to seem a plausible pick, and was Chief Secretary to the Treasury 2008-09, replacing Burnham himself. The so-dull-they-must-be-competent brief would also fit Pat McFadden, currently Work and Pensions Secretary, but he may be regarded as too close to the present régime. Former Defence Secretary John Healey and anonymous current Chief Secretary Lucy Rigby have the air of names pulled from a hat, while elsewhere there was a suggestion that Darren Jones, the intensely ambitious Chief Secretary to the Prime Minister, is interested (of course he is), an outcome which would not be universally popular among Labour MPs. What is striking is how little of the deliberations seem to rest on policy and so much on personality (for those candidates who have one) and internal Labour Party dynamics.

2. “Britain after Brexit”: in City A.M., former Bank of England Chief Economist, Chief Executive of the Royal Society of Arts and Permanent Secretary for Levelling Up at the Cabinet Office Andy Haldane gives a detailed analysis of the United Kingdom’s current economic travails and presents some potential solutions. (Haldane is reported to be providing advice to the newly elected Member for Makerfield, Andy Burnham.) I instinctively like Haldane, even though our politics are probably some way apart: he has the earnestness, good will, intellectual curiosity and creativity which I rate very highly in policy-makers. He presents a thesis that the last 20 years in the UK have been heavily and negatively affected by a number of major challenges: the Global Financial Crisis, the Brexit referendum, the Covid-19 pandemic, the cost of living crisis. “Each of these once-in-a-generation events has left a deep scar. These scars are both financial and psychological.” I won’t simply précis what he says, and it’s a thoughtful and careful analysis. But I will offer a few observations. He cites some outcomes which might seem to support the massive level of publicly and the reassurance of an economic safety net, first to save the banking system by passing the Banking (Special Provisions) Act 2008 during the Global Financial Crisis, and then with the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme during the pandemic. Whatever the merits of these, we seem to have raised public expectations of state intervention and salvation when things go wrong; when Jaguar Land Rover suffered a major cyber attack last year, against which the company had not properly prepared, such was the pressure upon it that the government had to offer enormous financial support to JLR. Where is the logical endpoint? Haldane also points to government intervention as the key to ending the economic crisis of the 1930s: “a programme of public works in the UK and United States uncaged the animal spirits of households and businesses, leading those economies out of the Great Depression”. Yet there is an interpretation of events, very far from a fringe one, that Roosevelt’s New Deal created a hostile environment for investors due to the overarching scale of intervention and may have prolonged, not ended, the Great Depression in the United States (see George Selgin’s recent False Dawn: The New Deal and the Promise of Recovery, 1933-1947). For all that, if this is the level of discourse about the future of the UK, that in itself in reassuring.

3. “Farage’s terrible judgement lies at the heart of this thumping defeat”: the veteran observer and Farage biographer Michael Crick argues in The i Paper that Reform UK’s surprisingly heavy defeat by Labour’s Andy Burnham in the Makerfield by-election was at least partly attributable to the flaws of its candidate, Robert Kenyon. “Reform is hopeless at picking candidates for by-elections… voters seem to have realised Kenyon would be a huge embarrassment as their MP.” But this factor, Crick maintains, is a symptom of a wider malaise, one which is foundational. “Reform is a dictatorship. There’s no internal democracy. Only one man is responsible for picking Kenyon. The same man who picked Matt Goodwin [for the Gorton and Denton by-election]: Nigel Farage.” I’ve argued for some time that Farage is not a politician as we generally understand the term, but a campaigner, and a highly effective one. The skills required for each, however, overlap but do not fully coincide. Farage relies on a blokey, matey, sometimes-challenging rejection of orthodoxies, setting himself up as the outsider, the champion of the ordinary voter. That stance is much easier to maintain when focused on a single target, like leaving the European Union or whipping up emotions about immigration, then when having to face the electorate as a potential Prime Minister. And Farage has a surprisingly thin too, ready always to throw the brickbats or pass them forward to others, but irritable and defensive when some of his more dubious claims are questioned by the media.

4. “UK defence readiness is indefensible”: in The Critic, my Defence on the Brink colleague Ted Jeffery suggests that, while the Defence Secretary and the Minister for the Armed Forces may have resigned last week over the inadequacy of the draft Defence Investment Plan, some responsibility must be taken by senior military officers. There seems to be little debate now that the financial settlement HM Treasury is offering is not enough to implement the Strategic Defence Review in its entirely. Certainly that is the view of the Secretary of State who oversaw it, John Healey, and its lead author, Lord Robertson of Port Ellen. Even the Pirme Minister and the Chancellor have not sought directly to contradict Healey rather than obfuscate. All of this puts the Chief of the Defence Staff, Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, is a difficult position. He has indicated publicly, on several occasions and two a number of parliamentary committees, that the capabilities of the armed forces will be compromised without additional resources. Serving officers have, of course, a duty to follow orders and to make the best of the available expenditure, but that duty cannot be absolute. As Ted concludes, “after having exhausted the appropriate channels to demand further and faster investment in defence, resignation is now the answer. It’s not a tantrum, but the only remaining act to punish them for what they’ve done—and left undone.” The position of Chief of the Defence Staff was created on1 January 1959, the supersede the role of Chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, and Knighton is the 25th officer to be appointed to it. Not one of his 24 predecessors resigned on a point of principle¹, but I am not at all sure that weakens the case for doing so. The basic question is this: if the Defence Secretary resigns because he believes the MoD budget will “increase the risk to personnel on operations, and could make the country less safe, how can the Chief of the Defence Staff remain in post to implement that risky budget which makes the UK less safe?

5. “The trouble with the Ministry of Defence”: another Defence on the Brink colleague, Simon Diggins, writes in The Spectator and goes to the heart of many elements of dysfunction in our defence policy. He is clear about a running theme in the ongoing saga: “the blame for miscommunicating the need for Britain to spend more on defence lies squarely, and fairly, with the Ministry of Defence”. Even as more politicians than was the case, say, a decade ago pay lip service to the fundamental nature of national security, very few, as Sir Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves have proved, are either able or willing to follow their arguments through to action, the action of increasing public expenditure on defence, including, in the last resort, by cutting spending in other areas. Simon points out that the MoD has a very poor track record of managing money efficiently and wisely, as we can see from the gallery of disastrous, some ongoing procurement programmes and their through-life management: the General Dynamics Ajax armoured fighting vehicle, the ARTEC Boxer infantry fighting vehicle, the Type 45 destroyer, the New Medium Helicopter (Leonardo/AgustaWestland AW149), the Dreadnought-class ballistic missile submarines, the Boeing E-7 Wedgetail AEW1. He also notes that “there is real doubt about whether any uplift will be spent on the right things… the suspicion, no doubt unworthy, was that the uplift was more about saving current hobby-horses”. Nor has the department helped itself in terms of credibility with the public :“the MoD has been woeful: unforthcoming with information, devoted to spin, often neglectful of democratic accountability, and less than straightforward with the Prime Minister and ministers as to the limits of our military capabilities”. Simon has seen this trend of failure from several angles, as Chief Logistics Officer and Deputy Chief of Staff, 24 Airmobile Brigade, as Defence Attaché at the UK Embassy in Kabul and as Deputy Assistant Chief of Staff for Mission Support and Training, Joint Warfare at Joint Forces Command (now Cyber and Specialist Operations Command). The MoD is excessively secretive, defensive about its failures, in denial about threats and, perhaps most corrosive, its persistent presentation of a more positive set of circumstances than the facts would support.

6. “Restore the King James Bible”: the excellent Fr Marcus Walker of the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great in Smithfield writes in The Critic in favour of the use of the Authorised Version of the Bible of 1611, otherwise known as the King James Version. He praises its sonorous, lofty and often poetic language and argues it has a dignity and beauty utterly absent in modern, hyperaware translations. I have no dog in this fight, in a sense, in that I’m not a communicant member of the Church of England, but I understand completely the desire for beauty, grace and an element of mystery in liturgy. (“Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal. And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.” 1 Corinthians 13:1-2; “So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.” Matthew 20:16) Quite part from its ecclesiastical use, the King James Bible is one of the glories of the English language, the source of dozens of phrases and idioms which we use without any pause for thought every day (all right, not everyone uses the phrase “the bowels of Jesus Christ” (Philippians 1:8) every day). As Marcus noted, Lord Macaulay said that if every other recorded work in the English language was destroyed, the King James Bible “would alone suffice to show the whole extent of its beauty and power”. If the English Bible is the most precious jewel of the English language, the Church of England might seem logical custodians of that treasure, but certainly it should be conserved and gloried in.

7. “Gen Z have just found a new way to make themselves miserable”: writing in The Daily Telegraph, the ever-wise Hannah Betts, whom I esteem greatly, suggests not without sympathy that Generation Z (born between 1997 and 2012; so in this country very literally Blair Babes) have an approach to love, romance, sex, dating and pairing of all kinds that has been warped by some of their experiences. It finds its most horrific-sounding manifestation in a recent trend dubbed “pitch your bestie”, which I’m afraid is every bit as bad as you think. Fleeing the regimentation and protocol of dating apps, Gen Z have produced “the most artificial situation possible: delivering a Dragons’ Den-style sales presentation about your single pal to a room packed with potential suitors”. As Comrade Betts sums it up—and this made me actually as oppose to figuratively LOL—“think flogging cattle only without the blessing of a bolt gun”. I think she is absolutely right in saying that this spectacle of ghastliness lacks the essential ingredient of forming any kind of deep bond of affection, which is privacy, escape, refuge. “Intimacy flourishes in pairs. It is catching someone’s eye and entering into a conspiracy of two… Gen Z should stop mistaking love for a spectacle. It’s a pact.”

8. “Having a child at 25 was one of the best things I ever did. It made me an adult”: also in The Daily Telegraph, Kara Kennedy Clairmont, whom I got to know well before her brutal abandoning of this royal throne of kings in favour of our first North American colony, Virginia, writes of her experience of an unexpected pregnancy (my apologies: that sounds like an “unexpected item in the bagging area”) at the age of 25. She recalls that “like most women my age, I had been taught that an unplanned pregnancy was the ultimate tragedy; a catastrophic detour from the track of self-actualisation we were all on”, and by today’s standards, 25 is a young age to begin parenting: the average age of first-time mothers in the UK is 29 or 30, and it is not much below that in the United States, though it varies extremely widely by ethnicity and geography, especially between urban and rural areas. Yet there was a plain truth in the reaction Kara received from her mother: “You’re married, and you’re hardly a child. You are 25 years old.” When I was born in 1977, my mother had just turned 28, and was regarded as noticeably old in years; the average age of all mothers giving birth was only 26½, while for first-time mothers it was 23. Kara quite rightly points to a number of economic factors which have made women reluctant to enter parenthood much the near side of 30, but she also suggests a generational loss of nerve and self-confidence combined with a sense of fraught perfectionism. “Modern culture has reframed having children as a capstone, a reward for achieving a flawless life… children aren’t the final brick in a carefully constructed house of adulthood; they can also be the foundation.”

Jukebox jury: duets

1. “Senza Una Donna”, Zucchero and Paul Young

2. “Love Hurts”, Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris

3. “Shallow”, Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper

4. “Please Read the Letter”, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss

5. “Islands in the Stream”, Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers

Lay on, Macduff…

… Macbeth tells him, and damned be him that first cries, “Hold! Enough!”

1. Marshal of the RAF Sir Peter Harding (CDS 1992-94) resigned when he was revealed to have had an extramarital affair with the wife of a former Conservative MP and defence minister, Sir Antony Buck.