Sunday round-up 22 June 2025

The Hampstead Tube opens, the title of "Emperor of India" is omitted from the royal style and titles, and St John Fisher and St Thomas More are commemorated

Bunting and finest Ecuadorean cava today for an eclectic group including actress and iconic Torquay hotel châtelaine Prunella Scales (93), Brighton bombing-injured former Leader of the House of Commons then Leader of the House of Lords Lord Wakeham (93), music producer and Island Records co-founder Chris Blackwell (88), journalist, presenter and assisted dying campaigner Dame Esther Rantzen (85), actor and director Klaus Maria Brandauer (82), journalist, presenter and commentator Brit Hume (82), singer, guitarist and producer Peter Asher (81), former President of the Royal College of Psychiatrists and of the British Medical Association Baroness Hollins (79), producer of The Mousetrap and former financial journalist Sir Stephen Waley-Cohen (79), landowner, former Page of Honour to HM Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and trepanation enthusiast the Earl of Wemyss and March (77), singer-songwriter, guitarist and producer Todd Rundgren (77), Investigatory Powers Commissioner, tabloid press-botherer, former High Court judge and improbable Scouser Sir Brian Leveson (76), actress and multiple Academy Award winner Meryl Streep (76), actress Lindsay Wagner (76), attorney, academic and US Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren (76), actress, coffee-peddler and Mrs Trevor Eve for the last 45 years Sharon Maughan (75), singer-songwriter, producer and actress Cyndi Lauper (72), Scritti Politti frontman Green Gartside (70), journalist and screenwriter Danny Baker (68), attorney and environmentalist Erin Brockvich (65), Bronski Beat and Communards singer Jimmy Somerville (64), Jesus and Mary Chain minimalist drummer, Primal Scream founder and paint-by-numbers leftist Bobby Gillespie (63), best-selling, genuinely-not-very-good author Dan Brown (61), filmmaker Uwe Boll (60), actress and singer Emmanuelle Seigner (59), actress Laila Rouass (54) and Scrubs star Donald Faison (51).

Crossed off the birthday card list with varying degrees of firmness are William the Conqueror’s father Duke Robert I of Normandy (1000), philosopher, linguist, civil servant and university founder Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767), radical nationalist and Italian patriot Giuseppe Mazzini (1805), novelist, colonial administrator and land reform campaigner Sir Henry Rider Haggard (1856), Imperial German Navy hero Vice-Admiral Maximilian Reichsgraf von Spee (1861), fighter ace, aviation enthusiast and last commander-in-chief of Hitler’s Lufwaffe Field Marshal Robert Ritter von Greim (1892), novelist Erich Maria Remarque (1898), sellotape and masking tape inventor Richard Drew (1899), bank robber and gangster John Dillinger (1903), director, producer and screenwriter Billy Wilder (1906), theatre and film producer and third of Elizabeth Taylor’s seven husbands Mike Todd (1909), British Army officer, leader of the 1953 expedition to climb Mount Everest and one-time Chairman of the Parole Board Lord Hunt (1910), nurse, social worker and champion of the hospice movement Dame Cicely Saunders (1918), actor, The Waltons lynchpin and Democratic congressional candidate Ralph Waite (1928), laicised Roman Catholic priest, chairman of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and advocate for conscientious objectors Bruce Kent (1929), former Queen of Iran Sorayâ Esfandiâri-Baxtyâri (1932), California Senator Dianne Feinstein (1933), singer-songwriter, actor, writer and Rhodes Scholar Kris Kristofferson (1936), long-time military ruler then President of Ghana Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings (1947), comedian and actor Freddie Prinze (1954), murdered Labour MP for Batley and Spen Jo Cox (1974) and two-time Indianapolis 500 winner Dan Wheldon (1978).

The “Last Link”

Today in 1907, the President of the Board of Trade, David Lloyd George, officially opened the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, a deep-level tube line owned by the Underground Electric Railways Company of London, Limited (UERL). The company also owned the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway, opened on 10 March 1906, and the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway, which Lloyd George had opened on 15 December 1906. The “Hampstead Tube”, as the new line was commonly known, initially ran from Charing Cross to Camden Town before bifurcating, with one branch continuing to Golders Green and the other to Highgate. From Charing Cross to Golders Green was a distance of around six miles, while the route from the junction at Camden Town to the terminus at Highgate was two miles. Lloyd George was presented with a golden key by the UERL and then turned on the current to a special train which made the first official journey, from Charing Cross to Highgate, back to the junction and then to Golders Green. There were 16 stations at first, each about half a mile apart, although it was a mile and a half from Hampstead, the penultimate station, to Golders Green.

Although the Hampstead Tube had been financed and built relatively quickly, it did not live up to its initial expectations. In its first year of operation, it carried 25 million passengers rather than the 50 million which had been anticipated. UERL had overestimated usage on its other lines too, but all tube and sub-surface railways were suffering from growing competition from electric trams and motor buses. The company collaborated with the City and South London Railway, the Central London Railway and the Great Northern and City Railway to introduce fare agreements and through ticketing, and in 1908 they began to brand themselves collectively as “the Underground”, publishing a map showing all services. (The Waterloo and City Railway did not participate as it was owned by the mainline London and South Western Railway which operated services to as far afield as Bude in Cornwall.)

The move towards greater integration was inevitable. The London Electric Railway Amalgamation Act 1910 created a company owned by UERL which combined the management of the Charing Cross, Euston and Hampstead Railway, the Baker Street and Waterloo Railway and the Great Northern, Piccadilly and Brompton Railway. In practical terms it transferred the assets of the first and second to the third and renamed it the London Electric Railway (LER), but each section remained separately identifiable for operational purposes: the Bakerloo Tube, the Hampstead Tube and the Piccadilly Tube.

Under the provisions of the Edgware and Hampstead Railway Act 1905, the Edgware and Hampstead Railway Act 1909 and the Edgware and Hampstead Railway Act 1912, permissions had been obtained, maintained and extended to create a route beyond Golders Green to Edgware and thence to Watford. The London Electric Railway Act 1912 formalised the assumption of these permissions by the LER, but work was postponed again and again due to the First World War and lack of available finance. However, in 1921, the Treasury agreed to underwrite a number of major construction projects as a means of employment creation and economic development, and work began on the northern extension in June 1922; in November 1923 the first section opened with stations at Brent (now Brent Cross) and Hendon Central, and a further extension came into operation in August 1924 stopping at Colindale and Edgware (an intermediate station at Burnt Oak opened in October that year).

The London Electric Railway Act 1923 approved a southward extension from Charing Cross to Kennington, where an interchange would be constructed with the City and South London Railway. This was completed in September 1926, but services were still struggling to be profitable. In 1912, UERL had bought the London General Omnibus Company, which was successful and had effectively cross-subsidised the railways, but by the mid-1920s it too was facing more and more competition. There was a campaign to bring the Underground network and bus services into public ownership, championed by Herbert Morrison, a leading Labour member of London County Council who became Minister of Transport in 1929.

In 1930, Morrison introduced a hybrid bill which, after long and detailed consideration, was eventually granted Royal Assent as the London Passenger Transport Act 1933: it created a public authority, the London Passenger Transport Board, which oversaw railways, tramways, trolleybuses, buses and coaches within the London Passenger Transport Area. It was chaired by Lord Ashfield, formerly Managing Director then Chairman of UERL, while the Vice-Chairman was Frank Pick, UERL’s Commercial Manager who had been responsible for much of the advertising and visual identity of the London Underground. The other five original members of the LPTB were Sir John Gilbert, an alderman and former Chairman of London County Council; Sir Edward Holland, former Chairman of Surrey County Council; Patrick Ashley Cooper, Governor of the Hudson’s Bay Company; Sir Henry Maybury, President of the Institution of Civil Engineers; and John Cliff, Assistant General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers’ Union.

Of the Hampstead Tube’s original 16 stations, 15 are still in use: Charing Cross, Leicester Square, Oxford Street (now Tottenham Court Road), Tottenham Court Road (now Goodge Street), Euston Road (now Warren Street), Euston, Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, Chalk Farm, Belsize Park, Hampstead, Golders Green, Kentish Town, Tufnell Park and Highgate (now Archway). The 16th station, South Kentish Town, closed on 5 June 1924 because of low passenger usage but the surface building remains standing on Kentish Town Road near the junction with Castle Street, and is used as a venue for an escape room. The tunnels and platforms remain and the station is an access point for repairs and maintenance. The Hampstaed Tube’s route forms, of course, a central part of the modern-day Northern Line.

Easy come, easy go

After what is more neutrally known as “the Indian Rebellion of 1857” but many of you may, like me, still instinctively think of as the Indian Mutiny, the Government of India Act 1858 transferred authority over the territories and possessions controlled by the East India Company to the British Crown, replacing the Court of Directors and the President of the Board of Control, a British minister, with a Secretary of State for India and the India Office, as well as an advisory 15-member Council of India. The Governor-General of India was henceforth generally known as the Viceroy. Bahadur Shah II, the last Mughal Emperor, was by then confined effectively to the walled city of Shahjahanabad, or Old Delhi, but in September 1857, aged 81, he was deposed, tried between January and March 1858 for aiding and abetting those involved in the mutiny, assuming sovereignty of “Hindostan” and helping to wage war against the Crown, and found guilty and exiled to Rangoon, the Mughal monarchy coming to an end.

For some time, Queen Victoria had been attracted by the idea of having an imperial title; she disliked the fact that Tsar Alexander II, with whom she had enjoyed a brief romantic friendship when she was 20, outranked her in terms of precedence as an emperor, and, after 1871, the idea that her eldest daughter Victoria, who had married the Crown Prince of Prussia in 1858, would hold a higher status than she did when her husband Friedrich eventually succeeded as German Emperor (in the end he would reign for only 99 days in 1888 before dying of cancer). The title “Empress of India” was already informally in use in some circumstances, and the post-1858 government of India was frequently referred to as the British Indian Empire. As early as 1843, the Governor-General, Lord Ellenborough, had written to Victoria arguing that as sovereign she should rule India directly rather than through the East India Company, adding that “the princes and chiefs of India would be proud of their position as the feudatories of an empress”.

The East India Stock Dividend Redemption Act 1873 formally dissolved the East India Company. In February 1874, William Gladstone, whom the Queen found unbearable, was succeeded as Prime Minister by Benjamin Disraeli, whom she had come to adore, and Victoria began encouraging him to create the imperial style after which she hankered. She mentioned an intention to open Parliament in person, which had become the exception rather than the rule since the death of her husband the Prince Consort in 1861 and generally indicated a wish to have her way on some measure. Disraeli’s informal soundings of Members of Parliament did not produce a positive response to the idea and he temporised, but by 1876 the Queen prevailed: she opened the third Session of the 1874 Parliament in person on 8 February. The Gracious Speech from the Throne touched on the recent visit of the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, to India, and drew an ingenious conclusion:

I am deeply thankful for the uninterrupted health which my dear Son, the Prince of Wales, has enjoyed during his journey through India. The hearty affection with which he has been received by my Indian subjects of all classes and races assures me that they are happy under my rule, and loyal to my throne. At the time that the direct Government of my Indian Empire was transferred to the Crown, no formal addition was made to the style and titles of the Sovereign. I have deemed the present a fitting opportunity for supplying this omission, and a Bill upon the subject will be presented to you.

The Royal Titles Act 1876 was passed swiftly but not without debate by Parliament and given Royal Assent on 27 April. It did not, as is often asserted (sometimes by those who should know better) bestow any new title on Victoria but rather made provision for the Queen “to make such addition to the style and titles at present appertaining to the Imperial Crown of the United Kingdom and its dependencies as to Her Majesty seem meet”. It was the following day, 28 April, that the Queen issued a proclamation which announced the addition of “in the Latin tongue in these words: ‘Indiæ Imperatrix.’ And in the English tongue in these words: ‘Empress of India.’”

Victoria was now Queen of the United Kingdom and Empress of India, and altered her signature to “Victoria R&I” for Regina and Imperatrix. As a vernacular form in India itself, the Viceroy, Lord Lytton, with the unanimous consent of his Council, issued a proclamation at the Delhi Durbar in January 1877 which authorised the use of the style “Kaiser-è-Hind”, intelligible in Hindi, Urdu and Persian as the new imperial title. With the accession of Edward VII in 1901, the style became “Emperor of India”, and he and his three successors, George V, Edward VIII and George VI, all added the letters “R I” for Rex Imperator after their names in the royal sign-manual.

The Indian Independence Act 1947 granted independence to British India as the Union of India and the Dominion of Pakistan on 15 August 1947. Both dominions remained subject to the Crown, each with its own governor-general. The act also provided for, but did not itself enact, the abolition of the imperial title:

The assent of the Parliament of the United Kingdom is hereby given to the omission from the Royal Style and Titles of the words “Indiae Imperator” and the words “Emperor of India” and to the issue by His Majesty for that purpose of His Royal Proclamation under the Great Seal of the Realm.

Eventually, on this date, 22 June, in 1948, King George VI issued a proclamation. In it, His Majesty announced:

We have thought fit, and do hereby appoint and declare, that, so far as conveniently may be, on all occasions and in all instruments wherein Our Style and Titles are used, in the Latin tongue, the words “Indiae Imperator”, and, in the English tongue, the words “Emperor of India” shall be omitted.

George VI remained monarch of India until it became a republic on 26 January 1950 and of Pakistan until his death on 6 February 1952; Pakistan remained a dominion until 23 March 1956, when it too became republic, but for just over four years, Elizabeth II, along with many other titles, was also Queen of Pakistan. A further proclamation on 24 December 1948 set out various changes to coins under section 11 of the Coinage Act 1870, one of which was to omit the title Emperor of India, abbreviated as “Ind. Imp.”, from coins produced thenceforth. Until the current 10p coin was introduced in 1992, the previous, larger coin was in circulation alongside declining numbers of pre-decimalisation two-shilling pieces (otherwise known as florins), some of which predated both the accession of Elizabeth II in 1952 and the 1948 proclamation and therefore still bore the head of George VI and the title of Emperor of India. The florin was demonetised the following year, 1993.

Ecclesia Britannica

It is a bumper day for British Catholics in particular, as we mark the feasts of St Eusebius of Samosata (d AD 379), a strong opponent of Arianism who was Bishop of was killed by a roofing tile thrown at his head by an Arian woman in northern Syria; of St Nicetas of Remesiana (AD 335-AD 414) who championed the cause of Latin sacred music, was Bishop of Remesiana in modern-day Serbia and was friends with Paulinus of Nola (see next); of St Paulinus of Nola (AD 354-AD 431), a Roman poet, senator, suffect consul and governor born in Gaul who renounced his public life to embrace Christianity, became Bishop of Nola in southern Italy and is credited with the introduction of bells into Christian worship; of St Aaron of Aleth (d after AD 552), born somewhere in Britain, perhaps in Wales, who became a hermit and monk on the island of Cézembre in Brittany and was eventually abbot of the community there; of St John Fisher (1469-1535), Bishop of Rochester, a staunch anti-Lutheran and partisan of Queen Katharine of Aragon who refused to swear to the royal supremacy, was attainted and imprisoned then tried and executed for treason 32 days after being created a cardinal; and of St Thomas More (1478-1535), scholar, lawyer and statesman, one-time intimate of King Henry VIII who served as Speaker of the House of Commons and Lord High Chancellor of England but, like Fisher, refused to assent to the royal supremacy and was, like Fisher, tried and executed for treason. For added Britishness, until 1960 today was also the feast of St Alban (d 3rd century AD), the first British martyr, who was scourged and eventually beheaded and is now invoked by converts, refugees and torture victims, but the revised General Roman calendar transferred his commemoration to 20 June.

For the less martial of spirit, it is Windrush Day in the UK, remembering the arrival of one of the first group of West Indian immigrants at the Port of Tilbury aboard the HMT Empire Windrush in 1948. It is Father’s Day in Jersey, Guernsey and the Isle of Man, Teachers’ Day in El Salvador, the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Great Patriotic War in Belarus and Anti-Fascist Struggle Day in Croatia (a struggle, it must be said, to which not all Croatians committed themselves wholeheartedly between 1941 and 1945).

Factoids

1. The last Emperor of Austria, the Blessed Karl I (1916-18), was the nephew of the assassinated Habsburg heir Archduke Franz Ferdinand. He in turn was the nephew of the penultimate Emperor, Franz Joseph I (1848-1916), who was the nephew of his predecessor, Ferdinand I (1835-48); Ferdinand suffered from severe epilepsy, and his father, Franz I (1792-1835), stipulated in his political testament that the new Emperor should in all matters of internal policy consult his uncle, Franz’s brother, Archduke Louis.

2. When Neville Chamberlain flew to Germany on 15 September 1938, to visit Adolf Hitler at his Alpine retreat at Berchtesgaden, the Prime Minister was only six months shy of his 70th birthday (the Führer by contrast was only 49 years old). In addition, except for a very brief excursion at an industrial fair, Chamberlain had never flown before. He would fly to and from Germany twice more within the space of two weeks.

3. The United States is regarded by some as too eager to wield military power abroad, sometimes for dubious ends. Yet there is a legal quirk to this. Only the United States Congress can formally declare war, under Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the US Constitution. This power it has only exercised in five conflicts in history: on 18 June 1812, against the United Kingdom and her allies; on 13 May 1846, against Mexico; on 25 April 1898, against Spain; on 4 April 1917, against Germany, and 7 December 1917, against Austria-Hungary; and on 8 December 1941, against Japan, 11 December 1941, against Germany and Italy, and 4 June 1942 against Romania, Hungary and Bulgaria. Overall, however, the United States has been involved in 133 armed conflicts, of which arguably three are ongoing: the war in Yemen including Operation Prosperity Guardian in the Red Sea, the Somali civil war and Israel’s conflict with Iran and other actors. In addition, there are still American forces deployed to Syria but these are being drawn down rapidly.

4. A thought prompted by the passage of the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill by the House of Commons on Friday: although it is a scene ripe for dramatic exploitation, everyone present knows the outcome of a division if not the precise result before the numbers voting in favour and against are read out. Two MPs on each side are appointed by the Speaker as “tellers”, to count (informally) and report the result, and where they stand when the division is over shows what the outcome is. The tellers for the Ayes will stand at the Table of the House to the left of the Speaker and the tellers for the Noes will stand to the right, and one of the tellers for the Ayes will read out the result. So except in the extremely rare instance of a tied vote—none occurred between July 1993 and April 2019—it is obvious as soon as the tellers line up whether the question, whatever it is, has been agreed to or negatived. Gasps of surprise, elation or shock when the result is read out are either related to the size of the majority or are somewhat performative.

5. The Empire Windrush, the ship which brought one of the first large groups of immigrants to the United Kingdom from the Caribbean in 1948, had only borne her name for 18 months when she arrived at Tilbury. She had been built by Blohm & Voss in Hamburg in 1930 as an ocean liner for Hamburg Süd, launched as MV Monte Rosa and then taken into military service as a troop ship by the German Navy in 1940. In two voyages in November 1942, she deported 46 of Norway’s 768 Jews, 44 of whom were subsequently murdered in Auschwitz, and at the end of 1943 she was moored alongside the battleship Tirpitz in Altafjord as a repair ship. In November 1945, the Monte Rosa was claimed by the UK as a prize of war and subsequently refitted as a troop ship in South Shields, and on 21 January 1947 she was transferred to the Ministry of Transport and renamed HMT Empire Windrush, her management contracted to the New Zealand Shipping Company. She was the last survivor of the five ships in her class: MV Monte Cervantes sank near Tierra del Fuego in 1930, MV Monte Sarmiento was sunk during an air raid on Kiel harbour in 1942, MV Monte Olivia suffered the same fate in the same harbour in 1945 and MV Monte Pascoal, damaged during an air raid on Wilhelmshaven in 1944, was scuttled by the British authorities in the Skagerrak in 1946.

6. The senior official from the Colonial Office on board the Empire Windrush was a seconded RAF officer, Flight Lieutenant John Smythe. He had been born and raised in Sierra Leone, then a British colony and protectorate, and had volunteered for the RAF in 1941. After qualifying as a navigator, he served with No. 623 Squadron and was shot down on a diversionary bombing raid on Mannheim, then spent 18 months as a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft I near Barth on the Baltic coast in Pomerania; asked by German interrogators why he was fighting a war in Europe, he told them “Sierra Leone is part of the British Empire and I’m fighting for my king”. Smythe later successfully defended two servicemen in courts martial despite having no formal legal training; at the suggestion of one of the presiding judges, who provided a letter of introduction, he studied law at the Inns of Court, was called to the Bar at Middle Temple in 1951 and returned to Sierra Leone. He rose to become Solicitor General then Attorney General of Sierra Leone, a Queen’s Counsel and then a successful lawyer in private practice.

7. At a diplomatic reception in Freetown, Smythe found himself in conversation with the German Ambassador to Sierra Leone, who had been a Luftwaffe night fighter pilot during the Second World War. It transpired that the Ambassador’s first victory had seemingly been shooting down Smythe’s aircraft over Mannheim in November 1943. (It is also reported that the aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire from the ground but that is a much less satisfying story.)

8. St Thomas More, whose feast day it is today (see above), is one of only three people to have served as presiding officer of both Houses of Parliament, that is, as Speaker of the House of Commons and Lord High Chancellor. More was Speaker from April to August 1523, then Lord Chancellor 1529 to 1532; the others are his direct successor in both offices, Sir Thomas Audley, Lord Audley of Walden, Speaker of the House of Commons 1529-33 and Lord Chancellor 1533-44; and More’s nemesis Sir Richard Rich, Lord Rich, Speaker of the House of Commons June to July 1536 and Lord Chancellor 1547-52.

9. More was not a peer, and Audley was not ennobled until 1538, by which time he had been Lord Chancellor for five years. But it was not necessary for the Lord Chancellor, although effectively speaker of the House of Lords, to be a peer. The House of Lords Precedence Act 1539 stipulated the seating arrangement for “any person or persons which at any tyme hereafter shall happen to have… the saide office of Lorde Chauncelor [who] shalbe under the degree of a Baron of the Parliament”, and noted that such a person “can have noe interest to give any assent or dissent in the saide House”, but that did not preclude carrying out the few legislative functions of the role. However, by the 16th century it was becoming established that the Lord Chancellor would be a peer (or a prelate); after Audley’s ennoblement, the only commoners to hold the office were Sir Thomas Bromley (1579-87), Sir Christopher Hatton (1587-91) and for the first two years of his tenure Sir Edward Hyde (1658-67), as well as Sir Charles Yorke, who was Lord Chancellor 17-20 January 1770 before dying or committing suicide (he was to be created Baron Morden but the letters patent conferring the peerage were awaiting his own authorisation under the Great Seal).

10. It remained more common until the 18th century for those who were not peers, though many were subsequently ennobled, to hold the almost identical office of Lord Keeper of the Great Seal. The office had emerged in the 12th century as a substitute for the Lord Chancellor who would have physical possession of the Great Seal in the Chancellor’s absence, and a Lord Keeper would also hold the Great Seal during any vacancy in the chancellorship, but it was a less prestigious role. It was codified by the Lord Keeper Act 1562, which stipulated that the Lord Keeper was “entitled to like place, pre-eminence, jurisdiction, execution of laws, and all other customs, commodities, and advantages as the Lord Chancellor”, and frequently individuals would be appointed Lord Keeper then subsequently be made Lord Chancellor. The last Lord Keeper was Sir Robert Henley (1757-61), ennobled as Lord Henley in 1760 then appointed Lord Chancellor by the new sovereign, King George III, in January 1761. The Great Seal has henceforth either been held by the Lord Chancellor or, infrequently, put into commission under the Great Seal Act 1688 (1770-71, April-December 1783, 1792-93, 1835-36 and June-July 1850), with three senior judges acting as Lords Commissioners of the Great Seal.

“I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn’t ever have to rely on the press for my information.” (Christopher Hitchens)

1. “How to fix No. 10”: in the Substack he co-authors with his father, Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman, Sam Freedman tackles the hardy perennial of reforming the centre of government to give the Prime Minister greater control over Whitehall. He lays out the problems and options for reform logically and ably, and provides a useful summation of previous attempts at structural change, as well as nodding towards the substantial Institute for Government report of 2024, Power with purpose (Freedman is a Senior Fellow at the IfG). Cards on the table: I’m an outlier on this issue as I think strengthening the direct power of the Prime Minister os approaching cabinet government from the wrong perspective, as I explained in an essay last December. That being said, Freedman’s analysis is a useful addition to a now-voluminous literature on an issue which concerns the current Prime Minister and his advisers and which few, I think, could argue we are getting right as things stand.

2. “The Democrats Must Confront Their Gerontocracy”: anyone who has any familiarity with American politics will be aware of the much greater active role that older politicians—by which I mean in their 70s or beyond—play than in British public life. President Trump marked his 79th birthday last weekend, and there is the searing lesson (if those who need to are willing to learn it) presented by the physical decline of President Joe Biden, laid bare in Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s Original Sin. But these are not outliers. I wrote a piece for The Hill in February on the grip of the gerontocracy on US politics, but here in The Atlantic, the excellent Helen Lewis focuses on the Democratic Party. Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington DC’s non-voting delegate to the House of Representatives, recently turned 88 and is still to decide whether she will seek a 19th term in Congress, despite several reports of cognitive decline. As Lewis points out, she is “older than nylon stockings and the ballpoint pen”. Yet a combination of the seniority system in Congress and a tendency to self-mythologising by older legislators and executives leads many who are past their best to see themselves as indispensable, and feel they have earned a freehold rather than a leasehold on their office. An interesting and sympathetic treatment but one which will not buy the party line: look where the party line got the Democrats last November.

3. “Peak absurdity on campaign finance reform heads to the Supreme Court”: lazy assumptions and unexamined positions are dangerous things in politics, and, while it may not always be comfortable to be made to re-examine what you thought you think, it can be bracing and is always valuable. George Will’s position, here reiterated in The Washington Post, is that regulations on how much money can be spent on politics are undesirable, unnecessary and a violation of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, which says “Congress shall make no law… abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press”. Surely, though, serious and earnest people like me who want fair and clean politics think, the astronomical sums of money spent in the United States in particular on campaigns and elections are a way of buying influence and are indispensable? Will argues not: “actual quid pro quo corruption involving donors is rare”, he says, and “political contributions move to politicians’ issue positions, not the other way around”. That is, donors favour people who agree with them already rather than using their financial leverage to make politicians change their minds. He boils the argument down to what he sees as the underlying principle: “All laws regulating political competition involve government stipulating the permissible quantity of speech about the government’s composition”. The very nature of “campaign finance reform”, in his view, pertains to limiting political discourse, which is the heart of a democratic system. Agree or not—and I genuinely don’t know—Will puts an elegant and principled case.

4. “California has a date with Trump in court”: in his Substack, Walter Olson, Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, highlights President Trump’s ongoing antagonism with the State of California and his attempts to coerce and punish the state’s government by withholding federal funding of all sorts. That Trump will use any available means to try to enforce his will on anyone is a given: he is deaf to advice and never concedes or acknowledges error or the validity of opposition, so accepts only surrender. He is also indifferent to the arrangements and strictures of the Constitution, save where they benefit him, and has consistently sought to ignore judgements in the courts that he is acting outwith his powers. I suspect there will be many more “dates in court”, and Olson is extremely learned and erudite, but I’m increasingly uncertain that the judiciary as a branch of government has the will or the desire to oppose presidential overreach, or that its rulings are automatically going to be observed and respected. These are troubling times.

5. “How to redraw a city”: something I find perennially fascinating but always seem to need to read just a little more about is the city: urban history, development, trends, dynamics and effects on human behaviour. Le Corbusier famously described a house as “machine for living” (“une maison est une machine-à-habiter”), but I think the epithet sometimes fits the city just as well. Two of the earliest entries in this blog dealt with the future of the city and the urban experience in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, and I come back to the subject regularly. In Works in Progress, “a magazine of new and underrated ideas to improve the world”, Anya Martin charts the story of land readjustment, a mechanism of urban development designed “to pool neighbouring plots into one larger collective plot, to redraw the boundaries in such a way that enables space for public infrastructure, and to redistribute the remaining land in newly drawn plots in a way that is equitable between the former landowners”. Land readjustment (土地区画整理 tochi kukaku seiri) was critical to the growth of modern Japanese cities, and is known in Japan as “the mother of urban planning”, but analogous processes were used is pre-First World War and Weimar Germany. Whether this is an interesting history or a blueprint for the future is up to you: my libertarian instincts kick over the traces but at the same time I always try to have an open mind. I’m slightly wary of using Japan as a model for anything, because its history is so odd: opened up in 1854 after 220 years of almost-complete isolation from the world, the country had to pack centuries into decades and decades into years to find itself a place in the family of modern nations. Nevertheless, this is worth digesting and reflecting on.

6. “Imperialism still overshadows our intellectual history”: in The Spectator, the mighty Simon Heffer reviews Peter Watson’s The British Imagination: A History of Ideas from Elizabeth I to Elizabeth II, and, like the best reviews, goes much further than a simple verdict on the volume in question. Heffer was always a formidable scholar and trenchant commentator, but in his 60s I think he’s getting better, developing a lightness of touch which serves him well without sacrificing weight. He finds much to praise in Watson’s book: “a perfectly nuanced account of Adam Smith”, “he is right to conclude that the historic significance of Britain in these fields [science and innovation] is immense”, “the book shows extensive and intelligent reading”. But he argues there is a too much crammed into too little space, yet notes that Watson finds no space for music and only two brief mentions of George Orwell, neither dealing with his journalism. You can hear Heffer’s weariness when he writes of “questions such as whether Jane Austen expressed her antipathy to slavery sufficiently clearly in the novel Mansfield Park”, but this is far from a hatchet job. Watson’s book sounds interesting and worth reading, and Heffer’s review is a useful companion piece.

7. “Theodore Roosevelt’s lessons in global power”: from Engelsberg Ideas again, Charlie Laderman examines the foreign policy of President Theodore Roosevelt and his rejection of America’s isolationist instincts in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There is a school of thought that the United States began to expand its influence, not least through the construction of a viable navy, for economic and commercial reasons. These played a part but Laderman points out that they were rarely cited by politicians, and Roosevelt, in particular, saw the world and America’s place in it in moral and ethical terms, as well as through the lens of self-preservation. He told Congress in December 1901 that “the surest way to invite national disaster is for a nation to be opulent, aggressive and unarmed”. His position came to be “that the US needed to be armed, not just to protect its own security, but also to help uphold a wider global order, on which both its political and economic interests depended”. How different from the current incumbent of the White House.

8. “Trump’s lazy insult for liberals is deeply confusing”: I include this heartfelt piece by Monica Hesse in The Washington Post not for the simple reason I think she’s right, though I am in sympathy with much of her sentiment. I chose it because it encapsulates something many of Donald Trump’s enemies—among whom I cheerfully count myself—have still not managed to absorb: trying to argue in any rational, logical, coherent or consistent manner about or with Trump is a waste of time, but the President does not accept your premise. He does not believe there is an objective, difficult, nuanced truth to be uncovered through diligent and patient debate and discussion, he does not accept that there can be a range of different but valid perspectives on major matters of philosophy or public principle, and he does not, fundamentally, accept that victory is achieved by the power of argument (how could he?). When Hesse mourns that “there is something essential we are missing about one another’s versions of either love or America”, she is implictly expecting a degree of reciprocity which Trump does not grant. She is right to criticise the woeful inadequacy of much of the Left’s counter-argument against Trump and MAGA, but when she pleads with her audience to “Love America because leaving it is not an option for most of us and hating it isn’t, either”, she is working within boundaries that Trump would neither recognise nor respect. That is not how the 45th and 47th President of the United States interacts with the world.

9. “Why English doesn’t use accents”: another delightful instalment from Colin Gorrie’s Dead Language Society Substack, this time examining and explaining the development of diacritical marks in some languages, why French positively teems with them—garçon, écouter, crème brûlée, maïs—and why English more or loess shuns them completely. It is, of course, the age-old and ongoing task of trying to fit the spoken word to orthography and vice-versa, and, as Gorrie points out, has the additional piquancy of the culture clash between English-speaking Anglo-Saxons and Francophone, newly arrived Normans. If you’re interesting in linguistics, this is a gem, and if you’re not, well, boy did you pick the wrong Substack.

10. “Red Crosses That Weren’t”: a ridiculously interesting and recondite Substack essay by my old St Andrews friend Andrew Cusack on the development of variations on the Red Cross. As any fule kno, the red cross on a white background is the symbol of the International Committee of the Red Cross, founded by Henry Durant in 1863 to protect and assist victims of conflict. It was not originally chosen as a religious symbol but rather a colour inversion of the Swiss flag, a white cross on a red background, designed to be easily identifiable on the battlefield; but in 1876 the Ottoman Society for Relief to Military Wounded and Sick adopted, mutatis mutandis, a red crescent on a white background, which rather missed the point. After that it was a frenzied free-for-all, although many proposed “reimaginings” of the red cross foundered at an early stage: as Andrew points out, one can see why a 1957 proposal to cater to Buddhists and Hindus alike with a red swastika was not followed up. Fascinating exploration of something to which I had heretofore given virtually no thought.

Jukebox jury

Once again, no hard sell, just some highlights from my internal playlist over the past week (one over which I have surprisingly little control).

1. “One Of These Nights”, The Eagles

2. “The Power of Love”, Jennifer Rush

3. “Imitation of Life”, R.E.M.

4. “Halo”, Texas

5. “Suspicious Minds”, Fine Young Cannibals

From the archives: The American Century

The United States has struggled internally with its place in the world almost since the day of its foundation. It has swung from the fullest extent of global imperial power during the Cold War to the most self-denying isolationism of the 1920s and 1930s, and even in the past 25 years we have seen the neoconservative Global War on Terror to Donald Trump’s (somewhat exaggerated) retreat from an imperial stance to concentrating on America’s immediate interests.

Henry Robinson Luce was born in China in 1898 to Presbyterian missionary Henry Winters Luce and his wife Elizabeth Root, and at 15 was sent “home” to America to attend the Hotchkiss School in Connecticut. He was an outstanding student and a particularly able linguist, mastering Greek, Latin, French and German in addition to the Chinese he already knew; he also became editor of The Hotchkiss Literary Monthly. In the autumn of 1916, Luce matriculated at Yale, scored the highest academic grades of any freshman and was chosen for a staff role on The Yale Daily News, one of only four freshmen selected. As a junior, he was admitted to the Skull and Bones Society, and applied unsuccessfully for a Rhodes Scholarship to the University of Oxford. Although he did not win a scholarship, Oxford admitted him as a matriculated student and he paid his own way to travel around Europe in 1919-20, before returning to the United States and becoming a reporter for a Chicago newspaper.

With his Hotchkiss and Yale classmate, Brooklyn-born Briton Hadden, Luce had often discussed the idea of creating a magazine which would act as an authoritative digest of world news. In November 1922, Luce and Hadden left their reporting jobs and founded Time Inc. The following March, having raised $86,000 of a target of $100,000, they published the first edition of Time, America’s first weekly news magazine. Luce acted as business manager while Hadden was editor-in-chief. Hadden died suddenly in 1929, and Luce became editor-in-chief, president and chairman of the board. The publication and the company grew rapidly, launching business journal Fortune in 1930 and the pictorial Life in 1936.

Luce was a prominent member of the Republican Party, an opponent of President Franklin Roosevelt and a leading voice on foreign affairs, with an ambition to be Secretary of State in a future Republican administration. He was a key figure in the China Lobby which championed American support for the Republic of China and its leader Chiang Kai-shek. Luce fundamentally opposed the isolationism into which the United States had retreated during the 1930s, and, influenced by his missionary father, saw a powerful role for America as promoting freedom, democracy and Christianity around the world. On 17 February 1941, while America remained formally unengaged in the Second World War, he published a long editorial in Life under the headline “The American Century”. It set out his vision for America in the world and remained a strong influence on policymakers for decades afterwards; indeed, it still has a great deal of resonance.

His opening was a direct and uncompromising diagnosis of a national malaise, pulling no punches:

We Americans are unhappy. We are not happy about America. We are not happy about ourselves in relation to America. We are nervous—or gloomy—or apathetic. As we look out at the rest of the world we are confused; we don’t know what to do.

By contrast, Luce argued, Britain might be beleaguered and facing an apparently overwhelming enemy, but her people were calm and resolute.

The German Luftwaffe has made havoc of British cities, driven the population underground, frightened children from their sleep, and imposed on everyone a nervous strain as great as any that people have ever endured. Readers of LIFE have seen this havoc unfolded week by week. Yet close observers agree that when Mr Churchill spoke of peace in the hearts of the British people he was not indulging in idle oratory. The British people are profoundly calm. There seems to be a complete absence of nervousness. It seems as if all the neuroses of modern life had vanished from England.

This was the heart of Luce’s argument: the British were calm because they had a purpose, a clarity about their mission and their responsibilities, and it was that sense of determination which America so lacked. He went on to show that America could not simply stay out of the Second World War and remain unaffected, so had to think through the consequences of action and inaction, consider the cause for which it should fight and how it should conduct that fight.

The United States was rich, prosperous and powerful, and had an almost unique ability to influence the course of history. Luce proposed that it was the fulfilment of promise and destiny for America to champion the cause of freedom, and that in doing so Americans would find their purpose and therefore a sense of calm and order.

Throughout the 17th century and the 18th century and the 19th century, this continent teemed with manifold projects and magnificent purposes. Above them all and weaving them all together into the most exciting flag of all the world and of all history was the triumphal purpose of freedom. It is in this spirit that all of us are called, each to his own measure of capacity, and each in the widest horizon of his vision, to create the first great American Century.

The whole editorial is worth a very careful digestion. It is easy to be cynical about such openly high-minded, perhaps even self-righteous, idealism. Certainly we live in a different age. All the same, I think there is something fundamentally true underlying Luce’s perception of the need for a role and purpose in the world. It is unquestionably more stirring than negotiating between a 10 per cent and a 25 per cent tariff on a range of manufactured goods. Idealism is not always naïve, and ideals are not always unrealistic.

All right, all right…

… as Pope Alexander VI’s last words went, I’m coming. Wait a moment. (“Va bene, va bene, arrivo. Aspettate un momento.”)