Sunday round-up 23 June 2024

Today we give the bumps to Clarence Thomas, Frances McDormand and Zinedine Zidane, and commemorate the release of Sonic the Hedgehog

Who is gorging on cake today? I’m glad you asked. Blowing out varying numbers of candles are former lord chancellor and Sir Tony Blair’s pupil master Lord Irvine of Lairg (84), Astronomer Royal Lord Rees of Ludlow (82), Australian cinema legend Bryan Brown (77), currently beleaguered United States Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas (76), rallying legend and arguably motorsport’s most successful female driver Michèle Mouton (73), actress and fulcrum of Fargo Frances McDormand (67), French footballers and managers Zinedine Zidane (52) and Patrick Vieira (48) and one quarter of briefly successful boyband Blue Antony Costa (43).

Born this day but taken from us, for better or worse, or just to ease the congestion, are Joséphine de Beauharnais, later Empress of the French and wife of Napoleon I (1763), 12-month king-emperor, perpetual child and Nazi-adjacent antisemite Edward VIII, later Duke of Windsor (1894), choreography guru and jazz-hands enthusiast Bob Fosse (1927), country music royalty June Carter Cash (1929), fleeting teen idol Adam Faith (1940) and supernumerary Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe (1942).

Today in 1757, a force of around 3,000 soldiers under Colonel Robert Clive of the East India Company met a much larger force of Indian and French troops led by the Nawab of Bengal at Plassey (now Palashi) on the Hooghly River. The nawab’s army comprised around 30,000 infantry and 20,000 cavalry with 50 artillery pieces and crews from the French army and 10 war elephants. Although he had a far larger force, the nawab was betrayed by his commander-in-chief, Mir Jafar, and defeated by Clive, and fled only to be captured and executed on 2 July. Jafar seized the throne and became nawab under effective British control. French influence in Bengal was ended and the Treaty of Paris, signed in February 1763, confirmed their exclusion and recognised a number of British clients as rulers of the princely states. France’s possessions in India were reduced to a handful of outposts including Pondicherry, Karikal and Chandernagore. That said, they remained under French control in law until 1962.

In 1940, Adolf Hitler and the general building inspector of Berlin, architect Albert Speer, went on a three-hour tour of the architectural highlights of Paris, which had fallen to the German Army nine days before. They arrived by aeroplane at Le Bourget early in the morning, entered the city through the Porte de la Villette and took in Opéra Garnier, the Église de la Madeleine, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower, the Hôtel des Invalides, the Panthéon and the Basilique du Sacré-Cœur. The convoy then returned to Le Bourget and Hitler flew back to his temporary headquarters in Belgium. It was the only visit to Paris he would ever make.

On this day in 1991, Sega released a new game called Sonic the Hedgehog in North America for its Genesis games console (known in other markets as Mega Drive). It would go on to sell 24 million copies and began one of the most successful games franchises in history.

Eight years ago, in 2016, the United Kingdom voted by 51.9 per cent to 48.1 per cent to leave the European Union. The turn-out was 72.2 per cent, or 33,577,342 votes cast. The UK formally left the EU at 11.00 pm on 30 January 2020.

For those of a spiritual bent, it is the feast of St Æthelthryth, a 7th-century East Anglian princess who became abbess of Ely. She died in AD 679 of a neck tumour, which she attributed sent by God in his goodness to relieve her of guilt for her vanity in having worn heavy necklaces in her youth. Accordingly she is the patron saint of throat complaints. Remarkably, she had three sisters who also became saints: St Wendreda, St Seaxburh of Ely and St Wihtburh, all daughters of King Anna of the East Angles (c. AD 636 to AD 654). It is also the feast of 19th century Turinese priest and social reformer St Joseph Cafasso and the Blessed Marie of Oignies (1177 - 1213), a young Belgian woman who was a member of the Beguines, a lay religious order. She is invoked by women in labour and against fever.

Away from the godly realm, it is International Widows’ Day and United Nations Public Service Day. In Estonia, it is Võidupüha, or Victory Day, to commemorate victory at the Battle of Cēsis in 1919 over the Baltic Landwehr. It is also the official birthday of the Grand Duke of Luxembourg, Henri, and therefore the national day of Luxembourg. Happy birthday, Your Royal Highness. (He’s 69.)

Factoids

1. British cabinets have contained members with a variety of close connections: from 1924 to 1927, the Marquess of Salisbury was lord privy seal while his younger brother Viscount Cecil of Chelwood was chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster; in 1938, aristocratic brothers Lord Stanley and Oliver Stanley were secretary of state for Dominion Affairs and president of the Board of Trade respectively; from 2007 to 2010, David Miliband (foreign secretary) and Ed Miliband (chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster then energy and climate change secretary) sat alongside each other. A slightly more strained connection existed in Tony Blair’s first cabinet from 1997 to 1999: birthday boy Lord Irvine of Lairg (see above), lord chancellor, was married to the former wife of Donald Dewar, secretary of state for Scotland. The two did not speak beyond their professional dealings.

2. The current French council of ministers has even more potential for awkwardness. Current prime minister Gabriel Attal was until 2022 in a civil union with Stéphane Séjourné, the minister for Europe and foreign affairs. Neither has commented publicly on their relationship. I’m sure it’s all fine. But then, in 2011 Francois Hollande won the Socialist Party nomination for the presidency, and went on to be president of the French Republic from 2012 to 2017, beating party rivals who included his former partner of 29 years, Ségolène Royal.

3. Actor Peter Falk died today in 2011. He is best known, I suppose, for playing the eponymous detective in Columbo, which ran from 1968 to 1978 on NBC then 1989 to 2003 on ABC. Over the years a galaxy of Hollywood talent made guest appearances, but a few actors had several turns as different characters. These versatile players include Tyne Daly, George Hamilton, Patrick McGoohan, Leslie Nielsen, Dick Van Dyke and William Shatner. God bless them all.

4. When the Queen died in 2022, there was very little fuss about the style of her successor, the Prince of Wales becoming King Charles III. (I had wondered if he might take another regnal name, perhaps George in honour of his grandfather.) Certainly there was no controversy over his regnal number, as he was clearly the third Charles after Charles I (1625-49) and Charles II (1660-85). It is not quite as simple as that, however. When Elizabeth became Queen in 1952, there was a minor furore in Scotland because there had never been an Elizabeth I north of the border. When the new monarch’s cipher, EIIR, began appearing on pillar boxes, some Scottish patriots found it so noxious that they attacked and defaced them. In 1953, prime minister Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that the convention was, and would be, that in the event of a monarch with a controversial regnal number, the higher would be used. But this had long been the case: when the Duke of Clarence and St Andrews succeeded his brother George IV in 1830, he became William IV, as there had been three King Williams of England but only one of Scotland; the same convention was applied to Edward VII and Edward VIII, as there had never been a King Edward in Scotland (although Edward Balliol had been crowned at Scone in 1332 and maintained a claim to the throne until 1356). There had been a degree of happenstance here, since in the years since the Acts of Union in 1707 nine of the thirteen monarchs had names which had either never been used in England or Scotland, or had only been used since the Union of the Crowns in 1603.

5. One interesting side effect of this convention is that if there is ever a monarch who chooses the regnal name Alexander, he will become Alexander IV, since there have been three Kings of Scots of that name in the 12th and 13th centuries. There has never been an English king called Alexander.

6. The convention is, of course, resting on an arbitrary foundation. The king who ruled England from 1272 to 1307 is universally recognised and described as Edward I. But there had been three Anglo-Saxon kings of England: Edward the Elder (AD 899 to AD 924), Edward the Martyr (AD 975 to AD 978) and St Edward the Confessor (1042-66), the only English monarch to be canonised. Edward the Martyr and Edward the Confessor were both styled Rex Anglorum, or King of the English, as all English kings would normally be until John; Edward the Elder was styled Anglorum Saxonum rex, King of the Anglo-Saxons, or English and Saxons, so could arguably be excluded. There is no logic for excluding the two later Edwards.

7. I suspect most of us think very little about Finland. It is, after all, a small country of maybe 5.6 million people, and very few people outside its borders speak Finnish (there are small communities in Norway and Russia, a very small one in Sweden, and about 26,000 speakers in the United States). Politically, it is a young country: it became a grand duchy under Russian rule in 1809, and then independent in theory at the end of 1917. But it is odd and intriguing. For some years it had been ranked the happiest country in the world, yet until recently it had the highest rate of suicide in the world, and still tracks above the European average. It has a high rate of alcohol consumption (roughly the same as ours among men, though British women outdrink their Finnish counterparts). After Reykjavík, it has in Helsinki the world’s most northerly capital (60°10′15″N 24°56′15″E), and the fourth coldest. Famous Finns? Well, I’ll be generous: Martti Ahtisaari, Tom of Finland (actually Finnish, real name Touko Valio Laaksonen), Mika Häkkinen, Renny Harlin, Tove Jansson, Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, Sanna Marin, Kimi Räikkönen, Jean Sibelius, Ari Vatanen, heavy metallists Lordi… I’m not including Santa Claus. It also has one of the most free media ecosystems in the world. Things invented in Finland: the wireless electrocardiogram heart monitor, the graphical web browser, the sauna, video game Angry Birds, Nokia, ice skates, Linux. There’s a lot going on.

8. Another famous Finn (at least by birth) I could have added is George Gaynes, probably most famous as Commandant Eric Lassard in the Police Academy film franchise. He was born in 1917 in Helsinki, then capital of the Russian-controlled Grand Duchy of Finland to a Dutch businessman, Gerrit Jongejans, and a Russian artist of Finnish descent, Iya Grigorievna de Gay. His parents left Finland soon after and he was raised in France, England and Switzerland. Nevertheless, he must be one of the most famous actors with strong Finnish connections (although Matt Damon’s mother has Finnish antecedents, her family name having been changed from Pajari to Paige).

9. Have you ever wondered what the most deadly animal in Britain is? You are now, I guarantee. It’s hard to rank them exactly, but certainly the top three are dogs, cows and wasps. That said, we are dealing with very low numbers: in 2023, there were 16 deaths caused by dogs (an unusually high number), something like five or six caused by wasp sting-induced anaphylaxis and four or five caused by cows. Influenza kills maybe 25,000 of us a year, so, you know, perspective.

10. As we are talking about death, the oldest hospital in the United Kingdom which still carries out medical services on its original site is St Bartholomew’s Hospital in the City of London, now part of Barts Health NHS Trust. It was founded in 1123 as part of an Augustinian priory, by a priest and monk called Rahere, a favourite of Henry I. While on pilgrimage to Rome in the late 1110s or early 1120s, he fell ill, possibly with malaria, during which he had a vision of St Bartholomew, and he promised to found a hospital on his return to England if he was spared. The king granted him a parcel of land in Smithfield and he was as good as his word, the hospital soon gaining a reputation for its curative powers. The priory was suppressed in 1539, and though the hospital survived, its finances were for a while deeply precarious. In 1546, months before his death, Henry VIII refounded the hospital, vesting it “in the mayor, commonalty, and citizens of London, and their successors, for ever, in consideration of a payment by them of 500 marks a year towards its maintenance, and with it the nomination and appointment of all the officers”. It was threatened with closure under the recommendations of the Tomlinson Review of 1992, and lost its accident and emergency department in 1995, but remains an important teaching hospital. (For five years, the director of strategy for Barts Health NHS Trust was my old colleague from the House of Commons, Ralph Coulbeck, with whom I worked on the Health Committee in 2006. His eminence makes me feel old.)

I don’t dream at night, I dream at day, I dream all day; I’m dreaming for a living (Steven Spielberg)

1. “Chinook: Zulu Delta 576”: you could be forgiven for reaching saturation point with grim government cover-ups (covers-up?) which did untold damage to the lives of innocent people, but this two-part BBC documentary, the first episode of which aired on BBC2 on Friday, is fascinating and salutary. The basic story is this: on 2 June 1994, an RAF Chinook helicopter flying from Aldergrove to Inverness crashed in foggy conditions on the Mull of Kintyre. All 29 people on board were killed: four crewmen and 25 senior members of the intelligence community, from the Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Security Service (MI5). An initial board of inquiry was unable to establish the cause of the crash, though a review undertaken by Air Chief Marshal Sir William Wratten and Air Vice-Marshal John Day declared that pilot error had caused the accident. This was challenged by a fatal accident inquiry in 1996, a report of the House of Commons Defence Committee (1998) and of the Public Accounts Committee (2000). In 2001, the House of Lords set up a select committee to investigate the issue, which reported in 2002. Eventually, in 2011, then defence secretary, Liam Fox, announced that a review had exonerated the pilots, and he made a public apology. The whole thing is a tale of a bureaucracy the first instinct of which is to defend itself, no matter what the cost.

2. “M*A*S*H”: this week the great Donald Sutherland died at the age of 88. I am writing a tribute which will probably appear on CulturAll, but it made me contemplate the extraordinary length and range of his career. I don’t think he ever turned in a sub-par performance, but on balance probably his best leading role was in Robert Altman’s savagely dark 1970 satire which spawned a hit television series running from 1972 to 1983. If you have only ever seen the TV series, which is mildly charming in its own way, watch the film but expect to be stunned. Set in a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital (MASH) during the Korean War, it is, of course, about the Vietnam War, brilliantly illustrating the madness, incongruity, heroism, fear and selfishness of conflict. Sutherland is superb as Captain Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, a cardiothoracic surgeon who despises the hierarchy of military life and expresses his frustrations by drinking heavily and playing practical jokes. Sutherland is pitch-perfect as a man trying to do good in a world he hates and cannot fully understand, aware of the senselessness of the situation he is in. Outstanding.

3. “Ronin”: last night Channel 4 screened John Frankenheimer’s penultimate feature film from 1998, a star-studded, downbeat thriller starring Robert De Niro, Jean Reno and Stellan Skarsgård, with marvellous supporting turns from Natascha McElhone, Sean Bean, Jonathan Pryce and the great Michael Lonsdale. Let’s admit before we start that Pryce’s Irish accent is among the worst committed to film: astonishingly, both he and McElhone were provided with a dialect coach (and McElhone is half-Irish!). I maintain, though, that as a film it is superb: taut, dramatic, moody, bleak and featuring some of the best car chases since Bullitt and The French Connection. It’s also worth noting that Frankenheimer refused to shoot exchanges of gunfire in slow-motion, insisting that violence should be depicted in real time. The script by J.D. Zeik was developed by David Mamet, under the pseudonym Richard Weisz, and Robert Fraisse’s cinematography is visceral and compelling. The suitcase around which the plot revolves is also a perfect example of a MacGuffin, Angus MacPhail’s term for an object which is necessary to the story but in itself insignificant: we never find out what is in the case. For me is a brilliant film because it does everything it sets out to perfectly, stylishly and effortlessly. It has also gifted me a phrase I rely on probably too heavily, when Skarsgård’s Gregor reviews the situation and remarks wearily, “Look at us all. What could have been conducted in polite, collegial fashion is now fucked into cocked hat.”

4. “The Rest is Politics US: Why Biden is losing the Black and Hispanic vote”: I continue to enjoy this spin-off from The Rest is Politics, presented by the BBC’s special correspondent in the US Katty Kay and financier and entrepreneur Anthony Scaramucci. They have a cheerful, friendly, inclusive relationship, which seems to be founded on actually liking each other, and their analysis of US politics for an outsider is, I find, sharp and insightful. This week they looked at the way various ethnic groups in the United States behave in electoral terms, how it is increasingly unpredictable and decreasingly monolithic, and the factors we need to take into account when trying to understand the presidential campaign. The Mooch raises an important point which I’ve been gently advancing, that Donald Trump will not choose a vice-presidential candidate to attract a specific minority group: that would mean admitting a fault or a lack in himself, which is anathematical. An entertaining and information 45-minute round-up.

5. “1973: The Last Days of Porter”: a tiny but delightful snippet from the BBC archives, as Larry McCoubrey marks the end of porter as a staple of public houses in Northern Ireland. He pays tribute to the drink’s role in working-class and especially manufacturing culture and mourns its passing, though one can imagine that in 1973 in Belfast the availability of a beer was not uppermost in people’s minds: the previous year had been, and would remain, the bloodiest of the Troubles, with 480 people killed, and another 255 would lose their lives in 1973. But among horror and chaos we find small, significant pleasures. Tragically, McCoubrey himself died in 1974 of a brain haemorrhage, at the age of 38.

He asked, “What makes a man a writer?” “Well,” I said, “it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.” (Charles Bukowski)

1. “Diplomacy and Diamonds: My Wars from the Ballroom to the Battlefield”: Charlie Wilson’s War (2007) is both a rollicking roller-coaster of a film and an important chronicle of US foreign policy, drawing on real events. This is the autobiography of Joanne Herring, played in the film by Julia Roberts, whose life was not exactly as portrayed but was nevertheless absolutely extraordinary. It is patchwork of so many different elements that it seems like it cannot possibly be true, yet it is, and is all the more engaging for being told with an unusual combination of self-deprecation, humour and complete earnestness. Now 94, Herring was born into pre-war Houston society, enjoyed a career in television, became friends with General Zia-ul-Haq, president of Pakistan from 1978 to 1988, and became a lynchpin of anticommunist activism in US politics. However you look at it, she’s a remarkable woman.

2. “How a long, debt-loving bipartisan consensus has warped U.S. business”: a more than usually dyspeptic Washington Post column from George F. Will, prompted by Ruchir Sharma’s new book What Went Wrong With Capitalism. Will’s essential argument is that the United States has become addicted to debt, to “prolonged low interest rates, the ‘socialization of risk’ and the resulting misallocation of capital”. The government has come to see corporate bankruptcies as a disaster to be avoided at almost any cost, rather than an inevitable feature of the free market, and deploys taxpayer-funded grants to prevent them. This has created an economic ecosystem which is heavily dependent on government largesse and operating in “permanent crisis mode”. Whether you agree or not, it is striking that there have only been four years in which the federal government has run a surplus since 1970, and America’s debt to GDP ratio is now 123 per cent. (In the UK it is a relatively modest 98 per cent.) It is hard to see how this can be sustained over the long term.

3. “Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Businessman”: first published as a short story in The Saturday Evening Post in April 1916, this Robert Updegraff work is a superficially breezy tale of a man who goes into advertising and becomes enormously successful through the straightforward but rare ability to notice very obvious things: an early example is his advice to a hat company that in showing men wearing their hats as full-length illustrations, they are making the hat itself tiny and wasting space. Like, I suspect, many readers, I came to Obvious Adams through the recommendation of Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy UK: he recounts being given a copy early in his career and initially being rather offended that it was a frothy self-help parable “rather than… say, a subscription to McKinsey Quarterly”. But it led him to reassess data and the mistaken privileging of quantifiable information over anecdote, the fallacy which Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman described in Thinking, Fast and Slow as WYSIATI or “What you see is all there is”. It is a profoundly useful lesson in how to think differently and better, and you can read it in an hour. You won’t regret it.

4. “The Schools That Are No Longer Teaching Kids to Read Books”: with the caveat that I need to find out much more about this, a horrifying article in The Atlantic by novelist, screenwriter and columnist Xochitl Gonzalez, detailing a literacy programme called Into Reading which is being introduced two-third of school districts in New York City. This prescribes a single textbook for each grade, called myBook, using excerpts of longer narrative texts rather than individual books. Gonzalez argues this means “reading has been distilled to practicing for a comprehension exam”. The publisher of Into Reading, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, protests that it contains “multiple opportunities for kids to read full-length books at every grade level”. Gonzalez counters that “teachers, parents, and students say that, in practice, the curriculum doesn’t leave much time for such opportunities”. As I say, I am not an expert on literacy policy in New York City public schools, but there is certainly enough in this piece to dismay, depress and urge greater research.

5. “Can Nvidia stay at the heart of the new AI economy?”: this week’s Big Read in The Financial Times, by Tim Bradshaw and Michael Acton, tackles the sudden public prominence of tech giant Nvidia. It’s a timely piece: I won’t be the only person who’s been trying to work out if this is the sign of the world economy or a passing craze, and it has been intensified by the fact that many people think artificial intelligence will be central to our future economic and societal development but know very little about it or what Nvidia does. Undoubtedly the company’s market value, at over $3 trillion, is almost impossible to absorb, but there is little agreement on where it goes from here. It impinges more obviously on some of my areas of interest because Nvidia’s founder, Jensen Huang, is Taiwanese, and Taiwan produces a huge proportion of the world’s microchips. This raises the stakes of China’s territorial designs on its small neighbour vastly. A helpful, calm, balanced analysis.

“The French have a phrase for it…”

… as Raymond Chandler observed. “The bastards have a phrase for everything and they are always right. To say goodbye is to die a little.” Au revoir.