Bunting today for actor, producer, director and marijuana enthusiast Tommy Chong (88), legendary folk and rock musician and songwriter Bob Dylan (85), singer-songwriter and “Godmother of Soul” Patti LaBelle (82), former Conservative MP and minister, businessman and extremely decent cove Steve Norris (81), ex-Conservative MP and House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee Chair Sir Richard Ottaway (81), actress, businesswoman and famous widow Priscilla Presley (81), singer-songwriter, producer and ubiquitous session guitarist Waddy Wachtel (79), renowned character actor Jim Broadbent (77), cinematographer Sir Roger Deakins (77), occasionally hangdog actor Alfred Molina (73), singer-songwriter, guitarist and country music dynast Rosanne Cash (71), former Conservative MP and Attorney General for England and Wales Dominic Grieve (70), Dire Straits keyboard player Guy Fletcher (66), luminous and iconic actress Dame Kristin Scott Thomas (66), novelist and screenwriter Michael Chabon (63), world champion middle- and long-distance runner Elizabeth Nuttall (formerly McColgan) (62), Olympic gold medal-winning swimmer Adrian Moorhouse (62), rubber-faced character actor John C. Reilly (61), footballer, actor, philosopher and epigrammatist Eric Cantona (60), former Conservative MP and Cabinet minister Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg (57) and racing driver Andrew Jordan (37).
The bunting has long come down for Bishop of Salisbury and Anglican theologian Dr John Jewel (1522), one-time Covenanter, convert to royalism and stalwart of Restoration Scotland the Duke of Lauderdale (1616), physicist, inventor and temperature guy Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit (1686), political theorist, revolutionary, unlikely temporary resident of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and regretful bath enthusiast Jean-Paul Marat (1743), rabbi, scholar and founding father of Reform Judaism Abraham Geiger (1810), Queen Victoria, Empress of India (1819), former Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa and Rector of the University of St Andrews Field Marshal Jan Smuts (1870), peanut butter pioneer H.B. Reese (1879), New York publishing magnate Samuel Irving Newhouse Sr (1895), barrister, author, former prisoner of war and President of the Colditz Association Lord Campbell of Alloway (1917), actor, comedian, impressionist and Parliamo Glasgow creator Stanley Baxter (1926), poet and essayist Joseph Brodsky (1940), former Labour minister, historian and biographer Baroness Hollis of Heigham (1941), World Rally Champion, master of four-wheel-drive and Audi hero Hannu Mikkola (1941) and actor, dancer and choreographer Gene Anthony Ray (1962).
First we take Manhattan…
Peter Minuit was born between 1580 and 1585 in the Hanseatic city of Wesel in north-western Germany, but by descent he was part of Wesel’s Walloon community. His Calvinist family had fled Tournai, an ancient city on the River Scheldt, because of religious persecution conducted by the Habsburg authorities in the Spanish Netherlands. He became a diamond cutter and broker, probably assisted by his marriage in 1613 to Gertrude Raedts, who came from a wealthy female in Kleve, but by the 1620s Wesel was facing economic stagnation and decline.
Around 1625, Minuit and his wife Gertrude left Wesel, Gertrude initially returning to her parents in Kleve while Minuit moved to Holland to join the Dutch West India Company. This had been founded in 1621 to control the trading monopoly for Dutch merchants in the Caribbean and was given jurisdiction over Dutch participation in the Atlantic slave trade, Brazil, the Caribbean and North America. In 1625, Minuit was sent to the colony of New Netherland to look for tradable goods other than fur pelts; New Netherland had first been established in 1614 on the eastern coast of America, and the first settlement was at Fort Nassau, a small trading post and defensive stockade on Castle Island in the North River (today the Port of Albany in the Hudson River).
It had proved difficult to establish lasting settlements. Fort Nassau was flooded and abandoned in 1618, but in 1624 New Netherland was designated as a province of the Dutch Republic. Its northern border was set at the 42nd parallel north, to accommodate England’s claim to Cape Cod, and it contained three main rivers: the North River (Noort Rivier, now the Hudson); the South River (Zuyd Rivier, today the Delaware); and the Fresh River (Versche Rivier, now the Connecticut). Willem Verhulst, the second Director of New Netherland, began construction of Fort Wilhelmus on the Delaware River and Fort Amsterdam on a promontory where today’s Hudson and East Rivers converge.
Although Minuit had only recently returned from New Netherland, he was sent back in 1626 to take over as Director from the unpopular Verhulst. He arrived in the colony on 4 May, and took some early decisions which would prove to be momentous. The original plan had been to site the capital of New Netherland on the South River, as it seemed on first examination to have the most attractive climate. But longer experience demonstrated that the area was malarial in summer and the waterways froze in winter, and Minuit decided instead that the promontory on which Fort Amsterdam was being built would be a better capital.
It was the policy of the Dutch West India Company at the time that as far as possible territory should be bought from the native tribes rather than confiscated. Accordingly, Minuit negotiated the purchase of the island on which Fort Amsterdam was situated. According to a letter from Pieter Janszoon Schagen, the representative of the States General in the West India Company’s Assembly of the Nineteen, its board of directors, to his masters:
They have purchased the Island Manhattes from the Indians for the value of 60 guilders. It is 11,000 morgens in size [about 22,000 acres].
The sum of 60 guilders was a bargain: Minuit had acquired Manhattan Island for the equivalent of around $1,600 today. The apparently absurd low price was due to the fact that the natives did not share the European conception of land ownership and property, believing that water, air and land could not be traded. The goods they received from Minuit may therefore have seemed very welcome; on the other hand, the Dutch now believed—and had the means to enforce the idea—that they had full property rights over Manhattan, which was named New Amsterdam. It is now home to 1.66 million people and has a gross domestic product of $1 trillion.
The company of saints
Today is the feast of SS Donatian and Rogatian (d AD 290), sons of the chief magistrate of Nantes, who were denounced as Christians, arrested, tortured after refusing to offer sacrifices to the pagan gods then pierced by the spear of a lictor and beheaded outside the city walls; of St Vincent of Lérins (d AD 445), born to a noble family in Toulouse, who may have spent some time as a soldier before becoming a monk at the Cistercian Abbey of Lérins, off the coast from Cannes, and wrote the Commonitorium summing up the doctrinal decisions of the Council of Ephesus; and of St Simeon Stylites the Younger (AD 521-AD 596), born in Antioch and drawn from a young age to a life of extreme austerity, who spent 68 years of his life living on top of pillars, reading and copying Holy Scripture and offering communion to those prepared to climb a ladder to receive it.
For those who adhere to Methodism, today is Wesley Day (also known as Aldersgate Day), commemorating the day in 1738 on which the Revd John Wesley attended a meeting of the Fetter Lane Society at the Moravian meeting house on Aldersgate Street and felt assurance of his new birth, beginning his spiritual journey towards what became the Methodist movement.
Factoids
Berengaria of Navarre, Queen of England by her marriage to Richard I from 1191 to 1199, never visited England while she was queen consort. She initially accompanied the King on crusade, and was crowned in the Chapel of St George at Limassol in Cyprus, then spent the rest of his reign at Beaufort-en-Vallée in Anjou. She may have visited England after Richard’s death (she lived until 1230) but there is no irrefutable evidence.
The capital of Wales is Cardiff. Right? True enough, but it only became the capital in living memory. Cardiff only became the most populous settlement in Wales by the time of the 1881 census, outgrowing Swansea and Merthyr Tydfil, and was not granted city status until 28 October 1905, when Edward VII issued Letters Patent making “the County Borough of Cardiff” into “the City of Cardiff” and its chief magistrate the Lord Mayor. Over the centuries, Wales’s seat of government had been Abergwyngregyn, Strata Florida Abbey, Machynlleth and Ludlow, and the ecclesiastical capital was St David’s. In the first half of the 20th century there was growing pressure for Wales to have a formally designated capital city: asked about the matter on the House of Commons in 1950, Prime Minister Clement Attlee said that he agreed with the Lord Mayor of Cardiff that it should be a “domestic matter”. In 1951, the Conservative government of Winston Churchill gave the Home Secretary the additional title of “Minister of Welsh Affairs”; in that capacity, Gwilym Lloyd George told the House of Commons in December 1955 that the government accepted the view of the Association of Welsh Local Authorities that Cardiff should be the capital and was prepared to recognise it as such. He added that “no formal measures are necessary to give effect to this decision”, and that remains the case. The Welsh Office, established in 1964, was based in Cardiff, as is the Senedd, formerly the National Assembly for Wales.
Proceedings in both Houses of Parliament are recorded almost (but not quite) verbatim by the Official Report, more commonly known as Hansard. It bears the name of Thomas Curson Hansard, who in 1811 bought out William Cobbett; summaries of debates were being published as supplements to Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, but Hansard saw a greater opportunity. Formerly a private enterprise, it was taken over by the parliamentary authorities according to the recommendations of the Select Committee on Parliamentary Publications in 1909, and since then has been a full record in the first person of all speeches. But Hansard’s origins lie in a desire to control as much as to publicise: in the late 1620s, news merchants began selling unofficial accounts of debates and proceedings in Parliament. In April 1628, the Committee of Privileges considered “A Book in Print, concerning some Proceedings in Parliament”, there being an argument that to record what was said in Parliament was a breach of privilege. In January 1711, a French Huguenot, Abel Boyer, began publishing a monthly periodical called The Political State of Great Britain, which included reports on debates in Parliament, and other publications soon followed. On 13 April 1738, at the instigation of the Prime Minister, Sir Robert Walpole, the House of Commons passed a Resolution “That it is a high indignity to, and a notorious breach of the privilege of, this House for any news-writer in letters or other papers… to give therein any account of the doings or other proceedings of this House, or any Committee thereof, as well during the recess as the sitting of Parliament, and this House will proceed with the utmost severity against such offenders”. This ceased to be enforced after 1771 as the House gave up an unequal struggle.
Yesterday was the anniversary of the birth in 1795 of architect Sir Charles Barry. He is most famous for designing the Palace of Westminster after the catastrophic fire of 16 October 1834 which left only Westminster Hall, the Chapel of St Mary Undercroft and the cloister of St Stephen’s Chapel (itself destroyed). The Royal Commission appointed in 1835 to oversee the rebuilding of Parliament stipulated that the new building should be either Elizabethan or perpendicular Gothic in style, as a distinctively English, conservative form, which would also fit alongside the 16th century Lady Chapel of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey and, up to a point, Westminster Hall; the popular neo-classical style was associated by many with republicanism and radicalism. The Royal Commission received 97 entries for the project, each identified not with a name but only a pseudonymous symbol, and selected a shortlistof four, then agreed without question on Barry’s design. The symbol he had used was a portcullis, which became the emblem of Parliament.
Barry had designed a number of buildings in the perpendicular Gothic style so was very comfortable and familiar with the style, but he was not a prisoner of it. Although only one public building was constructed from his pen in the Greek Revival style, the Royal Manchester Institution, he designed and remodelled a number of prominent buildings in the Italianate style, including the Travellers’ Club, the Manchester Athenaeum, the Reform Club, Trentham Hall, Cliveden and Halifax Town Hall.
Have you ever wondered who owns Stonehenge? As you might assume, it belongs to the Crown Estate and is managed by English Heritage, but was only gifted to the nation in 1918. From 1540 it had passed through the ownership of the Earl of Hertford and the families of Lord Carleton and the Marquess of Queensberry before being purchased by the Antrobus family of Cheshire in 1824. In 1915, Sir Cosmo Gordon Antrobus, having just inherited the baronetcy and the family estate from his brother, put various pieces of land up for sale at auction, including Stonehenge. In Salisbury on 21 September, Lot 15, “Stonehenge with about 30 acres, 2 rods, 37 perches of adjoining downland”, was purchased by Cecil Chubb, a wealthy local barrister, for £6,600 (about £537,000 today). He had not intended to do so—his wife had sent him to the auction to buy some dining chairs—but bought the site on a whim, believing it should go to a local Salisbury man. He then gifted it to the nation on 26 October 1918.
The most senior serving female officer in the Royal Air Force is Air Marshal Suraya Marshall, Deputy Commander of Cyber and Specialist Operations Command. She is married to Air Marshal Allan Marshall, Air and Space Commander, who is responsible for air operations within the RAF and oversees No 1 Group, No 2 Group, No 11 Group (including No 83 Expeditionary Air Group), No 22 Group and United Kingdom Space Command. Collectively, therefore, they are the Air Marshals Marshall.
The first woman to be promoted to Air Marshal and to hold a three-star rank in the RAF or any other service was Air Marshal Dame Sue Gray, promoted on 20 February 2019. She served as Director General of the Defence Safety Authority from March 2019 until her retirement in May 2022.
The most senior woman in the armed forces, and the most senior ranking female officer in British history, is General Dame Sharon Nesmith, Vice-Chief of the Defence Staff. She is the only woman to hold a four-star rank in any service.
“I’d like to have money. And I’d like to be a good writer. These two can come together, and I hope they will, but if that’s too adorable, I’d rather have money.” (Dorothy Parker)
“How bad are today’s politicians really?”: in his Wallenstein’s Camp Substack, Stephen Webb wonders whether, as is commonly believed, we are living in an age of particularly lightweight, rootless and inept political leaders, and, perhaps more provocatively, whether a Lincoln-esque “team of rivals” would appreciably improve the governance of Britain. He points to the very high calibre of many individual members of Harold Wilson’s 1974-76 Cabinet, which failed to get to grips with the country’s economic woes, compared to, for example, the more modest abilities of many of Clement Attlee’s colleagues in the 1945-51 Labour government which nonetheless transformed Britain. There are always intellectually first-rate minds which aren’t suited to running a Whitehall department—Sir Keith Joseph, William Waldegrave—and highly effective ministerial chiefs who would not be regarded as scholars or thinkers—Ernest Bevin, Michael Heseltine. I think Webb’s fundamental point is that brilliant minds might be desirable but they are not enough: “the most important thing is a vision and a plan; then the people to execute against it, and then the technology at hand”. Very occasionally, all of the qualities will coincide: think of the William Gladstone, the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, early-stage H.H. Asquith, Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary but not as Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan (I would argue), Harold Wilson. But one cannot rely on that, nor, importantly, can it be predicted. In the 1960s, if there had been a formula for a successful Prime Minister, its ingredients would probably have included most aspects of Edward Heath’s character, and his premiership was a disaster. By contrast, Clement Attlee turned Tacitus’s assessment of Galba on its head so that it read “incapax imperii nisi imperasset”. Much food for thought.
“What does it say about Britain that the Palace of Westminster is crumbling?”: in The Spectator, David Honigmann reviews Jan-Werner Müller’s Street, Palace, Square: The Architecture of Democratic Spaces. I should say here that I haven’t read the book; judging by the review, it is potentially interesting but runs the risk of navel-gazing theorisation to which scholars of politics as a stand-alone discipline—even worse, a “social science”—can be prone. I include it here because of the (provocative?) question in the headline, to which I can give you answers which cover a majority of the rationale and require no deep contemplation of metaphor or life imitating art. The Palace of Westminster is crumbling because: decisions have been delayed; once made, they have been revised or reversed; the inevitable costs are extremely high; many politicians are unwilling to take publicly recorded responsibility for authorising such a vast project; plans have been gold-plated ludicrously, allowing the good and the best, the required and the desirable, to be mixed together in a multi-billion-pound cocktail; some politicians have pushed for pet projects or particular enthusiasms to be included or accommodated; and the timescale is such that some Members of Parliament could spend their whole parliamentary careers not sitting in or using the iconic Palace of Westminster and regard that as undesirable. Those are some of the reasons.
“The Golden Fleet on Paper”: on the Foreign Policy Research Institute’s Behind the Front Substack, Dr Emma Salisbury, one of the clearest and most authoritative commentators on maritime conflict, examines the new United States Navy Shipbuilding Plan and tries to assess it fairly and in the round. She welcomes its accurate and clearly articulated diagnosis of the problems facing the US Navy and some of the sound responses to the rapidly shifting challenges of modern naval combat, particularly the so-called “hedge strategy” set out by Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Daryl Caudle. This approach “pairs high-end, multi-mission platforms with modular, attritable, lower-cost systems capable of being produced at volume”. But the plan also contains politically driven elements which are inconsistent with its overall tenor, like the Trump-class battleships, and the recurring failure of “the US Navy’s willingness to pick a design and leave it alone long enough for a shipyard to actually build it”. The plan is by no means wholly bad, but it has tensions within it and will require great discipline to implement. Whether you think that is a likely scenario is a matter of opinion, but I am deeply sceptical.
“Cultural amnesia explains our fury at the past”: in what I believe is his debut in The Spectator, the always-engaging Dr Ioannes Chountis de Fabbri reflects on a visit to Newcastle-upon-Tyne where he saw the towering Grey’s Monument, build to commemorate the Whig Prime Minister Charles, 2nd Earl Grey, during whose premiership the Great Reform Act (the Representation of the People Act 1832) was passed; and, in the cathedral, a memorial to the phlegmatic, cool-headed Vice-Admiral Lord Collingwood, Nelson’s second-in-command at the Battle of Trafalgar and, like me, an Old Novocastrian. (Collingwood was the ideal foil to Nelson, as I tried to reflect when I marked Trafalgar Day for City A.M. last year.) Ioannes makes the point, not only of Newcastle but of Glasgow, Preston, Bristol, Manchester, Oxford, Halifax and London itself, that he have gradually forgotten the meaning and stories behind these monuments, in an act of what he calls “collective amnesia”. When we are confronted with the past now, too many of us look at it as a morality play, through a lens of grievance, which “treats the past as a courtroom, and a courtroom requires a verdict that closes the case”. Hence “Rhodes Must Fall”, the tossing of the statue of Edward Colston into Bristol Harbour and the removal of William Gladstone’s name from a hall of residence in Liverpool. I agree with much of this thesis, that we now want history to conform to contemporary norms or else be judged deficient, and that makes a nonsense of history as a discipline. This was part of the argument I was making recently when I looked at the way Tudor Protestantism is anachronistically and incorrectly understood. Our past shapes the present whether we like it or not. Where we have a choice is in making the effort to understand it or not.
“Withnail’s Coat & I”: if you’ve never seen Withnail & I, Bruce Robinson’s 1987 hilarious, scabrous, haunting and profoundly affecting tale of two out-of-work actors contemplating their lives as the 1960s draw to a close, you should. Tonight. Now, maybe. In any event, this article from the On The Row Substack by Adam Scovell is a fascinating—yes, admittedly niche—examination of Withnail’s iconic tweed coat, how it came to be, how Richard E. Grant as Withnail wore it and what became of it, or rather them, after the film. Absorbing.
“For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face”
“Face to Face: Evelyn Waugh”: on 26 June 1960, the novelist Evelyn Waugh—astonishingly, he is only 56 here—appeared on the BBC’s ground-breaking Face to Face interview programme. The idea was simple: a public figure would talk for half an hour to the almost-unseen interviewer, former Labour MP and minister John Freeman. He had stepped down from Parliament in 1955 and been employed by the BBC on Panorama, and Hugh Burnett, who devised and produced the series, which ran to 35 episodes between 1959 and 1962, was drawn to Freeman’s ability to ask probing, insightful and often personal questions while remaining courteous and respectful. Waugh was two-thirds of the way through his Sword of Honour trilogy, Men at Arms having been published in 1952 and Officers and Gentlemen in 1955, and his most recent novel had been 1957’s The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold. The year before his encounter with Freeman, he had published The Life of Right Reverend Ronald Knox, a biography of his old friend and spiritual mentor. There is little sense that Waugh is enjoying the encounter, and Freeman’s deft questioning is a model from which many could still learn, yet at the same time there is no suggestion that the author, whose vibrant tweeds and puce complexion almost burn through the black-and-white film, is going to have a tantrum or demand the interview be halted, as so many modern celebrities would. The lasting impression of Waugh is not of a nice or pleasant or charitable man— he once told Nancy Mitford that he would be even more horrible if he were not a Christian—but of a complicated, imaginative, erudite intellectual with a great deal of darkness in him. He may have cultivated and exaggerated it as part of his persona, and it is a useful reminder that artists do not exist to be liked. However unpleasant he was, Waugh remains one of the very best English prose stylists of the 20th century.
“Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr: The Question of South Africa”: Firing Line ran for more than 30 years under the lofty supervision William F. Buckley, from April 1966 to December 1999, for most of its life being broadcast on PBS. It was uncompromisingly focused and high-minded, opening with the Third Movement of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F Major and running for a full hour except for the period from 1988 to 1999 when it was reduced to 30 minutes. It was, like Face to Face, a very simple format: Buckley would twist and contort in his chair while questioning and sometimes challenging a galaxy of guests, from mainstream political heavyweights like Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and Henry Kissinger through prominent intellectuals including J.K. Galbraith (with whom Buckley sparred with especial vigour), Friedrich Hayek and Thomas Sowell to some more offbeat subjects like Hugh Hefner, Groucho Marx and Truman Capote. On 13 March 1974 in Johannesburg, Buckley interviewed the Prime Minister of South Africa, John Vorster, who had succeeded the murdered Hendrik Verwoerd in 1966. Vorster was seen as a more humane figure than his predecessor but was no less vigorous in his implementation of apartheid and no less uncompromising in his defence of South Africa’s political stances. The encounter took place in the run-up to a general election on 24 April in which, as Buckley noted drily, Vorster’s National Party was expected to be confirmed in office (it was in power from 1948 to 1994). Buckley, although a conservative through and through and in the 1950s and early 1960s willing to defend not only segregation in the United States but apartheid in South Africa, changed his views substantially from the late 1960s onwards; and there is a kind of distaste and impatience with the South African premier visible from time to time. Vorster, by the same token, though no fool, bore all the intellectual constraints and limitations of a racist ideologue and did not cut a particularly impressive figure. But it is grimly fascinating to watch a world leader put the case for a system of racial segregation in the necessity and desirability of which he seems honestly to believe.
“Borges: South America’s Titan”: another edition of Firing Line, for which I make no apology at all, this time a 1 February 1977 interview by Bill Buckley with the Argentinian short-story writer, essayist, poet and translator Jorge Luis Borges. The writer was 77 at this point and had been completely blind since the age of 55, and had only four years before stepped down as Director of the National Library of Argentina. What dazzles is his combination of erudition, imagination, good humour and bone-deep love of language, not just his native tongue of Spanish but language as a device for communicating. His rhapsody for the flexibility and depth of English, as “both a Germanic and a Latin language, those two registers”, is joyful: he highlights the difference in precise meaning between “regal” and “kingly”, between “fraternal” and “brotherly” and between “dark” and “obscure”, and argues that the distinction, fine but important, cannot be expressed in Spanish. A satisfyingly knotty meditation on literature and language.
“Good Afternoon with Mavis Nicholson: Diana Mosley”: on 31 March 1977, on Thames TV’s Good Afternoon, broadcaster Mavis Nicholson interviewed the 66-year-old Lady Mosley (née Diana Mitford), wife of former British Union of Fascists leader Sir Oswald Mosley. The couple had known the most senior figures of the Third Reich in the years before the Second World War—they married at the Berlin home of Joseph Goebbels, with Adolf Hitler as guest of honour—and were interned from 1940 to 1943 under Defence Regulation 18B as potential Nazi sympathisers. Diana Mosley always spoke in guarded terms about her relationship with Hitler and the German leadership: although she sought to provide some distance between herself and the worst horrors of Nazism, stressing that her close association with Hitler had been before the Holocaust and suggesting that the Führer had not been central to the genocide, she was nonetheless unrepentant about many of her extreme right-wing views and certainly evinced a fundamental antisemitism on a number of occasions. It is that lack of contrition, combined with an aristocratic hauteur and confidence, which is so strikingly horrifying in her interview with Nicholson. Particularly chilling is the unapologetic way in which she describes Hitler as “fascinating” and “charming”, clearly quite prepared to overlook whatever role she believed he had played in Nazism’s crimes. The Security Service, which monitored both Sir Oswald and Lady Mosley during their wartime internment, believed that Diana was cleverer and more dangerous than her slightly absurd husband, and you can see why. There is a steel, a poise and a sheer blank-eyed coldness about her which you can imagine being bent to whatever purpose she chose. Diana, Lady Mosley, died in Paris in August 2003, at the age of 93: in an obituary in The Daily Telegraph, the historian Andrew Roberts described her as an “unrepentant Nazi” and a woman who “took her disgusting, unchanged views to her grave”.
“Saddam Hussein’s purge”: on 16 July 1979, the 42-year-old Saddam Hussein became President of the Iraqi Republic, having forced Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, whose Vice-President he had been since 1968, into retirement. He had been both effective and brutal as Vice-President, nationalising the Iraq Petroleum Company, diversifying the country’s economy, introducing free healthcare and education and expanding women’s rights; but he had also overseen the defeat of Kurdish insurgents in northern Iraq and sanctioned repressive measures and mas deportations in the aftermath of the conflict. Saddam had grown up in an atmosphere of violence and murder and had dropped out of law school at the age of 20 to join the Iraqi branch of the Ba’ath Party, which combined Arab nationalism, socialism, republicanism and anti-imperialism. After the 1958 coup which overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq, he spent a period in exile but returned in 1963, was imprisoned for two years but then became Deputy Secretary of the Ba’ath Party Regional Command in 1966, proving a brilliant organiser; he became Deputy Chairman of the Ba’athist Revolutionary Command Council and then Vice-President of the Iraqi Republic. By the 1970s, he was the power behind al-Bakr’s throne, working as an effective executive minister, securing a loyal power base within the party and cultivating an image internationally. In 1976, he was appointed a general in the Iraqi Army and secured his position as the strongman of the régime with the support of the armed forces and the security services. Assuming the presidency in 1979 was a formality but it was the last piece of the jigsaw—almost. Six days after he became President, on 22 July 1979, he convened a conference of senior Ba’athist leaders at the Al-Khuld Hall in Baghdad. Dressed in a well-cut suit and smoking a cigar, Saddam told his assembled colleagues that he had uncovered a Syrian-backed faction within the party which was seeking to overthrow him and the régime. This was “confirmed” by the alleged confession of Muhyi Abdul-Hussein Mashhadi, secretary to President al-Bakr. Saddam, a charismatic and intimidating showman, had the meeting filmed, and the clips from it are a chilling study in the careful and meticulous application of terror as a method of control. Names of other conspirators were read out, 68 in all, and the men were taken from the auditorium by guards, being tried shortly afterwards; 21 were executed and another sentenced to death in absentia, 33 were sentenced to prison and 13 released. Some were given weapons and ordered to kill their co-conspirators. Watching the purge unfolding is deeply uncomfortable, but there is no question that Saddam gives a brilliant and terrifying performance, mixing steely resolve with apparent emotion, keeping his voice level and calm and demonstrating to everyone in the hall that his presidency will deal swiftly and savagely with any who are less than absolutely loyal. He was off to the races.
Jukebox jury: from this week’s YouTube listening habits
“Out Here On My Own”, Irene Cara
“You Came”, Kim Wilde
“Pictures of You”, The Cure
“Welcome to the Cheap Seats”, The Wonder Stuff
“Jolene”, Mindy Smith ft Dolly Parton
Þæt is nū hraðost to seċġenne…
… as Alfred the Great supposedly said on his death bed, þæt iċ wilnode weorðfullīċe to libbenne þā hwīle þe iċ lifde, and æfter mīnum līfe þām mannum tō lǣfanne þe æfter mē wǣren mīn ġemynd on gōdum weorcum.
(“That is now the quickest to say, that I desired to live worthily while I lived, and after my life to leave to the men who come after me my memory in good works,” from the King’s own translation of The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius.)
(Jan-Werner Muller's book isn't dryly theoretical, and I owe him an apology if I have made it sound as if it is: although he doesn't specifically say much about the Palace of Westminster the terms in which he frames his argument do point to a lot of the causes you mention. I suspect, though, that you may not admire the Scottish Parliament building as much as he does.)