Sunday round-up 27 April 2025

Today in 1992 Betty Boothroyd was elected Speaker of the House of Commons, and Michael Fish, Anna Chancellor and the King of the Netherlands all celebrate birthdays

Hope no-one’s gluten-intolerant because there’s cake aplenty today for former Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of All Ireland Lord Eames (89), former Archbishop of Kraków and papal adviser Stanisław Cardinal Dziwisz (86), Le Mans 24 Hours winner and Red Bull Racing adviser Dr Helmut Marko (82), legendary meteorologist Michael Fish (81), pioneering folk and country musician Herb Pedersen (81), security consultant, author and criminal Frank Abagnale Jr (77), singer-songwriter, bassist and B-52s founder Kate Pierson (77), World Rally Champion and former Member of the European Parliament Ari Vatanen (73), former Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt (70), singer, actress and (like my late mother) Bellshill native Sheena Easton (66), former Conservative MP, minister and Second Church Estates Commissioner Andrew Selous (63), Queer as Folk and Doctor Who legend Russell T. Davies (62), actress, scion of aristocracy and forever “Duckface” Anna Chancellor (60), His Majesty King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands (58), marathon orator Senator Cory Booker of New Jersey (56), ballerina and television star Dame Darcey Bussell (56), versatile Academy Award-nominated actress Sally Hawkins (49), actress and Doctor Who companion Jenna Coleman (39) and singer, rapper, flautist and (allegedly) possessor of ‘a bit of a temper’ Lizzo (37).

Apologies have been submitted in behalf of former Quaestor and Praetor and Caesar-stabbing assassin of Decimus Junius Brutus Albinus (81 BC), Mughal empress and Taj Mahal inspirer Mumtaz Mahal (1593), philosopher, writer and proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759), code inventor Samuel Morse (1791), Civil War general, two-time President of the United States and more-than-occasional drink-taker Ulysses S. Grant (1822), composer, conductor and pianist Sergei Prokofiev (1891), Serbian royalist, Chetnik leader and possibly less-than-model citizen Draža Mihailović (1893), inventor of nylon Dr Wallace Carothers (1896), Anglo-Irish Poet Laureate and famous father Cecil Day-Lewis (1904), poet, translator and first Scots Makar Edwin Morgan (1920), Quincy, M.E. star Jack Klugman (1922), author, activist and famous spouse Coretta Scott King (1927), prolific actress Anouk Aimée (1932), South African foreign minister Pik Botha (1932), disc jockey, actor, presenter and Shaggy-from-Scooby-Doo’s voice Casey Kasem (1932), former Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Lord Imbert (1933), actress and comedian Judy Carne (1939) and Badfinger lead vocalist and writer of Without You Pete Ham (1947).

Curse the Duma! It’s all Witte’s fault

On this day in 1906, the State Duma of the Russian Empire met for the first time after the legislative elections of March and April. There had never been a Russian parliament before, or any kind of representative government, and the Tsar was an absolute monarch in the fullest sense. The first codification of the imperial powers had been in 1832, a committee chaired by Mikhail Speransky, head of the Second Section of the Chancellery, compiling 35,993 enactments into The Full Collection of Laws. From this came The Digest of Laws of the Russian Empire, which confirmed the nature of the Tsar’s authority: he could alter or repeal any laws at will, and was constrained only by two stipulations, that he and his spouse must profess Russian Orthodox Christianity, and that they must observe the laws of succession set out by Tsar Paul I (1796-1801), which essentially mandated primogeniture, limited the succession rights of female members of the imperial family, and removed the right of reigning tsars to designate their chosen successors. Otherwise, the Tsar’s powers were unfettered.

(Without being critical or smug, it is worth noting that, just as Speransky’s committee was concluding its work, the United Kingdom Parliament was passing the Representation of the People Act 1832, otherwise known as the Great Reform Act.)

By the beginning of the 20th century, there was growing unrest in Russia and increasingly radical political ideas were in the ether. In 1881, Tsar Alexander II had been assassinated by revolutionary socialists who had thrown bombs at his carriage in St Petersburg. Russia’s humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05 had seen revolution break out in January 1905, and unrest continued in waves, culminating in the famous mutiny on the battleship Potemkin in the Black Sea in June. By October, there was a general strike in St Petersburg and the Tsar and his advisers were starting to wonder if they were facing an existential threat to the monarchy.

Tsar Nicholas II, a weak man cursed with autocratic powers, wanted his cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas, a highly respected military leader, to form a military dictatorship to control the revolution; meanwhile, the Chairman of the Committee of Ministers, Count Sergei Witte, proposed a number of reforms which, he hoped, would satisfy those agitating against the régime. The Tsar was fundamentally opposed to any compromise, believing his autocratic rule was benevolent, effective and sanctified, and was only persuaded to follow Witte’s advice when the Grand Duke threatened to shoot himself in the head if the Tsar refused.

The result was The Manifesto on the Improvement of the State Order, known as the October Manifesto, issued in the Tsar’s name on 30 October 1905. It promised an elected parliament, the State Duma, without the approval of which laws could not come into effect, and the granting of fundamental civil freedoms “including real personal inviolability, freedom of conscience, speech, assembly and association”. These seem mild enough from a Western European perspective, but they carried at least the spirit of an enormous change from Russia’s traditional government.

In the short term, the October Manifesto worked, and the unrest came to an end almost immediately. While elections for the first Duma were underway, the Tsar promulgated a new constitution, The Fundamental Laws of the Russian Empire, which, on closer inspection, was relatively weak in terms of creating a more democratic and accountable government. The Tsar retained “supreme sovereign power”, and obedience to him was mandated by God; he had an absolute veto on any legislation proposed by the Duma, and sole initiative to propose any changes to the constitution; he had control over foreign affairs and treaties, possessed sole power to declare war and retained supreme command of the armed forces. The Tsar was also to appoint and dismiss ministers at will and decide their allocation of responsibilities.

There were two legislative chambers, the State Duma, elected for five years by popular franchise, and the State Council, of the membership of which the Tsar could appoint half. Both chambers had equal legislative power, and the Tsar could dissolve either or both at his own discretion. Ministers were not appointed by nor were they responsible to the Duma, and it was prohibited from interfering in the budget of the armed forces.

If it was not much of a parliament by Western standards, it was still an elected legislature, the like of which Russia had never possessed. The election enfranchised men over the age of 25, voting in six electoral colleges: landowners, city-dwellers, peasants, workers, Cossacks, and non-Slavic people. These were not evenly balanced, and there was a deputy for every 2,000 landowning electors, compared to every 90,000 workers. There were 497 elected members, and while the records are incomplete, there were 184 from the Constitutional Democratic Party (“Kadets”), 85 Trudoviks, who were democratic socialists, and 38 Octobrists, broadly right-wing anti-revolutionaries who supported a constitutional monarchy. Most of the radical left parties, like the Party of Socialist-Revolutionaries and the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, boycotted the elections.

The State Duma elected Sergei Andreevich Muromtsev, an aristocratic professor of Roman law at Imperial Moscow University, as its first Chairman. He had been one of the founding members of the Kadets, and approached his role as presiding officer with strict, meticulous professionalism, trying to maintain the Duma’s standing as a dignified and respectable part of the constitutional settlement.

The new body was eager to press on with further reform, particularly in terms of the electoral franchise and land tenure. Meanwhile the Tsar and his ministers saw the Duma as an annoyance at best and a grave threat at worst. Witte, who had become Chairman of the Council of Ministers and effective prime minister of Russia, regarded the new constitution and the creation of the State Duma as a reformist success but had poisoned his relations with the Tsar and the imperial court. He resigned shortly before the Duma assembled and was replaced by Ivan Goremykin, a conservative who encouraged Nicholas II in his view that he had suffered a moment of weakness in agreeing to the October Manifesto. But Goremykin was also a lightweight in political terms, dull and ineffective, and he lasted 77 days as Chairman of the Council of Ministers before being eased out in favour of the young Minister of the Interior, Pyotr Stolypin, a monarchist who believed that agrarian reform and modernisation, accompanied by greater prosperity, would assuage general desires for constitutional reform.

The Tsar has had quite enough of the Duma too. The same say that Stolypin was appointed Chairman of the Council of Ministers, in July 1905, Nicholas II dissolved the Duma, complaining “Curse the Duma! It’s all Witte’s fault!”

There would be three more attempts at a legislative assembly. The Second Duma sat from February to June 1907, the Third Duma from November 1907 to June 1912 and the Fourth Duma from November 1912 to October 1917. But these reforms were moving too slowly, and the appetite was building for more drastic changes, which would burst on to the scene when Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized power in the October Revolution in 1917.

Call me “Madam”!

Today in 1992, Betty Boothroyd, the Labour MP for West Bromwich West, was elected Speaker of the House of Commons, the first woman ever to hold the role. She defeated Conservative former cabinet minister Peter Brooke 372 to 238, Brooke being regarded as the government’s preferred candidate and the representative of the majority party.

Boothroyd was 43 when she reached the House of Commons at a by-election in 1973, having made four previous and unsuccessful attempts to be elected for Leicester South East, Peterborough, Nelson and Colne and Rossendale, and early promotion to assistant whip under Harold Wilson in 1974 lasted less than 13 months; it would be her only government role. But in 1979 she was appointed to the Chairman’s Panel, a group of senior backbenchers who chair legislative committees, and after the 1987 general election she became Second Deputy Chairman of Ways and Means, the most junior of the three Deputy Speakers in the House of Commons.

She was the second woman to hold the office of Deputy Speaker, a very different prospect from her predecessor, Conservative MP for East Renfrewshire Betty Harvie Anderson, a formidable Glasgow grande dame who insisted on being addressed as “Mr Deputy Speaker” since she represented the office rather than herself as an individual. But Boothroyd carried weight and had a breezy and briskly cheerful manner not far below the surface of which lay a firmly disciplinarian Yorkshirewoman. If she was frustrated by never flourishing on the front bench, she concealed it well but was clearly ambitious in a more general sense and had a proper regard for her own intelligence and abilities.

When John Major requested the dissolution of Parliament for a general election in 1992, the Speaker of the House, Bernard Weatherill, announced that he would not seek re-election. One of the Deputy Speakers, Conservative Sir Paul Dean, also retired, but this left a potentially awkward situation. The senior Deputy Speaker, Chairman of Ways and Means Harold Walker, was an efficient, firm and decisive presiding officer with an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Parliamentary Labour Party and a sound grasp of the procedures of the House. He had occupied his role for nine years, and naturally felt he was the obvious candidate for a Labour Speaker after Weatherill’s time in the chair. But he was respected more than liked: he could be sharp and peremptory, and was, in the description of his obituarist Edward Pearce, “inclined to the pre-emptive rather than the catch-up use of authority”.

Meanwhile, Boothroyd too wanted to be Speaker. Although she was the most junior of the three Deputy Speakers, she had no intention of deferring to Walker (who was only two years older than her). Walker had impeccable socialist credentials: the son of workers in the hat industry, he had left school at 14, having passed the scholarship examination for a grammar school but his family being unable to afford to maintain him there; he had worked as a toolmaker and been a trades union shop steward; and as MP for Doncaster (later Doncaster Central) he was fierce defender of workers’ rights and a champion of health and safety.

This was, however, the era of Labour Party modernisation, and the leadership was much more attracted by promoting one of its own to become the first woman Speaker. It is rumoured that Walker was offered a peerage in compensation for not becoming Speaker; if so, it was a reward delayed, as he did not retire from the Commons until 1997 and then became Lord Walker of Doncaster. Whatever transpired, Giles Radice, the well-spoken, public-school-and-Oxford Labour MP for North Durham who was Boothroyd’s campaign manager, reported to her that Walker had been “persuaded” not to seek the office. Walker was, however, very deeply wounded by the experience, and if, as many believed, he had not much liked Boothroyd beforehand, he liked her very much less now.

Boothroyd went to the first sitting of the Commons after the general election assured of her party’s support. On its own that was not enough, although there was a general feeling that it was Labour’s “turn” for the speakership after the rotation since 1959 of Hylton-Foster (Conservative), King (Labour), Lloyd (Conservative), Thomas (Labour) and Weatherill (Conservative). But alternating between the two main parties was only a recent and less than robust convention, and MPs could easily be found to argue that an equally strong convention was that the governing party had always provided the Speaker since the Second World War.

When the House met on 27 April, with former Prime Minister Sir Edward Heath presiding as Father of the House, having first been elected in February 1950, a Conservative backbencher, Sir Michael Neubert, moved “that Mr Peter Brooke do take the Chair of this House as Speaker”. Brooke, recently turned 58, was a genial Conservative who had been MP for the City of London and Westminster South since 1977. His father Henry Brooke had been Harold Macmillan’s Home Secretary while his mother Barbara had been Vice-Chairman of the Conservative Party, and both had become life peers. As amusing and charming in private as he was wooden and soporific at the despatch box, Brooke had been a whip or minister continuously since 1979, latterly in the Cabinet as Northern Ireland Secretary. But at the beginning of 1992 he had foolishly but without malign intent been persuaded to sing “Oh My Darling Clementine” during an appearance on RTÉ’s The Late Late Show on the same day that a soldier and seven construction workers had been killed by a Provisional IRA bomb in County Tyrone. It had damaged his credibility and probably ended any chance of remaining in Cabinet.

John Major, claiming to want to promote younger faces to Cabinet after the election, had made it clear Brooke was surplus to requirements, but had suggested that he might offer himself as Speaker of the House. Able, affable and well-liked, if not seemingly dynamic, Brooke was a plausible, even strong candidate. That he had been a minister was no disqualification in terms of precedent: since the war, Morrison, Lloyd and Thomas had been Cabinet ministers, Hylton-Foster had served as a law officer and Weatherill had been Deputy Chief Whip, only Clifton Brown and King never having held government office. But Brooke had only surrendered his office 10 days before, which seemed too close for comfort to some MPs.

Boothroyd was not a cipher or a token candidate. She had acquitted herself well as Deputy Speaker and controlled the House ably. The support of the Labour Party was not enough on its own, however, as they were still in a minority. What tipped the balance was the fact that John Biffen, the popular and respected former Leader of the House, agreed to propose an amendment to Neubert’s motion endorsing Brooke, which instead put Boothroyd forward. While complimenting Brooke, Biffen stressed the importance of impartiality and pointed to Boothroyd’s record as Deputy Speaker and on the Chairman’s Panel, and in the end persuaded 73 other Conservatives to vote for her rather than Brooke. That was enough to give elect her by a considerable margin, whereas, had they all supported their party colleague, he would have prevailed by 14 votes.

She was, in fact, the first Speaker to come from the opposition benches when first elected since James Abercromby in 1835. She was also the first to take office with proceedings already being broadcast on television (it had begun in 1989), and it gave her a platform which she exploited brilliantly to become a household face, name and voice. She stepped down as Speaker in October 2000, and died in February 2023; I wrote an assessment of her speakership for The Daily Telegraph at the time.

If we took a holiday/Took some time to celebrate

Who are the holy men and women up for a bit of veneration today? Well may you ask. It is the feast of St Pollio (3rd century AD), a lector in Cybalae who refused to renounce his faith under interrogation by the local prefect and was burned to death outside the city walls; of St Anthimus of Nicomedia (d AD 303 or AD 311-12), Bishop of Nicomedia and martyred probably during the Diocletianic Persecution; of St Liberalis of Treviso (4th century AD), a priest from north-western Italy who practised extreme mortifications and fasts, fought the growth of Arianism and retired to be a hermit; of St Assicus (d AD 490), a skilled metalworker and friend of St Patrick who became the first Bishop of Elphin in County Roscommon; of St Floribert of Liège (d AD 746) who succeeded his father, St Hubert of Liège, as bishop of their home town; and of St Zita of Lucca (1212-72), who became maid to a family of silk merchants, tended to the poor and is the patron saint of domestic servants.

It is also the Day of Russian Parliamentarism, marking the meeting of the first State Duma in 1906 (see above), Independence Day in Togo (from France in 1960) and Sierra Leone (from the United Kingdom in 1961), Freedom Day in South Africa to commemorate the first post-apartheid elections in 1994 and Flag Day for any readers in Moldova, after the Supreme Soviet of the Moldovan Soviet Socialist Republic adopted the blue-yellow-red tricolour today in 1990.

Factoids

Given that Pope Francis died at the beginning of the week (I wrote a short assessment of him for City A.M. here), I thought we’d have papacy-themed factoids, since, my word, it’s an institution which is not short of quirks.

1. The Pope’s full title is Bishop of Rome, Vicar of Jesus Christ, Successor of the Prince of the Apostles, Supreme Pontiff of the Universal Church, Patriarch of the West, Primate of Italy, Archbishop and Metropolitan of the Roman Province, Sovereign of the Vatican City State, Servant of the servants of God.

2. The title of “Servant of the servants of God” is an early mediaeval humblebrag-cum-burn: Patriarch John IV of Constantinople (AD 582-AD 595), a few years into his tenure, summoned the bishops of the Eastern Church to the imperial capital in his name as “Ecumenical Patriarch”, the “ecumene” (οἰκουμένη) being the Greek term for the known and therefore civilised world. Pope Gregory I (AD 590-AD 604) regarded this as self-aggrandising and an outrageous infringement on his own authority, but decided to get even rather than get mad; he declared that “whoever calls himself ‘universal bishop’ or desires this title, is, by his pride, the precursor to the Antichrist”. To underline the point, he therefore began styling himself as “Servant of the servants of God”. Point made, or perhaps not. The Patriarch of Constantinople (the incumbent is Bartholomew) is still styled “Ecumenical Patriarch” and regarded as primus inter pares of the bishops of the Eastern Orthodox Church, though he lacks the authority that the Pope enjoys over the Catholic Church and has no direct jurisdiction over his fellow patriarchs or the 17 autocephalous Orthodox churches.

3. When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected Pope in 2013 and became Pope Francis, he was the first pontiff born outside Europe for 1,272 years since the end of the reign of Gregory III (AD 731-AD 741), who was born somewhere in Syria in what was then the Umayyad Caliphate. The last Pope born in Africa was probably Gelasius I (AD 492-AD 496), likely born in the Diocese of Africa (roughly modern Tunisia, Algeria and western Libya); if he was not, then the last African-born Pope was St Miltiades (AD 311-AD 314). There has never been a Pope from Asia beyond the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, North America or Oceania.

4. There is a story that, when a pope dies, the Camerlengo, head of the papal household, taps the deceased pontiff gently on the forehead with a small ceremonial silver hammer three times and speaks his Christian name, and death is confirmed if there is no reply after the third tap-and-call. It has been reported as fact and denied by the Vatican, and in some versions it was the practice but was discontinued after the Second Vatican Council. It is the sort of quirky tradition that easily could exist: we sometimes forget how difficult it sometimes was to be sure someone was dead in the days before modern medicine; more likely there is or was a tradition that the Camerlengo calls the Pope’s name three times, and that has become embellished over time.

5. There certainly is a hammer involved in the ceremonies after a papal death. Once the Pope is dead, the Ring of the Fisherman (Anulus piscatoris or Piscatory Ring), the ring which bears his seal, will be removed and ritually destroyed or defaced by the Camerlengo, usually in the presence of the College of Cardinals. This is very straightforward if you think about it: the papal seal would be used to authenticate and authorise documents by being pressed into wax, and the potential for misusing it after the Pope had died would at one point have been significant. It has traditionally been smashed with a hammer—the broken ring of Pius IX (1846-78) is in the Alice and Louis Koch Collection at the Swiss National Museum in Zürich—but the ring worn by Benedict XVI (2005-13), who abdicated from the papacy rather than dying in office, was defaced with a chisel, two deep cuts in the form of a cross being made on its face.

6. It is often stated that the tradition of the Pope wearing a white cassock dates from the papacy of St Pius V (1566-72), who was a friar of the Dominican Order before his election and (it is claimed) simply continued to wear the white habit of his order after becoming Pope. In fact, the Ordo XIII, a book of ceremonial usage compiled under Pope Gregory X in about 1274, explicitly refers to the Pope wearing white.

7. Until 1963, when Paul VI was the last pontiff to have such a ceremony, popes were crowned with a tiara in the form of a triple crown or triregnum. It began as a piece of headgear similar to an episcopal mitre, and around the 9th century AD a circlet of linen or cloth of gold around the based evolved into a coronet which was decorated with jewels and came to symbolise the Pope’s temporal power as ruler of the Papal States. A second crown is said to have been added by Pope Boniface VIII around 1300 to symbolise the Pope’s twin authorities as a spiritual and temporal ruler, shortly following which a third was added by Benedict XI or Clement V. Certainly by the early part of the 14th century it was a heavily jewelled triple crown which became known as the Tiara of St Sylvester. Pope Paul VI was crowned with the tiara but towards the end of the third session of the Second Vatican Council in 1964, he descended from the papal throne in St Peter’s Basilica and placed the tiara on the altar to symbolise the Church’s renunciation of worldly power and glory. His successor Pope John Paul I decided not to have a coronation but an “inauguration” on being elected in 1978, and when he died after 33 days, his successor, St John Paul II, said “This is not the time to return to a ceremony and an object considered, wrongly, to be a symbol of the temporal power of the Popes”.

8. Pope Francis was the first pontiff who was also a member of the Society of Jesus. The Jesuits have had a complex relationship with the papacy since their foundation in 1540, initially renowned for their absolute and unquestioning obedience to the Pope under the terms of their Constitutions. In 1773, Pope Clement XIV suppressed the order after it had been banned from the territories of various countries, suspected of political manoeuvring and duplicity. Pius VII then restored the order in 1814. However, some 50 other popes have been members of religious orders: 19 Benedictines, 15 Franciscans, seven Dominicans, six Augustinians, two Cistercians and one Theatine. The most recent before Francis was St John XXIII (1958-63), a member of the Secular Franciscan Order.

9. Over the centuries, the papacy sometimes delegated its authority or allowed its authority to be assumed by various monarchs, usually for political reasons: for example, the Corcordat of Bologna of 1516 gave the King of France the right to make nominations to ecclesiastical office, while the Pope retained a theoretical veto and controlled the formal canonical installation of clergymen. When the Apostolic Nuncio to France, Angelo Roncalli, was created a cardinal and appointed Patriarch of Venice in 1953, the President of the French Republic, Vincent Auriol, revived the privilege of the monarchy and placed the red biretta on Roncalli’s head on the Pope’s behalf at a ceremony at the Élysée Palace. (Roncalli was later elected Pope John XXIII, see above).

10. Pope Joan, the woman who disguised herself as a man and was elected Pope, only being rumbled when she gave birth during a procession? Didn’t happen. Seriously. Never happened. Subsequent popes sitting on a chair with no seat so a cardinal could feel their testicles to ensure they were male? Never happened. No contemporary evidence from any of the suggested periods in which she might have reigned. Because it was all just a story, a myth, a legend. So let’s move on.

“Writing is the painting of the voice.” (Voltaire)

1. “‘Vladimir, STOP!’—Trump is being humiliated by Putin”: I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again because it remains true, Owen Matthews is one of the best, sharpest, funniest and most elegant commentators on Russia at the moment and is always worth reading. This article in The Spectator lays bare the sheer inadequacy of Donald Trump as a figure on the international stage when faced by leaders for whom brutal statecraft is second nature. He correctly stresses that the President of the United States had surrendered most of the “cards” of which he talks so fondly before negotiations with Vladimir Putin had even begun, and is now not only lacking in leverage but seemingly unwilling to be tough towards the Russian dictator. It is a stark and shameful contrast with the way Trump has treated Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and his reliance on out-of-his-depth Steve Witkoff, a Manhattan property developer with whom he plays golf, as an intermediary and envoy has done further harm. There has only been one beneficiary from this inglorious process so far, and it’s the dictator in the Kremlin.

2. “My friend Robert Jenrick needs to stop trying to be Boris Johnson”: the phenomenon of politicians becoming more attractive figures once they leave office and are free of responsibility and accountability is a common one, and I can’t deny that I have some regard for the way Kwasi Kwarteng has conducted himself since his dismissal as Chancellor of the Exchequer by Liz Truss and his subsequent decision to leave the House of Commons. He is a curious figure: clearly of considerable intellect, reach and grasp, he has taken his part of the blame for the Truss period on the chin without conceding completely, though still occasionally suffers from the surfeit of self-confidence that strikes many Old Etonians. Here his gentle but insistent critique of Robert Jenrick’s apparent political manoeuvring in The i Paper is well crafted: generous, conciliatory but inescapably clear. Play up! play up! and play the game! But remember it’s a team sport.

3. “The Education Department was born of banality, and it shows”: Donald Trump’s expressing intention to abolish the United States Department of Education sounds at first blush like some kind of anti-intellectual, midwit, fanatical desire to destroy vital institutions of government, and would be met with incredulity in the UK or France, for example; but it’s important to remember that its Washington manifestation is only 45 years old, signed off by President Jimmy Carter as a gift to the National Education Association, the country’s biggest labour union. Before that, education, like huge swathes of public policy, had been the responsibility of state governments, not the federal government. As the inimitable George F. Will points out in The Washington Post, Congress used to apply what James Q. Wilson called the “legitimacy barrier” to policy proposals: is this a legitimate federal government concern, given that the Constitution supposedly limits Congress’s powers by enumerating them? Such self-restraint is now a thing of the past, but what has the Department of Education done? What improvements in public policy has its existence wrought? Will argues that, for example, fourth- and eighth-grade reading scores have not improved in 33 years, despite the expenditure of $2 trillion by the department, and that the factors which most affect children’s performance in school are at home or controlled by parents, rather than schools. “Education problems abound. But if the Education Department is the answer, what is the question?”

4. “Terrain and Gallipoli, 1915-2025. Part one”: Friday (25 April) was Anzac Day, the annual commemoration of the service and sacrifice of Australians and New Zealanders in conflict which marks the date of the first landing by Anzac forces in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC) had been formed in Egypt late in 1914 from the first troops from the southern hemisphere to reach the main theatre of conflict in the First World War, and the brave but inexperienced Diggers and Kiwis were sent into combat for the first time as part of the misconceived and disastrous Dardanelles campaign. This Substack study by Professor Peter Doyle shows how important the terrain of the Gallipoli peninsula was, how far it worked against the Allied forces and to what extent they had given it due consideration. However much the “lions led by donkeys” narrative has been discredited (and it has), the Anzacs were ill served by some of their commanding officers in their baptism of fire in Ottoman Turkey, but the Anzac spirit that emerged from that fire was, and is, truly remarkable.

5. “P.J. O’Rourke and the Death of Conservative Humor”: there are many aspects of Donald Trump and some of his leading courtiers which are objectionable, but one which is strangely telling is that I cannot imagine many of them telling a proper joke or generously and whole-heartedly laughing at anything. They have no sense of self-mockery or goodwill, which means they are profoundly unfunny. (This is not to say there are no po-faced bores on the left; my God, there are.) In search of solace from this populist, sneering, swaggering grimness, I found this tribute to P.J. O’Rourke, the great American conservative satirist and humourist, from the pen of Christopher Buckley, another satirist and humourist on the right, son of conservative icon William F. Buckley Jr, who was also written novels and travelogues as well as serving as chief speechwriter to Vice-President George H.W. Bush in the 1980s. Published in The New York Times in February 2022, it is a great reminder of how humane, generous, observant and funny O’Rourke was, never having to sacrifice his meaning to make his audience laugh. Not long before his death at the hardly Methuselan age of 74, he told Buckley, “You know, I’ve been doing this for a [expletive] half-century. I’m tired.” Sometimes I know what he means.

In paradisum deducant te angeli…

… in tuo adventu suscipiant te martyres, et perducant te in civitatem sanctam Jerusalem. Chorus angelorum te suscipiat, et cum Lazaro quondam paupere æternam habeas requiem.

[May the angels lead you into paradise; may the martyrs receive you at your arrival and lead you to the holy city Jerusalem. May choirs of angels receive you and with Lazarus, once (a) poor (man), may you have eternal rest.]¹

1. Antiphon from the final part of the Requiem Mass, sung in procession on the way from the final blessing of the corpse to the gravesite.