Sunday round-up 27 October 2024

The end is nigh! Of British Summertime, anyway; birthday wishes to John Cleese, A.N. Wilson, Francis Fukuyama and Glenn Hoddle, and St Abraham the Poor's Day

Today we buy last-minute cards and petrol-station Toblerones for Monty Python legend John Cleese (85), country singer-songwriter and Donald Trump Bible partner Lee Greenwood (82), President of Brazil Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (79), author and professional New Yorker Fran Lebowitz (74), journalist, historian and corduroy suit wearer A.N. Wilson (74), actor, writer and director Roberto Benigni (72), historian and political scientist Francis Fukuyama (72), stalwart thespian Peter Firth (71), footballer, manager, Diamond Lights chanteur and friend of Jesus Glenn Hoddle (67), pastel suit-wearing Duran Duran frontman Simon Le Bon (66), model and second wife of Donald Trump Marla Maples (61), former cabinet minister Kit Malthouse (58), violinist and skier Vanessa-Mae (46) and singer &c. Kelly Osbourne (40).

The cake has been left out in the rain for Henry V’s wife Catherine of Valois (1401), Prussian field marshal and military reformer August Graf Neidhardt von Gneisenau (1760), violinist and composer Niccolò Paganini (1782), Boys’ Brigade founder Sir William Alexander Smith (1854), 26th President of the United States Theodore Roosevelt (1858), General Plenipotentiary for Labour Deployment and executed war criminal Fritz Sauckel (1894), poet and playwright Dylan Thomas (1914), film producer Harry Saltzman (1915), President of the African National Congress Oliver Tambo (1917), pop art supremo Roy Lichtenstein (1923), former US secretary of state Warren Christopher (1925), White House chief of staff and Richard Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman (1926), poet and novelist Sylvia Plath (1932), mafioso and “Dapper Don” John Gotti (1940), stock car driver and actually-his-real-name Dick Trickle (1941) and director and producer Ivan Reitman (1946).

Today in AD 312, Constantine I, co-emperor of Rome, was camped outside the imperial city with an army of around 20,000 soldiers. He shared control of the Western Empire with his brother-in-law, Maxentius, who controlled Italy and North Africa, while Licinius and Maximinus II struggled for dominance in the Eastern Empire. After years of simmering tension, he had decided to move against Maxentius. Having been proclaimed emperor in York in AD 306, he exercised power over Britain, Gaul and Spain, and in AD 312 took an army into northern Italy, defeating Maxentius’s forces at Turin then Verona. By 27 October, he was outside Rome, preparing for battle the following day. Constantine was, of course, a pagan, and from AD 303 to AD 311 there had been a savage campaign against Christians across the empire known as the Diocletianic Persecution. That night, however, Constantine had a dream, or rather a vision: sources vary on the details, but in some way or another the emperor saw the sign of the cross in the sky and was commanded to use the symbol as his own and through it defeat his enemies. Whether it was a cross of fire or a cross appearing above the sun, the effect on him was profound. The following day he won a decisive victory over Maxentius at the Battle of the Milvian Bridge, in which Maxentius was killed, and Constantine occupied Rome on 29 October. The following year he issued the Edict of Milan, which officially recognised and tolerated Christianity, and the emperor himself gradually embraced the faith, though he was not formally baptised until shortly before his death. After Constantine, Roman emperors would be Christian rulers (with the brief exception of Julian the Apostate from AD 361 to AD 363), until the death of Constantine XI on 29 May 1453 as Constantinople fell to the Ottoman sultan. Quite a dream, all in all.

On this date in 1775, King George III opened a new Session of Parliament. The King’s Speech addressed “the present situation of America”, where the colonies were in open rebellion and the Battles of Lexington and Concord had taken place in April, British forces being pushed back to Boston. General Sir William Howe, recently arrived from Britain (and still Member of Parliament for Nottingham) had won a tactical victory at Bunker Hill in June to seize control of the Charlestown Peninsula but had suffered heavy losses. On 23 August, the King issued a Proclamation for Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition, which declared the colonists to be in “open and avowed rebellion” and instructed officials “to use their utmost endeavours to withstand and suppress such rebellion”. The speech from the throne reinforced the policy of the government led by Lord North: it condemned the actions of the rebels, rehearsed the great patience and indulgence which the crown had shown, but declared that, essentially, enough was enough. “It is now become the part of wisdom, and (in its effects) of clemency, to put a speedy end to these disorders by the most decisive exertions.” The Royal Navy and the Army were being expanded to deal with the rebellion, and there would be reconciliation for any colonies which returned to obedience. That, of course, was not quite how the conflict would transpire.

In 1964, a moderately famous actor called Ronald Reagan made a television broadcast on behalf of the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona. Reagan had begun life as a Democrat but increasingly strong anti-Communist views had led him to register as a Republican in 1962. His last film, The Killers, had been released in July 1964, with Lee Marvin and Angie Dickinson starring. Although he would host 21 episodes of the Western anthology series Death Valley Days for CBS, he was looking towards a political career, and in January 1966 announced his candidacy for governor of California, winning the election in November and serving for eight years. His speech in favour of Goldwater, known to posterity as A Time for Choosing, was a bold advocacy of small government and personal freedom, the “choosing” between a path “up to man’s age-old dream—he maximum of individual freedom consistent with law and order—or down to the ant heap of totalitarianism”. Although Goldwater was beaten soundly by President Lyndon Johnson in the election of November 1964, the speech, which raised more than $1 million for the Republican campaign, launched Reagan into the political mainstream as a powerful conservative voice. David S. Broder in The Washington Post called it “the most successful national political debut since William Jennings Bryan electrified the 1896 Democratic Convention with his ‘Cross of Gold’ speech”, while George Will, a columnist for the same paper, said after Reagan’s election as president in 1980 that “Goldwater won the election of 1964... it just took sixteen years to count the votes”. The speech is worth watching: some may find it melodramatic and stark (“the last stand on earth”), but its power is undoubted, and it is a useful reminder of why Reagan was so popular.

It is a decade since the last British combat troops left Afghanistan. Camp Bastion near Lashkargāh, the capital of Helmand Province, was handed over to the Afghan Ministry of Defence by Brigadier Rob Thomson, Deputy Commander Regional Command Southwest and the senior British officer in Helmand. Operation Herrick, and its predecessors Operation Veritas and Operation Fingal, had cost the lives of 453 British personnel (four more would die in months and years to come) since military action had begun in November 2001. Bastion, which was renamed Camp Shorabak, was the largest overseas military base Britain had constructed since the Second World War, the logistics hub for the UN-authorised, NATO-provided International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and could accommodate more than 32,000 people. The last “roulement”, or deployment, Op Herrick XX, was commanded by Brigadier James Swift (eventually Chief of Defence People 2020-23), CO of 20th Armoured Brigade, and was based around 2nd and 5th Battalions, The Rifles, elements of 1st Battalion, The Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment, 1st The Queen’s Dragoon Guards and 26th Regiment Royal Artillery. British forces would remain in Afghanistan for training and mentoring as well as force protection as part of Operation Toral until 8 July 2021. To quote Wikipedia: “Outcome—operational failure”.

A decent haul of saints today: it is the feast of St Abraham the Poor (d. c. AD 372), an Egyptian hermit who spent 17 years living in a cave; St Gaudiosus of Naples (d. c. AD 455), bishop of Abitina near Carthage who fled North Africa to escape the persecution of the Vandal king Genseric and introduced the Rule of St Augustine to Naples; St Namatius (d. after AD 462), bishop of Clermont who built the city’s first cathedral and acquired the relics of SS Vitalis and Agricola; St Abbán of Corbmaic (d. c. AD 520), a rather shadowy Irish abbot of whom very little is known; and St Oran of Iona (d. AD 548), a companion of St Columba who supposedly consented to be buried alive underneath a chapel which was being constructed and is, somewhat oddly, the patron saint of atheists.

It is Independence Day in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, a Commonwealth member captured by Britain from the French during the Seven Years War which became independent in 1979. Slovakia marks the Černová massacre of 1907 in which 15 people were killed when gendarmes opened fire on a crowd gathered for the consecration of a Catholic church.

It is UNESCO-declared World Day of Audiovisual Heritage. It is also National Black Cat Day, and National Mother-in-Law Day, should you possess such a connection (I no longer do), so we recall the words of the late Les Dawson, who remarked “I wouldn’t say my mother-in-law was ugly, but when she was born, the midwife slapped her mother”.

Finally, British Summertime ended at 2.00 am, so I hope you put your clocks back appropriately and savoured a bonus hour for whatever purpose you prefer.

Factoids

1. Of the 18 prime ministers since the Second World War, only two have been only children, Theresa May (2016-19) and Liz Truss (2022), although Truss had a brother, Matthew, who died a year before she was born. Clement Attlee (1945-51) came from the largest family, as the seventh of eight children, while Alec Douglas-Home (1963-64) was the eldest of seven.

2. Only two of the 18 have contracted multiple marriages. Anthony Eden (1955-57) was married to Beatrice Beckett (1923-50) and then to Clarissa Spencer-Churchill (1952-77), while Boris Johnson has been married three times, to Allegra Mostyn-Owen (1987-93), Marina Wheeler (1993-2020) and Carrie Symonds (2021-date).

3. By contrast, no only child has ever become president of the United States. Vice-President Kamala Harris has a younger sister, Maya, so whatever the result of the forthcoming election, this pattern will remain for some time. J.D. Vance and Tim Walz also both have siblings, should the worst come to the worst.

4. British Summer Time, which ended this morning, was established by statute, under the Summer Time Act 1916, with various changes being consolidated in the Summer Time Act 1972. Britain had only adopted a nationwide definition of time, based on Greenwich Mean Time, 36 years before under the Statutes (Definition of Time) Act 1880; before this there were noticeable local variations, but the advent of the railways made these impossible. The Time (Ireland) Act 1916 brought Ireland, still part of the United Kingdom, into line with GMT and abolished Dublin Mean Time, which was 25 minutes and 21 seconds behind it. Having darkness fall at a later clock time during summer, an idea championed in the UK by builder William Willett, was intended to increase daylight recreation time and reduce lighting costs. There is some evidence that sleep health and circadian rhythms benefit more from a standard year-round time and public opinion seems to favour adopting BST (or daylight saving time, as it is known internationally) for the whole year. This was implemented for a trial period in 1968-71, which saw a reduction in the number of road accidents, but various attempts to make a permanent change have so far failed.

5. Russia, as the largest country in the world by geographical size, has no fewer than 11 time zones, from Kaliningrad Time (GMT +2) to Kamchatka Time (GMT +12). China, the world’s third largest country, has only one time zone, China Standard Time (GMT +8).

6. Under Swiss law, certain animals are defined as “social animals” and it is an offence to keep them individually. The category includes rabbits, guinea pigs and parakeets. Cats may be kept individually but must have daily human contact or visual contact with other cats. Dogs must also have daily contact with humans and, ideally but not enforceable by law, contact with other dogs: you may not leave a dog alone for more than four hours at a time.

7. The first jet-powered flight, by a Heinkel He 178, took place of 27 August 1939, just under 36 years after Wilburn and Orville Wright had make the first heavier-than-air flight of any kind in history. By contrast, and as a mark of the speed of change, if you go 36 years back from the Wright brothers, penal transportation of convicts to Australia was only just ending; the last shōgun of Japan, Tokugawa Yoshinobu, surrendered his office to the emperor; Joseph Lister unveiled the discovery of antiseptic surgery in The Lancet; the United States purchased Alaska from the Tsar of Russia (for $7.2 million); and the Rev Thomas Baker was the last Christian missionary to be cooked and eaten in Fiji.

8. When Spain played Croatia in their opening match at Euro 2024 in June, some criticised the Spanish players for a lack of patriotism because they did not sing their national anthem. In fact the Spanish national anthem has no official words: the Marcha Real, composed by Manuel de Espinosa, is one of the oldest anthems in the world, first adopted in 1770. Although different lyrics have been sung under various political conditions, no official text has ever been agreed. A competition to compose new lyrics was held in 2007 but the results were deemed unsatisfactory. It therefore remains one of only four entirely orchestral national anthems, along with Bosnia and Herzegovina (Državna himna Bosne i Hercegovine), Kosovo (Himni i Republikës së Kosovës) and San Marino (Inno Nazionale della Repubblica di San Marino).

9. From the top of the Willis Tower (formerly the Sears Tower) in Chicago, you can see four different states: Illinois, Michigan, Indiana and Wisconsin. At 1,451 feet and 110 storeys, it was the tallest building in the world when it opened in 1973 and held that distinction for nearly 25 years.

10. Due to the presence of myristicin, an anticholinergic which blocks the action of the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, nutmeg is mildly hallucinogenic. Or so the giant swan next to me insists.

“There are now more TVs in British households than there are people—which is a bit of a worry.” (HM King Charles III)

1. “Bette Davis at the NFT”: BBC iPlayer offered up this brilliant 1972 encounter in which the Hollywood legend talks to Baroness Bakewell (as she now is) in front of an attentive and devoted audience. Davis—only 64 here, surprisingly—was coming to the end of her career as a major film star, with only a few dazzling cameos like Death on the Nile (1978) in the future, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? was already a decade past. She is as sharp and funny as you would expect, and fascinating on her early career in Hollywood’s adolescent years of the 1920s and early 1930s. I was surprised, not for any logical reason, in retrospect to learn that she had hardly acted in theatre at all, and had never performed Shakespeare (an audience member longed for her to play Lady Macbeth, and it’s quite a thing to imagine). It is striking, though, that, despite her reputation for playing hard-edged, sometimes unsympathetic characters, in conversation with Bakewell she comes across as warm, friendly and deeply modest.

2. “Joan Bakewell at the BBC”: the encounter with Bette Davis was shown as part of a series of programmes honouring Bakewell (I didn’t spot an obvious anniversary or commemoration but who cares?). The broadcaster is now 91 and this profile reminds you firstly of just how much she has done, but also of how groundbreaking much of her work was. It was Frank Muir, by no means an unkind man, who dubbed her “the thinking man’s crumpet”, a reflection of different times, though Bakewell disliked the term: “it was meant as a compliment I suppose, but it was a little bit of a put-down”. Muir was referring to the fact that much of her presenting work was unashamedly intellectual and highbrow, like BBC2’s pioneering discussion programme Late Night Line-Up which included guests like Allen Ginsberg, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Marcel Duchamp, and she had, after all won a scholarship to Cambridge. Her style, driven by a combination of necessity and inclination, is antithetical to many attributes we take for granted now: elocution lessons as a young girl had eradicated her Cheshire accent and she could appear austere and high-minded. But this reminds the audience that she was a major influence in the development of documentary television and of arts and culture coverage in particular. (I don’t take it personally but on two separate occasions I have narrowly avoided being run over by Baroness Bakewell in the House of Lords car park.)

3. “Trump: The Criminal Conspiracy Case”: yet another BBC offering, this 90-minute documentary is a methodical and painstaking examination of the 2020 US presidential election and Donald Trump’s increasingly overblown and vainglorious attempts to overturn the result. Spurred by a genuinely close result in Georgia, a state won by Joe Biden by only 11,780 votes, the Republican was (and remains) determined to use any tool available to discredit the outcome of the poll, although consistently courts have found no evidence of significant irregularities or electoral fraud. With the next presidential ballot now only nine days away, this is a grim reminder of how disbelief that he could possibly have been defeated (even though Hillary Clinton won a greater share of the popular vote in 2016) curdled into the violence and mayhem of the 6 January assault on the Capitol. It is hard to judge whether the cult of election denial, by which the Republican Party is tightly gripped, is simply a political play, or if Trump’s narcissism is so powerful and so unmoored from reality that he actually cannot comprehend the notion that he might not have been victorious. The polling data seem to indicate a tight race this time, but if he is defeated by Kamala Harris, do not expect him to accept the outcome gracefully, if at all.

4. “Al Pacino: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood”: yes, that crumpled, genial, portly old man with the bad dye job being interviewed by Colin Paterson is screen legend Al Pacino. Now 84, he has recently published his autobiography, Sonny Boy, and in this leisurely and good-natured encounter he is more than happy to recount tales of his long and dazzling career. His breakthrough came as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972), though studio executives wanted an actor with a higher profile, and Jack Nicholson, Robert Redford and Warren Beatty had all tried out for the part, as had a little-known New York actor in his late 20s called Robert De Niro. Iconic roles followed in Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Scarface, Scent of a Woman, Glengarry Glen Ross, Carlito’s Way and Donnie Brasco, all electrified by Pacino’s unstoppable intensity. He is also frank about a chaotic personal life complicated by substance abuse and financial disasters. A delightful interview subject and some wonderful insights into a towering career which is not quite over yet.

5. “Lord Butler of Brockwell: Lord Speaker’s Corner”: there is something faintly weird and self-conscious about this series of podcast interviews by the Lord Speaker, Lord McFall of Alcluith, and even his nearest and dearest would not claim that the former maths and chemistry teacher, who turned 80 this month, is the most dynamic or incisive inquisitor. Still, when your pool of subjects is the House of Lords, the content is there and McFall coaxes well told and interesting stories out of former cabinet secretary Robin Butler, who was head of the civil service from 1988 to 1998, taking in the premierships of Margaret Thatcher, John Major and Tony Blair. Butler, who joined HM Treasury in 1961 when the distinctly late Selwyn Lloyd was chancellor of the Exchequer, is an old-school public servant: head boy at Harrow then a first-class degree in classics at University College, Oxford, where he was twice a rugby blue. He talks with the mild self-deprecation expected of his eminence and class about working for Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher, the experience of the PIRA bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton in 1984 and his chairmanship of the 2004 Review of Intelligence on Weapons of Mass Destruction which examined the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq. A strong advertisement for the House of Lords and a genuinely lovely, courteous, kind man.

“Only write if you can’t not.” (Stephen Bergman)

1. “Kemi vs Robert: who would be the best Tory leader?”: with the leadership of the Conservative Party now a choice between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick and the result announced this coming Saturday, The Spectator carried these interesting apologiae from author and journalist Ed West (Jenrick) and historian Sir Niall Ferguson (Badenoch). Their arguments can stand for themselves but both are eloquent, as I’d expect. The leadership contest has been slightly peculiar, in that I keep reading stories of its brutality and vitriol while it has struck me as a fairly tame affair, thankfully. The evidence seems to suggest that Badenoch will prevail, perhaps winning comfortably, but the electorate is small (probably around 160,000) and unpredictable. We shall see.

2. “The future that never came”: in The Critic, Nicholas Boys Smith describes the devastation wrought on London during the Second World War, in which 30,000 Londoners were killed and 116,000 homes destroyed or irreparably damaged. The response, as we touched on in 25 August’s Factoids, was Patrick Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan of 1944, which, in the spirit of the strange and rather inhuman Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, would have built a new and modern London of tall towers and capacious roads. Five great ring roads would encircle the capital, old “drab and dreary” buildings would be cleared away and (red flag) large swathes of the population would be moved either to new satellite towns or specially designated residential zones. Widespread destruction is guilty manna for architects and town planners, and there was a broad consensus behind Abercrombie’s scheme, but Boys Smith relates how a lack of financial resources forced local authorities to compromise, saving, thankfully, much of the city we know today.

3. “What if the NHS crisis is a classic management problem?”: Camilla Cavendish, writing in The Financial Times, suggests that one of the challenges facing the National Health Service, as the government appeals to the public for their ideas for reform, is that it is poorly managed. Full disclosure: both my late father and my stepmother, after clinical careers, ended up as chief executives of NHS trusts, so I’ve always had an unhealthy interest in and a reflexive defensiveness about NHS management. All the more so given how easy a focus of dissatisfaction they often become. The common perception that the health service is vastly over-provided with managers at the expense of medical and ancillary staff is not just laughably untrue but the opposite of the truth: by any reasonable metric, the NHS, given its size and complexity, has far too few managers. I made most of these arguments in CapX last summer but it does no harm to have them stated again, and Baroness Cavendish of Little Venice (as she is properly known) is thorough and sensible. She identifies the main obstacles to good and efficient management, concluding “Perhaps what we need to imagine is a classic management turnaround”. My only reservation is that management changes are not a silver bullet. There is no one thing which will transform the NHS, but certainly looking hard at how the organisation is managed is a necessary component.

4. “Why Londoners got it right on Chris Kaba”: some of the reaction to the acquittal of Sergeant Martyn Blake, a marksman from the Metropolitan Police’s MO19 Specialist Firearms Command, of the murder of Chris Kaba this week has left me astonished. I don’t know if the case should have got as far as the Central Criminal Court at the Old Bailey, or if the Crown Prosecution Service was excessively eager in its decision to prosecute. But for people to be saying, after a full criminal trial, that this demonstrates some kind of impunity or lack of accountability for the police suggests an unwillingness to accept reality. In The Times, the reliably wise Janice Turner avoids the extremes of opinion on the issue, acknowledges the range of factors at play and concludes that “London should be proud of how it has handled this awful affair: formally, transparently and without social breakdown”.

5. “On political endorsement”: there is a major row at The Washington Post over its decision not to endorse either presidential candidate in next month’s election. Here, the publisher and CEO, ex-pat Brit William Lewis, argues that the newspaper is returning to its roots of neutral and unbiased analysis and commentary, noting that it only began endorsing one side or the other in 1976 (when it backed Jimmy Carter), despite having been founded in 1877. However, there are strong rumours that the editorial board had drafted an endorsement of Democratic candidate Vice-President Kamala Harris, but was overruled by the Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos who wants to curry favour with Donald Trump. Many feel that this not only encourages intimidation of the media, but that the threat posed by a second Trump presidency is too great to permit sitting on the fence. Editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned in protest and 2,000 subscribers cancelled their relationship with the paper within 12 hours. You might, of course, question how many minds an endorsement from The Washington Post, which has always backed the Democratic nominee, might actually change, but this will, as the say, run and run.

I wrote at the start that this was a record of hate…

… as Bendrix muses in The End of the Affair, and walking there beside Henry towards the evening glass of beer, I found the one prayer that seemed to serve the winter mood: O God, You’ve done enough, You’ve robbed me of enough, I’m too tired and old to learn to love, leave me alone forever. (Actually, it’s not quite so bad, even if I’m now 47 years old. TTFN.)