Sunday round-up 3 November 2024

Birthdays bumps (gently) for Michael Dukakis, Kenneth Baker and Lulu, 490 years since the First Act of Supremacy and the feast of St Rumbold of Buckingham

Today’s birthday boys and girls are an eclectic bunch: former governor of Massachusetts and 1988 Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis (91), philosopher, economist and Nobel laureate Amartya Sen (91), former Conservative home secretary and education secretary Lord Baker of Dorking (90), American novelist and screenwriter Martin Cruz Smith (82), Dennistoun’s own singer and actress Lulu (76), legendary editor-in-chief of Vogue Dame Anna Wintour (75), comedian and actress Roseanne Barr (72), actress, producer and Steven Spielberg’s wife Kate Capshaw (71), singer-songwriter, actor and dandy highwayman Adam Ant (70), actor, martial artist and professional hunk-of-man Dolph Lundgren (67), minister of state for skills and former home secretary Baroness Smith of Malvern (62), bemused Irish actor, writer and comedian Dylan Moran (53) and model and inexplicable personality Kendall Jenner (29).

The candles have gone out for sculptor and painter Benvenuto Cellini (1500), expansive Mughal emperor Aurangzeb (1618), travel guide peddlar Karl Baedeker (1801), Adidas founder Adolf Dassler (1900), Scottish journalist and author Sir Ludovic Kennedy (1919), tough-guy actor Charles Bronson (1921), former taoiseach and Fianna Fáil leader Albert Reynolds (1932), film soundtrack supremo John Barry (1933), actor, definitive Sherlock Holmes and Clapham resident Jeremy Brett (1933), iconic folk guitarist Bert Jansch (1943) and Swiss-Italian DJ and producer Robert Miles (1969).

On this day 490 years ago, in 1534, Parliament agreed to the first Act of Supremacy. The statute declared that the king was head of the Church of England, “called Anglicana Ecclesia”, with “full power and authority from time to time to visit, repress, redress, record, order, correct, restrain, and amend all such errors, heresies, abuses, offenses, contempts and enormities… which by any manner of spiritual authority or jurisdiction ought or may lawfully be reformed, repressed, ordered, redressed, corrected, restrained, or amended”. But the narrative framework should be noted: the legislation was presented not as creating or conferring this title and authority, but merely confirming it. The preamble stated that “the king’s Majesty justly and rightfully is and ought to be the supreme head of the Church of England, and so is recognized by the clergy of this realm in their convocations”, and the Act of Supremacy was, in a sense, supposed to be once more for the people at the back of the room, so to speak. It also made a point of rejecting any foreign jurisdiction over the Church of England, affirming the royal supremacy “any usage, foreign land, foreign authority, prescription, or any other thing or things to the contrary hereof notwithstanding”. When the act spoke of “the imperial crown of this realm”, it meant “imperial” not in the sense we might use it of expansionist or seeking overseas possessions, but in the sense of self-contained and outwith any superior jurisdiction. the king was supreme and answerable only to God, not to the pope (or, for that matter, to the Holy Roman Emperor in temporal matters). It represented the opening legislative salvo of the English Reformation, an unusually legalistic process; Mary I had it repealed in 1554, and Elizabeth I then restored a modified version with the Act of Supremacy 1558, of which section 8 is still in force today in England and Wales, and Scotland, but not Northern Ireland. This recognised the monarch as supreme governor, rather than supreme head, of the Church of England.

Today in 1868, a special election was held in Louisiana’s 2nd congressional district to fill the unexpired term of Rep. James Mann, a Democrat from Maine who had been elected when the state was readmitted to the Union after the Civil War. It was won by the Republican candidate, John Willis Menard, who became the first African-American elected to the United States Congress. Born in Illinois and educated there and in Ohio, he was the child of Louisiana Creoles from New Orleans, and settled there after the Civil War; during the conflict he had worked as a clerk in the Department of the Interior, visiting British Honduras (now Belize) in 1863 to investigate a proposal for the establishment of a colony for newly freed slaves. However, his defeated Democratic challenger in the election, Caleb S. Hunt, challenged the result of the election (sounding familiar?) and the House of Representatives Committee on Elections refused to seat either man, referring the matter to the House as a while. On 29 February 1869, the House suspended its usual procedures to allow Menard and Hunt to speak to the body, and the former became the first African-American to address the House of Representatives; the latter did not speak. The House debated a motion to seat Hunt, which was defeated 137-41, then decided to send the matter back to the Committee on Elections. However, the motion was amended to include a provision to seat Menard while the committee deliberated, and was defeated 130-57. Any further investigation into the matter therefore fell, and neither man was acknowledged before the 40th Congress came to an end on March 4. It was not until 12 December 1870 that the first African-American, Rep. Joseph Rainey of South Carolina, was seated in the House of Representatives.

On this day in 1946, Emperor Hirohito gave imperial assent to the new Constitution of Japan. It had been drafted mostly by the United States authorities, especially Lieutenant Colonel Milo E. Lowell and Brigadier General Courtney Whitney, both experienced lawyers, and accepted by the cabinet of prime minister Baron Kijūrō Shidehara. The Imperial Diet agreed to the document with very few amendments, the House of Peers passing it on 6 October and the House of Representatives the next day. It came into effect on 3 May 1947. Written in modern rather than classical Japanese, it is only 5,000 words long: it affirms the principles of popular sovereignty and fundamental human rights; restricts the powers of the emperor to a purely ceremonial role; renounces war as a means of settling international disputes; and enshrines the legislative and judicial institutions of modern Japan. (The emperor had—debatably, anyway—already renounced his divinity by the Humanity Declaration of 1 January 1946.)

Ahead of Tuesday’s momentous election, it is 60 years since Lyndon Johnson was elected president in his own right, having succeeded to the presidency the previous yerar after the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Johnson beat his Republican challenger, Senator Barry Goldwater of Arizona, and his running mate Rep William E. Miller of New York. Johnson enjoyed a landslide victory, winning the Electoral College 486-52 and carrying 44 of the 50 states, as well as the District of Columbia which was voting for the first time. It was the last presidential election in which the Democratic Party won the support of white voters, and the only time the party has ever won in Alaska.

It is a frankly massive festal day. From Wales, St Clydog, St Cristiolus and St Winifred; from Spain, St Gaudiosus of Tarazona, St Pirmin and St Ermengol; from Brittany, St Gwenhael; from France, St Papulus and St Hubert of Liège; from Italy, St Libertine and St Silvia; from Ireland, St Malachy O’More; from Peru, St Martín de Porres; and from England itself, St Rumbold of Buckingham, who was born in AD 662, able to speak from birth, and professed his piety, demanded to be baptised, delivered a sermon and then died at three days old.

Celebrating Independence Day today are Panama (from Colombia in 1903), the Commonwealth of Dominica (from the UK in 1978) and the Federated States of Micronesia (from the US in 1986). We also mark the independence of the Ecuadorian city of Cuenca—officially Santa Ana de los Ríos de Cuenca—from Spain in 1820, one of a series of territories which broke away before Ecuador became independent and sovereign on 24 May 1822.

Factoids

1. Today in 1908, William Howard Taft was elected 27th President of the United States. He had been governor-general of the Philippines and then secretary for war under Theodore Roosevelt, who surprisingly declared that he would not seek another term, a decision he quickly regretted. Roosevelt then used his control over the Republican Party machinery to promote Taft as his successor, despite interest by secretary of the Treasury George Cortelyou and Charles Evans Hughes, governor of New York. Taft went on to defeat Democrat William Jennings Bryan, on his third bid for the White House, by 321-162 in the Electoral College. He won 29 states to Bryan’s 17, but it was founded on only 51.6 per cent of the popular vote. Taft lost a bid for re-election in 1912 to Governor Woodrow Wilson of New Jersey, but in July 1921 President Warren Harding appointed him chief justice of the United States Supreme Court, serving till his death nine years later. He is the only former president to occupy appointed federal office, although John Quincy Adams, president from 1825 to 1829, went on to represent Massachusetts in the House of Representatives 1831-48, and Andrew Johnson, president from 1865 to 1869, was senator for Tennessee for a few months in 1875.

2. By contrast, while a head of government rather than a head of state, of the 58 prime ministers since the office was generally recognised, 14 of them (so far) have served under successors, most commonly as foreign secretary: the Duke of Newcastle, the Duke of Grafton, Lord North, Henry Addington, the Duke of Portland, Viscount Goderich, the Duke of Wellington, Lord John Russell, A.J. Balfour, Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald, Neville Chamberlain, Alec Douglas-Home and David Cameron. In the past century, Edward Heath expected to be made foreign secretary by his successor Margaret Thatcher in 1979 but was instead offered (and refused) the post of ambassador to the United States, while David Lloyd George was asked by Winston Churchill to become minister of agriculture in 1940, but, aged 77, told his secretary “I shall wait until Winston is bust”.

3. After the end of the Civil War in 1865, some adherents of the Confederacy, reluctant to accept defeat and the process which became Reconstruction, emigrated to Brazil (where slavery would remain legal until 1888) to maintain some semblance of their antebellum society. Dom Pedro II, the emperor of Brazil from 1831 to 1889, had been a staunch supporter of the Confederacy and offered enticements including free transport, cheap land and an easy path to citizenship. Up to 20,000 so-called Confederados would make the journey, initially to São Paulo (where they founded the city of Americana) but also to Amazonas and Pará. Today there are around 260,000 Brazilians of American descent.

4. You will know this if you have seen Ken Burns’s magisterial documentary The Civil War, in my view possibly the best piece of television ever made. If you haven’t seen it, stop right now, go and watch it all. The first major battle of the American Civil War, which is now remembered as the First Battle of Bull Run, took place on 21 July 1861, near the town of Manassas in Virginia. It was a resounding victory for the Confederate forces commanded by Brigadier General P.G.T. Beauregard and Brigadier General Joseph E. Johnston, taking place on the farm of a man called Wilmer McLean. He was so traumatised by the intrusion of conflict into his life that, saying that he hoped never to see a soldier again, he moved south to Appomattox, near Lynchburg in southern Virginia. Just under four years later, on 9 April 1865, as the war ground to its bloody end, General Robert E. Lee sent soldiers out to find a suitable location at which he could formally offer his surrender to Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. They chose Wilmer McLean’s house at Appomattox. Years later, he would declare, “The war began in my front yard and ended in my front parlour”.

5. One of the Union officers present at the surrender was 25-year-old Brevet Major-General George Armstrong Custer, commanding officer of the 3rd Cavalry Division. His superior, Major-General Philip Sheridan, gave him the table on which the surrender had been signed as a gift for his wife Elizabeth. Custer rode away with it on his head, though it is now in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC.

6. The volcanic eruption of Krakatoa in the Dutch East Indies in 1883 actually lasted for five months, from 20 May to 21 October. The most violent incident, however, in the late morning of 27 August, was of a sheer scale of destructive power almost unimaginable even to our nuclear-habituated age. That explosion destroyed nearly three-quarters of the whole archipelago, causing it to collapse into a caldera, ruptured the eardrums of sailors on RMS Norham Castle, 40 miles away, and was audible at a distance of more than 3,000 miles. The pressure wave it produced travelled around the globe three and a half times. So much ash and other debris was thrown into the atmosphere that the sky was darkened for years afterwards, and it produced sunsets so vividly red than citizens in New York and Connecticut sent for the fire brigade, assuming there must be a blaze nearby. The official death toll was 36,417.

7. The eruption was used as the backdrop for the 1968 disaster film Krakatoa, East of Java, starring Maximilian Schell, Diane Baker and Brian Keith. Directed by Bernard L. Kowalski, it tells the story of a steamboat captain (Schell) trying to save people endangered by the unfolding catastrophe. The film received mixed reviews but on a second release topped the US box office in December 1969. Krakatoa is west of Java.

8. Ludwig van Beethoven, famously, began to notice a decline in his hearing in his late 20s, and was almost completely deaf by the time he was 44. When his majestic Symphony No. 9 in D minor, the Choral, was first performed at the Theater am Kärntnertor in Vienna on 7 May 1824, the audience included fellow composers Franz Schubert and Carl Czerny and the imperial chancellor, Klemens von Metternich. It was Beethoven’s first appearance on stage since 1812, although the official director of the performance was Michael Umlauf, the theatre’s Kapellmeister. The reception was ecstatic, the audience giving the composer five standing ovations, but Beethoven had to be turned around to see their reaction, which he could not hear.

9. Beethoven is not the only famous composer to have been or become deaf. Bedřich Smetana, the Bohemian composer who championed the folk music of his native culture, became almost totally deaf by the age of 50 but continued to compose music. The 18th century English composer and organist William Boyce, who was friends with Bach, Handel, Arne and Gluck, gradually lost his hearing in his late 40s. Brian Wilson, the creative genius behind the Beach Boys, has been deaf in his right ear since the age of 10 or 11. The cause is unclear, variously ascribed to illness, a genetic disorder and an injury inflicted by his domineering and violent father Murry.

10. Probably the most famous contemporary deaf musician is Aberdeenshire-born percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie. She began losing her hearing aged eight and is profoundly deaf, though she argues eloquently that “deafness” is misunderstood as a concept and that she hears through parts of her body other than her ears. In 2020, she was the guest on an early episode of my friend Mark Heywood’s podcast Behind the Spine, as a result of which I can report that, as an extremely skilled and practised lip-reader, she can tell if someone pronounces her name correctly—“Ev-lin”—or incorrectly—“Eeev-lin”.

“Television can be a very fickle place.” (Megyn Kelly)

1. “The Diplomat”: the Keri Russell/Rufus Sewell political drama returns to Netflix for a second series. The first series was generally well received in April 2023, regarded as enjoyable and pacy with some fine performances. Some critics felt it was not entirely realistic, Rotten Tomatoes perhaps summing up this feeling in its description of “a soapy take on statecraft”, but a completely faithful and accurate portrayal of the working life of an ambassador would not necessarily make gripping television. Taken on its own terms, I found it well constructed by show-runner Debora Cahn, lively, sharp and entertaining, with enough of an authentic feel to sustain an eight-part series, and it is a welcome return. (I wrote about it for CulturAll here.)

2. “The Omen”: BBC wheeled out this chilling classic for Hallowe’en and it always repays another watch. Richard Donner directed this 1976 horror which, on paper, sounds either absurd or simply naff: an American diplomat’s wife gives birth but the baby is substituted for another, without her knowledge, who turns out to be the Antichrist. That performers of the calibre of Gregory Peck, Lee Remick, David Warner and Billie Whitelaw went anywhere near it is a testament to the persuasive powers of producer Harvey Bernhard but also to the quality of the film and its genuine spirit of sinister unease and suppressed fright. Contemporary critics had mixed reactions, and certainly it is redolent of a particular era of horror cinema, but on its own terms it absolutely delivers and was an ideal choice for 31 October.

3. “Bram Stoker’s Dracula”: I am unapologetic and evangelical in my adoration of this 1992 Francis Ford Coppola effort, a lavish and romantic retelling of the vampire classic. Admittedly it was released at my moodiest and most gothic teenager years, but it is a startlingly brilliant and sumptuous film with a terrific performance as the eponymous count by Gary Oldman, and strong turns from Winona Ryder, at her loveliest, as Mina Harker and (yes, I promise) Sadie Frost as Lucy Westenra. Anthony Hopkins chews roaringly on the scenery as Professor Abraham van Helsing and there is a weird cameo by Tom Waits as R.M. Renfield, with the only weak link being Keanu Reeves as Jonathan Harker, delivering one of the worst English accents ever committed to celluloid. The film captures the strangeness of Transylvania and has a powerfully occult thread running through it. Some dazzling contributions by Seal and Annie Lennox feature on a great soundtrack.

4. “Niall Ferguson: Don’t Underestimate the China-Russia-Iran Axis”: historian and author Sir Niall Ferguson spoke at the Centre for Independent Studies, an Australian think tank, this week to argue against the thesis proposed by American veteran political scientist John Mearsheimer, that the United States should avoid engagement in conflicts like Ukraine and the Middle East to concentrate on the challenge of China. Ferguson, while displaying passable impersonations of Henry Kissinger and Donald Trump, argues that the mutipolar nature of the modern world makes it more, not less, important that the United States remains active globally: for America to stand back while Russia extinguishes the democratic government of Ukraine would only encourage Xi Jinping in his territorial ambitions towards Taiwan and dominance of the Pacific. Typically punchy and persuasive presentation.

5. “Wag the Dog”: reviewers are trolling cinema and TV archives for presidential material in the run-up to Tuesday’s vote, and you will go a long way before you find a better satire of Washington politics than this puckish, sardonic 1997 Barry Levinson comedy. When the President of the United States becomes embroiled in a sex scandal with only weeks before re-election, a White House adviser, played by Anne Heche, turns to spin doctor Conrad Brean (Robert De Niro) to provide a public relations distraction. Brean engages a Hollywood producer, Stanley Motss, a glorious Dustin Hoffman, who constructs a fictional war in Albania to draw the media spotlight. A sparkling Hilary Henkin/David Mamet screenplay was based loosely on Larry Beinhart’s novel American Hero (1993), but there was a strange life-imitating-art sensation in December 1998 when Bill Clinton authorised a major bombing campaign against Iraq during his impeachment trial. Immaculately cynical, entertaining and just plausible enough to make you think…

“There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, no one can agree what they are.” (Somerset Maugham)

1. “Doomed from the start: the four reasons HS2 failed”: in The Times, former Downing Street transport adviser Andrew Gilligan looks at the turbulent history and progress of the High Speed 2 rail programme and identifies reasons underlying its enormous cost overruns and delays. Gilligan argues there were four flaws in the fundamental concept which doomed any chances of success: the wrong route, the wrong speed, poor connectivity with other modes of transport and a ratchet effect of incremental failures and inefficiencies. Rail guru Christian Wolmar has called HS2 “the biggest omnishambles in history” and the final cost is likely to be considerably north of £100 billion; yet I cannot say there is much confidence that lessons will be learned.

2. “‘Trope’ is not a synonym of ‘lie’”: a perceptive and cautionary article in The Critic by Ben Sixsmith, prising apart the two concepts of lying and using tropes and pointing out that the two are fundamentally different. The shooting of Chris Kaba by Sergeant Martyn Blake of the Metropolitan Police has prompted a torrent of commentary, some of its deeply rushed and poorly constructed. As Ben makes clear, Kaba was not killed because of his background or identity but because of his actions and the police’s reaction to them, and so far from being “unaccountable” Sergeant Blake was literally tried for murder at the Old Bailey and acquitted.

3. “Of Course Black Men Are Drifting Toward Trump”: in The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper examines an apparent conundrum. He is clear that “you would be hard-pressed to find a more brazenly racist major American politician on this side of the Civil Rights Act” than Donald Trump, and yet polling suggests that a quarter of black male voters support him, more than have backed any Republican candidate in history. The reason is straightforward and ideological: “Black voters are both more culturally conservative and more economically liberal than the current version of the Democratic Party”. As a result, despite Trump regularly expressing or tacitly endorsing views on race which are toxic, a substantial number of black voters will look beyond the candidate and play the ball rather than the man. Two observations are worth making. The first is that the Democratic Party in its current iteration is some distance from natural ideological alignment now not just from many black voters but Hispanic voters and other ethnic minorities. The second is that if Donald Trump can capture the support of one in four black male voters, what proportion could a Republican candidate without a track record of fairly grim gut-level racism win over?

4. “How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors Behind Every Successful Project, from Home Renovations to Space Exploration”: this fascinating book by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner examines why major projects like HS2 (see above) so reliably go wrong and how they can be executed efficiently and according to budget and schedule. In principle, the solutions are not complex, but they become enormously challenging to implement in the context of public policy, government funding and supervision and hard-to-quantify issues like reputational and electoral pressures. Well worth reading and then giving to everyone you know who works in politics in any way.

5. “Team Trump: who’s in—and who’s out?”: in The Spectator, deputy editor Freddy Gray looks ahead to next week’s presidential election and the figures who would have influence in a second Trump White House. He makes the point that family is the overriding priority; although Ivanka and Jared Kushner, major players in the first administration, may no longer be in the picture, Don Jr is driving the Make America Great Again agenda, Eric is responsible for the Trump Organization and Eric’s wife Lara is co-chair of the Republican National Committee. Also waiting in the wings are Elon Musk, Robert Kennedy Jr, Stephen Miller, Vivek Ramaswamy and Howard Lutnick. Quite a collection.

My necessaries are embark’d…

… as Laertes says. Farewell. As the winds give benefit and convey is assistant, do not sleep, but let me hear from you. Or, whevs.