Sunday round-up 4 May 2025
The anniversary of Margaret Thatcher's appointment as Prime Minister in 1979, birthday wishes for George Will and Rory McIlroy, and it's Star Wars Day (ahem)
Form an orderly queue to give the bumps to former Chairman and CEO of AIG and philanthropist Hank Greenberg (100), musical matriarch Katherine Jackson (95), physician and author Robin Cook (85), Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and personal hero George F. Will (84), engineer and racing car designer John Barnard (79), Grand Prix winner and commentator John Watson (79), singer-songwriter, dancer and son of Katherine (see above) Sigmund “Jackie” Jackson (74), child star and legendarily bad actress Pia Zadora (71), former Conservative MP and cabinet minister Dame Caroline Spelman (67), country singer-songwriter and actor Randy Travis (66), dancer, acrobat, one-time “Miss Purley” and Bucks Fizz stalwart Jay Aston (64), broadcaster and journalist Kate Garraway (58), dancer, actor, producer and NSYNC bass Lance Bass (46), actress Ruth Negga (44), golfer, Holywood native and recent Masters Tournament winner Rory McIlroy (36) and singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist and possible pseudonym user Rex Orange County (27).
No longer being bumped (at least not in this life) are inventor of the piano Bartolomeo Cristofori di Francesco (1655), abolitionist and the “Father of American Education” Horace Mann (1796), biologist, anatomist and champion of evolution Thomas Henry Huxley (1825), possible Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland inspiration and better-leave-it-there Alice Liddell (1852), former Archbishop of New York and purveyor of spicy takes Francis Spellman (1889), actor and comedian Eric Sykes (1923), long-time President of Egypt Hosni Mubarak (1928), actress, style icon and improbable famous Belgian Audrey Hepburn (1929), surf-rock guitar maestro Dick Dale (1937), journalist and author Amos Oz (1939) and former King of Tonga George Tupou V (1948).
That’ll show him
On this day in 1415, the Council of Constance declared the English priest, theologian and religious reformer John Wyclif to be a heretic and banned his works. The ecumenical council of the Catholic Church had convened in the southern German city (modern Konstanz) in October 1414 primarily to resolve the Great Schism which had afflicted the Church since 1378 and had reached a point of absurdity. At that point, there were three rival popes, all claiming to be the legitimate successor of St Peter: Gregory XII in Rome, Benedict XIII in Avignon and John XXIII flitting between Pisa and Florence. Each was supported by various European countries but the situation was clearly at a point of crisis, and Pope John was persuaded by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund to convene a general or ecumenical council of the Church to determine who would be pontiff.
This had been tried only five years before, when the Council of Pisa had deposed Benedict XIII and Gregory XII for schism and manifest heresy, and instead elected the Archbishop of Milan, a Cretan cardinal called Petros Philargos, as Alexander V. He had died after 11 months, however, and John XXIII had been elected to replace him. Meanwhile the other two popes remained in place.
The Council of Constance would sit for three-and-a-half years, and was attended by 29 cardinals, 100 “learned doctors of law and divinity”, 134 abbots and 183 archbishops and bishops. In February 1415, it was agreed that the attendees would vote in blocs or “nations”, in imitation of the organisation of mediaeval universities: England, France, Italy and Germany, the last also including Poles, Hungarians and Scandinavians. In February 1416, the delegation from Spain arrived and was recognised as the fifth nation.
Of the three papal claimants, only John XXIII attended personally, but soon realised he had overestimated his support. The Italian bishops were steadfastly behind him but many other attendees took the same view as the Emperor, that all three would-be popes should resign and a new pontiff be elected. In March 1415, John pledged to resign, but three weeks later fled Constance disguised as a postman and sought refuge with one of his supporters, the Habsburg ruler Frederick, Duke of Austria and Count of Tyrol. The Council then passed the decree Haec sancta synodus, which declared that an ecumenical council had authority even over the papacy because its power came “immediately from Christ”. This paved the way for solving the decades-long schism, as John XXIII was deposed in his absence in May and Gregory XII abdicated in July. Nothing would persuade Benedict XIII to do the same, so in July 1417 he was declared a schismatic and excommunicated, and in November the Council chose Oddone Cardinal Colonna, a former ally of John XXIII, as Pope Martin V.
The Council also intended to deal with heresy, especially the teachings of the Czech priest and theologian Jan Hus, who had been excommunicated in 1410 for attacking the sale of indulgences and supporting a vernacular Bible and communion under both kinds (that is, bread and wine). Hus was summoned to the Council to debate his views with a promise of safe passage, but on arrival he was arrested and the recantation of his beliefs demanded. When he refused, he was burned at the stake as a heretic on 6 July 1415.
This was after the condemnation of Wyclif, but the Council has less leverage over the Englishman, not least because he had been dead for 30 years. That said, eventually, in 1428, his body was exhumed in Lutterworth in Leicestershire, burned and the ashes scattered in the River Swift. But Hus had been strongly influenced by Wyclif’s views, including the need for Scripture in the vernacular and the condemnation of indulgences.
Wyclif was a Yorkshireman, born near Richmond some time in the 1320s. Little of his early life is definitively known, but by around 1345 he was at the University of Oxford, recorded variously as associated with The Queen’s College, Merton and Balliol, and he was ordained a priest in 1351. The chronology of his time at Oxford is somewhat muddled, but he was Master of Balliol College for a while, having been a junior fellow at Merton, and seems to have been appointed Warden of Canterbury Hall, an institution for monastic and secular clergy at Oxford, then swiftly replaced by a monk. He appealed to Rome against this decision in 1367, and it was eventually refused in 1371. He also held livings in Lincolnshire and Buckinghamshire, but in 1374 he became priest of Lutterworth, retaining the position for the rest of his life.
What is clear is that by this date Wyclif was a scholar and theologian of some renown, not just at Oxford but on the radar of King Edward III (who appointed him to Lutterworth). In 1374 he was part of a delegation of English clergy who met with papal representatives in Bruges to discuss various largely administrative issues disputed between England and the papacy, but he also began writing publicly: De civili dominio (1377) argued that the Church should divest itself of its enormous property and that clergy should live in poverty, which earned him condemnation and censure by Pope Gregory XI and a summons to appear before the Bishop of London. But he found favour with the anti-clericalist party led by John of Gaunt, the Duke of Lancaster and son of the King, who was the richest man in England and virtual head of the government during the senility of Edward III and the minority of Richard II.
By the beginning of the 1380s, Wyclif had gone from an outspoken reformer to something dangerously close to heresy. It was one thing to attack the temporal power and wealth of the Church, as he did in De incarcerandis fedelibus, De officio regis and De ecclesia, arguing that the King and Parliament should have authority over excommunication rather than the Church alone. But De Eucharistia (1380) denied the doctrine of transubstantiation and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and at the same time he commissioned a translation of the New Testament into Middle English. This was combined with a passionate belief in the power of preaching and in justification by faith alone was enough to be a movement; his arguments were taken up by priests and preachers, and made exponentially more dangerous with the eruption of the Peasants’ Revolt in the summer of 1381.
Wyclif was summoned to appear before a synod in Oxford in November 1382, and then to Rome the following year. But he suffered a debilitating stroke and was excused from travelling, and returned to Lutterworth. He continued to write polemics against Church order, but as he was saying Mass on Holy Innocents’ Day, 28 December 1384, he suffered another stroke and died a few days later, probably in his late fifties. His teachings were now in the ether, however, and grew into what was England’s first full-blown domestic heresy: his followers became known as “Lollards”, probably from the Middle Dutch lollaerd or “mumbler”, and in 1395 the Twelve Conclusions of the Lollards, summarising Wyclif’s approach to religion and the Church, were presented to Parliament.
The response was the Suppression of Heresy Act 1400, more descriptively known as De haeretico comburendo, which identified Lollardy not only as theological and doctrinal heresy but also as sedition and an offence against the temporal order, punishable by death. In March 1401, a Norfolk priest, Fr William Sawtrey, became the first Lollard to be burned at the stake for heresy at Smithfield in London. Sir John Oldcastle led a Lollard-inspired uprising against Henry IV in 1414 but it was quickly and severely put down, with 79 Lollards being burned or hanged. The movement lacked a large-scale popular base but never quite went away throughout the 15th century and was used freely by the Catholic Church as a tool to justify suppression of any kind of heterodoxy. Wyclif, however, had died without ever being formally charged or excommunicated, and it was to make good that oversight that, 31 years later, he was denounced at the Council of Constance.
There is a long-standing historiographical debate as to how far Wyclif and Lollardy were forerunners of the Reformation, given some of the theological arguments common to the two movements: justification by faith alone, condemnation of Church wealth and hierarchy, denial of the efficacy of indulgences, Scripture in the vernacular. Did Wyclif walk so that Luther might run? It would be perverse to deny any connection. Certainly Jan Hus was heavily influenced by Wyclif, and Hussitism blended with political factors to assume a strength in Bohemia that Lollardy never had in England, and after 15 years of conflict a degree of autonomy in practice was allowed to moderate Hussites while their radical brethren were proscribed. Equally, when Martin Luther went to face the Reichstag at Worms in 1521 with a promise of safe passage, everyone would have had in mind Hus’s fate at Constance 106 years before. There is a strong sense of the aphorism attributed to Mark Twain that history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.
Two final thoughts: a critical difference between Lollardy and, say, the early work of Luther was the milieu. Wyclif lived in an age before printing, which dramatically limited to potential reach of his prodigious output, and, for all his doctrinal radicalism, he remained in essence an Oxford scholastic theologian and philosopher, working in relatively abstruse and impenetrable language and concepts. Luther was no less able a scholar nor less of a product of the mediaeval university system—he was an Augustinian friar, remember, a doctor of theology trained at Erfurt and Wittenberg and a professor of the Bible—but he grasped in a way Wyclif did not how to connect with ordinary people beyond academia, his works were translated swiftly into a number of European languages and Wittenberg became one of the biggest printing centres on the continent (for more about the transmission of Luther’s ideas, read the outstanding Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation (2016) by my old doctoral supervisor Andrew Pettegree).
The other observation is that, despite the appearance of Lollardy in the late 14th century and the stiff measures introduced to suppress it, England was, right up until the beginning of the Henrician Reformation in the late 1520s, a relatively conservative country in religious terms. It is true there was a long tradition (much longer than most people suppose) of vernacular translations of at least portions of Scripture; while Wyclif’s Bible was the first complete English version, St Bede had translated the Gospel of St John into Old English shortly before his death in AD 735, and the Vespasian Psalter, from around the same time, had an interlinear gloss in Old English of the Book of Psalms. Otherwise, however, a visitor to England in around 1500 would have found a Catholicism which may not have been intellectually the most vibrant in Europe but was healthy, orderly and orthodox, and well entrenched in the wider cycle of communal life (the classic work of local pre-Reformation English piety remains Eamon Duffy’s The Voices of Morebath: Reformation & Rebellion in an English Village, well worth a read even for non-specialists).
The lady’s not for turning
Today in 1979, Margaret Thatcher, having led the Conservative Party to victory at the previous day’s general election, went to Buckingham Palace to kiss hands with the Queen and become Prime Minister. She was Elizabeth II’s eighth premier in 27 years, and by far the closest in age, only six months older than the monarch. She was also the United Kingdom’s first female Prime Minister, and only the sixth woman to be head of government anywhere in the world (see below). Thatcher spent 45 minutes with the Queen then was driver, with her husband Denis, to Number 10 Downing Street. At the door of her new official residence, holding a notecard with the headings jotted on it, she responded to questions from journalists and famously quoted “some words of St Francis of Assist which I think are really just particularly apt at the moment”.
Where there is discord, may we bring harmony;
Where there is error, may we bring truth;
Where there is doubt, may we bring faith;
And where there is despair, may we bring hope.
It was, of course, not wholly in tune with what would emerge as her style of government. Nor was it actually the work of St Francis: although it was taken from what is commonly known as the Peace Prayer of St Francis of Assisi, the words cannot be verified before 1912. It had been suggested to Thatcher by her speechwriter, playwright Ronald Millar. She had been anxious that the prayer might be too controversial on her first day, but Millar was adamant: “Churchill spent half his life being controversial and much of what he said is remembered whether people agreed with it at the time or not”.
Forty-six years on, it is easy to forget how improbable Thatcher’s victory was in many ways. She was 53 years old and had been in Parliament for nearly two decades, but had only held one middle-ranking cabinet position, as Education and Science Secretary from 1970 to 1974. Her rise to lead the Conservative Party in 1975—which I explored at some length here in January 2023—had been to a degree accidental, when no other plausible figure came forward to challenge Edward Heath, and by 1979 she had by no means won the majority of her colleagues over to her firmly held, slightly stern monetarist views. She was a fierce and confident performer but very clearly learning as she went, and even with the open goal presented by the fragile Labour administration of Harold Wilson (1974-76) and James Callaghan (1976-79), she could not count on election victory.
Callaghan had defeated Michael Foot, Roy Jenkins, Tony Benn, Denis Healey and Anthony Crosland, quite a field, to succeed Harold Wilson as Leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister in April 1976. He assumed the premiership at the age of 64 and in inauspicious circumstances: there was double-digit inflation, unemployment was rising and within months a financial crisis took place so severe that Healey, Chancellor of the Exchequer, was forced to seek a $3.9 billion loan from the International Monetary Fund to maintain the value of sterling. Cuts in public spending were the inevitable result, and the government’s difficulties were compounded by the fact that the majority of three it had won in October 1974 had disappeared by the time Callaghan took over and he had to manage to challenges of a minority government. The so-called Lib-Lab pact, which afforded him the support of the Liberal Party from March 1977 to August 1978, brought some relief but also exposed the government’s fragility.
Incredibly, however, not all was lost: by the summer of 1978, the opinion polls showed the Labour Party enjoying a lead over Thatcher’s Conservatives of up to five points. Callaghan, avuncular and reassuring, was seen to have handled the financial crisis adeptly, while Thatcher remained untested and lacking in warmth. Inflation was back into single digits and unemployment was gradually falling. It was expected that the Prime Minister would call an election in the autumn and was likely to win majority, making his and his party’s position safe until 1983, and a general election loss might well have been fatal for Thatcher, a vindication of everything her critics had said. Then, at the Trades Union Congress in Brighton in October, adapting an old music hall song, Callaghan made it clear there would be no election that autumn.
The Winter of Discontent followed, widespread industrial action as trades unions demanded higher pay increases than the government was willing to countenance. It coincided with bitterly cold weather and soured the public mood, and Labour’s poll ratings dropped sharply: a five per cent lead in November 1978 became a 7.5 per cent disadvantage by January 1979, and the following month the Conservatives were 20 points ahead. The government was defeated on a confidence motion in the House of Commons in March and Callaghan requested a dissolution of Parliament and a general election. The Conservative poll lead fluctuated, however, going as high as 21 per cent and as low as three, and an opinion poll two days before the election had put the Labour Party 0.7 per cent ahead. Thatcher worried that there would be another hung Parliament, even if her party was the largest, and it was more than five years since there had been a government with a stable working majority.
The Iron Lady need not have worried. On 3 May, the Conservatives won 339 seats, their share of the vote up eight points at 43.9 per cent, and Thatcher was rewarded with a majority of 43, more than enough for a full Parliament. Labour’s vote share only dropped by 2.3 per cent, but the Liberals suffered a setback and lost two of its 13 MPs, while the Scottish National Party went from 11 seats to only two. Callaghan’s instinct was to resign as Labour leader straight away—he was by now 67—but he stayed on for 18 months, hoping that his former Chancellor, Denis Healey, the biggest beast in the Labour jungle, would replace him. It didn’t work. The party began a period of savage internecine strife, the witty and learned but unelectable Michael Foot was chosen as leader in November 1980, 28 Labour MPs left to join the new Social Democratic Party the following year and Thatcher won the 1983 general election handsomely, Labour proposing a radical left-wing manifesto mordantly dubbed by Gerald Kaufman “the longest suicide note in history”.
Whatever your view of Thatcher and Thatcherism, 1979 was the beginning of dramatic and thorough break with the past. The post-war economic consensus was played out, the Labour Party had a long period on painful introspection ahead of it, Margaret Thatcher would redefine the Conservative Party and win over a new generation of voters, and nothing would ever quite be the same again.
Party hats all round
Today is the feast of St Florian (AD 250-AD 304), a Roman military commander from central Europe executed by his soldiers for refusing to make sacrifices to the pagan pantheon by being thrown into the River Enns with a millstone round his neck, who is now one of the patron saints of Poland as well as Linz and Upper Austria, and chimney-sweeps, soap-makers, brewers and firefighters; of St Judas Cyriacus (d AD 360), a Jew from Ancona who helped St Helena find the True Cross and was martyred during pilgrimage to the Holy Land, his supposed body now visible in the Cathedral of San Ciriaco in Ancona; of St Sacerdos of Limoges (AD 670-AD 720), a French monk from the Dordogne who founded Calviac Abbey and was Bishop of Limoges then Bishop of Sigüenza; and of St José María Rubio (1864-1929), a Spanish Jesuit who preached and ministered to the poor in Madrid and whose motto was “Do what God wants and want what God does”.
Away from the Kingdom of Heaven, it is International Firefighters’ Day, which requires no explanation, the Day of the Restoration of Independence of the Republic of Latvia, Remembrance of the Dead in the Netherlands, Literary Day in the Republic of China (that is, Taiwan), Greenery Day in Japan, Death of Milan Rastislav Štefánik Day in Slovakia commemorating the death in 1919 of one of the founders of Czechoslovakia and National Youth Day in Fiji.
It is also, of course, the informal celebration of Star Wars Day (“May the Fourth be with you”, yes, I’m sorry, it wasn’t my idea), which has been marked by the emotionally stunted and single since 2011 (it started in Toronto: of course it did).
Factoids
I mentioned that Margaret Thatcher became in 1979 only the sixth female head of government in the world. I knew you’d ask: Sirimavo Bandaranaike (Ceylon/Sri Lanka) 1960-65, 1970-77; Indira Gandhi (India) 1966-77, 1980-84; Golda Meir (Israel) 1969-74; Isabel Perón (Argentina) 1974-76; and Elisabeth Domitien (Central African Republic) 1975-76. Portugal, England’s oldest ally, would follow the example of Thatcher less than three months afterwards, when Maria de Lourdes Pintasilgo was appointed as Prime Minister of a caretaker administration by the President, General António Ramalho Eanes.
Eagle-eyed readers will have spotted that there was a brief period of time, at the beginning of 1976, when four of the first five female heads of government were in office, only Golda Meir having stepped down as Prime Minister of Israel.
Bandaranaike, Gandhi, Perón and Domitien all attended Roman Catholic schools at some point in their childhoods. (Golda Meir attended public schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.)
Although Thatcher was the first woman to be Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and was in office for 11½ years, she only ever appointed one other woman to the cabinet in that time: Baroness Young, a former leader of Oxford City Council ennobled under Edward Heath, was Leader of the House of Lords from September 1981 to June 1983, but was demoted to Minister of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, outside the cabinet, after the 1983 general election. Thatcher concluded that she “was perhaps too consistent an advocate of caution on all occasions”, an attitude which sat uneasily with her prime ministerial mission.
Continuing last week’s papal theme, the youngest Pope in history was Benedict IX in the 11th century, and his is quite a story. He was born Theophylactus, son of Count Alberic III of Tusculum, in Rome in around 1012, the nephew of two popes, grandnephew of another and great-grandnephew of still another. Alberic styled himself “Consul, Duke and Patrician of the Romans”, acknowledging his temporal control over Rome and the surrounding territories, and he was also Count of the Sacred Lateran Palace, an office within the Curia. In 1032, Theophylactus’s uncle Pope John XIX died, and Alberic used widespread bribery to have him elected as his uncle’s successor, becoming Pope Benedict IX. He was somewhere between 18 and 20 (stories that he was 11 or 12 are probably mistaken), and the youngest pontiff ever.
Benedict IX was also manifestly unsuited, supposedly dissolute, and at the centre of a court riven by factional strife. In 1044, a revolt in Rome drove him out of the city and Giovanni dei Crescenzi, the Bishop of Sabina, was installed as Pope Sylvester III; Benedict excommunicated him and within two months returned to Rome and expelled Sylvester, who went back to his episcopal duties in Sabina. So Benedict entered his second papacy, but his heart was not in it and he wanted to marry. Accordingly, he consulted his godfather, Giovanni Cardinal Graziano, Archpriest of St John by the Latin Gate and a widely respected figure in Rome, as to whether it was possible to abdicate. On being advised that it was, he agreed to vacate the papacy so long as his and his father’s original election expenses were reimbursed. Graziano saw the opportunity to be rid of a clearly inadequate pontiff, paid the money and was recognised as Pope Gregory VI in May 1045.
Gregory VI was unable to restore peace, not least because dei Crescenzi, back in his diocese, still maintained a claim to the papacy, and Benedict was unable to wed his desired bride and changed his mind; he wanted to be Pope again. In an attempt to mediate, the King of the Romans and Holy Roman Emperor-elect, Henry III, convened a synod at Sutri, 30 miles outside Rome and summoned all three aspirant Bishops of Rome, of whom Sylvester and Gregory attended. Henry deposed all three and installed his ally Suidger von Morsleben-Horneburg, Bishop of Bamberg, as Pope Clement II. Within a year, however, the new Pope had died, and Benedict IX seized the Lateran Palace and became Pope for a third time. It was not for long: in July 1048 he was driven out by German troops and the splendidly named Poppo von Brixen was elected Pope Damasus II, his reign lasting for 23 days before he died, possibly of malaria. Benedict was charged with simony the following year and excommunicated after failing to appear at his trial. His fate after 1048 is obscure, but he seems to have given up any hope of a fourth pontificate, and he died in 1055 or 1056 in Grottaferrata, just outside Rome, in his early forties, having, I think it’s fair to say, packed a lot in to a short life.
Mention of De haeretico comburendo and Jan Hus’s death in 1415 makes me think—like any normal person—about burning at the stake. Despite the way we commemorate the Gunpowder Plot every 5 November, Guy Fawkes was not in fact burned at the stake but hanged and quartered (“luckily”, in the most reductive sense, he broke his neck and died during the hanging so was already dead by the time his body was cut into four and the pieces despatched to various parts of the kingdom while his head was placed on a pole in London). Equally, at the famous/infamous Salem Witch Trials in Massachusetts in 1692-93, although we think of burning witches, none of those who died was burned: 14 women and five men were hanged, at least five others died of disease while in prison, and 81-year-old Giles Corey, accused on being a wizard, refused to enter a plea either way. He was therefore subjected to peine forte et dure, a process by which the accused was stripped naked and a heavy board placed on the body on to which rocks were piled. This pressing was supposed to induce a plea one way or the other and Corey was subjected twice, on 17 and 19 September 1692, but steadfastly refused to answer, and died at noon on the second day, his last words supposedly being “More rocks” or “More weight”.
In 1881, a signalman on the Cape Town-Port Elizabeth railway in South Africa, James “Jumper” Wade, faced a professional crisis. He earned his nickname from the habit of jumping between railcars but had fallen and lost both of his legs below the knee. His solution was to purchase a baboon named Jack whom he trained not only to push his wheelchair but also to operate the signals under supervision. He did not initially inform this railway management of this solution, and a passenger reported seeing a baboon changing the signals at Uitenhage near Port Elizabeth, so an investigation was started. Wade’s employers were (understandably) initially sceptical about this unorthodox arrangement, but, showing an admirable willingness to embrace change, they agreed that if Jack’s competency could be verified, they would employ him officially. It was, and they did, for 20 cents a day and half a bottle of beer a week. Jack the baboon worked for the railway for nine years before his death from tuberculosis in 1890, and never made a mistake.
The coming week sees Victory in Europe Day on 8 May, marking the unconditional surrender of the German armed forces in 1945, but Russia commemorates the defeat of Nazism the following day, 9 May, as it was on that day that the surrender was announced in Moscow. To say that it came as a relief to the Soviet Union, which suffered 8.7 million military and maybe 18 or 20 million civilian deaths, would be an understatement. The celebrations were so intense that by 10 May 1945, there was no more vodka in Moscow for sale. It had all been drunk.
“Write what will stop your breath if you don’t write.” (Grace Paley)
“The Trump GOP’s attacks on universities advance the left’s agenda”: on his 84th birthday, one of this week’s columns in The Washington Post by the mighty George F. Will, in which he skewers the intellectual mess and petty anger and revenge of Trumpism. Again and again, we find that when the President rails against an “abuse”, like that of freedom of speech or the judicial system, it’s not that he’s outraged about the infringement of principle, but what he sees as the infringement of principle by the other side. So with universities: “as “conservatives” mount sustained attacks on left-dominated educational institutions, they advance the left’s perennial agenda—the permeation of everything with politics”. It’s not the politicisation of higher education the MAGA right hates, it’s the kind of politics, and they want to replace it with more congenial ideology. In fact the fundamental problem is that politicisation is there at all, and that’s what a conservative administration would root out. But for Trump, everything is about winners and losers. He has to win, so someone else as to lose.
“The Truth Underlying Pete Hegseth’s Job Security”: Vanity Fair’s Gabriel Sherman explores the situation at the Department of Defense, where even President Trump concedes that Pete Hegseth is not enjoying a smooth ride (“I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him”). Equally, Trump has supposedly decided on a “no scalps” rule, meaning he will not dispose of any cabinet officials on the basis of adverse media coverage. Indeed, the worse the coverage, the more the President’s resentful paranoia grows and the more stubbornly he will defend his appointees. The MAGA purge of the Pentagon has not made the situation any more stable—the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Chief of Naval Operations, the Commandant of the US Coast Guard, the Director of the National Security Agency and the Vice-Chief of the Air Force are just some of those dismissed—and the appalling security lapse of Signalgate has added additional pressure. But we can overanalyse this: Pete Hegseth is struggling to run the Department of Defense (2.8 million employees and a annual budget of $850 billion) because he’s not up to it, in terms of experience, ability or temperament. He’s a swaggering, simplistic, aggressive talkshow host fixated with the idea of “the warrior ethos” and shows no signs of wanting or being able to make a considered and rational decision about anything. Worse, he seems to gauge his “effectiveness” by the volume of criticism, a sure sign of an overconfident midwit. He shouldn’t be there and he’s inadequate and unqualified, so it’s not an enormous surprise that he’s struggling. That said, when former US Marine Corps intelligence officer Colin Carroll was asked recently if the Secretary of Defense was emotionally all right, he answered hesitantly “I honestly—I don’t know. I’m not sure.”
“‘It is sad that we are sometimes seen as just killers’: an interview with Japan’s last ninja”: a delightful encounter in The Spectator between Tokyo University lecturer Philip Patrick and 76-year-old Jinichi Kawakami, regarded by many as “the last ninja”. He is head of the Banke Shinobinoden school of ninjutsu (ninja culture), director of the Iga-ryu Ninja Museum and Ninja Council, and a professor of Ninja Studies at Mie University, which seem strong qualifications. In this polite, guarded and elegiac exchange, Kawakami explains what and who ninjas really were, why they were significant and how he feels about such a long and famous tradition petering out. Not an exchange I had expected to read, but a real joy.
“How is ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ TV show even dumber than the book?”: I suspect I agree with Eris about almost nothing, and in truth I don’t even have especially strong feelings about Margaret Atwood, but I came across this polemic by accident, in which the author eviscerates Atwood, her dystopian novel of 1985 The Handmaid’s Tale and, especially, the Bruce Miller TV adaptation on Hulu. The arguments, though iconoclastic and savage, hang together and had me nodding more often than I expected. I don’t know if it’s accurate or fair or right, or none of those things, but it’s intelligent and I admired the bravura pace and swing of it. Given how The Handmaid’s Tale is revered as a classic, this is worth reading merely to hear another side of the argument. But brace yourself.
“How Labour lost the North East”: musician and community worker David Littlefair grew up, as I did, in Sunderland, and we must be similar ages (I think he is a bit younger) so my attention was drawn to this piece in The Critic. Littlefair chronicles the erosion of Labour Party support in the North East, once a heartland, and the growing strength of Reform UK. I agree with a lot of what he says, and much is undeniable: when I was growing up in the 1980s, the idea that the North East would ever be anything other than rock-solid for Labour was absurd. Stockton South, Darlington and Langbaurgh had all had Conservative phases after the SDP/Liberal Alliance had split the centre-left vote in 1983 and 1987, Tynemouth had once been reliably Tory in all but the worst years and I found it quaintly amusing that my home constituency of Sunderland South had been represented by a Conservative between 1953 and 1964, but in the Conservative rout of 1997, only Peter Atkinson in Hexham remained in the whole region. In places like Easington and North West Durham, it really was the old joke about weighing rather than counting the Labour vote. A lot that changed in 2019, when Boris Johnson’s Conservatives swept through the Red Wall and installed MPs in places which I would never have believed, like Sedgefield and Blyth Valley, but that was manifestation not so much of a convinced swing towards Conservatism as the first major weakening of tribal loyalties which had lasted a century. Effectively, for the first time, huge numbers of voters across the North East were looking for a home, and many still are. Reform UK has recently provided that for many but I don’t think the process is over yet. The Labour Party I knew, built on class solidarity, heavy industry, a long struggle for rights and sheer endurance, the party shown so deftly in Peter Flannery’s Our Friends In The North, is gone and won’t be back. It was built on economic, social and cultural circumstances we wouldn’t even recognise today. Who wins the struggle for North Eastern voters is another issue.
“I don’t dream at night, I dream at day, I dream all day; I’m dreaming for a living.” (Steven Spielberg)
This week, as I have yet again watched very little television, we are trying something new (my friends know how easily and readily I welcome change and novelty). Five films, some of which you may have seen, all of which were released 50 years ago, some time in 1975.
“Monty Python and the Holy Grail”: not the group’s first feature film, but 1971’s And Now For Something Completely Different had been a compilation of sketches, while Holy Grail was a single (if deliciously barmy) story of King Arthur (Graham Chapman) searching for knights to join him at his Round Table, and then being ordered by God to find the Holy Grail. It was directed by Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones, both making their directorial debuts, with all six Pythons contributing to the script. The budget, only £175,350, came from eight investors, mostly as a tax write-off, including Led Zeppelin, Pink Floyd, Ian Anderson of Jethro Tull and record labels Island Records, Chrysalis Records and Charisma Records. It is cheap, basic, woolly and often feels semi-improvised, and is much less polished than the film which followed it, 1979’s Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Yet there is a real charm to Holy Grail, and its sheer silliness and unpredictability can be screamingly funny. Some of us have large tranches of the script burned into our memories (“Tis but a scratch!”, “Your muzzer waz an ’amster and your fazzer smelt of elderberries”, “Help! Help! I’m being repressed!”), and some will find it simply impenetrable, but I’ve always relished it’s light-hearted charm and chaos.
“Jaws”: the most famous music in cinema history? Certainly a strong contender. Jaws has an almost foolishly simple plot—shark terrorises coastal resort, mayor torn between public safety and the livelihood of the town, three men and a boat eventually hunt the shark to its demise—and grew from Peter Benchley’s successful novel of the previous year. But director Steven Spielberg had two strokes of genius: to leave the shark largely unseen until the final scenes, with only an occasional fin breaking the surface of the water; and to commission composer John Williams to produce the scintillating score. The film also benefits from three outstanding performances from Roy Scheider as Chief of Police Martin Brody, Richard Dreyfuss as marine biologist Martin Hooper and Robert Shaw pushing himself right to the edge of overacting without ever going too far as grizzled local shark hunter Quint. The film is actually a shade over two hours long but never seems it, always taut and tense, a brilliant demonstration of the power of good storytelling and never giving away too much. You’re gonna need a bigger boat…
“The Man Who Would Be King”: I’ve recommended this recently but I’m no compunction in doing so again, because the John Huston adaptation of Rudyard Kipling’s short story is sensational. Rich, earthy, dark, funny and oddly endearing, it is the tale of two former soldiers in the British Army in India, Daniel Drevot (Sean Connery) and Peachy Carnehan (Michael Caine) who go in search of the virtually unknown Kafiristan. They go north through the Khyber Pass and across Afghanistan, picking up former Gurkha Billy Fish (Saeed Jaffrey) on the way, help hard-pressed local tribesmen defend themselves against raiders, then Drevot is taken to be a god and… well, does being taken for a god ever end well? Connery and Caine were both in their forties when the film was made, no longer young but settling into magnificent gravitas and richness as actors. A great Sunday afternoon film, but with enough depth to reward viewing after viewing for more than just the comfort of familiarity.
“One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”: based on Ken Kesey’s novel of 1962, this tells the story of Randle McMurphy (Jack Nicholson), imprisoned for statutory rape, who feigns mental illness to be moved to a hospital rather than be forced to undertake hard labour on a work farm in Oregon. But he finds the régime of Nurse Mildred Ratched (Louise Fletcher) infinitely more brutal and terrifying, learning that sentence limits no longer apply in a mental institution and he could be detained indefinitely. His relationship with the other patients is a study in intricate and sad beauty and Nicholson doesn’t hold back in his battle of wits with Ratched, who sees the threat he represents to her authority. It’s not a perfect film, in terms of pace, construction or plot, but at its best it is so intense you can hardly watch but cannot possibly look away.
“Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom”: now, look, I’ll be honest. Not everyone likes this weird, twisted, shocking film by Pier Paolo Pasolini. I’m not even sure I like it. I had heard of it, in hushed, semi-legendary tones, decades before I saw it but everything I’d heard was true. It is, I will say, not like any other film I’ve ever seen. Essentially, it takes the Marquis de Sade’s unfinished 1785 novel The 120 Days of Sodom and sets it in 1944 in the Italian Social Republic, the rump fascist polity in northern Italy where Benito Mussolini retreated as the Allies moved up from Sicily and Naples, after he was ousted by the Grand Council of Fascism in Rome and the government of King Vittorio Emanuele III sued for peace. Four wealthy powerful men, named as the Duke, the Bishop, the Magistrate and the President, facing inevitable defeat and death, agree to marry each other’s daughters and retreat to a mansion for what is in effect an attempt to find the limits of debauchery and libertinism (and they look hard, believe me). Pasolini was a peculiar, unhappy and tortured man, and in many senses Salò is an indulgent exploration of how gross and dark and perverted the human mind can be, and it’s not a film you would (I hope) watch every few weeks. I found something horrifyingly compelling about the spiral of madness as the characters egg each other on and abandon any limits of human decency, and I’m glad I’ve seen it. But, as I say, I’m still not sure if I liked it. Pasolini was savagely beaten and murdered on a beach in Ostia three weeks before the film was released in November 1975, in grotesque circumstances which have never been fully explained.
We’re leaving Downing Street for the last time…
… after eleven-and-a-half wonderful years and we’re happy to leave the UK in a very much better state than when we came here.