Sunday round-up 5 May 2024

Celebrating the first issue of The Guardian and the meeting of the French États Généraux on the brink of the revolution, as well as Sir Michael Palin's birthday

Today’s birthday selection features Monty Python founder and professional traveller Sir Michael Palin (81), the never-knowlingly-underacting John Rhys-Davies (80), Swaziland’s own Richard E. Grant (67), calendar-based seducer Craig David (43) and the imcomparable Adele (36).

Today in 1640, Charles I dissolved Parliament. It is significant because the legislature had only been sitting since 13 April, and its three-week tenure led to it being labelled the “Short Parliament”. The king needed money to finance his war against the Covenanters in Scotland, but MPs were more interested in debating the rights of the Crown and infringements of parliamentary privilege. Charles’s offer to stop levying ship money was not persuasive enough, so he cut his losses and sent the two Houses away.

At the other end of the parliamentary scale, today in 1789 the États Généraux assembled in Paris because Louis XVI was also in dire financial straits. But it was a striking demonstration of the different traditions of the two countries: the French legislature had last sat in 1614. By this time, the country was sliding towards revolution.

Today in 1821 the first edition of The Manchester Guardian was published, funded by the Little Circle, a group of non-conformist merchants and businessmen. For all its faults, the newspaper is still going. Seventy years later, the Music Hall opened at 881 Seventh Avenue in New York. Now more famous as Carnegie Hall, the first concert featured a rendition of the hymn “Old Hundredth” and a speech by Henry Codman Potter, the bishop of New York. The guest conductor was the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, about to turn 51.

In 1945, the date saw the only fatalities of the Second World War in the continental United States: a Japanese Fu-Go balloon bomb, a hydrogen-filled paper balloon carrying four 11-pound incendiary devices and a 33-pound anti-personnel bomb, was pulled from trees near Bly, Oregon, by curious observers. Five of were killed, four of them children.

Last week I mentioned the feast of St Aphrodisius, bishop of Béziers; today the Church commemorates St Hilarius, bishop of Arles, less than 100 miles away, who died in AD 449. He was a prolific theologian, though spent much of his episcopal career in power struggles involving the emperor, the pope and individual bishops. He is not to be confused with the earlier St Hilarius of Poitiers, another Gallic saint after whom Hilary term—from January to March—at the University of Oxford and Trinity College Dublin is named. Other ecclesiastical shout-outs (shouts-out?) to St Angelus of Jerusalem, St Aventinus of Tours, St Gotthard of Hildesheim and the Blessed Edmund Ignatius Rice. Today is also the day on which the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod celebrates Martin Luther’s protector Frederick the Wise, elector of Saxony, who died on 5 May 1525.

It is also UNESCO-approved World Portuguese Language Day (there are around 260 million speakers, the world’s fifth largest native language), World Laughter Day, National Pipe Organ Day (a moveable feast) and Hug A Shed And Take A Selfie Day (I’m OK, thanks).

Factoids

1. Frederick the Wise of Saxony (see above), although he was the patron and protector of Martin Luther in the late 1510s and early 1520s and was reputed to have received a Lutheran form of communion on his death bed, was a devout Roman Catholic with an enormous enthusiasm for collecting relics. At the Schlosskirche in Wittenberg, on the door of which Luther supposedly nailed his 95 theses, he amassed a hoard of more than 19,000 objects. Included in this collection were the thumb of St Anne, the mother of the Virgin Mary, a twig from the burning bush which Moses had seen, some hay from the manger in Bethlehem and a sample of the Virgin’s breast milk. Anyone who offered appropriate devotion to all of these objects would have been eligible for a remission of 1,902,202 years from their potential stay in purgatory.

2. We take for granted in Britain that the Conservative Party is represented by the colour blue and the Labour Party by red. Political aficonados train themselves to remember that the colours are flipped in America: blue represents the left-leaning Democrats and the conservative Republican Party is shown by the colour red. But that coding in the United States is more recent than we imagine or, for many of us, remember, and only became standardised during the pivotal and fiercely contested presidential election of 2000. In 1976, ABC showed the states won by Democratic victory Jimmy Carter in blue, but the defeated President Gerald Ford had his tally marked in yellow. Four years later, CBS and NBC both used blue for the Republicans and red for the Democrats. By 1992, most networks coloured maps red for the GOP and blue for the Democratic Party, but there was not a clear identity association between hues and parties, and David Nyhan of The Boston Globe could write about when “the red states for Clinton start swamping the blue states for Bush”. It was the peculiarly protracted nature of the 2000 election, which was decided in the Supreme Court and saw the election night maps repeated daily, which established the current strong link between red (Republican) states and blue (Democratic) states.

3. Our own traditions have shallower roots than we might suspect. Depending how tangential a lineage you are prepared to countenance, the Conservatives are one of the oldest political parties in the world. The Democratic Party in the United States was founded in 1828, but if you accept the Conservative Party (generally dated to Sir Robert Peel’s publication of his Tamworth Manifesto in December 1834) as a development of the existing Tories, you can trace a sinuous heritage back at least to the Exclusion Crisis of 1679-81. Their general identification with the colour blue, however—“true blue”, “clear blue water”, “vote blue, go green”—really doesn’t go much further back than the 1980s. It is true that in March 1949, the National Union of Conservative and Unionist Associations, in an attempt to “regularise” the party’s image, recommended “the adoption of Blue as the official Conservative Party Colour”, but local diversity was stubborn. In Norwich, Conservatives sported orange and purple, pink and blue elsewhere in East Anglia, yellow in Cumbria, red in parts of Worcestershire and Cardigan. Consistency simply wasn’t seen as a priority.

4. Other things associated with the colour blue: police and law enforcement (London’s Metropolitan Police, founded in 1829, were dressed in blue to emphasise their status as a civilian rather than a military force at a time when British soldiers were synonymous with red coats); the Blessed Virgin Mary (according to a 6th-century decree by Pope Gregory I, perhaps inspired by depictions of Byzantine empresses in blue robes); the United Nations (its flag is sky blue, chosen as the antithesis of red which was felt to be the colour of war); and, in general, boys (though this is a relatively recent association and its origins are fiercely contested).

5. Britain has not had a prime minister with facial hair for more than 60 years, when Harold Macmillan (1957-63) resigned. Yet if you look at the first 57 years of the century before Supermac’s appointment, there were only three clean-shaven premiers: H.H. Asquith (1908-16), Stanley Baldwin (1923-24, 1924-29, 1935-37) and Winston Churchill (1940-45, 1951-55). Eight of the other nine had moustaches, while the Marquess of Salisbury (1885-86, 1886-92, 1895-1902) sported a full beard. It is hard to see the pattern changing. Only two current cabinet ministers, Home Secretary James Cleverly and Conservative Party Chairman Richard Holden, have beards, as do two of Sir Keir Starmer’s top team, shadow business and trade secretary Jonathan Reynolds and shadow chief secretary to the Treasury Darren Jones. (By contrast, Starmer has a pair of siblings and the brother, wife and son of former cabinet ministers in his shadow cabinet.)

6. Another change—I am not aware of a causal link—is the trend towards prime ministers having only period of tenure. The last person to have separate premierships was Harold Wilson (1964-70, 1974-76), but of his predecessors from the turn of the century, four (Salisbury, Baldwin, MacDonald, Churchill) had multiple terms, while 10 did not. Whether Boris Johnson (2019-22) can defy this trend remains an open question.

7. Pope Francis is barely out of the headlines at the moment. The ailing pontiff will turn 88 in December (if he is spared), the oldest occupant of the see of Rome for more than a century and one of the oldest ever. When he was elected in March 2013, connoisseurs of these sorts of things noted that he was the first ever Jesuit pope: the Society of Jesus was founded in 1540, and in the later years of St John Paul II’s pontificate the Jesuit archbishop of Milan, Carlo Maria Cardinal Martini, was regarded as a leading candidate to replace him (indeed it is suggested that he received 40 votes to Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s 38 in the first round of the conclave in 2005). But 51 popes—about one in five—have been members of a religious order, with the Benedictines topping the table (23 pontiffs) followed by the Franciscans with 17. The only other order with a single entry is the Congregation of Clerics Regular (Theatines), who saw Paul IV reign from 1555 to 1559.

8. The current pope is Argentinian, of course, and he succeeded the German Benedict XVI and the Polish St John Paul II. But those with long-ish memories will recall that when Karol Cardinal Wojtyła, archbishop of Kraków, was elected in 1978, he was the first non-Italian to be head of the Catholic Church for 455 years. 217 of the 266 popes have been Italian, France being the only other country to record double figures with 16. At the bottom of the table with a single pope apiece, apart from Argentina and Poland, are the Netherlands (Adrian VI, 1522-23) and England (Adrian IV, 1154-59). Even that is slightly misleading: Adrian VI was born in Utrecht, now in the Netherlands but in 1459, when he entered the world, an independent Sticht in the Holy Roman Empire ruled by the bishop of Utrecht.

9. Adrian VI was born Adriaan Florensz Boeyens and joins Marcellus II (Marcello Cervini degli Spannocchi), who was pope for 22 days in 1555, as the only two popes in modern times to use their baptismal names as their papal names. The tradition of choosing a new name on becoming pontiff began with John II in AD 533, because his given name was Mercurius, and it was generally agreed to be inappropriate for a pope to bear the name of a pagan deity.

10. From the middle of the 13th century there were stories that there had once been a female pope. We now refer to this figure as Pope Joan (Ioannes Anglicus), and it is said that she was an intelligent and learned woman who disguised herself as a man and rose through the hierarchy of the church until she became a cardinal and then was elected pope. Her true identity was revealed—as it rather would be—when, while in a papal procession, or possibly mounting a horse, she gave birth to a child, and died shortly afterwards, either of natural causes or murdered by members of the curia. She is first mentioned in Jean de Mailly’s Chronica Universalis Mettensis, written around 1250, and her reign was cited in his defence by the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415. In fact she almost certainly never existed, and Clement VIII declared her pontificate to be a legend in 1601. In 2000, Peter Stanford, former editor of The Catholic Herald, published The Legend of Pope Joan: In Search of the Truth, in which he concluded that “I am convinced that Pope Joan was an historical figure, though perhaps not all the details about her that have been passed on down the centuries are true”. Professor Vincent DiMarco of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, described it as “credulous”.

Television is teaching all the time. It does more educating than the schools and all the institutions of higher learning (Marshall McLuhan)

1. “A Man In Full”: I am an enormous Tom Wolfe fan but it’s one of those enthusiasms that might be widely shared or surprisingly niche, I can’t tell. It’s hard to dispute Wolfe’s cultural and literary significance as one of the pioneers on New Journalism, that 1960s-birthed adaptation of the techniques and flair of fiction to the business of reporting and essayism, but he is also famous, outwith his control, for one of the most calamitous page-to-screen transfers in Hollywood history, Brian De Palma’s The Bonfire of the Vanities of 1990. This new Netflix production tackles Wolfe’s 1998 heavyweight tale of an Atlanta real-estate mogul suddenly facing bankruptcy. I have only watched the first episode (of six), but it is glossy and quick and had the unstoppable swagger that Wolfe’s style demands. Jeff Daniels (has he ever turned in a bad performance?) is outstanding in the lead as Charlie Croker, Diane Lane is perfectly cast as his status-conscious first wife and British actor Aml Ameen gives a fine performance as lawyer Roger “Too White” White II. You won’t get bored.

2. “Paul Wolfowitz on the Afghanistan and Iraq Wars and a Life in Foreign Policy”: this edition of the Hoover Institution’s Uncommon Knowledge, recorded a month ago, is a fascinating and detailed insight into American foreign policy by someone who was deeply embedded in the decision-making process. Paul Wolfowitz is 80 years old, born in Brooklyn to a family of Polish Jewish immigrants, and wrote a doctoral thesis on nuclear proliferation under Albert Wohlstetter at the University of Chicago. From 2001 to 2005, he was deputy secretary of defense under Donald Rumsfeld in the first Bush administration, and one of the first people to press for action against Iraq as part of the global response to 9/11. He was nominated to be president of the World Bank in 2005, but his tenure became mired in controversy and he left after only two years. For many people a hate figure as the neocon’s neocon, Wolfowitz is worth listening to. Under Peter Robinson’s gentle and deft questioning, you see into the brain of the Pentagon, and Wolfowitz remains sharp and assured of his thinking. Absorbing.

3. “Reagan vs. Mondale: 1984 Election Ads”: this is just a 15-minute compilation which does exactly what the title describes, but it’s a superb time capsule. In some ways, the time since then seems every one of its 40 years, and yet there is something timeless about the style of the broadcasts. It also makes you think of how very different our political culture was from that of America in the mid-1980s. We were trying to make up a lot of ground in a short space of time: the general election of 1983 was the first in which the governing decided to make television its principal focus of campaigning, and Margaret Thatcher was entirely in agreement. She admired President Ronald Reagan’s seemingly effortless communication with the electorate, and, buoyed by victory in the Falklands War the year before, she was starting to grow fully into her role on the world stage. One of the adverts in this compilation, the famous “It’s Morning Again in America”, is by my estimation a masterpiece, less than a minute long but pitched perfectly at the American people at that time and offering a message which had profound resonance.

4. “Report from Vietnam: Who, What, When, Where, Why?”: I came across this February 1968 CBS report by Walter Cronkite by accident on YouTube but it’s a riveting artefact of the Vietnam War. It was in the early weeks of the Tet Offensive which saw enormous inroads into South Vietnam made by the People’s Army of Vietnam and the Viet Cong, and Cronkite manages to interview a surprisingly upbeat president of South Vietnam, Nguyễn Văn Thiệu. The legendary news anchor’s message is unmistakeable, however. The war is a disaster, with death and devastation everywhere. Sombrely, he closes with the words, “But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honourable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could”. On seeing the report, President Lyndon Johnson is supposed to have reflected “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America”. If the war had ever been winnable, those days were past, and most people seemed to know it. And yet, there were seven more years of conflict to come. Saigon did not fall to the forces of North Vietnam until 30 April 1975.

Writing is like sex. First you do it for love, then you do it for your friends, and then you do it for money (Virginia Woolf)

1. “Bright Lights, Big City”: on Monday I was at the Groucho Club for their celebration of World Book Night, which may be the most “mwah-mwah” thing I’ve said in some time. It was a fantastic night, my friend and business partner, the inestimable Mark Heywood, acting as compère as 10 authors gave readings from their own or others’ work. As a finale, Mark himself read the opening passages of Jay McInerney’s sizzling 1984 debut novel. Bright Lights, Big City had floated around my consciousness as one of those books I would read soon-ish for decades, but I finally used the copious free time of the early days of lockdown in 2020 to make a start. It’s a slim work, fewer than 200 pages, and crackles with such furious energy that I sliced through it in a few sittings, drinking in its semi-autobiographical depiction of a young writer who finds himself employed as a fact-checker for a prestigious New York magazine. McInerney was at the time working in exactly that role at The New Yorker: if it even qualifies as a roman à clef, the key is already in the lock. It’s unusual in being told in the second person (“You are not the kind of guy who would be at a place like this at this time of the morning…”) but it somehow seems natural, and from that first sentence it grabs you by the throat. Funny, outrageous, outlandish, poignant and unremittingly pacy. A bravura debut: I was surprised by how many people in the audience had never heard of it, but after Mark’s reading I suspect Amazon shifted a few copies. Buy it. Read it.

2. “Wales is facing a US-style opioid crisis”: I make zero apology for continuing to bang the drum for Kara Kennedy Clairmont, a writer of exceptional spirit, clarity and verve, and this article from The Spectator about the growing popularity of nitazenes among drug users in Wales is stark and sobering. The potency of some narcotics is increasing by multiples and far outstripping even clinicians’ ability to treat addiction, and it’s hard to know if the problem is that users and potential users aren’t aware of the dangers or just don’t care (after all, if you’re in the market for opioids, you probably haven’t conducted a rigorous evidence-based risk assessment). Something you should read for the information it contains but also because it’s a joy to read good writing.

3. “British spies and the IRA”: there is an implicitly defeatist mantra that there is never a military solution to terrorism (about which, as a blanket statement, I’m dubious) but there can certainly be effective military and intelligence mitigations. This article in The Critic by Henry Hemming, inspired by the recent publication of the report by Operation Kenova, argues that a vital part of creating the circumstances under which the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement could be concluded was the methodical, painstaking and brilliant work of the security forces—the Royal Ulster Constabulary, the British Army and the Security Service—in penetrating the highest echelons of the Provisional IRA and severely diminishing its ability to plan and carry out operations. One source suggests there may have been as many as 800 British agents involved in the battle against terrorism, and by the early 1990s, eight out of every 10 proposed attacks were either disrupted or called off. The security forces may not have won the war, but we should remember the scale of their success in allowing it to be wound down by other means.

4. “Harvard Square”: André Aciman, born in Alexandria to Francophone Sephardi Jewish parents, moved to the United States as a teenager and read for an MA and a PhD in comparative literature at Harvard and was in his mid-fifties when he first found fame as a novelist with Call Me By Your Name. This was multiplied many times over when the book was adapted for cinema in 2017 with Timothée Chalamet in the lead. During lockdown, for reasons which I now can’t recall, I read this, Aciman’s third novel published in 2013, an intense but elegant story of a graduate student who is a Jewish-Egyptian emigré. He finds himself in the maelstrom of existential doubt that can afflict graduate students and finds a friendship with an Arab taxi driver makes him question the basis of identity and future plans. Skilfully written and affecting, and anyone who has spent much time in university communities will find some resonance.

5. “Is Venezuela Serious About Invading Guyana?”: this is a reflection on me rather than the situation, but the current tension between Venezuela and Guyana over the potentially oil-rich region of Essequibo makes my mind go first of all to Tintin and the books which Hergé set in the fictional South American states of San Theodoros and Nuevo Rico. Of course this is a more serious matter: the socialist President Nicolás Maduro, who runs Venezuela largely as an autocracy, is beset on all sides, his 11 years in power having seen the country’s GDP halve while he boasts that he will make Venezuela a “great power” (“una patria potencia”) by 2050. Inflation is at its highest level in history and the bolívar has more or less collapsed and been effectively supplanted by the dollar. This useful essay in The Atlantic by Gisela Salim-Peyer, who grew up in Venezuela, explains the tortuous history of the territorial dispute but warns that we cannot dismiss the current tension as shadow boxing. Maduro is trapped and could think that an irredentist military campaign might solve several of his problems. It was, after all, a similar set of circumstances which prompted the Argentinian president, General Leopoldo Galtieri, to seize the Falkland Islands in 1982.

Goodbye, goodbye, we’re leaving you, skiddlydye…

May you enjoy the extra leisure of the bank holiday and recharge your batteries. As Sergeant Jablonski used to remind his officers in Hill Street Blues, let’s do it to them before they do it to us.