Sunday round-up 7 June 2026
Birthdays for James Ivory, Sir Tom Jones and Liam Neeson, marking the ratification of the Lateran Treaty in 1929 and Ronald Reagan asks Mr Gorbachev to tear down this wall
Receiving the bumps today (careful with some of them) are director, screenwriter, producer and period drama titan James Ivory (98), actress and author Virginia McKenna (95), weapons-grade Welshness-toting musical legend Sir Tom Jones (86), Academy Award-nominated actor and possessor of a very particular set of skills Liam Neeson (74), novelist and screenwriter Orhan Pamuk (74), former Vice President of the United States Mike Pence (67), painter and Young British Artist Damien Hirst (61), adventure, author, intrepidity given human form and self-licking ice cream Bear Grylls (51), model and actress Emily Ratajkowski (35) and singer-songwriter George Ezra (33).
No longer celebrating are legendary condottiero and Knight of the Garter Federico da Montefeltro, Duke of Urbino (1422), castrato and Handel collaborator Gaetano Berenstadt (1687), socialite, hostess and political organiser Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire (1757), engineer and cast-iron pioneer John Rennie the Elder (1761), third-longest serving Prime Minister and faction-balancing Tory the Earl of Liverpool (1770), archetypal dandy and style maven Beau Brummell (1778), customs official for the Austrian Ministry of Finance and father of a troublesome offspring Alois Hitler (1837), Post-Impressionist painter, sculptor and paedophile Paul Gauguin (1848), painter, designer and architect Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868), leader of the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution Imre Nagy (1896), Academy Award-winning actress Jessica Tandy (1909), world’s verified longest-living canine and Australian cattle dog Bluey (1910), singer, actor, comedian and producer Dean Martin (1917), reliable character actor Ronald Pickup (1940) and diminutive singer-songwriter, producer and purple enthusiast Prince (1958).
Wherever I lay my triple crown, that’s my home
The idea of papal supremacy, of the Pope as the head of the Church, was becoming widespread in Western Christendom by the middle of the fifth century AD, championed with particular vigour by Leo the Great (AD 440-61). It was not, of course, accepted by the Eastern Orthodox Church, although in AD 450 the Eastern Roman Emperor Theodosius II was willing to acknowledge the Bishop of Rome as “Patriarch of the West”. However, from AD 756, when Pepin the Short, King of the Franks, defeated the Lombards to take control of northern Italy and gifted the territories formerly comprising the Exarchate of Ravenna to Pope Stephen II, the pontiff was also a temporal ruler. Charlemagne is said to have granted the papacy more land including the Duchy of Rome, Ravenna, the Duchy of the Pentapolis, parts of the Duchy of Benevento, Tuscany, Corsica, Lombardy and a number of Italian cities. The Papal States therefore extended across much of central Italy including, of course, Rome, as both the ancient imperial capital and the seat of the Pope’s episcopate.
The boundaries of the Papal States extended and contracted over the next 1,000 years or so, and being a temporal Italian prince as well as Vicar of Christ and successor of St Peter frequently dragged popes into situations in which they had competing priorities and considerations. At the height of Henry VIII’s attempts to have his marriage to Katharine of Aragon annulled, for example, it made no difference what the theological and doctrinal opinion of Pope Clement VII was. The papacy’s stance on the matter was determined by more mundane considerations: in 1527, after Clement had allied himself with Francis I of France as part of the League of Cognac and against the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, the Imperial army of 14,000 Landsknechte under Georg von Frundsberg, 6,000 Spanish tercios and an unknown number of Italian infantry stormed Rome’s defences on 6 May and sacked the city violently and bloodily. On 6 June, Clement VII was forced to surrender himself and his fortress of Castel Sant’ Angelo on the northern bank of the Tiber, and was kept under house arrest. Even after he escaped, the Emperor was the dominant figure in central Italy, which meant the Pope could do nothing which would harm the interests of Katharine of Aragon—because she was the aunt of Charles V.
The movement to unify Italy was gathering pace by the middle of the 19th century, championed by Giuseppe Mazzini, founder of the Young Italy movement and briefly in 1849 Triumvir of the Roman Republic; Camillo Benso Conte di Cavour, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Sardinia; and Giuseppe Garibaldi, a soldier and revolutionary who had been born in Nice. Those seeking unification, whatever their philosophical beliefs, came to accept that it could only practically and sustainably be achieved under a strong monarchy, which almost by default made the figurehead of the movement Vittorio Emanuele II, King of Sardinia and Duke of Savoy.
When Garibaldi led his volunteers on the Expedition of a Thousand in 1860, Vittorio Emanuele supported him, and after the collapse of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, Naples and Sicily were absorbed into the Kingdom of Sardinia. Tuscany, Modena, Parma and Romagna also sided with Vittorio Emanuele, and on 17 March 1861, he was declared the first King of Italy. The Papal States, however, were not part of the unified monarchy as they lay under the protection of France. But in 1870, as France was engaged in losing a war against Prussia, the King used the opportunity to seize the Papal States, and Rome was captured on 20 September.
It had always been the intention of supporters of unification that Rome, and by default the Papal States, should be included in the new Kingdom of Italy. Ten days after Vittorio Emanuele had been declared King of Italy in 1861, the new Italian Parliament, meeting in Turin, had agreed that Rome was the capital of Italy, even if it did not at that point lie within the borders of the unified kingdom. Cavour’s successor as Prime Minister of Italy, Bettino Ricasoli, said that “To go to Rome is not merely a right; it is an inexorable necessity”.
When Rome had been captured, Pope Pius IX had been forced to disband the Papal Army and was permitted to retain only the Swiss Guard, the Noble Guard and the Palatine Guard. The Italian government was willing to permit the Pope to retain sovereignty over the Leonine City, the area of Rome within the walls built by Leo IV in the ninth century, but Pius refused to give up his wider territorial claims. On 1 November, he issued an encyclical entitled Respicientes, in which he excommunicated the invaders of Rome including King Vittorio Emanuele, but he had lost any temporal power. The Italian Parliament passed the Law of Guarantees of 13 May 1871, which acknowledged the Pope as an independent sovereign with autonomy in terms of international diplomatic representation, declared his body to be sacred and inviolable and granted a number of privileges in terms of self-government over the Leonine City and extensive influence in religious matters. But Pius refused to accept or recognise the law and declared himself a “prisoner in the Vatican”.
For decades, successive popes refused to recognise the Kingdom of Italy, but Italian governments remained convinced that the status of Rome as the national capital was essential to the stability and survival of the state. Although initially reluctant, the King took up residence in the Quirinale Palace, built by Pope Gregory XIII in 1583, both a papal residence and the seat of government for the Papal States and the location of papal conclaves in 1823, 1829, 1831 and 1846. (It is now the official home of the President of the Italian Republic.) Relations between the papacy and the government of Italy remained hostile for more than 50 years and the issue became known as “the Roman question”.
Benito Mussolini, a former journalist who had founded the Fasci Italiani di Combattimento in 1919, reorganised into the Partito Nazionale Fascista (National Fascist Party) in 1921, had organised the March on Rome by 30,000 Fascist supporters in October 1922. (Mussolini himself had not participated in much of the march itself but made sure to be available for photo opportunities.) Il Duce, as he styled himself, had demanded the resignation of the Prime Minister, Luigi Facta, who led a centre-right govvernment. Facta was determined to resist what was nothing but an attempted coup d’état, and made preparations to declare martial law and use the army to suppress the Fascists before they reached Rome. But to his astonishment, the King, Vittorio Emanuele III, refused to put his signature to the declaration of emergency, and on 28 October, Facta and his cabinet resigned in protest.
On 30 October, partly fearing the prospect of widespread armed unrest but also reassured that Fascism no longer posed a direct threat to he establishment, the King asked Mussolini to become Prime Minister. The following day, Il Duce accepted and formed a cabinet including figures from across the Italian right, but during 1923 several right-wing parties merged themselves into the National Fascist Party. At the beginning of 1925, political assemblies and demonstrations were banned and the Chamber of Deputies was closed, and in October 1926, after an unsuccessful assassination attempt on Mussolini, all other political parties were banned.
Amid this consolidation of power, negotiations began with the papacy in an attempt to settle the Roman question. Mussolini wanted the support of the Catholic Church and the prestige which would come with it, and was therefore willing to show some flexibility. In strict secrecy, the Pope appointed as his intermediary his legal adviser, Professor Francesco Pacelli, an aristocratic Roman who was an expert in canon law; his brother, Eugenio Pacelli, Titular Archbishop of Sardes, was Apostolic Nuncio to Germany and in 1939 would be elected Pope Pius XII. Mussolini was represented by a diplomat and member of the Council of State, Domenico Barone.
Two principal compromises were achieved in the negotiations, breaking the deadlock which had existed since 1870: the papacy would renounce its claims to the former territories of the Papal States, and the Italian government would recognise the Pope’s complete independence from Italy. The result, finalised on 11 February 1929, was the Lateran Pacts. They included a financial convention and a concordat, but the central document was the Lateran Treaty between Italy and the Holy See, signed by Mussolini for the Kingdom of Italy and Pietro Cardinal Gasparri, the Vatican Secretary of State, for the Pope.
The Vatican City was recognised as a sovereign state ruled by the Holy See. In return, the Pope recognised the Kingdom of Italy. The financial agreement set out terms for Italy to compensate the Holy See for the loss of the Papal States in 1870, while the concordat recognised the Church’s position in Italian society, enshrining clerical privileges, mandating the teaching of Catholic doctrine in schools and “considering the teaching of Christian doctrine according to the form received by Catholic tradition as the foundation and the crown of public instruction”.
The Lateran Treaty came into force today, 7 June, in 1929, when it was ratified by the Italian Parliament. It immeasurably increased Mussolini’s prestige and reputation nationally and internationally, as he had solved a diplomatic wrangle which had lasted for nearly 60 years and had seemed intractable. For the Church, it was a valuable template as it sought to secure its status in secular states, and provided a generous financial element. The Holy See also saw in Fascism, as it would to an extent in Nazism, a perhaps-distasteful but staunch ally against Communism, which had been condemned by Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum novarum of 1891.
Feast or famine? Feast, please
Today is the feast of St Colmán of Dromore (6th century AD), originally from Dál Riada, who was a disciple of St Caolán, became the first Abbot of Muckmore in County Antrim then settled in Dromore on the River Lagan in County Down where he founded an abbey and may also have been bishop; of St Gottschalk (d 1066), an Obotrite prince who established a Polabian Slavic kingdom on the River Elbe, oversaw missionary work and Christianisation and founded monasteries at Oldenburg, Mecklenburg, Ratzeburg, Lübeck and Lenzen before being murdered in a rebellion; of St Landulf of Yariglia (d 1134), who studied at a Benedictine establishment in Pavia but never took the tonsure and became Bishop of Asti; of St Robert of Newminster (1100-59), born near Skipton in North Yorkshire, who studied at the University of Paris, became a Benedictine monk at the Abbey of St Mary in York, was exiled with a group of brother Benedictines and founded what became Fountains Abbey, which became associated with the Cistercian reform movement, and then founded Newminster Abbey west of Morpeth and became its first Abbot; and of St Antonio Maria Gianelli (1789-1846), born in a farming community near Mantua, who co-founded the Daughters of Our Lady of the Garden, an order for women undertaking pastoral ministry, the education of young people and the care of the sick and elderly, and was Bishop of Bobbio in Emilia-Romagna from 1837 till his death.
Today is Tourettes Awareness Day, and, presumably purely by coincidence, Día del Periodista (Journalist Day) in Argentina, marking the date in 1810 of the first publication of the Gazeta de Buenos-Ayres, which championed the First Junta, the government formed after the May Revolution against Spanish rule.
Malta is celebrating Sette Giugno (lit. Seventh of June), commemorating riots in 1919 in protest at the cost of living crisis (sound familiar?) in what was then the Crown Colony of Malta, leading to the proclamation of the Amery-Milner Constitution on 30 April 1921 then eventually independence as the State of Malta on 21 September 1964.
Factoids
Excluding titles held by the royal family, there are only 24 dukes in the peerage, with 29 ducal titles between them. The multiple title holders are the Duke of Richmond, Lennox and Gordon, the Duke of Hamilton and Brandon, the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry and the Duke of Argyll and Argyll, who holds one title in the peerage of Scotland (1701) and one in the peerage of the United Kingdom (1892). Currently only the Duke of Westminster has no male heir, but he is only 35 and married in 2024. Three dukedoms became extinct in the 20th century: the 12th Duke of Leeds died without issue in 1964; the 10th Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne died without issue on Christmas Day 1988 (having inherited the title on 4 November); and the 9th Duke of Portland died in 1990, his son and heir having predeceased him.
With a hat-tip to historian Dr Helen Castor, Henry VIII’s sixth and last wife, Katherine Parr (1512-48), was named after his first wife, Katharine of Aragon (1485-1536). The former’s mother, Maud, Lady Parr, was a lady in waiting to Queen Katharine from 1509, who was also godmother to her daughter Katherine.
Katharine of Aragon, born on 16 December 1485 and five-and-a-half years older than Henry VIII, was the first of his six wives to be born. The last was his fifth wife, Catherine Howard, who was born around 1523, an impressive span of nearly 40 years (especially considering Henry was only 55 when he died).
This year is, as you will no doubt be aware, the semiquincentennial (or sestercentennial or bisesquicentennial or quarter-millennial) anniversary of the creation of the United States of America, taking as its foundation date the signing of the Declaration of Independence on 4 July 1776. In an idle moment, I wondered how many other current nation states existed in a more or less recognisable form 250 years ago. The answer (or my answer; I realise some are judgement calls) is 22 or 23, which, given that the United Nations has 193 members which are sovereign states, is not many. By my calculation, they are, with their 1776 identities in brackets if different: the Principality of Andorra; the Kingdom of Bhutan; Brunei Darussalam (Sultanate of Brunei); the People’s Republic of China (Great Qing Empire); the Kingdom of Denmark and the Kingdom of Norway (in personal union known as Denmark-Norway); the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia (Mängəśtä ʾItyop̣p̣ya, Empire of Ethiopia); the French Republic (Kingdom of France); Hungary (Kingdom of Hungary); the State of Japan (Nihon-koku or Nippon-koku, Nation of Japan); the Republic of Malta (Malta, ruled by the Sovereign Military Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem); the Principality of Monaco; the Kingdom of Morocco (Sultanate of Morocco); the Republic of the Union of Myanmar (Kingdom of Burma); the Federal Democratic Republic of Nepal (Kingdom of Nepal); the Netherlands (Republic of the Seven United Netherlands); the Portuguese Republic (Kingdom of Portugal); the Russian Federation (Russian Empire); the Independent State of Samoa (Kingdom of Samoa); the Most Serene Republic of San Marino; the Kingdom of Spain; the Kingdom of Sweden; the Swiss Confederation; and the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (the Kingdom of Great Britain and the Kingdom of Ireland).
If you were thinking that the current official name of the Netherlands is the Kingdom of the Netherlands, given that King Willem-Alexander has been on the throne since Queen Beatrix abdicated in 2013, you’d be wrong. The Kingdom of the Netherlands is a sovereign state with four constituent countries: the Netherlands, the Country of Aruba, the Country of Curaçao and Sint Maarten. The last three are often collectively known as the Dutch Caribbean.
In 1860, judging by wealth per capita, the richest state in the United States was Mississippi, and it had more millionaires than any other state. The wealth was founded primarily on the cotton industry. However, that is only true if you take per capita as including just free men and women, who made up 45 per cent of the population of 791,305. The other 55 per cent were enslaved African-Americans, legally property at the time and on whose free labour the profitability of the cotton industry depended. Mississippi was home to fewer than 1,000 free black citizens.
The disastrous Gallipoli campaign of 1915-16 was a pivotal experience for Sir Winston Churchill and his Second World War deputy and successor as Prime Minister, Labour’s Clement Attlee. Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty in H.H. Asquith’s Liberal government from 1911 to 1915, conceived of the idea of at first a naval assault on Ottoman fortifications in the Dardanelles, the narrow strait connecting the Sea of Marmara and the Aegean Sea and marking the border between Europe and Asia. He wanted to relieve pressure on Russian forces in the Caucasus and to look for a daring gambit which might break the deadlock between Britain and France on one side and Germany on the other on the Western Front. When it became clear that no decisive result could be achieved by naval power alone, Churchill oversaw the amphibious assault by the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, including the famous Australian and New Zealand Army Corps (ANZAC), at Gallipoli in April 1915. The campaign dragged on until the Allied forces were evacuated in January 1916, having suffered 250-300,000 casualties including between 40,000 and 60,000 killed; but Churchill had been removed from the Admiralty in May 1915 as the Conservatives’ price for joining a coalition government, serving as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster until November when he resigned and saw active service on the Western Front, for a while as commanding officer of 6th Battalion, Royal Scots Fusiliers. Captain Clement Attlee, 32, landed at Cape Helles in Gallipoli in July 1915 as adjutant of 6th (Service) Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment, but fell ill with dysentery and was put on a ship back to Britain. Eager to return to the front, he left the ship at Malta, spent a short period of recovery in hospital and then returned to his battalion which had been chosen as the rearguard for the Allied evacuation from Suvla Bay on the Aegean coast of the Gallipoli Peninsula in December 1915. In the early hours of 20 December, Attlee was the penultimate man to leave the Allied positions at Suvla Bay, the last being the General Officer Commanding 13th (Western) Division, Major-General Stanley Maude. Despite his illness and the appalling conditions leading up to the British defeat, Attlee believed that the fundamental plan for the Gallipoli Campaign was sound and could have succeeded if it had been better implemented on the ground, and he carried that admiration for Churchill as a military strategist into their working relationship from 1940 to 1945 when he was Lord Privy Seal (1940-42), then Deputy Prime Minister, first as Dominions Secretary (1942-43) then Lord President of the Council (1943-45).
All 100 current United States senators have at least a first university of college degree. Until March, the only senator not to have a degree was Republican Markwayne Mullin, the junior senator for Oklahoma, who left Missouri Valley College when his father became too ill to run the family business and Mullin left his studies to take over. In 2010, he received an Associate in applied science, specialising in plumbing, from Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology. He left the Senate on 23 March 2026 after being confirmed as Secretary of Homeland Security, and the Governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, nominated former energy company CEO Alan S. Armstrong to fill the remainder of Mullin’s term, which expires in January 2027. Armstrong has a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Oklahoma.
The youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature was Rudyard Kipling. The poet, novelist, short-story writer and journalist won the award in 1907, when he was 41, “in consideration of the power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas and remarkable talent for narration that characterise the creations of this world-famous author”. He was also the first winner of the prize to write in English, after two Francophones and one writer each in German, Norwegian, Spanish, Polish and Italian. English-language writers now head the list, with 29 laureates from 122 (in addition, Rabindranath Tagore (1913) wrote in Bengali and English, Samuel Beckett (1969) wrote in French and English and Joseph Brodsky (1987) wrote poetry in Russian and prose in English.)
The oldest recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature to date is Doris Lessing, who won in 2007 at the age of 87 and was hailed as “that epicist of the female experience, who with scepticism, fire and visionary power has subjected a divided civilisation to scrutiny”. When informed by a Reuters journalist that she had been awarded the Nobel Prize, her reaction was “Oh Christ”. Lessing was born in Kermanshah, a Kurdish city in north-western Iran (then generally referred to as Persia), before moving with her parents to Southern Rhodesia when she was six. She moved to London in 1949 at the age of 30 and died in 2013, at 94.
“Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man, and writing an exact man.” (Sir Francis Bacon, Viscount St Alban)
“What is the British military actually for?”: in The Daily Telegraph, former 3 Para company commander Andrew Fox asks a fundamental question which should, but doesn’t always, underpin any consideration of defence and security policy. He argues that for many years the armed forces have hidden behind capabilities and procurement—“carrier strike, Global Britain, persistent engagement, grey-zone competition, war-fighting readiness”—and have avoided attempting to articulate a clear and sustainable high-level strategy: what are they for, who and what are they defending, what are Britain’s priorities, which geographical regions are most important? For presentational reasons, tasks are added but none ever deleted, while the budget shrinks and personnel levels dwindle. “We have wanted global prestige, moral authority, low spending and great power military options. No serious country can reconcile all four.” Sensibly within the confines of a newspaper column, Fox does not set out to answer the question, but he points to some possible answers and highlights the different postures, resources and capabilities each would require. In early 2024, I explored what it might mean if we faced up to the reality of disavowing “full spectrum” military capability, but I think it’s becoming clear that, with the possible exception of the United States, no country can now pursue true “full spectrum” abilities; coats must be cut according to the cloth. As yesterday morning’s rather bad-tempered jeremiad stressed, the UK is doing particularly badly at this because self-deception and avoidance of reality are rife within government. Fox asks hard questions which invite painful answers, but easy questions are never the ones worth answering.
“J.D. Vance’s Britain doesn’t exist”: US Vice President J.D. Vance has wasted no time in coopting the tragic murder of 18-year-old Henry Nowak in Southampton last year and the undoubted and appalling mistakes and misjudgements made by Hampshire and Isle of Wight Constabulary in their response to his attack to burnish his portrayal of Europe as a racially divided hellhole sinking into near-civil war. On Friday, he tweeted that “He should still be alive today, and he would be if the last few generations of European elites had stood their ground against the politics of self-hatred and the mass invasion of migrants, many of whom despise the West and the people who love it”. On his eponymous Notebook Substack, columnist for The Times and former editor of The Spectator Fraser Nelson examines crime statistics to show that Vance’s narrative is evidentially unsupportable: over the past 20 years, immigration has doubled while crime has halved, the murder rate is at a 40-year low, NHS admissions for “assault with a sharp object” are the lowest on record, 78 per cent of people in England and Wales feel safe walking alone after dark. But Vance and other MAGA luminaries need to narrative of civilisational decline and potential extinction in Europe because they need to present Europe to American voters as the canary in the mineshaft: as in Europe, so too in America unless you vote MAGA (and Vance remains the favourite for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 2028). This is not to say by any means there is no crime in Britain nor that there are no challenges, but the picture Vance paints simply doesn’t match up to reality: but then, depressingly, perhaps it doesn’t need to in the Trumpian era of “alternative facts”.
“Alex Younger, former MI6 chief, 1963-2026”: I include this obituary from The Financial Times by Charles Clover and John Paul Rathbone of Sir Alex Younger, former Chief of the Secret Intelligence Service because it is particularly well-written and full of small but revealing observations, because Younger was reckoned one of the best Chiefs of SIS—known as ‘C’—of recent years and partly because he is so far the only C to have graduated from my alma mater, the University of St Andrews, although his predecessor, Sir John Sawers, having read physics and philosophy at the University of Nottingham, subsequently studied at St Andrews as a postgraduate. (George Kennedy Young, Vice-Chief of SIS 1959-61, early supporter of the Conservative Monday Club and ubiquitous right-wing plotter of the 1960s and 1970s, had graduated with a first-class degree in French and German from St Andrews in 1934.) Unlike Sawers, who had spent most of his career in mainstream diplomatic posts, Younger was an SIS lifer, having joined the service after a short stint in the Scots Guards, and his tenure as C, at nearly six years, was the longest since Sir Dick White (1956-68); of the 18 holders of the post of Chief of SIS, Younger held it fifth-longest. He was regarded as a “spy’s spy”, and when he first became an SIS officer he was told, “You’re perfect… you’re an introvert pretending to be an extrovert. That’s exactly what we want.” An exceptional man who necessarily worked for most of his career in the shadows.
“How to get big stuff done in government”: on his eponymous Substack, James Breckwoldt, Senior Research Analyst at Focaldata, examines the lessons for radical government reform to be drawn from Unfinished Business, the memoirs of Sir Roger Douglas, who served as New Zealand’s Minister of Finance (1984-88) and Minister of Revenue (1984-87). Although serving in the Labour government of Prime Minister David Lange, Douglas pursued policies of floating the New Zealand dollar, introducing private-sector corporate methods into state services, selling state assets and carrying our major deregulation and cuts to subsidies. The key factors in implementing what became known as “Rogernomics”, according to Breckholdt, include “highly-skilled, honest, analytically serious and imaginative” officials and advisers, taking major, transformative leaps at great speed rather than working on gradual, slow-paced incremental change, acting consistently and credibly, being honest with the public and remaining focused on solving long-term problems. In current British politics, you can hardly move without tripping over someone rethinking state capacity or bemoaning our “broken” institutions, so it’s useful and refreshing to have a real-world example of someone who did carry out massive change to great effect, and did so from a counter-intuitive philosophical tradition, as a Labour politician introducing neoliberal reforms. Great food for thought.
“Britain’s Greatest Defeat”: my weekly round-up on 15 February looked in, ahem, some detail at the fall of Singapore to the Japanese on that date in 1942, an event which was regarded as perhaps the worst military disaster to befall Britain (and certainly the largest British surrender in terms of troops captured, far exceeding the still-calamitous fall of Kut in 1915-16). Here former British Army officer Matthew Palmer in his Cracking Defence Substack also turns to the capture of “Fortress Singapore”, but rather than treating it simply as an historical narrative he attempts to distil some lessons to be learned from the Japanese victory over a possession which was seen as impregnable and was foundational to British strategy in the Far East and globally. He points to a fundamentally flawed strategy which allowed mistaken assumptions to become received wisdom, the inadequacy of operational planning, poor civil-military coordination and a serious failure to assess the capabilities of the enemy. The picture he reveals suggests that the surprise was not so much that Singapore fell, but that anyone thought it wouldn’t.
From the archives: Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
This week, my regular “On This Day” column for City A.M. marked the death on 5 June 2004 of President Ronald Reagan. It was impossible, of course, to squeeze his life, career and legacy into less than 1,000 words, but going over the events before drafting gave me cause to look at some of the stand-out moments: his speech in support of Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign, A Time for Choosing; his near miss at snatching the Republican nomination from President Gerald Ford in 1976; his droll response to questions about his age during his bid for re-election in 1984 at which even his opponent, Walter Mondale laughed; his brilliantly judged and moving message to the nation when the Space Shuttle Challenger was lost in 1986.
Friday next week, 12 June, will mark the 39th anniversary of Reagan’s second visit to West Berlin, to join the commemorations marking 750 years since the German capital was founded, during the joint reign of Johann I and Otto III as Margraves of Brandenburg. His visit was controversial: Berlin had long enjoyed a reputation as a city where the Left was strong, and that had intensified during the Cold War as citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany resident in West Berlin were exempt from compulsory military service, leading to an influx of young liberals, socialists, Communist, Marxists, pacificists and others who wanted to avoid the draft. The day before Reagan’s arrival, there had been a 50,000-strong protest against his visit which had required the biggest deployment of police in Berlin’s post-war history.
On arrival in West Berlin, Reagan and the First Lady, Nancy Reagan, were taken to the Reichstag building, the former home of the German Empire’s parliament and that of the Weimar Republic. The West German legislature, the Bundestag, could not sit in Berlin as the city was outside both the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) under the terms of the Four Power Agreement on Berlin of 1971, but the Reichstag was used for occasional representative meetings and one-off events. From a balcony, Reagan looked out over the Berlin Wall, the Antifaschistischer Schutzwall or “Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart”, which had divided the city physically since its establishment by the East German authorities on 13 August 1961. It was a concrete manifestation of the Cold War, of the division between East and West, and by the time of Reagan’s visit at least 134 people had died trying to cross the border. The most recent had been 24-year-old lorry driver Lutz Schmidt, who had been shot in the heart by a border guard while attempting to climb the wall at Rheingoldstraße near Schönefeld Airport on 12 February 1987.
At 2.00 pm that day, President Reagan gave a speech in front of the Brandenburg Gate, at the junction of the Unter den Linden and Ebertstraße. Two panels of bulletproof glass behind him protected him from East Berlin. The Federal Chancellor, Dr Helmut Kohl, the President of the Federal Republic of Germany, Richard von Weizsäcker, and the Governing Mayor of West Berlin, Eberhard Diepgen, were all present. Weizsäcker, from an old aristocratic family in Württemberg, had been Mayor until 1984 when he had resigned to seek the presidency; he had also once been a protégé of Kohl (though he was 10 years older), but their relationship had soured in 1971 when Weizsäcker had supported Kohl’s victorious opponent, Rainer Barzel, for the leadership of the Christian Democratic Union. Kohl in turn had tried to frustrate Weizsäcker’s bid for the presidency, and the President had since then been outspoken in his occasional criticisms of Kohl’s government.
Reagan’s address was principally the work of one of the White House speechwriters, the 30-year-old Peter Robinson, who had been Chief Speechwriter for Vice President George Bush (and is now a Fellow of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and host of its excellent interview platform, Uncommon Knowledge). Several senior members of the administration opposed any direct reference to the Berlin Wall or its potential removal, fearing it might damage East-West relations and jeopardise the working relationship Reagan had built up with the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev. The White House Chief of Staff, Howard Baker, warned against the key phrase in the draft, “Mr Gorbachev, tear down the wall”, calling it “extreme” and “unpresidential”, and was supported by the Deputy National Security Advisor, Lieutenant General Colin Powell. The President, with his uncanny feel for phraseology and for what appealed to ordinary voters, told them “I think we’ll leave it in”.
Reagan’s judgement was absolutely the right one. In the central passage of the speech, he framed the United States’ intentions carefully and skilfully as supporting freedom. everywhere, for all people, and welcoming “change and openness”: a riff, surely, on Gorbachev’s policies of perestroika (“restructuring”) and glasnost (“transparency”). He addressed the Soviet leader directly, and encouraged him to behave in a way consistent with his stated intentions. Surely, he implied, Gorbachev was acting in good faith.
We welcome change and openness; for we believe that freedom and security go together, that the advance of human liberty—the advance of human liberty can only strengthen the cause of world peace. There is one sign the Soviets can make that would be unmistakable, that would advance dramatically the cause of freedom and peace. General Secretary Gorbachev, if you seek peace, if you seek prosperity for the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, if you seek liberalisation: Come here to this gate. Mr Gorbachev, open this gate. Mr Gorbachev—Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall!
As with so many of Reagan’s most effective speeches, it was not simply the words, finely honed though they were. The ex-actor had an extraordinary ability—perhaps partly buttressed by his age?—to sound almost artless, an honest, plain-speaking man saying simply what needed to be said. But it was so different an approach from that of most politicians, even in the 1980s, before the discipline was inundated by jargon, evasion and half-truths, that it made Reagan striking and popular, reflected in his electoral success at home.
In his peroration, he waxed philosophical, almost spiritual, in a way American politicians can manage but most European leaders cannot. He reflected on a piece of graffito on the Wall which he had seen from the balcony of the Reichstag, which read “This wall will fall. Beliefs become reality.” He picked up that theme and made it an assertion of the inevitability of the West’s victory.
This wall will fall, for it cannot withstand faith; it cannot withstand truth. The wall cannot withstand freedom.
His final paragraph sounded almost like an afterthought. He referred, though his advisers had recommended he should not, to the protests against his visit. Again, his manner allowed him to muse on the demonstrations without obvious rancour, with a touch of good-natured humour and indulgence. But his point was powerful.
And I would like, before I close, to say one word. I have read, and I have been questioned since I’ve been here about certain demonstrations against my coming. And I would like to say just one thing, and to those who demonstrate so. I wonder if they have ever asked themselves that if they should have the kind of government they apparently seek, no one would ever be able to do what they’re doing again. Thank you and God bless you all. Thank you.
The speech did not single-handedly win the Cold War. Its public impact at the time was relatively limited, though it grew in significance when the Wall was indeed torn down only two-and-a-half years later in November 1989. However, some historians have argued that its true initial influence was in shaking the confidence of the Soviet leadership and reassuring Reagan’s domestic political audience that he remained as resolute an opponent of Communism as ever. Conversely, because of its language, because in some ways Reagan was extending a hand of co-operation to Gorbachev, it offered the Kremlin a potential off-ramp and allowed the Iron Curtain to come down in a more relaxed atmosphere than might otherwise have been the case.
The author and journalist James Mann, writing in The New York Times in 2007, presented an analysis which feels right. He argued that the speech “encapsulated Mr Reagan’s successful but complex approach to dealing with the Soviet Union”, and was doing several things at once.
It acknowledged that Mr Gorbachev represented something significant and fundamentally different in Moscow; that he was not merely a new face for the same old Soviet policies… while the speech reasserted the anti-communism on which Mr Reagan had based his entire political career, it also gave recognition to the idea that the Soviet system might be changing… The new element in 1987 was not the idea that the wall should be torn down, but the direct appeal to Mr Gorbachev to do it… he [Reagan] wasn’t trying to land a knockout blow on the Soviet regime, nor was he engaging in mere political theater. He was instead doing something else on that damp day in Berlin 20 years ago—he was helping to set the terms for the end of the cold war.
I think that holds water as an analysis. I think it’s also worth looking at the speech almost from the other end of the telescope, as part of a narrative of Reagan’s almost-mystical ability to connect with the public across the political spectrum, witnessed by the phenomenon labelled “Reagan Democrats”, voters who were traditionally firm supporters of the Democratic Party but were persuaded to vote for a Republican president and help him to two landslide election victories. It was not a platitude that he was dubbed “the Great Communicator”.
Peter Robinson can be seen discussing the speech on C-SPAN in 2021 here.
Jukebox jury
This week I watched The History of Sound, starring Paul Mescal and Josh O’Connor, an excellent, multifaceted and moving film through which runs a thread of traditional folk music. So here are five songs from the film, each accompanied by another interpretation, which is, after all, the lifeblood of folk music.
“Silver Dagger”, Oliver Coates feat. Paul Mescal
“Silver Dagger”, Gillian Welch
“The Snow It Melts The Soonest”, Oliver Coates feat. Sam Amidon
“The Snow It Melts The Soonest”, The Unthanks
“Grieved Soul”, Oliver Coates feat. Aedin Moloney
“Grieved Soul”, Dann Pell
“Here in the Vineyard”, Oliver Coates feat. Briana. Middleton
“Here in the Vineyard”, Anna & Elizabeth
“Across the Rocky Mountain”, Oliver Coates feat. Paul Mescal
“Across the Rocky Mountains”, Ricky Skaggs and Bruce Hornsby
I don’t care…
… as Holden Caulfield lamented, if it’s a sad good-bye or a bad good-bye, but when I leave a place I like to know I’m leaving it. If you don’t you feel even worse.