Sunday round-up 8 December 2024

Happy birthday to the last of the 1966 squad Geoff Hurst, Bill Bryson, Kim Basinger and Ann Coulter, as well as the Feast of the Immaculate Conception

We’ve reached that stage of the year when anyone celebrating a birthday runs the risk of hearing the dread words “The present is for your birthday and Christmas”. So who is potentially uni-gifted? Belfast-born “Man with the Golden Flute” Sir James Galway (85), World Cup Final hat-trick scorer and last of the team of ’66 Sir Geoff Hurst (83), Booker Prize-winning novelist John Banville (79), essayist, humorist and adopted national treasure Bill Bryson (73), publisher, businessman and former pornographer Richard Desmond (73), Academy Award-winning screen siren Kim Basinger (71), European Commissioner for Defence and Space Andrius Kubilius (68), Canadian-American author, critic and embracer of the alt-right Mark Steyn (65), author and commentator Ann Coulter (63), actress and seemingly-if-surprisingly good sport Teri Hatcher (60), actor and presenter David Harewood (59), footballer, coach and pundit Les Ferdinand (58), NASCAR titan Kevin Harvick (49), rapper and actress Nicki Minaj (42), promoter and former boxer Amir Khan (38), England football star Raheem Sterling (30) and always-keeping-busy actor Owen Teague (26).

At least some people are beyond the vale of one-present tears, including lyric poet Horace (65 BC), Mary Queen of Scots (1542), politician and diplomat Horatio Walpole (1678), last non-Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Francis I (1708), inventor of the cotton gin Eli Whitney Jr (1765), General Motors and Chevrolet founder William C. Durand (1861), composer, violinist and Finnish national hero Jean Sibelius (1865), legend of Mexican art and culture Diego Rivera (1886), creator of Popeye the Sailor Man E.C. Segar (1894), humorist and cartoonist James Thurber (1894), painter, illustrator and famous grandson Lucian Freud (1922), Rat Pack all-rounder Sammy Davis Jr (1925), Conservative MP and journalist Sir Julian Critchley (1930), actor, director, producer and screenwriter Maximilian Schell (1930), actor, director, producer and semi-convincing kung fu Shaolin monk David Carradine (1936), Doors front-man and “Lizard King” Jim Morrison (1943) and country-rock giant Gregg Allman (1947).

Sisters are doing it for themselves

Today in 1660, the King’s Company, a theatrical troupe led by witty and dissolute playwright Thomas Killigrew, staged a production of Shakespeare’s Othello at the Theatre Royal, Vere Street. In September 1642, the Long Parliament had issued an order forbidding the performance of stage plays:

instead of which are recommended to the People of this Land the profitable and seasonable considerations of Repentance, Reconciliation, and Peace with God, which probably may produce outward Peace and Prosperity, and bring again Times of Joy and Gladness to these Nations.

(Good luck with that.) The ban was lifted after the Restoration of Charles II in May 1660 and a blossoming of theatre ensued.

This production of Othello was notable for the fact that the part of Desdemona was played by a woman, Margaret Hughes, the first time a woman had ever appeared on the English stage. She was 30 years old, described by Samuel Pepys as a “might pretty woman”, and may have had a brief affair with the King, though that would hardly make her the member of an exclusive club. It was a significant change in the presentation of drama in England. The practice, standard until then, of female parts being taken by male actors was feared to encourage “unnatural vice”, that is, homosexuality, and in 1662 Charles II went so far as to issue a royal warrant stipulating that female roles should only be played by women. Killigrew took the instruction one step further, and in 1664 staged an all-female production of his own 1641 play The Parson’s Wedding, repeating the act in 1672.

Later in the 1660s, Hughes became the lover of the King’s cousin Prince Rupert of the Rhine, who sat in the House of Lords as Duke of Cumberland, was a member of the Privy Council and, after the Duke of York, was Charles II’s closest adult relative. Although they never married, Hughes benefited from Rupert’s patronage, becoming a member of the King’s Company in 1669 and thereby immune from arrest for debt. She was painted four times by the leading portraitist at court, Sir Peter Lely, and bore Prince Rupert a daughter in 1673 called (perhaps inevitably) Ruperta. Although Rupert left most of his estate of £12,000 to Hughes and their daughter when he died in 1682, she was a lavish spender and enjoyed an “uncomfortable widowhood”. She died in 1719, aged 89.

I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this any more

On this day in 1864, Pope Pius IX issued an encyclical entitled Quanta cura (“With how great care”), in which he condemned a series of what he believed to be significant errors of thought afflicting the modern world. There was an element within the Catholic Church calling for liberalisation and the church to adapt to contemporary mores, but Pius IX was having none of it. A 72-year-old aristocrat from Ancona on the Adriatic coast, Giovanni Maria Mastai Ferretti had been Archbishop of Imola before being elected Pope on the fourth ballot at the June 1846 conclave which followed the death of Gregory XVI.

As a bishop, Ferretti had been considered a liberal and sympathetic to Italian nationalism, and he defeated the conservative Secretary of State, Luigi Cardinal Lambruschini to become pontiff. But he become a fierce proponent of the centralisation of authority in the Vatican and of his position as the church’s supreme religious authority, issuing a record number of encyclicals during what became the longest papacy in history (1846-78). Qui pluribus (“On faith and religion”) in 1846 had warned against rationalism, pantheism, socialism and communism, among other ideologies, while Nostis et Nobiscum (“You know and see with us”) in 1849 denounced socialism and communism for attempting to confuse the faithful and conspiring against the Papal States; at this point the Pope was still a secular ruler as well as a religious one, governing Rome and much of the surrounding territory including Lazio, Bologna, Ferrara, Umbria, the Marches, Benevento and Pontecorvo.

Quanta cura was a thorough rejection of the tenets of liberal thought. It condemned freedom of conscience and worship, the legitimacy of public opinion, the imposition of work on days of holy obligation, the idea that parental rights and education were a matter for civil law alone and any opposition to the existence of religious orders. As if this were not sweeping enough, Pius IX, clearly in his stride, added an appendix entitled The Syllabus of Errors, systematically and painstakingly recording the opinions, principles and philosophies he thought wrong: it included pantheism, rationalism, latitudinarianism, socialism, communism, secret societies, anti-clericalism and a series of propositions asserting the power of the civil law over the church.

Ten years later, William Gladstone, having lost the premiership earlier that year to Benjamin Disraeli, condemned the Syllabus, writing that “no one can now become [Rome’s] convert without renouncing his moral and mental freedom, and placing his civil loyalty and duty at the mercy of another”.

Pius IX lived to the age of 85. Italy had been largely unified in 1861, and in September 1870 the Italian army seized Rome after a short siege. A plebiscite the following month was won convincingly by those in favour of unification with Italy and King Victor Emmanuel II issued a decree proclaiming the absorption of the Papal States. Pius responded with an encyclical excommunicating the invaders, including the King himself, but he had no temporal force to retaliate. He refused to acknowledge any of the formal declarations of the new status quo, calling himself “a prisoner in the Vatican”, and relations between the papacy and Italy would remain hostile until the conclusion of the Lateran Treaty in 1929, which recognised the Vatican City as a sovereign state.

Written in the stars

Today in 1955, the Council of Europe formally adopted the Flag of Europe, a circle of 12 gold stars on a blue background, now more famous as the emblem of the European Union. A committee had been appointed in 1950 to devise a symbol for the new organisation, the Council of Europe having been established by the Treaty of London on 5 May 1949. It was committed to “the pursuit of peace based on justice and international co-operation” and there were 10 founding members: Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom. There are now 46 member states, Russia having been expelled in 2022.

The choice of flag was eventually narrowed down to two designs. One, by Spanish diplomat and historian Salvador de Madariaga, featured a constellation of stars against a blue background, the stars positioned according to the location of member states’ capitals with a larger star representing the seat of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. The second, designed by Arsène Heitz who worked for the council’s postal department, was a circle of stars on a blue background, inspired, Heitz later said, by the crown of stars depicted being worn by the Woman of the Apocalypse, a common device in the iconography of the Blessed Virgin Mary (see below).

In September 1953, the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe recommended a circle of 15 stars on a blue background, the number representing the member states at the time. West Germany objected, however, as one of those members was Saarland, a French protectorate established in 1947 around the River Saar in western Germany led by Minister-President Johannes Hoffmann, although the French High Commissioner, Gilbert Grandval, wielded considerable influence. After 1949, the Federal Republic of Germany pressed for Saarland to be integrated into its territory, but by 1953 it was still notionally separate and a member of the Council of Europe. Representing it on the flag would, the West German government felt, imply its sovereignty was recognised.

The Committee of Ministers endorsed the design of a circle of stars, but reduced the number to 12, “representing perfection and entirety”, and the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe approved this on 25 October 1955, instructing the head of its cultural department, Belgian journalist and Holocaust survivor Paul M.G. Lévy, to finalise the design. After its formal adoption, the new Flag of Europe was unveiled in Paris on 13 December.

The Council of Europe promoted the flag as a symbol of European unity. In 1985, a committee of the European Economic Community proposed adopting the flag with the addition of an E in the centre of the circle of stars. Many members states, however, were opposed to the idea of the EEC having a flag at all, and a compromise was reached whereby the Flag of Europe, without an E at the centre, would be the “logo” of the community. It remains a symbol, but not officially the flag, of the European Union. It was to have been given formal status in the 2004 European Constitution, which failed to be ratified, and was recognised in early drafts of the Treaty of Lisbon but removed before the instrument was approved at the end of 2007. However, the majority of member states individually recognise the flag as “representing allegiance to the EU”.

Party hats—or crowns of stars

In festal terms, The Big One today is the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception. In this case it is not, as is commonly misapprehended, related to Jesus but marks the conception of His mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVM, if you’re on email terms). It was originally a feast concentrating more on one of the active participants and commemorated the “conception of St Anne, the ancestress of God”, St Anne being the BVM’s mother. The precise status of Mary differed across Christendom but there was a growing movement in the West by the 11th century which held that God had ordained her to be conceived without being guilty of original sin (hence “Immaculate”), whereas the more common view in the East was that God had chosen her to bear Christ because of her piety and virtue. It became one of the many disagreements which caused the Great Schism between Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy in 1054. When Pius V revised the Roman Breviary in 1568, the office of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin was replaced by that of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin and Pius IX proclaimed it Catholic dogma in 1854. It is also the patronal feast day of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Italy, Korea, Nicaragua, Paraguay, the Philippines, Spain, the United States and Uruguay.

All of that excitement leaves little room for anyone else, but it is also the feast of St Eutychian (d. AD 283), a Tuscan who became the 27th Pope and reigned from AD 275 to AD 283; of St Eucharius, a 3rd century AD missionary who is venerated as the first Bishop of Trier and was reputed to have brought a dead man back to life; of St Patapios of Thebes (4th century AD), a hermit and preacher who is the patron saint of dropsy; of St Budoc of Dol, a 5th century AD Breton monk and bishop who is said to have crossed the Channel at one point and founded what is now the town of St Budeaux in Devon; and St Romaric (d. AD 653), a Frankish nobleman who took monastic vows at Luxeuil Abbey then founded and was abbot of Remiremont Abbey, a double convent of monks and nuns, in the Vosges mountains (rather magnificently he had daughters called Ozeltruda and Zeberga, and a granddaughter named Gebetruda).

In the secular world, it is Battle Day in the Falkland Islands, which marks, well, the Battle of the Falkland Islands in 1914, when a British cruiser squadron commanded by Vice-Admiral Doveton Sturdee hunted down and defeated a German squadron under Vice-Admiral Maximilian Reichsgraf von Spee, who was killed when his flagship SMS Scharnhorst was sunk in the encounter.

It is Constitution Day in Romania, marking the 1991 referendum which approved the post-Communist constitution, and in Uzbekistan, marking the constitution’s adoption by the Supreme Council in 1992. For Albania it is National Youth Day, while Ethiopia celebrates Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Day, celebrating the country’s 80 different ethnic groups. (I won’t list them but the smallest in the 2007 census was Qewama, with 298 members, while the largest was the Oromo at nearly 25 million.)

Factoids

1. The Treaty on European Union, otherwise known as the Maastricht Treaty, established the EU on 1 November 1993. This was not simply a rebranding of the EEC but the creation of a new body through the completion of the merger of three European communities: the European Economic Community, the European Coal and Steel Community and the European Atomic Energy Community. The EEC and Euratom had been founded at the same time, on 25 March 1957, by the Treaty of Rome and the Euratom Treaty, but the European Coal and Steel Community dated back to the Treaty of Paris, signed on 18 April 1951 by Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands and West Germany. Its pioneer, French foreign minister Robert Schuman, believed that pooling the production of coal and steel, in his mind initially between France and West Germany, would make a future conflict between the two countries “not only unthinkable but materially impossible”. The United Kingdom declined to participate because the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, in language which is eerily familiar now, stated the country “would not accept the economy being handed over to an authority that is utterly undemocratic and is responsible to nobody”.

2. Since Glasgow is mentioned below, a word about the magnificent City Chambers, built between 1882 and 1888. The building was designed by William Young, whose credits by then included Haseley Manor in Warwickshire, new wings for Gosford House in East Lothian and the now lost Chelsea House in Cadogan Place. At the time, Glasgow Town Council was based in what is now the Old Sheriff Court on Wilson Street, but this was deemed inadequate to administer a booming city of three-quarters of a million souls, so an area of land on the east side of George Square was purchased for a new, purpose-built headquarters. What emerged was a magnificent Beaux-Arts palace, with an enthroned statute of Queen Victoria added to mark the Golden Jubilee in 1887. The Banqueting Hall is 100 feet long and 48 feet wide, with enormous murals by the Glasgow Boys. The whole building is so grand that it has been used by filmmakers to stand in for the British Embassy in Moscow and the Vatican, and the supposed killer fact is this: the City Chambers contain more marble than the Vatican. It is a reminder that Glasgow really once was the Second City of the Empire.

3. It’s important to remember how much Glasgow has changed. At the last census, its population was 635,130, still bigger than anywhere in the United Kingdom except London, Birmingham and Leeds, and the highest since 1981. But between 1981 and 1991 it fell from 881,000 to 629,220, and bottomed out at 579,000 in 2001. Its current size, excepting the past 25 years, is the smallest it has been since 1891 (565,839), and it peaked just after the Second World War at over a million, when it was one of the most densely populated cities in the world, and home to some of Europe’s worst poverty.

4. Famously, of course, Glasgow prospered as a shipbuilding city. Again, it’s worth remembering some of the actual statistics. Until the 1850s, three-quarters of Scotland’s shipbuilding took place on the east coast. By 1900, there were 200 separate yards on the River Clyde, constructing 20 per cent of the world’s ships. Clydeside built 43 per cent of British shipping tonnage during the First World War. But the Great Depression took its toll, and after the Second World War the Glasgow shipyards found it increasingly difficult to compete with overseas manufacturers. Now there are two shipyards left: the former Yarrow site at Scotstoun and what was Fairfields in Govan, both owned by BAE Systems Surface Ships Ltd.

5. Ships built on the Clyde include the tea clipper Cutty Sark (1869), ocean liner RMS Lusitania (1907), battlecruiser HMS Hood (1920), Cunard Line stars RMS Queen Mary (1936) and RMS Queen Elizabeth (1940), fleet aircraft carriers HMS Indefatigable and HMS Implacable (1944), the Royal Navy’s last battleship HMS Vanguard (1946), the former royal yacht HMY Britannia (1954) and cruise ship Queen Elizabeth 2 (1969).

6. Returning to grand buildings, it is also easy to forget that many of the most striking and impressive edifices in London and other major cities were originally private residences for aristocrats and plutocrats. Lancaster House, one of the governments grandest properties, was, as Stafford House, the London home of the Duke of Sutherland. Glasgow’s Gallery of Modern Art on Royal Exchange Square was built for tobacco lord William Cunninghame, and was then the Royal Bank of Scotland, the Royal Exchange and one of Glasgow District Library’s buildings. Leinster House in Dublin, the core of the buildings which house the Oireachtas, the Irish parliament, was built as the town residence of the Duke of Leinster before being sold to the Royal Dublin Society. And, of course, the core of what is now Buckingham Palace was originally the London seat of the Duke of Buckingham.

7. The Catholic Church in Scotland before the Reformation had two archdioceses: the Archbishop of St Andrews, the head of the church in Scotland, oversaw the Bishops of Aberdeen, Brechin, Caithness, Dunblane, Dunkeld, Moray, Orkney and Ross; the Archbishop of Glasgow’s suffragans were the Bishops of Argyll, the Isles and Galloway. The only mainland cathedral to survive the Reformation and remain in use is Glasgow Cathedral, consecrated in 1197 and dedicated to St Mungo, now a parish church of the Church of Scotland.

8. Vice-Admiral Maximilian Reichsgraf von Spee (see above), killed at the Battle of the Falkland Islands this day in 1914, was honoured by the German Navy after the First World War in the naming of the “pocket battleship” Admiral Graf Spee, commissioned in 1936 nominally (but not actually) in accordance with the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the ship embarked on a commerce raiding operation in the South Atlantic and was eventually tracked and engaged by a Royal Navy squadron at the Battle of the River Plate on 13 December 1939. Having badly damaged HMS Exeter, the Graf Spee’s commanding officer, Captain Hans Langsdorff, sought refuge in Montevideo in neutral Uruguay. Believing he faced superior Allied naval forces if he put back to sea (he didn’t), Langsdorff scuttled his ship and with his crew was taken to Buenos Aires where, on 19 December, he shot himself. So the ship named after von Spee, who had died near the Falkland Islands, sank in nearby Uruguay and its captain committed suicide in Argentina.

“It costs only a penny an hour to operate your TV set, and there are times when it’s worth it.” (Arnold H. Glasow)

1. “Inside Barlinnie”: less famous than Strangeways, Belmarsh and Wakefield, Barlinnie opened in 1882 in what was then rural Riddrie, north-east of Glasgow, partly to ease overcrowding at Duke Street Prison in the city itself. It became the biggest and most notorious prison in Scotland—the Big Hoose, Bar-L—with 1,600 inmates in an estate with a capacity for 1,018. Between 1946 and 1960, it saw 10 hangings, six conducted by the famous/notorious Albert Pierrepoint and two by his uncle Thomas Pierrepoint. It is now closing, ruled “not fit for purpose” in 2020, and work has begun on a modern successor in Glasgow’s East End, on the site of the former Provan Gas Works, as a projected cost (so far) of £400 million. This BBC documentary looks at the history of Bar-L through the experiences of staff and inmates, a sobering, sometimes chilling story of an institution filled with brutality (though one which also, in its Special Unit between 1973 and 1994, pioneered rehabilitation, as charted by Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws’s recent book).

2. “Renaissance: The Blood and the Beauty”: I’m really not sure what I made of the first episode of this BBC documentary-with-dramatic-inserts, which looks at the work and rivalry of Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti and Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known simply as Raphael. The script is based on Michelangelo’s letters, it is narrated by Sophie Okonedo, and the talking heads are distinguished: Sarah Dunant, Walter Isaacson, Kate Lister, Sir Antony Gormley, Alison Lapper, David LaChapelle. I wouldn’t instinctively have tapped 78-year-old, six-foot-two booming Charles Dance as the diminutive and gnarled Florentine artist but he’s having a ball, so fine. The content is fascinating, albeit some of the ground is well-trodden, but I was left slightly baffled as to what, exactly, I’d seen. I’ll reserve judgement till the end of the series.

3. “Michael Gove vs Lionel Shriver: are politicians due a Covid reckoning?”: whether you will enjoy or can cope with this Spectator TV debate, gingerly overseen by economics editor Kate Andrews, will depend on your existing views of the participants. Shriver was an early sceptic of lockdown and all the panoply of government responses to the Covid-19 pandemic that went with it, while Gove, as Minister for the Cabinet Office from 2019 to 2021, was chair of the cabinet committee coordinating Whitehall’s policy on Covid-19. (He is now, of course, editor of The Spectator, for which Shriver is a regular columnist.) It is a good-humoured and polite exchange, with reasonable points on both sides: I think Shriver exaggerates when she protests that “no-one” is talking about the pandemic but she has a point about needing to learn lessons. This one is very far from done yet: the current public inquiry led by Baroness Hallett will continue public hearings until 2026, is unlikely to report before 2028 and (I fear) has become bogged down in (fascinating) fiery Whitehall gossip.

4. “Edward vs George: The Windsors at War”: you might think there is little left to be said about the events leading up to the Abdication Crisis of 1936, the crisis itself and its aftermath, and it is certainly well-tilled ground. (Indeed, my dear friend Michelle and I recorded several podcasts about David, as Edward VIII was known, and his pre-abdication life.) This Channel 4 series, however, draws heavily on the excellent Alexander Larman’s recent book The Windsors at War: The Nazi Threat to the Crown, and has some genuinely new sources like the diaries of Helen Hardinge, wife of the Private Secretary to the Sovereign (1936-43) Lord Hardinge of Penshurst, the unpublished memoirs of Edward VIII’s legal adviser Viscount Monckton of Brenchley and testimony from Austrian filmmaker Georg Stefan Troller, who interviewed the Duke of Windsor (as Edward had become) in 1966 and caused him to explode with fury with an unscheduled question. Even if you know the bones of the story, worth watching if history, especially royal, constitutional and personal history, is your thing.

5. “The Big Snow of 47”: another serviceable documentary from Channel 5 looks at the fierce winter of 1946/47, one of the coldest and most severe for decades. It came in only the second winter of the Labour government, when Britain was still in the first stages of recovery after the Second World War, and is not simply nostalgic anecdotes of sledging and snowballs. Whole herds of farm animals froze and died (sheep numbers took six years to recover), cereal and potato harvests fell by 10 to 20 per cent with potatoes having to be rationed, industrial output dropped 10 per cent and the recently nationalised coal and electricity industries came close to collapse (the Minister of Fuel and Power, Manny Shinwell, became deeply unpopular and was demoted in October). To use a comparison from the Covid-19 pandemic (see above), post-war Britain was already a vulnerable patient, and the cold weather of January to March 1947 was a titanic shock to a fragile system.

“Writing, when properly managed (as you may be sure I think mine is) is but a different name for conversation.” (Laurence Sterne)

1. “The Regressivists come to Washington”: in The Washington Post, veteran journalist David Ignatius suggests that Theodore Roosevelt’s Progressive movement shared with Donald Trump and his restless reformers like Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy a belief that government had become stagnant, overweening and curiously ineffective. There is an appetite, indeed a demand, for change. But Trumpism sees change as a restoration of past greatness, whether or not that greatness is real: “make America great again”. Ignatius points to some of the biggest targets of Trump’s first presidency, in the shape of food stamps, the Affordable Care Act, Medicaid and children’s health insurance, combined with substantial tax cuts which benefited the very rich and large corporations. Will change be radical and constructive, or build on retribution against political enemies and ideological opponents? It’s an open question.

2. “Dissertations and their discontents”: in The Critic, a welcome and sensible defence of the academic doctorate by Professor Alexandra Wilson, a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford, with a PhD from Royal Holloway, University of London. She teaches and researches the history of music, especially opera, and has expressed the view on several occasions that public funding of academic research is a wholly valid subject for debate. She also worries that it is “increasingly being reserved for research that addresses a relatively small number of currently fashionable socio-political issues”, so she is no wild-eyed progressive. But she makes the important point that individual academics and researchers should not be the target of this debate, as they are merely participating in a system which already exists. Wilson also maintains, rightly, that “a PhD has value as an exercise in intellectual rigour: in finding, sifting and prioritising information, in marshalling evidence and articulating an argument”. Being a doctor doesn’t make you an infallible expert or an across-the-board authority, but it is in many cases an indication of specific subject expertise and, more broadly, demonstration of sound critical thinking. I must finish mine…

3. “Why are political memoirs so mediocre?”: in The Financial Times, historian Alex von Tunzelmann uses the critical reception of former Chancellor of Germany Angela Merkel’s recent volume, Freedom: Memoirs 1954-2021, to argue that memoirs by politicians are inherently mediocre, because “the best memoirs rely on authors reckoning honestly with themselves in ways that are painful and exposing”. She is quite right that it is a rare politician who engages in such an exercise, though not unknown, but I think it is a category error. A memoir is simply an account of the past written from personal experience, and that is what political memoirs deliver: they are the author’s view—whether honest or not—of what happened, why and how. Essentially Tunzelmann wants all memoirs to be politicians apologising, admitting error and disavowing previous beliefs, but that is simply unrealistic. To take the obvious example of Sir Tony Blair’s A Journey, of course it justified the invasion of Iraq, because Blair still believes he acted correctly. You can agree or disagree, but claiming a memoir is a failure because it does not accord with your own views is absurd. (Incidentally, it is technically true to say that “Churchill never said: ‘History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it’,”, but a slightly snide and cheap shot: he did say, and it is recorded in Hansard, “I consider that it will be found much better by all parties to leave the past to history, especially as I propose to write that history myself”, which is exactly the same sentiment.)

4. “Suddenly Reform is starting to look plausible”: writing in The Times, Janice Turner makes a sound and cautious case of the opportunity for Reform UK to harvest support from Labour after the Prime Minister’s vaunted-and-ridiculed-in-equal-measure Plan for Change did not explicitly address immigration in its six “milestones”. It comes in the wake of the decision of Tim Montgomerie, founder of ConservativeHome, to join Nigel Farage’s party, and Reform polling higher than the Labour Party for the first time ever, albeit by one point. I am no friend of Farage nor have I ever felt the attraction of his party or his politics, and I have never believed that the Conservatives should seek some accommodation with him, but his voters cannot be ignored or his attraction dismissed. Turner is right when she says Reform is “developing an electrifying USP: it posits itself as a truth-sayer about issues other parties avoid, speaking for voters who feel shut down”. We have seen the potency of this, from President Donald Trump to the surge of the Alternative für Deutschland in Germany and the Rassemblement National in France. It does not need a capitulation to angry, simplistic and inarticulate populist fury but to pretend the unrest is not there is stupid and will be self-destructive. I genuinely don’t believe Sir Keir Starmer is capable of the task, or even that he understands or accepts its existence. Look around the world, and see how that has ended up.

5. “Ministers and Mandarins: Inside the Whitehall Village”: Jock Bruce-Gardyne was a rare politician. His background was impeccably of the Establishment, a scion of Scottish landowners who was educated at Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford, who then joined the Foreign Office. He became Conservative MP for South Angus in 1964, losing it to the SNP ten years later, then returned as MP for Knutsford at a 1979 by-election only for his seat to disappear in boundary changes in 1983. Bruce-Gardyne received a consolatory peerage but died in 1990, aged only 60, of a brain tumour. He was an early monetarist, and had a brief period in office (1981-83) as a junior minister at HM Treasury but was fundamentally too independent and honest for loyal government service. This memoir of his time in Whitehall, published in 1986, is entertaining and frank, utterly without pretension and affectionate, but also demonstrates how little is new under the sun: civil servants trying to assimilate ministers into their departmental entities like the Borg in Star Trek: The Next Generation, a bureaucracy obsessed with hierarchy and process, a dismissal of Parliament as a wayward nuisance and the near-impossibility of effecting substantial change from within. Worth a read, but more seriously than Bruce-Gardyne’s downbeat wit might initially suggest.

The wild things roared their terrible roars and gnashed their terrible teeth…

… and rolled their terrible eyes and showed their terrible claws but Max stepped into his private boat and waved goodbye. As must I. I once told a departing colleague in the House of Commons that he would be greatly missed. “Oh yes!” he exclaimed. “But not for very long.” Toodle-oo.