Sunday round-up 8 June 2025

Millicent Martin, Nancy Sinatra and Bonnie Tyler walk into a birthday party... and marking the Viking raid on Lindisfarne, St Jadwiga's Day and French Indochina Day

Careful administering the bumps today to actress, singer and That Was The Week That Was stalwart Millicent Martin (91), singer, actress, author, celebrated boot-wearer and famous offspring Nancy Sinatra (85), sixth incarnation of the Doctor and let’s-face-it-nobody’s-favourite Colin Baker (82), frequently papabile former Archbishop of Quebec and Primate of Canada Marc Cardinal Ouellet (81), singer-songwriter Boz Scaggs (81), detective novelist Sara Paretsky (78), holding-out-for-a-hero Welsh powerhouse Bonnie Tyler (74), inventor of the World Wide Web Sir Tim Berners-Lee (70), Dilbert creator and increasingly right-wing loon Scott Adams (68), Fenian-adjacent-but-sure-I’ll-have-the-gong former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford and the University of St Andrews Professor Dame Louise Richardson (67), inexplicably successful sleazy dreadlock enthusiast Mick Hucknall (65), actress Julianna Margulies (59), tennis champion and commentator Lindsay Davenport (49), rapper, producer, no friend of the Jews and outspoken not-the-well-man Ye (48) and financial marketer, investor of DeepFuckingValue-to-his-Reddit-friends Keith Gill (39).

Exercising the old mortality exeat are Protestant reformer and author of the first Slovene-language printed book Primož Trubar (1508), composer and violinist Tomaso Albinoni (1671), Founding Father and third Governor of Rhode Island John Collins (1717), twice Secretary of State of the Holy See Ercole Cardinal Consalvi (1757), composer and critic Robert Schumann (1810), painter and Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood founding member Sir John Everett Millais (1829), celebrated architect Frank Lloyd Wright (1867), biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist and DNA boffin Francis Crick (1916), long-serving President of Indonesia and stylishly mononymous Suharto (1921), former First Lady of the United States Barbara Bush (1925), actor, comedian and producer Jerry Stiller (1927), actress Dana Wynter (1931), cricketer and sportscaster Ray Illingworth (1932), unforgiving comedian Joan Rivers (1933), murdered Ulster Unionist Member of Parliament Rev Robert Bradford (1941), scandal-beset-then-exonerated former Archbishop of Sydney George Cardinal Pell (1941) and court-martialled United States Army officer and My Lai war criminal William Calley Jr (1943).

They come by sea

AD 793 saw the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Northumbria troubled and agitated. Three years before, King Æthelred I, deposed in AD 779, had been restored and Osred II forcibly tonsured and exiled to the Isle of Man. He returned to Northumbria in AD 792 in an attempt to regain power but was deserted by his soldiers and eventually murdered on Æthelred’s orders, his body buried at Tynemouth Priory. Then, in the first few months of AD 793, strange and worrying signs were seen in the sky. According to the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles:

Fierce, foreboding omens came over the land of the Northumbrians, and the wretched people shook; there were excessive whirlwinds, lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying in the sky.

As the year wore on, a terrible famine struck the kingdom, adding to the sense of living under God’s unfavourable judgement. Worse was to come.

The Irish monk St Aidan had founded a monastery at Lindisfarne, a small island linked to the coast by a low causeway, in AD 634. For the next 17 years, until his death in AD 651, Aidan served as Bishop of Lindisfarne and head of the monastic community, travelling on foot around the Kingdom of Northumbria proselytising among the pagan population. Christianity began to gain ground and the abbey at Lindisfarne became a notable seat of learning, and from AD 685 to AD 687 St Cuthbert, perhaps the greatest of the Northern saints, was Bishop. His supposedly incorruptible body was buried there and the island became a popular pilgrimage site. Around the beginning of the eighth century the monks produced the magnificent Lindisfarne Gospel, now exhibited at the British Library.

By AD 793, there were probably 30 or 40 monks at Lindisfarne, a substantial community under Bishop Higbald. On 8 June, Viking longships appeared on the horizon and landed easily at the gentle sloping shoreline, an ideal landing for shallow-draught boats like those of the Norse sailors. Then they attacked.

The monastery was a perfect target for raiding: isolated, undefended and utterly unprepared. No-one imagined that danger would come from the sea. It was a wealthy foundation, too, with golden crucifixes and crosiers, silver pyxes and ciboria, ivory reliquaries and valuable tapestries, gifts from wealthy patrons and donations from pilgrims.

The Northumbrian cleric and scholar Alcuin, serving as an official at the court of Charlemagne, King of the Franks, at Aachen, wrote to Bishop Higbald in the wake of the raid.

The calamity of your tribulation saddens me greatly every day, though I am absent; when the pagans desecrated the sanctuaries of God, and poured out the blood of saints around the altar, laid waste the house of our hope, trampled on the bodies of saints in the temple of God, like dung in the street… never before has such terror appeared in Britain. Behold the church of St Cuthbert, splattered with the blood of God’s priests, robbed of its ornaments.

Another description is given by Simeon of Durham, a Benedictine monk at Durham Priory writing around the end of the 11th century. His Historia regum Anglorum et Dacorum recalls that the Vikings:

came to the church of Lindisfarne, laid everything waste with grievous plundering, trampled the holy places with polluted steps, dug up the altars and seized all the treasures of the holy church. They killed some of the brothers, took some away with them in fetters, many they drove out, naked and loaded with insults, some they drowned in the sea.

The attack on Lindisfarne was profoundly shocking for Christian Europe. It was brutal and impious as well as unexpected; monks were killed or drowned, and some, probably the young boys serving as oblates, were taken into captivity, presumably destined to be sold as slaves. It would have been a lucrative venture of a kind at which the Vikings were adept. Peter Ackroyd, in Foundation, the first volume of his history of England, has suggested that a Christian holy site was specifically targeted in retribution for Charlemagne’s campaign against the pagan Saxons from AD 772 onwards, during which he had ordered the destruction of the Irminsul, or sacred pillar, near Paderborn. It is speculative: no evidence of motivation survives from the contemporary record.

The devastation of Lindisfarne is taken as the historiographical starting point of the Viking Age in Britain. There had been a handful of isolated raids before but nothing on the scale of AD 793. But individual raids quickly gave way to more permanent intrusion, and in AD 850-51, a Viking army overwintered for the first time on the Isle of Thanet in Kent. Another stayed on the Isle of Sheppey in AD 854-55. An army of conquest led by Ivar the Boneless and his brother Halfdar Ragnarsson and described by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles as a mycel heathen here or “Great Heathen Army” arrived in AD 865. Two years later, York fell to the Vikings, and Jorvik, as it became, would be the centre of Scandinavian activity in northern England until the Norman Conquest in 1066.

One famous but unattested legacy of the fate of Lindisfarne is a desperate plea by Christians for divine protection: A furore Normannorum libera nos, Domine, “Free us from the fury of the Northmen, Lord”.

No place for a woman

Ramsay MacDonald had been Labour’s first Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for just over nine months in 1924, forming a government after Stanley Baldwin’s Conservatives lost first the general election in December 1923 then a vote of confidence in the House of Commons the next month. The first Labour government had been hard, with only 191 MPs out of 615, dependent every day on the grudging support of 157 Liberals. They were swept away in October 1924 when Baldwin returned to government with biggest single-party majority in history, 209, yet less than five years later Labour became the largest party and MacDonald became Prime Minister for a second time, kissing hands almost a week after the election on 5 June.

MacDonald then began constructing a government. In 1924, he had held the office of Foreign Secretary himself alongside the premiership, largely unwilling to entrust foreign affairs to anyone else, but the workload had taken its toll on him and he realised it was not sustainable for a second time. His preference was to appoint J.H. Thomas, the convivial Welsh General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen who had been Colonial Secretary in the 1924 cabinet. He was a well-dressed man who had forged an especially good relationship with King George V, and the outgoing Foreign Secretary, Sir Austen Chamberlain, encouraged MacDonald in the appointment.

The obstacle was Arthur Henderson, a Methodist preacher from Glasgow who had been Labour’s first ever cabinet minister when he had joined Asquith’s coalition government during the First World War as President of the Board of Education. By 1929, he was 66 years old and had already been leader of the Labour Party twice, in 1908-10 and 1914-17, and served as Home Secretary in the government of 1924. He made it clear to MacDonald that he not only wanted to be Foreign Secretary, but that he would accept no other office. He was a pacifist—he resigned from Lloyd George’s war cabinet when his proposal for an international conference on the war was rejected by his colleagues—and an ardent supporter of the League of Nations, hard-working and sufficiently narrow in perspective to maintain great self-confidence. Austen Chamberlain thought him “very stupid and rather afraid of responsibility”; it was a harsh judgement but the Conservative was probably right to regard Jimmy Thomas as more able and certainly as more clubbable.

MacDonald was left with little choice but to appoint Henderson, who therefore achieved his goal but knew that he had not been the Prime Minister’s first choice, while Jimmy Thomas, who had no wish to return to the Colonial Office (although he would do exactly that in 1931 and again in 1935-36), was also dissatisfied and pressed instead for a significant domestic portfolio. MacDonald appointed him Lord Privy Seal with special responsibility for tackling unemployment. He was to be assisted by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, a flamboyant 32-year-old aristocrat who had begun his career as a Conservative MP before becoming an independent in 1920 then winning the Smethick by-election as a Labour candidate in 1926. His name was Sir Oswald Mosley.

The non-negotiable appointment was that of Philip Snowden as Chancellor of the Exchequer, the post he had held in the previous Labour government. Nearing 65, he was an austere Yorkshireman who walked with the aid of two sticks after a serious cycling accident in his late 20s, and he had been a Liberal before joining the Independent Labour Party, but in truth he was an old-fashioned Gladstonian Radical who believed in a balanced budget as a moral as well as economic objective: borrowing was an iniquitous for the nation as it was for an individual, and free trade was an essential ingredient of prosperity. It put him profoundly out of sympathy with many of his socialist colleagues and he rejected the growing influence of the economist John Maynard Keynes.

Once MacDonald had chosen his ministers, the majority of the cabinet was formally appointed on 7 June, travelling to Windsor Castle to receive their seals of office. In late 1928, the King had become seriously ill with septicaemia, which developed into an empyema between the base of his right lung and his diaphragm and required repeated drainage. He recovered more quickly than expected, but still spent three months, from February to May 1929, convalescing at Craigweil House near Bognor; it belonged to industrialist and former Conservative MP Sir Arthur Du Cros, who offered it to the King because of its location directly on the coast. The Privy Council meeting at which he had granted the dissolution of Parliament on 10 May had been held there, shortly after which he had moved to Windsor Castle, though he was not yet well enough to return to most of his public duties.

On 8 June, today in 1929, two members of the cabinet remained to be appointed. One was the former trades union official and autodidact J.R. Clynes, MP for Manchester Platting and Lord Privy Seal in the previous Labour government. He became Home Secretary, an able and shrewd political operator if lacking in charisma.

Completing the cabinet was the Minister of Labour. MacDonald made history by choosing the 56-year-old MP for Wallsend, Margaret Bondfield, who became the first female cabinet minister and first female Privy Counsellor in history. She was from Chard in Somerset, the tenth of 11 children of a lacemaker and political activist, William Bondfield. He lost his job when Margaret was an infant and was unable to find regular work, but he and his wife Ann did their best to provide for their children: Margaret, a clever child with a creative streak, attended Chard High Street School until she was 13, and often played the piano or recited poetry at Sunday school and local events. For a year she was a pupil-teacher in the boys’ division of the school, earning three shillings a week, before moving to Hove to begin an apprenticeship in a draper’s shop.

Shop work was hard, pay was meagre, conditions were poor and employers were often exacting: Bondfield worked between 80 and 100 hours a week for 51 weeks of the year. In 1894, she moved to London where her brother Frank was a printer and a trades union activist, and he became involved with the National Amalgamated Union of Shop Assistants, Warehousemen and Clerks. She also encountered George Bernard Shaw and Sidney and Beatrice Webb, leading to her joining the Fabian Society and the Independent Labour Party. In 1898 she became Assistant Secretary of the NAUSAWC, and following year was the first female delegate to the Trade Union Congress, voting for the formation in 1900 of the Labour Representative Committee; this was an umbrella body for trades union-sponsored MPs and her union was one of the first to affiliate. It became the Labour Party in 1906.

Bondfield resigned her post at the NAUSAWC after ten years and devoted her energies to the Women’s Labour League. She stood unsuccessfully for London County Council in Woolwich in 1910 and 1913, and her ascent in Labour circles was confirmed in 1918 when she was elected to the General Council of the TUC. She first stood for Parliament in the Northampton by-election in April 1920, making inroads into the Liberal majority, and contested the seat again in November 1922, maintaining her share of the vote but seeing the sitting MP’s majority increase. But persistence was rewarded in December 1923 when she beat both the incumbent, Liberal Charles McCurdy, and the Unionist candidate, John Veasy Collier, to win Northampton by 4,036 votes. Along with Susan Lawrence (East Ham North) and Dorothy Jewson (Norwich), she was one of the first three women elected as Labour MPs.

When the first Labour government was formed in January 1924, Bondfield became Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour, with Tom Shaw, a Lancashire weaver and trades unionist as her ministerial chief. She was the first woman to hold a traditional ministerial post, although previously the Mistress of the Robes had been a political appointment when there was a queen regnant; she spent some of the government’s short tenure out of the country, chairing a delegation of the Overseas Settlement Committee to Canada to examine the experience of child migrants in September and returning to London only a few days before Ramsay MacDonald resigned as Prime Minister on 8 October. At the subsequent general election, she lost her Northampton seat by 971 votes.

The former Attorney General, Sir Patrick Hastings, resigned his seat in Wallsend in June 1926, disillusioned with politics and having suffered from a kidney ailment the previous year. Bondfield was elected to succeed him at the ensuing by-election in July and would hold the seat until the general election of 1931 when she was defeated by the fearsome, intelligent, six-feet-tall Conservative Irene Ward. She was almost guaranteed a ministerial role when Labour returned to office in 1929, and her trades union experience and brief previous stint at the Ministry of Labour made it a natural destination. So it was that on 8 June 1929, Margaret Bondfield was sworn of the Privy Council and appointed to the cabinet Minister of Labour, the first woman to reach either level. As he received her, King George V told her he was “pleased to be the one to whom has come the opportunity to receive the first woman Privy Counsellor”.

Oh happy day

Today’s carousel of festal cheer includes the feasts of St Melania the Elder (AD 350-AD 417), born in Hispania and becoming one of the richest citizens in the Roman Empire, who founded a convent and a monastery in Jerusalem, embraced a life of asceticism and was known to SS Jerome, Augustine of Hippo and Macarius of Egypt; of St Medardus (AD 456-AD 545), a prosperous and pious Frank who was ordained in his 30s, became Bishop of Noyon and is often depicted laughing, hence invoked against toothache; of St Chlodulf of Metz (AD 605-AD 697), who followed in the footsteps of his father St Arnulf as Bishop of Metz despite a reputation for impiety in his youth and spent 40 years reforming and inspecting his diocese and providing for the poor; of St William of York (d 1154), son of Herbert of Winchester, Chancellor and Treasurer under Henry I, who was twice Archbishop of York (1141-47 and 1153-54) and allegedly murdered by one of his clergy who poisoned the chalice used at Mass; of St Jadwiga (1373-99), daughter of King Lajos the Great of Hungary who was reigning Queen of Poland from 1384 to her death and a powerhouse of learning and culture; and of St Jacques Berthieu (1838-96), a Jesuit priest and missionary to Madagascar who was tortured and clumsily murdered by Menalamba rebels.

Elsewhere, it is World Brain Tumour Day (raising awareness rather than celebrating), World Oceans Day and, for those on Norfolk Island, Bounty Day, the national holiday which commemorates the arrival in 1856 of the Pitcairn Islanders descended from the mutineers of HMS Bounty. Today France marks French Indochina Day, remembering those who died during the First Indochina War (1946-54) and especially at the Battle of Điện Biên Phủ in 1954.

Factoids

1. Puyi, nephew of the Guangxu Emperor and last ruler of the Qing dynasty, had a fairly varied curriculum vitae. At the end of 1908, aged two, he became Emperor of China, his father, Prince Chun, standing as regent. Three years later, on 12 February 1912, in the wake of the Xinhai Revolution, his aunt, the Empress Dowager Longyu, endorsed the Imperial Edict of the Abdication of the Qing Emperor on his behalf, having replaced Chun as regent the previous year. Puyi was allowed to retain his imperial title, and he and his household withdrew to the Forbidden City, the 72-hectare complex in central Beijing which had been the seat of the imperial government since 1420. He was restored to the throne for nearly a fortnight at the beginning of July 1917 by the warlord Zhang Xun, and from 1932 to 1945 he was first Chief Executive (1932-34) then Emperor (1934-45) of Greater Manchuria, the Japanese puppet régime carved out of north-eastern China. Wen Yuan-ning, a contemporary writer and journalist, remarked that he had been “made emperor three times without knowing why and apparently without relishing it”. Perhaps Puyi’s oddest role was in 1956: while a prisoner in the Fushun War Criminals Management Centre in Liaoning, he played a left-wing Labour MP in a play about the Suez Crisis, The Defeat of the Aggressors, challenging Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd (played by one of his former ministers in the Manchurian government) in the House of Commons over Britain’s military action in Egypt. He reportedly enjoyed the experience and went on to perform in other plays.

2. Last Thursday, 5 June, was the 50th anniversary of the referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the Common Market, about which I wrote for City A.M. Traditionally, the political establishment had been sceptical of referendums as unfiltered and unsophisticated manifestations of public opinion, Clement Attlee in 1945 referring to “a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum, which has only too often been the instrument of Nazism and Fascism” and “the device of dictators and demagogues”. Margaret Thatcher echoed that second description a few months before the 1975 poll, though she went on to campaign enthusiastically for Britain to stay in the EEC. It is often regarded as the UK’s first referendum, which is true insofar as it was the first such vote to be held throughout the United Kingdom. However, on 8 March 1973 there had been a referendum in Northern Ireland with the options of the province remaining part of the UK or joining the Republic of Ireland. It did not do much to settle the question at the heart of the Troubles: Nationalists boycotted the referendum, meaning turnout was only 58.6 per cent, which in turn made the 98.9 per cent support for remaining in the UK both inevitable and meaningless. Its net effect was to ask Unionist voters if they supported the Union.

3. During George V’s health crisis in 1928/29 (see above), he had informed the Privy Council that “having been stricken by illness, he was unable for the time being to give attention to the affairs of the Realm”. He therefore issued Letters Patent delegating some of his duties to a group of Counsellors of State: Queen Mary, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII), the Duke of York (later George VI), the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Gordon Lang, the Lord High Chancellor, Lord Hailsham, and the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. Until the Regency Act 1937, these Counsellors of State had no statutory authority but rather were appointed under the Royal Prerogative, and were empowered to:

   summon and to hold on Our behalf Our Privy Council, and to signify thereat Our approval of any matter or thing, to which Our approval in Council is required, and further to do on Our behalf any matter or thing which appears to them necessary or expedient to do in Our behalf in the interests of the safety and good government of Our Realm.

   However, “except in accordance with instructions transmitted” by the King, they could not grant any rank, title or dignity of the peerage, nor could they dissolve Parliament. It was for that reason that George V himself had to convene a meeting of the Privy Council in Bognor in May 1929 to grant a dissolution of Parliament.

4. Counsellors of State now always include the monarch’s spouse and the next four people in line of succession to the throne, so long as they are British subjects aged over 21 (or over 18 for the heir apparent or heir presumptive), domiciled in the United Kingdom and not disqualified from becoming monarch. The Regency Act 1953 and the Counsellors of State Act 2022 allow the monarch to nominate additional Counsellors. There are currently seven Counsellors of State: the Queen, the Prince of Wales, the Princess Royal, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Duke of Sussex, the Duke of York and Princess Beatrice, though in practice only working members of the Royal Family will be asked to undertake the duties. Therefore the Duke of Sussex, the Duke of York and Princess Beatrice would not be required to act as Counsellors of State.

5. Although Counsellors of State may not dissolve Parliament “except in accordance with instructions transmitted” by the sovereign, that has taken place. On 7 February 1974, while the Queen was absent on a tour of Australia and the Pacific Rim, Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, acting as Counsellors of State with the express direction of the Queen, granted Edward Heath a dissolution of Parliament for the general election held on 28 February.

6. Edward the Confessor, who became King of England today in 1042, is the only English monarch to have been formally canonised. He was recognised as a saint by Pope Alexander III in 1161, 95 years after his death, the same pontiff who canonised Thomas Becket; the fact that the recognition came amid a crisis of authority in which the Pope had the support of King Henry II may not be coincidental, as Edward was not strikingly pious or saintly in life. His cult grew thereafter, with Henry III being particularly devoted, commissioning a life of the Confessor from Matthew Paris, building a grand tomb in Westminster Abbey and naming his son Edward. Until the middle of the 14th century, St Edward the Confessor, Edmund the Martyr and St Gregory the Great were regarded as the patron saints of England, but King Edward III preferred the more martial inspiration of St George, who gradually displaced them all.

7. For some reason, English historiography decided to start numbering kings and queens from Norman Conquest and disregard any who came before. Therefore we refer to Edward Longshanks, King of England from 1272 to 1307, as Edward I; but there had been three Edwards who were incontrovertibly and fully king before 1066—Edward the Elder (AD 899-AD 924), the son of Alfred the Great; Edward the Martyr (AD 975-AD 978); and Edward the Confessor (1042-66). So the King who abdicated in 1936 should really have been Edward XI, but no English or British monarch has exceeded an “Eighth” (Henrys and Edwards).

8. Lord Home of the Hirsel, Lord Hailsham of St Marylebone and Viscount Stansgate all passed through my mind recently, their common factor being that they all disclaimed peerages under the provisions of the Peerage Act 1963. In the 62 years since then, 18 people have disclaimed peerages, consisting of four earls, three viscounts and 11 barons. The barony of Silkin has been disclaimed twice by successive inheritors: created in 1950 for the Labour cabinet minister Lewis Silkin, it was disclaimed by his eldest son Arthur, 2nd Lord Silkin, in 1972, and then by Arthur’s nephew Christopher, 3rd Lord Silkin, in 2002. The younger sons of the 1st Lord Silkin, Samuel and John, both became Labour MPs, and Samuel was created a life peer as Lord Silkin of Dulwich in 1985.

9. Samuel Silkin was Attorney General for England and Wales from 1974 to 1979 while John Silkin was Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from 1976 to 1979. They do not quite count in the records of siblings sitting in the same cabinet, since the Attorney General is not usually a full member of cabinet, though he or she will often attend cabinet meetings as the government’s chief legal adviser.

10. Sir Rufus Isaacs, Attorney General 1910-13, was a full member of cabinet from 1912, as were his successors Sir John Simon (1913-15), Sir Edward Carson (1915), Sir Frederick (F.E.) Smith (1915-16) and Sir Douglas Hogg (1924-28). Perhaps the enhanced status had a beneficial effect? Isaacs went on to be Lord Chief Justice, Ambassador to the United States, Viceroy of India and Foreign Secretary; Simon became Home Secretary (twice), Foreign Secretary, Chancellor of the Exchequer and Lord Chancellor; and Smith and Hogg both became Lord Chancellor, Hogg twice. Carson served as First Lord of the Admiralty and later a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary, but his eminence was such that he was able to turn down the opportunity to be the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in 1921; he was given a state funeral in Belfast and is the only person to be buried in St Anne’s Cathedral.

“If you do not breathe through writing, if you do not cry out in writing, or sing in writing, then don’t write, because our culture has no use for it.” (Anaïs Nin)

1. “The game plan of Zelenskyy’s powerful chief of staff”: Jamie Dettmer, Politico Europe’s Opinion Editor, has produced an illuminating profile of Andriy Yermak, the 53-year-old Head of the Office of the President of Ukraine and one of Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s most trusted and powerful allies. After his career as a lawyer led him towards intellectual property and then the entertainment industry, he founded Garnet International Media Group and became friends with Zelenskyy when the latter was a producer at Ukrainian television channel Inter. Yermak manages to be both scrupulously, almost fanatically, loyal to the President but also extremely influential. He is said to be a brilliant reader of other people, Zelenskyy in particular, and has steadily eased out any alternative power bases within the government of Ukraine. Critics accuse him of centralising power and enabling a Zelenskyy autocracy; Yermak counters that he has created the kind of quick and effective decision-making machinery needed in wartime. Opinion is divided on whether he is vaultingly ambitious and preparing for a future beyond Zelenskyy, or derives his enormous influence entirely from his relationship with the President. Either way, we are always fascinated by enigmatic consiglieri.

2. “Ukraine’s valor is reminiscent of Britain’s in 1940”: an exemplary column by George Will in The Washington Post which, in well under 1,000 words, neatly and elegantly sums up the situation in Ukraine, skewers the baleful attitude of Donald Trump and his coterie, underlines the astonishing grit and bravery of the Ukrainian people and gives a useful historical analogy, all of it in that softly lyrican and scholarly way he has honed over more than 50 years. Will makes an important point when he refers to the “unseemly ‘realism’” of some Americans; it’s a trait I’ve observed with growing dismay and hostility among (generally right-wing and/or populist) politicians who, in a deeply adolescent way, seem to think that extreme cynicism is somehow a mark of sophistication, and demonstrates genuine insight into a situation. So when Vice-President Vance remarks “I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or the other”, he is signalling how well he understands the situation and how free he is from bias or illusion, while those who are in thrall to “moralistic garbage” have somehow been gulled. It’s as pitiful as it is revolting, but such are the times in which we live.

3. “Biden has become a scapegoat for the Democrats”: I cite Janan Ganesh’s columns in The Financial Times frequently, which is not because I always share his conclusions but because I think his analysis is usually thoughtful and thorough. Following the recent release of Original Sin, Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s coruscating account of the concealment of President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline and incapacity, Ganesh points to a wider problem with the Democratic Party. It has, he argues, “a tolerance of probable and often proven election losers”, of whom Biden was not the only example. George McGovern (1972), Walter Mondale (1984) and Michael Dukakis (1988) all went down to landslide defeats by Republican opponents (McGovern’s was the second heaviest defeat in a contested presidential election while Mondale’s was the third), but none was unforeseeable. Hillary Clinton was chosen as the Democratic nominee in 2016 despite having stumbled in 2008 and despite polling consistently saying that voters did not find her likeable. And it is an extraordinary commentary on the narrow nature of the Democrats’ talent pool that vice-presidential candidate Tim Walz was the party’s first nominee for president or vice-president since 1980 who had not attended law school. However much President Trump and his acolytes might misrepresent the scale of his victory last November (he triumphed by 1.5 per cent, less than 2.5 million votes), I think he was eminently beatable; but equally, despite the idolisation by progressives, I think Vice-President Harris was an obviously weak candidate. None of this required a crystal ball. Yet there is no clear sign that the Democrats will not do the same again in 2028.

4. “The Pentagon will adjust to an increasingly ‘verticalized’ global map”: with the approach and then arrival of the Strategic Defence Review, my focus has been relatively insular recently, and I haven’t recommended anything for a while from Thomas P.M. Barnett’s always-absorbing, always-thought-provoking Substack, Global Throughlines. His most recent book, 2023’s America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse, could hardly have been better timed, as contemporary world events force us all to be our own amateur geostrategists, but Thomas is able to speak with experience and authority. His ground-breaking The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (2004), was the sort of volume which makes you look at everything at a slightly different angle, with profound effects. Here, starting with a new report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC, he looks ahead at the United States reorientating its military posture along north-south lines, as he has long both recommended and predicted. He identifies a fundamental difference in philosophy between the two political traditions in America: “Basically, the Dems are willing to address the ‘force’ (climate change) while the MAGA crowd is only interested in addressing the ‘friction’ (climate migrancy)”. US military and foreign policy is now, he argues, based on three ‘verticals’, namely North and South America, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, and the Asia-Pacific region. A lucid and logical argument—though one must remember that the White House and the Pentagon are not being run by the lucid or the logical.

5. “When Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon Tenure Started Going Sideways”: in The Atlantic, Missy Ryan and Ashley Parker examine the chaotic first few months of Pete Hegseth’s time as Secretary of Defense and assess his chances of continuing in post. Although President Trump as so far defended him despite mishap after egregious mishap, and despite Hegseth’s very public loyalty to the President, the authors point out that Trump burned through four secretaries of defense in his first term of office, so the average shelf life is not long. They suggest a significant step in diminishing Trump’s confidence and support was 21 March, when Hegseth casually invited Elon Musk to attend a classified Pentagon briefing on China. Trump regarded the invitation as inappropriate and told the Defense Secretary it was “a bad look”. We have to bear in mind that we cannot apply normal or rational standards to this situation: Hegseth is grotesquely unqualified to be Secretary of Defense, he shrugs off mistakes and security breaches which should be sackable offences and, as Ryan and Parker interestingly observe, uses his office as a “flex”. One source said, “He’s got this $180,000 Ferrari. That’s the Pentagon for him, and he likes to show it off.” Aggressive, simplistic, unthinking, burgeoningly self-confident, steeped in performative machismo and intellectually flimsy: he may stay or go, but he certainly should go. The fact that Vice-President Vance had to go to the Senate and use his casting vote to ensure Hegseth was confirmed tells you a great deal.

6. “In conversation with Fiona Hill on Donald Trump’s nuclear nightmares”: Jack Dickens, Commissioning Editor at Engelsberg Ideas, talks to Dr Fiona Hill, the County Durham-born foreign policy specialist and intelligence analyst who has just finished co-writing the UK’s Strategic Defence Review and spent two years as resident Russia expert on Donald Trump’s National Security Council. She talks about the complexity of a nuclear-armed multi-polar world, Trump’s generational fear of nuclear war, the huge extent to which the President’s imagination is a visual one and the common thread in all of Trump’s thinking and approach to any situation, which revolves around himself. Hill has seen the President at very close quarters, and her description certainly fits and enhances everything I’ve ever assumed about his personality and thinking.

7. “Learning to Live with Trident”: Lord Biggar’s Substack—called, with uncharacteristic whimsy, The Biggar Picture—often wears a furrowed brow and a mien of deep and agonised thought, and isn’t for a light, relaxing break from the world. Nevertheless, when he gets his teeth into something he does it justice, and this moral and ethical analysis of nuclear weapons and their potential usage is serious, well-considered and sound. I confess to a degree of heresy on nuclear deterrence: the first article I ever wrote for CapX declared that I “no longer believe” in the deterrent, which may be slightly more absolute than my real opinion. What does trouble me is that I cannot conceive of a situation, even after the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, in which a British prime minister would order the launch of ballistic missiles against any target. I appreciate the importance of strategic ambiguity, and I’m not a unlateralist: in any ideal world we might not have nuclear weapons, but we do, and I don’t think it would help to set them aside at the moment (though the cost is fearsome). I think Biggar’s argument holds together: essentially that there is no logical reason why nuclear weapons are inherently in a different moral category from conventional weapons, and it’s worth remembering that neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki was the most devastating Allied raid on Japan of the Second World War in terms of deaths: Operation Meetinghouse, the firebombing of Tokyo on 9-10 March 1945 remains the single most destructive aerial bombing raid in human history. Worth reading, digesting and reflecting on Biggar’s careful argument.

8. “Curtis Yarvin’s Plot Against America”: I wrote about the neo-reactionary blogger and pseudo-intellectual poseur Curtis Yarvin a year ago, and you can judge from that description roughly what I think of him and his “philosophy”. Ava Kofman dug deeper into Yarvin’s personality and background for The New Yorker, and I’m quite pleased that there is nothing in her profile which makes me resile from my first shuddering distaste and contempt. It’s not just that I find his “Dark Enlightenment” authoritarianism absolutely antithetical, it’s that his whole approach, and especially his use of history—which was the main point of my 2024 blog essay—is either ignorant or mendacious. He uses disconnected facts with misleading connections and no genuine understanding of context or nuance. Kofman exposes some revealing aspects of Yarvin’s character and appeal, and, I think, points to some of his flaws and faults. Worryingly, however, there are influential people in the United States who regard him as a kind of sage.

9. “It’s time for the second draft of globalisation”: when the Chair and CEO of BlackRock writes an op-ed in The Financial Times about a new global economic system, it seems only polite to read and absorb. Larry Fink didn’t get where he is today by calling the future wrong, and this is interesting. But I’m unconvinced; perhaps it’s just a matter of articulation, but he seems to me to be trying—without wholly succeeding—to try to square a circle, praising the transformative economic power of free markets (“Global GDP grew more since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 than in all recorded history before it”) while arguing that a free market “doesn’t mean countries can’t steer more of that capital home” by establishing “a more nationally attuned model”. His proposal to encourage more people to invest is fair enough but can only ever be behavioural nudges and persuasion, and I think his idea of radical deregulation within the EU, which “operates under 27 different legal systems”, flies in the face of popular or at least populist opinion. Perhaps he knows something I don’t.

10. “Leave our period dramas alone!”: an elegant but sharp-edged cri de cœur by recent arrival at The Spectator Madeline Grant (who for her sins used to edit my columns for The Daily Telegraph), in which she takes producers to task for witting and unwitting anachronisms in period drama and desperate and simplistic (and often unnecessary) attempts to make them “relevant” to a modern audience. She concludes by encapsulating one of my bugbears: “It’s a sort of chronological myopia which implies that these characters can only ever be interesting if they, under the bodices and bonnets, think and act exactly like people of today”. When I was teaching history at St Andrews all those years ago, introducing undergraduates to the 16th century which most had never studied before, I always regarded my challenge as being twofold: first, to make them understand that the characters about whom they were learning were not cyphers or stereotypes, but real, complex, flawed human beings like them, but at the same time they existed in a mental world which was so far from our own that we always had to guard against anachronistic imposition of contemporary ways of thinking on our forefathers 500 years before. That challenge is part of the problem Madeline identifies.

Jukebox jury

As last week, no hard sell, no cultural analysis, just a few pieces that have spent more time than usual in my head this week and which I would always recommend.

1. “Cum on Feel the Noize”, Slade

2. “Fight Fiercely, Harvard”, Tom Lehrer

3. “Total Eclipse of the Heart”, Bonnie Tyler

4. “Fantasia on British Sea Songs”, arr. Sir Henry Wood

5. “Ne me quitte pas”, Jacques Brel

From the archives: Hola Camp

The Colony and Protectorate of Kenya had been established by the United Kingdom in July 1920 to formalise British administration over the East Africa Protectorate, the area around the African Great Lakes it had assumed from the failing Imperial British East Africa Company in 1895. There had been long-standing unrest caused by the settlement of the White Highlands in central Kenya by Europeans and the alienation of the Maasai, Kikuyu and other tribal groups from the region. Critical to the way in which the unrest would transpire was a fundamental misunderstanding: while the colonial authorities entered into successive treaty agreements with the Maasai for the surrender of land, some was purchased from Kikuyu owners on a commercial basis. In accordance with colonial law, the British took these purchases to be of freeholds, while the Kikuyu, who had no local custom of the transfer of freehold ownership, assumed that the colonial government was renting the land on a leasehold basis.

The dynamics of the situation was further complicated by the immigration of substantial numbers of traders and entrepreneurs from India. The Indian incomers, as subjects of the Empire, expected certain rights, such as the right to own land and to have a say in the government of the colony in which they lived, and recognised in the Kenyans useful allies who should be afforded similar rights. This the authorities could not allow: equal rights for the Kenyans was unthinkable, but even granting them to the Indian population would have implications for the Union of South Africa. It was a dominion of the British Crown when established in 1910, and was governed by a complex racial hierarchy of differing levels of freedom and privilege.

Racial status in Kenya would have an obvious effect on South Africa. These issues were made yet more difficult by numerical disparities: in 1921, the population of Kenya was 2,376,000; of those, 9,651 were white Europeans, 22,822 were Indians and 10,102 were Arabs, while around 98 per cent of the population was Kenyan.

The issue of land flared into widespread violence in October 1952 when the Kenya Land and Freedom Army, commonly known as Mau Mau, assassinated a local chief who supported then British authorities. The recently appointed Governor of Kenya, Sir Evelyn Baring, sought and obtained the permission of the Colonial Office to declare a state of emergency and began action to suppress the violence and round up leading members of Mau Mau. The colonial authorities used high levels of force and violence against the insurgents, seeing them as part of a depraved and savage tribal cult, and their superiority in weaponry and organisation allowed the British to bring the Kenyan Emergency, as the Mau Mau Uprising was more primly known, to an end in 1956.

It came at a cost: not only did the authorities make extraordinarily extensive use of capital punishment, executing 1,090 insurgents in the space of four years, but much greater numbers of Kenyans, some Mau Mau but many civilians died either by violence or through the conditions created by the Emergency. There is no agreement on the precise numbers, but it may easily have been between 30,000 and 50,000, of whom perhaps half were insurgents. Even after 1956, many suspected Mau Mau were kept in detention camps—the authorities say 80,000, others say many more—and there were many instances of mistreatment, abuse, torture and killing.

The detention camp at Hola in south eastern Kenya was reserved for “hard-core” detainees, the most recalcitrant of whom refused to obey orders, carry out manual labour or engage in any rehabilitation processes. By the beginning of 1959, it held 506 detainees, of whom 127, the most uncooperative, were in a secluded “closed camp” away from the other prisoners. The camp’s recently appointed superintendent, Michael Sullivan, determined that he would use all means necessary to make 88 of them work, in order to undermine the detainees’ morale. The plan was put into action on 3 March 1959: 85 prisoners were marched outside and ordered to work digging drainage ditches under threat of violence but most refused, instead dropping to the ground in an apparently coordinated effort. The guards used force: they were beaten with clubs, and soon 11 of the prisoners were dead or dying, and another 23 required hospital treatment for their injuries.

The initial response of the colonial authorities was that the men had died through circumstances of nothing more than misfortune. A statement issued to the local newspapers said:

The men were in a group of about 100 who were working on digging furrows. The deaths occurred after they had drunk water from a water cart which was used by all members of the working party and the guards.

As the weeks unfolded there was a reluctant investigation, and the medical examiner concluded that “they had died from either lung congestion or shock and haemorrhage following multiple bruises and other injuries”. It was widely reported that the beatings had been carried out with the approval of the superintendent. The Attorney General of Kenya , Sir Eric Griffith-Jones, declined to proceed with a prosecution on the grounds that it was not possible to establish who had inflicted the fatal blows.

At Westminster, the government came under intense pressure. The Colonial Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, explained in a letter to Baring:

We fully recognise there can be no legal liability upon you but public opinion is extremely sensitive on Hola problem, and Kenya government are widely regarded rightly or wrongly as under a moral obligation for the deaths… We could I fear maintain a rigid stand on the legal rights and wrongs at best only at the cost of a great deal of bitter and unnecessary political trouble here. I am sure you will agree we should try to let this unhappy incident drop out of sight as soon as possible. If a ‘niggardly’ attitude is taken this will be impossible.

Questions were asked in the House of Commons about how the government would deal with the revelations of the inquest on 7 May, and on 16 June the Labour Opposition forced a debate on the events at Hola. A disciplinary investigation was eventually begun and a report produced, but Lennox-Boyd tried hard to avoid making any further comment, despite being pressed on 23 July.

Eventually, a debate on the report was granted on 27 July 1959. It did not begin until 10.22 pm, with the Labour MP for Ipswich, Dingle Foot QC, opening. Brother of future Labour leader Michael Foot and of Sir Hugh Foot, at that point Governor and Commander-in-Chief of Cyprus, he had been a Liberal MP from 1931 to 1945, joining the Labour Party in 1956, and was a distinguished barrister who had been called to the Bar in half a dozen Commonwealth countries. He gave a slow and meticulous demolition of the government’s position and argued that British subjects and those under the protection of the British Crown had the inviolable right to due process. Some Conservative Members accused Foot of blatant partisan politicking, while others stressed the difficult conditions under which the colonial authorities were working.

Sir Roland Robinson, Conservative MP for Blackpool South and Chairman of his party’s Commonwealth Affairs Committee, emphasised the savage nature of the Mau Mau detainees, referring to their “record of bestiality”. He regretted the deaths but wanted them put in context.

We should remember that Mau Mau gave the worst example known in generations of man’s inhumanity to man. Some of these Mau Mau men were reduced to the lowest depths of human degradation and beastliness. There were many, many murders of both white and black men, although it was the black man in Kenya who suffered more from Mau Mau murders than the white man.

It was 1.15 am when the Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West, J. Enoch Powell, rose to speak. He had been elected to the House of Commons in 1950 and in 1957 the new Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan, had appointed him Financial Secretary to the Treasury; but, along with the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Peter Thorneycroft, and the Economic Secretary, Nigel Birch, he had resigned a year later in protest against excessive public expenditure.

Powell had no time for the compromises and allowances made by his colleagues. He was appalled by what had happened at Hola Camp, rejected the idea that it was simply a series of misjudgements by colonial administrators under severe pressure, and recoiled from the notion widely put about that it was impossible to expect the same kind of standards of justice and legality in Africa as would be taken for granted in Britain. He spoke for 20 minutes, the House tense but almost completely silent, his flat voice unwavering but relentless. He concluded:

Nor can we ourselves pick and choose where and in what parts of the world we shall use this or that kind of standard. We cannot say, “We will have African standards in Africa, Asian standards in Asia and perhaps British standards here at home.” We have not that choice to make. We must be consistent with ourselves everywhere. All Government, all influence of man upon man, rests upon opinion. What we can do in Africa, where we still govern and where we no longer govern, depends upon the opinion which is entertained of the way in which this country acts and the way in which Englishmen act. We cannot, we dare not, in Africa of all places, fall below our own highest standards in the acceptance of responsibility.

According to The Daily Telegraph, “as Mr Powell sat down, he put his hand across his eyes. His emotion was justified, for he had made a great and sincere speech”. Denis Healey, Labour MP for Leeds East and an expert on foreign and colonial affairs, later described it as “the greatest parliamentary speech I ever heard… it had all the moral passion and rhetorical force of Demosthenes”.

The full speech in the Official Report is here.

Powell’s speech, even on the page, is an astonishing address. His case is compelling, tracing the events and the inexorable thread of responsibility, then going through each of the arguments in mitigation and casting them aside. None of them mattered. Wrong had been done, even evil committed, and there could be no obfuscation, no “burking”, and doing nothing was intolerable. It was a relentless assault on his own party’s colonial policy and it was unsparing. And everyone in the House that morning knew it.

And presently, like a circling typhoon…

… in Waugh’s words, the sounds of battle began to return.

It feels like that rather too often at the moment. Look after yourselves.