Sunday round-up: observations and recommendations 10 March 2024

Once again, a few facts which have passed through my mind recently, and some things you should watch or read

My foray into weekend pedagogy seemed to be well received last week, so far as I can judge from cold statistics, so I thought I would do it again, since there is no shortage of material circulating in the busy traffic intersection of my mind.

Factoids

1. In November 1953, the United Kingdom’s first operational nuclear weapon, Blue Danube, was delivered to Bomber Command’s new Armament School at RAF Wittering, on the border between Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire. It hasd a yield of 10-12 kilotons, slightly less than “Little Boy”, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945. However, there were no aircraft equipped to carry it until No. 1321 (Valiant/Blue Danube Trials) Flight RAF was formed in 1954, operating the Vickers Valiant.

2. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, the first minister of Scotland, Humza Yousaf, the former chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Sajid Javid, Scottish Labour leader Anas Sarwar and former Conservative cabinet minister Baroness Warsi all have roots in Punjab, like around 45 per cent of “British Indians” (or whatever term you prefer). So too does Nikki Haley, until recently a candidate for the Republican Party’s nomination for president of the United States. Perhaps one should not be surprised: the population of Punjab, which straddles India and Pakistan, is around 190 million.

3. In 2017, the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, visited Pakistan, where the chief minister of Punjab, Captain Amarinder Singh, told him, “We consider you one of our own. We see it as a homecoming.” When Khan was asked about this by a journalist, he responded “Home is south London, mate”. Khan’s grandparents, Sunni Muslims, moved from Lucknow to Pakistan when British India was partitioned in 1947, his parents moving to the UK in 1968.

4. Theodore Roosevelt, 26th President of the United States from 1901 to 1909, enrolled at Columbia Law School after graduating from Harvard but didn’t finish his degree, being elected to the New York State Assembly at 23. In 1900, he was Republican William McKinley’s running mate after Vice-President Garret Hobart had died of heart disease, and he formally took office in March 1901. He found he had almost nothing to do in Washington: his only formal role was as presiding officer of the United States Senate, and the vice-president didn’t even attend cabinet meetings until 1919. He would describe the office as “a fifth wheel to the coach”. After a five-day special session from 4 to 9 March 1901 to confirm the president’s new appointments, Congress adjourned until December. He therefore conceived the idea of completing his law degree, partly for future use but mainly to ward off boredom. The idea of the sitting vice-president enrolling at law school horrified the chief justice of the Supreme Court, Melville Fuller, who offered to supervise TR’s studies himself. (The issue resolved itself: President McKinley was shot by an anarchist on 6 September and died of gangrene eight days later, propelling Roosevelt into the White House.)

5. President William Howard Taft, who succeeded Roosevelt in 1909, ran for re-election in 1912. He would lose to Democratic challenger Woodrow Wilson, the governor of New Jersey, not least due to Roosevelt seeking a fresh term, running as a third-party candidate for the Progressive Party. On election day, 5 November, Taft’s running mate, Vice-President James Sherman, was dead. He had succumbed to Bright’s disease on 30 October. Until the adoption of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment in 1967, there was no constitutional mechanism to replace a vice-president between elections.

6. Woodrow Wilson, 28th President of the United States from 1913 to 1921, is famous as the author of the Fourteen Points, set out in a speech to Congress in January 1918 as the basis for a peace between the warring parties in Europe, and as the architect of the League of Nations after the First World War. He was also a pretty grotesque racist, born in the antebellum South to pro-slavery parents, who entrenched segregation in the federal bureaucracy and “loved to tell racist ‘darky’ jokes about black Americans”. He organised the first showing of a film in the White House, D.W. Griffith’s pro-Ku Klux Klan epic The Birth of a Nation. David Frum recently suggested in The Atlantic that Wilson should be to some degree “uncancelled” or at least contextualised, and made an eloquent case (articulated here on Matt Lewis Media). What is true is that he was the only US president to hold a doctorate, being awarded a PhD in history and government by Johns Hopkins University in 1886. His thesis was entitled Congressional Government: A Study in American Politics, and, like any ambitious academic, he made a book out of it.

7. The only British prime minister to receive a PhD is Gordon Brown, who was awarded a doctorate in history by the University of Edinburgh in 1982. His thesis was entitled The Labour Party and Political Change in Scotland 1918–1929: the politics of five elections.

8. Harold Wilson, prime minister 1964-70 and 1974-76, had been a very eminent young academic. Judged by his politics tutor, the eminent historian and psephologist R.B. McCallum, as the best student he had ever had, he achieved a first-class degree in philosophy, politics and economics from Jesus College, Oxford, with an alpha grade on every paper. He then became a lecturer in economic history at New College at the age of 21. In 1938, he was awarded a junior research fellowship at University College and became research assistant to the new master, William Beveridge, whose 1942 report, Social Insurance and Allied Services, would become the foundation of the post-war welfare state. Wilson also took the examination for a prize fellowship at All Souls College twice, without success.

The idiot box: what’s on television

You don’t hear the phrase “the idiot box” much any more. Nor, for that matter, pace the great Noel Edmonds, “telly addicts”; perhaps it is presumed to be a universal condition? Or it is no longer seen as an affliction. One thing I would say is that I don’t think television is inherently a bad or stupid medium. I think there is a lot of bad television, but there are very many bad books, lots of bad films and even the occasional bad play. None of those are held to damn the medium itself. I roll my eyes, I’m afraid, at the sort of person who says “Actually I don’t have a television”, much more “a set”. Why deny yourself access to some bona fide works of cultural greatness? I have written about two, off the top of my head, Peter Flannery’s 1996 state-of-the-nation epic Our Friends in the North and the razor-sharp BBC adaptation of John le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy from 1979. I would confidently put either up against any drama of any form.

1. What It Takes To Run 6 Government Departments: I suppose this is a podcast, really, but it is filmed too. Alastair Campbell and Rory Stewart talk to Sir Sajid Javid, former chancellor, who has also run the Home Office, the Department for Health and Social Care, the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Department for Communities and Local Government and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Like many ministers recently, Javid suffered from very short tenures in these posts—he was chancellor for less than seven months—and is standing down as a Member of Parliament at the general election. Perhaps for that reason, he is frank and interesting in this encounter, discussing his upbringing and family as well as his political career. He is only 54, so his professional life is hardly played out, but you can understand why he is choosing to leave the House of Commons now rather than go through one or two parliaments probably in opposition. A cynic could hardly have designed a better, more classless back story for a modern politician, the child of immigrants from Pakistan who sought his fortune in New York and became Chase Manhattan’s youngest ever vice-president at 25. It never quite came together, but careers often don’t.

2. Sarah Everard: The Search for Justice: this was a meticulously crafted BBC documentary, shown to commemorate the third anniversary of Sarah Everard’s murder by Wayne Couzens, an officer of the Metropolitan Police. It seems so much more than three years ago. I worried occasionally that it was morbid or prurient, but it assembled the people most closely involved in the case and exposed the horror of what happened to Everard; it could have happened to anyone. That, I think, is why it struck such a chord with the public. But the additional horror not only that Couzens was a police officer but that he used that status to entrap her is almost unbearable. It is a stain the Metropolitan Police will not easily wash away, not least because it uncovered such a well of rancid behaviour. The clumsiness of the police’s handling of the vigil on Clapham Common on 13 March 2021, 10 days after the murder but only three days after her remains were found in Kent, is a study in insensitivity and mismanagement. For me, the most chilling part of the whole documentary was the CCTV footage of Couzens, returning to London from Kent, where he had only hours before raoped and murdered Everard, stopping at a branch of Costa. He bought a hot chocolate, and I don’t know why that detail turned my stomach, but it did. He will never be released from prison.

3. Our Dirty War: The British State and the IRA: Peter Taylor is in his early 80s now but remains the doyen of journalists when it comes to the Troubles and the hard side of Northern Ireland’s past decades. His 2000 book Brits: The War Against the IRA is definitive on the security forces and their attempts to defeat and suppress terrorism, and the accompanying three-part BBC series is superb. This documentary preceded Friday’s publication of the interim report from Operation Kenova, the official investigation—eight years and £40 million so far—into offences committed by and in connection with the British Army double agent in the IRA known as “Stakeknife”. I wrote a swift response to the report for The Spectator but it will need much absorption and is only an interim document. Taylor is on great form: calm, incisive, determined. One of our best investigative journalists.

A man will turn over half a library to make a book

Finally a few things I have read this week which have interested, intrigued, impressed or amused me.

1. “A US Grand Strategy on Climate Change”: Tom Barnett is one of my favourite thinkers, erudite, imaginative, entertaining, practical and challenging, and his latest book, America’s New Map: Restoring Our Global Leadership in an Era of Climate Change and Demographic Collapse (2023), is essential reading for anyone who tries to think about politics in a global way. I first encountered his work watching this brilliant 2008 TED Talk, Rethinking America’s military strategy, which managed to make the revolutionary seem blindingly obvious. His use of maps and geography is a great way of making pressing and complex problems digestible, and whatever your stance of climate change, his argument is simple: it’s already happening, it’s already affecting population movements, and that’s a geopolitical reality. His prose is punchy and he takes no prisoners, but his point is that we can change things. So, how? And he thinks big. “That is what a grand strategy on climate change looks like: big, ambitious, and demanding. For American Millennials and Gen Zs, allegedly bereft of national identity and purpose, it is a pragmatic fit.”

2. “How Germany became a security liability”: I know I share this opinion with my friend and business partner Christian Hunt, but Katja Hoyer is a brilliant commentator on Germany and German history, and, more than that, she has a peerless ability to communicate her knowledge to a British audience which sometimes knows less about Germany than perhaps we should. This article in The Spectator unpicks the latest stumble by the German chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the grotesque security breach by Brigadegeneral Frank Gräfe, a Luftwaffe general who joined a supposedly secure conference call from a Singapore hotel. Inevitably Russian intelligence heard everything and have made hay. Scholz is trying to play a nuanced game on support for Ukraine, with Germany giving hundreds of millions of Euros in assistance but refusing to supply Taurus long-range cruise missiles. Politico’s Berlin Bulletin described his policy perfectly by the German saying “Too much to die, too little to live”, and its author Matthew Karnitschnig made me laugh out loud by dubbing the Scholz approach “kinetic homeopathy”. Hoyer, fairly but not indulgently, tries to put the hapless chancellor in a political context. He is desperately unpopular (though lucky enough as leader of Germany to hold a position in which he will never be “most unpopular ever”, for obvious reasons) and in fact his ambivalence about Ukraine and his anxieties over Germany’s relationship with Russia is reflected by the electorate.

3. “Hand-Off: The Foreign Policy George W. Bush Passed to Barack Obama”: I have only dipped into this so far but it’s a fascinating resource. Essentially it’s a selection of the transition memoranda which President Bush’s National Security Council prepared for the incoming Obama administration, in the far-off days of orderly transitions (remember them?). Edited by Stephen Hadley, national security advisor from 2005 to 2009 after four years as deputy to Condoleezza Rice, the book presents each memorandum with a postscript by the experts who crafted the original, and it’s a fabulous insight into American foreign policy in the late 2000s, almost a decade into the Global War on Terror, with a contemporary perspective and assessment. As The New York Times put it, the memos “underscore that major challenges on the international stage are rarely solved for good, but instead are bequeathed from one administration to another, even in evolved form. So too are the successes and failures.”

La commedia è finita

I have tried to keep this manageable in length. In pursuit of which objective…