issue 42, November 2023 The Critic

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BETTER THAN EVIL foreign stories ranked higher in British interest than what was happening in South Africa. The depth of our moral concerns for Israelis and Palestinians are comparable to those we used to have for black and white South Africans. We decried apartheid and we broke off defence agreements and restricted such trade as was prudent to do so. Much like the democratically-deficient countries ringing Israel, we didn’t apply our strictures to the “frontline states” which bordered South Africa either. For some reason we only expected South Africa to be democratic, and not her neighbours. Why this was so became clear 30 years ago when South Africa finally did become democratic. For whatever we claimed at the time, our concern for the sufferings of poor black South Africans was inextricably bound up with our abhorrence for the prejudices and actions of white South Africans. With apartheid’s dissolution, our interest in the political and material fate of the South African majority slipped far down our scale of priorities. South Africa is rarely in the news: we demonstrably do not regard what black people are doing to other black people with the same distress.

Israelis are of such great interest to us not, as we shall discuss below, because we as a society “other” them. But because we “us” them. Where once Jews were treated as the ur-other in Christendom, now they’re just other white people, to be held to the standards of fellow white people. For Israel’s champions in the wider West this leads to rhetoric about our civilisational imperative to stand with “the only democracy in the Middle East”. For Israel’s Western foes, the hatred for her is just the self-hatred the idiot wing of the Left has for Western institutions — but with the added spice that given Israel’s precarious position, who knows, perhaps anti-Israeli activism could voyeuristically achieve there the real destruction such habitual fools are still incapable of achieving at home. In their most poisonous form, Western

critics of Israel inevitably exist most multitudinously in our bloated universities. If you want to read about these weeds, our executive editor, Sebastian Milbank, has in pointillist detail used Edinburgh University as a case study. Such varsity blaming of holocaust victims for their lack of courage, or white women for wanting to be raped, you can find in grim and exhaustive detail on our website. All this

has happened publicly and without consequence. But let us here not even name them. They are unworthy people from an university which in recent years has set about traducing the esteemed reputation it had built over the course of more than four centuries. The signature question in their vile tweets has been along the lines of: “What did you think decolonisation meant? Just words?” These foul inadequates would boldly have you know that they think their moronic slogans encompassed children being tortured to death. But, of course, what we should expect of them is nothing but words. These revolting academics obviously being nothing of the sort. For far from revolting, they are tame, safe, conformist and far away from danger.

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Multiculturalism has palpably failed when the murderers who tortured children are being cheered without shame

At its most absurd level, the emptiness of Western academic valorisation of Palestinian terrorism is LGBTQ-forHamas. Such ignorance is pitiful. These are not serious people, they are children of all ages. But then it is sadly piquant to see claims that the meaningful hatred of Israel here in the UK is some age-old European stain recrudescing. The evidence of our eyes plainly tells us otherwise. Israel is hated on our streets by the people who hate her on Middle Eastern streets. Not exclusively, and not anywhere near as monstrously, but the opposition is who it is. We must not pretend otherwise. The prescient Home Secretary, Suella

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Braverman, was doing her job, and making it plain that others had signally failed for decades to do theirs, when she spoke clearly and bravely about the failings of British multiculturalism. For it has palpably failed when the murderers who tortured children to death are being cheered without shame. Yet although gruesomely large numbers of Palestinians and their foreign supporters would have Israelis slaughtered, this does not and cannot mean that they in turn deserve to die without number. Palestinians are not vermin. This is not the place to get into how

IA IN M A STERTO N/A LA MY STO CK PH OTO

Forty and fifty years ago, few

many Palestinians have been slaughtered by Israelis and vice versa. That’s not because of some specious talk of it being “whataboutery” to do so. It is because it has ceased to matter for the purpose of “who started it?” It doesn’t matter how bestial one side has been to the other side. What matters first is what happens here, and some way behind that, for us, what matters is what’s right.

The Palestinian claim to being right is not that they are oppressed by Hamas, an entity wickedly encouraged by successive Israeli governments as a form of divide and rule, which also discredited the wider Palestinian cause. Their claim would have been righteous had, in the West Bank, even a batsqueak of revulsion at children being tortured to death made itself plain. This has not happened. Now, with Israel’s vastly greater firepower, Palestinian children will die in doubtless greater numbers. But death from the air, and still more grotesquely, death from deliberate starvation, is simply cruel and wanton. Death on the ground, death as the children were rounded up, death as they were tied together, death as they were set alight, death as they screamed out to be saved, and all as their

parents watched is too much not to be despised. Whatever sufferings you have had in return, it is too much. It is too much to expect that Israel, however rotten her government, however feeble her security forces have proven themselves to be, and however culpable her own sins have been, can stay the hand of vengeance. It’s precisely because the miraculous victories of Israel’s past in no way guarantee her future that she must now lash out. This is a weak state, not a strong one. Our interest in Israel and Palestine is that their problems should not be on our streets, in our shopping malls, on our Tube trains. This is a job of vigilance for the state, and a proper one at that, unlike the inanities the police divert themselves with, such as harassing pronoun transgressors as they timidly ignore unabashed celebrants and champions of murder. Being entirely solvable by firm government, such problems here are as nothing to those being faced by Israel.

Let us be clear: Israel possesses no right to exist that Palestine lacks. Nations don’t have rights to exist. We don’t, France doesn’t, Russia, China, Germany, America, Israel, Palestine, long lost Crusader states — none of them have it. All they ever had or will have is the ability to exist, if they can claim it for themselves. Israel has done so — this October getting “rid” of those who struck across her boundaries to enact the pogrom that they wanted to expand into a full-blown Holocaust. Her test now is to be a civilisation worthier of existence than the barbarism Hamas visited upon her. This is not a high bar to clear, though plainly it is a hard one. Let Israel be judged as “one of us”. Let her show that she is better than the evil which is all Hamas has to offer. Those who hate her will continue to do so, whether she does the right or wrong thing. So let her do that right thing for her own sake. Israel can do by degrees to Palestine what too many there would do to her in a day and a night. Be better than that, O Israel. O

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Contents Fanfares for the common man Ian Pace on communist composers who wrote concertos for the comrades 47

COLUMNS Helen Joyce Playing nice hasn’t worked

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Rock’n’roll dreams D.J. Taylor goes into the studio to record an EP four decades after his last gig 50

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Law Yuan Yi Zhu: A domestic bill of rights 9 Woman about Town Sarah Ditum: First-night nerves

STUDIO Matthew Lloyd Roberts: The reconstruction of Berlin

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BOOKS

Nova’s diary California Dreaming

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Serious business Ned: Go woke, go broke

16

Sounding Board Marcus Walker: The road to Wigan’s tears 24 Arty Types D.J. Taylor on Delilah Sampson

30

Everyday Lies Theodore Dalrymple: Children’s leisure activities are without price 40 Economics Tim Congdon: The USA’s debt trap

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My Woke World Titania McGrath: Time to outlaw the Tories 45 Romeo Coates Going viral

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Adam Dant on … Hell is the Northern Line

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FEATURES Dear Rishi, what about culture? Jaspreet Singh Boparai doubts the Conservative government has a plan for the Arts Council 13 The cathedral and the museum Pierre d’Alancaisez argues that churches and art galleries have much in common: they must return to their core mission to survive 17 Britain: a goner with the wind Barry Norris warns that the dash for wind power is an expensive generational folly that risks the nation’s economic future 20

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Israel at war: where will it end? Peter Caddick-Adams says the violence on the Gaza strip must be contained, if it is not already too late 25 Guardian of liberal freedoms Rod Dreher says the West’s anti-Viktor Orbán hysteria is absurd: his Hungary 28 is safe, civilised and democratic Puckish polymath John Self says writer Italo Calvino’s interests spanned the cosmos, but his concerns were very human 31 Lewis the prophet Rhys Laverty says the Narnia author deserves to be remembered as a seer and a sage

33

Profile: Rory Stewart Ben Sixsmith doubts whether the deep thinker actually has the substance 36 to be a political leader School for Tory stars Andrew Gimson recalls his time at the sometimes raffish and bohemian Conservative Research Department

38

Here we go again William Norton compares today’s tired politics with those of the turbulent times of the 1970s 43

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Yuan Yi Zhu: The Great Defiance: How the World Took On the British Empire by David Veevers 58 Alexander Lee: Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World by Ulinka Rublack 60 Fitzroy Morrissey: The Middle East: A Political History from 395 to the 62 Present by Jean-Pierre Filiu Sophie Nicholls: Penning Poison: A History of Anonymous Letters by 63 Emily Cockayne Ruth Dudley Edwards: Rough Beast: My Story & The Reality of Sinn Féin 65 by Máiría Cahill Daniel Johnson: Hegel’s World Revolutions by Richard Bourke; After Kant: The Romans, the Germans and the Moderns in the History of Political Thought by Michael Sonenscher; Vienna: How the City of Ideas Created the Modern World by Richard Cockett 66 Lola Salem: Metropolitain: An Ode to the Paris Metro by Andrew Martin 68 Darren O’Byrne: The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall, 1918–33 by Frank McDonough; Bystander Society: Conformity and Complicity in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust by Mary Fulbrook 69 John Marshall: Unearthing the Underworld: A Natural History of 71 Rocks by Ken McNamara Michael Henderson: Answered Prayers: England and the 1966 World Cup by Duncan Hamilton 72 John Self: Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain; Our Strangers by Lydia Davis; Hackenfeller’s Ape by Brigid Brophy 73

THE SECRET AUTHOR Spare us the wagging finger

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Letters

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THE CRITICS MUSIC Norman Lebrecht Have I just seen the future of music?

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Country Notes Patrick Galbraith bids a fond farewell to the Shooting Times 92

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Deluxe Christopher Pincher sparks up a cigar 92

OPERA Robert Thicknesse A problem like Marina

POP Sarah Ditum My garage band benediction

ART Michael Prodger CA RTO O N B Y LEN H AW KIN S; C RI TI C FOX B Y JA SON F OR D/ H E ART

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CINEMA Robert Hutton When cinema goes to war

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TELEVISION Adam LeBor Ghosts of Beirut is a haunting thriller

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RADIO Michael Henderson Michael Palin was a rare Radio 4 treat

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ARCHITECTURE

Turf Account Stephen Pollard on the row over the future of a champion hurdler

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Style Hannah Betts does modishly dull

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Hot House Claudia Savage-Gore struggles to give thanks at a vegan Thanksgiving dinner 97

IN PRAISE OF

Charles Saumarez Smith The museum that keeps the faith

Drink Henry Jeffreys resigns from the “anything but chardonnay” club 94

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Michael Powell: an auteur who loved collaboration by Christopher Silvester 98

TABLE TALK

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Eating Out Milly Ffyne has an excellent but dispriting fondue in Gstaad 89

Patrick Kidd: Rugby’s mismatches 100 Nick Timothy: NUFC and the Saudis 101 Boris Starling: The gang of four 102

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If you’re a writer, artist or academic

Helen Joyce

Even when I keep quiet about being cancelled, the censors don’t invite me back. So I might as well tell the truth about that too

who has strayed beyond the narrow bounds of approved discourse, two consequences will be intimately familiar. The first is that it becomes harder to get a hearing about anything. The second is that if you do manage to say anything publicly — especially if you talk about the silencing — it will be taken as proof that you have not been silenced. This is the logic of witch-ducking. If a woman drowns, she isn’t a witch; if she floats, she is, and must be dispatched some other way. Either way, she ends up dead. The only counter to this is specific examples. But censorship is usually covert: when you’re passed over to speak at a conference, exhibit in a gallery or apply for a visiting fellowship, you rarely find out. Every now and then, however, the censors tip their hands. And so, for everyone who says I can’t have been cancelled because they can still hear me, here’s the evidence. The first time I know I was censored was even before my book criticising trans ideology came out in mid-2021. I had been asked to talk about it on the podcast of Intelligence Squared, a media company that, according to its website, aims to “promote a global conversation”. We had booked a date and time. But as the date approached I discovered I had been dropped. When I asked why, the response was surprisingly frank: fear of a social-media pile-on, sponsors getting cold feet and younger staff causing grief. The CEO of Intelligence Squared is a former war correspondent who has written a book about his experiences in Kosovo. But at the prospect of platforming a woman whose main message is that humans come in two sexes, his courage apparently ran out.

◉◉◉ Next came the Irish Times, my home country’s paper of record. Soon after my book came out a well-known correspondent rang me, said he had stayed up all night to finish it and wanted to write about it. He interviewed me, filed the piece, checked the quotes — and then silence. When I nudged by email, he said the piece had been spiked as it was going to press. Sometime around then it was the BBC’s turn. I don’t know the exact date because I only found out ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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months later, when I met a presenter from a flagship news programme. Such a shame you couldn’t come on the show, he said, to which I replied I had never been asked. It turned out that he had told a researcher to invite me on, but the researcher hadn’t, instead simply lying that I wasn’t available. I’ve still never been on the BBC to discuss trans issues. Next came ABC, the Australian state broadcaster, which interviewed me for a radio show about religion and ethics. This time, when I nudged, I was told there had been “technical glitches” with the recording, but they would “love to revisit this one in the future”. They’ve never been back in touch. Then I recorded an hour-long episode of Common Ground, a short-lived show on Sky News hosted by Trevor Phillips. Its premise was to seek points of agreement between people with differing positions on some current issue. The other guest on the episode I was on was Joanna Harper, a trans-identified man who argues that trans-identified men who lower their testosterone levels should be allowed into women’s sporting competitions. Before we recorded I told the team that I would avoid “misgendering” Harper, or saying that transwomen were “men”. But I wasn’t going to use the words woman, she or her for Harper or any other transwomen, and I’d have to say that transwomen were male to make my arguments, which rest on the male sporting advantage. All of that was agreed to, and yet as soon as I said “male” Harper objected, saying he’d been promised no one would use that word. He was overruled, and the recording went ahead. But it never aired, and I don’t know why; perhaps because I insisted on stating that transwomen are male, or because I stated that fact in front of a man so invested in denying it made for pretty awkward viewing. All that Sky told me when I asked was this: “After reviewing [the show], we felt that we weren’t really happy with it — basically our production standards were not good enough … This is absolutely no reflection on you (or for that matter Joanna): you

PO RTR A IT B Y VA N ESSA DELL

Playing nice hasn’t worked

Who did Woman’s Hour invite on: the best-selling campaigner for women’s rights or the bloke who’d written a book about his penis?

Why all this matters isn’t because it’s unfair to me, although it is. It’s because what I’m trying to shout from the rooftops is that women’s rights are being destroyed in the name of a parody of social justice; that politics and policymaking are turning towards ideology and away from evidence; and above all that a socio-medical scandal is being played out on the bodies of children. People rarely share these stories. A big reason is financial. That well-known columnist asked me not to name her because her column is her main source of income and she fears getting a reputation as “difficult”. Even though I’m out (and proud) about believing that sex is binary and immutable, I too feel this fear. It’s risky to talk about being censored because the censors don’t like it — and they’ve just demonstrated their power. Another reason is shame. If you tell the world that someone interviewed you and then binned the result, some people will think you must have said something terrible. It also makes it more likely that more people will shun me for fear that the same will happen to them. And it’s even more shame-inducing to see people who quote you being attacked: I don’t much like being the cause of other people’s careers being harmed. Well, I’ve decided I’m no longer playing this game. I’m not the one who should be ashamed — that emotion is a better fit for the cowards who would rather turn a blind eye to the harms being done to children than risk social media blow-back. And playing nice has got me nowhere. Even when I keep quiet about being cancelled, the censors don’t invite me back. So I might as well tell the truth about that too. O

were engaging and interesting, and we’d love to invite you back on Sky News.” Reader, they haven’t.

◉◉◉ I’ve no such striking story for bbc

B B C; UNH ER D

◉◉◉

Woman’s Hour, because it’s never got as far as recording anything with me that it could then drop. The nearest I have to proof that this is deliberate rather than an oversight is something that happened in early 2022. Grace Lavery, a trans-identified man whose book Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis was about to come out, had claimed that none of the feminist critics of trans ideology were willing to debate him. I sighed heavily and decided to take one for the team. UnHerd agreed to host a debate between him and me, booked a venue and started selling tickets — at which point Lavery pulled out, insinuating that I, UnHerd and anyone on my side were fascists. And who did Woman’s Hour invite on after this performance: the best-selling campaigner for women’s rights or the bloke who had written a book about his penis, and who insults and demeans women’s-rights campaigners? It’s not like the show’s producers and presenters can possibly think this is what its audience wants. Every August they tweet requests for topics and interviewees for “listeners’ week”; let’s just say I’m mentioned a lot in the replies and Lavery isn’t. I’m such a contaminant that even people who

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Write to The Critic by email at [email protected] including your address and telephone number

FORGOTTEN WAR Thank you to Andrea Valentino (HALF A CENTURY OF THE WORLD AT WAR, OCTOBER) for so splendidly conveying

why The World at War documentary series succeeded in its task of explaining and communicating the enormity of the Second World War. The article makes a passing reference to the series’ effective sequel, The Cold War, which was also co-produced by Jeremy Isaacs and ran for 24 episodes in 1998. It adopted a similar approach and, besides featuring extraordinary archive footage, it recorded invaluable testimony from the likes of George Kennan, Fidel Castro, Robert McNamara and Mikhail Gorbachev. Generally well received at the time, it quickly faded from view and whilst The World At War continues to be repeated all over the world, and downloaded by schools and individuals, The Cold War is forgotten. Sure, you can find it on YouTube, but judging by the low number of recorded views, only a few thousand people have troubled themselves to do so (compared to millions of YouTube views for The World At War). Why is this? The World At War was groundbreaking whereas The Cold War followed, distantly, in its wake. In that sense, it did not represent the same level of television “event”. But such could be said of any number of TV history documentaries over the last 30 years that — unlike The Cold War — you can still buy through Amazon or stream on Prime or Netflix. It seems that the Second World War resonates in ways that the Cold War does not, even although the latter’s proxy wars killed and crippled millions (and almost caused Armageddon) and so many of us have at least some recollections of the latter as news in our time, whilst having no direct experience of the events of 1939 to 1945. Is the only conclusion that while much of humanity remains — rightly — hotly engaged by the near six years’ total war between liberal democracy (and its dictatorial allies) against fascist totalitarianism (and its dictatorial allies) we have

ŏ$FFRUGLQJWRWKLV\RXUOHJVDUHƓQH you just have to remove the cat.”

become ambivalent about the nature and outcome of the succeeding 43-year struggle between liberal democracy (and its client dictatorships) and communist totalitarianism (and its client dictatorships)? If so, where does that leave discourse now, as western countries contemplate the challenge of the authoritarian nationalism and alternative worldviews of Putin’s klepto-theocracy and China’s acquisitive version of communism with an international investment portfolio? On what historical experience are we drawing? Surely it’s time to give Jeremy Isaacs’s other great documentary series a new audience. Andrew Richardson

london SOLE TRADING The strong suggestion made both in the editorial of the October edition (LEGACY OF FAILURE) and Lee Reynolds's article (HOW TO FIX BREXIT) that EU membership held back vital infrastructure investment in this country is unsupported by examples in those articles. Let me just give one counterexample. In 2014 the House of Lords threw out attempts by opponents of HS2 to scupper it using EU environmental law in a judgment of court including Lords Carnwath and Sumption — judges not

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known for Euroscepticism. In another case involving HS2, only this year, the Supreme Court authorised the compulsory purchase of land for infrastructure development on a favourable basis for the government. Our “Brexit freedoms” played no role in the judgment which could have been reached while we were still members of the EU. Looking at the wider picture, since we left the EU, we have indeed regained the freedom to set our own kitemarks and ban mergers approved elsewhere. However, we abandoned the first recently as industry was not interested in a double application process for the same product in the same geographical zone. In the second case, our attempt to ban the Microsoft acquisition of Activision (which had been approved everywhere else) had to yield to political and commercial realities, leaving our Competition and Markets Authority looking like the Grand old Duke of York. Stephen Hornsby

perth, perth & kinross LETTUCE LEFTOVERS As I began reading Rohan Watt’s piece (LIZ TRUSS: WHAT IF … ? OCTOBER), I greatly enjoyed it as a piece of satire praising Liz “The Lettuce” Truss and her disastrous time at Number 10. Then it slowly dawned on me — like that bit in a horror film when you realise who the mad serial killer is — that Rohan was deadly serious. I suggest that Rohan go and hang out with the remaining fanatical Corbyn groupies. They can compare notes on their lost leaders. The rest of us can get on with living with the consequences of Truss: high interest rates, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt and a future Labour government. Ian Oakley west drayton, greater london WOKE CROCKERY A mug bearing the slogan “Some people are normal. Get over it!” (THE DIVERSITY TRAP, OCTOBER) would be a suitable response to Stonewall. Andrew Smith epping, essex

CA RTO ON B Y PAU L WOO D

Letters

YUAN YI ZHU ON LAW

Who rules: judges or parliament? A domestic bill of rights is not necessarily the panacea its adherents intend it to be

P O R T R A I T B Y VA N E S S A D E L L ; T H E C A N A D I A N P R E S S / R O N P O L I N G A L A M Y S TO C K P H OTO S

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mere six months ago,

almost the entirety of Britain’s legal commentariat welcomed with glee the death of Dominic Raab’s ill-starred British Bill of Rights which, despite its lofty short title, was essentially a tweaked version of the Human Rights Act 1998, which incorporated the provisions of the European Convention on Human Rights into United Kingdom law. What few of Lord Chancellor Raab’s critics appreciated was the fact that, had his Bill of Rights been enacted, British membership of the European Convention would have become far more difficult to challenge politically. The excesses of the ECHR/HRA regime could always be blamed on New Labour; but with the Bill of Rights the Tories would have effectively assumed political co-ownership of the ECHR. Now, with Raab’s political demise, British withdrawal is once again on the table. Suella Braverman’s Washington kite to that effect was no doubt designed to dissuade the judges of the European Court of Human Rights from getting too legally imaginative with her Rwanda plan once the test cases inevitably reach them. But even if Strasbourg ultimately gives way, the memory of a single anonymous ECtHR judge blocking the flights to Rwanda at the eleventh hour, using a made-up power which cannot be found in the text of the Convention, will not soon be forgotten in government circles.

Those with longer memories may feel some cynicism at the latest ministerial threat. After all, every Conservative prime minister since David Cameron has, at some point in their careers, threatened to pull the UK out of the convention. Theresa May even planned to fight the 2020 general election on that policy, before events dictated

of rights which would largely otherwise. And many replicate the ECHR’s moderate Tory MPs still seem provisions, minus the to be entranced by the “it’s a supranational court. It is the bad look” argument against approach adopted in peer withdrawal, that bane of countries such as Canada and British governance. New Zealand, neither of All of which makes Lord which, as Sumption notes, Sumption’s recent announcehas a particularly disreputament, in the form of a ble record on human rights, Spectator cover story, that he Every Prime unlike some of the ECHR’s now supported UK withdrawcurrent signatories. al from the ECHR all the more Minister since Yet if the intention is to noteworthy. True, he has long David Cameron been a critic of the ECHR, has threatened curb the abusive judicial interpretation of human going back to his 2013 Sultan to pull the rights instruments written at Azlan Shah Lecture in Kuala a high level of generality, Lumpur. And his criticism has UK out of having a domestic charter of only intensified in recent the ECHR rights as opposed to an years, most memorably in his international one might not be the 2019 Reith Lectures, which drew an angry panacea that Sumption is looking for. rebuke from Róbert Spanó, the Icelandic True, Parliament can always override ex-president of the ECtHR. problematic judicial interpretations by His arguments for British withdrawal statute if the apex court is in London. But — mainly centred around the undemocratthis would require Parliament to assert its ic and unaccountable nature of the constitutional prerogatives against the Strasbourg court, which he no longer courts, and in a society conditioned to look believes can be reformed — are not at the judiciary for moral guidance this especially original. The real novelty lies in cannot be taken for granted. the fact that that a retired Supreme Court judge should have broken ranks with the rest of the senior legal profession and The Canadian case is instructive. admitted to holding such a distressingly The Canadian Charter of Rights and Daily Mail opinion. Freedoms contains a notwithstanding clause allowing legislatures to override most of its provisions for five years at Reactions to Sumption’s trahison a time. des clerc were depressingly predictable. Given that Canada has one of the Stuart Wallace, sometime fellow of world’s most activist judiciaries, one would Homerton College, Cambridge, said he expect legislators to make abundant use of was articulating “the plaintive cry of the this power. In practice, however, even oppressed, white, oxford-educated [sic], mentioning the notwithstanding clause old boy”. Jessica Simor KC, who once has become politically toxic, as its use is stood for election as an ECtHR inevitably framed as a case of politicians judge, accused him of “fanning taking away rights from the people, instead dangerous flames, the flames of of the legislature disagreeing with a judicial nationalism” and much else in a interpretation of a constitutional right. reply politely described by Outside of Quebec, whose political class Sumption as a “bucket of ordure”. has never quite accepted the legitimacy of The vehemence of the the charter, the notwithstanding clause has responses to Sumption is all the only been used four times in 40 years. The more fascinating since he search for a workable solution to the is merely advocating for problem of the gouvernement des juges the replacement of the rumbles on. O ECHR by a domestic bill

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Woman About Town First-night nerves

B

SARAH DITUM

kinds of beaches, of course — strips of sand packed solid with sunbathing bodies. But the best places were the inaccessible ones, only hazily signposted from the roads. One was approached via a steep descent through stubby vines. Another required you to rappel down a short cliff hanging onto a rope, and back up when you wanted to leave. This seemed challenging with a beach bag in tow, but I watched locals carrying parasols, inflatables and whole cool boxes with aplomb: a nation that doesn’t like its relaxation to come too easy.

y the time this magazine is in your hands,

I will be — after much huffing, straining and shedding of tears — a published author. My book Toxic: Women, Fame and the Noughties will be on bookshop tables and readerly nightstands across the country. How do I feel right now? The honest answer is, sort of terrible. This anxiety is, I’m told, normal. No one feels good about publishing a book. Maybe that’s why it’s traditional to douse all the nerves in not-quite-chilled white wine at the launch event. At least I’ve now undergone the ultimate trial by fire: recording the audiobook, which meant four days of reading my own words back to myself while a producer gently

P

can overdo the culture on a family holiday. So we kept it light: one trip to the Red History Museum in Dubrovnik (highly recommended, especially for the recreation of a communist-era flat where you can pry through all the cupboards), and a walk round the Roman ruins in Split. According to social media lore, all men think about the Roman Empire twice a day. In my marriage, though, I am the Roman-thinker-abouter: I fall asleep listening to audiobooks about Romans (I’m currently doing the new Mary Beard). For me, the appeal is that Romans combine relatable human experiences — office politics, professional rivalries — with a totally alien belief system and attitude to violence. But wouldn’t it be fun if you could remove obstacles to your ambition with a poisoned fig tree? Scrambling around the ruins of the colosseum outside Split, Roman life seemed almost familiar: here was where you came to be entertained, and through entertainment, understand what power is. Obviously here, also, was where you came to watch the subclass being mauled by tigers for your delight, which seems downright barbaric. Although then I watched Matt Hancock paying for his sins in government by being physically tormented on Channel 4’s Celebrity SAS, so maybe things haven’t changed all that much.

corrected my pronunciation and pacing. If I didn’t hate it after all that — and I didn’t — there’s a good chance the book is pretty good after all. Certainly, it seems to be timely. The sexual assault allegations against Russell Brand reported by The Times, Sunday Times and Channel 4’s Dispatches led to an early burst of interest in Toxic. Did I feel guilty about this “good luck”, asked some friends. The truth is, no — and it wasn’t luck (though it obviously wasn’t planned). There aren’t many things you can count on in life, but the gradual revelation of men doing terrible things to women is definitely one of them.

*** The wild side Summer holiday was a two- week family trip to Dalmatia — the first time I’ve been to Croatia, and a revelation. The people were friendly, the food was excellent (I never knew octopus burger was a thing before and now I don’t know how I lived without it) and the beaches were bracingly wild. I’ve got used to the British seaside, where most spots offer public toilets and a snack shack, most likely under the protective gaze of yellow-shirted lifeguards. Croatia had these ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

•••

revious experience has taught me that you

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NOVA’S DIARY “Trick or Treat?” Akshata has come into the study, holding something behind her back. Rishi has been printing out spreadsheets and arranging them on the table. “I reject the stale consensus on Halloween,” he tells her. “The question I prefer to ask is: Treat or Trick?” Akshata sighs. “That’s very courageous of you, darling.” “I know. But do I get any credit from the media?” “Well, don’t worry, next year all this will be behind us.” “How do you mean?” Akshata suddenly looks panicked. She puts the brochure she was holding behind her back. It says something about Malibu Real Estate, which I think is a sort of car. Rishi has decided he likes cars now. “What if we got Jeremy Clarkson in?” he asks his friend James. “We could talk about how much we both love cars, with their big steering wheels, and their gearboxes.” “Mmm, we did ask, but apparently Clarkson’s a farmer now.” “You see, Rish?” says Akshata. “Lots of successful men have sudden and unexpected career changes in mid-life. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about.” The King has to give a speech soon, and James and Rishi are trying to think of things for him to say. “Are there any more train lines you can cancel?” Akshata asks. “No one cancels things like you do.” “We’re building train lines now,” explains Rishi. “Well, not building them. But we’re saying people could build them.” “Except to Manchester,” says James. “What we need,” says Rishi, “are announcements that show how different we are. Boris just spent the whole time promising to make everything better, and we’ve got to make sure people understand that we won’t be doing any of that.” James looks a bit thoughtful about this. Rishi tries to reassure him. “Isaac explained it all. Labour’s lead is soft. There’s a narrow path to victory, when voters realise that if they want things to not happen, they need to keep us in charge. Only one party is committed to delivering change by keeping everything the same.” Akshata smiles. “Well, I’ll leave you boys to it. You certainly seem to have it all under control.” I follow her out down the stairs. “California dreaming,” I hear her singing quietly, “on such a winter’s day.” O

O Ammo, amas, amat But Croatia also meant a sad end to a treasured family mascot. A while ago, my son announced that he’d acquired a bullet. This was by accident: he’d bought a jacket at a kilo sale while at university, and the bullet had been in the pocket. Cue much fascination with — and speculation about the origins of — the item nicknamed “Bullety”. (This is after a brilliant Peep Show episode where Mark and Jeremy become owners of a gun, and call it “Gunny”.) But after a while, even a mystery bullet can be absorbed into the fabric of family life, and Bullety was mostly forgotten. Until we went through airport security at Split, at which point my son got whisked aside for extra checks. I watched a mild but firm member of staff hold out Bullety with a quizzical expression before dropping it (him?) into the contraband bin. She seemed surprisingly relaxed about it, but for historic reasons, perhaps it’s not wildly unusual for tourists to be busted leaving Croatia with old ammo in their pockets.

•••

Rumpled boyhood

B I LLUSTRATI ONS B Y JOHN MO NTGOM ERY

ack in bath, and to the theatre to see A Voyage Round My Father — John Mortimer’s autobiographical play. It’s a slightly soft rendition that only fully comes alive when Rupert Everett is on stage playing the titular father, a patriarch so domineering that

even the fact of his blindness (he dislodged his corneas in a gardening mishap) is never mentioned outright. “Watch the TV version,” urged the critic friend I’d gone with. It’s on YouTube, and I recommend you do the same. It’s from 1982 and stars Laurence Olivier. On stage, the theatricality of Mortimer’s father is very entertaining, but the medium skews sympathy his way: you like him precisely because he’s a ham. On TV, there’s more tension between the father’s charisma and his coercion. One thing that’s true in both, though, is how incredibly odd the child-rearing rituals of the upper classes are. I’d like to think small boys are no longer being dispatched to boarding school to have books hurled at them by disturbed masters, but I wouldn’t bet on it. O ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

As told to Robert Hutton

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4 x

DEAR TORIES, WHAT IS YOUR PLAN FOR THE ARTS? This open letter to the Conservatives asks whether they have the will and the vision to take an opportunity to reshape British culture by reforming the Arts Council By Jaspreet Singh Boparai e who consider ourselves “Creatives” — writers, artists, actors, dancers, singers, musicians and so on — tend to loathe the Conservative Party. By temperament, few of us are right-wing. You Tories have always seemed hostile to us. It doesn’t help when so many of you treat our vocations as mere subsidised hobbies. But you still have a chance to win our allegiance: we may loathe you, but we hate and fear the Arts Council, and are looking for someone to protect us from them, since we still need their patronage, for now. Conservatives used to be intelligent patrons of the arts. In the 1930s, you had the most sophisticated cultural operation of any political organisation in a democratic country. Also, thanks to Alexander Korda’s film company, you had soft Tory propaganda in the cinemas — and audiences actually liked it. You peaked in 1941 with That Hamilton Woman, Winston Churchill’s favourite film. Then, being Tories, you bottled it. Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve (1942) and Michael Powell’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943) are two of the greatest patriotic films ever made. But you thought they were “damaging to morale”. What were you thinking? That was when you began to lose the “culture war”. For 80 years you have been inept patrons of the arts, when you’ve bothered to make the effort at all.

points. They think principally in stories, images and symbols. This is why your policy papers end up being useless in terms of convincing anyone of anything, even when you’re right. Nobody lives long enough to gain real wisdom purely through experience. People need fiction — especially comedy, drama and tragedy — to reflect the world for them, and help them illuminate reality. We Creatives don’t like criticism, but concede that critics are important: they teach people how to understand works of art; in reading critics’ judgements people eventually learn how to look at the world itself. Every effective ideologue knows this, and will seek to influence (or control) critics as well as creators. You Tories have no effective mechanisms for enabling creative work, or paying for it, or even criticising it. This is one of the reasons why you always lose (even when you win elections and hold power for 13 years, you still manage to keep losing). You have zero control over the narratives that matter in terms of ensuring that you have a future.

Many Tories like to masquerade as posh. Fair enough. Creatives like to put on costumes too — some of us have even made it into an art. But you people have no talent for playing your role. Nobody believes in your pretence of noblesse oblige, and a lot of you don’t think even to pretend to have one. But if you care about power, patronage matters. The two most effective arts patrons of the twentieth century were the cia and the French Communist Party. They understood what you Tories don’t: Creatives have far more influence and authority than politicians, legislators or economists. Real statesmen know not to neglect us, because we shape, guide and even control people’s dreams. Most Tories are nerds. As teenagers you spent Saturday nights in front of a bathroom mirror practising your first Budget Speech as Chancellor of the Exchequer. That was how you would eventually get us back for not inviting you to our parties. But you don’t understand that most people don’t think in bullet

We Creatives tend to divide you into two categories: “PPE-ists” and “Scrutonians”. When Oxford introduced the “Modern Greats” degree a century ago, focusing on Politics, Philosophy and Economics, it was meant to create a new administrative class for the United Kingdom. ppe-ists managed to lose the British Empire in less than a generation, yet they cut funding for the arts on the grounds of ineffectiveness. As for Scrutonians: we Creatives might not like the writings of Sir Roger Scruton, but we respect the man’s memory. At least he was cultured. You Scrutonians ape and parrot Sir Roger’s more cultured-sounding writings; your problem is, you never seem to do anything else. What good are Scrutonians to us Creatives when your vision of the arts stops at 1950? We like museums too, but you do nothing whatsoever to support those of us who are alive today. Instead, you complain ineffectually about the “woke takeover”

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of Tate Britain, the British Museum, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and other beloved national institutions. ppe-ists and Scrutonians alike think we Creatives are all “woke”. But you don’t have an effective working definition of the term, unless you borrowed it from Chris Rufo or Jordan Peterson; and even then, you don’t understand: we Creatives are ultimately loyal to our vocations, and seek above all to exercise our gifts. Politics isn’t important to us — unless we have no talent and are angry at the fact. Otherwise, our highest principles are embodied in the art we create, and as far as we can see, Tories are useless to help us realise our visions. Creatives will never be real Tories, for the most part. But you’d be surprised at how many of us would join you in a tactical alliance, if only you would give us something concrete in return. You potentially have an opening, now that the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (dcms) will be publishing a comprehensive review of the Arts Council by March 2024 (not, of course, that you are likely to remain in government long enough to implement it). Do you even have a plan, or are you going to fumble this for another 30 years?

coordination and strategy, the few of us who weren’t already vocally pro-Labour were permanently won over. Very few Tories understood what Blair meant, or had any idea of how to respond. The rest of you didn’t see through the ruse. You should have instantly realised that much of that new “arts” funding was going directly into the pockets of administrators, managers, “Arts Facilitators” and other commissars. In other words, Labour was creating a new bureaucratic tyranny under your noses. You Tories were too engrossed in petty power struggles to notice how the ace might be used against you. The “management and administration” of ace has consistently expanded for a quarter-century. Right now there are over 600 full-time employees: 639 in 2020/21, but numbers have gone down a little since. “Administrative costs” were £36.8 million in 2020/21, and £40.8 million in 2021/22. But how much does it cost to give away free money? How much ace grant money ends up being spent, not on Creatives, or our projects — but to pay the salaries of further useless commissars at national institutions? If you have ever attempted to read an ace report on any subject, you see that nobody has any clear notion of what priorities are or how the institution is supposed to function. Nobody seems to be accountable to anybody else, and there is no single system for instituting or enforcing policy. Despite the size of the institution, individual commissars appear to operate with near-complete independence, and total impunity if they fail to follow such guidelines as exist.

The original Arts Council of Great Britain (acgb), founded in 1946, was never particularly transparent or accountable; but it never controlled the sheer amount of money that Arts Council England (ace) does. In 1994, acgb was reorganised into three separate bodies: ace, Creative Scotland and the Arts Council of Wales. ace gained majority control over 20 per cent of the National Lottery Distribution Fund. This means a quarter of a billion pounds a year, on top of Grant-in-Aid funding — which amounted to £540,236,000 for the 2022/23 fiscal year, and £686,801,000 in 2021/22. ace receives, and spends, a great deal of money. In 1997, Tony Blair explicitly made clear that the arts were an integral part of his vision for the nation. We Creatives were charmed and flattered; after 18 years of poor Conservative management of arts organisations, and a reprehensible lack of

ace revised its process for National Lottery Project Grants yet again this year. There is still no reliable system of appeals, no consistent procedure to provide applicants with feedback, and no established, effective mechanism for guiding applicants through an ever-changing process that has never been made simpler, clearer or more efficient in the history of the organisation. Nobody who applies for funding will ever seriously complain about any of this, because the ace is not transparent, and everybody who relies on it is afraid of being

“I have some personal news that’s not yet available online.”

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CA RTO O N B Y MAT T PER CIVA L; T HEO M CIN NE S/HUC K

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punished or blacklisted by some faceless employee. with envy at people whom you despise, but might turn out to We can’t help but suspect that the system was cynically be more politically valuable than you? designed to work like this: when we’re anxious, afraid and exhausted, we’re more likely to obey instructions, and less After Tony Blair left office, his political prolikely to object if “guiding principles” are unclear, inconsistent gramme carried on, and even expanded to include more “Arts or impossible to follow. We’d like to approach someone on our Education”, more “Development Programs”, more inexplicable knees and beg, but have no name or face to turn to — not even bureaucracy than ever before. Luckily for him, David Cameron an email address. turned out to be the most openly philistine prime minister The results are as we see them. This is how the ace controls since Ramsay MacDonald. Of recent major world leaders, perhaps only Richard Nixon cared less about culture. culture. Nobody who relies on it for funding will dare step out Cameron’s failure even to pretend to be interested in what of line, and indeed we have no idea where the line even is. Who is an informer, and whom are they informace might be doing had predictable results. With the looming ing? The institutional culture of ace, and The opening and closing ceremonies for the 2012 London Olympics perfectly expressed a the dread it inspires in all Creatives, was review of the Arts New Labour vision of British history, culture briefly illuminated in 2006 by Sir Nicholas Council, you have and national character. The irreverence Hytner (then Artistic Director of the National an opportunity to towards traditional institutions and idealisaTheatre). On the Today programme he begin reshaping tion of disposable, Americanised popular lamented his inability to find a “good, culture was infectious. You could not object mischievous right-wing play”. British culture at to it without looking foolish, or unattractiveThere was an instant uproar: actors were least as radically ly bitter and curmudgeonly. shocked; playwrights denied being rightas Tony Blair did. Certain Tories moaned that this was an wing; artistic directors made clear that they But do you have any offensive “New Labour pageant” and were would never produce a right-wing play; literary managers claimed never to have vision whatsoever? rightly shouted down for doing so. The assessment was correct; the complaint was seen a good right-wing play. For months foolish. You people allowed this to happen. To whinge was to afterwards, theatre critics, reviewers and culture journalists reveal how impotent and ineffectual your traditional Conservpublicly dissected the question of whether they knew of any atism had become. good right-wing plays, or such a thing was even possible. At least the Church of England had the good sense not to Fear was so pervasive that many theatre professionals began object when the closing ceremonies featured John Lennon’s to go out of their way (even by their standards) to make public “Imagine” and Eric Idle’s “Always Look On The Bright Side of displays of not being right-wing. Evidently the system worked. Life” as an announcement to the world that the Established Did conservatives notice any of this? Church was an irrelevant mummery, without even a ceremoniAs we saw during the pandemic, ace’s behaviour during al role in public life anymore. This is what happens when you try lockdowns caused widespread to ensure short-term survival with retreat after tactical retreat. outrage even among Creatives who are financially dependent on its support. Few have dared ace squandered £5.4 million on 12 pieces of forgotten criticise it publicly other than public art to commemorate the Olympics. One piece of the artist Alexander Adams, “environmental sculpture” in Merseyside cost £535,000, whose October 2022 pamphlet despite the fact that work never even started on it. The project “Abolish The Arts Council” was simply wasn’t feasible. Even so, the artist took home £40,000. the subject of a story in the Say what you will about Tony Blair: at least he had a vision, a Telegraph. But prominent strategy for achieving it, and a body of well-paid Creatives who Creatives who are known to have been acting according to his plans for years, long after have read this, and support most of us fell out of love with New Labour. Adams’s views in private, have Now, with the looming review of the Arts Council, you feigned ignorance. The cost of Conservatives have an opportunity to begin reshaping British 7KHSDPSKOHWE\DUWLVW $OH[DQGHU$GDPV dissent is too high. culture at least as radically and comprehensively as Blair did. An intelligently-organised But do you have a plan? Do you have any viable personnel movement against ace would generate widespread support who are willing and able to implement it? Do you have any vision whatsoever? Or should we Creatives carry on as we from Creatives; but as long as you Tories continue to maintain always have since the Second World War, thinking you are this pompously philistine ppe-ist’s stance towards culture in scarcely even worth our scorn? O general, nobody will seize this opportunity to win support from the people who influence the national conversation far more Jaspreet Singh Boparai is a writer and critic than anyone else. Are you blind, in denial — or merely seething ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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SERIOUS BUSINESS

Go woke, go broke A presidential contender has lessons for UK investors

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ith donald

Trump’s improbable plotline so dominating the American political soap opera, little attention is being paid to the other characters seeking the Republican nomination for the White House. There is, however, one candidate who deserves to be better known on this side of the pond, not so much for his potential as a future leader of the free world, but more for his perceptive analysis of what has gone wrong with Western business over the past decade. Despite never having held public office, the biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy is starting to be seen as a credible challenger for the GOP crown, should Trump stumble. This is thanks to his populist, if rather eccentric, platform which includes abolishing the FBI, raising the voting age to 25 and restoring the gold standard. But what interests me about Ramaswamy are the views which first brought him to prominence and earned him the money that allows him to play at presidential politics — his highly cogent critique of so-called “woke” capitalism.

after making his first fortune as the founder of the drug developer Roivant Sciences, he went on to start Strive, an investment fund with the “unwavering mandate that the purpose of a for-profit corporation is to maximize long-run value to investors”. Its mission is to avoid companies whose CEOs take public stances on fashionable social issues or drone on about “stakeholder capitalism”, and instead back only businesses that focus exclusively on the bottom line. In an era when our pension pots are shrinking in real terms thanks to high inflation and stagnant returns, there is a moral urgency about profit maximisation. Explaining his approach, Ramaswamy says: “We will tell oil companies to be

struggled to keep my excellent oil companies and What interests internal monologue from coal companies to be me about Vivek going external. excellent coal companies The PR men are getting and solar companies to be Ramaswamy is in on the act too. Waiting in excellent solar companies,” his highly cogent the reception of a City office It is an investment critique of sorecently, I found myself strategy which makes good called “woke flicking through a strange sense to me. I have always little book, The Activist thought that Shell’s baffling capitalism” Leader, written by two green “transition plan” was partners at Brunswick. It seemed to a latter-day equivalent of Palmerston’s suggest by channelling their inner Gretas Schleswig-Holstein question, where the or Swampys (and putting their firm on a only three people who knew the answer six-figure retainer) CEOs can become had either died, gone mad or forgotten it. more trusted and successful. In Woke Inc., the book in which Ramaswamy lays out his views in detail, he paints a persuasive picture of a corporate but it’s the folks at the Big Four America where leading businesses such as accountancy firms who have the best Goldman Sachs, BlackRock and Facebook/ racket. First they advise policymakers on Meta, cynically appropriate environmental new Environmental, Social & Governance or diversity issues to advance the personal (ESG) regulations, then they sell back “best agendas of their leaders or win ill-gotten practice guidelines”, and “compliance regulatory advantages. tools” for the same regulations to hapless firms who have to bear the cost of them. Plenty of battery-powered BMWs, there are lessons that we in eco-holidays to Costa Rica and Hampshire Britain can learn from his analysis of the hobby farms have been bought by US scene — but there are some important consultants who have “product-ised” transatlantic differences. social change, but it’s hard to see any If American woke capitalism is an ethical tangible benefit for the ordinary savers yet elegant Patagonia quarter-zip fleece, its who ultimately own our listed companies. UK equivalent is more a frumpy charity shop Stakeholder capitalism — the big idea anorak. While there might be a handful of that underpins woke capitalism — rarely British bosses who would love to appear on benefits the stakeholder it is supposed to Question Time to opine on Black Lives help. Instead the ego-driven bosses and Matter, the truth is that many of them are consultants are the main winners. introverts who rose to the top through the Furthermore, as Ramaswamy argues, finance route. stakeholder capitalism is actually dangerFor them, the thought of speaking publicly on anything remotely political ous to democracy because it encourages causes them to sprout facial boils. So over big business to believe it has a legitimate here, it’s not bosses who profit from riding role in advocating on social issues which the wave of woke issues, but the consultare rightfully the realm of politicians. The idea of shareholder primacy may ants who have created lucrative new have gone out fashion in recent years, but products to capitalise on this growing it is high time it is rehabilitated as the most C-suite angst. effective — and ethical — approach to Last month, I sat through a board conducting business. presentation from an external diversity and It is hard to feel positive about the inclusion “expert”, who listed the 21 upcoming US presidential battle, but if it immediate actions any company needed to stimulates a better debate about how take to avoid “falling behind the pack”. wealth is created and distributed, then When this consultant reached item 19 — a some good may yet come from this “global Tourette’s policy” — I felt some bunfight. O— ned involuntary twitching and, I have to say,

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With declining attendances and a neglect of their core mission, churches and art galleries have much in common. To survive, they must ignore fads and focus on what truly matters

THE CATHEDRAL and the museum Pierre d’Alancaisez

MI CH AEL M ACO R /T HE SA N FRA N CIS CO C HR O NI CLE V IA G E T TY I MAG ES

hen Tate Modern opened in

believes that the museum and the cathedral compete as suppliers of enlightenment, many of the existential threats they face are partly of their own making. The revelation of thefts from the British Museum and the escalation in the diplomatic argument about the future of the Parthenon marbles are only the most visible manifestations of a deeper problem. If the museum’s mission was once to preserve and educate, in recent years it has expanded to encompass questions of social equity and diversity which, in turn, have forced the institutions to rethink their approach to the canon which they guard. That is no terrible thing because diversity in collecting would mean that we all have more culture to enrich us. Perversely, this same omnivore logic built museum collections from the spoils of empire. Today’s cultural expansionism is supposedly gentler (although artists who often complain of being exploited may disagree). But art institutions are also desperately keen to “decolonise” their work, ensuring that they must declare themselves morally incompetent to deal with some parts of their collections and jettison others as immoral. This marks a contradiction between the universalist tenets that would value all culture and the essentialism that shouts foul at cultural appropriation.

London in 2000, it seemed the ideal Sunday pilgrimage destination for London’s otherwise-idle middle classes. The contemporary art gallery would help quell the anxiety of modern life and fill the void left by the decline in organised religion. How art gained the authority to guide the liberal individual’s relationship with a secular society and what aesthetics and social forms this new cathedral of art would promote were the centre of debate. The museum is the spiritual successor of the church. After the Reformation freed art from its sacral obligations, it also turned aesthetics into a civil matter. Early public museums such as the Victoria & Albert and the Smithsonian were founded in the nineteenth century and their core aim was the moral edification of the masses through art. In the time it has so far taken to build Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Família Basilica in Barcelona, hundreds of just-as-grand museums have opened across the world, proving the unceasing demand for secular spiritual experiences. Fittingly, Tate Modern’s earliest blockbuster was The Weather Project, Olafur Eliasson’s yellow sun installation which had audiences gazing in awe at a replica of a celestial entity. But now the museum’s role and fate risks replicating that of the church it seemed set to replace. The museum faces fundamental challenges. It is haunted by a crisis of purpose that is manifest in the heated debates over restitution of artefacts. A crisis of confidence has seen many institutions turn against art itself. Ultimately, this is a crisis of meaning that pushes audiences away.

These problems are taking museums in Britain by surprise, and most are in denial. But institutions such as the Church of England have faced the same dilemmas themselves — not always successfully — and their struggles are the subject of constant debate. Even if one

There are consequences. For example, there is a prin-

cipled case for the return of some Benin bronzes from European museums to their Edo origins. But in reality, that a tranche of these artefacts resituated by German museums has already gone missing in private hands in Nigeria rather than being put on public display is an insult to that culture and its diaspora. Such problems are not merely matters for diligent administrative practice but are rooted in the confusion about the museum’s status in a changing world. Christian churches have grappled with many museum-goers versions of the same paradox. The ordinatoday are baffled by tion of female priests and the blessing of anything made after gay partnerships are only two examples in Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain which a compromise requires rewriting

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Many more people visited Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition Infinity Rooms at Tate than will ever come together in an antiaesthetic well-being event at any museum.

seen as vital replacements for the declining community infrastructure which once included the parish church as a vital component. Again, this is a good idea until these caring responsibilities lead to aesthetic conflict. In June, Tate Britain hosted Queer and Now, a festival of performances, film screenings and talks held under the auspices of LGBTQ+ Pride. There were market stalls where queer creatives sold their trinkets, a pop-up rave stage, and a protest banner-making workshop. One could legitimately ask if this ideological cross between a village fête and a school disco deserved a place in the nation’s premier art institution. But the real art crime was that the event’s participants had no interest at all in the exhibition of the iconic queer filmmaker Isaac Julien (film still, left), which was Tate’s main offering at the time. Rather than frame the festival around Julien’s oeuvre, the museum threw art under the bus to appear legitimate to the queer community. In his essay “Cura, the Curatorial and Paradoxes of Care”, the scholar Ed McKeon highlights that the institutionalisation of pastoral care overlapped with the waning of the moral authority through which the pastor once guided the flock. This lack created the impression that the hierarchical difference between the institution and its subjects had disappeared, too.

The greatest problem is that many museums are losing their interest in art. It would be easy to blame artists for this crisis of faith: many museum-goers today are baffled by anything made after Duchamp’s 1917 Fountain. But not all the art which has filled museums and galleries since circa 1960 deserves such scorn. Conceptual artists, including the English group Art & Language and the pioneer of auto-destruction Gustav Metzger, did unleash a revolution against the image, but their work was not anti-aesthetic per se and their critiques specifically targeted the institutions. Even the sometimes shocking, sometimes hollow work of the Young British Artists, such as Tracey Emin, who were making their mark just as Tate Modern opened its doors, revelled in art’s ability to share the human experience. No, the museum’s anti-art stance is the curator’s professional choice. In this, it uncannily trails the church’s faltering relationship with God. In the past 30 years, museums and contemporary art galleries shifted their focus from looking after artefacts to the care of the audience. Today, funding for art institutions hinges on cultural experiences engendering wellbeing and artistic projects promoting social cohesion. But rather than resist instrumentalisation, museums relish being

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But institutions never give up their power willingly and where they lack authority, they turn to authoritarianism.

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YAYOI KUS A MA , TATE, CO URTESY OTA FI NE A RTS A ND V I CTOR I A M IR O; IS AAC JU L I EN , TAT E, CO URTE SY VI CTOR IA M IR O

the fundamental doctrines that govern their practice. Given that until recently the unchangeability of the church was regarded as one of its strengths, it is little wonder that a Church of England which today promotes a “third way” is in a bind. For the museum, which evolved alongside liberalism itself, such contradictions are not yet apparent. But its impractical “fudge” could be just as damaging.

Guidance turns into governance, and thus into the corruption of the institution’s purpose. This may or may not have been the story of the church for centuries. But at Tate Britain, the festival was vigilantly watched over by a team of lanyard-wearing “Vibe Checkers”, staff members who would ensure the museum was “a welcoming environment for everyone”. In the eyes of art, we are all equal until somebody displays the wrong type of “queer joy”. Where are all the museum-goers and, indeed, parishioners who don’t pass the vibe check? Contemporary life offers them an infinite choice of spiritual fulfilment. There is a museum in the virtual-world game Fortnite and a church in the Metaverse. But these are institutions in name only, and their authority stems from an algorithm. Yet many of us settle for this and scroll through our TikTok feeds until the machine understands our moral outlook. As McKeon observes: “Curation is now ubiquitous as the absence of both foundations and destiny — for the human, for art, for truth itself — has become palpable.” For all this, museums carry on with unflinching confidence, constantly producing new narratives of their “relevance”. They claim to hold the solution to the climate crisis or that they are uniquely placed to resolve racial tensions. They are so good at this that some churches even believe that art can solve the crisis of faith. And perhaps it can. 2019’s helter-skelter installation in Norwich Cathedral did get the punters in and at least some paused in awe at the religious art that has adorned the building’s walls for centuries.

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But the foundations of this coalition may not be sound. Richard Parry, the creative director at St James’s church in London’s Piccadilly recently described the institution as “a space of community, of compassion, and wisdom”. That’s some praise from a curator who once directed high-profile contemporary art events. But Parry, under whose tenure St James’s hosts drag nights alongside music recitals, went on to say that his institution “understands that [it] is an irrelevance in contemporary life”. With friends like this, who needs competitors? If the cathedral and the museum can teach each other anything, it’s that the institutions which treat the image seriously stand the greatest chance of survival. Many more people visited Yayoi Kusama’s exhibition Infinity Rooms at Tate than will ever come together in an anti-aesthetic wellbeing event at any museum. Kusama’s experiential installations are more helter-skelters than good art, but their success does tell us something about the aesthetic needs of the population. Some museums still make serving these a priority. Christian denominations which continue to invest in the spectacle of worship, likewise, are faring better than those which try to accommodate conflicting ideas. There may be a theological explanation for this. But the aesthetic one is, perhaps, more compelling. O

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The Travelling Companions, Augustus Egg, 1862.

Pierre d’Alancaisez is a curator and critic

Public domain via Birmingham Museums Trust.

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BRITAIN: A GONER WITH THE WIND Barry Norris ritain has bet everything on wind, mostly offshore wind, to decarbonise the national electricity grid by 2035 and reach Net Zero by 2050. The commitment is to increase the current 14 GW of offshore wind production to 50 GW by 2030, enough to power around half the UK’s predicted electricity consumption. It is Britain’s only current growing source of energy generation. And yet the wind industry is in crisis. New developments are on hold and the government’s offshore auction in September failed to attract a single bid. Wind farm operators are effectively on strike unless the UK taxpayer ponies up more cash. The reason is that offshore wind is too expensive to be commercially viable, even with inflation-adjusted price guarantees which protect suppliers against intermittency and supply chain problems. Mads Nipper, the CEO of Danish offshore wind pioneer Ørsted, told Bloomberg News recently it is now “inevitable” that consumers will have to pay more. “And if they don’t, neither we nor any of our colleagues are going to build more offshore,” he warned in an embarrassing back-track from previous industry claims that offshore wind was the cheapest form of energy. The British government has long congratulated itself that between 1990 and 2019 carbon dioxide emissions fell by 44 per cent while GDP rose by 76 per cent. The UK, it boasted, was “decarbonising faster than any other G20 country”. However, this was achieved less by a switch to renewables than by replacing coal with natural gas as the main source of reliable baseload power. Gas turbine generation increased from just 5 per cent of the electricity grid in 1990 to 40 per cent in 2021. Since the costs of North Sea gas extraction were significantly lower than Britain’s coal deposits and with half the CO2 emissions, this made both economic and environmental sense. The shift was in line with previous energy transitions in which market forces determined the triumph of an economically superior product: during the Industrial Revolution, coal replaced wood, dried dung,

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and wind as the dominant fuel; in the twentieth century, oil and gas replaced coal. In this process, the natural evolution to the next stage might see nuclear, which has more “bang for buck” energy density, if not yet lower cost or ease of use, eventually replace fossil fuels. Instead, for the first time in history, we are seeking to replace a superior economic source of energy with an inferior product, wind power, which previous generations had discarded as being too weather-dependent, too expensive and generating too little surplus energy relative to the upfront investment costs. Since the free market would never embrace an economically inferior product, this transition requires constant government subsidy and coercion to ensure the survival of the unfittest. So it is no surprise that offshore wind developers are now calling the British government’s bluff for an even bigger subsidy, knowing that Whitehall has strategically limited the country’s energy options to a wind-powered future. In contrast with the 1990s “Dash for Gas”, the “Renewable Grid by 2030” and “Net Zero by 2050” now enshrined in statute require a command economy that diverts much of the nation’s financial resources into less productive economic activity — with disastrous consequences for standards of living. Building an additional 36 GW of offshore wind with capital costs now running at an estimated £5m per MW will cost an estimated £180 billion (although construction costs will vary considerably according to site and vintage). This is equivalent to 8 per cent of GDP. Assuming a generous load factor for new projects of 50 per cent (above the historic average of 42 per cent), this extra capacity would equate to theoretical generation capacity of 159 TWh (around half of current UK demand).

CH ART B Y PHI LIP PITTA M

The dash for wind energy is a generational folly that will see the nation’s economic future sacrificed on the altar of Net Zero

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The Seagreen Offshore Wind Farm in the North Sea will be Scotland’s largest when complete

But since the government is also planning for a doubling of electricity demand by 2050, at least 492 TWh of additional renewable power generation will be required, an eight-fold increase. To put in perspective the capital cost of this: 112 GW of deep-water offshore wind to decarbonise the grid by 2050 would cost roughly £560 billion or 25 per cent of the UK’s GDP. But these construction estimates just scratch the surface of the true costs of a renewable grid since they do not factor in the costs of intermittency (the stop/go nature of weather-dependent energy). These increase exponentially at higher market shares of wind power, a vast hidden liability for future generations of continuing to build intermittent energy production. Construction is not a one-off cost, since the useful economic life of wind turbines is officially just 25 years, though some industry reports suggest that the high cost of repairs and technical obsolescence of offshore wind turbines in deep, salty waters may make them uneconomic to operate after a mere decade or so without the pre-2017 legacy of overly generous UK subsidies.

A NDY B UCH AN A N/ AFP V IA G ET TY IMAGE

t is hard to think of a historical comparison for so much of a nation’s wealth to be spent replacing an historically cheap and efficient product with a less reliable substitute that depreciates rapidly and will always require ongoing consumer and taxpayer support. There are almost no offshore wind projects in the UK currently operating in the free market — without Renewables Obligation (RO) subsidy, Contracts for Difference (CFD) guaranteed prices, or above-market Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). The wind industry and its advocates previously made ludicrous claims about its cost competitiveness relative to gas. This was based on the decline in headline CFD auction prices (from £140 per MWh in 2014 to £37 per MWh in 2022), this being the level at which wind operators estimated they could make an adequate profit on the project with a guaranteed government price. But the CFD process is misleading since headline prices are ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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quoted at 2012 levels , when operators currently receive at least a third more because they automatically go up with inflation (and grid costs) for the 15 years of the contract. So the 2014 CFD is currently actually now worth £196 per MWh (+40 per cent) and the 2022 £45 per MWh (+21 per cent). Assessing the economic viability of wind energy by looking at the declining prices of guaranteed CFDs in new auctions over time is misleading — a trap which British politicians unwittingly fall into time and again. Most importantly, the governmentguaranteed price protects the wind industry from its own intermittency, the costs of which are transferred to the consumer. System-balancing costs published by the National Grid are now in the region of £4 billion a year, up from £400 million 20 years ago, and are set to rise further in a non-linear manner as wind market-share increases.

Let’s consider why wind farms will not operate without a government guaranteed price. If the wind is blowing in the North Sea, it is usually also blowing in the Irish Sea. So UK wind farms tend to produce power at roughly the same time as their peers. As with all commodities, the market price is set by the marginal cost of switching on supply to meet demand. So when the wind doesn’t blow, the grid must bid up supply from producers of reliable, dispatchable power (gas, nuclear, hydro, coal, biomass) to avoid blackouts. Conversely, when there is too much wind power that cannot be used (or stored), the grid makes low or even negative bids to discourage production. This means that as the wind generation increases, UK power prices will become even more volatile, which is not a sign of a well-functioning grid. Although the price of power will reflect a number of considerations, the analysis I have undertaken of half-hour system settlement prices since the beginning of 2021 and the corresponding market share of wind within these 47,000 discrete time periods — which fluctuates between 0 and 60 per cent accordƧƨƯƁſƁƂ

The costs of building large-turbine wind farms, which don’t offer much greater productivity than earlier models, have risen by up to 50 per cent ing to the weather — suggests wind generation is already significantly above its optimal UK market share: extremely high power prices occur during low wind market share periods and low and sometimes negative power prices at high market shares during windy periods, indicating excess wind energy that cannot be used or stored is essentially wasteful economic activity. It is the weather rather than the number of wind turbines installed that is already the constraining factor — and we already have a glut of capacity when the wind blows. Adding more wind generation will only make UK power prices more volatile with weather-dependent surpluses or gluts. The National Grid has paid wind farms, mostly in Scotland, over £1.4bn since 2010 to reduce their output on windy days, a payment that is justified as compensation for lost subsidy but with the result that the wind farm makes more when not generating than when selling to customers. The cost of this is borne by the consumer and will increase with even more volatile power prices that will result from more wind power being built. Crucially, the price achieved by excess wind generation does

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not adjust to reflect this low value since it is guaranteed by the CFD. In other words, the market value of wind power will always be less than the average power price. Conversely, when the wind doesn’t blow during peak demand periods, the UK has exceptionally high prices, because there is a scarcity of reliable power, which is of higher economic value. Unlike Denmark, which can operate — albeit with abnormally high average power prices — at a high share of wind power because it can trade (at prices that reflect the lower value of intermittent power) any surplus with Sweden’s nuclear or Norway’s hydro or the larger German market, the size and remoteness of the UK offshore wind farms — with bigger surpluses and higher transmission costs — will prevent a similar model championed by those advocating wind overbuild as an export industry (who presumably will also have to explain why British consumers would effectively be subsidising foreign electricity consumption). Wind farms operating on a large scale without this guaranteed price would either be forced to find a solution for their intermittency or realise much lower prices. Building even more wind capacity in the UK is like a factory owner deciding to hire additional workers on long-term contracts who guarantee to only turn up when they are not needed and, at the same, paying the factory’s existing workers — gas power plants in this analogy — who turn up to work at specified hours less; while insisting on the ability to fire these reliable workers without notice. The outcome would encourage all workers to become unreliable and the factory owner would end up having to employ far more workers overall than needed to compensate for unreliability, with no guarantee of being consistently adequately resourced. This unsolved intermittency problem is why more than $3.8 trillion has been invested in renewables globally over the last decade but the market share of fossil fuels has only decreased from 82 per cent to 81 per cent. The “Renewable Grid” is a political indulgence that can never provide the reliable, dispatchable power the grid requires.

he failure to attract a single bid in September’s fifth CFD auction at a headline price of £44/MWh (which is actually £59/ MWh) means the prospect of building 50 GW of offshore wind by 2030 now looks dead in the water. Consider that the “winners” of the fourth CFD auction in 2022, at a superficially low £37 MW (now £45 MW), suffered buyer’s remorse and refused to build their projects — notably Vattenfall’s 1.4 GW Norfolk Boreas project and Ørsted’s 2.9 GW Hornsea 3, the two largest projects awarded to offshore wind.

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It can also be feared that the offshore wind farms currently under construction awarded in the 2017 and 2019 auction would, at the CFD prices awarded, fail to generate an adequate return over their stated economic life for their investors, meaning that the miraculous post-2015 drop in UK CFD prices will prove unsustainable, with break-even instead likely more than double current estimates of gas turbine generator all-in cost (ex-carbon tax) of 50 GW/h. While it is doubtful whether the offshore wind projects built since 2015 on sub-£100/MWh CFDs were ever financially sustainable, several factors now make them even less viable. The costs of building large-turbine wind farms, which don’t seem to offer much greater productivity than earlier models, have risen by up to 50 per cent due to inflation and higher liabilities from turbine unreliability. Furthermore, the best sites in shallow seas have already been taken. Perhaps more importantly, wind projects were typically funded by as much as 80 per cent debt, meaning that the 500 bps rise in global interest rates since 2021 has resulted in a £4 annual increase in debt servicing costs for every £100 of capital expenditure. That adds up to £100 for every £100 spent over the course of a 25-year project. As befits a parasitical industry, wind enthusiasts have reacted furiously to the failed auction, blaming the government for its parsimony and hoping that a new Labour government might prove more malleable, rather than accepting that it became a prisoner of its own propaganda in claiming that offshore wind power was an economically feasible, scalable and, above all, sustainable solution for powering Britain’s electricity grid.

is subject to high energy losses on conversion. Consequently, the energy costs of hydrogen storage will outweigh any benefits.

hereas the “Renewable Grid” is a political indulgence, achieving Net Zero is truly only for those who either still believe in fairies and unicorns or want to embrace pre-industrial standards of living. It is worth remembering that the electricity grid currently still only powers less than 20 per cent of total UK final energy consumption, over 70 per cent of which is still reliant on fossil fuels. Most politicians seem to think our energy consumption relates solely to the grid. Net zero therefore must involve attempting to electrify all economic activity: manufacturing, agriculture, transportation and home heating. Customers would have to be forced to change their behaviour, as well as rely on products that haven’t yet been invented (and probably won’t be unless the laws of physics and chemistry change). And all of this powered by a dysfunctional grid that only works when the wind blows, requiring a blank cheque of taxpayer or consumer subsidy. Even if full electrification could be achieved, a mere doubling of electricity generation would appear to imply that per capita primary energy consumption would need to fall by at least 60 per cent to reach Net Zero, presumably with a commensurate fall in standards of living. UK electricity consumption has already declined by 20 per cent since 2005, owing to high prices and deindustrialisation. Our total energy consumption is down 30 per cent, now at levels last seen in the 1950s. This reverses a trend that since 1650 has seen our energy consumption rise by 20 times per capita, the real cost of energy fall by 90 per cent and our standard of living rise 30-fold. We were told that a fossil-fuel-free future would have few costs and a positive economic benefit. Whilst the costs of decarbonisation are now becoming clearer, what constitutes successremains elusive. When the decarbonisation of the West fails to produce a measurable change to global climate, the solution, like that of the medieval doctor with his bag of leeches, will inevitably be to administer more medicine — whose efficacy can never be measured — locking us into a green policy doom-loop. No one ever asked Britain’s electorate if they wanted to live in a country which wasn’t bankrupt but might be 2 degrees warmer. Britain’s economic future is being sacrificed on the altar of Net Zero. A renewable grid will produce abundant electricity for a few days annually and prohibitively expensive, unreliable power the rest of the time, resulting in demand destruction, supply rationing and deindustrialisation. Building more wind generation represents a monumental misallocation of capital and a generational policy folly. Britain is a goner with the wind. O

Net Zero disciples will continue to advocate that Britain plough on regardless with their unsustainable winddependent model in the hope that surplus energy generated on windy days can in future be efficiently exported or stored in a cost-effective, scalable manner. Whether it be lithium-ion or vanadium batteries, or the latest fad of green hydrogen, this is a hopeful delusion. Current battery technology is unable to offer an industrial scale solution for longer than a few hours. The building of “the world’s largest” lithium-ion industrial battery in Trafford, Manchester, recently hit the headlines. Costing £750 million, the battery would store just 2 GWh, enough to power Britain for little more than three minutes. At higher shares of wind power, much more electricity will need to be stored for much longer. It is easy to see how building an electricity grid powered solely by renewables could end up costing the UK more than 100 per cent of GDP. Hydrogen is the latest unfeasible storage fad touted to justify wind overbuild. Expensive industrial electrolysers would have to operate at very low capacity utilisation given the intermittence of renewable energy, which means weather-dependent hydrogen will never be cost competitive. Hydrogen is a dangerous gas and difficult to store, because doing so involves either expensive high-pressure vessels or chilling to -253 degrees Celsius to liquefy and safely transport it and

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Barry Norris is the founder and chief investment officer of Argonaut Capital Partners LLP

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SOUNDING BOARD MARCUS WALKER

The Church’s drive to remake itself has been a pastoral and financial catastrophe

W

e need to talk

about Wigan. “Why Wigan?” you might ask. Because Wigan is the prototype for a whole new way of being Anglican which is being rolled out across various dioceses and, being the first of this model, it has been the subject of a detailed study and shown to be a disaster. This is not hyperbole. I’m not sure how else to describe a scheme which drives away fully a third of your congregation and results in a collapse of giving by a third, which cost £1.2 million to implement and has resulted in the deficits of the churches involved shooting up from £56,000 per year to £295,666. Let’s go back to the beginning. Wigan was the first project of a vast scheme of national spending called “Strategic Development Funding”. SDF is the brainchild of Archbishop Welby and redirects the money made available by the Church Commissioners towards projects designed to bring many more people to church — projects focused around “fresh expressions of church”, which could not be spent on resourcing existing parish ministry. Nationally it has been a failure. A report by Sir Robert Chote, the former head of the Office for Budget Responsibility, showed that “out of the 89,375 new disciples anticipated from SDF projects from 2014 to 2021, 12,704 have been witnessed to date”. £176 million was earmarked for these projects.

Wigan shows why this has been a disaster financially, but much more importantly, pastorally. The great scheme took the 29 parishes of Wigan and merged them into one super- benefice, made up of seven

“parish hubs”. From 2013 the purely ideological reasons. They always number of clergy was Now they are going to blame slashed from 24 to 18 and the poor folk of Wigan for planned to then to 13. They would plans already in train which close these merge back-office functions they have objected to from churches, now the start. “Punishment and train laity to take on clergy responsibilities. they are going beatings shall continue until The project had ambitious morale improves.” to blame the aims. By 2021 Wigan would Morale will not improve. folk of Wigan have five new expressions of There is no plan to row back, church, and five “emerging” apologise to people who feel who objected expressions of church. They from the start deeply wounded and work would have increased giving out a better model of by £500,000. Congregations resourcing our poorest areas. would be growing in these new forms of On the contrary, in the report they church, while the existing parishioners highlighted as a “key learning” that were expected to sit tight and keep giving. “traditionalists and older people feel It doesn’t take a genius to work out sidelined” and proposed as a solution, what happened. The people walked and “intergenerational activities/services with took their money with them. older and young people (e.g. technology If you slash the number of clergy and sessions, ballroom dancing, handicrafts)”. the consequential number of services, and They asked for Communion and were remove priests from a direct pastoral given a handicraft session. relationship with specific congregations, those congregations will feel sufficiently There are two overlapping abandoned by the church that they will issues here. The first is the belief that a abandon the church in turn. Instead of place like Wigan, which has never bringing in an extra £500,000 a year, they recovered from the collapse of its mills and have actually lost £500,000 a year. Slow mining industry, must pay its own way or hand clap. lose its churches and its priests. As a national church this is unconscionable. Of course the poorer areas of the And it’s about to get worse. country cannot afford to pay for themIn the wake of the report, the Diocese of selves. That is why Queen Anne set up her Liverpool announced a plan to close 19 of bounty to fund the cure of souls in poorer its 29 churches. With the fall in numbers parishes. That money is currently paying and giving, they cannot afford to keep them £150 million a year towards projects that open, they say. have been shown not to work. Give it back What they don’t mention is that this was to the parishes and stop this cycle of always one of the objects of the C of E’s decline. original plan: “Deal with the “buildings The other issue is the ideological drive issue”, namely our understanding of a to transform the Church of England into a church which is overly reliant on style of church developed for other expensive buildings which are unfit denominations in other nations, most for twenty-first century mission and especially the United States. For that to be ministry. resisted, we need to show that the older “Configure the deanery around Anglican model particular to England still viable missional units fit for future has life in it. But for that, when we ask for purpose, each of which reflects a Bread we need to be given more than clear mixed economy of handicraft. O church.” As you can see, they always planned to close Marcus Walker is Rector of St these churches for Bartholomew the Great in London

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P O R T R A I T B Y VA N E S S A D E L L

The road to Wigan’s tears

Hamas knew its unprecedented attack would provoke ferocious retaliation and hopes the violence spreads

Israel at war: but where will it end? Peter Caddick-Adams

2008 financial crisis or the 2020-21 Covid pandemic. Resultant recessions and reductions in spending power of Western currencies affected the lives of hundreds of millions. Saudi Arabia’s stance elevated it from a poor Arab backwater to leading regional state and global economic player. Reflecting the increased cost of oil, wealth poured into the Gulf states, including Iraq, Qatar, and Kuwait. Faisal spent tens of billions propagating Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi/Salafist ideology, a militant development of Sunni Islam, across the Muslim world. The consequences of this financial and religious boom still resonate. When Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini threw the pro-Western Shah Reza Pahlavi out of Iran in 1979, implanting his equally radical Shi’ite interpretation of Islam, he was also asserting his nation’s presence as a regional power, a rival to Saudi Arabia.

MA HM UD H AM S/A FP V I A GE TTY IM AGES

t cannot be considered a coincidence that Hamas’s attacks on Israel began on 7 October, the fiftieth anniversary of the Yom Kippur War, fought over 6-25 October 1973 when Egyptian and Syrian forces, assisted by the wider Arab diaspora, launched a coordinated attack with complete surprise, starting on Yom Kippur, the “Day of Atonement”. This sacred day is when those of Jewish faith do not work or go to school, and instead reflect on the past year and ask forgiveness of sins. It’s a time when many Israeli Defence Force (IDF) service personnel are off duty and with their families. Although this year’s Yom Kippur was celebrated in late September, it was the anniversary of the 1973 war that was more important to Israel’s foes, for it was a moment when the state was very nearly extinguished. Back then, Egyptian forces attacked across the Suez Canal and simultaneously Syrian troops, later joined by other Arab brigades, assaulted Israeli positions on the Golan Heights. By the first afternoon, Israel’s fixed defences, the Bar Lev Line, had been penetrated and its armoured counter-attacks destroyed in the first major outing of anti-tank guided missiles supplied by Russia. The world reeled at the sight of blazing Israeli armour littering the northern and southern battlefields. While US President Richard Nixon and Israel’s Golda Meir considered a nuclear response, the IDF fought back and eventually prevailed through superior staff work and well-rehearsed drills, at a cost of 2,656 killed and thousands wounded. Their efforts were underwritten by Operation Nickel Grass, a strategic airlift comprising 22,000 tons of US aircraft, armour, ammunition and other military supplies, which saved Israel from extinction.

The Arab members of OPEC, led by King Faisal of Saudi Arabia, a pious Muslim, were determined to protect the sacred sites of Islam in Jerusalem and punish America for its support of Israel, and imposed an embargo on oil exports. The impact was immediate and staggering. World crude oil prices had quadrupled by December 1973, and the GDP of many nations slumped more dramatically than in the aftermath of the ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

At the root of every Middle Eastern conflict, and in Gaza today, are the differing views of these two nations, armed to the teeth, espousing competitive concepts of Islam. When Western countries espouse “anti-Muslim” legislation or causes, At a refugee they overlook these important discamp I met tinctions, in particular that Sunni residents who Islam ranges from the conciliatory had been born and peaceable to the suicidal marthere and hated tyr. In the middle, as the centre of worldwide Judaism, is Israel, creatthe West. It ing a whole series of complex, triwas a breeding partite challenges. ground for ugly Arab setbacks in 1973, which cost them 18,000 dead, and the extremism earlier Six-Day War of 1967 confined the occupants of the former British Mandate of Palestine to two separate areas: the West Bank of the River Jordan and the Gaza Strip. Other Palestinian refugees who lost their homes and livelihoods in 1967 fled to refugee camps in Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria. The descendants of these predominantly Muslim, displaced people now number 4.7 million, and act as a vociferous anti-Israel lobby in the region and around the world. They see Israel as occupying their homeland. When I last visited Jordan with a UN team, I met several residents in one refugee camp who had been born there. Then in

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of the Palestine Liberation Organisation, controlled by Yasser Arafat until his death in 2004, and today by Mahmoud Abbas. Thus, Hamas in the West Bank has barely heeded calls from their Gaza Strip brethren to rise up. Another militant Shi’ite organisation, Hezbollah, emerged in Lebanon in 1982, remains sympathetic to Iran and Syria, and under Hassan Nasrallah has become a dominant force in Lebanese politics. In 2006, Hezbollah managed to fight the IDF to a standstill, emerging as heroes throughout the Arab world. However, they are also competitors of Hamas and were not beforehand inducted into the secrecy of the 7 October attack, which explains the very limited attacks against Israel from the north. Every American president since Nixon has courted the Saudis to ensure the smooth flow of oil. But today Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS), partly to keep his nation relevant and a dominant world player, is keeping oil production down to elevate prices. His weaponisation of this natural resource helps Russia’s war in Ukraine by maximising Moscow’s foreign currency earnings. Although Saudi is the world’s leading Sunni nation (Indonesia is the largest), MBS has managed to decouple his country’s religious domination of its trade and diplomatic policies, reflected in closer Israeli-Saudi relations. Riyadh’s gradual trade normalisation with Israel, culminating in the first-ever visit of a minister to Saudi Arabia last month, has alarmed Tehran. Although Iran’s spiritual leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has significantly and specifically denied direct involvement in the Hamas attack, it would surely be in his interest to disrupt this rapprochement.

erhaps in frustration, Hamas regularly fires scores of home-made rockets at Israel, but on the morning of 7 October it was different. The skies were full of thousands of missiles, accumulated in great secrecy over many months. We know some originated in Iran, because of occasional shipments intercepted, but the majority were home-made, one of many warlike cottage industries within the strip. During my visit, I was shown home-made pistols and submachine guns by a policeman. The area is surrounded by a network of wire fences, concrete walls and forts equipped with cameras, ground-motion sensors and regular army patrols to keep the inhabitants in. These were breached in over 20 places during the 7 October attack using heavy industrial plant, and other entries made from the sea and by paraglider, again evidence of long-term planning. In another deviation from past behaviour, Hamas media units filmed these incursions and rapidly distributed their professionally edited clips on social media. Other innovations included the use of drones to drop missiles onto Israeli troops, vehicles and equipment. I do not assess this is the result of Iranian training. Rather, it comes from watching 18 months’ worth of the Ukraine-Russia war, and cherry-picking the best tactics, most suited to their uprising. Just as in the Arab Spring of 201012, digital platforms have proved the best medium to transfer technical knowledge as well as political and religious fanaticism. Hamas also has a presence in the West Bank, which includes the Old City of Jerusalem, home to the three major Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, but where power is exercised by Fatah. This rival organisation is the largest element

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The surprise attack by Hamas was the deadliest Arab assault on Israel in decades but was no repeat of 1973. Syria has taken no part. Damascus is close to Moscow, which would have no wish to endanger the lives of the 1.3 million settlers in Israel who emigrated from the Soviet Union and Russian Federation, and comprise 15 per cent of the Israeli population. They have full citizenship and are involved in Israel’s society at every level. Talk of Moscow’s hand in the Hamas attack makes no sense; in any wider conflict Russia would likely remain neutral.

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JAL A A MA R EY/A FP V IA GET TY I MAG ES

their twenties, they had known no other life, and their attitude to Israel and by extension to the West, was unprintable. Understandably, I could see it was a breeding ground for ugly extremism. Israelis assert the return of this population would endanger and possibly destroy the Jewish state. The area around the city of Gaza was granted limited self-governance in 1993, through the Oslo Accords, and since 2007 has been under control of Hamas, an Islamic political and military organisation, sworn to Israel’s destruction and replacement with an Islamic state. The Gaza Strip has a population of 2.3 million, living in five townships but, in reality, a continuous conurbation six miles wide and 25 miles from north to south. Within its 150 square miles there are hospitals, schools, universities, and UN-administered refugee camps. When I visited years ago, it took an hour to drive from north to south, though bomb damage sustained over the years has doubled or trebled this. Water, gas and electricity is mostly imported, controlled by Israel, and frequently turned off, as now, in punishment. My guide, Fatima, explained that with so many hemmed in to such a tiny urban area, the population was permanently angry and bitter, which explained a steady supply of young recruits to Hamas.

lease five US citizens, may have emboldened Tehran to goad Hamas into their attack. Frozen Iranian assets were transferred to an account in Qatar, but President Biden reports none of this money has been touched. There appears no connection between the two events, although Donald Trump asserts there is one. “I imposed a strict travel ban to keep radical Islamic terrorists the hell out of our country … Now they’re pouring back in … Joe Biden gave billions and billions of dollars to the world’s top sponsor of terror, tossing Israel to the bloodthirsty terrorists and jihadists … the atrocities we are witnessing in Israel would never have happened if I was still President,” he claimed, without offering evidence as to how or why. Former Vice President Mike Pence used the moment to decry America’s “retreat from the world stage … voices of appeasement like Donald Trump, Vivek Ramaswamy and Ron DeSantis run contrary to the tradition in our party that America is the leader of the free world”. The impending Israeli reduction of parts of Gaza, named Operation Iron Sword, is an understandable reaction to the shocking, animalistic violence in the first wave of attacks, such as the massacre of 250 partygoers by vehicle-borne gunmen at the Supernova music festival at Kibbutz Re’im, three miles from the Gaza border, and the beheading and burning of families including children at Kfar Aza, another kibbutz.

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From 2008 Israel and Russia allowed visa-free travel between their countries. Russia remains Israel’s main supplier of oil. Egypt and Israel have been at peace for more than 40 years. Egypt has “no skin” in the Hamas attack. It is the annual reThe real fear is cipient of several hundred million dollars of US aid. This of the violence explains why the only external spreading. action in support appears to Containment have been that of a policeman is everything. who killed two Israeli tourists and a local guide in Alexandria. Thus far, it The operational security seems to have practised by Hamas, which bybeen achieved passed even Fatah and Hezbollah, indicates a professionalism not before encountered. It also marks an Israeli intelligence failure. Israel possesses the most extensive intelligence services in the Middle East, with informants and agents inside Palestinian militant groups, as well as in Lebanon, Syria and elsewhere. However, this also underlines a wider failure in the inability of others such as America’s CIA, Britain’s SIS, Russia’s SVR or Egypt’s GIS to have picked up anything untoward.

It is hard to divine the precise reason and timing of such a major action. Hamas must have known that to attack the wasp’s nest would be to invite terrible retribution. The action has similarities to the Tet Offensive of January 1968, when Viet Cong forces launched a series of sneak attacks against military and civilian command centres in South Vietnam on the Lunar New Year festival. It echoes the similar Yom Kippur surprise of 1973, also attacking on a Jewish holiday, this time Simchat Torah, a day associated with dancing, feast-making and the distribution of sweets. In other words, another time when the IDF might be with their families, and young people partying in the desert. The real fear is of the violence spreading. Containment is everything. At the time of writing, this seems to have been achieved. The Hamas commander, Mohammed Deif, has called on Palestinians and other Arabs to join his mission “to sweep away the Israeli occupation” but so far his crusade has yielded little. The Fatah-Hamas split explains why there was no participation from Fatah. Hezbollah are probably furious at being excluded from the planning. The missile attacks have reduced in intensity and accuracy now. Long may that continue. The scene has shifted to a ring of Israeli steel around Palestinian Gaza. A wise military head might have paused for an alternative solution before throwing endless artillery and airstrikes against the buildings of the Strip, perhaps later infantry and armour too. But I fear the heart has won. Large chunks of Gaza are being reduced to brick dust as I write. Thus, the final scene is no longer the final scene, for violence will beget violence and the whole cycle will begin again. O

US politicians are desperate to show their proIsraeli credentials. This may well help President Zelenskyy in muting those American voices demanding an end to arms and aid for Ukraine. If Israel is to be the beneficiary of such assistance, and the movement of the USS Gerald R. Ford carrier battle group to the Eastern Mediterranean, then it will be more difficult to argue against continued US support for Ukraine. The likely impact on the American presidential election, scheduled for 5 November 2024, a little over a year distant cannot yet be gauged. Republicans claim a recent $6 billion transfer to Iran, part of a complex deal announced by the Biden administration to reƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

Peter Caddick-Adams is a defence analyist and historian

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ROD DREHER ARGUES THE WEST’S ORBÁN HYSTERIA IS ABSURD AND THAT HUNGARY IS SAFE, CIVILISED AND DEMOCRATIC

Could this stout, blunt, whip-smart man really be the monster our media make him out to be? True, intelligence is no guarantee of moral status, but I had been led to expect Orbán to be a coarse strongman. Instead, he displayed a curious, nimble mind and spoke with the kind of clarity and directness — in a language not his own — that you rarely hear from most Western leaders. I came back to Hungary to do research for a book, and then, in the spring of 2021, on a journalism fellowship at the Danube Institute, a think tank headed by the venerable British journalist John O’Sullivan. I had hesitated to come, still under the spell of the media’s disdain for Orbán, but I knew that anything that a man of John O’Sullivan’s calibre was part of couldn’t be all bad. After the first three weeks in the Hungarian capital, I was hooked. This place is great, I thought: clean, beautiful, and safe, without much police presence at all. I had asked to meet with one of the best of the anti-Orbán opposition, to hear their case. Péter Krekó, an academic, spent an hour with me, complaining about state corruption, and the Orbán government’s policies about same-sex marriage (not allowed, though civil partnerships are) and gay adoption (forbidden). “But at the end of the day,” Professor Krekó told me (I paraphrase), “I can stand in my classroom and say anything I like about the government, and nobody will touch me.” That’s interesting, I responded. In the United States, you can stand in the classroom and denounce the government, and nobody will bat an eye. But if you say something that offends a sacred minority in most universities you can be fighting for your job, and your career, in the blink of an eye. “So who is more free?” I put it to him. “A professor like you in Orbán’s Hungary, or your counterpart in an American university?” He had clearly never thought about it. In my recollection, the professor was honestly unaware of how terrible American universities had become on free speech and open inquiry. This is not a problem in Hungary.

Orbán:

guardian of liberal freedoms t never fails. On a recent sojourn into Western

Europe from my Budapest hideout, I ran into old friends I hadn’t seen since I moved to Hungary last fall. They were being a bit coy, and I knew exactly why. Eventually the penny dropped: “Isn’t the place, you know, fashy?” To be fair, they didn’t drop the actual f-bomb, but that’s what they meant. It’s what they always mean. They talk to me about my love affair with Viktor Orbán’s Hungary in the way Truman Capote’s friends must have kibitzed with him when he fell in love with an air conditioner repairman. One of my concerned Dutch friends declaimed that gay people get beaten up on the streets of Budapest. “Absolutely untrue!” I shot back. Later in the conversation, he expressed concern that Muslim migrants were attacking gays on the streets of Amsterdam. This was my moment. “You know where that doesn’t happen? Budapest,” I said. “You know what’s one of the safest big cities in Europe for Jews? Budapest. Why do you suppose that is?” The answer, of course, is that Budapest has very few Muslim migrants, and that’s by government policy. It gives Western Europeans the hives when you point that out. And this, I think, is a key to why they create this imaginary stock villain, Viktor Orbán.

But, a-ha! you say. what about Orbán’s kicking the George Soros-funded Central European University out in 2018? Yes, this happened, and on its face, it’s a black mark on Hungary. Yet when you speak to Hungarians who agree with the government’s actions, you’ll find the story is a lot more complicated. In their telling, CEU had become a beachhead for launching the kind of radicalism that has caused so much trouble in Western countries. William Ritchie, an Englishman who lives in Budapest, and who studied there in 2017, tells me that CEU was a hotbed of wokeness. He sat through a seminar in which Margaret Thatcher was denounced as a homophobe, a “fact” that students were taught discredited her entire legacy. He left the school shortly thereafter. Orbán understands the realpolitik of culture in ways that his British and American conservative counterparts do not. He gets that NGOs and academics use culture as a way of waging politics and was not going to sit back and let the CEU — drawing on the progressive billionaire Soros’s vast fortune — to radicalise Central Europe’s next generation of leaders and influencers.

I arrived in Hungary for the first time in 2018, speaking by invitation at a government-sponsored conference on religious liberty. At the end of the event, the organisers surprised us by saying that the prime minister would like to meet us. We motored in a jitney to the government office in an old Carmelite monastery overlooking the Danube on the Buda side, and were led into a meeting room. I thought we would meet Viktor Orbán, shake his hand, take a photo, and then be on our way. Instead, Orbán sat with us for a solid hour and a half, taking questions, and answering them intelligently, in good English — this, without a press aide nearby to protect him. It was an astonishing performance. ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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Besides, I can’t forget the words of a US diplomat a few years back who had spent much of his career in post-communist Europe: that corruption is endemic to all the countries of this region, and knows no party. That doesn’t make it right, of course, but it is profoundly woven into the ways of politics in the Central European countries — and prior to the Russia-Ukraine war, at least, it dwarfed other challenges. Romania, Bulgaria, Slovakia and other former Communist states all struggle with serious corruption. But only Hungary and Poland get called out in a serious way by Brussels. Why is that? Is it because those countries are governed by social conservative parties who reject European dogma on LGBT? No doubt that has a lot to do with it, given the grand mal hissy fit European bigwigs threw in 2021, when the Hungarian parliament passed a law banning LGBT media material aimed at minors. “Leave the Union!” Dutch prime minister Mark Rutte spat at the Hungarian leader, who maintained that the law was designed to protect children and parents. Around the US, more than a few schools have been found showing arguably pornographic LGBT-themed material to primary school students, but Hungary’s decision to keep that kind of thing away from its children — outrageous!

I HAD BEEN LED TO EXPECT ORBÁN TO BE A COARSE STRONGMAN. BUT HE DISPLAYED A CURIOUS, NIMBLE MIND AND SPOKE WITH A CLARITY YOU RARELY HEAR FROM WESTERN LEADERS

Anti-Orbán hysteria in western Europe is so absurd (the latest James Bond novel even takes a swipe at him) that I invite as many people as I can to come to Budapest — a city whose municipal government, like most big cities in Hungary, is governed by the Left — and see for themselves. My friend Peter Boghossian, the left-wing, atheist anti-woke crusader, came with trepidation, but trusted my recommendation — and fell in love with the place. He said he could have far more open and productive discussions about ideas with the conservative students at the Mathias Corvinus Collegium, where he was a visiting fellow, than in his left-wing college back in Oregon. He left Hungary still a leftist and an atheist, but with a new respect for the fact that in this supposedly far-right hellhole, the old liberal freedoms thrive in ways they no longer do in much of the West. “I came because I saw and felt the fabric of society deteriorating in the US and UK,” says Mark Bollobas, who grew up in Britain as the son of a Cambridge academic couple who had fled Hungarian communism. He rolls his eyes at the thought of Westerners who imagine a right-wing demagogue: the “Viktator,” as Orbán’s enemies call him. Elections remain free and fair; as hard as it may be for many to understand, it’s still democracy if the people vote in ways that do not reflect the interests of Washington and Brussels. And despite what you’ve read in the Guardian and the Washington Post, the opposition media in Hungary is robust and powerful, tearing into Orbán’s government every day. “It’s sometimes difficult to convince my English friends how good life is here,” muses Bollobas. “Non-stop negative PR works, and that is all that they have been told. But it’s safer here, more civilised, there’s barely any crime — and this without the constant police presence of an American town. And it’s a wonderful

TH IER RY MO NA S SE/GET TY IM AG ES

It’s like this: in February of this year, Samantha Power, the director of the US Agency for International Development, arrived in Budapest to donate $20 million to various NGOs to “sustain democracy across Central Europe”. To many Budapesters this seemed like tendentious meddling to undermine a pesky NATO ally. It is beyond absurd that gullible Westerners fall for the “Orbán is an anti-Semite” smear. For one thing, his government supports Hungarian-Jewish institutions generously, and is a close ally of Israel.

Where the critics may have a point is in calling his government corrupt — and in my experience, many Fidesz voters complain about it. Yet they keep voting for Orbán — he’s been elected four times in a row — in part because the opposition parties are so hopelessly bad. During the 2022 campaign, I read American and British puff pieces on Péter Márki-Zay, leader of the left-wing coalition trying to oust Orbán. What none of these reports said was that Márki-Zay was hapless on the campaign trail. Once he bragged in a public statement that the opposition coalition was truly diverse, because it included everyone from communists to fascists. Unsurprisingly, this did not reassure voters. ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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place to raise a family.” As Bollobas sees it, the biggest problem other Europeans have with Orbán is that he speaks “unpleasant truths” and doesn’t care what anybody else says. While immigration rolls over other European countries, and leaders like Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak, Brexit be damned, do nothing to stop it, Viktor Orbán says flat-out that it’s a bad thing, and protects Hungary’s borders.

inclined citizens, from asking why they can’t have what Orbán has delivered over the last 13 years: a country that is free, stable, and peaceful with a sophisticated, cosmopolitan capital; a country that is not overrun by mass migration and the malignancy of wokeness. A French citizen who relocated to Budapest said that when she’s here, it feels like the Europe in which she grew up. “I ask my friends: look around at how you are, where you are — is your life better now than it was ten years ago?” says Mark Bollobas. “Universally, the answer is no, life is less pleasant. Ask the same question in Hungary, and universally the answer will be yes, on all counts.” Viktor Orbán is not without fault, God knows. Hungary is a normal country with normal problems, not Shangri-La doused with sour cream and paprika. Still, the longer I live here, the more I understand why globalists, liberals, and others need a villain like Viktor Orbán. It’s the same reason Napoleon needed Snowball in Animal Farm: to distract from their own failures of governance and ideology, and to keep the population from asking too many questions. O

As Christianity and Christian values are widely mocked among the bien-pensants in Europe and Britain, Orbán asserts without apology that Hungary was founded on Christian values, and is going to keep them. If other European countries want to bury God and queer their children, that’s their business — but Hungary is not going to go that way. Orbán made his political reputation as an anti-communist student leader in the 1980s. He sees clearly that wokeness, which is destroying liberal values and institutions in the West, is a totalitarian ideology to be resisted with more than words (which is why, for example, his government refused to fund and recognise gender studies programmes at universities). The bottom line is that Europeans have to invent a cartoon Orbán to keep their populations, especially conservative-

Rod Dreher is a fellow of the Danube Institute in Budapest, and a columnist for The European Conservative

D.J. TAYLOR’S ARTY TYPES

Delilah Sampson Conceptual Artist for the Creative Arts advertises extensively. The London Review of Books, the Literary Review and Saga magazine all play host to its half- page solicitations addressed to “creatively- minded people” who would like to “explore their potential,” with a view to “releasing their inner spirit in an atmosphere calculated to bring out the buried you”. Not much survives of the castle, but enough remains to supply a picturesque backdrop for photographs of the Brammerton team. There are half-a-dozen of these creative behemoths. But somehow the attractions of “leading poet” Archie Sillitoe (who did indeed once publish a poem in the Listener back in 1989), “highly regarded ceramicist” Jerry Cascob (a bearded potter) and a dancing instructor whose last engagement was in panto sometime in the early 1990s pale when set against “conceptual artist” Delilah Sampson, whose portrait dominates the spread and whose classes in “freeform sculpture” and “found materials” are wildly over-subscribed.

What is it about Delilah that causes Brammerton’s guests — mostly avid retirees, but with a smattering of wide-eyed younger

folk — to flock to her sessions and jostle each other in the canteen queue for the privilege of sitting next to her at lunch? Part of it, naturally, is her appearance. She is a tall, statuesque woman of indeterminate age, quite often dressed in a kaftan, sandal-shod and bangle-festooned. Far more, though, has to do with the legend that hangs over her henna-haired head. There is, for example, the picture, snipped from a Sunday colour supplement and Sellotaped to the Brammerton common room noticeboard of her alongside Bryan Ferry (of this Delilah will say only that “we were rather chums”.) Then there is the liner note that somebody found on an old David Bowie album “with huge thanks to crazy Delilah S”. There are also the letters that periodically arrive at Brammerton addressed to “The Hon. Delilah Sampson”, not to mention the mystery of whether she is married to the centre’s saturnine and mostly silent proprietor.

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But above all, there is her manner. If her classes tend to consist of instruction in making objects out of chicken wire or collages from poster paints and hedgerow debris, then no one could doubt the intoxicating scent that lingers over the many pronouncements about her professional calling. “Artists,” she is fond of telling her audience, “are born, not made. You either have it or you haven’t. Believe me, I’ve paid my dues and I know.”

Deeply impressed by this advice, several of her students have given up more conventional jobs to pursue their artistic dreams, nearly always with disastrous results. Not everything in the Brammerton garden, alas, is flourishing. At £1,500 a week, it is undeniably expensive, the food is of variable quality and there are occasional complaints from female guests about hot-handed Jerry. Neutral observers can never decide whether Delilah is a spectacular old fraud or a beguiling piece of hippy flotsam from a vanished age. On the other hand, bookings for 2024 are going through the roof. O

ILLUSTR ATI ON B Y B EN K IR CHN ER /HEA RT

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The Brammerton Castle Centre

Italo Calvino’s imagination spanned the cosmos but his concerns were very human, writes John Self

he fictional worlds created by the Italian polymath Italo Calvino, who was born 100 years ago this month, attract adjectives not usually applied to serious literature. Puckish. Playful. Charming. But that is what you get with this author whose extraordinary intelligence never undermined his desire to entertain — to charm and disarm — the reader. Calvino was a writer whom opposites attracted. He was always serious and frequently funny. His mode was specifically Italian and thoroughly international. He was first a realist, then an experimenter. And his interest in his fiction was in looking both inward and outward: as far outward as the furthest reaches of the known universe. But he began at home, and the best way to appreciate Calvino’s peculiar genius is to trace the development of his writing, which can be divided into two broad phases. From his early work in the 1940s to 1963, he wrote realistic, socially engaged stories, usually set in the Italian countryside where he grew up. (His parents moved to Italy from his birthplace of Cuba when he was one year old.)

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split in two by cannon shot and whose two halves continue to live independently, was inspired by the divisions of the Cold War. The Baron in the Trees, about a boy who climbs a tree and lives there for the rest of his days, represented Calvino’s own view — head in the trees, if not the clouds — that writers should remain above politics. He returned to earth only for his last realist work, Marcovaldo (1963), a collection of stories representing a season in the city over a period of five years — and, incidentally, a good starting place for the Calvino beginner. The title character is a labourer who strives for fine things but rarely with success: the first story about foraging for mushrooms in the streets is a masterpiece of desire, resentment, achievement and regret, all in four pages.

GI AN N I GIA N SA NT I/G AM M A- RA PH O V IA GETTY I MAG ES

His first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nest (1947) remains in print because it is by Calvino rather than for any intrinsic qualities. The author was embarrassed by its success and regretted the failure of the book — about an adolescent boy joining the partisan movement during the Second World War — to transmute the base metal of his own experiences into literary gold. At the same time — through the 1940s and 50s — Calvino was turning out short stories at such a rate that they fill a handful of collections in English, most notably Difficult Loves, Last Comes the Raven and Adam, One Afternoon. These stories are seductive enough, but their status is marked by the fact that they weren’t translated into English until after the major works — mostly, indeed, until after Calvino’s death, when the rush for scraps from the table that has characterised his literary estate to this day first began. (The most recent new collection of his early stories was published in 2023.) No, the first signs of Calvino’s true calling came in the trio of novellas he published in the 1950s: The Nonexistent Knight, The Cloven Viscount, and his first masterpiece The Baron in the Trees. These tempered their realist style with allegorical purposes and fantastical elements: The Cloven Viscount, about a man

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But the break came with Calvino’s next books, the two collections of what he called Cosmicomics, published in the late 1960s. Always interested in science — his parents were agronomists — the writer who never repeated himself decided not only to look up from the city streets, but to extend his gaze to outer space. It’s a measure of not only Calvino’s originality but his ability to render that originality in an aesthetically pleasing form, over and over again, that his most celebrated books are also his most experimental; and the Cosmicomics stories reflected Calvino’s belief that realistic fiction was a busted flush. Narrated by a seemingly immortal being with the unpro-

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celebrated 2004 novel Cloud Atlas: Mitchell sought to go one better than Calvino by completing his series of stories-within-stories, where Calvino left each opening chapter hanging. Mitchell was wrong: completing things kills them. It’s not knowing that keeps us going.) All Calvino’s greatest fiction was elegantly translated into English by William Weaver, who did not always have a smooth experience. “I had problems with Calvino,” he said, “because he thought he knew English.” Calvino would “fall in love” with English words, not knowing what they really meant, such as “feedback” which he kept trying to add to the English translation of the last book published in his lifetime, Mr Palomar. (Weaver kept taking it out, and won the battle, when Calvino died before it was complete.)

nounceable name of Qwfwq, each story begins with a scientific theory, verified or apocryphal, and spins a story out of it. “The Distance of the Moon” takes as a springboard George H. Darwin’s belief that the moon was once close to earth: in Calvino’s rendering, people can prop a ladder against the moon and climb onto its surface, only for lovers to be parted when she begins to drift away. Or take “All at One Point”, which returns to the origins of the universe before the Big Bang, when Qwfwq and his family find living conditions rather crowded. There is a classic Calvino-esque comic tinge to it all: Qwfwq may not be human but he is very human-like, and mankind is the only animal that laughs.

The Cosmicomics stories, drawing on influences as diverse as “the Popeye comics, Samuel Beckett, Giordano Bruno [and] Lewis Carroll”, freed Calvino’s imagination, and all the fiction he wrote afterwards was evidence of what he called his “need to alternate one type of writing with another, to begin writing again as if I had never written anything before”. Indeed, he wrote as if nobody had ever written anything before, so groundbreaking were the results. The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1969) was a novel comprising a series of stories told using the cards of a tarot deck, and was typically ingenious. But it was his next book, Invisible Cities (1972), that ensured his place in the literary firmament. It consisted of 55 descriptions of imaginary cities, as reported to Kubla Khan by Marco Polo. There’s Thekla, a city always under construction; Zenobia, a city on high pilings where nobody ever descends to the ground; Sophronia, where half the city is regularly folded up and put away; and so on. This is not just a series of pretty pictures in words, but a manifesto for Calvino’s vision of the world. The stories shift from fantastical at the beginning to cautionary at the end. The mutually exclusive cities resemble Italy’s history of distinctive city-states. We see the cities as an outsider through Marco Polo’s words, but the descriptions are exclusively internal, of how the citizens live there: each perspective is at once separate from, and dependent on, the other. The duality is classic Calvino. As John Updike put it, “beneath Calvino’s tireless shimmer of fancy, the concern [is] of how men live together”.

Mr Palomar (1983) is a good place to finish. It can be usefully contrasted with Marcovaldo, the last novel Calvino published before his great revolution of the late 1960s. Both books comprise the adventures of an everyman encountering the wider world, but in Mr Palomar the naturalistic style is replaced with something more philosophical. This is a book of attention to everything, structured with three stories per chapter: the first visual and descriptive, the second anthropological and narrative, and the third speculative the book is a and meditative. But even in the scientific apcelebration of proach, there is comedy. In the story reading, both “The Naked Bosom”, our hero makes tongue-inso many attempts not to look at a cheek and sunbathing woman’s breasts that she devoted, with covers up and moves chapters from eventually away. The last story of the twenten imagined ty-seven in the book begins, novels deliciously, “After a series of intellectual misadventures not worth recalling …” And finally Mr Palomar lives up to Calvino’s own definition of a classic in his famous essay “Why Read the Classics?”, of “a book that has never finished saying what it has to say”. It has relevance to our times, and not only in its evergreen philosophical themes of man’s relations to the universe. But how better to render our own times — and how better to conclude a career, following his early death in 1985 at the age of 61, than like this? “In a time and in a country where everyone goes out of his way to announce opinions or hand down judgements, Mr Palomar has made a habit of biting his tongue three times before asserting anything. After the bite, if he is still convinced of what he was going to say, he says it. If not, he keeps his mouth shut. In fact, he spends whole weeks, months in silence.” O

hen came his most famous book, the novel If on a winter’s night a traveller (1979). It opens, irresistibly, “You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.” The book is a celebration of reading, both tongue-in-cheek and devoted, which alternates sections describing “your” experience of reading the book, with opening chapters from ten imagined novels. Here, Calvino was explicitly displaying his interests in both inner space and the wider world, even if his outward gaze on this occasion only extended as far as the bookshelves lining his room. (This book was the inspiration for David Mitchell’s ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

John Self is the fiction editor of The Critic

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RHYS LAVERTY

The Narnia author deserves to be remembered as a seer and a sage

LEWIS THE PROPHET n 22 november 1963 — a Friday — John F. Kennedy, Aldous Huxley, and

number of Christian intellectuals (alongside Jacques Maritain, Simone Weil, W.H. Auden, and T.S. Eliot) who had begun to consider what world the Allied powers would now make for themselves. Lewis saw a future in which the rejection of transcendent values would allow a technologised elite to re-make nature as they saw fit, ultimately overthrowing human nature itself — a process made possible through the ideological capture of education. In The Abolition of Man, Lewis speaks of “the Tao” (pronounced “dao”). He borrows the succinct term from the Chinese, but thinks of it as akin to what Hindus call “the Rta”, what Plato calls “the Good”, and what centuries of Western and Christian thought has called “natural law”. It means both the way things are and the way one therefore ought to feel and act: “It is the doctrine of objective value, the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are.” The Tao, albeit culturally inflected, had laid the foundation of all preceding human society (and thus, education) through the acknowledgement that certain transcendent values — truth, goodness, beauty, justice, piety, and so on — demanded certain responses of both feeling and action.

C.S. Lewis all died within hours of each other. Sixty years on, it is surely Kennedy and Huxley who are most remembered as men who saw the bend of history’s arc: JFK the radical reformer, whose visionary civil rights legislation anticipated the colourblind American future; Huxley the dystopian mystic who foresaw the West’s descent into slavish hedonism in Brave New World. Lewis, by contrast, seemed a relic of eras that were bygone even by the time of his death. Despite being best known as a children’s author and Christian apologist, his day job was as a scholar in medieval and renaissance literature at both Oxford and Cambridge — hardly the best way to keep abreast of the cultural ructions of the inter-war and post-war years. Alongside J.R.R Tolkien, he was still contending, in the 1940s, for the Oxford English undergrad syllabus to stop in 1832. Today, his well-known classic The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe feels dated to many readers, a once national favourite seemingly doomed to irrelevance by its preponderance of well-groomed Caucasian children saying “Well, that’s a rum thing” and being (to quote a Mitchell and Webb sketch on the topic) “a bit … Christian”. It is an assessment that does not do Lewis justice. Alongside the children’s author, Christian apologist and literary scholar, there is a fourth Lewis. This one is entirely absent from any popular image of the man, and even largely ignored by his Christian admirers: that of Lewis the prophet. Consulting his oracles in 2023, one finds that, far from being a sorry throwback, Clive Staples Lewis had a vision so profound in depth and incisive in detail that it outstripped that of Kennedy, Huxley, or indeed any of his contemporaries.

yet lewis detected, even in the midst of the Second World War, an assault upon the Tao within Western life. He generously conceded that this assault was not always intentional, but it was nonetheless real, and its primary battleground was in education. This latter aspect is no great surprise if one has read The Chronicles of Narnia attentively: schools there get a very bad rap. The Pevensie children blame the treacherous Edmund’s faults on his new school; when the children come to rule Narnia, they liberate young satyrs and fauns from compulsory education. Accordingly, the subtitle of Abolition is “Reflections on education with special reference to the teaching of English in the upper forms of schools”, the lectures having been prompted by Lewis’s encounter with an unnamed school English textbook, nicknamed “The Green Book”. Lewis began his first lecture, “Men Without Chests”, by taking issue with The Green Book’s treatment of a famed story in which Coleridge overheard one man call a waterfall “pretty” and another call it “sublime”. Coleridge rejected the first judgement and endorsed the second. In Lewis’s terms, “pretty”

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lewis the prophet emerges most clearly in his 1945 novel That Hideous Strength and his closely related lectures in The Abolition of Man, published in 1943. The former is really a fictional outworking of the ideas of the latter, to the extent that lines from the lectures appear verbatim in the mouths of characters from the novel (and Lewis says as much in the novel’s preface). At the close of the Second World War, Lewis was one of a ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

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departs from the Tao — it is, quite simply, the wrong word to use. The waterfall truly was sublime, and demanded recognition as such. But The Green Book rejected Coleridge’s reading, saying “When the man said This is sublime, he appeared to be making a remark about the waterfall … Actually … he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings.” Lewis here detected both the wolf of a grand metaphysical upheaval, the audacious sheep’s clothing in which it tried to disguise itself, and the educational carnage which would result from its entry into the flock. The Green Book promoted a cloven reality, with a radical divorce between facts and feelings. Whereas many teachers felt that the problem most students have is an overabundance of sentiment (concerned by the very real threat of emotional propaganda), Lewis found the opposite to be true. The issue was not an excess of emotion, but a lack of properly trained emotion: “For every one pupil who needs to be guarded from a weak excess of sensibility there are three who need to be awakened from the slumber of cold vulgarity. The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts … The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting and hateful.”

The rejection of this traditional view, Lewis argued, left education with two alternatives: to debunk all sentiment, or to condition it in pupils anyway by means of cynical propaganda because it yields certain pragmatic benefits. The anonymous authors of The Green Book opted for the former, and such a debunking of sentiment outright has characterised most education since Lewis’s day. Latterly, we have shifted into Lewis’s second alternative, but in either course, Lewis foresaw the result to be similarly disastrous.

“the conquest of death: or the conquest of organic life, if you prefer. They are the same thing. It is to bring out of that cocoon of organic life which sheltered the babyhood of mind the New Man, the man who will not die, the artificial man, free from Nature. Nature is the ladder we have climbed up by, now we kick her away.”

The aim is human beings who can live “with less and less body”. Devoid of sentiment, n.i.c.e. sets about various abhorrent schemes, principally the reanimation of a decapitated human head — the supposed forerunner of a future new humanity. Yet in doing so, both n.i.c.e. and its experimental subjects cease to be human in any real sense: thus, the abolition of man. Eventually, the institute is revealed to be the work of actual demons. The New Man is just the Old Enemy.

in classical and medieval thought, man was divided into the head (reason), the chest (sentiment), and the belly (appetite). Reason is meant to rule appetite through stable sentiments — the emotions are “the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man”. To deny the

with n.i.c.e., Lewis anticipated our contemporary technocracy. “Progress” is our unquestionable sacred cow, and its faithful handmaiden is technology. Whether we are tearing up areas of ancient natural beauty in order to build infrastructure supposedly intended to help protect the environment, prescribing new cross-sex hormones and surgery to enable greater self-realisation, or developing artificial wombs which we unconvincingly insist will only ever be used for the care of premature infants, there is now no technological innovation that we will deny ourselves today if it supposedly contributes to the nebulous “future good of humanity”. It is only Green Book education which makes n.i.c.e. possible. If truth, goodness, beauty, and so on are merely relative then there is nothing to rein in man’s “conquest of nature”. His scruples are mere hang-ups to be educated out. He will be driven by pure reason or pure appetite, with no sentiment to regulate

Heath Robinson Crusoe

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CA RTO O N B Y SHUA N M ADR I D; JO H N C HI LLINGWORTH /PICT U R E PO ST/ H ULTON A RC HI VE / G E TTY IM AG E S

existence of transcendent values which demand certain emotional responses, and to educate without or against them, would create “men without chests” — men unable to discern what truly merits love or hatred, directed only by ravenous appetite and calculating reason and unable to stop themselves indulging either. Men (and one woman) without chests dominate That Hideous Strength — living deserts in need of irrigation, with names like Frost, Wither, Stone, Hardcastle. The novel’s plot and themes are hard to summarise. It is the third in Lewis’s sci-fi “Cosmic Trilogy” (“the Ransom Trilogy”, to its devotees), following Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, but can be read on its own. It is set in a world in which Christian theology and the Arthurian legends are true, yet extraterrestrial life also exists, and each planet retains its ancient and medieval character and influence — masculine and warlike Mars, feminine and romantic Venus, etc — due to being governed by angelic beings who possess those qualities. In the small university town of Edgestow, the nefarious n.i.c.e. (National Institute of Coordinated Experiments) sets up shop. n.i.c.e.’s exact nature is often unclear, but it is committed to “man’s conquest over nature” — a quest which must ultimately terminate in the conquest of human nature itself. As Filostrato, one of their scientists, puts it, this means:

captor’s expectations, Mark revolts inwardly with a growing sense of “the Straight” or “the Normal” — that is, the Tao. Then, he is moved to “the Objective Room”, containing a large crucifix, “ghastly and realistic”, and instructed to stamp on and insult it. Mark is no Christian, but refuses — yet not due to any latent piety or even due to his growing sense of the Normal, but because of his sense of something beyond even that.

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mark studdock, in the end, escapes his Green Book education. We have not been so lucky. Any assumption of transcendent natural law, “the Normal”, the Tao, let alone something beyond it, has been expunged from our schooling, especially at the university level. Those “specifically human reactions” of sublimity and wonder, of sensing an inherent order in things are reduced to chemical reactions in our brains; nothing to do with the order of the universe itself. This is true whether we are subject to a hard-edged education in scientific reductionism, or brainwashed in emotive ideas about “social justice” and “equity”. The New Atheists dismissed natural law and Christian devotion as base superstition; the Woke Left problematise them as colonial and patriarchal oppression. But in the end, both frogmarch you into the Objective Room. A final key point to note is Lewis’s visionary clarity about what “man’s conquest over nature” would mean in practice: “what we call Man’s power over Nature turns out to be a power exercised by some men over other men with Nature as its instrument”. By this, Lewis did not mean (necessarily) rounding up the masses and shoving them into Matrix-pods. Rather, he meant that those few men in our time who are able to overthrow human nature by tinkering with our biology and educating the Tao out of us will exert disproportionate influence over future generations.The forward march of “progress” is not something asked for by most people (even though they may happily acquiesce to it), but something foisted upon them by a small elite. Lewis skewers these elites throughout That Hideous Strength with every character from n.i.c.e.’s various wings — scientific, sociological, policing — insisting that they are the true “inner ring” around which the work really revolves. Once more, Lewis anticipated the internal politics of any number of modern institutions convinced they are the key to humanity’s future. This autumn’s sixtieth anniversary of Lewis’s death presents an opportunity to give him fresh consideration in making sense of our technocratic age. Far from being some outdated anachronism, it is precisely his grounding in an older world which makes him a fit guide for our contemporary ills. The time has come for Lewis the Prophet to emerge from the shadows. O

It is precisely his grounding in an older world which makes him a fit guide for our contemporary ills their respective metrics of efficiency or pleasure.

perhaps the most unsettling portion of That Hideous Strength is Lewis’s portrayal of what a Green Book education truly involves. The novel’s male protagonist, Mark Studdock, is a young sociology lecturer, enticed by entering n.i.c.e’s “inner ring”, despite his growing disgust at its mission and methods. The product of a Tao-less education himself, Mark possesses no rationale for objecting to the unquestionable pursuit of “progress”. Eventually, he is given “a systematic training in objectivity … [a] process whereby all specifically human reactions [are] killed in a man”. He is first placed in a cell designed to unseat all natural senses of what is true, good, or beautiful — its proportions are off, its lines askew; it is decorated with obscene or frustrating artwork, and he is made to perform various pointless exercises there. Everything about it is “crooked”. Yet, contrary to his ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

Rhys Laverty is an editor at The Davenant Institute and writes The New Albion Substack. He is currently editing a book of essays on C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy

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The Critic Profile Rory Stewart The cerebral Old Etonian podcaster might be a deep thinker and was possibly even a spy but he lacks the substance to be a great political leader n dark times, man naturally seeks a saviour. We need guidance from the murky waters we have wandered into. In dark times for Britain, many of our fellow citizens have sought such guidance from the podcast The Rest is Politics — and, more specifically, from its cerebral host Rory Stewart. Rory Stewart is a very serious man. Reading his memoir about his time in Parliament, Politics on the Edge, you almost find yourself worrying for him. How does he make it through the day? Deciding whether to boil or fry his morning eggs alone must reduce him to agonised introspection — and that is before he starts to think about Afghanistan, populism and whether his co-host Alastair Campbell is going to tweet something heinous and get their podcast summarily cancelled. Of course, one should be serious about one’s responsibilities. That’s a virtue, not a vice. But there is a difference between serious thinking and serious thoughts. Stewart often seems to think that as the most earnest man in the room he is also the most insightful. But sincerity and wisdom are not one and the same.

Mr Stewart thinks with gravity — but gravity only keeps one on the ground. It doesn’t mean that one thinks deeper. A telling example from his book: he remembers a time when, as a local MP, a town was under threat — or felt under threat — from a crowd of rambunctious Gypsies. Stewart wanted to meet their “Gypsy King” but the local cops were dubious. “In Iraq,” Stewart recalls, “British officers had often questioned whether tribal sheikhs were genuine. It usually ended badly.” So, he met the man, who ended up being fairly reasonable, and the tensions settled down. “But Mr Stewart,” I was almost straining to ask, “It might have worked out in this case but hasn’t a policy of grim negotiations with ‘community leaders’ underpinned Britain’s multicultural failures for decades? And shouldn’t we want to avoid adopting the local customs ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

of the Middle East?” Yet Stewart had moved on — satisfied with his surface-level wisdom.

Mr Stewart has been a man with an impressive variety of hats. An Old Etonian with a Chatwinesque impulse towards adventure, he has worked as a diplomat in Montenegro, as a governor in Iraq, as an author (his The Places In Between is excellent), as an NGO boss in Afghanistan, as an academic at Harvard, as an MP, as a minister, and as a podcaster. It has often

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been alleged that he also worked for MI6, though it’s difficult to tell how he could have had the time. His CV must stretch to about the length of War and Peace. Stewart did some solid work in government — as Minister of State for Prisons, for example, where his years of being around MPs must have provided valuable experience in dealing with hopeless and often violent people trapped in crumbling buildings in a decaying system. It was hardly his fault that he was shunted upwards before his aims for the role were really tested. Still, you have to wonder how long he could last in a single job without getting the wayward eyes and jogging knees of a teenager who has been forced to sit through a family meal. For all the time he clearly spends thinking about world events, Stewart has a faintly messianic impulse that leads him to become SuperRory when he thinks disasters lie ahead. Again, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. But it takes keen judgement — and a willingness to question oneself in the aftermath. Stewart aimed himself towards Number 10 with the desperate goal of averting a “no-deal” Brexit — but Boris Johnson ended up getting a deal anyway. He was among the first prominent figures to demand lockdowns in 2020, and was hailed for his foresight, but it is unclear what he now thinks given the subsequent evidence suggesting that lockdowns were less effective and more damaging than modelled for. For a worldly man, he has an air of transcendent innocence. He was annoyed when a Sunday Times interviewer focused on his family background and relationships, for example, but he had talked to her about his family background and relationships. Did he really expect a click-hungry hack to home in on his thoughts about the parliamentary process? Again, when it comes to seriousness there is a difference between being earnest and being astute.

We live in a time when people feel painfully disconnected from politicians and from politics. Stewart has attempted to bridge the gap. He is famous for his #RoryWalks, and during his quixotic attempt to become Mayor of London he even offered to sleep on people’s sofas. If elected, he planned to keep sleeping in people’s flats and houses, which would have been one way to avoid London housing costs. But Stewart is also a staunch opponent of “populism” — not just in the sense of the demagogic style but in the sense of popular, traditional beliefs concerning issues such as immigration and internationalism. How to make sense of that? It’s possible, in theory. One could be a man of the people who is leading them towards mutually favourable ends through unfamiliar means. But Stewart does I L LUSTRATI ON BY ANDR EA V E N TU RA

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If elected, he planned to keep sleeping in people’s flats, which would have been one way to avoid London housing costs not have a vision like that. In fact, he does not have much of a vision for the country at all. Yes, Johnson was a moral hooligan (even if, given the nature of Stewart’s Rest is Politics co-host, this is a bit like someone denouncing cheats in sport while being best pals with Lance Armstrong). True, Parliament is riddled with dysfunction. But you could reform it with the sheer gusto of Mary Poppins cleaning an untidy room and you would still have an institution in search of answers. Good character is not enough. Say what you like about the great man theory of leadership but at least it’s not the nice man theory of leadership. Here, Stewart’s combination of watery Scrutonian tastes and modernistic pragmatism has an air of seriousness that is not matched by substance. One can hardly disagree with his sense that British politics has gone very badly wrong. But that is what makes the vague desire for maturity in leadership so unsatisfying.

Crack open his memoir Politics on the edge and look for the contours of Stewartism. Readers concerned about Britain’s energy crisis will find one mention of renewables and none of nuclear. Those concerned about the state of British multiculturalism will find that “terrorism” gets one mention and “Rotherham” none. “He had little to say about artificial intelligence, robotics, or nanotechnology,” writes Stewart about David Cameron — before going on to say almost nothing about artificial intelligence, robotics or nanotechnology. Granted, it is a memoir and not a manifesto. But it makes Stewart’s attitudinal centrism even less convincing than it might have been. I wish you could be in government, Stewart and Campbell’s fans are always telling them (forming a cabinet presumably featuring Stephen Fry, Gary Lineker and Carol Vorderman). The dream is of political leadership that could combine intelligence with empathy. Toughness and tenderness. Forward thinking and respect for tradition. It is a pleasant dream. It is clearly Stewart’s dream. But is it any more than that? O Ben Sixsmith

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Andrew Gimson recalls the “bohemian efficiency” of the unit that has honed the political skills of generations of Conservative big beasts

SCHOOL FOR FUTURE TORY STARS n the summer of 1983 a vacancy unexpectedly arose in the Conservative Research Department, and Oliver Letwin, who had worked there during the 1983 general election and was now a member of the Downing Street Policy Unit, asked whether I would be interested in filling it. I replied that since I had never had anything to do with the Conservative Party and had spent much of the past 18 months in France, so was more than usually out of touch with British politics, I could not be considered a suitable candidate. Letwin insisted, in his usual optimistic way, that none of this mattered, as they just needed someone who could write. It was true that I had written an unpublished novel, and also that I needed to earn a living. I was 25 years old, and many of my friends seemed to have embarked on serious careers of one kind or another, so I agreed to go for a talk with the Director of the Research Department, Peter Cropper. I felt extremely nervous and so, it appeared, did he. He was a great expert on economic policy, who had worked closely with Sir Geoffrey Howe, both in opposition,as they helped devise what became known as Thatcherism, and in the Treasury as they strove, under enormous pressure, to put it into effect. But Cropper could not, evidently, discuss economics with me, as I knew nothing about the subject, so he kindly asked me instead (for he gathered I had just been in France) whether I thought it would be beneficial to adopt in London the French cabinet system of government, under which a minister is assisted by a ƭơƞƜƫƢƭƢƜ

The next event was a dinner in some restaurant to get to know John Whittingdale for whom, if appointed, I would be working, and Robin Harris, special adviser to Leon Brittan, who had been made Home Secretary after the Conservative election victory a couple of months earlier on 9 June 1983. Whittingdale had been on the bus with Thatcher during the campaign, ready with various reference materials to answer any question about policy which might arise, and was now head of the Political Section in CRD, charged with studying the Opposition parties. He concentrated on the Labour Party and the idea was that I would focus on the SDP and the Liberals. We were having a most enjoyable dinner. Then without warning Harris asked me: “Are you a Conservative?” Letwin at once protested that this was a quite unfair question, but I ignored him, for it was of course a perfectly reasonable inquiry which had already occurred to me, and about which I wondered what I should say. Harris had just stood as the Conservative parliamentary candidate in Tooting, where he had fallen 2,697 votes short of victory, while I was not even a party member. “Well I think I have Tory prejudices,” I replied, and perhaps mentioned Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France. What strikes me 40 years later is how unideological my three companions were, in the sense that they imposed no tests of orthodoxy on a newcomer. The word “Thatcherite” carries connotations of narrowness, rigidity and exclusivity, but the Thatcherites in their great days were none of those things.

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group of political appointees. The cabinet system was unfortunately an aspect of French culture to which I had devoted no attention whatever, and about which I could not converse. I can’t remember what else we found to talk about, but Cropper was such a sympathetic man that somehow we got through the meeting. Letwin’s recommendation must have counted for much, for he was a man of high ability whom I had got to know at Trinity College, Cambridge, where we both read history, I in the year below him. In my last year, I had even been taught for a few weeks by him, so he had read some of my work.

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salary of £6,250 a year, and soon afterwards I reported for duty. XXX The Conservative Research Department (CRD) was founded in 1929 by Neville Chamberlain, and revived after the Second World War by Rab Butler, under whom it recruited such stars of the future as Iain Macleod, Reginald Maudling and Enoch Powell. They worked from a house in Old Queen Street, next to the present offices of the Spectator, with views over St James’s Park. But when the Conservatives returned to office in 1979, CRD was deprived of its building and told to move into the top two floors of Conservative Central Office in Smith Square, a warren of small rooms in a chilly neo-Georgian building. There was a feeling that we had come down in the world, lost our independence, which had lasted for 50 years, and were in danger of being subsumed into the Central Office bureaucracy, for which we harboured an unlimited scorn. The period immediately before one’s own often seems more glamorous, and from 1974–79, when Chris Patten (now Lord Patten) was Director of CRD, such figures as Michael Portillo, Matthew Parris, Michael Dobbs, Nicholas True (now, as Leader of the House of Lords, in the Cabinet) and Bruce Anderson had worked there, all of whom were still around. Anderson seemed to appear at almost every party. He had already begun the monumental researches, more extensive than those of any journalist still living though exceeded by many now dead,

The last hurdle was an interview with Cropper and the two people responsible for the stream of cogent publications produced by the Research Department: the Deputy Director, Tony Greenland, and the Assistant Director, Alistair Cooke (now Lord Lexden). At one point, I said that since it was envisaged that I should study the SDP, I really must at this stage declare an interest. “I suppose you will say David Owen [the SDP leader] is your godfather,” Cooke said. “As a matter of fact he is,” I replied. The meeting dissolved into laughter, I was appointed at the modest

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ŚĂǀĞĂƌĞĂůůŝŌ͍ ^ƚŝůƚnj,ŽŵĞůŝĨƚŝƐĂŶŝĚĞĂůĂŶĚĂĨĨŽƌĚĂďůĞĂůƚĞƌŶĂƚŝǀĞ ƚŽĂƐƚĂŝƌůŝĨƚ͘zŽƵĐĂŶŶŽǁƐĂĨĞůLJƚƌĂǀĞůďĞƚǁĞĞŶƚŚĞ ĨůŽŽƌƐŝŶLJŽƵƌŚŽŵĞǁŚŝůĞŬĞĞƉŝŶŐLJŽƵƌƐƚĂŝƌƐƚŚĞǁĂLJ ƚŚĞLJŚĂǀĞĂůǁĂLJƐďĞĞŶ͘ Neat, discreet, affordable and elegant A Stiltz Homelift can be installed into almost any room in your home.

“The installation guys were very clean and masters of the vacuum cleaner… As for the lift, it’s the best thing since sliced bread.” Mrs. K, April 2023

A Stiltz is uniquely compact with the smallest model taking up just over half a square metre. At the touch of a button a Stiltz Homelift turns your now home into your forever home.

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