Society

In his ruthless demolition of Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s new Churchill biography in last week’s Spectator, the historian Andrew Roberts pours scorn on the ‘insinuation that Churchill had fascist leanings in the 1920s’ as it is not supported by ‘any actual evidence (for there is none)’. Well, however justified his hatchet job of Wheatcroft’s book is in general, Roberts is deeply mistaken about Churchill and fascism. Like so many in the 1920s and well into the 1930s, from all sides of the political divide, Churchill was a fervent admirer of the former revolutionary socialist Benito Mussolini and the fascist movement which he founded in 1919. Fascism was a nationalist rather than internationalist

At the start of this year, Britain looked as if it would be the first major country to vaccinate its way out of lockdown. Kate Bingham and her team had secured Britain a supply of effective jabs delivered at the fastest rate in Europe. This opportunity was then squandered as the government was swayed by advice from Sage advisers, who kept underestimating the vaccines’ effectiveness. Sage produced no fewer than nine scenarios for Covid hospital cases by mid-August, all of which have proved vast overestimates. The government’s reliance on such advice has come at a heavy cost. In America, where most states lifted lockdown restrictions months before Britain, the economy

A couple of Southern Hemisphere summers ago, in January 2019, I was at the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington, New Zealand. It was an unseasonably chilly evening as I sat listening to an emotional solo piano performance by Nick Cave. He sang a rendition of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Avalanche’, a wonderfully gloomy piece of psychology set to music about the death of a father. This rather well-known Cohen track has particular significance for me. It always prompts thoughts of a slightly lesser-known L. Cohen, my own father, who had disappeared without trace 50 years earlier. Whatever became of him? Where did he end up? What might he have been doing at