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The SNP can only blame itself for its budget mess
Higher-than-expected public sector pay deals, social security reform and the SNP’s freeze on council tax have all contributed to putting pressure on the Scottish government’s budget, according to a new report from Scotland’s fiscal watchdog.
In a statement accompanying its latest fiscal report, the Scottish Fiscal Commission (SFC) seems keen to remind Scots that the Scottish government bears most of the responsibility for the budget challenges it now faces. ‘While UK government policies contribute to the pressures on the Scottish budget, much of the pressure comes from the Scottish government’s own decisions,’ says the SFC.
The SFC did not set out to put a spanner in the works of the SNP’s grievance machine but has found itself doing so by default
Though that statement is a simple expression of fact, from a Scottish perspective it reads as unusually bold. This is because the SNP has, with some degree of success, carefully crafted a narrative of powerlessness when it comes to budget difficulties. This is partly to deflect responsibility for tough decision-making to Westminster, but also to create a grievance narrative around fiscal powers and the constitution. The robust wording from the SFC effectively counters some of that populist sabre-rattling.
Public sector pay settlements have been higher in Scotland than in the rest of the UK, while the Holyrood government has been spending a rapidly increasing amount on social security following the devolution of new welfare powers in 2016. Devolved social security now makes up around 10 per cent of the Scottish budget, up from 7.5 per cent in 2017-18. Meanwhile, the Scottish government is committed to a freeze on council tax this year, which has led to claims the SNP is imposing austerity on local authorities while disproportionately benefitting the richest households.
‘The past choices of the Scottish government narrow its room for manoeuvre now and in the future. Previous pay settlements, the approach to social security payments, and the council tax freeze have all added to the in-year pressures that must be accommodated as it continues to negotiate pay with the public sector unions,’ says SFC chair Graeme Roy.
The Scottish government has estimated that in 2023-24 wages accounted for over £25 billion across the devolved public sector, including local government. ‘With pay making up more than half of the Scottish government’s day-to-day budget, we need more transparency and planning around pay awards at [Scottish] budget time to avoid disruptive spending controls being introduced part way through the year,’ says Roy.
In December the SFC reported that the Scottish government had not set a formal guideline for public sector pay for 2024-25 and that the average public sector pay award in 2023-24 was 6.5 per cent, three percentage points higher than the Scottish government had estimated last May. When a budget is based on faulty pay assumptions, it should come as no surprise that this then creates challenges for in-year budget management, and so cuts to spending on services.
The SFC is clear on where the responsibility lies. ‘The recent emergency spending controls the Scottish government has put in place for 2024-25 are the result of those challenges,’ its report states, referring to the Scottish government’s decision to follow the UK in no longer providing winter fuel payments to all pensioners, its scrapping of subsidised peak-time fares on Scotland’s nationalised railways, and other cuts.
The report and accompanying statement from the SFC flies in the face of Scottish government messaging. In announcing those recent spending curbs, Scotland’s finance minister Shona Robison described them as ‘unavoidable’, while Scottish government ministers often talk about Scotland’s hands being tied when it comes to its budget. It seems clear the SFC believes the Scottish government carries the weight of responsibility for Scotland’s budget outcomes. And that more careful management of the budget process would lower the chances of in-year budget crises materialising.
Is the SFC being political here? There is no evidence of that. The SFC has a statutory remit to objectively forecast and report on Scotland’s fiscal position. That its messaging directly contradicts the SNP Scottish government’s is merely a reflection of the skewed modus operandi of those in power. The SFC did not set out to put a spanner in the works of the SNP’s grievance machine but has found itself doing so by default.
In a Scotland where parts of the civil service have arguably become too close to the SNP, that is to be welcomed.
How saying ‘deez nuts’ can ruin your life
For most parents whose teenage years pre-dated Snapchat, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, few things are as terrifying as the social media use of their children. What might seem like harmless fun, such as posting memes, sharing photos, or venting frustrations, can have life-changing consequences. As a barrister who represents students, I have seen how a single ill-judged post can ruin a young person’s future.
In one memorable case, a pupil was expelled from secondary school for using the phrase ‘deez nuts’ with a classmate
In one memorable case, a pupil was expelled from secondary school for using the phrase ‘deez nuts’ with a classmate. The male pupil had meant it as a joke, but the female pupil found it offensive and reported it to the headmaster. The headmaster, prim and proper, deemed it an obscene, unsolicited allusion to oral sex and expelled the teenager. I have also handled cases where pupils have posted online about sensitive issues, such as the Black Lives Matter and #MeToo movements, and found themselves the subject of formal complaints from peers.
Offensive posts can go undetected at school but resurface years later. For students who go on to study certain professional degrees, like medicine or law, historic posts deemed unbefitting of a future doctor or lawyer can trigger disciplinary proceedings and bar entry into the profession.
Many employers, myself included, perform thorough social media checks when recruiting staff. It was during one such check that I discovered that a prospective au pair had a penchant for virtually naked selfies on Instagram. In some cases, a social media post can be unlawful. For teenagers and university students, the most relevant criminal offences will be those under the Protection from Harassment Act 1997, the Malicious Communications Act 1988, the Communications Act 2003, the Sexual Offences Act 2003, the new Online Safety Act 2023, and the Public Order Act 1986.
The most common civil actions are likely to be harassment, defamation and, if there is financial loss, malicious falsehood. To illustrate, a pupil who posts abusive messages on social media that, in the eyes of a reasonable person, cause emotional distress or alarm to another pupil may be committing the criminal offence of harassment, as well as the civil tort of harassment. If the pupil’s messages put the victim in fear of violence, that could amount to a more serious criminal offence.
Any person, including a pupil, who sends online messages conveying a grossly offensive message in order to cause distress or anxiety to the recipient may also fall foul of section 1 of the Malicious Communications Act 1988. This is punishable by up to six months in prison or a fine.
A pupil who sends an unsolicited, naked photo or video (real or fake) to another pupil to cause them alarm, distress, or humiliation may be committing an offence under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, and so too if the pupil shares or even threatens to share an intimate photo or video without consent. Beware, therefore, of sending a photo or film of your genitals to another person. Even if sent only to obtain sexual gratification (but you are reckless as to the distress it could cause to the recipient) then this is a criminal offence carrying up to two years in prison.
The Criminal Justice Bill, which has not yet gone through parliament, also intends to create a new offence of making a sexually explicit deepfake. That offence will not require the creator to share the video but merely to want to cause alarm, humiliation, or distress to the victim.
Finally, the recent riots in the UK have led to a number of high-profile prosecutions under the Public Order Act 1986. The offenders posted abusive messages on social media with the intention of inciting violence or stirring up racial hatred. One offender wrote on X: ‘Every man and their dog should be smashing [the] fuck out [of] Britannia hotel,’ where a number of asylum seekers had been housed. He pleaded guilty and was given a 20-month prison sentence.
Generally, the Crown Prosecution Service has a high threshold for prosecution as it needs to consider the public interest and the right to freedom of expression (under Article 10 of the European Convention on Human Rights). It may well find, for example, that a course of conduct is offensive or shocking but not ‘grossly’ so. However, a victim with deep pockets may start a private prosecution or launch a civil claim. Such proceedings would be highly stressful and disruptive for the accused student.
Social media offers many benefits. However, as a lawyer, I too often witness its darker side. It is vital that schools and parents educate children about potential harms and risks, even if this means scaring them with articles like this one. There is a wonderful song in the musical Hello, Dolly! where an amorous Cornelius describes falling in love: ‘It only takes a moment to be loved a whole life long’. In our digital age, it only takes a moment, perhaps when drunk, distracted, angry, lustful, vengeful or just thoughtless, for an ill-considered post to cause lifelong regret.
Daniel Sokol is a barrister and, with his father Ronald Sokol, the co-author of A Young Person’s Guide to Law and Justice, which is published today.
Wonderwall is the worst song ever written
It could be said that the last thing we need now is an Oasis reunion. I read somewhere that there are 56 conflicts in the world at the moment, and that doesn’t count what would surely happen if you put the Gallagher brothers in the same room. Siblings have a poor history in rock ’n’ roll – one immediately thinks of John and Tom Fogerty of Creedence Clearwater Revival, who didn’t talk for the last 20 years of Tom’s life, or Ray and Dave Davies of the Kinks. In 1971, Ray and Dave were dining in Manhattan. Dave tried to steal one of Ray’s French fries. Ray stabbed his brother in the chest with a fork. At Dave’s 50th birthday, Ray stamped on his cake.
After that, it goes on for another week or so, meaningless, tuneless, a demonstration of how bad pop music can be when it puts its mind to it
Noel Gallagher is the older, marginally more intelligent brother, who wrote all the early songs and once described his dimwitted younger brother Liam as ‘a man with a fork in a world of soup’. If only any of his songs had been as good as that. Like Elvis Costello once said, ‘Noel is deluded about a lot of things, most obviously that he is a songwriter at all.’ Noel’s lumpen, meat-and-potato songs stole so widely from the repertoire of 1960s and 1970s rock classics that it became more fun to try and work out where he had stolen those riffs than actually listen to them.
Liam generally supplied the ‘vocals’ for these ‘songs’, a horrible screeching din that made up in body hair and testosterone what they lacked in subtlety, nuance or skill. As I wrote in 2009, ‘There is something about Liam that seems to personify the boundless aggression and stupidity of a particular type of young, white British male.’ No longer, of course, as he is now solidly middle-aged, but he appears remarkably unmellowed by the passing years. Noel tells us that Liam once walked out of a Spinal Tap live show because he objected to the jokes, having previously believed that they were a real band and the film was a serious documentary. It says much for Liam’s reputation that we are willing to believe the story even though common sense tells us that it can’t be true.
The big question is: are they better off together or apart? When apart, it has proved so much easier to ignore their terrible music, from which all flair and originality were long ago excised. My friend Andrew Mueller and I have long debated the worst pop song of all time, often while watching cricket. He thinks it was ‘Imagine’ by John Lennon, and for a long time I thought it might be ‘Dreamer’ by Supertramp, but I think both have been safely trumped by ‘Wonderwall’, written by Noel and sung by Liam. Like all their other songs, ‘Wonderwall’ doesn’t go anywhere, it just is, repeating itself over and over again until every cell in your body is shouting ‘Enough!’ After that, it goes on for another week or so, meaningless, tuneless, a demonstration of how bad pop music can be when it puts its mind to it. The risk of them reforming is not that they would play live, which can be safely avoided, but that they would start recording again, and that they would record something as bad and as ubiquitous as ‘Wonderwall’. This seems to me genuinely to be feared.
All bands, except for the Smiths and, one has to say, Creedence Clearwater Revival, reform sooner or later. Noel and Liam declared independence from each other and proceeded to record their weedy songs to widespread public indifference, although Oasis’s more deranged fans kept the faith, as they always do. I remember going to a record shop to buy my favourite band new album in 2000 (Steely Dan’s Two Against Nature) on the first day it was out, only to find that it was the first day out for the new Oasis album as well. Standing in that queue, the only man holding a Steely Dan CD, I thought many ungenerous and snobbish thoughts about my fellow queuers, from educational attainments (I had some) via clothes (they were all wearing tracksuits) to personal hygiene. There was so much plaque in that queue I doubt that, today, any of them have any teeth left. One of them even appeared to have lost control of his bowels, possibly through excitement. The eruptions that will greet his heroes’ return really do not bear thinking about.
Ofcom can’t be trusted to censor social media
It’s boom time at Ofcom. In the past few years, what was until recently the government-backed regulator for broadcasting, telecoms and postal industries (already an absurdly broad range of responsibilities) has seen its remit expanded beyond all recognition. Following the passage of the Online Safety Act 2023, Ofcom has been handed the famously straightforward task of regulating social-media companies – compelling them to clamp down on illegal speech and activity on their platforms. The Media Act 2024, which gained royal assent in May, has extended its reach to streaming services, too. Now, a think-tank has essentially suggested we should cut out the middleman and turn the Office of Communications into a full-blown Ministry of Truth.
Ofcom’s new responsibilities under the Online Safety Act are already a major threat to free speech online
This is the call from the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) for Ofcom to be better equipped to ‘fight misinformation and deamplify harmful posts to prevent public disorder’. Among other proposals, apparently aimed at preventing a repeat of the recent race riots, the CCDH thinks that Ofcom, in times of crisis, should be able to apply to a judge for ‘emergency powers’, allowing it to demand immediate action on ‘harmful’ content and ‘misinformation’ posted on social-media platforms. Reportedly, this could be achieved by tweaking the ‘special circumstances’ directive in the Online Safety Act, which enables the science, innovation and technology minister to issue a direction to Ofcom during a crisis of national security or public health.
What could possibly go wrong? Quite a lot, obviously. We’ve seen from Ofcom’s never-ending crusade against GB News that it struggles with being impartial even within its existing areas of responsibility. And yet now it is being asked to enforce the rules around what ordinary people can and can’t say on social media. Last year, it had to suspend its new ‘online safety supervision director’ – charged with ensuring social-media firms obey the new censorship regime – after she allegedly liked an Instagram post accusing Israel of ‘ethnic cleansing and genocide of Palestinians’. Which hardly inspired confidence, given that Israelophobic take is itself a bit of misinformation.
Ofcom’s new responsibilities under the Online Safety Act are already a major threat to free speech online. The Act’s insistence that platforms proactively seek out and remove illegal content, or else face Ofcom’s fines and sanctions, is an incentive to censor first and ask questions later. Quite aside from whether or not we should have so many legal restrictions on speech as it is, this law will mean algorithms and overworked moderators removing all manner of perfectly legal speech, for fear of falling foul of their platform’s new duties. Ofcom’s final codes of practice for social-media firms haven’t even been published yet. That there are already calls for it to have greater powers suggests this is more about a rush to censorship than it is a sober reflection on how best to combat fake news and hate.
Because when you think about it for longer than five seconds, empowering a state-backed regulator to demand that Big Tech immediately clamp down on certain forms of speech is a recipe for authoritarianism. It certainly panned out that way during the pandemic, when social-media firms worked hand-in-glove with governments and public-health bodies to suppress certain statements and opinions about Covid. Time and again, people were censored not just for spewing obvious falsehoods, which would be bad enough, but also for opposing particular policies, or saying something that didn’t quite jive with the current public-health ‘consensus’. Censorship was, in effect, outsourced to the private sector and totally legitimate, legal statements were silenced as a consequence. Indeed, in the space of a year or two, the lab-leak theory – positing that Covid originated in a Chinese laboratory – went from being a racist conspiracy theory, wilfully clamped down upon by Facebook et al, to a plausible explanation endorsed by various US government agencies.
If we are truly concerned about tackling misinformation, or indeed hate, the last thing we should do is empower a state-backed body to define and censor it. Call me an old cynic, but when it comes to misleading the public, governments (and their ‘independent’ regulators) are repeat – and far more consequential – offenders.
The slow death of Star Wars
The video game Star Wars Outlaws is to be released this week. The game is set between The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi – so in the universe of the original, still-greatest film trilogy – and has been several years in development. According to its ‘narrative director’ Navid Khavari, ‘We didn’t just look at the original films, we looked at George Lucas’s own inspirations: Akira Kurosawa, world war two movies like The Dambusters and spaghetti westerns. You see the care that was taken in that original trilogy to make it tonally consistent. We need to make this feel like it has high stakes, lighthearted humour, emotional tension, growth between characters [and] the hero’s journey.’ All of which makes this expensive game rather more exciting than the usual run-of-the-mill fare. The player takes on the guise of Kay Vess, a young woman who lives by her wits and is planning a heist to pay off a syndicate.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars was essential viewing
If this sounds vaguely like the crime-picture trappings of the unsuccessful Star Wars prequel Solo, then you wouldn’t be wrong. Ever since Lucasfilm was acquired by Disney in 2012, there has been an tendency, by now bordering on some sort of compulsion, to mine its intellectual property for any profitable purpose. In the case of the first of the Star Wars sequels, 2015’s The Force Awakens, this led to vast financial success, glowing reviews and a rejuvenated interest in the series. In fact, it was better than the mediocre, George Lucas-directed prequels. Another two films followed, the divisive The Last Jedi and the ridiculed (but actually quite entertaining) The Rise of Skywalker. Then the floodgates opened.
Some of the films and TV shows produced by the Disney regime have, admittedly, been splendid. Rogue One was thrilling. It delivered sheer spectacle and fun better than any of the Star Wars sequels – despite, or because, of a downbeat ending that saw the deaths of the principal cast. Its prequel (confused yet?) Andor was also popular, earning the sobriquet ‘a Star Wars television series for people who don’t like Star Wars’, although to be honest it’s hard to see why such people would bother watching it. Likewise, The Mandalorian did well during its first two seasons, although last year’s third instalment was less enjoyable and less watched. Nevertheless, there is a feature film, The Mandalorian & Grogu, planned for 2026, as well as a possible fourth series.
And this is where Disney has got it so spectacularly wrong. What’s happened is the Marvel-ification of Star Wars. Marvel films were once entertaining, unpretentious adventures with some sly winks to comic-book connoisseurs. They became a hugely complex, virtually incomprehensible behemoth spanning several different platforms. The same is now true for the expanded Star Wars universe, where it is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up. There are now too many TV shows to list here, and the recent news that The Acolyte, the latest release, was cancelled after one series was a tacit acknowledgment that the flabby franchise is faltering. Yet still they come; the latest, December’s Star Wars: Skeleton Crew appears to be a family-friendly adventure about children adrift in the galaxy, with Jude Law as a suitably paternal Jedi guiding them on their way. (Law, incidentally, deserves some sort of medal for the number of franchises he has given gravitas to, what with his appearances in the Harry Potter prequels, Captain Marvel and now this; surely his M in the rebooted James Bond is inevitable casting at this point.)
I was too young to appreciate Star Wars the first time round, but a generation of film fans and directors still talk, admiringly, about the sheer effect that seeing the pictures had on them. It brought about the realisation, amid a decade in which cinema had become far more cynical, that there was still wonder and breathless fun to be had. Today, the exploitation of Star Wars’s ideas and iconography for the gawping chasm of streaming means that the wonder and awe have been swallowed whole.
I sincerely hope that Star Wars Outlaws really does live up to expectations, because it will be one of the very few offshoots of an increasingly tarnished brand that does. A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, Star Wars was essential viewing. But now, it’s just there, a product to be consumed or ignored, like 99 per cent of the rest of what’s on the streamers. For anyone who has a child still somewhere inside them, asking to be awestruck, it’s a pity.
Zelensky says Kursk offensive is collateral in a victory plan
At a press conference in Kyiv today, Volodymyr Zelensky spoke about his strategy to end Russia’s war. He has a plan which he says he will present next month to Joe Biden and to the two contenders to succeed him: Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. He also confirmed The Spectator’s report that the objective of the Kursk operation is ‘one of the key points’ as collateral in a negotiation which, he says, will ‘force Russia to end the war through diplomacy’.
Zelensky’s peace plans have often seemed overly ambitious
We’re now in week four of the battle in the Kursk region, with Ukrainian forces taking control of about 100 Russian settlements. The offensive has slowed but presses on. ‘We need to have a strong position at the summit [in November],’ said Zelensky today. Some 92 countries were represented at the first peace summit in Switzerland in June, but there was little progress as Russia was not invited by Kyiv. They will be this time as allies have demanded it. This was once a controversial point to Ukrainians, but there is a mood of acceptance now. ‘But if Russia doesn’t attend the second summit, we risk losing many countries,’ Zelensky said.
At present, Moscow says it won’t enter talks while 500 square miles of its own territory are captured by Ukrainians. The Kremlin had spent months calling for a ‘peace deal’ based on the ‘situation on the ground’ – e.g., Russia would keep all occupied lands. But the Kursk operation has changed the situation on the ground. Now Zelensky is gearing up with a new strategy, hoping the latest success will rally the allies to back his plan to end the war.
Zelensky offered very little detail about his plan. The Kursk offensive will be among other things in a ‘powerful package’ to compel Russia to negotiate, according to Zelensky. His plan’s success depends on Biden and whether the US will supply the necessary resources. Permission to strike deeper into Russia with American weapons is part of the means Ukraine needs, though Zelensky noted that ‘allies don’t want to discuss it, and I keep bringing it up.’
Zelensky has ruled out letting Putin keep all of his conquests. ‘We’re told to compromise with those who came to destroy us,’ he said. ‘At this point, the dialogue with Putin is futile and pointless because he does not want to end the war diplomatically without the condition that we give him 30 per cent of our land. The Kursk operation has helped reduce the number of voices on this topic.’ Russia’s lacklustre defence, he said, shows Putin cares more about seizing Ukrainian cities than protecting Russian territories. The most skilled Russian troops remain in the Donetsk region, rapidly advancing towards the strategic logistic hub in Donbas – the city of Pokrovsk.
Zelensky’s peace plans have often seemed overly ambitious. Last year’s ten-point proposal demanded that Putin withdraw from all Ukrainian territory and reaffirm Ukraine’s borders. These terms were unrealistic given Kyiv had no major victories on the frontline since the liberation of the Kharkiv region and Kherson in 2022. With so few details available on Zelensky’s new plan, its practicality remains uncertain. But even if Zelensky’s plan is rejected in Washington, allies will have to rethink their vague commitment to support Ukraine ‘as long as it takes’ – or the war will go on forever.
The quest for the world’s highest peaks
What makes men and women climb high? Most commonly, according to Daniel Light, ‘the prosecution of science or the advancement of empire’. It might also be general flag-waving or just personal fulfilment, as in the case of ‘private traveller’ Godfrey Vigne, who opened his English eyes to the wonder of the Karakoram in the baleful 1930s.
London-based Light – ‘a keen climber, not a serious mountaineer’ – has produced a colourful survey of mostly 19th-century mountaineering across the globe, starting with the geographer and natural philosopher Alexander von Humboldt and his five-year expedition to South America. The baron came back convinced he had got within 1,000ft of the highest point on Earth, then thought to be Chimborazo in Ecuador, and told tales of a strange sickness that came on at altitude: vomiting, dizziness, shortness of breath and bleeding from lips and gums.
The White Ladder, Light’s hugely entertaining book, is divided into four sections, following four types of climbers in a loosely chronological narrative. They are imperial surveyors of Asia; sporting alpinists; ‘amateurs’; and the first to tackle Everest. The book ends after George Mallory vanishes ‘going strong for the top’ – so before Sir John Hunt and the triumph of 1953. The author has a lot of fun as he makes his way up and down. In the closing paragraph of Part One he reveals:
The sport of ‘alpinism’ would bring a new urgency to the quest for the world’s highest peaks, personified by a man whose ego would eventually outgrow the mountains of Europe. He arrived with a bang, and his name was Whymper.
The tone is brisk, chummy and companionable: the reader feels safe on the end of Light’s rope. ‘There are 14 mountains of 8,000 metres or more in the world,’ he explains. ‘That’s roughly 26,250ft in old money.’ Most lie along a 300-mile stretch of Nepal’s border with Tibet or in the Karakoram. Above all, the author showcases a beguiling gallery of characters. Albert ‘Fred’ Mummery headed to India to bag the world’s ninth highest mountain, having knocked off all the trickier Alpine ascents. In 1895 he declared European peaks ‘overcrowded’, and ended up freezing to death on the slopes of Nanga Parbat with two Gurkhas.
Not all Light’s heroes sport iced-up beards. The American heiress Fanny Bullock Workman gets several chapters. She climbed higher than any woman had before, as well as lecturing at the Sorbonne and writing numerous travel books, such as her 1895 Algerian Memories: A Bicycle Tour over the Atlas to the Sahara. On the bottom rung of the white ladder is the detestable Aleister Crowley, busy even at altitude whipping the staff and pulling a gun on his tentmate.
As Light says, ‘no amount of imperial authority is a substitute for local knowledge’, and he pays tribute to the people who helped these mad white giants towards the top. Among them are 150 Balti porters who ferried provisions for Oscar Eckenstein’s 1902 expedition from Srinagar in lightweight wicker baskets called kiltas; the Kashmiri khansamahs who cooked the grub; and the Lepchas, Bhotias and, of course, Sherpas, ‘an ethnic group set to become synonymous with Himalayan mountaineering’. To many, the peaks held deep significance. Nanda Devi, ‘the bliss-giving goddess’, is believed to be the last refuge of a beautiful princess who dared to rebuff the advances of a Rohilla prince. She became the mountain, ‘its Devi or patron-goddess, and it is her eternal sanctuary’. A Tibetan translation of Kangchenjunga, ‘the most sacred of the eight-thousanders’, refers to five brothers who guard treasure stowed within its topmost snows.
Avalanches, cannonades, bivouacs, edelweiss and knapsacks… Light is above all a storyteller, and anyone who loves mountains will enjoy this book, especially if they prefer to experience the rasp of thin air from a base-camp armchair. On 25 December 1896, high in the Horcones Valley en route to the 22,837ft Aconcagua, Edward Fitzgerald and his team ate Irish stew straight from the tin, ‘slowly melting lumps of white frozen grease into our mouths and then swallowing them’. ‘Merry Christmas!’ they said to one another. Robert Godwin-Austen calculated the position of his 67-strong team as they slogged up the Chiring glacier, a day’s march from the Mustagh Pass between Kashmir and Chinese Turkestan, by observing the boiling point of water, which drops half a degree below 100° C for every 500ft above sea level. One can’t help thinking this might have impeded progress.
The White Ladder is a collection of mostly jolly tales bound together with folksy sentiment, like this one, with which Light concludes his endeavour: ‘There are no real endings to mountain stories. Beyond one summit stands another. And death, the epilogue of one adventure, soon becomes a prologue to the next.’ I wonder about that.
Some uncomfortable truths about World Music
Joe Boyd’s masterly history of what some of us still defiantly call World Music – more on which later – takes its title from Paul Simon’s ‘Under African Skies’, but is really less about the roots of rhythm than its routes. A typical chapter will start with a song from a particular geography, then wind the clock back to the country’s history, then forward again to show how that history has contributed to the development of its music, and finally move outwards, following the trade winds as they carry the sounds around the world.
The Argentine singer Carlos Gardel urges the young Frank Sinatra to turn from crime to music
Thus we open with Malcolm McLaren recording in Soweto; jump to Paul Simon’s more successful sojourn there; wind back to the Zulu incursions of the 19th century, through the Gold Rush and apartheid and musical censorship; alight on Solomon Linda’s ‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’; thrill to the rise of Mbaqanga, the powered-up Zulu jive that combines call-and-response vocals with basslines that have the guttural shudder of house renovation; then follow the golden generation of South African jazz musicians out into exile and premature death.
Later chapters perform the same trick with Jamaica, Cuba, Brazil, and with Argentinean tango – where Carlos Gardel urges a young Frank Sinatra to turn from crime to music. A mysterious tape from Bulgaria sets up a wide-ranging discussion of the music of eastern Europe. A concert by Ravi Shankar begins a chapter that encompasses the music of the subcontinent and the influence of the Roma. Having started in Africa, the book ends by covering most of the rest of the continent, including Senegal, Mali, Ethiopia, both Congos and Zimbabwe.
Because it follows the migrations of music and its makers, this is also inevitably a book about empires: the British in South Africa, Jamaica and India; the French, Belgians and Italians in Africa; the Russians in eastern Europe; and in South America the Spanish and Portuguese and indeed the United States. Boyd is fully aware of the crimes and brutalities of these empires without ignoring the parallel depredations that followed. Many of his heroes, from Fela Kuti to Caetano Veloso, are in and out of prison.
This intersection of history and music makes it sound like a version of The Rest is Noise that slips out of the concert halls to spend time in shebeens and nightclubs and folk festivals. Indeed, the patronage and arbitrary whims of dictators in Brazil or newly independent African states recall Alex Ross’s account of Stalin’s micromanagement of Soviet composers. But Ross never took tea with Tchaikovsky or sunbathed with Schönberg. Boyd is very much a character in his own story. At the end of White Bicycles, his memoir of his early years balancing sound for Bob Dylan, founding the UFO club and producing Pink Floyd and Nick Drake, he boasts that he disproves ‘at least one Sixties myth. I was there, and I do remember.’ Throughout And the Roots of Rhythm Remain, he is again there.
A couple of anecdotes are repeated: a recording session with the South African exiles, and Monica Getz looking daggers at Astrud Gilberto, who has had an affair with her husband Stan. But most of them are new. In Cuba, Boyd records with the cream of a previous generation’s musicians, prefiguring Buena Vista Social Club. When Chris Blackwell dashes to Jamaica to nurture Bob Marley, Boyd produces an album for Toots and the Maytals. He tries to make the Brazilian diva Virginia Rodrigues a star, and has even less success with Pakistan Qawwali duo the Ali Brothers. He is turned down flat as a producer by Youssou N’Dour. But he is instrumental in bringing Toumani Diabaté to western ears, and tirelessly promotes the music of the Balkans and Bulgaria.
Having run a record label, he is also keenly aware of the requirements of commerce and the danger of recording music without any certainty that it will find an audience; he gives full credit to his peers, notably Nick Gold of World Circuit. Boyd was present at the fabled meeting of label owners, DJs and journalists in an Islington pub in 1987 out of which came the decision to promote these disparate sounds as, collectively, World Music.
Most of the musicians covered here hate the term. (Whenever I interview any of them, several minutes have to be written off while they renounce it.) Boyd recognises the reasons for this allergic reaction; but he rolls his metaphorical eyes at ‘Global’ asa replacement and insists that as a marketing device the term did its work. ‘How many records would Thomas Mapfumo have sold had he been filed under M-N-O and stuck behind Mudhoney?’ In fact, without World Music as a section in record shops, Mapfumo – and all but a handful of the others – would have been lucky to make it in there at all.
Boyd is too clear-eyed to gloss over the uncomfortable truths that the industry prefers to ignore. First, that artists’ expectations are often unrealistic. Virginia Rodrigues ‘couldn’t comprehend how a rave review in the New York Times, curtain calls in London and [Bill Clinton’s] purchase of 500 copies of Sol Negro for Christmas presents hadn’t made her wealthy’. When her family and friends placed demands on her, it caused a breakdown in her relationships with her western allies. Countless people in Boyd’s position can tell similar stories, which have led to the break-up of bands like Kinshasa’s Staff Benda Bilili.
Second, that the tastes of British and American World Music fans seldom match those of home audiences:
Cubans reacted to Buena Vista’s triumph with a mixture of sarcasm, fury, contempt and a few cheers. It was as if the world had turned up its nose at Radiohead and Massive Attack, preferring to worship a group of Brit old-timers with banjos and accordions performing George Formby and Al Bowlly songs.
The tastes of the musicians may not match with their listeners either. When Paul Simon went looking for South African musicians, they were keener to play Americanised Soul than mbaqanga. Youssou N’Dour angrily turned Boyd down because the producer wanted to record his mbalax live and raw, and the Senegalese superstar craved gloss:
Audiences do seem to enjoy high-tech sounds. A Banjul disc jockey once told [the academic] Lucy Durán that he loved the way N’Dour made a synthesiser sound like a balafon. Most of the singer’s western fans would prefer to hear an actual balafon.
Boyd has his blind spots – to which he would probably cheerfully admit. He has no time for Fusion, even though most of the genres he writes about have their roots in multiple fusions. His dislike of synthesisers deafens him to the rare occasions when they are used creatively. He hates Peter Gabriel’s Last Temptation of Christ soundtrack, for example. He insists that Disco sucks, and is largely immune to hip-hop.
These aversions contribute to an elegiac feeling, a sense that the vitality has gone out of World Music. In fact, the genre is in rude health in the form of, for example, Afrobeats; it just sounds less organic than in the 1970s and 1980s. Boyd’s old acquaintance Dylan might have suggested that something’s going on here but he doesn’t know what it is. But none of that detracts from the achievement of the book that Boyd has written: deeply scholarly but grippingly readable – and with the best soundtrack in the world.
Will there ever be another cricket captain like Richie Benaud?
Some books have good titles. Many books, sadly, have terrible titles. But a few rare books have the perfect title – the one that tells you briefly what the book is about, and also whether you want to own it. Richie Benaud’s Blue Suede Shoes is one such. If that title grabs you, you should go out and buy it now, because the book is brilliant. If it doesn’t, you have probably stopped reading this review already and turned over to Melissa Kite.
Either you love Blofeld’s ‘My Dear Old Thing’ eccentricities or you want him slowly roasted over an open fire
Harry Ricketts is a poet and critic who was born in London but has lived in New Zealand since 1981. David Kynaston is probably best known as the author of doorstop social histories about the 1950s and 1960s, with titles like Family Britain 1951-57 and Modernity Britain 1957-62. My mother, who died late last year aged just 92, loved them and read them all several times. But Kynaston also has a profitable sideline in quirky cricket histories: WG’s Birthday Party was one (it’s superb), and a couple of years ago he published Arlott, Swanton and the Soul of England Cricket with my old friend the late Stephen Fay.
Kynaston, I would guess, is an Arlott man, and so am I: I still have PTSD from reading Swanton’s unimaginably snobbish and pompous columns in the Telegraph in the 1990s. One of the themes of this book is how the public school and amateur ethos, which, even after the abolition of the distinctions between amateurs and professionals in the early 1960s, meant that former amateurs were far more likely to be appointed captain of England than horny-handed sons of toil, held back England cricket for decades. That’s all over now, thank God, and not before time.
The bulk of the book, though, is dedicated to a single Ashes Test, the fourth Test of 1961 at Old Trafford. It’s so long ago that you would need to be in your seventies (as both Kynaston and Ricketts are) to have any coherent memory of it; and they have been assiduous in supplying both contemporary accounts of the play and a few with the benefit of hindsight. Written mainly in the present tense, these chapters are sparkling. If you want to know what Arlott or Swanton said on air or wrote in the following morning’s newspapers, it’s all here.
To cut a very long story short, Australia won by 54 runs; but the game had previously twisted and turned, with more subplots than the gnarliest Hollywood thriller. The central figures in the drama were the two captains: Peter May and Richie Benaud. May was a dry old stick even then. Younger readers may remember his disastrous phase as England’s chairman of selectors in the 1980s, during which he appointed his godson to the captaincy and generally showed a lack of empathy verging on the pathological. Benaud was a fair batsman, a leg-spinner of great skill and the captain of your dreams. ‘If you were trying to clone a captain, Benaud’s would be the DNA you would want’ – words of mine, quoted in the frontispiece, a considerable thrill of its own.
And the blue suede shoes? It’s barely more than a footnote in the book, but it operates well as a metaphor for the whole work. At the end of the fourth day, Benaud went out to look at the wicket wearing a pair of blue suede shoes:
It is probably fanciful to suppose that Benaud bought the shoes, is wearing them now, as a deliberate nod to Elvis’s mega-hit a few years ago with the Carl Perkins song, but he just conceivably might. That’s the thing with Benaud – he preserves a degree of enigma behind the public persona. It is impossible to imagine his opposite number, May, wearing suede shoes at all, let alone blue ones.
The authors say they have been wanting to write this book since they met at school in 1968; it is to our imperishable benefit that they have finally got round to it.
Henry Blofeld’s Sharing My Love of Cricket isn’t such a Marmite title, although Blofeld himself is the ultimate in Marmite personalities – either you love his ‘My Dear Old Thing’ eccentricities or you want him slowly roasted over an open fire. His books, of which there have been many, have agonising punning titles like Cakes and Bails and a sub-Wodehouse style without a trace of the Master’s wit or grace. Their smugness could power the national grid.
But Blofeld, now 84, seems to have mellowed – or maybe leaving the commentary box has given him a much needed dose of humility – because this book is a great deal better than I expected. He tells all the same old stories, no doubt for the umpteenth time, but for possibly the first time the ego is in service to the material, not the other way round. There’s no doubting his great love of the game, its practitioners and its chroniclers, for this is a generous, warm-hearted book. I couldn’t have been more surprised if it had leapt off the table and bitten me on the ankle. Actually, given some of the reviews I have written of his previous books, I’m quite surprised it didn’t. Anyway it is highly recommended for cricketers of every stripe.
The greatest British pop singer who never made a hit single
This is a magnificent book, regardless of whether the reader knows who it is about. I state this bluntly at the outset because I am keenly aware that many more people are ignorant of Lawrence’s career and achievements in the field of popular music than will be familiar with them; and that I will need to use up a significant number of words attempting to explain a figure who has repeatedly proven inexplicable to the public at large. So here goes…
Has the indefatigably eccentric Lawrence led a charmed life or a cursed one?
Lawrence Hayward may be the greatest British pop star never to have enjoyed a hit single. He emerged from the Birmingham suburbs in the early 1980s as the mononymous frontman of the indie band Felt, who released ten singles and ten albums in ten years before calling it quits, just as Lawrence had planned they would. Several of these records were truly magical, but none of them bothered the charts.
During the 1990s Lawrence reinvented himself with the pop group Denim. Despite touring alongside Pulp and issuing a string of catchy novelty numbers with titles like ‘Fish and Chips’ and ‘Job Centre’, Denim too failed to attain anything more than a sliver of fame. Lawrence’s bad luck streak – more of which later – continues to the present day via his Go-Kart Mozart combo, recently rebranded as Mozart Estate, whose latest LP was released to little fanfare and fewer sales last year. And this was the year Will Hodgkinson spent trailing the would-be musical legend around Margate, Welling, Temple Fortune and sundry other neighbourhoods you wouldn’t necessarily expect to bump into a wizard and/or true star.
In Henry James’s late story, ‘The Beast in the Jungle’, a man lives his entire life in fear of something awful befalling him, only to realise too late that the dreaded event was the waiting itself. In the case of Lawrence, he has passed four decades (he is now 63) attempting to become a pop star of the sort he idolised as a child of the 1970s. In this hilarious, compassionate and ultimately inspiring book, Hodgkinson demonstrates that it is this lifelong and as yet unfulfilled quest that has made Lawrence a superstar, albeit at street level. For those of a certain age and sensibility, he is our Peter Pan, our Ziggy Stardust, our Taylor Swift.
One reason he is so beloved by his fans is that he is a dependably fabulous interviewee. This means that Hodgkinson, who is chief rock critic for the Times, can pretty much set the first half of Street-Level Superstar to cruise control, pursuing Lawrence along ‘the Hot Dog streets’, noting his every gnomic and amusing utterance. For instance: ‘David Bowie didn’t have to do the things I have to do. Angie would do the supermarket shop for him’; or ‘I like them [Y-fronts] massive, but these are too big even for me. Perhaps they could work for some of the larger fans.’
But Lawrence does not merely talk it as he walks it; as Hodgkinson makes clear, when he is on song, he is great. Tracks such as Felt’s ‘Primitive Painters’ and ‘The Osmonds’, an epic ballad from the first Denim album, are worthy of comparison with records by the loftiest of Lawrence’s musical heroes. As the book goes on, however, we learn more of what Lawrence has endured to live his dream – from relative poverty and school kids laughing at him in the street, to clinical depression and homelessness. He seems incapable of maintaining close relationships. Of the handful who agree to be interviewed, ex-girlfriends and former bandmates have little good to say.
And when the bad luck strikes, it is devastating. In 1997, Denim were on the verge of massive success with a single called ‘Summer Smash’, a title that proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy in entirely the wrong way. In the week of release, Princess Diana was killed in a car crash. The track was banned from the airwaves and pulled from the shops. Lawrence responded to the setback by becoming a heroin addict.
Has this indefatigably eccentric man led a charmed life or a cursed one? Hodgkinson concludes:
On the face of it, Lawrence sacrificed his health, family, relationships and, arguably, his sanity for art, fame, pop, the pursuit of a particular vision. Whatever the consequences, he had the bravery to live his life in the way he saw fit. Actually, I don’t think he had any choice.
It was said of Samuel Johnson that he saw in Boswell ‘a being whose human need for just what he had to give was very nearly desperate’. In Hodgkinson, Lawrence seems to sense his biographer’s longing for a renewal of faith, not just in the magic of pop music but in the artist’s power to rouse his followers to new heights of devotion. Street-Level Superstar is travelogue, pen portrait, love letter and cautionary tale all rolled into one. Or, as Lawrence himself puts it: ‘Will has finally written his masterpiece. I’m glad I could be of assistance.’
Six politicians who shaped modern Britain
‘All political careers end in failure,’ said Enoch Powell. Maybe. But just occasionally our imperfect political system throws up someone whose impact on our way of life, for good or ill, outlives them. In a series of elegant essays, Vernon Bogdanor, professor of government at King’s College London, examines the careers of six politicians – three from left of centre, three from the right – who, in his view, changed the political weather of modern Britain. Only one, Nigel Farage, is still alive.
First up is Aneurin Bevan, the left-wing firebrand who, in the teeth of fierce opposition from the mighty, vested-interested British Medical Association, presided over the creation of the National Health Service. Although now fraying at the edges, the NHS remains the one part of the post-war settlement that has survived into the 21st century. Not even Margaret Thatcher dared mess with it.
This is not a book about heroes, but about those who were unafraid to stick their heads above the parapet
The achievement was all the more remarkable given Bevan’s inauspicious origins. One of ten children of a south Wales miner, he had a pronounced stutter and left school at 13. He worked as a miner during his teens, but had been unemployed for three years before he eventually found his way into parliament – only to be temporarily expelled from the Labour party in 1939 for advocating a popular front with the communists.
Most of his long career in politics was spent in opposition, both to the Tories and to the leadership of his own party. It says much for Clement Attlee’s tolerance and eye for talent that in 1945 he plucked Bevan from the backbenches and gave him one of the most important portfolios. It is sometimes overlooked that Bevan was also minister for housing, on whose watch 800,000 new homes were built at a time when raw materials were in short supply.
Bogdanor credits Enoch Powell with being one of the first politicians to begin the erosion of the traditional class divide in British politics, with his controversial speeches on immigration and parliamentary sovereignty – a process which peaked with Brexit. Bogdanor concedes that Powell was an obsessive, divisive figure, but acquits him of being racist and concludes that his principal legacy was a belief in the sovereignty of parliament and in the free market. ‘He lacked, however, the first quality of a constructive politician: the ability to win the support of colleagues.’
On many counts, Roy Jenkins was the most successful politician of the post-war era. As home secretary, he presided over a series of social reforms on abortion, the legalisation of homosexuality and the outlawing of discrimination on grounds of race or sex, all of which have stood the test of time. He was also a lifelong advocate of British membership of the EU, which – depending on your point of view – was either a triumph or a tragedy. Even his biggest setback, the failure of his Social Democratic party to break the mould of British politics, produced what was arguably one of his most enduring successes – the rise of New Labour. In office, Tony Blair repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Jenkins.
Sir Keith Joseph owes his place in Bogdanor’s pantheon not to any legislative achievements but as the man who, in a series of speeches in the early 1970s about reducing the role of the state and liberalising markets, paved the way for Thatcher – a debt she readily acknowledged. Seen by some as a potential Tory leader, he lacked many of the requisite skills. Bogdanor writes: ‘Conservatives could hardly elect a leader whose every speech needed to be qualified by amendments or repudiated by apology.’ In addition to this he was quite unable to cope with the virulent criticism that some of his speeches aroused. In many ways, however, he was the most prescient of his contemporaries.
Although a minister for 11 years, Tony Benn – like Powell and Joseph – owes his place in this select gathering not to any particular legislative achievements, but to his challenge to the age of deference:
Benn’s central insight was his perception that the world of deference and respect for authority was passing away. He was one of the first to perceive a trend of the future whereby authority needed to become more accountable to those upon whose support it depended.
And so we come to Farage, perhaps the most influential of these men. Like him or loathe him, says Bogdanor, he has been ‘in large part responsible for the most consequential foreign policy decision Britain has taken since the war’.
This is not a book about heroes. The author has painted warts-and-all portraits of some of the most significant politicians of our age. Their careers are full of failures, misjudgments and changes of mind; and sometimes their achievements produced the very opposite of the result they’d hoped for. But they were unafraid to stick their heads above the parapet on controversial issues, and in so doing they made the weather.
Falsifying history can only increase racial tension
For many years the academic sociologist Frank Furedi has been among the strongest conservative voices in the front line of the culture wars. The target of his latest book is the systematic campaign to discredit the history of the West in the interest of a modern political agenda. The vandalising of statues, the ‘decolonisation’ of institutions and curricula, the recasting of museums and the rearrangement of libraries are all symptoms of something more fundamental. Furedi argues that historical memory is the foundation of western identity and culture. The object of the campaigners is to discredit the West’s ideals and achievements. The result has been to persuade a generation of young people that our history and identity is something to be ashamed of and to dissolve the bonds of shared experience which make us a community.
This is an important book, which chronicles more fully than any other work that I know the gradual development of this rage against the past. It suffers from two main flaws. One is that Furedi is too angry to understand the mentality of those whom he is criticising. The other is that he tends to go off-piste to pursue other targets, such as gender-neutral vocabulary, trans ideology or dogmatic modernism, none of which has much to do with the discrediting of western culture.
As the campaigners see it, the object of their war against the past is to redress perceived inequalities, mainly of race, which they blame on the West’s sense of its own moral and cultural superiority. This, they argue, has marginalised racial minorities and whole nations outside Europe and America whose histories are equally valid but commonly ignored. In the process, their distinct identity has been suppressed. Slavery and colonialism, as the campaigners see it, are not just historical phenomena but symptoms of underlying attitudes whose persistence is held to be the main obstacle to the proper recognition of marginalised groups. Western societies must therefore be made to ‘confront’ these aspects of their past and feel suitably ashamed of them.
The attachment of historians to present values is not always objectionable. They naturally interest themselves in subjects such as gender and ethnicity which reflect modern concerns. Their views about slavery, torture or cannibalism inevitably reflect their own moral standards rather than those of the people who once engaged in these practices. The real objection to what conservatives call ‘presentism’ is not that it is unpatriotic or anti-western, but that it often relies on bogus methodologies and the tendentious selection of material. The result is a presentation of the past which is fundamentally false. It is exemplified at its extremes by fantasies such as that the original inhabitants of Britain were black or that the Greek philosophers plagiarised their ideas from black Africa.
The study of history is vulnerable to this kind of attack. Historical scholarship involves judicious selection from a vast and usually incomplete body of source material. The significance of any part of this mass of information must depend on the mentality of the age which created it, and not on our own political values. The major threat to historical integrity arises when a modern ideological agenda determines not just the choice of subject but the criteria by which source material is selected and analysed.
The chief offence against historical truth is to take all the worst features of some historical phenomenon and then serve it up as if it were the whole. This is what has happened to the study of the British Empire. The Jamaican slave plantations, the near-extermination of the indigenous inhabitants of Australia, the Opium Wars and the Amritsar massacre were dark episodes. No one denies that. But Britain’s imperial history cannot be treated as if there were nothing else to it.
Until quite recently, empire was part of the natural order of a world which lacked stable frontiers or any overarching framework of international law. The history of the world is the history of empires. Ancient China, Greece and Rome, the Islamic world, the acquisitive states of precolonial India and Africa were all imperial powers long before the great European empires. Violent migration in search of resources disrupts existing patterns of indigenous life. But it has also served to unlock the riches of the world, to spread technical knowledge and to enlarge cultural horizons, all processes which have immeasurably benefitted mankind.
The British Empire maintained itself by force or the threat of force, as all governments ultimately do. But it brought the rule of law, honest administration, global trade links and economic and technical development long before these things would have been achieved by the rulers that the British displaced, many of whom (such as the Mughal rulers of India) were themselves outsiders just like the British.
All government is light and shade. The liberal instincts which animated British imperialism in its final century were often disappointed by the event. But one area in which those instincts unquestionably prevailed was slavery. Britain has already ‘confronted’ its slaving past. It did so long ago when, against the tide of contemporary opinion, it became the first major power to abolish the slave trade and then slavery itself, before becoming the main agent of its suppression worldwide.
The culture of Europe and of European settlements in the Americas has not always been dominant. It was once outclassed by the civilisations of Asia and the Middle East. But it is silly to deny that in the two centuries before the second world war Europe was culturally, technically and economically the most creative region of the world and the source of most things that have made it a better place.
Does it matter that large numbers of race-obsessed intellectuals wish to discredit its legacy in ways that have very little basis in historical truth? Furedi is surely right to point to historic memory as the key to the identity of any coherent community. Nations exist because there is a sense of solidarity among their populations, of which consciousness of their past is a major component. Social and political institutions only work if people identify themselves with the wider society to which they belong. The fragmentation of a society’s historic identity undermines the solidarities that bind it together. In the process, it also impedes the integration of ethnic minorities and creates artificial grievances which generate racial tensions. The problem is aggravated by the intolerant and polemical tone that characterises much of what is written and spoken about the past.
Today, an older generation can laugh off the eccentricities of this movement. But to a younger age group they are not eccentricities. They are all that are being taught. A poll conducted in 2022 found that most 18- to 24-year-olds thought that Britain was ‘founded on racism’, a view shared by no other age group. These young people are the future. ‘Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past,’ ran the slogan of the Party in Nineteen Eighty-four, George Orwell’s nightmare vision of a totalitarian world. They called it ‘reality control’.
An accidental spy: Gabriel’s Moon, by William Boyd, reviewed
When was the last time you described – or indeed thought of – someone’s face as ‘even-featured’, ‘angular’ or ‘refined’? If the answer is never, I suspect you’re not a novelist, and definitely not one of the William Boyd, old-school kind.
In 1983 Boyd was among the 20 writers on Granta’s famously influential list of Best Young British Novelists, along with the generation-defining likes of Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Kazuo Ishiguro and Salman Rushdie. In the decades since, however, he’s increasingly moved away from more obviously literary fiction towards the sort that’s earned him the routine (and accurate) label of ‘master storyteller’. As in his earlier work, there’s still plenty of globe-trotting and journeying through the past, but his place within British writing has landed up closer to John le Carré and the higher end of Frederick Forsyth. In 2013, Boyd was commissioned to write a James Bond novel, Solo, but – in contrast to Sebastian Faulks’s Bond book Devil May Care – the result didn’t feel like a holiday from the author’s usual output so much as a more distilled version of it.
Two years ago, Boyd even lamented that ‘Flaubert’s pernickety paragraph-a-week model… has become the template for serious writing at the furthest reaches of the literary novel’. He appeared to claim as his own model the less fashionable Stendhal, ‘a sort of hack… who wrote his great novel The Red and the Black in 60 days’. He defiantly went on:
When people dismiss storytelling, I say: ‘Well, you have a go at it.’ You can polish your prose until it gleams, but a story that has readers wanting to know what happens next … that’s something you discard at your peril.
Sure enough, Gabriel’s Moon shows no interest in aiming for the Flaubertian. On the whole, all breakfasts are ‘washed down’ with coffee and all dinners ‘washed down’ with wine. As well as those only-for-writers facial descriptions I began with, we get an ‘untimely demise’, a ‘bald pate’ and a ‘greying at the temples’. And yet, of course, we also get a cracking read.
The main character – and the latest of Boyd’s innocents abroad – is Gabriel Dax, a travel writer who, in 1961, is in Léopoldville just after the Belgian Congo has ceased to be Belgian. Offered an interview with the post-colonial leader Patrice Lumumba, Gabriel records the man explaining how the West is out to murder him. The trouble is that Lumumba names names – some belonging to members of MI6 and the CIA – which means that when he’s killed not long afterwards, the two organisations are unscrupulously determined to acquire Gabriel’s tapes.
But that’s just for starters. On the plane back from Congo to London, Gabriel is upgraded to first class, where he spots a glamorous woman (with a ‘strong-boned’ face) reading one of his books. Needless to say, neither of these things is coincidental – as he discovers when the woman, whose name is Faith Green, contacts him to carry out a lucrative but mysterious task for British Intelligence: travel to Cadiz, buy a drawing from an artist there and deliver it to MI6’s head of station in Madrid, a duly louche homosexual called Kit.
Meanwhile, well… an awful lot of stuff happens that it would be a shame to spoil – although I think I can say that Gabriel becomes ever more Bondian in his competence, fondness for booze and tendency to fall for women with exotic names.
In The James Bond Dossier – his stout, academic-baiting 1965 defence of Ian Fleming – Kingsley Amis excuses Fleming’s wilder storylines on the grounds that ‘instantly recognisable implausibilities are better than the sort that sneak up on you’. (Incidentally, he earlier makes the point that Bond’s daily intake of half a bottle of spirits is ‘another instance of Fleming’s policy of moderation about Bond’s attributes’ and so ‘promotes self-identification’ – which may be more autobiographical than Amis intended.) Gabriel’s Moon, for its part, has its fair share of both types. MI6’s willingness to let Gabriel have a (Chekhov’s) gun, for instance, will surely strike most readers as a transparent improbability required for the plot. Elsewhere, it mightn’t be until after finishing the book that you find yourself thinking, ‘Hold on a minute….’
But in the end such objections seem beside the point in a novel so deliberately and satisfyingly stuffed with incident, Cold War history, romance and any number of mysteries, not all of them overlapping. At one stage, Faith gently mocks Gabriel (a Stendhal fan) for the fact that his travel books are ‘a bit over the top’. He defends himself by saying that ‘you have to give the full vicarious pleasure’ to the reader, and approvingly quotes Lawrence Durrell’s declaration that ‘you had to give’ travel writing the ‘full plum-pudding’. Gabriel’s Moon makes it pretty clear that, for Boyd, the same approach should also apply to the spy thriller.
Rather in the lurch: Small Bomb at Dimperley, by Lissa Evans, reviewed
Stories and films set in stately homes continue to fascinate us, and Lissa Evans’s latest novel is likely to increase our appetite. It is 1945, and Dimperley Manor, the large, dilapidated home of the Vere-Thissetts near Aylesbury, has been almost emptied of its wartime evacuees. Only the widowed Zena Baxter (who adores Dimperley) and her small daughter remain, and the place has become a millstone round the neck of the heir, Valentine. The new baronet is expected to marry a rich bride to save his ancestral home. The nation, battered and bloodied, has just voted overwhelmingly for Labour. Is it a new dawn or a disaster?
All this might seem familiar to fans of Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Hannah Rothschild and Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn. The mad relations living under one giant leaky roof, the shabby furnishings, brown tap water and discomforts of being cash-poor, snobbish and servantless are what render the subjects of class and property entertaining. But in the hands of Evans, one of our finest writers of literary entertainment, this all becomes more than an exercise in nostalgia. The second world war formed the background of her previous novels, including Their Finest (which was successfully filmed in 2016) and V for Victory. Here she shows how the war’s disruption to ordinary lives prepared the ground for everything in today’s Britain, from the welfare state to feminism. Soldiers are being demobbed and the age of Attlee has replaced that of Churchill, signalling change that will continue into our own time.
Inevitably, Dimperley’s aristocrats are mildly satirised. Their foibles and ineptitude are seen through the eyes of Zena, a tough, poor, practical single mother with a gift for organisation. She falls in love with Dimperley due to its resemblance to the estate in E. Nesbit’s The Enchanted Castle; but she is less impressed by the family, especially once she comes to realise that although they might seem to her ‘the poshest people imaginable’ they are in fact ‘on the lowest rung of the nobs’ ladder’. Valentine, too, has challenges. Wounded in an accident, the reluctant baronet (nicknamed ‘Thickie’ by former schoolfellows) has been convinced that he is stupid, due to undiagnosed dyslexia, and dismissed by his own family. How can these two unlikely heroes take on a house which lacks architectural harmony, a sufficient income and, in the case of Valentine’s family, common sense?
The formidable Lady Vere-Thissett; her mentally handicapped son Cedric; Alaric, her brother-in-law obsessed by the history of Dimperley; Valentine’s widowed sister-in-law, Barbara, and her teenaged daughters; Zena’s precocious five-year-old Allison, plus a number of dogs all wander in and out of a house that has ‘at least one stuffed animal in almost every room’. Their demands and frustrations are hard to sympathise with but easy to laugh at.
Yet war, rather than class, is really Evans’s focus, and her evocation of this time reveals quintessentially British vices and virtues that are not just comic tropes. How did ordinary people, trying to hold body and soul together, survive? The answer is by lying, stealing and cheating. How will women who have flown Spitfires during the war cope when ‘nobody’s going to employ a woman when they can give a job to a returning hero’? What will the Labour landslide mean for those who have hung on for the hope of better housing and jobs in peace time? Dimperley itself is a metonym for Britain in its battered incompetence and outdated assumptions. Is it doomed to be demolished or can it be rescued?
As in the best of country house fiction, the cleverness of this novel is that it is more than its setting and cast. Like Cold Comfort Farm, it is about the encounter between order and chaos: there is no funnier subject, because if it goes wrong the results can be disastrous. The small bomb at Dimperley is all too real and waiting to explode, but it is a question of when and where, and whether human beings have any agency. The efficient, judgmental and homeless Zena teeters on the brink of obnoxious bossiness, and the hopelessly romantic, privileged Valentine is exasperatingly passive. If they remain this way, they are lost; but each could complement the other if a leap of imagination and trust is made.
Meanwhile, their differences are what propels this delicious entertainment, which, like much genuinely comic, beautifully written fiction, will be as loved by readers as it is rejected by the judges of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize. Its prevailing spirit – perhaps for our own new political era too – is not one of class hatred, revenge and despair but of energy, generosity and hope.
India radiates kindly light across the East
‘Everywhere I could see India, yet I could not recognise it.’ So said India’s great national poet Rabindranath Tagore of South-East Asia, after travelling there in 1927. Tagore was fascinated by how elements of ancient Indian culture had found their way eastwards: gods, temple architecture, the Sanskrit language and the great epics the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. A nationalist but also a universalist, Tagore welcomed the reshaping of these ideas by the people who received them, a process whose fruits he encountered in Malay literature and Balinese dance. He even hoped that one day a ‘regenerated Asia’, making creative use of its shared cultural heritage, might heal the world of the wounds he believed had been inflicted on it by the modern West.
The Golden Road is William Dalrymple’s attempt to piece together the story of which Tagore found traces on his travels: India’s transformative influence on the world around it between the 3rd century BC and 1200 AD. He writes:
What Greece was first to Rome, then to the rest of the Mediterranean and European world, so at this period India was to South-East and Central Asia and even to China, radiating and diffusing its philosophies, political ideas and architectural forms.
The result was what Dalrymple, borrowing from his fellow historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, calls the ‘Indosphere’: great swathes of Asia which became host to Indian religion, music, dance, art, astronomy, mathematics and more.
Great swathes of Asia became host to Indian religion, music, dance, art, astronomy and mathematics
The very breadth of this story, Dalrymple suggests, has frustrated its telling until now. It has ended up divided across different academic specialisms while falling victim to the scholarly fashions of the past half century. Writers have preferred to emphasise the way recipient societies engaged with, and reworked, incoming ideas rather than risk repeating the colonial-era trope of a single sophisticated culture civilising the savages. In seeking to offer a properly joined up account of Indian influence, Dalrymple offers as his controlling image a ‘golden road’ running westwards from India into Africa, Persia and the Roman empire and eastwards to South-East Asia and China.
We begin with the tale of a British hunting party in 1819 making its way through thick jungle in India’s Western Ghats and stumbling across the Ajanta caves: 30 rock-cut Buddhist temples and monasteries dating back to the 2nd and 1st centuries BC. Apparently not the most cultured of men, the leader of the party, Captain John Smith, took out a knife and carved his name, regiment and the date into a pillar just above an image of a Buddhist deity. Later generations would treat with rather more reverence the art that adorned the walls of the caves: a series of murals depicting scenes from Buddhist stories – hunts, battles and glorious evocations of courtly life. The Ajanta caves are now a Unesco World Heritage site.
Marvelling at the murals’ vivid realism and their inestimable value as a record of ancient life (as always, his enthusiasm is infectious), Dalrymple uses the Ajanta caves to introduce us to the early history of Buddhism, the religion being the first Indian export to travel the golden road. We also encounter at this point one of the main themes of his account: ancient India as a place of great dynamism and diversity. The paintings feature
an international cast of characters: Persians, Parthians, Scythians, Ethiopians, Egyptians and even Greeks and Romans, each with distinct clothes, tunics, hairstyles, skin colours and drinking goblets.
With an eye perhaps to contemporary India’s sometimes chauvinistic politics, Dalrymple wants us to appreciate that in this era ‘India was not some self-contained island of Indianness, but already a cosmopolitan and surprisingly urban society’.
There follows the remarkable story of Buddhism’s spread beyond India’s borders into Central Asia and China, thanks to traders, monks, armies, sponsorship by the likes of Ashoka the Great and Empress Wu Zetian of China, and the hallowed centre of learning that was the Nalanda mahavihara in north-eastern India. It is a brisk and lively telling, brimming with memorable characters and skilled evocations of Buddhist art – one of the best ways of tracing the journey of Buddhist ideas around Asia. Buddhism, we learn, became the means by which Indian ideas in all areas of life made their way into China, from medicine and music to astronomy and visions of the afterlife. It was, Dalrymple tells us, ‘China’s first really intimate encounter with an equal civilisation’.
Later in the book, Dalrymple guides us through the adoption of Hindu deities in South-East Asia, the use of Indian architectural styles in the extraordinary temple complex at Angkor Wat and the movement of Indian science and mathematics into the Islamic world and from there to Europe. Almost all of this occurred via unforced cultural conquest rather than the raw projection of power. India was, after all, a shifting patchwork of kingdoms for most of this long period rather than a single polity interested in, or capable of, pushing its Asian neighbours around. A notable exception was south India’s Chola Empire of the 10th and 11th centuries, which extended into Sri Lanka and parts of South-East Asia. But even here, alliances and trade – especially with the Khmer – were what counted most in the outward spread of Indian ideas.
The Golden Road is at its best when the facts of export are set alongside the rationale of the importers: the attraction for Khmer rulers of Hindu concepts of divinely ordained kingship; the efficacy of an Ayurvedic powder in curing a Caliph’s indigestion; the elegant simplicity of Indian mathematics, thanks to Brahmagupta’s innovations in using zero and negative numbers. In places, the point of view of societies importing Indian ideas feels a little underexplored. We discover that India’s crafts and technical expertise were adopted far earlier than its gods in Myanmar and Thailand, and it would be interesting to know why. Also, why was it that in India, Hinduism and Buddhism would be bitter rivals while the two traditions managed mostly to co-exist in South-East Asia? Korea and Japan perhaps deserved more space, too, as enthusiastic adopters of Buddhist teachings, rituals and deities. Some would no doubt argue that since Buddhism made its way to Korea and Japan primarily as part of a package of Chinese ideas, those stories belong to an account of the Sinosphere rather than the Indosphere.
In any case, as Dalrymple tells us near the start of his book: ‘Over half the world’s population today lives in areas where Indian ideas of religion and culture are, or once were, dominant.’ That would be rather a lot of ground to cover in full even for someone of Dalrymple’s powers. What we have here is a richly woven, highly readable account of the highlights of India’s outsized influence on the world. It is also a celebration of cosmopolitanism and cultural exchange, written with passion and verve and hinting at an optimism for India’s future of which Tagore himself would no doubt heartily have approved.
The trivial details about royalty are what really fascinate us
For the moment, can there be anything new to say about Elizabeth II? In time, the archives will open up and more of her correspondence and any of the diary we know she kept will be made available to the public. (I wouldn’t get too excited – no monarch’s diary since Victoria’s has had much to tell us about its writer). But for now you would be forgiven for thinking every scrap has been gone over, every anecdote and every major or minor event in a long life.
In an excruciating encounter with HM, Brown told her the plot of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui
The first published biography of Elizabeth II came out in 1930, when she was four years old. When she died in 2022, she had been constantly written about for almost a century. In some ways we know more about her than about anyone who ever lived. The events of her life are minutely chronicled from hour to hour. We know so much about her speech, her voice recorded and preserved from her early teens to shortly before her death at 96, that her vowels could be the subject of a valuable linguistic study in the pronunciation shifts in upper-class English.
She pervaded our lives for so long that we still say ‘the Queen’ when we mean her, and not the present one; we dreamt and dream about her; our encounters with her, near or remote, were always worth preserving. Yet, wading through the immense bibliography, we come very quickly to the limits of what is known, and the interminable repetition of the same episodes. Perhaps, one might think, there could be a moratorium on the subject.
That, however, was before Craig Brown turned his mind to it. A Voyage Around the Queen is an extraordinarily original, enlightening and fresh look at Elizabeth II. It produces an enormous amount of surprising and fresh material. (In the interests of full disclosure, it also devotes a chapter to an article I wrote about gay men’s obsession with her.) It has a brilliant premise: since Elizabeth pervaded everyone’s life to such a degree, we can learn a lot about her, and about the world that made her, by examining the slight, the trivial, the near misses and the total disasters. This is partly a book about us all – the way we chose to think about and look at Elizabeth. It is, above all, extremely funny.
Most writers about royalty are not funny at all, and those who choose to be hive it off into a toilet-book anthology of ‘The Wit and Wisdom of Prince Edward’, or whatever. Brown sees, correctly, that comedy is a part of all that is serious, and by laughing at things we have a better understanding of their nature. Brown starts from an intrinsically comic point: that we almost certainly know more about the royal family than we do about our own. Not ‘more is known’, but we ourselves, individually, know more. He writes:
I know more about the Queen’s children than I do about my own siblings… I know, for instance, how the Windsor children got on at their various schools, and the exams they took, and their favourite books and television programmes, and what makes them laugh, and their various girlfriends and boyfriends and their opinions on everything from architecture to sex.
They are, however, the antidote to laughter in person. Brown catalogues the occasions when audiences at comic smash-hits were reduced to sober silence because of the presence of a royal in the theatre. Royalty can themselves be funny – ‘Oh come on, Garter, darling,’ Lord Snowdon said to the Garter King of Arms, rehearsing the Prince of Wales’s investiture, ‘can’t you be more elastic?’ But no one laughs, it seems, if royalty can hear. (The King, however, does make a gesture of laughing uproariously in theatres pour encourager les autres.)
Comedy is embedded in exactness; it can turn on a pause or a comma. It also rests on a proper valuation of the trivial. Brown is the most precise of literary parodists – some of his Private Eye pastiches in the voice of Elizabeth are rightly included here. Much of the value of his estimation of other observers of the monarch is of a stylist who uses diction as evidence of truth. (Doubt is cast on Woodrow Wyatt’s diaries, I think justifiably.) Prince Harry comes off particularly badly, as Brown homes in on stylistic contributions to his supposed voice from his American ghostwriter – ‘I was conversant with the general contours’ – and on insights straight out of The Crown’s absurd fantasies.
There are extremely amusing collections of fragments showing how commentators settle on the same word (one chapter on ‘radiant’ really shines); or on Elizabeth’s idiosyncratic use of words, such as ‘How interesting’ to indicate that an encounter was at an end:
When the Queen eventually reached him, she asked ‘What do you do?’ He duly informed her that he was a leading union official. ‘How very, very interesting,’ she replied and moved on.
Brown’s focus on trivial specifics that would be beneath more pompous biographers brings rich rewards. Twice, tarmac is laid for the specific purpose of sparing the royal gaze some indignity, and ripped up afterwards. The automatic flush in a gents’ lavatory is turned off lest the royal ear, passing, be offended. In 1949, the Daily Mail reported breathlessly that ‘Bristol schoolchildren are to be shown how to cheer and yet remain dignified when Princess Margaret visits the city next month’.
In a chapter on the catastrophe that was It’s a Royal Knockout, Browngoes a lot further than anyone else in transcribing the material. An argument, reproduced verbatim, between the Duke of York and the compères shows without doubt what a disaster the humourless Duke was bound to inflict on the institution. There is a Byzantine chapter on the rules of curtseying, and on Margaret Thatcher over-doing it. We also hear of overwhelmed foreigners hurling themselves dauntlessly into rococo verbal periphrasis or casting themselves prostrate before Her Majesty – ‘He can get up, you know.’
But much of it is about Elizabeth’s effect on her subjects, with well chosen photographs casting light on the age. There is the street party to celebrate the coronation outside 10, Rillington Place, Notting Hill, just three months after the bodies of John Christie’s victims were extracted from behind his partition walls. Or Shinners, the Sutton department store, celebrating the Silver Jubilee:
Oh to be in England
Now that Spring is here
Oh to be in Shinners (China and Glass)
In Jubilee Year.
Some of the book is personal. There is a wonderfully absurd chapter about bidding for royal mementos at a Colchester auction house, at which Brown deeply regrets missing out on a royal petticoat, Elizabeth’s wartime driving licence and, worst of all, a piece of the Princess Royal’s wedding cake which went for only £65. We have Brown’s dreams of monarchy, as well as those of many others, and a truly excruciating real-life encounter between the young Brown and HM, during which he told her the plot of Brecht’s The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui.
Painters are significant. As Ben Pimlott noted long ago in his own thoughtful biography, portrait painters are among those who spend most time alone with a monarch. Here we have not just Lucian Freud but Andy Warhol (who did Elizabeth remotely) and an excruciatingly funny chapter about Rolf Harris’s blundering conversation while perpetrating an atrocity: ‘Trying not to do a formal, state-occasion type painting, but something to capture the real you.’ Brown writes: ‘The whereabouts of Rolf Harris’s portrait of the Queen remains unknown.’
There is a Byzantine chapter on the rules of curtseying, and on Margaret Thatcher overdoing it
Most of all in this magnificent book we have a sense of the monarch being looked at freshly, without any prejudice or point to prove, and with a real understanding of human complexity. In one episode, Elizabeth terminates the employment of her long-standing racing manager Dick Hern after he had broken his neck and suffered a heart attack, evicting him from his grace-and-favour house. In Brown’s telling, Elizabeth emerges without credit. But it is balanced by stories of great humanity. Her kindness to the teenaged Timothy Knatchbull after the IRA bomb that killed half his family, including his twin brother and Lord Mountbatten, is beautifully affecting.
Grandest of all is Elizabeth’s encounter with one of the greatest Australian painters. In the summer of 1990, Clifford Possum Tjpaltjarri, who spoke half a dozen aboriginal languages but little English, was flown to London for his second solo exhibition. He had somehow understood that, once there, he would meet the Queen, and had given a press interview in Alice Springs informing the world of this. No such arrangement had been made. His gallerist, Rebecca Hossack, was horrified – yet another occasion, she thought, of white people making promises to aboriginals they could not keep. On the first night, however, a man walking in Fitzrovia saw the display and entered without an invitation. It was Lord Harewood, who, the morning after talking to Hossack, telephoned: ‘I’ve spoken to my cousin the Queen and she would be delighted to meet you and Clifford at the Garden Party this afternoon.’
Clifford Possum was installed in a morning suit. He painted his white tennis shoes with his ancestral ‘Possum Dreaming’ and put his paintbrushes in his top hat. And the Queen came up to him:
Clifford was very dignified. He and the Queen had a conversation… they were actually communicating. She had bush tobacco in her garden. Aboriginals chew it, and he noticed it, and so he and she talked about that… It was an encounter between two impressive people from very different worlds.
Like much in this book, the story represents a recognition of greatness, observable in many different ways. It is hard to think that a more thoughtful book on its subject will be published for many years.
Tories fire starting gun on voluntary chair race
It’s the Tory race on everyone’s lips. No, not the battle to be the next party leader but rather the contest to chair the Conservatives’ National Convention. The body effectively serves as the parliament of the voluntary party and is contested annually, with chairmen elected for three year terms and subject to re-selection every year. Some 850-odd association chairmen and various bigwigs vote to decide which of their number takes the prize.
But with voting opening tomorrow, this time there is actually something of a contest for the role. Former Hackney candidate Joanna Reeves has thrown her hat in the ring, pitching herself as an outsider railing against the ‘failed’ status quo. She is up against Julian Ellacott, one of the incumbent Vice Presidents of the National Convention. Despite the lack of any kind of hustings, both candidates are in a race to collect endorsements from various party grandees. Ellacott boasts former MPs Johnny Mercer and Sheryll Murray; Reeves has Simon Clarke and Gillian Keegan.
Reeves told Mr S that ‘My intention is to represent the voluntary party to and on the party board, not the other way around.’ Voting begins tomorrow and closes on Tuesday 17 September, a fortnight after the final four leadership candidates are announced. Will we see any of the current six make their preference known? If Reeves pulls off an upset, it will be seen as a warning shot from disgruntled grassroots members…
What’s the real reason Starmer axed his national security adviser?
Keir Starmer is making a big mistake by cancelling the appointment of one of Britain’s top generals as national security adviser. General Gwyn Jenkins, the ex-vice-chief of the armed forces, was picked for the role by Rishi Sunak in April. Jenkins is a widely-respected military man and was a perfect choice for the job. But Starmer has reportedly axed Jenkins’s appointment and opted instead to re-run the application process.
We can only guess at the motivation, because Downing Street has made no official announcement
Jenkins is, technically, entitled to apply a second time. He is a formidably qualified candidate: a Royal Marines general who was vice-chief of the Defence Staff until June, he had previously served as military assistant to prime minister David Cameron and deputy national security adviser with responsibility for conflict, stability and defence from 2014 to 2017. However, if his first appointment – which was carried out under normal procedures and regulations – has been cancelled it is hard to see why he would suddenly be chosen a second time.
Starmer could come to regret his decision. To overturn a senior official appointment like this, when it has been made properly several months before, publicly and formally announced, and when the individual involved has left his previous position, is absolutely extraordinary. If Starmer is unhappy that Sunak made this appointment, he shouldn’t be: there is no prohibition on governments at the possible or even likely end of their time in office making important choices of officials. Gordon Brown named Sir Mark Lyall Grant as permanent representative to the United Nations only six months before he lost the 2010 election, while Edward Heath appointed a new ambassador to Washington and a new permanent secretary to the Treasury in the last weeks of his administration.
The unavoidable conclusion is that Starmer and his team in Downing Street do not want General Jenkins to be the national security adviser. Many possible reasons have been adduced for this: that a military figure does not have the breadth of experience to fill the ‘national security’ role (though he was deputy NSA); that as an officer in UK Special Forces he concealed allegations of extrajudicial executions by members of the SAS; or that Starmer wants to appoint a more ‘politically loyal’ figure to an important and sensitive position at the heart of government.
We can only guess at the motivation, because Downing Street has made no official announcement on the story which first appeared in the Guardian on Monday night. That in itself is odd – and clumsy. Making such an unusual decision was always going to attract considerable media attention. Anyone with an ounce of political acuity and five minutes’ experience in communications would have advised the Prime Minister’s office to control the narrative by issuing a short statement saying exactly what was happening, when it was happening and what the reasons for it were.
Such a statement would have made all the more sense given the ongoing media coverage of out-of-the-ordinary civil service appointments made so far by the new government, with Emily Middleton, a former adviser to Peter Kyle in opposition, becoming a director general in his Department for Science, Innovation and Technology; Ian Corfield, a Labour donor, being appointed a director in the Treasury then giving up the role within weeks; and Jess Sargeant moving from party think-tank Labour Together to a position in the Cabinet Office’s Propriety and Constitution Group. But the government seems to think it should not have to explain itself when questions like these are raised.
This morning the Prime Minister gave an exhaustively trailed speech in the Downing Street rose garden to set out his programme for the autumn. When questioned by journalists, he declined to explain why he had cancelled Jenkins’s appointment as national security adviser, and was dismissive of allegations made by the opposition: ‘I’m not really going to take lectures on this from the people who dragged our country so far down in the last few years.’ A politician relying on ‘not taking lectures’ is already waist-deep in hubris. What Starmer would say about the issue was that ‘there will be an open and transparent process, and no I’m not going to publicly discuss individual appointments’.
That is not good enough. There is no reason a Prime Minister should not discuss individual appointments – they are fully enough discussed when political advantage is perceived – and it is all the more incumbent on him to ‘discuss’ them when they involve such unusual decisions as (effectively) sacking a four-star general from one of Whitehall’s most senior security jobs.
Starmer insists that he is putting ‘the best people into the best jobs’. How can we possibly know that to be true, when every detail has to be dragged out of them like recalcitrant teeth? Labour has made some controversial appointments, and it can hardly be surprised there is speculation about its motivation when it remains monkishly, or arrogantly, silent. This is not a complex or multifaceted question, let alone an impertinent one: Prime Minister, why have you binned your national security adviser?
Keir Starmer can’t blame the Tories forever
Keir Starmer’s rose garden speech today should be seen as a companion piece to last month’s melodramatic Commons statement by Rachel Reeves on the condition of the public finances.
In each case the purpose was clear – to lower expectations and buy the government more time by heaping extra blame on the last Conservative administration for the state of the nation.
So there we have it – any union that can bring a key industry to a standstill now knows there is a PM in office who will always seek to buy it off
How much validity there is in a pitch saying things are much worse than they expected is highly debatable. But it was both predictable and indeed predicted that Labour would do this.
As Prime Minister, Starmer naturally gave a rather broader assessment than his Chancellor had in her Commons statement of four weeks ago. But the core message was the same. Prisoner early releases – didn’t want to do them, the fault of the Tories. Means-testing the winter fuel allowance – didn’t want to do it, the fault of the Tories. An impending ‘painful’ Budget – don’t want to do it, the fault of the Tories.
Inviting in an audience of normal people – ‘apprentices, teachers, nurses, small business owners, firefighters’ – enabled Starmer to make another highly political point when he cited No. 10 and its garden as having been ‘once used for lockdown parties’. Both were now ‘back in your service’, he boasted.
Yet everyone will surely agree that despite the high moral tone, at some point Labour will start to be judged on whether it looks like turning things round. And this is where the Prime Minister’s speech was most lacking.
He claimed that the recent riots did not merely reveal the ‘sickness’ afflicting Britain, but also in their aftermath revealed the cure. This was apparently to be found ‘in the coming together of a country’ to clear up the mess the morning after.
But a spirit of togetherness depends on every part of society feeling that the rules of the game are fair. And yet while Starmer spoke frequently of the white riots, there was not even a line in his speech about the orgy of crime at the Notting Hill Carnival including a spate of stabbings which have left three people fighting for their lives in hospital. Two Tier Keir, anyone?
And he also advertised his weakness in the face of trades union militancy by setting in place a principle that concessions should be made to strikers if their conduct is causing knock-on economic damage: ‘I defy anyone to tell me that you can grow the economy when people can’t get to work… or can’t return to work because they are stuck on an NHS waiting list,’ he said in reference to the big no-strings pay rises for train drivers and junior doctors.
So there we have it – any union that can bring a key industry to a standstill now knows there is a PM in office who will always seek to buy it off. If he really thinks such a situation will be conducive to economic growth then he will soon find out differently.
According to the Office for Budget Responsibility, the most recent disappointing rise in recorded public borrowing ‘appears related to strong growth in public sector pay’. So with this approach Starmer and his gang are likely to create more black holes than they eradicate via impending tax rises. And those tax rises themselves are bound to further disincentivise enterprise and hard work anyway.
Labour could perhaps get lucky with the global economic climate. Its moves on streamlining the planning system could possibly pay off to some extent too. But the overall likelihood is that Starmer’s administration will preside over continued economic sluggishness and further debilitating declines in social solidarity and national unity.
The relationship between the British public and its new Labour government is the kind of loveless marriage of which veteran wedding-goers are liable to say on their drive home from the reception: ‘I give it a year tops until it is on the rocks.’
The Next equal pay victory is a dark day for British business
Who would bother to create jobs in modern Britain? Clothing retailer Next has done plenty of job-creation over the past few years – only to be whacked by an equal pay claim brought by 3,500 shop assistants. An employment tribunal has ruled that the company was wrong to pay them less than it paid staff at its warehouses. With back pay it could cost the company £30 million.
The cost of this kind of case goes far beyond the potential legal liability itself
Equal pay is one thing where it concerns men and women working alongside each other in the same jobs. It is quite another when it is extended to the concept of ‘work of equal value’, as it was in this case. The tribunal ruled that Next failed to show that paying its shop workers, who are overwhelmingly women, lower pay rates than its warehouse workers, who are mostly men, was not sex discrimination. There is no suggestion, by the way, that the company is discriminating against women by refusing to employ them in its warehouses – any female shop assistants who feel underpaid are quite free to apply for a job there, where they will be paid the same as male warehouse workers.
It doesn’t take too much imagination to see how destructive this area of employment law could turn out to be. The Next case is similar to the equal pay claim which brought Birmingham City Council to its knees, leading to bankruptcy and council tax bills being jacked up by 21 per cent over the next couple of years. There, the issue was with cleaners, whose work was deemed to be of ‘equal value’ to that of refuse collectors. Henceforth, all employers – whether in the public or private sector – are going to have to second-guess what an employment tribunal would make of the various occupations on its pay roll. It is an entirely subjective judgement, for example, as to whether someone who sells clothes is engaged in work of equal value as someone who designs them – but setting their remuneration has become a minefield which could cost employers many millions of pounds.
The cost of this kind of case goes far beyond the potential legal liability itself. It is going to undermine the labour market. A retailer might, for example, find itself with a shortage of warehouse staff but with a surfeit of shop assistants – which wouldn’t be altogether surprising given that working in distribution centres is pretty unpleasant work and tends to involve anti-social hours where shop assistants are needed mainly between 9am and 5pm. But how does it now tackle that situation? It can’t now seek extra recruits by raising pay for warehouse staff without also raising shop assistants’ pay. But if it does that then potential warehouse recruits might well decide they would rather work in the shops – so you are back where you started, with a shortage.
Judgements like this will inevitably lead to pay being bid up all round. What is there now to stop warehouse staff arguing that their work is of equal value to administrative staff, who in turn might claim to be if equal value as shop managers, who in turn might claim they should be paid the same as distribution managers? And so it goes on until everyone has to be paid the same as the Chief Executive.
On a political point, the government stands accused of surrendering to the unions, awarding fat pay rises without demanding changes to working practices. It has lumbered billions of pounds of extra costs on an already-unproductive public sector – in spite of Keir Starmer’s laughable assertion this morning that his government has done more in seven weeks to boost economic growth than the previous government managed in seven years. Yet the Next claim, like the Birmingham one, long pre-dates the current government. It shows just how far the law had already leaned over towards the side of the worker – even before we elected the most union-friendly government in nearly half a century.