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Don’t blame Taylor Swift for stubborn inflation
The UK’s inflation rate is comfortably back to target: inflation held at 2 per cent in the 12 months leading up to June, the Office for National Statistics confirmed this morning. This rate is unchanged from last month.
Yet this morning’s news is stirring up doubts that the Bank of England will go for its first rate cut in August. This is because, while the headline rate is back to the Bank’s target, the services annual rate remains sticky, unchanged from 5.7 per cent. Big reductions in clothing and footwear – which slowed to 1.6 per cent in the year to June, down from 3 per cent in the year to May – were offset by fairly large increases in other sectors. Restaurants and hotels rose to 6.3 per cent in the year to June, up from 5.8 per cent to May.
It’s what some are calling the Taylor Swift effect, as her three sold-out Wembley shows in June put added pressure on the hospitality industry (particularly hotels, which accounted for the largest month-on-month increase). But service sector inflation was proving stubborn long before the singer came to town.
Capital Economics notes this morning that cultural services inflation, ‘which would capture any influence from the ticket prices,’ actually slowed 7.4 per cent to 7.3 per cent. One-off events like concerts, the Euros, or bank holidays tend to settle in the data quickly: displaced activity is accounted for a month later, spikes in prices or retail tend to settle down. Both services and core inflation have been persistent, suggesting a one-off event can’t account for why price increases are skewed to the upside.
Markets suspect that Threadneedle Street is gearing up to push back an Autumn rate cut, as services inflation is notably above the 5.1 per cent rate for June that it had forecast last month. The BoE could still just about make good on a summer rate cut if it opted to do so at its September meeting instead. But the repeated delays continue to highlight just how hawkish the Bank has become, after failing to see the inflation crisis coming down the track in 2021.
Still, rate cuts are expected eventually. The Bank has said repeatedly in its recent minutes that it is possible to start cutting rates while also keeping monetary policy tight – largely because the base rate currently sits at 5.25 per cent. Small, slow, and steady cuts would still keep rates relatively high – especially compared to where they have been in previous years.
Rate cuts remain on the cards. But the waiting game continues.
Have the Republicans resolved their abortion dilemma?
The botched assassination attempt on Donald Trump could well generate a wave of sympathy that helps waft him into the White House in November. Another indirect result of those same events may contribute further to this effect. Until the Republican National Convention opened in Milwaukee this week, the GOP had a potentially awkward problem over its stance on abortion rights. Following the attempt on Trump’s life, this has now disappeared.
The abandonment of the old hard-line position removes an intellectual difficulty for the Republicans
Since the right-leaning Supreme Court a couple of years ago overturned Roe v Wade, suppressed the judge-made constitutional right to abortion that had existed since 1973 and told state legislatures that matters now lay entirely in their hands, the party has been split. Many Republicans, probably the majority, were happy to say ‘Job done’ and turn to other things. Following hints from Trump, this live-and-let-live line was taken up by the committee of something over 100 people that draws up the party’s official platform.
‘After 51 years, because of us, that power has been given to the States and to a vote of the People,’ it said in its draft last week, before adding, in a nod to principled pro-lifers, ‘We will oppose Late Term Abortion, while supporting mothers and policies that advance Prenatal Care, access to Birth Control, and IVF.’
A vocal minority on the committee thought otherwise. They wanted the pro-life position bolstered with a call for federal legislative prohibition on abortion, at least after 20 weeks, and also with backing for a Human Life Amendment to the Constitution stating that life began at conception, matters that had previously featured in the party’s manifesto. An ugly and embarrassing floor debate loomed.
However, following the Trump shooting on Saturday the minority opted for conciliation. Its report has been quietly sidelined, and the anodyne draft remains. Admittedly the issue remains, and there is a threat to resurrect it: but during the election the dispute has gone away.
To pro-lifers this might look like selling the pass. It is nevertheless good news for Trump and the Republicans. It is also the right decision, whether you are pro-life or pro-choice.
First and foremost, it is likely to increase Trump’s support, and the Republican vote generally, in an election where abortion remains a very hot-button issue.
Everyone knows Trump to be pro-life personally, despite his earlier flirtation with a pro-choice platform, and his running-mate JD Vance to be even more so. (The latter has come out as opposing abortion even in cases of rape, although he does grudgingly concede the point where the life of the mother is at stake.) But many potential Republican voters, especially in swing states, the rust-belt and places that have not done well under Biden, will be less sure; some might even quietly sympathise with limited abortion rights. They will find it much easier to back a party that leaves at least some wiggle-room. And even those with stronger pro-life views will be painfully aware that, however much they dislike the GOP position, many Democratic candidates have views they dislike more.
The abandonment of the old hard-line position also removes an intellectual difficulty for the Republicans. Many conservatives supported the reversal of Roe v Wade on a simple argument of states’ rights: why should Washington decide on the issue of abortion rather than the 50 state legislatures? But if the Republicans were now to propose federal anti-abortion legislation that would apply nationwide and pre-empt state laws, what price then those same states’ rights? Republican candidates, one suspects, would have been tying themselves in intellectual knots for years to come.
And, in any case, the decision is right. It is correct as a matter both of democracy and of constitutional balance. One difficulty with Roe v Wade was that it mightily over-extended the powers of the federal government and judiciary. Nowhere does anything remotely like a right to abortion appear in the Constitution: the best that the Supreme Court could come up with in 1973 was the thoroughly tendentious argument that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibiting any state from taking life liberty or property without due process had to encompass a right to privacy, and that the right to privacy in turn had to include a right in at least some cases to abortion. It is not difficult to see the difficulties here.
If you believe in democracy, on a matter of social policy as polarising as abortion there is every reason to allow a different result to be reached in, say, conservative Mississippi and, say, ultra-liberal Michigan (the latter of which, indeed, within months of the reversal of Roe v Wade inserted an express right to abortion in its state constitution, as it had every right to do). A return to allowing the federal government to dictate abortion policy, albeit legislatively rather than judicially, would upset this careful balance.
Trump can well do without polarising issues that distract from his message this November. The events of this week have, it seems clear, done him an enormous favour in removing one of these from the equation. He can now wait, hope, and campaign with a slightly lighter heart.
Is Starmer’s King’s Speech really a recipe for growth?
Labour’s first King’s Speech in almost 15 years is expected to be quite meaty. According to reports, His Majesty’s new government will propose 35 parliamentary bills for the coming year.
Labour is proposing dozens of red tape measures that will put the breaks on businesses
To be entirely realistic, many of these will fall by the wayside. Parliamentary time is limited, and there are always unexpected events that derail existing legislative plans and call for new ones. Nevertheless, the King’s Speech will be quite revealing about the new government. What they choose to include – and not – sends a signal about early priorities and dispositions.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer has said ahead of the speech that the government will ‘take the brakes off Britain’. They are promising a legislative agenda focused on improving living standards by driving economic growth. This comes off the heels of big announcements on housebuilding, infrastructure and major projects. Reforming the planning system is undoubtedly the most important part of the new government’s agenda. It is something that could really unlock growth and prosperity.
But, and there’s always a big but, the new government is promising more than just planning reform. They are proposing dozens of red tape measures that will put the breaks on businesses and entrepreneurs.
Before the election, research from the Institute of Economic Affairs found that Labour’s manifesto contained 62 policies to increase regulation and just 13 that would decrease burdens on British business. Many new regulatory measures will be in the King’s Speech, undermining the new government’s pro-growth rhetoric.
From the state’s perspective, regulation is costless. Unlike fiscal measures, which must be funded through borrowing or taxation, new rules require private enterprises to act on the government’s behalf without a financial transfer. A cash-strapped government will always be tempted to lean heavily into new regulations.
Regulation can also be entirely justified and necessary. The issue is when nice-sounding new rules are introduced on top of existing ones without a proper sense of the costs and limited benefits.
A good example of this phenomenon is Martyn’s Law, which is expected to be in the King’s Speech. This is a proposal named after one of the people who was killed in the Manchester Arena attack in 2017. It would mandate measures to protect against terrorist attacks, including risk assessments, training and security measures. The proposal could apply to most places the public can freely enter, from shopping centres and retail stores to concert halls, bars and nightclubs.
At first glance, this sounds like an entirely good idea – who could oppose strengthening security measures? In fact, complying with these fiddly new rules will be extremely difficult, particularly for smaller venues and businesses. The financial burden could result in some venues closing, which is hardly ideal considering the ongoing struggles nighttime venues face. The government previously estimated that the law would cost businesses £2.7 billion.
There’s also a significant risk that the new measures will fail. It’s hard to imagine that some new risk assessment processes will dissuade a terrorist intent on creating havoc. So it could be all new administrative burdens for no particular gain to security.
This is just one of many pieces of new red tape on the way. An even bigger and more costly theme will be workers’ rights. This will include measures to ban ‘exploitive’ zero-hour contracts and give access to unfair dismissal, sick pay, and parental leave rights from day one. There will also be new equal pay requirements and reporting duties for ethnic minorities and disabled workers.
Again, for most these measures sound reasonable. But the trouble is that such measures will increase costs and risks for businesses; as a result, they will either have to pay employees less or charge consumers more to compensate. There’s even a risk that making it harder to fire people will make businesses less likely to hire people in the first place. This is not a recipe for growth.
Then there are the government’s plans to introduce a football regulator, which the Tories also wanted in the previous parliament. This is meant to ensure local communities have more of a say in how their clubs operate. But it risks giving extraordinary new powers to an unaccountable quango, pushing agendas that ultimately undermine the commercial viability of clubs. This is hardly a way to celebrate the huge sporting and commercial success of the existing system.
It’s possible to go on like this – the smoking ban and new rules coming for AI are other measures that could undermine Starmer’s quest for growth. What’s clear is that while the new government is praying for a miracle to the gods of growth, much of their agenda is pushing in the opposite direction.
I’m an unrepentant sportsphobe
It’s 1 a.m. in our small cathedral city and car horns are honking in jubilation. From down the street comes the sound of smashing bottles, and a deep bellowing roar, growing louder as the ‘whooahs’ and the chants echo off Georgian terraces. Well, it’s a country town on a Saturday night; a certain amount of lairiness is priced in. But God, this lot seem loud. Football? Rugby? I’m sure I read somewhere that an Olympics is due. One thing is clear, though: the sports people are doing sports stuff again and no power on earth will stop them. All you can do about it – all you’ve been able to do about it for your entire adult life – is tug the duvet about your head and wait for it to go away.
At least ancient Greek athletes took their clothes off
I don’t dislike sport: it’s just entirely meaningless to me. It doesn’t register, it passes me by – and as a middle-aged, heterosexual white British male, that makes me a freak. ‘Could you do something on sport?’ asked the editor, adding, ‘Obviously we’ve got the Euros and the Andy Murray/Wimbledon saga’. Really? We have? The ‘Euros’, I realise, are football, but when is there not football? Wimbledon is the tennis competition that seemed to keep half our office glued to their screens throughout sunny summer lunch-hours. Plopping noises and occasional shouts. True, it feels like it might be that time of year again.
But ‘obviously?’ Not from where I’m sitting. Our TV subscription came pre-loaded with a cluster of sports channels. Last month they simply vanished. ‘We notice you haven’t viewed these channels in the last six months, and therefore we’re removing automatic access’, said the email and I did wonder what had taken them so long. Six months? Try three decades. That’s a long time to be entirely unengaged by a pastime that has such an overbearing cultural presence. All that TV coverage, all those column inches, ‘every kick of, it massively mattering to someone, presumably’, in the words of David Mitchell’s ‘watch the football’ sketch – one of the nearest things that we sports atheists have to a sacred text.
The other is Andy Miller’s 2003 book Tilting at Windmills, a cri de coeur written in the backwash of 1990s lad culture – probably the period in recent British history when a lack of interest in sport was most likely to be a social handicap. My twenties coincided with that whole Blair-era hellscape of Fantasy Football and ladettes and Three Lions and… I’m guessing, Gazza? Was Gazza a thing then? Anyway, back then I despised sport, though as Miller points out, it wasn’t really sport itself that we loathed but football, and the screaming, loutish circus around it. Take cricket: the knitwear, the gentle applause, dear old Blowers on Test Match Special. You couldn’t hate cricket. You could even grow to like it, if only you didn’t have to sit through the indescribable tedium of the actual game.
Miller writes about trying to cure himself of his sport-phobia by taking up miniature golf. To me, at the time, even that felt like a betrayal. He recounts the experience – familiar to every sports-shunning British male – of being stuck with a chatty taxi driver, and waiting for the inevitable, ‘see the match last night?’ Why, wonders Miller, do they never ask if you’ve seen the latest Fassbinder retrospective? I tried that at the pub once, with limited success, ‘so, catch the Leeds Piano Competition on Saturday? What about that Federico Colli, eh? My money’s on Schwizgebel in the Rachmaninoff’.
In truth, it’s a war that you can’t win: better, instead, to aim for peaceful co-existence. Some of my dearest friends sincerely love sport. They’ve taken me to football matches and have been as disappointed when I fail to share their elation as I am when they, in turn, are bored rigid by Peter Grimes. (Though in a culture that routinely accuses opera of being elitist, overpriced and governed by exclusive and intimidating social codes, it feels a bit rich to see Premiership football held up as some kind of great leveller).
I can appreciate the sincerity of their passion, even if the object of their enthusiasm baffles me. It’s just so relentlessly dull: hour upon hour of purposeless physical activity with zero visual appeal. (At least ancient Greek athletes took their clothes off). Possibly, like bebop jazz, it’s comprehensible and even enjoyable once you’ve mastered the abstract principles upon which it’s all based. But that would take time and mental energy that could be spent reading Buddenbrooks or rewatching The Sopranos. Life is fleeting, and I’ve long since signed a non-aggression pact with sport. I won’t bother it as long as it doesn’t bother me – or at the very least, keeps the noise down.
In defence of the vest
I have been fond of vests ever since those plain white cotton ones we wore for primary school athletics in the long ago and mythically hot summers of the mid-1970s. No other garment in the male warm weather wardrobe is quite the same. A T-shirt isn’t as breathable, while a loose linen shirt even half unbuttoned doesn’t allow the cooling air to play around the shoulders in the same way. And neither allow you to catch the sun on your skin so pleasingly. They only really come into play in high summer: you wouldn’t attempt one in May or September. But for July and August, when, in a good year, the temperature consistently gets into the thirties, if paired with cotton shorts and flip flops or sliders, they are about as stripped back as the male wardrobe gets away from a beach.
I won’t publicly name and shame the person in question, who is now an accomplished novelist and urbane radio presenter
I wouldn’t wear one to Glyndebourne, a court appearance or a job interview, but otherwise I have long found them pleasing informal summer attire – and stylish in their own way. Men generally look relatively good in them, I always thought. This is because the male body gains weight and loses definition around the midriff while the upper arms and shoulders tend to look comparatively buff, even on a dad bod. (A caveat here is that this looking relatively good only applies if the shoulders and, particularly, upper back are almost or completely hairless: any man at the more hirsute end of the spectrum should never, ever wear vests.)
The classic rendition of course is Marlon Brando, playing Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. Certainly his shoulders didn’t lack definition – while raging in his white vest, he smouldered as much as the New Orleans nights. Another example I fell for in my teens was on a now largely forgotten but then zeitgeisty book cover. The 1982 Picador edition of Edmund White’s A Boy’s Own Story showed a Matt Dillon lookalike in what my fashion-informed wife tells me is a ‘washed plum’ coloured vest. The fact that this was a gay memoir and that its imagery was gently homoerotic went over the head of my spellbound but straight teen self. I wanted the look. And I’ve worn vests ever since – usually in white, occasionally black, but never attempting anything as ambitious as washed plum. (A second caveat here: string vests are always wrong, no exceptions.)
However in recent years I’ve found that the popular response to this staple of my summer wardrobe has increasingly been one of scorn. During Covid, when meeting my mother on Zoom while clad in one, she pointedly asked as though I were still a schoolboy, rather than a man in later middle age: ‘John Sturgis, are you wearing an undervest?’ Meanwhile friends who encountered me wearing one began to witheringly describe my vest as ‘a wife beater’. This pejorative term, apparently imported from Australia, seems lately to have acquired ubiquity as a synonym for the male vest – which doesn’t help. However, rather than spurious domestic violence associations, I think that their main image problem is indirectly linked to that 1982 book cover which had captivated me.
Because vests were, at that exact point, becoming fashionable. The young Wham! days George Michael, for example, took one up at around the same time. And by the mid-to-late 1980s they were everywhere – but suddenly, rather than chic, this seemed naff. And soon they were worn by dreadfully uncool pop acts like Go West and, later, Right Said Fred; a case of ‘I’m Too Sexy For My Undershirt’. Vests don’t seem to have ever really recovered from this brush with mainstream fashion. But I stayed loyal regardless, wearing them every summer. Or rather I did until a turning point a few years ago when I witnessed the stir that a senior colleague provoked – by wearing one to work.
I won’t publicly name and shame the person in question, who is now an accomplished novelist and urbane radio presenter, but who was then a duty editor on a red top newspaper. One scorchio Sunday circa July 2017, he turned up to take news conference wearing shorts – and a vest. The fact that this outfit deviated significantly from accepted dress code wasn’t the issue. It was more the reaction of colleagues, particularly female colleagues, to how he looked in the vest that struck me: it was not received entirely favourably. And the negative reaction was compounded by the fact that he seemed to fall foul of my rule regarding vests combined with body hair on the upper arms or back. But I noted this reaction and have never worn a vest inside the North Circular since.
So instead, these days they have become more of a guilty pleasure. I’ve now taken to wearing mine only when I’m pretty sure I won’t bump into anyone I know – on dog walks or when on the allotment, say. Or if I’m feeling particularly relaxed and overheated perhaps in a market in the south of France. But I still like them and believe deep down that I look like Marlon Brando when I wear one – even if others apparently see more of a resemblance to Rab C. Nesbitt.
A beginner’s guide to baby gear
As an urban-dwelling, free-spirited 41-year-old with sleep issues and a whimsical trade – writing – having a baby posed many challenges. The chief of which has been having to constantly work with two other people: baby and baby-daddy. I vowed as the due date approached to get kitted up in ways that would feel reassuring, limiting the cannonball splash effect of the new arrival. Would I be able to spend my way out of the bits of ensnarement I feared most? The answer is: sort of. Here are the items that have got me closest to living my best self as a new old mum. Call it Mum and the City.
Sleep
For this, there is one main big-ticket buy that can literally make the difference between insanity and misery and… ‘hey, this is kinda fun, even when she screams for three hours!’ And that is the Snoo Smart Sleeper (£1,395), an American creation by a company called Happiest Baby, created by one Dr Harvey Karp, author of the parent bible The Happiest Baby on the Block.
The rather attractive Snoo bassinet (good till six months), a deep oval of firm beige net, is designed for ‘safe’ sleeping. This means the baby is securely on her back, without any suffocation risks. It contains a swaddle that at first terrified us for its straitjacket look, but proved comfortable and effective. But the kicker with the Snoo is that it sways and murmurs steadily, mimicking the feel and sound of the womb, and when the baby fusses it detects the noise and ups its vibrations and its pulse.
They’re a little odd because they flash, making me look either bionic or like an approaching train
It comes with an app – of course – which shows just how many wake-ups (e.g. parental sleep interruptions) are avoided thanks to the censor. If the baby cries for ten minutes without piping down, then the Snoo switches off and you have to step in. As soon as we got over our fright at the looks of the swaddle, we leaned in and so did our baby, who began sleeping six-to-nine hours continuously in its murmuring embrace. The only worry is what happens when she’s too big for it, or we travel, but the two American friends who told me about the Snoo first, and who swore by it, said weaning their babies off it wasn’t an issue, and the nice lady at Happiest Baby insisted it was a non-issue (but of course she would). In two months, all shall be revealed. It’s desperately expensive, like much new baby kit, but you can also rent it for £97 per month. It might save you.
Milk
I had two main goals: feed the baby breastmilk as entirely as possible and ensure other people could feed her easily and reliably. Breast-feeding directly was tricky and remains so: she was a bad latcher to begin with and is still patchy depending on degree of hunger.
But my milk supply was excellent. Enter the remarkable Elvie pumps. Wherever I go, mums (and men) marvel at them, remembering (the mums) the noisy hand-held udder-pumps they had to use. My Elvies are damned pricey (£269 each) but worth their weight in breast milk gold: they go under the bra, hands-free, with 200ml glass collection cups which you then decant into a bottle. They make only the faintest pulsing noise, which is soothing, like an old locomotive and in 15 minutes you’ve got a big feed or two sorted for later. I’ve used them in the cinema, on the Tube, walking, in cafes, at lunches in posh restaurants, working. They’re a little odd because they flash, making me look either bionic or like an approaching train. But they come with me everywhere and have meant the baby has had almost exclusively breast milk since birth, from a wide array of helping hands – particularly important at night. There’s an app too that allows the tech-forward to monitor amounts being expressed, plus a timer, and remote instructions about intensity.
When I do breastfeed, I like to do it comfortably, which is a surprising palaver. This palaver is minimised with a special chair. But I didn’t want a hideous one, which the traditional breast-feeding chairs are. So I went for one that I could see myself using at any time: a tasteful rocking chair of richly-coloured wood and a capacious off-white body that brings to mind Martha’s Vineyard sea-view more than lactation device. This was the Gaia Baby, from the Serena Bouclé Collection, in Chalk Boucle/Walnut, from trusty old John Lewis (£405). The rocking is soothing to me perhaps more than the baby, and it has big armrests and a nice soft but firm back.
Getting out
One of the great pleasures of the first few months has been the ease of grabbing the baby and heading off – almost as I used to do, even if it’s Cambridge or Hastings rather than Italy or Israel. But I have also had to keep working. Both of these endeavours were almost entirely reliant on the BabyBjörn Harmony carrier (£177), which was a cinch to carry for hours over hill and dale and also put her to sleep within seconds so I could toil for my daily bread – sometimes for up to four hours at a time (at which point the baby really needs to eat).
She has recently got tired of being strapped to my front, inward facing, and so we have ventured out in one of two prams in our possession – prams she rejected at first for their bewildering flat-lying rattly nature.
We have a nifty Thule Shine (£650) which is a lightweight, rather clever contraption that is a little more substantial than the ubiquitous YoYo. Given that I live in a flat up steep stairs to the building’s front door, lightness is essential so that I can haul it up and down as needed (it folds OK but you have to take the bassinet out for that – who can be bothered). The Thule works well on a range of terrains, like the dirt paths on Hampstead Heath that were my pre-baby second home.
But for the serious, more royal and rugged pram, we use the Bugaboo Fox Five, which makes up for what it lacks in light-weight stair-carrying with a sense of security, deep suspension and overall comfort. Its hood is good for hanging things from: the baby likes being wheeled about peering at (or engaging in hand-to-hand combat with) Mr Octopus, a garish creature of patches and mirrors and rattles. Also, I feel like a yummy mummy with this pram, which is helpful for self-esteem when I am otherwise dressed in sick-slicked elastic-ware.
Fun
And finally, for the rare moments that the baby is in a mood to just feel, see and be, we have the BabyBjörn bouncer (from £178). One can lazily tap it with one’s foot, which might just buy one another few minutes of peace, if not the freedom one once had.
As for the cheaper must-haves: a proper changing table (saves the back), glass bottles (they smell better over time and are easier to clean; I like Nuk); and a sleep swaddle that zips up (babies really do wake themselves up with the excitement of their limbs). Having a baby was scary. But it’s less scary than I thought thanks to an incredibly developed consumer market which requires either a bit of cash, or savvy second-hand shopping.
The National is a paper in need of help
Since its launch in Scotland in 2014, the National newspaper has made a name for itself for several reasons, none of them particularly good. It is not merely partisan in the way many British newspapers are, strongly supportive of one party and editorialising thunderously from the front page through to the opinion pages. At the height of Nicola Sturgeon’s premiership, the National was closer to a hymnal such was the reverence with which the SNP leader, her government and its policies were recorded. Back then, it was hard to distinguish the paper’s news articles from SNP press releases, except that press releases were slightly less sycophantic. And less Photoshopped, since for the first few years of its existence the paper was known for its unique splashes.
One of these splashes have got the newspaper into trouble. Saturday’s front page depicted a Spanish footballer kicking a rotund, topless man with a St George’s Cross painted across his considerable belly. The headline ‘Time for revenge’ was accompanied by a standfirst that read:
Every summer, they fill up your beaches. They drink all your beer. They make a mess of your plazas. They eat fried breakfasts all day instead of your wonderful food. They retire in your towns, and sponge off your public services. They don’t even bother to learn the language.
The front page was criticised for resorting to lazy stereotypes about the English, with some suggesting it would have fallen foul of the SNP’s Hate Crime Act had other nations been caricatured in comparable terms. The National’s editor Laura Webster has apologised, admitting the paper had ‘crossed a line’. The apology indicates reflection on the part of Webster and her editorial team and reads as sincere. Such statements are rare from British newspaper editors – a function of the industry seeing itself as a craft rather than a profession – and to that extent it is to be welcomed.
That’s not enough for the National’s implacable unionist foes, who think Webster should be sacked. On the other end of the horseshoe are hardline nationalists who defend the front page and insist it is less offensive than some newspaper cartoons, include one earlier this year which depicted SNP leaders hanged by their party’s loop-like emblem. But while Twitter tribalists compete in the offence-taking Olympics, they miss the institutional failing that produced Saturday’s front page. The bitter, chippy Anyone But England sentiment that seethes from north of the Tweed any time England is involved in international football is not unique to the National or indeed nationalists. As I’ve written before, Scots of all political persuasions and none suffer from wee man syndrome. They resent English football for failing to be as mediocre as its Scottish counterpart and count this offence among the many imaginary oppressions the Scots must suffer under Sassenach dominion. For more than a generation now, the highlight of Scottish international football has been England losing.
No, the problem with that front page is that it reflects the flippancy and shallowness of the National. Now, I’m not being priggish here. Kelvin MacKenzie’s Sun was flippant and shallow – and downright evil sometimes – but it combined an irreverent, cynical tone with a solemnity towards the issues the paper and its readers cared about. The Sun had a worldview that it promoted with vigour and if that meant monstering even MacKenzie’s idol Mrs T. then so be it. Here, and not in election endorsements, is where the Sun’s real influence lay. By balancing scurrilousness with seriousness and party loyalty with ideological conviction, the Sun enjoyed more sway over politics and public policy in the 1980s than every other paper combined.
The National enjoys no such sway over either the SNP or the Scottish government. It is difficult to think of a single policy it has influenced or changed, or a time it has nudged devolved Scottish ministers in one direction or another. When you are in the business of stenography, you take dictation rather than give it. And the National presents no particular reason for the leadership of the SNP to take it seriously, fixated as it is on the mad and the marginal, the sort of content that delights or riles its frankly loopy readership, be it the latest foolproof plan to sneak Scotland out of the Union or another barrage of bile and paranoia directed at BBC Scotland. It is a newspaper that is now ten years old but still refuses to grow up.
This is illustrated by a letter published in Tuesday’s edition which denounces Stewart McDonald, the moderate SNP MP who lost his Glasgow South seat on 4 July. McDonald, who was previously the party’s defence spokesman, has questioned the SNP’s policy of removing Trident from the Clyde within two years of Scottish independence. By way of response, the correspondence, penned by a fellow SNP activist, falsely describes McDonald as ‘pro-Trident’, claims he has been ‘groomed by the UK defence establishment’, and accuses him of ‘mixed loyalties’. It’s the sort of letter that gets written by someone who buys a lot of tin foil, and none of it for cooking. Fortuitously enough, the missive validates a point McDonald has been making about a ‘culture of unseriousness’ in the SNP.
Whether people like McDonald can drag their party back from its drift into magical thinking over independence and other issues, it will be much harder to re-tether the National. It has never been tethered to anything resembling gravity, rigour or intelligence. It might not plaster breasts all over page three like MacKenzie’s Sun did, but it makes tits out of an entire political movement. Scottish nationalism needs a platform – a newspaper, magazine or website – that offers quality reportage, campaigning journalism, and a place where serious people can debate serious ideas. The National fails on the first two counts. On the third, it doesn’t even try.
Watch: Marjorie Taylor Greene turns on Times Radio
What is it with Marjorie Taylor Greene and the Brits? First, she advised the-then Foreign Secretary David Cameron to ‘kiss my ass.’ Then, she told ex-BBC star Emily Maitlis to ‘go f**k off’. And now she has pinned the blame for the Trump assassination attempt on, er, British broadcasters at Times Radio. Clearly the spirit of 1776 is alive and well with this one…
In an interview with Times Radio reporter Jo Crawford at the Republican National Convention, Greene bristled at criticism of Trump’s pick for vice-president, JD Vance. After Crawford asked about Vance previously likening Trump to Hitler, Greene snapped and suggested that the reason ‘I have some of the most highest amount of death threats [is] because of people like you.’
She continued ‘shame on you, shame on you’ and declaring ‘we have to put up with the most unreal amount of bulls**t because of little liars like you that take your job and turn it into political activism.’ ‘Your job is the press. You should report the news’, she added before concluding:
You’re the cause of our country being divided. You’re the cause of our country being divided. You’re the cause of President Trump almost being assassinated. You’re the cause of everything wrong in evidence for these claims. No, no. You’re done. You’re done yet. Go back. Thank you.
Ouch. You can watch the exchange below:
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Boris reunites with Trump at Republican jamboree
The great and the not-so-good of the international conservative movement have descended on Wisconsin this week. Liz Truss and Nigel Farage are among the Brits jetting in to toast President Trump’s formal nomination at the Republican National Convention. But what of the man they once called ‘Britain’s Trump?’ Boris Johnson yesterday made a rather low-key appearance at the conference, appearing at vaping panel that was remarkable only for its poor turn-out.
But Johnson, it seems, has been busy behind the scenes. It turns out that the former prime minister has actually met with Trump, away from the glare of the cameras, to discuss a subject close to his heart – ongoing western aid to Ukraine. Johnson shared a picture of the two men giving a thumbs up and grinning. ‘Great to meet President Trump who is on top form after the shameful attempt on his life’, Bozza declared. ‘We discussed Ukraine and I have no doubt that he will be strong and decisive in supporting that country and defending democracy.’
Steerpike wonders what JD Vance – the America First conservative whom Trump picked as his running mate – makes of all that. Talk about a special relationship eh?
Britain’s economy is growing faster, but not fast enough
Another day, another small piece of good economic news. Today the International Monetary Fund has produced its World Outlook report for July, which revises UK growth for 2024 upwards, from 0.5 per cent to 0.7 per cent. This news follows on from last week’s monthly GDP update, which showed growth in May at 0.4 per cent – notably above economists’ predictions.
These are still not numbers to boast about. The IMF’s revision is still slightly below the 0.8 per cent the Office for Budget Responsibility predicted at the last Budget. But it shows the IMF’s downgrade for 2024 growth in April was too negative (it held its 2025 forecast for the UK at 1.5 per cent). The UK economy is slowly moving in the right direction. And while these growth rates are nowhere near enough growth to plug the multi-billion pound black holes in the public finances, it does seem that the dreary narrative around the UK economy – including its fall into recession at the end of last year – is lifting.
According to the IMF, Britain has gone from being towards the bottom of advanced economy rankings to sitting comfortably in the middle of the pack. This is still far off Labour’s promise to deliver the fastest sustained growth in the G7: the average growth rate for advanced economies this year is estimated to be 1.7 per cent. But it’s better to work your way up to the top from the middle – and Labour are going to benefit from economic updates coming down the track, including the slow and steady reduction in interest rates.
It’s worth noting that Labour has set itself a very ambitious target: the United States is forecast to grow by 2.6 per cent this year. Unlike trade wars, growth wars are no bad thing – but what Labour will have to do to significantly boost GDP is going to be politically challenging, even with its significant majority in Parliament. Building millions of new homes combined with a serious reduction in the NHS waitlist (and helping people with long-term sickness back to work) are two monumental tasks that the party has yet to give many details about how it will deliver.
A growth competition could get interesting. Over in the States, Donald Trump has just named JD Vance his vice presidential nominee, who takes a harder line on protectionism than Trump does, actively promoting tariffs. Were the Trump-Vance ticket to win, this could create an opportunity in Europe to present itself as a free-market alternative; it could also find itself in tricky territory trying to navigate trade with the US. All this will have an impact on GDP.
Starmer will have to navigate relationships abroad as well as public policy at home if he’s to get anywhere near the kind of growth figures he’s promised. But his supermajority has won him some time – something Rishi Sunak denied himself when he made his five pledges – including to get the economy growing, which he said would be achieved by the end of 2023.
No doubt had Sunak given himself a bit more time – and perhaps a later election – the economic story could have been framed slightly differently, and certainly more positively. A better economy this autumn is going to be a very helpful tool for the Labour party. But it is only the jumping-off point to deliver what Starmer has promised.
JD Vance appeals to trad America
I’m meant to maintain some air of objectivity at Trump’s selection of JD Vance for vice president, but I can’t be bothered. It’s just excellent. By appointing him, Trump guarantees that the Republican party will never go back to being neo-con warmongers run by Wall Street. To channel Kamala Harris, I believe Vance shows us what the Republican party could be, unburdened by what it has been.
The biography is well versed – white trash made good, author of Hillbilly Elegy, convert to Trump – but the philosophy is under-appreciated. The first thing to know is that he has a philosophy. How rare is that?! Most politicians ride into office on half-baked vibes and narcissism, but Vance is a thinker who has risen through the movement, someone who has paid attention to the times and what’s been written about them.
He sees America as broken, maybe the whole West. No cheap patriotism, please. Like drowning your sorrows in beer and cocaine, it’s deeply unhelpful.
There’ll be a lot of focus on the material aspects of his thinking – free trade, military aid – but his key point is that America has been remade since the 1960s by liberalism, and the experiment has hurt the very people it was meant to help because liberalism is decadent. It’s good at maximising freedom, bad at encouraging responsibility, maturity, seriousness, duty. In his Hillbilly Elegy, he demonstrated how individuals can become corrupted by self-pity. As a politician, he’s become more interested in how corporations and the state make it hard for us to live as dignified citizens by undercutting pay or polluting the culture with bad ideas.
Mass migration, even illegal, looks good – perhaps of moral benefit – to the wealthy liberal, because it means diversity and growth. To the working class, it means drug trafficking, low wages, rapid social change. The libertarian conservative is reluctant to reduce it either because they sympathise with the liberal’s cultural values or because they don’t like meddling with market forces. The populist conservative looks at the administrative state and says, ‘well, if it can be used to liberal ends, why not use it for conservative ends?’ It’s plainly never going away!
The vision of Vance is a society of happy, healthy families living on a single income. You don’t just get there through tax cuts; you must actively promote domestic industries and a healthy society. If there’s a legitimate criticism of Vance it’s that he leans towards European-style big state conservatism without going the whole hog. If we’re going to save the steel industry or ban TikTok, why not also promote unions, expand cheap healthcare or clean up the environment? But even if Trump/Vance isn’t heading there yet, it at least points American conservatism in the right direction.
Much will be made of his conversion to Catholicism, not least among liberal, cradle Catholics who despair of the conservative variety. Isn’t there a tension, they ask, between the universalism of the Church and Vance’s populist nationalism?
I think so; it is a serious problem. But Catholicism is drawing a lot of converts on the New Right because it has a rich heritage (Vance chose Augustine of Hippo as his confirmation saint); because the Church made the western civilisation they wish to preserve; and because Catholicism addresses what Barry Goldwater called ‘the whole man’. The Catholic isn’t just a Catholic in church, but at play, rest, even in bed, and it makes us part of something bigger and older than ourselves.
Westerners are not just consumers, but also producers; not only individuals but members of a community; and not self-invented citizens, but custodians of historical tradition that stretches back to Lincoln, Adams, Augustine and St Paul. In a speech to the National Conservatives conference, Vance dismissed the notion, popular on left and right, that America is a creedal nation, the product of ideas. Rather, its governing ideas are the product of religion, culture, time and place; the historical nation is real, it has a substance. It must be cherished and passed on.
The Trump phenomenon was motored by personality: you were really voting for him. Vance is driven by philosophy: his fans like what he thinks. Whether he loses or wins, he’ll likely be the Republican nominee in 2028 – and thus the baton passes to a new generation of conservatives.
Watch more on SpectatorTV:
Watch: Labour MP retakes oath after republican protest
Well, well, well, constitutional monarchy looks set to continue after all – despite the best efforts of Labour’s Clive Lewis. The MP for Norwich South was forced to swear in to parliament for a second time after his first attempt didn’t quite, er, cut the mustard…
Last Wednesday, Lewis drew attention to himself when he omitted to swear allegiance to King Charles and his ‘heirs and successors’, instead remarking: ‘I take this oath under protest, and in the hope that one day my fellow citizens will democratically decide to live in a republic.’ That’s not quite how it works, Clive…
It has now transpired that the parliamentary office sent Lewis a letter later that day warning him that he could be liable for legal action, endless fines and even a by-election under the Parliamentary Oaths Act 1866, if he didn’t ‘remake the affirmation in the words prescribed by law’. Crikey. MPs are also unable to participate in debates, vote or get paid until they swear in.
Lewis didn’t quite fancy facing those repercussions and duly rejoined the back of the queue earlier today. The Labour man seemed rather miffed at having to read it all out a second time, but just about made it through the ‘heirs and successors’ bit correctly. His lefty colleagues in the background could hardly contain their smirks as they watched the Norwich MP being forced to toe the line. A coup now looks unlikely this session, as both Lewis – and, to the Labour MP’s obvious displeasure – the King remain in place.
Watch Lewis’ first attempt here:
And his second…
A David and Goliath battle involving a billion-dollar pornography website
Laila Mickelwait’s Takedown describes in fascinating and often distressing detail both why Pornhub, the Canadian-owned internet pornography video-sharing website, needs to be destroyed and how this might be achieved. It’s not the story of a movement against the porn industry, like the one I have been involved with for decades, but more a woman’s lone, Erin Brockovich-like crusade to shut down a major distributor.
The book relates how, through investigative journalism, Mickelwait discovered that one of the world’s biggest websites was knowingly profiting from sex trafficking, and reveals her subsequent fight to hold Pornhub accountable for its distribution and monetisation of child sexual abuse and rape. She is the founder and CEO of the Justice Defense Fund and the founder of the Traffickinghub movement – but she is no ideologue. Indeed, she is keen to specify that what she seeks to abolish is illegal trafficking, not the legal pornography industry. Her view is that as long as it is ‘lawful and not harming another person’, what happens between consenting adults is their business. She points out that she herself has ‘hardly lived the life of a prude or an enemy of the entertainment business’, and has been known to spend New Year’s Eve at a Playboy mansion party.
Pornhub was storing all videos of child sexual abuse ever to have been on their site. That is a felony
But she is a Christian, and looked to prayer for inspiration in tackling the monster of the porn trade; and she eventually succeeded in getting Pornhub to publicly confess to a federal felony, with Katie, a senior staff member, disclosing that the company had access to every single video in their huge collection – dating to pre-2009. In so doing, Katie admitted that Pornhub was storing all videos of child sexual abuse ever to have been on the site. That is a criminal offence.
After spending countless hours combing through comments on Reddit, Mickelwait realised that what she was looking at was ‘a gold mine of incriminating comments from Pornhub’s own mouth’. On one thread, a user seeking advice stated: ‘There is child porn all over Pornhub.’ Katie offered reassurance: there was no need to inform a law enforcement agency – just send the evidence to them. In other words, a senior manager at Pornhub was telling someone not to report to the authorities the child sexual abuse videos they had found on the site.
Mickelwait chronicles the investigations conducted by herself and colleagues, who have spoken with rape survivors, moderators and former employees of Mind-Geek – which owned Pornhub until June last year. The revelations, written in potboiler form, drop ‘live’ on to the page. When she describes chasing criminals in an attempt to hold them to account in US courts the style is hyperbolic – but, then, there is much that is dramatic about the online porn industry.
I have known the author for some years, occasionally bumping into her at conferences where global experts gather – including tech men capable of policing the internet for illegal content. Feminists have long argued that pornography in itself represents abuse of women, which in turn helps build misogynistic attitudes and behaviour among boys and men. Mickelwait’s focus is on the rape and child abuse imagery that manages to end up online without triggering any penalties: not for the rapists, not for those who filmed the crimes, not for the host sites (such as Pornhub) and not for the consumers of illegal content.
A Canadian X account, @EyeDeco, targeted Serena, who, having discovered videos of herself being abused as an underage teenager on Pornhub, came forward to Mickelwait. This account posted old Instagram images of Serena in an attempt to shame her. It was unmasked as Grace Sinclair from Montreal, operating on behalf of MindGeek.
This is not just about the odd video depicting a criminal act that sneaks in among the many millions of videos hosted on such sites. Pornhub is the tenth most visited website in the world and operates in plain sight. Its free content – which makes up the vast majority of the videos available – is a smokescreen for its pay-to-download content. It hosted countless images of child abuse, rape and sadistic sexual violence – the largest collection in the world. The author’s portrayal of those responsible for such crimes – the rapists, traffickers and sadists – is all the more terrifying when you realise that these are just regular, everyday men.
And Pornhub is clearly culpable. Out of more than 1,200 employees, just one person was tasked with reviewing the hundreds of thousands of films flagged for depicting real crimes of child sexual abuse, rape and trafficking. At one stage, there was a backlog of 700,000 films. INHOPE, the international association of internet hotlines which purports to lead the fight against child sexual abuse material online, has taken money from Pornhub – ignoring the conflict of interest and helping Pornhub present a clean image.
Having interviewed women whose rapes and sexual assaults were filmed and uploaded to Pornhub, I understand something of the extent of their trauma, of knowing that the men viewing these videos were taking sexual pleasure from their suffering. Some women who have worked in the porn industry have sued Pornhub for ‘conduct amounting to rape’ on set. The number of lawsuits against the company rises constantly. Mickelwait documents the cases, and her mission is clearly personal. But her depiction of herself as a lone crusader is disingenuous. There is in fact a proud history of such work, including the outstanding contribution made by Gail Dines, the author of Pornland. Yet Mickelwait neither acknowledges the wider movement nor provides any of the historical context.
There have been complaints from adults who say that images of themselves being sexually abused as children have been uploaded, and there is irrefutable evidence that Pornhub has hosted rape, trafficking and child abuse content. It claims that there were no videos of extremely young children being raped – ‘Every video and photo is reviewed manually before upload by a large and extensive team of human moderators’ – yet the site was heaving with illegal content.
Takedown is a testament to the tenacity of Mickelwait and others who refuse to ignore grave injustices. Documented in an accessible and highly entertaining style, her campaign did more than just clip Pornhub’s wings: it also served, through her collaboration with high-profile journalists, to educate the general public about the reality of the porn industry.
Today, porn drives technology. It also generates more profit than Hollywood and the music industry combined. Fighting this is a classic David and Goliath battle. But what Takedown tells us is that the struggle to hold the industry to account must be a concerted, multi-pronged effort. One woman can make a difference, but she can’t do it alone.
‘I’m a hypocrite and a total fraud’ – the confessions of a French Surrealist poet
Michel Leiris (1901-90) was one of those intellectual adventurers who are the astonishment of French literature in the 20th century. Their achilles’ heel is that most were communists, in a few cases Nazis; and nothing kills the life of the mind more thoroughly than preaching. Their saving grace is that many were eccentric characters, and their autobiographical work can often be their most luminous legacy.
Among Leiris’s subjects are his dogs, his ideal hotel, his hatred of Wagner, his Anglophile snobbery and his tailor
Because they were anti-form, the ideal prose vehicles became ‘aphorism’ or ‘fleuve’. The most brilliant of the French aphorists, Emile Cioran (though he was Romanian), exclaimed in an interview ‘Expression – that’s the cure!’, meaning not society’s cure but the writer’s. Leiris usually chose the fleuve route; and since he was a psycho-mess and wanted lots of therapy, there’s plenty of outpour. He married a rich woman, and so there was plenty of time too. This exemplar of Tom Wolfe’s ‘radical chic’ divided his days between an apartment on the quai des Grands-Augustins and a country house not too far from the agonising toils of St Germain. Plus official visits to communist regimes and several forays into primitive society.
This, the fourth and final volume of his autobiography, was published in Paris in 1976 and is now translated by Richard Sieburth. I was put off by his rendering of Leiris’s sweet title Frêle Bruit as Frail Riffs. In the event, the translation reads well, often beautifully – no mean task, given that Leiris was a neurotic hair-splitter and auto-contrarian, tying up his pages in endless loops of subordinate clauses.
Here, as before, he is writing at length on the impossibility of achieving anything by writing, whether it be an intellectual goal or change in the external world. In the former case he is surely wrong, since literature is a triumph of our species. In the latter case, he was also wrong, though not in the sense he implied. Words have often wrought murderous destruction in the real world via literal addiction to scripture or to political formulae.
‘Whatever I do I only half do,’ he wails. He became a Surrealist, but soon fell out with André Breton. He became an ethnographer (sort of). He tried his hand at novels. Though a fleuviste, he wonders if instead he should ‘go for something far more incisive… little batches of phrases that say a great deal in a few words’. In many hands this has proven a highly successful idea, to replace the old-fashioned railway journey of a prose work with something like a small galaxy. He’d done it himself, in a much earlier autobiographical book on his sex life, L’âge d’homme. Many of the entries here, in contrast to the autobiography’s three previous volumes, are indeed short: poems (they are very clever), brief incidents. But it doesn’t satisfy him. He always needs to explain the explanation.
It is embarrassing when Leiris comes to the Revolution, because like all masochists he is a sentimentalist. He believes an earthly utopia should be striven for, ‘to get to that place where poetry and revolution might blend into each other’. He thinks you can legislate for ‘the marvellous’ and for ‘love’. Walter Pater’s hard, gemlike flame is ever before him: ‘… to live the marvellous at the highest and most accelerated intensity…’ Unsurprisingly, he was a lifelong insomniac. He never visited a gulag.
When all this gets too much even for Leiris, he writes about his dogs, his ideal hotel, the decadent night-owl in white tie and tails, his Anglophile snobbery, his hatred of Wagner, his love of the Mediterranean and tropical lands, the respective merits of town and country, the nobility of not having children, King Arthur and the Round Table, his tailor, ‘the fetishistic affection I feel for my clothes, which like my writings represent a feature of my person as it appears to others’.
This dossier of a book is as unique as its author’s fingerprints, something that all autobiographies should be and which few are. He is oddly genial throughout, even as the pages wither away in self-laceration and pirouettes of futility: ‘This idea keeps gnawing at me: deep down, I’m a total fraud.’ What dandiacal impudence! Maybe that is the secret of his improbable appeal. He says he is a hypocrite, that his writing is mere bricolage. He decides the only way forward is to conduct his private life with ‘graciousness and extreme modesty’. So is this the end of it? Not at all. Much more autobiographical work bodied forth well into his eighties. Meanwhile, he’d kept a secret journal from 1922 to just before his death. A thousand pages from it was published in Paris in 1992. What’s next – the letters?
In search of kindred spirits: An Absence of Cousins, by Lore Segal, reviewed
In Lore Segal’s An Absence of Cousins, Nat Cohn, a fellow at the Concordance Institute, a small college in Connecticut, browses through a children’s novel during a staff meeting and exclaims: ‘We don’t write stories like this any more. Chronic plot deficiency is our problem.’
The problem for contemporary novelists is that tightly woven plots of cause and effect belie the way their readers experience the world. Like her compatriot Elizabeth Strout in Olive Kitteridge and Olive Again, Segal addresses it by featuring a single protagonist, Ilka Weisz, a young Austrian émigrée, and various recurring subsidiary characters, in a series of closely interlinked stories.
Many of these first appeared in the New Yorker and all were collected in Shakespeare’s Kitchen (2008) – the Shakespeare in question being either Leslie, the Institute’s director, or Eliza, his brash, outspoken wife, who take Ilka under their wing when she moves to Concordance from New York. Segal’s choice of the less snappy title for this reissue underscores her intention to focus on her central theme: the need to cultivate a broad network of friends and acquaintances who fulfil the roles traditionally played by extended families.
She carefully delineates the smalltown Connecticut setting while leaving the period vague, although, given that Ilka left ‘Hitler’s Europe’ at the age of seven and has a baby around the time the Institute installs its first computer, it is safe to assume that it’s the mid- to late-1960s. This is a time when the Institute staff and their friends are free to enjoy long, boozy gatherings in the middle of the working day, and their most distinguished colleague, the Nobel laureate Winterneet, is so often absent from his desk that Ilka starts to wonder whether he actually exists.
Winterneet, who does eventually make a brief appearance, is just one of the richly eccentric characters – Institute members, their wives, children and students, not to mention a conscience-pricking dog – whom Ilka encounters in Concordance. Most memorable of all is Gerti Gruner, a fellow Viennese refugee, whom Ilka shuns, seemingly because she reminds her too much of herself.
The tone shifts in the later section of the book when adultery, death and echoes of the Holocaust and Hiroshima enter its pages. But Segal’s precise, witty prose and boundless empathy ensure that, even at its darkest, Ilka’s world of ‘elective cousinship’ is one filled with enchantment.
Margaret Tudor – queen, regent and hapless intermediary
The history of princesses and queens has become well-trodden ground in the women’s history genre, particularly the Tudors. Linda Porter’s The Thistle and the Rose, a life of Margaret Tudor, queen consort to James IV and mother of James V, provides a refreshing change in subject.
Margaret has had to share the stage with some of the most famous names and voices of the 16th century: Henry VII and his queen, Elizabeth of York; Henry VIII and his wives; and, of course, her namesake, Margaret Beaufort, the formidable Tudor matriarch who deftly helped place her son, the victor of Bosworth, on the throne. Margaret Tudor, though less considered in popular history, held equal if not greater sway in her contribution to history, as Porter demonstrates in her meticulously detailed biography of the English princess turned queen of Scotland.
The relationship between England and Scotland was fraught, with two centuries of war played out in the borderlands, a frontier zone peppered with garrisons. Margaret’s marriage to James IV of Scotland was intended to put an end to the fighting. Margaret’s importance to Anglo-Scottish peace has perhaps been overlooked by historians, but to her contemporaries, her marriage was a significant one. Aged 13 (young even by the standards of the time), Margaret travelled from Richmond to Scotland while still in mourning. The recent loss of her mother and her brother Arthur ‘shook the royal family to its core’. Henry VII and Elizabeth had lived in fidelity, having built a marriage on love as well as duty, a union following the Wars of the Roses. If Margaret had the same expectations for her relationship with James IV she would be disappointed.
James was young, attractive and a notorious philanderer, with an established mistress. (His reputation later prompted Walter Scott to suggest that en route to Flodden he seduced the Lady Heron, resulting in her abandoning the defence of Ford Castle.) Nonetheless, James doted on his young wife, gifting her an intricately detailed Book of Hours which later included a miniature of Margaret kneeling at an altar bearing the words ‘God us Defend’. As queen, she did her duty and throughout her late teens she was almost constantly pregnant. Though there was much adversity in her life, the real tragedy was the loss of nearly all of her eight children, some in utero, others in the cradle or childhood. The emotional impact of this must have been unbearable, which perhaps – this being such an important part of a woman’s life – could have been given more attention in the narrative.
The couple did, however, have one healthy son, the future James V. His birth precipitated the death of his father at the Battle of Flodden in 1513, a scene colourfully described, from the position of the armies to the detail of the cannons and the eventual bloody fate of James IV. Noting the atrocity of the battle, Porter writes: ‘The scene of slaughter was so appalling that, at its height, the loss of life rivalled in intensity some of the actions of the Somme.’
It was James IV’s wish that his wife would act as regent in the event of his death, and she did so with grit. Her main incentive was the security of her surviving son and, this being a man’s world, her regency soon felt unsteady. Margaret made the ill-fated decision to remarry. In a secret ceremony, she wed Archibald Douglas, a member of one of Scotland’s oldest and most notorious families. For Porter, this was not a lustful whim but a carefully considered decision to protect the future of her children, ‘looking to shore up her power base and build on it’. Her plan rendered her regency obsolete and she was forced to flee to Henry VIII’s court, but following a well-timed return to Scotland, she eventually saw to it that her son was installed as James V.
Telling the lives of women is challenging, owing to the scarcity of information available. Even for royal women the evidence is scant. The archive itself is gendered. When the record has little to offer, there is even greater need for a close reading of the material that is available. In places, the book might have offered a bolder, more creative perspective to avoid the story orbiting around ‘great men’.
A valuable source, however, is a collection of Margaret’s personal letters. These detail her disputes with her brother Henry VIII, indicating Margaret’s determination to secure her immediate family by showing strength and resolve against a notorious tyrant. The letters, interwoven with literary material and immense detail concerning the state of Anglo-Scottish politics, make The Thistle and Rose a fine example of royal biography and a welcome addition to Tudor narrative history.
Repenting at leisure: Early Sobrieties, by Michael Deagler, reviewed
Garlanded with praise from Percival Everett (‘the real deal’), Michael Deagler’s debut novel Early Sobrieties arrives with a fully formed literary voice best described as hysterical understatement. ‘Like all histories,’ Deagler’s twentysomething ex-alcoholic protagonist Dennis Monk tells us early on, ‘my family’s seemed composed of a series of recurring mistakes that, while theoretically avoidable, tended nevertheless to repeat themselves.’ Back living with his folks in suburban south Philadelphia after seven years of solid boozing, Monk is at leisure to repent his former life – a narrative of ‘utter shock and tragedy, a knee-capped bildungsroman’. The hysteria, while always close to the restrained surface of the prose, never quite breaks through.
This episodic novel has no plot as such: all we have is Monk’s peripatetic wanderings and the pleasure of his voice, which is consistently funny and wise. Realising that self-awareness was ‘recent, revelatory and bleak’, Monk sets about making amends for his drunken misdemeanours, though with little success. He spends much time reconnecting with old buddies in bars, ‘jealous of everybody for everything’, unable to interact socially, downing glasses of water while they get happily hammered: ‘With every round he ordered me a water… though I hardly needed so many. The accumulation of half-empty cups made it look like I was preparing a glass-harp performance.’
Unable to find work other than as a delivery driver (‘I’d been misinformed regarding the centrality of F. Scott Fitzgerald to the American job market’), Monk leaves his parents’ house and drifts from couch to couch, staying with college friends, also witnessing drunken altercations whose violence is described in prurient, albeit drily comic, terms. There’s a sense of dislocation or dissociation in this recovering addict’s observations, which Deagler perfectly articulates. Only when describing the suburban sprawl of Philadelphia, with its ‘cheesesteaks the size of dachshunds’, its malls, bland highways and the ‘vegetable stink of the Delaware’, does Monk really escape from his interior musings.
With its shifting cast of characters, Early Sobrieties perhaps lacks a sense of unity or narrative drive, presenting itself more as a series of linked short stories. Indeed, some chapters have appeared as standalone pieces in McSweeney’s, Harper’s and elsewhere. This is a shame, as we never learn about that family history of recurring mistakes. Monk’s postman father and weary paralegal mother disappear after the opening pages. We’re enticingly told: ‘An Irish Catholic family abhors nothing so much as a frank conversation.’ We want to know about why Monk started drinking in the first place, apart from having an addictive personality.
What makes the novel cohere, and what makes it such a pleasure, is Monk’s stream-clear voice and his growing insight into his condition. The ‘early’ of the title can only refer to the daunting lifetime of stringent self-control that lies ahead of him. ‘Take my years,’ he says at the end. ‘Just leave me my days.’
Another mistress for Victor Hugo: Célina, by Catherine Axelrad, reviewed
Recently I visited Hauteville House, Victor Hugo’s home on Guernsey, now magnificently restored, where he spent 15 years of exile in opposition to the autocratic regime of Napoleon III. His third-floor eyrie, a crystal cage with walls and ceilings of plate glass, resembles a greenhouse. Hugo wrote there, standing at a small, flat-topped desk, gazing out across the water at the distant coastline of France. He slept in one of two adjacent attic rooms. In the other slept a chambermaid, summoned by her master with a few light taps on the partition wall.
Vulnerable but resilient, Célina accepts the two francs left under her pillow for a night of sexual favours
The publication in the 1950s of coded entries in Hugo’s account books revealed payments for sex to a succession of serving maids. One of these was Célina Henry, the narrator of Catherine Axelrad’s novella. Published in France in 1997, the book has been translated into English by Philip Terry with some nice demotic touches.
Axelrad takes the bare facts about Célina – born into poverty on Alderney, joining the Hugo household in the late 1850s, and dying from tuberculosis in 1861 – and weaves them into a story of a vulnerable but resilient young woman who accepts the two francs left under her pillow for a night of sexual favours while eavesdropping during the day on the life taking place above stairs. Célina’s curiosity and intelligence provide her with insights about Hugo’s marriage and his relationship with the mistress he keeps down the street. She adopts the tragedy of Hugo’s family life, the drowning of his elder daughter in the Seine years earlier, as if it were her own. She grows jealous for her intimacy with Hugo when he briefly turns his attention to the local seamstress.
The extraordinary quality of Axelrad’s writing is the silence that envelops it. There is a featherweight lightness to it all that is a supreme contrast to the heavy mournfulness one feels after reaching the final page. Célina is not a submissive character, and life’s blows, including fears of impending death, glance off her, seemingly without leavinga mark. Nor is she subversive (unlike Célestine in Octave Mirbeau’s The Diary of a Chambermaid, whose employer fetishises her boots and ends up dead with one of the boots stuffed in his mouth). She knows that her social standing limits her freedom and the options open to her, and that it’s not, as one character says, ‘a crime to sleep with a servant’. Nevertheless, within those limitations, she is able to exert her individuality and choose her own lovers, including one disastrous final relationship after she leaves Guernsey.
At the end, I could almost believe that Axelrad’s Célina could have had some influence on Hugo’s creative life, perhaps as a prototype of Fantine, one of the most attractive characters in Les Misérables, forced to become a prostitute before she, too, dies from tuberculosis.
The irrepressible musical gift of Huddie Ledbetter
Huddie Ledbetter, better known by the prison moniker Lead Belly, was a musical genius born in the southern United States just as Jim Crow laws were starting to bite. He fell foul of an unapologetically racist legal system and ended up serving on a chain gang in 1915, later doing time in state penitentiaries in Texas (1918-25), Louisiana (1930-34) and at Rikers Island in New York (1939).
Sheila Curran Bernard takes as her focus the years 1933 to 1935 when, after years of imprisonment, Ledbetter took an academic, John Lomax, to be his manager and organise his entrance into the larger musical world of northern America. She reveals for the first time what a catastrophically bad decision that was, because Lomax’s greed and racism led him to treat Ledbetter as little more than a chauffeur, making him dependent on what could be raised by passing round the hat at the end of concerts – a sum averaging, she notes, 50 cents a day.
Lomax called Ledbetter ‘my convict negro’, making him dress up in his old prison uniform, and told audiences that Ledbetter had a reputation for being drunk, irascible and violent. The newspapers went crazy: ‘Sweet Singer of the Swamplands Here to Do a Few Tunes between Homicides’ was one headline in the Herald Tribune, and as recently as 2019 the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (to which Ledbetter was inducted in 1988) described him as ‘a man possessed with a hot temper and enormous strength’.
It was all lies. Huddie’s best friends never saw him drunk and insisted he didn’t start trouble, adding: ‘He loved children and he loved people.’ His wife described him as a gentle man. What makes him exceptional is that his musical brilliance survived 11 years within the most brutal prisons in the US. Three prisoners died in the chain gang of which he was part in May 1932. Whippings were frequent, on bare skin with leather straps; three blows were enough to break the skin, most prisoners screaming by the sixth or seventh blow.
It says much about his strength of mind that, despite such terrors, he applied to the state governor for a pardon – granted in August 1934. But then this was a man of exceptional quality. He stored in his head countless songs which, over the course of the next century, would permeate the culture. ‘Midnight Special’ has been covered by Bob Dylan, Brian Wilson, Creedence Clearwater Revival and Abba, among many others; ‘Goodnight, Irene’ by Tom Waits, Ry Cooder, Bryan Ferry, Rod Stewart and Nick Cave.
Bernard aims to demonstrate the extent to which Ledbetter was a victim of a racist legal system and, when he was released from prison, of an exploitative manager who deprived him of all but the barest means of existence. She has written a revelatory volume that rescues its subject from misconceptions that still circulate, enabling us to see more clearly a composer and performer who was the peer of Blind Lemon Jefferson and Bessie Smith, who both performed with him.
But this is a work of academic research which most readers will find difficult, disjointed and hard to navigate. That is hardly Bernard’s fault – her book is designed for the specialists who will make use of her 40 pages of annotations and the five-page list of sources. It’s easy to imagine a life of Lead Belly from birth to death which tells the story of how a young man with an irrepressible musical gift found his life derailed by a series of rigged trials in a racist country and later went on to become a widely admired singer and composer. Perhaps Bernard’s book will encourage someone to commission it.
An AI visionary looks forward to the best of all possible worlds
In 1993 Vernor Vinge popularised the notion of the Singularity – the point at which exponentially accelerating trends in multiple technologies move out of control in an endless positive feedback loop. Vinge was a science fiction writer; Ray Kurzweil is not. In 1993 he had already pioneered optical character recognition and synthesisers that could precisely mimic real instruments. His mission crystallised into making Vinge’s conceit a reality. He is principal researcher and ‘AI visionary’ at Google – and principal proselytiser, too, through any number of portentously titled books.
The Age of Spiritual Machines (1999) set out his stall; The Singularity is Near (2005) staked a claim for human-level intelligence in computers by 2029 and a generalised apotheosis in 2045. So, on his timescale, we are roughly half way between 2005 and a third book in the trilogy, presumably The Singularity is Now – although by that time no one will be reading books because adaptations to our neocortices will mean that all the world’s information will be available to everyone, everywhere, immediately, inescapably.
Faced with this prediction, the obvious questions are: will this happen? Will this happen on this timescale? And will the world be better as a result? Yes, says Kurzweil, and yes and yes. The least interesting parts of the book run a victory lap on his previous predictions. Twenty years ago he was regarded as wildly over-optimistic about the possible pace of change. Now, compared with a lot of Silicon Valley boosterism, he looks conservative. It is a truism of futurism that we overestimate changes in the short term and underestimate them in the long. Since 2005, the compounding effect of two decades of Moore’s Law (that computer power doubles roughly every 18 months) has brought in its revenges. In 2005 a dollar would buy you around 12 million computations per second. Today that number would be around 48 billion.
Timetables being what they are in book publishing, some of Kurzweil’s commentary on AI and Large Language Models feels almost quaint, as the technology has been so widely covered. (LLMs, in particular, are coming for the livelihoods of white-collar workers who use words for a living, so, unsurprisingly, those people have paid considerably more attention to the transformation than they did when technology was replacing manual work.) Recent research by Epoch AI suggests that AI improves by a factor of just more than four every year – so by 2029 it could be more than 1,000 times as powerful as today.
More contested are the social effects of the Singularity, or at least the run-up to it. This comes as a combination of interlocking technologies, principally advances in computing power fuelling AI; nanotechnology; and life extension. Kurzweil’s argument is that over the broad sweep of history, technology makes people’s lives better and more rewarding. Literacy is up; perinatal mortality is down; solar power is spreading rapidly. Democracy is becoming more embedded (although the record of the last two years has put that into reverse).
The effect on jobs is shrugged away, as is easy if you take a sufficiently long view, although that long view is not one in which anyone’s life is actually lived. He makes a case for the importance and desirability of life extension: more life in good mental and physical health is an unalloyed blessing, and life extension offers that kind of old age rather than eternity as a Struldbrugg. From there he hops to the belief that soon ageing will be a can that can be kicked down the road indefinitely. If 100-year-olds in the next decade start living to 150, that offers 50 more years to solve the problem of living to 200, and so on. Kurzweil was born in 1948, so feels the timelines of this particularly acutely.
His penultimate chapter flags up some existential threats to humanity and therefore to the Singularity. There could be a nuclear war. New biochemical threats could emerge. Nanotechnology could reduce the world to a grey goo. AI itself could run rogue. But he pronounces himself ‘cautiously optimistic’.AI makes these problems easier to solve: ‘We should work towards a world where the powers of AI are equally distributed, so that its effects reflect the values of humanity as a whole.’
That sentiment is precisely where The Singularity Is Nearer, for all its limning of technical possibilities and its Panglossian extrapolation of back-of-the-envelope calculations into visions of a transhumanist future, fails to make its optimistic case convincingly. Kurzweil is a master of all sciences except politics. When he hymns the possibilities of 3D-printing, he notes in passing the dangers of 3D-printed guns invisible to scanners. His considered conclusion: ‘This will require a thoughtful re-evaluation of current regulations and policies.’ Well, indeed. More broadly, when he discusses distributional issues, his premise is that the ‘idea that wealthy elites would simply hoard this new abundance is grounded in a misunderstanding’. Has Kurzweil never met any of the wealthy elite?
Every single technology discussed in the book will in the short term create losers faster than it creates improvements for society as a whole – not to mention a whole realm of unpredictable unintended consequences. And the capacity of political systems to navigate challenges of that sort has not, to put it mildly, been improving exponentially.