What Britain owed to Gracie Fields

Simon Heffer is the supreme Stakhanovite among British writers. Where the original Stakhanov moved 227 tonnes of coal in a single shift, within the past decade Heffer has produced four massive volumes of modern British history, each little less than 1,000 pages. Alongside them he has edited three equally voluminous diaries of the waspish socialite MP ‘Chips’ Channon, as well as writing regular reviews and columns. Hats off to the master!

In this latest and final volume of his tetralogy chronicling the British century between Queen Victoria’s accession in 1837 and Neville Chamberlain’s reluctant declaration of war on Germany in 1939, Heffer once more treats us to his vast knowledge and trenchant opinions on almost every aspect of the nation’s state, from high politics to crime and popular entertainment. It is an astonishing achievement of narrative history, and if it has an old-fashioned feel, it’s in the best sense of that phrase.

The author is a political animal with strong cultural interests, and while the bulk of this detailed work concerns the day-to-day struggle for control of the country at a crucial moment of change, he never neglects the parallel worlds of music and literature – devoting many pages, for example, to the fairly obscure writer Humbert Wolfe, and several more to one of his heroes, the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Each volume of these histories has an overarching theme – the ‘arrogant swagger’ of the Edwardian era, for instance, masking a deep anxiety about the future of British power. The narrative arc of this book explores how the country was dragged kicking and screaming into fighting a second world war soon after the first had left a bereaved nation firmly wedded to pacifism.

Heffer peppers his prose with extracts from the diaries and letters of contemporary witnesses, including Virginia Woolf, Maynard Keynes and the eccentric novelist John Cowper Powys. These illustrate how the statistics he marshals on every page affected people at the time, though members of the Bloomsbury set were hardly ordinary folk.

We usually view the interwar period as the roaring 1920s – girls with bobs dancing the Black Bottom – giving way to the grim 1930s: unemployment and hunger marches under the deepening shadow of war. Heffer presents a more nuanced picture, reminding us that for every Jarrow marcher beset by jobless near-starvation, there was a southern suburb enjoying ever-rising levels of prosperity and increasing leisure time filled with weekly visits to the cinema or lido.

The iconic figure who bestrides these two Britains is Gracie Fields, the Rochdale lass who sang her way from the music hall to the silver screen and ended her days in the lap of luxury on Capri. ‘Our Gracie’ not only gives Heffer his title, but epitomises for him the warm, resilient spirit of the common people who endured every hardship and injustice inflicted on them but managed to survive in some style.

Although Heffer writes from a High Tory perspective, he is more properly a classic Liberal. His 19th-century political hero is the upright anti-imperialist Gladstone rather than the slick chancer Disraeli. As such, he keeps a compassionate eye on the have-nots comprising the majority of the population, and deeply disapproves of unprincipled politicians such as Lloyd George, even when he successfully negotiates Ireland’s independence.

The book culminates with the premiership of Neville Chamberlain and the run up to war. In the great debate on appeasement – whether the high-minded PM was a far-sighted statesman striving for peace while preparing for war or a naive dupe who allowed Hitler to lead him by the nose – Heffer is scrupulously fair. Using aircraft production figures and the like he proves that Chamberlain followed a contradictory policy of rearmament while hoping against hope that the Führer could be persuaded to take the path of peace. In the words of one of his ministers, Chamberlain ‘walked into the thieves’ kitchen thinking it was the Carlton Club’. For his part, Hitler thought the PM a schlappschwanz (limp dick).

For those with the time and stamina to ascend this mountain of words, Heffer’s tetralogy offers a commanding view of a century that saw Britain at the summit and then beginning its descent. I think the word is ‘magisterial’.

What makes other people’s groceries so engrossing?

When you think of a collector you might imagine, say, Sir John Soane, Henry Wellcome, Charles Saatchi or Peggy Guggenheim, the fabulously wealthy, amassing their statuary, paintings and penis gourds in order to furnish their Xanadu palaces or display their good taste and fortune for the benefit of the nation. But there are other kinds of collectors: normal people.

Most of us at some point have had a little collection on the go – stamps, pebbles, gonks, succulents, Pokémon cards. I remember at school there was always great competition for Panini football stickers: everyone seemed forever to be in search of the elusive Kenny Dalglish.

Of course there will always be hoarders of knick-knacks, old tools, novelty nut-crackers, Northern Dairies milk bottles and goodness knows what else. I know someone who collects toenail clippers and another who collects snow globes and embroidered slippers – a mini V & A in the making. My uncle Dave used to search for those Bell’s Whisky ceramic decanter things. Charles Kane he most certainly was not: Dave was a minicab driver from Basildon.

Paper ephemera is perhaps the most delightful and affordable stuff for the average person. It’s cheap, durable and doesn’t take up too much space. No need for your Hearst castle, or even a drinks cabinet or shelf above the sideboard: you can keep your collection of pre-war bus tickets in a ringbinder in a drawer. The curator Ingrid Swenson preserves her collection in a dozen black presentation folders.

Swenson has amassed other people’s shopping lists. Her book is a beautifully produced catalogue of this collection, though catalogue is perhaps too strong a word. It’s just a small, dense, thick book full of colour reproductions of the hundreds – in excess of a thousand – of shopping lists found by her at the Waitrose on the Holloway Road in London over a period of about ten years, plus a few pages of explanatory text. You might think such a book would be simply silly: at best, an early Christmas stocking filler. But in fact it’s unputdownable, like a series of notes towards Beckett’s short plays. I found it much more interesting than some of the novels on the current Booker shortlist.

‘Almonds, asparagus, chillis, wine in Whitstable.’ ‘Milk, bread, eggs, rolls, veg – green beans (org), TURK.’ ‘Scallops Sardines Bread Broc (2) Soup PorridGe.’ It’s not difficult to understand why this stuff appeals. There’s the obvious odd aesthetic value: the vast array of colourful Post-It notes, the index cards, the backs of envelopes; and the incredible range of handwriting on display. (One important lesson from the book: penmanship has gone to pot.) But there’s also that rare glimpse into other people’s private lives: someone’s entire world, in Swenson’s words, ‘captured in a single, modest entity’. It undoubtedly helps that Swenson refrains from offering any grand theory or set of interpretations in her commentary. There’s no mention of Walter Benjamin, tempting as that must have been, no pontificating about cultures of consumption and obsolescence, no banging on about our archives of the self. She suggests merely some of the information that we might wish to infer from the limited data that the lists provide: age, gender, dietary habits, profession. Who exactly is buying ‘moose bread pastries chicken vodka + fags’? Or ‘Salt Nibbles Milk Cherrios Bunnies Burger Buns’?

She may not labour the point, but hers is undoubtedly a heroic task. We all know that in the end most of us will leave no trace; there’ll be little or no evidence that any of us ever existed. And, besides, the written shopping list as a part of our everyday lives is disappearing:

As life becomes more digital, more efficient and more ecologically aware, the shopping list as a quotidian fact of life, like so many everyday items, sounds and smells, is gradually dying out.

Swenson has been gathering our remnants, in several senses.

Behind all collections one can catch a glimpse of the collector: even today, Sir John Soane seems to inhabit every inch of his museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Swenson reveals in the final pages of her book that the shopping list project – begun in 2014 when she picked up her first crumpled note – ended last year, after she left her job of 23 years and embarked on life as a freelancer, and no longer found herself visiting Waitrose as often. If nothing else, Shopping Lists provides a reminder of a world that was – a time when ordinary Londoners could afford to buy, say, mozzarella and beer. Extraordinary.

The difficulties faced by identical twins

Despite being a twin myself, I wasn’t necessarily disposed to love William Viney’s Twinkind, a book for which the phrase ‘lavishly illustrated’ might have been invented. Much writing on twins intended for the general reader (including recent fiction such as Brit Bennett’s bestselling The Vanishing Half) has been produced by non-twins, or writers who have twins in their family. The emphasis is often on how twins appear to the singleton majority, lazily depicting them either as freaks of nature or prodigies of psychic connection. Indeed, Twinkind’s visual component seems to be asking the reader to look at twins from the outside, while its title appears to encourage us to see twins as a species apart. It was refreshing, then, to find that Viney is an identical twin, and approaches twins from the experience of actually being one.

Split into three sections, ‘Myth and Legend’, ‘Science and Progress’ and ‘Spectacle and Prophecy’, the monograph is interspersed with a comprehensive and well curated selection of twin-related art and artefacts, from Yoruban wooden masks to Hollywood movie posters. These are never intrusive, and instead form a subtle and sometimes comic commentary on Viney’s frequent insights into the cultural history of the subject. Admitting that ‘writing about twins means reconciling my own limited experience of being a twin with the vast diversity of twin experience in written and visual records’, he nevertheless has much to say on living in the world as a genetic copy of another human being: ‘Being a twin is a baffling and powerful combination of effort and ease… twins are always learning about what your curiosity looks like.’ What Viney sets out to do is explore exactly how this abiding curiosity arose.

Starting at the beginning of recorded history, he observes: ‘In many creation stories twins are deities… makers of life and the cosmos… They are mythology’s great catalysts. Everywhere, twins kickstart storylines.’ While the book reiterates the familiar tales of Castor and Pollux and Romulus and Remus, it also features less familiar pairings such as Apollo and Artemis, or the Ashvins, heroic horse-riding twins from the Rigveda. He suggests twin myths are often ‘products of political circumstances’, citing how Romulus and Remus are claimed by both Rome and Siena for their foundation stories, while the trope of the Evil Twin ‘represents a longer, more ancient dualism, which uses twins as bearers of cosmic wickedness and destruction’. Along the way, he addresses the deep-rooted ‘fears that twins are abnormal, kill the sick, pollute or damage livestock and crops, arise from adultery, are cursed and embody evil’, reminding us that their venerated status in certain cultures arose only recently.

In the second section, Viney laments that twins are used mainly as ‘monitoring instruments’ in science, while rarely being consulted on their attitude to this. While it’s accepted that ‘twin lives are a means to generate data’, he reveals that this is only a relatively new phenomenon, begun in northern Europe towards the end of the 19th century and ‘industrialised as a set of research methods at the beginning of the 20th century’. We learn some startling statistics and facts: there have never been more twins on Earth than now, with about 1.6 million twin pairs born each year. Also, that the creation of monozygotic identical twins (from a single cell that divides) is hardly seen in other mammals. ‘The nine-banded armadillo is the only other creature that produces twins in a similar way.’ Viney admits that twins offer a ‘rare form of experimental control’ and addresses the moral responsibility that comes with this, invoking the legacy of Mengele’s notorious experiments at Auschwitz. The consequences of twin studies are political as well as scientific: ‘They affect how twins and other human groups are respected.’

The book’s most compelling section explores how twins have been appeared in literature and film, covering the doppelganger trope in E.T.A. Hoffmann, Charlotte Brontë, Dostoevsky and Robert Louis Stevenson, and the offensive caricature of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The lines Viney quotes from Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors (as Antipholus of Syracuse sets off in search of his brother) most accurately convey the existential experience of being a twin: ‘I to the world am like a drop of water/ That in the ocean seeks another drop.’ He also cites the Duke’s lines from the close of Twelfth Night (when Viola and Sebastian are reunited) that encapsulate how twins appear to singletons: ‘One face, one voice, one habit and two persons/ A natural perspective that is and is not.’ In his indignant discussion of films such as Dead Ringers and the Schwarzenegger-DeVito romp Twins, Viney stops just short of using the phrase twinface: ‘The history of cinema involves people pretending to be twins, single-born people without lived experience that strive to play up to what screenwriters, directors, executives and their audiences expect from twin characters.’

Twinkind is an impeccably researched visual treat, and one that is necessarily partisan. As the author laments: ‘Twins are often treated as two persons that occupy the social position of one being.’ Perhaps it’s time, he suggests, that their unique individual experience of being in the world was acknowledged too.

How the Aeneid was nearly destroyed

According to legend, Vergil declared of himself ‘Mantua me genuit, Calabri rapuere, tenet nunc Parthenope: cecini pascua, rura, duces.’ (‘Mantua bore me, Calabria took me; now Naples holds me: I sang of pastures, fields, and leaders.’) In her rigorously researched biography, the American classicist Sarah Ruden shows that this is largely true – even if the author of the Aeneid was in fact born 30 miles from Mantua, in a little village called Andes, in 70 BC. 

Ruden must necessarily rely on Vergil’s most influential biography, written by Suetonius more a century after his death. And there’s no reason to doubt the skeleton of Suetonius’s life: that Vergil was unmarried, with no children; both his brothers died when he was young; his father went blind; and he also had a half-brother, Valerius Proculus, through his mother, who is thought to have remarried after her husband’s death.

There are debates about Vergil’s background. Suetonius says he had lower-class parents; but some critics have suggested his father was from the grand equites class. And in later life Vergil certainly moved among the great and the good, including the greatest of them all – the Emperor Augustus.

Vergil assumed the toga of manhood at 15, went to school in Milan and studied philosophy in Naples rather than Athens (the usual gap-year destination for smart Romans), but his genius elevated him into elite circles. In Naples, he lived near other literary grandees, although he often withdrew to Sicily and Campania.

Suetonius also suggests that Vergil was gay. Not only was he unmarried but he was ‘of desire more inclined than usual towards boys’. Vergil was nicknamed ‘Parthenias’ (‘Virgin’), a pun on his name, which sounded like virgo, Latin for the Greek word parthenos, meaning a sheltered, unmarried girl. All in all, he comes across as a deeply sympathetic figure: gentle, shy, chronically ill and a genius, his intellectual powers increasing as he grew older.

The Appendix Vergiliana, a collection of his early poems – if they are all by him – has been much criticised, as Ruden shows in her careful analysis. But then came the Eclogues and the Georgics, showing his gift for singing about the pascua, rura – those pastures and fields. And then there was the masterpiece, the Aeneid, which Vergil was still polishing when he died in Brindisi in 19 BC, aged 50. On his deathbed, he asked for his scroll cases which contained the Aeneid, wanting to burn them. Luckily, Augustus overruled him.

Even though the Aeneid wasn’t finished, Vergil was already celebrated by the time of his death. Just before he died, he set off for Athens to finish the epic. There he bumped into Augustus and accompanied him to Megara, where he caught his final illness in the intense heat. He refused to postpone that fatal voyage to Brindisi, where he died on 21 September, when southern Italy can still be punishingly hot.

Ruden is a considerable scholar, who conveys the brilliance of the Aeneid concisely – although I could have done with more Latin. Even non-Latin readers like little chunks of the lovely language. She ably translates Rome’s paramount mission, as described in Book 6: ‘Sparing the conquered, striking down the haughty.’ But how much more stirring the Latin is: ‘Parcere subiectis et debellare superbos.’ Ruden is also guilty of the great fault of modern academese – using too many Latinate words, one shared by classicists and non-classicists alike – and comes up with sentences such as: ‘The Platonic angle, the idealisation of impulses that were basically pederastic, also manifests.’

She lays out the known details of Vergil’s life clearly enough, but the problem comes with her attempts to fill the gaps. She declares: ‘As a translator of Vergil… I probably know better than anyone alive how it feels to spend time as he reportedly did.’ This belief in her genius sparks her into extreme conjecture (‘Perhaps the poet committed virtual suicide in a handy but discreet way, simply by sending his litter away or refusing a drink or a dip in cool water.’) So it’s hard to agree with her when she robustly says: ‘I would not push my own speculative reconstruction of events.’ She would – and she does, far too often.

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight

Caspar Henderson writes beguiling books about the natural world, full of eyecatching detail and plangent commentary. His Book of Barely Imagined Beings: A 21st-century Bestiary came out in 2012. A Book of Noises is a worthy companion – a pursuit of auditory wonders, a paean to the act of listening and a salute to silence.

Item: the music of the spheres. (The planets’ orbits, proving unideal and elliptical, suggested to the musically minded astronomer Johannes Kepler an appropriately sad, minor-keyed leitmotif for the Earth, where, he felt, misery and famine held sway’.)

Item: the world’s loudest sound. (The asteroid Chicxulub that killed the dinosaurs 66 million years ago; also an honourable mention to the Indonesian volcano Krakatoa, whose eruption in 1883 burst eardrums 40 miles away.)

Bees (playful). Frogs (ardent). Bats (unbelievably loud). Sounds of the cosmos give way to sounds of the Earth. Life follows, bellowing, and humanity comes after, babbling and brandishing bells. The 48 forays into sound that make up A Book of Noises are arranged with the sort of guileless simplicity achievable only after the author-compiler has been beating his head against a wall for some years.

Everything trembles. The world sounds and resounds. Elephants flee the noise of helicopter blades turning 80 miles away. The root system of the common pea will move towards the sound of water in a pipe. But there’s something missing. If ever a book cried out for an accompanying Spotify playlist, it’s this one. Maybe a kind reader will put one together. What the heck, maybe I will.

Ransacking A Book of Noises affords hours of listening pleasure, or at any rate bemusement. There’s Max Richter’s album Sleep to ease us in; then Sam Perkin’s ‘Alta for Two String Trios and Electronics’, capturing the ephemeral crackles that sometimes accompany the Northern Lights. There’s Dai Fujikura’s 2010 ‘Glacier’, which the composer describes as ‘a plume of cold air which is floating silently between the peaks of a very icy cold landscape, slowly but cutting like a knife’; and there’s Joseph Monkhouse’s soundscapes of the Somerset levels in the Iron Age. David Rothenberg’s quixotic saxophone duets with whales in 2008 stretched even Henderson’s famous generosity of spirit, and he writes: ‘It is hard to know how far, if at all, the whales are actually listening.’ Such grounding moments are important in a book chock-full of fancy.

The point is, the world makes sounds and we, at our best, make sounds of our own in response. For every natural wonder, there is probably an eccentric musical instrument gathering dust somewhere: for every frog, a flute; for every booming volcano, some variation on a horn. The sounds that humans make are rooted in a profoundly material soundworld. The extrapolated and bizarre soundworlds made possible by digital technology are still largely terra incognita, and there may be a good reason for this. ‘One is humbly aware that [this digital soundworld] will only be conquered by penetration of the human spirit,’ the composer Jonathan Harvey is quoted as saying, ‘and that penetration will neither be rapid nor easy.’  

Music itself, as a technology and as an idea, sometimes imposes too narrow a filter over our experience of sound. Henderson explains that the bells in Russian churches are meant to be voices, not musical instruments. For that reason, they are quite deliberately untuned, so that they produce as many over- and undertones as possible.

Humanity at its worst, meanwhile, makes a din that deafens whales and stresses birds out of their minds and mating patterns. Henderson cites the soundscape ecologist Bernie Krause’s 20-year project to capture the sounds at Sugarloaf Park in California – a dramatic and frankly depressing record of environmental diminution and fragmentation, speaking to ‘a catastrophic loss of sonic diversity and richness worldwide’. The story of our scraping of the planet is also part of Henderson’s narrative. This is not an altogether happy book.

Is it a wise one? This is Henderson’s clear and laudable ambition. One of the perils of writing a book like this is that to make the contents readable in any order you have to carefully top and tail every one of those 48 seemingly disconnected microchapters. The effort throws up gnomic and occasionally ponderous capstones that are a gift to the mean and cantankerous critic. Here are some chapter closers: ‘Life calls to us even as we call to it.’ ‘If there is to be a future worth living in it will surely hold a place for re-enchantment.’  ‘While you live, shine.’

This sort of niggle only shows up on a fast read. Readers can and should take their time. It will be time very well spent.

Back-room boys: Family Meal, by Bryan Washington, reviewed

There are meals galore in Bryan Washington’s latest novel: those that Cam and his lover Kai cook for one another; those that Cam’s childhood friend TJ cooks for his Thai boyfriend’s cousins; those that TJ’s Vietnamese father Jin cooked for his neighbours every weekend; and those that the now bulimic Cam vomits up after Kai’s murder.

There is also sex galore. Each of the novel’s three narrators – Cam, Kai and TJ – engages in ‘random hook-ups’, with Cam in particular using them to dull his pain. Working in a Houston gay bar, he takes customers to a back-room every few hours. His partners include ‘delivery guys and lawyers and dry cleaners and architects and engineers and college kids and kindergarten teachers and graphic designers and real estate agents and salesmen and house husbands and professors’. It’s no surprise when he says after an anonymous encounter that ‘niceness for the sake of niceness doesn’t fit into our transaction’.

There is no overarching narrative; instead, Cam, Kai and TJ tell their own stories of youth and early adulthood and, above all, their interconnections. They share many of the same concerns and speak in much the same voice, with Cam’s the most brutal and TJ’s the most appealing. If Washington offers any hope for these desperate lives, it lies in Cam’s realisation: ‘It takes all of these people to make one person’s life, okay. One person can’t do it for you by themselves… It’s our responsibility to take care of each other.’

Family Meal focuses on the web of relationships among a group of predominantly black, urban gay men. Its style is spare to the point of starkness, almost entirely devoid of adjectives and relative clauses. Eschewing literary flourish, the stripped-down prose is perfectly suited to the characters’ sex-and-drug-fuelled lives.

It is less accomplished than Washington’s previous novel, Memorial. There are too many short, discrete passages; at times, a one-line sentence stands alone on the page, giving the words a weight they don’t merit. In a book with so little descriptive prose, there are literally hundreds of references to skin colour, which become wearing, especially when, Kai’s murder apart, the different races live in harmony. But these flaws are transcended by the novel’s honesty, fluency and fearlessness. With its multicultural characters and gritty authenticity, Family Meal might best be likened to a mixture of fusion cooking and street food.

Too many tales of Mrs Tiggy-Winkle

A book about hedgehogs is not the obvious next step for Sarah Sands, the former editor of Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today, and before that editor of the Evening Standard. But then Sands has had a rough time of it lately. In The Hedgehog Diaries, she recounts the death of her father, Noel, the news broken to her by her brother, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who had to climb through a window of her Norfolk house to do so since she wasn’t answering her phone. Hesketh-Harvey, who was a writer and performer and a great favourite of the King, died not long afterwards of heart failure. Julian Sands, the actor made famous by his role in A Room with a View and the father of her eldest son, Henry, went missing while hiking on a Californian mountain in January this year, not long before Hesketh-Harvey died. The actor’s body was not discovered until June.

It might therefore be understandable that Sands has been thinking a great deal about life and death and that she latched on to the poorly hedgehog she and her two-year-old grandson found trapped in the netting by her pond one day. They called it Horace until a hedgehog hospital worker mentioned Horace’s vagina and the problems she was having with it (‘vaginal flystrike’, apparently), whereupon the creature was promptly renamed Peggy.

Sands reads a lot into something she calls ‘hedgehog philosophy’, and sometimes this becomes too much: at one point, worrying that her father is restricted by old age and illness, she says: ‘It is surely a hedgehog philosophy that freedom is dignity.’ She also quotes such luminaries as Isaiah Berlin, Jacques Derrida and Philip Larkin on the hedgehog, and interviews people from Hugh Warwick, the ‘David Attenborough of hedgehogs’ to a pair of schoolgirl enthusiasts whom she calls the ‘Greta Thunbergs of biodiversity’.

She also takes her husband on a pilgrimage to Alderney, so they can see the famous blonde hedgehogs, allegedly first brought to the island in a Harrods carrier bag. The technical term for their whitish fur is ‘leucistic’ but this doesn’t stop Sands from describing them, with a journalistic flourish, as ‘the Marilyn Monroe of hedgehogs’.

Sands asks the former Conservative MP Rory Stewart why he thinks his most famous political speech is an ode to the hedgehog. His answer is that the animals are ‘magically appealing’, and that rare subject which won’t get you into trouble on social media. Indefatigably, Sands also discusses hogs with the former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who rather sweetly says: ‘I feel like the hedgehog’s job is the next thing to be done.’ They both decide that ‘sequential’ is a good word for hedgehog behaviour. Williams also mentions that when he chose ‘The Hedgehog’s Song’ by the Incredible String Band on Desert Island Discs, his staff feared the BBC might confuse it with a Terry Pratchett song that features the bestiality-referencing lyric: ‘The hedgehog can never be buggered at all.’

Some of this is diverting and Sands’s writing is sharp and fluent. She does her best to place her interest in woodland creatures in a news context, noting that visitors flocked to the Beatrix Potter exhibition at the V&A on the same day that war broke out in Ukraine. She nonetheless quotes Ted Hughes as saying ‘I don’t know why I am so sympathetic to hedgehogs’, and I admit I hadn’t worked this out either by the end of the book. Perhaps I am heartless, but 159 pages of thinking about Mrs Tiggy-Winkle and her ilk feels slightly excessive.

Learned necromancers and lascivious witches: magic and misogyny through the ages

Curses, conjurations, magic circles, incantations, abracadabra, gobbledygook… Why would any serious historian want to write a history of magic books?

 Owen Davies issues a robust defence: magic is as old as human history, while a study of grimoires is a study of the book itself and its changing format over time. Through the lens of the grimoire (a book of magic spells and invocations), the parallel histories of religion and science are shown in an eerie new light. Perennial human desires, anxieties and aspirations for love, money and protection from harm bring people of the far past close to anyone today who reads a newspaper horoscope or consults the Tarot. At the very least, magic books continue to cast their spell over popular culture in countless films, novels, games and across the internet.

A professor of social history and the president of the Folklore Society, Davies has form. In 2009, his Grimoires: A History of Magic Books was published byOxford University Press, an entertaining yet scholarly title printed on indifferent paper with a limited, monochrome plate section. Art of the Grimoire could be seen as the coffee-table version with vastly expanded, colour plates and boiled-down text. It’s a far more beautiful production: a typographic and calligraphic treat as treasurable as a rare magical text itself. Almost every page is filled with wonder.

Davies begins his account with Sumerian clay tablets inscribed with protective formulae against sickness, demons and ghosts. Magic and medicine were not yet separate disciplines. Stone stelae inscribed with appeals to the gods were used in practical magic: water poured over the inscriptions was then drunk for health and good luck. Later, Neolithic axes were inscribed with spirits’ names, clay pots were decorated with demonic images, threatening boundary stones warned off intruders, soldiers scratched curses on lead tablets, while the wealthy sported gold amulets. The Chinese scratched their appeals on oracle bones and slips of bamboo. With papyrus, however, the potential of the magical text was vastly expanded and many examples from ancient Egypt survive. (At a later point in the story, this fabled wisdom of Africa was to provide solace to the descendants of slaves.)

Syncretism makes an appearance early on, perhaps because occult lore always gains more power by seeming to originate from some exotic source. A stunning 5th-6th century amulet in green jasper features an Egyptian cock-headed god with snake legs wearing Roman dress, below the names of the archangels Raphael and Gabriel. A papyrus scroll written in Greek contains a variety of spells: ‘To induce insomnia by means of a bat, win at dice, stop demons and apparitions, silence others, and provoke love.’ (Davies’s dry captions are a regular a delight.)

Though Davies wanders the globe in his survey, taking in Coptic charms, Islamic angels and jinns, yokai (Japanese demons), Hebraic and Arabic texts, the term ‘grimoire’ to most people invokes western mages such as John Dee and Doctor Faustus – whose final, despairing cry in Marlowe’s play of the same name is: ‘I’ll burn my books.’ Parchment heralds the arrival of the true grimoire. Davies presents impressive examples from illuminated manuscripts: a red-winged angel leading a man away from a bird-footed devil; intricate magical seals; carefully lettered talismans. The advent of printing, like that of the internet, democratised hidden lore, raising fears of the dissemination of dangerous material. Cornelius Agrippa’s De Occulta Philosophia deplored ‘commerces of unclean spirits’ and ‘unlawfull charms’, but nonetheless provided useful details of sigils, kabbalah and angel magic.

The theme of repackaging recurs throughout Art of the Grimoire. Books promising revelations of ‘ancient wisdom’ are patchworks of old material with new inserts, frequently and wrongly ascribed to canonical authors such as Agrippa. ‘It is their falsity that makes them genuine,’ Davies remarked in his earlier book, citing the ‘bogus traditions that cling to real grimoires’. A book could become a grimoire against its author’s sworn intention. Reginald Scot’s The Discoverie of Witchcraft (1584) purported to deplore conjuration, yet included material such as the depiction of an elaborate magic circle to be marked out on the ground with the names of five infernal spirit kings, thus making his text a valuable magical sourcebook.

Sensational texts whipped up a widespread terror of the occult that led directly to witch trials throughout Europe, and ‘white’ magic was as offensive to the authorities as the more malevolent type. ‘The object of focus of these early demonologists was not male magicians and learned necromancers with their manuscript grimoires, but poor women,’ Davies observes tartly. A crude 16th-century ink drawing shows three Swiss witches bound and laid on a pyre. Equally calm, a supposed werewolf from Geneva exhibits a surprisingly patient demeanour while chunks are torn from its flesh with red-hot pincers.

Lack of literacy tended to bar women from text-based magic. However, an early visual link between lascivious witches and books is made by a Netherlandish painting of 1526, ‘Saul and the Witch of Endor’, with its semi-naked crone consulting a volume held by a satyr, along with more familiar images of women flying on broomsticks. With cheap printing, spellbooks containing crude woodcuts of demons began to circulate widely, while alchemical texts appealed to loftier readers. A typically esoteric example features a ‘divine hermaphrodite’, a snake, chalice and trees of the sun and moon. The surrealist painter Leonora Carrington was to draw deeply on this tradition in the 20th century.

The rational Enlightenment had its counter-current in occult studies, with London as a key base for practitioners. Davies reproduces a drawing of three jovial ginger demons from Francis Barrett’s influential The Magus of 1801, a volume which fed into the development of ritual magic later in the century, despite containing little original material. A coloured talisman from the book has distinct Hilma af Klint energy. The life of Barrett is more fully told in Davies’s earlier book. He was an enterprising, if not overly successful, balloonist.

A later character to match Barrett was the American huckster Lauron William de Laurence, who began as a plagiarist and posed as a swami. Other self-presentations took on the Egyptian flavour that appealed to the movement for African-American empowerment. Laurence’s catalogue of occult paraphernalia became a book of magic in its own right.

Davies has an entertaining chapter on the explosion of occult material occasioned by the advent of ‘pulp’ publishing. Again, new technology advances magic rather than wiping it out. Davies touches on post-colonial schlock such as the St Cyprian paperbacks of South America, and print advertisements offering impoverished Americans ‘Ancient Knowledge’ and ‘Esoteric Treasure’ for a few dollars. ‘Purchasers must have been very disappointed with their $3 spend,’ Davies sniffs of one rip-off pamphlet.

Final chapters deal briefly but suggestively with modern magical trends: downloadable spells, multimedia artworks, automatically generated sigils, manga and anime, Harry Potter, and TV shows, such as Charmed from the 1990s with its prop Book of Shadows. While much magical activity has now migrated online, Davies asserts that manuscripts and hand-copying retain their intrinsic power, with modern-day grimoires akin to personal records of self-improvement. The full panoply of pseudo-scripts, grids, mystic symbols and infernal portraiture feeds into works of contemporary art. It seems that grimoires, far from being consigned to medieval darkness, aren’t going anywhere.

Andrew Boff removed from Tory conference for heckling Suella Braverman

So much for a blue-on-blue ceasefire. The Conservative party conference is inching towards its close but not without some penultimate day drama. The Tory London Assembly chair was this afternoon dramatically escorted out of Suella Braverman’s speech today after heckling her comments on gender. After quietly remarking that the Home Secretary was talking ‘trash’ about ‘gender ideology’, Andrew Boff was forcibly dragged out of the hall in Manchester.

Speaking to reporters as he was led away, Boff said: ‘It is making our Conservative party look transphobic and homophobic. Our party has a proud record of standing up for LGBT+ rights and she is destroying it.’ He said he had been a member of the party for over 50 years and was a ‘proud member’. It’s all somewhat awkward given Boff’s standing and the fact that tonight is the LGBT Tory disco, usually attended by both MPs and ministers.

Sounds like Suella won’t be in attendance…

Jeremy Hunt: we underestimated the impact of money-printing

Speaking at the Centre for Policy Studies fringe event at Conservative party conference this afternoon, Jeremy Hunt reiterated once again that there would be no big tax cuts this year. ‘Debt interest payments have gone up so much in the past six months’, he told CPS director Robert Colvile, taking estimates for debt servicing payments over the £100 billion mark this fiscal year. The Autumn Statement, the Chancellor said, will lay bare just how dire the situation is: ‘It’s likely that our debt interest payments… are going to go up by more than £20bn pounds a year in the Autumn Budget compared to what was predicted in the spring.’ In other words: no tax cuts until inflation stops wreaking havoc on borrowing costs.

What triggered the inflation crisis that has caused so much damage to personal and public finances? There are many reasons cited, but some suit certain agendas better than others. Both ministers and central bankers have worked hard over the past year to point the finger at factors out of their control. In the government’s case, it tends to cite Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In the Bank of England’s case, it cites the war, as well as accusations of a ‘wage-price spiral’ (despite wages increasing for over a year well below the rate of inflation).

What’s often left off the list is what happened at the start of the pandemic: a mass money-printing exercise carried out by central banks to allow politicians to spend without limits. In Britain, the Bank printed more in the first year in the pandemic than it did in the ten years leading up to it. As inflation tends to be a monetary phenomenon, it makes sense that quantitative easing had a direct impact on price spirals, and some are willing to point this out.

Former chief economist to the Bank Andy Haldane was warning about the effects of money-printing on prices back in June 2021, when the rate of inflation was just starting to rise. Former Bank governor Mervyn King has been saying since last year that ‘too much money’ contributed to the inflation spiral. Economist Julian Jessop wrote on this topic for Coffee House last month, noting how the annual rate of inflation has roughly followed the growth rate of broad money. Yet it’s been in the interest of both ministers and central bankers to avoid addressing the role of money-printing directly: better for the crisis to be something they’ve been forced to respond to, rather than something they helped to cause.

But this afternoon Jeremy Hunt cautiously added his name to the list. Asked what he thought had contributed most to the inflation crisis – the war in Ukraine, money printing or a wage spiral – he said:

I hate ducking questions. I don’t think it’s quite as straightforward as ranking them one, two, three. I’d definitely put Russia’s war in Ukraine at the top of that list. I think that quantitative easing…I think it is reasonable to say we collectively underestimated the impact of that. Although in fairness to the Bank of England they did start to raise interest rates before everyone else.

Threadneedle Street did move first to raise rates, but once other central banks like the Federal Reserve followed suit, they did so faster and more aggressively than the Bank of England: a move which is now thought to have helped get America’s inflation rate down to almost half that of Britain’s. Indeed one of Hunt’s predecessors – and now boss – Rishi Sunak was well aware of the possibility that QE could trigger an inflation surge: long before Russia’s invasion, chancellor Sunak was working to protect the UK’s finances from the prospect of even a small hike in the rate of inflation back in spring 2021. 

The evidence is there: while falls in energy costs have seen the headline inflation rate come down, inflation was more than double the Bank’s target months before Russia’s invasion. Furthermore, the huge rise in core inflation (which excludes food and energy prices) suggests the inflation crisis has been triggered by much more than energy costs: it has slowed from a peak of 7.1 per cent on the year to May to 6.2 on the year to August – still triple the Bank’s target. 

Tackling inflation remains Hunt’s priority. What are the prospects for tax cuts once that’s achieved? ‘All Tories want tax cuts’ he told the CPS’s audience. ‘But we need to focus on how we get there.’ For the chancellor, the answer lies in public sector efficiency gains. ‘If we want to stop taxes going up,’ he said, ‘we have to increase productivity growth in the public sector by half a per cent a year.’ For those with experience in the private sector, he said, the attitude is that ‘surely we can do that.’ Yet ‘those of us who have worked in the public sector know that’s a very big challenge… but we have to do it.’

If Hunt does find some fiscal headroom, what will those first tax cuts be? The ‘first priority’ he said, is ‘business tax cuts.’ It’s likely Hunt would look at the current ‘full expensing’ scheme to encourage more business investment, telling the CPS today that ministers ‘absolutely do want to make it permanent.’ 

On personal tax, the Chancellor expressed his hope that ahead of an election something could be done for ‘ordinary people’ to ‘show people our values and that we believe money is better when it stays in people’s pockets.’ Still, he insisted at the moment the Treasury is not in a position to have that discussion ‘or even to ask what if’. 

The clock is ticking.

Steve Barclay turns to AI to save the NHS

The NHS is struggling to cope with an ageing population. Disputes over pay have created a stand off between doctors and the government, while the crumbling social care system has seen bed-blocking reach record levels. So far, the suggested fixes have usually been calls for more money. But what about tech? That’s Health Secretary Steve Barclay’s big idea. 

Speaking to a large audience at The Spectator’s event ‘Can AI and innovation save the NHS?’ this afternoon, Barclay outlined why introducing AI into the health service is right. Chaired by The Spectator’s assistant editor Isabel Hardman, Barclay was joined on the stage by Dr Sandesh Gulhane MSP, shadow Scottish cabinet secretary for health and social care, Simon Denegri, executive director of the Academy of Medical Sciences, Katherine Holden, head of AI at TechUK and Richard Torbett, CEO of event sponsors ABPI. 

Could AI help solve the NHS’s workforce crisis? Perhaps, by ‘enabling, not replacing’ the workers, Barclay hastily clarified, ‘because that’s the way, certainly for now, that I see AI has the most active role to play.’ Barclay is adamant that AI could help by handing ‘non-clinical tasks’, for example administrative ward work.

Efficiency is what Barclay’s vision is all about. The overarching theme of the Health Secretary’s speech was how quickly patients are treated: to push people through the service faster and tackle expanding wait lists. Barclay believes technological innovation needs to hit the ‘sweet spot’ of ‘getting early care to patients’, while delivering a service that works faster and improve disease prevention. The panel were generally in agreement that AI presents not a threat to the UK’s health service, but an opportunity. It could help rapidly treat strokes and scale up screening programmes, and help with procurement and management. Would this come at the cost of quality healthcare? 

On budgets, the Health Secretary deferred to his own experience in the Treasury. Barclay referred to Chancellor Jeremy Hunt’s comments this week about pressure on capital budgets for the health service, ‘principally because there’s often a need to respond to pay pressure. And of course that’s a very live issue at the moment given the industrial action that we face.’

And while Barclay didn’t shy away from talking about workforce, he was brief on the subject. It is after all an issue that, had it not been mentioned, might have been a rather large elephant in the room given Barclay’s troubles with the doctors’ unions – whose members were, that afternoon protesting outside the conference centre. Barclay expanded on a topic he’d briefly discussed yesterday evening: making changes to training programmes for healthcare workers to ‘make the NHS more vocational’. Reading between the lines, Barclay appears to be hinting at a marked government shift towards favouring associated healthcare workers, for example physician’s associates. This is likely to go down well with doctors who already feel undervalued by the government – the relatively new PA role has caused a lot of controversy, while whole Reddit threads exist to berate the increasing powers of ‘noctors’. 

Barclay’s argument is that there needs to be ‘more opportunities for people to take on advanced roles, not to be confined by where they were at the age of 21 when one left school at 15 without any qualifications at 16.’ He continued: ‘The NHS as a big employer should be giving people that ladder to progress.’ To qualify as a physician’s associate, people from non-medical backgrounds can undertake a truncated course that allows them limited responsibilities on the wards with the aim of stream-lining medical work to medical doctors the government convince voters that – with AI – it has an exciting vision for the future of the UK’s health service? Those opposed to the new roles say that they devalue the medical degree and complicate work on the wards. Will this drive another wedge between the medical profession and the government? Barclay’s plans certainly seem to indirectly ensure that the doctors’ unions have a little less bargaining power.

So can the government convince voters that – with AI – it has an exciting vision for the future of the UK’s health service? It may be early days but the mood at today’s discussion felt hopeful, and different from the usual doom and gloom that accompanies most NHS-related discussions these days. But while there is certainly an overwhelming desire to see efficiency introduced to the NHS, Barclay’s point – and the slogan of the conference – is that the health service’s tech revolution will be no quick task. The benefits of AI in healthcare will likely only be seen in the longer term – time that the NHS may not be quite able to wait.

Suella Braverman’s sex offender crackdown won’t work

It’s easy to see the thinking behind Suella Braverman’s plan announced in Manchester today to prevent sex offenders changing their name. In a country without ID cards or universal means of identification, it is fairly easy discreetly to disappear if you are at the margins of society, and possibly even to find a way of claiming at least some form of social security. This obviously defeats much of the object of having a sex offenders’ register, since it can in too many cases reduce the official record to something more like Gogol’s rentroll of dead souls.

True, it is already technically a crime for anyone on the register not to tell the police of any change of name, address, or other details. But enforcement can be tricky: in the year to March 2022 some 30 sex offenders a week were prosecuted or cautioned for omitting to do this, and it is a racing certainty that a great many more have quietly vanished from sight without being caught.

The Braverman plan has the advantage of at least making disappearing acts slightly more difficult, by doing something that should have been done long ago: integrating the offenders’ register with other departments such as the Passport Office, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Inland Revenue and thus increasing the chance that any surreptitious name-changes are picked up and passed on. It also promises to encourage extra vigilance from all these departments when they are asked to register an account for someone with a suspicious lack of history or a large hole in their CV.

For this we must be grateful. But will the effect be more than marginal, however? Despite the fact that this move is superficially popular and seems to have cross-party support – for example, it was immediately welcomed by Labour’s Sarah Champion – there is considerable room for doubt.

For one thing, many changes of name are informal. England is unusual in Europe in that as far as the strict law is concerned, a person over 16 is entitled to call themselves what they like without asking permission from anybody, or telling anyone in authority. Furthermore, it is possible to do this semi-formally by executing a deed poll (which means in effect a simple declaration) in front of two witnesses stating that one is changing one’s name. While one can have this officially registered if prepared to pay £42.44, a measure that that makes it more acceptable in practice to banks and other organisations, there is no requirement to do so.

For a registered sex offender, however, it is already illegal to do any of these things without immediately telling the police. One might have thought that prohibiting them from doing so even if they did notify the local station sergeant added rather little: indeed, it might have the perverse effect of driving yet more changes of identity underground.

Secondly, it is hard to see that this change will add very much to the protection of the rest of us. As it is, the public has no access to the sex offenders’ register; this is strictly limited to the police, who will pass on information at their discretion to those, such as neighbours, whom they consider to be at risk and able to be trusted with the knowledge. Allowing an offender to change his name provided he notifies the police, as we do at present, leaves the process intact: the neighbour will simply receive details of the new name rather than the old. Banning such changes, by contrast, will if anything cause confusion. There is little the authorities can do in practice about someone informally starting to using a different name: as a result, one suspects that an outright bar on changes of name may well, ironically, lead to the dissemination of yet more inaccurate and outdated information.

Thirdly, for all the headline-grabbing there will presumably have to be exceptions. Even the government recognises that, for example, name changes for religious reasons or following a conscientious decision to change gender would probably have to be allowed under the present human rights regime.

Is there anything further that could be done about the sex offenders’ register, to make it more effective? One possibility would be to make it open to anyone to inspect, as is the case in some US states. This would have the advantage of improving the protection of the public, and possibly also of helping to keep the register up to date through individuals reporting their suspicions of unauthorised name changes. But this would not only run counter to the tendency of UK public authorities to keep as much information out of the public’s hands: it would probably also infringe the human rights of offenders, who might find both their privacy and their safety imperilled. Of course, there is a possible cure for the human rights point too: but we can leave that argument to another occasion.

Jacob Rees-Mogg: Put Nigel Farage in the House of Lords

Nigel Farage has been enjoying himself at Tory conference. The former Brexit party leader was filmed last night singing karaoke with Priti Patel and today he’s been propping up the bar in the Midland hotel in Manchester.

Farage certainly looks comfortable rubbing shoulders with Tory delegates, but would he ever be welcomed back into the Conservative fold? Jacob Rees-Mogg says that the party should welcome Farage – whom he jokingly described as ‘a bit left wing’ – with open arms.

Mogg also went further – suggesting Farage should be put in the House of Lords. He told a Spectator conference fringe event that his fellow Brexiteer’s ‘contribution to public life’ meant that Farage deserved a peerage. Arise, Sir Nigel?

Humza Yousaf is talking nonsense about Scotland’s oil

For nearly half a century, the Scottish National Party based its independence project on ‘Scotland’s Oil’ which it claimed had been stolen by England. Now the SNP seems to be saying it wasn’t Scotland’s oil at all and wasn’t even the UK’s to steal. The SNP and their Green coalition partners have discovered that North Sea oil is owned by foreign capitalists and is anyway unusable in the UK.

‘Most of this oil will be shipped abroad,’ insisted the SNP First Minister, Humza Yousaf, last week ‘and then sold back to us at whatever price makes the oil and gas industry most profit’. New fields like Rosebank off Shetland, he says, won’t therefore help reduce energy bills or replace oil and gas imports.

This has been the thrust of the SNP’s attack on Rishi Sunak’s promise to extract ‘every drop’ of North Sea oil to give the UK greater energy security. ‘It’s the greatest act of environmental vandalism in my lifetime,’ according to Nicola Sturgeon. Yousaf accuses the PM of being a climate change ‘denier’ who is in the pocket of capitalist fossil fuel behemoths by giving the go ahead for the development of the Rosebank, and the Cambo, another oil field off Shetland.

Yet these self same capitalist behemoths have been exploring and exploiting North Sea hydrocarbons for the last fifty years. How could the SNP not have noticed until now? The fact that the oil is mostly refined abroad doesn’t make it any less of a strategic energy resource. ‘Heavy’ oil goes to European petrochemical plants because we closed most of ours years ago. Oil is refined and then returns largely as petrol and plastics.

All oil is sold into a market. It is a complex system governed by a global energy price that more or less determines what fields are developed commercially. There is nothing new or sinister about this. And the anticapitalist rhetoric is such a bizarre revision of SNP energy policy that it calls into question the entire independence project.

How are we to have any confidence in the SNP’s current economic prospectus, which is based on forecasts of Scotland’s renewable energy wealth? That too is being exploited by Big Oil: companies like Equinor, Shell, Total and BP. Offshore wind energy is also sold into the energy market for profit. Are the SNP suggesting that Scotland’s wind is owned by corporate capitalism? Will we shortly discover that it is the wrong kind of wind because the turbines that collect it are owned by foreigners and any electricity surplus exported?

These are all specious arguments designed to cover for the fact that Yousaf has simply lost the argument over Rosebank. Most Scottish voters agree with Sunak that it is common sense to use Scotland’s domestic oil and gas rather than importing it from abroad. This is why the red herring of oil exports has been deployed to confuse the argument.

There was a time when the SNP didn’t use such arguments. They said Scotland was the only country to discover oil on its waters and not directly benefit from it. But oil is still immensely valuable for the revenues it delivers (£9 billion last year alone) and because it supports 100,000 jobs in the UK. That wealth can and has been used to lower UK energy bills. Yet under tutelage of the Greens, the SNP now suggests it should be kept in the ground.

Nationalists have always cited Nordic countries as models of environmental virtue. Yet Norway is drilling like mad, not least in the Arctic. It is getting UK consumers to pay for it by buying their gas while we’re supposed to stop using ours.

We still produce around 25 per cent of our natural gas and Rosebank and Cambo will help maintain that. The SNP appears to favour importing yet more Liquified Natural Gas (LNG) from the United States at much greater cost to the environment. US LNG is derived from fracking which is banned here.

SNP rhetoric is shot through with such hypocrisies and half truths. The reality is that Rosebank will not set net zero back by a single day as the regulator, the North Sea Transition Authority has conceded. It won’t stop the UK meeting its legally-binding target of 68 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030. Nor will Sunak’s decision, also attacked by the SNP, to delay the banning of new petrol and diesel cars to 2035. That just brings UK into line with the EU.

The SNP’s Rosebank alarmism has however undermined the credibility of Yousaf’s own net zero targets. Scottish voters now realise that the First Minister’s climate pronouncements are so much hot air.

The great Tory dilemma: try to win or prepare for defeat?

What are the Conservatives putting the most effort into: winning the next election, or life after defeat? While Rishi Sunak and some of his top team, including the Chancellor Jeremy Hunt, still sincerely believe that there is a good chance that they could win the election, other Conservatives have switched their focus to what happens afterwards. That’s why Liz Truss has been on the fringe, why senior cabinet ministers have been making comments that they know will be viewed as a tilt at a future leadership contest, and why this does not feel like a pre-election party conference.

Kemi Badenoch’s speech to the hall yesterday received the first sincerely warm round of applause that I’ve seen at this conference. She took great care to praise Rishi Sunak, but she also had a personal passage about Britain being the best place in the world to be a black person. Supporters of Badenoch had expected something interesting in her speech, and while she wasn’t undermining the current Prime Minister, she was also setting out her brand of Conservatism in a manner that will do her no harm when there is a contest.

Truss, meanwhile, has been delighting in the amount of attention and approval she has received from activists as the last leader they actually elected. Her mission is to push the debate about the future of the party in a certain direction, and with 60 MPs signed up to her Growth Group, she can say that she’s succeeding in that. She might claim victory if any of her ideas make it into a general election manifesto, but it is more likely that the Trussites will be encouraging MPs to say that their party lost because their policies were ignored by the current leadership.

Truss’s presence at the conference has been a source of great delight for Labour, who have been going to strenuous efforts to keep her memory fresh in voters’ minds. No opposition attack strategy can match the power of Truss herself being asked to sign copies of her mini-Budget at the conference.

But then again, even those who are actually focused on winning the next election, rather than what comes after it, are making some odd choices. Rishi Sunak has spent most of this conference refusing to clarify what he’s up to on HS2, rather than talking about the things he would presumably rather voters noticed. He and his ministers have also embarked on a rather weird tour of made-up Labour policies, including Claire Coutinho’s excruciating interview yesterday about whether the Opposition had really advocated a ‘meat tax’. Their other announcements have been small and odd, including a ban on mobile phones during the entire school day which many headteachers are already enforcing.

The comfort Sunak can take is that this isn’t a febrile conference, despite the rows over HS2. This is in part because Tory MPs have already done their panicking about the next election result, and many of them are already well advanced into exit planning for a life outside parliament should they lose their seats. But it explains the lack of energy around an election that is really only around the corner.

Sunak stays quiet on HS2

Rishi Sunak is still refusing to offer any detail on what he plans to do with HS2, suggesting in a round of broadcast interviews this lunchtime that he hasn’t yet made the final decision. He told Sky that: ‘I think it’s right that I’m not going to get forced into making premature decisions. Not on something that’s so important that costs this country tens of billions of pounds.’ Instead, he told the BBC, he would ‘approach this the same way I approach everything: thoughtfully, carefully, across the detail and making what I believe is the right decision in the long term for our country.’

Sunak’s camp have long believed that refusing to bow to the demands of the 24-hour news cycle makes for better government, and that voters reward a leader who is focused on getting things done, rather than merely talking about them. The calculation here seems to be that while there is a storm in Manchester about HS2, it will still be better to announce the decision at the time of the PM’s choosing, rather than rush. Controlling the narrative is a full-time occupation, and Sunak clearly thinks he could spend his time more wisely. He also has a wider party that has been uncontrollable for some time, and the next election campaign is simply not going to be a disciplined affair where ministers and MPs all say the same thing. So he has to work out how to embrace the noise, rather than dampen it down. It’s still difficult, though, when people hear ministers saying conflicting things – and few of them getting a chance to talk about the things they think voters might actually reward them for at the next election. 

We need trans-only wards

The Health Secretary Steve Barclay is expected to announce plans to ban transwomen like me from female hospital wards today. Let’s be clear, the privacy, dignity and safety of women in hospital have been overlooked for too long – but Barclay will also need to offer separate wards or rooms for transgender people. Yes, women should not be expected to budge up and make room for men who identify as transgender, but nor should the Health Secretary make the lives of those who transitioned – perhaps many years ago – more difficult than needs be. 

The goal for transsexuals (a term I prefer to ‘transgender’ because it is defined within The Equality Act) is to transition using hormone therapy and genital surgery and then re-integrate into society to get on with our lives. While I think few people would shed a tear if a part-time cross-dresser was housed on a male ward, where does this leave the transsexual who transitioned many years ago? Someone who married their long-term male partner as soon as the Gender Recognition Act allowed it and is now known within their family as a mother or grandmother? An open male ward? 

Some campaigners might well declare, ‘once a man, always a man’, but the abrasive language of social media does not translate well into policy. Yes, a male transsexual might still have a male body – human beings cannot change sex after all – but if that body no longer looks like a male body then privacy and dignity, if not safety, are going to be an issue on the male ward. The problem might have been moved, but it will not have been solved. 

This is why gender reassignment is a protected characteristic under the law. As Kemi Badenoch has said so powerfully in parliament, ‘the Equality Act is a shield, not a sword’ –  it should not be used to allow transsexuals to force themselves into spaces reserved for the other sex (or be placed there by ideological officials). Instead, it is there to protect those who have meaningfully transitioned – making sure they are not treated less favourably. 

Really though, all this is a mess of the Tories’ own making. It was Conservative MP Maria Miller, as chair of the Women and Equalities Select Committee, who stood up in the House of Commons to call on the Conservative government to give ‘unequivocal commitments’ to ‘ensure that the UK leads the world on trans equality rights’. Namely, introducing what she described as gender self-declaration and enshrining the nebulous concept of gender identity into UK law. 

That was December 2016. If Conservative prime minister Theresa May had had her way, the Gender Recognition Act would have been reformed to allow anyone to change their legal sex without any medical checks. Speaking at a Pink News awards dinner she declared that ‘being trans is not an illness and it should not be treated as such.’  

At the Tory party conference two years ago, her successor Boris Johnson looked on as his wife addressed a fringe event organised by the LGBT+ Conservatives and Stonewall. Penny Mordaunt – the current leader of the House of Commons – has preached the language of Stonewall from the despatch box: ‘trans women are women and trans men are men. That is the starting point for the GRA consultation, and it will be its finishing point too.’ 

The Labour party might have been even more egregious in its denial of biological reality, but this is not a battle between left and right – certainly in the traditional sense. The Communist party of Britain, for example,  knows the difference between men and women, and the party ‘rejects gender self-ID as the basis for sex-based entitlements in law to women’s single-sex rights, spaces and facilities.’ 

It looks like the government may at last be putting right its own mistakes, but it needs to be careful to avoid overcorrecting. There are solutions that don’t involve penalising those who’ve transitioned. In many countries, everyone can expect a private room in hospital. Goodness, that would be a tall order for the NHS. But perhaps it might be the best way of balancing the rights of transsexuals with the rights of women. 

Jacob Rees-Mogg’s defence of the British Empire

Jacob Rees-Mogg was in stirring form this morning, at a Tory party conference event on ‘Restoring prosperity, restoring Conservatism’ hosted by the Legatum Institute. The former minister for Brexit opportunities began his speech – where else? – at 1215 with Magna Carta before embarking on a potted history of English liberties, at one point digressing on the Anglo-Saxon root of the word ‘woman’, and why England is more successful than France (‘If you are an English peasant and you improve your land, who makes the money? You do.’)

But Mr S struck most of all by JRM’s defence of our past. He remarked that: ‘we should rejoice in our history and not be apologetic for it.’ And, he added, ‘We should also be proud of our colonial experience, not least in America’.

He went on: 

‘Our colonial experience – of course, as with anything in human life, it has its mistakes – was one of the greatest civilising, prosperity-creating forces the world has ever seen. Better and more lasting in its way than the Roman Empire.

We went around the world and we helped bring people prosperity. It seems to me it is better to have prosperity brought by the Empire’ than otherwise.

Perhaps Mogg will be leading a charge to recolonise the curriculum soon?

Lee Anderson reminisces about Thatcher bashing

Lee Anderson isn’t one to shy away from controversy and his speech on Monday evening at a fringe event at Tory conference certainly did not disappoint. The party’s deputy chairman addressed a packed out room at a Manchester club. While recounting  his life story, Anderson couldn’t resist taking a pop at Guardian journalists, Diane Abbott and, er, Margaret Thatcher. A rather brave move in a room full of Tories…

Anderson said being voted ‘the worst man in Britain’ by the Mirror was the ‘greatest honour’ of his life. ‘Funnily enough, that year was a very close competition. I’d just beat Prince Andrew to it. Did you get that, Guardian?’

‘I was brought up on a strict political diet of Skinner, Scargill and Tony Benn,’ Anderson continued. ‘We hated Maggie with a passion!’ 

She came along and all of a sudden our industry started closing down a bit, started closing… That was something that I find very difficult to forgive Maggie and the Tory party for.

Anderson wasn’t alone with his less-than-rosy memories of the Margaret Thatcher era. ‘We learned rhymes about Thatcher and how we wanted her to die in the playground at school,’ Miriam Cates MP chipped in after Anderson’s speech. Mr S isn’t sure the crowd was quite prepared to hear about all that Thatcher bashing…

On his ‘road to Damascus’ moment, Anderson explained that he saw the light during a constituency visit. When working for the Labour MP Gloria De Piero, he was trying to persuade a Conservative voter to change their mind, when he realised his had been changed instead.

‘I went back to Gloria and she said: “Which way is he voting?” I said, “Tory. I don’t blame him.”’

The deputy chairman hadn’t finished blasting the Labour party though:

They bang on about illegal immigration all the time… That we’re not caring and compassionate and welcoming country, and that’s nonsense because we are… I went to the camps with the Home Affairs Select Committee, which is a cross-party committee. Now, Diane Abbott was supposed to come, but she went to the wrong station in the morning. She never got there — so that was a bonus.

Ouch. Anderson went on:

This is part of the what the New Conservatives believe in. It’s about when people come to this country in genuine need of refuge… It winds me up when we see the illegals coming over, taking advantage of our system.

Punchy stuff. Anderson’s night didn’t end there though. Mr S spotted the MP zipping off to a drinks reception hosted by his other employer, GB News. It was the place to be: he joined Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liz Truss and even Priti Patel — who didn’t need much convincing to jump on stage and lead the crowd in a drunken rendition of Robbie Williams’s Angels. Who says the Tories don’t know how to have a good time…

Ben Houchen tells Tory rebels: ‘shut up and get out of the way’

It looks like the sniping has already begun here at Tory party conference. On Tuesday, Liz Truss decided to use the event as a vehicle to launch her ‘Great British Growth Rally’ – an attempt to push the party to reduce the size of the state.

That has not gone down well though with some of her colleagues, who’ve seen it as an attempt to undermine Rishi Sunak. Chief critic has been Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen, who said ahead of the rally that he wished Truss had ‘more awareness’ and stayed away.

Yesterday, Houchen went further at a panel hosted by the Centre for Policy Studies and CapX. At the event he issued a blunt message to Tory rebels seeking to undermine the PM, telling them to: ‘shut up and get out of the way’:

‘I would encourage the very small number of Conservative MPs who seem to be using conference and the recent months to cause difficulty to Rishi Sunak and his government to shut up, get out of the way and let Rishi Sunak set a vision for this country that people will be able to buy into and see a better future with a Conservative government.’

Mr S wonders if Houchen might have his work cut out. You can’t quite see the Conservatives playing happy families anytime soon…