Has the regeneration of Elephant and Castle been a success?

It has been ten years since work began in earnest on the regeneration of one of the few surviving sections of old-school central London. While the rest of Zone 1 seemingly saw wall-to-wall gentrification, Elephant and Castle remained an outpost of stubborn, scruffy ordinariness, an oasis of discount stores, greasy spoons and traditional boozers.

Over the past decade, billions of pounds have been lavished on sprucing up the Elephant. But while the old place certainly looks quite different – a cluster of new towers, thousands of new homes, a gaping hole where the 1960s shopping centre once stood – this is a regeneration that has had its fair share of troubles.

In fact, controversy has swirled around Elephant and Castle even before developer Lendlease set to work on its centrepiece in 2013. To make space for the £2.5 billion, 3,200-home Elephant Park development, Southwark Council first needed to clear the council estate it was to replace. The ‘decanting’ of the Heygate Estate was an ugly process. At the heart of the conflict was a hard core of residents determined to stay put railing against a council encouraging them to pack their bags – often using strategies such as turning off their heating to force them out.

Jerry Flynn’s family had moved to the Heygate in the 1970s and he stayed there until the early 1980s, when he got his own flat in Bermondsey. When rumours first began to swirl about the redevelopment, Flynn’s mother, who lived on the estate, filled him in. She asked him to help her navigate the process – and what Flynn saw horrified him.  

Council tenants were rehoused in Southwark, but those who had bought their council homes were offered such low levels of compensation that few could afford to stay locally. ‘They all moved out of the Elephant, some out to places like Kent,’ said Flynn, now aged 67. ‘There were also about 200 insecure tenants living there at the time – nobody knows what happened to them.’

Meanwhile, trouble was brewing at another Elephant and Castle landmark, the shopping centre, which owner Delancey has demolished to make way for a snazzy modern replacement. Admittedly the centre was more shanty town than showpiece of post-war architecture, but it was loved by the local community. Around 10 per cent of Southwark’s population is of Latin-American origin, and the centre was their de facto headquarters, packed with salsa bars, restaurants and kiosks selling regional delicacies from Peru, Brazil, Ecuador and Bolivia. 

When the centre closed, many long-term traders were offered alternative space at Castle Square, a temporary shopping centre tucked down a side road beside the railway tracks where passing trade is minimal. As a result, incomes have fallen. Clearly retail has suffered, both during and after the pandemic, but the optics of this as-yet-unresolved dispute are terrible.

Back at Elephant Park, work is now advanced. Some 2,300 homes have been completed on the site, which covers around 25 acres. The development will also feature a two-acre park, a leisure centre, shops and offices when it is completed in five years’ time. 

Angela Brennan, Elephant Park’s project leader, said the plan has always been to ‘create a place that recognises, respects and builds upon’ the strengths of the old Elephant and Castle. She said the local community’s wishes were baked into the scheme – a series of London plane trees on the estate were preserved at their behest, and the park was made fully pedestrian following consultation. Some 10 per cent of retail units are let at discount rates to local small businesses. And when the shopping centre is finished it will be linked to Elephant Park, creating a modern town centre.

A claim which is regularly levelled at developments such as Elephant Park is that the new homes created are far too expensive for ordinary Londoners. Prices currently start at £752,000 for a one-bedroom, 577 sq ft flat, which works out at a punchy £1,300 per sq ft. And the new restaurants which have been popping up nearby are expensive too – a cheese toastie and a small cappuccino at Little Louie, a recently opened café, will set you back just over £10.

‘It makes you wonder what problems these big regenerations are actually solving,’ said Flynn. By process of deduction, many campaigners believe a large chunk of Elephant Park’s homes have been sold to overseas buyers. They have certainly been marketed overseas, notably in Singapore, and in 2017 the not-for-profit Transparency International found that all 51 units sold, by that point, at one of the site’s buildings had gone to international investors. Lendlease would not comment.

It is true that a quarter of the homes on the site are designated as affordable, aimed at first time buyers and renters priced out of the area. Other buyers are British singles and couples, although Brennan concedes that the development has ‘opened up new markets’ for the area, particularly among the parents of wealthy international students studying in London. 

This is not to say that there have been no positive changes at Elephant and Castle. Its notoriously scary southern roundabout, as well as its network of subterranean walkways, have been replaced.

Mercato Metropolitano, an Italian market and food hall inside a hip disused paper factory on Newington Causeway – which also houses a cookery school, vegetable garden and cinema – has been a big hit with Londoners (new outposts have since opened in Mayfair, Ilford and Canary Wharf) and has created a sense of destination at Elephant and Castle. 

But what is being created is a very different neighbourhood to the one Flynn, now aged 67, grew up in. Back then the Elephant was both cosmopolitan and working class. The international flavour is still there, but the new incarnation of the Elephant – with events to mark Chelsea Flower Show, craft fairs, artisanal coffee shops and puppy yoga (yes, really) – is a far more homogenised and middle-class affair. ‘They say they are creating communities, but they are not communities which I recognise,’ said Flynn.

Brennan thinks that the zero-carbon Elephant Park is not only providing new homes and jobs, but also increasing the wellbeing of its residents: an improvement on what went before. ‘A lot of change is happening, and that is not always comfortable,’ she said.

The strange allure of disaster tourism

Some people call me a disaster tourist. I’ve been to Afghanistan, Somalia, North Korea, Syria and Ukraine, to name just a few. I’ve been threatened by kidnappers and have been shot at, but it’s never seriously bothered me. A taste for danger is just part of who I am. That’s why I respect those five men who perished in the Titan submarine last week. They were prepared to descend into the crushing depths of the North Atlantic in a tiny submarine to look upon the most notorious shipwreck in the world, the Titanic. They wanted to experience a place so dangerous that only a handful of people on earth would ever dare go.

There’s an allure to danger that is difficult to explain. In Iraq, I travelled to the city of Kirkuk to witness the fight against Isis, one of the most depraved and evil enemies the world has ever seen. As I sat in the car with my fixer and driver, I knew what the hot and dusty road led to. I knew we could have been blown up by an IED or hit by a rocket at any moment. When I made it to the front line, I came under fire from Isis and could have easily been killed. But I survived and was able to witness the courage of ordinary Iraqis fighting to liberate their land. With gunfire blazing all around, I felt more alive because I was closer to death. 

When I got back, I was able to share the story of those courageous men fighting Isis with the rest of the world. Sadly, the five people on the Titan can’t share their story, but they have still made a statement. They will be remembered.

Predictably, almost as soon as it was announced that the craft had been destroyed, people began to say exploration and extreme tourism like this shouldn’t happen. But who are they to decide? I get similar criticisms when I travel. People, usually keyboard warriors who have never been far from their sofa, say I shouldn’t do it. Why don’t I think of my family? Why waste the money? What is the point of it? 

I normally reply that there is no point in risking your life climbing Everest or crossing Antarctica either, but I’d rather die somewhere doing something dangerous than die from a heart attack on my sofa. If I share something with the men on board the submersible, it’s an appreciation for the extreme. First you have the fear of whatever you are facing, then you have the anxiety of experiencing the threat itself, and then finally the relief when you get back alive. The more extreme you go, the more you put yourself at risk, the more you appreciate what you have. 

We humans need to challenge ourselves; we need to put ourselves through trials and tribulations to progress. And as a species we need eccentrics like the men on the Titan. Critics claim that the trip would have achieved nothing even if it had succeeded, but that isn’t true. Every time we push the limits of technology and our own knowledge, we contribute to human endeavour. OceanGate was trying to build a world where it is easier to visit the bottom of the sea. What could be down there? Perhaps species we have never seen before or rare earth metals that could transform our society. If you don’t look, you’ll never know. Maybe the company was reckless – who knows – but their aim was a noble one. 

I read the mother of the youngest man on board say that her son was planning to attempt a world record for solving a Rubik’s Cube at the lowest point on earth. If that’s not making a statement with your life, I don’t know what is. And even though they have died, these men will go down in history for the remarkable thing they attempted to achieve. They’ve done something with their lives. How many of us can truly say that? 

Why doctors voted to strike – and nurses didn’t

As the crisis in the NHS continues, patients may be glad to hear the nurses’ strike is over. The Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has been forced to end its industrial action today after nurses failed to back a vote for more walkouts. But within hours of that announcement, any hope that the NHS might be returning to business as normal fell flat: consultants, the most senior doctors in the service, voted to strike – 86 per cent are in favour, on a turnout of 71 per cent. And while nurses won’t be walking out, many join doctors in remaining unhappy about the pay and working conditions within the health service.

Senior doctors will now stage a 48-hour walkout on 20 and 21 July, with clinicians providing ‘Christmas Day’ cover, which allows for emergency care plus a small level of routine work. This will follow planned strike action by junior doctors in England, which will last for five continuous days from 13 July to 18 July, to result in the longest walkout since the creation of the health service 75 years ago.

The doctors’ union, the British Medical Association (BMA), says that the cut to consultant pay is 35 per cent, factoring in how the pay of senior doctors has fallen by 27 per cent since 2008 after inflation, as well as changes to tax and pensions. Consultants – unlike junior doctors – are not asking for full pay restoration all at once and are instead looking for the government to start giving pay rises that at least match rates of inflation. Last year they received a sub-inflationary increase of 4.5 per cent. But with Prime Minister Rishi Sunak hinting he will block public sector pay rises, these demands seem unlikely to be met.

Doctors, of course, aren’t just after a pay rise: one consultant who voted for industrial action described the need for better working conditions, calling the result a ‘protest vote’.

‘All of us are planning our exit strategy,’ he added. ‘It’s all so demoralising.’ But while almost 90 per cent of those BMA consultant members who voted are in favour of taking industrial action, the medic pointed out that it is unlikely all of these members will be able to strike, given how much the service relies on senior doctors.

And there is a similar feeling of unhappiness among nurses, in particular directed at those who did not vote for strike action. Although turnout was low, of those nurses that did vote, 84 per cent voted in favour of taking action, equating to over 100,000 members. Many feel let down by colleagues who didn’t take part in the nursing union’s latest vote.

The ballot was to achieve a mandate for further strike action, after over half of the nursing union’s members rejected the government’s offer of a 5 per cent pay rise for this year plus a cash payment for the previous one. The government offer followed a historic move by the union to strike, after being balloted on industrial action for the first time in its 106-year history.

After voting to reject the pay deal, the RCN then announced a 48-hour strike at the end of April in a bid for the government to renegotiate. This was called off, however, after being deemed unlawful by the High Court – it fell outside the union’s six-month mandate for industrial action, which had been granted in November. The union had to achieve another mandate for industrial action if its members were to strike again, but it failed to do so when not enough nursing staff took part in the vote. Now, the nurses’ strikes appear to be over – at least for the moment.

Pat Cullen, the RCN’s general secretary, acknowledged the result will be ‘disappointing’ for her members but said that ‘we have so much to be proud of’. Cullen announced that she will be meeting with Rishi Sunak today to discuss the government’s plans for the NHS workforce and its commitment to nurses and care workers. ‘I know staff morale is low and the staffing crisis is set to worsen without immediate action,’ Cullen said. ‘I will be telling him this today.’

But questions are being asked about the declining engagement of the union’s members. The vote to reject the government’s pay deal in April was closer than what was expected and the latest ballot results suggest that the momentum workers had for industrial action has already peaked. 

Does it represent an increase in satisfaction with working conditions? Not particularly. In the middle of 2022, nurse vacancies reached a record high of 46,828 – increasing by over a fifth in the space of a year. While there has been a 12,000 increase of nurses this year, particularly thanks to international workers, staff retention remains a problem. The latest data shows that over half of those registered with the Nursing and Midwifery Council left earlier than they’d first planned to, with the majority not looking to return – including younger workers. A third of those UK-educated workers cited ‘burnout’ as a reason for leaving. 

Clearly then, there are significant issues with the working conditions facing nurses in England, and ensuring that staff trained in the country stay in their careers remains a priority. But as the results of the latest RCN ballot show, the disconnect existing between union members and their leaders will have to be better addressed if the RCN want to push for more.

Daniel Korski flails under questioning about groping

The questions aren’t going away for Tory mayoral candidate Daniel Korski. The self-proclaimed tech entrepreneur is having a tough time answering questions about claims that he grabbed the breast of a woman when he was working in No. 10 under David Cameron. In a bid to clear the air, Korski – who denies the allegation – has today done an interview with TalkTV. The former war reporter claims that:

I didn’t do what’s been alleged. I absolutely didn’t do that. Ten years ago, when it happened, nothing was said to me. Seven years ago, when this first came out, nobody alleged anything to me. I just didn’t do what’s being alleged…  I treat everybody with the utmost respect, I work hard to create an empowering and, and respectful environment and, and I sit appropriately in chairs, and I try to treat everybody with respect in order to get the best out of a professional situation. So I can categorically deny the allegation that’s being made. 

In the excruciating exchange, Korski was also asked by host Kate McCann whether he had ever been unfaithful to his wife. He replied thus:

Look, I mean, I have a fantastic marriage to my wife. And I’m really, you know, excited that we’ve built a fantastic family together. I don’t think it would be appropriate to talk about anything else. I have a loving relationship with my wife. We’ve been together for 22 years I think it is now …we met originally in Bosnia after the war. And, you know, I’m thrilled to to build a life and a family with her.

Robert Halfon MP has already withdrawn his support from Korski. Will others do the same?

Pornography for the Boden set: The Missus, by E.L. James, reviewed

As an erstwhile fellow peddler of dirty books (Ambition, 1989), I’m in two minds about E.L. James. On the one hand, I’m glad that I never made money writing tosh which led legions of gullible women to collude in their own humiliation. Granted, my heroine had SOLD tattooed on her forehead, but so far as I know no murdering man ever used my book as an alibi, whereas, as Wikipedia puts it:

Rough sex murder defence, also known as the Fifty Shades defence, is employed by some people accused of murdering a sexual partner who claim that the death occurred because of injuries sustained during consensual sex. Advocacy group We Can’t Consent To This has identified… 60 police suspects or defendants in the UK who have stated from the outset or later plead this defence, 45 per cent of which resulted in a lesser charge, lighter sentence, acquittal, or the case not being pursued.

On the other hand, I’ve been extremely envious of James for making all that money when I practically spent my humble £100,000 advance on the way home. After six Grey books and a complete lulu of a film, James is now set for life from her decades acting as chief pornographer to the Boden set and can do as she pleases – which appears to have been nursing a secret desire to be a sexed-up Barbara Cartland all along.

The Missus is a follow-up to The Mister. They sound like novelisations of EastEnders episodes but concern the romance of the Cornish Count Maxim and the Albanian Alessia, his former cleaner – ‘She used to empty a bin of condoms every time she cleaned for him’ – and recent ‘betrothed’. The opening paragraph has all the molten dynamism of a bank holiday trip to Homebase: ‘My footsteps echo an urgent beat on the hard reflective floor, and I squint beneath the unremitting light of the fluorescents.’ But no worries: the next paragraph brings the drama, as Maxim surveys the fractured, lifeless body of his brother:

Kit, my big brother.
My touchstone.
Kit, the twelfth Earl of Trevethick.
Dead.

Bad writers often do this; it’s their way of saying let that sink in, a social media phrase beloved of halfwits. Does anyone ever really think like this? In the morning, does E.L. go to her sumptuously appointed kitchen and reflect:

Espresso, my coffee.
My libation.
Espresso, a coffee-brewing method of Italian origin in which a small amount of nearly boiling water is forced under 9-10 bars of pressure through finely ground coffee beans.
Brewed.

The book begins in Albania, which I’m not sure will tap into James’s readers’ rampant desire for escapism. When I think of Albania, it’s not of the savage glory of its hinterlands but of deceitful men entering Britain illegally and pretending to be Syrian orphans in order to cadge off the state. That, and the statue of Norman Wisdom, neither of which shrieks ‘the good life’ to me. But by page 3, sex raises its ugly head and we’re back on solid – or rather liquid – ground: ‘My body rouses; desire, hot and heavy, flowing south.’

You know the ‘show, don’t tell’ rule of narrative? James thinks that’s a bourgeois convention. Hence: ‘She’s overcome so much in such a short time: trafficking, homelessness, finding paid employment… and falling in love with me.’ And: ‘She’s been trafficked through Europe, been homeless, lived in one of the busiest cities in the world, and she’s fallen in love… then had that all snatched away from her as she was kidnapped, and nearly raped, by her betrothed.’ And my personal favourite: ‘Tell me. What happened after I put you on that minibus on the road to Shkodër?’

When we’re not being brought up to speed on what happened in the previous book, we’re getting clunky bulletins on what a catch Alessia is: ‘You are the most beautiful, talented and maddening woman I have ever known. I love you!’ Sometimes the banality verges on the surreal: ‘Alessia does a twirl. She’s wearing a skirt, top and cardigan from the collection that Maxim bought her in Padstow.’ Talk about Fifty Shades of Beige.

This being James, there’s a fair bit of sex. I so wish people wouldn’t use the word ‘seed’ unless they’re talking about gardening. But you can really feel James’s excitement mounting when there are the occasional high-end fixtures and fittings to be described: ‘Their bedroom is all whitewashed wood, with distressed furniture.’ I’m not surprised it’s distressed, having to bear mute witness to all that flowing seed.

James is a singularly inelegant writer, the frequency of those ugliest of curses ‘arsehole’ and ‘shit’ reminding me of the level of social intercourse I grew accustomed to during my days as a ‘punk rocker’ without callow youth as an excuse. I’m fascinated by what drives a bad writer – the wordsmith equivalent of a one-legged person trying to pursue a career as a tap-dancer. Can they not hear themselves? Do they read good writers? Can they see the difference, or are they simply word-blind? James started out writing fan fiction in middle-age, after becoming fascinated by the Twilight novels, which are aimed at teen-agers, and she’s never progressed. She calls the Fifty Shades trilogy ‘my midlife crisis, writ large – all my fantasies in there’. Whether or not her fantasies now involve doing the deed in badly plumbed East European bathrooms while senseless on raki and wearing something smart-casual by Seasalt is anyone’s guess.

In more than 40 years of reviewing books, I don’t think I’ve ever read one quite this bad. There’s so much to hate about the ghastly pair, but the hero’s way of addressing himself as ‘dude’ and ‘mate’ come near the top. So does the heroine’s habit of saying ‘muchly’, and poking her tongue out when she’s concentrating – meant to be cute, but soon conjuring up the image of a gormless dunce. Calling credit cards ‘magic cards’ is also intended to be adorable but is one step away from having a character point to a plane and cry in fear and wonderment: ‘White man magic makes big flying metal bird!’

Some prose dances, sparkles, flies. This prose lumbers from situation to situation, location to location and emotion to emotion. There’s no light or shade, just solid, drab grey. Closing the book, I finally felt freed from my very own Red Room of Pain – and, I’m pleased to report, no longer the tiniest bit envious.

Who laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round?

In 2020, an American pilot and daredevil named ‘Mad Mike’ Hughes launched himself in a homemade steam-powered rocket, hoping to achieve enough altitude to prove to himself that the Earth was flat. Unfortunately, the rocket crashed and Mad Mike was no more. ‘I’m not going to take anyone else’s word for it, or Nasa, or especially Elon Musk with SpaceX,’ he had once explained in an interview. ‘I’m going to build my own rocket right here and I’m going to see it with my own eyes what shape this world we live on is.’ In this way he became a martyr to the modern conspiracy theorist’s mantra: ‘Do your own research!’

When people who claim that the Earth is flat, or that Covid didn’t exist, or that the moon landings were faked (all these crank opinions go together, along with, inevitably, vicious anti-Semitism) say they have done their own research, of course, they usually mean they have done zero research but have instead watched hundreds of hours of other conspiracy theorists’ videos on YouTube. It is at least to the credit of one of those YouTubers, Bob Knodel, that he spent $20,000 on a laser gyroscope which he expected would show that the Earth does not spin. When, instead, he got the correct result, he later explained ingeniously: ‘We started looking for ways to disprove it was actually registering the motion of the Earth.’

The distrust of actual research, of ‘elite’ science, is not a peculiarly postmodern phenomenon. It was also promulgated by the notorious English socialist and quack Samuel Birley Rowbotham, whose invented anti-discipline of ‘zetetic astronomy’ made him famous as a Flat Earther in the 19th century, before he went on to poison people (including one of his own children) with phosphorus cures. ‘Rowbotham urged people to carry out experiments,’ James Hannam writes in this splendid book, ‘while explaining what the results would be for those without the inclination to perform them for themselves.’ How helpful. Once in Plymouth, challenged as to why only the top of a distant lighthouse could be seen if the rest weren’t obscured by the curvature of the Earth, Rowbotham simply denied the evidence of everyone’s eyes and said he could see all of it.

We do not meet modern Flat Earthers until quite late on in The Globe, which aims mainly to dismantle ‘the conflict theory’ – the idea that a battle between science and religious literalism prevented people accepting the roundness of the Earth well into the 15th century. ‘The myth that everyone thought the Earth was flat until Columbus proved otherwise was taught as a fact from nursery to university for much of the 20th century,’ Hannam laments, and he sets out with great élan to disprove ‘the fiction of medieval stupidity and superstition’.

After a colourful tour through ancient Babylonian, Egyptian and Persian cosmologies, we arrive at the Greeks, who at last began to figure things out, starting with Anaximander’s revolutionary thought that the Earth was a solid object just hanging in space. Eventually it was Aristotle and Eratosthenes who proved that the Earth was (more or less) spherical.

The spread of truth was slow but inevitable, as Hannam’s scholarly survey shows. The great Indian astronomers had adopted the Aristotelian view by the 5th century CE, while Christian literalists were still defending flatness. St Augustine acknowledged the pagan theory but suspended judgment. Thanks to the great Jewish scholar Maimonides and our own Venerable Bede, however, the matter was essentially done and dusted by the 8th century. As Hannam concludes, rather thrillingly: ‘The truth is that, after AD 800, we don’t know of anyone in western Europe with a modicum of literacy who didn’t think that the Earth is spherical.’

What, though, about the illiterate masses? They, too, soon knew what was what, Hannam argues persuasively. Twelfth-century French troubadours, for example, minced around singing that the Earth was round like an apple; and English kings being crowned since at least Harold II – including Charles III – have been ceremoniously presented with an orb, not a disc, representing the planet. In short, there was never any dark middle age of Flat Earth superstition suddenly dispelled by Columbus. (Only in China did Flat Earthism persist for much longer, until their Jesuit court astronomers dropped the science.)

The Columbus canard, Hannam shows, seems to have been invented by the American writer Washington Irving in his bestselling 1828 biography of the explorer. Meanwhile Columbus himself, after his third voyage, argued that the Earth was shaped like a pear, with a giant western protuberance ‘like a woman’s nipple’ that he accidentally sailed up, which is what messed up his nonsensical observations of the Pole Star. In the annals of excuses for failure, that one is even better than a faulty laser gyroscope.

The woman who put the Spencer family on the map

The first woman to put the Spencer family on the map was not Diana, Princess of Wales, the youngest daughter of the 8th Earl Spencer, nor even Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, the elder daughter of the 1st. Rather, it was their Tudor forebear Alice, Countess of Derby, the subject of this absorbing biography by Vanessa Wilkie.

Born at Althorp – then a modest, two-storey red brick manor house – in May 1559, six months into the reign of Elizabeth I, Alice was the youngest daughter of Sir John Spencer, a prosperous sheep farmer and sometime sheriff of Northamptonshire, and his wife Katherine, née Kytson. At the age of about 20, Alice married Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. It was a brilliant match for her and the Spencers.

Heir to the earldom of Derby, Ferdinando was also a great-great-grandson of Henry VII. (The Spencer family tree, as Wilkie wryly observes, was but ‘a sapling’ by comparison.) Indeed, Ferdinando’s Tudor blood meant that he was a potential successor to the childless Virgin Queen. So, too, were the three girls Alice bore him over the course of the 1580s: Anne, Frances and Elizabeth. As events transpired, however, Ferdinando’s tenure as 5th Earl of Derby lasted less than seven months. He died suddenly in the spring of 1594, aged 35, following a short illness – variously ascribed by contemporaries to witchcraft or poisoning by Catholic plotters. Alice, who was pregnant at the time, miscarried shortly after.

Ferdinando is perhaps best remembered as an important patron of the arts. Lord Strange’s Men, his troupe of actors, was one of the leading late-Elizabethan theatrical companies and may have counted the young Shakespeare among its members. Alice was a noted patron too – and a muse to several poets, including John Milton, who called her a ‘rural Queen’, such as ‘All Arcadia hath not seen’, and Edmund Spenser, who praised her ‘excellent beauty’ and ‘virtuous behaviour’. Despite a difference of spelling, Spenser claimed a (probably fanciful) familial connection, noting that he felt a ‘private band of affinity’ to the Spencers in general and to Alice in particular.

Alice was also, in Wilkie’s memorable phrase, a ‘skilled cultural matchmaker’. When Anne of Denmark, travelling from Edinburgh to London for her coronation, paused en route at Althorp in June 1603, she was entertained with a masque that Alice had commissioned for the occasion from Ben Jonson. The new queen consort was soon commissioning masques of her own on a regular basis from Jonson – and performing in them herself from time to time.

The lives of Tudor women, even those of high status, are not always easy to piece together since their thoughts and experiences were committed to paper less often than those of their male counterparts. Alice’s life, however, can be reconstructed in un-usual detail, in part because she was exceptionally litigious. In 1594 – newly widowed and recovering from a miscarriage – she embarked on a long and expensive legal battle with her late husband’s brother, William, now the 6th Earl of Derby, over the terms and conditions of Ferdinando’s deathbed will.

In 1600 – midway through what proved to be 13 years of litigation – Alice took as her second husband Sir Thomas Egerton, the judge dealing with this dispute. As Wilkie puts it: ‘What better way to ensure a successful outcome than to marry the man at the helm of the equitable courts?’ And so it proved. The 6th Earl of Derby was ‘outplayed at every level’ by his former sister-in-law. Wilkie – the curator of early modern manuscripts at the Huntington Library in San Marino, California – knows her way around the archives, and has a gift for extracting the human drama from what in other hands might seem dry legal proceedings.

A great dynast, Alice – who continued to style herself Countess of Derby even after her second marriage – engineered socially and financially advantageous matches for her daughters. Anne was married off to the 5th Baron Chandos of Sudeley, Frances to the 1st Earl of Bridgewater, and Elizabeth to the 5th Earl of Huntingdon. Like their mother, all three were noted patrons of poets and dramatists – and Elizabeth an author in her own right.

Anne’s second marriage – to Mervyn Tuchet, 2nd Earl of Castlehaven – provides a sad coda to the story of Alice’s spectacular rise. In 1631 he was found guilty of ordering a servant to rape his wife and was executed on Tower Hill. Alice died in 1637, at the age of 77, having outlived both her husbands and two of her daughters.

M. John Harrison’s ‘anti-memoir’ is a masterpiece

It would be hard to categorise M. John Harrison as a novelist, and that is just the way he would like it. He may definitely have a foot in the camps of science fiction and fantasy – with fans including Neil Gaiman and the late Iain Banks – but he is not one for being pinned down, whether he steps outside those genres or not. Of his 1989 novel Climbers, he said:

It isn’t about somebody who ‘finds himself’ through climbing, or who ‘becomes a climber’. It’s precisely the opposite of that: it’s about someone who in failing to become a climber also fails to find a self.

And so we have now the self-declared ‘anti-memoir’, Wish I Was Here, whose splendid title tells us we are not in the territory of conventional memoir. The writing confirms this. You will find more autobiographical detail in Harrison’s foreword to the 2019 collection of critical essays about him than here – although you can learn that he lives in Richmond, in west London, has a blind cat, was from the Midlands, and was once told by ‘two or three sweet old ladies’ in Lytham St Annes that, despite his protestations to the contrary, he believed in all the loopy flying saucer nonsense they believed in. ‘You just don’t know it yet,’ they said.

So which was it? Two or three? The point is that it doesn’t matter, since he is not under oath or making a witness statement – and besides, the vagueness has a deeper honesty to the truth. I am reminded of Samuel Beckett’s stage direction at the beginning of the second act of Godot: ‘The tree has four or five leaves.’ (Harrison read Beckett keenly as a teenager.)

You do not need to have read a word of Harrison’s, though, to enjoy this book. It might even help not to have. Approached this way, what you have is a mixture of memory, failed memory, observation and very good advice for writers. Or it may be as much advice for himself: the second person singular can be addressed to the reader of the book as well as its writer, and indeed flicker between the two in the same sentence. ‘When you’re young you collect items that are less mementos than experiential trophies.’ It was only as I sat down to write this review that I remembered that I normally find the ‘you’ that actually means ‘I’ an irritating stylistic device – but not here.

There is not a single false note in this book, and every word has been chosen with care. I suppose this is why it took me a while to read it, though it’s not long, and doesn’t contain obscurities, wilful or otherwise. It uses simple language, but is as rich as cake. Here is Harrison on writing (and I wish I could quote the entire page that follows too, since it is one of the best things that I have ever read on the subject): ‘You swing from being very sure about the thing you’re writing to being very unsure about it and thence to being unsure about everything.’ Earlier, he suggests this for the struggling writer, who of course may or may not be himself: ‘Describe a faded Polaroid, found in an unlabelled envelope, as if someone else took it. If nothing else works, describe the envelope and how you found it.’ And here is the beauty of this advice: you can find it pleasing if – perhaps especially if – you have no intention of writing a thing of any significance, ever.

As might be clear, this is not a work that lends itself to easy paraphrase. Praise from authors as divergent as William Gibson (Neuromancer, etc) and Jonathan Coe (The Rotters’ Club, etc) testify plausibly to the broadness of Harrison’s scope and appeal. If I were to compare this book to anything, it would be to the work of the Portuguese essayist and poet Fernando Pessoa, who made of his various invented personae a kind of map of beguilingly genteel alienation, though this is more a matter of tone than subject matter.

At one point in the book (‘while I was writing this…’) a wasp appears. ‘I tried to hit it with the local freesheet,’ writes Harrison, ‘but I couldn’t reach that high; and anyway I didn’t believe in it as a wasp.’ Oh, you think to yourself, that’s actually really funny. There is much like this.

The Anne Frank story continues

The first time a friend told me that Hitler had the right idea about the Jews I was six. Most of my classmates agreed, and quoted their parents in evidence – from which I conclude that anyone who suggests that they don’t understand how the Holocaust happened is either a fool or a liar. It was a team effort by popular demand. If the Germans had won the war, no one would have felt bad about it. But the Germans lost. How awkward.

It became necessary to convince non-Jewish Europeans that mass-murdering Jewish Europeans was wrong. It was a hard sell. Images of old men with sidelocks would only affirm that the Jews were weird and foreign, just as everyone had said before it became crass to say it. Piles of dead bodies were tasteless – which was also what everyone had said about the Jews. When we consider how Anne Frank became the universal face of ‘Holocaust remembrance’, we should remember who’s doing the remembering and what they choose to forget.

‘I still believe that people are really good at heart,’ Frank told herself in her diary. That was before she was deported to Auschwitz, where she was shaved, stripped, tattooed and assigned to slave labour. Transferred from there to Belsen, she died of starvation and typhus in February or March 1945. Her childhood friend, Hannah Pick-Goslar, was reunited with her in Belsen, survived, and became a widely travelled Holocaust educator, dying last year aged 93. She did not believe that Anne would have felt the same about people’s good-heartedness after seeing Auschwitz.

Ghosted by the journalist Dina Kraft, My Friend Anne Frank is Pick-Goslar’s autobiography. I was ready to assume that the book was another child-centred narrative reminiscent of Roma Ligocka’s memoir The Girl in the Red Coat orJohn Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. I also feared it was part of the cynical commercial penumbra around Frank that might as well be a halo, as she completes her transition into an icon of near-Christian innocence. But it isn’t these things. If you think Frank’s diary is a brave, wise and heart-warming testament to the indomitable human spirit, you really should read the sequel.

Born in Berlin in 1928, Pick-Goslar was raised in a home that ‘bridged German philosophy and Jewish tradition’. Her mother loved German literature, music and art, and gave her the middle name Elisabeth ‘in tribute to Goethe, her god’ (Elisabeth being the middle name of Goethe’s mother). Her father was a Social Democrat, a press officer for the Prussian state government and an adult returnee to Judaism. After Hitler’s rise to power, Pick-Goslar’s father secured a job in London with Unilever. But Unilever cancelled the offer and the visas when he told them that, as an observant Jew, he could not work on Saturdays. The family went to Amsterdam instead; Hannah and Anne became friends, and then the Germans invaded.

Deportations, arrests, assaults and suicides followed. The Jews in Amsterdam were slowly immobilised: their passports were stamped with ‘J’, their bicycles were taken and a curfew and guards turned their neighbourhood into a prison. Hannah’s mother became pregnant again, just before ‘we acquired our yellow stars’. The Frank family disappeared in July 1942 – to Switzerland, the Pick-Goslars thought. Hannah did not know that they were hiding in the recesses of a trap.

When German soldiers deported the Pick-Goslars to the transit camp at Westerbork, only one neighbour, a German Christian, attempted to intervene. The rest leaned out of their windows to watch, ‘their freshly- poured morning coffee next to them on their windowsills’. From Westerbork, the family went to Bergen-Belsen, where Hannah’s grandmother, mother and father died. The smell from the crematorium was ‘sour, like boiling glue’.

Anne Frank was taken west from Auschwitz to Belsen as the Russians advanced. She and Hannah were in different sections of the camp and spoke through the wire. Anne was ‘freezing’, ‘starving’ and ‘dressed only in rags’. Her parents were dead – gassed, she presumed – and her sister Margot was dying from typhus. ‘They took my hair.’ Then she disappeared. In that part of the camp, Pick-Goslar writes, a rope would be tied to a corpse’s leg to drag it to ‘one of the piles which were growing daily in between and in front of the barracks’.

‘What will we do if we’re ever… no, I mustn’t write that down,’ Frank wrote in May 1944. She was a born writer. Her diary gave her the fame she desired, and her readers the absolution they need. But, as Cynthia Ozick wrote in 1997, a convenient ‘fixation’ on the girl in the attic forestalls a reckoning with the truth. This ‘subversion of history’ encourages readers to ‘stew in an implausible and ugly innocence’, and a ‘shamelessness of appropriation’.

If Anne had survived, as Hannah and one her sisters did, would good Europeans love her diary, or would they view her as a Zionist enemy? Pick-Goslar trained as a nurse and lived in Jerusalem. An observant Jew, she called her three children, 11 grandchildren and 31 great-grandchildren her ‘revenge’ on Hitler.

Ghosts from the past: Beethoven’s Assassins, by Andrew Crumey, reviewed

In an uncanny way, Andrew Crumey’s Beethoven’s Assassins reminded me of Vanity Fair. It has no epigraphs, but both these quotes nudged into my mind: ‘Come, children, let us shut up the box and the puppets, for our play is played out’; and ‘The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face’.

I have admired Crumey’s work for decades. When I first returned to Scotland, I found it astonishing that there was a writer being talked about as ‘our’ Calvino or Borges when the enthusiasm generally was for Trainspotting. His latest novel is more like Umberto Eco in some regards, but is still quintessentially Crumey. I hope its valedictory tone is a fiction within a fiction.

Structured around interlocking stories across time, it opens with Therese, Beet-hoven’s sister-in-law, who has little good to say about her dishevelled, dying relative but may know about a lost opera, The Assassins, or Everything Is Allowed. It then switches to a contemporary discussion about Beethoven, supposedly written by Robert Coyle, the dimension-shifting protagonist of Crumey’s Sputnik Caledonia, who in this iteration is dealing with grief.

The next voice is Adam Crouch, a washed-up screenwriter with no commissions, who somehow manages to bag a place on an interdisciplinary retreat. The connections begin to build. He is only at this once aristocratic pile because Coyle died there during his residency. Crouch is unlucky Jim, and these sections are acerbically funny. But there is also the forgotten J.W.N. Sullivan, a popular science writer and acquaintance of Katherine Mansfield, who stayed at the same estate, where séances involving armonicas seem to bring back the ‘imprint’ of Therese van Beethoven.

The book is seeded with recurring images which serve its theme. Is the perfect conspiracy so well-constructed it isn’t even recognised? Are tales of the Assassins, Freemasons, Illuminati, Rosicrucians, Knights Templar, Aleister Crowley, spiritualists and so forth merely sleights of hand and distractions from the true secret clockwork of the world?

It’s great cerebral fun, with its quantum physics, telepathy, time travel and fraying of fact and fiction. But all this is its own misdirection. Coyle’s mother has died suddenly, and his father has dementia. The writing here about the soul-grinding nature of the bureaucracy surrounding illness and death is chillingly good. The questions the novel poses about science and aesthetics (is Einstein as good as Beethoven?) pale in comparison to the rawness of the loss it depicts with the same scrutiny as an equation or a late quartet.

In 2003, Crumey was selected as one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, but honourably pointed out he was actually 41. It is a pity that his work is not more widely recognised as the achievement it is.

The haunting power of 17th-century Dutch art

Laura Cumming writes about art with a painter’s precision. She’s been the chief art critic for the Observer since 1999. Her fourth work of non-fiction, Thunderclap, is a beautifully illustrated memoir that intertwines biography, visual analysis and personal reflection. An eloquent homage to her artist father, James Cumming, and to the artists of the Dutch golden age, it explores the power of pictures in life and in death.

Dutch art is a culture like no other, writes Cumming. ‘Which other nation wanted to portray all of itself in this way, its food and drink and physical conditions, its lovers, its doctors, housewives and drunks?’ Freed from Spanish Catholic rule after 80 years of warfare, the newly independent Dutch Republic emerged in the mid-17th century with a cultural boom: between 1.3 and 1.4 million paintings were produced by up to 700 painters in under two decades. Why then, Cumming asks, is so much of the art ‘seen but overlooked’?

‘That old cliché’ – as she calls it – about Dutch artists only ever replicating what’s in front of their eyes doesn’t help. The relegation of still life to an inferior art form – ‘just depictions of trivial stuff’ – hits hardest at 17th-century Dutch art because there’s so much of it. She’s heard curators disparage Dutch painting as ‘a brown art of cattle, cartwheels and mud, of peasants and platters, too many flowers and wide skies’. Too many perhaps for some, but not for Cumming: ‘I cannot get enough of Dutch art.’

Her passion is inherited from her Scottish father, a painter of semi-figurative art who in the 1960s was given a grant to study Dutch pictures and to visit the Rijksmuseum and Rembrandt’s house. It was the one and only holiday the family took abroad, and everything stands out in Cumming’s memory ‘like a comet’: the gable façades and cheese roundels, the bright bicycles and little bridges. For her, Dutch art is less about things, and the way they look, and more about feeling, mood, charisma: ‘a mysterious kind of beauty, a strangeness to arouse and disturb, an infinite and fathomless world’.

Chief among her cohort of artists is Carel Fabritius, best known for ‘The Goldfinch’ (1654), a charming small painting of a pet bird which found fame first in the writing of the 19th-century French journalist and art collector Théophile Thoré-Bürger and later in the bestselling novel of the same name by Donna Tartt. There are scant records about Fabritius’s life, cut short by the gunpowder explosion in Delft on 12 October 1654. Just a dozen of his paintings survive, and few display ‘a definitive subject or style’. ‘He could not be discerned in the throng, perhaps. Or, to put it more positively, he cannot be pinned down,’ writes Cumming.

In Thunderclap, she takes Fabritius – an artist ‘explained away’ by historians as the missing link between Rembrandt, with whom he trained in Amsterdam, and Vermeer, his neighbour in Delft – and makes a compelling case for him being ‘one of the greatest innovators in Dutch art’. Her quest to gather together the scraps of his life and art coexists with her desire to get to know the man her father was before she was born. ‘All of my ideas of life and art come originally from our conversations,’ she writes, though the first 40 years of his life remain a mystery. She wants to understand what both men saw, to delve deeper into their ‘unknown picture world’.

Cumming is at her strongest when translating what she sees in art into words. In her hands, a lute shines ‘like a new chestnut freed from the husk’, while a woman’s hair is ‘scraped back in a topknot too foolish for her intelligent face’. Blackcurrants roll towards the edge of a shelf ‘in a darkening tide’, and a pair of fresh peaches are ‘lunar fruit, marked like the seas and mountains of the moon’. Of two striped snails, she writes: ‘One is sulking in its shell, the other exiting stage left as if they’ve had a row.’

Alongside Fabritius is the great Amsterdam flower painter Rachel Ruysch, and Clara Peeters, who made magic out of humble foodstuffs. The intimate images of Gerard ter Borch precede the dazzling domestic scenes of Vermeer. Cumming came across the work of Adriaen Coorte by chance as a student and continues to marvel at his refined and original still lifes, which render each element in such astonishing close-up that ‘you feel the artist’s presence’.

Fabritius and Cumming’s father were born 300 years apart, in 1622 and 1922. Fabritius died, aged 32, in the explosion, James Cumming from cancer in his sixties. Cumming examines their art and celebrates the power of pictures to bring us closer, not just to other people but to other worlds. ‘Looking is everything,’ she writes. ‘And art increases this looking, gives you other eyes to see with, other ways of seeing, other visions of existence.’

Spirit of place: Elsewhere, by Yan Ge, reviewed

This collection of stories is so assured, and delivered with such aplomb, that it’s hard to believe it’s a debut – and, as it turns out, that’s because it isn’t. Although Elsewhere is Yan Ge’s first book written in English, she is a seasoned novelist in China, where she has been publishing fiction for more than 20 years.

For the past decade, Ge has lived in Britain and Ireland, and the collection captures the spirit of both her birthplace and her adopted homes in a variety of registers. The stories set here have a whiff of autofiction to them, but transcend their origins with style and wit. In ‘Shooting an Elephant’, Shanshan, a Chinese woman living in Dublin with her reporter boyfriend Declan, can’t understand how the IRA kingpin Thomas ‘Slab’ Murphy got his nickname. ‘Perhaps he has a flat forehead?’ But saying things in this sparky fashion is a way of not saying other things. Shanshan, Declan says, ‘should focus on getting better’ (from what?), and there is an austere perfection in the evasive reference to her mother’s death, a single line: ‘A policewoman had asked her “Can you confirm the victim’s identification?”’

Similarly, the story ‘Stockholm’ describes with antic energy a writer’s difficulty in presenting a professional face at a literary festival while she dashes to the toilet to express breast milk and frets that her head is so filled with ‘nappies, pee, poop’ that she has lost ‘the ability to write or even perform like a writer’ – all the while surrounded by increasingly terrible literary people who are no doubt entirely invented.

But it’s Ge’s stories set in China that are the most formally adventurous. They range from a tale of arguments and sex in the aftermath of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake to a gripping account of the (real) death sentence imposed on the 11th-century polymath Shen Kuo. Most impressive of all might be the closing novella ‘Hai’, which unearths the politics around the succession to Confucius in the 5th century BC.

Here, struck by the quality of writing irrespective of its setting, we wonder what we have been missing in Ge’s earlier, untranslated fiction. In the story ‘No Time To Write’, the narrator says that to write is ‘to go down into my memories like a miner, get my hands dirty and dig out the nasties’. Another character demurs: the past is ‘just in your head. And it’s in everybody’s best interest if you just keep it in your head’. I tend to agree – but we will allow for exceptions.

In seven years, Lenin changed the course of history

The upheavals convulsing the Russian empire in 1917, Victor Sebestyen argues convincingly, were the seminal happenings of the past century. From them directly stemmed the second world war, the Cold War, the collapse of European imperialism and the dangerous world we inhabit today. There are many weighty modern accounts of these epochal events by historians such as Richard Pipes, Robert Service and Orlando Figes, and it is these that Sebestyen chiefly relies on in this brisk, well-informed and chilling account. He makes no pretence of original research.

‘The Russian Revolution’ is something of a misnomer as, strictly speaking, there were two such eruptions in 1917: a genuine, spontaneous revolution in February, and the planned coup d’etat by the Bolsheviks in October that founded the Soviet state. The motives of this tightly knit group of men were laudable, even idyllic. In the words of Trotsky, one of the main movers:

I can see bright green strips of grass, clear blue sky and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let future generations of people cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence and enjoy it to the full.

So what went wrong? How did this childlike vision become a nightmare system, itself dependent on evil, oppression and violence? A system in which Trotsky, for all his later protestations of innocence, was mired in blood. Challenging Marx’s dictum that impersonal factors rather than individuals are the moving forces of history, Sebestyen focuses on one man as primarily guilty of both making and perverting the revolution – Vladimir Ulyanov, otherwise known as Lenin, the fanatical polemicist who returned from Swiss exile, bullied his more timid comrades into seizing power and then insisted that the new society he was creating had to be more cruel, rapacious and murderous than its enemies to survive.

Sebestyen describes Lenin as a clean-living ascetic who never personally killed anyone and was no sadist. But he then weakens his argument by liberally quoting the dictator’s orders to his subordinates: ‘Let there be blood’, ‘Shoot them’ and ‘Death to all of them’. Lenin may not have been a sadist exactly, but he was certainly a vicious psychopath, and the society he constructed was built on the bones of his victims.

It was Lenin, not Stalin, who founded the Cheka (the secret police), who first extorted grain from starving peasants and insisted that revolutions could only be made by firing squads. The machinery of repression and mass murder was in place by the time he died in 1924. All Stalin had to do was use it.

Sebestyen’s early pages provide ample evidence of why revolution was inevitable. He paints a vivid picture of a vast country stuck in backward feudalism, despite the ‘liberation’ from serfdom of 85 per cent of the population in the mid-19th century. The Romanovs oscillated between savage reaction and inadequate reform, and were seemingly unworried that an astonishing 20,000 of their officials were assassinated during the last 25 years of their reign. Tsardom survived one revolution in 1905, triggered by Russia’s war with Japan, but a greater war with Germany in 1914 spelt doom for the ancien régime. By the time that bread riots sparked revolution in the freezing winter of 1917, Russia’s armies were deserting, and even conservatives were plotting revolt.

The first leader thrown up by the revolution, Alexander Kerensky, was a well-meaning drama queen who made the double mistake of continuing a hopeless war with a mutinous army and not shooting Lenin when the Bolshevik leader returned with the seductive slogan: ‘Peace, Land and Bread.’ Lenin didn’t mean it, of course. His goal was always a one-party dictatorship run by those who thought like him and treated the real workers with contempt. The ‘former people’ classes who once ran Russia were condemned to exile or extinction, while the rest began their 74-year jail sentences.

Reading this chronicle raises melancholy reflections about the present condition of Russia under its wannabe Lenin. A century after the original’s death, another bad Vlad is replicating his predecessor’s ugly example. Russia deserves better than rulers addicted to grandiose dreams of perfection but actually dedicated to bringing only suffering and death.

What ‘pax’ meant in Rome’s golden age of imperialism

The Roman emperor Domitian began life as a spare. At the end of the 1st century CE, while his brother Titus was the heir to their father Vespasian, the younger boy’s ‘sense of resentment and frustration had festered’, writes Tom Holland. ‘Rather than stay in Rome, where his lack of meaningful responsibility was inevitably felt as something raw’, Domitian moved away with a wife whom his family disliked, ‘doomed forever to be a supernumerary’, paranoid, attracting gossip, avoiding any company in which ‘innocent mention of baldness’ might be viewed as ‘mockery of his own receding hairline’.

In most judgments by posterity this Prince Harry of the early empire fulfilled all this lack of early promise. Big brother Titus became emperor only briefly. So the spare got the top job after all, but became mostly famous for catching flies to stab with his pen, enforcing castration and holding death-themed dinners for nervous senators. Within this provocative history of Rome’s ‘golden age’, a series of varyingly connected episodes between the deaths of Nero and Hadrian, Holland gives back to Domitian some of his bruised reputation.

Let the sensitive beware: this is a book that judges everything about Rome by the standards of the Romans themselves. The author is a master of immediacy – and not for him the fashion for deploring ancient virtues as modern vices. Providing peace, he argues, was the prime virtue for an emperor. But it was a particular kind of pax – the absence of wars in which Romans fought other Romans. Wars against other peoples were different. If the mass destruction or enslavement of Germans and Judaeans were necessary for Roman peace, so be it. For Holland, that is the key to understanding this time, which, as Edward Gibbon famously (and now notoriously) said, was part of ‘the period in the history of the world during which the condition of the human race was most happy and prosperous’.

Domitian learnt the importance of avoiding civil war from Rome’s first emperor, Augustus, who had won a series of such wars, as well as from both his father and his brother. Although his family had denied the younger boy any substantive responsibility, the spare had not for nothing spent his time at the centre of the imperial court: ‘His understanding of how power operated at Rome was pitiless and without sentiment,’ Holland says.

Vespasian had triumphed as the last of the ‘four emperors’, courtier warlords whose armies had slaughtered thousands of fellow Romans for every day of peace in 69 CE, the year when Pax begins. Titus was from the start at the heart of his father’s attempt at a different kind of supremacy. Vespasian did not wish to follow his three dead predecessors as a civil war victor. Between his victory over his final Roman rival and his triumphant entry into Rome came his elder son’s gruesome suppression of a revolt in Jerusalem, a vital act in persuading Romans that Vespasian and his family were the victors in a virtuous foreign war.

In his two years as emperor himself, Titus oversaw the opening of the Colosseum and the recovery of the towns around Vesuvius from the eruption of 79 CE, both events vividly described here. But it was this first assault on the temple of Jerusalem, wall by wall, room by room, that was forever his statement of what an emperor needed to do, keeping his armies proud, his rivals cowed and himself in power. ‘The sea of flame was nothing to the ocean of blood, nor the death squads of legions to the legions of the dead,’ wrote the historian Josephus, one of the many Judaeans who saw that the values of Rome in the era of their peace were not to be withstood.

Domitian had been left out of the triumphal chariots when his father and brother celebrated their Judaean victory in 71 CE. He had to be content to ride on horseback while the wagons of temple gold were driven to the treasury, alongside 700 of ‘the tallest and most handsome’ prisoners. Some of the gold would become coins with the motto Judea Capta, a message to internal rivals, rebels elsewhere and Domitian himself.

When Titus died childless in 81 CE, Domitian was the spare no more. There was no legal tradition of inheritance from father to natural son (none of the first Caesars had gained power that way), but Vespasian had the sons needed for a dynasty, and he was not beset by palace poisoners. Domitian had also studied well. He launched foreign wars in Scotland and Germany, maximised public revenues, and exercised the minutest control over expenditure. Roman government had for 100 years become a bureaucracy within a single household and, despite Vespasian’s aim to distance himself from the last heirs of Julius Caesar, the levers of Nero’s court were still there to be pulled.

Domitian ordered a new portrait coin of himself, ‘lacking so much as a hint of baldness’, as Holland points out, with Germania Capta as the words to remind everyone that he too was expanding the territory subject to Rome. He made no attempt to disguise his absolute power. He believed in sound money. When his revenues fell short of his ambition and Scotland had to be abandoned, he did not debase the currency but widened what was not yet known as his ‘tax base’. He did deals with the bigger reluctant tax-payers and massacred the smaller, reporting to the senate that he had forbidden the Nasamonians of Africa to exist.

Holland dismisses the idea that this obsessive management by the sometime spare was a cloak for the depravities that interested him more, the personal depilation of his concubines, boys and girls, and the torture of insects. Domitian, he says, was ‘not a man given to duplicity’. When he ordered the checking of male circumcisions to search for Jewish tax-evaders, he did not hide the policy. What you saw was what you got: ‘His duty was not to the senate, but to the empire as a whole, nothing less than to keep the world at peace.’ He never had a ghostwriter (and historians became his main problem), but he could not have put it better himself.

Domitian had the classic paranoid’s defence of elaborate security arrangements. ‘The only time that people will believe his report of a conspiracy,’ he complained, ‘is if he ends up actually murdered.’ And thus it turned out. In September 96 CE he was assassinated by some of his own courtiers, who thought that the violent paranoia was coming too close to home. Like Titus, he had no children.

His successor, a long-time servant to the former imperial family, conveniently declared his hatred of his dead friend, and the combination of closeness and distance was enough for a smooth succession. Only a bit more than a year later, Nerva died of a fever, also childless. The next emperor, Trajan, came from the army and had no need to burnish Domitian’s reputation, although, as Holland puts it, he ‘owed much to him’. It was becoming a general rule that the likelihood of a man being remembered as a good emperor depended most of all on whether his successor needed him to legitimise his power. No one in antiquity needed a ‘good emperor’ Domitian.

Trajan’s hairstyle, ‘straight, short, a soldier’s cut’, showed how he wanted to seem. (Hair is something of a theme in Pax.) He hoped to keep rivals at bay with his own boasts of captured nations. He based himself in Syria for an attack on Parthia (experiencing a forerunner of the Turkish earthquake this year), conquering enough to claim Parthia Capta on his coins but not enough to hold it when threatened by massive new rebellions. While Trajan was dying without a natural heir in 117 CE, one of his generals, Hadrian, was suspiciously ready to succeed, ordering retrenchment, new limits to the empire that included his wall against the Scots, and new ways of preventing civil war. The last words in Pax are from a piece of ancient graffiti found in Jordan: ‘The Romans always win.’ In this fascinating time, skilfully sparked into life, this was largely true. These were good years for the Romans.

Why Wagner’s coup failed

When Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was launched, the overall mood among those around me – Russians from a range of ages and social groups – was one of scarcely believable elation, even hope. ‘Judging from the news this morning,’ one man said to me that day, ‘the borders of the Russian Empire will soon be moving westwards.’

I didn’t share his enthusiasm. ‘In two years’ time, we’ll be lucky if there’s a Russian Empire at all,’ I replied.

Last Saturday, as Prigozhin and his Wagner group set out on their abortive coup, the picture was reversed: for the first time in 18 months, I felt a limited optimism about Russia’s future.

On reading Prigozhin’s statement that ‘there are 25,000 of us and we’re going to Moscow to sort it out,’ I couldn’t help but feel exhilarated. Not that I entertained any illusions about the Wagner group, who deal with malcontents by crushing their heads with a sledgehammer. Nor could I fail to realise that, if the coup succeeded, Russia would inevitably find itself in a period of high turbulence, compared to which the famously choppy 1990s would have seemed a haven of stability.

But at the same time, a changeover of power in the Kremlin could spell the end of war in Ukraine – a war in which Ukrainians are killed on a daily basis in the name of the Russian people – which means, by default, in my name as well. Though of course no pacifist, Prigozhin nonetheless openly admitted the false pretexts underlying Putin’s ‘special military operation’.

It wasn’t that Nato or Ukraine were about to attack Russia, as the Kremlin had put out, but simply ‘a bunch of w***ers wanting to show off and demonstrate how strong they are as an army. Shoigu (the defence minister) wanted a Marshal rank, and the oligarchs wanted to plunder the country’.

All this gave you the clear impression Prigozhin had no long-term faith in the war, or determination to wage it on these flimsiest of pretexts. Besides, should the mutiny have continued, collapse at the Russian front and an ensuing, colossal military defeat would have been inevitable. After a while the army would get demoralised, bewildered as to who their legitimate commanders were or – just as in 1917 – why they were fighting at all.

Other than opposition politician Aleksei Navalny, now rotting in jail, no major Russian figure before had exposed the real nature of the Putin regime: evil, certainly, but also weak, inefficient, and brittle. Given Prigozhin’s recent favourable mention of Navalny in an interview – in which he pointed out that Navalny’s famous investigations into the regime’s avarice had, for a time, made corruption and embezzlement more tricky – it even seemed possible he might have let Navalny out and proposed a wide coalition to build Russia from scratch. This would have meant dismantling Putin’s ‘vertical of power’ and calling for a new Constituent Assembly, symbolically resuming the session interrupted in January 1918 by the Bolsheviks.

By now, there can be no illusions. No peaceful protest will ever overthrow a ruthless regime. Demonstrations in Russia in 2011 and Belarus in 2020 proved that people of democratic convictions and the will to air them are rarely capable of handling guns and are seldom ready to kill or die for the cause. Revolution, such as it is, can be carried out only by a disciplined armed group, and not necessarily a large one. During Ukraine’s Maidan revolution of 2014, it was the right-wing radical nationalists, relatively few in number, who served as a battering ram for the uprising to prevail. The Wagner column marching on Moscow was only four or five thousand strong. But it could have performed a similar service in Russia, had there been a wide coalition of people with different, sometimes opposed convictions yet united by the common aim to overthrow the usurper.

Of course, no such coalition is currently in sight, and we see little will amongst the Russian people to take responsibility for the country and its future. While in a recent poll, 67 per cent said they would support a peace deal and the cessation of military action if agreed to by Putin, 68 per cent – perversely – still support the war as long as Putin does. The Wagner coup, it seems, was premature. Until life for the majority of Russians has become desperate enough, they will never raise themselves from their apathy to rebuild the country’s tattered institutions.

But as the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin wrote: ‘Where the danger is, the saving power also grows’, and nothing captures the current situation better. Clinging to power, Putin has put himself and his people in such a tight corner that any normalisation will be long, painful and volatile. The sooner it starts, the less dangerous and difficult it will be.

The first step to this is ending the war, whether by a peace deal or military defeat. In this respect if no other, the failed Wagner coup brought Ukraine’s victory decisively closer, not least by removing the most capable and legendary combat unit from the front, as well as being a severe blow to the morale of the rest of the troops.

A lot will now depend on Putin’s actions. Will he be flexible enough to take on board Prigozhin’s populist narrative of ‘justice’ and back it up with action? This would mean dismissing Shoigu at the very least and carrying out an anti-corruption campaign in the higher ranks. Or will he regard such actions as weakness and continue hiding in his bunker instead, surfacing from time to time to utter absurd lies and meaningless banalities? All his past behaviour predicts the latter: in which case the failed coup last Saturday foreshadows the end of Putin’s rule, just as that of August 1991 ushered in the collapse of the Soviet Union half a year later.

As for Prigozhin, perhaps he didn’t seize power last Saturday because he didn’t really want it – simply the removal of his enemies. Or because, as reported in the British press, Putin’s FSB thugs had threatened the coup-leaders’ families.

Yet there is another, more fundamental reason too. The national ethos of the Russian state, as for Putin, is self-preservation at any cost. No degree of madness, blood or repression is too much if it preserves the status quo. Likewise, no coup will succeed until real turmoil hits Russia, and the future leaders of such an action will only hit home if they seem not mere rebels but defenders of the great Russian state – whose mission is to return it to some semblance of normality.

This perhaps was ultimately why the Wagner Group initiative failed last weekend. It may have been the right action, but the wrong moment, and by people viewed as too reckless or menacing to inspire such trust. Next time Putin, whatever humiliating climb-downs and compromises he swallows, may not be so lucky. And, as Aleksandr Lukashenko recently put it, with unaccustomed self-knowledge: ‘If Russia crumbles, we’ll all perish in its ruins.’

Has Matt Hancock just had a good idea?

Matt Hancock’s evidence to the Covid inquiry was some of the most explosive we’ve seen so far. It was largely damaging to anyone who wasn’t Matt Hancock, naturally, but the former health secretary did induce some rather big cringes from all present when his voice cracked as he said ‘I’m not very good at talking about my emotions’. He also apologised to all those who had lost loved ones. Hancock did offer some important insights into the mistakes made at crucial moments in the run-up to the pandemic.

He told the inquiry that it was an ‘absolute tragedy’ that the planning had focused more on how to deal with large numbers of dead people, rather than on how to prevent so many dying in the first place. ‘The absolutely central problem with the planning in the UK was that the doctrine was wrong. The doctrine of the UK was to plan for the consequences of a disaster. Can we buy enough body bags? Where are we going to bury the dead? That was completely wrong.’ Instead, he argued that ‘central to pandemic planning’ should have been ‘how do you stop the virus spreading?’ He said that planners did not believe that ‘we’ve got to be ready to hit a pandemic hard: that we’ve got to be able to take action – lockdown action if necessary, that is wider, earlier, more stringent than feels comfortable at the time. And the failure to plan for that was a much bigger flaw in the strategy than the fact that it was targeted at the wrong disease’.

One dramatic claim was that the health service came ‘extremely close – within hours – of running out of medicines for intensive care during the pandemic’, and that the only reason they didn’t run out was because of the preparations made for medicine supply in the planning for a no-deal Brexit. But EU exit planning was also an overall hindrance to preparations for a pandemic, he said, because it led to an ‘overall reshaping of the department’ so the government could be ready for a ‘disorganised Brexit’.

There were other failures that went beyond planning for the health service. No one will have been surprised to hear Hancock say that pandemic preparation for care homes was ‘terrible’ – or perhaps we should have been surprised, given he spent the middle of 2020 claiming that the government had ‘thrown a protective ring around care homes’. His way of dealing with this contradiction was that the department didn’t know – and couldn’t know – what preparations local authorities had made for care homes.

Hancock will be back for the next module: this one is on pandemic resilience and preparedness. He has clearly thought a lot about the mistakes made even since he published his book on his time as health secretary during Covid. The argument about what exactly we should have been prepared for is a new one, for instance. He also backed the idea of a resilience minister who can work on planning rather than being distracted by the many other priorities in government. That seems to be a dead cert for one of the recommendations to come out of this inquiry, though as Hancock knows, government turnover is so rapid that the bigger challenge won’t be stopping that minister from being distracted by short-term issues, but keeping them in position for longer than 18 months so they can see the thing through.

How do we fix Britain’s stagnant economy?

With every passing week it becomes clearer that the British economy is in crisis. Not the ‘here today, gone tomorrow’ sort of crisis that bedevils the financial markets, but rather the deep-seated, slow-burning crisis of a progressive, life-threatening disease. ‘I am totally 100 per cent on it, and it is going to be okay and we are going to get through this,’ the Prime Minister promised last week. If so, he’s got his work cut out.

The economic performance of the UK economy has deteriorated sharply over the last decade-and-a-half compared to its performance beforehand. On key measures, such as output per hour worked, the UK was a poor performer even before the recent deterioration. 

Unfortunately, there are few serious grounds for optimism. Unless there are fundamental reforms of the economy, the most likely scenario is that the UK staggers on with very low growth. As a result, living standards will barely improve and the country will inevitably slide down the international economic league tables. A weakening of British influence in world affairs seems likely.

It has become obvious that this economic crisis is at the centre of our wider woes. Without a much stronger economy, the ambitions of politicians of all parties for a better future for our citizens will come to nought. 

Our economic problems can be summed up in a single word: productivity. There is widespread cynicism about this situation and an especial pessimism about what governments can achieve. Yet there are many examples in post-war history of countries that have achieved an economic transformation. 

It is true that some economic transformations have occurred without an explicit plan by government. No one set out the Industrial Revolution in the 19^thcentury, for instance. And in the post-war period, the phenomenal success of Hong Kong occurred without a government blueprint. But most recent transformations occurred clearly as the outcome of a government’s strategic vision. This is even true of Hong Kong – and it was true of the economic revival that occurred in the UK in the 1980s and ‘90s a result of the Thatcher reforms.

Some of what is wrong with the British economy is of the state’s own making; some is not. Either way, when things are as malformed and malfunctioning as they are in Britain today, leaving everything to the market will deliver, at best, simply an efficient path to decline and disappointment.

Even if a prosperous future involves more use of market mechanisms, the market alone will not be able to get us to this result. It will require a programme of action by government. 

Sometimes, what holds a country back is essentially macro. The UK exhibits two overall macro weaknesses today: the level and structure of taxation; and the level and type of real investment. 
Nevertheless, these are both related to particular weaknesses in umpteen sectors of the economy. Accordingly, a sound investigation of our economic predicament must devote a good proportion of its efforts to analysis of our various micro failings.

After all, if we are to achieve a much lower rate of taxation, this will require a lower share of government spending in GDP. Achieving this in a sustainable and efficient way will require a reimagining of the role of the government across various sectors and a drive towards efficiency. Simply imposing across the board cuts would be stubbornly opposed. It would lead to gross inefficiencies and would probably in time be reversed. 

Equally, sorting out the various micro problems of the economy can play a critical role in boosting real investment.

All the main political parties are desperately short of both ideas on economic policy and an over-arching economic vision. What’s more, the pressures of the political hullabaloo prevent them for giving sufficient time or resources to address these issues. What we need is sound assessment by independent analysts with the perspective, time and resources to devote to this all-important task.

What might this blueprint for economic revival look like?

Under a new programme that I will be leading at the think tank Policy Exchange, we are going to produce a series of self-standing analyses of the key issues, including the two macro questions referred to above. We will begin with an examination of recent economic transformations, including France and Germany after the war and a look at Mrs Thatcher’s reforms of the 1980s. Are there key lessons for the UK today? Is there a common theme to these stories of economic success? Subsequent studies will look at key parts of the economy which drag down economic performance: housing, health, education, welfare, roads, energy policy and the criminal justice system. When the series of studies is complete we will draw them together into an overall policy blueprint for Britain which goes from the analysis to quantified conclusions. Ambitious? Certainly. It is also absolutely necessary.

Roger Bootle is one of the City of London’s best-known economists, and director of Policy Exchange’s new Policy Programme for Prosperity

When will the Tories get a grip on the post-Grenfell construction chaos?

It’s been more than six years since the Grenfell Tower fire killed 72 people and made many more homeless, yet the survivors – and families of those who died – are still waiting for answers. The Grenfell Inquiry, which launched a few months after the disaster, was meant to hold people to account, to question the management and design of high-rise buildings and to rebuild trust. Yet the only tangible results so far seem to have been the £70 million paid to an army of lawyers.

The Inquiry has been labelled a ‘never-ending circus’ by the British-Nigerian novelist, Jendella Benson. It’s a description that is hard to disagree with. And while the Inquiry trundles on, a different kind of crisis is looming large. In the wake of the Grenfell disaster, there is widespread confusion about regulation within the building industry. Architects and builders are struggling to keep up with the latest rules and they fear what new and confusing regulation might be around the corner. Prioritising the safety of residents is, of course, paramount. But this chaos doesn’t help anyone – and it is helping to exacerbate the housing crisis, with little benefits to either Grenfell victims or others who live in high-rise flats.

The real human tragedy of Grenfell must never be forgotten and no one should seek to diminish its impact. But we must also realise that we are witnessing a significantly increased paranoia in the construction industry linked to the revelations of the Inquiry: hikes in insurance premiums, increased market volatility, mortgage uncertainty, leaseholder debt stretched to breaking point, and the lowest level of house-building since the war. The Inquiry and those involved in the construction industry, from architects to developers, remain oblivious to these negative impacts at their peril.

One problem is that the Inquiry has made an art out of blame. Suspicion is now the watchword. Litigation is the default. For five years, construction specialists have pored over every word in every email written by naïve architects, misguided contractors and financially-squeezed suppliers involved at Grenfell. Few would survive this level of forensic scrutiny without some mis-spoken word surfacing. The Inquiry’s rigorous approach to fault-finding has led to many companies covering their backs: they are terrified of repercussions. And everyone is desperate to avoid any possible censure.

Of course, accountability is important. The scandalous omissions and blatant manipulation of data on the Grenfell project require targeted retribution. It is an undisputed fact that the residents’ legitimate concerns were ignored. For that, changes must be made and heads must roll. That said, the official response to Grenfell implies that risk-aversion will forever more play a central role in the construction industry, and this comes with a number of problematic, unintended consequences.

First of all, we are in danger of losing perspective. Residential fires are rare events. The number of fatalities in fires has been in terminal decline for 40 years. The laser focus on Grenfell has resulted in an over-concentration on the dangers of construction rather than on the steady improvements over the years.

The initial response to the Grenfell disaster had been a call for greater competence across the construction sector. This was welcome. But unfortunately, over the last six years, many professionals have been unable to keep up with the new rules and regulations as they are bombarded with policy consultations, legislative changes and endless revisions. This is giving rise to less competence (even incompetence) as parties rely on mechanistic tickbox compliance without thinking.

The government, for example, has advocated that residential buildings over 30 metres in height need to be designed with two staircases. The Chief Fire Officers Association says that the two staircase rule should apply to 18 metre-high buildings. The Royal Institute for British Architects Expert Advisory Group on Fire Safety said in 2018 that it should be 11 metres. The government seem too cowardly to decide and so are leaving various interest groups to fight it out.

This muddle is driving down the confidence of those at the sharp end of the profession who recognise that any one of these options is as arbitrary and ill-thought out as the next. They still need to comply. But with what rule or regulation?

The confusion shows no sign of ending any time soon. The Mayor of London recently announced that all buildings taller than 30 metres must have two staircases, even if they are currently submitted for planning approval. As a result, the drawings, financial criteria, and business plans will have to be re-modelled. With no regard for the investors, nor those seeking homes, around 125,000 projects in the capital may become unviable overnight. And where is the evidence that the second staircase will make the finished housing any safer?

Some developers are pulling out of projects that could provide much-needed housing. A number of developers are planning low-rise buildings to beat the system, thereby denying the market of hundreds of apartments that might otherwise be built.

The upshot is that while the Grenfell Tower fire was a catastrophe, there is another danger slowly unfolding in the disastrously low housebuilding statistics and the record high levels of construction insolvencies. Ironically, an over-concentration on demonstrating safety at all costs will inevitably give rise to an industry even more disconnected from the real lives of the people it serves.

Austin Williams is the director of the Future Cities Project urban think-tank

How Humza Yousaf could take advantage of Labour

The campaign for Scottish independence is at an impasse. Humza Yousaf used the SNP’s conference in Dundee to set out his party’s latest strategy for achieving statehood for Scotland. That strategy isn’t all that different from what the party faithful has heard before: keep winning elections, keep up the pressure on Westminster, and sooner or later something will happen. 

The problem with this tartan Micawberism is that something has been going to happen for rather a long time. Here is a list, by no means exhaustive, of events that were supposed to shift the dial on independence: the SNP’s commanding wins in the 2015 and 2019 general elections; its victories at Holyrood in 2016 and 2021; the UK’s vote for Brexit; the arrival of Boris Johnson in No. 10; the pandemic; partygate; the cost-of-living crisis; the decision to block SNP gender reforms. 

Certainly, the polling has fluctuated over time. In the first year of the pandemic, Yes held a consistent lead in the polls but fell back in 2021 and has struggled to re-establish majority support ever since. Even so, public support for secession remains just shy of 50 per cent and only one poll in the last 12 months has put the Yes vote on less than the 45 per cent it recorded in the 2014 referendum. After the worst six months since the SNP came to power at Holyrood 16 years ago, its principal policy enjoys the backing of almost half of Scottish voters. 

The problem is Westminster. So far, it has proved a stubborn bulwark against Scottish separatism. Last November, the Supreme Court confirmed that Holyrood could not lawfully hold an independence referendum without Westminster’s permission. Since then, the UK government has flexed its political muscles, denying Royal Assent to Nicola Sturgeon’s Gender Recognition Reform Bill, refusing to play ball with Holyrood’s deposit return scheme, and banning SNP ministers from meeting foreign officials without a UK civil servant present. The Times reports that the latter policy has caused the European Commission to shoot down Yousaf’s plans to appoint a Scottish envoy to negotiate EU membership for a future independent Scotland. 

I’ve written my Scottish Daily Mail column this week on why Unionists shouldn’t become too complacent about this situation. Political, cultural and demographic trends pose serious challenges to the constitutional status quo. But the flip side is that, even if the independence question isn’t as settled as Unionists tell themselves, the SNP has to show that it is capable of moving its cause forward. That might seem unfair given the UK state’s refusal to budge but a) politics isn’t fair and b) the point of a nationalist party is to make the UK state budge. You can’t be the ‘vote here for independence’ party if supporters keep voting here but you make no progress on independence.

Yousaf’s strategy — win elections, ramp up pressure, make preparations — may be insufficient but it’s not wrong as far as it goes. These are all necessary components; they just don’t get the national cause beyond the point where Sturgeon left it. As I’ve noted before, demographics, cultural shifts and changing attitudes all stack up on the pro-independence side. Again, though, if you’re observing trends and waiting to see their electoral impact, you’re a political scientist, not a political leader. Yousaf needs to identify opportunities and exploit them.

An obvious one, to my mind, is the next general election. On current polling, we are heading for a Labour government. The conventional wisdom is that this is bad for the SNP because it lessens the urgency of independence and pulls undecideds and soft Noes back from the brink of voting Yes. There is probably some truth to this but politics is about more than public opinion, it’s also about power and institutions and how you use them. The SNP has demonstrated this amply since 2007, when it took a devolved parliament intended to lock in Labour’s Scottish fiefdom and turned it into a command centre for redrawing the electoral map and advancing the cause of independence. 

Almost immediately after coming to power, the SNP unilaterally renamed the Scottish executive ‘the Scottish government’, elevating the apparatus of legislative devolution to a rival seat of power to that in Westminster. So effective was this rebranding exercise that the Tory government changed the law to retroactively approve the new name. This was the template and reuse yielded measurable gains for the SNP as it turned the political settlement Labour had intended to ‘kill nationalism stone dead’ into a proto-state waging constitutional battle against Westminster. By pushing the perimeters of the devolution settlement — and sometimes going further still — the Scottish government has been able to project itself as a sovereign-state-in-waiting. The confidence this telegraphs not only makes independence appear less risky and more straightforward than it would be, it probably encourages a certain national confidence in the electorate. 

To achieve independence, the SNP needs to enhance devolution. The Tories have spent half of the last 13 years finding yet more Westminster powers to hand to the SNP but have seemingly come to a realisation that strengthening your enemy is very unwise, actually. Labour, however, remains devoted to the religion of devolutionism. Almost every senior Labour figure at Westminster speaks about Scotland primarily in constitutional terms, another example of the SNP’s success in reframing the terms of the debate. 

Because UK Labour has very little to say to Scotland, it fills the silence with vague talk about further devolution of powers or other political jiggery-pokery. Whispering in Sir Keir Starmer’s ear on these matters is Gordon Brown, a man whose drive for constitutional experimentation is invincible to all evidence of its abject failure. As for Scottish Labour, ever-expanding devolution is the closest thing the party has to an unshakeable creed. 

If it handles these circumstances carefully, the SNP can turn them to its advantage. The readiest means of doing so would be a strategy of constitutional bifurcation, dividing its agenda into long- and short-term goals. The long-term goal is obviously independence and it should still be pursued but the party should do so quietly, focusing its efforts on establishing a common, united position on all the key issues. The short-term goal should be to acquire more powers for the Scottish parliament and Scottish government. 

This would represent not so much a reinvention of the SNP as a re-emphasis, leading the charge for more devolution in such a way that Labour would have no choice but to give its backing. The SNP could demand the right for the Scottish government to enter into international agreements and join international bodies. It could call for devolution of the job centre network and a right to be consulted on the UK minimum wage. It could urge a consultation on raising the limits on Holyrood’s capital borrowing. Labour could not be seen to oppose any of these measures, not least because all of them are lifted from Gordon Brown’s Commission on the UK’s Future. 

The more powers it gains for Holyrood, the greater the opportunities for the SNP to use its institution — and, at this point, Holyrood is its institution — to further the cause of independence. A strategy of two SNPs, one that speaks about independence to itself and devolution to the public, could get the party around its current impasse. 

Pickles slaps down Boris over Mail column

Remember Eric Pickles? The larger-than-life Coalition mainstay who inspired such legendary headlines as ‘I did not spend £10,000 on extra biscuits.’ These days Lord Pickles is chairing the Cabinet Office watchdog Acoba, which vets appointments for senior civil servants and ministers upon leaving government. The agency is currently somewhat overworked, with onetime appointees from the Johnson and Truss administrations now going off to collect all sorts of exciting gigs.

Among them is, of course, Boris Johnson himself. The rambunctious rule-breaker announced he was taking up a new column with the Daily Mail a fortnight ago. But emails released today between Johnson’s office and Acoba reveal that he only informed the watchdog after the media trail had dropped and just four hours before his first column was published. Boris? Filing late after the deadline? It couldn’t be…

In one incredulous message from the Acoba secretariat, a poor civil servant disbelievingly asks Johnson’s team ‘Is this announcement on Twitter and video of you posted on the Daily Mail Online’s account correct, are you the Daily Mail’s new columnist?’ The answer was obviously yes – though the former PM’s team suggested he might not have breached guidelines because, er, at the time of the announcement, he hadn’t signed a contract yet.

Pickles hasn’t taken too kindly to Johnson thumbing his nose at his team and says that there was a ‘clear and unambiguous breach of the rules.’ He also noted that he was familiar with the rules, because as Prime Minister he had set them out and had previously been criticised for doing the exact same thing with his Telegraph column in 2018. Pickles adds that the rules on outside work by former ministers are out of date and need more teeth. The time is past, he says, when we can rely on ‘good chaps’ to do the right thing.

Will the Cabinet Office now finally get their act together and toughen them up? After all, it’s not the first time they have been in a Boris-related pickle…