CONCLAVE

While neither exactly an action thriller nor an ensemble docu-drama, Conclave is nonetheless a terrific caper which is unlikely to do the Roman Catholic church much if any harm. Taking place in the Sistine chapel and amongst the austere environs of Saint Peter's, Rome, the plot revolves around the process to elect a new Pope following the unexpected death of the incumbent, who bears a passing resemblance to Pope John XXIII. Before the obsequies have even been completed however, there are strong hints of skulduggery afoot, although the plot devices (including the arrival of an unexpected guest) owe more to Agatha Christie than to Raymond Chandler.

Amid the foreboding and dimly lit gloom, the role of master of ceremonies falls to Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, Dean of the College of Cardinals. This is played by Ralph Fiennes in a performance which is both nuanced and compelling. At the film's heart is the elucidation of his mental journey from reluctant compere of the papal consistory to likely winner of a deadlocked contest. Fiennes's portrayal of a man consumed by anguished doubt into which ambition is gradually squeezed is superb and continues to engage even as the plot twists start to mount up.

As it turns out, there are quite a few of these. In a two hour film, context and exposition inevitably have to be compressed. But this being the twenty first century, where audiences are deemed incapable of grasping ethical or moral complexity, the sign-posting of the goodies and the baddies in Conclave is inevitably cliched. But for the backdrop of the Vatican and the profusion of magnificent scarlet clobber and crucifixes, the movie could easily have been misunderstood as a bitchy committee meeting at the Athenaeum as much as a seminal event to chose the leader of the world's 1.4bn Roman Catholics. Anyone looking for some specifically theological or canonical context will be disappointed. Apart from the old canard about the so-called "Latin Mass" (aka the Tridentine Rite), the main differences between the candidates' platforms are achingly secular rather than doctrinal.

In the "good corner" is Cardinal Bellini played by Stanley Tucci with just the smallest hint of the camp menace which has characterised some of his other screen performances. He is the "liberal" or "modern candidate" (pro-gay, anti-patriarchy, ecumenical) and is more than happy to throw his zucchetto into the ring if it means stopping the "baddies". The latter are embodied in a misogynistic and homophobic candidate from Nigeria and a vaping Italian cardinal who stands for the "traditionalists" and who is clankingly and inevitably revealed to be a bit of a fascist. Notwithstanding, he has by far the best line in the film when he ruefully admits that even the French, Gawd help us, have a chance of securing the pontificate. Spicing up the mix of the papabile, John Lithgow portrays the Canadian Cardinal Tremblay, an ultimate insider who is blandly evasive yet who proves to be a dab-hand at curial infighting. There is also the mysterious Cardinal Archbishop of Kabul, a secret appointment of the deceased Pope and who appears to have hearing difficulties judging by the number of times Fiennes has to repeat things to him.

The cardinals are banged up in what looks to be a redux edition of Travelodge, all narrow beds, inadequate lighting, hermetically sealed windows and easywipe floors. There is also a sort of canteen for the red-hats in which simply revolting looking food is prepared (what IS that black thing next to the boiling chicken?) and which is supervised by Isabella Rossellini as an unsmiling Sister Agnes. In order to vote, the princes of the church are ferried to and from the Sistine Chapel in buses which makes everything look like a College works outing minus the crate of Newcastle Brown at the back of the charabanc. In the longueurs, they all vape, smoke and plot while Fiennes tries to work out which ones should be black-balled.

Watching a bunch of over-dressed clerics casting their ballots below an astonishing mock-up of Michelangelo's gorgeous fresco does not of itself make compelling drama, not even when some random terrorist gets to blow in one of the chapel's high vaulted windows, spraying the startled electorate below with shards of glass and masonry dust. But what makes the film such a masterpiece is that these set pieces are merely punctuation marks in the psychological drama which steadily unfolds. To be truly papabile, the candidates have at least to dissemble a lack of ambition for the supreme office. Of course, this proves to be impossible, even for the Dean of the College himself, who early on expresses a desire to quit his offices for the seclusion of a monastery. Pride, covetousness, vanity, wrath and envy are all subtly and dramatically explored in characters who, by the very nature of their calling, are supposed to eschew them. That all members of the cast do so convincingly gives Conclave some of the richness of Graham Greene's profoundly insightful works on the nature of priestly fidelity and obedience. Many of the tete-a-tetes are electrifying.

The ending, when it comes, is truly gob-smacking. If you don't like or even love this film, I'll eat my biretta and send my gratuity slippers back to the Pope's cobbler. 

Happy Christmas.

  

 

THE NIGHT OF THE DONALD

Generally, the 24 hour news business does not like slam dunks. Competitive tension drives public interest and advertising spend. It gives an opportunity to myriads of "experts" to get a profile where otherwise they would be totally anonymous. This is particularly true of the the political commentariat and somewhat true of the sports one. So the "too-close-to-call" US presidential election of 2024 should have been catnip for the pundits. In the UK, almost more so than in the USA, the mainstream media nonetheless decided there was only ever going to be one worthy winner and that wasn't Donald J Trump. So it was just a joy to watch egg exploding all over preening faces as the scale of the MAGA victory unfolded over the course of the early hours of Tuesday morning GMT. 

Channel 4 went for the jugular early: if they couldn't burn The Donald in effigy because of safety regulations, they would bury him under bucket-loads of ordure instead. Anchoring with Emily Maitlis and Krishnan Guru Murthy in Washington was Stormy Daniels, erstwhile "adult" actress and as comely a nemesis who has ever hovered over the 45th (now 47th) President. As a way of introducing a little bit of studio tension of its own, Channel 4 lined her up to debate the merits, amorous and otherwise, of the Orange Lothario with Boris Johnson. Stormy gallantly affected not to know of Bojo's own idiosyncratic behaviour with women and sweeping back her dark extensions, she became almost coquettish as she sized up the portly ex-PM. Alas, Johnson was just too determined to appear even handed and he was very swiftly returned to the pavilion. Various other experts were then deployed as the night wore on, including the son of Martin Luther King Jnr. A polite, softly spoken man, he looked increasingly uncomfortable as Emily and Krishnan went through the various phases of grief as the results built up remorselessly. 

Recalling the utter Horlicks it had made of the contests in 2016 and 2020, BBC 1 went for the straight - bat approach resulting in a very dull show indeed. Once again, Clive Myrie contrived to sound as if it was way past his bed-time and was not much helped by an equally lethargic crew who reacted far too slowly to what was happening on the ground. Given the "threat to democracy" (the Beeb's big angle), the viewer was treated to endless shots of empty voting stations that were set up like Fort Knox and footage of gigantically fat security guards with names like Sheniqua and Tyson, who did not look as if they could outrun a toddler, still less an adult crawling away on all fours. 

Beeb 2 was given a little more leeway; Newsnight's Victoria Derbyshire's focus was the likelihood of violence following an equally likely defeat of Trump, who was, we were sternly reminded (about forty times), a convicted felon who had twice been impeached. No one of sound mind was going to vote for that mountebank, right? In Beeb land however, there was perceptible anxiety the US electorate would fail to hand Harris the landslide she so richly deserved and trouble on the streets would be the result. Amazingly, pretty well all of her guests, regardless of affiliation, bristled at this presumption: the former Republican senator for Pennsylvania Rick Santorum plainly thought the BBC questions were ridiculous and gave Victoria the sort of smile we normally reserve for the deranged. But the Democrat lady too reassured the viewers the USA was no banana republic. 

The approach of the independents like ITV and Sky was to affect worldly scepticism, but  there too faces started to register bemusement as the hours passed. Tom Bradby anchoring for ITV had to ask several times "what was going on", a somewhat odd attitude for someone supposed to have the answers. As various pundits pondered the rapid evaporation of the Blue collar, 18-29, Latino and Black vote from the Harris column and tried to make their spreadsheets conform with previously complacent expectations by crossly punching their keypads, the distinct sound of a balloon losing air could be heard. By the end of the count, it was clear Harris had not improved on the Biden vote of 2020 in any state, county or district of the continental United States. Not one.

As for the focus of all their disappointment, the President - elect seemed to be taking it all pretty calmly. Up on the stage at the celebration back at Palm Beach, he identified the salient points of his astonishing victory as if they were base metals. There then followed an extended ramble which recalled the quieter moments of King Lear. As usual, his ambitions for America were delivered in the trademark whisper which Trump always uses for emphasis or repetition. The faces of the family group around him were however, a complete picture: his six-foot-six son stared with the glum realisation that he had got another four years of this uniquely tiring brand of circus. The others looked as if they had just been told Tiffany's had burnt down. Only his running mate JD Vance looked unambiguously delighted, as well he might: he is probably at most only four years away from the presidency himself.

You will be able, if you have the energy, to read the miles of column inches that will inevitably be written in the wake of one of the most astounding reversals in US political history. Pretty well every poll prediction which preceded the vote was confounded and commentators and bien-pensants everywhere have a lot of humble pie which it would be wise for them to eat and digest. For there seem to be two pretty clear cultural conclusions which can be drawn from the Night of the Donald.

The first is the English speaking mainstream media has a major credibility problem. The level of partisanship directed against Trump and his supporters amounted, at times, almost to a form of sectarianism. By November 5th, the thesaurus had been emptied of epithets; the words fascist or Nazi were so routinely deployed that their potency for damnation was lost. The "progressive" message to the electorate became simply preposterous. It was, for example, perfectly obvious that a vote in favour of the rights to abortion would be consistent with a vote for Trump. 

Secondly, the rot in the pulpit of the mainstream media has been part of the generation of another trend. The admiration and respect which has traditionally been given to learning, education and expertise is undergoing something of a transformation. By any measure, the financial crisis of 2007/08 and the official reaction to the Covid pandemic have cumulatively eroded confidence in the competence and expertise of educated elites across the West. As doubts grow about the omniscience of the rational mind it should be no surprise belief in the transcendental should revive. Yet "progressives" everywhere have doubled down on secular nonsense of their own. Mainstream Christian religion belief is denounced as obviously "right-wing" and fringe belief is only tolerated in so-far as it furnishes another minority grouping which "liberals" can patronise and exploit. Even worse, the nonsense intrinsic to the debates about gender, race, history, the environment and even the "meaning" of the word meaning, has been generated almost exclusively from within an educational establishment which was previously revered.

Against such a background, the mode of The Donald has gradually assumed the appeal of the avant-garde. His proposals might have been delivered in the cadences of a rough school playground, but at least they sounded rational. While his manner mostly (and quite naturally) upsets aesthetes, the considerate and the polite, his political popularity has moved "progressives" to the point of derangement everywhere. Yet the "progressives" lost because they have also lost touch. The elite to whom Harris appealed do not generally mix with the air-conditioning mechanics, burger-flippers, spare part salesmen, cable TV engineers and railroad workers who voted for Trump. In that sense too the traditional relationships with which the major parties have been associated, have been further inverted.

Trumpism is now very much the cultural mainstream and "progressives" have only themselves to blame.

LIMITS OF DEMOCRACY

In the winter of 1459, Henry VI called a Parliament in order to pass wholesale acts of attainder against the Yorkist rebels whom he had just defeated in battle. The savage and vengeful measures of the "Parliament of Devils" contributed to the continuation of the Wars of the Roses which condemned Great Britain to another quarter century of political violence and mis-rule. Were such a name be given to the UK assembly elected in the summer of 2024 it would be considered odd, not least because the decline of Christian religion has rendered the Devil almost invisible behind a veil of ignorance and moral relativism. The title would also be challenged by those who think it is the primary duty of government to re-distribute wealth on the grounds of "fairness" rather than actual need.

However, the "Parliament of Morons" may, in time, come to be seen as apposite. For the budget outlined on Wednesday 30th October 2024 has got to be one of the most colossally stupid set of proposals ever to come out of the UK Treasury. And can one seriously doubt the low levels of objectivity and intelligence on the part of those baying benches of MPs who cheered their Chancellor to the echo and baited the much diminished opposition benches with their foolish jeers? The rhetoric of the class warrior, the student demo and the perpetually aggrieved may have been supressed by the Son of A Toolmaker, but the spirit of Jeremy Corbyn most definitely lives on amongst the lumpen-polytechnic comrades.

By the standards of budgets of the last 25 years, admittedly a low bar, the proposal delivered by Rachel Reeves was a car crash which failed even in its own terms. Billed as a budget for "growth", the OBR responded by promptly downgrading its already vestigial expectations for GDP while raising its forecasts for inflation. After the foolishness of Truss in failing to inform the OBR of the details of her own free market ambitions, Reeves was taking no chances with this apparently omniscient totem of the un-elected quangocracy. Not that the OBR was appeased by her genuflections; it poured scorn too on her much trumpeted "discovery of a BLACK HOLE" in the finances bequeathed by the hated Tories. 

There was also the preposterous claim the budget was one for "investment". About the only detail which made any sense was the promise to complete the much needed upgrade to railway infrastructure in the north of England. The rest was an amateurish attempt to shift what is plainly day - to - day spending into the capital account and to pretend the resultant ledger did not thereby mean an increase in borrowings. Because government spending is really an asset, right? Not even Gordon Brown attempted these ludicrous sleights of hand at such a scale.

As for what the government deems investible, the sums are truly gargantuan. £5.1bn is being turned over to projects involved with "green hydrogen, carbon capture and storage". All the experts agree that these technologies are at the most challenging end of a zero emissions world, but that is not putting off the high priest of carbon juju, Ed Milliband. Over £6bn is being handed over to rebuild "portacabin" schools, a sum that should guarantee gold taps in every gender neutral bog in the secondary sector. Naturally, the real priorities have been ignored. There was nothing about support for prisons or investment in the delivery of justice. Indeed, these vital functions of a safe and properly functioning society are expected to tighten their belts further. The MOD is to get another £2.7 bn, about the same amount as is spent by the UK on publicly funded healthcare in a week. At least that should guarantee the pensions of the "army" of MOD  civilian apparatchiks, whose numbers now exceed those of serving personnel in the the Navy and RAF combined.

Because, needless to say the biggest winner was "Our NHS". This vast, decayed, useless and dying carbuncle is presently absorbing £530,000,000 per day, over a third more than was hosed at it in 2019. It has to be seriously questioned whether it is physically possible to spend that amount of cash, spouting at that rate, on healthcare. But no matter; Reeves has promised another cash injection of £26bn. If anyone doubts all this spending will be effective, there is a new quango laughably called the Office For Value For Money to check. It's a sort of job share with the NAO where the same tasks will cost twice as much to perform. With the £25bn rise in employer contributions to NI, it will be private business which will be holding the bucket as all this money is poured down the drain.  

Ah yes - business. Reeves also thinks that the white elephants she has allowed to run amok will attract private investment. She might as well whistle in the wind having clobbered the private sector with substantial additional costs in the form of an inflation busting rise in the minimum wage as well as the NI surcharge. Such is the derangement of the net zero agenda, penalty taxes on what is left of the UK oil industry have also been extended, notwithstanding a fall in the oil price. Not content with that, the hands of the state will now dip into the agricultural sector too, where a change in the rules of inheritance tax are likely to see an enormous and quite needless change in the patterns of land ownership, to the detriment of domestic food production and the stewardship of the landscape.

In the wake of the budget, there have been the usual squeaks of lobby - fed outrage in the press and the tedious lists of "winners and losers". Many column inches have been filled with spurious predictions for various economic and financial indicators, most of which will prove to be plain wrong and not in a good way. The big picture however, has been missed. 

Which is that the Reeves budget is the most explicit repudiation of the mixed economy since the Second World War. Tax as a proportion of GDP is set to exceed the levels reached in 1948 when the state was engaged in reconstruction and the biggest shift in asset ownership since the English Reformation. By 2030, on current forecasts the state will account for nearly 45% of the UK economy and total debt will still be hovering near 100% of national output. 

The second lesson is the Blairite approval of private wealth creation has been comprehensively spurned. Marginal rates of tax on risk taking have gone up across the board; indeed listening to Reeves talking about agricultural land, you would think that all forms of private investment is a fiddle which is barely to be tolerated. The scope of inheritance tax has been widened and thresholds frozen; the Tories must be ruing the day when they did not just scrap this wretched levy altogether.

The final lesson is the Labour Party is the party of the unreformed public sector. Public sector workers, who have already received inflation busting wage settlements will be largely immune from the budget's measures. Indeed, the budget was explicitly crafted to shield and further reward them; certainly the charlatans at the BMA and NHS Confederation will be well pleased. For in the government's eyes, the private sector exists not in symbiosis with the state, but explicitly to serve it. As far as Reeves is concerned, you work for her, not for yourself. The market measures of success and optimal resource allocation have been philosophically rejected in a way which might even have surprised Tony Benn. The direction of travel has been well and truly set.

The observant will notice the term "Parliament of Morons" should embrace all its members and not just those who sit on its Labour benches. The Conservative Party has been so complicit in the socialist drift of the past twenty five years that it was hard to distinguish it from the Labour Party. Indeed Cameron explicitly described himself as the heir to Blair and his interval of "austerity" was anything but, as total government debt continued to expand even as the annual deficit was ineffectually restrained. The Covid years and Johnson's vague program for "levelling up" merely added to an already sizeable state on which Reeves is continuing to build.

For if the heightened volatility of voting patterns and the ever declining participation rates at elections mean anything, it is that democracy is getting steadily more fragile. Elected representatives and civil servants are no longer fully trusted to govern in the national interest. Cock-ups and incompetence by the increasingly unaccountable state and its agents are getting more egregious and expensive. Yet there is a deafening silence across the political spectrum about what constitutes the proper functions and limits of the state and how much that should reasonably cost. Reeves's budget will pass not because it should but because it can.

The reason why Charles I faced armed rebellion in 1642 was because the wealth creators, strivers and owners were faced by an ideological, wasteful, unaccountable and capricious state which claimed, through Divine Right, that it knew best.

Sound familiar? 

LEE

What is is about Lee, Ellen Kuras's bio-pic about the legendary model, photographer and surrealist muse Lee Miller, which makes the film such a narcoleptic experience? It can't be the cinematography or the production values, both of which are stunning and which convincingly capture the physical awfulness of war-time Europe. Kate Winslett, who gamely plays the eponymous heroine, has also received a lot of praise for her portrayal of a woman who was over a decade younger at the time the actress represented her. There is large cast of characters with (potentially) interesting stories of their own. Indeed, Andrea Riseborough gives a near film-stealing turn as Miller's boss at the London end of Vogue magazine. 

There are however, three problems with the film. The script, the work of several hands and loosely based on the monograph of Miller's son Anthony, is absolutely dire and a classic example of artistic editing by a committee. The second is the excessively narrow focus on Miller's personal experience of World War II and the very clunky messaging which is appended to it. Lastly, there is the performance of Winslett herself. Lee Miller is only ever presented in one mode, that of a kick-arse proto-feminist who took a lot of umbrage with male assumptions and was almost perpetually tetchy: she must have been an impossible colleague and employee. This monolithic interpretation of someone so obviously multi-faceted (otherwise, what's the point of giving her an entire film?) is at first off-putting and becomes grindingly dull as the film wears on. Kate stomps about, takes pics, gets what she wants both in bed and on the margins of the battlefield and displays little more than a professional charmlessness throughout. Her revelation towards the very end of the film that she was raped as a small child is delivered in such a way as to suggest she was abstractedly put out rather than catastrophically scarred by the experience. There is no mention of the creepy use her father made of her pubescent years to further his own photographic interests. 

There are really only two moments in the film which properly engage, both entirely visual: her witness of the spiteful and vicious degradation of French women who were accused, after the Liberation, of "horizontal" collaboration with the German enemy and her visit to the concentration camp at Dachau. In both instances Winslett displays a degree of shocked compassion which does not yet obfuscate the moral ambiguity of the act of passively recording human suffering from behind the lens of a camera. The scene of Miller surreptitiously snapping a traumatised young girl at the Nazi death camp, a trauma reflected back in her own face, is especially poignant. Yet in the context of the rest of the film, these moments suggest Miller was only able to engage with the emotions of others when there was the barrier of her camera between them.

Given the extraordinary range of her life, the longueurs in which Kate is filmed smoking a fag; being bolshie about the use (or non-use) of her war photographs; having her breasts (pointlessly) covered in blue paint; or being prosaically interviewed by someone who (spoiler alert) turns out to be her son, could have been better deployed to fill out the extraordinary range of characters to whom Miller was a familiar, from Man Ray to Pablo Picasso. Instead there are soulless interactions with US military types and an almost unbelievably dull portrayal of her relations with her eventual (second) husband Roland Penrose, whom she married in 1947. The surrealist coterie around the husband and wife team of Paul and Nusch Eluard are allowed a few dramatic moments when breasts are bared and conversation arched, but none of that really adds anything of interest or note to the whole.

Of course nowadays, no historical film or bio-pic is complete without some clunking or anachronistic nod towards modern sensibilities. Thus Paul Eluard is made to declaim over a  post Liberation cocktail that the Nazis "Disappeared (sic) Jews, Gays (sic), Communists... and Blacks". Really? Anyone with a passing resemblance to Jesse Owens in Hitlerite Germany had been deported by 1939. There is also the aforementioned dramatic revelation of childhood rape which is, amazingly, parlayed as a sort of 1940's "@Me Too" moment. Could Miller really have believed that, in her opinion, the quotidian exploitation of women (as opposed to children) by men ranked above the Nazi death camps in terms of evil? Or surpassed her own childhood catastrophe? The film is then ended on the rather banal note that while Miller was a great if underappreciated photographer, she was probably a lousy mother. The final box ticked, the credits roll.

It was good to get out and get home.

GLOBAL WARMIMG - A LOAD OF HOT AIR?

"Science is at no moment quite right, but it is seldom quite wrong and has, as a rule, a better chance of being right than the theories of the unscientific. It is therefore rational to accept it hypothetically"  Bertrand Russell

At school we were taught that science is about the quest for empirical universal truth. We were also told the scientific method is about the validation of these truths (or hypotheses about the truth) by way of observation and measurement. They still sound like  pretty good maxims for scientist and layman alike. Some empirical truths are so much taken for granted that there is simply no mileage (or rationality) in trying to disprove them, which is why people of sound mind leave a skyscraper on foot through a door at its base rather than from its roof at the top or from windows in-between.

For centuries eminent doctors of the church and of astronomy believed the Sun orbited the Earth rather than vice versa. Copernicus (himself a Catholic cleric) and later Galileo confirmed by measurement and observation that this was not so. What they "discovered" is now as uncontroversial as what Newton "discovered" sitting under his apple tree. But the truth that the Earth orbits the Sun was not a truth just because these two gents said they had proven it was so. After all, the Earth and Sun have always behaved like this. The achievement of both Copernicus and Galileo was to disprove that the Sun revolved around the Earth. And this, I would very humbly suggest is the true nature of the scientific method and the advancement of knowledge. Science evolves and works by a process of disproof. 

A cursory knowledge of the UK mass media however, shows just how difficult it is to keep science and the scientific method in the public eye. In part, this is a reflection of the sensible division of labour: we would no more have asked Stephen Hawking to choose our wall paper as we would trust Kirstie Allsopp to explain the more arcane aspects of relativity. But when the trajectory of science does intersect with that of popular culture, strange things start to happen. There is no dramatization about Watson and Crick bending coat hangers and paper clips as they elucidated the structure of DNA. Nor is there one about Dorothy Hodgkin, only the third woman to win a Nobel Prize for Chemistry for her work, inter alia on the structure of Vitamin B. Nor about Freddy Sanger who won the Nobel twice. In mass market culture scientists are those with great minds which wander unhindered across the universe, like the crippled Hawking with his disembodied voice and wheelchair. Or Alan Turing with his repressed sexuality and his "bombes". It is this cultural relationship which possibly accounts for the enduring popularity of sci-fi. It helps of course if these characters are plainly wonkish or have other human traits such as homosexuality, atheism or autism which in any other context would be of only vestigial interest. In these films they are however, neither laboratory bound nor even mainly highly focused professionals like Hodgkin. There is barely any reference to the underlying science at all.

In popular understanding, science also protects us from things which are dis-obliging or which we otherwise find difficult to comprehend. In that sense, it has replaced religion as a source of consolation and hope, even of redemption. Scientists "prove" things. Even better is if they do so in the service of dishing our enemies like Barnes Wallis with his dam busting bomb or Dr Who bashing the Daleks. If you want a bigger bang, you have of course to cross over to America, which may account for the huge appeal of "Oppenheimer". At least that film contained a brief philosophical exposition of the purposes of science.

When science enters the orbit of government and the political process however, even weirder things occur. The seemingly unstoppable encroachment of government in our daily and increasingly our private lives can only really be justified by an appeal to technocratic superiority and excellence on the part of the ruling elites or to "science". Indeed this is an enduring myth of the UK Left: one of the main roots of its socialism is buried deeply in the beliefs of the Fabian movement, with all of its bossy certainties about the ordering of a progressive society based on scientific principles. 

We have become used to the quotidian cock-ups whenever the government or its agents gets involved in "high tec" projects like IT in the NHS or the Horizon system of the Post Office. Or to the handbrake turns which have to be executed when the scientific evidence used by the omniscient government turns out to be flawed, like Gordon Brown's partiality to diesel fuelled vehicles. Or to the inevitable embarrassments such as when an advanced new war fighting technology is powered by a near obsolete propulsion system like that of the UK's latest aircraft carriers. None of these however, approach the scale of the extraordinary faith and resource which was placed in "the science" during the Covid pandemic. Indeed, so often was this mantra repeated to justify the government's actions that it almost amounted to an abrogation of political and democratic responsibility. Given the global scientific and technological resources which were available, it seems remarkable that there was so much variation in the way developed countries reacted to the crisis. In the UK, the response was wholly driven by the priority given to stopping the NHS from being overwhelmed and, in its early stages, the extraordinary reliance which was placed upon epidemic modelling techniques from the University of London which turned out to be highly flawed. Yet all of this juju was dignified as "the science".

So what has all this got to do with global warming? It may be fairly said the consensus across the Occidental political spectrum about rising temperatures on Earth and the connection with humankind's burning of fossil fuels appears presently settled. However, the "scientific consensus" is assuredly not. Of course this reflects doubt about whether there can ever be a settled scientific consensus about anything which is not self evident. A dispassionate assessment of the claims of anthropogenic global warming however, reveals the high reliance which is placed upon so-called "model dependent realism" to show it is the burning of fossil fuels and the resultant CO2 which is driving climate change. This technique is partly informed by the fallacy which says that an understanding of how a system works allows us to make predictions about its operation in the future. But this can only ever be partly true and seems to take no account of probability or the role of unseen factors.

As our current technology and accumulated expertise allows us only an imprecise prediction of next week's weather patterns, it seems extraordinary the global warming debate references data which go back millions of years and which is variously deployed to support the assertions of each side. Apparently some of the biggest spikes in the levels of CO2 occurred when man wasn't around at all. The biggest bones of contention are whether or not it is CO2 which drives temperature and other climatic extremes and whether or not this constitutes some kind of "climate emergency" which threatens our whole existence. You can stare at data which goes back to the Pharaohs and further. You can do so both with and without the help of hallucinogens and yet still be none the wiser. But one thing which does become reasonably clear is that the "models" which predict disaster unless we de-carbonise the planet do not even accord with the historic observed data, never mind providing a rational platform on which to build government policy. Climate change is self evident, yet its causes are open to debate. This can only be addressed by observation, measurement and  by the calibration of risks if these causes presage harm. In such a state, it may seem reasonable for a lay person to accept Pascal's Wager which suggests nothing is lost if one prepares for an eventuality which may not materialise. But Pascal was talking about the existence or otherwise of God. In the case of climate change, such a wager is to confuse risk with uncertainty. And like insurance, the profits accruing are likely to be small.

Another approach is to ignore the controversies around the "science" of climate change and focus instead on some adjacent and environmentally friendly activity. Indeed, a perfectly good living can nowadays be made by the promotion, activation and regulation of the "sustainable", "circular" or "green" economies. But might not this just be displacement activity? After all, it is difficult to imagine a single legitimate human enterprise which deliberately sets out to consume more resource than it needs for its achievement. If this seems intuitively true of humans acting in their private capacity, then it is demonstrably true of an enterprise which has profit as its motive. And at the margin, societies have long evolved laws, regulations and taboos which aim to inhibit or prevent resource spoilation by bad faith actors.

Despite the best attempts of the UK Conservative party to hug a husky and sponsor a polar bear by packing "Dave" Cameron off to the Arctic on his sledge, the politics of "green" and climate change sits far more comfortably on the Left. Greta Thunberg has replaced Marx as the inspiration by which to critique and control the capitalist system. If we can't overcome capitalism by the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange we'll change it by slowing or shutting it down. In the jargon of the Left, "sustainable" emphatically does not mean the careful curation and optimisation of the totality of our resources to improve or enrich people's lives. It means curbing our appetites and forcing us to accept a finite and "fair" share of the economic totality, irrespective of our individual efforts. How this prospectus lifts people out of relative or absolute poverty is anyone's guess and it would undoubtedly be hard lines for any developing country, although Venezuela is giving it a go. 

Although class-based politics has far less resonance in the UK today, the Left has managed to organise a powerful if volatile coalition to support its agenda. It has been masterly in its exploitation of people's fears of the unknown, the incomprehensible and the dangerous with its promotion of the "climate emergency". In this, it has been hugely abetted by the media and the uncritical acceptance of anthropogenic warming by outlets like the BBC. Every bulletin of wild fire, cyclone, drought or famine is routinely attributed to the burning of fossil fuel. No gorgeous presentation of the natural world by the eminent zoologist Sir David Attenborough is complete without a jeremiad about the impact of human activity. He is too canny to demonise the very things from which he himself has benefited, but there is no doubt about the underlying message as we watch some poor polar bear struggling on some disintegrating chunk of sea ice. Personable and telegenic media scientists like Brian Cox are more artful still: the "public is done a disservice" by questioning anthropogenic warming (of which he says "we are 95% certain") because doing so calls into question the bona fides of the scientists who are only offering "advice". Give the man a BAFTA for sophistry ! If the preservation of foxes, badgers and other UK raptors from climate change is your thing, try the bromides of Chris Packham, another gifted communicator.

Yet arguably the least attractive trait of the swelling ranks of the Thunbergistas and their Extinction Rebellion stormtroopers is their vanity and conceit. In a world of seemingly finite resources, a perfectly reasonable case can be made for seeking alternative sources of energy. Despite the harrowing experience of Hiroshima, the Japanese turned to nuclear power generation not because they "proved" it was safe, but because they disproved the willingness of OPEC to provide them with oil at a price the Japanese found acceptable. Sustainability and care of the environment were on the agenda long before the shaman of Stockholm turned up: it was the uber capitalist Richard Nixon who set up the Environment Protection Agency in the USA over 50 years ago. Similarly, there were plenty of other sources of non- monetary enrichment and consolation long before the Greens and their fellow travellers flaunted their hair t-shirts: religious faith, feminism, pacifism and the ecology movement spring to mind.

The amount of political capital and treasure expended on fighting the "climate emergency" is simply colossal and there have been huge transfers, mis-allocations and even expropriations of economic resource. All this to ensure a "safer and fairer world for our children and our children's children" as the IPCC would put it.

But whatever the source of the "climate emergency", we can be categorical that it is not the fault of the children. Perhaps it's the rest of us who need to grow up.   

 

THE KINGDOM OF THE THUNDER DRAGON - BHUTAN

Below us on the outer ramparts of the Dzong is an enormous flag pole on which flutter four pennants. Respectively they show a Druk (dragon), a Garuda (ditto), a snow lion and a tiger. Sonam tells us that it is a reminder of the impermanence of the physical world: only the last creature still exists. Even if our guide had pointed out the image of a tooth fairy, we would likely have all nodded sagely; Bhutan has this effect on you. It is difficult to think or even to imagine a country and its culture which is more mysterious, charming, bewildering, mediaeval, beautiful and yet so highly sophisticated.

The country is a landlocked Himalayan kingdom about the size of Switzerland. But it has barely three quarters-of-a-million citizens, upon whom Buddhism is a profound influence. The country's jagged snow capped peaks, lush fir covered mountainsides and lowland paddy fields are jammed between the two most populous nations on the planet. Such a situation invites attention far beyond the tourists and travellers who visit; Bhutan has had to guard its sovereignty and cultural integrity with skill and determination. When the British tried to poke their noses in, during the nineteenth century, the Bhutanese saw them off at the battle of Dewangiri. Unusually, the British  took "No" for an answer and only properly re-appeared fifty years later when they helped to instal the first Druk Gyalpo, or dragon king. Famed for its inhabitants' prowess with the bow and arrow, today Bhutan's biggest money spinner is hydro-electricity, most of which is exported to its gigantic neighbour to the south. Tourism, although tightly controlled, is the next biggest earner. The Buddhist establishment also attracts a great deal of money from wealthy patrons overseas. Closer to home, there are some signs of development in a mostly rural economy widely dispersed by the unyielding features of geography and geology. But the transport structure is rudimentary: there is only one proper main road which meanders in the image of a tape worm from west to east. There are few planes and no railway. The tap water too, which passes the bladder of many a yak, herdsman, hill farmer and Buddhist hermit on its unpasteurised way south from the melting Himalayan glaciers, is undrinkable to any but the locals. Gastric infections caused by helicobacter pylori are commonplace.

Thus some of the facts. The facts however, only get you so far. Our charming and immaculately turned out guides Sonam, Karma and Wonchin  give us a level of dignified and frequently silent attention which amounts almost to a form of devotion in the two weeks which we spend in their company. All three are evidently and deeply ingrained by their Buddhist faith and show great respect to the person of the king and the religious culture of their country: each attends punctiliously to his personal ritual at the numerous temples and monasteries which we visit along the way. At various intervals, Sonam disarmingly and undogmatically explains what is his "understanding" of Buddhism which gets denser and more mysterious as the days pass. There is really no point trying to think about any of this in a western linear way: just remembering even a handful of the numerous deities and their equally numerous variations is like trying to recall every make and model of every plane that was ever built. And that is before you even consider the more esoteric elements of Buddhist philosophy. As an aid to concentration however, you are rarely far from serried ranks of fluttering prayer flags in the elemental colours of the air, water, fire, earth and the forest. These colours are also used in the representations of the various deities and bodhisattvas: white for compassion, green for pacification, red for subjugation and yellow for enrichment. The image of the impassive White Tara, the all-seeing deity of wise compassion, quickly becomes a favourite, her numerous eyes expertly scanning the hidden vices of those who behold her.

Yet we must at least try to orientate our minds, otherwise we are going to miss an awful lot and there is no time to achieve an understanding through familiarity and practice. The Buddha (as in "the" Buddha) was born sometime between the Fall of Nineveh and the Battle of Marathon, but the bigger deal of a deity in Bhutan is Padmasambhava or the "Lotus Born", who appeared well over a millennium later in what is now Tibet. It was he who took exile in Bhutan, subdued various malignant and disobliging local spirits before co-opting them for Buddhism, spread the word and left his physical imprints on a number of mountainsides. These are now quietly guarded by tiny monasteries precariously attached to precipitate rock faces. While the Buddha is invariably depicted with an expression of alert impassivity which is not unkind, the visage of Padmasambhava is rendered in a variety of moods and with a curling moustache and neat goatee which suggests a rakish intelligence. Certainly he was farsighted enough to know that Buddhism would not easily outlive his passing and so left a number of "treasures" hidden in rocks and crevices as proof of his provenance. These were much later revealed in miraculous circumstances by a series of "treasure finders" who thus got Buddhism rolling again. Among them was Pemalingpa, an artisan who dived into a mountain cascade with a burning lamp and re-emerged a distance further with flame still aglow and treasure in hand. Naturally, various academic spoilsports have tried to discredit the former blacksmith as a lowly born charlatan ever since, but Buddhism has very much come and stayed.

We hike, very slowly, because of the thin air: rarely are we below 9,000 feet and climb as high as 13,000 feet. The mountainsides are covered in scarlet rhododendron, pink and purple primula, white flowered daphne and euphorbia. Occasionally, a red-chested pheasant is seen. The trees are uniformly evergreen and reflect the contour heights at which they grow - Himalayan and brown Oak at the bottom, Tsuga (Hemlock), Juniper and Blue Pine in the middle range and silver downed firs at the pinnacles. All clinging with stoic and weather defying tenacity to the seemingly barren rock. Bhutan's development is today measured in units of Gross National Happiness rather than GDP. The basic idea involves a vox pop at various intervals to see if folk feel any jollier than they did last year. Naturally, this is supposed to capture the people's appreciation of improvements in healthcare, transport, communications and education as well as their own individual satisfaction, but critics have scoffed at the somewhat imprecise nature of the concept. More pertinently, some think that it has held back the country's long term economic development when it is used as an excuse for procrastination about decisions which might have an adverse impact on happiness in the short term. But this is a concept which is gradually gaining purchase in the developed world too as folk, jaded by mis-firing capitalism, seek intangible or non-monetary yardsticks for their lives and spiritual sources of satisfaction.

Gross National Happiness is of a piece with the Buddhist culture of the country. At Punakha we visit a magnificent Dzong. The jacaranda trees have sadly lost their distinctive violet blossom but the whole complex, which is one of the most ancient of the administrative and monastic centres of Bhutan, is en-fete. The courtyards are full of men in their magnificent and practical ghos and the women in their beautiful, kaleidoscopic and elaborate kiras. There is a buzz of dignified excitement - we are waiting for the appearance of the Sakya Lama, the leader of one of the four main strands of Tibetan Buddhism. The charged atmosphere and swirls of colour around the gigantic and ancient fortress cannot fail to fire the emotions of even the dullest sensibility. There is almost too much to take in. Meanwhile Sonam is trying to explain the detailed, elaborate and vividly painted religious and sacramental scenes which cover the most prominent walls. He intuits that our understanding is already beyond the otherwise workmanlike explanation that most of the images are "to ward off evil spirits". But now he has to describe the gradations of Buddhism and how the Sakya strand relates to the practice which prevails in most of Bhutan. We also need the Buddhist "Who's Who", as various senior clerics weave past us bobbing their heads in friendly greeting.  Allowing one's own mind to wander risks missing the path in an instant. 

The numerous temples are the preferred routes to exposition. Their interiors  are silent and scent filled oases of hand carved and decorated wooden fixtures; totems made of clarified and solidified butter; mountains of perishable offerings brought by the devout; thrones for dignitaries and teachers and sacred images and statues. Occasionally there is the steady monotonous hum of incantation or the sound of horns and drums. Photography is not allowed.  

Amongst the profusion, the mandala is a complicated geometric pattern painted inside the entrance vestibule of most monasteries and ancient buildings. In the Jakar Valley we are allowed inside a private temple erected at the instigation of the Bhutanese Queen Mother. Within there is a gigantic three dimensional mandala which is a mass of tiny and intricate carvings and logic defying constructions which would have baffled Piranesi. Like the pictures of the numerous deities and of the Bhavachakra ("Wheel of Life"), the mandala is a visual aid to enlightenment. Merely by gazing upon these representations is to receive a blessing. It seems the central tenet of Buddhist philosophy is that the path to enlightenment is achieved by the control and expulsion of negativity from ones conscience. There does not seem to be such a concept as "original sin"; rather the focus is on the forces that corrupt our consciousness such as ignorance, aversion and attachment. In that sense, the rather fierce images of deities like Purba, with his grotesque tusks and wings of fire, are there not for adoration so much as contemplation.

This Buddhist concept of the infinite individual consciousness making its way from the mortal world of samsara to the realm of perfect enlightenment (nirvana) via numerous earthly re-incarnations seems very alien to the Jewish/Christian tradition of the redeeming power of faith alone. But the Augustinian precept of the opening of the self to the work of God's grace does not seem so very different from the Buddhist one about enlightenment. Indeed is it possible the evolution of the early mediaeval monastic movement (with its emphasis on withdrawal, immobility, collective ritual and discipline) towards a more individualistic approach to the seeking of God's grace was influenced by the far more ancient Buddhist tradition of finding the path to enlightenment?

On the other hand there is something Homeric about the narrative arc of Buddhism with its profusion of deities, the fateful courses of a being's existence and its paths to the mastery (or otherwise) of the delusions of human consciousness. Yet the deities of the Odyssey are cruel, vexatious and capricious; not at all like the bodhisattvas who despite their frequently fierce appearance are in fact entirely benign (or so we are assured). Had Ulysses been taken to the bosom of the Green Tara rather than Calypso, his journey might have been more enlightened but perhaps less heroic.

For to western eyes there is something innately passive about Buddhism and its preaching of acceptance. It makes for charming and non-judgemental hosts while casting doubts on the sustainability of a culture already eroded by the pervasive use of English, the insidious influences of the internet and the increasing number of young folk who emigrate. The monastic communities and profusion of monks young and old suggest a country where the religious ethic is stoutly underpinned. Yet it is also one which is dominated by ritual rather than by evangelising and there are the occasional hints that the lifestyle of the majority of the clergy is just a shade too parasitical. The monk who sits in total isolation for three years and forty-five days contemplating the infinite in his quest to become a Lama can be admired for his abstinence and discipline: but not perhaps for his social conscience. It is not a coincidence that the king (and his forebears) are revered as much for their can-do spirit as for their royal blood. 

We take our leave, fitter if not leaner and having made some wonderful discoveries and friends. We have experienced the utter charm of our hosts throughout the country, the delicious food and awesome landscapes. There have been eagles, hermits, singing shepherds and grizzled folk among their herds of yak, chilli, betel juice and the smell of burning juniper. We have taken off and put back on our shoes more times than we care to remember, the tiniest marks of respect to a country which deserves so very much more. 

  

THE REVEREND VENNELLS - A LESSON FOR TODAY

What does the taking of personal responsibility actually mean nowadays? In an age dominated by gusts of emotion, "lived experience" (is there any other kind?), moral confusion and shallow "personal truth", the matter is elusive. Yet in seeking an answer, you could do a lot worse than watching the terrific French submarine thriller Le Chant du Loup (2019), now on Netflix. The plot is of course preposterous: some nonsense about "jihadists" buying an ex Soviet missile boat in order to provoke nuclear war between Russia and the West; an (indispensable) underwater acoustic expert who can apparently hear an octopus sneezing at 3000 yards; the French taking on the Iranian navy and then launching a nuclear strike on their own in defence of err, Finland. There is also some sweetly realised but highly irrelevant love interest. You get the picture. Yet the real hero of the film is arguably the pint sized admiral in charge of the French strategic missile fleet. He takes charge, sets an example, behaves with panache, uses his brain, galvanises his subordinates and in a sequence which defies anyone to keep a dry eye, goes down with his submarine while saving a colleague and averting nuclear catastrophe.

It is worth keeping this fable in mind at the end of possibly one of the worst weeks in the history of the modern British state outside a time of war or national emergency. In a sight which would have had giants of the Civil Service like Sir Robert Armstrong, Sir Norman Brook and Sir Burke Trend turning in their graves, we have been treated to the vision of the present Secretary to the Cabinet (Sir Simon Case) pathetically limping his way into the Covid Inquiry and blubbing his way through his testimony. We have witnessed the trivial but significant picture of an unprotected UK Prime Minister getting soaked to the skin by the rain and being drowned out by a vexatious and noisy professional agitator as he called a General Election in Downing Street. In Scotland, First Minister John Swinney demonstrated his "new kind of politics" by refusing to sanction a colleague who had been found out trying to defraud the public purse of £11,000. Then, just as we thought the NHS could not possibly plumb new depths of wilful malpractice or the apparat of a lower level of complacent uselessness, we have been faced by the damning findings of the six-year long Langstaff Inquiry into the NHS Blood Contamination scandal. Costing well over £100m in legal fees alone, Sir Brian's astringent report is likely to saddle the UK taxpayer with compensation payments north of £10bn to the thousands of victims knowingly treated with HIV and Hepatitis contaminated blood transfusions between 1970 and 1988.  

Arguably however, you had to be at Aldwych House in London for the Post Office Inquiry conducted by the former High Court judge Sir Wyn Williams to savour the full corruption of the governing class of the UK. Sir Wyn is in his eighth decade and although his inquiry was sanctioned in the autumn of 2020, his circus only hit the road in February 2022. Some of the sub postmasters and postmistresses to whom the inquiry relates have been waiting nearly 25 years for justice, but this being 21st century technology-enabled Britain, these things take time. 

However, the inquiry at last got to hear the testimony of Paula Vennells, erstwhile CBE, Anglican priest and CEO of the Post Office between 2012 and 2019. Arguably, Vennells had already been subjected to a lengthy and vitriolic public pillorying, but this did not stop the egregiously rewarded inquiry lawyers from having their public moment of expensive and carefully modulated outrage. Even the hitherto useless postal unions got a shout-out. From Vennells all one could hear were multiple evasions, denials of knowledge, the deployment of meaningless or misleading jargon and the occasional sob as she avowed her "love" for the Post Office and her regret that the victims of one of the worst miscarriages of justice since the turn of the century had been so appallingly treated. For the poor bloody sub postmasters and mistresses, one can only hope that the three days of theatre in which Vennells took the stand was worth it. 

Because, what in the end is the real purpose of these public inquiries? Of course having a bunch of advocates spending three days calling an immaculately dressed and coiffured woman a total bastard makes for great if toe curling entertainment in the media, but it is far less certain that it serves the course of justice. Unless the subbies resort to further expensive civil litigation, it is highly unlikely that the perpetrators of this monstrosity will ever see the inside of a court, still less a prison. Which is precisely where they should be.

Vennells of course was the main but not the only culprit. Some indeed have refused to even co-operate with the Inquiry. Sir Wyn's cast of quangocrat lickspittles, buck-passers, flaneurs and liars would however, have filled the stage at the Old Vic. What to make, for example, of Alice Perkins CB, New Labour luvvy, senior civil servant, wife of the former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and Chairwoman of the Post Office between 2011 and 2015? It was perfectly obvious that like Vennells, she knew a thing or three and was instrumental in 2014 in closing down the independent audit of the malfunctioning Horizon IT system that was at the heart of the miscarriage of justice. Or what about former director David Smith who congratulated the corrupt Post Office investigators responsible for sending the heavily pregnant and innocent Seema Misra to jail? Or Mark Davies, the PR toady who advised against a review of the prosecutions in case it made "front page news"? Or the IT apparatchiks who serially sought to conceal the failings of the computer system that drove many into prison and some to suicide? Or the in-house lawyers who refused to blow the gaff on the whole thing?

 

For although the subbies may well have enjoyed a long-overdue moment of sang froid as their tormentors were forced to squirm, the rest of us could only watch open mouthed as the authors of the scandal denied any responsibility whatsoever. Arguably, this was the issue at the very heart of their crimes. But as one of the vindicated sub postmistresses pointed out, the subbies had to take responsibility for their businesses and many ended up in jail as a result. So why not the bosses? Hearing it from Vennells however, this could all have been happening on a different planet as far as she was concerned. Yet she was in charge and paid handsomely to accept the responsibility which she now denies.

Thus the British state in the 21st century: Covid, Grenfell, Windrush, too many NHS scandals to list and now this. Years of public inquiries, reams of "lessons learnt", the remuneration of lawyers beyond the dreams of Croesus and the complete absence of anyone receiving a criminal sanction. The link? They all involve the public sector. The Post Office scandal is arguably the purest of the examples at the centre of the rot of the UK's public institutions. It had the lot: the well connected insiders drawn from the narrow ranks of the senior civil service and quangocracy; the complete ineptitude of the "leadership" cadre beyond an ability to network and back-scratch; the careful dispersal of accountability; the absurd waste of public money (let's not forget the coalition government subbed the "arms length" Post Office over £2bn to "modernise" its systems as late as 2013); the priority given to the advancement of personal careers rather than the public good; the denials and cover ups when things went wrong, even at the cost of the lives and livelihoods of others. Finally, it now has its very own public inquiry, the establishment's tried-and-tested machinery for drawing things out, allowing the media to let off steam, and holding as few people as possible to the standards which, at law, apply to everyone else. And then handing the bill to the taxpayer. 

The Post Office scandal is not a civil matter, still less a political one. It is a criminal one. The exoneration and compensation of its many victims is the very least that can be expected. But citizens also have a justified expectation that Vennells and co. should lose their liberty as much as their reputations. The survival of the UK polity may well depend upon it.

  

 

MATTHEW'S GOSPEL

Over the weekend of the most sacred of Christian festivals two broadsheets, whether out of a misplaced sense of mischievous irony or theological confusion, separately decided to publish opinion pieces on the matter of assisted suicide. Addressing the key argument of sceptics of the "assisted dying" lobby, namely that its legal permit will be the so-called "thin-end-of-the-wedge", Lord Sumption in the Telegraph and Matthew Parris in the Times came to conclusions which were respectively surprising on the one hand and completely extraordinary on the other.

Jonathan Sumption, as befits a former member of the UK Supreme Court, brought a formidable precision to his argument. The debate involved a clash between "two of the most fundamental values of humanity". In the matter of assisted dying, he opined, neither the reverence for human life nor respect for the autonomy of the individual can be reconciled. "The real question" he averred, "is how much risk to vulnerable people are we prepared to accept to facilitate suicide by those fully informed, mentally competent and determined to end their lives". But while he acknowledged the legalisation and normalisation of assisted dying risked aggravating the low self esteem of old, sick and dependent people and solidify negative public attitudes to old age, he concluded that a change in the law was morally justified for terminally ill patients. In short, it was a risk worth taking 

Yet while his Lordship favoured legal precision to limit the thin edge's ability to thicken, for Parris the "thick end" couldn't swell fast enough. If the old, the infirm, the immobile and the demented were not permitted and even encouraged to abbreviate their lives, "how were economies going to pay for the ruinously expensive overhang" of their condition? Making no apologies for his "reductivist tone which...treats human beings as units", Parris looked forward to a time when the "taboo" around assisted death was lifted so that society, "shedding a harsh beam on to the balance between input and output" could preserve its future as a "healthy" one.

Nowadays, the casual invocation of Nazi-ism or Fascism to denigrate the political or ethical views of opponents has become so widespread as to constitute almost a form of inverse blasphemy. In the case of Parris however, the comparison would seem to be exact. Indeed it would be no exaggeration to say that leading exponents of the perverted philosophy of Nazi-sim, such as Rosenberg in his 1930 book "The Myth of the Twentieth Century", might even have blushed at the columnist's world view. Of course it is entirely possible that Parris's intention was as much to outrage as it was to inform. Certainly his choice of language and the triumphal way in which it was expressed seemed designed to elicit that response, as Sumption's contribution to the debate did not. Yet Parris inhabits a milieu in which the ruthless enjoyment of its comforts, status and privileges rather precludes empathy for those not fortunate enough to be among its members. In that sense, his views should be taken at face value. They are certainly consistent with his somewhat idiosyncratic and quasi-aesthetic aversion to Roma, gypsies and other "travellers" and his widely broadcast disparagement of the mental capacities of those who were beguiled by "populism" and who voted for BREXIT. In Parris's world, the gap between the voluntary nature of assisted suicide and the involuntary nature of euthanasia would eventually be closed.

For what was perhaps the most striking thing about the contribution of Parris was the almost complete absence of consideration of the moral dimensions of the issue or even of how it related to the spiritual features of our humanity. In the course of a short 1000 word column in the Times or Telegraph, several fences will necessarily have to be jumped all at once. But Parris's dismissal of the "religious objections" to assisted suicide as "irrelevant" was perhaps just a little too glib. You do not have to believe in "a divinity who has sanctified all human life" to know that the centuries old Judean-Christian-Aristotelian tradition has profoundly informed and shaped the way we live socially and politically, infused our laws and provided the philosophical foundation of many if not most of the liberties which are today taken for granted. Above all, it forms the bedrock of our conception of what are widely understood to be fundamental human rights, such as the right to life and the absolute prescription of torture. By the by, it is also worth pointing out that all the mature democracies of the world are united by their rootedness in this tradition.

Without putting words in his mouth, it may be inferred from Sumption's remarks that such considerations are entirely mutable so that what today is considered moral might, by some intangible shrug of the zeitgeist, be taken as intolerable tomorrow. Morals can be adapted and superseded by the societies which hold them. Laws, by contrast, have meanings which have to be exact and words which are very, very precise. They are immutable until such time as they are amended or revoked. It is in such legal reasoning that Sumption places his faith that the nightmarish dystopia advocated by Parris will never be reached. 

Whether such faith will withstand the practical effects of a change in the law in favour of voluntary assisted suicide remains to be seen. At the risk of caricature, Sumption's conception is how it relates to those prosperous, intelligent, well informed and still sentient members of society whose lives have been highly fulfilled but whose tolerance to pain and indignity is low. What then could be more reasonable than one last glug of an important wine in the company of loved ones and admiring friends at a time of one's own choosing? However, anyone with even a passing acquaintance of how the state works will know this to be entirely wishful thinking. Once the practice of (voluntary) assisted suicide becomes more prevalent and "normalised", in a resource-constrained world the state will find it very easy to use its powers to incentivise assisted suicide in ways that make it more compulsive. Far fetched? What about tapering pensions to a point where a consideration of assisted suicide is unavoidable? What about helping the overstretched NHS by including young people with seemingly irredeemable depression within the scope of such a law? The boundaries of what constitutes a terminal illness will be easily flexed. The pressures will be persistent, insidious and overseen by a vast new bureaucratic class which will be narrowly motivated entirely by Parris's cost/benefit attitude to the continuance of our mortal existence. The rational and moral conception of the value of human life will be lost.

Is there perhaps not a middle way? Maybe we could draft individual laws for the voluntary assisted suicide of patriarchal commentators in the same way the full might of Parliament was mobilised to exempt Sir Keir Starmer from the punitive "lifetime allowance" provisions of the Pensions Act? We could even call such a bill the Parricide Act, an irony which the ubiquitous and over-exposed Times and Spectator columnist would surely appreciate.

GORGEOUS GEORGE

In the early hours of Saint David's Day, March 1st 2024, a pensioner wearing a rakishly angled felt fedora was duly elected the MP for the constituency of Rochdale in the north west of England. He had achieved a decent majority on a turnout of just under 40%, a figure consistent with many recent Westminster bye elections. The reaction of the establishment was however, instantaneous: the winner was denounced as a divisive demagogue and carpetbagger and even the Prime Minister felt strongly enough to give an impromptu press conference in Downing Street in which the new MP was accused of being an enemy of democracy and the purveyor of hate speech. It was all pretty strong stuff and seemed to imply the citizens of Rochdale were subversives and bigots for having the temerity to return him to Parliament. Wags were quick to brand him as the new "Member for Gaza".

A few days later he appeared at the bar of the House of Commons to take his seat. A seeming pariah, only two members could be found to escort him to the Speaker to swear the oath of loyalty. This he duly did, firmly gripping the Bible and sonorously declaring his fealty to the monarch in the eyes of God.  Later and accompanied by his beautiful younger wife, who is of Indonesian heritage and who sported bright fingernails in the colours of the Palestinian flag, the man signalled his pleasure at having sworn the oath as a Roman Catholic. A few days afterwards he delivered a short "maiden" speech to a largely deserted chamber in which he excoriated the main parties ("two cheeks of the same pair of buttocks") for the serial neglect of the poverty which, he said, unquestionably characterised his constituency. Aside from its directness and lack of artifice, the record of his contribution was mostly distinguished by the rude behaviour of the few other MPs present, one of whom (on the Liberal bench) could be seen languidly scrolling through her phone messages. More fool them as folk generally have a greater aversion to bad manners than they do to the extremity of a person's political views.

What is it about George Galloway MP that seems to continually get up some people's noses like a massive dose of stale snuff? Perhaps it is his voice: George is conventionally described as having a Tayside lilt, but those who say so cannot have heard it when he is politically aroused. Then it sounds like a well-oiled chain saw biting into seasoned wood. He is also conventionally described as being no stranger to controversy and a demagogue in the sense that he loudly promotes causes which are a little too gamey for the mainstream. Certainly he has an unerring ability to draw attention to himself in ways which cause many to doubt his motivation if not his sincerity. The faint whiff of corruption over his association with those involved with the (illegal) trafficking of Iraqi oil has never fully dispersed. His seeming championship of tyrants like Saddam Hussein, Bashir al Assad and Vladimir Putin and his apologetics on behalf of groups like Hezbollah (but emphatically not ISIS) have attracted incredulity, anger and fear. 

Notwithstanding, Galloway has achieved an extraordinary political longevity, not least because he has so often been on the cusp of oblivion: in the general election of 2019 he  barely scraped a thousand votes. Yet in his career he has represented constituencies from Glasgow to London and points in between. He has also attracted some extraordinary political bedfellows and supporters given his association with the far left (he is after all leader of the Workers Party of Britain) and lent his weight to the BREXIT campaign as well as being a long standing opponent of the SNP and Scottish independence. Some have dismissed this as the chameleon behaviour of a unprincipled careerist who is only interested in self promotion. Which again, if true, makes his enduring appeal something of a mystery.

Digging a little deeper, the one constant of his political journey in the twenty first century is his determination to expose the growing shallowness and cant of the Labour Party which he represented for many years in Glasgow and which summarily expelled him for his angry opposition to the war against Iraq in 2003. In this at least, George has been proven to be entirely on the money as he has been about western intervention in places like Libya and Syria. In his latest incarnation, Galloway has championed the people of Gaza, in a way in which he perceives the Labour Party to be shamefully and cynically incapable, despite the desperation of the Palestinian civilians caught in the ruthless and bloody fight between Hamas and the IDF. 

In this too, Galloway stands in the great tradition of British political radicalism from the libertine John Wilkes in the 18th century to the atheist MP Charles Bradlaugh in the next. In each case there was an identification and exposition of causes which were inexpedient at the time but which later developed a full flowering in popular consciousness. In the case of Gaza, we are perhaps already there. The seemingly endless demonstrations for the Palestinians cannot simply be dismissed as misguided endorsement of the murderous attacks on Israel by Hamas in October 2023. These huge and resonant rallies embrace far more people than those with merely sectarian interests. They too are in a tradition: the CND marches of the 1970s and 1980s,  Greenham Common and the massive "Stop the War" campaign of 2003.

Rochdale is a constituency in which very nearly a third of the citizens are of south Asian heritage and predominantly Muslim in religious faith. Whatever one thinks of Galloway's alleged opportunism, the denunciation of his victory by the establishment was as ridiculous as it was crass. If anything, his achievement has done them all a favour by giving the so-called voices of extremism a safety valve in the Commons and representation to a community which on the issue of their co-religionists in the Middle East, feels marginalised. In this sense, Galloway is only tearing away a veil which covers conflicting forces of faith, citizenship and social attitudes which mainstream politicians would rather ignore, not least because they have been so complicit in their steady festering. 

It is also worth making a presumption that Galloway's political activities are in fact strongly motivated by his own religious faith. George has always said that his transcendental beliefs are a private matter, but it is not hard to believe the Almighty smiles down upon his antics, not least because he has consistently shown a preference for the causes of the poor and marginalised. He supported the right of members of the Labour Party to campaign for a pro-life agenda even after access to abortion, previously a matter of conscience, became official Labour policy. He continues to support the family long after so-called progressives have deemed it expedient to disdain it, knowing full well how the poor are doubly disadvantaged by the lack of a secure unit at home. However, he drew the line at the Roman Catholic Scottish hierarchy's strictures against homosexuality. In all this Galloway has shown a degree of Christian humanism which seems far more appealing than do the dogmas of the princes of his church and certainly more so than the secular pieties of his former party.

At the Rochdale bye election, Galloway received more votes than all the other mainstream parties combined. The owner of a local garage who stood as an Independent came second. It was the first time in modern political history that the top two places in an election have been taken by anyone who did not represent Labour, the Liberals or the Conservatives. Of course, one bye election does not make a trend, but a more skilled politician than either Sunak or Starmer would have pondered before so foolishly denouncing the new MP.

Folk are not stupid. They know that politicians of all stripes have different views to balance and difficult choices to make. But they are tired of trying to elicit meaning from the evasions, virtue signalling and banalities of machine produced party politicians. They may not know what precisely George Galloway thinks, but they sure as hell know where he stands.

The man from Dundee won his seat fair and square. Let's hope he gets to keep it at the next election.

  

THE STRANGE DEATH OF THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY

Non fiction books written about UK politics by UK politicians are, with one or two exceptions like Denis Healey's wonderful The Time of My Life (1989), invariably dreadful reads. Those by Tory politicians are usually the dullest of the lot. So it is good to report that Rory Stewart's Politics On the Edge (2023) is enthralling. It is less entertaining than Alan Clark's Diaries (1993), partly because its devastating cameos of senior Conservative party colleagues and insights about the rhythms of what passes for government are as depressing as they are gripping. Its overarching theme is one of disillusionment and as Graham Greene once said about Evelyn Waugh, Stewart is au fond a romantic in the sense of having a dream which failed him.

After various intervals and assignments overseas, including a solo walk across the width of Afghanistan in 2002 and governorship of an Iraqi "province", Stewart entered UK domestic politics in 2010 with a somewhat heroic sense of public service. But what worked in the artisanal back streets of Kabul seemed to have very little purchase back home and Stewart established a reputation for being a maverick, albeit one skilled at promoting himself in unorthodox ways. He is disarmingly if earnestly candid about some of his own personal shortcomings and motivations, although there is very little of the hilarious self-revelation which made Alan Clark's book such a joy. His judgement is sometimes suspect - he is, for example, an uncritical proponent of climate catastrophism. He also reveals a strong streak of vanity, such as in his mis-placed campaign to be Mayor of London having been an MP for a profoundly rural constituency in the English Borders. He even finds time to take a tilt at the leadership of the party. Yet overall these foibles are offset by a strong feeling that Stewart was a politician of integrity

For all that, Stewart's book is a must-read for anyone who wishes to understand how appallingly badly the UK is governed. For those who like their political gossip neat, Stewart pulls off some bravura assassinations, not least those of Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. He is not much more complimentary about David Cameron. Indeed the only senior colleague for whom he seems to have any unalloyed admiration is David Gauke, Stewart's former boss at the MoJ who went on to lose his seat at the 2019 election whilst standing as an independent. Deservedly, a number of senior civil servants and quangocrats also take a knife in the front. 

Stewart is also good on the institutional fragilities of the UK state and brings these to life in an engaging and fluent way. His case that Parliament has lost its ability to scrutinise legislation effectively and hold the executive to account is very persuasive as are his numerous observations about the power of patronage to ensure the compliance of MPs with flawed and ill considered policies. His ministerial experience is of tax payers money being colossally squandered on projects for which there is little democratic accountability and being withheld from public services which are absolutely essential. Through all this is threaded a narrative of a civil service which is contemptuous of the ministerial merry-go-round of Conservative politicians and which is not merely obstructive but very nearly in a state of revolt.  

But if Stewart is good on the "how" he says far less about the "why". Chief culprit for the discontents must surely be the Conservatives themselves, who have now been in power one way or another for over a dozen years. It cannot honestly be said that they have used  the years since their chastening defeat in 1997 as a springboard for any kind of intellectual renewal. Instead, in  the 2001 and  2005  elections they tried the same negative tactics and bitter - tasting prescriptions which had failed to convince voters in 1997 and which failed again. The Conservatives then lost their nerve completely and decided elections would only be won by aping the techniques of New Labour under Tony Blair and by re-branding the party such that it would no longer be, in Theresa May's deathless phrase, the "nasty party". From now on the Conservatives were going to compete (like everyone else) for the "centre ground" where elections are apparently won. 

Fortunes have been made and lost in the hunt for this mythical land and an enormous industry has grown up which purports to show politicians how to find it. Today, no political programme can be advanced unless it has been road tested with numerous and disparate focus groups such that the original proposal is often diluted beyond recognition or abandoned altogether in the quest to nail down the support of the "average" voter.  In the case of the Conservatives, this resolved itself in "One Nation" branding and in nebulous concepts like Cameron's "Big Society" which imagined that community action and philanthropy could be galvanised by central government and was in some mysterious way compatible with Conservative "austerity". 

The modernisers also thought that greater attention to diversity and "inclusion" would be an easier route to electoral success than any intellectual heavy lifting. But while it is true that the Conservative Party has produced three women leaders and one of colour while the Labour Party hasn't produced any, that cohort which pollsters think should be most impressed by this (those aged between 18-44) are anything but. Nor have they been by initiatives such as Cameron's endorsement of same-sex marriage. Indeed support from this group for the Conservatives has fallen steadily over the last four general elections. Whatever else they may like, younger voters are not persuaded by the contradiction-in-terms that is "progressive conservatism". 

In its crab like leftward advance towards the "centre ground", modernisation of the Conservative Party has been characterised by an uncritical acceptance of propositions which have long been advanced by their traditional opponents and enemies. As a consequence the case for a smaller state has been abandoned; large scale immigration has been tacitly accepted; welfare spending has expanded; entrepreneurialism is disdained ("fuck business" Johnson passim); reform of rotten public institutions like the NHS, the courts and police has been shirked and ever higher levels of taxation accepted as the inevitable price of state intrusion into virtually every aspect of the lives of citizens.  

But in the Gadarene rush to the "centre ground", the common ground has been thoroughly neglected. Surveys of social attitudes have consistently shown a majority in favour of social conservatism, high levels of funding for critical public services and a welfare system which is linked to contribution as well as need. None of these preferences need advocating on moral grounds but are grounded in a desire to support that which has practical utility and bears some relation to the individual efforts of citizens while giving support to those who genuinely need it as opposed to those who merely want it. As such, they are causes which Conservatives should be able to promote with ease. Yet today, you will find leading lights like William Hague who vehemently parrot the need for social liberalism and "sound money". 

The Conservatives are kidding themselves if they think their ephemeral electoral success since 2010 has anything to do with their much trumpeted "modernisation". Indeed the need to continually update and re-evaluate a party's offering and appeal should go without saying and true conservatives realise that cherished institutions and traditional ways are best preserved by continually responding to change rather than resisting it. Today, the Conservatives seem determined to defend a Blairite dispensation that has given them only one very small majority in the past 13 years, despite the mis-steps of their opponents. Yet both Corbyn in 2017 and Johnson more decisively in 2019 showed what "populism" (aka a move off the "centre ground" onto the common ground) can achieve. 

On its present course, the Conservative Party is doomed, not least because it seems determined to establish its irrelevance. At the next election, only a very small vote for the Reform Party will deprive many Conservatives of their seats in a first-past-the-post race and tactical voting will do the rest. 

 

Rory Stewart's disengagement from the Conservative Party looks prescient.