Porter’s Pensées

Just over a year ago, before our referendum, I wrote a piece on Swedish attitudes to the EU, suggesting that Sweden might be tempted to follow Britain out of it: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/04/22/brexit-swexit/.  In fact, post-referendum, it appears that Brexit has had the opposite effect there. A recent article in Dagens Nyheter (http://www.dn.se/nyheter/varlden/svenskar-mer-positiva-till-eu-efter-brexit/, but behind a pay-wall, I think) argues that Swedes are ‘more positive towards the EU after Brexit’, with Britain’s departure being widely seen as a disaster all round, causing a re-think among the previously sceptical Swedes, 66% of whom are now in favour of continued membership. That must be because of the extraordinary difficulties that our Brexit is now facing, which were mostly unanticipated by the pre-referendum Little Englanders. If only we Brits could be permitted a similar re-think. But a democratic vote now, of course, would be undemocratic, on the grounds that a democratic decision has already been made. Holy Moses!

One of the great social scandals of the Victorian age was the existence of rich and poor ghettoes cheek by jowl in London, just like in Notting Hill today. Then the poor were hidden away in low slums, behind the mansions of the rich; now they’re put into high-rise tower blocks. I must say, having visited the posh part of Notting Hill often, I never noticed the towers, though I did sometimes wonder where all the proles who swept their lovely streets lived.

In the 19^th century it was cholera that forced governments to do something about living conditions in the slums, cholera not being class-specific, but in danger of spreading from poor areas to rich. With tower blocks there’s not that danger. The residents of Westbourne Park Avenue are not likely to be infected by disease wafting down from them, so there’s no pressing necessity for a local Tory council to look after their working-class (and often immigrant) neighbours in the same way. Indeed, in many of these prosperous inner suburbs the main task of their politicians was to save money by subcontracting their poorer areas out to private profiteering management companies, or – if they could – to ‘cleanse’ them in order for ‘developers’ to come in and replace them by ‘higher value’ residences. One rather extreme conspiracy theory floating around Kensington just now is that this was the hidden agenda behind the recent fire. Even short of this, however, there’s no doubt that the Grenfell Tower disaster was, indirectly, due to London’s extreme inequality, and therefore to the effects of late, uncontrolled capitalism. There’s a clip on the internet of David Cameron in 2012 announcing it as his ‘main task’ to do away with the ‘health and safety monster’, in order to liberate ‘business enterprise’. (See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/david-cameron-i-will-kill-off-safety-culture-6285238.html.)

The fire at Grenfell Tower is not, so far as I know, spreading directly to Westbourne Park Avenue, or even showering ashes there; but the sight of that horrible blackened stump so close on the horizon must have some effect on the rich people living around it; and on the reputation of recent Tory governments: the very people who cut fire, police and medical services, for example, in the interests of ‘austerity’. What will happen to it now we don’t know. It could be razed to the ground in order to provide space for upper-class villas, but surely not even the notoriously insensitive Theresa May (she even refused to meet the victims) could allow that now. Maybe it could be allowed to stand as it is – as soon as it has been stabilized – as a dreadful symbol and reminder over the next few years of the evil of late-stage capitalism. The surviving residents could be housed in some of the nearby dwellings that have been bought up by rich Arabs and left empty as ‘long-term investments’. One Labour politician has suggested this; only to be dismissed as a ‘Marxist’. So be it.

I sometimes suspect that most Brits assume that their press is normal, and that foreign newspapers must be much the same. Nothing could be further from the truth. I buy newspapers in most of the many countries I travel through; few of them have a ‘tabloid’ tradition like ours. Swedish tabloids – evening papers – can be sensational, and of course focus on celebrity, like ours; but none of them peddles lies or pornography, or acts so blatantly as propaganda vehicles for the political causes favoured by their rich owners. It must be for that reason that Britain features only 40th in the prestigious Reporters Without Borders’ World ‘Press Freedom Index’, which will surprise those who take pride – false pride, as it happens – in our ‘press liberty’ (see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/04/30/press-freedom/). Foreigners are genuinely shocked by our newspapers. This is one of the major factors contributing to Britain’s generally low reputation in the world.

The decline of the British press began in the 1890s, when Alfred Harmsworth founded the Daily Mail as a purely capitalist venture; that is, according to ‘market’ principles, in order simply to satisfy a demand. As I’ve written in my Britannia’s Burden:

If that demand was for sport, gossip and sensation, then that was what the Mail would provide. It would not preach to people, or try to stretch them, which would be elitist and arrogant. Everything in the paper had to be attractive, exciting and easy to swallow. “Do not forget,” Daily Mail journalists were told, “that you are writing for the meanest intelligence.” These were the main journalistic criteria, not ‘truth’, which came a very poor fourth. For Harmsworth himself the overriding criterion was profitability. Because the Mail’s editorial line [at this time] was usually imperialistic, some people saw him as having a political aim. In fact a “famous Englishman” (unnamed) was probably nearer the mark when he described him in 1901 as… “only a tradesman speculating in the reaction”. The “yellow press” in other words was a product not of the political but of the commercial morality of the day.

The Harmsworth (Northcliffe) family, of course, still owns the Daily Mail. You’ll already know about the more recent low points in its history, including its backing for Hitler in the 1930s. In this connection I recommend Andrew O’Hagan’s eviscerating demolition of the present editor, Paul Dacre, in a recent LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v39/n11/andrew-ohagan/whos-the-real-cunt. The word ‘cunt’ there gives you a clue.

So it didn’t all start with Murdoch, though he managed to pull his share of the press much further down the road to hell. The Times is the most obvious of his casualties, not because it’s the worst in his stable (that’s the Sun), but because it’s the one that has fallen from the greatest height. It used to be Britain’s ‘newspaper of record’; it’s no longer trusted as such. I imagine it has been replaced in that role by the Guardian, which is far more often quoted abroad.

The Guardian, in fact, is our only national daily quality left wingish paper, and so is something for us Lefties to be grateful for. But just at the moment few of us are. That’s because it does not provide quite the weight on the other side of the scales that some of us would like, in order to balance things up. The Guardian of course started out as a Liberal Manchester paper, but as the Liberal Party declined (in the early 20^th century) it adopted a more generally Leftish slant. It was, and I imagine still is, the paper of choice for up-market Labourites. (The Mirror is the down-market equivalent.) But then we Lefties have no alternative among daily papers; which is what had most of us despairing of it before and during the recent General Election campaign. The dismissal by most of the Guardian’s columnists of Jeremy Corbyn was ignorant, as it turned out, and patronizing. It only U-turned and backed him at the very last moment: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ng-interactive/2017/jun/02/the-guardian-view-on-our-vote-its-labour?CMP=share_btn_tw. As far as I was concerned, this was far too late. I feel angrier towards the Guardian, in fact, than I do towards the awful tabloids. At least one can understand sheer villainy. If the Independent had still been going as a newspaper – it’s on-line only now – I’d have switched over to it. (I need a broadsheet, rather than a laptop, to eat my breakfast off.)

Here’s a very good analysis of the Guardian’s backsliding, by an ex-Guardian journalist: http://www.middleeasteye.net/columns/the-guardian-elections-coverage-never-get-it-right-Jeremy-Corbyn-really-wrong-972873248. As a current Guardian journalist myself – well, reviewer – I’m hoping the paper catches up with the new reality soon. The true Left needs an organ.

Or does it, in the age of ‘social media’? Print newspaper circulations are declining. The Guardian is always appealing to its readers for donations. (I’ve contributed, despite my irritation with it. I need my table cloth.) Apparently the Tory press has met its match at last, not from a new Left-wing newspaper, but with Facebook, Twitter and the rest. The intelligent young read computer screens, not newspapers. Which, unwelcome as it may be to an old breakfaster like me, is great news if it means that the influence of the likes of Murdoch, Dacre, the Barclay Brothers and Desmond is shrivelling under the computer’s flickering glare.

Just sent to the Guardian:

Easy. Let Theresa May go on formally with her minority government, weak as it is. Domestic legislation should be initiated by any party, and then voted on in the Commons, which will represent a return to our historical tradition of Parliamentary democracy. For Brexit: set up a bi-partisan committee to sketch out some ‘soft’ Brexit ideas, probably accepting the customs union and free movement. Put the negotiations in the hands of a small number of competent ministers: i.e. including Keir Starmer but excluding Boris. Then see what happens.

This should satisfy everyone, both in Britain and in Europe, except for the Brexit-maniacs on the Tory Right. It’s also a very British (Parliamentary) way. It would allow proper democratic decisions to be taken on the separate elements of all the parties’ manifestos. And it would elevate the recent electoral fiasco into a glorious opportunity, to restore consensual democracy to the nation that one-party government, austerity and Brexit have so bitterly divided. Out of weakness would come strength. What is there to dislike?

Nearly all the commentators were wrong about this election, of course, except me; and even I was wrong to doubt how right I might be. That’s why I never allowed myself to hope, in spite of sensing the fundamental reaction across the Western world – and maybe beyond – against the effects of late-stage capitalism, which lie deep behind both the right-wing and the left-wing responses to what is currently called ‘globalisation’. Look back over my past posts here (here’s one: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/06/16/is-it-really-about-the-eu/), and you will find both the American Presidential election and the British EU referendum explained in these general terms, with the belief expressed that the very same grievances that had provoked both Trumpists and Brexiters could be exploited, and for what to me would be a preferable end, by a more radical Left. Sanders tried to do that in America. Now Corbyn has done it here. Hence the apparent transfer of about a third of the collapsed UKIP votes to Labour, rather than to the Tories, as those who saw politics in conventional Right/Left terms had predicted. That didn’t surprise me. What we are seeing now, basically, is a ground-shift to a new political discourse, arising out of the latest crisis of neo-liberalism, which the mainstream commentariat has been too imprisoned in its own older discourse to detect.

This has left that commentariat floundering. It has been bleakly amusing to see and read their reactions in yesterday’s media. Some of them deny Corbyn’s success, on the grounds that he didn’t actually win the election, did he? – which for someone who lives in Britain, and is aware of the height of the mountain he had to climb, appears ungenerous to say the least, and foolish at best. The reality is that with one enormous bound we (on the Left) are not yet quite free, admittedly, but are far further along that path than anyone whose mindset is constricted by the public discourse of the Blair-Cameron years could have imagined. Hence all their talk of Corbyn’s having ‘defied conventional wisdom’; by which they mean the wisdom of yesterday.

Then there are those – mainly on Right of the Labour Party – who seem happy enough to concede that they were wrong about his ‘leadership’, but make the excuse that this was because Corbyn then was a different creature from the Corbyn they see now. How could they have been expected to know that the man would turn so suddenly into Superman, when all they had had before them was a dozy Clark Kent? This is Peter Mandelson’s explanation: that Corbyn had somehow undergone a metamorphosis, or ‘character change’, which is what turned him into the utterly different animal that emerged from the election. A modified version of this is that he has ‘grown into the role’. Others’ changes of heart seem to be more qualified: yes, they now admit, he is a successful campaigner, and popular with the young folk (bless them), but that doesn’t mean they were wrong in doubting his capabilities as a real leader: i.e. as a potential prime minister. They’ll never be satisfied, of course, unless or until he becomes PM. And probably not even then.

In fact one reason they were wrong is that they never took him seriously even as Labour leader, and never allowed him to be viewed directly, without the mediation of the hostile (tabloid) and cynical (broadsheet) press, until the actual election campaign, which forced them – the TV networks, at any rate – to present him as he is. Theresa May’s arrogant incompetence helped here, of course, in providing a foil to his directness and honesty, which usefully boosted his ‘image’ at the same time as it was fatally destroying hers.

But the main reason is that, stuck in their ‘Westminster bubble’, and in Blair-time, they simply weren’t aware of the earthquake that had been slowly rumbling right under their feet over the past five years or so, making old political assumptions redundant; until they all fell into the hole suddenly and blindly, to the wicked amusement of those of us who had felt the earth moving – in my case I think deriving from my experience as a broad-based historian – but had been too nervous to quite credit it, against the opinion of all the political experts.

It was the best possible result. Labour didn’t win, but the result humiliated the dreadful, authoritarian Theresa May, virtually destroyed UKIP, and embarrassed all those Labourites who had refused to back their leader because he was ‘unelectable’. What they didn’t realise – as I did, or at least hoped – is that the discourse of British politics has moved on during the last twenty years, from all those control-freakish austerity-lite can’t-offend-the-tabloids assumptions of the Blairites, which understandably put millions of people – especially the young – off politics altogether, to a more direct and honest and, yes, socialist approach, represented by Jeremy Corbyn.

That approach also had the advantage of kindling enthusiasm, which Blair-Cameronism was never likely to do. Corbyn’s massive success, when measured against the powerful forces and special interests and vitriol ranged against him, will be the lasting spiritual legacy of the 2017 Election. Whether this translates into a material legacy – a Left-Labour government ultimately – remains to be seen. But it already feels like the beginning of the ‘revolution’ I half-heartedly anticipated at the end of my last post (my damned pessimism, again). Waking up this morning, with the sun shining through my bedroom window, I thought I knew how Wordsworth had felt on hearing of the French Revolution: ‘O bliss was it in that dawn to be alive!’ The tide is turning. Britain is becoming a place to deserve one’s patriotic loyalty again. Kajsa thinks so. I may rescind my application to become a Swede.

OK, Jeremy can’t form a government. (He might have done if his own MPs had been more loyal to him.) But that only means that it’s a Tory government that will be forced to carry out the negotiations with the EU which the ‘Brexit’ vote requires, and which are bound to be excruciatingly difficult. I can’t see any good or credit or popularity coming out of them. May, if she stays on, will be enormously weakened by the catastrophic judgments she has been making over the past few weeks, which could be repeated in the diplomacy to come, and in any case have damaged her credibility and dignity, not only in Britain but also abroad. Quite honestly, she’s a laughing stock. Then there’s the pact she’s having to form with the DUP devil: homophobes, creationists, and just as guilty by association as Corbyn was with murderous terrorists. Better for her, or whomever succeeds her (Boris?), to reap the opprobrium that the Brexit negotiations will surely bring upon her, than Corbyn. That’s why it was the best outcome possible for the latter to lose the election, but against all expectations, and only narrowly.

And who knows what might be the further implications? Ducking out of Brexit and getting back to normality may be one of them, if things go right. And contributing to the more global fightback against Euro-American nationalism and what I call proto-fascism, augured by Jez’s soul-mates in the USA – Sanders supported him strongly – and other forms of liberal resistance in France, the Netherlands and Austria, is another. There may be hope for the world yet. Who would have thought it, of this grey-bearded, gentle, vegetarian, allotment-digging throwback to the 1970s? That’s where true ‘strength and stability’ – May’s robotic mantra – lie.

Besides, I enjoy Schadenfreude. I know I shouldn’t; but May deserved it.

(Here’s Jonathan Pie’s commentary. Says it all.)

If this morning’s projections are right, we are headed for another overall majority of seats for the Tories, on the basis of 40% of the popular vote. That will allow May to do whatever she likes, contrary to the wishes of 60% of the voting public (and many more of the electorate at large). Few other countries would tolerate such a grotesque and undemocratic outcome. (I’ve blogged on this before: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/.) And that’s quite apart from Tory gerrymandering, the spreading of ‘false news’ to an almost Goebbels-ian degree, and the overwhelmingly anti-Left bias of the media, including in this election even the BBC. The result will probably be the end of the few remaining vestiges we in Britain have of the post-war social democratic settlement, and of any hope for an optimistic future. The late capitalist behemoth will have shed its flimsy restraints, and be free to career madly onwards: either towards a great new liberal utopia, or to its own and the planet’s bloody self-destruction – who can tell?

The election campaign has been an exhilarating ride while it lasted. Theresa May, elevating her own ‘leadership qualities’ to the forefront of the debate, was revealed to have feet of clay. Everyone accepts this, even on the Right: that her electioneering was disastrous, though her admirers – of whom I suspect there will be very few left soon, even if she wins – claim that this is no indication of how she’ll perform as prime minister. The Tory campaign was almost entirely negative, relying mainly on endlessly repeated clichés, much mocked (‘strength and stability’), and the character assassination of Jeremy Corbyn on the grounds that he is an old hippie throw-back to the 1970s. Most commentators assumed that this would be enough to ‘do for’ him. I’m quite proud to say that I was not one of them, from quite early on. Firstly, I didn’t think that the 1970s were that bad a place to go back to, if we needed to go back at all: https://bernardjporter.com/2017/05/11/back-to-the-future/. Secondly, however, with my much longer-term historical perspective, I knew that supposed ‘lost causes’ do often spring back into life. The example I gave was the ‘pro-Boers’ of circa 1900: ridiculed in almost exactly the same way as Corbyn was a year or so ago, only to be proved right, and victorious, in a relatively short space of time: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/08/07/bernard-porter/whos-a-dinosaur-now/. Most politicians and political journalists who claim to have a knowledge of and feeling for history don’t go back that far.

The Labour campaign, by contrast, was glorious, with an excellent manifesto – again, even the Tories admitted that; a fantastic campaign of mass meetings – 10, 20, or 30,000 at a time, contrasted with May’s couple of dozen ‘trusties’ meeting in secret – I reported here from one of Corbyn’s: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/07/31/jeremy-in-hull/; Corbyn a far better speaker, and proving to have the ‘common touch’ in a way May emphatically doesn’t; and a real movement developing behind him. In over fifty years of fairly active participation in British party politics, I’ve never experienced anything remotely approaching it. It has got the blood coursing again in the veins of a demoralised old man.

If we could give extra marks – or votes – for political enthusiasm, the Corbynites would have run away with this election. But then the enthusiasts only represent certain groups. Young and first-time voters are the most remarked upon, if they can bother to actually vote; if they’d done so last year we’d still be in the EU. A lot of effort is being put this time into ‘getting the youth vote out’. Then there are public employees, especially in the NHS, schools and universities; scientists; the artistic establishment; grey-haired old idealists like me; some (not all) of the absolutely and relatively poor; and – in general – the better educated. Also, I think, women, but only marginally. (It will be interesting to see the post-election social analyses of voting patterns.) Scots will vote, again, for their Nationalists, who seem ‘progressive’ enough at present to work in harness with a Labour minority in England and Wales.

The trouble is that this leaves many millions of others: those who have a material interest in Conservatism – low taxation, for example; who are ideologically attracted to what they call ‘freedom’; who have a ‘conservative’ temperament in the literal sense of the word, being afeared of ‘change’; who are easily scared by bogeymen (bogeypeople?) and, more reasonably, by the dreadful threats they see, or read about, around them; who share prejudices and hatreds of various kinds (though obviously Leftists also have their own); who have all their political impressions filtered through the Daily Mail, the Sun or even the shockingly ‘centrist’ Guardian; and who are prone to sheer stupidity. (Which, again, is not to say that you can’t vote Labour for stupid reasons too.) Most of these are not enthusiastic, but are easily swayed by the minority on the Right which is. These were what made up Theresa May’s constituency, and will probably determine the result of the election in her favour. The grey, stodgy porage will come to the top.

But this is being written in the afternoon of polling day. This evening Kajsa and I will be watching the returns all night, with two bottles at our side: one of whisky to drown our sorrows, another of a good red wine to celebrate, if I and all the experts turn out to be wrong. If they do, it could be the prelude to the most astounding and significant revolution, or counter-revolution, in modern British history; and elevate silly old Jeremy Corbyn, together with Bernie Sanders, his soul-brother across the water, to be two of the great heroes of our time. Wonderful. I’ve been waiting a long time – since the death of Bobby Moore, in fact – to have a hero to worship again.

A historian can find precedents galore, of course, for the current mini-wave of terrorist atrocities in the UK. Whether any of these precedents is of any practical use to us today is another matter. The ones I’m most familiar with are the Irish bombing campaign of the 1880s, and the Anarchist wave of the 1890s and 1900s: the ‘Sydney Street Siege’ and all that.

From my point of view – I was researching the government’s responses to them (see my Plots and Paranoia) – the most notable feature of these events was the resistance of Britons at the time to any suggestion that they should modify their liberal laws – for example of political asylum – in order to counter terrorism more effectively. That happened on the Continent, but counter-productively, felt British liberals. In other words, repressive regimes were supposed to provoke terrorism rather than prevent it; and indeed, the scale of Anarchist terrorism was far greater in, say, relatively repressive France and Spain than it was in Britain. Hence at an ‘anti-anarchist’ conference held in Rome 1911 Britain was the only participant refusing to go along with the stiffer measures and restrictions favoured by her European neighbours, on the grounds that her citizens wouldn’t swallow them. Her only ‘repressive’ responses to terrorism were the setting up of the ‘Special’ (Political) Branch of the London Metropolitan Police in the 1880s; and an Aliens (immigration) Act passed in 1906. They were considered to be bad enough by liberal Britons, and were very mildly administered. The Aliens Act, for example, expressly exempted political refugees. Happy days! But that’s not to say that we can or should seek to resurrect them.

It may be that something could be learned from the examples of these old terrorists themselves. One thing that strikes me about our modern kind is how many of them were ‘ordinary’ criminals before they became jihadis; with one obvious implication being that they adopted Islamicism, no doubt genuinely, but also in order to justify themselves and give some point and even dignity to their otherwise useless lives. We see the same with late 19^th century anarchists. The most bloodthirsty of them, called ‘Ravachol’ (real name François Koeningstein), pursued a life of crime, including thieving, murder and even grave robbery, before deciding that all his woes were the fault of capitalism, and so pursuing his career now for ideological reasons, and targeting anyone whom he considered complicit in the capitalist system, even passively: which was almost everyone. He also believed that ‘terror’ on this scale would eventually weaken the resistance of the capitalist establishment, and allow Anarchy to thrive. He was caught and guillotined in 1892, becoming regarded thereafter as a kind of martyr by his fellow ‘Anarchists of the Deed’.

The parallels here with present-day criminals-turned-jihadis are obvious. I’m sure there’s something to be learned here. I may return to it, and to other aspects of the current crisis, and its effect on the British General Election, when I’m more fully recovered and out of bed.

…and all sewn up So I won’t end up like this. Bless the NHS.

Lots to blog about, of course, when I feel up to it. Later.

Before I pass under the knife: there’s an excellent piece in today’s Guardian saying what I’ve been saying for years, but much better than I could have put it: (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/31/theresa-may-strong-leader-good-leader).

I’m not sure when the ‘Führerprinzip’ – as we both call it – first became embedded in British politics. Before then, we generally voted for local MPs and national governments rather than ‘leaders’, except in wartime, when Churchill was put up as our ‘leader’ to counter Hitler. In the first general election after the War the Conservative Party tried to capitalise on this – ‘Let him finish the job’ – but failed. A Labour government was elected to power, under ‘a modest man, who has plenty to be modest about’, in Churchill’s own rather ungenerous words, which however didn’t undermine Attlee’s achievement one whit. British politics carried on like this for the next thirty years, under collective cabinet governments, and with ‘leadership’ in the Churchillian sense not being regarded as so essential in peacetime. Clearly there were some people who still hankered after a Führer, prompting Harold Wilson’s protest, in his Memoirs (I think), that in his view leadership consisted in listening and achieving consensus rather than looking tough and imposing one’s own views; an approach which, in my opinion, and contrary to the common retrospective myth of the ‘Wilson years’, made those ’60s and ’70s Labour governments of his so successful in many ways.

It was Margaret Thatcher of course – who else? – who brought the Führer thing into British politics for almost the first time. Her reign as prime minister was very personal, even ‘macho’, insisting on a version of ‘leadership’ which emphasised strength, conviction, and sheer bullying, especially of foreigners. At the time this seemed to go down well with the electorate, or at least with enough of them to keep her in power. I remember one dictum of hers which jarred with me particularly in this context: ‘democracy is about leadership, not followership’. – Well, no, actually! Democracy is literally about following the will of the demos. But the ‘leadership’ idea and the Thatcher model caught on, and have dominated our elections ever since.

Hence Theresa May’s strategy in the current general election: to try to fight it on the ‘leadership qualities’ of the two prime ministerial candidates. That ‘strong and stable’ mantra of hers is part of this. So is the demanding and insulting tone she adopts towards other Europeans. People are supposed to vote for her and her ‘team’, based on her ‘strength’, rather than for the Conservative party, which is hardly mentioned in their propaganda, except in very small letters (on the side of their ‘battle-bus’, for example). It’s her fight. Corbyn is attacked for his supposed personal qualities of ‘weakness’ rather than for his party’s policies, which most people seem to like. Jeremy Paxman in a notoriously hostile TV interview recently asked him why so many of his personal convictions had not made their way into the Labour manifesto, as though that showed weakness; I’m not sure whether he quite understood Corbyn’s quite reasonable retort: ‘I’m not a dictator, you know’. But Paxman’s questions show how deep the Führerprinzip has penetrated. Another sign, perhaps, of the proto-fascism that is one of our great perils today.

May might yet be hoist with her own petard. Exposure on television makes her look weaker than the image that she and her minders would like her to convey, and Corbyn, by most accounts, more impressive – as well as being far nicer. (If, that is, ‘nice’ is compatible with the Führerprinzip.) If this works to chip away at her majority – the best we can hope for, I still think – it will be her own fault, for plugging the ‘leadership’ thing when she’s clearly not much of a ‘leader’ herself. And it may also get people thinking about politics in a different, more truly ‘democratic’, way.

Back after the op.