Porter’s Pensées

Sadly, Donald Trump – on top of all his other sins – has given (a) conspiracy theories and (b) criticism of the press a bad name.

When it comes to conspiracy theories, I’m still very cautious; except that I know that politicians do conspire. It is no less gullible to automatically dismiss a conspiracy theory, than it is to be prone to accept it. In my researches I’ve found so much certain evidence of Britain’s secret services’, for example, plotting subvertly throughout their history, as to be in no doubt of that. Sometimes in the last century it was in cahoots with the Conservative Party. If you don’t wish to credit the ‘Wilson Plot’ of 1974-6, which is supposed to have been responsible for ousting the PM then, you must accept the Zinoviev Letter Affair of 1924, which helped bring an end to the first Labour government. (See my Plots and Paranoia.) And, at a much lower level, just think about it: haven’t you occasionally conspired, in much lesser matters, with your partner to keep something from your children, for example, or with your team mates to disguise your googly (in America, curve ball)? People conspire all the time. But crying ‘conspiracy’ can also be a convenient excuse when you’ve not got your way, which is why it’s so distrusted.

And for any historian working in this field to argue that Harold Wilson was brought down by an MI5 ‘conspiracy’ in 1976 would be the kiss of academic death. I can understand why. Conspiracy theory is the field for weirdoes. Probably the weirdest of them all is the ex-Coventry City goalkeeper David Icke, one of whose theories (among many others) is that the British Royal Family are in fact alien shape-shifting lizards. Now we have the almost-as-weird Donald Trump joining him. Another reason why academic historians don’t warm to ‘conspiracy theories’ is that it upsets their ordered view of the past. They prefer great events to have big causes. They want to see patterns in history: the progress of liberalism, say, or the inevitable march of the Marxist dialectic, or the working out of God’s (or Satan’s) will. If they aren’t pre-disposed to such broad theories ideologically, they like them because it makes it easy to present history as a narrative. Even history books are supposed to have plots. (Mine do.) That these narratives can be seriously disrupted by anything as accidental as a conspiracy among a small number of people with their hands on the hidden levers of power is anathema to them (to us).

Likewise, to suspect that huge present-day events like Brexit and the election of Donald Trump were achieved through a small group of right-wing millionaires working clandestinely through ‘a dark, dystopian data company’ called Cambridge Analytica, and not through genuine popular choice (see https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy), must be a shock to democrats, as well as to historians. It throws all the political conventions out of the window; and fundamentally undermines confidence in democracy. That’s the ultimate political danger. Perhaps it’s just as well to be sceptical. But that doesn’t mean that conspiracies can’t be real. (See Robin Ramsay, Conspiracy Theories, Pocket Essentials, 2006, on this.)

Much the same is true of the other canard that Trump has floated among us: the idea of ‘fake news’. Again, no-one wants to cry this too loudly, because of its association with the Donald; but with regard to the present British election there can be little doubt that the news is skewed. Whether that’s connected with the ‘Cambridge Analytica’ thing – with the same millionaires behind both, for example – seems possible, but can’t be proved. The bias of the press against the Left, however, and Corbyn in particular, is pretty obvious, and not only in the papers owned, notoriously, by millionaire tax exiles. It has even reached the BBC and the ‘Leftish’ Guardian. Labour politicians are bullied, Theresa May is given a soft ride, the size of May’s public meetings is exaggerated and Corbyn’s – huge ones – diminished. There have been petitions on the web for the BBC to sack their Political Editor, Laura Kuenssberg (below), whose coverage of the election is blatantly inaccurate, biased and cynical; but of course she won’t be sacked – yet. (One of the petitions was rejected because some of its signatories expressed unpleasantly sexist views.) Besides, many of the BBC’s top people, and other political commentators, have strong Conservative links themselves. It looks quite grotesquely unfair, and far different from what we have grown to expect from a much-respected ‘impartial’ state broadcaster. There can be little doubt about this. Academic studies, for example by the Cardiff University Journalism school, confirm it. But any complaints are treated as sour grapes; which is why Corbyn generally doesn’t complain, though he must be itching to.

If these two things – a conspiracy, and the loaded press – can be shown, or even suspected, to have substantially affected the result of this election, it bodes ill for people’s acceptance of that result afterwards, and therefore for our public order. It will bear out the belief of many of us that Britain is only a semi-democracy, at best. Just as our press comes fortieth in the world scale of ‘press freedom’ (see https://bernardjporter.com/2017/04/30/press-freedom/), our political freedom can’t come very much higher. The power of our press certainly, and the ‘conspiracy’ factor possibly, have seen to that.

I realise that all sides cry ‘foul’ when it comes to politics – and to sport, which politics these days is coming more and more to resemble. So it’s easy to discount it as simply sour grapes. ‘You lost. Get over it’. That seems to be the response of the authoritarian Right these days, which is claiming that any criticism at all of a decision once made is illegitimate and – in the case of the Brexit vote – even treasonable.

This kind of hysteria may derive from the Brexiteers’ realisation, or at least suspicion, that their very narrow victory in last year’s referendum may have owed something to ‘dirty tricks’, including suborning the popular press, false promises, lies, and – recently unearthed – the use of subtle internet weapons to skew opinion. In which case there would be an argument for a re-run, on a more level playing field (the sporting analogy again), rather than relying on such a flawed measure of the popular will at one narrow and fraught period of time. The result might well turn out the same. But even if so, it would have more political and moral legitimacy, and so be easier for the losers to ‘get over’. I’m always happy to accept the result if West Ham lose fairly (as often happens); but I can be gripped with resentment for months if it’s because Chelsea have cheated. I’ll feel the same after this coming General Election, where the cheating, on the Conservative side, is widespread and blatant. I’ve never before encountered more ‘diving’ in the penalty area.

It’s not all cheating, of course. The Tories have also been very clever, in playing to the bias of their media. Hiding Theresa away was a brilliant ploy; if she’s shut up in the lav any time there are ‘ordinary voters’ around, she’s not going to stumble into being challenged by unexpectedly sharp questions from housewives or pensioners, or be surprised eating a burger clumsily. We know very little about Theresa, apart from what she revealed in (a) that cosy TV chat with her tax-avoiding but quite charming hubby, (b) her frankly authoritarian tenure of the Home Office, and (c) a couple of crazy antediluvian policies she has blurted out – hunting, grammar schools. Which makes the Tories’ choice of her as their vote-winner – all their propaganda is for her, not for her party – curious, you might think, but actually quite a cunning ploy. Let her be defined by her dull, anonymous, robotic but ‘strong and stable’ image, while at the same time concentrating minutely on Jeremy’s failings – some real, many others invented – in order to sink him. It will probably work.

I imagine that TM’s new appeal to ‘working class’ voters by stealing even more of JC’s clothes – workers’ rights restored, and the like – might help too. These Tories really are clever. Not intelligent, but ‘clever’; a quality the British are supposed to despise – what other country has a term like ‘too clever by half’ in its language? – but which will probably get Theresa home. What happens when she’s allowed out of the toilet is anyone’s guess. But that’s the whole point. We’re not supposed to know.

PS (later today). TM has at last been persuaded out of the lav to meet some ordinary folk. It’s not going well for her. But will it get on the telly? Or Corbyn’s HUGE crowds? Let’s see.

Sometimes, in this sort of situation, one half hopes one’s party will lose the coming election because then the other party will have to sort out the mess they’ve made of things. There’s certainly going to be a lot to clear up this time, and much more to come as a direct result of the Tories’ domestic policies: if, that is, having stolen one of Labour’s ideas (a cap on energy bills), they don’t run away with the rest of Corbyn’s ideological clothes – as Disraeli was supposed to have done to the Whigs in 1868. If not, then Theresa May is surely going to struggle, not only with her overriding ‘Brexit’ task, where we still have no idea of the direction she’s going to take, except that it will be confrontational; but also with the reaction her domestic policies are bound to provoke. We could even have a civil war, albeit a more polite, English kind than other countries’ – hopefully. (I’m happy to take part, but would prefer not to get killed.) In any event, there could be exciting times ahead. Isn’t this something to look forward to, to lighten the gloom that has descended on most of us goodies (!) since the Brexit vote, and to bring a smidgeon of comfort to us in these dreadful times?

Aux armes, citoyens!

Well, it looks as though we’ve had it. We – the Left – will get mauled in the General Election. That’s what the press and the polls are telling us, and even Labour’s Deputy Leader. Hence the levels of despair and anger we feel. The election is a vital one for the country, and yet is being fought one-sidedly, with most of the press, the most unprincipled propaganda, and all the ‘dirty tricks’, being on the Conservative side. (I’m sorry, but the parties are not ‘both the same’ in this regard.) The very calling of the election, unnecessarily, was a devious partisan trick; its morphing into a presidential campaign concentrating exclusively on what are supposed to be the personalities and abilities of the two leaders – May’s hidden away from the people, wisely, Corbyn’s already trashed by the media – is another cunning plan by Lynton Crosby, the Tories’ prince of darkness (a.k.a. electoral strategist); and the very timing of the election, re-opening the wounds inflicted by the (similarly dishonest) EU referendum campaign, is almost bound to skew the result. Quite apart from the greater issues involved, or which ought be involved, in this election – poverty, inequality, industry, democracy, our national health, migration, Anglo-American relations, global warming, even possibly war and peace – it’s no wonder that we on the Left are cross. I’ve never known such depression, desperation and rage before in all my 70+ years. This is not normal.

As a historian, however, I need to point out that this situation – the desperation – is not entirely unprecedented in Britain. Except that on the most recent previous occasion it manifested itself, it was felt on the other side. During the 1960s and ’70s Rightists also felt desperate; but this time at the progress of socialism in Britain – the welfare state, and all that – covertly aided, they thought, from Moscow, and destined to destroy the Britain they knew and loved. ‘Country’s going to the dogs’, was one of their favourite complaints. Some of their suspicions sound crazy now. I remember Philip Larkin’s talking, at a dinner party I attended, of certain evidence he had that the Labour Government was about to repeal the Quinquennial Act, so enabling Harold Wilson to rule for ever. There are accounts of Tory Cabinet ministers gathering their families around them at Christmas to warn them that that might be the last Christmas they would enjoy. The head of the home civil service, Sir William Armstrong, was found lying on his floor one day, ‘really quite mad’, and muttering about the ‘Red Army’ at the gates, before he was ‘gently removed to Lord Rothschild’s villa in Barbados for a well-earned rest’.

Some of them believed this existential threat to ‘their’ Britain justified extreme and indeed illegal measures to counter it. There’s a theory – not to be shrugged off – that Britain’s Secret Services, no less, were part of a great plot against the Wilson government, whom they suspected of being a communist agent. In the 1960s a group of retired generals visited the Queen Mother to get her support for a military putsch against Wilson and the socialists. Apparently the Queen Mum told them ‘not to be silly boys’. Another similar conspiracy was floated by the Daily Mail proprietor (who else?) in 1968. That came to nothing, too. A little later a number of ‘private armies’ sprang up in support of any such mutiny, when ‘the balloon’ went up. There’s a delightful skit on this on Youtube: a scene from Channel 4’s A Very Secret Army series in 1984, with the marvellous Geoffrey Palmer playing the nutty ‘Major Jimmy’, who is in on the plot: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJ-9R6NCZ0A. (It’s my favourite sit-com clip of all time.) None of this happened, of course; or not that we’re aware of. If there was a clandestine plot to get Thatcher in, it was a good deal more subtle. But it shows the lengths to which some of these demoralised and disappointed Rightists were prepared to go, in their desperation for their country, and in the face of an opposition whose success, they believed, was attributable to dishonest and foul means. (All this is in my Plots and Paranoia, and Britannia’s Burden.)

Are we on the Left there yet? We can, I think, certainly empathise with the feelings of these 1960s-’70s Rightists, though from a different perspective. Like them, I feel my country is being stolen away from me, starting with Brexit, and continuing with the authoritarian tendencies of Theresa May. At least part of the reason for this is the capture of influential parts of the machinery of democracy – mainly the Press – by the extreme Right. In this election, with a majority of the electorate supporting Labour’s policy manifesto but being turned against voting for it by the canards floated by the media, a justification could be made for protesting the result in unconstitutional ways, in order to restore genuine democracy. (The same applies to the USA, with Trump’s being a minority President; but at least there they also have the constitutional possibility, or even probability, of his being impeached. And then, hopefully, Pence.)

Of course the polls may be wrong. Labour ‘moderates’ (huh!) may yet learn to rally round Corbyn; the electorate’s eyes may be opened to his qualities, and also to May’s carefully concealed weaknesses; the young may come out to vote, which apparently would make a substantial difference; a shocking Tory scandal might unexpectedly break (May pictured sinking her teeth into a live fox?); and the tide will massively turn. I’ve not given up all hope yet. And I’ll be over the moon (and £90 in credit at the betting shop) if  my defeatist prediction proves wrong.

But we need to start looking ahead, at what we’re going to do if the proto-fascists (yes, really!) do prevail. Maybe not a putsch – we don’t have that kind of influence at the top; or a ‘secret army’. (Though incidentally I was quite a good rifle shot in my school CCF.) But something, please, beyond blogging and satire, to ease our pain, before the next election, if there is one. What are the good Americans doing, to ease theirs?

I’ve just discovered a feature on my Blogsite thingy that allows me to see which of my posts are most often read. I was shocked to find that the winner, nearly every day, and by a long shot, is a piece from January I called ‘American Pussy’. Here it is: https://bernardjporter.com/2017/01/31/american-pussy/. It’s a satirical cartoon I came across featuring Donald Trump and the Statue of Liberty.

Why is that the most popular? Now it occurs to me that the title of the piece might have got it indexed among pornographic sites. (Perverts will have been very disappointed.) I suppose I could check, by searching for ‘pussy’ on Google; except that this would probably get me added to the list, ‘algorithmically’, and I’d never be able to rescue my reputation. Computers don’t forget.

I blame Monty Python. Originally regarded as entirely beyond belief, but touching gently on certain British traits, it got us used to the ridiculous. Then came Brexit. The genuinely ridiculous Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – its leaders – could feature in a reprise of the series, without even needing to over-act. Theresa May could replace poor Terry Jones in his cross-dressing role: ‘Hello Mr Hilter!’ And for some (only) of their followers, judging by internet and radio phone-in programme comments I’ve seen and heard recently, how about the following?

‘My. Head. Hurts.’

Reality mirroring art, indeed.

As soon as the Labour manifesto is leaked, we get the Telegraph and the Mail rubbishing it as a ‘return to the 1970s’. That of course is in order to paint Corbyn as the antediluvian reactionary he – to be fair – does appear to be, and to tar him with some of the carefully-selected images the Right likes to use to characterise the 1970s with: unburied bodies lying among the dustbins, for example, rampant Red trade union ‘barons’ under Moscow’s thumb, and Michael Foot laying his wreath at the London Cenotaph in a donkey jacket. I wrote about this kind of portrayal of Corbyn in a piece two years ago: https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/08/07/bernard-porter/whos-a-dinosaur-now/; drawing a historical parallel in order to show how this had been done before – in order to dismiss the Liberal ‘pro-Boers’ around 1900 – but with no lasting effect.

In fact the ‘return to the ’70s’ accusation against Corbyn is not unfair; as neither was the fin-de-siecle Tories’ accusation against the anti-imperialists of their time for reverting to the Gladstonian 1880s. Rail and (part-) energy nationalisation; greater equality; high taxes on high earners; free higher education; an industrial strategy; expansion of the welfare state; an end to privatisation in the NHS; freeing up the Trade Unions; ‘no first use’…; all were either already established in the 1970s, or were on the Labour Party’s shopping list. Then they were considered pretty mainstream policies on the whole, shared or at least tolerated and rationally debated on both sides of the political divide. It was only some time after Thatcher came to power, and free market zealotry started making its come-back, that views like these came to be dubbed ‘extreme’, and were banished to the outer reaches of the conventional political solar system. Which goes to show just how far to the Right the political consensus has shifted over the last fifty years. Standing on the middle ground in 1975, and not shifting very much since then, Corbyn now finds himself dismissed as a wild-eyed Lefty, even a ‘Marxist’. And me too. I’ve not shifted (much) since the 1970s either. Which of course is one reason why I identify with Jeremy.

Of course we’re both ‘behind the times’. Except that I prefer to think of it differently. The 1970s were the decade when the social democratic trend in British politics climaxed, but then began to stagger and fail. There were many reasons for this: global money, the re-energising of the Right, mistakes on the Left (especially among the over-confident trade unions, damn them), Rupert Murdoch (of course!), and hosts of little ‘conspiracies’ (like, possibly, the secret service one against our last genuinely social democratic prime minister, Harold Wilson). Then the ‘Great Reaction’, as I call it in my books, kicked in, and Britain took a different turn in the road; the glitzy ‘free market’ one that has landed us where we are today.

Living in Sweden for much of the last twenty years, it’s clear to me now that there was another path we could have taken: the one taken by Sweden (and, I think, the other Scandi countries) since the 1970s. Britain and Sweden then were quite similar, politically and socially, with each of us following the ‘progressive’ social democratic road. In most ways Sweden was ‘ahead’ of us, and hence became a ‘model’ for us Labourites, but not so very much ahead, if you look back to that period; and with Britain taking the ‘progressive’ lead in some areas. But then we parted company. While we in Britain decided to veer off sharply to the Right, the Swedes kept to the ‘progressive’ road we had both been on before that point, and which they have – with a few little diversions, especially recently (‘free’ schools) – continued steadily along to this day. This was the ‘alternative’ that Thatcher told us didn’t exist. (Remember ‘TINA’?)

This may also be the reason for the material differences between us, with Sweden, and the Swedish people – especially at the middle and lower ends of the social scale – far more happy and prosperous than Britain is. Look at their economic and social indicators, by the side of ours! They don’t regard Corbyn as old-fashioned or extreme. Indeed, as a number of people have pointed out in the press recently, the Labour Party’s 2017 manifesto would be regarded as ‘moderate’, and indeed common-sense, in present-day Sweden and Norway; simply because their countries chose the British social-democratic way of ‘progress’, rather than the American one. That’s the road we Corbynistas should like to get back on to now; not just out of nostalgia, but in order to retrace our steps to the alternative and better future which this particular past could lead us on to. It would be like unravelling knitting after a dropped stitch, in order to progress again. I don’t hold out much hope of this; not for a while, anyway. But then the Tories’ trashing of the ‘dinosaurs’ in 1900 only worked for a limited time. In the following election, the people saw through them.

We good Leftists really do have a mountain to climb if we’re to overcome the evil Rightists and proto-Fascists ranged against us today. (OK; ‘evil’ may be a bit strong.) There’s the media, for a start, and people’s stupidity; and, in Britain, our somewhat unhelpful electoral system: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/first-past-the-post/. Beyond all that, however, or possibly lurking darkly behind it, there is the Right’s ability and willingness to use all manner of ‘dirty tricks’ to counter the Left, to a degree not found on the Left, but deriving from the Machiavellian amoralism you much more often find on the Right, and the practices that some of Britain’s Rightists have learned from a century of involvement in secret intelligence agencies like MI5 and MI6 (see my Plots and Paranoia, 1989), or in advertising. Often the excuse given for this is that the Left is using these same techniques against them; but that has probably not been true since the demise of the Soviet Union. Nowadays the KGB’s successors appear to be aiding the American, French and British Right. By the side of all this – ‘black’ and ‘grey’ propaganda, subversive plotting, psychological warfare, bribery, corruption, fake news, control of newspapers by foreign-based billionaires, Russian intervention – we poor principled Left-wingers, clinging to outworn and naïve ideas like honesty, transparency, fairness and truth, would appear to stand very little chance.

And now apparently we have a new weapon employed against us: the internet. Today’s article by Carole Cadwalladr in the Observer paints a truly alarming picture of British and American democracy’s being undermined and corrupted by rich Right-leaning capitalists aided by bright young computer geeks, using the data provided by Facebook and Google. The election of Trump and Brexit are alleged to be very largely attributable to this factor, and connected through it; which is possible, bearing in mind that the margins of popular victory in both cases were very small indeed or – in the American case – actually negative. Here’s a link to the article: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy. It’s well worth reading; fairly long, but not too technical. (I think I understand it, anyway, and my technical expertise has hardly progressed beyond bicycles and steam engines.) It ought to cast doubt on the strict validity of both the American presidential election and our referendum, not to mention our coming General Election; and, more broadly, on the legitimacy of what Cadwalladr calls our ‘managed democracy’. If, that is, this conspiracy was and is as effective as it’s painted here. The billionaire Rightists cited in this article have poured quite a lot of money into it, and they are supposed to be hard-nosed businesspeople. But they may have exaggerated the efficacy of their plotting. Let’s hope so.

The other trouble with these kinds of accusations is that they’re too often dismissed as ‘conspiracy theories’, by those who have read too many crazy David Icke-like conspiracy theories to want to waste their time properly examining any new ones that appear. And, in the case of the EU vote, by the sour, mean, angry reactions of most Brexiteers to what they regard as a conspiracy against them, by treacherous middle-class élitists who just aren’t prepared to accept the ‘democratic will’. All that, of course, is to the benefit of the conspirators, if in fact they do exist. And, again, to the extent that conspiracy ‘works’. (Obviously it can in some circumstances. I hope that doesn’t make a ‘conspiracy theorist’ out of me.)

Is there a logical or principled argument for ‘patriotism’? I can think of practical and emotional reasons: familiarity, tribal instinct, ignorance, and its value to a government that needs its people to fight for it. I can also think of reasons why anyone should feel fond of or even grateful to the country he or she was born and brought up in. (I do.) But as a reason for supporting that nation, come what may? And in preference to other identities: local, class, team, professional, gender, religious, racial (but only if your ‘race’ is being persecuted), or even humanity as a whole?

‘Patriotism’, of course, has traditionally been a slogan and requirement of the political Right; right up to the present day, with its appropriation in Britain by the ‘Brexit’ side of the current EU controversy, and by extreme nationalist organisations and parties all over, perhaps most notably in the USA (‘America First’). It is very much part of Theresa May’s ideological (or rhetorical) armoury: ‘if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere’ (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/05/theresa-may-treads-the-brexit-path-of-empathy-and-righteousness); which, however true it may be in literal, legalistic terms, is deeply disturbing in the context of a rising – and, yes, proto-fascist – world-wide nationalism.

Opponents of patriotism often gleefully cite the conservative Dr Johnson’s famous dismissal of it as ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’, but without fully understanding the context of the word at that time. In the later 18^th century ‘patriots’, in America, France and Britain, were those who championed the people’s rights ahead of those of the governments that were imposed on them; and so were generally what today would be classed as left-wing radicals or democrats. That’s why Johnson disliked them. They were also ‘citizens of the world’, in the sense that they identified and expressed solidarity with similar radical patriots in other countries: American revolutionaries, for example; which is very different from the xenophobic chauvinism more commonly associated with ‘patriotism’ today, and which Theresa May was appealing to. I wish there was a similar ‘radical patriotism’ in our times: one that took most pride, for example, in Britain’s democratic advances (such as they are), and institutions like the BBC and the NHS, giving us a sense of international fraternity with countries and parties abroad that shared the same or similar ideals. Now that is a kind of ‘patriotism’ which could, I think, be defended ‘on principle’.

Where does that leave those of us – in Britain, but I know there are many in America – who are beginning to feel very unpatriotic towards their countries as they are presently developing: away, that is, from the principles which we thought justified our loyalty to them in the fairly recent past? I’m toying just now with the idea of uprooting from this dark, mean, hateful, Farageist Britain, as all the public signs – and certainly its public press – seem to be presenting it, and moving permanently to Sweden, as a means of escape, and in order to cure this deep political depression that hit me when I landed back at Gatwick last week. But wouldn’t that just be cowardly? There are millions who feel like me in Britain, and who are bravely resisting the coming oppression; should I be abandoning them at this hour of their need? Not that I think I can do very much for them (especially at my age and with an operation coming up at the time of the General Election); but it would make me feel a traitor to the kind of radical patriotism I favour. ‘Stay with your comrades and join in the fight.’ I don’t think I could throw that off. So in a way, if I don’t go, it will be ‘patriotism’ that holds me back.

Alternatively, perhaps I can be of more use to the cause in Sweden; exposing our sufferings in the local press, and perhaps enlisting some Swedish help for our side. Maybe with some support from ‘citizen-of-the-world’ patriots in Britain, I could encourage the Swedes to invade us, implant their principles here – which used to be ours, too – and then give us back us our independence; or as much as the USA will allow a Brexited UK. I wouldn’t complain. There are worse fates than becoming a colony, if it’s of a country as enlightened as Storsverige.

I genuinely fear Theresa May. Perhaps I shouldn’t, because we don’t really know her yet. That may be why she decided to go to the country so unnecessarily early, and before we got to know; or, to put it another way, to rumble her. Her reputation in government was of a boring but efficient worker at the Home Office. She was there longer than almost any other politician in history, which must say something; but she’s done little else. She appears to have no fixed principles or ideals, which is why she could switch, astonishingly, from being a Remainer to a ‘hard’ Brexiter overnight. Apparently ‘she doesn’t read much history, and tries not to picture how things will be in advance’: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/23/theresa-may-vogue-history-thatcher. I think that’s a pity; and not just because I’m a historian, or believe that ‘History’ is a reliable guide to the future, but because I think it can contextualize events in a thought-provoking way.

May seems to look at problems entirely out of context, apart from their immediate, day-to-day contexts. She’s a quintessential short-term pragmatist: the opposite, in this way, of Margaret Thatcher, with whom journalists – and perhaps the public – like to compare her, for obvious but superficial reasons. Poor David Cameron, one feels, was the same. May’s statements about policy are always vague, simply mouthing what she senses – from reading the Daily Mail – will go down well at the moment, and boost her image. Having very little personality, or at least one that shows, she resorts to vapid soundbites, served to her by her ad-men, and endlessly repeated, robotically: like her much-mocked ‘strong and stable’ phrase. (I’m sure it’s not true that she got this from an NHS pamphlet on erectile disfunction that Jeremy Hunt had left behind in the Cabinet Room. But it’s a good joke.) Recently she’s been concentrating on what a ‘bloody difficult woman’ she will be in her negotiations with EU leaders: image, again. Otherwise her speeches are devoid of reasoning, facts and joined-up thinking; anything one can bite on. A study of History might have corrected this. So might being willing to debate her policies with her rivals, or even with the public, which she has resolutely refused to do. She won’t appear with Corbyn on TV, and her local meetings are stage-managed to a ludicrous degree: with only Tory supporters allowed in, for example, and even reporters excluded: http://www.devonlive.com/theresa-may-visits-devon-after/story-30306851-detail/story.html. To her and her media friends, any criticism or even discussion of, for example, Brexit, is ‘treason’ or ‘sabotage’. She’s clearly frightened of it, and nervous of her ability to cope with it – or, indeed, with ‘ordinary people’. Hence the Lib-Dem ‘chicken’ that is following her around.

Her main achievements at the Home Office were (a) that dreadful poster driven around the streets on a side of a truck telling (some) immigrants to ‘go home’, which was soon scrapped, thank God; and (b) her ‘Snooper’s Charter’, whose effect is to increase government surveillance of ordinary citizens to an extent not found today in any other democratic country (see https://bernardjporter.com/2016/03/01/the-snoopers-charter/), and in a way that flouts some of the major professed ‘national values’ of Britain in the past. But of course, with no interest in History, she won’t have known that. (I do wish politicians would read my books!)

All of which puts her firmly on the ‘authoritarian’ wing of the Conservative Party – the one that I call ‘proto-Fascist’. This is bound to increase liberal fears when Brexit ultimately goes through, and she and her government are permitted to amend and pass legislation – undoing and replacing EU laws – by ‘statutory amendment’, without parliamentary debate: see https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/may/03/true-conservatives-fake-ones-destroying-britian-theresa-may-real-patriots.  Monbiot in this article is right to dub this ‘unpatriotic’. If May had read anything about the history of our constitution, she would have known that.

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I’ve just been into a betting shop for almost the first time in my life, and put £10 on Jeremy Corbyn to be the next Prime Minister, at 9/1. I’ve also asked if they can give me odds on Britain’s not leaving the EU after all. (She’s going to find out for me.) That seems to be turning out trickier than anyone anticipated. I’m not altogether comfortable with giving money to the ultimate capitalist industry, as I’ll surely lose both bets; but it’s a way of expressing solidarity.