Porter’s Pensées

I posted some historical background to the ‘Snooper’s Charter’, which has just been passed, in March this year. Here it is: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/03/01/the-snoopers-charter/.

The talk seemed to go OK, though you can never tell. About 60 there? I kept it short and informal. My host thought parts of it might be ‘outside their comfort zone’ (I think he meant a bit left-wing), and so made them think; but that’s not a bad thing. Everyone very formally dressed, as Kajsa warned me, but some – obviously the rebels – had open-neck shirts. Food v.g., and genuine champagne, not Prosecco (I checked). 80% men. A nice bunch of people. Probably.

What made me sad was how upset they felt about Brexit. They had regarded the Brits as their main allies in Europe, sharing many of the same criticisms of the EU that they have. That made me feel guilty. As well as fucking ourselves up, we’ve betrayed our friends.

Clio has let me down. Not that I’ve ever regarded History as a reliable guide to the present or the future, and much of my recent writing activity has been devoted to questioning the lessons that others have believed they could infer from the past; but I can usually find one or two historical precedents that might shed some light on the present. There are of course some obvious ones to act as warnings against Trump and Trumpery and Farage and Farageism today, of which Europe in the 1930s is the one that usually comes to all our minds, perfectly reasonably, I think: so long as we take account of the peculiarly American cultural influences that serve to differentiate American Fascism (which it is) from, say, Nazism. But I can think of no historical precedent for the degree of irrationalism that is infecting Anglo-American politics today. The best I can do are inter-war Germany; Berlusconi; the witch-burnings of the 17^th century; and lots of events in more ‘primitive’ ages. Even these rarely exhibited the kind of light-headed craziness we are seeing nowadays, and which is a major characteristic. (I touched on this, briefly, many posts ago: https://bernardjporter.com/2016/02/29/tragedy-or-farce/). Nazism was always deadly serious – though many foreign contemporaries early on regarded Hitler as a bit of a joke. Farage and Trump seem to have entered mainstream politics by donning clownish uniforms, possibly to reassure people. Who wouldn’t mind, in ordinary circumstances, sharing a pint with Nige? (I mean, of course, white men.) We already have ‘Post-Truth’ – it’s just entered the Oxford English Dictionary; why not ‘Post-History‘? (The Sequel to Fukuyama.) I may return to this.

In the meantime I have my talk to give to the Swedish lawyers this afternoon. (https://bernardjporter.com/2016/11/18/brexit-for-swedish-lawyers/.) I’m nervous. I always like to know my audience, and I’ve had little to do with lawyers, apart from academic ones, since they fleeced me of £5000 in connection with my divorce twenty years ago. (In Sweden it would have been much cheaper.) Being Swedish, they probably know at least as much about Brexit as I do: their press reported every twist and turn of the EU debate fully, and much more objectively than ours. Still, I shall dress smartly for them, with a jacket and tie (Kajsa tells me that lawyers are the last profession in Sweden to wear suits); and I understand that wine will be available, to calm me down. (Note to self: Don’t mention Assange.)

The Queen is asking for £369 millions of taxpayers’ money to refurbish Buckingham Palace. I’m sure it needs it, just as the Palace of Westminster does. I don’t go along with those who say we could use the money to build a thousand new hospitals (or whatever); we ought to be able to afford both. (And would, if we taxed ourselves enough.) Public buildings are important, in all kinds of ways: people recognise and like them, and they give a sense of visual identity to places which otherwise wouldn’t be worth visiting. Just imagine a town whose most impressive building was a Tescos (there may be some: Stoke-on-Trent?), or a row of similarly utilitarian edifices. Or something as vulgar as a Trump Tower. London is defined and recognised, in part, by Buckingham Palace and the Houses of Parliament. So it’s worth some money – I’m not sure about the £369 million – to shore them up.

My only gripe is that they are such poor buildings, architecturally. If they weren’t so ‘iconic’ I might be in favour of pulling them down. The Palace of Westminster was always an uncomfortable merging of opposite styles of architecture, by a classical and a Gothic architect, before Pugin (the Goth) had truly mastered his style. The view that we all know of Buckingham Palace is of a re-facing job that was done in 1911, possibly the worst period in British history for official public architecture, and reeks of philistine imperialism, which it was intended (I think) to celebrate: dull, repetitive, and soulless. Most of the other large buildings erected at around that time were the same. ‘High’ imperialism and art don’t mix.

But then what distinguished public buildings does London have, to compare with – for example – Vienna , Paris, Berlin, even Stockholm? Wren’s St Paul’s looks like a bank. Westminster Abbey is ruined by those awful, disproportioned West Towers – designed by Hawksmoor, a great architect in his own English baroque style, but not here. The National Galley looks cheapskate – that pathetic dome. The British Museum is OK, I suppose, if you have to copy Roman temples. There are a few good monumental buildings – myself, I’d go for the Natural History Museum, and the new British Library in St Pancras – and of course some attractive smaller ones. But in general London is far from being a beautiful city, architecturally. (I explore some of the reasons for this in my The Battle of the Styles, 2011, if anyone’s interested.)

OK, let Queenie have her re-fit. The only alternative would be to pull the building down and replace it, but I’m not at all confident of how the replacement would turn out. Especially if the architecturally super-reactionary Prince Charles had any say in it, which of course he would be bound to have. Or perhaps you could evacuate it, leave just the facade as a landmark, with a children’s playground behind it, perhaps, or one of your thousand new hospitals, and move the Royals out to a mock-tudor semi-detached in Hornchurch. That – or something like it – was what I had to put up with. It wasn’t so bad.

For me personally, the most chilling of the many chilling statements I’ve heard from the Right in the course of our recent ‘double whammy’ – the Brexit vote and the election of the Donald – was Michael Gove’s last June: ‘I think people in this country have had enough of experts.’ (https://www.ft.com/content/3be49734-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c.)

Michael Gove is a curious figure. He is widely regarded as an ‘intellectual’, because, I think, he used to be a Times leader-writer, has ‘big ideas’, and is supremely confident – you might say ‘cocky’ – in expressing them. I first took against him when I watched him giving evidence at the Leveson Inquiry, where he offered a little potted history of the British Press – in order to make the point that it has always been the same as it is now – which I knew, from my ‘expert’ studies of the press over the last 200 years, to be utterly false. No-one challenged him, because there was no newspaper history ‘expert’ there. Gove was one of the prime defenders of the Murdoch press at that inquiry. The Times, of course, is a Murdoch paper. I’m not saying that this influenced him in any corrupt way, though we can never be sure; but being a leader writer for a paper that doesn’t particularly care for ‘truth’ as one of its major concerns, as compared with promoting what its (right-wing) readers want to read and its proprietors want them to think – in other words, propaganda – must have had an effect on him. You can see why he derides ‘experts’. They can so often get in the way of propaganda; or, at the very least, encourage you to think.

Of course Gove’s throwaway line isn’t the worst thing that’s been said in the course of the Brexit and presidential campaigns. Trump has trumped it a hundred times. Farage has said some pretty despicable things, too. It may be that Gove’s dismissal of ‘experts’ got under my skin particularly because I’m one of them myself: only in certain areas, of course, which doesn’t mean I’m free to pronounce authoritatively in others – of course I can hold opinions, but only on the condition that I will change them in the light of evidence – but in a way that makes me shudder at a leading political figure who can seem to undervalue ‘expertise’ wholesale. Of course ‘experts’ are often wrong; but their saving grace is that other experts will usually step in here, with evidence or rational argument, to put them right. It’s called the ‘scientific method’. It lies at the base of everything we scholars and intellectuals do. But beyond that, I also believe that the core of it – discovering truth objectively, or as objectively as is humanly possible – is essential in the wider political sphere in order to enable people to test and counter some of the more outrageous claims made by the likes of Trump and Farage. We have to keep hold of our rationality.

Over the last few months that hold has certainly slipped. There have always of course been anti-rational strains in both American and European society. Nazism could be said to have elevated irrationalism into a philosophy. In America the powerful ‘anti-intellectual strain’ in her politics was noticed and written about as early as 1963, with this path-breaking book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Anti-intellectualism-American-Vintage-Richard-Hofstadter/dp/0394703170/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1479474812&sr=1-1&keywords=anti-intellectualism+in+american+life. There, as in Britain, ‘intellectuals’ were often associated with ‘elites’, which is what helped fuel the disparagement of them by ‘ordinary folk’ or ‘middle America/England’ or the ‘silent majority’, to whom both the Trumpist Republicans and Ukip sought to appeal. The social media are currently another powerful vehicle of irrationalism, as seen in the myriad of crazy ‘conspiracy’ sites that have appeared, as well as Right-wing so-called ‘news’ agencies like Breitbart. We know of one internet troll who knowingly fed anti-Clinton lies into this polluted stream, as ‘satire’, he claims (he is in fact a Democrat), and now deeply regrets it: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’. (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/17/facebook-fake-news-writer-i-think-donald-trump-is-in-the-white-house-because-of-me/.) Poor fellow; but even more, poor us.

The Right knows it’s dissembling. Just a day or so after that notorious ‘£350 million-a-week’ slogan appeared on the side of the Brexit ‘battle-bus’ in June, the claim (that Britain was losing that amount of money to the EU, which could be spent on the NHS) was nailed conclusively as a lie – and yet the Brexiteers continued with it to the end. Currently it is being challenged in the courts, as having possibly broken electoral law (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/11/07/cps-considers-complaint-that-leave-campaigns-misled-eu-referendu/); but by the time the courts have ruled, of course, it will be too late. The interesting thing is that the purveyors of these untruths – especially Boris Johnson, who was frequently photographed in front of the offending vehicle – don’t seem to care in the least when their deceptions are revealed: so long, I imagine, as they’ve had their desired impact on voters. Everyone – or at least many people on the Right – appear to accept the ‘post-truth’ culture, as it is now coming to be called. Any lies are acceptable, so long as they sell. (Capitalism again!)

Which is why I put Gove’s statement about ‘experts’ at the head of my list of deplorable statements made during the campaigns that have just saddled us with these two awful outcomes. Trump’s ‘pussy’ boast, and libelling of Mexicans, and criminalising of Hillary Clinton, are of course much worse. The point is, however, that if America and Britain had been sensible, rational societies, willing to listen (critically) to ‘experts’, or people who knew, all these lies could have been more effectively challenged, and hopefully emasculated. (The use of a male metaphor here is deliberate.) Experts, and in particular the thinking processes that contribute to expertise, are our last line of defence against all kinds of democratic dangers; including, in this case, incipient fascism. Experts of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your – what? Tenured positions in a Trumpian/Goveian world?

Next week I’m addressing a Stockholm law firm on the question of ‘Brexit’. They profess themselves puzzled. They invited me as a historian; and also asked for some comments on Sweden. Here are my rough notes for the talk. I’m going to have to scale them down drastically – I’ve only got 20 mins, before the discussion starts.

*

Brief historical Intro – UK’s relations with Europe

•  An island but not insular
• Waters around us roads, not barriers. (Cf the Vikings.)
• More cosmopolitan than most other nations; and a wider cosmopolitanism than merely European. Empire only part of it.
• Ideological differences between Britain & Continent: mainly to do with our conception of ‘freedom’, and our more organic and directly democratic system of law. Individual liberty, not social. True during C19th. (Nb. I don’t necessarily agree with it.)
• No political policing, no spying.
• Hence welcoming – or rather tolerant – towards influx of refugees then. Open borders. Almost no extradition. Protective of the oppressed of the unstable, warlike Continent. Marx…
• These differences diminish during the C20th, and no longer exist today – Britain one of the least liberal nations in Europe in these senses, BUT the memory of the differences continues to inform present-day British perceptions of our ‘superiority’.
• Myth that ‘we’ won the wars against Germany, indeed ‘saved’ Europe, with no help at all from Continental powers.
• Secondary myth: that it was a victory for the British Empire too, now re-named the ‘Commonwealth’, and regarded – illusorily – as a kind of voluntary, multiracial, proto-United Nations, rather than an expression of conquest and power.

All this affected our reluctance to join the EU for 25 years after its precursor was formed. I.e.:

• Feelings of moral superiority on the part of the British. The ‘freedom’ thing.
• Sense of ‘outward-lookingness’, towards the ‘wider world’, where millions of our ‘kith and kin’ resided, plus ‘coloured’ citizens who had become Anglicised, bound to us still by the Commonwealth (unlike the Swedes in Wisconsin) and by cricket; rather than the more ethnically closed European Continent. What you call our ‘imperialism’ was seen as far more internationalist than the Continent’s, which at that time embraced only white men and women.- But of course were never so ‘isolated’ from the Continent as we’re about to become.
• Our patterns of trade were much more ‘international’ in this sense, with only about 30% of our trade and investment going to the Continent, whereas for most Continental countries it was about 80%.  – This created substantial practical problems for our economy, which had to adjust in a way other European countries’ didn’t need to. For France, Germany and the rest, the Common Market reflected the normal pattern of their trade. Britain had to wrench herself away from hers.

But still, after two earlier approaches when we were turned down by General de Gaulle, who suspected us of being a stalking horse for the Americans, in 1973 we joined. One of the reasons was that the old Commonwealth had lost its lustre; another was simply economic.

Two years later we had a referendum on the issue, which the ‘Remainers’ won. Note: on that occasion the opposition to EU membership was led from the Left. The Right – the old imperialists, generally voted for. That’s a complete reversal of the position today.

*

So: you want to know why the Right changed sides this summer? For it was the Right who led the Brexit movement, though with the backing of a few ideological Socialists; and the mass support of very many working-class people who you would normally have expected to be on the Left. It’s that, I think – the working-class support for Brexit – that was crucial, and needs to be explained.

(Though note: parts of Britain voted solidly Remain, like Scotland, N Ireland and London.)

Everyone in Britain has different explanations for Brexit. (We’re just as confused as you.) Here’s my spin on it.

1. It had little or nothing at all to do with Europe. It’s essential, I think, to grasp that crucial fact from the start. People were not really interested in or concerned with the EU. Knew very little about it.
2. Nor did the ordinary voters share the rest of the upper-class Brexit leaders’ reactionary ideology: bring back Grammar Schools, allow smoking in pubs, anti-‘political correctness’, male chauvinism, etc.; some of them – like Trump’s – pretty close to Fascism.
3. Even in some of those cases, that ideology may not have been deeply believed. It’s a matter of record that our chief court jester, Boris Johnson, wavered in his opinion until just before the vote, and only came down on the Brexit side because he thought it would give him a better chance of becoming PM. He seems to have been surprised and shocked by the result, as though he’d never really wanted it. (Boris is thought to be amusing, and has the reputation of being an intellectual because he went to Eton and knows ancient Greek. But of course he’s a fool. As is Farage (great chum of Trump just now). I imagine, though, that they fit quite comfortably into a common Swedish stereotype of the English – derived probably from Monty Python.)
4. A large part of the right-wing owned and dominated press, however, had been pushing anti-EU propaganda for years: false stories of straight bananas, etc etc. Swedes should remember that newspapers in Britain – and not only the ‘tabloids’ – are mostly owned by expatriate millionaires – and regarded by them mainly as political propaganda sheets, rather than purveyors of objective news. Even the Times, since it was bought up by Murdoch. The Guardian the only exception; and that can be seen in some ways as a (mildly) left-wing propaganda organ. The tabloids print right-wing sensational, shocking or easily personalised political news; but in general are anti-politics as a whole, as befits a capitalist institution. Voters are simply consumers of politics, as of everything else.
5. Among ordinary voters, the major issue was probably immigration (as here?); but not necessarily because it materially affected them. It was blamed for lowering wages, taking places in schools and hospitals (even though 1/3 of our doctors and nurses are from overseas), and taking more in state welfare handouts than the ‘native;’ population (which is simply untrue). – But: there was more anti-immigrant opinion in places that had in fact had little immigration, and less, even among established populations, in places – like London – which had had most. People got these ideas not, generally, from personal experience or observation, but from the tabloid press.
6. (and here’s my main explanation for the Brexit vote): People were fed up with a lot of other things: their material situation – lower wages; insecure part-time contracts, austerity, bankers’ bonuses, and so on; and felt that the government of the country – Conservative or Labour – wasn’t in touch with them. It’s widely referred to as the ‘Westminster Bubble’, which includes metropolitan-based journalists People resent the fact that very few MPs have had ‘proper jobs’ before being elected – generally starting off as student politicians (Labour) or young party workers (Conservatives), mostly male, and so can’t really represent people with normal lives. They also feel that the political system of the country, and in particular the ‘first-past-the-post’ voting system, doesn’t allow their views to be accurately reflected in the House of Commons. Which it doesn’t. Our present right-wing Conservative government was elected by only third of the people who voted, and a quarter of the electorate as a whole. – Though I’m not a Brexiteer, I share most of these criticisms (and in fact broadly prefer the Swedish system for that reason; though I do like having my ‘own’ MP). So I feel it’s a reasonable complaint.
7. What isn’t reasonable, however, is blaming it all on Europe. That’s what all those discontented Brits did on June 23^rd, egged on by the Press barons. The reason for that was this. The EU Referendum wasn’t simply an election like our others. Each vote counted. This, then, was the first opportunity for a people who felt themselves neglected and uncared for by their governments – especially the dreadful and incompetent government of David Cameron – to have their say, effectively. They were ‘cocking a snook’, as we say, against an unpopular government, ruling class, and system of government. Which is why Cameron was so criminally foolish to allow the referendum, at that time. (He did it to appease his right-wing backbenchers.) Again, as I say, Europe had almost nothing to do with it.
8. There are of course other influences. The ‘post-truth’ culture that apparently we’re living in now has a lot to do with it, as it did in the case of the American election. Brexit’s great red ‘battle-bus’ had a great slogan painted on the side of it, claiming that the EU cost us £350 millions a week, which could be spent on the National Health Service. Both of those claims were immediately revealed as lies, but the Brexiteers continued with them. (It’s being challenged in court now, for flouting electoral law.) Behind that probably lies the sound-bite society we’re living in now, with no-one reading books any more or joining ideas together, and instead depending on Facebook and Tweets. Is it the same here? I guess not.

*

What will happen to us now we’ve voted ‘out’ is anybody’s guess. No-one in the government expected Brexit to win, so they made no plans for it. There’s a legal challenge being prepared against the idea that we can simply leave the EU without consulting Parliament, which will probably succeed. We’re a Parliamentary democracy, after all, not a plebiscitary one. So the terms of our divorce will have to go back to Parliament. Most MPs are in favour of remaining. They could vote that way if they wanted; but whether they would do so, in a way that the tabloid press would regard as a ‘betrayal’ of the people, is hard to say. (You know about that Daily Mail headline, with pictures of three appeal judges: ‘Enemies of the People’? Another throwback to Nazi Germany.) We can only wait and see.

As well as this: Scotland will very likely seek to secede from the UK; and it looks as though the Brexit campaign has aggravated British racism, Islamophobia and even anti-intellectualism to a worrying extent.

*

Does that make things a bit clearer? – I’d like to finish by drawing some broader inferences from this – to my mind – quite ludicrous and disastrous situation for Britain; including some for Sweden.

For Britain isn’t alone in having this widening gap between her people and her ruling ‘establishment’. It’s a world-wide trend. I’m sure in my own mind that a similar gap accounts for Donald Trump’s support and victory in the USA. ’Drain the Swamp!’ was an even more effective slogan, I think, than ‘Build a Wall!’, or ‘Lock her Up!’, or even Trump’s most constant refrain, which was ‘Me, me, me!’ It could be – I don’t know enough about these other countries – the crucial factor behind the growth of right-wing movements in Hungary, Poland and elsewhere. That, and the after-effects of the Great Bank Crash of 2007-8, and the fact that its causes haven’t really been addressed since then.

Could that Crash, and these after-effects like Brexit and Trump, be a symptom of a crisis of capitalism? Even perhaps the final one, predicted by Marx? Happening in a globalised world – ‘globalisation’ was one of Trump’s main targets – it’s likely to be international in its effects, affecting all of the dangerously interlinked economies of the world. Even Sweden could be swept away by it. You have your Sverigedemokraterna, after all, plus your own Nazis, and your Nordic Nationalists. Until recently I thought Sweden would be sheltered from this disaster by its welfare state, strong trade unions, and its ethos of co-operation more generally, which had protected Britain, too, from ‘capitalism red in tooth and claw’ until Thatcher got in. But these appear to have been chipped away in the 20 years that I’ve been here: privatisation, public schools run for profit – even we haven’t gone that far yet! – and so on. So, in a global world, I can’t see you long escaping the broader dangers – the collapse of all this – that Brexit was a symptom of. And then there could be a similar reaction here, in broad terms, though it might take a different form.

Whether it takes a Brexit-like form, however, I rather doubt. Sweden joined the EU very much later than we did, of course, and on the basis of a pretty narrow popular vote. Like us, you spurned the Euro. But your majority political parties, as I understand it, are all pro-Europe. You used to have a UKIP of your own – your Junilistan – which won 15% of the vote in the 2004 European elections, but which seems to have withered away since. The latest opinion poll put its support at 0.3%. There’s also your Folkrörelsen (is that right?) opposed to EU membership on mainly socialist grounds, which is the direction you would expect Swedish Euroscepticism to come from (just as British Labour opposition to the EU did in 1975). The ‘Vs’ are also anti-Europe. Sverigedemokraten’s policy is to renegotiate the terms of Sweden’s membership, as I understand it, rather than to leave. The Greens are swithering. Sweden has had particular issues with the European bureaucracy over the years. It stopped them exporting snus, for example: and has its greedy eyes on Sweden’s (and my) beloved Systembolaget. So the UK is not the only ‘semi-detached’ member of the EU.

But the Swedish people? – Broader public support for continued Swedish membership did seem to dip earlier this year, to only 44%, but with a large number of ‘don’t knows’; due mainly to Europe’s reluctance to share her refugee burden with her. But apparently it’s gone back now; and I know from the way I was looked at and spoken to when I returned to Sweden for the summer after our referendum, that you think we Brits are rather mad. So we are.

Directly after Brexit I applied for Swedish citizenship (jointly with British). With a Swedish sambo, it should make things easier for me; and in any case I identify with Sweden politically. One of my several identities is European. Brexit has deprived me of that. So I’m angry; and this may have affected this analysis of mine.

Nevertheless, I rest my case.

I’ve been busy this last week reading and reviewing Ian Cobain, The History Thieves. Secrets, Lies and the Shaping of a Modern Nation (Portobello, 2016). Hence the lack of posts here. Nothing to do with the Election. I’ve not committed suicide; though on my way back from Stockholm last Wednesday I was careful not to step too close to the edge of the platform at Gatwick Airport station in case I was tempted.

The review should appear sometime in the LRB. They’ve not indicated when. I may add some thoughts about the book – an important one – to this blog soon.

On the US Election I have nothing to say that others haven’t. I still think it’s a symptom of the crisis of capitalism. And that it’s our fault in a way. If sane and rational people can’t organise society in a way that benefits everyone – or if the cold logic of capitalism doesn’t allow them to – they shouldn’t be surprised when the lunatics take the asylum over.

The European Parliament is debating a measure allowing disappointed British Remainers to apply for ‘associate’ citizenship of the EU, with certain privileges, as individuals. That seems a great idea. The Brexit vote robbed me of one of my proudest ‘identities’, as a European. This would give it me back. But Brexiteers are up in arms against it: http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/european-parliament-considers-plans-for-brits-opposed-to-brexit-to-remain-eu-citizens-a3390696.html. I really can’t see why, unless it’s out of spite. (They can be a spiteful lot.)

If I can strike a discordant note here…

Might there not be something to be said for having a US President who – amongst other, far less admirable things – can get on with Putin, doesn’t want to invade the Middle East, has set himself against political corruption, and is concerned about the effects on ordinary workers of globalisation?

The pity is that it had to take the form of this obnoxious, privileged, racist, sexist, ignorant, narcissistic, dishonest, tax-avoiding, asocial, thin-skinned (any more?) monster, instead of a genuinely left-wing champion of the people, like Bernie Saunders, who might have beaten him on his own pitch; or, best of all, a far more radical and inspiring woman candidate than the rather too conventional – except as regards her gender – Hillary Clinton. Trump really is a fascist. His appeal is almost exactly the same as Hitler’s in the mid-1930s, minus the particular emphasis on Jews. His was always the form a genuine American fascism would take. (And have you noticed how he has taken to thrusting his lower jaw forward after he has finished ranting, just like Mussolini?)

It’s all part of a pattern, of course – this, Brexit, the various populist movements all over Europe – of popular discontent with the impact, whether people realise it or not, of late-stage capitalism. It somehow seems deliciously apt that a man who is almost a caricature of late-stage capitalism – a shallow, greedy, unproductive chancer – should be the one to preside over what may be (fingers crossed) its death throes. Short of death, the only answer to it, in Britain as well as in America, must be a popular left-wing movement that addresses the Trumpists’ and Brexiteers’ fundamental material concerns, but without Trump’s and Farage’s dangerous nationalist and nativist baggage. Corbyn’s Labour Party comes close; if only it had – or Corbyn could become – a more acceptable leader. Can Bernie push the Democrats this way?

If this depressing election persuades enough of the discontented of this, it might turn out not to be the complete disaster it appears to be now. Cold comfort, I realise, but it’s the best I can do.

In Stockholm we live very near Skogskyrkogården, a wonderfully designed and landscaped ‘World Heritage Site’ woodland cemetery. Every year, on the dark evening of All Saints’ Day, people go there to put candles on the graves of their departed loved ones. We went yesterday with a friend. It was a moving experience, the whole forest glittering with little flames.

There were thousands there. Kajsa tells me that the number of people observing this ritual seems to have increased in recent years. We can’t think why. Sweden is a markedly unreligious country, and certainly doesn’t appear to have grown more religious recently: except perhaps the Moslems, who are hardly represented (yet) in Skogskyrkogården. Nor has it become more ‘pagan’, which might fit the character of the site more. (I was reminded of Viking graveyards.)

Maybe it’s something more basic and ominous. I’ve read that animals and birds can sense catastrophes, like earthquakes, long before they happen, and flee. In three days’ time we have the American presidential election coming up, and the prospect either of a catastrophic new President, or of civil war in the US because the catastrophic side won’t accept the result. Instinctively and racially (human racially, that is), we feel this in our bones. For me, in the midst of all those fir trees, gravestones and candles last night, my very marrow freezing, and under a purple, lowering sky, it seemed the right place to be, just before Armageddon. Maybe the thousands of others felt the same.

We returned there this morning, to visit Greta Garbo’s grave. Judging by the number of candles there, she has many lovers still. That cheered me up.