Porter’s Pensées

A sort of novel. It’s meant to be satirical. I don’t really believe Thatcher was a Soviet mole – the point is, however, that it would make perfect sense if she were. Either a free-standing little story; or I could continue it into an alternative history of the 1980s and ’90s. Again, comments welcome. (If anyone is following this.)

THE THATCHER CONSPIRACY

CHAPTER I

The Beginning

‘Now, let me just get this straight’, she said, as she took another sip of her tea. Not proper tea, not English tea, but with a bit of hot water added and a dash of milk it would serve.

‘You want me to become a Conservative?’

She grimaced as she said the word. It went against all her newly-acquired principles. She was a true believer, after all. Her ambition was to become a heroine of the Revolution, helping to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat in the country where Marx had believed it would begin, but was proving curiously resistant to embracing it. She despised Conservatives. They were the ones who had patronized and snubbed her as a gurrl – she remembered the sneery tone – at Oxford. And they were her political kind’s archest enemies. Weren’t they?

But she continued listening. The man was, after all, good to listen to, and to look at: tall, patrician, gently-spoken, a bit effeminate, the very personification of all those heart-throbs she and her school friends had used to swoon over in their cheap Mills and Boon novels – usually read secretly under she sheets. (She took naturally to covert activities.)

‘Of course the Conservatives are a problem,’ he replied; ‘but not necessarily for the reasons you suppose. That’s why you have to join them, and eventually, we hope, to lead them. I’ll explain in a moment. But firstly, let me tell you how we – you and I together – will go about it. We’ve been preparing it for years.’

He lit a cigarette. Foreign, she thought. A Gauloise? No, it had a long tube attached to it; Russian, perhaps. That went with the romantic image too.

‘First of all, we’ll need a back-story. That won’t be too difficult, in view of your real background. A provincial shop-keeper father is a little lower in the social scale than we generally go for; but the petty-bourgeois very often have the right sorts of ideas. Petty-bourgeois women especially, I’m afraid. Sorry; it’s not their fault, poor dears’ – he couldn’t shed his own inherited patronizing language completely – ‘but the effect of their conditioning. And an entrepreneurial background – of a sort – may appeal to the modern kind of Tory more than the effete nobs, like me, that they’ve looked up to all these years. They also tend to have closed minds. That can be presented as an asset, if it’s dressed up the right way – as “conviction”, for example.’ He paused.

OK, she thought. And her membership of the Oxford University Conservative Club couldn’t do her any harm. No-one need know that she had joined that simply out of curiosity, or that she had been a secret member of the Communist Association at the same time. They’d be able to keep that quiet. And to shut up anyone who might betray any of the Lefty thoughts she had shared with her friends during her time at Oxford. She had heard that polonium was a pretty effective silencer. (She looked at her glass of tea with a twinge of anxiety. But he had drunk out of the same pot.) In any case, she hadn’t had many close friends at Oxford. Or, come to think of it, at any time. What was it about me? she wondered, not for the first time. Oh well, it’s their loss.

‘Of course,’ he continued, ‘you will have to pretend to admire your father, the sower of the entrepreneurial seed in the womb of your poor, despised mother – an apt metaphor for what we hope will be your relationship with your country – and the source of all your deeply moral principles.’ He turned to look at her more directly, aware that this might present a problem.

‘But Dad was a monster!’, she cried.

Anthony corrected her. ‘Father, not Dad. “Dad” is infra dig in the circles we expect you to move in now.’

Margaret made a mental note to take this on board. She went on.

‘He was mean, unsympathetic, materialist, judgmental, and pretty universally loathed by his customers and our neighbours. I began to see through him at the age of 14. That’s when I developed my bolshie streak. Isn’t it normal for children to react against their parents around then? And he tyrannized over Mum – sorry, mother – in a way that left her like a limp rag at the end of her life. If I ever get to write an account of my own life, I’ll try to make it up to her.’

‘No, you won’t’, interjected Anthony. That will ruin the image. If you can’t think of anything bad to say about her, you must miss her out completely. People will wonder why, but will come to understand. A soft, motherly mother is not what a strong leader needs. I’m sorry if that sounds macho, dear, but macho is what we need. You must grow some balls. – Not literally, of course’, he added hastily. ‘Conservatives don’t do transgender. Although’ – quietly, as an aside – ‘they do do queer.’

‘Queer?’ thought Margaret. ‘What does that mean?’ Anthony said the word in a way that seemed to imply more than just ‘unusual’; perhaps something a little naughty. But she didn’t want to betray her naivety in this area.

‘Secondly,’ Anthony went on, ‘you’ll need a husband. In fact we’ve got one lined up for you. He’s ideal: rich, which will pay for the child-minding (don’t worry, when you’re prime minister you won’t have to help with other people’s children), and – given a gin and tonic or two, and a round of golf – pretty docile. He’ll be able to introduce you to other rich people. Of course, they’ll be your natural constituents in the future. The only real problem is his name, which we presume you’ll need to adopt: it rhymes too easily with ‘snatcher’. Still, maybe no-one will think of that. He doesn’t know, of course: he’s too dumb to understand the complexities of our plot, and too indiscrete to be trusted with them. Apparently he has literary ambitions – is toying with the idea of doing a Diary piece for Private Eye. We may be able to help him there; the editor is one of ours, too. It will be blimpish in tone. That should help us with the image we want to set up for you. How could a strong socialist woman abide such a fool?’

Margaret shuddered at the thought. Particularly the idea of having intimate relations with him. Perhaps, if things worked out well, they could just do it once. And have twins, for economy. As long as neither of them turned out to be like the monster they were planning to turn her into.

‘The next thing, of course, will be to get you into Parliament, then into a Conservative cabinet, then elected leader of the party. We have the people to do that: Conservative MPs we’ve turned or compromised, lots of lovely girls – and boys – to act as honeytraps, genuine right-wingers who only need a little encouragement to get behind you, tame journalists to stick their knives into your rivals.’

Margaret wondered who they might be. Surely not dear Rupert?

‘Of course your feminine – uh – affliction may go against you at first, though we have ways to counter that. Remind those public school toffs of their school matrons. For those who still go in for certain sado-sexual practices that may not be difficult. Whisper ‘dominatrix’ in their ears. That should have them panting for you. Don’t worry; you won’t need to actually sleep with them. They’ll be far too terrified. You’ll have your Members in your hand. Metaphorically speaking, of course. Unless…’

‘No, no,’ interjected Margaret, hastily. She did understand some doubles entendres; or at least, when a double entendre was meant. ‘But OK. You’ve got me into Parliament, made me leader of the party, and won a general election for me, despite my “affliction” as you call it. I’m sure I can make a lot of that – first female prime minister, and so on. We might even get some of those feminists on board! After that I’m sure you can keep me going with other tricks and hidden allies.’

‘Indeed.’ It was at this point that Anthony came out with the name of one General Galtieri of Argentina, whom she’d never heard of, but who apparently had promised to step in to help – he hadn’t said how – if she found herself losing popularity. Plus some foolish trade union leaders to antagonize the public. They had it all planned, didn’t they?

Gosh, she thought. Perhaps it might just work!

*

‘But what then?’

Of course she had an inkling. But this next stage looked even more difficult than the first. She had got used to the idea of subverting left-wing parties, trade unions and protest movements to the Communist cause. Moscow had been trying that for years, with only moderate success. (Harold Wilson was a particular disappointment.) Surely Conservatives – even those who liked having their bottoms spanked by a woman – would be far more resistant. They were the ones, after all, who owned the assets that her sort of socialist wanted to sequester. Surely they’d notice when she started doling out their hard-earned (or hard-inherited) money to the feckless poor, and nationalizing things?

Or perhaps Anthony’s idea was quite different – for her to make a thorough mess of it, discrediting her party, and so bolstering Labour that way? Labour would win the following election, and that’s when the transition to true socialism could start. Margaret didn’t like the idea – she was constitutionally averse to making a mess of anything; but, of course, in a higher cause one must make personal sacrifices. Or – she suddenly thought – was that too risky? An incompetent leader could after all be easily replaced. Misogynistic Tories would not be at all averse to this – or, indeed, surprised. ‘Women, eh?!’ Someone else would fill her shoes. And capitalism would survive. It would have all been for nothing.

She put this to Anthony. He was impressed. ‘You’re a bright girl, Margaret’, he said. ‘Or can I call you Maggie? A little narrow-minded, but clear-headed. I’m sure you’ll be good at tactics, when it comes to it.’ She flushed. ‘But just now we’re concerned with the broader strategy. That may be a little further-looking than a petty-bourgeois, even a petty-bourgeois who has converted to socialism, will have thought of.’ That took some of her blush away. ‘You’re perfectly right that we don’t want you either to “turn” the Conservative party, or to wreck it. Not in the short term, anyway.’

That was said with emphasis. It seemed to be the key.

He sat back, shifted his bottom to make himself more comfortable, and put his fingers together, a bit like a professor in a seminar. Then, after a short pause, he resumed.

‘I’m afraid, Maggie, I’m going to have to give you a bit of a lecture on Marxist theory here. You may have heard it already, at that short course at the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow you attended just after we recruited you, you remember; that time when you told your parents you were going on a dirty weekend with a boyfriend. No, they didn’t believe it, either. (A friend? Unlikely.) They suspected you were going to a Young Conservative ‘do’. They entirely understood your wanting to keep that quiet. And it was a very short course, and rather dull and technical – the labour theory of value, and all that stuff – so you might have missed the important part of it, so far as your future career is concerned. That was to do with the coming revolution. This is where you come in.’

He leant forward, clearly excited. She could feel it. She didn’t think it was sexual – not, at any rate, for her. (There was a rather good-looking young waiter approaching.) ‘The thing is, Margaret, we want you to be a successful Conservative prime minister; successful, that is, in fostering unrestrained free market capitalism, castrating the trade unions, widening social and economic inequalities, and undermining the welfare state. Plus, a war or two might come in handy. Conservatives like those.’

The waiter cleared the tea things away. Anthony ordered a malt whisky for each of them; and something more for himself ‘later’ – she didn’t quite catch what. She hadn’t had whisky before, but she took a sip. It gave her a nice burning feeling, just behind what her posh friend Alan Clarke liked to call her embonpoint. She thought she might take to it. It could give her courage, too – ‘iron in the soul’. (Was this what the Scots called ‘Iron Brew’? She must check.) She was going to need plenty of that, if she was to succeed in this great if puzzling project that Comrade Anthony had mapped out for her. But to what end? It looked so – well – counter-productive. Unless he wasn’t what he was pretending to be, a KGB mole, but in fact what he seemed: an arty-farty reactionary.

‘Let me explain’, he said. ‘But first you’ll need a history lesson.’ That’s odd, she thought. Surely history was just kings and queens and dates. Whatever use could that be? But she listened anyway. The Iron Brew was helping her focus, in a pleasant, warm way. Her embonpoint hardened at the tips.

*

‘You’ll have read your Marx – some of it, at any rate. I don’t expect any of our comrades have read all of him, though in fact Kapital volume I has some rather good jokes in. Funnier than Poussin, anyway.’

Poussin? Another reference that passed her by. It sounded like a hair conditioner. Anthony sensed her discomfort.

‘An artist,’ he added, helpfully. Ah, that explained it. Daddy – sorry, Father – had not gone in for that sort of thing much. ‘He was French seventeenth century, idyllic landscapes with classical timeless figures; perfect representation of the aristocratic class values of his day. You can see why I chose him for my speciality – the ideal cover for a communist. Marx, of course, was against the aristos; more than that, he believed they were on their way out. Inevitably, according to the laws of our new science of historical materialism. I imagine, by the way, that it was the ‘scientific’ aspect that attracted you to communism, with your degree in Chemistry.’

Well yes, she thought. It could well have been. Science. So definite, so certain, so comforting.

‘By the time Marx was writing,’ Anthony went on, ‘the old feudal aristocracy was already on its way out, being rapidly displaced – again, inevitably – by the newly emergent capitalist middle class. That was obvious. It was what the philosophers of free market capitalism had been predicting for years, and what any fool could see happening around him or her in mid-nineteenth century Britain. The industrial revolution, free trade, philistinism, industrial slums, tight-arsed morality’ – he winced – ‘all that stuff. So that wasn’t a particularly clever observation on Marx’s part. So far, so liberal. But then he moved on. And this is where it gets really exciting.’

Anthony looked excited. Perhaps he really was stimulated by ideas.

‘The thing was this. The process wouldn’t stop there. Victorian liberals tended to think it did; that liberal capitalism was the highest and ultimate form of human social organization – the “end of history”, if you like. (That’s a good phrase. I wonder whether Comrade Fukuyama might like it?) Everything would get better for everyone. The world would get richer. People would be happier. There would be no more wars, or foreign imperialism, or even domestic crime. Armies and police forces could be disbanded. There would be enough “stuff” for everyone. Tyrannies would melt away. Superstitions would give way to rational thought – otherwise known as Protestant Christianity. Free competition would conduce to greater equality – yes, even that. Not many people know that’ – this said in his Michael Caine voice. ‘It would be heaven on earth, brought about by the liberation of the divine spirit of competition between individuals. Full stop.

‘But no. Marx had looked beyond this. It was difficult for him, because according to his own philosophy everyone’s thinking processes were bound by the assumptions, the climate of opinion, the ‘discourse’, as a later school of alleged philosophers put it, of his or her time; which is why you couldn’t get a decent salmon en croute in the Middle Ages. But Marx did. (Not get a decent salmon en croute – see into the future.) He glimpsed, albeit mistily, so far as its material details were concerned, the truly socialist society that was to come about in the future – was to, notice, because he saw that this too, like every other broad trend in history, was inevitable. First feudalism; then capitalism; then socialism: each stage following on from the other, naturally. And “naturally” because they didn’t require any human agency, or will, or policy, to give rise to them. It would happen anyway. But only in certain circumstances. – Are you getting bored?’

Margaret was, a little, but quite happily so. That could have been down to the three or four further whiskies Anthony had plied her with as he was talking. ‘Stop it,’ she giggled; ‘too much alcohol and I’m anyone’s.’ ‘Not mine’, quipped Anthony. Again, she didn’t quite understand.

‘So, what are these circumstances?’ she asked, which showed that she had been following the main train of his discourse, roughly. ‘I guess you mean when the time was right.’

‘Exactly!’ said Anthony, delightedly. ‘Gosh you are a bright one, Maggie! I must tell them back at the Lubyanka. They had their doubts when I picked you out of that bunch of tourists visiting the Royal Art Collection all those years ago. I liked the way you ignored the pictures but just sat on the bench with your face buried in Hard Times. They thought that indicated stupidity; I thought it marked you out as materialist material, if you’ll forgive the clumsy phrase. Just what we wanted. I guess you’ve never lost your admiration for Thomas Gradgrind? No, I thought not. You may be able to use that in your new career.’

‘So,’ she asked, ‘when will the time be right for socialism to displace capitalism – for our revolution?’ She imagined it would be when the trade unions and the Labour Party and the Church of England and the animal rights people and the vegetarians and academics and LRB contributors and all those other likely fellow-travellers, plus a few workers, had been thoroughly subverted and fallen into the laps of the comrades. That’s what she understood the latter had been working towards up to now. But no. According to Anthony, that was entirely wrong. It wasn’t a question of persuasion. It was a matter of events.

‘Let’s go back to Marx’, he said. ‘Remember him? A lot of so-called Marxists don’t seem to. They think of him as the leader of a revolution. To be fair, he did come to think of himself a bit like that just before his death, when all this philosophy went to his head. Incidentally, did you know that the London Police Special Branch were still keeping him under observation two years after his official death? Either they feared his breaking out of his grave in Highgate Cemetery, or they knew something we don’t – even in the KGB. Perhaps he faked his death in order to spend more time with his family. Or his mistress. Or playing cricket – I’ve often thought he bore an uncanny resemblance to WG Grace. Or the police were just fools. (That’s the most likely answer.) But there’s a nice potential conspiracy there waiting to be uncovered. Which, however, would have little bearing on our main concern today. I think.’

Gosh, these conspiracy theorists! thought Margaret. They do have such fun!

Anthony went on. ‘The point about the time being right is that none of these revolutions will work if the time is wrong. In the case of our revolution, it was wrong in 1917, when it is generally supposed to have broken out. That was in Russia, of course; but conditions were nothing like ready for it there. Industrialism and industrial capitalism were patchy; and the countryside in particular was still largely feudal – that is, two stages of historical development in arrears. Russian Marxists, however, were some of the most “advanced”, in organization and enthusiasm. They wanted their revolution then. They kept writing to Marx, and, after his (query) death, to Engels – “please can’t we have it now?” – only for Engels patiently to point out the scientific facts to them: which were – yes, you’ve got it – that the time wasn’t yet ripe. But they went ahead regardless, and succeeded in achieving a kind of revolution in 1917.

‘Even then, however, hardly anyone believed it was a satisfactory one, either practically – all that oppression of the “people”, who were supposed to be its beneficiaries – or theoretically. Lenin was troubled by Russia’s economic backwardness in 1917, but got around that by arguing that if you regarded global capitalism as a whole as having developed to its maximum, with imperialism being its “final stage”, and so internationally ripe for collapse, the Russian part of it could be regarded as its weakest point. That, however, would only convince meticulous ideologues if its collapse started a chain reaction across the rest of the capitalist world. There seemed hope for that for a while, but then it faded. (Lenin blamed imperialism, again.) The 1917 revolution clearly stood out then as having been premature. If you think about it, that makes good sense of the Soviet Union (and other communist states) today. Premature babies are not fully formed; can’t flourish in the wider (in this case capitalist) world; and as a result need incubators to keep them alive. The incubator in Russia’s case is her autocratic form of government – I grudgingly admit it – which is what we hope will keep the hope of socialism alive in a hostile environment, until it can live by its own physical resources. But it’s still far from satisfactory, from a theoretical point of view.’

*

Margaret had listened to this lecture with wrapt attention. She thought she understood it. (She’d seen incubators in her Domestic Science classes at school.) But she couldn’t quite see where it was all leading, apart from some rather depressing conclusions about her new-found faith. Nor could she see how it involved her. She was being asked to aid the development and success of the capitalist system she loathed. How on earth could that be reconciled with bringing the whole monstrous edifice down?

And then it came to her, in a flash. She was a bright girl, if she was led in the right direction. The Communist revolution had failed because the historical conditions for it were wrong. In particular, capitalism was not mature enough in the countries it was first tried in. Ergo, for the revolution to stand any chance of success, capitalism must be further developed until it was ripe enough for its fall. Marx – she remembered now – had predicted that this would happen due to internal faults in the system, contradictions, which would lead it to collapse of its own accord. (This was Marx’s true genius, Anthony pointed out – as an analyst of the capitalist system and its inherent flaws. Even in the later twentieth century he had never been surpassed in this field.) But only then.

And then she looked – or rather thought – around her. Capitalism didn’t seem to be doing so badly in Britain. People tolerated it. Conditions under it had certainly improved since her young days, in the 1930s and ’40s, with less poverty, and so far less radical opposition to it than between the wars. Parliament had used to have Communist MPs. No longer, unless they were dissembling; which simply meant that anti-capitalism was not a popular enough cause to be openly professed. Why was that? It went against all early Marxist expectations, which were of capitalism’s becoming progressively and naturally redder and redder in tooth and claw, until the people saw the savagery – inequality, poverty, unemployment, Chelsea football club and the rest – that underlay it, and could tolerate it no more. Competition would morph into monopoly, which would erect grand tyrannies to rival any statist one. Capitalism would take over the instruments of education and propaganda, which would leave ordinary people with no means to counter it. Then, because of ever decreasing profit margins – she didn’t understand the technicalities of this, with her rather basic economic perceptions (based on her weekly shopping), but she accepted it – things would become so bad that the system must collapse. But this wasn’t happening. The natural progression, or depression, on which the Marxists had so depended had been halted. Capitalism was acceptable. Why was that?

Put like that, the answer was obvious. Anthony smiled as he saw enlightenment flooding Margaret’s pretty face. (At least he supposed it was pretty. He was no judge. To him it looked hard and flinty.) The welfare state had intervened. Unemployment and sickness insurance had rubbed the rough, pointy edges off the capitalist system, so that ordinary people did not feel its inherent injustices any more. Trade unions had intervened to prevent the deterioration of wages that a ‘red in tooth and claw’ capitalist system clearly implied. This was mainly Labour’s doing, under Attlee and then Wilson; but even the Conservatives – influenced perhaps by the aristo-paternalistic strain that still remained in the party: noblesse oblige, and all that – had taken it on board. This was the particular problem that Anthony’s people were faced with. They understood Labour, though they despised it for trying to compromise with capitalism to shore it up. The Conservative party, however, was different. It was not playing the game as it was meant to. It was not capitalist enough to bring the Communists’ much longed-for Götterdämmerung about. It was – shall we say – somewhat ‘wet’.

‘So,’ said Anthony, his eyes gleaming quite fanatically by now. ‘You know what you have to do. Take over the Conservative party. Revive the “dry” side of it, which has always been there, but overshadowed recently by the “wets”. (That may have something to do with the Empire. You can’t run an Empire drily. The natives get uppity. But the Empire isn’t a consideration any more.) Get the capitalist juggernaut running properly again, unencumbered by regulation, taxes, trade unions, or any legislation designed to protect “people” from its downside. People will have to learn to put up with it. Their reward will be the tiny chance of their becoming rich beyond avarice, or decency; which, you can say, will benefit everyone because their wealth will “trickle down”. (It won’t, of course.) Those who can’t cope with this, through weakness or inability or moral scruples, will only have themselves to blame. Self-blame comes easily to a culture with Christian roots, however far back. I understand you used to be a Methodist? That may be a problem: Methodism in the past was generally associated with working-class radicalism. But you can change that. The parable of the Good Samaritan, for example, can be tweaked by suggesting that the Samaritan couldn’t have been as charitable as he was if he hadn’t have been an entrepreneur. (Just an idea.) Another idea would be to suggest that there’s “no such thing as society”. That might not faze the socialists, but it should put a smidgeon of doubt in the minds of the socially-minded – i.e. nice – people in your own party.

‘You’ll know what to do then. Undermine the welfare state, emasculate the unions, and so on; all in order to get the capitalist train racing more and more rapidly, until it crashes into the buffers. Then we’ll take over. The New Jerusalem. Easy-peasy. You can fling off your dowdy two-piece Tory-blue suits, ruffle your twin-set, and reveal yourself at the barricades, in your true identity, bare-breasted – if you like; that part isn’t compulsory – as our new Marianne.’

*

Margaret wasn’t sure who or what Marianne was, but she rather liked the sound of this. She imagined, pleasurably, her father turning in his grave. Perhaps they would make her Queen, in a socialist kind of way: Comrade Queen, perhaps – she thought she could develop the voice for it, with some training to get rid of the ‘Linkisheere’ – and put her profile on the coins. (Or would they need to abolish money? She wasn’t sure.)

But enough of these pleasant conceits. They might not come about. It was difficult to imagine capitalism being put through all its paces during the term – even, say, two or three terms – of a single prime minister. She assumed that Moscow had made contingency plans for that; was lining up a successor to her: another ‘dry’ Conservative, or even a Labour Prime Minister with enough gall – and lack of principle – to continue her work. The Russians, she knew, were supreme chess players, and knew when, in the interests of the long game, to sacrifice a Queen. In which case she would die unremembered for what she really was, and probably reviled for what she had seemed to be. She had a prevision of a young man in the future decapitating a statue of her. She wouldn’t blame him. But she would have liked him to know.

This was why she had decided to pen this account of that crucial meeting with Anthony Blunt, in the third person so that no-one could accuse her of vanity. It would remain a secret until the Revolution came, when British Communism’s true clandestine heroes could be revealed, and properly memorialised. Margaret would be disinterred and laid to rest at Karl’s feet in Highgate cemetery. Niall would lie nearby; together with all those others who served the cause selflessly, anonymously, and at such cost to their good names. She rather liked the idea of that – until she thought of the worms. That did make her a bit frit. But hey, this was all a while away. Until then there was work to do. And she was good at work.

CHAPTER II

Several years later

She was sitting in the garden of her dreadful mock-classical suburban villa – the philistinism had always been genuine – sipping yet another whisky, the sixth today, she thought, and looking back. So, that was that. She was ousted. Who was responsible for that: her party, the rabble protestors, or the hidden hand of Moscow, annoyed that with the poll tax she was pushing on too quickly too soon for the plan? She’d heard whispers that they had a younger and cleverer – if shallower – successor in mind, who was at that very moment being primed to complete the task. ‘Tony’, his name was supposed to be. Not her dear Anthony, surely? No, she remembered, he was dead. And de-knighted. She gave out a sigh. Well, she had protected him as long as she could. And he would no doubt join them all in Highgate Cemetery when the trumpets sounded. ‘Thank you, Anthony’, she whispered, in a prayer to the Great Collective in the Sky. ‘Your heroic deception will not have been in vain.’

‘What was that, Mumsy?’ It was son Mark, coming from the house behind her. One of the things she most regretted is that she had not let him into the plot, giving him, in company with a whole generation of what had come to be called ‘Thatcher’s children’, an entirely unsuitable role model to follow in life. (Carol had had a little more spunk. She wondered if she had suspected?) ‘Any chance of a few quid? That arms deal didn’t quite come off. And there’s this super wheeze to oust an African dictator I’ve been asked to contribute to. Led by an Old Etonian. It can’t go wrong.’ She’d heard that before. She wasn’t over-impressed with Etonians – hadn’t Eden, Macmillan and Home had been three of them? – which is why she had sent Mark to Harrow: her friend Winston’s school. For all the good that had done him. Stupid little prick. – Thirty years in the House of Commons had embellished her vocabulary somewhat.

… Abandoned for now. Probably utter crap. One reader has told me so.

I’m decided to reactivate this blogsite, after a year of silence, mainly to give me a ‘project’ to work on now that I have no more books to write. It will be a mix: comments on the news, especially relating to Sweden; links to items I’ve read; some memories of a longish life; a couple of aborted novels (!); my thoughts on Sweden, Hull, life after death, and how to make the perfect Yorkshire puddings.

I don’t imagine I have any ‘followers’ left, or will pick up any, though I’m told that if you wait long enough they will come. Comments will be welcome, especially from anyone who thinks my ‘novels’ might be worth persevering with. Keep tuned!

I’ve never bought into the idea that Islam is a religion of peace and freedom which is being perverted by a few extremists. Here’s a comment I found on a Guardian blogsite this morning:

‘The problem is that many followers of Islam (the majority in fact according to many polls) believe that the Qur’an is the one and only interpretation of God’s will, and to suggest otherwise is blasphemy, punishable by death.

‘This seems pretty unambiguous:

‘Qur’an (33:57) – “Lo! those who malign Allah and His messenger, Allah hath cursed them in this world and the Hereafter, and hath prepared for them the doom of the disdained”

‘Qur’an (33:61) – [continues from above] “Accursed, they will be seized wherever found and slain with a (fierce) slaughter.”‘

‘Islam’ (continues the blogger) ‘needs a reformation of its holy text to remove such sentiments. Ironically, moderate imams and clerics who advocate change of it are gunned down/killed, whatever.’

Of course this applies, in varying degrees, to all ‘unreformed’ and dogmatic religions or ideologies; Catholic Christianity in the Middle Ages, for example; and Stalinist Communism in the 1930s and ’40s. It just so happens that it’s Islam (or lslamicism) that is the main offender today.

Or – rather – is the extreme dogmatism that young men (and a few women) who, for various reasons, WANT an extreme and violent dogmatism to identify with, go to today.

The February edition of History Today will carry an article by me on ‘Surveillance: a new British tradition’. It contrasts our acceptance of all kinds of government intrusion into our affairs today with Britain’s proud and national identity-defining anti-espionage tradition until recently. I wrote it some time ago, and it’s purely by chance that it will be appearing at a time when people may be more willing to accept domestic espionage, in the face of very real Islamist threats (Paris, 7 January). I think I’ve made it clear that I’m not necessarily advocating the same degree of ‘spylessness’ today, and I hope it won’t be taken that way. My main point is that ‘national identity’ can’t be founded on ‘history’, but is bound to change, with circumstances, through time.

The Palace of Westminster is crumbling. It will require £3 billion to restore it. I’ve never been very fond of the building architecturally, and it wasn’t popular when it was built – least of all among MPs, who complained of the stink it let in from the Thames – but familiarity often breeds acceptance, and the silhouette has become so iconic that of course the place needs to be put back into shape. Whether or not that’s worth splashing out three billion for, when there are so many other worthy causes to hand, such as bailing out banks, is for taxpayers – or rather the chancellor – to decide.

Another question is what to do with MPs while the job is being done. They could stay there, I suppose, while the work goes on around them; but anyone who’s had builders in will know the inconveniences of that. But isn’t there a golden opportunity here? The fabric of the palace isn’t the only thing that’s crumbling. The reputation of those who work in it is, too. That may have reached crisis point, with decreasing turnouts in successive elections and the current extraordinary success of an essentially anti-politics party. Ukip may have been founded on right-wing xenophobia, and be led by public school bankers, but it’s beginning to beat more populist, traditionally left-wing drums: against big business, NHS privatisation and the like. I don’t want to make too much of the analogy, but this is the way Nazism gained its mass support: nationalism plus ‘socialism’, against a background of widespread disillusion with ‘old’ politics.

Ukip is gentler than that, a soft-ball version of the fascist game. But a common factor, which it also shares with other new or growing parties in Europe – the Sverige Demokraterna, for example, or the Front National in France, or Italy’s Five Star Movement, together with the Tea Party in the United States – is its anti-establishment politics. In Britain it has been fed by the expenses and other scandals, various cover-ups (those ‘lost’ paedophile files), Parliament’s perceived powerlessness in the face of Brussels and big business, the rise of consumerism and press cynicism; but a powerful component is the idea that politicians no longer relate to the electorate. They’re not ‘ordinary people’ any more. Tories are all Bullingdon Boys (they aren’t, but that’s the image), and Labour MPs are professional politicians since their student union days, who have never done a proper job in their lives. (Except my local MP, the former postman Alan Johnson, who has ruled himself out for the Labour leadership; and Tristram Hunt, who has been a university lecturer. Yes, that is a proper job.) In a literal sense, most of them are no longer our representatives.

Aggravating this is their geographical distance from most people, in the bubble of privilege in the south-east of England known as London and the ‘home’ counties, with a totally different economic trajectory from the rest of the country – house prices are rising there, for example; they’re still stagnant here in Hull – and a general disdain for ‘provincials’. (I also realise that the south isn’t all soft: many areas of London, for example; the part of Essex where I grew up; towns like Rochester; the far south-west.) One way of dealing with this alienation might be to insist that prospective MPs have done a ‘proper job’ for at least ten years before offering themselves to the electorate. (I’d exclude ‘public relations’ from the list of acceptable jobs, but maybe that’s just me.)

Another, however, might be to take advantage of the Palace of Westminster’s imminent overhaul to evacuate it and move Parliament around, like the Cup Final while Wembley was being rebuilt. Peripatetic parliaments or king’s councils are not unprecedented. We had them in the early Middle Ages. Other countries still do. That way MPs could re-engage directly with the parts of Britain that feel distanced from Westminster today. Meeting one year in Manchester, the next in Glasgow (not Edinburgh, given the local competition), another in Swansea, then in Newcastle or even Hull (UK City of Culture in 2017), they would see the shuttered-up shops, the desolation caused by deindustrialisation, as well as the many positive and promising aspects of provincial life. And national journalists would follow them, and report. I’m sure they could find enough big rooms to meet and debate in – even some that might remind them of their old home, such as Manchester Town Hall (a much better building than the Palace of Westminster). Getting away from London for a while could do Britain’s crumbling democracy a power of good. What’s to lose?

(Previously on the LRB Blog, 25 November 2014.)

No belief that can’t be insulted is worthy of respect.

When I began following West Ham fifty years ago nearly all the team was made up of local lads, including the World Cup-winning trio of Moore, Hurst and Peters; plus Harry Redknapp – a bit of a joke on the wing. (How we loved him! I still do.) Of course there were players bought in, one or two of them even from abroad; but the core was made up of East Enders and Essex boys. One of them (Andy Malcolm) went to my Dad’s school. We supported them because they were us.

For many years now, like many other people, I’ve been growing increasingly unhappy at the takeover of the ‘people’s game’ by global capitalism. There are groups of supporters all over the country, like FC United of Manchester, trying to pull their teams away from the behemoth. It does no good. It’s money that talks.

It turns out, however, that the phenomenon, and anxiety about it, are nothing new. I recently read Brian Belton’s Founded on Iron (2003, reissued in 2010 by the History Press), an account of West Ham’s origins. The club emerged from a works team, Thames Ironworks, hence the ‘Irons’ nickname, and the crossed hammers on the club crest: nothing to do with the name of the place. The president of the club, Arnold Hills, wrote in 1899:

‘In the development of our clubs, I find a tendency at work which seems to be exceedingly dangerous. The committees of several of our clubs, eager for immediate success, are inclined to reinforce their ranks with mercenaries. In our bands and in our football clubs, I find an increasing number of professionals who do not belong to our community but are paid to represent us in their several capacities.

‘Like the ancient Romans, in their period of decadence, we seem to be willing to be artists and sportsmen by proxy; we hire a team of gladiators and bid them fight our football battles… Now this is a very simple and effective method of producing popular triumphs. It is only a matter of how much we are willing to pay and the weight of our purses can be made the measure of our glory. I have, however, not the smallest intention of entering upon a competition of this kind: I desire that our clubs should be spontaneous and cultivated expressions of our own internal activity; we ought to produce artists and athletes as abundantly and certainly as a carefully tended fruit tree produces fruit.’

To be fair, Hills scarcely lived up to this himself. The same year, he financed the transfer of Syd King to bolster Thames Ironworks’ porous defence. King came all the way from Kent. And as any East Ender knows, ‘sahf’ of the river is almost as foreign as you can get.

The trend may be as old as professional football, but it has recently increased ad absurdum, so that very few successful clubs can claim their success has anything to do with the character or qualities of the localities whose names they take. It’s all down to the international capitalists who own them, or dominate them with lucrative TV contracts. (The rot really set it, as with so many rots, with Rupert Murdoch.) Most Premier League players now are highly talented and obscenely paid foreigners. That being so, how can anyone ‘support’ the teams? Follow them, perhaps; enjoy the entertainment they provide; but support, in the sense of identify with? You might just as well call yourself a ‘supporter’ of Tesco, or J.P. Morgan, or – an apter comparator, perhaps – Billy Smart’s Circus. Or am I reading too much into the notion of ‘support’?

The trouble is that objections to too many foreigners coming into British football can sound like racism, or at the very least Ukippery. That makes me uneasy. I accept that with the triumph of capitalism in just about every area of life (Marx was so right), there’s nothing much we can do about this. Murdoch is on the side of history. But does that make it OK? Is it so very bad, or necessarily chauvinist, to want your favourite team to have genuine social links with its neighbourhood, and so with you? Rather than being just ‘mercenaries’? Or to wonder whether there might be something in Arnold Hills’s striking parallel with ‘the ancient Romans, in their period of decadence’? Or is it just a sign of my grumpy old age?

(Previously posted on the LRB Blog.)

The Assange affair rumbles on. Assange is still holed up in the Ecuadorian Embassy, at a cost of God knows how much to the taxpayers of Ecuador, and more to those of the UK, to pay for the police stationed around it ready to whisk him away to Sweden if he ventures outside. The situation must be an embarrassment all round; not least to the British and Swedish governments, which have both shown signs recently of realizing how ridiculous the whole situation is. I’ll come on to that at the end of this piece. In the meantime it may be worth recapitulating on events so far. Assange doesn’t any longer surface much in either the British or the Swedish press – I’ll touch on that at the end, too; and I have reason to think – from comments on a piece I posted recently on the London Review of Books site – that many people who ought to know about it don’t, or have forgotten. So here is a run-down of the salient features of his case; the case of his attempted extradition, that is, rather than of Wikileaks more generally.

Assange was in Stockholm early in 2010 to talk about Wikileaks, when he lodged with a female admirer, and – consensually (there’s no doubt about that) – had sex with her. He also had sex with another admirer shortly afterwards. The first groupie was annoyed by this, which may (only may) partly explain what followed. Groupie no.1 was worried by the fact that their sex had been unprotected, and by his reluctance to have an AIDS test afterwards. So she went along to the local police in order to ascertain whether he could be forced to have the test. Somehow that mushroomed into an accusation of ‘rape’ against Assange, which groupie no. 1 persuaded groupie no. 2 to go along with. Assange consented to be interviewed by the police in connection with that, after which they decided there was no convincing case against him, and let him go to Britain, which was the next place on his schedule. So far so good. Assange is obviously what we oldies used to regard as ‘a bit of a cad’ in his personal life, but probably no more. If we made a habit of extraditing cads, we wouldn’t have many of our young male upper classes left. Alarm over.

Then, however, Marianne Ny stepped in. She’s a prosecutor (not a judge) in Gothenburg, over on the other side of Sweden, who is well known for championing ‘women’s causes’, and for recommending that even tentatively suspected sex offenders should be immediately incarcerated: viz.:

‘only when the man is arrested and the woman is left in peace does she have time to get some perspective on her life, and then get a chance to discover how she really has been treated.’

Apparently Ny decided off her own bat that Assange’s case needed to be reopened, and to apply under the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) to get him extradited immediately. Why her mere say-so sufficed to set this in motion is a mystery to many of us, but apparently was enough to persuade the British court that heard his appeal to let it go forward. In the end Ny’s accreditation was the only point at issue; not the flimsiness of the evidence against Assange, which was apparently immaterial at that stage. That’s what the Appeal judge said. He was bound by the EAW.

I have to say was taken aback by this. It was Assange’s case that first drew my attention to the EAW, which had entirely passed under my radar when it was originally incorporated into British law in 2003, when David Blunkett was Home Secretary. I wasn’t paying attention. I know something of the history of British extradition law before then. It had always been hedged around with certain safeguards: suspects could only be extradited to countries whose legal systems we trusted; if they were formally charged with offences that were offences in Britain too, and explicitly not for ‘political’ offences; if a British court thought, from the evidence, that there was a good prima facie case against them; and with the assurance that, once extradited, they could not be charged with or re-extradited for any other offence. That last was very important, and was intended to prevent obvious abuses, like using the original extradition request as a mere pretext. Now all that has gone. The overt motive for this was to facilitate bringing terrorists and mobsters to justice – it was all part of that ‘War on Terror’ nonsense after 9/11; another might have been to cuddle up to Europe, even if it meant sacrificing fundamental ‘British liberties’. Whatever; hundreds of people have been removed from Britain under the terms of the EAW over the last ten years, many of them entirely and indeed obviously innocent. Assange was one of them; or would have been, if he hadn’t sought asylum in Ecuadorian national territory before they could get at him.

He wouldn’t have needed to do that if Ny had met two simple conditions: that she question him in London (or by Skype), as is very common in these trans-national cases (there’s a European mechanism for it); and that the Swedish state, or courts, or whoever has the ultimate say in this, promises not to extradite him on to the USA. That of course is why he wasn’t willing to go back to Sweden voluntarily to ‘face the music’. He has always protested his innocence. Sweden – especially the last centre-right coalition government – is more hand-in-glove with the Americans than it likes its people to think. That was something, incidentally, that one of the earliest ‘Wikileaks’ revealed (it was to do with ‘rendition’). The USA certainly wants to extradite him for his Wikileaks ‘offences’, in order to try him on political charges that could land him in an awful American prison for decades. (If he is to go to prison, he’d do much better in a Swedish one; they’re pretty comfortable – which is probably why Sweden has a lower rate of recidivism.) Sweden has so far refused to rule this out. No-one can understand why both these conditions have not been met.

Which of course makes the whole thing look suspicious. The obvious peculiarities of this case are such that its manipulation by the Americans, in league with the Swedish Moderaten Party (recently advised, for example, by Karl Rove of all people) – in other words, a ‘conspiracy’ – begins to seem the most credible of all possible options. I doubt whether Ny is part of this; she has enough ultra-feminist motivation of her own. Maybe the conspirators were just lucky to have her on hand; and that Assange’s alleged offences were the most likely to prejudice ‘progressive’ Swedes against him, whatever they might think of Wikileaks. The soil was well-tilled for a Swedish-British-American plot against him, if that’s what it was. The idea of his being flown over to the USA, after or even before a Swedish trial on the (mooted) ‘sex’ charges, may be on balance unlikely, but is not out of the question. If I were Assange, even if I were confident of being able to exonerate myself in a Swedish court, I would be afraid, too.

I’m also less confident than I used to be of his getting a fair trial in Sweden. This has surprised me, sharing as I do the common view (certainly on the Left) of Sweden as a progressive and liberal-socialist utopia, a model for us all. I still think it’s that in many respects, including most of its laws. But not its legal processes. I’ve learned a lot about those since the Assange case came up. So have many Swedes, who seem generally much more ignorant of their legal system than we are of ours, simply because they don’t participate in it. That’s because Sweden doesn’t have juries. Cases are tried by a judge flanked by two political appointees. (I’ve actually witnessed this.) Defendants are locked up pre-trial for months in isolation, and rarely granted bail. There have been cases where this has led to suicide. They often aren’t given full details of the charges against them until the last moment; this is happening to Assange too. I’m not sure that innocence is always presumed. The Swedes have a rather rigid, pedantic view of the law, which means that clearly innocent people can be convicted, and their convictions upheld on appeal, if it can be shown that the legal processes have been followed correctly. (This happened in the recent notorious case of Thomas Quick – a convicted ‘serial killer’ who turned out not to be. Never mind; if the trial was conducted by the book, he must have been.) The Swedish police are pretty dodgy, too; look at the mess they made over the murder of Olof Palme. (Don’t go by Kurt Wallander.) As well as this, the police, press and politicians seem to be allowed to prejudice trials in advance. Again, Assange is an example: prime minister Fredrick Reinfeldt made a public statement in February 2011 declaring Assange guilty; in Britain couldn’t that have led to Reinfeldt’s being imprisoned for contempt of court? He also claimed that our – British – problem was that we didn’t take rape seriously. That’s not going to help, in any Swedish trial of Assange.

I’ve no idea what Assange and his legal team think of all this. Obviously it wouldn’t be a particularly bright idea if, before a possible trial in Sweden, they started trashing its system. For all they and I know that system might have advantages over ours – be more efficient, more consistent, less vulnerable to popular (jury) prejudice. For somebody brought up in the Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, however, it must seem unnerving to have to go to trial without the protection of twelve of your ‘peers’, under a system that goes back in Britain for centuries, and indeed formed the historical foundation of our sort of ‘democracy’. A judge flanked by placemen: to us that appears almost to encourage corruption and tyranny. We fought a civil war against this sort of thing. Reasonable or not, this is a cultural matter, a deeply-ingrained distinction between Britain and the Continent. Again, if the Australian Assange felt uncomfortable with the Swedish system, I wouldn’t blame him. I hope I never cross it when I’m there. But of course we’re not supposed to say that of a respected fellow- member of the EU.

If Assange were returned to Sweden, after being questioned in the Ecuadorian embassy, and with the assurance that the Americans wouldn’t be allowed to get him, one would have thought, from the evidence made public so far, that any case against him would be pretty easily countered. The women were not forced into anything. They even boasted of their ‘conquests’. Groupie no. 2 seems to have been a reluctant complainant in any case. The case mainly rests on a condom that Assange is said to have ripped deliberately: but then when the woman ‘produced’ it for the police, neatly cut, it turned out to have no traces of anyone’s DNA. The other charge is that Assange, already in bed with groupie no. 1, and after one bout of sex, asked her for another go while she was ‘half asleep’. I wonder how many of us, women as well as men, have been guilty of that? And remember it’s only their words against his. Could a case for ‘rape’ be made out of this? Clearly not in Britain. But then we don’t take rape seriously, according to Reinfeldt. In Sweden they are far more advanced, or crazy, if you like (it’s up to you), and have already assumed Assange is a rapist. That overrides everything: both the Wikileaks and the extradition issues. A pity; because if they could break free from this, they might come to understand more about their own legal shortcomings, and their government’s true relations with America. On this last – the ‘conspiracy theory’ – I’ll leave readers to judge.

Whatever the truth of that may be, it’s pretty much submerged now as a public topic. Swedish newspapers scarcely ever mention anything to do with Assange now; it all seems too indelicate. British papers seem to find him almost as embarrassing. Some of them have done hatchet-jobs on just about everything about him, ranging from his alleged ‘treason’ to his personal hygiene; culminating in Andrew O’Hagan’s long demolition of his character in a recent London Review of Books, after failing to establish a rapport with him as his ghost writer. I had the curious experience recently of being ‘pre-moderated’ (that is, blacklisted) from the Guardian’s website for wanting to mention his name in connection with the European Arrest Warrant. I still am. Assange has had his spats with the Guardian, of course. I doubt if there’s anything sinister behind these, but you never know. But it makes it difficult to discuss the Assange extradition case outside the (non- Guardian) blogosphere.

In a recent Commons debate on the EAW (the one the government at first tried to avoid) no-one brought up his case. Why not? You can understand why governments – any governments – and their stooges might want him buried. But what about the others? Could it be the ‘sex’ thing again? Is it impossible for a cad to be a hero any more? Have we progressed that far from James Bond?

But it could all change soon. During the eventual Commons debate on the EAW, Home Secretary Theresa May made it clear that the criteria for Britain’s abiding by it had changed, so that much stricter criteria would be followed in the future. Formal charges would need to be laid against suspects, for example, not just accusations by prosecutors; and the British courts would expect to be allowed to judge the prima facie quality of the evidence. If these standards had been in place in 2010, there is little doubt that Assange could not have been extradited then; or at least, not under the terms of the EAW. (There are other, slower and more scrupulous extradition procedures available.) On the other side of the North Sea, an appeal court in Sweden recently dismissed a motion to have the EAW withdrawn in Assange’s case, for the usual pedantic reason that it hadn’t been technically wrong; but on the other hand strongly criticised Marianne Ny for refusing to question Assange in England. An under-secretary at the British Foreign Office, Hugo Swire, has stated that he would ‘actively welcome’ and ‘do everything to facilitate’ that. Apparently it’s still up to Ny. (Yes, her alone.) She’s said to be thinking about it.

First published in Lobster magazine a couple of weeks ago.

I understand that I have some new subscribers, even though I haven’t contributed to this blogsite for a year. So I’ll add some posts shortly – mainly things I’ve written for other blogs or newspapers.

As a principled anti-nationalist, I hope Scotland doesn’t vote for independence, and stays with us English. If I were a Scot, however, I might feel otherwise. The Scottish political discourse really is very different from the Southern English – more social-democratic – which explains much of the Scots’ feeling of alienation from the Eton-Bullingdon-Buckinghamshire set that are governing us today. That’s another reason why I hope they stay with us; without them there would be a perpetual Tory (or UKIP) majority in England, leading to even more horrors than we are suffering now. 

I see, however, that some Scottish nationalists are fishing for a new union with the Scandinavian countries, whose social politics are really very much closer to the Scots’. There are other links too: lochs (fjords), a liking for strong liquor, and the fact that Scotland was actually a part of (Viking) Denmark for (?) 200 years. Much of this however applies to my part of England – the North – too. Most of that was part of the ‘Danelaw’. Many place-names around me are Nordic. And the real gulf between the two Britains today – widening and deepening year by year, a survey tells us today – comes not at the River Tweed, let alone Hadrian’s wall (at present all in England), but at the Humber-Mersey. If Scotland does break away and join Scandinavia, can it take us with it too?