Porter’s Pensées

The suburb next to ours is called Sandsborg. It has a swimming pool for the elderly and disabled, water 30 degrees C, lots of equipment for crocks like me, staffed by people who can get you in and out of the water, and charging just 70 kronor (about £6) for a single visit. The pool is part of an attractive complex of small flats (for oldies who don’t have Kajsas to live with), with little squares and gardens, a supermarket, cafes, a library, a gym, an Apotek, a doctor and a dentist, a sauna, and a Tunnelbana station nearby; all provided by the local municipality. Here are some pics of the pool.

https://motionera.stockholm/trana-gymma-simma/sandsborgsbadet/

I was there today, hoping the warm water would soothe my ankle. I broke it, incidentally, forty-odd years ago, getting off a plane at Chicago O’Hare Airport. Have I told you the story? About how an employee of the airport rushed to my aid; her first question was ‘can I get you a lawyer?’ – not ‘can I get you a doctor?’  Yes; I’m in America, I thought. Anyhow, a charity hospital in Bloomington (I think) repaired the ankle, but warned me that when I got old, that was where arthritis would strike. It has.

All this – the Sandsborg complex – is a wonderful example of post-war Swedish social democracy. The ‘nanny state’, some in Britain would call it. But most Swedes don’t mind paying high-ish taxes if they can be nannied when they need it.

Next week I’m being assessed for a possible op on the ankle. (The cartilage has gone.) Then I’ll know how well the hospitals work here. Wish me luck.

A correspondent asks me what I have against golf. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2024/09/19/zeitgeists/, btl.) Well, it’s not only Trump. (Who apparently cheats at it.)

Firstly, there’s the fact that it has gobbled up so much of our beautiful English countryside, with its unnaturally close-cut grass fairways, and ugly sand-filled ditches (‘bunkers’?), which we proles are always being instructed to ‘keep off!’. Then there’s the sheer nonsense of hitting a ball with a long stick dozens of yards to get it into a tiny hole in the ground – I can’t even imagine a transferable skill that gives you – when it would be far easier to run along and plop it in by hand. Obviously golf is a waste of time, which could be spent doing something useful, like writing a book, or having a nap. Usually one is ‘competing’ only with oneself – have you ever seen Trump with a golf partner? – which makes it a kind of sporting onanism. – ‘Sporting’? Give me a break. Where’s the physical exercise it requires, even? There’s always the walking, I suppose; but these days golfers seem to drive from hole to hole in little electric carts. There can’t be much there to keep one’s body in trim. (Look at Trump, again.)

However, I first took a personal dislike to the game on grounds of class; especially ‘golf clubs’ (not the sticks, but the societies), with their restricted membership – no blacks, proles or, at one time, women; their strict vetting to ensure you were none of these things; their deliberate exclusivity, therefore; and the upper-middle class – or aspiring upper-middle class – way their members talked and behaved. Club golfers were notorious for this, maybe unfairly these days – particularly in Scotland, where the game was invented; but the (supposed) culture put me right off. That prejudice remained with me even when I had to drive my teen-aged son and his friend – and all their golfing paraphernalia – to a local course on one of its ‘free’ non-members’ days, to play there. But then you’d do anything for your boy, wouldn’t you?

All that set up my general aversion. The clincher, however, came when a close friend of mine, a keen golfer, tried to introduce me to the game by taking me for a round on a nine-hole course in Scotland. I’d never held a golf club before; but my first hit (stroke?) turned out to be an unexpectedly good one. Beginner’s luck, of course; but as a joke I pretended it was deliberate, and suggested that my partner use a five-iron (I think it was) when he tee-ed off. (Have I got the terminology right yet?) His immediate response was to insist on fining me two points (runs? goals? strokes?), on the grounds that rule 42 (I think it was) of the Laws of Golf forbade a player giving advice to his or her playing partner.

It was then that I really took against golf. What kind of game was it, I thought, where you can’t try to help another player – even as a sheer beginner, and in jest  – with advice? How could it have turned my great and reasonable friend into such a monster, after just one stroke? It was this experience that made me realise what a thoroughly evil game golf is. No wonder Trump is such a fan.

And the late Margaret Thatcher’s husband, apparently, too. In fact I’ve arrived at the conclusion that golf is the most quintessentially Thatcherite game on the planet, or at least in England; the most individualistic, anti-social (except in the clubhouse over a few gins), easy to cheat at, and basically Tory activity. Now that my son can drive himself there, I’m having nothing more to do with it.

So there you have it, ‘jfkyachts’. (Goddam these pesky pseudonyms!) You imply that you share the same prejudice. Could it be for similar reasons?

In 19^th-century Britain – and probably around the world – ‘democracy’ was opposed and resisted mainly on the grounds that it would enfranchise the unlettered and stupid, who were unfitted to make the sorts of intelligent decisions on which stable government depended. As well as this, they would likely vote for what today we would characterise as left-wing, worker-friendly or socialist policies, which both Conservatives and Liberals assumed was what the ‘great unwashed’ wanted.

Nonetheless, democracy eventually came to Britain, by stages (1832, 1867, 1884…), albeit excluding poor people and women initially, and never entirely satisfactorily. Which only exacerbated the problem. One of prime minister Benjamin Disraeli’s solutions to the danger of democracy was better schooling: ‘we must educate our masters’ was the way he put it; leading to some major educational reforms after the 1860s.

But he also had another cunning plan. That was to appeal to the plebs’ more visceral or tribal instincts over their material needs; especially to patriotism, morphing later into imperialism: ‘Make Britain Great Again’ (although of course he never used that resonant phrase). This worked a treat, helping to keep the Tories and the Liberal Imperialists in power for another half-century, despite the growing challenge of Labour during those years. Later on it helped keep Thatcher in power too.

By then the Right had learned that they could control the Great Unwashed – divert them from socialism – by means of propaganda, developing out of commercial advertising, and seeping into the political world through the new (circa 1900) ‘yellow press’, now largely owned by capitalists with amoral commercial motives, and with reactionary political agendas. Throughout the 20^th century the Daily Mail was the main exemplar of this type; joined in Thatcher’s time by the infamous Murdoch press.

So, that’s the situation as it stands today. And it leaves Britain’s ‘democracy’ no better off, essentially, than it was before the plebs won the vote. If Disraeli’s ‘masters’ are more formally ‘educated’ than they used to be, it is not in a way that renders them necessarily better able to take political decisions; largely because their school curricula often exclude ‘Politics’, for fear of being accused of ‘bias’. At least, this was the situation when I was at school; it may very well have changed since, which will perhaps account for young people’s more ‘progressive’ inclinations today. That’s judging by their relative support for the EU in the 2016 Referendum, and by the several polls that found that support for ‘Brexit’ was, and is, at its greatest among the more elderly, and the relatively uneducated.

Mention this, however, and one is accused of being ‘élitist’; which is difficult to counter, because it’s true. In this case it simply means that you have been schooled in politics and history and – crucially – critical thinking more than the non-élite, which should by rights and in logic give you more authority over the latter. Gary Lineker is not accused of being a football élitist because he knows more about the game.

There is, surely, no better explanation for the general state of British (and American) politics today, on all sides but mainly on the Right. This includes the clownish personnel; the lying propaganda, appealing to feelings and instincts rather than to evidence and argument; image valued over reality; the cheating, faking and general amoralism of so many politicians and the tabloid press; the idea that all opinions are equal, however crazy – ‘I’m a free American and I can believe anything I like’, as I heard on a US phone-in programme years ago, from a contributor being challenged on his claim that the London blitz was in retaliation for the bombing of Dresden (!) – and all the other nonsense that we’re seeing on social media today. It all comes from the ‘great unwashed’ presumably; but exploited by better-educated men and women who should – and presumably do – know better.

It’s called ‘stupidity’, and should be called out for that. But it’s not entirely the stupids’ fault.

Context is important. All serious historians know this. It’s what makes us chary of making judgments of people’s actions in the past; actions which could in fact be largely attributable to the Zeitgeists within which they acted.

That won’t entirely excuse, for example, 18^th-century slavery and slave-trading, which a significant part of the contemporary British Zeitgeist was hostile to; or British imperialism, which also had its enemies and critics at the time. (Zeitgeists were not homogenous.) But it should help us to understand them better. Slavery was not so unusual in the world in the 1700s, and imperialism not as excoriated in the 19^th century, as they are today. That’s what their apologists are always telling us, quite rightly: not to judge the past by today’s standards, or – to put it another way – according to our current preconceptions.

Apart from anything else, it leaves our generation open to be hoisted by the same petard fifty or a hundred years hence. One can imagine a future in which people will judge us just as badly for permitting cigarette smoking, for example, or gross inequality, or ‘Public’ schools, or golf. (Sorry; golf is a particular bugbear of mine.) Or, if the Zeitgeist moves in another direction, we could be criticized for our naïve liberalism, our tolerance of immigrants, and our ‘wokeness’ (whatever that means). In other words: most historical judgments are based on the predominant assumptions of their times.

Which is a reason why we professional historians should – and generally do – seek to avoid such judgments altogether; and instead explore why people and societies believed and acted as they did. In many cases that will be because they were at the mercy of broad historical forces they had no real control over, often manifested in religions (the worst offenders), or other ideologies. My own assumption – which again will have been heavily influenced by the Geist of my Zeit – is that in modern European and world history these underlying forces were primarily economic, with the development of capitalism, through its several stages, determining the broad progress (or regress) of most western societies, quite impersonally. Move over Thatcher and Reagan, and give the Zeitgeist its due.

Don’t you miss Gordon? I do.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/sep/17/europe-far-right-appeasement-france-populist-progressive

I don’t remember ever subscribing to The Daily Telegraph web version, but its front-page headlines come up on my computer every day. What strikes me is how many of these have to do with money: how to make more of it; how to avoid tax on your pile of it; how to manage your children’s school fees now that Labour is planning to end the independent schools’ tax exemption; the nicest places to spend your expensive holidays; and how to protect your lucre generally from the coming assaults of those socialist villains, Starmer and Reeves. These are clearly the major topics of the day for what I assume has always been the Telegraph’s core readership; together with the ‘culture wars’ issues that have entered in – to add some spice to the mixture – more recently.

The Telegraph used to be better than this: good solid journalism, intelligent commentary, biased, obviously (as is The Guardian’s); but never so narrowly and selfishly mercenary as it is today. For pity’s sake: the world is in as dangerous situation as it has been in for half a century, with a third-world and possibly nuclear war threatening, Gaza and Ukraine under existential threat, starvation all over, national and international inequalities deepening, health systems collapsing, and climate change looking like destroying everything if we don’t do something about it soon. And all the Telegraph’s readers can think of is their own bank balances, and profits, and luxuries, and privileges, and holidays: money, money, money, all the way.

At least I don’t see them obsessed – or as obsessed as many Americans seem to be – with clowns like Trump (that came and went with Boris), baby-killing abortionists, pet-eating immigrants, Marxists, childless cat ladies, and the like. Maybe Nigel Farage will bring some of that back with him from the far-Right jamboree he’s currently visiting in Chicago, in the company of some of America’s – and Europe’s – worst. Hold the front page.

Now for something serious, historical and (probably) boring. This is going over old ground for me.

History (like life) is complicated. I feel that it’s been one of my missions over the past fifty-odd years – if that doesn’t sound pretentious – to try to disentangle its complications, at least to the extent that my limited (and now declining) intellectual powers allow; in order to reach a more nuanced and complex understanding of past events. Other serious historians have generally taken notice. But I should also have liked my work to have percolated through to a more general audience, thus informing its views of present as well as of past politics. This however seems not to have happened.

The main problem with ‘popular’ history is that it tends to be over-simplistic. My particular beef in this regard – as you might expect from my academic specialism – has to do with the use of the word ‘imperialism’, or its derivatives, usually critically, in connexion with Britain’s – and several other countries’ – pasts. This may go back to the subject of my very first research, the journalist and ‘heretical’ economist John Atkinson Hobson, who discovered – or at least first analysed, albeit crudely – the economic ‘taproot’, as he called it, of the imperial expansion of his day (the turn of the twentieth century); so giving birth to the ‘Capitalist Theory of Imperialism’, which was subsequently taken over by Lenin, and then by most of the political Left. (See my Critics of Empire, 1968.)   

Sure: the economic and specifically ‘capitalist’ roots of most modern imperialism are – it seems to me – indisputable. But they were not its only roots; and should not colour or dominate our retrospective view of what, again, was a very complex phenomenon. Other motives and causes – not always the same things – fed into it. Some were humanitarian, if often misguided. Early ones were libertarian – at least as regards ‘free trade’. A few were even essentially anti-capitalist, like the Royal Navy’s ‘West Africa Squadron’, operating from 1808 to the 1860s, and tasked to stop the trans-Atlantic slave trade, at some expense to the British Exchequer, and of course to the slave-trading capitalists. ‘In the field’ British official colonial and Indian policy often worked against the interests of those capitalists who wished only to exploit Africa and Asia; earning the capitalists’ displeasure as a result. The problem here was that there weren’t enough colonial officials to tame them, with the personnel and power of the Colonial Office being very thinly spread, and indigenous resistance more effective than is sometimes credited. In other words, it could be said that there was not enough ‘imperialism’, in Africa especially.

Then again, at a personal level, not all professed imperialists were exploiters, racists and slave-drivers themselves. Colonial and Indian civil servants generally saw their mission as a paternalistic one, aiming to help and ‘raise’ what they regarded as ‘primitive’ peoples in the ‘scale of civilisation’, as they put it. In these instances they can’t be called ‘exploiters’, or even (literally) ‘racists’, because their assumption had to be that these ‘races’ could be ‘raised’. (Genuine racists, like Gobineau in France, were often anti-imperialist, because they believed racial inferiority was  impermeable.) In my early books I coined the word ‘culturalist’ as a better alternative. But some of these people even preferred the ‘cultures’ of the people they were ‘ruling’. That was called ‘going native’, in the unpleasant colonialist argot of the time. But there was a significant number of them.

And ‘rule’ is another word that requires scare quotes, because there were many limitations to the authority that these men exercised over their ‘subjects’. Some of these were recognised; for example in the policy called ‘Indirect Rule’, which was the Colonial Office’s answer to the difficulties of administering (with its small numbers) the millions of people it had under its care in West Africa: ‘rule the native on native lines’, as it was described. It was not a particularly oppressive system; or not designed to be. Most of the oppression came at the hands of capitalists – plantation owners, mining companies, settlers (usually the worst) – who were out of the effective control of the imperial government. And most of the proselytism – another wrongdoing usually attributed to imperialism – was done by Christian missionary societies, which were similarly distrusted and opposed by the colonial authorities, on the grounds that they disrupted native communities. – And so on. I won’t go on; if you want more on this, you’ll have to read my British Imperial. What the Empire Wasn’t. (2016).

That book also analyses the conditions and circumstances that lay behind British imperialism in all its various guises and stages. It doesn’t skate over the atrocities that were a part of it, from slavery onwards – Omdurman, Amritsar, Indian famines, and all the rest of the horrendous catalogue; but it does seek to unravel its complexity (again), in order to prevent simplistic judgments of it. Indeed, I’d prefer that judgments weren’t made of British imperialism at all, any more than you would of the weather. Whenever in the past I offered a manuscript on imperialism to a publisher, I was asked whether it was pro- or anti-Empire. That seemed to be their only concern. In fact if you read any of my books you’ll find that I don’t come down on either ‘side’. Personally I’ve always been – or considered myself to be – an ‘anti-imperialist’; but mainly on the grounds that imperialism was misguided, rather than morally wrong; and prone to abuse, rather than intrinsically abusive. (This blog should certainly not be read as an apologia for it.) Imperialists made terrible mistakes, but sometimes for the best of reasons, or out of ignorance. (Tony Blair, with his backing of Bush’s Iraq War, was one of these.) Others were genuinely bad men: especially the capitalists (like Rhodes, probably), but also some of the officials, and military men. (The rogues do all appear to be men; but then women were not allowed into this sphere except very marginally.)

Then there are the historical ‘contexts’ of Britain’s imperial exploits to consider: economic, political and diplomatic. And also the fact that, by and large, her people at home were not particularly imperialistic themselves. (See my The Absent-Minded Imperialists, 2004.) And lastly, there is the fact that although Britain certainly did not originally invent imperialism, in any sense – the Cro-Magnons probably did that – she could be said to have invented anti-imperialism (Hobson again), which was an important factor behind even her imperial practice in the 20^th century. Again, British Imperial. What the Empire Wasn’t, elaborates this point.

I realise that much of this will be difficult to credit by those brought up with simplistic views of the whole phenomenon; but all these factors, and others, make far more sense of this complex subject. At the very least, if modern Britons, for whatever reason, want to criticise, or even to laud, Britain’s past imperial record they should unpick and specify what kind – and agency – of imperialism they mean. Often they’ll find that what they object to – or admire – is not ‘imperialism’ per se; but, say, the capitalist, exploitative or missionary elements in it, distinct from other – kinder or more ‘progressive’ – ones.

Which bears on the general and more important point I want to make here: which is that popular and over-simplified versions of history – as of everything, probably – are one of the main obstacles to a useful understanding both of history, but also and more importantly, of the present day. I like to think that it’s people’s preference for simple answers, as well as for books that seem to bear out their prejudices, which accounts for the failure of my books – even the well-reviewed ones – to penetrate very deeply into what today is called the ‘contemporary discourse’; by contrast with – in my case – clearly pro- or anti-imperial ones. Or it may be, of course, that they’re not very good. I sometimes fear so.

‘We used to rule half the world’ was a slogan I recently heard yelled out at an anti-immigrant riot. – Well, no, actually. My books had clearly not got through to ‘Tommy Robinson’s’ kind.

There. History lesson over.

‘…your Mum and Dad. They may not mean to, but they do.’ (That’s Philip Larkin, of course.) – I was going to use that quote in a post here, to hook a bit of autobiography on to. In particular I considered writing about my late mother, whose character, beliefs and behaviour didn’t exactly ‘fuck me up’, I like to think; but whose own fucked-upness, by her Mum and Dad (so not her fault), gave me a life-long insight into the mentality of many lower-middle class English women of her generation, and consequently into the history of that time. (Thatcher, for example, made complete sense to me.) Many political and social historians, I imagine – and hope, for their sakes – won’t have this advantage.

But I’ve now abandoned that idea, at least for the time being, and in this blog. (Maybe later, for my children and grandchildren alone.) The main reason is that the recollection is proving painful for me, even after all these years; not only the memory of Mum’s awfulness, as I perceive it, but also of my treatment of her, emotionally if not in material terms. Another is that I have little tangible evidence to go on, apart from my own memories, which may be false. (I’ve learned from my historical research that memoirists’ often are.) When she died my mother left no papers from her or my father’s past, apart from a couple of wartime ration-books, kept no doubt in case the time came when she could use some unredeemed ‘coupons’; and some yellowing pictures of the Queen Mother, cut out from newspapers.

A third reason is that I don’t want this blog to turn too personal. It’s not intended to be a diary, but more a chronicle of important national and world events, with commentary. Maybe that commentary has been influenced by my fucked-up mother; but not in any obvious or direct way, I think. (Unless it was her example that turned me against Thatcher.) But how can we ever tell, with Mums and Dads?

I must stop there. I’ve probably gone too far – too personal – already. And I have to walk the dog; always – me, not the dog – on the lookout now, of course, for foreign immigrants who come over here to eat our pets. – Yes, I got up early this morning – 3 a.m. here – to watch the American Presidential ‘debate’ on TV. Extraordinary. (The ‘eating pets’ claim comes of course from Trump.) Living with Mum may have prepared me for Thatcher; but not for Trump, obviously.

Back from the UK after a month there, and travelling through northern Europe on the way back to Sweden, the differences between the two (or several) places appear stark. Of course this might be because the part of England I was visiting is a particularly downtrodden one, and the Stockholm suburb we live in currently is rather better-off.

But the Dutch, German and Danish places we passed through on the way were also consistently cleaner, tidier and pleasanter than almost anywhere in England. This was, I reflected, in spite of their having been extensively bombed by the RAF and the USAF in the 1940s. – Or maybe it was because of that? Northern Germany in particular had to be almost entirely rebuilt, and so was, restoring its ancient buildings in a way that reflected the Germans’ pride in them – those glorious brick cathedrals, for example – and seemed to indicate a wish to roll back their history to pre-Nazi times, and start again.

Of course there is a contrary wind blowing in just now from the former DDR, whose towns and buildings I’m less familiar with. The first time I was in Halle, many years ago, there were potholes in the roads, and even in the floor of its cathedral, and brown coal dust everywhere. Does this make a political difference, even slightly? Are the nice clean towns and villages of the West as fertile a soil for the likes of the AfD, as are dirty, run-down ones?

As soon as we get into Holland and Germany it’s like entering modernity. They have even planted neat high hedges along the sides of the motorways. (Maybe the dirt and coal dust lie behind them.) Domestic buildings are well kept, freshly and attractively painted, mostly well designed if they are new, and sensitively restored if not. Another thing we noticed was that all the cars are modern and shiny, with not an older one – say more than five years old – among them. The same applies here in Stockholm, where the only older cars you see are big American 1960s open-top Chevrolets, driven around at weekends for fun; or antique Volvos being lovingly repaired and restored for veteran auto shows. All the rest are new, shiny, and usually electric.

Of course there are things I miss about dirty old Britain: small friendly butchers’ shops, for a start. (There are none in our Stockholm neighbourhood, only big supermarket meat counters. ‘Elf’n’safety’, I presume.) There’s a certain picturesque attraction about Newland Avenue in Hull that you don’t get in Enskede. But that aside, the contrast is striking. Entering continental Europe from northern Britain – and vice-versa – feels like passing through a time warp.

Has this anything to do with Britain’s coming out of the EU?

Is it wrong to want to make political capital out of the horrendous human tragedy that was the Grenfell Tower fire of 14 June 2017 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grenfell_Tower_fire)? Maybe. And yet there’s no doubt that politics had much to do with it, and in particular the political ideology that lay behind the various failures and criminality that have been revealed – or, in most cases, confirmed – by Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s Report on it, published yesterday.

In that Report the blame is cast wide, and is particularly scathing of the commercial firms that were responsible for the building, and in particular for the flammable outer cladding that was responsible for the spread of the fire to embrace nearly all of the Tower’s 24 storeys. Builders used cheap materials after deliberately falsifying the risk reports on them, ignored safety rules, and swept aside well-founded warnings from the tenants and their representatives. Some of those firms may be criminally prosecuted at a later date. We’ll see.

But there’s a political factor lying behind all this too. Large buildings are supposed to be regulated to prevent outcomes like the Grenfell Tower fire. A lot of this regulation falls on the shoulders of local authorities, which in this case was the impressively-named ‘Royal [sic] Borough of Kensington and Chelsea’; which also takes in Notting Hill, whose posh inhabitants apparently didn’t like looking out at an un-clad tower block, mainly inhabited by the working classes and immigrants, from the windows of their expensive town houses. You won’t be surprised to learn that the local Council there has been Tory since the area became fully gentrified in the 1960s. (I knew it before then. Remember the ‘Notting Hill Race Riots’?) That really does explain a lot. – But above even the ‘Royal’ Borough of Kensington, stands the national Government in Whitehall. And that bears a responsibility, too.

Enter, stage Right: Lord Pickles. Of course he wasn’t a Lord then – he was elevated in 2018 by Theresa May, for services to the Conservative Party – but he was Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government from 2010 to 2015. So he had the ultimate responsibility then for making sure that communities – and especially their housing – were safe.

Pickles was a bit of an anomaly, in a Conservative government dominated by the privileged classes. He wasn’t particularly privileged, for a start. He came from Keighley in Yorkshire, from a staunchly Labour family, before he switched to the Young Conservatives in 1968. (Where have we heard that before?) He didn’t attend a Public School, or Oxbridge, with his Wiki biography naming his university as ‘Leeds Beckett’, which I must say I hadn’t heard of. (I have now; it later became ‘Leeds Metropolitan’). He was active in local government in Yorkshire, but had no other substantial ‘job’, so far as I can gather, before he was selected and elected for the Brentwood Parliamentary constituency (far to the south in Essex) in 1992. So he came with considerable experience in the politics of municipal government; which no doubt is why David Cameron thought he’d make a good shoe-in as Local Government Minister. (Few of the posher boys in the higher reaches of his party had ever had to soil their hands with mundane matters like planning permissions and drains.)

So Pickles – take a look at the ‘official’ picture of him here –  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Pickles – was given the job; and appeared to have introduced a new social element into the make-up of the Conservative Party, which could be regarded as, in a way, ‘democratising’ it. Of course the ‘democracy’ in his case didn’t go very deep, and in fact it wasn’t so unusual – in the party that had clearly taken up the cause of the solid middle-middle class for years, and which had recently had the very middle-middle class Margaret Thatcher as its talismanic leader – to recruit people like Pickles as supporters, if not Ministers. So what Pickles brought to the Government of his time was not any strictly ‘popular’ approach to politics, but rather the peculiarly middle-class ideology that Thatcher had made famous, and which most Tories were wedded to by now. You’ll know the main ingredients of that: ‘free enterprise’, individualism, patriotism, ‘choice’; and all the rest of that highly seductive creed.

But there was also another element to it, which Pickles seems to have been particularly attracted to, perhaps deriving from his experience as a Conservative member of a predominantly Labour Council in Bradford. That was a deep-grained distrust of government interference – national or local – in local decisions. We still see this today in media like the Daily Mail, characterised and mocked as the ‘nanny state’, ‘elf’n’safety’, ‘red tape’, and even as a sort of tyranny, undermining people’s liberty and holding back enterprise. Pickles was clearly imbued with this libertarian philosophy, and indeed expressed it openly as a city Councillor. Which will have contributed to his disregard for, or his dismissal of, the warning signals that were coming to him when he was in Whitehall from Kensington, and have been a crucial factor leading up to the Grenfell Tower disaster.

At the time one commentator attributed that disaster to ‘a 21^st-century economy obsessed with outsourcing risk’. (See  https://www.theguardian.com/news/audio/2024/sep/06/from-the-archive-a-merry-go-round-of-buck-passing-inside-the-four-year-grenfell-inquiry-podcast.) ‘Outsourcing’: that’s the key. There was no-one to take responsibility. Capitalism could police itself. That, of course, is Thatcher’s legacy.

Many, inevitably, made fun of Pickles’s silly name and appearance. There’s also his behaviour before the Committee of Inquiry to be taken into account – expressing annoyance, for example, that he should be summonsed at all, when he had an important dinner date to attend. And there’s a mystery surrounding a short period in his parliamentary career, when he disappeared from public view. (Some smelled a scandal.) But he was no less important, for all that. Several MPs today are asking for his baronetcy to be taken from him.