Porter’s Pensées

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.

Apparently Estonia has surplus prison accommodation which it’s offering to the British government (for rent, I presume) to help ease the latter’s critical shortage: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/prison-overcrowding-labour-mahmood-estonia-b2607985.html. I understand that Britain has turned the offer down, preferring instead to build more prisons of her own, albeit slowly; and to release serving prisoners early in order to make more space in the existing gaols.

But I wonder whether it has occurred to the Home Secretary to ask why Estonia has so many empty cells, when Britain’s are bursting with villains. Are Estonians less villainous than Brits? Are the Estonian police less effective at hunting them down? Are murderers and rapists on the prowl everywhere in Tallinn? Or have they all emigrated to Sweden? (From some Sverigedemokraterna propaganda – and Scandi noir detective novels – you might think so.)

Or is it simply that the Estonians don’t use incarceration so much as a punishment? I know nothing at all about their penal system – I must Google it – but it’s well known that Britain imprisons more offenders than most European countries; and just a little less well known that Sweden – just a short distance over the water from the Baltic States – has a very liberal penal policy, with fewer (and nicer) prisons; which nevertheless appears to be more successful than Britain’s in deterring crime.

Isn’t this what that key-shop man (Timpson?) whom Starmer appointed to his government was meant to be looking at?

A long post, I’m afraid; and on a sensitive and even dangerous topic.

I seem to remember warning in an earlier post that the ‘Israel lobby’s’ scurrilous hounding of Jeremy Corbyn as a supposed ‘anti-semite’, might rebound on them, and actually encourage anti-semitism – or at least hostility to the government of Israel, which of course is not the same thing – in the Labour Party and more generally. Following on from that, Netanyahu’s brutal war on the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank could have had the same effect: eroding support for Jews, and in particular getting people who hadn’t previously given much thought to the Zionist project (that is, the establishment and defence of a ‘national home’ for the Jews) to examine its political, historical and moral credentials.

Which are, we must surely acknowledge, extraordinarily flimsy. Apart from the ‘God’s covenant’ argument, which no-one who isn’t a Jew or an American Evangelical is at all obliged to trust, and which in any case may be based on a misreading of the scriptures (see https://bernardjporter.com/2024/08/24/gods-covenant/), the best reason for allowing the Jews to have a ‘national home’ is to protect them from the persecution that has dogged them as a diaspora for centuries, culminating of course in the Russian anti-Semitic pogroms of the late 19^th century, and the Hell on Earth of the ‘Holocaust’.

But there are problems here too. Not all Jews – possibly only a minority of them – have historically wanted a ‘state’ of their own, separate from the rest of humanity. Many Rabbis hold that the idea is heretical. The very notion of a racially or even religiously-defined state doesn’t sit very well with modern enlightened thought. It was almost universally abhorred in the case of apartheid South Africa, with which modern Israel is sometimes compared. It involves a toxic amalgam of ‘racism’ with ‘nationalism’, neither of which is seen as a particularly ‘progressive’ ideology today, and both of which – together with religion, another ingredient in the Israeli mix – could be seen as responsible for many of the problems of the world just now.

The alternative to this – a multicultural and tolerant society, including Jews and giving full scope to their talents, as was the situation in Britain for most of her modern history – seems far preferable. To be fair to the currently much reviled British Empire: this was its ideal in its dying – ‘Commonwealth’ – days. Which is why the Brits of that time couldn’t understand why the Muslims of British India should want a nation of their own, or why Jews and Arabs couldn’t get along better with each other in their Palestine mandate. It’s also why the notorious ‘Balfour Declaration’ – which incidentally only favoured a Jewish ‘national home’ (whatever that meant) on the ‘clear’ understanding that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’ – did not seem so problematical in 1917 as it turned out to be.

Diaspora Jews have played a brilliant part in many areas of European and American life over the past few centuries, especially in politics, the arts, philosophy and science. This was despite their having no state of their own; or perhaps – could it be? – because of it. To attach them to and identify them with a single geographically defined nation, with all the luggage that brings with it, might well undermine this contribution, and would certainly – as we are witnessing today in present-day Israeli domestic politics, and in Gaza and the West Bank – corrupt it.

This in fact must lie at the root of the problem. Jews, having achieved the nationhood that some of them had long hankered for, are now themselves behaving like a nation, and indeed like some of the worst nations in recent history; attracting comparisons – valid or not – even with the régime that was their principal oppressor in the 1930s and ’40s. They are even aggressively colonising, stealing and illicitly settling other people’s lands, just like European empires did in the bad old days.

This is what mainly disturbs philo-semites (like me), who used to hope and believe that the Jews could be better than this. As a community, they behaved more morally and effectively when they were a diaspora: ‘a people without a land’, as they used to call themselves. They could, and often did, live in peace and friendship with both Christian and Moslem neighbours, contributing greatly to their cultures. Their conduct today has nothing to do with their being different, or ‘Jewish’ (well, perhaps just a little, with that ‘Covenant’ nonsense); but far more to do with their becoming the same as us.

And as ‘the same as us’, surely they must merit the same scrutiny and criticism as other nations, when they offend ‘civilised’ standards of national behaviour, as Israel is doing in Gaza right now. Indeed, if it weren’t the Jews who were involved, with their terrible history of persecution, Israel’s behaviour today would automatically disqualify her from any international sympathy or support at all. This is what the Tsars and the Nazis did to them: shielded them from criticism that would clearly be more widely applied if it weren’t for the Jews’ sufferings in the past.

Of course it might be better for the world – and for the Jews themselves – if the state of Israel had never been created. But that is no longer an option; apart from in the dreams of their vicious Islamicist (and undoubtedly anti-semitic) neighbours. What practical measures can now be taken in order to give Jews the security they deserve after more than a century of persecution is not for me to opine. I personally would prefer a single secular state embracing both peoples, like most European nations are, and as India in 1947 was supposed to be. But that seems unlikely. We are where we are.

So any settlement will probably need to be the much canvassed ‘two-state’ one: two nations living side by side, boundaries negotiated fairly between the parties, one nation Jewish- and the other Moslem-dominated, but neither of them theocratic or racially exclusive, and each of them liberal and tolerant of both (and other) faiths. Right now that seems a big ask. In particular the Jewish side is too wedded to being a separate and historical ‘nation’, in a region and a world where all the spaces for nations are taken up.

But at least modern Israelis could be more aware of the underlying problem, as many Jews of course are; which is not ‘anti-semitism’, but is the nationalism that has made things so much more difficult for them, and is alienating so many people – me, for example – who hugely admire and would like to be friends with Israelis, so long as they are not too Zionist; and with more liberal Jews.

I went to a boys-only ‘Direct Grant Grammar School’, part-boarding (I was a ‘day boy’), which desperately wanted to be regarded as a ‘Public’ (private, independent) school, and decked itself out with all the supposed appurtenances of that status in order to foster this impression.

So: we had ‘masters’ rather than teachers, all wearing gowns; corporal punishment; ‘praeposters’ in place of prefects (some of whom were allowed to beat junior boys); sadistic PE teachers; school on Saturday mornings; ‘houses’ (like in Harry Potter); an impressive and complicated coat of arms; a dodgy foundation date, giving us 400 years of semi-fake ‘history’; a Public school-type motto (‘Virtue, Learning, Manners’); a rather good school song; a uniform that included the wearing of ‘boaters’ (flat straw hats) in the summer; a compulsory Cadet Force; emphasis on the (ancient Greek and Latin) Classics; a Gothicky school chapel; huge emphasis on getting boys into Oxbridge, if possible to ‘read’ Classics – other universities and subjects were considered infra dig; a visit from the Queen one year (I had to be in her ‘guard of honour’, dressed in army cadet uniform, creases ironed so you could cut a finger on them); a flourishing Old Boys’ Society (without me); and a general prejudice against ‘townees’, or the local lads, who used to mock us in our blazers and boaters.

But none of this seemed to work. We always felt inferior to the ‘genuine’ Public School products, whose lives and exploits we greatly envied, as they were presented to us in the ‘Billy Bunter’ and similar juvenile stories. I would have willingly endured all the beatings and cruelties to be at Eton, Harrow or the fictional ‘Greyfriars’. But I probably should be grateful to my school. I had some good and inspirational teachers there, who managed to get me into Cambridge. The local ‘maintained’ schools were not half as ‘successful’.

Mine is now a fully Independent school, only taking fee-payers plus a few ‘scholarship boys’ (and girls, I believe); but it doesn’t yet seem to have acquired the cachet it so desperately craved in my day. One thing in particular was missing: a good sex scandal – gay goings-on in the dorms, or kiddy-fiddling masters. The first undoubtedly went on – although as a day-boy I was mercifully and naively ignorant of it. Whenever it came to light the perpetrators were expelled for ‘bullying’. How was I – safely snuggled up innocently in bed at home – to know what that really meant?

The second missing part has only come to light recently. A former music master has been arrested by the police for (and I quote) ‘Indecent Assault, Making Indecent Photographs of Children, and Observing a Person Doing a Private Act‘, during the forty years he was teaching and choir-mastering at the school. His trial comes up next month.

Cheap, I know; but this may be just what my school needs to push it up into the élite ranks. It’s one of the things the great Public Schools are known for. Not them alone, of course, and not it alone; but it goes on a lot in these institutions, for obvious reasons: adolescent boys sleeping together in dormitories, paedophile masters with huge power over them. Most of it is hushed up, as was clearly the case in my school for several years. Which is yet another reason, of course, although not the main one, for abolishing the whole institution; and not just its tax-exempt status.

Of course things may be better now…

What are we to make of the women who have figured so prominently on the Right of British politics over the past several years? Do they shock us – me, at any rate – because they seem so unwomanly?

Women are supposed to be the ‘softer’ sex, kinder than men, and put on earth to compensate for the latters’ grossness. ‘Her voice was ever soft, gentle, and low; an excellent thing in woman.’ That’s King Lear, holding in his arms the body of Cordelia, his dead daughter, whom he had banished from his kingdom in Act 1 because she had refused to flatter him. I have to say that this has long been my own ideal of womankind, undoubtedly sexist though it is, and sometimes contradicted by my own experience.

And it’s also contradicted in the play by Lear’s experiences in Acts 2-4, when his two other daughters – Goneril and Regan – turn out to be the very opposite of ‘soft, gentle, and low’. (Also of course Lady Macbeth in the Scottish play; and Kate in The Taming of the Shrew.) Shakespeare knew about evil women, and seems to have thought there was something ‘unnatural’ about them. Which is how I – with my old-fashioned gender conditioning – feel about Margaret Thatcher, Priti Patel, Suella Braverman and Liz Truss. Vile women all of them; and all the more vile because of their sex.

Obviously there are monsters among Tory men, too; and leading female Labour, Lib-Dem and Green politicians who aren’t or weren’t monsters at all. My great hero Barbara Castle was one of them; Rachel Reeves may turn out to be another. (Also, over the Pond, Kemala Harris.) So it’s obviously not their gender per se that makes Braverman et al monstrous.

Unless it’s their position as women in a male-dominated society. It was always said of Thatcher that she felt she had to adopt a hyper-masculinist persona – deepening her voice, for example – in order to be taken seriously; or, as one of her ministers put it at the time, as ‘the only member of her [all-male] cabinet with balls’. All these villains will have been subjected to condescension or worse early in their careers; two of them – Braverman and Patel – also on grounds of their ‘race’ (they’re both the daughters of immigrants); and Thatcher because of her original ‘class’. This could have toughened them for the unfair wars they would need to wage against the white, privileged, upper-class men who comprised the Conservative Party they were trying to gain a foothold in, and sharpened their political philosophies.

That I think is normal. It affects lower-class men too. (Look at 30p-Lee Anderson.) The most reactionary Fellow of my Cambridge college years ago was a man who was several classes beneath the majority of them (except me); using his Right-wingery, I felt, in order to establish his right to hob-nob with the toffs. Maybe that’s happening with our present-day Gonerils.

On the other hand it might not have anything at all to do, even indirectly, with their gender or origins; but be merely the result, in all these cases, of rational independent thought. The fact that they shock me more than men holding the same views probably says more about my own conditioning and prejudices. Why shouldn’t the fairer sex – as I used to regard them – have its share of proto-Fascists too? After all, the first ever leader of an overtly British Fascist party in the 1920s was a woman. (Look her up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotha_Lintorn-Orman. Is it my prejudice that makes me think she looked a bit butch?)