Porter’s Pensées

A few days ago Johnson threatened to unleash ‘the terrors of the earth’ against some of the miscreants in his own party. Boris is reputedly engaged in writing a book about Shakespeare (how’s that going, I wonder?), so he will be well aware of the origin of that curse. It is of course King Lear: rejected by two of his daughters and wandering around on the ‘blasted heath’, cold and soaking wet; a narcissistic and foolish old ruler flailing out against his enemies, all the more pathetically because he has no idea how he can punish or stop them. 

I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall – I will do such things –
What they are yet I know not, but they shall be
The terrors of the Earth!

Not, I would have thought, the Shakespearean character Boris should really be identifying with. It will be interesting to see how the biography turns out.

I’ve been offline for a while, finishing my review of Ian Morris’s Geography is Destiny. Britain’s Place in the World, a 10,000 Year History, due out next month; a great read – highly recommended – though I have some fairly big bones to pick with it. I would give you a preview of my piece here, but journal editors don’t like us doing that.

Now I have to work on the pre-publicity for my new book, Britain’s Contested History. I finished writing it last August, so it will already be out of date when it’s published in – they now tell me – July. I warned Bloomsbury about this, and even approached other publishers to see if they couldn’t get it out more quickly, but to no avail. That was irritating, to say the least. Why on earth can’t publishers get more of a move on with these things? Especially when the practical stages must have been enormously speeded up with the advent of computer word-processing, obviating the need for a second round of proof-checking to make sure that the type-setters – arranging their little pieces of metal – have it right.

Anyhow, Britain’s Contested History obviously won’t have anything in it about Partygate, or Johnson’s reaction to the war in Ukraine, or Tory MPs’ misogyny (the thing that provoked that ‘terrors of the earth’ quote), or any of the other issues that are dominating the news today. On the other hand, none of these recent events negates or undermines anything I’ve written about Britain’s ‘contested’ history up to last August. If anything, it’s the reverse: they bear out the ideas I advanced then. So the book should still be worth reading. I hope.

I consider I’m pretty well-versed in British constitutional history. It was the only compulsory course we had to follow at my university (this was sixty years ago). It was a bit of a bore, and of course very exclusive, in the sense of concentrating on ‘high’ domestic politics, and finding no place in it for the proles (‘social’ history came in only later); or – believe it or not – for the British empire and imperialism. (There was a second-year option on what was called ‘The Expansion of Europe’; but – as I’ve written before – that was only taken by dum-dums who couldn’t cope cerebrally with the history of political philosophy, which was the alternative. I took the latter, not wishing to be classed as a dum-dum; so my Cambridge undergraduate course was not where I was introduced to my later specialism. That came through my interest in political philosophy: in this case ‘anti-imperialism’. But I digress…)

My point is that I consider that my education in constitutional history, much as it bored me initially, has served me pretty well over time. There was a broad theme running through the course in Cambridge, a ‘Whiggish’ one; which taught that England’s (and later Britain’s) political development was one of steady progress via various reforms and one revolution (two if you count the ‘Glorious’ one), towards the happy quasi-democracy that we enjoyed in the 1960s. If this syllabus had a hidden function, it was a ‘patriotic’ one. Britain deserved our loyalty because of this liberal progression, achieved with very little violence, because we were, as a nation, so smart and moderate. Not, note, because of the Empire; which only came into this picture at the stage of ‘decolonisation’, which was supposed to fit the general pattern of democratic ‘progress’.

That aside, the point I want to make here with regard to our present political situation is that my early grounding in the history of the (unwritten) British constitution is probably what has alerted me to the violence that is being done to some of our fundamental national traditions by the government today; especially to the principles of the separation of powers, checks and balances, the primacy of parliament, probity, the independence of the civil service, and many others. This was highlighted the other day by Peter Hennessy, probably our leading present-day constitutional historian, in his castigation of Boris Johnson as ‘the great debaser in modern times of decency and public and political life, and of our constitutional conventions – our very system of government’.

I imagine that Boris and his pals, not having been brought up on Tanner and Elton as I was in the ’sixties – maybe not having studied British history at all, only ‘Classical’ – may not be fully aware of this. If they are, they may want simply to dismiss Hennessy as one of Michael Gove’s derided ‘experts’. In either case, they are clearly departing from the form of ‘patriotism’, and even ‘conservatism’, that was inculcated in those of us reading History at Cambridge in the 1960s.

Recent events have clearly shown how flimsy and inadequate our constitutional conventions are proving today, in the face of these ignorant Borisian assaults. This has left us poorly protected by our ‘constitution’. What this situation requires now, I should like to suggest, is a major public enquiry into all aspects of Britain’s government; embracing the relations between the three classical pillars of the constitution (executive, legislature, judiciary); our electoral system; the funding of parties; the civil service; devolution; the power of the media; class and gender, insofar as they relate to politics; the ‘Public’ schools (of course)…. and so on. It might take many years; but if so, then so much the better. It would require long and deep thought. Perhaps Lord Hennessy could be its Chair. – On the other hand, this wouldn’t suit those who are exploiting the weaknesses and vagaries of the present ramshackle system, to their own undemocratic advantage. So it’s probably a no-no; certainly under the present government.

*

PS. Another thought – rather more trivial. It relates to Boris Johnson personally. We all know about his vaunting ambition; and that he only ever wanted to ‘be’ prime minister, not to ‘do’ anything in the job. Well, he’s managed that, by playing the crooked game that our tattered constitution has left us with; but is now well on track to become Britain’s worst and most reviled prime minister ever. Does this matter to him, I wonder? After all, he’s cemented his place in the history books. Is that good enough; to feature prominently as a failure and a rogue in the main texts of our future histories – perhaps even have a chapter devoted to him – rather than appearing as merely a footnote? Would he prefer notoriety to marginalisation? At least now he is noticed. That may be all he ever wanted. It fits with his own personal history, right back to Eton and before. But that’s not for us – least of all constitutional historians – to know.

Does Priti really expect her Rwandan wheeze to succeed? Or does she even want it to? Her Home Office officials are apparently against it, which is why she’s having to use a ‘ministerial directive’ to push it through without their support. Scores of lawyers are warning that it will probably come a cropper in the courts; and the moral outrage it’s provoking from all quarters – the Left, humanitarian pressure groups, even the older-fashioned kind of Tory politician: the ones whom Boris has side-lined so successfully in Parliament because they’re not Brexiters – is likely to give it a difficult run in the months ahead.

Which is leading me to wonder whether all this hasn’t been factored into the scheme from the beginning. We know that at the start of the ‘Partygate’ scandal Johnson and his advisers devised a strategy to convince his political base to stick with him, called ‘Operation Red Meat’. (I imagine his Australian Svengali, Lynton Crosby, had a hand in this.) The idea was to float a number of outrageous right-wing policies that would appeal to them, and keep them on-side in spite of everything that was going on. The Johnson government’s interventions in the ‘culture wars’ on the ‘anti-woke’ side are part of this, together with Priti Patel’s assault on the right to demonstrate noisily, instructions to the RNLI not to rescue ‘boat people’ from drowning, and the attacks by both her and Boris on ‘Lefty lawyers’ and the historic procedures of the Houses of Parliament. Deporting refugees to the middle of Africa fits in with this in a score of ways, appealing to the red-meat eaters’ nationalism, racism, and fondness for ‘firm government’.

So, even if the Rwanda policy fails, and Britain can’t send her poor asylum seekers there, it will still have succeeded in its political purpose; and indeed will have succeeded even more if it does fail, because then Boris and Priti will be able to put the blame for its failure on their favourite populist scapegoats: judges, left-wing politicians, and the ‘metropolitan elite’. That will further stoke the fires of what I like to call ‘proto-fascism’ – the ideological soil from which historical Fascisms have sprung – in order to make the country compliant with their underlying demands. Either way, for the Tory red-meat eaters it’s ‘win-win’.

One of the great things about having colonies – or ex-colonies, if they’re still dependent on you – is that you can shovel your rubbish into them. Examples of ‘rubbish’ are nuclear waste (the Pacific, I think), criminals (Cayenne, Virginia, Australia), political dissidents (Siberia), and now unwanted immigrants (Rwanda).

I wish I’d thought of that while I was writing my books on the British empire. This perverse new refugee policy of Priti Patel’s is obviously a legacy of European imperialism that I’d missed. Colonies are our dustbins.

The reason I’ve not commented much here on the war in Ukraine, despite its being the most important issue of the day (as opposed to ‘of our time’, which of course is climate change), is because I know too little about it, compared with expert commentators in other media; and because my historical expertise hardly helps here at all. Yes, there are superficial parallels that might be drawn, going back to Tsarist and Soviet times, or with other world empires – the Roman, British, Hitler’s; but most of them are misleading, and they can’t really tell us much about the roots of what looks superficially like a simple case of bloody imperial aggression by a powerful and tyrannical ruler against one of his country’s innocent neighbours.

What my immersion in history over the years tells me is very little about the ‘rights and wrongs’ of this particular conflict, but simply to hold my judgment back until the fog of propaganda disperses, and we can see a little more clearly the ‘facts’ of what has been going on. If history ‘teaches’ anything it is that wars are always surrounded at the time by lies, uncertainties and disinformation; which are, indeed, often weaponised by the combatants themselves. Which is why we need historians to sort things out later; by which time, of course, it is too late.

Personally, and for what it’s worth (which isn’t very much), I’m pretty convinced that responsibility for this war doesn’t rest entirely with Putin, but that Ukraine itself and ‘the West’ (the EU, America, NATO) contributed to it in recent years with several mis-steps, to put it kindly; which had the effect of provoking Putin – who seems to have been very provocable, even paranoid (see https://bernardjporter.com/2022/03/21/hell-hath-no-fury/) – to take the action he did. And there are influential ‘neo-Nazis’ in the Ukraine, of course, as there are virtually everywhere, including Britain and the USA; and probably other features of Ukrainian society which make the latter rather less ‘innocent’ a victim than we in the West like to think.

Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that it is still a ‘victim’, overwhelmingly; and that the evidence of terrible atrocities that we see on our TVs can’t all be ‘faked’, as Moscow claims. (If they are, then it suggests an impressive sophistication on the part of the Ukrainian propaganda department, to be able to fake them so convincingly.) Nothing the West may have done, or Ukraine itself, could justify the clear savagery of Russia’s response. Which is why we British liberals must choose the Ukraine’s side in this conflict; as we did in the case of Ireland, whose situation in the 19th century bears some slight comparison with Ukraine’s in the 21st. But I don’t want to make too much of that.

In my case my support is expressed by my offering my home to any Ukrainian refugees who can get past the obstacles that Priti Patel is putting up against them. Now there’s someone who might be – very loosely – labelled a ‘Nazi’. Deporting asylum seekers over to the middle of Africa, for pity’s sake! It so happens that that was one of the original Nazis’ solutions to their ‘Jewish problem’, before they hit on the ‘Final’ one. Is Priti aware of that?

Sorry. That’s as much as I feel I can write about Ukraine. But it still dominates my thinking, and my reading of the real experts on the issue.

When Boris Johnson became prime minister in 2019, we all knew – didn’t we? – that he was a bad character; or, as TV interviewer Eddie Mair put to him directly in 2013: ‘a nasty piece of work’. (See https://www.theguardian.com/politics/video/2013/mar/24/boris-johnson-accused-nasty-video.) Since then the evidence of his serial dishonesty and duplicity has been so overwhelming – even his own followers acknowledge it – as to leave no doubt.

But it raises questions. One is whether his rise was in spite of his bad character, or because of it. In other words – and of more general relevance – do you need to be ‘virtuous’ in politics in order to succeed? And if not, what other qualities will compensate for that? A cuddly image? Bertie Wooster-ism? Tousled hair? Seductive promises? Rich backers? Or will your ‘badness’ find you out in the end? – We may of course be about to have that last question answered in the next few weeks or months.

Another notion that has occurred to me is that perhaps the legacy of the old British Empire has something to do with all this. I’ve always argued – and indeed written books arguing – that the Empire left less of a mark on British politics, culture and society than many modern historians (‘post-colonialists’) have argued. I still hold to that. But there may be an important caveat to be made here, in the case of the class that used to run the Empire, and which did not simply wither away when the Empire did. The link here is my old bugbear Eton College (see https://bernardjporter.com/2021/04/28/floreat-etona/), and the other ‘Public’ schools which shared the same culture. (Sunak has just donated £100,000 to his alma mater, Winchester.) For in Victorian times one of these schools’ functions was to prepare boys to rule, often over ‘natives’ in the colonies, but also over the ‘lower classes’ at home. This wasn’t always oppressive, by the way; this was in the noblesse oblige era, before the schools had opened their doors to the sons of capitalists, which may be what eventually corrupted them. And George Orwell and Clement Attlee were two of their products.

But he word ‘lower’ is important here. ‘Ruling’ was conceived of as essentially de haut en bas: by a superior class over a separate and inferior species. The whole ethos of these schools – and their classical education, for example, especially the Roman bits – was predicated on this strict division of peoples between ‘rulers’ (them) and the ruled. Hence some of the most unlovely recent activities of the boys who attended these schools: distinctive dress-codes, burning £50 bills in front of beggars, trashing restaurants and then paying for the damage, snobbery, the whole ‘Bullingdon’ business, and the special vein of ‘humour’ that rested on sneering at the ‘lower’ orders. (Before you jump to conclusions, I never felt myself to be a target of this.) All these helped to emphasise the bifurcation of British society into ‘rulers’ and ‘ruled’. So it’s hardly surprising that in formulating their new regulations to make society safer during Covid, it never occurred to this ruling class that the same laws should apply to them too. Really. Hence ‘Partygate’; whose major significance may be in showing how our Public school-educated rulers perceive of their relationship with the rest of us poor proles; rooted in the history of these schools.

So Rishi Sunak is demanding a ‘rigorous enquiry’ into who leaked his family’s tax status. It seems to be a peculiarity of our culture that such matters should be considered to be so private and personal as to merit this degree of secrecy. (Is it the same elsewhere?) This is despite the fact that personal wealth and how it’s ‘earned’, taxed and and dispensed have vital social ramifications – and also roots – that make them of crucial public interest too. No man – or woman, for that matter – is ‘an island’, in the words of John Donne; or is truly ‘self-made’. Society contributed to their riches; so society should be allowed to know.

So, in my view everyone’s payslips and tax returns should be open to perusal by any of their compatriots; as I believe they are in Sweden, where it’s considered to be a ‘democratic’ desideratum – as it surely is. It follows that Sunak’s going to these lengths to hide his financial ‘secrets’ shows how fundamentally undemocratic his whole way of thinking is. And also selfish, petty and personal, when there are so many other questions, affecting millions more people, that are surely at least as deserving of ‘rigorous enquiry’. Child poverty, NHS underfunding, and the necessity for ‘food banks’, for starters.

Of course this is yet another ‘late-stage capitalist’ thing. Capitalists – in Britain at any rate – used to avoid direct participation in government and politics, in favour of occupations that could make them richer. Now they’re stepping up to take overt control over us. Sunak is not the only one. The current Health Secretary, Sajid Javid (also from Asia originally, which is a little discomforting), is the latest cabinet member to be revealed as having used the device of ‘non-dom’ status, and a US ‘green card’, to ease his personal tax burden when he was a banker in America. The monster is taking over at the top. Surely in the light of this no-one can any longer dispute that Marx was essentially right?

The very latest indication of this is the current threat to Channel 4. For American readers, Channel 4 is a ‘public service’ TV station that isn’t paid for by Government, but by advertising and by selling its programmes, and so doesn’t need financial ‘owners’ and investors to keep it going. It broadcasts excellent, innovative and popular programmes, commissioned from independent producers; and is in good financial health. One of its distinctive qualities is its ‘balanced’ reporting of news events, enabling more scrutiny of Britain’s current government than is found either on the BBC – scared of the government’s control over its license fee – or ITV. Yet the current ‘culture’ secretary, Nadine Dorries – a truly ridiculous figure, best known for her ignorance and for being filmed eating an ostrich anus on some silly ‘reality’ TV programme (but, to be fair, it must have been difficult for Boris to find intelligent ministers when his choice was restricted to Brexiters) – is dead set on ‘privatising’ it, and so turning it into a commercial operation like all the others.

There’s nothing wrong with Channel 4 that could justify this. Opponents are saying that the real motive behind its proposed privatisation is revenge for some of its programmes that have expressed or implied criticism of Boris and his government. But another might be more purely ideological: neoliberal opposition on principle to non-capitalist enterprises, even if, and perhaps especially if, counter to the claims of neoliberal ideology, they actually work. It reminds me of Thatcher’s privatisation in the 1980s of the dear old Trustee Savings Bank, mentioned in my last post: ‘owned’ by its customers, and working well, but not making a personal profit for anyone, and so ripe for privatisation on that ground alone. That marked the virtual end of ‘social’ banking in Britain (the TSB is no more), and – to my mind – also marked a narrowing of choice for all of us, forced as we now are to choose between only truly ‘capitalist’ banks. Which – as we all know after they fucked us all up in 2008 – aren’t necessarily as beneficial to broader society as neoliberal ideology would have us believe.

Sunak’s elevation to the Treasury, and the values he’s revealed while there, both in his last mini-budget and in the priority he seems to be giving right now to his own personal family fortune, are telling indications of the ‘late capitalist’ stage in our national story that we’re now at. Again: well spotted, Karl! Although I’m not quite so sure about the rest of the old devil’s predictions. Revolution looks a while off yet. A socialist revolution, that is; and in a UK whose collective brain seems to have been turned – by the capitalist press – to mush.

My first visit to the USA was in 1970, or around then, to teach ‘summer school’ at the University of Rochester, NY State. It was in the middle of the Vietnam War; one of my students was a refugee from a famous riot at Kent State University, where he had (he said) led the rioters in a burning of the American flag. (I won’t give his name, in case the Feds are still after him.) Other students missed classes in order to travel to New York City – or it may have been Albany: in any case a day’s travel – to argue for their exemption from the ‘draft’. – Interesting times, for someone on the safe edge of things; only slightly marred for me by the summer parties around swimming pools where I was virtually the only one not ‘high’ on drugs, and consequently boring. The best thing I took away from that trip was an LP of Arlo Guthrie’s wonderful and draft-related Alice’s Restaurant, which I still have. And some money.

It’s the money I want to write about here. I still feel guilty about it; and the current row about Mr and Mrs Sunak’s money has reignited that guilt. It was paid to me in the US with taxes (Federal and State) deducted; but still a fairly tidy sum to bring back to the UK. On my return I took it in to my bank to deposit; only for my bank manager – one of the old breed, a bit like Captain Mainwaring – to tell me I might be liable to British tax, on top of what I had paid in America. The way to get around this, he explained, was to open an offshore account, and deposit the money there for a year. So he fixed that for me; and so for a year I held an account in a Barclays branch in Jersey. After the year was up it was transferred back, UK tax free. I can’t remember the sum involved – it was fifty years ago, remember – but I think I used it for a deposit on my first house. It was obviously peanuts, compared to Akshata Murty’s millions; but it makes me a tax dodger in the same category as her, and as the tax avoiders we on the Left are so fond of criticising today. It probably makes me a bit of a hypocrite.

After this I changed my bank to the TSB, which was the only mildly socialist bank I could find at the time (the Co-op didn’t have a branch near me), and remained so until Thatcher stole it from its depositors, privatised it, possibly illegally; and it was bought up and destroyed by those capitalist bastards at Lloyds. But that’s another story.

I must say I felt qualms even at the time about my Jersey account; but no-one else seemed to be bothered. The ethos then was that you were entitled to employ any devious trick available to you to avoid tax, and that you were a bit of an idiot if you didn’t. Didn’t Trump say something like this? ‘Only little people pay taxes’? As an ex-banker, Rishi may well share that view. Which makes it pretty ironic – that’s the kindest word I can find for it – that he should be the man in charge of all our taxes.

Two simple questions – maybe a bit pedantic. They’re to do with Rishi Sunak’s wife, Aksharta Murty, and her huge fortune, most of which she’s managed to avoid paying UK tax on, by choosing to claim ‘non-dom’ status: a common (and entirely legal) practice among the very rich in Britain; thus depriving the British Treasury – presided over by her husband, the Chancellor of the Exchequer – of many millions of pounds that it could have used rather better in these straightened times. (Whether it would have done, of course, is another question.) This has been the subject of much comment in the press, with most commentators – even some right-wing ones – deploring the hypocrisy and crass insensitivity of it; while others argue that as she broke no law there could be no problem with it; and wasn’t it rather mean and unchivalric – possibly even sexist and racist – to try to get at the Chancellor through his wife?

My points here are rather different, and focus on semantics, or the definitions of words. Firstly: ‘dom’, as in ‘non-dom’, is short for ‘domiciled’, and means ‘lives in’ (from the Latin, ‘domus’, or ‘home’). Murty was born in India, but incontrovertibly lives in the UK presently: at No. 11 Downing Street, to be precise, although she and hubby also have grand domūs (pl.) elsewhere in the country. Secondly, the money that comes to her from overseas she classes as ‘earnings’. But that’s a misnomer, surely? Most of her fortune appears to be dividends from gifts bestowed on her by her multi-billionaire father. To call these monies ‘earnings’ is surely stretching the meaning of the word somewhat. ‘Earnings’ are money you’ve ‘earned’, usually by work of some kind. Murty’s fortune wasn’t earned in this sense, but merely and fortuitously fell into her lap. ‘Profits’ or ‘unearned income’ would be better words for it.

Then there’s the question of where these profits are situated just now. Another notorious way in which very rich people can avoid taxation is by hiding their monies in overseas ‘tax havens’. Murty and her financial advisers won’t tell us whether this is so in her case. For in Britain your tax affairs are a personal and private matter, between you and your God; on a level with your sex life (if you can keep the tabloids out of that). So, unless a whistle-blower in Jersey or the Cayman Islands – or even HMRC – pops up to betray your confidences, your secrets are safe. But wouldn’t it be good, and socially defensible, if we could all know what these rich bastards were doing with their ill-gotten millions?

(In Sweden, incidentally, it’s very different. I don’t know about overseas ‘earnings’; but I do know that my Swedish tax return is already filled out with my salary and pension details when it lands in my postbox. And you can get up anybody’s tax details – I think – on the internet.)

The Murty situation stinks. But not because she’s an Indian, or a woman. It reflects the general opacity and corruption of the British financial system. Which is one of the reasons, as I understand it, why Russian oligarchs love – or used to love – the City of London so much. If he weren’t so compromised by his wife’s situation, Sunak should have the means to correct that.

‘’Twas ever thus’ (see https://bernardjporter.com/2022/04/01/twas-ever-thus/) is only one of the false conclusions that people claim to infer from ‘history’. Another is ‘They’re all the same’ – and always have been, it’s implied. Usually applied to politicians, and to describe their venality and hypocrisy, it’s a way of undermining all of them, and consequently the ones you presently have in your sights. Just like ‘’Twas ever thus’, it also has the effect – or at least the tendency – of destroying faith in all governments, and hence in ‘the system’ overall. It’s a reason why people used to become ‘Anarchists’, if they had thought it through; and now are ‘Populists’, if they hardly think at all. ‘What’s the point in voting?’ if all political candidates are like this: ‘on the make’, only looking out for ‘Number One’, and ready to lie and swindle their ways into power? And of course this, too, is supposed to have been ‘ever thus’; which makes it doubly hopeless to try to change it.

It’s arguable that this way of thinking is one of the greatest obstacles to responsible democracy at the present time; accounting for low electoral turnouts in Britain and the USA, for example, and the widespread vilification of most democratic politicians. This, incidentally, and to refer back to my earlier post, was certainly not ‘ever thus’. There have been times when some British politicians, at least, were far more respected than they are today. Their low reputation now is partly their own fault, of course. The various scandals that have beset them over the past few years – votes for cash, expenses, duck houses, second jobs, illegal parties, bullying, sexual harassment, drug-taking – can’t be blamed on anyone but themselves. But it should be blatantly obvious – do I need to give examples? – that they can’t ‘all’ be like that. Other professions must be more essentially corrupt. (Estate agents? Popular journalists?) And there may also be another factor at work here, exploiting the depravity of some MPs, for different ends.

The popular Press, especially, has leapt on to these instances of depravity: partly because they are the juicy sort of stuff it knows will appeal to its readers; but also for more venal reasons. The British Press, remember, is mainly owned by capitalists – or ‘oligarchs’, as they would be called if they were Russian. In this ‘late capitalist’ age of ours, it is – or is conceived to be – a major interest of capitalism to be enabled to operate ‘freely’: that is, without let or hindrance, or sometimes even any regulations to restrain it; which is what the neo-liberal Right is presently offering. But of course to most reasonable people – including reasonable capitalists – capitalism needs a degree of outside control, in order to soften the injurious social impact of the ‘red in tooth and claw’ features of it. And that can only be done politically; which is as good a reason as any for the oligarchs to want to discredit politics and politicians altogether. This may help to account for the way Jeremy Corbyn, in particular, was treated by the Press and by the Tory Right in the last British election; largely, one suspects, because his transparent – even naïve – honesty didn’t fit the image they wanted to project of politics generally. ‘’Twas ever thus’ and ‘They’re all the same’ contributed to this.

They’re also a way of excluding ‘principle’ from politics, so enabling Machiavels like Dominic Cummings to ‘play’ it simply as a ‘game’. So far as we – the ordinary people who play along with this – are concerned, there are two further factors favouring both ‘ever thus-ism’ and ‘all the same-ism’ as contributions to political debate. The first of these is the healthy scepticism that ought of course to be encouraged in any electorate: a reluctance to accept authority without question, and a desire to find out what might lie beneath it. That’s fine so far as it goes: essential, in fact, if we’re to be able to make intelligent assessments of the policies being offered to us. ‘Intelligence’ however, requires thought; and simply replacing ‘authority’ with a blanket dismissal of any of it on the grounds of ‘ever thus-ism’ and ‘all the same-ism’, isn’t a thoughtful response at all. Indeed, this may be why these two approaches are so popular today. They don’t require critical thought. They’re ways of dismissing all politicians and their opinions without needing to come properly to grips with them; yet giving the impression that you have come to grips with them, simply because you ‘know’ what lies behind them. People need simplistic analyses like these, in order to make them appear sophisticated and critical, but at the same time to save them from the hard intellectual effort of serious thinking.

Now this may well have been ‘ever thus’: among many people, that is. And just now it’s difficult to know how it should be met, in order to insert a greater degree of rationality into our ‘democratic’ politics, and to counter the Machiavels. At present the House of Lords – a more calmly deliberative body – seems to be our best bet; extraordinarily, in view of its almost indefensible role and composition. Can ‘history’ give any other clues?