Porter’s Pensées

Do they really believe it? That Starmer was responsible for getting Jimmy Savile off? I wouldn’t be surprised if some of their voters do. After all, in America they fell for a similar slur about Hilary Clinton – running a Satanic paedophile ring from a Pizza restaurant in Washington DC; and the appalling ‘anti-Semitic’ smear against Corbyn is still believed here in Britain, if some of the people I’ve spoken to are any guide. ‘I was going to vote Labour, but then I read about the anti-Semitism, so I changed my mind.’ That was my Hull taxi driver on the way to the airport, for my flight back to Sweden in October. I don’t think I’ll ever forgive the British Board of Deputies, for perpetuating that scurrilous lie. And I’d always been favourably disposed towards the Jews as – on the whole – an ethical people. It could even have turned me into an anti-Semite. But of course it won’t.

Starmer seems to have laid that one to rest, by expelling all his party members, including Jewish ones, who criticise the current policies of the government of Israel: which criticism obviously needn’t be – and usually isn’t – a sign of anti-Semitism at all. That I consider to have been craven; although it may – only may – be necessary at this unhappy time in British politics, when it’s gestures that count. But it obviously forced the Conservatives to dig around for a new atrocity to pin on Starmer; which they then found in associating him with paedophilia, which is even more atrocious than anti-Semitism in most people’s eyes. Earlier Labour leaders also had to face slurs, although not quite of this degree of awfulness. With Ramsay MacDonald and Harold Wilson it was good old-fashioned treachery, a charge that was made against Corbyn too; but Wilson’s time was before the age of Social Media, and the ‘Dark Web’ (is that right?), which now allow the poison to spread far more widely and swiftly than even the Daily Mail was able to achieve in the days of the ‘Zinoviev affair’.

As to its effectiveness: who knows? Many of the elections and referenda these strategies were targeted at turned out to be pretty close-run things, which means that just a small minority believing the lies – my taxi-driver, for example – could have swung them. The Conservatives’ super-clever strategists – Dominic Cummings, Lynton Crosby – are (or were) being paid mountains of money to manipulate the electorate by focussing its attention on these sorts of thing. (Or, as mentioned earlier, on ‘dead cats’: https://bernardjporter.com/2020/03/10/the-dead-cat/.) They wouldn’t have bothered, surely, if they didn’t think their tricks would be effective.

The question remains, however: do they and their political paymasters really believe their own lies? Do Boris Johnson and his loyal lieutenants genuinely think – without a scintilla of evidence – that it was Starmer who covered up for Savile? Or that the life-long anti-racist Corbyn is an anti-Semite too? Where do they stand on the great slanders of the past: Zinoviev, for example, and Harold Wilson as a Soviet ‘sleeper’? (That is, if they’re even aware of this old history.) And if they don’t genuinely believe these lies, what are they doing parroting them? Is this all part of a new post-truth politics, where statements are only valued for their effects? Is this (to return to one of my favourite hobby-horses) what they now teach them at Eton? Any lie that will win will do. Machiavelli, thou shouldst be living at this hour. And Goebbels too.

And isn’t it significant that this sort of amorality is found mainly – I was going to write ‘only’, but that can’t be true – on the political Right?

This is an early sketch of a piece I hope to place in the press just before my new book comes out.

‘If people are not proud to be British, or of our flag or Queen, they do not have to live in the United Kingdom. Perhaps they should move to another country they prefer’. That was Lia Nici, Tory MP for Great Grimsby. (Grimsby was one of the ‘red wall’ seats that turned from Labour to Conservative in 2019.)

This is obvious nonsense. I write, incidentally, as someone who has actually taken Ms Nici’s advice and moved to a country I currently prefer. But other considerations came into that decision too, more personal ones; and the word ‘currently’ is important here. I’ve fallen out of love with what Britain has become, partly because of people like Lia Nici. I still feel loyal to what I thought, maybe naively, Britain used to represent. That hasn’t changed; the country has. (Or so I think; and my new European neighbours too. We’re no longer admired abroad as we used to be.) Does Nici feel I ought to remain ‘proud’ of Britain regardless?

And because of our ‘flag and Queen’? Which are, I agree, valid historical symbols of ‘Britishness’, but among others (roast beef and cricket?), and with what exactly they represented having changed quite crucially over the years. As has the idea of British ‘patriotism’. In the 18^th and early 19th centuries, for example, it was those who wanted to change Britain who classed themselves as ‘patriots’, and whose patriotism was famously excoriated by Dr Johnson as a result – ‘the last refuge of the scoundrel’. After the last World War it was those self-same patriots who voted to make Britain a better place than she had been before it. For patriots can want to build New Jerusalems, as well as to return to old ones. Especially where those past Jerusalems are so thoroughly misunderstood as they are by many Brexiters – and others; perhaps the majority of people – today.

And yet still those Brexiters persist in harnessing Britain’s ‘history’ to their cause. Jacob Rees-Mogg recently published a – quite awful – history of Victorian Britain, lauding the achievements of the ‘Titans’ of that time, as models for the present day. Boris Johnson similarly looks ‘back’ to various British ‘golden ages’ for inspiration; and to the Empire and Winston Churchill in particular. Margaret Thatcher lauded the ‘Victorian values’ that had once made Britain ‘great’, before the Socialists had got their envious hands on them. Much of the appeal of Brexit lay in its promise to ‘take back’ the control that Britain had used to have as a ‘sovereign’ nation, before she surrendered it all to Brussels. So a view of ‘history’ appears to be integral to the Brexit case. Perhaps one shouldn’t be surprised at this, at a time when many Britons feel they have descended so low.

There are so many problems with this approach, however, as to have provoked me, at the beginning of last year, into writing a whole book to try to put it right. One of the problems is that the ‘history’ that many of these ‘patriots’ appeal to is simply wrong. No, ‘we’ didn’t use to ‘rule half the world’, as populist mobs have been heard yelling today. (‘Half’ is an exaggeration, for a start. But there are difficulties with the idea of ‘ruling’, too.) No, Britain’s power and influence in the past weren’t to the credit (or the debit) of Rees-Mogg’s ‘Titans’, whose ‘spunk’ simply needs to be recovered in order to restore our ‘greatness’ again. No, ‘we’ – the British – didn’t win the two World Wars on our own. No, the Empire wasn’t an unalloyed force for good in the wider world; but nor also was it a tyranny comparable with Nazi Germany; and it wasn’t always ‘racist’ by most definitions of that word. Britain’s South African ‘concentration camps’ were entirely different from Hitler’s. (Of course. We shouldn’t be misled by words.) Winston Churchill was neither the saviour of his country in World War II, although his oratory helped hugely here; nor a Fascist. Apart from Churchill, it was the Conservatives of the time who were the ‘appeasers’, not Labour; and the working classes who were the staunchest supporters of the war effort. You wouldn’t think that to hear some of today’s Tories.

Apart from these factual errors, and others, present-day popular views of Britain’s past – not only on the Right – often err by not giving enough consideration to context. Context is the essential contribution the historian can make to our understanding of the past, more important even than verifying the ‘facts’. Which is why my forthcoming book needs to be a little bit fatter than it would have been if correcting mistakes were the only point of it. (It’s still quite short.)

Beyond all this, however, there lies the question of whether people’s loyalties towards a nation should be based on its history at all. They don’t need to be. In Swedish schools, for example, children are taught to love their country for its aspirations – equality and so on – rather than for the Vikings or Sweden’s 17^th-18^th century  Stormaktstiden (when she was a ‘great power’ in northern Europe). It may be natural to be fond of the country we were born and live in, and to admire its past achievements; but we surely shouldn’t be expected to feel pride in those achievements, if we had no part in them, as we obviously won’t have done for most of ‘history’. I’m entitled to feel neither pride nor shame for my country of birth’s imperial past, simply because I happen to live on the same little patch of the earth as the imperialists did 100 years ago. (Although, to be fair, I was still around in its dying days, albeit as a critic.) I can possibly admire that past, or regret it, or even help make up for the damage done by it; but I can bear no responsibility for most of it. We can’t choose where we were born. Immigrants can take pride in the country they migrated to – they after all did (we presume) choose it. But not the native-born, and not with regard to anyone’s country’s past history. ‘I’m sorry, officer. It had nothing to do with me. I wasn’t there.’

This is why Lia Nici’s implied insistence on blind allegiance to ‘flag and Queen’ is not something I personally can relate to. More importantly, however, it can muddy the picture of Britain’s past, if that is what people are basing – in part – their views on Brexit upon. Of course these views don’t necessarily depend on ‘history’ at all. There are other and I would say much better arguments both for Brexit and against, leaving history out of the question entirely. It’s for those who do rely on ‘history’, however, that my book – now on its way to the printers – is intended. After reading it people can still come to their own conclusions about whether Britain should have exited the EU, or remained within it; and whether she should now stay out of it, or seek to return. If Britain’s past history is a factor in their choice, then they might do worse than read Britain’s Contested History. Lessons for Patriots (Bloomsbury Press, early summer of 2022), to put them right about one or two things. Otherwise they won’t need to fork out the £20.

Read, mark, learn and get angry.

https://eand.co/the-idiot-who-ruined-britain-a62542447f92

I wonder whether the current nightmare the British are suffering under Boris will get them any closer to the abolition of his ‘Public’ school, and of the rest of them? It certainly ought to. As a result of the inanities of Boris and Jacob Rees-Mogg, and before them of the smooth David Cameron, Eton College has become a laughing stock among the general public, who are beginning to question not only whether it doesn’t give an unfair and undemocratic social advantage to those whose parents can afford to send them there – we’ve always known that – but also whether the academic education it prides itself on is really up to scratch.

Most of it appears to be heavily based on the Greek and Roman ‘classics’, which can test memory but not necessarily intelligence, and which of course can have almost no relevance at all to the present day. (Sorry, Mary Beard!) I’ve written to the guy at Eton who appears to be in charge of ‘History’ there, asking him how much modern history they teach, but without getting a reply. I can’t see any modern history either in Eton’s published syllabus. I can only conclude that History for them stops in around 400 AD; which may help explain Rees-Mogg’s recent book on The Victorians, which the Daily Telegraph reviewer (no less) characterised as a ‘clichéd, lazy history’ that ‘often reads like it was written by a baboon’. (For the range of reviews of this book, nearly all of them awful, see https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/may/19/jacob-rees-mogg-book-the-victorians-12-titans-who-forged-britain.) Boris’s ventures into history are hardly any better.

The ‘great’ Public schools, however, never claimed to be tops at academic education, which generally came very low in their list of priorities. Intellectual pupils – ‘swots’ – were often bullied. Heroes were the ‘sporty’ ones, or ‘jocks’. The schools mainly existed – overtly, anyway – to develop ‘character’, among boys who would grow up to be ‘leaders’, either at home or in the Empire. In the 19^th century ‘character’ embraced a number of qualities, including honesty, bravery, selflessness, modesty, and the old feudal principle of noblesse oblige: doing good for those ‘beneath’ them, socially. I always had a sneaking admiration for them historically, and even imperially; at their best (and they weren’t always at their best) they served to rub down the sharp edges of capitalist exploitation in the colonies, and so to preserve the illusion that imperialism was a selfless and humanitarian enterprise. That was one of the major roles of the Public schools then.

But of course it wasn’t to last. The need for noblesse oblige largely disappeared with the fall of the Empire, and as the resurgence of free marketism – the mortal enemy of all the old feudal values – crushed it under Thatcher. (The noblesse were her ‘wets’.) Which left the Public schools without their previous moral and social justifications (if I’m right about these), and relying now only on the husk of ‘prestige’ that they had built up during their golden age, with its real value hollowed out. They became simply hives of privilege, for those whose parents were rich enough to afford them, and who were therefore unlikely to want their sons educated in ‘obliging’ ways that might strike at the sources of their richesse. The schools lost their souls; with Boris being one of the results: privileged, self-regarding, amoral, dishonest and dim.

Eton must bear some responsibility for this. The whole country would benefit enormously from the destruction of this school, and others like it, and of their post-imperial spawn.

Another dead cat! And the biggest and deadest so far. Not that I’m disputing that there’s a dangerous crisis emerging on the Russia-Ukraine border; but Boris is obviously using it just now to divert attention from his own problems, which he can paint as a distraction in themselves from these much weightier matters.

That seems to be his and his allies’ main line of defence currently: that it’s his critics who are trivialising politics by concentrating on his ‘parties’, rather than on the ‘big’ decisions: which he has always ‘got right’. That, of course, is a lie in itself (see the recent cross-parliamentary committee report on the government’s initial response to Covid); but in Boris’s post-truth world the mere claim is the only thing that matters. (He’s still maintaining that his government is building forty new hospitals, and that the infamous slogan on the side of the Brexit ‘battle-bus’ was justified.)

This latest ruse – the Ukrainian one – is risible because, as well as obviously using the crisis to get him out of a hole, he’s implying that a phone call from him to Putin, followed by a visit to Moscow by Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, can have any influence on the situation at all. That might cut some ice with what Jeremy Paxman has called the ‘harrumphers’ in the Conservative party, still clinging on to the tatters of their old imperial ermine; but it comes over as ridiculous – even embarrassing – to those of us who have reconciled ourselves (quite happily) to Britain’s having become just an ordinary nation once again: and even more ordinary now she’s left the EU. On her own, Britain can have almost no positive influence on world affairs. Will Putin even bother to take Boris’s call?

On Johnson’s lies generally, and the wider damage they are doing to Britain’s governmental processes, Jonathan Freedland has an excellent piece in today’s Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jan/28/sue-gray-report-britain-liar-met-police-partygate-report. ‘Partygate’ is not trivial – just to do with parties. The culture it reveals is fundamentally destructive of good government, and of people’s acceptance of the same. It has the same malignant effect on democracy as a lie can have on a marriage. In other words, his lying is the ‘invisible worm’ at the heart of Blake’s sick Rose. Which is one reason – of many – why Boris has to go.

Proof reading. The most boring of all literary activities, but thankfully finished yesterday, and the corrections sent in. So now I can’t add or change anything; which is a huge relief, even though I know that ideas will keep coming to me which ought to be included, and events happen in the next few weeks which might cause me to rethink what I’ve already written. I’ve tried to hedge my bets on – for example – Boris’s fate over the next few days or weeks (or even hours?), and on future prospects for the country more generally. It’s no part of a historian’s duty to predict in any case. We know better than most how many predictions have come croppers in the past. (The longevity of the British Empire was one.)

Who would have thought, for example, that it would be a party that would prove Boris’s nemesis – if indeed it does (I’m not predicting) – after all his other egregious failings, stupidities and political sins? I imagine this is because it brings into the equation human interest stories that are the main diet of the popular press, and of far more concern to its readers than big and really important political events, like Brexit and the upcoming – possibly: again, no predictions – Russia-Ukraine war. Stories of ‘ordinary’ people having to say their tearful goodbyes to dying relatives through windows, while their censorious rulers are flouting the rules and living it up in Whitehall, and then laughing about it, are bound to strike home, more sharply than almost anything. It’s the perfect mesh of the personal and the political. Couldn’t the government have predicted this?

Incidentally, here in Sweden we’re seeing Swedish warships in the Stockholm Archipelago. How far away is Ukraine from us?

Partygate got full coverage in the Swedish media again today, with scenes in the Commons shown on SVT delighting those here who always suspected that Monty Python was fact. In tomorrow’s Dagens Nyheter Katrine Marçal, the paper’s excellent London correspondent, bemoans the fact that it all seemed to be about Johnson, and none of it about politics, which is what the Swedish parliament usually concerns itself with. She also thinks it won’t matter much to Johnson, because it plays to people’s fond perceptions of him in any case. He relishes the role of ‘distraction’.

Which made me wonder whether in fact he might be the latest and most cunning of  Lynton Crosby’s ‘dead cats’, thrown on to the table deliberately (see https://bernardjporter.com/2022/01/14/a-line-of-dead-cats/), in order to take our attention away from the direr things going on underneath it: especially Priti Patel’s dismantling of our liberties, and Nadine Dorris’s threats to the BBC. Now that would be clever. Is Boris aware?

Is it true? It’s widely reported that there’s a plot afoot to rescue Boris from the mess he’s got himself  into, and to save his premiership from what threatens to be its rapid, ignominious and well-deserved end, to which the code-name ‘Operation Save Big Dog’ has been given: the title suggested, apparently, by Boris himself. From what can be gathered the plot consists of waiting for it all to ‘blow over’; putting all the blame on his underlings, and sacking some of them; polishing up and presenting what can be seen as some of his recent achievements (‘getting’ Brexit and the vaccine roll-out ‘done’); and putting forward some new ‘populist’ measures – cutting lockdown so that people can party, stationing troops on the south coast to deter immigrants, perhaps a bit of money for covid-sufferers, and some juicy ‘culture’ bones for his extreme right-wingers – to lure the ‘red wall’ back into the Big Dog’s embrace. If these don’t work, then of course there’s the ‘dead cat’ strategy (see last post). Or does he have something else up his sleeve?

Of course the most likely thing to ‘Save Big Dog’, at least in the short-medium term, is the fact that he has no obvious successor in the government – or even in his party – who has any ability or dignitas at all. Truss? Gove? Sunak (perhaps)? He sacked all the most experienced and competent of them before the last election, in order to over-promote the callow young (or youngish) Brexiters whose loyalty he thought he could rely on to see him through. Most of the most able Tory MPs were pro-Europeans. That leaves no-one for the Party to turn to, to do a good job of leadership, while at the same time keeping the Brexit flag flying still.

Well, we’ll see. In the meantime, I’m left wondering who really thought up that ‘Save Big Dog’ slogan. It seems awfully arrogant for the man himself. It sounds like something Carrie calls him in bed. ‘Come and snuggle up, you lovely big dog, you!’ Maybe, to win the voters back for hubby, she’s got another baby up her sleeve. (Or somewhere.) No, that wouldn’t do it.

Labour must be secretly hoping that he does survive. Just at present he’s an electoral liability for the Tories, who are ten points in the rear. And the next scheduled election isn’t for two years.

First there was Brexit. That didn’t go very well, did it? But then along came Covid 19, to take our attention away from all that. The Government handled that badly too: incompetently and corruptly; so we needed a distraction from that. That’s when brave Prince Andrew stepped in, to hog the front pages with his (alleged) misdemeanors, and then his (un-) dressing down: his ‘HRH’ and ill-gotten medals falling off him like autumn leaves. This is the story currently. But people will soon get bored of that too; and so we have today’s new scandal: a Chinese spy, for pity’s sake. Spies always steal headlines, although this one doesn’t seem terribly significant, except to the Right-wing tabloids, because of her alleged – but in fact risible – relations with the Labour Party.

So, we have a sequence of supposed scandals, each one distracting popular attention from the one before. And in fact Brexit itself could be regarded as a distraction from the much more serious scandal that preceded and should overshadow all of them: our political leaders’ failure to respond adequately to climate change.

You’ll remember the Australian propagandist and amoralist Lynton Crosby’s ‘dead cat’ political strategy? If there’s a problem, throw a dead cat on to the table in order to get everyone talking about that instead. I’m not claiming that Covid was a deliberate distraction; but this has been its effect. And the other ones could have been deliberate: except that Johnson doesn’t seem clever enough to think of them.

Perhaps the arch-amoralist Dominic Cummings had a part in them? Not in order to protect Brexit, necessarily, and certainly not Boris; but to divert attention from the other key development in British politics today: which is the trend – scarcely noticed beneath all these distractions – towards a form of authoritarianism. Which seems to be his baby.

PS. By the way, Bojo and Partygate got the full treatment on Swedish TV News this evening. I felt quite proud.

One would imagine that Boris will need to go very soon.  It must be remembered that many of his backbenchers have distrusted him for years: ‘Boris will always let you down’, as a retiring Tory MP told me was the almost universal feeling among his colleagues before the last General Election. (I may have quoted this before.)

We’ve all known about his enormous failings of character and of personal morality, which indeed were noticed when he was a boy, and reported to his parents by one of his masters at Eton (I’ve quoted that, too). There are at least half-a-dozen books about his flaws, especially his penchant for lying. There’s no excuse for the cognoscenti (who include Conservative politicians) not being aware of all this. ‘The people’ may have remained ignorant, and seduced by what many have described as his ‘PG Wodehouse’ characteristics. It was this supposed appeal to the populace that persuaded the Tory Party to select him as their leader and prime ministerial candidate in 2019, in the belief – quite justified, as it turned out – that an older and fatter Bertie Wooster might appeal – more than the slimmer and deadly serious Corbyn – to the politically unlettered and to the aficionados of TV comedy programmes.

Having won the election for them, but with his obvious stupidity, superficiality, lack of judgment and gross immorality only now clearly affecting both his appeal to the people (‘one law for them…’) and his direction of the country, many Tories know that it’s time for him to go; having done his job for his party in 2019. Of course he has weathered personal crises like this before, generally by ladling on the ‘charm’. But can that take him any further in 2022?

I’ve written before about Johnson’s personal flaws, especially the lies. Then I wondered whether personal immorality, generally speaking, could really be a determining factor when it comes to national politics. Soon we may know.