Porter’s Pensées

A repost from 2 years ago. It still resonates.

We’re getting through The Crown, one (old) episode an evening. Last night’s was the one about the Profumo scandal: its inclusion justified, no doubt, by Prince Philip’s association with Stephen Ward. (Otherwise what did it have to do with ‘The Crown’?) According to this version, Anthony Blunt persuaded MI5 to keep his treachery quiet by threatening to reveal pictures of Philip drawn by Ward. That must be it. It was also a way of completing the series’ deeply unflattering picture of Macmillan, for dramatic effect.

In fact that’s what the whole of The Crown has been about: using incidents in the lives of the royal family to make dramas out of – one per episode. The continuity is very thin; and spoiled last night by the re-casting of all the main characters – Dr Who-like – in order to keep up with their ageing. In this episode that was rather crudely signalled by the early scene in which the ‘new’ Queen remarks on her image on a new set of postage stamps. Well, it had to be done, I suppose, with a story spanning 90 years; and both the actresses (actors?) playing Elizabeth have got her peculiar enunciation off to a T.

Of course to a serious historian it must appear all wrong: seeing public lives portrayed in self-contained episodes, the history of Britain presented only through public lives, and the most dramatic moments in those lives at that; most of the dialogue obviously made up, and some of it rather unconvincingly (if only because it’s too good); and key characters almost entirely left out because – we assume – they’re not colourful enough (Attlee): all this quite apart from questions relating to its factual accuracy, or otherwise. This may be OK as drama. In fact Kajsa and I are thoroughly enjoying it, although Kajsa was (rightly) shocked by the Gordonstoun episode. And it’s by no means an unusual way of presenting ‘history’. Look at Shakespeare! 

But it does get you wondering about where non-historians get their history from. Ronald Reagan is said to have got his from Hollywood movies. I wonder if Boris got his from films and TV? He appears not to have studied any history later than the ancient Romans at school. (I’ve written to Eton asking about their syllabus, but they’ve not replied. Probably wise.) These can illuminate aspects of history, ‘bring them alive’, as they say; but ideally they should not comprise the whole sum of people’s historical knowledge. 

That of course is where we ‘serious’ historians come in: to leaven the personal dramas with the deeper but more boring context that alone can make sense of that knowledge. Macmillan is not fairly or adequately portrayed as a foppish and cuckolded aristo (as it happens he wasn’t an echt aristocrat at all); or Clem Attlee as the nonentity he was made to appear by contrast with Churchill. It’s these men’s wider relationship with the country, the world and the grand tides of history that explains their ‘place’ in that history, which may be more important in the cases of the bores or the fops than of the eccentrics. But TV viewers clearly prefer personalities and drama: as don’t we all? Which is why The Crown gets immeasurably more viewers than my books get readers. (No hard feelings on that account!)

And it probably explains Boris Johnson’s romantic but very false view of his country’s history, and of his own hoped-for place in it. We are governed by a patina of myths, overlying and obscuring the – I would say – material imperatives lying underneath. There’s probably no way of getting away from this. I think I’ve always known that.

(Incidentally: I’m waiting nervously to see if my own encounter with Her Maj – https://bernardjporter.com/2020/12/01/the-crown/ – will be covered. I’m hoping to be played by George Clooney.)

Fine piece by Zoe Williams in today’s Guardian. Here’s the peroration.

‘I didn’t realise how patriotic I was until after the referendum: I knew I cared about my compatriots, and therefore jobs, freedom of movement, food prices. But I didn’t realise how much I cared about the United Kingdom, about the Union, about peace within it and the historical scars that built that peace, about our international standing, about our universities, constitution, landscape, rule of law. I just didn’t realise how precious it all was. Brexit is a process of disintegration, and opposing it was, it transpires, meaningless and unreal. Those abstracted arguments had a nihilistic fervour that it simply wasn’t possible to match, and we drained the life out of ourselves in the attempt.’

And the full article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/dec/07/realities-brexit-respect-for-the-system?

Historians, if they are wise, don’t make predictions because they know how unpredictable the past has often been. Despite this I’m going to make one now, and a very vulnerable one, because it could be disproved in the next day or two. 

This is it. Boris will come back with a ‘deal’ with the EU. It won’t be a very good one, but it will be presented in the Tory press as a triumph of statesmanship. They’ve already prepared the ground for this by painting the Europeans as vicious obstructionists, with whom any agreement, however feeble, can be presented as a diplomatic triumph. Boris needs that; diplomacy has always been his weakest suit – viz. his time as Foreign Secretary – which needs, therefore, to be strengthened. The dutiful Express, Mail and Telegraph can help him here. Neville Chamberlain’s ‘piece of paper’ comes to mind.

Or not; in which case, of course, the nasty Europeans can be blamed. Let’s see, over the next couple of days (or so).

We’re catching up with The Crown, via (I think) Netflix. I’d avoided it up till now, because I have virtually no interest in the British Royal Family, or in any royalty at all after Olaf I of Norway (see https://bernardjporter.com/2020/10/13/kung-olaf/), and am bored and irritated by our popular press’s unhealthy obsession with it. I was also rather put off the royals by my mother’s near worship of the Queen Mother (Queen Mary?). When my mother died I found dozens of pictures of her (the Queen Mum) cut from the Daily Mail, religiously preserved because she (my Mum) thought they were valuable. That was although she’d got rid of all my early Eagle comics, from the very first issue, which – had she known it – would have fetched a small fortune today. She also embarrassed me when Queenie visited my school and Mum broke through a cordon and ran into the street to tap at the window of her car as she departed. All my friends knew whose mother she was. Imagine!

But people kept telling me how good The Crown  was, so we started watching it. It’s now filling our long Nordic nights. We’re up to Suez, so with lots more to come. And I must admit I’m thoroughly taken by it. Not as history – I found lots to quarrel with there – but as sheer soap opera. For those who haven’t seen it – and there can’t be many of you – it’s not really about ‘the Crown’, but about the personal lives of those who live in its shadow. Marriages, divorces and ‘affairs’ make up most of it (so far). The acting is superb, as is the dialogue. I wonder how much of that was the Royals’ themselves, and how much is down to the series’ scriptwriters? A lot of it must be embarrassing for the surviving Royals and their hangers-on to watch, and even potentially libellous. It’s certainly not particularly ‘respectful’ of them. Philip comes out of it as rather stupid and ‘blokeish’. But that’s hardly a surprise. Macmillan isn’t as impressive as I remember him; and Attlee is ignored almost completely. But on the whole the writers have made a good – or at least a watchable – job of all the ‘great and the good’ (a.k.a. ‘nobs’) of those pre-Beatles years.

The Queen comes over wonderfully; which I’m happy with, as I’m a bit of an admirer of hers. (She’s the only one.) I fell for her after meeting – being ‘presented to’ – her at a Historians’ function many years ago. I’d drunk several glasses of dry sherry before she reached our group, which I didn’t think mattered as she wouldn’t be capable of any intelligent conversation with me. (‘They’re all inbred.’) She asked me what I worked on, and I told her in simple words that I thought she’d understand; only to be taken aback by a very insightful supplementary question she put to me. I think it was about British-American relations. So I shook the alcoholic fuzz from my head, or tried to, and treated her to a long lecture on the subject. You can see how fascinated she was from this official photo. (Actually, everyone says she doesn’t photograph well.) I’m the second from the left, in Professor Donald Read’s (literal) shadow. I’ve kept that picture hidden from nearly everyone since then. Even Kajsa was only allowed to see it after we’d been together for ten years. Now I reckon it can cause me no more embarrassment.

OK, soap opera. But isn’t that what the Royal Family basically is?  Eastenders with sparkly hats.

It is  beginning to look a bit like the ‘End of Days’, isn’t it? – if not for humanity generally – though you never know: Covid-19 might turn out to be the agent of the next ‘Great Extinction’ – then for the British and American ‘ways of life’, the Republican and Democratic parties in the USA, the Conservative and Labour Parties in the UK, truth, decency and honour in both our countries, and late-stage capitalism. And it’s extraordinarily difficult to know what to do about it.

The most likely outcome – short of extinction – is the rise of a new sort of fascism, such as we’re seeing the seeds of today, in the authoritarianism implicit in Trump’s thankfully short-lived term as American President – but which will persist, surely, among his ‘robbed’ and vengeful followers; in various right-wing regimes around the world, from Hungary to Israel; and even – to descend to the example closest to me – here in Britain: where the Labour Party now appears to be putting ‘authority’ before ‘democracy’, by forbidding the discussion, even, of certain crucial issues in its constituency meetings. (See https://bernardjporter.com/2020/08/17/8636/.) Members have already been expelled for raising these questions; and the deputy leader of the party, Angela Rayner, has just been heard threatening to summarily suspend ‘many thousands’ more if they attempt to debate the issue of – for example – the possible exaggeration of the extent of anti-semitism in the party, as I’ve done. (See https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/angela-rayner-says-labour-suspend-23088719; and this blog, infra.) Hence my own departure, jumping before I’m pushed. Stay, and fight from within, I was told; but I don’t feel I should remain in a party that denies freedom of speech. Is that self-indulgent of me?

The relevance of this rather parochial (and indeed personal) issue to the ‘End of Days’ scenario is that democratic socialism is the only – or at any rate the best – way I can see of preventing the catastrophe that looms; so that if Labour no longer represents democratic socialism, of the kind promoted by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell in the last two General Elections, I can see little real hope for us in Britain. It’s obvious that a stronger State and a better-funded NHS – the great achievement of democratic socialism in Britain – would have coped with the coronavirus pandemic better than the present laissez-faire  government’s reliance on its chums in the private sector. It’s also clear to me that greater social equality would have helped soothe the resentments that provoked the populist Brexit vote in 2016, whose disastrous repercussions are a main cause of much of our non-Covid-related distress today. In short, what we really, really want (cue the Spice Girls here) is a return to the path the country seemed to be following from 1945 through to the 1970s, under Attlee, Wilson and – yes – the social Tory Harold Macmillan, before the monster Thatcher (or, I would say, the special interests and large historical forces pushing her) slammed on the brakes and undid it all. That path was the basis of Corbyn’s and McDonnell’s platform, the one that had served us pretty well and had at least given us hope before the witch came on to the scene; which of course was one of the things going against it in 2019 – making it appear reactionary, and so playing to the negative propaganda of the right-wing press; in an election in any case dominated by extraneous issues, like Europe, immigration and Corbyn’s supposed ‘anti-semitism’. 

The 2019 election result may have put an end to all chances of a return to the pre-1970s consensus, and to the taxation and social spending regime that had rescued Britain from economic ruin after the Second World War, and could conceivably rescue her from the similar situation that Covid-plus-Brexit might inflict on her in the next few months and years. I could imagine Corbyn returning us to the 1960s, and to proper social democracy – or trying to, at any rate; I find it difficult to see Starmer taking on the vested interests that have dragged us away from that since the ’60s, and putting in train the social revolution that alone will rescue us from Covid, the effects of Brexit, and the danger of authoritarianism. When Corbyn was first elected Labour leader I welcomed it for the traditional Labour philosophy he represented, while always being aware of the personal baggage he carried with him, which the Press was bound to seize on in order to bring him down. My hope at that time was that he would remain leader for enough time to reform its policies, and then give way to someone who would follow the same path, but ‘charismatically’ enough to please the Press:  https://bernardjporter.com/2016/07/12/keep-corbyn-for-now/. I had in mind Emily Thornberry; or a return of Ed Milliband; or even Hilary Benn – if he’d been anything like his Dad. Unfortunately that didn’t work, and in the light of subsequent events it’s hard to see how it could have done. I also hoped – though without any great confidence – that, if he were fairly presented, Jeremy might come to appeal to more people in time, as he does to me, and did to the hundreds of thousands of much younger people he inspired and politicised before the 2019 election.

Can Starmer, with his relative respectability, the support of the Jewish community, and the ‘authority’ granted to him after recent events, turn radical enough to carry out the second part of my plan if returned to power, and implement Corbyn’s agenda? I still think that social democracy, of the kind we aspired to in the 1960s, is the only way out of the current ‘End of Days’ situation. If Keir can get us back on to that track, I might forgive him his assault on our ‘freedom of speech’. But the fact that I would need to says a great deal about our deeply depressing times.

Just now putting the final touches to my Elgar Society talk for Saturday; broadcast from our island off the Swedish coast. I’m nervous on many levels: historical (the Vikings are not really ‘my period’); musical (I’m no musician); but mostly technological. It’s going out via Zoom, of course; but how will that cope with my Power Point illustrations and musical examples? And can I rely on the WiFi we have out here? My kind fellow Elgarians arranged two rehearsals for me last week, but I’m still not altogether confident. Kajsa will be at my shoulder, however. She’s more experienced with Zoom.

If you want to learn about ‘Elgar and the North’, or to see me messing things up, I believe you can tune in to it from wherever; on Saturday at 2 p.m., GMT. Just follow the instructions below. (Or don’t, and save me the embarrassment.)

‘The next virtual meeting is being promoted by the Yorkshire and North East Branch and is entitled Elgar, the North and King Olaf .  The presentation will be delivered by Bernard Porter and will take place on Saturday 28 November 2020 at 2.00 p.m. via Zoom.  All Society members are welcome to attend as are non-members, so feel free to recommend this presentation to friends and family, but be sure to encourage them to join the Society too!  If you would like to attend, please contact yorkshire-NE@elgar.org, who will pass on access details.’

Sad to learn of Jan Morris’s death, although she was a great age. She was probably the greatest of all travel writers. I never met her, but we corresponded when she and I were both writing books about the British Empire. I was one of the few academic historians willing to appreciate her somewhat romantic view of the whole enterprise, on the grounds that she was expressing an aspect of it that was common at the time, and so which helped explain it.  I can’t put my hands on my review just now – it will have been in the early ‘70s – but I remember comparing Pax Britannica to an account of the stuccoed surface of a dilapidated building. She was happy with that. Later she wrote me a postcard complimenting me on The Lion’s Share, which she said she’d been reading in the bath and found so engaging that she couldn’t get out until the water had gone cold. I think that’s the best review I’ve ever had. I must see if I can find the pc when I get back to England. 

Of course she was a ‘he’ then. Halfway through her ‘imperial’ trilogy she changed sex, and wrote a book about it: Conundrum. I read it – all except the middle chapter, which described the operation. This was a man who had been in an elite Army regiment, climbed Everest with Hilary and Tensing, and fathered five children. Amazingly, and touchingly, his then wife, Elizabeth, stayed with her and has survived her. Jan also became a passionate Welsh patriot, living in the north-west of Wales until her death. It pains me that I never got around to visiting her there. RIP.

Fascinating article here on Trump’s anti-science ‘cult’ and its responsibility for the spread of Coronavirus in the USA.

https://historynewsnetwork.org/article/178317

It’s not getting any better, is it? Both Britain and Sweden seem to be experiencing ‘peaks’ in the virus just now, with only flickering hopes of a vaccine in several months at the earliest. The Swedish statsminister, Stefan Löfven, is scheduled to broadcast to the nation at 7 o’clock this evening (CET), which alarms me slightly; the only occasion I recall the British prime minister doing that previously was to announce that ‘we are now at war with Germany’. That seems unlikely today. Denmark – Sweden’s traditional enemy – can still be pretty irritating, but I can’t see a casus belli there. 

Nonetheless things seem pretty serious. It looks as though we should be planning for a long-term – maybe even permanent – lockdown. For people who have to work in crowded environments, or enjoy company, that’s going to be very hard. Luckily I fall into neither category. Isolation provides the perfect conditions for a writer; my sambo is here in my bubble with me; and other family and friends I can reach via the internet. Thank God – or whomever – for Zoom.

It’s starting to get cold here, with flurries of snow. Luckily I have my long-johns; and yesterday we ventured into the city to buy (among other things) some Bovril, from Taylors and Jones, the wonderful English butchers in Hantverkargatan. A cup of steaming Bovril is just what one needs after a long walk in the cold. Kajsa claims it’s no different from buljong, but there must, surely, be more to it than that?

We’ll see what Stefan has to say this evening. Kajsa’s guess is that he’s going to admonish Swedes to do the right things. Apparently there are no laws in Sweden to enable the government to enforce  lockdowns. It all depends on the individual’s sense of social responsibility. This is a free country, after all! Doesn’t that go against at least one stereotypical view of ‘socialist’ Sweden? But there’s no doubt that people here are  more aware of their social obligations than they are in – say – Britain. There’s hardly any littering, for a start.

7.30 CET: It was much as Kajsa predicted. ‘Keep to the rules for the sake of your fellow Swedes.’