Porter’s Pensées

I’m a bit of a fan of ‘alternative’ history. There’s nothing wrong with that. All historians need to speculate about ‘what might have happened if’ history had turned out differently, in order to understand why what actually happened did. For me it started with a novel I read ages ago set in a modern Britain (and world) where the Reformation hadn’t taken place; no, not Kingsley Amis’s The Alteration, though that was quite funny – Harold Wilson as a Cardinal, for example – but another, earlier one entirely. It had a steam-driven car on the front cover. (Catholic theology had banned the internal combustion engine.) Can anybody remember? It was more serious than the Amis. More recently I’ve been devouring all those books predicated on the Nazis winning the War – Robert Harris’s Fatherland, for example. And then of course there are similar fables written about an ‘alternative’ USA. I have to say that none of these fictions seems anywhere near as unlikely as what we have in both the UK and the USA just now. I sometimes think that we’re actually living in a speculative novelist’s ‘alternative history’. No-one would have believed in a Trump or a Johnson if a novelist had invented them. Reality should be more normal than this.

I mention it because for years now I’ve toyed with the idea of writing a ‘What If’ novel myself. It wouldn’t be at all serious, and therefore of any use to historians, but I thought it might be fun. It arises out of the research I used to do into the early London Metropolitan Police Special (or political) Branch; and out of one particular police report I discovered in the course of that. It was penned by an officer whose job it was keep a watch on Karl (or Charles) Marx, the famous London resident. The officer reported back  that Marx was showing no sign of plotting against anyone or anything, so that he could be safely left alone.

Jolly good. It was reassuring to know that our boys in blue were guarding the interests of Britain so resolutely, so that the late Victorians had nothing to fear. Except  that the date didn’t fit. When this report was written, Marx had been dead for three years. Which suggested three possibilities.

The first one was that the Special Branch was a bunch of idiots; which would be entirely consistent with its other activities at this time. (See my The Origins of the Vigilant State, 1987.) The second was that they were somewhat over-zealous, and fearful lest Karl might be resurrected, emerge from his grave in Highgate Cemetery, and resume his fearful career as scourge of the capitalist class. I imagined our portly policeman sitting in a deckchair by his grave, a bottle of Alsopp’s pale ale by his side, keeping an eye open for any sign of the topsoil being disturbed from beneath.

Or – thirdly – did the Special Branch know something we don’t? Maybe Marx faked his own death, adopted a clever disguise, and then, sick of all that writing and plotting, lived his final years in pursuit of another career? That’s the scenario on which my ‘alternative history novel’ would be based.

Then, I admit, it gets a bit silly. Here I was influenced by the career of one of Marx’s followers, the socialist Henry Hyndman, who founded the first genuine British ‘Marxist’ party, the Social Democratic Federation, or SDF; but who before that had been – of all things – a county cricketer. (He’s in Wisden: played in the 1860s for Cambridge University and Sussex, right-hand middle-order batsman, highest score 64, average 16.26.) Hyndman was converted to communism by reading Marx; but what if the conversion had also gone the other way? And then I looked at who else was playing county cricket at that time, and especially at their beards; which of course led me on to the most famous late-Victorian cricketer of them all, WG Grace, whose beard was as spectacular as Karl’s was. All Marx had to do was to trim his differently – longer, less at the sides – and it would amply disguise any other differences in their physiognomies. Then – after getting rid of WG’s body, and a bit of coaching from Hyndman – he could concentrate on making centuries for Gloucestershire, while maybe doing just a little dialectical materialism – to keep his hand in – when he wasn’t actually at the crease.

But sadly, it doesn’t work age-wise. Marx was thirty years older than Grace. In 1883, when he would have taken over from the genuine WG, he was 65. Cricketers  played for longer then than they do now, but not into their 70s. Which is why I’ve abandoned my ‘alternative history’ project. That’s a shame, as I have the Police and Cricket history at my finger-tips. Perhaps I can find another plot to make use of these skills. WG Grace as Jack the Ripper, perhaps? He was a doctor, after all…

Well, it’s a change from genuine history. Facts can be so boring, Ask any postmodernist.

There’s one powerful argument in favour of the forcible toppling of the 17th century merchant Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol yesterday: which is that he was a vile slave-trader who did not merit being memorialised in this way. I must admit that I personally felt some satisfaction on seeing (on TV) his effigy being tipped into Bristol harbour, whence many of his slave-ships had sailed, literally crammed with Africans for sale in the New World, many of whom died and were unceremoniously dumped in the Atlantic before they got there; to the lasting shame of those responsible at the time, and arguably of their descendants too. (One direct descendant has written on Facebook to say that he was not at all unhappy to see his ancestor treated in this way. Good for him.)

But there are also two equally powerful arguments against. The first is historical. If we remove the visual and public evidence of men like this, we also delete them, and their sins, and the nation’s sins, from history. So people walking around the streets of Bristol (or Oxford, where of course the Rhodes statue outside Oriel College was recently the target of a similar movement to remove it) will no longer be reminded of the dark underside of British history, which must be undesirable. Only memorialising ‘good and great’ people can encourage a rose-tinted and falsely patriotic sense of history, which – as we can see today in the case of Boris Johnson, and all his Brexit nonsense – is illusory and can be highly damaging.

What was wrong about the Colston statue was the inscription on its base, which made no mention of the ‘commodity’ he dealt in as a shipowner, but only of his generosity to the city. Apparently that has been controversial for some time, with efforts being made to change the inscription getting nowhere. But that would have been preferable to moving him out of sight and out of mind. Either that, or stick him in a museum. But publicly memorialising him as a villain would be better.

The second argument against pulling down his statue is the ammunition that gives to the Right. I watched the long Commons debate on the incident this afternoon: one Tory MP after another attacking the ‘mob rule’ of the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, with only a few token – and probably insincere – mentions of the racism it was protesting against. The ‘law and order’ Home Secretary, Priti Patel, was obviously relishing it. And so the antics of a few hotheads effectively obscured the more important issue; as they so often do.

I’m sorry, but I still hold a candle for Jeremy Corbyn. Here’s an excellent recent piece, penned by two journalists who certainly can’t be dismissed as ‘Corbynistas’, on the scurrilous campaign that was waged against him.

https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/killing-jeremy-corbyn

Of course he was unequal to the forces ranged against him. I’m now prepared, out of loyalty to the Labour cause, to go along with Keir, who is probably more politically astute. (I see that he’s already given in to the ultra-Zionists.) But I’m not going to abandon Jeremy, in my heart, just because he was crucified.

Of course we’re not at the end of it yet; but already it has to be accepted that Britain’s response to the coronavirus pandemic is one of the most incompetent and disastrous of any nation’s, resulting in many thousands of unnecessary deaths, mostly the direct and criminal fault of our government. Why is this? Does ideology come into it: the neoliberal-cum-Malthusian idea that the plague should be accepted – ‘taken on the chin’ in Boris Johnson’s words – in order to weed the unfit out of the population, so making the country more efficient? Is this what’s meant by ‘herd immunity’? Or is it simply because we have a government of fools?

If it’s the latter, then the mess that Brexit made of our politics must shoulder much of the blame. Patrick Cockburn of the Independent explains the connexion here.

https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/coronavirus-lockdown-government-death-toll-boris-johnson-a9551516.html.

So, another unwanted effect of that disastrous decision in June 2016. How are the mighty – or at least the haughty – fallen!

I watched this press conference live on TV this morning.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-barnier-eu-uk-trade-talks-boris-johnson-latest-a9550691.html?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR23QXq17irrpYxc6gWIhusqE7_m6VzeOn8TJ055wwDs_AkkmSNZxB4rBSo#Echobox=1591356993.

Barnier is listing all Johnson’s broken pledges to the EU over the last few months. Comparing him to our politicians – Boris and his pathetic Brexit trusties – made me want to weep, and to long for the (general) good sense of European bureaucrats again. It recalled to me what my ex-student, a retiring MP, told me was the opinion of many of his fellow Tories late last year: ‘Boris will always let you down’. Utterly unprincipled, vacuous, a mediocre author and worse historian, a disreputable journalist, a bumbling and incoherent speaker, and on his way to becoming the worst prime minister Britain has ever had – all in all what Shakespeare would have called a ‘scurvy knave’ – he’s almost as disastrous for us Brits as Trump has been for our cousins over the water. It’s almost as if Falstaff – the scurviest knave in all Shakespeare’s corpus – became king. Already Boris has managed – though not alone, I grant you – to push our Coronavirus mortality figures to the top of the international scale. For someone who’s always boasting about how he wants Britain to ‘lead the world’ in just about everything, that must be disquieting.

Or does he actually take pride in it? – I’m reminded of the Jimmy Cagney figure in White Heat, cornered on the roof of a blazing refinery, shouting ‘Top of the World, Ma!’ as he burns. After the present crisis is over, and when we’ve worked out what will follow it (socialism? Fascism?), we’ll need to do some serious thinking on what it is about our ‘democratic’ systems in both countries that can propel such ludicrously unfit men to the top. Poor political education? First past the post? The power of money? The historical imperatives of late capitalism? The media? The continued domination of the Public schools (here)? Pure chance? Or is it some intrinsic flaw in the ideal of ‘democracy’, and consequently – because this follows – in ‘the people’? After all, in Shakespeares’s time the groundlings adored Falstaff .

I get a number of these: emails from school students hoping – in effect – that I’ll write their essays for them. I imagine she’s contacted other historians too.

Doesn’t it occur to them that we might have expressed our ‘opinions and ideas’ in books? Or are requests like this intended to relieve them of the necessity of reading? I’ve written back kindly, simply recommending the latest and shortest of my own works on British imperialism. Let’s hope she knows what a ‘book’ is.

I don’t mind, incidentally, specific questions that have occurred to students after  they’ve done a bit of work on the subject. But this is different.

Good evening,

I am currently in Y12 and am starting to think of coursework ideas and am thinking of doing it on the British Empire, I saw you were a historian who specialises in this area and was wondering what your thoughts were. I was thinking of doing it on what factors affected the growth and decline of the British Empire in the 19^th century (1800s) and would love to hear your opinion and ideas.

I appreciate in these difficult times you may not be able to get back to me but I would love to hear your views

Thank you for taking the time to read this email and I hope to hear from you in the near future,

Many thanks, ********

When I first published books I used to eagerly check all the papers for reviews of them, usually taking hours to leaf through all the likely ones in my university library. (This was before Google Search, of course.) Now I rarely bother, which is why I must have missed this one in the LRB four years ago, despite being a subscriber and indeed a contributor to that distinguished journal myself. Maybe I was in Sweden at the time? I’ve also come to reconcile myself to the fact that no-one – except a few academics – is really interested in my stuff; which is OK because I mainly write to please myself. (You might call it literary masturbation.) Of course I’d like to influence others, but have now given up on that. The book reviewed here was my final effort to spread my ideas about British imperialism in a more ‘popular’ way to a wider audience, but so far as I can tell it failed in that. At any rate it never went into paperback.

So I was surprised suddenly, while crouched over my computer this morning, to hit on Ferdinand Mount’s rather good four-year old piece on British Imperial: What the Empire Wasn’t; ‘good’ because he’s clearly read and understood the book, which not all reviewers do. (Incidentally: isn’t Mount a Tory?)

Here it is: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v38/n07/ferdinand-mount/lumpers-v.-splitters. I also quite like being described  there as ‘both pugnacious and good-humoured’. Perhaps they could put that on my gravestone? (Until now I’d favoured ‘He Made a Mean Mashed Potato’.)

Not that I’ll have a gravestone. I’ve asked Kajsa and the kids to have me cremated and my ashes scattered in the park by St Albans Abbey. The funeral, if there is one, will start with this: before coming on to the Elgar, of course. Black humour at its African-American best.

But I’ve wandered off the topic.

I’m greatly missing the Swedish summer, and my beloved sambo. Can anyone advise me how to get from Hull to Stockholm during lockdown?

Strictly speaking, as a vulnerable oldie I shouldn’t leave my house; and even then of course there’s the ‘two metres’ self-isolation rule. As well as this, I understand that there are no longer any  flights from the UK to Sweden; and in any case I wouldn’t feel comfortable being crammed into a plane for two hours with hundreds of potential infectees, or – for that matter – into a train taking me to Gatwick or Manchester airports. I could go by boat from Hull to Rotterdam, isolating myself in my cabin; but then I’d need to catch a train through Holland, Germany and Denmark before reaching Sweden, and couldn’t bank on getting a socially-distancing carriage. Kajsa could meet me in Rotterdam in her car (I don’t have one, and am no longer allowed to drive); but it’s an awfully long way, and likely to be interrupted by national anti-virus frontier controls. (I should be OK at the Swedish frontier, with my new Swedish passport.) A friend has offered to build a Viking boat to take me all the way from the Humber across the North Sea and around Norway to the Swedish east coast, but – as she tells me – she has to learn how to sail first. So it looks as if I’m stuck here in Yorkshire. Kajsa’s friends are working on the problem; but it might tax even the Great Brain of Dominic Cummings.

Mind you, Sweden might not be all that safe a place to move to. It currently has a death rate from the coronavirus, per head of population, only a little lower than Britain’s. Kajsa suggests it’s because their welfare system means that more old people live long enough to be struck down by it; but whatever. Frying pans and fires come to mind. But I’d be willing to risk it. Apart from anything else, I too need a haircut. Any ideas?

Renaissance Florence isn’t ‘my period’ – to trot out the familiar historian’s defence – but I do wonder whether the Medicis don’t provide the closest precedent for present-day British politics; not in their bloodiness, of course, but in the amorality of their political discourse. I did study Machiavelli as an undergraduate (for ‘Political Theory’), both the Prince and the Discourses, and remember writing an essay where I argued that he wasn’t really commending the low tricks he described there, but was merely making his readers aware of them so that they could avoid being influenced by them.

As an Etonian and a Classicist, Boris Johnson may well not have read anything as modern as Machiavelli; but the Discourses, of course, were based on ancient Roman history, which he did steep himself in. The conduct of both Boris and Dominic Cummings – who will almost certainly have ‘done’ Machiavelli in his ‘Ancient and Modern History’ course – is reminiscent of the great Florentine, in its apparent underlying assumption that politics is a game to be won or lost by fair means or foul, and without much concern for ideology, except insofar as it might attract the people you need to support or (in a democracy) to vote for you. ‘Principles’ and ‘values’ are similarly unimportant, except as tools. Hence Cummings’s famously technocratic approach to politics, moving on from Machiavelli to employ the latest clever means of influencing the outcomes of elections and referenda, like the now notorious Cambridge Analytica. If lies and tricks can win power for you, then so be it. ‘Playing the Game’ is an outmoded English concept.

I’ve known people like that in ordinary life: who if questioned on their conduct would have less regard for the ‘truth’ than for ‘what they can get away with’. That has been Boris’s habit all along, and seems to be Dominic’s too. Sometimes they’re found out, if they’re stupid enough; which is why Boris has his deserved reputation as a rogue and a liar; the cleverer ones however, like Dominic, keep it better hidden. But the stigma of dishonesty has stuck to both of them; and is the reason why Dominic’s extraordinary explanation for his out-of-lockdown Durham trip yesterday was so widely doubted – and indeed much mocked.

The extent to which this will damage either of them can’t be known at present. They could survive – like Trump has done. But I wouldn’t be surprised if Cummings is out quite soon; or Johnson, with that other unprincipled Machiavellian, Michael Gove, taking his place, and Cummings staying on as his Svengali. Mikey is no better than Boris. This is not a prediction, but a warning – of the kind that I used to attribute to Niccolo.

The most recent of Dominic’s lies is his claim yesterday that he anticipated coronavirus a year ago in his blog. In fact some clever blog detectives have established that the reference to coronavirus was inserted into that blog retrospectively. So he’s perhaps not so clever after all. Ultimately the tragedy of the ‘Cummings affair’ may be that it undermines trust in Boris’s and Dominic’s government even further. So ‘character’ – the sort of thing the Public Schools were supposed to impart, but clearly do no longer – may after all be important in politics.

In the meantime it’s reported that the UK has now come out top of the international scale of deaths by Covid-19, measured as a proportion of her population; higher even than the USA and Brazil, and up there with – sadly – Sweden. A world-beater, you might say.

Boris can’t get rid of Dominic. He’s his brain. Boris on his own is glib, lazy and fundamentally stupid. Dominic by contrast is – not exactly intelligent, I would say, but cunning. He read History at University: a more cerebral subject than Johnson’s Classics, which is chiefly a matter of having a good memory. (That at any rate was its reputation at my University; and I’ve seen no evidence since from ex-Classical scholars to prove me wrong.) Apparently Dom’s History essays at Oxford were highly ‘original’; which may testify to his cleverness, but not necessarily to his judgment.

Obviously that rather let him down during his latest escapade – breaking his own government’s ‘stay at home’ injunction to drive up to Durham – unless it was part of a very cunning plan to – I don’t know – undermine his present patron, so that he can take over; or perhaps to further his original scheme – ‘herd immunity’ – to infect oldies, like his parents, in the North-East with the virus he’d picked up in London. (Can it be a coincidence that the mortality level in County Durham, quite low before he went there, soared soon afterwards?) In any case, he’s clearly indispensible to the duffer Johnson, who wouldn’t have won either the Brexit campaign or the last General Election without Dom’s Machiavellian scheming.

It’s hard to see where either of them goes from here. Even Tories are dismayed that Dom is still in post. There are even choppier waters coming up, what with Brexit, a new Great Depression, and all the rest. Boris’s schoolboy bluster – painfully exhibited in his ‘defence’ of Cummings at his televised press conference this afternoon – won’t get us through all that. And Cummings’s ‘scientific’ approach to politics, if he can find another patron after Boris – Gove, perhaps? – looks positively dangerous.