Porter’s Pensées

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.

I’m working just now on the copy-edit of the new edition of my The Lion’s Share, due out in September. It’s very little changed from the 5th edition (2012), apart from a new concluding chapter on ‘Brexit and the Empire’, which will constitute my final thoughts on the question of British imperialism; or so I imagine, unless Boris succeeds in his old Etonian wet dream of restoring Britain’s glory to its former heights. The first version was published by Longmans 45 years ago. Since then it has passed through the hands of several publishers, as each was bought up by another, with no say in the transaction by its poor authors, who were simply dragged into their new stables as ‘property’.

In the present case this has meant that the present ‘owner’ has been unable to use any of the type-setting of the previous edition, or the art-work, without seeking and paying for ‘permissions’ again. My biggest disappointment here concerns the cover; which has gone through several versions; my favourite of which by far was the first one:

That was modelled and painted in-house by Longmans. I pleaded to have it restored to the new edition, but nothing doing. So instead I chose this one from a number of ‘Getty Images’ the publishers sent me. I think it’s of the sculpture in front of the Rhodes Memorial in Capetown. It doesn’t really represent the main argument of the book, which is far less macho; but it should be striking enough. (The subtitle should say ‘1850-2020, by the way.) I think you’ll need to click on to it to see it.

Porter cover suggestions (Porter cover suggestions (dragged) 2) 

The copy-editor whose work I’m checking is terrific, by the way. Copy-editors have the most boring job in the whole literary world.

I’ve been watching the rather prescient 2011 film Contagion (Matt Damon, Gwyneth Paltrow…). Quite incidentally, I was struck by this statement, from the mouth of the character played by Elliot Gould: ‘Blogging isn’t writing. It’s graffiti with punctuation.’ That’s put me in my place.