Duas coisas são infinitas: o universo e a estupidez humana. Mas, em relação ao universo, ainda não tenho a certeza absoluta.
(Einstein)
But the tune ends too soon for us all (Ian Anderson)
Apparently it’s easy to make money on YouTube by teaching a course in your specialism. Mine is having no friends. And I share my aversion to humanity with a number of very distinguished names. Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Emily Dickinson and Howard Hughes were all solitary creatures who didn’t allow social frippery to dilute the focus of their ambitions.
Psychologists tell me I have ‘autism’, which is promoted so widely in our society that we ought to call it ‘taughtism’. But I take issue with these experts. I don’t believe I have a neurological disorder. And I’m not some crazy hermit who lives in a cave or a ditch. I simply can’t help noticing that most human beings are a waste of space – myself included. I have a handful of acquaintances whom I see infrequently and always at their instigation. They’re talkative, gregarious types who only contact me when they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel. I’m happy to be scraped.
My companionship is very low calibre. I can’t match anyone in conversation. My mind is sluggish, my opinions secondhand, my delivery hesitant and underpowered. I hear myself wittering away and I wonder why I don’t just shut up. I can barely recall making a witty or worthwhile comment in my entire life. Once maybe. In 1985 I shared a house with Shirley and Jeremy and we were discussing old age. Shirley: ‘I don’t want to live to be 104.’ Me: ‘You will when you’re 103.’ Or maybe Jeremy said that.
Avoiding social events is a skill that involves fibs. To dodge a wedding, invent a christening. (And vice versa.) Skip a funeral by letting the relatives know that your aching heart is too fragile to endure the burial rites. Finding an excuse to bunk off a family birthday party is trickier because your loved ones know about your gamesmanship. A gift is usually required as well, which makes things worse. I hate presents. I always see them as insults. Toiletries: you’re unwashed. Books: you’re unread. Clothing: you’re unkempt. Timepieces: you’re unpunctual. Hankies: you can’t even wipe your own nose. I think I’ve solved the birthday problem once and for all. I give the celebrant a nice new padlock in some shiny wrapping paper. This unusual gift stimulates conversation at the party and delivers a flattering message: ‘You own something that your enemies want to steal.’
Some social gatherings are unavoidable. Drinks parties, for example. Who invented these horror shows? A room full of strangers dosed up with alcohol to numb the pain of being in a room full of strangers. Every-one hates drinks parties. Everyone goes to them. Everyone wishes they could leave. Everyone stays longer than they meant to. When I’m talking to a guest at a drinks party, I feel my mind dividing into an inner and an outer voice. My outer voice, the Public Spokesman, tries to chat agreeably about books or politics or whatever the subject is. My inner voice, the Escape Committee, submits a list of plausible getaway options. I could wave at an imaginary friend and melt into the crowd. I could beg permission to slope off for a cigarette. At a pinch, I could fake a seizure and stagger out of the room clutching my chest. To make the nightmare worse, I’m aware my fellow guest is experiencing an identical torment and is secretly longing for me to vanish into thin air and make way for a more attractive and well-connected companion.
That’s the truth about drinks parties. All of us are praying for the sudden departure of the person we’re lumbered with. It’s like 100 failing marriages in a single room. But I have a solution. The Jeff Bezos technique: think like a billionaire. Jeff doesn’t go to a drinks party for the free grog or to hear unsolicited advice about Amazon’s landing page. He meets the people he wants to meet and then he clears off. He has better things to do. So do you. Find your inner Jeff Bezos. Once you’ve said hello to the host, you can depart with honour. And your sense of liberation may inspire you to stay a bit longer. Not me, of course. I often travel across London to a party and leave about 90 seconds later. It’s not a bad form of entertainment. You can have a nosy around the area. Look at the firebombed churches, the boarded-up police stations, the hunched teens on park benches torching their lungs with weed.
The ultimate prize of the lone wolf is to die in peace. I feel sorry for those ageing movie stars who spend their final days in a private hospital surrounded by fidgeting relatives and the odd fair-weather friend hoping to sneak a ‘last photo’ and flog it to the tabloids. Advance preparation is required and I’ve left instructions with certain family members to ensure that my departure is serene and dignified. The location: a single room. The guest list: nonexistent. I intend to quit this life in a state of perfect solitude guaranteed by a firearm concealed beneath my deathbed. Loaded and unlocked. If I’m disturbed by a nosy well-wisher, he’s going first.
Whatever happened to Britain, or the UK, or England, or whatever they’re calling it? We can’t even agree on what it’s called. But what happened to England, the England that, if you’re over 50, you grew up learning about, the England that controlled the world, the England that ran the largest empire in human history at the end of the first world war?
Britain, which is an island in a pretty inhospitable climate, controlled something like a quarter of the Earth’s surface – and not controlled in the way the United States controls the rest of the world with an implied threat or with economic ties through trade, but with administrators and people sitting at desks with eyeshades, counting things. Way more than Rome, way more than the Mongols, way more than anybody, ever, or maybe in the future, ever.
Britain was the most powerful country in the history of the world. And then 25 years later, it was this kind of sad, soggy welfare state, which is, to some extent, what it still is, except maybe even a little bit worse. What happened?
There are a couple of levels on which to think about this. First is just geopolitical, and I guess they spent a lot of money in these wars and the ruling class, half the class at Eton in 1910 was killed in the trenches. You can think of a lot of different ways to explain what happened to Britain. The fact remains, however, the British won the two biggest wars in human history. They won and yet they’re still greatly diminished and to some extent humiliated. What is that?
So again, the first explanation can be described in economic terms. The United States took over. The British Empire just moved west to its child, the US. They just transferred the power and a lot of the gold to this new country, which had its systems and some of its customs.
But there’s something deeper. If that were the whole story, then Britain would still be recognisably Britain. The English people would still be recognisably English. They would just be not in charge anymore. They would have less money and less power. But the country would be, by any conventional measurement, thriving, just not running the Bahamas and Hong Kong and Pakistan.
But that’s not what’s happened. After winning the two biggest wars in human history, Britain has shrunken not just physically, but in some way that’s hard to describe. Its culture has changed, some might say has been destroyed, and it’s become something completely different. And what is that? And why does it matter what it is?
Well, it matters because what’s happened to Britain, to England, is also happening to many countries in the West, certainly its heirs, the Anglosphere: Australia, New Zealand, the United States, Canada, Ireland. It’s happening to those countries. It’s also happening to the rest of western Europe all at the same time.
A bunch of different profound, never seen before phenomena are happening to all of those countries, including ours here in the United States. So it’s worth understanding what has happened to Britain. So maybe the best image that describes it is the one that we’re about to show you.
Watch this:
So what is that? It’s hard to argue that if your government is arresting people for praying that you’re watching a political phenomenon. Because, of course, praying is not simply a non-violent act. It’s not even a physical act. It can’t possibly, at least in secular terms, affect outcomes or harm anyone. Praying for people can never be a crime. But it is a crime in Great Britain, literally a crime. And the woman you saw is not the only person who’s been arrested for doing it. So clearly we’re watching a spiritual phenomenon here. There’s sort of no arguing it once you see things like that.
But what is that spiritual phenomenon and what are its effects on the people of this country? Before we go further, we should just say that if you visit the ‘Yookay’ as it’s now called, or London, its capital and completely dominant city, the first thing you’ll notice is it’s actually pretty nice. The nice parts of London are as nice or maybe even nicer than any city in the United States. Certainly nicer than any city in Canada or Australia. It’s a great city, filled with lots of happy people.
But broadly speaking, this country has changed dramatically, and it’s changed in ways that are recognisable. Here’s what you recognise. The people of Great Britain are going through a series of crises, and they’re all internal. Drug use, alcohol use. Their appearance has changed. People are no longer as well kept, the streets, the landscape is not tidy anymore. It’s got lots of litter and graffiti in some places. To technocrats, these are not meaningful measures of anything. Who cares if you’ve got graffiti? Does that affect GDP? Well, maybe. Maybe not, but it’s definitely a reflection of how people feel about themselves.
People with self-respect do not tolerate public displays of disorder or filth or graffiti or litter because they care about themselves and their family and they understand intuitively, as every human being does, that once you allow chaos and filth in your immediate environment, you are diminished. So you just don’t allow that. No healthy society does.
But all through the West, these are not just features, they’re defining features. All western cities are filled with litter and graffiti, and people who look like they didn’t bother to get dressed this morning, but are instead wearing their pyjamas in Walmart. It’s not just in your town, it’s everywhere in what we refer to as the West.
The point that underlies all of this is a really obvious one, that too few people say. This is the behaviour of a defeated people. This is what it looks like when you lose. This is what it looks like when you’re on your way out to be replaced by somebody else. This is what it looks like to be an American Indian.
Now, one thing nobody in the United States ever says about the American Indians, except in a kind of pro-forma white guilt way, is these weren’t just impressive people – and no, they didn’t write the Constitution before we did – these were some of the most impressive people, most self-reliant, most dignified. Read any account of early American settlers, people who were pushing west, who came into contact with Indians and yes, were often scalped and forced to eat their own genitals and roasted over open fires. I mean, these were cruel people. But even the people who were in danger of being murdered by them respected them. Because the Indigenous Americans had a great deal of self-respect. They had what we call dignity. And now, hundreds of years later, the opposite is true. The poorest people in the United States are American Indians. Why? Because the federal government hasn’t given them enough. The federal government is completely in charge of the indigenous economy in the United States, and has been for over a hundred years, and it hasn’t worked. American Indians are still the poorest.
Why? Because the Iroquois and the Navajo weren’t impressive? No, they were the most impressive. Again, read the account of anyone who dealt with them. Even people who were dodging their arrows thought they were amazing people, because they were. And now they are by many measures, the saddest people in the United States. Why is that? Some inherent genetic predisposition to patheticness? They couldn’t deal with modernity? Well, they probably could. They were defeated. And in some deep, the deepest way, they wound up destroying themselves. And it’s not unique to them. That’s the point.
And just to be completely clear, all of this is observed with a great deal of sympathy, not scorn. No one’s mocking the American Indians. Everyone should feel bad about it. For real. Again, not in a silly white girl guilty way, but in a real way. These are amazing people. Greatly diminished. And the reason it’s worth remembering is the same thing is happening to the West.
And it makes you realise, especially if you travel a lot, that the problem is not necessarily the immigrants. The problem is what mass migration does to the people who already live there. They’re the victims of it in a way that, again, is hard to measure and sometimes hard to notice, but totally real.
So you walk through this city, London, and it’s been completely transformed by immigration. Completely. And the numbers are really, really clear. One hundred years ago it was nearly 100 per cent white British. Now it’s less than 40 per cent. OK, that’s massive, unprecedented demographic change. The immigrant areas are absolutely poorer than the traditionally white English areas. There’s just no question about it. But wealth as measured by the government is not the only measurement. Actually, and this is true in the United States, too, lots of immigrants who have a lot less money than the native population seem a lot more balanced and happy, both because this is a huge upgrade for them just in terms of annual income and standard of living. But it’s more than that. They’re not defeated. They don’t hate themselves.
And if you have traditional nationalist opinions in the United States, I can confirm this personally, you’re never going to be stopped on the street and screamed at by some Guatemalan who’s like: you are racist for having your views on immigration. No, they’ll probably agree with you. The only people who ever get mad at you are the people who already hate themselves, and it’s always, famously, some private equity wife or somebody who should be happy about how things are going because they’re in the portion of the population that’s benefiting from it. But they’re not happy. They’re angry.
What is that? That exact same thing is going on in this country. And it’s part of a very recognisable syndrome, and it’s the most destructive of all. History is just filled with examples of people who get invaded and clubbed to death and have their women stolen from them, and they’re fine. They’re fine. It’s the people who feel defeated inside who no longer exist. And that is happening to the West. And it’s measurable.
What other society hates its own national symbols? It’s only happening in the West, only in Great Britain. This is coming to be true in the United States. It’s already true in Canada and Australia. What other country finds it embarrassing to fly their national flag? What are you saying if that embarrasses you? You don’t hate the flag. You hate yourself.
And it’s obvious because people who have dignity, self-respect, who believe in their own civilisation want to continue it. How do you do that? By talking about it a lot? No. By continuing it through reproduction. No one is preventing the West from reproducing. And people who come up with these conspiracy theories, like, oh, they’re doing it. No, we’re doing it to ourselves. What else is abortion? It’s not empowering for women. Of course not. That’s absurd. Anyone who believes that is an idiot. Abortion is the way to stop people from reproducing. So is birth control, by the way, of course. So is convincing people that their dumb job is more important than having kids. It’s not. It never will be. Any person who can get clarity for a second will recognise that. It’s only about stopping you from having more of you.
And is there anything that’s a clearer representation of how you feel about yourself than how you feel about having kids? And by the way, it’s not just because these people are selfish and they want to go on vacation and don’t want to pay for children, or they’re worried about how much it might cost. Notice that none of these impoverished immigrants living on Snap and housing subsidies, they don’t seem worried about it at all because they know it’ll be fine. Most of the time it will be fine. They’re having kids when much more affluent natives are not, because they believe in themselves and their culture, their civilisation. They’d like to see it continue. It’s the most basic of all human desires.
So here in Great Britain, which has about a 30 per cent abortion rate, 30 per cent of all conceived children are killed. Who’s doing that? It’s not the immigrants because they don’t hate themselves. They’re not defeated. They’re ascendant. And so they can see the future. They know that they may not live to experience it, but they’re still fully human. And they know you plant the tree not because you can bask in its shade, but because your grandchildren will. This is the most obvious of all human instincts and the most basic.
But the native population in Britain is not debating abortion because it’s not even a debate here. Everyone agrees it’s just an affirmative good, of course, to eliminate your own people. Absolutely. But again, no one’s making them do this. They’ve decided to do it themselves. But now their most enthusiastic campaign is for state sponsored suicide. They’ve already done this in Canada. It’ll come to the United States. What is that? That’s an entire people saying we should exit the stage. Our time is done. It’s over. Let’s go. Someone else will take our place.
This is what defeated people do. This is what happens when you break people inside. And maybe it’ll just reach its terminus. Maybe there’s no way to stop it.
So in Great Britain, if you were to say, wait, what the hell is this? This looks nothing like the country I grew up in – guess who’s going to arrest you? Your fellow Britons. The ones whose great-grandparents lived here. The whites. They’re the ones enforcing this. They’re the ones determined to eliminate themselves.
This is a transcript of a Tucker Carlson monologue, which first appeared in The Spectator’s World edition.
Começo por informar que não tenho conhecimento privilegiado da carreira de Cristiano Ronaldo. Quase não vejo futebol há pelo menos vinte anos, e hoje a minha relação com a bola limita-se a ocasionais vídeos de Pelé e Cruijff no YouTube. Sucede que Ronaldo é tão omnipresente que mesmo o mais distraído dos sujeitos não consegue não saber que ele é um atleta extraordinário, um sujeito com uma dedicação quase desumana ao ofício que escolheu ou que o escolheu a ele.
Em larga medida, Ronaldo é o exacto oposto da maioria dos que, nos últimos dias, se tornaram seus detractores. E por isso Ronaldo é tudo o que os detractores detestam. Nasceu e cresceu na pobreza extrema e, através de um esforço incomum e apenas através do esforço, alcançou fama e fortuna de dimensões impensáveis. Subiu na vida, como se diz. E não se envergonha das origens. E é extraordinariamente bom no que faz, a ponto de ter dispensado as proverbiais ajudas ou “cunhas”. E, numa idade e situação em que podia passar o resto da existência na piscina a contemplar os Bugatti na garagem, continua a resistir à reforma e à preguiça.
Em suma, Ronaldo tem todos os defeitos. Faltava um. O pormenor que faltava para que o ódio dessa gente por Ronaldo explodisse sem amarras “patrióticas” chegou agora. Há duas semanas, manifestou em entrevista uma inequívoca admiração por Donald Trump. Esta semana encontrou-se com Trump na Casa Branca, onde jantou. O dinheiro, os automóveis, a ostentação, os penteados ainda se fingia tolerar, até porque o contrário implicaria exibir um rancor injustificável pelo maior desportista português e a única celebridade portuguesa. Ainda havia um módico de decoro, ou de vergonha na cara. Após a entrada em cena de Trump, o decoro foi-se e o descaramento irrompeu com força.
O ódio que se verteu nas “redes sociais” não espanta. O ódio vertido nos “media” convencionais também não. As televisões, principalmente as televisões, estão repletas de “especialistas” em Política & Variedades que ocupam noventa por cento do seu tempo a esconjurar o presidente americano (os dez por cento restantes são aplicados no dr. Ventura). E é engraçado verificar a relação directamente proporcional entre o nível de fúria que Ronaldo lhes mereceu e o grau de idiotia que os “especialistas” habitualmente demonstram. Sumidades que juraram aos espectadores pela saúde mental de Joe Biden e pela vitória de Kamala Harris acham-se com legitimidade não só para continuar a comentar coisas mas para achar “inaceitável” a ida de Ronaldo a Washington. Em canal que não recordo, vi um sujeito, que jamais vira, recomendar “cautela” a Ronaldo. Outro aconselhou Ronaldo a ir a Gaza. Não é necessariamente verdade que os recursos naturais são limitados: a estupidez de tantos “especialistas”, por exemplo, é infinita.
Corre por aí a tese de que a inveja explica tamanho ódio. Trata-se de uma explicação parcial. Claro que a burgessos convencidos de que expelir inanidades na Sic Notícias é o apogeu do cosmopolitismo, a ascensão de Ronaldo à Sala Oval deve doer. Porém, o que lhes dói mais nem é Ronaldo, ou o brutal abismo que separa Ronaldo da mediocridade deles: o que lhes dói é o ocupante da Sala Oval ser Trump. O Síndroma do Destrambelhamento fez inúmeras vítimas, e não acredito que invejem encontros com Trump – excepto durante um comício, a partir de um telhado e com arma mais bem calibrada que a de Butler, Pensilvânia. Com Biden ou Obama no poder, os medíocres calariam a inveja e louvariam a honra concedida ao “melhor jogador do mundo”.
Por fim, há a questão da Arábia Saudita. É uma ditadura brutal? É, e os recentes progressos evidentemente não bastam para redimir o regime. Mas nem a pergunta nem a resposta são essas. Eis as perguntas: alguém levantaria sequer uma ligeira objecção caso Ronaldo tivesse acompanhado uma delegação saudita ao Eliseu, a fim de obsequiar o badameco local? Ou ao Torquemada da Temu que mora em Downing Street? E eis a resposta: não, obviamente que não.
Para cúmulo, estamos a falar de criaturas que, com altíssima probabilidade, ignoraram ou aplaudiram os múltiplos e fraternos encontros de “estadistas” nacionais com Hugo Chávez, Nicolas Maduro, o sr. Lula, Fidel Castro, Vladimir Putin (depois da Crimeia), os presidentes de Angola, o soba da Guiné-Equatorial, o torcionário da China, o saudoso Kadhafi (recebido em glória por cá) e, vejam lá, o próprio príncipe herdeiro das Arábias, com quem o prof. Marcelo reuniu em Riad e em Lisboa. E estamos a falar de criaturas que possivelmente festejaram os golos da “selecção” em paraísos dos direitos humanos do calibre da África do Sul, da Rússia e do Qatar.
O problema das criaturas não é especialmente com Ronaldo, ainda que a grandeza deste os humilhe e ajude a expor a respectiva pequenez. O problema é com Trump. O problema, hoje, é sempre com Trump, que embora ao contrário de Ronaldo não pareça ter muitas virtudes, tem a virtude maior, que é a de irritar as pessoas certas: as que nunca deixam de estar erradas.
For perhaps the first time in my life I have experienced ‘fomo’ – fear of missing out. It is strange to feel this teenage sentiment now I am safely in my forties, and even odder that it should occur in relation to a party political conference in Liverpool. Yet as I sat watching videos from Your Party’s first conference this week, there was no way to avoid the feeling that I had missed out on something big – a feeling only intensified by the likelihood that Your Party’s first conference will also be its last.
It pains me that I should have missed out on the opportunity to see some of this week’s events in person – beginning with the fact that party founders Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana fell out before the conference began, with Sultana boycotting its first day. Perhaps because of this infighting, the party members ended up voting for neither MP to lead the party and instead approved a model of ‘collective leadership’.
Watching the people who took to the podium gives you some idea of how well this ‘collective leadership’ is likely to go. For instance, there was a gangly young chap who introduced himself by saying that his name is Joseph and that he uses ‘she/they’ pronouns. Joseph next mentioned that he comes from West Yorkshire but had recently moved to Edinburgh. He stated this last detail in that style of ‘upspeak’ which left the impression – accentuated by a slight pause afterwards – that Joseph either wasn’t sure if he had recently moved to Edinburgh, or imagined that such a move deserved some ovation.
Without doubt Joseph was a star of the conference. While first on stage he wore what appeared to be a hand-knitted bobble-hat in the colours of the Pride flag. This probably gave the audience some hint as to whether Joseph belonged to the Islamic wing of the party or the trans wing of the party. (That’s not to say that these two wings cannot get along, of course: Your Party is evidence that they can get along perfectly well for several minutes.)
Joseph informed conference that when it came to the party’s organisational strategy, he was advocating for ‘Option A’, which would allow it to stand candidates as widely as possible. He acknowledged the concerns of some delegates with this option, including the possibility that it will ‘allow transphobic and racist and otherwise bigoted candidates to stand in the name of Your Party’. He went on to refer to two MPs who he said ‘had recently resigned after making transphobic comments’. At this point the chairwoman tried to cut him off – a move that the Your Party chairpeople had to grow used to.
Allowed back on stage later – this time without his hat – Joseph was one of a number of speakers who admitted to being a member of something called ‘Socialist Alternative’ and thus ‘very against the purges of our comrades in the Socialist Workers party’.
Another star of conference was a Scouser whose name and sex appeared indeterminate. They announced themselves as ‘a non-binary person’, at which point she (on re-watching it I’m inclining towards ‘she’) shouted: ‘Give it up for the trans people everybody!’ Some of the hall whooped. Egged on, the speaker continued: ‘Thank you, comrades. And it’s an honour and a privilege to be stood speaking on this podium today. The reason I am saying yes to socialism in this political statement is because as a trans comrade, as a disabled comrade, as a mad comrade, as a neurodivergent comrade…’ It isn’t often in political life that people actually announce that they are mad, though it certainly provides their critics with a shortcut.
Not that Your Party needs outside critics. There are enough on the inside. Last month, MPs Adnan Hussain and Iqbal Mohamed quit Your Party for reasons that are, like every-thing else, disputed. Sadly, when Sultana finally did speak to the conference she found herself heckled over the loss of these MPs. A male Muslim speaker from the floor insisted there had been a purge of people with ‘conservative’ views.
Lest anyone fall into the misunderstanding that Your Party has been infiltrated by the Conservative party, a solution to the riddle was soon provided. It appears that Hussain quit because – unforeseeably – he wasn’t fully on board the trans train. Which in turn led Sultana to accuse him of ‘bigotry’. With this now finally out in the open, Sultana responded by accusing her Muslim interrupter of misogyny. ‘Sorry, this is my speech,’ she said, truthfully enough. ‘It is misogyny. It is misogyny.’ At which point another activist started shouting: ‘We should not be screaming over each other.’
Outside the main hall a young white woman in a keffiyeh confronted Corbyn to clear up the question of whether or not he is ‘anti-Zionist and anti-imperialist’. A clearly frustrated Corbyn said: ‘Look, I’m fed up with being painted into a corner as being some kind of pro-Zionist.’ If you, or anyone you know, has ever spotted that corner or that paint then write in and I will send you a cash prize.
Amid a gathering crowd, Corbyn’s tormentor pushed on. A man with the distinction of being the former leader of both the Labour party and now of Your Party was put through a struggle session over his anti-Zionist credentials. This included the charge that he has been insufficiently supportive of ‘the resistance in Palestine’. Eventually Corbyn exploded: ‘What do you think I’ve spent my life doing?’ It was both a plaintive question and an easy one to answer. What Corbyn and his friends have spent their lives doing – most recently with Your Party – is trying to smelt electoral gold from incompatible metals.
Perhaps my regret at not attending this year’s conference should be overridden by pity for those who were let in.Most of them seemed to be the sort of people who should never be allowed out.
Readers tend not to approve of rows between columnists, but I must take issue with something Lloyd Evans wrote in ‘No life’ last week. Our theatre critic claimed that his companionship ‘is very low calibre’, that he ‘can’t match anyone in conversation’ and that he ‘can barely recall making a witty or worthwhile comment’ in his life. I should like to disagree.
Some time ago at a party in The Spectator’s garden I got talking with Lloyd and he said one of the most interesting things I’d heard in years. I had gone over to congratulate him on summing up the general awfulness of most of George Bernard Shaw’s plays in just a few paragraphs in a recent column, and then began commiserating with him. My sentiments went something along the lines of: how do you do it? How does anyone put up with having to go to places like the Royal Court Theatre almost every night to see so many appalling plays, and yet still report back fresh, weekly, from the front lines?
His reply was as pellucid as anything he has put on the page. ‘Most of the theatre isn’t really the theatre,’ he said. ‘Then what is it?’ I asked. ‘I think it thinks it’s a thinktank,’ was his reply.
That observation returns to me almost every time I see something new in London or on Broadway. And it returns to me whenever I see some appalling actor or actress publicly oppose some government policy or other. Not that they do that much when Labour is in power, obviously. But whenever they do make a stand, thanks to Lloyd, I think: ‘Of course. They must be so frustrated.They think that they are going to change the world – or even a government policy. And yet their means of trying to accomplish this is to appear nightly in some Caryl Churchill play, to a half-full house of well-off and bored theatre-goers.’
In fact Lloyd’s observation that evening has led me to compile in my head an ongoing list of other industries in our culture which are something other than the outsider imagines them to be. The publishing industry, for example. You might imagine that publishers want to publish books that will inform, entertain and instruct the general public – hopefully making a bit of cash along the way, and generally widening the borders of the republic of letters. Yet whenever I hear of some eruption of rage from non-binary junior staffers at a major publishing house, followed by the almost inevitable kowtowing by their seniors, I am reminded of the reality:that much of the publishing industry believes its job is to assert the boundaries of what should be permissible to say or do in the culture and then beat those boundaries mercilessly.
Again, as with the theatre industry, there must be an unbelievable amount of frustration and unhappiness in a life spent doing this. Because all the time some junior editor at a failing publishing house is trying to keep public opinion and knowledge restricted, an enterprising young Substacker is blowing the whole thing open anyway.
There are other, more obvious examples of the rule. The teaching unions. Most people who claim to be involved in the education industry. Parts of the National Health Service. Readers might like to make their own additions.
Anyhow, I say this not just to point out that Lloyd does not have an accurate view of himself, but also to point out that in my experience people quite often say things they think haven’t landed but which cause ripples and sparks in other people for a long time to come. One lesson I have learned in life is that we should be better at telling people when they have made a difference to us. Which is why I offer up this gentle rebuke to a columnist I admire.
Speaking of the world of letters, this week brought news of the death of the author and journalist David Pryce-Jones. David was literary editor of this magazine in the early 1960s, and an occasional contributor until his death aged 89. By any measure he led a remarkable life. The son of former Times Literary Supplement editor Alan Pryce-Jones, David’s mother’s side of the family were Austrian Jews, and so he spent his childhood fleeing the Nazis. The family left Austria for France when David was a baby. In 1940 he was woken by his nanny as the Nazis were advancing on Paris. He ended up being taken south and across the border into Spain, and spent the war years in North Africa.
Coming to England after the war, he had a both conventional and highly unconventional education and career – as readers of his memoir Fault Lineswill know. In a long and remarkable life he not only delighted his friends and readers, he was also a moral lodestar. His fierce anti-Nazism was perhaps inevitable. His book Unity Mitford: A Questbrought him into conflict with the remaining apologists for that horror, including, on one occasion, a live television debate against Oswald Mosley, chaired by Melvyn Bragg.
But David’s anti-communism – and indeed his anti-Islamism – were just as strong. The variety of people his many worlds brought him into opposition, alliance or friendship with is demonstrated in his wonderful 2020 bookSignatures, which takes readers on a tour of some of the books in his collection which authors had signed for him and describes the circumstances in which this happened. The list included Arthur Koestler, W.H. Auden and Albert Speer.
In person, as on the page, David was a figure of steely moral force and effortless delight. All his friends can attest that there was no one else you would rather spend an evening with. He was a friend but also a guide. After the editor and critic John Gross died, Martin Amis said in a eulogy that every-thing he wrote, he would still always in some sense pass by Gross’s desk. I feel the same about David, and always will.
It is very hard to imagine the University of Oxford ever constructing a modernist building again. This is the significance of the new Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities. In its sheer scale, in its prominence both within the city centre and within the university – the first multi-department, purpose-built structure to open in its history – it is the most important building to be erected in Oxford in half a century and an endstop to an architectural era. One can imagine that its use of a restrained classicism won’t just influence the architectural aesthetics of Oxford but also of other universities within historical cities, both in the UK and internationally.
Its impact is all the more profound given its radical – in Oxford terms – proposition. Since that unfortunate incident in 1209 when Oxford’s townspeople lynched a student, prompting some scholars to flee to Cambridge where they founded an alternative place of study, the university has developed a built form to keep the city at arm’s length. The beautiful cloistered quadrangles that we know today are legible as such only from the inside. They are walls to those who live outside them. This typology has evolved but remained largely unchanged even into the 20th century.
This is despite the fact that one of the propositions of modernism in postwar Britain was to be somehow open, either visually through glazed façades or through huge open plans once inside. This has not been the case in Oxford, where the impact of modernism has been largely symbolic. The exoskeleton of the Thomas White Building at St John’s College by Arup Associates may straddle the old wall on Lamb and Flag Passage but it remains inaccessible except to those who are allowed through the porters’ gate. The Schwarzman is a genuine attempt to reorder that relationship with an open-access building – the public is free to wander both the ground floor and basement.
One of the achievements of the postwar modernists, however, was their ability to create megastructures that blended multiple uses – Denys Lasdun’s University of East Anglia complex comes to mind. At the Schwarzman Centre, the marriage of so many departments is reconciled around a central route at ground-floor level between two formal north and south façades, all clad in the Clipsham stone that was introduced into Oxford in the 1870s and has since gradually replaced the local stone.
At its centre is a three-storeys high, oak-lined space with entries to key departments at cardinal points. Rather than sacrificing the symmetry and coherence of this atrium, the reconciliation of the different needs of departments happens away from view. Meanwhile, the toing and froing of 600 academics and their students to seven different departments – including English, history and philosophy – takes place beneath an oak crown that shades the building’s dome: a compelling image of tradition and modernity in harmony. The really complicated work is in the basement, with its jaw-dropping, 500-seat, wood-and-concrete concert hall, a brilliant little 250-seat theatre, and several other performance spaces.
It is said that the classicism of the centre is largely down to the taste of the donor, which perhaps says something about the strength or otherwise of the planning committees in the city. However they have got lucky. Stephen Schwarzman is the co-founder of equity firm Blackstone and a Republican super-donor, with an off-on friendship with Trump and an MBA from Harvard Business School. If his £185 million gift to Oxford seems strange – he’s not a Rhodes scholar – that is to judge him by the generally self-serving culture of US philanthropy. Fortunately Schwarzman has a sense of the civic values of universities and a very clear architectural agenda.
Following the incredible growth of Blackstone in 2013, he created a Rhodes-style programme for US students at Tsinghua University in Beijing and through that founded a key relationship with the American architect Robert A.M. Stern. The Beijing Schwarzman is clad in the grey brick characteristic of the city and uses its typologies to create strong shared spaces. Beyond a low garden wall with open-entrance pavilions is a courtyard, around which is a double-height forum. The big conference space is beneath the courtyard, not unlike the Oxford Schwarzman. Above, the scholars live in single rooms around common lounges. Stone and brick panels surround large windows, all beneath a traditional tile roof. Classical but with Chinese characteristics.
Stern – his playful postmodernist period of the 1980s well and truly behind him – was also the architect of the classical extension to the Harvard Law School in 2012, not funded by Schwarzman but clearly something that the donor, and Hopkins, the architects of the Centre for the Humanities, have looked at. The variegated limestone façades and arched entrance porches of the building in Cambridge, Mass., are more portentous than the refined Georgian scale of the Oxford porticos but we are, as they say, in the same ballpark. In the buildings that Schwarzman has funded, there are a coherent set of ideas: they are impressively democratic in intention, if not in practice, and appear motivated by a belief in classical architecture as a vehicle for civic principles.
For the Schwarzman Centre at Yale, Stern renovated the 1901 Commons building by Carrère and Hastings together with three floors of the adjoining Memorial Rotunda. Perhaps this was where the Oxford building was born. Like at Oxford, the Commons offers a large, central space with simple architectural gestures: in Yale’s case, a dining room with brick pilasters that lead the eye up to ornate roof trusses. From plain brick and wood, something of great grandeur is made.
Oxford has had modern classical architecture before of course. Robert Adam produced the Art, Archaeology and Ancient World Library, half a mile away from the Schwarzman in 2001. Adam’s building is admittedly less classicist and more postmodern than perhaps was intended. The drum of the library is a cramped melancholy echo of the baroque Radcliffe Camera to which all circular forms in Oxford make obeisance. (Indeed the central spine of the Schwarzman is similar to the plan of the Camera and its environs, albeit as a domed interior.) Adam’s later Levine Building at Trinity College was disappointingly bland: a Mittel-European courtyard building.
But the Schwarzman supersedes the style wars – the late 20th-/early 21st-century jousting match between the trads (of which Adam is one) and the moderns. Andrew Barnett at Hopkins Architects may claim his building is contextual; it does share something with the Oxford University Press building on nearby Great Clarendon Street: a grand entrance with plane wings, stone-fronted, brick-flanked. However the Centre’s closest neighbour is the futurist glazed disks of the Blavatnik School of Government (2012) by Herzog de Meuron. The Schwarzman is a riposte to that building, a clarification of the organisational principles of late 20th-century megastructures. It offers a symmetrical building, with a central entrance route through two arched classical porticos clad in stone. A palpably traditional civic institution.
It is a long time since a modernist building has had a similar impact; the University Campus UTEC in Lima (2015) by the Irish practice Grafton Architects springs to mind. In Oxford, this architectural movement has only left a handful of striking examples: the Denys Wilkinson Building, built to house the Van de Graaf generator, and James Stirling’s cramped, mildew-infested Florey Building. (The fractious build of the Florey and the flaws in its construction put the university off building anything in any style for most of the 1970s and 1980s, and led to senior academics at Oxford writing to colleagues advising them to blacklist its architect.) The Blavatnik arrived as a strange, almost primitivist end point to all this, with perhaps Powell & Moya’s overlooked Wolfson College presenting the only compelling vision of education’s task in modernist form.
Of course there is a certain irony that the rather flat façade of the Schwarzman was made in a factory near Worksop: prefabrication being one of modernism’s key innovations. And yes, the ominously named and factory-like Life and Mind Building – which will house the departments of experimental psychology and biology – creeps towards conclusion, much of its massive bulk hidden away at the eastern flank of the city centre. The Schwarzman, though, shows that the energy and the money is with the classical.
Everyone’s moaning about political bias at the BBC. They have done for years. And they’ll continue to. The right’s accusations that the BBC is anti-Trump and anti-Israeli are mirrored by the left’s accusations that the BBC is pro-Israel and reluctant to criticise Brexit. This indicates the difficulty of the broadcaster’s role, and suggests it’s probably doing something right.
The bigger issue with the BBC is that it is dumbing down its output, a process that it’s half confessed to with its vow to make ‘lighter’ content for ‘C2DE’ audiences, whatever they are. If you want an example of this condescension, look no further than the BBC’s latest blockbuster series, Civilisations: Rise and Fall, which began on Monday night with the Sack of Rome.
In its worst parts, it seemed more like a Channel 5 effort, for post-pub viewers on a Friday night. There was needless CGI, sepia rinses and five talking heads a-minute making vapid sound bites. BBC arts chief Suzy Klein had the chutzpah to compare it to Kenneth Clark’s 1968 TV magnum opus, Civilisation.
She acknowledges – and who wouldn’t – that Clark’s Civilisation ‘became a defining piece of television, opening up a world of art and culture to audiences at home’. She says the new series, Civilisations: Rise and Fall, ‘is the next iteration’.
There was actually a second ‘iteration’. In 2018, ubiquitous TV intellectuals Dame Mary Beard, David Olusoga and Simon Schama examined the role that art has played in shaping civilisations around the world. It received criticism from some quarters for lacking a coherent narrative. But at least the programme makers couldn’t be accused of dumbing down. They can this time. It seems the BBC can’t trust us to concentrate on something as monumentally interesting as the fall of the Roman Empire for more than three minutes without the help of cheap gimmicks.
The talking heads, in particular, were numerous, annoying and relentless. Historian Kristina Sessa, with arms waving, was clearly keen for as much airtime as possible, despite not having that much to say.She even tells us the same thing in successive sentences. Apparently, Honorius, the callow emperor who presided over the city’s fall, ‘is not from Rome. He is not even born in Rome.’ So that’s clear.
Actually, at least that made sense. Her initial contribution was designed to set the scene in 410AD as Visigoths stormed the Eternal City. ‘Imagine thousands of men pouring into your city and rushing into your home,’ she trilled. I can’t. I live in a 60 square metre flat in Kennington.
There were countless interludes with ham actors, supposed to illustrate political intrigues in the imperial palace. The impression was less I Claudius and more Carry on Cleo.
The second episode looks at the fall of the Ptolemais in Ancient Egypt. We don’t have commentary from Cleo’s Amanda Barrie, although we might as well have. Instead, we’re treated to the expert analysis of Alastair Campbell. Yes, Tony Blair’s old spin doctor. No, he hasn’t spent recent years retraining as an Egyptologist. He is on hand to belabour the point that ancient empires, including that of the Ptolemais, suffered from the same sort of social political crises that we do.
The series continues another depressing trend, highlighted recently by the recent documentary series Human: the emergence of the poseur-presenter. Human was difficult to watch for more than a few minutes without wanting to throw your dinner at the pouting face of presenter and paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi, as she flicked back coiffured curls and made am-dram gesticulations. The BBC seemed to think we were too shallow and feeble-minded to watch a documentary on something as fascinating as the history of the human race, without an attractive, camera-loving guide to maintain our attention.
Having a young, female presenter of Arab descent shows inclusive hiring. If TV representers from minorities are talented – the brilliant Ade Adepitan comes to mind – then sign them up, I say. But communication skills should be the top priority.
There were other defects in Human’s story-telling; particularly a lack of clear graphics or timelines to reinforce the deluge of claims and information – an odd failing given the BBC’s desire to make its high-profile documentaries accessible and intelligible to a wide audience.
Instead, we had endless blurry, low-res images of black extras from central casting posing as prehistoric family units, trudging across murky landscapes.
Civilisations has its very own poseur, Luke Kemp, from the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. We are treated to his front and side profiles, as he smiles beneficently at the camera in a green velvet jacket, white shirt and pendant. He looks and sounds like a life coach. Which isn’t to suggest Kemp is a charlatan. But it does add the impression that the BBC think that ordinary people have the attention span of gnats. We don’t.
There is so much interesting stuff in Civilisations: Rise and Fall – from Rome, Egypt, Mexico and Japan. We want to hear it, without the gimmicks.
Too much information. That’s what you’re about to get. I wouldn’t read another line if I were you. I will be talking, at length, about my prostate and, by extension, my old fella and why I will not let the medical clergy anywhere near either of them, not the private medics or the chaotic maniacs who work for the NHS. I don’t mind whipping it out for you, though – and so this is an article which is both repulsive in its personal revelatory details and will also, if anyone takes it seriously, result in 230 premature deaths over the next decade or something. I don’t think it’s going to get me on the shortlist for the Orwell prize, then. But telling unpopular truths hasn’t worked very well either, so never mind.
My attitude towards doctors has always been: stay the fuck away from them. Go to the GP only when you know what’s wrong with you, in order to procure the requisite ’scrip. Or, in fairness, for trauma injuries. I always considered them quite good at those, at least until I drove my car into a large tree and – following 12 hours in A&E and then X-rays – was given completely the wrong diagnosis. ‘Your shoulder is broken,’ one of them said, jubilantly. ‘No it’s not,’ said his colleague the following day. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing’ is what I replied. To both.
I don’t know if you notice, but GPs score an average of three to four thousand quid on the cash-builder round of The Chase, only an inch ahead of teachers, who come across as almost immeasurably thick. We have been schooled to revere these people but I am not at all sure why. They are floundering in a fuzzy universe in which their algorithms work about 50 per cent of the time.
And yet consent to them sending you for tests and you will never, ever escape their clutches. You will live out the rest of your life being tested, waiting for test results, listening to their mistaken analyses of what those test results mean, clobbered by a terror of the dark which awaits us all and hopelessly in their thrall, believing that they represent the shining edifice of science.
They do not. They represent the slightly more foxed edifice of shit education and stunted imaginations and the affectation of wisdom. No offence intended, it’s just how it seems to me. And then they will zap you with radionuclides or poisons synthesised from a periwinkle which make you puke all day and go bald and give you an extra year of life. Gee, thanks. What a year that was!
A little under a year ago I had a conversation with my friend and colleague Giles Coren, who had written a piece for the Times about how he had gone for a prostate screening thing and they’d detected a tiny amount of cancer. Why on earth did you do that, I asked him – and Giles laughed and made a very funny (and quite correct) comment about my medieval lifestyle and how in some ways it was commendable but in other ways, such as this way, it was not. Trouble is, all Giles’s tests revealed was the intimation of mortality: you have this thing – it is of no consequence and requires no treatment, but we ought to keep an eye on it, because one day it might go bananas and kill you. More tests. More doctors burrowing their happy way up his arsehole. And all the while the worry must nag away.
Giles says it doesn’t – he’s an insouciant chap, as well as a lovely writer. But it would with me. It would cloud every second in a manner that the foreknowledge of my own death, which one assumes will happen in the not vanishingly distant future, simply does not. We are all under a death sentence: I just prefer mine to be a bit vague and both unregulated and privatised.
I don’t have much doubt that if I went for a test they’d find something. I get up every night at four o’clock for a piss and then return to bed, pull the covers around me and read for an hour, in preparation for my cosy second sleep. I’ve always been a bit useless at holding it in and sometimes, in my twenties, I would need the lavatory so urgently that I would unzip my fly and take out Cousin Norman before I had actually reached the pub toilets, which occasioned some concern among other patrons, especially women. Also, it is probably true to say that I do not quite have the – how can I put this? – ardour I had when I was 16. Sometimes I think that if Nastassja Kinski materialised in front of me in a leather basque purring ‘Take me, panther boy’, I’d only manage a semi. Both of those are indications that something is up. But both are also indications to me that I am 65 years old. A chicken for whom spring is but a distant, libidinous memory.
It’s more than that, though. We should take care of our personal health of course, but not to the extent of signing up to medical torture, to intimidation cloaked in kindness and concern – and pristine fitness is not the only thing in life. I agree with the chairman of the cancer screening committee who this week rejected universal prostate screening tests. Professor Mike Richards said: ‘The harms are that it can leave people with incontinence and impotence, and the numbers who will be affected by that exceed the numbers, considerably, that would have their lives saved.’
Quite. And if more evidence were required, I would suggest that almost every-body who has been demanding universal prostate cancer screening also believes that we should recognise the Palestinian state and haul Benjamin Netanyahu before a war crimes tribunal. Oh – and also this. That 12,000 men die from prostate cancer every year – perhaps half the number who suffer medical errors that contribute to their death.
