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)
Hippies at a rock festival, 1969 (Globe Photos/Zumapress)
I grew up in the America of the 1960s, an era renowned for its kaftan-wearing hippies, its ethos of free love and hallucinogens, and demos against the Vietnam War. This was something that caught the imagination of my two London-born, English sons, once they were old enough to have acquired some knowledge of recent social history. And they naturally assumed I’d been part of that whole scene, with flowers in my hair and love beads around my neck, smoking pot and blasting out Jimi Hendrix records from a bedroom hung with Che Guevara posters. They took it as read that I was at the legendary Woodstock music festival and danced all night in a muddy field. This image of their youthful mum appealed to them, so they convinced themselves it was real.
It couldn’t be further from the truth. I had to tell them that their mum had been a real square, as they called uncool people back then. I wasn’t in the least bit psychedelic, having no interest in drugs. I didn’t even smoke pot, although practically everyone I knew did. Once, when I was 15, a boy asked me if I liked grass, and I honestly thought he meant the stuff of lawns. I shrugged and replied ‘Well, it’s nice to walk on with bare feet.’ Square, huh? I did smoke cigarettes, albeit very mild ones called Virginia Slims, designed for women. (Their advertising slogan was ‘You’ve come a long way, baby.’ I guess they didn’t mean me.)
I didn’t dress like a hippy, either. Instead, I took my cue from the Sally Field character in the 1960s sitcom Gidget. She was a California beach girl who went surfing and favoured those ribbed-cotton ‘poor boy’ tops and sleek slacks. I didn’t surf, obviously, it wasn’t a thing in suburban New York. But back then, I actually bore such a close resemblance to Sally Field that kids at school would ask me if we were related. When I said yeah, she’s my sister, the more gullible ones believed me.
So that leaves political activism. Anti-war demos? Nah, never went on one. I didn’t rail against the Vietnam War. Don’t misunderstand – I wasn’t a hawk or anything. It’s just that I didn’t have much time to fret about it. While others were out chanting ‘Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?’, I was probably trying to get my parents’ permission to attend some friend’s house party, or agonising over whether the posh private-school boy I’d met while out shopping would ever call me, or desperately hoping I would pass my driving test the second time around if I didn’t go through a red light again. You see? A bit preoccupied.
Decades later, when my teenaged sons probed me about my presumed wild youth – did I ever have a bad LSD trip? Get roughed up by the cops? Burn my bra? – I would smile patiently and explain that they had got me all wrong; mine had been a very un-1960s sort of existence. They would merely smirk, exchange looks and retort ‘Sure, Mum. Yeah, right.’ They reckoned I was simply whitewashing my ‘groovy’ past so as not to encourage them into a life of sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll. The alternative was too awful to contemplate: that their mother didn’t know that ‘grass’ was marijuana and hadn’t been a flower-child putting a daisy in the barrel of a National Guardsman’s rifle. That she had, in fact, been entirely, embarrassingly, devoid of hippy street cred.
This 1960s theme cropped up from time to time over the years, but despite my protestations, my sons hung on to their preferred notions of my past. In the end, I stopped denying any of it. Today, I have two teenage grandsons. I won’t be going through that rigmarole again. After all, what does it matter if your offspring, or their offspring, have a few harmless illusions about you? We perceive everyone – even those closest to us – through the prism of our imagination, and there’s always a bit of refraction in that, a bit of added colour. So I’ll take a different approach this time. ‘Look, guys,’ I’ll explain, ‘there’s an old saying: “If you remember the 1960s, you weren’t there.” So yeah, man, it was crazy! But my memory of it is a bit hazy…’
‘Not all suffering can be relieved’: A debate on assisted dying
Credit: John Broadley
As Kim Leadbeater’s private member’s bill comes before the Commons, the former justice secretary Lord Falconer (who introduced a similar bill to the Lords) and The Spectator’s chairman Lord Moore debate assisted dying.
CHARLIE FALCONER: The law has effectively broken down. If you assist anybody to take their own life, you’re immediately guilty of an offence, irrespective of motive, and you can be sent to prison for a maximum of 14 years. Even the authorities no longer think that’s enforceable. The Director of Public Prosecutions, the chief prosecutor in the country, has introduced rules that say there are certain circumstances in which he will not prosecute, particularly where somebody assists another to die motivated by compassion and is not a medical professional. That indicates the law is failing and needs to change. When people talk about the moral overreach of the state, they are blind to the fact the state is already there.
CHARLES MOORE: Is that really what this is about though? I don’t believe that what you’re really saying is we just need to clean up a thing in the law. I think you’re saying we need to change a very big thing in society, which is that we now want to help people kill themselves. It is a factual misnomer to call it ‘assisted dying’. This is assisted suicide. And you’re in favour of it.
CF: I’m in favour of somebody taking their own life, which legally is often called suicide, where they are dying already. I am strongly in favour of a situation where, if I have a terminal illness, I am entitled to make my own choice as to the moment of death.
CM: Why are you so nervous of the word suicide?
CF: I used it just then.
CM: You did, but you said, ‘is often called…, etc’. There is a massive moral, not legal, prohibition on suicide because there’s an important thing at stake about human life.
CF: I prefer ‘assisted dying’ because when you talk to people who are in this position, they don’t see it in terms of suicide. They see it in terms of how they will die in the context of terminal illness.
CM: But the problem with ‘assisted dying’ (and it’s an even greater problem with the cant phrase ‘dignity in dying’) is it elides a whole load of other things. There is masses of assisted dying – and so there should be. It’s called palliative care. Opinion polls suggest that a large number are unaware of this distinction. So when you ask ‘Are you in favour of assisted dying?’, if you then explain that that does not include palliative care, the number of people who are in favour of it goes down, which is what you’d expect. There’s wool being pulled over the eyes of the public.
CF I don’t think when people are asked, ‘Are you in favour of a bill that allows people who are terminally ill to be helped to take their own life?’ they think that includes palliative care. But opinion polls shouldn’t determine whether or not parliament passes this. People should look at the details of how the thing works and say whether or not we can improve it. I’m sure we can.
***
CM: Do you not sense the strength of the arguments on the other side?
CF: I sense there are groups who are strongly against it – the Catholic Church, for example. The depth of their feeling is very, very strong, but I do not detect broad support against it. My sense is that most people who come to it without a spiritual or moral view will say: ‘I think it’s probably quite sensible.’
CM: It’s right that there are a lot of religious reasons why people object, but I don’t think that’s why people in general see problems. The arguments of those who have seen the suffering of people and therefore want assisted suicide are important to hear, but there are a lot of people on the other side who also have direct experience of this. There are people in palliative care, for example. There are families with disabilities. I know one wants to avoid the cliché of the slippery slope, but if you trace what’s happened in Oregon, Canada, the Netherlands and so on, you notice that the criteria move. There are extreme cases, which admittedly are untypical, but they do arise. You get conditions of mental illness in which young people are persuaded to end their own lives. There are cases of autism. I’ve read a case of tinnitus. One of the things that’s difficult about this is that most of us, luckily, don’t deal with people who have severe illnesses all the time, so we don’t know what happens in palliative care. I worry people think there is only one kind way out. It isn’t as simple as that.
CF: First, your point that some people in palliative care are against it is right. But equally, some people engaged in palliative care are very strongly in favour of it. Secondly, you imply that a terminally ill bill could lead to people with tinnitus being given an assisted death. That is wrong. You then clump together Oregon, the Netherlands and a variety of other countries. The select committee on health did a report last year in which they confirmed that where a nation or a jurisdiction decides it wants some sort of assisted dying bill, if it starts with a terminal illness bill, as opposed to an unbearable suffering bill, that is where it sticks.
CM: So you would be against an extension beyond terminal illness?
CF: I would. I am against, as a matter of policy, the state assisting people to take their own lives save in the context of terminal illness.
The other point you made was that the proponents of this bill are saying this is the kind way out. Most people won’t want an assisted death. They will want to go on with a maximum palliative care that can be obtained. But everybody you talk to indicates that there are some people, no matter how good the palliative care is, who cannot bear to go on. Sometimes it’s the pain which cannot be dealt with, but sometimes it’s the indignity. Earlier you slightly sneeringly referred to dignity…
CM: I don’t refer sneeringly to dignity. I am critical of the appropriation of the word to your side of the argument.
CF: For some people the idea, for example, of being dependent upon one’s adult children can be something they just cannot bear. They do not want to be a burden.
CM: These wishes at these times are understandable. But I worry about it as a basis of law. It raises something which is not quite understood about suicide, which is the effect it has on other people. I’ve seen this very much with people who’ve committed suicide – nothing to do with assisted suicide, just suicide. One of the sad things that happens when you’re in a mood to commit suicide is that you become, through no fault of your own, solipsistic. Everything’s closing in on you. You think about yourself and you think very badly of yourself. Therefore, it’s hard for them to understand that by killing themselves they cause great pain to others. They often think they’re doing a kindness to others. I’m worried about the balance of the whole of society about persuasion in these matters and where it might lead.
Near us in Sussex is this wonderful thing, the Beachy Head Chaplaincy.Because of the wretched effect of the internet, Beachy Head is now a global suicide destination.People come in huge numbers to kill themselves there. All these chaplains do is walk along up to where people jump and they try to dissuade them. Last year, they dissuaded something like 500 people from jumping. That seems to be a very interesting example of the power of persuasion for good. Almost nobody would say: ‘How dare they try to persuade them not to jump? They have their own right to jump!’ But it’s jolly difficult to kill yourself if people are engaging you in polite conversation. By the same token the other way round, if we create a society in which you are in some circumstances encouraged to kill yourself, we change the moral basis of society. Vulnerable people will be more vulnerable.
CF: You rightly contextualised your remarks on the basis that you are not talking about terminal illness. You’re talking about suicide in a different sort of context. That’s why, as far as I’m concerned, there’s a rock-solid line that the right to be assisted only goes to people who are terminally ill.
***
CM: What’s being proposed is unfair on doctors, because the new law is not asking them to make a medical judgment about the best interests of the patient. It’s asking them to sit in judgment on the patient’s choice.
Lying behind your argument is the idea that choice is the supreme virtue here. One reason people are so upset about death is that they’re used to exercising control, and they find it very hard to be in a situation where they don’t have it. Fundamentally you cannot control the fact that you will die and I worry about the pressures on society if there appears to be a choice on this matter. Our law, our social relations, and our overall moral judgments depend on the idea that we should not intentionally kill one another or help kill one another. If this [the Assisted Dying Bill] comes forward, we are setting up a choice, presented to everybody who faces a terminal illness. This is an unpleasant choice to be confronted with for professionals, for judges, for the families and people involved.
It will also result in exploitation. The sad fact is some people very much want people they know well to die. Another fact is most of the people who are in this situation may not be in a good position to exercise a choice because they are suffering from the drugs they’ve taken, mental distress, tiredness.
CF: You appear to be saying that people should not have a choice when they are terminally ill as to how and when they die. I recognise the need for safeguards in relation to that, but I do not think that is an inherently bad thing. Indeed, the underlying principle of the terminal illness bill that I have introduced is that it is inherently a good thing that you should have a degree of autonomy about how you die.
The second point you made was that if people are given a choice, that choice is subject to exploitation and abuse by others. Completely separately from my bill, when one is ill there are a lot of choices that have to be made, and many of those choices are not the choices of the patient at all. They are made by their doctors, hopefully with consultation, but sometimes not. Those choices are presumably equally exploitable in your book, but have no safeguards whatsoever. It seems to me that if there has to be your treating doctor, an independent doctor and a judge to check that you are not being exploited, that’s a pretty strong safeguard.
And your third point, that people reach what might not be their real view because they’re tired, they’re ill, they’re depressed… People who have had experience of dealing with those who are terminally ill will tell you it’s often very clear what people want. I’m interested in your austere view that people should not have choice in this matter.
CM: It’s not austere. It’s trying to remember that we live in a culture and we live in a society. What’s at stake here is how the whole of society is constructed in the most humane way possible. This is a practical policy thing as well as a moral thing, because it’s a question of what happens next. So, for example, in a National Health Service which is notoriously desperate for money, despite getting more and more all the time, it will be cheaper and in some sense easier for there to be more assisted suicide. In some societies people will say this sort of thing quite openly. In more unpleasant societies they will extend that to the handicapped and so on, because people have a totalitarian idea of ‘What’s the point of somebody who’s not productive?’ You do not want to open the door to that way of looking at things. But you don’t have to open that door. I was distressed by Kim Leadbeater saying that if we don’t get her bill, the choice will be ‘suffering, suicide or Switzerland’. No. It’s insulting to the hospice movement and palliative care to say that and it’s insulting to a lot of non-professionals who look after those they love. Not all pain can be relieved, not all suffering can be relieved.
But nevertheless, there’s a more optimistic way to look at our society. When you and I were young there was much more of an assumption, for example, that nothing much could be done about disability. It was thought that children with Down’s syndrome had to be more or less locked away and couldn’t be integrated into society. Similarly, we have the collective capacity to assist dying, in a real sense. There’s an inner pessimism in your side of the argument, which I’m resisting.
CF: I reject the suggestion that if you introduce a heavily safeguarded assisted dying provision, that is going to lead to people saying: ‘Oh, people who are disabled should just be not treated.’ I repudiate that opening the door in this way will lead to this horrible dystopian picture you create.
***
CM: There are serious questions about the [prognosis of] six months [in order to qualify as ‘terminally ill’]. It’s not often tremendously easy to diagnose terminal illness, particularly within a time frame of six months. Because of the great improvement of drugs, it makes it hard to judge whether ‘six months’ will mean anything. You will have an odd situation if your bill is passed (or Leadbeater’s) in which people actually want a terminal diagnosis because they’ve decided this would then allow them to have assisted suicide.
CF: It requires a judgment, but a lot of medical care requires a judgment. In the majority of cases it will be plain that the person’s death is coming in the next few days or weeks. This is not really a problem. You identify a group of people who have a chronic condition that is not immediately going to kill them, but they want a diagnosis of six months or less so they can avail themselves of assisted suicide. You’ve created this scenario. Do you have evidence that that’s what’s happening?
CM: I’m sorry to go back to the phrase, but there is a slippery slope in these things because there are a lot of people who want [assisted dying] who have a fundamentally different approach to human life to what I do and perhaps even what you do. They actually want there to be more euthanasia. It’s not just that they’re trying to remedy a desperate situation. They think there’s something wrong about people existing in conditions that are suboptimal and they would like the world to be rid of people like that. The Voluntary Euthanasia Society, which Dignity in Dying emerged from, has a background in the history of eugenics.
CF: The idea that a bill where two doctors and a High Court judge have to approve it is, in fact, the thin end of a eugenic wedge is absolute nonsense. It is such an inflammatory and unfair way to oppose the bill.
CM: No, it’s not inflammatory. Although I don’t perhaps have quite your reverence for the judiciary. We are giving the power of life and death to judges.I’m sure they’ll act conscientiously, but it worries me. You’ve tried to separate the arguments for your bill from wider arguments, but am I not on to something about the cultural effect of helping people kill themselves? We often love criticising taboos, but they are very important things. They restrain us from doing the things we tend to want to do.
CF: The way you’re framing your opposition is so overdone. You are sensible and compassionate, and your responses are probably the responses of most people in this country. Yet at the same time you wrap up your opposition to the bill in risks that don’t really exist. Why do you think the law cannot reflect a sensible practice of distinguishing between the compassionate and a much more pernicious sort of behaviour? Is the difference between us my faith that the law can manage it?
CM: The scales will be pushed the wrong way. It will encourage some bad actors to act worse, and it will put more pressure on the weak and ill to feel that it would be a kinder thing for them to go. It has wider consequences. One has to see it as a whole and as a whole it’s a move in the wrong direction.
CF: Yes, you do have to see it as a whole. The consequence will be that you will reduce quite considerably the suffering of a significant number of people. You will not remotely encourage bad actors, nor will you put pressure on the vulnerable, because of the level of safeguarding. It will bring compassion where at the moment there is only confusion and terrible compulsion.
CM: There isn’t only confusion and terrible compulsion. There’s a great deal of good done. That’s what we need to bolster.
CF: You set the kindness and compassion in the palliative care movement against those who want an earlier moment of death when they are terminally ill. There is no conflict between the two. Both can coexist.
This is an edited transcript of the conversation. Watch the full debate on SpectatorTV at spectator.co.uk/tv.
detail of a painting by Francisco de Zurbaran, 1630 (Bridgeman Images)
As I leant over to speak to one of my dining companions in a busy restaurant, I felt something shuffle on my knee. I briefly wondered if it was a rat. But it was just a busybody waiter, who had taken my napkin from the table and folded it upon my lap. It was a bit strange that he did so without asking – but then, this same waiter had, when taking our order, crouched down (so that he was sitting on a chair) and asked, ‘Are you guys ready to order, and do you want me to explain the concept?’ So much to dislike.
My biggest gripe used to be waiters who poured your wine too frequently, and too full, in their mission to total the bottle so that you order another. A few years ago, I was in a very high-end restaurant for a celebratory meal to mark a special occasion, and had ordered some rather expensive wine. The waiters wanted to turn the table – even though this was not official practice at this particular venue. And because we were just a bunch of women, with no men involved to add an air of authority, they kept refilling my glass even though I had barely had a sip. When I told them to please stop, I heard one waiter whisper to the other, ‘Don’t give any to the cunt in the middle.’ I complained so hard that I ended up with a sizeable chunk taken off the bill.
Another thing that drives me mad is being told that the kitchen will send out whichever dish it fancies whenever it happens to be ready, so you might end up with the dessert coming first and the olives last. Then there are the tapas places where the tables are about 10 cm square and the numerous plates are in constant danger of toppling onto the floor.
Being asked repeatedly if everything is OK and whether we are enjoying our food is also a major irritant. Although to do so once is polite, I always think that if there was anything wrong, you might be expected to mention it to the waiter – despite being British.
What else? How about those chefs who think themselves celebrities, with their tour of the tables at the end of service – so that just as you’re about to take a mouthful of dessert, you find yourself having to make polite conversation with someone you would really much rather just stayed in the kitchen.
Or waiters that don’t bother to write the order down, and then get something wrong – or have to come back twice to check. Big ego thing. Some places insist that all of the food is perfectly seasoned and therefore don’t put salt and pepper on the table, then look at you as if you’re some kind of jumped-up pervert when you ask for it.
But my most serious complaint is reserved for restaurants that are incapable of serving up everyone’s food at the same time. What do you do? Force yourself to start eating (and therefore not enjoying it at all) as you look over your shoulder for where the rest of the food is? And waiters who start clearing the table before everyone has finished eating come a close second.
Of course, it’s a two-way street: let’s not forget the hell that some diners put restaurant workers through. I’m thinking of diners who continue chatting to each other, oblivious to the presence of the poor waiters standing by the table, balancing heavy armloads of dishes. And then the blank stares when half of them have forgotten what they ordered, while the server desperately tries to stop the plate from sliding onto the floor. If it were me, it would go straight into the diner’s lap.
I have eaten out with people who never even deign to look at the person serving them, just carrying on with the conversation as the food and drink magically appears before them. I would ban phones in restaurants. Not only because of how rude it looks to other diners when people act as though they are eating in their own home, barking into the phone and ignoring both the food and their dining companions – but also to stop them from taking photographs of every bloody course they are served.
Other crimes I would like to see punished include using fingers to scoop out ice when there is a perfectly good pair of tongs on the table, eating from a knife, and going outside for a smoke between courses. There is no room for complaints about the food or the service if diners behave like Neanderthals themselves.
At home, the left sees him as cynical, conniving and corrupt; while the right sees him as tired, weak and unambitious. Abroad, he is almost universally loathed and distrusted. And yet no one can deny his Machiavellian mastery of the dirty game of politics, domestic and international.
Modern history has produced only two figures who fit this description. The first is Germany’s Iron Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. The second is Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu. For Bibi – his nickname and the title of his recent autobiography – read Bibismarck.
Netanyahu has been Prime Minister for almost 14 of the past 15 years, not quite the 19 years Bismarck served as German chancellor. For nearly a decade, whether Bibi should stay or go was the central question of Israeli politics. Between 2018 and 2022, Israel held five elections in which one of the rallying cries of the opposition was ‘Just not Bibi’. In August last year, Israel was racked by anti-Netanyahu protests that drew hundreds of thousands to the streets, including almost every member of the country’s cultural and even military elite. The surprise attack of 7 October was seemingly the final nail in Netanyahu’s political coffin.
Yet there Bibi still sits in his office in Jerusalem: still Prime Minister. As the anniversary of 7 October approaches, he is again ahead in the polls.
And no wonder. Hamas has largely been vanquished in Gaza, its remaining fighters confined to tunnels under a heap of rubble. More impressively, Israel has conducted arguably the most successful clandestine operation of the 21st century, maiming around 3,000 Hezbollah operatives with explosive pagers. And it is waging a war in all but name in Lebanon, attacking more than 5,000 targets in the past month and eliminating 16 of Hezbollah’s most senior operatives.
Last week, Bibi was at the UN General Assembly, defiantly quoting the Prophet Samuel: ‘The eternity of Israel will not falter.’ Half an hour after he stepped down from the podium, from his hotel on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, he ordered the killing of Hassan Nasrallah, the seemingly invincible secretary-general of Hezbollah. On Monday, Netanyahu went even further. In a video addressing the Iranian people, he hinted that Iran ‘will be free sooner than people think’.
Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at the UN General Assembly in New York City, 27 September 2024 (Getty Images)
At the time of writing, Iran has launched more than 180 ballistic missiles at Israel. Judging by his recent performance, Netanyahu may seize the opportunity to hit the Iranian ‘octopus’ over the head, seeking to topple the theocracy in Tehran, or at least to strike a blow against its nuclear weapons programme.
When we met with Netanyahu in Jerusalem in February, we were struck by his Bismarckian demeanour. Throughout our conversation, he kept glancing sideways to a map of the Middle East that hangs on his office wall, as if to remind himself of his country’s predicament. Bismarck famously said that his map of Africa was a map of Europe. Bibi’s map of the world is a map of Israel, tiny and surrounded by foes.
Asked what a future historian in 20 or 30 years’ time might think about him, he replied: ‘The United States was declining. But Israel was able to resist the regional ambitions of Iran by defeating or containing the tentacles of the octopus.’ He added that in pursuing this objective, he always took care to avoid antagonising ‘superpowers’, meaning Russia and China. The future historian may add that, by focusing relentlessly on the Iranian threat, Netanyahu succeeded in building bridges to the Arab states, including those in the Gulf, while at the same time marginalising the Palestinians. The Abraham Accords were the result not of idealism but of vintage Realpolitik. In pursuit of his goals, Netanyahu has worked with Russia in Syria, enabled Hamas in Gaza, and defied first Barack Obama and then Joe Biden in Washington.
Moreover, like Bismarck, Bibi has combined devious foreign policy with devious domestic politics. He took the soft-left Yair Lapid as his finance minister, the hard-right Itamar Ben-Gvir as his national security minister and rallied the conservative masses against the liberal bourgeoisie with the lightning rod of judicial reform, repeatedly dividing the nation to secure his own political position.
Bismarck instrumentalised German unification to defend the Prussian monarchy and aristocracy against the threat posed to them by bourgeois liberalism. He built the German Reich with a series of short, sharp wars: against Denmark, against Austria and against France. Having founded the Reich, he never lost sight of Germany’s vulnerable position between France and Russia. He devised the intricate diplomatic instrument of the Secret Reinsurance Treaty to avoid being dragged into a fight with Russia on Austria-Hungary’s behalf. All this could be sustained domestically only with a series of artful measures to divide the liberals, exploiting their anti-Catholicism and anti-socialism, as well as the susceptibility of the industrialists to the temptation of tariffs.
Yet, for all the resemblances, Netanyahu seems to be reliving Bismarck’s career in reverse. In 1874, 16 years before being forced out of office, Bismarck complained: ‘I am bored. The great things are done.’ After close to the same amount of time in office, Netanyahu has never been less bored, for he now has the chance to do the great things. The decapitation of Hezbollah may be his Königgrätz, the battle in 1866 which confirmed Prussian primacy over Austria. Destroying the Iranian nuclear programme – or the regime itself – would be his Sedan, the battle that doomed the Second French Empire of Napoleon III.
In Krav Maga, Israel’s national martial art, breaking out of a headlock requires striking the opponent in the head with a free hand, disorienting them, then going on the offensive. This metaphor describes many episodes in Israeli military history. In 1955, Operation Elkayam killed 72 Egyptian soldiers in retaliation for the Fedayeen insurgency, humiliating Egypt into a ceasefire. In 1967, Israel launched the Six-Day War as a response to Egypt’s closure of the Straits of Tiran. In 1978, Israel launched Operation Litani to end PLO raids in northern Israel. Israel’s headlock, before and after 7 October, was obvious. Iranian proxies – Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, Palestinian Islamic Jihad – threatened it from multiple sides. We now have a sense of how Netanyahu seeks to emerge from it.
Launching a new war in Lebanon gave Israel three options. The first was to trigger an Iranian response, which would yield an opportunity to strike either the Iranian nuclear programme or the stability of the regime itself. The second, had that not materialised, was to hit Hezbollah so hard that Iran weighed in to try to push Hamas into a ceasefire on Israel’s terms. The third was to pre-empt a harsh reaction by a weakened Hezbollah, which would have given Israel the opportunity to effect lasting strategic change north of its border.
As with all Bismarckian stratagems, there were many risks involved. It seems unlikely that the Hamas chief, Yahya Sinwar, if he is still alive, will be more likely to agree a ceasefire now, as Hamas does not depend on Iranian supplies, and a larger war might even save it from perdition. And an all-out Lebanon War would absorb Israel’s capabilities, giving Iran a window to sprint to a bomb.
Bismarck saw five fronts in his famous ‘combinations’ (Austria, Britain, France, Russia, Italy). Netanyahu has to think about more than seven (Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen and Iran – to say nothing of Turkey, Egypt and the Gulf states). The coming days, more than any other period in his career, will determine Netanyahu’s place in history. As the son of an historian – his father Ben-Zion wrote The Origins of the Inquisition in Fifteenth Century Spain – Bibi is no doubt aware of that.
Perhaps the most profound similarity between the Iron Chancellor and the Iron Prime Minister is the way they look at history. Survival is more important than ideology, a principle that extends as much to one’s own political career as to the life of the state. Bismarck was born in 1815. His political career tracks the rise and fall of the great powers’ Congress System. Netanyahu was born in 1949. His political career tracks the rise and fall of the Pax Americana.
After living through the revolutions of 1848, Bismarck concluded that the advance of modernity was unstoppable. Netanyahu’s father taught him that Jewish history is a ‘history of Holocausts’. The conservativism of the two men is perhaps rooted in this essential pessimism. Netanyahu, unlike his settler allies, can all too easily imagine a world in which Israel no longer exists. Unlike his opponents on the left, he cannot imagine a utopian end of history. Like Bismarck’s, then, his is a vision of perpetual struggle.
The key question for Israel is what follows Netanyahu. Henry Kissinger’s critique of Bismarck was that it is impossible to institutionalise a multi-year tour de force. The same may be said of Bibi. He has no obvious successor, and that is by design. The Israeli political landscape is littered with protégés turned enemies: former prime minister Naftali Bennett, former defence minister Avigdor Lieberman, former defence minister Moshe Yaalon and former justice minister Gideon Sa’ar (though Netanyahu managed to coax him back into the cabinet last week).
Netanyahu’s view that there is no one up to the task may be true. But after Bismarck came Caprivi. And eventually came Bethmann-Hollweg, the chancellor whose miscalculations plunged Europe into war in 1914. Netanyahu’s most likely successors in the Likud party are avowed populists without his historical sensibility or facility with the English language. He thus bequeaths his country as uncertain a future as Bismarck left to his. Bismarck unified Germany but failed to unite the Germans. His successors embarked on a road that led to war and the dissolution of the Reich.
To be the Israeli Bismarck is no mean feat. But there may be a sting in Bibi’s tale.
Uma perspetiva única dos rios Severn, Test, Clyde e Derwent. Série documental de 4 episódios.
Richard Hammond atravessa o Reino Unido para explorar os mais belos rios da Grã-Bretanha. A série documental de 4 episódios leva-nos pelos rios Severn, Test, Clyde e Derwent e explora a importância histórica, ecológica e económica de cada um. Da nascente à foz, Richard revela as histórias não contadas e a incrível variedade de personagens e história de cada rio. Nadando, andando de caiaque e percorrendo esses notáveis cursos de água, conhece pessoas para quem o rio é parte fundamental da sua vida, seja para viagens, comércio ou lazer.
A Nissan Juke hybrid car on the production line (Getty Images)
Is it really any surprise that car manufacturers have started refusing to sell us petrol cars? According to Robert Forrester, chief executive of dealership Vertu Motors, anyone trying to buy a petrol car at the moment is likely to be quoted a delivery date into next year. As I wrote here last December, unless electric vehicles (EVs) enjoyed a sudden rush of popularity, the inevitable result of the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate would be that car manufacturers would be forced to withdraw from the UK market. The reason was coming down the road at us like a three-ton electric SUV. Under ZEV, which began on 1 January this year, manufacturers are obliged to ensure that at least 22 per cent of their sales this year are pure electric models. If they fail to meet this threshold they will be fined £15,000 for every petrol, diesel or hybrid car that they are over the limit.
Trouble is that the demand for full EVs has stalled at around one sixth of the market. In the seven months to the end of July, according to the Society for Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT), just 16.8 per cent of cars sold were battery electric vehicles (BEVs). This is marginally above the level of 16.1 per cent in the same month of 2023, but it is nowhere near 22 per cent – and that is in spite of manufacturers bending over backwards with generous discounts on the vehicles. Motorists are refusing to take the bait partly because of the high price of EVs – which still cost around 50 per cent more than the nearest petrol equivalent – and partly because of charging problems. For the third of UK households which do not have off-street parking, an EV remains an impractical and expensive solution – whatever EVs’ evangelical supporters may say. Moreover, EVs tend to be a lot bulkier than the petrol models they are replacing, which makes them far less practical for people who have to park them on the street.
Now the crunch has come, as it was always likely to do in the autumn: car-makers are getting to the point at which they can’t afford to sell many more petrol, diesel or hybrid models this year without risking running into those punitive £15,000 fines. Hence the efforts to push sales into next year. But that will only buy a temporary stay of execution, because next year manufacturers will have to ensure that 28 per cent of vehicles they sell are BEVs – and the proportion rises to 80 per cent by 2030 (or quite possibly 100 per cent if Labour returns to an all-out ban on petrol and diesel cars by 2030, and adds hybrids to the banned list too). If you have pre-sold much of next year’s petrol and diesel quote in advance, life is going to be even more difficult next year.
What can manufacturers do if buyers simply don’t want the EVs which are being pushed at them and opt to keep their old banger running instead? They could try doing as Stellantis (which owns Vauxhall, Peugeot-Citroen and Fiat) did in May: announcing that it is to team up with Chinese electric car maker Leapmotor, whose relatively cheap vehicles it will sell under an Amsterdam-based subsidiary. But while we are seeing more Chinese EVs on the roads, there is no guarantee that buyers would take to these vehicles in their masses, even if price parity with petrol cars could be achieved. That has been made all the more difficult thanks to new EU tariffs of up to 37 per cent on Chinese-made cars.
No-one should be surprised if some manufacturers simply withdraw from the UK market altogether. German car-makers used to call Britain ‘Treasure Island’, so lucrative was our car market. Thanks to the ZEV they may start treating it instead like Snake Island – a place to avoid landing at all costs.
What a thrilling number of glass ceilings have been broken this century – with more still to come, apparently. In 2008 America elected its first black president. In 2012 Barack Obama was re-elected and so became the first black president to win re-election. In 2016 America had a chance to elect its first female president but the public blew it and failed to elect Hillary Clinton. Fortunately they somewhat made up for this in 2020 by voting in the first female vice president. A vote that was made sweeter by the fact that, on that occasion, the public had a two-for-one offer and were also able to vote in the first black vice president. Now the public have a further chance to improve themselves by voting for the first black female president.
Hillary Clinton had a chance to ruminate on this at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago this week, declaring that between herself and Kamala Harris: ‘Together we’ve put a lot of cracks in the highest, hardest glass ceiling. On the other side of that glass ceiling is Kamala Harris raising her hand and taking the oath of office as our 47th president of the United States.’
Close observers might have sensed a certain forced smile on Clinton’s face as she said this. She had hoped to be commander in chief since at least the time that her husband was breaking in the new intern pool in the 1990s White House. An unkind person might say: ‘Always the bridesmaid, never the bride.’ But a kind interpretation of history (of the sort that Hillary is presumably already writing) is that she is like one of those early astronauts who paved the way for Neil Armstrong. Or an early explorer who traversed the Arctic wastelands and in whose historic footsteps other explorers more successfully followed in less bigoted times.
Much of the media is content to frame things in this light. In a news story this week, the BBC asked ‘whether the political backdrop has transformed enough for the vice president to reach the nation’s highest office’. Are the US public yet bold enough, open-minded enough and – yes – strong enough to agree with a BBC editorial team? We shall see. And the BBC will be watching.
The ‘glass ceiling’ conversation sometimes seems to be the main game in western politics. If the public do not vote for the glass-ceiling-shattering candidate, then it is they who are at fault. Here is the BBC again: ‘During her run for president in 2016, Mrs Clinton faced a barrage of criticisms over her appearance, her clothing and even the sound of her voice.’ For shame. Anyone with a long memory will recall that in 2016 nobody made any comment on Donald Trump’s appearance, clothing or vocal habits.
A couple of years after her election defeat, Clinton and her daughter Chelsea were hawking around a book they had put their names to called The Book of Gutsy Women. Asked by the excellent Emma Barnett on the British leg of their tour why this book of female trailblazers did not include Margaret Thatcher, Clinton acknowledged that Britain’s first female prime minister could be said to be ‘gutsy’ but that ultimately she failed to make the grade because ‘she doesn’t fit the other part of the definition in our opinion, which really is knocking down barriers for others and trying to make a positive difference’. Which is the sort of moment where the game truly reveals itself.
Because – as the wiser students of politics will by now have worked out – a female candidate is not a female candidate if she does not conform to various leftist shibboleths. I do not remember these voices celebrating the idea that Sarah Palin might have broken a glass ceiling. Even the career of Britain’s most successful postwar prime minister can be dismissed by these people if she can be deemed not to have tried to make ‘a positive difference’ – which translates as ‘doing what the left agrees with’. And so we must agree that Thatcher broke no glass ceilings, was not a force of positive change or even in any real sense a woman, and that the British public can spend this century making up for our bigotry.
In 2017 we seized the magnificent opportunity to re-break a glass ceiling when we decided with overwhelming public enthusiasm that it was time to give another woman a go at the top job. Who can forget the resulting glory years of Theresa May? We then had the opportunity to celebrate our first ethnic–minority prime minister in Rishi Sunak and, although he didn’t prove to be our most popular PM, Keir Starmer was among those who paid tribute to his ceiling-shattering. The first words Starmer said, on returning from Buckingham Palace last month, were to thank ‘the outgoing prime minister, Rishi Sunak, for his achievement as the first British Asian prime minister of our country’. Perhaps it was churlish not to point to all of Sunak’s other achievements. But it didn’t matter, because the achievement for Sunak was in just being, and ceiling-breaking.
In March, Vaughan Gething was likewise celebrated for becoming ‘the first black leader of Wales’. When he fell from office his supporters inevitably blamed ‘racism’. Which goes to show that Wales ought to find another black leader to atone for things fast.
Scotland has also broken ceilings by briefly having a Muslim first minister in Humza Yousaf. A point he made on the way up. But on the way down, he started to refer to bigotry – and now says it’s so bad he may have to leave Scotland altogether.
I do wonder how long this can go on. Will it stop when we have all voted in the first black transgender dwarf in each of our countries, and promised to re-elect them? Or will it never stop?
Proportionally, there are three times more gays who are MPs than there are gays in the general population. Which suggests that if representation is the key, there should be a cull of gay MPs at the next election. But that won’t happen. And no one will suggest it.
It’s almost as if ‘representation’ and ‘glass ceilings’ aren’t the real issue. I miss the times when competency and achievement were.
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