Popularising an ugly game

If you think that football is the international game, think again. If you think it’s athletics, or chess, or tiddlywinks, well, you’re still on the wrong track. Today, the great game in country after country, is ‘get the immigrant’.

It’s the one thing that seems to unite large, and growing, numbers across nations and cultures. They all hate anyone from other nations or cultures. And they’re keen to keep them well away, especially if they’re being badly treated and escaping persecution or back-breaking poverty.

Here’s what a British Conservative MP, William Evans-Gordon, had to say on the subject, talking about the horror of finding aliens taking over areas of London: 

East of Aldgate, you walk into a foreign town

Even further to the right, Nigel Farage told a UKIP conference about how upset he was on a train in the outskirts of London:

It wasn’t until after we got past Grove Park that I could actually hear English being audibly spoken in the carriage. Does that make me feel slightly awkward? Yes.

Returning to Evans-Gordon, he also declared:

Not a day passes but English families are ruthlessly turned out to make room for foreign invaders 

And another Conservative MP from the far right of the party, at the time Home Secretary and responsible for action on immigration, Suella Braverman, used the same kind of language about invaders when she told the House of Commons:

The British people deserve to know which party is serious about stopping the invasion on our southern coast, and which party is not

Keeping that kind of invasion out requires a solid barrier, and the Dutch politician Geert Wilders claimed he knew what was needed:

We must have the courage to restrict legal immigration instead of expanding it, even if we sometimes have to build a wall

Naturally, his is not the only, or most famous, call for a wall against immigrants. Who could forget Donald Trump, with all his typical self-deprecating modesty:

I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border and I’ll have Mexico pay for that wall.

Trump got four years as president to show what he could do and got a few miles of wall built, not an inch of it paid for by Mexico.

Before we go any further, I should admit that I’ve cheated a little. 

Farage, Braverman, Wilders and Trump are all contemporary politicians. Evans-Gordon isn’t. He was a Conservative MP from 1900 to 1907. I quoted him only to show how little the rhetoric of these characters has changed in over a century. The only shift has been in the targets of their attacks. In the early years of the twentieth century, the great concern, not just in Britain but across Europe and in the United States, was with Jewish immigration. Persecuted within the Russian empire – which back then extended right into most of Poland – Jews were fleeing westward, often destitute and in terrible health. Far from being greeted with open arms and assistance, most of the countries to which they turned tried to keep them out.

These days, anti-Semitism has faded somewhat, though it’s making a bit of a comeback thanks to the pursuit of violence by both Hamas and the Israeli state. What has grown into that same space is Islamophobia. As Geert Wilders assures us:

I am not ashamed to say that our culture is far better than the Islamic culture, which is a culture of barbarism.

What’s interesting about these views is the paradoxes they often contain. For instance, there were several hours of violent rioting in Dublin on 23 November, in protest against a knife attack which left three children and an adult injured, some hours earlier in the city. The rioters burned buses and cars, including police cars, and looted shops.

Police at the riots in Dublin

Rioters shouted anti-immigrant slogans.

Curiously, the Guardian tells me that the Irish have also raised nearly 350,000 euros for a young man who intervened against the knife-wielder, at considerable risk to himself. Clearly his action was appreciated by many in the country. And who was this heroic young fellow? Why, a delivery driver by the name of Caio Benicio. Where’s he from? Brazil.

He wasn’t alone in his intervention. A seventeen-year-old student joined him, taking minor injuries to his hands and face. He was from France.

In other words, the riots were triggered by the actions of a man who, it seems, was a naturalised Irishman and long-term resident of Ireland. He was overpowered by two foreigners. Both recent immigrants to the country.

A similar irony emerges from the recent history of Geert Wilders. He won the most seats in the recent Dutch general election but is having a bit of trouble trying to put together a government coalition he could lead. The man he appointed to conduct negotiations with other parties, Gom van Strien, had to stand down before he’d even started because of fraud allegations against him. That’s quite useful evidence about Wilders, showing that it isn’t only in his political stance that he resembles Donald Trump, but also in the company he keeps.

What’s more, despite his virulently anti-immigrant views, he strangely takes a populist or even left-wing stance on various social and economic matters, such as healthcare, pension entitlement, the minimum wage and public housing. According to two Dutch economists, Marcel Klok and Marieke Blom, if it pursued such policies, a coalition including Wilders might well have the effect of stimulating the economy. But Dutch unemployment is low. So the economists told the Guardian: 

Given the current strains in the labour market, we expect this to result in more demand for foreign workers.

Wilders espouses economic policies that may well lead to more immigration, while continuing to spout his bitter anti-immigrant rhetoric. But there’s nothing unusual about that, as the Irish have shown, or indeed experience in Britain. Anti-immigrant language is common across the British political spectrum, while huge areas of the economy, particularly agriculture, the catering sector and healthcare are in desperate circumstances for lack of foreign workers.

Ah, well. Anti-immigration remains the great international sport. But that doesn’t mean that it necessarily makes any sense. 

Presumably that’s why it attracts spokesmen who talk nonsense, like Wilders, like Trump, like Braverman. Or William Evans-Gordon. Spouting the same bile for over a century, even if the ethnic group targeted has changed.

The luck of a Churchill

The devil’s in the detail, they say. Again and again I have to admit that’s true, when I’m trying to refresh my knowledge of history, as I do for my podcast, A History of England. But sometimes it’s also in the detail that I find the most fun.

The greatest pleasure can be in the personal anecdotes. Especially when they concern historical giants whose main achievements are familiar to us. That’s the case, for instance, of the strange strokes of luck in Winston Churchill’s early life.

Cartoon of Churchill by ‘Spy’ (Sir Leslie Ward), 
in Vanity Fair, September 1900 
National Portrait Gallery D45032

Churchill didn’t bother with university but went straight into the army. Once there, he was constantly demanding to be sent into combat, even though the unit to which he’d been assigned wasn’t due any action. He had himself seconded to a different regiment so that he could take part in fighting on the northwest frontier of British imperial holdings in India. He did the same when he accompanied a military expedition into Sudan. 

Often, he’d only be allowed to join this kind of mission at very considerable expense to himself. He covered his costs with his pen – it turns out that in Churchill’s case, the pen may have been mightier than the sword, but he proved good at wielding both together – writing articles for the press at the time, or books, which enjoyed considerable success, about his experiences afterwards. 

This worked well for him when Britain went to war against the Boer republics in South Africa. He pleaded to be allowed to go and eventually, after much badgering by him and lobbying by his supporters, was allowed out there, but only at his own cost. That he covered by persuading the Morning Post newspaper to pay him £250 a month for a four-month assignment. In modern terms, that’s close to £40,000 a month or over £150,000 in total, a sum most of us would regard as very welcome.

Early in his stay in South Africa, he was on an armoured train that was ambushed by Boer troops. He immediately got stuck into the job of getting the train and the wounded out of there, something he did highly effectively, but which was hardly the work of a newspaper correspondent.

At the end of the engagement, he was captured and held at a prisoner of war camp in Pretoria. However, within weeks he’d escaped. That’s all a bit controversial, since he left behind two others who’d been planning to escape with him. Did he leave them behind? Or were they slow at getting their act together? It now seems that he probably did nothing wrong, but one at least of his fellow prisoners apparently never forgave him for going without him.

He was now wandering through tough territory, on his own, trying to get to the port of Lourenço Marques, today Maputo, in the then Portuguese territory of Mozambique. That was 280 miles (450 km) away.

He eventually decided he could take no more of struggling along the road without proper food or shelter, and knocked at the door of a house near a mine. And that’s where luck struck for him. The man who opened the door to him was an English mine manager called John Howard. Once Churchill abandoned the ludicrous cover story he’d invented to try to explain what he was doing alone and dishevelled on the road at night, and admitted what he was really up to, Howard agreed to help. 

A first piece of luck.

Howard called in another Englishman, Dan Dewsnap, from Oldham near Manchester, who lowered Churchill down a mine shaft with plenty of provisions. 

He stayed for a week until they were able to get him onto a train where he could hide among goods being taken to the Portuguese port, on behalf of another Englishman, Charles Burnham. The train trip was due to last 16 hours but in fact took more like 64, with frequent stops and holdups. Later Churchill talked of his luck in avoiding discovery during any of them, but the real luck was that Burnham had decided to travel on the train with him and distributed bribes judiciously to make sure it got through the various blocks without over-zealous scrutiny of the cargo.

A second piece of luck.

Before he left England, Churchill had been selected by the Conservative Party to stand in a by-election in Oldham. He was beaten though he did reasonably well. He was back from South Africa in time to stand there again in the 1900 general election. At a public meeting, he told the story of the help he’d received in South Africa from Dan Dewsnap, from Oldham, the town which Churchill hoped to represent in parliament and where he was speaking. 

‘His wife’s in the gallery,’ a voice shouted out from the audience.

It’s hard to say how much that helped Churchill's election chances, but it felt like a good omen. Dan Dewsnap had assured him that, after his 1899 defeat, ‘they’d all vote for you next time’. Surely, he’d win the seat on his second attempt?

He did. However, the swing in voting to Churchill between 1899 and 1900 had been only 6%. That’s nothing historic. So much for ‘they’d all vote for you’ – it was far fewer than ‘all’. 

Then again, that had been enough. Who needs more than enough? He was in and that was all that mattered.

His third piece of good luck.

His victory in Oldham launched Churchill’s career in politics. As it happens, it would really take off following the next general election, in 1906. At which he won a different seat, and not as a Conservative, but as a Liberal.

That, though, is another story. And it, too, involved a good share of luck. Perhaps I can tell that one too, some time.

Spanish politics, a spectator sport for our times. Sometimes terrifying, always entertaining

As a spectator sport, politics can be right up there with the most gripping. 

Sometimes, here in Spain, it feels like a gritty comedy drama. Sometimes, more like a bullfight. But it certainly isn’t dull.

The 28th of May, when local and regional elections took place, was a bad day for those of us out here who don’t much like the far right. Or even the less far right. The traditional party of the right, the Popular Party or PP, in alliance with the far right Vox (which means voice in Latin, a good name for that bunch of loudmouths) swept into office in town halls and regional assemblies across the country. For the PP, think of the US Republican Party before Trump. Vox is the Trump version. 

Those results painted a bleak picture for the centre-left government of the Socialist Party, the PSOE, and the Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez. It looked like the elections due before the end of the year were likely to see him out of a job. I just hoped he would be able to turn things around a bit over the few months the old parliament still had to run.

But then he astonished me. Instead of waiting he called a snap election in July. My immediate reaction was to think that he’d made a mistake, that it was too soon, that he could only be defeated if he went that early. But then I reminded myself that Pedro Sánchez constantly surprises everyone, constantly overturns any predictions made about him.

And this time he did it again.

It’s undeniable that he lost the July election. The PP won 137 seats to the PSOE’s 121. Sánchez had come second. On the other hand, against all expectations, he’d actually added one seat to his tally in parliament, at a time when everyone expected him to lose some.

Then there were his allies out to the left of the PSOE. A bunch of small parties organised in a group called ‘Unidas podemos’ (‘United we can’, with ‘united’ in the feminine – yep, that’s how with-it they were) had won 35 seats last time around. Now, with a new leader and reorganised as ‘Sumar’ (‘add up’), they took 31.

A relatively small loss but a loss all the same.

The problem is that there are 350 seats in the lower house of the Spanish parliament. To be absolutely sure of being able to form a government, a candidate for Prime Minister has to have the support of 176 MPs. 

If that’s not possible, a second round of voting takes place, in which it’s enough simply to get more MPs voting for you than voting against. The problem was that neither the PP with Vox, nor the PSOE with Sumar, could gather 176 votes, or even enough to outvote the other side if they all voted together.

That was remarkable, given that the PP had 137 seats. In the previous parliament, Vox held 52. All they had to do was hold or increase that number. The local and regional elections, in which they’d done so well, suggested they’d have no problem. That would give the PP-Vox coalition the votes it needed.

That was what made the election in July so extraordinary. Because far from growing its allotment of seats, or even holding its own, Vox collapsed, losing 19 seats to end up with 33. That meant that together with the PP’s 137, it would reach 170 and fall short of a majority by six.

Even with the support of two small parties with one MP each, they’d still be on 172. That wouldn’t quite get it over the line.

It’s up to the king to decide which party gets the first chance to try to put together a coalition that would allow it to lead a government. He perfectly sensibly called on the PP to have a go. The biggest party in parliament clearly deserved to try first. But no one expected them to pull off the trick, hated as they are by so many of the smaller parties – or at any rate, hated as is the presence of Vox in a potential coalition by almost all the other parties.

Once it became clear that the PP wasn’t going to succeed, the king, again perfectly properly, called on the PSOE instead. It makes sense, doesn’t it? You try the biggest single party first, and if that doesn’t work, you switch to the second biggest.

That’s when Sánchez astonished me again. He’s proved himself extraordinarily skilful at coalition building. 

With his 121 seats and the 31 of Sumar, he was on 152. 

The two Basque parties (left and right) with their eleven MPs and the (left-wing) Galician party with one, came on side, putting him on 164. 

Still far from enough. 

Sánchez needed the support of the two Catalan nationalist parties with seven MPS each. That’s ERC, the Left Republicans of Catalonia, and Junts per Cataluña, Together for Catalonia. The ERC was happy to back him. That put him on 171. But that meant he still couldn’t outvote the opposition, even if Junts abstained.

He needed both Catalan parties to vote with him. But their support came with a serious price tag. The leader of Junts and then President of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, had held an unauthorised referendum on Catalan independence on 1 October 2017. It had been attacked by police sent by the PP government of the time in Madrid, with serious violence, followed by the flight of some leading members of the party, including Puigdemont, abroad (those who stayed were gaoled). 

Junts and ERC wanted an amnesty for their colleagues in gaol or facing trial. And they wanted an official referendum.

It was clear that Sánchez would refuse the referendum. But he was prepared to move on amnesty. And I feel, why not? After all, these characters hadn’t done anything violent, no one had been killed by their calling the referendum, illegal or not, and I really couldn’t see how their actions merited a prison sentence.

Right wingers demonstrating against the Spanish Socialist Party

A lot of people in Spain, however, don’t see it that way. The right wing has been holding angry demonstrations outside the Socialist Party headquarters in Madrid. But many on the left are just as fed up. Spaniards are sensitive about anything that affects the integrity of the nation, and they find the behaviour of the organisers of the referendum far more reprehensible than I, as a mere Englishman, do.

That shows the courage of Sánchez. While sticking firmly to his refusal of a referendum, he agreed to put a bill to parliament providing the amnesty the Catalan parties wanted. They eventually agreed to accept that commitment as the price of their support, possibly in part because their vote has been falling in successive elections, and the alternative of another general election didn’t appeal to them.

So Sánchez got the seven MPs from Junts to back him too, taking him to 178. And then, to cap it all, he even persuaded the single MP from the Canaries Coalition, a right-winger who’d previously backed the PP-Vox attempt to form a government, to switch and support him instead.

So he ended up with 179 votes, a clear absolute majority, and has been re-elected for another term of Prime Minister.

Now, there’s a lot of hostility towards the amnesty. Of course, I feel the electorate can only blame itself. If it didn't want a compromise, coalition government, they should have given one party a majority. They elected a parliament that pushed Sánchez into this kind of concession. How can they blame him now?

Still, the question remains, whether the hostility to the amnesty will eventually do him serious harm. It’s hard to know. Spaniards can get passionate about their politics, as the demonstrations against the Socialist party show. But will they be able to keep it up? However passionate such movements are when they start, it’s hard to see them lasting for many months.

Interestingly, one of the symbols of those demonstrations is the Spanish flag with the royal coat of arms that normally sits in the middle, cut out. Why? Because by even inviting Sánchez to try to form a government, some of these demonstrators feel the king has betrayed the country.

The Spanish flag with the royal coat of arms cut out

That’s not limited to Vox people. Many on the right call what Sánchez has pulled off a ‘coup’. It was fascinating to see the president of the Madrid region, Isabel Ayuso, in the PP but on its hard right, calling for a response ‘golpe por golpe’. That’s a gloriously ambiguous demand. It can mean ‘blow for blow’, which would be fairly innocuous. But it can also mean ‘coup for coup’. Was she calling for an actual coup against Sánchez? And was that what upset the people who cut the coat of arms out of the flag – that the king hadn’t called out the army for a coup?

Intriguing times ahead. Sánchez faces terrible hostility. He heads a coalition that runs from Coalición Canaria on the right to Sumar on the left. The received wisdom is that it can’t last.

But that’s the thing about Sánchez. He keeps proving received wisdom foolish. It’s going to be fascinating to watch what happens in the coming months and years.

Spanish politics is going to remain a remarkable spectator sport for a while yet.

Victorian morality and four love stories to make the point

When I was a kid, certain people – mostly conservative people – would hold up Victorian morality as a model that society as a whole, and I in particular, ought to return to as soon as possible. Strict and pure, those Victorians knew how to live a life of goodness, instead of simply chasing a good life.

Recently, though, I’ve been reading up on the Victorian period, and the Edwardian that followed it, for my podcast, A History of England (which, incidentally, now has the first 35 episodes also available in Kindle or paperback form, on Amazon). 

Let’s start with the Derbys and the Salisburys. Grand old English families. Long-established nobility and, in the nineteenth century, right up there at the top of the British political tree. 

The fourteenth Earl of Derby was Prime Minister on three separate occasions, one of only four heads of government to have managed more than two terms. On the other hand, he had the misfortune to become leader just when his Conservative party was emerging from a catastrophic split. That had given its opponents a grip on power that it was able to shake only on a few brief occasions. His three terms gave him a total of less than four years in office.

The third Marquess of Salisbury, on the other hand, also managed three separate terms, but between them they gave him nearly ten years longer than Derby. He, however, headed a Conservative party that had pulled itself together, while the Liberals opposite had themselves split, leaving them out in the cold for a long time.

Sadly, the two families were linked in another and less reputable way than leadership of the Conservative party and capture of the top job in British politics. A way that rather undermined the irreproachable morality which is the boast of those who admire the Victorian era, including – in their time – the Victorians themselves. 

Salisbury’s father, the second marquess, was widowed at 48. When he was 56, he launched himself into a second marriage, with Mary Sackville-West, who at that time was 23. He died in 1868 when she was 34. She waited for a decent mourning period but in 1870 remarried, this time to none other than the 15th Earl of Derby, son of the former Prime Minister. 

That fifteenth earl had a distinguished political career himself though he never made it to Prime Minister.

The second Marquess of Salisbury, Mary Sackville-West and
the fifteenth Earl of Derby

He was a lot closer in age to his wife than the Second Marquess of Salisbury. Indeed, he was two years younger. All very proper, you might feel. But the Salisbury who became Prime Minister didn’t see it that way. There was a distinctly cold relationship between him and his stepmother (only six years his senior) and her second husband. That flowed from a widespread suspicion, which seems well-founded, that the couple hadn’t waited for the death of Salisbury’s dad to get their own relationship started.

Now, that wasn’t wholly in line with the expectations of Victorian morality.

Nor was Salisbury the only Prime Minister of the time to have been caught up in a love triangle of this kind. Decades earlier, in a time that is strictly speaking pre-Victorian, since the matter came to a head the year before Victoria mounted the throne, the then Prime Minister, Lord Melbourne, had what on the surface seems to have been a close friendship with a certain Caroline Norton.

Mr Norton didn’t see things that way. In 1836, he sued his wife for divorce, on the grounds of her adultery with the Prime Minister. The charge was hardly beyond reasonable belief. Melbourne had a reputation as what was known as a ‘ladies’ man’, which means a man who has his way with ladies. However, the husband couldn’t prove his case and was denied the divorce.

Lord Melbourne and Caroline Norton

That was only the start of Caroline’s troubles, however. Married women’s property was at that time regarded as the husband’s, so after they separated she took nothing. He also denied her access to their children. What’s more, any earnings she might have, and she’d hoped to live on her income from journalism, also belonged to the husband, so he was able to deny her even that. She got her own back a little by running up debts with tradesmen, and telling them to sue her husband for payment. 

She also campaigned hard for reform of the law, and indeed gained at least some improvements in how divorce worked.

But the great story of the time has to be that of the Parnells. Charles Stewart Parnell, despite being a landowner and a Protestant, became the champion of the downtrodden Irish to the point where many called him ‘the uncrowned king of Ireland’. He launched a blistering campaign of parliamentary disruption, with long speeches on indifferent points, and hundreds of amendments to proposed law, amendments that took forever to debate but never had any chance of being adopted, but only delayed legislation. He came to be seen as an appalling nuisance by pretty well everybody other than his backers in parliament, but he focused MPs’ minds on the Irish issue for a good decade.

A fellow Irish MP, but of a very different kind, a man more than enthusiastic to ingratiate himself with the powerful in England and driven only by whatever could lead to his personal benefit, was Captain William O’Shea. He played a dubious role as a go-between for Parnell’s Irish movement and the British government, limited in usefulness by the consciousness on both sides that he tended to say what he felt they would like to hear, rather than what was actually the case. 

Unfortunately, for all three, when his wife Katharine met Parnell, they fell entirely in love. They were, in fact, the love of each other’s life. For quite a time, O’Shea did nothing about it. That was probably because he felt that discretion served his own personal agenda better. When he realised, however, that no one trusted him anymore and his hopes of a bright future in politics were in pieces around his feet, he turned on the couple and sued his wife for divorce. The result? Parnell was found guilty in the court of public opinion, not of so much of adultery, but of adultery flaunted before the pubic. His career crashed, since Victorian morality was utterly unforgiving, not so much of the sinner, as of the sinner caught.

Katharine and Charles Parnell

Parnell was sacked as leader of his party and he barely had time to marry Katharine after her divorce came through before dying a few months later, at the age of 45.

The Norton affair (in both senses of the word) predates the strictly Victorian period. Let’s end with one that stretched beyond it. It also involves the Salisbury family we met at the beginning of this string of edifying stories.

Edward Cecil was one of the sons of the third marquess of Salisbury, the Prime Minister when his tale opens. Cecil was a Major in the army and was sent to South Africa to take part in the Second Boer War (yep, Britain not satisfied with one such war, in which it had been left with a distinctly bloody nose, launched itself into a second just as soon as it could). Cecil travelled with his wife, née Violet Manxse, with whom he was far from happily married.

It was no doubt because Cecil was the son of the Prime Minister that the man in charge of British South Africa, Lord Alfred Milner, offered to put them up at his official residence. It was an honour that did Cecil’s marriage absolutely no good at all. He was packed off by the army to the town of Mafeking (today Mahikeng) which soon found itself in the grip of a Boer siege that lasted 217 days. That was plenty of time for Violet Cecil and Alfred Milner to fall in love, just like the Parnells had, and then for their relationship to grow and take meaningful shape to the satisfaction of both.

Edward Cecil, Violet Manxse and Alfred Milner

Over the next twenty years, they had little chance to take things much further. However, in 1918, Edward Cecil died. Again, there was a decent mourning period, but on 26 February 1921, Violet and Alfred were finally married.

It was all a bit late, though. Milner was 66, Violet 49. He died in May 1925, of sleeping sickness contracted on another African trip. Poor Violet: after waiting twenty years, she got four years of marriage, followed by 33 years of widowhood.

Not unlike the Parnell story, I can’t help feeling.

In any case, all four these stories strongly confirm one view of mine. That all that business of Victorian morality is so much guff. It’s just a fine hypocrisy, in which what mattered wasn’t how you lived, but whether you avoided getting caught.