The pathetic fallacy, or not the weather we hoped for

It was forty-five years ago, but I still remember as if it were yesterday a pronunciation exercise I was given in language classes as part of my French degree.

It proclaimed that if a Frenchman talks about the weather, that means he’s incapable of talking about anything else. But to be a good Englishman, you have to be able to talk about the weather, whether that’s the weather as it is today, the weather of the past or the weather we might have in the future.

I was reminded of this today by a piece of news Danielle mentioned. She’s a member of several groups of expatriates living in the Valencia region. It seems the associated websites are being inundated by regrets from foreigners who have recently moved here.

Certainly, the weather’s giving us plenty of material for English conversations.

My way home from the shops this morning
The heavens weeping at our sad condition?

“We came for the glorious weather. And it just keeps pourng,” they complain.

To which the locals reply, “we love it! You don’t know what you’re wishing for. We know the heat that’s coming. Enjoy this while you can.”

On the more literary side of my degree course, we also studied the so-called ‘pathetic fallacy’. This is the belief that inanimate objects, even the whole of nature itself, can sometimes reflect human moods or events.

One of the most powerful examples is in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. On the day before the Ides of March, a terrible storm strikes Rome. The character Casca is awestruck by it:

I have seen tempests when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
Th' ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam
To be exalted with the threatening clouds,
But never till tonight, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction.

Yep. Not quite “A deep depression has moved over the East coast of Italy from the Tyrrhenian Sea, bringing high winds and potentially electric storms to Rome.” 

No, this isn’t meteorology. This is the sauciness of humans (got to love that way of putting it) getting right up the noses of the Gods. And, indeed, Rome’s in for a bad time the next day, the Ides, when Julius Caesar will be assassinated.

Windswept moors, as in Wuthering Heights

There are plenty of other examples. Why, the very title of Wuthering Heights uses the pathetic fallacy: ‘wuthering’ is the howling wind worrying away at the people and the buildings it encounters. Again, in Dickens’ Great Expectations, the protagonist Pip comments on the weather just before things turn a bit hairy:

Day after day, a vast heavy veil had been driving over London from the East, and it drove still, as if in the East there were an Eternity of cloud and wind. So furious had been the gusts, that high buildings in town had had the lead stripped off their roofs… Violent blasts of rain had accompanied these rages of wind, and the day just closed as I sat down to read had been the worst of all.

Not exactly “turned a bit blowy and wet”, is it? Not “are we ever going to get a Spring?”, either, or “bet Wimbledon gets washed out”. Rather more intense than the usual comments Englishmen tend to make, however expert they may be at talking about the weather. Also rather more portentous, rather more wrapped up with human events than I generally look for in my weather reports.

Well, with all due respect to Shakespeare, Dickens and Emily Brontë, I always took a bit of a supercilious view of all this kind of stuff. “What, the weather reflects moods on Earth? Pull the other one,” I’d tend to say.

Now, though, I’m less sure. Is it simply a coincidence that the weather’s been atrocious for over five weeks now, which is just as long as the Coronavirus lockdown’s lasted in Spain? As any good conspiracy-theorist would say, I think not.

No. With my apologies to those who moved to Valencia for the lovely weather and have found nothing but disappointment so far, I have to say that you may have been caught up in something much bigger than any of us.

This could be the very heavens weeping over our lack of preparedness for the pandemic. Over our terrible and constraining lockdown. Over the illness and death sweeping the world.

Still. At least you can share the awe. This may be the first time that we’ve ever been privileged to see the pathetic fallacy actually borne out in reality.

Something to remember with pride, I’d say, and rejoice in while it lasts.

BoJo's British coup

Let’s be absolutely clear: the decision to prorogue parliament was taken by Boris Johnson, but it was issued in the name of the Queen. Why? Because Johnson was exercising a royal prerogative.

You thought the British monarchy was just a matter of pageantry and ceremonial? Think again. It is no longer the monarch who rules, but many of the powers of monarchs persist and are exercised by the government. That allows ministers, in particular the Prime Minister, to rule almost arbitrarily at times, and to dismiss any kind of scrutiny by elected representatives.

In a fuller democracy, such behaviour by the executive would not be tolerated. It would be thwarted by a powerful judiciary. By the equivalent of Parliament, in fact. But in monarchical Britain, Parliament can still be overruled, and that’s what Johnson has done. He’s issued a diktat – well, strictly, got the queen to issue a diktat for him – and anyone we actually voted for is out of the picture, apart from those, handpicked by him, who are in his government.

Boris Johnson: author of a very British coup

There’s nothing unusual about this, historically. A man – it almost always is a man – who wants power untrammelled by constitutional niceties, starts on his road to autocracy by a coup d’état against a parliamentary body he finds vexatious.

Julius Caesar took on the Roman Senate. He came unstuck personally, murdered by a group of aristocratic senators, but in the civil war that followed, his successors won the imperial power in Rome that had eluded him.

In Britain, Charles I was no more successful than Caesar in breaking the power of parliament, and he too paid with his life, but again at the cost of a civil war.

Napoleon came to power in a France drained by tyranny, misgovernment and war, and secured his own rule by emasculating parliamentary authority. That meant he could exercise arbitrary and unconstrained power. The consequence was even more deaths in war leading to ultimate crushing defeat.

When Hitler managed to get MPs elected to the Germany parliament, they infamously showed their contempt for the institution of which they were members by turning their backs on the speaker. In short order, the Nazis had reduced parliament to a speaking shop only, wholly docile to Hitler’s rule.

Why do they get support when these would-be autocrats go down that road? After all, the people suffered terribly in every one of the cases I’ve mentioned and, as a general rule, things ended pretty badly, above all for them.

There is a naïve belief among many citizens, even in a democracy, that elected representatives are all lying, corrupt, power-hungry and ineffective. They look instead to a strong man who will sweep all these timeservers and timewasters out of the way and get things done. The things that everyone – by which they mean everyone who thinks like them – know to be necessary and which are being held up by the corrupt opportunists who occupy parliamentary seats.

That, after all, is exactly what has happened with Boris Johnson. Parliament has been unable to legislate Brexit. It hasn’t been able to do so because it is divided within itself, but that is a true reflection of the state of the nation. However, for some voters, the failure of parliament to reach a decision is a simply a failure of parliaments, and it’s time to move on, to find the man free of the corruption and personal ambition which parliamentarians serve, and have him deliver the Brexit the people voted for.

The irony is that the strong man in this particular instance is the most corrupt and lying of them all. But so were Hitler or Caesar. What BoJo’s supporters are looking for is strength, and none of the rest really matters. BoJo provides the strong smack of authority they crave.

The other irony is that in reality, no one voted for a hard Brexit. It wasn’t an option on the ballot paper. And the people who are clamouring most loudly for it will be among the hardest hit by it. But again, none of this concerns them. They see stalemate now, they see action from the strong man, and that’s what they admire.

People will tell me that BoJo’s nothing like the historical characters I mentioned. Certainly, unlike Napoleon or Hitler, he’s not making a bid for indefinite and unlimited power. But make no mistake about it, what he has done today is a coup d’état. He has seized personal power, monarchical power, for himself by eliminating the possibility of parliamentary scrutiny of his actions or opposition to them.

The coup d’état is temporary. It’s due to end on 14 October when parliament will be allowed, by grace of Boris, to convene again. And should take immediate action to cut back on the royal prerogative powers the executive exercises.

Or will it reconvene? Another lesson of history is that once autocrats have tasted such power, they find it hard to give up. And Brexit is going to lead to difficult times ahead, in which a strong man is going to be seen as still more necessary.

Will normal service resume on 14 October? I hope so. But do I think it’s guaranteed? I most certainly don’t.

This ides of March and that one

The Ides of March, to quote Shakespeare, are come. And this year, 2061 after the murder of Julius Caesar that took place on that date – 15 March – it’s particularly apt to mark the event.

Julius Caesar, populist and autocrat
Sadly, we have indeed seen his like again.

Why? Because the assassination of Caesar was an attempt to prevent the conversion of Rome, and its growing empire, into an autocracy. The driving force towards dictatorship? Caesar, a populist who, though an aristocrat himself, had won himself a powerful reputation among the common people as a man to speak for them.

My problem is that I’ve never known who to sympathise with in that incident. There’s no doubt that Caesar was an opportunist, a narcissist and a budding tyrant. He had shown not merely his effectiveness in warfare but his ruthless cruelty, as he wiped out thousands of his defeated enemies, including women, children and the old.

Unfortunately, though the men who opposed him spoke for the Republic, it was nothing like the kind of Republic we’ve come to know and admire since the revolutions – notably in France and America – in the eighteenth century. Entry to the senate wasn’t by election but by appointment from within a wealthy elite. And even elective office was, in effect, bought by those who could win themselves the most short-term popularity with Roman voters.

Certainly, Cassius, Brutus and the rest weren’t fighting for any kind of democratic or popular government that we would recognise. They were trying to defend a system in which they represented the establishment, and which worked to protect their interests and power. It was a system rotten with corruption and principally focused on the needs of the wealthy.

Essentially, the assassination was the culmination of a battle between an autocratic Republican maverick reaching for power on the back of a populist wave, and a corrupt Republican establishment intent on defending its privileges. I can sum up my feelings in another line from Shakespeare: a plague on both your houses.

My main feeling, though, is a sinking one, at the thought that the choice is as poor today as it was 2061 years ago.

Still, today we have a better solution than assassination: we can vote for change. We just need a genuine alternative. Come on Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren in the United States.

And in Britain, come on you successor to Jeremy Corbyn – whoever you may be.

The debt Britain owes Gina Miller

The trouble with populists is that they’re always in a hurry.

When they’ve seen that something needs to be done, they want to do it now. They don’t want to have to waste time with the niceties of consensus building and scrutiny – they take so long and delay necessary action. You can see it with Trump in the States: he wants to reintroduce torture as a weapon of policy, and wants to do it quickly, by means of an executive order.

The Guardian quotes Steve Kleinman, retired air force colonel and chairman of the research advisory committee to the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG):

“If the US was to make it once again the policy of the country to coerce, and to detain at length in an extrajudicial fashion, the costs would be beyond substantial, they’d be potentially existential. We’ve seen how [torture] promotes violent extremism, how it degrades alliances. We’ve seen how it only serves to provide information that policymakers want to support [desired policies], not what they need,” Kleinman said.

“A lot of these people who weigh in heavily on interrogation have no idea how little they know, [and do so] because of what they see on television,” said Kleinman, who emphasized that he was not speaking for the HIG.

But populists are in a hurry. They don’t want to have to stop to take such annoying and delaying objections into account.

It was always so. Julius Caesar marched on Rome because it was time to do away with the corrupt and inefficient republic. Napoleon launched a coup d’état because it was time to restore order to France and let her be great again. The war clique in Japan in the 1930s did away with the opposition to its rule because it knew it was time for the Empire to astonish the world with its military prowess.

Sadly, a little opposition might have avoided outcomes far worse than the problems they were trying to fix. Caesar’s actions replaced a rotten republic by an Empire which again and again became a bloodthirsty tyranny. Napoleon led France to momentary glory then utter failure, on the retreat from Moscow and the field of Waterloo. Japanese militarists won spectacular victories throughout 1942 and then were forced step by step to the loss of all they had gained and the destruction of much of what they had at home.

Now, one of the things about populists is that they’re often popular. They can frequently put together a popular majority (not Trump, as it happens, but he did win the election despite that). As democrats, we’re obliged to go along with the majority view (or the electoral win, at any rate, in the case of Trump).

But the lesson of those cases is that even when they have popular support, and they’re in a hurry, we should not on any account slacken in our scrutiny of the measures they propose.

In Britain, a popular majority decided in June of last year that Britain should leave the European Union. It was a misguided decision, as the country will discover over the next decade or two. But the decision has been taken and I see little or no chance of its being reversed. Britain will leave the EU.

The process starts with triggering what is known as Article 50. The Prime Minister, Theresa May, decided that she would do so. After all, the people had spoken. As Prime Minister, she could take that step using prerogative authority, a hangover of truly monarchical power, now exercised by ministers rather than the crown.

Gina Miller: staunch champion of British constitutional rights

Any true democrat must therefore be immensely grateful to Gina Miller. She launched a case, later joined by a number of other plaintiffs, demanding that the government should not act without the authority of parliament. She won the case and the government’s appeal against that judgement has now been rejected by the Supreme Court.

By a majority of 8 to 3, the Court ruled that leaving the EU would have a major impact on British laws, and only Parliament can make, change or revoke laws.

The effect on the Brexit process will be nil. Parliament will certainly approve the triggering of article 50. Britain will still take the senseless and self-destructive step of leaving the EU. But at least we have established that government, on major, law-making matters, can’t simply by-pass our elected representatives. It must win their consent to such steps.

That may be slow and dull. It’s horribly frustrating for the hurried populists and their supporters. But, as the examples of Caesar, Napoleon and the Japanese Empire demonstrate, the alternative is far worse.

Trump seems likely to prove the point again over the next few years.

Gina Miller has suffered horrible abuse in social media and the press. Any Brit that cares about the constitutional settlement of the country, and believes that any idea, good or bad, ought to be subject to scrutiny, should be deeply grateful to her.

Thanks, Gina. The personal cost to you has been immense, I know. I salute your courage and principled determination.

Donald Trump and the Establishment's Ides of March

The Ides of March are here. Over two millennia ago, on this day, Julius Caesar was struck down in the forum of Rome by his inveterate enemies.

Well, it was fairly clear they weren’t fans. Stabbing knives are a bit of a giveaway.

Since that time, commentators have tended to see the event in one of two ways. There are those to whom the assassins were making a last-gasp stand in defence of the republican virtues and time-honoured freedoms of Rome against a would-be military dictator. Others instead see the conspirators as reactionaries trying to defend an old and outdated dispensation that needed a hero to overthrow it.

My own view is of the “plague on both your houses” variety. Brutus, Cassius and their mates were aristocrats of the old elite that had run, and indeed owned, Rome for centuries. They weren’t there to defend ancient liberties, or at least ancient liberties for anyone but themselves and their class. The common man? He was of interest to them only insofar as he could further or resist their plans for themselves.

As for Caesar, he was a megalomaniac with all sorts of weird delusions – I mean, what kind of man writes his autobiography in the third person? An aristocrat himself, he won an enviable reputation – for those who envy military reputations – by waging bloodthirsty war on the inhabitants of Gaul, who’d done him no harm at all but provided him with a good ladder towards power.

Then he’d used his military might to seize that power back in Rome.

Isn’t that so like what’s happening on the Ides of March in 2016?

The primary elections in the US today are pretty much the last gasp for the old American elite – the people we tend to refer to as the Republican Establishment – to try to block the road to power of a megalomaniac who, like Caesar, is convinced that only he can save his nation from itself. Unlike Caesar, Donald Trump is no military leader. On the other hand, to be a military leader Caesar had to raise millions to fund his legions; Trump too has raised colossal financial power to fund his legions of foot soldiers. Not all that different.

Are the Republicans heading off into a long dark night?
And will they drag the rest of us with them?

Caesar’s violence was of a different order. But Trump’s movement is dipping that way now, with increasing violence at his rallies. And isn’t it interesting that they are rallies? These aren’t forums for debate, they are mass adoration sessions where the providential man tells his followers what to believe, and they reward him with their worship in return.

A major difference is that the freedoms at stake aren’t merely those of an elite. One of the most striking, and admirable, characteristics of the United States is that it has a remarkable Constitution. A mere 7000 words long, it laid the foundation for a system in which no one could exert excessive power, because another body would counterbalance theirs and keep it under control.

I’m not aware of any time in history where that admirable state of affairs has ever been under greater threat than today. Sam Brownback, who is to the state of Kansas what Trump is to the entire nation (but with the additional flaw of actually being in office), has signed into effect legislation that would allow him to impeach any judge that struck down a law that he favoured. The chances are that such a step, which denies the possibility of an independent judiciary, would be thrown out by the Supreme Court in any government led by a president committed to upholding the Constitution; but would even the Supreme Court be able to resist the bullying of a President Trump, with his contempt for the Constitution?

You don’t believe he has contempt for the Constitution? Look at what he has been saying about the media. He hates journalists, he says. If elected, he claims, he will bring in legislation that would make it considerably easier to sue media outlets for libel. In other words, this keen supporter of the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms, wants to circumscribe the effects of the First, which upholds the right to freedom of speech.

Sadly, aligned against him are only the tired old figures of the Republican establishment, as weirdly Conservative as he is. They are unlikely to succeed tonight in defeating Trump. In that respect, they are once more not unlike the conspirators against Caesar: although they did assassinate him, the act only rebounded on them, as Caesar’s party rallied its forces and crushed the assassins in war, thus ending the Republic anyway and ushering in the autocratic rule of the Roman Empire.

When it comes to Trump, there really is only one hope left of stopping him. A diminutive, not particularly trustworthy or popular woman, Hillary Clinton. An unlikely and uninspiring figure to be the last best hope of American liberty.

But, hey, we don’t always choose the weapons to defend ourselves. We just have to reach for the best we can find when we’re up against an urgent threat. That’s likely to be Hillary, and boy do we need her. 

Because being Trumped is about as threatening, and as urgent, as it gets.

Happy New Year! Thanks to British Conservatism

Happy New Year!

Surprised? Asking yourself what year starts on 6 April? Whether there’s some calendar you’re unaware of, in one of the world’s great religions?

Here’s a clue. It’s not a matter of celebration for most people.

No, 6 April is the start of the British tax year. 

But is that really the answer to the right question? Or are you now wondering “why on Earth does the British tax year start on 6 April?”

The ecclesiastical year was used for centuries for administrative purposes throughout Christendom. It contains Quarter Days: Lady Day on 25 March, marking the annunciation to Mary that she is to bear the child of God, Midsummer day on 24 June, Michaelmas on 29 September and Christmas on 25 December.

Note the spooky exact nine months between Lady Day and Christmas Day. Almost as though they’d been specifically picked to correspond to the canonical length of a human pregnancy. We’re being told that the birth of Christ was a truly human event, not a supernatural one (begotten not created, and all that.)

In this system, the year started on the first Quarter Day, 25 March. The British tax authorities followed that convention. Religiously.

“OK,” I hear you cry, “but that still isn’t 6 April, is it?”

“Patience, good sir or madam,” I reply, “the story is not yet complete.”

For over a millennium and a half, Europe lived by the Julian calendar, named after that skilful general, wily politician and outstanding murder victim, Julius Caesar. Alas, however, his calendar is based on their being 365.25 days in the solar year, the time it takes the Earth to travel round the sun. The extra quarter of a day was compensated for with a leap year every four years.

In fact, 365.24 is a better approximation. So 1600 years on, the calendar was out with respect to the seasons by as much as 12 days. Pope Gregory XIII decided this had to stop, so he introduced the aptly named Gregorian Calendar in 1582. This skipped ten days, and decreed that a year divisible by 4 would only be a leap year if it wasn’t also divisible by 100 (so 1900 wasn’t a leap year), unless it was also divisible by 1000 (so 2000 was a leap year).

“OK,” you object, “but 25 March plus 10 days only takes us to 4 April.”

“Hold on,” I counter, “we’re not there yet.”

Britain is famously one of the great conservative countries, if “great” and “conservative” are words that can be used together. This is a nation whose regime, a limited monarchy, has merely evolved since the eighteenth century; by contrast, France has had three monarchies, two Empires and is now on its fifth republic.

Oddly, there’s little to choose between the two countries in quality of government. Though perhaps that’s not so odd.

Anyway, Britain was officially Protestant by the time of Gregory’s reforms, and wasn’t having anything to do with this strange Papist change to the calendar.

“What, it is a leap year, unless it’s a century years, except if it’s a year divisble by 400? Who’ll even remember?”

Gregory XIII
Author of a necessary reform to the calendar or of a Popish plot?

So we stuck with the Julian system. Good enough for Caesar, good enough for us.

But by the mid-eighteenth century, it was all getting too much. Goods would arrive in London days before they’d been sent from Calais. A settlement sent on time from Edinburgh would arrive way over deadline in Milan. It was all too confusing.

So in 1752 Britain swallowed its pride and, with a sense of being excitingly innovative, switched from “Old Style” dates to “New Stye”. By then the gap had grown by another day, so the skip had to be eleven days, not ten. There was a lot of suspicion and resistance, as people felt they were being robbed of part of their lives, but the change went through.

Britain wasn’t by any means the last to make the change. Russia, even more conservative, clung on into the 20th century. It took the Communist revolution of 1917 to bring the calendar in line with the West, by which time the difference was thirteen days. But with all the bloodshed, I suspect losing a couple of weeks wasn’t a top priority to most Russians. Though deep-rooted conservatism culminating in violence might give them something to ponder even today.

In Europe, Greece was the last country to go, losing its thirteen days in 1923.

One body that wasn’t going to put up with being robbed of any of the time due to it was the British Treasury. So it stuck with the old dating of Lady Day, adding eleven revenue-collecting days to the tax year when the change took place. 

Well, nominally adding eleven days, though that kept it the same length, if you see what I mean.

So there you have it.

“Hang on, hang on,” you complain, “eleven days after 25 March still isn’t 6 April. 25 plus 11 is 36. March has 31 days. 36 minus 31 is 5. So why doesn’t the tax year start on 5 April?”

“OK, OK, you’re right,” I have to confess.

In 1800, which wasn’t a leap year in the new system, the tax authorities decided to nick an extra day again. So they shifted the start of the tax year on one more day, taking us to 6 April.

And then in 1900, they decided that they’d had enough.

“What, some century years we have to add a day, others we don’t? Who’ll remember?” they asked. And they stopped doing it.

And that really is the end of the story.

Happy New British Tax Year!

Hear the knives sharpening, this Ides of March

2058 years ago today, a shady politician turned up for a meeting whose importance he had probably not yet fully grasped, but soon would. 

He was there despite being warned that it was a bad day for him to do anything. Indeed, as he arrived he caught sight of the man who’d given him the warning. He turned to him and, rather too smugly as it happened, commented:

“The ides of March are come.”

To which the soothsayer replied:

“Ay, Caesar, but not gone.”

It wasn’t many minutes later that Julius Caesar lay dying at the feet of the statue his late rival Pompey. ‘Late’ in great part thanks to Caesar himself. All terribly ironic. Especially since it was men he thought he could count on who turned their knives on him.

Why did they prove the soothsayer right and turn the Ides of March into such a bad day for Caesar? They thought he was about to realise his ambition and establish his personal power in Rome. They made sure that didn’t happen.

15 March. Not a good day for Julius Caesar

Of course, things may not have gone exactly the way I described. I’m only quoting Shakespeare, and I suspect he wasn’t there. I mean, did they even speak English in those days?

Somebody who could no doubt tell us about all of that is the present Mayor of London, Boris Johnson. The man’s a bit of a classicist. He even wrote a book called The Dream of Rome which was a bit glitzy and superficial, but had its merits.

He knows all about powerful men cut down in their prime by their own supporters. So he must have had a bit of wry smile yesterday.

Because being Mayor of London’s only a consolation prize for him. What he’s got his eye on is Downing Street. And with his ‘friend’ David Cameron, the current tenant of number 10, making such a mess of things, he must fancy his chances of getting the Conservative Party leadership after Cameron loses the next election and gets sacked. Then he’d spend a parliament getting ready to mount his own challenge for 2020.

Not all his ‘friends’ are entirely happy about this shady politician realising his ambition, any more than the ‘friends’ of his predecessor were two millennia ago. These days, though, we don’t generally settle these things with knives. So one of Johnson’s ‘friends’ has found a much smarter and sneakier way of doing things.

Boris Johnson
The target?

Michael Gove’s established himself as a special kind of education secretary. For instance, he tells us that he is “a decentraliser. I believe in trusting professionals.” Despite that, he has managed to infuriate pretty much the entire teaching profession, not least by his outspoken defence of the use of unqualified teachers. 

It was also he who sent a bible to every school in the country, which I presume was intended to be some kind of inspirational move. Personally, I have difficulty believing that students are pouring into their libraries for the opportunity to consult their Gove bible lovingly and with rapt attention. 

What has Gove done now?

Something truly surprising. He’s turned his fire on the number of old Etonians in the cabinet – the cabinet in which he serves. That includes his boss, David Cameron. Gove, in an interview with the Financial Times, draws a parallel between the present cabinet and that headed by Robert Cecil, Lord Salisbury over a century ago.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, the Conservative cabinet was called Hotel Cecil,” declared Gove, “the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’ came about and all the rest of it. It is preposterous.”

It doesn’t bother him individually: “It doesn't make me feel personally uncomfortable because I like each of the individuals concerned, but it's ridiculous.”

And he wonders “I don't know where you can find some such similar situation in a developed economy.”

Extraordinary. Here’s Gove decrying his own government. A Conservative-led government. And for being elitist, of all things.

It seems inexplicable until you remember that David Cameron’s not the only Etonian around. Another is the present occupant of City Hall in London. Oh, yes. Boris Johnson’s another graduate of Eton College.

And that gives us the subtext to Gove’s interview, and with Tories, it’s always the subtext that counts. He’s saying we’ve got an Etonian Prime Minister, and that seems ridiculous in this day and age. On the other hand, he’s already there. Leave him in place. But we certainly don’t want another. 

Michael Gove
The dagger?

Boris has been warned. He needs to watch his back, where his so-called friends are standing. And sharpening their knives.

Then again. 2058 years ago today, Caesar was warned too. Perhaps we can still avoid a Johnson premiership.

Let them live, however vile

Nearly two thousand years ago, a group of aristocrats decided to defend the privileges that they and their ancestors had enjoyed for centuries, by striking down the military leader who seemed intent on putting an end to them.

On 15 March 44 BC, they mobbed Julius Caesar in the Roman forum and stabbed him to death. The assassination sealed their own destruction in the civil war that followed, along with the end of the republic they had been so keen to defend. For self-fulfilling prophecy, to say nothing of own-goals, the assassination of Julius Caesar is right up there with the all-time greats.

Just under a century and a half ago, a mediocre actor achieved far greater fame than he ever could on stage, by bursting into Abraham Lincoln’s box at Ford’s Theatre and shooting him in the head. To crown his act, John Wilkes Booth shouted ‘sic semper tyrannis’, the words Brutus is said to have proclaimed after killing Caesar, to signal that all tyrants would die. 

John Wilkes Booth.
May not have been much of an actor, but I wish he'd stuck to it.

As it happens, anyone less like a tyrant than Lincoln would be hard to imagine: his consummate skill was in persuading, cajoling or indeed buying (as the recent film Lincoln showed) enough support to compromise his way to success.

How might things have been, in the counter-factual hypothesis that Lincoln had survived? We can’t know, of course, but I guess that we might not have had to wait until Franklin Roosevelt to see a president re-elected to a third or fourth term of office. What effect that might have had on Lincoln and his commitment to good government and democratic principle it’s hard to say.

More significant would have been the effect on post-civil war reconstruction. My suspicion is that the reintegration of the southern States would have been quicker and more complete, and on the basis of a more rigorous equality among races. The fourteenth amendment freeing slaves was passed in 1865; a century later, their descendants were still battling – in many cases literally – for their civil rights. A lot of bloodshed might have been avoided.

So those were two successful assassinations that were wholly unsuccessful in achieving any useful aim.

On the other hand, there have been assassinations successfully avoided. For instance, late in the Second World War, the British Special Operations Executive launched a plan to murder Hitler. Who opposed these action men, the blowers-up of bridges, the killers of officials in occupied territory? The more established agents of conventional intelligence with their cooler heads. Why? They believed any replacement would run German military power more effectively than Hitler, lengthening the war and making victory less sure.

SOE: Bravest of the brave, but a little misguided over Hitler?

Why am I dealing with such morbid issues? Blame my youngest son Nicky who criticised me for talking too much about the natural death of Maggie Thatcher, having promised to stay silent on the subject. He insisted that I spend some time on violent political deaths, to make up for my inconsistency. 

As an inhabitant of Madrid, he’s particularly well placed to make that demand. I first got to know Spain well in the early nineties. Already then, I had trouble remembering that the country had been under the thumb of a thoroughly vile dictator, though he had died less than twenty years earlier. Indeed, in between, there had been the 1981 attempt by Antonio Tejero, latter-day John Wilkes Booth, to seize power by an armed attack on parliament. Friends in Barcelona described that terrible night in 1981, as they drove about the city to track each other down and try to decide what to do: to wait, to fight, to fly? But then in the small hours, the King finally broke his silence, and called out the army to put down the few rebel units, which it duly did, and the coup was over.

Antonio Tejero: misguided, wrong and thankfully a complete failure

So Spain was a strong enough democracy to resist even an armed attack.

Now would it have been the same had Franco been assassinated? That’s another counter-factual, but again I have little doubt over the broad outlines: Franco would have become a martyr, the far right would have been revived,  crushing repression would have been imposed and many opposition figures murdered or worse. I’m not at all sure that Spain would have been a democracy even today.

Killing an individual leader, however evil or incompetent, seems seldom to produce the desired result. Sometimes, as in the case of Hitler or Franco, it’s best to learn some patience and wait: the effect seems far more profound and longer-lasting.

That’s a lesson the West would do well to learn. There was such celebration over the execution of Saddam Hussein, but might he not have been dead by now anyway? Would things have been much worse? Or rather, when we look around the bloody, Iranian-dominated state Iraq has become, might they not have been a great deal better?

The Ides of March: reviewing progress

In Shakespeare’s play, as Julius Caesar approaches the forum he spots the soothsayer who has warned him against the Ides of March, and calls out mockingly:

‘The Ides of March are come.’

To which the soothsayer replies, ‘Aye, Caesar, but not gone.’

Given that we know what’s about to happen inside the Senate building, I think that line qualifies as the most sinister in Shakespeare.

Well, the Ides of March are come again. 2056 years ago today Julius Caesar was struck down by a group of die-hard Roman aristocrats, who left him to bleed out at the foot of the statue of his great enemy Pompey. 

If only he'd listened

It’s worth pausing a moment to ask how far we’ve come in those two millennia.

Caesar’s enemies were Senators, as he was, in other words members of the elite of Rome who exercised all power over the nascent Empire, thanks to their colossal wealth. Around them, the mass of Romans struggled to get through the day, finding work where they could, begging where they couldn’t, all in order to live in conditions inconceivably miserable to their wealthy masters, when they could make a living at all.

By being an outstandingly talented manipulator of the sentiments of those masses, whose support he skilfully bought, and at the same time a highly successful general who could command the total loyalty of his soldiers, Caesar was making a formidable, to some apparently unstoppable, bid for total power on his own. His adversaries decided that the only way to hang on to their own share of authority, was to kill him. The rest is a bloody body on the floor of the Senate.

Today, in many countries, wealth still often combines with control of the army to support power. Look at the Assads in Syria, revealed in their e-mails to be spending on interior decorations sums of money it would take their citizens several years to earn, while they turn heavy artillery on those same citizens when they try to change that arrangement.

In the wealthier nations, military strength is not these days a factor in determining who will rule us. Nor, fortunately, do we tend to decide the fate of our leaders by assassination. Wealth, on the other hand, remains inseparable from power: the US election this autumn is set to be the most expensive in history. And the unscrupulous and wealthy still use manipulation of the masses and purchase of our support to get and hold onto political power.

So on this Ides of March, looking back to that distant one 2056 years ago, what should the report card read? 


How about ‘has made some significant improvements but still has a long way to go; a serious increase in effort is needed if expectations are ever to be fulfilled’?

My exploits and Caesar's, and goodbye to Emeryville

Stations are romantic, exciting places. The sound of the trains sets the heart beating, while all around the joy of greetings for new arrivals mingles with the excited anticipation of those setting out on their journey.

Airports on the other hand are synthetic and soulless. Because San Francisco airport is my gateway back to home and Danielle it promises pleasure, but in itself it’s a miserable place. Utilitarian, pedestrian, rushed. No heart. The contrast is all the starker because I’ve spent a week in a hotel next to the Emeryville Amtrak Station, from which several times an hour I’d hear that haunting sound, iconic of the United States, of a train’s horn. Its mournfulness seems to express the sorrow that this country, which did so much to pioneer the railways, has since turned its back on them, preferring the dullness of air travel. 

How right one of my teachers was to say that  if God had intended us to travel by air, he would never have given us the railways.

While we were here, we didn’t actually use Emeryville Station because, although San Francisco itself is right opposite, the Amtrak lines run all the way along the Bay but not over it or under it. Instead we used the BART, the Bay Area Rapid Transit. We took it several times in complete innocence, not realising until I was warned just a day ago that our nearest station is regarded as a dangerous place.

There’s no way we could have known: we had nothing but pleasant experiences there, above all with a wonderful woman who was manning (womanning? personing?) the information booth. She came out to help us get our tickets from those appalling machines the BART provides for the purpose, and which are entirely incomprehensible until you’ve undergone intensive training. After that, whenever we saw her she would smile and chat to us about how we’d enjoyed the city.

Nor is that the only pleasant recollection I shall take away from Emeryville. For me, the town will from now on be forever linked with Julius Caesar. 

‘Emeryille?’ I hear you cry. ‘Rome, certainly, even Spain, North Africa, Egypt, Asia Minor, all the places to which that extraordinarily mobile conqueror travelled. Even Britain. But Emeryville?’

He never made it to Emeryville, except in (my) spirit

Ah, but Caesar’s association with this little town is my own entirely, a purely personal link. As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been enchanted by a series of podcasts recommended to me by my son Michael: The History of Rome, put together over a long period with considerable, pretty well unremunerated effort by Mike Duncan, as apparently disinterested in the enterprise as he was interested in the subject. 

This week,while I’ve been pounding the streets of Emeryville, I’ve been listening to his episodes about Caesar. Out running every morning, I’ve heard about the great general’s own feats, to the accompaniment of the boots of his legionnaires hammering the roads, like mine, though in their case they were criss-crossing Europe and the Middle East; as I’ve  targeted my own personal goal for this week’s runs, I’ve listened to the tale of the great statesman’s drive to achieve his objective of power over a great Empire. 

Let me say that my target was was no easy one for me to hit: to complete a half marathon. Not in one session - that’s not quite in my capacity - but at least over several. This morning I made it, as the sun rose above San Francisco Bay and Caesar fell to his assassins’ daggers.

The sun rises over Emeryville Marina, perhaps to salute my (minor) triumph

My achievement, I admit, hardly rivals his, but by my scale of things, it was quite satisfying enough. And at least it didn’t leave me bleeding to death at the foot of Pompey’s statue.