Boris Johnson second rate? No way.

When I look at the behaviour of the Johnson government, the thought “second rate” always springs to mind. Only to be replaced by, “that’s so unfair”. Followed by a swift reassessment.

Gentle humour, charmingly readable

Decades ago – oh, it was probably the seventies – I discovered the books of George Mikes. Most English speakers pronounce the name as though it were the plural of the nickname ‘Mike’. Or rather, since practically no English speaker even remembers him, perhaps I should say that they used to pronounce the name that way.

He was Hungarian by birth, though he lived most of his life in England. Strictly his name ought to be pronounced something like Mick-esh or possibly Meek-esh. But I like to think of him as Mikes.

He wrote a whole series of books commenting on the different nations he visited, starting with his adopted country, Britain. Just the title of the first of those books gives a feel for his style: How to be an Alien: a handbook for beginners and more advanced pupils. His books were light-hearted, humorous reflections on the behaviour and attitudes of various countries.

In one of his books, and I certainly wouldn’t be able to find the passage now, he mentions that a critic had called his writing second rate. He rejected this notion as a wild exaggeration. By way of explanation, he gave a ranking of authors, which again I don’t remember, but here’s a similar, if partial and entirely personal, ranking of my own.

In the ‘first rate’ I’d want to include Jane Austen, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Harper Lee, Salman Rushdie and Terry Pratchett.

So in the ‘second rate’ I’d have to have Charles Dickens, Edith Wharton, Joseph Conrad, Joseph Heller, John le Carré and Hilary Mantel.

I’m not going to bore you by going down a whole list, but simply point out that the second rate is made up of outstanding writers, whose names will ring down the ages, and who produced extraordinary books.

Mikes reckoned that he was at best tenth rate, which is probably about right. He’s down there with other writers who entertain and help you wile away a dull hour – you know, John Grisham and Nevil Shute – good writers (well, Shute was a lousy writer but a great story teller) who hit the spot but are a long way behind the best.

Now we can take the same approach to government. We need to be careful, however, because there are more factors to take into account. Competence is crucial, but competence applied to do harm is a defect, not a virtue.

On those grounds, while Abraham Lincoln in the US, Clement Attlee in the UK or Pierre Mendès France in 1950s France, were all first rate, we’d have to say that Tony Blair, whose government might have been first or second rate without Iraq, tuned out at best third rate in the end.

Because they were competent and did more harm than good, I’d have to put the Wilson governments up into second rate. Equally, the Callaghan government didn’t do too much wrong, entitling his time in office to be viewed as third rate.

Maggie Thatcher was extremely able and powerful, but did huge harm, wiping out whole communities (a few years ago, I revisited a village in Yorkshire which was once thriving when it its mine was running, to find it run down, shrunk in population and with 40% of the population on either unemployment or invalidity benefit, victims of Thatcher’s vandalism).

Twelfth rate at best.

When the amateur burglars pay a call
A fine metaphor for the inept playing at Thatcher

I remember an advert from a long time ago for an insurance company. It showed a devastated living room, with books and records all over the floor, amongst the ruins of broken furniture, devices and pictures. The catch phrase was something like, “If you think professional burglars are a threat, wait until the amateurs pay you a visit”.

Well, if we think that the competent Thatcher was a damaging presence, we now need to absorb just how much damage an incompetent version of the same can do. Think of a government that stumbles from crisis to crisis with no plan or guiding philosophy except its own self-aggrandisement, that takes its decisions too late and applies them too weakly, that sacrifices lives to profits in cruel indifference to the suffering and bereavement it causes, and then seeks to blames its advisers for its shortcomings. Yep. You’ve got it. That’s the Johnson government. Thatcher redux, without the ability.

Second rate, this lot? Way beyond their reach

Shall we say twentieth rate for the Johnson government? Or, OK, let’s be generous, maybe nineteenth. But second rate? Nah. They’re nowhere near that good.

As Mikes made clear, second rate is pretty remarkable.

The Johnson crowd comes way, way down below that on the Mikes scale.

Preparing for the pandemic

A crisis! A crisis! It’s a time to rise to a challenge, to show your mettle, to confront and overcome whatever life throws at you.

Of course, the first thing is admitting that there’s a crisis at all. I’ve always preferred what might be called the Jim Callaghan approach, after the Labour Prime Minister of Great Britain, who in 1979 is said – wrongly as it happens – to have declared, “Crisis? What Crisis?”

The nice thing about that kind of denial is that it allows you to show your mettle by returning to the sofa and having another glass of wine.

The problem with denial, unfortunately, is that while comfortable, it doesn’t actually solve any problems. Jim Callaghan discovered that to his cost a few months later when Maggie Thatcher gave him a drubbing in the 1979 General Election.

Danielle and I decided that it was time at last to treat the Coronavirus threat with a little respect. I have to admit that a part of me still says that it’s what an Italian Minister called an ‘infodemic’ rather than an epidemic. That’s a spreading pool of anxiety, if not panic, caused by the sheer volume of information, and mostly rather shrill information, swilling around all the conceivable media today.

Still. It’s certainly true that many communities are already facing the tedious inconvenience of quarantine. So it struck us that, while we can’t do much about the disease itself except cross our fingers and hope it doesn’t get us, we could at least take some steps towards preparing ourselves for isolation, just in case it happens to us too.

We are, therefore, beginning to build up some stocks. We’ve got quite a lot of water, though I do feel we ought to add some beer, preferably Corona, if only out of a sense of appropriateness. We’ve also bought a lot of flour, so Danielle can make bread, and a lot of pasta and rice, plus various tins, so we can cook some basic meals if the need arises.

Flour, rice, pasta, tins: our Coronavirus quarantine survival kit

It seems to me that we’ve probably assured our survival. Surviving isn’t quite the same as living, though, is it? I suppose I can still pop out to buy some more wine. Or I might just have to reconcile myself to the idea that the idea isn’t to have a good time, it’s just get through it.

We can live on pasta with tomato sauce, alternating with rice with tomato sauce, with a tin of something thrown in from time to time for variety. And bread for breakfast, since we have enormous stocks left of Danielle’s excellent marmalade, made just a few weeks ago.

Overall, I’m reasonably satisfied that we’ve made some adequate preparations.

It’s true, though, that we’ve only got enough for about three weeks. That may not seem long. On the other hand, on such a diet, I can’t help feeling that it might seem more than long enough.

Beyond three weeks, I’m not sure whether Coronavirus infection might not start to seem the lesser evil.

Labour and the coming general election: the context

As we in the British Labour Party prepare for our next general election, on 8 June, it struck me as interesting to look at the others there have been since the end of the Second World War. We are, after all, in a sense still living the post-War era, at least insofar as there has not been such a violent shock in the evolution of society as that war produced. Not yet, anyway, even if Donald Trump’s working on it.

There have been eleven leaders of the Labour Party in that time, not counting deputies who have acted as leader while a new one was being elected (George Brown, Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman twice). Of the eleven, nine have fought at least one general election; John Smith sadly died before he could, and Jeremy Corbyn, the current leader, is about to face his first.

Elections, how Labour did, under which leader
Victories in red, defeats in blue
Worst result in black, best in orange

The table shows how they have all fared.

Curiously, since 1945, Labour has only lost one more election than it has won (nine victories to ten defeats). However, it has managed to hang on to power significantly less successfully than the Conservatives: of the nearly 72 years since the war ended, Labour has held power for only about 30.

The Tories have moulded the era in which we live far more than Labour has.

Of all the elections it contested in that time, Labour reached its nadir in 1983, under Michael Foot, when it won just 209 seats. Under Neil Kinnock, it gradually rebuilt its fortunes in 1987 and 1992, until it achieved its biggest success under Tony Blair in 1997, winning 418 seats – curiously, precisely double the number won under Foot.

Almost as spectacular as Blair’s success of 1997 was his victory four years later, when he won 412 seats, with Attlee’s landslide in 1945 and Wilson’s in 1966 (393 and 363 seats respectively) close behind.

At the other end of the scale, the number of seats won by Labour fell at both of the last two general elections, until under Miliband in 2015, it reached 232, just 23 more than Foot took in 1983.

So that’s a little context. The obvious question is will the trend reverse in 2017? Will Corbyn, like Kinnock, put the party on a road back up towards power? Or will he merely continue the downward trend from Brown to Miliband? Will he move us off the bottom or, conversely, set a new post-War low?

I shall be out canvassing with other members to ensure that we achieve the former outcome rather than the latter. The polls are against us but the polls can be bucked. Seven weeks from now, we’ll know whether we’ve pulled off that trick.

Labour anti-Semitic crisis? What crisis?

My mother being Jewish makes me, naturally, Jewish. God-fearing or not. In Israel or in the diaspora.

It’s a law nearly as inescapable as the law of gravity.

That meant I was, from childhood, regularly exposed to Jewish humour. Broadly, there are two great categories of jokes about Jews. On the one hand, there are those told by anti-Semites which target the supposed meanness and deviousness of Jews, and are desperately unfunny because they are so heavily marked by hatred. I shan’t be repeating any of them.

On the other hand, there are the jokes told by Jews about themselves. They highlight supposed characteristics of the Jew in a stereotype to which, I’m sure, no Jew really corresponds, but they are often brilliantly witty precisely because they are marked above all by wryness and a certain love.

For instance, a woman meets a young mother pushing a double buggy.

“Oh, what a lovely baby,” she says.

“Which one?” asks the mother, “the lawyer or the doctor?”

But one of my favourites concerns a mother with her son on a Tel Aviv bus. She keeps talking to her son in Yiddish even though the son always replies in Hebrew. Eventually, one of the other passengers turns to the mother and points out:

“Madam, your son is a citizen of the state of Israel. Our official language is Hebrew. You should be encouraging him to speak it.”

“Yes,” she replies, “but I don’t want him to forget he’s Jewish.”

I like that joke because of a profound truth at its core. There is a particular kind of Jewishness characterised, above all, by European Jewry with its Yiddish-speaking roots. That community reacted to persecution by loathing all persecution. It voted massively left of centre, it proclaimed a doctrine of tolerance, it was in the best and deepest sense of the word, liberal.

It would not have dreamed of believing that a Palestinian, as a Palestinian, was entitled to fewer rights than anyone else. It would have laughed to scorn the idea that such a Palestinian might be persecuted by a Jew. “We, the perpetual victims of racism, to be perpetrators of racism ourselves?” 

Sadly, that is a set of attitudes that seems out of vogue in Israel. The nation that speaks Hebrew is far less imbued with those values, which I cherish, than the nation that spoke Yiddish once was. It makes Israel far less the home of certain kinds of Jews than it might have been.

But not all Jews find their home in Israel anyway. The Jewish Agency apparently believes that something like 5.3m Jews, just 100,000 fewer than in Israel, live in the US. It used to be said that many American Jewish families would of course eventually settle in Israel, showing solidarity with their brethren there – but only once the sons were past military age.

There was also a story in the community about a suggestion that American Jews might be given their own soveriegn state within US territory, but it had to be turned down when no one could be found to agree to serve as Ambassador to Israel.

Right now, the papers are proclaiming that the British Labour Party is suffering a crisis of anti-Semitism. Jim Callaghan, Labour Prime Minister in the 1970s, once famously said of some economic difficulties the country was suffering, “crisis? What crisis?” He was made to pay for the words by a self-righteous press that found he wasn’t taking them seriously enough.

I’m inclined, today, to say “anti-Semitism crisis? What crisis?”

Naz Shah in the House of Commons:
the MP now suspended from the Labour Party

Naz Shah was elected Labour MP for Bradford West in 2015, wresting the seat back from a particularly unsavoury individual, George Galloway who took the traditionally Labour seat three years earlier. She has now been suspended from the Labour Party for supposed anti-Semitism. Among other things, it seems that in 2014 she posted a tweet suggesting that the whole population of Israel could be moved to the US, and the problem in the region would be sorted.

It may not have been particularly funny. But was it any worse than the joke, from inside the Jewish community, about no US Jew wanting to serve as Ambassador to Israel? Or anything like as deadly as some of the barbs that have been thrown our way down the ages?

Why aren’t we able simply to grin, shrug our shoulders and walk away from it?

We are in the closing stages of a US Primary Election campaign which is likely to see Donald Trump win the Republican nomination. This man has said that he would be prepared, as President, to exclude all Muslims from entering the US for a period.

It strikes me that this kind of Islamophobia, which extends far beyond Trump, is much more pernicious than the occasional outbursts of anti-Semitism that we see. And when it comes to offensive remarks, it is far more brutal than her weak joke.

We Jews of the diaspora used to represent some pretty admirable values, which we’ve rather lost recently – most British Jews today vote Tory. But it feels to me that we’re also in danger of losing our sense of perspective. And worse still, the sense of humour which we retained even through the Holocaust.

Now that would be a truly lamentable loss.