Carving up the world

 “We’ll break our trip for one night in Tordesillas,” I was told as we drove out towards Cantabria, in Northern Spain, for a holiday with family.

Tordesillas: a fine place to break a long journey

I had no objection, especially as I understood it was a fine place to visit. It wasn’t till quite some time after we’d got there that I realised that the name of the place should have rung a bell, though it hadn’t. It was the site of a pretty significant incident, and I like to think I know about the history of such events.

It was galling that I hadn’t spotted it at once.

This was the place where the two leading powers of Europe of the time decide to carve up the world between them. 

In today’s Europe, it’s hard to think that it was those two nations that led the way, but that was the way things were back in 1494. Portugal was the first European nation to have started building an overseas Empire. And, just recently, Spain had sent Christopher Columbus out westward across the Atlantic in search of a new route to India. What he actually came across was the colossal double-continent in the way, the lands we now know as the Americas. That had happened only two years earlier: as we all learn as kids, in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

On his return, he called in on Lisbon first and let the Portuguese king, John II, know about his discoveries. Which rather put the cat among the pigeons. After all, the Portuguese had a decree of the Pope, no less, saying that any lands ‘discovered’ south of the Canaries, would be theirs.

Because, of course, the Pope had every authority to make such a dispensation. And the people who actually lived in those places had obviously not discovered them, until Europeans got there.

“Hey, guys,” the new arrivals would say, “consider yourselves discovered.”

“What a relief,” the locals must have replied, “it was such a bore being undiscovered and not really counting for anything in the world.”

Or possibly not.

So here was the upstart Spain – and not even all of Spain, but just one of its two Kingdoms, Castile – poking around in what was obviously south of the Canaries and therefore clearly Portuguese.

The result was the meeting in Tordesillas. On the one hand, there was Isabel Queen of Castile, with her husband, Ferdinand King of Aragon, together the so-called Catholic monarchs of Spain. On the other hand, there was John II of Portugal. Both sides were accompanied by significant people supporting them, but not significant enough for me to remember their names or anything about them.

The decision was to split the world between Spain and Portugal. Any new lands ‘discovered’ to the west of a line of longitude running 270 leagues west of the islands of the Azores would be Spanish, anything east of it Spanish. That wasn’t particularly clear, since no one really agreed how long a league was, nor where in the Azores the measurement should be made from, but hey, it was good enough. It meant that most of what we now know as Eastern Brazil would be Portuguese, which is why modern Brazil speaks its version of that language, while the rest of what was to become Latin America would be Spanish.

Just over ten years later, the Pope endorsed the agreement, giving it divine authority. Or so everyone involved imagined. Or pretended to imagine. 

Ten or so years after that there was a debate about whether the dividing line continued all the way around the world, splitting Asia too between those powers. Further negotiations led to a new division out there as well.

The importance of all these decisions left me a little dumbfounded at not remembering any of it until I saw the monument in the city celebrating the event. That taught me a salutary lesson on how much history I simply don’t know, or have forgotten.

Monument to the Treaty and its main signatories

After all, it was a significant event, what with its papal endorsement and everything. Though perhaps more for what it left out than what it included.

For instance, it only involved Spain and Portugal among the European nations. Portugal was already a declining force. England and Holland were beginning to show the first stirrings of ambition. Meanwhile, there was a rising power that was already snapping at Spain’s heels and destined ultimately to overtake it, in the form of France. None of those nations were mentioned in the Treaty. Not even the Pope’s blessing was going to make those nations keen on accepting a partition of the world between two of their rivals.

Besides, less than a quarter of a century after the Treaty of Tordesillas, the Reformation would split Europe into Catholic and Protestant states. Protestants felt under no obligation whatever to accept the Pope’s authority on any of these matters. So, while Spain and Portugal more or less stuck to the Treaty, everyone else pretty much stuck two fingers up to it.

But, significant though all that is, it leaves out the most striking aspect of all in the grand negotiations at Tordesillas.

They made absolutely not mention whatever of the people who might actually be living in the lands these great powers were carving up between them. The ‘discovered’ people had no say in the negotiations, no rights confirmed by the treaty. Spain and Portugal were given possession of ‘new lands’, but those already living there were given possession of none, least of all their own.

No wonder we’re still having to say ‘Black Lives Matter’ five centuries later.

That aspect was far more eloquently captured by a street mural we came across in the city, than by any monument to the Treaty.

Spain and Portugal carving up the world. While an ‘Indian’ weeps at the rape of her lands

The King has flown...

The King has flown the coop! Literally.

Well, literally as far as flying is concerned. I understand he took a plane. He didn’t really live in a coop, but in a significantly more desirable residence, the Zarzuela palace on the outskirts of Madrid.

He wasn’t a real King any more. He abdicated in 2014 and became ‘emeritus King’. Some nasty scandals, involving an elephant shoot, a mistress, and a lot of unexplained millions, made it advisable for him to stand down.

The elephant hunt was in Botswana in 2012, when Spain was struggling with soaring unemployment. Junkets at 40,000 euros a head weren’t viewed favourably. Especially when the King’s expenses were being covered by a Saudi businessman.

Besides, the King wasn’t accompanied by his Queen, Sofia, but by Corinna Larsen. Let’s just call her a ‘close friend’.

Emeritus King and close friend

The business of the millions emerged later, and many of them came from Saudi too. For what hasn’t ever been made clear, but he built up 100 million US dollars in a Geneva bank account. He transferred 65 million euros to Corinna. So you can see how close a friend she was.

There were also delightful moment, including the transfer of banknotes to Switzerland in a briefcase. Straight out of the kind of clichéd international thriller series that you might only watch on a wet Sunday, if you don’t feel up to anything more demanding.

I ought to clarify that when I say he wasn’t a ‘real King’, I was using the word ‘real’ in the English sense. In Spanish, ‘real’ doesn’t really mean real, it means royal, which he really was once, but isn’t really any more. Following a royal cockup.

I hope that’s clear.

It amuses me that if you live long enough, you get to see practically everything. I never expected to witness the restoration of a monarchy. To me, restoring monarchies was something Europe gave up on a couple of centuries ago. But, in 1975, Spain put the royal family back on the throne. That meant crowning the King we’re talking about, Juan Carlos I.

Now that I live in Spain, I keep being surprised by how many things are ‘real’. You know, you don’t have a yacht club, you have a royal yacht club. You don’t have a Music Academy, you have a Royal Academy of Music. It’s like England, rather than most Latin nations, which are Republics.

Still, if the restoration of the Spanish monarchy struck me as an anachronism, at least the events that accompanied it were pretty impressive. The dictator Franco had made Juan Carlos heir to his power. That was the Franco who had seized power in a military uprising forty years earlier and consolidated it through bloody civil war and brutal repression.

Juan Carlos used Franco’s legal framework to take Franco’s system apart. Within three years, the Spanish people had voted by referendum to move to a parliamentary monarchy as democratic as any in Europe. The subsequent elections included parties that had been banned and hunted for decades, including the Communists.

The King had been under no obligation to take this road. Most historians agree that, though the popular pressure for democratisation might have been hard to resist, he did far more to ease the transition than one might have expected. He built himself an enviable reputation, so that even among Republicans, many would say, “I’m not a royalist, I’m a Juan-Carlist”.

There aren’t so many Juan-Carlists these days. No one has put it better than the ex-King himself: “anyone under the age of 40 will only remember me as the one with Corinna, with the elephant and with the briefcase”.

How the mighty are fallen.

Still, it’s exciting to witness not just the restoration of a monarchy, but now the flight into exile of a monarch. One more throwback to a distant past.

Juan Carlos is keen to stress that his isn’t a flight from justice. It’s true that, sadly, all those dodgy financial transactions have led to police investigations. Even Corinna, now ex-friend just as he’s the ex-King, may be facing up to four years in gaol for money laundering. Juan Carlos says he will make himself available to any enquiries into his affairs. His departure from Spain was just to cause no further embarrassment to his homeland, and to allow his son, now King Philip VI, to play his role more easily.

It’s not clear where Juan Carlos will end up. It seems that for now he’s gone to the Dominican Republic. A lovely irony for Republicans: a King abandons his monarchy to take refuge in a Republic. You couldn’t’ make it up.

Who knows where he’ll head next. He obviously has friends in Saudi, but it’s hard to imagine him going there. But, hey, who knows.

In any case, and this may not come as a surprise, it doesn’t seem that Queen Sofia will be joining him.

In England, for decades after the Stuarts were kicked off the throne, their fans, when drinking the King’s health, would pass their wine over a glass of water, to indicate they were drinking to the “King over the water”.

Perhaps some in Spain may do the same for Juan Carlos. Or, if he does go to Saudi, they could pass their glass over a dish of sand. Unless they feel a piece of elephant hide is more appropriate.

Interesting times…

Making our nations laughable again

It’s always good to have a laugh, isn’t it? Laughter’s the great natural therapy for humans, in the state technically known to psychiatrists as ‘down in the dumps’. That’s a sad condition particularly common in our hard times.

Unfortunately, the laughs these days, precisely because times are so difficult, are sometimes a little bleak. We smile, but on occasion, more than a little wryly. The laughter, when it comes, is often hollow.

That’s true, for instance, of our amusement over the dark irony that those leaders, from the radical, populist right, whose proclaimed aim it is to make their countries world leaders, in fact make them into laughingstocks.

Cummings (l), the organ grinder, and Johnson
The mini-Trump combo currently running Britain

This week that has been particularly true of Great Britain. That benighted country has a government headed by Dominic Cummings, the Prime Minister’s principal adviser, a man who led efforts to put in place the country’s lockdown regulations, but immediately broke them himself when he found that they inconvenienced him personally.

His decision to travel several hundred miles around the country while ill with Coronavirus, potentially infecting rather a lot of people on the way, was curious enough, but what was truly fascinating was his apparent inability to understand that anyone might find that behaviour reprehensible. He explained that he had problems organising childcare while he and his partner were in quarantine. It was as though no one else had ever faced similar difficulties, and his case should be treated as exceptional, because his circumstances were unique.

The Cummings government is fronted by Boris Johnson, a man often referred to as mini-Trump. He owes the nickname to his apparent desire to emulate the mega-Trump across the Atlantic. Why he should want to do that is hard to understand. It may be that he belongs to the shrinking band of people around the world who think Trump shows deftness of decision-making and sureness of vision, capable of inspiring people like Johnson with a desire to emulate him.

Anyway, this week the Cummings-Johnson duopoly went seemingly out of its way to provide us with material for laughs, if of the slightly grim kind. Johnson announced policy U-turns, on quarantining visitors returning from Spain and on tightening Coronavirus restrictions in the North of England, in the late evening and without anything like proper notice.

This gave the impression of a government without a strategy or any kind of ability to adopt measures in a rational or controlled manner. An impression which, if its track record is anything to go by, is entirely accurate.

One of Maggie Thatcher’s iconic sayings was in relation to U-turns. “You turn if you want to,” she told the 1980 Conservative Party conference. Then she paused for the inevitable applause and followed up with, “The Lady’s not for turning.” And the applause turned ecstatic.

Well, the Cummings-Johnson show clearly is for turning. Gyrating in the breeze, indeed.

So we laugh, grimly, at the irony of a government whose stated aim is to make Britain’s response to Coronavirus ‘world-beating’, while in fact it has succeeded only in making it laughable.

Trump:
braying can be quite funny but is no substitute for planning

Meanwhile, what’s the latest on mega-Trump? As he constantly assures us, researchers and drug companies in the US are working at speed (warp-speed, indeed, to adopt the administration’s own term, a reference to a form of travel in science fiction which corresponds to nothing real). Their efforts to develop a vaccine against Coronavirus are such that one may yet be available before the end of the year. But, it has now emerged, the administration has developed no plan to manage the distribution of the vaccine if one is developed, or to decide who should receive it first and who should wait as supplies ramp up.

As the received expression has it, fail to plan, plan to fail.

Another hollow laugh then, at yet another example of incompetence from Trump. Not, of course, that we expect anything else from him. Or indeed from Johnson.

I suppose it’s that complete fulfilment of expectations that makes Trump and Cummings-Johnson something to laugh at. Not a merry laugh. But a laugh all the same.

We should take some comfort from that much at least. See the funny side. Find a smile as an alternative to tears.

Though perhaps we might also pause a moment to learn an actual lesson. Which we might sum up quite neatly, as:

Plan to vote Populist, plan for disaster.

Trump: ready to steal what he can't win

Nothing Trump does surprises me anymore, but it’s still saddening to read that he’s now proposing a delay to the presidential elections.

It’s unsurprising because the US economy is in terrible condition. At the same time, deaths from Coronavirus have risen above 150,000 and are running at around 1500 a day. By way of contrast, Spain, where I live, is struggling to contain the epidemic but has a daily death toll in single figures.

The US has going on seven times the population but perhaps as much as 300 times as many daily deaths.

No wonder, then, that Trump would like the election held later, when the news, both on the economy and the epidemic, may be less damning for him.

What is even more depressing is that he’s challenging the validity of postal voting. Many prefer voting by post precisely because they don’t want to expose themselves to Coronavirus infection by attending polling stations in person. It’s true, too, that historically such votes tend to break more for the Democrats than the Republicans. That doesn’t make them fraudulent, as Trump claims against all the evidence, just less favourable to him.

Why that’s so particularly worrying is that it sounds far less like an argument for delaying the election, as for challenging the validity of the results if it’s held as planned and he loses. It’s by no means certain Biden will win, but it does look as though Trump is preparing a plan B, in the event of his losing. 

In other words, it feels as though Trump is preparing to steal the election.

Biden (left) working to win by the rules
Trump: preparing to rob him?

He could. Just imagine the following scenario.

The Democrat wins the presidential election by a small but nonetheless clear majority of the popular vote, say 50.9% to 47.9%.

And he wins the electoral college by a similarly small but conclusive margin of 39 votes over his Republican opponent.

Then things turn murky. Republicans challenge the votes of four states amounting, between them, to 20 electoral college votes, all of them for the Democrat. Removing those disputed votes from his total would leave him, exasperatingly, just one vote short of a majority – still 19 votes ahead of his rival, but not able to clinch the election.

Of course, he only needs one of the disputed electors to win. Things still look good for a Democratic victory. Republicans are worried.

After long weeks of negotiation, the two Parties agree to arbitrate the result. A special commission will adjudicate on the votes cast. It will include five members of the House of Representatives, five Senators and five Justices of the Supreme Court.

And that’s when the wheels start to come off the bus. Because on every vote, the commission splits 8:7 in favour of the Republicans. As a result, every single one of the disputed votes is awarded to the Republican candidate who emerges with an electoral college majority of just one and is duly sworn in as President.

The Democrats needed just one of those votes. They received none. And so they were defeated.

The worst thing about this scenario is that, far-fetched as it might sound, it’s no fantasy. In fact, it’s already happened.

What I was describing was the 1876 Presidential election. Samuel Tilden, the Democrat, was defeated, or rather robbed of victory. His Republican opponent, Rutherford Hayes, won the election, or rather had it stolen and handed to him. He became the nineteenth President.

Never heard of him? No surprise there. He deserves his obscurity. He achieved little and left little trace. Sadly, the same can’t be said of Trump. As the death toll from Coronavirus, and the damage to the economy, of the US and the world, have shown, his legacy is assured. Another four years, and there’s every chance it’ll be far more devastating still. And all the more difficult to recover from.

The only way to make it hard for Trump to steal the election is to make sure his defeat is so comprehensive that a challenge to any votes would not change the result.

Back in 2016, a lot of people, including friends of mine, couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary. Let’s hope that this time around, whatever misgivings they may have about Biden, they understand the importance of backing the candidate best placed to beat Trump.

Electing Rutherford Hayes was a dirty business. But re-electing Trump would be a real catastrophe. And be warned: he’s preparing the ground to steal what he can’t win.

 

Postscript

Though Samuel Tilden was, no doubt, robbed back in 1876, his campaign could hardly claim to be pure or admirable. Many of his wins came in the deep south, and were only obtained because white agitators physically threatened black voters to prevent them voting. Eleven years after a Civil War during which a Republican President, Lincoln, had freed them from slavery, the vast majority of blacks voted Republican.

In other words, had Tilden won, his victory would not have been that much cleaner than Hayes’.

Rutherford Hayes (left), the Republican
Samuel Tilden saw his victory stolen and handed to Hayes

Still. This time, though, Biden is trying to play by the rules. Let’s hope that doesn’t cost him victory.

Seaside with the family

There are two great things about seaside family holidays. One’s the seaside. The other’s the family.

As for the seaside, the great thing about that is the sea. Beaches? Yeah, fine, good enough. But let’s remember the deathless verse of Lewis Carroll:

The Walrus and the Carpenter

      Were walking close at hand;

They wept like anything to see

      Such quantities of sand:

If this were only cleared away,'

      They said, 'it would be grand!'

 

If seven maids with seven mops

      Swept it for half a year,

Do you suppose,' the Walrus said,

      'That they could get it clear?'

'I doubt it,' said the Carpenter,

      And shed a bitter tear.

As for beachballs, buckets, spades, air mattresses, umbrellas and camp chairs, all the general beach litter that seems to accumulate near seaside sun worshippers, you can keep them. Collateral damage of a pleasant interlude by the sea, is my far-from-humble opinion.

No. It’s the sea itself that makes the trip worthwhile. Swimming in it. But also just enjoying the sights, or giving those sights permanent expression in a photograph. That’s something that constantly draws me to the sea.

This happened the other day. We were out on a rocky headland. More than that, really. A ruddy great rock sticking out of the sea.

A rock on the Spanish coast
Fortunately not surmounted by the Union Jack

I’m surprised it’s not a British possession: we like to seize control over large rocks off the Spanish coast, don’t we? But I suppose this one’s smaller than Gibraltar, and maybe the Foreign Office hasn’t noticed its existence.

It was clear that, with a bit of a scramble, I could get right down to the water level. At worst, I might suffer a bruise or two, perhaps a slight graze. But some of the waves were striking the rocks and throwing up great spouts of foam, potentially making a great picture.

Unfortunately, I was never quite on time to get that photo, or at least quite the way I wanted it. I got some pretty views, but nothing spectacular.

Wave breaking on the Ifach rock
Not as spectacular as I'd have liked

What I hadn’t taken into account was that the sea could produce a fairly spectacular picture of me. And the other part of the holiday, the family bit, would be right on hand to record it. Gleefully.

I got soaked by one of those lovely waves I was so keen on. Davide – which, pronounced as though it were French, is what we use to distinguish him from me (I don’t like ‘old David’ and ‘young David’) – is a far superior photographer, and he was cheerfully snapping away.

More spectacular than I bargained for
Davide catching me as a wave caught me

He even got the aftermath, of me standing there, trying to put a brave face on things and smile, though I knew I’d be spending the whole evening, including dinner, sopping wet.

The aftermath, or the price of my art
Soaking wet just in time for dinner

Ah well. The sea. And a son. Sources of joy, both of them.

And they come together just as they should in the family seaside holiday.

How the mighty have fallen. And are falling today

In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…

Replica of Columbus’s ship, the Santa Maria

Ah, the jingle we all learn at school. Making 1492 almost as memorable to British schoolkids as 1066 and the Norman invasion of England. But Columbus did more than sail the ocean.

To this day, Spain’s national day is 12 October, supposedly the anniversary of Columbus’s ‘discovery’ of the New World (in quotation marks because I assume the people who were already living there didn’t feel he’d discovered the place. Nor would they have seen much to celebrate in the event).

That day is also celebrated in much of the Americas, even the US, where it’s explicitly referred to as ‘Columbus Day’.

It’s that important because it marks the ascent of Spain to the status of world power. The primary world power of its time. The head of perhaps the greatest Empire the world had seen up to then, an Empire on which the sun never set. It stretched from the Philippines to the Americas, and quite a lot in between. Even in Europe, the Spanish holdings were massive: a lot of Italy, bits of France and Germany, and the whole of the Low Countries (present day Benelux).

It was true that it was always daylight somewhere in the Spanish Empire.

Of course, that isn’t always such a good thing. It was later true of the British Empire that the sun never set on it, but Duncan Spaeth, a bright commentator in the US commented, “I know why the sun never sets on the British Empire: God would never trust an Englishman in the dark.”

Spin had the muscle to back up its status. The ‘tercios’ were the most feared infantry units in Europe, virtually unstoppable on battlefields, and it had redoubtable maritime forces, to service its overseas imperial possessions.

And then it lost it all. At the Battle of Trafalgar, at the start of the nineteenth century, the best of the Spanish fleet was destroyed, alongside its French allies. In the course of the following decades, most of its American colonies fought and won their independence, until by the end of the century its only substantial possessions were Cuba in Latin America and the Philippines in Asia. Then it fell out with the new upstart nation on the world stage, the United States, which sank the weakened navy it still had, and relieved it of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam.

America justifies its its toasting of Spain

Things hadn’t gone well at home either. The decision as to who should be King would be determined by fighting between foreign powers – Britain and Austria on the one hand, France on the other – at the start of the eighteenth century. At the start of the nineteenth, Napoleon would put a brother of his on the throne. Meanwhile, instability and war had reduced the country to poverty and backwardness. Where once it had called the shots in Europe, it was now the victim of other nations’ bullying.

What went wrong? How come in 400 years Spain could go from straddling the globe to suffering poverty and defeat as a third-rate European power?

You don’t have to look far to find the answer. The Church imposed a regime of solidly enforced ignorance on the people. When France, Britain, and many states of Northern Europe were driving science forward, and building new technology on it, the Inquisition made sure that such dangerous ideas were given no opportunity to grow in Spain.

In parallel, a class of super-wealthy nobles ensured that the unbelievable levels of wealth extracted from the Empire maintained essentially themselves. They owned huge holdings of land and lived off them. They paid little or no tax themselves but enforced payment of backbreaking sums from those poorer than themselves. Just as the Spanish Church prevented enlightenment ideas from spreading into the development of new ideas and techniques, so the Spanish elites ensured that no significant investment would be made in new industries and wealth-creation generally.

The result? There was neither the will nor the means to do what was necessary to preserve Spanish pre-eminence. For instance, to replace the fleet lost at Trafalgar.

Spain lost its status as a world power because its domestically powerful weren’t ready to embrace any change that threatened their lifestyle. And so they, and the rest of the people, lost the lot in the end.

Why is this worth reflecting on? Because I believe that the same happened to Britain. It replaced Spain as a nation of colossal power in the world. But then it couldn’t adapt to new circumstances or accommodate the changes in society needed to make the nation fit for a different world. It had the chance to embrace a powerful new role in 1970s, as a major player in a powerful world bloc, the EU. But, as nostalgic as the Spanish always were for a supposedly glorious past that was rapidly slipping away, Britain then left in 2016. Like Spain before it joined the EU, it will become a third-rate power struggling to make its voice heard.

And even more important than Britain, what now is happening to the US? As Trump has alienated nation after nation, he can no longer pull together a coalition, for instance for his quarrel with China. Like the Spanish leaders of the eighteenth and nineteenth century, he is fixated with a past that is vanishing. That leaves him incapable of dealing with a future that is careering down the track towards him.

It happened to Spain. It happened to Britain. If the US sticks with Trump, we may well see his people Making America Small Again.

Truth, fact and fiction

I love the expression ‘in my humble opinion’. That’s because it isn’t just wrong. It’s wrong in so many different ways.

After all, how can an opinion be humble or proud? Or pretty much anything other than right or wrong, well-founded or fanciful? The holder of the opinion may be humble, but if so, why advance the opinion anyway? Surely putting forward an opinion at all shows a certain confidence in it, if not downright arrogance?

Anyway, in my humble opinion, the two best pieces of TV I’ve watched in recent months are Unbelievable and Unorthodox. The fact that both titles are negative adjectives may be unnerving but is certainly unintentional.

Merritt Wever and Toni Collette as the detectives in Unbelievable
Fictionalised versions of real characters

Unbelievable is based on a compelling account of police work, led by two women detectives, on a serial rapist, with the linked story of a young woman whose rape complaint wasn’t believed by far less bright cops.

Unorthodox is drawn from the novel, built around her experiences, of a woman who broke free from an Orthodox Jewish community in New York, and the difficulties she faced both in her earlier existence and in coming to terms with the new one.

Shira Haas in Unothodox
The lake scene is one of the most poignant in the series

Both are works of fiction based on historical fact. This is not a spoiler, but there is a strand in Unorthodox to do with music which does not correspond to the real character’s history. But it’s powerful and engrossing, so it’s a welcome addition to the story. And it certainly doesn’t detract from its psychological truth.

Similarly, in Unbelievable, the names of the female protagonists have been changed. In the case of the young rape victim, this is principally to protect her identity. In the case of the two outstanding detectives, it is because though they are drawn from real figures, they differ from them in certain ways, and the invented names recognise the extent to which they are fictional creations.

Libby Hill recently ran an interview on Indiewire with Susannah Grant, co-creator of Unbelievable. The article’s worth reading in its entirety, but for now I’m going to focus on just a single sentence, because it struck me so forcefully. This is Hill’s opening, a quote from the novelist Madeleine L’Engle:

Truth is what is true, and it’s not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing.

Facts can be used to mislead. It is fact, for instance, that UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson recently announced £5 billion of infrastructure expenditure as a key element in the government’s response to the economic crisis associated with the Coronavirus pandemic. It’s also a fact that when US President Franklyn Roosevelt had to respond to the economic crisis precipitated by the crash of 1929, he called it the ‘New Deal’.

Unsurprisingly, Johnson called his initiative a New Deal too.

The parallel with Roosevelt’s unprecedented and colossal programme in the 1930s is impressive. Or so it seems, until we add a further fact. Johnson’s New Deal represents 0.2% of British GDP, while FDR’s amounted to around 40% of the US economy.

A fact without context gave us a fiction that communicates a falsehood.

Unbelievable, on the other hand, took facts as a starting point, but then built a fiction around them which conveyed important truths. It used the fiction to illustrate the horror and distress of rape, the pain of the victim disbelieved, and the contrast between the slapdash work of an inept policeman and the tireless and exhaustive work of two excellent ones.

In other words, a good fiction can communicate an important truth, while simple facts, as in Johnson’s case, can be used to deliver a falsehood.

This all put me in mind of one of my favourites writers of all time, Denis Diderot, the French novelist and philosopher of the eighteenth century. He was a remarkable writer, and his novels sparkle and amuse even today (if you don’t know it, you should try Jacques the Fatalist, one of the greatest comic novels of all time). Strangely, he admired Samuel Richardson, an English writer whose novels are stodgy and cloyingly sentimental with a touch of sadism thrown in. Diderot was heavily influenced by him, which is odd, since his books are lighter, more compelling and above all funnier.

There was a sharp debate in Diderot’s day about the relative truth of history and the novel. This was a time when historians were not above inventing speeches to put in the mouths of the major figures they were dealing with, on the grounds that, though no one knew what Julius Caesar or Charlemagne had said on a particular occasion, this is the kind of thing they might have said. But even without such downright invention, much history is necessarily speculative – based on documentary evidence perhaps, but filling in gaps by interpretation.

Diderot directly addresses Richardson on this subject:

Oh Richardson! I will go so far as to say that the truest of histories is full of lies, and your novel is full of truths. History paints a few individuals; you paint the whole human race… The human heart, which has been, is and always will be the same, is the model you copy… I will go so far as to say that history is often a bad novel; and the novel, as you have made it, is a good history. O painter of nature! It is you who never lie.

I love that notion. Fiction can be more truthful than fact. “Truth and fact are not the same thing,” as Madeleine L’Engle so sharply put it.

To see how valid that is, watch Unbelievable and Unorthodox if you haven’t already seen them. And tease out the truths in these and other fictions, of screen or page.

Then listen to the allegedly factual statements of Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin or even mini-Trump Boris Johnson, with a seriously large pinch of salt.