Passacaglia and Fugue

It's time for an end-of-the-year post. Lots of things happened in 2024.

At last we got rid of the Tories, although Starmer seems almost as tone-deaf as his predecessor (in either government or party dimensions). It's true, of course, that things can't be fixed overnight, but he doesn't seem to do "hope" particularly well. Locally, the Tories lost the seat to Labour, with a disappointing Lib Dem result, although recently I reflected that perhaps we had taken some votes from the Tories, which would have been important in the final result. I suspect there are quite a few places where the margin of victory wasn't particularly high, and as a result the parliamentary landslide is shallow. Reform are emboldened by Trump's victory in the US and the Tories seem determined to track them rather than attract voters by returning to more central ground. I have the feeling this won't end well.

Given my post from last year, I should observe that since November we've been connected with full fibre. So far, so good. It turns out, in a repeat performance of digging up the roads, Virgin Media is also an option now. It seems everyone apart from BT/Openreach think it's worth laying fibre here. There might be regulatory reasons for that.

A friend, who is a few years older, retired early from their job, precipitated by changes to USS. It was bound to start happening at some point, but nonetheless it was a psychological jolt. For me, work has been a mixed bag and there are definitely some things I don't like about it. Over the holiday period I have been researching, planning and playing what-ifs with spreadsheets. I can't quite access my SIPP yet, but it's getting close enough that I think it's worth contacting Pension Wise in the new year, probably following up with real financial advice. Things would be a lot easier if I thought there were benign economic waters ahead in the next four years.

Anyway, here are some highlights from my year:

• Fiction - The Assassin of Verona, by Benet Brandreth


• Non-fiction - You're Him, Aren't You?, by Paul Darrow


• Music - Henry Wood's orchestration of Pictures at an Exhibition at the Proms


• Film, TV and Theatre - Ludwig (unblogged)


• Museums, Exhibitions and Visits - Yoshida at Dulwich Picture Gallery


• Food and Drink - Kinnie Spritz at Aaron's Kitchen in Valetta

Honourable mentions for
The Devil's Flute Murders (fiction); The Subterranean Railway (non-fiction); The Britten Sinfonia and the Will Gregory Moog Ensemble at the Barbican, and Jonathan Scott's Organ Recital and two Kanneh-Masons at the Proms (music); One Life and Moonflower Murders (film, TV and theatre); MUZA in Valetta, the Tarxien Temples and the Ħal Saflieni Hypogeum (exhibitions and visits).

Book Review: Heroic Failure - Brexit and the Politics of Pain, by Fintan O'Toole
I've often read Fintan O'Toole's journalism, mostly in The Irish Times, on Brexit, and this book had been on my to-read list for a while, but it was too painful to approach. Then, way back in the days when Liz Truss was Prime Minister, something moved and I felt ready to read it - Brexit is far from dead and I'm certainly not at the "acceptance" stage of grief, but it is less raw and I think the mini-budget has crushed any notion of Singapore-on-Thames; the Conservative party has become obviously ludicrous. (For what it's worth, I think Sunak will be "bad", but I think Truss was "mad"; now the damage has been done, Sunak has a ready-made alibi, but I think it will give him only a modest boost in the polls.)

The author begins by outlining some history, including a visit made by his family to England in the 1960s; clarifying some of the cultural contrasts and stereotypes (England more industrial and forward-looking; Ireland more rural and traditional, for example). But scratching beyond the surface, and navigating back to the present, his thesis is that the English (and he is careful to make the distinction between England and the rest of the UK, let alone the purely geographical entity of "Britain") felt insufficiently rewarded by its victory in World War II. Victory brought near-bankruptcy, austerity, loss of Empire, and over a longer term, faster recovery of European economies and standards of living. Further, the War did not give the English enough opportunity to prove their virility through the suffering of being invaded as was much of the continent. (Just imagine if we had lost.) Put in these terms, it's clearly unhinged, yet it makes sense. The 1973 entry into the EEC, in this perspective, is an annexation, following on from the initial dithering and indifference for the European project of the 1950s, then the humiliation in the 1960s. O'Toole makes some tenuous links to novels such as SS-GB and Fatherland, as well as Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose series, but he makes the metaphors fit. Finally, the austerity unleashed after the financial crisis of 2007/8 provides a way for the Powell/Farage populist tendency to tap in to dissatisfaction. The 2016 referendum might as well have asked the question "Do you like things the way they are?" - well, of course not.

As a journalist, O'Toole doesn't have to propose solutions (for more of that, see How Britain Ends), but he gives us the perspective of a friendly near-neighbour in at least offering a calm and sympathetic diagnosis.

Book Review: The Story of Crossrail, by Christian Wolmar
Whereas The Tunnel Through Time focused very much on the psychogeography and history of some inner London districts, Wolmar's book is closer to what I would expect, starting with the origins of the Underground routes across London and observing that North-South routes were established early on, but the city remained ambivalent about East-West routes, making do with the Metropolitan and District lines (elements of which were later united as the Circle line) and the piecemeal construction of the Central line. There's an illuminating discussion on the "objectiveness" of cost-benefit analysis, and the way various lobby groups have operated over the decades, which delayed getting Crossrail off even the vaguest of drawing boards prior to the 1990s. (The DLR and Jubilee line extension were both evaluated less favourably, yet were built earlier, due to influence from the owners of Canary Wharf. And that's before you consider similar projects outside of London.)

The later chapters of the book are more technical (though not specialist), focusing on the tunnelling, trains, stations and signalling - the last of these has been the principal cause of delay, and having read the book, it is easier to understand how this came about. Depending on one's point of view, this can be somewhat ascribed either to a chronic lack of investment in the railways, or EU bureaucracy. On the rolling stock, again, political interference trumps strict commercial considerations, where the bidding would have favoured overseas construction. On the stations, it is interesting to read about the TfL design ethos, somewhat at odds with conventions of the construction industry, but reassuringly in keeping with the iconic designs of the Tube over its history. Overall, we may be exercised by the cost overrun of about 20% (unknown at the time of writing), but Wolmar reasonably makes observations that overruns of 50-100% are not uncommon in projects of such scale (at least partially due to massaging of original estimates to get the project off the ground).

Apparently Lord Adonis wanted to call it the Churchill line but a certain Mayor of London had an infatuation for the monarch even greater than his infatuation for the wartime prime minister. Perhaps we should be grateful that it's opened in the jubilee year, rather than being delayed until yet another round-numbered VE-day anniversary.

This book was published in 2018, so although it has some awareness of the announcement of the delay, it doesn't cover what happened afterwards. One of the interesting aspects of cost-benefit analysis is the sensitivity of the "benefit" side to the state of the economy. Inevitably, a new scheme appears most favourable and is most needed when the economy is doing well; equally inevitably, it seems, by the time it has been constructed, some of the demand will have faded. The financial circumstances in which TfL finds itself in 2022 seem to follow this pattern. Wolmar points out that usage of most new transport schemes eventually exceed their estimates, though we may have to wait some time to find that out. Crossrail 2, if it ever goes ahead, is putatively to be called the Churchill line.

Book Review: FDR, by Jean Edward Smith
This was more of a doorstop than I had expected, and the world was a different place when I began reading it. My interest in the subject was driven by the pattern emerging from the infinite stream of WW2 documentaries on the leaders of the various powers - in particular the apparent naïvety of FDR regarding Stalin; his political ambivalence towards Britain is easier to comprehend. This book doesn't exactly resolve that for me, but it gives a lot more background to his character which goes some way. Born into privilege in 1882, and marrying into even more privilege, it is perhaps surprising that he should have entered the Democratic Party; but then, the positions of the two major US parties on various issues has moved strangely (to an outsider) over time. It's interesting that he occupied a position in the US Navy (Assistant Secretary) during World War 1, like Churchill: perhaps this goes some way to explaining their personal relationship, though there's no real discussion of his opinion of the British Empire. Also like Churchill, there's ample discussion of the divisive personality he was within his own party, though this was largely settled by electoral success. The New Deal and the "One Hundred Days" saw genuinely radical change, but the wider picture painted is rather more opportunistic and cynical - for example, the shameless attempt to pack the Supreme Court. Controversially seeking a third term in 1940, he found ways through the legal barriers to supporting the UK and France, prior to Pearl Harbor; rising again as a wartime leader, though often at odds with some of his military advice.

This felt like a thorough book, although it feels like it's missing an epilogue: what of FDR's legacy, Truman's succession, the 22nd amendment? The book is weighty enough without them, but there is perhaps still a sense of incompleteness.

Book Review: As It Seemed To Me, by John Cole
I first read this book in the 1990s; it seemed due for revisiting. Anyone who watched political news in the UK in the 1980s would know John Cole, with his impartial-yet-critical analysis of the trials and tribulations of the Thatcher regime. (As I recall, there was even a Spitting Image puppet of Cole, featuring in a sketch with the BBC questioning his overtime claims after the Westland affair). Nonetheless, Cole self-deprecatingly recalls being mistaken for Ian McCaskill on the streets of Britain (both sporting prominent glasses and distinctly non-BBC English accents).

Cole began his journalistic career in Belfast; his memoirs don't give much insight into that era, starting with his move to the Guardian, then based in Manchester, in 1956. He reported firstly on labour and industrial stories, working his way to News Editor and Deputy Editor; this was a troubled period for the paper, and he recalls internal issues as well as the wider stories of the day. Cole is far more positive than Dominic Sandbrook, in his assessment of Harold Wilson: perhaps it's the virtue of actually being there, though perhaps the (then recent) despair of Labour in the 1980s also elevates Wilson as a leader who was electorally successful and held his party together, though pragmatism was not enough, and neither party could sustain economic growth and control inflation. Cole credits Callaghan too, though he does not go quite as far as Sandbrook, who described Callaghan's as the first monetarist government in Britain.

Cole goes into detail on many issues after the 1979 election: Michael Foot as Labour leader, the formation of the SDP, the Thatcher regime, and the parlous state of unemployment and inflation. It's clear that he belonged to the generation that regarded full employment as a given objective, and like many, he was taken aback that the government - and also evidently, in time, the electorate - were prepared to tolerate such high unemployment.

In 1981, Cole moved to the BBC and became the face of political reporting for a decade. There's little overt opinion in his writing; it focuses on events and offers perspectives, but he avoids judgements. My recollection of earlier reading of this book had been that Cole tended to a rather simplistic view of Thatcherism, but the re-read doesn't bear that out (beyond, perhaps, ascribing that simplicity to some of her backbenchers). Later chapters cover the poll tax, resignations over Europe, the leadership challenges of 1989 and 1990, and the unexpected Conservative victory in 1992. His observation that a political party can become populated with ideologues just as that ideology is falling from favour may resonate with our own times.

Here there were only elections for the Police and Crime Commissioner. It's a post I don't believe in (or, at least, I don't believe it should be the subject of a direct election - why not elect regional Health Commissioners for example, by the same argument - surely our local elected representatives could come to a consensus over an appointment on merit) so I didn't want to dignify the process by adding to the turnout, even if to spoil my vote.

I'd like better democracy, which is not necessarily the same thing as more democracy.

Book Review: Yes, Prime Minister - the diaries of the Rt Hon James Hacker, Volume 1, edited by Jonathan Lynn and Antony Jay
I was looking for some easy reading in the days leading up to Christmas, and I discovered that according to Goodreads, I read the Complete Yes Minister in 2014. Clearly there would have been a plan to follow up with the rest of the series, but then stuff happened, and here we are, at the end of 2020.

As usual, it feels as fresh as ever; indeed, the opening chapter, Party Games, in which Hacker is elevated to the office of Prime Minister, involves Hacker feeding the press misinformation on Brussels proposals for the Eurosausage as part of his successful campaign. Oh, happy days, when people could recognise satire and fiction. It feels to me that the "editors" occasionally went overboard with their explanatory footnotes, but there are really no duds in this collection of stories.

Book Review: State of Emergency - The Way We Were: Britain 1970-1974, by Dominic Sandbrook
This had been on my to-read list for a while, and it was a Christmas present. Now, somehow, seemed a good time to pick it up. Apparently as an infant I had baths by candlelight, due to power cuts (presumably in 1972, as power cuts were actually less of an issue in 1974). I do remember my mother tended to keep the cupboards "well-stocked", with typically two or three bags of flour (and I still have a couple of packs of left-over candles). Admittedly she did more baking, and also had a smaller range of items, but little risk of running out bar a major incident.

Sandbrook is a few years younger than me, born "about nine months after the start of the Three Day Week" (we are left to draw our own facile conclusions), so the book is all researched and unearthed rather than remembered first-hand. Part of a larger series, this book essentially covers the Heath premiership, though it doesn't pay too much attention to the date range, quite often looking forward into the late seventies or even eighties when a theme requires it.

Most, though not all, of the book is driven by political events, which Sandbrook chooses to discuss thematically, with a liberal chronology. Starting with the General Election of 1970, which unexpectedly promoted Heath to the office of Prime Minister: a time of relative affluence (certainly of greater affluence than previous generations) and parlous industrial relations, with the cracks (metaphorical and literal) beginning to appear in the post-war programme. One thing that strikes me is that Sandbrook is very scornful of Heath's naïvety and arrogance over the short-termism and greed of British companies and management (Heath expresses recognisably the same exasperation in rather different terms in his own autobiography). Add to this a powerful and political trade union movement, where the workers were rather more militant than their leaders in a time of near-full employment, and an overheating economy, and it all begins to break down rather quickly. Perhaps World War I is a comparison in the sense that it was probably no-one's intention, but combined stubbornness and denial brought about the events anyway. Yet there are other events to which the public seemed perhaps sceptical but largely indifferent - decimalisation in 1971 and entry to the EEC in 1973. Wilson's opposition was entirely opportunistic.

The couple of chapters on the Troubles in Northern Ireland are grim reading, at once for themselves, and also in comparison both to the state of Ulster unionism some sixty years earlier (described in The Strange Death of Liberal England) and also today: a combination of insecurity, intransigence and a belief in some sort of "Britishness" that doesn't exist in the rest of the UK.

Other chapters deal with race and gender politics in the period, with frequent reference to television and films of the era. Sandbrook's fondness for Doctor Who comes through in titling his chapter on environmentalism The Green Death. It was news to me that the Peladon stories are allegories for entry into the EEC and the miners' strike. Survivors (again stretching beyond the book's strict timeframe) seems all too relevant to today. The book draws to a close with the February 1974 General Election, again producing an unexpected, and this time inconclusive, result. Sandbrook notes that there are so many what-ifs in this period. Overall, this is an engagingly written book, mixing gloomy and desperate times with more light-hearted reflections, and makes you realise quite how much happens in just a few years.

My voting history includes Labour and Green over the years, but mostly Lib Dem, and in 2016, after the EU referendum, I joined the party. But I've been a very inactive member until recently, giving a bit of money to help campaigns here and there, no more. It's a slippery slope.

Bizarrely - and I'm sure it was just coincidence - on the day P posted to our local Virtual HQ Facebook group asking for volunteers to do data entry on a batch of questionnaires that had been sent out and I thought "I can do that" - I received a phone call from none other than Dr Phillip Lee, at that time the MP for Bracknell and our Lib Dem candidate for Wokingham, asking me to help in the campaign. I demurred, but I acknowledge it nudged me into a response on the Facebook group. And so the following Monday evening after work I found myself negotiating the route firstly from Reading station to Winnersh, and thence to P's house, where I met a number of volunteers dealing with these forms. A number of the forms - often completed in green ink - contained more fruity comments like "TRAITOR!", "TURNCOAT!" or "BETRAYAL!"; but many were more supportive. It turns out the local party had massively underestimated the likely number of responses, and I made several repeat visits to do more. I also learned that almost everyone, regardless of political affiliation, claims to care massively about the NHS; and that Conservative voters are highly concerned about crime, even though this is not a high-crime area.

This, with a bit of data science, led to more targeted mail-shots and the hand-writing of envelopes; and in the final week of the campaign I was persuaded to take up some leafleting. I'm sure my spatula techniques could be improved, but I have learned to hate low-level letterboxes and blocks of flats without "Trade" bells. On the eve of polling I was distributing more targeted leaflets on a new-build estate in Wokingham and encountered a Labour leafleter walking the same street in the opposite direction. "Well, this is awkward", he said; I just laughed and moved on. If I had presence of mind I would have asked why he wasn't working in neighbouring marginal Reading East; despite coming (a poor) second in 2015 and 2017, all the data showed clearly that Labour was out of the running here this time around. Our polling suggested we had a chance, some even putting us ahead, though only under benign conditions, locally and nationally, from other progressive parties.

Locally, we had a meeting on Wednesday evening to determine our polling day plan. I hadn't done any canvassing and didn't like the idea of "knocking-up" (getting out the vote) either. I wasn't convinced I was playing to my strengths by telling at the local polling station, but accepted it would be of some use, and I only had to endure it for one hour at a time, on a rotation with others. It didn't turn out to be so bad: the polling station staff were friendly and most people were content to volunteer their numbers, only a few declined more assertively; many didn't have their polling cards with them (which may, of course, have been a soft refusal). I was pleased to see many younger voters, although I fear they may have fallen for Labour's past-sell-by-date campaign based on its 2017 performance. A couple of visits from the local police in the evening turned out to be merely routine. I was lucky to be at HQ at the time our candidate visited to thank us for our efforts. Perhaps the most difficult thing all day was that the Conservatives hadn't bothered to field a teller themselves, so with only one person taking numbers, many were easily able to tailgate past and the numbers were missed. In the long term, it makes no difference - the marked register will become available to all parties; the immediacy of the data is only of use if it tells you who to target on the day. Returning to our local HQ each time, I had felt reasonably positive, but L, running the committee room, didn't feel the numbers were quite there for us. A party of hardy souls braved the weather during the afternoon to do what they could.

We returned home just in time for the exit poll, which was at the depressing end of earlier predictions. I stayed up until around midnight; hailing from the North East, the Blyth Valley result filled me with disbelief. I had a patchy night's sleep, and didn't get up until around 9 on Friday morning, at which point I found out our local result: we were 7000 votes short. Dejected but not all that surprised, I later realised that, of the constituency results I checked, including our seat gains, we had the largest increase in Lib Dem vote anywhere, but it wasn't enough.

Last Wednesday, the news broke that Boris Johnson had asked the Queen to prorogue Parliament for a 5-week period. Among the first 50000 or so to sign the inevitable petition against, I felt this was a necessary but not sufficient action, and decided to join the hastily-convened protest at College Green in the evening. The sound system wasn't really up to the job, but among others I heard Diane Abbott convincingly describe how the UK would conventionally react to such a democratic suspension in a Latin American country. We moved on to Parliament Square and Downing Street, where other, similarly chaotic protests, were going on. The mood was distinctly different from earlier People's Vote marches, much angrier, and although I did not feel unsafe, I had the sense that we have entered a more dangerous phase, and I was not surprised to hear of clashes with Brexit Party supporters later in the evening.

By the weekend, things had become more organised; as I was planning on going to the Proms on Saturday evening, I decided to join the lunchtime protest at Westminster in lieu of the more local protests taking place. In some respects, this was a disappointment, as it was clearly led by the hard left, and the speakers were all either from the Labour Party, the Green Party, or the Unions. John McDonnell made a reasoned speech; some of the Trades Union reps were off-message to my ear, almost overtly suggesting that Corbyn be made head of a caretaker government, at which point he could implement Labour's policies, including the more far-left ones. It pleased the crowd, but that wouldn't be any more constitutional than the present position. Fortunately the loudest booing during the speeches was reserved for the moment when the Vauxhall Labour Party chair mentioned that his MP was Kate Hoey; I'm not sure whether that was the expected reaction.

Despite the arrangement for a "static" demonstration, we had to exit somewhere, and people marched up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square. Enough time had passed for people to be inventive about their placards; I only got poor photos of the light-hearted "More Pierogi, Less Prorogation" or the less subtle Boris Johnson picture with added Hitler moustache, but there were others too.

There was further booing and shouting as we passed the Wetherspoon's pub on Whitehall; as we got closer I realised that a few of Britain's Finest Gammon were being contained by a heavy police presence.

I could see the traffic was being disrupted as I made my way to the National Gallery for a couple of hours to pass the remainder of the afternoon; as I emerged it seemed police were moving in to break up the sit-down protest.