First Drafts
The Prospect magazine blog
James Elwes
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15th May 2012
Alan Clark's diaries reveal a man with an unusual ability to see himself clearly, warts and all. Photo: Wikipedia Commons
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The most extraordinary thing about this recording of Alan Clark’s diaries is the author’s own voice. Those who have read his chronicle of life as a Conservative MP and minister in the government of Margaret Thatcher will have developed a strong impression of his character. So how strange it is to hear that Clark sounded much less like a Jim Hacker or a Francis Urquhart and much more like Kenneth Williams. Yes—that Kenneth Williams. For, extraordinary though it may be, Clark, and there is no other way to put this, did not sound especially posh. Or at least not as much as might be expected. His voice is high and nasal, his vowels ringing out with an almost estuarine twang.
But then Clark was always a contrarian. A high Tory, with estates in Scotland and Sussex, he was also a vegetarian who didn’t allow hunting on his land. A staunch right-winger, he quite openly said that he liked the Labour party, especially Frank Dobson, whose collection of eye-wateringly dirty stories Clark particularly enjoyed. In his diaries he often quotes “the Fuhrer,” and compares the layout of his offices to that favoured by Mussolini, but is frantic with worry when a he finds a badger caught in a trap. He was a raffish, attractive womaniser who loved fast cars, but was riven with self-doubt. But Clark happily revealed these contradictory facets of his character—the unstudied accent only adds to the impression that he had nothing whatsoever to hide.
Clark reads well, his tone of voice matching closely the narrative ups and downs. Certain passages are frosted with venom, especially when he dismisses the “gnomes,” the “shits,” the “creeps” and the “wankers” who inhabit the Westminster village. At these moments, the voice hardens, the delivery becomes punchy and sardonic. He must have made a terrible enemy. But at other times, he becomes gentle, reflective, poetic even, as with the extraordinary passage in which he walks to an abandoned Devon farm remembered from childhood and falls into a trance as he contemplates the open fields and the distant church steeple. Gazing at the view, he is overcome by the possibility that young men had looked at the same scene before being sent to the killing fields of Flanders. In moments such as this, hearing the author speak his own words considerably increases their emotional weight.
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Russell Parton
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15th May 2012
At this year's Globe to Globe festival, Madrid's Rakatá theatre company bring some Spanish flavour to Henry VIII Photo: Andreas Praefcke
It’s rare that one of Shakespeare’s history plays brings the house down, but that’s what happened when Henry VIII was first performed at the original Globe on 29 June 1613, after sparks from a cannon, fired to mark the entrance of Henry in an early scene, set the theatre’s thatched roof alight. The fire spread, razing the entire building to the ground in just a few hours.
Rodrigo Arribas, director of the Spanish production of the play due to be performed at the Globe to Globe festival at the end of May, knows the story well. “Our desire is to burn the Shakespeare Globe theatre again—but in a figurative, not a literal way,” he jokes.
Rakatá, the Madrid-based company responsible for the production, specialise in Spanish Golden Age theatre, staging plays grounded in Spanish history by the likes of Lope de Vega and Tirso de Molina. Theirs is the first ever Spanish production of Henry VIII, Shakespeare’s least performed history play in any language. Doubts still linger over its authorship, with many believing John Fletcher, Shakespeare’s successor as house playwright for the King’s Men, had a hand in the writing. Moreover, as the historical period it covers was still relatively recent, the play strikes a cautious note; its culmination is a lavish procession to celebrate the coronation of Anne Boleyn, and the baptism of the future Elizabeth I.
Scenes of pageantry and a propagandist agenda might make Henry VIII seem a less attractive proposition compared with Shakespeare’s better known works, but for Arribas its reputation as a minor play is unjustified. “Obviously it’s impossible to compare Henry VIII with Hamlet or Macbeth, but it still has a lot to say about human nature, such as man’s relationship with power and the way love is used to achieve other objectives, something we see clearly in the relationship between Henry and Catherine of Aragon.”
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Parveen Akhtar
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8th May 2012
Labour has done well, but its marriage of convenience with Muslim elders has left it out of touch with young minority voters. Photo: kstewart
Amid the strong Labour gains last week, the party suffered two noticeable setbacks: the defeat in the London mayoral elections and the failure to win control of Bradford Council. While the first has inevitably dominated headlines, the second reveals more about the state of grassroots Labour politics.
Buoyed by George Galloway’s spectacular by-election victory in March, Respect won five council seats in Bradford. The result left Labour one seat shy of winning overall control of a council they have led since 2010. Moreover, Respect also managed to gain some high-profile scalps in their five-seat haul: most prominently, Ian Greenwood, a Labour councillor of 17 years and leader of the authority for the last two.
But having come away from Thursday’s local elections with 823 new councillors and 32 new councils, there’s a danger Labour could view the Bradford result as a one-off. And there is some reason to. The wins in Bradford were wins for Galloway. On voting slips, “the Respect Party” became “Respect (George Galloway),” a ploy which has led to calls to change the rules allowing individual candidates to include extra wording on the ballot paper. Just as Labour lost to a charismatic figure in the mayoral election, they were faced with a popular and populist figure in Bradford, someone able to exploit an anti-politics sentiment and appeal to Muslim voters. Respect candidates were not put up in any other cities. Not London, where Galloway won Bethnal Green and Bow in 2005, nor Birmingham, where Respect leader Salma Yaqoob was, up until 2011, a popular councillor.
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Will Hazell
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4th May 2012
The double dip recession may not be front page news, but its long-term consequences are more worrying for the Conservatives than bad press. Image: kenteegardin
As results for the local elections continue to trickle in today, it is increasingly clear that the Conservatives did poorly. This should be to no one’s surprise: you can tell a government is doing very badly indeed, when news that the country is experiencing its first double dip recession since 1975 fails to qualify as the lead story in most of the next day’s papers.
The ongoing phone hacking saga, combined with uncertainty over Jeremy Hunt’s future and continuing aftershocks from the “omni-shambles” Budget, meant that last Wednesday’s official confirmation that the UK was back in recession was overshadowed in the press. This however belies the fact that the double dip, in contrast to Westminster media fluff about “pasty” and “granny taxes,” could be a political game changer with serious consequences for the Conservatives and Labour at the next general election.
The double dip is potentially of lasting political significance for two reasons. Firstly, it calls into question more seriously than ever before the economic competence of the government. The extent to which George Osborne’s programme of spending cuts is responsible for the return to recession (two consecutive quarters of negative growth) is, and will remain a matter of fierce debate between economists. Only the most churlish of commentators would claim that the contraction of the economy had nothing to do with continuing instability in the eurozone. The problem is that the grace period during which the public readily accepts that poor economic performance is primarily the result of external factors is short, as Gordon Brown and heads of government throughout history have found to their cost. It is far easier for a public who are inherently sceptical of politicians to comprehend economic woes in terms of the mismanagement of this or that group of men and women, rather than as the result of rather more complex and amorphous phenomena, like a “subprime mortgage default” or “eurozone debt crisis.” For this government, it looks like the period when the public will accept these explanations has passed: last weekend a Sunday Times YouGov poll found that 32% blame the double dip on UK government policies and 29% on the eurozone.
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Tom Streithorst
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4th May 2012
Fashion, food, and now TV. Scandi-mania has extended its reach with a string of programmes good enough to humble British telly. Photo: BBC
Back before your grandfather was born, Britain made the world’s greatest ships. Engineers from all around the world came to Bristol or Glasgow to learn the state of the art. No more.
Back before I was born, America made the greatest cars. Made in Japan was a joke, a byword for shoddy quality. No more. Today, a Cadillac is no status symbol and much of Detroit is derelict and returning to nature.
For as long as any of us can remember, however, there was one thing our two countries did better than anyone else, something we could be proud of, something that stimulated our export sector, created fun and high paying jobs, and burnished US and British reputations around the globe. I’m talking about television programmes. Everybody around the world watched our shows, we never watched theirs. Why should we? Ours were so much better.
No more. The Danes are eating our bacon. I liked The Killing, I loved Borgen but after just four episodes of The Bridge, I am blown away. This is brilliantly made television. Television, of course, is a collaborative medium. Just one genius can’t make a TV show. Every department needs to be at the top of its game to make something great and that is what makes this Danish/Swedish co-production so impressive. The cinematography looks like fine art photography, the casting is subtle and daring, even the dowdy wardrobe shines, not to mention the brilliant writing, directing, and acting.
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Will Somerville
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1st May 2012
Some immigrant groups thrive, others struggle. If Eric Pickles wants integration to work, he needs to understand the difference. Photo: Ben Dodson
The integration of immigrants is the hottest of political potatoes. Marine Le Pen won the backing of nearly one in five voters in the first round of the recent presidential election in France by focusing on Muslims and immigrants and their lack of integration. Greek fascists are making opinion poll gains for the first time in a generation, charging immigrants with causing crime and social unrest. In Norway, the Anders Breivik trial shows the intensity of hatred to the realities of modern societies.
In Britain, Eric Pickles is the politician in charge of integration as the secretary of state for communities. Pickles revels in a reputation as a robust and tough operator—a politician unafraid of a fight and ready to challenge orthodoxy. On integration, we might expect strong words from him. After all, it was only a year ago in Munich when David Cameron said we needed a more muscular form of liberalism and reminded us that he thought multiculturalism had failed.
Instead Pickles has chosen to be strikingly low-key. His plan for integration was released almost a year late (in February) and was contained in a surprisingly slim 26-page document. He followed this effort with a tub-thumping speech on integration on St George’s day that spoke of building an inclusive Britain. The speech attracted not a single jot of publicity, suggesting he had not been pushing for headlines. Indeed, the perfect metaphor for the Pickles approach arrived in the middle of his speech, when the intervention of the fire alarm left audience and Secretary of State becalmed in a very British drizzle.
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James Macintyre
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1st May 2012
As the Archbishop of Canterbury prepares to leave his post, we're beginning to hear the true voice of Rowan Williams. Photo: BriYYZ
When Rowan Williams publicly confirmed in March what some insiders had for months expected, that he would be standing down as Archbishop of Canterbury in the coming months, he was diplomatic about the reasons behind a move he didn’t have to make until 2020.
During a round of interviews, a rueful Williams did at one point admit to certain “frustrations” in the job. But he did not identify them explicitly.
Chief among these are believed to be the church’s preoccupation—near obsession—with matters of gender and sexuality. At home, the issue of women bishops is set to dominate the Church of England as it comes delicately to some sort of a head at General Synod this summer. Elsewhere, extremists in Africa and the US, on both sides of the divide over homosexuality and the Anglican Communion, lead some in Lambeth Palace to say: “a plague on both your houses.”
These questions have been forced on much of Williams’s time as Archbishop. As he once told me, they “filled the sky” in the run up to the 2008 Lambeth Conference, which—despite apocalyptic forecasts—Williams navigated his very broad church through, after intense preparation and prayer.
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Hannah Rosefield
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30th April 2012
Robert Browning's legacy has been unfairly overshadowed by Dickens. Image: The Art Institute of Chicago
History has not treated the Victorian poets kindly. Writing during the age of the novel, and caught between the Romantics’ poetic riches and the modernists’ iconoclasm, Victorian poets were overlooked for much of the 20th century—or worse, condemned as staid, pompous or irrelevant. It is Robert Browning’s additional misfortune to have been born just three months after Charles Dickens (7th May 1812 to Dickens’s 7th February). Compared to the slew of documentaries, adaptations, books and exhibitions that marked Dickens’s bicentenary, the celebrations for Browning, which have been largely restricted to academic circles, are lacklustre. Nevertheless, the 200th anniversary of Browning’s birth deserves notice. Here’s why:
1. Services to the dramatic monologue
The dramatic monologue existed before the Victorian period, but it came of age with Robert Browning. A poetic form in which the speaker is a character distinct from the poet, and speaks aloud, usually to some silent audience, the dramatic monologue borrows elements from the theatre but, like the novel, is particularly suited to examining the relationship between character and context. In Browning’s hands, the form has the immediacy of speech, and the hundreds of historical and fictional characters who speak his monologues are mad, bad and peculiar enough to rival those invented by Dickens. “My Last Duchess” and “Porphyria’s Lover” are now Browning’s best-known works, with the former often described as the perfect dramatic monologue. Though these two are brilliant as stand-alone poems, they gain from being read alongside his other monologues. Try “Andrea del Sarto,” “Fra Lippo Lippi,” “Mr Sludge, ‘the Medium’” or “The Bishop Orders His Tomb at St Praxed’s Church”; for a collection, choose the 1855 volume Men and Women.
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Prospect
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27th April 2012
A poster for the 1990 Whit Stillman film, Metropolitan. Image: impawards
What we’ve been enjoying this week:
David Wolf:
It is always disappointing to be reminded of how predictable one is. As someone who likes JD Salinger, Wes Anderson and Francois Truffaut, I was all but guaranteed (in an Amazon – “if you liked this, then you might also like to try…” – kind of way) to like Whit Stillman’s film Metropolitan, which I saw for the first time last weekend. It’s a portrait of a group of young, hautest of the haute bourgeouisie in New York in the early 1990s. They bum around, they go to fancy parties, they chat about Charles Fourier and Lionel Trilling, they have awkward romances and non-romances. It’s baggy and charming and doesn’t really go anywhere. And, yeah, I really liked it. I hadn’t heard of Stillman until a month ago but his new film, only his fourth in 22 years, is out today. Post-Metropolitan, I’m pretty keen to check it out.
James Macintyre:
Not for the first time, I’m trawling through the brilliant Alastair Campbell diaries, this time to review the accounts of meetings with Rupert and James Murdoch. Both Labour and the Tories have long been in awe of the media mogul, closeness to whom has only this week been exposed as dangerous for, not advantageous to, political fortunes.
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Joy Lo Dico
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26th April 2012
Rupert Murdoch’s empire may be pushing the boundaries of influence, but so are other media operations. Photo: The Department for Culture, Media and Sport
At the heart of the last few days’ evidence at the Leveson Inquiry has been the question of who lobbied who, and who was too easily influenced by whom. The Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt stands accused of bending like a reed in the wind to the will of the Murdochs. His special advisor Adam Smith has already resigned amid many bad jokes about his “invisible hand” in the negotiations.
But to suggest it was only Murdoch’s team that was bearing down on the government seeking special favours is wrong. As much as he lobbied for, he was also lobbied against. Back in October 2010, when Rupert Murdoch had signalled his intention to mount a takeover of BSkyB, eight executives of other media organisations put themselves in a cartel of collective interest.
The signatories, representing the Guardian, Mail, Telegraph, the Mirror, the BBC, Channel 4, BT and Northcliffe regional newspapers clubbed together to write a letter to the Business Secretary Vince Cable complaining about the implications for media plurality, something in which they all had commercial as well ethical concerns. Read more »
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