Martin Kettle's Blog, page 12

The House of Lords is very flawed. But if it picks apart Sunak’s Rwanda bill, that’s its job and it deserves support

It’s hypocrisy for the PM to claim peers are frustrating ‘the will of the people’ after years of refusing to reform the upper chamber

Recent prime ministers have been all too obviously thrilled by the adrenaline rush of the flak jacket and international conflict. One or two others have preferred the more cerebral challenge of the British constitution’s Rubik’s-cube intricacies. Neither of these, though, has ever seemed like an issue that floats Rishi Sunak’s boat. Instead, this prime minister has always appeared far more interested in new technology, economic theory and mastering the detail, rather than national security policy or political checks and balances.

Yet now, at the start of 2024, Sunak finds himself out of his managerialist comfort zone. Instead, he is increasingly reliant on defiant public postures on both military action and the constitution. In the former case he has taken on the improbable mantle of a warrior leading a bombing campaign against Houthi attacks on Red Sea shipping. In the latter, equally awkwardly, he is now casting himself as a populist hammer of the House of Lords in the pursuit of his Rwanda policy.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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How should Keir Starmer take on 2024? By looking back a century to Labour's first government | Martin Kettle

Ramsay MacDonald’s short-lived victory holds three key lessons and helps explain the difficulties and defeats since 1924

Next year’s general election will be the 22nd in Britain’s postwar history. Only a handful of these can be described as pivotal. Three stand out: Clement Attlee’s Labour victory in 1945, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative win in 1979 and, more debatably, Tony Blair’s Labour landslide in 1997. Boris Johnson’s 2019 win might have been a fourth, but it has proved a lurch into a cul-de-sac. Today we may possibly be on the threshold of another of these rare change-making elections. Scepticism about that prospect is sensible.

As time passes, individual elections cease to echo with shared meaning as they once did. There is, though, one more pivotal general election that ought to resonate today. It took place exactly a hundred years ago this month. And it still makes three relevant calls on today’s politics.

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Britain is a country that looks to its parliament. And the truth is, parliament is failing us | Martin Kettle

Of course faith in MPs is in decline: crises abound, and yet too many are incompetent, badly behaved and have the wrong priorities

Watching the parliamentary year dribble towards the Christmas recess this week, three glaring reasons for Britain’s political malaise shone out as a dark December afternoon unfolded. One is that too many MPs have the wrong priorities. Another is that too many lack the right competence. The third is that too many simply behave badly. All of these are connected.

Priorities first. On Tuesday, the House of Commons debated something important. The Post Office (Horizon system) Compensation bill goes some way to compensate victims of the Post Office’s 16-year wrongful prosecution of more than 700 post office operators over false accounting. The case is a national scandal. But get this. There are 650 MPs at Westminster. At no time did I count more than 17 MPs in the chamber to debate it.

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Hansel and Gretel review – vivacious staging of Humperdinck’s benign fairytale

Royal Opera House, London
Mark Wigglesworth’s conducting and the playing of the ROH orchestra are top drawer, with Antony McDonald’s production reclaiming the innocence in the dark Grimm tale

There are two particularly good reasons not to miss the Royal Opera’s Christmas revival of its 2018 production of Hansel and Gretel. Both are musical. Mark Wigglesworth’s conducting, and the playing of the Royal Opera House orchestra, each come out of the top drawer.

Wigglesworth possesses a symphonic sense of line that allows Humperdinck’s benign score to unfold as it should. But he also has a theatrical instinct for when to push on and when to step back. He brings out the music’s Mahlerian qualities as well its Wagnerian and Brahmsian ones. He is the star of the show. The ROH orchestra played superbly for him. In the hands of its leader Magnus Johnston, one violin phrase that otherwise you might barely notice seems to float in the air like a benediction.

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Migration is dominating Sunak's premiership – but the pressure on Starmer may be even greater | Martin Kettle

Although Labour has successfully kept the spotlight on Tory incompetence, difficult battles are yet to come

For Keir Starmer, the Tory party is the gift that keeps on giving. If Labour has one overriding wish as the start of general election year approaches, it is that Rishi Sunak’s party should continue to remind voters why they have given up on the Conservatives after electing them in such numbers in 2019. On Tuesday, in the Commons, the Tory party delivered handsomely on that Labour wish.

As well as days of buildup, every newsflash throughout Tuesday was about Tory division and Tory difficulty. There hasn’t been a spotlit display of Conservative dysfunction like this for, well, several weeks. It may not have been a gamechanging horror show on the scale of Partygate in 2021 or the Truss emergency budget in 2022. But it was a reminder that the Bertha Mason version of his party that Sunak tries to keep locked in the parliamentary attic is alive and well and ready to burn down the house if it gets the chance.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Lazy and fraudulent: we saw the true Johnson at the Covid inquiry – and why his like must never have power again | Martin Kettle

He confirmed himself as manifestly unfit. Those who gave Britain such a leader should carry the shame of it to their graves

François Mitterrand once said that the most essential single attribute for success in politics is indifference. France’s former socialist president possessed that quality to his core. His views could turn on a centime, from right to left to centre and back again, as the political situation and his own power required. Indifference, skilfully translated into policy and action, was an essential driver of his 14-year presidency.

Boris Johnson is blessed – which may not be the right word – with an indifference of his own. Johnson is lightly encumbered with political principles, since he believes in little except himself. He famously wobbled about which side to take on Brexit. His instinctive capacity for indifference took him right to the top of the greasy pole. If that is his blessing, his curse is that, unlike Mitterrand, he could not then turn it into effective government action.

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Europe has entered a new age of anxiety – and it's dragging Britain along too | Martin Kettle

Far from freeing the UK from continental insecurities, Brexit has made some of them worse. Isolationism won’t help: the only hope is to work with our neighbours

Once again, a spectre is haunting Europe. Yet the spectre is not communism, as Karl Marx wrongly predicted nearly 200 years ago. Far from it. The spectre today consists of multiple new drivers of national and regional insecurity. Together they threaten Europe’s – and Britain’s – long postwar years of general democratic stability and intermittent economic optimism. And Europe does not yet know what to do about it.

Last week’s success for Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands’ general election is the latest of these many shocks. The vote for Wilders’ anti-migrant, anti-Islamic and Eurosceptic campaign has sent a jolt through all of Europe. It is too simplistic to call it part of a general shift to the right, partly because that may encourage simplistic responses. The far right has always been a problem in each country, and will continue to be so. But the increased vote for Wilders is also a sign of something altogether larger.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Enduring greatness: five essential Maria Callas recordings on her centenary

Born 100 years ago this week, the great soprano left an extensive recording legacy. From Puccini’s doomed Tosca to Wagner’s demonic Kundry, we pick the five roles that saw her hailed as the greatest voice of the age

Maria Callas – the life of a diva – in pictures

I never heard Maria Callas sing. But I did see her once. In 1971, when I was a student on my first visit to the US, I managed to get a back stalls seat at the Metropolitan Opera in New York for a gala performance of Verdi’s Don Carlo, with a rising young tenor called Plácido Domingo in the title role.

In the interval I wandered into the Met’s glitzy foyer. Standing at the foot of the staircase which curved up to the grand tier, I heard applause from higher up. The crowd parted and, down the stairs came that completely unmistakable woman, instantly recognisable to any opera fan, and to millions of others too.

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Mozart in Italy by Jane Glover review – the making of a master

An account of the teenage Mozart’s operatic awakening is packed with humanising detail

Of all the stories that are told about Wolfgang Mozart’s visits to Italy, one exceeds all others in fame. It concerns the day in Rome in April 1770 when the 14-year-old Mozart first heard Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere, an unaccompanied nine-part polyphonic setting of a psalm that normally lasts about 13 minutes. The Miserere rises repeatedly to an ethereal top C, a haunting moment that had already given the work Europe-wide mystique in Mozart’s time and ensures that it is still widely performed and recorded today.

The Miserere had been written in the 1630s for the exclusive use of the Sistine Chapel choir and for performance only during Holy Week. The score was a ferociously guarded Vatican secret. No written versions were supposed to exist. Yet, in the chapel that day, young Mozart listened to the Miserere once, then went home to his lodgings and wrote the entire thing down from memory.

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The Gaza truce is a ray of hope in the darkness. Both sides must remember that | Martin Kettle

The deal divided the Israeli cabinet, and likely Hamas too – for now it suits their interests, but this is a very fragile pause

Observing events from outside the region, one habitually hesitates. Nevertheless, it feels clear that the four-day truce between Hamas and Israel, with the exchange of prisoners that is woven into it, is better than what preceded it.

It will bring home some abducted Israelis and will save some Palestinian lives, though not enough in either case. It involves the kind of political concessions without which conflict becomes endless. It is a cheering success for the diplomacy that brokered it. It brings a pause. And it is a precedent.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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