Martin Kettle's Blog, page 16

Are you hoping for a progressive alliance to oust the Tories? Don’t hold your breath | Martin Kettle

Parties cooperated in the local elections, but that was then: come the general election, Labour’s self-interest will out

It is less than a week since the local elections confirmed that party politics in England are changing in big ways. The weekend coronation then blew the election results off the front pages. But, with the king back in his palace and the bunting now stored away, it is important to re-engage with the inquest. A new electoral map of England emerged out of last week’s voting. The map matters. It is important to grasp what it means for British politics – but also to grasp what it doesn’t mean.

What it mainly means is that Labour is on course for a general election victory. Keir Starmer is right to make this claim. Projections from 4 May give the party a share of the poll lead of seven or nine points over the Conservatives. It’s a strange political system that sees this as disappointing. But with Prof John Curtice and his colleagues arguing that Labour will need a lead of 12 points to form a majority government, that’s how it is. It is a sign of how high the opposition’s expectations were raised by the Tory debacles of 2022 that there is suddenly now such nervousness.

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What do the Tories' dismal local results mean for the general election? Our panel responds | Katy Balls and others

The polls in England proved ‘disappointing’ for the Conservatives. Are gains by Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens enough to guarantee a Tory loss at the next election?

Few in the Tory party expected the local election results to be anything other than painful. Yet the first wave of results still managed to be worse than anticipated internally, as the party lost support to Labour in various “red wall” areas and to the Liberal Democrats in the traditional Tory shires. “You know something’s gone wrong when the expectation-management figure becomes the reality,” sighed one Tory MP – following early morning suggestions from the polling expert John Curtice that the Conservatives could be on course to lose 1,000 seats.

Katy Balls is the Spectator’s political editor

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The coronation offered a chance to reform and modernise the monarchy. It has been squandered | Martin Kettle

Despite gestures towards inclusivity, the ceremony remains rooted in outdated religious and feudal ideals

At the heart of the coronation of Charles III on Saturday is a very deliberate national deception about religion. In some ways, the deception hides in plain sight, not attracting attention. Pre-coronation speculation has focused instead on more trivial things – Camilla, Harry, Meghan – or on monarchy’s general popularity in the post-Elizabeth era. But when you watch and listen to the coronation itself, the religious deception will be hard to miss – and harder to believe.

Many will instinctively want to be generous about the coronation and will not want to spoil the party. In that spirit, they might call this weekend’s ritual a historical pretence that pleases many and does no particular harm. If they were being stronger-minded, as they ought to be about an event that inevitably says so much about this country to itself and the world, they could instead call the ritual what it is: a lie at the heart of the British state.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Simon Rattle is right: Britain is becoming a cultural desert – and that’s a political choice | Martin Kettle

The arts and classical music say much about us as a country. Labour should fight for their place in our national life

Classical music will rarely have a larger audience or a more exalted place than at the coronation next week. And yet, like so much that occurs in Westminster Abbey on 6 May, it will send a misleading message about the kind of country that Britain now is. For Simon Rattle is incontestably right in what he said this week: classical music in this country is “fighting for its existence”.

Over the decades, Arts Council England (ACE) and the BBC have done more to sustain classical music and the other performing arts than anyone. But there is nothing coincidental about ACE now taking the knife to the nation’s orchestras and opera companies, and the BBC’s attempt to kill off the BBC Singers and slash spending on its orchestras. As Rattle put it in his cry from the heart in London, these cuts are “rooted in political choices”.

This article was amended on 27 April 2023 to correct the name of the Arts Council England chief executive to Darren Henley

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Arminio review – confident staging returns Handel rarity to its starting point

Linbury theatre, London
This lesser-known darkly compelling work is given a smart production that fizzes with contemporary relevance and puts female voices to the fore

There is no such thing as a neglected Handel opera these days, but Arminio comes pretty close. On this evidence it is hard to see why. The setting is dramatic, the plot darkly compelling, the hero one of the great icons of German history and the score contains occasional top-notch Handel. This new production, in the Royal Opera’s smaller downstairs theatre, brings Arminio back to Covent Garden, where it was premiered in 1737.

Staging and music are mostly in the hands of members of the Royal Opera’s Jette Parker Artists programme. Past projects of this kind have sometimes struggled to find their stride, but that can’t be said this time. There is impressively confident artistic smartness from the start in Mathilda du Tillieul McNicol’s direction and Noemi Daboczi’s sets and costumes. They give the opera’s military and political settings contemporary zing without ripping up its classical roots. The set initially evokes a hospital ward, and the curtains move back and forth to keep the narrative pace admirably brisk, which is not easy in Handel.

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Brexiters have a new threat to focus their nationalism on: China. But their influence is waning | Martin Kettle

In this pragmatic Rishi Sunak era, a fresh start with China – and an end to bullish Tory sabre-rattlers – is on the cards

Cleverly by name. And perhaps even Cleverly by nature, too? Judging by his Guardian interview this week, and by his step-by-step rebuilding of Britain’s relations with Europe, James Cleverly seems to be quietly cajoling Conservative foreign policy down off the post-Brexit battlements and towards a more recognisably practical and stable place in world affairs. If so, two important questions follow. Where exactly is that new place for Britain? And will the Tory party let him do it?

The foreign secretary’s interview in Tokyo exemplifies Rishi Sunak-era pragmatism. The interview’s tone is less brazen towards China than anything that any of Cleverly’s recent predecessors would have either wanted or felt able to say. But it is also stronger on mood music than on measurable stuff. It reads in part like an attempt to soothe the ill-feeling provoked by Emmanuel Macron’s comment that America’s allies should not become its “vassals” in any confrontation with China.

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Let's be clear: Joe Biden isn’t the problem for Northern Ireland – it’s the Brexit diehards | Martin Kettle

When it comes to Irish politics, the US president has baggage. But the DUP’s attempts to cast him as a meddling nationalist won’t wash

Normally it is difficult for a visitor to arrive in Ireland without seeing large signs proclaiming how welcome they are. The fusillade of unionist hostility that marked Joe Biden’s visit to Belfast suggests a very different message. You would almost think that everything in Northern Ireland would have been sweetness and light if only the US president had had the decency to have stayed away.

Unionist politics deployed big guns against Biden’s visit. The former Democratic Unionist party leader Arlene Foster can be quite pragmatic; on Wednesday, even she declared that he “hates the United Kingdom”. Her former deputy, Nigel Dodds, dismissed the president as “transparently pro-nationalist”. Predictably, the DUP MP for East Antrim, Sammy Wilson, suggested an even darker purpose, charging Biden not just with the crimes of being “anti-British” and “pro-republican” but of “trying to force the UK to fit into the EU mould”.

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A committed unbeliever: Nigel Lawson left the Tory party a complex, divisive legacy | Martin Kettle

Lesser politicians try to emulate Thatcher’s clever, contrarian chancellor. That’s risky in these very different times

In death this week at the age of 91, Nigel Lawson has been saluted by all wings of the Conservative party as a prophetic thinker and Tory exemplar for our times. Rishi Sunak led the way in this response, posting a photograph of himself as chancellor that showed one of his own first actions in the Treasury was to hang a portrait of Lawson on his wall.

There can be no disputing that, between 1983 and 1989, Lawson was an immensely significant and consequential Tory chancellor. Nor that, at his peak, he was one of the most influential ministerial figures of the Margaret Thatcher decade. He then wrote the most important memoir by any senior figure of those years. But it is a big mistake, and a destructively common one in the modern Tory party, to see him as a changeless icon for today.

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The SNP is the most vulnerable it’s been in a long time. But only a fool would write it off | Martin Kettle

While Humza Yousaf faces an uphill battle reviving his party, Britain continues to slowly come apart at the seams

The visitor to Derby’s city museum, perhaps attracted there by its Joseph Wright paintings, will also discover a recreated 17th-century, oak-panelled living room. The room is on display because it was in Derby, in December 1745, that Prince Charles Edward Stuart called off his Jacobite army’s advance on London and began the retreat to Scotland. It was a turning point for the British monarchy and for the union. Four months later, the prince’s forces were brutally routed at Culloden.

In the 277 years since then, no one else emerged from Scotland to challenge the British political order as fiercely as the Bonnie Prince – until Nicola Sturgeon. True, Sturgeon never invaded England. But then she never needed to. From Hanoverian Edinburgh, underpinned by successive nationalist election victories, she has rocked the assumptions underpinning the union of Scotland and England more effectively than anyone in modern British history.

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Boris Johnson has been sliced and diced. The real winner is Rishi Sunak | Martin Kettle

What mattered was that a stake should be driven through the heart of the beast. And, to a quite unexpected degree, it was

It had felt tempting beforehand just to look away, and by doing so mount your personal, not-in-my-name protest against the Boris Johnson show’s latest attempt to hijack the battered and drifting hulk that is British politics.

But this country is too far gone for any lingering squeamishness about Johnson to be permissible. The issues that surround him are too important, the dangers of ignoring him too great. What mattered on Wednesday was that a stake should be driven through the heart of the beast. And, to a quite unexpected degree, it was.

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