Martin Kettle's Blog, page 17

Rishi Sunak is shaping up to be a prime minister Keir Starmer should be wary of | Martin Kettle

Sunak’s handling of the NI protocol suggests a leader – and a Tory party – with more left in the tank than some think

Does Rishi Sunak deserve some kind of apology? Too soon for that. But don’t underestimate this prime minister, either. His party trails Labour by more than 20 points in the polls. His job approval rating is bumping along at -26. But his handling of the Northern Ireland protocol changes this week suggests a leader with more in the tank than critics have allowed. Perhaps Sunak should not be too readily dismissed as a caretaker who is seeing out time until Keir Starmer takes over.

It is, admittedly, early days for such speculation. The protocol deal has not yet been approved. The DUP is divided about how to respond, and enjoys the feeling of having Sunak’s future in its hands. A return to power-sharing at Stormont, with the DUP playing second fiddle to Sinn Féin, is a long way off. An improved UK-EU relationship that could eventually ease Britain’s trading problems is more distant still. Most voters in Britain don’t have Europe or Northern Ireland on their minds anyway.

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‘Just give Ukraine the planes’ is the battle cry of the armchair generals. It's not that simple | Martin Kettle

A year on from Russia’s invasion, there is no shortage of pontification. What’s required now is statecraft

Cut to the chase and give them the planes, demanded Boris Johnson during Monday’s Commons exchanges on Ukraine. Send them the fighter jets, insisted Liz Truss a few moments later during the same debate, as the two ex-prime ministers vied to flaunt the leadership qualities they lacked when they were actually in power.

If only the Ukraine war were as easily resolved as we armchair experts like to think. But it is not – and it won’t be when the fighting resumes soon either. The anniversary of Vladimir Putin’s invasion this week has provided a platform for a lot of well intentioned pontification. It’s often spot on, as Joe Biden’s was in Kyiv and Warsaw this week. Good for morale, undoubtedly. Not so good for objectivity, however, or for statecraft.

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The Rhinegold review – witty and insightful, Jones’s production delivers an emphatic win for ENO

London Coliseum
The Rhine shimmers, the gold dazzles and the gods posture – Richard Jones has by and large gone back to Wagnerian basics for his assured and cogent staging. In the pit, Martyn Brabbins and ENO’s orchestra add lustre

There is an awful lot riding on English National Opera’s new production of Wagner’s Rhinegold. Still reeling from funding cuts, the company needs an emphatic theatrical winner to prove its artistic health and direction. Mostly this new Rhinegold – the Ring cycle’s opening opera – delivers that, and then some.

After the same team’s misfiring Valkyrie at the end of 2021, this was far from assured. Even now, the future of this Ring remains in the balance, with the next section, Siegfried, now postponed by ENO and the prestigious co-production with the New York Met appearing stillborn.

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Nicola Sturgeon is going. Does that mean the United Kingdom will survive? | Martin Kettle

The big question posed by the resignation of the first minister is whether this is a watershed moment for Scottish independence

The political vultures have been circling Nicola Sturgeon for several weeks now. But her resignation as first minister and leader of the SNP still comes as a lightning bolt from a not especially threatening Scottish political sky. It is certain to trigger the biggest convulsion in Scottish politics since the independence referendum of 2014, and its implications will be felt across the electoral and constitutional politics of the whole UK too.

Sturgeon’s resignation statement at Bute House today showed why she will be such a formidable act to follow, and also why it is time for her to go. She had much to say, about Scotland, independence, Covid and political life, which was as eloquently done as ever. But her speech, perhaps like her leadership, went on too long. Even as she spoke, you could sense that the political world was cruelly turning to consider the post-Sturgeon era.

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We’re ready to talk covertly about Brexit failure – but still far from ready to fix it | Martin Kettle

Contrary to what leavers say, it’s not a betrayal to discuss Brexit’s shortcomings – but it should be done openly

In a life-enhancing essay that confirms, if nothing else, that he would have been the all-time ideal dinner party guest, Robert Louis Stevenson writes that to talk with others about the affairs of the day is to “bear our part in that great international congress, always sitting, where public wrongs are first declared, public errors first corrected, and the course of public opinion shaped, day by day, a little nearer to the right”.

The written word, to which Stevenson himself brought such a gifted hand, will always fall short of the richness of the talk that precedes it, he argues. Literature itself “is no other than the shadow of good talk” in which “the imitation falls far short of the original in life, freedom and effect”. Indeed, no legislative measure ever comes before parliament, Stevenson suggests, unless “it has been long ago prepared by the grand jury of the talkers”.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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RPO/Petrenko review – dazzling Scriabin and spine-tingling Wagner

Royal Festival Hall, London
After a sombre opening, the ecstasies promised in the evening’s theme were reached with Wagner and Scriabin. The Royal Philharmonic and its new conductor are clearly enjoying themselves in this imaginative and accessible season

Now in his second season as its music director, Vasily Petrenko has brought a welcome touch of post-pandemic style and excitement to the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, once the Cinderella of London orchestras. His thematic programming this year, subtitled Journeys of Discovery, is at once imaginative and accessible. Best of all, the RPO, who were in great form, seem to love playing for him.

Not all of the repertoire in the latest concert lived up to the evening’s prescribed theme of Ecstasy. There are certainly ecstatic moments in Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, but you would hardly know that from the four largely doom-laden pieces Petrenko selected from the ballet to open the concert. Nevertheless the RPO played them with swagger, weight and swift-fingered finesse, allowing a succession of principals to shine.

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Biden’s State of the Union speech was in stark contrast to Britain’s dearth of economic ideas | Martin Kettle

The US president’s strategy is a world away from anything the Tories have to offer. Labour needs to learn from it

Like every State of the Union address by every US president before him, Joe Biden’s speech to Congress on Tuesday was aimed squarely at the domestic audience. The United States may be a global superpower, but the rest of the world counts for little when the president makes his annual winter journey up to Capitol Hill. The Beltway rituals of the evening – the obligatory hallowed phrases, the namechecks of the guests in the gallery, the breaks for standing ovations (and this week some heckling) – all combine to label this as a 100% American occasion.

Watching from across the ocean, the temptation may be to discuss a State of the Union as if we are Americans, too. Some in the British political class slip readily into the garb of voyeur participants, weighing how the Democratic president’s agenda will play in the Republican-controlled Congress, talking about Donald Trump and culture wars, speculating on the next election, and offering views on whether the 80-year-old Biden ought to run again.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Truss and Brexit have sunk Britain’s economy – and the right is in deep denial about both | Martin Kettle

The global economy is hardly booming, but the country is at the bottom of the pile of developed nations for two clear reasons

The International Monetary Fund could hardly have made it clearer this week. The chronic British disease, the underlying one that marks out the UK from the developed world crowd, is our low economic growth.

The IMF’s revised forecasts for 2023 certainly make stark reading for Rishi Sunak. Last week, at a cabinet awayday at Chequers, Sunak told colleagues they would be judged on five issues at the next election, of which one would be their success in expanding the economy. Yet just a few days later, the IMF revised its UK growth forecast down from the very modest 0.3% increase it posted three months ago to a 0.6% contraction.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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LPO/Gardner review – magical outing for Tippett’s ‘unplayable’ piano concerto

Royal Festival Hall, London
Coleridge-Taylor’s stately, long-lost Solemn Prelude and a crisp, exploratory interpretation of Elgar’s first symphony completed a trio of English compositions

Three very English but three very different composers – Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Michael Tippett and Edward Elgar – made up the London Philharmonic’s latest programme under Edward Gardner. The centrepiece was unquestionable: a rare but thoroughly persuasive outing for Tippett’s fluent yet entangled piano concerto of 1953-55.

It was condemned as unplayable by the soloist Julius Katchen, who walked out shortly before he was due to give the premiere. These days, especially in the hands of Steven Osborne, a champion of the work, that seems an extraordinary misjudgment about a concerto that has proved its staying power. In Osborne’s hands, the concerto was not merely playable but eloquently played. It would be hard to imagine a more convincing account than the one that, playing from the score, he conjured here.

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Sending tanks to Ukraine makes one thing clear: this is now a western war against Russia | Martin Kettle

Volodymyr Zelenskiy is finally getting the help he wants, but it places more of Ukraine’s future in US hands

Sending more western tanks to support Ukraine does not mean, as some politicians occasionally come dangerously close to implying, that the war is now almost over – save only for the fighting. The Ukraine war will still last months, if not years, and today’s decisions are more of a strategic body swerve than a complete and fully executed U-turn. Nevertheless, this is an unmistakably big moment, and for three main reasons.

The first is that battle tanks give Ukraine a military advantage that, in the words of Ed Arnold of the Royal United Services Institute, could be transformative. The three types of western battle tank now being committed to Ukraine – the US’s M1 Abrams, Germany’s Leopard 2 and the UK’s Challenger 2 – are all significantly more powerful than the Soviet-era T-72s that form the bulk of the Russian and Ukrainian tank forces. The same goes for the French Leclerc tanks, whose dispatch to Ukraine has not been ruled out either.

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