Martin Kettle's Blog, page 20

Think it’s all over? Think again – if Truss wins, she will have to call an election | Martin Kettle

The politician tipped to be the next Tory leader will not be an illegitimate prime minister. But she will be a weak one

The Conservative leadership contest has been dragging on for so long now that familiarity may be breeding indifference. It seems an age since Boris Johnson resigned, and there are still nearly two weeks before the new prime minister takes over. In news terms, the contest is slipping into a downpage summer sideshow. As a result, we may be losing sight of what a groundbreaking event this 2022 succession race actually is.

We should be clear that on 5 September political history will be made. What makes the contest special is that, if the polling and betting are correct, the members of a political party are about to select a prime minister, Liz Truss, for whom neither Tory MPs nor the country itself has voted. Truss will be the third prime minister to be chosen by the Tories in mid-parliament since party members got the final say in leadership contests. But she will be the first to win through party members overturning the MPs’ choice from the earlier rounds.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Truss and Sunak are promising sunshine without rain – don’t believe them | Martin Kettle

From Churchill to Roosevelt, great leaders have told the public the truth: that in dark times, sacrifices must be made for the greater good

There was never any formal announcement to the effect that modern British politics would no longer call on its citizens to make significant sacrifices. It just turned out that way. Perhaps it was after the 1970s oil crisis that politicians began to suspect such appeals were too great an electoral risk. Perhaps it got another push from the financial crisis of 2008. Either way, the mindset still remains strong of not trusting or relying on the public to stay the course when normality is put on hold.

No modern British politician would now make the speech that Franklin Roosevelt did when he became US president in 1933. “If I read the temper of our people correctly,” Roosevelt said in his first inaugural, “we now realise as we have never realised before our interdependence on each other; that we cannot merely take but we must give as well; that if we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because without such discipline no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective.”

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The post-Johnson era is taking shape — and it looks like a massive lurch to the right | Martin Kettle

Fixated on the tax cuts beloved of Tory members, Truss and Sunak have no plan at all to deal with the UK’s looming crises

It is hard to imagine a more devastating and more completely foreseeable slow-motion car crash in economic policy than the one that the Conservative government is heading towards. The scale and the damage caused by steeply rising energy prices, amid surging inflation, has been predictable for many months. And yet, preoccupied by its leadership contest, the Tory party has remained in almost complete denial until the last minute. Some Conservatives, perhaps including Liz Truss, still are.

If nothing else, Truss should consult the calendar to see how close is the moment of impact that may destroy her prime ministership almost before it has begun. The leadership contest goes on until early September. Until then, Britain has a caretaker government unfocused on policy. When a new prime minister is chosen on 5 September, all immediate politics will be taken up with government changes. Ten days later, parliament goes into another recess until the middle of October. Yet on 1 October, the new energy price cap comes into force.

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The Ring Cycle review – ideas-free patchwork staging signals Bayreuth’s fading authority

Bayreuth festival
Valentin Schwarz’s new staging of Wagner’s epic has some thought-provoking moments, but few were sustainable and most were just distracting

In the final pages of his Ring cycle, Wagner’s orchestral writing reaches extraordinary heights of grandeur and conviction, in music that depicts the destruction of an old corrupt world and the dawn of a new untainted one. It is the moment to which everything in the cycle has been leading, the moment when the tangled and dishonest world of the gods, in which the audience has been enmeshed across four operas and nearly 16 hours of music and drama, comes crashing down. It is by any standards climactic.

As these final pages were reached in Valentin Schwarz’s new Ring cycle at the Bayreuth festival, the conductor Cornelius Meister and the festival orchestra, in the concealed Bayreuth pit, were playing out of their skins as the score demanded. Above them on the stage, however, Iréne Theorin’s Brünnhilde, who is supposed to be the agent of destruction and rebirth, was settling herself on the bottom of an empty and dirty swimming pool next to the dead body of her husband Siegfried, the remains of her mutilated horse in a plastic bag, and with no suggestion at all in Schwarz’s staging that a moment of artistic significance had been reached.

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Boris Johnson isn’t finished. His next move in politics may be even more alarming | Martin Kettle

Once out of office, the former PM could emulate US media shock-makers, wielding influence without accountability

As this summer has shown, no prime minister gives up power enthusiastically. Almost without exception, Britain’s leaders leave office in a foul mood somewhere between fury and fatalism. Herbert Asquith and Edward Heath stand out among former inhabitants of 10 Downing Street as two who could never come to terms with their falls. Both went to the same Oxford college as Boris Johnson.

Most prime ministers at least try to go with a show of acceptance, albeit through gritted teeth. A few – Arthur Balfour, Neville Chamberlain and Alec Douglas-Home among them – even served later in other prime ministers’ cabinets. The palm for good grace, though, goes to Stanley Baldwin, who reportedly told the police on the Downing Street door on his last exit in 1937 that he was departing with a spring in his step.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian associate editor and columnist

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David Trimble’s passing shows how much politics has changed – and not just in Northern Ireland | Martin Kettle

Neither Liz Truss nor Rishi Sunak is a Tory in the sense that he understood it - they show no interest in preserving the union

I realised David Trimble and I would get on fine when we met for the first time. Over lunch just off Whitehall in the early 1990s, I asked Trimble, in those days the embodiment of a hardline backbench Ulster Unionist MP, if he ever spent time in the Irish Republic. With a grin, he replied that he had just recently been in Dublin for a performance of Leoš Janáček’s Kát’a Kabanová, a work he greatly admired. We spent the rest of the lunch talking about opera as well as politics. It was clear that this was a unionist politician who was worth knowing.

And so it proved over many years, in conversations of every kind. Trimble, who died this week, was smart, approachable, sometimes sharp, but above all an immensely practical politician. He came from a relatively liberal unionist family background in County Down, but he always knew he had to carry his ardently loyalist base in his Upper Bann constituency along any new path that he advocated or that events required. He was one of those politicians who think around corners, not in straight lines, the best sort.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian associate editor and columnist

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Little Women review – classic tale struggles for momentum on opera stage

Opera Holland Park, London
Although conducted with energy by Sian Edwards and performed by a strong cast, Mark Adamo’s opera – here receiving its UK premiere – doesn’t fully cohere into a narrative reality

The many who love Louisa May Alcott’s 1868 American sisterhood novel will come with expectation and goodwill to Mark Adamo’s 1998 opera, here receiving a belated UK premiere after several outings in the US. Those feelings will carry them a long way in Ella Marchment’s production for Opera Holland Park, which always treats Alcott’s themes and characters with affectionate sensitivity and respect.

In the end, though, this is not enough to make Little Women into a successful opera. The root of the problem is partly that Alcott’s coming-of-age tale is not primarily theatrical, and Adamo’s setting struggles to overcome this narrative reality. Intelligently, he frames Little Women as a pared-down retrospective seen from Jo March’s adulthood, an approach which gives the piece dramatic structure but brings its own problems.

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The first Tory leadership debate could significantly reshape the contest | Martin Kettle

Sunak performed well, with Mordaunt failing to justify her billing and Truss struggling to appeal beyond the party’s right

Ever since the first televised presidential debates in the US more than 60 years ago the received wisdom has been that TV debates are important hurdles, but that they do not shift a lot of votes. However, the first Conservative leadership debate on Friday evening felt as though it could significantly reshape the contest to succeed Boris Johnson.

In reality, the Channel 4 debate was an insight into two different arguments. The big one is the race to be Britain’s next prime minister. That battle is mainly between the three frontrunners in the first two rounds of voting this week: Rishi Sunak; Penny Mordaunt; and Liz Truss. In that respect, Sunak clearly had the best of the evening, with Mordaunt failing to justify her strong showing in the early rounds, and Truss struggling to appeal beyond the right wing of the party.

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Forget the ‘natural party of government’: these Tories are headless chickens | Martin Kettle

The leadership election is revealing a party that has no time for anything as boring as self-reflection

The first round in the Conservative leadership contest settled nothing, though that is not how Jeremy Hunt or Nadhim Zahawi, both now eliminated, will see it. But it showed a party without a map, without a compass and in an unfamiliar place. Above all, it showed a party lacking a shared analysis of why it is where it is, a week after the ousting of Boris Johnson.

The results suggest that the next prime minister is likely to be either Rishi Sunak or Britain’s (and the Tory party’s) third female leader. It remains to be determined whether Penny Mordaunt or Liz Truss will go forward to the final stage, and whether Sunak will do so. It also looks likely that Suella Braverman and Tom Tugendhat will withdraw or be eliminated in the next round on Thursday.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian associate editor and columnist

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Otello review – a truly compelling and long overdue revival

Royal Opera House, London
American tenor Russell Thomas – the first black man to sing the title role at Covent Garden – delivers a searing and shattering performance

For a moment, if you can, put aside the fact that, after 234 previous performances of this opera at Covent Garden, here was a milestone night of a sort, the first time that a black man has sung the title role in Verdi’s Otello on the Royal Opera House stage. Instead, judging this latest version of Keith Warner’s 2017 production squarely on its artistic merits, note also that this is a truly compelling revival.

Five years ago, Warner’s crepuscular staging disappointed some of the high expectations that surrounded Jonas Kaufmann’s debut in the role. Now, revived by Isabelle Kettle and conducted by Daniele Rustioni, the production hits its stride more surely, in a psychologically gripping triangle of jealousy that is elevated by the American tenor Russell Thomas’s at times almost elemental incarnation of the notoriously demanding title role.

Otello is at the Royal Opera House until 24 July.

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