Martin Kettle's Blog, page 22

Andy Burnham is a prime Labour leader candidate, but also a mayor. That’s a problem | Martin Kettle

Piecemeal devolution and a mess of Westminster rules are preventing political talent playing a bigger role in British public life

Call it the Andy Burnham problem in British politics. Yet the Labour mayor of Greater Manchester is more a victim than a source of it. Nor is the problem confined to him, or indeed to the Labour party. The same thing applies in all the parties. It is structural, cultural, very British, and it needs addressing.

The problem is the mismatch between the realities of British politics and governance on the one hand and the assumed supremacy of the unreformed Westminster parliament on the other. Burnham’s case is particularly topical, because there may shortly be a vacancy for leader of the Labour party. If Durham police issues a fixed-penalty notice against him for breaching Covid regulations, Keir Starmer has said he will step down. Burnham is the bookmakers’ clear favourite as successor. As things stand, however, he is ineligible to stand because he is not a member of parliament.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Philharmonia/Blomstedt review – flow and glow as one one of wonders of our age remains in control

Royal Festival Hall, London
In Mozart, Maria João Pires was an ideal partner for Blomstedt’s attentiveness to pulse, phrasing and dynamics; his unified and unshowy approach brought lightness and clarity to Bruckner

Even popes retire these days but, like the Queen, Herbert Blomstedt just goes on and on. The Swedish-American conductor is 94 now, and the joints are visibly stiffer than they were as he enters and leaves the stage, but Blomstedt remains amazingly spry. His control of the Philharmonia Orchestra – using his hands, not a baton – was beyond question, and he conducted the entire evening without once sitting down.

The music-making of elderly conductors can sometimes be either lofty or slow, sometimes both. Neither quality applies to Blomstedt. As with the late Bernard Haitink, his conducting in old age radiates both flow and glow. Blomstedt does not force or underline the music, he releases it. But the attentiveness to pulse, phrasing and dynamics are unflagging. There is something to learn from his handling of every transition in the score.

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Ignore the pomp: thanks to Boris Johnson, Britain has never been less united | Martin Kettle

The full uniformed flummery of the state opening of parliament belies the fragile state of the nation

You had only to watch a few minutes of the state opening of parliament to know that, in Britain, an old order is passing. Most comment has focused, naturally enough, on the enforced absence of the Queen, and on Prince Charles deputising for her. But the process of change we are witnessing is not just about individuals, it’s about our governance too. It’s about our politics – and it’s even about the nation itself.

The rituals and robes of a state opening appear familiar. But they are an invented tradition from the imperial age, like the building in which they take place. What we saw on Tuesday dates from 1852, during the reign of Queen Victoria, who only intermittently opened parliament herself. Most of the current uniformed flummery was created for Edward VII in 1902.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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In an era of electoral fragmentation, Labour must learn to embrace power-sharing | Martin Kettle

The French election showed how electoral systems shape politics. In the UK, abandoning first past the post could be transformative

You have got to hand it to Charles de Gaulle. The electoral system he created for France’s Fifth Republic has stood the test of time. More than six decades on, this week’s re-election of De Gaulle’s latest successor, Emmanuel Macron, is a reminder that the particularities of electoral systems can set the terms of a nation’s politics more lastingly than we sometimes allow. There’s a message for Britain there too, but we will come on to that.

De Gaulle’s constitution, constructed between 1958 and 1962, aimed at two goals in particular. The first was to empower De Gaulle and his successors to govern as executive presidents, embodying what the general’s biographer Julian Jackson called “a certain idea of France”. The second aim was to keep the French left, and the Communist party in particular, out of power for as long as possible.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Johnson will win this vote, but what about the next one? His days are numbered | Martin Kettle

Partygate and the cost of living crisis have sealed the prime minister’s fate. This is the beginning of the end

One way or another, Boris Johnson will survive the Commons vote tomorrow on whether he misled parliament over the lockdown parties in Downing Street. That bit’s a certainty. But it’s also, very importantly, not the real point of the exercise. The point of Labour’s motion is to get Conservative MPs to dip their hands in the blood.

Most Tory MPs, we can be confident, think that Johnson did in fact lie to parliament. Labour’s motion is drafted in as unprovocative a way as possible, in the hope of capitalising on this truth. Johnson is not accused in the motion of deliberately misleading MPs; instead it lists a number of statements to MPs that “appear to amount to misleading the house”. Nor would the inquiry by the privileges committee start until the police investigation is over.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Lohengrin review – powerful and prescient production strips Wagner’s opera of its romance

Royal Opera House, London
A revival of David Alden’s war-torn staging of Wagner’s early opera finds disturbing new resonance with current events; in the pit Jakub Hrůša has an unerring sense of the work’s structure

It is only four years since the director David Alden placed Wagner’s Lohengrin firmly inside an oppressive and febrile wartime setting for the Royal Opera. Today, Alden’s approach, now in the hands of Peter Relton in this first revival, feels disturbingly prescient in light of current events in Europe; the opera’s setting in a divided society threatened by war from the east has shed its historical trappings and instead become unexpectedly contemporary.

Not everything works entirely persuasively in Alden’s visceral presentation of Lohengrin’s Brabant as a quasi-fascist society, its public square dominated by an Albert Speer-style swan monument. Not least Lohengrin’s own music, especially in act three, which shows him to be anything but a fascist leader, and the militarism and red-and-black flag-waving of the production feels overdone as a consequence.

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Lie, deny and move on – the Johnson mantra is a plague on British politics | Martin Kettle

Partygate, bullying ministers, groping MPs and insider lobbying: the Tories have polluted our entire system of government

Boris Johnson was never going to resign if he didn’t have to. This is all about the Tory party’s view of him now. The party knows as well as you or I that Johnson lied about the lockdown parties. It knows that the lies hit middle Britain, conscientiously obeying the lockdown laws, in the gut. It knows the Tories will take a hit for it in the local elections and eventually the general election too. Yet, remarkably, when it weighs all this up, the Tory party thinks this does not matter all that much.

The ostensible reason now being offered is that a prime minister is too important to be dumped during a war. Britain’s own history shows how specious this claim is. Margaret Thatcher was ousted during the build-up to the Gulf war in 1990; Neville Chamberlain during the second world war in 1940; and Herbert Asquith was pushed aside during the first in 1916. Actually, you could argue that a war is a good time to ditch a failing prime minister, not a bad one.

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The UK is cut adrift by Johnson’s Brexit fantasy – when Ukraine shows the need for solidarity | Martin Kettle

For all the prime minister’s ambitions on the world stage, the big decisions are being made by Washington and Brussels

Two years ago, during the first Covid lockdown, Boris Johnson came face to face with a reality which until that moment he had seemed reluctant to acknowledge: the unwelcome truth that he was not the all-powerful prime minister of the whole UK. Because health policy is a devolved matter, on Covid he was prime minister of England alone.

To be an effective leader, therefore, he would have to go against his instincts and cooperate. Predictably, Johnson proved to be not very good at cooperating, and as a result effectiveness suffered. The imposition and then the easing of Covid restrictions around the UK became ever-more confused and politically driven. A global health problem became entangled with Johnson’s denialism, with the narcissism of small differences between the governments, and with his increasingly chaotic management of the Tory party at Westminster. In short, Johnson himself became part of the problem of fighting Covid.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Czech Phil/Bychkov/Wang review – an electrifying evening of unity and defiance

Barbican, London
With programmes that include three of their greatest native composers, the Czech Philharmonic’s visit felt momentous and deeply moving

There was absolutely no chance that the first of the Czech Philharmonic orchestra’s two concerts in London this week would be anything other than a special occasion, for musical and non-musical reasons alike. And so it proved.

As the first international orchestra to play in the Barbican Hall since the start of the pandemic, the Czechs would have drawn full houses anyway, especially in programmes featuring three of their greatest native composers. But the invasion of Ukraine supercharged the opening evening. Czechs know better than anyone what a Russian invasion is like. The orchestra rose to the occasion with its trademark warm intensity of tone, but also with flashes of a rare fire.

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Rupture is not an option: after this war, the west must learn how to live with Russia | Martin Kettle

Solidarity with Ukraine is the priority. But the old ways of dealing with the Kremlin have failed – and it isn’t going away

Two weeks into Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine, the outcome of Vladimir Putin’s war remains in the balance, remarkably so. Uncertainty on this scale was not predicted on either side or by outside observers, all of whom expected a quicker, more decisive conflict. Putin’s miscalculations have instead catalysed new and dynamic factors that are still vigorously playing out – among them more effective Ukrainian resistance and stronger western unity – while exposing significant Russian incompetence.

One factor, though, is as old and indestructible as the continent itself. When the dust of the Ukraine war settles in some way, and it will, the other nations of Europe will need to find an appropriate new form of relationship with Russia. This war, after all, is in large part the result of the failure of the old relationships that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. So it is not too soon to begin to consider what can be put in its place that, at the very least, makes a sustainable European peace between Russia and the liberal democracies more likely than another terrible war.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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