Martin Kettle's Blog, page 23

Fighting the threat from Putin will take teamwork. But who trusts Johnson’s Britain? | Martin Kettle

A country that spends its time antagonising allies and threatening trade wars needs to grow up and get real, fast

The default view at Westminster and in most of the media is that Vladimir Putin has saved Boris Johnson’s skin, for the present. The reflex on the Conservative backbenches is that the prospect of a European war means this is no time for a leadership change. In reality, of course, the reverse is true. Russia’s seizure of parts of Ukraine this week makes the case for replacing Johnson far stronger. That does not mean it will happen – the police investigating “partygate” and the voters have not yet spoken – but it should.

Putin’s annexation of the Donbas provinces is an epochal event. It is an assault on a sovereign European state and a western ally. From the Gulf of Finland in the north to the Danube delta in the south, it ratchets up the military threat to a string of other vulnerable European nations. It redefines at a stroke the security and energy assumptions of our entire continent for a decade and more.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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The Cunning Little Vixen review – colourful staging takes Janáček’s opera to the dark side

Coliseum, London
Anguish rather than sentiment is to the fore in Jamie Manton’s new production, with Sally Matthews and Pumeza Matshikiza a well-matched central pair

Storms blew away last week’s planned premiere of English National Opera’s new version of Janáček’s 1924 hymn to the cycles of the living world. The opening was quickly rescheduled for Sunday afternoon, but it was a useful reminder that our coexistence in nature has a pitiless side, as well as the pantheistic charge that fires Janáček’s ecstatic score.

Jamie Manton’s busy staging is fuelled by anguish not sentiment. The composer set his opera in a Moravian forest, where a woodman captures a young vixen, who escapes back to the wild to raise a brood of cubs, only to fall victim to a hunter from the village. But Tom Scutt’s designs, fiercely lit by Lucy Carter, give us instead a deforested landscape, blasted by logging, in which the rhythms of life play out against a backdrop scroll that unwinds a visual representation of the story to reveal a chillingly blank sheet at the close.

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The Prince Andrew affair has shown us how fragile the monarchy really is | Martin Kettle

This started as a scandal about one man’s behaviour. It could end up a story about the kind of country we choose to be

If a uniformed flunkey holding aloft a vellum scroll had stood in front of Buckingham Palace and read it out for the benefit of the world’s cameras on Tuesday afternoon, the message from the official proclamation would have boiled down to this: “The royal embarrassment is over. Long live the royal embarrassment.”

This week’s out of court settlement of Virginia Giuffre’s sexual assault claims against Prince Andrew is not the tidy closure of a tawdry affair. The sleazy content of the allegations and the prince’s boneheaded response to them have not merely discredited him personally – though they have done that so conclusively that only someone as obstinate as he is could think otherwise. They have also shaken the monarchy itself, and at an extremely delicate time – one that is certainly not over yet and that may continue for at least a decade.

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No amount of ‘reboots’ or reshuffles can hide the truth: Johnson is finished | Martin Kettle

The prime minister is good at creating distractions – but the parallels with Thatcher’s 1990 downfall are clear to see

Looking back on the 1990 ousting of Margaret Thatcher as Conservative prime minister, her chief whip Tim Renton concluded that Thatcher had lost power because she “had ceased having an open mind” about how to unify her party or to govern. “She only wanted to have her own friends around her and she had come to identify No 10 and the job of prime minister with herself,” wrote Renton. “Anyone who stood in her way … was to be dispensed with. They were not of the right faith.”

Boris Johnson is not in the same league as Thatcher as a successful prime minister and much else. She lasted 11 years in Downing Street and won three general elections. He has been prime minister for two and half and has won just once. She possessed ideological conviction in spades. His only serious interest is in himself.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Alcina review – Opera North clear clutter but there’s minimal magic on this enchanted isle

Grand theatre, Leeds
Handel’s opera is full of glorious music but its improbable plot makes it difficult to stage; Tim Albery’s intelligent production only fitfully succeeds

Few will challenge Alcina’s claims to contain some of the finest vocal writing that even Handel ever penned. The problem is with staging it. Under the skin, Alcina engages with serious stuff – desire, betrayal, rejection and trust. But the plot – an island enchantress battles to retain power over her lovers – is wrapped in artifice and improbability. Many productions fall short. Tim Albery’s intelligent staging for Opera North – the first of several Alcinas in the UK over the coming months – is, ultimately, another of them.

Albery’s achievement is to have cleared enough of Alcina’s clutter to ensure focus on the work’s emotional core. The score is heavily cut, reshaped into two acts, not three. Hannah Clark’s perky designs, stripped back and sustainable, consist of 1960s upholstered chairs and a bearskin rug. Costumes are contemporary, save the occasional sword and breastplate. Ian Galloway’s video backdrop initially suggests an island of dreams but morphs into an oppressive heart of darkness jungle.

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Reckless, Trumpian leadership is losing Johnson allies. It should lose him his job | Martin Kettle

The resignations of Munira Mirza and other aides should galvanise Tory MPs to do what they must now do

In writing about politics you can either try to explain what you think is happening or you can say what you think should happen. Right now, there is a complete convergence between the two. Boris Johnson’s premiership is on the slide, irreversibly so. The question is not whether Johnson will go. It is when and how – and what will come after.

Simultaneously it is increasingly plain that Johnson should go. Some take this view for partisan reasons or because Johnson’s personality appals them. Fair enough. But that’s not my argument here. There is also an extremely powerful Conservative case against him remaining. In the end, this will be decisive, because he will only go only if it is in the Tory party’s interest; no one else’s.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Why is parliament still banning itself from talking about the monarchy? | Martin Kettle

When Keir Starmer was blocked from talking about the Queen, it highlighted a convention that has no place in the 21st century

With Boris Johnson reeling, the House of Commons was a stormy place at prime minister’s questions last Wednesday. The impact on the prime minister’s fate was minutely scrutinised. As a result, a separate exchange during that session has had less attention than it deserves.

In one of his questions, Keir Starmer began talking about the contrast, widely highlighted in the media beforehand, between the Queen sitting alone, obeying Covid rules at her husband’s funeral, and staff at No 10 ignoring the rules while partying with colleagues the previous evening.

Martin Kettle is a Guardian columnist

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Rigoletto review – powerful update, led by stellar duo, is a revelation

Grand theatre, Leeds
Underlining the otherness of Verdi’s court jester by making him a black man is a masterstroke by Femi Elufowoju Jr, the leads sung with potency by Eric Greene and Jasmine Habersham

The big idea in Femi Elufowoju Jr’s reading of Rigoletto for Opera North is so powerful and so current and at the same time so true to the artistic force of Verdi’s setting of Victor Hugo that it is somehow surprising that it has taken until now for someone to put it on the stage.

Elufowoju Jr’s production rediscovers the otherness of Rigoletto and his daughter Gilda for the 21st century. In Hugo and Verdi, the title role is a 16th-century hunchback court jester, who keeps his daughter hidden away to protect her from philandering aristocrats. Here, however, Rigoletto’s otherness is as a black man with a vulnerable daughter existing on the margins of an entitled bunch of rich white party animals who cannot be trusted around young women. Sound familiar? The political topicality is never explicitly stated, but it gives the idea searing extra credibility.

Rigoletto is at Grand theatre, Leeds, until 19 February, then touring until 1 April.

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If Johnson is ousted, expect a showdown between Tory MPs and the party faithful | Martin Kettle

The Conservatives tends to choose the opposite of what they have just rejected. But don’t write off the populists

Boris Johnson’s fall is not yet a fact. But it grows more likely by the hour. The hue and cry resumed at full throttle on Wednesday morning. Then Christian Wakeford, Conservative MP for the “red wall” marginal of Bury South, who had been the regional chief of the Back Boris campaign in 2019, defected to Labour. Thirty minutes later, David Davis quoted Leo Amery (who was quoting Oliver Cromwell) telling Neville Chamberlain in 1940: “” No leader can indefinitely survive these levels of assault.

Assuming it now takes place, there are two important things to keep in mind about the 2022 Conservative leadership election. The first is that the many twists in this extraordinary story may not have all been exhausted. Experience of recent Tory leadership contests suggests that we should expect the unexpected.

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Former Covid taskforce head ‘sorry’ for holding Cabinet Office leaving party ‘with drinks’ in December 2020 – as it happened

Kate Josephs apologises for farewell gathering on same date as separate Simon Case party on 17 December 2020. This live blog has now closed – for coronavirus updates, please follow the global Covid live blog

No 10 apologises to Queen over parties on eve of Prince Philip funeralFormer Covid taskforce head ‘sorry’ over party in December 2020Analysis: Johnson’s apology to Queen a new low for a prime ministerHow No 10’s alleged parties took place as UK Covid death toll roseJames Slack: PM’s former aide apologises for party held in his honour

The shadow attorney general, Emily Thornberry, accused Boris Johnson of overseeing a “culture” that enabled boozy parties to be held at No 10 while the country was in lockdown and called on him to resign and apologise to the Queen.

Speaking to Sky News, she said:

We are waiting for the prime minister to look into his heart and soul and decide whether or not he has a scrap of human decency in him.

Because if he does he will resign. How the hell can he possibly expect to go before Her Majesty again at a weekly audience and be able to look her in the eye and pretend everything is alright?

What I would say is that it will be charitable to say that partygate, if you like, is due to acts of extreme stupidity on behalf of those at No 10.

I think everyone would think that, wouldn’t they?

I’ve had many people who aren’t normal correspondents, so they aren’t people who regularly write to me in order to say the government is terrible, Boris is this whatever, you know, we do get quite a few correspondents of that nature.

These are, I’d say about half of those - because I do monitor it very closely - are new correspondents and that is always a red sign on the dashboard.

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