Martin Kettle's Blog, page 34

Post-coronavirus, the UK must find some friends to stand up to China | Martin Kettle

Covid-19 has seen China supplant the US in the global power league. Alliances are now crucial to reject the superpower’s bullying

Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage

Amid the pandemic, the great issues of the day are inescapably immediate and health-centred. But eyes will lift eventually, and as that happens we will notice how the wider world has already changed as a result of Covid-19. A lot of the speculation about the post-coronavirus political world is plain fanciful. But there was a gripping reminder this week about one effect that is now more real than ever: the pandemic’s role in boosting the global heft of China.

The rise of China is of course not new. In some Chinese perspectives, it goes back centuries. Even from a western viewpoint it was already well advanced before the pandemic. But when the Obama administration’s US ambassador to the United Nations, Samantha Power, was asked this week by the Commons foreign affairs committee to assess Covid-19’s impact on the global order, she turned first and without hesitation to China’s rise.

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Published on May 20, 2020 08:57

Boris Johnson looks increasingly like the prime minister of England alone | Martin Kettle

There have been cracks in the United Kingdom for many years. Coronavirus has prised them wide open

Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage

As Boris Johnson finished his televised address on Sunday evening, many viewers were confused by what he had just said. One thing about his message, though, had been strikingly clear. To the surprise of many of those watching, and perhaps even to Johnson himself, it turned out that the coronavirus outbreak has changed the prime minister of the United Kingdom into the prime minister of England.

Over the past two months we have all become familiar with the fact that Covid-19 wreaks its most powerful effects on those individuals who are said to suffer from “serious underlying conditions”. What is only just becoming clear is that the virus can have a similarly destructive effect on nation states and societies which suffer from their own serious underlying conditions too.

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Published on May 13, 2020 07:23

Boris Johnson's baby is the perfect symbol of his personality-driven politics | Martin Kettle

It would require a heart of stone not to be moved by such a story of illness and new life. But this is no apolitical birth

Less than a month ago, Boris Johnson was close to becoming the first prime minister to die in office since the Victorian era. Today he is the third prime minister of the 21st century to be celebrating the birth of a new baby in No 10. It would require a heart of stone – and doubtless there are some of those where Johnson is concerned – not to be moved by this vertiginous private ascent from darkness into light. As a metaphor for the optimistic way the prime minister would like a troubled country to see the coronavirus crisis, it is beyond audacious. You could not make it up.

Let’s acknowledge, if nothing else, that today’s announcement was a brilliantly executed piece of political tradecraft. The operation in Downing Street is still a lot smarter than many would like to think when they see it preside over those wooden and evasive daily briefings. That’s because, over the 24 hours preceding the announcement that Carrie Symonds and Johnson had had a baby son, No 10 played the media brilliantly.

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Published on April 29, 2020 06:56

Opera and classical concerts to watch at home: our critics' picks – week six

Our critics pick a daily highlight from the treasure trove of online music to help get you through lockdown. This week we bring you dancing horses and bonking bunnies

Our picks from week five: Stockhausen’s Lucifer to a Beethoven marathon

The French string quartet should have been a significant presence at the Wigmore Hall this spring, playing Shostakovich and Weinberg. They stand alone in having recorded the complete quartet cycles of both composers, though Weinberg only features here as an encore, the vibrant scherzo from his fifth quartet. Their main programme is Austrian, old and new, opening with Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue, K546, originally conceived for two keyboards. (The British Library holds the manuscript of the fugue, the extraordinary adagio actually an afterthought.) Together with Haydn’s Op 20, No 5 and Beethoven’s Op 132, these are all highly focused and intense performances. Not that Olga Neuwirth’s Hadal Akroate is exactly light relief. Taking her title from a description of vampire squid in the treatise Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, which dives into a “literal and philosophical ocean”, Neuwirth creates a soundscape alternating between acute tension and moments of eerie underwater serenity. Closeups show the players fixing paper clips and foldback clips to the strings, while the unusual bowing techniques wreak havoc with the second violin’s bow-hairs - with no time to break them off, they are left to flail in the air, bright filaments in momentary visual counterpoint. Rian Evans

Lockdown listening: classical music and opera to stream at home

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Published on April 27, 2020 09:15

Opera and classical concerts to watch at home: our critics' picks, week six

Our critics pick a daily highlight from the treasure trove of online music to help get you through lockdown. This week we bring you dancing horses and bonking bunnies

Browse our picks from:
• week five
• week four
• week three
• week two
• week one

The French string quartet should have been a significant presence at the Wigmore Hall this spring, playing Shostakovich and Weinberg. They stand alone in having recorded the complete quartet cycles of both composers, though Weinberg only features here as an encore, the vibrant scherzo from his fifth quartet. Their main programme is Austrian, old and new, opening with Mozart’s Adagio and Fugue, K546, originally conceived for two keyboards. (The British Library holds the manuscript of the fugue, the extraordinary adagio actually an afterthought.) Together with Haydn’s Op 20, No 5 and Beethoven’s Op 132, these are all highly focused and intense performances. Not that Olga Neuwirth’s Hadal Akroate is exactly light relief. Taking her title from a description of vampire squid in the treatise Vampyroteuthis Infernalis, which dives into a “literal and philosophical ocean”, Neuwirth creates a soundscape alternating between acute tension and moments of eerie underwater serenity. Closeups show the players fixing paper clips and foldback clips to the strings, while the unusual bowing techniques wreak havoc with the second violin’s bow-hairs - with no time to break them off, they are left to flail in the air, bright filaments in momentary visual counterpoint. Rian Evans

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Published on April 27, 2020 09:15

What the EU procurement furore tells us about Johnson's real priorities | Martin Kettle

It’s clear that the coronavirus pandemic is not the first thing on the prime minister’s mind

On one level, the argument about what Sir Simon McDonald said to the foreign affairs select committee this week can be dismissed as a storm in a Whitehall teacup. Hours after the head of the foreign office had called Britain’s refusal to join the European Union’s procurement efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic a “political decision”, McDonald retracted his words. Whitehall-watchers are fascinated. The wider world has bigger things to worry about.

But on another level, this week’s row is political dynamite – and for two main reasons.

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Published on April 22, 2020 08:13

Opera and classical concerts to watch at home: our critics' picks – week five

Our critics pick a daily highlight from the treasure trove of classical music currently available. Today, music to see you through from 20 to 24 April, from Stockhausen’s Lucifer to a Beethoven marathon

Our picks from week four: The Turn of the Screw and Guillaume Tell

Lockdown listening: classical music and opera to stream at home

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Published on April 20, 2020 09:00

Opera and classical concerts to watch at home: our critics' picks, week five

Our critics pick a daily highlight from the treasure trove of classical music currently available. Today, music to see you through from 20 to 24 April, from Stockhausen’s Lucifer to a Beethoven marathon

Browse our picks from:
• week four
• week three
• week two
• week one

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Published on April 20, 2020 09:00

After coronavirus, Boris Johnson's Tories will be a very different party | Martin Kettle

A brand built around Brexit and the anger of the left-behind is becoming much less relevant in the shadow of pandemic

Coronavirus – latest updates See all our coronavirus coverage

It is only four months since Boris Johnson led the Conservative party to a historic victory. His 80-seat majority seemed to recast the electoral landscape for a generation. It also marked another milestone in Brexit’s transformation of the Conservative party from the party of business to the party of the flag. Today, that seems like another world.

Everything has been upended by Covid-19. The business of government is wholly taken up with protecting public health, keeping the economy on life support and, in Johnson’s own case, his personal survival. Today the national lockdown is expected to be extended into May.

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Published on April 15, 2020 22:00

We don't need a Churchill, Thatcher or Blair. We need a leader for this crisis, now | Martin Kettle

Britain doesn’t need the skills of the past – the coronavirus pandemic demands leadership that is practical, open and trusted

Leadership matters in a crisis. In a huge crisis, therefore, leadership ought to matter even more than ever. Britain, with its potent memories of war leadership, is particularly predisposed to this view. Today, along with the rest of the world, the country faces an exceptional public health crisis in the shape of the Covid-19 pandemic. But it is not alone in finding that the leadership being offered in the current crisis is far from exceptional.

Britain’s current failures of leadership are not now a matter of opinion but of fact. Hopefully they will not prove catastrophic, but they need to be recognised and avoided in future as far as humanly possible. The understandable instinct to rally round, to do our bit, to defer to authority and to postpone difficult subjects until afterwards all contribute to a widely shared wish to make the best of things in difficult times. This is naturally much enhanced by Boris Johnson’s personal struggle in intensive care, again wholly understandably so. But these could yet be dangerous responses.

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Published on April 08, 2020 08:30