Martin Kettle's Blog, page 38
October 30, 2019
Boris Johnson has inadvertently taught us the greatest skill in politics: compromise | Martin Kettle
The prime minister’s failure to get his way has been an inspiring case study in the limits imposed by a hung parliament
Before we all charge off into the electoral unknown, let us remember some realities that are at risk of being left behind in the rush. In the 30 years before 2010, no British general election produced a hung parliament. In the nine years since 2010, two have done so. Nothing about this is predictive for 12 December. But it is clearly within the bounds of possibility that there could be a third hung parliament – and a fourth Conservative government in this decade without an overall majority.
“Single-party government is the British norm,” wrote the political scientist David Butler in a 1978 book, Coalitions in British Politics, that presciently considered what might happen if that norm were ever to change. Forty years on, change has come. In this election at least seven British parties, and three more in Northern Ireland, could win seats. So the new norm could easily continue, recur or perhaps even become more entrenched.
We live in a Britain of disintegrating and lighter political loyalties
Continue reading...
October 23, 2019
Johnson’s Brexit is in sight. But he’ll still have to make concessions to parliament | Martin Kettle
It is almost as easy to lose your bearings amid the furious churning of the Brexit crisis as it is to get lost in the fog of battle. Fresh Brexit preoccupations succeed one another chaotically, and with dizzying speed.
Tuesday’s votes at Westminster exemplified this mercurial and even hysterical quality in our politics. A major victory for Boris Johnson on his EU withdrawal agreement bill was instantly followed by a defeat on the tight timetable for debating it. Within seconds, the talk was of an entirely new subject: a general election.
The risk is that parliament could decide to finish the job on terms that would blow the majority for a deal wide apart
Related: Why Labour's election reluctance goes beyond no-deal Brexit fears
Continue reading...October 22, 2019
Alison Balsom in Gabriel review – trumpets get lost in translation
Barbican Hall, London
As actor, singer, compere and musician, Balsom drives this reimagining of Samuel Adamson’s celebration of Purcell, but the venue impedes its drama
When Gabriel was first staged at Shakespeare’s Globe six years ago, reviewers of this heady mix of Henry Purcell’s music and a sequence of short plays set in 1690s London were captivated by it. Some of the essential parts of what is now subtitled “an Entertainment for Trumpet” have made the journey intact across the Thames into this energetic reimagining of the piece in the Barbican Hall, but too much has also been lost in the translation between venues.
The unavoidable reason for this is that the Globe and the Barbican are very different stages. So are their atmospheres, performance dynamics and publics. None at all of this is in the Barbican’s favour, because the Globe’s earthy immediacy is impossible to recreate and the performers have an uphill task making the kind of audience connections in the concert hall that come naturally in the theatre’s more disrespectful space.
Continue reading...October 20, 2019
Why Barenboim is the Ring master of our age
The chance to see a complete Ring cycle is all too rare these days. Martin Kettle reports from Berlin’s Staatsoper, where Daniel Barenboim might be hidden from view, but his Wagner is revelatory
There was a time when it was unusual for a season to pass in a British opera house without the complete Ring being performed. The first Ring cycle to be mounted in postwar Britain was premiered in 1949 at Covent Garden. Thereafter (with the sole exception of 1952), the Ring, or parts of it, was an annual fixture at the Royal Opera House for two decades. Finally there was a fallow year in 1969. By this time, however, Sadler’s Wells Opera (later English National Opera) was building its own cycle, sung in English. The Ring – or parts thereof – continued to be performed most seasons into the 1980s at both houses, with Welsh National Opera and Scottish Opera also mounting Rings and - just as significantly - touring them around Britain.
Little of this period of plenty remains today. This is not to downplay some important recent Ring cycles, such as those put on by Opera North and Longborough festival, or the concert performances at the Proms and elsewhere, let alone the cycle directed by Keith Warner for Covent Garden in 2007 and revived in 2012 and 2018. But the gaps are increasingly large and obvious. Though there are many different causes for this change, the steady decline in Britain’s public subsidy to the opera sector is certainly one of the most decisive in making Wagner’s opera cycle an increasing and sometimes very expensive rarity on our stages. The result is that younger newcomers to the Ring are no longer able to get access to this most important and ambitious of 19th century European musical art works.
The Berlin cast, a mix of newer and fresher voices with some Barenboim veterans, is close to being as good as you will hear these days
Continue reading...October 16, 2019
At first, I accepted Brexit. Now it’s become clear that we must not leave the EU | Martin Kettle
Though we don’t always admit it, lots of us pro-Europeans have spent the years since the Brexit referendum trying to juggle two essentially irreconcilable views of what should happen next. One is that, awful though Brexit is, the leave vote must be honoured in the least damaging way. The other is that Britain’s departure from the European Union is so mistaken that it must be reversed, once again with least damage.
More than three years on some of us are still juggling, even as Boris Johnson heads to Brussels. The thing that keeps the juggling alive is not, in the end, an inability to make up our minds. I am a remainer. Full stop. The question is how to respond to Brexit in the political circumstances of the moment, in the best long-term interests of the country as a whole? The answer has evolved. But it will soon be make-our-minds-up time.
Related: Brexit weekly briefing: all eyes on EU summit as deadline looms
Continue reading...October 9, 2019
Brexit’s legacy for England will be politics as sectarian as Northern Ireland’s | Martin Kettle
How people vote in a forthcoming UK election will depend almost entirely on whether they favour leave or remain
You could call it Ireland’s sweet revenge, and both the timing and the irony would be historically exquisite. It would come just as Boris Johnson’s reckless government tries to bully Dublin on future Irish customs arrangements and as large parts of the Tory party salivate for a no-deal Brexit that will cast the Irish peace process casually aside. But if the 2019 general election that Johnson craves takes place, it may not be long before, politically speaking, Brexit Britain comes to resemble Northern Ireland.
To understand that this possible Ulsterisation of British politics is a genuinely serious prospect, step back a bit and consider the way that electoral behaviour has been evolving in Britain. Ever since 1964, political scientists, mainly based at Nuffield College, Oxford, have worked on the British Election Study (BES). For more than half a century they have tracked the decline of the old industrial-based two-party system in which general elections were fought between the Conservatives and Labour, who battled for the floating voters in the middle ground across the land.
Related: Uncertainty over Brexit will make election hard to call – study
Related: The Irish border is a matter of life and death, not technology | Fintan O’Toole
Continue reading...October 2, 2019
This cowardly speech reveals Boris Johnson’s armoury is empty | Martin Kettle
A general election is now the PM’s only hope of Getting Brexit Done. If they stick together, his opponents can beat him
Boris Johnson’s speech to the Conservative party conference was of a piece with his brief and tawdry prime ministership so far. The speech was a scam, an attempt to pretend that inconvenient realities can be wished out of existence by putting on a crowd-pleasing act. Yet these inconvenient realities include such things as the law of the land, the elected parliament, the European Union and the island of Ireland. Between them, these realities have enough clout to foil him.
Today’s speech was hardly designed to reassure the undecided. Most prime ministers devote weeks to honing their message to their party conference. They probably take the occasion too seriously. Johnson is the precise opposite. He seemed to have cobbled together his speech over breakfast. There was no architecture or narrative to it.
Related: Raising hopes and denying gropes: Tory conference leaves no fantasy untouched
Johnson is not in control of events. His new plans on the Irish border are mostly old ones.
Continue reading...October 1, 2019
'A majestic figure in every sense' – stars remember Jessye Norman
She was a diva so grand she needed to Rolls Royce just to get across the street. Martin Kettle kicks off stars’ tributes to the great American soprano
Jessye Norman’s voice was a force of nature, a gift from the gods. When you went to hear her sing, you always knew exactly what you would get. Sumptuous, creamy and voluptuous tone was Norman’s trademark, along with a meticulous attention to text and expression. For some, it was all too grand and undifferentiated, like a meal in which the richness of the food was overwhelming and unchanging in every course. But the sheer vocal splendour that Norman produced was the sort of sound that comes only once in a lifetime.
Yet Norman was not just an unforgettable voice. She was an unforgettable public presence – an African American presence – in every event in which she participated. The knowingness that marked her vocal art extended seamlessly to her public conduct. Her choices on Desert Island Discs did not include her own recordings (which, given her personality, they might easily have done) but Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech. She was a majestic figure in every sense, and she knew from the start of her career to the end that she was also an embodiment of her black brothers and sisters. She would never be anybody’s second-class citizen. And she never was.
Continue reading...September 25, 2019
Johnson’s plan is to turn his supreme court humiliation into rocket fuel at the polls | Martin Kettle
An angry and disturbingly pumped-up Boris Johnson’s response to the court in the recalled House of Commons tonight was an act of total contempt – for the courts, for parliament and ultimately for public and political decency. For the time being, Johnson still retains much of the formal power of the prime minister. But the role’s inner power, its moral authority, the holder’s ability to govern and his meaningful capacity to represent the country are practically shot. There is nothing tragic about this for Johnson personally. There is everything tragic for the country that never asked for him to become its leader.
He can’t blame the judges, because he does not dare. He likes to blame MPs, because they are an easy target. But the real blame lies with himself and the Tory hard leavers.
Continue reading...Covent Garden is living in a dream world if it thinks Domingo should perform there still
The Royal Opera must surely follow New York’s Met and abandon bookings with star tenor Placido Domingo while he faces sexual harassment allegations
Placido Domingo’s total withdrawal from the Metropolitan Opera in the wake of continuing sexual harassment allegations against him ought to mark a line in the sand for the operatic world. The problem, however, is that when the world of opera is confronted with an expanse of sand, its instinct is to bury its head in it.
From the moment the allegations against Domingo from women at the Los Angeles and Washington operas first erupted in public in August, it was clear that the 78-year-old’s performances this month at the New York Met, where he has performed since 1968, should have been put on ice. The allegations, which Domingo denies, often in very dignified language, were serious. The Met must have known that the singer’s next US performances – in Verdi’s Macbeth at the Met starting this week – could not go ahead in such an atmosphere.
Continue reading...Martin Kettle's Blog
- Martin Kettle's profile
- 2 followers
