Martin Kettle's Blog, page 41
June 26, 2019
Boris Johnson’s full English Brexit could rip the union apart | Martin Kettle
It is time to wake up, but there is barely a moment to smell the coffee. If Boris Johnson becomes prime minister, Britain will be sleepwalking towards the break-up of the United Kingdom. The minority who want this to happen are rubbing their hands at the prospect. The separate minority who say they don’t care if it happens seem beyond reasoned debate at present. But the majority who don’t want it to happen aren’t being much more attentive either. Unless this changes, they could be in for a shock more lasting than Brexit.
Related: Boris Johnson is self-destructing. How much of Britain will he drag down too? | Nesrine Malik
Related: I was Boris Johnson’s boss: he is utterly unfit to be prime minister | Max Hastings
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June 19, 2019
From Thatcher to Brexit: this Tory folly was 40 years in the making | Martin Kettle
Margaret Thatcher wrenched the party away from its pragmatic traditions. Brexit has turned it into a faith-based movement
“I’d like to have led the Conservative party. I’d like to have been prime minister,” confessed a disappointed Conservative politician on Monday. It is proving to be that kind of week for the Tory combatants. Today it was Rory Stewart’s turn to come to terms with the dying of his national leadership dream, as Boris Johnson consolidated his grip on the Tory election in advance of today’s next rounds.
But these words of regret did not come from Dominic Raab, Matt Hancock or any of the earlier fallers in this contest. Instead they were spoken this week by Michael Heseltine, in the final part of the BBC’s excellent five-part documentary, Thatcher: a Very British Revolution. It is what Heseltine said next that speaks most directly of all to the perhaps unsolvable problems facing today’s Tory party. If he had become prime minister, Heseltine said: “It would have been a different country.” He is right about that. But he didn’t. So it isn’t. And that is the Tory party’s problem.
Brexit is the price the party is paying for the unchecked flowering of poisonous political seeds planted under Thatcher
Related: TV debate brought home a terrifying truth: one of these men will be PM | Jonathan Freedland
Continue reading...June 5, 2019
Brexit Britain and Trump’s America are a betrayal of the values D-day was fought for | Martin Kettle
The D-day commemorations have never felt so uneasy. Trump and Brexit are tearing apart the bonds forged after 1945
They are saying that Thursday – the 75th anniversary – will be the last of the international D-day commemorations in which the veterans of 1944 participate. For obvious reasons that may well be so. The surviving soldiers who fought their way up the beaches of Normandy are in their 90s now, so it seems poignantly unlikely that more than a handful will return in 2024.
But there is a more political reason why this week could be the start of a less unified approach to marking the liberation of Europe at the end of the war against Hitler’s Germany. The reason is that Donald Trump’s US and Brexit Britain, though both still immeasurably and justifiably proud of the roles their predecessors played in this epic climax of the war in the west, are each in their own way turning their backs upon the European order that the invasion of 6 June 1944 made possible.
Related: 'I count myself lucky': D-day remembered on the 75th anniversary
Related: D-day veterans and world leaders take part in emotional ceremony
Continue reading...June 3, 2019
The Bartered Bride review – charm and wit in assured English village staging
Garsington Opera at Wormsley, Stokenchurch
Director Paul Curran transfers Smetana’s comic masterpiece to 1950s England to create an irresistibly energetic production
A generation ago, Smetana’s comic masterpiece could still be billed as the quintessential Czech opera. But that bohemian folksiness is dated now, and the idea of selling a bride – though it never quite happens in the opera – is more than unsettling. Garsington Opera’s season opens with a winning production by Paul Curran that moves the action from a 19th-century Czech village to 1950s England. The charm and folksiness survive even though there’s not a Moravian knee boot, an embroidered headdress or a puffed sleeve in sight. Instead, the first act takes place in a village hall, the second in a pub and the third in the travelling circus. But in such an English setting it seems perverse to preserve the original language rather than perform a translation.
Curran’s staging, in Kevin Knight’s busy naturalistic sets, is continuously assured and full of witty touches. At the start, the vicar puts an LP on his Dansette record player, cueing Smetana’s scurrying overture. The drinking chorus in praise of beer leads to a stream of visits to the gents’ loo. The heroine Mařenka dances the polka in a polka dot dress. And when the circus arrives at the beginning of act three, the acrobatic exuberance and tricks have an irresistible theatrical impact. Even Mařenka gamely celebrates with a cartwheel at the end.
Continue reading...May 29, 2019
Forget Boris Johnson. The Tory leader could come from the centre | Martin Kettle
He may be the frontrunner, but the former foreign secretary will surely lose his allure. Look out for the unexpected
Something important and wholly without precedent is happening in plain sight in British politics – but not enough attention is being paid to it. The something is that never before has a new British prime minister been chosen by the grassroots members of the ruling political party. Such a thing might have happened in 2007, when Tony Blair resigned, but Gordon Brown was chosen unopposed. It nearly happened in 2016, after David Cameron stepped down, but in the end the other candidates stood aside in favour of Theresa May.
Now it’s the third time it could happen, and this one is almost certain to be different. There are already 11 candidates in the field to succeed May. Five more are said to be weighing whether to join. Many will fall at the first and subsequent hurdles in June, when Tory MPs begin a series of elimination votes in Westminster. But it would be a surprise if this contest does not go all the way to a two-person runoff among the party members in July. If it does, that will be a historic first – a national leader chosen by a party membership, not by parliamentarians or the wider public.
Continue reading...May 22, 2019
Brexit has become a subplot to the battle for the post-May Tory party | Martin Kettle
Until quite recently, it was still accurate to say that the central problem in British party politics was Brexit. This week, that has imperceptibly but now decisively changed. Now, and probably for much of the coming summer, the central problem in British party politics is no longer Brexit itself but the character of the post-Theresa May Tory party.
May’s decline from the now hard-to-recall autumn of 2016, when she enjoyed the confidence of 87% of Tory voters and 54% of the whole electorate has been long and slow. The mishandling of the needless election of 2017 resulted in enormous self-inflicted damage. But even as the diminished May continued to battle on into the early part of this year to get her withdrawal agreement adopted, British politics was still essentially about Brexit rather than her.
If the situation facing Britain was not now so serious, there would be an irony in the approach that May has adopted
Related: May's offer was neither 'new' nor bold. It will be her final failure | Tom Kibasi
Continue reading...May 21, 2019
Andrea Chénier, ROH review – a singers' evening that won't start a revolution
Royal Opera House, London
Sondra Radvanovsky thrills and Roberto Alagna goes for loudness in David McVicar’s old-school production of Giordano’s French revolution-set opera
Andrea Chénier is saturated in the French revolution. The story of the liberal poet who sympathises with the oppressed but who is executed in the Terror is loosely based on a real one, and Giordano’s opera is full of historically specific characters and political references. Robespierre himself even gets a walk-on part and there are musical allusions to at least three anthems of revolutionary France.
Yet artistically, Andrea Chénier is no revolutionary work. The inevitable departure to the guillotine at the close is high-grade operatic ham, with none of the chilling theatrical power of its equivalent in Poulenc’s Dialogues des Carmélites. David McVicar’s 2015 production, revived at Covent Garden for the first time and with a strong cast, takes the piece at face value, offering naturalistic settings for the ancien regime first act and for the three in revolutionary Paris that follow it.
Continue reading...May 15, 2019
The political landscapes of Brexit Britain and Weimar Germany are scarily similar | Martin Kettle
Enter the disturbing special exhibition that has recently opened in Berlin’s German Historical Museum and you are immediately confronted with a series of bleak statements: “Liberal democracy cannot be taken for granted any longer … Authoritarian parties are even gaining strength in countries with a long democratic tradition … The public’s trust in liberal democracy seems to be waning in Germany as well.”
Related: Delivering Brexit won’t quell the forces of nationalism, as Eurosceptics might hope | Rafael Behr
Related: Britain’s real democratic crisis? The broken link between voters and MPs | Aditya Chakrabortty
Continue reading...May 8, 2019
‘Global Britain’ is doing its foreign policy on autopilot | Martin Kettle
Paralysis over Brexit means the country is burying its head in the sand over the very real challenges ahead
The European elections Theresa May never intended Britain to participate in are now only two weeks away. They are inevitably being fought as a proxy contest for Brexit by all the political parties. The results will be interpreted as a verdict on Brexit too, just as last week’s English local elections have been, and probably in much the same careless way.
Yet it would be a stretch to pretend that, for once in our recent history, the UK’s European elections are actually focusing on Britain’s and Europe’s place in the 21st-century world. The truth is far less flattering. These elections can better be understood as another episode in the national – and, in particular, Conservative – trauma over the historic decline of British power, of which the referendum was an interim climax. The elections are therefore unlikely to be cathartic or cleansing. On the contrary, they are dragging us deeper into the ongoing psychodrama that was intensified by the vote in 2016.
Related: Brexit has robbed Labour of its insurgency. It’s time to claw it back | Owen Jones
Continue reading...May 2, 2019
She’s back: and Ruth Davidson could be the one person who can save the Tories | Martin Kettle
The Scottish Conservative leader returns to the frontline today – and she’s still one of the party’s most popular politicians
The 2015 general election belongs to a different political universe from the Brexit-dominated one we now inhabit. Yet it is only four years since David Cameron, in the middle of the election campaign and on the verge of winning an outright Conservative majority, announced he would not be leading his party in what was then expected to be the 2020 contest.
If Cameron had won the Brexit referendum in 2016, this summer of 2019 would have been his swansong. The Tory party would have been preparing to choose a new leader to succeed him. We would be awash with Tory leadership speculation. Ambitious ministers would be jostling and calculating. The Boris Johnson bandwagon would be rolling. Funny, that. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
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