David Runciman's Blog, page 2
January 14, 2022
Intoxicating, insidery and infuriating: everything I learned about Dominic Cummings from his £10-a-month blog
Since he left Downing Street, Boris Johnson’s former adviser has been setting out his worldview – and settling scores – on his Substack. Could it help us understand the most notorious man in British politics?
Who is the most interesting writer about politics in Britain today? No question, it’s Dominic Cummings. The Substack blog he started in June last year is not cheap – £10 a month for an erratic and irregular output via email – but it’s worth it. Whenever and whatever he does post, you can be sure it will contain plenty of extraordinary ideas, unexpected insights and eye-popping indiscretions. Cummings appears to have little or no filter on his thoughts, with the result that his writing offers as clear a view into the dark heart of contemporary politics as is available anywhere. He has no time for any of the usual pieties. What you get is a voracious intellect – Cummings is interested in everything from 19th-century German history to quantum physics – coupled with a tireless curiosity about anything that lies outside the conventional wisdom. It’s a revelation.
As Boris Johnson’s former right-hand man – and the architect of Brexit and the Tories’ 2019 election landslide – Cummings is nothing if not divisive. Since Johnson fired him in late 2020, Cummings has turned on the prime minister and made it his mission to force him out of office. If your enemy’s enemy is your friend, this makes it hard for many of Cummings’ former critics to know what to think of him now.
Continue reading...
December 12, 2021
Votes for children! Why we should lower the voting age to six – podcast
Welcome to a new series of long reads: Reconstruction after Covid
The generational divide is deforming democracy. But there is a solution. By David Runciman
Continue reading...November 15, 2021
Votes for children! Why we should lower the voting age to six | David Runciman
• Welcome to a new series of long reads: Reconstruction after Covid
The generational divide is deforming democracy. But there is a solution
There is no good reason to exclude children from the right to vote. Indeed, I believe there is a strong case for lowering the voting age to six, effectively extending the franchise to any child in full-time education. When I have made this case, as I have done in recent years in a variety of different forums, I am always struck by the reaction I get. It is incredulity. What possible reason could there be to do something so seemingly reckless and foolhardy? Most audiences recognise that our democracy is growing fractious, frustrated and frustrating. Our political divisions are wide and our institutions seem ill-equipped to handle them. But nothing surely could justify allowing children to join in. Wouldn’t it simply make everything worse?
It would not. In fact, it might make things better. But to understand why, we first need to understand the nature of the problems our democracy faces, and in particular, the generational divide that has become an increasingly important factor in politics over recent decades.
Continue reading...March 2, 2021
Law in a Time of Crisis by Jonathan Sumption review – beyond the lockdown sceptic
The former judge and renowned historian loses his cool on Covid and the culture wars
Jonathan Sumption has always been more than just a lawyer. For many years he was the brilliant QC and then supreme court justice who somehow found time on the side to write a definitive, multivolume history of the hundred years war: a true Renaissance man. Over the past 12 months he has emerged as a very different sort of public figure: the take-no-prisoners lockdown sceptic. He gained recent tabloid notoriety by telling Deborah James, who has stage 4 bowel cancer, that her life was “less valuable” than that of others with longer life expectancy. Sumption claims that his words were taken out of context, though as a historian he must know that we don’t always get to choose the context in which our words are read. It is certainly a case study in how quickly one sort of reputation can morph into another.
This collection of essays, based on speeches Sumption has given over more than a decade, tries to pull the different sides of his intellectual persona together. Though law is their unifying theme, he begins with reflections on history and ends with a blistering attack on the government’s draconian response to Covid-19. It is as a historian that he is at his most urbane and appealing. A believer in the power of history to broaden our minds and constrain our hubris – he says that the world would be in better shape today if Woodrow Wilson, US president 100 years ago, had been a historian rather than a political scientist – Sumption also manages to celebrate his status as a gentleman amateur among the professionals. How, his friends ask him, have you managed to write all those books while doing all that law? By not being an academic, is his answer. The professionals are far too busy being academics to have proper time to reflect.
Continue reading...January 24, 2021
Biden wants unity and democracy. But in the US these have always been in conflict | David Runciman
Its institutions were designed to keep the people out. The new president could have blamed the founding fathers
The three words that stood out in Joe Biden’s powerful inaugural address, if only for the number of times he used them, were “democracy”, “unity” and “truth”. But it was democracy that took centre stage. “This is democracy’s day,” he said, in his first statement after taking the oath of office. “The will of the people has been heard … Democracy has prevailed.”
Is this apparent vindication of democracy enough for unity and truth to prevail as well? The founding fathers of the American republic, whose history and institutions Biden also repeatedly invoked, might have been surprised to hear him run the three together. They believed they were founding a state that was designed to keep democracy at arm’s length. James Madison, one of the authors of The Federalist Papers and a future president, stated that the American constitution he helped to write would mean “the total exclusion of the people, in their collective capacity, from any share [in the government]”.
Continue reading...October 24, 2020
Boris Johnson is learning that in politics you cannot simply 'follow the science' | David Runciman
The prime minister is trying to pretend that nakedly political decisions are driven by data. But almost no one buys it
What happened to following the science? In the spring, when Boris Johnson and his scientific advisers were proceeding in lockstep, there was no disagreement about the necessity of shutting the country down. Now the government is coming to its own conclusions about what is needed, and the scientists on the Sage advisory group have started distancing themselves from No 10’s decisions.
Critics complain that the politicians are chancing it rather than being led by the evidence. But as the German sociologist Max Weber argued a century ago, politics can never really follow the science. Pretending that it can is where the trouble starts.
Related: Boris Johnson's refusal to seek compromise will be his undoing | Martin Kettle
Continue reading...September 4, 2020
JFK: Volume One by Fredrik Logevall review – the Kennedys and the Trumps
A riveting study of young JFK considers the role of his father and brothers, and the rivalries propelled by valour, greed and vanity within the Kennedy clan
John F Kennedy and Donald J Trump have a surprising amount in common. Both are the second sons of wealthy, self-made fathers from up-by-their-bootstraps immigrant families. Both fathers were domineering, callous, money-obsessed and racist. In both families paternal hopes were pinned on the first-born boy to follow in his father’s footsteps, before tragedy struck. Each older brother died relatively young (Kennedy’s in combat during the second world war, Trump’s of alcoholism). It was then up to the second son to fulfil his father’s ambitions.
The difference between them, though, is that Trump took on this mantle by trying to be like his father. Kennedy never did. Trump’s older brother Fred Jr was always a bit of a disappointment – Fred Sr thought him weak and lacking in ambition – whereas Donald was a chip off the old block. Kennedy’s boorish and confident older brother Joe Jr was everything his father could have hoped for. It was Jack who seemed to be the weakling – a sickly child, bookish and with too many ideas of his own. It was a surprise to the family when he turned out to be the one destined for greatness.
Related: John F Kennedy at 100 - in pictures
Continue reading...March 26, 2020
Coronavirus has not suspended politics – it has revealed the nature of power | David Runciman
In a lockdown, we can see the essence of politics is still what Hobbes described: some people get to tell others what to do
We keep hearing that this is a war. Is it really? What helps to give the current crisis its wartime feel is the apparent absence of normal political argument. The prime minister goes on TV to issue a sombre statement to the nation about the curtailment of our liberties and the leader of the opposition offers nothing but support. Parliament, insofar as it is able to operate at all, appears to be merely going through the motions. People are stuck at home, and their fights are limited to the domestic sphere. There is talk of a government of national unity. Politics-as-usual has gone missing.
But this is not the suspension of politics. It is the stripping away of one layer of political life to reveal something more raw underneath. In a democracy we tend to think of politics as a contest between different parties for our support. We focus on the who and the what of political life: who is after our votes, what they are offering us, who stands to benefit. We see elections as the way to settle these arguments. But the bigger questions in any democracy are always about the how: how will governments exercise the extraordinary powers we give them? And how will we respond when they do?
Though the pandemic is a global phenomenon, its impact is greatly shaped by decisions taken by individual governments
Related: It's right that parliament shuts – but democracy can't be suspended | Polly Toynbee
Continue reading...February 1, 2020
It was all a dream: there was no way to stop Brexit | David Runciman
Until quite recently, many people fervently believed this day would never arrive. Just over three months ago, Brexit finally seemed to have pushed British politics to the brink of a nervous breakdown. There were tears and tantrums in parliament. There were petitions and protests outside. A litany of lawsuits was waiting in the wings to derail the whole process. Ardent remainers felt they were tantalisingly close to stopping Brexit altogether. The future looked wide open.
From a second referendum to a government of national unity, from toppling over the cliff edge to beating a full retreat, almost anything appeared possible. Yet here we are – one day after formally leaving, just as the British people decided on 23 June 2016 – and all that is gone. What happened? Were the last four years a mirage?
Related: We remainers must now aim for Britain to do well – and the EU even better | Timothy Garton Ash
Related: Independence Day will expose Brexit as a ruse to free an imaginary nation | Fintan O’Toole
Related: We leave the EU tonight – but Europe is still alive in people’s hearts | Gaby Hinsliff
Continue reading...November 6, 2019
May at 10 by Anthony Seldon review – politics and pressure
Whatever happens in next month’s general election, it is hard to see how Theresa May can win. If Boris Johnson gets a parliamentary majority and is able to force his version of Brexit through, he will be the one who did what she couldn’t, who got the backing of the voters where she failed, who reopened a deal she said was closed, and who seized his moment when she didn’t dare. It will be his victory. On the other hand, if Johnson comes a cropper at the polls and Brexit ends up stymied again, May will go down in the annals of her party as the PM who squandered their best chance to save Brexit and to save themselves. He will be the fall guy. But she will get the ultimate blame.
Anthony Seldon’s exhaustive inside account of May’s tenure in Downing Street offers little ammunition for anyone hoping to mount a defence of her premiership. Based on extensive interviews with all the key players (except the PM herself), his book portrays May as a brittle and shallow politician, incurious, inflexible and ultimately out of her depth. She has her moments – he commends her handling of the Salisbury poisonings, for example – but on the whole she comes across as fixed in her views when she needed to be open, yet indecisive when she needed to act: a fatal combination.
Continue reading...David Runciman's Blog
- David Runciman's profile
- 167 followers
