Yet pain is everywhere in Cartland’s fiction, if you scrub off the makeup and strip the pink away. The critic Peter Conrad claims “the romances she writes are as humid as pornography, though tamed by euphemism: her heroes are all red-blooded rampant phalluses . . . Her subject is always rape.” He’s right. I read Hazard of Hearts (1949), in which Serena Staveley’s father gambles her away to the Marquis of Vulcan and commits suicide by duel. Serena is threatened with rape by Lord Wrotham — “One grows tired of easy conquests, my sweet Serena, and a trifle of hatred will give our life together a spice and a piquancy” — before Vulcan’s tenderness, and his desire to control her, reveals itself. “She quivered for one second before she surrendered herself, utterly and completely. She knew then his strength, she knew then how strong and masterful he would always be and she gloried in it.”

In Cartland’s fiction, as in Cartland’s life, there is no redemption without terror. The first novel is always the best tell of a writer and in Jig-Saw (1927), she wrote, “If only he would lose his temper, be brutal or abusive, Mona felt she would adore him. The eternal considerateness and kindness towards her simply rasped on her nerves.” It makes me laugh to think that this most Establishment of novelists — she became a dame in 1991, thanks to the late Queen Mother — was writing sexual masochism all those years. She made hundreds of women out of paper, like marionettes, and gave them what she wanted, or thought she deserved.

Unhappiness, though, was her essential characteristic; that and snobbery. She was not an aristocrat, but she wanted to be; even Cecil Beaton called her a snob, and he would know. It is hard not to think, reading Hazard of Hearts: Cartland’s truest love was the class system, and that is, as she would say, a cruel master.

More from this author

Makerfield: crucible of resentment

By Tanya Gold

Instead, she was from immaculate Birmingham trade, which surely created the work ethic: her grandfather was a screw magnate, quite literally. He shot himself in the head when Cartland was two and the affluent life shattered: the house was sold, the maids were fired, the money was gone. Cartland heroines are habitually carried off to castles, but Cartland traveled in the opposite direction: from mansion to farmhouse. Her father, James,  was an alcoholic: he did not know how to live without money. Cartland would write her anti-father all her life: men who were not drunks, but “masterful.” Even so, her mother, Polly, ran the family, and she held on to their aristocratic-style life by her fingernails, and with work. When there were plums in the garden, Cartland lived on plums, and Polly sold the rest; at one point Polly opened a dress shop above a pharmacy. For the young Cartland, this trauma was compounded by self-hatred: she felt herself unbeautiful, when beauty was all that mattered for girls. “I have spent many years of my life trying to lay the ghost of that plain child,” she said. “She has haunted me.”

Cartland was haunted by many things: her family fortune was lost to suicide; her father to alcoholism; her two brothers to the Second World War; her first marriage to adultery. It’s hard to imagine such a woman ever feeling safe, hence the fantasies of sexual domination, and nobility. She married at least one man she didn’t love; and she couldn’t love the only real girl she produced over 723 books: her daughter, Raine, who tried to be a mirror of her mother. It was a mistake.

She built the emotional edifice early. Her bizarre face — she used boot polish for mascara — would follow it, as if in sympathy. “Quite early on,” she said, “I learned the best way to survive is to pretend that anything unpleasant simply hasn’t happened.”

But unpleasant things did happen. After the Great War almost a million young men were missing. That generation’s lovemaking was morbidly extreme: her shell-shocked lovers threatened to shoot themselves and left her with “a horror of sympathy.” “I had no wish to be married to anyone,” she said, “I was frightened now of any deep emotion.” When she found out about sex — she initially thought you could get pregnant from a kiss on the neck — she called off her first engagement and married for money instead. “In the spring of 1927, I became engaged to be married to Alexander [“Sachie”] McCorquodale, whose father was chairman of the companies owning the largest printing group in England,” she wrote in her memoir The Isthmus Years (1945). McCorquodale was too rich to function and he drank too much. Cartland, though obliviously, had married her father. “I cried all through my first honeymoon,” she wrote. “He had a terrible inferiority complex. He drank to boost himself up. You can understand it.”

She wrote about her husband in If the Tree is Saved (1929) as if she hated him: “She had loved the back of his neck, but in the strong light from the window it looked purple and patchy, and she noticed with distaste the commencement of a small boil.” And again in For What? (1930). “Unreasonably romantic, she had looked to her honeymoon to create a spell which would change both Alan and herself into fictitious creatures so different from their true selves, that only a child could have imagined such a possibility”. Her marriage failed, she married Alexander’s cousin Hugh, and established the factory of terror and sex.

Cartland did not like women, real or fictional. So she terrorized them, punished them and fetishized virginity: the partial, or anti-woman. This is most obvious in her treatment of Raine, her only daughter. Cartland could not even bear to look at her as a baby: she had a special pram made, with the child facing outwards. When Raine excelled academically, it disappointed Cartland, who did not approve of female agency beyond her own. “Do tidy your hair, darling,” Cartland said, “No man wants a clever woman.” She called Raine “nauseating” — was it the child’s desire for her mother’s love that disgusted Cartland? — and admitted she was disappointed to have a girl: “I don’t think I’ve ever been so thrilled by anything as having a son”. Still, Raine tried to please her by following the trajectory of a series of Cartland heroines: she married an earl, then another earl, and then the son of a marquis. Raine was not mentioned in Cartland’s will, as if she deserved nothing. I didn’t think anything could make me like Raine Spencer, who inherited ugly snobbery from her pinked mother, but The Great Dictator did. She said she finished Das Kapital by 12, and it was “awfully boring”.

Suggested reading

Stephen King's boomer propaganda

By Kat Rosenfield

The fantasy she wove to conceal herself was superficially all-consuming: a glittering edifice filled with oddness and magic. According to Sweet, she claimed to be visited by ghosts; that her interior decorator was psychic; that a spirit guide helped her win at roulette; that her friend Lord Moutbatten invented elasticated shoelaces. She pretended she had aristocratic lovers when she didn’t: an extension of her novels. It is possible that she did not believe her fantasies. She told the writer Maboth Moseley, “I believe in being honest with oneself alone. If one told the truth to others about themselves one’s life wouldn’t be worth living.” This is not self-love, but self-annihilation; the language of absolute loneliness.

Towards the end of her life, her self-hatred became more explicit: she projected onto real women as well as fictional ones. She said things like, “Women shouldn’t have character. They should be like pretty chocolate boxes”; and “a stupid man is preferable to a clever woman”; and “Women . . . are not as intelligent as men, and they have awful squeaky voices”. When she was told the piles of Cartland heroines contradicted her own life — that she did have agency — she denied it. When Melvyn Bragg told her she was a career woman she replied: “When my [second] husband died I’d only written thirty or forty books.” When Alan Whicker told her, “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone less in need of protection”, Cartland retorted, “You’re horrid to me. I just want a nice strong man to look after me.”  We can’t know if she meant it, or if it was part of her strategy of concealment: I doubt she knew herself.

“This was the mask of a woman who could not quite see her own face,” Sweet writes: because she did not want to. “Reflection on these matters would have required Cartland to stop the machine, and the machine could not be stopped, because the machine was Cartland”. The most prolific romance novelist who ever lived was also the purest and most imaginative kind: the self-hating kind. Sweet has mastered Cartland, and with tenderness: it’s impossible to imagine her response. “That stupid sadness,” she told the psychiatrist Anthony Clare disgustedly, “that’s wrong. You’ve got to go on.”

‘The Great Dictator: a Life of Barbara Cartland’ is published tomorrow by Hodder & Stoughton 

Andy Burnham is an oppressive presence in Makerfield: he hovers. Posters of the current mayor of Manchester, who will parlay a win here into a bid for party leadership, fill the streets. They block the windows of a derelict pub in Ashton. He looks like a New Yorker byline cartoon, and I wonder if AI made the image; he is buffed and smoothed. His election leaflet comes in the shape of a vinyl single: a 45, for those who dread the future, which is everyone here. It says: “Keep the Faith”. Few have.

Ashton is a town of amazing intensity — and bleakness. It used to be a coal town with a famous hinge factory. Now there is a KFC, a job centre, a betting shop and a wedding dress shop, which looks faintly aggrieved: between them, people traipse like furious ghosts. This is a by-election for the raging and the indifferent (half will not vote) and, in tribute to Makerfield’s temporary importance, the council have dug up the road. My taxi driver, once a lawyer in Pakistan, says white boys throw stones at his car. He shows me the cracks in the window. He blames Elon Musk and says things have never been so bad. I have never met voters — or non-voters — who talk so much about social media. They ask me if I am from YouTube.

This could have been another Runcorn and Helsby, which Reform took from Labour by six votes last year. But all by-elections are different; they are fables of resentment, and the most thrilling narrative usually wins. In Makerfield, that is Burnham’s: his promise to topple Starmer if elected makes him, not Reform, the insurgent here. Burnham also benefits from the growth of the disconnect, at least this time. Reform, which usually manifests that disconnect, is threatened by its dissident ex-MP Rupert Lowe, who has founded Restore. The disconnect disconnected. Restore’s branch in Norfolk, Great Yarmouth First, won the 10 seats it contested in the local elections on a promise to ban the burka, defund the BBC, begin mass deportations and have a referendum on the death penalty. Restore will welcome Tommy Robinson if he chooses to join, though Reform will not. The revolution eats its children.

Burnham HQ is a sports hall filled with activists from all over Britain: it is like a Liberal Democrat campaign. They exude the excitement and the entitlement of the day-tripper. I see a southern Labour MP in a bright Range Rover, which reminds me of Boris Johnson’s motorcade in Hartlepool in 2021, when Labour lost, because its ownership of the North had gone. I also see John McDonnell, Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow chancellor, drinking in the bar: a sign that Burnham, if he wins, will take the party to the Left.

Some talk about this election in terms of legend: Labour’s last stand and, in Burnham, the only chance to beat Reform in the next general election. “The future of the country is at stake,” I am told by a young activist. “I think Andy is probably the only person who could make a real difference. He’s got the mentality of an insurgent. We live in a populist world, and we’ve got to fight fire with fire”. Or they say that Starmer is not relatable. “He doesn’t connect well with people,” says a woman from Devon, who is here because she loved Corbyn, and she thinks she sees some of him in Burnham. Or, from a young woman in Manchester: “You could look at him [Starmer] and his style and think that’s just another Tory.” They report that former Reform voters are returning to Labour because of Burnham: because he is from the North.

Outside, in real Makerfield, politics is mostly taboo: people are not only afraid of what is happening, they are afraid to talk about it. They are afraid of speech: their own, and others’, and I think this is new. The political meeting organised by Ed Gemmell, leader of the Climate Party — it exists to fill the gap the Greens left when they swapped climate anxiety for Gaza — is attended by only two residents, and one of them is drunk. The undrunk one left Ashton as a teenager and recently returned. He doesn’t like to talk about politics due to, “self-preservation. If you go into Wetherspoons, you hear some awful stuff. I don’t want to make my political views known.” When he was a child, he says, “Ashton was a village. If you wanted meat, you went to the butcher. If you wanted fish, you went to the market. Everyone looked after each other.” They never locked their doors.

“The people are still as friendly as they always were,” he says, “but they don’t smile as much. People are more divided. They talk about rugby, football, but nothing in depth or with any real content, people seem to be worried about talking about it for being judged or ridiculed. It’s a shame. I love this area, but you come back and you think, ‘why do I love it? It’s falling apart’”. The politics follows it.

Suggested reading

Burnham won't quell England's revolt

By Aris Roussinos

I follow the politics down the Wigan Road to a grand house behind a gate. It has a fantastical garden with a single black garden gnome and an enormous Reform flag on an enormous flagpole. It would be Donald Trump’s house if he lived on the Wigan Road in Ashton. They are delighted to speak to me, which is unusual, but I knew they would be when I saw the size of the flagpole. They are Reform because a car hit their boundary wall and, they say, the police refused to charge the Muslim driver because it was Ramadan, and he was hungry.  She shows me a picture of the wall in pieces and complains about HMOs. They don’t get to meet their neighbours. But, as ever with the prosperous Reform voter, their anxiety seems more existential than material; more dreamt that real. She still thinks Josh Simons, the Labour MP who stood aside for Burnham, is charming.

The narrative in Makerfield is not Burnham-saves-Labour: that is an imposition from the activists coming from outside. (Though the less bewitched Labour activists say it is closer than the polls suggest.) It’s the same as it is at every by-election I have covered in the North: people won’t allow themselves that much hope.

Like ghosts at the feast, Reform voters gather at what was once the Labour Club. They speak about Starmer with hatred. “I mean,” says one man, “he’s supported kiddie fiddlers and things like that. Jimmy Savile, you know. Some of the locals said they’d rather vote Jimmy Savile than him.” Can they mean it? A video circulates of a man tearing up Andy Burnham’s signs: they laugh at this. “Labour is dead in the water,” says another. “Everybody in this club at one time would have voted Labour, and now I don’t think there’s anybody in this club that will vote Labour. They’re a spent force.”

These voters no longer feel important; they feel of passing use. That’s the key, and it is societal as well as personal. “I can’t phone Andy Burnham and talk to him”; “He reckons he’s a local lad, but he’s never done anything for here”; “there are coloured faces everywhere you go”. When Josh Simons visited, they still felt cheated. “He was telling me, ‘I used to come in here and have a pint’ and in the next breath he asked me where the toilets were’”. And contempt whistles through his teeth.

For them, their candidate, Robert Kenyon, has been unfairly treated by the press. He replied to a social media post in 2021 that talked about touching Carol Vorderman’s arse. Kenyon gave the post a thumbs up, and wrote, “He’s only saying what we’re all thinking.” Here, they feel the same. “They hung Bob out to dry,” a man says. “All he did was give the thumbs up”.

There are few exceptions to the resentment. By the bus stop a teenager says gaily: “Listen to me. Is this going on a podcast? Andy Hurdham [sic] is a good man. He’s got good intentions. Reform — it’s all immigration. They want to get rid of immigration. We need immigration: NHS, we’ve got a lot of immigrated jobs in this society and we need it. Reform wants to get rid of that. They want the old Britain. I want the new Britain.” He grins at me, a loved child with faith in Andy Hurdham. “I like the new Britain. End of.” Then he calls me back to say: “You want to vote for the people with the best intentions.”

Restore are hardly that, but they gather at the Bay Horse to prepare for canvassing. The men are large and angry, the women beautiful and mournful. They are ardent but pallid – angrier than Reform, but with the self-conscious gravity and slow movements of those who know they are the only ones who would save their country. Their canvassing maps — streets surrounded by pen bubbles — look like lines around a corpse. They tell me I can canvass with them, then change their minds after the largest and angriest man makes a telephone call. This is the Restore Paradox, one of many: they claim they don’t get media coverage, then send journalists away. I eavesdrop instead.

“We need a supermajority,” says one. “You get support, then more support and the more support you have the more support you get. If you have 450 seats you can out-vote the opposition who will obfuscate”. “If he [Burnham] wins [Makerfield] the [Manchester] mayoralty is up for grabs,” says another. “It’s kind of win-win. We are soaring in the polls. We know we are [on] 20%”. “We need at least 35% to win this seat.” This is dreamland, though they might make 10%. Restore can only thwart Reform to let Burnham through here, but they don’t care, because only their anger is real to them.

“I am quite passionate about his [Lowe’s] beliefs,” says a woman with mermaid’s hair. (Restore’s women are glossy.) “I like how he’s doing it for us, the people of this country. Nigel Farage is a great disturber, but I don’t think he’s serious enough to be prime minister. Rupert Lowe seems to be genuine.” Her father was a factory worker. “He always voted Labour. He’d be devastated now if he was alive, at what Labour represents, because they say they’re for the working man, but they’re not. They are for anyone but us.” This is the Reform song in a louder pitch: the elites, which now include Nigel Farage, will destroy us.

Like Labour activists, the Reformers speak of a last stand in a coming war. One says he has had “an easy life. I shouldn’t be here. There shouldn’t be a need for this. We should have a decent country where people can just live together”. But “We live in a hostile environment. People aren’t safe.” Everyone native to Makerfield says this, except the boy at the bus stop, and he is young.

The man remembers, “the first black child coming into our school. He was a nice lad, Rastafarian, and then you could see other people coming in, and every little thing was named Mohammed, and they all stuck together”. He is here to “make things a bit better. I don’t know what else you can do. I’m not for going out and fighting on the streets.” If Starmer — or Burnham — cannot fix the problems of the state, others will fight on the street on the man’s behalf.

If Makerfield slouches towards the polls fearfully, there are some with more to lose than most. I meet an elderly Pakistani immigrant, grave and formally dressed, campaigning for Burnham. When I ask if his community is frightened, he says, “Inflammatory language concerns me and residents of my community”. In his restraint, he sounds more British than anyone.

Once a safe seat — Labour won 50.8% of the vote 18 months ago — today, such things have evaporated. This by-election was called after its MP, Andrew Gwynne, resigned on the grounds of ill health (he is 51). He was previously suspended from Labour for writing in a local MPs WhatsApp group: “Dear resident, Fuck your bins. I’m re-elected and without your vote. Screw you.” As a paradigm of our fracturing democracy, it can’t be bettered.

Polling currently has Labour coming third, and Reform or the Greens winning, because blood will have blood. Last year, Reform took nearby Runcorn and Helsby from Labour by just six votes: and they didn’t have the help of the Greens, who this week are standing Hannah Spencer, a plumber with dancer’s legs, golden trouser suits and soaring, raging cadences. She begins most speeches with references to herself, because this is the era of politics as personal journey. Reform has Matt Goodwin, an academic-turned-broadcaster who vibrates like a tuning fork, trying to project the kind of wracked reasonableness that used to be native to Tory wets. He is helped by the presence of Advance UK, a Christian Nationalist party to the right of Reform, because they make Reform look like humanists.

But this feels less like a by-election than the frenzied, and thoughtless, herald of a coming war: extremists meeting themselves. To mirror it, this is a constituency in two halves. The west — poorer, nearer Manchester, and with a large Muslim population — is a forest of Green Party signs: 30% of this constituency is Muslim. The Muslim Vote campaign (“Peace in Palestine, Equality in the UK”) has endorsed the Greens: social conservatives will vote with trans advocates to punish Labour for Gaza. To the east, white working-class Denton is all Reform-leaning voters and Union Jacks. And here, in the Red Lion pub, unofficial Reform HQ, they sing karaoke with alcohol-fueled nostalgia. They seem to think in ballads, as if these songs were their politics. A large man rises, and sings:

Home is a love that I miss very much
The past has been bottled and labeled with love

But no one is listening.

An aged veteran talks about betrayal as he slowly gets drunk. He won’t let me record him or even take notes. “You know how I feel,” he says, in mitigation; and it’s true that a lot of people here talk as if they have read the same Facebook posts. The talking points — immigration; stupid Net Zero; the death of British culture — are identical. He shows me a photograph taken after a military parade. It is of him, and three friends. One went home from the parade, he says, and hanged himself. His drinking partner, a woman in her sixties, tells me: “We [the white working class] don’t matter.” She says this very deliberately, hitting the table with the side of her hand. She repeats it — “We. Don’t. Matter.” — and every time she says it, she hits the table. Then, in a blink, she is crying. “You don’t know my story. I’ve taken it from men. I’ve brought up three kids. I’ve worked every day. I’m not represented.”

The hustings in St Andrew’s Church, in Levenshulme, are sullen and angry. Ten candidates are here, including a representative from the Communist League, which feels oddly appropriate — if we are re-enacting the Weimar Republic, let’s do it right — and an Asda cashier standing as a Libertarian who behaves like he has won a prize. Only Sir Oink-A-Lot of the Monster Raving Loony Party is missing, as if it is too trivial for him. But it is hard to mock politics when it feels so joyless.

The candidates sit by a sign that says, “Fishers of Men”. The audience leans Green, but there are three Terfs in the front row supporting the Conservative candidate Charlotte Cadden, a former police detective who is skilled and sensible and looks exhausted.

They give opening statements which, consciously or not, evoke home. Green (Hannah Spencer): “I’ve probably fitted a toilet for some of you.” Labour (Angeliki Stogia, interpreting JFK): “I came here from Greece over 13 years ago, and I found a city that did not ask where I came from.” Liberal Democrat (Jackie Pearcey): “This is a great place to live. I’ve lived here long enough I’ve even managed to pay off the mortgage.” The response to Labour is tepid. Between, the “Dear resident, Fuck your bins”, message, the cost of living, and Gaza, her support has shriveled to a nub.

This constituency has common problems but despite this, and possibly because of it, they decide to talk about Jews for 40 minutes. This by-election deals in fairy politics: the theoretical, the fantastical, and the mad. Jew hatred is only one of many harbingers of collapse to choose from: and Gaza is a continent away. The first question: what is the candidate’s response to the rise of antisemitism since October 7, 2023?  Cadden, the Tory, replies: “I stand shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish community.” Goodwin finds it “utterly depressing”. Spencer blames “divisive politics and politicians who spread hatred and vile stories about individual groups”.

None of them has anything valuable — that is, analytical — to say about antisemitism, other than they don’t like it: they speak to air. But when a man asks: “Do you agree with the majority of genocide scholars that there’s a genocide in Gaza?” that air turns febrile. Jackie Pearcey says it comes, “pretty close”. Spencer says, “We do not need to wait a decade, or however long it takes for a tribunal to tell us that what is happening in front of our eyes is a genocide.” Angeliki Stogia, trying to hold the seat for the governing party, says in her tiny, gentle voice “it is heart-breaking”, and cries.

The SDP candidate Sebastian Moore, a ruddy boy, says, slowly and with genuine curiosity, “I don’t know if our politics has always been like this. Maybe people that are slightly older than me can tell me. What’s happening in the Middle East, whether I term it a genocide or not, has no bearing on the tragedy that is unfolding there. So, no, I’m not going to answer your question.”

There are heckles, particularly towards Goodwin, and, among some candidates, an overarching contempt for each other. Goodwin accuses Spencer of misrepresenting his tax policy; Spencer accuses Goodwin of misrepresenting her drug policy.

Real politics is soporific here – you can sense the room flagging. But the trans question, or rather statement — the Government is transphobic — ignites it again. Spencer says, inevitably, “I think I was here when the Levenshulme Pride took place!” The Liberal Democrat says she believes that, “trans people are people”, though no one is suggesting they aren’t. She is addressing a void. As we stare into it, Goodwin says he must leave: “I’m meeting pub landlords after this, whose businesses are being completely decimated by the current government.” He is laughed at, though I cannot see the joke.

The next day, outside the Green Party HQ, I meet a Muslim who has driven from Birmingham to campaign for the Greens. He says he joined the Party two weeks ago: “it is [the] first time that I’ve actually joined a [political] party.” He has been in the UK for 64 years. But only recently, he says, has he been asked “‘Am I English?’ ‘Am I British?’ ‘Do I belong?’. You know what they’re saying, but they’re not saying it. You not only fear the color part, but you also fear the part that you’re a Muslim and therefore an Islamist or therefore,” he speaks very slowly, and tiredly, “a terrorist. I have six grandchildren. For my grandkids, the times are desperate. Or will be.”

As I leave, I see a handmade sign: it reads, “Ministry of Plumbing and Plastering. Hannah Spencer, MP.” She is, I see, a bewitching candidate. And as I walk around this constituency and talk to the voters fleeing Labour, this election feels like it is playing in the realm of fantasy. It is not really about racism, though it is everywhere. It is about home, and where it is, and who has one, and who doesn’t. Real politics — the management of competing needs — is hard. Labour asked for a decade to fix the state, but patience has already gone. Instead, voters fall to magical thinking: that voting Green will help Palestinians; that voting Reform will recover the Empire; that you will, one day, find home.

The next day, Advance UK pitch their stall opposite the Red Lion in Denton, in an empty square. A woman tells me, “I’ve got brown skin, but I’m British through and through.” Her parents were immigrants from Jamaica. “I’ve got red, white and blue flowing through my blood.” Illegal immigrants, she says, have homes. They are staying in five-star hotels and swimming in pools, “whereas our guys [are] on the streets. People are getting angry. They don’t want to pay for people in hotels. They don’t want to pay for their tennis lessons and their trampolining lessons.”

Her fantasy is that Reform is, “controlled opposition. They’re paid to do what they do by whoever.” By whom? “I’m not saying. We need change,” she goes on happily, “but Nigel [Farage] is not the one to bring it. His right-hand man is Zia Yusuf. This is a Christian country. We shouldn’t be led at all by a different religion.” I ask her if she thinks there shouldn’t be Muslim, or even Jewish, MPs. “I’m not saying that we shouldn’t have any different religions, but not in high government positions.” I think of the woman at the bus stop, saying things can’t get worse, and watch Goodwin roll down the street on his Reform bus, which is as clean and empty as a new house. He waves a sign and promises, through his loudhailer, to rid us of Keir Starmer. His promise, if elected, is this: “This seat will never be ignored again. It will never be neglected, and it will never be disrespected.” Dreamland, again.

In the Queen Vic pub opposite, an angry young man points at his teeth. They are also a metaphor. “I need five fillings,” he tells me. “I’m fucked.” It will cost £3,995 privately, he says, and he cannot find an NHS dentist. He has a good job — he is an engineer — but suggests that perhaps, instead, he should become an illegal immigrant? “Do I need to go to France and throw my ID in the fucking bin?” he asks me. “Money shouldn’t be free,” he goes on, “I work seven days a week. Labour wants to tax the air that you breathe. Are you mad?”

Reform is “guaranteed” to win here, he says, from behind his reluctantly political teeth, but in truth it could go three ways. The Greens could edge past Reform, but the Muslim-LGBTQX coalition cannot hold long-term. Labour could still run through the middle, though in such reduced numbers victory will be considered defeat. By-elections are runes: they show us how angry people are, and these are the angriest I have met since Covid, and significantly more hopeless. “The Greens are fucking mad,” he says. “They will do heroin but not eat meat. If you’re a straight white man you’re a cunt. The white person is demonized more than anyone.”

Here ends centrist politics, at least for now, because hope in incremental solutions has gone. If you believe these runes, Reform will be the next government. And if Reform should win the next General Election?

“I’m not convinced governance will be so much of an issue,” Goodwin tells me. “Public opinion will be a challenge. We are living through managed decline, right? And so, the public appetite for change is enormous, but public patience is extremely limited”. He has told Farage that he thinks they may win the election “because we’re just the other guys, right? We’re not Labour, we’re not Tory, we’re just the other guys.” And so, he thinks, “there may not be a honeymoon period at all. There may not be a significant period of support in the polls. It may just sort of prove to be very febrile and very volatile. I’m convinced it will be much more like Trump 2 than Trump 1, and we’ve got so much that’s planned. The untold story about Reform is how much legislation is already drafted and prepared.”

Here, though, the voters do not know that; I am not even sure they care. In the Queen Vic pub, when I ask what will change under a Reform government, an older, red-bearded man, speaks for the first time. “Nothing,” he says. But he will vote for them all the same.

I try to book a walking tour online. But it will only take bookings for two — so technically Jane Austen wouldn’t get on her own walking tour. I book another and, by the Pulteney Bridge, I meet a young American woman who is impersonating the heroine of a Netflix Christmas film. She bounces up in curls and bobble hat and duffle coat and announces she has just finished Pride and Prejudice. Her praise, though, is understated, baffled even. She understands that Austen is a brand now and Bath is a city of brands: Cos; Mountain Warehouse; the Romans. But my Netflix friend is still a seeking woman: an Austen heroine. We all are, and that’s the game. Austen offers not a portrait but a mirror, and a woman reads Austen not to find Austen, but herself.

The tour is guided by an ancient German émigré who lives in Chippenham and is also, I think, in his Sunday best. As he takes us round — the house in Sydney Place, which is in denial about being Austen-related, almost sulking; Trim Street, which was too rough for Austen; the house in Gay Street — he treats her like another edifice of the city. In his words, she might be an abbey or a Roman bath: you can just get in her.

He is filled with detail, not sensibility. I think of Charlotte Brontë’s criticism of Emma: “anything like warmth or enthusiasm; anything energetic, poignant, heart-felt, is utterly out of place in commending these works”. But Austen was English, and she spoke to the speechlessness of the English: Brontë was half Cornish and half Irish. So we stare at the house on Gay Street, and we do not talk about whether Mr Darcy would be a hot fuck, though I think he wouldn’t. All Austen’s heroes are duds, except Captain Wentworth of Persuasion (“you pierce my soul”) but it doesn’t matter what I think, because Austen wrote someone for everyone. Hilary Mantel was writing a novel about Mary Bennet when she died.

Austen had stupid children in novel form: the Bridgerton siblings of the novels, now a Netflix juggernaut. The Bridgerton tour is led by an angry man from Surrey who I doubt has read all six novels. This is testament to Austen’s reinvention as theme park: anyone can have a go on her. The Bridgerton novels take the Austen aesthetic and run wild, mostly with lilac. They are pleasing and mindless and they speak to those who travel to their idea of Regency England for the clothes, and the comforting truism that, here, women do not work. Empire line is easy to replicate and flattering. A big girl — Penelope Featherington, who featured in the TV version — can look as good as a slender one, or better. Bridgerton also gives us the sex Austen denies us. Martin Amis, who wrote that he “wouldn’t have minded a rather more detailed conclusion [to Pride and Prejudice] — say, a twenty-page sex scene featuring the two principals, with Mr Darcy, furthermore, acquitting himself uncommonly well”, would have liked Bridgerton.

More from this author

Jeff Bezos belongs in Venice

By Tanya Gold

We fight our way through the Christmas market and our guide has a stand-off with carolers by the Colombian Coffee Company. We do a quiz as we follow him up Pulteney Street and the winner gets three out of 20 right and wins a bar of chocolate. This is Janeland as numbing out.

The true addicts are at the Jane Austen Centre on Gay Street, which has quotations from the novels on the back of the toilet doors. Austen lived a few doors up the hill at No 25, but when the centre tried to move to that house, the dentist tenant resisted them, which means people with toothache are stared hard at by Janeites, who then move on to the exhibition here. The door to the centre is manned by Henry Tilney from Northanger Abbey, who I always liked because he is funny. There is a male cast roving around the centre — Mr Bennet, Willoughby, Wickham — but they don’t dare have Mr Darcy for fear he might be groped by Janeites.

The gift shop sells a Pride and Prejudice photo casebook featuring hamsters in bonnets. Even hamsters can’t resist Jane. Or you can buy an Elizabeth Bennet bath duck or a Captain Wentworth Christmas decoration. Or Jane Austen bingo. Or, elsewhere in Bath, Jane Austen’s Christmas. Or Jane Austen’s Wardrobe. I meet a woman who has an Austen tattoo and another who reads Sense and Sensibility when, and only when, she is unhappy. Austen isn’t just an analgesic, of course, but she’s the best. Amis complains that she sets her bad girls loose, and this is “the limitations of her art” — Lydia Wickham, only 15, who believed in Wickham just as Lizzy did, is exiled without a tear — but you can hardly tell a (female) national novelist who to love, and who to push off the page.

Suggested Reading

Spare us another Pride and Prejudice remake

By Poppy Sowerby

The Janeites pass through in a reverential hush because they are communing with a god. I meet young women who bonded through a shared love of the novels — she guided their friendship— women who go to Austen for her feminism and women who go to her for her femininity. This is Jane Austen as life coach. At the town bookshop, I find a compendium of her wisdom called Janesplains. All her writing is how-to-be-a-girl, among the things girls want — houses, clothes, and love. And they send letters of thanks: “Dear Jane, thank you for your writing”; “I’ve found my Mr Darcy! Thanks for sharing the blueprint”; “You’re the best!”

Of the true addicts, the very truest have tickets to the Yuletide Ball at the Pump Room: I heard the tickets sold out in eight minutes. I get there early and stand outside — no press is allowed; press is a modern intrusion — and stare through the window at women setting up the ballroom in a kind of trance. Their movements are over-deliberate, and over-graceful: they would pull the curtains on the world if they could. Soon, the guests gather outside in the mandatory Regency costume, alongside the drunks in Christmas sweaters, and when Christmas drunks approach them to ask them to take photographs for them the Janeites look astonished. It’s the intrusion. These women — all women, a few with hostage husbands — are clearly, though temporarily, not living in this world. The Janeites are the most functional of all obsessives and so, like her, are the most socially acceptable. They are racing back in time to 1812, but they pause to tell me that, “her stories relate to women even now”, or “I am here for the sarcasm”, or “She was a Feminist!” or “the characters learn from their mistakes”. The older ones love Persuasion, the purist’s favorite, because it gives a woman love late in life, and that is incomparable solace. (Anne was 27.)

As I leave, a round young woman in a red cape runs past me, ducks round the Christmas tree and sprints into the ball. She has flushed cheeks, is laughing with happiness and for some reason she reminds me of the woman dressed as an owl I met a furry convention many years ago. As a woman she was ordinary. But then I saw her as an owl with vast eyes — from a Coca-Cola bottle, she told me happily, which she painted — and, as an owl, she was a god. Both owl and Janeite in red cape have the same quality of power found and held. And I think that is Austen’s essential message: not love, not by itself, but self-possession.

There are five female speakers at the Holiday Inn and just one man: an extension of her politics. Sultana, born in Birmingham to Muslim parents of Pakistani descent, is one of four sisters. She knows how to fight for herself.

She has toured Britain in the last six months preparing for Liverpool. She says she wants to unite the Left: Corbyn, ever an unwilling savior, tends to hide in his allotment. But he did emerge yesterday for his own pre-conference rally: for his Your Party. Rumors fly. Corbyn’s people brief the media that Sultana-allied Leftists banned from Your Party — the Revolutionary Communist Group, the Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) and the Socialist Party (SP) — may try to disrupt Conference. It was counter-briefed that Corbyn attended a Marxist festival this year. Extra security guards have been hired.

If Sultana does kick Corbyn into the sea when collective leadership is passed this weekend — he prefers the single leadership model — she will assume de facto leadership of the hard Left, in the sense that they have leaders. She is, after all, Your Party’s only MP: Corbyn now sits as an independent. If she learned singularity from the querulous king of Islington North, she might surpass him now. She is the second most followed British politician on TikTok, after her enemy Nigel Farage.

Corbyn’s allies called her undiplomatic, which is funny, considering what he is. And at the rally, she is defensive: polished and hurt. “We’re not here for fiefdoms and coronations and jobs for mates, and we’re definitely not here for a toxic culture that witch hunts people on the eve of conference and treats people like absolute shit.” Scores of Socialist Workers were expelled from Your Party yesterday. Though 18% of people were interested in voting Your Party in summer, it then slid to 12%. She doesn’t mention the lost 6%.

The Holiday Inn and Your Party are an odd fit. The hotel is aspirational, made for Thatcherites, and styled to repress the world outside — we might plausibly be in John Lewis — but the revolution they yearn for, or think they yearn for, is not here yet. So, they plot, like people waiting to re-wallpaper a country. Speakers from Bristol Apartheid Free Zone, Stand up to Racism, the National Education Union and Borderlands, a refugee charity, discuss the rise of Reform, the fears of people of color and migrants, and small victories against the boss class. If the hard Left is usually energized by struggle, these are the most defeated I have met. They speak in whispers, and, in the break, strangers do not talk. It is as if they are exhausted, before the battle has even begun. Meanwhile, at Corbyn’s rally, there were squabbles and four people were evicted. Splitters.

The hard Left exists for its contradictions. It constantly debates and it does not debate at all; it needs systems, but it does not trust them; it calls itself progressive, but it never changes. It fights with itself, constantly. Yet it has always housed the same people, city to city. There are ancient revolutionaries, always white, seeking a shared renewal to mirror the one they want for themselves. Every few years a charismatic leader emerges, and they cling to that. Before it was Corbyn. Now it is Sultana.

So today, the revolutionaries include young women of color, energized by Sultana’s rage. Candi Williams, the Your Party organizer for Bristol, tells Sultana with tears in her eyes: “This time last year, last August, I boarded up my windows because we were scared that racists were going to break in.” Her fear is rational, of course, but I fear the hard Left response won’t be. Sultana talks about bussing people in from all over the country to combat far-Right rallies. But this will only feed the anger: all extremists meet themselves in the looking glass of battle. On making Britain safer, and more prosperous — anathema to all extremists — she has nothing beyond a call to abolish capitalism. The country — the working-class — Sultana wants to renew may as well be Plasticine.

Suggested Reading

The twilight of the millennial socialists

By Jonny Ball

She recites the credo effortlessly, like a comic at the end of a tour: tax the rich; nationalize water and energy; free public transport; fight climate change; Trans rights. She will abolish the monarchy, Zionism, and leave NATO: “Every penny that we spend on tanks, missiles and bombs is money stolen from our homes, our hospitals and our schools”. No one mentions Ukraine.

The real enemy is the Labour Party. She says that Lord Mandelson, “the Dark Lord, alongside his minion, Morgan McSweeney, has created a dark government”, and she will not rest until, “Keir Starmer, David Lammy, Shabana Mahmood and the rest of them are in the docks of The Hague because [the] blood [of Palestine] is on their hands”. This all sounds absurd in the John Lewis Holiday Inn — overthrow the government from here? — and people listen with only moderate enthusiasm.

Her rally represents an incoherence, and she knows it. People ask her: “What’s the point of Your Party? You should just join the Greens.” Instead, she says, she is going to reach out to Reform voters. “One third of Reform voters actually blame the super-rich for the problems in this country,” she says. “We know that the work has to be done by listening to them, understanding their grievances and going on a journey.” Success, she claims, is about talking to those communities, speaking to the “left behind, knocking on doors and yes, some people are going to slam those doors in your face and tell you to fuck off. And that’s fine. People are really angry. But the Right does not have a monopoly on working class anger.”

These voters, she says, are “blaming the wrong people for the misery that’s been caused in their life”.  But how will she stop them? As ever with the hard Left, I think the talk of reaching out is a feint, mere vanity.  No one asks her a hard question here, as the great new Left party is being born. That would be a heresy. She does admit, though, that “often in Left-wing spaces we just say things, and not everyone is always on the same page, and we’re all in different parts of our political journey”. But she knows, she says, that the people are, “watching, they’re waiting. They’re ready to join and fight.”

The line is, then: the proletariat will save us! Perhaps Sultana has read 1984. But I can’t see how the proletariat can save us. They are barely here. This is still a bourgeois movement and, Sultana, the grammar-school educated daughter of an accountant, is no more working-class than I am. That’s the incoherence.

More from this author

Reform is tearing the Tories apart

By Tanya Gold

The event ends when she’s asked how she navigated politics as a Muslim woman in the western world. “I really don’t want to start crying,” she says. “This is why I go to therapy”. This may be a joke, because she adds, “In all seriousness, it has been really difficult… you are just told to be grateful.” Another party member, a young woman, is grateful: “seeing you gave me so much hope that we could achieve something better”. And that’s the heartbreak: promising revolution in a constitutional monarchy will not work. Hard Leftist politics are a drug, and the comedown will be messy.

Your Party will choose its name this weekend from a shortlist: Your Party, Our Party, Popular Alliance, For the Many. Sultana’s choice — The Left — did not make the shortlist. It’s a good name, and very like her: brief, and made for TikTok.

Corbyn said yesterday, “we’re going to get through this weekend,” which is barely the rhetoric of hope. Monty Python was right.

It’s odd sitting in a mansion listening to anti-Israel rhetoric, while inside they pretend they cannot hear. It is still, perhaps, the most British experience of my lifetime. Beyond the host offering to have me removed from the city — someone would take me for a drive, she said — no one had a thing to say about it. I made small talk about J.K. Rowling. That was my second mistake. I must have said something kind about her, because an amateur harpist chided me. They did have opinions.

This story is sequential, and divided into three stages: the first, from when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party in 2015 to the October massacre of 2023; the second, from the massacre in Israel to the attack in Manchester on Yom Kippur last week; the third, the five days since. For me, they have one common emotion. Rage. Not for myself, but for the murdered Jews of Europe, and Jewish children today, told to remove their blazers outside school because the badges identify them as Jews.

Where does it end? Zalmen Gradowski, the Sonderkommando who buried his testimony in the ashes of Birkenau, called the crematoria in Poland a mechanism to soothe an insatiable god, “who is hungry for their flesh and thirsty for their blood”. That feels right: Nazism was a religion, and antisemitism is a subconscious act, which comes from a place beneath thought. In The Zone of Interest, the best Holocaust novel, Martis Amis called Nazism a “Walpurgisnacht”.

More from this author

The cowardice of the far Left

By Tanya Gold

If this sounds morbid, this is my cultural inheritance. I’m a British Jew, fortunate and haunted, a member of one of the only intact Jewish communities in Europe. But the British love for Jews is heavily caveated. The blood libel was invented in Britain, in 1144, in Norwich. There were pogroms in London in 1189, and in Stamford, Bury St Edmunds and York in 1190. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from England. Ancient history, you may say. There’s no such thing. But, since our return to England in the 17th century, we have called ourselves lucky, even if England locked the gates to European Jews in 1938, leaving them to die. As a young woman, I thought British Jews pallid and uninteresting. I understand us better now. Anything not to be noticed, anything to demonstrate loyalty — our prayers for the royal family are gaudy; Bevis Marks, our famous synagogue, looks like a Wren church — but that was then.

The pause ended with Corbyn, who has absorbed the antisemitism (the anti-Zionism) that emerged from Stalin’s Russia. Its creed is: Zionism is racism. As ever, Jew hate is absolution of a kind; for a faction of the Left, it is absolution from colonialism and smaller personal failures. The journalist Vasily Grossman wrote: “Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” In 2016, I covered The World Transformed, the Corbynite conclave in Liverpool, and attended a debate asking whether the Labour Party had a problem with Jews. It was the best attended event of the week, even with a world to transform, because the hard-Left thrive on aggrievement, not thought, and need an enemy — the Zionist Entity! — to explain their calamities to themselves. Afterwards, I found an organiser and told him, like a credulous child: you’ve got a problem. Can I help? Apparently not. They’ll take the Walpurgisnacht.

Those years were pre-shocks. I left the Labour Party, or, rather, it left me because it was understood that Jews had murdered the last hope of modern British Socialism in toppling Corbyn, who really toppled himself. It was a new charge — or variation on an old charge — on a long sheet.

Until October 7, 2023 was the time before; everything else was the time after. When there were celebrations on London streets, I was shocked, and I was not shocked at all. My non-Jewish friends exuded embarrassment, boredom and, above all, cowardice. Write about it, non-Jewish journalist friends told me. No, I thought, you write about it. It’s as much your story as mine: no, more so. Besides, Jewish testimony is suspect. Philip Roth wrote a novel about Anne Frank: The Ghost Writer. Anne survived the war, but pretends she is dead, so people will read her story. The death holds the magic, and the power. People listen harder when we’re dead.

“You’ve got their sympathy when you’re being shoved in the oven,” a Hungarian-born survivor told me. I’m not sure I’d call it sympathy. “A bit blunt,” he says, “but I’m afraid this is it. The only time I did not feel the world was antisemitic was when the gates of hell opened up in 1945 until Israel started winning the war [in 1967]. Back to the old fashioned.”

I was mesmerized by the protests: I thought I could read our future in them. On the first great march for Palestine, I saw a woman with a sign: “resistance by all means necessary”. Is this what Manchester was? I found a first draft on the back of a sign in Trafalgar Square, a failed attempt, abandoned, as its writer was: “Israel is like my ex [boyfriend].” I thought of Jean-Paul Sartre’s words: “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” Is this Sartre’s mirror?

Suggested reading

It’s complicated being a Jew

By Nicole Lampert

I stood with counter-protesters too: a group called Stop the Hate. As the marchers passed, they swelled towards us and gesticulated: the finger for “fuck you” most often; a cut-throat sometimes; the Hamas triangle, made with fingers, once. They come from all social classes, though young Muslims and bourgeois Leftists are overrepresented. This is an internal, and a proxy, war: partially a war on themselves, because their movement is anti-democratic, with a loathing of dissent.

I went to another Stop the Hate rally on a grim arterial road in inner London. Interview after interview was the same. “Just anger,” a woman told me. “Pure anger.” She works in a school, she said, and, playing football, Jewish children were told they should be gassed. A young Orthodox Jew told me antisemitism is now, “a trend. A cool trend.” That is, young people find it fashionable now. A man with a boombox played Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive”. Men laid tefillin — it’s a form of prayer — by the boombox, but only middle-aged women knew the words. Things have changed, but not that much.

Opposite us, a man stood on a traffic island holding a sign that says: “Israel kills more children than all other countries in the world combined.” He wore a suit and tie, and his expression was one of triumph amid fumes.

Again, on Yom Kippur five days ago, I was shocked, and I was not shocked at all. British Jews are a news story now, and we aren’t used to that. History has caught up with us. I went to Stamford Hill, where the Charedi live, and marveled at how odd their civilization — old Jewish Poland remade in London — felt that day. Some fear to wear the Star of David, or yellow hostage ribbon in public. Others do so, explicitly. Some of us go to synagogue more. Some of us go to synagogue less. Some of us have retreated into Jewish silos. Others have abandoned Jewish life. Some need Israel more. Some need it less.

The future security of Jews in Britain does not depend on Jewish denunciations of Israel. That is a feint and, when the Right has used us to attack Muslims — then what? It depends, rather, on the behavior of the impartial majority: what historians call the bystanders. I hope for solidarity. I expect silence.

As I sit among the crowd at an event called “Strengthening the Rule of Law”, an over-loud PA system cuts in to tell us, “Nigel Farage will be signing shirts [for £60]”. Otherwise, his party looks like the Tory Party in Sunday dress: Barbour jackets; Union Flag suits; cocktail dresses; a Panama hat, worn by a man telling a story of how he once met Nelson Mandela. On the first day, the More in Common think tank launches its analysis of Reform’s support base. Their current ceiling is 42% of the vote; supporters are socially conservative but tend Left on wealth distribution and nationalization; most define politics as “broken”, and 59% of them do not believe Britain is a real democracy. New supporters are female, less radical and less online; those who have switched from both Labour and the Tories may switch back; potential supporters do not want the end of Net Zero, do not trust NHS reform, and fear Farage’s fondness for Donald Trump. Reform’s real dilemma is: as their coalition grows, their vulnerability grows with it. Voters want different things, and triumph is hard.

At “How to Reverse the Boriswave and Clean up the Other Parties’ Mess”, I watch the pollster James Frayne hurt his audience by telling them the truth. “Prepare for the first six months of a Reform government being a complete shambles,” he says. “Getting into government is hard enough, but actually being in government is more difficult.” He rebukes Reform’s dreamers and culture warriors: that is, much of the activist base here. “The party cannot rely on bullshit sound bites and ‘everything will be alright on a day,’ and ‘we’re just going to try hard, and we’ll face everybody down. We’ll fight people we don’t like’”. Reform must also, he says, “grow up out of this sort of tub-thumping stuff that sounds great somewhere like this” — he waves his arm at the room that sometimes hosts Crufts — “but when you get into government, the public will despise you within six months, unless you’re getting stuff done”.

I suspect it is no coincidence that Frayne is sharing a stage with Matthew Goodwin, the GB News presenter and tub-thumper who looks like an angry Lego man. Goodwin says the British state and the civil service — “let’s just say ‘the Blob’” — are going “to go to war with this movement. Including the Lords.” His gut instinct, he says, is that “they are just going to use every trick in the book to slow [Reform] down”. Expectation management will be essential, he says. But first win the battle, “where actually you do need a bit of tub thumping”.

Reform is not being propelled into government on a wave of joy, but on a wave of fear, and the fearful are combustible. Voters look to Farage on immigration, Frayne says, but they are nervous about a “perceived lack of competence, a perceived sense of extremism — less around Farage but around the margins of the party — [and] also a pervasive, to use a slightly and politically incorrect term, madness. There’s more than a whiff of eccentricity about the party.” It is true: Farage compares the UK to North Korea, which is absurd, and many activists are in costume, as if wearing their grievances. They love hats. But Reform is not the first political party to be held hostage by its own activists. It happened to Labour under Corbyn; his new project Your Party is the next installment. At heart, Reform have done the same: this is the vengeance of the Tories on themselves, though others will get hurt.

Frayne cites Liz Truss; her budget initially polled OK. “When it unraveled within five days the public were apoplectic, and they have been burned so badly that they now know that they need to look for detail.” The other parties don’t have the answer either: “If you put a microphone in front of Yvette Cooper’s face, it’s laughable. It’s clear that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. So, what we might end up with next time is a real sense [that] nobody can sort this stuff out, and at that point, it makes the next election very difficult to predict.” And the one after that, even harder. I used to think about Britain after a Boris Johnson government. Now I think about Britain after a Nigel Farage government.

Some in Reform, though, fear anything that feels like conventional politics — including detailed polling — because to collude with convention is to lose yourself in it. Zia Yusuf, head of Reform’s DOGE, and the party’s most prominent figure after Richard Tice, the deputy leader, and Farage himself, says: “Certainly, while I was chairman, we never commissioned a single focus group. Our focus group was talking to voters on the doorstep.” Yusuf talks about politics less as a national project than a personal journey, though this tendency is hardly singular to Reform. He walks his anecdotes from stage to stage, the cult of individualism on legs.

More from this author

The battle for Runcorn

By Tanya Gold

Reform supporters talk about betrayal the way drug addicts talk about heroin because they have the same sickness they accuse the Left of: over-dramatization. Boris Johnson — who Dorries wants to join Reform to smash Labour — betrayed them. The Fabian Society, higher education, the civil service, the media, the judiciary, the RNLI, which plucks migrants from the sea, and the Labour Party all betrayed them; the Motability scheme and toothbrush coordinators in schools betrayed them; soon the House of Lords will betray them too. Nothing is sacred but their aggrievement.

They want to send illegal immigrants to the Falkland Islands; they would ban public sector workers from striking because they think there will be a General Strike within two weeks of a Reform government; they want to abolish MPs’ expenses, and therefore MPs’ offices.

I listen to James Orr, a professor of philosophy of religion at the University of Cambridge, and a major intellectual figure in Reform. He looks like a Merchant Ivory hero and talks like a romantic. “With every Government scandal, Reform gets stronger,” he says. “With every Conservative hypocrisy, Reform gets stronger.” At some point, momentum may turn into hubris — only a third of voters think Reform will actually improve the country — but not yet.

I hear stories of hiring thousands of workers — a parallel civil service — but, four years from an election, they hesitate to commit to policy: it is always painful easing a dream into reality. Richard Tice is asked what three things he would do on his first day as Chancellor. Tice, who mimics Farage’s cadences these days, replies that he can’t know the state of government finances; the civil service — the Blob — is not helpful. Essentially, he doesn’t answer the question. Wait for the manifesto, and until then, blame the media.

But some, at least, are hungry for facts: you cannot expect people who want their country back to wait forever. Last year, I am told, members, “spoke of nothing but immigration”. This year, according to one political analyst, “not one mentions immigration”. He thinks Reform know they have won this argument. Now they are talking about “gilt yields, the national debt and welfare. Some people are getting a bit frustrated. ‘We like Nigel, but that [his speech] was all fluff, really. Where’s the plan?’” As far as I can see from the fringe, it is this: tax cuts will be paid for by cutting waste, not public services. Jam for everyone you like, then; no jam for those you don’t.

“They need,” one man tells me, “To flesh out their economic policies: to show their workings-out. Because there is an inconsistency.” He adds: “They cannot be all things to all people”.

“I don’t think the depth is there,” another man tells me. “This is not an intellectual party”.

Even so, the next day, the historian David Starkey and Jacob Rees-Mogg, both Tory exhibitionists, headline an event called “How Can Reform Succeed in Office?” They are here to counsel crowds with their wisdom: this is how bad things are. Starkey says, “The thing that really matters is to understand: we’re all conservatives. What [Tony] Blair did was fundamentally — to use a technical phrase — to fuck Britain up. Our job, ladies and gentlemen, in another technical phrase, is to unfuck Britain”.

It will not be easy. “My great fear,” Starkey says, “is, at the moment you are riding to victory. There is simply no doubt about this, but there’s a terrible danger.” Starkey’s melodrama stirs the room. The reason Keir Starmer won, he says, “was simply they [the electors] got tired of Jacob [Rees-Mogg]. It took 14 years to get tired of Jacob. Jacob is endlessly entertaining.” Rees-Mogg does not flinch. If Reform win, he says, “and a Nigel-led government does not succeed in changing things within six months,” he fears the nation will be, “so angry that we will then be in real, real trouble. There will be nowhere else for them to go.”

Suggested reading

Farage has no plan for power

By James Sean Dickson

The plan, Starkey says, is this: appoint five hundred new peers to the Lords. “We will have to neutralize the Lords, otherwise all of what we want to do will get lost in a Sargasso Sea of amendments”. I like his phrasing. Jean Rhys’s novel The Wide Sargasso Sea is about the first Mrs Rochester of Jane Eyre: the raving subconscious of every human being. “We have to be ready with both a blunderbuss and a scalpel. You need the big and the precise, and without that, we will lose.”

“What Reform has got to be is what Disraeli said,” he tells us. “‘The Conservative Party is a national party, or it is nothing’”. Starkey looks around at the sea of faces that look like Tories, and I think he is right: these are, at heart, just angry Tories. This is evidence of both a glut — in communication and entitlement — and an absence here: of compassion, and of hope. “I would hope,” Rees-Mogg says, “that everybody in the Conservative Party is as conservative as everybody in this room”.

“We’re not,” a man shouts at him, but Rees-Mogg laughs the heckle off, and it was the only fringe event which brought the people to their feet with cheers. Despite the pollsters and the Tory grandees attempting to finesse the brand, this is a race to the end: to a Britain none of us yet knows. I leave thinking that Reform is the Tory split over Brexit, reanimated yet again, and its bloodiest manifestation yet.

It’s arresting if you aren’t involved — death by poison stories are like bad childbirth tales — so the case of “Fungi fatale” Erin Patterson, the mushroom drudge of Leongatha, Australia, has traveled the world. She was found guilty of three murders and one attempted murder this week. Authorities decided not to charge her with the attempted murder of her ex-husband Simon, who was likely her real target. He was wary enough to decline her invitation to lunch.

The cognitive dissonance is riveting: superficially mild housewife and mother of two serves poisoned beef wellington, a formal, very respectable dish, with poisoned mushrooms to her former parents-in-law, and her ex-husband’s uncle and aunt, at a lunch to discuss Patterson’s fantasy ovarian cancer diagnosis.

More from this author

Life on the Cornish breadline

By Tanya Gold

The poisoner in the kitchen is the mad woman in the attic, escaped with a wooden spoon to stir her psychosis: femininity spoiled and home subverted. That is what the interest in Patterson amounts to: fear. She is a monster from a fairytale come to end you: the kitchen is a charnel house. What is up with Mama? Sexual frustration? Menopause? Rage? The apple in Snow White was, to its gormless heroine, a gift of love, not murderous envy. Perhaps Patterson’s victims thought the same, but her husband knew her better.

Lunch guests don’t expect death: food is love. But popular culture — Anthony Bourdain’s writing and the TV show The Bear — remind us that food is something else too: magic. It can do anything and be anything. Bourdain described his fury and longing for control before he killed himself. The cook says eat what I give you, and every tasting menu is homage to that. I have gagged on the rage of cooks. I have eaten rage made of turnip. Or it is thwarted love. Chef Carmy of The Bear wants to reanimate his family at every service, but happy this time. If “restaurant” is a corruption of “restore”, the poisoner’s table is the opposite: the removal of everything.

Patterson shows what a woman can do if she is furious enough, and how she can do it — surprisingly easily. I can see foxgloves from my desk: enough to kill my family. The kitchen cupboards are filled with poisons. Katherine Watson’s Poisoned Lives: English Poisoners and Their Victims, a study of cases from 1752 to 1914, describes the mothers, stepmothers, and wives who poisoned their husbands and children. It was a minor epidemic. Rebecca Smith killed eight of her babies because, she said, she couldn’t care for them, and was the last woman hanged in Britain for murdering her child. Beware of limiting women’s access to birth control. That’s Smith’s message.

Or the poisoner is a wife gone awry: the climax of a mad romance. Nannie Doss, America’s most famous serial poisoner was called the “Lonely Hearts Killer”. Doss met some of her victims through the personal columns and the Diamond Circle dating club: then she fed them rat poison and arsenic. In all, she murdered four of her five husbands. Is lonely the right word? The British poisoner Mary Ann Cotton was hanged in 1873: it is believed she killed four of her five husbands. She was famous enough for a nursery rhyme: “Mary Ann Cotton is tied up with string. Where? Where? She’s up in the air.” Where, of course, the witches are.

More from this author

Hollywood does terrible things to women

By Tanya Gold

The duality of the poisoner — powerless, suddenly empowered — explains our fascination. She is everywhere in our culture: drudge and queen. She is Erin Patterson and Rebecca Smith, and Medea, and Empress Livia of I, Claudius. Claudius thought Livia was herself a poison: “They say a snake bit her once and died.” She is Cary Grant’s murderous aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace, case studies in unthreatening femininity — until they killed the lodgers. In J.K. Rowling’s Troubled Blood her poisoner is a nurse, and, Rowling writes, “to see the truth of her is almost impossible.” Rowling is canny: she could have been speaking of Erin Patterson.

Venice is a fishing village founded by people fleeing the Germans after the Roman Empire fell. If it looks improbable, it is: a city in the middle of a lagoon covered with marble when cost allows. She lies at the head of the Adriatic, where the trade routes meet — a wise investment in the crusades. Now a party town, a whore in brick and marble, Venice flaunts itself for Bezos’s wedding and attendant festivals. This is its expertise: this is what it lives for. Here be Trumps, Kardashians, the Queen of Jordan, Leonardo DiCaprio and Orlando Bloom, plus Oprah Winfrey: a guest list conjured by AI because, like actors in a play, they do not know each other. They were not invited to this wedding, but cast, and stalked to a shallow lagoon by the world’s press. It is an ancient display of power and control, so expensive no one can say what it costs: all of Bezos’s childhood dreams of being.

It is the final reveal — the unboxing — of the aesthetic of the age, and this also suits Venice, which loves aesthetics as much as it loves power, though it has more of the former than the latter these days. Theirs is a populist aesthetic, and at least — the bar is low here — it is honest: the most honest thing about oligarchy is its clothing. Vulgarity is always honest because it doesn’t want to be any thing else. At least it is not Cottage Core, which exists for rich Liberals to lie to themselves, and everyone, about how good they are. That is an aesthetic of denial. This isn’t.

This is the aesthetic of the Age of Trump: lewdness, power, rot and color blocking. It is pornographic, of course, and thrillingly unreal. The faces and breasts are augmented and shiny: not good enough as they are — for this is an aesthetic of anxiety, too — they must be renewed. They are gaudy frontage, like Venice herself, and the aesthetic mirrors Trump, made more for TV than for life. I think it is, essentially, a cry for Mama in the dark — tits, tits, tits! — and a cry for Dada too: bring me the diamonds! Will that make you happy, children afraid of the night? Of course not, but it’s worth a try.

Nothing is hidden and nothing is dissembled by these crazed exhibitionists: it is almost touching. And yet it is also costume. Kim Kardashian, all snakeskin and breasts, a hundred feet tall, reminds me of the vast Madonna on the walls of the Torcello cathedral in the Venetian lagoon, surrounded by fields of gold mosaic. I imagine her cracking from the walls and walking across the lagoon for a prick of Ozempic at the wedding, though the Kardashians might think her understated. Sánchez, who usually dresses like a Real Housewife of An Apocalypse Bunker, had multiple costume changes over the weekend, like a woman who does not know who she is and is now so rich she never will. She was a lampshade, Audrey Hepburn, and Princess Grace of Monaco, with graceless cleavage. She blew kisses to the media because that is easier — it has more reach — than speech.

What do they do? Not much, and it doesn’t matter here; it would be odd if they did, and we would be unable to project onto them so happily. Sánchez was a TV journalist: now she is a picture caption. Bezos sells things to people who confuse TV with life. Kardashian is in Reality TV: she does the same. DiCaprio sank with the Titanic. Orlando Bloom played an elf of Middle Earth, which was far less weird than this.

Suggested reading

The battle for Runcorn

By Tanya Gold

But no one will say it — this wedding is weird, a royal wedding for commoners, a carnival made for press attention — because where there is power, there is tribute. Anna Wintour, the former editor of Vogue, gatekeeper of global style, prostrated herself before the couple, apparently offering them space in her magazine: I never pitied high fashion until now. Is Lauren Sánchez stylish if she appears in Vogue? Of course not: even I know not to wear a camisole to a presidential inauguration. Rather, Vogue is shameless to have her: it is taken over, colonized by the money it follows, another estate fallen to ruin.

There is more tribute from protestors who threatened to jump in canals with inflatable alligators to force Bezos out of Venice because they are exhibitionists too. No oligarchs welcome, they said, which means they do not understand the city they are in.

It is true that Venice was, until Napoleon, a Republic: of oligarchs. They wrote their names in the Golden Book, their Debrett’s Peerage; they power-boated in gondolas; they built a ship while the King of France was having lunch. All of Bezos’s tinny excess fits with Venice. I fantasize that he will insinuate himself into Titian’s Assumption of the Virgin in the Frari. They might let him if he fixed the roof. Venice will do almost anything for a price. That’s its charm.

Above all, Venice fascinates because she works as metaphor. She was once everything humans were capable of, and she exists in peril from the sea. Daily jeopardy, then, but for what now? Very little. No wonder Bezos chose Venice for his fete: if futility were a city, this is it. Nothing besides remains.

A girl, young and raging, interrupts. “England should focus on English people.” She resents the people who come on the boats, and hates the man who killed three girls in Southport, 30 miles north, last year. “If I went to their country and did that I would be shot in the head,” she says. (The murderer is a British citizen.) She believes public services are given to foreigners but denied to her. She says she knows people who would rather be in prison than wait for a house: their ambition has shrunk to that. She is absolutely alienated from her democracy, and at the age of 19.

“Stop it,” says her mother softly, “It’s not their fault.” Still, she has “no hope” either: her home was broken into last week, and the police didn’t turn up, even though she has footage of the crime. I ask her: when is the last time you had hope? “2016,” she says. Brexit.

This Cheshire constituency is a patchwork: there’s Labour Runcorn, a small town, pretty Frodsham and villages that leaned Tory in the past. There is industry here, and housing is cheap, but public services are failing and wages are low. In Runcorn they speak with alarm at benefit cuts for the elderly; in the villages they oppose taxing farmers.

The story began in October in Frodsham, a town named in the Domesday Book. Mike Amesbury (majority 14,696, Reform second, the Tories just behind) attacked a constituent outside District Taxis, which is now a minor tourist attraction for this reason. He was jailed for 10 weeks — suspended on appeal — and resigned from the Labour Party. It was, though unwittingly, a paradigm: an eruption of violence in an English paradise; perhaps an omen of things to come. “I don’t recognize myself,” Amesbury said later, and now his constituency mirrors him.

Amesbury drank that night in the Cholmondeley Arms, where here I find men as politically alienated as the girl in Runcorn, though more amiable, being half drunk. “He was always in here,” says one. “He was always pissed. He was a useless MP. Labour are Labour.” He rolls his eyes. “Gobshites.” Another says, “Farage reminds me of Arthur Scargill,” which is eerily true: both can be pulled out of a lineup; both function as brands. He grins, and tells me he thinks Farage’s clothes are absurd. Amesbury still has supporters: one man tells me, “I would still vote for him. He’s a normal lad.” (As in: who hasn’t wanted to punch a voter?) Only one will admit to voting on Thursday: he supports the English Constitution Party, aggrieved English nationalists with a leader called Daddy Dragon. Within the laughter, these are men whose faith in conventional politics has gone.

Still, there is hope for Labour: some voters — older people, the young are bewitched by Farage’s TikTok and gift for selfies — defend the party, now it is threatened. I meet a raging Labour voter: “Nigel Farage comes from money,” he says. “He thinks he’s supporting the working man? He’s a million miles away. He’s a fucking gobshite.”

More from this author

The last bastion of Tory Britain

By Tanya Gold

I find Tories at a tea dance in a normal-seeming village under an escarpment called Helsby Hill. This is a landscape of power stations and duck ponds: Mordor and the Shire. Here, Tories and once-Tories are dancing the Lambeth Walk. Two women tell me about Runcorn in their youth. “You knew your neighbors,” says one. “It was a small town with lots of activities going on: carnivals; May Queens; Whitsuntide, when all the primary schools used to walk with the banners. You knew people.” They talk like Rip Van Winkle in a ballroom: they fell asleep, and when they woke they knew no one, and no one knew them.

“I think I will remain Conservative,” says the other. “They’ve got a big few steps to cover, haven’t they? I don’t know if it’s gone too far to even pull back to how we would like it to.” An army veteran tells me that when he was growing up in Runcorn, it was so isolated that nearby villages “were foreign countries. Runcorn was a working town then. We had three tanning yards, a gas works, and two cinemas. Now England is a foreign country.” He has always voted Conservative, but tomorrow, he will vote for the independent Alan McKie, who lives in Helsby, and organized the tea dance. “The Conservatives spend all their time fighting one another. They have done nothing.” And they split, and split again.

Others are more proactive. Stand Up to Racism is standing up to Reform all over the north, and near Iceland in Runcorn. They hand out Unmasking Reform leaflets, with a photograph of Farage laughing near a horse. They tell voters he is a stockbroker; that he is a threat to the NHS; that he blames the cost-of-living crisis on refugees, migrants and Muslims. The response is muted. A young father, holding two toddlers by the hand, is aggrieved by their message that Farage is a racist: it means he is too. His cheeks flush in anger. “Farage won’t destroy the NHS,” he says, “it’s political suicide.” He looks aghast, hurt even. Even so, women thank them for coming; a few cars beep their horns, though gently.

They are the trumpets for George Galloway. The leader of the Workers Party replaces Stand Up to Racism near Iceland with Peter Ford, his deputy leader and by-election candidate. Ford was British ambassador to Syria and Bahrain and then worked for UNRWA in Palestine. Galloway’s small huddle of supporters is the most conventional politicking I have seen in Runcorn. They are like creatures from another age. Galloway, though, with his offer of socialism and social conservatism — no cuts, no foreign wars — loves conflict. When a bystander calls him a cunt, he invites him to ask a question, and seems faintly disconsolate when he does not.

Galloway’s nemesis is Labour, the party he once loved. He says they have “a mark of death” upon them: opening the door to Reform with their incompetence and malice; inviting pensioners to kill themselves. But he despises Farage too. “What’s the point of Nigel Farage’s politics?” he asks. “And, by the way, it’s an affectation, because I’ve spent time with him. I know he’s not a racist. It’s much worse than that. He deliberately uses racism to get votes while actually not being one himself.” Farage’s Britain, he says, “would be a Britain torn apart. This is a contest between blue Tories, turquoise Tories and red Tories. They all stand for the same thing. If an arse could have three cheeks they are it.”

There is a hustings, at last, at St Paul’s church in Helsby, and it is full. The main candidates sit in a semi-circle of anxiety, though the minor and novelty candidates are more relaxed, having less to lose. Karen Shore of Labour, a teacher, looks tired but resolute. Sean Houlston for the Tories looks like a man whose hinterland evaporated when his back was turned. Sarah Pochin for Reform — previously a Tory councillor and magistrate — is very beautiful. Reform has a developing female aesthetic and it is borrowed from Fox News.

The vicar names the rules: no heckling, no recording, all questions submitted in advance. “We are in the house of God,” he says. “We follow someone who challenged the authorities of the time and was killed for being different. But he preached: love one another.” “This,” he points at the candidates, “is a human being. This is a person.” I sit with friends of Daddy Dragon (Graham Moore). Some political parties are sexual fetishes grown large.

The questions are blunt: the vicar reads them out. The answers, from the main candidates at least, are small, and without vision: as if vision is a deadly thing. Asked if the Tory Party is dead, Houlston talks about fixing roads and green spaces, which seems like an affirmation of the question. Shore offers more GP appointments, and a named police officer for each area. During the 2024 election campaign, Starmer asked the people for 10 years. If Runcorn falls, he won’t have 10 months.

Pochin, asked what Reform’s policies are besides immigration, answers in wordcloud: she sounds like an incumbent already, and that will be a problem for Reform soon. It says: Family, community, country. She is sensitive, too, as politicians often are: she tells an audience member, “I don’t think you should be shaking your head.” But why not?

The minor candidates are more interesting, being eccentrics. I met John Falch from Rejoin EU — the candidate’s agent and stand-in — outside the chippie Oh My Cod before the hustings. “I’m half-Norwegian and half-British by parentage,” he told me. “Made in Italy. Born in Worcestershire. Schooled in Belgium. The referendum literally took my identity.” He says a similar thing in the church, and waves an EU flag while nationalists — definitely Reform and the English constitutionalists, possibly some Tories, though they should know better by now — hiss at him.

Daddy Dragon asks why the English, of all the British nations, are singularly oppressed. He says that, though a Londoner, he identifies with Runcorn and Helsby constituents because he too lives next to an incinerator. Michael Williams, a grave independent, says: “If you climb to the top of Helsby Hill you can see the whole world.” He is standing so his children, “know the democratic process is not for other people.”

The atmosphere beyond is sadder, though; poorer; angrier and more confused. There is what feels like recklessness here, born, I suspect, of grief, because we now are, and explicitly feel, like a declining country with no obvious path ahead. Locals may despise Farage but some of them will vote for him anyway. Some of them will vote for him because they despise him: plain decadence. I meet a Sudanese-born taxi driver who says he will vote Reform: “And 90% of what they [Reform] say they will do: they aren’t going to do it anyway.” All this, he says while laughing.

As I leave Runcorn, I meet an Iraqi-born British citizen, sitting on a bench, smoking. He has a master’s degree in finance, “but it hasn’t served me well. I’m a barber.” I ask about his politics and he quotes Plato: “The price good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.” I ask if he fears racism and he says not: this is the safest country he has lived in, and British people are gentle at heart. He tells me that Farage provides, “a surface level logic” and “a turnkey solution to an existing problem” but he thinks he will drift away, as populists do.

There is rage here, of course, but what is most pointed is disaffection: the growing idea that conventional politics cannot give you what you want. Labour may hang on — Pochin is cold for Cheshire — but, if they do, it will be in inches. It is not Labour, but the system itself that is mistrusted. Of all the people I meet in Runcorn the barber has the most hope but, Plato or no, he will not vote on Thursday. Plato was for another time, he says; a customer comes for a haircut, and off he goes.

When her delusions are exposed by her young lover, Norma, a glittering narcissist, murders him. She was played by Gloria Swanson, also a great star of silent films: Sunset Boulevard was her Salome, her comeback. It is a cruel and brilliant film, and its reach is long. Norma is fictional, but her story created the idea that the average famous, incalculably gifted woman is insane. We all know that Hollywood does terrible things to its women: objectification at best, rape at worst. We talk less about how we diminish, and erase, their art, in which they are invited to collude.

I thought of Sunset Boulevard when I watched Maria, the new biopic about Maria Callas, starring Angelina Jolie. It is, in many ways, a remake of Sunset Boulevard, and Jolie plays Norma, though I suspect she doesn’t know it. Norma yearned for the close-up and the scene where a lighting technician shines the beam on her is the best in the film. “Let’s get a good look at you,” he calls from his eyrie. He doesn’t mean it. The real inner woman is of no interest to Hollywood. She just reflects the light. Jolie loves the close-up too: she has internalized something.

More from this author

How the rich destroyed Notting Hill

By Tanya Gold

Most films about famous female entertainers are variants on Sunset Boulevard. We have Sunset Boulevard starring Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland (Judy), Sunset Boulevard starring Ana de Armas as Marilyn Monroe (Blonde); Sunset Boulevard starring Marisa Abela as Amy Winehouse (Back to Black); now we have Maria too, the latest gilded film to call the subject of its devotion mad. You might say that Garland, Monroe and Winehouse were all mad: all were addicted to drugs, and they died young. But madness wasn’t their defining characteristic, even if these films insist on it. Their industry treated them as things, first alive, now dead: as a young actress Monroe was invited to expose her breasts to studio executives and Garland, given drugs to make her work as a teenager, was not allowed to rest. It was the same for Winehouse.

Maria is a film about the best-selling classical singer in history, and the most important opera singer of the 20th century. This is not a controversial view, and it is not disputed. Callas lost her voice early for a singer — we’re not sure why — and she had a relationship with the shipping tycoon, Aristotle Onassis — we’re also not sure why — who later married Jackie Kennedy. Neither of these facts, though unfortunate, can erase Callas’s contribution to music. Unless you are her cinematic biographer, that is.

Like Sunset Boulevard, Maria opens with a death bed: her own. It is 1977, and Callas is 53, or she was. She is lying on the floor of her exquisite Paris apartment, dead as newsprint. Then we travel backwards in time to the previous week. Maria, tended by servants who act as parents, is broken. She has lost her voice and her lover, the tiny Onassis. She is addicted to Mandrax, which she hides from the servants, and she feeds her meals to the dogs. This is the material of the obsessed but unseeing biographer. It is not Callas. They just use her name, as if for branding.

Sophia Lambton, classical music critic and author of The Callas Imprint: A Centennial Biography, tells me this is fiction. Callas listened to her records all her life: Maria says she feared them. She did not call her records perfect. She was not reclusive. Onassis did not hate opera or try to thwart her career: and she left him, not he her. She suffered from low blood pressure and died of a heart attack, but she was not a drug addict.

The real Callas was made happy by music, but Maria is not interested in music. The result, of course, is lifeless, and Jolie plays Callas as a poised corpse. Craving profundity in every shot, Maria lands on South Park with better clothes. With an already-dead heroine, the only real drama is: where to put the grand piano? By the end everyone is so emotionally cauterized, only the dogs are capable of a response. The credits thank Cartier: perhaps that was the point of it all.

Maria insists Callas was cursed. Judy (2019), another retelling of Sunset Boulevard with Renée Zellweger as Judy Garland / Norma Desmond, does the same: again, it begins at the ending, a place without hope. It is set in 1969, the year of her death, when she was gravely ill. If you hoped this film might be an homage to Garland’s contribution to music — to her fleeting joy, and the joy she gave — you are wrong. There is no music, just sickness, as if that were Garland’s only legacy. Yet watch her dance with Fred Astaire in Easter Parade and outdance him! Garland’s voice does not appear in Judy. Zellweger sang for her, as Marisa Abela sang for Amy Winehouse in Back to Black (2024), and she won the Oscar denied to Garland in her lifetime. Garland thought Hollywood hated her. Whether it knew it or not, she was right.

Perhaps the most vicious retelling of Sunset Boulevard is Andrew Dominik’s Blonde (2022). It is from a Joyce Carol Oates novel that seethes with envy, and it dealt with Marilyn Monroe. There is a scene where Monroe’s soon-to-be-aborted son begs to live — this scene is set in her vagina, while, elsewhere, his useless mother, who was really an autodidact and the greatest comic actress in film, chokes on JFK’s cock. Monroe is reduced to loveless acts in pursuit of a father who will not return. Blonde is framed as a search for the father, and, in such quests, the heroine is turned again into a child, though, in Monroe’s case, an obscene one: a child who cannot even be a child, though in reality she could steal a scene from Jack Lemmon. Some sick child.

But this is the manifesto of Sunset Boulevard and all its awful children. The female star, with her autonomous gifts, is just too threatening to be admired. She must, instead, be pitied, and turned into a cautionary tale for girls: her success is itself a failure, because it is the root of her tragedy. In lesser hands than Wilder’s, the message is a call for women to stay mundane: from cinema’s most self-hating, and desolate, franchise.

The de facto ban is hypocrisy, because on some subjects Polanski will be heard. Chinatown is about child abuse, which is the very thing Polanski did: in 1977 he pleaded guilty to unlawful sexual intercourse with a 13-year-old girl in America and has lived as a fugitive in Europe since, dogged by accusations of predation. Chinatown was 50 this year, and there are public screenings in its honour. But An Officer and a Spy cannot be shown when it is urgently needed. This makes no sense. If you are prepared to allow Polanski’s work to exist — and filmmaking is a collaborative effort — why not show the truth of the Dreyfus case? If you are for censorship, censor all his work. Or none of it.

Its story is this: in 1894, the French army knew there was a German spy in their midst. They scapegoated Alfred Dreyfus (Louis Garrel), the only Jew on the general staff; when they realised the case was weak, they falsified evidence against him. “The idea of the Jew, took hold of them, seized them, dominated them,” wrote the historian Joseph Reinach. “My only crime,” Dreyfus said, “was being born a Jew.” He was convicted, and, at the official degradation ceremony, his sword was broken and the crowd shouted, “Death to Judas, death to the Jews!” He was imprisoned in French Guiana on Devil’s Island — how apt — and as Polanski pulls the camera back from the island to the ocean, Dreyfus’s isolation — his Jewishness — is explicit.

France was the first European country to give equal rights to Jews, and this was the revenge. It was also an epigraph to the Holocaust, in which many French people colluded. Eventually, due to the diligence of Georges Picquart (Jean Dujardin), a fellow officer and repentant antisemite, and the activism of the novelist Émile Zola, Dreyfus was pardoned, then exonerated. This is an old European story, ever revived: a Christian nation divines itself through the prism of the Jew.

Polanski does not place Dreyfus at the centre of his film: he is the man things are done to, in cinema and life. But at least he does justice to the antisemitism that destroyed him. “How does he look?” Picquart is asked of Dreyfus’s degradation. “Like a Jewish tailor weeping over his lost gold.” “What was the mood like afterwards?” “As if a healthy body had been purged of something pestilential so that life could resume.”

More from this author

The many delusions of Roger Waters

By Tanya Gold

The Variety critic described The Dreyfus Affair as “fabled” and “legendary”. Subconsciously, at least, he could not accept that Dreyfus was real. The IndieWire critic could not bring himself to review the film: rather he reviewed Polanski and called it “a film-length tantrum” from “cinema’s most-storied rapist… as nakedly autobiographical as anything Polanski has ever made”.

Polanski demurred — to an extent: “In the story, I sometimes find moments I have experienced myself. I can see the same determination to deny the facts and condemn me for things I have not done. I must admit that I am familiar with many of the workings of the apparatus of persecution shown in the film, and that has clearly inspired me.” He was talking about the rape case. He was also talking about the murder of his pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and their unborn child, who were murdered by the Manson Gang in 1969: Polanski was initially blamed, because he made Rosemary’s Baby.

Suggested reading

Woody Allen: the biggest lie of all

By Kat Rosenfield

If he was also talking about Kraków, where he lived and saw his father taken in the liquidation of the ghetto when he was six, he didn’t say so, and I wonder if the spurious identification with Dreyfus obscures the deeper one. Martin Amis said Polanski’s films, “with their emphasis on terror, isolation and madness, seem no more than a demonic commentary on his life”.

But why is it Polanski’s tale of Jew hate that particularly offends, not his strange, self-hating erotica (Bitter Moon) or sketches of demons (The Ninth Gate) which are more expressive of this darkness? Why can we tolerate his fictions, but not his realities? The Pianist, Polanski’s other film about antisemitism, is still permitted. But it is a fable with cartoon Nazis. It is soothing to lay all murderous antisemitism at their feet, which is a very partial truth: witness the Poles’ long battle to be considered only rescuers, when they were nothing of the kind. France, too, was a mire of collaboration and it does it credit that it both lauded An Officer and a Spy and picketed it. Britain should do the same.

There is a tendency to tell only two pieces of Jewish history: the Crucifixion and the Holocaust. The crime and the punishment, if you will. Read the Gospel of Matthew, watch Schindler’s List and you’re done. All the average person knows of Jews is that we apparently killed Christ and were burned by Nazis. There is more. If you want to understand antisemitism, learn the history of the Jews, no matter who tells it. There is an awful lot of junk culture about this subject. This is something better, from a master filmmaker and common Jewish villain.

There was, beforehand, a limp kind of excitement. It felt closely held, protected. Johnson appealed to people who wanted to live through him. Too scared to drive supercars or flirt with strangers or prorogue parliament, they chose someone who would. They still speak fondly of him, because he is still the only politician they have ever liked, and I can’t think of a better measure of our failure. They still talk about his “charisma” because they don’t know him. They just think they do. He has what Kemi Badenoch’s supporters call an ability to “cut through” in the age of attention deficit disorder: in the leadership election she will depend on it. They “hope he will be back” but he “probably won’t be because MPs don’t like him”. The current Tory Party is, “individualist” and “too weakly led”. “I don’t think anyone led the party like he did.”

His entrance is downbeat. He shuffles in, hair shining and dishevelled. He looks, for an instant, mock terrified, and then does the nodding dog with his head. The downbeat entrance is deliberate: his small penance. He can’t say it in words because he doesn’t really feel it. Unleashed is not an apology for how he promised hope and set it on fire, nor is it a fair assessment of what he really unleashed, which is a more toxic populism that even he gave us. It is propaganda, written in the fake intimate style of the lifestyle columnist. I searched in the book for passages on his failure, and how he felt about it. They aren’t there.

He says he’s sorry he’s late, but it’s not his fault this time: “I understand everyone was being frisked for handguns”. They laugh: that’s not their England. The interviewer offers a trivial question first, for the fans. It’s about the zipwire at the London Olympics 2012, when he dangled with a Union Flag: the Johnson stunt by which all others are judged. “Although I was held to global ridicule,” he says, “it had exactly the effect I wanted: not for the first time!” The next day, he says, Britain “began to win medals”. This is Johnson the magician who expresses, entirely unconsciously, a universal boredom with conventional politics. It is also Johnson the Fisher King. His wounds mirror ours — that is his peculiar power — but neither are healed.

He is asked about the Brexit bus and its promise of £350 million a week for the NHS. “It’s the bus of truth!” he cries, even now. This is not a place to analyse the rotting political discourse, and what part he may have played in it. Such agonies are for Leftists. “It’s a significant sum,” he says, “people were right to ask what they were getting for it.” He adds, “Being unleashed from the EU gave us the freedom to do things differently,” and if they weren’t better, that is not his fault. Brexit saved lives during pandemic, he says. She asks about other “concrete dividends”. He looks nervous, cites giving lethal weaponry to Ukraine, makes a joke about William Hague’s baldness, and I remember that there are at least five different people inside him.

Johnson is happiest on diversions: Nicola Sturgeon, for instance. “Princess Twinkle-toes investigated by the fuzz for possession of a campervan. The Nationalist dog barked while the campervan moved on”.  It’s a mash-up of metaphor and slang: and it’s meaningless. His serious point, when he gets there, is this: Reform polled low when he was prime minister. He kept us “bubble-gummed together”. But he didn’t.  Rather, he opened the doors to them.

He is asked about his Covid. “A lot of people say I was shamming,” he says. But he was ill, he insists. And he realised, “I’ve done some pretty worthwhile things. I need to keep going. I thought I had a lot to live for and I had a country to look after”. Now I think: if he’s telling us he loves us, he wants to come back. He’s waiting for the party to fall so low they take him back.

Suggested reading

Boris Johnson's squandered chance

By Travis Aaroe

The audience is restless. It wants Johnson the avatar of joy, and he’s talking about the nearness of Death, and defending his government. “We acted as vigilantly as we could, given what we knew”. He thinks Covid-19 came from a laboratory: “Do you really believe that this was the result of the love that flowered accidentally between a small slice of pangolin and a bat?” He doesn’t despair about a Trump presidency, even if he hated the Capitol riots: “He is not going to spend the first few months of his presidency trying to make the Soviet Union great again”. He says this last part in an accent thieved from Paint Your Wagon.

But then he reveals something. Being mayor of London was “great” because “I was a monarch”. And that’s it. Johnson was always more suited to absolute monarchy than parliamentary democracy, and, like an absolute monarch, he doesn’t think he did anything wrong, because an absolute monarch is the law. To Tory voters who hated him because he betrayed them, and, worse, made them betray themselves, he offers nothing. To the Tory romanticism he destroyed while pretending to share it he says nothing. The wine in the suitcase was a Downing Street ritual that long preceded him. His defenestration was all, “a bit of a put-up job”.  His advice to the audience – a response audience question, they still think he has something to offer, is: “there’s no earthly point in being too self-deprecating”. Is that what he thinks he was?

At Cheltenham, Johnson offers us, as ever, a mirror, because that is what he is. He mirrored our hope. Now he mirrors our confusion. The Tory Party is in ruins — he essentially endorsed Truss, his closest allies voted for her — and it had nothing to do with him. He doesn’t talk about the leadership contest. He talks about himself.

At the end, there are no cheers, as if he has disappointed them, but the disappointment should be with themselves. Johnson was our first modern populist politician and his danger was always in his precedent: now there will be other, less charming populists walking the paths he made. His damage to the polity was incalculable — the prime minister who lied to parliament — and they don’t even mind. Nor, it seems, does he. Out they go, holding copies of Unleashed. It wasn’t what we — or even he — thought it would be. It is something infinitely sadder, and that, of his legacies, will endure.

This is laconic Toryism, narcotic, incurious and swagged. Georgian mansions line the river and in the gardens of Ayscoughfee Hall, a medieval red-brick manor and museum, schoolchildren play by an ornamental lake and topiary. If there is decline here, it is hidden at the edges.

Off the market square, where the busker says Elvis is the favourite — he plays for people who had a lot of sex in the Seventies — I find a gun maker selling Barbour dress clothes and, nearby, a gypsy boy by his pony and trap. The horse is called Red Bull, he says, and he drove him from Peterborough for chips. Faced with this landscape — this majority — the Liberal Democrats are remote, and Labour is barely campaigning. The candidate didn’t appear at the hustings where the first question was: who is your favourite king? There are Union Jacks everywhere: on cushions, tablecloths and dogs. There is occasional bunting and a defibrillator on an exterior wall because Tories are old, and old people die. Typhoons from RAF Coningsby rip the sky.

It is Armed Forces Week, and a parade of local dignitaries muster with soldiers, banners and pipers: slowly. Sir John Hayes MP is photographed with the staff of Peacocks. I don’t think I have ever had a Tory MP on the record while reporting an election — they tend to flee — but Hayes is a secure Tory.  I ask him why this is the safest Tory seat. He doesn’t tell me about Spalding, but himself, as related to Spalding. He and the town are one — as in Arthurian legend.

“I’ve been here a very long time and over that time I’ve touched many people’s lives,” he says. “As I go round countless people say to me, ‘Oh thank you for what you did for my mother or my child or my neighbour or my friends.’” That, he says, “makes a huge difference. In a way,” — in a way! — “the national brand matters but that brand matters too.”

He campaigns like a lover, and it is amazing to watch. He darts down a line of women, pounces on one, and mutters into her hair: “Look after me on the 4th.” As he speaks, his voice takes on a distinctive London accent and he adds, “you will, I know you will” — like a spell. “I certainly will!” she giggles, a heroine of romance fiction in Spalding. We retreat. “That’s how it is, alright,” he says to me, comfortably. I have only ever seen Boris Johnson do this, but his eyes were dead.

“That intimacy,” he says, “is the heart of good democratic representation, and it’s particular to our system. They feel they own me. I’m a romantic High Tory: a Disraelian High Tory. I keep his picture with me all the time. I will show you.” He gets it out: it sits inside a tiny book of Keats’s poetry. Disraeli stares at us, and Hayes enacts a masterclass in the Disraelian creed: the Tory aristocracy and Tory working-class as one. That is, he speaks the theory into my Dictaphone, and runs into the crowd to demonstrate the practical. He shouts at a greengrocer: “I’m on it, Michael!” Then to another woman: “If I didn’t get your vote,” — he gazes into her welcoming face — “I’d be really worried.”  “I think the way you are really matters” he says, “your demeanour”.

More from this author

The battle for Cornwall’s cowboy town

By Tanya Gold

I believe in Hayes’s belief: later I meet a man on a mobility scooter. He has a Poppy keyring and a sticker that says: “Send Nudes”. (Spalding has the glossiest mobility scooters I have seen. They are Ferrari red and festooned with Union Jacks.) He says his mother wrote to Hayes — they live in the same village — and a few days later he received the two-bedroom bungalow he wanted.

Jack Braginton, 23, the Liberal Democrat candidate, has been alive for less time than Hayes has been MP. He did work experience in Hayes’s office as a schoolboy, because that is how Spalding works. (In 2019, the Lib Dems got 6.6%, almost half the Labour share.) We meet by Greggs. He says that Spalding’s Toryism is “perhaps rooted in the belief within a rural community that hard graft provides. And deep within this, is the duopoly of thought: personal responsibility for hard work, and a deep sense of community.”

I ask why they don’t talk about it? Why is Hayes the only Tory philosopher in a Tory town? Braginton, who is ruddy and genial, says: “It is not for us to consider larger questions of economy, society or politics.” Rather, “it is the role of a politician to just keep our way of life ticking over, it does not need change or bureaucracy, it just needs to be allowed to continue as it is. That is the genius of the Conservatives — balancing all interests by doing nothing and calling that consensus.”

Spalding is so Tory that the dangerous opposition is also Tory — a former Tory, now Independent — and I wonder if Hayes would smile on this and say: the system works! He is Mark Le Sage, a nurse and local councillor. We meet in the gardens of Ayscoughfee Hall by the lake. He is functional, aggrieved. The meaningful opposition is always independent here. If people are angry on polling day, they stay at home.

“I am a very annoyed, very upset, very frustrated, very disillusioned dad, granddad, nurse,” he says. “I’m so fed up with the system: the lies; the backstabbing; the scandals. I’ve had enough”. He stood, he says, because he was so frustrated, “with the fact that we just been lied to: over and over again. And then they brought David Cameron back — the guy who left us in the lurch after Brexit!”

Here, when you look behind the swag, people are “disconsolate”, though I think they aren’t used to naming it. The cost-of-living and public service crises don’t stampede in Spalding. They crawl. A former teacher tells me girls don’t feel safe in the town. A Bulgarian woman says eastern European immigrants bring crime to Spalding and “make life hard”. A homeless girl says she was attacked with a brick and shows me the scab. A young man tells me his mother died from cancer last winter. It shattered him. It was, he says, like television: “When it’s like, ‘the NHS is on its knees’. I sat with her at Christmas for three hours and nobody came. She deserved so much better.” That is: the outside world intruded on Spalding, and this is awful, and new.

Later I stand in the Spalding’s Gentlemen’s Society, and stare at the curiosities — its members measured a conch by drinking from it, the guide tells me — and the rows of unread books. Spalding had an Enlightenment: it was a progressive town 300 years ago, and that helped to make it rich. If it is in decline now, I think it doesn’t yet know it, and I wonder if that is the spell Hayes casts so well.

At the Red Lion, a group of ageing men in straw hats and women in bright dresses sit in the sun, drinking. They are the affluent, self-made Tories of Braginton’s analysis. Their fear of Labour is semi-religious, with inbuilt legends. “Keir Starmer is a paedophile-lover,” says a woman. “Exactly,” says a man. “I don’t trust him one little bit.” Tony Blair is a war criminal: “All those soldiers that lost their lives in Iraq and Afghanistan: that was down to him.” Jeremy Corbyn is, “the worst thing that ever happened to this country”.

“Poor Rishi Sunak,” says one, “He got fined for saying, ‘Happy birthday,’ to someone.” The table silences itself in sympathy: then someone moans that Sunak came home early from D-Day, “because he’s not an Englishman”. What is their main concern? “Too many foreigners,” says one, and he points at his friend. “He’s from Peterborough.” They cackle.

Reform is no threat to this kind of Toryism: it is dysfunctional, messy, a threat. “Nigel Farage is a complete cock,” says another. “What is he going to bring to the table?” Their main resentment, though, is towards the civil service. They think it stymied Brexit. They are grateful we left Europe, despite everything: they think it is doomed. But not Spalding in its sunlight, with defibrillator and swans: the last, gasping vestige of British exceptionalism.

The mobile post office, then: everyone agrees that it is terrible that provision is down to one day a week in Godolphin Cross. I have lived in west Cornwall for seven years and I know the question doesn’t speak to the smallness of Cornish pride — Phoenicians came here for tin when London was mud — but, I think, the smallness of Cornish hope. West Cornwall is beautiful, isolated, and poor. It is a sump for competing fantasies, because beauty in landscape does that. It is a peninsula that feels like an island, its churches feel like pagan shrines. The local gentry are influential, the working classes are conservative — the castle from House of the Dragon looms over Mount’s Bay, after all — and, due to the Isles of Scilly, this constituency often declares last, which speaks to a spiritual, as well as logistical, truth. Because we are always late with the count. It is sunny half the year, and rainy half the year, like a clock.

The hustings drag on: one man has a long question about septic tanks, and a sheaf of notes, should he forget what he is so angry about. Everyone is polite, because west Cornwall is a village. If Andrew George allowed his daughter to live in a taxpayer funded flat when he was last in parliament, the Tory does not say so, though everyone knows it. If Partygate was a disaster, the Lib Dem does not say so, though everyone knows it. When I meet John Harris, the man who looks like a wizard — he is from the Common People Party, and he wants a universal basic income and underground cities, with a rewilded world above — he praises the mainstream candidates. He says Cornwall is time travel and this is, essentially, happening in 1974 — hence the courtesy — in a constituency with its back to the sea. “There’s nothing else beyond it,” he says. “You go back into prehistory as far as you like.”

The real issues — poverty, housing and low pay — are barely discussed today. We don’t hear, for instance, that emergency accommodation might be a caravan with mould slaked walls; that the inhabitant might be hospitalised for a lung complaint, and the landlord might say it is the occupier’s fault for not cleaning enough. We don’t hear that people compete to rent property by telling the landlord they are the deserving poor, or that women with a few hours of cleaning during school hours wait in the rain for a bus that never comes. Not in winter, anyway: the summer tourist buses always run.

The Lib Dem campaign has the most energy, but it is muted, because this is west Cornwall. There is none of the orange mania you find in Tory to Lib Dem swing seats further east. Still, there are vast orange signs on verges, and the candidate appears on bridges with small gaggles of supporters and poses for photographs on Newlyn beach. He is too well-known to be exciting, and people remember that his daughter stayed in his flat. Fishermen particularly mention it, but fishermen are Tories, now segueing to Reform.

The Tory campaign launch is at a hotel near Prussia Cove. Two supercars are parked outside: they look odd here, a cry for help. The Tories are ageing and dressed as farmers on Sundays, though there are two young men. They eat pasties, and grumble about central government, which is common: many Cornish people behave as if taxes go to Westminster in error. They are not sullen, but disappointed. Sunak came here two weeks ago, bought a bacon sandwich by the station, met railway workers, and headed east.

“This week’s been very difficult,” says the Party chair.  “One couple said to me, ‘my husband’s father was at D-Day, he was on the beaches, and he’s voted Tory all his life. He could never vote Tory again after what happened’. Nearly everyone I spoke to [agreed].” “At this point it seems like Rishi has given up,” says one of the young Tories. Another says: “It’s just so unfair. We had an 80-seat majority, and we pissed it away sucking up to old people and drinking like students. Pure self-indulgence. We could have built a million houses. Harold Macmillan did.” A woman tells me: “In spite of their appalling record of inaction I am still voting Conservative because they are the only party who have stood up for the reality of biological sex. Very feebly.” The next person says: “I’m voting for Derek because he’s a hard-working chap. I’m not a great fan of Rishi. I think he’s behaved appallingly quite honestly.” How so? “I think he stabbed Boris in the back.” I ask a final man: why are you voting Conservative? “Because I always vote Conservative,” he replies, surprised that I asked. “I wouldn’t vote anything else.”

Bill Johnson, a fisherman of the inshore fleet in Mousehole tells me that 75% of local fishermen voted for Brexit “on the promises that things would get better. None of them think things have got better. They have got a whole lot worse.” The six-mile limit hasn’t materialised yet, and over-regulation and bureaucracy is rife: they make elderly fishermen use Apps at sea, which baffles them. I saw one fisherman on the quay in Newlyn last autumn, paperwork falling from his pockets. He looked dismayed.  “Fishermen,” Johnson says, “have been pawns of political expediency.” He remembers the day the Brexit Flotilla called at Mousehole: he stood on the quay. But fisherman, he judges, will not go Labour (“they are city Socialists”) here. The unions never had a foothold. For him, the Liberal Democrats, “are like an echo in an empty room”. He is voting Tory still — he feels a personal loyalty to Thomas — but others are tempted by Reform, who “are uttering the right sort of words on immigration”.

We walk around Mousehole, and he points which houses are lived in full time: it’s quicker that way. The centre of the town is a miniaturised St Ives: 87% holiday lets and second homes now. Turn-out on Election Day will be low. Denied access to housing, young people live with their parents, or in sheds, or move out of county, hoping to return with London money. Tourism work is seasonal and low-paid. Six fishing boats sail out of Mousehole: in twenty years Johnson thinks there will be none. Even so, it’s so busy in summer that the bus cannot get through: once, in an appalling metaphor, I saw an Ocado lorry parked in the bus stop, as if it was the bus. Today there is a replica of a tenth-century ship on the beach. It smells of pitch. It came from Brittany, sailed into Mousehole, and is stranded on the beach until the tide is high enough to carry it away. Its sailors — medieval reenactors — sell common rustic goods at vast prices on the sand, and this meets the current Mousehole aesthetic: an awful pastiche.

Lynne Dyer has been feeding local people from the kitchen below her Growing Links office since 2014. The men in the tents on the prom, and in the woods by the Coombe River, and by the boating pond, come here each night for supper, or they walk from Mousehole, and their tents on the cliff. Dressed for mountaineering in a town, the most painful to see are the youthful, with their insistent courtesy. She feeds people who live in temporary accommodation — cheap hotels or those repulsive, mouldy caravans — where they aren’t allowed to cook, and families and the low-paid.

More from this author

How the rich destroyed Notting Hill

By Tanya Gold

The system isn’t broken, Dyer tells me. It’s worse than that. Rather: “It does not exist. This is like a fucking cowboy town. From mental health to rough sleeping and the housing problem and energy crisis. No money, no food, changes to Universal Credit. Oh my God, I could go on forever.”

“We were feeding over a thousand people who couldn’t afford to eat through the pandemic every week,” she says: fishermen were selling mackerel from boxes outside their doors. “Families who were starving; doctors who are referring people to us who’ve got malnutrition; mums who are feeding their children are not feeding themselves. I’ve never ever seen Mr Thomas ever. Andrew George was a volunteer for five years.”

This morning, she says, she drove back from Wales. “And I saw lots of flowers on the prom and then I’ve come into work and there’s flowers outside and I just thought, ‘fuck, who’s died?’” She starts to cry. “It’s a young man who killed himself outside The Lugger. He was constantly homeless and in addiction.”

“That’s what the Tories have done,” she says. “They killed that young man by taking away family services, by taking away social services. Everything preventative has been stripped from us. It’s young people’s lives who fall through the cracks. And they grow up and they anesthetise themselves with drugs and alcohol and,” — her voice flattens — “everyone hates them. That’s what the Tories have done. I hold them responsible for every young person who’s overdosed or killed themselves during this reign of terror on people.” She cannot wait for them to go. She counts the days. She thinks “Starmer might be a good Socialist. I want him to win. I will be voting Liberal Democrat for one less Tory seat: for Labour to get in.”

I walk to the boy’s memorial on the sea front: the wall across the road from The Lugger is decked with flowers and balloons. They fight the wind. It’s low tide on one of those June days when the water sparkles with the promise of a child’s eternal summer. When the tide is this low, you can see the petrified trees of the once great forest of Mount’s Bay. Again, and as ever, one Cornwall conceals another.

But Notting Hill is two cities with two kinds of stories, the dreamlike and the deadly. One Notting Hill contains residents who paid more capital gains tax than three major British cities in 2020; in the other, looms Grenfell Tower, swaddled in rippling tarpaulin. These two depend on each other, because you only need a dreamworld if reality is unjust. Nowhere else in London is so polarised, or practices self-worship like this.

The most famous Notting Hill story is the one by Richard Curtis, which turns 25 today. Curtis is an affable man who can’t look at the world without trying to turn it into something it isn’t: an entirely benevolent place. He has lived in Notting Hill, and he made it an object, like a man writing a love letter to his sofa. His Notting Hill is a retelling of Cinderella with William Thacker (Hugh Grant) as the maidservant and Anna Scott (Julia Roberts) as the prince — now a film star; what’s the difference? They are both thwarted artists (he can’t sell books; her films are terrible) and neither seems to know if they are humble or grandiose or if they want to live in fiction or reality.

Notting Hill feels the same way —more wax-work garden than place — and is the ideal setting for this self-pitying, consumer capitalist love affair, which reaches a climax when Anna gives Thacker a Chagall. Here, on a Saturday morning, the market is swagged for its six million annual visitors. It is a crush, which happens when you hollow out London, put all the wisteria in one place, and write a vapid, world-famous fairy tale about it.

I am posing as a vapid fan on a Notting Hill film tour. Because my fellow fans are foreign tourists — Gucci-heavy Italians, exhausted Israelis, and an ethics professor from Michigan — their first question to the young guide is: do you live here? I repress a snort as she says that she lives in the western suburbs of London, because I knew that.

The idea that Notting Hill is an authentic London is powerful: because cinema says so, we believe that ordinary children walk these streets, though they don’t. The Phoenix Cinema, which appeared in Notting Hill is now an art gallery filled with Victoriana: that is, it has stopped screening a fake London, and has become the set of one instead. This is a film-maker’s ideal: a brightened Victorian slum filled with happy Victorian children, a Dickensian stage without Dickensian ideas. It’s true that Portobello Road — named for a battle in Panama — was once like this. Notting Hill’s gentrification is tidal: the rich come in, leave, and return, and the poor take up whatever space is left to serve them. But we are at the top of the curve: a terraced house on Chepstow Villas is £15 million now, and the only working-class people who own houses in Notting Hill have lived here since the Sixties.

I meet a greengrocer with a flat in Blenheim Crescent. Her father was in Notting Hill, she says, in a yellow shirt, and when she misses him, she watches it. Notting Hill was more fun in the Sixties, she adds, when everyone was on LSD, and I don’t doubt it: actresses manned stalls when they were resting. The market traders are fearful that the market will be shrunk, to make it more like Soho. The market and the carnival are always under threat, being remnants of working-class culture but the traders have bought into the dream world too. One tells me: “It [the market] creeps under your skin, and you come to love this untidy little creature, it becomes part of you.” He sounds like Bert in Mary Poppins, or Richard Curtis himself, if he had given a working-class Londoner a leading role in Notting Hill, which of course he didn’t. It famously had no black characters, though this was a Caribbean district, and you can see the remnants to the north: Jay Dees Catering and Caribbean Take-Away and People’s Sound. Curtis held a looking glass up and saw only himself.

Probably unconsciously, our guide tells us a joke. She pauses by Banksy’s “Made You Look” (2006, it’s the title in scrabble tiles) on the wall of an ugly modernist house. She says the owner interrupted the graffiti artist and was told that if he went back to sleep, he would wake up to a more valuable house. This is Banksy the anti-war anti-Capitalist as Rumpelstiltskin, weaving straw into gold for the already rich. George Orwell’s house is opposite, and I wonder what he would say to Banksy’s intervention. But capitalist activism is popular here: Conscience Kitchen, for instance, on All Saints’ Road.

Suggested reading

The betrayal of Benefits Street

By Tanya Gold

Thacker’s Travel Bookshop was inspired by the Notting Hill Bookshop in Blenheim Crescent. Tourists mass round it, taking photographs of themselves. “Notting Hill feels like a film set,” a local woman tells me, “because so many people are taking photographs all the time.” “It’s like a cult,” says another. The shop is packed but almost no one is buying a book. Perhaps they don’t need one since, being in fiction. Instead, they buy canvas bags that say Notting Hill to prove they came here and write love letters, which are posted on the cork board: “Dear reader it was like a dream to enter the store after watching the movie.” We visit the blue door of Thacker’s home. It isn’t the real door: that was auctioned for charity.

You can’t buy a home here, but you can buy an idea. Notting Hill, one tells me, “is huge in China”. Biscuiteers “Biscuit Boutique and Icing Café” has an entire biscuit London in the window, because the more uninhabitable London becomes for the average person the more it is finessed into an aesthetic or, here, biscuit. A ginger-bread resident is £7.95, and you can buy a biscuit pencil to write a biscuit novel.

At the end of Portobello Road is the pub where the murder in Martin Amis’s London Fields was planned: in the novel, the Black Cross; in life, the Golden Cross. It is now, inevitably, a sushi bar, but it is still sticky with alcoholism, which is oblivious to newer dream worlds, having one of its own already, and it is my favourite place on Portobello Road.

“Being a resident from a working-class background we say Ladbroke Grove,” a man tells me, pointedly. (Like all dream worlds, the boundaries of Notting Hill are vague and sinuous). He says calling it Notting Hill, “does bother me. Because of everything that comes with Notting Hill. The working class will be moved out, and the history will be rewritten in a heartbeat. I don’t think tourists truly grasp that.”

The charmed rich tend to destroy what they think they love: they can’t help it. John from Portobello Camera under the Westway says: “So-called people,” — he means the charmed rich — “don’t want nothing to do with the carnival. The very thing they love about the area they don’t want to participate in. They board up their property, lock it down, and fly away. They want to pick their social menu.”

Suggested reading

What if King Charles were your landlord?

By Tanya Gold

I head north to the Grenfell Tower and the memorial to the 72 dead. It isn’t much. The memorial is a board by a school, shockingly close to the ruin itself, and a mirror to the corkboard in the Notting Hill Bookshop. “Five years, no justice,” it says. [It’s seven years now]. “We will never forget all these lives lost for what? £££! Your lives ALL matter no matter what age, colour, or creed. JUSTICE FOR GRENFELL.” “Fuck the Tories”. “Poor quality housing kills too”. “You all deserved so much better”. “Missing you is a never—ending sorrow”.

Notting Hill is where the architects of Austerity lived: it is also the site of its calamity. “Could Grenfell have happened elsewhere?” a man asks me. He answers his own question. “In other parts of Kensington and Chelsea, definitely not.” This part of Notting Hill ripples with fury: there are makeshift memorials in scrubby gardens, and on walls. I find a list of 18 children who died in the fire, one still born. Even so — or, rather, for this reason — dream Notting Hill is winning, being pretty, better funded, and a movie star.

Here I am, walking down Benefits Street, behaving no better than Channel 4 when it put a camera on a drug addict called Fungi — he named himself for mould — lamenting the loss of his child. This late Victorian street is fascinating, but TV can turn anything into Madame Tussauds. The houses are small, and neat, but the overriding aesthetic is bins.

Birmingham Council has a mad bin policy. Each tiny house has two vast black bins outside it. As if in fury at this mad bin policy, the street is filled with rubbish. When I discuss this with the residents — they all talk about rubbish — they blame each other. This is a very ethnically diverse area, and they blame eastern Europeans. If I were Channel 4, I would find an eastern European to defend himself — did you drop that nappy, did you? — but I’m not, and I don’t.

As if to delight Channel 4, the first thing I see is a robbery, and it is barely 10am. With sublime irony, it takes place opposite HMP Birmingham, which dominates Winson Green: there used to be a workhouse and an asylum too, but only the prison made it. There is scuffling, and a young woman punches her way out of a corner shop and hurries across the road. She was stealing food worth pennies, says the woman who works in the shop. She tells me not to worry. It happens every day. It’s easy for a tourist to find what they are looking for here: despair. I see a homeless woman near the tram stop, scrabbling on the floor for silver she has dropped. She is frightened it will be stolen, and she grapples with the dirt.

But James Turner Street is more functional than it looks: or, rather, it isn’t special. The man who owns the MOT shop — that is the industry here now, cars and corner shops — suggests that, if it were honest, Benefits Street would have been a franchise, with an outpost in every town. “What they [Channel 4] tried to isolate — ‘this is the dump of the UK!’ — it isn’t,” he says. “Every area you go to you will find a street where people are going through similar struggles. It is just another street. It’s in line with the rest of the UK. It has become worse [in the last decade]. The only ones who are benefitting are the upper class.”

We stare at business owners, landlords, driving Range Rovers past his window. He knew Stephen “Smoggy” Smith, “the 50p man” from TV, who sold household goods for 50p. He had a kind heart — he gave things away to struggling parents — but he moved on. Everyone who starred in the show has moved on, been imprisoned, or died. The only one I manage to contact is Sherrell Dillion, now a successful model. She sends me a courteous message on Instagram, but she can’t face talking about the show: “I’ve spoken about Benefits Street until my legs fall off.”

There is an Ofsted-rated “outstanding” school on the corner and, opposite it, the community garden. I am given a tour by a kindly old man. He shows me compost “fully rotted down”, which he sells for £4 a bag, the wildlife sanctuary — birds, squirrels, “rats of course” — and the herb beds for local families. On Bonfire Night they had 200 people, and fire pits. “They [Channel 4] weren’t interested in anyone with a functional life,” he says. “They picked on people with benefits, they picked on the ones who were more colourful, so to speak. It helped to sell the programme.”

I see an elderly couple walking into a house. It belongs to the man’s brother, he says, who is in hospital. He is happy to let me in. And here it is: the fictionalised house. The decor is from the Seventies, when wages in Birmingham were among the highest in the country: they collapsed within a decade as manufacturing did, though Benefits Street didn’t talk about that. The carpets are dark swirls; the wallpaper is a pattern of red poppies; there is a horse figurine on the gas fire, and seascapes on the walls; the small Christmas tree is dying in its pot. The woman is cleaning a stain from the red velveteen couch on her knees.

Suggested reading

Why sneer at Wetherspoons?

By Chris Arnade

He tells me that 2014 was an odd time in the history of the street. There were alcoholics and drug addicts here: “a period when they all seemed to come together”. His brother likes it here: “He’s not an adventurous person. He’s lonely, and he took to drink.” He tried gardening to ease his loneliness, by taking part in an allotment scheme: “It fell by the wayside and disappeared. No one is left from that time.” Or almost no one. They tell me to call on a lady four doors down. I knock, a face peers out of the front window, and an ancient woman opens the door a crack. She has lived here for 50 years, she says. “They [Channel 4] never came to my house. I don’t smoke cigs,” — and she laughs — “I don’t smoke ganja.” Her husband is dead and she tells me she thinks she will die soon.

“Everything has changed here. It was lovely,” — and she points down the street — “Mrs Shaw lived there. And,” — she squeezes her forehead up — “I can’t remember her name. It’s my home. I paid for it. Not council. My husband was a bus driver. We had hanging baskets: lovely plants. There is rubbish everywhere. God forgive me. I am not telling a lie. I won’t do anything about it because I will soon be gone. We all have to go sometime. This street has gone to the dogs — that’s what I say. We are human beings.”

She points down the street: “They are gone. They are gone. They are gone”. She opens the door wider. Her small living room is very hot, and gaudily decorated. She points at a photograph of her hanging baskets in bloom: so I will believe that they existed.

I bump into a man who worked for 47 years as a lorry driver. It is important to him that I know this. “I refused to go on [the show],” he says. “They didn’t say they wanted people on the dole. I can show you the paperwork. They never said nothing about a job centre, [about] benefits. They didn’t tell people what they were doing. They said it was about the community.” He shuffles off in anger, still smarting at the insult. But still he turns back and adds: “I have been burgled 28 times.” Then I meet Jay, a youngish man with paper bags of new goods. “It’s a shithole!” he exclaims. “No matter what street you pick, it is definitely the shitter end of Birmingham. But you could have thrown a dart at any major city in Britain: Birmingham, Liverpool, London, and you would have hit a James Turner Street. We drew the short straw there and ended up on the telly. I should imagine it would ruin your life if you were on drugs.” I think of Fungi, later to become a ghostly tabloid staple. He died in 2019.

He points towards HMP Birmingham: “There are more criminals this side of the fence than that side. You could have picked any street in any big city and found characters like that. Apparently, some of them did well out of it.” I follow him home. He lives in an HMO [house of multiple occupation] “with three men from Gambia who smoke weed”. We sit in the living room, which has a vast red sofa and a vase of plastic flowers. It smells of bleach because they are cleaning up after a mouse infestation. It got so bad the landlord moved a cat into the front bedroom. I also meet Minnie the English bulldog who, Jay says, “saved me”. She places herself between us, and growls. Minnie is trained to bark at people wearing face masks and carrying pipes. I also meet his flatmate, who is masked, though Minnie doesn’t bark at him. Jay introduces me as his probation officer.

Jay shows me his housing benefit papers: the landlord gets £1,000 per room per month from the taxpayer, or almost £50,000 a year for a house worth £100,000, with no hot water downstairs “apart from the shower”, cockroaches, and mice. This stuns me but Jay wants to talk about crime. He’s been in HMP Birmingham — “one of the best prisons in the UK” — for violence and theft, “though I’ve calmed down now. It’s much better than Strangeways. The drug scene is terrible here. Crack, heroin, cannabis: you name it. These HMOs aren’t helping.” Drug dealers steal from each other. They find cannabis plants using heat sensors and smash their way in, but no one is arrested because you can’t telephone the police and say your cannabis plants have been stolen.

Jay went into a spiral when his mother died. He split up with his partner, his children were taken into care, and he started drinking. “I think I’m coming out the other end of it,” he says. “I could do with moving from here to be honest.” He stares at me: “If you’re looking to start again this isn’t the place to do it. People keep themselves to themselves. It’s hard to start a new life here. It’s hard to live on benefits. Most people are on benefits, and I don’t know how. I look around me, and everyone I know is on the sick. There are five people living in this house and not one person works. How can that be? I don’t see anyone putting into the pot. How can everyone I know be taking out?”

He was offered a job at the carwash round the corner, he says, for £10 per six-hour day in mid-winter. The minimum wage is £10.42 an hour, not £1.66, but the owner trusted the taxpayer would intercede. Now Jay is off for depression: “They will sign anyone off for that. I have been on the sick for two years.” He used to fit ventilated wall systems in London and wishes he could again, but he lost his licence for drink-driving. “The gaffer wouldn’t touch it. I shamed the company.” The next day I go back to say goodbye. His housemate answers the door. Cannabis smoke flows around him like a special effect. He says Jay is asleep and can’t be disturbed.

I leave, knowing that there are variations of Jay in the inner suburbs of all of our cities, but we don’t see them. Channel 4 made a fiction from a whole class — and a fiction can be easily ignored. It was. It still is.

Dorries was MP for Mid Bedfordshire for 18 years, rising to Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport under Johnson. She was the ultimate loyalist and when he fell, her grief was real.

She presents herself as an ingénue — Tinkerbell with a Range Rover at the age of 66. When invited to the Wolseley restaurant, she frets that she will not understand the menu. Perhaps she thinks this makes her sound relatable. But nothing could. While she simpers and flirts with older politicians, there’s another perhaps truer side to Dorries: a raging one. When a journalist enquired about employing her daughter during the expenses scandal, she threatened to nail his balls to the floor using his own front teeth.

The Plot reads like a Facebook conspiracy theory: the Tory Party has a parasite within. It is called “the Movement” and it consists of Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove, Lee Cain, Dougie Smith from Central Office and someone called “Dr No” that a lawyer wouldn’t let her name. The movement is connected to CCHQ and the Spectator magazine: some of them came from the Confederation of Conservative Students and wanted to kill Nelson Mandela; some of them went to Fever sex parties. They destroyed Boris Johnson by surrounding him with traitors and leaking against him. The Movement wanted to keep us in the EU by taking us out of the EU. I don’t follow either, but she insists it is true.

More from this author

Russell Brand's latest addiction

By Tanya Gold

Dorries’s prose is deranged for a former Secretary of State. She says the Movement is like an elephant, but it is also like a mouse. They eat rats. (I think this is a metaphor.) She believes in “small state, big people” and talks to portraits of dead politicians: “Was it different in your day, Walpole?” He doesn’t reply. Croissants smile up at her and villains step out of fantasy fiction. Dominic Cummings is the Dark Lord, but he is also Sauron. Both have eyes, she notes carefully, in what may be the oddest paragraph. Even Cummings would admit to that.

One part is heartfelt, though: her portrait of Boris Johnson. She is so clearly in love with him, there is almost nothing left to say, except it’s piteous. She visits him, marvels at him, flatters him, and she wrote this junk to place at his feet. She is awed by him: or, rather, by her invention of him — she paints him as credulous, sweet-natured, a saint. She says Johnson’s flaw is thinking too well of people. Perhaps that is true. If he thinks well of them, they might think well of him. If he forgives them, they might forgive him.

He is the hero, a man just out of reach. “Never be bitter,” is his advice to her, “no good will ever come from it.” Since they cannot make love, she admires his bookshelf (some ancient Greek, a Robert Harris novel) and repeats rumours about Michael Gove to him. She is attracted, above all, by his gilded class: Dorries loves private clubs and servants; cucumber water and roaring fires. She interviews Iain Duncan Smith, who calls Gove: “The poor boy on a wet night in the cold outside looking through the brightly lit window into an opulent room with shining tableware and a roaring fire at this exotic, privileged life.” Gove, c’est moi. No wonder she loathes him.

When Gove and Johnson were at Oxford, Gove hung around, “like a love-sick school-boy just waiting to be in the company of Boris”.  She tells Johnson, “He was hanging around for you. That he was bedazzled by you because you were what he could never be, as he was with Cameron, only you were first.” To his credit, Johnson merely says, as anyone would: “Really?”

More from this author

Will Uxbridge ever trust again?

By Tanya Gold

There is no politics in this book because Dorries is, at heart, a bad artist, all (self) sensibility and no skill: I think that is why she is drawn to Johnson, who is the same. She lost the whip in 2013 for appearing in I’m a Celebrity, the house of masochism. Her most intense political position is: the No. 10 coffee was poor.

Her constituents knew it. She left parliament after Johnson’s attempt to give her a peerage was ruined: for a time, Mid Beds had no functioning MP. When I went there to cover the by-election, I heard no good word about her. She didn’t live in the constituency; she employed family members. Mid Beds must have disappointed her, and it was mutual: it went Labour.

But now she has this, a glutinous piece of self-deception that tells a kind of truth: the Tory Party is riven with dreams, hatred, and, above all, thwarted sex. She is like the protagonist in The Little Stranger, who, seeking the murderer in the mirror, fails to recognise her own reflection. She doesn’t accept that Johnson had no judgment; that he isn’t an epoch-defining genius (Robert Harris novels?); that she is as addicted to intrigue as anyone; that they are both symptoms of that same decay. “He had zero remorse or self-awareness. Zero regret,” she says of Cummings. It’s projection.

The Plot has one real aim, I think, and it is cynical and daring: it makes Boris Johnson look serious enough to be prime minister again. Placed beside Dorries, who wouldn’t? Perhaps that was the plot all along: the redemption of Boris with Dorries as ecstatic suicide in his service. She knows this book will destroy the remains of her reputation. I suspect she revels in it. Romance fiction has triumphed over reality: Gotterdammerung.

Blackpool is odd: a suicide on morphine. Shops sell fake breasts and dildos made of sugar, or mobility scooters and junk food side by side. The pavements are smeared with filth. And yet, when you think all the ugliness in the world has gathered, you will find a ballroom dancer in black tie stealing down a street in patent shoes. Brand, too, was made for Blackpool. Destruction, and renewal.

Brand’s tour, which ends today at the Brixton Academy, is a display, and the meditation is the most important part: the part that is most meaningful to him. It’s the reveal of a show he calls “33” because he thought that was the age at which he would die. What is public meditation for a man as noisy and self-destructive as Brand: health signalling? Performative recovery? WELLNESS in lights? Brand is myriad — actor, polemicist, activist, comic — his most dominant self is former heroin addict. Though he is almost 20 years sober, addiction can chase a man his whole life, and terrify him with a glimpse of what he was. And yet, the man thinks, if he can meditate in front of a thousand strangers in Blackpool, he must be safe. It’s a truism that a comic needs an audience more than an audience needs a comic, but it’s truer of Brand than of anyone. He needs us. He says so. “How much attention does one man need?” he asks. “We don’t yet know. We haven’t found the upper threshold”.

I am not here for Brand: not really. I have read his memoirs, and I feel I know everything he is prepared to tell us, and himself. I couldn’t get through his polemic Revolution, which he wrote at his wealthy girlfriend’s country house. His childhood was broken. He thought his mother’s recurring cancer was his fault, and his father, on holiday, ordered prostitutes for them both in a room they shared. He almost killed himself, and then didn’t. He is candid about everything except his anger: the kind of addict who is so ashamed he tells you everything. He is a very typical comedian in some ways: a man seeking his father’s affirmation from the stage. He very obviously finds it agonising when hecklers interrupt him. He must be heard. He is a very typical addict too: softness and savagery twinned.

What interests me most about Brand is not him, though he is charismatic. It is his reach, the people who come to see him, and what they can tell us about political alienation. If he was a movie star in 2010 — he is an under-rated actor, not least by himself, but he’s less afraid of his rage on screen — he is now a YouTube demagogue flirting with conspiracism and posting to 5.65 million followers. Typical posts are: “So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!”; “You’ve Been LIED To About Why Ukraine War Began”; “Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers??!”

More from this author

Why I am an addict

By Tanya Gold

The doors open at 5pm. I watch them gather. I would call his constituency either fragile and seeking, or angry and untrusting. The first group, many of whom have risen from a sickbed, admire his personal transformation — his recovery from heroin addiction and the book he then wrote, ripped off from AA’s 12 Steps: Freedom from our Addictions. You aren’t supposed to monetise AA, but he has a very personal definition of humility. “You feel he really does care about people,” says one woman. “He’s been through so many things himself and he’s still keeping going. He still comes out for people.”

The second group admire his YouTube channel which segues from mistrust of the Establishment to disinformation and alienation. They ask me who I write for because they do not trust the press. “He knows exactly what’s going on,” says one woman. “He just makes people aware [of corruption]. I wouldn’t vote for anyone. There’s no one worth voting for.”

I meet a superfan videoing herself by the stage door. Social media is important: as if by broadcasting, you will be listened to. It’s one of his contradictions: Brand says that if we were forced to carry iPhones we would smash them up ourselves. Yet he depends on them. “Much as he is an intellectual,” she says, “he teaches you in a nice way and actually I’d like to rip his pants off.” Her friend likes “his videos about conspiracy things. Well, they aren’t conspiracies. They are conspiracies for six months and then they are facts.”

For another man, it’s a modern political — or apolitical — encounter: he and Russell found each other through algorithm. “He’s saying the right thing,” he says. “A lot of the information that Russell finds is what I’ve found. Covid is an excuse for where they want to take us. It’s all through fear.” He fears tyranny, this man, but another contradiction is that Brand, who despises conventional political practises, will take him closer to it. “All political parties are the same”, he says. “He [Brand] manages to channel anger or discontent in a positive direction.”

I sit in the gods, which are like a velvet cliff edge, next to a serene sex therapist and her Italian husband. She is disappointed that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader of the Labour Party. She has no plan to vote in a general election: she thinks there is no point. I look up her constituency, which is a Tory/Labour marginal. Her vote does matter. But Brand, despite his personal message of empowerment, would have his followers more disempowered. It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message. It’s fine for a rich man to shrug off politics. He doesn’t need them. He can invent his own, and he does. He is not so very different from the men he despises. They lay false trails.

The show is in four parts. The first is pandemic-themed stand-up, and it is good stand-up. It’s self-aware, and therefore bearable. He mocks the audience and himself. During the clap for carers, he tells us, he was a medical worker so the applause would be directed at him. He collects testimony of pandemic-themed shame from the audience — he’s very interested in shame — and tells a story about a man who wiped his bum on a face mask, and a woman who drunk wine in a Zoom work meeting, and pretended it was tea. When he gets to the audience member who masturbated to something under every letter in the Pornhub alphabet, he invites us to shout the words: tea-bagging; wanking; zebra.

More from this author

The cowardice of the far Left

By Tanya Gold

The second part speaks to his YouTube audience, and it’s a lie: that you can be more politically engaged by placing your faith not in your democratically elected politicians but in him. Love is not a mandate — if it is even love, rather than the narcotic of attention and praise — but the root of this is clear enough: he didn’t trust his father. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “I start there”. This sounds like his most authentic self. “I start at ‘fuck off’.”

“The system wants you hypnotised and stupefied,” he says, as if government is only a meeting of Spectre. “We are told that we are participants in our democracy. That we are adults. That we matter. That our voice will be heard. That we would be able to organise society through the ballot box because you are adults and your voice matters. That is one of the myths of our time.”

Brand is weirdly Manichean. He appears to divide the world into two parts, and they are solid, and immutable. The evil are evil, and will remain so. The good are here, as if buying a ticket to “33” is a kind of protective spell. Sometimes he tends to Luddism and talks as if he would like to live in some kind of idealised village, or circle, and why wouldn’t he? He’s strong, and a man.

The third part is the hug part, and it’s the weirdest part. Having divested us of the desire for representative democracy he becomes a healer. It begins in the interval. He jumps down from the stage, and waits there, and people fill the aisles to hug him. It looks intensely silly, but they are moved by him. I wonder if this is the replacement — and true destination — for his sex addiction: intimacy, which other people have paid for. (I return, in my mind, to his father and the prostitutes.) I wonder if this is the real point of the exercise. They come, one after the after, for hugs of all kinds — swift, flirty, soulful — and photographs, and a combination of the two: the soulful hug selfie.

At the end of the show, he puts on a blue pointed party hat, like a wizard, and leaves the auditorium through the main exits, to hug people in the street outside. I notice he has a personal photographer and videographer: a slender man in black with a professional expression who follows him and who records every interaction. Does Brand archive them, and look back on them: on every piece of love? People cry in his arms. He whispers to them. He takes a picture of himself with us all behind him, like an army. It’s so obviously his new addiction there is barely anything left to say: a delusion into which he carries others, by the sheer force of his charisma, and his silly pointy hat. And he won’t know where to stop. He never does. And then he goes back inside for a mass meditation. The audience at Lancashire’s biggest theatre close their eyes and pray.

More from this author

Adam Kay's dangerous misogyny

By Tanya Gold

At the end, when he has hugged everyone who waited, I listen to them praise him. “You can’t have control over what’s going on in the world, but you can have control over yourself,” says one. It’s a doctrine of renewal, but so atomised as to be meaningless. “He’s got that attention to the working class,” says another. “He is like us,” says the third, “a free thinker [who] cares about everyone in the world, not ground down by politicians and big corporate companies. He cares about individual people.”

But does he? I think he is using them, and, worse, they let him. Brand is another symptom of our alienation: of the fracturing of the institutions that we need. We will see more, and different Brands in future, as the centre falls away. They will blow in on the wind. His doctrine of disengagement will change nothing for them. Will they notice? Will they care? I wonder if, in the end, they have confused politics with love. Or, rather, magic.

Uxbridge and South Ruislip is part of the tongue-shaped Tory stronghold in northwest London. It is a land of highly skilled, self-employed non-graduates. It has a Conservative council, was immune to Blairism, and is so Conservative in spirit it still has a Conservative Club whose carpet is the colour of Margaret Thatcher’s suits. It was Boris Johnson’s constituency (a 7,210 majority on 68.5% turnout in 2019) until he resigned from Parliament, rather than face a by-election as punishment for misleading it.

Johnson may be a coward and a fool, but he is still liked here by the people he mirrors: white, semi-affluent, late middle-aged. I think he might have won if he had stood, and it was as good an opportunity for a personal redemption as any. Uxbridge Woman is close to Essex Man: they forgive him Partygate because they would have done the same. “We love Boris,” a woman says, adding: “He just didn’t care.” She laughs. “He’s down to earth. He’s human.” But he baulked, and into the vacuum he made in Uxbridge and South Ruislip — the vacuum that is his legacy, and his mirror — all the oddities floated in.

The numbers are on a whiteboard outside the Underground station courtesy of Star Sports betting. They have sent a political analyst for the day. He says Labour will win this seat, and, in homage, their activists sweep through the high street with their candidate, Danny Beales, 29, a local councillor who grew up in Ruislip, the child of a single parent. They avoid journalists, and then retire to Wagamama. I see the deputy leader of the Welsh Labour Party browsing a charity shop in a straw hat. I am not so sure about Labour: the only certainty is that voters are volatile and emotional, and Uxbridge Person has a problem with Keir Starmer. Voting is a consumer act now — something generated in the subconscious — and they don’t trust him. He doesn’t have Johnson’s fake authenticity and will to drama: a powerful drug when you are trying to avoid reality. The most common responses to questions about Starmer are “I don’t like him” or “I don’t know”. Johnson, one woman says, “doesn’t bother to bury the bodies”.

The analyst is so sure Labour will win, he is now wondering which of the novelty candidates will do best: there are 17 in all, so many that “mainstream” candidates avoid hustings, for fear of looking like attendees at a politicised fancy dress party. There used to be one or two novelty candidates in any by-election: now there is a glut. Now he is calculating Laurence Fox (Reclaim) versus Count Binface (Count Binface Party). Fox is slightly ahead because he did nine series of Lewis and Binface is mostly on Twitter. Novelty candidates fish in the same pool. The main battle is happening off-scene. I do see the Tory candidate Steve Tuckwell — a former postman, a fact that is presented like a jewel on a velvet cushion — in the Three Tuns Pub, but his press man won’t let me approach him. I stare at him as if he is a flamingo while he holds his pint.

More from this author

What if King Charles were your landlord?

By Tanya Gold

The most devoted novelty candidate is Piers Corbyn of Let London Live. He is Jeremy Corbyn’s brother, and he looks like Albert Einstein made homeless. He parks his blue Vauxhall opposite the station. It has a loudhailer on the roof from which plays a song to the tune of “It’s Beginning to Look a Lot like Christmas”. It substitutes the word Christmas with Genocide (“with every jab you take”). Later, he plays conspiracy-theory rap. I can only think: what happened at a Corbyn childhood Christmas? He is accompanied by a press officer who says he is banned from sleeping rough in Westminster. “I am the candidate the Establishment fear,” Corbyn says, which is not true.

He is opposed to Covid lockdowns and Ulez (ultra-low emission zones, a tax of £12.50 a day for non-compliant cars that Sadiq Khan is extending here next month). Corbyn reminds me that he was arrested 16 times for protesting lockdown. He says the Underground is 40 times more polluting than roads. He says that if Sadiq Khan cares about pollution he would shut down the Underground, and that carbon dioxide is not a pollutant: we need more of it. Corbyn is a constant by Uxbridge station, performing his dark carnival, and the council have their revenge at teatime. They give him a parking ticket.

It is obvious that conspiracism, incubated under Covid, has mainlined in British politics, walking from Facebook to life. This is the first by-election where working-class Tory-leaning women tell me it doesn’t really matter who is in charge. If this is Johnson’s legacy, they don’t yet know it. “Rishi is trying,” says one, “but it’s hard to do a job with your hands tied behind your back. Somebody kicks him down. They’ve already got their person to put in.”

A retired bricklayer tells me the Tories have done nothing wrong; that people are greedy for benefits; that the state can’t do everything for people. I meet another who doesn’t know why he votes Tory but will anyway, like a contraction. Another is sorry that Johnson left: “Who’d have a pandemic?” I find no Tory who is happy he has gone.

I meet raging Labour voters. “They [the Conservatives] are for the little people, not the big people,” says one: he can’t afford to go out after he has paid his rent, and is aghast at Sunak’s wealth. Another thinks the Tories “are idiots”; yet another calls Sunak “Fishy Rishi”, but as a former Liberal Democrat alienated by the coalition government of 2010-15, his main complaint seems to be against Jo Swinson’s wardrobe. He has a resentment against her cardigan: “You do have to look the part. And then she just disappeared like a house of cards collapsed. She just vanished into thin air like AI. Like she never was.” Two young men say they will vote Labour when they can vote — they are 16 — as “we are falling apart now”. They are sophisticated, and despondent. “Everything is going downhill. Every year it just gets worse and worse. Imagine what it be like in ten years. Everything has doubled in price. It’s not very safe. Somebody gets stabbed every day.” They never saw Johnson in the constituency. Then one says what I think is the most profound thing anyone has ever said about him, and he says it with great seriousness: Johnson was a meme.

Then there are the apolitical, the non-voters. One calls himself “helpless. It’s all a game. There is no change. It just rolls on and rolls on. The top people stay at the top.” He is functional, but sounds despairing, as if he carries his sorrow in his pocket. A woman in a Little Miss Trouble T-shirt tells me Starmer “is much of the same thing [to Sunak]. Labour and the Conservatives seem to have meshed together.” Inevitably, I meet someone who thinks Johnson is still prime minister.

In the D2o Boardgame Cafe, the man behind the counter says his clientele “are completely disengaged. This is a Conservative constituency, and we are an LGBTQ+ board game cafe. The younger people are red-leaning, but I don’t know if they are even going to vote.” Like many in the constituency, he is against Ulez; it is cross-party anger that the Tories hope to exploit. “I think anything that uses a fine as a method of discouragement is classist,” he says. “If you can afford a flat in central London, you can afford to pay the Ulez charge. All it is going to do is affect the people who need to work in London but can’t afford to live there.”

I walk the high street with the Rejoin EU candidate Richard Hewison; Uxbridge voted Leave, alongside four other London boroughs and the whole of Essex. We meet two repentant Brexit voters in 30 yards. “I got caught up in the narrative, and me and my whole family voted to leave the EU,” says one man, “in hindsight, a terrible mistake.”

David Simmonds, the MP for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner, is “the candidate’s friend”. He sits in the bar of the Conservative Club, which has a quasi-Italian stone garden: wet, aesthetic Toryism. He looks phlegmatic, calm. The Conservative Council is very popular here, he says and voters are proud that Uxbridge is different from the centre of London (“there are deer in the woods, there are rivers, there are lakes”). Tory voters, he says, are most worried about the tax burden.

Suggested reading

Will the hard Left ever leave campus?

By Nicholas Harris

I meet Leo Phaure, a business analyst and independent candidate, on the square. His campaign is gaudy. His children are leafleting. “Vote for no-Ulez-Leo,” he tells a man who looks like him. “We send a strong message to the Labour Party that they potentially lose Labour voters in next year’s election. We have got a unique opportunity in this town — no one else has got this opportunity — to send a message to Keir Starmer that we reject Mayor Khan and Ulez.  We send a message that if you still support him in next year’s General Election, you are going to lose London boroughs. You can’t have any policy where you [are] persecuting the pockets of the working man.”

He turns to a bystander and says: “I’ve got nothing to hide, I’m not Danny Beales.” (Beales didn’t turn up at the Brunel University hustings on Thursday). They hate Ulez because they think it is unfair: one couple say their daughter had to sell her car and buy a BMW. “And the buses are rubbish,” says a woman. “My seven-year-old grandson says to me: ‘That’s the bus that lies, Nanny.’” Even public transport is deceitful, and in homage to this fear, Beales now says that Ulez should be delayed.

The thing that unites Uxbridge voters is mistrust. If by-elections are a weathervane, this one points to disconnection, to ennui. Five years ago, a car singing about genocide would be an outlier: something bizarre. Now it feels common. Johnson’s danger was always in his precedent. His unseriousness — his sense of carnival — is toxic. Novelty candidates are all his children.

At dusk, the Star Sports betting white board has changed. It is now wondering which minor candidate will get 5%. As I leave, police surround a woman in pink. She has written “Army and Police Traitors” on a pillar under a cross. She starts to shout, holding her Bible in the air: “I am a homeless with a Bible! In London! Hallelujah!” They handcuff her. Corbyn takes his loud-hailer — it seems attached to him — and accuses them of torture as they take her to the van. He identifies with her sorrow: “I have been arrested…”

I ask a policeman: what is happening? “We didn’t arrest her. She is threatening to kill herself. We can’t just leave her.” He indicated his iPad: “I am telephoning her Mum.” This is Metroland. Anything can happen.

This is Not a Drill just left Germany, where there were attempts to ban it. In Frankfurt, he played the venue where Jews were imprisoned after the Kristallnacht riots and in Poland his shows were cancelled. These cries have snowballed: the US government and Keir Starmer have pointed out Waters’s antisemitism. “Sixty fucking years [of making music] and they’re trying to cancel me, and it hurts,” he says later.

Yet here he is. The anti-Waters faction complained that he dresses as an SS officer in the show — he doesn’t; it is a generic fascist uniform — that he placed a Star of David on an inflatable pig — he did, a decade ago — and that, by mentioning Anne Frank in a list of victims of tyranny, he defames her. The last is true, because Waters believes that a Jewish conspiracy overthrew Jeremy Corbyn, fixed the result of the 2019 general election, and controls Keir Starmer. It’s a variation of the conspiracy theory that killed Anne Frank.

The protest has Israeli flags and a series of Pink Floyd-related signs: “Hey Roger, Leave us Jews Alone”; “From the Dark Side of the Moon to the Wrong Side of History”. One is more pointed: “Your Daddy Didn’t Fight the Nazis for you to Desecrate the Holocaust”. Eric Waters was killed in the battle of Anzio in 1944, when Waters was five months old, and I think his interest in fascism — his parodic fascism, which he communicates with fists and leather, and sympathy for Putin and Assad — comes from this loss. To inhabit something, to impersonate it, is to control it: Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy” for a 79-year-old rock star. Firing a fake machine gun while wearing a leather coat with double hammer insignia is plausibly theatre; naming Jews as players in a demonic conspiracy is deadly.

The crowd must navigate Waters’s passion and they do it in different ways. First, they must pass the protest, which angers them, because it is a rebuke, when they are having fun. When you go into dinner, you don’t want to talk to the food. Some pause and shout: “Free, free Palestine!”

There are reasonable people here: an army of bystanders to the latest eruption of antisemitism. It’s weekly now. Some of them want to reassure. They pause to say that the fascist uniform is satire, the flying Star of David pig is satire. Waters, they say, is Pink from The Wall. “He campaigns against demagoguery”: a hard sell from a stage in a massive arena. “Roger loves everyone!” “I think this is wrong, because it’s not Roger”. “He’s got nothing against Jews, you’re blowing it all out of proportion”. “It’s ironic”. Then they ease off, with saddened eyes. “I just like the songs,” pleads one man, and in he goes.

More from this author

Russell Brand's latest addiction

By Tanya Gold

But there are also the unreasonable. A man stops to shout: “Racist! Apartheid state! Down with Israel! You are killing Palestinians! You hate Muslims! Mass murderers, you are mass murderers, you have turned oppressors, you have forgotten about the Holocaust! You are creating a Holocaust on the Palestinians! Are only your lives important?”

An immaculately dressed man mutters, “pathetic, scum….” on passing: is it so painful to walk past a flag held by a Jew? I see him again later, saying into a telephone, “Meet me where the Israelites were protesting”. I go in, passing a woman raging at the protest, dressed as a rainbow.

Inside, in the queue, an affable man from Newcastle tells me: “I think he’s cracked. Like lots of geniuses.” He can’t say why Waters moves him. It comes from a place without words.

The show opens with a statement about the events in Germany, projected onto a screen: “Regardless of the consequences of the attacks against me, I will continue to condemn injustice and all those who perpetrate it.” This gets a moderate cheer, which will disappoint him. They are here for the music and if some of them half or wholly believe him — I’m not sure how many Corbynites can afford the O2 — for others it is only the price of entry, nodding alone as he says Fuck the Occupation, Fuck the Roman Empire, Fuck Drones. But he doesn’t know it. “If you are one of those ‘I love Pink Floyd but I don’t like Roger’s politics’ people,” says an announcer, “you might do well to fuck off to the bar.” But they don’t.

The stage is arranged as a piano bar, for intimacy and the flow of ideas. It is another of Waters’s delusions because, the following night, when a man unfurls an Israeli flag in the arena, his opinion is not suffered in “the bar”, and he is manhandled away. Tonight, though, Waters says he wants to “exchange human feelings. All of you in the O2 are in the bar with me somehow.”

Waters speaks his distress. “I don’t know if anyone’s ever tried to cancel any of you. I’ve watched other people being cancelled. I watched Jeremy Corbyn be cancelled by the Israeli lobby. That is what happened in 2019. I know you didn’t come here to listen to this,” he moans, “and I didn’t come here to tell you.” Didn’t you? “If only I didn’t have to tell you, if only these fuckers weren’t trying to cancel me, but they are, and I’m not going to let them do it. I’m fighting back.” A man screams: “I love you!” “I love you,” Waters replies, “whoever you are”, unaware that he who loves everyone loves no one.

He attacks the Tory-turned-Labour MP Christian’s Wakeford’s criticisms of him: Wakeford, whose constituency has a large Jewish community, complained about the mention of Anne Frank, the flying Star of David pig, and the “SS” uniform. “Star of David on a giant pig, blah, blah, blah,” he says. “Guess what Christian? I didn’t. Do your research you cripple!” The crowd, listening patiently, as if watching a man they admire shout at a broken Teasmade, emits a murmur of confusion. Surely this is a banned word? “You are making shit up because you’ve been told to by your masters in the Foreign Office in Tel Aviv. Because this hate — hate, this hate! — is being organised from Israel. Alright..” And he slumps a little, “The Bar…” And he sings.

Suggested reading

Anti-Semitism runs deep in Britain

By Matthew Sweet

This is Not a Drill is explicit: Waters believes that the world is controlled by a cabal that includes Bush, and Obama, and Clinton and Biden (“war criminal — just getting started”), and arms companies and Israel, but not Putin, who appears briefly next to a sign that reads “Believe”. The music is better than the politics; others helped him make the music, and the politics are all his own. The music is incredible: Waters has finessed his screaming over 60 years.

We are, for our entertainment, told, in song and image, that we are dolls, robots, babies, sheep: that we are inhuman, and at the mercy of a demagogue that Waters inhabits but in no way is. “It’s theatre, darling!”

I goggle when the Fuck the Patriarchy sign blooms on the screen because Waters’s feminism is not convincing. The two women on stage are young and lovely, though the men are not. The bass guitarist and the saxophonist get long solos; the women do not. Waters squeezes himself past them, saying, “Shanay, squeeze, Amanda, squeeze”; he’s a rocker Benny Hill. The following night, he will insult Polly Samson, the wife of his former bandmate Dave Gilmour, who called him an antisemite on Twitter in February. “Imagine waking up to that every morning,” he says, and I am reminded he has been married five times. The next morning, Gilmour posts a picture of Samson, saying he is glad to wake up with her. Waters has a gift for making people sing to his tunes. He does it here.

By the end, the crowd is sated on Waters’s combination of exultation and grief. Most of them stand by Waters because they love the music of Pink Floyd. It’s good show, but not a good excuse.

Sammy Fabelman lives in suburbia between two poles, real and metaphorical: his artist mother, who makes music, and his scientist father, who makes machines. Both parents are, in their own ways, thwarted and incomplete: his mother cannot have her art — she is a pianist, but gave it up to raise her children — and his father cannot have his family, because he is a workaholic. Sammy learns, as artists do, to create a world he can control.

He can change the world by filming it: change its emphasis; change his place in it. Sammy films, without realising it at first, his mother’s touch on his father’s best friend during a camping trip and learns that she is unfaithful. The insinuation — and this is the most self-aware thing in The Fabelmans — is that cinema is a poisonous medium: eat from the tree of knowledge and be cast out of paradise. But Sammy collapses to its incredible power to transform. The antisemitic bully of his schooldays in Arizona becomes a hero through Sammy’s lens, so much so that even the bully is humiliated by it. Sammy makes him small by making him big and sends him back to the world with his shame.

The shame, though, was Spielberg’s: in making The Fabelmans he is collapsing to the very power that he describes. Why can he not be honest about the scale of his ambivalence? According to his biographer, Joseph McBride, Spielberg was so ashamed of his Judaism he once pretended he did not know his own grandfather. “And suddenly,” Spielberg said, “my grandfather, with the yarmulke, comes out of our house, two houses down, and yells: ‘Shmuel! Shmuel! [Steven’s Hebrew name]. I’m not answering him. I’m pretending I don’t know him. I’m denying that name. My friend is saying, ‘He’s looking your way. Does he mean you?’ They point at me, and I’m saying ‘No, it’s not me’.”

Like all 20th-century American Jews, Spielberg grew up among stories of the Shoah — his parents talked about it constantly, inappropriately. I suspect this unimaginable loss was magnified by the loss of his family’s happiness, which shattered when his mother’s adultery was exposed: apparently by him. He was spoiled, though. “We never said no,” his mother Leah said in an interview. “Steve really did run us. He called the shots.” He describes her too: “We never grew up at home, because she never grew up.”

So, a shattered, gifted child: making himself big where he was once small. His sister Anne wrote the script for Big, in which a 12-year-old boy is given the body of an adult. He is fearful — what else could he be? Spielberg’s films are about anxiety. The truck (Duel) or the shark (Jaws) will kill you. Or the suburbs will: your own home. Suburban children are terrorised in Spielberg’s work. Their alien friend (though Spielberg is both Elliott and E.T.) is threatened; corpses rise from the ground (Poltergeist). He was very afraid as a child: “I used to be afraid of my hand shadow.”

Cinema is a solution to this, and this explains his monomania, and his skill. It is an act of survival. “I had no way to sublimate or channel those fears until I began telling stories to my younger sisters. This removed the fear from my soul and transferred it right into theirs.” Later he found a bigger audience. “One of the best ways to cope with it [fear] is to turn it around and put it out to others. I mean, if you are afraid of the dark, you put the audience in a dark theatre. I had a great fear of the ocean.” After Jaws, we all did. The great white shark was collateral damage.

More from this author

Russell Brand's latest addiction

By Tanya Gold

An obvious theme develops across his work: this man is preserved in childhood. He “can always trace a movie idea back to my childhood”. The mother is tortured; the father is lost. There are few politics in Spielberg’s films, and there is no sex. The sex scene in Indiana Jones is a man having sex with his mother. “Where,” she asks him during foreplay, “doesn’t it hurt?” Sometimes the child finds the absent father. In the final Indiana Jones film, I thought the grail was his father. Indiana says to Henry: “We never talked…”

And like a child, Spielberg is covetous, often unkind. He bought one of the Rosebud sleds in Citizen Kane, but he wouldn’t help Orson Welles, its creator, get work. Julia Phillips, his producer on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, called him “a writer fucker”. He can be amazingly obtuse, because he has lived his life in Hollywood and because he is always transmitting. He was so confident he would be nominated for the best director Academy Award for Jaws, he invited a news crew to film him watching the nominations. Only four came, including editing: no best director. According to Phillips, he had the editor, who won the Academy Award, kicked off his next film.

He had a public adolescence in 1993, with Schindler’s List: his acknowledgement of his Judaism. “The experience of making Schindler’s List made me reconcile with all of the reasons… I hid from my Jewishness,” he said in a 2017 documentary. “And it made me so proud to be a Jew.” Even so, it is a film about Jews non-Jews can live with, because it is about non-Jews: Oskar Schindler and the commandant Amon Göth.

It was Schindler he identified with, of course, as David Thomson noted: the morally complex showman, the maker of enamel, then souls. “The closest Schindler’s List comes to art may be in aiding Steven Spielberg to back into the upheld coat of his own mysterious, brilliant, actorly nature.” Again, it came from his childhood. He told The Jerusalem Post that the antisemitic school bully “never became my real friend. I was able to stop some of the hatred by, in a way, doing what Schindler did. Which was to charm him and make him a conspirator… Schindler consorted with the enemy, and he got what he wanted.”

He had wanted to film in Auschwitz but was forbidden. I had thought — how could he even ask? — but then I read about him: he is Steven Spielberg. He felt he could. His fake concentration camp outside Krakow is still there. I have seen it. I think he did Jews a real disservice with Schindler’s List, though unconsciously: his Nazis are glamourised while his Jews are a mute and terrorised mass.

Suggested reading

How American Jews lost themselves

By Ben Judah

Remember the last scene: the imposition of a redemptive ending, which felt more horrifying than anything that went before? How could he make such a film and then miss the point of it? A film-maker friend saw a rough cut of Schindler’s List: he reported no music, no child in a red coat, and no redemptive ending. He thought it was a masterpiece. But that is Spielberg. He cannot stop editorialising because he does not trust the audience, only himself. “I am the audience,” he said.

The usual complaint about Spielberg is that, a gifted child making cinema for less gifted children, he has turned cinema from the sophisticated art form of the Seventies into an anaesthetic. Pauline Kael said the problem isn’t Spielberg but his acolytes: “It’s not so much what Spielberg has done, but what he has encouraged. Everyone else has imitated his fantasies, and the result is an infantilisation of the culture.”

His response to this is typically hurt: “I think some people would like me to make a movie that explores the dark side and provides no easy answer to make the audience feel better when they return to their cars. If those critics want more pain in my films, they can give me $2 million — that’s all it would take to make a film about pain — and I’ll make that movie.” I like to think that the only thing standing between him and greatness is his self-deception — his insistence on his own affability — but the awful thing is I know he could make it. And I wish he would.

I wonder how much he understands himself: The Fabelmans, despite its beauty, suggests not at all. His wife, the actress Kate Capshaw, who starred in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, once asked him what happened to her career. “He said, ‘You weren’t supposed to have a career. You were supposed to be with me.’” It’s what happened to his mother precisely: it was the source of her anguish. He says so in The Fablemans. But I am not surprised that he forgets this. His films don’t deal with the characters’ relationships with one another. They deal with Spielberg’s relationship with himself. His work looks ever backwards to the glittering, and limiting, landscape of the child.

So feudalism returns to save us from ourselves and, like feudalism, Nansledan has a wild charisma. There is a granite obelisk at the roundabout, by the kind of Art Deco building you might see on the finer parts of the North Circular. It is made of Bodmin granite, and it marks the King’s first visit to Nansledan in 2014. I spend three days here — I was trapped after one of Cornwall’s rare snow flurries — and I think I know a lot about the king from the village that walked out of his head. There is something sensitive and thwarted about him — his watercolours are idealistic, and fragile — and Nansledan mirrors this. There are bird nooks in the walls of cottages, a herd of cows browsing in a wildflower meadow, and solar panels on roofs designed to look like slate. The school looks like the Overlook Hotel in The Shining — it has stolen its roofline — but that is a rare mistake, and surely not his. Everyone remarks on his taste.

There is a master plan. It shows sector after sector rising over 25 years, courtesy of approved builders: Morrish Homes; Wainhomes; C G Fry and Son. Eventually it will have 4,000 homes, produce one job in Nansledan for every household, and will meet up with Newquay Orchard, another expression of the king’s preoccupations, across the valley. (A stone at the base of a tree in the orchard says, rather ruefully: “We are all growing.”) It has principles which summon a village of the past, but with pain scrubbed out. There is no typhoid or indentured servitude here, though people are appreciative of the king, and talk about him fondly: “You know he’s coming when people start sweeping things up, and finishing houses.” I pity the republicans here, who statistically must exist, but people will do a lot for good housing nowadays.

Everything is within walking distance to discourage cars. Small independent businesses are favoured, though a Little Waitrose made it into Queen Mother Square in Poundbury, possibly because it stocks Waitrose Duchy Organic. Apprenticeships of traditional crafts are promoted, as is renewable energy. Freeholders must sign a covenant agreeing to maintain their buildings according to duchy principles, and holiday lettings and the placing of whole buildings on Airbnb are banned. Of the housing, 30% is reserved for social housing, affordable housing, and shared ownership — a high proportion for Cornwall and for England — and it took a royal duchy to do it.

I have only lived in old houses and older towns, and nothing prepares me for the oddness of Nansledan. I’ve never seen a village like it: there are no road markings, no mature trees, no church, no pub and, for a village, very few people. Mothers with buggies flee past, out of the wind; young children scoot on pristine streets. There is a glut of parking, which is astonishing for Cornwall: Elysium.

More from this author

Life on the Cornish breadline

By Tanya Gold

Art Deco is where the king’s clock stops. Otherwise, Nansledan winds its way from medieval through Queen Anne to neat Victorian cottages. They are painted in pastels, like that street in Notting Hill: pale pink, pale blue, pale green. Nansledan: meet Instagram. The impression is of a box of macaroons stranded on a hill, stamped with a crown: a Duchy Original village, and it is both addictive and curiously oppressive, due to the intensity of its vision. I have a fantasy that he lives here in an ice-blue Victorian pastiche cottage, sticking his nose out of his door, and sniffing his cherry trees. I think he should: it is his.

The house builders have their offices on the main road by the obelisk. Donna from Wainhomes takes me to the show home, a white oversized cottage on three storeys, with a cherry red front door. If the exterior aesthetic is disorientating, the interior is generic: it’s a show home clad in neutrals, well-designed and finely built. Perhaps it is a metaphor for monarchy itself: something ancient rebuilt with mod cons to stay pleasing, a common royal contortion in the shape of a house.

“It’s like a fishing village,” says Donna and it is, if you have never seen a fishing village. There are no fish, and no sea, and no Lidl, and no foodbank. Cornwall tends to divide itself into local and tourist aesthetic, and Nansledan has chosen the tourist aesthetic. This is not wrong — why should it be? — but it is new, and therefore odd.

In a parade of shops, I find life at the Methodist community space. I peer in, see two women and two dogs, and they wave me inside. I sense that Nansledan, which is isolated on its hill, is very like St Mary’s on the Isles of Scilly: in a few minutes everyone will know who I am, and why I am here. Clare Anderson is the Methodist minister in Newquay. She lives here because the Methodists were going to build a church at Nansledan, but costs spiralled, and they will build in Newquay instead: there will be no idealised church. She has lived here for four years.

“There’s a lovely sense of community apart from the keyboard warriors and the people who are a bit cliquey,” she says, when I ask what it is like living in a partially built ideal village. “Because the duchy has got a design code it’s almost a stick to beat people with.” No one will tell me explicitly about WhatsApp fights relating to hanging baskets — it’s too new and small a community to criticise the neighbours openly — but they don’t have to. I can sense them. They have sworn fealty to their village and its design code, and woe betide those who won’t conform.

“It’s a mixed environment,” Claire says, “but nonetheless it feels like a wealthy development and that brings its own prejudices and baggage. There are coffee shops where a cup of coffee is expensive. If you were living in affordable housing here it would be completely unobtainable.” She is a town councillor, and she knows the misery of the housing crisis — she says every local Facebook group is filled with pleas for housing as rentals are sold for Airbnbs. I ask her what Nansledan will achieve. “30% of these houses is just a drop in the ocean,” she says, looking about. “It’s not something Nansledan can solve.” At least, not alone, and so Nansledan functions partially as a rebuke, and partly as — and this is universal — something that others cannot have.

More from this author

How Camilla became Queen

By Will Lloyd

I visit Newquay. There is nowhere to buy food in Nansledan when the cafes and the chocolate shop and the bakery close at dusk. Newquay is the same as most mid-sized Cornish towns, grand — the waves are vast, rolling in off the Atlantic — and rotting. It has none of the finesse of Nansledan, but it feels real nonetheless, and therefore comforting. I find a pasty in Warren’s, and the prototype for Nansledan: a small estate called Tregunnel Hill near the boating lake. Within Newquay, the duchy aesthetic feels less deranged than in Nansledan: that is, it looks like a piece of high Victorian Eastbourne, transplanted to Cornwall by people with time and leisure for good taste.

On the way back I stop in St Columb Minor, the closest village to Nansledan. Sometimes in winter Cornwall feels like a shoulder closed to the wind. A woman with a vast fur hood tells me she thought Nansledan was like Noddy’s Toytown when it emerged from the farmland. (There is a still a farmhouse. It is proudly unrenovated. It looks angry, for a house). She regards Nansledan in the same way that she might regard Asgard. “A hundred pounds for a cardigan,” she says, amazed, and says that Nansledan is not for her: too expensive. It is true that it is expensive for Newquay — an open-market three-bedroom house is £330,000 in Nansledan against £250,000 outside it — but as of last August 45% buyers of open-market homes were from Newquay, and 70% were from Cornwall. (This is down from 72% in May 2020.) There are a few second homeowners, but they keep their heads down, like women living among religious fundamentalists.

I visit the shops, which are offered at good rates to suitable businesses, which must go through a detailed application process. There are rules on signage colour, placing and font. Eventually there will be a vast marketplace but for now Nansledan sells pretty food and, above all, aesthetics, as if they sing to each other. There is a café called Shiva with an attached yoga studio, two homeware shops — one also sells clothes — a giftshop with a minimalist bucket and spade, two hairdressers and a boutique which I suspect is the source of the £100 cardigan slur. Nansledan is already a shopping destination. Local people come to the Ladyvale bakery to eat gluten-free cakes, admire the papery flowers on the ceiling and, above all, park their cars.

In Shiva I meet a young woman who used to lived here with her father over his blinds and awning shop: she has a baby, and she is as lovely as anything in Nansledan.  She has now bought a home here with her partner for 60% of market value under a section 106, which will remain affordable even if she sells it on: her previous home in Newquay has Airbnbs on both sides. “There were so many people who applied for our house,” she says. “They chose us!”  She adores Nansledan: “It’s like a movie set, it’s so perfect”. The Cornish relationship to affluence is complicated. It must be, in a relatively isolated and culturally feudal duchy with a thriving entrepreneur class on the one hand, and some of the poorest people — and housing — in western Europe on the other.

More from this author

The prostitution of Cornwall

By Tanya Gold

But Nansledan admits no such tension openly: it is as smooth as icing sugar. This is the village of a perfectionist, who has lined up every Cornish element he can find. The street names are Cornish. The granite and slate are Cornish. The houses are Cornish-shaped; there is even a tiny replica of the ducal manor house at Restormel. The effect of all this Cornishness, of course, is to make Nansledan seem very un-Cornish. It is pastiche, and that is forgivable. If it isn’t Cornish, then neither is he, but he gifts his vision – his experience – of Cornwall to them, and they accept it happily.

I think the contradiction — the potential offence — of Nansledan is that something so fine has emerged from a feudal remnant and is likely to be fetishized for it; perhaps we will want more of it, since government and council cannot provide. It offends our far newer belief in democracy, which has not provided the housing people need: on the contrary, children are dying in mouldy homes due to the greed of landlords enabled by our insane planning laws. It takes a man who can afford not to be greedy, to show us the error of greed in house building, and I can’t think of anything more depressing, or more English.

Nansledan is not just an aesthetic marvel I am confused by, because it meddles with time and space. Above all, it is a failure of government, and so we look backwards for a solution, and establish an idealised village in less than a decade. I can laugh at the fishing village without fish or fishermen and the Waitrose magazine aesthetic fallen on the streets like snow, but the truth is I don’t have a friend in Cornwall who wouldn’t want an affordable home in Nansledan, and that is both cheering and pitiable.

We do have a prince whistle-blower, however, telling his fury across six episodes of Netflix’s Harry & Meghan: the first three were released yesterday, and his memoir Spare comes next month. The TV series opens in the VIP Windsor Suite at Heathrow Airport the day the prince left Britain. It tells the story of his meeting Meghan, a coup de foudre, with summaries of his childhood and adolescence, and hers. There are parts on slavery and the British Empire; the stalking and death of his mother; the behaviour of elements of the media (offering her parents money for stories and paying neighbours to mount cameras over-looking her garden); the run-up to the wedding.

The response from the media — many of whom are being sued by the prince — has been negative. The media are accused of intrusion, where they claim there was none: a shot of the couple with their son was taken from an agreed position, and a picture of a paparazzi wall was from a Harry Potter premiere. Media say the cameras he complains of were permitted by the palace, and many were, but that compounds his misery: his family colluded with it. It is sleight of hand, of course, but who can argue they weren’t hounded? Harry shouted at a photographer as a young man: “Why don’t you just leave me alone?” It made the front page: not as an example of our immorality, but of his.

His mother, Diana, was similarly traduced for her Panorama interview. “She was deceived into giving the interview,” Harry says in the documentary, “but she spoke the truth of her experience”: that her husband abandoned her before their wedding day, but he had trauma of his own. And here he reveals the bitterness of monarchy: they are meat or mirrors. They exist to be consumed, or provide a pleasing reflection, and if they resist this, they will be punished. We require absolute compliance for our attention. He asks, remembering his mother’s tears: what am I part of?

It is so obvious that he has PTSD from his mother’s life and death, there is almost nothing left to say. There are videos of him and William in the documentary looking strained but repressing it to be polite. William shows his teeth in a photocall and lies that is happy. Even their father is shown saying that if you don’t learn to negotiate the cameras, you will go mad. Harry says he remembers very little of Diana from his early life, and that makes sense: if you hide your sadness from a child, you hide everything. He remembers the cameras though: they are his most powerful memory. He says that women he wanted were chased away, as his mother was chased away: “the media…. had driven so many other people away from me”.

Like Edward VIII, he chose a woman who he thought would free him because, as a non-British subject, she was not daunted by status. She enabled him, unlike Edward VIII, to relive the trauma of his mother’s experience, and regain some control of it. He says he fell in love with Meghan when he saw a photograph of her with dog’s ears and a dog’s nose, and that is understandable. He is an English nobleman.

Suggested reading

Is Elizabeth II a bad mother?

By Tanya Gold

It is true that Meghan is easy to mock. She is ridiculous in the way that all rich people who want to be known for goodness are, and so is he. She seems aggrieved that when performing royal duties, she had to wear neutrals (fawn, camel, cream). Then we saw a photograph of the late and current queens dressed as Cadbury’s Roses for contrast, and I laughed.

There is a shot of Meghan feeding chickens in Montecito. In the next shot, she is sitting beside a bowl of crystal balls, and I wondered briefly if they were the eggs. She seems uncomfortable expressing emotion and hides under a film of quasi-emotional language so hackneyed it is meaningless. I think it indicates insecurity, not self-love: before one date with Harry, she had a shower because “I wanted to look more like myself”. Does Meghan un-showered not look like herself?

The most interesting thing I read about her is that she is a calligrapher, which is a search for beauty and control. Her surroundings are important to her: Hermes blankets are neatly folded as she cries. But Meghan was the trigger, not the cause, of his semi-enlightenment: he chose her. She is not a reincarnation of Princess Diana, even if he compares her “empathy” and “warmth” to his mother’s. But he is. He cannot leave monarchy. But he cannot stay. He is half-conscious, and half-free.

He knows the inherent cruelty in monarchy because he lived it: the adamantine hierarchy, the suppression of emotion, the demand for ownership, the disconnection of family members from one another. After his mother died, when he wasn’t at school, it seems he was often alone at Highgrove with servants and police protection officers. He can attempt to atone for his “unconscious” bias – his description of his apology to the Jewish community for dressing as a Nazi was awkward, and moving, as I imagined a penitent teenage prince at an audience with the Chief Rabbi. He can call himself a feminist, and environmentalist, and it is true that, as Meghan says, his Instagram feed is filled with photographs of elephants.

Suggested reading

Introducing Charles III

By Tanya Gold

This is where he becomes ridiculous, and pitiable though: where he is half-conscious, and half-free. You cannot leave the royal family and seek to keep the status it confers on you: not if you are repentant for its racism and sexism. You cannot talk about racism and sexism and environmentalism without talking about class. The difference between healing, his obsession, and the lack of it is not just self-realisation: it is money. And he doesn’t talk about class, or money: not one word, though he watches as his wife is wound into a fantastical ballgown by four people. His self-knowledge ends at precisely the point of his complicity.  He is still a prince, with all the expectations and pomp of a prince. We can all speak the truth of our misery, but what happens then?

He knows that some things must be exposed: media viciousness and intrusion, the collusion of his family, and the country; how monarchism isn’t love, but hunger. But he can’t acknowledge that our interest in his story is part of the same culture of unseriousness and worship of power.

He thinks he has a different future now: the Sussex brand, which will run on the money Netflix has paid him to tell his story. It is red-carpet philanthropy, which is bogus philanthropy: a luminous unseeing and unhearing of its own. It does not centre the genuinely dispossessed and the desperate: it can’t. In its glib riches, its insatiable desire for attention without merit, and its commitment to the superficial, it is as dishonest as the life he has left behind.

The Cambridges and Sussexes are at war, according to the media: the next three episodes of Harry & Meghan will be aired next week, on the same day that the Duchess of Cambridge is playing the piano at a carol concert. Remember the battle of the bridesmaids’ tights, when each duchess was accused of inciting tears in the other? This is in the same vein of pettiness.

If it is a war — and the media are determined it should be — it is a war not of substance but of style. It is not about how different the brothers are, but how similar. Both remain monied, driven, and convinced of the importance of their work as a newer world sags around them. If he continues on this path, I wonder if he will ever realise not how far he has travelled, but how little.

Order your copy of UnHerd’s first print edition here. 

Jamie is closer to Rickman than any of his other parts: not only was Rickman also a Labour activist who played the cello, but he was similarly needling and obsessive. And I wonder if Madly, Deeply is supposed to perform the same spell for a different woman: the resurrection of a loved one. This book is not a finished piece of art. Its publication feels personal: it is a fragment of a man, a fragment of the cult of the actor, and vanity by proxy. Obliviously, this book investigates that cult of the actor.

People will say that they like the diaries because they like Rickman the actor, and they want more of him: but you don’t get that from the diaries. He was clearly likeable, and generous: he mocked himself in Galaxy Quest, playing a Shakespearian actor slumming it in a Star Trek rip-off for money, and he felt that tension between artistic and commercial imperatives. (An entry written during a Harry Potter film says bleakly: “More Great Hall. More turkey. More Hogwarts song”.) But the diaries aren’t good. Rickman is a subtle actor, but he is not a writer, and I think he knows it. He agonises over the entries. He hints that he lied to them, fretting that he cannot remember the “coded details and the sharp thoughts hidden between the safer lines”. A good diarist will betray his friends and, above all, himself, as consciously and willingly as an actor will put “the chicken” on his head for the part. But Rickman is more oblique: his confessions are accidental.

You yearn for him to tell more — to inhabit himself consciously. But the most he manages is to call women he dislikes “Ms”, beadily; suggest that famous actresses are controlling, and write “[He] has a wonderfully pitched reading. I wish he would find different mouth-shapes,” about Simon Russell Beale. He is fragile. He struggles. He watches Yes To The Dress.

Rickman knows that fame is self-hating: the phenomenon of wanting to engage with fantasy people not real ones, that is, not engaging at all. I suspect his battles with the media are a proxy for his battles with himself: art versus commerce. He notes the terrible questions journalists ask on press junkets: “Alan, what are the smells of Barcelona?”

More from this author

Russell Brand's latest addiction

By Tanya Gold

He notes the offensive diary items. He suspects a female masseur is taking sexual pleasure from touching him in a professional capacity. Did she confuse him with Hans Gruber, or the Vicomte de Valmont? Many actors excel at playing who they are not — it’s the ecstasy of transgression. He is nothing like a villain, or a satyrmaniac: he was in a relationship with the same woman for almost 50 years.

I think a large part of Rickman was repelled by his fame — he mocks actors who care who is playing what and for how much — but it addled him anyway. Fame corrupted and exposed him, and we know that because in the diaries he accidentally exposes himself. He and his partner are distraught to discover that there are no Leftists at the luxury hotel in the West Indies they visit over Christmas: why would there be? He frets that the (presumably First Class) airport lounge he finds himself in has no space for “Eccentrics and Weirdos” like himself. So why not step outside?

His serious politics — and I am willing to believe they are serious in intent — are made absurd by the publication of these diaries. If you place serious things next to trivial ones — and the lifestyle of a famous actor can only be trivial — they become trivial too.

This is Rickman at an anti-austerity march in 2011. It reads like parody. “Straight to EAT for coffee and a sandwich before wandering down to Trafalgar Square and long wait for the Equity banner. At Park Lane the sight of the Dorchester proved too much.” “Ms [Mia] Farrow talked long and expertly about Darfur,” he writes in another entry. “Salma Hayek talks of her time in India as a volunteer for Mother Teresa — this utterly beautiful woman talking of wiping up shit and worms and keeping the flies off a dying woman’s face.”

Suggested reading

Nick Cave's divine rebirth

By Dorian Lynskey

It often reads like parody, Adrian Mole grown up: “On the way home, a visit — forced — to Dean Street Tesco. What a dump this chain is. A sort of shopping equivalent of our shoddy government.” Or: “St James’s Christmas Mass. The sermon evoked Stalin as a reason for the need for God. Mostly I was looking at the congregation and wondering why we don’t have a local Waitrose.” Or: “Tonight the tree frogs were silent. What do they know?”

He should have written a book about acting. He is, of course, a superb critic: “Emma [Thompson] needs to work with someone who will ask her to dig rather than skim”; “Ms [Georgina] Cates [in An Awfully Big Adventure] suffers from only functioning from her sense of the story. She listens to nothing, responds to nothing. She’s a butterfly inside her own glass case, watching herself bat around.” “Every line,” in a Henry Goodman performance of Shylock, “is a thought contained in a body which has a life.”

Suggested reading

JK Rowling sees through her enemies

By Kat Rosenfield

But mostly it is Rickman in an unfinished play: what would he think? It is a fair metaphor for our treatment of the acting class: deification is objectification, and destruction; the end of Perfume, in which the desired man is torn apart. It is fragments from a nervous man who hated gossip, and now will be read for it: “Bumped into P. Mandelson & Reinaldo [his partner] in Westbourne Grove. He was eating a choc-ice and trying to rent a video. Tea with Mussolini.”

So it is a tragedy, then: with the publication of this book, perhaps commerce won. A question from the Sweeney Todd press junket is cruel, but it displays his predicament neatly: Alan, if you were a pie which flavour would you be?

“There’s nothing happening here,” the man says, when he stops laughing. “They’re just letting this town run down to the ground. They aren’t doing anything. You walk down through there” — and he points at a road — “they were going to take a building down, make more room for the market. They’ve scrapped that now. Why? Nobody knows.”

This is dairy country with undulating, sun-wilted hills from Exmoor to Lyme Bay. The towns are golden and ancient: less sleepy than necrotic. Londoners buy second homes and treat the landscape, which looks like an advert for butter, as a garden while common issues — low pay, lack of housing, infrastructure, local services — have been ignored. Still, it was safe for Tories: farmers are conservative. Parish’s majority in 2019 was 24,239 votes: 60.2% of the vote. Labour came second in 2019 and 2017 but the Liberal Democrats, the professional opposition, hope to repeat their successes in Chesham and Amersham and North Shropshire with their candidate Richard Foord, a former major in the army.

Three hundred activists a day come from out of the constituency to help: angry Tories don’t vote Labour. If it goes Liberal Democrat, it means Johnson is still in danger. If it doesn’t — and even Liberal Democrats are unsure — it means Partygate is forgotten, and he has hope: to continue his personal redemption through destruction.

“I would like,” the man continues, “to think the Liberal Democrats will get it. Make a completely new start. Because the Conservatives — what have they done?” But this is a by-election: just one less brick in the wall. It will change nothing. Does he know that? He answers his own question, enunciating carefully: “Very, very little. Did he [Neil Parish] make a mistake? Would you walk into the Houses of Parliament and produce a phone and start looking at porn?”

“Is he the only one who’s doing it?” asks his friend, and they guffaw for a while. In east Devon you must be patient. They think in decades. To them, Parish is a fool, not a fiend. There is not the same anger towards him as there was towards Owen Paterson in North Shropshire. Those who liked him still like him. (One man says he loves him.) Those who hate him hated him anyway.

More from this author

The battle for North Shropshire

By Tanya Gold

At the edge of Tiverton, where it segues from golden town to sprawl, I find the Community Arts Theatre. Public hustings are almost unknown nowadays because they are unpredictable but, since it is organised by the Fund Our Tivvy High campaign — the school needs to be rebuilt — the main candidates agreed to it.

I arrive early and watch the For Britain candidate, a ruddy, pinched boy called Frankie Rufolo, who carries aggrievement like a cartoon cloud over his head, attempt to infiltrate the hustings. He was not invited. “You’re a racist,” a youngish man tells him. “I’m an anti-racist,” Rufolo pleads back. (For Britain is endorsed by Tommy Robinson.) A security guard approaches to remove Rufolo. I ask Rufolo if he is local. “I have relatives in Devon,” he says sulkily. “No, you don’t,” says the security guard (though, in fact, he does), and leads him away, head hanging like a daffodil.

I listen to the Labour candidate Liz Pole, a genial woman essentially trying to climb a mountain in slippers, giving a TV interview: “The Conservative vote has collapsed, even people who are voting Conservative are doing so through gritted teeth, a lot of people are staying home or are switching…” Her press officer, who is presumably decorative, won’t brief me on or off the record but I think it is less tactics — an informal non-aggression pact with the Liberal Democrats is a persistent rumour — than laziness. Later, when I call out to her, she places a finger in the air and walks to the carpark with it.

As the audience muster, a group called LIFT (Local Independents for Tiverton) unfurl a banner that says: The Party’s Over, Prime Minister. Post confidence vote, it is an ancient slogan. It could be by Cicero. “The Conservatives have taken us for granted,” says a LIFT supporter. “The only time we were on the news is when our MP was caught looking at pornography in the House of Commons.” He talks about local food poverty, which is “remarkable” (donations have flat-lined and the church that stores them is empty), the dangerous condition of the school and lack of representation, homes for locals and well-paid jobs. There used to be a clutch of thriving factories around Tiverton, he says. Now they are shuttered or small.

He is by far the angriest man I meet in Devon. This is not raging North Shropshire, where former Conservatives would denounce Johnson on street-corners, or Chesham and Amersham, where the atmosphere was a kind of gleeful transgression in sunlight. It feels sadder than that: splintered, tetchy, defeated, as if Johnson’s corruption is settling over everything like dust, leaving people bewildered and exhausted. Many people tell me they won’t vote, and never have: “I’d rather sit in my garden and have a cold beer.” “They’re all the same”. One Labour woman voted Liberal Democrat tactically in 2010, and never will again; an old betrayal haunts her and so she will help Johnson by voting Labour. A youngish man is one of the few Tory splitters I find: “I was a paid-up member of the Conservative Party and there’s no way I can vote for the Tories in the state they are in. They’ve lurched to the Right.”

Some people are gently awed that politics has fallen on them. A man in a checked blue shirt with exquisite RP accent, who is here to find out if the Conservative candidate is pro field sports, says: “I’m not going to tell you who I normally vote for, but I am much to my own surprise” — and he does look very surprised — “a floating voter.” If he is anything other than a Conservative now leaning Liberal Democrat, he needs a better disguise.

More from this author

What can we learn from Southend West?

By Tanya Gold

Inside, it is packed with political obsessives who know how they will vote: anti-Tory. The Tory candidate Helen Hurford, a former teacher who now owns a beauty salon — Corbynistas smirk at this because they are snobs — sits with Gill Westcott, the Green Party candidate, who is the sort of woman who sags under her obvious intellect. Liz Pole sits with Richard Foord. He looks open-faced but exhausted, as if a burden is upon him. That’s the disease of by-elections: the idea that they matter for anyone beyond the lobby’s Kremlinologists. They are only runes.

I have covered many by-elections and Hurford is the worst candidate I have found. Initially she says she wants to share “all my ideas and my aspirations for the Tiverton and Honiton”. The definite article is singular to her; she considers everything from her own perspective; her speech is filled with exclamation marks; its content is banality meets rage. “I know what it’s like to raise a family and be brought up in this area,” she says. “It’s beautiful! I’ve had lots of ministers coming down to support me and they’re saying, ‘isn’t it gorgeous?’ and I say, ‘Yeah it is, why would you want to live anywhere else?’”

A woman in a straw hat rises to ask: “In light of the resignation of two ethics advisers in less than two years, what is your personal view on the moral character of Boris Johnson?” “It’s hard to know where to start, just the lies, the repeated lies,” says Liz Pole, looking phlegmatic because the alternative is screaming: “The brass neck of the man.”

“The first part of that question, I believe, was about the resignation of the ethics advisers,” says Hurford. “It’s very Westmistery. That’s the expression I use. I’m not in Westminster but my understanding is that it was a commercially sensitive issue.” There are heckles at this, but she moves through them like a tank: “That’s what I’ve been told, thank you very much!” The chair presses her: do you have any concerns about his character? “I have no concerns that his pledges are honest”. Foord says: “To lose one ethics advisor could be regarded as misfortune, but to lose two ethics advisers can only be carelessness.”

Hurford is pressed on the cost of living (“I’m feeling it too!”) the environment (“I don’t have the answer!”) and the policy of sending refugees to Rwanda: when the refugees get there — “and it will happen” — they should “be treated kindly and fairly!” She summons Zelenskyy in her support and, at the end, when she is asked who her favourite thinker is, she names her grandfather. (Westcott names Gandhi, Pole Dickens and Foord W. B. Yeats and Paddy Ashdown). “You know, I hated school,” Hurford says conversationally, and it sounds like the truest thing she has said. “Slightly ironic that I became a head teacher.”

I think of May Welland from The Age of Innocence: Hurford has that hard, unyielding brightness. It shines. It lets nothing in. She is a typically Johnsonian Tory; evasive, anti-intellectual and self-obsessed; quick to anger when threatened, slow to change her mind, if she ever does. Every time she speaks, I feel materially closer to autocracy. At the end she says: “This is a fantastic opportunity for a girl that was born and raised and absolutely adores this constituency Tiverton and Honiton”. I wonder if she will burst into song. “Everything that I do will be for the benefit of Tiverton and Honiton because I am Tiverton and Honiton.”

Suggested reading

Inside Wakefield's corrupt election

By Jacob Furedi

Later I meet Richard Foord. He is not as interesting as Hurford, not being a mad kind of nadir, but he has spoken to hundreds of former Conservatives and, like Pole, he believes the Conservative vote is ebbing. “There are a lot of long-term traditional Conservatives who don’t regard Boris Johnson as a Conservative,” he says. “The most cited reason is that they regard him as lacking in integrity and honesty and for some people these traits are part of their own identity as Conservatives. Some Conservatives do put that above everything else.” There are Johnson loyalists, he adds, “who will stick with him, but I think they are outnumbered by the number of Conservatives who feel they should be better led.”

The next day I find the Liberal Democrat office on Honiton High Street. It is swagged with Union Flags. There are no chairs inside to discourage sitting down, which is not a sign of confidence. An elderly man returns from canvassing in Axminister. He moans that people aren’t budging from the Conservatives — “We are Conservatives,” he reports them saying to him — takes another bundle of leaflets, and leaves disconsolate.

The Honiton Conservative Association, a few doors down, is shuttered. There is a rumour, which I cannot confirm because it is shuttered, that the officers of the Honiton Conservative Association are voting Liberal Democrat. There is a Liberal Democrat sign on the Honiton Conservative Association, but I cannot say who put it there. I think it is a joke.

This by-election is the most depressing I have covered. It feels sunken and shameful, which is not surprising when you consider its origins: a by-election not for constituents, who feel ignored no matter their stripe, but for other people. The media is here, mugging locals and holding up queues in the butchers. They gawp at the nerve of it: as if we are more interested in a prime minister’s fate than a constituency’s. They wonder why they were not always so interesting to us; why we never came here before; if we are irreparably trivial.

I meet aghast and defensive Tories, thwarted Leftists, the undecideds who will choose whether Hurford gets to parliament or not and the eternal, maddening non-voters. But I can’t find the purity of the anger I heard in North Shropshire like a bell. “It’s quite amazing,” a Left-leaning bookseller tells me, his fingers stroking their spines, “how much people will tolerate before they rouse themselves.” I can’t escape the sense that the Tiverton and Honiton is just another distraction: another tiny chapter in the incremental narrative of Boris Johnson’s will to power. I wonder if he is more afraid of boredom or hatred. And we are back to him, again.

Blackpool is odd: a suicide on morphine. Shops sell fake breasts and dildos made of sugar, or mobility scooters and junk food side by side. The pavements are smeared with filth. And yet, when you think all the ugliness in the world has gathered, you will find a ballroom dancer in black tie stealing down a street in patent shoes. Brand, too, was made for Blackpool. Destruction, and renewal.

Brand’s tour, which ends today at the Brixton Academy, is a display, and the meditation is the most important part: the part that is most meaningful to him. It’s the reveal of a show he calls “33” because he thought that was the age at which he would die. What is public meditation for a man as noisy and self-destructive as Brand: health signalling? Performative recovery? WELLNESS in lights? Brand is myriad — actor, polemicist, activist, comic — his most dominant self is former heroin addict. Though he is almost 20 years sober, addiction can chase a man his whole life, and terrify him with a glimpse of what he was. And yet, the man thinks, if he can meditate in front of a thousand strangers in Blackpool, he must be safe. It’s a truism that a comic needs an audience more than an audience needs a comic, but it’s truer of Brand than of anyone. He needs us. He says so. “How much attention does one man need?” he asks. “We don’t yet know. We haven’t found the upper threshold”.

I am not here for Brand: not really. I have read his memoirs, and I feel I know everything he is prepared to tell us, and himself. I couldn’t get through his polemic Revolution, which he wrote at his wealthy girlfriend’s country house. His childhood was broken. He thought his mother’s recurring cancer was his fault, and his father, on holiday, ordered prostitutes for them both in a room they shared. He almost killed himself, and then didn’t. He is candid about everything except his anger: the kind of addict who is so ashamed he tells you everything. He is a very typical comedian in some ways: a man seeking his father’s affirmation from the stage. He very obviously finds it agonising when hecklers interrupt him. He must be heard. He is a very typical addict too: softness and savagery twinned.

What interests me most about Brand is not him, though he is charismatic. It is his reach, the people who come to see him, and what they can tell us about political alienation. If he was a movie star in 2010 — he is an under-rated actor, not least by himself, but he’s less afraid of his rage on screen — he is now a YouTube demagogue flirting with conspiracism and posting to 5.65 million followers. Typical posts are: “So…Trump was RIGHT About Clinton & Russia Collusion!!”; “You’ve Been LIED To About Why Ukraine War Began”; “Can We REALLY Trust Vaccine Fact-Checkers??!”

More from this author

Why I am an addict

By Tanya Gold

The doors open at 5pm. I watch them gather. I would call his constituency either fragile and seeking, or angry and untrusting. The first group, many of whom have risen from a sickbed, admire his personal transformation — his recovery from heroin addiction and the book he then wrote, ripped off from AA’s 12 Steps: Freedom from our Addictions. You aren’t supposed to monetise AA, but he has a very personal definition of humility. “You feel he really does care about people,” says one woman. “He’s been through so many things himself and he’s still keeping going. He still comes out for people.”

The second group admire his YouTube channel which segues from mistrust of the Establishment to disinformation and alienation. They ask me who I write for because they do not trust the press. “He knows exactly what’s going on,” says one woman. “He just makes people aware [of corruption]. I wouldn’t vote for anyone. There’s no one worth voting for.”

I meet a superfan videoing herself by the stage door. Social media is important: as if by broadcasting, you will be listened to. It’s one of his contradictions: Brand says that if we were forced to carry iPhones we would smash them up ourselves. Yet he depends on them. “Much as he is an intellectual,” she says, “he teaches you in a nice way and actually I’d like to rip his pants off.” Her friend likes “his videos about conspiracy things. Well, they aren’t conspiracies. They are conspiracies for six months and then they are facts.”

For another man, it’s a modern political — or apolitical — encounter: he and Russell found each other through algorithm. “He’s saying the right thing,” he says. “A lot of the information that Russell finds is what I’ve found. Covid is an excuse for where they want to take us. It’s all through fear.” He fears tyranny, this man, but another contradiction is that Brand, who despises conventional political practises, will take him closer to it. “All political parties are the same”, he says. “He [Brand] manages to channel anger or discontent in a positive direction.”

I sit in the gods, which are like a velvet cliff edge, next to a serene sex therapist and her Italian husband. She is disappointed that Jeremy Corbyn is no longer leader of the Labour Party. She has no plan to vote in a general election: she thinks there is no point. I look up her constituency, which is a Tory/Labour marginal. Her vote does matter. But Brand, despite his personal message of empowerment, would have his followers more disempowered. It’s the one thing I can’t bear about him: his anti-voting message. It’s fine for a rich man to shrug off politics. He doesn’t need them. He can invent his own, and he does. He is not so very different from the men he despises. They lay false trails.

The show is in four parts. The first is pandemic-themed stand-up, and it is good stand-up. It’s self-aware, and therefore bearable. He mocks the audience and himself. During the clap for carers, he tells us, he was a medical worker so the applause would be directed at him. He collects testimony of pandemic-themed shame from the audience — he’s very interested in shame — and tells a story about a man who wiped his bum on a face mask, and a woman who drunk wine in a Zoom work meeting, and pretended it was tea. When he gets to the audience member who masturbated to something under every letter in the Pornhub alphabet, he invites us to shout the words: tea-bagging; wanking; zebra.

More from this author

The cowardice of the far Left

By Tanya Gold

The second part speaks to his YouTube audience, and it’s a lie: that you can be more politically engaged by placing your faith not in your democratically elected politicians but in him. Love is not a mandate — if it is even love, rather than the narcotic of attention and praise — but the root of this is clear enough: he didn’t trust his father. “I don’t like being told what to do,” he says. “I start there”. This sounds like his most authentic self. “I start at ‘fuck off’.”

“The system wants you hypnotised and stupefied,” he says, as if government is only a meeting of Spectre. “We are told that we are participants in our democracy. That we are adults. That we matter. That our voice will be heard. That we would be able to organise society through the ballot box because you are adults and your voice matters. That is one of the myths of our time.”

Brand is weirdly Manichean. He appears to divide the world into two parts, and they are solid, and immutable. The evil are evil, and will remain so. The good are here, as if buying a ticket to “33” is a kind of protective spell. Sometimes he tends to Luddism and talks as if he would like to live in some kind of idealised village, or circle, and why wouldn’t he? He’s strong, and a man.

The third part is the hug part, and it’s the weirdest part. Having divested us of the desire for representative democracy he becomes a healer. It begins in the interval. He jumps down from the stage, and waits there, and people fill the aisles to hug him. It looks intensely silly, but they are moved by him. I wonder if this is the replacement — and true destination — for his sex addiction: intimacy, which other people have paid for. (I return, in my mind, to his father and the prostitutes.) I wonder if this is the real point of the exercise. They come, one after the after, for hugs of all kinds — swift, flirty, soulful — and photographs, and a combination of the two: the soulful hug selfie.

At the end of the show, he puts on a blue pointed party hat, like a wizard, and leaves the auditorium through the main exits, to hug people in the street outside. I notice he has a personal photographer and videographer: a slender man in black with a professional expression who follows him and who records every interaction. Does Brand archive them, and look back on them: on every piece of love? People cry in his arms. He whispers to them. He takes a picture of himself with us all behind him, like an army. It’s so obviously his new addiction there is barely anything left to say: a delusion into which he carries others, by the sheer force of his charisma, and his silly pointy hat. And he won’t know where to stop. He never does. And then he goes back inside for a mass meditation. The audience at Lancashire’s biggest theatre close their eyes and pray.

More from this author

Adam Kay's dangerous misogyny

By Tanya Gold

At the end, when he has hugged everyone who waited, I listen to them praise him. “You can’t have control over what’s going on in the world, but you can have control over yourself,” says one. It’s a doctrine of renewal, but so atomised as to be meaningless. “He’s got that attention to the working class,” says another. “He is like us,” says the third, “a free thinker [who] cares about everyone in the world, not ground down by politicians and big corporate companies. He cares about individual people.”

But does he? I think he is using them, and, worse, they let him. Brand is another symptom of our alienation: of the fracturing of the institutions that we need. We will see more, and different Brands in future, as the centre falls away. They will blow in on the wind. His doctrine of disengagement will change nothing for them. Will they notice? Will they care? I wonder if, in the end, they have confused politics with love. Or, rather, magic.

It was the final of European Cup, Burton tells me, sitting in his living room with Paul Trippett, who was also there that night. They made Blair watch the match; then they talked. “No disrespect to the MPs round here in the Seventies, but they were cannon fodder,” says Trippett. “They put their hand up at the right time and it was a culture of booze and not getting very much done. And all of a sudden there’s this young lad and he’s a breath of fresh air”. Burton adds: “If you were normally wanting a seat, you tell people what they want to hear. But he didn’t.”

In 1983, Labour Party policy was for nuclear disarmament and the nationalisation of Marks & Spencer. Burton and Trippett had to sell it on the doorstep. When voters stared at them, Burton and Trippett had to say it probably wouldn’t happen. The party leadership was addicted to Socialism in a constitutional monarchy and unserious about winning power except over rival factions in the Labour Party. “We were New Labour before anybody mentioned New Labour,” says Trippett. “If you don’t get power, you can’t do anything.’”

The majorities were astonishing in safe Labour seats like this one, but they were a taunt. “We need,” Blair told them, “to engineer our policies so that they can actually vote for us [in the midlands and the south]. And then once they vote for us and we get a majority in parliament we can then do the things that you guys want to do for your people in the north-east.” It is a contortion that has divided Labour since Blair left in 2007; his success only compounded the bitterness.

“Every time I listened to him speak, I used to cry,” says Burton. In the footage of Blair’s election night count in 1997, Burton is at the edge of the screen, writing numbers in a notebook. Then they got on a plane from Teeside to London with Blair to watch him speak outside the Royal Festival Hall. “And he said,” says Burton, “‘a new dawn is rising’ and the sun started to shine in the dawn”. When Blair left the hall for Downing Street, Burton thought he would walk on the water.

Sedgefield is 160 square miles of County Durham, and vital: the first steam-powered passenger train open to the public, Locomotion No.1, was assembled here. Blair called it a microcosm of the country — community minded but hard-headed and aspirational — and treated it as such. The media called him an Islington man as a slur, but he wasn’t. (Corbyn was.) Rather, he thought the London Labour Party was “pretty crazy”. He grew up nearby in Durham and there was an alchemy between Blair and his activists here. “We were desperate for power,” says Trippett, “We’d had 18 years of unremittent Tory government.” Blair’s offer of capitalism to fund public services — of emphasising wealth creation as well as taxation — his positioning of Britain as a global power and his fixation on law and order was invented in Sedgefield.

From the same series

Tony Blair's war on reality

By Mary Harrington

Sedgefield is, as they say, “a real mix”. In the south of the constituency, in the suburbs of Darlington, people are monied and commute into Teesside and Durham. In the east, in the old pit villages, where high streets are bare and buses stop running at six, there is shuttered poverty. Newton Aycliffe, William Beveridge’s idealised new town, was once tidy and preening. Now it is tattered redbrick, though the landscape around it is lush. Sedgefield is small-c conservative, conscious of fairness, and ambitious for itself. It is that archetypal English rural constituency, which is considered a joke in Westminster, but isn’t: save the NHS, hang the paedophiles. When Blair won in 1997, he thanked his constituents, then the police.

Sedgefield town itself is ancient, bustling, and wealthy: a tourist destination for people from surrounding cities to visit at weekends. Restaurants, gift shops and gastropubs surround a tidy green. Corbynites would tut, then settle in: it could be Islington. Black Range Rovers are parked on the streets. Posters advertise a medieval fayre, an easter egg hunt, a flower club, and Jubilee tea parties.

The Dun Cow Inn, where Blair brought George W. Bush for fish and chips in 2003 is warm and faded. They like Blair here. “He modernised the party,” says one man. “Blairism was a reasonable thing,” says another. “He had lovely children,” said a third, pointedly, as if I am poised to say otherwise. One woman thinks that he was “corrupted by power”. When I ask why his legacy is so conflicted, another woman says, “Iraq, and that’s all there is to it”, and turns away. It was his defining example of hubris and nemesis, and it left him looking more like an archetype than a man.

From the same series

How Blair broke Britain

By Aaron Bastani

Sedgefield went Conservative in 2019. Phil Wilson, who worked for Blair from 1987 and took his seat in 2007, lost as Jeremy Corbyn was conceding. Paul Trippett worked in Wilson’s office. At the beginning of the campaign, he says, they had two teams out, one in an affluent suburb of Darlington and another in a working-class village. The message came back: “We are going to struggle.” Trippett asked them: “What’s the problem?” If it had only been Brexit, they replied, they could win. “But we couldn’t win the seat with Corbyn as leader. We couldn’t sell him. We didn’t want to sell him.” Trippett had been there before in 1983, with Burton and Blair himself, and they loathed the people around Corbyn. Their policies were time travel, Wilson says, but in the wrong direction. The Tories were campaigning in the 1950s and Labour in the 1970s, offering, “Competing images of the past”.

“In 2017 we were given the benefit of the doubt because they didn’t think we could win,” says Wilson. “In 2019 they didn’t vote for us because they were frightened that we would. I remember in 2017 a woman in the polling station saying, ‘Phil I voted for you. But get rid of him.’ That person wouldn’t have voted for me in 2019. Brexit was a part of it, but the biggest fundamental was Corbyn. He went against the grain of your traditional Labour voter who was patriotic, who saw him as a terrorist sympathiser. Giving the Russians the benefit of the doubt over Salisbury? Just embarrassing”. The seat went blue with a tepid majority of 4,513.

Now, Trippett says, “we have to work every seat like it’s a marginal”. The last pit closed 50 years ago and the monolithic culture the mines birthed has gone. Voters think like consumers, and, like consumers they are volatile and hungry. They no longer say: if I don’t vote Labour my grandmother would turn in her grave. They say: what’s the Labour Party going to do for me? Are the voters too individualistic as consumers, too fractured? Trippett ponders: “I don’t know how a political party can be a broad church these days.” It may take time, he thinks, to get Labour into power. Not the next election perhaps. But with the right candidate they’ll get Sedgefield back. Now Starmer is following Blair — emphasising security and law and order — the polls look friendlier. “You win from the centre,” says Trippett, “it’s always been in the centre. Sometimes it pushes a bit one side and sometimes the other but this block in the middle never changes”.

From the same series

Cherie Blair's class war

By Joan Smith

I meet Blair online. For someone who has lived through drama he is almost preposterously calm: atrophied by power, by slander. He is polished, wary. He calls Sedgefield, “crucial. I always grounded myself in my constituency and in the community”. He would arrive on Friday for constituency business, address the Labour club, and go to church in Trimdon village on Sunday. It was from this tiny medieval building opposite John Burton’s house that he addressed the nation after Princess Diana died.

The Tory victory of 2019, was, he says, “Corbyn and Brexit: Corbyn more than Brexit in my view. If you put forward Jeremy Corbyn as the potential prime minister of the country in a constituency like Sedgefield, they think you’ve gone crackers”. Labour voters here, he says, “are very patriotic, they are very tough on law and order, and they expect people to behave themselves respectably”.

Why is New Labour so traduced? “The reason,” he says, “is there are two groups of people in whose interests it has been to trash the New Labour concept and record. One on the left who want to say, ‘because you’re New Labour, you’re basically a sell-out’ and they wanted to take control of the Labour Party. And then you got another group of people who are the right-wing people who hated me and New Labour because we kept winning.”

“Once you leave office, unless you have a constituency prepared to argue for the record your enemies close in on it,” he says. “That’s why eventually,” — is the eventually a caveat? — “I think one route back for Labour will be to understand that it should be proud of the last Labour government, and they won’t get there unless it articulates that”.

Further reading

Centrism always fails

By Will Lloyd

I wonder if it is that simple. Labour is currently polling 13% ahead for the local elections on Thursday. The economy is the most important issue for voters and that is the government’s responsibility. 57% want Starmer as PM, compared to 43% for Johnson. And 47% of voters think he should resign. Starmer is polling well by invoking parts of Blair’s offer, and he is benefiting from Johnson’s chaos, but his problems are different. The economy is not booming as it did under Blair, and there are crises in housing, energy and inflation. Labour is two parties now, and Starmer is far to the Right of his enemies. They don’t want a negotiator to tweak capitalism: they want a socialist Utopia.

In Sedgefield, Labour voters hate Corbyn, despise Johnson and aren’t sure of Starmer yet. There is a weird kind of emptiness here politically: a waiting. It is true that Blair offered a future that came to devour him, but in 2019 both parties chose, as Wilson said, a backward glance. Starmer will make gains on Thursday by following some New Labour paths, but that settlement is a quarter of a century old. However much they long for them in Trimdon, the old politics are gone.

When has she come closest to peril? That’s easy, in your royal pub quiz: the death of Princess Diana. But why did she come so close? Because the royal family were not emotionally responsive when Diana died? Because they did not lower the flag, or leave the castle to meet their desolate people? Nonsense: this was an act of projection, of guilt buried under the anti-Jubilee of a death.

We understood why the monarchy shook when Diana died: because she died, because she married into a family that is dysfunctional, because we like it that way. Diana was not gilded by her status. She was killed by it. Her marriage was arranged when she needed a love match, and in that brief burst of understanding was our grief. Or it should have been.

Now Tina Brown’s The Palace Papers is here, and it adds detail to the groaning library of royal biography, which is an odd genre prone to be read not with understanding but with glee. Because if you understand you can’t go on with the game. Brown divides the royals into functional and dysfunctional: good and bad. I am more cynical: I divide them into victims and survivors.

The victims pile up with their awful testimony: who survives this family? Not Edward VIII, possibly a Nazi-sympathiser. But he wanted something less suffocating than a crown and married a woman who gave him less. The Queen Mother responded to his gift by telling people Mrs Simpson was a prostitute and denying her the title HRH. She was a sore winner but for some people nothing is ever enough. Brown speaks the party line here. The family, “always believed that it was the excess public attention that had promoted Edward’s delusion of outsize significance and the coddling of dangerous emotional needs”.

More from this author

The cowardice of the far Left

By Tanya Gold

There is Margaret, denied the man she loved, and by her sister, who then deceived herself about the cause of Margaret’s depression: because the Queen is a survivor. “Once,” writes Brown, “when one of Margaret’s inner circle called her to say her sister was threatening to throw herself out of the bedroom window the Queen replied, ‘Carry on with your house party. Her bedroom is on the ground floor’”. That’s a cold response to suicidal ideation. Margaret married a monster on the rebound and filled herself with fags, Famous Grouse, and nothing. When it was suggested to the Queen that a therapist might help her sister, the Queen replied, “Perhaps when she’s better we could consider that”. “It was one of her lifelong dreams to ride on a bus,” writes Brown sadly of Margaret, but I doubt it would have saved her, even if she had become a conductress. Margaret’s desire to be cremated at Slough was her personal elegy, made with apt disgust.

There is Charles, who lacked the words and the expectation of sympathy to tell his mother what he wanted — a wife he loved. There was Diana, a corpse, and Fergie, a tabloid headline, who cannot leave and cannot stay. She is trapped in the carpeted purgatory of her ex-husband’s home Royal Lodge, a dystopia with a vast TV on which they can watch the news that consumes them.

Both Andrew and Harry are victims of monarchy too: of Elizabeth’s dedication to the Edwardian style, which is tight-lipped, hierarchical, and filled with superficial morality. I suspect we need a more casual style of monarchy — that is what Harry howls for from California — but perhaps they think we will not accept a monarchy without the suffering that we impose on it? There are reasons why Elizabeth has been a successful queen beyond longevity: she placed it first, and not all the children thrived. One lost second son is a misfortune. Two is a pattern.

Andrew grew up to know that he is not as important as his older brother and the Queen, when she was present — she often wasn’t, she once returned from a royal tour and went straight to the races, not her children — presided over this. That’s male primogeniture for you. Winner takes all. It must be a canker unless you are peculiarly mentally healthy, even before you meet your mad acolytes.

Suggested reading

Test article

By Helen Thompson

If you feel yourself aggrieved, you may give yourself permission to behave as you wish. You will not open your own curtains. This is the testimony of a maid who hated Andrew because he made her climb the stairs to open his curtains. (It is impossible to believe that he is not addressing his mother.) You will call your wife, as Brown relates, “a fat cow”. You will have a collection of teddy bears, carefully arranged by the maid that hates you, even in your fifties, and yet imagine that you are really a naval officer. (Charles travels with a teddy bear according to Brown, but just the one). You will think, at best, that a trafficked 17-year-old will want to have sex with you because you are the Duke of York.

Then there is Harry. I used to think he left for privacy. Now, as he wades through autobiographies, Netflix deals and self-deception, I don’t think he left at all. Like Edward VIII, monarchy obsesses him; he can’t leave any more than Margaret or Sarah could. Attention without merit is addictive. Brown is fascinating on Harry and Meghan. “So why,” she asks, “didn’t Harry help navigate palace culture for his future wife?  He didn’t want to. Their complicity required Meghan to fight all the norms she had kicked against for so long. She was now his comrade in arms”. On Suits, she notes, Meghan was sixth on the call-sheet. In the royal family, Harry is sixth on the call sheet. They meet there, thwarted.

The two things that threaten the Jubilee — Andrew’s self-absorption and Harry’s rage — are entirely self-made. I know it isn’t kind to call a witch-goddess a bad mother, but perhaps you can’t mother a nation and your real children too. I wonder if they acknowledge it themselves. Charles’s plan to “slim down” the monarchy to himself, William, a middle-class woman and three children under nine, looks less like policy than testimony: a moment of self-knowledge and self-preservation before it all ends.

Putin needs a buffer in Ukraine, said one on Twitter. Would you be a buffer, was one reply, and the tweet was duly taken down. The far Left’s most pleasing character trait is its cowardice. It collapses easily. Nato expansion is de rigueur in eastern Europe for countries seeking to join the EU, said a woman at a Stop the War meeting, as if national sovereignty — which she is blessed to have — is something trivial for those defending it in Ukraine.

Stop the War says we shouldn’t arm Ukraine or impose sanctions: it will only encourage Putin. Such is their determination, a man with a Ukrainian flag was escorted from a meeting this weekend as he cried, “Shame!” I would have listened to him but that is not part of their culture: not when they are met with opposition, which they do not like, and to hear them now praise “diplomacy” — as they did — is bizarre because it involves listening. During the meeting they congratulated themselves on their courage for speaking as they do, among friends — the media were barred for immorality even as independent media is fleeing Russia — and inside a liberal democracy.  Such is their toxicity now, Diane Abbott and John McDonnell pulled out of a Stop the War rally.

They may be a pottage of vanity, self-deception, and rage, but they have been clear on Ukraine, even before the hammer and the sickle appeared at a rally in London this week. “In [the] game of great power politics, if we have to pick a side over Crimea let it be Russia,” they said in 2014, when Jeremy Corbyn was their chair. “Some of us have never supported Putin,” he says now, a coward among cowards.

The willingness to understand Putin was obvious, again in 2014, when Corbyn’s spin doctor Seumas Milne, a rich Communist sympathiser, appeared with Putin at PR junket alongside leaders of the European far Right. A surprising number of far Left leaders are rich as if they, who don’t really need politics, can afford uniquely unserious ones. If you are rich, it doesn’t matter if the Socialist Utopia never comes. Dreaming, to steal their language, is a privilege.

For George Galloway, an original sponsor of Stop the War, closeness to tyranny seems to be a soothing and instinctive need. His address to Saddam Hussein in 1994 is infamous: “I still meet families who are calling their newborn sons Saddam. Sir, I salute your courage, your strength and your indefatigability and I want you to know that we are with you until victory, until victory in Jerusalem.” Another sponsor was Andrew Murray, a rich Communist sympathiser; yet another is Jeremy Corbyn himself. Plenty of them failed to oppose Bashar al-Assad, even as Muslim activists begged them to. They didn’t support aid convoys to Aleppo — too imperialist — or the White Helmets pulling bodies out of Russian-bombed rubble in Syria. They are only anti-war when the West is the aggressor. There are no just wars when the West fights them is their reasoning, if we are calling it that; but every war against the West is, if not just, then at least understandable.

But this isn’t pacifism, however they may brand it. It is Occidentalism: hatred of the West, and, with that comes hatred of parliamentary democracy too, because it is disappointing and hard work.

What real — rather than self-serving and performative — sympathy do they have for those beyond themselves? Who have they really helped beyond themselves? I often wonder what would happen if they threw themselves behind moderate Labour with all their fury as an experiment in real politics — if they acknowledged, for instance, that a Socialist Utopia is unlikely in a country that is also a monarchy. But this kind of self-reflection and generosity is not in their nature.

More from this author

Corbyn's Labour resounds with loathing

By Tanya Gold

Consider their brutal anti-Semitism. Jeremy Corbyn doesn’t know he is an anti-Semite, but that doesn’t make him any less of one. Much can be laid at the door of their idiocy; like idiots, their world is binary. They do not think the West can be saved, and they will not help others save it.

I sensed the anti-democratic tendencies of the far Left when I first met Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2015. It was obvious in the way they spoke about their enemies, which they define as anyone who has ever disagreed with them. Tory Right or soft Left: to the far Left there is no difference. Every day they say so on social media: Liberals and Centrists are bemused to find themselves called far Right. It’s poison on the doorstep. It made former miners vote Tory in 2019 because if soft Left is far Right, why not? The violence of their language offered a creeping kind of dehumanisation of the enemy who is also — crucially — a voter: someone to be seduced by a serious politician is, for them, only someone to be despised.

Violence was always acceptable if it was against your enemy: the rhetoric itself made it necessary. I heard many far Left cheerleaders call the throwing of milkshakes and eggs acceptable if they landed on the wrong kind of politician, and what comes after that? Quite recently a far Left journalist celebrated a policewoman being knocked off her horse. I saw a journalist attacked at a far Left meeting last autumn; they applauded when the victim left the room. At the last campaign rally in 2019, a Jew was physically attacked for carrying an anti-Corbyn banner. I concluded that they do not believe in parliamentary democracy, because they do not believe in the legitimacy of opposition. It’s a defect that makes a nonsense of any good within them. It isn’t a whimsical thing. It’s a structural fault.

So, their kindness to Putin this last week — their willingness to see the world from his point of view, even as he destabilises it — is no accident. It is, consciously or not, a recognition of similar desires.