To be fair to Brod, there would be no Kafka without him. As Kafka’s literary executor, Brod did posterity a favour by refusing to consign his friend’s diaries to flames, as was instructed of him. Fifteen years later, in 1939, he did another good turn, ferrying the files to Palestine along with him when Prague fell to the Nazis. By then, however, Brod had already committed his original sin of apotheosising his mate in Kafka: Eine Biographie, which came out in 1937. There, Kafka appeared less the sex fiend that he was in reality, and more the tortured saint that he later became in the public imagination.

Brod set the tone. After the war, he ran his blue pencil through Kafka’s diaries, which appeared in two volumes in English in 1948-9, the second translated by the humourless Hannah Arendt. It was on the strength of Brod’s bowdlerisation that the contemporary TLS reviewer was able to conclude that Kafka’s diary was “one of the saddest books ever written”. Brod himself artfully leaned into the theme. Kafka’s diaries, he wrote in 1955, “resemble a kind of defective barometric curve that registers only the lows, the hours of greatest depression, but not the highs”.

This was, to say the least, utterly disingenuous. If there were no highs in his edition, it was because he had expunged all of them. He had his reasons, of course. In canonising Kafka as a writer with serious pretensions, he was seeing to it that his own star rose. There was perhaps a touch of pudeur, too, in his calculus. Brod may not have wanted kith and kin to find out about their nocturnal escapades to brothels together. Not for nothing did Kafka’s father think Brod was a meshuggener ritoch — a crazy hothead.

Ross Benjamin, by contrast, has no axe to grind. In translating a German edition brought out by the S. Fischer Verlag, he has now restored the diaries to their original form. What we have here is a record of Kafka’s life in all its messy glory. Benjamin has essentially given us a facsimile: 700 dense pages of mid-sentence pauses and spelling mistakes, anachronisms and repetitions, doodles and drafts.

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This is, above all, the portrait of a sex-mad dandy. “Wrote nothing,” reads more than one diary entry. “Nothing, nothing,” reads another. As a writer, I can attest to the inverse relationship between living and writing. What was he doing? Those laconic entries tell us that the man who wrote little knew how to live a little. A trip to Paris finds him and Brod living it up during the last gasps of the belle époque: “how easily grenadine with seltzer goes through one’s nose when one laughs.” Back in Prague, we find Kafka among his friends, all of them cackling heartily as he read aloud drafts of his stories. The Kafka of these diaries is a bon vivant, a man who enjoyed his puerile jokes and Quaker oats, a theatre aficionado who hit it off with a Yiddish theatre troupe, the kind his father — an assimilated German-speaking Jew — disapproved of.

As a law student at Charles University, Kafka desultorily did his doctorate. His rather unoriginal thesis, by his own admission, was “intellectual sawdust that thousands of others’ mouths had already chewed up for me”. His heart evidently wasn’t in it. More important were his literary and sexual pursuits, in which Brod was a partner in crime.

These continued into adulthood proper. Kafka took up a job as an insurance assessor — dealing with workplace accidents and the like — that apparently frayed his grey cells and left him too knackered to moonlight as a writer. But this isn’t quite true, though Kafka himself is in part responsible for the misleading picture. As he has it in the diary: “here, in the office, for the sake of so wretched a document I must rob a body capable of such happiness.” As a result, he sought solace in seedy brothels. It is a sentiment that Don DeLillo was able to pin down later with droll brevity: “talent is more erotic when it’s wasted.” Yet in Kafka’s case, it doesn’t have the benefit of being true.

Far from sucking his energy, his job was in reality a sinecure. He typically clocked off at 2 pm and spent his afternoons writing and whoring. What’s more, there was nothing sordid about his life. Kafka was a known quantity in the beau monde of Prague. As his biographer Reiner Stach shows, Kafka frequented not the shabby establishments of the lower orders but Weinstuben, those permissive wine bars where waitresses joined guests at tables. The draw was harmless flirting, though the chambres séparées held the possibility of deeper connection. Sometimes, Kafka and Brod used to meet at 5 am and, as it were, “have two girls” for breakfast before heading off to work.

These days, we would call Kafka a hipster. He was certainly a faddist. Before the war, he moved about in Lebensreform circles, where ventilation and vegetarianism were in vogue. Kafka took up the creed of Horace Fletcher, “the great masticator” who was given to maniacally chewing food until it turned into mush. Then there was the Wandervögel movement, which turned on coming to terms with vile bodies, au naturel and in nature. Kafka exercised twice daily, naked, with windows open. From his diaries, we learn that he spent two weeks in a nudist colony in the Harz Mountains. He had green fingers, liked spas, and enjoyed rambling and wild swimming. He succumbed to bouts of gluttony: “candies are poured into me like hail.”

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The biggest advance of these unredacted diaries is unquestionably in our understanding of Kafka’s sex life. Brod had prudishly done away with such passages as the one in which Kafka waxes poetic about a hirsute Spanish prostitute, with “hair running thickly from her navel to her private parts”. At a synagogue, Kafka observes a brothel-keeper in attendance; Brod had kept the line, even as he omitted the relevant detail that Kafka knew the man’s occupation not as a finger-wagging busybody, but as a patron of the place.

Brod had likewise censored anything that suggested that Kafka’s sexuality was more complex than what the Hays Code could handle. Now, we have Kafka lustily eyeing up two Swedish boys, their legs “so formed and taut that one could really only run one’s tongue along them”. Then we have him fantasising about the “sizeable member” of a commuter in his train carriage. Posing in the nude at a sanatorium for a friend, Friedrich Schiller, must have no doubt thrilled him; though it transpires that Kafka had been coy about getting his kit off — perhaps on account of circumcision. To Brod, he confessed dreams in which he kissed Franz Werfel, the author of The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, the epic novel about the Armenian genocide.

But Kafka wasn’t a homosexual as we would understand the word today. For sexuality wasn’t a binary business in 1910s Bohemia. Indeed, he was something of a womaniser, a tubercular lady-killer consumed by an insatiable appetite — “senselessly drawn, senselessly wandering through a senselessly dirty world,” as he put it. His diaries are littered with references to his mistresses. The great love of his life was Felice Bauer, to whom he was engaged twice; though they saw one another in person only on 17 occasions. It was, for the better part, an epistolary relationship. Kafka sent her more than 500 letters. All the same, he was quite disillusioned about the affair. “Blonde, somewhat stiff, charmless hair” was his first observation about her. When they met, he had casually introduced himself as a “gadabout”. To his diary, he confided the main reason for wanting to marry her: his “inability to endure life alone”. The engagement ceremony found him “bound like a criminal”. When they went shopping for furniture together, all Kafka could think of were tombstones.

Then there was his engagement to the tubercular clerk Julie Wohryzek, broken off when he transferred his affections to his Czech translator, the married grass widow Milena Jesenská. This was followed by an affair with the waitress Juliane “Hansi” Szokoll, who called him “Franzi” and had a penchant for living life lockdown-style, Proustianly in bed for days on end.

At some point before that was his fling with Hedwig Weiler. She was “very bright, very Social Democratic”, he wrote to Brod, but she needed “to keep their teeth clenched so as not to come out with a conviction, a principle, at any provocation”. Kafka was wholly uninterested in her politics, which clearly mattered a lot to Weiler, who went on to earn a doctorate in 1914. Needless to say, the affair didn’t last very long.

Finally, there was Dora Diamant, a Jewish Chassid girl on the run from her ultra-Orthodox Polish family; later a prominent communist actress. The two lived together in Berlin during Kafka’s dying days, day-dreaming about opening a restaurant in Palestine. Dora would cook, and Kafka would wait tables. His tuberculosis, with which he had lived for seven long years —“with such a body, nothing can be achieved”, he noted in his diaries — killed him in Klosterneuburg in 1924. Kafka was only 40.

All in all, it had been an uneventful, fairly apolitical life. Later critics made him out to be a raging critic of communism and fascism, but these are posthumous annexations. The fact is that he was too consumed by his interiority to really be preoccupied with politics proper. In his diaries, he devotes some 500 words to the subject of Russian circumcision, but then registers the onset of the Great War with laughable concision. His 2 August 1914 entry can be quoted in full: “Germany has declared war on Russia. Swimming school in the afternoon.” Indeed, his indifference to world-historical events is the most striking aspect of his diaries.

Much has been made of Kafka’s pacifism. But this view, too, rests on over-interpretation. Kafka simply didn’t have too strong an opinion on the war. If he didn’t fight, it wasn’t on principle but because he failed to make the cut. Kafka tried thrice to enlist in the Austrian army. Later, he purchased war bonds and visited replica trenches in Prague to vicariously live life on the front.

Kafka was, according to the historian Ritchie Robertson, a “conservative modernist” like Conrad. True, he was fond of Flaubert, but for the most part, the culture he consumed was rather pedestrian. He enjoyed adventure stories. When it came to cinema, he had a preference for Westerns and melodramas. His literary tastes, Robertson writes, were cosmopolitan if “mildly conservative” — as one would expect from a subscriber of Die Neue Rundschau. His themes, both in his short stories and novels, were ambiguity and decline. His protagonists are typically weak men in the throes of existential crises flailing about in a world of bureaucratic intransigence.

It is easy to see why Cold Warriors took so well to his oeuvre. In the age bookended by the rise of Nazism and the fall of the Soviet Union, Kafka’s works were effortlessly appropriated as antitotalitarian pamphlets. At first blush, they appear to be on the money. The Trial, for instance, is the story of the arbitrary arrest, then execution, of Josef K. Hairs have been split trying to figure out whether Kafka had the Soviets in mind when writing the novel or the would-be autocrats closer to home. Some have argued the book is really about colonial violence — about the Herero, who were consigned to German concentration camps in Namibia in 1904-7, an episode generally regarded as the harbinger of the Holocaust.

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It’s a persuasive thesis. But those of us who have caught a glint of Occam’s razor may prefer a simpler explanation: Kafka’s books aren’t about authoritarianism at all. They’re instead about his father. They’re not so much about anti-statist as filial rebellion.

Kafka had daddy issues. The young Franz was mortally afraid of his father, who used to beat him. Hermann Kafka was by all accounts an abrasive and choleric character, given to banging on insufferably about the poverty of his youth, and abusing his employees, who once threatened to resign en masse from his haberdashery shop. It was left to Franz to cajole them one by one into staying on. “All I have written has been about you,” Franz wrote in a letter he never had the courage to send Hermann. “I was oppressed by your sheer corporeality.” Hermann was a huge man, whereas Franz was “a little skeleton”. He developed a stutter in his father’s presence. In his diaries, Kafka workshops a story that was later published as “The Judgement”, about a carefree twentysomething condemned “to death by drowning” by his killjoy father. More famously, in The Metamorphosis, Gregor Samsa wakes up to find himself transformed into a monstrous insect who is, in the end, fatally wounded by an apple hurled at him by his father.

Kafka no doubt had good reasons for being politically passive. The Bohemia of his youth was an intensely political place, brimming with Czech nationalists who had it in for the elite German minority. As a Jew, though, Kafka had no skin in the game. Moreover, he knew from experience that, for all their differences, both sides were united in their antisemitism. In 1897, when Count Badeni made Czech one of the two languages of government along with German, violence broke out between the Germans and Czechs. The biggest casualty, however, was Prague’s Jewish population, whose homes and shops were singled out for attack.

For Kafka, aged 14, it must have been a formative episode, even if the business owned by his parents was spared. It might have been what turned him off politics. It also goes a long way in explaining Kafka’s Zionism, though it must be said he wore these ideas lightly. It seems he was less interested in following the mundanities leading up to the creation of a settlement in Palestine — the tawdry business of lobbying the Ottomans and the like — than in learning Hebrew and dabbling in Jewish history. Indeed, there was no more to his Zionism than a healthy cultural curiosity. As Kafka himself put it, “What do I have in common with Jews? I have scarcely anything in common with myself.” Convictions of any kind he found boring. But above all, he was bored by politics.

Kafka had fun. He liked to épater la bourgeoisie, but beyond that, if his diaries are anything to go by, he was a rather vacuous chap.

Many describe Franz Kafka’s disenchanted fables as tragic. And this is certainly true. But they are also farcical. To watch someone being relentlessly wrong can be grimly enjoyable — as long as you’re not the person in question.

The term white feminism, as it is commonly used today, is a classic example of the Kafka Trap. If you show too much interest in the lives of people of colour, you risk being accused of white saviourism — which is another way of saying you have a suspiciously condescending attitude to people of colour. But if you don’t show enough interest, you are insufficiently intersectional. You only care about the white, middle-class cisgendered women in your social circle.

White feminism is a classic example of the Kafka Trap because whatever you do is either too much or not enough. You are never right.

Joanne Harris, a bestselling novelist, recently wrote a blog post entitled “White feminists, I’m looking at you”. Harris describes white feminists as “women who ‘don’t see’ race, and who think that counts as a virtue” and are “quite happy to see women abused, as long as those women are different from their own privileged circle of friends”.

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She argues that white women are too defensive when they get accused of racism: “I get it. It’s easier to focus on the words and what they mean, rather than the reason they were used in the first place. So stop thinking about the words, and think about what you did, instead. Consider whether you said or did something that was harmful.”

But whether something is harmful in the first place surely depends on the meaning of words and the content of what was said? Otherwise, what justification would there be for saying the thing was harmful?

Harris’s blog insists that her white female readers should be thoughtless. Instead of reflecting on the situation at hand, they should simply listen to their critics. In short, she wants them to acquiesce to any charge of racism levelled against them: “This isn’t about you”, she states. “No-one cares why you caused harm. All that matters is that you did.”

But is it true that no one cares why someone caused harm? If someone who is, in general, an intelligent and lovely person caused me harm, I would be especially curious to know why they did. And conversely, if I caused someone harm, I would want to know how. But then again, I’m not a white woman; passivity is not for me.

Apart from being an exercise in incoherent pontificating, and a text that instructs a group of women to fulfil archaic gender roles, Harris’s blog is also narcissistic. If no one should care why a white feminist caused harm to a group of people, why should anyone care what a white feminist like herself has to say about any of this?

In principle, Harris is encouraging greater tolerance. She says that white women are not perfect, and that she includes herself in this: “White feminists, I’m looking at you. White feminists, I’m looking at me.” But this ostentatious meekness presupposes that everyone apart from white feminists will be acting in good faith: if white feminists are not perfect, why should we assume everyone else is? In truth, no one is perfect.

But if you only insist on the imperfections of one group of people, that provides the perfect backdrop for the Kafka Trap. Whatever they do will always be judged by a harsher set of standards.

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In her blog, Harris is perhaps referring to Kate Clanchy, a writer and teacher who was recently denounced on Goodreads and Twitter for the way she described some of her students in her memoir Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me. Three writers in particular — Chimene Suleyman, Monisha Rajesh and Sunny Singh — condemned the book for its use of racist language and the hurt this has caused people of colour. Clanchy described one student as having “chocolate-coloured skin” and another as possessing “almond-shaped eyes”. Clanchygate, as these things often do, descended into chaos. Those three critics of Clanchy unpardonably received racist abuse and trolling on Twitter.

Before this summer, I only knew Clanchy as a teacher on Twitter who shared viral poems of her students. When I first heard about the incident, I was gently bemused by it. The first real shock came when Picador, Clanchy’s publisher, announced she would be rewriting sections of the book. Something was not right here — the book was only published two years ago, not fifty or even twenty, and it would have been read by countless people at the publishing firm.

I don’t think the publishing industry is staffed by people who are indifferent to racial prejudice. So what could have gone wrong? The novelist Amanda Craig, a defender of Clanchy, suggested on Twitter that the book would have benefitted from sensitivity readers — people of colour who are paid by publishing companies to ensure any description of ethnic minority people is not offensive.

But the problem with sensitivity readers is that people of colour are not the same: what is offensive to one black or Asian person is perfectly fine to another. It assumes that there is a correct line on such matters, and only a select elite of people of colour can establish it. But I don’t want a clerisy of ethnic minority people to shape what I read; I want editors to do their job and ensure the book is as good as it could be.

An example of a person of colour who was not offended by the descriptions in Clanchy’s book is one of her former students: Shukria Rezaei. Writing in the Times, Rezaei pointed out that “in the book, she describes one of her pupils as having ‘almond-shaped eyes’. Critics labelled this description patronising, insulting, offensive, colonialist and racist. This upset me. I am that girl with the almond eyes. I did not find it offensive”.

She added that “almond eyes” is “a term that I have often used in my own poems. My almond-shaped eyes are at the core of my Hazara identity”. In other words: context matters. And in reading both the testimony of her former students and the book for myself, I came to the conclusion that the imputation of racism made by Clanchy’s online detractors was unjustified.

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Clanchy entered Rezaei — and many of her other students —into poetry competitions; Rezaei had just immigrated from Pakistan (but her family is originally from Afghanistan) and didn’t speak good English. Clanchy found Rezaei funding to stay in school for an extra year because her immigration status was unsettled. And Clanchy found Rezaei scholarships and helped with her university applications.

Rezaei is not the only young person of colour Clanchy has helped. In her Times article, she quotes Asima Qayyum, another former student of Clanchy’s, who says:

“Kate gave us platforms we never expected. She fought for us to be in rooms and places we had never been welcomed in before and made sure people heard what we had to say. I know first-hand how cruel and completely unacceptable racism is in any form, and from my experiences it’s not something I’ve ever associated with Kate. I just want people to know and hear from a student who has worked with Kate for almost ten years that my experience with her has impacted my life in so many positive ways it’s unimaginable.”

In a recently published open letter to The Bookseller, a group of Clanchy’s former students characterised by what they call “multicultural diversity”, describe their personal experiences of Clanchy as one of “unequivocal care and support, always, for us as poets and as people”. On the topic of whether Clanchy is exploiting them, they say: “Kate’s promotion of our poems does not take away our agency: we do not speak through Kate, and she does not presume to speak for us”.

If the claim of “listen to people of colour” is meaningful then it needs to include voices such as Clancy’s former students in any estimation of her. Yet all too often “listen to people of colour” means listen to a select group of people of colour, take their word for writ, and suspend your critical faculties: what else can help explain how a publishing company that hitherto passionately supported an Orwell-prize winning book can acquiesce after an online backlash?

Some may argue that Clanchy is guilty of a type of white saviourism: the privileged English teacher condescending to refugee students. This would be a cynical distortion of what is evidently a generous woman trying to do her best to encourage marginalised young people to thrive. Some of the descriptions of her students in the book did make me cringe a bit, but reading the entire book did not leave me with the impression of a racist. Quite the opposite. Clanchy is genuinely enthused by living in a multiracial England.

Yet the Kafka Trap enables an English teacher who has gone out of her way to help refugee students thrive to become paralysed by the accusation of racism. Any further response from her would be used as evidence against her.

Joanne Harris addressed her piece to white women, but the Kafka Trap has severe implications for anyone who believes there is an important distinction to be made between clumsy writing and racial prejudice. Between imperfect women (and remember, no person can be perfect) and people complicit with racism. And between those of us who believe in tolerance and those whose minds have been degraded by a politics that speaks the language of compassion but is in practice vindictive.

But her card wouldn’t work at the cashpoint either. She tried another one. With the same result.

Laura opened the banking app on her phone. It said only ‘error’, then automatically closed.

She finally abandoned her shopping and went into the nearest branch of Santander. There, the counter assistant seemed just as mystified. After about an hour of waiting, though, Laura was called through into the manager’s office.

“I’m going to read a statement out for you,” the manager said. “But I’m not going to be able to answer any of your questions after that.”

He read out:

“We have locked your bank account. We can’t give you any more information. We might be in touch in future with more information. But we don’t know when that might be.”

Could she have her money? No.

But how was she supposed to get home? After all, she lived eight miles outside of Leeds, and now she had no bus fare. Apparently, this was not the bank’s business.

This low-rent version of The Trial went on for another three weeks. Frequently, Laura would phone up Santander customer services. She’d be put on hold for ages. Then the phone would just go dead. She wrote to Santander to complain. They wrote back: they weren’t interested in her complaint and wouldn’t be taking it any further. Meanwhile, her rent, standing orders and Direct Debits stacked up, the late fees and penalties mushroomed around them, as life tumbled towards chaos.

Nearly a month on, she received a letter from Santander:

Under the terms and conditions… we can withdraw banking facilities at any time, and in line with company policy we don’t give further details.

The account had been closed. Without apparent irony, the balance had been appended as a cheque.

‘Laura’ could be any of us. But she is also Laura Towler, one of the founders of Patriotic Alternative. Towler is a sort of next-gen BNP type, a net-savvy white identitarian who campaigns against mass-migration, and occasionally winks to her Telegram followers about ‘you know who’ (they know alright: The Jews). It would seem that Towler had been expelled from Santander for her views. But in line with the bank’s conditions, this has not been made clear.

By a strange coincidence, in the same month, the same thing happened to Mark Collett, her Patriotic Alternative co-founder. Only, Collett doesn’t bank with Santander — he is with HSBC. Somehow, the same thing also happened, in different countries, to Europe’s leading young white identitarians: Brittany Pettibone and Martin Sellner.

Coincidence abounds in the modern world. Last year, on the other side of the Atlantic, various alt-ish-Right figures who banked with JP Morgan Chase woke up on the same morning to find that they no longer banked with JP Morgan Chase. They included the chair of the Proud Boys Enrique Tarrio, former InfoWars staffer Joe Biggs, Project Veritas associate Laura Loomer, and Martina Markota, a Trump-supporting performance artist.

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Of those four, it’s the other Laura whose case drives home the full capriciousness of corporate power in a networked age. Loomer styles herself as the “most banned woman in the world”. In addition to Chase, she is banned from PayPal, from VenMo, from The Cash App, Airbnb and Instagram, from Lyft, Uber and UberEats, from the blogging monetisation platform WordAds and the t-shirt print-to-order site TeeSpring, from Twitter and Facebook — obviously — and from any one of a half dozen other platforms for digital congress.

Some of these bans are strongly self-inflicted; controversy is her currency. She got booted from Uber in 2017 after ranting about being unable to find a taxi driver who wasn’t Muslim in Manhattan, in the hours after the NYC terror truck attack. Twitter banned her in 2018, after she laid into Ilhan Omar, the Muslim Congresswoman, claiming, scandalously, that Omar was part of a religion in which “homosexuals are oppressed”, and ”women are abused” and “forced to wear the hijab.” Later that month, wearing a gold ‘Juden’ star (Loomer is Jewish) she handcuffed herself to Twitter HQ, to protest the decision.

But many of those bans are mere cascade effects. TeeSpring works with PayPal. PayPal had already declared Loomer an unperson, and thus they informed TeeSpring that they would have to stop supplying her. Ditto Venmo and The Cash App.

You don’t want to mess with the people who make the widgets that undergird the financial system. In 2018, in response to activist pressure, MasterCard began choking off various far-Right and internet Right figures. That in turn meant their often lucrative Patreon accounts were cancelled: YouTube ‘Classical Liberal’ Carl Benjamin lost $12000 a month. Now, in a post-Covid world, where we’re often being told that cash is no longer acceptable, some are also being told that electronic banking is no longer for them. It’s an interesting crossroads.

The likes of Towler might be distasteful. But if that alone is the bar for the arbitrary exercise of power by, say, the PR department of NatWest, then all kinds of people — from Cat Bin Lady down — stand to be unpersoned.

Right of admission is always reserved — we all know this — and you might say that these examples are just the market at work. Except that some things are so fundamental to our everyday lives that they’re not so much markets as the thing that you need in order to use a market.

In the dying days of Gordon Brown, an attempt was made to guarantee every citizen’s right to a current account. It was quickly shot down by the Big Five banks (after all, it wasn’t as if they owed the government any favours). A decade on, that tide is further out than it has ever been.

In the banking system’s capacity to disable the individual without pro-actively doing them harm, there’s an echo of the elegance of the Chinese government’s social credit. “There was no file, no police warrant, no official advance notification. They just cut me off from the things I was once entitled to. What’s really scary is there’s nothing you can do about it,” was how Liu Hu put it — a Chinese journalist, who ran afoul of social credit in 2019. But perhaps Black Mirror’s ‘Nosedive’ episode would be a more apt comparison. In our hemisphere, that kind of deletion is done more cheerily, coated in the veneer of freedom of choice and association, by PR and HR, not by the grey monolith of The Party’s star council.

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Increasingly, we allow our corporations to police the soft boundaries of acceptable speech and thought, from Sainsbury’s rejection of ‘racist’ shoppers to the Yorkshire Tea wars to Tampax’s latest bloodbath.

Ironically enough, the license that companies now take as part of their remit is a perfect mirror image of the Cake Problem: the oft-rehashed libertarian thought experiment, over whether a fundamentalist Christian cake-maker should be forced to bake a cake for a gay wedding. When US Libertarian Party candidate Gary Johnson was posed the question in 2016, he said that they should — and added that he would equally require a Jewish baker to make a Nazi wedding cake. The underlying principle is one of neutrality. Where two belief systems clash, if they remain polite and cooperative, shouldn’t the public still retain an underlying right of service?

Evidently not.

Another great thought experiment dawned in August of last year, when Laura Loomer stunned the Republican establishment by winning the GOP primary for Florida’s 21st Congressional District. The 21st is West Palm Beach, where Mar-a-Lago lives. Trump himself has already cast his vote for her.

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Clearly, Loomer’s campaign has been adversely affected by her various bans. At the time of her deletion, Loomer’s tweets were getting 150 million impressions a month. As she puts it: “They just assume that people can afford TV, and that they’re not going to get all their information through social media.”  She might have wingnut tendencies, but Loomer is also half of the choice for voters in the 21st District.

This year, “in the interests of transparency and fairness”, Twitter has given every single candidate standing in the US election a blue-check verified account. So, when she won her primary, she applied to have her accounts reinstated.

No dice. She can’t get on Big Social, the broadcast networks are ignoring her, and her opponent, Lois Frankel, won’t even say her name, let alone debate her.

Should she win — still a long shot — Loomer has sworn to spend her time on Capitol Hill breaking up the tech giants’ monopoly. So couldn’t it be said that they’re acting to titrate their own legislative environment?

F.A. Hayek, and his prophet on earth Margaret Thatcher, saw the market as the best bulwark against tyrannical state power — that by pulling lots of little levers every day with our cash, we’d effectively be voting, in a constant dialogue of mini-democracy. It was only towards the end of their regime that the Thatcherites began to realise that some things — from trains down — remain public utilities in spirit, no matter who runs them.

As the Hunter Biden story still freezes the New York Post’s Twitter feed, it seems the power of the corporate lever-pullers to mould the outer edges of democracy is as strong as it has ever been. We can vote with our wallets, sure. But what if the scope extends way beyond a single product line, into an entire kind of product, or the social architecture that makes products possible? What if the lever-pullers are our wallets?

Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, by Jorge Luis Borges
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This short story tells of the discovery of an encyclopaedia describing an imaginary world that has been invented by a secret society. In Tlon there is only one intellectual discipline: psychology. Physical objects are ideas in the mind; only the floating world of impressions and notions exists. Yet these insubstantial ideas have the power to invade the realm of matter.

In a postscript, Borges records how, after the discovery of this encyclopaedia, people began to find small and extremely heavy cones, “made from a metal that is not of this world”. The “primitive language” of Tlon found its way into schools, where a make-believe history was taught and only a concocted past remained. The imagined universe of Tlon disintegrated the human world.

Nearly everyone in lockdown has been struck by a sense of unreality. It is not only the empty cities that seem phantasmagorical. So, too, do the lives we led before the pandemic. If we long to return to the way we used to live, we also suspect that this previous life was a fantasy.

In pre-lockdown reality, other species were becoming extinct at a rate unprecedented for tens of millions of years. The climate was becoming violently unstable. Yet these realities did not disturb the world dreamt up in the human mind. It came to be believed that humans lived in a new era — the Anthropocene — in which they had mastered the natural world.

Like Tlon, the Anthropocene was a figment of the imagination. Springing from living relics of wilderness sold off to be eaten, the virus has disrupted that dream. While it was dreaming, humankind was desolating the planet. Now the dream has dissipated, we find ourselves in a world that seems too strange to be real. But it is in this world in which we must learn to live, with the virus.

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The deluded cult of social justice

By John Gray

The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono
Recommended by Polly Mackenzie

One of the great lessons of this crisis will be that we need to make more decisions for the long term. We have to prepare not for what we need now, but for what we will need in the future. To help us absorb this lesson, there is one parable I think we should all read, and especially everyone working in politics: The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jean Giono.

It tells the story of a shepherd called Elzéard Bouffier, who Giono meets in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence in 1910. He watches Elzéard sorting and then planting hundreds of acorns as he walks through the wilderness. Giono returns after surviving the first world war to find the valley is starting to bloom into health, with saplings everywhere. The world has torn itself to pieces but one man’s gesture of hope has created new life where there was none. And Elzéard continues to plant, even after the forest is mature and the valley prosperous.

This modern edition has an introduction by Michael Morpurgo

Elzeard teaches us that life and hope can come from the most desolate circumstances. He teaches us that one man or woman’s choices can make an endless difference. He teaches us that small gestures can be transformative, if you give them time, and don’t give up.

The story is short but it covers decades of history. You have to, if you’re writing about trees. It’s just one of those things about them, as I had to explain to my son when he planted a pear seed in the middle of the lawn last week. They take a long time to grow. There will not be pears for dinner. You do not plant trees for today, or for yourself.

So look at the trees in your park or street as you go for your daily constitutional. Wonder who planted them. Give thanks. And then wonder what gift you can give to someone who comes twenty, or fifty, or a hundred years from now.

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A Covid death is not a good death

By Polly Mackenzie

The Expert System’s Brother, by Adrian Tchaikovsky
Recommended by Chris Deerin

There’s something about the lockdown — the unshakeable murmur of anxiety, the throb of genuine distress, the sudden unknowability of the future — that has left me temporarily unable to cope with, and less tolerant of, much literary fiction. I need escape, and plot, and preferably humour. Stories in which things happen. That don’t overstay their welcome. That get me out the door.

I’m largely finding my solace in science fiction: world-building and otherness provides a place to liberate oneself, to get lost, to be dazzled.

Adrian Tchaikovsky is among modern sci-fi’s biggest plasma guns. I came to him relatively late, when his wondrous, anthropomorphic tale of space-spider evolution, Children of Time, deservedly won the 2016 Arthur C Clarke award.

I’ve just finished one of his slighter works, a 170-page novella called The Expert System’s Brother, published in 2018 but highly germane to the current madness. Humanity endures a reduced, agrarian lifestyle, living in small villages run by wise elders. The twist, though: these elders seem to be cyborgs.

Don’t underestimate the power of a good sci-fi novel

As the story unfolds it becomes clear that a lost history — of forgotten science and technology and space travel — is being excavated, both figuratively and literally. In his search for meaning, 16-year-old Handry, the central character, is therefore confronted with two possible futures for his kind.

How much power and autonomy should technology be given? What is the role and purpose of human agency? How can difference and prejudice be overcome? Can tradition be beaten? Along the way, our protagonist encounters a figure who offers messianic certainty — and Handry struggles to hold on to scepticism and doubt, those most essential human qualities.

As we emerge from the Coronavirus plague and recalibrate our society, these questions — as old as the hills but utterly of the moment — will similarly confront us. The Expert System’s Brother is a useful primer, a philosophical stimulant, and a cracking read.

The Diary of a Nobody, by George and Weedon Grossmith
Recommended by Tom Holland

On Easter Sunday, I rose very early with my wife, and walked through an empty London. To see the banks of the Thames, the City and the West End all still and silent was as eerie an experience as any we have ever had. Looking towards Primrose Hill, wherein H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds the Martians set up their base and then die of flu, it was hard not to feel that we had strayed into the world of the novel. “Those who have only seen London veiled in her sombre robes of smoke can scarcely imagine the naked clearness and beauty of the silent wilderness of houses.”

Which is why, as my lockdown read, I would recommend a novella published five years before The War of the Worlds, and which, although likewise set in late Victorian London, could not be more utterly, more joyously different.

“Why should I not publish my diary? I have often seen reminiscences of people I have never even heard of, and I fail to see — because I do not happen to be a ‘Somebody’ — why my diary should not be interesting.” So begins The Diary of a Nobody, the chronicle of the spectacularly unspectacular life of Mr. Charles Pooter, a City clerk.

Illustrations by Weedon Grossmith

He paints a bath; he despairs of his raffish son; he attends a ball at the Mansion House. Nothing much more than that happens. There are certainly no murderous tripods. Yet it is the easiest, most enjoyable read. “The funniest book in the world,” Evelyn Waugh called it — and he did not exaggerate. As a distraction from the strange and unsettling times in which we live, I cannot think of a better recommendation than this great celebration of the normal and the utterly conventional.

Oh, and the illustrations are wonderful as well…

The Burrow, by Franz Kafka
Recommended by Jenny McCartney

The experience of ‘lockdown’ has — for many of us — shrunk the world to the confines of our homes, save for the occasional government-approved excursion. With sufficient vigilance, we are encouraged to think it may be possible to keep the viral foe at bay. Meanwhile we contemplate our domestic grocery stores with fluctuating concern or satisfaction.

Which is why, while stuck indoors, you should read Franz Kafka’s short story ‘The Burrow’. Do not, however, approach this story if your sanity already feels precarious.

‘The Burrow’ is narrated in the voice of a large burrowing animal — a carnivorous, mole-like creature, we intuit, although the exact species is never declared. This creature is obsessively concerned with the security of its home and larder, into which it has poured a vast amount of labour and strategy over the years. Like any stockpiler, it gloats over its supplies, which it hoards in a section called the Castle Keep: “Consequently I can divide up my stores, walk about among them, play with them, enjoy their plenty and their various smells, and reckon up exactly how much they represent.”

The animal has acute hearing and smell, which enable it to detect the approach of enemies — or false alarms — at a great distance. Such perceived threats trigger enormous worry, and a degree of precautionary plotting that verges on madness. The story is a unique portrait of a paranoid mind, and yet — without any objective means by which to assess the external threat — the reader cannot judge whether or not the paranoia is partly justified.

Kafka, a German-speaking Jew in Prague, was keenly aware of both the lurking external menace of anti-Semitism, and the invasive horror of a germ: the tuberculosis that killed him. Yet only his peculiar genius could have nosed out such a means to let anxiety speak.

All good writers try to shrug on other skins, to inhabit other characters. But Kafka dares to cross into other species, to shrug on skins that are not human, and somehow triumphs. Although this creature talks, it is not human: its tunnelled world reeks of earth and instinct and the atavistic consumption of lesser animals, or ‘small fry’. And yet we recognise its voice.

I have read ‘The Burrow’ many times, and it still astounds me. To come to it now, however, is to experience the height of its bizarre spell. For we are communally closer to its claustrophobic, uneasy mindset, in this strange period of history, than most of us have ever been before — and, hopefully, will ever be again.

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The Kafkaesque nightmare of British justice

By Jenny McCartney

The Clothes They Stood Up In, by Alan Bennett
Recommended by Simon Evans

To the Billy Liar in all of us, a sudden lurching change in reality such as that effected by Lockdown triggers a slew of rough parallels drawn from fiction, myth and movies. Everything from Planet of the Apes to 28 Days Later to The Truman Show have suggested themselves as templates for our new situation. Or in Hove, Planet of the Gulls.

But the short fiction that has helped me to understand the potential of this moment is that of the shift in perspective often associated with the mid-life crisis. Such events are often regarded as fundamentally comic, even trivial, in nature. Yet what is Dante’s Divine Comedy if not such a crisis, writ mythopoetic?

“In the middle of the journey of our life, I came to myself, in a dark wood, where the direct way was lost…” — we’ve all been there, lately.

One good example, and of very readable length, is Alan Bennett’s The Clothes They Stood Up In. A late middle-aged couple return home from Cosi Fan Tuti one evening to find that their house has been burgled — but of everything. Beds, carpets, light fittings, the lot. Hence the title.

On an unexpected change of domestic circumstances…

I won’t spoil the story — it’s on Kindle, and less than £2 — but it takes several unexpected turns before the final curtain. It’s tackled as light, bittersweet comedy, of course, and deftly done. It has many of Bennett’s familiar tropes, and mild failings. It’s full of slightly twee vernacular and his sympathies fall a little predictably — though he acknowledges this at one point with an unexpectedly graceful meta-injunction on his characterisation of the husband.

But it is the effect the burglary has on the wife that has stayed with me. In particular, her tangible disappointment when their former life is restored, after all, and things return to “normal”.

This, as much as anything, is something we need to brace for, I suspect, when Lockdown lifts. And this gentle, very English book is a hint at some worthwhile preparatory meditations, tempered by some affectionate reflections on the likelihood of their making a damned bit of difference when it comes.

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Why mock Jordan Peterson's suffering?

By Simon Evans

A Temporary Matter, by Jhumpa Lahiri
Recommended by Freya Sanders

If you could spend a year in solitude, where would you choose? “A house full of books” would have once been my answer. But now the hypothetical has happened, I’m quite unenthusiastic about reading. It only makes me feel more distant from social life.

If you feel compelled to read, though, read Jhumpa Lahiri. She’s an expert on the ways in which we can feel distant from one another.

In one of her short stories, A Temporary Matter — available in The New Yorker archives — a young-ish married couple receives a letter informing them that “for five days their electricity would be cut off for one hour, beginning at 8 P.M”. The inconvenience jolts the household out of its routine. For months, the husband has eaten dinner in his study, pretending to work; the wife has eaten hers in front of the TV. “With no lights, they would have to eat together.”

You sense that until now the lives of these two characters have crossed only in conversations about the washing up, complaints about coats not hung up properly. But now, thrown together for an hour, the couple start to talk. The wife suggests they each share one thing about themselves that the other doesn’t know. They do this, each night. Until, eventually, they address the elephant in the room.

The irony of social distancing is that a lot of people are suddenly spending a lot of time with loved ones who have been, for whatever reason, distant. Lockdown may, as some suggest, end in a cascade of divorces — but will be the confinement be the cause, or the catalyst? People, it seems, are perfectly able to trudge along together miserable peace, until something like the virus — or a persistent power-cut — makes such an existence impossible. But then what…

‘A Temporary Matter’ is the first in a Pulitzer Prize-winning book of short stories that is called, aptly, Interpreter of Maladies. Each narrative addresses one of life, and lockdown’s, big puzzles: how to communicate with those we’re stuck with, in sickness or in health.

Death in Venice, by Thomas Mann
Recommended by John Lewis-Stempel

In which wearied writer Gustave von Aschenbach, after encountering a tramp one revelatory Munich afternoon, suffers a ‘contagion’ of desire to travel to the Venetian lagoon, where he falls lovesick for the boy Tadzio, wearer of sailor suit and bearer of golden curls.

Cosmetically de-ageing (he believes, tragically) with hair-dye and rouge, von Aschenbach then falls physically sick with Asiatic cholera. “And before nightfall a shocked and respectful world received the news of his decease.”

This is the novella for this time of pestilence, but also the novella for all modern time. Because our entire lives are diseased. Famed for its languid evocation of The Floating City (note that Tadzio is a homophone of adagio), Death in Venice is more truly the existentialist fiction that prefigures Sartre.

There are no escapes, even in forbidden love, even in aesthetics. Mooning after Tadzio causes Aschenbach’s death since he fails to flee Venice in time. As for the ‘improbable’ beauty of  the city, Mann turns over every exalted stone of Ruskin’s to show  Venice’s decay: the mephitic canals, the petty thieves, the “hateful sultriness in the narrow streets.” Et in La Serenissima ego.

Significantly, Aschenbach, solitary and solipsistic, chooses not to go to his house in rural Germany for recuperation. The German countryside was filling with the Lederhosen hearties of the Vandervogel movement who pre-figured Nazism. (There really are no ways out from the dilemma of being.) Some authors have their fingers on the pulse. Mann had a lancet, carved the human body gob to groin, and placed his hand on its soul.

You’ve got to laugh. Truly. A novel interpretation of Mann’s novella would suggest endemic subdermal black humour. He is wickedly funny about the self-pities and the pretensions of The Writer in maturity. Aschenbach “banished from his style every common word.” He could not indite “smelly”, he had to scribe “mephitic”. It was von Aschenbach’s first malady, his lucubration.

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Will rural France recover from Covid?

By John Lewis-Stempel

What’s Expected of Us, by Ted Chiang
Recommended by Sam Leith

I’m here to recommend a very short story indeed: the science fiction writer Ted Chiang’s ‘What’s Expected of Us‘. It’ll take you maybe three minutes to read, if that. But like a sip of a good wine, the taste lingers. Chiang’s story is a tiny squib on perhaps the biggest subject of all: free will. It’s a subject that seems particularly relevant at this time of global unfreedom, while we contemplate what we don’t know and what we’d rather not know.

The McGuffin for this story is a device called a Predictor: “Its only features are a button and a big green LED. The light flashes if you press the button. Specifically, the light flashes one second before you press the button.” The reader, the narrator says, has probably seen one — millions have been sold by the time you’re reading this. On the face of it they’re like a gimmicky executive toy. They work by sending a signal a second back in time. Everyone tries to find ways to “fool” them — but they can’t be fooled.

The story concerns the effect that these things have on people. Basically, they prove that free will is an illusion. As that knowledge sinks in, a global pandemic of why-bother sets in. People just… give up. They stop talking, stop doing anything. The narrator, it becomes clear, is issuing a dire warning — but why, and how, and from where? Aha: even for a short short story, no spoilers.

You can find this story online for free here. With a bit of luck, that taster will lead you to buy Chiang’s collection Exhalation — in which every story, though they aren’t all as short as this one, develops some giant idea. They do, to my mind, just what the best speculative fiction ought to. The best of them open up entirely other worlds and imagine what it would be like to live in them — or posit huge ideas in logic or ethics and work out just what it would mean to live with their consequences.

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Why I'm reactivating World of Warcraft

By Sam Leith

This is Pleasure, by Mary Gaitskill
Recommended by Rowan Pelling

The single aspect of normal working life I miss most is gossip. Without humans interacting in the same physical spaces over extended periods of time, there’s no flirting, no power games, no rebellions and no febrile soap opera. Or, at least, not the sort you can witness, or have retold to you in exquisite detail by a gimlet-eyed observer.

The crimes and recriminations of #MeToo suddenly seem to belong to another era. But Mary Gaitskill’s brilliant (and I do mean pitch-perfect on every level) novella This Is Pleasure plunges you right back in.

Quin is a foppish, married publisher who conducts numerous tendresses (why do the French have words we so painfully lack?), but not love affairs, with young women who he tells himself he wants to pique and spur on to greater things. His intimacies involve many, small provocations and a few undeniable, graver trespasses. Quin is outrageous and quite possibly dangerous, but also entertaining and compelling. He’s exactly the sort of person many of us do allow greater leeway than we should, for fear of boredom.

This new novella will make you miss office politics.

Quin’s close friend Margot also edits books and has graduated from being one of his prodigies/playthings/experiments — it’s hard to tell which — to being a family guest and confidante.  She has experienced his inappropriate behaviour first-hand, but also his unforced generosity, professional support and joie de vivre. Margot has chided him, “You delectate pain,” but never intervened — something that will haunt her after Quin is denounced, fired and becomes a social pariah.

The novella is conducted in short chapters that alternate Quin’s and Margot’s points of view. The sense of two eras, before and after #MeToo, is deftly interwoven. This is a work that’s purely concerned with the grey areas. Quin is by no means a rapist and Margot is not by nature an appeaser. Nevertheless, they have been complicit. The degree to which one or both are guilty can only be decided by the reader and everyone will put down this book with a slightly different verdict.

The strange thing is that you may also find yourself nostalgic for the office world of power-games and dodgy gallantries. If there’s one thing worse than your colleague’s “micro-aggression”, it’s being bored out of your skull.

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What did Playboy ever do for women?

By Rowan Pelling

Houston, Houston, Do You Read, by James Tiptree Jnr.
Recommended by Matthew Sweet

My friend Una McCormack is an accomplished science fiction writer. Last year she introduced me to another. James Tiptree Jnr.

Who’s he? I asked. It’s complicated, she said.

She was right. In the 1970s Tiptree was celebrated as the Ernest Hemingway of sci-fi. However, neither readers nor peers nor publishers ever clapped eyes on him — which meant they had no idea he was really Alice Bradley Sheldon, a former CIA officer who chose her nom-de-plume while reading the labels in the jam section of her local supermarket.

Tiptree’s stories are about change — how to manage it when it happens, what to do about it when it doesn’t. They are about women — sometimes as individuals, sometimes as a collective — negotiating a solution to the problems of male power.

The short story collection Her Smoke Rose Up Forever gathers a set of bright hard gems that might reflect some light on our own historical moment. The Women Men Don’t See (1973) maroons its narrator in a mangrove swamp with a mother and daughter who, much to his bafflement, decline to behave like damsels in distress. The Screwfly Solution (1977) is set in a world overcome by a pandemic of male sexual violence: men have literally declared war on women, in an act of organised revenge upon Eve.

Don’t judge an author by her cover.

But perhaps Houston, Houston, Do You Read (1976) is her masterpiece. It’s about three male American astronauts who encounter unexpected company on a circumsolar mission — another spaceship, staffed by women who speak in Australian slang. At first the men hypothesise that the new ship has tumbled from the future through a black hole. However, it soon becomes clear that the traffic has moved in the opposite direction. The Earth to which they are returning is one in which plague has wiped out the male population, leaving women to figure out new ways of maintaining human life.

What should the new world look like, Tiptree asks. Whose skills will be most valued? And who will find themselves irrelevant? Questions we might ask as we shelter at home, while nurses and cleaners and shelf-stackers take up their positions on the front line.

There is, however, perhaps no other author who catches so keenly the confusion and distress of individuals who have lost all confidence — and sense of their own rights — in a system that appears to be operating according to its own unknowable rules, which are riddled with failings so familiar that they are now factored into expectations.

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Don't let Brexit become the next Troubles

By Jenny McCartney

The Trial, in particular, is acutely relevant to our current age, in which our criminal justice system — once internationally renowned — is in a deepening state of crisis. Meanwhile, away from courts, informal ‘trials’ with inconstant rules and outcomes have become a frequent feature of both social media and company policy.

These latter ‘trials’ — although they lack legal force — nonetheless have the power to ruin a life: to destroy an individual’s reputation, to sink current and future prospects of employment, and in some especially bleak cases to push those involved towards suicide.

The Trial, written in 1914-15 and first published posthumously in 1925, begins with the line: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Thereafter, K. finds himself immersed in an interminable and terrifyingly hazy case in which he is the defendant. There is something particularly chilling about such an opening line, because precisely the type of event it describes is familiar from immediate UK history.

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The town that should shame our politicians

By Paul Embery

The fantasist and paedophile Carl Beech has recently been jailed for perverting the course of justice — “telling lies,” indeed — by falsely alleging that a string of public figures were involved in a paedophile ring reportedly characterised by rape, torture and murder. Beech’s testimony was given weight by the senior police officer in charge of the investigation who declared his evidence “credible and true” on national television without awaiting the outcome of the ongoing investigation.

In the face of Beech’s unsubstantiated accusations, a lifetime of service to the state apparently counted for nothing. One of those accused by Beech was Field Marshal Lord Bramall, a hero of D-Day, who, in a searing recent interview with Dominic Lawson, described the circumstances of discovering that he was a suspect in an ongoing investigation.

He was having breakfast in March 2015 with his late wife Avril, who was then in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, when two police officers arrived at the door. They said: “Accusations have been made.” He asked: “Against whom?” They answered: “Against you.” In Lord Bramall’s words:

“All they would tell me was that 40 years ago I had abused an underage male. And at that moment they showed me a warrant, and 20 policemen in overalls came in and they searched this house for 10 hours.”

His lawyer later found out the charges, which included the most lurid accusations, such as “supervising the torture of small boys on Salisbury Plain”.

Suggested reading

Why women are Carl Beech's real victims

By Joan Smith

Lord Bramall lived long enough to see Beech imprisoned, although his distressed wife did not. Nor did Leon Brittan, the former Home Secretary: he died of cancer before hearing that his name had been cleared.

Paedophiles do exist, of course, and so do paedophiles in positions of public trust. Allegations from complainants need to be properly investigated. What distinguished the Carl Beech case from other cases – what made it worthy of a Kafka plot – was the willingness of the police to court publicity while openly abandoning due process and the essential principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’

Those caught up in Operation Midland had both the misfortune and the good luck that it unfolded in the public eye. Misfortune, because their status amplified the pain and shame of being stained with such appalling allegations, and good luck because it ensured that the case was at least subjected to press scrutiny and their exoneration was decisively publicised.

Yet it begs the question: how many more injustices are routinely pursued, largely unseen, against those who have few resources with which to counter them? The protections of our criminal justice system have long been intended to guarantee that all accused are treated equally in the eyes of the law. But those protections have been steadily eroded on a number of fronts. Kafka’s imagined world creeps ever closer.

Suggested reading

The trial of Danny Baker

By Eric Kaufmann

In January this year, The Law Society submitted a parliamentary briefing on a “criminal justice system in crisis”, which it argues has been caused by “years of underinvestment and neglect”. The challenges it cited included increasing shortages of duty solicitors; a restrictive means test for legal aid; inefficiencies in the system; more and more courts being closed; and crucial evidence often not being disclosed.

To take but a single example, the role of criminal duty solicitor – the person you can call for professional advice if you are being held in a police cell – is now so badly paid that younger lawyers are refusing to go into it. The youngest duty solicitor on the Isle of Wight is now 55 years old. She is understandably concerned about what happens to the rights of suspects once she retires.

The rates that criminal barristers are paid for undertaking legal aid cases are often less than £100 for a day’s work, out of which they must pay travel costs and fees to chambers. Many are finding that – despite an extensive education, for which they have usually incurred sizeable debts, and working long hours – they cannot afford even a modest mortgage out of their professional salary.

Young barristers are therefore leaving crime work in their droves for commercial or corporate practice. There is no area of the law in which the stakes for the individuals concerned are so high; yet those lawyers who remain in criminal law see cases being postponed and court buildings and their machinery crumbling.

Suggested reading

I'm sick of fighting moronic culture wars

By Lionel Shriver

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that the ongoing underpayment of criminal barristers and solicitors, the degradation of the infrastructure in which they operate, and the squeezing of public access to legal aid itself, is driven by an unspoken but resolute political intent. In one passage in The Trial, Kafka describes the surreal and miserable conditions in which the Advocates (those who represent defendants) work:

“It wasn’t saying too much if the Advocates called these conditions scandalous. Complaints to the authorities had not the slightest effect, and it was also strictly forbidden for the Advocates to make any structural repairs or alterations at their own expense.”

The narrative voice offers the reasoning for this situation:

 “Still, there was some justification for this attitude on the part of the authorities. They wanted to discourage defending counsel as much as possible, the whole onus of the Defence must be laid on the accused himself.”

Does this sound a fanciful translation from fiction, if applied to our current circumstances? Perhaps not when one considers a policy that is already in place, dubbed ‘the innocence tax’. Those who are above the threshold of legal aid funding – in the magistrates’ courts, anyone with an annual household income of £22,325, and in the crown court, above £37,500 of disposable household income – are currently compelled to fund their own defence privately, often at a considerably higher rate than legal aid fees.

Should they then be acquitted, however, the government will only reimburse them at legal aid rates (a deliberate policy: before 2012, they were allowed to claim back “reasonable costs”). This can leave people, after acquittal, with a large outstanding fee which in some cases has led to bankruptcy or the loss of life savings.

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Test article

By Jenny McCartney

The former Commons deputy speaker Nigel Evans experienced this personally, when he was acquitted of charges of rape and sexual abuse but lost his life savings in the fight to clear his name. He has since said:

“People don’t see people like me as victims, and there’s a sense that it could not happen to them. That’s what I thought too, but it’s completely wrong. There’s nothing easier than someone falsely accusing you of a crime.”

It has long been accepted that if one has the misfortune to be wrongly accused of a crime, a conviction is disastrous. Now, thanks to the ‘innocence tax’, so too might be the aftermath of acquittal.

Our legal system is the ultimate guarantor of individual liberty. It should be the last line of protection against the arbitrary persecution of the state, individual malice, and the passing mores or prejudices of wider society. The law should be broadly immune to contagious emotions or fashionable ideology.

Today, legal independence seems more necessary than ever, as the shifting traps of judgement and taste that are laid by social media – the complex blurring of private and public life – can have life-altering consequences for the unwary.

In June this year, for example, a 54-year-old disabled grandfather, Brian Leach, was fired from his job at Asda for posting an anti-religious skit – which mocked both Christianity and Islam – by the comedian Billy Connolly on his Facebook page. Asda, which itself sells Billy Connolly DVDs, said that he had breached the company’s social media policy. Leach was summarily dismissed, despite having deleted the post and apologised for any potential offence to colleagues.

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Tolkien's guide to contemporary politics

By Peter Franklin

That the behaviour of the police can also be influenced by perceived public mood was evidenced by Operation Midland: it is widely thought that the misplaced eagerness to find Beech’s testimony “credible and true” was in part a reaction to the bad publicity generated by the acknowledged previous failure of the police themselves to investigate sexual abuse allegations properly in relation to Jimmy Savile and others.

Recently the police also appear to be taking a worryingly keen interest in patrolling lines of opinion and argument – resulting, for example, in a bizarre case being brought earlier this year by West Yorkshire police, Essex police and the CPS against Miranda Yardley, a self-identified transsexual, for ‘harassment’ allegedly motivated by ‘transphobia’. It is worth noting that while Yardley, the defendant, was and is transsexual, the complainant was not trans, but a ‘trans ally’: the origin of the complaints was a spat on social media.

District Judge John Woollard dismissed the case against Yardley in a one-day hearing, saying there was simply no evidence, and awarding costs to the defence. In his blunt summary: “There is no case and never was a case,” something that neither the police nor the CPS were apparently able to perceive within a ten-month investigation.

Suggested reading

Who will resist the great awokening?

By Eric Kaufmann

Meanwhile another recent development has been worrying solicitors, who witness clients increasingly trapped – like the unfortunate Josef K. – in a legal limbo without apparent end: the rapid rise of the phenomenon of ‘released under investigation’ (RUI). Criticism of the pre-charge bail system – in which suspects were endlessly bailed and re-bailed without their case being resolved – led to bail being widely replaced with RUI.

This is arguably much worse: unlike with bail, there are no fixed calendar dates whereby suspects can discover the progress of their case. Instead, a suspect’s relationships, studies or career must be placed on hold while the case stagnates or inches forward. The suspect will be notified at some point of the case’s direction, but he or she will have no idea of exactly when that might be, and nor are the under-resourced police under any formal obligation to tell them within a given time-frame.

When the Law Society Gazette ran an article on RUI recently, anonymous solicitors spoke below the line of their own experiences. One read: “I’ve had one client RUI for 25 months and counting and the case is not yet even at the stage of being sent to the CPS for a charging decision. That will be a minimum of another four months, so the case might yet break the three year mark in due course.” It goes without saying that such delays also grievously affect the lives of complainants.

More from this author

The woman who haunts the IRA

By Jenny McCartney

For those of us who are not routinely involved with the criminal justice system, such stories crop up troublingly and drift away again. They do not touch our lives – until one day, perhaps, they do indeed affect us or our loved ones, with catastrophic consequences.

Yet something is going profoundly awry with the justice system in the UK, and if it is not understood and addressed as a coherent picture – which it is – it will have deeply corrosive and long-lasting effects. Start, if you like, with reading or re-reading The Trial, and then listen out for its many echoes today.

Those echoes keep on coming, right up until the miserable moment of Josef K.’s death. Two men in frock coats and top hats come for him eventually, officials of the state with malign intent, and K. asks himself: “Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court to which he had never penetrated?”

One man holds him down, one stabs him, and then K. watches them watching him die: “’Like a dog!’ he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.”

Suggested reading

How we warp our moral code for genius

By Douglas Murray

Well, we must all be wary of hysteria and exaggeration. Frock-coated officials are certainly not stabbing suspects to death in the UK today. Yet still those stubborn little echoes persist – “like a dog!”.

An inquest jury concluded this July that the death of Rafal Sochacki, a 43-year-old Polish national, on 21 June 2017, was most likely due to him being subjected to excessive heat. Sochacki had been arrested on an extradition warrant and was being transported in a prisoner-escort services van, a task outsourced to the private company Serco, on one of the hottest days in central London for over 40 years.

The van stopped outside Charing Cross police station, holding Sochacki in a cell inside the vehicle for 50 minutes with the engine and air conditioning turned off. He was then taken to court at 10am, soaked in sweat, and put into a very hot, unventilated cell: the air conditioning at the court had not worked for weeks, and mobile air-conditioning units were proving ineffective.

Rather like K., in fact, he never got to see the judge or the court. Having been noted as behaving oddly and erratically, he was finally found unresponsive in his cell at 2.45pm, having died of severe heatstroke and hypertensive heart disease.

And it is strange, because when I read about the circumstances of Sochacki’s death, my very first thought was that there might have been a greater public outcry if a dog had been treated in this way.

Kafka, like Orwell and Dickens, belongs to that select band of authors whose name has become an adjective. “Kafkaesque” is a term most often used to describe an overweening bureaucracy or system that traps an unwitting individual in an illogical, nightmarish maze, governed by complex forces beyond his or her control. I suspect that as Kafka is more widely and heavily evoked as an adjective, the detail of what he wrote is less frequently considered. We think we know what he says. We’ve got the gist.

There is, however, perhaps no other author who catches so keenly the confusion and distress of individuals who have lost all confidence – and sense of their own rights – in a system that appears to be operating according to its own unknowable rules, which are riddled with failings so familiar that they are now factored into expectations.

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Who takes advantage of disadvantage?

By Jenny McCartney

The Trial, in particular, is acutely relevant to our current age, in which our criminal justice system – once internationally renowned – is in a deepening state of crisis. Meanwhile, away from courts, informal ‘trials’ with inconstant rules and outcomes have become a frequent feature of both social media and company policy.

These latter ‘trials’ – although they lack legal force – nonetheless have the power to ruin a life: to destroy an individual’s reputation, to sink current and future prospects of employment, and in some especially bleak cases to push those involved towards suicide.

The Trial, written in 1914-15 and first published posthumously in 1925, begins with the line: “Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” Thereafter, K. finds himself immersed in an interminable and terrifyingly hazy case in which he is the defendant. There is something particularly chilling about such an opening line, because precisely the type of event it describes is familiar from immediate UK history.

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How social media is creating dangerous legal precedents

By Jenny McCartney

The fantasist and paedophile Carl Beech has recently been jailed for perverting the course of justice – “telling lies,” indeed – by falsely alleging that a string of public figures were involved in a paedophile ring reportedly characterised by rape, torture and murder. Beech’s testimony was given weight by the senior police officer in charge of the investigation who declared his evidence “credible and true” on national television without awaiting the outcome of the ongoing investigation.

In the face of Beech’s unsubstantiated accusations, a lifetime of service to the state apparently counted for nothing. One of those accused by Beech was Field Marshal Lord Bramall, a hero of D-Day, who – in a searing recent interview with Dominic Lawson – described the circumstances of discovering that he was a suspect in an ongoing investigation.

He was having breakfast in March 2015 with his late wife Avril, who was then in the advanced stages of Alzheimer’s disease, when two police officers arrived at the door. They said: “Accusations have been made.” He asked: “Against whom?” They answered: “Against you.” In Lord Bramall’s words:

“All they would tell me was that 40 years ago I had abused an underage male. And at that moment they showed me a warrant, and 20 policemen in overalls came in and they searched this house for 10 hours.”

His lawyer later found out the charges, which included the most lurid accusations, such as “supervising the torture of small boys on Salisbury Plain”.

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Why women are Carl Beech's real victims

By Joan Smith

Lord Bramall lived long enough to see Beech imprisoned, although his distressed wife did not. Nor did Leon Brittan, the former Home Secretary: he died of cancer before hearing that his name had been cleared.

Paedophiles do exist, of course, and so do paedophiles in positions of public trust. Allegations from complainants need to be properly investigated. What distinguished the Carl Beech case from other cases – what made it worthy of a Kafka plot – was the willingness of the police to court publicity while openly abandoning due process and the essential principle of ‘innocent until proven guilty.’

Those caught up in Operation Midland had both the misfortune and the good luck that it unfolded in the public eye. Misfortune, because their status amplified the pain and shame of being stained with such appalling allegations, and good luck because it ensured that the case was at least subjected to press scrutiny and their exoneration was decisively publicised.

Yet it begs the question: how many more injustices are routinely pursued, largely unseen, against those who have few resources with which to counter them? The protections of our criminal justice system have long been intended to guarantee that all accused are treated equally in the eyes of the law. But those protections have been steadily eroded on a number of fronts. Kafka’s imagined world creeps ever closer.

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By Eric Kaufmann

In January this year, The Law Society submitted a parliamentary briefing on a “criminal justice system in crisis”, which it argues has been caused by “years of underinvestment and neglect”. The challenges it cited included increasing shortages of duty solicitors; a restrictive means test for legal aid; inefficiencies in the system; more and more courts being closed; and crucial evidence often not being disclosed.

To take but a single example, the role of criminal duty solicitor – the person you can call for professional advice if you are being held in a police cell – is now so badly paid that younger lawyers are refusing to go into it. The youngest duty solicitor on the Isle of Wight is now 55 years old. She is understandably concerned about what happens to the rights of suspects once she retires.

The rates that criminal barristers are paid for undertaking legal aid cases are often less than £100 for a day’s work, out of which they must pay travel costs and fees to chambers. Many are finding that – despite an extensive education, for which they have usually incurred sizeable debts, and working long hours – they cannot afford even a modest mortgage out of their professional salary.

Young barristers are therefore leaving crime work in their droves for commercial or corporate practice. There is no area of the law in which the stakes for the individuals concerned are so high; yet those lawyers who remain in criminal law see cases being postponed and court buildings and their machinery crumbling.

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The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

It is impossible to avoid the suspicion that the ongoing underpayment of criminal barristers and solicitors, the degradation of the infrastructure in which they operate, and the squeezing of public access to legal aid itself, is driven by an unspoken but resolute political intent. In one passage in The Trial, Kafka describes the surreal and miserable conditions in which the Advocates (those who represent defendants) work:

“It wasn’t saying too much if the Advocates called these conditions scandalous. Complaints to the authorities had not the slightest effect, and it was also strictly forbidden for the Advocates to make any structural repairs or alterations at their own expense.”

The narrative voice offers the reasoning for this situation:

 “Still, there was some justification for this attitude on the part of the authorities. They wanted to discourage defending counsel as much as possible, the whole onus of the Defence must be laid on the accused himself.”

Does this sound a fanciful translation from fiction, if applied to our current circumstances? Perhaps not when one considers a policy that is already in place, dubbed ‘the innocence tax’. Those who are above the threshold of legal aid funding – in the magistrates’ courts, anyone with an annual household income of £22,325, and in the crown court, above £37,500 of disposable household income – are currently compelled to fund their own defence privately, often at a considerably higher rate than legal aid fees.

Should they then be acquitted, however, the government will only reimburse them at legal aid rates (a deliberate policy: before 2012, they were allowed to claim back “reasonable costs”). This can leave people, after acquittal, with a large outstanding fee which in some cases has led to bankruptcy or the loss of life savings.

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The danger of digital strip searches

By Timandra Harkness

The former Commons deputy speaker Nigel Evans experienced this personally, when he was acquitted of charges of rape and sexual abuse but lost his life savings in the fight to clear his name. He has since said:

“People don’t see people like me as victims, and there’s a sense that it could not happen to them. That’s what I thought too, but it’s completely wrong. There’s nothing easier than someone falsely accusing you of a crime.”

It has long been accepted that if one has the misfortune to be wrongly accused of a crime, a conviction is disastrous. Now, thanks to the ‘innocence tax’, so too might be the aftermath of acquittal.

Our legal system is the ultimate guarantor of individual liberty. It should be the last line of protection against the arbitrary persecution of the state, individual malice, and the passing mores or prejudices of wider society. The law should be broadly immune to contagious emotions or fashionable ideology.

Today, legal independence seems more necessary than ever, as the shifting traps of judgement and taste that are laid by social media – the complex blurring of private and public life – can have life-altering consequences for the unwary.

In June this year, for example, a 54-year-old disabled grandfather, Brian Leach, was fired from his job at Asda for posting an anti-religious skit – which mocked both Christianity and Islam – by the comedian Billy Connolly on his Facebook page. Asda, which itself sells Billy Connolly DVDs, said that he had breached the company’s social media policy. Leach was summarily dismissed, despite having deleted the post and apologised for any potential offence to colleagues.

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Don't be afraid of the digital dustbin

By Sam Leith

That the behaviour of the police can also be influenced by perceived public mood was evidenced by Operation Midland: it is widely thought that the misplaced eagerness to find Beech’s testimony “credible and true” was in part a reaction to the bad publicity generated by the acknowledged previous failure of the police themselves to investigate sexual abuse allegations properly in relation to Jimmy Savile and others.

Recently the police also appear to be taking a worryingly keen interest in patrolling lines of opinion and argument – resulting, for example, in a bizarre case being brought earlier this year by West Yorkshire police, Essex police and the CPS against Miranda Yardley, a self-identified transsexual, for ‘harassment’ allegedly motivated by ‘transphobia’. It is worth noting that while Yardley, the defendant, was and is transsexual, the complainant was not trans, but a ‘trans ally’: the origin of the complaints was a spat on social media.

District Judge John Woollard dismissed the case against Yardley in a one-day hearing, saying there was simply no evidence, and awarding costs to the defence. In his blunt summary: “There is no case and never was a case,” something that neither the police nor the CPS were apparently able to perceive within a ten-month investigation.

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Who will resist the great awokening?

By Eric Kaufmann

Meanwhile another recent development has been worrying solicitors, who witness clients increasingly trapped – like the unfortunate Josef K. – in a legal limbo without apparent end: the rapid rise of the phenomenon of ‘released under investigation’ (RUI). Criticism of the pre-charge bail system – in which suspects were endlessly bailed and re-bailed without their case being resolved – led to bail being widely replaced with RUI.

This is arguably much worse: unlike with bail, there are no fixed calendar dates whereby suspects can discover the progress of their case. Instead, a suspect’s relationships, studies or career must be placed on hold while the case stagnates or inches forward. The suspect will be notified at some point of the case’s direction, but he or she will have no idea of exactly when that might be, and nor are the under-resourced police under any formal obligation to tell them within a given time-frame.

When the Law Society Gazette ran an article on RUI recently, anonymous solicitors spoke below the line of their own experiences. One read: “I’ve had one client RUI for 25 months and counting and the case is not yet even at the stage of being sent to the CPS for a charging decision. That will be a minimum of another four months, so the case might yet break the three year mark in due course.” It goes without saying that such delays also grievously affect the lives of complainants.

More from this author

The woman who haunts the IRA

By Jenny McCartney

For those of us who are not routinely involved with the criminal justice system, such stories crop up troublingly and drift away again. They do not touch our lives – until one day, perhaps, they do indeed affect us or our loved ones, with catastrophic consequences.

Yet something is going profoundly awry with the justice system in the UK, and if it is not understood and addressed as a coherent picture – which it is – it will have deeply corrosive and long-lasting effects. Start, if you like, with reading or re-reading The Trial, and then listen out for its many echoes today.

Those echoes keep on coming, right up until the miserable moment of Josef K.’s death. Two men in frock coats and top hats come for him eventually, officials of the state with malign intent, and K. asks himself: “Where was the Judge whom he had never seen? Where was the High Court to which he had never penetrated?”

One man holds him down, one stabs him, and then K. watches them watching him die: “’Like a dog!’ he said: it was as if he meant the shame of it to outlive him.”

Suggested reading

How we warp our moral code for genius

By Douglas Murray

Well, we must all be wary of hysteria and exaggeration. Frock-coated officials are certainly not stabbing suspects to death in the UK today. Yet still those stubborn little echoes persist – “like a dog!”.

An inquest jury concluded this July that the death of Rafal Sochacki, a 43-year-old Polish national, on 21 June 2017, was most likely due to him being subjected to excessive heat. Sochacki had been arrested on an extradition warrant and was being transported in a prisoner-escort services van, a task outsourced to the private company Serco, on one of the hottest days in central London for over 40 years.

The van stopped outside Charing Cross police station, holding Sochacki in a cell inside the vehicle for 50 minutes with the engine and air conditioning turned off. He was then taken to court at 10am, soaked in sweat, and put into a very hot, unventilated cell: the air conditioning at the court had not worked for weeks, and mobile air-conditioning units were proving ineffective.

Rather like K., in fact, he never got to see the judge or the court. Having been noted as behaving oddly and erratically, he was finally found unresponsive in his cell at 2.45pm, having died of severe heatstroke and hypertensive heart disease.

And it is strange, because when I read about the circumstances of Sochacki’s death, my very first thought was that there might have been a greater public outcry if a dog had been treated in this way.