This element, detectable in his later body of work, feels like a first cast of the ideological tendencies of today’s Alt-Right – with their narrative that men have grown weak and ‘beta’ under the tempering influence of a feminised society.

London explores the tendency most explicity in The Mutiny of the Elsinore, a novel published in 1914, two years before he died.

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Ostensibly about a cargo vessel and its crew, as they sail for Seattle from Baltimore via the treacherous Cape Horn, The Mutiny is narrated by a lone passenger – the wealthy yet world-weary young playwright, John Pathurst. There are two worlds aboard this ship: a small elite of men naturally inclined to rule, and their social inferiors – the poor and non-white, who are relegated to the level of sub-humans.

As Pathurst recounts colourfully: “And we sit on the poop, Miss West and I, tended by our servants, sipping afternoon tea, sewing fancy work, discussing philosophy and art, while a few feet away from us, on this tiny floating world, all the grimy, sordid tragedy of sordid, malformed life plays itself out.”

A bloody and unforgiving struggle between the two classes ensues after a mutiny among the crew – depicted as a collection of madmen and scum. The revolt is violently put down by the ship’s officers.

Events aboard the Elsinore feel at times like an exaggerated metaphor for the sort of class-ridden, hierarchical society that London quite possibly intended to lampoon. But in doing so, in his descriptive zeal, the author reveals something of himself. He details the brutalities of the ship’s crew with relish and a distinctive “streak of savagery”. The racist assumptions of its day echo throughout the book and look forward to a time when the same assumptions would birth the rapid rise of fascism.

Pathurst is a fervent snob and racist. He describes one member of the crew as a “a loathsome, non-human thing”, whereas the “mental and muscular superiority” of the ship’s officers is driven home in gushing tones throughout. Those who control the ship are said to be “as of another species to the sailors under them”. Captain West is referred to as “The Samurai”, a Nietzschean archetype.

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Of course, there is always a danger in treating works of fiction – and especially words uttered by fictional characters – as synonymous with the prejudices of their authors. Yet some of the views expressed by Pathurst are of a piece with the Social Darwinist and racialist theories that were popular at the turn of the 20th century – theories which London also subscribed to. In an 1899 letter, London wrote that First Principles – a book by renowned Social Darwinist Herbert Spencer – had “done more for mankind, and through the ages will have done far more for mankind, than a thousand books”.

In recent years, a more strategically astute version of this race science – one that purports to be espousing inconvenient politically incorrect truths – has made a comeback. As Gavin Evans put it in an essay for the Guardian: “The idea that certain races are inherently more intelligent than others is being trumpeted by a small group of anthropologists, IQ researchers, psychologists and pundits…” In this way, The Mutiny was a century ahead of its time.

London enjoys this theme. His other sailing stories, for example, feature white men taking on the elements and asserting their natural dominion over supposedly inferior races. His non-fiction, meanwhile, teems with visceral language about lesser humans. In The People of the Abyss, his epic 1903 foray into the underclass of the east end of London, the author discovers “a thousand ragged wretches”, people he refers to as the “refuse of a human sty”. Along with the eugenicists of his day, London was obsessed with the apparent degeneration of the human stock.

Today, once again, the Alt-Right is obsessed with the degeneration and the supposed decline of western civilisation. “Future historians will likely look back on the contemporary West as a madhouse,” wrote the author of a recent blog on the influential website Alternative Right.

By the time London sat down to write the book his commitment to the cause of socialism was waning. By 1914, he had already dropped out of socialist activism and resigned from the Socialist Party. He welcomed the First World War in language similar to that deployed by proto-fascists of the day, describing it as a “cleansing that can only result in good for humankind”.

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London understood the emotional appeal of fascism precisely because he was willing to take his own political temperature. He could comprehend the contempt with which fascists viewed non-whites and the poor, largely because he felt similar pangs himself. Even though he called himself a socialist, he held reprehensible views that grew more pronounced towards the end of his life (London lived to just 40-years-old).

But such insight was useful. He was the opposite of most contemporary progressive writers: their ‘wokeness’ rests upon their purported moral purity. As a result, fascism is today understood in a theoretical rather than emotional sense. Fascists are treated as if they were born rather than made; they are depicted in popular culture as a motley cast of deplorables who appear on the scene like ghosts, only to vanish again.

For an ordinary person to confess to fascist impulses today – as the actor Liam Neeson did recently – is to invite the braying hostility of the mob. Such opinions are cancelled and so our understanding of the ideology and its appeal is limited.

The Mutiny of the Elsinore, therefore, is an interesting text for our times. London’s concept of socialism, as can be seen from the book, was an exclusively Anglo-Saxon one, whereby notions of equality were parochial and restricted to a dominant ‘race’ or in-group. From there, it was not a huge leap to portray those who fell outside of this favoured class as inferior types who were temperamentally inclined to savagery. And that gave on to the path towards fascism.

The path London’s socialism eventually took him down,  as captured in the book, offers a cautionary tale to those today enamoured by repackaged theories of racial and class-based superiority. And it should also serve as a warning to those on the contemporary Left whose altruism stops abruptly at the shores of the English Channel.

This self-hating genre – it is written, almost exclusively by women and feminine low self-esteem is its engine and its shy subject matter – won’t survive #MeToo. It doesn’t deserve to. But there was a novelist who exposed the monster long ago even if few people read her: Jean Rhys.

Her masterpiece was Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). It is usually called a prequel to Jane Eyre – but it is more important and interesting than that. It demolished Jane Eyre and made it look silly; it looked forwards, through Rhys’s marvellous bitterness, to a time when women were less masochistic. It exposed Jane Eyre as the sexual fantasies of a virgin who dreamed of that never-to-be-found contradiction in love, and realised it so finely that the fantasy is still in print: control of a controlling, vicious man. If the fantasy is definitive, so is the book that murders it.

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I love Jane Eyre – who doesn’t? Hilary Mantel calls it a book for lonely children and she is, as ever, bang on. It’s a schoolgirl’s book. Read it after Wide Sargasso Sea and hear the idiocy in your own longings. How could you want Edward Rochester, even in the 1944 film, in which he had Orson Welles’ voice? He destroyed his first wife; after that, his home, Thornfield, was always vulnerable to destruction by fire. It was justice. He was equally awful to the woman Jane thought he was to marry, Blanche Ingram. What would he do to Jane?

The concept of Wide Sargasso Sea is brilliant. It is the autobiography of the first Mrs Rochester – the madwoman in the attic at Thornfield and the most interesting, and underwritten, character in Jane Eyre. In fact, it makes me long for a whole series of novels devoted to minor, or even potential, characters in Jane Eyre, written with a similar cynicism: Mrs Brocklehurst, John Reed, Adele’s mother, the woman St John Rivers would have married had he lived (Rivers the parson and sadist is character worthy of Jean Rhys). But that didn’t happen.

It has become fashionable to label Mrs Rochester as a sort of universal feminine id, a metaphor for female rage, eventually consumed by fire. Rhys had the nerve to flesh her out, and she tells the plausible story of the demolition of a marriage and a woman. Antoinette is born in decline, in Jamaica just after the abolition of slavery. Her family’s estates are rotting; the locals despise them. Her father is a drunk; her mother is mad. When Edward Rochester arrives seeking an heiress, she is riven with sensibility – a novelist’s sensibility, a drunk’s sensibility – and completely open to him. He is transfixed, and then repelled. It’s a short road from ecstatic marriage bed to attic prison – and it all makes sense in Rhys’ hands.

Jane Eyre is a wonderful book; but it is no way plausible. She inherits a fortune? His wife dies by suicide? Really? However, how could it, I thought reading Wide Sargasso Sea for the first time, have been any other way?

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Rhys is a mystery to some critics. They do not understand her. How could a woman so gifted – half Welsh, half Creole – have ruined herself? Wouldn’t she have been happier living in Highgate and contributing to obscure literary journals? She could have co-founded the LRB! Few girls who attended the blue-stocking Perse School for Girls in Cambridge – she was sent there from her childhood home in Dominica – went on to become dancing girls, whores or great modernist novelists, as Rhys did. I wish they had.

Rhys wrote four autobiographical novels about absinthe, smoking and pathological isolation in the late 20s and 30s and then nothing until Wide Sargasso Sea because, quite frankly, she was pissed most of the time. She was living in Devon, hiding her unpublished novels under the bed and shouting at people. She was an angry drunk, a brawler who spent time in Holloway prison, a terrible neighbour and a worse mother: she placed her first child, a son, in the orphanage where he later died. All this is easily explained if you understand that Rhys was an alcoholic who sought misery and found it; what is amazing is that she managed to stay sober long enough to write five novels and lived to 89. But she hated herself.

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“If I stop writing my life will have been an abject failure,” she wrote. “It is that already to other people. But it could be an abject failure to myself. I will not have earned death.” I would not be as cruel to Rhys as she was to herself, but she earned death on her own terms with Wide Sargasso Sea. She deserves to be a #MeToo heroine. She named Edward Rochester as an abuser of women and blew the founding novel of romance fiction apart. She could do so because she knew more about men than Charlotte Brontë – although she could hardly know less. Thank God they never met.

In another sense, though, they do. Banks died in 2013 – tragically young, at just 59. But he lived to see a technological world that was wildly different from that of the mid-1980s, when the Culture was first set down on paper (and wildly different from that of the 1960s, when he first had the idea). Most sci-fi, a few decades after it’s released, starts to look distinctly ropy. The 1983 vision of a super-hi-tech computer with green text on a screen and a blinking cursor would have been laughably dated by 2005. Watch any old Star Trek episode and you’ll see.

But Banks’s science fiction – even his earliest – rarely falls into this trap. Read the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, back to back with the most recent, and you’ll notice how little the technology has changed. In Phlebas, Banks is a bit more willing to use the word “computer” – it probably seemed quite futuristic, back in 1987 – but even in The Player of Games (published the following year), the word seems passé. An intelligent drone wails that the primitive aliens they’re visiting are “calling me a computer!” (The AI and drones are always characters in Banks’s fiction, never objects or tools.)

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In some specific ways, too, Banks foresaw the changes that technology would bring. In Player, Banks says in an aside that when Culture citizens tell stories “in which Things Went Wrong” (the standard opening), “the equivalent of straying off the path in the wild woods in one age, or a car breaking down at night on a lonely road in another”, was humans “losing or forgetting or deliberately leaving behind their terminal”.

A terminal – usually a ring, button, pen or similar small jewellery-like item – is a person’s link to the super-powerful AI “Mind” that runs each artificial Culture world (and to everybody else in the Culture.) It’s a communication tool, an information source, a personal organiser; it can form a screen when required and answer any question. It’s always passively listening and a shout or a word can activate it. The titular character in Player uses his to take photographs. Imagine getting used to having all that to hand! No wonder it’s Culture citizens’ worst nightmare to lose it.

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Player was published in 1988, when mobile phones were brick-sized things employed solely by awful City traders in those stupid blue shirts with white collars. But by the early 2000s, when my Nokia phone started to gain a few extra functionalities – a colour screen and the capacity to play music; then a camera; and at last a link, of sorts, to the internet – I remember having a conversation with a friend. “They’re becoming terminals,” I said. “They’re becoming the one thing you use for everything.” I used the Banks term because it seemed so clearly to be the Banks concept.

The iPhone wasn’t released until 2007, and smartphones didn’t become widespread until a few years later. But to a Banks fan like me they very obviously fit the framework of the terminal: small, jewel-beautiful objects that could be your communicator, your computer, your link to a global datasphere containing the majority of human knowledge. They could play videos or music, be a book or magazine.

As Siri and Alexa came into being a few years later, the parallels became ever more stark. I could say “Hey Siri” right now and, in my pocket, my phone would do whatever I wanted it to. (Or, more likely, because it’s in my pocket and my voice would be muffled and anyway they’re not quite perfect yet, it would phone my mum and I’d have to scramble to switch it off. But it’s getting there.)

The only functional difference between a smartphone and a terminal is that the latter links you to a godlike Mind that controls the entire world as though it were a theme park. And that, of course, is only because there is no such Mind in our world.

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We may build one though, in the not too distant future. Most AI researchers think that a superintelligent machine will be built in the lifetimes of children alive today. And Banks, unlike many science fiction writers, understood just how transformative that will be. The humans in the Culture have rich lives, full of adventure and sex and drugs, but they are bit-players. The civilisation is run by the Minds, because they are vastly more intelligent than the citizens.

Citizens’ lives are protected by the Minds, while the economy is entirely run by them; most humans just live lives of uninterrupted leisure. Whether that’s a utopia or a dystopia is a question of perspective.

The superintelligent machines will not, Banks saw, be like computers that we use. If they come to exist, they will be sovereign. We need to ensure that they, like the Minds, are on our side. After all, they’re quite likely to connect to us all via the possession most of us have to hand at this very moment: our terminals – I mean – smartphones.

There’s an obscurity that especially bedevils futuristic novels. Of all those millions of books that have been published, so many of that ilk, in particular, sink into the oblivion of the copyright libraries.

Occasionally, though, a few will bubble back up to the surface to surprise you. And a book you have never heard of before, will suddenly be on the lips of various and unexpected people. This was the case for me, with Robert Hugh Benson’s novel Lord of the World, which was first mentioned by a friend in Silicon Valley, and then recommended by the Pope – though not personally in the latter case.

It was on a flight from the Philippines, in January 2015, that Pope Francis mentioned the novel to a group of journalists, with the words “I advise you to read it“. The novel was duly reissued, and Robert Hugh Benson’s works saved from obscurity.

If ‘Benson’, as the surname of an author, means anything to anyone today then it is most likely because of Robert Hugh’s brother, EF Benson. His Mapp and Lucia novels still have admirers, and have twice been adapted for television, first in the 1980s with Nigel Hawthorne, and then more recently, in 2014, by the BBC.

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The Bensons were a remarkable family, as a biography of the family published three years ago (A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain by Simon Goldhill) made clear. The father – Edward White Benson – rose to become Archbishop of Canterbury but all six of his children were queer in several definitions of the word. As, apparently was their mother.

Between them they produced scores of books, including novels and memoirs. AC Benson edited Queen Victoria’s letters and wrote the words to Land of Hope and Glory by his friend Edward Elgar. But it was Robert Hugh who published his strange dystopia in 1907, three years after becoming ordained as a Catholic priest (to the horror of the family).

Lord of the World is a strange and unsettling work, set in the early 21st century, it depicts a world in which secular humanism has almost completely replaced religion. Like all futuristic novels some of the details no longer convince. For instance Esperanto never quite caught on so much as Benson seems to have anticipated it doing.

But the novel is full of other disturbingly prescient insights. These are both specific – he predicts, for example, a ‘European Parliament’ – and more general – universities have become moribund and closed, made irrelevant by their own areas of study. As one character puts it: “The object of secular education is presumably the production of something visible – either character or competence; and it became quite impossible to prove that the Universities produced either – which was worth having.”

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The idea that most houses of worship have been converted to secular uses didn’t require much foresight – Benson could have looked back to the French Revolution to discover that inevitability. But it is his description of the details of the outlook of people in the secular humanist world that he gets strikingly – if exaggeratedly – right.

Euthanasia has become an entirely normal facet of life. When there is a Volor accident – a Volor is a type of aircraft in which everyone travels – squads of government euthanasia specialists move in to deal with the injured. The mother of one of the leading secularists in the novel makes a late life return to Catholicism, which her son clearly disapproves of. As she nears her end, she is euthanised at the command of her daughter-in-law, while her husband is away. She is clutching a rosary as she is killed.

Throughout the novel, Benson manages to capture the difference in outlook between those few remaining believers – centred in Rome – and the secularised world which rules. Yet the book is not pure invective against that world, any more than the picture of the church and its clergy is remotely hagiographic. The subtle differences in life and world outlook that manifest in the absence of religion are persuasively depicted.

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Time and again throughout the book, Benson seems uncannily attuned to some kind of deep, eternal truths which mean that when he predicts a thing, he predicts it accurately along with its consequences. So just as he foresees the world’s leaders travelling around by Volor from one summit to another, he also anticipates the evil ends to which this sort of advance will be put. The idea of aerial bombing, and specifically the wiping out of whole cities, occurs to Benson more than three decades before it occurs to – and was put into practice by – the leaders of Europe.

And in the novel’s central figure there is something so strikingly prophetic, that it is understandable why the work retained a few faithful – not to say cult – followers. Julian Felsenburgh is a mysterious figure who rises to startling prominence. He captivates all those who cross his path and many who have not but who are fascinated with the stories of his origin and reputation.

Felsenburgh is said to have a tremendous charisma, able to command and to speak softly. He rises to become the leader of Europe because he promises to bring peace. Of course, the promise comes only if the public are willing to blindly submit to him, but vast proportions of them are willing to do precisely that and so the hell into which Felsenburgh is able to catapult the world comes not in spite of the people, but with their enthusiastic participation.

In many ways Lord of the World is a typical depiction of the anti-Christ story from Biblical apocalypse texts. Felsenburgh comes in order to stand against the mother church and bring about the end times. But if that were all that Benson had written, the novel would not have had much enduring appeal.

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Its resonance lies, instead, in the fact that Benson identified deep undercurrents in religion and secularism that we feel tugging at us now: the want of meaning, the vulnerability to almost any new idea or leader. Benson understands that the character of mankind will never change. Specifically, he sees that man’s desire to worship and believe does not change. What happens is that man merely transfers his allegiances from one set of orthodoxies and hierarchies with which he has become disenchanted, in order to prostrate himself (imagining this to be freedom) before almost any other. And, as Benson suggests, a world wholly without religion may also be a world wholly without defences.

To re-read Neuromancer is to experience a series of shocks. The first shock is about the passage of time. William Gibson’s novel was first published 35 years ago this July; I read it a few years later. Since then, I’ve aged but the book hasn’t; neither story nor setting have dated at all – a testament to Gibson’s almost eerie prescience.

If you’ve heard of Neuromancer, it’s probably as the book that imagined – and named – “cyberspace”; the book that described the connected world a generation before we moved our culture, commerce and conversation online. Gibson described, “A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts” – at a time when few people had even a rudimentary computer in their home.

Case, his protagonist, is a hacker employed to steal secrets from corporations and governments, navigating a world made up of limitless data:

“Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan…”

Again, remember that Neuromancer was published in 1984. While the projected numbers are out by several orders of magnitude, it is still a striking description of the big data world that would not come to pass for another three decades.

Yet re-reading the novel, I found that predicting the internet age and the dawn of big data was one of the less interesting feats Gibson pulls off. Neuromancer – and its sequels, Mona Lisa Overdrive and Burning Chrome – do so much more than that. It’s not really about technology, it’s about the way technology changes the way we live, the way we think and the way we feel when we inhabit two worlds – the real and the virtual. The real shock is how horribly familiar a world imagined in the early 1980s – by an author listening to Joy Division on his Sony Walkman – feels today.

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Sleepless, restless, rootless: Gibson’s world is all too recognisable to anyone who’s ever spent too much time online, ever stared too long at a glowing screen instead of doing something that actually matters. For some, the means to connect to that other world becomes an integral part of them: Neuromancer is full of people who plug enhancements and memories straight into their brain via sockets installed on their skulls. Gibson called them “microsofts” (the company of that name was nowhere near famous when he was writing).

Even though Gibson completely missed the potential for mobile telephones (landlines survive in Neuromancer, along with paper-based money: no-one gets everything right), his conception of people outsourcing their memory and perceptions to a small piece of tech – kept close to the body at all times – feels as familiar as the phone that’s always in my pocket.

He also captures the spirit of a world where technology, travel and global corporate branding have homogenised culture and experience. Case travels from Japan to the US to Turkey and onwards, but everywhere feels the same. His trip through Istanbul – in a driverless car that narrates the journey for passengers, of course – could be any big city.

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Celebrity too has gone global in the world of Neuromancer – in a way that feels strikingly contemporary. Tally Isham is a “simstim” celebrity – an icon whose fans experience her (subtly edited) life minute-by-minute in vivid technicolour. Long before the Kardashians were born or Snapchat was thought of, Gibson understood the limitless human hunger to see and feel the world through the lens of another, better, richer, prettier person. Just like today’s influencers, Isham doesn’t do anything meaningful – she just is.

To me, the most striking – and possibly unnerving – element of Neuromancer concerns the human body. A novel famous for the notion that human experience can be disconnected from flesh actually has a great deal to say – and predict – about human biology and how it can be changed.

In Case’s world, basic augmentation to change someone’s looks is routine: faces can be chosen like clothes off a rack, if you have the money. Muscles too: “joeboys” with enhanced physiques are the soldiers of crimelords, while omnipresent corporations – and wealthy individuals – mould and retain latter-day samurai, whose reflexes and skills are enhanced, and whose bodies sometimes have weapons installed. Meanwhile, Case’s sometime lover Molly has sunglass lenses grafted over her sockets, and retractable scalpel blades under her fingernails.

We’re not there yet, but the most advanced military forces of our day are paying growing attention to how the human body can be altered to make it more dangerous and more durable.

More interesting still is how, for those with the means, technology offers bodies that will last much, much longer than those of ordinary mortals. Neuromancer introduces Julius Dean, an importer and trafficker who is 135 years old, “his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormone…genetic surgeons reset the code of his DNA”. Another, even richer character is said to be 200 years old. In a world controlled by vastly wealthy corporations and their vastly wealthy owners, the 1% have realised that the ultimate treasure to amass is life itself.

If you’ve watched the Netflix series Altered Carbon, you’ve seen this idea taken to the next level, with the rich effectively achieving immortality. That show is based on a novel published in 2002, more than 20 years after Gibson began writing Neuromancer.

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William Gibson has said that Neuromancer is set in about 2035. What could happen in the next 16 years to take us closer to his cyberpunk future?

Today, if you talk to scientists, doctors and even insurers, you can glimpse a near future where the extension of current trends in public health, wealth and medical technology combine to widen existing gaps in life expectancy, to the point where the rich live significantly longer, healthier lives than everyone else. Last month, official statistics showed that the rich are living longer, while life expectancy for the poorest is falling.

Wealth inequality may well be the defining issue of today’s politics and economics. Health inequality may be tomorrow’s challenge. If my prediction is right, remember that William Gibson’s Neuromancer gave us an early warning, all those years ago in 1984.

What if the President of the United States of America – a teetotal man of German immigrant stock – went completely off his rocker? Fantasised, say, about a deep-state conspiracy to do him down, sought to shut down a hostile press, used the FBI to do his political bidding and tried to end-run Congress to install a stooge as head of the CIA?

A President who wants to turn his back on his European allies, cosies up to Russia and scorns the “paper ramparts of NATO”? A President who, advisers worried, wasn’t safe to have his finger on the nuclear button, and who was up for a one-to-one pow-wow with the head of a hostile nuclear power? Far-fetched, right?

That, nevertheless, is the premise of Fletcher Knebel’s political thriller, Night of Camp David, first published in the innocent days of 1965 – when it caught the national mood enough to spend 18 weeks in the bestseller lists. The New York Times’s reviewer called it “a little too plausible for comfort”, and said it “raises the story to a level of belief not ordinarily achieved by novels of this genre”. Anyway, for some reason Vintage chose to reissue it in November last year.

The story centres on Jim MacVeagh, a youngish first-term Senator from Iowa, who is summoned by the President for a nightcap after the annual Gridiron dinner in Washington DC. It turns out this nightcap, as he discovers when he presents himself at the White House, involves his being driven two hours in the middle of the night to Camp David for a private pow-wow.

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This pow-wow is held in near complete darkness, and President Hollenbach is mad as hell. His Vice President has been mired in a relatively low-key corruption scandal (favours for donors) and the President has no intention of keeping him as a running-mate for his forthcoming campaign for re-election. What’s weird, though, is that he regards the VP’s disgrace not as a political misfortune but as a deliberate attempt to damage the President’s reputation (it’s all about him): “He’s out to grind me down-… all right, I’ll say it… to destroy me.”

And, quite out of the blue, the President indicates that he’s considering tipping the nod to MacVeagh himself as a candidate for Vice President in the forthcoming election. At a further meeting, he reveals that he has conceived of a secret plan for a global superpower drawing the US, Canada and the Scandinavian states into a single giant country to be ruled (if he must) by him. All this gives our Jim much to think about on the long journey home.

“Warm waves of air blew over him from the car’s rear heater, but he found himself shivering, and he knew it was the clutch of fear. Jim MacVeagh had reached the conclusion that the President of the United States was insane.”

Mind you, the thing that really tips the scales – that turns suspicion into certainty, at least for the reader – is that he gives 15 minutes of private conference to a member of the public campaigning to make the chrysanthemum the national flower.

So, chrysanths aside, what’s this mad President like? He’s secure enough in his approval ratings with his base that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose a vote. As one character remarks, “Hell, I think we can run an Ay-rab with a goiter for second place, so long as we got Hollenbach on the head of the ticket.” He has a Messianic vision for making America great again: “Together, Jim, we can save this country and change the course of history for centuries to come.” And he’s jolly proud of signing stuff: “He held it out, and in the flickers of firelight Jim saw that it was a silver fountain pen. ‘I used that to sign the last nuclear treaty,’ said Hollenbach.”

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He angrily slaps down a call for environmental protection legislation, and his attitudes to civil liberties are distinctly questionable: “No respectable citizen would have a thing to fear. It’s the hoodlums, the punks, the syndicate killers and the dope peddlers we’re after.”

Oh, and he doesn’t like the press:

“‘Something has to be done about those irresponsible newspapermen,’ said Hollenbach. He bit out the words. ‘Freedom of the press is one thing, but unbridled license to degrade and ridicule officials who devote their lives to this country is something else again. I know we can’t legislate responsibly, but one thing I can do. I can cut off Craig Spence’s sources at the White House.'”

 Jim Acosta and Kaitlan Collins, both of whom had press bans from the White House, might wince at that one.

There are, of course, differences. President Hollenbach, for a start, is not only a Democrat but a decorated war hero and a figure of great honour and popularity. He is a man of indefatigable energy, who sleeps less than six hours a night, never finds time to go golfing, has no “executive time” in his schedule and is consumed by politics. He firmly disapproves of extra-marital rumpo, even as a young man refusing to sleep with the local seductress on the grounds that he wasn’t yet married, and even now “gets as much loving as a Tibetan monk”.

Plus, he’s not quite an isolationist, and his admiration for the, er, Nordic states goes hand in hand with a very un-Trumpian enthusiasm for union with Canada. And among the signs of his madness are his enthusiasm for a nationwide network of surveillance and interception of telephone calls – where the current occupant of the White House, for all his faults, is a pretty strong opponent of such measures, memorably asking: “How low has President Obama gone to tapp my phones during the very sacred election process.”

Further reading

Trump's white identity politics

By John Sides et al

So, the crystal ball is a little cloudy. Anyhoo… The first effect of Jim’s attempts to get at the truth, unfortunately, is that most of the people he speaks to about it think that he himself has gone mad. Hollenbach Derangement Syndrome, you could call it. Indeed, at one point our hero is himself carted off to the psychiatric ward by a pair of secret service agents. But eventually he gets a handful of senior Beltway figures onside. And most of them agree, it’s paranoia – indeed, early on in the book we are given a textbook definition, noting that “although ideas of persecution predominate in paranoid reactions, many paranoids develop delusions of grandeur in which they endow themselves with superior or unique ability”.

There our heroes have a problem. At the heart of the book is something much discussed in our own time: the Twenty-Fifth Amendment, which provides for the Vice-President to take over in the case of presidential incapacity. This was timely in the year of the book’s publication: the text of the 25th was only submitted to Congress in the summer of 1965, so it’s referred to in embryonic form as “the disability thing in the amendment we put through a few years ago”, with a shout-out to its begetter Birch Bayh.

But, as one character glumly notes:

“A heart attack, a stroke, some obvious and apparent physical accident, sure, then anybody can see the President is disabled. But this mental stuff is something else. It’s all too hypothetical, too sticky. It’s like trying to find a dime in a pot of glue.”

And as others also realise, with an election coming up there are political problems too: “This is bigger than party.” “That’s easily said by a man who doesn’t have to face the voters.” Plus, since you need a Cabinet majority to activate the amendment, you have a press problem: “Cabinet leaks like a sieve. We might as well phone all the newspapers.”

So how does it all turn out? Ah. No spoilers…

The fact that the word “meritocracy” originated in the dystopian fiction of Michael Young is usually forgotten among politicians. It’s most commonly used to represent a positive, optimistic goal for those who believe in social mobility and opportunity for all – those who want leadership potential to be judged on capability, not parentage, race, gender, class, or sexuality.

Such an idea is compelling – particularly in the current climate of idiocracy, where we seem to be governed by precisely the least capable people for the job.

But Michael Young’s warnings about the perils of meritocracy deserve a hearing. We may not have a true meritocracy, but we already have many of the faults he predicted in his 1958 novel, The Rise of Meritocracy – a mock-history charting the rise and, in 2033, fall of the concept.

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Young had three major things to say about the dangers of a meritocratic society.

The first is that only a certain kind of “merit” would be celebrated – and it would be the kind favoured and promoted by the establishment classes. Essentially, he argued, we would evaluate merit on a scoring system designed to favour the children of the privileged. And so the meritocracy would look faithfully familiar to the class hierarchy it supposedly replaced.

Second: Young observed that those at the top of a society which considered itself meritocratic would inevitably end up smug and arrogant, believing every luxury of their status to be earned and deserved. He foresaw the emergence of something like the divine right of kings: the divine right of the best to live the best lives.

Instead of recognising the obligations owed by all of us to society – and to those less fortunate – meritocrats would shrug their shoulders at the poor (believing that, after all, everyone’s got what they deserve). Perhaps they might even suggest removing the vote from those less capable of exercising correct judgement.

Finally: Young warned us of the impact a meritocracy would have on those at the bottom of this ladder of human capability. It is unjust to live poor because you were born poor, and because the system is set up to preserve the hierarchies of class. But to live poor because society’s rules have judged you and found you wanting – judged you to be without merit? That is to strip a person of all dignity. It is the rage of those denied a place in society that leads to the ultimate downfall of the meritocracy in Young’s account.

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We’ve managed to generate every one of these problems in our divided society. We celebrate a certain kind of academic achievement, devaluing vocational pathways into work. Our version of social mobility means taking the brightest people from the places that are struggling – and bringing them to London to become high court judges or merchant bankers. In effect we are asset-stripping towns of talent.

Too many of our political and business leaders are, indeed, smug and arrogant. You can see this in the growing assumption among the very rich – and the largest businesses – that tax is for someone else to pay. Instead of recognising that their success is enabled by a functioning tax-funded state, leaders tell themselves the lie that they are self-made, that their profits are driven exclusively by their own talent and judgment. I don’t have a problem with people being rich, but those who benefit the most from our society should contribute the most to it.

And you don’t need to have been on Whitehall last month during the pro-Brexit march to know that we have a problem with anger among those stripped of their dignity by our economic and democratic settlement.

We need both more and less meritocracy in our society to rid us of these ills.

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The most dangerous thing about meritocracy

By Peter Franklin

We need to live up to the ambitions set out by those who call for equal opportunity and social mobility. Talent should be celebrated and rewarded, so that the best can make it to the top no matter their background – because the best people are the ones who will do the best job. We have all seen the disasters wrought by inadequate leaders, kept in place by birth, tradition, or the old boys network.

But a true meritocracy would require radical change. We must prevent the successful from hoarding opportunity for their children with expensive schools, inherited wealth and a social structure that privileges “cultural capital”. A true meritocracy would give every child a level playing field: the chance to make it for themselves, not make it thanks to the bank of mum and dad.

More importantly, still, we mustn’t let talent blind us to our mutual obligations to each other. There are endless debates about whether ability comes from our genes, or the environment in which we are raised. It doesn’t matter. The one thing those two factors share is that you have no control over them. My parents gave me my genes, and they gave me my childhood. It would be as wrong for me to claim credit for my talents as it would be to let them go to waste. Talent, or merit, is an obligation as much as a gift.

And finally, to privilege only the kinds of merit that are prevalent among the people already in charge is, as Young’s dystopia suggests, to prop up elitism. Society has to offer a place to everyone – and celebrate the contribution of us all. There is no hope for a society that sees no merit in the cleaners, the carers, or the refuse collectors.

We are all humans, and as such, we all need dignity. We all have merit, and we all have a role to play in choosing the direction of the country. So we don’t need to call it meritocracy: we can call it democracy, where each finds their place to serve the rest.

“Transsexualism has taken only twenty-five years to become a household word,” reads the opening line of the 1979 book, The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male. The author, Janice Raymond, a renowned academic and feminist campaigner, caused a massive kerfuffle when she published the work, which seriously tackled the theory and consequences of diagnosing the feelings of body dysphoria and the unbearable desire to live and present as the opposite sex.

Raymond wrote TTE as a response to the rising rates of sex-change surgery in the US. She had long been concerned about the medical practices that negatively impacted women, such as unnecessary hysterectomies and caesareans. This led her to question the medical consequences of the bodily mutilation inherent in transsexual surgery, and the detrimental effects of taking lifelong hormones.

She predicted that the handful of gender identity clinics treating adult transsexuals – the first of which opened in 1967 – would become what she calls ‘sex role control centers’ for so-called deviant female and male children. “Such gender identity centers are already being used for the treatment of designated child transsexuals,” she wrote, before arguing that these centres would proliferate.

There are now at least 40 such clinics treating children’s ‘gender dysphoria’ in the United States, and in England there are seven treating adults, and only one at present that specialises in under 18s, but with calls for more. This is in spite of concerns about the effects that such treatment might have on individuals legally considered too young to make most major life decisions.

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Small wonder, then, that 40 years after it was first published, TTE is perceived as an important foundation stone in gender critical feminist thinking.

In 1979, the word gender was understood to be separate from the word sex. Sex was what defined a person biologically; gender was understood to mean the sex-appropriate behaviour that was socially constructed. Today, gender has replaced the word sex in common parlance, as if gender itself were biological.

Raymond foresaw this shift. “As I saw it then and see it now, transsexualism goes to the question of what gender is, how to challenge it, and what reinforces gender stereotyping in a role-defined society,” wrote Raymond in her preface to the 1994 reprint of TTE. When I interviewed her recently for this article, she added that “only feminism can challenge the idea of the ‘male’ and ‘female’ brain and notions of ‘masculinity’ and ‘femininity’ being innate”.

And only feminism can defend the rights of those born into the bodies of women – though it sometimes feels as though we’re not allowed to call ourselves ‘women’ anymore. Instead we’re uterus-owners, egg producers, chest feeders and even non-men. Abortion providers now often use the term ‘pregnant people’ rather than ‘pregnant women’ so as not to exclude trans men.

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What does gender have to do with genitals?

By Julie Bindel

One of Raymond’s transsexual interviewees, quoted in TTE, proclaimed: “Genetic women are becoming quite obsolete, which is obvious, and the future belongs to transsexual women. All you have left is your ability to bear children, and in a world which will groan to feed 6 billion by the year 2000, that’s a negative asset.”

Today, trans women are asking for womb transplants and the ability to breast feed. By demanding the ‘right’ to give birth, they are rendering natal women obsolete.

Suggested reading

Trans athletes make a mockery of women's sports

By Meghan Murphy

Forty years ago Raymond wrote, “Masculine behaviour is notably obtrusive”. She was referring to the level of notoriety achieved by the trans woman Renee Richards “in the wake of the Tennis Week Open”. Richards fought to compete on a level playing field with natal women. The New York Times review of TTE read: “The transsexual propagandists claim to transform ‘women trapped in men’s bodies’ into ‘real’ women and want them to be accepted socially as females (say, in professional tennis).”

Not only was The Transsexual Empire prescient – so too was the response to the book. Raymond experienced the kind of backlash that is endured by anyone who questions trans women’s rights today. Martina Navratilova was hounded on Twitter after she wrote a piece examining transgender participation in women’s sport; upon the publication of TTE, the transsexual lobby accused Raymond of bigotry and said the book constituted ‘hate speech’. Navratilova was thrown out of an advocacy group for LGBTQ sportspeople, which accused her of ‘transphobia’; Raymond was turned down for grants, reported to her university and publicly harassed and threatened with violence on a regular basis.

With the advent of the internet, a cesspool of vitriol aimed at anyone who dissents from transgender orthodoxies has gone viral. Since I first wrote about the issue I have come in for the same treatment as Raymond, as have scores of other women.

And the bullying doesn’t stop there. Today, many lesbians who will not date trans woman say they feel under pressure to do so or risk being labelled transphobic. In recent years, the term ‘cotton ceiling’ is used by some trans-activists to describe the difficulties faced by male-bodied trans women in persuading lesbians to have sex with them. Recently published research on the ‘cotton ceiling’ phenomenon found that significant numbers of lesbians have encountered bullying and sexual harassment by ‘trans lesbians’. Reading the chapter, “Sappho By Surgery”, it’s hard not to think she must have a time machine: she writes that men who asserted they were women would also claim to be ‘trans lesbians’ and expect access to natal women’s bodies.

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Twitter's dangerous approach to 'hate speech'

By Meghan Murphy

“It is significant that in the case of the transsexually constructed lesbian-feminist,” wrote Raymond, “often he is able to gain entrance and a dominant position in women’s spaces because the women involved do not know he is a transsexual and he just does not happen to mention it.”

Four decades ago, Raymond saw how in a society obsessed with gender rules which determine how women and men should behave, that it would become easier and more acceptable to change bodies rather than behaviour. Did she also foresee how aggressive and demanding trans activists would eventually become, where ‘mis-gendering’ a trans person can be treated as a ‘hate crime’ and reported to police?

“Yes” she tells me. “I always suspected that transsexualism would change women’s lives in a way that would attempt to define us out of existence.”

The pundits didn’t predict it. Before the 2016 referendum, leaving the EU seemed unimaginable to vast swathes of the mainstream media. But 44 years earlier, one writer saw it coming. Daphne du Maurier is famous for Rebecca and The Birds; but her last, lesser-known novel deserves its fair share of recognition, for its eerie prescience if nothing else. It predicted both the UK’s entry into the European Union and its undignified exit.

Rule Britannia is a satire set in a future where the British people have voted to leave the European Economic Community. When the novel was published – in 1972 – the UK was on the brink of joining the EU’s precursor, but it wasn’t until the following year that the nation’s membership was approved. By the time the EEC became the EU in 1993, the UK was a loyal part of the union.

In the world of Rule Britannia, the UK’s EEC membership is short-lived. Due to “no failure on our part”, says Du Maurier’s fictional Prime Minister, the UK’s relationship with Europe breaks down and the public votes to withdraw. After a referendum, general election and the hasty formation of a Coalition government, Britain goes bankrupt and turns to the US for help. A new union – the USUK (read: You Suck) – is proposed, but becomes sinister when American troops occupy Great Britain overnight.

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Du Maurier’s attempt to understand the Britain her grandchildren would inherit makes for startling reading today. The success of the American invasion she describes depends on the instabilities in British identity that she sensed in seventies – and which have since come to a head. Du Maurier recognises the seeds of the dispossession that propelled the Leave campaign to victory in 2016.

Set in Cornwall, a region that voted 56.5% in favour of Leave, Rule Britannia rails against the “up-country” politics decided upon by a Westminster elite. The protagonists of the novel feel disempowered and are divided over the government’s new union with America. The novel draws on contemporary fears that entry into the EEC would create a semi-permanent rift in British society between pro and anti Europeans.

Du Maurier predicts that such a societal split would be crippling. In Rule Britannia, the US marines initially succeed because of internal divides in the local community. Emma protests, “it can’t happen here, that’s what people in England have always said […] because they were all together on their own ground”. But the narrative predicts that, if the UK’s unified front were to break down, the nation would become an impotent pawn in the games of larger powers.

With American warships occupying the English Channel and US marines building barricades along the Cornish coast, Rule Britannia imagines the UK as an occupied territory. No longer the plucky little country that won WWII, but simply a “small offshore island” with no power to fight off invaders, Du Maurier’s UK becomes a country that dreams of rebellion.

A guerrilla Cornish resistance rises up: Rule Britannia’s narrator, Emma, observes the different ways that members of the county’s community behave in the face of invasion, from the quiet rebellion of the farmers to the opportunism of the publicans. Everyone does their bit to ward off the American overloads.

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How Parliament disdains the people

By Giles Fraser

It’s no coincidence that in the 12 years leading up to Rule Britannia’s publication, the British Empire was visibly falling apart: 26 former colonies had gained independence and the UK’s image on the global stage was that of an overthrown tyrant. Seeing their country’s identity challenged, the British public began to embrace narratives that positioned the UK as culturally under threat from abroad. Rule Britannia plays into these concerns: in the novel, the British become the oppressed rather than the oppressor, fighting to reclaim their identity.

These narratives are still potent. When Nigel Farage called for 23rd June to be celebrated as the UK’s independence day, he was met with cheers. Though the UK was never colonised, he implied that the Leave campaign could be seen as freedom fighters rebelling against the political autonomy of the EU. He positions the UK as viscerally under threat, receiving no benefits from EU membership and actively victimised by the union.

Du Maurier seems sceptical of this stance, letting her characters succeed in their bid for independence, while suggesting that long-term prosperity as dubious. At the close of the Rule Britannia, the Americans pull out of the UK, but the country is left in a precarious position: on the brink of “bankruptcy” and at the mercy of another US “take over, and martial law”.

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Fast forward to a post-Brexit Britain

By Carl Miller

Despite emphasising the importance of local autonomy, Du Maurier recognises that for the UK to thrive in the modern world, this might not be enough. Still, like any good novelist, she doesn’t draw conclusions; she simply gives a voice to the Cornish protagonists of her novel. They define their own concept of independence and decide what price they are willing to pay for it.

Despite being written almost half a century ago, the satire of Rule Britannia feels spookily resonant today. Large parts of the country feel their concerns are not represented in parliament; many believe that British autonomy over economic and political policy can only be achieved by leaving Europe.

But Du Maurier’s most important prediction was not, in fact, that of the EU referendum. It was her recognition that for Britain to renegotiate its place in the world, it must first look within its borders. She knew that a divided nation is a vulnerable nation.