Spartans who remade Britain

ICommons decision since the Second World War. On 29 March, 2019, 28 so-called “Spartan” Conservatives defied the Whip under unrelenting pressure and helped vote down Theresa May’s EU Withdrawal Agreement for the third time. They were reviled for their actions by most Brexiteer pundits and politicians, but for them, the issue was fundamental and the consequences monumental. How and why did it happen, and might it yet be undone?

The debate itself saw high parliamentary drama to rank with the Norway debate in 1940. This, unlike the referendum, was a decision made in parliament by a handful of MPs in the most chaotic political conditions in living memory. On it hung not only the country’s future relationship with Europe, but the very survival of the Tory party.

The 28 MPs were widely condemned for their actions, but triggered a series of events that led to the first significant Conservative majority in 30 years, with the supposedly impossible-to-reopen Withdrawal Agreement duly reopened along the way. No one but them saw this as being even slightly feasible. Predictably the pundits did not foresee these events. Most markedly, pro-Brexit commentators on the right (Iain Martin, Tim Montgomerie, Fraser Nelson, Henry Newman, James Forsyth, the editorial writers of ConservativeHome and the Spectator) were all for accepting the Withdrawal Agreement by the time of the decisive vote.

If the commentators of the avowedly Eurosceptic right were wrong, then the journalism of the left, Remain and the BBC was spectacularly faulty. When a Eurosceptic renaissance in the Conservative Party had to rely on the votes of the Labour Party and Remain Tory MPs to pull off one of the biggest political heists in modern times, you know somebody miscalculated. Do Dominic Grieve and Hilary Benn regret joining with Steve Baker and Mark Francois to help deliver Brexit and Boris’s majority? It would be impolite to ask.

So what was it the Spartans saw last March that eluded the entire UK political class? And why has it come about that the greatest beneficiaries of the Tory Renaissance — Boris Johnson, Michael Gove and Dominic Cummings — all supported May’s Withdrawal Agreement and its acceptance of a highly-aligned Customs Union?

aof the referendum result in June 2016. While the wider pro-Brexit family celebrated and Vote Leave was dissolved, nervous conversations among the parliamentary group of the European Research Group chaired by Steve Baker began in earnest. The key question was: how could pro-Brexit MPs, who were a small minority within parliament, ensure that the UK left the EU — and left in more than name only?

For this the Conservative Party needed a leader committed to Brexit, no small task given decades of pro-EU leadership. Early attempts to initiate a Boris Johnson government committed to Brexit were kiboshed in an unhappy episode played out in the background of the official Vote Leave victory party. Desperate attempts to back Andrea Leadsom similarly floundered. The result was the unexpected premiership of Theresa May.

While with hindsight it seems odd that May initially gained approval from many senior Eurosceptic MPs, there was always a great wariness towards her. However, flush with the referendum mandate and a cabinet full of very carefully chosen pro-Brexit ministers there was little to do but wait. There was also the strong strategic sense among senior ERG MPs not to be “premature betrayalists” — to not voice their fears about May too soon or too loudly, precisely because doing so might forestall the coalition they’d eventually have to build to resist what became known as BRINO (Brexit in name only).

Warning signs, however, immediately flashed. Why had David Davis, a man not known for his love of detail, been appointed to the Brexit Department? Why had he appointed the markedly pro-Remain James Chapman as his spad (special adviser)? Why had the insider’s insider but equally pro-Remain Denzil Davidson reappeared from the European Commission in May’s No 10? The presence of Philip Hammond and Amber Rudd at the top of the cabinet table was discussed. The prosaic James

Brokenshire and David Lidington were discounted as Remainer threats — they were just her type of people. The warning signs were there but Eurosceptics gave May the benefit of the doubt, not least because, having anxiously gamed out what hollowing out Brexit — at that stage a surely paranoid fear — would take, the common assumption was, “No one would try to do that.” They would see how unlikely it was to succeed and how it would break the party in the process.

asubterranean phony war. The ERG had regular talks with cabinet ministers, and Davis, Johnson and Liam Fox told their Eurosceptic audience what they expected, and wanted, to hear. Confidences were exchanged, operations were arranged, a common purpose was felt. May’s Lancaster House speech of January 2017 came and went. The wording “associate member of the Customs Union” rang large warning bells, but it was too early to panic.

With the Three Brexiteers of Davis, Johnson and Fox flatsharing at Chevening, nobody could surely believe the government was hellbent for BRINO. So the ERG kept quiet, doing what they could to avoid the inevitable jibes that “you lot just can’t be happy you have won”. No pundit prediction was more repetitive in 2017 than that “the Brexit right” would inevitably cry betrayal. The smear was effective.

Eurosceptics also knew, having run the numbers, that for now the parliamentary arithmetic was in the Brexit Goldilocks zone. David Cameron’s 2015 majority was small enough that BRINO would be defeated by the ERG, but large enough that pro-Remain holdouts could not mount their own operations. What the ERG really feared most in the days after the Lancaster House speech was an election.

And this, despite her po-faced assurances that she wouldn’t, is what Theresa May called in April 2017 to the secret horror of many senior pro-Brexit MPs. An election that pundits and hacks alike had down as producing a large Conservative majority would have been the death knell of Brexit. The actual result was not much better — a hung parliament, where Remain Conservative MPs were able to cooperate with Labour. For those in the ERG this changed everything, and the tentative ERG/DUP pro-Brexit voting coalition needed careful handling. They had feared they were saboteurs to be crushed by the seemingly inescapable May triumph, but an electoral result the chattering classes failed to see coming delivered their chance.

It was at this time the May/Robbins plan came into the open with Chequers. No longer was BRINO a hypothetical danger — it was out in black and white. The Chequers Plan was a masterpiece of subterfuge and diplomacy. A “common rulebook” and

“facilitated Customs arrangement” resting on a permanent Northern Irish Protocol, cleverly rebuilt the EU from the outside. The UK would henceforth follow EU rules it would have no say on and have its trade policy and access to the single market managed and traded away in Brussels. It was worse than EU membership and would have been a stepping-stone for the inevitable Rejoin referendum.

It was this Chequers deal that precipitated the resignations of Boris Johnson and David Davis. Others, including Michael Gove, did not resign. This was the deal — unacceptable to Boris Johnson in July 2018 — that the 28 Spartans eventually voted against for the third time in March 2019, having lost Johnson, IDS and the Brexit press along the route.

aand March 2019? And why did the Spartans not falter as others fell away? One key thing to understand is that, left to their own devices, the hard core of the ERG became the ones making the political weather. The resignations of both Davis and Johnson had been mishandled and were, it transpired, politically ineffectual. The recession in both men’s standing was swift and deep.

The Spartans understood exactly what May’s deal meant. They had their own friends in the civil service and access to legal knowledge they trusted. They had unpicked the plan so carefully put in place behind David Davis’s back even as Number 10 and its advisers, Denzil Davidson, Olly Robbins and Gavin Barwell, were convinced that they could create a parliamentary coalition for BRINO, encompassing the Tory left and a tamely compliant Corbyn-led Labour Party. They were wrong.

If Number 10 thought they could make up the lost Conservative numbers with the Labour Opposition MPs — Chequers was almost designed around the Labour manifesto — they were wrong. They were wrong again with Labour backbenchers, who while much more sympathetic to Number 10’s now visible efforts to hollow out Brexit than their doctrinaire Brexiteer leader ever was, would only appear over the horizon if they knew the government would win. It turned out they understood the Conservative Party better than Number 10 did, much as the ERG’s back channels within the Labour Party were a better guide than the fantasies of the government whips. The ERG and Labour backbenchers had the measure of the parliamenrtary arithmetic much better than Julian Smith, the then chief whip, ever did.

Added to the government’s miscalculation was the belief that the objections to the Withdrawal Agreement were not disagreements on principle. After a failed Commons vote, Barwell offered up his prime minister’s resignation to buy votes. Senior ERG MPs and others were summoned again to Chequers, this time with May supporters such as Damian Green. There, Duncan Smith, Baker, Rees-Mogg and others were told that she would go, if only her deal finally got over the line.

Like much else that May’s No 10 attempted, this human sacrifice was bungled. Her head was offered to the wrong mob. While there were some within the ERG’s orbit who were tempted by the glittering prospect of a leadership contest, others shrugged. It was clear to them that May would never fight another election anyway. She was bound to resign at some point: it was merely a matter of timing. Had the ERG accepted the Chequers Withdrawal Agreement they would have irrevocably tied Britain to a Customs Union and obeying EU rules.

SaMay’s cabinet claimed in private to Brexiteer MPs that “of course” the UK could just “leave and change”, that we should “take the win” of leaving because even if May’s deal tied us into vassalage on paper, we could, and would, simply “break” the law later. The MPs who ended up being the Spartans were unconvinced. “Which prime minister would junk international treaties Britain had agreed to once they had been signed?” was the persistent question to which no satisfactory answer came, not even from Michael Gove.

For the burning core of the ERG it was an easy decision. If no withdrawal deal was agreed, the Spartans insisted it would not mean what the pundits and No 10 said — namely lead to No Brexit. Instead, they calculated, holding the line would lead to a new leader and a new direction. No Agreement it was.

The Spartans within the ERG realised by the time of the third “meaningful vote” (MV3) that if May and her advisers were not going to reopen the Withdrawal Agreement with the EU, then the impasse could end in only two ways: their expulsion from the Conservative Party or May’s resignation. While their expulsion could not be ruled out, they were on safer ground predicting the prime minister’s resignation if she stuck to her deal. These predictions were not shared by everyone. At the last meeting of ERG parliamentarians before MV3, one ERG hereditary peer stood up to say he had been told by the political editor of a Brexit-supporting weekly magazine, “Whatever you do, you must support this deal! It’s the end of the government if they don’t do this!” “I’m only passing along what James says,” the affable peer added. “I’m not entirely sure he’s right, y’know.”

While the Tory whips kept the government together as No 10 flailed and failed after the 2017 election, in one regard chief whip Julian Smith fatally miscalculated. He and Mark Spencer, the whip then responsible for reaching out to the opposition (and now chief whip), sincerely believed that a cohort of Labour MPs stood ready to rebel against Corbyn and come over and support May’s deal, if only the meaningful vote numbers in the Commons could ever come close enough.

Number 10’s major misjudgment, based on this advice, was that they could reduce the number of Spartans to a fantasy level. They doubled down on the misjudgment by seeking to involve the Labour leadership in Chequers in April 2019. This was not seen as a threat by the Spartans. What was in it for Jeremy Corbyn to back May, BRINO or the Tories? Why should he hand the government a get-out-of-jail-free card, given that it was imprisoned solely because May had gone back on all her previous

Brexit pledges and was needlessly pursuing BRINO? Nor were backbench Labour MPs keen to break their own whip and risk the potential fury of Momentum activists. Yet having denounced Corbyn as an indulger of terrorists, May was obliged to parley for what support he might deign to offer — which further galvanised the ERG. “If she’ll do that, what won’t she do?” was the drumbeat of their concerns to more agnostic Tory MPs, focused on the government’s standing in the polls.

Following this misjudgment was the belief that the threat of having to hold European elections in May 2019 would somehow diminish the power of the ERG. This was the strangest piece of punditry, as it was clear to the ERG’s hard core that the Tories would do badly, accelerating the departure of both May and her deal. Furthermore, by this stage May’s exit was the only glimmer of hope for Tory MPs in marginal seats. Yet this threat was made again and again to diminishing effect. It was even made by Brexiteers such as Johnson and Duncan Smith when they backed May’s deal at MV3.

a— to the constant refrain of “you’re the fools throwing your Brexit away” — was that of the second referendum. The idea was that if the ERG did not accept the deal, the logic of a Remain parliament would mean a new referendum. This idea was again picked up by the wider commentariat, but it was a ludicrous and empty proposition. Many of the Spartans were veterans of the original referendum legislation and knew it would take six months to push a second referendum bill through parliament, if it could be done at all with no mandate.

And even if there was a second referendum, it seemed safe to conclude that the Remainer obstructionism in parliament would have done little to deter Leave voters. Above all else, ERG MPs were utterly sceptical that other parliamentarians would relish the prospect of another referendum on any basis whatsoever. This, then, was just one more phantom threat the ERG was presented with, which the press obsessed about, but which a sufficient number of MPs never gave any credibility to.

When May’s deal was voted on for the third time in MV3, it was defeated in the Commons by 344 votes to 277: a margin plainly beyond any hope of rescue by imaginary pro-May Labour legions. The ERG had split in the process: Boris, Davis, Duncan Smith and Raab had all supported May from the backbenches, but Spartans such as Baker, Francois and Suella Braverman held the line.

However, Number 10’s greatest misjudgment was yet to come: it misread the Conservative Party’s leadership election rules. All the hopes May’s leadership entertained of getting her deal through parliament rested on the belief that the failed 2018 vote of no confidence had given her a year’s breathing space as Tory leader. This was not so, and, uniquely, the ERG knew it.

The first ERG attempt to secure a new leadership ballot, led by Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker, failed to secure the necessary 48 letters of support. We now know Rees-Mogg was within

an ace of triggering the ballot on 15 November 2018, but it wasn’t until almost a month later, 11 December, that enough Conservative MPs handed their letters in to start the process. The ballot was eventually held on 12 December 2018 and May won by 200 votes to 117. The initial rebuff fortified a belief in Number 10 that she was safe.

awas that now May could not be challenged for another year. Which gave them 12 more months to dangle in front of Brexiteers the possibility that more would be worse (“agree to this deal, or this Remain parliament will give you one you like even less”).

What the ERG Spartans knew — and No 10 did not — was that the 1922 executive which oversaw the leadership rules had far more leeway than was generally understood: clause 3 stated that the executive could change the leadership election rules if it wanted.

There was a good reason why the ERG knew this: the 1922 rules had been drafted by Lord Spicer, a former ERG chairman. For good measure, the only other living former 1922 chairman Lord (Archie) Hamilton was also an active ERG member, and together they decided to communicate with Number 10 in the only medium it understood — the front page of the Daily Telegraph. This operation — discovering the loophole, communicating to the 1922 executive that the loophole had been discovered, and placing it in the press — was entirely an ERG operation from start to finish.

Hamilton and Spicer’s Telegraph piece publicly opened up the possibility of a new leadership contest and triggered the end for May and her Brexit deal. The way was open for Boris. There was also some sour satisfaction that Sir Graham Brady had been shown to be, at the very least, fallible in his understanding and presentation of the rules. His earlier role, as ERG hardliners saw it, in bouncing the parliamentary party into facing a vote of no-confidence timetable which suited May had been neither forgotten nor forgiven.

It was at this point that the greatest misjudgment of all was made in parliament — that of the Remain Tory MPs: Rory Stewart, Oliver Letwin, Dominic Grieve et al, the stupidest intelligent people you are ever likely to meet and the darlings of the BBC and liberal pundits. Having allied with Labour and the ERG on a number of pretexts, rebel Tory Remain MPs lost a deal that could have been designed for them: a deal overseen by Remainers in Downing Street to preserve vast chunks to the EU, a deal so bad that a referendum to rejoin would have left many ardent Leavers believing EU membership was better. Having lost their best chance to remain and preserve EU rulemaking they then went on to misjudge Boris Johnson and lose their seats.

SIf the Spartans had voted for May’s deal, we know what we would have got: the EU’s Customs Union, alignment of rules and Brussels in effective control of the regulation of the UK economy. There is no conceivable circumstance that the UK would have escaped from the deal. At worst, the Tory party would have fallen apart and Jeremy Corbyn would have become prime minister. At best, May would have been succeeded by a Tory who would have — well, what? Unpicked the deal? How? When? With what majority? And most fundamentally of all, why would such a successor ever have attempted to unpick it once in ensconced in No 10, needing a majority sufficiently vast to get past incumbent Tory MPs like Greg Clark and Damian Green who would have voted to keep the BRINO status quo in place?

But even now, can we be sure this will not happen in any event? Boris Johnson and Dominic Raab may have resigned from the cabinet over Chequers but they ended up voting for it when the pressure was really on. Michael Gove, whose current incarnation is as best friend of Boris, always backed May’s deal and said even after Johnson became PM that he would still do so. So is Brexit out of the woods?

The answer is maybe. While Boris probably doesn’t have plans to use his majority to ram through BRINO in the way May would have, there is little to stop him. The original 28 Spartans were operating in a hung parliament with the knowledge that Labour and the Liberal Democrats could be guaranteed to oppose a Conservative deal. What choice did good pro-Europeans have but to vote against her deal? What did anti-Tory partisans have to do other than let May and her supporters keep tearing the Tory party to pieces?

Without the great gift of that Goldilocks majority, what odds that all the MV3 arguments which convinced Johnson, Gove and Raab before won’t convince them again? Boris only had one thing to fold on before he got to where he is now: his loud and lusty promises on Ulster. He duly did so. If he folds again — this time on high alignment — what’s to stop him? There certainly aren’t 50 Spartans in this parliament to hold him to account, which would be the bare minimum required.

Which leads us to the biggest irony of all. The biggest beneficiaries of Brexit and the destruction of May’s Chequers deal are the men who voted for it: Johnson, Gove, Raab, Sajid Javid. They benefited from the logic and tenacity of the Spartans and their plan. Without the Spartans, the Conservative Party would remain deeply divided and unelectable, while Corbyn’s extremism and Farage’s simplistic message would be prospering. There was no genius in what Boris did in backing MV3, only the dumbest luck. He was saved from his own folly last time: there’s no one to do that next time.

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I wouldn’t dream of wearing it now though, and not just because so few people would remember the phrase. These days the joke is on the Lobby, a timid, limping animal that inspires little fear among those who used to court us. The beast that clawed Blair is now routinely kicked around by Boris Johnson and his team. Shortly after New Year, No 10 made an imperious announcement that it was moving its morning briefings with Lobby correspondents from the House of Commons to Downing Street. The impotent howls of rage from the journalists so afflicted tell a sad story about power and its loss.

lobby journalists get their name from the Members’ Lobby of the House of Commons. The only people who may enter and stand there are MPs, Commons staff, and those journalists allowed privileged access to Parliament and its members. Anything said by an MP to a journalist in that chamber is “on Lobby terms” — the MP cannot be identified in subsequent reporting.

In reality, the term has changed and precious few Lobby hacks now enter the Lobby seeking gossip and intelligence; the coffee bars of Portcullis House are a more comfortable place to natter, and even that has largely given way to WhatsApp or (for the very cautious) Signal, whereby politicos can safely feed lines to hacks discreetly and distantly.

A more accurate contemporary definition of the Lobby is those political reporters, from papers, websites and broadcasters, who attend regular briefings with the prime minister’s official spokesman. His name is James Slack, a former Daily Mail political editor now employed as a civil servant to feed his former colleagues such crumbs of information as No 10 considers necessary.

Before Blair, such briefings were a faintly clandestine business. Lobby journalists could report the essence of what they were told, but there could be no quoting and absolutely no suggestion of an official statement from No 10. Blair, or rather, Alastair Campbell (another former Lobby hack turned press officer) shook things up a bit, putting twice-daily briefings on the record in 1997 and, for a while, delivering the briefings himself. Half of those briefings, the ones in the mornings, he conducted in Downing Street, in a slightly dank basement well away from the state rooms upstairs. In the afternoons, the No 10 press team would meet the Lobby on home ground, in a room high up in the Palace of Westminster that is also reputed to be the meeting place for the local Masonic Lodge.

Why would one of the prime minister’s most senior staff spend so much time sparring with newspaper reporters? For all Campbell’s professed contempt for his old comrades, it was because the Lobby mattered, really mattered to Blair. His team obsessed, to an unhealthy extent, about the smallest details of newspaper coverage.

Did the quote from an unnamed minister about Blair and Carole Caplin on page six of that morning’s Mail really decide the fate of nations or justify the volleys of abuse Campbell dished out over such things? Probably not, but the fury pointed to a deeper truth, that the way the papers covered things could

actually make a difference to politics. That even a prime minister with a Commons majority visible from space and the self-belief of a minor deity had to acknowledge that some other people — some journalists — had power he must reckon with. Ultimately, we enjoyed Campbell’s bollockings, because they confirmed that what we did and said counted for something.

Not that Campbell didn’t try to change things. In 2002, he pushed to reform the Lobby further. Instead of the No 10 basement, we were forced to trudge across St James Park to a rented room on Carlton House Terrace. Cue much semi-ironic grievance: “I didn’t come into journalism to walk in the rain,” etc. The briefings held there would be open to Other Journalists. The foreign press were invited.

Worse, our specialist colleagues, the education, health or home affairs correspondents were supposed to attend, to bring their so-called expertise to bear on presentations by senior ministers and officials on matters of detailed policy. There was much chatter that this was all a prelude to Campbell pushing the nuclear button and televising the briefings.

The lobby has always opposed letting cameras into the briefing, supposedly because we think it would turn the exchanges into shallow grandstanding like you used to see from Washington. In reality it’s because the off-camera No 10 briefings are one of the few things that newspapers have that broadcasters haven’t captured. In the end, Campbell-Blair bottled it. The Carlton House terrace briefings proved to be a disaster that generated only negative coverage as ministers and officials were duly savaged by the pack. Morning Lobby briefings, delivered by earnest and anonymous civil servants, moved to the Treasury, then that semi-secret Commons room.

Campbell’s successor, Damian McBride, preferred to drink with amenable Lobby hacks rather than yell at us. McBride and his boss Gordon Brown had no illusions about caging the feral beast. Instead, they fed it and hoped it would bite someone else instead. To a hack, few things taste as sweet as the hand that once fed you.

David Cameron talked a good fight about defying the Lobby before he took office, promising he would end the Blair-Brown fixation on day-to-day coverage. That, of course, was worth about as much as the rest of his cast-iron promises and life for the Lobby continued largely unchanged during his time.

The tragi-comedy of Theresa May changed everything and nothing about relations between the Lobby and the government. The briefings continued much as before but everyone knew they didn’t really matter. The official spokesman had nothing to say about what the PM was doing or thinking, because she wasn’t doing or thinking anything, and even if she was she wouldn’t have told her spokesman, or anyone else. Nor would it have made any difference to anyone if she had.

News didn’t come from No 10, it came from anywhere but: ministers, spads, backbenchers and Brussels were all better uses of a hack’s time than Downing Street.

And while all this was going on, as Blair swanned off, Brown raged, Cameron smarmed and May calcified, things were changing outside that turretted briefing room above the Thames, changing in ways that would transform the position and nature of the Lobby.

When Blair made his speech at Reuters HQ in London, no one had an iPhone and only a few of us from bigger media organisations had Blackberries that would have allowed us to file

Tony Blair’s parting shot at the press showed that we had got to him, even rattled him. We were delighted

from the room. But we didn’t, because what was the rush? Yes, some of us had “online” versions of our papers to serve, but that wasn’t proper journalism. What mattered was the copy we’d file when we got back to our offices on the press gallery in the Commons (then still served by its own bar and restaurant). After all, the way we interpreted and framed that speech would shape the way the punters saw it, either because they read our copy or because they heard a BBC report consciously premised on our reporting. Tweeting was what birds did.

And now? Now you file early and often, because online needs something new, now. Not that anything there is really new, since it was all on Twitter half an hour ago. Is there anything more demeaning than senior Lobby journalists haggling with No 10 “sources” after the morning briefing about precisely when and how they can all, in unison, tweet about some minutiae of government business? Political editors whose greybeard predecessors treated cabinet ministers like social inferiors now beg for scraps from minor officials.

Newsdesks watch the same Twitter feeds we do, looking for stories at source rather than relying on us to reveal and explain, and looking for stories that others have and we don’t. And no, it doesn’t matter if those stories are purest cobblers knowingly spun by Downing Street to the gullible: if it’s on Robert Peston’s blog, there must be something in it, right?

once, the lobby were the gatekeepers, holders of secret knowledge that made them indispensable to their papers and gave them and their stories power to shape the way the country saw its leaders. Now they churn out “content” like ordinary desk hacks, spaff their few original insights up the Twitter wall, and can’t understand why No 10 thinks they’re largely irrelevant.

And what about the job, the life? Remember that scene in Goodfellas when Ray Liotta is talking about how great it was to be a hood (“If we wanted something we just took it”)? Well, 20 years ago, a political editor at Westminster was still a capo and his reporters were made guys. We started late, walked the Palace as if we owned it, lunched till 3pm, then popped by the afternoon Lobby to agree the line before calling the desk to tell them what the stories were and when we’d file them. Then we went to our own bar (“The usual, Clive, two receipts”) to sharpen up for another night drinking with MPs or spads, or dining with ministers who all gave us stories because they wanted a good write-up. If we wanted something, we just expensed it. Because we knew where the news came from, and only we could go there and bring it back.

Now? Goodfellas ends with Ray Liotta looking back on what used to be: “We were treated like movie stars with muscle. We had it all, just for the asking. Everything was for the taking. And now it’s all over. And that’s the hardest part. Today, everything is different. There’s no action. I have to wait around like everyone else. Can’t even get decent food. I’m an average nobody. I get to live the rest of my life like a schnook.”

Feral beasts can scare people and to tell them what to do. Schnooks get pushed around, or ignored.

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AI was asked by a well-known woman film director to take on an (unpaid) job as consultant on an historical film, based on the life of George III’s consort Queen Charlotte. I didn’t hold out much hope for the historical quality of the script once it informed me that Charlotte received the news of her royal engagement by telegram in 1761. Nonetheless I read to the end, as the director promised that the film addressed an extraordinary “secret”; namely that the queen was of mixed-race heritage, specifically of African descent.

I had been aware of this theory, which has been knocking around online since 1995, and expressed my astonishment that anyone continued to take it seriously. I received in return a document listing the supposed historical proofs for the argument. I replied, giving my opinion that none of them was remotely credible and advising her to be very cautious about further involvement with the project.

I was quite surprised, therefore, to hear on Radio 4 that a similar film is being produced. Both the script and the proof document appeared, fairly cynically, to be attempting to link Queen Charlotte’s purportedly mixed-race ancestry with the marriage of Meghan Markle into the royal family. The departure of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex from duties as senior royals has been vociferously attached to charges of racism. Whatever one’s opinion of such claims, it seems important to disengage them from an idea which is, quite simply, extremely dubious historical practice.

for Queen Charlotte having been of African descent derives from a theory published online by a Portuguese historian of the African diaspora, Mario de Valdes y Cocom. Sophia Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz was born in 1744 in the eponymous north-German dukedom. Cocom traces her ancestry to Margarita de Castro e Souza, a fifteenth-century Portuguese noblewoman who in turn was descended from the mistress of the thirteenth-century king Alfonso III, a woman named Mandragana. The exact relationship between Mandragana and Alfonso is unclear, but Cocom “takes” the former to have been a Moor, which he considers to mean having black ancestry. “Moor” did not necessarily refer to a person of African descent, but as a general term to the inhabitants of the Moorish empire in

North Africa and Spain. We have no idea of what Mandragana looked like. She may have had Berber, Spanish, Arabic or indeed African features, but she might equally have had blonde hair and blue eyes, as after the fall of the Roman empire tribes from Northern Europe, including East Germany and Scandinavia, invaded the Moorish kingdoms. Moreover, the 500 years between Mandragana and Charlotte would suggest any African bloodline would have been significantly diluted.

The next piece of evidence was that Queen Charlotte’s physician, Baron Stockmar, described her at birth as having “a true mulatto face”. This might appear convincing, were it not that Christian Friedrich von Stockmar was born in 1787. It was therefore impossible that he could have seen Queen Charlotte as a baby. In fact, Stockmar, (whose memoirs, translated from the German in 1873 are available from the British Library online), was physician to Prince Leopold of SaxeCoburg-Gotha, who married Princess Charlotte, the daughter of George IV, in 1816, two years before Queen Charlotte’s death.

Cocom describes a literary allusion to Queen Charlotte’s appearance in a poem celebrating her marriage to George III as being decisive evidence that she possessed African features: Descended from the warlike Vandal race,

She still preserves that title in her face.

Tho’ shone their triumphs o’er Numidia’s plain, And Andalusian fields their name retain;

They but subdued the southern world with arms, She conquers still with her triumphant charms,

O! born for rule, — to whose victorious brow

The greatest monarch of the north must bow.

The Vandals were an Eastern Germanic tribe, who, as noted above, spread across Europe after the decline of the Roman Empire. They established a kingdom in North Africa in the fifth century, but they were colonial conquerors, not indigenous inhabitants. Such allusions to ancient and illustrious ancestors were a common trope of celebratory poetry (one might compare Tudor propaganda which traces the bloodline of Henry VII to Aeneas). Possibly, the use of “Vandal” might be interpreted as satirical — since the Vandals were “barbarians”, it could have been a sly and derogatory dig at Charlotte’s German blood, but it has no bearing whatsoever on the colour of her skin.

A portrait of Queen Charlotte by Allan Ramsay and studio is

cited as the final proof. Ramsay made several portraits of the queen and one in particular has been perceived as showing her with “mixed” (I quote from the document) features. The plot of the film centred around the presumption that Ramsay had been obliged to tone down and Europeanise Charlotte’s face, but nonetheless “his representations of her were the most decidedly African of all her portraits”.

it’s true that Charlotte’s features might be seen as “mulatto” (again I quote). However, as I pointed out to the director, we have to be cautious about what we see. To my eyes, the Ramsay portrait shows a reddish-haired woman with blue-grey eyes, a large nose, heavy chin and full lips. Such features were considered unattractive according to the standards of beauty of the age and since royal portraiture is not known for its harsh realism, these features may certainly have been softened by other painters, without any necessary disguising of the colour of Charlotte’s skin.

A good comparison of the flattering tendency in royal portraits is Van Dyck’s painting of Queen Henrietta Maria in the Royal Collection at Windsor, where her famously awful teeth, described by a contemporary as protruding from her mouth “like guns from a fortress”, are invisible. It is possible that Ramsay was unusual in daring to depict the queen as she was, rather than bowing to flattering convention, but there is, equally, considerable similarity between his painting and those of other artists, such as the Dance Holland portrait and the picture by Francis Cotes, which latter was described by Lady Mary Coke, who knew Charlotte well, as “so like that it could not be mistaken for any other person”.

None of the other considerable body of portraiture, for example works by Zoffany and Gainsborough, is suggestive of “mulatto” blood. While Cocom argues that this was a cover-up job, it seems unlikely that in an age when cartoonists depicted the royal family in the most scurrilous of situations (having sex, defecating), there should be no other visual reference to what, after all, would have been a fairly startling feature.

Cocom’s theories have been spread, though not entirely accepted, online. Both and have run features on them, which, at a quick glance, gives them an aura of superficial respectability. Nonetheless, he has very little credibility as an historian. A search through JSTOR, the online collation of peer-reviewed academic journals, throws up just one reference, from (Vol 27, Spring 2000), in which his theory is repeated without any notes or citations.

I called a contact at Sotheby’s, who dismissed the Ramsay argument as a and several other historians, all of whom concurred that there is not one piece of creditable evidence that Queen Charlotte was of African descent. Cocom’s ideas are no more than speculations which have, as yet, absolutely no plausible basis in fact.

take liberties with hard facts, but when I presented my conclusions to the director, I suggested that to promote a biography of Charlotte in which her skin colour was the salient differentiator was, to the best of my knowledge, inaccurate and unwise. Suggesting that African descent is a trans-historical category which trumps gender, class and acculturation places one in some fairly unsavoury intellectual company. The response I received was puzzling. This film had a black woman producer and a black woman scriptwriter, who wanted to tell the story regardless of its historical veracity.

I dislike the term “black history” for the same reason I dislike “women’s history”. The qualifier suggests a hierarchy of scholarship which I feel is unnecessary and patronising. Surely all history should be subject to the same rigorous research standards regardless of subject, yet this did not seem to be the inference I was meant to draw. The director’s response seemed insulting to a large body of valuable and highly significant historical work around a previously marginalised group about which much more needs to be discovered and acknowledged.

That the contribution of people of African descent to academic history has been shamefully neglected is true — for example, in a recent post for Art UK, Paterson Joseph passionately drew attention to the disregard of African figures in British art history. Estimates of the African diaspora community in eighteenth century London alone are between 8,000 and 20,000. That’s a lot of real lives and a lot of real stories. Were any significant evidence of Queen Charlotte’s racial inheritance to come to light, hers might be one of them, but thus far, it just isn’t there.

Ftowards the end of last November, Disha, a 27-year-old woman veterinarian, hopped on her scooter to return home. She stopped at a motorway toll booth, just south of the booming tech city of Hyderabad, and dismounted briefly. Returning to her bike, Disha noticed that one of the tyres had deflated. She called her sister to report the puncture and also to warn that a couple of men in a truck were eying her menacingly. She was scared. It was the last call she ever made.

We will never know exactly what happened next, but it goes something like this. Four men climbed down from the van offering to help her. She lowered her guard; they grabbed her and bundled her into the vehicle. One of them had earlier slashed her tyre. She was then driven to a remote spot off the Hyderabad-Bengalore highway, in the state of Telangana, where she was gang-raped and murdered. Her body was doused in petrol and set alight. The charred remains were found in an underpass.

When the details of this abominable crime emerged a couple of days later, the country went into convulsion. After the police announced that they had caught the four men accused of Disha’s rape and murder, a mob quickly laid siege to the police station where they were being held. Outrage and anguish only increased when, on the very same day, a 23-year-old woman rape victim on her way to a court hearing in Delhi was waylaid, doused in kerosene, and also set ablaze. The five perpetrators included two of those accused of her rape. She suffered 90 per cent burns and died later in hospital of cardiac arrest.

Overtaken by the febrile, vengeful atmosphere, the police reacted by marching off the four suspects in Disha’s case and executing them. In the official account, the police had taken the quartet back to the scene of their crime, where the accused had then jumped them. The coppers fought them off, apparently, and bravely managed to shoot them all dead. Why the men were not handcuffed at all was never explained, nor why they were being ordered to collect further evidence at the scene of the crime in the pitch dark at five in the morning. It was, in essence, extrajudicial murder – known as an “encounter” killing in south Asia.

the almost casual brutality of these events, nor the shame that they brought on the country. Yet they point to a deeper malaise within Indian society, a malaise that keeps on producing such tragedies. The West might fret over a “climate emergency”, but India is very firmly in the grip of a “rape emergency”, as it is commonly referred to, symptomatic of what amounts to a civil war between men and women in the country.

Sectarian division, particularly between Muslim and Hindu, stoked by the present Hindu nationalist BJP government, remains India’s most obvious and corrosive faultline. But the rape emergency is just as pressing, only more hidden, and probably contributes even more towards the country’s perpetual under-achievement in the world. Furthermore, the civil war between men and women in India shows every sign of escalation.

Take the reaction to the events in Telangana. On the one hand there were many (probably a majority) who applauded the macho action of the police gunning down the four suspects. They were showered with petals by local residents: the mother of the young vet thanked them from her heart, as “my daughter’s soul must be at peace now”. Lots of men, from politicians to sports stars, took to social media to shout their approval.

From one member of the BJP ruling party and a former minister: “I congratulate the Hyderabad police and government that allows police to act like police.” From a badminton star: “Great work #Hyderabad police … we salute u.” Other state police forces were equally ecstatic, boasting about how many bad guys they themselves had rubbed out in similar fashion. The former chief minister of India’s most populous state, Uttar Pradesh, invited other cops to “learn” from the excellent example of Telangana’s finest. Bizarrely, admiring comparisons were even made to Saudi Arabia. “Look how swiftly justice is delivered there,” mused one MP of the Islamic theocracy.

On the other hand, and after a little more reflection, many others, mostly women, condemned the police murders. Complaining that India risks turning into a banana republic, lawyers

and activists pointed out that the very absence of due process and a functioning legal system evidenced by the police killings is exactly the reason why so many Indian men carry on raping, harassing, hitting and setting fire to women. These men believe they will almost never be prosecuted, and if they are, that they will almost never stand trial and that any punishment can be endlessly postponed. And, generally, they are right. Just look at the men who carried out the notorious gang-rape, torture and murder of the physiotherapy intern Jyoti Singh on a Delhi bus in December 2012.

The rape, torture and murder of a young Delhi intern in 2012 was supposed to have been India’s #MeToo moment

India’s #MeToo moment, when the country finally woke up to the dreadful reality of its violent rape culture. But as the seventh anniversary of Ms Singh’s death passed on 6 December, the four surviving members of the gang (another committed suicide, supposedly, in prison, and a minor had to be released) were still shuffling around the legal system, having originally been sentenced in 2013. Due to be hanged on January 22nd, the moment was postponed once again. Smoking four rapists in a field might make men feel better, but in fact it merely allowed India to dodge the much harder, more profound work of ending impunity and addressing the deeper societal pathologies that have produced the rape emergency in the first place.

One woman who fervently believes that these latest rapes and murders in Hyderabad and Delhi must be a turning-point is Swati Maliwal, the 35-year-old Delhi city Commissioner for Women. A few days after Disha’s murder, she started a Gandhi-style hunger strike, drinking water only, in protest against such violence. By the time I visited her lying on a raised dais in a large tent opposite the Mahatma’s memorial area at Raj Ghat, one of the city’s most revered sites, eight days into her fast the fiery former activist was already weak. Though she was well rugged up against Delhi’s freezing winter nights, her voice was a whisper. There was nothing weak, however, about her message, which has attracted hundreds of women, and men, from all over India in support. She is demanding change, and was prepared to die for it. After 13 days, she fell unconscious, was rushed to hospital and put on an intravenous drip.

Swati stopped eating, she told me, because she is “sick and tired of tokenism”. Every time a particularly barbaric rape hits the headlines, there is some bullish talk, maybe a tweak to a law, and then everything reverts to normal. And the normal is horrific. In just three years as commissioner for women she has handled 55,000 cases of rape and violence against women and overseen 33,000 court cases.

In India as a whole, there are, according to official figures, about 100 rapes a day, and the real figure is likely to be much, much higher. So much of it goes unreported; only the high-profile cases, involving middle-class educated women like Disha, or Jyoti Singhon, ever make headlines. Most of the carnage happens out of sight in rural areas, involving poorer or lower caste girls and women.

According to the health ministry’s own statistics, such is the stigma associated with sexual violence that 80 per cent of women who have endured it never tell anyone about their experience. In 2018 the world’s biggest democracy and seventh-richest economy had the deeply shameful distinction of being voted the most dangerous country in the world to be a woman by a panel of international experts for the Thomson Reuters Foundation, edging out the blood-soaked warzones of Afghanistan and Syria. Indian women, Swati says, live in a permanent state of fear. The rapes and murders in Hyderabad and Delhi were the final straw for her; “I could feel their blood on my hands. I’ve had enough.”

Yet in the face of this epidemic of violence against women, resources that administrators like Swati have to work with are pitiful. “Once a girl is raped,” says Swati, “the system starts raping her.” Lots of well-meaning laws have been passed, but they are seldom enforced and woefully under-resourced. For years, the key demand of reformers has been the introduction of fast

track courts, so that perpetrators can be tried and convicted within six months. These courts, as far as they exist, are impressive, with separate rooms so the victim does not have to mingle with the accused. Yet the country that has just announced its ambitions for a third moonshot in two years has managed to construct only 107 of them, across the entire country. Altogether, there is a backlog of 133,000 rape cases pending in the courts. Little wonder that many Indians embrace extra-judicial killing; they know that otherwise those suspected of rape are unlikely ever to face justice.

might occasionally rub out a few bad apples to earn brownie points from badminton stars, the rest of the time they aren’t doing much either. Rape is not a priority. Swati estimates that in Delhi, India’s rape capital, so few officers are assigned that some of them are investigating up to 600 cases each. Only 7 per cent of India’s police forces are women, and almost none of them senior officers, which may have something to do with the priority-setting.

Notoriously, the federal government takes little interest too; the silence over the December rapes and murders was deafening. This time there was barely even any tokenism on offer; MPs, and the media with them, seemed almost gleeful to move on to the row about the BJP’s new citizenship bill, denying Muslims the same rights to refuge in India as other confessionalists.

There is a reason for this. Only 15 per cent of the federal parliament’s legislators are women. Most shockingly of all, many legislators are themselves rapists, or have abused women. The Association for Democratic Reforms, a think tank, carried out an extensive study last year which found that between them India’s parties, at a local and national level, had given tickets to 327 candidates with charges of violence against women pending against them from previous years. Forty-seven MPs or local assemblymen had been accused of rape in the survey.

One former BJP MP, Kuldeep Sengar, was recently sentenced to life imprisonment for the gang rape, together with ten others, of a 17-year-old who approached him for a job. She was kidnapped for a week. Campaigners might hail the sentence, but the authorities were only prodded into action after the victim attempted to set herself on fire outside the house of the chief minister of Uttar Pradesh state to protest against police indifference to her case. Rape, apparently, is definitely not an impediment to a political career. But the crime will never be taken seriously as long as politicians have a direct vested interest in covering it up.

Swati argues that the systemic changes that she is demanding — swifter court processes, more police, more CCTV in public places — can eventually alter behaviours such that rape might be defeated. I hope, fervently, that she is right, but I fear that this is only half the story. For rape in India is symptomatic

Most shockingly of all, hundreds of legislators have been accused of rape or violence against women

of the striking imbalances between the power of boys and men in Indian society, and the relative powerlessness of girls and women. Rapists and abusers learn their trade at home from an early age, and their behaviour is all too often sanctioned by societal norms.

The official report quoted above gives a picture of rampant domestic violence. Every third women in India has encountered some violence at home since the age of 15, and most of the violence being meted out comes from husbands. Young girls are also preyed on by other relations; one victim, from a high-caste family, told me that her uncle, a senior army general, had started abusing her from the age of about ten.

Yet, remarkably, the same survey also reported that only 14 per cent of those women who had experienced violence sought to stop it or report it. In short, there is still such a stigma attached to sexual violence that most women suffer in silence, unaware of their rights, legal or otherwise, within their own home or marriage. They are just too afraid to speak up.

“Fear of rape”, argues Swati, “is the permanent state of mind of women in this country; it’s conditioned into us from the moment we are born and it’s impossible to escape. I am constantly thinking about my safety, and you can say that for almost every woman in India. Imagine where India would be if that time could be put towards the progress of our country.”

Indeed. Whereas the proportion of women joining the workforces worldwide has been climbing relentlessly over the past 15 years, in India it has actually fallen, from 35 per cent to 26 per cent. Extraordinarily, women are less likely to work in India than in any other big country except Saudi Arabia. There are several reasons for this, but one of them is undoubtedly to do with safety fears, at work and from living in India’s rapidly expanding urban environments.

riding a bus in Delhi? For single women in particular, cities like Delhi, and to a lesser extent Hyderabad, are just too dangerous. Consequently, even if they are just as qualified as men, women will simply not apply for certain jobs, resulting in huge gender imbalances. The booming IT sector, for instance, has put on 56m jobs since 2005, but 80% of those are jobs for the boys.

This is not only a tragedy for Indian women, but for India as whole. In a famous study cited by the IMF, it is estimated that if the country were to rebalance its workforce to employ an equal number of women, the country would be 27 per cent richer, perhaps more. That most spurious of questions about the fate of the twenty-first century — India or China? — would finally be settled. Rape in India is not only a human rights and criminal justice problem, it is also an economic one. Perhaps one day a government will grasp this point, and that might finally provoke some real change.

c

watching diplomats from around the globe voting in 1998 to establish the world’s first permanent international criminal court, I allowed myself to believe that putting individuals on trial for crimes against humanity might deter future tyrants. Sadly, the International Criminal Court (ICC) has not lived up to the high hopes of its founders. Calling for an independent assessment of the court’s work last year, four former presidents of the assembly that represents the court’s member states said they were “disappointed by the quality of some of its judicial proceedings, frustrated by some of the results, and exasperated by the management deficiencies that prevent the court from living up to its full potential”.

When those states met in December, the UK said the need for change was now “acute and pressing”. Judges needed to be elected on the basis of “merit and experience”, the government added. And the new prosecutor, who takes over next year, should be “demonstrably the best, most qualified candidate”.

It was implicit that those criteria had not been met. The UK called for a review of how the court’s prosecutor was interpreting the “complementarity” test — which says the ICC should get involved only if a member state is unwilling or unable to bring criminal charges itself.

Those comments were aimed at Fatou Bensouda, the current prosecutor, who has now spent six years considering whether UK troops committed unpunished war crimes against detainees in Iraq between 2003 and 2009. Her concern is that UK investigators may be trying to shield British soldiers from criminal accountability. Foreign Office lawyers want her to concentrate on the big picture — Britain’s commitment to the rule of law — instead of trying to micromanage individual cases.

Early in 2015, Bensouda opened a preliminary examination into what she called the situation in Palestine. At the end of last year, she concluded that there were reasonable grounds for upgrading her preliminary examination into a formal investigation. She accuses the Israel Defence Forces of disproportionate attacks in the Gaza conflict of 2014 while Hamas and other Palestinian armed groups are accused of intentionally directing attacks against civilians. Israel is also accused of using lethal force near the Gaza border in 2018 and “transferring” its civilians into occupied territory.

To initiate a formal investigation on her own initiative, the prosecutor needs prior authorisation from a pre-trial chamber of three judges. That’s not required if a state which has accepted ICC jurisdiction asks the court to investigate conduct that occurred on its own territory. The Palestinian leader Mahmoud

The UK says the need for change at the ICC is “acute” and is demanding the most qualified prosecutor and better judges. It is implicit those criteria are not currently being met

Abbas accepted the court’s jurisdiction in 2015. As a result, Bensouda considers that the ICC’s jurisdiction extends to the territory occupied by Israel in 1967 — by which she means Gaza and the West Bank, including East Jerusalem.

As the prosecutor acknowledges, this is disputed. “The Palestinian Authority does not govern Gaza,” she notes. “Moreover, the question of Palestine’s statehood under international law does not appear to have been definitively resolved.” So, before she launches her investigation, she wants the pre-trial chamber to confirm that the ICC has territorial jurisdiction.

Her submissions run to 112 pages — a tacit admission that the arguments are controversial. Despite taking almost five years to get this far, she expects the judges to rule on jurisdiction by late April. In a detailed opinion published hours before Bensouda’s announcement, Israel’s attorney general Avichai Mandelblit said that the ICC has no jurisdiction because Palestine is not a state under international law. A sovereign state has criminal jurisdiction over its nationals and those within its territory. But the Palestinian Authority has no such jurisdiction over Gaza, Jerusalem or Israeli settlements in the West Bank. If these areas are occupied, as the Palestinians claim, then jurisdiction must rest with the occupying power.

Speaking for the Israeli government, Mandelblit argued that the ICC operates on the basis of powers delegated to it by states parties. If no sovereign state has jurisdiction over a territory, no state can delegate jurisdiction to the court. Sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza remains in abeyance pending peace negotiations.

Israel is not a party to the court’s founding treaty but, behind the scenes, its officials have been engaging with the prosecutor’s office. The Israelis argue that the ICC should concentrate its limited resources in areas where the facts and jurisdiction are beyond doubt. No court could possibly say it was a “serious violation of the laws of war” to let Jews return to the Jewish Quarter of Jerusalem in 1967, 19 years after they were expelled. But Ukraine is still waiting for the ICC to investigate Russia’s invasion and annexation of Crimea in 2014.

If the ICC had brought more warlords to justice over the past two decades, it might have earned the world’s respect. But prosecuting individuals cannot resolve international conflicts. It merely prolongs them.

c

Wwas born in Brooklyn, the 1920s were already roaring. When she died aged 97 on 30 December, the 2020s were just dawning. Her parents, Max and Bertha, were Jewish immigrants from Russia who spoke Yiddish at home. They were poor yet hardworking and fiercely self-reliant: Max’s glass business went bust in the Depression, but he recovered and his family flourished. Having had little formal education themselves, they ensured that not only their son Milton but Gertrude, too, earned degrees, from Brooklyn College and City College respectively.

Milton went on to become a leading figure at the American Jewish Committee and an expert on what is still the largest urban Jewish community in the world, whose politics he wryly summed up thus: “Jews earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans.”

Gertrude, outwardly at least, left her Jewish heritage behind as she worked her way up the academic ladder in New York and later Chicago. Like many of her milieu, she began as a Trotskyist; at a political meeting in Brooklyn, she met her future husband, Irving Kristol. After a brief courtship, they married in 1942, though she kept her surname. After the war Irving and Bea Kristol, as Gertrude Himmelfarb was always known to her friends, spent time in Britain and always felt at home here.

They ended their days in DC. But the Jewish milieu in Brooklyn that had brought them together remained their lodestar: the omnivorous appetite for knowledge, politics and discussion, the intellectual ambition. For 67 years they remained inseparable; only death parted them. Their friend, the sociologist Daniel Bell, said of the Kristols that they had “the best marriage of [his] generation”. It was a partnership of ideas, too. Irving and Bea were swimming against the tide of the political and academic cultures of their time.

They cared little for the criticism they invited or how it waxed and waned; they did care about posterity. For them, books and ideas were the lifeblood of America, a country created ex nihilo on the strength of ideas, which had welcomed their forebears from a hostile despotism. Their duty, as they and their comrades in arms saw it, was to breathe new life into the abstractions of the constitution and the monuments of our civilisation.

this remarkable couple, let alone persuade Gertrude Himmelfarb to join the editorial advisory board of Standpoint? It still amazes me.

It is a truth seldom if ever acknowledged that a single man in possession of no fortune must be in want of an intellectual mentor. Forty-two years ago, with nothing to my name but a history degree, I decided to be an historian of ideas. In the Oxford of 1970s, the only example available was Isaiah Berlin. He indulged, even encouraged me, but Berlin’s kind of “pluralist” liberal — perpetually teetering on the brink of relativism — didn’t ultimately appeal.

It took me a while to realise that what had attracted me was his subject matter — Russian revolutionaries and German reactionaries — rather than his methods. Besides, who could hope to be Isaiah Berlin? He had his admirers, some of them distinguished in their own right: John Gray, Michael Ignatieff, Timothy Garton Ash. But he had no successor. Even after his death, there was no vacancy.

Berlin may have been the most celebrated historian of ideas of my acquaintance, but Gertrude Himmelfarb was by far the better role model. My field, however, was the history of German thought; hers Victorian England. She was, moreover, a conservative. A neoconservative, indeed — a hybrid species too exotic to flourish in the frigid climate of opinion in these islands. Even at Peterhouse, where the High Tory historian of “public doctrine” Maurice Cowling held court, I don’t recall her work being discussed.

By the time I encountered both the woman and her work, many years later, I had given up academic life and begun a journalistic career at The Times and Daily Telegraph. But my ambitions were always transatlantic. A longing to write on high culture for a congenial readership inevitably led me to New York.

There I came into contact with the American neoconservatives: in particular Norman Podhoretz and his wife Midge Decter, and Neil Kozodoy, successive editors of the New York magazine Commentary. Then there were the “theocons”, Catho

lic intellectuals led by Michael Novak, Richard John Neuhaus and George Weigel. Through them I met the Washington neoconservatives, including Charles Krauthammer and his wife Robbie. The Kristols were from Brooklyn, and she taught for most of her career at the City University in New York; but by the time I got to know them, they were living in an apartment in the Watergate building in Washington.

For Gertrude Himmelfarb and Irving Kristol, books and ideas were the lifeblood of America, a country created ex nihilo on the strength of ideas, which had welcomed their forebears from despotism

not only as writers but as public intellectuals. Their personalities were what is meant by “larger than life” — but above all they lived the intellectual life, the life of an intellectual, to the full. In his book on The Immigrant Jews of New York, the neocons’ liberal rival Irving Howe wrote of his fellow New York intellectuals that they “developed a characteristic style of exposition and polemic.

“Let us call it the style of brilliance . . . Nervous, strewn with knotty or flashy phrases, impatient with transitions and other concessions to dullness, wilfully calling attention to itself as a form or at least an outcry, fond of rapid twists, taking pleasure in dispute, dialectic, dazzle — such, at its best or most noticeable, was the essay cultivated by the Jewish intellectuals.” As much as the ideas that they embodied, it was this combative virtuosity that attracted me.

Even in such illustrious company, the Kristols shone. Irving was always smiling and jovial, Bea gracious and wise. Irving gave me the best piece of advice I have ever received: “If you have a good idea, start a magazine.” I took it as a compliment and founded first Standpoint and later TheArticle. It did not detract from the compliment that, as I soon discovered, he had said the same thing to many others. Not so many, after all, have acted on it. He himself had started several of the best and most influential magazines ever published, including Encounter and The Public Interest.

His no less brilliant son Bill went on to found the Weekly Standard. Irving Kristol had developed a powerful critique of the liberal establishment in America that had seemed omnipotent after Watergate. Along with Norman Podhoretz at Commentary, he had helped to create what is now known as the Reagan consensus, even before Reagan was elected in 1980. Without the battle of ideas fought by the neoconservatives, there might have been no Reagan presidency and certainly no Reagan consensus. The last quarter of the twentieth century and the first quarter of the twenty-first could have turned out very differently — and all because of those ideas embodied in magazines.

Bea Kristol, meanwhile, had a less obvious impact, yet one that was perhaps even more profound. She believed that history had the power to save us from our own follies. Like Lord Acton, the subject of her first book, she thought the historian had a

duty to judge, even if that meant being a “hanging judge”. As Acton had famously put it in his letter to Creighton: “Historic responsibility has to make up for the want of legal responsibility. Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men . . .” Himmelfarb preferred to write about ideas, which “are carried along, and carry men along, by an irresistible tide which often takes them far from their place of birth”.

in its legacy of ideas than the nineteenth. Himmelfarb fell in love with the Victorians for all the reasons why their twentieth-century successors had shunned them. Yes, they could be moralistic and sentimental; they were certainly pious and bourgeois. But they also built the most successful, humane and widely imitated society the world had ever seen. Himmelfarb made it her mission to discover the secret of that triumph, by studying the ideas that animated them and the individuals who made it happen. In a very long life, she never tired of that mission.

Her frame of reference extended back into the eighteenth century and forward into the twentieth, but her focus remained firmly on the nineteenth. She was often severe in her judgments, but never sneered at the “eminent Victorians”, as Lytton Strachey did and the innumerable epigones of Bloomsbury still do. Instead, she devoted many books and essays to the vindication of the Victorians and their often visionary ideas.

If one were to summarise the quality that for Himmelfarb vindicated that era, it would be the title of one of her best books: The Moral Imagination (2007, new enlarged edition 2018). That phrase was a conscious allusion to The Liberal Imagination, the book with which her most important mentor, Lionel Trilling, made his name in the early 1950s. It was also the title of her essay on Trilling, in which she paid tribute to his insight that liberals are always in danger of making other people “the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom, ultimately of our coercion.

“It is to prevent this corruption, the most ironic and tragic that man knows, that we stand in need of the moral realism which is the product of the free play of the moral imagination.” It is characteristic that Himmelfarb sees this legacy as relevant not only to liberals, but also to conservatives, who “are well disposed to that realism, being naturally suspicious of a moral righteousness that has all too often been misconceived and misdirected, confusing feeling good with doing good”.

Ithat drove much of her work, crystallised in The Idea of Poverty and Poverty and Compassion. The Victorians had confronted poverty in a new, post-Christian way: the poor were no longer blessed, but victims of injustice. How, in that case, did society motivate them to transcend their poverty? Was there a valid distinction between the deserving and undeserving poor? This debate re-emerged in the 1983 British general election, when Margaret Thatcher was asked whether she approved of “Victorian values”. “Very much so,” she replied. “Those were the values when our country became great.” In the 1990s, a similar phrase emerged in Clinton’s America: “family values”. This led Himmelfarb to study the consequences of “the great philosophical revolution of modernity”, whereby “morality became so thoroughly relativised and subjectified that virtues ceased to be ‘virtues’ and became ‘values’”.

The contrast between virtues and values was elaborated in one of her most suggestive books, The De-Moralisation of Society: From Victorian Virtues to Modern Values. She deplored the wilful abandonment of the bourgeois virtues of “work, thrift, prudence, temperance, above all self-reliance and personal responsibility”, in favour of what Pope Benedict XVI would later call “the dictatorship of relativism”. Himmelfarb concluded: “Today, confronted with an increasingly de-moralised society, we may be ready for a new reformation, which will restore not so much Victorian values as a more abiding sense of moral and civic virtues.”

That moral reformation, unlike the one that ushered in the Victorian age, has so far failed to materialise. In 1985 Himmelfarb devoted one of her most celebrated essays for Commentary to the moral decline from the “high-minded Evangelicals” of the early nineteenth century, via the altruistic agnostics of the next generation, to the Bloomsbury Group and the Cambridge Apostles. “From Clapham to Bloomsbury: A Genealogy of Morals” began with the group of reformers who spearheaded the abolition of slavery and many other social evils in early industrial Britain and who were indeed aristocratic or upper middle-class Anglicans of an evangelical cast of mind.

Decades later, one of their number, James Stephen, wrote an essay for the Edinburgh Review on “The Clapham Sect”. The name has stuck. “The doctrine,” he wrote, “is that of an all-embracing, all-enduring charity — embracing every human interest, enduring much human infirmity.” Stephen contrasted “the German mind”, which “soars towards the unapproachable and indicts the unutterable”, with “the Clapham mind”. “The practical Englishman . . . betakes himself to form societies, to collect subscriptions, to circulate books, to send forth teachers, to build platforms, and to afflict his neighbours by an eloquence of which one is tempted to wish that it really was unutterable.”

The Bloomsbury Group, too, had their mission: “a liberation from Clapham itself and from those vestiges of Evangelicalism and Victorianism that still persisted in the early twentieth century”. For Himmelfarb, this liberation entailed a reorientation away from moral and civic responsibilities, and a new focus on the immediate circle of intimates: “This was the Bloomsbury credo: living for ‘our-selves.’” This, far more than their aestheticism or promiscuity, has been the Bloomsberries’ lasting legacy: they are the progenitors of the “selfie”.

It is easy to find latter-day spiritual descendants of Bloomsbury: the narcissism and moral anarchy of the 1960s eventually morphed into the culture of Silicon Valley, Wall Street and the City of London. New transatlantic elites have emerged, guided by their strenuously hedonistic ethos of “work hard, play hard” — though the legacy of the counterculture has been devastating for the less monied classes below them, as Charles Murray and Robert Putnam have shown. It was all very well for John Maynard Keynes to profess his secular religion: “I am, and always will remain, an immoralist.” It was quite another for those who lacked the abilities and resources to survive the wholesale abandonment of moral virtue.

of the “Clapham mind” today? The mentality of Extinction Rebellion? Philanthropy certainly flourishes, but it is seldom focused on the re-moralisation of society, still less the restoration of the bourgeois virtues to their rightful place in Britain or America. Himmelfarb herself would be the first to admit that her hopes of such a moral reformation have not been realised, but she might gently point to the role of the history of ideas in stimulating the moral imagination. Himmelfarb was always conscious that morals without a religious foundation stand on unstable ground. She even had a soft spot for Nietzsche, who said in 1889: “For the Englishman, morality is not yet a problem.” He saw, she thought, “the precariousness of that late Victorian morality” which was “too impoverished, too far removed from its original inspiration, to transmit itself to the next generation”.

The title of her 1994 volume of essays Looking into the Abyss: Untimely Thoughts on Culture and Society again alluded to Nietzsche, who was obsessed with the abyss that yawned beneath civilisation. But she read Nietzsche with hindsight and irony. Her teacher Lionel Trilling had already worried that his students found the most subversive works of modern literature and thought merely “interesting” or “exciting”.

Himmelfarb, too, invoked the German philosopher’s moral seriousness, contrasted with the frivolity of students who wore “Nietzsche is Peachy” T-shirts. As a more egregious example of such moral bankruptcy, she cited the academic apologists for the postmodernist guru Paul de Man, who proved to have been a Nazi collaborator and an antisemite. For her, the deepest abyss of all was the Holocaust; she was angry with those who sought to relativise it.

One of these was the historian David Abrahams, who had dedicated his book The Weimar Republic to his parents, “who at Auschwitz and elsewhere suffered the worst consequences of what I can only write about”, thereby giving the impression that they had been killed by the Nazis. In fact, they were alive and well when the book appeared in 1979. His dedication was defended by a more senior colleague, Natalie Zemon Davis, and others who sought to “demystify” or “deconstruct” the most abysmal crime in history. Himmelfarb was “dismayed by the expenditure of so much ingenuity on a subject as solemn and unambiguous as this, an all too real abyss in which millions of people did in fact suffer the ‘worst consequences.’”

She lived to see the defence of depravity on campus degenerate still further, until it sometimes seemed that the beasts had actually taken over

she was repelled by the glibness of “our professors”, who “look into the abyss secure in their tenured positions, risking nothing and seeking nothing save another learned article”. In the decades since Trilling, she warned, “the abyss has grown deeper and more perilous, with new and more dreadful terrors lurking at the bottom. The beasts of modernism have mutated into the beasts of postmodernism — relativism into nihilism, amorality into immorality, irrationality into insanity, sexual deviancy into polymorphous perversity.” Nearly three decades have passed since Himmelfarb wrote these words. She lived to see the defence of depravity on campus degenerate still further, until it sometimes seemed that the beasts had actually taken over.

Yet in her final years, Himmelfarb never succumbed to pessimism. She maintained a remarkable cheerfulness in spite of the apparent hollowing-out of Western civilisation. I believe her equanimity arose from a renewed immersion in and apprecia

tion of the Jewish culture of her youth, a culture that always put family first and last. She announced this return to her roots with a short book, The Jewish Odyssey of George Eliot, published in 2009 with a dedication to “Bill and Susan, Liz and Caleb” — the two Kristol children, Bill and Liz, and their spouses.

George Eliot was, for Himmelfarb, a kind of heroine. Her fiction, of course, speaks for itself, though in the case of Daniel Deronda, Eliot’s last novel, what she called “the Jewish element” baffled contemporaries; a century later it was still seen as a “deformity” by the critic F. R. Leavis, who tried to excise all things Jewish from the text. Though never given credit as the de facto editor of the Westminster Review, Eliot was one of the most brilliant journalists of her time. But for Himmelfarb, she was also a “formidable” intellectual: as the translator of Strauss, Feuerbach and Spinoza, she included an epigraph to one chapter of Deronda by Leopold Zunz, a pioneer of Jewish scholarship, rendered by her from the German: “If there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations . . .”

In just 180 pages, Himmelfarb takes readers on their own odyssey, a journey that transcends George Eliot and stretches from the origins of Zionism and antisemitism in nineteenth-century Germany to the tracts on Jewish identity of Jean-Paul Sartre and Nathan Sharansky in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. En route, she investigates Eliot’s “initiation” into “the Jewish question” and Judaism itself, explaining how this notorious agnostic saw the role of religion for Jewish people in an unexpectedly positive light.

Eliot was also, it emerges, a cultural, social and political conservative. She admired Disraeli as much for his novels — proto-Zionist, like her Deronda — as for his politics. Himmelfarb dissects the reception of Daniel Deronda, including the charge of “orientalism” levelled at Eliot by Edward Said and those critics who have followed his critique of Zionism. Eliot herself, she suggests, “knew everything her opponents (and some of her friends) might say in refutation of her views, having once shared some of them”. Whereas “many novels of ideas die as the ideas themselves wither away”, she concludes, “Eliot’s vision of Judaism is as compelling today as it was more than a century ago, very much part of the perennial dialogue about Jewish identity and the Jewish question.”

Hhomage to George Eliot, published at the age of 87, might have been her final word on the subject of Jews and Judaism. Not a bit of it. Two years later, in 2011, she returned to the fray with The People of the Book: Philosemitism in England from Cromwell to Churchill. Similar in scale but much wider in scope than her study of Eliot, this volume was Himmelfarb’s response to the post-9/11 “resurgence of antisemitism throughout the world”, including the UK.

She wrote it to counter the “lachrymose” view of Jewish history, which is in perpetual danger of making Jews into victims and their history a chronicle of misfortunes: “Surely, I felt, Judaism is more than the history of antisemitism.” Himmelfarb wanted the Jewish people to be defined by the qualities that had enabled it to endure.

She was appalled by the re-emergence of antisemitism even in the land of George Eliot, on which she had observed in her book that it was “most ominous in England, because it is so discordant, so out of keeping with the spirit of the country”. Long before Jeremy Corbyn and his acolytes took over the Labour Party, she wrote to me in 2012: “When I wrote my book [on philosemitism in England], I started to write a chapter bringing it up to date, in which your father [Paul Johnson] would have featured prominently. I gave up on it because I couldn’t weave it into the historical context that concluded so dramatically with Churchill (and that would have obliged me to engage at some length in the very disagreeable subject of the current surge of antisemitism in England).”

By the end of a long and fruitful life, Himmelfarb had known the worst and the best years in Jewish history, the Holocaust and the creation of Israel. She refused to write about her own past, telling me: “Irving wrote wonderful memoirs. I don’t.” Yet through her ability to see the world through the eyes of others, she bequeathed to us, in her limpid prose, two volumes that conjure up that epic and not-so-distant past, when Jews and righteous Gentiles worked together to defeat their enemies and make possible the miracle of the Jewish state. The arc of her intellectual narrative brought her finally to that finest hour.

She ended her last book by quoting her late brother Milton: “Hope is a Jewish virtue.” She once liked something I said about Western civilisation and commented: “I remember using that term in a speech and was accused of being not only reactionary but, worse, Eurocentric.” Future historians will look back on the life of Gertrude Himmelfarb and conclude that, as much as or more than any human being of her time, she actually was Western civilisation.

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well thank heavens that’s over — that fit of neo-puritanism which overtakes the country every January. This year the normal soullessness of Dry January has been made even drier by the aridness of Veganuary — a rare word, whose reality cannot possibly be as grim as its construction.

“I judge a man by one thing,” said Isaac Foot, Liberal MP and father of Michael Foot. “Which side would he have liked his ancestors to fight on at Marston Moor?”

Well, so do I — and January is a good month on which to base that judgment. Not that the other months are much better. Puritanism is on the march, my friends, as it has marched at various, repeated, always tedious, and often dangerous points of history. It is an eternal battle, crystallised, in our culture, by the fight between the Cavaliers and the Roundheads, but could just as easily have been defined by the suppression of the cult of Isis in Rome, the rise of the Abbasids, the Gregorian reforms of the twelfth century, or the Prohibition era in the US. “The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy” is one which cuts across cultures and eras.

Now historians of each will no doubt jump up and call this unfair — even our home-grown Puritans are undergoing a revisionist revolution with attempts to claim the black-suited forbidders of Christmas for the cause of levity and sexual pleasure. Revision notwithstanding, there is undeniably a strain of human psychology which treats pleasure as something to be wary of.

this is my beef with Dry January and its more miserable barely pronounceable fellow-traveller. It’s about cutting out pleasure. If your concern is that you’re drinking too much, going cold turkey for a month is not the solution — cutting it out or cutting it down, is. If eating meat is destroying the planet, a month’s performative fast isn’t going to change a thing. Neither is a solitary month going dramatically to improve your health, not unless it’s part of a wholesale lifestyle change, in which case we’re discussing something else entirely.

No, what we have just witnessed is a performative act of self-denial. Now hold on, I hear you say, you’re a priest. What about Lent? What about the 2,000 years of Christian fasting and abstention?

There is a significant difference, albeit one which has often been ignored by Christians as we go through our periodic bouts of puritanism. For Christians creation is good and to be enjoyed. Christ turned water into wine “when they were all well drunk” and made wine the ritual focus of the worship of him at the Eucharist; he said that he came that we may have life and have it in abundance. Pleasure, rightly enjoyed, is good. Which is why laying it aside as a sacrifice (on Friday, the day on which Christ died, or in anticipation of Holy Week) is a struggle and a willing offering to God. It is choosing to lay aside the things you enjoy in order, at the end of that season, to take them back and revel in them.

For the puritan, you shouldn’t have been enjoying them in the first place: there is something unwholesome about the pleasure we take from wine or meat.

This is the lurking menace behind the whole creeping neo-puritanism which is rising in Western culture. While Dry January (etc.) is mercifully only self-inflicted and self-imposed, it is part of a wider cultural narrative, whose joylessness and suspicion of pleasure has a dangerously missionary feel to it. We see it in universities, we see it in workplaces, we see it on our television sets.

Our neo-puritan age doesn’t just internalise its joy-hating: like all good puritans, it looks outwards at an impure world and wants to transform it. Take the desire to police thought and speech which has spilled out of universities into the real world with terrifying speed.

Take also the campaign to treat people vaping in the same way that we treat smokers. While the NHS says, “The risks of passive smoking with conventional cigarettes do not apply to e-cigs,” e-cigarettes tend to banned wherever cigarettes are banned and vapers consigned to the freezing cold alongside those smoking the very things they have probably just quit.

This is literally the opposite of any rational policy designed to wean smokers off cigarettes — because this is not rational behaviour. It’s hard to avoid the impression that this is the frustration of those who are outraged not at the risk to health but at the prospect of pleasure.

so what can the Cavalier-inclined readers of The Critic do? Rejoice in the world we have been given to enjoy and the fruits thereof, and the next time we take a glass of wine remember the words of Roger Scruton, whose death has left the anti-puritan resistance bereft of its spiritual leader:

That first sip of a fine wine stirs, as it makes its way downward, the rooted sense of my incarnation. I know that I am flesh, the by-product of bodily processes which are being brought to a heightened life by the drink that settles within me.

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He proceeds to do all the things Joe Biden has been doing for years. He flits from the light-hearted to the serious and back again, cracking dad jokes with the young volunteers assembled for this photo-op one minute and giving them earnest old-timey advice the next. “My Dad always said showing up is half of winning,” he tells them. The schtick is equal parts global statesman and avuncular Irish-American cheekiness. The effect is more ex-presidential than presidential — and the mood is flat.

stead, this twice-failed presidential candidate wants to persuade you of one thing: that he can win. The problem is that there is plenty to suggest he might not. In the monthly televised debates, his contributions have been rambling and sometimes incoherent, enlivened only by the prospect of an imminent slip up from the self-confessed “gaffe machine”. This is not a helpful attribute for a steady-handon-the-tiller candidate like Biden. Nor is the entanglement of his son’s business in Ukraine with the messy impeachment trial that dominates headlines even if it scarcely gets mentioned on the campaign trail. Democratic strategists and voters also worry Biden might not have the stamina for the gruelling path to the White House, let alone the job itself. In conversations with dozens of Iowa voters three weeks before caucus day, I keep hearing the same thing: “I love Joe, but . . . ” One Iowan even described Biden as her “favourite politician of all time”, but won’t support him. Some are more explicit: “He’s too old!” says one exasperated citizen.

But it isn’t just the self-evident shortcomings of Biden the candidate that undermine the case for his nomination. Also working against him is something bigger, something that goes to the heart of American politics. It’s the slippery question of which of the old rules still apply after Trump broke so many of them in 2016, and a lack of confidence in what “electability” really means in 2020.

At the Des Moines campaign office Biden ends his speech not in the rhetorical crescendo you might expect from a seasoned campaigner but with a slightly underwhelming promise that “if I’m the nominee, I will not let you down.” Volunteers applause politely. He ignores questions from reporters and exits through a door with a campaign poster affixed to it that reads “No Malarkey!”

When the younger biden first asked Iowans for their support, Bernie Sanders was making a name for himself as the unapologetically socialist mayor of Burlington, a small progressive college town in Vermont. Elizabeth Warren was a legal scholar at the University of Pennsylvania specialising in bankruptcy law — and still a Republican. Pete Buttigieg was a five-year-old boy in South Bend,

Indiana, the town he would go on to lead as a wunderkind mayor.

Thirty-three years later, these four Americans are all looking for the same thing: an Iowan seal of approval. As we go to press, with caucus day in under two weeks, pollsters agree that the Iowa race is close. Too close, in fact, to be sure of very much beyond the identity of the four candidates with a reasonable chance of winning.

If Biden comes out on top here, and in other early states, where he was originally expected to underperform his level of national support, then he could have half a hand on the nomination remarkably early, killing off the hopes of his rivals in Iowa and stopping late entrant Mike Bloomberg (who is focusing on later states) in his tracks.

If Sanders triumphs, he emerges as the undisputed alternative to Biden, turning things into a two-horse race. Both Warren and Buttigeig need a strong showing to keep pace. If anyone outside this top four wants to be taken seriously much longer then they probably need to crack the 15 per cent threshold needed to win Iowan delegates.

i meet enthusiastic supporters of all of them. Outand-out Bernie Bros at a debate watch party in downtown Des Moines, a retired women in a cap dotted with Buttigeig badges at a rally on a bitterly cold night in the north of this snowbound state, students energised by Elizabeth Warren’s bevy of plans to overhaul American capitalism.

But the person who looms largest at all of these events is Donald Trump. A debate over who is best placed to win the national contest is part of any primary process, but the extent to which Trump dominates proceedings is exceptional — and no candidate will get very far with these voters unless they can convince them of his or her ability to boot him out of office.

At least superficially, Sanders is the candidate with the biggest electability problem. An independent senator from Vermont, he has trodden a lonely path to the top of American politics, building a devoted following along the way. However energetic his base, self-described democratic socialists have not fared well in US presidential elections and, were he to win in November, Sanders would be comfortably the most left-wing president in American history.

This cycle, his flagship policy is Medicare for All, an overhaul of America’s healthcare system that may address an area of genuine concern for voters but is riddled with electoral difficulties.

a single-payer system means huge tax hikes on middle-class households and the elimination of existing healthcare plans.

Then there is the age problem — Sanders is as old as Biden, even if his performances, both on camera and in person, are considerably more energetic. He suffered a heart attack in October and was forced to take a break from the campaign trail in which most people assumed his presidential bid would soon fizzle out. Oddly, however, his comeback from that medical setback proved to be an energising moment — he raised a whopping $34.5 million in the fourth quarter of 2019 from nearly two million individual donors — and Sanders has looked like Biden’s most serious rival ever since.

the hazards for the sanders campaign are hard to ignore at a small gathering of his supporters at the University of Iowa. The 50-odd people were there not to hear from the candidate himself, but campaign surrogates. Cornel West is a long-standing Sanders supporter and a familiar face on the American left. A prominent black public intellectual, philosopher and Harvard professor, the 66-year-old is a merciless critic of Barack Obama and everything else that looks like moderation in the Democratic party. He has preached a socialist creed, invoking the intellectual inheritance of Martin Luther King to do so, for decades.

In his trademark black tie and waistcoat, he delivers a barnstorming, culturally rich endorsement of the Vermont senator that has the students and locals fired up on this cold January morning. “Bernie Sanders is a tender brother, he’s a kind brother, he listens to everyday people,” he tells them. “Electability” doesn’t come into it. Bernie is a thermostat, not a thermometer, he says.

“Don’t let anybody tell you, ‘Oh my God, he is a democratic socialist, America is going to look like the Soviet Union in four years,’” he warns. “No — you tell them: Get off the crack pipe!”

Attendees are just as unequivocal in their support: “I was a big Bernie fan four years ago, and I’ve followed him for 30 years,” says one. “He’s the most consistent candidate, he’s the one honest candidate and I agree with every single one of his policies.” Others compare notes on how far they have driven for the event. A middle-aged man sporting a “Bernie 2020” T-shirt over his sizeable gut proudly announces that he has moved to the state to help get Sanders elected.

It all feels a lot like a Corbyn rally. And to many Democrats, the abject failure of Labour in last year’s British election is a powerful reminder not to confuse the enthusiasm of Sanders’s loyal support with the ability to win a national election. However, if Democratic moderates have the cautionary tale of Corbyn’s failure in 2019, the left can point to Hillary Clinton in 2016. You don’t need to share Sanders’s politics to see that third-way triangulation hasn’t proved especially successful in recent years. While a candidate with a radical agenda needs to explain why he won’t bomb at the ballot box, a centre-left insider needs to accept that the last two presidents won the White House as insurgent outsiders and demonstrate why this time is different.

The authors of an essay in Jacobin, the pro-Sanders house magazine of American millennial socialism, frame the far-left case for electability as follows: “While every other general election matchup seems likely to descend into the bleak and muddled culture clash of 2016, a contest between Sanders and Trump would present American voters with a stark choice: the populist who wants to win you healthcare and cancel your debt, or the rich prick who doesn’t care if you live or you die so long as your boss gets paid.”

Sanders is the closest thing the Democrats have to a Trump of their own: a straight-talking candidate committed to radical change and overturning conventional wisdom, and with enduring popularity that frustrates the party establishment. His candidacy is doomed for all the reasons Trump’s election bid was a non-starter. We all know how that story ended.

If biden has pitched himself as the most explicitly “stop Trump” candidate, and Sanders is a kind of mirror image of the president, then Pete Butteigig is standing on a cleverly constructed “tough on Trump, tough on the causes of Trump” platform. The 38-year-old has a stump speech that varies a little from event to event, but every time I hear it in Iowa it starts with an invitation to the audience to imagine “a day in our future that I hope is not very far off” and that is “the first day the sun comes up over Mason City [or Clear Lake or whichever Iowa town he happens to be in], over America, and Donald Trump is no longer president of the United States.” It’s a line that always gets a big cheer, before Butteigig goes on to say that “the reason I always ask folks to picture that day is because it’s not the day our trouInstituting

bles end but the day our work begins.” Whoever is in charge on that day is going to need to unify the country, he argues, and also “deliver big answers to big problems, because the problems that got us to this point are only going to get more serious each passing day between now and then”.

Buttigeig has a CV that ticks all the boxes: a midwestern Rhodes scholar who served in Afghanistan and former mayor of the kind of hollowed-out town where Trump’s message of economic decline really resonates. He’s also the first openly gay candidate to seek the Democratic nomination. He speaks with a self-assurance and thoughtfulness that would make for an interesting foil to Trump’s braggadocio in a general election campaign. At his rallies I meet former Republicans who no longer recognise the party they once supported, a twentysomething who lost his job because of Trump’s steel tariffs and college students turned off by the leftwards drift of some of the other candidates. At one event, he even piques the interest of a voter in a “Trump 2020” baseball cap.

While Mayor Pete (as he is universally known) polls well in midwestern states like Iowa, his nationwide numbers are less impressive, not least because of a well-documented problem with black voters. In many ways, Buttigeig’s platform screams “electable”. He has heeded caution in the face of a progressive wing convinced that now is the time for a raft of radical policies like Medicare for All and a Green New Deal, but without the passion of the left-wing candidates or the reassuring experience of his moderate rivals, his candidacy can surely only go so far.

while i am in iowa, an uneasy truce between Sanders and Warren, the next most left-wing candidate, comes to an abrupt end when it emerges (almost certainly from the Warren camp) that in a private 2018 meeting between the two candidates Sanders

is alleged to have expressed concern that a woman couldn’t win the presidency in 2020. Immediately after a CNN debate in Des Moines in which Sanders denied the story, Warren is caught on a hot mic telling her longtime senate colleague, “I think you called me a liar on national TV.”

Warren’s candidacy is built on a wonky brand of populism that promises to rewire the American economy and redistribute power away from a coterie of corporate bogeymen. Her professorial tone and her CV — teacher, legal scholar, creator of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in the wake of the financial crisis, and liberal Massachusetts senator — means the message, however ill-advised, is delivered with considerable authority. She has effervescence and enthusiasm that mean she is the one septuagenarian in the race whose mental and physical fitness for office is unquestioned. As with Sanders, she would be the most left-wing president in living memory. Unlike the other populist options available, her message seems to resonate most with the liberal cultural and academic elite; the risk is that she would pile up votes in parts of the country where they aren’t necessarily needed, but has limited appeal in the parts of the country that will prove decisive in November.

The row between Sanders and Warren about gender is revealing not because it demonstrates any kind of misogyny in the Vermont senator — even if the Warren campaign does little to dissuade people of that notion. Rather, it is yet more evidence of the way in which 2016 has scrambled old certainties. Gone is the yesshe-can glass-ceiling-smashing swagger with which Hillary Clinton launched her 2016 campaign. Some might want to double down on left-wing identity politics and fight a high-stakes, no-holds-barred culture war with Trump. Others aren’t so sure.

at a warren event in indianola, a small town south of Des Moines, a voter tells me he is torn between Warren, Sanders and Biden. Like most of the people I speak to, he says he is looking first and foremost for a candidate who can beat Trump. They need the “character, appearance and attitude that will make that happen”, he says. “Warren is old enough, she’s had enough diverse experience, she can speak without hesitation and touch on all the aspects of the job, but I wonder if the voters are willing to elect a woman.”

This is an uneasy moment in American politics. Iowans, like voters in other states, find themselves second-guessing their own convictions, unsure of the country’s appetite for radical change and uneasy about their neighbour’s possible prejudices. Almost all of this is thanks to Trump. And perhaps the real lesson for Democrats from 2016 is to avoid the meta-conversation about electability that preoccupied so many people in Iowa. After this electability-obsessed primary we may see that those who fare the best are the ones who, rather than overthinking what it is the voters want, appear most comfortable in their own skin. And, for all their unmissable shortcomings and undeniable differences, the two candidates who seem most authentically themselves are Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.

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Theresa May speaks during the historic debate of 29 March, 2019

Flying high: Blair on the campaign trail in 1997

Queen Charlotte by Francis Cotes

Was the Queen a “mulatto”? The Allan Ramsay portrait which sparked controversy

Tired of tokenism: Delhi’s Commissioner for Women Swati Maliwal went on hunger strike

Inseparable: Irving Kristol and Gertrude Himmelfarb

Joe Biden: A walking re-set button

Bernie Sanders: America’s Corbyn?

“Darling, is that you?”

Elizabeth Warren: Wonky populist

Pete Buttigieg: Thoughtful but inexperienced