The anti-Corbyn plot that never was

Tthat Jeremy Corbyn’s reign as leader of the Labour Party was going to end in political humiliation, the true believers of the Corbyn project began constructing a ticking time bomb designed to detonate under the party’s new leadership. Their dream of a truly socialist government had, they believed, been sabotaged by a centrist fifth column, who bought into what they believed to be the false claims of a number of traitorous “whistleblowers” — the party officials who told me on the BBC’s Panorama that under Corbyn, Labour had created a safe space for antisemitic views.

Furthermore, they claimed, some of these officials had actively conspired to stop Corbyn winning the 2017 election in a secret project funded with the party’s own money with the connivance of senior party staff. Indeed, so their analysis goes, just 2,227 more Labour votes in just seven marginal constituencies could have seen Jeremy Corbyn instead of Theresa May installed in Number Ten. Clear proof, they believe, that Corbyn had been stabbed in the back.

And the evidence for all this? A leaked 851-page internal report titled “The work of the Labour Party’s Governance and Legal Unit in relation to antisemitism, 2014-2019”, which also has a section on the alleged 2017 election plot. Don’t be fooled by the portentous title. The report was written by some of Corbyn’s most loyal allies — by a faction for a faction. It claims to be the result of an “in-depth and extensive investigatory work” providing a “full and thorough account of the evolution of the Party’s disciplinary processes in relation to dealing with complaints of antisemitism”.

It’s nothing of the sort, though the report continues to provide ammunition for those who cling to the belief that “Jeremy” was betrayed rather than defeated in the same way that doomsday cult members blame the calendar when the world fails to end.

at the heart of both the alleged 2017 election conspiracy and the alleged antisemitism smear conspiracy: Panorama’s main whistleblower, Sam Matthews. Matthews is an open, intelligent, easy-going 28-year-old who, as an official in the Governance and Legal Unit was responsible for investigating complaints, including those relating to antisemitism. With no fewer than 935 references to him in the leaked report, he has become a target of near-pathological hatred by Corbynites.

The former Party middle manager is portrayed as having Svengali-like powers. Although he wrote a series of emails to the Leader of the Opposition’s Office (LOTO) seeking their guidance on antisemitism disciplinary cases, the report suggests he didn’t want their guidance at all. It was all a fake, because what he was really doing was collecting LOTO’s replies so he could leak them to the press after he left his Labour job to show that LOTO had interfered in antisemitism cases contrary to Corbyn’s multiple denials.

So let me try and deal with the facts. Having spent many hours interrogating Matthews and other party officials ahead of the Panorama broadcast, I regard him as a man of integrity. I believe him when he (supported by others in a position to know) says the reason he sought LOTO’s guidance on antisemitism disciplinary cases was because 18 months of hostility from Corbynite NEC members and interference from LOTO itself in disciplinary cases (not just antisemitism) had left Matthews and colleagues at their wits end, fearful of enraging LOTO when what they needed was political cover for their decisions, not opposition.

that the leaked report omits. “We thought ‘You know what?” said one former official. “If you want to make these decisions, then just make them and you take responsibility. Let’s not pretend we’re making them and that you’re not interfering.’”

The alleged antisemitism “conspiracy” is just one of several the report sees as having been directed at undermining the entire Corbyn project. But the report’s central pillars crumble when subjected to forensic scrutiny, as may become clear with the publication of the Equalities Commission inquiry into antisemitism in the Labour Party this autumn.

Alas, this is a journalistic challenge that activists in the alt-left media such as Skwawkbox, The Canary, Novara Media, and even the UK-based political website Open Democracy have conspicuously ducked. Instead, they’ve taken the report’s findings at face value.

A recent tweet from Novara Media’s founder Aaron Bastani tells you all you need to know about the quality of today’s “activist” journalism. Responding to breaking news of the massive

TBeirut explosion, Bastani tweeted: “Thermobaric weapon. Only one Air Force uses them so liberally.” He then deleted it in an attempt to disguise his anti-Israel prejudice.

of dissenting voices by supporters of the failed Corbyn project has described as a “wrecking tactic” by former leadership candidate David Miliband. How the report came to be commissioned, its contents and its leaking are now the subject of an inquiry set up by Starmer, headed by Martin Forde QC and a team including the former Labour General Secretary Larry Whitty, Baroness Debbie Wilcox, head of the Welsh Local Government Association, and Professor Ruth Lister.

Last month, a submission to Forde from Corbyn and eight of his closest political allies and advisers was leaked to the Guardian. It claimed overwhelming evidence of sabotage in the 2017 general election. A submission from Unite also alludes to “electoral sabotage” by officials whom McCluskey has described as “politically crooked”.

As with all the alt-left media reports on this subject, Unite relies on the leaked report’s finding that a secret project was run by anti-Corbyn party officials, diverting “at least £175,000” from the 2017 election budget to fund a “parallel general election campaign . . . to support sitting MPs, some of whom enjoyed comfortable parliamentary majorities”.

Unite suspects possible “fraud . . . and false accounting” and want Forde to find out if the money was “diverted to particular Labour candidates because they were personal friends or factional allies”. Unite stopped short of alleging sabotage, but Corbynite cheerleader in chief Dr Justin Schlosberg — a former rock singer turned departmental head of media studies at Birkbeck University, London has no such hesitation. He postulates that the mainstream media have not picked up on this story “not so much (because) there is insufficient evidence of sabotage, but overwhelming evidence”.

It is troubling that a media academic doesn’t seem to know how the mainstream media works. Were there any compelling evidence of sabotage in the 2017 election, journalists would have been all over it like a pack of wolves. There isn’t.

Tis correct to say there was a project, which it calls the “Ergon House project”, so named because it operated out of Ergon House, the party’s London regional office. The report is also correct in saying that the project was run by Matthews, although it was inspired by more senior officials who, like Matthews, had witnessed levels of ineptitude not experienced with any previous Labour leader and their private office. The project was also secret in as much as it was not disclosed to Corbyn or his office.

But beyond reporting these facts accurately, the authors provide no evidence from scouring (they claim) 100,000 emails that the motivation was to sabotage Corbyn’s chances of becoming prime minister. The report’s authors “are trying to build a mythical ‘stab in the back’ conspiracy theory to absolve themselves of the consequences of their incompetence,” one former official told the Guardian.

The project was actually called the “Bespoke Materials Service”. Unite’s submission to Forde even misreports the amount the BMS spent which was £135,014, just 1.2 per cent of Labour’s reported £11 million election spend.

In fact, the rationale behind the BMS was this: with the Tories 19 points ahead when Theresa May called the 2017 election, officials in Labour’s senior management team (SMT) feared for the very survival of the party as a viable opposition. Based on information about where voter sentiment was moving away from Labour, all the party’s 231 seats were graded according to whether they were “key”, “should be OK”, or “not winnable”.

From this breakdown, 75 “key” seats were selected as qualifying for additional campaign support — should the local candidate or their campaign teams request it. In practice, only about half did. Fifty-one of the 75 “key” seats were in the Midlands and the North, including some that formed Labour’s so-called Red Wall.

I“belt and braces” strategy, Team Corbyn’s strategy was to put the leader in front of large crowds. “Ergon House . . . failed to understand the momentum that was gathering behind the Labour campaign led by Jeremy Corbyn,” says the leaked report and that, at least, seems fair comment. With nightly pictures of Corbyn playing to the crowd in stark contrast to May’s public awkwardness, the polls began to narrow. Even so, Labour’s seasoned election strategists assessed that a more sophisticated localised campaign was required in parts of the party’s traditional heartlands where “Corbyn rallies, leaflets and direct mail” were proving to be counterproductive. “The last face many Labour voters wanted to see was Jeremy Corbyn,” said one BMS official. “That was the clear message coming back to us from the doorstep. To be honest, many of them couldn’t stand him.”

So, much of the £135,000 spent on BMS went towards a Project Fear PR campaign, the focus not on Corbyn but on what Margaret Thatcher did in the 1980s. “The Tories have wrecked the north-east before — and they’ll do it again,” was Labour’s message to places like Sunderland There was just a nod to the Corbyn manifesto “For the many not the few.”

Unite claims that had the BMS budget been allocated to LOTO’s Corbyn-based campaign, “it is entirely possible that Labour would have won sufficient seats to deprive the Conservatives of a majority.” Another 2,227 votes in seven marginals, maintains Unite, would have given Corbyn a chance to form a minority “Rainbow” government with the SNP, Lib Dems, Greens and Plaid Cymru.

convinced the leaked report provides irrefutable proof of the plotting and sabotage committed against Corbyn, this is where they reach a pitch of fantasy beyond even the report itself. Had Labour won the extra 2,227, they would need to have been perfectly distributed so as to give each marginal a majority of just one. Moreover, without BMS, at least three seats it targeted would probably have fallen. Officials say it was only thanks to BMS that Labour scraped in at Newcastle-under-Lyme, Dudley North and Ashfield with the slimmest of majorities: 30, 22 and 441, respectively.

Even if Labour had won the extra seats, this would still only have brought a Corbyn-led “Rainbow coalition” level-pegging with the Conservatives and the Democratic Unionist Party at 321 seats each. For Corbyn to actually get into Downing Street assumes he and his prospective partners could all have agreed a Queen’s Speech they could all live with — including a demand from the SNP for a second Scottish referendum. Brexit would also have been an issue. How long would this “Rainbow” have lasted before there was another election, which the Conservatives would have won?

We know they would have won because there was another election in 2019, when Corbyn had complete control of the party and all the anti-Corbyn officials had left. What happened? Those Red Wall seats which BMS officials had presciently targeted collapsed in a heap of rubble, the worst Labour election defeat since 1935. If anything, the Corbynites sabotaged Labour’s electoral chances in 2019 by focusing on Jeremy Corbyn who by then had become Labour’s most unpopular leader on record.

“It was categorically never my understanding of BMS that its purpose was to prevent Jeremy Corbyn from winning,” says Matthews, who supervised BMS’s PR and poster campaign in the project’s 75 seats. “Quite the reverse: its principal purpose was to try to ensure that the Labour Party remained a viable opposition even if we lost the 2017 election. Every penny was properly accounted for in election spending returns, and there are emails which show this.”

Meanwhile, Corbyn’s inner circle regarded the 2017 result — they lost by 55 seats against the worst Conservative campaign in living memory — as a triumph against expectations and, I am told, celebrated with champagne.

winning the 2017 election was apparently not the be-all and end-all. “Jeremy and his people didn’t actually think they could win,” said one insider. “They couldn’t have cared less about losing seats like Ashfield — seats that were saved by BMS — because they didn’t regard the likes of Gloria de Piero [then Ashfield’s MP] as legitimate Labour MPs. They wanted to fill the house with the Richard Burgons, the Barry Gardiners, the Chris Williamsons and the Rebecca Long Baileys. So all this talk about ‘sabotage’ is a load of sanctimonious bollocks.”

A former official explained: “They always talked about ‘The Project, The Project, The Project.’ It was almost like electoral suc

cess is selling yourself out.” The exception was John McDonnell who set his heart on winning and always sounded as if he meant it. I am told that officials occasionally witnessed Karie Murphy saying that winning “isn’t necessarily a priority for us”. That was reserved for transforming Labour into a post-Marxist party so that “we can change our communities for the better”.

However, the leaked report does contain enough private messaging to prove that many in Labour’s senior management team were praying for a humiliating Corbyn defeat (although no such messages have been published from Matthews). But that’s very different from saying they actively sought to bring it about. What is clear is that under Corbyn’s leadership, they felt the party was doomed and hoped a defeat would trigger a leadership campaign with Labour resuming its role as a credible opposition under a credible leader — as it has begun to do today.

I am told the BMS Project was not disclosed to LOTO because Team Corbyn “would have wanted to spend all of the party’s money on Jeremy rallies. They were obsessive about this. We were trying to ensure the survival of the party.” Nevertheless, as a twice elected leader with a large mandate, Corbyn clearly had a right to know, though the secrecy seems more of a political and moral issue than anything resembling McCluskey’s suggestion of fraud.

And anyway, shouldn’t a competent leader’s office have noticed that something was afoot, not least because 30 staffers had disappeared from Labour Party HQ? “The primary reason why they didn’t know about it was because they were too thick to ask the right questions,” said another ex-official. “They weren’t capable of being in control of this thing. It’s their own ineptitude that created this.”

Ifor other plots the conspiracy-minded Corbynites allege. John McDonell’s former adviser Joe Ryle seems convinced that the party machine sought to undermine Corbyn from the start. “I saw from the inside how Labour staff worked to prevent a Labour government,” he writes. “When Corbyn and McDonnell walked in on Day One, many of the computers had gone missing and the offices weren’t properly set up.” When inquired about this, I was told that because LOTO’s offices are part of the parliamentary estate, responsibility for supplying computers lay with the Parliamentary Information and Communication Service — not the Labour party. “There weren’t computers because Corbyn’s campaign hadn’t bothered to appoint a competent office manager to liaise with PICS,” a former official told me.

Martin Forde’s inquiry into the credibility of the report is not due to report for several months, but the Corbynites are already getting their retaliation in by dismissing Forde as a likely whitewash. Likewise, Corbyn has accused the Equalities Commission of no longer being independent but “part of the government machine”.

All political careers end in failure, but every previous Labour or Conservative leader has taken their punishment with dignity and left the stage. Can Corbyn and his supporters really be so oblivious to their growing reputation as the sorest losers in British political history? Do they even care? Perhaps not.

The report was leaked within hours of its formal submission to Keir Starmer by the outgoing Corbynite secretary-general Jennie Formby, presumably to embarrass Starmer. Whichever geniuses decided to do this have heaped catastrophe on ignominy. The leak has triggered several dozen legal claims for defamation and privacy. Damages and costs against Labour could run to several millions, which is why Starmer may seek to hold the leakers vicariously liable for this mess. The leaker(s) should worry. Forde is said to have already identified them.

“We’re not going to trash the last four years,” Kier Starmer said when he was running for the leadership. But now the Corbynites are full of vengeance and victimhood, he might have to. There’s a war on, more visceral than anything Labour has ever seen before.

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Ttoo many examples of top civil servants giving bad advice that led to government blundering. Appeasement was perhaps the most serious of these, although the allocation of blame between politicians (Neville Chamberlain, Lord Halifax) and the key official (Sir Horace Wilson) will always be debated by historians. Later in life Wilson insisted that Chamberlain had been in charge, but at least one contemporary — Lord Woolton in his memoirs — said that Wilson had “tremendous power” and was crucial in ensuring that in the late 1930s appeasement was government policy.

Almost immediately after becoming prime minister in May 1940, Churchill decided that Wilson had to go. Wilson was permanent secretary to the Treasury and head of the home civil ser- vice, but he was so close to Chamberlain that his office was at 10 Downing Street. In the early morning of 11 May Randolph Churchill and Brendan Bracken took up station in this room. As he turned up for work, they gave Wilson his marching orders. They told him to clear his desk that morning. If he were ever seen in Downing Street again, the prime minister would appoint him governor of Greenland.

By comparison, the defenestration of Sir Mark Sedwill at the end of June was a dignified affair. Sedwill — like Wilson 80 years earlier — had risen to the position of cabi

by the Wilson and Sedwill ejections is the definition of the proper role of the civil service in government. Strictly speaking, the United Kingdom is a constitutional monarchy, in which the sovereign is served by two kinds of secretary of state.

One kind is political, temporary and sackable. To be precise, it consists of the cabinet ministers appointed on the basis that they belong to a party that has won a general election, with the prime minister recommending them to the monarch. Rather often, they reach their eminent positions by chance and whim.

The other is non-political and “permanent”, appointed on the very different basis that they have climbed by merit and hard work through a long civil service career. All being well, they are not to be removed by the government of the day.

But everyone is political. Top civil servants may camouflage their politics and trim to the latest think-tank nostrums, but they have beliefs and attitudes like other people. A particular problem is that finding the best solution to a policy issue may depend on — or be thought to depend — on having the right kind of expertise. Civil servants usually have deeper knowledge of major policy areas than their so-called “political masters”, as well as better access to leading outside experts. This apparent intellectual superiority may lead civil servants into thinking that they have the right technical answer to a particular challenge, when that answer is in fact both politically loaded and unsatisfactory in its own terms. Whitehall groupthink is then very dangerous.

decades been areas of particular difficulty, very much the province of technical jargon and expert insight. In principle the Treasury is the dominant department in economic policy-making, even if the location of power has fluctuated between it on the one hand and 10 Downing Street and the Bank of England on the other. Its permanent secretary was in the past also head of the civil service, and per

Butskellism continued until 1979, except that prices and incomes policy (to keep inflation down) was increasingly seen as a vital accompaniment of Keynesian fiscal policy (to maintain demand and output at the full employment level). Inescapably, economic policy in this period was a failure. The UK was at the bottom of the league tables of output growth, while sterling lost its key currency status and much of its international value. Inflation was consistently higher than in comparable countries, with the increase in the retail price index in August 1975 reaching the astonishing figure of 26.9 per cent.

CBut a striking feature of the official policymaking machine in the Butskellite era was its continuity. Lord Bridges (head of the home civil service and joint permanent secretary to the Treasury, 1945-56), Lord Armstrong (permanent secretary to the Treasury, 1962-68) and Lord Croham (permanent secretary to the Treasury, 1968-74) served successive Labour and Conservative governments without strain. (To remind, a new party of government took over in 1951, 1964 and 1970.) The politicians did not object to them, and — as far as the public record goes — they did not object to the politicians. Both ministers and officials were complicit in the economic policy mistakes of that period.

Monetarism was antithetical to Butskellism. Whereas the Butskellite consensus believed that inflation could be reduced only by direct state control over prices and wages, monetarism said that inflation could be checked by restricting the growth of the quantity of money. Given the risk that large budget deficits might be financed by borrowing from the banks, monetary restraint further implied that fiscal policy should not be used to manage demand.

But the successor to Lord Croham as Treasury permanent secretary, Sir Douglas Wass, was a Butskellite to the core. He appreciated by the mid-1970s that elite opinion was shifting, as both The Times (with William Rees-Mogg as editor, Peter Jay as economics editor and the author of this article on the economics staff) and the Financial Times (where Samuel Brittan was in his heyday as chief economics commentator) endorsed monetary control as the right antidote to inflation.

But Wass was committed to Butskellism, including the practice of peak negotiations between government, industry and the trade unions to settle rates of pay increase. In a February 1978

speech to the Johnian Society (for members of St John’s College, Cambridge), he said that financial markets risked being misled by official statements which endorsed money growth targets. Connoisseurs of that period will not be surprised that the index to Wass’s memoir of the 1976 financial crisis, entitled Decline to Fall, contains four references to Jack Jones and one to monetarism.

Needless to say, the reference to monetarism is dismissive. (For young readers, Jack Jones was general secretary of the Transport and General Workers Union in the 1970s, as well as probably the recipient of KGB money for passing internal Labour Party documents to Russian spies. According to Wikipedia, “In January 1977 a Gallup opinion poll found that 54 per cent of people believed that Jones was the most powerful person in Britain, ahead of the prime minister.” A Jack Jones House in Liverpool was originally built for the TGWU, but is now occupied by Unite.)

HThatcher government of 1979 — committed, as a central programme, to reducing inflation by monetary control — work with Sir Douglas Wass? Although the chancellor, Sir Geoffrey Howe, and Wass got along somehow and even became quite chummy, Thatcher and Wass disliked each other. But he was not sacked. Instead Thatcher and her key cabinet colleagues made two key appointments in order to de-emphasise him and like-minded Treasury civil servants.

They brought in Terry Burns from the London Business School as chief economic adviser and gave rapid promotion to Peter Middleton, who as Treasury press secretary from 1972 had come to know the crusading monetarist pundits and their thinking. After the 1983 general election Middleton became permanent secretary, a position he kept until 1991. Burns then followed and was permanent secretary until he fell out with New Labour’s Gordon Brown in 1998. Burns and Middleton have subsequently had careers of considerable distinction, with an unusual blend of work in the public and private sectors.

The early Thatcher years therefore did see a radical transformation in economic policy, from Butskellism to the monetarist counter-revolution, and an upheaval at the top of the civil service was a crucial element in it.

Wass retired in 1983, but retained an interest in government administration. In 2011 he gave evidence to a House of Commons committee on the role of the head of the civil service. It was beautifully written and judiciously expressed, as befits someone often seen as the inspiration for Sir Humphrey Appleby in Yes Minister. To quote, “I believe that au fond conduct is a matter best left to the service itself, with ministers of the day standing aside from the definition of what is right and what is not. The service is very jealous of its tradition of loyalty to the government of the day and of its political impartiality.”

At which point someone in the room must harrumph. It cannot be overlooked that Wass in the early 1980s, like Wilson in 1940, had long represented inside the official machine — in fact, at its very summit — a policy approach openly antagonistic to that of the government of the day. Like Sedwill recently, Wilson and Wass had to be removed. (At any rate, they had to be bypassed and neutralised.) The policy questions were so divisive and fundamental that the changes of prime minister — in 1940, in 1979 and 2019 — were effectively regime shifts. To cite “political impartiality” in such a context is merely silly.

involved in an establishment plot to thwart Brexit? In the best traditions of the universities (both of them) where top civil servants have usually been educated, the question no doubt turns on how “an establishment plot” is defined. Might it be suggested — indeed, might it be suggested au fond — that Robbins and Sedwill were doing their damnedest to keep Britain inside the European Union despite the referendum result?

Yes, the civil service must distance itself from party politics. All the same, there ought to be an understanding that — for good or ill — some issues are binary and regime-defining. When regimes change, the prime minister must have the undisputed power to redeploy everyone at the top of government, including the most senior civil servants.

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One of the advantages of being a clergyman is that I can talk about evil. When politicians try, they sound absurd; ask the “Axis of Evil”, whose labelling as such probably enhanced its targets’ reputation while diminishing poor old George W’s already limited reputation for wordsmithery. But clergymen? It’s rather our job description.

So what happens when evil wins? Obviously I desperately hope what I really mean is “if”. But there’s no guarantee that in any era “good” will triumph. Barack Obama got it wrong when he misquoted Martin Luther King Jr and said, “The arc of history is long but it bends towards justice.” If history teaches us anything, it’s that the arc of history does no such thing.

Good guys lose all the time, good things disappear for good, liberties get watered down and then lost. To think that history is the advance of good people leading us inexorably out of a bad past is a privilege almost unique to our very specific place and time.

After our time in charge, the liberal West faces a challenge not just to its geostrategic position but to its entire political and ethical framework. We are witnessing the coming of age of a political philosophy and ethical framework that has moved from the dictatorial commonplace of mass surveillance, suppression of free speech, and the occasional massacre, to that of an expansionist slave state.

Actions against the Uyghur Muslims of Xinjiang province have tipped over into genocide. Millions are in concentration camps, have endured forced sterilisation, and had forced labour inflicted upon them; this is the eradication of a people and a culture. In 1945 we said, “Never again.” It is happening again.

This is not the fault of the Chinese people. The people of Hong Kong have shown, by their multi-million-strong, heroic, doomed resistance to Beijing, that a love of liberty and a valuing of human worth is something every person can enjoy — with the right political and cultural ecosystem to nurture it.

The vibrant democracy of Taiwan shows this too, even as its people live under the daily threat that their liberty will be crushed by force.

But more than the economic and military threat that communist China is now presenting to its neighbours, it is the alternative system of morality that is the greater challenge to us. The heart of this anti-liberal slave economy might beat in Beijing but you can feel its pulse much closer to home.

In Qatar, for example: home to thousands of British expatriates, host of the next World Cup, and a state built on forced labour. This is where we start to explore the uncomfortable question of what happens when evil wins, and get the uncomfortable answer that most people will live with it comfortably and quietly.

Just wait two years, and we will put out our flags and head down to our pubs to cheer on our team, and many who have spent this summer pulling down the statues of dead slavers will eagerly tune into a competition hosted in stadia built by modern slaves.

We don’t need to go to Qatar to see this. Our phones, clothes, television sets and cars are all tainted with the blood and torture of the modern slaves of Xinjiang, and our universities, ports and nuclear power stations are mortgaged out to a system of government and thought that has properly exposed itself as evil. Do we think we have the moral confidence to resist this? If we do, when will we start?

This is where we can see a depressing overlap between what has happened during the pandemic in East and West. China stepped up the internment of its minorities, demolished Hong Kong’s democracy and invaded Indian territory, murdered its soldiers and bullied its leaders into backing down.

In the West we have seen a moral panic as justified outrage over the killing of George Floyd turned from reasonable questions asked about the status of race relations in Western nations into a questioning of all the underlying assumptions upon which we have built our civilisation.

Assumptions and narratives, one might note, which gave us the moral resolve to fight German tyranny in the twentieth century, French tyranny in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and devote almost 2 per cent of our national income fighting slavery in between.

For all the criticisms of British history and culture which have been made in the last few months, one thing simultaneously stood silently in its defence: the people of Hong Kong. Their brave stand for liberty did not come out of nowhere: it came out of the British Empire, and the truths we told ourselves and them.

It takes moral courage to fight evil. It is easier not to. We need to recover a sense of moral and cultural pride if we stand any chance of holding our own in this coming moral disputation — and one which can be shared by all of our citizens.

If we don’t, then evil will win. Those who have spent recent months proclaiming themselves to be on the right side of history might ask themselves why they were playfighting a long-dead slave trade, rather than resisting the triumph of an all too real one.

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‘‘ Wit is because people volunteer their liberty voluntarily.” A bold pronouncement, but what we have come to expect from Lord Sumption, former Supreme Court judge, in his campaign to defend civil liberties under lockdown.

What could persuade people to volunteer their liberty? Fear, in a word. Emergency situations call for emergency measures. The government responded swiftly to a pandemic despite scant evidence of the infectiousness and severity of Covid-19. The regulations were nodded through parliament to applause

under the Public Health Act, originally designed to immobilise and treat people who are infectious, not the entire population. What made Covid the first disease to merit quarantining an entire population of the healthy? It was feared that the NHS would be overwhelmed. Other countries had already locked down under emergency legislation, setting a strikingly authoritarian template, which surprisingly became the norm across the liberal democratic countries of Europe: “There is a herd instinct in governments and it gave them political cover,” Sumption told me. “Sometimes the best thing is to do nothing.”

It’s clear now that Covid is not the severe worldwide killer originally feared. After the Public Health England counting fiasco, the death toll was reduced by 5,377 to 41,329 in the UK. Daily deaths are now zero or very low in each region of the UK. Excess deaths have been below the five-year average since mid-June.

Some say this means the Covid epidemic is over; for others the jury is still out. The government has reviewed its emergency legislation behind closed doors, leaving MPs and the public in the dark about the evidence and proportionality of the emergency regulations. One estimate is that 21,000 non-Covid deaths have been indirectly caused by the lockdown measures, and a government report in July predicted

that more than 200,000 could ultimately die as a result of delays to treatment associated with lockdown or a Covid-related reluctance for ill people to seek treatment. The inevitable public inquiry must assess whether the whiplash emergency response disproportionately impacted the nation’s medical, social and economic health. A less scrutinised but perhaps more serious consequence remains: has democracy been quarantined and is the rule of law in need of resuscitation?

The lockdown has been enforced mainly through the Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020, known as the “Lockdown Regulations”, imposed under powers delegated by the Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. In addition, the Coronavirus Act 2020 prohibits gatherings, cancels elections and contains the notorious Schedule 21 which allows for you to be forcibly detained, tested, treated and quarantined. The act will be reviewed by parliament this month, and can be revoked if no longer needed.

On 23 March the prime minister ordered people to stay at home. The next day health secretary Matt Hancock underscored that these were “rules”, not guidance. But Sumption says: “A huge proportion of the British population do not understand the difference between guidance and regulation. The government said ‘you must’ and people assumed it was a rule, when it was not. I think the government knew people did not understand the difference and exploited their confusion.”

Once these “rules” were announced, police forces across the country started to enforce them. Derbyshire police tweeted they would be breaking up groups of people in the streets, provoking Sumption’s outburst, as he describes it, on BBC Radio’s The World at One. He told me: “They had no business doing anything in a national crisis except enforcing the law. They are not there to give effect to their own views on what a national crisis might require or to give effect to what a prime minister’s views might require in a crisis. They are citizens in uniform who should apply the law and nothing else.”

Ewhat has troubled barrister Kirsty Brimelow most has been the wrongful convictions that followed the obfuscation between law and guidance. She blames a “chaotic approach and huge incompetence”. She points out that although citizens must follow the law, we are allowed to decide for ourselves whether to follow guidance. The conflation of guidance and law led people to be “wrongfully arrested, wrongfully convicted and that is not only bad for the person concerned, but also for society and the rule of law in general”. In England, for example, there was a rule we should be two metres apart. It might be sensible guidance, but it has never been law.

Brimelow felt compelled to speak out because of what she saw as miscarriages of justice, such as the conviction of Marie Dinou, who was arrested at Newcastle station at the start of lockdown. She was held in the cells for two nights (under no powers), “treated appallingly” by the district magistrate, given a criminal conviction under the wrong legislation and fined £660, which was subsequently quashed. Dinou’s case was not exceptional: every single conviction under the Coronavirus Act has since been overturned.

“Criminalisation should be removed from these laws,” says Brimelow. “Too many people sitting together having a picnic should never be a criminal offence.” She hoped there would be sensible guidance from police chiefs to officers. Instead, “we had police stepping beyond their powers, fining people for sitting on park benches and threatening to inspect people’s shopping trollies.”

Perhaps some of the confusion arises from the lack of

parliamentary scrutiny. The first emergency laws were understandably introduced quickly, but that was surely no excuse when a further 264 statutes were brought in. Laws to cover local lockdowns could be debated properly in parliament and Brimelow says the fact that they aren’t “can only mean government seeking to bypass the democratic system”.

Brimelow created a guide for the public and lawyers, and has worked with Silkie Carlo, director of the campaign group Big Brother Watch, on working to raise awareness of wrongful arrests and convictions and get them set aside.

Currently she is encouraging police chiefs to overturn fixed penalty notices. Although they might seem more trivial than criminal convictions, they are stressful and expensive, especially for people who may have lost their livelihoods during lockdown. And there are fewer safeguards, including no right of appeal. Carlo says: “This is the greatest loss of liberty in modern Britain and it has happened by diktat. This is how autocracies and dictatorships emerge, for the ‘greater good’, measure by measure.”

Big Brother Watch mainly fights against state surveillance and Carlo says we should be vigilant about the big tech response to the crisis. “It’s been a cacophony of disaster. With contact tracing, the government wanted to collect as much data as possible and hold it centrally. They were basically asking people to be on a state-issued digital tag. We warned them that there are serious risks with this.

“A lot of public money has been wasted. The government doesn’t understand that they need public trust, but that doesn’t come from rhetoric and finger-wagging. You can’t force people, you need a high degree of trust. That trust did not exist with the app.” More covert surveillance powers may be being used, including “sentiment analysis”. Does she mean our private Facebook timelines? “Facebook and ‘private’ don’t belong in the same sentence,” she shoots back.

Normally the introduction of new policing technology would be publicly debated, but Covid has accelerated the take-up of drones and facial recognition software. Carlo cites a police force in Wales using a drone to disperse people who had been queueing outside a pharmacy for prescriptions, a “dehumanising and intimidating” form of policing.

Sis so concerned about the misrepresentation of guidance as law that he founded the website Law or Fiction to help citizens and employers make sense of the emergency legislation. He says he has received many messages from confused and worried people, some quite

heartbreaking, such as a new mother who needed a doctor to examine her burst and infected episiotomy stitches. Astonishingly, she was not offered an appointment, but asked to send a photograph of her genitals to an unsecured practice email address. This insensitive and intrusive request is no substitute for proper medical care.

“People think physical contact is not allowed. There are sad cases of people thinking that they must only wave through the window at family, grandparents think they can’t hug their grandchildren. But they are allowed. And imagine the barbarity of not being able to say goodbye to loved ones on their deathbed. This creates permanent scars.”

Jackson specialises in employment law and his website has

wrote an article arguing that the emergency regulations were incompatible with human rights. On reading it, a businessman, Simon Dolan, who also believed that the government had acted illegally and disproportionately, contacted him.

Together with solicitors Wedlake Bell they mounted a legal challenge against the government, arguing that the lockdown regulations removed the right to liberty by restricting people to their houses, the right to a private and family life, the right to freedom of religion and expression of it, the right to protest and free assembly; plus the damaging effect on business interests and education.

They also question whether the government was right to make the emergency laws under the Public Health Act since it covers infectious people, and the whole population cannot be deemed to be infectious.

At first, a High Court judge denied their request for judicial review. But on 4 August the Court of Appeal ruled their case highlighted “fundamental” concerns about the accountability of ministers. The next hearing is expected to be held at the Court of Appeal at the end of this month. This will decide whether the case should progress to a full appeal which would see the government pressed to defend the introduction of measures which were described by the court as “possibly the most restrictive regime on the public life of persons and businesses ever”.

a portrait of his ancestor, Sir Nicolas Tindal, whose judgments saved many defendants from execution by codifying the protection of the insane from criminal conviction.

This same passion is evident in Hoar: “I don’t mind being an outsider. There are a number of times that the establishment has got it wrong before. I’m in a profession where one is supposed to protect the outliers and the vulnerable. The great heroes of mine have often done that, even when the prevailing opinion was extremely unpopular. That’s what a barrister should do.”

Hoar implores lawyers to do their part: “The rule of law does not exist in isolation. It depends upon lawyers and judges prepared to defend it against government power: not just through their cases but through condemning the state for stripping individual liberty. It is our responsibility as lawyers to do so.”

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Sand never leave you until they’re told, even if it takes years to get the opportunity to tell them. One such story is the murder of Richard Everitt in 1994. Not solely because of the tragedy itself, which attracted little press coverage at the time, but because the response to the crime exposes a double standard in the unremitting debate on race that’s become ever more apparent in the intervening years. Here was the murder of a teenager that drew parallels with that of Stephen Lawrence a year earlier in 1993, except in this instance the victim of the crime was white and his killers were not.

The details of the Lawrence story have been justly documented at length and will be aired again in a three-part sequel to the 1999 ITV drama The Murder of Stephen Lawrence. A recent BBC film dramatised the murder of black teenager Anthony Walker on Merseyside in 2005, for which the brother of footballer Joey Barton was charged, but films relating to Richard Everitt have been conspicuous by their absence. This is therefore an apposite moment to tell a story I’ve attempted to tell previously.

in 2008, when the man sentenced for participating in his murder was released from prison. It was, perhaps, the final chapter in a story of which little was known beyond the basic facts offered as a footnote by broadsheets. The 15-year old was stabbed to death in an unprovoked attack by a group of Asian boys in Somers Town, north London. One of the culprits was now free having served 12 years of a life sentence. He was 19 years old at the time of the trial.

In 2009 I pitched a proposal to the Sunday Times and was commissioned to write an investigative feature for its magazine. From the outset the Lawrence and Everitt murders attracted my attention beyond the futility of the crimes, and the impact on the respective families. I was familiar with the area where Lawrence was murdered; some of my relatives had moved from council homes in south-east London and bought houses in Eltham and the neighbouring suburbs. Their children attended the same school as the teenager. As press interest intensified over time, it struck me how both race and class were central to the coverage. The lack of O-levels of the murder suspects, the revelations that their mothers were neither non-smokers nor natural blondes were cited as though evidence of guilt.

I was criticised for commenting on this by pundit Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who wrote in the Independent that I was “proffering an intellectual alibi for the killers of Stephen Lawrence”. My point was that the residents of Eltham, and the whole of the white working class, were put on trial. A London cab driver expressed it more succinctly: “When Stephen Lawrence was murdered I thought it was terrible,” he said. “Three years later I thought I’d killed him myself.”

I headed to Somers Town, a neighbourhood responding to change with the gentrification of nearby King’s Cross a snapshot of the shape of things to come. (The Shane Meadows film Somers Town had put it back on the map the previous year). Eurostar had been rehoused at St Pancras where the refurbished Midland Grand Hotel, the monumental nineteenth-century Gothic creation of George Gilbert Scott, would soon accommodate the longest champagne bar in Europe.

The art of Eduardo Paolozzi and Anthony Gormley figured in the piazza of the British Library, which in 1997 relocated to the site of an old rail goods yard that was once a key source of employment for local residents and migrants alike.

In the nineteenth century Somers Town appeared in the fiction of Charles Dickens. After his father’s release from debtor’s prison his son moved to The Polygon, the neighbourhood’s first major housing estate. In Bleak House, Harold Skimpole lives there along with “poor Spanish refugees walking about in cloaks, smoking little paper cigars”.

housing projects emerged when a local priest established St Pancras Housing Improvement Society to eradicate slums. The landmark Sidney Street estate was built in the 1920s. Turks, West Indians and Africans arrived over time, with families coming from Sylhet, Bangladesh, in the 1970s.

By the 1980s, white British families were taking up the right-to-buy option with many later selling up and shipping out to Essex or elsewhere. As Pret and Starbucks came, regeneration began to erase the past and one notable chapter in Somers Town history became dust and ashes.

The singular reference to the murder of Richard Everitt was a plaque [right] bought by his parents, Norman and Mandy Everitt, to commemorate their son. When the site where it was displayed was demolished they transferred it to a tiny park tucked in the corner of the neighbourhood. “I knew people would forget Richard,” his mother told me in 2009, “but I didn’t want them to forget the circumstances of his death.” (In June this year the plaque was removed again, due to current redevelopment.)

T— moved to Somers Town Estate with their three children in 1986. The Sir William Collins school was another staple of the area, established in the 1890s and re-christened South Camden Community School by the time their youngest son attended. There was a diverse ethnic mix within the classrooms. Close to 60 per cent of pupils were Asian, 25 per cent black and 15 per cent white. Following his death, the annual Richard Everitt trophy was introduced and awarded to two children at the school. According to the department for Children, Schools and Families at Camden Council it was presented to pupils who showed “leadership in promoting community cohesion”.

In the 1990s it was a lack of cohesion and violence between ethnic gangs that led the late Rosemary Harris — a reader in anthropology at nearby University College — to make Somers Town the subject for her research, assisted by field workers and youth club leaders. Camden council expressed an interest, until the findings revealed white racism was not the impetus for the violence of Asian gangs.

“Camden Council wanted nothing to do with it,” she told me. “I think because the Bangladeshis failed to emerge as the totally innocent victims of local racism. What angered me at the time was that the findings were dismissed as ‘racist.’” Some of the research featured in the book Divided Europeans: Understanding Ethnicities in Conflict (1999) but the original 50-page document remained unpublished. Yet its content might have offered solutions to issues addressed by the authorities following the Everitt murder.

The pattern of violence began in earnest in

1992, according to the report: “A white boy outside the school offended a group of Bangladeshis and they lacerated his back with knives.” One black youth was stabbed ten times by Bangladeshi boys, yet managed to survive. Harris sat in on a meeting between the parents of a white boy and a teacher, after the parents become fearful for their son’s safety. Previously a knife was pulled on him as he queued for his school meal, now seven Bangladeshi boys attacked him as payback for a tackle made during a football match.

Rosemary Harris wrote that teachers were vulnerable to charges of racism, “an accusation that they know is likely to follow any action by them against misbehaviour by Bangladeshis”. The main culprit was temporarily suspended, with the school denying racism played a part in the assault according to the parents. The victim was Richard Everitt.

In the summer of 1994 a gang of Bangladeshi teenagers between 10 and 15 strong went in search of an elusive boy believed to have stolen jewellery from the girlfriend of a gang member. Having assaulted a couple of white boys — attempting to stab one of them — they happened upon Richard Everett and two friends, aged nine and 17, returning from a burger bar. The trio of boys were ambushed. One was head-butted but managed to flee with the younger child. Richard — 6ft and 13st — was killed by a seven-inch kitchen knife penetrating his ribs, lung and heart.

in the weeks that followed. A team of 24 constables patrolled the area to prevent retaliatory attacks or violent flare-ups between gangs. The Everitts appealed for calm, putting their name to a letter distributed to 7,500 local homes, after the firebombing of a halal butcher. An Asian businessman’s offer of a £10,000 reward for the names of the killers proved futile in an investigation hampered by the silence of Bangladeshi families. Several of the suspects were dispatched to relatives in Bangladesh.

The Everitts were targeted with hate mail and moved to a safe house under the witness protection scheme, eventually relocating to the north of England. The family never attempted to capitalise on the racial element of the killing, but were adamant it was a racist murder — a contention backed up by numerous people I interviewed off the record, including former family liaison officers. This was also the line of the crime writer I spoke to at the Sun, one of the few newspapers to investigate the story at length.

At Millbank, I met the family’s local Labour MP Frank Dobson, who believed there was no racist motive to the crime, and to have suggested so would have only inflamed the situation, creating further division. On leaving I asked if he planned to retire before the next election. The party had persuaded him to stand again, he said, because he could “bring in the Bangladeshi vote”.

The groups, quangos and columnists that made anti-racism central to their remit were siFurther

lent on the racist motivation of the crime and concentrated on fears of a backlash against Bangladeshi families. This was a marked contrast to events following the killing of Stephen Lawrence, when the chairman of the Commission for Racial Equality, Herman Ouseley, telephoned the Metropolitan Police Commissioner to say this was a racist crime, and “it was imperative that it should be investigated as a racist crime”, according to the book Racist Murder and Pressure Group Politics (2000).

The following day the Anti-Racist Alliance and representatives from similar groups were on the doorstep of the Lawrences’ suburban home. Two weeks later the couple were at the Athenaeum Hotel in west London for a meeting with Nelson Mandela, who compared the killing to events in South Africa where “black lives are cheap”. The only high-profile person that expressed an interest in the Everitt murder, privately at least, was Princess Diana. She laid flowers on the spot where he was killed.

At Scotland Yard, I spoke to a young Asian officer recently appointed to Somers Town. He voiced his concerns over a reluctance to acknowledge how gangs in the area were divided by race rather than by housing estates and neighbourhoods: “It was much more comfortable to see these things geographically.” The Everitt killing was originally classified as a “racist incident” by those leading the investigation, before becoming one that was no longer “purely a racist attack”, according to news reports. Perhaps they, like the teachers Harris mentioned, feared allegations of racism, a development that has become more commonplace in recent years, most controversially with the delayed exposure of Pakistani grooming gangs.

The police were also reeling from the fall-out from the Lawrence murder in which charges of incompetence and insensitivity were levelled, with the vague allegation of “institutional racism” added during the Macpherson Inquiry. The argument central to the Lawrence case was that the teenager would not have been murdered if he was white. Yet the race industry never considered Richard Everitt was murdered because he was.

ISunday Times article. Lawyers for the newspaper made amendments. Time passed. The magazine editor left, pegs and hooks fell by the wayside, the story died. It happens sometimes no matter how handsomely a writer is paid for their efforts. Nevertheless, I persevered as there were other angles of interest. The Everitt trial began at the Old Bailey in October 1995, six months before the private prosecution brought by the Lawrence family was staged there.

The Lawrences’ lawyers were the defence team in the Everitt trial. Before becoming identified with the Stephen Lawrence case the eminent QC Michael Mansfield defended the Birmingham Six and the Bridgewater Three; now he represented the Camden Six, as their supporters tagged the accused. Ultimately, two of the gang were convicted: one for being a participant in the murder, the other for violent disorder. They received prison sentences of 12 and three years respectively. The legal principle used was “joint enterprise”, the doctrine that assigns criminal liability to all those present at a crime.

In 2009, I found myself seated at lunch within the old Reuters building on Fleet Street — recently converted to a Conran-style restaurant — pitching ideas to the future editor of the Sunday Times. He was familiar with Somers Town but less familiar with the developments in the Everitt story and my attempts to write about it. Within a fortnight the paper’s news editor had me update my feature and rewrite it as a news story. Days before it was to be published, the anonymous sex blogger “Belle de Jour” opted to reveal her identity to the Sunday Times. As I say, hooks and pegs fall by the wayside, stories die. It happens.

was proving more difficult than getting people to talk about it. (Pitches to other newspapers came to nothing, meetings at Channel Four and Radio 4 didn’t progress beyond the perfunctory development meetings.) Many had been ready, willing but unable to speak because of a lack of legal protection. I’d fared no better with those that supported the campaign to free the teenagers shortly after the sentencing. The human rights charity Liberty, Camden Legal Centre, Camden Racial Equality Council, the Society of Black Lawyers, added weight to the campaign, which accused the jury and the Crown Prosecution Service of racism.

In its literature the plight of the “King’s Cross Two” was compared with that of the “Sharpeville Six” in the South Africa of the 1980s, who were convicted under “joint enterprise”. (The London teenagers charged were not activists protesting

against apartheid, nor were they sentenced to death.)

The following decade, on the tenth anniversary of the Macpherson Report (1999) on the death of Stephen Lawrence, Trevor Phillips, then Chairman of the Commission for Human Rights and Equality, claimed the battle against “institutional racism” was not yet won. However, the police would deal with the Lawrence murder differently if it occurred today, he said, citing the murder of Anthony Walker, which was immediately treated as a racist attack.

It was unlikely the killing of Richard Everitt would have been treated any differently. The murder of Christopher Yates in Newham at the hands of an Asian gang around the time of Walker’s death was just one of the many incidents in which the racial motive was not considered a factor when the victim was white. If it took the tragedy of the Stephen Lawrence murder to highlight covert prejudice within the police force, it was the murder of Richard Everitt that finally exposed double standards in the race industry.

Iwith a government minister on a flight from New York. Coincidentally I’d interviewed him for BBC’s The Politics Show just weeks earlier. He was wearing the best Chelsea boots I’d ever seen and, as I pointed out, taking the Tories’ austerity measures seriously by travelling economy, and finding himself seated next to me. We talked of the news that had dominated in the UK during our absence: the latest chapter in the Stephen Lawrence story provided the headlines. Finally, two of the suspects were convicted of the murder, under joint enterprise. Those that condemned the use of this in the Everitt trial were now celebrating, as it resulted in a verdict they approved of.

I informed the minister of my efforts to tell the Everitt story. He suggested that a back-bencher might take up the cause. The Everitt case could have been reactivated years after the investigation had closed, in pursuit of all those responsible for the murder. (Last month the Lawrence investigation was officially classified as “inactive”). Neither the Lawrences nor the Everitts discovered the identity of the actual murderer of their sons, and others involved escaped prison.

Both families had endured battles they should not have had to fight. Norman and Mandy Everitt never saw their son’s murder elevated to the status of a race crime, and also witnessed attempts to prevent his killers being brought to justice. “I know it’s a terrible thing to say, but I sometimes wish that Richard had been murdered by a white boy,” Mandy Everitt told me, when I first approached her with plans to write about her son. “Then we’d have had to deal with the murder but not the nightmare of everything else that followed.”

Ironically, under the interpretation of “racism” according to current hate crime legislation, a racial incident is one that is “perceived” to be as such, regardless of the intention or the motivation of the accused. On the strength of this criteria, Richard Everitt was unmistakably the victim of a racist murder. Twenty-six years later, in the absence of an ITV series or a BBC film dramatising his story, maybe we can at least finally allow him that.

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Whave thought of the idea that she, more than any of her contemporaries, was the supreme intellectual representative of the mid-twentieth century? The question is unanswerable — she died in 1975, aged just 69 — but I am pretty sure she would have been verblüfft (flabbergasted). She had no false modesty and a proper sense of her own contribution to political philosophy, but it would have astounded her that she — rather than, say, the master existentialists Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers who loomed so large in her life, or her closest literary friends such as W.H. Auden, Hermann Broch and Mary McCarthy — should be singled out for such approbation.

In a 1957 letter to her old comrade Kurt Blumenfeld, she distinguished between the “real geniuses” and the “highly cultivated”, who should beware of “overreaching” themselves. Hannah Arendt never considered herself a genius — and she found the pomposity of her sometime lover Heidegger, who really was one, “simply insufferable”.

Artists need to have their work concretely displayed, but thinkers have little to show for themselves except abstract thoughts. The notion of hundreds of thousands of people queuing to gawp at this dead white female’s briefcase, jewellery and her old fur coat would have brought a wry grin to their owner’s face. The Men in Dark Times to whom she devoted a celebrated volume of essays were not, she insisted, “representatives of an era” or “mouthpieces of the Zeitgeist”. No more was she. Neither Arendt’s life nor her work were really representative of anything except herself.

Yet this is the idea behind “Hannah Arendt and the 20th Century”, a major exhibition about her that opened in Berlin this summer at the German Historical Museum (until 18 October). The show is accompanied by an illustrated book of the same title, serving both as catalogue and homage, with 19 essays by Arendt scholars, writers and other worthies. Unable to visit the exhibition myself, due to the present exigencies of travel, I nonetheless highly recommend a visit to anyone finding themselves in Berlin — if only for the marvellously evocative black and white photographs, some by her fellow émigré Fred Stein, others by Arendt herself. You can almost taste the cocktails and smell the cigarettes. In keeping with its subject’s writings, the show is bilingual.

rather than the work that emerges most strongly. Though Arendt was more fortunate than most European Jews of her time, her story was not without its uncanny episodes. This exhibition, over the top as it is, is a belated tribute by the German state to a woman who was lucky to get out of its capital alive. What happened in February 1933 resembles an episode in the TV detective series Babylon Berlin. Just days after Hitler came to power, the 26-year-old Arendt was interrogated for more than a week at the Polizeipraesidium in Alexanderplatz (Berlin’s equivalent of Scotland Yard).

With the usual German thoroughness, her widowed mother Martha was taken into custody too. Her daughter had indeed been committing a crime: secretly collecting material on antisemitism for an underground Zionist organisation led by her lifelong friend Kurt Blumenfeld. He was desperate to show the world that, in their malice towards the Jews, the Nazis were not joking — and he needed chapter and verse. Hannah was lucky in her captor: a rare police officer in those early days of Nazi Germany who had nothing against Jews. She told her inquisitor “a lot of lies” about her activities. Whether he believed her or not, he let mother and daughter go. On her release, Arendt took the next train to Prague.

From there she moved to Paris and made a new life there among the émigrés, who included her second husband, Heinrich Blücher. In 1940 Hitler’s armies caught up with her and she found herself an “enemy alien” in Gurs, a Vichy internment camp. There she considered but rejected suicide: her “courage of life” was too strong. With Blücher, she bribed or bluffed her way out of the camp, then lay low in Montauban with the Cohn-Bendit family, parents of the future student leader and MEP. After further vicissitudes, the couple found their way to Lisbon, entrepôt for the transatlantic voyage, and arrived in New York in May 1941, just before a still isolationist US closed the door to European refugees.

The rest of her life was spent in the United States. She embraced America as her new homeland and quickly mastered English, even if she never lost her Teutonic accent. The Blüchers’ Upper West Side apartment was as open-ended as their lives: library, sitting and dining room merged into one, with books, conversation and meals consumed together in a perpetual love-feast of mind and body.

Tintellectuals were fought over with all the fury and ferocity the émigrés among them had left behind. The difference between battles in the New World and the Old was that, while both left plenty of bad blood, in America none was actually shed. For Arendt, there could be no question of the conformism that today drives so many debates on identity, gender and race. None of the controversies in which she became embroiled illustrates this better than her “Reflections on Little Rock”, her first public foray into American politics — specifically the incendiary issue of racial integration versus segregation. Incensed by two pictures that appeared in the New York Times of black children being followed to school by jeering white mobs, Arendt waded in with a critique, not of the Southern segregationists, but of their opponents. She came to this perverse conclusion via her sharp distinction between the realms of politics, where the state could legitimately overrule the individual, and society, where it could not. Nor could humane ends justify inhumane means. For her, it was simply wrong for black parents to thrust their children into the front line, just as it was wrong for reformers to impose their liberal views in the private sphere of education. As long as racial discrimination was not imposed by the law, people should be permitted to follow their prejudices; schooling was an area where the federal government should respect states’ rights.

The editors of Commentary, the Jewish magazine that had commissioned her essay, found her defence of the Deep South unconscionable, and dithered over publication. Frustrated, she turned to Commentary’s rival Dissent, which ran her piece. Having invited obloquy, she got it in spades. Her ignorance of the Deep South, which led

to various inaccuracies, was exposed, as was her failure to grasp the fact that the black teenagers and their parents had freely chosen their acts of defiance.

When challenged, she conceded the point — but it did not occur to her to draw concrete parallels with her own predicament in Weimar Germany. It did not help that Arendt sought to justify herself by insisting that “as a Jew I take my sympathy for the cause of the Negroes as for all oppressed and underprivileged peoples for granted and should appreciate it if the reader did likewise”.

against civil rights protestors would have ended her career. In the 1950s, her rise continued regardless of controversy. Chicago, then the most exciting place for political thought in America, invited her to lecture and later to teach classes, as a member of its Committee on Social Thought; Princeton made her its first female professor; she taught at many other universities, too, but always refused a permanent, “tenure-track” position, preferring freedom to security.

She chose to be buried, not at these famous universities, but at Bard College in upstate New York with her husband Heinrich, who taught there. In the 1950s it was possible for a man with no degree to be hired by a liberal arts college to teach undergraduates about Western civilisation. Heinrich’s course was aptly entitled “The Common Cause”: it was this grand tradition that Arendt learned from him to uphold.

To do so, however, she had to return to its fons et origo in Europe — and that meant Germany. She returned to Berlin in 1949. Her mission, on behalf of American organisation Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (JCR), was to ferret out collections of books and art that the Nazis had “arianised”. She overcame the chicanery of librarians, curators and bureaucratic bullies to send quantities of surviving Jewish artefacts to Israel or the US, including the unique library of the philosopher Hermann Cohen, which is preserved at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

One of Cohen’s volumes surfaces in the exhibition, with Arendt’s JCR label opposite the swastika stamp of Himmler’s minions on the flyleaf. For a woman who was later accused of lacking ahavath Israel, “love for the Jewish people”, Arendt took great pains to preserve her people’s heritage.

Many other obscure but revealing aspects of Arendt’s career emerge from the Berlin exhibition. Who knew of the Sisyphean task she undertook to force the German authorities to acknowledge that she had been deprived by exile of the opportunity to teach at a university in the land of her birth? It took three decades of litigation, but she won substantial compensation. A Lex Arendt enshrines the principle at stake in German law.

in the rediscovery of Kafka, editing and translating the Diaries, or of her less successful attempt to do the same for Walter Benjamin. There is ample material in the exhibition, too, on her engagement with student protests in America and Europe, on her attitudes to Zionism, Marxism and feminism, and on her friendships — above all the relationship with Heidegger.

In his essay on the latter for the Berlin book, Wolfram Eilenberger, the bestselling author of Time of the Magicians, contents himself with a respectful commentary on this romantic meeting of great minds, “a philosophical event of the twentieth century”. Is this not, however, the perspective of a male academic — one who, perhaps, has never been on the receiving end of the abuse of power? Today, if the affair had become known, Heidegger would certainly have been dismissed from his chair at Marburg. Rightly, we have zero tolerance for sexual misconduct by a professor of 35 with a student of barely 18. The imbalance of power is too great.

Heidegger’s first letter to Hannah in February 1925 shows that he, a married man old enough to be her father, was well aware of the boundaries he was crossing — and the danger of scandal. Writing to “Fräulein Arendt” and using the formal “Sie”, he plays down the impropriety: “That I became your teacher and you my pupil was only the occasion for what happened to us.” From the first, he exercised what would now be called coercive control. Their assignations were meticulously planned by him to ensure her complicity — and the affair was concealed until both parties were dead. The person who broke the silence, her biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, was struck by its profound and traumatic impact on her subject. At the time, Hannah wrote a third-person account of it for Heidegger, significantly titled “Die Schatten” (“The Shadows”). It was clear to her in retrospect that “the spell” which this “magician” cast on her had “frightened” her, robbing her of freedom and innocence, inducing depressive, even suicidal thoughts. The poems she wrote at the time are dark. It is significant that she ended the affair, leaving abruptly without a word, so that he could not talk her out of it.

By then, Heidegger had got everything he wanted from the liaison. He had written his first and most important book, Being and Time, during the years when he was sleeping with Hannah. She, by contrast, was only able to write her doctoral dissertation

“On the Concept of Love in Augustine” when she escaped to the safe haven of Heidelberg, seeking guidance from Heidegger’s rival Karl Jaspers. Though she rekindled the friendship with Heidegger after the war, it was very much on her terms, with the power relationship reversed. The “Führer of the German university” was only rehabilitated thanks to her help. That she was able to forgive him for the sake of his work speaks well for her, but we see such abusive relationships differently today and are more aware of the lasting damage they can do. Arendt’s self-respect demanded that she did not see herself as a victim, but that does not mean she wasn’t one.

Her seducer’s hold over her persisted even after she had built a career in America. She knew how her critics might have reacted had her affair with Heidegger become public knowledge during her lifetime. After the war he played down but never repudiated his antisemitism. She wasn’t fooled and, as we have seen, she found his habit of commenting on his own work like a biblical text “insufferable”. Yet still she defended the reputation of a man whose ideas were seen by most people in her milieu as Nazism on stilts. Her last letters to him remained reverential: “You read like no one else and no one before you either.” At some level, the sorcerer never relinquished his power over his apprentice.

AWhat about the works? The Berliners aren’t entirely wrong to focus on two of her books that have overshadowed the other eight: The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). Both, though, are read today more as documents of their times than for their own sake. Totalitarianism is still part of our vocabulary, though we owe the key distinction between totalitarian and authoritarian regimes not to Arendt but to Jeane Kirkpatrick. But the concept is usually deployed as a tool of propaganda rather than analysis, while the elision of distinctions between Nazism and communism has been exploited to relativise the Holocaust. As for Eichmann in Jerusalem, it is remembered for one phrase, “the banality of evil”, and for Arendt’s denunciation of the Judenräte, the Jewish councils who obeyed German orders. This legacy, too, has merely served to muddy further what are already the murkiest of waters. Indeed, the harsh judgment at the time of Norman Podhoretz, in a review for Commentary entitled “The Perversity of Brilliance”, still hardly seems unfair: “In the place of the monstrous Nazi, she gives us the ‘banal’ Nazi; in the place of the Jew as virtuous martyr, she gives us the Jew as accomplice in evil; and in the place of the confrontation of guilt and innocence, she gives us the ‘collaboration’ of criminal and victim.”

A suggestive way to see Arendt’s work is as one long meditation on the problem of evil. Without totalitarianism, she wrote in 1950, “we might never have known the truly radical nature of Evil”. A dozen years later, having gone to Jerusalem to report for the New Yorker on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Arendt decided that the man in the dock personified, not “the radical nature of Evil”, but its banality. “When I speak of the banality of evil,” she explained in a postscript, “I do so only on the strictly factual level, pointing to a phenomenon that stared one in the face at the trial.” By this she meant that there was no “diabolical or demonic profundity” about Eichmann; he “had no motives at all”, but simply “never realised what he was doing”. She was almost certainly mistaken about Eichmann, who seems to have had clear ideological motives for carrying out the “Final Solution” and knew precisely what he was doing. Arendt, though, was disillusioned: she had come to Israel to confront evil in person, but found only a very ordinary murderer.

is illuminated by her own experience. Having lost her father (to syphilis) as a child, she sought a substitute in her teacher, a man she should have been able to trust. But he made her his mistress, exploited her and then later turned on the Jews, her people. Having lost her German fatherland as a secular Jewish woman, she sought a new homeland in America, but found a society that was very far from perfect and did not always reciprocate her love. And so she fell back on her own resources. Traumatised early in life by an abuser who was also her mentor, she struggled to make sense of evil.

She was caught between the unprecedented enormity of the Holocaust and the pettiness of its perpetrators. Renouncing children, she gave birth to one book after another, dedicated to the cause of resistance to each new manifestation of evil. Towards the end of her life, for example, she fired off the slim but extraordinarily erudite volume On Violence, a polemic against the “glorification of violence” by white students and black protesters. “The practice of violence, like all action, changes the world,” she wrote, “but the most probable change is to a more violent world.”

This is the Arendt who deserves to be rediscovered today. Her true literary metier was not the grand narrative or the systematic treatise, but the conversational essay; her best books are not monoliths but mosaics. Her favourite among her literary offspring was actually Between Past and Future, which concludes with her definition of a cultivated person: “one who knows how to choose his company among men, among things, among thoughts, in the present as well as the past.”

Her only full-length biographical portrait was of Rahel Varnhagen, the most cultivated woman in Berlin, who presided over a salon for Romantic poets and intellectuals. The Life of a Jewess, she called the book, which she wrote in the aftermath of the affair with Heidegger — who had not acknowledged his lover’s Jewish identity. In a correspondence stretching over half a century, he never did. The ambiguity of evil was a burden long after she had abandoned Heidegger, but it did not crush her. She knew how to choose her company among men, and she chose Heinrich Blücher.

Not to worship genius, with its propensity to go to extremes, but to enjoy, expound and defend the legacy of Western civilisation: for this Hannah Arendt bravely, if not always reliably, stood. It is still our common cause.

c

I— and knowing now as I do of all the subsequent folderol, this is really just as well. At 6.30 in the morning of Friday 12 June, I woke up in need of the lavatory, as bloody usual. But when I attempted to stand, all was not well. My left foot, hitherto an always thoroughly dependable plinth, was behaving as if it was just in from a night on the tiles — horsing around as if it were composed of aspic. I sneaked down an exploratory hand in order to sort it out, but that too appeared to have been whooping it up at the same shindig, and was also evidently drunk and incapable.

My wife at this point put two and two together and arrived at quite the right conclusion. An ambulance was summoned, and arrived extremely quickly, which rather amazed us both. The two chaps were kind and efficient, saying they thought it was a stroke, and therefore they would take me not to my local hospital, the Royal Free in Hampstead, because if they did, I would only be transferred to UCH, who specialise in this sort of thing, and so that is where we were bound.

I was wheeled out and loaded up; I learned from my wife the following day that all the neighbours were very much aware of all that was occurring: a bit of bonus street theatre at breakfast time. At UCH I think I underwent a CT scan and that drugs were administered (I was not at my most alert — terribly tired) and at some point was shipped across to their sister hospital, the National in Queen Square, Holborn, where they have a dedicated stroke unit: this, I was assured, was exactly the place I wanted to be. I actually wanted to be back at home, but never mind.

The following morning I was told that I had indeed had a stroke — but it was relatively minor, and “very unglamorous, quite common or garden”. I didn’t know whether to feel relieved or rather slighted. There are two main sorts, apparently: those caused by a blood clot shooting up to the brain, and what are called the “bleeders” – a brain haemorrhage, basically, which can cause untold and lasting damage. I was in the former camp, thank the Lord. And so, then — where do we go from here?

I asked questions in the wide-eyed and unsuspecting manner of a child, for I am wholly unused to illness of any sort at all. Apart from a few days as a child (with suspected meningitis, which turned out not to be) I had never spent a day in bed or taken a day off work through illness — and certainly I had never spent a single night in a hospital — not even visited one as an outpatient, and nor did I ever take drugs (prescribed or otherwise — even paracetemol). The exception was a very low dosage (5mg) of a blood pressure pill recently expressly prescribed in order to fend off any danger of all this sort of thing: had I been in the mood, I might even have laughed, but settled instead for a sardonic and rather grudging snigger, while remaining unamused.

naturally, had the least idea of what sort of a year it might turn out to be — true every 1 January, of course. All I knew was that there were a couple of significant dates looming, the first of which was a landmark birthday for me, for which we had only modest plans, the Picasso exhibition at the RA followed by lunch at the Wolseley, but even these were scuppered by the lockdown, which began on the very day of my seventieth: 23 March. The date still to come is our golden wedding anniversary in December: I wonder how that will go?

And in the meantime, how was I faring in an NHS hospital? For a fair while, I just wanted to be left alone, but I quickly saw that the staff’s refusal to countenance any such thing was not a sort of sadism, as initially I had assumed, but an essential early part of the therapy. “What is your name?” “What is your date of birth?” “Do you know where you are?” “What year is it?” “Do you know the date?”

My correct and immediate responses to this ceaseless bombardment made us both feel considerably better, I think: there seemed to be no cognitive defects, for which I was almost tearfully grateful. On the second morning I completed The Times crossword, as I habitually do — the nearest I get to a morning work-out — which cheered us all up no end. Then there was the physical side: “Can you raise your arm?” “Your leg?” I could. Then they want you to grip their hands, pull them towards you, push them away. All this seemed to be OK.

And soon I began to see this succession of earnest nurses and therapists (what I could see of them, anyway, all corona-masked as they were) as a valiant army of determined and dedicated troops, unswerving in their task, which I then decided must not be thankless: I put into it all the effort I had. I found I could walk reasonably well with assistance, though with that slight lollop and those small and tentative baby steps that actors will habitually affect when depicting the old and frail.

It is a huge mercy that I am right-handed, as it was my left hand that was affected: I continued to make notes and record my

thoughts, observations and feelings, as they struck me, while striving to excise any sort of drivelling self-pity, not always successfully — it is hard to totally expunge that nagging question: why me? One nurse asked me, when seeing my usual array of identical rollerballs: “Why do you have so many black pens?” Oh, I said, I scribble a bit (manfully resisting the urge to forcibly reply: “Because black pens matter!”, which I deemed to be on the whole inadvisable). I have always written all my books and journalism with a pen — even in the days of the typewriter, I could never create on a keyboard. I later transfer my scrawl to the screen, and edit it there. The system ain’t broke — so why fix it?

of a bombshell. The senior registrar to a very eminent (I later discovered) cardiovascular consultant surgeon is showing me a picture of my latest neck scan. It turns out that the carotid artery on my right side (which, wouldn’t you just know it, controls the functions of my affected left side) is rather severely furred up — probably the cause of all this.

He says that there is an operation which will reduce the likelihood of a recurrence (always a worry with strokes — and sometimes they can happen within months, or even weeks) from the current rather alarming 25 per cent to as little as 1-2 per cent. He goes on to say that there are risks, most notably that of a further stroke on the operating table, “although this is extremely rare”, and that if I agree, this operation ought to be performed soon.

How soon, I wonder? The day after tomorrow, he says. And I thought: oh, bloody hell. I have a few doctor friends, one of them a consultant anaesthetist, and so I canvassed their views. The latter turned out to know the surgeon, and was all for it. This surgeon is the go-to man, he said, and in these extraordinary times, it is amazing that you have been offered instant surgery.

Everyone else seemed to agree with that, so of course I said no — turned down the offer flat: “You have got to be joking! What do you take me for? I am as weak as a sheet of paper as it is!” I had never had an operation — not for so much as an ingrown toenail — so how could I contemplate serious surgery when I was still in so diminished a state from the initial attack?

And then — I said yes, because I suppose I had always known, instantly understood, that it was really the only course of action. In this smallish ward, I was opposite two stroke victims who were in variously awful states, and I simply couldn’t risk succumbing to all that.

Everyone tells you to rest, relax and recover – but you cannot sleep in an NHS ward: literally, not one wink. The noise and disturbances are constant and varied — everything from being roused at 11pm for a blood pressure test (roused again one hour later for an antibiotic) to bleeping machinery, which alone can send you mad. The lunatic melody, like a Fisher Price My First Moog Synthesiser endlessly fooled around with by a vacuous and demonic child, invades your brain like a trilling and malignant worm.

Then there is the fizz, crackle and tinkling of mobiles, the snoring, the groans of pain, the nightmare yelps and the perfectly

heart-rending and anguished sighing. Overlaying it all is the ceaseless talking of the staff: the ward doors are never closed, the lights in the corridor never dimmed, let alone turned off (in common with the television) and whoever is passing by — cleaners, nurses, doctors — hail each other with far more gusto and enthusiasm than they tend ever to show to us, and they always have time to enjoy a good old giggle, as if it is first day back at school: they are certainly not going to allow the grim proximity of old, sick people to diminish their fun.

In the middle of the night before my operation, a truly ancient man was admitted, and a huge kerfuffle immediately ensued. It was 4 am. I was due to undergo major surgery in seven hours, so I felt I had to tut. The tutting did not go down well. I was angrily told that they had a sick patient here: I have no idea what they imagined me to be — possibly some sort of curious tourist who had just popped in to absorb a little local colour and maybe take a few snaps.

Doctors seemed to enjoy chatting loudly to other staff. One female registrar, I learned (whether I wanted to or not) was thinking of going to practise in Europe. “Germany, possibly. Neurology is so different and varied there. In the UK, it’s just stroke, stroke, stroke, stroke. So boring!” And I was thinking this: you want boring? Try it from this side, matey.

Iafter that most horrendous and utterly sleepless night. My major surgery is due at 11 o’clock. Then I am told that it might have to be delayed because, due to Covid, they are allowed to perform only three operations per day, and an urgent brain injury has just been admitted. Having dreaded this thing for 48 hours, I now most desperately wanted it. If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly, if you know what I mean.

I stewed for a bit, and when later in the day (by which time I had bitterly resigned myself to having to undergo a further night of dread anticipation) I was brightly informed that we were to go ahead, I think I even wept in quite piteous gratitude. I’m telling you: navigating solo these uncharted waters, it affects you in unimagined ways. Also, I was pretty light-headed from not having eaten or drunk (even water) for 20 hours, on instruction. In these circumstances, you become so highly emotional: well-wishing emails from friends and family bring a quiver to the lip; anything from my wife made me tearful.

I while away the afternoon catching snippets of other people’s sufferings: an old man on whose arms they cannot locate a “good” vein in which to install a cannula. He whimpers at the touch of the needle. “So sorry, my lovely, but it’s only small.” Another who is asked his date of birth. “December,” he says. “When, exactly?” “Well — it was a very long time ago.” Then, as I am wheeled away to the theatre I hear a nurse say, “You can cross Joseph Connolly off.” What can she mean?

It turns out that the very affable anaesthetist is a chum of my consultant anaesthetist chum. He gave me a “pre-anaesthetic” which, he said, would make me feel gently woozy. Disappointingly, it made me feel nothing at all. The real thing, he said, works immediately, and the next you know, you’ll be awake again, and it will all be over. Both true, as it turned out.

When I did come round, it was as if I had been cast as a non-speaking extra in a 1950s B film about a leak in an atomic reactor. Everyone was wearing a bright blue floor-length plastic anorak, a red hard hat and a Perspex visor over a mask. So, if waking up in an NHS hospital is shocking, then waking up to the sight of this little lot, having just undergone a major carotid operation following a stroke — well that is absolutely shocking: full stop.

Because I have a small mind, my first thought was for my beard: they had kindly agreed to shave just the underside and the bare minimum, and my groping fingers told me they had been true to their word. This buoyed me up most awfully. You see, I told you: small mind. I felt fine: a bit of an ache in the neck, but nothing more. Later on, despite my being still half-anaesthetised, they said they would give me liquid morphine, which would make me feel great. Once again, nothing, nothing at all: I make a very unpromising junkie — simply don’t seem at all able to enter into the spirit of the thing.

And afterwards? I had been told that in 99 per cent of cases, you feel a little swelling, it throbs a little and there might be a little exudation. Yes well — for all those “littles” read one big large. For, naturally enough, I just had to be Mister 1 Per Cent, didn’t I? The haematoma (bruise with accumulated blood, since you ask) was modelled upon an ostrich egg, it hurt like hell, and the floods of engorged blood into immediately charged dressings was a constant, day and night. All rather frightening, actually, though all the doctors seemed pretty calm about it. But to coin a phrase — it’s my neck. Even after I was discharged, I had to return nearly daily to have it attended to, and even spent a further three days in the Royal Free, to save all the to-ing and fro-ing, I suppose.

They discovered something amiss with the platelets in my blood, and after a bone marrow test (not one of life’s more beautiful experiences) decided it could be managed with yet more medication. I am still very tired (“only to be expected,” says everyone on the entire planet) but I do feel that things are going in the right direction. The wound has finally knuckled down and is listening to reason, my mobility and dexterity are good. It will still take a while, but I hope reasonably soon to be able to scamper on those damned elusive sunlit uplands.

A thought: this affliction, coming as it does as a bolt from the blue, ought to be called a strike, and not a stroke, for it has about it nothing of the caress.

An observation: everything for everyone is always completely tickety-boo right up until the split second when it ain’t.

A moral? Only the usual: don’t get old. But if you find that somehow you must already have inadvertently done so — well then, don’t get ill.

c

Iin Washington n a summer when everyone from protesters to ex-presidents has publicly affirmed that “black lives matter”, some acknowledgments of racial injustice in America will have changed more minds than others. Among the more consequential — and surprising — sources of those three words were the lips of J.D. Greear.

Greear is a pastor from Durham, North Carolina, and the president of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose 15 million members make it the largest Protestant denomination in the United States. Founded in 1845 after a disagreement with Northern Baptists over slavery and vocal in its support for the Confederacy, the SBC’s history is irrevocably intertwined with the story of race in America.

Frederick Douglass was unsparing in his description of the “horrible inconsistencies” of the church in slave states. “We have men-stealers for ministers, women-whippers for missionaries, and cradle-plunderers for church members,” he wrote in the same year the SBC was founded.

In a 2018 report on racism and slavery in its own history, the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary — the SBC’s oldest educational institution — found that “throughout the period of Reconstruction and well into the twentieth century,

[the faculty] advocated segregation, the inferiority of African-Americans, and openly embraced the ideology of the Lost Cause of southern slavery.”

Greear is not the only white religious leader to have been more forthright in his response to the killing of George Floyd than many might expect from such figures. The high-profile megachurch pastor Joel Osteen described Floyd’s death as a “turning point” that “ignited” something in him.

“I stay away from political issues, but this is not a political, this is a human issue,” he said after marching with Floyd’s family in Houston, Texas. In Mississippi, white Baptist churches were an important part of the coalition that successfully campaigned for the removal of the Confederate battle emblem from the state’s flag.

These leaders are careful to distinguish the sentiment that black lives matter from the organisation of the same name, whose far-left goals are at odds with the views of most American Christians, black and white. The willingness of those who millions of white evangelicals look to for spiritual direction to engage in questions of racial injustice is one of the more encouraging subplots in an otherwise divisive summer of racial reckoning, protest and unrest.

“Harbouring racist views is a positive independent predictor of white Christian identity” — Robert P. Jones

The contrast with the inflammatory rhetoric emanating from the White House, often in tweet form, is striking, and has led many to wonder whether — not for the first time in the country’s history — Christianity might have an important part to play in what can seem like a hopelessly fraught conversation on arguably the most difficult subject in American public life.

Robert P. Jones, the author of White Too Long, a new book about the legacy of racism in American Christianity, certainly hopes so. Jones, who is white, was raised in the Baptist church in Georgia, studied at a Baptist seminary and today runs the Public Religion Research Institute in Washington, DC, where he specialises in public opinion on religion and politics. He tells me he wants white Christians to “ask the harder questions about the forks in the road our institutions took in the past” and says that the gestures from Christian leaders in recent months make him more optimistic than he was when he delivered the manuscript of his book last autumn.

But if Jones is optimistic, he certainly doesn’t underestimate the scale of the challenge. “White churches have not just been complacent; they have been complicit,” he writes.

To demonstrate that complicity, Jones uses

polling responses to questions on everything from explicit questions of racial perception to issues like the treatment of African Americans in the criminal justice system and black economic mobility to construct what he bluntly calls a “racism index”. If a respondent agrees with statements like “It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder, they would be just as well-off as whites” or “Professional athletes should be required to stand during the national anthem at sporting events”, their racism index number will go up. If they say they are “angry racism exists” it will go down.

With responses to 15 questions like this and some statistical tinkering, Jones finds a tight correlation between white Christianity and high levels of racial resentment. “Harbouring racist views is a positive independent predictor of white Christian identity,” he writes. The problem is not limited to the South or evangelicals, and, perhaps most damningly for Christian leaders, regular church attendance does not appear to have any mitigating effect on these views.

When it comes to national politics, white evangelicals remain among Donald Trump’s most unwavering supporters. According to Pew, 72 per cent approve of the president, down slightly from 77 per cent in January; 82 per cent say they will vote for him in November.

Among that 82 per cent is Jonathan Jakubowski, a conservative author and the chairman of the local Republican Party in Wood County, Ohio. Explanations of evangelical support for a garish, Godless adulterer generally alight on comparisons with flawed Biblical leaders like Cyrus. Jakubowski’s support for the president is less zealous.

“When I talk to Christian brethren, I say that Donald Trump is not, and never will be, our saviour,” he tells me. “The problem with American politics is that we have heroes,” while too many Christians “have decided that the flag is greater than the cross”.

Jakubowski was part of a group of religious and political leaders who, shortly after Floyd’s death, went to Minneapolis for a summit on race and religion. White evangelicals and black evangelicals met Minnesotan veterans of the civil rights movement, prayed at the site of Floyd’s death, spoke to members of a community roiled first by that tragedy and then the rioting that followed. Throughout the trip, participants had what they told me were “difficult conversations”. Jakubowski tells me that “apart from our shared Christian faith we had about as divergent views as you can probably have on politics.

“It helped to round out my limited vantage point and perspective,” he says, recalling a moment in a black Baptist church in Minneapolis where the pastor told the group that they were the “first white political and religious leaders to have set foot in this church.

“How can I connect with you if you don’t hear my pain, see my pain, feel my pain? How can we even have a conversation?”

asked the pastor. “That will remain with me for the rest of my life,” says Jakubowski. Organised by Philos, a US-based initiative that usually focuses on promoting Christian engagement in the Middle East, the trip aimed to bring that experience to bridging a cultural divide closer to home.

Dr David Jackson, a black religious leader and former police officer from Atlanta who was also on the trip, says that white Christians have tended to see racism as a strictly historic issue: “Some of our evangelical brothers and sisters want to believe that this is all in the past. ‘Let that go, we’re all one in Christ.’ But they’re not dealing with the reality of what black people have been dealing with for 401 years in this country. You can’t just say 401 years are just wiped away in the blood and in the name of Jesus. We’ve had real experiences with racism.”

Jackson insists that “this was not a Kumbaya, ‘make white people feel better about themselves’ kind of trip.” There were differences of opinion over language, there was scepticism over what some of the white participants saw to be a narrative spun by the liberal media. For Jackson, the goal of the trip was to address the elephants in the room and help white participants “understand that this is real. I’m not making this up.” in 1968, martin luther king, jr said that “11 o’clock on Sunday mornings is the most segregated hour in America”. The pews may be emptier than they were half a century ago, but American Christians still largely worship along racial lines. As of 2012, eight in ten Americans worship in a place where a single racial group comprises at least 80 per cent of the congregation.

In Macon, a city in King’s home state of Georgia, this “great tragedy of our nation” is hard to ignore. It is home to two neighbouring churches with almost identical names: First Baptist Church and First Baptist Church of Christ. In one, the congregation is overwhelmingly black. In the other, the congregation is overwhelmingly white. The similar names and proximity are not coincidental; once, there was just one First Baptist Church. Then, in 1845, it split on racial lines. Slaves in one church, slaveowners in another. For more than a hundred years, the two institutions barely interacted with one another.

That changed when James Goolsby, the black pastor of the mostly black FBC, and Scott Dickison, the white pastor of the mostly white FBC of Christ, were invited to lunch by a mutual friend six years ago. That meeting started a relationship that would lead to a major reassessment of the benign story the white congregants of FBC of Christ had told themselves about the church’s history, the creation of a covenant of reconciliation between the churches and tentative steps towards worshipping together.

The process was far from painless. Goolsby says that some members of the white church’s congregation “couldn’t deal with it”.

He went on: “In Macon there’s so much history of segregation and of racism. One of the things we discovered while digging into the history was that a previous church building was paid for by selling slaves who were part of the congregation. To go through that and beyond that was difficult for some of them.”

This process means the congregants of both churches are well placed to process the events of recent months. “My hope all along has been to use a clearer rendering of our past as a way of understanding the present, which usually proves to be even thornier,” says Dickison.

Given the rapid secularisation of American society, there will be sceptics of religion’s ability to help steer the country through a fraught racial moment.

But, as Robert Jones’s research suggests, white Christians still have the furthest to travel on race. And, given that both sides of America’s political divide increasingly talk past one another, Christianity at least offers a common language to help black and white Americans understand one another.

“Some in the white church couldn’t deal with its history” James Goolsby with fellow pastor Scott Dickison

Even in secular circles, the conversation around race is still full of religious language: sin, guilt, atonement, repentance and forgiveness. Compared to the academic anti-racism doctrines that increasingly dominate elite liberal institutions, a more religious conversation about race at least stands a chance of meaning something to middle America.

Some will doubtless wonder whether “difficult conversations” can actually achieve material improvements in the lives of black Americans. To that, the victories of the spiritually-inflected civil rights movement stands as a powerful counter-example. “We need a truly biblical reconciliation in this country,” says Jackson. You don’t need to be a believer to see his point.

I ask Goolsby, who grew up in the Atlanta projects and remembers watching Martin Luther King’s funeral procession as a child, whether he is hopeful about where a racial reckoning in America in 2020 might change things for the better.

“I will probably be as shocked as I was when President Obama was elected,” he replies. “In my heart of hearts, I was hoping. But I thought this is America, it ain’t going to happen. And then that night, I was blown away. I just never thought I would see that happen in my lifetime. That is where I am with a true change with this nation’s thoughts on race. Is this finally the time when we really turn a corner? Or do we do get hope snatched from us at the last minute? I’m hopeful. But, again, America surprised me by electing President Obama and then went right back to her old habits in electing President Trump.”

c

Owho was tried and convicted with Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, finally admitted to the New York Times, after five decades of denial, that he had spied for the Soviet Union. He implicated Julius Rosenberg in a conspiracy that delivered to the Soviets “classified military and industrial information and what the American government described as the secret to the atomic bomb”. He was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison and served almost 19. The reporter, Sam Roberts, asked Sobell if, in fact, he was a spy. Sobell replied nonchalantly, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, call it that. I never thought of it as that in those terms.”

This was the same insouciant Morty I remembered from the mid-1980s when I first met him. It was the same Morty who, speaking about his disillusionment with communism to me in 2011, casually said, “I bet on the wrong horse.” When I mentioned the murder of millions in the Gulag, he said, “Well, that goes with the territory.” Citing communists’ early participation in the civil rights struggle, he noted, “Well, that was political.”

Sobell’s 2008 confession was no surprise; he almost confessed to me more than 20 years before. Why did he finally confess, an act that threw his devoted defenders under the bus and exposed as a pitiful fraud decades of his own life? It may have been a desperate attempt to reclaim relevance in the eyes of a left that had moved on and had little nostalgia for the old days.

2018 at the age of 101. I knew him well. I hunted him down in 1982, kept track of him through the intervening years and sat down again with him for a long series of interviews from 2011 to the final year of his life.

He was inextricably linked to the Rosenbergs, and their execution in 1953 shifted the spotlight to him, the third, almost forgotten defendant. You touched the Rosenbergs by touching him and that may have been part of my motivation. I was a boy when the Rosenbergs, young parents of two small children, were executed on 19 June 1953 and I remember that the sky seemed to darken. It especially darkened for the Jews, who remembered the gas chambers, stilled just eight years before. And once again there was the odour of burning flesh.

In contrast to the “progressives,” the party faithful, most American Jews and all Jewish communal agencies had no interest whatsoever in joining a worldwide, communist propaganda campaign to portray America as a warmongering, antisemitic regime, the inheritor to Adolf Hitler, planning to engulf the world in a war of imperialist aggression. The very notion enraged them, partly because they loved America and partly because Jewish communists inflamed the appetites of the lunatic fringe of antisemites.

Lucy Dawidowicz captured their feelings in 1952 in an article in Commentary, writing that the communist campaign “aims to persuade the world at large that the American government is in the hands of an anti-Semitic conspiracy which is inexorably working up to the extermination of the American Jew, and that the conviction of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for espionage is a 1952 version of the Reichstag fire, prelude to an American version of Auschwitz”.

Noting that the communist press did not even mention the Rosenbergs until they were convicted and sentenced to death on 5 April, 1951, the Daily Worker sprang into action at the beginning of 1952, pronouncing their prosecution “a ghastly political frame-up. It was arranged to provide blood victims to the witch-hunters, to open the door to a new violence, anti-Semitism, and court lynchings of peace advocates and Marxists as ‘spies’”. In another essay, Dawidowicz said the party’s late entry was due to a lack of any real concern for the lives of the Rosenbergs: “The Communist Party would prefer to have two dead martyrs rather than two live potential witnesses against it.”

it’s at least possible to sketch his whole story. It’s the story of many other Americans steeped in communism as well. And it is my story, during my teenage years in the Stalinist netherworld.

This began in the late 1950s, when as a teenager in New York I hung around the Communist Party. My parents were divorced. One day a girl rang the doorbell. She had a round, swarthy face,

dark red lipstick and wide eyes. She was wearing a yellow blouse, black skirt and red knee-socks. She was curvacious and extremely short, and gazed up at me with a cheerleader smile. Her name was Ellen and she lived in my apartment house. She was holding a petition. I had no idea what it was for but I signed it and invited her in.

Her parents, Joseph and Leona Richman, were progressive; they had marched in protest when the Rosenbergs were executed. Indeed, they looked remarkably like Ethel and Julius. They became my family. Then one day Ellen left for the party’s Camp Wo-Chi-Ca and new beginnings with a boy with a guitar who sang folk songs to her. I felt I had nowhere to turn.

I tried to find my family in the comrades, eternal malcontents who wanted life to be perfect, the way they thought it was in the Soviet Union. They offered me unconditional love and acceptance if I was “progressive”. I knew the lingo. But the stench of the Gulag was in the air; even Khrushchev had spoken of Stalin’s crimes. The impact on the party resulted in a mass exodus, more than during the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939. But that’s how I got lucky: as the comrades were leaving the party in droves, crowding the exits, one innocent-looking, bespectacled little fellow of 14 — me — was pounding on the door, struggling to get in. They greeted me warmly, referring to me as “a representative of the youth”.

And there was Pete Seeger. I first saw Corliss Lamont, the party’s “useful idiot” millionaire, introduce Seeger to his children at his mansion as “the people’s folk singer”. Then there he was, pied piper of the young, strumming his guitar, singing “We Shall Overcome” at Lewisohn Stadium while I peeked at the beautiful progressive girl beside me, my eyes filled with tears, hoping I could overcome my paralysing shyness. When he sang “Where Have All the Flowers Gone?”, that elegaic celebration of lost innocence, I bawled like a baby. The girl looked at me curiously.

The party’s resident intellectual, Herbert Aptheker, who called anti-communists “goats, gorillas and vermin”, entrusted me with his manuscript, The Truth about Hungary, in which he explained that the Hungarian revolution was manufactured by fascists to destroy human progress in the great people’s republic. He asked Benjamin J. Davis, the party’s storied black leader, to induct me into the party (I chickened out at the last minute).

Aptheker was my favourite; there was always the feeling in the air that he might murder someone. But I was not a communist. I was a fiction writer and this carnival of human curiosities, this mix of idealism and craven support of the Soviet snakepit, this mysterious chemistry of character and motives, this alternate reality, all those FBI agents around the party (you recognised them because they were young, Irish and wore shiny shoes), this whiff of conspiracy and spying, this crazy romance and collusion with KGB murderers while marching for free milk for children, was heady stuff for a fledgling writer.

I recently read Dostoevsky’s novella My Uncle’s Dream, in which the most honourable character, Zina, repelled by the manoeuvrings of her scheming mother, says to her: “I shall be stifled in this filth.” Reading that line, I recalled long ago sharing

a toast to Fidel Castro with Comrade Sophie, the sweet-natured manager of the party’s Jefferson bookshop off Union Square. Sophie viewed me as a young Lenin. She adored me and bought me socks, but criticised my writing because it wasn’t celebrating the joyful workers achieving incredible production quotas in the USSR. (She kept precious books like William Z. Foster’s Towards Soviet America hidden in the basement because the party line had changed, but she wanted me to drink deep in the wells of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.)

The Rosenberg/Sobell rallies in the late 1950s and 1960s shamelessly exploited the Rosenberg sons with show-business sheen and glitz. The music, the oleaginous, oozing sentiments, were a curious mix of hysteria and unctuous self-righteousness personified by Helen Sobell who neglected her own son Mark while travelling around the world being photographed with the likes of Bertrand Russell and Jean-Paul Sartre. The comrades (although not the Rosenbergs’ sons) knew that the Rosenbergs were guilty; in fact they really were innocent because they were guilty. But the level of desperation appeared to an outsider like myself like an unconscious admission of guilt. If they were so certain of the Rosenbergs’ innocence they would not be fainting in the aisles and screaming to the rafters.

What most fascinated me about the party was its overwhelming connection to the Soviet Union, even while it accused anyone who suggested it of McCarthyism and witchhunting. What I witnessed as a teenager convinced me from the beginning that the Rosenbergs and Sobell had given critical information to the Soviet Union. Why wouldn’t they? It would have been the highest honour to help.

Bthe year of the Russian Revolution, Morton Sobell breathed the air of American communism from birth. His uncles were high up in the party. Louis Pasternak was a courier for the KGB and a member of the American Communist Party’s disciplinary committee. Julius Rosenberg recruited Sobell in December 1943 to spy for the Soviet Union. Sobell had originally met Rosenberg at City College’s engineering school and belonged to the party’s Steinmetz Society, where many members of the Rosenberg network first marinated their plans. Sobell worked at the Navy Bureau of Ordnance in Washington and went on to join the aircraft and marine engineering section of General Electric. He provided his KGB handler with information about radar, servo-mechanisms, ballistic missile defence systems, and the composition of American military aircraft. While in Washington he had an affair with his future wife Helen while she was married to Casey Gurewitz, a communist functionary. He and Helen married in 1945.

Sobell kept spying after the war ended. He worked at the Reeves Instrument Corporation on Air Force and Navy contracts and provided a wealth of classified military material. In 1948 he told his friend Max Elitcher, a communist and City College classmate, that he had a canister of 35-millimetre films to deliver to Julius Rosenberg. The information, he said, was too hot to destroy and too dangerous to keep in his house. Elitcher accompanied him on the car ride to deliver the material.

In his 2008 confession, Sobell also disclosed that in 1948 he photocopied hundreds of pages of secret Air Force documents stolen from the safe of Theodore von Karman, a famous aerospace engineer. Sobell, Julius Rosenberg, William Perl and a fourth man spent a weekend photographing the files.

David Greenglass confessed to espionage and implicated his wife Ruth, his sister Ethel Rosenberg and his brother-in-law Julius. After reading of Greenglass’s arrest, Sobell knew he had to flee. There was no time to apply for a passport. He and Helen boarded a plane for Mexico City with their two young children. In Mexico he tried unsuccessfully to obtain passage to the Soviet Union or Eastern Europe. Many of his comrades had escaped behind the Iron Curtain, but he was acting too late.

He learned on 18 July that Julius Rosenberg had been arrested. Sobell took a plane to the port of Veracruz and registered at a hotel under the name “Morris Sand”. He flew on to Tampico under the name “M. Sand”, and registered there under the name “Marvin Salt”. He returned to Mexico City on 2 August and went to the Soviet and Polish consulates, but inexplicably did not ask for help. He said hello and left. It was a mystery I would explore with him endlessly. “You cannot explain mental confusion,” he said to me.

On the night before he was arrested, he banged on the door of Mexican Communist Party headquarters at midnight in desperation, but there was no one there but the night watchman. He was arrested on 16 August, 1950, by armed Mexican security police. Helen bit one of the policemen on the hand and Morton tried to grab a .38 calibre pistol from another. He was extradited to the US.

Tand Sobell began on 6 March, 1951. On the advice of his lawyers, Sobell did not testify. Max Elitcher was the only witness to testify against him. Judge Irving Kaufman sentenced Sobell to the maximum prison term of 30 years. He was sent to Alcatraz in 1952 and was later transferred to Harrisburg, Atlanta and Springfield prisons. He played chess at Alcatraz with another spy, Colonel Rudolph Abel, who presented him with a painting upon parting.

David Ward, penologist and author of Alcatraz: The Gangster Years, visited Sobell on several occasions. “Alcatraz might have

been easier for Morty than for any prisoner in its history. Most of the inmates I visited at Alcatraz couldn’t bear to think about life outside in the free world, because it would kill them. You’ve got to focus on the inside. For Morty it was exactly the opposite. He wanted to know what was going on outside because he was a celebrity. You’re not alone. Someone’s paying attention to you, cares about you. That’s why Morty wanted visitors. Other prisoners didn’t want those reminders of what they were missing.

“This explains why someone like Mort, with no prior prison experience, could do very hard time. He loved the publicity. He was always full of himself, friendly but authoritative. So he did time in a really unique way, violating most of the rules of existence of his fellow convicts.

“He knew that if the government had not sent him to Alcatraz, if he had gone to a regular penitentiary, it would have been very difficult to generate interest and mobilise a Sobell movement on his behalf. It needed the drama and notoriety of Alcatraz. He had a lot of help from the outside, from the Sobell Committee. And he was smarter than everyone else and he showed it. That’s why he was glad to meet Colonel Abel and Robert Stroud, the Birdman, at Springfield, intellectuals on his level. So he felt he was lucky.

“As to Helen having affairs with other men, he felt he understood it and psychologically wanted to know about it, about the people she was involved with. I think it generated emotion in him and kept him alive. And again, that is totally unique among any prisoners I’ve ever encountered in 60 years of being involved in this work.”

When he came out of prison in 1969, Morton and Helen visited Moscow, where he was greeted as a hero by the KGB. Helen received a gift of a fur coat. Sobell’s handler, Alexander Feklisov, revealed in a memoir that he had passed on thousands of pages of text and drawings of valuable military secrets.

was free and living in Manhattan, I began to follow him around the city when he appeared at events. He grew a ponytail and a long flowing beard, and his white hair blew in the breeze. He struck the pose of the innocent revolutionary.

I was determined to write about him in my satirical Rosenberg novel, Red Love. And so I began an excavation project, seeking out FBI agents, scholars and historians of communism, former comrades and remaining true believers. I spoke to family members of the Sobells and the Rosenbergs, including a heartbreaking interview with Julius’s sister, Ethel Appel Rosenberg. And I began my pursuit of Sobell himself.

Over the years I won his trust. Nancy Gruber, his second wife, a chastened Trotskyite, gave me her big smile over lunch and said brightly, “Do you enjoy being a spy?”

Wit was through Helen. I didn’t tell her that Bill Buckley was helping me find subjects to interview for a book. Buckley grasped what the comrades never would — that I was seeking to understand Sobell and a generation of true believers. Helen (who died in 2002) and the Rosenbergs would have been thrilled with recent events in the US, especially the defacement of monuments, the denigration of the police, and the resurrection of progressive mantras about the country’s racist, ugly nature. She spoke to me of the anti-Columbus “celebrations” she was staging with her students, since “Columbus came to this continent, looked at these people who welcomed him, and the first thought he had was how to use them.”

She said, “The power structure takes a human being and puts him in prison and keeps him there. I think that those people who destroy people are the ones who bear the brunt for any murders. Black people are robbed of everything they have from before they are born, because even in their mothers’ belly they are robbed of the necessary nourishment. They are justified — justified! — in whatever they do.

“I was in Washington, in the park, picketing, when we heard

the Rosenbergs were murdered. We lined up to put away our signs on the truck. As each sign was lowered by its stick into the truck, into a huge growing pile, it was as if a part of the world’s virtue was being destroyed and savagery was winning sway.”

When I finally met Sobell, we sat in silence except for the cracking of his knuckles. He wore a green workshirt, brown trousers and slippers. The wall posters proclaimed Chile: Free All Political Prisoners. Who Killed Letelier?

He looked at the floor and said, “So? Begin.” “Tell me about Julius Rosenberg.” “As a scientist,” Morton said, “Julie was a fish out of water. He should have been a Greek scholar.

“Julius and Ethel went to Coney Island one day. People left their clothes in the lockers. But Julie brought all of his things out to the beach with him. Legend has it that all the lockers were robbed that afternoon. They always told afterward how wise Julie was.”

Later, Morton said, “I never had a good hold on him.” “Did you like him?”

Sobell didn’t answer for a long time. “He was a comrade. This to me is saying a good deal. To understand what this meant is a whole story in itself.”

“What’s the story?”

Morton shifted. “My friend,” he said, “beyond that, you’ll have to use your imagination.”

Ah, I thought. That’s it. He did it.

We would meet several times and I wrote about him in my novel. I never really stopped writing about him.

In 2005, three years before Sobell’s confession, Ivy Meeropol, a film-maker and daughter of the older Rosenberg son, Michael Meeropol, released a gripping film about the case, Heir to an Execution. Sobell is prominently featured in it, still maintaining his innocence and that of Julius Rosenberg. I recognised the old Morty. For one thing, as always he put everybody else down. He said of Julius and Ethel that “they were really very ordinary people.” For another, he was laughing his head off throughout, confusing Ivy, who was trying to treat him like a saint. How well I remembered that laugh. It may have been his embarrassment about what he was concealing from Michael Meeropol’s earnest and intelligent daughter. She tried to locate his anger about imprisonment and frame-up, but he kept laughing and gazing elsewhere. He realised the incongruity of his answers but could not reveal the simple truth. Instead he laughed. He was touched by her innocence but still liked being the centre of attention.

“Are you angry about prison?” she asked.

“No.”

“But what about what was done to you?”

“No.”

“An innocent man.”

“No, no. Anger is a wasted emotion.”

And then, for the first time, Sobell expressed his disaffection, a prelude to his confession in 2008.

“Do you still call yourself a communist?”

“I don’t know what the word means any more. I’ll tell you my problem. I know what the defects of the socialist system are. And I don’t know how they can be resolved the way their societies are set up. I don’t believe that cooperation is the answer. You have to have built-in constructive tension for the system to function best, rather than cooperation. You don’t have that under socialism. The biggest strength of this country is the tension that does exist between the different classes. This is what makes it strong. If that didn’t exist, it could easily be uprooted. You need to have that constructive tension.”

In 2011, Nancy Gruber and his stepdaughter, Kate Reilly, asked me to write an unauthorised biography of him. Sobell’s family was a sophisticated cultural and political one. Nancy played the violin and viola in a chamber music group; Kate was a professor of linguistics and cultural anthropology at Rutgers University. Coming from the left (the Trotskyite faction of it), they might have chosen someone who could be relied upon to write a sympathetic portrait. “But,” Nancy said, “you understand Morton better than anyone else.”

c

The winner of our competition — the first person to send in a fully correct solution to Adam Dant’s Rebus in

July/August issue — is Angus O’Neill. A limited edition signed Adam Dant print is on its way to him, courtesy of TAG Fine Arts.

Centrist Svengali? Panorama whistleblower Sam Matthews

Team Corbyn’s strategy was to focus exclusively on the leader

Sir Horace Wilson on his way to Munich

Boris Johnson is welcomed to Number 10 Downing Street by cabinet secretary Sir Mark Sedwill. Dominic Cummings lurks in the right-hand corner

“We, representatives of a thousand islands, are gathered for the important task of coming up with a salad dressing.“

Murdered: Richard Everitt

Protesters calling for “justice” for two gang members

Belated tribute: The Berlin exhibition

Dissent

Arendt and her controversial article

Martin Heidegger: Secret affair, coercive control

Hannah Arendt with her husband Heinrich Blücher

Pastor Joel Osteen greets Lee Meritt, a lawyer for George Floyd’s family, at a protest march

Morton Sobell (left) walks to court in New York in March 1951 for the first day of his trial on espionage charges with the Rosenbergs

Sobell takes the plane to Alcatraz in 1952

Sobell and his wife Helen on the day of his release in 1969

“There’s no blood in my stools…”

Sobell with Ivy Meeropol, the Rosenbergs’ granddaughter, at the premiere of her film