Every indignation of the age

'Furious' Prince Harry 'still expects apology' from Royal Family as he begins news life in UK

While the return of Harry to the UK raised hopes of reconciliation with his family, he is said to be still ‘spitting feathers’

Prince Harry is “just as angry” as when he left Britain six years ago and “expects an apology” from the Royal Family, friends of the Duke reportedly claim.

Harry, his wife Meghan and their two children Archie and Lilibet returned to the UK to live earlier this week.

His mind, under the influence of that insidious mildew which eventually forms on all but the few, gave itself up furiously to every indignation of the age.

F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Politics as Theatre

Sometimes a viewpoint solidifies while alternatives fade away. To my mind, one of the solidifying viewpoints is an old one – politics as theatre. To take a topical example, the UK power struggle between Keir Starmer and Andrew Burnham is mostly theatre.

We've always known it too. The need to analyse doesn't go away, but even Burnham’s preference for ‘Andy’ over ‘Andrew’ is obvious theatre. Unfortunately for Starmer he isn’t a very good actor – he only does Awkward Lawyer.

The Starmer/Burnham performance highlights the problem though - what we are presented with is mostly theatre. As theatre it has little room for analysis apart from analysis of the performance, the stories, setting and perhaps the cost. Critics have no secure place from which to criticise – the performance must go on as the old cliché has it - and it does.

Politics as theatre is not even a remarkable political conclusion because much of the public arena is theatre, even in our supposedly technocratic age. From the World Cup to Davos, from the arts to soap opera, from TV news to activist stunts, theatre dominates, critical analysis doesn’t.


Amory had grown up to a thousand books, a thousand lies; he had listened eagerly to people who pretended to know, who knew nothing. The mystical reveries of saints that had once filled him with awe in the still hours of night, now vaguely repelled him. The Byrons and Brookes who had defied life from mountain tops were in the end but flaneurs and poseurs, at best mistaking the shadow of courage for the substance of wisdom. The pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans, Jesuits, Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni at a college reunion they streamed before him as their dreams, personalities, and creeds had in turn thrown colored lights on his soul; each had tried to express the glory of life and the tremendous significance of man; each had boasted of synchronizing what had gone before into his own rickety generalities; each had depended after all on the set stage and the convention of the theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

F. Scott Fitzgerald This Side of Paradise (1920)

Crumbs, what does that imply?

A man’s social rank is determined by the amount of bread he eats in a sandwich.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

ABF’s Hovis takeover deal given go-ahead by competition watchdog

The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said ABF could have pulled out of the UK bakery sector if the merger were not to take place.

The takeover of Hovis by Kingsmill owner Associated British Foods (ABF) has been cleared by the UK competition watchdog...

Both companies have been affected by an overall decline in demand for bread, increased demand for lower-margin supermarket own brand bread and significant cost increases, particularly for energy, wheat and distribution.

Significant cost increases for energy, wheat and distribution eh? That would be tangled up with Mad Ed Miliband's energy games, although on a personal note we eat less bread these days, it's not the staple it once was. Maybe it's a social status thing as Scott Fitzgerald said. 

Crumbs, what does that imply?

Surely Andy, this dead horse is already buried

Andy Burnham says he 'would revive HS2' if he became prime minister

Andy Burnham has said he 'would revive HS2' if he became Prime Minister by using a 'Crossrail style' of funding.

The Greater Manchester Mayor said that he would revive the northern leg of HS2, between Birmingham and Manchester, as he claimed the 'lack of high-quality rail infrastructure in the north of England holds back its growth potential'.

Speaking to the i Paper about what he would do if he became Prime Minister, Burnham said 'if you put that infrastructure in, it lays the foundations for higher growth'.

He was ineffectual and vaguely helpless here as he had always been. One of those personalities who, in spite of all their words, are inarticulate, he seemed to have inherited only the vast tradition of human failure — that, and the sense of death.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Starmer vows to resist

Starmer vows to resist leadership challenges

Sir Keir Starmer has vowed to fight any coup launched against his leadership this year and intends to still be Prime Minister come 2027.

In an interview with the BBC’s Sunday with Laura Kuenssberg, Sir Keir argued that switching leaders would be a “gift” to Nigel Farage and was against the “national interest”...

At another point he said bringing about political “chaos” by changing leader “would gift Nigel Farage”, the Reform leader whose party has been top in opinion polls since April.


Something Keir Starmer seems unable to grasp is the placing of emphasis. As F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote nearly a century ago, emphasis moulds the confusion of life and this includes the confusion of politics.

My mind, brightened by the lights and the cheerful tumult, suddenly grasped the fact that all achievement was a placing of emphasis — a molding of the confusion of life into form.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Bowl (1928)


Instead of using emphasis to mould debates and narratives, Stamer adds to confusion by his reliance on dull clichés and sound bites. He never seems to know where to put the emphasis to mould an interview, debate or even a speech. As if even in his own mind he emphasises the wrong things in the wrong way.

Self-assurance and opportunism come first

Warning as Vladimir Putin could attack Britain - by blocking out the SUN

The Telegraph reports that Kerry McCarthy, the climate minister, wrote in a letter: “The UK is a longstanding leader on climate action and an active international collaborator in scientific research. The Government recognises the need to understand the risks and impacts of [solar radiation modification] approaches that could be deployed by an independent or third-party actor. Robust scientific evidence is essential for informing responsible and inclusive governance.”


Robust scientific evidence is essential? It has not been essential in the past and Ed Miliband certainly manages without it. 

As Scott Fitzgerald wrote over a century ago, at the top of the greasy pole, self-assurance and opportunism win out over technical knowledge.

We've known that for a long time.


It seemed to him that the essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal, self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge; it was obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom — so, with appropriate efficiency, the technical experts were kept there.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

To the infinite confusion of all values

The other delegates from America — red-headed Schwartz with his saint’s face and his infinite patience in straddling two worlds, as well as dozens of commercial alienists with hang-dog faces, who would be present partly to increase their standing, and hence their reach for the big plums of the criminal practice, partly to master novel sophistries that they could weave into their stock in trade, to the infinite confusion of all values.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night (1934)


When we consider educated elites, it soon becomes apparent that their education is enough to offer a partial explanation of their disdain for veracity, especially in the political arena.

The explanation arises when educated mediocrities are able to articulate their political interests via sophistry. They climb the elite ladder by doing what Fitzgerald described, they use their ability to master novel sophistries that they could weave into their stock in trade, to the infinite confusion of all values.

There is no member of the UK Cabinet who doesn’t do it. They may be mediocrities, but they are educated enough to master sophistries which restrict and control the interests of the wider population and they do it in pursuit of an undeserved and undignified political career.

The point to be made is this - if they did not restrict and control the wider population, those sophistries wouldn't be elite sophistries, they would be subsumed into the market of ideas. They have to be sophistries which don’t restrict the elites, do restrict the wider population, but are just about plausible enough to acquire a following of useful idiots within that wider population.

Unfortunately here in the UK, many elite mediocrities struggle to maintain their grip even on the lax standards of mediocrity. The failed mediocrity has become a fixture within UK political elites. They eschew sophistries in favour of lies, and censorship which they find easier to master.

Thanks to our deplorably low standards of elite mediocrity here in the UK, Net Zero has evolved into a tangle of ridiculous lies and nonsense with hardly a plausible sophistry to be seen. As have mass immigration, gender politics and the supposed benefits of the EU. We see it all the time, we've always seen it, but previous elites sometimes managed their sophistries with style. Not now.

Not an individual of mental adventure

Moving on from the previous post which highlighted a lack of curiosity among COP29 attendees, we have F. Scott Fitzgerald’s idea of mental adventure and those who opt out. It’s a striking aspect of social and online life.


Anthony Patch had ceased to be an individual of mental adventure, of curiosity, and had become an individual of bias and prejudice, with a longing to be emotionally undisturbed.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned (1922)


It’s a guess, but likely enough that everyone who reads this knows or has known people who are not, in Fitzgerald’s words, an individual of mental adventure.

It’s one of those things which baffles, frustrates, annoys sceptics. Those endless encounters with people who lack the curiosity to climb off dubious, flaky or stupid standpoints. People who refuse to embark on the mental adventure of finding something better.

Finding new insights is an adventure - how can anyone stand back from it? But they do.

The eternal generality

I was born tired — but with the quality of mother wit, the gift of women like Gloria — to that, for all my talking and listening, my waiting in vain for the eternal generality that seems to lie just beyond every argument and every speculation, to that I have added not one jot.

F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Beautiful and Damned (1922)


Taking the easier route, eternally adjustable generalities appear to be what educated midwits are after. Leak-proof simplifications midwittingly imbibed with their education. All of which is yet another generalisation, but fortunately not an eternal one. I hope not anyway.

Another aspect of eternally adjustably generalities is that they allow us to be superstitious without being traditionally superstitious. They facilitate secular mystique and the hunger for socially agreeable simplification. Without this, traditional political parties would go nowhere, which unfortunately for us is the only suitable place for them.

The search for eternal generalities is easy to understand though. Something like a solid scientific law, without the dry rigour of science, but politically, academically and socially useful. That’s another generality, but this one isn’t eternal either. 

And yet many sceptics must sometimes find themselves at one time or another waiting in vain for the eternal generality that seems to lie just beyond every argument and every speculation. 

The set stage and the convention of the theatre

The pageantry of his disillusion took shape in a world-old procession of Prophets, Athenians, Martyrs, Saints, Scientists, Don Juans, Jesuits, Puritans, Fausts, Poets, Pacifists; like costumed alumni at a college reunion they streamed before him as their dreams, personalities, and creeds had in turn thrown colored lights on his soul; each had tried to express the glory of life and the tremendous significance of man; each had boasted of synchronizing what had gone before into his own rickety generalities; each had depended after all on the set stage and the convention of the theatre, which is that man in his hunger for faith will feed his mind with the nearest and most convenient food.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - This Side of Paradise (1920)


To a significant degree, political disputes do not go much further than the set stage and the convention of the theatre. The political arena is effectively a theatre of political dispute with politicians as its actors. Only when matters become critical enough to threaten the theatre itself are actors required to become more than actors.

The oddity of political theatre is that it is so obviously theatre. Equally obvious is that it leads to a feeble democracy where political parties and vested interests subvert the purported point of democracy, the point of voting to change something - anything.

Yet if political parties were to provide effective political oversight of the permanent administration there would be no political theatre. The point of the parties is the theatre, not the oversight. The permanent administration mostly oversees itself.

It is certainly easy enough to imagine a situation where political parties do provide effective political oversight, where they require the permanent administration to adhere to standards, achieve results and remain within budgets. A situation where failure is dealt with as it would be elsewhere.

But this is an imaginary situation because so many voters seem to accept political theatre as democracy even when it is clearly no such thing. Most voters vote for an ineffectual vote.

The Armchair Campaigner

From an armchair in the office of his Tarrytown estate he directed against the enormous hypothetical enemy, unrighteousness, a campaign which went on through fifteen years, during which he displayed himself a rabid monomaniac, an unqualified nuisance, and an intolerable bore.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned (1922)


It applies to some more than others, but there is much to be said for the idea that our news media are campaigning businesses ranged against the same enormous hypothetical enemy, unrighteousness. We have modern versions of the campaign Fitzgerald invokes - media businesses with broad campaigns to guide editorial policy and encircle the audience with authoritative righteousness.

It is not news, veracity and unbiased opinion that big media provide. Nobody offers advertising revenue, political influence or social status in return for veracity. Veracity is cheap anyway. 

Instead, big media offer their audiences a veracity alternative - a comforting sense of being on the right side of something never quite specified exactly. Not the political right, but the right causes, movements, charities, celebrities, opinions, fashions and lashings of moral indignation. Big media roll it all up into an airy sense of being the active, supportive, very slightly superior audience for a broad campaign of armchair righteousness.

We could call it many things, but perhaps campaign farming is one. There are many others.

Each pretended to accept the other

They said things that were more revealing than they intended — but each pretended to accept the other at face, or rather word, value.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

Chancellor says 'everything on the table' in autumn statement as he promises to remove tax 'barriers' for business

Jeremy Hunt tells Sky News the tax burden is "too high", as he hints at cuts ahead of Wednesday's major fiscal event.

"I am not going to talk about any individual taxes as that will lead to even more feverish speculation," he said.

But the chancellor admitted the tax burden is "too high" and the government "wants to bring it down", with lower tax "essential to growth".


As the high tax burden appears to be deliberate and the burden of Net Zero certainly is deliberate, it isn't easy to see why any interviewer would take Hunt seriously, or even pretend to. But that's what they do.

In an impassioned debate

Her feeling of defiance had reached such a pitch that she preferred that no one should understand. She was content to be justified by the impassioned sincerity of her desires.

F. Scott Fitzgerald – All the Sad Young Men (1926)

Lib Dem members defy leadership on housing target

Liberal Democrat members have defied the party leadership by voting to keep the party's housebuilding target for England.

Party bosses had wanted to shelve the 380,000 annual target, arguing it had failed to deliver necessary new homes.

But members backed a motion from younger activists to keep it at the party's conference in Bournemouth.

In an impassioned debate, the activists said ditching an overall target risked alienating younger voters.


It's not dissimilar to playing poker with buttons. Those younger activists want to play with more buttons. Oh well - it passes the time and there are no real consequences. Hence the impassioned debate, it's what Lib Dems do.

This dazed and floundering opportunism

There is nothing that so much prevents a settlement as a tangle of small surrenders. We are bewildered on every side by politicians who are in favour of secular education, but think it hopeless to work for it; who desire total prohibition, but are certain they should not demand it; who regret compulsory education, but resignedly continue it; or who want peasant proprietorship and therefore vote for something else. It is this dazed and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything.

G. K. Chesterton - What’s Wrong with the World? (1910)

It's everywhere, just as it was over a century ago in Chesterton's time -  this dazed and floundering opportunism that gets in the way of everything. As if opportunists see the world in terms of personal opportunity rather than trying to connect the dots and do something constructive. 

In the world of the opportunist, Net Zero isn't good or bad, sane or insane, but merely an opportunity. Yet many people know well enough that Net Zero is crazy. In which case, why aren't their voices heard? The reason for that was apparent over a century ago too -


It seemed to him that the essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal, self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge; it was obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom — so, with appropriate efficiency, the technical experts were kept there.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

To make nothing out of something

So much for the effort and ingenuity of Montmartre. All the catering to vice and waste was on an utterly childish scale, and he suddenly realized the meaning of the word "dissipate"--to dissipate into thin air; to make nothing out of something.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Babylon Revisited (1931)


There's a lot of it going on in the modern world, making nothing out of something. It’s what convinced Malthusians do, but they don't dissipate their own something. Their focus is always something belonging to social classes below their own, classes they think should have more nothing and less something.

Malthusians dissipate what isn’t theirs. Energy is the big one, but there are many others and even some intangibles such as democracy, knowledge, science, freedom, Brexit. They are particularly keen to dissipate your vote, to make nothing out of something. 

Feeding their vanity

“There’s too much good manners,” he said on the way back to Gstaad in the smooth sleigh.

“Well, I think that’s nice,” said Baby.

“No, it isn’t,” he insisted to the anonymous bundle of fur. “Good manners are an admission that everybody is so tender that they have to be handled with gloves. Now, human respect — you don’t call a man a coward or a liar lightly, but if you spend your life sparing people’s feelings and feeding their vanity, you get so you can’t distinguish what should be respected in them.”

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender Is the Night (1933)

Vanity - it’s another feature of cancel culture and woke culture generally. There is vanity behind a refusal to be contradicted.

Either you think —

Either you think — or else others have to think for you and take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes, civilize and sterilize you.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender Is the Night (1934)


It’s an interesting word to have used - pervert. Which is the easier course to take though? Obviously the path of least resistance is to have others think for us. That’s the easier, inconspicuous and superficially virtuous path.

For a huge part of our lives, this is what we must do anyway - imitate behaviour which is accepted, including the behaviour we call ‘thinking’. We must do it simply in order to understand each other and foster social cohesion.

Imitation is not thinking though - not what Fitzgerald meant by thinking. We don’t have to make a deliberate virtue of imitation, but people do. Sometimes they even end up watching the BBC or reading the Guardian which take power from you, pervert and discipline your natural tastes. As we know.

When the circus comes to town

It seemed to him that the essential element in these men at the top was their faith that their affairs were the very core of life. All other things being equal, self-assurance and opportunism won out over technical knowledge; it was obvious that the more expert work went on near the bottom — so, with appropriate efficiency, the technical experts were kept there.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

COP26 propaganda has been so extraordinarily relentless that an optimist might be inclined to take something positive from it. Perhaps the propaganda has been too obvious. Perhaps the self-assurance and opportunism are too obvious. 

The blatant hypocrisy of it, the private jets, limousines, preening celebrities and blanket privilege have been grossly incompatible with an ethos of planet-saving self-denial. Saint Francis of Assisi was conspicuous by his absence. Many neutral outsiders must at least wonder if the whole thing is just a media circus. Many must know it is.

For all to see who choose to see, is the contrast between those who are supposed to bear the burden of winding back a consumer society and those who clearly have no intention of doing any such thing. Not ever. There are wild cards too, such as Joe Biden who cannot add anything positive to whatever he endorses. Wild cards such as China remaining aloof for reasons which are not hard to work out. 

Who knows how deep these things run? How the frost of rising awareness seeps into the cracks of carelessly constructed fable. Because there has been something careless about COP26. The stamp of Boris Johnson perhaps. A lax eye for detail. The climate game could yet go sour.

Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape

 

Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. The complexity is too subtle, too varied; the values are changing utterly with each lesion of vitality; it has begun to appear that we can learn nothing from the past with which to face the future — so we cease to be impulsive, convincible men, interested in what is ethically true by fine margins, we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity, we value safety above romance, we become, quite unconsciously, pragmatic.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - The Beautiful and Damned (1922)

 The other day, Mrs H had to contact our GP surgery because of an intermittent issue which requires a prescription. She made contact through an online system, was phoned by a doctor within a couple of hours and the same afternoon I collected the prescription which had been transmitted electronically to the pharmacist.

 The smooth competence of the overall routine was mostly down to computer systems which even in the past decade or so have been improved, sorted and extended. This appears to be one of the major gains from computers – sorted routines rather than artificial intelligence. Maybe this is the real monster.

 In a technical sense the doctor could have been any doctor anywhere in the world, although for that to happen we would need global integrity as well as global computer routines. Maybe that will come over time as we substitute rules of conduct for ideas of integrity.

 Ah yes – rules of conduct. That one moves us on from Mrs H contacting our GP surgery to the coronavirus debacle. As we know, the UK Coronavirus Act 2020 was recently passed by 484 votes to 76, a majority of 408. By a huge majority MPs voted to extend government control over all aspects of our lives. 

As things stand, this implies some permanent level of routine control over all aspects of our lives. Sorted computer routines are already being embedded in the process. Those which are not yet sorted will be sorted one way or another and vast numbers of voters are likely to be quite happy with that. 

Routine comes down like twilight on a harsh landscape, softening it until it is tolerable. And it will be tolerable – for most.

The versatility of madness

But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike.

F. Scott Fitzgerald - Tender is the Night (1934)

There seems to be a division between people who are comfortable with viewpoints which are merely conventional social formulae and those who prefer more nuanced views and have a tendency to see many conventional formulae as misleading or at least questionable.

Familiar enough and hardly surprising because we need conventional formulae as shortcuts to social cohesion. We can’t keep inventing the wheel of ideas. The problem is complexity because social formulae have to be very widely adoptable which inevitably means that they cannot easily evolve the nuances and adaptability demanded by a complex world. Adoptable is not adaptable.

It is tempting to see many current social trends as akin to madness, but madness may be a feature here, not an aberration. What could we have done to avoid the madness? Nothing – there is no formula for avoiding the madness. One solution appears to be the widespread adoption of a formula which may be somewhat crazy but it works, it holds societies together and causes more good than harm. A religion for example.

However, as Christian religions fade away as useful if obviously patchy social formulae we seem to be adopting a monolithic political formula, a totalitarian form of sentimental environmental socialism. This is quite obviously not a formula for avoiding confusion, nonsense and outright madness. It is far too simple, sentimental and too suspicious of reason and analysis.

Again – there is no formula for avoiding madness. If there were it would not be a formula. Socially we may blunder into madness but not out of it. That requires more of an involuntary upheaval such as a revolution, which of course is another form of madness.