BY STEWART SLATER
We start this month with an apology. In the last of these ‘Reflections’ pieces, published October 1st, I wrote of Sue Gray, “she has power, so she does not need politics.” Five days later she resigned. Predictions, it turns out, are hard. Particularly those about the future. In my (partial) defence, the politics she needed was office politics, not the mass, electoral version I had in mind since her ouster followed a behind-the-scenes power struggle. We think of court history – the analysis of interactions between groups vying for the leader’s ear – as a relic of an earlier time. But it offered useful insights into Boris’ No. 10 and appears to offer the same for Starmer’s. If people haven’t changed much (and we haven’t), neither has our behaviour.
- Ellie Reeves is the Chair of the Labour Party. She is also the sister of a Labour MP and the wife of a Labour MP. Her mother-in-law was a Labour MP. Her father-in-law was also a Labour MP and is now a Labour peer. As we brush off our court history, so should we return to our prosopography – the study of family links and relationships between the noble clans of ancient Rome.
- As readers of Robert Harris’ Roman series (like all his work, third rate fiction obscures what might have been first rate non-fiction) will know, every so often an outsider could break into the privileged elite. Cicero came from a (comparatively) unprivileged and defiantly non-metropolitan background to achieve eminence at the Bar and, for one term, the highest office in the land. He toadied to whomever he thought would assist his political advance, tied his colours to the mast of a failing political system, and had a high opinion both of himself and his personal rectitude. Remind you of anyone?
- Still, at least none of them will have to look at the portrait of Margaret Thatcher. Or the one of Gladstone. Or Elizabeth I etc. etc. On one level, how the PM chooses to decorate his office is his business, but I think we should be quite keen for the great names of the past to be on his walls. They would remind him that he is not the start of history but merely a minor link in a long chain. While he may (or he may not) think he currently “bestrides the narrow world like a colossus”, like those whose pictures offend him, he is ultimately, just a “here today and gone tomorrow politician”. Gladstone, Thatcher et al. are the pictorial equivalent of the slave who would whisper to the triumphal Roman general, “Remember you are mortal”.
- Since last we spoke, Alec Salmond has died (“passed” is an expression which gives me the “ick”, always striking me as vilely mawkish). The warmth of the tributes from across the political spectrum made me wonder if Nigel Farage, a similar constitutional disruptor, will receive the same when he goes to the great saloon bar in the sky. Will Alastair Campbell et al. take to Twitter, tearily to reminisce about shared drinks after Question Time? I suspect not and the reaction to Lady Thatcher’s demise makes me reasonably confident in this prediction. Are those on the right/unionist side just nicer people than the left/Nats? Or is it just that Salmond ultimately failed, allowing his opponents to be generous? Everything can be forgiven except success.
- This will not be a problem for Ineos Britannia who lost the America’s Cup 7-2 to the Kiwis. Nor, indeed for the Ineos Grenadiers, the cycling outfit which, as Team Sky, won seven out of eight Tours de France and has, since the rebrand, won one (the first after the take-over). Nor for Mercedes F1 who won seven drivers’ titles before selling a stake to Ineos. Since when they have won none. We shall pass over Man Utd. (part-owned by Ineos) in a discreet silence. If predictions are hard, so too, it appears, is sports investing.
- It is, of course, more complex than that. In recent years, the only way to win the Tour has been to employ Tadej Pogacar or Jonas Vingegaard, head and shoulders (legs perhaps?) above the rest of the peloton, as lead rider. F1 had one of its rule changes, favouring aerodynamics over engine power. Any team which does not employ Adrian Newey is, in those circumstances, fighting to come second. While Ineos may mourn their failure, the rest of us should not. In some sports at least, natural genius can still beat lavishly funded talent.
- Pogacar, Newey et al are amazing but so, as the advert once had it, are you. Two specific people, let us be delicate, “interacted” at a specific point to produce you. Had your particular parents not “interacted”, you would not be here. Had they interacted at a different time, you would not be here – my daughter shares her parents with my son, but is very clearly not him. This is, of course, not confined to the current generation. The same can be said of our parents, grandparents and so on. We are all the product of a specific chain of specific people “interacting” at specific times all the way back to the dawn of the species. If just one of those interaction had not happened, you would not be here.
- Compensation aims to correct harm. If we judge that an event has altered an individual’s condition for the worse and we can identify a culprit, we tell them to cough up. This is the argument for slavery reparations – the historical practice has negatively impacted the lives of individuals today. But what do we know of their lives absent slavery? Would these individuals have even had lives? To believe so we must believe that the precise chain of descent which produced the current population would be replicated exactly in the absence of a mass movement of people which engendered substantial population mixing. For many (most? All?) alive today, the comparison is not between the modern Caribbean and some Wakanda-esque alternative reality, it is between existing and not. For such individuals to be harmed by slavery, life on islands which market themselves as tropical paradises, in a culture which is annually celebrated on the streets of London, must be worse than never being born. It is entirely possible to believe both slavery and compensation today for its historical practice to be wrong.
- In the spirit of political ecumenism, if the left are wrong about reparations, the issue of slavery causes problems for the right too. Yes, Britons today should feel no guilt about the crimes of their ancestors but if that is the case, why should we take credit for their virtues? If no-one alive today was involved in the slave trade, no-one alive today was involved in supressing it (bar possibly the British diplomats who freed slaves who “touched the flagpole” in Muscat and Dubai in the 1960’s). We might borrow a phrase from America and talk about the left’s “stolen grievance”, but we should also be aware of the right’s “stolen pride”.
- During the long gestation of this piece, the clocks went back, always a useful indicator of how many miles one has on the clock. If it is a cause for joy because it gives you an extra hour in a nightclub, you’re still young. If (small children permitting) because it gives you an extra hour in bed, I’m afraid Middle Age has arrived.
- As I like to say, any phrase which follows “As I like to say…” (or its cousin, “It’s what I call…”) is never as witty or insightful as the speaker thinks. It is a marker of a pub bore whose self-regard outpaces their self-awareness.
- Pubs are, of course, in decline, the finger being pointed at some combination of tax, regulation, changing mores and other phenomena I can’t be bothered to enumerate. Perhaps the media environment too plays a part. The rise of Twitter, Substack, podcasts, Loose Women, The Jeremy Vine Show, etc. means that no longer must the local loudmouth restrict himself to sharing his half-baked thoughts with his half-cut drinking buddies. Why aim for the Moon (Under the Water) when you can be a star on GBNews?
- Nosiness is the name we give to the curiosity of people we do not like.
- Only those who forgive themselves can accept the forgiveness of others. To those who do not, it is merely evidence of low standards.
- We end with the habitual quote, a Turkish proverb in this case. Why it popped into my head at this particular point in time, I leave to you: “When a monkey moves into a palace, he doesn’t become a king. It becomes a circus.”
Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.