Britain’s political rhetoric is often at its most thrilling and memorable when it deals with abroad and uses the past. You need to be in your mid-70s to have even a fragmentary memory of the second world war, but its causes, heroes and villains continue to inform, or misinform, our understanding of present events. Hilary Benn speaks of “fascism”; Tony Blair warns of “appeasement”; Hitler strides the stage again in the form of Gaddafi and Saddam; somebody in parliament remembers to be Churchillian. The importance of long-ago battles to present national identities is easily mocked – Kosovo (1389) to the Serbians; Bannockburn (1314) to the Scots – but if England exists 500 years from now, the chances are that it will still be remembering 1940.
As for abroad, the confidence that we can intervene benignly isn’t confined to the right or the centre left or wherever Hilary Benn is now. Jeremy Corbyn always sounds more at ease addressing an intractable conflict, such as Palestine, than he does tackling problems nearer home – Scotland; the collapse of the steel industry – where, for better or worse, he might actually have some effect. He’s the other side of the same imperial coin: not the militarist but the missionary who, as Dickens wrote of Mrs Jellyby, utters “beautiful sentiments” about African orphans and the brotherhood of man while her own children run wild. Diana Athill, who turns 98 this month, puts it simply and well in her new book when she says, “The difference between being the hub of a vast empire and being a tiny island off the shores of, but not belonging to, Europe seems to be something they [present-day politicians] are unable to understand.”
This is more than a pity. It leaves a great hole in mainstream politics where arguments about Britain’s present and future should be. This week, for example, the retailer Mike Ashley emerged as an outstanding example of business rapacity when the Guardian disclosed the working conditions inside his vast Derbyshire warehouse.
Ashley’s Sports Direct chain has made him the 22nd richest man in Britain, estimated by the Sunday Times Rich List to be worth £3.5bn. Temporary workers at his warehouse, by contrast, get paid hourly rates that work out below the minimum wage and suffer the kind of indignities – including rigorous harangues over the public address system to work faster – that come straight from a dystopian novel. Ashley, as well as being very rich, is also the unpopular owner of Newcastle United. The items he sells are made cheaply in east Asia. His warehouse depends on cheap eastern European labour. Few individuals so neatly encapsulate the fortunes, in both senses, of modern Britain.
A political view of him would be wonderful to hear … and, to be fair, Ed Miliband did attack his “Victorian” business practices in a speech last year, saying that the proportion of the workforce on zero-hours contracts – 18,000 out of 20,000 employees – made Sports Direct “a bad place to work”. But the speech got only passing attention. It didn’t evoke a glorious past. It made too few people care.
Ashes to ashtray, dust to dust
Big Tobacco is fighting a last-ditch stand against the standardisation of the cigarette packet. In the high court this week, the four largest manufacturers began their challenge to laws and regulations that, from May, will give the healthsecretary the power to oversee packet design. Their chance of winning looks slim; parliament passed the legislation with hardly a vote against, and France and Ireland are enacting similar laws. Images that were once ornaments to everyday European life – everyday European death, too, of course – are soon to be replaced by packets as white as a shroud. The gypsy dancer on Gitanes, the portrait of Robert Burns on Sweet Afton, the capstan on Capstan Full Strength: ashes to ashtray, dust to dust.
Many other charming scenes and characters vanished long before. When I was a six- or seven-year-old, a craze for collecting cigarette packets suddenly gripped the children in our street. It was easy enough to find Woodbine, Capstan, Senior Service and Player’s Navy Cut, harder to discover Churchman’s and Kensitas and Craven A, rarest of all to bend into the gutter and retrieve a Three Castles or a Passing Cloud. In fact, I don’t think I ever saw an example of the last until I was old enough to buy some. A luxury brand. Surviving smokers of a certain age will remember that the cigarettes were oval-shaped and the packet, which was pink, showed a cavalier enjoying an anachronistic fag during a break in the English civil war.
There was genuine artistry in almost every design, from Woodbine’s flowers (rather arts and craftsy) to Player’s bearded sailor framed inside his lifebelt. Perhaps as seven-year-olds we unconsciously recognised that charm – were charmed by it, in fact. Certainly the packets were attractive to us long before nicotine was. How were we to know that Craven A’s black cat purred a false promise – “Will not affect your throat” – or that the affable butler who welcomed us to Kensitas would eventually reveal himself as the doorkeeper to the tomb?
Don’t let Scotland be Trumped
In 1907, the Glasgow and South Western Railway opened an elegant 100-room hotel for golfers next to what was to become a championship course at Turnberry on the Ayrshire coast. It was part of a small boom in resort hotels built by Scottish railway companies – its architect, James Miller, also played a role in the design of the last of them, at Gleneagles. For more than a century, all went well, or at least decorously, until last year, when Ayrshire woke up to discover the hotel had been bought by Donald Trump, who immediately renamed it the Trump Turnberry in the belief (surely mistaken even then) that his name brought trade. A boycott is needed. If he isn’t forced to sell up within a year, we’ll know what to think of golfers.
Saturday slacking
The wine bar El Vino’s was famous as the venue of journalists when newspapers were still published in Fleet Street. Like a club or a grand hotel, it had rules. By the 1990s, the one that prevented women standing at the bar had gone. Men, however, were still required to wear jacket and tie, except on Saturday lunchtimes, when more casual dress was allowed. Not jeans, probably, but the kind of rig favoured circa 1980 for country weekends: cavalry twills, Viyella shirts, roll-neck jumpers with leather elbow patches, quite possibly cravats. As a desk-worker on a Sunday paper, I never went to El Vino’s on a Saturday lunch time, and only rarely at other times, but I noticed its effect in the office. Senior men – gregarious columnists and suchlike – who wore dark suits on weekdays now appeared tieless in beige and brown. Saturdays gave them that licence.
Something similar now happens on Radio 4. On Saturdays, from 7am until mid-morning, it puts on its cavalry twills and laughs – not audience laughter, but journalists and broadcasters laughing among themselves as though they’d been ordered to relax. Anne Perkins wrote a perceptive piece recently in the Guardian about reporters crying on camera – a new phenomenon that risks ending that useful fiction, the reporter’s judge-like neutrality. Saturday mornings on Radio 4 inhabit the other end of the emotional spectrum, in chummy merriment. Everybody’s at El Vino’s now – apart, that is, from the listener.
