I guess the higher up you go in the C of E hierarchy the more anodyne becomes your mission statement. Usually along the lines of ‘let’s love each other to death rather than have another bun fight.’ But I was struck this evening hearing on the news the Archbishop of Canterbury, ex-oil industry exec Justin Welby declare that the funeral tomorrow is ‘absolutely about the Duke of Edinburgh.’ I was moved, almost (to turn the radio off). But I wanted to hear what other profound insights he had to offer. Surely the word ‘extraordinary’ had to be deployed? Indeed it was, when we heard that the Queen has shown ‘extraordinary courage.’ Courage? Is that the appropriate description of somebody grieving over the loss of a loved one? He didn’t but could have said she must be extraordinarily grieving (after 73 years with the Duke), which would have made more sense if sounding a little less heroic. As it is, if Welby is seeking to demonstrate the comforting power of religion he seems rather incapable, merely reciting the on message guff of gong seeking sycophants.
Before you know it, when this is all over we’ll hear from Justin how Prince Andrew is ‘courageously’ dealing with the fallout of his past liaison with the paedophile Epstein. Everything regarding this family has to be spoken of in hushed tones of admiration if you are the Archbish of Canterbury.
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+I was alerted by Labour List to a story in the Huffpost which claimed that Starmer had got angry with some of his parliamentary colleagues because of their ‘unattributable attacks on his aides.’ The irony of this may be lost on those who spent a good part of every day of Corbyn’s leadership attacking him and all around him, although to their credit (in a limited sense) many of them did so publicly. The Huffpost article lists the names of some shadow cabinet members who leapt to Starmer’s side and for the life of me I can’t say I’ve heard of any of them. No doubt they would argue it’s difficult to make a breakthrough during a pandemic when nobody is listening to the opposition. There are other explanations of course, but now is not the time to ask. Not when there’s elections coming up (which for those of us who followed the Corbyn defenestration shambles piles irony upon irony)!
+I have been contacted by reader asking why I am not terribly enthused by Caroline Lucas MP’s private member’s bill on climate change, of which my reader writes ‘one of the main aims of the Bill is to strengthen the Climate Change Act by not allowing targets to be missed by planning on speculative negative emissions.’ That is a worthwhile aim, but a bigger ambition has to start with the targets themselves, and the targets which the bill refers to flow from the Paris Agreement of 2015, which are wholly arbitrary, voluntary and worse, delusionary. Passing a law to meet those targets would be nugatory. It had to happen of course. It was what the BBC was invented for. I only went out for a walk at lunchtime and returned to hear the news that the Duke of Edinburgh had died, aged 99 and ten months. No telegram for you mate! The BBC had switched into its legally required full eulogistic mode, trotting out royal biographers and gong seekers, all of whom hadn’t listened to what the previous ones had said—meaning that the same words and lines were repeated ad nauseum. Extraordinary! Extraordinary! Extraordinary! What a life! This will go on for a few days yet. Then, perhaps by midweek, the yellow press will be speculating (if a swift funeral wasn’t arranged) whether Harry and Megs will be ever-so socially distanced, particularly from Wills and Kate at the ceremony. And quietly behind the scenes might someone in government think this is a good time to bury bad news? And will our Prime Minister comb what’s left of his hair at the funeral?. I suspect at some point the dapper D of E will have passed comment on our PM’s schtick. Bloody scruff! Who is he anyway?
Closer to home for me in many ways is the death just announced of Peter Ainsworth, former Tory MP for East Surrey. I got to know him when he chaired the Environmental Audit Committee. We became friends, sharing an environmental interest and a sense of humour, which was great fun when at one point (both no longer beholden to the Westminster political life) we thought it would be a great idea to write a book together. This provided the excuse for regular lunches, but little progress. I was pleased to call him a friend, even if he was a Tory. I think in later years he became less a Tory, perhaps just a TINO - Tory in name only. I shall greatly miss him. +There’s a lot of handwringing going on about the re-emergence of street riots in Northern Ireland. Tory ministers, who lied so much about there never having to be a post-Brexit border between the province and GB are now fretting that 12 year old Molotov cocktail throwers have picked up on this injustice, and are expressing their dissatisfaction with the Northern Ireland protocol in the only way they know how. Yes, of course there are a few other considerations to be taken into account, such as longstanding traditions of religious-aligned criminality. In truth, it probably doesn’t take much to strike a match in parts of Northern Ireland. When I once visited such world famous avenues like the Shankill Road, I saw the militarised police fortifications and the ‘peace’ walls, the painted curbstones, the gable end murals, the flags, the sinister looking black cabs, the decorated scaffold arches—none of this cultural war was eliminated by the peace process. I doubt that we’re really heading back to the 1970s, but as we’ve seen it doesn’t take too much to kick off a good old fashioned round of rioting in Northern Ireland, and I’m quite sure that there will be ‘real’ nationalists and unionists figuring out how they can capitalise on this latest burst of trouble, assuming of course that they will have encouraged it in the first place. Brexit has left the ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’ looking decidedly dodgy and as I have blogged before I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing. The way that the ‘fringe’ countries attached to England have been marginalised, colonised and abused has a long history, and one feels that self-determination is the answer to England’s post-colonial malaise. The ‘United Kingdom’ is increasingly a fiction, and it perhaps wouldn’t do any harm in Northern Ireland particularly if the concept of self-determination came to fruition. What if there were two republics of Ireland (for the time being)?
+I turned art investigator today. This was prompted by the appearance in a local art auction of a picture by the Russian artist Nikolai Suetin (1897-1954), ‘Geometric Composition’ in pen, pencil and watercolour, estimated at between £300 and £400. Suetin studied with Chagall and Malevich (he of the black square) and can be said to be a significant figure in early Soviet art. So it looked underpriced, except of course for the words ‘attributed to’ which means you can’t know whether this picture was actually made by the hand of Suetin. A search on the web revealed an identical painting being offered in a Brussels auction in 2017 for between €2000—€3000 (update 9th April - it sold for 4,500). Enlarging both pictures on the screen, they really did look absolutely identical. I don’t know what the Brussels picture actually sold for, but given the plethora of forged Russian art of the modernist era, it seems hard to imagine that a genuine Suetin could be picked up for £300—hence the phrase ‘attributed to.’ Still, money aside I’d probably rather have a fake Suetin to errr . . . a genuine Hockney. |
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