Section:GDN 1J PaGe:2 Edition Date:190907 Edition:01 Zone: Sent at 6/9/2019 18:20 cYanmaGentaYellowblac
- The Guardian Saturday 7 September 2019
2
a political Elvis – twilight years – who’d
had to be slapped awake on the tour bus ,
given some of his special medicine, and
shoved on to greet the LA crowd with the words “Hello,
Philadelphia!” This, but in Wakefi eld.
Having very belatedly taken the stage, Johnson
proceeded to die on his arse in front of rows of
police offi cers. Does this technically count as a death
in custody? Certainly, it bore all the hallmarks of
such an event, of which there have been 1,718 since
1990 , with not a single conviction for murder or
manslaughter. Which is to say: it was brutal and
disturbing, it happened right in front of multiple police
pretending not to notice, and the victim was offi cially
concluded to have done it to himself.
There is much discussion about what really “cut
through” this week, with Johnson’s greatest shits
collection set against such viral delights as a factual yet
simultaneously car-crash delineation of Labour’s Brexit
policy by Emily Thornberry on Question Time. It is quite
something to be got the better of by fellow panellist
Richard Tice, a sort of radicalised Damart catalogue
model, but the shadow foreign secretary managed it.
As for Jacob Rees-Mogg, the leader of the House
of Commons, his insolent front bench loll-about is
still lighting up Facebook. I’m not going to go full
ad hominem on Nanny, but I do think the time has
come when we all have to ask: has anyone EVER done
a worse job and stayed in post longer? She’s still there!
Jesus Christ, Nanny: YOU HAD ONE JOB. Teach him
some manners, yes? Jacob Rees-Mogg is 50 (FIFTY).
Is he even housebroken?T
hen again, why expect more from
a guy who believes that even
incestuously raped minors should
be forced to give birth , at the same
time as his investment fund profi ts
from the sale of abortion pills? Asked
about this hypocrisy once, Rees-
Mogg declared airily: “ The world is
not always what you want it to be.” You’re telling me,
mate. Very much ditto. With the world as it is, we have
to tolerate the spectacle of the chancellor of the Duchy
of Gilead spreading his loins all over the front bench
and comparing an NHS doctor who co-wrote offi cial
no-deal contingency plans to disgraced anti-vaxxer
Andrew Wakefi eld. This last piece of utter yobbery saw
Jacob humiliatingly ordered to apologise, presumably
by Dominic Cummings (a man widely believed not to
have completed the Norland Nanny training course).
Perhaps it was terror of Cummings, then,
that prevented Johnson from assisting the faint
policewoman in Wakefi eld. The PM chose instead
to gibber out the last of his prepared lines, and the
bulletins duly led with his claim that he’d “rather be
dead in a ditch” than delay Brexit.
As for who would fi nd his remains, it increasingly
feels like a case for Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman,
the pair of cops in Se7en, a movie in which various
people are ritually deadly sinned to death. A man of
many uncontrollable appetites, Boris Johnson has
embodied each of the sins at points in his life, and this
week it almost felt as if he was being strapped in like
the glutton and forced to prime minister himself to
death. Had enough prime ministering yet, dear? I think
you can fi t just a bit more prime ministering in, and a
bit more, and a bit more, and ...
Anyway, you get the idea with that one. I guess the
major philosophical question facing some of us this
week was: would it all be worth it? Would you take three
years of political paralysis, a toxic public realm, bitter
family rows and no prospect of even medium-term
national healing just to watch this one absolute monster
reap his own whirlwind, live on telly, in a horrifyingly
hilarious cautionary tale about getting everything you
always wanted? The answer, of course, is no. Not even
close. And he might still get a majority.
Having said all that ... you’ve got to get your kicks
somehow in these dark times, and if you can’t enjoy
a good binfi re, what’s really left? So chuck another chair
leg on the fl ames, take your warmth where you can, and
try to get some rest before he takes a crack at next week.The speech on Thursday by Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s
prime minister, praising the fertility of Hungarian
women as a bulwark of Europe’s survival appeal ed to
dangerous and atavistic myths. That isn’t a reason to
ignore it. In fact it needs meeting head-on, for it marks a
further irruption into mainstream politics across the rich
world of “ replacement theory ”: the belief that the nature
of Europe is threatened by demographic change. This
fear has become central to politics in the United States
and Australia, as well as many European countries,
whether or not they have large immigrant populations
themselves. It was one of the drivers of the result of the
Brexit referendum, in which hostility towards European
immigrants served as a cover for wider xenophobias.
The presence at the Budapest summit of the former
Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, and his praise
of Mr Orbán, underlies the global nature of this belief.
At a speech in honour of Margaret Thatcher in 2015,
Mr Abbott, one of the architects of Australia’s brutal
refugee policy, argued that European countries should
embark on a massive programme of imprisoning
would-be migrants overseas, and repelling them at land
borders and at sea: “It will require some force; it will
require massive logistics and expense; it will gnaw at
our consciences – yet it is the only way to prevent a tide
of humanity surging through Europe and quite possibly
changing it for ever.”
The prediction relies in part on undeniable
demographic reality: the population of parts of the
developed world is shrinking, while that of the poor
world is growing. This is happening just as the climate
emergency makes the most populous parts of the
world less habitable. With the best will in the world,
these changes will lead to strains and tensions. And
the best will – even good will – is in short supply in
the world at the moment.It is easy to deride awards, especially if you haven’t
won one. And good fun too. Edward St Aubyn, snubbed
by Booker judges in 2006 for the fi nale to his Patrick
Melrose series, At Last, took revenge with the 2014 satire
Lost for Words. That novel depicted clownish judges
deciding which book, from a terrible shortlist, should
win a thinly veiled version of the Booker.
This week’s decision by Booker judges to shortlist
The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s much-anticipated
sequel to her 1985 feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s
Tale, might seem similarly worthy of derision. The book
hasn’t even been published yet. Apart from 800 copies
leaked to Amazon in the US, what takes place between
its covers will be kept from most readers until its global
release on 10 September – her publishers having broken
with convention by not bringing the publication date
forward once the novel was known to be in the running.
Atwood, shortlisted for the Booker six times and winner
with The Blind Assassin in 2000, is one of the most feted
living novelists, so hardly needs the award’s imprimatur
or £50,000 prize money.
The novelist Amit Chaudhuri argued last year that the
Booker is not fi t for purpose. “The idea that a ‘book of
the year’ can be assessed annually by a bunch of peopleIn the past, the left has responded to the
anti-migration rhetoric of the right with economic
answers. These are important but not suffi cient, as the
rise of anti-immigrant populists has shown. Even if
it’s true that people can be swapped out as economic
units without regard to their origins, that is not
something the people who feel themselves swapped
out will happily accept. The left traditionally, and
rightly, believes that people are far more than the sum
of their economic usefulness to others – that they have
rights, and an intrinsic value just because they are
human. This is the belief, and the moral compulsion,
that leads us to treat refugees as fellow humans.
What is new about the Orbán government’s recent
approach to this problem is that it proposes that as
well as excluding refugees, Hungarian women should
do their patriotic part by raising more babies. This
has already led to a diplomatic row with Sweden,
whose minister for social security, Annika Strandhäll ,
said in February that it stank of Europe’s 1930s – a
time when politicians in many countries (including
Sweden) urged women to have larger families as
part of the nationalist competition which ended so
catastrophically in 1939.
Any attempt to discuss demographics now must
start with the importance of reproductive rights and
women’s choices. It can’t stop there, though. So long
as child-rearing is understood as primarily work for
women, attempts to encourage large families will
inevitably be seen as attempts to chase women out of
the workforce. For men to take a greater share of their
responsibilities around the home is an essential step
towards a fairer and more sustainable world.
The issues will not go away, though, and
they cannot be ignored for the global right to
exploit. In their hands they will become a further
encouragement to far-right terrorism. But in an age
of environmental breakdown, we cannot close our
eyes and ears to the realities of population growth
and shifts. Very hard questions will arise about the
division of resources on a planet that cannot even
aff ord the consumption patterns of the rich world
today, to which the poor world justifi ably aspires.
The reduction of consumption has to be part of the
answer. So must work towards a world in which every
child is wanted, and in which each has a place.- judges who have to read almost a book a day – is
absurd, as is the idea that this is any way of honouring
a writer.” Aesthetic judgments are subjective, which
is one reason why prize organisers are right to see
diversity on judging panels as important. Individual
tastes aside, Chaudhuri argued that literary value
has increasingly become subordinate to commercial
considerations. The Testaments can certainly be
expected to succeed on these terms. Thanks in part
to the Netfl ix adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale ,
but also in light of political developments in the US
and elsewhere, Atwood’s novel has become newly
pertinent. Off red’s white bonnet and red cape have
become real-life symbols of feminist resistance from
Northern Ireland to Argentina.
But while it is a pity that keen readers have not yet
been able to read The Testaments, this year’s contest
remains an exciting prospect. First won 50 years ago
by PH Newby with Something to Answer For, the
Booker has changed with the times, and in recent
years has come in for a good deal of justifi ed criticism
after changing its rules so that American as well as
Commonwealth and Irish authors can enter.
Concerns remain about the increased diffi culty,
for non-US English-language novelists, of accessing
what remains a vitally important shop window.
But for now at least the signs are good. Last year’s
deserving winner was the little-known Northern Irish
writer Anna Burns. On this year’s shortlist, along with
Atwood and another former winner, Salman Rushdie,
is Lucy Ellman’s Ducks, Newburyport – a novel
rejected by her regular publisher before being taken
up by a tiny independent – and with most of its 1,000
pages taken up by just eight sentences.
Continued from frontMargaret Atwood is not the
only name to watch on an
exciting Booker shortlist
Fiction
Demography
Women’s autonomy and
rights must be defended
against nationalism
Founded 1821 Independently owned by the Scott Trust No 53,8 20
‘Comment is free... but facts are sacred’ CP Scott
Johnson heads into the twilight
zone – with a police escort
Marina Hyde
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