10 1GT Friday December 11 2020 | the times
Maybe best to avoid this one, Theresa
I
ain Dale has bravely committed
himself to recording 55
instalments of his The Prime
Ministers podcast: one episode
per prime minister. Wisely, he’s
not going in order. A show that
spent the first weeks of its
existence grinding out episodes
on such vanished 18th-century
personages as the Earl of Wilmington
and the Duke of Grafton would
probably be doomed. Actually maybe
it would be even more depressing to
do it backwards: Boris Johnson,
Theresa May, David Cameron...
Each episode is an interview
with an academic or journalist who
contributed an essay to Dale’s recent
book The Prime Ministers. The
undoubted highlights of the series so
far are Simon Heffer on William
Gladstone and The Times’s Rachel
Sylvester on May. Listen to them
together for a vertiginous sense of the
gulf that separates one of our greatest
prime ministers from one of our worst.
Heffer, opinionated and vigorous,
lauds Gladstone as a titanic moral
figure and the most intelligent person
to have held the office of prime
minister. He laments that he was
lumbered with Victoria as his queen.
Gladstone’s mistake in dealing with
her, Heffer says, was that he treated
everyone as an intellectual equal
whereas Victoria was one of the
stupidest monarchs in our history
(“and that’s quite an achievement”).
He despises Benjamin Disraeli as a
corrupt toadie. It’s good someone is
still this angry about Victorian politics.
Ironically, May was also a morally
driven prime minister, but one whoseturgid sense of duty led only to
disaster. Sylvester’s unsparing
prosecution of the May administration
makes it seem worse in hindsight than
it did even at the time. What emerges
in this account is how May’s total lack
of fitness for office was visible in every
screw-up and debacle. Strangely, her
failure often seemed to stem from the
absence of traits typically detested inpoliticians: her lack
of personal ambition,
her refusal to “play”
politics as a “game”, her
disinclination to court
the media. But this is all stuff prime
ministers have got to do. Sylvester
points out that May’s failures are all
the more tragic because she knows her
political history; she will be all too
aware that she’s going down in
the text books as one of our worst
prime ministers. Youch. I recommend
this show to everyone except
Theresa May.
You’re Wrong About is a well-
established American podcast that is
both fascinating and deeply irritating.
The most recent episode explores
the idea that thousands of youngAmericans are losing their parents to
online conspiracy theories and fake
news. That sounds hyperbolic, but the
show’s hosts, the journalists Sarah
Marshall and Michael Hobbes,
construct a convincing case from
statistics and anecdotes. People over
the age of 65 share seven times more
fake news than young adults. A survey
of older Facebook users found that
only one in five knew that an
algorithm determines what stories
appear in your timeline. Many
assumed the company employed
a human news editor.
There are good stories from
distressed millennials reporting
previously sane relatives falling into
wormholes of anti-vaxxer madness or
refusing to wear masks. One man
reports of his dad’s alarming progress
into the online conspiracist universe:
“First of all it was Bigfoot and flat-
Earth stuff and then he starts
posting all these deeply
antisemitic memes... by
the way, we’re Jewish.”
I would have given
this five stars, but
I’m deducting two
of them for the
maddening,
brain-melting
stream of zany
quips and backchat.
Mark Carney, the
former governor of the
Bank of England, is off to
a decent start with his Reith
Lectures. The thrust of his argument
is that society places too much
emphasis on the financial worth of
goods and services as opposed to their
moral value. He makes a timely case
(few in the year of Covid would
oppose the idea that nurses and
carers are underpaid), but the
argument so far is not an
overwhelmingly original one.
He acknowledges debts to the
economist Mariana Mazzucato and
the philosopher Michael Sandel, who
have been making arguments along
these lines for years. There’s still time
to improve.Theresa May, who is unsparingly criticised by Times
journalist Rachel Sylvester. Right: William GladstoneCHRISTOPHER FURLONG; BETTMANN ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGESThe Prime
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