Professor Dumb Down

I love legal dramas. Specifically I love the Rumople of the Bailey stories of John Mortimer. I think I must have read them all. I’ve also seen all of the old television adaptations with the actor Leo McKern doing a marvellous job in the part of the heroic fatty, second only to Sir John Falstaff in the annals of English drama!

There is one particular story and episode I have in mind at the moment, namely Rumpole and the Right to Silence. I’ll come on to the reasons for this in a bit, but firstly a word or two on the setting. The action takes place in Gunster, a fictitious university in a fictitious northern English city. The university itself is an awful place, a jumped up polytechnic, a sort of tasty bites outlet, all the more tasty in that sponsorship comes from one Sir Denis Tolson, a super market mogul. The Vice-Chancellor of this academic Tesco is Hayden Charles, full of bright ideas about relevance, another word for pot noodle degrees. His university does not have a library, no, it has a multi-media centre!

So, why this particular slice of Rumpole? It’s because my attention was drawn to an article in the Telegraph by Charles Moore, some candid comments on an interview last week a Parliamentary Select Committee carried out with Professor Les Ebdon, whom the government wishes to appoint to head the Office for Fair Access (OFFA), a body concerned with university admissions.

It’s clear from what he said during the interview that the man is a screaming mediocrity; he is a real-life Hayden Charles! I have a further literary allusion in mind – duck speak from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, a reference to words being trotted out like the quaking of a duck without the interference of any kind of thought process. There was Prof Les trotting out a succession of tiresome clichés. He is “passionate about…social mobility…transform hundreds of thousands of lives…best practice…evidence-based…open and transparent” and on and on and on, quack, quack, quack. He went on to criticise Magdalen College, Oxford for interviewing applicants in their “grand formal settings.”

Moore has his own literary reference, to Thomas Hardy’s novel Jude the Obscure. There Jude, of humble origins, dreams of the dreaming spires of Oxford, called Christminster in the book. For Jude it is a “heavenly Jerusalem”, a place he looks on from afar, climbing a ladder, for “the higher he got, the further he could see.” Prof Les (Professor Dumb Down might be better) will never understand people like Jude, Moore quite rightly says. For, without even thinking about it, he rejects the dream that lies behind the phrase “the higher he got, the further he could see.” The “frightening” quality, as Moore puts it, of a great university is part of its allure. It most certainly is.

For Dumb Down dreaming spires and grand halls is all about - horror of horrors - elitism. He would prefer something much cosier, perhaps the glass and concrete of the University of Gunster, replete with its ‘multi-media centre.’ Moore settles on a few home truths about this silly man;

Thanks to a selection process that is run by bureaucrats who naturally advance their own kind, it was only at a regrettably late stage that anyone began to notice the problem with Professor Ebdon. This man is a trade unionist for the former polytechnics. He chairs their “think tank” (actually a pressure group) called million +, whose chief executive was a would-be Labour candidate at the last election. He writes articles in favour of teaching “Mickey Mouse” subjects at university. He is the epitome, the crème de la condensed milk of the cult of educational mediocrity. He seems perfectly nice, by the way, but to put him in charge of who gets in to some of the greatest universities in the world would be like putting a scoutmaster in charge of recruitment to the Army.

It’s especially ironic at a time when Michael Gove, the Secretary of State for Education, is attempting to make the worst schools raise their standards that the government in which he serves wants to appoint a man who hopes to make the best universities lower theirs.

So far as the Select Committee is concerned Dumb Down spoke himself out of the job. This after he made reference to the “nuclear option” of refusing access agreements to universities if the did not satisfy him. He would also like the “tactical strike option” to sanction particular universities, doubtless Oxford and Cambridge.

Approval was withheld. But as the appointment is in the gift of Vince Cable, the Business Secretary, dumber than most, it may very well go ahead. Cable, of course, is on the Limp Dumb side of our present coalition government. But, in complete exasperation, I have to ask how a government with any Conservative element, a government with a Conservative majority, could ever have considered the wretched Ebdon for such a sensitive post? How could this petty-minded apparatchik ever command any respect? England does not love coalitions, Benjamin Disraeli once said. I certainly don’t.

The Dream of Pharaoh

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

We have reached the end of days. It’s obvious, is it not, in this year of the Maya? The banking crisis, the euro crisis, war, famine and pestilence are all there; the calendar moves into its final phase. Public debt rises and national economies weaken under the burden. Anarchists occupy New York’s Wall Street; anarchists set up camp outside Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London. The veil has been lifted; all has been revealed; the apocalypse is here!

Actually, we’ve been here before, many times, in the great cycles of our history. There is a timely reminder in History Today by Tim Stanley that chaos and poverty are the historical norms of Western civilization, not peace and plenty. Bad times always appear uniquely bad to those living through them, but they are seldom as bad as all that, or we can at least comfort ourselves with worse examples. In previous ages millenarian sects would rise by the dozen in cataclysmic times, the flagellants would be wandering the streets, their backs all bloody. Now we just wring our hands while we watch the slow motion collapse of the euro!

Oddly enough some of the examples given by Stanley in his article seem understated, or rather it seems odd to me to set the German Peasant’s War, a great national tragedy, alongside the US Bank War of the 1830s, when then President Andrew Jackson took the kind of action that the present Wall Street shower could not even dream of! But, hey, where is the Black Death?!

He’s certainly more on key in highlighting the troubles of the Great Depression, which make our present banking crisis still something of a teddy bears’ picnic. Then there really was war and rumours of wars; then history entered one of its most malevolent cycles, the nadir of civilization. In my own period of special interest, England of the seventeenth century, the world was indeed turned upside down during the Civil Wars, many expecting the Second Coming daily.

Karl Marx was wrong about boom and bust, as he was wrong about most things; it’s not a feature of capitalist accumulation; it’s a feature of human history. It’s there in the Bible in the dream of Pharaoh, the fat years followed by the lean years. The trouble is that we come to believe that the fat years are fat forever; they are not. If communism was the delusion of Marx the end of history was the delusion of Francis Fukuyama, the delusion of a great many of us.

It might be the delusion of democracy itself, which is arguably not the end of historical evolution, but merely a stage passing through, simply a chrysalis. Stanley quite rightly says that the end of the Cold War and the global sweep of democratic capitalism in the 1990s gave the impression that the struggle of history was over, a reverse Utopia from that anticipated by the Marxists. But democracy promised more than it could deliver; and in Russia it delivered chaos.

Now democracy is an inconvenience for the big battalions, as Robert Michels’ iron law of oligarchy takes definite hold in the European Union. Here government of the bureaucrats by the bureaucrats for the bureaucrats makes sure that meaningful democracy shall indeed perish from the earth, or the European part of it at least. Still, the end is not yet. Things might be bad but they could always be much, much worse. Let me rest and dream of the Maya. :-)

Always Keep A-Hold of Nurse

Scotland is to have a referendum on independence. Though no definite date has been set it is likely to be held in 2014, three years after the ruling Scottish National Party obtained a majority of seats in a devolved parliament that, according to Labour, would kill nationalism stone dead. Well, like every other prediction emerging from the benighted Labour Party, it has proved to be complete rubbish.

Why so late, you may wonder? Alex Salmond, leader of the Scottish National Party (SNP) and Scotland’s first minister, says that it has been delayed merely to ensure that it is ‘well-organised.’ Yes, sure, believe that it you like. It just so happens that 2014 is the seven hundredth anniversary of the Battle of Bannockburn, when the Scots led by King Robert Bruce defeated a larger English army, incompetently headed by Edward II.

I have little doubt it’s on a wave of national celebration, of unrestrained Braveheartism, that Salmond hopes will carry the good ship Independence, wandering fruitlessly for so many years, a little like The Flying Dutchman, at last home to port. He even proposes to extend the franchise to sixteen-year-olds, most of whom, I hazard, know next to nothing about politics and quite a lot about patriotic clichés, mythic spiders and what have you.

There is a bit of a risk here of course. The evidence suggests that the majority of Scots, that is those a tad older than sixteen, are not that keen on independence. Here he has the example of the Alternate Vote referendum like Macbeth’s dagger before him, a poll held last year which effectively killed ‘voting reform’, much beloved by the Liberal Democrats, stone dead.

So, instead of a simple yes no he wants a third option, something he calls ‘devolution max’, which would deepen the powers exercised in Scotland, really only leaving defence and foreign policy as whole kingdom responsibilities. The situation would then be akin to the Union of the Crowns, that phase in Anglo-Scottish relations between the accession of James I to the English throne in 1603 to the Act of Union of 1707, which combined both national parliaments.

The trouble for Salmond, a big fish in a little pond (his deputy is called Sturgeon!), is that any referendum would have to have the authority of the UK government or risk being declared unlawful. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, has concentrated the first minister’s thoughts here, saying he can have his race but only with the yes no horses. Expect more wrangling in the period leading up to 2014, political battles that may yet dwarf Bannockburn.

Meanwhile, the Labour Party, whose bone-headed barons long disgracefully treated Scotland as a kind of political fiefdom, is in a bit of a panic. If Scotland were cast free it would mean the end of their northern block vote, without which they are unlikely ever again to get a clear majority at Westminster. I can’t think of any better reason for Scottish independence. Oh, yes, I can: it would mean that taxes raised in England could actually be spent in England, rather than sent north in doles.

Please do not misunderstand me. I’m fond of Scotland; I have many close friends there. My parents have a cottage in the far north, a place where I’ve spent many enjoyable vacations, long and short. I could only wish that the Scots were fonder of the English, that they could lose a mindset cast so far in the past, cast, yea, even so far back as Bannockburn!

As a postscript I read that Tommy Sheridan, one time leader of the far-left Scottish Socialist Party, has been released from prison, a third of the way through his sentence for perjury. This seedy man was much given to Marxist sloganeering…and visiting Manchester sex clubs. Now the king of the swingers, sorry, make that commissar of the swingers, is free. He says he will soon be back in court, launching a fresh bid to overturn his conviction. Not only that but he will be fighting for an independent and socialist Scotland. I can just picture it – Alba as Albania, a bleak future indeed. The Scots might care to take heed of the fate of Hilaire Belloc’s Jim and always keep a-hold of nurse for fear of finding something worse.

Past Spirits

I wrote this article at the turn of the year, shortly after visiting the exhibition in question. I held it over until today to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, one of England’s greatest writers and most generous spirits.

I loved all of my grandparents, but father’s father was the biggest single influence in my life. He died when I was twenty, almost six years ago now. I still miss him, I miss the things we used talk about and the stories he used to tell, wonderful stories of his time in India both before and during the Second World War, stories of his life at school, stories of his Norfolk boyhood.

It was he who introduced me to the tingly pleasures of the ghost story. It’s the winter nights I remember best, cold outside, warm within, when he read aloud, fire blazing and lights dimmed (candle light was best), the tales of haunting long ago. It was by his fireside that I was introduced to the delights of Elizabeth Gaskell, Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James (really scary!), E. F. Benson and so many others. It was by his fireside that I first heard Charles Dickens’ tales of the supernatural, not just A Christmas Carol, the most famous ghost and morality fable ever written, but others like The Signalman and The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber.

Like me, Dickens was introduced to ghost stories early in life. It was the tales told in childhood that left him with a life-long hankering after ghosts, which just so happens to be the title of a rather charming little exhibition presently being held in the Folio Society Gallery in the British Library!

Scheduled to run until early March, A Hankering after Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural displays the author’s interest through a variety of printed media. I went not long before Christmas, which added to the general cosiness of the whole thing. So far as I am concerned the way it was laid out could not be bettered. It presents, if you like, a study in ambivalence: Dickens’s fascination with the subject, informed by his childhood influences, on the one hand, and the scepticism of a mid-Victorian rationalist, on the other.

It’s a kind of voyage in several stages, beginning with childhood, illustrations from The Arabian Nights along with a copy of The Terrific Register, a kind of penny dreadful that the writer read in his teens with lasting effect, not surprising, given the lurid nature of its content. He later recalled that it used to frighten the wits out of his head!

But he recovered them sufficiently to treat some of the more farcical Victorian obsessions, particularly with spiritualism, with amusing condescension. Apparitions and other manifestations of the supernatural could be reduced to natural causes, so he believed. In Well Authenticated Rappings, a satirical sketch published in 1858 in Household Words, an uncanny voice in the narrator’s head turns out to be no more than a thumping Boxing Day hangover. There is more of spirits than spirit about you, one is tempted to observe.

While he could mock the spiritualists, Dickens entertained his own fashionable notions, including a belief in spontaneous combustion (think of Krook in Bleak House) and, most particularly, in mesmerism. His own efforts here were to cause a slight rift with his wife Catherine, as an 1853 letter shows, after the author’s magnetism with one Augusta de la Rue appeared to her to be a little too animal!

In the end one is simply left with the ghost story as a story, all rational explanations aside. It’s not about the real or even the surreal world; it’s simply about imagination and the power of imagination. Here Dickens did so much to stimulate contemporary interest. His ghosts, it might be said, are comfortably bourgeois, no longer inhabiting Gothic piles but Victorian firesides; his apparitions are ever more fearful for appearing by the side of something as modern as the railway.

Now let me say a word or two in appreciation of John Leech, the man who created the splendid illustrations that make A Christmas Carol even more memorable. There is the manifestation of Marley, the magnificent Odin-like figure of The Ghost of Christmas Present and, the most chilling of all, The Last of the Spirits pointing to Scrooge’s doom. As an aside here I have to say that a lot of the film adaptations of A Christmas Carol hopelessly miss the point, seeing this encounter as the decisive moment. It’s not; it’s only the final part of Scrooge’s gradual redemption.

Andrea Lloyd, the curator of the exhibition, has written of its theme and purpose;

Dickens is already closely aligned with Victorian ghost stories in many people’s minds largely because of the success of A Christmas Carol. However, Dickens touches upon the supernatural in many of his other works, revealing his thoughts about unexplained phenomena, which in turn reflect the evolving scientific theories and beliefs that were prevalent in 19th century England. At this time people were debating the virtues of mesmerism and animal magnetism, getting caught up in the Spiritualism craze that arrived from America, and actively investigating and recording ghostly phenomena. By engaging with this vogue for the supernatural, and by tapping into the Victorian attraction to the macabre, Dickens created some of his finest works.

He did more than that. As G. K Chesterton once wrote, he did not strictly make a literature; he made a mythology. I thought of Dickens; I thought of the ghosts of Christmas past, not long past, my past; I thought of my beloved grandfather, to whose memory this article is dedicated.

Time and History

I originally only planned to publish my recent article on the decline of American power contrasted with the rise of China’s (How Are the Mighty Fallen, 30 January) on BrooWaha. I published it here because the editorial process there was log jammed for several days. Now it has appeared there it elicited an interesting response from a fellow contributor, one who lives in India. I think my own detailed reply, slightly modified, deserves to stand here on its own.

Greatness and power have nothing at all to do with freedom and human rights. The Roman state survived for centuries as a slave power and rapacious conqueror. China has never enjoyed a full democratic existence in the sense that you and I would understand the concept. Even before the Communist takeover it was ruled, when it was ruled at all, by dictators, warlords and freebooters of one kind or another in the period after the revolution of 1911, which overthrew the last imperial dynasty.

I’m sorry, I complete disagree with you; the present government of China shows little in the way of communist orthodoxy; it shows not the least interest in exporting its brand of high holiday politics, unlike its economic imperialism. Mao would simply not recognise the China that has emerged after his death. The Chinese government is simply an oligarchy, interested in the perpetuation of its power, a power over which Marxism is draped like a fig leaf. Their brand of realpolitik owes far more to Machiavelli than Marx, more to The Prince than to The Communist Manifesto.

A nation survives by conserving its power, not wasting it. Yes, governments have a responsibility to ensure the security of the land. But America under George W Bush did not contain a threat; it simply made it worse. Where was the logic in invading Iraq, a country with a secular government, a country with no connection to terrorism, a country actively opposed to Al-Qaeda? Where was the logic in invading a country that had effectively been neutralised after the First Gulf War, and neutralised to the advantage of the West?

There are so many things I could say about this disaster, things I have said previously. Not only was the Al-Qaeda genie let out of the bottle, not only was the power of Iran immeasurably increased, but the aftermath of a war, which Bush described as a ‘crusade’, led to the tragic destruction of the age-old Iraqi Christian community, rather ironic in the circumstances. Has the invasion of Afghanistan made America safer? I rather think not. Anyone with even the lightest grasp of history would have kept clear of this ‘graveyard of empires.’

America has spent trillions beyond its means; America is now in hock to China, a further proof of my argument that one power has waned while the other has waxed. If the country has, as you put it, protected its interests, its gone about it in a wholly cack-handed fashion. Would you, as an Indian, someone surely with a better understanding of regional politics and history, ever have envisaged your country invading a hopeless place like Afghanistan, even with the co-operation of Pakistan? Was the British example not enough; was the Russian example not enough? The invasion of Afghanistan did not destroy the Taliban, merely submerged it for a time. The invasion of Afghanistan did not destroy Al-Qaeda, merely allowed it to relocate in the tribal highlands of Pakistan. Muscles were not flexed; muscles were lost.

I am no wiser or prescient in these matters than any other. I cannot see into the future, only project on the basis of present trends. These trends allow me to predict that this will be the Chinese century, but on this question only time and history will sit as the final arbiters.

A Prophet Unarmed

The stones of Florence are suffused in history. The traces of the past are everywhere, the traces of the Medici, from magnificent beginnings to a wretched and degenerate end. The traces are there, too, of Girolamo Savonarola, the Dominican friar who became, for a brief season, the avatar and prophet of the Florentine republic. I had a sense of him in his cell in the Convent of San Marco, where his eagle-beaked portrait hangs on the wall. I had a sense of him standing in the Piazza della Signoria, the site of his famous Bonfire of the Vanities, where he himself was consumed by a great bonfire in May, 1498.

He was an extraordinary figure, one of the meteors of history. He came seemingly as a prophet armed only to end as a prophet outcast. In a sense he was the Catholic Martin Luther, condemning the many abuses of the Church, particularly bad during the pontificate of the Borgia Pope Alexander VI, his nemesis. Florence was his celestial city, one that was destined to inherit the legacy of Classical Rome, reforming and renewing the purity of Catholic Christianity.

Born in Ferrara, Savonarola, full of messianic vision, came to Florence at just the right time. The sun of the Medici Renaissance was in eclipse. A new and terrifying disease had come to Italy with the invading French army of Charles VIII. Not yet known as syphilis, it was simply called the French pox. The half millennium was approaching, giving all the more force to Savonarola’s message of the Last Days. Florence was to be the New Jerusalem. Alas, in the end, by his own admission, he was a false prophet, no more than a ravening wolf. Or was he?

In Savonarola: the Rise and Fall of a Renaissance Prophet Donald Weinstein, an expert on the period, has compiled a meticulous and commendably objective biography. He has a fine eye for the man, the place and the times. He also has a talent for pithy and memorable phrases. Savonarola appealed to what he calls the ‘myth of Florence’, a city he mesmerised by his ‘charisma of grace.’

The book does an excellent job in tracing the evolution of the Dominican’s message, moving by stages from one of Christian renewal to outright millenarianism. With the army of Charles VIII, Savonarola’s ‘New Cyrus’, threatening the city, people were more and more willing to hear what God had in store for them. The Medici were exiled. The myth of Florence and the myth of Savonarola came, for a time, into perfect harmony. Cometh the hour, cometh the man.

The history of Florence, and the biography of Savonarola, in the years between 1494 and 1498 is worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy. It’s a complex tale of faction, counter-faction, intrigues, feuds and wars, the stuff of high Renaissance politics, a labyrinth through which the author spins a fine thread.

In his consistent determination to avoid bias Weinstein lays every fact before us, building his structure brick by brick. He makes it clear that Savonarola, contrary to appearances, was always a prophet unarmed (he was never the city republic’s political master). His power was one of persuasion, a message supported up by the coincidences of the times, the key to his initial success and his ultimate failure. It was his tragedy that he found a power within himself only to denounce it in the end, not only a result of torture but also of an acute loss of self-belief.

Sober and scholarly, Weinstein also has a talent for weaving a gripping story, full of the most memorable characters, all set against the background of papal politics, foreign invasion and Renaissance humanism. Savonarola treats the subject sympathetically, even with a degree of admiration, without falling into the dangers of complete seduction. I’ve certainly come to understand the man much better from a reading of this book, though any personal sympathy I have for him is arrested by the fact he is alleged, personally, to have consigned paintings by Sandro Botticelli to the Bonfire of the Vanities!

I love irony and I love anecdote, and the author also has a taste for both. For example, I was fascinated to discover that Charles VIII, upon whom Savonarola placed so much faith, died after banging his head on a doorframe the same day that the friar was arrested, a strange turn of fate, particularly fateful as the king was short so the door must have been even shorter!

This is a good story, lucid, meticulous and exhaustive. If you have any interest at all in biography, in history, in a fascinating life and in the even more fascinating canvas of Renaissance Italy I can assure you that there is no vanity in reading Savonarola.

Playing Fields and Bombs

My grandfather and father both went to Eton College, the public school founded in 1440 by special endowment of King Henry VI. I would have gone too if had been a boy, continuing in a family tradition. For those who are not English I should make it clear that public does not mean public but private, as in private and highly exclusive! It has a reputation that carries far and wide, generating more than a few myths in the process.

The Duke of Wellington, another alumnus, said that the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton. Perhaps you’ve heard that one? A good many people have. Actually he said nothing of the sort. The comment, though not in that exact form, first appears in the French memoirs of Charles Count de Montalembert, published in 1856, four years after Wellington’s death.

There was one great conflict won on the playing fields of Eton, or rather by the discipline and training induced by the school’s officer corps, a far grander field of combat than Waterloo – the First World War no less. Yes, indeed; or it least it was according to Adolf Hitler.

Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary and himself an old Etonian, visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden in the months leading up to the partition of Czechoslovakia at Munich. Clearly war was on Hitler’s mind, particularly Germany’s defeat in the First World War. British victory was no surprise, he rambled on, given the school’s military ethos. Eton clearly acquired a paramount importance in his mind as the cradle of the British establishment, the cradle of all its glory!

Of course when Hitler was convinced of something it was impossible to change his mind. Eden’s objection that the College officer corps was shambolic was simply shrugged off. I dare say he concluded it was an act of dissimulation on the Foreign Secretary’s part. Apparently, though I can’t find any hard evidence of this, he even ordered the school bombed during the Second World War. Two bombs did fall on the College in 1940, one just missing the Library, hardly proof, though, of a systemic campaign. Still, it may prove one thing: that Luftwaffe pilots were not the types ever to grace the playing fields of Eton.